by Helen Smith
“Oh, I see. That’s useful to know.”
“Don’t go cheap on the incense. Nothing stinks so much as a cheap joss stick.”
“No. OK. Thank you. Yes. Where’s Teena? I’d like to thank her, too.”
“She went to meet Polly. To talk about writing.”
“She’s not with Polly,” said Emily. “Polly’s been taken ill.”
Morgana stepped aside to allow two more women to come into the room. They were carrying flowers in cellophane. There was something ghoulish about the way they were all gathering, silently, in memory of someone they had never known. They came into the room with the solipsistic entitlement of people who are grieving. They seemed confident that they had a right to be here. But once they had taken their seats they looked around expectantly, as if in anticipation of a pleasant evening. They were not like bereaved relatives or friends; if anything, they reminded Emily of hobbyists meeting for the first time at a convention to celebrate whatever it was they collected or practiced.
“Hobbyists is a nice way of putting it,” whispered Dr. Muriel loudly, when Emily confided her thoughts. “Zombies—that’s what they remind me of. The undead coming to claim their own. There seems to be no way of staving off their approach, except with one of Zena’s romance novels.” She demonstrated by picking up a copy of Starlight Falls and holding it in front of her, as if she was a vampire killer holding a bible. When she took a step forward, boldly, and waved the book around, the grieving vigilers shrank back slightly. Dr. Muriel replaced the book on the table with a wink at Emily.
“I saw something very strange just now,” whispered Emily. She told Dr. Muriel about M. Loman with his bulky black bag, going through the bins.
“Do you have your notebook?”
Emily handed it over.
“Yes,” said Dr. Muriel, reading and nodding.
“What?”
“Yes. Yes.” Dr. Muriel handed back the notebook. “Very interesting.”
“I know we thought it must be two people working together. But it can’t be Cyril Loman and Henri, surely?”
“I have no idea, m’dear. You’ll solve it, I’m sure.”
Two more women shuffled forward and placed their flowers on the floor beneath the book of condolences, still in their plastic wrappings. Morgana gave them a tragic smile, which was greeted with mild hostility, and then she signaled discreetly that it was time to leave.
Archie and Cerys were waiting for them in the Captain Thomas Coram room, a wood-paneled meeting room on the first floor. The members of the committee, and Emily and Dr. Muriel, joined them at a large round table in the center of the room, their hands almost touching, as if they were planning to take part in a séance. The mood was somber. Emily took out the pen and notepad from her bag, ready to make notes.
Morgana said, “I need your help to find something to say about Winnie. Now, I know very clearly what I don’t want to say. I don’t want to come out with meaningless phrases like ‘not on my watch’ or ‘her beloved.’ Don’t you hate it when someone dies and they liked something and it’s ‘his beloved Arsenal,’ ‘her beloved cat.’ Actually, this woman did have a cat. That much we know, at least. I’ve got the skeleton for a statement—I’ve been going over it with Muriel, who has been curbing my flourishes so that when I speak, it doesn’t sound like a blurb for a tragic love story. Cat. Husband. Other than that, we just know so little else about her. We know that she died, but not how or why, never mind what sort of person she was. I mean, anyone can love a cat.”
“Not me,” said Cerys. “They bring me out in blotches, all up my arms.”
Archie spoke up: “Have they no further info, then? The police?”
Dr. Muriel, sitting to Emily’s left, said, “I wonder…could Winnie have been killed because she was part of the One Star Club?”
The door banged and Polly came in and joined them, ghostly pale, as if the séance had begun, and the words One Star Club had summoned her there.
Chapter Eight
THE ONE STAR CLUB
“The One Star Club?” Polly said, suspiciously. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Is it something I ought to mention at the press conference?” asked Morgana.
“That would be most ill-advised,” said Dr. Muriel, cheerily. “The One Star Club—assuming it even exists—is supposed to be rather hush-hush.”
“I’m not quite sure what it is, Muriel. Will you enlighten us?”
The door opened quietly as Nik Kovacevic and Maria slipped into the room. Maria was pushing a trolley with two bottles of white wine in coolers, eight wine glasses and three bowls of luxury mixed nuts. “My compliments,” Nik murmured. “It’s been a stressful day.”
