Poinsettias and the Perfect Crime

by Ruby Loren

  “Oh?” I said, deeply suspicious.

  “Gillian Wrexton called me up this morning and officially contracted us to investigate the disappearance of the diamond.”

  “Us?” I said, picking up on that innocuous little word.

  Fergus grinned. “You’re my scientific consultant! I need you to, you know, do the science stuff.”

  “Science stuff?”

  “Like… touching the diamond when we find it to see if there’s any kind of chemical on it.”

  I frowned. “Didn’t you say that, if there is a substance on the surface of the stone, it’s deadly?”

  Fergus waved my concerns away as if they were nothing. “The main thing is, we’ve got official dispensation to look at the crime scene and find the diamond. We don’t have to sneak around!”

  “Wait… are we not even getting paid for this?”

  “Our reward will be finding the truth! Is that not enough for you?” Fergus stood up and made a fist when he said it, to demonstrate his sincerity.

  “Not really, no,” I replied, taking a biscuit from the plate. “I have bills to pay, don’t you? Or is your writing career enough to support you?”

  “Never you mind,” Fergus said, as smug as a bug in a rug. Wait… that was ‘snug’. I was definitely missing my morning lie-in.

  “It’s Christmas! I’m busy! Everyone’s busy.”

  Fergus lifted his shoulders. “Can’t deny that. According to Gillian, no one even wanted to look into any of this before the New Year. What are you busy doing? You said that business was bad in the winter.

  “That was before I started running wreath making classes, selling wreaths, and the online bouquet ordering,” I protested. “Plus, I’ve got family to deal with. My sister turning up with a new man when none of us even knew she’d got rid of her husband is hardly a recipe for Christmas success. Now both of us are tangled up in a murder investigation. I’ll be surprised if we’re invited to Christmas dinner at all.” I looked at Fergus. “Do you… spend Christmas with family?” I asked, curious to know. There was so much about Fergus that remained a mystery without me even realising it. I wasn’t sure if it was a sign that I was self-centred, or that Fergus simply wanted to keep his secrets.

  “Nope. Christmas is usually me and Barkimedes pulling crackers together. We have a good time.”

  “Want to come to my family’s Christmas dinner? Scratch that… can I come to yours?” I said, my mouth twisting when I remembered what awaited me this year at the family home.

  Fergus looked at me seriously for a moment. “Would you really invite me over for Christmas?”

  “Of course. You are housetrained, right?” I added to diffuse the serious mood that had suddenly caught up this conversation. “If you want to come, just turn up here on Christmas Day at around eleven. We’ll go over together. You’d be doing me a favour actually - by distracting from me.”

  “I am an excellent distraction,” Fergus agreed, looking pleased.

  He patted his leg with his hands. “Just a question… you don’t suspect me at all, do you? Of killing Bill, I mean.”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” Fergus asked, his expression unreadable.

  “It wouldn’t make sense for you to steal the diamond. You wanted to find it when we went looking, but it was to uncover the truth behind the conspiracy theory. Stealing the diamond would ruin that as you would never have a chance to prove your theory to be correct.”

  “But what if I stole it so I could find it again and then have an excuse to examine it?”

  I shot Fergus a sideways look. “Are you trying to tell me you did it?”

  “Do you think I did it?”

  “No, I don’t! I don’t think you could ever kill someone. The person who did this planned it and knew what they were doing with a knife. Anyway, I’ve seen what you’re like around blood. You go all green.”

  Fergus’ face relaxed into a smile. “That’s why you handle all of the science stuff… and gory stuff. Not that there’s going to be any more of that,” he hastily added. “I just wanted to see how easy it was for you to justify that I wasn’t the killer. It’s a bit awkward, not having an alibi and all that.”

  I tilted my head at him. “Weren’t you talking to Charlotte and Samuel until you came and rescued me from my arch enemy?”

  “I don’t know why you dislike Cordelia so much. She’s always been nice to me.”

