“Gareth, you mustn’t follow me around anymore.”
“Okay,” he said, reaching for his beer once again.
“I’m serious. Promise me that you won’t follow me again.”
“Only if you promise not to meet any more suspects. Let the police do their job.”
“Gareth, you know that the police aren’t doing their job.”
“Well, they might now that Amanda is dead.”
“All right, I promise not to meet any more suspects.”
He smiled, and gave my knee a quick squeeze. I passed him his beer. However, rather than open the beer he’d been craving, he suddenly tipped his rucksack upside down and a dozen DVDs tumbled out.
“What are you doing?”
“I was planning to come here after lunch. I’ve brought back some of the DVDs.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Well, I’ve already re-watched these.”
“Gareth, there are at least ten films here!”
“Yeah. It’s boring at Barry’s.”
He turned towards me, and looked into my eyes, purposefully. I supposed I could find it in myself to relieve him of the boredom of Barry’s for one more night. After all, he would have been my saviour had one of the suspects attacked me with a cake fork. You should never let a silly detail such as not getting attacked with a cake fork stand in the way of a little well-deserved sex.
I pulled Gareth on top of me and collapsed onto the sofa. I wondered if the assertive man from Café Revive might put in an appearance. I smiled to myself as I remembered lunch — my husband had sprung into action and stood up for me. And looking at the bulge in his jeans, I’d say he was standing up for me once again.
* * *
No more meetings with suspects, that’s what I had promised. However, with interviewing people off the menu, I was a little lost. I sat in front of my computer, wondering if there was any kind of research I could do from home.
The first thing I did was check the rank of the anthology — for research, obviously. Wowsers! Number thirty-five! A Dee Whittaker book was in the top forty! Then I remembered the calibre of the book, and felt slightly nauseated.
By now, news of the copycat must have spread further than just Kindle reading circles. I searched for Amanda Kenwood in Google news.
Sure enough, multiple national news sources were reporting that a killer was copying the stories from a ‘a ropey short story collection’ by a group of ‘vanity publishers’.
I felt my blood begin to boil. We were not ‘vanity publishers’, we were indies! I had chosen to be an indie. I didn’t want a publisher. It was a conscious decision to self-publish because that was the life I wanted for myself.
As for ‘ropey’, I was mortified, but I couldn’t entirely disagree. Even the stories that had been finished were poor. My unfinished draft was a catastrophe. Now, thanks to The Book of Most Quality Writers, I would never sell another book! That reminded me, I hadn’t checked the sales of The Red River today.
I signed into my Kindle dashboard. Holy Moly! I’d sold 235 copies in the last twenty-four hours. What was going on? Surely ‘Busty and Giving’ wasn’t attracting readers? I’d used ‘wandering’ instead of ‘wondering’ at least twice! Still, I wouldn’t complain, I could really use £235 right now.
The Red River was now in the top 100 humour books, so I quickly grabbed a screenshot and sent it to print.
The forum seemed like the next obvious point of call, so I quickly signed in. The most recent post was by Danger Smith. Presumably it would be about the copycat.
No, on closer inspection, Danger was asking for feedback on his new cover — a brown square with a pixelated semi-colon in the centre. I was temporarily sucked in, not because I liked the cover (how could I?) but because I wondered what the twenty-eight replies could possibly have to say about a brown square with a pixelated semicolon in the centre.
The first few were lies. Dawn claimed to think that it was ‘daring, brave and progressive’. Annabel claimed to think that the colour scheme was ‘en vogue’. Montgomery said that the cover ‘complemented the tone of the story’ (which may well have been true). Eventually, Rafe Maddocks had posted a comment, politely informing Danger that whilst the cover was an improvement on his blurb, it wasn’t quite captivating enough to sell a book. Danger responded with ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Rafe, don’t I have your depth of experience? I’ll tell you what, shall I replace it with a 3D spinning burlesque dancer instead?’
The next thread was an argument about bookshops. Should we be supporting them more instead of ‘selling our souls’ to Amazon? The discussion had gotten pretty heated. One user called ‘bookshop owner’ was particularly enraged. I wondered if I should broaden my list of suspects to include bookshop staff.
Then somebody brought up Peter Pearson, the managing director of one of the biggest publishing houses in London. He was quoted as saying ‘Vanity publishing will be the last nail in the coffin of reading. If eReaders and the shockingly poor self-published content that they feed us are allowed to prevail, people will become so disenchanted with reading that they will turn to staring at the wall instead.’ Wow — that was one bitter man.
Below that was a thread about the film adaptation of Montgomery’s I Shot series. The general consensus was that it was great. I supposed it might be true. I Shot a Man wasn’t too bad, as books by the Pompomberry House crew went.
Finally, four threads down, the discussion turned to the copycat. It was interesting to see how people prioritised their lives. I skimmed through. The thread began with a post linking to all the different news articles covering each event, from the pig through to Amanda’s death. It had been posted by a user whom I didn’t recognise. I opened all of the articles separately and sent them to print.
