When I passed Naomi’s office, she looked up from her computer and gave me a brief nod. I traveled on for three or four steps before I stopped. It occurred to me I had enough anger to go round, and another appropriate target right to hand. I backtracked and paused in the door as she finished typing. I told myself to remain calm, but I trembled nonetheless.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard as she cut her eyes at me.
“Hello, Naomi,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing. I know we had that early look at the Druids exhibition yesterday, but I wonder did you attend the gala last evening? Must’ve been quite a do—Tommy’s eyes are bloodshot today. Listen, Naomi, here’s an odd thing. You said you and Zeno had never met before, but Tommy said you and Zeno had worked on an exhibition together in Kent. Oasthouses?”
Naomi had kept stock-still while I blathered, but now dropped her hands in her lap. The color came up on her cheeks and I saw her jaw working.
“‘Worked together’?” she repeated with derision. “I could hardly call it that. I’m a faceless entity, aren’t I? Oona never remembered me—neither did Zeno. Am I that forgettable? Did I not work on those events as much as any other expert in her field?”
“What exactly was your job?”
“I see,” she said with a huff. “You’re just like them, aren’t you? Saying I contributed nothing?”
“No, I’m asking what it was you did. Design? Construction? Publicity and promotion? Tickets? Did you carry around samples of dried hops for visitors to smell? What?”
“Traffic flow,” she said, jutting her chin out. “It is a vital yet underappreciated responsibility in any public event to provide not just an adequate path for visitors to walk, but one that will enliven and enrich their experience while maintaining the Health and Safety standards that ensure a trouble-free experience.”
“Traffic flow,” I repeated. I filed that topic away for later consideration and our own exhibition, before focusing on Naomi again. “Is that why you were so annoyed with the watercolorists the afternoon Oona was killed?”
Naomi rolled her eyes. “Where do I begin? Idiots. They’d set an unsecured, flimsy easel in the middle of the room at the very spot where people would want to take a sharp left or right. They were inviting trouble—I’m surprised it hadn’t happened before that.”
“You left them,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t have to name my source. “You said you spent the entire afternoon with the watercolorists until police arrived. That isn’t true.”
“Well, aren’t you the little detective?” Naomi snapped.
Lord Peter knew the importance of knowing where everyone was and at what time. And Kenny Pye said people don’t always tell the whole truth the first time they are questioned. No wonder police had to go over the same events again and again with a potential witness. Or suspect. This was the truth of detection—plodding and relentlessly pushing forward.
“Did you think the police wouldn’t find out?” I asked.
“I didn’t think it would matter,” Naomi said, and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “And afterward, I suppose I felt too ashamed to admit it. That afternoon, I was up to here with the watercolorists. I told them I might have a substitute easel for them to use and that I would go and look, but what I really did was march straight down to that café at the bottom of Bartlett and have a coffee and catch my breath. I must’ve been there for an hour or more, and when I returned, there were police everywhere. So there—satisfied? I’m not proud of my action. What sort of an exhibition manager gets fed up and scarpers? No wonder I’m only here doing bookings.”
“Booking managers are a vital part of any public event,” I said with passion, for I had suddenly thought of Bess. “Why, any exhibition or performance would be chaos without guidance.” Had Bess’s job as booking agent for three performance groups in Cheltenham become too much for her? Is that what was wrong? She hadn’t replied to my text yet—neither twin had.
“Well,” Naomi said as she searched up her sleeve for a tissue, “you’ll be happy to know I’ve told the police all about my past association with both Zeno and Oona.”
But not voluntarily, I’d wager.
* * *
* * *
Clara had her tablet tucked under one arm and a hand holding firmly to the railing as she reached the bottom of the spiral staircase.
“I’ve returned a bit early, Hayley,” she said. “I had an idea you might be looking at the Druids and thought I’d come and find you. Wasn’t it awfully nice of Mr. King-Barnes to invite us down anytime we want? Shall we go back to the office now and we’ll get down to work?”
She’d made it to the landing by then and so was able to look at me. I considered what sort of a task I could give her and thought perhaps the two of us would start on a few simple displays, seeing as how most of what Zeno had come up with was rubbish. Then another thought occurred to me.
“I think it’s time we take a look at the floor plan—look at the built-in display cases. We’ll need to source freestanding units. I realize we don’t know how many, but we can count up what the Druids have and estimate. Also, we need to consider how best to accommodate the public. These are things you always need to keep in mind in an exhibition even if we don’t have the displays chosen and designed yet. Traffic flow—did you know that’s Naomi’s specialty? Let’s see if she has a few minutes for us.”
In the absence of inspiration, we may as well focus on the practicalities. And, yes, I did feel a bit bad about Naomi and how she’d been treated, so this might cheer her up.
“I’d be happy to help,” she said when I asked, and immediately launched into an explanation of the theory and function of traffic flow. Clara took a chair and began tapping away into her tablet while Naomi searched for an article titled “The Study of Footprints.” Traffic flow, not detective work.
