Moonflower Murders

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘Hello? Is that Mr Pünd? Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I can hear you. Is this Mr Schultz?’

  ‘Thank you for calling us, sir. I want you to know, you have a great many admirers here in New York.’

  ‘You are too kind.’

  ‘Not at all. If you ever decided to write a book about your exploits, I hope you would allow this agency to represent you.’

  That was, Pünd reflected, exactly what he would have expected from a New York agent. Even as he was discussing the death of one of his clients, he was attempting to secure another. He said nothing, ignoring the invitation – and perhaps the man at the end of the line realised he had stepped out of line.

  ‘We’re all heartbroken by the death of Miss James,’ he continued earnestly. ‘As you may know, she hadn’t acted for some time, but she was about to make a comeback and all I can say is, it’s a great loss to the movie industry. I’m sorry I can’t be in London to speak with you personally but I very much hope you’ll help us out here. We want to know who did this. We want to know what happened. We feel we owe it to her.’

  ‘And if I do find the truth,’ Pünd said, ‘what then?’

  ‘Well, obviously, that will be a matter for the British police. But our feeling is we can’t just sit on our butts and do nothing. We wanted to get involved and then some bright spark in the office suggested you and we got in touch straight away. We were lucky that one of our associates was in London this week and he carried my letter with him on the flight. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that we can’t waste any time. We don’t want to let the trail go cold.’

  ‘It is certainly true that an investigation is at its most effective in the days immediately following the crime,’ Pünd agreed.

  ‘We’ll pay your usual fee, Mr Pünd. You can ask your assistant to get in touch with our finance department. I can’t tell you how much it would mean to us if you came on board. There are a lot of sharks in this business – male and female – but Melissa was one of the kindest and most considerate people I had the privilege to meet. She never let success go to her head and she never forgot her fans.’

  ‘When did you last speak with her, Mr Schultz?’

  ‘I’m sorry? I can’t hear you.’

  ‘When did you last speak with her?’

  ‘About two weeks ago. We were discussing a contract for a new film. She was going to earn a lot of money – and it strikes me that may have had something to do with what happened.’

  ‘It is, I suppose, possible.’ Pünd sounded unsure.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave the thinking to you. Can I tell my partners that we have an agreement?’

  ‘You can tell them, certainly, that I will consider the matter.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I am truly appreciative. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.’

  He rang off. Pünd sat in silence.

  ‘What did he say?’ Miss Cain asked. She had been sitting opposite him throughout the conversation but she had only heard one side of what was discussed.

  ‘It is interesting,’ Pünd said. ‘If I decide to take this assignment, it will be the first time I have been engaged by a long-distance telephone call!’

  ‘You would have thought they could have flown over,’ Miss Cain sniffed.

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘Are you going to do it?’

  Pünd turned the letter round and tapped his fingers gently against the paper as if there was something hidden inside the words and he was trying to dislodge it. Finally, he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only last night this case was mentioned to me and now this has occurred. There is something about the approach from her agents that persuades me that, as you suggested, this could be a case of great interest. Please can I ask you to book two first-class rail tickets to . . . I believe Tawleigh-on-the-Water is the name of the village? We will also need accommodation in a comfortable hotel.’

  Miss Cain stood up. ‘I’ll get on to it straight away.’

  ‘As a courtesy, we will need to contact the local police and inform them of our arrival, and you can also call back Herr Schultz and inform him that I have decided to take the case.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll also organise the contract and the payment.’

  ‘That too. I take it you have no issues that would prevent you from accompanying me?’

  ‘None at all, Mr Pünd. I’ll pack the moment I get home.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Cain. And if you will be so kind as to pick up the train tickets, the two of us will leave tomorrow.’

