A Death at Dinner: An amateur sleuth murder mystery (A Mary Blake Mystery Book 2)

by AG Barnett

  “Oh, yes,” Mary said vaguely, “interesting.”

  “Anyway,” Anna said with a sigh, “I’d better go, I'm meeting Spencer.”

  “Where are you meeting him?” Mary asked, wondering if she should gate crash and ask more questions.

  Anna gave a small smile as she rose, her cheeks flushing.

  “We're going to Bella’s in town,” she said sheepishly. “I'll see you later.” She turned and hurried away.

  “We passed Bella’s when we were in town,” Pea said with a grin. “A little Italian place that looked very romantic.”

  “Oh stop wiggling your eyebrows,” Dot said sharply. “You're like a giggling schoolboy.”

  “What was that about an argument between James Donovan and Thomas?” Mary asked.

  “I didn't think you were listening,” Dot said with a questioning gaze. Mary answered it with silence before Pea broke in.

  “More than just an argument...you saw James’s black eye.”

  “That was from Thomas?” Mary exclaimed, leaning forward with interest.

  “Yep, sounds like there was a bit of a love triangle. Did you really not hear any of that?!”

  “No! Stop being astounded that I drifted off for a minute and just tell me!”

  “All right, all right!” Pea said, raising his hands in front of him defensively. “Anna was telling us that everyone seemed to be in love with Ruth, can’t say I blame them, I mean she is quite the looker.”

  Dot hit him hard on the arm. “You’re old enough to be her father!”

  “Don’t worry,” Pea said, grinning as he rubbed his arm, “I wasn’t planning on making a move.”

  Dot adjusted herself in her seat hurriedly. “Yes, well perhaps I’d better explain if you can’t be sensible.”

  Mary frowned at them both, thrown by this odd exchange, but before she could process what it meant Dot had continued talking.

  “Anna said that Thomas had been smitten with Ruth and apparently she liked to lead him on.”

  “Lead him on? So she wasn’t actually interested?”

  Dot pursed her lips. “Seems the sort that would enjoy leading people on more than actually having a relationship with them to me.”

  Mary frowned again. Was Dot now becoming an expert at reading people? In Mary’s view, she had always seemed to see other people as some sort of alien species. Maybe she was softening? Or maybe she just had a bee in her bonnet over Ruth Faulkner after Pea’s comments about the young woman earlier?

  “Maybe she was leading him on in order to get recipes out of him for her book?” Pea said.

  “Blimey,” Mary said, exhaling, “so what about James Donavon?”

  “Anna thinks he was sweet on Ruth as well,” Dot continued, “and that’s why they had a bust-up. Thomas gave him the black eye he’s got, whatever it was about.”

  Mary gave a slight smile at being “sweet on someone.” Sometimes talking to Dot was like a portal to the 1950s.

  “Well, I think we should ask him.” Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it from her jeans. “Hello?”

  “Mary, it’s Inspector Corrigan,” there was a slight pause, “Joe.”

  Mary felt a prickle of heat run up the back of her neck. “Hi Joe, any news on the autopsy?”

  She heard him sigh down the phone, the small speaker at her ear crackling. “They didn’t find anything conclusive, Mary.”

  “Conclusive? So, they did find something?”

  “Not really, the doc says that he was generally in good health. He looked at his medical records and it looked as though his medication had his heart condition under control.”

  “So he thinks he might have been poisoned?”

  “Well, the initial blood results didn’t turn up anything out of the ordinary. If he was poisoned, we might never know unless we have an idea what to look for.”

  “So you need me to look into it and see if I can give you something to go on,” she said thoughtfully.

  “No, that’s not what I said,” he answered, sounding exasperated. “I want you to go home and try to forget about it. I can’t investigate any more, there’s nothing here to show that something suspicious happened.”

  Now the prickle of heat that ran up her neck and caused her face to flush was not from the sudden intimacy of Corrigan using his first name, it was from anger. He didn’t believe her that there was something suspicious about the death of Thomas Mosley; he didn’t trust her.

