by Mona Marple
“So maybe he was protecting you?” Crystal asked, then took a sharp intake of breath. I followed her gaze and watched as Bryan Derby entered the room again. He closed the door behind him, took a moment to stare at me, then returned to his seat as if nothing had happened.
“Oh no,” I murmured.
“What?”
“Did you see the way he looked at me? He knows I’ve told you what happened. He’s going to hurt me, I know he is. Maybe he wants to drag it out… make me suffer.”
“Ellie, calm down,” Crystal ordered. “He had his chance to hurt you. Sorry to be so blunt, but he did! The two of you alone, with his ghosts or whatever they are, that was the perfect chance. Tell me again what the vision revealed?”
“It was just… a hand signing a sheet of paper. And then there was a voice, and it was his.”
“Snipe’s?”
“No, Bryan Derby. It was his voice, I know it.”
“And then what?”
“Then I lost the vision. I panicked. He was right there in the room with me and I just panicked.”
“You couldn’t get it back?” Crystal asked. “You’re always much better at controlling a vision than I am.”
I shook my head. “It was jumping around. I think there was too much emotion around it. I mean, his body’s not even cold yet.”
“Hmm,” Crystal said. “We need to get back in there, try again.”
“No way,” I argued.
Crystal stood and looked at me, then began to walk towards the door. I closed my eyes and swallowed, then followed her. No way could I let her leave alone. I didn’t dare glance back towards Bryan Derby as we left the dining room and closed the door behind us.
“This is insane,” I hissed as we marched back towards Sid Snipe’s office.
“Let’s just be quick. You go ahead and I’ll mind the door,” Crystal said as we entered the room. I chose the corner furthest away from Sid’s body and didn’t bother casting a circle to protect me. What was the point in protecting myself when Crystal was right there, unarmed?
I closed my eyes and repeated my spell, and waited.
Nothing happened, and I tried to focus more on calming my mind. My breathing was ragged, and my thoughts returned to Bryan Derby, to his army of dead, to their shadow faces and leering mouths. It was pointless.
“Ellie…” a voice came, a welcome distraction. I opened my eyes to see Crystal over at Mr Snipe’s desk.
“What is it?” I asked. We were alone. Well, us and the corpse. I pushed myself up from the floor and went across to her. She held a document across to me. A single sheet of paper.
“It’s the withdrawal,” I said under my breath.
“Be careful with it,” Crystal said. “The signature’s still wet.”
And so it was. Sid Snipe’s name, signed in fountain pen, had smudged a little at my touch. I moved my fingers away and read the document. It was legalese and I couldn’t understand it all, but it was clear that this was the document Sid Snipe had the right to sign and serve within three months to stop the Academy changes becoming final.
“He’d never have signed this willingly,” I said. “This must be what my vision showed.”
“I know,” Crystal agreed.
“So, Bryan Derby threatened him? Forced him somehow? And then killed him?”
“Why kill him?” Crystal asked.
I looked across at her.
“With his signature on here, why the need to kill him?”
I considered the question. It was a good point. “To stop him revealing what had happened? To stop him going back on it?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, my voice urgent. “We’ll take this to Violet.”
“Hold on,” Crystal said. “If we’re taking this, we should take other things too.”
“Why?”
“If we go in with just this one sheet of paper, it’s pretty obvious to the killer what we’ve found. Let’s just take a pile of papers and then we can pretend we’re working through them a page at a time.”
“Genius,” I gushed as I grabbed a wad of papers from the desk. Crystal did the same. Armed with the papers, we grinned at each other.
“Do you think we should cover him up?” Crystal asked, suddenly. We both looked down at Sid Snipe. It seemed wrong to leave him there, uncovered.
“I don’t know if it might interfere with the evidence,” I said.
“Look, you’ve already collected those clues from around his body, and now we’re taking his papers. Our fingerprints are going to be all over this room.”
“That’s true,” I said. I hadn’t considered that before. What if the Magick Squad turned up at some point and arrested us? “We really need to find out who the killer is before we end up being prime suspects ourselves.”
“Exactly,” Crystal said. “So I don’t see what it would hurt to just cover his body up. I know I wouldn’t want to lie there dead if I were him.”
“Fine,” I said. I shifted the papers so they were all in one arm, and then grabbed a tapestry blanket from one of the Chesterfields and draped it across his body. “Do I cover his head?”
“I don’t know,” Crystal said. “I mean, we don’t want to suffocate him, do we?”
“He’s dead,” I reminded her.
“But still…”
We shook our heads at the madness of the situation and left Sid Snipe with his head peeking out from the blanket. He looked as if we’d tucked him into bed for the night, apart from the bulge in the blanket where the knife protruded from his back.
19
Violet
“Come on then,” I said.
Lizette Anderson-Pugh interrupted the greedy sip of wine she had been indulging in and flashed me a look with her narrowed eyes.
“You want to be interviewed. Let’s go,” I said, then turned and lead the way to the production booth. Her eyes widened at the shabby space but she didn’t say anything.
