by Unknown
“The trouble with the One Star Club is that it doesn’t exist. And even if it did, there’s no reason to believe that Winnie or Teena were members. So we keep coming back to the question of why Winnie was killed. Why? She seemed perfectly nice. It was a senseless killing, and yet it all seemed to have been planned out so carefully.”
“Why do you say it was planned, m’dear? Couldn’t it have been an opportunistic attack?”
“The polls were rigged to bring Winnie here. None of the organizing committee remembered voting for her piece of fiction.”
“Well blow me down. I thought I’d lost my mind!” Cerys looked round at her friends. “Do none of you remember? It’s not just me?”
“So who stood to gain from her death? Her husband, maybe. But he was in another country. Her elderly relatives in Milton Keynes. But they’re elderly. And they were in Milton Keynes.”
She looked for confirmation to Det. James, in position at the door. He nodded.
“Then there was Maggie, of course—with Winnie and Teena out of the way, she was the clear winner in the online fiction competition.”
“Ooh yes!” Everyone in the room wanted it to be Maggie.
“But that’s not a very strong reason. There was no financial reward, and besides, she was already a winner. But the members of the RWGB made a financial gain. There was a terrific boost to book sales at the conference after Winnie’s death—they even had to bring in a local bookseller specially, to sell books to the people who’d turned up for the vigil. There was renewed press interest in the RWGB, which is suffering from dwindling membership. It struggles to get noticed in comparison to some other associations for romance writers. So, we’re back to the organizing committee again.”
“You don’t know who did it, do you?” Polly spoke gently and kindly. “Come on, Emily. There’s no shame in admitting it. It’s been an interesting exercise. But maybe we should move on and leave the investigation to the police.”
“I do know. I’ll tell you how I know. It’s because of the anomalies. And it’s because of the smokers and the litter. And it’s because of the job I was doing before this one, where I used to wait for ages to get in the elevator, and then when I got in, no one would ever press the button for me because they were so rude and self-involved. So I used to wish that I had my own private elevator to take me up and down between the floors. And here in the hotel, the guest elevators are even slower. And you know what I realized? The killer was using the service elevator like a private elevator. And that’s important because it’s all about timings and alibis. And that’s another reason I know who did it—the alibis. But first I’ll tell you about the anomalies, shall I?”
“OK,” said Det. James from the back of the room. “Be great if you could get this over and done with before my boss arrives.”
“The poisoning’s the big one. Two murders that fit with each other, and then there’s an attempted poisoning of Polly with a chocolate. I mean, why? And then there’s this weird phone call I got from Winnie, speaking in a Southern accent. Except it wasn’t Winnie because she was already dead. And there was the way that nobody really seemed to care about what happened to Teena because it had all already happened to Winnie. But the weirdest one, the one that’s the key to it all, is what the doctor said to me in Polly’s room when she came to check her over after Polly’d been sick.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a real doctor?” said Cerys, getting into the spirit of it. “Did you check?”
Nik called from the back of the room: “It was our usual doctor. I sent her up there myself.”
Polly shrugged and blushed. “It was all rather embarrassing, really. She said I was having a panic attack.”
“The doctor got angry with me. She said that you mustn’t administer the antidote to a patient without knowing for sure if they’ve been poisoned, because it could be really dangerous. That was the anomaly. The doctor talking about the antidote.”
“The doctor did it?” said Cerys, puzzled. “Are you sure, love?”
“The doctor?” the buzz went up around the room. “Did she say the doctor? The doctor did it!”
“It wasn’t the doctor!” Emily had to raise her voice to make herself heard. “It was Polly.”
