B00BCLBHSA EBOK (11 page)

“Like chloroform?”

“Pepper spray, perhaps.”

“Hairspray?”

“That would do it. But who would arrange to meet in this horrible
bit by the bins up here?”

A look down at the litter at their feet answered that question. Smokers.

“Winnie didn’t know anyone here. She
checked in early, but none of us saw her.”

“Someone saw her,” said Dr. Muriel,
grimly. “But why would the attacker risk moving her, when he or she might so
easily have been seen?”

“It’s like the killer’s trying to say something: to make some
point.”

“Indeed. But what?”

Emily went along to the Virginia Woolf room with her
trio of chocolates and handed them over to Det. Rory James. She said, “I’m
having all the chocolates from the rooms brought down to you so you can test
them for poisoning.”

Rory was filling out a form. He put his pen down and pushed his
chair back a couple of inches from the table, and he looked up at Emily. He
didn’t say thank you. He said, “There’s a lot of paperwork involved in
something like that.” He said it in the tone of voice of someone who doesn’t
relish paperwork.

Emily spoke quickly, hoping that her enthusiasm might transfer
itself to him. “If the poisoned chocolate was meant for Polly, then the only
time it could have been tampered with would be
after
it had been put into the gift bag, or after it had been put
into her room. If all the chocolates are poisoned, then it could have been done
at M. Loman’s factory or in the hotel kitchen. But
then whoever was responsible would have ended up a mass murderer if we’d all
eaten them. That’s not very likely. It means that Polly was probably the
target. But we need to know, don’t we? So do you think you could get them
tested?”

“I can see that you’re anxious about this. Your friend’s ill.
Someone has been killed in the vicinity of the hotel.” He smiled. He looked
tired. He was in his shirtsleeves. Emily could feel the heat coming off him—not
sexual heat. Just long-day-at-work, tired heat. Emily
wondered how soon it would be before Rory became a hard-bitten maverick with a
disastrous private life, like the police detectives she saw on TV. She felt
very sympathetic toward him. But then he said, “Look, if I could prove to you
that this isn’t poisoned, would it make you feel better?”

He snatched up the packet of chocolates, opened it, removed a violet
crème, sniffed it, broke it in two pieces. He put the
smaller of the two pieces in his mouth. His eyes held Emily’s as the
chocolate-coated purple fondant melted on his tongue. The air between them was
tense, and there was a challenge in the way he looked at her, as if he was
accepting a dare and wanted her to admire him for it. She did admire him for
it. It was audacious, an act of bravery that summed up his fury about all the
endless paperwork that was now part of his job. She thought, suddenly, how
beautiful it would be if all protests against bureaucracy—if all protests
against everything—could involve warm, tired men in clean shirts silently
gathering to put chocolates with mauve-colored centers in their mouths, and melt them on their tongues
while holding the gaze of young women standing across from them, with humor in their eyes and bravado in the set of their
shoulders. More entertaining than student protests, anyway,
which—whatever the wrongs and rights of it—were always a bit scruffy and shouty.

But as well as being admirable, there was a little part of Rory’s
chocolate challenge that was somehow also patronizing, as though he needed to
demonstrate to Emily that she was worrying unnecessarily and creating drama
where there should be none.

“It’s actually very nice,” he said after a few moments. “I don’t
think it’s poisoned.” He didn’t reach out and eat the rest of it, as Emily
might have been tempted to do—perhaps he didn’t want to cross the line
between using an unorthodox method to test the evidence, and consuming the
evidence because it was delicious. Maybe there were even rules about not eating
luxury handmade chocolates on duty, just as there were rules about not drinking
on duty. He shrugged and grinned, inviting Emily to relax and forget about it.

“At least we know we’re not dealing with a mass murderer,” said
Emily.

“Makes my job a bit easier!”

“Will you make a note, though, that she was sick—and about the
taste of bitter almonds in the chocolate she ate?”

“I will.” He didn’t pick up his pen and write anything. “Anything else? Any other theories?”
He smiled engagingly, a naughty, happy light in his eyes. He must get precious
little opportunity to be cheerful at work. Still, Emily wasn’t going to indulge
him in this. She maintained a lemon expression. But she couldn’t stay quiet for
long because she had another question.

“Would you need two people to move a dead body?”

“Not necessarily. It depends on the strength of the person doing the
moving and the weight of the body.”

“But if you had to lift the body over a wall? If
you had to do it quickly?”

“Well,” Rory sighed—a teacher tiring of a precocious child. “In
that case four hands would be better than two, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?”