“I realise that you must be in shock, but I don’t think drinking so much is going to help,” I said, with pursed lips. “At the least, you’re going to have a roaring headache in the morning.”
“Don’t pretend you care about me,” Lizette slurred.
“I won’t,” I said. That jolted her to attention. Her mouth opened and closed as if she were a dying fish taking its last breaths. “I barely know you, so I won’t pretend anything. Why were you so eager to be interviewed?”
“It’s always the wife!” Lizette exclaimed, eyebrows raised. She gave a little round of applause for some reason I couldn’t understand.
“It’s actually usually someone the victim knows. Not necessarily the wife. Do you have some sick desire to see your days out in prison, or do you really have something to confess?”
“I don’t even have to answer your questions,” she said. She folded her arms across her considerable bosom and gave a petulant huff.
I rolled my eyes. Behaviour like this was the reason I kept myself to myself. People could be intolerable!
“You might as well go back out there, then. I’ll move on to someone else. And I’ll tell the Magick Squad how unhelpful you were, if they ever turn up.”
“Fine!” Lizette exclaimed with a nervous look out towards the dining room. “If it keeps me in here, I’ll talk. What you wanna know, huh?”
“Did you kill your husband?”
“No.”
“Do you know who might have?”
She snorted. It did unpleasant things to her face. “How could I know anything? He never talked about work. I couldn’t have named any of these people before tonight.”
“You’ve never met any of them before?”
“Only one, the secretary,” Lizette said.
“Helen Sculley?”
Lizette nodded. “I was on a bricklaying course one weekend, came home early, Helen was at the house.”
I tried to ignore the revelation that Lizette was a secret bricklaying enthusiast and foc
us on her discovering Sid’s mistress in their home.
“Why was she there?”
Lizette shrugged. “I was well trained to know that school business weren’t my business. I knocked on Sid’s study to offer him a drink and, honestly, the weekend had been quite exciting. One of the students had really got into it with the instructor about the method he was using, and it was quite the debate. I guess I was a bit hyper, and I wanted to have a coffee and a chat with Sid about it all.”
“Coffee?” I queried.
“I never drink alcohol,” Lizette said.
It was my turn to snort in disbelief. “You seem to be managing it tonight.”
Lizette’s expression clouded over and her eyes welled with tears. Finally. Grief for her dead husband. “I didn’t want to come tonight. I was so nervous. I might not know these people but I know enough about the school. Sid would leave out curriculums sometimes, around the house. I always suspected he was making a point - giving me a taste of a world I’d never be part of. I’m not the smartest, and my family ain’t never had money. I know these people look down on me.”
“So you’re drinking to give you courage to get through the night?”
She gave a long, exaggerated nod but said no more.
“You were telling me about the time you met Helen?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Lizette said. She reached into her clutch purse and pulled out a tissue, then dabbed at her eyes. “They finished whatever they were working on and came out of the study. I offered them both coffee but Helen had to get home. That was that.”
“What were they working on?” I asked as I tried desperately to keep a straight face. I knew darn well that their work would have involved undressing each other and couldn’t believe that Lizette hadn’t realised what was going on.
“I didn’t ask,” she admitted. “I know my boundaries, remember.”
I gazed at her and she took a deep breath.
“Look, it’s not that he wanted to keep me out of it, just for the sake of it. Lots of things he dealt with were classified. I saw the Academy papers at home two years before it ever made the news. It was better to keep things secret.”
“How did you see the papers?”
She grinned. “I was curious, and stupid. At that point, I thought he was having an affair. I waited for him to forget to lock the study - it happened occasionally - and I crept in. Learned a lot about the school and, man, I felt bad for doubting him.”
“You did?” I asked.
She nodded enthusiastically. “He was always at work, and there was this new hire - I don’t even remember her name but he mentioned her to me three times, and he was the man who never mentioned work names. So I got a little suspicious. What I realised when I searched around his office was that he was dedicated to this place. If there was another woman in our marriage, it was Winifred.”
So, Lizette really had no idea about her husband’s extra curricular activities with Helen Sculley it would seem. Remarkable. It never ceased to amaze me the things that we could fool ourselves into not seeing.
“Helen Sculley’s the only person here that you know, then?” I checked. She nodded. “What did you think of her?”
Lizette scrunched her nose as if a bad smell had just joined us in the production booth. “Mutton dressed as lamb.”
I gave a wry smile. “She does have a rather interesting way of dressing, doesn’t she?”
“I expected it, to be honest,” Lizette said, “I mean, men choose their secretaries for that reason don’t they? They have to look glamorous. Pretty face to look at and all that. My dad told me I’d never make it as one.”
“Did you get any impressions of her as a person?”
“I was impressed and relieved,” Lizette said. “Impressed that she’d given up her weekend to help Sid, because I saw how stressed he were with work and I was glad he’d got some help. And relieved that she were older, because I’d rather die than be one of them women with a husband knocking off his secretary.”
“Quite,” I murmured as I felt my cheeks redden. She was absolutely clueless.