The next few posts were from people who agreed that the occurrence of all four incidents within a week was too unlikely to be mere coincidence. The next seven posts discussed the book — what readers liked, what readers didn’t like and what readers would like to see more of. In fact, very little of the discussion seemed to concern the investigation. Only two people speculated as to who the killer might be.
‘I bet it’s somebody from a traditional publisher. Indie books are threatening their business, so they want to make indies look like crazed killers.’
‘Now come on! The Amanda thing has helped indie writers. I bet it’s an inside job!’
The remarks weren’t terribly helpful, but did exemplify the question that had been on my mind for days — was the killer trying to help or hinder us?
I was now certain that none of the anthology’s authors was responsible. They all had solid alibis for Amanda’s death, and the two most likely suspects had been in Spain during the first three enactments.
In the next post, Montgomery managed to twist the discussion back to the film adaptation of his work. There was a link to the trailer. Did I really want to watch it? I’d read his short so many times looking for clues, that I was bored senseless by his mundane protagonist. Still, with no other leads, the trailer might be worth checking out.
Oh dear. The trailer was painful. It was so bad that I found myself feeling sorry for Montgomery. The acting was wooden, the special effects were embarrassing, and the attempts at tension were so bad they were humorous. By the end of the trailer, I found myself laughing aloud.
Poor old Montgomery. He’d written some half-decent books and obviously sold the film rights to the first company who had come along. Now his hard work was going to become a laughing stock. Who were Sultana Productions anyway? I clicked through to the trailer’s YouTube page. In the sidebar there were further videos by the same production team. I couldn’t resist taking a sneaky peek. I could do with another chuckle.
However, what I saw next turned my world upside down. The piece was called Puns about Guns, which didn’t exactly inspire me. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the terrible script, the overacting or the imposing soundtrack that horrified me, it was wha
t I saw fifteen seconds in. A butler walked into the shot — a hunky, blond butler with steely blue eyes. It was Biff.
It was a shock to see him. A painful reminder of the weekend on Pompomberry Island. However, the part that shocked me the most was that Biff was an actor. And not just an actor, but an actor who worked for the production company that made Montgomery’s film. What did this mean? Had he been both an actor and a handyman, or not really a handyman at all?
With my heart pumping in my chest, I looked at the date the video was posted. It was only two weeks old. Still, that didn’t mean anything, it could have been filmed long before it was uploaded.
I looked at the credits below the video. There was no mention of a Biff. In fact, the only male in the film was called Ricky Foster. Still, that didn’t seem too surprising; Biff was never likely to have been a given name.
A quick google of ‘Ricky Foster’ took me to his Star Now profile. At first it seemed odd that nobody had taken down his Star Now profile. But then I remembered that his family and friends might know only that he had disappeared. They wouldn’t necessarily know that he was dead.
As I glanced through his acting resume my head started to spin. According to the profile, Biff, or should I say, Ricky, had been in a musical just last week!
Oh my God!
Biff was still alive!
I felt awash with great relief! Lovely Biff wasn’t dead after all, but enjoying life! I remembered our chats, our evening together watching DVDs, his wood-chopping action and his sculpted smile. Thank goodness that lovely man was still living and breathing.
At the same time, I felt sick. It was like having the planet ripped out from beneath me and freefalling into the depths of the unknown. My whole understanding of the entire Pompomberry House situation, had been based on the assumption that Biff was dead.
Ricky Foster was not a handyman called Biff, but a professional actor. His death had been nothing more than an acting job. Why?
Chapter 16
I needed to meet Ricky Foster. Having dealt with Netta Lewis, I had learnt a little about honesty in such situations — use sparingly. I could write to Biff telling him that I knew he was alive, but that probably wouldn’t inspire him to meet me. After all, he had been more than happy to let me believe he was dead for weeks now.
I remembered him apologising. “Dee, I’m sorry.” I remembered him trying to brush it away. “Forget I said anything.” Had he been feeling bad about what he was going to do?
No wonder the police had been unable to find any evidence. No wonder I couldn’t demonstrate that a murder had taken place. There was no murder!
‘I’m a casting director,’ I wrote, using an email address that I found for Ricky. ‘Ewan McGregor has gone down with scarlet fever and we’re filming tomorrow. Please get in touch if you’re interested.’
Somebody who has to turn to fake deaths to get acting work is unlikely to refuse a potential film offer. Granted, realising that he’d been conned wasn’t going to be the greatest start to a meeting, but if I told the truth the meeting might not happen at all.
I had to know why Biff had done it. Why had he pretended to be murdered? Had somebody put him up to it? Did the other writers know? Is that why they wouldn’t go to the police? I felt that I was more likely to get honest answers from Biff than anybody else.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when your most trustworthy source is a man who pretended to be stabbed to death in front of you. However, in light of the competition, Biff seemed positively honourable.
For four hours I waited. Still no reply. Biff’s greed for fame was clearly less pronounced than Netta’s, but that wasn’t difficult. Finally, at half past five in the evening, he took the bait.