  Seven

  A Question of Time

  It took them six hours to reach Tawleigh-on-the-Water, starting from Paddington at midday and changing trains twice, at Exeter and at Barnstaple. Miss Cain had made all the arrangements with the efficiency that Pünd had come to admire. She knew the different platform numbers and porters met them at each stop, ensuring that the journey was as smooth as possible. Pünd passed the time absorbed in a study that he had received from the highly respected American Academy of Forensic Sciences: an examination of the so-called Nutshell Studies of Frances Glessner Lee, who had constructed intricate models of complicated crime scenes in order to analyse them. His secretary, meanwhile, had brought a library book, A Daughter’s a Daughter, the new Mary Westmacott.

  There was a taxi waiting for them at Bideford and it drove them across the Bideford Bridge to Tawleigh just as the sun was beginning to set. The rain had finally cleared and their first view of the village could have been taken from one of the picture postcards on sale inside the chandlery. They drove past a brightly painted lighthouse at the far end of a harbour, a line of fishing boats, the Red Lion pub, then a long crescent of sand and shingle. It was true that there were no children and no sandcastles, no donkeys or ice cream, but they could be easily imagined. A carpet of brilliant red lay shimmering on the water and the waves broke with a soft, gentle rhythm as the moon took its place in the sky and the darkness gathered.

  ‘You wouldn’t have thought a murder could happen in a place like this,’ Miss Cain muttered as she looked out of the window.

  ‘It is the nature of murder that it will take place anywhere,’ Pünd responded.

  They were staying at the Moonflower Hotel. The taxi drew up but nobody came out to help them with their luggage. Miss Cain rolled her eyes, but Pünd was more forgiving. The hotel was in the middle of a police investigation. It was unlikely that things would be running smoothly.

  At least the young girl behind the reception desk was friendlier. ‘Welcome to the Moonflower.’ She smiled. ‘I see you’ve reserved for two nights.’

  ‘It may be longer,’ Miss Cain warned her.

  ‘Just let me know.’ She turned to Pünd. ‘You’re in the Captain’s Room, Mr Pünd. I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable there. And I’ve put your assistant on the floor above. If you’d like to leave your luggage here, I’ll have it brought up for you . . .’

  The Captain’s Room had originally been an office when the building had functioned as a customs house. It was very square with a bed where the desk might have been and two windows looking out over the Marine Parade and the beach on the other side. It still had a strong nautical feel: there was a sea chest at the end of the bed, a captain’s swivel chair in the corner and even a globe between the windows. Pünd was intrigued by the ship’s cabinet in the bathroom with its dozens of tiny drawers to keep things in place if there was a swell. Meanwhile, Miss Cain had been shown to a smaller room in the eaves. They were both tired after their long journey and so went to bed early, having had supper brought to their rooms on trays.

  Pünd opened his eyes to blue skies and the sound of seagulls. It was half past seven when he came down to breakfast and the girl who had greeted them the evening before had not yet started work. Her place had been taken by a man with a moustache and slicked-back hair, dressed in a blazer and cravat. He had been laboriously typing a letter, using just one finger on each hand, but he looked up as Pünd appeared.

  ‘Good m
orning,’ he muttered. ‘You came down from London yesterday. Is that right?’

  Pünd told him that it was.

  ‘Do you like your room?’

  ‘It is most comfortable, thank you.’

  ‘I’m Lance Gardner, the general manager. Let me know if there’s anything you need. I suppose you’ll be wanting your breakfast now.’

  ‘That was my intention.’

  ‘We don’t usually serve until eight. I’ll see if the chef has got in yet.’ But Gardner didn’t move. ‘Are you here about the murder?’

  ‘I am here to assist the police. Yes.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re not a journalist. We’ve had them crawling around the place all week – all on expenses, of course, drinking the bar dry. As for the police, if you ask me, they need all the assistance they can get. It’s been over a week now and they haven’t got anywhere, keeping us all here with their damn fool questions. It’s like living in Russia!’

  ‘You knew Miss James?’ Pünd asked, reflecting that actually Tawleigh-on-the-Water had very little in common with the Soviet Union.

  ‘Of course I knew her. She owned the hotel. I ran it for her – not that she ever gave me much thanks for it.’

