by Ruby Loren
Holly shook her head, just to reassure him. “Why did you suggest the competition?” she asked, genuinely curious. She’d assumed it was Miranda’s idea - probably in an effort to gain some sane company for herself over the weekend.
Rob shrugged. “I thought it would be nice to have someone come in from the outside world who might not pick holes in our stories the way other detectives do. That and I also thought that just in case someone decides to kill us all off, wouldn’t it be great to add in an extra target to buy myself a little more time? I’m very forward thinking like that.”
“Thanks a bunch,” Holly muttered.
“What were you doing up there? You took forever!” Miranda greeted them when they walked back into the living room. The organiser suddenly dissolved into blushes. Rob grinned, enjoying every second of her and Holly’s discomfort.
“Nothing but bats and birds and, ah… a slightly ripped ceiling to report,” Rob said, deliberately avoiding eye contact with Miranda.
“We found nothing, too,” Emma said, and then quickly added: “Miranda and I made cake,” before the organiser could ask the questions she so clearly wanted to about the ceiling.
Emma held out a plate towards Rob, who took it eagerly.
“I needed something chocolate so badly. I’m afraid I couldn’t resist,” Miranda said, raising a plate containing her half-eaten piece of sticky cake.
The next moment, she was dead.
Rob dropped his fork a second after Miranda dropped to the floor.
“Of all things sacred and holy…” he muttered and stared longingly at his plate of cake. “Fudge!” he cursed… or perhaps he was just identifying the type of cake. It wasn’t very clear. Emma said a different word beginning with ‘f’ that was definitely not ‘fudge’.
“Why would anyone want to poison Miranda?” Holly asked, hoping her curiosity wasn’t callous.
Emma and Rob exchanged a glance.
“Well…” Emma grudgingly began, after Rob had shaken his head and mimed placing crosses in front of himself a few times to indicate he didn’t want to speak. “Miranda wasn’t exactly a detective, but she was a super-fan. You might have missed it…” Holly wasn’t sure if that was sarcasm or not. “Anyway, we’ve allowed Miranda to put these little meetings together for us for a couple of years now. She loves hearing about our cases and we…” She cleared her throat. “…well, these meetings can be interesting for us, too.”
Rob unhelpfully mimed being overcome with gratitude at the almost - but not really - complement.
“There was one case that Miranda cracked all on her own,” Rob cut in, but Emma shot him a glare that clearly said he’d given up his right to tell this story.
“Being a super-fan, she was the only one who figured out that the mastermind behind seven different murders was actually the same person. It just so happened that we were each working on the individual murders in our own different ways. It was that case which brought us all together. Miranda solved it, and after she solved it, she made us a chocolate cake to celebrate. From then on, well… she’s always made the cake,” Emma said, starting to sound a little bit choked-up.
“So… it is someone who knows you really well,” Holly deduced, feeling simultaneously alarmed and relieved.
There was no way a stranger would have known about Miranda’s connection with cake. Someone with a personal grudge against the detectives was definitely targeting them, and she personally had no history with them. There was surely no reason for her to die. That didn’t change the fact that two detectives were still alive, one of the seven was missing from the meeting all together, and it was pretty obvious that something was going to happen to reduce their number even further.
The silence stretched out as the others thought through the same facts.
“It’s probably Tom,” Emma said, voicing all of their growing suspicions aloud. “But why? And also… how? We’ve searched the house.”
Holly had just opened her mouth to say something when they all heard a crash from upstairs. Emma’s reaction was to sprint from the room in the direction of the sound. She was already gone by the time Holly shouted at her to stop.
There was a burst of machine gun fire and the sound of running footsteps was cut short.
“Tommy Gun mystery,” Holly and Rob said together, exchanging a horrified look. They didn’t want to go and see what had happened to Emma, but just in case… in case she’d somehow made it… they had to. They had to see what had happened and see if it got them any closer to solving this case, before it reached its very final conclusion.
“Where did the machine gun fire even come from?” Rob mused when they stepped out into the hall, both treading carefully to avoid the spreading pool of blood that surrounded the late Emma White - another detective mown down by the twisted fiend behind these murders.
Holly quickly glanced at the bullet holes and then back up in the direction she supposed they must have come from. All she could see was a wooden panel, much like any of the hundreds of other similar panels that decorated the interior.
“What if everything that has happened was set up in advance? What if someone’s been watching us all along without actually being here at all?” she said, feeling the cold dread of realisation washing over her.
“Tom… Tom was always good with technology,” Rob growled, his hands twitching nervously.
“I have an idea. Let’s go back to my room while we figure out what to do next,” Holly suggested. “I probably won’t have been targeted, will I? Also, there aren’t any tunnels or anything like bank vaults in my room… and how would anyone have predicted that you’d end up in there?” she finished.
Rob raised an eyebrow.
Holly just crossed her arms and gave him a death stare. Now was really not the time!
“You could have picked any room,” she said and immediately blushed when she heard her own words. “I didn’t mean…” She sighed and trailed after Rob, whose chest seemed to have puffed up to double its usual size.
