The Peacock's Poison

by Ruby Loren

  “I need the loo anyway. I think I’ve got a bad case of mince pie overdose. They keep giving them out in the shop,” Tiff said, and I noticed she did look rather green. Still, her makeup was perfect…

  “You can never have too many mince pies,” I informed her and waited until she’d turned the corner in the direction of the staff loo before I turned to face the cloakroom cupboard. Once upon a time, I thought I’d seen Jenna walk out of here when she’d been forced into emptying her hiding place. Might she have used the same location to conceal a hard drive?

  I looked around. It was still too early for coffee break, so the room was empty. I walked into the cloakroom, turning the light on and shutting the door behind me. Then I stood in the small space and waited for something to jump out at me.

  After a few moments, I was forced to conclude that there was nothing obvious. The room contained the winter coats of staff members, but when I poked around behind them, the walls were blank. The only thing that might be considered a ‘furnishing’ in the room were the two metal poles that the coats were hung on. I checked them. They weren’t loose and were pretty firmly attached to the wall.

  Think! my mind pushed, and I looked at the floor. Jenna loved mysteries. Hiding something beneath the floorboards would definitely have appealed to her. I got down on my hands and knees and started feeling around the wooden floor, hoping that no one would walk into the cloakroom right now.

  “Aha!” I said when I felt one of the boards come loose in the very corner of the room. Upon further inspection, it became clear that the tacks used to hold the boards down were missing. I prised the rectangle of wood up and reached into the void beneath, holding my breath.

  At first, I thought there was nothing there, but then my fingers grazed something smooth and hard. I found the edges and lifted up the item.

  It was a slim black hard drive.

  I exited the cloakroom back into the staffroom and walked over to the communal computer, that was mostly used for printing. Fortunately, the USB cable was still attached to the hard drive. I looked around, but Tiff must still be in the bathroom.

  I plugged in the cable, wondering if I really had found something significant.

  The contents of the hard drive looked almost identical to the files that had been present on Jenna’s laptop. There were only a few difference that I could see. The first one was the additional folder entitled ‘My Novel’. I hovered over it with the cursor. So, Jenna really had written a novel after all! I thought about checking it, but I’d noticed something strange I was eager to check out.

  The file containing Jenna’s TV shows for the week she’d died was present on the hard drive.

  I opened it up, my eyes scanning the page. A lot of soaps and daytime TV shows passed before my eyes, until my mouse came to rest on CrimeWatch.

  Feeling a strange sense of trepidation, I double clicked on the file.

  Continue playback? A little box proclaimed and I clicked ‘yes’.

  “These scammers are responsible for a whole spate of crimes, stretching back for years. Let’s take a look at them in action, shall we?”

  The presenter stood to the side and the screen flashed up with some pretty decent quality footage of a normal couple, greeting people outside of what looked like a garden centre.

  “This family run amusement park and rare plant centre thought they were hiring a top-level events team to boost sales with a special event during the summer season. They were even given a special offer to entice them.” The presenter walked away from the footage. “Like any good business, Mr and Mrs Barker were aware of cyber crime, so they decided to do their homework about the company.” The presenter stopped walking and stared directly at the camera. “But would you believe it? Everything checked out. And indeed… the company they thought they were working with is a reputable business. But that wasn’t who the unsuspecting couple were signing up with.” He pointed at a fresh screen and a photo of a ginger man and woman popped up. “To make matters worse, this pair of cyber crooks didn’t just take the revenue they made from their special events. They’d persuaded the amusement park to allow them to take all entry fees on the basis that they would handle it all for the company and be able to submit an accurate set of accounts at the end, when the money was paid.”

  I shook my head, privately thinking that should have rung alarm bells immediately. I thought the owners of the amusement park had been fools to trust the pair.

  But I was the one who was the fool.

  Just before I decided to turn off the programme, my eyes focused properly on the two suspects, still displayed on the screen.

  “Hi Madi, I’m actually looking for Auryn,” Barnaby said, making me jump when he walked in through the staffroom door. I desperately clicked close on the video player, but it was too late.

  “She knows!” Barnaby called and I was unsurprised to see Sara appear around the door frame.

  “That’s such a shame. We’d have been gone after Christmas. Now we have to cut things shorter,” she said, her voice even icier than it had been when I’d first met her.

  “Let’s finish up here and get going,” she said to Barnaby, as if I didn’t even exist.

  He looked at me with those warm brown eyes. I wondered if they were real, or if he was wearing contact lenses. The only thing that had clued me into him being the same person as the scammer on CrimeWatch was the fact the playback had started there and the bone structure of the pair when they had their pictures next to each other.

  Barnaby took a step towards me and Sara shut the door of the staffroom behind her in a very final way.

  “You are not going to get away with this,” I said, hoping that Tiff would choose this time to put in an appearance. Those mince pies must have really disagreed with her! At least if she’d appeared, it would be two on two.

  To my horror, Barnaby pulled a small axe from his belt, that looked like it had most recently been used for chopping down Christmas trees. He took another few steps forwards and I backed away, trying to think of something that would stop me from being chopped into little pieces.

