Mistletoe Mystery by Sally Quilford Read Free Book Online Page A

business.”
    “I know enough.”
    Philly did not know or understand why, but she sensed that
once again Matt closed the shutters on her.
    The lake looked extraordinarily pretty with the winter
sunshine upon it, surrounded by trees glowing russet and yellow in the
sunlight; a pre-Raphaelite landscape come to life. As Philly had promised,
various follies were dotted around the bank of the lake. Arbours hidden away
amongst the trees so that one could sit in the shade but still have a full view
of the house and lake; small temples dedicated to various gods, mostly of the
female variety, such as Aphrodite and Diana. They had walked several hundred
yards when Philly stopped suddenly.
    “It’s the tower,” she said. “The one from Robespierre’s
painting.”
    Sure enough a stone tower, no more than seven feet in height
stood at the side of the lake, with a path running from it to the water. 
 Behind it was not the forest that Philly had seen in the picture, but a
low hedge, with a gap in the centre.
    Philly let go of Matt’s hand and walked around the tower,
looking for the right perspective. Finally she found it.
    “The artist, Robespierre, must have stood about here,” she
said.
    Matt went to stand next to her. “Yeah, I guess he did.” He
had that puzzled look on his face again. “So I guess the painting does belong
to this house.”
    “What do you mean? Of course it belongs to this house. I
found it in the attic.”
    “Sorry,” said Matt, “what I mean is that it was painted
here, probably on commission. It wasn’t bought from a gallery.”
    Philly had the strong suspicion that it was not what he
meant at all. She left him standing on the path and walked around to the back
of the tower and found that it had an alcove with a stone seat built into it.
Except that where all the other seats faced the lake, this one faced the house,
looking through the gap in the hedge and across the lawns to the long Gothic
façade of the house.
    Inside the alcove, the walls were scratched with graffiti;
mostly the names of girls whom Philly assumed had attended the school. One
piece of graffiti was a heart and written inside was a time and partial date,
leaving out the year. Philly assumed it was a secret assignation between one of
the girls and a boy she should not have been meeting. She scoured the walls and
found there were several other hearts, all with a different time and date,
usually a month or so apart. One heart was etched on the wall under the
seat.  She idly hoped that the young lovers had managed to run away
together and get married.
    Turning to look at the house, Philly had a fantasy of a
teenage girl, running across those lawns to meet her boyfriend. That was when
it occurred to her. What if that teenage girl had been Dominique DuPont? What
if all she had done was run away with the boy she loved? It did not explain why
her family also seemed to disappear, but they might have been ashamed if she
had run away with a lower class boy. Things were different in those days, and
the lines between the classes were more pronounced.
    What if, Philly thought, having gorged herself on too many
Hollywood movies, the boy had not been a boy at all? He might have been an
older man who could pass for a teenage boy. He might even have been a spy of
some sort. There were many problems in France in the sixties, as Philly well
knew from reading The Day of the Jackal . The boy spy, an Algerian
perhaps, might have killed the whole DuPont family then it was all hushed up by
the government.
    She became so lost in her daydream, she almost forgot that
she had left Matt alone. When she went back to him, he had moved nearer to the
lake and had his back to her, looking into the distance. He was also talking
into his mobile phone.
    “No,” he was saying firmly, “there’s no need to send anyone
else yet. I need to look around a bit more. I think the answer is in the attic,
but it’s locked…. I’m sure I can get the key... No, no … Let