  ‘You would not say that she was an easy person with whom to work?’

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth, Mr . . .’

  ‘My name is Atticus Pünd.’

  ‘German? I’ll make no comment. I didn’t fight in the war. Rickets.’ He rubbed his neck as he considered what Pünd had asked. ‘Was she easy to work with? Well, I liked her. We had a good relationship. But the truth is, she didn’t know very much about the hotel business, certainly not the way we do things round here. Nothing’s cut and dried. When you’re working with farmers and fishermen who’ve been in Tawleigh for generations, you have to learn how to adapt. She wasn’t from this part of the world and she never quite worked it out. And that’s the truth of it.’

  Lance Gardner had used the word ‘truth’ three times in almost the same sentence. From Pünd’s experience, people who were so insistent on the truth were very rarely telling it.

  ‘It must be very frustrating for you,’ Pünd suggested. ‘Awaiting the end of the investigation.’

  ‘I certainly won’t be sorry to see it over.’

  ‘Do you have any theory as to who might have killed her?’

  Lance Gardner leaned forward, pleased to have been asked. ‘They’re all saying it was her husband. But then it’s always the husband, isn’t it? God knows, if my wife drove herself off Beachy Head, they’d say I was the one behind the wheel. They’d be quite wrong. I’d be pushing it from behind!’ He let out a bark of laughter. ‘Take it from me, Francis Pendleton doesn’t have it in him. He’s not a killer.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘If you ask me, it wasn’t anyone from around here. Melissa James was a star. She had all sorts of loopy followers and fans. They used to send her letters here at the hotel. They knew where she lived. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of them had come down here with some sort of lunatic scheme in his head and killed her simply because he didn’t like her last film or she hadn’t sent him an autograph or he just wanted to be famous like her. The police are blundering about asking questions, but I think they’re just wasting their time. And ours!’

  ‘It is an interesting theory, Mr Gardner. Where is the breakfast served?’

  ‘In the dining room.’ Gardner pointed. ‘Through those doors. I’ll see if the chef is around.’

  * * *

  Breakfast was surprisingly good. Pünd had purchased a copy of The Times, which had come down on the night train, and he read it as he ate scrambled eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade and a cup of strong tea from Ceylon. Miss Cain did not join him and he was not surprised. She was the sort of woman who was very sensitive to all the niceties and she would have considered it overfamiliar to have eaten breakfast even in the same room as her employer.

  In fact, she appeared at nine o’clock, the same time that she began work in London, and the two of them repaired to the main living room. They were sitting there when, ten minutes later, Detective Chief Inspector Hare appeared. He saw them at once and joined them.

  ‘Mr Pünd?’ The detective chief inspector stood in front of him as Pünd got to his feet and the two men shook hands. Hare’s first impression was of a lean, smartly presented foreigner who seemed to carry a world of experience about him and who was already measuring him up with eyes that would miss nothing. He was right about that. Pünd was seeing a police officer who was being beaten down by a case that refused to unlock itself for him and who was approaching the edges of failure and disappointment. And yet at once there was a warmth between them, as if their coming together might finally open up new possibilities.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Hare, I believe.’

  ‘It’s a very great pleasure to meet you, sir. It goes without saying that your reputation precedes you.’

  In fact, Hare had consulted his files in Exeter the moment he had heard that Pünd was on his way. He had read the details of several of his investigations, including the arrest of Luce Julien, an internationally renowned artist living in Highgate who had killed her husband with a palette knife on their fortieth wedding anniversary – a case that had brought him to fame just after the war. More recently, of course, the return of the Ludendorff Diamond had been the talk of the whole country.

  ‘May I introduce you to my secretary, Miss Cain?’

  Pünd gestured and Hare shook hands with her too. ‘A pleasure to meet you.’

  ‘And can I offer you some tea?’

  ‘No, thank you, sir. I’ve just had breakfast.’

  ‘I hope you do not consider my presence here to be an intrusion,’ Pünd began as the two men sat down again.

