Poison Pen Read online

  Viola had told us to take Esmerelda along to the green room and restore her with light refreshments after her event, but by the time the last goth had reluctantly plucked himself away, Esmerelda said she was exhausted and wanted to lie down. We were under such strict instructions not to leave her alone that Graham and I, along with the security guards and the uniformed policeman, escorted her back over the road to her hotel. The whole time, I worried about Trevor and had this horrible gut feeling that something, somewhere was badly wrong.

  We didn’t dare abandon Esmerelda in the lobby, and en masse we followed her up the stairs to her room. I half thought we might all have to tuck her into bed.

  It turned out I needn’t have wasted my energy worrying about Max attacking Trevor.

  Esmerelda Desiree put her key in the lock and pushed her door open. We saw Max Spectre, spread-eagled across the bed, staring up at the ceiling with cold, dead eyes. The pages of his manuscript were strewn over the floor. And his neck was punctured with two neat wounds.

  When I saw those marks, my stomach turned right over. There wasn’t a trace of blood on the sheets. It was as though every drop had been sucked out of him.

  death of a ghost

  Graham and I had met Inspector Humphries, the investigating officer, twice before. He wasn’t thrilled when he found out that it was us who had discovered Max Spectre. When he arrived to examine the crime scene and saw me and Graham standing there, he muttered something about us being “the kiss of death”, which I thought was a little unkind: it wasn’t like we went out of our way to find dead bodies.

  Inspector Humphries gave strict instructions that we were all to return to the town hall and stay there while forensics crawled over Esmerelda’s hotel room looking for clues. Then, when he had finished his own examination of the crime scene, he followed us over to talk to the children’s authors, who had all been pulled out of their workshops and herded into the green room. The inspector looked as perplexed as Graham and I felt about the whole thing.

  Wiping his glasses with a crumpled handkerchief, Inspector Humphries told us it was possible that Max Spectre had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as he could see, Max had gone to the hotel to leave the manuscript for Esmerelda to read. Someone had been lurking in her room and had killed him with a single blow to the head the second he’d walked through the door. The puncture “wounds” had been done with a felt pen purely for effect – that’s why there hadn’t been any blood. For some reason that struck me as odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  “Are you suggesting that I was the intended victim?” Esmerelda’s voice sliced through the tense atmosphere in the green room like a knife. “Am I still in danger, Inspector? Do you think the killer will try again?”

  Inspector Humphries surveyed his audience, then cleared his throat dramatically. “I believe every author here is a potential target. It was pure chance that none of yesterday’s incidents ended in death.”

  There was a collective gasp of horror. Katie and Francisco paled and clasped each other by the hand. Muriel Black drew her legs up and curled into a tight ball in her armchair. Basil Tamworth pressed a handkerchief to his mouth. Charlie Deadlock sat biting his trembling lip. Trevor looked like he was going to faint. Nigella sharpened her pencil and began scribbling in her notebook. Viola was weeping buckets of despairing tears and Sue sat beside her looking distracted, patting her half-heartedly on the back.

  Esmerelda, on the other hand, responded in a very interesting manner. She put a hand to her heart and her eyes widened as if she was experiencing a blast of pure terror. She appeared to be in shock – she was doing all the right expressions, making all the right gestures, giving a very good impression of someone who had narrowly escaped being murdered – and yet her eyes were sparkling with something that wasn’t fear. Excitement? Satisfaction? I couldn’t tell.

  Inspector Humphries commandeered the upstairs room to interview each of the authors and festival staff separately, starting with Viola Boulder. Meanwhile, Graham and I handed out cups of hot, sweet tea to fortify the nervous writers – who sat either pretending to read the newspapers, or staring wildly into space. When we’d done the rounds with the chocolate biscuits, we sat in a corner and whispered to each other.

  “I don’t trust Esmerelda,” I said. “I don’t reckon she’s really shocked. She’s acting the part.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Graham.

  “Yes. Something to do with her eyes. She looks kind of pleased with herself.”

  “She has every right to. According to today’s papers The Vampiress of Venezia has now sold more copies than The Lord of the Rings. She must be a multi-millionaire.”

  I took another sneaky look at the glamorous author. Graham could be right. Maybe she was just glowing with self-satisfaction. “Is that why her publisher is so keen for her to write a sequel?”

  “It would make commercial sense. There must be a huge demand from the reading public for a second book. And after all, publishing is a business like any other. They want to make a profit.”

  “I wonder why she’s so dead set against it, then?”

  “Perhaps she has writer’s block too,” suggested Graham.

  “She can’t have. She said she was already working on something new.” Thinking of unpublished books got me back on the subject of Max Spectre. “It’s odd that Esmerelda was nice to Max, isn’t it? All the others couldn’t wait to get rid of him. And Katie said ‘there’s always one’. It sounds like they get approached by people like Max quite a lot.”

  I knew that I was missing something – a vital piece of jigsaw was lost, and without it I couldn’t begin to make sense of the whole picture. Frustrated, I changed tack.

  “Do you think the killer really meant to murder Esmerelda?”

  “Inspector Humphries seemed to think so.”

