by AG Barnett
Mary could hear the voice on the other end of the line barking but couldn’t make out any words.
“Of course, sir, but I also realise the sensitivity of the case,” Corrigan continued. “Believe me, she’s our number one suspect, but we wouldn’t want to go too far down that road in the glare of the public eye unless we’re sure.”
Mary felt a rush of gratitude for Corrigan. She had already had the impression that he didn’t really see her as a realistic suspect, but now it sounded as though he was trying to avoid exposing her to the madness of the press as well. Though from watching the TV earlier, she suspected it was too late.
“We did find a note in another guest’s room though.” There was a slight pause and Mary heard the crinkle of a plastic evidence bag. “It says: This is just the start, you’re going to pay for what you did to me.”
There was another pause where Mary could only hear the scuffing of Corrigan’s shoe on the hallway floor and the sound of the disembodied voice on the phone droning through the small speaker.
“Yes, sir, of course, I understand. Bye, sir.”
Mary heard the inspector swear under his breath and to her horror, walk towards the bathroom door.
She sprung away from it, turned the tap on at the sink and began splashing water with her hand in order to convey that ordinary bathroom activities were taking place. What those would be exactly from this noise, she wasn’t sure, but it seemed the right thing to do. The handle turned, twisted a couple of times and she heard Corrigan move away, accompanied by more swearing.
She gave it a few moments before she left the bathroom and hurried out into the hall where she was relieved to see that the inspector had clearly gone off to find another bathroom, leaving only a single officer who watched her as she moved back towards the living room door and entered.
“Flintock,” she said as soon as she had entered and spotted him half lying on the sofa, his head back and tissue shoved up each nostril.
The officer by the door rushed around in front of her, his hands out wide.
“Now madam, we don’t want any more unpleasantness, do we?”
“Oh, I’m not going to hit him again!” Mary said testily. She looked around the room at the rest of its occupants, who were staring at her slightly aghast.
“I’m not!” she protested. “Look, I just lost my temper and I wanted to say sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Flintock said in a nasal voice. “Come on, Mary, let’s make it up and then maybe we can talk about your future?”
“Yes,” Mary said through gritted teeth, “that would be great.”
The officer shrugged and returned to his post by the doorway to the hall. Mary moved across and perched next to Flintock, who struggled upright next to her.
Emily Hanchurch was glancing at her with jerky, bird-like head movements from the other end of the sofa, as Dot and Pea stared across the room with concerned expressions, clearly wondering whether they should come and join them or give her some space. She gave them a look which she hoped conveyed the latter and turned to Flintock.
“Dave, you know everything that goes on in showbiz,” she said, deciding to start with some basic flattery, which she suspected would well on a someone like Flintock. “I need you to tell me everything you know about Steve Benz and Melanie,” she continued, keeping her voice low so only he could hear. “What was going on between them?”
“Steve?” he said, frowning. “Well, he was bloody furious with her, if that’s what you mean?” He turned and looked at the figure of Emily, who was facing the television again.
“I’ll talk to Emily in a minute,” Mary said, reading his thoughts. “But she might be a bit biased, and I want to know what really happened. Why was Steve furious with her?”
“Because of that show of his, the one that got cancelled,” Flintock said, his head still tilted backwards. “It was his baby, he’d been involved in everything, even helped out with the original premise. The problem was, the whole thing had been geared around Melanie doing it. The network already had her in mind for something big and they insisted. Steve was OK with it, but then just before things were going to start actually getting into motion, she pulled out.”
“She pulled out? Why? Because she was offered my role?”
“Ha! No, that was after.” He looked at her with a grin. “You know how she got your job?”
“Tell me,” Mary said, not sure if she wanted to hear the answer.
“She told them that if they really wanted her to take a big role, then there was one that was perfect for her: yours. She persuaded them that they could use the crack team they’d gathered for Steve’s show to give Her Law a boost and she would be the new star, ‘freshen it up a bit’ was the phrase doing the rounds.”
“So, she just asked for it?” Mary’s eyes drifted upwards.
Had the decision really been that easy for them to make? After all the years she had put into that role, Melanie just had to ask and it was hers?
“Melanie had a way of getting what she asked for,” Flintock chuckled. “I was trying to represent her, but the truth was, she didn’t really need it.”
“And that’s why you pestered her every bloody day about it, is it?!” Freddie Hale roared as he got up from his armchair and marched towards them.
Mary had forgotten he was even still there. With his chair facing towards the windows, he hadn’t been visible to them sitting on the end of the sofa.
“Now come on, Freddie,” Flintock said in a weaselly voice. “I was just trying to do my best for you. The two of you working together more would have been a dream team!”
“And you didn’t care what that might do to me, did you?” Freddie raged back. “You didn’t care that I fell in love with her!”
Flintock’s mouth opened and closed again before he looked desperately at Mary and then back to his client.
“Freddie, I didn’t know. But at least you got to have the time you did with her, right? That wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for me getting you two together.”
