B00BCLBHSA EBOK (19 page)

“Tallulah’s Treasures? Well I never! Did everyone else know?” Cerys looked around. Approximately half the people in the
room nodded. The other half stared blankly. “Where’ve I been, then? Stuck under
a rock? Well, blow me down.” She wasn’t a very good actress. No one believed
her.

“I think you said, didn’t you Cerys, that
you’d like to get your hands on Tallulah and teach her a lesson, because she’d
written you a nasty review?”

“I’d have liked to have words, if that’s what you mean. Wouldn’t we all?”

There were general sounds of demurral from around the room, as if to
suggest that nobody present had ever received a poor review, and if they had,
they wouldn’t be so silly as to get upset by it.

Only Polly spoke up for her. “I think we all get cross when we see
someone has written something unkind about us. Don’t these people realize we
have families and friends who might read what they have written? Don’t they
realize that we ourselves have feelings? It doesn’t mean we’d kill someone over
it.”

“What about you, Zena? There was a melted
doll on the altar in your room last night. It is an altar, isn’t it?”

“My books are smoking hot, babes. But I’ve never set fire to a doll
on an altar. Anyone ever had a bad review from a doll? Didn’t think so! No one
has. Certainly not Zena.”

“You weren’t trying to bring harm to someone?”

“Nope.”

“The doll was dressed in pink, to represent Polly.”

“Ooh!” Everyone in the room turned to look at Polly. Polly remained
absolutely still and quiet. Her face was inscrutable.

“You’d disconnected the smoke alarm in your room, hadn’t you?”

“Yeah, well. Gotta put my hand up to that. Didn’t want to go outside on them
chilly steps to have a puff. That’s not a crime, is it?”

From the back of the room, Nik Kovacevik piped up, “Actually—”

Emily ignored him and addressed Zena. “You
heard the news that Polly had been nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award
and you…you put a likeness of her on the altar to wish her luck after dinner
last night.” Emily suspected that Zena might not have
been wishing luck to Polly. But Zena took her cue,
gratefully.

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s it, babes. Even someone as successful as Polly,
she can do with a little Zena luck.”

“Mmmmm,” said the people in the room.
Everyone looked at Polly. Polly smiled graciously.

“You lit your incense and made your wish, and when you went to sleep
something on the altar caught fire—maybe the hot tip of the incense touched
part of the doll’s clothes. Whatever it was, it didn’t trigger the alarm
because you’d dismantled it. And you were oblivious until you were dragged out
of bed by the firefighters.”

Zena chuckled. “I
was having me some sexy dreams.”

“So the fire was a separate story that got mixed up with the murder
story. It wasn’t relevant at all.”

“What about Archie?” asked the brunette sitting to his left.

“Ach. I was having me some nightmares.”

Emily looked up at Det. James as she said, “Sometimes it helps to
write them down, doesn’t it? It doesn’t mean anything.”

Rory James grinned at her in a way that plainly said:
Yeah! Thanks for the hint. Tell me something
I don’t know.

“What was peculiar about this…
case
was that Winnie’s body was moved after her death. We
all agree that she fell from the roof terrace, don’t we? Or was pushed?”

Det. James said, “Mrs. Kraster
was pushed. She offered no resistance, but she was pushed.”

“Aha!” said Dr. Muriel.

“Same thing with Teena Durani.”

Emily was now feeling confident enough to play to the room a little.
“But why didn’t they offer any resistance?”

“Hypnotism?” suggested Morgana. “Some sort of weird secret society
cult thing?”

“How about hairspray?” countered Emily.

“Ahhh!” said all the women in the room who
had ever attended a self-defense class.

“A face full of that would be enough to distract the victim.
Temporarily blinded, one shove and she’d topple over the fence to her death.
Then it would have needed two strong people to move her body to the housing
estate next to the hotel. Two women, maybe. Two
members of the organizing committee who’d lured Winnie
here to her death.”

“Oh, Emily!” said Morgana in a very, very hurt voice. “Darling, no.
Which of us would do such a thing?”

“Cerys?”

“Well I never!” said Cerys. “The worm
turns.”

“A quick burst of hairspray and a shove, and Winnie
and her review site are silenced for good. And then Cerys
and her friend Zena move the body.”

“Ach!” Archie was furious. “Here we go. Blame the black woman in the
room.”