  “It all feels a bit odd. Bashing someone over the head seems clumsy to me. And a felt tip? It’s not exactly clever, is it? Not like the other attacks.”

  “You may be right. But the puncture ‘wounds’ would tie in with the note. As I recall, Esmerelda’s said ‘Bloodsuckers deserve to die’.”

  I wasn’t so sure, but I dropped the subject for the time being. I couldn’t put it into words, but I couldn’t shake off the sensation that there was something not quite right about the way Max had died.

  I didn’t share this with Inspector Humphries, of course. I knew for a fact that he wouldn’t be remotely interested in my gut instinct. So when he called me and Graham for our interviews, I kept my ideas pretty much to myself.

  Graham’s mum and dad were both working that day, so it was my mum who came to the town hall to be the Responsible Adult present at our interview. She was about as thrilled as Inspector Humphries that we’d got involved in another murder investigation.

  “A book festival?” she demanded furiously as we trooped up the stairs. “You’d think that would be harmless enough. How on earth did you two manage to find a dead body at a book festival?”

  Graham and I kept our accounts brief and to the point. It was only at the very end of the interview, when we’d all stood up to go, that I suddenly found the lost piece of jigsaw.

  A uniformed PC came into the room clutching Max’s manuscript in a see-through evidence bag. He slapped it down in front of Inspector Humphries. “You asked for this, sir?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “No wonder the man couldn’t find a publisher,” sniffed the PC. “I read a bit of it. I’m no expert, but I reckon it’s bloody awful.”

  My stomach lurched. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the bag on the table, which was crammed with fresh, bright white, neatly printed pages. I remembered the manuscript in Max’s carrier bag: typewritten, dirty, dog-eared and yellowed with age.

  I had no idea who’d written the manuscript that had been strewn over Esmerelda’s carpet, but I was absolutely convinced it wasn’t Max Spectre.

  the pen is mightier

  I d
id tell Inspector Humphries about the manuscript, but he wasn’t exactly impressed. He made a brief note of it and then we were dismissed: free to go.

  Graham had to come home with us, and when we got back to the house Mum disappeared into the kitchen to start on supper. She was furious with both of us, which was hardly fair: it wasn’t us who’d gone and bashed Max over the head. But I couldn’t expend any energy worrying about Mum. Graham and I had to figure out what was going on.

  “Whoever killed Max must have stolen his manuscript,” I told Graham. “I’m positive that one wasn’t his. But he definitely had the real one in his bag when he talked to Esmerelda. I saw it.”

  “Theft…” mused Graham. “Robbery is number two on the Motives for Murder list. The intriguing aspect is that the manuscript was swapped. I wonder who would do that?”

  “I suppose any of the authors could have,” I said. “All apart from Esmerelda. We were with her the whole time, there’s no way she had anything to do with it. But there’s still something odd about her…”

  “The person who ‘discovers’ a body is very often the murderer,” Graham pointed out.

  “But she didn’t leave our sight the whole time. She’s the only one with a cast-iron alibi.” I sighed. “How about Charlie? He didn’t want Max spilling the beans, did he?” I remembered Graham’s words about celebrity autobiographies being written by ghost writers, and suddenly a thought struck me. “Suppose Max’s book was his own autobiography? It might have had all the details about him finishing the last Sam the Striker book. That would give Charlie a motive for nicking it, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would indeed. And Zenith might feel the same if we’re correct about him writing her book, too.”

  “But she’d gone home by then,” I objected. “Although she’s rich enough – I suppose she could have paid someone else to do it.”

  “I’m not sure that author assassination would be consistent with her religious principles.”

  “That’s true. And even if Zenith was responsible, we’ve still got the problem of how today’s events fit in with yesterday’s attacks.” I paused to draw breath and then said, “I think we might be looking at two separate plots, don’t you? With two separate culprits. Someone wanted to kill Max, and they set it up to look like Esmerelda was the target in order to confuse the police. Maybe someone completely different did all that stuff yesterday. And that would mean that Esmerelda’s the only one who’s got away without being attacked…”

  “…which brings us back to the idea that she might be the perpetrator,” said Graham, completing my sentence for me.

  I thumped the arm of the sofa in frustration. “But she can’t have done it, can she? The death threats, the football and all that – she wasn’t even here.”

  “As far as we know.”

  “As far as we know,” I echoed. I thought for a few moments and then said slowly, “Of course, she could have been here without anyone noticing… If she was dressed differently – without the make-up and the posh frock – she’d be another person entirely. If she was in jeans and had her hair up in some sort of hat, for example, nobody would recognize her…”

  “That’s very true. She seems to be a good actress. She freely admitted she’d been to drama school. We have no idea who she really is underneath the glitz and the glamour.”

  “But why would she want to kill the other authors?” I wondered. “Back to the Vellum Prize, do you think? Could anyone want to win it so badly that they’d murder their competitors?”

  “It’s worth a good deal of money,” Graham replied. “Yet she’s a bestselling author. You wouldn’t have thought she’d need the money.”