Freddie threw his glass down at Flintock’s feet where, surprisingly, it didn’t smash but instead bounced up onto the agent’s lap.
The constable arrived at a run, but Freddie was already striding away and back out of the French doors into the grounds as he had done earlier that day, leaving the young man to look around the room awkwardly before heading back to his post at the door.
Flintock sighed and leaned back into the sofa. “If I had known he’d bloody fall in love with her, I’d have never let him near her,” he muttered.
“Melanie didn’t feel the same way about him,” Mary said thoughtfully, watching the figure of Freddie Hale grow smaller as he crossed the wide lawn.
She turned back to Flintock. “And what about you? You seem to have plenty of reasons to want Melanie out of the way?”
Flintock laughed. “Course I did! That doesn’t mean I was going to bump her off!”
“Not even if she was going to take your best client away from you?”
He gave a snort of derision. “Freddie wouldn’t leave me, he wouldn’t last five minutes representing himself like Melanie did. His looks aren’t the only boyish thing about him, you know—he’s still got the mind of a teenager. All rushes of blood and thinking with his pants. He’ll always need a proper grown-up to take care of him. Anyway,” he said, leaning forward. “If you want someone to point the finger at, why don’t you talk to your lord of the manor over there?”
He nodded towards Pea, who was talking in hushed tones with Dot and glancing across at them every so often.
“Pea?” Mary said, shocked. “Why on earth would you say that?”
“Well,” Flintock said, his face set into a leering grin, “last night when we were having a break from the murder mystery, I was having a wander about. I went into the library across the hall and there was Melanie and your brother kissing. She pulled away and slapped him, told him to leave her alone and marched out of there.”
&nbs
p; Mary realised her mouth was hanging open. “You can’t be serious?”
“Why don’t you go and ask him yourself?” Flintock grinned.
Mary got up and moved back to the other side of the room in a daze.
“Are you all right?” Dot asked as Mary took her seat at the bar again.
“Did you kiss Melanie last night?” she said, ignoring Dot and turning to Pea.
“I, well, not exactly.”
“You either did or you didn’t?” Mary insisted.
“You kissed Melanie?!” Dot said, glaring at Pea herself.
“It was weird!” Pea said miserably. “She asked to see the library, so I took her in. I was just telling her about the gallery in there and she grabs me and kisses me, then straight away she shoves me back and slaps me!”
“And then what happened?” Dot asked.
“Well, then she stormed out and I realised Flintock was there, cackling away.”
“Did you tell the police this?”
“No,” Pea said, looking down sheepishly. “I thought it might sound a bit, well, odd.”
“It bloody well does sound odd!” Dot said.
Mary looked at her and noticed her cheeks were slightly flushed.
“Which way were you facing when she kissed you?” Mary asked.
“Um,” Pea frowned, “I was facing the shelves and she was facing back towards the hallway.”
“I’m starting to realise the kind of person that Melanie was,” Mary said slowly.
“What do you mean?” Pea asked, decidedly not looking at Dot who was still sitting with a pinched mouth.
“I think she just liked to mess with people. Look at the way she was getting on everyone’s nerves last night. I think she kissed you because she saw Flintock come in and thought it would be funny to make him think that you had come on to her. I think she got a kick out of it all.”
She glanced past them and across to the fence windows which led out across the grounds.
“Just take Freddie Hale for instance. Flintock got the two of them to fake their relationship, but then Freddie fell for Melanie. I think she enjoyed the power of it, that’s probably why she was trying to get him to leave Flintock. Just because she could.”
She looked at the two of them.
“They found a note in Steve Benz’s room too.”
“What?” they said in unison.
“I overheard Corrigan telling his boss about it on the phone. Apparently, it said: This is just the start, you’re going to pay for what you did to me.”
“Blimey,” Pea said, eyes wide. “And do you think Melanie sent it to him? That would definitely give him a motive.”
“It would, and I’m guessing the police think so too. They’ve had him up in his room for quite a while now.”
“Well they’re still going to have to solve the problem of how anyone could have got into the room and out again with the door being locked from the inside,” Dot added.
“Maybe there’s some trick you can do with turning the key from the outside?” Pea said thoughtfully.
“Oh, come on, Pea,” Mary said dismissively. “This isn’t one of my shows where there’s some tricky little move the killer made that throws everyone off.”
She watched as their expressions changed to the ones of sympathy they had been wearing when looking at her for weeks.
“Oh, knock it off, you two, I can mention the show without falling to bits, you know. Anyway, I doubt Steve knows how to lock a door from the outside. I doubt any of them here do.”
Mary looked down as she picked at the edge of a beermat. She knew she was focusing on Melanie’s killer partly to avoid thinking about the repercussions of her father’s words, but it was more than that. A woman had died and no matter how horrible she was, no one deserved that.
