The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Part 51

Lady Angela looked around again. "That she'd arranged for the fire. She was quite unrepentant. As far as she was concerned, Rory had been seduced by the wretched girl and it was up to Mary to deal with her. I imagine lawyers know lots of unsavoury people to do jobs like that."

Various obscenities ran through the inspector's mind. Then he took out his phone and called Andrew Garvie.

Mary Thatcher denied everything. She was a lawyer, so she was good at denial. Sir Rory refused to corroborate Lady Angela's statement. In the lack of further evidence, no charges were brought. The media learned nothing about the development and interest in the case began to fade.

Jimmy Bain was summoned by his boss.

"I'm taking you off the case, Inspector," Garvie said. "It needs a fresh approach."

"It needs someone to question Mary Thatcher properly," Bain said, his cheeks aflame. "Why didn't you let me do it?"

The superintendent glanced at him. "Because the Chief a.s.signed me."

The inspector had been doing some digging. "Does the Chief know that you play golf with Sir Rory Ferguson and Donald Farrelly?"

Garvie raised his shoulders. "Is that of significance?"

"Aye!' Jimmy Bain shouted. "It is of b.l.o.o.d.y significance! This is not a victimless crime. A girl was murdered!"

More words were exchanged before the inspector withdrew.

Three weeks later, Mary Thatcher, who had recently divorced, was bludgeoned to death in the garden of her weekend house in Berwickshire. Her four-year-old son was asleep upstairs. Suspicion immediately fell on the father of the dead au pair, but he had the perfect alibi he had been shooting moose in the mountains east of Bergen with three friends. He never mentioned the anonymous e-mail he had received and immediately deleted, and he knew the former French Foreign Legion man he used for special operations would keep his well-paid mouth shut.

Jimmy Bain had also deleted the message after he sent it from a cyber-cafe in central Edinburgh. Next door was a branch of the bank Sir Rory Ferguson had run into the ground. It was being turned into an "Everything for a Pound" shop. The inspector didn't know that Mrs Thatcher was a mother.

AND HERE'S THE NEXT CLUE . . .

Amy Myers.

MR PERCY PIP had always yearned to be a crime writer. From his careful study of how to break into the market with an eye-catching potential bestseller, he realized that two obstacles lay in his path to stardom. The first was his name, which if displayed in large lettering across the dust-jacket would not instantly attract an enthusiastic readership. The second was somewhat more of a problem. He had learned that rule number one in achieving one's goal was to write about what you knew, but so far Percy had never committed a murder.

Percy Pip therefore took steps to remedy both of his shortcomings. First, he selected a nom de plume for his new occupation. This would be part-time of course, since rule number two for crime writing was not to give up the day job. When he became a household name, he might reconsider this decision but until then his employers could be rea.s.sured of his loyalty, especially as his job dovetailed nicely with his criminal purposes.

Secondly, he began to make meticulous preparations for his first murder. Unfortunately, this would have to be the first of several, since rule number three, so it appeared from his perusal of booksellers' crime sections, was that a serial killer was an essential feature. The golden days of the lone murder, or even of two (permitted in order to keep the investigation going for 256 pages), were long since over. No, three had to be the minimum, with the necessary clues, preferably gruesome, to indicate that a series was in progress.

"What do you mean, crime scene?"

Dr Jonathan Fuller, the director of Mystery Unravelled: Crime-writing Courses Ltd., looked aghast. He had put on several successful workshops all over the country without the intervention of a corpse, and the cause of his distress hovered between his own position and wondering who amongst his current group might be a real-life murderer. Janice Dove's dead body had just been removed from the hotel, having been found in her room by his a.s.sistant Mavis Sharp, after Janice had failed to appear for breakfast. Since then the workshop's peaceful discussion of the criminal viewpoint in fiction had given way to an all too real influx of police, doctors, and scientists clad in white scene suits.

"Just routine, sir," the investigating officer said rea.s.suringly. "Suspicious death, you see."

"But surely it was a heart attack or perhaps food poisoning," Jonathan croaked. "The staff . . . "

"Poisoning's possible," was the not so rea.s.suring reply. "Was anyone else taken ill?"

"Not to my knowledge. After dinner at 7.30 some people prefer to go their own way or retire early," Jonathan explained, "but I heard nothing mentioned at breakfast about ill-effects."

Jonathan's weekend courses took place in hired conference facilities in a country house hotel in varied locations. In the current one, in Suffolk, the facilities had seemed the best yet, with his party of two dozen completely separated from the rest of the guests, although this, he realized, would focus the investigation on his own pupils. After all, Janice Dove was known from previous courses to several of the partic.i.p.ants here. Many of them around him now were eager, no doubt, to pick up such gems of police procedure as they could. He found himself automatically answering the inspector's questions. No, this was not the first workshop that Miss Dove had attended. Yes, she was an aspiring writer.

"Such a gift," he added weakly. "She showed me her latest rejection slip, on which the agent had written a personal encouraging comment."

