“People said it was heated, Charlie, barking, growing angrier with you.”
Charlie laid on the ground, his head by my feet. “He was,” I said. “But Finley had a lot to drink, he didn’t know what he was saying, or what he was doing.”
“Do you know how long he’d been drinking for?”
“Since birth?”
He didn’t find the humour in it. “Did you see him at all before then?”
“Yes, he arrived early. I’m not sure if he’s staying, as some of us are, but he was already drinking when I got here,” I said. “So, likely story is, he fell, knocked himself out, and then died choking while being sick.”
Paul shook his head. “We didn’t find any cuts on him, or his head, or anything,” he said. “It’s suspicious, don’t you think.”
“I do, but you said—”
He closed his notebook. “I’m only telling you this because you’ll go out of the way to drag anything up,” he said. “The man’s lips were burnt, there was blood, from the nose as well, and his cheeks have small welts on them.”
“So, that’s why we’re on lockdown.” The truth revealed, but why did he spin the narrative about him being knocked unconscious?
He hummed to tell me I was right.
“You think he was—”
“—killed.”
FIVE
Once Paul finished, he sighed and shook his head, wandering off to go talk to someone else. But he’d let it slip, he’d told me just what was happening, and while the thrill of finding out what he was keeping a secret from me usually fired me up, this time, I felt deflated.
Ruth approached me and nodded to our table. Most people were mingling and talking, drinking champagne.
“What happened?” she asked in a hushed voice.
I sensed eyes on me, watching as Paul walked away and the sullen look on my face probably gave away I knew something, or I was partly an answer to his questions and my expression was of guilt.
“He came out and said it.” Exacerbated, I sighed. Charlie shuffled his head and nuzzled against my foot.
“What? What did he say?”
I shook my head and butt my lips. “It’s being considered a murder.”
She pawed my arm. “And that’s what we thought, right?”
“No, no,” I said. “He made it sound like an accident, he convinced me almost it was.”
“And?”
“Then he said it’s too suspicious, no bruising, no cuts,” I continued, rolling my hands out onto the table to grab my glass of water. “More or less, he was telling me so I didn’t meddle.”
“Oh, because you’ve got a habit of interfering,” she chuckled back.
My brows rose in her direction. It was true. “And anyone here could have done it,” I said. “Let’s be really honest, the man was successful at making enemies.”
Ruth tipped her chin up, moving her head as if to slyly scan the room for people. “What else did he say?” She pulled out her chair and took a seat.
“His lips were burnt, or chapped, dry—perhaps,” I mumbled. “I have no idea, and I don’t want to see the body.”
Ruth nodded. “Well, I did get a look over some man’s shoulder,” she said. “Being tall, and in heels, has some perks, I guess.”
My jaw clenched and my hand snapped tightly around the glass. “What did you see?”
“Two paramedics, taking notes, pictures, they’d covered the head with some plastic, I think, so whatever it is under there, they didn’t want anyone to see,” she said. “Sounds like you might be right about the lips.”
“And cheeks,” I added in another mumbled. “I’m sure he said cheeks too.”
“Whatever it is, it sounds painful.”
I reflected for a moment, looking into the glass of water. Of course, of anyone to die, it had to be him, it had to be someone who I’d spoken to, with whom people knew we’d had a few heated words. But I knew I wasn’t the only one who’d spoken with him.
Turning my head in a stretch, I glanced around the room to try catch a glimpse of Diane. She wasn’t to be seen. Perhaps she was dealing with the crisis in only the way she knew how; controlling the narrative. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d called the lockdown so everyone could be forced into signing non-disclosure agreements about what had happened at the company party.
“Diane,” I said to Ruth.
“Diane?”
With a stern nod, I repeated her name. “Diane hated him, and she’d tried to avoid him all night,” I said. “So, sure, if they came into contact with each other, she could’ve done something, or whatever, I don’t know.”
“Is this your list?” she raised her brows. “Let me get a pen and paper.”
I pulled a napkin from the small basket near the centre of the table. “I have a pen in my purse.”
Ruth rubbed her hands and smiled. “So, what’s first?”
“Names,” I threw out, “motives, how he died, anything to try get some dots on the page.”
I scribbled my Diane’s name first, followed by her husband, Patrick.
“You could add he was very drunk,” she stated. “Easily in a state of influence.”
Drunk. I added. Angry. “He could’ve provoked it from anyone.”
“From what you said about the burn, I’d guess poison,” she said. “No sign of cuts or bruising, it had to be internal.”
Poison. “What type of—”
Ruth shrugged before I could finish. “There are too many poisons in this world, I’d have to see their blood report to even know, and even then, those things can be inconclusive. But whatever it was, he locked himself in the bathroom, he probably went in there to throw up.”
“Do you think he knew he was going to die?”
“Whenever you’re vomiting, it’s not the first thing which comes to mind.”
I nodded. “Besides, if he thought he was about to die, he’d have shouted about it, accused everyone of trying.” From his display of peacocking throughout the early evening, it was clear he wasn’t averse to throwing around accusations.
