Poison Pen Read online

  In two seconds flat Zenith had disappeared under a heap of horse manure.

  the old boar

  Zenith didn’t stay for her event. She’d been literally dumped on from a great height. After they’d dug her out – which took a while – she charged out of the town hall and back to the hotel, pushing pink princesses roughly aside and threatening to sue Viola Boulder and pretty much every other human being who’d ever dared to exist.

  Back in the green room, news of the incident was greeted with loud guffaws from Katie Bell and Francisco Botticelli. Muriel Black laughed until she cried, and even Basil Tamworth allowed himself a good giggle.

  Katie, Francisco and Muriel were scheduled to do an event together right after Zenith had finished. Nigella Churchill was chairing a discussion on “Reality versus Fantasy in Teen Fiction”.

  Their event was supposed to be in the same place as Zenith’s, but of course the stage was completely covered in horse manure, so Viola had to hastily sort out a different room. Basil Tamworth was doing a talk in the library next door and the other rooms in the town hall were taken up with various adults’ creative writing workshops and a desperately serious poetry reading. The only one left was where Charlie had done his session in the morning. Leaving dozens of heroic volunteers shovelling manure into dustbins, Graham and I escorted the three authors upstairs. We helped put the chairs back out while Tim clipped microphones to the writers’ chests.

  “Do you think one of them might have been behind the assault?” Graham asked me quietly.

  I looked over at Katie, Francisco and Muriel, who were still chuckling.

  “I wish I’d seen her face!” laughed Katie.

  “Me too,” sniggered Muriel.

  “It musth have been magnifico!”

  “They probably dislike Zenith enough to want to drown her in manure,” I replied. “But if they planned it as a joke, wouldn’t they have come and watched it happen? I mean, that would be half the fun, wouldn’t it? The anticipation? No… I don’t think it was them.”

  “It must have required a great deal of effort to obtain that much manure and load it into the roof space without people noticing,” said Graham.

  “Not necessarily.” I know all about manure supplies. That’s what happens when your mum is a landscape gardener. “There’s a stables just down the road. It would be dead easy to get hold of a few bags. And it was chaos in here this morning. Anyone could have done it, I reckon.”

  “Max Spectre?”

  “Well, he certainly gets around without anyone noticing. He seems to be popping up all over the place, doesn’t he? Next time we see him, we’ll follow, OK?”

  Graham didn’t look too thrilled at the idea but nodded bravely.

  “Max seems to be the only one who links everything together so far, doesn’t he?” I said thoughtfully. “I mean, he could have put those notes in the packs. He’s got some sort of problem with Charlie – and Zenith. He tried to get both of them to take that bag off him. I don’t know why he’s doing it, but I think Max is our man.”

  “Should we tell someone?” asked Graham.

  I considered for a while. Nasty notes. A football in the face. Horse manure. It didn’t exactly add up to Grievous Bodily Harm. Not yet, anyway. “Maybe he’s just got a warped sense of humour. I don’t think he wants to actually kill anyone.”

  It seemed I was wrong.

  Halfway through their event, when Katie, Muriel and Francisco were enjoying a vigorous debate about the merits of gritty reality versus flights of fancy, three things happened simultaneously.

  A deafening roar – the kind a real dragon might make if it actually existed – was followed by a burst of flame behind Francisco’s chair. It was just as well he was so short – if he’d been any taller it would have blasted his head off. At the same time, an arrow flew through the air, embedding itself deep into Katie’s chair, just a hair’s breadth from her neck. And a sharpened broomstick swooped down from the ceiling, thudding into the floorboards right between Muriel’s legs, pinning her dress to the stage.

  For a split second there was a terrible, shocked silence, then the audience erupted into panic, pushing back their chairs and running for the door. It was every man for himself. The flames vanished as suddenly as they’d appeared, but it was enough to trigger the sprinkler system. Everyone on stage and in the audience was doused with ice-cold water, including me and Graham, which was horrible but did at least have the effect of halting the stampede. There must have been a hot line to the fire station, because then we could hear the distant scream of sirens.

  Viola’s staff had been well trained. They evacuated the town hall more or less smoothly, and soon we were all standing, dripping, in the car park while the fire brigade checked the building.

  Nigella Churchill’s mascara had run all down her face. She looked like a killer panda, cursing Viola and threatening to write a long and detailed article about the “gross inefficiency” and “poor management” of the festival. “Your reputation will be ruined,” she spat. “You’ll never be allowed near an author again.”

  Viola didn’t attempt to defend herself. She held her chin up and looked straight ahead, but you could see in her eyes how upset she was. If a granite boulder could deflate like a beach ball, that’s what she looked like. Saggy and beaten. Her festival was in shreds.

  Then things got even worse.

  Ear-splitting squeals came from several directions at once. For a moment I thought the pink princesses were back, but then I realized it was animal, not human. Was it a recording, like the horse’s whinny and the dragon’s roar? I looked around for the loudspeakers. Couldn’t see any. Then I got a waft of pungent farmyard smell. Suddenly, the air was thick with it. And a piglet shot past me. A real, live piglet. Followed by another. And another. There were dozens of them!

