Shunter frowned and twirled his moustache. He understood what the speaker was trying to say, that the mechanics of investigating serious crime were unglamorous, often repetitive, and not at all like the exciting investigative journeys of someone like Inspector Wexford or Holmes and Watson. But saying that it was ‘dull’ because it wasn’t ‘fun’ or ‘intriguing’ enough seemed to him to devalue the death of a human being. He had particularly taken umbrage at the speaker referring to it as a ‘game’, something that it most certainly was not. Every killing was a tragedy for all concerned, even for the perpetrator most of the time, and it galled him to hear the speaker treat the subject so lightly. She had also insisted on using the word ‘murder’ throughout her talk when, in the real world, very few people plotted the death of another with malice aforethought. Homicide was usually the result of a brutal, unplanned act of violence, not a meticulously researched and organised campaign involving poisons, mechanisms, traps or misdirection. Homicide was pushing a knife into someone’s guts during a momentary fit of rage and then leaving them to bleed out while you panicked and ran away and, as such, it was a world apart from the average murder-mystery plot.
As the speaker began detailing a list of her top ten most entertaining murders, Shunter apologised to the sour-faced Milly sitting next to him, stood up and shuffled crab-like along to the end of the row of chairs and towards the door. As he’d anticipated, the talk had only made him grumpy.
Outside, the pretty little High Street was awash with spring warmth. All evidence of the overnight rain had gone and red kites soared high above in a Wedgwood sky. Flies and wasps buzzed busily by and Miss Cutter clones of all shapes and sizes, ethnicities and ages trotted between venues for talks and screenings or followed tour guides around in little fan-club groups. Idly, Shunter wondered what the collective noun would be for a group of lady detectives. A sleuth, perhaps. Or a murder? He eventually settled upon a gaggle, because they reminded him of geese as they waddled about, selfie sticks raised high in the air like long necks as they photographed themselves at locations they recognised from the books.
Outside Mrs Scattergood’s Olde Fashioned Sweete Shoppe, the site of Smitheram’s Grocery in The Dead Do Not Rise, he spotted a brace of bewildered-looking police officers and he felt some genuine sympathy for them. They would have been bussed in from Bowcester – the village was too small and too law-abiding to warrant its own bobby – and they would undoubtedly be pressed men. No young cop would voluntarily give up the excitement of everyday police work for a weekend of lost property enquiries and being treated as a glorified information bureau by a village full of middle-aged ladies. And what young coppers they were, he noted. Shunter remembered an old saying that went something like, ‘You know that you’re getting old when the police officers start to look young.’ These two looked like children who’d been in the dressing-up box and Shunter suddenly felt very old indeed. He caught sight of himself reflected in the shop window and scowled. His hair had turned grey in his thirties and his waist had got lost somewhere in his forties. His jowly face, even when relaxed, looked like an old bulldog whose bone had been confiscated and the scowl was doing him no favours at all. Also mirrored in the glass were the many Millies behind him and Shunter suddenly realised that, dressed in nondescript dark trousers and a short-sleeved polo shirt, he was the person who stood out from the crowd.
Somewhere in the distance, the staccato piano theme to The Miss Cutter Mysteries was being played on a bad PA system, probably by a busker. It clashed with the maudlin accordion accompanying the morris dancers and the irritatingly upbeat carnival music coming from the village green. The sounds of the mechanical organ carried with it the smell of delicious and unhealthy fatty foods and Shunter’s stomach growled in counterpoint. He made his way through the bustling gaggles towards the green and Savidge’s van. He might be a pain in the arse at times but the angriest man in the village grilled a damned fine burger.
*
Savidge’s day was going from bad to worse. The queue for his van was getting longer and his customers ever more quarrelsome and irascible. Many were hungover, having celebrated their arrival in Nasely by drinking long into the night at the hotel bar. Others had made an early start and swigged from wine glasses and hip flasks as they waited in line. Having just fielded a volley of questions about the safety of eating genetically modified onions, which he didn’t actually use, Savidge now found himself passively watching as two fierce-looking ladies argued over the definition of free-range chicken. As the discussion raged on he reached for his medicine bottle and frowned. He had already reached the limit of his daily dosage and it was barely midday. He could feel his temper rising up inside, like the contents of a saucepan preparing to boil over. He closed his eyes and mentally ran through a relaxation exercise that he’d once been taught on an anger management course: Inhale deeply for four seconds . . . One. Two. Three. Four. Then exhale for eight seconds . . . Feel the air moving in and out of your lungs. His meditation was rudely interrupted by a loud rapping on the burger van’s metal counter.