  “You’re going to sit down and you’re going to eat a few of these,” Barnaby said, pulling out a little packet full of familiar blue crystals. “Everything will go away after that.”

  “I’m not eating rat poison,” I told him, flatly.

  “Come on, Barnaby! This is a golden opportunity to get ourselves out of trouble. If you manage to do this right, it will buy us more than enough time to get away. She’s quite a convincing suspect and you told me the police don't like her,” Sara pressed.

  “Sorry, I really did think you were nice,” he told me, moving closer with the axe. “Poison would be better than this.”

  “I’m not taking anything,” I told him, trying to keep a small distance between us. “What’s the big plan? You’re going to try to make me die the same way you killed Jenna when she figured out who you were? Will you leave the vial of rat poison next to me as some kind of guilty admission? No one is going to believe it. I had no reason to kill Jenna,” I said.

  Sara shrugged, still holding the door. “Don’t worry, I’m sure your name will be cleared eventually, but we’ll be gone by then and no one will catch up with us. Avery has done better for us than we’d ever expected. That arts and crafts day was a masterstroke!”

  I was reminded of Jordan telling me I was being taken advantage of by agreeing to speak at the seminar for free. If this was where the money from it was going, I thought he had a point.

  “On CrimeWatch it said you manage to convince people you’re a genuinely successful company. How?” I asked, wondering if I could play for time. Unfortunately, the zoo was busy, and technically, no one should be in here until around 10:30, which had been an hour or so away when Tiff and I had entered the staffroom.

  “It’s very complicated,” Sara said, examining her manicured nails. She also seemed to know the time and that no one was likely to come this way anytime soon. “A marketing email gets
sent out. When someone clicks the link in it, they’re taken to what looks like the official site of the events company we’re spoofing. Only, there’s an extra page added on that belongs to us, and it’s the only place where you can add your special money off discount code and sign up for a call with us.” She smiled. “It was an expensive piece of work developing what is essentially a computer virus that overlays certain website details with our own when activated, but it has certainly earned us our money back.”

  “Surely if someone checked on a different computer, they’d realise,” I said, shocked that anyone would fall for it.

  “It’s less likely than you think. Most people will go via the email link we sent them, as it’s the only way to access the secret discount. They’ll click it on the new device and hey presto, the virus is working again. If they don’t click the link, the extra page doesn’t come up. The customer thinks it’s because it’s only accessible with the newsletter. No one has noticed that the contact information also changes. Who really takes notice of whether there are dashes in an email address, or not, or remembers the telephone numbers listed? We piggyback on a company with a good reputation, charge a better than fair fee and land the job.”

  “And then you persuade the business to let your company run all admissions and event transactions, before taking it all,” I concluded.

  Sara laughed. “That’s it!”

  “What about the staff? Are they all working for you?” I asked.

  Barnaby smiled and suddenly he didn’t look like such a silver fox, more like a very sly one. “Events staff are a fascinating breed. They will work for a specified amount of time on the promise of a big bonus at the end, depending how much commission they earn. We haven’t paid anyone a penny yet. By the time they realise, we’ll be gone. All of the animal hire and props, we get that on credit, too. That way, we get to keep everything. No one ever realises until it’s too late. By then, we’re two different people running a brand new events company in a new part of the country. The police will never catch us because, for the most part, we work the same way most of the legitimate companies do! It’s a bad industry for the workers,” he said with a self-satisfied smile.

  “It’s only bad when self-serving people like yourselves take advantage of the goodwill of others. You put family run attractions out of business. You ruin peoples’ dreams,” I said, stunned at how heartless the couple could be.

  “We’re doing businesses a favour. You’d be amazed how much community support there is after we’ve hit a place. I swear some of them make an absolute killing when we’re gone,” he said, shaking his head

  “That doesn’t justify what you do,” I told him.

  Barnaby groaned in annoyance - a far cry from the attentive and kind man I’d thought I knew.

  “I knew you were someone to keep an eye on. When I did all of my research about the zoo, I found out what happened here with the last owner.” He shook his head. “When I dug a little deeper, I also found out who it was who happened to catch the criminals in the act. The zoo has it’s own little Nancy Drew.” He smirked.

  For a strange moment, I found I wished I had Lowell here with me. Now would have been the perfect time for him to burst into the room and distract the bad guys, the way I’d done when he’d been in trouble the time Barnaby was talking about.

  “That’s how you knew about the poison,” I said, remembering that the cause of the serval’s death had landed in the press, resulting in the arrival of animal activists, both real and fake.

  “We always make sure we plan for every eventuality, including a contingency plan if anything goes wrong. I really did send Jenna a marketing video to show to her interns when we were still ironing out the contract here. I had no idea CrimeWatch was going to run that feature, same as they tend to do every Christmas. It’s never bothered us before, as we always change our appearances so much, but after I came in to sign the contract, Jenna said hello. Then told me she knew who I really was and said she was able to prove it.”

  “Why would she tell you?” I said, confused.

