Evil Under the Stars

by C. A. Larmer

  She didn’t think real life was ever quite as clever as an Agatha Christie novel.

  “Well you sure shoved yourselves in the middle of it all,” said Indira as she stepped across an open picnic basket and onto Alicia’s rug.

  “All the better to prove my theory,” she swatted back.

  Alicia had decided that the best way to handle the prickly DI was to give as good as she got and, failing that, to let the woman’s comments wash over, not to take it all so personally. Jackson insisted Indira was a good person at heart, and so she would give his partner the benefit of the doubt and see how that worked out.

  Perry was not so easily swayed and could barely restrain his frown as he watched her dump her bag and then drop down on Jackson’s other side.

  The book club had all gathered tonight except for Anders, who had been dropping out of group get-togethers of late, and Alicia tried not to think about that now. For all their history, for all his combativeness, she enjoyed having him around. Somebody needed to play devil’s advocate. It couldn’t always be Claire, who was now slumped on her own blanket, rubbing her temple.

  “I know we’re here to help, Alicia, but I’ve got such a headache. I feel a migraine coming on.”

  “I’ve got some paracetamol if you need any,” Indira offered.

  “Thanks. I think I’ll be okay,” she replied, shaking her head at the beers that Jackson was handing around.

  Indira took one while Missy held out a Tupperware container full of rice snacks topped with avocado and cheese. Her diet was clearly still on track, and she looked the better for it, her energy still high, her smile still in place.

  A sudden burst of applause caught everyone’s attention, and they looked up to find the movie was just starting on the big screen at the front of the roped-off section of the park.

  “Now what?” asked Indira.

  “Just settle in,” Jackson said. “And enjoy the show.”

  She frowned at that idea but did as requested, pulling a pillow from her backpack and resting her elbows back against it, her legs out in front.

  Jackson scooched closer to Alicia, who had also brought cushions this time, while the rest of the gang spread out on the myriad rugs and blankets that the Finlay sisters had prepared earlier. There were also several coolers, a picnic basket and three backpacks.

  Alicia pulled a fresh red blanket out of one backpack and flung it over Jackson and herself, then they put their beers aside and settled under the blanket to cuddle. Within minutes they were kissing amorously, which didn’t seem to bother anyone, except Indira.

  “Jeez, you two, get a room,” she hissed.

  They tried not to laugh as they continued wrestling under the blanket for another five minutes or so. Eventually, as the film progressed, things settled down and Alicia was now huddled quietly, Jackson beside her, the others spread out in a range of positions, and Indira was feeling more relaxed.

  She hadn’t picked Jackson as the “public display of affection” type and was glad they had snapped out of it. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for Claire though. The poor woman had dashed off to the toilets at one point, looking ready to throw up.

  Other than those two interruptions, Indira soon got caught up in the Sandra Bullock blockbuster and was as surprised as everyone else when intermission hit soon after and the lights flickered back on.

  “Anyone going to the snack bar?” Missy called out, and Perry nodded his head.

  “Sure, I’ll come.”

  They helped each other up, and then he held a hand out to Indira.

  “Come on, stretch your legs. It’ll do you some good.”

  Indira shrugged. “Sure. I could do with something more substantial than rice cakes.” She glanced towards the red blanket. “Where’d Jacko and Alicia go?”

  “Oh they’re already in the queue,” Perry said. “They were famished.”

  “Impatient buggers. Okay, what about you, Claire?” Indira glanced over to where Claire looked half-asleep under her pink blanket.

  “I’ll see if she needs anything,” said Lynette, waving them on.

  As the trio closed in on the snack bar, they noticed a long queue. Indira suggested they cut the line and join Alicia and Jackson, who were just visible at the front, but Perry was having none of it.

  “Just because you’re a cop doesn’t mean you don’t have to wait your turn like the rest of us plebs, you know.”

  “Fine,” she snapped back, adding, “You don’t like me much, do you, Perry?”

