by Ruby Loren
“It’s okay. Thanks though. It's something I'll have to work out with him.” Or not, I mentally added.
“I hope things work out for the best," Auryn tactfully said, before we wished goodbye to one another.
It might have been my imagination but he sounded a little more cheerful than when we’d begun our conversation.
When I placed my phone back in my pocket, I realised I felt more cheerful too.
As the end of another day at the zoo approached, I decided I'd stop by the lions. Part of it was to reassure myself that I wasn’t developing any irrational fears, and the other part was to simply check how they were. Their trip around the zoo had probably been no less scary for them than it had for me. I wanted to make sure that their behaviour hadn’t changed.
The viewing windows were free from people when I arrived by the enclosure and looked around at the pride. It took me a minute to locate the strange growling sound that filled the air.
“Oh! Oh goodness!" I said, half amused, half embarrassed by what was going on in the enclosure. I reassured myself that it was nothing David Attenborough hadn’t seen a thousand times before.
The lions were mating.
Lions were fairly good at breeding in captivity in general, but Pendalay Zoo was hardly the norm. The return of these natural instincts couldn't make me any happier. It was such a strong sign that these animals were well on their way to recovery.
I looked across at the picture on the information plaque and then back to the enclosure and shook my head in wonder at the difference. You would never guess it was the same pride of lions. It made everything - even my mad drag race through the zoo - worthwhile.
I heard the sound of running footsteps approaching fast and turned away from the lions. Gemma was sprinting down the path towards me.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn't a little perturbed, but she wasn’t carrying a weapon and looked distressed.
She skidded to a halt when she spotted me. “You’ve got to help! He’s been stabbed!”
I didn’t hesitate to ask more, and together we ran back down the path Gemma had been running along.
I saw the blood before I saw what had happened. It was in a little trail of drops across the floor that drew the eye. I realised I was just putting off the inevitable and raised my gaze so it came to rest on the man writhing around on the floor.
“Darren, what happened?” I knelt down next to Zara’s husband and tried to gently pry his hands away from where he was clutching his back. One look at the wound let me know it was bad.
“What do we do? Is he dying? What do we do?" Gemma said, her hands flapping around in a panic.
I looked up at her. “You need to call for an ambulance. While you’re doing that, go to the staffroom and see if you can find a first-aider.” I deliberately kept my voice slow and steady, hoping that my very specific instructions would calm her down.
She nodded and pulled out her phone before turning and walking away. I figured all I could do was hope for the best and returned my attention to the man on the ground in front of me.
All staff members at Avery Zoo (my old place of work) had been required to take basic first-aid courses, but I didn’t feel too confident about what was in front of me.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, pulling off my sweater and pressing it against the wound. I applied pressure and hoped it would be enough to ease the flow of blood. The first-aid course had covered broken bones, cuts and grazes, and CPR - not giant stab wounds, which was what this looked like.
“I’ve been here all day in one of the office spaces working on the zoo’s financials. I popped out for a break. When I was walking, I think I heard someone running up behind me, but I just thought it was a kid. The next second, there was this searing pain. I tried to run after my attacker, but my leg is still bad," he motioned to the heavy bandage he wore. “I also started to realise that something really bad had happened to my back. The pain wasn’t going away. When I looked down, there was blood on the floor. I sort of staggered around for a bit, trying to find someone who could help and that’s when I saw Gemma and she came and got you.” Darren coughed and made a noise of pain.
“Well, at least it should all be on CCTV," I said, hoping that this might be what finally caught the stalker out.
“Unfortunately, it won’t be. I was walking near the wasteland where all the Halloween stuff is still set up. There's nothing down there. I thought it was a kid at first because no one’s allowed in that area. I figured they’d run off from their parents.”
"Did you get a good look at the person who did it?” I asked, already suspecting the answer.
He shook his head. “They attacked me from behind. When I chased them, all I could see was that they were dressed in a hooded top with the hood pulled up and jeans. That’s not really much to go on, is it?”
There was the sound of more running footsteps and Jules arrived with Gemma in tow.
“It’s okay, I can take it from here. I’m a trained nurse,” she said, surprising me.
I moved aside and managed to nod at Gemma.
“I called the police, too,” she told me.
“Good. We're going to need them,” I said, grimly.
“What's happened? Where is he?”
I closed my eyes, knowing exactly who that voice belonged to.
Zara Banks trotted round the corner, her face a mask of distress.
I took the opportunity to look her over. She wasn’t wearing any overalls or an apron and her clothes looked clean…
I shook my head. Was I really starting to subscribe to the Detective Toyne school of thought?
“This is enough! They've got away with too much. Why has no one found them and stopped this?”
We didn’t have to wait long for the police and the paramedics to arrive on the scene. Twenty minutes later, I found myself giving yet another statement about what I'd witnessed.
“I wasn’t expecting the husband to be targeted," Toyne said, conversationally.
I looked across and found that we were a little way away from the rest of the police. I wasn't sure I was too comfortable about that.