  “Well, Inspector Corrigan, luckily you don’t get to decide what I do. I suggest you go back to chasing people who haven’t paid their parking fines or whatever it is you have to do that is so much more important than a murder.” She hung up the phone and dropped it onto the table in front of her.

  She stared at it a moment before raising her head, intending to tell Pea and Dot the bad news, and that maybe she had had them barking up the wrong tree all along when a woman’s scream rang out from the direction of the kitchen.

  The three of them darted from their table and sprinted towards the swing door which led through to the kitchen. Mary reached it first and pushed it open to see Ruth crouched on the floor next to Spencer Harley, who was twitching on the cold stone tiles.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him!” Ruth cried, looking up at them, her eyes wide with fear and wet with tears. Mary bent down next to her and looked at Spencer’s face, which shone with a waxy look under the strip lights of the kitchen. He was breathing, but it was ragged and unsteady. His body convulsed periodically and his tongue seemed too large for his open mouth. She heard Pea calling an ambulance behind her while she rolled him on his side in order to get him into the recovery position. As she did so, she noticed a small, crushed blue petal stuck to his neck. She frowned as the world seemed to swim around this delicate object so strangely out of place. She turned her head and looked up at the shelf to a white vase, which now stood empty.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The next few hours passed in a blur. The police had arrived again en masse, with Corrigan at the forefront. He hardly spoke to Mary. Instead, they exchanged glances across the restaurant as people buzzed about looking for evidence of wrongdoing while he took statements at a table in the corner. When it was finally her turn, she sat in front of him with a blank expression, waiting to see what he would say first.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said quietly, his dark brown eyes searching hers.

  “I doubt it,” Mary answered tersely.

  “It’s too much of a coincidence that just a day after Thomas Mosley’s death, Spencer Harley collapses. You think they were both poisoned.”

  “Have you heard anything from the hospital?” Mary asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

  “He’s alive, but it’s touch and go,” Corrigan answered. “He’d be dead if you hadn’t noticed the flower.”

  Mary felt a chill run through her. She had recognised the bright blue petal she had seen stuck to Spencer’s neck as she had turned him over. She had seen it just that morning, though it felt so long ago now it could well have been months. The bright blue flower that had stood in the simple white vase on the shelf in the kitchen, which was now gone. She had informed the police, knowing that somehow it was relevant. Clearly, it had been.

  “What is it?” she croaked, her throat dry. She reached down for the glass of water in front of her as Corrigan replied.

  “Wolfsbane, or monkshood. It’s deadly poisonous despite its pretty looks. The leaves contain aconite, nasty stuff.”

  Mary took a deep breath and tried to arrange her thoughts. “How quickly does the poisoning take hold?”

  “Very quickly,” Corrigan answered. “You’d feel the effects within seconds depending on how you ingested it. Spencer…”

  “It had to have been Ruth Faulkner,” Mary said suddenly, cutting him off.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked, sitting more upright in the hard-backed restaurant chair.

  “She told us she was going home, the next thing we kno
w she's screaming that something had happened to Spencer.”

  “She told us that she'd forgotten her phone.” Corrigan shrugged.

  “Maybe she did, maybe she didn't, but either way she was the one with Spencer—she had to have been the one that gave it to him.” She paused, her own words confusing her. “How did she persuade him to eat something?”

  Corrigan looked at her but said nothing.

  “I mean, say she whips up something yummy and filled with poison. Surely it wouldn't be normal for her to just walk up to Spencer and shove a cake in his mouth.”

  “She didn't,” Corrigan said.

  “No, of course, she didn't, she would have had to tempt him, persuade him, but there wasn't time. She'd only been gone a few minutes after leaving us. Where would she have left the poisoned cake? Just in the kitchen, where anyone could find it? No, that would be crazy. Then again, maybe she is crazy...”

