Poison Pen

by Tanya Landman

  “I would have thought it was an absolute certainty.”

  “And Esmerelda worked there? So maybe The Vampiress wasn’t ghost-written. Maybe she nicked it.”

  “But surely its author would have objected?”

  “Not if she’d done away with them.”

  We quickly switched on the computer and trawled frantically through the web looking for something, anything that would help. It wasn’t long before Graham had tracked down a tiny snippet of information on a newspaper website. It was one of those news-in-brief bits that you find tucked into a corner of the page, but it made sense of the whole confusing puzzle. It was dated three years ago and reported that a man had collapsed on the pavement outside the London offices of Fletcher, Beaumont & Grimm. It said he’d died of natural causes.

  “I bet he didn’t,” I growled. “It’s too much of a coincidence. Maybe he’d been visiting the offices. I bet he had a manuscript too – I bet it was The Vampiress of Venezia. The dates would be right. Esmerelda must have stolen it, then killed him. Find out some more, Graham.”

  But Graham couldn’t track down anything else about him. We couldn’t even discover his name. So we were left trying to fit all the pieces together, filling the gaps with wild flights of fantasy that would have made Francisco Botticelli proud.

  Tea was a silent meal – Graham and I were in deep thought and Mum was still sulking big time. When it was over, she took herself into the garden to check on her cuttings, leaving me and Graham to load the dishwasher. It was then that I suddenly had one of those blinding flashes of inspiration. There was only one solution – one person – that tied every last little loose end together. The plate I was holding slid through my hands and cracked into pieces on the floor.

  “We’ve been struggling with motives from the very beginning, haven’t we?” I said to Graham. “None of them made much sense. I mean, Charlie may have wanted Max out of the way, but why kill Esmerelda? Esmerelda could have had Max murdered, but she wouldn’t commit suicide with a fountain pen. Katie or Francisco or Muriel might have dumped manure on Zenith, but they wouldn’t have attacked themselves. Who’d have it in for a bunch of authors anyway? It doesn’t make any sense. But suppose someone was after just one author?”

  “Esmerelda?”

  “Yes. If that guy they found on the pavement was murdered by her… If he had friends or relatives who worked out what had happened… It’s the only thing that makes sense. Revenge, Graham. That’s what’s behind it all. The whole book festival was a set up. Those death threats must have been put in the bags before we arrived. The attacks … that business with the pigs … we kept saying how well organized it was. There’s only one person who could possibly have orchestrated it all.” I grabbed Graham by both shoulders. “Viola Boulder.”

  “Viola Boulder?” Graham echoed incredulously. He looked at me as if I’d gone stark, staring mad.

  I bent down to pick up the pieces of smashed plate, wrapping them in an old newspaper and shoving them impatiently in the bin. If I couldn’t persuade Graham that my theory was right, how on earth was I going to convince Inspector Humphries?

  “Think about it,” I said earnestly. “She’d never organized a festival before. Why start now? The whole thing was a trap to get Esmerelda down here. Esmerelda was meant to die. The letters, the other attacks – all those were just a smokescreen.”

  “But Viola was outraged about Charlie and the football,” protested Graham. “Don’t you remember?”

  I did. I could recall her exact words. “It hit him. It actually hit him.” Her fury had been genuine, but maybe there was another way of looking at it. “Suppose the guy in the football strip was meant to miss Charlie and got him in the face by accident? That would explain why she was so angry.”

  Graham was unconvinced but I was well away. “The same with Basil Tamworth. Viola said something to Sue about how he should have been able to cope with a few pigs. It’s like he wasn’t supposed to get hurt. And Zenith wouldn’t have actually drowned in that manure.”

  “Katie? Francisco? Muriel? Those things were potentially lethal.”

  “So how come they didn’t do any harm? Those booby traps were brilliant. Do you really think that anyone clever enough to rig those up was going to miss? It must have been done deliberately.”

  “And where does Max fit in?”

