by Mark McCrum
‘You really think that?’
‘I really know that,’ said Francis. That shut her up. Her mouth opened twice, like a hungry goldfish, then she was silent. ‘But first,’ he continued, ‘let me take you through the people I was initially suspicious of.’ He launched into a summary of what he’d been thinking before Grace died: Dan, insulted in print, but with no other obvious motive; Conal, who had publicly threatened to kill Bryce, but had almost certainly been too drunk to do so; Priya, the textbook prime suspect, but with a sound alibi and no motive; Anna, cruelly treated by Bryce and a probable beneficiary of his will, staying in the same hotel, with an ex-Marine boyfriend; Scarlett, out at the cottage with kids, but with most to lose – and gain; and finally wild card Virginia, just down the corridor, whose feelings about the celebrated critic were clearly complex, to put it mildly.
‘Now this was not a stabbing,’ Francis went on, ‘a shooting, or even a hanging. If it was murder it was trying very hard not to look like it. So what had happened, I wondered, to this man who lay with his eyes closed, the only marks on his body being a bruise on his right cheek and a love bite on his neck? If he hadn’t died naturally, might he have been poisoned? Strangled? Suffocated? The bloodshot eyes we found when Dr Webster peeled his eyelids back suggested the last, though they could also, just as likely, have resulted from tiredness or discomfort from the contact lenses Bryce wore. But imagine for a moment that this redness had not had such an innocent cause, my guess was that some sort of sedative would have been involved. The other thing any murderer needed to be sure of was that his victim was alone in the room. Which meant that Priya had to be well out of the way.
‘The same was obviously true if he’d been strangled. Poisoning was a little different. If our killer had found a way to make sure that Bryce alone took poison, it didn’t much matter where Priya was. However, unless he’ – Francis paused and looked slowly round the packed room – ‘or she, of course, had managed to get his hands on that apocryphal South American snake venom that acts immediately and leaves no trace, the post-mortem was in due course going to give him away. For that reason, I thought that option less likely.
‘Indeed, after a busy day running around talking to all my suspects, I was starting to think perhaps I’d been wrong in imagining that this death was suspicious at all. Maybe Bryce’s post-mortem would reveal no more than another sad case of a man in middle age struck down by natural causes.
‘But at the very moment I was coming to this conclusion, there was a second death. This changed everything. Though a few were saying that Grace’s bizarre fall was an awful coincidence, I instinctively felt that it wasn’t. I was also – I thought – able to rule out no less than three of my potential culprits. For at the time this latest incident had occurred, I myself had been closeted with Scarlett in her cottage ten miles outside Mold. Then, driving back into town after this interview, I’d stopped at the Black Bull pub in Tittlewell, where I happened across Conal O’Hare having a quiet drink with Fleur Atkinson, Grace’s close friend. Meanwhile, Virginia Westcott hadn’t moved, by all accounts, from the Green Room where I’d left her after her talk.
‘Just as I was simultaneously certain that foul play was afoot, yet despairing of my shortlist of suspects, Priya here presented me with another one. She confided to me that Bryce’s hatchet job on Dan Dickson had only been the starter. The main course had been going to be his big event on Sunday – Celebrity and Hypocrisy. The central subject of that was one of our very best known TV faces, whom we are fortunate to have with us here tonight: Jonty Smallbone, Family Man.’
As his audience turned to check the famous face, Francis glanced over at the police line-up. Her sidekicks were as impassive as trained coppers should be, but on DCI Julie’s lips was the flicker of the smile that accompanies a job well done. ‘I’ve now had a chance to read Bryce’s speech,’ Francis continued, ‘and I can tell you it had even more juice in it than his attack on Dan in the Sentinel. I’m not going to go into all the details here and now, but the burden of it was that Family Man’s wholesome public image was not exactly borne out in the way he lived his life –’
‘You can stop right there!’ said Jonty, rising to his feet. His smarmy confidence had gone; his voice was a reedy quiver.