Gareth had made me promise to stop meeting suspects but Biff was hardly a suspect, was he? We had ascertained that the killer either loved or hated the writers; Biff was neutral. Or was he? I realised that I knew very little about Ricky Foster. Was any part of Biff’s character the real Ricky? Did he even like Arrested Development? Oh gracious — was he lying when he said he’d read my book?
I wondered if I should invite Gareth along, for safety. However, then I remembered how I’d lusted after Biff on Pompomberry Island, my knee-jerk reaction to leaving Gareth. What if I still felt giddy every time I saw his biceps? There was no sense making Gareth unnecessarily insecure. This was one meeting I needed to do alone.
* * *
Dusk was already veiling me as I left the tube station and headed for the bar where I planned to meet Biff. The darkness gave the meeting a date-like feel. But obviously, I wasn’t going on a date because that would have been wrong.
Or would it? Gareth and I were separated, I’d told him it was over, we’d been to mediation; I was a free woman.
Although, he had brought some of the DVDs back, which constituted a retraction of sorts ...
I reminded myself that the man I was meeting was expecting me to be a film director and that he wasn’t Biff the handyman anymore. A human being might not have been murdered, but a character had.
The bar was pleasant — one of those places that upholsters everything. There were sofas, cushions and beanbags everywhere. Even the artwork consisted of fabric stretched over canvases. The lighting was flattering — dim and slightly orange. This felt like a lovely place for a reunion between a makeshift detective and a reanimated victim.
Ah, there he was! Biff! As gorgeous as ever. As he walked in, a wall light caught his hair, illuminating the golden tresses and naturally well-carved face. I gawped at him for a few moments. I was surprised to note that although he was every bit as handsome as I remembered, my giddiness had gone. I don’t know whether it was discovering that he was a lying rat bag, or the amount of time I’d been spending with Gareth, but somehow my crush had lost its power.
Then it happened — he saw me. He blinked a couple of times as he focussed his eyes, then turned and leapt out the door.
Oh no you don’t!
I hurried after him. There was no way that Ricky Foster was getting away. He could be the key to the whole mystery. If I could unlock the reason for Biff’s fake death, I might be able to stop two more murders and some particularly unpalatable human snacking.
“Oi! Ricky!” I yelled, which was more effective than I expected.
He turned back. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Oi! Ricky!’”
“You know my name?”
“Well, yes ...”
Then I saw the disappointment hit him. He screwed up his face. Even dismayed, he looked hunky. Hunky and cross. “You invited me here.”
“Yes!”
“So there is no film director.”
“No.”
“And Ewan McGregor is fine.”
“Probably.”
“Damn!”
I raised an eyebrow.
“So you know?” he said.
“Yes.”
“We’d better go and sit down.”
A few minutes later, we were back inside the bar and I was waiting for Biff to return with two mojitos. I knew I shouldn’t drink while I was investigating, but it’s not every day that you’re offered a drink by a fit handyman that you thought was decaying in an unmarked grave.
I was relieved to note that the sexy Scandinavian edge to his voice was still there, beneath the Cockney tones. Perhaps Biff’s character was closely modelled on Ricky’s real life. I hoped so.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as he sat down. He stared at the table and apologised again. “I’m really sorry.”
“Why did you do it? Why pretend to be stabbed?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Biff ... I mean, Ricky, I reported your death to the police!”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did. None of the others did. So I think you owe me an explanation.”
“What did the police say?”
“Well, they didn’t take me all that seriously, but then I couldn’t give them any real names. The
writers all use pens and you ... well, you lied.”
“I’m sorry, Dee. I hated lying to you.”
“The police made me feel as though I was losing the plot!”
“You weren’t.”
“I know!”
I scowled into my mojito. Biff put a finger under my chin and tried to tilt my head up to meet his eyes, but I stubbornly glared into my drink.
“Do you want me to talk to the police for you now?” he offered.
“I think they’re more interested in Amanda Kenwood.”
“The singer? What’s she done then?”
“She’s dead!”
“What?”
“Where have you been? You’re not really dead!”
“I don’t read the news.”
“Ricky, a string of crimes have been committed, following the storylines in our book!”
“What, the book you wrote on the island?”
“Yes!”
“Holy shrimp!”
“Quite. Now come on Ricky, you need to start talking.” I realised how much I sounded like a detective and I rather liked it.
He looked down, took a deep breath, and when he came back up to face me, there was a look of deep gravity in his eyes. “They hired me.”
“Who hired you?”
“The fat lady and the posh man.”
“Dawn and Montgomery, or do you mean Rafe?”
“The older chap.”
“Montgomery. Dawn and Montgomery hired you, but why?”
“I don’t know. They never explained why. They just said that my ‘motivation’ was to be handy, whilst making sure that everybody saw me, and then I had a death scene. At first I thought it was a murder mystery party, but then, when they were so adamant about secrecy, I realised it wasn’t. I’m sorry Dee, I really needed the money; I was in so much debt.”
“How much did they pay you?”
“Ten grand.”
“Ten thousand pounds! Are you serious?”
“Yes, it really helped me out. I was going to get evicted from my flat.”
“They must have had a very strong motive, to pay you ten thousand pounds.”
Pompomberry House Page 23