Emily was still playing to the room. “But why?”

“Because society’s inherently racist and you can’t help yourself,
hen.”

“No, I meant why would they move the body. It doesn’t make any
sense. So maybe it’s not Cerys and Zena. Maybe it’s not the organizing committee who moved the
body. Maybe it’s someone at the hotel.”

Emily continued, her eyes on Nik Kovacevic, “Two strong men who know the layout of the
hotel, who know how to temporarily dismantle the CCTV, who want to protect the
reputation of the hotel. A porter, maybe. And a…a
manager.”

There was a scraping sound as Nik drew
back a chair and sat down. He seemed to need to take the weight off his legs
before they gave in under him.

“But why would they kill a guest at the hotel?” Emily continued, “It
didn’t seem like it would be very good for business.”

“The One Star Club!” said Cerys. “Got to
be.”

“The One Star Club,” said Emily, for the benefit of the people in
the room who hadn’t been privy to Dr. Muriel’s
fabrication, “is supposed to be an international club. Its members undertake to
leave one star reviews for books, goods and services online.”

There were lots of “Ohhhhs!” Everyone—they
were all authors in the room, except for Rory, Nik,
Maria and Maggie—liked the idea of a conspiracy. It fitted with the
deep-seated belief they all had that no genuine readers of their books could
ever dislike anything they had written.

“The trouble with the One Star Club is that it doesn’t exist. And
even if it did, there’s no reason to believe that Winnie
or Teena were members. So we keep coming back to the
question of why Winnie was killed. Why? She seemed
perfectly nice. It was a senseless killing, and yet it all seemed to have been
planned out so carefully.”

“Why do you say it was planned, m’dear?
Couldn’t it have been an opportunistic attack?”

“The polls were rigged to bring Winnie
here. None of the organizing committee remembered voting for her piece of
fiction.”

“Well blow me down. I thought I’d lost my mind!” Cerys
looked round at her friends. “Do none of you remember? It’s not just me?”

“So who stood to gain from her death? Her husband,
maybe. But he was in another country. Her elderly
relatives in Milton Keynes. But they’re elderly. And they were in Milton
Keynes.”

She looked for confirmation to Det. James, in position at the door.
He nodded.

“Then there was Maggie, of course—with Winnie
and Teena out of the way, she was the clear winner in
the online fiction competition.”

“Ooh yes!” Everyone in the room wanted it to be Maggie.

“But that’s not a very strong reason. There was no financial reward,
and besides, she was already a winner. But the members of the RWGB made a
financial gain. There was a terrific boost to book sales at the conference
after Winnie’s death—they even had to bring in a
local bookseller specially, to sell books to the people who’d turned up for the
vigil. There was renewed press interest in the RWGB, which is suffering from
dwindling membership. It struggles to get noticed in comparison to some other
associations for romance writers. So, we’re back to the organizing committee
again.”

“You don’t know who did it, do you?” Polly spoke gently and kindly.
“Come on, Emily. There’s no shame in admitting it. It’s been an interesting
exercise. But maybe we should move on and leave the investigation to the
police.”

“I do know. I’ll tell you how I know. It’s because of the anomalies.
And it’s because of the smokers and the litter. And it’s because of the job I
was doing before this one, where I used to wait for ages to get in the
elevator, and then when I got in, no one would ever press the button for me
because they were so rude and self-involved. So I used to wish that I had my
own private elevator to take me up and down between the floors. And here in the
hotel, the guest elevators are even slower. And you know what I realized? The
killer was using the service elevator like a private elevator. And that’s
important because it’s all about timings and alibis. And that’s another reason
I know who did it—the alibis. But first I’ll tell you about the anomalies,
shall I?”

“OK,” said Det. James from the back of the room. “Be great if you
could get this over and done with before my boss arrives.”

“The poisoning’s the big one. Two murders that fit with each other,
and then there’s an attempted poisoning of Polly with a chocolate. I mean, why?
And then there’s this weird phone call I got from Winnie,
speaking in a Southern accent. Except it wasn’t Winnie because she was already dead. And there was
the way that nobody really seemed to care about what happened to Teena because it had all already happened to Winnie. But the weirdest one, the one that’s the key to it
all, is what the doctor said to me in Polly’s room when she came to check her
over after Polly’d been sick.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a real doctor?” said Cerys,
getting into the spirit of it. “Did you check?”

