Killing Jane Austen - A Honey Driver murder mystery (Honey Driver Mysteries)

by Jean G. Goodhind

  With her heart racing, Candy took the stairs two at a time. All the while she wondered: why the personal appearance from Mr North. The knot in her stomach tightened.

  The room had that plastic kind of smell beloved of all mid-range hotels. A single light burned on a bedside table. One of the windows was open. He was leaning out, his back to her, his broad shoulders shielding the view.

  The curtains moved in a strong draught. It had been windy all day; the only thing keeping the temperature down and the rain at bay.

  The sound of traffic filtered in along with the damp smell of a city in winter. The cold reached around him like icy fingers.

  She regretted shivering. It wouldn’t be good to appear nervous. Candy knew this from experience. Best be your normal sweetie-pie self, she decided. Digging deep in the inner well, she put the bounce back into her step and a smile on her face.

  She glanced at the bottle and two glasses. ‘Oooh! Champagne! Lovely.’

  ‘Is it?’

  His voice was dark and low, like the grumbling sound the earth makes before a landslide.

  ‘Well,’ said Candy, exhibiting an ebullience she didn’t feel. ‘There must be something to celebrate. Otherwise, why the champagne? Shall I be mother?’ she added, her fingers already around the neck of the bottle.

  ‘Come here.’

  He still had his back to her. Candy put the bottle down. What was this?

  The apprehension she’d been feeling turned to fear. But she did as ordered. She was used to doing as ordered. That’s how come she had the money she did, and money was everything – or it was to her.

  She placed her hand on the nape of his neck. ‘Hi, sweetie.’

  ‘Well?’

  Her nervousness showed in her tinkling laughter. ‘Win some, lose some.’

  He grabbed her by the nape of her neck.

  ‘You failed?’

  Candy squirmed and tried to prise his fingers off with her own. ‘She didn’t want to know me.’

  ‘Why is that? I thought you were told she was an out and out lesbian.’

  ‘I was told that …’ Candy confirmed. Her mouth opened and shut like a fish gasping for air. ‘I can’t breathe!’

  ‘Then your source was wrong.’

  ‘Please … sweetie …’

  The pressure was building on her larynx. Her words were strangulated. Nail extensions split and popped off as she tried in vain to wrestle his fingers from her throat.

  ‘I am not your sweetie!’

  If she’d had breath, she would have screamed when he flung her into the room. Her head thudded against the marble-topped coffee table. Champagne flutes tumbled, rolled over the edge and on to the floor.

  The bottle fell over and champagne bubbled from the bottle soaking the sleeve of her dress and wetting her hair.

  Blearily, she raised herself up on to one elbow. The room spun in ribbons of dark and light. She heard something snap and saw that he’d crushed a champagne flute beneath his foot. The sight of the splintered glass held her gaze. His other foot moved. She watched fascinated, her heart thudding against her ribs. He held his foot over the other flute and did the same to that.

  There was a message in his method. Candy grasped the meaning. It wasn’t only champagne flutes that could be crushed underfoot.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Brett Coleridge was worried. He’d been used to the high life. There was nothing he didn’t have or couldn’t afford to buy. But now his life appeared to be unravelling at a rate of knots.

  The eyes of the three men sitting around the boardroom table were full of misgivings. He could almost smell their bloodlust. They were the hunters. He was their prey.

  ‘We are not happy,’ said Pollinger, financial director and heavyweight shareholder.

  ‘Do you think I am?’ Brett snapped back, his arrogance only just about covering the nervousness he was feeling.

  The city and international banking people in general prided themselves on backing winners. For the most part their judgement as regards the company started by Brett’s grandfather had proved to be a constant in an ever-changing world. The Coleridge family could be depended on to run a sound operation. This fact had been true in the case of George Shavros Coleridge, Brett’s grandfather, and also in the case of Malcolm Isaac Coleridge, Brett’s father.

  Brett Coleridge had not inherited his antecedents’ natural ability to make money and neither had he inherited their integrity.

