by AG Barnett
“Come on,” Mary said, holding her hand out to her. “Why don’t we go for a little walk—a bit of fresh air will make you feel better.”
Emily nodded and got up as though in a daze. Mary shot a look at Dot that she hoped conveyed a clear message not to follow her and led Emily out into the hall, where she grabbed their coats from the stand and headed out through the main entrance.
“We’re just going for a walk around the house,” she said to the young officer who was standing there. His mouth opened, about to protest, when he saw the tears that were still rolling down Emily’s pale cheeks and instead just nodded and moved aside.
The power of a crying woman, Mary thought as she turned her companion right along the path that ran in front of the house. She held Emily’s arm, which even through the thickness of the coat she could feel was as thin and hard as bone. Added to her pale complexion, Mary rather cruelly thought of her as almost skeletal in appearance. Despite this, she was a good-looking woman. Her high cheekbones and striking green eyes were assurance of that.
“So, are you and Steve an item then?” Mary said, always favouring bluntness over delicacy.
“I, I’m not sure anymore,” Emily stammered, her voice thin and punctuated by sobs. “I thought we were, but…”
“I saw you going into his room last night, was that the first time you’d been together?”
“Oh no, we’ve been seeing each other for a while now. We met at an on-set party through mutual friends a few months ago.”
“Oh, right,” Mary said, puzzled. “Sorry for saying, but you haven’t seemed overly ‘together’ since you’ve been here?”
“Something’s wrong with Steve,” Emily blurted out, her bottom lip wobbling. “I don’t know what it is, but he’s been all strange since the day before we got here and he just won’t talk to me. He’s been pushing me away and then, well, today!”
“What about today?”
“Melanie dying has sent him completely crazy.” She paused and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “And now I’m starting to wonder if the reason he was being so cold to me was because Melanie was here.”
“Surely you don’t think there was anything going on between them?!” Mary said incredulously. Steve Benz was in his mid-fifties, and not exactly a catch. There was no way she could see Melanie Shaw being interested in him in a million years.
“Steve is a successful producer, Melanie was probably fluttering her eyelashes at him to get her a part in a show or something. And then last night…” she said, shaking her head as though trying to shake the memories out.
“What happened last night?” Mary asked, stopping and halting Emily with a touch of her arm. They had rounded to the corner to the back of the house and on the far side, two officers were still combing the area for signs of an intruder.
“He was, just awful.” Emily spoke slowly and dramatically, her whole body shaking with either hurt or anger, Mary couldn’t tell. “I went to his room, but he said it was all over and that he couldn’t see me anymore. Just like that!”
“And did he say why?” Mary asked, stepping back slightly. Emily looked like a woman on the edge.
“He said his life was moving in another direction now and we didn’t fit into that, whatever that means.
“Anyway,” Emily said bitterly, “he told me to get out.”
“And have you spoken about it this morning?”
“I was trying to when he began shouting at me—he’s barely said a word all morning.”
“Come on,” Mary said, taking her arm. “Let’s head back, I’ll try and talk to him for you.”
“Oh, would you? Thank you,” Emily said, beaming. She squeezed Mary’s arm as they turned around and made their way back to the house.
Chapter Eleven
“What’s going on?” Mary said as she and Emily arrived back in the hallway of the house.
Dot, Pea, Dave and Freddie were all heading up the stairs in a line. Dot turned at the sound of her voice.
“Oh, Mary, I wondered where you were. I stuck my head out the front door, but there was no sign of you.”
“We’d gone around the side of the house, what’s happening?”
“The police are going to search all of our rooms, they want us there while they do it.”
“Oh, right,” Mary answered, following the group up the stairs in a daze, gripped with a sudden fear.
Once they searched the rooms, they would find Dot’s laxatives. As soon as the post-mortem revealed that they had been in Melanie’s system, Dot would confess and the evidence would back her up. Mary needed to get ahead of this. She needed to talk to Inspector Corrigan now.
As they reached the landing and began to fan out towards each of their rooms, she saw the inspector was standing outside hers, a female uniformed officer by his side.
Mary felt her breathing quicken.
Why was he waiting outside her room? All the others had a single police officer outside, but the man in charge had apparently decided that she was worthy of his special attention.
“Inspector,” she greeted him curtly.
“Miss Blake,” he replied, that slight smile that always seemed only moments from his lips appearing again. “I’m sorry for the intrusion, but I assure you this is necessary.”
“It’s quite all right,” Mary said stiffly. “Actually, I need to tell you something.”
She looked over her shoulder, but as Melanie’s room had been the one next to hers and she was at the end, there was no one in earshot.
“Why don’t we go into your room to talk?” Corrigan said, his face now serious and business-like. “Constable Jones here can begin searching your room while we do so, if that’s OK with you?”
“Fine,” Mary said, before following them both through the door.
“Big room,” Corrigan said, looking around.
“They’re all big rooms here,” Mary said.
She moved to the small sofa under the right-hand window and decidedly took her seat in the middle, ensuring there was no room for Corrigan. Instead, he pulled the red, padded chair from in front of the dressing table and dragged it in front of her.
