Murder on the Hill (6 page)

“Sure thing, Dad. Won’t be till later, though. Goin’ ridin’ with Jim.”

“Be careful,” he said.

Turning his attention back to us, he spread his arms to take in the shop. “Would you like to buy?” He gave us a cheeky smile, and I couldn’t help but warm to his old charm.

“I’m afraid you’re out of our budget, Mr. Kirino,” Cordi said. “But perhaps one day. Thank you so much for your time this morning, you’ve been very helpful.”

“Anytime. Good luck with search.”

We left him behind his counter and stepped outside into the warm sun. It was nearly noon, and my stomach rumbled loudly. Cordi heard.

“Do you want to go grab something to eat? Much better to analyse a case over some hot food.”

“Count me in,” I said. “By the way, Bellman lied. Said he didn’t know Kirino. Why would he lie about that?”

“Why indeed?” Cordi said, that eager look in her eyes again. “It’s quite the mystery. Still, food first, sleuthing later. Come on, there’s a great pub up here. It’s on expenses, so perhaps we’ll have dessert too, eh?”

“Now you’re talking.”

I didn’t need to be asked twice when cake was involved.

CHAPTER 6

After we ate a metric ton of cake and roast beef, we waddled our fat bodies back to the car and headed back to Cordi’s. We stayed in the pub for quite a while going over the notes and trying to understand why Bellman would have lied.

Nothing came to us, but Cordi said something will come up. It always does. Before we left, she called Bellman and mentioned we spoke with Ryu. Bellman gave nothing away and apparently didn’t seem overly concerned, which, of course, now makes me wonder if it wasn’t Ryu lying, but for what reason I couldn’t fathom.

Bellman gave us a list of people who had seen his wife in the last few days. She was pretty much a recluse up until then, having suffered from agoraphobia and various heart conditions. The only other people who had had access to the flat above the shop, apart from Bellman himself, were a carer and an accountant.

“It’s curious, don’t you think?” I said to Cordi as she drove us back to her place. “That an accountant was one of the last to see her alive. Do you think Bellman was doing some scam for her life insurance?”

“I don’t think so. Alex would have said something if the case was that easy.”

“Why’s he on the case, anyway? You said he works in fraud.”

“That extends to art and forgeries,” she said.

“Huh! So that ties in with what Ryu said about the doru. It was a fake. It was hollow, so couldn’t have been a real one. Perhaps we ought to share our notes with Alex, pool our—”

“Oh god, he’s got to you already, hasn’t he?” Cordi said, negotiating a roundabout with the fierce determination of a racing car driver.

“Got to me? What do you mean?”

“That smile of his, those damned eyes. He could charm the pants off the devil. But he’s bad news, Harley. Trust me.”

I hid my blush with my hand, pretending to smooth my hair back. “I just thought that if we cooperated, we might benefit from each other’s information.”

“We’re doing just fine on our own.”

“Okay, okay, shit, mind that—”

Cordi swerved around a wayward cyclist and joined the traffic as though nothing had happened. By the time we got to her place and stopped the car, I needed to use the toilet. All that cake and Cordi’s driving had made me queasy.

I grabbed her keys and dashed up the steps, unlocking the door. Running in, I slipped on something and pitched backward. Cordi was thankfully behind me to stop me from crashing to my back.

“What the fu…”

I bent down. A jiffy bag had been pushed through the letterbox. It had a courier sticker on it. It had only been sent an hour ago. Must be urgent. I handed it to Cordi, and she ripped it open.

“It’s a dongle,” Cordi said. “And a note. It’s from Bellman.”

“What does it say?”

Cordi handed it to me.

“That’s not a dongle,” I said. “That’s a memory stick.”

The handwritten note said that it was a recording of Bellman’s security camera footage from the night of the break-in. He said the police had a copy, but thought it might help us with our investigation. He signed the letter with a scrawl for a signature.

I handed it all back to Cordi. “Fire up the laptop, and we’ll take a look at it. Right now I need your toilet.”

I sprinted upstairs and hoped her bathroom wasn’t as rammed as every other room. I had important business and didn’t want to negotiate another killer bookcase.