Nik called from
the back of the room: “It was our usual doctor. I sent her up there myself.”

Polly shrugged and blushed. “It was all rather embarrassing, really.
She said I was having a panic attack.”

“The doctor got angry with me. She said that you mustn’t administer
the antidote to a patient without knowing for sure if they’ve been poisoned,
because it could be really dangerous. That was the anomaly. The doctor talking
about the antidote.”

“The doctor did it?” said Cerys, puzzled.
“Are you sure, love?”

“The doctor?” the buzz went up around the room. “Did she say the
doctor? The doctor did it!”

“
It wasn’t the doctor!
”
Emily had to raise her voice to make herself heard.
“It was Polly.”

“This wasn’t about Winnie at
all. Teena was the main target. She lived in a
village in Buckinghamshire, not far from Polly. Like lots of bloggers, she
liked blogging so much that she had more than one blog. She reviewed books at
TeeandBooks.com. But she also wrote about local news at the Buckinghamshire Bugle. Teena was proud of being a ‘citizen journalist,’ covering
everything from restaurant reviews to village fetes, from cricket matches to
campaigns against accident blackspots, and so on. I
was reading her blog just now, before I came down here. She had rather an
unfortunate manner in person, but she was articulate and persuasive when she
wrote online. She was vehemently in favor of
renewable energy and had got the whole village behind her. One of the things
she campaigned for was a wind farm. Wind farms…well one of the problems with
them is that birds fly into their rotary blades and get shredded. Polly’s
husband had just taken over a bird sanctuary in the area.”

“The swannery!”

Polly was unmoved. She certainly wasn’t about to admit to murder.
“We look after swans there, yes. All sorts of birds.
Pete’s a vet. He likes taking in broken and injured birds—if they’ve
swallowed fishing tackle or been covered in oil in an oil spill, that sort of
thing.”

“Aww,” said several people in the room.

“He’s a decent man. Yes.”

But Emily wasn’t about to get distracted. “He was fighting, and
losing, a campaign against the wind farm. Polly uses her maiden name on her
books so as not to confuse her fans, so I doubt Teena
had any idea that her favorite novelist’s husband was
involved.”

“But you did!” said Dr.
Muriel. “Clever girl!”

“Look, I wouldn’t have got this, I don’t suppose,” said Emily
self-deprecatingly, as if they were discussing the answers to a difficult pub
quiz, “if I hadn’t stood in the Brunswick room and looked at those blogs
scrolling down the screen in tribute to Winnie. I
wondered—I hoped—there’d be some kind of message from Teena since it was the last thing she did before she died.
There
was
a message, though she
didn’t leave it deliberately. She’d set up the computer to grab information
from all the blogs written by Winnie’s friends around
the world and display them, and she included both of hers.”

“The universe always finds a way to get that message across, babes.”

“Darling, couldn’t Polly—and I do think you’ll find you’ve got a
bit mixed up here and you’ll find she’s entirely innocent, but I’m going to
play along anyway—couldn’t Polly just have campaigned against the wind farm
instead of killing two people and poisoning herself?”

“I’m guessing it’s something to do with her wanting to stand as a
Member of Parliament. A campaign like that would be too controversial. She’d
never get elected.”

Polly gave a relaxed, slightly condescending smile, like a cowboy
watching a duchess learning to use a lasso. “The voters are not notably keener
on murderers than they are on anti-wind-farm campaigners.”

“But you thought you’d get away with murder,” said Emily. “The
voters weren’t supposed to know what you’d done. You couldn’t have campaigned
against the wind farm in secret.”

“Polly does care about her birds,” said Cerys.
“Remember that business with the goose at the RWGB Christmas dinner?”

“We’ve had the why, m’dear. Shall we get
onto the how?”

“Polly invited Winnie to go up to the roof
terrace to smoke a cigarette. What an honor! Her
heroine offering her a cigarette, and inviting her to hide round the back of
the bar like a schoolgirl, while they chatted about writing and indulged their
sneaky habit.”

“Aha!”

“But Polly had doctored all the cigarettes in the packet. Winnie takes one. Polly lights it for her. Winnie takes one puff and gets dizzy. Polly pushes her over
the fence, and Winnie lands in the bins below and
breaks her neck. Polly didn’t expect the body to be found for an hour or two.
So she calls and talks to me, pretending to be Winnie,
to give herself an alibi.”