A maid knocked on the door and came in. A badge on her breast
advertised her name as Lydia. She was a chubby Filipina woman of about thirty,
wearing a pale lilac uniform dress and sensible shoes. She had a careworn face.
She could have been a nurse on duty, except that she was carrying a gift shop
bag full of violet crèmes.

“What I do with these?” Lydia asked.

Rory didn’t look at Emily as he said, “Thank you, uh…Lydia? Perhaps
you could dispose of them for us?”

As Lydia left with the chocolates, Emily slipped her the twenty
pounds she’d had from Morgana.

Rory said, “You must leave this to us, Emily. There are procedures
to be followed. It’s not just me working on this investigation, you know. We
haven’t even had the pathologist’s report yet. I can’t tell you everything, but
we know what we’re doing.”

Emily left the room, closed the door and got out her notebook. Then
it occurred to her that she ought to write down the exact time that Rory had
eaten the chocolate, just in case it contained a slow-working poison and he was
found, cold and dead and slumped over the paperwork he hated.

With that horrible image in her head, she burst back into the
Virginia Woolf room, with the passion and breathlessness of a romantic hero who
can’t pass up the opportunity to say “I love you!” to the heroine, and chases
after her and…

Rory looked up at her, half-smiling in spite of himself, like a
toddler reacting to a game of peekaboo.

“I just wanted to check you were OK. You know,
the chocolate…”

He grinned. He was OK.

Emily withdrew, shut the door, and left him to it.

So Emily was now looking for two people working
together—one of them possibly armed with hairspray, at least one of them a
smoker—who had pushed Winnie off the roof terrace
or contrived to make her fall, and then heaved her body over the wall into the neighboring housing estate for reasons unknown. She glanced
around the public areas of the hotel, and
everywhere
there seemed to be guests sitting in pairs, or members of staff working in
pairs. But how many of them were capable of murder?

When she got to the bar she saw Morgana and Dr.
Muriel sitting together talking over their notes. Dr.
Muriel poured black coffee from a pot on the table into a cup in front of
Morgana. A silvery jingle of bracelets and a hiccup accompanied Morgana’s
cheerful wave. As Emily approached, Morgana said to her friend, “Thank you for
recommending Emily. She’s been
such
a
help.”

Emily was conscious that she’d hardly done a stroke of work.
Sometimes, she’d noticed, people liked you more, the less work you did. If you
came along and tried to do things your way, or did everything too quickly and
showed everyone else up, then you could make yourself unpopular. Sit on your
arse all day, or chase about following up clues to a murder, and people were
unstinting in their praise.

Another silvery jingle called them to attention. “Darlings, I need
to make a plan for this evening.”

“I thought you’d put me next to that old rogue, Lex
Millington.”

“Not a seating plan, Muriel. A
plan
plan.
In fact, the committee’s meeting shortly to make a plan, but I need a plan for
that meeting. We’re in a terrible pickle. A poor woman has died, and there’s to
be a vigil at the hotel. We have a press conference arranged, and I need to find
something suitable to say about the whole affair. It’s not in my nature, as a
novelist, to make things
less
dramatic. I need your help.” Morgana hiccuped.

“Ah! You think, as an academic, I can help make everything seem dry
and serious?”

The two old friends smiled at each other.

Emily said, “Is there anything you want me to do?”

“We’re in for a long night, Emily.” Another
hiccup. “You take a breather, if you like. You want to meet us back here
in fifteen, twenty minutes? We can inspect the arrangements for the vigil
before the press conference. I’m not looking forward to being confronted by an
angry mob.”

“You’re worrying unduly, Morgana. You’re always too hard on
yourself. Even a mob could not fail to be charmed by you.” There are people
who, having discovered that some people like sticky labels, will offer sticky
labels to everyone. Dr. Muriel was not one of these.
While she might have discovered that her undergraduates liked sticky labels,
she knew only too well that Morgana preferred reassurance. So she was handing
that out in dollops, washed down with strong black coffee.

Emily wasn’t quite sure where she should go or what she should do
with her “breather.”

“All right, then. I’ll go and…” She faded away without actually
saying what she would do.

Inevitably, she started turning over the day’s events in her mind.
Whatever Polly had seen, she might have seen. Did that mean she was also in
danger? As for
who
they had seen, that had been Nik. Emily didn’t much
like him. But that didn’t make him a murderer. Still, she thought she might
have another look outside. What had he been doing out there when she and Polly
had run into him? He had seemed very keen to shoo them away and back into the
hotel.

