Illusions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 2)

by Jean Saunders

  Mother seemed to have said a hell of a lot, thought Alex, considering she had said so little to anyone on the cruise. But maybe she had, and Alex simply hadn’t been listening. She had also thought it amazing that such a dun little woman had travelled alone, but not anymore. Not after seeing how she had asserted herself with would-be clients on the cruise.

  ‘So who do you think the stalker is?’ she asked Moira directly. ‘Could it be someone you know? It frequently is.’

  ‘No idea,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t make enemies as far as I know. I’m a florist. Nothing harmful about that, is there? I do weddings and funerals, and floral arrangements for functions,’ she added grandly.

  ‘And you’re being stalked,’ Alex stated, moving into professional gear. ‘How? Is someone following you? Sending you hate mail? Telephoning you at odd hours of the day and night?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve always had hate mail. People were a little afraid of mother, so they made me the target instead.’

  ‘Excuse me? People were afraid of your mother? In what way?’ For the life of her, Alex couldn’t imagine anyone being afraid of Leanora... and yet, hadn’t she been, more than a little? She revised her thoughts at once.

  Moira fixed her with a severe look. ‘Mother was genuine, you know. She was definitely psychic. I never had her gift, but you don’t have to see a seed growing under the earth to know that it will bear fruit in the course of time, do you? You know it, and you feel its power. Mother had that power.’

  ‘I think we’re getting off the track here,’ Alex said firmly. ‘What is it you think I can do for you?’

  ‘Find the stalker and bring him to justice before I join mother in the Great Beyond. The last message I got from him was a bunch of dead lilies delivered to my shop accompanied with a black-edged card with my name on it the day after mother died. Is that proof enough of his intentions?’

  ‘It may be, or it could be a cruel hoax,’ Alex said. ‘In any case, if you’ve been getting death threats, don’t you think it’s a matter for the police?’

  Moira said nothing for a moment, and then she took a small notebook from her bag and laid it on Alex’s desk.

  ‘Mother felt it was a matter for you, Miss Best, otherwise why would she have wanted me to contact you? I’ll leave her note-book with you and a cheque which should cover things for now, I think. They call it an upfront payment, don’t they?’ she said in an attempt to sound modern.

  Alex tried not to let her eyes widen at the substantial size of the cheque. Mother had certainly been loaded.

  ‘I have to go now,’ Moira continued. ‘There’s a lot to do before mother’s funeral. The floral tributes and so on.’

  God, she was a cold fish all right. Her mother wasn’t yet buried, and she was more worried on her own account than seeing the old biddy put decently underground. And if mother was now in the habit of talking to her from the Great Beyond, why couldn’t she tell her the identity of the stalker?

  ‘The cheque is more than adequate,’ she said at last.

  ‘Good. Mother liked you, and she thought you could help us.’ She fished in her bag again. ‘You might find the account in the local newspaper useful. You’ll be contacting me then?’

  She was gone before Alex could consult her diary and invent a dozen reasons never to see this woman again. If Leanora had been weird, Moira was downright creepy, and definitely the more dominant of the two women.

  She left the notebook alone for now, and unfolded the local newspaper. The account of the clairvoyant’s murder was front-page news, followed by the quick arrest of the man accused of the crime, and the eyewitness story from Leanora’s client who had arrived to consult her, and instead of which, had discovered her body.

  His first-hand story intrigued Alex most. The rest was routine stuff... and she was instantly appalled at herself for glossing over the end of a woman’s existence in those terms. Even a woman like Leanora had once loved and been loved, married and had a daughter. Alex shook her head slowly. Having met her, it was still hard to imagine her as a young lover, wife and mother.

  Before doing anything else, she took another look at her holiday photos, studying the ones with background shots of Leanora. She hadn’t ever been intentionally included, but in every one of them, her sharp eyes seemed to be looking directly into the camera, straight into Alex’s eyes, deep and penetrating, asking for something, telling her something…

  Quickly, Alex put the photos away and scanned the newspaper story again. Mentally thanking an enthusiastic local reporter with an ear for drama, Alex read the words of the eyewitness, repeated in full for a ghoulish public.

