by Morgana Best
Linda smiled in appreciation. “Thanks. It’s an electric stove, not gas, though. They say that good cooks use gas stoves, but to tell you the truth, I really don’t like flames.” I smiled to myself, wondering if that was because Linda was a Shifter wolf, and animals don’t like fires. I thought it prudent not to comment.
Linda pushed on. “And it has a lovely dishwasher, and don’t you just love this splashback?”
“I do.” I walked over to the splashback and ran my hand over it. It had a mirrored surface, but with dark smoky glass. The whole house screamed quality.
“I’m going to smudge the whole house with white sage,” Linda said, “but I’ll wait until after my furniture arrives. I think it will be a waste of time to do it now as I’ll have to do it again after the removalists leave.”
I nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Okay, let’s start our investigation. What do we do first?”
I tapped my chin. “We need to track down Beckett’s housekeeper. Let’s start by calling on all the housecleaning services in town and ask if any of their people worked at Beckett Maxwell’s house.”
“Good idea. I noticed one of the free papers had been flung onto my driveway, so I’ll pick that up on our way out.”
Minutes later, Linda and I were sitting outside an unremarkable brick building on a side street in town. The front was overgrown with vines and had an entirely messy appearance. “Hardly a good first impression for such a service,” I said to Linda.
She readily agreed. “I’m surprised there are so many housecleaning companies in town. I thought there’d be one or two, maybe. I found the one I used to clean my new house on Facebook.”
I shrugged. “Let’s go in. Hopefully, we’ll uncover the information at this one and won’t have to try anymore.”
A weary looking receptionist glanced up at us. “Can I help you?” she said in a monotone.
“We need to find Dr Beckett Maxwell’s housekeeper,” I informed her. “I was wondering if she came from this agency.”
“Name?” she said.
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
The woman at once became more alert. “Beckett Maxwell? He died this morning, didn’t he?”
I should have known the rumour mill would precede me. The Bush Telegraph was strong in this place. “That’s right,” I said in the most even tone I could muster. “I was with him when he died. His housekeeper left just before Beckett died, so I wanted to break the news in person. The only trouble is, I don’t have her name.”
“It was no one from here,” she said.
Linda leant over the desk. “Could you at least look it up?”
“I don’t need to,” the receptionist said with a smile. “I’d know if one of our housekeepers went out to Beckett Maxwell’s place.”
I figured she was right. Everyone knew everyone else’s business in this town. I thanked her, and all but pulled Linda out of the room.
“Do you think she would really know without looking it up on her computer?” Linda asked me when we were both back in her car.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “You get used to this sort of thing in a small town, Linda. We’ll just have to push on to the next cleaning service.”
“I have an idea. You know how it’s usually the last place you look?” She pulled a face. “What I mean is, that every time I open a packet of incense, I always open the wrong end, without fail. Lately, just as I reach for it to open it, I flip it over to the other end. That always works.”
I smiled. “Yes, I always open incense packets at the wrong end, too.”
“Why don’t we reverse the order of visits to the cleaning services?”
I laughed. “Sure.”
Five cleaning services later, and it was clear that it didn’t work the same as incense packets. Not one of them had heard of Beckett Maxwell. Sure, they knew about his death, but they all said that he wasn’t a client.
“Last one,” I said to Linda. This one had an unassuming sign amongst numerous others on an old wooden building on the south side of town.
It took the two of us to push open the hefty door, so I wondered how anyone else would get in. The door creaked open onto a large but dull reception room. To the right was a sign stating that the occupant was a real estate conveyancer; to the left was a sign stating that the inhabitant was a dentist—I shuddered violently—and ahead was a sign announcing that the occupant was the Beachside Housekeeping Agency.
The door was slightly ajar, so I walked over and knocked. I was about to poke my head around the door when a strident voice called, “Come in!”
I stepped forward, but Linda caught my arm. “Let me do the talking!” She slapped herself on the head. “How could I be so stupid?”
I looked at her with surprise. “What do you mean?”
“This was the company I enlisted to clean my new house before I moved in. How could I forget?”
I patted her arm. “You have a lot on your mind.”
Linda nodded and walked through the door, with me following.
“Mrs Williams,” the woman said. “I trust your house was to your liking.”
“Oh yes, you did a beautiful job,” Linda said.
The woman looked doubtful. “You’ve already paid, by credit card over the phone. Didn’t you receive the email invoice?”
“Yes I did, thank you,” Linda said. “I popped in to thank you in person because the entire house was absolutely spotless, but I also wanted to mention another matter while I was here.”
The woman raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.
“My friend here, Pepper, was with Beckett Maxwell when he died,” she said.
The woman looked at me for the first time. “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. He was a lovely man, although I barely knew him. He kept to himself and didn’t come to town very often. He used to employ us from time to time to clean his house.”
“He did? Did he employ someone from here in the last week?”
The woman shook her head. “No, not for years.”
“Would you have any idea who he did use lately?”