Maria parked the trolley and left the room, but Nik remained behind and fussed with the wine, opening and pouring it almost silently. Only Archie and Emily declined a melon-size glass of sauvignon blanc, and Nik compensated by putting the mixed nuts closest to them. He was nothing if not attentive to his guests. Though she didn’t like him much, Emily was impressed by the way he looked after the RWGB committee personally, as though they were VIPs.
Dr. Muriel rested her right hand on the top of her cane and looked around at each of the group in turn, to be sure of holding their attention. She said, “The One Star Club is talked of in academic circles. A mythological group, if you will. It’s said that its members join incognito, with enrollment only possible via a personal recommendation from one of the current members. If indeed it does exist, it seems it must be an international organization with a membership who meet occasionally in person, but otherwise conduct their business online.”
“You’re pulling our legs, Muriel,” said Morgana, taking a large gulp of wine. “What business do they conduct, for goodness’ sake?”
“Ah, well it’s a business that would be of interest to you. That's why I thought you might have heard of it. In order to be a member of the One Star Club, one has to enjoy giving one-star reviews to products, services, books and films.”
“I knew it!” said Cerys.
“A conspiracy?” said Archie. He shook his head, not convinced. He caught Emily’s eye and shook his head again. As someone who was conspicuously taking notes, individual members of the committee automatically sought to persuade Emily to record their views.
“Surely not,” said Polly. “What would be the point of it?”
“Mischief-making, score settling, sheer bloody-mindedness…Some have hypothesized that they’re absurdists, others that they’re anarchists trying to upset the cozy commerciality of unverifiable review systems.”
“What makes you think that Winnie was anything to do with them?”
“I don’t. I was merely asking the question.”
“Her reviews were generally quite fair,” said Morgana. Then, with a quick look at Cerys, “Generally.”
“I don’t bother much with reviews,” said Zena.
“Never read them,” said Archie.
“None of us does,” said Morgana.
Polly caught Emily’s eye and smiled as if to say, I do. Emily smiled and bent to her notes.
“A secret society?” said Cerys. “I’d love to know where they meet. I’d turn up and shake a bag of snakes in through the air-conditioning ducts to bite the lot of them.”
Emily wrote snakes, struck by how specific this plan was, as if Cerys hadn’t only just thought of it.
“Darling,” said Morgana. “Imagine the trouble you’d have wrangling the snakes. Wouldn’t they bite indiscriminately? What about the staff? What about the general public? What about you?”
“I’m not serious, M.”
“I’m no convinced,” said Archie. “About the One Star Club.”
“No,” said Morgana. “Me neither. No offense, Muriel.”
“How do you know so much about it?” Zena asked. “You’re not a member?”
“No indeed. Academics do have rather a sordid reputation for trashing each other’s work, whether in the press or anonymously. B
ut that’s rather unjust. We’re mostly very supportive of our colleagues.”
“In layman’s terms, Muriel’s professional areas of interest encompass conundrums, puzzles and ethical considerations,” said Morgana to Zena.
“You don’t need to put it in layman’s terms for me. Zena’s as bright as the best of them.” Zena made a huffing sound.
“Indeed.” Dr. Muriel laughed her rattly laugh. “You know, I don’t claim to be able to provide any answers. So I can only ask: could Winnie’s appearance here be connected to the One Star Club, should such a club exist?”
“We invited her here,” said Polly. “It doesn’t make any sense—unless one of us is a member of this club.”
Everyone looked around at each other, suspiciously.
“It takes me all day to write three pages of my manuscript,” said Morgana. “Never mind the hours taken up with responsibilities associated with the RWGB. Where would I find the time to write unkind reviews of other people’s books?”
“No need. You can leave that to the bloggers,” said Cerys.
“Quite!” said Morgana. And then, realizing she had misspoken, she added, “Not that many of them succumb to the temptation, of course. Broadly, as you know, I’m in favor of bloggers.”
“You mentioned that people could only join if they were recommended by a current member,” said Polly. She took a sip of water—she was still very pale. “But what happens if someone wants to leave this club?”
