The Glass Tower

by Gregg Dunnett

  Yet it was also the case that, in recent months, the shine of attending the Creative Circle had worn off for Geoffrey. Though he tried to hide it, the other members were aware of this, and also aware of why. It was obvious he missed Julia now that she was too famous and too important to attend a small, provincial creative writing group. But they assumed Geoffrey would get over it. After all, life goes on. Though there would be a time when they would come to re-evaluate that.

  Marjorie’s email that week had promised – or threatened, depending upon your perspective – to present a PowerPoint presentation on the various Roman artefacts that had been found in the archaeological dig at the site for the new Waitrose supermarket. And rather oddly this had resulted in a packed meeting, so that the only seat available to Geoffrey when he arrived was next to Kevin. Normally he tended to avoid the man. It wasn't anything personal, but he’d once explained that he didn’t have running water in his trailer, and to be honest you could tell. Still, he nodded a greeting as he sat down, and Kevin nodded back, then the presentation limited any further conversation. But, a long hour later, as they stood up to leave, Kevin turned to Geoffrey.

  "Where's that Julia, then?" Kevin said to him.

  "Excuse me?" Geoffrey replied.

  "Your mate, Julia. I thought she might be here tonight?"

  "No. She's living up in London these days." Geoffrey began explaining. "She has quite a few media commitments currently so it helps to be based–" But Kevin interrupted him.

  "Nah, mate, she's back, didn't you know?" Kevin seemed both surprised and cheered by the revelation that he knew more about this than Geoffrey did.

  "No, I don't think so..." Geoffrey began, but Kevin cut him off again.

  "Oh she is, I've seen her. She came out to my trailer after more of those pills she's on."

  Geoffrey frowned. "Pills?"

  "Yeah! And then earlier this week she phoned me up for something else. You’ll never guess what?"

  "What?"

  Kevin grinned. "A gun."

  "What?"

  "Yeah! Said she wanted it as research for a book or something."

  Geoffrey stared in sheer bewilderment.

  "A gun?"

  "That's right! It was a handgun she was after specifically. Though when I told her that might be difficult she said any gun would do. Said she thought I had a shotgun at least. Since she saw my washing line with dead squirrels hung up on it. Only they weren’t bleedin’ squirrels were they? Them was just me kegs.”

  Geoffrey was struggling to follow Kevin at this point.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When she came to me trailer, she saw my washing line. I’d just done my washing. Had all my pants out to dry, she thought they was dead squirrels!”

  Geoffrey tried to filter this information so that it made some kind of sense. But he kept coming back to the earlier word.

  "A gun?" Geoffrey said again. He paused for a long time. "Well, did you…?"

  "Get her one? Of course I didn't! What do I look like? A bloody arms dealer? Do I have a towel on my head like some A-rab?" He shook his head and Geoffrey blinked at him.

  "Yeah, she sounded pretty insistent though." Kevin kept talking. "Anyway, you on for the pub?"

  Usually Geoffrey did go along for one or two, but this time the comments from Kevin had so unsettled him that he refused all offers and walked quickly back to his car. Once he was inside he pulled out his mobile phone and searched to see if he had missed any calls from Julia. He hadn't, so he phoned her. And as it usually did these days, it went directly to voicemail. Geoffrey hadn't been bothering to leave messages recently – he suspected Julia was so engrossed in her new project that she wasn't actually listening to them. Correction. He had suspected she was so engrossed in her new writing project. Now he didn't know what to think.

  "A gun?" he said a third time, and the word sounded as ridiculous in his car as it had in his head. Julia didn't exactly write the sort of books that had guns in them. What could she possibly need to research that actually required her to get a gun? And why on earth would she decide to ask Kevin for one? Geoffrey considered that perhaps the man might be making it up, or maybe on some sort of pills himself – that much was almost a certainty. But he'd sounded quite sure of himself. It hardly made sense that he would decide to make up such a story – what would the purpose be?