  And then Basil Tamworth was staggering out of the library, tie askew, shirt rumpled, his sharply tailored suit newly printed with trotter marks.

  He’d been trampled by a litter of Gloucester Old Spots.

  killer pigs

  The police turned up not long after the fire engines, and what with them and the pigs it was mayhem. We soon discovered that piglets can run extremely fast. Once the town hall was given the all clear, the firemen attempted to round them up but they proved uncatchable. The sow, meanwhile, was in Attack Mode. No one even attempted to tackle her. Then someone had the bright idea of scraping the remains of the celebrity chef’s failed cooking demonstration into a bucket and putting that in the back of the trailer. Once they caught the whiff of food, the pigs trotted in eagerly two by two like animals escaping the flood.

  By the time the pigs were safely banged up, Viola’s granite will had reasserted itself.

  “We will not be defeated!” she declared. Under such an onslaught the British Blitz Spirit came out in force and her army of Plucky and Heroic volunteers gave her a rousing cheer. Then she put them to work. While the authors supported each other to the nearest pub, Graham and I spent the next hour helping to scrape pig poo off the library carpet. Not a pleasant experience.

  But by the end of the afternoon everything was more or less restored to normal.

  “Tomorrow is another day,” promised Viola. “We will assemble as planned. I’ll see you all at 9 a.m. sharp in the town hall.”

  She was truly remarkable. A great leader. I was surprised that no one saluted.

  “It was awful,” Sue Woodward told us later as she gave Graham and me a lift back to my house. Sue, along with Trevor, had been with Basil Tamworth when they’d encountered the pigs.

  His event had been held in the central library. There was a large meeting room right at the back which had been set aside for Basil’s talk. They’d walked in, shut the door behind them and come face to face with the Old Spots.

  “How did they get in there?” I asked.

  “That’s the odd thing. Gill said they were delivered first thing this morning by someone dressed as Farmer Biggins.”

  I r
emembered Basil’s shocked, white face when he’d first arrived in the green room. He’d said something about seeing his fictional farmer. What was going on?

  Sue continued, “The man had a note from Viola saying that Basil had requested the pigs for his event. I suppose it must have been forged. That room opens on to the car park so he parked the trailer outside and left them there. The staff thought it was a bit unusual, but it all seemed official so they went along with it. Later, someone must have let them out and herded them into the meeting room. You saw for yourselves the mess they made.”

  “How did Basil come to be trampled?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just back out again?”

  “Poor Basil! He gets so nervous! He’s terribly shy – public events are torture, really. That’s why Trevor came along to hold his hand, not that he was any help. Basil’s mind was on his talk, and he was halfway across the carpet before he saw the pigs. Then he sort of froze. The sow was at one end and the piglets were at the other. Somehow he managed to get right between them.”

  “And, as we know, it’s extremely dangerous to come between a mother and her young.” Graham looked at me, and I knew we were both remembering a tigress who’d killed her keeper in a similar situation. Graham added, “Sheep will attack dogs that threaten their lambs. And I gather that pig bites are particularly unpleasant.”

  “Yes, I suppose it could have been a lot worse.” Sue sighed. “Viola was furious. She said, ‘You’d think he’d know how to deal with a few pigs after writing all those books!’ But he just stood there, watching the sow charge at him.”

  “How did you get him away?”

  “Chocolate biscuits. I’d brought a packet along for afterwards, you see. I pelted her with them and she was thrilled to bits. While she hoovered them up, Trevor and I got Basil out.”

  It made me laugh to think of Sue hurling chocolate biscuits like frisbees at a charging sow. I complimented her on her quick thinking.

  She gave me a watery smile. “It was a terribly narrow escape. He might have been killed! Imagine that! As it is, I don’t suppose the poor man will ever want to talk in public again.”

  “But who’s doing all this? Who could hate a bunch of authors that much?”

  “I can’t imagine,” said Sue, biting her lip. “And what’s worse – I can’t imagine what will happen next.”

  collateral damage

  The attacks on Zenith, Katie, Muriel and Francisco were the results of very clever booby traps triggered by timing devices, according to the evening news. Inspector Humphries told the reporter that they could have been set up well before the festival began. So while the police trawled through the records of who’d had access to the town hall during the last few weeks, Graham and I tried to figure out what on earth was going on.

  It was Saturday night and my mum, Lili, had gone out to fetch a Chinese takeaway. I reckoned we had about half an hour, maximum, to do some serious research on the web before she came back. She’d missed the news, but if she found out we’d got ourselves involved with more Suspicious Goings-On it would mean the end of our careers as student ambassadors.

  We knew that all the authors who’d been attacked wrote books for kids or teenagers. The other thing that linked them was the Vellum Prize, so we typed it into the search engine and were rewarded instantly with the list of shortlisted books.

  Katie Bell – Stupid Cupid

  Muriel Black – Wizard Wheezes

  Francisco Botticelli – Dragons and Demons

  Charlie Deadlock – The Spy Complex

  Esmerelda Desiree – The Vampiress of Venezia

  Basil Tamworth – This Boar’s Life

  Zenith – Princess Peony and her Perfect Pony Petrushka

  “So the only one who hasn’t been attacked is Esmerelda Desiree, but she’s not doing her thing until tomorrow,” I said.