  “Inspector Humphries was right – he was killed by accident. Maybe he walked into that hotel room when Viola was rigging up a booby trap to kill Esmerelda, so he had to die. Then Viola had to go back and finish the job later. It was revenge, Graham. I reckon she’s connected to the guy who died on the pavement. In fact, I’m absolutely sure of it.”

  “It’s an enormous stretch of the imagination,” Graham said doubtfully. “And we have no proof. If you telephone Inspector Humphries now you’ll be accused of wasting police time.”

  As it turned out, I didn’t need to. Inspector Humphries had come to the same conclusions I had. It was announced on the breakfast news the next day that Viola Boulder had been arrested. And when she’d been taken in for questioning she’d freely confessed to planning Esmerelda’s murder.

  violas confession

  The news showed Viola being led up the steps of our local police station. At the top she’d turned and delivered a speech to the television cameras. She stood, proudly upright, and explained clearly and concisely that she’d had a brother called Sebastian Vincent – Tim the technician’s father. He’d once written a book and given it to her to read.

  “I knew at once that it was a work of genius,” Viola said. “I advised him to send it to Fletcher, Beaumont & Grimm.”

  A month later he received a phone call asking him to come to London for a meeting, she explained.

  “I don’t know who he met or what happened at that meeting, but when he was found dead and his manuscript was missing, I was certain he’d been murdered.

  “Sebastian was on medication at the time,” Viola continued. “It was only a minor complaint but it meant he wasn’t allowed to drink. Yet the autopsy found traces of alcohol in his blood. The coroner assumed he’d simply forgotten – it was the Christmas party season, after all – but I knew him better than that.

  “Sebastian simply wouldn’t have made that kind of mistake. Someone spiked his drink. And as soon as The Vampiress of Venezia came out, I knew who the culprit was. Esmerelda Desiree was a leech. A bloodsucker. A thief and a murderess. She deserved to die. But let me state here and now that my plan went sadly awry. I was responsible for neither her death, nor that of Max Spectre.”

  “She’s confessed to planning it, that’s all,” Graham pointed out to me as we waited for the bus to school. “She’s denying that she actually carried out Esmerelda’s murder.”

  “Yeah, well, it looks like Inspector Humphries doesn’t believe her.” The news item had said she’d been charged with both murders. Tim had been charged as an accessory and also with orchestrating the assaults on the other authors.

  The bus pulled up and we didn’t feel much like continuing the conversation in public. Then we had different lessons all morning, so it wasn’t until lunchtime that we got a chance to discuss it more. We headed straight for the school library. Sue Woodward was about to close it for a few minutes while she went off to collect a sandwich, but she let me and Graham stay in there unsupervised.

  “I’m not allowed to, strictly speaking,” she smiled. “But I think I can trust you two not to go wild and wreck the joint.

  We tucked ourselves into a corner.

  I was pleased that my wild theory had proved right. But I was also starting to think there were too many questions still left unanswered.

  “Satisfied now?” asked Graham.

  I shook my head. “No. If Viola says she didn’t do it, I believe her. She confessed to planning the whole thing – she seemed proud of it. Why not take the credit for the actual murder?”

  The more I thought about it, the more wrong it felt. I sighed. “I don’t get it…
If Viola really did bash Max over the head, why would she mark his neck with a felt pen? What was the point of that? And who swapped the manuscripts? As for Esmerelda… Stabbed in her hotel room? It doesn’t fit in with the rest of the plan, somehow. We’re missing something.”

  “All the assaults were very public,” mused Graham. “Staged, like pieces of theatre. It does seem strangely inconsistent that Esmerelda should have died in private.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” I thought back over everything I could remember about our time with Esmerelda, right from when we’d first seen her in the hotel. For some reason my mind stuck on an image of Tim sorting out her microphone. Tim, the son of Sebastian Vincent. Tim, who had just been charged as an accessory to two murders…

  When the microphone had nestled against Esmerelda’s pearly white skin it had reminded me of a cockroach. It occurred to me for the first time that her microphone had been an unusually large one – much bigger than the rest of the authors’. And he’d fixed it higher. The harness had fitted snugly around her neck, the mike’s tip resting against her jugular vein. Then it hadn’t worked because Tim spilt his coffee, and Viola had completely lost it. At the time, I’d assumed it was just the result of one too many disasters. Suppose I was wrong. What had she said? I can’t bear it. Not after all my hard work.

