by Helen Smith
Emily opened her notebook and studied it while she was waiting for her vegetarian option of wild woodland mushrooms and vegetarian sausages with toasted sunflower bread to arrive.
“Do you know who’s responsible for these women’s deaths, Dr. Muriel?”
“Certainly not. That’s your department. It’s all in your notebook.” Dr. Muriel tapped it for emphasis. “You are a young woman who is full of ideas, Emily Castles. Now comes the time to put them to the test.”
“I do have ideas. Also wild theories, prejudices and unfounded suspicions. Also, in some areas, no ideas at all.”
As if he’d been summoned to back this up, Det. James wandered past and pulled up a chair. He looked exhausted. Dr. Muriel poured him some orange juice from a jug on the table. “Don’t you ever stop working, Rory?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” he said amiably. “What about you?”
Dr. Muriel laughed as though she’d been caught out. “Observing, always observing. And cogitating. Or daydreaming, as my mother used to call it. She would not have approved if she’d known I get paid to do it. Any news, dear boy?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly.” Dr. Muriel seemed satisfied with this. She munched on a piece of eggy toast.
“My boss is saying he should have brought in a more senior officer, right from the start.”
“That’s the sort of thing bosses say, though, isn’t it? I’m always catching hell from mine. You must be glad, Emily, that you don’t have a boss that you’re permanently answerable to. You do have them, of course. But you can chop and change. There must be a feeling of freedom in that.”
Emily’s vegetarian breakfast arrived, and she gloomily did her best to enjoy the feeling of freedom that came with knowing she’d be out of a job again tomorrow.
Nik Kovacevic approached the table. “Everything all right, ladies? Please accept the hotel’s apologies for last night’s events. There were circumstances, as I’m sure you realize, that were beyond our control.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Muriel. “Emily has a theory about it.”
Rory James rolled his eyes good-humoredly and drained his orange juice.
Nik said, “We run a very popular murder mystery evening here at the hotel. If you like ‘investigating,’ Emily, you should think about booking for that.”
Rory James laughed and stood up to leave.
Dr. Muriel laughed, too. “I think we need to get things wrapped up soon, don’t you? There might be other lives at stake. If you gentlemen aren’t too busy, perhaps you’d be kind enough to join my session at the conference at ten o’clock.”
They both looked startled. Det. James said, “Why, what’s happening?”
“Emily’s going to tell you whodunit.”
A little bit of toasted sunflower bread went down the wrong way, and Emily started to choke. Rory James thumped her on the back. Emily recovered enough to wash down the toast with a reviving cup of tea. She reminded herself that if things went horribly wrong, she’d never have to see any of these people again.
Dr. Muriel heaved herself to her feet. “All set?”
“I need to spend a few minutes in the room where they’re holding the vigil.”
“Ha! Quiet contemplation among the shabby cats and the wilting flowers? Or are you fossicking for clues? No! Don’t tell me. I’ll wait for the denouement. See you downstairs.”
In the Montagu room, as the basement conference space was officially known, Morgana was testing that the projector was working, by turning it on, then off, then on again. She was wearing a tartan waistcoat and a Tam o’ Shanter—a tartan bonnet with a red pom-pom on the crown. She seemed jittery. Maria was putting out the last of forty pads and pencils at intervals along the horseshoe-shaped tables.
“I wonder if I should have asked for the tables to be set up cabaret style?” mused Morgana, as if to deliberately provoke Maria, who took no notice. “I suppose it’s too late now. Are you all set for this morning, Emily? Muriel’s cooking up something, isn’t she? But she won’t tell me what it is.”
Emily felt that Dr. Muriel was treating her like the subject of one of those science experiments at school, where you’re invited to touch a Van de Graaff generator and your hair stands up on end without you doing anything clever at all. But she also felt strangely…confident. All the information was there in her head. She just had to spool it out carefully, in the right order.
She decided she was up to the challenge. Why not? After five o’clock today she was finished, anyway. They couldn’t very well sack her if she got it all wrong.
Once everyone had filed in, Morgana stood to open the conference officially. There were surprisingly few gaps around the table considering what a late night everyone had had. All the members of the organizing committee were there, including Zena and Archie. Whereas there had been a table plan for dinner last night, seats at the conference this morning were unallocated. Emily noticed that Archie had a pretty brunette woman sitting to his left, and a pretty brunette woman sitting to his right, both looking at him expectantly, as if it wouldn’t be the end of the world if there was a fire and Archie had to strip his shirt off to rescue them.
There were faces Emily recognized from last night, though she didn’t know their names. The thing about working on short-term, temporary contracts like this was that you got to know some people very, very well, and others…others you didn’t get to know and would never see again. They were like churchyard statues. No doubt they had lived rich and interesting lives. But to strangers passing quickly by, they were interchangeable gray figures, their features blurry and unmemorable. And Emily was passing by very quickly.