  “I just hope Mrs Boulder has taken adequate security measures,” worried Graham. “I would have thought Esmerelda Desiree must be next on the attacker’s list.”

  It turned out that the Vellum Prize was worth a lot of money – the winner would walk away with a cheque for £25,000.

  “There would be the increased book sales too,” Graham reminded me. “And as we know, money is number five on the US Motives for Murder list. So maybe one of the authors is trying to get rid of their rivals?”

  “If that’s the case, they’ve had a spectacular lack of success so far,” sniffed Graham.

  “There have been some pretty close shaves, though. And actually, any one of them could have arranged an attack on themselves so as to avoid suspicion.”

  “Or Esmerelda Desiree could be behind it.”

  “True,” I agreed. “But that would be a bit obvious, wouldn’t it?”

  Graham looked thoughtful. “I suppose another motive might be jealousy of those seven writers. There would have been a great many books nominated by readers. They’d have been put on a longlist, and from that the readers and judges would select the shortlist. Seven books made it: many more didn’t.”

  “So … someone might be really cross at being left out? Let’s have a look at the longlist, then.”

  When Graham found it I let out a long, slow whistle. There were over 100 books listed, and some of them were as long as Francisco Botticelli’s.

  “Do the judges have to read all of them?” I asked, amazed.

  “I believe so, yes. And in a very short space of time, too.”

  “That would be enough to drive you bonkers, wouldn’t it? You’d be practically walled in by books. Do you reckon one of the judges has gone demented?”

  We scanned the list of titles and authors. No names leapt out as obvious suspects – none of them had been invited to the Good Reads Festival as far as we could see – but there was one thing that surprised both of us. Nigella Churchill turned out to be not only a judge … she was the chairperson.

  “That means she’ll have the casting vote,” Graham explained. “There are five of them, look. If they don’t agree on the winner, she’ll be the one who decides.”

  “And she’s been going mad over Charlie’s new book, hasn’t she? No wonder Katie and Francisco glared at her like that. They said something about it being a stitch-up. They must know that Charlie will win if Nigella has her way.”

  “I can see why Katie or Francisco may have wanted to attack Charlie, then. Yet it doesn’t explain why they became victims themselves.”

  “No,” I agreed. “And they’ve all been so shocked, haven’t they? I can’t really see any of them doing it. So who does that leave us with? Max is definitely suspicious. Spectre … it’s an odd name. Do you think it’s real?”

  Graham considered. “It could well be a pseudonym. Many authors use them. The Brontë sisters were originally published under pen names, for example.”

  “But Max isn’t a published writer.”

  “No…” Graham said thoughtfully. “And yet there was that strange conversation between him and Charlie Deadlock.” He paused for a moment, then added, “You know, spectre is another word for ghost.”

  “Ghost?” I seized on the word with interest. “Katie said something about Zenith’s book being ghost-written. What did she mean?”

  “It’s when another writer is paid to do the work. I gather that most celebrity autobiographies are written that way. They have the celebrity’s name on the cover, but a different person entirely is responsible for the contents.”

  “That’s like cheating!” I said crossly. “Does that mean Zenith might not have actually written her book?”

  “It’s perfectly possible,” Graham agreed.

  “And it got nominated for a prize! No wonder the others don’t like her…” I thought for a moment. “So where does Max fit in? Zenith didn’t recognize him, so I reckon they’d never met face to face. But she knew his name all right, didn’t she? It wiped the smile off her face when he said who he was. Maybe he wrote the book for her.”

  “It seems a plausible assumption.”

  �
��And if it’s true,” I said slowly, “that might explain all that stuff with Charlie, too! Sue said he had writer’s block after he’d completed the Sam the Striker series, and so did he. But Max said it was before he’d finished the last book. Suppose Max is right? Suppose he knows the truth? What if Charlie did get stuck? What would happen if you got stuck with a book? Do you get into trouble with your publisher? Is it like being late with your homework?”

  “From what I’ve read, writers often have deadlines to meet. With a series like the Sam the Striker books, the publisher would have arranged events – signings, appearances, interviews, that kind of thing. They would have been booked months in advance. It would have been vital to have the book ready on time.”

  “So … if Charlie was blocked in the middle of a book, could he have paid Max to finish it for him?” I asked.

  Graham looked thoughtful. “It certainly sounded as if the two of them had some sort of contractual agreement. That would help explain why he mentioned the confidentiality clause – if Max did finish writing it, clearly he’s supposed to keep quiet about the fact.”

  “And now Max has written something else – something of his own – and he wants help to get it published.” I frowned. “Charlie wasn’t at all helpful about that, was he? And Zenith looked at Max as if he was something she’d trodden in. It might all be enough to make him a bit unhinged. Maybe he’s written stuff for the others, too…”

  “It’s possible,” Graham said. “And he may well be a little unbalanced. Yet his chief desire seems to be the publication of his manuscript. I don’t see how attacking authors would help him achieve that objective.”