Chapter Eighteen
THE HOW AND WHY
“This wasn’t about Winnie at all. Teena was the main target. She lived in a village in Buckinghamshire, not far from Polly. Like lots of bloggers, she liked blogging so much that she had more than one blog. She reviewed books at TeeandBooks.com. But she also wrote about local news at the Buckinghamshire Bugle. Teena was proud of being a ‘citizen journalist,’ covering everything from restaurant reviews to village fetes, from cricket matches to campaigns against accident blackspots, and so on. I was reading her blog just now, before I came down here. She had rather an unfortunate manner in person, but she was articulate and persuasive when she wrote online. She was vehemently in favor of renewable energy and had got the whole village behind her. One of the things she campaigned for was a wind farm. Wind farms…well one of the problems with them is that birds fly into their rotary blades and get shredded. Polly’s husband had just taken over a bird sanctuary in the area.”
“The swannery!”
Polly was unmoved. She certainly wasn’t about to admit to murder. “We look after swans there, yes. All sorts of birds. Pete’s a vet. He likes taking in broken and injured birds—if they’ve swallowed fishing tackle or been covered in oil in an oil spill, that sort of thing.”
“Aww,” said several people in the room.
“He’s a decent man. Yes.”
But Emily wasn’t about to get distracted. “He was fighting, and losing, a campaign against the wind farm. Polly uses her maiden name on her books so as not to confuse her fans, so I doubt Teena had any idea that her favorite novelist’s husband was involved.”
“But you did!” said Dr. Muriel. “Clever girl!”
“Look, I wouldn’t have got this, I don’t suppose,” said Emily self-deprecatingly, as if they were discussing the answers to a difficult pub quiz, “if I hadn’t stood in the Brunswick room and looked at those blogs scrolling down the screen in tribute to Winnie. I wondered—I hoped—there’d be some kind of message from Teena since it was the last thing she did before she died. There was a message, though she didn’t leave it deliberately. She’d set up the computer to grab information from all the blogs written by Winnie’s friends around the world and display them, and she included both of hers.”
“The universe always finds a way to get that message across, babes.”
“Darling, couldn’t Polly—and I do think you’ll find you’ve got a bit mixed up here and you’ll find she’s entirely innocent, but I’m going to play along anyway—couldn’t Polly just have campaigned against the wind farm instead of killing two people and poisoning herself?”
“I’m guessing it’s something to do with her wanting to stand as a Member of Parliament. A campaign like that would be too controversial. She’d never get elected.”
Polly gave a relaxed, slightly condescending smile, like a cowboy watching a duchess learning to use a lasso. “The voters are not notably keener on murderers than they are on anti-wind-farm campaigners.”
“But you thought you’d get away with murder,” said Emily. “The voters weren’t supposed to know what you’d done. You couldn’t have campaigned against the wind farm in secret.”
“Polly does care about her birds,” said Cerys. “Remember that business with the goose at the RWGB Christmas dinner?”
“We’ve had the why, m’dear. Shall we get onto the how?”
“Polly invited Winnie to go up to the roof terrace to smoke a cigarette. What an honor! Her heroine offering her a cigarette, and inviting her to hide round the back of the bar like a schoolgirl, while they chatted about writing and indulged their sneaky habit.”
“Aha!”
“But Polly had doctored all the cigarettes in the packet. Winnie takes one. Polly lights it for her
. Winnie takes one puff and gets dizzy. Polly pushes her over the fence, and Winnie lands in the bins below and breaks her neck. Polly didn’t expect the body to be found for an hour or two. So she calls and talks to me, pretending to be Winnie, to give herself an alibi.”
Det. James called out, “Why the ridiculous accent?”
“To cause more confusion. Maybe she thought she’d shift suspicion to whoever took the call—originally she asked for Morgana, but she ended up speaking to me—if we claimed to have spoken to someone who didn’t speak like Winnie at all. Or more likely she wanted to establish the person on the other end of the line as an unreliable witness, in case the timing of the call didn’t quite fit with her alibi. But anyway she called. And then she came down to the ground floor.”
“Where she proceeded to move the body?”
“No, that’s just it. She wanted the body to be found where it fell, so it would look like an accident. And then Teena’s death would follow after, with less scrutiny, as an also-ran. But someone else moved Winnie’s body and sparked a murder inquiry. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who.”
Emily avoided looking at Nik.
