Mystery in Provence: Miss Ashford Investigates Read online

  Mystery in Provence

  Miss Ashford Investigates

  Vivian Conroy

  One More Chapter

  a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2022

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  Copyright © Vivian Conroy 2022

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  Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

  Cover illustration © Gary Redford / Meiklejohn

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  Vivian Conroy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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  Source ISBN: 9780008549251

  Ebook Edition © October 2022 ISBN: 9780008549244

  Version: 2022-08-24

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  Last Seen in Santorini

  Thank you for reading…

  About the Author

  Also by Vivian Conroy

  One More Chapter...

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  June 1930

  When the news that would change her life forever reached Miss Atalanta Ashford, she was climbing the rocky path to the ruins of an old Swiss burg, fantasizing those tattered grey remains were the white marble columns of the Parthenon.

  Her vivid imagination filtered out the tinkling of bells attached to the sheep grazing on the grassy slopes of the surrounding mountains and replaced them with the murmur of tourists’ voices, speaking all the languages of the world. Beside her she pictured eager young people whom she was telling everything about Greek mythology, and a few feet away walked a handsome man with intriguing deep brown eyes who had cast interested looks in her direction as she explained about the Hydra of Lerna.

  He might invite her later to try baklava at a table under a large old tree in a shaded courtyard while a sole musician lured melancholy notes from his mandolin. ‘I’ve rarely heard,’ her male admirer would say, ‘someone speak about a multi-headed monster with such passion, Miss Ashford.’

  ‘Miss Ashford!’ A voice echoed the words from her imaginings but it was not male or admiring. It was female, young, and decidedly impatient.

  Atalanta halted her upwards movement and slowly turned to look over her shoulder. At the bottom of the steep path, one of her younger pupils stood waving a white item in her hand. ‘Miss Ashford! A letter for you. It looks awfully important.’

  Atalanta sighed as she gave up on the glittering vision of the Parthenon behind her back and made her way, precariously, down the path to her real life. She had done this many times before, always with a sharp stab of regret that the fantasies that made her so happy were just that: daydreams.

  But she also renewed her determination with every step she took that she would one day see Athens or Crete or Istanbul. Now that she had at last paid off her father’s debts, she was finally in a position to save money for her travel plans.

  If only the letter wasn’t from another debtor, who had found his way to her via the others who had been paid. It had taken her years to settle things and finally be her own woman. She wanted to enjoy that freedom. Admittedly, her vacation this year would just be a small trip to a nearby valley, but it would be the first money she could spend on herself since she had stood at her father’s grave, knowing she was now all alone in the world, faced with two choices: running away from responsibility or paying the debts, no matter how long it took, and making a fresh start of it. The idea that that money might be snatched away by yet another debtor made her heart sink.

  ‘It looks like a crest on the envelope,’ the girl called, studying the item in her hand. ‘Perhaps it comes from a duke or an earl.’

  Atalanta smiled involuntarily. She liked it when people expected the winds of change to blow through the cobwebs of their daily treadmill existence. Still, it was extremely unlikely that a duke or earl would write to her. Her father had come from an aristocratic family but he had broken off all ties with them, forging his own path in life. He had so wanted to achieve something, make a name for himself, away from his birthright. He had longed to prove to his father that he could be more than merely an heir to a title, a man waiting in the wings to take his place in the row of ancestors who were commemorated in the family tree.

  Sadness washed through her. Her father had died feeling that he had failed. Not failed himself, but failed her, his only child.

  I wish he could know how well everything turned out for me.

  Swallowing quickly, she forced her attention back to her pupil. A frown furrowed her brow. ‘Why are you still here, Dotty? Shouldn’t your father’s driver have picked you up already?’

  Dorothy Claybourne-Smythe was the daughter of an English diplomat who had a house in Basel. She was supposed to spend the summer vacation there, if the family didn’t decide to go to their Tuscan villa. If Atalanta was lucky, Dorothy would send her a postcard that could further feed her fantasies about travel abroad. She had entire albums full of postcards and pictures cut from newspapers with an invisible promise written beside them: one day I will see these sights for myself. The albums were her lifeline when things got hard.

  Dorothy’s expression set. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

  It didn’t sound rebellious, just achingly sad.