  He turned to her, his lips wide. “I could say the same about you!”

  “Well, if you did it wouldn’t be true. You seem like a nice enough person. When you’re not interfering with my investigation, that is.”

  He looked even more outraged. “Interfering, sure, but I’ll have you know I’ve never been called ‘nice’ in my life—not even by my exes! I’m fabulous, darling, and a lot of fun. But nice? I don’t think so.”

  Then he gave her a sly smile as he turned back to face the front.

  Indira smiled too. It was as good a truce as either was prepared to make. She glanced back towards the counter where she noticed Alicia and Jackson were handing over some cash in exchange for a cup of hot chips.

  “What are you going to get?” Missy asked, and Indira glanced back at her.

  “The chips look good,” she replied as the queue slowly snaked forward.

  By the time Indira, Missy and Perry returned to their rugs, the second half of the film was just getting underway and Indira only had a moment to glance around before darkness descended again.

  She noticed that Claire had made a good recovery and was helping herself to a snack while Alicia was lying down under her blanket, an empty bucket of chips behind her head.

  Jackson was sitting upright next to Missy on a small deckchair she had brought along and was a fair distance from his girlfriend now.

  “Everything okay?” she whispered across to him.

  He glanced at her, then to Alicia and back. “Lying down’s doing my back in.” He stretched a little to emphasise the point.

  Forty minutes later, the credits were rolling, the crowd was applauding, and Indira was wondering what the point of the evening was. She had enjoyed the movie, despite herself, but that was not the reason she had come. There was still so much work to do on the case, and she was starting to feel restless again.

  She glanced across to Alicia, who was still snuggled under her blanket.

  “Not a sci-fi fan?” she said to Jackson, who was laughing at some joke with Missy.

  He looked up at her. “Sorry?”

  “Your girlfriend’s fallen asleep. I thought she had some grand plan for the night. I didn’t realise it involved her catching up on her z’s.”

  Jackson frowned. “Hm, that’s odd.”

  He stood up and stepped across several blankets to reach Alicia’s rug.

  He bent down and gave her a gentle shake.

  He frowned, then gave her another shake, a firmer one this time.

  Then he fell back on his thighs, looking stricken.

  “Oh my God,” he said, gasping. “Oh my God, Alicia, nooooo!”

  Indira swept around to stare at him, her lips wide, her face as ghostly as the screen above her head.

  Chapter 39

  Indira’s colour had returned, along with her trademark glare, but she didn’t know who to direct it at first—Jackson for pulling her leg or Alicia for pretending to play dead.

  They were all sitting up now, every one of them nursing a beer, including Claire whose “migraine” had miraculously vanished.

  “I’m sorry, Indira, really I am,” said Alicia. “But I needed to see if my theory worked. And it did.”

  Indira glowered. “I don’t think you’ve proven anything. So you lay there pretending to be dead. As a detective, I’d still point the finger firmly at the people closest to you in that second half. Nobody else came within a metre of you. I would have noticed.”

  “Except
I’d been lying there, pretending to be dead since before intermission,” Alicia said, causing Indira’s jaw to drop.

  She took a moment to digest that. “But… but I saw you at the snack bar, didn’t I?”

  She glanced at Perry and Missy, who giggled.

  “No, Indira,” Missy said. “That wasn’t Alicia. That was Jackson and Claire.”

  Indira looked over at Claire, who was reaching into a backback and pulling out a short, shaggy blond wig. She gave the detective a sympathetic smile.

  “I pretended to be sick and went off to the loos where I changed into the wig.”

  “But I looked at Alicia’s blanket,” Indira persisted. “She wasn’t there.”

  “That’s because I had ‘strangled’ her earlier,” said Jackson, using finger quotes, “while we were having our passionate little wrestle. Then when Claire left, I carefully nudged Alicia’s ‘lifeless body’ closer to Claire’s pink blanket so it looked like Claire had returned and was now snoozing underneath.”

