by Mark McCrum
‘How much more plausible was it that someone altogether closer to home had decided to delete those files. As part of her framing of the national treasure so damningly implicated by them. That same person had already demonstrated to me, and the police, that she was highly familiar with the contents of Bryce’s laptop. If she knew how his documents were organised, why on earth shouldn’t she have read everything he wrote? Long before. Giving her a chance to plan the perfect murder – of the man she’d had in her sights for ten long years.’
As Francis’s gaze settled on Priya, she looked straight back at him. The familiar humour had drained from her features. If you think you can betray me now, her taut face said, this had better be good.
THIRTY-SIX
‘You pulled the wool over my eyes,’ Francis continued, ‘right from that first moment when you excused yourself from my room saying you wanted to say goodbye to Bryce. You were gone for much longer than you needed to be, but you were clever, even about that. You changed into different clothes, giving me a visible reason why you’d taken your time.
‘On the evening before, Bryce was tired and returned to the hotel early. I’m afraid, Priya, the contrast between the Bryce I spoke to at the Sentinel party and the weary-looking man captured on Fleur’s footage was all too marked. Once I saw that, I knew for sure that someone had drugged him. It was just that at first I hadn’t realised it was you. Even though Jonty was handing out canapés at the Sentinel party, it was you who were beside Bryce all evening, you who had access to the Zimovane you had pinched from the cottage when you’d stayed there earlier in the week, then left in Bryce’s washbag, to make it look to the police as if it were a sleeping pill he regularly used. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to fetch him a drink and slip one into it. Maybe it was in that glass of champagne you brought him right in front of me, while he was standing flirting with Grace at the Sentinel party. A present from Laetitia, you said. But was there an extra little present from you in there too?
‘Later, out at Wyveridge Hall, you chose not to go back to the hotel with him. You wanted to stay and enjoy the party, you said. Fair enough. In any case, Jonty was encouraging you to hang around, an exchange you were quite happy for Fleur to film. What could be better than an alibi by invitation, recorded on video, with the nice side-effect of implicating your preferred main suspect. Was that just fortuitous – or had you worked hard to get the result you wanted?
‘As the evening wore on, there were plenty of cars going back into Mold, but you deliberately missed them all. And yes, it’s not easy to get one of Mold’s two taxi firms to come out at eleven, when they’re busy doing runs from pubs. But by midnight in this little town, even during the festival, things have quietened down. Had you bothered to phone Ace Taxis, whose number you’d been given by Ranjit, you could have gone home then. Couldn’t she, Terry?’
‘She could,’ came the gruff voice of the bouffant-haired jazz musician.
‘Instead you waited. Until you could be sure that Bryce would have stopped working on his talk and had his second dose of Zimovane, which you had left waiting for him in a receptacle you knew he would find impossible to resist – a pillow chocolate. Unless something had gone very wrong with your plan, by the time you got back to your room Bryce would be out cold, all set for a firm application of the pillow before you let rip with your hotel-waking scream. You could, perhaps, have done without Conal’s unscheduled attack on you. But despite appearances, that hardly threw you. And there was a bonus, as your ex put himself in line with the other suspects you had so carefully set up.
‘Otherwise all went fine with your evening. You had, maybe, a slight panic when you realised that taxis in Mold stopped at one a.m. But you managed to keep your cool and a lift into town did eventually materialise. It was only when you got back to the hotel that things started to go wrong. Bryce had returned with the main set of keys and you couldn’t make the spare outside door key, which you’d cleverly taken along with you, work. Why should it? It was the wrong one, given to you by Irina, the scatty Polish girl, who was as inept with keys as she was with everything else.
‘So now you had to ring the doorbell. And, once Cathy had admitted you, pretty much sprint upstairs, let yourself into your room, check that Bryce was sufficiently sedated, suffocate him, then run outside and scream. Your original plan had also given you ample time to delete the files of Bryce’s speech from the computer. Now, in a mad rush of blood to the head, you realised this was something you were going to have to sneak back and do later. Unless of course you aborted the whole thing. But no, you had worked so long and so carefully to set up your scenario that you couldn’t back out now.