Thankfully it wasn’t.

It was actually clean and spacious.

While I was doing my whatever I heard Cordi’s voice echo up from downstairs. The bathroom was over the kitchen. Her voice was raised, and going by the one-sided nature, she was clearly on the phone. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce who she was talking to.

“You have to get involved, don’t you,” she said. “No, I saw the way you looked at her in the library. Leave the girl alone. She’s far too young for you anyway.”

Urgh, it seemed they were talking about me. I really didn’t want to get involved in the middle of that particular shit-storm. But I disagreed with her. I wasn’t too young. Alex was in his mid-late thirties. About a decade older, that’s not exactly Playboy Bunny/Hugh Hefner territory.

“She’s a sweet girl in need of a break. She can do without you messing with her head. No, she’s working for me now. Yes, on the Bellman case. What? I know about that. It’s a fake; I guessed that when I saw you at the library. Why are you looking into it? Okay, fine, whatever. And I’ll sign those damned papers in my own time. Goodbye, Alex.”

Flush.

***

Walking into a room casually, pretending you didn’t just hear everything isn’t a skill I’ve yet mastered.

“Oh, God, you heard everything, didn’t you?” Cordi said, placing her palms on her cheeks, looking like
The Scream
painting.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I understand. It’s nice that you’re looking out for me. I’ve not had much of that from anyone, really. I appreciate it.”

“Anytime. Besides, I think you and I are making a good team.”

“Competitive cake-eating team? Absolutely.”

Cordi laughed and relaxed, though her eyes were glossy as if she were on the verge of tears. I imagine it was hard for her to deal with her ex when he was so involved with everything. This whole issue with the papers sounded serious. I didn’t want to push it, so I indicated to the laptop.

“Hey, you turned it on,” I said.

“Am I really that useless?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to sound so patronising.”

“Patronise away, my dear, I am totally useless. I don’t even know what a memory stick is or where it goes, but with Alex on my case, I can certainly think of one place.”

That conjured quite the image.

“Right here,” I said, pointing to the USB port on the side.

Cordi sat down on the chair, and I stood behind her, giving her first computer lesson. I’m sure most people’s first lesson isn’t watching security camera footage of a break-in, but everyone’s got to start somewhere.

The Finder window popped open after she plugged the memory stick in.

“Move your finger on that pad to move the arrow over the drive labelled: Bellman’s Disk.”

Cordi hesitated but managed it.

“Now just double-tap the pad with your finger to open it.”

The folder popped open, making Cordi make an ‘ooh’ sound.

Inside was a single MP4 video file.

“Okay, double-click on the file to watch the video.”

The QuickTime player popped open, and I switched it to full screen.

The black-and-white video footage looked like a static image. Nothing changed apart from the time counter in the corner. It flipped forward a few moments. The time reached two a.m.

“Oh, there’s a shadow of movement,” Cordi said.

I paused the video and put myself in the position of the intruder, having done this a few times before myself. If I were to break into a jeweller’s, I wouldn’t go through the front, like this one seemed to be. Although the figure wasn’t visible, the shadow extended out, indicating they were standing right there inside the store, just out of frame of the camera.

That indicated that they had scoped the place out and knew the location of the security camera and its angle.

I continued the video. Whoever it was out of view threw the doru so it landed on the glass countertop. It rolled over a few times before coming to a stop. The shadow withdrew just as the lights inside the shop came on and flashed, the movement must have triggered the proximity alarm.

“What are you thinking?” Cordi said.

“That whoever did this knew Bellman and knew the shop. Given the position of the shadow, it’s clear they knew they would be out of sight and that throwing the doru would set off the alarm. Given that Bellman’s place has a metal shutter outside, it must be someone who had access to a padlock key. Or someone who was good at picking locks, though those particular shutters aren’t difficult to get into.”

I shut up as Cordi was looking at me a little strange. I didn’t want to reveal all of my bad history. I still needed to pay off Ivanov, and that meant finding the gem or at least working this job, and to be honest, over the course of the day, I’d been feeling bad about trying to steal the gem. I knew it’d get Cordi into trouble and potentially harm the case.

