Booked for Murder Read online

  “Lindsay?” It was Helen’s familiar voice, Liverpudlian crossed with Glaswegian, untouched by anything south of the M62. “How’re you doing, girl?”

  “Off my head with jet lag, but otherwise okay. Listen, Helen, I need a bed a few nights sooner than we anticipated.”

  “What do you mean, jet lag? Are you here in London already?”

  “Yes. Just me. I’ll explain when I see you, it’s too complicated over the phone. Is your spare room free?”

  “Course it is. The whole house is a total tip, though, on account of I wasn’t expecting the pair of you till next week, but if you don’t mind a bit of chaos and no milk in the fridge, move on in. Sophie’ll go nutso when she sees the state of the place, but I’ve had more important things on my mind than tidying and Kirsten wouldn’t notice if the council started emptying bins into the living room, bless her,” Helen gabbled.

  “Sophie’s not with me,” Lindsay cut in as soon as Helen paused for breath.

  “Aw, Lindsay, you’ve not done one, have you? I know you, first sign of trouble and you’re off over the horizon. You should stay and talk it over, you know you should. You’re a million times better for her than I ever was.”

  Lindsay laughed. “Give me some credit. I have grown up a wee bit in the last half-dozen years. There’s nothing wrong between me and Sophie, I swear. The reason I’m here early is something else entirely. Look, I’ll explain when I see you, okay? I’m running out of money here.”

  “All right. Listen, can you get yourself round to the office? Only I’ve got to leg it to an important meeting, but I can leave the spare set of keys with reception, and you can sort yourself out, is that okay?”

  “That’s fi–” The money ran out and Lindsay found herself talking to dead air. She hailed the first cab that passed and asked him to wait outside the warehouse in Camden occupied by Watergaw Films while she picked up the keys. They stopped at Meredith’s to collect Lindsay’s luggage, then carried on to Helen’s terraced house in Fulham. As the black taxi juddered through the early afternoon traffic, Lindsay pondered her next move. Collecting keys and luggage had reminded her that she needed to check out the flat where Penny had been living.

  Dredging her memory for details of a half-forgotten dinner conversation with Penny and Meredith, Lindsay recalled that Penny had swapped her house for a flat in Islington belonging to a friend of Sophie. An academic, Lindsay recalled. A philosopher? A psychologist? A philologist? Something like that. The Rubik’s cube of memory clicked another turn and the pieces fell into place. A palaeontologist attached to the Natural History Museum. Called . . . She pinched the bridge of her nose in an attempt to awaken her protesting brain as the taxi rattled along Fulham Road. They turned into a side street wide enough for cars to double park without obstructing the road, then rounded the corner into a street of three-storey terraced villas, their stucco in varying states of repair that reflected whether they were single residences or split into rented flats. As the taxi squealed to a halt, Lindsay suddenly realized she didn’t really need to remember his name. He was the man living in Penny’s house, at the end of a phone whose number she knew almost as well as her own.

  Feeling triumphant, she paid off the taxi and staggered wearily up Helen’s short path with a bag that felt heavier with each step. She unlocked the three mortises that fastened the front door of the sparklingly painted house and keyed the last four digits of the phone number into the alarm pad to silence the high-pitched squeal of the warning klaxon. Then she stumbled into a living room that could have been sold to the Tate Gallery under the title of Installation: Millennium Chaos. There were piles of newspapers and magazines in a haphazard array by the chairs and the sofa. The coffee table was invisible under an anarchy of used crockery. A spread of CDs was strewn in front of the stereo and tapes were tossed randomly on the shelves to either side of it. Books teetered in tall pillars against the wall. The only remotely ordered area in the room was a cabinet of videos that seemed to be arranged according to some system, though there were gaps in the rows and half a dozen unboxed tapes were piled on top of the TV. A tabby cat sprawled on one of the two video recorders, barely registering Lindsay’s arrival with a flicker of one eyelid.