“Ah!” said Zena. “Interesting.”
“You think Winnie was killed because she tried to break ranks?” said Cerys, excitedly. “You think she might have been killed by other bloggers?” She stood and began to stride around the room, just as she would if she was trying to work through a difficult plot point while writing in her office at home. Realizing she was in company—and that she didn’t want it to look as though she were responsible for this particular plot—she sat down again.
“We’re certainly straying into the realms of fantasy, now,” said Morgana. A slight tremor passed through her body, from hat to toe, betraying her nervousness.
“We’re storytellers. Course it’s tempting to try to put a story to the poor woman’s death,” said Archie. “But I cannae believe in this One Star Club. It’s more likely a random killing, eh?”
“It looks as though more than one person was involved,” said Emily. “At least two. It could have been a group effort.”
“A group effort?” said Morgana. Another tremor, as if her body was rejecting the information that her mind had just taken in.
“You’re not saying the police suspect the committee?” said Cerys. “We’ve all talked to them, haven’t we? Ruled ourselves out. It’s crazy. None of us could have done it.” They looked around at each other again. And perhaps they realized that, although they knew each other, they didn’t know each other’s secrets.
“And then there’s the poisoning,” said Emily.
“Poisoning?” said Zena and Archie, more or less together. “What poisoning?”
“Cyanide,” said Cerys.
“Oh,” said Polly. “No, that was me. Overactive imagination, I think…Well, you know how it is. I’m OK now.” She didn’t look OK. She looked like a Victorian matchbox seller who has been out in the cold all night and hasn’t had a decent meal in three weeks.
“Ach, well,” said Archie. “You’d know if you’d been poisoned by cyanide.”
“Who’d want to poison you, Polly?” said Zena, in a tone of voice that suggested she could think of a dozen people off the top of her head.
“I don’t know. Some people are jealous.”
“If Polly’s in danger, we’re all in danger, yeah? If it’s about jealousy. We’ve all had our share of success.” Zena’s eyes went to Emily’s notebook, to be sure she was writing that down.
Morgana said, “This is just the kind of speculation we need to avoid at the press conference. We need to say something nice about Winnie tonight and then cut it off there. What did we know of her, anyway?”
There was a polite, thoughtful silence. No one had known anything about her.
Zena took a purple lipstick out of her bag, removed the lid and twisted it before proffering it to Polly. “Here you are, Poll. Put a bit of color on.”
Polly hesitated slightly but could hardly refuse without implying she thought that Zena had cold sores or germs. She applied the lipstick by feel, without the aid of a mirror. Now with purple lips, without a scrap of makeup on the rest of her face, she looked like a zombie in a YouTube video made by eleven-year-olds.
Cerys tried to help. She got out her blusher brush and a little pink pot. “This’ll put roses in your cheeks, love.” She stood and stroked the brush briskly down one side of Polly’s face and then the other. Polly kept her face still and slid her eyes to the very left of her line of her vision to meet Emily’s. Emily giggled. Zena now stood and began to apply purple eye shadow to Polly. As she and Cerys worked silently, competitively, to transform Polly into a crayon-faced monster, Morgana tried to get the meeting back on track.
“What shall I say about Winnie?”
Emily said, “Could you let her speak for herself by reading her competition entry?”
“Very good!” Morgana put on her glasses and looked through the papers in front of her on the table. “Yes, here it is. Winnie’s effort is called ‘The Secret.’”
“Ah,” said Dr. Muriel. “Interesting.”
“ Oh dear. It seemed such an innocuous title, but now everything seems to connect to this One Star Club that you mentioned so (forgive me, Muriel) so mischievously just now.”
Archie said: “Perhaps it’s in code?”
Cerys snatched up the piece of paper. “I swear to you, M, I don’t remember reading this or voting for it. There’s something funny going on.”
Zena put out her hand for the page, and Cerys put it in her hand. “Nuh. Never seen it.” Zena looked around the table at her friends, puzzled and wary. “She writes about a star in the sky…One star! Morgana, what’s going on?”
Archie said, “Ach. I was joking about the code. You know?”
