3 Invitation To Die

by Helen Smith

  “Look, I know you believe that criminals can be rehabilitated—” said Zena.

  “Lex is not a criminal,” said Morgana.

  “You’re not streetwise, Morgana,” Zena continued. “Where I come from—”

  “I hate innuendo, Zena. Innocent until proven guilty. It’s a law that applies in North London just the same as anywhere else.”

  Polly spoke calmly, reasonably: “Teena just wants a leg up in the business, doesn’t she?”

  “Everyone wants a leg up,” said Cerys. “Youngsters these days! What’s wrong with doing it the hard way like the rest of us? Learning your craft.” She put her arm through Zena’s. “Come on, love. I’ve earned it, I’m going to spend it. Let’s get out there quick, or we’ll no sooner arrive at the shops than we’ll have to turn round and come back.”

  Emily wondered why Cerys hadn’t gone to the shops half an hour ago if she was so keen.

  Zena wasn’t quite ready to go yet. “Poll, babes. Where’d you get that cardigan? I’m looking for something like it in purple.”

  Polly blushed and shrugged her narrow shoulders. Her little pink cardigan scarcely looked big enough to be used as a bonnet by Zena, who was big boned and meaty, and incredibly buxom. “Oh, this old thing?” she said. “I don’t remember.”

  Cerys was used to catching her grandsons by the scruff of her neck. She reached out and grabbed the collar of Polly’s cardigan, and turned the label out for all to see. “Topshop. I can’t even find a pair of tights to fit me in there. Good luck getting a cardigan in your size, Zeen.”

  Cerys and Zena left to go shopping, arm in arm.

  “Don’t be late for the dinner, will you, darlings?” Morgana called after them.

  Polly neatened the collar of her cardigan. “Any news on the missing blogger?”

  From just behind Polly, Morgana made frantic no signs with her eyes.

  “Uh, no,” said Emily.

  “Well, if you want me to do anything…” Polly said.

  “This is the most stressful conference I can ever remember,” said Morgana, huskily. “I’m gasping for a cigarette. You’re lucky you’ve given up, Polly.”

  Polly winked at Emily, half-guilty, half-conspiratorial. “I miss it sometimes,” she said.

  There came the sound of Teena’s raised voice again. Morgana said, “No cigarette breaks for the wicked. I have to go and sort out that little lot.” She hurried over to where Lex, Teena and Maggie were sitting.

  “Poor Morgana,” said Emily. “‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Was it Voltaire who said that?”

  “My son insists it’s Spider-Man. Either way, you know it’s got to have been a man. Women don’t have to wait to become powerful; we deal with responsibility every day—everything from worrying about birth control to doing the weekly shop.”

  “Men do the aphorisms; women do the dishes,” Emily suggested

  Polly laughed. “I hope one of us can find a way to keep you on after the conference, if you’ll have us. If it wouldn’t be too dull?”

  “I don’t know anything about writing.” Emily couldn’t see herself taking dictation under the circumstances in which romance novelists are generally believed to create their work, with a lap full of dogs, in an office heavily perfumed and decorated somewhat tastelessly in shades of pink.

  “Oh, it isn’t just the writing. I’ve got kids…a restaurant, various business and political interests. I’m based in Buckinghamshire, that’s the only catch. Nice and quiet for the kids. Great for writing. But maybe a bit quiet for someone your age?”

  Was Polly Penham offering her a job? It was tempting. Emily couldn’t imagine leaving her home in South London to go and live in Buckinghamshire, busying herself with timetables for Polly’s children’s piano and karate lessons. But Polly’s interest in Emily seemed genuine. Emily gave Polly a big, warm smile. How did she manage to take an interest in other people, write full-time, have children, and a restaurant, and a swannery or a cannery or whatever it was?

  “You’re amazing.”

  Polly responded by giving her a quick hug. “Emily, you really are the sweetest thing.”

  As Polly headed back to her room, for Emily’s benefit—she knew Emily was watching—she walked exaggeratedly softly past where Morgana sat with Teena and Maggie, so as not to attract their attention, like a cartoon mouse.