  “It’s about reputation too, though, isn’t it? You win something like that and people look up to you. Maybe that matters to her. Maybe it matters more than anything…”

  So that was that. We concluded that Charlie was definitely under suspicion for the murder of Max, but Esmerelda was somehow behind the attacks on the other authors. We didn’t know how she’d managed it, but she was our number one suspect.

  Then the local news came on and all our theories were smashed to smithereens.

  Esmerelda Desiree had just been found dead in her hotel room. Stabbed in the neck with a fountain pen.

  go west!

  The news carried a long piece about Esmerelda Desiree and her glittering career. There were live pictures of the scenes outside the hotel where her body had been found. Goths had gathered with lighted candles in silent tribute to their heroine.

  Graham and I watched the whole item with our mouths hanging open. There was clip after clip of Esmerelda on various sofas – it looked like she’d done every single chat show on every single TV station in every single country in the world. It would have been enough to make every other author sick with jealousy. Was that motive enough to kill her?

  The feature ended with Nigella Churchill giving a long, slightly weepy interview in which she said that the literary world had lost one of its brightest stars.

  “I talked to her just this afternoon,” said Nigella chokily. “I was fortunate enough to have been granted an exclusive interview. She told me about her forthcoming book, Go West!”

  My ears pricked up at once. Beside me, Graham gave a sharp intake of breath. This was significant news.

  “She refused to talk about that this morning,” I murmured.

  Graham nodded, his eyes glued to the TV.

  “Was it a sequel to The Vampiress of Venezia?” asked the interviewer.

  “No – it was an historical novel set in the American West. I was privileged to see the manuscript when I interviewed Esmerelda. I was only able to read the first few pages, but it was immediately obvious that she’d produced another bestseller. It’s a tragic, tragic loss.”

  The interviewer murmured something dull and conventional and then moved briskly on to a different item. I leapt up.

  “That has got to be Max’s book!” I shrieked, punching the air. “I knew someone had nicked it!”

  “So what are we saying? That Esmerelda somehow managed to steal Max’s work and then got killed for it?”

  “That’s about the size of it. All we’ve got to do now is work out how. And why.”

  “And then we need to discover who killed her.”

  “No pressure, then,” I said with a grin. “I suppose we ought to start with the Why. She’s a mega bestseller. Why would she steal someone else’s work? Unless…” I grabbed Graham by the arm. “Suppose she didn’t write The Vampiress of Venezia? It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  Graham’s brows contracted in a tight frown but I pressed on.

  “Think about it, Graham. Esmerelda has stood out from the very beginning. All the others are nothing like their books, yet there she is – looking like a walking, talking vampire. The perfect package. Too perfect. I should have been suspicious about her right from the start. I bet she can’t write a word. That would explain why she was so reluctant to produce a sequel.”

  “We have to consider two things,” said Graham slowly. “Firstly, the manuscript that appeared in her bedroom. If Max didn’t write it, who did? The same question applies to The Vampiress of Venezia. Who was the author of that if it wasn’t Esmerelda Desiree?”

  “Another ghost writer?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “OK… So Esmerelda gets hold of Max’s book. Although I don’t see how she managed it.” I shut my eyes, remembering the few sentences they’d exchanged on the town hall steps. She’d cut across him with an offer of help. Interrupted him. Why? What had he been saying? I struggled to retrieve Max’s exact words, and at last they popped into my head. I spoke them out loud. “I heard you…”

  Graham looked at me, puzzled. “Heard me what?”

  “No … that’s what Max said to Esmerelda.”

  “What did he mean? Heard her on the radio? On TV?”

  “It was more like he was going to say ‘I heard you might be helpful’, or ‘I heard you were nice’. As if som
eone had told him to try asking her. She cut him off before he could say any more.”

  “So someone may have pointed him in her direction? Someone who was helping her get hold of the manuscript, maybe? That would suggest she was working with an accomplice.”

  “Who? Another author? Charlie? Could he be involved?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  We sat in silence, racking our brains. We were pretty sure Charlie would have wanted Max out of the way, but had he wanted Esmerelda dead too? Had he been her accomplice, then turned against her?

  Unexpectedly, the television news gave us a completely different answer. The programme was just finishing with a summary of the headlines. It reported the very latest on Esmerelda’s death, and her publisher was giving a short interview. The name of his company appeared beneath him on the screen.

  Fletcher, Beaumont & Grimm.

  fletcher, beaumont & grimm

  Mum was still clattering around in the kitchen, but I could tell from the familiar rattle and bang that tea was fast approaching. We didn’t have much time left to work things out.

  I’d heard the name Fletcher, Beaumont & Grimm before – not once, but twice. Charlie had told Max to contact them. Katie had given him their address. And now their name was plastered across the TV screen in big, block capitals.

  “Our association with Esmerelda goes back some years,” the man from Fletcher, Beaumont & Grimm told the reporter. “She had a holiday job here when she was still at college. I like to think that was what inspired her to take up the pen herself. She was a great talent. She’ll be sadly missed.”

  “Wow!” I said, turning to Graham the moment the news had finished. “Things are really starting to fall into place now, aren’t they? Do you reckon Fletcher, Beaumont & Grimm had one of those – what did Sue call it? – slush piles?”