  “Sure… now you look the way you look she’s nice to you. It would have been a different story if you’d gone to school with her. Where did you go to school?” Fergus certainly hadn’t been brought up in Merryfield or anywhere nearby, or I’d have known him for years.

  “Let’s not change the subject. Unfortunately, I wasn’t with Samuel or your sister. I was on my own during the window in which the police believe Bill Wrexton was murdered.”

  “Doing what?” I said, narrowing my eyes. I still didn’t think Fergus was the killer, but I doubted that he’d merely been hanging out next to the nibbles table.

  “I, uh, might have scoped out some of the rooms prior to our upstairs investigation.”

  “Which rooms?”

  “Oh, you know… some of the rooms upstairs. Bedrooms and so on. I didn’t see anyone around. I don’t remember anyone walking past, either.”

  I remembered the mud on the floor and the way I’d seen Samuel walking back to the party as if he’d been outside… “Have you told the police you were up there before the murder?”

  “Of course not! I don’t actually want to go to prison. It’s not a great leap of deduction to place me at the scene of the crime, and some pretty poor leaps of deduction seem to be the order of the day around these parts, when it comes to the police. I told them I was mingling and that I couldn’t remember who I spoke to, or if anyone spoke to me.”

  “I guess that is the benefit of a big party like that. People don’t know what the time is when they’re talking to you and they don’t necessarily remember if you went missing for any stretch of time, or even if they saw you at all,” I observed, thinking the killer had known it, too.

  Fergus nodded and then grinned. “You ready to get started, partner?”

  “I never agreed to anything!”

  He nodded along. “I’m actually going back to the crime scene now. The police are all done with it and Gillian promised to keep it untouched so that I could have a look. I’m sure I’ll find all kinds of interesting things. I’ve brought my dowsing rods… a pendulum…”

  “All right, I’m coming. I’ll drive,” I said, feeling a cold sweat start up. “You haven’t really brought dowsing rods, have you?”

  “No, I just said that to manipulate you into saying yes. Glad it worked. Can I leave Barkimedes here?” he asked.

  “Sure, but Fergus…” I eyeballed him. “…no crazy theories.”

  He raised his hands, that stupid smile still on his face. “I can’t promise anything.”

  10

  Winter’s Bloom

  Gillian Wrexton looked like a different woman from the one who’d been such a dazzling host at the Merryfield Ball. Last night, she’d been a stoic figure who’d cooperated with the police’s every need with elegance and grace. Today, she looked like a woman who had just lost her husband.

  “Just go straight through. You don’t need me, do you?” she asked, looking hopeful that we didn’t.

  “We’ll be fine. Is Cordelia around?” I asked, wondering if the note of worry in my voice was as evident to those listening as it was to me.

  “No, she’s gone out with friends,” Gillian said without seeming to actually process the question or notice my concern.

  “Mrs Wrexton… I am sorry about your husband.” I felt it needed to be said.

  “Me too,” she replied, sounding almost angry for a moment, before her shoulders relaxed again. “Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be here.”

  Fergus and I watched as Gillian Wrexton walked downstairs looking like an aimless ghost.<
br />
  “They have to catch whoever killed her husband,” I said, feeling terrible now that I was witnessing the effect losing a family member had on those closest to the victim. It wasn’t fair.

  “We aren’t learning anything by standing around. Let’s go take a look at that crime scene again. Perhaps we’ll learn something. It should go without saying, if we find the diamond, we’ll probably have found the killer,” Fergus said, looking as grim as I felt.

  “It should also go without saying that if we find the killer, we find ourselves in a lot of trouble. We should try to avoid that part.” I looked imploringly at my companion.

  “Sure. We’ll call in the cavalry way before anything gets dangerous. No unnecessary heroics here,” Fergus said, entirely unconvincingly.

