by Helen Smith
“Makes my job a bit easier!”
“Will you make a note, though, that she was sick—and about the taste of bitter almonds in the chocolate she ate?”
“I will.” He didn’t pick up his pen and write anything. “Anything else? Any other theories?” He smiled engagingly, a naughty, happy light in his eyes. He must get precious little opportunity to be cheerful at work. Still, Emily wasn’t going to indulge him in this. She maintained a lemon expression. But she couldn’t stay quiet for long because she had another question.
“Would you need two people to move a dead body?”
“Not necessarily. It depends on the strength of the person doing the moving and the weight of the body.”
“But if you had to lift the body over a wall? If you had to do it quickly?”
“Well,” Rory sighed—a teacher tiring of a precocious child. “In that case four hands would be better than two, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?”
A maid knocked on the door and came in. A badge on her breast advertised her name as Lydia. She was a chubby Filipina woman of about thirty, wearing a pale lilac uniform dress and sensible shoes. She had a careworn face. She could have been a nurse on duty, except that she was carrying a gift shop bag full of violet crèmes.
“What I do with these?” Lydia asked.
Rory didn’t look at Emily as he said, “Thank you, uh…Lydia? Perhaps you could dispose of them for us?”
As Lydia left with the chocolates, Emily slipped her the twenty pounds she’d had from Morgana.
Rory said, “You must leave this to us, Emily. There are procedures to be followed. It’s not just me working on this investigation, you know. We haven’t even had the pathologist’s report yet. I can’t tell you everything, but we know what we’re doing.”
Emily left the room, closed the door and got out her notebook. Then it occurred to her that she ought to write down the exact time that Rory had eaten the chocolate, just in case it contained a slow-working poison and he was found, cold and dead and slumped over the paperwork he hated.
With that horrible image in her head, she burst back into the Virginia Woolf room, with the passion and breathlessness of a romantic hero who can’t pass up the opportunity to say “I love you!” to the heroine, and chases after her and…
Rory looked up at her, half-smiling in spite of himself, like a toddler reacting to a game of peekaboo.
“I just wanted to check you were OK. You know, the chocolate…”
He grinned. He was OK.
Emily withdrew, shut the door, and left him to it.
Chapter Seven
THE VIGIL
So Emily was now looking for two people working together—one of them possibly armed with hairspray, at least one of them a smoker—who had pushed Winnie off the roof terrace or contrived to make her fall, and then heaved her body over the wall into the neighboring housing estate for reasons unknown. She glanced around the public areas of the hotel, and everywhere there seemed to be guests sitting in pairs, or members of staff working in pairs. But how many of them were capable of murder?
When she got to the bar she saw Morgana and Dr. Muriel sitting together talking over their notes. Dr. Muriel poured black coffee from a pot on the table into a cup in front of Morgana. A silvery jingle of bracelets and a hiccup accompanied Morgana’s cheerful wave. As Emily approached, Morgana said to her friend, “Thank you for recommending Emily. She’s been such a help.”
Emily was conscious that she’d hardly done a stroke of work. Sometimes, she’d noticed, people liked you more, the less work you did. If you came along and tried to do things your way, or did everything too quickly and showed everyone else up, then you could make yourself unpopular. Sit on your arse all day, or chase about following up clues to a murder, and people were unstinting in their praise.
Another silvery jingle called them to attention. “Darlings, I need to make a plan for this evening.”
“I thought you’d put me next to that old rogue, Lex Millington.”
“Not a seating plan, Muriel. A plan plan. In fact, the committee’s meeting shortly to make a plan, but I need a plan for that meeting. We’re in a terrible pickle. A poor woman has died, and there’s to be a vigil at the hotel. We have a press conference arranged, and I need to find something suitable to say about the whole affair. It’s not in my nature, as a novelist, to make things less dramatic. I need your help.” Morgana hiccuped.
“Ah! You think, as an academic, I can help make everything seem dry and serious?”
The two old friends smiled at each other.
