The Postscript Murders

by Griffiths, Elly

  ‘I once told my editor that I was going on holiday to Tuscany and somehow that became “divides her time”. Mostly I divide my time between the sofa and the fridge. As you can see.’

  JD made similar comments on the panel, about wanting to see women in her books who were ‘overweight and unglamorous, like me’. Why do people put themselves down like this? thinks Benedict. It’s rather boring. JD is tall but she’s not at all overweight. Then he thinks, is that what he does? Puts himself down in the hope that someone will disagree with him? If so, perhaps it’s about time he stopped.

  Edwin has obviously decided to get down to business.

  ‘How did you know Peggy, JD?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, do call me Julie.’ Julie gives him a smile which, like her laugh, is surprisingly warm. ‘Dex told me about Peggy. We got chatting at a crime-writing festival and I told him that I had problems with plotting. It was all right with the first book. That almost seemed to write itself. But with the next one I got into real difficulties. I knew there had to be a murder but I just couldn’t think of an original way to do it.’

  ‘And Dex suggested that Peggy could help?’ asks Benedict.

  ‘Yes. He made a joke about her. He said that she was a born assassin.’

  Benedict and Edwin exchange looks.

  ‘He said that she had the soul of a killer hidden in the body of a sweet old lady. He was joking, of course. Anyway, he suggested that I should contact her. He was generous that way, Dex. He always helped other writers, even if there was nothing in it for him. I wrote to Peggy and she came up with some great ideas for the books.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Peggy in person?’ asks Edwin.

  ‘No,’ says Julie, regretfully. ‘But we sent each other lots of emails and letters. Peggy was a great letter writer. And I always mention her in my acknowledgements.’

  ‘PS: for PS,’ says Benedict. ‘Postscript for Peggy Smith.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Julie. ‘She liked that. She loved codes and puzzles. She did the cryptic crossword every day. Sorry, I’m sure you knew that.’

  ‘We used to do it together,’ says Edwin. ‘But she was much quicker than me. I can never work out anagrams. You said something about Peggy being involved in the Cold War. I had never heard that story.’

  ‘I’m trying to remember how I heard it,’ says Julie. ‘I think Peggy hinted at it once. She also mentioned Russia rather a lot.’

  ‘The kulaks,’ says Edwin.

  ‘Yes,’ says Julie, smiling. ‘That was what she called her son. He sounded very dull. I don’t know how she knew so much about Russia. I really don’t know anything about her past. I’m sure you know more,’ she says to Edwin.

  ‘Not really,’ says Edwin. ‘I know that her husband had been in the navy. She didn’t talk about him much but she once said that he’d been the love of her life. After him, she wasn’t interested in men. I mean, she was only in her early sixties when he died. She could have married again. I thought that was very sweet. I think she liked working in the civil service and she retrained as a librarian later. She worked part-time in the library when she first moved to Shoreham.’

  ‘You don’t know if she ever went to Russia?’ says Benedict.

  ‘No,’ says Edwin. ‘I think Peggy did most of her travelling in books. Anyone want another drink?’

  ‘It’s my round,’ says Julie. But, at that moment, Natalka appears from behind the settle, accompanied by a tall man in glasses.

  ‘This is Lance,’ she says. ‘He was the man who asked the question. He’s a writer. He also knew Peggy. He’s going to help us.’

  Lance looks like he’s not too sure about that. There’s a rather awkward discussion about Peggy and then Lance offers to buy drinks. There’s further discussion about whose round it is but, eventually, Lance and JD go to the bar, Edwin disappears to find the loo and Benedict finds himself sitting next to Natalka. There’s a silence broken only by voices murmuring on the other side of the wooden settle.

  ‘We’re getting somewhere,’ says Benedict. ‘With the case, I mean.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Natalka. ‘Lance also had one of those notes. He didn’t want to come here at first but I persuaded him.’

  Benedict wonders why Lance hadn’t wanted to come. Is it just because he doesn’t want to socialise with them or is he hiding something? Why did he leave the library event immediately after asking his question? He’s about to ask Natalka what she thinks when her face changes, so immediately and so completely that it’s almost shocking.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, pointing to the partition.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those men. I think they’ve come to kill me.’

