Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death by Amita Murray

Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death by Amita Murray

Author:Amita Murray
Format: epub


Chapter Twenty-One

T

he next couple of weeks, I’m overrun by garden parties again. Some days, I’m baking most of the day and cleaning for the rest of it. I try to tell myself that the murders are not my problem. That the police can deal with them. Yet, the questions and details play on my mind day and night.

One morning, I get a call from a lawyer, informing me that Tobias Yards has left me a couple of paintings in his will. “It might take some time to get them to you,” the man says in a bored voice. “Or it might not. It’s hard to say anything at this point, to be honest.”

I’m touched, even though Shona had as good as told me that I might have something coming my way. When I put down the phone, I swallow hard to dissolve the rock in my throat. I’d admired one of Tobias’s canvases once. Most of his art was classical. But this one had been a painting of St. Ives by a woman called Emma Jeffries. I’d exclaimed at the vast vista of turquoise, the houses that speckled the beach in the distance, and the vantage point of a circle of red and pink flowers through which you saw the rest.

I know it, suddenly, as I stand there staring at my phone, that he’d have left me that one. Tobias was that kind of person.

The next day, the last Sunday of July—for some reason a busy day for birthday parties and garden parties—I spend most of the day touching up decorations, some baking of last-minute orders or changes in orders, packing, and sending things off with Sebum, my courier.

He keeps telling me his name isn’t Sebum but rather Josiah. I tell him not to be so stupid, Sebum. The first time I called him that, he giggled, and I realized he thought I’d called him Semen. I told him off for flirting with an older lady – him being no more than twelve, clearly – and explained – kindly – to him that I didn’t go for boys that still had wet dreams. He went red and said he hadn’t had one of those in months. Weeks, he admitted. It was last night, wasn’t it, Sebum? I asked him kindly.

The day is hectic, and I can’t wait till it’s dusk, and everything is done, so I can try to head out for a walk in the woods. But then a cake goes wrong at the last minute, and it’s eleven at night by the time I’m done with cleaning and putting things away and checking orders for the next day. By the time I’ve managed to take a shower it’s creeping closer to midnight.

On my way out, I see something white on my doorstep. Another sheet of A4. I’d forgotten all about the first two. I frown down at it. Crude black letters like the first two, typed, with hardly any writing on it. If people you loved betrayed your trust, taught you that you could not be loved, then you can help yourself.



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