THE FLOWER ARRANGER AT ALL SAINTS a gripping cozy murder mystery full of twists (Suzy Spencer Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  THE

  FLOWER

  ARRANGER

  AT ALL SAINTS

  A gripping cozy murder mystery full of twists

  LIS HOWELL

  Suzy Spencer Book 1

  Revised edition 2021

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2006

  © Lis Howell 2006, 2021

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Lis Howell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78931-667-4

  CONTENTS

  A Note on the Church’s Seasons

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  ALSO BY LIS HOWELL

  FREE KINDLE BOOKS

  A SELECTION OF BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY

  GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH USAGE FOR US READERS

  To my mum, Jessica Edna Baynes, the best-read person I know, who made us all go to Sunday School!

  A Note on the Church’s Seasons

  The Church of England’s calendar starts with the season of Advent, beginning officially on the nearest Sunday, before or after, to St Andrew’s Day (30 November) — in effect the fourth Sunday before Christmas — and ending on Christmas Eve.

  The twelve days of Christmas, celebrating the birth of Jesus, come to a climax with the feast of Epiphany on 6 January. This marks the arrival of the wise men bringing their gifts to Bethlehem, when the Christ-child’s arrival was first made known to non-Jewish people. In some countries, people give presents at Epiphany rather than at Christmas.

  For the rest of the year, major Church festivals are linked to the date of Easter. This falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (20 March). Easter could fall at any time from 22 March to 25 April.

  Before Easter comes the forty-six-day season of Lent (the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness, plus six Sundays), starting with Ash Wednesday and ending just before Easter. The name ‘Lent’ is from an old English word meaning spring — literally, when daylight hours lengthen. Depending on the date of Easter, Ash Wednesday can be as early as the first week of February and as late as the second week of March. Lent is a period of repentance, prayer, fasting and reflection. There will probably be no flowers in church.

  The fourth Sunday in Lent is Mothering Sunday and the fifth is Passion Sunday. Then comes Palm Sunday, when the Church remembers Christ’s triumphal entry to Jerusalem on an ass. This is the start of Holy Week, leading up to Good Friday (perhaps originally ‘God’s Friday’) — the bleakest day of the year as the Church commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus. Then, after Easter Eve (sometimes known as Holy Saturday), is Easter Day, the joyful celebration of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The name ‘Easter’ could come from the pagan god Eostre whose feast was celebrated in April, or it might be from the Anglo-Saxon ostre, to rise.

  The Sunday after Easter is known as Low Sunday, though no one seems to know why. Perhaps there’s a feeling of come-down after the joy of Easter. The fifth Sunday after Easter is Rogation Sunday (from the Latin rogare, to ask), when there are special prayers for God’s blessing on the crops. Some churches observe the tradition of ‘beating the bounds’ on Rogation Sunday, processing round the parish boundary. The following Thursday is Ascension Day, marking the ascension of Christ into heaven.

  A week and a half after Ascension Day is Whit Sunday (or Whitsun). This feast commemorates the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples on the Jewish harvest festival of Pentecost, and many churches refer to Pentecost rather than Whit. ‘Pentecost’ is from the Greek word for fiftieth; the original Jewish celebration was on the fiftieth day after the second day of Passover, while the Christian Whitsun/Pentecost falls on the fiftieth day of the Easter season. The name Whitsun probably comes from White Sunday, after the ancient custom of wearing white robes at and after baptism.

  Because of the movable date of Easter, Whit Sunday could come any time in the period from 10 May to 13 June. Whit Monday is a public holiday in most European countries. In Britain it has been replaced by the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday in May, though many people still refer to it as the Whitsun holiday.

  The Sunday after Whit is Trinity Sunday, when the Church reflects on its fundamental doctrine of God as three persons in one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The long season of Trinity continues until the start of Advent, punctuated by occasional saints’ days on fixed dates such as Michaelmas (St Michael and All Angels) on 29 September. Most churches hold a Harvest Festival in late September or early October. The Church also commemorates All Saints — or All Hallows — on 1 November, though popular ways of marking Hallowe’en the previous day have lost any connection with the Church’s teaching.

  Acknowledgements

  All quotations at the heads of chapters are from The Book of Common Prayer.

  I would like to thank my agent Vanessa Holt for all her help and advice. Thanks too to Barbara Carthew for teaching me the little I know about real church flower arranging, and for helping me with research for this book, and also for her personal support. And I’d like to thank all my old friends who were so kind during the unhappy winter of 2003/4 — Jane Mawer, Jane Joscelyne, and Vreni and Andy Stephen and many more.

