THE SUPPER CLUB MURDERS a gripping murder mystery packed with twists (Smart Woman's Mystery Book 3)

by VICTORIA DOWD

  She turned down her mouth.

  ‘I think I shall go and make us all a strong pot of tea. It might bring a little sense.’ Mrs Abaddon walked out of the room without waiting for permission.

  That’s when I noticed Tony Voyeur lingering by the door, intent on his slow exit from the room unnoticed by anyone else.

  ‘Wait, please, Mr Voyeur,’ I said.

  He paused at the door.

  ‘Can I ask you about your magic?’

  ‘Oh, not this again,’ Gerald groaned. ‘It’s not a trained monkey and it’s not black magic.’

  Mother looked disappointed. ‘Ursula, this is no time for playing tricks with David Copperfield.’

  ‘I prefer Oliver Twist.’ Aunt Charlotte nodded trying to look learned.

  ‘May I see your hand?’ I said to Tony Voyeur as I walked towards him.

  He hesitated before holding it out. Clearly, he knew which one I was asking to see. Carefully, I reached out and held it.

  ‘If you’d like a séance, dear, my rates are very reasonable. We could try and contact His Lordship. Maybe he can help. Table tipping is very good, or Ouija board.’ He smiled and I could see his yellowing teeth.

  ‘No, no, no! No more fortune tellers,’ Aunt Charlotte said defiantly.

  Tony Voyeur gave her a decidedly disgruntled look. ‘It’s not fortune telling. It’s communing with the spirits.’

  ‘They already know all about that,’ Bridget said snidely, looking at me.

  I ignored her and turned over the magician’s hand, and there was the coin, nestled at the bottom of his fingers and wedged into the top of his palm.

  He looked at me sheepishly. ‘We all have our tricks, dear.’ He glanced across at where Dad’s shadow lingered in the corner before giving me a knowing look.

  My eyes widened. I looked back at his hand. ‘How does it stay there? Your grip?’

  He looked into my eyes without blinking. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘It’s magic.’

  I reached out to take it with my other hand but he pulled back. He then picked up the coin himself and held it out to me. I took it slowly, but before he could take his hand away, I wedged it back into his palm and it stuck.

  I looked into his surprised face. ‘We all have our tricks,’ I said.

  Mother looked frustrated. ‘Are you going to tell us just what exactly is going on, Houdini?’

  Aunt Charlotte opened her mouth to speak, but Mother silenced her with The Look.

  ‘Ursula, why don’t you make all the attention worthwhile,’ Bridget said sourly.

  I ignored her. ‘It’s his ring.’

  ‘Disgusting.’ Aunt Charlotte turned away.

  ‘His ring. On his finger, Aunt Charlotte. It’s a magnet.’

  He stood very still.

  ‘Watch.’ I turned his hand over so the palm was facing downwards. The coin didn’t fall.

  ‘There are two coins. One he places on top of the glass table and covers with his hand. The other coin is stuck to his ring, holding it in place against the palm of the other hand, which he places under the table. He takes away the top hand and the coin, which he hides. He then displays the second coin, which has come from underneath the table. It appears to the audience that the coin has passed through the table. Am I correct, Mr Voyeur?’

  ‘I hated kids like you.’ Tony Voyeur leaned into my face. ‘Do you know what it’s like for entertainers?’

  ‘Every time.’ Mother shook her head. ‘Always the child who went up and revealed the magician’s trick. Why do we need to expose this sad man quite so publicly?’

  ‘Please, no exposing of him, for God’s sake!’ Aunt Charlotte flapped her hands.

  ‘Mother! Aunt Charlotte! The crucial point is it’s a magnet!’

  ‘So?’ Mother stared at me.

  ‘It works through the table.’

  ‘Yes and . . .’

  ‘The glass table. If you turn the trick upside down, it still works. He could just hold the coin under the table and his hand with the ring on it would keep the coin in place.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Verity gasped.

  ‘What?’ Aunt Charlotte said.

  Bridget was looking very smug. ‘Oh yes. Yes, I see. Perhaps if we’d taken the time to listen to me earlier, we might all know why this was significant.’ She cast a smile around us all.

  ‘Well?’ Mother prompted.

