Poinsettias and the Perfect Crime Read online

  “I’m not sure…” Fergus said, rubbing his chin. “Maybe I’ll know more after a few of those nice biscuits from the kitchen…” He grinned at me, but it faded when I didn’t smile back.

  “We need to talk about T.C.King,” I said and waited for his reaction.

  Unlike Samuel, he didn’t turn pale, panic, or try to deny it.

  “So… you found me out!” he said with a wry smile. “Have you read any of the books yet?”

  I shook my head. “I wanted to see what you had to say about it first. Samuel said something about me featuring in your work?! Has my name been slapped all over conspiracy sites? Or my face?” I added, remembering what Samuel had said about not knowing Fergus’ name, but recognising his face.

  “No, nothing like that. I, uh, may dramatise some of our adventures together, that’s all. I don’t use our names, of course. Half the readers think it’s complete fiction…” Fergus shot me a guilty look. “It’s all been rather successful, actually. People liked what I wrote before, but my life seems to have become a lot more exciting since I’ve met you.”

  I frowned. This was sounding a lot like what Samuel had done to my sister, minus the engagement and love bit.

  “Don’t get that look! This is completely different. You’ll understand once you see the site and the books. I’m trying to share the truth with people.”

  “What about me? Am I just being used?”

  “No… never,” Fergus said, his eyes clouding with worry. “Diana… we are a team. It’s you and me against all of the bad things out there. I know I’ve joked that it’s the other way around, but I’m Watson to your Sherlock. I document our adventures and your brilliance.”

  “No one knows who I am?” I said, wanting to be sure on that. One Fergus in my life was proving to be more than enough. If hordes of conspiracy theorists suddenly turned up on my doorstep…

  “No one,” he promised. “No one apart from me. And Gillian Wrexton’s probably figured it out from the books. And Samuel, of course. He knew as soon as he saw me with you.” He took a step closer towards me and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Look at the site, read some of the more recent books and you’ll see. I was doing all of it long before I met you, but you made everything so much better. You make everything about me so much better. I just wish we spent more time together,” he said, before looking worried he’d overdone it.

  I looked into his eyes and saw my fears that I was putting him into the same category as Samuel reflected back to me. But it wasn’t the same. My feelings were telling me that it wasn’t. “Fine. I’ll read them. But if they’re as bad as Close Encounters of the Eleventy-First Kind, we can never speak again.”

  “They’re… they’re not worse,” Fergus said, the smile returning to his face now that he could see I wasn’t cursing his name and walking out of his life.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my eyes seeking his.

  He shuffled his feet. “Honestly? I thought you’d think it was a stupid thing to write about. I never actually prove any of the theories I’m looking into. I’m basically a huge failure.”

  “I don’t think you’re a failure. You’re more of a success now than you’ve ever been,” I told him, sincerely.

  He shrugged his shoulders and looked away. “It’s made for good stories, but not good results. I hate to say it, but you’ve got to me. I used to jump at every theory and want to believe everything I read. Now I think I’m seeing it all through your eyes. I always find myself considering how a theory could be explained within the laws of science, and usually, that’s when I find a fatal flaw. I don’t know if I’ll ever find it. All I’ve ever wanted is to find that theory, one that I can prove. Then I’ll be a happy man.”

  I looked at him seriously for a long moment. I snorted. He stared at me in surprise.

  “Per-lease! You love the struggle and the whole ‘tortured artist’ act you’re putting on right now. I’m still peeved,” I added, not wanting him to think he was off the hook. If I found a single bad word said about me, or whomever my character was in these books, Fergus was going to find himself strung up by his unmentionables.

  Fergus grinned and I felt our old friendship slip back into place. “So, now you know the real me. Any secrets you want to get off your chest? Any… feelings?”

  “I’ve always been open and honest with you,” I said, unable to keep from sounding prim.

  Fergus nodded before shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “You never really explained all of the questions you were asking back there. Why were you asking for photos of the diamond? Do you still doubt its existence?”

  “Maybe,” I said, pulling a sorry face at him. “I don’t know. It was something put into my mind by Samuel. It may well have just been his way of throwing us off our game. But the more I thought about it…”

  “…the more you realised it could be a possibility. You know, you’re thinking a lot more like me these days. If you ever want to start a blog and write books under a witty pseudonym, you let me know. You’d have to come up with your own adventures. I don’t think there’s room for us to tell the same tales…”

  “I doubt they’d be quite the same,” I said, looking sideways at him. Something told me we still saw the world through our own sets of tinted glasses. Fergus’ were probably tinted with alien slime, or something like that. “We’re digressing. I think the diamond probably is real. I also think it was probably stolen.”

  “It’s just the rest of it that doesn’t make sense,” Fergus said, beating me to it again.

  I nodded my agreement. “The word left on the jotter, the writing on the windowpane, the flower on the floor of the room… even the murder itself. All for a diamond?” I shook my head. “I know greed is a powerful thing, but still… And then there’s the mystery of Bill himself! Why write a strange word instead of the identity of the attacker, if you knew who they were? And if you didn’t know, why not write something… anything else? It had to mean something. It all has to mean something.”

