by Fiona Leitch
“I got Louise back to her cabin and sent Rob away before he blurted out anything else. She threw up on me, stupid bitch, so I took off my nun’s costume and went to wash it off in the bathroom. When I went back into the bedroom she was struggling to sit up and she said she’d tell you what I’d done. I was so angry with her for taking your drink and ruining everything, then bloody puking on me, that I just grabbed the corkscrew and stuck it in her neck.” She ran a hand through her hair, and I could see that her fingers were trembling. “That sobered her up. She tried to get up and ended up on the floor.”
“But Joel came to the cabin - ”
She laughed scornfully. “Joel’s bloody useless, isn’t he? I mean he’s hot, I can see why you’d want him, but he’s not long term partner material. He stuck his head round the door but he obviously didn’t really want to get involved. I was just coming out of the bathroom - I had to look in the mirror to get my wimple straight - and he was right there. If he’d come any further in he’d have seen her lying on the floor. I told him she was throwing up and ‘spoke’ to her in the bathroom. I pretended to hear her reply and Joel, desperate as he was not to have to deal with her, thought he heard her too.”
“And all the time you were doing that, she was bleeding to death at your feet.”
“Yes.”
“But you must’ve been covered in her blood?”
“I was.” She looked down at her hands. “My hands and face, my chest… I wiped the bits that showed on her bedding, then just put the nun’s habit back on."
I looked at her in horror. “So you spent the rest of the night sitting in the Pearl, covered in Louise’s blood under your costume?”
“I didn’t know what else to do!” she said, almost pleadingly. Well she could plead as much as she wanted to, I was never going to have any sympathy for someone who had already killed three people and was eyeing up a fourth - all over a sodding book.
“So when did you decide to frame me?” I asked, and she sniggered. She was clearly barking mad. I wasn’t sure if she’d been mental before getting on the ship or if murdering Louise had driven her around the bend.
“I thought it would be poetic justice if you got the credit for my work again,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t be the last one to see her alive, so I decided to ring the purser’s desk - I knew there was a phone in the store room because Rob and I had had a - what do you call it?”
“Shag?”
“An assignation in there earlier.”
“I was right, a shag. How unhygienic. And then you rang your own phone to give yourself an alibi, knowing that everyone had heard that stupid ring tone.”
She smirked. “I know, how brilliant was that? I love that song. I was annoyed when my husband rang me earlier - I suppose he was trying to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid - ”
“That worked well,” I humphed. She ignored me.
“He didn’t realise he was helping to give me an alibi. Which makes it all the sweeter…”
Chapter 32
As Zoé smiled and looked irritatingly pleased with herself, I leant against the railing and let my hand drop to my side. I felt the reassuring shape of my own mobile phone in my pocket and prayed I hadn’t inadvertently knocked it. I couldn’t believe that I’d managed to slip it into my trousers as we left the Pearl without her noticing, but then she’d been distracted by the iPad and by the thought that Will was on his way, hurrying to get away before he arrived.
“So you killed Louise,” I said, “and you gave yourself a brilliant alibi. You were never even on my list of suspects because I just assumed you were in the Pearl when the phone call was made. And then when Joel turned up - to carry on as if nothing had happened - to tell him she was asleep and then just leave her there, dying - you’re a psychopath!”
Zoé shrugged. “Whatever. At least I’m not a plagiarist.”
I gritted my teeth. “I didn’t steal your bloody story! And anyway, I think murdering three people trumps plagiarism, don’t you? Which leads me to ask - why did you murder Sylvia? Up to that point I was looking good for it, but you planted my belt on her and that was just too obvious. Harry Carter was convinced it was me, but even he started to have doubts after that.” I looked at her. “And how did you get hold of my belt? And my corkscrew?”
“Don’t you remember?” She smirked at me, and then I remembered. I groaned.
“You came to see me in my cabin the morning afterwards,” I said. “Checking up on me, being a good friend… You took the corkscrew then, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “I hadn’t planned to, but it was there on the table. I saw it was a fancy one like Louise’s, and I knew mine wasn’t like that, so I was hoping it would narrow the field of suspects down a bit. And there was a key card on the side, so I took that too, just in case it came in handy. And of course, it did.”
“You came in a couple of nights later and took my kimono belt,” I said. “I knew someone had been in there. And you put the key card back so we wouldn’t notice it was missing.”
“I couldn’t believe you hadn’t already,” she said. “Really, so careless leaving it lying around like that, anyone could’ve picked it up.”
“Anyone did,” I said shortly. “But poor Sylvia…”
“It was a toss up between her and Heather,” said Zoé. “Heather was winding me up. She was so convinced of your innocence and she wouldn’t shut up about it, but I could see Sylvia wasn’t sure. When I started listing all the evidence against you, the cracks really started appearing - even Michael half-thinks you did it now. I wanted to shut Heather up, but I thought it would make more sense for you to murder Sylvia, so she had to go. I told her I’d discovered something that proved you’d done it, but I was too scared to go to the Captain or Harry Carter in case they told you about it. I asked her to meet me in the Gatsby, because I knew you wouldn’t be there and it would be quiet.”
