by Morgana Best
I shook my head. “She can’t blackmail the Fowlers just because they spent so much on the cruise, and she seems quite spiteful. I’d say she’s more likely to report Valerie Andrews to the Australian Tax Office rather than blackmail her over it.”
“She’s penny pinching, though,” Carl said. “Let’s go somewhere where we can throw out these ghastly handbags. I’m not going to take them inside my house.”
“You won’t get any argument from me,” I said.
Carl cruised down the street until we came across a rather large rubbish bin directly outside the small town supermarket. “That will do,” Carl said. He jumped out of the car and disposed of the offensive items, and then disappeared into the supermarket. He was in there for quite a while. When he returned, he handed me an opened packet of pull-out baby wipes. “I feel contaminated,” he said, viciously dabbing at his hands with a baby wipe. I couldn’t blame him—I did the same. Carl retrieved the used baby wipes from me and deposited them in the rubbish bin, too.
“Now let’s get home. We have work to do. They could arrest me at any time.”
“Surely not,” I said, trying to put his mind at rest. “You heard Linda. Lots of people in town were angry with Bob.”
“I’ll make lunch first,” Carl said once we were back at his place. “After we have lunch, we can make lists of suspects and figure out how we’re going to investigate them.”
“You know, my money is on Valerie Andrews’ husband,” I said. “I can’t see why anyone would murder a plumber over bad work or a high bill, but I’m sure lots of husbands have murdered their wives’ lovers.”
Carl stuck his head in his fridge. “You could be right. Wine?”
I declined. “Isn’t it a little early in the day for that, Carl? I’ll just have some hot chocolate with marshmallows, please.”
“Well, I need a wine,” Carl said with a pout. “I won’t be getting any wine in jail.”
I sighed and put my head in my hands. “Carl, you’re not going to jail.”
A loud knock on the door startled us both. “Are you expecting anyone?” I asked Carl.
He shook his head and crossed to the door in long strides. From where I was sitting, I could see his body go rigid. Okay then, it wasn’t Tom, after all. That had been my secret wish. I had not heard from Tom all day.
Carl opened the door. Detective Palmer and Detective Thompson stepped in. “Would you mind if we have a look around?” Detective Palmer said.
“I suppose that’s all right,” Carl said, worried.
I hurried over to them. “Do you have a warrant to search the place?”
Detective Palmer shook his head. “Do you want us to get a warrant, Mr Camden?”
Carl shook his head. “No, I’ve got nothing to hide. Just make sure you don’t leave any external doors open, because my cat isn’t allowed outside.”
Detective Palmer opened the door that Carl had shut behind him, and made a beckoning motion. Moments later, several uniformed officers came inside. Carl wrung his hands. “They think I did it,” he said in a whisper loud enough that everyone could hear.
“I’m sure it’s just routine,” I lied. Clearly, they thought Carl did it. I’m sure they were not searching the premises of every disgruntled client of Bob Jones. After all, they hadn’t searched my house, and I was the one who found the body.
“Come on, Carl,” I said to him, gently tapping his arm. “Let’s go into the kitchen. Don’t let them disturb our lunch.”
Carl allowed himself to be led into the kitchen, but continued to look crestfallen. “How about I make us some lunch, Carl?”
Carl looked horrified. “I don’t want chocolate for lunch, Narel,” he said. “I was going to make a nice healthy lunch.” He must have seen my face fall, because he added, “And some chocolate for dessert.”
Detective Thompson came into the kitchen just as Carl served up two big plates of salad. I wondered if Carl would notice if I poured chocolate buttons into it. “Can we have the key to your garden shed, please?” Thompson demanded none too politely.
Carl opened one of the kitchen drawers and fished out the key. “Look on the bright side; they’ve all gone outside,” I said to Carl once they were out of earshot.
He nodded. “They didn’t make any mess. Hang on a moment—I’d better check in the bedrooms.”
He came back with a smile on his face. “It all looks good. I was worried; in movies they often make a terrible mess.”