  Poor girl. Atalanta jumped down the last few feet across a large boulder and landed beside her pupil, putting an arm around her narrow shoulders for a moment. ‘It won’t be that bad.’

  ‘But it will. Father never has time for me and I hate my stepmother. She will comment on everything from my wardrobe to my freckles. I want my mother.’

  Atalanta’s gut clenched. How could she say something uplifting to his girl whose situation was similar to her own? Like Dorothy, Atalanta had never known her mother. From her untimely death onwards it had been just her father and her, rocked on the tides of his spending, with times when money was abundant and they could afford books and clothes and desserts, and months
when they had absolutely nothing and Atalanta was sent to the door when the debt collectors came because they might take pity on a little girl in a tattered dress.

  She had learned quickly how to read their posture, the look in their eyes, and to determine whether she could bargain with them to give her father a little more time or whether she should offer right away that they could take something from the house by way of payment.

  She had kept her face composed while her mother’s jewellery was taken. Only after the door closed had she sobbed like a baby. Nothing left of her mother but memories, and the photograph beside her bed.

  ‘At least you have family, a place to call home,’ Atalanta said softly to Dorothy. A stable home instead of constantly changing addresses and an existence walking a tightrope between hope that their circumstances would this time really change for the better and fear that it would never turn out the way her father projected. In his enthusiasm he often overlooked risks.

  ‘Home?’ Dorothy grimaced. ‘Often I feel like my presence is too much. It’s just about the boys.’

  The boys were the rambunctious twins her stepmother had borne. Especially the elder, and heir to the estate, who never got corrected or punished for anything he did, Dorothy had often explained to her.

  Atalanta couldn’t deny that male descendants—heirs—mattered, a lot, in any well-to-do family. Still, she couldn’t stand to see her pupil so dejected. Being able to adapt, constantly, to new circumstances was a great asset in life, as well as understanding that you could not always have your way. And that unpleasant situations could be made better if you changed your outlook on them.

  ‘You’ll have to devise a plan then.’ Atalanta pressed Dorothy’s shoulder. ‘Whenever your stepmother isn’t nice to you, just imagine yourself someplace else.’

  ‘Where?’ the girl asked, rather perplexed.

  ‘Anywhere you’d like. A place you’ve read about, a place you’ve been to. A place you made up, all to your liking,’ Atalanta enthused. ‘It can be your secret castle where you hide away when the world feels like a lonely place. In there you have everything you need. Friends, even. That’s the beauty of imagination. It has no limits.’

  Dorothy looked doubtful. ‘Does that really work? My friends are here and they can’t come with me. I’m not allowed to bring even one friend. My stepmother says we get too loud and it gives her headaches. But when the boys scream all day, it doesn’t hurt her ears at all. It’s so unfair.’ She sighed and pressed her head against Atalanta. ‘I wish I could stay here with you.’

  The simple gesture and words raised a lump in Atalanta’s throat. To have a younger sister like this, to feel an unbreakable bond… But the boarding school director was very strict. The pupils shouldn’t form too close a connection with the teachers. Emotion was discouraged, empathy disapproved of. She had to keep her distance even though she didn’t want to.

  ‘But I’m not staying here.’ Atalanta smiled down on her warmly to soften this blow. ‘I’ve found a little village in a remote valley where I can climb and explore to my heart’s delight.’

  ‘So I can’t write to you either,’ Dorothy said, her expression setting. ‘I so wanted to write to you whenever I feel sad or the boys tease me.’

  ‘Then write it all down and pretend you send it to me.’ As a girl she had written countless letters to her mother, telling her what she had learned to play on the piano or how gorgeous the park looked with the budding blossoms. She had never written about her father’s business transactions, or when the jewellery had been taken. That would only have made her mama sad.

  Dorothy didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘But I couldn’t have written anything meaningful anyway,’ she said, pursing her lips. ‘Miss Collins would have read it. She steams open the envelopes and glues them shut again, you know.’

  ‘It’s not polite to say such things about other people.’ Even if they were true, Atalanta added to herself. Miss Collins was their housekeeper, postmistress, and much more. She was kind to the girls and an ally when Atalanta had a more unusual educational plan, but she was also insatiably curious.

