The Final Crumpet Read Online Free

old, but I still remember the fuss in Scotland. Thousands of policemen across the United Kingdom searched for him.”
    “What was his claim to fame?” Flick asked. “He was a BBC radio personality,” Nigel said.
    “And also an author and philanthropist,” Conan added. Jim chimed in. “Don’t forget that Mr. Makepeace was also known as ‘The Tea Sage.’ He visited the tea museum several times.”
    “This museum!” Nigel howled.
    “Oh yes, sir. I heard him lecture in the Grand Hall on two occasions. Very knowledgeable he was about tea.” Jim chortled. “Imagine me digging up his bloomin’ body.” He leaned close to Flick. “And imagine the coppers finding an antiquities box full of Mr. Makepeace’s clobber.”
    Flick met Nigel’s eyes. She knew exactly what he was thinking.
    Imagine the tasteless reports on TV Picture the lurid tabloid headlines. He had been right; she had been abysmally wrong.
    A mobile phone rang. “It’s mine,” Conan said.
    He listened for a moment, then said to Nigel, “I didn’t think it would happen so quickly, but an outside-broadcast van just pulled into the staff car park.”
    Nigel translated for Flick. “A mobile TV production studio. The first of the TV news teams has arrived.” He added with a smile, “The reappearance of Etienne Makepeace seems to be a topic of some interest to the media.”
    Flick nodded vaguely, waiting for Nigel to say I told you so, and wondering what could be worse than a “juicy scandal.”
    “We’ll soon find out,” she said to no one in particular.

Two
    “G ood heavens—Stuart has torn the place apart,” Nigel muttered when he saw the carnage in the Duchess of Bedford Tearoom. Stuart Battlebridge’s crew had stacked the sixteen square tea tables against one wall of the museum’s ground floor restaurant and arranged the sixty-four dining chairs “theatre style” in eight even rows in front of a podium that stood atop a newly installed raised platform. They had also brought in an ugly bank of floodlights that seemed bright enough to illuminate the Royal Tunbridge Wells Common.
    I’ll skin the man alive.
    Nigel’s twinge of annoyance quickly changed to a pang of remorse when he remembered that he had personally authorized the transformation. Somehow Stuart had managed to snooker him into hosting a news conference in the museum’s ground floor restaurant.
    You fell for his stirring sales pitch—that’s how!
    “The Duchess of Bedford is an ideal venue in which to meet the press,” Stuart had said, with the delight of an explorer setting foot on an unexplored continent. “Your tearoom is friendly, accommodating, and visually exciting, yet indisputably your turf.” He had done a slow pirouette, then pointed to the glass wall that gave diners a view of the museum’s greenhouse. “We shall locate the podium there.”
    Nigel had called Stuart minutes after the first outside broadcast van appeared in the tea museum’s car park. The rotund, fiftyish spin doctor—a principal in the local public relations firm of Gordon & Battlebridge—fancied himself an expert in crisis communication. He rushed to the museum from his office on Monson Road and was soon giving orders like a field marshal.
    Nigel had to admit that Stuart knew how to sort out the journalists and correspondents who flocked to the museum on Friday afternoon. He cheerfully filled their requests for background information about the museum, explained that the members of the museum staff were not granting interviews today, and guided them to the police spokeswoman who had driven over from the Kent Police Headquarters in Maidstone to answer their questions.
    Early on Friday evening, Stuart had managed to convince Nigel that the museum should hold a news conference and museum tour at nine o’clock on Monday morning, two hours before the museum reopened to the general public. “We’ll let the weekend go by and build the media’s curiosity about the museum,” he had said.