B00BCLBHSA EBOK (18 page)

Emily would have said she’d hardly slept at all. But
she’d had crazy, smoke-filled dreams, with Archie shouting and breaking out of
prison with Lex, and policemen in uniform dropping
dead after eating poisoned artichoke hearts, and Morgana and Polly holding
hands and jumping off the roof and calling, “It’s OK, Emily. We can fly. Come
and join us.”

It’s said that a good night’s sleep is a wonderful way to put your
thoughts in order. If true, then there was no surer indication that Emily
hadn’t had a good night’s sleep. She still had no clear idea about what had
happened to Winnie and Teena.
Perhaps Dr. Muriel knew what she was doing and they
could expect a confession from someone that morning, and Emily wouldn’t have to
worry about making sense of things.

She went into the Brunswick room to find that dozens of people had
washed in again for the vigil, their presence and absence seeming almost tidal.
The pile of cellophane-wrapped flowers was a little higher than yesterday, and
the sweet rotting-compost smell that came from the lower layers was more
noticeable. Several toy cats had also been left under the table, in
acknowledgment of Winnie’s love for her pet.
Apparently stuffed representations of Maine coon cats were hard to find in
London, because people had brought in black-and-white cats, ginger cats, pink cats. The ginger cats were the most popular. Small
ginger cats were on special offer in WHSmith, and
there were two branches of the shop in nearby King’s Cross station.

Frazer the bookseller was setting up his stall again, with the
cheeriness of someone who expects to make a good few sales. Polly’s pile of
books had a beautifully written notice next to it:
Nominated for a RAA Lifetime Achievement Award
. Polly was at the
table, in a pale pink trouser suit, hair tied back neatly, pen in hand, signing
books. She looked up at Emily and smiled, and rubbed her wrist ruefully (she
had a lot of copies to sign) and then got back to work.

Emily went to the hotel dining room to meet Dr.
Muriel for breakfast. The kitchen was functioning again—presumably the police
had completed their search—and there were a lot of tired, grumpy,
hungover people in the hotel dining room eating the full
English breakfast: bacon, sausage, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and toast.

Emily opened her notebook and studied it while she was waiting for
her vegetarian option of wild woodland mushrooms and vegetarian sausages with
toasted sunflower bread to arrive.

“Do you know who’s responsible for these women’s deaths,
Dr. Muriel?”

“Certainly not. That’s your department. It’s all in your notebook.”
Dr. Muriel tapped it for emphasis. “You are a young woman
who is full of ideas, Emily Castles. Now comes the time to put them to the
test.”

“I do have ideas. Also wild theories, prejudices
and unfounded suspicions. Also, in some areas, no ideas at all.”

As if he’d been summoned to back this up, Det. James wandered past
and pulled up a chair. He looked exhausted. Dr.
Muriel poured him some orange juice from a jug on the table. “Don’t you ever
stop working, Rory?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” he said amiably. “What about you?”

Dr. Muriel laughed
as though she’d been caught out. “Observing, always observing. And cogitating. Or daydreaming, as my mother used to call it. She would not
have approved if she’d known I get paid to do it. Any news, dear boy?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly.” Dr. Muriel seemed satisfied
with this. She munched on a piece of eggy toast.

“My boss is saying he should have brought in a more senior officer,
right from the start.”

“That’s the sort of thing bosses say, though, isn’t it? I’m always
catching hell from mine. You must be glad, Emily, that you don’t have a boss
that you’re permanently answerable to. You do have them, of course. But you can
chop and change. There must be a feeling of freedom in that.”

Emily’s vegetarian breakfast arrived, and she gloomily did her best
to enjoy the feeling of freedom that came with knowing she’d be out of a job
again tomorrow.

Nik Kovacevic approached the table. “Everything all right,
ladies? Please accept the hotel’s apologies for last night’s events. There were
circumstances, as I’m sure you realize, that were beyond our control.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Muriel. “Emily has a
theory about it.”

Rory James rolled his eyes good-humoredly
and drained his orange juice.

Nik said, “We run
a very popular murder mystery evening here at the hotel. If you like
‘investigating,’ Emily, you should think about booking for that.”