The inspector was not interested in rejection slips. "We'll need all the information you have on Miss Dove. Do you know what she ate for dinner?"

Jonathan looked uncertain. "I expect it was the stew. It was a buffet. We were moving around little tables, you know the sort of thing. Most people-"

"Fish," one of his group, Paul Merlin, interrupted firmly. "Janice chose the fish. It had prawns in it."

"She had stew," Mavis Sharp retorted equally firmly. "I saw this morning that Janice had been sick. It was stew, and plum crumble, I think."

"Sharp of eye as well as by name, eh?" the inspector said jovially. "You found the body, didn't you?"

"I did." Mavis looked modest. "Of course my profession helps." She was the author of six lurid whodunits, one of which had actually received a review in a newspaper.

"We make a strong team. Miss Sharp is cosy, whereas I am hard-boiled," Jonathan explained, receiving a strange look for his pains.

"The two types of crime novel," Mavis explained briskly. "The Agatha Christie school versus the tough brigade."

The inspector's brow cleared. "Rebus!"

As a hat had been thrown into the ring, Mavis felt the need to distance herself from the cosier cosies. "Of course, I am in the modern Agatha Christie school."

Another strange look, this time for Mavis. The inspector decided to move on. "And all of you were strangers to each other?" He cast a glance over the crowd before him.

"No." Jonathan steeled himself to speak for his little flock. "The venue and subject matter of these workshops change, but their value is so great that some of my students come to more than one. I believe there are about eight regulars here today."

To Jonathan's eye they all still looked unlikely candidates for the role of murderer, and none of them so far as he knew had had any close relationship with Janice Dove, who was in her fifties and hardly likely to catch the eye of an idealistic crime writer looking for a model moll.

Among the eight, three were prominent in terms of potential troublemakers, in Jonathan's opinion. One was David Patterson, an ex-policeman in his forties, who a.s.sumed his experience was an automatic gateway to publication. He wrote with enthusiasm, but the result, unfortunately, was not fiction. His stories were turgid dollops of "I proceeded north-west in an easterly direction".

Paul Merlin was in his early sixties at a guess, an accountant on the point of retiring, with an over-absorbing interest in what he called the psychological approach and Jonathan privately termed the s.e.x-obsessed. He was the ferret breed of student, anxious to display his own superior knowledge while at the same time to winkle out every last drop of knowledge that might be lurking in the recesses of his instructor's mind.

Luke Hayward was twenty-nine, and a teacher with what seemed such a fanatical dislike of teaching that it was clear what drove him onwards towards the promised land of crime writing. A bad teacher, Jonathan decided, the sort who would demolish his pupils in order to rebuild them in his own image. Jonathan prided himself on his ability to pick out the achievers in his audience, a gift acquired from the auctions he conducted in his other occupation. Achievers were those whose willpower would drive them onwards, no matter what the opposition, and no matter whether they were Eton-schooled, state-schooled or unschooled. The chief achiever of the a.s.sembled company around him, including Mavis, would in his estimation be Paul Merlin, although he never underestimated the power of the non-achiever to throw a spanner in the works.

"I'm extremely sorry about Janice," Paul told him earnestly. "A terrible thing to die amongst strangers."

"We weren't strangers," Luke immediately objected. "We'd all met before."

"Yes, but we didn't know each other on a personal basis," Mavis quickly pointed out. Miss Marple always remained detached from her suspects.

"What did kill her?" Jonathan asked, after the inspector had vanished and they were being ushered back towards their own secluded workshop room for interrogation.

David almost visibly swelled with pride. "We won't know until the autopsy report."

"We?" Luke picked up sarcastically. "Didn't know you were with the Suffolk police."

David scowled. "Once a policeman, always a policeman."

"I dislike being treated as though we were all potential murderers," Paul muttered as a gimlet-eyed policewoman opened the door for them to enter. "How do they know she didn't take the stuff herself?"

"What stuff?" Luke pounced, as he would on an unfortunate sixth-former. "How do you know it was poison?"

"Even if it was," David said, "it could have been an accident."

Mavis drew herself up. "It could not."

"How-" David began.

"Because there was a distinctive supermarket plastic bag at her side full of some p.r.i.c.kly fruit, a knife and spoon, a packet of disposable plastic gloves, and an open window and-"

"Still could have been an accident or suicide," David interrupted, annoyed at being outranked by a woman.

"And-" Jonathan prompted Mavis to continue.

"A peppermill taped to her chest."

There was a certain camaraderie about the Mystery Unravelled crime-writing course, held three months later and on this occasion in a Hampshire manor house. Those partic.i.p.ants who had attended the previous course, five in all, enjoyed an enviable position so far as the somewhat nervous but excited newcomers were concerned, as they were able to speak with first-hand knowledge of a real-life crime scene.

David in particular came into his own, having come by privileged information gained by bribing former colleagues with beer, flattery and, regrettably, twenty-pound notes.

Even Mavis condescended to listen avidly, as they awaited lunch on the Sat.u.r.day morning. "So what did poor Janice die of?" she asked.