  We walked down the hall, following the same route we had when we’d found Bill Wrexton’s body the previous evening. Merryfield Manor had seemed magical last night when the decorations had been fresh and everyone was dressed in their party best. Now it was a cavernous empty thing, like the set of a Christmas horror flick.

  The door to the study was already open when we arrived. The police must have left it that way for ease of access. We walked into the room where the smell of death still lingered. Bill Wrexton’s body had been removed last night after forensics had done their job, but the blood stains on the wooden floor was a cold reminder of where he’d taken his final breaths.

  I glanced at the jotter pad and saw that the note had gone. I wasn’t surprised. Even Walter Miller wouldn’t have missed that glaring piece of evidence, plus he had outside help when it came to crime scene analysis. Budget cuts in the force meant that, as far as I could tell, he’d be investigating the murder, but all of the ‘sciencey stuff’, as Fergus liked to call it, was farmed out to the district forensics team.

  I walked around the room carefully, using all of my senses to see if anything jumped out at me. Fergus was over by the safe, peering inside and then sniffing. He took something from his pocket, waved it around, and then put it away again.

  “Are you using a Geiger counter?” I queried when I heard the familiar clicks.

  “Stop critiquing my methods. We’re supposed to be in this together.”

  “I wasn’t…” I tried to say.

  “You were thinking it.”

  He was right. I definitely was.

  I turned my attention away from Fergus and looked down at the floor, hoping to discover something about the dirt that I’d seen there last night. The police would have disturbed a lot of it walking in and out, but I was hopeful that it might at least tell me where the killer went in the room, and if they’d come in or gone out through the window. There were smudges of dirt, seemingly liberally scattered everywhere, which confirmed my opinion that the police had probably done some spreading of their own. They’d have a better idea than I did of where the marks had originally been.

  I still wasn’t sure what to make of the mud. It seemed like a simple mistake to make, but when you combined the error with the number of people who’d ended up with traces of mud on their shoes, or who’d contributed to the mud by doing some wandering outside of their own, it was almost like the work of an evil genius. I wasn’t so sure it was a mistake after all.

  I frowned, trying to recall when I’d first noticed the trail of dirt at the ball. Who had I been speaking to before I’d noticed it? What had the time been? I kept looking along the floor as I considered these things. Then I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head and realised that what had drawn my gaze was a flash of white against an otherwise dark wood floor. I bent down to take a closer look.

  The petal was partially trapped under the heavy oak desk that dominated this corner of the room. I looked around, but there was no trace of a vase of flowers anywhere close by. I didn’t remember there being flowers in the room last night, either, and I was pretty good at noticing flowers these days. I gently tugged the petal free without tearing it. One half was stained with mud and partially crushed, but the other half leading down to the centre of the flower was intact, and even had part of the flower’s greenish stamen attached to it. I tried to consider all the possibilities, but I thought there was a good chance that this flower had been brought in on someone’s shoe.

  “The question is… was it here last night?” I mused out loud, inspecting the petal and realising I knew what kind of flower it was. It was a variety of hellebore. Helleborus x ericsmithii to be exact. I recognised it from its classic white tinged with greenish-pink petals and the centre of the flower with its starry stamen.

  “You found something?” Fergus asked, backing out of the safe opening and blinking in the light. If there’d been any clues inside the safe he’d have either found them or inhaled them by now.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, considering the battered petal. I placed it into one of the small plastic baggies I’d brought with me after Fergus had announced I was ‘the science one’ and I’d figured I should prepare accordingly. I popped it into the exterior pocket of my jacket. It was unlikely to get too warm in there and wilt any further.

  “I’m not making much progress. There’s nothing in the safe.” Fergus glanced back at it. “That much is obvious when you look at it… but there’s still nothing when you really look at it.”

  “No radioactive diamond?” I asked sarcastically.

  Fergus just shook his head before shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “I’m going to go down to the kitchen and score myself some biscuits. They always have the good type here. That was the biggest bonus of…”

  “Of your scheme to get inside this place,” I finished for him.