  “Then,” Claire said, “Jackson came to join me at the front of the snack bar where, from the back, it looked like he was standing with Alicia. We’re a similar height and size, and dressed in similar colours, with the wig on, most people couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “But I saw…”

  “You saw what your brain expected you to see—Alicia and Jackson,” explained Perry, “but really it was Claire and Jackson. You only saw them from the back, remember? I wouldn’t let you get too close.”

  Indira’s lips formed a perfect O. “That’s right. You told me not to cut in. Cheeky man!” She shook her head. “Okay, so when I got back to the blankets…”

  “You saw what looked like Alicia asleep, Claire awake and Jackson far, far away,” said Perry. “A replica of another film night a few weeks back.”

  They all nodded along except for Indira, who was still struggling to get a clear picture in her head.

  Jackson smiled at Indira’s perplexed expression, opened a fresh bottle of beer for her and said, “Shall we start from the top?”

  Indira took the bottle, sighed dramatically and said, “Go on then, wise guys.”

  And so, as the rest of the crowd gradually finished their picnics and headed off into the night, the Agatha Christie Book Club talked Detective Inspector Singh through Alicia’s “insane” theory, one they had just proven was not quite as mad as they had originally thought.

  Alicia wished the main players could be there to witness the “grand denouement,” just as they were in every Poirot novel, but of course, this wasn’t a work of fiction. The revelation would be made to them with their rights read, crafty lawyers present and far less chance of a dramatic admission of guilt.

  She took a sip of her beer and began.

  “It all played out just as we performed it tonight,” she said. “We don’t know the exact details—”

  “Of course!” Indira interrupted.

  She smiled. “But here’s what we think happened…”

  Chapter 40

  It had been a glorious, sundrenched day, and the crowds had flocked to the small park in Balmain early to clinch the best patch of grass in front of the large white screen at the northern end of the park.

  Evil Under the Sun would be showing that night, and they could not wait.

  One of the early comers was a pregnant woman called Maz Olden. Maz could wait. Indeed she did wait, for over an hour, witnesses would later tell detectives, just leaning against a cement balustrade near the park entrance, watching the crowd, biding her time.

  Whether she was waiting for a man with a peppery moustache she had lured there under false pretences or simply plucked him out of the crowd that evening, no one knew, not yet, but as soon as he spread his rug on the ground to the right of the screen, not far from the bar and, more strategically, close to the Portaloos, Maz finally made her way across, dropping down to claim the bare grass beside him.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the moustached man she was targeting but the large family who were seated just behind, knowing they would be distracted as all families are, and moving and wriggling a lot. Whatever the case, Maz spread her hot pink blanket out and, when no one was paying too much attention, pulled out another blanket, a red cashmere one, and spread that out on the edge of her own.

  Latecomers, like the book club, would then wrongly assume that the Mumfords had placed the blanket there and gone away and come back.

  And so the crowds continued to spill in, and dozens of colourful rugs became a bright quilt that spread across the entire lawn, a jumble of picnic baskets, backpacks, and bodies everywhere. So many bodies, in fact, that it was almost impossible to tell where one group ended and another began.

  And that was what Maz and Eliot were counting on.

  Earlier that evening Eliot had somehow managed to get his wife drunk, so drunk she was almost incoherent and barely able to walk. How he managed to do that would be a matter for the detectives, but Alicia had a hunch that Kat had drunk willingly with her husband for the final time. Perhaps she was drinking orange juice laced with vodka? Or perhaps he had convinced her to have a final hurrah before they broke up? In any case, by the time Kat arrived at the park and was dragged across the lawn to the empty red blanket, she was moving from giggly drunk to barely cognisant. She would have been legless if it wasn’t for the firm hands of her sober husband helping her onto the rug.

  And so they flopped down noisily, making their presence known, ensuring there were plenty of witnesses as they kissed and cuddled and carried on, Kat so intoxicated she probably had no idea what she was doing or even where she was.