  Chapter 19

  Harbinder: parathas

  Harbinder is, in fact, absolutely furious about the trip to Aberdeen.

  ‘How dare they?’ she says to Neil. ‘How dare they go off like that? As if this is some sort of game . . . some sort of . . . road trip. Don’t they know this is a murder investigation?’

  Neil is silent for a moment because he is driving. They are on their way to interview Nigel Smith who lives in a village near Lancing. Neil is always extra careful on winding country roads.

  Eventually he says, ‘Why did they go?’

  This, unfortunately, is the key question and the answer is going to put Harbinder in the wrong.

  ‘I met Natalka for a drink,’ she says. ‘Just to discuss a carer for my mum. I told her about J.D. Monroe, about her getting one of the postcards and being on the way to Aberdeen.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  Harbinder tries to answer honestly. Partly it was because Natalka had opened up to her about the cryptocurrency fraud but partly, she knows, it’s because she had let her guard down, enjoying having a drink with an attractive woman. She can’t say this to Neil. He knows she’s gay, of course, but she’s pretty sure that he’s never actually equated this with fancying women.

  ‘I was trying to find out if she knew any more about Peggy,’ she says. It sounds feeble in her own ears. Neil seems to accept it though.

  ‘So Natalka’s gone to Scotland with the coffee guy,’ he says. ‘Are they an item then?’

  An item. Who says ‘an item’? But, hard though this is, Harbinder doesn’t take the opportunity to mock Neil’s vocabulary.

  ‘They’ve taken Peggy’s elderly neighbour Edwin with them,’ she says. ‘It’s hardly a romantic trip.’

  ‘They’re just playing amateur detectives,’ says Neil. ‘Don’t worry about them.’

  She has to hope that he’s right. They have reached the village which is so pretty that it makes Harbinder’s teeth ache. Neil, of course, is in heaven as they circuit the duck pond looking for the house, which is far too grand to have a number.

  ‘It’s a perfect English village.’

  ‘Probably full of racists and fascists,’ says Harbinder, who is trying to track their progress on her phone.

  ‘Why would you say that?’ says Neil. ‘I’d love to live somewhere like this. It’s like a Christmas card.’

  ‘Exactly,’ mutters Harbinder. She’s being unfair, she knows. Neil isn’t a bad sort, it’s just he’s in thrall to a certain idea of Englishness, one that still isn’t available to people whose skin isn’t as white as Bing Crosby’s Christmas.

  Eventually they track down the house, High Trees, which is set back from the village green and, yes, surrounded by both a high wall and high trees. Nigel obviously isn’t much of a one for droppers-in. He’s expecting them, though, so opens the door with an attempt at bonhomie. Sally is hovering behind him.

  ‘You’ve found us all right, then?’

  ‘No problem,’ says Harbinder, fending off a rather overweight spaniel. She’s slightly off dogs after Starsky broke her mother’s leg. This creature, who seems to be called Ozzy, reminds her of her friend Clare’s dog, Herbert,
an overindulged fluffball who enjoys invading your personal space.

  ‘Down, Ozymandias,’ says Sally, in a rather ineffectual way.

  Ozymandias. Of course.

  Nigel leads them into his study, a room full of leather-bound books. Harbinder is ready to bet that Dex Challoner’s oeuvre is not represented. In fact, the whole room looks like one of those show homes in Harbinder’s favourite property magazines. There’s even a display of antique suitcases and an oversized station clock.

  Sally bustles off to make tea, accompanied by Ozymandias.

  ‘We wanted to talk to you about Dex Challoner,’ says Harbinder. ‘You’ve heard what happened to him?’ In all honesty, Dex’s death would be hard to miss. The author’s murder has been on every news programme and has dominated the local press.

  ‘Yes,’ says Nigel, sinking into what looks like a very expensive office chair. ‘Ghastly thing to happen.’

  ‘I know that your mother and Dex were friends,’ says Harbinder. ‘And we’re looking into the possibility that the two deaths were connected.’