Det. James called out, “Why the ridiculous accent?”

“To cause more confusion. Maybe she thought she’d shift suspicion to
whoever took the call—originally she asked for Morgana, but she ended up
speaking to me—if we claimed to have spoken to someone who didn’t speak like Winnie at all. Or more likely she wanted to establish the
person on the other end of the line as an unreliable witness, in case the
timing of the call didn’t quite fit with her alibi. But anyway she called. And
then she came down to the ground floor.”

“Where she proceeded to move the body?”

“No, that’s just it. She wanted the body to be found where it fell,
so it would look like an accident. And then Teena’s
death would follow after, with less scrutiny, as an also-ran. But someone else
moved Winnie’s body and sparked a murder inquiry. I
don’t suppose we’ll ever know who.”

Emily avoided looking at Nik.

“So that’s the smoking. Now the litter.
When I first met Polly, she had a long stub of a cigarette in her hand. It was
the first of only two times I ever saw her bother to pick up a cigarette butt.
The second was just after Teena’s death. As Winnie—and, later, Teena—went
sailing over the edge of the roof terrace, they’d dropped the cigarette they’d
been holding into the courtyard below. Polly wasn’t tidying her litter. She was
removing evidence. See, that’s where what the doctor said about the antidote
comes in. I looked it up online—”

“Isn’t that cheating?” asked Dr. Muriel.
“I tell my students not to google anything.”

“Well, I didn’t have time to go to the British Library. So I looked
it up online and the antidote to cyanide poisoning—or one of them, anyway—is
amyl nitrite. It’s sold legally, over the counter, as a muscle relaxant. Popular in nightclubs as a legal high. You can sniff it or
you can dip a cigarette into it and inhale it that way. Of course, if you
didn’t have cyanide poisoning and you weren’t used to doing drugs in
nightclubs, you’d be knocked half sideways if someone took you up on a roof and
offered you a cigarette that had been dipped in the stuff. Dizziness,
low blood pressure, fainting. While you were dealing with that, two
hands in the middle of your chest, whoosh!”

“I didn’t think you went clubbing, Emily,” said Polly, mildly.

“I don’t. But I know what people get up to when they go. Besides,
you click on one link on the Internet, it take you to another one, and another.
I had all the information I needed about amyl nitrite—and more—after five
minutes of searching on the computer in Nik’s
office.”

Morgana’s hand went to the pompom on her hat, and she squeezed it a
few times, like a stress ball. “Darling, you don’t need to tell anyone in this
room. We’re all convinced we could write ten books a year if we didn’t spend
our valuable writing time looking at the Internet.”

All the authors laughed at that, some more bitterly than others.

Emily addressed Polly directly: “You used to do a lot of clubbing
when you were younger, didn’t you say?”

“I’ve made no secret of it. I’ve talked about it on Twitter. But I
never did poppers.”

“Yes! Poppers. That’s what it’s called in club culture. Thank you. I
think the doctor must have seen a bottle of it on the dressing table in your
room. I don’t know for sure but…”

Emily looked over at Rory. He nodded. “I’ll get the boys on it.”

“But why all that nonsense about the poisoning in the first place?”
Dr. Muriel banged her cane on the ground at the stupidity of it.

“It would give Polly another murder method if she needed it. So if
she couldn’t get Teena up to the roof to push her
off, she could put poison in her food later that night or at breakfast, or slip
something into her drink, and no one would suspect her because she’d also been
a victim. There was no real rush, just so long as it happened that weekend and
seemed to be connected to Winnie’s death, and was
overshadowed by it.”

Emily looked over at Det. James, who tapped his watch to get her to
hurry up and finish. A uniformed officer now stood by his side.

“The timing’s all wrong for Teena’s
death,” said Cerys. “How could Polly get up to the
roof and back down again to the bins where you found her? You’re not saying she
can fly like her precious birds?”

“When she turned up to help me pack the gift bags, she arrived in
the service elevator. And that’s how she traveled all
weekend. While the rest of us would wait for ages to travel from floor to floor
in the guest elevator, she went the quick way. I think, once the CCTV pictures
are checked, the timings’ll fit.”