“I have learned something this weekend,” said Morgana by way of introduction to the day’s sessions. “Some of us are writers, some of us are readers, some of us are reviewers. Most of us only really have one talent, and we should be thankful for it and exploit it. We have seen the death of two talented women. They weren’t much good as writers of fiction. I’m sorry. It’s true. I brought them here under false pretenses, and I shouldn’t have done it. I valued them for one talent—as bloggers—and instead of celebrating that, I brought them here and feted them as writers of fiction. And I hope to goodness, I really do, that my chicanery didn’t result in either of their deaths.
“We will have an opportunity to consider that, perhaps, during Muriel’s session on ethics, which will start us off this morning. Then after the break, we have Zena with ‘What am I? A Piece of Wood?’—a look at the depiction of people of color in literature. Then lunch. Would you all please take time to pop in to the Brunswick room and sign copies of your books for anyone who has bought them? Then after lunch we’ve Cerys with ‘Don’t Ask Me! I’m Only a Woman.’ Then I’ll finish up with ‘Whither the Novel,’ at the end of which we’ll have a chance to talk about next year’s conference, and what we might do differently.
“Without further ado, I’ll hand you over to Dr. Muriel Crowther.”
Rather than walk to the front, Dr. Muriel remained where she sat, and addressed the room. “What must be done,” she asked, “when we’re dealing with real life people in our stories? Do we have a greater obligation to them than to the creatures of our imagination, much as we love them?”
If any of the authors present balked at the use of “we” they didn’t show it. Dr. Muriel had published twelve books, including two biographies of famous psychiatrists and two of famous Victorian charlatans (she was fond of inviting her audiences to comment on whether or not she should simply say she had written the biographies of four charlatans), so although she didn’t generate stories in the same way as the romance writers in the room, she knew what she was talking about.
Archie spoke up from across the room. “I think we have to honor them.”
“Yes indeed. You see, something very strange has happened this weekend. A story has been created before our eyes, and it has involved real people, and some of them have got hurt. It hurt so much, they’re dead.”
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Dr. Muriel spoke softly. Everyone leaned forward, intrigued to hear what she would say next.
She said something that surprised everyone who wasn’t expecting it: “So now I’m going to turn you over to Emily Castles, a very bright young woman whom all of you have met. And she’s going to explain what happened, and how, and why. Detective James, can you confirm that your men are standing by at the other side of the doors, please?”
Everyone looked round at Det. James, standing in front of the door with Nik Kovacevic, who looked as though he might faint. Det. James nodded.
“Very well. Let’s begin.”
Emily also remained in her seat. She had no need to walk up to the front and switch on the projector—it wasn’t as if she’d prepared any slides. She took out her notebook and laid it on the table in front of her. Her stomach turned over and over, presumably with nerves, though perhaps she shouldn’t have eaten those vegetarian sausages.
“I can’t claim to know all the answers. Anything that struck me as strange over the last twenty-four hours, I wrote it down. Some of it related to the story—”
“Why call it a story? Isn’t it usually called a ‘case’?” one of the churchyard statues called.
“Calling it a ‘case’ sounds a bit pompous,” admitted Emily.
Cerys defended her. “Let her call it a story if she wants to call it a story.”
“Some of what I’d written down relates to the story, and some of it relates to me. And I spent ages trying to disentangle the two before I realized I was in this story, too.”
“Too right, babes. Everything’s connected. That’s the way the universe works. She’s got a wise head on them shoulders!” Zena’s voice was slightly hoarse because of the smoke she’d inhaled before being hauled out of her room the night before.
“And then—Dr. Muriel’s right—I realized someone was writing this story for us, and turning the pages, and telling us what we should see. There were too many clues. Way, way too many. That’s because there was more than one story. There was the murder story, and all our personal stories mixed up with it, and other stories as well. And someone had been planting superfluous clues, which didn’t help. But I’ll get to that. Two things seemed to be important, though at first I couldn’t see why. In fact, I wondered if they had nothing to do with Winnie’s and Teena’s deaths and they only were bothering me because…well, because they always bother me. The first was smoking. How many people smoke, here?”
Just under half the people in the room raised their hands, including Zena, Cerys and Morgana.
“The other one was litter.”
“Ha!” Dr. Muriel looked around the room, nodding sagely at anyone who would meet her eye.
“But the big question seemed to be, why was Winnie invited here? If her death wasn’t a random attack, had she been invited here to die?”
“Ooh,” said most of the people in the room, though there were also some “hmms.”
“I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll start at the end and work backward.”
“Who are you? Martin Amis?” This from another of the gray, blurry faces whose name Emily didn’t know and would never probably know. She ignored him.
“First of all, the fire. It could have been an attempt to destroy evidence, couldn’t it? It could have been an attempt to intimidate witnesses, or even kill someone in their sleep. The two main players in the story of the fire were Zena and Archie. It started in Zena’s room, and the person who was most affected by the fire—or seemed most affected by it—was Archie. Both are members of the organizing committee who voted to bring Winnie here. Winnie, of course, ran a popular blog under the name Tallulah.”
“Tallulah’s Treasures? Well I never! Did everyone else know?” Cerys looked around. Approximately half the people in the room nodded. The other half stared blankly. “Where’ve I been, then? Stuck under a rock? Well, blow me down.” She wasn’t a very good actress. No one believed her.
