Murder Is a Must

by Marty Wingate

  I began a shaky reply as I broke into a trot.

  On my way—

  My phone rang—Val. I sent the text and answered his call.

  “Hi,” I panted, and held up by the postbox at the top of Gay Street.

  “I’ve been caught,” he said. “The department head wants to talk about the exhibition—he has a few ideas for us. I’ve got my class at four. I won’t be free until close to six. You go on to the cellar if you’re ready.”

  “Something else has come up. Dom has information about—”

  I heard Val’s voice, turned away from the phone. “Yeah, I’ll be right there.” He came back to me. “I’m sorry, but as the college is a sponsor, I thought I’d better do this.”

  “No, that’s fine.” My mind overflowed with important questions and vital details. I caught the first one I could get hold of and asked, “Wait—how did it go with Bess?”

  A moment of silence followed.

  “My girls. I don’t know how they got to be twenty-four, I can tell you that.”

  “How dare they grow up on us,” I said.

  I heard a laugh—a small one.

  “And why isn’t London theater good enough for them?” he demanded.

  “Perhaps Bess and Adam will make their marks across the pond, return home, and start a theater company in Bath.”

  He mumbled something, and then said, “She was glad to talk with you.”

  That was my bright spot, and I basked in it for a moment before saying, “You go on. I’ll see you later.”

  At least it was downhill to the police station.

  * * *

  * * *

  Well, Ms. Burke,” Sergeant Owen said. “This time they’re waiting for you.” He picked up his phone, and in a moment Kenny Pye appeared. I followed him back to the inner workings of the station.

  “Is it really Zeno?” I asked as I trotted behind him. “Wearing brown trousers and the like?”

  Kenny turned to me and his dark eyes held a gleam. “He’s quite observant, Mr. Kilpatrick.” He opened a door to a room with several desks and wide screens. Dom leapt up from a swivel chair, sending it spinning off to a far wall.

  “All right, Dom?”

  “He’s there, Hayley. I’ve seen him. Come and look.”

  I approached the screen and stood at Dom’s side, Sergeant Hopgood on the other.

  “Now,” Dom said, controls in hand, “we can go directly to the images because I’ve marked the specific frames by first adding a . . .”

  It’s possible I didn’t absorb Dom’s complete and thorough description of how the technical side of CCTV worked, but a terrible thrill ran through me when he went directly to an image of a platform at the Bristol station.

  “There.” Dom pointed to a tall man in drab, shapeless clothing and wearing a fedora that looked as if it had been left out in the rain. The film had been slowed so that the man’s every move could be examined. He kept his head down and his face in shadows, and yet he was oh so familiar.

  “Must’ve changed his mufti at this office in Bristol,” Hopgood said, and Dom snorted.

  “Mufti means ordinary clothes,” Dom explained to me with obvious delight. “Detective Sergeant Hopgood is referring to the suspect’s usual manner of dress—that blue suit. Teal. And the tie with the large colored dots on it.”

  “They look like giant Smarties to me,” I said, and Dom laughed again. At least someone was having a good time here.

  “He forgot to change his shoes,” Dom added.

  He forgot to change his shoes, and that’s what had sunk him. For want of a nail, so to speak.

  “Can you be sure it’s Zeno?” I asked.

  “Watch, Hayley,” Dom said, raising the controls again. “Watch.”

  The scene on the railway platform jumped and here he came again, the tall man in the floppy fedora. A child ran by, disturbing a pigeon, which then flew toward the man. He flinched as the bird barely cleared his head, lifting his arm as if to ward off the attack and looking back over his shoulder in the camera’s direction for an instant. Dom froze the frame and there he was—Zeno Berryfield.

  My arms broke out in gooseflesh, and I shivered as if I’d been doused with ice water. “Oh my God.” He had lied and lied and acted the fool, and all the while Zeno had murdered Oona.

  “And it’s the right time?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Hopgood said. “In these frames, he’s returning to Bath midday. Mr. Kilpatrick has offered to look through the rest of the footage to find Berryfield heading back to Bristol, where, we presume, he switched out his clothes.”