  “There’s been no sign of the diamond being sold, either,” Fergus said. “I was going to tell you that when I saw you next. I’m afraid it puts a dent in your Cordelia helping a criminal and then splitting the loot theory. The insurance scam could still be a possibility, but I don’t think it would be wise to follow that route without significant further evidence. Gillian Wrexton really does miss her husband. I don’t think it would be a good idea to suggest that any family member paid or coerced someone else into bringing about his death.”

  “It doesn’t fit with what actually happened either,” I complained, knowing we were chasing our tails. Nothing about this robbery-turned-into-murder seemed to make any sense when you tried to come up with a scenario that would explain everything. “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,” I said, quoting the most observant detective of all time.

  “And what would that be, Holmes?” Fergus asked, close to rolling his eyes.

  I looked down at the floor as the cogs in my brain seemed to whir and crunch whilst they processed everything. “That this was never about the diamond at all. It’s all about the murder… and perhaps whatever else was in that safe,” I said, testing the words as they came out of my mouth. “I wonder…?” I said as a sudden possibility struck me.

  I looked at Fergus, and then I turned and practically ran down the stairs in my excitement.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re running to? And maybe why?” he called from just behind me.

  “No! I could be wrong!” I batted back, before I carried on, feeling a strange kind of laughter bubble up out of me. Could it be? Could it really be that the theft of the diamond was one big, fat misdirection? Was I even close with my hunch? I slowed down when I reached the edge of the lawn that bordered with the woods.

  The little piece of flower I’d found on the floor hadn’t played on my mind until now. I’d assumed that it had just been on the bottom of the shoe of the kil
ler, or perhaps even one of the police officers who’d searched the grounds the morning after, before returning to look around the scene. Anything was possible when you had Walter Miller in charge of the local police force. But now, it had me thinking. There really had been so much mud on the floor. What had the killer been doing prior to entering the room, paddling in the stuff? I had already subconsciously decided that the amount of mud and its dispersal throughout the venue might have been a carefully calculated trick to throw suspicion on unwitting guests who’d stepped in the dirt. What I hadn’t considered was the amount that had been present in the study itself. It had been a lot. And, in theory, only two people had entered the study prior to when Fergus and I had first come upon the scene of the crime. And only one of them had left.

  “What are we looking for?” Fergus asked as I plunged through the bushes, turning my head this way and that.

  “That!” I said, pointing when I saw it.

  In amongst the greenery was a small plant. It had a delicate spray of white-ash green flowers with just the slightest hint of yellow at the centre. It was a hellebore, the same kind as the petal and stamen I’d found in the study. I was very aware that the presence of the plants here could mean nothing more than the thief passing through this way, if it had come from the thief’s shoe at all, but I had to be hopeful that it was something this criminal had overlooked. It was something they hadn’t planned.

  When I discovered a clump of plants that had been slightly crushed and missing some of its flowers, I felt a small stab of jubilation. They’d been here. I examined the ground and then my shoes. We’d had a fair amount of rain this winter, and things were a little squelchy, but not like the thick, loose dirt that had been spread around the manor house. It gave me hope that my theory was right.

  I kept my nose pointed at the ground and began looking around, beneath bushes and trees close to the flowers. And that’s where I found what I was looking for.

  The killer may have been a pro at stealing things and killing people, but they weren’t so skilled when it came to literally getting their hands dirty. I spotted the signs of fresh digging close to a holly bush. I got down on my hands and knees, not caring about getting dirty myself, and I pushed apart the dirt, feeling a sort of feverish excitement.

  My hand scraped against something hard… something like a rock.

  I clawed some more dirt out of the hole and managed to get my fingers beneath it, before I prised the item out of the earth and held it up to the winter light.

  “I suppose that answers our worries about whether or not the diamond really exists. I don’t think we need those photos either,” Fergus commented, looking at the stone in my hand.

  I brought it down to my face level. It was dirty, but there was no mistaking the clarity of the mineral. I’d just dug up one of the largest diamonds in the world.

  “We need to talk about this and decide what to do next,” I said, lowering the stone. The feverish excitement had been replaced with a cold sort of dread, the kind that informed me I’d been wrong about everything all along. I’d hoped that finding the diamond due to my hunch about it not actually being important at all would make all of the pieces fall into place, but right now, I was left with more questions than answers.

  “How does it feel?” Fergus asked. He had a strange look in his eye.

  “The diamond? Kind of dirty. Like a big smooth rock,” I said, frowning at the strange question.

  “Nothing else? Nothing… bad?”

  All of a sudden, I felt my fingertips start to itch. A shiver ran through my whole body. I dropped the diamond back on the pile of dirt. “You think it’s cursed! You let me touch it!” I’d forgotten all about Fergus’ original diamond theory in the heat of the moment.

  “I’m sure it’s fine. You don’t believe in any of that.”