‘You there! Young man! Wake up!’ snapped a fearsome-looking virago brandishing a walking stick. ‘I asked you a question! Does it still count as free-range if the chickens are fenced in?’
‘What?’ said Savidge.
‘Yes. And what if the chickens have names?’ slurred her companion.
Savidge growled dangerously.
Shunter walked past stalls selling local farm produce, jams, cakes and handicrafts. He waved and nodded to the villagers who were manning them, some in character as Miss Cutter, others in striped blazers and boaters in an attempt to recreate the Roaring Twenties and looking like podgy extras from The Great Gatsby. A noisy traction engine was powering the mechanical pipe organ and there was a display of vintage farm machinery that nobody seemed very interested in. He said hello to a team of fire officers from Bowcester who, as part of their community outreach programme, had parked an engine on the green. Small children swarmed all over it wearing outsized yellow helmets and pressing buttons and swivelling levers that perhaps they shouldn’t. He had a go on the tombola and won a bottle of terrible wine, which he immediately donated back to the prize table, and then joined the end of a disappointingly long queue for the burger van. He watched as Savidge fielded question after question and felt some sympathy for the man. Some of the Millies were really quite demanding and a few were downright rude, barking questions in that special imperious way that only older people who have been used to the good life can. A large number of them were obviously tipsy and several were very drunk indeed. An irritating cloud of midges was drawn to the line of warm bodies and added to everyone’s grumpiness. As the minutes dragged by, Shunter began to realise that the queue was barely moving and, at its current speed, he’d be waiting at least half an hour for his food. With a resigned sigh, he walked away, beating the midges from the air in front of him, a move misinterpreted by Savidge as Shunter pretending to slap someone. He replied by miming wringing someone’s neck. Shunter smiled wanly. Perhaps he’d avoid going to the Onion that evening if Savidge was having a particularly bad day. Even he had limits of patience.
Ever since her spat with Esme Handibode the night before, something had been gnawing at the back of Brenda Tradescant’s mind. It concerned the book that had spilled out of the infernal woman’s suitcase and the several other tacky romance novels that she’d hastily and unsuccessfully tried to conceal among her clothes. More specifically, it concerned the books’ author, Simone Bedhead. Miss Tradescant knew a nom de plume when she saw one.
Erotic fiction had become a huge amateur industry in recent years and had spawned a few superstars such as E. L. James, the pseudonymous author of Fifty Shades of Grey, and ‘Rocky Flintstone’, whose books were the subject of the hugely popular My Dad Wrote a Porno podcasts. Miss Tradescant spent a great deal of her spare time surfing chat rooms and trawling through blogs and forums to find and read work by other writers, hoping to discover the magic formula th
at would offer her the same kind of success. She also wrote a great many erotic stories herself, mostly about Millicent Cutter, and did so under the name of ‘Mademoiselle Bellefrage’, a play upon the name of Miss Cutter’s mortal enemy and amour interdit. Miss Tradescant knew that her bank manager fiancé would be horrified if he ever got to read the filthier kind of stories that she revelled in writing. He had no inkling of her baser literary passions or, indeed, of her somewhat promiscuous and regretful past, and that was the way she intended things to stay. ‘Mlle Bellefrage’ allowed her private life and her writer’s life to be held away from each other at arm’s length.
That Simone Bedhead was a pen-name, she had no doubt. The French-sounding Simone was a dead giveaway and, while Bedhead was a legitimate surname, a cursory Internet search had revealed it to be uncommonly rare. This made her suspect that the author of Love’s Moist Promise and four other equally terrible books was, most probably, using it as a saucy pen-name. After all, ‘bed head’ was another name for a headboard, and it was also descriptive of the kind of hairstyle you’d have after a night of wild passion.
‘Do you want another tea, dear?’
Miss Tradescant’s train of thought was broken by the appearance of Mrs Ann Moore, proprietor of the delightfully named ‘Moore Tea, Vicar?’ café in which she sat. The café was bustling with Millies because it famously doubled as Crowfoot’s Tea Rooms in Broken and Snared, in which Miss Rummage had been murdered with a strychnine-laced Bath bun. Mrs Moore was a kindly lady with a penchant for opal rings, ripe gossip and gimmicks. An oversized plaster bun decorated with raisins stood on the counter alongside an equally large bottle marked ‘poison’.
