Poison in Paddington (A Cozy Mystery) (Cassie Coburn Mysteries Book 1)

by Samantha Silver

  * * *

  At ten thirty I was looking at my wardrobe, trying to find as many dark clothes as possible. I eventually settled on the closest thing I had to all black: very dark blue skinny jeans, a black turtleneck, and a scarf to hide my auburn hair. Luckily I did have some black flats, and coupled with black socks I figured it was good enough. Looking at myself in the mirror, I sighed. Even to me I looked shifty and suspicious. Still, it was what Violet had said to wear.

  When she knocked on my door at eleven, she was dressed pretty similarly to me, carrying a small purse that I had a feeling had more than just some makeup for touch-ups. She didn’t say much; evidently she was thinking about what we were about to do. Hailing a cab, she had the driver drop us off at my old hostel.

  “Why are we here?” I asked as she paid the fare.

  “Because we have a reason for being here. You still technically live here, remember? We have a plausible reason to be at your place after midnight, we don’t have a good reason to be at Enderby Insurance.”

  “So that means whatever we’re about to do isn’t exactly legal, right?” I asked.

  “I asked you to dress in black for a midnight excursion to an office where everyone went home at five. Did you really think there was going to be anything legal about this?”

  I had to be honest: deep down, I knew this was totally going to be illegal. I just hadn’t let myself admit it. I swallowed hard and steeled myself for what we were going to do next. “Come on, we’re casually going to walk toward the Enderby building,” Violet told me, and we strode down the street together.

  I was completely and totally torn here. On the one hand, I didn’t want to commit a crime! I had always been a good girl. The worst thing I’d ever done was jaywalk, and maybe drove a little bit too fast from time to time. But whatever we were doing, it was going to be worse than that. I had a feeling this was breaking and entering territory. But at the same time, I couldn’t deny a part of me was excited. For the first time since my accident, I could feel the rush of adrenaline coursing through me. I was part of something bigger than me. I was helping to find a killer, even if I was just mostly tagging along. So what if it wasn’t exactly legal? There’s that saying about having to break a few eggs to make an omelette, isn’t there? That totally applied to this situation.

  At the same time, I was all too conscious of the fact that Violet thought I was a terrible liar. The last thing I wanted to do was to screw this up, to make her think that this was all a mistake and taking me with her was a terrible idea. So I took a deep breath and tried my best to relax as we walked through the streets toward Enderby Insurance. Every time a car drove slowly past I was sure it was a cop, but I forced myself to stay relaxed and not turn around to check each time I heard an engine coming near us.

  After what seemed like an eternity, but in reality had only been ten minutes, we were in front of the Enderby Insurance building. Rather than going to the front door, however, Violet walked past it and toward the entrance for the underground parking area.

  “They only man the underground parking until eleven pm,” she explained to me. “Afterwards they have a single security guard to watch over four floors of cars, and some CCTV cameras. Be careful to follow me exactly.”

  Violet moved like a cat, and I found that I had trouble keeping up with her. She entered the underground garage on the far side, away from the unmanned guard’s hut. She stopped about fifteen feet past it, and took five confident strides, ending up right in between an entrance lane and an exit lane. She walked directly on the center line for a little while before stopping and moving to the far wall, pressing herself against it, then edging her way carefully toward a little enclave. When I entered the enclave a few seconds after her, she smiled.

  “Not too bad at all. Good work.”

  The praise affected me more than I’d like to admit. It was like getting a compliment from a professor, I realized, and blushed slightly. There was a door in the enclave, a thick one. Violet took some tools out from the small purse she was carrying, and began to pick at the lock. A minute later, I heard a click and Violet opened the door a fraction of an inch, but no more.

  “There will be a guard stationed on the ground floor. I doubt there will be more, but all the same, we have to be careful.” She slipped the door open and looked out, then motioned for me to follow her inside.

  My heart was pounding in my chest. I’d never done anything like this before. When I was in the sixth grade, I was hanging out with some friends one night and they decided to see if we could climb onto the roof of the elementary school near our house—spoiler alert: we couldn’t—but it had been the biggest rush of my young life to worry about breaking the rules and being caught doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing.

  This gave me that same kind of rush. Unfortunately, now as a thirty-year-old, I was well aware that this rush could very well lead to serious jail time if it went wrong, as opposed to the severe threat of being grounded for a month back in grade six. Violet crept up the stairs like a cat; she was stealthy. Quick, but quiet as a mouse. When we reached the door for the ground floor, she knelt underneath the small window looking out into the building’s lobby. Taking out her phone, Violet subtly moved the camera up into the window area, took a photo, and had a look. Clever; there was only about an inch of phone sticking up in the window. Not only would the guard not have noticed that little movement, but unless he had eyes like a hawk he wouldn’t have noticed the camera sticking up for a split second.

  She nodded. “He is at his desk. We’re all good. Follow me.”