  ‘Oh, so you want to listen to me now?’ Bridget stroked her villain’s cat.

  ‘For God’s sake, someone just tell us before there’s another murder.’

  Bridget pursed her lips. ‘Mr Bradshaw.’ Her eyes flicked over to him. ‘Could you please tell us a little more about your detectoring?’

  Gerald Bradshaw looked surprised but somewhat pleased. ‘Of course. What would you like to know?’

  ‘About your equipment.’

  ‘Bridget!’ Aunt Charlotte looked shocked.

  ‘Quiet!’ Bridget said firmly. ‘Your equipment went missing, yes?’

  He nodded.

  I could feel Tony Voyeur looking at me, but I didn’t look back.

  ‘And we met you on your way to . . .’

  ‘The moat.’

  ‘The moat.’

  ‘Yes, the moat. I’ve found coins, shields, bits of armour and . . . What is this? Why am I being cross-examined here?’

  Bridget slipped out a smile. ‘Oh, this is just an informal inquiry, sir. The cross-examination will come later. Now, tell the ladies and gentlemen. Do you often go “detectoring” around the moat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ Bridget looked wrong-footed.

  ‘Around the moat isn’t very profitable.’

  ‘No,’ I repeated slowly. ‘That’s why Harriet said it! That’s the key to it all!’ All eyes flicked back to me.

  Mirabelle leaned forward. ‘What?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mother sighed. ‘What’s the key to it all?’

  ‘Shopping trolleys!’ I announced.

  ‘Oh, Ursula. Really.’ Mother turned away.

  ‘Think! We’ve all seen the moat. There aren’t any shopping trolleys. No one dumps them by the side of a moat. Where do you get shopping trolleys?’

  ‘Wandsworth Bridge Sainsbury’s?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Charlotte, thank you. Now I see why Harriet Bradshaw said “shopping trolleys”. I understand! They’re not dumped at castles or the sides of moats. Where are they dumped?’ I looked around. ‘In the water. Rivers, canals and, it would seem, moats. You’re not looking around the moat. You’re looking in the water, aren’t you?’

  ‘In?’ Mother whispered.

  The monkey made a slight ‘oo’ sound but fell immediately quiet when Marsha looked at it.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. That’s what I said, isn’t it? There’s so much more to find in there.’ Gerald was becoming more animated. ‘I’ve found some old coins, a musket and, like you say, there is for some reason always an unhealthy amount of shopping trolleys in bodies of water!’

  ‘I don’t care.’ Bridget shook her head.

  ‘I do! It’s my moat,’ Marsha said.

  ‘How quick she is to say “my”,’ Lucy Morello noted.

  They traded venomous looks again.

  ‘I can’t imagine why anyone would want to climb in that filthy water. That’s suspicious enough in my book.’ Mirabelle pushed the cat away and looked guiltily at Bridget.

  ‘I don’t get in the water,’ Gerald said. ‘I don’t need to.’

  ‘OK, well, would you like to talk us through what exactly you are doing?’ I gave him an encouraging smile.

  He looked around us as if some great honour had been bestowed upon him. He cleared his throat in readiness. ‘Fishing.’

  ‘Fishing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But sometimes your “catch” is quite heavy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yet you don’t go in?’

  ‘No, I stand on the bank. Like most fishermen. I use . . .’

 
‘A magnet,’ I said slowly.

  He nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s it. Magnet fishing. That’s how you’d expect to fish for metal, isn’t it, young lady? It’s all the rage now with detectorists who want to explore underwater. Basically, there’s a thick nylon rope.’

  My mind snapped to the blue rope wrapped around Jocasta’s limp body.

  ‘There’s a grappling hook and a super-strong neodymium magnet attached to the line. It’s relatively small. Would fit in the palm of your hand. You just throw it all in and see what it brings up. People find all sorts of things. Lots of abandoned shopping trolleys though. Makes you wonder why.’

  ‘Yes, doesn’t it?’ Aunt Charlotte nodded.

  ‘If we can just bring it back from that,’ I said. ‘Back to the trick.’

  ‘What?’ Gerald looked genuinely affronted.

  ‘Your magnet is very strong, yes?’

  ‘It was, until it was stolen. I told you, my detectorist’s kit was stolen.’