“OK,” he said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “What do you want to tell me?”
Mary sighed and looked down at the worn carpet.
She was reminded of the time at school when she had hit Henry Chadworth with her hockey stick for grabbing at her breasts in the playground. Sitting before an unsympathetic headmaster, she had been defiant then. Righteous in the knowledge that she had done the right thing and that that boy had got exactly what he had deserved.
Now, though? Now she felt small, awkward, and, most of all, guilty.
The uniformed officer, who had begun mooching around the room as soon as they had entered, started looking through the bedside drawers. Mary watched her as her mind tried to ignore her current situation by lingering in the past.
Henry Chadworth, she remembered, had gone on to be a politician.
“Last night, purely as a prank, I took some tablets from my friend’s handbag and slipped them into Melanie Shaw’s drink,” she said in a rush of words that tumbled out of her mouth before she folded her arms and stared at the inspector as though daring him to say the obvious.
“OK, thank you for telling me.”
“Look, just because I wanted to give her a dodgy tummy for a while, doesn’t mean I’d…” She paused and frowned, realising he had not accused her of murdering Melanie as she had thought he would.
“How many pills?” he asked, ignoring her outburst.
“Four,” she answered, and then added quickly, “but I don’t think that’s enough to do anything really bad. I mean, the recommended dose is two tablets!”
She realised she sounded more hopeful and desperate than convincing and was relieved when she saw Corrigan give her a sympathetic look.
“I can’t see how it could have anything to do with her injuries,” he said softly. “But I have to say this doesn’t h
elp you to look any more innocent, Miss Blake.”
Mary said nothing, sensing from the look in the inspector’s eye that he had more to say.
“Crime scene says there’s no sign of any part of the furniture having been the cause of Miss Shaw’s death,” he said grimly. “We are now treating this as a murder.”
“Bloody hell,” Mary said, leaning back in her seat as she puffed out her cheeks and exhaled in surprise.
“The only problem is,” Corrigan continued, his eyes looking up to the ceiling. “We have no sign of a murder weapon, no clue how someone could have entered the room and then exited with a thick, solid door locked from the inside and a sheer wall outside the window.”
His gaze returned to her suddenly, as though he had just realised how much he was sharing with her.
“Are you sure you didn’t hear any sounds from next door last night? A bang? Scuffling? Anything at all?”
“Nothing,” Mary said, still unwilling to report on her friend’s nocturnal meeting, and then frowned.
“What is it?” Corrigan asked, his voice rising in sudden expectation.
“I’ve just remembered that I did hear a kind of thump, and a sort of tapping noise just before it now I think of it,”
“A tapping, and a thump,” Corrigan repeated slowly.
Mary felt she had disappointed him and to her own surprise, wanted to help some other way.
“What about the window?” she asked.
“What about it?” Corrigan answered. “I’ve already said, scaling that wall seems unlikely.”
“No, I don’t mean that,” Mary continued. “I mean, what if someone threw something through it, like a rock or something. Or fired it.”
“Like a catapult?” Corrigan smiled.
“Well,” Mary huffed, slightly hurt at his amusement. “It’s a possible answer, isn’t it? That’s more than you’ve got now.”
“If something had been thrown through the window it would still be in the room,” Corrigan said, the smile gone now. “We didn’t find anything. There’s hardly anything in the whole room that could have hit her over the head, and what there is we’ve tested and found no traces on it.”
“Sir?” the police officer said from across the room. She was standing by the bed, holding a small piece of paper and staring at Mary strangely.
“Stay here please, Miss Blake,” Corrigan said, giving her a sharp look as he rose and moved across the room.
The officer held out the paper to him with a latex-gloved hand and his eyes scanned it before turning back to Mary.
“I’m afraid it looks like we have even more to discuss, Miss Blake,” he said flatly.
Chapter Twelve
“You could at least tell me what it says,” Mary said haughtily. She was desperately trying to keep the rising terror at bay by channelling it into being bloody furious instead. The way they were acting had her worried. What on earth could they have found in here that would have them both looking at her as though she was some kind of mass murderer?!
“Or maybe that’s your plan?” she said angrily. “It’s probably just some scrap of paper that’s been in here for years and you’re just pretending that it’s something to do with what happened to Melanie.”
Corrigan had said nothing for at least two minutes since the uniformed officer had handed him the note. The constable had continued her search of the room while Corrigan had taken a seat back on the chair by the dresser and stared at Mary with a blank and unreadable expression.
Finally, the officer emerged from the bathroom and nodded at her superior.
“That’s it, sir, nothing else,” she said before standing against the wall with her hands together in front of her, staring off into space.
“Miss Blake, this piece of paper,” Corrigan said, holding up the small see-through plastic bag that contained it in front of him. “Says ‘you are the killer!’ in a printed font.”
“What?!” Mary said, sitting up in her chair wide-eyed.
“And bearing in mind it was found under your pillow, I have to wonder why or how it got there?”