"If you’re expecting anything at all, you should be doing everything in your power to stop it from actually happening,” I told him.
“I can’t say you must be too sorry that Tom Riley is dead and gone," he said.
I frowned. “What happened to Tom was terrible.”
“Sure, but at least it shut him up. He had a lot to say about you,” the detective said, giving me a curious look.
I felt like spiders were crawling up my spine.
“What did he have to say in particular?” I asked, my mouth going dry.
“Something amounting to nearly an entire novel’s worth. That’s why he was really here. It was to investigate you.”
“He told me he was looking into ZaZa PR,” I said, but I could already see how naive I’d been to believe that.
“He was looking into you and only you - until he caught wind of an unsolved case with ongoing action happening right next-door to him. You won’t believe it, but his renting of that house was an accident after all! Probably quite a convenient one when it came to convincing you he was telling the truth about what he was writing about.”
I didn't respond.
“He’d been doing a lot of digging. According to his notes, you were involved with black market animal trading at a place called Avery Zoo. Then you wound up in the same sort of trouble again, only this time you were in the middle of venom based illegal drugs. More recently, you were in France, pretty close to a place where a bizarre paragliding incident was reported in the local papers but… nothing else.” Detective Toyne narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Ol’ Tom thought that was the most interesting thing of all. You spent, what - a month over there? He contacted law enforcement, expecting the same stories about the black market trading, but they clammed up and wouldn’t say a word. In fact, they referred him to someone called Ms Borel. Interestingly, she happene
d to turn up looking for him right after he was murdered.”
I kept my face as blank as I could but for all his faults, Toyne was a good cop. He'd probably just read the suspicion right off my face.
“You know her,” he said. It wasn't a question.
“We met when I was in France. She was in the village asking questions. You’ll have to ask her if you want to know the rest. I don’t want to get in any…" I trailed off.
“…Trouble?” the detective finished. “Interesting. You know, Tom started investigating you because someone tipped him off about all of the black market stuff and implied you were involved. Before you ask - they didn’t give a name, or Tom didn’t write it down. Either way, you should know that you have enemies. The deeper he got into your career, the more intrigued he became. Your association with Lowell Adagio was something he was particularly interested in. He tried to do some research into Lowell's past too, but once you’ve gone more than a few years back, there’s nothing. Apparently it’s almost as if Lowell Adagio doesn’t really exist.”
I felt a dagger of ice twist in my heart. It was just as I’d started to suspect. Lowell was not the man he claimed to be.
“Before he died, Tom theorised that you might be involved with the Secret Service yourself.”
I choked out a laugh but the detective continued to scrutinise me.
“Are you kidding? I’m an animal specialist who writes comics in her spare time. I love hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows. I’m hardly James Bond.”
“It takes all sorts,” the detective replied. “He kept writing about everything he thought he knew about the case being turned upside down. Whatever you think is true, is actually a lie.”
I just shook my head. That sounded pretty paranoid to me.
“What's going to happen to everything that he wrote?” I asked, knowing that it definitely had enough power to end my career working with animals for good.
“Well… his publisher is very keen to take a look to see if the novel is still viable, but I think it will be better for everyone if the notes accidentally get destroyed by an intern who thought they were wastepaper." He raised an eyebrow at me
I spared a moment of pity for the unsuspecting intern, but I was grateful.
“Why would you do that for me?”
“Because I know what it’s like to be shunned, and I don’t think anyone who is passionate about what they do deserves to go through that.”
We both heard Detective Maynard calling his name. Toyne nodded at me once, before walking away to join her.
"Well, that was weird," Jules said, coming over to join me.
“You can say that again,” I said, thinking about the conversation I’d just had with Toyne.
“I’ve never seen a wound like that before and believe me, I've seen a lot of knife wounds," she said.
I turned to look at the PA. “How come?”
“Before I ran off in search of the quiet life in Cornwall, I was an A&E nurse in one of the, shall we say… less desirable boroughs of London.” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“I had no idea,” I confessed, but I was impressed. It just went to show, you shouldn’t judge people by what you saw on the surface.
“Anyway, I digress. I saw a lot of nasty stuff. After a while, you start being able to ‘read’ wounds. They all have giveaways that tell you where the attacker was standing, and how tall they were, and so on. I’ve come across strange wounds before, and this is definitely one of them.” She shook her head.
“What's strange about it?” My curiosity was well and truly piqued.
She pulled a face. “It’s hard to make sense of. I overheard Darren saying to the police that at first he thought a kid had come up behind him. I think maybe he was right. The wound's on his lower back but the cut was made from above, with the knife pointing down. You’d either have to be very short, or the victim would already have to be moving away, so it would sort of miss.” She took a breath. “I can only guess they must have been short because otherwise, it’s too deep and in a strange place too! It starts to the left of the spine and goes down diagonally, getting deeper towards the end of the wound. It’s the first one I’ve seen like it.”
