Aunt Bessie Considers (Isle of Man Cozy Mystery Book 3)

by Diana Xarissa

  Bessie sighed. “We could quiz the catering staff. Maybe someone saw Mack grab one just before they started putting things out?”

  Marjorie shook her head. “I’ve already done that,” she told Bessie. “Everything for the dessert bar was kept in the café downstairs until after they cleared away the canapés. The brownies weren’t even cut until they were ready to put them out, because they didn’t want them to get stale.”

  “So someone was kind enough to take Mack a brownie,” Bessie replied. “That still doesn’t make it murder.”

  “Except that the brownies that were supplied by the café definitely didn’t have any nuts in them,” Marjorie said triumphantly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I talked to the head chef myself and he confirmed it. There aren’t even any peanuts in the café at any time. The chef doesn’t like them.”

  “What did Inspector Corkill say about all of this?”

  Marjorie flushed. “I haven’t exactly told him,” she mumbled.

  “What?” Bessie demanded. “But you have to tell him everything you’ve told me.”

  Marjorie shook her head. “I’ll end up as his main suspect,” she argued. “He’ll soon find out that our brownies didn’t have nuts and then he can work the rest out himself. If I tell him that we used to date, he’s bound to think I had something to do with Mack’s death.”

  “If he finds out later, from some other source, you’re going to look more guilty than if you go and tell him yourself,” Bessie suggested.

  “I don’t know.” Marjorie’s eyes filled with tears again. “I’m not sure I can bear to talk about Mack with anyone else, least of all with Inspector Corkill. Can’t you just solve the murder and then I won’t have to tell anyone about my past?”

  Bessie frowned. “Finding murderers is a job for the police,” she said. “And Inspector Corkill made it very clear when he interviewed me that he wasn’t going to let me interfere with his investigation. I really think you should have a talk with him.”

  “I’ll think about it,” was all Marjorie said in reply.

  “So if you’re sure it was murder,” Bessie said thoughtfully, “who could possibly have done it?”

  “Everyone who ever met him?” Marjorie suggested with a wry smile.

  Bessie grinned. “He wasn’t that bad.”

  “You didn’t date him,” Marjorie retorted.

  “Neither did Harold, but Inspector Corkill seems to think he had a motive.”

  Marjorie nodded. “Mack’s talk just about destroyed poor Harold. All these years he’s been looking for Roman remains and Mack is the one that actually finds them? Harold could have killed him. You know, Mack would have done serious damage to Harold’s career if he hadn’t died.”

  “This wasn’t the first time Mack had done something like this,” Bessie recalled.

  “No, he made a habit of it,” Marjorie said. “I’m sure there are other people here who had their careers negatively impacted by the man.”

  “Do you think you can get me more details on exactly who?” Bessie asked.

  “Without Inspector Corkill noticing that I’m asking, I assume.”

  Bessie laughed. “Well, yes.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” Marjorie promised.

  “Marjorie, I know you didn’t kill him,” Bessie assured her friend. “Are there other women here who used to date him and might have done it?”

  Marjorie shrugged. “Every blonde under forty should be a suspect,” she replied.

  “Oh dear,” Bessie frowned.

  “Obviously, I didn’t keep track of his love life after we split up,” Marjorie told Bessie. “But when we met he already had a girlfriend.”

  Bessie frowned. “Did he now?” she asked, trying not to sound judgmental.

  “He did. Unfortunately, he didn’t think to mention it to me until months later. When we met, I was living in London and he was working on an excavation in Leeds. We met at a conference in York and started dating, but we only saw each other on odd weekends for about four months. When his dig finished, he casually mentioned that he’d be moving back in with his girlfriend in Birmingham for a short time.”

  “And that’s when you dumped him,” Bessie suggested.

  Marjorie laughed humourlessly. “If only I had been that smart,” she replied. “Oh, we had a huge fight and I told him I never wanted to see him again. He showed up on my doorstep a week later with a suitcase and moved in. I was stupid enough to be thrilled when he told me he’d picked me over her, whoever she was, and naïve enough to think that he’d be faithful to me.”