  ‘Could it work through glass?’

  ‘Yes, of course it could.’

  The room paused. I spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘And just as Mr Voyeur’s magnet can hold a coin through the glass, so your very strong magnet could perform Mr Voyeur’s trick but with a cannonball suspended on the other side of the glass, yes?’

  I heard Verity take a sharp breath. The whole room seemed to glisten with interest now.

  He nodded once. ‘It could, but it would just hold it there. It won’t drop.’

  ‘Until the strong nylon rope was pulled away, yes?’

  ‘That’s correct. You’d still need someone to gather the rope in. You’d need to pull the magnet away from the glass.’

  ‘Or you could use a mechanism, a very strong mechanism built for lifting something heavy, if someone wound the rope around that mechanism — say, as the gates descended?’

  The monkey made a small, excited noise again.

  Gerald nodded and everything was replaced with silence.

  ‘So, someone could go up into the gatehouse and place your fishing line magnet on top of the glass in the murder hole and secure the rope around the portcullis mechanism. Then, if they came down the stairs and pushed Joseph’s trolley over in order to climb up to the ceiling, and held up a cannonball to the glass, it would stay there. And could stay there all day?’

  Gerald nodded again, more slowly this time.

  ‘Once the cannonball is held in place by the magnet on the other side of the glass, they climb down and move the trolley away. Then, when the portcullis fell, the rope would be pulled back, pulling the magnet away and releasing the cannonball, while both gates came down. Yes?’

  ‘That would work, yes.’ He spoke quietly as if the full meaning of his words was still percolating.

  ‘You would be left with a man on his own, with the gates down and a cannonball that had fallen from a solid, immoveable glass roof, yes?’

  He didn’t need to answer.

  ‘And anyone could clear away the magnet, which you said was as small as the palm of your hand, and the rope.’

  ‘No one went up there until the next day,’ Marsha said.

  ‘Only we know that they did, because Gerald’s rope was used to tie up Jocasta.’

  ‘Anyone could have taken that stuff away,’ Mother added. ‘There would have been plenty of time for someone to slip up there. We’d raised the portcullis and gone to Verity’s. Then we separated out. Plenty of people were on their own. It would have been so easy for someone from the village or any of the rooms in the castle to slip out at any time, get the magnet, kill Jocasta and then head off to the sleeping vicar.’

  ‘It could be anyone,’ Aunt Charlotte said in wonder.

  ‘Ingenious!’ smiled Bridget. ‘And to think I cracked it!’

  ‘Woah there!’ I stammered. ‘I worked out the trick. The magnet behind the glass.’

  ‘To be fair, I worked that out first,’ Tony Voyeur offered.

  ‘Yes, you did know how to do it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, come on, everyone here’s seen that trick a hundred times. I freely admit that.’

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ Bridget commanded. ‘It means the portcullis operation is the focal point. To put the scheme into operation and pull back the rope that had to move. There were only three ways that it could be lowered — the remote, the override and the control panel up in the castle. Only one person had access to all of those.’

  Everyone turned to look at Marsha, and the monkey let out a scream of excitement as if somehow his scheme had worked. And in that very strange moment, it seemed as if the monkey had framed the lady of the house.

  CHAPTER 32: ANNOUNCING A MURDERER

  ‘So, we’re all just coming back round to it being me then, is that it?’ Marsha glared.

  ‘You see, it’s often the most obvious person,’ Aunt Charlotte nodded confidently.

  ‘Motive is a very powerful clue.’ Bridget was looking very self-satisfied again, so we braced ourselves.

  ‘That bitch hated him,’ Lucy Morello spat. ‘That’s motive enough. He was trying to divorce her and leave her without any money or her precious castle. This way she could get rid of him and have everything she wanted.’

  I looked round the room. ‘Surely if she was planning that and such a complicated way of killing him, she wouldn’t leave herself as the only person here, with the remote control in her bag. She’s left herself as the ridiculously overwhelming main suspect.’

  Lucy Morello tightened her mouth.

  ‘You thought you might benefit from his will, didn’t you?’ Mother added.