Emily said, “Is there anything you want me to do?”
“We’re in for a long night, Emily.” Another hiccup. “You take a breather, if you like. You want to meet us back here in fifteen, twenty minutes? We can inspect the arrangements for the vigil before the press conference. I’m not looking forward to being confronted by an angry mob.”
“You’re worrying unduly, Morgana. You’re always too hard on yourself. Even a mob could not fail to be charmed by you.” There are people who, having discovered that some people like sticky labels, will offer sticky labels to everyone. Dr. Muriel was not one of these. While she might have discovered that her undergraduates liked sticky labels, she knew only too well that Morgana preferred reassurance. So she was handing that out in dollops, washed down with strong black coffee.
Emily wasn’t quite sure where she should go or what she should do with her “breather.”
“All right, then. I’ll go and…” She faded away without actually saying what she would do.
Inevitably, she started turning over the day’s events in her mind. Whatever Polly had seen, she might have seen. Did that mean she was also in danger? As for who they had seen, that had been Nik. Emily didn’t much like him. But that didn’t make him a murderer. Still, she thought she might have another look outside. What had he been doing out there when she and Polly had run into him? He had seemed very keen to shoo them away and back into the hotel.
Emily walked through the dining room—she saw Maria, and nodded at her—and then, when she thought no one was looking, she slipped through the door leading to the kitchen, walked along the shabby corridor, and went out of the white door that led to the courtyard with the bins. What was she looking for? How would she find it? How would she know if she’d found it? She didn’t know. This wasn’t going to be a methodical approach. She simply hoped that if she kept an open mind and looked around, the information she needed would present itself. Whatever it was, she had to find it fast and get out of there before anyone (before Nik) saw her. Though the area looked much as it did when she was there earlier in the day, it now seemed to have an atmosphere as unpleasant as its smell. It seemed eerie.
There were cigarette ends discarded on the floor, as before. Emily moved quietly, looking at the ground, then looking up at the hotel. There were no guest windows overlooking this area, but she could see the low fence surrounding the service area at the back of the bar on the roof terrace. She tried to visualize the trajectory of a body falling from there into the courtyard below. She saw that it might land in one of the large, colored bins about twenty feet in front of her. Red was for waste food. Yellow was for paper and cardboard. If Winnie had landed in a yellow bin, the contents might have acted as a mattress, stopping Winnie’s bones from shattering and her skin from bursting open, and her organs falling out. Emily walked cautiously toward a yellow bin—and stopped, hearing a scrabbling sound from inside the capacious red bin next to it. A rat? A dog? A man? A murderer? She cringed, reflexively making herself smaller. Should she investigate or turn and walk away?
The decision was made for her when her mobile phone rang. Emily was scrupulous about turning her phone off when she was in the theater or the cinema. She never answered the phone in the bank or at the counter in the post office, or when paying for purchases in shops. She’d have to add “when investigating the possible scene of a temporary resting place for the body of a murdered woman” to the list�
�next time. If there was a next time.
Emily pulled her phone from her handbag and hit the red button to cut off the call, while simultaneously swiveling and ducking behind a large, yellow bin behind her. As she went down, the head of a man bobbed up above the lip of the red bin. He looked around. Had he heard the phone? Had he seen her? Was any part of her still poking out from behind the bin? Anyway she could see him. It was M. Loman.
“Hello?” he said. He was dressed in his smart suit. He was not dressed appropriately for going through the bins. “Hello?” he said again. He ducked down inside for a few moments, and then he threw a black, plastic bin bag out over the side. It was filled with something bulky. Next, he put his gloved hands on the lip of the bin and heaved himself out, quite elegantly, as if heaving himself out of a hotel swimming pool. “Henri?”
Emily watched as one of the porters came up to M. Loman from the other direction. They stood close to each other, whispering in French. Henri was small and dark like M. Loman, presumably hailing from the same country of origin. They shook hands once, in a brief, businesslike way. Then M. Loman picked up his bulky black bag and began to walk toward where Emily was hiding.