  Lindsay closed her eyes briefly. She’d had her moments in the untidiness rankings, but she’d never come close to this. Helen had been right. Sophie would go absolutely nutso. Grinning, she gripped her suitcase and staggered upstairs. The spare room was considerably clearer than downstairs. On the floor next to the ironing board was the biggest pile of clean but crumpled clothes Lindsay had ever seen, but that apart, the room could have been almost anyone’s guest room. What marked it out as belonging to Helen were the framed TV and film stills featuring actors she’d placed in her previous career as a casting director. Though she’d progressed to producer/director in her own independent production company, it was clear she hadn’t forgotten how she’d started in the business.

  Lindsay dumped her case on the floor, not even bothering to open it, and headed back downstairs. There had to be a phone somewhere. She tracked it by the flashing light on the answering machine. A glance at her watch told her it would be just after eight in the morning in San Francisco. She didn’t even have to feel guilty about calling too early. On the third ring, a voice said, “Hello?”

  Foiled in her hope that he’d identify himself, Lindsay blundered on regardless. “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “It’s Lindsay here. Sophie’s partner?”

  “Oh, hello,” said the precise voice she remembered from phone calls she’d answered previously. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. And you? Settling in okay?”

  “Well . . . Everything was going splendidly and then I had some rather terrible news about . . . well, about our flat and the woman we swapped with.”

  “I heard about that,” Lindsay said sympathetically. “That’s actually why I was ringing, Brian.” Brian! It had suddenly come to her in midsentence. Brian Steinberg, married to an anthropologist called Miriam. Grinning with relief, Lindsay said, “I know this probably sounds a bit weird, Brian, but did you happen to leave a spare set of keys with anybody when you left?”

  “Keys?” he echoed.

  “Yeah, for the flat.” When in doubt, gabble. It was a lesson Lindsay had learned from Helen years ago, and she’d just had the refresher course. “The thing is, Penny’s girlfriend, Meredith, is in a bit of a state, as you can imagine, and I’m over here in England with her trying to get things sorted out. You know what it’s like, all the bureaucracy. Anyway, I’m just trying to sort out the practical stuff, and Penny’s agent is desperate to get hold of the manuscript of Penny’s last book, and it’s stuck on the hard disk of her computer, which of course is in the flat, and the police are being really difficult about letting anyone in, so I thought if I could get the keys and just nip in and out . . . I mean, you know me, you know I wouldn’t be doing anything I shouldn’t be doing . . .”

  “I don’t know,” he said hesitantly. “If the police don’t want you to go in . . .”

  “There’s no reason for us not to go into the flat. It’s not as if the police have any objections, it’s just that they’re being really awkward about fixing up a time when we can go and sort it out. I don’t have to tell you about bureaucracy, you’re dealing with American academia.”

  “Yeah,” he said, with feeling. “Oh, I suppose it’ll be okay. I can’t see any real problem, and the police have had days now to do whatever it is they have to do. I left a spare set with Miriam’s sister. She lives up in Hampstead.” Brian gave Lindsay the address and promised to phone his sister-in-law right away to warn her Lindsay was on her way.

  What felt like a lifetime later, Lindsay emerged from the rancid stuffiness of the tube into sunlight at Highbury Corner. Even though it was laden with traffic fumes, the air was still fresh enough to rouse her from the virtually catatonic state she’d reached underground thanks to the combination of heat, jet lag, lack of oxygen and lack of proper sleep.
She hoped her exhaustion wouldn’t make her miss anything in the flat. Probably it could have waited till the following day, but Lindsay had never liked leaving till tomorrow what could be thrashed out today. Besides, this was a good time to make an unauthorized entry. At the end of the working day, all sorts of people were going in and out of buildings where they didn’t necessarily live.

  To guard against her potential for carelessness, she stopped at a chain-store chemist for a pack of disposable latex gloves. A few minutes later, she turned into the street where Brian and Miriam occupied the middle flat in a converted Georgian terraced house. Even though she was pretty certain the police would have finished by now with the scene of crime, that was no reason to take chances. She walked right to the end of the street, then kept turning right till she’d done a circuit of the block and was back where she’d started. She’d seen no sign of any police officers, nor did there seem to be any twitching curtains or faces at windows as she strolled down the street for the second time.

