by Sara Rosett
“I have no idea.”
“Just an estimate. A guess.”
I shrugged. “Maybe five minutes, but I’m not sure at all.”
“And had you met Mia Warren before yesterday?”
“No.”
Byron nodded. “Thank you Ms. Sharp.” It was a dismissal.
“One other thing that I think you should know,” I said, hesitantly. “You know that Mia worked in the Pump Room?” He nodded, and I plowed on. During the time while I was waiting and thinking, I’d decided it was something he should know. “After you interviewed me yesterday at the Baths, I went into the Pump Room. That’s where our group was set to meet. I recognized Mia and stopped to talk to her. She was interested in Cyrus and asked lots of questions about his death.”
“That’s natural.”
“Yes, I realize that, but she told me she’d talked to him. She said Annie likes for the staff to talk to the guests. She said he mentioned going to Sydney Gardens and then on to the Circus.”
Byron watched me for a moment then said, “Ms. Warren mentioned the same thing to me when I questioned her yesterday. What do you make of it?”
“Me?”
“You obviously think it’s important enough to make sure I knew about it.”
“I don’t know. It seemed that she had taken quite an…interest in Cyrus. She was a bit dazzled with the television connection, I think, and, well, her death can’t not be related to his, right? It would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?”
“At this point, we can’t assume anything,” Byron said and looked over my shoulder and nodded at the sergeant, indicating he was ready for the next person. “Please give your contact details to Sergeant Gadd before you go.”
I took the yellow legal pad that the sergeant held out and wrote down the address of the cottage in Nether Woodsmoor as well as my cell phone number. As I handed it back to Sergeant Gadd, Byron said, “Mia Warren worked here. Cyrus Blakely was a guest here. Mia’s death could be one of those freakishly odd coincidences. Perhaps not. Freakishly odd coincidences are rare in my line of work.”
Chapter 15
INTERVIEWS COMPLETED, OUR GROUP STOOD on the sidewalk outside the hotel, blinking in the bright sunlight. Byron had finished with us and asked us to stay clear of the hotel until that evening. Official vehicles clogged the street and uniformed officers as well as other investigators traipsed in and out of the hotel.
We stood uncertainly, now on the outside of the crime tape that blocked off the area in front of the hotel. Melissa had left to attend to her mannequins at the Fashion Museum, but the rest of us lingered. Now that we had been dismissed and could go our separate ways, I think we all felt reluctant to break from the group. And there was the fact that the day had a surreal quality to it. It couldn’t really have happened—it was too awful.
I ran my gaze around the ring of faces. We all looked a bit shell-shocked. Much more than we had after Cyrus’s death. Even though none of us had known Mia personally, it had impacted us more. Was it because it was the second death in as many days? The mind and body can only take so many shocks. Or was it because her death had been more…gruesome? There wasn’t another word to describe the blood.
“What now?” Paul asked, interrupting my thoughts.
We all looked toward Elise, but she shrugged. She’d been so brilliant and efficient earlier, but the shock must have caught up with her because she looked almost numb. “I have no idea,” she said, quietly.
A man carrying several large bags walked up to the crime tape beside us and looked at the hotel. “Now how is a bloke supposed to get in there?”
Paul said, “Elise, I think this is the lunch delivery.”
“Lunch?” Elise asked, absently.
“For the picnic. To Box Hill. We planned it for this afternoon.”
She blinked. “I’d forgotten. With everything…” she waved vaguely toward the police vehicles.
“Elise DuPont?” The man asked, consulting a tag clipped to one of the bags.
“Yes, that’s me, but I’m afraid—”
“I can see you’ve had some sort of trouble.” He tilted his head toward the crime tape. “But no worries. It’s all paid for. I’ll leave it here with you.” He held out the bags to Paul, obviously identifying Paul as the one who did the grunt work. The man nodded and left.
“Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do with that,” Elise said, a faint trace of her usual vinegar-like personality showing through.
After a long moment, Felix, juggling the change in his pocket, said, “We could go.”
“On a picnic? Today?” Elise said, slipping back into uncertainty. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem appropriate.”
“We have nothing else to do,” Felix said. “They won’t let us back in until they’re done, which could be hours. Might as well carry on as best we can.”
“I suppose you’re right.” She looked around the group. “Any objections?”
“Not from me,” I said. “A trip to the countryside might do us all some good.”
I glanced at Alex and he nodded. “I’m for it. Let’s put some distance between us and Bath, if only for a few hours.”
Paul handed off the bags to Elise. “I’ll get the van.”
A little over two hours later, we arrived at Box Hill and surveyed the gently rolling countryside with its pattern of smooth fields bounded with tufts of hedges, which contrasted with the forested hills and swaying grass of the meadows. Overhead, the sky stretched blue and unmarred by a single cloud. A few picnics were in progress, but it wasn’t incredibly crowded.
We all set to work, leaving the food for later. Felix, Elise, and Paul debated the possible angles that would be required to keep the city of Dorking, which sprawled below us, out of the shots. Alex and I photographed, shot some video on our phones, and made notes, even jotting little handmade maps of the area.
