Dead Funny (2 page)

“What a remarkable piece of design!” enthused Graham. “Who was the architect?”

I didn’t hear Sylvia’s answer because at that moment something else caught my attention.

A man was sprinting across the terrace nearest to us and then down the steps towards the iron gates two at a time. I was used to seeing joggers – our local park was full of them – but this man clearly wasn’t out for exercise. He was dressed in crisp, white trousers, with a scarlet waistcoat and matching carnation that dangled precariously from the buttonhole of a red-and-white striped blazer. A once neatly knotted bow tie was rapidly unravelling, the ends flapping against his shoulder. Thinning grey hair was revealed when he stumbled and his straw hat fell onto the ground. He didn’t stop to retrieve it. When he saw our car, he froze for a second. But then he took off once more, his pace increasing even though his gait was lurching and uneven, and he had a hand to his side as if he had a stitch. He was some distance away, but I could hear what his body language was saying as clearly as if he’d shouted the words aloud. He was panicky, desperate. Terrified.

Elbowing Graham in the ribs, I pointed to the man out of my window and then asked Sylvia, “Who’s that?”

The secretary glanced at me in the rear-view mirror and then looked out across the grounds.

“What the…?” she exclaimed, slamming on the brakes again. But by the time the car had come to a halt, the man had slipped through the iron gates just before they clanged shut and disappeared from view.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“No.” Sylvia’s smooth forehead creased in a puzzled frown that made her ponytail jerk. She said crossly, “That’s most peculiar. Miss Sugarcandy didn’t say she was expecting a caller today. I do wish she’d let me know when she changes her plans, it’s so difficult to get anything organized otherwise.” She shook her head, tutting. “I’ll take you all to the house to meet Miss Sugarcandy first,” she told Mum as she accelerated up the drive once more. “Then we’ll go to the guest wing. You’ll need to get some rest, I should think, before you begin work.”

Mum didn’t answer. By now she had gone very pale. She turned and pulled a face at me and Graham. When Sylvia stopped the car in front of Miss Sugarcandy’s spectacular house and got out, Mum whispered, “I hope this isn’t a huge mistake. I suppose if she doesn’t like my ideas we can always go home again… But then I won’t get paid. Oh dear!”

“It will be fine,” I said confidently. Even though I was really sleepy, I was excited about meeting Miss Sugarcandy. The prospect of studying a real life celebrity at close quarters was absolutely fascinating.

But my eager anticipation didn’t last long.

When we walked into the vast, marbled entrance hall I realized that I wasn’t going to get the chance to see the star in action after all. No one was. Ever again.

Baby Sugarcandy lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of a sweeping staircase, and it was very obvious that she was dead.

I
was the first person to reach the body, closely followed by Graham. Mum had frozen, standing with an open mouth as if emitting a silent scream. Sylvia was also fixed to the spot, but rather than looking upset she seemed annoyed at the interruption to her well-planned timetable.

I’d seen corpses before – there had been a few of those when Graham and I had been on holiday in Scotland – so I wasn’t as shocked as Mum. Even so, it was still pretty distressing looking at that poor broken body and I had to take a few deep breaths to steady myself. Half of me just wanted to run straight back to the airport. But the other half was dead nosy. Remembering from television crime shows I’d seen that I shouldn’t touch anything, I bent over Baby Sugarcandy for a closer look.

She was old but not very wrinkly. Small – not much taller than me and Graham, I thought – and she’d really taken care of herself. Her fingernails were beautifully manicured, her lips were neatly slicked with lipstick. She wore a long, white silk dress trimmed with a red-and-white striped sash that was tied in a great big bow on her hip. She looked like she was about to walk down a red carpet with a load of photographers clicking away at her. I noticed that the heel of one shoe had snapped and was dangling by a strip of leather from the sole. And the poor woman’s neck must have snapped too, I thought: her head was twisted at such a strange angle. It was a deeply disturbing sight. She was like a china doll that had been smashed by a spoilt child: delicate, expensive, fragile and now damaged beyond repair. No amount of superglue would put her back together.

As Graham and I were absorbing the details, Sylvia Sharpe’s tightly-laced shoes padded over the marble floor towards us, closely followed by the soft thump of my mum’s trainers.

“How awful!” gasped Mum. “Poor, poor thing!”