  “Shhh! You never know who could be listening. Keep up the good work. I’ll be back to check your findings.”

  I waited for him to be gone and then I slipped out of the room myself. If Fergus was taking tea breaks, I could take them, too. For the second time in two days I found myself in the lair of my childhood bully and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why she was the way she was. I wasn’t sure that nosing around the place she’d lived her entire life would let me unlock the inner workings of Cordelia Wrexton, or if I even truly wanted it to, but I was more than aware that I hadn’t yet left the past behind me, and I wanted to. I really wanted to.

  I turned right out of the study and walked deeper into Merryfield Manor. I passed by endless dark wood doors, all shut tight, and I wondered what lay behind them. Sure, I could have looked, but there were so many rooms. Did they even use all of them? I decided to find out and selected one at random. I pushed open the door to swathes of cream. The room was huge with a hardwood floor and a fourposter bed at its centre. It looked like a room fit for a princess, but Cordelia Wrexton was a long way from royalty. I hesitated in the doorway and then pulled the door shut. Sure, I could have gone poking about inside, but I knew inside that this was all wrong. If I had lasting problems, it was something I needed to fix on my own. Becoming obsessed with my enemy was not the solution.

  I turned and walked back down the corridor. For some reason, I felt lighter. It was almost as if the dark shadow that had been riding my neck unseen for years had decided it was time to find a new home to dwell in. I was so immersed in my brighter thoughts that I didn’t process I was hearing voices until I turned the corner and nearly walked into the people coming the other way.

  Cordelia stopped walking and stared at me in shock. “What is she doing here?” she said to her boyfriend, not even addressing me.

  “I’m helping Fergus do some work for your mother,” I supplied, not wanting to say that Fergus had signed us up to be unpaid treasure hunters.

  “Do you have to actually be here for that?” Cordelia asked, trying to look down her nose at me and failing. I was too tall for her to do that to me these days. Instead, she just looked like she was straining her neck. “And why are you here in this corridor? What are you looking for?” Her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  “I won’t know until I find it,” I told her, hope
fully infuriatingly. I threw in a big smile for luck.

  She frowned and her nose wrinkled, before this nasty little smile danced across her lips. “Lover boy not with you today? He seemed very keen last night.” She raised her eyebrows, trying to insinuate… something. I wasn’t actually sure what. I was busy trying to figure out who she was talking about.

  Oh, right.

  George.

  “I haven’t seen him since.” I looked at her seriously for a moment. “I wish you had locked him inside a room instead of letting him wander out.”

  “What do you think I was really doing going back upstairs? I’d been going to lock him in!” She frowned, finally figuring out what I’d just said. “Wait, you don’t like this guy?”

  “It might have escaped your notice, but he’s my ex-boyfriend. I have no idea why he’s doing any of this.” I also had no idea why I was telling Cordelia. She’d probably use it against me the first excuse she had. But all the same, I liked her knowing she’d inadvertently tried to do me a favour.

  She knew it, too.

  “Urgh. Well stay out of my way while you do it. Watch her, Harrison. She’s probably up to something.” Cordelia Wrexton swept past me in a haze of floral perfume. I usually liked all things flowery, but her taste was over the top - along with everything else about her.

  Harrison and I watched her flounce off.

  “What are you really doing here?” he asked the moment she was out of earshot.

  “I was telling the truth. Fergus and I have been contracted to investigate the disappearance of…” I trailed off, unsure if Harrison would be in on the ‘family secret’.

  “Don’t worry, I know the secret diamond is real. Cordelia told me pretty much as soon as we hooked up,” he said with a little shrug.

  “I bet she did,” I said, wondering if it had been part of her chat up line. ‘Hi, I’m a rich heiress who may one day inherit a giant diamond, please date me!’. It had to be something along those lines. Her personality sure wasn’t going to do it.

  “She’s nice, once you know her. I’m sure you two will put your past behind you soon,” Harrison said, smiling amiably.