I think we were all glad to do some actual work and when we finally found a nice spot in a meadow to settle down with the food, the conversation was still about the pros and cons of the location.
“The angles will be so restricted,” Felix said, unwrapping a sandwich.
The bright sunshine made that day almost warm, and Elise had taken off her cloak, which Annie had returned to her before we left the hotel. Elise picked up an apple and gestured to the view. “But we have the opportunity to film at an actual location that Austen wrote about. So many of her locations were fictional, which forces us to improvise. And we can film here, unlike Beechen Cliff,” Elise said, naming the walk that Catherine takes with Mr. Tilney and his sister in Northanger Abbey.
Beechen Cliff was a real place, a hike that gave a great view of the city of Bath, but it was impossible to film there and get the deserted feeling of a country walk because the noise and activity of modern Bath intruded. The beeping noise of buses, or coaches, as they backed up at the bus station directly below, carried up to the cliff, and the train station was also nearby. The subject of filming at Beechen Cliff had come up during our early morning drive to Bath. We’d already discussed the disadvantages of that location and eliminated it from our list of possibilities.
“I think we should take advantage of the authenticity here.” Elise had been silent on the drive—we all had, in fact—but now that we were back in our work sphere she’d shaken off the hesitant manner and was back to her old self. “It’s not perfect, but it is workable.”
Alex and I had spread our coats on the grass for our makeshift picnic blanket. We were a few feet away from Elise, Felix, and Paul. Alex, who had collected our sandwiches, handed one to me and sat down beside me. I said in a low tone, “I wonder how long until the topic of alibis comes up.”
“Not long, I imagine.”
Felix said, “I still think we should at least look into other locations. This is a tourist spot. Imagine what it will look like in a few months.”
“We’ll work that out with the locals,” Elise said with a glance at Alex and me. I made
a note in my Moleskine journal. No matter how much Felix argued, I could tell Elise was set on this location.
Felix shrugged and shifted so that he was facing the view as he ate his sandwich. I had a feeling he was going through the motions of being contrary. His heart didn’t seem to be in his arguments.
I was sure our picnic was much less elaborate than any Regency picnic. Austen didn’t go into great detail describing the preparations for the Box Hill picnic in Emma, but I thought it probably involved lots of servants. No horses toiling uphill pulling wagons of china and silver for us. Only sandwiches and soda, but I doubted any of us wanted a big spread of food right now. We lapsed into silence as we ate. I soaked up the view, letting the greens and browns of the landscape along with the varying textures of trees, meadow, and grass soothe me.
“I wonder where Dominic went?” Elise asked suddenly.
Despite the fact that we hadn’t spoken about Mia’s death for a while, it was still at the forefront of everyone’s mind, because Felix said immediately, “He went to get light bulbs.”
“And you know this how?” Elise asked, eyebrows raised.
“I heard him. I was on my way up to my room after breakfast. As I passed through the kitchen, he said something to Annie about the light on the stairs being out. He said he’d pop out and get a replacement.”
Elise said, “I see. I was upstairs when I heard Annie scream.” She shivered. “I had no idea what had happened. No one else was by the entry area?”
Alex said, “Kate and I were in the dining room with Paul.”
“And Melissa was still upstairs,” I said.
Elise frowned. “Hmm…well, at least none of us are suspects in this case. Because whoever killed Mia would have to be covered in blood. Even though the police were trying to keep us away, I saw enough of the office to know that.”
Alex opened his mouth to say something, but Felix was a little quicker. “I don’t know about that,” Felix said. “My interview with the inspector did not feel like a routine chat.”
I looked at Alex as I chewed a bite of my sandwich, expecting him to speak, but he’d fallen silent. I swallowed and turned back to Felix. “What did the inspector ask you?”
Felix stared at the patchwork of fields and trees in the distance. “Mostly, he wanted to know about my movements and if I knew Mia before we came here.”
“All perfectly normal. He asked me the same thing,” Elise said, briskly.
Felix squinted and shook his head. “It wasn’t the questions themselves. Something about the way he asked and listened…like he was memorizing every word I said, and later he’d pull them out and examine them one by one. It didn’t seem run-of-the-mill to me.”
“Heightened awareness from the shock of the death,” Elise diagnosed in a dismissive tone. She looked toward Paul, “I suppose the only bright side about this whole thing is that you now have an alibi.”
Alex and I exchanged a glance.
“For Mia’s death,” Paul said. “But I doubt the police would give me a passing glance there.”
Elise said, “But Mia’s death is connected to Cyrus’s. It must be.”
A thought stirred. “Did Inspector Byron ask you all for your contact details today?” I asked.
Elise said yes, and everyone else nodded.
“And you wrote them down for him, on the pad of paper?”
Again, nods all around.
“What are you getting at?” Elise asked.
“Just a thought.” I wiggled my bottle of water firmly into the grass so that it wouldn’t tip over. “I’m not sure what it means, if anything. If it does mean something…well, I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”
Elise rolled her eyes.
Felix deposited his empty sandwich wrapper back in the shopping bag. “We should leave soon. The roads will be clogged if we wait much longer.”
Elise waved away his concern. “Yes, soon.”