“I know I’m a bit brash like, but I love my Sid. Heck, I’ve put up with a lot over the years because of how much I love him. I know this place were his number one. I got the scraps. I got the tired, stressed out Sid at the end of the day. That maybe shouldn’t have been enough for me, but it was. I’ve got my own life too, I didn’t need us to live in each other’s pockets.”
“I believe that you didn’t hurt him, Lizette. And I believe that he didn’t tell you much about what went on here, but things were particularly turbulent in recent times. Plenty of people here were unhappy about the Academy plans. Did he tell you anything about those? Did he tell you about any particular arguments he’d gotten into?”
Lizette gazed into the distance as she considered the question. “He told me that Helen had moved into her own office, that’s the only thing I can think of.”
“Did he give a reason why?”
“Said he needed more privacy,” Lizette said. “It made sense to me, I’d always thought it a bit strange that she were in his office, but I’ve never done office work. Maybe that’s how it always is. So I thought it were probably a good thing. We talked about it one night and I said yeah, that’ll be good, but it sticks in my mind because…”
She paused, her eyes wide as the memory replayed in her mind.
“Go on,” I gently encouraged.
“He had nightmares that night,” she whispered. “He never had nightmares. But that night he couldn’t settle. He were tossing and turning and sweating all over the bed. Talking in his sleep. I asked him about it the next morning but he couldn’t remember, it had never woke him up like. I made him a double portion of bacon and by the next night he were right as rain. But I’ve never seen him like that before. I didn’t know that things were bad here like, but I guess the stress of it all were on his mind that night.”
“And that was the night that Helen moved into her own office?”
Lizette gave one, definite nod.
“You say he was talking in his sleep. What did he say?”
“Just the one word, over and over again like.”
“It’s important, Lizette. What was the word?”
“Winifred.”
20
Ellie
“Come on, it’s worth a try?” Crystal coaxed as I stood in Sid Snipe’s doorway, ready to return to the dining hall.
“We should be getting back,” I said. Sharing a room with a dead body had spooked me and I was ready to return to the crowded hall, and Violet. Although she had as little experience solving murder cases as I did, she gave off this wisdom that I found reassuring. Like, even if she didn’t know what she was doing, I could fool myself that she’d work things out eventually.
“Ellie, don’t be a bore,” Crystal said with a wink, and she strode off towards the door to Helen Sculley’s office.
I sighed and followed her. She knew I hated the suggestion that I was dull, mainly because I had a suspicion it was true. Not that Crystal’s life was much more exciting than mine. Sure, she scrubbed up better than I did, and had money I could only dream of, but she watched just as many romcoms as me.
“Fine,” I said in an exaggerated petulant child tone.
Helen Sculley’s office, in contrast to Sid Snipe’s, was immaculately tidy. The room had a homely feel to it, which was appropriate given the fact she spent more time in it than in her actual home. A floral patterned settee stood behind a coffee table, complete with coffee table books on art and African photography. Helen’s desk was clear apart from her computer and mouse. Not a piece of paper in sight.
“Someone’s a neat freak,” Crystal breathed.
“Uh huh,” I agree. “Guess we know who used to keep Mr Snipe’s desk so tidy.”
Crystal snorted. “That’s such a woman thing to do. Have a lover’s tiff and stop doing the tidying.”
I raised my eyebrows. I couldn’t imagine that Cry
stal’s mum had ever done any tidying, and Crystal hadn’t had a relationship last long enough for her to sulk in such a domestic way.
“What are we looking for?” I asked.
Crystal stood in the middle of the room and did a 360, spinning slowly, then stopped and shrugged. “Should we look in her drawers?”
“We can,” I said. “I guess we might as well while we’re in here.”
“You don’t look keen,” Crystal said with a pout.
“I just don’t want to end up finding her knickers or anything gross,” I said, my own lips curled. I had a suspicion that anyone having such a public affair probably hadn’t paid much attention to hiding the evidence.
Crystal laughed. “They’ll all be in Mr Snipe’s office. Little gifts to remember her by…”
“Eww!” I exclaimed.
Crystal opened the top drawer of Helen’s desk and, despite my knicker-phobia, I walked across and peered in.
“Seriously? There’s something wrong with people who are this tidy,” Crystal said. The drawer held one stapler, one hole punch, a box of rose gold paperclips, a separate box of rose gold bulldog clips, and one tub of Wite Out which stood in it’s own little tray - in case it leaked, I guessed.
The second drawer was clearly her personal drawer, and the idea that she was anal enough to separate it made me roll my eyes. In it, she kept a cell phone charger, an unopened sachet of microwave porridge, an umbrella, and a small cosmetic bag.
“Look in the bag!” I said. “See if she has a spare lipstick. We can check the colour against the one found by the body.”
“Ooh, good thinking,” Crystal said. She unzipped the small bag and groaned, then held it out so I could see the contents. It didn’t hold make-up, but instead was a treasure trove of every kind of medication a person could possibly need. Pain killers, antihistamine, cold sore gel, and even an unopened tube of cream for thrush.