“I think you said, didn’t you Cerys, that you’d like to get your hands on Tallulah and teach her a lesson, because she’d written you a nasty review?”
“I’d have liked to have words, if that’s what you mean. Wouldn’t we all?”
There were general sounds of demurral from around the room, as if to suggest that nobody present had ever received a poor review, and if they had, they wouldn’t be so silly as to get upset by it.
Only Polly spoke up for her. “I think we all get cross when we see someone has written something unkind about us. Don’t these people realize we have families and friends who might read what they have written? Don’t they realize that we ourselves have feelings? It doesn’t mean we’d kill someone over it.”
“What about you, Zena? There was a melted doll on the altar in your room last night. It is an altar, isn’t it?”
“My books are smoking hot, babes. But I’ve never set fire to a doll on an altar. Anyone ever had a bad review from a doll? Didn’t think so! No one has. Certainly not Zena.”
“You weren’t trying to bring harm to someone?”
“Nope.”
“The doll was dressed in pink, to represent Polly.”
“Ooh!” Everyone in the room turned to look at Polly. Polly remained absolutely still and quiet. Her face was inscrutable.
“You’d disconnected the smoke alarm in your room, hadn’t you?”
“Yeah, well. Gotta put my hand up to that. Didn’t want to go outside on them chilly steps to have a puff. That’s not a crime, is it?”
From the back of the room, Nik Kovacevik piped up, “Actually—”
Emily ignored him and addressed Zena. “You heard the news that Polly had been nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award and you…you put a likeness of her on the altar to wish her luck after dinner last night.” Emily suspected that Zena might not have been wishing luck to Polly. But Zena took her cue, gratefully.
“Yeah. Yeah. That’s it, babes. Even someone as successful as Polly, she can do with a little Zena luck.”
“Mmmmm,” said the people in the room. Everyone looked at Polly. Polly smiled graciously.
“You lit your incense and made your wish, and when you went to sleep something on the altar caught fire—maybe the hot tip of the incense touched part of the doll’s clothes. Whatever it was, it didn’t trigger the alarm because you’d dismantled it. And you were oblivious until you were dragged out of bed by the firefighters.”
Zena chuckled. “I was having me some sexy dreams.”
“So the fire was a separate story that got mixed up with the murder story. It wasn’t relevant at all.”
“What about Archie?” asked the brunette sitting to his left.
“Ach. I was having me some nightmares.”
Emily looked up at Det. James as she said, “Sometimes it helps to write them down, doesn’t it? It doesn’t mean anything.”
Rory James grinned at her in a way that plainly said: Yeah! Thanks for the hint. Tell me something I don’t know.
“What was peculiar about this…case was that Winnie’s body was moved after her death. We all agree that she fell from the roof terrace, don’t we? Or was pushed?”
Det. James said, “Mrs. Kraster was pushed. She offered no resistance, but she was pushed.”
“Aha!” said Dr. Muriel.
“Same thing with Teena Durani.”
Emily was now feeling confident enough to play to the room a little. “But why didn’t they offer any resistance?”
“Hypnotism?” suggested Morgana. “Some sort of weird secret society cult thing?”
“How about hairspray?” countered Emily.
“Ahhh!” said all the women in the room who had ever attended a self-defense class.
“A face full of that would be enough to distract the victim. Temporarily blinded, one shove and she’d topple over the fence to her death. Then it would have needed two strong people to move her body to the housing estate next to the hotel. Two women, maybe. Two members of the organizing committee who’d lured
Winnie here to her death.”
“Oh, Emily!” said Morgana in a very, very hurt voice. “Darling, no. Which of us would do such a thing?”
“Cerys?”
“Well I never!” said Cerys. “The worm turns.”
“A quick burst of hairspray and a shove, and Winnie and her review site are silenced for good. And then Cerys and her friend Zena move the body.”
“Ach!” Archie was furious. “Here we go. Blame the black woman in the room.”
Emily was still playing to the room. “But why?”
“Because society’s inherently racist and you can’t help yourself, hen.”
“No, I meant why would they move the body. It doesn’t make any sense. So maybe it’s not Cerys and Zena. Maybe it’s not the organizing committee who moved the body. Maybe it’s someone at the hotel.”
Emily continued, her eyes on Nik Kovacevic, “Two strong men who know the layout of the hotel, who know how to temporarily dismantle the CCTV, who want to protect the reputation of the hotel. A porter, maybe. And a…a manager.”
There was a scraping sound as Nik drew back a chair and sat down. He seemed to need to take the weight off his legs before they gave in under him.
“But why would they kill a guest at the hotel?” Emily continued, “It didn’t seem like it would be very good for business.”
“The One Star Club!” said Cerys. “Got to be.”
“The One Star Club,” said Emily, for the benefit of the people in the room who hadn’t been privy to Dr. Muriel’s fabrication, “is supposed to be an international club. Its members undertake to leave one star reviews for books, goods and services online.”
There were lots of “Ohhhhs!” Everyone—they were all authors in the room, except for Rory, Nik, Maria and Maggie—liked the idea of a conspiracy. It fitted with the deep-seated belief they all had that no genuine readers of their books could ever dislike anything they had written.