  “Polly! There you are.” Morgana was too canny to be outwitted by someone pretending to be a cartoon mouse. “Do come and join us, and give Teena and Maggie some tips about how to imitate your success.”

  Emily smiled at that. But she soon turned serious again and opened her notebook and tried to get her thoughts in order. Could Winnie really have been murdered? If so, by whom? Random strangers? Muggers? Angry bloggers? One of the members of the RWGB organizing committee who had brought her here? What had Lex been accused of in the past? Was his lack of appetite a sign of guilt? And what had Cerys been doing, in between telling them in the basement that she was going shopping, and finally leaving with Zena just now?

  Emily made a few notes about the things that were bothering her. Rather than try and make sense of it now, she thought she would write down everything as it came to her and ponder it later. She wrote:

  Lex, Cerys, Nik Kovacevic

  Cigarette butts

  Chefs, kitchen, bins

  Hairspray!

  Who killed Winnie, and why?

  What absurd, suspicious thoughts! She was light-headed from lack of food, and it was making her fanciful. Lex was not likely to have murdered anyone. Cerys had probably spent at least twenty minutes putting hairspray on her hair, doing plenty of damage to the environment but not actually killing anyone. Anyway, she wasn’t even sure that Winnie was dead. Wasn’t it more likely that the woman who had been found on the estate was not Winnie at all, and Winnie had just gone shopping?

  Emily looked over at Polly and the two prizewinners, and eavesdropped as shamelessly as the organizing committee had done. Polly had an easy way with people that Emily admired. As she sat with them by the fire in the drawing room of the Coram Hotel, Teena and Maggie gazed at Polly with something like love.

  Polly looked the way you might want your mummy to look if you were nine years old and the product of a chaotic and slatternly home: she was neat and clean and calm, and her outfit was the color of strawberry ice cream. But that wasn’t why Teena and Maggie admired her. They admired Polly because she wrote best-selling books.

  “I hope this won’t be too dull for you,” Polly was saying. “What do you talk about at bloggers’ conferences?”

  “We don’t have them. Not really,” said Maggie.

  “What would you talk about?”

  Maggie and Teena were silent. Maggie looked alarmed, Teena resentful, as if they suspected this was some kind of test.

  Polly was unperturbed by their failure of imagination. “You’d probably talk shop, wouldn’t you? Why the five star rating isn’t enough. Something like that.”

  “Yes!” Maggie had cheered up a bit. “Yeah, there’s some books I’d like to give six stars. Or ten stars, if I could. Like yours…Polly.” She used Polly’s name hesitantly—a school-leaver meeting a teacher in the pub and being invited to discard the usual honorific.

  “Or zero stars,” Teena said.

  Teena could probably find something sour to say if she watched an orphan opening a present on Christmas Day. If Emily had been responsible for rigging the poll to choose who should attend, she’d have done her best to keep Teena away.

  But Polly’s response was upbeat. “Teena, that’s what I love about book bloggers. First of all the frankness. And also the inventiveness. Why get stuck with a five star system if we don’t like it? Why not six stars or no stars?”

  “How do you write, Polly?” asked Maggie. “What is it you do that makes you so successful?”

  There was really no answer to this. Polly sat down and wrote, and then she revised what she wrote, and then she revised it again until
she was happy with it. And because she was really good at it, what she ended up with was acceptable to Polly, her editor, her publisher, her readers and the reviewers. But that wasn’t the answer Maggie and Teena were looking for. They wanted a secret shortcut.

  Polly bought herself a few seconds of thinking time by passing the plate of French Fancy cakes with colorful fondant icing and grittily sweet cream inside. Teena and Maggie both took one, as though being offered a cake by Polly might be the first step on the road to publication.

  For those who were desperate for success in a creative field, Emily could see that it would be difficult to try and imitate the “manufacturing process” because it takes place inside a person’s head. So it would be tempting to believe that mimicry of your hero or heroine’s mannerisms, or the faithful recreation of their working environment, might enhance the chances of success. For some, the mimicry would involve boozing. For others it would be shopping. Or smoking. Or fishing. Others would wish for a bare room to write in, or a room full of books. For others it might mean moving to London or Paris or New York, or having a house by the sea. Perhaps it wasn’t the method of imitation that mattered, but the ritual—the acknowledgment that one needed to create space in one’s life for the muse. If so, then perhaps Teena and Maggie hoped the act of picking up a bright yellow cake (Teena) and a bright pink one (Maggie) from a china plate proffered by Polly would stimulate the flow of brilliant writing.

