A scrap of silk, p.1
A Scrap of Silk, page 1
A SCRAP OF SILK
Tiggy Jones Mystery Series
Book 1
Virginia King
TIGGY JONES MYSTERY SERIES
A Scrap of Silk
A Missing Signature
A Deadly Concoction
(Coming 2024)
Copyright © 2023 by Virginia King
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Author's Note
Prologue
1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21
22. Chapter 22
23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24
25. Chapter 25
26. Chapter 26
27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
29. Chapter 29
30. Chapter 30
31. Chapter 31
32. Chapter 32
33. Chapter 33
34. Chapter 34
35. Chapter 35
36. Chapter 36
37. Chapter 37
38. Chapter 38
39. Chapter 39
40. Chapter 40
41. Chapter 41
42. Chapter 42
43. Chapter 43
44. Chapter 44
45. Chapter 45
46. Chapter 46
47. Chapter 47
48. Chapter 48
49. Chapter 49
50. Chapter 50
51. Chapter 51
52. Chapter 52
53. Chapter 53
54. Chapter 54
55. Chapter 55
56. Chapter 56
57. Chapter 57
58. Chapter 58
59. Chapter 59
60. Chapter 60
A MISSING SIGNATURE
About the Author
Other Books by Virginia King
Acknowledgements
Author's Note
Topsham and Exeter are real places on the Exe Estuary in Devon, UK, but most of the locations that feature in the Tiggy Jones Mystery Series are fictional, along with all the characters.
Many thanks to my editors and cultural advisors. Any errors are my own.
Prologue
The moment is quick. The aftermath, devastating.
Then a shattering silence.
They share a look.
One task remains.
Conceal it.
Chapter 1
“Stop! Thief!”
A few people turn to look, but I keep walking.
“The woman with the candlestick,” he screams. “Stop her.”
I’ve just reached my car, clutching a brass candlestick to my chest, when he suddenly looms over me.
“Mine!” he yells and snatches it from my arms.
“You’ve made a mistake.” He’s big. My voice is trembling. “I’ve just bought it at the jumble sale.”
“Thief!” he screams, raising it above his head.
As I cower before the blow, he smashes it down …
On my windscreen.
“What do you mean you’ve been arrested?”
I ignore the simmer behind Simeon’s words, then smile in spite of my ordeal. Simmering Simeon: Sim-Sim. His new nickname.
He’s used to my antics and I can almost hear him count to ten. “If it’s true you only get one phone call, I suppose I should be honoured.”
“You’re the first person I thought of, Sim.” Sim-Sim. “And it’s not really an arrest. Just a cosy chat at the police station. I need a character reference. And a lift.”
“Not murder then.”
“Jaywalking.”
He laughs – it’s more of a snort – because the word could describe my whole life. “They arrest you for that where you come from?”
Then his mental cogs start to vibrate down the phone. He doesn’t want the press to get wind of it, even though it would lead to a spike in my book sales. ‘Sales to the wrong readers,’ I hear him cry, after way too many courses on branding. ‘They write bad reviews – and don’t buy any more books.’
Simeon Barron used to be my agent, then he started a small press and I went with him. Antigone Jones, his flagship mystery author with a growing fan-base. Our relationship is like a marriage only better: no co-habiting.
“I know,” he says. “You unscrambled a clue from that book and sleuthed out some unsuspecting stranger, pounded on their door and demanded to search their cellar. It’s called harassment and trespassing, Tiggy. We do have laws against that over here.”
He’s talking about a crossword page torn from The Times with some coded words scribbled on it. I found it a couple of days ago inside the cover of a new book and made the mistake of telling him about it.
“Someone is calling for help,” I say.
“It’s too sophisticated. The police think it’s a windup. Anyone in danger wouldn’t hide clues like that. The staff at the bookshop know you’re a mystery author, so they cooked up a puzzle and slipped it inside the book you bought. Now they’re probably taking turns to follow you around and make videos to share on social media.”
Weird things have been happening ever since I inherited a property from my eccentric English grandmother. Not a twelve-room mansion on an estate, like any mystery author worth her title would manifest in a keystroke, but an old boathouse in an English village. I didn’t know Letitia and after recovering from the shock, I blew into town from Australia to claim it as my new home and ruffled more local feathers than a pillow fight.
“Someone did follow me today,” I say. “But he wasn’t from the bookshop. After snatching my freshly purchased candlestick and attacking my windscreen, he’s helping the police with their enquiries.”
Simeon’s voice flips. “Attacked your car? With a candlestick?” The sympathy I’m craving is a mirage. “What did you do to provoke that?”
