The Art of Betrayal

over t’ Long Barston,’ I said. ‘Might catch that play—The Green Maiden.’”
“And?”
“She gave me a look—funny-like, you know—and said, ‘One day they’ll get it right.’”
“What did she mean?”
“I ’aven’t a clue.”
“Did Mrs. Villiers ever receive visitors?”
“Not while I was ’ere. What she got up to in the evenings, I wouldn’t know.” Mrs. Wright stood and carried our teacups to the sink. “I should be going.”
“You go on,” I said. “I’ll clean up.”
“Ta.” She zipped her jacket and turned to face me. “I will pay you back.”
I followed her through the laundry and locked the door behind her, watching her scurry down the drive without a backward glance.
So the young man who did errands for Evelyn Villiers had a black van. According to Tom, the neighbors reported seeing a dark van in the area at night. Was he a friend of Mrs. Villiers, someone who worked for her?
Or had he taken advantage of her and then murdered her?
Tom needed to hear what I’d learned from Mrs. Wright. The problem was, how could I tell him without getting PC Weldon in trouble?

Chapter Sixteen
The Three Magpies was busy for a Thursday night. All the tables in the dining room were occupied, so Tom and I grabbed one of the small banquettes in the bar. A new barmaid had been hired recently, a pretty young woman with pink cheeks and a bouncy blonde ponytail. Tom put in our order. Fish and chips, a humble dish, but at The Three Magpies, something to celebrate—filets of locally caught haddock, lightly breaded and panfried to golden perfection. The chips were equally irresistible, served in small wire baskets.
Tom returned to the table with a half-pint of ale and a Sauvignon blanc for me. The lines around his eyes had deepened. I wondered if he’d slept.
“How did things go last night?” I asked, concerned.
“Let’s just say not as planned.” He laughed ruefully. “We’d been informed about a shipment of drugs headed for a lorry depot near Ipswich. They never showed. Either the informers were playing us, or the bad guys had been tipped off.” He leaned back, stretching out his long legs. “I checked on the Oakleys. Nigel, the father, has a spotless reputation. Nothing on Martin Ingram. The son, Peter, had a few drug arrests back in his twenties, but nothing recent.”
“No reason to worry, then?” I remembered the cloud that had passed over Nigel’s face at Finchley Hall when he’d spoken of his son.
“I didn’t say that—just that we have nothing on record to cause undue alarm. I heard you spent a few hours at Hapthorn today. Did you get the book on Suffolk legends?”
“Actually, I brought it with me.” I pulled the book out of my handbag.
“And what did you learn?”
“Quite a lot, actually.”
“Hmm.” Tom lifted his glass and took a long drink. “Read it to me. I need a distraction.” He closed his eyes.
I removed the Kleenex I’d used as a bookmark and read.
“During the rule of Harold Godwinson, Earl of East Anglia, an elderly yeoman farmer in a village on the border between Suffolk and Essex went out one morning to survey his sheep folds near the River Stour. He was surprised to find a young maiden, asleep in a hedgerow. She appeared to be age twelve or thirteen and wore the roughly woven shift of a peasant. She was a pretty child, with hair as black as coal and cornflower-blue eyes, but her skin was as green as the moss on a stone wall, the devil’s own hue.
“At first the farmer was afraid, but he was a kindly soul, and when the girl began to weep, he took pity on her. As he and his wife had no children, they took the strange child into their cottage and treated her as their daughter. When questioned, the girl said only that she had come from a land of semi-darkness with a great river running through it, giving life and health to the inhabitants. And so they gave her the name Mersia, from the Anglo-Saxon word for river.”
I stopped reading. “The river thing keeps coming up, Tom—the flooding river in the play; the photograph above Evelyn Villiers’s bed; her love for the River Stour. Now this.”
“Who told you she loved the river?”
Oh man. I’d been planning to ease into the housekeeper story. I sidestepped the question. “Why else would she have a photo of a river above her bed?”
He opened one eye. “What does a river have to do with theft and murder?”
“I don’t know yet. Just listen.”
“Mersia lived with the couple until she was seventeen, in the full bloom of womanhood. Over time, her skin had faded to the pale green of a moth’s wing, and she was said to be the loveliest maiden in all of East Anglia. As the farmer and his wife were now aged, they agreed to give her in marriage to a young yeoman farmer who lived near the village of Borley in Essex.
“Sadly, the story of Mersia’s history followed her. Some of the women in Borley claimed Mersia was a changeling. Others said she was a witch, casting spells that caused women to miscarry. Even her husband turned against her, testifying that she had attempted to poison him with strange herbs mixed into his drink. Only the intervention of the priest saved Mersia from the gallows. Instead, she was cast out of the village and sentenced to dwell alone in a cottage along the riverbank. There she died in the great flood of 1065.”
“Interesting but irrelevant as far as I can see.”
“I’d agree if it wasn’t for this.” I handed him the book.
He sat up, angling the page toward the candle on our table. Two phrases had been underlined faintly in pencil. After the first, “agreed to give her in marriage to a young yeoman farmer,” someone had written in the margin the words “Not true.” After the second, “died in the great flood of 1065,” the same person had written a single word: Murdered.
“What do you