Evil Under the Stars

by C. A. Larmer

  The Agatha Christie Book Club

  Investigates…

  Evil Under the Stars

  By

  C. A. Larmer

  Copyright © 2017 Larmer Media

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  Discover other titles by C.A. Larmer at Smashwords.com:

  Do Not Go Gentle

  Do Not Go Alone

  Killer Twist

  A Plot to Die For

  Last Writes

  Dying Words

  Words Can Kill

  A Note Before Dying

  An Island Lost

  The Agatha Christie Book Club

  Murder on the Orient (SS): The Agatha Christie Book Club 2

  calarmerspits.blogspot.com.au

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  License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Larmer Media, Goonengerry,

  NSW 2482, Australia

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-9942608-7-1

  Cover design by Stuart Eadie

  Edited by The Editing Pen

  & Elaine Rivers (with heartfelt thanks)

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  This one’s dedicated to my friends and fans, old and new, nearby and far, who read my books religiously and quietly cheer me on from the sidelines, without fuss, without reward.

  You’re the ones I’d share my blanket with at a moonlight cinema.

  Thanks for your ongoing support.

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  Table of Contents

  A Note From The Author

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Connect online

  A Note From the Author

  It will come as no surprise to hear I have been an Agatha Christie fan since I can remember (no, really), and yet I feel the need to mention it as I am often asked how I came up with the idea of the Agatha Christie Book Club series. Did a marketing dynamo whisper it in my ear? Am I just riding on Dame Agatha’s tails? Who do I think I am?

  So let me answer the question once and for all.

  Yes, I adore Agatha Christie, but it goes deeper and farther than that—all the way, in fact, to a secluded island in remotest Papua New Guinea. I was holidaying with my family. I was not yet ten. There was no television, no radio, nothing to tempt a bored tweenie at night but a termite-infested bookshelf bursting with pulp fiction and Agatha Christie novels.

  I scooped one out. I dusted it off. I opened the pages… You know the rest.

  It was that first book—Evil Under the Sun, as it turns out—that planted the seed that eventually grew into a love of mysteries and a flourishing writing career.

  This series is my homage to the greatest mystery writer of them all.

  Each and every book is in honour of Ms Christie, and yet I’m not trying to write an Agatha Christie novel—I wouldn’t dare. Nor am I trying to recreate her extraordinary characters in my own. Instead, I’m simply extending the joy to a new group of fans, my book club friends, and exploring what happens when you take a bunch of amateur sleuths, plonk a complex puzzle in their laps, and let the words of Miss Marple and Monsieur Poirot guide them home.

  I hope you enjoy these modern adventures as much as I have enjoyed writing them, and I hope they renew your love for all things Agatha Christie.

  Prologue

  As she stared, gobsmacked, at the woman sprawled under the cashmere blanket, looking as if she were simply asleep, the irony was not lost on Alicia Finlay.

  She glanced at the blank screen behind her and back again.

  Ah, Agatha, she thought. You have a lot to answer for.

  “Is she dead?” someone asked.

  “As a doornail,” someone replied, someone without tact.

  “Let’s move back, please, people. Let’s give the woman some space,” came a third voice—Anders, of course, the good doctor, taking charge.

  “What on earth happened?”

  That was the husband, wild-eyed, shocked. He’d been asking a version of the question over and over for the past five minutes ever since he’d pulled the blanket from his wife’s sleeping body and found, instead, a lifeless corpse.

  There was no way to answer, of course, at least not yet, but the thick purple smudge around her neck gave plenty away. Not that the crowd was privy to that. The young woman’s body had been covered over again by the blanket, and so most of the group melted away—homes to return to! babysitters to be paid!—while the sound of a siren shredded the still night air.

  Lynette leaned down to whisper in Alicia’s ear. “Looks a little familiar, don’t you think?”

  She nodded. Eerily familiar, in fact.

  The words of Hercule Poirot—uttered only minutes ago—circled Alicia’s brain like a childhood nursery rhyme, only more sinister and foreboding:

  “The sky is blue, the sun is shining, but you forget everywhere there is evil under the sun.”

  But this time it was not evil under the sun that she was witnessing. It was evil under a starlit sky. And instead of a secret murder on a secluded cove in Devon, this poor woman had met her fate in a park packed with people in a fashionable suburb of Sydney.

  That made it so much worse, of course, not the suburb so much as the very public nature of the attack. How did no one see it coming? How did no one hear her cries? And how could the Agatha Christie Book Club have been lounging just metres away and missed the whole event?