  “But he wasn’t?”

  “Mack didn’t even understand the concept of monogamy,” Marjorie said with a sigh. “But he wasn’t running around sleeping with every woman he met, either. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. He always had a girlfriend that everyone knew about, that he took to events and that sort of thing. But he also always had another girlfriend on the side.”

  “How nice,” Bessie said sarcastically.

  Marjorie managed a small grin. “Yeah, well, the thing is, I didn’t even realise that I was in the ‘on the side’ category until I’d already fallen head over heels. Once he moved in with me, I got, well, promoted, I guess. I became the woman that everyone saw him with and got to meet his friends and whatever. What I didn’t expect was that he’d find a new woman to replace me as the ‘other woman’ or whatever you want to call it.”

  Bessie shook her head. “I’m sure going over all of this has to be painful,” she told Marjorie. “I’m sorry.”

  Marjorie shook her head. “It’s been enough years. I should be over it,” she said. “I actually thought I was over it until he suddenly appeared. Seeing him again brought back a whole load of emotions I thought I’d firmly squashed.”

  Bessie frowned. “So if Mack brought Bambi with him as his girlfriend, does that mean he was seeing someone else behind her back?”

  “Probably,” Marjorie answered. “I suppose he might have changed, but I doubt it. He and Bambi didn’t seem to be getting along all that well, anyway. Maybe she found out about the other woman?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bessie said slowly. “Bambi told me that they were fighting. I think she would have mentioned if she’d found out that he was cheating on her.”

  “So maybe she hadn’t found out yet.”

  “Why would Mack’s secret girlfriend be here, though?” Bessie asked. “I mean, surely he wouldn’t have brought both Bambi and his mistress to the conference?”

  Marjorie shrugged. “He might not have invited her specifically, but she could be here anyway. He liked to get involved with other academics. Usually he could get them to help him with his research. He hated doing research.”

  Bessie frowned. “So the important question now is, who is she?”

  Chapter Five

  Marjorie and Bessie chatted until it was nearly time for the day’s talks to begin. They discussed everyone at the conference, but Bessie didn’t feel like they got any closer to discovering either the murderer or the identity of Mack’s secret girlfriend. She felt frustrated, because they had no evidence that he was seeing someone behind Bambi’s back, and even if he was, they didn’t know for sure that the woman was even on the island. Somehow, both those things just felt highly plausible to Bessie, so she was going to assume that they were true, at least for the time being.

  Back upstairs, the foyer had filled up with a combination of eager historians and archeologists, a handful of reporters who were hoping to question people about the murder, and a few members of the general public who had a sudden macabre interest in the conference. Bessie stopped to check the notice board where a neatly typed note had been pinned up.

  “Please note the following changes to today’s schedule:

  At 10:00 a.m. Dr. Harold Smythe will be giving his lecture in the Ellan Vannin Theatre on the ground floor.

  Dr. Joseph Steele’s lecture will be held in the Kinvig Room.r />
  Dr. Michael Brown’s lecture will be held in the Blundell Room.

  At 2:00 p.m. Marjorie Stevens will be giving her lecture in the Ellan Vannin Theatre on the ground floor.

  All bus excursions have been cancelled due to circumstances beyond our control.

  At 4:00 p.m. the Round Table Discussion will take place as scheduled, at a location as yet to be confirmed.

  At 7:30 p.m. Paul Roberts will be giving his lecture in the Ellan Vannin Theatre on the ground floor.

  Dr. Claire Jamison will be giving her lecture in the Kinvig Room as originally scheduled.”

  Bessie wondered why the bus excursion had been cancelled. Poor Marjorie and Harold. They’d worked very hard for so many months to arrange everything. She walked through the room, waving and nodding at some of the people she knew, but she didn’t stop to talk to anyone. She headed straight for the Kinvig Room and the first lecture of the day. The doors were still shut when she arrived, and she was just wondering what they were waiting for when a loud voice called for attention.