  “Back to the teal suit and Smarties tie,” I said.

  “Why would he do it?” DC Pye asked. “Only to get her job?”

  “To get her everything,” I said. “Oona was all that Zeno wanted to be but wasn’t. She had talent, skill—”

  “She scared me,” Dom said.

  I laughed. “Yeah, she scared me, too. But she was good. Zeno is none of that. He comes up with lame ideas and talks big and does nothing. Apart from once electrocuting a fellow.”

  “Time we had another chat with Mr. Berryfield.”

  “He’s gone up to London,” I said bleakly. Had Zeno done a bunk? “But I’ll tell you who told me, and you could talk with him. It’s the person Zeno used as a reference, the man who is TKB Events. You asked me about that earlier, and I finally made the connection. Tommy King-Barnes—TKB.”

  “TKB—the Bristol office where Berryfield said he’d spent his day?” Hopgood asked. “Do you have a phone number for Tommy King-Barnes?”

  “I have three.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The police left to have a word with Tommy at the Charlotte. I intended to follow on foot, but stayed to keep Dom company as he waited for Margo. He had dearly wanted to ride along with Hopgood and Pye, but I reminded him that he might’ve cracked the case and wouldn’t his girlfriend want to know everything? She arrived only minutes later, and I listened to Dom’s entire story again. At last, the couple left, discussing the fact that Dom looked a great deal like the detective sergeant on Midsomer Murders. I bade Sergeant Owen good afternoon and hoofed it up to the Charlotte.

  Had I expected the road to be lined with blue-and-yellow-checkered police cars with their blue lights flashing? Had I hoped to see Tommy King-Barnes being dragged off in handcuffs? I don’t believe I had any particular expectations, but the utter lack of activity stunned me.

  The exhibition perked along with a handful of visitors and a cluster of ten-year-olds ogling the display on human sacrifice. The woman at the ticket table said Tommy had left a bit ago. On his own? I asked in all innocence. She couldn’t quite remember, as the school group had arrived at that moment, and she’d been busy.

  Naomi’s office stood open and empty. I had nowhere else to go but up to Oona’s office, where I sat uncomfortably at the desk chair and thought what to do next. Val would be in class, and I shouldn’t distract him by texting that Oona’s murderer had been found and he had an accomplice—a Druid. No, I’d hold on to that news until later.

  A few papers from the desk had slipped to the floor, as if they’d been caught in a breeze. I collected them and looked for clues to Oona’s murder or, at the very least, ideas for exhibition displays. Nothing—only a receipt for duct tape from Homebase.

  My eyes fell again on the flip chart behind the desk, and I remembered the shadowy figure in one of the drawings. I had recognized Oona on the landing, and I believe Clara had, too, but now I remembered the shadowy figure who wore a hat with a floppy brim that covered his face. I took the chart out and paged through, looking for that sketch. Had the murderer drawn a picture of the crime scene and included himself? Was he that self-obsessed? Or that thick?

  But although the other sketches he’d started and abandoned were there, the drawing with
the man in the hat was missing. It had been ripped from the chart, leaving behind the top inch or two of pencil marks that filled in the darkness of the scene.

  Had Zeno torn it out? Was he belatedly trying to cover his tracks? Or perhaps he had blithely traveled up to London carrying the sketch in his satchel to show it off to the British Library, where he hoped to co-opt the post Oona had expected to take. That, I would believe. But something—someone—was missing.

  Where was Clara?

  26

  Feeling all right?

  For five minutes, I stared at my phone and waited for a reply from Clara. When nothing came, I sent another text, which took me twice as long because my finger shook.

  Let’s meet for coffee. Free now?

  Two minutes later, I left, by way of Naomi’s office.

  “Have you seen Clara?” I asked her.