  I want to thank my friend Lesley Beames, former TV researcher, now magistrate, who was the first to read this, and my sister-in-law Gill Chivers of Ontario for helping make it more readable in North America. Thanks also to my friends Claire Kilvington and Lynn Miles, for reading the manuscript and for their suggestions. Sadly Lynn died before the book was published but her enthusiasm inspired me (and everyone else) and she will be sadly missed.

  I would like to thank journalist and writer Victoria Kingston for her friendship and for making me persevere! I owe her a great deal for her unfailing professional support and interest, and for introducing
me to the very kind novelist Peter Lovesey who in turn introduced me to Vanessa Holt.

  Thanks also to my great friend Peter Elman for his help with twists of the plot, and to my colleague Harriet Gilbert of the MA in Creative Writing at City University for her encouragement and sterling advice to ‘get on with it and write another murder mystery’.

  My faith in the accepting Anglican Church has been revived by the Reverend Michael Learmouth and his wife Bridget of St Andrew’s, Thornhill Square, Islington, who run a warm and welcoming parish where I and my partner Richard Parker are now so happy.

  And I would especially like to thank Richard for his help, on every aspect of this book but especially with all things theological. The character of Robert Clark bears some resemblance to Richard Parker . . . and yes, dear reader, I married him!

  Lis Howell

  September 2006

  1

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  Easter Eve

  Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord . . .

  From the third Collect at Evening Prayer

  The cold evening light flooded through the Gothic windows of the flower vestry at All Saints Church. Phyllis Drysdale was bending over the bucket of arum lilies, which were just opening on their stiff green stems, but she looked round to catch the glow. Outside, the sun was starting to set beyond the North Country fells in a final burst of chilly gold, as if to say, ‘Look what you’ll be missing!’ Within half an hour it would disappear behind Tarnfield Scar.

  ‘Goodbye, Phyllis,’ the Reverend Nick Melling called from the church. ‘Will you be all right working here by yourself? It’s nearly six o’clock.’

  It would soon be dark, but there were only the lilies left to do. They were to be the crowning glory of the big Easter Sunday arrangement at the altar, after the bleak flowerless days of Lent.

  ‘Yes, of course I will. Thank you, Nick.’

  She disliked calling him Nick. Phyllis was old enough to find diminutives too familiar, except for babies or pets. But Nick Melling, the new parish priest, was in his early thirties and insisted on informality.

  Phyllis shivered.

  She was used to working in the cold. But Easter was very early this year, in March, and it seemed especially icy in the flower vestry, which was at right angles to the main church, about twelve feet square, with windows facing east and west on each side, and a big stone sink in the corner. All Saints had been built more than a century and a half earlier. In the 1980s someone had added metal shelves to the flower vestry’s stone walls but they were now bent and scratched, packed with plastic urns and huge lumps of oasis foam, and the wires, scissors and secateurs needed for the job.

  A piece of rusty chicken wire stuck out and jabbed Phyllis’s elbow through her cardigan as she straightened up.

  ‘Ouch!’ she gasped.

  You needed to be careful. Some of this stuff was dangerous. She groped around for her toolbox on the floor. The sun was still there in the west, but through the opposite east-facing windows of the vestry it was already night. With her fingers wet and aching from cutting and wiring, Phyllis thought it was a good job her arthritis wasn’t so bad in her left hand. Her right was pretty useless but at least she could still manage. Oh, the spiteful trials of age! She was tired now. She would put the lilies in place; then it would certainly be time to go home.

  Tarnfield village was always quiet at this time of the evening, especially on a Saturday during a bank holiday weekend. No one was at the Chinese takeaway yet, the Lo-cost supermarket was almost empty, and the last bus had gone. It was getting colder. Phyllis loved Easter when it came in April, but she thought March was a mean month, showering you with bitter little raindrops or slicing you with icy blasts of wind, just when you thought it was warming up. Still, she was pleased with the flowers. There were lilies, forsythia and flag iris and tons of daffodils — though of course they wouldn’t mix with the others. Daffs were poisonous to other flowers.

  Poison. The thought stopped her rummaging through her tools. Phyllis was worried. She was one of those rare people who feel uncomfortable with gossip. The backbiting which was so much a part of parish life worried her. It seemed there was nobody she could talk to about the information that was wriggling away in her brain like the nasty little caterpillars they sometimes found in the chrysanthemums at Harvest Festival.

  She heard the porch door at the back of the church creak and swing open, and Suzy Spencer shouted, ‘Are you there, Phyllis?’ Carrying the lilies, Phyllis nudged open the vestry door. She caught sight of Suzy’s cropped bright highlights in the final shaft of silvery sun through the rose window.

  ‘Yes, Suzy, I’m fine. I’m just doing the lilies now. I’m so glad we splashed out on the arums. There’s no need to stay. I know you’re busy, you get away . . .’