“Thanks for your concern that I might be injured.”
“You’ve been making wisecracks so you must be in better shape than your car, and the police don’t have cosy chats for nothing.” Then he remembers my predicament. “Tell me about it when I pick you up.”
“Thank you, Sim.”
“And Tiggy, try to stay out of trouble until I get there.” Before he hangs up, he murmurs, “The character reference will be challenging enough already.”
While I sit in the gleaming waiting room of the new police station, trying not to fixate on my shattered windscreen, I stare at a photo of the cryptic clues. The book was a special order that I made before I left Sydney, waiting for me in a local bookshop. It was sitting on a separate shelf with my name on the spine, so the messages could have been planted inside the cover as a joke. Because my arrival hasn’t been embraced by everyone.
My boathouse is about as humble as a liveable building can be, but it’s in a prime location right on the bank of the Exe Estuary. I was on a research expedition in the wilds of Central Australia, so it took the lawyers a while to inform me of my inheritance. As the weeks ticked by here in Topsham, a few locals started dreaming of an auction at a knockdown price. Since I took up residence two weeks ago, I’ve been hounded by a tenacious estate agent, and there have been pranks at my expense. Are the coded messages more of the same?
I’ve looked at the first clue a dozen times and the meaning is still eluding me:
1. Sounds like a dockside opener. (3)
My mind wanders. How much will I say to Sim about this morning? He’ll insist on hearing the whole story, and I haven’t told him about my new preoccupation: jumble sales.
As my father’s maiden aunt Daphne used to say with a wink: ‘A single girl needs at least one vice.’ Hers was a series of fluffy little white dogs, all named Nixie followed by their succession number. It was Nixie Six – Sixie for short – who barked the alarm when Great Aunt Daphne died. Dad’s family has a penchant for choosing names from Greek mythology. Like Daphne. And Antigone: an-tig-onee – the daughter of Oedipus – as if I needed any more skeletons poised to fall out of my closet.
My interest in jumble sales, which led to today’s windscreen attack, is related to my surprise inheritance.
After crossing the Simpson Desert with eleven other people and sixteen camels – to celebrate my thirtieth birthday and research the setting for a mystery where one by one the expeditioners die – our bedraggled group of adventurers trudged into Birdsville in outback Queensland with murder on our minds, ready to kill for our first shower in 28 days, followed by the pub’s famous seven-course lunch: a meat pie and a six-pack of beer.
Imagine the shock when I plugged in my phone to check on a month’s worth of messages and found a string of emails from a UK law firm, and increasingly urgent pleas from Simeon who was the only other contact of mine they’d managed to track down.
The next few weeks were a blur as I raced back to Sydney, dealt with my mother’s reaction to my grandmother’s passing, signed documents, gave notice to my flatmates, booked a flight to London and crammed all my belongings into one bag.
“A boathouse?” my best friend Nessa said. “Are you sure your grandmother actually lived there? It looks like … a box.”
She was looking at a photo of my new home as we huddled under a patio heater at Dumplings then Die, our favourite Potts Point hole-in-the-wall.
“They carried Letitia out in the proverbial box, apparently.” I sounded flippant about her death but the memory of the photo I didn’t show Nessa still made me shudder: an interior so cluttered it would make a hoarder salivate. “All her stuff is still inside. I won’t have to buy a thing, just sort it.”
“I know you can claim the trip as research,” she said, sinking her teeth into a vegetable mandoo, “but you don’t have to move over there. Sell it and buy something here.” Nessa grew up in England then ran away, making her an expert.
“I’m never going to afford a place in Sydney,” I said. “Even if I sell the boathouse and get enough for a deposit, the mortgage broker told me banks regard authors as high risk.”
“Because your royalties go up and down?”
“Our moods. We’re prone to bouts of depression.”
Nessa dropped her chopsticks and swiped her forehead with a dramatic flourish. “You suffer for your … art.”
“Pretty much. We can’t turn our brains off, so we sleep weird hours, or not at all. We work alone, obsessing about people who don’t exist. We forget to exercise and we manage our mental health with … substances.”
We both looked at the glass of pinot gris that I’d been glugging down like cordial.
“You don’t know anyone over there. You’ll be more isolated than ever.”
“I know Simeon,” I said.
“He’s as weird as your characters. And he’s in London, isn’t he?”
“Just a couple of hours by train, all tax deductable. And he’s got a holiday cottage further down the estuary where he spends a lot of time in the summer. He’s going to stay there for a while and help me settle in.”
She didn’t look convinced. “Promise me one thing. You’ll get a cat.”
It made me think of Sixie. Did my grandmother have a companion who stayed by her side until the end?