  “I could tell you what I do. But each of us is different. Let’s talk about your writing, shall we?” Polly clasped her hands together for a moment, as if praying to the gods of creativity.

  Consciously or unconsciously, Teena clasped her hands together, too. “I’m all right once I get going. But its intimidating sitting there, looking at a blank page.”

  “Let’s talk about how to kick-start our writing engines. Have you heard of automatic writing? Morgana swears by it. And she’s the master when it comes to masterclasses. Notebooks ready, ladies? Pens?”

  From their expressions, Teena and Maggie might have been suicide bombers at Heathrow Airport, asked to remove their jackets. Polly sensed their anxiety and moved to reassure them.

  “I won’t look at what you’ve written! This is just a warm-up. Let’s think about a big event in our lives, but write about it from the point of view of someone else involved in it. Instead of trying to create something from nothing, we’ll be like forensic investigators, uncovering the truth about what happened, and why. Yes? After that we’ll talk about what it feels to write; how we feel as writers. Sound good? We can share our thoughts and learn from each other. That’s what we’re here for.”

  Emily could see that Polly had indeed hit upon the best way to deal with Teena and Maggie, which was to flatter and involve them, and encourage them to talk about themselves. Who, after all, wants to listen to someone like Lex impart knowledge? Very few adults make good students, and Teena and Maggie were not among them. They had come here longing to be taken seriously as writers. They were about to get a taste of what they wanted, as Polly gave their voices equal credence with hers.

  Poor Winnie, Emily thought again. Missing all this. She closed her notebook and picked up a snack menu from the table in front of her and studied it. She hadn’t eaten any breakfast and she was hungry. She needed to eat in order to think. Unfortunately, almost everything on the menu had meat in it—vividly described meat: succulent pork from a speckled Somerset pig; tender beef from a Highland cow; moist breast of chicken from a woodland-dwelling, free-range fowl; etc. Emily was vegetarian. Perhaps she could have a plate of chips. She looked at the menu and was unsurprised to see that these were not just any old chips. They were thick farmhouse wedges of fluffy Maris Piper potatoes, twice-fried and served with sour cream and piquant—

  “Hello!” a man’s voice interrupted her. “I’ll buy you something to eat if you’re hungry.”

  She looked up and blushed bright red. It was Constable Rory James, dressed like an ordinary member of the public. Surely he hadn’t come all this way just to…?

  “I’m investigating a murder,” he said, cheerfully. “Detective James now. Do you mind coming along with me?”

  Chapter Three

  GIANT CAT

  The facts, as Detective James (“Call me Rory”) explained them, were these: The body of an American woman tourist had been found in the estate next door to the Coram Hotel, propped up next to the wall that separated the housing estate from the hotel. She had remained there for a while because she had looked peaceful; any local resident who had noticed her had assumed she was drunk, and sleeping off the effects of alcohol. Street drinkers were not uncommon in the area, though (unlike most of them) the woman had been dressed smartly, she was alone, and she was not accompanied by a friendly dog on a leash made out of a piece of string. Eventually some youths had approached the woman and determined that she was dead, at which point the police were called.

  Their inquiries established that the woman had checked into the Coram Hotel earlier that day, for a total of two nights. The cost of her first night’s accommodation had been met by the Romance Writers of Great Britain. The woman’s name was Winnie Kraster. She lived in Connecticut and, prior to arriving in London, she had been visiting relatives in Milton Keynes. An officer had gone up to Milton Keynes to interview the relatives. Winnie’s husband had been informed of her death and was on his way to Heathrow.

  “You’re helping to organize the Romance Writers’ conference, aren’t you? Do you remember meeting Winnie at all?”

  “I didn’t meet her. I spoke to her on the phone.” Emily recounted the details of the conversation she’d had with Winnie as accurately as possible.