“You were taking a big risk, though,” I said, and she smirked again.
“Oh but I never went to the Gatsby,” she said. “An unknown steward went there instead…”
“Of course - you’d already bumped off Rob to keep him quiet, and you went to his cabin and took his uniform.”
“The stewards have got caps as well, although most of them only wear them during the welcome aboard party,” she said. “I took that as well and tucked my hair up inside it. I walked straight past Harvey and Michael and they didn’t even notice me. No one looks at you once you put a uniform on. All the stewards blend in with each other, don’t they? That’s how I got your corkscrew into Louise’s room too.”
“So you waited for Sylvia and suffocated her with a plastic bag. That must’ve taken some doing.”
“I’m stronger than I look.” Zoé almost looked proud of herself. Mad bitch.
“When did you kill Rob?”
“That night, after the murder - ”
“Which one?”
“You know which one. Louise’s. He was already panicking about slipping her the drug, and I knew that once he heard she’d died - well, I had to get to him quick, before he had a chance to confess to the Captain.”
“So you lured him up here, to the life boats where you’d first met him, for a shag before dispatching him. Classy.”
“He was stronger than Sylvia, wasn’t he? I had to get him to let his guard down. If it’s any consolation, he wasn’t a very nice person and he died happy.”
“You really are completely bloody bonkers. You feel absolutely no guilt about any of this, do you?” I could see on her face that she really didn’t grasp what she’d done. In her eyes, she’d been totally justified - because I’d stolen her idea.
Let me be honest here: all writers worry at some point in their career about having inadvertently stolen an idea. I don’t mean we read someone’s unpublished manuscript and go, ‘oh yeah, I’ll have a bit of that!’, more that, like everyone else, we watch stuff on the telly and read other books and go to movi
es, and some stuff just kind of sticks. Add to that the fact that there are only so many plots to go around, so many character archetypes, so many locations and settings and, I dunno, names - at some point there’s going to be that nagging little voice that asks (quietly but insistently) where that idea came from. Sometimes I’ve come up with something that I think is so cool it worries me, because I think I can’t possibly have invented something that good.
If Zoé had been talking about any other book of mine than the one I’d written about my time in Venice, when I’d met Will, I might have had one of those moments of worry; because who can honestly say, hand on heart, that they’ve never been influenced by someone else’s work to some degree? But that book came straight from my own experience and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that any similarities between her work and mine were just a coincidence.
Besides which, she had just confessed, quite proudly, to murdering three people…
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“You die.”
“Yeah, I guessed that bit.” I rolled my eyes. “I meant, let’s assume you’ve just killed me, what happens now? Do you really expect to get away with it?”
“I don’t see why not.” She smiled. I was looking forward to wiping that smug (if somewhat insane) look off her face. “Like you said, I’m not a suspect. I was never even on anyone’s radar.”
“Hmm, I dunno. Will thought there was something weird about you.” I laughed. “Understatement or what? ‘Weird’! I should bloody say so.” She looked angry but I spoke again before she could say anything. “No, what I really mean is, how do you expect to get away when you’ve just done exactly what you said you wouldn’t do and told me everything?”
“Yeah, well that won’t be a problem when you’re dead, will it?” She took a step towards me, drawing her arm back ready to thrust the knife in. I sent up a silent cry for help: please be there…
I pulled out my mobile phone and held it up. “It might still be a teeny bit of a problem, seeing as we’ve just been broadcasting live on Facebook.” I risked a glance at the phone screen and was relieved to see that I actually had hit the Facebook live icon as I’d stuffed it in my pocket, and not the Amazon app instead, which would have been both embarrassing and possibly fatal. And I might have inadvertently bought something I didn’t want, and you know what some Amazon sellers are like when it comes to refunds…
“What?!” Zoé shrieked in horror and made a grab for the phone, dropping the knife. I let her take it, gazing over her shoulder as she stared at it.
“Ooh, look how many ‘likes’ we’ve got!” I said. “I do have a lot of followers. Let’s read some of the comments - ”
Zoé gave what could only be described as a howl of rage and threw herself at me, hitting me with her full bodyweight - which, next to mine, was a bit puny, but still heavy enough to knock all the air out of me as I hit the metal railing. She pulled back and drew back her arm to hit me -
“Oh no you don’t!” Will grabbed her arm and she howled again, as Joel took hold of her other arm. I looked up to see them standing behind her and felt relief wash over me.
“About bloody time!” I said, then swayed a bit as I realised how close a call I’d just had. Will let go of Zoé, handing her over to Joel, and took me in his arms; I wasn’t sure if he was hugging me or holding me up, but at that moment I needed both so I wasn’t fussed either way.
“Are you okay?” Will held me tight, his face buried in my hair, and I heard him take a deep, shuddery breath. Evidently it had been a bit close for him, too.
“Sorry we took a while, we had to make sure she confessed to everything,” said Joel. “It was a bit hard to hear what she was saying - ”
Will must have felt me freeze because he squeezed me and said, “It’s alright, we got enough. She won’t be going anywhere.”