  The part I hadn’t realized was that by taking the stairs and not the elevator, which would have been closed for the night by now, on top of being right next to where the guard was sitting, Violet’s plan involved climbing eleven more flights of stairs, with only the light from her phone to guide us. I normally didn’t make a big deal out of my knee; other than the slight limp I was mostly stuck with, I barely ever felt anything out of the ordinary anymore. But today, by the time we finished climbing all of those steps, my knee was definitely aching. Not to mention I was incredibly out of breath, since it wasn’t as if I was hitting the gym every day since my accident. Most of my physiotherapy had been designed to rebuild the muscle in my leg after the surgery; my cardio was definitely lacking.

  “You need to ride that bicycle more often,” Violet teased gently. Of course she wasn’t the least bit out of breath. Some things just weren’t fair.

  “Give me a minute,” I asked, my hands on my knees, breathing hard, and Violet did as requested. “Where are we, anyway?” I asked.

  “We’re on the floor below where we were today, at the stairwell next to the elevators. As soon as I open this door, we have sixty seconds to figure out the code for the alarm before the police are called.”

  “And how exactly do you plan to do that?” I asked.

  “With a little bit of thinking,” Violet replied. A minute later she asked if I was ok. I nodded, and she opened the door, striding straight to the little white box next to the elevators blinking away. If I thought I was tense before, it was nothing like having a definite timeline.

  I watched as Violet looked at the numbers on the keypad. God, they all looked exactly the same to me. How on earth was she going to figure out the code? She tried a four-digit combination. Nothing happened, the light continued blinking. Oh God. This was going to fail. The cops were going to be called, we were going to be arrested, I was going to jail and then when I was done serving my sentence I was going to be deported back to America. This was such a horrible idea. Maybe I still had time to run out of here, run back down the stairs and get out. I was just about to start panicking for real when Violet punched in another set of four numbers. This time, the light stopped blinking and turned solid green.

  I froze where I was, staring at it. Green was good, right? Violet turned to me, a grin on her face.

  “See? Easy.”

  Yeah, easy. I was pretty sure my lifespan had ju
st been shortened by at least five years.

  “How did you know the code?” I asked, and Violet motioned me over.

  “See the keypad? Look at the numbers.” I looked at them, but nothing stood out to me. There were all the numbers from zero to nine. Well, except for the four, which had been kind of smudged out.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed, suddenly realizing what Violet wanted me to see. “Some of the numbers have been worn down, which means they’ve been tapped the most.”

  “Exactement,” Violet exclaimed happily. “It is exactly that. So now you see, the four numbers of the code for the alarm system—I recognize the company, I know their codes are four numbers and none of the numbers are used twice—are four, two, six and eight. Humans are creatures that like patterns, so it is most likely the four that is the first number in the code, as we write from the left to the right, and the four is the number furthest to the left. The shape is most likely a diamond, so the question becomes: ‘is the code four, eight, six, two or four, two, six, eight’? It could be others, of course, but always try the most obvious combination first. It turned out that it was the second option. four, two, six, eight was the code.”

  Enough light pored through the windows from the city lights below that we were able to see just well enough to make our way through the offices without further help from the phone flashlight. Violet put it away as we headed down a hallway.

  “How do you know there isn’t any extra security? Cameras and stuff?” I asked in a whisper, wondering if I should cover my face just in case.

  “I looked at the security the last few times we were here. The first thing you should always do when you enter a building is determine how to get in unnoticed, in case the need arises.”

  “Between this and telling me to practice lying, I’m starting to wonder if you really do work with the police, or if you’re the reason bodies are popping up everywhere,” I muttered as Violet stopped in front of a solid door. I had no idea what was on the other side of it, but she evidently did.

  “The line between solving crimes and committing them is very thin,” she replied. That explained why I was standing in the middle of an office hallway after midnight wondering if I was going to wake up in jail the next day. She took her pickpocketing tools back out of her bag and a moment later she opened the door.

  “Wait,” she told me before going in. Slipping a mirror from her pocket, Violet checked something on the other side of the door.

  “Good. No cameras, we are clear,” she said, entering the room. I couldn’t help but notice that she checked once more once we were in the room to ensure there weren’t any other cameras around.

  “The good thing about major companies is they never think that their servers can be touched. They always think technology will be magically protected,” she said as she made her way expertly between racks of computer hardware. Pulling an eleven-inch laptop from her purse, along with a cable, Violet plugged it expertly into a certain hole in the server room.

  “This will take some time,” she told me. “Likely around twenty, thirty minutes.”

  I looked as Violet tapped away at the screen.

  “So you’re good with computers, hey?” I asked.

  “You could say that, yes.”

  “How good, exactly? Like, are you a hacker?”

  “Hacker is a very broad term. But yes, in general, I am very good at getting into technology that is generally protected. As you must imagine, I did not have many friends growing up. However, the computer, it was an escape. An excellent escape. I am more comfortable with my computer than with people.”

  I could understand that, for sure.

