The Postscript Murders

by Elly Griffiths

  ‘I’m Harbinder Kaur. I was a friend of Peggy’s.’

  Harbinder is aware that she’s an unlikely friend for a ninety-year-old white woman. Out of habit, she clocks the fact that she is the only person of colour at the funeral. She has prepared a story about her mum living at Seaview Court but this is easy to disprove unless she kills off the poor old dear, which seems unnecessarily cruel.

  But Sally does not ask. ‘Peggy had lots of friends,’ she says, head on one side. Harbinder takes this to mean ‘even black people’.

  ‘She was a lovely person,’ Harbinder says.

  ‘Wasn’t she?’ Sally almost touches her arm then seems to think better of it. ‘Let me introduce you to Patricia and Maria. Patricia runs Care4You and Maria was one of Peggy’s regular carers. Jenny you know from the service.’

  Harbinder doesn’t feel that she knows Jenny at all; she also wonders if the cleric expected some sort of title before her name. She’s looking a bit steely. Patricia is a tall, rangy woman who looks as if she’d be more at home in a tracksuit than a black dress. Maria is small and pretty. Her accent sounds Eastern European—​maybe she’s Ukrainian, like Natalka. Harbinder is aware that Natalka is watching them from the other side of the room.

  ‘Dex Challoner was here,’ says Sally. ‘The writer, you know. So nice of him to come.’

  ‘I’ve read all his books,’ says Jenny. ‘I love a good murder.’

  ‘Was he the man in the sharp suit?’ says Harbinder. ‘I saw him as I was coming in.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Sally. ‘Such a charmer.’

  ‘His mother used to live at Seaview,’ says Patricia. ‘She was one of our clients.’

  ‘I looked after her,’ says Maria. ‘She was a character.’

  Harbinder is mildly interested that Dex Challoner seems to have used her alibi, of having a mother living at Seaview Court. Of course, it’s the truth in his case.

  ‘Can I offer you anything, Harbinder?’ says Sally. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

  Harbinder notes that there are opened bottles of wine on a side table—​and Jenny is holding a brimming glass—​but Sally has obviously made the cultural assumption that she is teetotal. On the other hand, she did get her name right.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Just wanted to pay my respects.’

  ‘We’ll miss Peggy,’ says Patricia. ‘She was a one-off.’

  ‘She always asked about my family,’ says Maria. ‘She knew such a lot about Poland. Unlike most British people,’ she adds darkly.

  ‘I know,’ says Sally. ‘Nigel studied modern history at Cambridge but I’m frightfully ignorant.’

  Harbinder’s friend Clare says that people who went to Cambridge always mention it in the first ten minutes of conversation. Sally is true to this rule, even if only vicariously.

  ‘Did Peggy go to university?’ says Harbinder. ‘She never told me.’ This is true, because Harbinder never met her.

  ‘No,’ says Sally. ‘She was born in 1929 and not many women went then. She was really clever though. She read so many books.’ She gestures at the empty shelves.

  ‘Where are the books?’ asks Patricia.

  At this moment, Nigel appears, a bottle in each hand. ‘Who’s for a top-up?’

  Harbinder is about to ask for a glass of red when a voice in her ear says, ‘Time to go.’

  Harbinder turns to see Natalka, Glasses and Pink Bow Tie looking at her expectantly. ‘Summit meeting,’ explains Natalka. ‘The Coffee Shack. Five minutes.’

  * * *

  IT’S ABOUT TEN minutes before she can escape but, after saying all the right things to Sally and Nigel, Harbinder heads down to the beach. The Shack, Natalka said, and there’s only one place it can be. A wooden hut on the coast road, right on the beach itself. It’s directly in front of the flats and must, Harbinder thinks, have been directly in Peggy Smith’s eyeline as she looked down from her window.

  The Shack turns out to belong to Glasses, whose name is Benedict. Pink Bow Tie is, as she suspected, Peggy’s friend Edwin. They sit at a picnic table and drink excellent coffee and watch as the seagulls swoop low over the waves. It’s five o’clock and the seafront is quiet, just a few dog-walkers enjoying the last of the sun.

  ‘Harbinder is a detective,’ says Natalka. ‘She’s going to help us find out who murdered Peggy.’