Emily walked through the dining room—she saw Maria, and nodded at
her—and then, when she thought no one was looking, she slipped through the
door leading to the kitchen, walked along the shabby corridor, and went out of
the white door that led to the courtyard with the bins. What was she looking
for? How would she find it? How would she know if she’d found it? She didn’t
know. This wasn’t going to be a methodical approach. She simply hoped that if
she kept an open mind and looked around, the information she needed would
present itself. Whatever it was, she had to find it fast and get out of there
before anyone (before Nik) saw her. Though the area looked much as it did when she was there earlier in
the day, it now seemed to have an atmosphere as unpleasant as its smell.
It seemed eerie.

There were cigarette ends discarded on the floor, as before. Emily
moved quietly, looking at the ground, then looking up
at the hotel. There were no guest windows overlooking this area, but she could
see the low fence surrounding the service area at the back of the bar on the
roof terrace. She tried to visualize the trajectory of a body falling from
there into the courtyard below. She saw that it might land in one of the large,
colored bins about twenty feet in front of her. Red
was for waste food. Yellow was for paper and cardboard. If Winnie
had landed in a yellow bin, the contents might have acted as a mattress,
stopping Winnie’s bones from shattering and her skin
from bursting open, and her organs falling out. Emily walked cautiously toward
a yellow bin—and stopped, hearing a scrabbling sound from inside the
capacious red bin next to it. A rat? A dog? A man? A
murderer? She cringed, reflexively making herself smaller. Should she
investigate or turn and walk away?

The decision was made for her when her mobile phone rang. Emily was
scrupulous about turning her phone off when she was in the theater
or the cinema. She never answered the phone in the bank or at the counter in
the post office, or when paying for purchases in shops. She’d have to add “when
investigating the possible scene of a temporary resting place for the body of a
murdered woman” to the list—next time. If there was a next
time.

Emily pulled her phone from her handbag and hit the red button to
cut off the call, while simultaneously swiveling and
ducking behind a large, yellow bin behind her. As she went down, the head of a
man bobbed up above the lip of the red bin. He looked around. Had he heard the
phone? Had he seen her? Was any part of her still poking out from behind the
bin? Anyway she could see him. It was M. Loman.

“Hello?” he said. He was dressed in his smart suit. He was not
dressed appropriately for going through the bins. “Hello?” he said again. He
ducked down inside for a few moments, and then he threw a black, plastic bin bag
out over the side. It was filled with something bulky. Next, he put his gloved
hands on the lip of the bin and heaved himself out, quite elegantly, as if
heaving himself out of a hotel swimming pool. “Henri?”

Emily watched as one of the porters came up to M. Loman from the other direction. They stood close to each
other, whispering in French. Henri was small and dark like M. Loman, presumably hailing from the same country of origin.
They shook hands once, in a brief, businesslike way.
Then M. Loman picked up his bulky black bag and began
to walk toward where Emily was hiding.

It was no use. M. Loman would walk right
past her and was bound to see her. Emily would have to stand up and make herself known. Seeing a familiar face in unusual surroundings
would be rather awkward, like going on holiday to Thailand and seeing a neighbor on the beach. She wondered what the correct
greeting should be, under the circumstances.
How nice! What a surprise! Lovely day for grubbing about in the recycling
bins—find anything useful?
None seemed quite right, especially as he was
carrying a…what
did
he have in that
bag?

“Hsst!” called Henri. M. Loman turned, looking slightly disoriented. Henri jerked
his head in the direction of the wall that separated the courtyard from the
estate next door, and M. Loman walked away from Emily,
following Henri toward the wall.

Peeping from behind her yellow bin, Emily saw Henri stop and crouch
at the bottom of the wall, making the crook of his arm into a kind of step for
M. Loman to use to climb over. M. Loman
threw the black bag before him, then followed it over the wall and disappeared.
Henri brushed himself down, looked around warily, then
went back in the direction of the kitchen.

Emily waited until she was sure he had gone, then
she went and peered into the red bin. The interior was pretty revolting. There
was a deep layer of discarded foodstuff, and an opened-out cardboard box on top
of it with footprints on it—M. Loman had presumably
been standing on the cardboard to stop his shoes sinking into the quicksand of
rotting detritus. There was nothing inside the bin that seemed linked to Winnie’s death—but then, if there had been, and M. Loman was in some way connected to it, she’d hardly expect
to see it; he would have been there to remove it. Certainly, he had removed
something. But what? Emily had hoped to gather new
information out here, but whatever she’d gathered hadn’t helped her to solve
the mystery of what had happened to Winnie—it had just
given her something else to puzzle over.

Emily walked back to the restaurant. She turned her mobile phone
back on and checked to see who had called her. It was Morgana. She went to find
her in the bar.

