The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(13)

‘I’m always willing to listen to advice,’ she said, quite truthfully. Whether or not she took it was an entirely different matter, of course.

‘I shouldn’t talk about the Falklands War too much in front of Mr Finch, if I were you. He’s apt to be a bit sensitive about it.’

‘Oh?’ she said mildly — and craftily. It had been her experience that the less you seemed to want to gossip, the more gossip came your way.

Mrs Jessop’s genteel face took on a look of mild distress. ‘People can be so . . . unkind, sometimes,’ she said, her hands fluttering over her cup. ‘There are all sorts of nasty rumours going around that . . . well, I really don’t know how they start. But in a village . . . people can be so spiteful, can’t they? And I’m sure there’s nothing in it, really. Just because Mr Finch was a Londoner, you see. And, well, sort of very aggressively working class, so to speak.’ She gulped out the last words in a slightly embarrassed rush. ‘And just because he grew up in a neighbourhood with some rather, well, shall we say undesirable men, people will take on so,’ she finished firmly, looking faintly relieved to come to the end of her somewhat rambling sentence.

Jenny had no difficulty in interpreting this rather obtuse explanation. It was quite obvious that people in these parts believed Lucas Finch to have been one of those parasites who had somehow profited from war. The kind of man who’d made a fortune from other people’s misery, in fact.

Jenny sighed. She thought that the locals probably had it right. Men of Lucas Finch’s ilk could turn a war into a goldmine, and regularly did. So had he been an arms dealer in the not so distant past? Or simply one of those men who could supply whatever was needed cheaper than anyone else, and thus raked in the readies? It was, she supposed grimly, just as well that she wasn’t a gambler by nature. Lucas Finch probably was just as bad — or worse — as he made out. And liking him just showed spectacularly bad judgment on her part!

But she smiled kindly at Mrs Jessop — who obviously needed to consider her employer more in the light of being a rough diamond, rather than an out-and-out crook — and agreed that, yes, people could indeed be very spiteful when they wanted to be.

*

At half past eight, a rather impressive-looking Jaguar XJS pulled up on the gravelled entrance at the front of the house with just a little jaunty spurt of gravel. Jenny, who was just walking back to the boat, found herself curious, and paused to watch the couple who emerged.

In spite of the sports car being what she considered to be a young man’s toy, it was a silver-haired man who climbed out from behind the wheel. From the ramrod-straight way in which he marched to the passenger’s side and held open the door, she had no trouble in recognizing an ex-soldier.

This then was Gabriel Olney.

Expecting a similarly silver-haired, genteel officer’s wife to make up a matching set, the cook was faintly surprised by the woman who stepped very elegantly from the car. She was, Jenny saw at once, extremely stylish. Everything about her fairly screamed it. Her hair was dark and shaped into a short, very chic geometric cut, and when she turned and smiled rather perfunctorily at her husband, Jenny caught a glimpse of liquid chocolate eyes as dark as her hair. But she wasn’t quite as young, perhaps, as she was trying to make out. Jenny put her somewhere in her mid-forties, but her figure was as smart as that of a twenty-year-old and her clothes must have cost the earth. She wondered, without so much as a single pang of envy, how many times Jasmine Olney did her shopping in Paris.

Then the pair passed on into the house, and the curvaceous cook returned to the Stillwater Swan to tend to her tomato and herb omelettes and the nicely sizzling bacon.

Ten minutes later, Jenny glanced with satisfaction at the browning sausages and checked her watch. It was nearly nine.

She didn’t like to prompt her employers, but food should be enjoyed when at its premium. She turned down the heat on the stove and, wiping her hands on a pristine towel, made her way out to the open decking at the Swan’s stern. She could see at once that the planking had been freshly marked for quoits. So Brian O’Keefe had been busy after all.

As she moved across to the open landing gate, she saw the engineer himself walk past, a block and tackle draped casually over one shoulder. He paused and gave her a brief but all-encompassing look. It was the kind of look that missed nothing, and left you feeling somehow unnerved — and not in a nicely feminine and appreciative way either.

Brian O’Keefe, Jenny saw at once, was tall, dark and extremely handsome, which was three strikes against him right from the start. He was, she guessed, of Irish ancestry, and had the dark, brooding good looks of that race, and their clear, dark blue eyes. He had the bad manners to look at her as if he found her wanting.

Jenny sniffed. Hard.

Just then, Gabriel and Jasmine Olney appeared at the landing stage, with Lucas Finch and two young people of almost remarkable appearance. Remarkable in that they seemed to go together like two halves of the same coin.

These, Jenny surmised, must be David and Dorothy Leigh. Dorothy was a small, elfin, fairy figure of a woman, and no sign of her condition yet showed. She rather nervously tucked a long lock of pale hair so blonde it was almost silver behind her ear, and looked up at her husband. On her face was a look of such adoration that Jenny very nearly winced.

David Leigh was a perfect foil for his wife. He was taller, but not so tall that he made Dorothy look dwarfish. He was lean, but had a look of strength about him that was in perfect contrast to her rather ethereal figure. His hair was a rich shade of brown, very earthy, to offset Dorothy’s own silver hue. What he made of her look of adoration, though, the cook couldn’t tell.