I was tucking into my dessert—a Moelleux Au Chocolat Lava Cake—when Detective Thompson returned. He handed Carl his key. “I’ll have a look under the kitchen sink, if you don’t mind.”
Carl simply nodded. Detective Thompson opened the doors and pulled out all the contents—some kitchen wipes, a bottle of white vinegar, a packet of bicarbonate of soda, a wooden scrubbing brush, and some eco-friendly, minus-phosphates-and-nasties dishwasher tablets. From his position squatting on the ground, he looked up at Carl. “Where do you keep your chemicals?”
“Chemicals?” Carl echoed. “I don’t believe in chemicals. As you can see, I clean with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda.”
“What do you use to poison weeds in the garden?” Thompson asked Carl.
Carl looked aghast. “Weeds? I don’t have weeds. Can’t you see the garden is heavily mulched? If a weed does manage to pop through the heavy layer of mulch, I either pull it out or pour some white vinegar on it.”
“What about insecticides?”
Carl put his hands on his hips. “I don’t use insecticides.”
Thompson bit his lip and looked puzzled. Finally, he spoke. “We had an anonymous tip that you recently sprayed your house with insecticide. You do realise that the victim was killed with organophosphate poison, a common insecticide?”
“Linda Forrester,” Carl and I said to each other.
“She didn’t waste any time,” I muttered.
Carl crossed his arms over his chest. “We have just come from Linda Forrester’s house. She wanted to come over here to give me a quote for cleaning my house. I didn’t want her to, so I lied and said I had recently sprayed the place with insecticide and no one was allowed to enter it for a month. I lied, simply to stop her coming to my house.”
Carl was getting quite worked up about it, so I decided to interrupt. “Carl had organised to meet Linda Forrester here at eleven so she could give him a quote for cleaning his house. She didn’t show, and she didn’t answer her phone. Since there’s been a murder in town, we were worried about her, so we went over to her place. She’d got the times mixed up, and she invited us in for a cup of tea. While we were there, she told us all sorts of personal information about the other people whose houses she cleans, so there was no way Carl wanted her to come here and go through his things.”
“That’s for sure!” Carl said. “She’s a mean-spirited old busybody.”
Detective Thompson’s face was growing redder all the time. “Sorry to have bothered you, sir. We do have to follow up all leads, however. Sorry for the inconvenience.” He hurried out of the house as fast as he could. We peeked out the window to see him marshalling the other officers. They left within moments.
“That old…” Carl said, using a few descriptive words.
“Carl! I’ve never heard you use such language before.”
Carl looked slightly shamefaced. “I just can’t believe it. Thank goodness I didn’t allow her in my house, though.”
“There is that,” I said. “Now, let’s get to your whiteboards.”
Carl’s face lit up. After we cleaned up after lunch and put all the plates in the dishwasher, we walked into the living room. “We have some good suspects now,” he said. “I’m going to add Linda Forrester to the list.”
I was puzzled. “Why? Do you think she had a motive?”
Carl’s face was as dark as a thundercloud. “No, but I don’t like her,” he said in a firm voice. Carl drew three lines down the board. “I think we should divide the suspects into three groups
,” he said. “The first group is for angry clients, and the second group is for women who Bob was having an affair with.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do you think he was having more than one affair?”
Carl shrugged. “It’s possible. I think we should leave our options open.”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Sure.”
“And the third column is for people who don’t fall into either of those two categories.” In the first column he wrote, Scott and Emily Fowler. Underneath that he wrote Celia Carruthers. In the second column, he wrote Valerie and Daryl Andrews. In the third column he wrote Linda Forrester, and followed her name with a big exclamation mark. Under her name he wrote, Graham Gibson.
“You know, you should separate Valerie and Daryl Andrews.”
Carl swung around to face me, his whiteboard marker hovering in the air. “I’m not sure I get your meaning.”