Rory James laughed and stood up to leave.

Dr. Muriel
laughed, too. “I think we need to get things wrapped up soon, don’t you? There
might be other lives at stake. If you gentlemen aren’t too busy, perhaps you’d
be kind enough to join my session at the conference at ten o’clock.”

They both looked startled. Det. James said, “Why, what’s happening?”

“Emily’s going to tell you whodunit.”

A little bit of toasted sunflower bread went down the wrong way, and
Emily started to choke. Rory James thumped her on the back. Emily recovered
enough to wash down the toast with a reviving cup of tea. She reminded herself
that if things went horribly wrong, she’d never have to see any of these people
again.

Dr. Muriel heaved
herself to her feet. “All set?”

“I need to spend a few minutes in the room where they’re holding the
vigil.”

“Ha! Quiet contemplation among the shabby cats and
the wilting flowers? Or are you fossicking for clues? No! Don’t tell me.
I’ll wait for the denouement. See you downstairs.”

In the Montagu room, as the basement conference space
was officially known, Morgana was testing that the projector was working, by
turning it on, then off, then on again. She was wearing a tartan waistcoat and
a Tam o’ Shanter—a tartan bonnet with a red pom-pom
on the crown. She seemed jittery. Maria was putting out the last of forty pads
and pencils at intervals along the horseshoe-shaped tables.

“I wonder if I should have asked for the tables to be set up cabaret
style?” mused Morgana, as if to deliberately provoke Maria, who took no notice.
“I suppose it’s too late now. Are you all set for this morning, Emily? Muriel’s
cooking up something, isn’t she? But she won’t tell me what it is.”

Emily felt that Dr. Muriel was treating
her like the subject of one of those science experiments at school, where
you’re invited to touch a Van de Graaff generator and
your hair stands up on end without you doing anything clever at all. But she
also felt strangely…confident. All the information was there in her head. She
just had to spool it out carefully, in the right order.

She decided she was up to the challenge. Why not? After five o’clock
today she was finished, anyway. They couldn’t very well sack her if she got it
all wrong.

Once everyone had filed in, Morgana stood to open the
conference officially. There were surprisingly few gaps around the table
considering what a late night everyone had had. All the members of the
organizing committee were there, including Zena and
Archie. Whereas there had been a table plan for dinner last night, seats at the
conference this morning were unallocated. Emily noticed that Archie had a
pretty brunette woman sitting to his left, and a pretty brunette woman sitting
to his right, both looking at him expectantly, as if it wouldn’t be the end of
the world if there was a fire and Archie had to strip his shirt off to rescue
them.

There were faces Emily recognized from last night, though she didn’t
know their names. The thing about working on short-term, temporary contracts
like this was that you got to know some people very, very well, and others…others
you didn’t get to know and would never see again. They were like churchyard
statues. No doubt they had lived rich and interesting lives. But to strangers
passing quickly by, they were interchangeable gray
figures, their features blurry and unmemorable. And Emily was passing by very
quickly.

“I have learned something this weekend,” said Morgana by way of
introduction to the day’s sessions. “Some of us are writers, some of us are
readers, some of us are reviewers. Most of us only
really have one talent, and we should be thankful for it and exploit it. We
have seen the death of two talented women. They weren’t much good as writers of
fiction. I’m sorry. It’s true. I brought them here under false pretenses, and I shouldn’t have done it. I valued them for
one talent—as bloggers—and instead of celebrating that, I brought them here
and feted them as writers of fiction. And I hope to goodness, I really do, that
my chicanery didn’t result in either of their deaths.

“We will have an opportunity to consider that, perhaps, during
Muriel’s session on ethics, which will start us off this morning. Then after
the break, we have Zena with ‘What am I? A Piece of Wood?’—a look at the
depiction of people of color in literature. Then
lunch. Would you all please take time to pop in to the Brunswick room and sign
copies of your books for anyone who has bought them? Then after lunch we’ve Cerys with ‘Don’t Ask Me! I’m Only a Woman.’ Then I’ll
finish up with ‘Whither the Novel,’ at the end of which we’ll have a chance to
talk about next year’s conference, and what we might do differently.

