A Murder to Die For Read online

  ‘Whoa, stop there,’ said Shunter. ‘Can you run it forward to just before the van turns into the alley, please?’

  The video stopped and started to play at normal speed and in the right direction. As the crowd of Millies moved out of the way to allow the van to turn into Handcock’s Alley, the CCTV operator froze the picture, providing a blurry view from Camera Two of the driver – a man in a dress and hat and wearing gloves.

  ‘Now, who, I wonder, is that?’ said Shunter.

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as a bit premature?’ said Banton. ‘I mean, declaring Handibode a murder suspect based on a jam recipe? Damned if I’d have done it.’

  ‘And especially after making such a balls-up with Miss Tradescant,’ said Jaine. ‘But it’s his call. And you must admit, it is a hell of a coincidence . . . someone dies from eating poisoned yew-berry jam and Handibode just happens to mention it in her notes.’

  ‘Yeah, but the jam wasn’t part of our murder investigation, was it?’ said Banton. ‘Now it is, and we have three deaths to investigate. And that concerns me.’

  ‘More overtime,’ said Jaine, smiling.

  ‘Yes, but saying that she’s responsible for the car crash – which is dubious – is one thing. Saying that she must therefore also be responsible for bludgeoning and stabbing our victim to death is a massive leap.’

  ‘That’s our guv’nor,’ said Jaine. ‘He can’t see a shark without jumping it.’

  *

  Blount’s pacing habit had brought him to the back of the library and to the crime-fiction section. The stars of the golden age of murder mystery shone down on him: Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Margery Allingham, Michael Innes, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey among them. The Sherlock Holmes books of Conan Doyle were there too and one entire bookcase was taken up with Agnes Crabbe books and DVDs. If ever there was a good place to inspire someone who was trying to work out how a murder had been committed, and by whom, this was it, he guessed. He sat down, took a deep breath and once again opened Esme Handibode’s copy of Swords into Ploughshares. He began scanning through her handwritten notes and tried not to get distracted by the novel itself.

  ‘Let me get this right. You expect me to clamber over the railings of a second-floor balcony and climb down to the ground on a home-made rope with my legs tied together?’ said Helen Greeley.

  ‘Yes,’ said Savidge. He had used a pair of tights to secure her ankles and had then proceeded to cut her bed sheets into strips before knotting them together to make a rope. He had then tied one end to the balcony railings and thrown the remaining length to the gardens below to create an escape route. ‘If I don’t tie you up, you’ll run away as soon as you reach the ground.’

  ‘But I can’t climb without using my legs,’ said Greeley. ‘I don’t have the upper body strength.’

  ‘I suppose I could tie the rope around you and lower you down. Or you can abseil.’

  ‘I fucking can’t.’

  ‘You can,’ said Savidge, waggling his penknife.

  ‘Do you intend to stab me if I don’t do as you say?’ asked Greeley.

  Savidge thought about this.

  ‘I might,’ he said unconvincingly.

  ‘I am not abseiling down the outside of a hotel or trusting you to lower me down on a sodding rope made from torn bed-sheets,’ said Greeley firmly. ‘You’ll just have to stab me and be done with it. But I don’t believe that you will. You don’t look the stabby type.’

  Savidge saw the resolute look on his captive’s face and knew that she was right. He didn’t believe he was going to stab her either. What was wrong with him? He had a licence to kill, didn’t he? Or did he? He closed his eyes and tried to focus on his mission. Why was everything so hazy?

  There was a sudden loud knock at the door.

  ‘Ms Greeley?’ said a voice. ‘This is the manager. Are you all right in there?’

  Savidge placed the point of the penknife against her breast bone and whispered, ‘Not a sound!’

  There was another knock.

  ‘Ms Greeley? There’s been some concern expressed about you not turning up for your talk. Can you please just let us know that all is well?’

  ‘Don’t answer,’ said Savidge.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Just a “yes” will do and then we’ll go away,’ said the manager. ‘Otherwise, I will have to come into the room to check for myself.’