  ‘Now hang on a minute,’ says Nigel, switching into bluster mode. ‘My mother’s death was from natural causes.’

  Harbinder thinks it’s interesting that this legal phrase comes so easily to Nigel’s lips when talking of his mother’s demise.

  ‘We’re not suggesting anything different,’ says Harbinder, although they are, really. ‘It’s just that your mother was involved with Dex Challoner’s books.’

  ‘I don’t know that I’d use the word “involved”,’ says Nigel. ‘Mum knew Dex’s mother Weronika. That’s all.’

  ‘She used to think up murders for Dex,’ says Sally, coming in with a tray. ‘She was very proud of that. She loved murder mysteries.’

  Nigel shoots his wife a look that could’ve come straight from a crime novel.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ he says. ‘She was an intelligent woman.’

  ‘Don’t intelligent people read crime fiction?’ asks Harbinder. ‘Dex went to Oxford, after all.’

  ‘That’s different,’ says Nigel. Of course it is, thinks Harbinder. Dex was a man, for one thing.

  ‘Did Peggy talk to you about her consultancy on Dex’s books?’ says Harbinder, directing her question to Sally, who is still hovering by the door.

  ‘A little bit,’ says Sally. ‘As Nigel says, she got to know Dex when he visited his mother at Seaview Court. He was impressed by her knowledge of crime fiction. She’d read it all. From the golden age right up to the very newest stuff, some of it quite violent. Apparently, Peggy suggested a way of killing someone that hadn’t been done before – poisoned incense, I think – and Dex used it in a book. He acknowledged her in the author’s notes and, from then on, he always sent her his work in manuscript and often took on her suggestions.’

  ‘Poisoned incense,’ says Harbinder. ‘Was that in Murder at Matins?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Sally. ‘I haven’t actually read any Dex Challoner. I’m more of an Agatha Christie girl myself.’

  Harbinder thinks that Sally Smith is the sort of woman who calls herself a girl to deflect attention from her intelligence. She detects the same tendency in her own mother.

  ‘I’m not much of a reader,’ says Neil, with the sort of bluff good-humour that he does well. It’s a deflection tactic too, in its way. ‘I was totally out of my depth at the publishing place. We went to see Dex’s editor and publicist. The publicist, Pippa, remembered meeting Peggy and Weronika together. She thought that they might have had some knowledge of Russia, perhaps during the Cold War?’

  ‘My mother worked for the civil service,’ says Nigel, in a voice that is meant to shut down the conversation.

  Luckily, Sally has other ideas. ‘I always thought she was a spy,’ she says brightly. ‘The conversations she used to have with Weronika. And there was that business in Moscow, with the Ukrainians.’

  ‘That’s not relevant,’ snaps Nigel.

  We’ll be the judge of that, thinks Harbinder. ‘What business in Moscow?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, just something that happened to Peggy in Russia. She went on holiday with a friend. They were both in their seventies. It was a real adventure for them. Anyway, they seem to have got caught up with some Ukrainians who may or may not have been spies. This was before Russia annexed the Crimea. Anyway, I think Peggy and her friend let these men stay in their rented apartment. It got them into trouble with the Russian authorities but the embassy stepped in – Nigel has some friends there – and it all turned out happily in the end.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ says Harbinder. ‘Do you have this friend’s name?’

  ‘She’s called Joan Tate,’ says Sally. ‘She’s still alive but I think she has Alzheimer’s. She’s in a home near Lewes. I’ve got the address somewhere. I still send her Christmas cards.’

  ‘That would be very helpful,’ says Harbinder. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s no point,’ says Nigel. ‘She’s out of it. Completely doolally. I really wouldn’t bother.’

  I’m sure you wouldn’t, thinks Harbinder. She has noticed before that Nigel gets an odd facial twitch when he’s talking about his mother. Right now, his face is like a pulsating orange.

  ‘He’s hiding something,’ says Neil, driving carefully over the speed bumps that surround the perfect village.

  ‘You think?’ says Harbinder.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ says Neil, who can’t do irony and drive at the same time. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Harbinder patiently, ‘I do. The question is, what?’