  The man, one Vernon Cole, unemployed lorry driver, aged 52, had run out into the street in hysterics, shouting for somebody to send for the police and an ambulance. When he was questioned by the police, he had apparently babbled:

  ‘I didn’t know she was dead until I touched her, and then I let out a scream of fright. It was a hell of a shock to see that knife sticking out of her back and to see so much blood.

  ‘It turned my guts, I can tell you. I never saw a dead body before, except my wife’s, and she died naturally in bed. Nobody really liked Mrs Wolstenholme, mind, but she could definitely see things other people couldn’t. After my wife passed over, she helped me to make contact, and I went back to her for comfort more than anything. It was always worth it.’

  Alex had learned by experience to study sentences minutely. Separating them into words and phrases, and often finding more in them than speakers realized they had revealed.

  In this case, it was the last phrase that caught her attention. ‘It was always worth it.’

  ‘Always’ meant that Vernon Cole had consulted Leanora more than once. ‘Worth it’ meant he had probably paid handsomely for the trouble. Went back to her ‘for comfort’, did he? And Leanora would clearly want to prolong the contact as long as he was paying upfront for the privilege.

  Then there was that phrase ‘so much blood’…

  Didn’t a single stabbing mean that the blood was contained until the knife was removed? So there had to have been more than one thrust of the knife, which indicated a frenzied attack. Referring back to the police report, Alex saw that she was right. One up for detection, girl.

  But clearly, Leanora wasn’t daft. Alex visualized the woman’s modus operandi... dangle the bait by inventing some significant phrase for the poor lost sap mourning his wife, and from then on, reel him in at frequent intervals in the hope of hearing more, at a hefty fee.

  And she was turning into as big a bloody cynic as DI Nick Frobisher ever was, Alex thought. But by now, she knew some of the rottenness of human nature, as well as the finer bits. Unfortunately, it went with the job.

  Nothing was what it seemed. Or sometimes it was exactly that. You had to take account of that too.

  Anyway, as far as her new client went — and since she had pocketed the cheque, she had agreed to take her on, she realized — it wasn’t Leanora’s death that should be concerning her. So why did she think that it was? Why did she think that Moira’s little charade in coming here with some cock-and-bull story of a stalker was just a ruse to get her to investigate her mother’s death further?

  She continued reading the entire newspaper account. The funeral had been delayed until the police and the coroner decided to release the body, and it was this coming Saturday. And Alex knew that whatever else she had on hand, she was going down to Worthing on Saturday to attend it.

  She shuddered, but decided that the notebook could wait until tomorrow. Tonight she had other things to do. And if you didn’t get your mind off the sometimes gruesome aspects of the job, you could go quietly insane.

  She put the notebook in a drawer, locked up her office and went home to take a leisurely shower and decide what she was going to wear for her dinner date with Scott Nelson. She normally wore black from head to toe, since it made such a dramatic contrast with her flame-red hair and green eyes.

  But after the events
of the afternoon, the thought of wearing black was too funereal, and she needed to get her mind away from that. So after changing her mind a dozen times, she welcomed Scott at the door of her flat, wearing a slinky black top and a long emerald green skirt, with an elegant green choker around her neck.

  ‘I hope I’m not too formal,’ she said at once, as gauche as a schoolgirl on her first date.

  ‘You look stunning,’ he said gravely. ‘But I knew you would. Nick said you were a snappy dresser, but my guess is that you look good in anything.’

  ‘Careful,’ Alex said, starting to laugh. ‘I can get to like all this flattery.’

  And thank God he hadn’t added: and out of it too... She didn’t want that yet. It was too soon, and she was amazed that she was even thinking self-restraint. But she didn’t know him yet. There had been too many times when she had jumped into lust and then wanted out. This time could be different.