  Suddenly I felt sick. “Ohmigod, Graham! I think Esmerelda was supposed to die in front of us all!”

  “What? How?”

  “That microphone. It was another booby trap! I reckon there was something in there that would puncture the veins in her neck. Only Tim couldn’t trigger it because he spilt his coffee on the control desk.”

  Graham’s eyes widened. “You may well be right,” he said. “That would be consistent with the other incidents.”

  “So Viola would have needed to come up with another plan. But before she could, someone else killed Esmerelda.”

  “What makes you so sure it wasn’t Viola?”

  “Because she’d have admitted it! She wasn’t the least bit ashamed of planning the murder. She’d have been delighted to be the one to finish off Esmerelda.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” said Graham thoughtfully. “In which case, we still have two unsolved murders on our hands. We’re right back to square one.” There was a long pause and then he added, “What we have to consider is who benefits from both crimes.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure Esmerelda nicked Max’s book. But she can’t have killed him.”

  “I think we may have been on the right track last night,” mused Graham. “I believe we have to assume she was working with an accomplice. The question is, who?”

  We looked up Esmerelda on the computer. Since her murder had been announced, her book sales had trebled. The Vampiress of Venezia was already a worldwide bestseller. It must be worth a fortune. Which gave me something else to think about.

  “Who gets her money now, Graham?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. It would usually pass to her next of kin.”

  “She wasn’t married, though, was she?”

  “Not as far as I know. It certainly doesn’t say anything about it on her official website.”

  We couldn’t find anything helpful about her family on her official site. But – bless all those blogging goths – one of them had discovered that Esmerelda Desiree was a pseudonym. After a few minutes of trawling the web, we discovered that her real name was Rosie Bakewell.

  “Bakewell?” I looked at Graham and my heart sank into my shoes. “Like Trevor Bakewell? They’ve got to be connected, haven’t they?”

  “The likelihood of it being a coincidence that they share the name is practically zero.”

  “So she’s either Trevor’s sister,” I said slowly, “or she’s his—”

  “Wife.” A familiar voice finished my sentence. It felt like being slapped with a cricket bat.

  We turned. Trevor Bakewell was standing framed in the door of the library, and he was looking neither nervous nor eager to please. He had a hardback copy of Dragons and Demons in his hand, and the expression in his eyes was positively murderous.

  death by dragon

  “What are you doing here?” Graham asked nervously, looking around for Sue. Time was getting on; she was clearly having trouble tracking down that sandwich. “How did you get in?” Our school is usually pretty hot on security.

  Trevor smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “Your librarian is very industrious, isn’t she? She persuaded all the authors to donate signed copies for the school, and I said I’d drop them in before I left town. The receptionist buzzed me through. It seems that my visit is rather fortuitous. You two were about to expose me, and I can’t have that. Not now.”

  “So you did kill Max,” I said flatly.

  “Oh yes. Although I have to confess that part was Esmerelda’s idea. I added the puncture marks: I thought it would be rather clever to mimic Viola’s grand plan, and it’s just as well I did. The police are convinced she was behind both murders. Very convenient for me.”

  “I can understand why you killed Max,” I said, playing for time. “I know you were after his manuscript. But you’d got it. You’d succeeded. Why kill Esmerelda?”

  Trevor looked pleased with himself. “It was all a matter of marketing in the end, darling. I was planning to pay a ghost writer to produce a sequel to The Vampiress of Venezia. It would have been a guaranteed bestseller – people were simply begging for it. As to the quality – it really wouldn’t have mattered if it was second-rate. The brand was the important thing. But Esmerelda had begun to buckle under the pressure of being asked what she was doing next. She felt she had to come up with something herself. Frankly, she became a little delusional – she started believing she really was a writer!”