  ‘Something about his mum,’ says Neil.

  He’s a little woodland animal, Harbinder tells herself. A cute squirrel nibbling on a nut that is rather larger than he is.

  ‘Nigel was very cagy about Russia,’ she says. ‘Dex wrote about Russian spies, Peggy actually met some spies in Moscow. Now they’re both dead.’

  ‘The Russians would hardly bother to kill an old lady living in sheltered accommodation in Shoreham.’

  ‘Really? What about those poor people poisoned in Salisbury earlier this year? Or did you miss that?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Poisoned at Pizza Hut, weren’t they?’

  ‘I think it was Zizzi’s,’ says Harbinder. ‘But that’s hardly the point. The point is that the Russians are perfectly capable of killing people living quiet lives in England. Dex wrote about Russians. Remember that extract I read you? The one we found in Peggy’s desk? I think that was from his new book, Murder in the Park. And, in the desk, there were all those letters from Joan.’

  ‘Do you think it’s the same Joan?’

  Climbs tree, examines fur for fleas.

  ‘It’s certainly a theory,’ says Harbinder.

  ‘You couldn’t read her writing though, could you?’

  ‘None of us could. I’m hoping the graphologist gets back to me soon.’

  She waits for Neil to ask what a graphologist is but, instead, he says, ‘And there were those men watching Peggy. Maybe they were Russians too?’

  Harbinder is pleased that he has come up with this connection on his own. ‘Natalka thought they might actually be after her,’ she says. ‘She got involved with something dodgy back in Ukraine. Cryptocurrency fraud.’

  ‘Cryptocurrency? Is that like bitcoin?’

  ‘That’s right. Natalka claimed to have been in on the early days of it. She was studying maths at university in Kiev.’

  ‘You friend Natalka is a bit of a dark horse.’

  ‘She’s not my friend,’ says Harbinder. She wonders if Neil, in his whimsical woodland way, is trying to imply something. ‘But she did say something else. Apparently Peggy told Maria that a clue about Weronika’s death was hidden in the book. You know, Thank Heaven Fasting. Benedict emailed me a synopsis of it. Sounded ridiculous.’

  ‘Who’s Maria?’
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  ‘A carer. In fact, she’s caring for my mum at the moment. Do you mind if we pop in on our way back?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ says Neil. ‘Do you think she’ll have made some of those flatbread things?’

  ‘She’s on crutches,’ says Harbinder. ‘She hasn’t got time to make parathas.’

  In fact, she’s very much afraid that, not only will her mother have been cooking, she’ll give Neil a care package of food to take home.

  Sure enough, Bibi is cooking. At least, she is sitting at the kitchen table chopping onions furiously while Harbinder’s brother Abhey stirs something on the stove.

  ‘Abhey’s being so helpful,’ says Bibi. ‘He’s turning into a very good cook.’

  Harbinder can only see Abhey’s back but she knows that he’s smirking.

  ‘Man stirs food for ten minutes and suddenly he’s Jamie Oliver,’ she says. ‘I know the syndrome.’

  ‘When did you last do any cooking, sis?’ asks Abhey. ‘Hallo, Neil.’

  ‘Hi, Abhey.’ Neil’s voice drops an octave. Harbinder knows that he finds her brothers intimidating. They’re both over six foot and look even taller with their turbans on.

  ‘Are the kids here?’ asks Harbinder. In her opinion, Abhey and his wife Cara mostly visit when they want free babysitting.

  ‘No,’ says Abhey, virtue emanating from him like the aroma from the curry. ‘I just popped in to see Mum. I had a job in the area.’ Abhey, Bibi tells everyone, employs three people and has his own business cards.

  ‘Where’s Starsky?’ says Harbinder, looking around for the dog. She wouldn’t put it past him to trip her mother again.

  ‘Downstairs. Helping Dad in the shop.’

  ‘Stacking shelves, is he?’ But Harbinder’s heart isn’t in it. For some reason, her parents really believe that the dozy animal is their best friend and helpmate.

  ‘Give Neil something to eat,’ says Bibi. ‘I’ve made parathas.’