  He was troubled now, and he started the engine and drove the few miles to Julia's village, not expecting to find her in, and even less sure what to expect if she was there. But as he pulled up outside the window of her little cottage there were no signs of life. There was no car on the driveway, the lights were off, and there was no smoke coming from the chimney. He thought about asking her neighbours if they had seen her, but he knew she had got herself involved in a bit of a feud with them, and they seemed to have carried their resentment over to him as well. He sighed and decided that wouldn't be the best idea. Instead he sat outside and tried her number again. This time he left a message. Then he sent her a text message and an email asking her to contact him urgently.

  Early the next morning Geoffrey came back to Julia's cottage before even having breakfast, and found the place in exactly the same state as before. This time he got out of the car and peered into the windows. Inside looked as expected, and there was nothing that really indicated whether she might be living there or not. A few empty wine glasses on the work surface, a coat dumped on the sofa – but then Julia wasn't the tidiest person. It was a product of her creative mind.

  Geoffrey didn't have much on that weekend. So after checking his phone again, and finding no messages from Julia, he left a full bowl of food and water for Edgar and filled his car for a trip to London.

  Forty-Nine

  Julia eagerly monitored the news, expecting that the death of Becky and Rob would be quickly announced. But it stubbornly refused to break. At first Julia tried to convince herself that the poison might simply work slowly, but when she saw Becky's post about the poisoned dog, she had to accept that something had gone wrong. Exactly what it was she didn't know, but the coincidence seemed impossible to ignore.

  And the bloody dog hadn’t even died!

  For a short while her disappointment prompted her to consider other, more certain methods of dispatch. She considered shooting them, and – remembering how Kevin had strung dead animals on a washing line outside his caravan – she telephoned him to ask if he could get her a gun. But that turned out to be hopeless. The stupid man denied having one, and when she insisted – pointing out the line of clearly shot animals by his trailer – he made the bizarre claim that the crumpled brown items were in fact his underpants. After he’d washed them. In the end she hung up in a mixture of disgust and despair. Then she took a deep breath and started thinking properly.

  Poisoning was out. So was shooting them. What options did that leave? Perhaps she could run them down with her car? The idea was attractive, but there seemed no obvious way she could arrange to have them both in the road in front of her. Any kind of direct attack was too daunting to even think about; it would be two against one, and Rob would easily be able to overpower her. She considered burning the lodge down with them inside. But it had recently been refurbished. She had noticed the sprinkler system when she was there, mistaking it at first for security cameras.

  It was a shame she couldn't get poisoning to work. It was such a nice, neat solution. She looked around her penthouse flat for inspiration.

  The decoration of her new living room had begun with Geoffrey's efforts, and also ended there. He had almost single-handedly manoeuvred in the sofa, and the reading chair, and he had built the IKEA bookshelf. Then, almost as a joke, he had presented her with a signed copy of his book, The Apple Tree Killer. Julia's eye turned now to his sad little paperback, squashed against the end of the bookshelf by a dozen handsome hardcover editions of The Glass Tower. She pulled the book out now, and considered its amateurish cover. The lack of any notable review quotes. Then she rem
embered how they had discussed the book at a meeting of the Creative Circle. How proud he had been, and how patiently he had pushed back against Marjorie when she insisted it was unrealistic that his killer had used cyanide distilled from apple pips to carry out his dirty work.

  Julia hadn't paid very much attention at the time. But Geoffrey had been adamant that it was both possible and therefore plausible. She thumbed through the book now, trying to find the section that sparked the discussion. In it Geoffrey had – rather clumsily, she thought at the time – explained the process by which the seeds of apples could be ground down and then the resulting powder mixed with simple tap water to produce concentrated hydrogen cyanide. Julia hadn't studied the sciences at school, and had offered no opinion about how effective this would be at killing a man, but she remembered now that both Geoffrey and Kevin were adamant that it would do so in just a few seconds. Marjorie had thought this ridiculous.