  They were experienced enough to know he was not telling the absolute truth about his dealings. Body language was not a new science. It was something that came with experience and dealing with people. Another name for it was instinct.

  Brett adjusted the legs of his trousers before crossing one leg over the other. Bluff it, he’d said to himself.

  He flicked at an imaginary mark on his trousers. The action was casual and meant to convey that he was unruffled and they should be the same.

  He adopted a half smile and turned on his boyish charm. ‘Look. Let’s be sensible here. Don’t call in the loans to the Coleridge Group just yet.’

  ‘The group has invested a lot of money in this picture. We’re covered by the insurance anyway.’

  It was Pollinger who spoke. He was the eldest of the group. Rumour had it that nowadays he only worked for three days a week. He was seventy-five years old, his eyes were still good, and he had a quick mind.

  Brett wished he were dead.

  ‘Insurance is taken out in the event of failure,’ said Pollinger. ‘We are not in business to be failures.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Brett, still cultivating a winning smile and using Pollinger’s comment to get into his stride. ‘Wait until the film is finished. It’s a dead cert at the box office. Jane Austen is a worldwide commodity. We’ll be selling internationally. There’ll be money plus foreign dubbing rights. Then there are DVD rights. We might even get it turned into a novel. Don’t you like making money, gentlemen?’

  He realized he sounded mocking, but one thing he had learned was that you needed to play people at their own game.

  OK, the shares in the company set up by his father were doing badly at present, but a new direction and younger blood would do the trick. He assured them of it.

  That had been the plan. Today was a different matter.

  The three men conferred. Brett made big efforts to control his breathing. It was of vital importance that he maintained the cool, confident facade. Even when the sweat trickled into his eyebrows, he made no move to swipe at it. Stay cool. He had to stay cool in order to beat this.

  Still wearing that faint, confident smile, he kept his eyes fixed on the three wise men as though he deeply respected them.

  They were conferring, speaking in low whispers; raising an eyebrow here, pursing slack lips; not once did they advert to him.

  Respect? Ha! Three wise monkeys more like. He couldn’t ignore them; they controlled the global corporation left to him by his father.

  At one time he’d been the majority shareholder, but the playboy lifestyle had intervened. He’d also thought he could play the stock market, betting against shares rising or falling. The streetwise kids from red-brick universities had outdone him on that score. Quicker than he could possibly have imagined, the shares and other finances had diminished. Bad judgement and pure extravagance was to blame, but, hell, he was entitled. His father had left it to him to do with as he pleased.

  The three men turned to face him.

  ‘We’re doing some much-needed reorganizing within the group. Luckily for you it’s likely to take us some time. We’ll wait, but be warned, we want success. We are not inclined to wait for ever.’

  Once he was back in his own office, he ordered a crate of Krug to be sent to his personal table at the nightclub he’d got involved with. Tonight he would celebrate.

  His secretary, Samantha, made the arrangements.

  ‘By the way, a woman phoned. She said it was urgent and she’d try to call back.�
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  Brett Coleridge was walking on air. ‘She’ll have to wait,’ he said. His arm encircled Samantha’s ample waist and whirled her around the floor.

  ‘Tonight I celebrate!’

  Samantha giggled like a love-struck teenager. He’d inherited her from his father and had sometimes considered replacing her with a younger model. He’d changed his mind. Samantha was loyal, discreet, and middle-aged; in other words, the ideal secretary, and well suited to the job.

  He finally twirled her behind her desk and into her chair.

  ‘The woman who phoned said she’d send you an email if she couldn’t get to a phone.’

  ‘She can wait,’ he said dismissively. Probably an old flame or one of the ‘tabloid tarts’ as he called them; the girls he used to pursue a business that was his very own.

  That night after a bath, a line of coke, and a bowl – a whole bowl – of champagne, he checked his emails. He found the one from Samantha’s mysterious woman.

  The elation he’d been feeling since leaving the directors’ meeting vanished. His face clouded over.

  ‘Bitch!