  Then, during that first half of the movie as all eyes were gripped by the murder of Arlena Marshall on the big screen, Eliot Mumford was gripping the neck of his wife, silently squeezing the life out of her, and nobody noticed.

  Kat did not cry out or fight him off because she was so drunk by that stage that she barely knew what was happening. And nobody noticed a thing because they were a passionate couple, right? As several witnesses said: “They were just having a little wrestle under their blanket. It was innocent enough.”

  In fact, if the poor, intoxicated woman was still cognisant, she was probably wrestling for her life.

  No sooner had Kat gasped her last breath then the next part of the plan sped into motion. Maz, who had pretended to be an annoyed audience member to the left of the Mumfords, faked morning sickness, rushing off to use the facilities and making sure she caught the eye of several concerned witnesses as she did so. She needed to get away before intermission. She had a new role to play. Concealed under her pregnant stomach—a stomach that wasn’t really as big as it looked—was a long blond wig and Kat’s grey fedora, Gucci glasses and suede jacket. They had been pinched from the deceased woman earlier that evening, easy enough to do when the victim was drunk and her husband helping you out.

  As Maz quickly changed clothes, Eliot carefully and slowly shuffled himself and his now deceased wife across from their red blanket to the hot pink one, moving inch by inch, so slowly that nobody noticed. As Alicia had proven tonight and during the screening of Grease, blankets blend into each other when laid out on the grass. It’s easy to mistake them in the dark or shift between them with little fuss.

  Then with his dead wife hidden beneath the edge of Maz’s rug, Eliot slipped away to the bar just before the lights came back on. It was the most gripping part of the movie—the part where Arlena Marshall’s body is discovered—and he was banking on the fact that nobody would notice that he was alone. Or if they did, they would later assume that Kat joined him at the bar soon after.

  Meanwhile, Maz had morphed from a sickly, curly haired pregnant woman into a drunken blonde with her trademark white glasses and fedora, a flowing skirt, and a large suede jacket to hide her pregnant bulge.

  And so she slipped out of the Portaloos and over to the Booze Bar to join Eliot near the counter. And there she played the role of her life—faking a fight with her “husband” in fr
ont of a queue of strangers, including Alicia and Lynette, who had no idea it wasn’t really Kat because, well, they hadn’t really seen Kat properly, had they? She had been huddled under Eliot’s arm when she first arrived.

  And so the fight scene played out perfectly with one intention and one intention only—to provide Eliot Mumford with an airtight alibi. With the curious queue watching on, he stormed off to sit alone, a safe distance from his “wife,” while his “wife” continued to make her presence known, staggering first to the snack bar, then when the lights were low enough, back to the red blanket to settle in all alone—and very much alive.

  Kat had to be alive at the start of the second half! Scores of witnesses had seen her, right?

  While Eliot perched beside the book club, fake Kat pretended to fall asleep below her blanket. Yet all the while, the real Kat was already dead and now lying with one arm over her stomach, under Maz’s pink rug, looking like a sick pregnant woman, not a corpse.

  At some point in that second half, only one witness could confirm, fake “Kat” slipped away to the Portaloos, returning five minutes later, sans her disguise, as the real Maz. Then all Maz had to do was plonk down on the other side of Kat’s lifeless body.

  With so many eyes on the screen above, so many bodies sprawled on blankets, and so many people reaching over each other to fetch drinks, cuddle up and move about, it would not have been too hard for Maz to then slip Kat’s belongings back or to nudge her slowly but subtly to her original position under the red blanket.

  And yet she made one niggling error.

  While she had returned Kat’s fedora, Maz had forgotten to give back the glasses. They probably got caught up in her own blanket or in the backpack she’d brought along. Alicia guessed that the police would find a pricey pair of Guccis somewhere among Maz’s belongings. They cost a small fortune, and she wasn’t exactly flush, so there was every chance she hadn’t disposed of them.