Strictly Murder

by Lynda Wilcox

  “You could do worse. He’s in a good job and it’s about time you settled down.”

  I ignored her, refusing to look away from my computer screen.

  “And you’re still young enough to have kids. I quite fancy being a surrogate grandmother.”

  “Stop it, KD. You’re about as subtle as a train crash. And you’re beginning to sound like my mother.”

  I swung round ready to lay into her and stopped at sight of her grin. She’d been winding me up. Well, two could play at that game.

  “Anyway, I’ve got more than one string to my bow. You forget I had dinner with Greg Ferrari last night.”

  Her grin disappeared quicker than a ferret up a drainpipe.

  “I don’t like that man. Be careful, Verity. It could be him who’s trying to kill you.”

  If I was right about the Charlotte Neal connection then, yes, he probably was. I didn’t let on to KD that this was one of my reasons for journeying north. Knowing her, she would only try to stop me and I was determined to get at the truth of Mr Ferrari’s background.

  “Oh, I don’t think Ferrari is any more serious about me than I am about him.” I said, casually. “But it was a useful evening, none the less, and the food is always good at Chez Jacques.”

  She made a noise suspiciously like ‘harrumph’ and reached for the pages I’d placed on her desk.

  I made my booking at the Georgian Hotel before leaving for a late lunch.

  My lunch had consisted of a cheese and tomato sandwich and a cup of coffee. The sandwich had been soggy, the bland, white bread holding together such a meagre amount of grated cheese and tasteless tomato it had been both unappetising and unfilling. The coffee was a turgid brown sludge, served lukewarm, with all the fresh aroma of used washing up water. I hadn’t enjoyed it. In fact, I’d spent the time it took to consume it longing for the contents of KD’s marble and chrome kitchen or dreaming of a mouth watering Brie filled baguette at the ABC. Nor were the surroundings any better; drab and dirty beige walls hung with obscure prints in dark and dingy frames by equally obscure and long forgotten artists. I wouldn’t be visiting Jenny’s Café - ‘freshly prepared, home cooked food daily’ - again any time soon. If I lingered now it was only because I lacked the energy to move - inert of brain and body I ran through my notes again, doodling on a separate pad as I did so. Trying to get into a dead woman’s brain is hardly the easiest task to set yourself, yet I felt driven to understand the woman whose body I had discovered just over a week ago and to play some part in bringing her killer to justice. Maybe I was still suffering from shock, the shock of finding a corpse, close encounters with moving traffic and the dreadful thought that someone had tried to kill me. My bust-up with Jerry hadn’t helped my mood either. I sighed, mentally trying to shake the fog from my brain. Thinking of brains brought me round to Holly Danvers. She had been right. Jaynee Johnson had certainly had more intelligence than I had given her credit for. At the moment she was certainly beating me in the ‘how to be cryptic’ stakes. As for Holly herself, whilst she came across like an ingénue, could I take such innocence seriously?

  A couple of girls in their late teens asked if they could join me. The coffee shop was still full with lunchtime shoppers - why did people come here? - and so far I’d had the table to myself. I nodded absently, listlessly, my mind elsewhere.

  “Of course.”

  The two girls, one blonde with a bright purple streak down the side of her hair and enough piercings to stock an ironmongers, placed their cups on the table and noisily pulled back chairs. The other youngster, dressed all in black - and that was just her hair, eyes, lips and fingernails - smiled across at me as she sat down.

  “Thank you. Anyway. You’ll never guess! I’ve just seen Greg Ferrari going into House of Fraser.”

  “Really? Oh, I like him. He’s gorgeous, in’t he?”

  Mention of my chief suspect perked me up. I kept my head averted, eyes on my pad but tuned in my ears to their conversation.

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that.”

  “Oh, he’s way out of our league, Rache. He’s way too flash for the likes of us.”

  “Oh, I dunno, Keeley. Stranger fings ‘ave ‘appened and a girl’s got to dream. Still,” she sighed sadly, “You’re probably right. Shame, innit?”

