Another couple of people had come into the café. Lionel leaned forward conspiratorially.
‘It happened about two or three weeks before the murder,’ he said. ‘I’d finished at the spa and I was doing a quick run around the grounds. It was a warm night. Beautiful. There was a full moon. So I ran and did some stretches and then I decided to do some chin-ups. There was a tree I liked to use. It had a branch at the perfect height. It was in this wood – near to Oaklands, the cottage where Melissa lived, as a matter of fact. So there I was, making my way along, when suddenly I heard noises and the next thing I knew, there they were the two of them, him on top of her, both of them stark naked in the grass.’
‘Are you sure it was Lisa and Stefan?’
‘That’s a fair question, Sue. It was night and there was a distance between us, and at first I got the idea it was Aiden having it away with his future sister-in-law, which would have been quite a laugh. But I’d worked out with Aiden and he’s got this big tattoo on his shoulder. He always called it his cosmic snake, but to me it just looked like a giant tadpole!’ He laughed. ‘Whoever the guy was out there, it wasn’t Aiden. He had bare skin – I’d have easily seen a tattoo in the moonlight.
‘Anyway, I didn’t want to hang around like some kind of perv, whoever it was out there, so I started to move away. And of course you’re going to guess what happened. I only stepped on a branch and the bloody thing went off like a gunshot. Well, that stopped them. The guy looked round and I saw his face as clearly as I’m seeing you now. It was definitely Stefan.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You never talked to him about it?’
‘Are you kidding?’
I thought it through. ‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Lisa fired him a couple of weeks later. If they were having sex, why would she do that?’
‘I wondered about that. But my guess is that he’d told her to get lost. What she was doing was exploitation, no more, no less. Maybe he threatened to put in a complaint.’
I still hadn’t heard from Stefan Codrescu and I wondered how long it would take for my letter to reach him in jail. There was still the question of whether he would agree to see me, but it was critical that the two of us should meet. I needed to know everything that had happened between him and Lisa Treherne. She wasn’t going to say anything. Only he could tell me the truth.
‘You were with him on the Friday night,’ I said. ‘He got drunk at the party.’
‘That’s right.’ Lionel glanced at the clock on the wall. We had been talking for twenty minutes of our allotted half-hour. He drained his protein shake, leaving a green half-moon on his upper lip. ‘That wasn’t like Stefan. He could usually hold his liquor. But of course he’d just been fired, so maybe he was drowning his sorrows.’
‘You took him back to his room.’
‘That would have been about ten o’clock. We walked over to the stable block, which is where they put us up. I had the room next to his. I said goodnight and we both went to bed. I was pretty knackered myself, actually.’
‘What time did you get to sleep?’
‘I guess about ten or fifteen minutes later – but before you ask, I didn’t hear anything. I’m a heavy sleeper. If Stefan got up and went into the hotel, I’m afraid I can’t help you. All I can tell you is that he was lying on his bed when I left.’
‘Did you see him the next day?’
‘No. I was in the spa. He was helping with the wedding.’
‘Do you believe he killed Frank Parris?’
He had to think about that. Eventually, he nodded. ‘Yeah. Probably. I mean, the police found plenty of evidence and I know he was broke. He did a lot of online gambling. All these Romanians do. He often asked me to bail him out before he got paid at the end of the month.’
He looked at the clock again and got to his feet. Our time was up.
‘I hope you can help him, Sue,’ he said. ‘Because actually, I quite liked him and I think what happened to him was pretty crook. And I hope you find Cecily. Do they have any idea what happened to her?’
‘Not yet.’ There was one last thing I wanted to ask. ‘You said that, at first, you thought it might be Aiden with Lisa in the wood. Was that because he was usually promiscuous?’