“If either Valerie or Daryl murdered him, it would be one of them acting alone,” I explained. “I’m sure they weren’t in it together.”
Carl nodded. He swung back to the whiteboard to rub out the names, and wrote Valerie Andrews. Under that he wrote Daryl Andrews.
He stood back to admire his handiwork.
“That only gives us five real suspects,” I said, “and I don’t think Celia is serious suspect. Do you think we should start investigating these people one by one, or should we find more suspects first?”
Carl thought for a moment and then flung himself beside me on the sofa. “I don’t know. I’m still shocked about the police invading my personal space, all because of that dreadful woman. And to think I gave her twenty dollars for that old, mouldy handbag! She’s a nasty piece of work, that one.” He appeared to be on the point of tears.
“Everything you say about her is true,” I said in a placating tone, “but we mustn’t get distracted, Carl. If we can’t find a motive for her to murder Bob Jones, then we have to concentrate on the actual suspects who did have a motive.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Carl said in a petulant voice. “Who will we investigate first?”
Chapter 10
I was in my garden, dressed in a brief tee-shirt and thick jeans, pulling out weeds with thick gloves. Of course, I had been careful to poke a stick down into all the fingers of the gloves to make sure there were no redback spiders in there. I lamented the fact that I was in Australia. Otherwise, I would have been able to wear shorts, but no one would wear shorts in the country in summer, no matter how hot the weather. Deadly Eastern Brown snakes were an ever present danger, and they liked to sun themselves in the garden.
Obviously, my mulch wasn’t as deep as Carl’s, because my garden had plenty of weeds. I needed to get the garden shipshape in a hurry so I could put the house on the market. The painting had been done; the bathroom had been renovated, so only the garden was left to go. Once it was spruced up, I could sell it.
I had been intending to get around to weeding the garden, but Carl and I usually spent Sundays together doing some fun thing. Earlier, Carl had shooed me out of his house and said he needed to take a long nap. Carl never needed to nap, so I found that suspicious. I knew he was hiding something from me, but I just couldn’t figure out what it was. At least that meant I’d be able to get some gardening done and get the house on the market more quickly.
I did need to move on with my life. I dreaded the hassle of selling the house, although Tom would be dealing with the buying public. I was already irritated in advance by the terrible low offers I knew I would get, not to mention all the bargaining. I intended to put the cottage up for sale for a reasonable price, but I knew that wouldn’t stop people offering a ridiculously low sum for it.
There was also the hassle of finding another house. With my workload the way it was, I thought I should buy a new house. My renovating experience had just been one bathroom and that was enough to put me off renovations for life. Plus, running a business full-time as well as starting an online business didn’t leave me much time to myself. I couldn’t really handle that and the renovation as well. No, I would have to buy a new place, something that still had builder’s warranty and would not cause me any stress. I looked at the two major Australian real estate websites on a regular basis. There were never many houses for sale in my small town, but I looked daily just to see if there were any new listings. So far, I hadn’t been in luck. Most of the houses were renovators.
And then there was Tom. We were at the beginning of a relationship—or so it seemed to me—but I wished things would progress a lot faster.
I poked at the mulch under the sasanqua camellia before being brave enough to stick my gloved hand close to the ground to pull out a weed. Eastern Brown snakes often do a dummy strike first, that is, a warning bite with no venom, and while that was nice of them, I didn’t want to risk it. Perhaps I should just pay a gardener for a few hours’ work. That would be far less life-threatening—for me, at least.
My thoughts turned to the redback spiders. It seemed to me that the murderer had collected redback spiders and put them over Bob’s body to make it look like his death was accidental, by spider bite. I supposed it wasn’t too hard to find redback spiders in numbers. If someone had a pile of timber lying around, they could probably collect five or so spiders at once. But I had seen dozens in the outdoor dunny. Would an ordinary house harbour dozens of redback spiders? I wasn’t sure.