I left them to it and went back downstairs to count plug outlets. I counted once and then, to be sure, counted again and came up with a different number. I started on the third time, my eyes on the floor, when a pair of high-shine black oxfords appeared.
“Well, Ms. Burke.”
Zeno stood over me, his face giving away nothing, but his eyes were small and dark, telling me he knew that I knew. I stopped counting outlets. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tommy drift off into the back and out of sight.
“Who told you I’d found you out?” I asked. “Was it Exhib or Tartan Affairs? Or could it have been Tommy himself with Timeless Productions?”
“I hope you will allow me to explain. Shall we withdraw to the office?”
I wouldn’t want Clara walking in on us. “No, let’s go across to the café.”
Zeno glanced in the direction of Oona’s office and then out the door and across the road to the Assembly Rooms. “In public, Ms. Burke?”
“This isn’t a flogging, Zeno. Come on.”
* * *
* * *
I even bought him a coffee. Although he ordered a drink so complicated he had to repeat it twice, reminding me of how Oona liked her Earl Grey.
We sat near a window and I idly stirred my cappuccino, waiting for him to begin. He rearranged the salt, pepper, sugars, and sweeteners on the table, smoothed his Smarties tie, and shifted his cup a quarter turn to the right and then back again. If he didn’t start talking soon, I would throw my coffee at him.
“You are upset at the references I offered.”
“Yes, I am. Because you represented them as three different references, but in fact they were all the same person.”
Zeno lifted his shoulders and his eyebrows followed suit. “Ms. Burke, I fail to see my sin here. Yes, Tommy has several distinct businesses, but I have legitimately worked for all three separately. They stand alone as individual projects, each with its own trials, tribulations, and glories. It is not my place to tell him how to handle his affairs or to reveal that one is the same
as the other. Because they aren’t. And regardless, my work records speak for themselves.”
“You lied, Zeno,” I said, sounding like a broken record.
“But for a good cause,” he said.
“Good cause? You mean, paid employment?”
“To create something for Oona.”
Across the room, dishes clattered and the espresso machine hissed, and I looked round and realized we were sitting at the same table where I’d seen Oona that first day. I said nothing and Zeno continued.
“When you came to me after she died”—after she had been murdered, he meant—“and offered me this post, it was the last thing I wanted to do. How could I begin to measure up to what she might’ve created had she been given the chance? I tell you, I wanted to turn tail and run, but I didn’t. I knew I had to do this for her. And so, I hid my grief, put my best face forward, and gave you references that reflected the breadth of my talent as well as my connection with literature.”
Literature? Oh, that’s right—in Tommy’s Scottish persona, Zeno had worked on an event called Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Me about Robert Louis Stevenson.
“What else are you hiding from me?” I asked.
“Ms. Burke,” Zeno said, and I could hear the confidence return to his voice as he cottoned on to the fact I was relenting. “My life is an open book.” He grinned. “Heigh-ho.”
Damn you, Roger.
* * *
* * *
Zeno left from the Assembly Rooms for an appointment to “pursue a notion of some significance,” and as it was well past lunchtime, I was too weak from hunger to ask any further questions. I bought myself a sandwich from the café’s cold case and ate it as I returned to the Charlotte by way of the side entrance.
I met Clara on the first-floor landing coming back from Naomi’s office, having learned surely all there was to know about traffic flow, and I started up the spiral staircase ahead of her.
“She called it manipulation, but really it’s only guiding people,” Clara explained. “Ms. Faber says you can predict which way a person will turn in the room just by—”
Clara broke off as I opened the office door and her coat fell off the peg, flumping to the floor. A crumpled paper tumbled out of one of the pockets, and I set my sandwich on the corner of the desk and bent over to retrieve it.
“No, don’t!” Clara shouted. She shoved me, grabbed the paper, and clutched it to her chest. But she was too late, because I’d seen the date printed in the corner—September 1950—and I knew it to be a page of transcription from Lady Fowling’s notebooks.
23
Clara, what do you have there?” I asked.
Red blotches had appeared on her face, and her breathing was ragged.
“Nothing. Sorry, it’s just something I’m working on.”
“No, it isn’t.”
My heart pounded in my chest, and it took every ounce of my strength to stay calm.
I held my hand out. “Let me see.”
“But it’s mine, it is,” she insisted, and then thrust it at me. “Oh, all right. Here.”
I took the paper, smoothed it, and saw that it was the page I’d printed out of Lady Fowling’s coded phrases along with Oona’s adornments—wild scribbles and doodles.
For a moment, all I felt was enormous relief. Here it is at last! Now we would find the book, that elusive signed first edition of Murder Must Advertise, because Oona had broken the code, and what she had written would lead me to it.
But my elation did not last long, because this page—long sought after and last imagined in the hands of a murder victim—had been found in the coat pocket of her personal assistant.
“Clara . . .” I held out the paper, unable to ask the question that needed to be asked.
Clara craned her neck to look, and behind her glasses her eyes grew large. “What’s that?”
“You know what it is—it was in your pocket.”