  Julia read the controversial passage now. In Geoffrey's story, his killer dropped just a few drops into a cup of tea given to the victim, and within only a few seconds she had turned blue and was dead on the floor.

  "Wouldn't she have tasted it?" Julia had asked him, in the pub afterwards. "When the killer gives her the drink? Wouldn't she have realised it was laced with such a deadly poison?" And he had smiled at her in delight.

  "That's just the thing,” Geoffrey had replied. “No one knows what it tastes like because no one’s ever lived long enough to find out!"

  Perhaps, Julia considered, she had been a little hasty in writing off poisoning as the answer. Perhaps she simply needed a stronger poison. And if Geoffrey were right, she could still get her poison on the shelves of the local supermarket.

  Julia went to the library to check Geoffrey's claims on the internet, and she was so encouraged she went straight from there to buy twenty bags of apples.

  She began by cutting each apple into quarters and carefully removing the little black seeds. It didn't matter when she inadvertently cut them in half, she was going to grind them down anyway. It took her the whole afternoon but eventually she had a small pile of apple seeds, and a huge pile of discarded apple flesh. She placed the seeds on a tray and put them in the oven at 50 degrees for an hour, and while she was waiting, she carried the remainder of the apples down to the bin and dumped them.

  She had to go out again to buy a pestle and mortar, but she was confident that in isolation it couldn’t be seen as suspicious, and so she used her credit card. Then she spent a tiring hour smashing and grinding the seeds to a black pulpy mess. The resulting amount of material was so pathetic she decided it would never work, so she went back to the shop, and this time bought a top of the range food processor. That did the job much better, but it reduced the already tiny pile of seeds to such a minuscule amount of black dust that she decided to buy another twenty bags of apples and repeat the whole process again.

  Two full days later she very carefully poured a small amount of yellowy-clear liquid into a handy travel-sized shampoo bottle that Geoffrey had once given her from one of his holidays.

  Fifty

  Geoffrey was a troubled man. Julia wasn't answering his emails. Wasn't returning his calls, and – despite what Kevin had said about seeing her in Dorset – didn't appear to be living at her cottage. And when he arrived in London, there was no answer on the buzzer for her penthouse flat either. But after driving all the way up to the capital, it didn't make much sense to just turn around and leave. Instead Geoffrey loitered outside, trying all the numbers he had for her, until one of the other residents of the building left. At that point Geoffrey ran forward to catch the door, ready to explain his reason for needing to get in. But the woman didn't even challenge him.

  Geoffrey took the stairs up to the penthouse. He banged on Julia's door, and wished it had a letterbox that he could peer into. And when that didn't work, he decided to try downstairs to see if any of her neighbours knew anything.

  He tried the flat directly beneath Julia's first. He remembered how the man who lived there had helped to move in Julia’s desk. A nice guy, Geoffrey remembered, he had been friendly. Geoffrey pressed the doorbell.

  "Yes?" The man seemed suspicious at first, and when he saw Geoffrey there was no sign he remembered him.

  "Hello, I'm a friend of Julia Ottley," Geoffrey began, trying to put a reassuring smile on his face. But the man didn't respond in kind.

  "Who?"

  "Julia, she lives upstairs," Geoffrey went on. "But I'm struggling to reach her at the moment, and I wondered if she mentioned to you anything about–"

  "Who?" The man interrupted him this time.

  "Julia... The woman who lives upstairs. In the penthouse?" The smile on Geoffrey's face began to falter. Surely they couldn't have failed to see each other in the lift or the lobby downstairs?

  "Oh, her." There was something pointed about the way the man spoke. "What about her?"

  Geoffrey hesitated. He tried to remember what he had chatted about with this man those months before. They'd joked about the joys of DIY, that was it. About how the instructions were always inscrutable. He seemed much less friendly now.

  "I, um. As I say I'm a friend of Julia's but I'm struggling to get in contact with her. I wondered if she might have mentioned to you where she was going?"