“Oh no!” Sylvia said. “How appalling! I am so very sorry you’ve had to see this. Dear, oh dear. What a ghastly accident! I guess she tripped?”

“I suppose so…” I agreed hesitantly.

“I think her heel came adrift,” added Graham.

I looked at the staircase. It was certainly steep enough to kill anyone. If her shoe had given way at the top and she’d fallen, she could easily have broken her neck on the way down. Broken all her bones, in fact.

So why didn’t I quite believe it?

I took another look at Miss Sugarcandy. She was immaculately dressed, from her dangly diamond earrings to her pedicured feet. But there was something not quite right. What was it?

Her hair’s wrong, I thought at last. I remembered the photograph of her that Graham had found in his
Guiness World Records
. Baby Sugarcandy had styled her hair in a beehive, backcombing it, winding it round and piling it on top of her head until it looked like an enormous ice cream. But now it was a mess, squashed and crumpled like a badly-made bird’s nest. What’s more, it was slightly damp, as if she’d just stepped out of the shower. I sniffed. A faint whiff of bleach was coming from it.

Sylvia had bent down and was now extending a hand towards the corpse. “I’ll carry her to her room,” she said. “Her daughter Judy will be home soon. I don’t want her to be troubled.”

“No!” I said sharply. “Don’t touch a thing!”

Sylvia looked at me, astonished. “It was an accident, young lady. We can’t just leave her here. If Judy sees her mother like this she’ll be in therapy for ever.”

But it was too late. At that moment, a theatrical sigh of immense weariness was followed by a series of thuds as several heavy bags were dropped on the marble floor.

I turned to see a thirty-something-ish blonde standing amid a pile of designer shopping bags. She was the complete opposite of Sylvia: all lace and glitzy jewellery and heavy make-up. Her heels were scarily high, her bust was thrust forward in a menacing fashion, and she wore so much lipstick that I was surprised she could speak – it looked as though her lips ought to be gummed together. I assumed this was Baby’s daughter, Judy. “Sylvia,” she said, “take these bags up to my room, would you? And then fix me something long and cool to drink. I’m
exhausted
.”

Sylvia didn’t move and Judy looked at her with a frown of annoyance. “Didn’t you hear me?” she said. “Why are you just standing there?”

“Miss Ford,” Sylvia said slowly. “Judy, I—”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid there’s been a terrible accident.” Sylvia stepped aside so that Judy could see her mother’s body.

Judy’s eyes narrowed for a moment as she took the scene in. “Is she dead?”

“I’m afraid so,” replied Sylvia.

A strange look passed across Judy’s face: it wasn’t sorrow, it wasn’t shock, it was satisfaction. She tried but failed to smother a smile of pleasure. Her heels clacked across the marble floor as she teetered towards her mother and said, “Oh, for pity’s sake!” She looked down at the broken body. “Sylvia, you’d better carry her up to her room. And then I guess you should call a doctor.”

“I think it’s a little late for that—” Sylvia began.

“I can see that,” Judy said waspishly. “But he’ll need to sign a death certificate or something, won’t he? Go on, pick her up.”

“You mustn’t!” I protested. “Don’t touch anything.”

Judy looked at me and her eyes narrowed into snake-like slits. “And who the hell are you?”

“This is Poppy. Her mother, Ms Fields, is doing some work for Miss Sugarcandy, or at least she was…” said Sylvia.

“First I’ve heard of it,” snarled Judy.

Mum stepped in front of me then as if to defend me from the savagery of Judy’s glare. I took advantage of it by slipping a hand into Mum’s pocket and pulling out her mobile phone.

Then Graham and I edged casually back towards the front door and stepped outside. I dialled 999.

It didn’t work.

“You’re dialling the wrong number,” said Graham. “It’s 911 over here. And you probably need the country code too.”

So, thankful for Graham’s nerdiness once again, I dialled the numbers he told me to and this time got through to the police.

“I’m at Miss Sugarcandy’s house,” I explained quickly. “And she’s dead. It looks like an accident but I don’t think it is—”

“Sure, honey,” said a crisp voice at the other end. “Now hang up so people in real trouble can get through.”

“I’m not joking,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“No, really. It looks like she’s fallen down the stairs. Her neck’s broken.”