  Besides, after their first meeting in Nick’s company, he seemed more stand-offish than she had expected. Not unfriendly — after all, he had asked her out — but not over-easy with women, either.

  ‘Have you found your way around town yet?’ she asked, as they walked outside to his car. ‘I thought we might have got together with Nick before he left to show you around.’

  She tried not to show her resentment, but there had undoubtedly been a cooling off from Nick, after her refusal to marry him and become his token female accessory.

  ‘I know London, actually,’ Scott told her. ‘My wife and I lived here for about a year before we went back up north.’

  ‘Is she still there? Up north, I mean,’ Alex said as casually as she could, wondering why the hell he had asked her out building up her hopes, damn it — if there was a wife in the background all along.

  And calling herself a bloody fool for assuming that one dinner date could be leading to forever — or anything.

  ‘I don’t know where she is. We’re divorced. And before you ask, there are no kids, no mortgage, no other ties. OK?’

  ‘Do I seem that conventional?’ she said lightly.

  ‘I’d like to think so. It’s good to meet women who can still be feminine and not predatory these days.’

  No jumping into bed right after the first date then.

  She hoped she hadn’t said it aloud, but from the way he was concentrating on the traffic, she knew she hadn’t. At the time she didn’t register the odd note of resentment in his voice either.

  ‘I’ve made a booking at a nightclub. Is that all right with you, Alex? I thought some after-dinner entertainment might be nice.’

  To avoid too much conversation, perhaps? And what the hell was wrong with her? Or him, for that matter. He was a great guy, and she had fancied him from the moment she saw him, but she was starting to read double meanings into everything he said — and they weren’t to her liking.

  Great guys with the combined looks of several hunky movie-stars didn’t always have great conversation or a sizzling seduction technique. By now something was telling her loud and strong that Scott Nelson was one of them. He was as pedantic as the stereotypical Mr Plod.

  She also knew herself — and she was quick-witted enough to be easily bored. Over dinner, she knew she was right. He was great-looking, but there was nothing inside. He was like one of those empty shells you find at the beach. Boring. A nothing. Regretfully so.

  As the meal went on she found herself looking around, studying other couples, and longing for the cabaret to begin so that they didn’t have to continue this stilted attempt to be physically attracted any longer.

  Well, maybe it was physical, but it certainly wasn’t mental, and in Alex’s book the two had to go together. She liked him... but she no longer felt the kind of magnetism there had been between herself and Nick. It alarmed her, making her wonder, not for the first time, if she was frigid. Wanting the chase, but no longer wanting the capture when it was a certainty.

  Except that in this case, she didn’t think it was. Scott Nelson was never going to be more than a friend, a buddy, and despite her momentary misgivings about her own sexuality, Alex gradually felt a great sense of relief wash over her. So what if she was frigid — temporarily — and only as far as this one was concerned — there was nothing wrong in having a good mate, especially in the force.

  She smiled at Scott more warmly, and saw his eyes widen in a kind of mild panic. So she had been right. He didn’t want a relationship, just friendship.

  ‘I always enjoyed a platonic friendship with Nick,’ she said calmly. ‘It’s refreshing to be friends with someone of the opposite sex with no strings attached, don’t you think?’

  ‘I do indeed,’ he said, while Alex wondered faintly if it was really her saying all these things.

  Gary Hollis, her one-time lover, had referred to her as sexpot personified... but Gary was in the past and she hadn’t seen him since he’d taken up with a new love. And she didn’t know why she should be thinking of him now, except that they had first met in a nightclub, sleazier than this one, when she’d thought him brash and dangerous and sexy in his leathers, and he’d taken her for a ride on his powerful Harley Davidson motorbike that was an extension of his own powerful, sexy personality.