Emily walked with Morgana and Dr.
Muriel from the bar to the Brunswick room. It was one of the small function
rooms on the ground floor that was normally reserved for private dining or
daytime seminars. It had been set aside for use for the vigil, and it was being
supervised by Zena and a local bookseller, an
amiable-looking, youngish man with a ponytail. Zena
waved them in, and Emily saw that a book of condolences had been left open on a
long table in the middle of the room. On either side of it were two computer
screens. One displayed the home page of the Tallulah’s Treasures blog, with a
winsome picture of Winnie in her prime and, under it,
the words RIP. Another had a scrolling display of blogs that had joined the blogathon, posting personal memories of Winnie-as-Tallulah
and tributes to her. The reminisces were touching, even though some of those
posting had only ever met Winnie online—or perhaps,
Emily reflected, that actually made it more poignant, because Winnie’s online friends would now never have the
opportunity to meet her in person.

Against the far wall, another table carried the latest titles from
members of the RWGB, together with a pile of novels labeled
“Tallulah’s Top Ten Picks,” and copies of a book called
Publishing without a Parachute (How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to
Fly)
by Lex Millington. Emily picked it up,
hoping to find a clue to the accusations against Lex,
against which Morgana had so vehemently defended him. But she only saw that the
book seemed to be some kind of gossipy insider’s guide to the publishing
industry, and had been blurbed by Jonathan Franzen as “the most important book about publishing you
will ever read” and by Oprah Winfrey as “a classic.”

Three woman sat in a semicircle at the
other side of the room. They seemed to have gathered for the vigil. When they
saw Morgana they looked vaguely hostile. But all three held copies of Polly’s
latest book, which they had purchased from the ponytailed bookseller. They
warmed up a bit when Morgana went over and greeted them, and explained that
Polly had been taken ill but would be along later to sign books.

Zena called over
from the table, “Not just Polly, babes. We’re all prepared to spend as long as
it takes signing books, in Tallulah’s memory. It’s what she would have wanted,
yeah? Tallulah loved signed books.”

As she talked, Zena held up a copy of her
book,
Starlight Falls
. Morgana
nodded. The semicircle of three nodded. But none of them took the hint and
bought Zena’s book. It was a shame, because the pitch
had been done smoothly and professionally—Zena
would have been an excellent choice as the host of a TV shopping channel, and
her nails looked good, which is important when the cameras go in close on a
product.

Two more people came into the room—a man and a woman in matching
blue anoraks. They looked at the computer screens and read some of the blogathon tributes. The woman signed the book of
condolences. She seemed upset. She blew her nose loudly. The man—her husband,
perhaps—had the resigned, nothing-to-do-with-me air that men affect when they
accompany their wives on shopping trips. The woman looked around. After signing
the book of condolences, there wasn’t much to do. She wandered up to the
bookstall and picked up one or two of the books, turning them over in her
hands. Presently she chose both Morgana’s new book and Polly’s. Her husband
paid for them, and Morgana graciously autographed the copy of her book. In
purely commercial terms, it looked as though this tragedy might turn out to be
something of a success.

Emily got out her pen and looked in her handbag for her notebook.
Then she realized she had caught the attention of the others in the room. They
watched her standing there pen in hand, and they expected her to write in the
book of condolences. She hesitated and then decided to go for it.
Dear Winnie
,
she began. What next? She had no fond memories to share. Simply writing RIP
sounded a bit…hip-hop. She read a few of the previous entries, hoping to take
her cue from them. But she didn’t feel comfortable suggesting that Winnie was looking down on them. In fact, it only made her
think of Winnie looking down from the roof terrace at
the yellow bin below, or falling into it. She looked further back in the book.
What had Teena written?
It’s a competitive world, Winnie, but you
died a winner. RIP, Teena.
That was nice. Some of
the others had taken up the Winnie’s a Winner theme
in their entries. Just copying everyone else didn’t sit well with Emily,
either. Finally she decided on
I’m sorry
I never got the chance to meet you.
And then she remembered her dog,
Jessie, dying in her arms at a very old age, not so long ago. She thought of
how desperately upset Winnie’s husband Des must be,
on his way to a foreign country to be with his wife’s body, knowing he’d never
see her alive again and hadn’t been with her when she died. And it set her off.
She wiped away a few tears. The woman in the blue anorak handed Emily a tissue,
and Emily blew her nose. She felt both hypocritical—as if she was pretending
to have known Winnie and to have cared about her more
than she did—and slightly relieved and vindicated. What was the point of a
vigil without a public display of sorrow? Grief for strangers these days was
oddly competitive.