‘Promiscuous! That’s a funny word to use. You mean did he fool around?’ Lionel gave me a crooked smile. ‘I don’t know anything about his marriage, and when I saw those two people out there I don’t know why it popped into my head that it might be him. Maybe he and Cecily were happy together and maybe they weren’t – but I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t think Aiden would’ve dared go behind her back. I mean, she was the one who’d found him and brought him up from London, and in her own way Cecily was as tough as her sister. If she’d found out he was cheating on her, she’d have had his balls for breakfast.’
We shook hands. Another trainer had come into the café, also in Lycra, and I watched the two of them give each other a man hug, bumping chests and rubbing each other’s back.
I still wasn’t sure that I liked Lionel Corby. Could I believe the version of events that he had presented to me? I wasn’t sure about that either.
Michael Bealey (Lunch)
Michael J. Bealey was a busy man.
His PA had rung to say that drinks at Soho House would no longer work but could I meet him for lunch at twelve thirty? Lunch turned out to be a sandwich and a cup of coffee at a Prêt just around the corner from his flat on the King’s Road, but that was fine by me. I wasn’t sure if Michael would have had enough conversation for a two-course meal. He had always been a man of few words, despite having published millions of them. The “J.” on his business card was important to him, by the way. It was said that he had known both Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick and had adapted his own name as a sort of tribute to them both. He was well known as an expert on their work and had written long articles that had been published in Constellations (which he had also edited at Gollancz) and Strange Horizons.
He was already there when I arrived, scrolling through a typescript on his iPad. There was something mole-like about the way he worked, hunched forward as if he was trying to burrow his way into the screen. I had to remind myself that he was about the same age as me. His grey hair, glasses and old-fashioned suit added an extra ten years, which he seemed to embrace. There are some men who are never really young, who don’t even want to be.
‘Oh, hello, Susan!’ He didn’t get up. He wasn’t the kissing sort, not even a peck on the cheek. But he did at least fold the cover over his iPad and smile at me, blinking in the sun. He already had a coffee and a Bakewell tart, which was sitting on the paper bag it had come in. ‘What can I get you?’ he asked.
‘Actually, I’m all right, thank you.’ I had glanced at the rather depressing muffins and pastries on offer and hadn’t been tempted. Anyway, I wanted to get this over with.
‘Well, do help yourself to a piece of this.’ He pushed the tart towards me. ‘It’s quite good.’
That clipped speech. I remembered it so well. He was like an actor in one of those plays from between the wars where everyone talks for a long time but very little happens.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m very well, thank you.’
‘And in Greece, I understand!’
‘Crete, actually.’
‘I’ve never been to Crete.’
‘You should. It’s beautiful.’
Even on a Sunday, the traffic trundled past on the King’s Road, and I could smell dust and petrol in the air.
‘So how are things?’ I asked, snatching at the question to fill the silence.
He sighed and blinked several times. ‘Well, you know, it’s been one of those years.’ It always was, where Michael was concerned. He’d turned gloom into an art form.
‘I was pleased to see you picked up the Atticus Pünd series.’ I was determined to be positive. ‘And you kept my old covers. Somebody gave me a
copy the other day. I thought it looked great.’
‘It seemed both pointless and uneconomical to rejacket them.’
‘Are they selling well?’
‘They were.’
I waited for him to explain what he meant but he just sat there, sipping whatever was in his paper cup. ‘So what happened?’ I asked eventually.
‘Well, it was that business with David Boyd.’
I vaguely knew the name but couldn’t place it. ‘Who is David Boyd?’
‘The writer.’
There was another silence. Then, hesitantly, Michael continued. ‘I actually brought him into the company so in a way I suppose it was my fault. I bought his first book at Frankfurt. A three-way auction, but we were lucky. One publisher dropped out and the second wasn’t overenthusiastic, so we got it at a good price. We published the first book eighteen months ago and the second last January.’
‘Science fiction?’