“So, love, help me out here? Polly rigged the vote?”

“I don’t know if Polly rigged it or…” Emily avoided looking at
Morgana. “Or someone else. But as soon as they accepted the invitation to come
here, Teena’s and Winnie’s
deaths were inevitable. Teena because of her campaign in the Buckinghamshire
Bugle. And Winnie because she was visiting
from a foreign country, and that made her interesting. Her death would seem
like the focus for the story, instead of a footnote.”

Maggie piped up. “Can I just say, about the murders, that I don’t
think Polly did it?”

No one took any notice of her, so she added, “And also, she’s my favorite novelist.” At which point half the room wished (and
then felt guilty, and tried to unwish it) that Polly
had done a more thorough job and finished off all three of them.

“So anyway, that’s it.” Too late, Emily realized she should have
prepared a more rousing conclusion.

“A very, very good story,” Polly drawled. She didn’t look fazed by
it at all. “Most people here wish they could work up such a detailed story from
such scant notes.”

“You’re against the wind farm, are you, Poll?” Cerys
was very keen to get the details right.

“I believe there are better ways of getting sustainable energy than
setting up giant mincing machines that chop birds out of the sky. But that
doesn’t mean I’m guilty of murder.”

The uniformed officer, with a fine sense of drama, now stepped
forward and held up a clear plastic bag containing a small brown bottle. “Maybe
this does. Amyl nitrite. Colloquially known as poppers. Found on Miss Penham’s dressing table.”

The room responded appreciatively: “Ooh!”

Morgana stood up. “I think that’s as good a point as any to break
for coffee, don’t you? Big round of applause for Emily
Castles, who led such an interesting session this morning. On behalf of
the Romance Writers of Great Britain, thank you, Emily.”

Everyone applauded, and then surged out of the room for coffee, cake
and gossip.

While the uniformed officer arrested Polly Penham
and read her her rights, Rory James came up to Emily
and gave her a big smile. “Well done, Emily. Look, when I’m done with my
paperwork, do you fancy going for a drink?”

A sweet, dimpled smile. “Thanks. But I think I’ve had enough romance for one weekend.”

Zena walked past
with Cerys, a note of awe in her voice: “That doll
melting, it was an accident, yeah? But it shows it works. You don’t mess with
the altar. Cause today, you gotta admit it, that girl
got
burned
.”

Emily caught up with Dr. Muriel at the
door to the Montagu room where she had been detained by Nik
Kovacevic. He said, “About the One Star Club—”

“Nik, it doesn’t exist.”

“Yes, but if one wanted to start such a thing up. Where would one
advertise for members, do you think?”

“Ha!” said Dr. Muriel, taking Emily’s arm
and walking out of the door. “Ha-ha.”

“You know,” said Emily to her friend. “When you asked me to lead the
session this morning, I thought it was one of your daft experiments.”

“Indeed. Of course it was. This one worked astoundingly well,
though. Eh? Eh?”

Dr. Muriel laughed
her dirty laugh as they walked to where the coffee and cake had been set up.

Nik Kovacevic walked past them back to his office, a brilliant idea
forming in his head about a secret society he planned to set up. As a chef
walked past them in the other direction, Emily could have sworn she heard
someone singing, very quietly, yet mockingly: “Heigh-ho!”

Upstairs in her room, Maggie Tambling was already on the third
paragraph of a fluently written, witty blog post that would eventually run to
more than two thousand words. It would become the most popular post on her
already-popular Tamble with Me at Your Own Risk! blog, referenced by the
Guardian
books blog, linked to by bloggers, spoofed by hipsters, quoted on Twitter by
Stephen Fry and Neil Gaiman, and earning Maggie the
first nomination for a nonprint journalist for the
irreverent Stabbies Awards for reviewers who, in the
words of the organizers, “eviscerate the pretensions of authors and their
acolytes.” The award would be won by a journalist from the
New York Times
: her reviews were so poisonous, so her colleagues
quipped, that she kept an antidote by her computer, in case her words should
ever come back to bite her. But Maggie was proud, as she had been in the
inaugural and never-to-be-repeated RWGB short fiction competition, to be among
the top three.

The title of Maggie’s blog post was “Romance Writers Get Busy: The
Hate, the Hats and a Helluva Way to Die.”