  Bitch! ’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Out of bed by five thirty! Get on set at six thirty. An ungodly hour to get up for some people, but Honey was used to it.

  Her mother had phoned the night before to remind her to set her alarm.

  ‘I’ll see you on set,’ she’d added. ‘You remember they’re filming at Henrietta Gardens tomorrow?’

  Honey had answered that she did. One of the houses there was supposed to be representing the place Jane had lived during her years in Bath. She’d lived in both Sydney Place and Gay Street. Gay Street was out of the question. Even the most skilled of sound technicians couldn’t hold back the sound wave created in the wake of a tour bus.

  Sydney Place was better, but still not quite right. In desperation they’d decided to use Henrietta Gardens as a backdrop. The road could be closed off when filming. Better still, their trucks and buses could be parked along the back of Henrietta Park and even in the park itself. Mindful of protecting the grass, the city council had laid vast sheets of tarpaulin, all at the production company’s expense of course.

  It was pure devilment to phone Steve Doherty and enquire what time he’d be along to ask questions of the make-up girl.

  She tapped in his number. His groggy voice answered. ‘Who the hell is this?’

  ‘Your early morning call,’ said Honey, squeezing her nose to make herself sound different.

  ‘Get lost.’

  ‘I thought you were coming along to ask the make-up girl some questions.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And Candy?’

  He suddenly became distracted. ‘I’ll have to call you back. There’s a call coming through on my other phone.’

  Just as they were about to take their leave, a figure in pink flannelette pyjamas came lolloping down the stairs. Mary Jane’s slippers were the same colour as her pyjamas and had goggle eyes and floppy ears; a pink rabbit get-up. Just the thing for any non-fashion-conscious woman of seventy plus!

  ‘I just thought I’d better warn you,’ said Mary Jane in a hushed voice. ‘Sir Cedric suggests you take a bacon sandwich and a chocolate croissant with you.’

  ‘Right.’ Honey realized she sounded like an automaton, but it was par for the course. Early mornings were not her favourite time of day and everyone in the hotel trade sounded the same this early in the morning. Yes, she was used to getting up early, but that didn’t mean to say that her attention span had clicked in on full chat.

  ‘Just thought I’d tell you,’ Mary Jane said before flip-flopping back up the stairs to bed.

  Honey and her daughter exchanged a what-the-hell-was-that-all-about kind of look.

  Lindsey shrugged. ‘Beats me.’

  They marched through the city in the early morning chill. Marching kept them warm.

  ‘Quite bracing,’ said Lindsey, and meant it.

  Honey wound her muffler that bit higher. Her nose was turning bright red. She could see the tip of it changing colour before her eyes.

  ‘Did Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ever get a mention in Jane Austen?’

  ‘No. Christmas was non-commercial back then. Did Gran mention that she doesn’t approve of you getting involved with a bookseller?’

  ‘Doherty’s going to be there.’

  ‘Ditto her views on him too. She doesn’t reckon either of them is good enough for you.’

  ‘In a professional capacity.’

  ‘Grandma pointed out that he’s not rich.’

  ‘Onassis isn’t available.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Good enough.’

  The trees in Henrietta Park were indistinct, shrouded as they were in early morning mist. The film crew were moving like wraiths, grey figures hunched in padded jackets, clipboards tightly clasped in mitten-clad hands. Unlike the Jane Austen characters who wore dainty lace mittens, theirs seemed to be knitted from rainbow remnants and likely acquired from a few choice charity shops.

  Gloria Cross, true to her word, was on hand to impart the wisdom of her years.

  ‘Hannah! A word before we are called to act.’

  Acting was hardly how Honey would describe standing around like bits of scenery, but she let it go. Her mother sidled up close and spoke out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘I’ll be close at hand, Hannah. You’ll need someone to keep you focused on the script.’

  Luckily Richard Richards was waving at her. She waved heartily back.

  ‘Excuse me, Mother. I think I’m being offered an extra-large bacon sandwich.’