  Naomi replied with a frown. “I looked out the window earlier and saw those police detectives. When I went downstairs, they were leaving with Tommy, but they stopped long enough to ask if I’d seen Zeno. He’s your problem—I knew you’d have trouble with him. The cowboy. I hope he hasn’t dragged Tommy into anything, because the Druids have been one of the easiest bookings I’ve had.”

  “Have you seen Clara?”

  “Yes, but that was late morning. Why?”

  I didn’t answer, but hurried down to the ground floor, out the door, and headed for the Pulteney Bridge, keeping my mind in neutral and my nerves under control. I arrived at the block of flats on Williams, breathing heavily, and pressed the button for Oona’s flat. The door unlocked, and I went in. Lift or two flights of stairs? The indicator told me the lift was on the fifth floor, and so I took the stairs and arrived at the second floor still breathing heavily. The door of the flat stood ajar. I knocked and then pushed it open with one finger.

  “Clara? It’s Hayley—are you all right?”

  No movement, no sound. The place looked deserted and untouched.

  “Clara?”

  I didn’t like the silence. I realized what a terrible idea it was for me to be there, and how much better it would be to leave and ring the police. But at that moment, I heard a faint clanging. The sound reminded me of footsteps on the spiral staircase. Perhaps I’d imagined it, but I shivered nonetheless. Then came a muffled voice—no words, only “Aaaahhh” like the wailing one might expect from a ghost.

  But would a ghost haunt a bathroom?

  I dropped my bag and ran into the pass-through from bedroom to kitchen, and flung open the bathroom door.

  Clara sat awkwardly in the tub, knees up to her chin, her hands and feet bound with duct tape. Her mouth had been stuffed with what looked like a tea towel and secured with more duct tape wound round and round her head. Her arms extended forward over her knees, and her wrists were attached to the hot and cold taps with more loops of tape. Her bun listed to one side, her face blanched of color. She shook her arms, and the taps, slightly loose, clanged.

  I rushed over and knelt by the tub. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. I searched for the end of the tape round her mouth as she began speaking. Although she was completely unintelligible, I could pick up from the intonation that she was telling me the whole story. “Hang on,” I said. I picked and picked at the tape and at last began to unwrap her gag.

  “It’s Zeno, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Her head bounced up and down and her bun wobbled. She continued her tale, her voice leaping in register and then dropping down as she said I knew not what.

  Finally, I reached the last layer of tape. “Sorry, Clara—this will sting.”

  She shut her eyes tight. I ripped the tape off her face, but I didn’t have the heart to pull it off her hair, and instead let it hang in a long, silver curl down her back. I pulled the tea towel out of her mouth, and she coughed and worked her lips and tongue.

  “Is he gone?” she asked quietly, her voice raspy.

  “Yes. But where?”

  “He wants to get away. He said he only needed time to get away.”

  “Did he follow you here?” I asked as I started to pick at the tape around her wrists.

  “He wanted that drawing, and he followed me from the Charlotte. You see, after you left, I took the flip chart out again. There was something about the one with the figures in it that looked odd. Familiar, but odd. And then I knew it—I recognized the man in the hat. He had stood close behind me at Pret A Manger on the day Oona was murdered. I thought hard about those few minutes, and realized that there had been some jostling in the queue, and I think he took out my phone then.” She turned large, watery eyes at me. “It was Mr. Berryfield.”

  “Yes, it was. But if he took it out, why did he put it back?”

  Clara shook her head. “‘Obfuscation.’ That’s the word he used. He said it would confuse the police.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think he only confused himself.”

  I snickered in relief at this show of good spirits. I was getting nowhere with the tape on her wrists, and stopped. “I’ve got to phone the police. I’ll be back to help you, and we’ll get out of here. Hang on.”

  “Look,” Clara said, nodding to a cosmetics bag at the sink. “In there.”

  I took the bag and turned it out on the floor and riffled through until I came up with a pair of nail scissors. I cut through her wrist restraints. “Here,” I said, handing over the scissors, “you do the rest.” It looked as if Zeno had used half the roll of tape on Clara’s feet alone—that would take her a few minutes.

