All-Butter ShortDead (Prequel: Oxford Tearoom Mysteries ~ Book 0)

by H. Y. Hanna

  I stared at him. “What tragedy?”

  He blinked, his old face showing mild surprise. “Her plane crashing, of course. It was her first big research trip—sabbatical, they call it, I think. She was going out to study one of them tribes in some faraway place… New Guinea. That’s right, Papua New Guinea. Deep in the jungle. Had to take a small plane to get there. It crashed and they never found any of the survivors. Very sad, it was. The Principal of the college said Lynn had a bright future ahead of her. A real loss to the University.”

  I took a sharp intake of breath as an idea struck me.

  “Are you all right, miss?” Tom Dooley looked at me in concern.

  I blinked and pulled my mind back to the present. “Uh… yes, sorry—so, do you remember anything else about Jenn—I mean, Lynn Williams? Like, did she have any family in Oxford?”

  The old ex-porter furrowed his brow. “She was only with the college a short time before she disappeared. Didn’t really get to know her that well. It was over twenty years ago. Wouldn’t have remembered her, actually, except that she used to come to the Lodge and we’d have a yarn about those tribes of hers.” He chuckled in remembrance. “She used to say that we were all barbarians deep down, beneath the fancy suits and posh manners.”

  “So you don’t know anything about her family?” I said, disappointed.

  “She wasn’t from Oxford. Family was somewhere in Exeter, I think. She was married,” he offered. “But she didn’t talk about her husband much. Think he gave her some grief—bit of a wandering eye, if you know what I mean. Oh, and there was a younger sister. Came up to the college to see her once. Actually, I was really surprised to hear that they were sisters when Lynn introduced me—her being so fair and her sister being so dark, you know. Looked almost Italian or Spanish or something.” He grinned suddenly at me. “Wondered if maybe her parents had brought home the wrong baby! But you always know your own, don’t you? Even when they look totally different, like—you know your own family.”

  We talked a bit longer but Tom Dooley didn’t have much else useful to tell me. Finally, I thanked him and left. As I was about to re-mount my bicycle, my phone rang. It was Cassie.

  “Hey, Gemma—I was just calling to see how you were,” she said. “You sounded so down last night. Have you heard from the inspector again? Or the bank?”

  “No, but listen, Cassie, I think things are finally beginning to make sense!” Quickly, I told her about my revelation that morning with the electric toothbrush and then about my talk with Tom Dooley.

  “So… are you saying that the woman who was murdered was really an academic at Oxford? But then how did she end up in Australia under a different name?”

  “That’s just it!” I said excitedly. “She went out on this research trip to Papua New Guinea, right? It’s famous as one of the last places in the world where a lot of the population still live in tribes and primitive societies—it’s like a haven for anthropological research. And guess what? It’s about a hundred and fifty kilometres from the north tip of Australia. Really close. In fact, I remember a Sydney friend—who was a keen sailor—telling me that you could cross the water between them easily by a small boat on a calm day.”

  “Okay, but so what?” Cassie sounded puzzled.

  “Well, supposing Jenn—Lynn Williams—had gone out on this research trip and her plane crashed in the jungle. There were no official survivors—everyone was presumed dead—but suppose Jenn hadn’t died. Instead, she was rescued by one of the remote tribes and was looked after by them for weeks, maybe even months. And suppose she had a head injury and lost her memory—”

  “You’re doing a lot of supposing,” said Cassie.

