Murder on Page One (2 page)

‘Go and get the receptionist to open up this computer, will you?’ Osborne said. ‘We’ll have to take it away, but I’d like a sniff round it first. And try to find out who sent the roses. You’re a woman,’ he added.

Shaking her head, Flick willed herself to be patient.

‘I organised the flowers,’ Aline-Wendy admitted after some probing. ‘Ms McNeill thought it important, professionally, you know, that people should see how much she was loved. I know very little about her private life, she kept that to herself. When someone did send her flowers, she was so pleased, so happy. Anyway, at the end of a bad week I organised a delivery. I put on the card: “From you-know-who”, and she just winked at me. But I could tell she liked them. From then on, every Monday, I phoned in an order. These were fresh yesterday. She commented on their deep red colour.’ Her voice dropping to a whisper, she added, ‘I even started taking the money out of the company account.’

‘Sergeant! I haven’t all day,’ Osborne’s voice was raised.

‘Sorry,’ Flick whispered, then added, ‘We really need to see what she had on her computer. Could you get us in?’

A look of panic passed over Aline-Wendy’s face. ‘But Ms McNeill is … was very strict about security, erm, confidentiality, that sort of thing.’

‘This is a murder,’ Flick said softly. ‘Did Ms McNeill have any enemies you can think of?’

‘Some agents didn’t like her much, I believe, but she always said that was envy. Almost everyone loved her …’ She reached again for the tissues.

‘Felicity!’

‘Coming,’ Flick snapped. Putting on a severe face, she said, ‘We need to catch who did this. Please, now.’

Aline-Wendy responded to a firm tone, as Flick sensed she would. She glanced at her face in her hand-mirror and sniffed. Then she marched into her employer’s office, doing her best to ignore Osborne, who lolled in the chair and watched as she bent over the desk.

‘There, that’s her e-mails. You’ll be able to see most of her documents, too. I don’t know the passwords for a few files. That’s all I can do. And we don’t have ashtrays in the office.’ Aline-Wendy straightened herself, sniffed again and left the room.

Osborne pinched the butt of his cigarette and put it in his pocket then spent the next ten minutes reading e-mails. A pile of hard-backs sat on a coffee table. Flick selected one and began to read. It was a ‘whodunit’. On the first page, a pensioner was garrotted. She picked up another. It opened with a traffic warden being hung, drawn and quartered. She saw the significance of the page under the body but didn’t rush to share her insight.

‘Nothing here,’ Osborne sighed. ‘Still, you’d better have a gander.’ He looked out of the window. ‘Give me the car keys. I’ll pick you up here in a couple of hours.’

Trying not to imagine the aromas she feared he would return with, Flick brushed fingerprint powder and cigarette ash from the desk then sat at the dead woman’s computer, eating the muesli bars she had packed in her briefcase.

An hour later, she reluctantly agreed with the Inspector. It was the computer of a busy and successful businesswoman, with no frivolity anywhere and surprisingly few unpublished books in the documents.

‘Did Ms McNeill get a lot of approaches from people who wanted her to represent them? New writers, I mean?’ Flick asked when Aline-Wendy brought her a coffee.

‘Hundreds. Every week.’

‘I see no sign. There’s nothing on the computer and there are no piles of manuscripts in this room.’

‘We don’t keep them here. I’ll show you if you like.’ She led the way to a cupboard in the corner of the hallway. With an apologetic shrug, she opened it.

The space from floor to ceiling was crammed with thick bundles of paper, all white A4. Flick pulled out one at random and disturbed some dust. The thick rubber band which held it together had perished and fell uselessly to the floor. On the front, in large bold type was the title, A Bath Full of Blood, and the author’s name and details. At the back was a large, brown, stamped addressed envelope. Spilling it and some of the typescript, Flick checked the first page. As she expected, a body was found in a bloody bath. She put the bundle down and selected another: a gamekeeper was shot on page one.

‘Ms McNeill liked a shock opening,’ Flick commented.

‘She insisted on it. For crime.’

‘Was it mostly crime she dealt with?’