  “Yeah. Anyway,” the oddly named Rache - I assumed it was short for Rachel - strove to get back on track, ” the thing is, my friend Donna reckons that Ferrari in’t his real name. You’ll never guess what is?”

  “Donna? How would she know?”

  How would she indeed? I’d spent more than an hour searching the Internet for Ferrari’s background, fruitlessly, as it turned out. I’d been unable to find anything about him before the age of twenty. Even his own website was remarkably reticent about his past and I could dismiss as fantasy the story the man himself had spun the night before. It bore as much resemblance to the truth as the phrase, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’. I wrote the words ‘GF not his real name’ next to the abstract doodle I’d just made on my pad and carried on eavesdropping.

  “Well, Donna’s mum’s Italian, right.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, she is.”

  “And she told Donna that Ferrari’s Italian for Smith, you know, like in blacksmith.”

  “Blacksmith?”

  Keeley had obviously never heard the word but, thankfully, Rache laboured her point.

  “Yeah. So Greg Ferrari is really Greg Smith, then, in’t he, if that’s right?”

  I wanted to jump across the table and kiss her. I wanted to stand up and pump my arms in the air yelling, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I wanted to cheer wildly. Instead I kept my face averted to hide my grin, while flicking rapidly back through my book. I made a heavily underlined entry next to JayJay’s list, wrote ‘GF’ next to it and then gave it a tick. The presenter’s Mr Smith referred to Greg Ferrari. Four down, two to go. At this point it occurred to me that I should call Jerry Farish and his team to pass on what I’d learned but told myself they’d probably worked all this out for themselves by now and besides I didn’t want to speak to him. Instead I decided to get out of the hot and steamy atmosphere of the cafe and take a walk to Victoria Park where I could find a shady tree and sit in the open air to mull over this new piece of information. I put my book and pen in my bag, smiled at the two girls and left.

  Outside the sun beat down, hitting my skin with all the intensity of a chef’s blowtorch on crème brulée. Glad that I had at least applied suncream that morning - the rest of the tube lay in my bag ready for use when I got to the park - I now regretted not bringing a hat or even a scarf with me to shade my head and neck. Accompanying the heat came a sultry, almost damp, feeling to the air. Maybe the good weather of the last few days was finally about to break and that would be summer over for another year. I strolled along, anxious to reach the quiet coolness of the trees, my mind occupied by the conundrum of Jaynee’s diary but not that distracted that I forgot to pay extra attention at road junctions. I appreciated the element of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted in this belated sense of caution, but wasn’t prepared to help out any would-be killer by making the same mistake twice.

  The squeals of happy toddlers excavating the sand pit while their older siblings swung and whooped on the children’s playground watched over by gossiping mothers greeted my entrance to the park. I passed the public toilets, sadly now closed, the floral clock and the wrought iron bandstand before I found a suitable seat under a horse chestnut. The walk had done me good and stimulated my brain for I reached into my bag for book and pen and started writing almost as soon as I’d sat down.

  Assuming that Mr Smith was Greg Ferrari, then JayJay had seen him on five occasions between February and April. Both the April dates had been on a Friday, a day when, according to Holly, they were not rehearsing or even at the studios. Annoyingly, JayJay had rarely bothered to write down the times of her appointments in the diary - maybe she had a good memory for tho
se - thus making it impossible to tell when exactly she had met her co-star or the nature of their get-togethers. Were they business meetings, committee meetings or political meetings? All of which I thought as unlikely, quite frankly, as the two of them having joined the Golden View Cribbage and Canasta Circle. Which left only lovers’ trysts but, if this were so, then their affair had been over before the end of April. Why wait until June to kill her? I heaved a sigh, rubbing the strain from my neck. A blackbird landed in the border next to my bench. Diligently, it began sorting the leaf litter into separate piles, turning its head first this way then that, until the moist soil below lay revealed, and into which it now drilled its yellow beak. I smiled to myself, amused at the similarities between us. In a way we were both sifting through our respective middens searching for the prize beneath. The bird cocked a bright eye in my direction before swallowing what it had unearthed. If only finding JayJay’s killer were that easy. I fanned myself with my notebook and mopped at the beads of perspiration on my brow. Disturbed by the movement, my companion gave a disapproving chirp and flew away.