  “Just bear with me,” I pleaded. “So then finally, months later, she emerges from the jungle and makes her way to Australia. By then, all the news about the missing plane with the Oxford academic would probably have been forgotten. And with her amnesia, Jenn would have no record of her previous life, no way to find her way back—”

  “Hang on… wouldn’t people have asked questions or noticed? I mean, even if the plane crash wasn’t in the newspapers anymore, the story would still be around and—”

  “Remember, this was over twenty years ago! We didn’t have Google Search or social media everywhere. We didn’t have smartphones. You couldn’t just look up information on the internet; people couldn’t share news across the globe as easily as they do now. And Jenn might have changed a lot after her stay in the jungle. If she arrived at a small port on the northern tip of Australia—some backwater town which didn’t have the tight border control and immigration bureaucracy that we have these days—then she could easily have slipped through and joined the local community.” I thought for a moment, then added, “In fact, her surname—Murray—that’s a really common street name in Australia. Almost every city has a Murray Street. Maybe it was given to her by the local people when she couldn’t remember her own name… and she became Jenn Murray.”

  “I don’t know… It’s all a bit far-fetched. It sounds like something out of a novel or a movie,” Cassie complained.

  “Yeah, well, you know what they say—truth is stranger than fiction sometimes. You’ve seen enough bizarre stories in newspapers to know that. And besides, the point is, this story fits the facts as we know it. I’m willing to bet that if the Australian police dug into Jenn’s background, they’d find something just like what I said.”

  “So are you saying that Jenn lied all along about her name and her background?”

  I thought back again to Jenn’s vague comments about Oxford—she had mentioned “glimpses” in her memory. I had assumed that she was talking about her childhood but now I realised that she was probably speaking the literal truth. She really did just have “glimpses” of Oxford in her memory.

  “No, I think Jenn was telling the truth—as much as she could remember of it,” I replied. “Maybe something had happened recently back in Australia which had re-awakened her brain and triggered some memories. That was why she finally decided to make this trip back to England. And it would explain the strange combination of her being a stranger and yet knowing details about the Oxford colleges that only an insider could have known.

  “And—” I added eagerly, “—this also explains her morbid fear of flying! That makes total sense now that I know she’d been through a plane crash. It’s probably what prevented her from making the trip before now. But then suddenly, after twenty years in Australia, her past was finally starting to come back to her—”

  “So she started trying to discover her true identity,” Cassie finished for me.

  “Yeah… and somebody didn’t want that,” I said grimly. “Somebody wanted ‘Lynn Williams’ to remain buried in the past.”

  “You mean, somebody recognised her?”

  “Yeah, even though Jenn didn’t recognise them in turn. But they must have decided that they couldn’t take any chance that Jenn might remember ‘more’ of her past.” I took a deep breath. “So they killed her.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  As I cycled slowly back to Oxford, I mulled over the conversation that Cassie and I had just had. Then my mind strayed back to what Tom Dooley had told me. I knew I should have gone straight to the police with this new information but a part of me balked at doing Inspector Glenn any favours. It was childish, I know, but after the way the inspector had treated me so far, I didn’t even feel like speaking to him again. Besides, he was the police—he had every resource at his disposal. Let him do his own investigating! I thought resentfully. He should have ferreted out Jenn’s background and connection to Locksley College by himself.

  Still, what should I do now? I had solved the mystery of Jenn’s true identity, yes, but that brought me no closer to finding her killer.

  I sat back slightly, letting the bicycle freewheel as I followed the curve of the road, whilst my mind went feverishly over the case again.

  The murderer had to have been someone at the hotel, I decided. Jenn had gone th
ere straight from the airport—therefore, the “someone” from her past who had recognised her must have been at the hotel. A guest? Or a member of the staff? I racked my brains again, trying to remember my conversations with Jenn. Who else had she mentioned from the hotel?

  The maid Marie, I realised suddenly. That first time she had called me from the hotel, Jenn had complained about one of the maids. She said she had caught the woman rifling through her handbag—and didn’t like the way the maid had been so inquisitive about her background. “Insolent”, Jenn had called her. She hadn’t mentioned a name but she had described the girl as “dark”. Marie was dark—black hair, olive-skin, and those eyes—I remembered those sullen eyes. I was willing to bet that the maid Jenn had been complaining about was Marie.