‘Yes. There’s a huge international market. If you get a hit, it can be very lucrative. We’ve had quite a few best-sellers.’

‘I see from your website that wannabes are asked to e-mail their submissions. What happens when they do?’

‘They come to me. I look at them. If the first chapter seems well-written and there’s a murder on the first page, I e-mail the author, inviting them to send the full manuscript in hard copy, with a stamped addressed envelope. The manuscripts go in the cupboard.’

‘And did Ms McNeill …?’

‘She was so busy. She concentrated on her existing clients. “They’re our bread, butter and jam,” she would say.’

‘What about the wannabes?’

Aline-Wendy pulled a face. ‘“Nevergonnabes”, she called them. I felt sorry for them. Some had tried very hard. I usually took a couple from the cupboard home at weekends and, if I really liked them, I put them on her desk, but it’s nearly two years since we’ve taken on a new author. Mind you, today he’s a best-seller.’

‘Can you give me a list of all the wannabes who have approached you in the last year?’ Flick was thinking needles and haystacks.

Aline-Wendy shook her head. ‘The e-mail rejections get a standard response then I delete the submission and our reply. Once we’ve had a look at the manuscripts we send them back. We don’t keep records. You could look through the cupboard, of course.’

Flick, who had pictured herself writing detective stories in her retirement, was downcast. ‘If they send in their manuscript and don’t hear back, do they not get impatient?’

‘Sometimes, but I just tell them we’re very busy and we’ll let them know when we can. About once a year, I go through the cupboard and send back a whole lot even if we haven’t looked at them.’

‘Can you think of anyone who has responded angrily after being rejected?’

‘They just seem to accept it. Sorry, I can’t think of anyone right now.’ Aline-Wendy shook her head then brightened. ‘But I have an idea. You should contact the Crime Writers’ Association. They run a competition for aspiring writers. It’s called the Debut Dagger. If Ms McNeill’s killer wants to become a crime writer, they’re sure to enter. I think the closing date is early February.’

‘Just a week or two away. A lot of the entries will already be in. How do I find them?’

‘I don’t know. They’re in England, somewhere. You’d probably be best Googling them.’

As Flick thanked Aline-Wendy, the door flew open. Osborne rolled in, pungent wafts of spices and nicotine in his wake. Flick took the air freshener from the desk and gave a five-second burst.

3

‘You’re ’aving a laugh, pet … Felicity. Why should crime writers associate? To plan murders?’

‘As we can’t compare lists of both agents’ rejects, the Debut Dagger has to be the next best thing.’

‘We’re sticking in the real world. I’ll solve this with old-fashioned police work, not by consulting ’Ercule bloody Poirot.’

‘They say that all writers reveal more of themselves than they think, and if we’re looking for disappointed wannabe authors …’

‘Bollocks. You cannot be serious.’ They were driving past the All-England Club on their way to Lorraine McNeill’s flat, and Osborne mangled the vowels of Brooklyn and Whitechapel as he delivered the famous McEnroe line.

Flick shrugged. It was no more than she had expected. She would wait till old-fashioned police work hit a dead end before raising the subject again.

Lorraine McNeill had made her home in a modern luxury block standing back from a road containing expensive houses. Four-by-fours, or ‘Wimbledon tanks’ as Sharon, Flick’s friend in traffic called them, guarded many of the driveways, ready to close in on the local Primary School later in the afternoon.

Flick had the keys. Once through the outer door, the two officers gazed round the marble-floored foyer, silently asking themselves how much a flat here would cost.

A ping announced the arrival of the lift. Over his shoulder, Osborne said: ‘You said the second floor? Check out the stairs and I’ll have a look at the lift.’ As the door slid open, he barged in before a smartly-dressed woman could get out. Flick had noticed that, in the presence of wealth, the Inspector became more than usually pugnacious. She smiled apologetically at the woman, who ignored her.

The stairs were spotlessly clean. Flick saw nothing remarkable as, deliberately slowly, she made her way up. Outside the flat, Osborne scowled at her, an unlit cigarette between his lips. Enjoying his impatience, she selected the correct key, put it in the lock and turned it.