‘Because of course Prime Suspect Jonty was only Plan B, the guy with the cast-iron motive if Plan A, Tragic and Unexpected Natural Death, failed. You had prepared the ground brilliantly for this, addressing that distinctive symptom of suffocation, bloodshot eyes, before Bryce had even died. Early on Saturday afternoon you took him off for a walk – or was it more? – in a cornfield and made sure he got dirt in his eyes, which gave him grief with his contact lenses. By the time he turned up at the Sentinel party people were noticing how red-eyed he looked, which fitted in neatly with the tiredness that swept over him once he’d had his first dose of Zimovane. As for the love bite you planted on his neck; what better evidence was there that you were seriously keen on him?
‘The pillow chocolates that he found on your bed when he got in were ones left over from Friday. You had sliced them open and filled them with ground sedative. Did it matter that the earlier batch had pink sugar roses, while on Saturday the chef had moved on to purple? No. Bryce had never even seen the first lot. So all you had to do was get back to the room on the Saturday evening and make your switch.
‘As it happened, I ran into your victim at the very moment you must have been doing this. Bryce was pacing up and down the lobby of the White Hart looking impatiently at his watch. What had you told him? That you needed to refresh your make-up, that you’d forgotten something in the room? It didn’t matter, because he didn’t suspect anything bad of his beloved Priya, did he? All went fine and the bait was laid. Your mistake came later, when in your hurry to get out into the corridor and scream, you failed to notice the choccie that Bryce had touchingly left out for you – on the side table. When I asked you about it subsequently, you claimed to have eaten it when you went up to the room to get your suitcase. You didn’t, did you? It would have knocked you out. But I’d already seen it, with its pink rose, and wondered why it didn’t match the others put out on Saturday night.
‘Back to the action: as soon as you’d got round the corner from the front door, out of sight of Cathy, you sprinted up the stairs at speed. You let yourself into your room. Found Bryce was, as you’d hoped, out cold. What you hadn’t anticipated was that he’d be out cold with a bruise on his cheek. What had happened? The temptation to abandon your plan was even stronger.
‘But you’d waited so long, hadn’t you? Even as you panicked, you decided you had to go through with it. So you held down the pillow, having first wrapped it in a towel so there would be no bite or saliva marks. Two minutes later Bryce was dead. You rinsed the towel through, wrung it out, and left it on the rail in the bathroom. Then you plumped the pillows, took the annotated hard copy of his speech from the bedside and slipped it into your bag, for disposal later. Why didn’t you also take the pen he’d been using to correct it? Because it had a date and an inscription on it that might implicate yet another suspect – Virginia Westcott. If that turned out to be a misjudgement, the rest of your plan was brilliantly thought out. It was you who planted that half-empty bottle of Optrex by the bed, bang next to Bryce’s contact lens case. If the police did follow up on this clue, they would discover that Bryce had already had red eyes the night before. It was hardly likely they would ever find out that he normally left his contact lenses in the bathroom at night.
‘Then you ran outside and started screaming. A little later, aft
er I’d been up to have a look at him, you went back to “say goodbye”. It was then – at five fifteen a.m. – that you deleted the Celebrity and Hypocrisy files and shut down the laptop. You weren’t to know that in due course a police IT expert would recover them and discover this damning timing.
‘Nor was it your fault that when he turned up, the local medic cracked a feeble joke that made the rookie police suspicious, made them think they’d better cover their backsides and call in more senior officers. No worries, you had your back-up plan. With Bryce’s talk erased, all you had to do was plant the idea of Jonty’s guilt in a suitably gullible mind. Could you believe your luck when I presented myself? The crime writer who thought he was a detective. You accepted my offer of the bed in my room, then subtly slipped into the position of being the sounding board for my ideas, biding your time with my suspects before ingeniously planting your own.