  Returning to my notes, I wondered again about the link between Smith and Ferrari. Had JayJay simply translated the word or had she used it because she knew that Smith was Greg’s real name? And how had she found that out? I scratched at my temple with the end of my pencil. This was all well and good but I still had no motive. Neither the end of their relationship nor the knowledge of any name change would be sufficient cause to kill her, surely?

  Betting that Agnes Merryweather never faced these sorts of problems, I decided to give it up for now. I would go home and throw some things in a case for my trip tomorrow and drop in on the ABC wine bar later.

  I strolled into Valentino’s place about nine o’clock, delighted to find it so busy that I had to fight my way to the bar. The fact that my favourite stool was occupied was a small price to pay for the good business Val was doing and besides, he passed me a glass of wine as soon as I came within reach of the counter. He even waved aside my offer of payment - now that’s my idea of a good barman!

  I wasn’t drunk by the time I left nearly two hours later but I’d had enough to make me glad I’d decided to come into town on the bus and take a taxi home. Black Cat Cars had an office about half a mile away on the other side of the canal; it was a fine night, warm and still, and I didn’t mind the walk. It would clear the last vestiges of Merlot from my brain, or so I hoped, and give me time to think. I was still wrestling with the motive for Jaynee Johnson’s murder and moving out of my flat in Sutton Harcourt and I needed to make decisions. Instead, my thoughts kept coming back to little Charlotte Neal and what had happened to her all those years ago. Something was nagging at the back of my brain. Someone, somewhere had said something that might be important, something that had passed me by at the time. But who, where, when and what escaped me. I wasn’t even sure it had to do with that case. Maybe it was a snatch of conversation I’d heard at Silverton Studios, from Candida perhaps. I could always check on that when I got home, I had written plenty of notes in my book during the interview and Ms Clark had been nothing if not forthcoming. I dodged a young couple saying a passionate goodnight outside a Chinese takeaway - really! The places they choose - trying to scratch at the itch in my memory. It remained elusive. Maybe I needed to sleep on it and would wake up tomorrow morning with the answer fresh in my mind, though I considered it far more likely I’d wake with a hangover.

  I had reached the end of the shops along the high street and with it the comforting yellow glow of their neon lights. Ahead of me now lay a dark patch leading up to and over the canal bridge with the taxi office a hundred yards or so beyond that. I walked into the blackness and onto the bridge feeling the rough stone of the centuries-old parapet under my hand, hearing the lapping of water. When I reached the top I stopped, taking a moment to let my eyes adjust to the lower light levels. Above me the bright stars of the summer triangle sailed though the June night. I brought my gaze downwards, leaning on the top of the stone. It was very quiet and still. Below me a narrow boat, cabin lights barely masked by floral curtains lay moored, its ropes taut to the tow-path. I stood on tiptoe and peered over.

  Suddenly, everything was happening at once. I heard a pattering noise, strong hands gripped my legs, I was pitched forward and barely had time to scream out, “What the …”, before being catapulted into the inky blackness below.

  It wasn’t a graceful dive, no forward somersault, half-pike and twist but there was definitely a degree of difficulty in it as, arms and legs flailing wildly, I cleaved the ice-cold, filthy water with all the elegance of a pregnant buffalo and went under.

  Fortunately, canals aren’t deep and I came to the surface quickly, coughing and spluttering, hair and weed plastered over my face. I felt a thump in my back and thrashed about madly, convinced whoever had thrown me from the bridge was hanging around to finish me off.

  “Keep still, gal,” came a man’s deep voice. “I’ve got the boat hook on yer.”

  I relaxed as someone skilfully drew me in to the side of the narrow boat.

  Then a woman’s voice said:

  “I told you I’d heard a splash. Get her up, Ned, and bring her in. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Well-muscled arms reached down to grasp mine and hauled me over the side of the boat where I lay for a moment doing my best impression of a freshly caught trout.