The woman looked at Linda. “No, I don’t. Why do you ask?”
I spoke up. “Just before he died, he was looking for his housekeeper,” I said. “I wanted to break the news to his housekeeper in person.”
“Whoever it was would already know,” the woman said. “It’s all over town.”
I had to think fast. “Yes, but I wanted to reassure her that he didn’t suffer. It was very quick. I thought she’d want to hear it from me.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” she said. “I’m sorry I can’t help you. I don’t have any clue as to who it could be, though. There are other cleaning services in town.”
I grimaced. “We’ve been to them all.”
She nodded. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of services. Not services as such, I mean individuals. They’re not professional cleaners and they think they can make some extra money just by cleaning someone’s house, but they don’t do a proper job.” Her comments descended into a tirade against non-professional house cleaners. When she drew a breath, we thanked her and left.
“What do we do now?” Linda asked me. We were standing on the street in the shade of an old shop awning. “I suppose we could look through recent Facebook posts say, in the Lighthouse Bay Buy Swap Sell Group, to see if anyone’s offering cleaning services.”
I screwed up my face. “We could, but that would be an awfully long shot. Why don’t we have coffee at the Lotus Bean?”
Linda’s face lit up.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and waved it at her. “But first, let’s print out the photos from my iPhone. I took plenty at the scene. Maybe we uncovered something.”
Linda grabbed my arm. “Pepper, there’s a man watching us.”
I spun around, but couldn’t see anyone.
Linda shook her head. “He’s gone. Pepper, someone’s following
us! I’m sure of it.”
Chapter 6
The chemist was the only place in town that provided a photo printout service. It was an old building in the main street, but was filled with enthusiastic sales assistants, several of whom hurried over to ask if they could be of help. The air was filled with the fragrance of numerous perfumes and cosmetics.
There were five photo printout machines, all of which had seen better days. The bulky, pale green machines were situated between the cosmetic section and the medical section of the chemist. Several people were lined up beside them, waiting for their prescriptions.
The machines were all vacant, so I headed for the first one. I had not printed out photos for some years, but I had downloaded the app and hoped the process would be straightforward. It proved to be easy, after all, especially with Linda’s help. “This is cutting off a lot of the edges, Pepper. Can you fix it?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea how. Can you try?”
Linda took over for a moment, and then clicked her tongue. “No, I can’t seem to, either. Here, why don’t you keep going and I’ll go and ask someone.”
After Linda disappeared, I continued to print out the photos. They shot out one after another. I had no idea I had taken so many, and the sound of the photos being ejected was almost hypnotic. Linda returned soon after, shaking her head. “They said these machines often cut off the edges of the photos.”
I groaned. “Oh well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I still have the originals on my phone. I just thought it would be easier to look at hard copies rather than blowing up things on the screen, but I still have that option.”
After I paid for the photos, we headed for our favourite coffee spot, the Lotus Bean. The coffee here was as good as the interior design, all carved wood and attractive shades of lilac and green. The lights were copper, and the hanging potted plants were real. In a retirement town, this stood out as quite modern. I remarked on this to Linda. “Everyone from Australia likes to retire to the beach,” she said, “and even though the house prices here are high, they’re still a fraction of the prices in Sydney.”
I agreed. The waitress waved to us from behind the counter. “The usual, ladies?”
“Yes, please,” we both called back in unison. I handed half the photos to Linda. “Why don’t we look through them and stop if we find something interesting?”
“Do you actually think we will find something interesting?” Linda said with a smile.
I laughed. “Most probably not. Still, I thought it a good idea to take the photos. I’ll be surprised if anything does show up, but at least we have a photographic record that might prove to be of use later.”
Linda screwed up her face. “Let’s hope anything interesting wasn’t cut off by those dreadful ancient machines.”
By the time we finished our coffee, we were still looking through the photos. “Don’t get too excited yet, but I might have found something,” Linda said. She handed me a photo. “What do you think about that?”
“My first thought is that the machine cut off most of the edges,” I said.
Linda nodded. “In this case, it might have done us a favour by highlighting the important bit. Do you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
I peered at the photo. “Is that what I think it is?” I tapped my finger on the photo.
“You see it, too?”
I nodded slowly. “Does it look like a syringe mark to you?”
Linda moved her empty coffee cup aside. “Exactly. That’s exactly what it does look like.”
I held the photo close to my face. Staring at it for some time made no difference—it definitely looked like a tiny puncture mark. “Nothing else could do that? Mosquitoes don’t leave marks like that.”
Linda chewed her lip. “A spider might be able to make a mark like that, but surely there’d be two puncture marks.” She leant across the table to me. “Think about it logically, Pepper. If he was murdered, then something had to have killed him. He hadn’t been shot or stabbed or anything like that, so it stands to reason he was poisoned. What poisons act that quickly?” Before waiting for me to answer, she pushed on. “None that I know of, none that are ingested. The poison must have been administered by a syringe. He was diabetic, and an overdose of insulin would have killed him, for sure.”