“Someone here at the house killed Melanie, and they’re trying to frame me,” she said quietly. “If we’re staying here tonight, I suggest we try and find out who it is.”
“How on earth would we do that?” Dot said gruffly.
“We talk to people, try and find out what they were doing last night, find out if they might have wanted Melanie dead.”
“I think they all might have wanted Melanie dead,” Pea sighed.
“Well then, we’ll have our work cut out for us, won’t we?”
“Mary, you’re not Susan Law,” Dot said, raising one eyebrow.
Mary felt that bringing up the character that neither she nor Melanie would play again was slightly below the belt but decided to ignore it.
“No, but do you think whoever killed Melanie is going to stop at just leaving a note in my room? Who knows what they have planned next? Maybe they want to bump me off too!”
Mary laughed, but then saw the serious expressions of both Dot and Pea, and her smile vanished. She had said the words as a joke, but now that she thought about it, it really didn’t seem very funny.
“Emily thought there might have been something going on between Steve and Melanie,” she said, moving the conversation on from the grim silence.
“You must be joking!” Pea said, his eyes bulging. “Steve and Melanie?!”
“I thought it was unlikely too, but he’s hardly spoken since we found her and then there was all that business last night. She seemed to have a right bee in her bonnet with him as well.”
“She had a bee in her bonnet with everyone,” Dot said.
“And Emily said that she and Steve have been a bit of an item, but last night he chucked her out of his room and said that things had changed.”
“You think something between him and Melanie had caused this mood change?”
“Could be.” She shrugged.
“Well I think Flintock has got to be our prime suspect,” Pea said, looking over his shoulder at the rotund manager across the room. “I mean, he had the most reason to bump her off, didn’t he? She was trying to get his best client to leave him, and I wouldn’t put anything past that little toad.”
“Neither would I,” Mary said, “and he was up at night because I saw him in the kitchen.”
She frowned thoughtfully.
“I saw Freddie trying to get into Melanie’s room then as well, he said she answered and told him to go away. He might not have done.”
“Even if she let him in, we still have the problem of how on earth he got out and locked the door after bashing her over the head,” Dot added.
“True.” Mary nodded. “And in any case, I think he really loved her—he seems devastated at her death. I just can’t see him doing it.”
She looked up and watched Emily Hanchurch picking at her top lip as she watched the TV.
“What is it they say? ‘Beware a woman scorned’? If Steve kicked Emily out of his room, she would have been out in the corridor with no one around.”
She sighed and put her head in her hands. “So pretty much everyone had a motive, and everyone had a chance to have done it.”
“Apart from the little fact I like to keep bringing up,” Dot said. “How on earth did anyone kill her in that room in the first place!”
Mary looked at Pea. “You don’t think there are any secret passages in this old place we didn’t find when we were kids, do you?”
“You know there aren’t,” Pea said, shaking his head. “We searched every inch of this house over the years. If there was anything like that, we’d know about it.”
“Then we must be missing something obvious,” Mary said. “I mean, killers can’t walk through walls, can they? We need to start looking at other things. These notes, for example. Mine was just the bit where the killer was revealed form the murder mystery game. What time did you put the scripts in the library, Pea?”
“Oh, it was when we were all getting coats on to go up to the roof. I just threw them on the nearest table in there.”
“Who would have seen you do that?”
“Well, anyone could have really. I mean we were all milling about in the hall. Flintock definitely did though. He was in the library
already because he’d stormed out of the living room just before, remember?”
“I do! So, he saw exactly where you put them?”
“Of course, he was standing right by them, then I told him to come up on the roof with the rest of us and he did.”
“OK, we know for sure that at least one person saw them there, maybe more.”
“How did they get the note into your room and under the pillow?” Dot asked. “I mean, they must have done it between when we all got up and when the police arrived.”
“Maybe, but they could have done it afterwards. When the police first got here they were only focused on Melanie’s room and everyone was wandering all over the place. Someone could have slipped into my room without much fuss.
“Wait a minute,” Mary said, her mind racing. “I was assuming that the note in Steve’s room was either from the real killer, trying to frame him as they did with me, or from Melanie herself.”
“Yes?” Pea said slowly.
“Well think about it, why would the killer go to the trouble of ripping off a part of the script to implicate me, and then use their own handwriting on a note to Steve? I mean, it wouldn’t make sense. They could just either write both notes or rip some other part of the script out that sounded like a threat or something.”
“So, it’s more likely that Melanie did write the note in Steve’s room?”
“Exactly, which means we need to talk to him.”
The door to the living room opened and Steve Benz shuffled in, his gaze fixed on the carpet.
“Well, it looks like you might have your chance,” Pea said.
Chapter Fifteen
“Steve!” Emily said, rushing to him. She embraced him, her head against his chest, but Mary noticed there was a reluctant stiffness from his side, and he ended the contact swiftly.
“I need some time,” he said to her quietly.
“What’s going on then, Steve?” Flintock called from across the room. “Did you kill her or what?”