  ‘I’ll have to say something,’ said Greeley.

  ‘Tell them you don’t want to be disturbed,’ whispered Savidge. ‘Say you’re ill.’

  ‘Look, if I call out, they will be in here in seconds and you’ll be off to prison,’ Greeley whispered back. ‘You and I both know that you’re not going to stab me so why don’t you—ow!’

  Savidge hadn’t realised quite how sharp the knife was. As Greeley had been speaking she had accidentally pushed against the point and it broke her skin. A bead of wine-red blood appeared and ran down into her cleavage. Horrified, Savidge pulled the knife away and was about to apologise when Greeley took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m fine!’ she shouted. ‘But I have a tummy bug!’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ said Savidge, transfixed by the trickle of blood.

  ‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’ asked the manager.

  ‘No, it’s nothing serious,’ Greeley said loudly. ‘I just don’t want to get too far from a loo. Don’t come in. It’s not very nice in here right now. I’m going to try to sleep it off.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. Please send my apologies to the Festival Committee.’

  ‘Actually, they’re here with me,’ called the manager. ‘They were concerned too.’

  There was a muffled chorus of voices all saying hello from behind the door.

  ‘Can we reschedule for tomorrow?’ shouted Greeley. ‘I’m very sorry for any inconvenience.’

  There was another muffled chorus of approving noises.

  ‘Well, as long as you’re sure,’ said the manager. ‘We’ll leave you in peace then.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Gilderdale. I’ll speak to the committee tomorrow. When I’m free.’

  Outside the door, Mr Stendish felt satisfied that they’d done all they could. ‘Well, that’s that then,’ he said. ‘We’ll just have to shuffle Sunday’s programme.’

  The manager scratched his head. ‘But my name is Jaycocks,’ he said.

  *

  ‘Well, how long ago did he die?’ barked Godolphin impatiently.

  ‘First of all, there are two shotgun wounds, fired, I would say, from quite close range, some ten yards,’ said Dr Angus MacDonald. ‘I base that on how the shot is concentrated. You’ll note that there’s not a lot of spread. As to the time, well, given the conditions, I would say fourteen to sixteen hours ago. Early yesterday evening, I’d imagine. Oh, and if it helps at all, he didn’t suffer. Death was instantaneous. I doubt I will find his heart at the post-mortem. The two shots have played havoc with his insides.’

  Blount had once again succumbed to the lure of Agnes Crabbe’s prose and had discovered that, despite his best intentions, he had quickly developed the need to know who had killed the constable in Chapter One. Flicking ahead to the final few pages had revealed the answer, but it was strangely unsatisfactory without knowing the why and the how. So he now found himself dipping randomly into the book in an effort to piece together the whole plot. It said something about his own procedure-driven nature that he was finding it difficult to concentrate on his own case until this fictional one was resolved in his mind. Finally, after some twenty-five minutes, he was satisfied. But he’d also discovered some curious Handibode-penned notes along the way.

  Most of them related to the plot, a murder mystery involving a shell-shocked ex-soldier turned farmer who was slowly but surely killing off the surviving members of the platoon who had left him for dead in No Man’s Land during the Great War. But written on a mostly blank page at the end of a chapter he’d spot
ted what appeared to be a random assortment of words and phrases all listed under the heading of ‘ANDREW T – SECRET’:

  Evidence of MC

  Marr Harry?

  S&B.

  Falk.

  Crib p.103?

  At first, he’d assumed ‘Evidence of MC’ to mean the facts that Millicent Cutter had strung together to solve the crime. But most of the words and phrases seemed to have no bearing on the plot of the book. There was indeed a crib mentioned on page 103, but why Mrs Handibode had made a note of this, he had no idea. ‘S&B’ could mean anything and ‘Falk’ sounded like a name but there was no one in the book called Falk. ‘Marr Harry’ might also be a name, or maybe it was an abbreviation of ‘Married Harry’? But the names Marr and Harry also didn’t appear in Swords into Ploughshares either. And then there was that cryptic heading – ‘ANDREW T – SECRET’. Blount assumed it referred to Andrew Tremens and wondered if Mrs Handibode’s notes had anything to do with the solicitor’s important announcement. If it did, then it might be important to decode what the notes meant. Maybe Banton could figure them out? Of course, he couldn’t admit to her that he didn’t know, so maybe he’d set her a challenge and make her think that it was some kind of test that he had already passed. He headed back to the Incident Room.