  “If I could just have everyone’s attention for a moment? Please, can you all quiet down?”

  Bessie turned and spotted Harold at the far end of the room. He really needed a microphone to make his voice loud enough to be heard over the general babble. Slowly, people began to stop talking and turned to face him.

  “Ah, um, thank you,” he said, looking flustered. “I just wanted, that is, I think it’s only appropriate if we have a minute of silence in honour of Mack?”

  A quiet murmur went through the crowd, but no one objected.

  “Okay, well, then, um, let’s have a minute of silence, shall we?” Harold asked, and the room fell quiet.

  Bessie felt as if she could hear the large clock on the wall behind her ticking off the seconds as she tried, but failed, to think about Mack and his untimely death. They were only about halfway through their minute when the lift doors suddenly opened with an accompanying “ping” that sent a nervous giggle through the crowd. Inspector Corkill and two uniformed constables stepped out of the lift and stopped short as every person in the room stared at them in the heavy silence.

  The inspector cleared his throat and glanced around the space. “Should I ask what’s going on?” he asked eventually.

  “We were, um, having a minute of silence for Mack,” Harold replied. “It seemed like the appropriate thing to do.”

  “Indeed,” Inspector Corkill nodded. “I’m sorry I interrupted, then.”

  “No problem,” Harold assured him. “We were just about finished anyway. It’s time for our first session of the day to begin. I hope that’s okay with you?”

  The inspector frowned, but nodded. “That’s fine. My men and I are here to spend some time going back through the room where the body was found. What did you call it again?”

  “The cuillee,” Harold answered. “It’s Manx for back room.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s where we’ll be. We’ll try to stay out of the way of the conference,” Corkill said.

  “Obviously, we all want to help as much as we can,” Harold replied, too loudly. “If there’s anything that I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  A perfunctory nod was the only reply he received as the inspector and the other officers turned and headed into the Moore Theatre. The inspector used a key to open the door and then, once they were all inside, he shut the door tightly behind them. Another moment of awkward silence descended on the foyer.

  “Well then, right, um, I guess we should get started with the day’s events,” Harold said finally.

  Henry was only a few paces away from Bessie and he quickly used his keys to open up the Kinvig Room.

  “My lecture will be taking place in the main theatre downstairs,” Harold told the crowd. “Dr. Joseph Steele will be talking in the Kinvig Room about applying the techniques he’s learned as a paleontologist to Manx archeology. Dr. Michael Brown will be discussing seventeenth-century pottery in the Blundell Room, which is just down the hall.”

  Bessie watched as the bulk of the crowd headed towards the lifts and the stairs. Harold, as one of the main speakers at the conference, was sure to be popular. That was why she had decided to attend Joe’s talk. She didn’t want him to end up talking to an empty room. She barely knew Michael Brown, and had very little interest in old pottery, anyway.

  Bessie smiled as she took a seat near the front. The small space began to fill slowly, with several familiar faces from the previous evening. Liz Martin was back, presumably having a day away from the demands of motherhood. Bessie waved to Claire Jamison and Helen Baxter as they took seats near the front. She was surprised to see Bambi wander into the room just moments before Joe was due to begin speaking.

  An hour later, Bessie felt like she’d learned far more than she’d ever wanted to know about digging for dinosaurs. She wasn’t completely clear on exactly how that applied to Manx archeology, but archeology wasn’t her field, so she gave Joe the benefit of the doubt on that score. The question-and-answer session that followed the talk was, luckily, short, as it was of no interest whatsoever to Bessie.

  When the audience had run out of questions and the room began to clear, Bessie checked her copy of the schedule. The next thing scheduled was a catered lunch at noon. That gave Bessie an hour to chat with some of the other conference-goers.

  She made her way out of the room and surveyed the lobby. Bambi was standing along one wall, holding a steaming cup. Bessie headed straight for her.

  “I really didn’t expect to see you here today,” she said as a greeting.