  Now, Atalanta took the envelope from Dorothy’s hand and studied the flap to see if it had been opened, but the sender had taken the precaution of sealing it with an old-fashioned red wax seal. He had even pressed his ring into it. It wasn’t a crest, though, as Dorothy had suggested. Rather, initials: an I and an S entwined like vines on an old tree. Whose initials could they be?

  She turned the envelope over and studied the front with the neat name and address directing it to her at the International Boarding School for Young Ladies of Good Repute.

  No sender address though. Mysterious.

  ‘Dorothy Claybourne-Smythe.’ The name should have been pronounced with indignation but the speaker’s lack of breath made it sound rather like an engine that had run out of steam. Miss Collins stood beside them, putting her fleshy hands on her hips. ‘Your father’s chauffeur has arrived and is waiting for you. Why are you not packed and ready? Where is your hat? It does not do to run around bareheaded.’ She cast a half-reproving, half-amused look at Atalanta. ‘That goes for you too, Miss Ashford.’

  Atalanta reached up with her free hand to feel across her head as she became suddenly conscious she wasn’t wearing a hat. ‘Yes, Miss Collins,’ she murmured obediently, noting to herself that if, by some miracle, she did ever get to the Parthenon, a stylish sunhat would be an essential.

  Dorothy said, ‘Bye, Miss Ashford. Thank you for what you said,’ and ran off down the broad paved footpath leading back to the school.

  Atalanta felt the emptiness where the girl’s head had rested against her. Her pupils trusted her and confided in her, but those wonderful moments reminded her sharply that she herself had no one to turn to. That she had to fend for herself.

  Miss Collins stayed in position, glancing curiously at the letter in Atalanta’s hand. ‘I didn’t know the mailman had come.’

  Apparently, Dorothy, skulking about to avoid her father’s chauffeur for as long as she possibly could, had managed to lay her hands on the letter before the postmistress had even noticed its arrival.

  ‘It reached me without problems, merci.’ Atalanta smiled. ‘I will now continue what I was doing. Au revoir.’ And she retraced her steps up to the burgh ruins. She knew Miss Collins thought it very unladylike to ‘scramble up paths’, as she called it and would not follow her, giving her the privacy she craved to look inside her mysterious letter. If it was bad news, she would have time to compose herself before returning to the school.

  And if it was good news… But what good news could it possibly be?

  After a few minutes of climbing, she stood on the top of the small hill amongst the cracked stones and mossed formations of what once had been a burg overlooking the village below.

  Pink and white wildflowers bloomed between the stones, bees buzzed, and overhead the red kite let out its eerie high cry as it circled against the blue sky, its wings spread wide to catch as much rising hot air as it could to stay soaring.

  She pulled a pin from her hair to use to slit open the letter and then dropped the pin carelessly in her jacket pocket to look inside as soon as she could.

  Extracting a leaf of fine, high-quality paper, she unfolded it and read the opening lines, written in a strong—probably male—hand with expensive blue ink.

  Dear Miss Ashford,

  I trust this letter finds you well and in good health. It pains me to write to you expressing my condolences at the death of your grandfather, Clarence Ashford, Esq.

  Atalanta gasped, pushing her heels hard against the cracked stones under her feet to maintain balance. She had only seen her grandfather once. She had been about ten and he had come to their house to offer her father his help in paying off his debts. Atalanta had believed the arrival of a fine coach and a well-dressed man was the answer to their prayers but her father had only fought with their visitor, throwing terrible accusations and insults at him, and sent him off with
a sharp order never to call on them again.

  Later, as their situation got increasingly desperate and her father’s health began to suffer, she had been tempted to pick up a pen and write to her grandfather, begging him for assistance. But she never had. It would have been too painful to receive a cool reply stating that he was too mortified by the earlier treatment to look kindly upon her request, or something of that nature. Her father had treated him horribly, and such a response would be natural.

  Besides, she hadn’t known how the revelation that she had contacted his family would affect her father. What if he became so angry with her that he suffered a heart attack or a stroke? She couldn’t risk it. The chances of a happy outcome were simply too slight.

  And now it was too late.

  Her grandfather had gone.

  The breeze felt suddenly cold on her neck and she blinked against the burn behind her eyes. She steeled herself to read on.

  Your grandfather left very specific instructions concerning his last will, which I must convey to you in person. I have taken up residence in Hotel Bären across from the station. I will await you there at your earliest convenience so you may learn something to your benefit.

  Yours faithfully,