  Barnaby shot me a rueful grin. “I think she took a fancy to me. Perhaps she thought she could get a cut, or join us. Sorry to tell you this, but your friend wasn’t a saint. Or who knows? Maybe she wanted to give us a chance to hand ourselves in and thought she would be a hero. Some people watch too many films.” He shrugged. “I never found out what she wanted. We’d agreed to talk about it the day after the party.”

  “You killed her before she could talk to you,” I said, feeling sick with fury.

  “It was too easy to get her one last drink and slip the poison in. Even if it hadn’t been a blue drink, she was so drunk, she wouldn’t have noticed anyway. You made getting the poison a piece of cake, too. One of the first things I asked the caretaking team after I’d signed the contract and spoken to Jenna was where all of the heavy duty cleaning products and pest control items were kept, you know… for future reference. I knew if there was something useful, it would be kept there. ”

  “Then you fixed the crime scene to make it look like her death had something to do with an annoyed lover, or an enraged partner,” I concluded.

  Barnaby shrugged. “It worked. The same way that dropping those cigarettes was supposed to be a convenient end to that interferer O’Reilly and also a way to get rid of any inconvenient evidence that Jenna might have left lying around. Not that I thought she was smart enough to do that,” he said, disdainfully.

  I bristled. Jenna had been smarter than any of us had given her credit for. She’d even hidden the evidence that would have acted as the safety policy on her life… had Barnaby not killed her first.

  “Why try to kill Lawrence?” I asked, still confused by that part. Barnaby had called him ‘interfering’ but that had just been his way.

  “The job’s not done when we’ve signed a contract. We always have to submit our finance reports and so on as we go along to whatever finance team an attraction has. Having a professional accountancy team is part of what we claim to have, but actually paying for one would be a nightmare. We have a set of templates we edit for every job. It slips straight by most people. They’re too impressed by the numbers at the bottom of the page. This time, we hit a snag. The old man had a lot of questions about the money we were making, and it got to the point where they were hard to answer. We’d have had to hire a crooked accountant, or get rid of the old man. I’m sure you can see which option was preferable, on our tight budget.”

  I shook my head at him. Killing off an old man because it was convenient and might also help to tie up some other loose ends? It was just another show of how despicable these criminals were.

  “Who knew that a small-time zoo like this one would have paid the extra for a fire-safe office suite?” Barnaby looked disgusted. “That’s a one in a million chance!” He looked at me with those warm eyes that had inspired what I’d thought was friendship. He’d seemed so likeable, but that was the whole point, right? The best conmen of all of were easy to like.

  “Family run attractions have the potential to make more money than anyone ever expects. They have respected names, a good support base, and best of all, police who aren’t used to dealing with any criminals who aren’t bumbling fools. Who knows? They may even chalk it all up in your name and we’ll just be the scammers who got away…” He raised the blue packet. “It’s worth it for the millions we’re walking away with.”

  “I’m not taking it, and good luck forcing me!” I said. I may be little but I was certainly fierce and ready to fight tooth and nail.

  “Barnaby, get on with it!” Sara said, suddenly deciding it was time to make an end.

  That was when Tiff walked into the room, looking greener than ever.

  “Madi, I think I might need to go home…” she started to say and then froze at the sight of Barnaby holding an axe above my head.

  I knew an opportunity when I saw it.

  I dived forwards across the coffee table, scattering magazines and half-empty m
ugs, before rolling across the floor and running at Sara. I heard Barnaby cry out in anger and something swooshed through the air. My legs pushed me to the right. There was a ‘thunk’ when the axe imbedded itself in the wall, just half a metre away from Sara’s head.

  “Idiot!” she screamed and wrenched the axe free from the wall. Unfortunately, that meant the gatekeeper I had to get past was now armed.

  “Tiff, they’re murderers!” I said, probably somewhat redundantly, considering Barnaby had just thrown an axe at my head.

  My best friend wasted no time in picking up the mugs I’d scattered when I’d jumped across the table and flinging them at Barnaby. He grunted and covered his face with his arms, trying to get close to Tiff, so he could probably get rid of her, too.

  Never before had I so badly wished that someone would skive off for an early coffee break…

  Sara swung the hand axe straight at my head. I ducked. Luck was on my side. Sara was only ever supposed to play the part of the events overseer. She didn’t have much experience of doing anything with an axe. I watched as her swing carried on, leaving her off balance.

  A quick trip and a push sent her sprawling across the floor.

  “Come on, Tiff!” I shouted, just as she threw the last mug.

  Barnaby ducked it and ran towards her, his hands aiming for her throat.

  I abandoned my escape and ran towards him, grabbing a wooden stool on the way. It was too late. I could see Barnaby was about to throttle Tiff before I could even get close!

  Suddenly, her face turned even more green and she was sick… all over Barnaby.

  “Sorry,” Tiff said, British manners getting the better of her and forcing her to apologise to the man trying to murder her.

  Fortunately, I was not crippled by politeness. Whilst Barnaby was still looking down at the chunks of half-digested mince pie in horror, I swung the stool. Tiff’s eyes widened for a moment. He turned slightly before the stool clocked him right on the back of his head.