They both sat on Holly’s four-poster bed, staring out at the snow in the distance. The snow closer to the house featured a huge crater and rather a lot of staining. They didn’t look at it.
“So… things are triggered, and we’re probably being watched. Listened to as well, I guess,” Holly said, glancing at Rob for approval. To her, this sounded way too much like being in a bad spy movie.
“Yeah… who knows, right? I don’t do technology. I just get in the bad guys’ heads and then get my spade out and dig,” he said, miming digging. “Now Emma… she was great with tech! Always knew how to program my iPod. Jack, too. He was very into it with all the military stuff. And Lawrence… the sort of gear he had to track targets and isolate threats - well, it boggles my mind!” He sort of trailed off. “Come to think of it, everyone here - even Miranda - was brilliant at technology - apart from me. They’d probably have been able to figure all of this out a lot sooner, if they’d lived. That’s probably why I’m still alive,” he added brightly, and then frowned, remembering that while ignorance had kept him alive so far, there was still the big finale to come. “How are you with technology? Could you hack their system and turn it back on them, or something like that? I don’t know what I’m saying. It just sounds good.”
Holly gritted her teeth. “Nope. If you want a piano played, I’m the one to call. I can send email and do the usual everyday stuff on a computer, but not much more. I definitely don’t know about any of this hi-tech surveillance stuff.” She looked round at Rob, but he didn’t even appear to be listening.
He was crouched in front of the bookshelf. “We should start checking for bugs. Having said that, I have no idea what one looks like, so we probably won’t know if we find one. Whoops!” His hand had brushed the spine of one of the rather weathered books and it fell face-down onto the rug. There was a dull metallic thunk when it landed.
Rob and Holly looked at each other for a long, silent second.
“Nancy Drew,” Rob said,
reading the spine. “It looks like your name was on the kill list after all.” He gingerly lifted the book. Holly looked down at the sharp metal barb, which was so firmly embedded in the floor, the rug was now pinned to the floorboards. If she’d opened the book, it would have fired straight into her face.
“They’re all amateur detective novels,” Rob noted, inspecting the spines of the remaining books.
Holly gulped, probably audibly. If they hadn’t been running around the house, she’d almost certainly have picked one up to read. That sort of book was her favourite. Someone had either known it, or was a very good guesser.
“Why would anyone want me dead?” she mused, thinking wildly back to the dog-fighting ring and the mayor’s stolen chain. Neither of those cases seemed worthy of a death vendetta.
Rob shrugged. “Maybe our killer wanted a clean sweep. By the way, it would be awesome if you could let me know if you see anything that looks threatening or deadly and at all related to my cases. Just a heads-up,” he said casually, but Holly wasn’t fooled by his cool act. She may have narrowly avoided death thanks to Rob’s clumsiness, but his own ending was still imminent.
“We may have semi-solved the mystery. Your old friend Tom isn’t really your friend. But we’re still probably going to die,” Holly concluded, chewing that one over.
The traps that had killed all of the other detectives may still be loaded. They’d need to watch themselves around the machine gun area and the room where Lawrence had been assassinated. And who knew? There could be more death traps hanging around the place - just in case any of the original attempts had failed.
“What do we do now?” Holly pulled out her phone and stared again at the tiny ‘no service’ message on the screen.
“I can think of a few things…” Rob said.
Holly shot him a warning look.
“Do you think that cake was a hundred-percent poisoned, or just the sponge itself? Maybe if I only ate the icing…” the last detective standing mused.
“Maybe there is no death trap for you because the person doing this to us knew that, if you were left alone for long enough, you’d eventually find a way to kill yourself with no help needed.”
Rob frowned. “Now is not the time to flirt with me!”
Holly was about to protest, but he was already on his feet, looking out of the window. Not so subtly, his hand searched around the window pane edges until…
“Ah-ha!” he said, pulling off what looked like a blob of congealed dirt to Holly, but turned out to have little wires attached to it. “This is definitely a… something. What are the chances that it's the only one?” They searched some more, but found nothing further, except for the strong possibility that Holly’s bathroom mirror contained a concealed camera - something which completely grossed her out.
“I guess that we should hope for the best and talk plans,” Rob said in a low voice that they both prayed wouldn’t carry. “I say we make a run for it.”
Holly’s eyes were immediately drawn down to the snow that surrounded the house. “Following in Jack’s footsteps,” she muttered.
Rob winced. “I know it’s chancy, but we can’t stay here forever, or that chocolate cake is going to start looking real good. I mean, it already does. But, you know - even better.”
“No, I mean really follow in his footsteps. Until he hit the landmine, he was fine. Hopefully we will be, too,” Holly explained.
Rob’s face brightened a little. “Hey, that is a point! Too bad Jack only made it a few steps before ‘boom’. But it is a start.”
Holly chewed her lip, wondering if this really was the only way. But with decomposing bodies for company and no more poison-free food, they didn’t have much choice. Unfortunately, she suspected that the perpetrator of this massacre would have realised as much.
“It seems as good a time as any to die,” Rob said, pushing himself up off the bed and walking out the door.
Holly made to move after him and then sat down again.