  “Is the alarm disabled for the whole office?” I asked. Violet nodded. “It should be, yes.”

  “Can you pick the lock upstairs for me? I want to have another look at Elizabeth’s office. After all, there isn’t much for me to do here while we wait for the computer.”

  “Excellent idea,” Violet replied. “Give me three minutes to set everything up, and I will come with you.”

  The three minutes felt like an eternity. I knew that Violet had disabled the alarm. I’d seen her do it. And after all, we’d been here for minutes already. If anything had been triggered, at the very least that guard would have come upstairs to see what had happened. But there was still that little niggly part of my brain that knew what we were doing was a serious crime and couldn’t help but expect the police to break the door down and arrest us at any moment.

  Still, we made our way back to the doorway, then upstairs to the floor where Elizabeth Dalton worked with no issues. And sure enough, when we entered, the light on the alarm system box was a solid green. We were all good.

  Silently, Violet and I made our way down the hall. I couldn’t help but think of how creepy this place was. It was dark; I could make out the silhouette of Violet in front of me, and I could tell where the walls were, but not much more than that. The HVAC system hummed low in the background, but apart from that there was silence. It felt like the beginning of a horror movie, when you just know something’s going to come out from one of the rooms and murder you.

  I was so caught up in my thoughts that I didn’t notice Violet stop in front of me, and when I walked into her my heart leapt into my throat. I jumped about three feet in the air and let out the first part of a squeal, which I quickly stopped by clamping my hand over my mouth.

  “Just a little bit jumpy?” Violet asked softly. She had stopped in front of Elizabeth Dalton’s door. We were here.

  “Sorry,” I murmured, my heart pounding so hard in my chest I was sure Violet could hear it.

  “It is all right, you get used to committing crimes after a while. It is the worst part, really. It is not good to get complacent. A close call now and then—how do you say—keeps you on your toes.”

  “Well, I’ll be perfectly happy if that close call doesn’t come tonight,” I said as I heard the click of the lock. We entered the office, both of us pulling out our phones. It was obviously too risky to turn the light on in here, so we took out the flashlights.

  Violet made her way to the filing cabinet and opened the top shelf, taking out a number of plain off-white folders. She handed me half the pile.

  Years of being a medical student meant that I was fully used to studying texts late at night, and my old habits came back to me pretty quickly. I settled myself down on the floor, the stack of files next to me, and began to flip through them while Violet did the same at the table.

  “Are we looking for anything in particular?” I asked.

  “Keep an open mind. You never know what could be important, but you also do not want to direct your thoughts in a single direction. That is dangerous, you may overlook a vital piece of information if it does not fit the narrative you have formed in your head.”

  “Got it,” I replied. It seemed like my files were basically just invoices from a number of companies – mainly printers, ad agencies, TV stations and other marketing-related businesses—that Elizabeth Dalton was in charge of paying. It quickly became apparent that keeping an open mind wasn’t going to be a problem; keeping an interested mind was. But hey, if I could make it through a class entirely dedicated to the internal structure of the human eye, surely I could flip through some invoices and make sure nothing was off about them.

  Fifteen minutes later I was flipping through my fourth folder of boring invoices, and the only conclusion I’d come to was that marketing services were a very lucrative business. Tens of thousands of pounds per month just to advertise the business on Facebook? Maybe I’d just found my new career path. I was flipping through the invoices when suddenly something caught my eye. Stuck to the back of one of the pieces of paper was about half a post-it note. It was the same colour as the paper, and obviously didn’t belong.

  Pulling it off the page, I had a look at the note. It just had some stuff scribbled on it that didn’t make much sense to me:

  14-1: 1,000

  28-1: 1,000

  10-2:
1,000

  08-6

  Anything else that might have been on the post-it had since disappeared.

  “Hey Violet,” I told her, calling her over. “I think I might have found something. I don’t know. It’s weird.”

  She came over and looked at the note.

  “Well now that is interesting,” Violet said as she looked at the note carefully. “I don’t think Elizabeth Dalton was embezzling money from the company anymore. I think she was blackmailing someone.”

  Chapter 12

  “Blackmailing someone?” I asked. “How do you know?”

  “I’m fairly certain the numbers at the bottom are the first half of a sort code, which has been cut off. The numbers at the top look like a date, and an amount. Perhaps how much a person is supposed to pay, and into which account. Is the other half of the note in here somewhere?”

  We spent another half hour looking through all the files, but didn’t come up with the other half of the note. Violet finally sat back on her heels, defeated. “Well, I cannot say I am very surprised. I expect Elizabeth Dalton tore the whole note in half, and must have thought she had thrown out both halves. It is only good fortune that one half escaped the bin.”

  “She really didn’t seem to me to be the blackmailing type,” I muttered to myself.

  “There is never a type!” Violet admonished. “I doubt you would believe your new landlady to be the ‘type’ to smuggle one of the world’s biggest sapphires into England, either.”