The person on the other end sighed and said, “OK, sugar, but you’d better not be kidding. I’ll get a car up there right now. Don’t touch anything, and don’t let anybody leave the premises.”

We went back into the house.

Mum was saying quietly, “Surely the authorities ought to be told? In England if there’s a sudden death—”

“There’ll be no cops,” Judy barked.

“But—” said Mum and Sylvia together.

“She had a fall,” Judy said firmly. “Anyone can see that. Sylvia, pick her up. And you.” She fixed Mum with a fierce look. “Whoever you are and whatever you think you’re doing here, you can go right back to wherever you came from.”

“I don’t think we can actually,” I said. “The police say we have to stay here.”

“You called the cops?!” shrieked Judy.

“Yes. They’re on their way.”

As if to back me up, the sound of sirens drifted in through the mansion doors, faintly distant, but growing louder.

“Great!” sneered Judy. “That’s all I need. I’m going to my room.”

“You can’t,” I told her. “We’ve all got to stay exactly where we are until they arrive. We’re witnesses, you see.”

“Witnesses?” Judy screamed, her face growing as red as her lipstick. She glared at me. “To what? An old lady whose heel snapped? An old lady who took a tumble and broke her own neck?”

“No,” I said, swallowing nervously but staring straight back at her. “Witnesses to murder.”

Tea
was the only solution. When the police arrived we were confined to the vast kitchen while they examined the scene of the crime. Baby Sugarcandy’s furniture, fixtures and fittings looked like they had been magically transported from an old-fashioned English farmhouse, which was quite a surprise among all that steel and glass. Finding a copper kettle, Mum filled it and set it on the Aga to boil. Judy sat at the long pine table, picking off her scarlet nail polish and looking furious.

Sylvia stood in the middle of the slate-tiled floor, her hands knotting and unknotting themselves, uncertain about what to do with herself.

Graham and I retired to the far corner, where a warm, floral-scented breeze was blowing through an open window. Perching on high stools by the counter, I opened my body language book, and Graham opened his
Guiness World Records
. Neither of us read a word, there was too much going on for that. But the books were a useful screen to hide behind while we had a hasty, whispered conversation.

“Are you sure she was murdered?” muttered Graham nervously. “It looked like an accident to me. The police won’t be amused if you’re wrong.”

“Her hair was wet,” I replied. “And it smelt funny. Like she’d been bleaching it.”

“So? Maybe she had,” said Graham.

“With that posh dress on?” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Graham looked perplexed as if the mysteries of hairdressing were utterly beyond his comprehension. “Well, you wear clothes to go to the hairdresser don’t you? And if you go to a posh salon you’d wear posh clothes, wouldn’t you? I don’t think that’s necessarily significant.”

I considered. I hoped he wasn’t right. I mean, I’d only been to a salon once. Most of the time Mum was happy to trim my fringe with a pair of kitchen scissors but she’d made me go and have a proper haircut just before she’d won that prize at the Chelsea Flower Show. They had basins that you tipped your head back into while someone else washed it. “She was at home, Graham, not the hairdressers.”

“She’s a star. She might have an army of stylists in the house for all we know. Probably got a whole salon upstairs.”

I was beginning to suspect that Graham might be right, in which case I would be arrested for wasting police time. Oh dear. “OK,” I said reluctantly. “But why would she have been walking around with wet hair? When I went with my mum we had our hair blow-dried.” I shuddered. I’d hated every second of it.

“Perhaps she got interrupted,” suggested Graham. “The phone could have rung, or someone could have come to the door…”

“Mmmmm, maybe.” I didn’t want to let go of my hunch that things weren’t right. But I’d had hunches before that had turned out to be mistakes. Fighting a sinking feeling, I shut my eyes and recalled exactly how Baby Sugarcandy had looked. The soggy hair. The diamonds. “That’s it!” I hissed. “Got it. I know what was wrong. Even if she’d been in the middle of having her hair washed, surely she would have taken her earrings off first?”

“That would seem to be the logical thing to do,” Graham agreed.

At that point the kettle screamed to announce it was boiling and Mum dashed to take it off the heat. She was intercepted by Sylvia, who said with a contorted smile, “You’re a guest here. I’ll make the tea.”

“Oh, I’d rather—” protested Mum.

“I know what you’re thinking. It’s what all you British assume: Americans can’t make proper tea?”