Page 32 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
“You think she married him for his money?” Phil’s tone didn’t judge.
“Isn’t it obvious? She was far too young for him. Even if she wasn’t a total bitch.”
“Age-gap relationships can be a success,” Phil suggested.
She shot him an incredulous look. “God, you’re naive. Men are just so bloody stupid when they get older.”
I coughed and leaned forward. “So why d’you s’pose she thought you’d taken that necklace?”
Vi reddened. “Well . . . it wasn’t the first thing to go missing.”
“You’d been, um, borrowing her jewellery for a while?” I asked, because it seemed a bit rude to just come out with So, you made a habit of nicking her stuff?
“Not exactly . . . Honestly? It started because I just wanted to piss her off. So I’d take one of a pair of earrings. Make her think she’d dropped the other one somewhere. Or one of those designer scarves she’s so fond of. I used to use them for dusters when I was poking around in the attic. And it was fun, watching her go mad trying to find where things had got to. You don’t know what it’s been like since she got her cheap talons into Dad. It’s been horrible, no fun at all. She’s such a c—” Vi stopped, her round face all screwed up. “Oh, bollocks, now I’m sounding like I did do it, aren’t I? But I didn’t. Anyway, it was all petty stuff. I’d never have taken something as valuable as the necklace. Although even if I had, it wouldn’t have been theft. It was Mummy’s necklace, and it should have been mine. But I’d never steal it.”
Phil coughed. “How valuable was the necklace?”
Vi shrugged. “Oh, I’m not sure. Daddy paid three hundred thousand pounds for it”—okay, so maybe not a small country, but definitely a small house in the country, as long as you didn’t mind a bit of a fixer-upper—“but that was years ago. It should be worth a lot more now. The diamond market’s gone up like crazy in the last few years, and this is a top-quality stone. Superb clarity.” Whatever that meant. “It was vintage, from the year Mummy was born, and Daddy had it reset for her. I thought it was so romantic when he bought it for her.” She bit her lip, showing the first signs of any softer emotions I’d ever seen from her.
“You must have been upset when he gave it to your stepmother,” Phil rumbled, his tone neutral.
Vi looked up sharply, her eyes flashing. “I could have bloody ki— Shit.” She hung her head for a moment.
“You could have killed him for it?” Phil suggested, which wasn’t what I’d been thinking at all.
Vi shook her head with a touch of impatience. “Not Daddy. I don’t blame Daddy at all. Amelia had this way of getting people to do whatever she wanted. Well, men,” she added, with a look of disgust for the whole cock-led lot of us.
Yeah. Given the way Mrs. F-M. had had my sister by the short and curlies—and bloody hell, that was not an image I wanted to have in my mind—I reckoned it wasn’t quite as simple as Vi had made it sound. After all, she’d managed to get me to make a right tit of myself in front of hundreds of people, and blonde hair aside, she really hadn’t been my type.
“But I didn’t kill her for it, either,” Vi went on, her tone steely. “It’s just a figure of speech and you know it. Who are you, anyway, Tom’s fiancé? Police? You sound like it.”
Not a bad call. Well done, that girl.
“Private investigator,” he told her steadily.
Her eyes widened. “Who are you working for?”
“No one, right now.”
I happened to know that wasn’t strictly true—Phil’s business was ticking along nicely, ta very much—but he was probably right to assume she wouldn’t give a toss about any unrelated cases.
“Are you any good?” Her chest rose and fell, and she went on without waiting for an answer. “I want to hire you.”
“To find out who killed your stepmum?”
Vi coloured. “No. I want you to find Mummy’s necklace.”
Phil and I exchanged glances. “I thought you knew it’d been found, uh, with your stepmum?” I asked cautiously. I mean, she’d literally just mentioned it.
She shook her head impatiently. “Not that one. The real one. The one Amelia had when she died was fake.”
“Well, that puts a bit of a different complexion on things, doesn’t it?” I said to Phil after Vi had left.
He nodded, petting Merlin thoughtfully. “Widens the field a bit.”
“You reckon? I mean, it’s got to look better for Vi and her dad, hasn’t it? Not that, you know, I had them down for killing her, but well, it made it look personal, didn’t it? And they were the only ones who could leave a necklace that valuable, uh, where they left it and know they’d get it back in the end.”
“Maybe, but just how pleased do you reckon Vi would have been to find out her stepmum had sold Mummy’s necklace and replaced it with a fake? Or Mr. Majors, for that matter?”