  ‘We’ve no evidence that she was murdered,’ says Harbinder. ‘That’s quite an assumption.’ She senses that it’s important to remind Natalka of little things like this.

  ‘No evidence?’ says Natalka. She’s sitting on the picnic table and smoking a cigarette, making a half-hearted effort to blow the smoke away from them. Benedict flaps his hands apologetically but Harbinder has to admit that Natalka makes smoking seem cool, like the girls behind the gymnasium, all those years ago at Talgarth High. ‘Tell her, Edwin,’ says Natalka.

  ‘Sally said that I could have a memento,’ says Edwin. He has a nice voice, thinks Harbinder, posh without sounding patronising. ‘She’d kindly selected a few things for me, an ornament or two, a photograph of Peggy on Brighton Pier. But I thought I’d take one of her books. We always talked about books, Peggy and me. Besides, I was slightly annoyed that Nigel had already boxed them up, as though they were just objects to be thrown away. So I opened one of the boxes and took out this.’

  Edwin is carrying something that’s a cross between a briefcase and a manbag. From its leather depths he produces a hardback. The cover shows a grainy shot of a tower block with the name Dex Challoner in gold foil across a stormy sky. The title is in smaller type below. High Rise Murder: A Tod France Mystery.

  ‘I’m not a Challoner fan,’ says Edwin. ‘But Peggy liked his books. This is the latest, an advance copy.’

  ‘It was the book Peggy was reading when she died,’ says Natalka. ‘It was open on the table beside her.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Edwin. ‘You told me. That’s partly why I chose it. I thought it would bring me closer to Peggy somehow. Anyway, when I opened it, this fell out.’

  It’s a plain postcard and on it are the words: We are coming for you.

  6

  Natalka

  PS: for PS

  IT’S ALL VERY well sitting around drinking coffee, thinks Natalka, but we need some action. She’d thought that the detective, Harbinder, would provide some momentum but she seems as cautious as Benedict. That’s quite an assumption. Natalka likes Harbinder though. There’s something watchful and ironical about her, as if she thinks before speaking, something Natalka admires in others but can rarely manage to achieve herself.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Natalka had asked that first evening, when they were sitting in that untidy office with the weird baby calendar.

  ‘Sussex,’ Harbinder had answered. But then, relenting a little, she’d said that her parents had been born in India. ‘I’m a second-generation immigrant,’ she said, ‘the sort that’s meant to be mad keen to assimilate.’

  ‘And are you?’ asked Natalka, ‘mad keen?’

  Harbinder shrugged. ‘Not really. I do get a bit fed up with people telling me to go back home when I only live in Shoreham though.’

  Natalka came to England in 2013 to study Business Studies at Bourne­mouth University. While she was still getting her head round statistics and British sexual mores (the latter much harder to understand) war broke out in her home region of Donbass. Her brother Dmytro joined the Ukrainian Army fighting the so-called separatists. Despite an official ceasefire in 2014, the fighting continued with one Ukrainian solder being killed every three days. Natalka hasn’t heard from Dmytro since a text in 2015 wishing her a happy birthday. The official story, as far as there is one, is that Dmytro is missing in action. Natalka has managed to track down some of his comrades, all of whom believe that he’s dead. Natalka’s mother refuses to accept this and spends all her time and dwindling resources on searching for her son.

  Natalka’s father left the family home when she was twelve and, for all she knows, might as well be dead. Natalka v
eers between grieving for her brother and a stubborn conviction that Dmytro is still out there somewhere. She misses her mother but nothing will make her go back to a war-ravaged country. After university, Natalka solved the visa issue by marrying another student and swiftly divorcing him. Now she works as a carer by day and, at night, buys and sells bitcoin. Most of what she earns goes in a fund named, in a moment of mordant humour, Motherland.

  She’s not looking for a mother figure, she tells people, because she has a perfectly good one waiting for her at home. Her father is another story. But she likes some of the old people she visits, their fortitude and understatement. ‘I’m a little wobbly on my pins’, when they need a Zimmer frame to get across the room. ‘The old ticker’s a bit dodgy’, when they practically go into cardiac arrest after climbing the stairs. In contrast, Natalka’s own generation seems whiny and self-obsessed. All those pictures of their lunch on Instagram, all those selfies at weird angles with eyebrows raised and lips pursed, all those status updates #whothehellcares. Natalka has learned the value of keeping a low profile, which is why she doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter. The old people understand this. Mrs Smith once told her that she made a point of never giving strangers her real name.