‘I will, Jonty, don’t worry. Of course,’ Francis went on, as Family Man sank slowly back into his seat, ‘Bryce’s allegations never came to be made. But the idea that Jonty might have been involved, even if not directly, in Bryce’s death, seemed to fit perfectly. And it answered one question that had been troubling me all along: if what you wanted to do was kill Bryce, why do it in the full glare of a festival? Especially if you wanted to make your murder look like a natural death, why not do it at some other time, when you’d be far more likely to get away with it? Because, obviously, if Jonty had only found out about this threat to his brand some time on Friday or Saturday, he’d have had to act fast. Whatever else happened, Bryce’s event was scheduled to go ahead at three p.m. on Sunday. There would be journalists in the audience, quite apart from all those bloggers and tweeters. By teatime, the super-injunction that had kept the lid on Jonty’s double life for so long would be next to worthless.’
Family Man was back on his feet again. ‘Now listen here!’ he said, ‘you have absolutely –’
‘Let Francis finish,’ interrupted Priya.
‘– no foundation –’
‘Shshsh!’ came the collected hiss of the room, as Priya pulled him back down again.
‘This new suspect,’ Francis continued, ‘also gave me answers to the main problem of the second murder: why Grace? Because, of course, as soon as she’d heard about Bryce’s death, she had gone rushing into Mold to uncover all she could about what had happened. She did well. A day ahead of me she found out about the content of Celebrity and Hypocrisy. And she was on the brink of filing a piece to her newspaper about Jonty’s real lifestyle when she met her horrid end.
‘I was getting somewhere, but without access to any of the evidence the police had uncovered, I was stuck. So this morning, early, I called on DCI Julie Morgan, taking with me Priya here, whose support and feedback I’d been finding very helpful. This was, we both hoped, going to be a mutually beneficial meeting. We would alert the police to our suspicions about Jonty. In return, they might tell us what they had found at the crime scenes, not to mention on the two laptops they had taken away: Bryce’s – and Grace’s.
‘We were in luck. After a little, entirely understandable, obstruction, DCI Julie was ready to cooperate. A cursory search of Bryce’s laptop revealed that all the drafts of his attack on Jonty had been wiped. Someone had wanted the substance of this talk removed and they had done a thorough job. Sadly not quite thorough enough, because the police have some very skilful IT people working for them. Eventually the deleted speech was retrieved and, as Priya had suggested it would be, it was damning. Things weren’t looking good for Jonty, were they? Yes, he’d been out late at the Wyveridge party on Saturday, but he’d also been one of those encouraging Priya to stick around, leaving Bryce to go back to his room alone. He and his wife Amber had then returned to the hotel some time before her. If he had somehow managed to put a sedative in something Bryce had eaten or drunk, say a glass of wine or one of the canapés he’d been handing round at the Sentinel party, all he had to do was let himself in to Room 29, hold a pillow over Bryce’s face for five minutes, and that would be that. He could then search the room, remove any hard copy of the incriminating speech, wipe any drafts off the laptop and exit.’
‘Ridiculous!’ said Jonty loudly.
‘He also, I felt sure, believed he could get away with it. There was a strong chance that the local medic and the police wouldn’t pick up on the over-red eyes of someone whose lids had been carefully closed, who in any case wore contact lenses, and had helpfully indicated his discomfort by leaving a bottle of Optrex right by the bed. If the case did go to post-mortem and traces of sedative and high levels of carbon dioxide were found
in the blood, then there was nothing whatever linking Jonty to Bryce. Once those files were deleted, he was out of the picture. Priya might have known the contents of the speech her boyfriend had been planning to make, but that would only ever be hearsay.
‘Unfortunately for Jonty, though, circumstances intervened. Between leaving the party and getting back to the hotel Bryce had managed to get himself in a fight, and there was now a livid new bruise on his right cheek. When they saw the body, the young constables who were first on the scene were suspicious. More senior officers were called in, then Bryce’s room was put in the tender care of scene-of-crime officers, with all their state-of-the-art forensic capabilities.
‘At the same time, Grace was sniffing around, very publicly asking leading questions. Jonty was one of the first she spoke to on Sunday morning. So here was my thought: during the course of that interview, had Grace let on that Priya had told her what Bryce planned to reveal in his talk? Had she in fact gone so far as to challenge Jonty; to raise his double standards with him directly; even to suggest that he might have had something to do with Bryce’s death?’