  “What on earth happened?” uttered the husband again, and then a new question, “Who would do such a thing?”

  He looked directly at Alicia then, and she met his gaze, softened her features, and tried to offer him a comforting smile.

  She had an answer for him, of sorts, but she swallowed it back down for now. It wasn’t the time or the place to be clever, but there was one person who had to accept at least part of the blame, Alicia decided, tearing her eyes from the man to the corpse and then back to the screen now looming like a black blotch on the horizon.
>
  If only it hadn’t been Evil Under the Sun showing at the outdoor cinema that night.

  If only it had been a more mundane movie, a less riveting plot, then surely more eyes might have strayed more often and more people might have noticed a cold-blooded killer before he got away.

  Oh yes, thought Alicia, glancing back at the lifeless lump beneath the bright scarlet rug. Dame Agatha has a lot to answer for.

  Chapter 1

  When Dame Nellie Johnson built herself a grand house in the year 1898 on the flats of outer Western Sydney, it was thought the height of folly on her part. A woman of such social standing would be better suited to an elegant apartment right in the heart of the city where she could wine and dine her many admirers with ease. And yet it was that isolation and solitude that she coveted.

  Little did Dame Nellie know, however, the semirural mansion with its lush, wide meadows and fresh running stream would soon be swamped with neighbours and then businesses and, eventually, thanks to a sweeping, state-of-the-art bridge, offices and, yes, even apartment blocks, although elegant they were not.

  Today Balmain is considered an inner suburb of Sydney, and a popular one at that, and just a small patch of that once-secluded greenery remains, now given back to the people as a public park. It was on this patch that the inaugural Cinema Under the Stars was to be held in just under a week’s time.

  Claire Hargreaves, as elegant as Dame Nellie and as fiercely independent, stared at the film flyer with her trademark delight before placing it neatly in the middle of her eighteenth-century Chinese gold-and-polychrome-lacquer-panel coffee table, adjusting the angle so that it sat exactly parallel with her spotless copy of Murder at the Vicarage.

  She couldn’t wait to show the book club. They’d be equally as enchanted; she just knew it! She glanced at the mantelpiece and frowned.

  That is if they ever arrived.

  “Sorry, possum, sorry!” came the breathless tones of Missy Corner just a few minutes later as she thrust her arms around Claire on her way through the doorway. “Couldn’t get my act together at all today.”

  “Don’t worry, Missy,” Claire replied, disentangling herself. “No one else is here yet.”

  “Really? Goodness me. I beat them all? Stop the presses! That’s got to be a first.”

  She readjusted her zebra-print cat’s-eye spectacles and headed straight for the couch where she took up her favourite position, slam-bang in the middle of the three-seater, just where she liked it. The book club had become the young librarian’s fortnightly group hug, and she was shameless about that.

  “Can I get you anything?” the hostess asked just as the doorbell rang again.

  Claire held a manicured fingernail up and said, “Hold that thought.”

  This time it was Perry Gordon at the front door, also issuing apologies, something about romance and how it could take a flying leap. Claire heartily agreed as she welcomed him in.

  The Finlay sisters arrived next, Lynette with a handful of her famous freshly baked scones, Alicia with their shared copy of the Agatha Christie book. It looked like Claire’s copy after a rough night on the town, with yellow Post-it Notes poking out on various pages, and—horror of horrors—bent corners and scribbled pencil marks.

  Claire was just about to close the door when she spotted Anders Bright striding down the footpath towards her house. He had his arms wrapped around a book and was staring at the path in front of him, a grim expression on his face. She shrank back and swept around to look for Alicia, who was now making her way towards the couch.

  “Everything okay?” That was Lynette, one thickly pencilled blond eyebrow cocked high.

  “I didn’t think he was coming,” Claire whispered. “I… I thought…?”

  Lynette frowned, then followed her gaze out the door. Her frown melted away. “It’s okay. Anders is still welcome.”

  “But won’t it be a bit…?”

  “Awkward?” Lynette said, finishing her sentence, and Claire nodded.

  “Probably, but that’s what happens when you sleep with a member of the band. You’ve still got to face them at gigs when you break up.”

  Claire looked at her, bemused, and Lynette smiled.

  “It’ll be fine. Alicia and Anders are both grown-ups. Or at least I hope they are.”

  She then sat down on the other side of the couch.

  Claire took a deep breath and pasted a smile to her lips as Anders approached.

  “Welcome, Anders! Welcome!” she said loudly, as though reinforcing the point, and he looked up with a start.

  “Thank you,” he replied tentatively, before entering the house.

