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been working on. It may have
been returned to him by someone who doesn’t realise he is
dead.”
    Beatrice
nodded and mentally kicked herself for not having thought about
that herself. She opened her mouth to speak but, to her
consternation, he was already on his way to the door.
    “Ben?”
It felt terribly familiar to use his first name, especially given
their relatively new acquaintance, but he didn’t appear to have any
objection to her familiarity. “Would you mind putting this into
uncle’s study, please? It is the room next door.” She put a
delicate hand to her nose and tried hard not to sniff. “I can’t
take any more of that odour.”
    Ben
nodded and happily complied. If he was honest, the stench had
started to grate on his senses too. He just wished that there was
something else he could waft around to smother the
smell.
    Holding
the plant carefully away from him, he walked casually into the
study and stared in horror at the sight that greeted him. He
quickly put the plant onto the floor by his feet and hurried back
to the sitting room.
    “Beatrice?”
    She eyed
the cold fury on his face and felt her stomach drop to her toes.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
    Once
again, her thoughts turned toward the strange noise she had heard
earlier, and knew deep inside, that she wasn’t going to like what
he was about to tell her.
    “I am
afraid that there appears to have been a break in.”

CHAPTER FOUR

    Beatrice
stared at him in horror and started to struggle to her feet. “What?
Is it the study?”
    “Come
on,” Ben murmured gently as he swept her off her feet.
    “All you
seem to have done this afternoon is carry me,” she grumbled quietly
but didn’t ask him to put her down. She rather enjoyed the way he
seemed inclined to want to carry her everywhere.
    Ben
merely threw her a regretful look. Seconds later he placed her on
her feet just inside the doorway of the study and stood back to
allow her to see the chaos. A part of him didn’t want her to look
at the mess that had been made of the room, but she needed to
witness the destruction for herself before he went to fetch the
constable.
    “If you
want to take a look around and try to identify if anything might be
missing, I will take a look at this window. I cannot remember
seeing any sign of damage on the back door, but whoever did this
may have gotten in through one of the other downstairs windows,”
Ben muttered as he carefully picked his way across the room to
study the window frame.
    Beatrice
glanced around the room in confusion. “Ben, what makes you think
this place has been broken into?”
    Ben
turned to stare at her in consternation and waved toward the papers
and books strewn practically everywhere.
    “I am
afraid that it usually looks like this,” she murmured ruefully when
she realised the misunderstanding. “To the untrained eye, this is
nothing more than a wild mass of confusion that should be swept up
and thrown away.” She studied the things her uncle had spent a
lifetime collecting and sighed. “To my uncle, everything had a
place and he knew exactly where that place was. Everything here
meant something to him.”
    It just doesn’t mean anything to me, she thought regretfully, although didn’t say as much to
Ben.
    When a
bolt of lightning lit the sky, she looked out of the window and
shivered at the sight of the darkness of the sky. The storm seemed
to be an omen for troubled times ahead, and she couldn’t shake the
feeling that the near-miss with the carriage was just the start of
a whole host of troubles that were only just beginning. She quickly
turned her thoughts away from her incident in the lane and looked
back at Ben. For some reason, just looking at him seemed to
reassure her that everything would be alright. She was so very glad
he was there.
    “God, I
see now why you rarely ventured in here when your uncle was alive.
With as many papers as this, it is inevitable that you will
dislodge something.” He took a moment