‘There was only one problem with this theory. For Grace’s death at least, Jonty had a watertight alibi. On the Sunday afternoon he’d been present at my event in the Big Tent, then highly visible in the Green Room afterwards. So if he had done it, how had he done it? Was it possible that he’d had an accomplice? His wife Amber perhaps, or maybe even Anna Copeland, who had ghostwritten his latest book Wild Stuff and was now a close associate and friend. She of course had with her her boyfriend Marv, an ex-Marine, who had spoken frankly in his talk about what it’s like to kill a fellow human being, albeit in a war zone –’
‘Now ’ang on a moment,’ came Marvin’s deep voice.
‘Let me finish,’ said Francis, holding up a hand.
‘It’s fine,’ said Anna. ‘This is so crazy I’d like to hear it.’
‘Amen to that!’ said Jonty.
‘But unless it was his wife,’ Francis continued, ‘how on earth had Jonty persuaded such a person to help him? It was all very well getting Anna to write for you by proxy, but to murder by proxy? The incentive would have had to have been huge. Unless of course this accomplice had been part of the original murder, so now had to be involved in the cover-up.
‘Now whoever Grace’s killer was, he, she – or they – must have known her and been trusted by her. Because Grace would never have gone up to the battlements of Wyveridge with any old stranger, would she? And this person – or people – knew exactly what they were doing, taking Fleur’s video camera with them, making it look as if Grace had been filming. At the same time the impact from the long drop was almost certainly going to wipe the memory card, and with it any incriminating footage from both Saturday night and Sunday morning.
‘In our meeting this morning the police confirmed that the memory card had indeed been trashed. But not, they told us, in the fall. The card had been removed previously, stamped on until it no longer functioned, then replaced. Even as I was thinking about the implications of that, it occurred to me that Fleur might have outsmarted our murderer by backing up at least some of the footage on her computer. When I’d called out to Wyveridge on Sunday morning, I’d seen her camera right next to her laptop with images of the previous night’s party on the screen. So after Priya and I had finished with the police we drove straight to Wyveridge.
‘We were in luck. Despite our murderer’s attempts to stop us, we were able to see all Fleur’s film from Saturday night. This included Grace chatting and laughing with Anna, Marvin and Jonty, and Priya being persuaded by Jonty to stay at the party. If I could just understand how Jonty had got Anna and/or Marvin to do his dirty work for him, we would be in business. Did the fact that both Jonty and Marvin had once been in the Navy have anything to do with it? Or perhaps it simply came down to money. Jonty had plenty of that, while Anna and Marv had very little, and with Marv recently discharged, and Anna freelance, no regular income either. And if they were planning the baby Anna had wanted for so long –’
Family Man was on his feet again. ‘I hate to cut you off in mid-flow,’ he said, and now his tigerish smile was back on show, ‘but there’s only one problem with these highly entertaining speculations of yours. I didn’t kill anyone. Yes, I may have tried to persuade Priya to stick around on Saturday night, but that was only because – I’m happy to admit it – she’s a very attractive young woman and I was enjoying talking to her. And yes, I was, like half the rest of the White Hart’s guests, interviewed on camera by Grace on Sunday morning. But she certainly never told me anything about what Bryce had planned to talk about that afternoon. The first inkling I had of that was when you and Priya spoke to me in the Green Room after my event on Monday, a full twenty-four hours after the poor girl met her death. My keen interest then, which I’m sure you remember, was not faked.
‘How did I manage such a watertight alibi for Sunday afternoon? It was just what happened. I was here at the festival, attending interesting lectures. Yours included. And d’you want to know why you couldn’t work out how I’d persuaded Anna or Marv to kill Grace? Because I didn’t. Anna is an excellent writer and editor. She did, as you’ve guessed, pretty much write Wild Stuff for me. But her skills don’t extend to murder. Just because Marv was in the Special Boat Service doesn’t make him an assassin either. What a highly offensive suggestion!’