  "She doesn't talk to us." The man stared at Geoffrey defiantly.

  "Well, has she been around recently? Have you noticed?"

  "Don't know. Like I say. Doesn't talk to us." The man held his door firmly, and Geoffrey sensed he was just waiting to shut it in his face.

  "Okay. Well, could you say when you last saw her?" he asked, his own smile fading now.

  "Heard her. Not saw." The man seemed to think for a moment. "Maybe last week. Last Wednesday? Sounded like she was having an argument with someone. Herself, probably." The man narrowed his eyes. "I remember you. You’re the furniture man aren’t you?" Geoffrey began to reply but the other man carried on without hesitation. "You should keep away from that woman. She’s no good."

  Geoffrey was taken aback.

  "I'm sorry?" he asked. He wasn't at all sure he had heard the man right.

  "She’s no good. Not kind." He began to close the door.

  "Now, hang on!" Geoffrey began. He almost put his foot in the door, but that would have been too strong a reaction. Instead he went on. "That's a bit strong, I know she can be..."

  But there was no point finishing his sentence, since by now the door was shut.

  “Extraordinary!” Geoffrey said to the closed door.

  Geoffrey considered trying some of the other neighbours, and in fact did knock on one other door – there were two flats on the floor below Julia's – but whoever lived in the other flat wasn't home. Geoffrey even considered calling the police. There was the possibility that Julia was inside her flat, but for some reason unable to answer the door. But there wasn't anything to suggest that this was the case; indeed, the only evidence Geoffrey had for her whereabouts was from Kevin, who claimed she was down in Dorset. And if the police asked why he was concerned – well, he could hardly tell them it was because Kevin had told him about her requesting a gun. No. Whatever Julia had got herself mixed up in – and Geoffrey was sure it was something – calling the police was the last way to help her.

  Instead, Geoffrey made his way back downstairs and returned to his car for the long drive home.

  Fifty-One

  Julia rested her elbows on the stone wall in front of her, and focused her binoculars on the former lantern room of the lighthouse. Had anyone seen her, they would have assumed she was just another visitor to Hunsey Island, a keen birdwatcher, perhaps, given her attire of dark green wax jacket, brown corduroy trousers and walking boots. Though perhaps the backpack she carried was larger than the norm.

  Through the lenses she could see Becky, slightly hunched over her laptop. The light was fading now and the girl's face was illuminated by the glow from her screen – though whatever words Becky was writing were obviously
too small for the binoculars to pick up. Becky had been there for nearly two hours now. Julia about the same.

  Julia swivelled around to check the coastal path again. Rob had gone that way at about the same time Becky began her work for the afternoon, and Julia had noted as such in her notebook. But this time he wasn't with his camera equipment but dressed in a rubber wetsuit and carrying a surfboard. And just as she had done several times over the last week, Julia had followed him at a safe distance and watched as he picked his way down the cliff, over the rocks and into the sea.

  As before she had hoped, but not expected, that he would slip when descending and tumble to his death. And just as before she had been disappointed. On some of his surfing expeditions she had also allowed herself to hope he might simply drown, or be set upon by a great white shark, launching at him from underneath, knocking and ripping the life out of him with its rows of razor-sharp teeth. But neither of those things had happened either. Instead, Julia had spied upon him for a while, from her vantage point behind a large outcrop of rock, and then gone back to spy again on Becky.

  At no point had there been any opportunity to deploy her new poison. Her disguise this time around was aimed at fooling others into believing she was a normal visitor to the island, but it would not work against Rob or Becky, who would recognise her at once. Therefore she was cautious when approaching the lodge. She had been up to its windows on many occasions, and even ventured inside once, but there had been no chance to slip the poison into their food or drink. When distilling it, she had visualised dripping it stealthily into their morning coffee, but she now realised that this was so impractical as to be almost impossible. Her previous opportunity – she now realised – had been an incredible stroke of good fortune that might never be repeated.