  ‘Is that the best resolution you can get?’ asked Shunter.

  ‘Yuurr,’ said the CCTV operator.

  On the screen was a pixelated image of the man driving the van. His hair was cut in a fashionable 1920s bob so it was undoubtedly a wig. His stubbled face, though indistinct and plastered with badly applied make-up, had a familiarity to it.

  ‘I assume that there’s no way to enhance the image to make it sharper?’

  ‘Nuuur. The CIA might have . . . you know . . . errrm . . . software like that but we’re still . . . like . . . running on Windows 98 here.’

  ‘Can you do me a printout of it?’

  ‘Yuurrr.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Shunter. ‘You might just have helped catch a murderer.’

  ‘Sick,’ said the operator.

  Shunter walked back down the stairs from the control room and considered what to do next. The right thing to do was to give the printout to Blount, but he wouldn’t be thanked for doing so. He wouldn’t even put it past the man to have him arrested for interfering with his precious investigation. With hindsight, he realised that he should have got the CCTV operator to email the photo to the Incident Room. But he hadn’t, and he could hardly expect the operator to lie on his behalf. He would have to take it to Blount himself and face the consequences, whatever they turned out to be.

  He ran the gauntlet of several inappropriately saucy drunks as he ambled across the road towards the library. There were nowhere near as many Millies on the streets now as most of them would be getting ready for the dance at 8 p.m. Others, meanwhile, would be back in their hotels and guest houses busily updating blogs, forums and newsfeeds with spurious theories, largely inaccurate descriptions of the day’s events and endless photographs. The main social media platforms were already abuzz with speculation and #AgnesCrabbe was trending on Twitter. Most of it was nonsense, human memory being notoriously fallible and prone to exaggeration and outside influences, and the various descriptions of events clashed and disagreed with each other. But interest was high and, among the Crabbe fan community, it seemed that a good story was always much more entertaining than the truth. The one noticeably missing voice was Pamela Dallimore’s and a number of commentators had pointed out her absence.

  He arrived at the library and steeled himself for the inevitably fractious meeting with Blount. The DI was a microcosm of every bad manager that Shunter had ever encountered during his career. But public safety and the needs of the community came before personal feelings. He had to do the right thing. He looked once again at the photograph and suddenly realised who the van driver reminded him of. He looked quite like Savidge.

  ‘Perhaps calling you Mr Gilderdale was a coded message?’ suggested Mr Stendish. The Festival Committee had regrouped in the hotel lobby along with the manager. ‘In A Wrathful Man, there’s a moment where Miss Cutter sends a message to Colonel Borwick in the form of an acrostic.’

  ‘A what?’ said Mr Jaycocks.

  ‘A sentence where the first letter of each word spells out a hidden message,’ explained Mr Stendish. ‘In that instance it was “Craneflies always swarm towards late evening.” C.A.S.T.L.E, you see. It told Borwick that she was imprisoned in Heversedge Castle.’

  ‘“Thank you, Mr Gilderdale” would be a very short acrostic,’ noted Miss Clark. ‘And “TYMG” would be nonsensical.’

  ‘It may be simpler than that,’ said Mr Horningtop as he typed an enquiry into a search engine on his smartphone. ‘I don’t profess to know as much about Agnes Crabbe’s books as some of them do round here, but I do know that in one of the stories there’s a character called Gilderdale. Ah, here we go. Oh. Oh dear.’

  ‘What?’ said the manager.

  ‘I think we need to call the police,’ said Mr Horningtop, looking at the result of his search.

  ‘Guv, there’s a call for you. Transferred from HQ.’

