“Capturing this moment for prosperity.” Quoth hit SAVE on his video and slipped his phone back into his pocket. “Morrie will love to see this. He needs something to cheer him up.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I’ve got three pints of house-made cider. Have you decided on your food yet?” The waitress leaned across our table at The Right Fowl – the pub where I’d waited for the bus the day Sherlock Holmes kidnapped me.
Now there’s a sentence I never expected to apply to my life.
I peered up from the menu, which I had to hold so close to my face that my nose touched the paper. “I’ll have the bangers and mash, please, with a side of mushy peas. Oh, and the loaded fries and also this ploughman’s platter with the cheese and pork pie. And a rasher of bacon for Oscar, and a slice of cheesecake for dessert. What about you guys?”
“That’s all for you, ma’am?” She sounded surprised.
I grinned. “I’m starving. We’ve just come from Wild Oats—”
“Oh, the wilderness foraging course.” She made a face. “Did Sam make you his famous cockroach omelette for breakfast?”
I made a face. “He was a bit… off his game last night, so fortunately, all we had this morning was nettle tea. It tastes like feet.”
“Say no more. I’ll bring you another pint of cider, too. You’ll need it for washing down the cockroach taste.”
“So you’re quite familiar with the wilderness center?” Heathcliff asked.
“Oh, sure. The tour groups and hippie travelers basically keep this pub in business, especially over winter.” She nodded toward the mountains. “Those hills are crawling with ramblers in summer, but over the winter Sam’s the only one around here who brings in business.”
“So he’s well-liked around here? You don’t think it’s a little weird, what he does?”
“Sam’s a bit strange, to be sure, but mostly harmless. It’s a pity about all the trouble he’s had, first with that girl gone missing and then her body showing up. This place was swarming with police a couple of weeks ago. It’s the most exciting thing to happen in the village since we got hooked up to mains sewage.” She turned to Heathcliff and Quoth. “What’ll it be for you two?”
Heathcliff peered at the menu. “I’ll have the full English breakfast, with a side of chips, and absolutelynomushrooms.”
“Porridge with berries for me,” added Quoth. “And I’ll have a slice of cheesecake, too.”
The waitress returned a few minutes later with our ciders and cheesecakes. Heathcliff drowned his drink in one swig. Truthfully, I wasn’t that far behind him. Knowing the waitress was a talkative type, I pressed for some more information. “If Sam was the one who reported the body, then who else—”
“Sam wasn’t the one who reported the crime,” the waitress said. “Well, now, technically hewas, but only because he had to.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the strangest thing. A German tourist came into the pub after the police removed the body and told me the whole story over a pint. He’d been hiking in the woods on the paths that crisscross into the area Sam uses for his expeditions. He heard something odd in the trees, so he left the path and found Sam grunting as he dragged a heavy object down toward the valley. The tourist stopped to offer help and Samfreaked out. It was only when the tourist noticed the blood leaking from the survival blanket that he realized Sam was dragging abody. Sam said he was bringing the body back to hand it over to the police – it had already been badly attacked by animals, and he didn’t want to leave it up there for more evidence to be lost. The German convinced Sam to drag the body into a fallen log and bring the police to it.”
“That’s not what he—” I stopped myself before I admitted I’d been speaking to Sam about the murder. It wouldn’t do to have people in the village remembering us snooping around. “That’s not what the papers said.”
“Nope. The police looked at Sam as a suspect initially, but there were footprints near the original crime scene significantly larger than Sam’s shoes, and they went after some other bloke for it. The coppers sure thought Sam’s behavior mighty suspicious at first, but people do stupid things when they stumble onto crime scenes. Sam seemed to genuinely think he was helping by bringing the body off the mountain, and he took them right to the original crime scene further along the ridge.”
She left to put our order in and I pulled out my phone and texted Morrie. He needed to know that Sam lied about how he found the crime scene, and that his moving the body probably counted for many of Kate’s bruises and the drag marks around the log.
“Well, this has been asuper funweekend hanging out with our new friend the murderer,” Heathcliff finished his second cider.
I groaned into my hands. We were trying to eliminate suspects, and now we’d just added another to our list. Sam moved the body – did he kill her in a fit of rage over his ruined business and then attempt to conceal the evidence?
Could our kind-hearted cockroach chef be the murderer?
Chapter Sixteen
Our trip to return Oscar and then back to the shop was uneventful, which was just as well because I kept spinning the facts of the case over in my head. Sam moving the body. Tara’s threat, Grant’s sleazy behavior, Kate’s financial troubles and her decision to fake her death in the first place… not to mention, the weird way she was killed. None of it made sense.
As Heathcliff pushed open the shop’s front door, he sniffed the air and made a face. “Something smells fishy, and I’m not talking about your mother’s lack of interest in turning our shop into a smoothie bar.”
“Mum must’ve got fish and chips from Oliver again.” I sniffed the air as I flipped the sign to CLOSED. We were a few hours early, but after all that walking I did, I was going straight upstairs to snuggle with a cup of tea.