  Deciding it was clear, she turned nonchalantly into the entrance of Brian and Miriam’s house. She climbed the four steps up to the front door and hastily sorted through the bunch of keys until she found the ones that fitted the two locks on the heavy street door. Inside, she closed the door smartly behind her. Ahead lay a dim carpeted hallway, a flight of stairs at the far end. Cautiously, Lindsay made for it and climbed to the first landing. There was a sturdy door facing her, criss-crossed with yellow plastic tape that proclaimed Police. Keep out. The flat was still officially a crime scene.

  Pulling a face, Lindsay pulled on the gloves, then fumbled with the locks until the door swung free. Then, with a quick look round the corner to check the stairs above were still clear, she ducked under the tapes and into the flat. This long after the killing, she couldn’t believe she was going to affect any crucial forensic evidence.

  She found herself in a corridor which opened out into a large, high-ceilinged room whose walls were hung with richly colored fabric panels. The soft furnishings were low, squashy and oatmeal-colored, coordinating with what could be seen of the room’s paintwork. Face down on a low table whose legs were carved African fertility goddesses was an open paperback of a Robertson Davies novel. Beside the nearest chair was a bowl of grapes starting to go moldy, a thick A3 pad of scrap paper and, inevitably around Penny, a couple of autopencils. Caught momentarily off guard, Lindsay was ambushed by her grief. Suddenly, she couldn’t see through tears, and the lump in her throat threatened to choke her. Subsiding into the nearest chair, she set her sorrow free, her shoulders shaking with sobs as memory flooded her.

  Eventually, the wave of pain receded, leaving her beached in a corner of the enveloping sofa. She rubbed a hand across her face, forgetting about the gloves until the latex skidded across her tear-streaked cheek. With a watery grin, Lindsay pushed herself out of the sofa and forced herself to work.

  There wasn’t much more in the living room to mark Penny’s presence, apart from a postcard of the Golden Gate bridge from Meredith, wishing her a safe arrival. Interesting that she hadn’t binned it, Lindsay thought. Perhaps Penny hadn’t been as adamant in her dismissal as she had seemed to be.

  Lindsay crossed the hall into the kitchen. While the lounge looked as if its resident had popped out for a minute, the kitchen made it plain that she wouldn’t ever be coming back. On the cork-tile floor was a reddish-brown stain like a giant Rorschach test. Spatters of dried blood afflicted everything else in the room, from cupboard doors to kettle, their sizes ranging from pinpricks to bottle tops. There was even what looked like a thin drizzle in one corner of the ceiling. On every surface, the bloodstains were half obscured by fragments of glass and fingerprint powder. Looking at the room, it was hard to imagine how it had got like this. Logically, Lindsay knew that when an artery was pierced, blood spurted and sprayed like an out-of-control fountain. But this was beyond that. It looked as if someone had shaken a jeroboam of blood-colored champagne and sprayed it joyously round the room, like a driver winning a murderous Grand Prix. And then thrown the bottle after the foam.

  She took a deep breath. There was a faint metallic smell of blood but it was overlaid by the sour smell of spilt beer. Lindsay looked around at the arena of death, taking in the outline marked on the floor like a scene from a bad Saturday Night Mystery Movie. She noted the fridge, tall for a British one, its top standing just under five feet above floor height. On top of it, three bottles of German Weissbier remained standing. In spite of her reputation among her students and former colleagues as a cold-hearted bastard, Lindsay didn’t expect to drink wheat beer ever again.

  It was easy to see how the first assumption was of accidental death. A bottle exploding under pressure at that height could easily drive flying glass slicing through soft tissue. To have imagined it was murder would have seemed perverse without Catriona Polson’s information. Even so, there were no signs of another’s presence. No alien footprints, no tell-tale bloody handprints on the door jamb. Nothing that didn’t tally with the hypothesis of accident.