  “Thank you,” I managed, as I staggered to my feet feeling like a drowned rat. I probably looked like one, too. I shivered with shock as much as with cold as the man led me down the steps and inside.

  “Welcome to The Mermaid’s Lair. I’m Ned, Ned Oldfield, and this good lady is my wife, Alice.”

  “Verity Long,” I replied in a shaky voice as Ned wrapped a blanket round my shoulders and settled me on a chair.

  His wife put a mug of hot, sweet tea in my hands and I hunched over it, sipping the dark brown liquid, warming my hands as well as my insides.

  “How on earth did you come to end up in the canal, gal?” Ned asked having brushed aside my thanks.

  “I was pushed in, I think. Well, thrown in, really,” I amended, remembering the arms around my legs.

  “Thrown in?”

  “Yes. It was probably somebody’s idea of a prank.” I tried to make light of it.

  “Harrumph. Not much of a prank in my estimation,” said Ned.

  Nor in mine either but I didn’t want to admit to this kind stranger that someone was trying to kill me. I hadn’t truly acknowledged it to myself, yet. I shrugged my shoulders, ignoring the look of concern on the boatman’s face.

  Alice, who having supplied both the blanket and the drink had left us and gone further down the boat, now returned with a pile of clothing and a large towel.

  “I’ve looked you out some clothes. They’re only old ones, I’m afraid” she added apologetically, “but they are dry.”

  I opened my mouth.

  “No, no,” she stopped what would have been a churlish attempt to refuse this kindness and I took them from her gratefully.

  “Now I think you’d better have a shower, there’s plenty of hot water and sitting around in wet clothes after a dip in a stinking canal is not a good idea”

  “You have a shower?” I asked, overlooking the implication that I was starting to smell.

  Both of them laughed.

  “Oh, we’ve got just about everything in here,” said Ned, proudly. “She may be narrow but she’s perfectly formed.”

  Realising he was talking about the boat and not his wife - no one could honestly describe her as narrow - I followed Alice along the companionway.

  “You’ll find everything you need in there.”

  She pointed to a door on my right and left me to it.

  Showering in a narrowboat is obviously an art form all of itself and one I didn’t have time to master. I managed to bang my leg, my bottom and both elbows before emerging clean, sweet smelling and fully dressed, into the corridor.

  “P
ass me your wet clothes, I’ll rinse them though before you go.”

  I demurred at this kindness but Alice insisted. While she did my laundry Ned showed me the boat, his obvious pride in it well merited.

  “Do you live on the canals permanently?” I asked when we returned to the cabin.

  “Oh, yes. And travel the length and breadth of the country. At the moment we’re heading to the festival at Stoke Bruerne.”

  “Oh, yes,”

  I knew it; a pretty little village on the Grand Union Canal with a waterways museum, some twee and expensive shops and a couple of decent canal-side pubs.

  “How are you getting home lass?” Ned asked, as Alice handed me a bag containing my dry clothes. I explained about the taxi.

  “Come on then, I’ll walk you round there.”

  “Thank you. You’ve both been very kind.”

  “That’s all right, love. Drop in again, soon,” said Alice with a wicked grin and a wink.

  I relaxed in the back of the taxi, waving goodbye to Ned who’d insisted on seeing me safely on my way, trying in vain to forget the whole incident. But I had to face it. Somebody wanted me dead.

  Chapter 11

  “You could have been killed!”

  “Yes. I rather think that was the intention.” I pointed out.

  “You mark my words,” KD carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Someone is definitely trying to kill you.”

  It was the morning after my late-night swim in the canal and I’d just filled her in on what had happened. Now we sat in the office drinking freshly brewed coffee, I needed the caffeine, having arrived for work after a poor night’s sleep but without any time for breakfast.

  “Face it, Verity, it can’t be coincidence. Two attempts in two days? You should have gone to the police.”

  I shrugged.

  “It was nearly midnight when I got home. I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep.”

  “Even so, you should have told them. Someone is trying to kill you.”

  “Yes. I know they are! Or it’s certainly beginning to look that way,” I admitted. “The question is, why?”