  ‘Is Peggy Smith your real name?’ Natalka had asked her.

  ‘Who would make up a name like Smith?’ Peggy had replied. Which wasn’t exactly an answer.

  But now she wants to do something, not just sit looking out to sea and theorising about the note in the book. She waits until Harbinder goes back to work and Edwin slopes off to feel sad on his own. Then she gets to work on Benedict. He’s a born rule-keeper but he’s also a great conspiracy theorist and is always ready to believe that ‘they’ are somehow out to get him. That comes of being a Catholic. And an ex-monk. Natalka couldn’t quite believe it when she found out about Benedict’s past. On one hand, it explained a lot (his dress sense, for one), but on the other, it’s hard to believe that anyone still does that, shut themselves into monasteries and pray to an invisible being. Natalka’s family are Orthodox Christians but she left all that behind her when she caught the plane for Heathrow.

  ‘Come on, Benny. Something’s going on. They’re keeping something from us.’

  ‘Who?’ says Benedict, looking troubled. ‘Who’s keeping something from us?’

  ‘Nigel Smith, for one. Why was he so keen to clear Peggy’s books away? Did he know that there was a note in one of them? We are coming for you. You can’t say that’s not suspicious.’

  ‘Peggy never said anything to me about a note,’ says Benedict.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ repeats Natalka. ‘Why was Dex Challoner at the funeral? Was it to watch us? And why did he leave so early?’

  ‘Maybe he just wanted to pay his respects.’

  ‘Maybe. And maybe he knew that there was a message in one of his books. Maybe the message was from him. We need to get into Peggy’s flat and look through her belongings before Nigel sells them.’

  ‘How could we get in?’ asks Benedict. Natalka knows that she’s got him now. He’s talking practicalities instead of ethical concerns.

  ‘I’ve got a key,’ she says. She doesn’t think it’s worth adding that she’d had it copied before giving the original back to Patricia.

  ‘Shall we wait until it’s dark?’ he says.

  ‘No. That would look too suspicious. It’s nearly six o’clock. If we go now, we’ll just look like any other carers doing the bedtime call. Seaview Court is swarming with them.’

  ‘OK.’ Benedict squares his shoulders. He’s not bad-looking really, tall and rangy with nice brown hair and eyes that look green in certain lights. It’s just that usually he looks so apologetic, walking with his head down and arms hanging. He wears terrible clothes too. One day Natalka will take him shopping.

  They let themselves in without difficulty. The green-carpeted corridors are deserted. The whole place reminds Natalka of a film she once saw about an ocean liner that was really an outpost of hell, full of damned souls endlessly playing bingo and having three-course meals with a single complimentary glass of wine. She looks at the doors stretching in front of her—​all painted a uniform green that still manages to clash with the carpets—​and imagines that behind each one is a different reality: an ice-bound planet, a shadow realm, a world made entirely of library books. It must be because she read The Magician’s Nephew at an impressionable age. The wood between the worlds.

  They climb the non-slip, rubberised stairs and let themselves into Peggy’s flat. Someone, probably Sally, has cleared away every vestige of the wake. There’s not a plastic glass or a crumb anywhere. Peggy’s chair sits by the balcony window pointing towards the sea. Her binoculars aren’t there though. Even the pictures have been taken down from the walls. Everything has been packed into boxes, some marked ‘Charity’, others ‘Keep’. They open a few at random, Natalka stabbing with a knife found in a box labelled ‘kitchen equipment’, Benedict carefully peeling off tape. It’s clear that Nigel has decided to keep most of the hardbacks and give the others to charity. Many of the hardbacks are by Dex Challoner and the covers show urban scenes, gritty and mysterious, with the X in Dex like a gunsight in the sky.

  ‘Some of the earlier ones are different though,’ says Benedict. ‘They have people on them.’