“About the gem,” I said, about to come clean.

“Oh yes, I totally forgot,” Cordi said, interrupting me and standing up suddenly from the chair. She grabbed the book from the kitchen counter and flicked to a particular page. “Does that look like it?”

“Yeah, exactly,” I said. I have a good memory of jewels and gems.

“Read what it says under the photo.”

I scanned to the small text and read it aloud. “The Widow Maker necklace, made from a series of black diamonds, is thought to originate from Queen Victoria’s personal jeweller. It’s reputed to be cursed, having been owned by five previous ladies of varied monarchies, all of whom died in unusual or unexplainable circumstances. It was lost during World War II and is rumoured to have ended up in a cache of a Nazi general’s personal treasure.”

Closing the book, I looked up at Cordi, who was fussing with a kitchen cabinet. “What the actual fu—”

“Fudge cake, dear?”

Cordi turned, bringing out a tin with more cake inside.

“I will literally die if I eat more cake,” I said. “But thanks anyway. That curse stuff, you believe that?”

“Not for one moment. But the Nazi treasure is interesting, isn’t it?”

“Um, you’re not like a white supremacist or anything, are you?”

“No, Harley, just poor.”

“So what’s next?” I asked.

“Tea, cake, and an evening watching
Midsomer Murders
. We’ll speak with the carer and accountant tomorrow. I have a good feeling about this one,” she said, spooning fudge cake into her mouth and heading into the living room, where presumably she was going to hunt through the wreckage to find her television.

I sat down at the kitchen table and thought about the gem.

Now, I’m not one to believe in curses, but still…

I headed into the living room, dismissing my vision as an artefact of getting carried away with curses and suchlike.

Besides, there was a greater evil waiting for me.

Monty!

CHAPTER 7

Day 3

I slept through the night without incident in the now tidied-up living room.

Monty didn’t smother me; a bookcase didn’t fall on my tits. I woke with a slight sense of anticlimax, the same feeling I got from most of my ex-boyfriends.

By ‘most’, I meant two.

Despite not being entirely hideous, I’d hardly ever got close enough to boys, or men, to form a functional relationship, and I didn’t want to just sleep around for the sex, because let’s face it, a girl can please herself infinitely better than a drunken five-minute fumble. And there’s less emotional fallout to deal with.

It might be an old-fashioned idea, but I wanted to stay chaste until I met someone who I actually loved. I thought it was love twice before, hence the exes.

The first was when I was nineteen. He was a social worker helping me to get my life on track. Looking back, I now know it was just infatuation and a response to someone who spent a lot of time with me.

The connection we shared built up from the circumstances. Naturally it didn’t last long after our first intimate moment. I just knew as I lay there beneath his sweating body that I was just a sex object to him.

The whole experience made me feel so hollow that I vowed to never do it again.

Until I did.

The second guy wasn’t so sleazy and obvious. I was travelling through Peru during a couple of years of backpacking around the globe. I kept bumping into this dude on my travels in the various hostels and camping sites.

It was funny, the whole travelling thing. The chances of running into the same people were higher than you might think—especially for thrifty backpackers. There are certain countries, cheap ones, that we go to, and naturally, there are only so many affordable places for accommodation.

Guy Number Two recognised me in a bar one night. One of the few places that played Western rock music among the native Peruvian watering holes. I’d spent most of the day trekking and was using cold beer as a restorative medicine.

As soon as I saw him ordering tequila shots, it was destined to happen.

Although it wasn’t as soulless as my experience with Guy Number One, however, as we lay entwined in the heat, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted.

Being super independent and seeing the world isn’t as great as many people make out.

It can be lonely and destabilising at times.

Which is why, as I woke for the second morning in Cordi’s place, I felt more grounded and safe than I had done in months, if not years.

Sapphire had left me a message on my voicemail sometime during the night to ask how I was doing. Luckily she got her door all fixed up, and there was no other damage.

Sapphire knew my situation, so it wasn’t that strange to her that I had to run. I returned her call, telling her I was okay and would be in touch soon.