  “Mary,” Corrigan said in a firm voice. She jerked her gaze up to him, her thoughts derailed. “No one baked a cake for the poison—they administered it directly.”

  Mary blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “The petal you found on the victim's neck, we found more of them in his mouth. We think someone shoved the plant in his mouth.”

  Mary reeled with the image of this. Someone had physically forced a poisonous plant into Spencer’s mouth? Who would do something like that? Something so up close and personal, something so brutal.

  “I just can’t believe we missed it the first time around,” Corrigan said, shaking his head before pinching the bridge of his nose, eyes closed. “The bloody plant was right there in the kitchen the whole time, and we didn’t even check it.”

  “You weren’t to know,” Mary said. “They just looked like pretty flowers. You didn’t even know that Thomas had been poisoned at the time.”

  “But you did,” Corrigan said, looking up at her. “You told me he had, and I didn’t trust you enough. I’m sorry.”

  Mary felt a deep pang of guilt.

  For most of her life, she had found that she’d never needed approval from anyone. She had largely done what she had wanted to do and pleased herself, not caring what anyone else thought of her. She realised now how angry she had been with Corrigan, how important it had seemed that she should be taken seriously, that she should be listened to. But why? She was an actress, not some crime-fighting superhero, and yet she had expected Corrigan to believe her. As he sat in front of her and apologised, she was realising how silly she had been.

  “You had his food tested,” she said. “What else could you have done at the time? Anyway, now we know, I assume you’ll be looking to see if this is what killed Thomas?”

  Corrigan nodded. “I’ve already called it in. Listen, Mary, whoever did this to Spencer must have been desperate. If Thomas was poisoned, which I now think he was,” he added quickly, “then that was planned. It was cold and calculated. This was anything but.”

  Mary shook her head. “How on earth can you think of killing someone by stuffing flowers into their mouth?!”

  “A crime of opportunity,” Corrigan said. “Whoever did this to Spencer knew that the flowers were right there in the kitchen, and knew they were poisonous.”

  “So it’s definitely the same person who killed Thomas,” Mary said, thinking hard. She looked up at him, an apologetic smile on her face. “There’s something I need to tell you.” Corrigan’s eyebrows rose. “Spencer asked me to come here, not because of the restaurant bash, but because he was being blackmailed.”

  “Blackmailed?!”

  Mary nodded and watched as his eyes grew hard, his lips thinning.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?” he said, his voice like iron.

  “He asked us not to! It turns out he already knew who it was, he just wanted me to find some evidence of it.”

  “Who did he think it was?” Corrigan leaned forward, his voice urgent.

  “Roderick Sutton.”

  Before she had even finished the name, Corrigan was up and stalking across the restaurant.

  Mary stood and made her way across the room to where Dot and Pea sat at a table.

  “Where’s he dashing off to?” Pea asked, peering at the commotion Corrigan was now causing amongst the three uniformed officers that were by the kitchen door.

  “To question Roderick I’d imagine,” Mary said as she sat heavily and put her head in her hands. “I just told him about Spencer being blackmailed.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Pea muttered darkly. “How did he take it?”

  “Unsurprisingly he was not happy that we hadn’t told him earlier.”

  “Well, he’s right,” Dot added.

  “Well, thank you Miss Obvious,” Mary snapped. “Anyway, at least we’ve got to the bottom of how Spencer and Thomas were poisoned.”

  She filled them in on the blue flowers that had been in the kitchen and how they had been used. Pea’s face, open like a book, as usual, moved through a range of shock and horror, while Dot’s remained impassive, steely. Her eyes, though, seemed to flame with anger.

  “Why would anyone do such a thing?” she said quietly when Mary had finished.

  “I think we need to focus on Thomas,” Mary said. “Joe was right when he said that poisoning Thomas had to be planned. Someone had thought it through carefully and managed to cover their tracks well. We still don’t even know how he was poisoned!”