It was no use. M. Loman would walk right past her and was bound to see her. Emily would have to stand up and make herself known. Seeing a familiar face in unusual surroundings would be rather awkward, like going on holiday to Thailand and seeing a neighbor on the beach. She wondered what the correct greeting should be, under the circumstances. How nice! What a surprise! Lovely day for grubbing about in the recycling bins—find anything useful? None seemed quite right, especially as he was carrying a…what did he have in that bag?
“Hsst!” called Henri. M. Loman turned, looking slightly disoriented. Henri jerked his head in the direction of the wall that separated the courtyard from the estate next door, and M. Loman walked away from Emily, following Henri toward the wall.
Peeping from behind her yellow bin, Emily saw Henri stop and crouch at the bottom of the wall, making the crook of his arm into a kind of step for M. Loman to use to climb over. M. Loman threw the black bag before him, then followed it over the wall and disappeared. Henri brushed himself down, looked around warily, then went back in the direction of the kitchen.
Emily waited until she was sure he had gone, then she went and peered into the red bin. The interior was pretty revolting. There was a deep layer of discarded foodstuff, and an opened-out cardboard box on top of it with footprints on it—M. Loman had presumably been standing on the cardboard to stop his shoes sinking into the quicksand of rotting detritus. There was nothing inside the bin that seemed linked to Winnie’s death—but then, if there had been, and M. Loman was in some way connected to it, she’d hardly expect to see it; he would have been there to remove it. Certainly, he had removed something. But what? Emily had hoped to gather new information out here, but whatever she’d gathered hadn’t helped her to solve the mystery of what had happened to Winnie—it had just given her something else to puzzle over.
Emily walked back to the restaurant. She turned her mobile phone back on and checked to see who had called her. It was Morgana. She went to find her in the bar.
Emily walked with Morgana and Dr. Muriel from the bar to the Brunswick room. It was one of the small function rooms on the ground floor that was normally reserved for private dining or daytime seminars. It had been set aside for use for the vigil, and it was being supervised by Zena and a local bookseller, an amiable-looking, youngish man with a ponytail. Zena waved them in, and Emily saw that a book of condolences had been left open on a long table in the middle of the room. On either side of it were two computer screens. One displayed the home page of the Tallulah’s Treasures blog, with a winsome picture of Winnie in her prime and, under it, the words RIP. Another had a scrolling display of blogs that had joined the blogathon, posting personal memories of Winnie-as-Tallulah and tributes to her. The reminisces were touching, even though some of those posting had only ever met Winnie online—or perhaps, Emily reflected, that actually made it more poignant, because Winnie’s online friends would now never have the opportunity to meet her in person.
Against the far wall, another table carried the latest titles from members of the RWGB, together with a pile of novels labeled “Tallulah’s Top Ten Picks,” and copies of a book called Publishing without a Parachute (How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Fly) by Lex Millington. Emily picked it up, hoping to find a clue to the accusations against Lex, against which Morgana had so vehemently defended him. But she only saw that the book seemed to be some kind of gossipy insider’s guide to the publishing industry, and had been blurbed by Jonathan Franzen as “the most important book about publishing you will ever read” and by Oprah Winfrey as “a classic.”
Three woman sat in a semicircle at the other side of the room. They seemed to have gathered for the vigil. When they saw Morgana they looked vaguely hostile. But all three held copies of Polly’s latest book, which they had purchased from the ponytailed bookseller. They warmed up a bit when Morgana went over and greeted them, and explained that Polly had been taken ill but would be along later to sign books.
Zena called over from the table, “Not just Polly, babes. We’re all prepared to spend as long as it takes signing books, in Tallulah’s memory. It’s what she would have wanted, yeah? Tallulah loved signed books.”
As she talked, Zena held up a copy of her book, Starlight Falls. Morgana nodded. The semicircle of three nodded. But none of them took the hint and bought Zena’s book. It was a shame, because the pitch had been done smoothly and professionally—Zena would have been an excellent choice as the host of a TV shopping channel, and her nails looked good, which is important when the cameras go in close on a product.