“No, that’s not what—”
“You snatched it out of my hands. Clara, where did you get this?”
“I don’t know—it isn’t mine.”
“This is one of the pages I transcribed from Lady Fowling’s notebook—you remember I brought them over to Oona. Just moments before she was murdered, she sent me a text. She knew where that valuable first edition is stored. I believe she’d looked at these phrases and figured out that Lady Fowling was using a code to tell us the book’s location.”
“Oona didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“She didn’t have the chance, did she? Someone hit her over the head, pushed her down the stairs, and she died. Police gathered up the papers that had been scattered all over the floor and the landing and took them in as evidence. Except this page—it was gone. Stolen.”
Clara recoiled against my unspoken accusation, backing up to the wall, her face so pale she looked translucent. “No, I don’t know about that.” Her voice wobbled and I saw tears in her eyes. “What do you mean? You think I could . . . it’s nothing to do with me. I didn’t do it.”
She sank to the floor in a swoon.
Where’s a cup of tea when you need one?
* * *
* * *
With my arm round her shoulders, Clara managed to get off the floor and into a chair, but she kept her head down and turned away from the paper. Although I longed to study it, I also needed her attention, and so I folded it up and stuck it in my bag. Once it was out of sight, a bit of color came back to her face. I sat across from her, our knees almost touching.
“So, Clara,” I said, using my soothing mum voice, “that wasn’t the paper you thought it was.”
She shook her head.
“You didn’t pick it up accidentally that afternoon when Oona died—perhaps thinking it was yours?”
Another shake.
“But then, how did it get in your pocket?”
Clara shrugged.
“You realize, don’t you, that you’re going to need to explain this to the police.”
“Yes,” she said, and swallowed. “I will explain that I don’t know how it came to be in my pocket.” Her head came up. “Will they put me in prison?”
“Clara, no one is accusing you of anything.” Yet. “But this is evidence. Look, I’ll go with you.”
Because the police had never heard of this paper before. I would need to explain that I hadn’t realized it was missing until two days ago. They would need to be made to understand its possible significance as a piece of evidence.
We pulled on our coats. I cinched the buckle on my bag and then clutched it to my chest as if that one page might form itself into a paper airplane and fly out of the office of its own accord. I had barely glanced at it—was it evidence or was it nothing? I longed to take another look. Clara had her back to me, repairing her bun, and so I turned away, opened my bag, and slipped the paper out.
Oona had been lavish with her words—or symbols or sketches. Whatever they were, they looked like hieroglyphics to me. She had drawn one circle round the entire list of phrases and then lines from each word out to the margins, making the thing look like a wonky wheel with too many spokes. To the side floated a square with smaller boxes inside and dots inside those. The box sat on four legs. What I could read quite clearly were two names. One came from Murder Must Advertise: “Death Bredon.”
The other name was mine.
* * *
* * *
We walked with purpose and in silence to the police station, my mind teeming with conjecture and confusion, while Clara’s—well, who could say what filled her thoughts?
“Hello, Sergeant Owen,” I said.
“Ms. Burke,” he replied. “How are you?”
We’d be asking after each other’s children soon.
“Fine, thank you. I hope you’re well. We’re here for Detective Sergeant Hop
good or Detective Constable Pye—whichever, it doesn’t matter. But it’s quite important.”
We hit the jackpot—both detectives came out to the lobby.
“So, Ms. Burke, Ms. Powell,” Sergeant Hopgood said. “What do you have for us?”
I drew the paper out of my bag, unfolded it, and handed it over. Before I could begin an explanation, Clara jumped in.
“It was in my pocket. I don’t know how it got there. I’ve never seen it before that I remember.” She frowned and glanced at me. “But I suppose I must’ve seen it before Oona died, because Hayley brought it over to us at the Charlotte.”
Hopgood kept his brows in neutral, but his eyes cut to me.
“It’s a page from the transcriptions of Lady Fowling’s notebooks,” I said. “I have them on my computer, but I’d printed them all out for Oona. That’s what those papers are that you took from the scene and put in binders. I’ve been looking through them for a clue. But this page was missing until today. And I think it might be possible that it has something to do”—I noticed how cautious I had become in my declarations—“with that rare first edition.”
“It was in my pocket,” Clara repeated. “I don’t know how it got there.”
I sensed a new version of “I lost my phone,” and now wondered if she truly had.
“Right,” Hopgood said. “Pye, why don’t you have a chat with Ms. Powell while Ms. Burke and I discuss a few things.”
Clara flinched. “But, Hayley—”
“Yes, that’s fine,” I said quickly. “Clara, I’ll see you in a few minutes. You wait for me—or I’ll wait for you.”
She nodded, a barely perceptible movement, and we followed our escorts behind the desk and through the door that remained locked to all but us precious few. Hopgood paused at Interview #1 and handed the evidence to Pye, moving aside for them to continue to #2.
DC Pye asked Clara if she wanted tea, and I heard her say, “Yes, please. Thank you. Two sugars.”
Murder Is a Must Page 24