Suddenly Zoé stamped down hard on Joel’s foot. Joel must’ve relaxed his grip slightly as he spoke to me, because the next thing we knew she’d freed herself and flown at me and Will. Will whirled me around, out of her way, but she had too much momentum to stop. Zoé screamed as she hit the railing, which was quite low here, and went straight over the top.
“Oh my god!” I rushed to the railing and looked over, expecting to see her thrashing about in the water below - that was certainly what she’d had planned for my body - but this deck was narrower than the one below, leaving room for the lifeboats to hang and then be winched out over the water during an evacuation. Zoé landed on the metal deck beneath us with a loud thud, which knocked her out cold.
“Is she dead?” cried Joel, looking down on her twisted body. A groan escaped her.
“No, but that’s got to hurt,” said Will. We all shared a look.
“Shame,” I said.
Chapter 33
So Zoé, the previously air headed but harmless bookseller turned psychotic murderer, lived. The ship’s doctor was called, and she was loaded onto a stretcher and taken away to where Harry Carter was waiting for her.
Meanwhile Will, Joel and I went to get a stiff drink.
“You took your time,” I said to Will. “I was hoping you’d find me before we left the Pearl.”
He smiled. “Sorry. Better late than never. If I’d known you were with Zoé though I’d have warned you.” He looked at my confused face. “The email Carmen sent me - I’d asked her to dig up some back ground on a few of our fellow passengers. Zoé, Peter and Lauren - ” He stopped abruptly, glancing at Joel. Joel noticed and shrugged.
“I’d probably have done the same in your position,” he said. “Did you find anything interesting?”
“About you? Not a thing.” Will grinned at him. “I didn’t have much to go on with Zoé, just this feeling. I got Carmen to check up on her job. You remember she said she’d won her place on the cruise, for being top salesperson in a bookstore chain?” I nodded. “She said it was Montgomery’s Books, but when Carmen checked she discovered they’d let her go last year after an incident.”
“An incident?” I asked. Will nodded.
“That’s all they would tell her. ‘An incident’. She had to buy her own ticket. Why would she lie about that? It made me wonder what else she was hiding.”
“Susie rang me - ”
“She rang me too,” said Will, and Joel nodded.
“Yeah, and me. I didn’t even know she still had my number.”
“She rang me and said you’d abruptly put the phone down on her, and that you’d sounded a bit funny,” said Will. “And then she told me about this woman who was accusing you of plagiarism…”
I gulped at my drink, the warmth of the alcohol helping to calm the trembling in my fingers, although I suspected it would take a few more to stop it completely.
“When I grabbed the phone I wanted to call you, but I only had a couple of seconds while that mad cow’s attention was elsewhere. I clicked the Facebook icon by accident as I picked it up, so the easiest and quickest thing to do was hit the live video button and hope the phone would pick up what we were saying.”
“You could have been a bit more blatant when you said you’d returned to the scene of the crime,” said Joel. “There have been quite a few crime scenes.”
“How did you know I was on Facebook?” I said. “I was hoping you’d get a notification or something.”
Joel nodded and I was surprised. He looked defensive. “I never got round to unfriending you.”
“You know I don’t really do social media,” said Will. “But Susie saw it and rang me again straight away. Joel came and found me, and then we followed your trail.”
“And you saved me. Both of you. My heroes!” I raised my glass to them both, and knocked back what was left of my drink. Joel grinned and followed suit, then so did Will, more hesitantly.
The Captain came and found us, and the Chief Purser, and by then the news was out all over the ship. Heather came and cried on me for a bit, relieved to have found out who had kille
d her best friend, and I think relieved that she hadn’t been wrong about me. Harvey and Michael came and hugged me, Michael slightly shamefaced, although I told him I would have had doubts about me in his place too. I wouldn’t have, but it didn’t hurt to be magnanimous.
I looked at Will across the by-now crowded bar and gave him my ‘rescue me’ look - it had come in handy a few times, when we’d been at book events and I’d been accosted by over-enthusiastic fans. I’m an extroverted introvert; I do like socialising, but I get to a certain point and it’s all just too much.
It had been a long day…
Will shouldered his way through the crowd and took my hand, pulling me gently to my feet and slipping an arm around my waist.
“I think Bella needs a lie down now,” he said, looking around. “She’s been through a lot.”
The crowd looked a bit disappointed - they hadn’t all had the chance to hear me recount my adventures first hand - but they made understanding noises and stood aside to let me through.
We got back to our cabin. It felt like it had been a very long time since we’d got up that morning, and there had been points where I hadn’t been sure I’d ever see this room again.
Will kissed me gently, and held me as I cried small but exhausted tears. This trip had been emotional, and I was glad it was coming to an end tomorrow. Then we undressed and made slow, tender love until we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
I woke the next morning fizzing with excitement. We were nearing New York, one of my favourite cities (in small doses) in the world! And I’d solved three murders, cleared my name, and survived an attack by an insane ex-bookseller. I leapt out of bed, filled with a kind of mad, manic energy; I felt ready for anything, but settled for putting the kettle on.
Will however had different ideas, and was still fast asleep. Even the boiling kettle and the scent of that first cup of tea of the day wafted under his nostrils couldn’t make him keep his eyes open.