‘Not exactly. Cybercrime. Very well researched. Quite well written. It’s actually quite terrifying stuff. Big business, fraud, politics, the Chinese. Disappointing sales, though. I don’t know what went wrong, but the first book underperformed and the second book was actually much weaker. At the same time, he had an aggressive agent – Ross Simmons at Curtis Brown – trying to tie us down to a new deal, so we took a decision and let him go. Sad, but there you are. These things happen.’
Was that the end of the story? ‘What did happen?’ I asked.
‘Well, he took umbrage. Not the agent. The writer. He felt we’d let him down, gone back on our word. It was all very unpleasant, but the worst of it was that he – actually, you’re not going to believe this – but it seems that he hacked into the Hely Hutchinson Centre to get his revenge.’
A whole series of terrifying possibilities opened up before my eyes. I had read about Hely Hutchinson in the Bookseller: a brand-new, state-of-the-art distribution centre near Didcot in Oxfordshire. Two hundred and fifty thousand square feet. Robot technology. Sixty million books shipped every year.
It had been a nightmare, Michael explained. ‘It was absolute chaos. We had the wrong titles being sent to the wrong bookstores. Orders got ignored. We had one customer who received thirty copies of the same Harlan Coben . . . one a day for a whole month. Other books just disappeared. If you tried to find them it was as if they had never been written. That included the reissues of Atticus Pünd.’ He realised that he had managed several sentences in one go and stopped himself. ‘Very annoying.’
‘How long did this go on for?’ I asked.
‘It’s still going on. We’ve got people in there now, sorting it out. The last two months were the worst. God knows what it’s going to do to our sales and operating profit for this quarter!’
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said. ‘Have you gone to the police?’
‘The police are involved, yes. I really can’t say any more than that. We’ve managed to keep it out of the press. I shouldn’t really even be talking to you about it.’
Why was he talking to me about it? I guessed. ‘I suppose this isn’t a very good time to be approaching you,’ I said. ‘I mean, for a job.’
‘I’d love to help you, Susan. I think you did a very good job with the Pünd novels – and I understand Alan Conway wasn’t an easy man to work with.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘What actually happened? At Cloverleaf Books?’
‘It wasn’t my fault, Michael.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’ He broke off a piece of Bakewell tart. ‘But, of course, there were rumours.’
‘The rumours weren’t true.’
‘Rumours very rarely are.’ He popped the fragment into his mouth and waited until it had melted. He didn’t chew or swallow. ‘Look, I’m firefighting at the moment and I really can’t help you. But I can put the word out and see. What are you looking for? Publisher? Editorial director?’
‘I’ll take anything.’
‘How about freelance? Project by project?’
‘Yes. That might work.’
‘There might be something.’
Or there might not. That was it.
‘Are you sure you won’t have a coffee?’ he asked.
‘No. Thank you, Michael.’
He didn’t dismiss me quite yet. To have done so would have been a humiliation. We talked for another ten minutes about the business, about the collapse of Cloverleaf, about Crete. He finished his coffee and his pastry and then we parted company without shaking hands because he had icing sugar on his fingers. So much for the Ralph Lauren jacket! The meeting had been a complete waste of time.
Craig Andrews (Dinner)
It was my third meal of the day and I still hadn’t eaten.
This time, however, I was going to make up for it. Craig had taken me to an old-fashioned trattoria in Notting Hill, one of those places where the waiters wear black and white and the pepper grinders are about six inches too long. The pasta was home-made, the wine rough and reasonably priced and the tables a little too close together. It was exactly the sort of restaurant I liked.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked as we tucked into very good bruschetta with ripe tomatoes and thick leaves of fresh basil.
‘The food? The restaurant?’
‘The crime! Do you think they’ll find Cecily Treherne?’
I shook my head. ‘If she was going to turn up, I think she’d have done so by now.’
‘So she’s dead.’
‘Yes.’ I thought for a moment. I hated writing her off like that. ‘Probably.’
‘Do you have any idea who killed her?’