  The girl sniffed and flicked her head dismissively. ‘I did not. She’s the beneficiary. It’s a lot, all this.’ She waved her hand round the room. ‘She’s not so old. Maybe she thought it was worth doing the time for.’

  ‘We know that’s not a possibility,’ I said. ‘Remember? The Forfeiture Rule? Aunt Charlotte’s favourite — a person criminally responsible for the death of another person cannot inherit as a result of their criminal act.’ I waited.

  And then the darkest part of my thoughts lit up with an idea. ‘We go back to the beginning and we look at it from another angle. We turn the trick around and look at it upside down. The remote control is in Marsha’s bag — very visibly. Why is the platform with wheels there? Who knew the secret system of tunnels that led under the graveyard and beyond to move around and dispose of the vicar’s body?’ I thought back to the scratching and dragging I’d heard in the walls. ‘How is it that Lord Elzevir ended up on his own? Why are we here?’

  ‘We were invited.’ Mother frowned.

  ‘Some of us were.’ Bridget couldn’t help herself.

  ‘By whom?’ I asked. ‘The lady who plans to kill her husband? She could have done that any day of the week and looked a lot less guilty than this!’ I shook my head. ‘No. We must start to look at the questions fairly. We must see each person as equal and then the answers come flooding in.’ I bent down and tapped my fingernail rhythmically on the table until it was the only sound in the room. I carried on, everyone just watching. Listening.

  ‘By the tapping of my finger something wicked this way comes,’ Bridget said, as if a light had just turned on for her too.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Mother doesn’t like other people understanding things when she doesn’t.

  I stopped tapping my finger and the room was quiet. ‘There was no tapping.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mother, listen. Something has been itching at me since the beginning of all this. I see it now. I hear it. Or at least I didn’t hear it. There was no tapping, but there should have been, shouldn’t there, Verity?’

  All our eyes travelled towards the woman sitting calmly in the chair with her cane by her side.

  ‘When we surprised her by going back there, when Marsha took us there and hammered on the door, it was Verity who answered — very quickly, I recall. And there was no tap, tap, tap of her cane on the stone floor as ther
e had been everywhere else she’d walked previously. Marsha lunged forward towards Verity in front of everyone else. She embraced her, and I remember Verity’s hand was on hers, meaning Marsha’s was under Verity’s. Marsha’s hand would not have been under Verity’s if Verity was holding the cane in the first place. Verity, you’d put your hand on top of Marsha’s as she handed you the cane, hadn’t you Verity? You’d walked to the door quickly and without a cane. Because you don’t need a cane, do you?’

  Lee Colman stood close by her, looking down at the woman. ‘Verity?’

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t look at him. She stared straight ahead, tears flaring in her eyes.

  Bridget continued now with relish. ‘Yes, oh yes,’ she beamed. She clapped her hands. ‘I knew it! This makes so much sense now.’

  I continued, vaguely off-balance from Bridget’s enthusiastic agreement.

  ‘Marsha looked so clearly guilty. She always has — ridiculously so. In fact, she’s always looked so guilty that it started to look to me as though she was being framed. Surely no one would leave this amount of evidence pointing to themselves. No one would leave themselves so obviously as the suspect — alone in the castle, the only one with access to any of the means to lower the gate. So I asked myself, why is Lord Elzevir dead? Everyone seemed to have a motive but they were all tied up in vengeance for past misdemeanours. The Peacocks hadn’t been paid their money, the Bradshaws were cross about the perceived loss of heritage, even you, Joseph Greengage, had an affair with his wife.’

  ‘Hey, wait a minute, that was a one-off—’

  Mother held up a silencing hand. ‘But I don’t think we’re looking at vengeance here, Ursula.’

  ‘No, Mother. It all makes sense now. Someone set this up and, in the process, set Marsha up too. This took a lot of planning didn’t it, Verity?’

  She sat still, quietly staring.

  ‘So we go back to the beginning with my questions but now armed with the knowledge that Verity is able-bodied and does not need a stick to walk. It all looks very different, indeed.’ I nodded to myself.

  ‘Verity?’ Lee Colman repeated. ‘Say something.’

  She looked up at him. ‘What can I say, Lee? The girl is right. I don’t need the stick anymore. I . . .’ Her head collapsed into her hands. ‘I haven’t for a long time.’