“Who else?”
Everyone. “Ex-business partners, ex-lovers, ex-employees.”
“Someone who wanted revenge.”
I nodded. Revenge.
We continued to talk over names and people around us, but once Yvonne joined the table, huffing into her seat across from us, the conversation stopped.
“You speak with Paul yet?” she asked, rolling her head on her neck. “All thing is barmy.”
I removed the napkin from view, sitting them on my lap beneath the table. “Terrible,” I nodded.
“Earl was telling me about his demands,” she said. “He wanted champagne on arrival, a bouquet of flowers for the woman he was bringing, and he’d even requested to have a dressing gown embroidered with his name on the back to commemorate the event.”
I looked around, at the mention of the women who was hanging from his arm earlier. She wasn’t in sight, probably off somewhere talking to the police, or perhaps she did it.
“Did you know the women he brought with him?”
She shrugged. “Nobody does by the sounds of it,” she said. “Diane almost died when she found out he was bringing a plus one to this thing.”
I hummed. I remembered the moment well.
Ten Days Earlier
Wednesday 20th February 2019
I had offered to help Diane with the arrangements for the event. I was feeling like a spare part in the offices. I’d submitted all my articles for publishing, and had very little left to do, especially as I didn’t have a lot of time left before moving on to the new job.
Diane called me into the small board room, and on the table, was a giant sheet of lilac paper. At the top, was the scrawling of the seating chart.
There were thirteen tables, each pictured as large white circles, and around each table were smaller circles; six to a table.
Diane planted her hand to her head. “I wanted a maximum of ten tables,”
she grumbled. “Ten.” Holding her hands up and extending her fingers out.
“Oh?” I looked over the seating chart and the map of the hall we were going to be in. The last time anything like this had happened, was for the 30th anniversary, and I’d only been here for two years at that time.
“You’re on the second table,” she said. “In front of the stage, besides my table.”
“Oh? With who else?”
She pounded the sheet with her hand. “Everyone else is all the way to the back.”
“So, the last tables are the ones you really don’t want here?” I asked with a slight grin. “Because that can be a secret.”
She shrugged. “People know their importance based on where they’re seated.”
“So, who should I be wary of then?”
A scowl formed across her lips. “Anyone who’s invested anything in the publishing company,” she said. “Everyone gets an invite, and I hope and pray they don’t send back their RSVP slip.”
“Did you have to?”
Diane swanned around, her batwing white blouse moving in the gust of her movement. “Patrick’s decision,” she said, not making eye contact. “And by that, I mean, he’s trying to keep the investors open for future business, and not inviting any of them is like shooting your doctor, and then shooting yourself in the foot, and being shocked you don’t have a doctor to help.”
That was definitely one way of putting it. “I know you have advertisers for the magazine, are they—”
“A few of them, yes,” she replied. “But I only do business with people and businesses I like. Patrick’s side of things is the worst.”
I didn’t know any of the names, other than the people I worked with in the office, and some of the freelancers, but even they weren’t in the front few tables. I had invited Ruth along with me, and from what I could see, we were going to be seated with Yvonne, her husband, Howard, and his wife. The perfect team, in my opinion.
On the first table, Diane and Patrick, and some names I didn’t know. Possibly their friends or major business associates. I searched for Suzanne’s name; on the third table, she had invited another as well—fiancé, husband, boyfriends; whoever he was.
“Finley Carson,” she scoffed. “Finley.” She dotted her finger to the circle with his name, away from all tables, currently alone. “I sat him a little far back, hopefully far enough where I won’t have to interact with him.”
“Who is he?”
She scoffed. “A thorn in my side.”
“How so?”
“For starters, he weaselled his way into this event,” she said. “Now he’s brought a plus one. A plus one.” She shook her head.
“What does he do?” I asked. The name wasn’t familiar on my ears, he could’ve been anyone.
“A little bit of everything,” she said. “But for the event, he’s here on behalf of an advertiser.”
I glanced at the seating chart to see if I noticed any names around him. I didn’t.
“The main issue with him is how he doesn’t get along with anyone,” she said. “Mainly his ex-business partner, Spencer.”
“Do you need my help with it?” I asked.
“I need a fresh set of eyes,” she said. “Where should he go?”
SIX
Diane’s voice echoed through the hall, travelling through the sound system of the speakers. “Leave me be,” she said.
The jazz band cut.
Glancing around the room, I watched as Diane strutted out from the corner, chased after her by Patrick, her husband. She dropped her microphone, letting a drone of static spit through the speakers.
“My birthday is ruined!” she shouted, stopping at her table. Patrick pulled his wife into his arms, before gesturing to the band to start up again.
All eyes were on the couple as they seemed to talk in hushed whisperings. My eyes were on watch, attempting to decipher anything they were saying and the way their bodies were moving.
“Think she’s had too much to drink,” Yvonne offered up her thoughts.
“As we all should be,” Ruth nodded. “It’s a party.”