Cautiously, she pushed the door and peered into the dark hallway. There was a screech and a scrabbling noise. A light brown cat sped past and down the stairs. Both officers pretended they had not been startled. Osborne switched on the light and they went in.

Immaculate was the word Flick first thought of. Clinical was the second. It was like a show flat until Osborne left muddy footprints behind him. Even the cat’s litter tray and basket, side by side on the floor of the gleaming kitchen, had a designer appearance.

Flick went to the desk in the living room and began to search through the drawers, unsure what she should be looking for and hoping that she would recognise something significant if she saw it. It did not take her long to bag the financial papers and scan the holiday brochures. Luxury was the constant theme, but from the pages that had been marked it was clear that McNeill had been a single holidaymaker. Flick went through utility bills and boring letters about insurance and concluded that the dead woman had been well-organised and rich, but lonely. The only thing in the room with personality was the bookcase. It occupied an entire wall and most shelves held two rows. There were lines of bleached and battered Agatha Christie paperbacks. Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Georgette Heyer were well represented. Flick ran her fingers along volumes by Drabble, Du Maurier, Mitford and Austin. A leather-bound Dickens set occupied the top shelf. The sole photograph in the room was above the fire. It showed a family group: a father, mother and two pre-teen girls. Their clothes suggested the late seventies. The CD rack was filled by Mozart and Beethoven. Flick wondered if the preening confidence exuded by her office had been skin-deep, and that Lorraine McNeill had come home seeking the comforts of childhood.

‘Life is full of surprises,’ Osborne said, making her jump. He came into the room and waved under her nose a pink dildo, which he held by his fingertips, despite the rubber gloves. ‘Bedside table,’ he explained. ‘Hold this bag open, will you?’

Flick could see no connection between the dildo and the murder, but she showed no emotion as she helped bag the exhibit.

‘Got to be thorough, Felicity,’ Osborne said. With a wink that made Flick’s flesh creep, he returned to continue his search.

The retired stockbroker who lived across the landing told the detectives that Ms McNeill had been a quiet neighbour. Pleasant and polite without being friendly, she worked long hours and seldom had visitors. He and his wife were appalled to hear she had been murdered. She had lived there alone for the past three years.

‘So, no partner, no lover, success by day, wanker by night. You say there’s no children, a sister in Australia and a widowed mum in a home near Slough?’ Osborne asked once they were back in the car.

‘Right.’

‘She drank, you know. She had two gin bottles in the kitchen. And a good few bottles of wine. Chateau this, Chateau that and Chateau the next thing.’

‘Were the bottles empty or full?’

‘Full, of course, except one of the gin bottles. But you don’t buy that stuff to stick it up on your mantelpiece. Anyway, her ex-husband’s coming in. When?’

‘Five.’

‘Do her finances look okay?’

‘Can’t say for sure, but yes, I think so.’

‘Dig deeper, Felicity. This woman had one deadly enemy, and I plan to find out who that was, without blindly interviewing a bunch of crap crime writers.’

* * *

‘I hadn’t seen her for months, honestly.’ George McNeill, a tall man in a shapeless tweed jacket, who reminded Flick of the actor in the BT ads, looked worried. ‘We are … were divorced,’ he added defensively.

Neither Osborne nor Flick said anything. Faces expressionless, they eyeballed him across the table.

He began to gabble. ‘It was a bit acrimonious at the time, but that was three years ago, and we were fine any time we met or spoke on the phone. It was a complicated settlement. Loose ends to tidy up, you know? Lawyers are expensive, so we tried to sort out any problems ourselves. Not that there were many. Or that important, really. No children. Just as well, I suppose … It was a mistake to buy property in Spain. You think our bureaucracy is bad …’ With a twitchy smile he looked at the files on the desk. ‘It got sorted, of course. She could negotiate, I can tell you. She was a natural for her job. I still can’t believe it.’ Sitting back in his chair, he looked almost desolate.

‘Did she have any other romantic attachments?’ Osborne asked sharply.