My mother wanted me to stay home for different reasons. “She’ll get her claws into you.”
“Letitia?”
“That’s who we’re talking about. My mother.”
“She’s dead,” I said.
“Sell the boathouse and spend the money.”
“I might want to live there.”
“Bad idea,” she said.
“Why?”
“Why do you think she left her place to you?”
“I’m her long-lost grand-daughter.”
“Who she never clapped eyes on.”
“Thanks to you.”
“You’re welcome.”
It’s always like this with Delilah. I call her Del because she won’t answer to Mum. She’s never told me why she had nothing to do with Letitia for fifty years. All I know is she eloped as a teen with my Australian father back in the sixties, vowing to stay childless, then moved to Sydney and had me as an accident in her forties.
It explains why I became a mystery writer.
I’ve grown up searching for clues.
Chapter 2
The jetlag-inducing flight from Sydney was followed by a sleepless night in a budget-priced London hotel that had ‘fire hazard’ written all over it. I dreamed that I followed the emergency exit map all the way to a fire escape that led across the rooftops three storeys up, inspiring thoughts of a dramatic chase scene for a future novel. I get some of my best ideas after midnight.
The following morning, Simeon picked me up way too early. During the drive to the south-west and over a scenic breakfast at Runnymede on a grassy bank overlooking the Thames, we caught up with each other, having only met in person once at a conference in Sydney. He’s put on a little weight but he’s still the same fifty-something guy with a receding hairline and designer-stubble on his chin. The late July weather was almost warm and, over his jeans and open-necked white shirt, he sported his signature waistcoat.
I’d already researched the location of my new home but I let him tell me again.
“Topsham,” he said, “can be pronounced two ways, depending on how posh you are.” He chuckled. “Topsham with a ‘sh’ or Tops’m without it. It’s an old maritime trading port on the Exe Estuary, in the county of Devon. Its safe harbour was once an important centre for both fishing and shipbuilding. Your boathouse must date back a few centuries. Then over the years it probably had other uses before being converted into a residence sometime in the mid-twentieth century.”
His own holiday cottage is further down the Exe at Lympstone where he’s staying while I settle in.
“What’s special about Topsham these days?” I asked, already feeling nervous about fitting in.
“It’s a desirable place to live and holiday, with a strong arts community. The old Dutch-style houses are charming, dating back to the days when cotton was exported to the Netherlands. But as the city of Exeter grew, Topsham got … absorbed.”
“Were the locals happy about that?”
He chuckled again. “I doubt it.”
We arrived late-morning. Sim drove through narrow one-way streets until he found a parking space. Then we walked in single file along footpaths lined with old buildings of several floors huddling together, many painted white, their doors opening straight onto the pavement. It was a serious culture shock after my month trudging over endless sand-hills and dealing with camel tantrums. The ambience of Topsham wrapped me in its heritage embrace and by the time we reached the shops, my excitement level was teetering on overwhelm. We entered a narrow arcade beside a teashop and took the stairs to the lawyer’s office above, where the window gave me another view of the street and a peep into the residential flats opposite.
After a few formalities, including permission to live in the boathouse while its title is transferred to me, my grandmother’s solicitor Hayden Sinclair handed over the key.
“It’s just a stroll down this road,” he said, “until you get to Punt Lane. Then it’s the first building past the boatyard. On the waterfront, next to the florist.”
The route was lined with more quaint premises, including the bookshop where I’d already placed an order before leaving Sydney, but they all flashed by in a blur. Then I was staring at the single storey building from the photo, painted white like its neighbours, its one large front door, below high windows, opening directly off the lane. The boat ramp beside it provides a private parking space and on the other side it shares a common wall with the florist next door, their steeply sloping roofs meeting at a high ridge in the middle.
When I finally got my fingers to stop shaking enough to push the key into the lock, Sim stood back. Then the interior confronted me: one large room with a deeply sloping ceiling. At the far end, full-length windows protected by an iron safety rail overlook the wide expanse of the Exe Estuary and the flat riverbank on the other side. And filling every space, the clutter was just as Letitia had left it, the museum of her life stretching to all four walls.
While I was boggling, Sim came in behind me. “You didn’t say she was an artist.”
“I didn’t know.” Now I saw what wasn’t clear in the photo. Every vase and jug was crammed with paintbrushes or bunches of dead flowers. Table cloths covering several folding tables were all adorned with layers of spilled paint. Out of the camera’s view, an easel with a painting still on it stood to the left of the door.
The sight of it reflected Letitia’s presence so strongly, I almost swooned. “She’s still here,” I murmured.