  That first day, when I had been with Inspector Glenn in the hotel room, I had opened the door to find Marie eavesdropping outside. I had also seen her later, downstairs in the lobby, with Brett Lyle the journalist, right before he had come to hound me with questions. Was she the one who had fed him—and the police—that ludicrous story about me and Jenn being lovers? If Marie was the killer, then that made sense—it would have been in her interest to push the suspicion onto me, especially as she would have known that I was the last person to go to Jenn’s room the night she was killed.

  And she could have easily done it, I realised, remembering that night again and the way Derek Sutton had complained about Marie leaving the reception desk unattended. The maid had burst out of the side door connecting to the staircase that led up to all the floors. The same staircase that came out right next to Jenn’s room. Marie could easily have run to the third floor using the staircase, killed Jenn, hidden in the bathroom, and waited until I had left the room, then slipped out and used the staircase to get back down to the lobby again. With the lift being at the other end of the corridor, I would never have seen her. The timing fit perfectly.

  But why would she have killed Jenn? What was the motive? What connection could there have been between Jenn Murray and a maid working in a Cotswolds hotel?

  Then something Tom Dooley said came back to me: “…there was a younger sister. Came up to the college to see her once. Actually, I was really surprised to hear that they were sisters when Lynn introduced me—her being so fair and her sister being so dark, you know. Looked almost Italian or Spanish or something…”

  Could Marie have been Jenn’s sister? I frowned. Surely she was a bit young? But then, I didn’t know the age difference between them. Tom Dooley had simply said “younger sister”. There could sometimes be a decade or more between siblings.

  But in any case, wouldn’t Marie have been overjoyed to see her long-lost sister again? Why would she want to murder her?

  I had to speak to Marie, I decided grimly. I leaned forwards over the bike and began pedalling harder, heading northwest out of Oxford and into the Cotswolds. I would go back to the Cotswolds Manor Hotel and find the maid now. That was the only way to get answers.

  Besides, I had a vague feeling that there was something I had overlooked yesterday—something I’d read or something I’d seen while in that Incident Room. Maybe the Old Biddies were right and you did unconsciously pick up clues that you stored away without realising. Perhaps if I went back there, it would jog my mind and I would remember…

  ***

  There was an eerie sense of déjà vu as I stepped into the hotel lobby: the same bellboys hurrying past with trolleys of luggage, the same smattering of guests by the reception desk, waiting to check in and check out, the same crowd of tourists congregating in the lounge, enjoying scones, cakes, and dainty sandwiches with pots of English tea. And even—I did a double take—the same four little old ladies huddled furtively by the potted palm tree. The Old Biddies. What were they doing here?

  I marched over to them and peered over their shoulders. “Hello.”

  They jumped guiltily, then looked at me in relief. “Oh, it’s only you, dear.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Sleuthing,” said Mabel Cooke succinctly. “We were interrupted yesterday so we are back to finish the job.”

  “You’re not going to try to get into the Incident Room again?” I said in disbelief. “The inspector will never believe any story you make up this time.”

  “Inspector Glenn’s down at the station,” said Mabel smugly. “I’ve checked that. He won’t be coming to the hotel until after lunch. And his sergeant’s with him. They’ve only left one constable on duty to guard the room and we’ve taken care of him.” She smiled in a way that made me wonder what the poor officer had been sent off to do.

  “What about Derek Sutton?” I said. “It was originally his office—he might be around.”

  “Oh, him.” Mabel waved a dismissive hand. “We’ve sent that gormless hotel manager off to the ballroom to take some measurements… for our Meadowford Ladies’ Society lunch,” she explained with a twinkle in her eye. “We certainly can’t hire the room until we know that it is of the right dimensions to accommodate our home-made cakes display.”

  Poor Derek Sutton, I thought with a sigh. “Okay, but I still think it’s too risky. And besides, I thought you looked through the papers yesterday? What else do you think—”

  “We didn’t have time to go through them all,” Florence protested.