“That makes sense to me,” I said. “What do we do now?”
Linda shrugged one shoulder. “I suppose we take it straight to the police and show them.”
I said the first thing that occurred to me. “They’ll ask why I took photos of the scene. They’ll think I’m trying to snoop.”
Linda waved one hand in dismissal. “Don’t worry about it. Just tell them at the time you thought it might have been murder, so you took photos in case the paramedics disturbed anything.”
“I don’t think they’ll believe me,” I said doubtfully.
“Who cares?” Linda said. “They’re not going to arrest you for taking photographs. They might think you’re a bit strange, but I don’t know if they’ll actually disbelieve you. The main thing is to show them that photo.”
And so, fifteen minutes later, I was walking through the front door of the Lighthouse Bay police station, following an enthusiastic Linda. Linda marched straight up to the desk sergeant. “I’m Linda Williams, and this is Pepper Jasper. Pepper found the body of Beckett Maxwell this morning. Could we speak to Detective Mason or Detective Oakes, please?”
“Just a moment.” The man punched some numbers into a phone. “I have a Linda Williams and a Pepper Jasper here to see you.” He listened for a while, and then hung up before turning back to us. “He’ll be out in a moment.”
Linda and I sat down in the waiting room. There was no one else there. “Oh look, they have a new painting,” Linda said, pointing to a huge picture of sunflowers on a wall.
“It’s pretty sad that we know what the police station usually looks like,” I said dryly. “Maybe they were trying to brighten the place up.”
“It sure needs it,” Linda said. She was right. The floors were a dull grey, as were the walls. The paint was peeling, and the fluorescent lights overhead were flickering in a disturbing, headache-inducing fashion. The atmosphere was dark and brooding. It certainly needed a good space cleansing. I would love to get in there with my Tibetan singing bowl, my white sage smudge sticks, and my Van Van floor wash.
“So where did you say Lucas was going?” Linda asked me after an interval.
I held up my hands, palms upwards. “I don’t have the slightest clue. He didn’t tell me.”
“It seems sudden.”
I agreed with her. “It certainly was. Some dire Cleaner business, I suppose.”
“There’s been no hint of anything strange in the local papers, not lately,” Linda said, “but I suppose that’s what Cleaners do—keep it out of the papers.”
“Let’s just hope Scorpius Everyman doesn’t come back to town,” I said. Scorpius Everyman was a disgraced former Cleaner. He was deeply involved with The Other, and it seemed he was up to his ears in the business. He had captured me once, so I certainly did not want to run into him again.
I looked up to realise Detective Oakes was looming over me. “Ladies,” he said in a bored tone, “please follow me.”
I expected he would show us into an interview room, but he took us into a cramped office. He pointed to two see-through plastic chairs which looked quite modern, in contrast with the rest of the building. He came straight to the point. “What’s all this about?”
Linda shoved the photo across the desk to him. “What does this look like?”
Before he could answer, I hurried to say, “I didn’t know if it was a murder or not, you know, when I first found Beckett Maxwell like that. When I heard the ambulance sirens, I thought I should take photos of the crime scene to give to you.”
Oakes quirked one eyebrow, but thankfully didn’t comment. “And you showed me this photo because…” His voice trailed away.
Linda reac
hed for the photo and jabbed her finger on it. “There’s a syringe mark on his neck.”
Oakes shot her a look of disbelief. “And this is why you’re here? To show me that?”
Linda nodded enthusiastically. “It’s obviously a puncture mark. What else could it be? No spider could kill him that quickly, and there would be two puncture marks. There is only one.”
Oakes sighed and picked up the photograph. He held it close to his nose, then held it up to the light, twisting it this way and that. Finally, he put it down on the table. “You ladies have an overactive imagination,” he said. “Ms Jasper, I figure you’ve been involved with a couple of murders now, so you’re probably seeing a murderer under every bush.” He laughed. “Look, I appreciate you trying to help, but that’s clearly just a freckle.”
“A freckle?” I said rather crossly. “It doesn’t look anything like a freckle. Beckett was diabetic. It’s obvious someone murdered him with insulin.”
“Can’t you please look into it?” Linda pleaded with him.
Oakes frowned deeply. “The autopsy has already been done, and his death was due to natural causes. Now if you ladies will excuse me, I have a lot of paperwork to get through.”
He pushed his chair back and stood up. Linda and I exchanged glances as we followed him down the corridor. “That was a waste of time,” Linda said as soon as we were safely out of earshot. “Will I take you back to your place now?”
I nodded. “You know, it seemed obviously a syringe mark to me. If only he would have shown it to a medical examiner.”
As we were walking down the steps from the police station, Linda seized my arm, her fingernails biting into my flesh. “Look, Pepper, there!”
My eyes followed her pointing finger, and I saw a dark shadow ducking into the café opposite.
“It was him. He was just standing there, staring at us, and when he saw me pointing, he ducked into that café.”