  I left her to it, ran out to my bag, and dug for my phone, always at the bottom when it’s most needed. When I’d closed my hand round it, I moved to the window to ring Hopgood, but before I could hit a key, an arm went across my throat, and I was wrenched back and held fast.

  “Ms. Burke,” Zeno said, “what a surprise to see you here.”

  27

  Choking out a cry, I struggled, trying to get a good angle to elbow Zeno in the stomach, but he had the advantage of height and weight, and the pressure on my throat made me both faint and nauseous.

  “There’s no need to put up a fight,” he said, his voice strained. “I won’t hurt you. But you must not ring the police. Calm down and give me time to make my exit.”

  It was what he’d said to Clara. I stopped fighting. Zeno produced the roll of duct tape from a pocket, wrenched one of my arms back and then the other, wrapping my wrists behind me and to the drawer pull of the built-in sideboard. I took a step toward him, yanking the drawer open. Dishes rattled, but the piece of furniture didn’t move.

  Zeno backed off slightly and straightened his suit jacket. “There,” he said with a nod. “That should hold until I can leave.”

  “Did you set a trap for us here?”

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “I merely followed Ms. Powell, because she’d taken something I needed.”

  “The sketch you’d made of yourself as murderer. Good move, Zeno.”

  He didn’t take the bait. “When I saw it was you who rang the bell,” he said, “I didn’t think you would just go away. So I stepped down the corridor until you were safely inside the flat so that we could all three—”

  “Why did you kill Oona?”

  His dark, beady eyes flickered to me as he adjusted his cuffs. “She asked for it,” he said, his voice full of acid.

  “Because you wanted her job?”

  “Oona took everything,” he said, checking his watch. “She didn’t want only this job, she wanted all of them. And she got them, too. She had merely to point and say, ‘I’ll have that,’ and it was hers. Everyone else was invisible as the great Oona Atherton took over. And I swear it was her idea for me to flood that entry on the Isle of Man where the fellow was electrocuted. Dropped me in it. It wasn’t fair.”

  I heard a faint clang of metal and, beyond Zeno, in the pass-through, I saw a shadow of move
ment in the bathroom. Had Clara broken free?

  Zeno cocked his head. “Is Ms. Powell all right?”

  Such concern. I raised my voice to cover the noise.

  “Oona’s flat, Oona’s office, Oona’s exhibition—the nerve of her! You couldn’t stand it, could you? The truth is, Zeno, Oona was very good at what she did.” And you aren’t.

  “She never gave anyone else a chance,” he snapped.

  “You went to the Charlotte in disguise—you planned to murder her.”

  Zeno grunted. “I went to talk to her about a compromise.”

  “You stole that paper from Oona, didn’t you?”

  He glanced out the window behind me. “I had no idea what she was crowing about, but I knew that paper meant something, and so I took it, certain it would come in handy. And so it did. It bought me time, pointing the finger at perfect Ms. Powell.”

  “You failed there. You planted Clara’s fingerprints on the paper in a way that made it clear it was faked.”

  And speaking of Clara, a thin line of her slight figure appeared at the corner of the pass-through. I tried not to look and continued to goad Zeno, to keep his attention focused on me.

  “You put on such a show when I told you about Oona’s death—you laughed in my face when I offered you the job. And then the next day, you were contrite and practically in mourning.”

  He smirked. “Good, wasn’t I? Always making it clear that Oona had been the love of my life. I tell you now, being married to her was sheer torture. But I knew if I cast doubt on others, I would be in the clear.”

  “But nothing you tried worked, did it? Pretending you hadn’t seen Oona, trying to make me think Clara was usurping power, planting evidence. Police have a witness who recognized you in your disguise and saw you on the day Oona was murdered going into the Charlotte. You see, Zeno, you forgot to change your shoes. Bad luck.”

  He pulled a cosh out of his satchel and squeezed it—the same one he’d knocked Oona out with, no doubt. “Just a precaution, Ms. Burke,” he said when I eyed it. “I promise. Not to worry.”