  Glenda nodded eagerly. “There were several interviews with the hotel staff and they were so interesting! Did you know that one of the golf-caddies has been having affairs with several of the lady guests? There was a picture of him and I must say, he’s a very handsome young man. Oh, if only I were forty years younger…” she sighed.

  “And Mrs Carson, the Maître D’ in the restaurant, is actually Miss Carson,” said Florence. “She just pretends to be married because she doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s still a spinster at fifty-five! And I always thought that Mr Sutton was divorced but it turns out that he’s a widower, terrible tragedy, and Mr Sullivan of the concierge too. Although he’s remarrying again later this year. And Miss Kerry, from the spa, is actually adopted and so she’s not Irish at all!”

  “And one of the bellboys is going on Britain’s Got Talent,” added Ethel. “He can whistle underwater, apparently. He has been practising the entire ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ in the bathtub for his audition piece.”

  “What I want to know is if Mrs Carson really trained in Paris,” said Mabel with a sniff. “Always putting on airs and graces and acting like she’s better than everyone else…”

  I made a noise of exasperation. “But what’s all this got to do with the murder? You just want to snoop through people’s backgrounds,” I said. “None of these people have anything to do with Jenn! At the very least, you should have been looking at the interviews of the staff who had contact with her—” I broke off and gripped Mabel’s arm urgently. “Mrs Cooke—did you read anything about a maid called Marie? What’s her surname? Where’s she from? Does she have any family?”

  “Marie?” Mabel screwed up her face in an effort to remember. “No, I don’t think so, dear…”

  “We’ve got to get back in the Incident Room!” I cried, completely forgetting my own protests earlier. “I’ve got to find the notes on Marie and find out about her background. She’s in charge of the floor with Jenn’s room—surely the police must have questioned her in more depth. In fact, when she came down yesterday with that cosmetic bag—”

  I broke off, sucking my breath in sharply.

  Suddenly I realised what it was that had been nagging me—the “clue” that I had unconsciously picked up.

  The answer that had been staring me in the face all along.

  “Oh my God… I think I know who the murderer is…” I whispered.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Old Biddies stared at me. “Gemma? Are you all right?”

  Without answering, I turned and ran from the lobby. Following the signs, I ducked down the long corridor connecting the main building of the hotel to a large structure out in the grou
nds, which had originally served as the coach house, but which had recently been converted into a spacious ballroom. My shoes skidded on the polished wood floor as I came to a halt inside the ornately panelled room with its gilt-edged mirrors and graceful chandeliers.

  Derek Sutton looked up from the far corner where he was crouched, a measuring tape in his hands.

  I advanced towards him, breathing hard. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  He rose to his feet. “I beg your pardon?” he said pleasantly.

  “You… you murdered Jenn Murray,” I said, staring at him. “Or should I say, Lynn Williams, your wife?”

  He froze. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, still in that polite hotel manager voice.

  “Oh, I think you do,” I said. “You recognised her, didn’t you? That night when she came down… you had been off a few days with the flu and had just come back on duty so you hadn’t seen her check in, but when she came down to meet me, you recognised her instantly. I remember you seemed to act a bit weird, standing there staring at her, but I thought it was just because of her funny request for a hot water bottle. You must have had a bad moment until you realised that she didn’t recognise you at all. Although…” I snapped my fingers. “I remember now! Jenn did mention that you looked familiar, when we were having drinks. She couldn’t place you at the time, but her memory might have slowly come back. That’s what you couldn’t risk, wasn’t it? That’s why you killed her?”

  There was a long pause, then at last Derek Sutton said, “Yes. I couldn’t afford for her to suddenly recognise me and remember who she was.”

  “But why? Why would you want to kill your own wife?” I demanded. “You should have been overjoyed that she had returned at last. She had been lost in a plane crash, hadn’t she? That was the ‘terrible tragedy’ that was mentioned in your police interview notes—and which had left you a widower.”