  Blount took the phone from Clifford Jaine. ‘DI Blount. What? If I must, I suppose. Put her through.’

  As Blount took the call, Jaine looked around the Incident Room. ‘I bet it was much more exciting back in the day,’ he said. ‘There would have been loads of people in here bustling about, indexing everything on cards, taking paper statements. I’ve seen photos.’

  ‘Computers have simplified the process,’ said Banton.

  ‘You’ll never replace a copper’s hunch with a machine,’ said Jaine.

  ‘No, no, I do not, madam!’ said Blount suddenly. He jabbed angrily at the red button on the phone, wishing for the old days when you could slam the receiver down on to the cradle to make a point. ‘Incredible. HQ gets a call from some spinster claiming that Helen Greeley has been kidnapped or is being held hostage in her hotel room, and they pass it on to me! Can you believe that? Like we haven’t got enough on our plate already.’

  ‘Think we should check it out, guv?’ asked Jaine.

  ‘What? No, of course not! It’s just another one of their silly bloody conspiracy theories. I’ve been hearing them all day. Nazis. Aliens. Nazi aliens. Illuminati. The Mafia. Cross-dressing solicitors. You would not countenance the tripe I’ve had to listen to. Just because she didn’t turn up for her talk this evening doesn’t mean she’s been kidnapped.’

  ‘She didn’t turn up for her talk?’ said Banton. ‘That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it? I mean, to drop out of a gig without an explanation.’

  ‘Is it? She was probably having a hissy fit. These pop stars and so-called celebrities have them all the time. And who says that there isn’t an explanation? Just because the caller isn’t aware of it . . .’

  ‘She was held hostage by some nutter fan a while back,’ said Jaine. ‘It would be really bad luck if it’s happened to her again.’

  ‘Don’t you think that if she’d genuinely gone missing someone might have told us? Her agent or someone?’ said Blount.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Banton.

  ‘You suppose right. And even if it were true, it’s nothing to do with us. We have quite enough to be getting on with. The woodentops can deal with it. We have a murderer to catch and I’m damned if I’m going to give any credence to . . . Oh Jesus Christ. That’s all I need.’

  Shunter had appeared at the door of the library.

  Savidge was in a state of extreme confusion. As the chemistry of his brain had finally begun to stabilise, the imaginary world of spies and espionage and zombies and commandos that he had constructed had started to dissolve away, leaving behind the stark realisation that he had done something very, very stupid. He had taken a world-famous actress hostage in her hotel room and he had stabbed her. Well, maybe ‘stabbed’ was a somewhat exaggerated description of what had happened but, nevertheless, it was more than enough for a c
harge of GBH to be added to his tally of offences. He suddenly found himself in a very tricky situation of his own making.

  ‘So what happens now?’ said Greeley.

  ‘Be quiet. I’m thinking,’ said Savidge.

  ‘Well, can we have a drink while you think?’ she said, reaching for the gin.

  To Shunter’s surprise, any initial frostiness from Blount had thawed immediately upon the production of the photograph. There had been no snide comments, no accusations of interfering: Blount had taken one look at the photo, shaken him by the hand and then asked DS Jaine to show him to the door before reaching for his phone and excitedly barking orders into it. The name Savidge featured a great deal.

  ‘Is he all right?’ asked Shunter. ‘I expected to get my head bitten off.’

  ‘Well . . . I shouldn’t really say but . . .’

  ‘Ah yes. I’m outside the circle of trust.’

  ‘Look, you know the score,’ said Jaine, quietly. ‘We’ve been struggling to get anywhere with this case and this is the first concrete lead we’ve had. Any suspect is going to give Blount a hard-on.’

  ‘There’s a mental image I could have done without. But look, can you do me a favour? I only said that it looked like Savidge. The photo is very blurry and he has a generic kind of face. There isn’t much distinctive about him. So please, bear that in mind and don’t go in all guns blazing when you catch up with him.’

  ‘Duly noted. Your best bet now is to stay well away from here. Get out while the going’s good.’