  Det. James didn’t say anything for a short while. He seemed to have something to say that was going to be a bit awkward, and he was trying to find the best way to express it. Eventually he said, “It’s human nature to want to see ourselves at the heart of a drama.”

  Emily wasn’t sure where he was going with this. The last time they’d met, she’d helped to save the lives of some children in an end-of-term show at a theater school. There had been plenty of drama then, not all of it onstage. But she didn’t think Det. James wanted to chat about old times. She remained quiet, waiting for elucidation.

  They were in a small, pretty meeting room on the ground floor of the hotel. It was called the Virginia Woolf room—presumably for no other reason than that the hotel was situated in Bloomsbury; there was no evidence that Virginia Woolf had ever visited—and it had been commandeered as an interview room by Det. James. It had an inlaid marble fireplace and was furnished with two art deco lamps. Emily was impressed to see that the jug of iced drinking water that had been supplied by the hotel had slices of both lemon and orange floating in it, and there was a plate of pastries and cakes on the highly polished wooden table where Det. James leaned to write his notes. Though he had offered to buy her something to eat, Emily didn’t want to order it and then sit there and wait for it, and then eat it in front of him, so she had refused the offer. Now he saw her looking at the plate and pushed it toward her. She chose a Florentine and a macaroon and ate them greedily, licking her fingers when the chocolate from the Florentine melted on them.

  Det. James said, “Winnie was from Connecticut. She was born and raised there. I’ve already spoken to her husband. People in Connecticut don’t speak like that, Emily. You’re doing an accent from somewhere…I don’t know…the deep south. Mississippi or somewhere. You sound like Elvis.”

  “That’s how she spoke,” said Emily. She blushed bright red. She resented the idea that Det. James—Rory—thought she was making a drama out of it: enjoying this poor woman’s death.

  He said, “There’s something else that doesn’t quite make sense.”

  “You said she checked in this morning, but she called after that to say she’d be late.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is odd,” admitted Emily. “But I’m telling the truth. Maybe she didn’t want us to know she was he
re, so she could do some shopping?”

  “Yes.” Det. James looked embarrassed. “But think about it. If you want to change your mind about anything you’ve told me, let me know.”

  “But you haven’t told me the most important thing,” Emily said. “How did she die?”

  “It’s rather strange, actually. Her neck was broken. We think that’s what killed her. But she had other broken bones, and cuts and bruises on her body.”

  “What was it? A violent mugging?”

  “It seems nothing was taken. Her handbag was found with the body. It was like…like…have you ever seen a cat playing with a mouse? It was like a giant cat picked her up and played with her and killed her, and then set her down quite gently. The body was posed by the wall like she was asleep.”

  Emily shuddered.

  “Keep all this to yourself for now.”

  “Her death, you mean?”

  “Not that. It’s been on the news. The Chief Super’s been appealing for witnesses. Doesn’t look good, does it? An American tourist walks the streets in broad daylight and she’s attacked. No, I mean keep the details to yourself.”

  “Had she been moved very far, do you think?”

  Det. James closed his notebook and smiled. “You’re asking a lot of questions, Emily.”

  “She was a guest at the conference. I’d like to help, if I can.”

  “OK. You think of anything else you remember, bring it to us.”

  “Poor Winnie.”

  Det. James stood and walked with her to the door of the room. He held it open for her, politely. “These things are really rare, so don’t go worrying, OK?”

  His words were meant to reassure, but they didn’t.

  When Rory had closed the door behind her, Emily took her notebook from her bag, leaned against the doorjamb and wrote Giant Cat. Then she went to look for Morgana.

  Chapter Four

  COCKTAILS

  Morgana was in the bar, drinking a cocktail, a pile of shopping bags at her feet. Nice life! But as soon as she spotted Emily, before Emily could say anything, Morgana jumped down from the bar stool, grabbed Emily’s hands and gibbered, “Blogathon! There’s a blogathon!” Morgana seemed to be genuinely frightened. Emily looked around the bar, but she couldn’t see anything. What on earth was a blogathon, anyway? It sounded like a made-up creature. A dragon in a kids’ story, something like that? And then the blogathon roared and all the flowers in the garden shuddered and closed their petals in fear…