‘I appreciate that you weren’t Bryce’s murderer, Jonty,’ Francis said slowly. ‘Or Grace’s.’ Out of the corner of his eye he clocked the faces of the police line-up. Both her sergeants were looking round at DCI Julie, who was saying nothing, her lips pursed as she stared at Francis with an expression that was half intense curiosity as to what he was about to say now, half fury at being betrayed. ‘And my apologies also,’ he went on, ‘to Anna and Marvin. But my earlier misconceptions do have some relevance. Because if I hadn’t been looking on Fleur’s film for evidence of Jonty’s likely accomplice, I wouldn’t have come across some other footage which gave me a crucial lead in another aspect of this case: Bryce leaving the Wyveridge party and doing so in a taxi with … Dan Dickson.’
Heads turned towards the great iconoclast, inscrutable in his black leather chair.
‘Now, suddenly,’ Francis continued, ‘I had a chance to get to the bottom of a witness report of Bryce and Dan fighting on the Mold bridge at ten p.m. on that fatal Saturday evening …’
‘Didn’t you believe me?’ That Pathé News voice again.
‘I did, Virginia. But as you said yourself, you were too far away from them to know what they’d been fighting about. But if they’d shared a taxi back from Wyveridge together, there would have been a witness – the driver, Terry Jenkins. When I called on him at his house, he told me the pair had indeed been quarrelling, though he couldn’t recall what about. However, there was one snippet of overheard dialogue he repeated to me which confirmed a suspicion that I’d already had when I’d looked through the festival albums – one that involved Bryce’s paternity of his beloved girls.’
Francis looked out around the room. The eyes of the assembled company were bright and attentive. Over in her wingback chair, Scarlett’s mouth was a taut line, her gaze impassive.
‘Things were happening fast,’ Francis continued, as he looked directly at her. ‘Even as I drove out to Scarlett’s cottage, wondering if she would still be there, DCI Morgan called to fill me in on the results of Bryce’s autopsy. Carbon dioxide levels in his blood indicated that he had been suffocated. Prior to that, sedated. With a powerful prescription drug called Zimovane.
‘At the cottage, Scarlett was packing to leave. When I confronted her with my suspicions, that she and Dan had once had an affair, and that it was he, not Bryce, who was the father of the twins, she tried to deny it. When she realised that was pointless, she agreed things didn’t look good for her. As I left, I pretended I needed to visit the loo before I drove back into Mold. Once upstairs, I had a quick look around Scarlett’s en suite. And the
re, tucked away at the top of a cupboard above the sink, were two packets of … Zimovane.’
Now the shshers were open-mouthed; you could almost hear the intake of breath across the room, as heads slowly turned in the direction of Bryce’s long-term partner.
‘Perversely,’ Francis went on, ‘as soon as I gave it two minutes’ thought, the presence of this sedative made me realise that it was less, not more likely that Scarlett was involved. For surely no competent murderer would sedate their victim with a drug that they then left lying around their bathroom. There was of course the possibility that these packets were old ones belonging to Bryce. But, when Scarlett confirmed to me what she’d already told the police, that Bryce never used sleeping pills, it occurred to me that someone might have been actively trying to frame her.
‘As I drove at speed towards Mold my head was buzzing with all the possibilities. Back in the Green Room at the festival site I found Dan. Initially, he denied he’d been fighting with Bryce; but when I told him what I knew, he confessed all. And yes, he admitted, when he’d heard about Bryce’s sudden death, he had been worried that he might have had something to do with it. At least until Grace died. Should I believe him? Was it possible that the fight was the start of something darker that had happened later that night?
‘As I was walking back to the White Hart, my mobile rang again. It was DCI Julie, confirming all the suspicions Priya and I had had about the deleted Celebrity and Hypocrisy files. They had been there on the laptop, she said, draft after draft, the last one auto-recovered at eleven thirty-two p.m. More interesting was what the police’s IT people had found out about the timing of the deletions. They had been made at five fifteen a.m.’
Francis paused, enjoying the silence as this piece of information sank in. ‘After Priya had found the body, in the silent hour before the ambulance crew arrived. Suddenly everything that had been circling round at the back of my brain came together and I knew who had killed Bryce. It was, I suppose, just possible that Jonty or Anna or Marv had sneaked along to his room shortly after five, while you and I, Priya, were sitting huddled with shock in my bedroom. But why would they have waited till then? Because they’d forgotten to do the job earlier? Was that really likely? When the removal of the incriminating evidence from the computer was central to the whole plan?