‘It’s complicated, Craig.’ I tried to collect my thoughts. ‘Let’s start with the call that Cecily made to her parents. And let’s assume that someone overheard her talking. I thought at first that she had telephoned from Branlow Cottage, in which case it could only have been Aiden or Eloise, the nanny. But actually she made the call from her office in the hotel and that widens the field.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because Derek, the night manager, was there and he told me. “I knew something was wrong when she made that phone call. She was so upset.” That was what he said.’
‘So he overheard her.’
‘Yes. But Lisa Treherne had the office next door and she might have too. It could have been one of the guests. It could have been someone walking past the window outside.’ I sighed. ‘Here’s the problem. If you accept that Cecily had to be silenced because she knew something about the death of Frank Parris, then it follows that whoever killed her killed him. But as far as I can tell, none of the people I’ve mentioned had ever met Frank before. Not Derek, not Aiden, not Lisa. None of them had any motive.’
‘Could they have killed Cecily to protect someone else?’
‘I suppose so. But who? Frank Parris had been in Australia. He turned up by chance on the weekend of the wedding and he had no connection whatsoever with Branlow Hall except that he had booked himself in for three days.’ I drank some of the wine, which had rather pleasingly arrived at the table tucked into a straw basket. ‘Funnily enough, I have found two people who had a proper motive for killing him. And they’ve lied to me! But the trouble is, they live outside the hotel and I can’t see any way that they could have overheard Cecily making her telephone call.’ I thought about it. ‘Unless they happened to be there for a drink . . .’
‘Who are they?’
‘Joanne and Martin Williams. Sister and brother-in-law of the deceased. They live in Westleton and Frank had a half-share in their house. That was the reason he was in Suffolk. He was going to force them to sell it.’
‘How do you know they lied?’
‘It was a small thing, really.’
It was Aiden who had first mentioned it. The marquee for the wedding had arrived late. It hadn’t come to the hotel until Friday lunchtime. When Martin Williams was talking about his brother-in-law, he had said that Frank had complained about the wedding and in partic
ular about the marquee, which spoiled the view of the garden. But he had also told me that Frank had come to the house early, after breakfast. So, putting two and two together, Frank couldn’t possibly have seen the marquee.
On the other hand, Martin most certainly had. He must have gone to Branlow House sometime after Friday afternoon. Why? It was just possible that he wanted to find out which room Frank was in because he’d decided to kill him. Which would also explain Joanne’s last words to me: ‘Piss off and leave us alone.’ She knew what had happened and she was scared.
I told Craig all this and he smiled. ‘That’s very clever, Susan. Do you think this guy, Martin Williams, had it in him to kill his brother-in-law?’
‘Well, as I say, he was the only one with any motive. Unless . . .’ I hadn’t meant to put my thoughts into words, but Craig was fascinated by the whole story and I knew I had to go on. ‘Well, it’s a crazy idea, but it has occurred to me that Frank might not have been the target.’
‘Meaning?’
‘First of all, he changed rooms. He was originally in room sixteen but apparently it was too modern for him. So they put him in room twelve.’
‘Who went into room sixteen?’
‘A retired headmaster called George Saunders. He taught at a local school. Bromeswell Grove. But suppose someone didn’t know that. They knock on the door of room twelve in the middle of the night and he opens it and in the half-light they whack him on the head with a hammer and kill him before they know what they’ve done.’
‘Would he have opened the door in the middle of the night?’
‘That’s a good point. But I’ve had another thought. Suppose this wasn’t about Frank Parris or George Saunders or any of the guests. It could have been all about Stefan Codrescu. It seems that he was having an affair with Lisa Treherne and there was all sorts of sexual jealousy and anger bubbling away at Branlow Hall. Suppose someone wanted to frame him?’
‘For murder?’
‘Why not?’
‘And just killed a guest at random?’ He didn’t need to inject so much scepticism into his voice. I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. ‘I can see why you need to talk to Stefan,’ he said.
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