Two more people came into the room—a man and a woman in matching blue anoraks. They looked at the computer screens and read some of the blogathon tributes. The woman signed the book of condolences. She seemed upset. She blew her nose loudly. The man—her husband, perhaps—had the resigned, nothing-to-do-with-me air that men affect when they accompany their wives on shopping trips. The woman looked around. After signing the book of condolences, there wasn’t much to do. She wandered up to the bookstall and picked up one or two of the books, turning them over in her hands. Presently she chose both Morgana’s new book and Polly’s. Her husband paid for them, and Morgana graciously autographed the copy of her book. In purely commercial terms, it looked as though this tragedy might turn out to be something of a success.
Emily got out her pen and looked in her handbag for her notebook. Then she realized she had caught the attention of the others in the room. They watched her standing there pen in hand, and they expected her to write in the book of condolences. She hesitated and then decided to go for it. Dear Winnie, she began. What next? She had no fond memories to share. Simply writing RIP sounded a bit…hip-hop. She read a few of the previous entries, hoping to take her cue from them. But she didn’t feel comfortable suggesting that Winnie was looking down on them. In fact, it only made her think of Winnie looking down from the roof terrace at the yellow bin below, or falling into it. She looked further back in the book. What had Teena written? It’s a competitive world, Winnie, but you died a winner. RIP, Teena. That was nice. Some of the others had taken up the Winnie’s a Winner theme in their entries. Just copying everyone else didn’t sit well with Emily, either. Finally she decided on I’m sorry I never got the chance to meet you. And then she remembered her dog, Jessie, dying in her arms at a very old age, not so long ago. She thought of how desperately upset Winnie’s husband Des must be, on his way to a foreign country to be with his wife’s body, knowing he’d never see her alive again and hadn’t been with her when she died. And it set her off. She wiped away a few tears. The woman in the blue anorak handed Emily a tissue, and Emily blew her nose. She felt both hypocritical—as if she was pretending to have known Winnie and to have cared about her more than she did—and slightly relieved and vindicated. What was the point of a vigil without a pub
lic display of sorrow? Grief for strangers these days was oddly competitive.
That word again. Competitive. She wrote it in her notebook. Maybe she was just echoing Teena’s words. Maybe her investigative notes were just a mild form of plagiarism? In that case, she might as well go the whole hog. In her notebook she wrote Winnie’s a Winner. And RIP. She stuffed it in her bag before anyone could see. The people sitting around here were so poorly served for entertainment that if any one of them should ask what was in the notebook and she should say poetry, they might actually ask her to stand there and read a bit of it aloud.
“Should I stay and help out here?” Emily asked Morgana.
Zena replied for her, “Naw. We’re all set, babes. That Teena girl come and set up the computer screens for me. I got Frazer there selling the books. We got the banqueting people bringing in the members of the public who turn up for the vigil, and they’ve promised to keep ’em out of trouble and feed ’em fancy snacks. Zena’s taken care of it. It’s all in hand.”
“I need you next door, Emily,” said Morgana. “I need you to take notes. But I value your input, too. Thank you, Zena. You’ve been wonderful. We’ve all pulled together in the aftermath of this tragedy. We’ve shown what we can achieve under pressure.”
“I’ll let you into a secret, babes. You want something, you visualize it, yeah?” Zena came close to Morgana and lowered her voice. She smelled of incense and toothpaste.
“Yes. I suppose I do.”
“Well that’s not enough, M. Not with all the competing wishes and dreams being visualized all around the world by so many needy people. And London’s majorly bad with the high density of population: all want, want, want. So what I do, I give my visualization a boost. I create something that represents what I want to happen, and I light some incense, and I say out loud what I want to happen, and I ring a little silver bell to draw attention to my prayer. And then, that brings success. I don’t ask much for myself. I’m basically a spiritual person. I hold back from asking for things for myself all the time. But if you want something, do that. It works.”