"Hyoscyamine," David replied smugly. "Datura seeds grated in the peppermill over, probably, the stew. Clever, wasn't it? I understand there's no forensic evidence to indicate anyone else was involved."

"So it could have been suicide," Paul said triumphantly.

"Rather a let-down," Luke sneered, but was disregarded.

"Then why bother to tape the pepper mill on?" David grunted. "Daft. I'm just a straightforward cop. Something like that happens in old Agatha's stuff, not in real life."

Mavis took this personally. "Only in this case, it did," she snapped.

"Still suicide," Paul maintained, anxious to maintain his lead. "A killer couldn't guess exactly when she would die in order to creep in to attach the peppermill."

"The first person to find her could," Luke said meaningfully. Mavis had criticized the best short story he had ever written. And he knew why: she intended to steal his plot.

Mavis quelled him with a look. "I knew your thinking was wobbly, Luke, but really! Would I go along to Janice's room armed with a peppermill to check if my victim were dead and then stop to tape it on in order to draw attention to the fact that it was murder?"

Luke rallied. "Agatha might have done."

She capped him. "Agatha always had a rational explanation. I doubt if you do."

David entered the fray. "Of course, I'm just a plain cop, but in my experience, the first on the scene often is the killer."

Paul switched tack to leap on the pa.s.sing bandwagon. "It's the psychology."

"Why," Mavis boomed savagely over him, "should anyone wish to tape a peppermill on to a victim?"

"It's easy," Paul persevered. "In the interests of her or of course his art." Two and two for a retiring accountant were permitted to make five.

"Eh?" David looked blank.

"To test us all," Paul explained. "If you understood the s.e.xual perspective-"

"Balderdash," David interrupted. "It was a joke."

Mavis seized her chance. "As I explained in this morning's workshop, the death itself should never be a joke. A peppermill comes perilously close to it."

The workshop students took this to heart, and the peppermill at the buffet lunch remained untouched either by hand or in conversation. The wine bottles fared much better. They were all emptied and five more called for, and consequently when the students rea.s.sembled for the afternoon workshop, they were some way into discussion of the intricacies of the protagonist's responsibility towards readers before Charles Beeton, one of the five regulars, was missed.

"He'll be here somewhere," Jonathan said anxiously. "He's probably fallen asleep." Charles was a gentleman of mature years and girth, and after the lunch they had all enjoyed, this explanation seemed highly likely. "But I'll check his room to be on the safe side." When he arrived, however, he found it unlocked, but empty.

Mavis was not so lucky. En route to the ladies' room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, she stumbled over Charles's dead body. Her scream could be heard by the group in the workshop, growing ever louder as she rushed back to summon help. "Attack," she gasped, as she reached the room, panting for breath. "He's dead. Chest."

"A heart attack?" Jonathan caught her words as he returned from his fruitless errand, and joined the rush downstairs, already reaching for his mobile phone.

"Attack on the heart certainly," Luke said soberly, as he reached the body and saw what awaited them. David immediately felt for a pulse, but without success. A knife was protruding from Charles's chest, and Jonathan could not avoid seeing something else too.

Not only was there a distinctive-looking plastic supermarket bag at Charles's side, but another knife, shiny and clean, was carefully taped to his sweater.

"Don't touch the bag," David ordered, as Luke peered curiously into it. "Evidence."

In his element, David took charge, seizing Jonathan's mobile to summon the police; he then deputed Mavis, Jonathan and himself to guard the body while the others should remain together in the workshop room. Any visits to the toilets would be accompanied, according to s.e.x, by himself, Mavis or Jonathan.

The crime scene manager of the police team that speedily arrived fully agreed that the plastic bag was evidence. Inside was a pair of men's shoes, an old-fashioned plastic mac that appeared slightly stained with blood, and another packet of disposable gloves. The shiny knife too, he agreed, was evidence though its purpose naturally eluded him, as the knife that killed Charles was declaring its presence so obviously.

"What on earth was the second knife for?" Luke asked, a trifle shakily, after they had been dismissed from the crime scene and rejoined the other students round the table in the workshop room.

"The first one's easier to understand," David said ponderously. "Removing it would have covered the killer in blood."

"But the second?" Luke persisted.

"I think I can guess," Paul said, with what he hoped was quiet authority.

"Psychologically they carry a s.e.xual implication?" enquired Luke innocently.

Paul stiffened. "It could be," he replied defensively. "However I am inclined to think these are deodands." He looked round at their blank faces, and added modestly, "As a solicitor, I have a knowledge of legal history."

"I thought everyone knew what they were," Luke immediately put in. "They're relicts of medieval law which held that the object was a guilty party in the crime and as such forfeit to the crown, sometimes being pa.s.sed to the victim's family in compensation."

"Quite," Paul said patronizingly. "Not repealed until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a rail company objected to forfeiting one of their express trains. In the case of poor Janice and now Charles, the peppermill and the knife are to be held responsible for their deaths."

"Try telling that to the Old Bailey," David snorted. "No way. It's a copy-cat murder. You'll see."