“So that’s the smoking. Now the litter. When I first met Polly, she had a long stub of a cigarette in her hand. It was the first of only two times I ever saw her bother to pick up a cigarette butt. The second was just after Teena’s death. As Winnie—and, later, Teena—went sailing over the edge of the roof terrace, they’d dropped the cigarette they’d been holding into the courtyard below. Polly wasn’t tidying her litter. She was removing evidence. See, that’s where what the doctor said about the antidote comes in. I looked it up online—”
“Isn’t that cheating?” asked Dr. Muriel. “I tell my students not to google anything.”
“Well, I didn’t have time to go to the British Library. So I looked it up online and the antidote to cyanide poisoning—or one of them, anyway—is amyl nitrite. It’s sold legally, over the counter, as a muscle relaxant. Popular in nightclubs as a legal high. You can sniff it or you can dip a cigarette into it and inhale it that way. Of course, if you didn’t have cyanide poisoning and you weren’t used to doing drugs in nightclubs, you’d be knocked half sideways if someone took you up on a roof and offered you a cigarette that had been dipped in the stuff. Dizziness, low blood pressure, fainting. While you were dealing with that, two hands in the middle of your chest, whoosh!”
“I didn’t think you went clubbing, Emily,” said Polly, mildly.
“I don’t. But I know what people get up to when they go. Besides, you click on one link on the Internet, it take you to another one, and another. I had all the information I needed about amyl nitrite—and more—after five minutes of searching on the computer in Nik’s office.”
Morgana’s hand went to the pompom on her hat, and she squeezed it a few times, like a stress ball. “Darling, you don’t need to tell anyone in this room. We’re all convinced we could write ten books a year if we didn’t spend our valuable writing time looking at the Internet.”
All the authors laughed at that, some more bitterly than others.
Emily addressed Polly directly: “You used to do a lot of clubbing when you were younger, didn’t you say?”
“I’ve made no secret of it. I’ve talked about it on Twitter. But I never did poppers.”
“Yes! Poppers. That’s what it’s called in club culture. Thank you. I think the doctor must have seen a bottle of it on the dressing table in your room. I don’t know for sure but…”
Emily looked over at Rory. He nodded. “I’ll get the boys on it.”
“But why all that nonsense about the poisoning in the first place?” Dr. Muriel banged her cane on the ground at the stupidity of it.
“It would give Polly another murder method if she needed it. So if she couldn’t get Teena up to the roof to push her off, she could put poison in her food later that night or at breakfast, or slip something into her drink, and no one would suspect her because she’d also been a victim. There was no real rush, just so long as it happened that weekend and seemed to be connected to Winnie’s death, and was overshadowed by it.”
Emily looked over at Det. James, who tapped his watch to get her to hurry up and finish. A uniformed officer now stood by his side.
“The timing’s all wrong for Teena’s death,” said Cerys. “How could Polly get up to the roof and back down again to the bins where you found her? You’re not saying she can fly like her precious birds?”
“When she turned up to help me pack the gift bags, she arrived in the service elevator. And that’s how she traveled all weekend. While the rest of us would wait for ages to travel from floor to floor in the guest elevator, she went the quick way. I think, once the CCTV pictures are checked, the timings’ll fit.”
“So, love, help me out here? Polly rigged the vote?”
“I don’t know if Polly rigged it or…” Emily avoided looking at Morgana. “Or someone else. But as soon as they accepted the invitation to come here, Teena’s and Winnie’s deaths were inevitable. Teena because of her campaign in the Buckinghamshire Bugle. And Winnie because she was visiting from a foreign country, and that made her interesting. Her death would seem like the focus for the story, instead of a footnote.”
Maggie piped up. “Can I just say, about the murders, that I don’t think Polly did it?”
No one took any notice of her, so she added, “And also, she’s my favorite novelist.” At which point half the room wished (and then felt guilty, and tried to unwish it) that Polly had done a more thorough job and finished off all three of them.
“So anyway, that’s it.” Too late, Emily realized she should have prepared a more rousing conclusion.
“A very, very good story,” Polly drawled. She didn’t look fazed by it at all. “Most people here wish they could work up such a detailed story from such scant notes.”