I stood. “I think I’ll wander around a bit before we go.”
“I’ll join you,” Alex said. We set off across the meadow toward a line of trees.
After we’d walked several paces, Alex asked, “So, are you going to let me in on it?”
“On what?”
“Whatever you’re frowning over. Something to do with the contact information?”
I stepped over a tree root. “There may be some completely innocuous reason for it, but Byron already had all our contact information. I gave him mine yesterday. You gave your contact info to him during your interview at the police station, right?”
“Yes.”
“So why ask for it again?”
“Bureaucratic incompetence is a possibility.”
“Yes, there is that. But he asked each of us to write down the information that we’d already given. Just now, as I was thinking about it, it reminded me of an Agatha Christie novel, Murder on the Orient Express,” I looked away from the ground to him.
“I’m not a huge mystery reader, but I have heard of that one.”
“Just checking,” I said, returning his slight smile. “Anyway, Poirot has each suspect write down something for him so he can get a sample of their handwriting.”
We walked several paces, and I said, “So, if there’s not some computer glitch or mix-up of files that left him without our contact information, why would he want to see what our handwriting looks like?”
We had been walking through an area with a few scattered trees and bushes, but we had reached a thick belt of trees and stepped into their shade. The temperature immediately dropped several degrees. Alex said, “Blackmail is one possibility, I suppose.”
“That’s what is running around in my mind. You remember how interested Mia was in Cyrus’s death, how many questions she asked at the Pump Room. What if she discovered something…something incriminating and threatened to expose the person? But if that is what happened, the blackmail note would be in Mia’s handwriting…so why would Byron want handwriting samples from the rest of us?”
“Unless the killer wrote something down…maybe something to lure Mia to the office,” Alex said slowly.
We followed a little trail through the trees, the sunlight dappling our shoulders. “And then left the note for the police to find? That’s…sloppy,” I said.
“Maybe the killer intended to destroy the note, but didn’t have time.” The path began to climb. As we worked our way up it, taking long vertical steps, Alex said, “Of course, that’s all speculation. A computer glitch or delay is probably the most likely explanation of why he wanted our details written down. Maybe he likes to have a paper backup of information.”
Alex reached back, and I gripped his hand as we went over a steep section. “Inspector Byron didn’t strike me as that type of person. He didn’t write anything down when he interviewed me.”
“Me either.” Alex said. “So maybe the handwriting samples do have something to do with blackmail. Mia did work in both places, the hotel and the Pump Room. And the Pump Room is connected to the Baths, which you pointed out to me. She might have been in a position to notice something.”
“If the crimes are connected—if the same person killed both Cyrus and Mia—then that means that you, me, and Paul do have alibis,” I said.
“Elise will be so relieved,” Alex said with a half laugh. “She can mark a couple of names off her spreadsheet.”
“Not her own, though,” I said. “Interesting that she was so helpful this morning and then sort of fell apart after the police arrived.”
The path flattened, and we meandered along it, enjoying the easier walk after the climb.
“Crisis does that to some people,” Alex said. “Brings out the best in them, then the reaction sets in later.”
“Hmm. I have to say it was one of the few times that she put her bossiness to good use.”
Our steps slowed as we came to a point where a fallen tree blocked the path. I stopped and looked back the way we’d come. “We’d better not go too far. Elise might be ready to
pack up.” I perched on the trunk of the fallen tree.
“Felix seemed like the one who was anxious to leave.” Alex sat down beside me. “I see one problem with the handwriting issue. In this day of email and text, why would a millennial like Mia send a handwritten blackmail note?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe she was smart enough to realize that a text or email could be traced back to her if she sent it over her phone or from her computer.”
“That is the sticky issue with blackmail. A clever person might be able to turn the tables.”
“As long as they don’t care about their secret coming out,” I said. “To expose the blackmailer would mean revealing what you’re being blackmailed about. And I have to say that I think murder would be something you’d want to hide.”
“And possibly murder again to keep hidden,” Alex added.
We sat in silence for a few moments.
My thoughts circled back to Elise’s alibi theories. “Earlier, you were going to say something when Elise said that whoever killed Mia would have to be covered in blood.”
Alex shifted. “I don’t think she’s right about that. You’re the mystery reader, but I don’t think it is a given that the killer would be drenched in blood. The walls of the office facing away from the door had blood on them, but the other walls didn’t. I noticed that when I left the office—after I realized that there was nothing I could do to help Mia.” He picked up a fallen leaf. It was dry and brittle and the color of mud. He twirled the stem between his fingers then said, “Mia must have been in the center of the office, facing away from the door. If the killer stood behind her, he’d probably have blood on his hand, maybe his arm.”
“Annie had blood on her hand,” I said.
Alex nodded. “Yes. That’s what I was thinking about earlier when Elise said what she did. Most of the blood on the walls of the office was on the walls opposite the door, but there was one other place that had blood on it—the light switch. If the killer hit the lights on the way out, it would smear blood all over the switch plate and probably get some on the wall around it. But that was the only place that had any blood on it on that side of the room. Nothing else on that wall or anywhere else near the door had blood, except the light switch.”