  Oh no, she wasn’t losing it, she thought with a secret smile as the rush of adrenalin flashed through her senses, and the Italian waiter gave her an admiring look as he poured her another glass of wine. It was just that Scott Nelson wasn’t the one to set her on fire after all.

  ‘Do you know Worthing at all?’ she asked him casually, having learned that he seemed to have gone just about everywhere during his time in the force.

  ‘Slightly,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m going to a funeral there on Saturday. Nobody I knew well. An acquaintance. Sort of. I’ll stay in the background.’

  But he wasn’t a copper for nothing. She should have known he’d pick up on her jerky sentences. Nick would have done so in a minute too, and she saw Scott’s eyes narrow.

  ‘It can be rough, going to a near-stranger’s funeral. Awkward with the relatives and so on. If you want company I could drive you if you like.’

  Her instinct was to say no. She was following up a lead, of sorts. Deciding whether or not she wanted to take on Moira’s case or say bye-bye to what could be a fat fee for her services, since Moira was apparently the loaded one now.

  ‘Don’t you have other things to do? Other people to see?’ she demurred. Another life?

  He shook his head. ‘A day at the coast would be very welcome, despite the circumstances.’

  ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘You did say you were going to a funeral?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. But as I said, it’s someone I only knew slightly. I might change my mind.’

  He gave a small smile. ‘But you won’t, will you?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I’m no head shrink, but I’d say that when you decide to do something, you always see it through. Am I right?’

  She laughed. ‘Of course. It goes with the territory, doesn’t it? Private eye or dedicated copper, you always see things through, don’t you?’

  He smiled back. His teeth were toothpaste white, and she wished she could still fancy him, but the feeling had vanished like dreams of a lottery win when your numbers didn’t come up.

  ‘Well, whatever it is that’s really taking you down to Worthing, I promise I’ll stay in the background as well, unless you invite me into your confidence.’

  He raised his glass to her and she smiled back sweetly, remembering her vow to see hell freeze before she got a copper involved in her case — unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Chapter 3

  Long before Saturday, Alex had studied Leanora’s notebook, and was staggered at the woman’s astute sense of observation. She may have been an apparent nonentity on board the cruise ship, but she had a fine turn of phrase when it came to describing her fellow passengers.

  But the no
tebook went much farther back than the past few weeks. It contained a mass of notes about Leanora’s clients, acquaintances, relatives and friends, and if it ever got into the hands of some unscrupulous person who wanted to publish it, it could be scandalously hot, Alex realized. There was even the odd MP or two, seeking guidance on their respective relationships with call-girls and a junior minister’s wife.

  This notebook was a gold-mine, Alex thought, and she wondered if Moira knew exactly what she possessed. She could bring down a hell of a lot of people, if she chose. Leanora could have done it too, and presumably neither of them had that intention. But the more Alex read, she more she became intrigued by the pair of them.

  She almost wished her old mate Gary was here. He’d be raring to go over this little mystery, egging her on to inform the newspapers for the highest sum... which was why it was a bloody good job he wasn’t around.

  Client confidentiality was essential for her reputation, and so it must have been for Leanora. After all, if one of the influential people in this notebook thought she had betrayed them, they could have silenced her for ever…

  ‘My God,’ Alex whispered, her hand shaking slightly as she closed the book. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what did happen. Maybe it wasn’t the guy they had arrested at all, but someone else entirely. Someone in higher places!’

  She skimmed through Moira’s newspaper again. It was a weekly, and as yet the police hadn’t named the murder suspect, except to say that he was a local man, well-known for being a loner. The classic suspect... as if that explained it all! And one woman’s murder in a seaside town that seemed to have a cut-and-dried answer to the crime, wasn’t newsworthy enough to attract the attention of the mass media.

  Alex knew she had to find out more, and Nick might have missed something in the police files. She had the strongest hunch that Leanora’s killer was still on the loose. She might be barking up the wrong proverbial now, but like a dog with a bone, she couldn’t let it go.

  ***