Murder in Abbot's Folly Read Free Page B

before reading the proofs of Marsh & Daughter’s current book, but she had been worried that Peter might be brooding about Elena. ‘Solemn and sarcastic comes to mind,’ she added.
    â€˜Spot on. I’d like to get one up on him.’
    â€˜Hasn’t he retired by now?’
    â€˜That won’t spare him.’ Peter paused. ‘Might be worth our giving that Jane Austen Gala a go on Saturday.’
    She took the bull by the horns. ‘Is this about Luckhurst or Elena?’
    Another pause, longer this time. ‘Let’s find out what she’s up to, daughter mine. Meanwhile, let’s assume it’s about Robert Luckhurst.’
    The subject of Elena was clearly closed, and on the whole, Georgia reflected, remembering Luke’s advice to keep it cool, that was a good thing. Was Peter seriously considering taking on this case, though? So far, probably not. Marsh & Daughter had their own ‘rules’ for choosing new cases, and this one did not qualify. She suspected that Peter was merely using it as a distraction from Elena, and if so, there was no reason she couldn’t do the same.
    â€˜You said there were a couple of loose ends over the Tanner conviction,’ she prompted him.
    â€˜Yes. For instance, why should he choose to take his revenge for a lost licence twelve months after losing it?’
    â€˜There was another reason for the murder,’ Georgia reminded him, ‘if it’s true that he and Amelia Luckhurst were an item.’
    â€˜Worth bearing in mind. Luckhurst seems to have been a funny sort of chap,’ Peter reflected.
    â€˜Don’t tell me he was the Stourdens Jane Austen fan?’
    â€˜An understatement. I rang Dora and badgered her into telling me more. He seems to be of the obsessive collector genus.’
    â€˜Expensive hobby when Jane Austen is the subject.’
    â€˜Not if you’re handed down the goods by your father,’ Peter said. ‘But the Luckhursts owned Stourdens from the middle of the nineteenth century, so it seems odd that we are only hearing about this collection now. A question mark, don’t you think?’
    â€˜It’s possible. Lots of old mansions still have unexplored attics full of goodies. It just needs an enthusiast to inherit – and Robert Luckhurst seems to have been just the chap. Any idea what the collection consists of?’
    â€˜None, so we’re left with the Clackington Claptrappers’ heavy hints. Anyway, it’s hardly relevant to the Luckhurst murder because theft wasn’t the motive for it. Not a mention of theft in the trial reports or from what Dora could tell me. Jane Austen’s archive was in the Folly when Luckhurst was killed, but it wasn’t touched. So we have to look elsewhere for a motive, if we exclude the ones we know about. And there seems no reason to do that at present. Tanner seems either to have planned his crime very oddly or to have been seriously unlucky in having so many potential witnesses turn up.’
    â€˜Explain please.’ She knew he liked nothing better than explaining. Anything to stop thinking of tomorrow and meeting Elena again. Georgia was painfully aware that her reluctance to think about her mother might be linked to emotions whose origins were too deeply buried to want to unearth, as well as those springing from more obvious causes.
    Peter obliged. ‘It was Saturday sixteenth June. Tanner and Luckhurst were mates of a sort, because they belonged to the same classic car club, which met every month at the Edgar Arms and had a summer annual beano at Stourdens. Apart from that one day, Luckhurst was severely reclusive, being paranoid about having his precious Austen collection pinched. Which, as I told you, it wasn’t.
    â€˜What happened was this,’ he continued. ‘Just as the classic car owners were getting into their serious technical jargon stride, their numbers were swelled by a protest group of twenty