  I looked at my hand. The strange itching sensation was still there. I told myself it was all in my head. It probably was, right? I’d just let all the talk about curses get to me. “Why did I not wear gloves?” I muttered, before looking at the diamond again. With a withering glare in Fergus’ direction, i bent close and sniffed the diamond. I couldn’t smell anything other than the earth. I stuck a finger on it and rubbed, figuring that I’d already touched it once. More skin on skin contact wouldn’t make it worse. The diamond felt like a rock… and a normal rock at that. There was no feel of anything coating its exterior. I relaxed a little.

  “It could still be an anomaly in the mineral kicking out negative energy,” Fergus said, looking like he was about to start warding the gemstone away with a cross made of sticks, or something equally melodramatic.

  “Do you even listen to the words coming out of your mouth?” I said, snatching up the diamond and putting it safely in my coat pocket. “I think I’m going to go with Samuel on this one. There’s no curse, it just may, or may not be, a political nightmare in the form of compressed carbon.”

  “It could still be cursed!” Fergus protested. “It only activates when people steal it, remember? The thief could have already got their comeuppance.” He looked around, as if we might be about to stumble upon a body at the edge of the Wrextons’ lawn.

  “Fergus… there may be something about this diamond. There may not be. But can we consider our next move? I don’t think we’ve been told the whole truth by the people this has happened to. This whole thing is a stretch to believe. We’ve already discussed the inconsistencies in all our theories. I think it’s time we made a few leaps of logic. What possible reason could our thief have for leaving this diamond in the dirt?”

  “They could have panicked after the murder and left it…” Fergus began before frowning. “If they were panicking, they’d probably have left it in the room, and wouldn’t have buried it.”

  I nodded. “What’s more, the petal and the amount of dirt demonstrates that they’d already dug the hole prior to breaking into the study.”

  “Right,” Fergus agreed, before looking momentarily pleased. “They might have buried the diamond in order to come back for it when the heat had died down.”

  “I did consider that… until I found the hole one minute after I went looking for it. I don’t think they cared about whether the diamond got found, or not. It was never about that. I assumed, foolishly, that the woods out here would have been combed. Perhaps the police didn’t take the mud seriously either. It did initially appear to point to ineptitude, or a diversion. I didn’t realise it was a very deliberately laid clue.”

  It seemed so obvious now that I had the diamond. Finding it was probably supposed to make us believe that it had all been the work of a panicked thief. This person was smart enough to be trying to create the impression that they were something they were not. “And then they went back to the party as if nothing had happened,” I said, remembering that Samuel hadn’t been accounted for right before Fergus and I had gone snooping. But then, Fergus had been missing, along with George, Charlotte, and probably many more people that no one could quite remember. That was the beauty of an event as large as the Merryfield Ball. Even Cinderella would have lost track of the time.

  “Where are the police now?” Fergus said, looking at the manor and frowning, as if noticing their absence for the first time.

  I considered. The last I’d heard from them was when they’d been after Fergus and the Merryfield Murder Mystery Fans. “Probably on their Christmas holidays,” I muttered and then wondered if I hadn’t hit the nail on the head. Public services like the police force were supposed to continue over Christmas when it came to emergencies, but I privately suspected that Walter Miller wasn’t going to get back to the grindstone until after the New Year. He probably figured that, what with Bill Wrexton being dead and the stolen property gone, there wasn’t much he could do right this second. I shook my head, before wondering if I was constructing a fiction. He could be beavering away behind the scenes right this second… but somehow, I just didn’t see it.

  “The writing,” I muttered, getting stuck on that
point. The word Bill Wrexton had left behind seemed meaningless, but what about the writing on the window? It had been written so that someone on the outside could still see it. My forehead creased as I considered everything once, and then again. This case was definitely going to get me some premature wrinkles.

  “I think I have it. I need some answers, but I think we can get them now that I know…” I looked up at Fergus. “We have to get back to the house. I don’t think we have that much time.”

  “I think you lost me around the diamond part, but okay,” Fergus said. He kept looking sideways at me, like I was going to turn into a cloud of dust, or explode in a mess of entrails. I decided to ignore it. We had more pressing issues than an ancient Egyptian curse.

  “Something that I haven’t been able to work out is why Bill Wrexton had to die,” Fergus said. “I have maybe one idea, but it’s too ridiculous to even contemplate.”

  “Remember what I said about eliminating the impossible? You never know,” I said as we strode back across the lawn. “But I think it’s become rather obvious why he was killed, and it wasn’t because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The writing on the jotter proves that.”

  “What does it prove?” Fergus smiled winningly at me.

  “Bill Wrexton had to die because he knew something that the thief didn’t want him to tell anyone else. Writing that word on that jotter was Bill’s way of trying to get the message he’d died for to someone who would be able to understand it, or work it out.”

  “I guess that rules us out then.”

  “You’re not wrong,” I said, knowing I hadn’t cracked that code. My leaps of logic could only take us so far. “But I’d say it’s a good bet he was thinking about his wife when he wrote them… or quite possibly her suited associates.”

  We walked into Merryfield Manor headed for the office. I didn’t fail to note that our shoes were every bit as dirty as the killer’s had been, after we’d essentially repeated their actions in reverse, but it didn’t seem to matter right now. The only thing that mattered was finding out the truth that we hadn’t been trusted with from the very start.