‘No thank you,’ said Miss Tradescant.
‘Doing the crossword, are you?’ asked Mrs Moore, peering at the newspaper on the table. After completing the Sudoku, Miss Tradescant had doodled ‘Simone Bedhead’ several times in the page margins. ‘What’s the clue?’
‘It’s not a clue. It’s more of a puzzle really,’ said Miss Tradescant. ‘Simone Bedhead is the author of several quite awful books and I am convinced that the name is an alias.’
‘Looks like an anagram to me,’ said Mrs Moore. ‘I can see a Mona there straight away. And an Enid.’
Mrs Moore bustled off to talk to some other customers and Miss Tradescant found herself pondering upon her suggestion. Moving the letters around she quickly identified the surnames Meades, Shand, Mason, Bond, Haines, Dean and Osman and forenames including Denise, Niamh, Sinead, Damon, Aiden – there were plenty of men who wrote erotic fiction too – and even a Desdemona. But then her heart skipped a beat as the name Esme appeared. A sudden, incredible thought struck her and she quickly scribbled the name down again and began crossing off letters, one by one. As she drew a line through the final letter E, her heart began to race. There it was in black and white in front of her. Simone Bedhead was a letter-for-letter anagram of Esme Handibode.
The revelation quite took her breath away.
Savidge didn’t start the fight, at least not directly. The first sputtering fuse had actually been lit by a sozzled member of the late Denise Hatman-Temples’s Agnes Crabbe Literary Society, who had suggested to an equally intoxicated member of Gaynor Nithercott’s Agnes Crabbe Book Club that the latter was responsible for the death of the former.
‘Why was she still driving?’ snapped the lady from the Agnes Crabbe Literary Society. ‘She was nearly blind, for goodness’ sake.’
‘Her eyesight was obviously good enough for the DVLA,’ said the lady from the Agnes Crabbe Book Club.
‘Then how could she possibly not have seen the car in front of her?’ said Society.
‘It was dark. And raining. Maybe your dithery Hatman-Temples woman hadn’t turned her lights on,’ countered Book Club.
‘Oh, now you’re just clutching at straws. She was clearly a menace to other road users.’
‘You can’t say that. That’s libel, that is.’
‘You can’t libel the dead,’ said Society. ‘Any fool knows that. It would be slander. At least know the difference between torts before you make silly accusations.’
‘Silly accusations? It was you who said that Miss Nithercott caused the accident,’ said Book Club. ‘I’ve a good mind to report you to the police.’
‘Fine with me,’ said Society. ‘I’m sure a proper investigation will prove that your Nithercott woman killed Mrs Hatman-Temples as surely as if she’d plunged a dagger into her heart.’
‘You take that back!’
‘No.’
‘Take it back, you old sow!’
‘I will not!’
It was at this moment that Savidge chose unwisely to intervene. ‘Ladies! Ladies!’ he said from the serving hatch of his van. ‘Can’t you go somewhere else and argue? You’re upsetting my customers.’
‘We are your customers!’ said Society.
‘Not if you don’t buy anything, you’re not,’ snarled Savidge.
‘She started it with her baseless allegations,’ said Book Club.
‘I don’t care,’ said Savidge.
‘Baseless my foot!’ blustered Society. ‘It was—’
‘Look, I don’t give a toss who started what!’ said Savidge, his face red with frustration. ‘Just go away and take your silly bloody argument with you.’
‘Hardly a silly argument!’ snapped Society.
‘Of course it’s silly,’ said Savidge. ‘All this fighting between fan clubs is ridiculous. You’re all the bloody same.’
The ladies bristled.
‘We most certainly are not the same!’
‘Most definitely! For a start, the Agnes Crabbe Literary Society has over—’
‘Yes you are,’ snapped Savidge. ‘You’re all obsessed. For fuck’s sake, she was only a writer.’
Savidge ducked as a string of pearls whipped towards his face like a striking cobra. A venomous-looking crowd suddenly surged forward and, from somewhere within the melee, a selfie stick was thrown. Savidge deflected it with his burger flipper and it cartwheeled through the air before connecting heavily with the head of a tall, muscular and quite obviously male Miss Cutter. The man replaced his cloche hat and wig, picked up the selfie stick and glowered. Sensing that withdrawal was his best tactical option, Savidge shut the van’s serving hatch and locked all of the doors. Outside, a small army of gin-soaked and angry Millies slapped and thumped the side of the vehicle and beat at the hatch with their walking sticks. Rumours ran through the crowds like Chinese whispers, becoming more insulting with each retelling.