‘By that stage, Grace was dead. That had never been part of the plan and killing her was a terrible thing to have to do. But needs must. At first, you tried to use her. When she came and interviewed you in my room on Sunday morning, you did as you did with me, told her and her camera about Jonty’s double life, giving her a magnificent scoop and simultaneously implicating him in the murder. But she was cleverer than I was, had somehow, at least in part, cottoned on to what you were up to. Did she confront you – or did you just realise from her line of questioning that she suspected you? Was that why you had to trash the video memory card – even if it did also contain your Saturday night alibi?
‘Grace had arranged to speak to the police about her misgivings about you that Sunday evening at six p.m. Was her tragic mistake to wait until she’d emailed her scoop about Jonty to her newspaper before she did that? Whatever, the delay gave you your chance. You couldn’t obviously repeat what you’d done to Bryce, but you quickly came up with another idea.
‘Grace’s murder wasn’t something you had a lot of time to plan. She’d told you she was going back to Wyveridge to write and file her story. It occurred to you that if you could get her up onto the battlements, you could push her off and make it look like an accident. If you took the camera with you, it might seem as if she’d slipped while filming. The upside of this method was that once she was over, you had no worries about the body, either getting rid of it or what might be found in the post-mortem.
‘So early on Sunday afternoon you drove her out there, in the car you had now inherited from Bryce. As well as offering her a lift, you had agreed to provide her with the compromising detail of the Jonty story. The ace up your sleeve was that you’d kept a digital copy of Bryce’s speech on a memory stick. Even if she had her suspicions about you, she needed that.
‘Once you got out to Wyveridge, you found the place wasn’t as empty as you’d hoped. There was noise from the kitchen, so you sent Grace down to find out who was there. She was so desperate to get her story off to her newspaper, she was happy to go along with your insistence that your presence in the house remained a secret. What did you tell her? That you couldn’t face them all so soon after Bryce’s death? That you didn’t want Eva back on your case? I’m sure you were convincing. And when she told you that it was indeed Rory, Eva and Neville loitering around having tea, you had a brainwave. You knew from your earlier conversation with Birgit that Rory had LSD in his possession. If you could somehow get hold of this, without him realising, that would provide a convincing reason why Grace might have fallen – or jumped – from the battlements. Leaving her with Bryce’s speech, you sneaked up to Rory’s room and found his wallet in his trademark velvet jacket on the back of his chair. The tabs were there, just as Birgit had described them – white postage stamps with a strawberry motif.
‘So how were you going to persuade Grace to take one? You weren’t. Once Rory and his pals had finally left for the festival, a cup of tea and a slice of the cake she had brought to Wyveridge herself was a thoughtful thing to bring her as she worked on her piece. You had one too. She wasn’t to know that hers had been doctored.
‘Somehow you then got her up on the battlements. Did you wait until the drug kicked in before you did that, or did you do it while she was still unaware of what she’d taken? That I don’t know the answer to, nor exactly how you persuaded her to go. What I do know is that chucking over the video camera after her was inspired. Not only did that suggest that Grace might have been filming, and cover up your destruction of the memory card, but you also made it look as if your chosen prime suspect had been repeating his tricks. What had been on there that Jonty didn’t want anyone to see, the police would wonder. As it happened, very little, but that didn’t matter. Because by that stage the blond hairs and the threads of purple shirt you’d taken from him later that Sunday morning and brought with you to plant on the lead roofing would have worked their magic. When you told me that the consolatory hug Jonty had given you had been “long enough”, I hadn’t quite realised the full import of your words.
‘But now,’ Francis continued, ‘when Grace was lying dead on the gravel, and you were free to go, you did what many a murderer is guilty of. As you checked desperately through your actions, worrying if you’d missed anything that might incriminate you, you had a bright idea. Why not give her a dose of that shroom tea that was conveniently still sitting on the kitchen table? A combination of that and acid was surely going to convince the pathologists that poor Grace had been in a crazy enough state to jump from the roof. In the heat of the moment, that struck you as a brilliant addition, even if that was one of the things that made me so suspicious: two hallucinogens taken by a woman who didn’t like drugs. The splash on her cotton dress was another mistake you couldn’t have bargained for. You must have been panicking, your hands shaking, shocked and appalled by what you’d done.