Through a furrowed brow, I glanced to her. It might have been a party, but there wasn’t anything to celebrate, at least not while a dead body lay in the bathroom floor with a plastic bag covering it out of view—while I hadn’t seen it, I was living in assumption.
“It was a really important event for her,” I said. “I don’t blame her for being angry. The police are crawling the place and interrogating everyone.” I tilted my head to the side. “And I think she should understand, someone is dead, and the faster we know who did it, the faster we can all get back to the celebration.”
Yvonne raised her glass to the comment. “Then tomorrow, we can all enjoy hot stone massages.” Pausing before putting it to her lip. “Who did it?” she repeated. “What do you mean?”
I forced myself to laugh. “Force of habit,” I said. “You know, finding those dead bodies.”
Yvonne snorted. “Maybe you’re cursed,” she laughed.
I smiled back, I hoped she wasn’t right.
Diane and Patrick sat at the table, their voices growing louder as more people joined them, including Yvonne’s husband, Earl.
“Has anyone asked how long they’ll be?” Diane’s voice grew. She pushed out from her chair to view the people and officers around the room. “I’m just glad they haven’t stopped the band, or pulled the plug on the chocolate fountain.”
“We’re in lockdown,” Patrick said, almost as if he’d told her for the seventh time. “They’ll get to the bottom of it, and it’ll all be solved soon.”
I folded the paper napkins on my lap and crammed them into my small clutch purse.
Smash.
“I told you, I’ve only known him a week!” a woman shouted.
The same woman Finley had brought to the party. She now had a knee-length leather coat jacket covering her body, tied at the waist, with both arms folded across the chest.
The officer in front of her took a step back.
“I told you everything I know,” she said. “Now, can I leave?”
I didn’t watch further for an answer.
Yvonne stood and gave a wave before she joined her husband at Diane’s table.
“Everyone must think they’re doing a once over of the scene and nothing much else,” I said. “Nobody knows they think it’s a murder.”
“I’m sure they’re getting clued up,” Ruth added. “There’s officers everywhere, and not to mention anything, they’ve put the place on lockdown.”
For a place where there was a murder suspect supposedly on the loose, nobody was reacting like it. Nobody was reacting as if they’d heard news of a killer, but everyone knew there was a dead body.
“What do you think is going through everyone’s heads?” I asked.
Looking around, everyone was helping themselves to food, helping themselves to more champagne. They looked over their phones, smiled to each other, talked. There was no overwhelming panic, and nothing to say these people were any wiser.
“Why they served such small food portions,” she grumbled back. “Why they only employed male wait staff to serve us, you know, nothing important, obviously.”
I had noticed both observations. “Diane’s choosing,” I answered in short. She was very particular about what she wanted at her party and the magazine event, and she wanted to be waited on by men, young men, specifically, with silver plates in hand and champagne on constant supply and flow. I remembered that much, at least.
“Of course,” she replied, wryly smiling back at me. “The dream, right.”
Pulling the napkins from my purse once again. “Who do you think could’ve done it?”
“Sounds like poison,” she said. “So, my money is on a woman.”
“A scorned woman he hired?” I posed.
“If the woman who just had a tantrum was anything to go by,” she sighed with a nod of her head in the direction where the woman had be
en standing, arguing with a police officer. “But if he’s here, he’s probably rich, he could pay himself out of whatever box they cornered him in.”
“That’s the problem with people and money,” I said.
Harry had always told me, the people he did business with were the type of people who could buy people. It was perhaps one of the reasons I never knew much about his business dealings, he wanted to keep me away from it all.
The boat trips out on the lake, I’d have spent all my time talking with wives or girlfriends while the men stood by the wheel with their beers in hand, talking business, and I was discussing different coloured wood panelling for a new decking in a house I’d probably never visit or see.
“What are you thinking about?” Ruth asked, as if noting I was away in the space between my ears; inside my own thoughts. “Because I think if Paul told you and let on more information than he’s done before, it could be a cry for help.”
He was Harry’s brother, after all. And the two of them did act similarly, I saw it in the way they would both go in all guns ablaze and then not know how to apologise. Of course, I rarely saw that side to Harry, only during his last years when we knew he was dying, and the stress would get to him all sudden in a heat.
I set the napkins on the table. “It must be someone here, and I think you’re correct with the poison,” I said, tapping a finger on the napkin. “But there must be hundreds, if not thousands of poisons, and I’m sure there are business folk here who dabble in the pharma world, you know, research funds, donations; plaques and names on hospital wings kinda thing.”
“You should ask Diane,” she said, nodding to the table across from us.
Diane was currently in no state to talk about the people she’d invited, she’d had a few too many drinks in her system and was being consoled by her husband, seated as he hushed into her ear and kept her from wandering off. Not a state I’d ever seen her in before, she’d always been refined and poised.
“Later,” I said, although my focus was on her husband, he knew more about the businesspeople here.
As more interviews were conducted, people inside the ballroom grew louder, restless. There was panic, almost as if everything was catching up to them, everything was hitting them all at once.
Murder at Maple House Page 3