“You’re against the wind farm, are you, Poll?” Cerys was very keen to get the details right.
“I believe there are better ways of getting sustainable energy than setting up giant mincing machines that chop birds out of the sky. But that doesn’t mean I’m guilty of murder.”
The uniformed officer, with a fine sense of drama, now stepped forward and held up a clear plastic bag containing a small brown bottle. “Maybe this does. Amyl nitrite. Colloquially known as poppers. Found on Miss Penham’s dressing table.”
The room responded appreciatively: “Ooh!”
Morgana stood up. “I think that’s as good a point as any to break for coffee, don’t you? Big round of applause for Emily Castles, who led such an interesting session this morning. On behalf of the Romance Writers of Great Britain, thank you, Emily.”
Everyone applauded, and then surged out of the room for coffee, cake and gossip.
While the uniformed officer arrested Polly Penham and read her her rights, Rory James came up to Emily and gave her a big smile. “Well done, Emily. Look, when I’m done with my paperwork, do you fancy going for a drink?”
A sweet, dimpled smile. “Thanks. But I think I’ve had enough romance for one weekend.”
Zena walked past with Cerys, a note of awe in her voice: “That doll melting, it was an accident, yeah? But it shows it works. You don’t mess with the altar. Cause today, you gotta admit it, that girl got burned.”
Emily caught up with Dr. Muriel at the door to the Montagu room where she had been detained by Nik Kovacevic. He said, “About the One Star Club—”
“Nik, it doesn’t exist.”
“Yes, but if one wanted to start such a thing up. Where would one advertise for members, do you think?”
“Ha!” said Dr. Muriel, taking Emily’s arm and walking out of the door. “Ha-ha.”
“You know,” said Emily to her friend. “When you asked me to lead the session this morning, I thought it was one of your daft experiments.”
“Indeed. Of course it was. This one worked astoundingly well, though. Eh? Eh?”
Dr. Muriel laughed her dirty
laugh as they walked to where the coffee and cake had been set up.
Nik Kovacevic walked past them back to his office, a brilliant idea forming in his head about a secret society he planned to set up. As a chef walked past them in the other direction, Emily could have sworn she heard someone singing, very quietly, yet mockingly: “Heigh-ho!”
Upstairs in her room, Maggie Tambling was already on the third paragraph of a fluently written, witty blog post that would eventually run to more than two thousand words. It would become the most popular post on her already-popular Tamble with Me at Your Own Risk! blog, referenced by the Guardian books blog, linked to by bloggers, spoofed by hipsters, quoted on Twitter by Stephen Fry and Neil Gaiman, and earning Maggie the first nomination for a nonprint journalist for the irreverent Stabbies Awards for reviewers who, in the words of the organizers, “eviscerate the pretensions of authors and their acolytes.” The award would be won by a journalist from the New York Times: her reviews were so poisonous, so her colleagues quipped, that she kept an antidote by her computer, in case her words should ever come back to bite her. But Maggie was proud, as she had been in the inaugural and never-to-be-repeated RWGB short fiction competition, to be among the top three.
The title of Maggie’s blog post was “Romance Writers Get Busy: The Hate, the Hats and a Helluva Way to Die.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Andy Bartlett, Jacque Ben-Zekry and the wonderful team at Thomas & Mercer. I’m grateful to everyone who has been involved in the production, design and marketing of this book.
Thanks also to my lovely new agent, David Hale Smith at InkWell Management.
I have a friend called Brenda Castles, and she has a sister called Emily. Emily and I have never met, but I liked her name enough to borrow it for the main character in my mystery series, with her permission. Thanks to the Castles family. I hope your mam likes the book, Emily.
Thank you to Al Kunz and Lauren Smith, who read the manuscript before publication.
Lauren has read every book and every play I have ever written and given me useful notes on all of them. She has never complained about this. I borrowed Lauren’s sweet nature, her dimples and her freckles for my descriptions of Emily in the book. Thanks for being my inspiration and my joy, Lauren.