‘You returned in Bryce’s car to Mold, your alibi still, just, intact. Because of course your cover story was that you’d been “at” my talk. How was I expected to spot you in that big tent, especially if you weren’t there? Earlier, in my room, you had read my note cards. Later, you discussed my talk and the questions afterwards with Rory and the others in the pub. It was just a shame that this evening, when I made a reference to one of these, about me being a coconut, you didn’t pick up on it.
‘I wonder how you felt as both I and the police fell for this story of yours, hook, line and sinker? I even followed your lead in looking at Jonty’s book and spotting his chapter on Wild Highs. Comically, I thought the idea that Grace might have been tripping on shrooms was mine. You led me by the nose on that, just as you did on everything else. As a result, I’d pretty much decided Jonty was our man, even though I was convinced he must have had an accomplice for the second murder. However. Trying to keep, like my detective George Braithwaite, an open mind, I continued to follow up all my other leads and suspicions at the same time. For a while, I must admit, I also had doubts about Scarlett, and when I found her packing for London this afternoon, I began to wonder whether you’d led me to bark up the wrong tree.
‘Then came the call from Detective Chief Inspector Julie, about the timing of the deletions, and suddenly everything made sense. So many niggling little loose ends that I’d been trying to fit to unlikely suppositions hung together. One of the reasons I’d been so set earlier on the idea of Jonty as murderer was that I could never understand why this crime had been committed here at a festival in the full glare of publicity. I’d been stuck on the assumption that it had to be done in a hurry. But there was a better explanation. In London, wherever really except for here, you, Priya, would have been prime suspect. But by doing it at Mold, where Bryce was surrounded by upset exes, as well as enemies old and new, you were putting yourself well down the list. If the case against Jonty failed, there was Scarlett and her Zimovane; then Conal, Dan and maybe even Virginia. And that mattered, didn’t it? It was clear to me that even though you’d decided you had to kill him, you really didn’t want to be caught.
‘I needed to back up this sudden blinding conviction that it was y
ou who’d done it, so I raced back to the hotel and let myself into your room. At that point I didn’t know what I was going to find, but I thought there might be something. When my initial search was a failure, for a moment I wondered if my intuition was at fault. Then on a second search I found a memory stick. When I plugged it into my laptop and opened it up, there they were: Celebrity and Hypocrisy and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. The talks you had repeatedly told me you’d never even seen, let alone kept. And why had you kept them? Because you yourself had deleted them from Bryce’s computer.
‘Everything fitted. Even a call from Julie telling me that the hard copy of Bryce’s speech had been found in Jonty’s briefcase didn’t put me off. You’d already shown your propensity for planting evidence. My only problem was the one which had been there from the start – motive. Why on earth would you, Priya Kaur, with your whole life ahead of you, want to murder anyone, let alone this man who offered you so much? Bryce had taken you on and made you his protégée on the newspaper, you pretty much ran the section now. As for his personal life, you had successfully ousted both his long-term partner and his girlfriend. He lived in a nice place and had plenty of money. You had enthused to me about his charisma, how he was not just talented and knowledgeable, but kind and thoughtful too …
‘If there was no clue in your relationship, I had to look elsewhere. Now it had occurred to me early on that you hadn’t talked much about your family. Why should you? I’d only known you a couple of days. But even Conal, who had been involved with you for several months, didn’t seem to know that much about them either. Then yesterday afternoon, while we were out at Wyveridge, looking at the outline of poor Grace’s body on the gravel, you broke down and told me the tragic story of how your pregnant sister Chinni had died in a house fire. Later, in the small hours, you opened up further …’