At any rate, the thought of poisonous creatures made me abandon plans for removing weeds, so I decided to fertilise the garden instead. I fetched my watering can from the back door and checked under it. Sure enough, there was a redback spider sitting under it. I screamed and threw the watering can away. When I retrieved it, there was no sign of any spider. I breathed a sigh of relief, filled the can, and then added some liquid seaweed to the water.
I walked around the garden, making sure the fertilised water reached all the leaves. I had to refill the watering can every few minutes, so it wasn’t a very efficient system. I made a mental note to buy one of the liquid seaweed containers that locks onto a hose.
“Narel Myers!”
I jumped and dropped my watering can once more. I spun around. This time it wasn’t a spider, but something equally as venomous. Graham Gibson, the particularly unpleasant local journalist. “What do you want?” I snapped by way of greeting.
Graham held up both hands in front of him. “Now, there’s no need to be like that, Narel. I was hoping we could let bygones be bygones.”
“Not a chance,” I hissed. “Do you realise you’re standing on private property?”
Graham frowned and put his hands on his hips. “All right then, if you want to be that way. Would you like to comment on the fact that your best friend, Carl Camden, is the major suspect in a murder case?”
“Just leave now or I’ll call the police,” I said.
I hadn’t realised until now he was holding something in his hand. He thrust a microphone under my nose. “Narel Myers, what do you think of the fact that your best friend, Carl Camden, is a person of interest in the heinous murder of Bob Jones?”
I leaned closer to the microphone. “I’ve heard you’re a person of interest, Graham Gibson. I heard you had a big falling out with the murder victim, Bob Jones, that directly led to you being sacked from your Sydney paper, and the only job you could get was in this small country town. Would you like to comment on that?”
Graham’s face contorted with rage. He took a step closer to me. “How dare you! I’ll sue you!”
I stared at him. “Are you serious? You come here and say Carl’s a suspect when he doesn’t have a motive, whereas you do!”
“It’s all lies!” he spat.
I shook my finger at him. “Whether it’s true or not, I’m sure the police are looking into it. In fact, I wonder if this murder case will attract the attention of Sydney journalists. They might be interested in you as a suspect, too. I suggest you think on that before you go around accusing others.”
Graham stepped closer.
“Don’t you dare tell anyone!” he yelled, his fist raised. For a minute I thought he was going to hit me. He loomed over me, menacing, for what seemed like an age, but finally must have thought the better of it. He shook his fist at me and then hurried away to his car. He took off with a squeal of tyres.
I watched Graham’s car burn rubber down the street and then turned my attention back to my watering. That man clearly had anger management issues.
After I finished fertilising the garden, I cut the dead roses off all the bushes. That took quite some time, because I hadn’t done it in ages. It was only when my stomach rumbled that I realised how much time had got away from me. I was feeling a little light headed from lack of food. I hurried into the house, popped a few chocolates into my mouth, and then had a quick shower. I was about to hop out of the shower when I heard my phone ringing. I turned off the shower, wrapped a towel around me, and hurried into my bedroom. I snatched up my phone.
It was Tom. “How are things?” he asked me.
I filled him in about the police going to Carl’s and what Linda Forrester had said. “Are you at Carl’s now?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’ve been doing some gardening, to get the place ready to sell. Can you recommend a gardener? I think it just needs a bit of a tidy up, and then I can put it on the market.”
“That’s great, Narel, but I didn’t call to talk shop.”
It was as if my heart stopped beating. I sat down, not caring that I was dripping everywhere. “Oh?” was all I said.
“Would you like to have dinner tonight?” He blurted out the words.
“Yes, I’d love to,” I said, trying not to sound too excited.
“Great.” Tom was obviously greatly relieved, but surely he didn’t think I’d refuse? “How about I call for you at seven?”
“That would be great,” I said lamely. What does one say in situations like this? I was hardly experienced at this kind of thing.
By the time seven came, I was a nervous wreck. I had been fully dressed and ready for half an hour and was pacing up and down my living room. Even Mongrel was surprised. He was sitting on the sofa, watching me.