Zena still had hold of Winnie’s story. She tapped the page. “The universe has ways of communicating with us, and we can communicate with it, too. C’mon! We all know words are important. Every time we write something, every time, it’s a kind of manifesto. It’s heard. It’s read. It gives a voice to what’s inside our minds.”
“Aye. Shopping lists an’ all, Zena?”
“You want it. You think it. You write it. You buy it. Yeah? Shopping lists work. Kind of proves my point.”
Morgana held up her hands. “Darlings, this is just the kind of lively debate we’re all looking forward to at the conference tomorrow. That’s why I so love it when we all get together. But, look, time’s going on and we have to deal with the press conference.” A worried little jingle of bracelets. “I’ll investigate the selection and voting and whatnot when I get home. I’ll need to contact an IT person, perhaps there’s been a glitch. Never mind that now. The funniest—well, I mean the horriblest—thing that’s happened is that poor Winnie has been murdered, and I need to say something about it. Death has cast its long and terrible shadow over the conference, and plucked one of our guests from our midst with cold, gray fingers…Is that too much?”
“Least it’s all over and done with now, love,” said Cerys. “No more death.”
But she was wrong.
Nik Kovacevic had been at work since eight o’clock that morning, and he wouldn’t finish before ten o’clock that night. Even if he’d been able to knock off early, he wouldn’t have been able to rest. His mind was full of the day’s events—they tumbled into his head like brightly-colored rubbish falling down a chute to be sorted. He picked through it all, piece by piece, trying to make sense of it. And, as if he was in the grip of a physical illness, he felt sudden flushes of anxiety every time it hit him that one of his guests had died today.
People died in hotels, of
course they did. Life in a hotel was a more extravagant version of normal, everyday life. Shortly after someone wakes up in the morning, they get up and brush their teeth. At night, they will brush their teeth again and lie down on the bed to sleep. In between those two events, they breathe, eat, cry, laugh, talk, dress, get undressed, do their ablutions—and these things are universal, whether a person is at home in their flat in Notting Hill or staying at a hotel in Bloomsbury. At the Coram Hotel, the food cost more than it would at home. There was no housework to be done—or rather, none to be done by the guests. There was plenty to be done by the staff. There were clean cotton sheets on the bed and a chocolate placed on the pillow by Lydia or one of the other maids at night. There was fancy hand cream in the toilets and little hand towels that only need to be used once before they were washed. There was life. And sometimes there was death.
Some people die quietly, some die horribly. Fortunately, the poor lady who had died that day had been found in the grounds of the estate next door. That was something Nik Kovacevic was grateful for—even proud of. He understood the reason why a guest was prepared to pay a large sum of money to stay in an establishment like the Coram Hotel. It was because of the way life at the hotel appeared to be. The hotel had to seem like a lovely place to spend time (and money). He thought he might say something about it in his next staff meeting. He would explain that standards and services were important…no. All the staff knew that already. He would explain that they were magicians, creating an illusion. They earned their living in the gap between normal life and the life of ease offered at the hotel. And this gap was adjustable and illusory. Guests didn’t want to pay for a gap that had dead bodies stuffed in it. He would say that. Or did it sound weird? It might be better to say nothing.
First there was a porter he needed to go and interview, whose papers were not quite in order. He needed to ensure that everything was sorted, one way or another, to the satisfaction of the Home Office. It was his duty to know everything that was going on in the hotel, and to forestall any potential trouble. When he’d been assistant manager here he’d intervened to stop illegal, high-stakes gambling meetings, organized prostitution (the disorganized kind was tolerated, so long as it was discreet) and too much drug taking among staff (a little bit of cocaine use among chefs was known to help them get through the long working hours, though too much made them belligerent; and the use of expensive drugs by lower-grade staff was not a good idea, because they couldn’t afford it). After he had dealt with the porter, he had to be on hand at the RWGB press conference, to ensure the hotel was portrayed in the best possible light. Though if anyone said anything unfavorable, he was not sure what he was supposed to do. Turn off the lights? Charge to the front with a roar and threaten everyone? Stay silent and fume? Probably the latter. That’s what he usually did.