“Without further ado, I’ll hand you over to Dr.
Muriel Crowther.”

Rather than walk to the front, Dr. Muriel
remained where she sat, and addressed the room. “What must be done,” she asked,
“when we’re dealing with real life people in our stories? Do we have a greater
obligation to them than to the creatures of our imagination, much as we love
them?”

If any of the authors present balked at the use of “we” they didn’t
show it. Dr. Muriel had published twelve books,
including two biographies of famous psychiatrists and two of famous Victorian
charlatans (she was fond of inviting her audiences to comment on whether or not
she should simply say she had written the biographies of four charlatans), so
although she didn’t generate stories in the same way as the romance writers in
the room, she knew what she was talking about.

Archie spoke up from across the room. “I think we have to honor them.”

“Yes indeed. You see, something very strange has happened this
weekend. A story has been created before our eyes, and it has involved real
people, and some of them have got hurt. It hurt so much, they’re dead.”

Dr. Muriel spoke
softly. Everyone leaned forward, intrigued to hear what she would say next.

She said something that surprised everyone who wasn’t expecting it:
“So now I’m going to turn you over to Emily Castles, a very bright young woman
whom all of you have met. And she’s going to explain what happened, and how,
and why. Detective James, can you confirm that your men are standing by at the
other side of the doors, please?”

Everyone looked round at Det. James, standing in front of the door
with Nik Kovacevic, who looked
as though he might faint. Det. James nodded.

“Very well. Let’s begin.”

Emily also remained in her seat. She had no need to
walk up to the front and switch on the projector—it wasn’t as if she’d
prepared any slides. She took out her notebook and laid it on the table in
front of her. Her stomach turned over and over, presumably with nerves, though
perhaps she shouldn’t have eaten those vegetarian sausages.

“I can’t claim to know all the answers. Anything that struck me as
strange over the last twenty-four hours, I wrote it down. Some of it related to
the story—”

“Why call it a story? Isn’t it usually called a ‘case’?” one of the
churchyard statues called.

“Calling it a ‘case’ sounds a bit pompous,” admitted Emily.

Cerys defended
her. “Let her call it a story if she wants to call it a story.”

“Some of what I’d written down relates to the story, and some of it
relates to me. And I spent ages trying to disentangle the two before I realized
I was in this story, too.”

“Too right, babes. Everything’s connected. That’s the way the
universe works. She’s got a wise head on them shoulders!” Zena’s
voice was slightly hoarse because of the smoke she’d inhaled before being
hauled out of her room the night before.

“And then—Dr. Muriel’s right—I
realized someone was writing this story for us, and turning the pages, and
telling us what we should see. There were too many clues. Way,
way too many. That’s because there was more than one story. There was
the murder story, and all our personal stories mixed up with it, and other
stories as well. And someone had been planting superfluous clues, which didn’t
help. But I’ll get to that. Two things seemed to be important, though at first
I couldn’t see why. In fact, I wondered if they had nothing to do with Winnie’s and Teena’s deaths and
they only were bothering me because…well, because they always bother me. The
first was smoking. How many people smoke, here?”

Just under half the people in the room raised their hands, including
Zena, Cerys and Morgana.

“The other one was litter.”

“Ha!” Dr. Muriel looked around the room,
nodding sagely at anyone who would meet her eye.

“But the big question seemed to be, why was Winnie
invited here? If her death wasn’t a random attack, had she been
invited here to die
?”

“Ooh,” said most of the people in the room, though there were also
some “hmms.”

“I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll start at the end and work
backward.”

“Who are you? Martin Amis?” This from another of the gray, blurry faces whose name Emily didn’t know and would
never probably know. She ignored him.

“First of all, the fire. It could have been an attempt to destroy
evidence, couldn’t it? It could have been an attempt to intimidate witnesses,
or even kill someone in their sleep. The two main players in the story of the
fire were Zena and Archie. It started in Zena’s room, and the person who was most affected by the
fire—or seemed most affected by it—was Archie. Both are members of the
organizing committee who voted to bring Winnie here. Winnie, of course, ran a popular blog under the name
Tallulah.”