  Sighing, Lindsay backed away from the kitchen and started to search the rest of the flat. In the bedroom, she found nothing unexpected. Penny’s suitcases were under the bed. Her clothes occupied one half of the wardrobe, Brian and Miriam’s, presumably, the other half. The chests of drawers told the same story. In one, Lindsay recognized Penny’s T-shirts and swimsuits. In the other, unfamiliar clothes were stuffed into overcrowded drawers. The bedside table held a notepad and autopencil, a battered copy of W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems and an alarm clock.

  She had higher hopes of the study when she saw the papers strewn across desk and table, but even a casual scrutiny told her there was little of interest there. There were a couple of scribbled lists of Stuff To Do along the lines of “Imperial War Museum, tampons, Tabasco, Brewer’s Dictionary, ???video store???, bread, grapes, ???Calistoga???” Under a paperweight there was what looked like a reading list—The Ghost Road, The Invisible Man, The High Cost of Living, The Information, Crime and Punishment. An odd selection, but other people’s reading tastes never seemed normal, in Lindsay’s experience. Most of the rest of the sheets contained single handwritten paragraphs of description of individual characters. These ranged from highly stylized and polished pen portraits to scrawled sentences like “looks like Larry, broods on imagined slights, has the dress sense of a color-blind hobo in a thrift shop.” Lindsay couldn’t help a smile escaping as she skimmed them.

  Eventually, she found a dozen pages with the header Heart of Glass. Judging by the page numbers, they were from the first couple of chapters, though not all the pages were present. She searched those of the desk drawers that were unlocked, but found no more of the supposed 300 pages that Penny had completed. As she shifted the desk away from the wall to search more thoroughly, she discovered something more chilling than the missing papers. The power socket behind the desk contained a plug with a cable that led into a transformer which stepped down the voltage from 240 to 12. A second cable led from the transformer to nowhere. But Lindsay knew what would normally be attached to that particular cable.

  “‘The curious incident of the dog in the night-time,’” Lindsay muttered as she cast around the room for any possible remaining hiding place for a laptop computer and a fistful of floppy disks. It was conceivable that the police might have taken the manuscript away with them for further scrutiny once murder had been alleged. But she found it hard to believe that even the most dim-witted of detectives would have taken the laptop away for further study without the source of its power. Admittedly, it ran off batteries too, but not for long enough to scrutinize every file on the hard disk.

  The absence of the laptop was a serious problem. Lindsay had hoped it would still be here, not least because Penny and her computer were virtually joined at the hip. Unlike most authors, who seemed content to use their machines merely as word processors on which to write their novels, Penny fed everything into her machine—accounts, diary, notes, scanned photo
graphs of Meredith, her friends and her beloved garden. Lindsay had expected to find answers to almost all of her questions nestling somewhere in the massive memory of a machine that weighed little more than a bag of sugar. To find it gone was more than a setback; it was a puzzle.

  Whoever had taken it was no petty thief; the printer, for example, was still sitting on the floor under the table. Lindsay decided the chances were it had been taken by someone who knew a little about computers, since there wasn’t a floppy disk in the place. After a painful episode in the early days of her computing life when a hard disk had crashed and Penny had lost seventy pages of a new book, she had been particular to the point of paranoia about making copies of all her material on floppy disks. Given that her motto when working was “Back up early and back up often,” it was inconceivable that there were no floppies to be found.

  The only reasonable conclusion seemed to be that the killer had known Penny’s habit of storing every piece of her personal and professional data on her computer and had needed to make sure some incriminating piece of information was gone for ever with the absence of her hard disk and every floppy in the place. Whoever killed Penny Varnavides had not only known about the murder method outlined in her book. They had also had to possess a considerable amount of information about her life. Lindsay rubbed her tired eyes and sighed. If she hadn’t been representing Meredith, she’d have been her prime suspect.

  She had a last trawl round the flat, checking she hadn’t missed the laptop and the back-ups. Finally, she was forced to admit failure. Wherever they were, it wasn’t in the flat. And there was nothing else to be found here.