“Well, how the hell am I supposed to know?!” Mary said, throwing her hands into the air, exasperated. “You don’t seriously think that Melanie took the time to get to a computer and write an incriminating note after I’d whacked her over the head, do you?”
Corrigan said nothing, but the corner of his mouth rose and his eyes took on a questioning quality.
“Oh, I didn’t mean I’d actually bashed her over the head! I’m just pointing out how ridiculous all of this is!”
“As ridiculous as a murder in a locked and inaccessible room?” Corrigan asked dryly.
Mary opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again as Corrigan got up and moved across the room to the window on the left-hand side. He opened it and leaned his head out for a moment before pulling back in, shutting it and returning to his chair.
“You know?” he said, sighing. “The climb in through Melanie Shaw’s window would be a lot less difficult if you were going across from yours rather than all the way from the ground up.”
“You can’t be serious?! I’m not some bloody spider-woman crawling all over the building!”
“I’m just presenting you with the current situation,” Corrigan said. “A woman has been killed and right now, you look like the most likely candidate for the murder.”
Mary swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. The full weight of Melanie’s death being murder hit her, alongside the terror of being the prime suspect. All those shows where she had chased down the bad guy, her well-practised look of righteousness plastered across her face.
Now, though, in real life and on the other side of the questioning, it was horrible.
“Are you OK?” Corrigan asked, his head tilting to one side.
“Fine,” Mary croaked. “What happens now?”
Corrigan took a deep breath, his deep brown eyes fixed on hers.
“Did you murder Melanie Shaw?”
The words hit Mary like a boot to the chest. She cleared her throat and returned the intensity of his stare.
“No, I did not.”
He held her gaze for a moment in silence before nodding and rising from his chair.
“Thank you, Miss Blake, we’ll talk again once I’ve checked about the other rooms.” He left, closely followed by the officer.
Mary took a seat and tried to gather her thoughts. What on earth was she going to do?
Her gaze snapped up from the floor as she heard raised voices coming from the hallway and she sprang from the sofa and headed towards it.
In the corridor, the rest of the guests were lined up outside their respective doors. That is, apart from Freddie Hale, whose arms were being held back by two officers as his red face contorted in anger and frustration.
“What is it, Benz? What did they find?!”
Steve Benz was standing outside his door with a pale, sorrowful expression, his eyes cast downwards and his shoulders hunched. Inspector Corrigan was standing next to him, looking into a small bag next to a uniformed officer. He looked up and gestured to the officer who led Steve Benz back into his room.
“Can you please escort everyone else downstairs?” Corrigan said to the officers who began rounding up the guests with Freddie Hale in front, still swearing and mumbling under his breath as he shook off the officer’s now loosened grip.
Once back in the living room, Freddie made his way straight for the small bar in the corner and poured himself a whiskey that Mary considered stiff even by her standards. Dave Flintock moved across to his client and laid a hand on his back, which was quickly brushed off by Freddie, who stormed across to the windows with his drink. Flintock shrugged and began looking through the bottles on offer at the bar.
Emily Hanchurch had returned to the sofa and was sitting there in pale-faced silence, staring at the blank television screen without turning it on again.
“What’s going on?” Mary asked as Dot and Pea appeared to either side o
f her by the door.
“They found some sort of note in Steve Benz’s room.” Dot answered.
Mary frowned. “In Steve’s room?”
“Yes,” Dot continued, eyeing Mary suspiciously. “And I noticed the inspector had something from your room as well?”
“What?!” Pea said, his eyes widening.
Mary sighed as she looked between them. “It was a note which apparently says that I’m Melanie’s killer.”
“Bloody hell!” Pea gasped. “Someone thinks you killed her? And they snuck into your room to leave a note?!”
“Where was it?” Dot asked.
“Under my pillow.”
“And did you see it?”
“Not really, he just flashed it at me. It was printed though, which doesn’t make any… Wait!”
Mary pushed through the two of them and ran for the door, bursting through into the hall and barging straight into the officer who had been waiting on the other side.
“I’m sorry!” she called to him as she raced up the stairs, ignoring his shouts for her to stop from behind.
The door to Steve Benz’s room was open and she pushed it wide and stepped into the room.
“It was from the game!” she boomed triumphantly.
Corrigan jumped up from the chair he had been sitting in, facing Benz, and moved quickly towards her.
“Out, now,” he said firmly, taking her arm and sending her spinning back into the corridor.
“This is a murder investigation,” he growled as they spilt out into the corridor. “You can’t just walk into a room where I am interrogating a suspect and start talking about some game or other!”
Mary recoiled from his ferocity, taken aback by his change in manner. His soft eyes had hardened and narrowed, his mouth tightened and his jaw set. He seethed like a bear who had just been woken from hibernation early.
“Wait,” he said suddenly looking puzzled. “Why were you talking about, a game?”
The anger had vanished as quickly as it had come, and Mary straightened her back and lifted her chin.
“Well, if you’d just listened rather than leaping about and manhandling me,” she said, giving him an accusing look. She was surprised to see his cheeks redden and feeling uncomfortable herself, moved on quickly.