  Bambi laughed. “I can’t figure out why I came,” she told Bessie. “I barely slept last night and when I got up this morning I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. The police won’t let me go home yet and the hotel room got claustrophobic in about three minutes. I finally decided that hanging out here was better than sitting around feeling sorry for myself.” She grinned at Bessie.

  “Having said that,” she continued, “if that last talk is anything to go by, I might just go back to the hotel after lunch.”

  Bessie laughed. “Dr. Steele isn’t the most gifted speaker I’ve ever heard,” she told the young woman quietly. “But Marjorie is giving a talk this afternoon about the archives, and that should be excellent.”

  Bambi made a face. “I’m not sure I feel right going to her talk,” she confided in Bessie. “I know she and Mack used to date, and I feel sort of weird about it.”

  “Did Mack tell you that?” Bessie questioned.

  “Yeah,” Bambi shrugged. “When we first arrived, he was talking about how his talk was going to be so explosive and important. He said he was going to put Harold Smythe in his place and teach Marjorie Stevens a lesson all at one time. I asked him about them and he said Harold was an academic rival and Marjorie was a romantic one.” She waved a hand. “It was something like that, anyway.”

  Bessie frowned. “He called her a rival?” she asked.

  Bambi shrugged again. “I can’t remember exactly what he said. It didn’t really seem important at the time, you know? I was trying to get him to agree to let me skip his talk and he was trying to persuade me that I would want to be here for the ‘fireworks,’ as he put it.”

  “Did you tell the police about the conversation?” Bessie asked, wondering if Marjorie was going to have to talk to Inspector Corkill about her relationship with Mack whether she wanted to or not.

  Bambi shook her head. “No, it didn’t seem important. That stupid inspector is convinced that it was all just a horrible accident. He won’t listen to me, anyway. I answered all of his questions, but I didn’t volunteer any more information that I had to.”

  “But you still think it was murder?”

  “Of course it was,” Bambi sighed. “But no one else seems to agree.”

  Bessie was going to argue, but their conversation was interrupted by Joe Steele, who was eager to find out what Bessie had thought of his talk. Bessie gave him the sort of polite fe
edback that was required of her, and by the time she’d finished, Bambi had disappeared.

  Bessie made her way around the foyer, smiling and nodding at friends and acquaintances as she went. Liz was sitting on her own, sipping a drink, as Bessie skirted the crowd.

  “I didn’t know you were planning on coming again today,” Bessie said, after the pair had exchanged polite hellos.

  “This conference is all that Marjorie has been talking about for weeks,” Liz said with a laugh. “I figured that it was only neighbourly of me to come.”

  Bessie grinned. “My neighbours don’t seem to feel the same way,” she said jokingly.

  “Ah, you know me,” Liz said. “Any excuse to get away from my little darlings for a few hours. I thought they should have some quality time with hubby. He can deal with the nappies and finding something for them for lunch and try to keep them entertained all day. Maybe he’ll actually start to appreciate everything I do for a change.”

  Bessie laughed. “He’ll be worn out when you get home,” she predicted.

  “No doubt,” Liz laughed again.

  “Do you know anyone here other than Marjorie?” Bessie asked.

  “Besides you and Henry, you mean?” Liz replied. “Not a soul.” She gave Bessie a long look. “You aren’t investigating that man’s death last night, are you?” she asked in a dramatic whisper. “I mean, I know you’ve helped find murderers in the past, and his dying like that was terrible and all, but I thought the police said it was an accident.”

  Bessie shook her head. “Inspector Corkill made it clear that he’s not going to tolerate any interference in his investigation,” she told Liz. “And as far as I know, they still think it was just an accident. I was just wondering if you’d ever come across any of the others when you were at school or anything.”

  Liz frowned and then leaned over, close to Bessie’s ear. “I actually met the guy who died once,” she whispered. “But I haven’t told the police, and I hope you won’t either.”

  “Why haven’t you told them?” Bessie demanded.