  ‘Oh, thanks, Phyllis. I’ve got to get the kids on the six fifteen train to their dad’s . . .’

  ‘I understand, dear. You ought to hurry.’

  Suzy raised her hand in a wave and disappeared. She was an unlikely helper, Phyllis thought. Two children, a job ‘in media’ and a husband, if he was her husband, who was obviously living somewhere else. And surprisingly it had been Phyllis’s dear friend, the late Mary Clark, who’d recruited Suzy Spencer.

  ‘Not really our type,’ Mary had said briskly to Phyllis, ‘but she was hanging round the church and she seemed to need something to do.’ Phyllis was surprised at Mary’s interest. Mary had been conventional — and judgemental sometimes. There was no doubt Suzy’s lifestyle as a harassed working mum had clashed with Mary’s perfect housekeeping standards.

  Suzy often missed the meetings of the flower arrangers’ group. At the last gathering, one or two of the others had taken the chance to bitch about her, something Mary had done constantly before she died. Phyllis had said nothing, but it had made her feel awkward. Yvonne Wait, a smart single woman in her forties with a bell of glossy dark hair, had groaned, ‘I see Suzy Spencer isn’t here again. I don’t see why she can’t be a bit more organized. Anyone would think having two children meant your brain was on hold!’ Yvonne was an administrator at the local hospital.

  Phyllis had said quietly, ‘Well, she does work as well, you know . . .’

  ‘Oh, I really don’t agree with working mothers,’ tall, faded fair-haired Jane Simpson had added regally. Jane lived in Tarnfield House, and had one grown-up son who’d spent most of his adolescence at boarding school. Phyllis had sighed. She could remember when Jane had been just Jane Strickland, a girl from the village, with secret pretensions. Phyllis had never really liked ‘Lady’ Jane, with good reason. But she was far too mild-mannered to let the past intrude.

  Monica Bell from Bell’s Wood Yard had tried to change the subject. ‘Well, whatever you think of Suzy Spencer, we need her energy. No one else here can get up the ladders to put those floral swags on the pillars.’ Monica, small and stocky, was always practical. Her husband Frank had fixed great hooks into the church masonry to hold trailing displays of flowers and, like Frank himself, they were big, solid and just a bit awkward. It was a great relief to Monica that Suzy Smith was agile enough to get up the ladder to them. Monica was too heavy, Jane was too grand, Yvonne was too smartly dressed, and poor Phyllis was limited by her arthritis.

  How difficult it was getting church people to work together without all sorts of personality clashes, Phyllis thought. It had been different when Mary was alive. She had been Phyllis’s best friend since they were children in Tarnfield, but she had died just over a year ago. Mary Clark had virtually run the church, whipping everyone into shape, and her death had left a big hole in Phyllis’s life — no, in the life of Tarnfield. Mary’s husband Robert tried hard to help, but he had never been as committed to All Saints as Mary, and he was wrapped up in his own grief. He was a quiet man, five years younger than Ma
ry, too young to be one of those people Phyllis considered ‘their’ generation, the last generation really to have any sense of old-fashioned values, so he failed to fill the gap for her. Phyllis had always been rather shy of men. They could be so temperamental, she thought, remembering her own past. And now she had the Bible study group to deal with. Oh dear. Mary had always coped with it all before.

  Phyllis went back into the flower vestry to get her scissors, and blinked in the growing gloom. Just this last armful of lilies to do, and then she could get home to the bungalow. But where did I put my final Bible study list? she wondered. Oh, why am I so absent-minded? I never imagined Mary would go before me, she thought yet again. Phyllis had been the older one with the weak heart, the one who barely survived rheumatic fever in childhood, the ‘old maid’ with endless complaints. Yet Mary, efficient and capable, had died, and Phyllis was left. God certainly moved in mysterious ways.

  As she thought the word ‘moved’, Phyllis sensed there was someone behind the vestry door, in the church, but she stifled the idea.

  ‘Look to the west,’ she told herself, ‘and turn your back on those dark east windows.’

  Outside, the fells were a dusky skirting board to the setting sun, but its dying brightness still filtered into the pointed lead-lighted windows. Phyllis thought of Psalm 121, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help, and tried to ignore her sense of disquiet. Such a pity Nick Melling hated the psalms so much. He’d replaced them at the Family Service with songs to guitar, which Phyllis found fatuous. Mary might have talked him out of such silliness. But he wouldn’t listen to anyone else, and he was stubbornly enthusiastic. Phyllis sighed.

  There was a rustle behind her again, but she ignored it. She didn’t want to grope for the light switch. Electric light so finalized the day. Ah, here was the Bible study group list.