  When he reached the lounge room, he didn’t quite meet Alicia’s eyes, just offered everyone a general hello and took his usual seat—a lone armchair—and turned his attention to his book.

  Lynette gave her sister an encouraging smile, but it was lost on Alicia, who was now hostage to her wild imagination. She had been preparing herself for this moment ever since the book club returned from a cruise to New Zealand, which along with a few corpses, saw the demise of her relationship with the fellow club member.

  If truth be told, it had never really got off the ground. Anders could never quite get over his errant wife, and Alicia couldn’t quite find the energy to drag him there.

  So they had decided—by mutual consent, she kept reminding herself—to go their separate ways. The fact that she had fallen for another man on the ship was a whole other matter and one that didn’t bear thinking about today.

  Perhaps it was because of this new beau that Alicia didn’t feel she had the right to boot her ex from the book club. It was a book club after all, his club as much as hers, and it felt unfair to send him packing when he hadn’t, strictly, done anything wrong. If anything, she was the guilty party.

  Still, it didn’t stop Alicia from imagining the day’s progression with dread. She pictured Anders’s sulk intensifying, she imagined him snapping at her every comment and then making a final, fiery ultimatum: “This simply won’t work! Either Alicia leaves or I do. You can’t have us both!”

  Of course that wasn’t going to happen. They would all be very civilised, except perhaps for Perry and Missy, who kept glancing from Alicia to Anders and back again, looks of delight on their faces, waiting, perhaps, for some fireworks.

  Alicia was determined not to provide any.

  “Right,” said Claire, clasping her hands together and dragging everyone’s eyes front and centre. “Welcome, everybody. I’ve got a lovely pot of Earl Grey to bring out and some sweet citrus cakes I whipped up this morning, and then we’ll get started.”

  “I’ll help,” Alicia said, desperate to avoid the scrutiny, and Claire nodded, leading the way.

  “Are you okay?” she asked as soon as they were out of earshot.

  “I will be if everyone would just act normal.”

  “Of course, yes, of course.”

  She reboiled the kettle and, as it worked its magic, pulled a plate of lemon tarts and another of orange-flavoured cupcakes from the fridge.

  “And our dishy detective?” she asked, peeling off the plastic wrap.

  “Hm?”

  “Is he still in the picture?”

  Alicia matched her smile. “Yes, but now may not be the best time to discuss my love life.”

  “I understand. Here, be a pet and take these out.”

  Claire handed her the plates and then reached for the steaming kettle.

  Within ten minutes, the atmosphere in the room had settled, but it took another ten minutes before Anders managed to meet Alicia’s eyes and a further ten before he was able to smile reassuringly at her.

  She knew she had hurt him—clearly more than he had hurt her—but she hoped their mutual love of Agatha Christie would ease them through. And today, at least, it came close.

  The book they were discussing—Murder at the Vicarage—was an obvious and belated choice. The first full-length novel to feature the beloved Jane Marple, the “nosy
spinster” from St Mary Meade, was all Missy’s idea and a brilliant one at that. She was shocked the club had focused so heavily on Hercule Poirot in the past and mentioned it again as she handed out some notes with neatly typed questions and discussion points.

  “It’s really very naughty of us,” she said. “And a little sexist, if I’m being completely honest. I mean, especially for a book club filled with so many strong women!”

  “Who are you calling a strong woman?” said Perry in jest, but Missy hadn’t finished making her point.

  “Miss Marple never did get quite the same acclaim as Monsieur Poirot, but I, for one, think she’s better. She was an amateur sleuth, after all, and couldn’t just strut in and take over. She had to eavesdrop and encourage gossip and pretend to be fetching a ball of wool while the clues were being sprinkled about. That would be so hard, don’t you think?”

  Claire agreed. “Oh yes. By comparison, Hercule Poirot had it easy.”

  “Now that you put it like that,” added Alicia, “he’s what you’d call a ‘mediocre white male’.”

  “Steady on!” said Anders, and the women laughed.

  “We’re just teasing,” Alicia said, “but Missy is right. Miss Marple did have to work smarter and harder than Poirot. He had his sidekick Captain Hastings to do his legwork and Inspector Japp firmly in his pocket. Miss Marple was just a little old lady living in a quiet village. She wasn’t a celebrity detective, so she had to somehow ingratiate herself into an investigation—no easy feat.”

  “As we know,” said Perry, referring to past mysteries this batch of amateur detectives had helped solve. “Still, I prefer Poirot. Miss Marple has none of the sophistication and brilliance of that little Belgian. Bit of a dithering old gossip, if you ask me.”