The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(16)
Jenny delicately raised an eyebrow. ‘I imagine she goes there to shop,’ she said, determined to be fair. First impressions could be so misleading sometimes.
Tobias smiled, and resigned himself happily to a good gossip. ‘When I say that she keeps a chap down in London, I mean she actually keeps a man down there. Pays the rent on a little flat, apparently. It seems that one of her bitchy friends from up Oxford way actually heard from another friend who was looking for a flat of her own that Jasmine had, on the sly, rented out a bedsit in the West End. And, of course, she simply had to call in to look it over, and ask Jasmine for advice on getting her own flat set up.’
‘Of course she did,’ Jenny acknowledged drolly.
‘And who should answer the bell but this big dark Adonis — the friend’s choice of word, that, not mine. Well, of course, the word got round.’
Jenny smiled wryly. ‘I bet it did! But surely, her husband . . . ?’ Tobias Lester suddenly became very reticent about ‘the husband.’ He shrugged, muttered something about a man’s married life being his own affair, and set about attacking his bacon.
Jenny promptly took the hint and left.
But afterwards, back in the galley, as she set about creating a mountain of toast and testing Mrs Jessop’s homemade marmalade (and adding just a touch of much-needed lime juice), she wondered why Tobias Lester would be willing to gossip about Jasmine Olney, but not about her husband.
And then she promptly reminded herself that it was none of her business, and began to industriously chop some spring onions.
This was, after all, her holiday too.
She had no idea then that in her other role as a reluctant but effective amateur detective, it was going to become something of a busman’s holiday before the weekend was over.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jenny heard the engines throb into life and quickly finished the washing up. She left the crockery to drain and wiped her soapy hands on a towel as she went. She left the galley, moving through the main salon, and then stepped out onto the starboard side deck. There she walked to the rails and watched in pleasurable satisfaction as the riverbank began to fall away.
There was nothing quite like that first moment when a boat left the dock, be it an ocean liner about to cross the mighty Atlantic, or a river boat about to cruise through the English countryside. There was always that little tingle of anticipation, that atavistic sense of more than mere physical movement. You were afloat, and who knew where the tides of fate might take you?
Slowly, virtually silently, and with a smoothness that rivalled silk, the Stillwater Swan took to the centre of the River Thames, her course heading due east, towards the dreaming spires of Oxford. And with the sun facing her bridge, both of the Swan’s side decks were darkened in a comfortable shade. As this fact had also been noted by others, Jenny could just faintly hear the guests on the port side, chattering in excitement.
The houses and cottages of Buscot were slowly left behind, and rows of weeping willows and ash began to crowd down to the banks. A pair of mute swans watched their namesake with unimpressed dark avian eyes and ruffled their feathers slightly.
Jenny pulled a wooden but comfortable and, more importantly, substantial deckchair nearer to the railings and sat down. A touch gingerly, she acknowledged it was true. In the past, she’d had some rather unfortunate dealings with deckchairs. It was a sad indictment of the new millennium, she’d always thought, that more than a decade into it, nobody had yet learned how to make proper garden furniture.
A pleasant, cooling breeze rippled across the water. At the side of the river, and well out of the main current, lime-green river reeds swayed gently with the passing movement of the boat, whilst yellow-flowering native water irises grew in rich profusion in the margins at the banks. Water-crowfoot, rife with tiny white flowers, flowed past the boat just below the surface of the water, like the adorned hair of some fabulous water maiden. The turquoise and orange flash of a kingfisher darted into a bank, no doubt with an offering of food for hungry chicks.
Every now and then on the bank, tall amethyst plumes of a native wildflower Jenny couldn’t put a name to pointed proudly to the sky. And in the open meadows, cattle that had come down to drink shied nervously away from the large white boat with its turning wheels and strange, melodious whistle, watching it go past with brown velvet eyes.
In a world of traffic-jammed motorways, mobile phones, email, computers and stress, it was like taking a step back into the past. Jenny could have stayed there all morning. It was one of the very rare times when she could almost wish she didn’t have food to prepare.
Behind her, through the open French doors that led into the salon, she heard voices, however, and sighed deeply. She got reluctantly to her feet, giving the passing scenery a last wistful glance. They were, she knew, due to stop near the village of Kelmscott for lunch, which was not that many hours away.
Time to work.
Besides, Jenny had no wish to overhear anybody’s conversation. She still had vivid memories of a birthday party that she had been hired to cater, and the murder that had followed. The family concerned, as she recalled, had all had the unfortunate habit of talking about something confidential just when it was impossible not to overhear them!
So she coughed loudly as she stepped into the main salon to announce her presence, nodded pleasantly at David and Dorothy Leigh, who were the first to forsake the open air and were currently engaged in reading the morning papers, and returned to her galley.