  “That was her manuscript, then? The one on the floor?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Trevor winced in genuine pain. “It was terrible. I have to say, Max’s book is good. Great, even. So now there will be another Esmerelda Desiree masterpiece on the shelves. Now she’s dead, I’ll have publishers falling over themselves to print it. I can rake in the money without worrying that Esmerelda will wreck everything.”

  “So you killed her for the money,” I said. It was kind of disappointing.

  “Well, not only the money. There was the problem of image, you see. When I found The Vampiress of Venezia on the slush pile, I could see right away it was a winner.”

  “You found it? I thought Esmerelda did.”

  “No. We were both working at Fletcher, Beaumont & Grimm – it’s where we met – when I spotted it. It was simple enough to arrange a meeting with Sebastian Vincent when the offices were empty.”

  “But why didn’t you just publish his book? Why did he need to die?”

  “Because he looked awful! An old man in a tatty suit? He was bald; his teeth were dreadful; he was so shy that he could barely string a sentence together! You wouldn’t want to see him on the breakfast news – he’d put you off your cornflakes. A writer like that just doesn’t sell, darling. I knew that if that book was going to succeed, it needed the whole package – glitz, glamour, a stunning young author. It needed a touch of celebrity. It needed Esmerelda. And it worked. It worked spectacularly well.”

  “So why kill her?” I demanded.

  Trevor sighed wearily as if I was extraordinarily stupid. “Because I knew she was going to ruin everything sooner or later. You see, the way she dressed, the way she looked – it was perfect for The Vampiress of Venezia. Then she got me to steal Max’s book. What’s worse, she told Nigella Churchill the storyline, so there was no going back. If I’d had my way, she’d never have given that interview.” Trevor slapped his forehead in frustration and added scornfully, “Go West! What was she thinking? What was she planning to wear on the book tour? Some ghastly gingham frock? Cowboy boots? A ten-gallon hat?” He looked outraged. Then he remembered Graham and me, and a chill prickled my skin as I saw his eyes narrow. “Heavens! How I do run on! I must do something about you two before
Sue gets back. Mmm, let me see. Time for an accident, I think. My goodness!” He ran his finger slowly along a line of books. “Your library is terribly well stocked. Shame the shelving is sub-standard. It’s really not up to the job, is it?” After a last, calculating look, Trevor quickly grabbed the pole Sue used to open the top windows and rammed it under the nearest set of shelves, levering them over.

  It turned out that Trevor wasn’t as weedy as I’d thought. Before Graham and I could move, books were raining down on us. Volumes of epic fantasy thudded on my back as hard and as heavy as bricks. I put my arms up to protect myself, but it was no good. The corner of one book caught my eye, tearing the skin on my lid and temporarily blinding me. I tried to run, but I couldn’t see. I slipped on the books, fell and knocked into Graham, sending him tumbling to the floor with me. We were both lying there, helpless, as Trevor up-ended another set of shelves: the reference section. Volumes of encyclopaedias. Dictionaries. The last fifty years’ worth of Guinness World Records. We were trapped under the heap, buried from the neck down. Bruised. Bleeding.

  And then Trevor was climbing over the pile towards us, the signed copy of Dragons and Demons in his hand.

  “One more blow,” he murmured thoughtfully. “One small tap just there where the skull is nice and thin. Yes, that should do it.”

  He raised the book high above my head. Graham yelled in fear and struggled to free himself, but his arms were pinned down with heavy volumes. I shut my eyes, waiting for the deathly blow.

  But instead of a being struck by a fantasy tome, I was hit by a falling Trevor.

  Sue had returned.

  The noise of the cascading books had drowned out the squeaking of her shoes as she’d come in, and with astonishingly good aim she had flicked Princess Peony and her Perfect Pony Petrushka across the room and into the back of Trevor’s head. It wasn’t enough to do him any serious damage, but enough to unbalance him. He fell on to me and rolled sideways, crushing Graham, before scrambling quickly to his feet. Then he stood and faced Sue.