  She found herself at the head of the queue. John Rees was right behind her.

  ‘Great to see you.’

  His smile was as warm as ever and his eyes twinkled. He sparkled brightly for a guy who spent hours with dusty books.

  She didn’t have any chance to gush over him. A plate banged down in front of her.

  ‘My speciality,’ said Richard Richards, his face already moist and pink. The omelette was colourful, bright yellow with bits of white, black and purple.

  ‘Black pudding omelette. With beetroot,’ he said proudly. ‘Here’s your knife and fork.’

  ‘Amazing!’

  It was all she could say. She certainly didn’t dare tell him that she hated black pudding. The moist pudding made from pigs’ blood was definitely a treat she reckoned should be confined to Yorkshire. The people up north obviously had stronger stomachs than she did.

  ‘It’s a bit chilly so I’ll take it over to the bus,’ she said breezily. She was already plotting how to get rid of it.

  ‘Wait!’

  She did as ordered. What now?

  ‘Here’s a nice cappuccino. I’ve used mint chocolate pieces on the top of the cream – full cream of course. In fact, Cornish cream.’

  She hated mint. And a Cornish cream cappuccino? On top of black pudding?

  This called for equal measures of tact and sincerity.

  ‘Well, that’ll warm me up, Richard. And so totally unique. Thank you very much.’

  She stepped down from the wooden platform set before the counter on which those wishing for breakfast were expected to queue.

  The smell of the bacon was so enticing that she half considered turning back and demanding he take what he’d given her back and hand her a bacon sandwich pronto. With ketchup! Or brown sauce!

  The exchange between Richard Richards and John Rees put her off.

  John Rees was telling him what he wanted. ‘Bacon, sausage, potato fritters and fried bread. No egg.’

  ‘No egg? No poached? No omelette? No scrambled?’ Richard Richards sounded as though he were the Pope and John Rees had just uttered the ultimate blasphemy.

  John Rees explained. ‘I hate eggs. I throw up if I eat eggs. Or cream. Can’t stand it. Oh, and if you could only lightly fry the bread.’

  ‘I’ve got toast.’

  ‘I don’t want toast.�
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  ‘Well, I don’t do fried bread. It’s common.’

  ‘Fine. Skip the fried bread.’

  It was plain to see that Richard Richards was reluctant to fill the order. ‘Some people have no taste! Especially Americans! If it wasn’t for McDonald’s, they’d starve!’

  ‘You’ve upset him,’ murmured Honey.

  John was looking at his plate. ‘He’s given me scrambled egg. I specifically said that I hated it.’

  ‘I should have warned you,’ said Honey as they made their way to the double-decker bus being used as a dining hall. ‘Richard Richards considers himself the master chef of outside catering for films. He’s not very good at taking criticism.’

  The bus was almost empty. Because it was early and not too many extras were required, there was room downstairs.

  They eyed each other’s plates with glum distaste.

  ‘We’ll share,’ said John.

  ‘Good idea.’

  Richard Richards had given her a torpedo roll and butter. They cut it open and stuffed it with sausage and bacon. Honey divided it into a third for her and two thirds for John.

  ‘I’ll eat the scrambled,’ she told him when he was about to protest. ‘And if you could spare a mouthful or two of coffee?’

  Division of food agreed, they caught up on things.

  John Rees had landed himself a part. ‘Guess what? I’m playing a bookseller.’

  ‘I’m doing a walk-on. I think I’m a lady’s maid. All I have to do is follow along behind. Can’t see it’s that much more than being an extra, but there you go. Do you know extras are used to hide parking meters and lamp posts?’

  ‘Must be cheaper than using a computer to block stuff out,’ he said, between mouthfuls of bread and bacon.

  Honey felt privileged. She’d been told to report to the large trailer which was divided into two departments; administration and make-up. Only walk-ons, bit players and the stars themselves, of course, got to be pampered in make-up.

  John popped the last of his food into his mouth and wiped his fingers on a paper napkin. ‘How about we trade food again at lunchtime?’