  “Well, I doubt it was the same way Spencer was,” Pea said. “Sort of thing a chap would mention at dinner, someone stuffing flowers in your mouth.”

  “No, he must have been given the poison some other way. What happened to Spencer was an act of panic. He must have found out something, maybe he knew who the killer was and they silenced him before he could talk?”

  “I can’t believe he was poisoned in the next room from where we were sitting,” Pea said sadly. “Poor Anna was here only a few minutes before.”

  “Anna!” Mary said suddenly, jumping up from her seat. “Someone needs to tell her!”

  “We already have,” Corrigan said as he made his way over to the table. “We called through to the restaurant where she was supposed to meet Spencer and have sent a uniform over to pick her up. Mary, can you come with me?” He gave her a small nod to follow him and turned away again. Mary looked at the other two nervously before following.

  He led her across the lobby and through the door to the bar. Sat on a stool with a drink in hand was Roderick Sutton.

  “If you’d like to take a seat, Miss Blake,” Corrigan said.

  Mary sat on a stool next to Roderick, who was eyeing her suspiciously. She was feeling a rising sense of unease at the situation, not helped by Corrigan being so formal with her.

  “Now,” the inspector said, standing between them and folding his arms, “Miss Blake here tells me that Spencer Harley was receiving blackmail threats.”

  “Blackmail?” Roderick said in surprise. He looked at Mary. “Blackmail about what?”

  “I don’t know, but I know that whoever was sending them wanted him to sell the hotel.”

  Roderick’s expression changed from one of confusion to one of amusement.

  “You can’t think I was sending them?! That ridiculous!”

  “Who else wanted Spencer to sell? Everyone else here would have lost their jobs if your plans to turn this place into flats had gone through.”

  Roderick’s mouth opened and then closed again.

  “Where have you been over the last few hours, Mr Sutton?” Corrigan asked.

  “I… I was in my office.”

  “And where is that exactly?”

  “I have a room here at the hotel, it’s on the first floor. I can show you.”

  “And can anyone else vouch for your presence there?”

  Roderick’s eyes flashed between the two of them. “No. Look, this is crazy! You can’t actually think I had anything to do with this. I don’t know the first thing about poison!”

  “If you coul
d just wait here a moment,” Corrigan said to Roderick before gesturing to Mary to follow him again.

  They stepped back out into the lobby as the inspector closed the door behind him.

  “I’m sorry I brought you into that, but I wanted to see his reaction when he realised Spencer had confided in you about the blackmail.”

  “And?” Mary asked.

  “If I were a betting man, I’d say that was the first he’d heard of any blackmail, but I’ve seen too many good liars to go on that alone. What about you?”

  “I thought the same as you, but I meant what I said. He’s the one who has the motive for getting both Thomas and Spencer out of the way. It means he can sell this place and make his money.”

  Corrigan nodded. “Go back to the restaurant, I’m going to get his office searched and ask him a few more questions. I think it would be good if you were here when Anna Crosby turns up.”

  Mary nodded and was about to say sorry for not telling him about the blackmail letters, but he had already turned and headed back into the bar.

  Chapter Twenty

  As she turned back towards the restaurant, the main door to the street opened to her left and a uniformed officer stepped into the lobby and to one side. Anna Crosby entered arm in arm with Daisy White and moved towards her as the uniformed officer closed the door with him on the other side.

  “Oh, Mary!” Anna said, her eyes wide in horror. “Is it really true? Spencer’s been poisoned?”

  “I'm so sorry, but yes,” Mary said as she took her hands in hers. “I thought you would be going straight to the hospital?”

  “We tried,” Daisy said at her side, “they won't let anyone see him at the moment.”

  Mary nodded, wondering if this was because Spencer was too ill, or if they were worried that his life was still in danger.

  “I just don't understand how this could have happened,” Anna said, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Why would someone want to hurt Spencer?”

  “And Thomas,” Mary said. She watched the shocked reaction of the two women before continuing.