  He’s right. Earlier editions show a ruggedly handsome man, sometimes accessorised by a clinging blonde woman. But, about ten years and ten books ago, the publishers decided to ditch the humans and go for buildings. Over this period Dex’s name has got bigger and acquired the trademark X. Natalka opens Any Port for a Murder, showing a dockyard in a snowstorm. For Peggy, reads the dedication, without whom . . .

  ‘Without whom what?’ she says.

  ‘Without whom this book would never have been written,’ says Benedict. ‘That’s what they usually say.’

  Natalka finds several more books dedicated to Peggy and, even when the dedicatee is different, she is always mentioned in the acknowledgements. Thanks to Peggy Smith for her invaluable help. Thanks, as always, to Peggy for her advice and encouragement. Special thanks to Peggy, she knows why.

  ‘This is a good one,’ says Benedict, who is looking at Murder Market, which shows Smithfield, complete with meat hooks. He reads aloud, ‘“For Peggy, with thanks for the murders.”’

  ‘Thanks for the murders,’ says Natalka. ‘That’s the one I saw before. Is that an English phrase? Like some kind of code for something else?’

  ‘Not one I’ve ever heard,’ says Benedict. ‘Are there any more?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Natalka, ‘when I was packing them up, I saw books by other writers too. Try the charity boxes.’

  These boxes contain well-thumbed paperbacks, mostly murder mysteries and nearly all with a dedication or an acknowledgement to Peggy. ‘Thank you, Peggy, for all your help.’ ‘Special thanks to Peggy Smith.’ ‘PS: for PS.’ This last is in a book called Why Didn’t You Take Me? Though recognisably a crime novel, it’s very different from the Dex Challoners. Even the name, J. D. Monroe, is in a loopy ‘feminine’ typeface and the cover shows a Tuscan farmhouse with the title disappearing into the blue depths of the pool. Natalka rifles through the box and finds three others by the same author. Why Not Me?, It Was You, and You Made Me Do It.

  ‘Lots of question marks,’ she mutters. From the blurb she reads that Julie ‘JD’ Monroe divides her time between Tuscany and Brighton. And very nice too, thinks Natalka. Three of the books have the same ‘PS’ line in the acknowledgements.

  ‘This one’s in Latin,’ says Benedict. ‘Peggy Smith, sine quibus.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Without whom.’

  ‘Who’s the book by?’

  ‘Lance Foster. It’s called Laocoön and The Times said it was a literary masterpiece.’

  ‘Sounds shit.’

  Benedict laughs, which surprises Natalka a little. ‘It does indeed.’

  ‘What does it all mean?’ says Natalka. ‘All the
books. “Without whom”. “Thank you for the murders”. She called herself a murder consultant. Do you think she told these writers how to kill people?’

  ‘But how would Peggy know how to kill people? She was a retired civil servant.’

  ‘She lived through the war. She may have been a spy.’

  ‘She was born in 1929. She was a child in the war.’

  ‘Do you think children can’t be spies?’

  ‘No,’ says Benedict. But he sounds uncertain.

  ‘My country’s at war,’ says Natalka. ‘The first thing you learn is that you can trust no one. Not that sweet old lady in the flat upstairs, not your old babysitter and not children. They see everything. They make excellent spies.’

  ‘That must be terrible,’ says Benedict.

  ‘Yes,’ says Natalka and finds that she doesn’t want to talk about it any more. She turns her attention to a box of books marked Charity. These look very different from the Challoners. They are mostly paperbacks—​smaller than the paperbacks Natalka sees in the supermarket—​some with plain green and white covers, others with lurid pictures of dripping knives and smoking guns.

  ‘Classic crime,’ says Benedict. ‘Peggy loved these writers. I do too. Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie. Sheila Atkins.’

  ‘Who’s Sheila Atkins?’

  ‘She’s a golden-age writer. Famous between the wars. No one really reads her these days, which is a shame. Look at this one.’

  Benedict proffers a book with a cover showing a woman in a skimpy dress carrying a candle and a bloody knife. It’s called Give Me the Daggers.

  ‘Lots of them have titles from Shakespeare,’ says Benedict. ‘This one’s called The Prince of Darkness Is a Gentleman. I think that’s from King Lear. It comes when—’

  ‘Thanks, Benny,’ says Natalka, because she’s afraid he’s going to tell her the plot. ‘I have heard of Shakespeare. We even study him in Ukraine.’