  ‘Not at all, Mr Pünd. Quite frankly, I couldn’t be happier to see you.’ The detective drew a hand across his brow. ‘I’ve been a serving police officer for thirty years. For what it’s worth, I wanted to join the army when the war started but they wouldn’t let me. They said they needed me here. The fact of the matter is, though, that I’m not used to murder. In my entire time with the Devon and Cornwall Police, I’ve investigated barely a dozen cases and in the first three of them, the perpetrators turned themselves in the next day. Any help you can give me will be more than appreciated.’

  Pünd was pleased. He had known straight away that he was going to get on with Hare and what he had just heard confirmed it. ‘You are fortunate, Detective Chief Inspector, to be living in a part of the country where violent crime is a rarity.’

  ‘You’re right there, Mr Pünd. In the war years, we had looting, racketeering, desertion. There was a lot of upheaval when everyone came home again and as you might expect, there were guns all over the place. But Devonshire folk don’t tend to do each other in. That’s been my experience – until now.’ He paused. ‘May I ask why you have taken an interest in this case, sir?’

  ‘Miss James’s agents in New York asked me to look into it on their behalf.’

  ‘Meaning, I suppose, that they have no faith in me.’

  ‘Whether that is true or not, Detective Chief Inspector, I can assure you it is not my opinion. I would like to think that we can work on this together.’

  Hare’s eyes brightened. ‘I see absolutely no reason why not.’

  ‘You are already several days ahead of me. Perhaps you could share with me what you have found so far.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Would you mind if I took notes, Detective Chief Inspector?’ Miss Cain asked, drawing a pen and a shorthand pad out of her handbag.

  ‘Please go ahead.’ Hare had produced his own notebook. He cleared his throat. ‘The trouble with this investigation is that it should be fairly cut and dried. This is a small community. Miss James was an extremely well-known figure. And there’s a time period of just seventeen minutes in which the crime must have taken place. I don’t know why the answer isn’t more obvious.’

  ‘It i
s my experience that the more obvious the answer, the more difficult it can be to find,’ Pünd remarked.

  ‘You may be right, sir.’ Hare opened his own notepad and referred to what he had written. For the next few minutes, he spoke uninterrupted.

  ‘The last person to see Miss James alive was her husband, Francis Pendleton. You may wonder why I don’t refer to her as Mrs Pendleton, incidentally, but she was known to the whole world by the name with which she appeared in her films and that’s the name she used here. Mr Pendleton is ten years younger than his wife and comes from a wealthy family. His father is Lord Pendleton, a Conservative peer, and I’m afraid he didn’t approve of the marriage, so his son was subsequently cut off without a penny, as they like to say.

  ‘There is a suggestion that there was a certain amount of friction between Francis Pendleton and his wife. Of course, there’s a lot of gossip in a place like Tawleigh-on-the-Water and it only makes my job more difficult, trying to separate truth from speculation. Anyway, they have a cook and a butler who live in the house – a nineteenth-century folly by the name of Clarence Keep, about half a mile outside the village. The two halves of Clarence Keep – that is, the part for Miss James and Francis Pendleton and the part for the servants – are carefully separated and sound doesn’t travel easily from one to the other, but even so they have told me there were occasions when they heard the two of them arguing. The Gardners, who run this hotel, have also confirmed that things between them were not going well.

  ‘Miss James was in a meeting, here at the Moonflower, which finished at 5.40 p.m. She went home, arriving just after 6 p.m. That time is confirmed by the cook and the butler, who saw her very distinctive car, a Bentley, draw in. According to Mr Pendleton, he and his wife had a brief and friendly conversation before Mr Pendleton left in his other car, an Austin, to attend the performance of an opera, The Marriage of Figaro, which started at 7 p.m. in Barnstaple. He left at 6.15 p.m., he says, although we only have his word for it as nobody saw or heard him go. His car was parked around the side of the house, out of sight of the servants’ quarters. Miss James was meant to be going with him, incidentally, but had decided that she wanted an early night.