‘. . . said she was only a writer. Only a writer!’
‘. . . had the audacity to suggest that she was a terrible writer . . .’
‘. . . claimed that her stories are dreadful and that she couldn’t write for toffee . . .’
‘. . . said she was a talentless hack . . .’
Muscling his way through the mob, and a good six inches taller than everyone around him, the beefy drag artist reached the van and peered angrily inside. He began hammering on the passenger window with a sizeable fist, and many of the enraged and inebriated Millies joined in with the beat, drumming on the side of the van.
‘What did you do that for?’ he shouted through a badly applied lipstick sneer. He pointed to a red mark on his forehead. ‘Come out here and apologise!’
‘Not happening,’ shouted Savidge, having decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
‘Come out here, you coward!’
The drag artist grabbed the door handle of the van and began repeatedly pulling at it. The vehicle began to rock from side to side. Seeing this, the Millies added their weight to his efforts and the van began to sway more violently.
‘Come out here and apologise, you little shit!’ yelled the drag artist. ‘Be a man!’
‘You first, mate!’ Savidge shouted back.
The taunting made the big man double his efforts. By now he’d been joined by even more drunken Millies, who had heard that the burger man had a
pparently stated that Agnes Crabbe was the worst writer who had ever lived.
Savidge was confident that the big cross-dresser couldn’t get the door open but he could still feel the panic and anger rising inside him. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and tried once again to focus on his anger management exercises. The rocking of the van was becoming more and more pronounced, and he began to wonder if there was even a remote possibility that it could tip over. Suddenly, the fridge door whipped open, spilling cans and soft drinks bottles on to the floor. Utensils and bags of bread rolls began toppling from shelves and, more worryingly, the hot oil in the deep-fat fryer began to splash about. Savidge looked over his shoulder and realised that, even if tipping the van over wasn’t possible, he still had a problem.
‘Okay, I get the point! I’m sorry!’ he shouted at the crowds outside. ‘Can you stop now, please? There’s hot oil back there!’
His begrudged apology was lost in the din of their massed rage. Fuelled by a liquid diet of gin and Pimm’s, and exhibiting exactly the kind of partisan-inspired violence that set football fans at each other’s throats, the militant Millies continued to attack the van of the man who had, apparently, dared to say that Agnes Crabbe’s novels were only fit for use as toilet paper. Meanwhile, several small fights had broken out between members of rival fan clubs who had seized the opportunity of the crush to settle old scores. Heavy handbags were swung, wrinkled faces were slapped and varicose shins were kicked. Inside the van, Savidge bounced off the walls as he tried to make his way into the kitchen area to turn off the appliances. But he was too late. The nearside wheels lifted from the grass and, as the vehicle crashed back down, the sudden lurch sent a small wave of cooking oil sloshing from the fryer on to the hot plate where it burst into flames. Savidge searched desperately for a fire extinguisher and it was his misfortune that the first one he found was the wrong one. As he squeezed the trigger he was treated to a near perfect demonstration of why you should never use water on an oil fire. The fryer erupted and, all of a sudden, the whole interior of the van seemed to be ablaze. Having thrown himself back into the driver’s compartment, and caught his groin painfully on the gearstick in doing so, he scrabbled desperately for the door handle and launched himself into the open air just as the cans of fizzy drinks, which had been sitting in the middle of the burning floor, began to explode. The van was rocking no longer – at the first suggestion of a fire, the mob of Millies had disappeared back into the large crowd that had gathered to watch – and as cans and bottles began to burst with a sound like shotgun fire, the crowd pulled back further still. Toes were trodden upon and ribs were elbowed and several more fights broke out as old rivalries and unsettled scores added energy to the violence. By the time that the two young police officers arrived at the scene, the fire was very fierce and very high and the local fire officers who, handily, had an engine parked just fifty yards away, were gearing up to tackle it. Their job wasn’t made any easier by the scrum of at least eighty Crabbe fans who were attempting to knock seven bells out of each other. One of the police officers strode into the crowd.
A Murder to Die For Page 5