He shot her a sympathetic look. “Take your time, I’ll wait,” he assured her.
She nodded absently, her eyes still fixed on the distant, perfect, undisturbed snow. She walked back over to the window and ran her hand across the spines of the books, lost in thought.
Rob looked up when she finally exited the room.
“I just had another thought,” she told him.
Lucky Number Seven
Old houses tended to have their fair share of junk. Holly knew it was time to brave the cellar and go in search of it.
Rob waited nervously in the living room, trying to pretend that Miranda wasn’t face-down on the floor. They’d both agreed it would be a pretty stupid idea for him to go into the cellar. Holly wasn’t convinced it was one of her most brilliant plans either, but Miranda and Emma had visited and returned unscathed. She could only hope that the same would be true for her… and that she’d be able to find something that fit the idea she had in her head.
A few tennis rackets and strips of twine later, they had what they needed - makeshift snowshoes.
“Nice work, Miss Blue Peter, but how does this help? Beyond giving the forensics a good laugh…” Rob asked, looking dubiously at his feet. They were standing in front of the sodden carpet, where the snowdrift Jack had let in had since melted.
“Jack went out in his combat boots, right? The mines were either buried during the storm, or maybe even before it. After all - the bad guy couldn’t bank on there being snow to keep us all here. It’s probable that they were laid right after we all arrived. So maybe they had to do it in the snow? I guess there’s also a chance it was done before all the snow and then - I don’t know - activated later? Is that a thing with landmines?” she asked and shuddered, half from cold, half from the thought that she may have already walked over a landmine that contained enough explosive to vaporise her. And she hadn’t known a thing about it.
“My bet would be that they did all of this long before we arrived. This killer doesn’t leave a lot to chance,” Rob concluded, still frowning at his tennis rackets.
“The theory of the shoes is that they’ll spread our weight. There’s a chance we may be light enough to not trigger the mines. It probably won’t work, but I just thought… every little helps,” Holly said, thinking more and more that this had been a stupid idea. Actually, the whole wanting to be a real detective and driving up to Scotland for this convention had been a stupid idea, but there was no time to dwell on that.
She had an appointment with death.
They crawled up the steep incline of snow, both holding their breath after every movement. Eventually, they were standing on top of the white stuff, looking at the crater where Jack had met his end.
“Ladies first?” Rob heroically suggested. Holly glared at him. They both stared at the red stain on the snow for a bit longer, before they furiously played rock, paper, scissors.
Holly won.
“Best of three?” Rob asked, but Holly crossed her arms.
The first few metres went fine. Holly’s theory about following in Jack’s footsteps held out, and it was only when they reached the spot where Jack had died that things went a bit pear-shaped.
“I suppose we should go round,” Holly suggested, trying not to be sick from the smell of blood and… other things… which were starting to defrost, along with the snow.
“Into the unknown we go,” Rob muttered and shuffled around the edge of the hole, casting nervous glances in its direction. Holly followed him.
They made it another two metres before it finally happened.
“Boom!” a voice shouted. They both nearly jumped out of their skin. A burst of maniacal laughter travelled across the snow and they looked back in the direction of the house, to see a man striding around the side towards them.
Where he’d come from, Holly didn’t know, but she had a feeling that they really didn’t want to stick around to find out.
“Run!” she hissed at Rob, but it turned out to be quite a challenge to do
anything more than a steady waddle in their tennis racket shoes. Holly wondered if she’d slowed them down for nothing. The man was walking easily across the snow, like there was nothing to worry about. Perhaps he just knows where all of the mines are, she thought. She wondered if they could take him out and then follow his footsteps back to safety. Unfortunately, if he was willing to show himself to them, it probably meant that there was zero chance of their survival.
Just to prove her right, Rob made a strangled screaming sound and promptly fell to his death.
Or he would have done, if Holly hadn’t been semi-expecting it and grabbed the back of his coat, swinging him a little to the left with a gargantuan effort.
“Unnngh!” said Rob, which might have translated into: ‘Thanks for mostly saving me’. Alternatively, it might have meant: ‘There are spiky things in this pit that just opened up, and I’m still hanging over it’. The latter was unfortunately true. While Holly had done enough to keep Rob from outright falling into the previously concealed pit, he was now braced over the abyss… and the snow around the edges looked like it could give way at any second. Holly hoped that he was as in-shape as he looked, because his core strength was about to be tested.
“Tom March, I presume?” Holly said, turning to face the newcomer, hoping that if she blocked his vision of Rob, Rob could quietly work on getting himself out of the sticky situation.
A gun glinted in the bright afternoon sunshine, looking dark and deadly. The man standing in front of her slowly clapped against the back of the hand that held the gun, the cruel smile not leaving his face. Holly looked at the person she’d assumed to be the face of evil and found he actually looked quite normal. His hair was pale and ashy and his face was quite pleasant, if it hadn’t been for that smile. Holly looked into his blue eyes and didn’t see what she’d expected, but that just went to show…
“Come on, Rob, be a sport and let go. If you end it now, I’ll let your girlfriend live,” Tom called.