I was about to point out that there was a first for everything, but Zara arrived and we hastily turned to more neutral topics until we were dismissed by the police.
I wasn't looking forward to it, but I knew I needed to speak to Lowell.
“I found out something bad today,” I said when I arrived back at the house.
Lowell stopped stroking Lucky - who was taking liberties by strolling around on the kitchen table - and frowned at me.
“I heard that someone was stabbed.”
“How…” I began to say but stopped.
“Ms Borel,” Lowell needlessly informed me.
I’d already figured out that her fingerprints were all over everything - and quite possibly had been from the very start.
I shook my head. “It doesn't matter. I spoke to Detective Toyne and he said that Tom Riley wasn’t looking into Zara's company after all. He was interested in me.”
Lowell looked away. “I know,” he said, after what felt like an eternity.
“You know?”
“Ms Borel is in charge of cleaning up his mess. The man was a vulture. He found out something from someone about that case where I met you and he chased it. It wasn’t long before his obsession with exposing you for fraud and animal abuse got him in too deep with… with us,” he said, seriously.
“How long have you known?” I said.
Lowell raised his hands defensively. “Only as long as you! It wasn’t until you told me that he was writing about the PR company and had found out about you on the side, that I started to suspect. I called Ms Borel and found she was already on her way down to investigate. This guy had been digging around in France. The police over there had done exactly as she’d told them to and forwarded his enquiries to her.” He made eye contact with me. “I never wanted you to be involved in any of this, but I’m glad it’s not going to ruin your life.”
"What do you mean?” I said.
“Ms Borel’s arranged for the writer's notes to be ‘mislaid’.”
“Huh! I should have figured,” I muttered, thinking about Toyne’s chivalrous speech. I was starting to wonder if I was a sucker for thinking the best of people when the worst turned out to be true.
“Does Ms Borel know who’s responsible for killing Tom Riley?” I asked.
A muscle twitched in Lowell’s cheek. “No, she doesn’t and it’s not on her list of priorities to find out. She just wanted to sweep this misguided book under the rug and then she's gone. Riley got too close to identifying me as an agent.”
I sat down at the kitchen table with a sigh, gathering Lucky up and bringing him onto my lap. “It could be anyone doing it to Zara. This town may be small, but it’s full of tourists. Anyone could be staying here.”
“Has Zara mentioned seeing anyone familiar around?"
“No. Her PR team are all new. The only person I can think of is Detective Toyne. I’m not sure if she recognises him. He wasn’t in charge of her case when she lived back in Otley.”
“Do you think it could be him?” Lowell asked.
“It could be,” I admitted and then frowned. “I just don’t see how, or why.”
“The 'why' is usually only understood by the person responsible for it all. If you understand what’s going on in their head, then I’ve got some bad news for you.”
I almost smiled at his attempt at a joke.
“I didn’t tell you about the stab wound,” I said and filled him in on everything that Jules had told me.
“Stand up, I want to try something,” I said. I pitched a protesting Lucky onto the sofa and walked over to the kitchen unit to pull one of the knives out of the wooden block.
“Okay. Now turn your back on me.”
Lowell eyed me nervously.
“I promise I won’t actually stab y
ou. Although I am tempted,” I said.
It was meant to be a joke but there was a little too much bite to it.
Fortunately, Lowell turned around and the awkward moment went away.
Five minutes later, I was no closer to figuring out how the wound could make sense - if it was the way Jules had described.
“So, I’m crouching down a little to get to the height needed to swing down. I’m using my left hand to get the left to right cut because that’s the way my arm wants to go. But…” I bit my lip. “It’s still not right. If I do this, the wound would be deep when I stabbed the knife in and then shallow when I took it out. Jules said that Darren's wound was basically the opposite of that.” I stood up and lowered the knife. “What am I doing wrong?”
“Give that here a second,” Lowell said and I handed him the knife. He tossed it from hand to hand before settling on the left. I watched as he twisted his hand beneath his elbow and reached behind, lightly drawing the knife down in a diagonal angle away from his spine.
“That’s it," I said.
“The wound would be deeper at the bottom of the cut because the person doing it wouldn’t be able to exert pressure higher up. The blade would only sink in when they had full movement of their arm closer to the end of the cut.”
We looked at each other.
“So, Darren Banks stabbed himself. Why?” I said, baffled.
Then it hit me. It was something that Detective Toyne had mentioned in our conversation earlier today. He’d said that Tom had written that everything had been turned upside down. What he’d thought was true was actually a lie. I’d thought it was his paranoid rambling about how he’d been blocked by Lowell’s employers from finding out the truth about his line of work.
What if these particular notes weren’t about me at all? What if they were about Zara?
If you flipped things upside down and assumed that what was presented as being true was actually a lie, you painted a very different picture. Darren didn’t love Zara… he hated her.
“We've got to go to the police. I think Darren’s the one behind all of this.”
I strode over to the door and grabbed my coat.
