Poinsettias and the Perfect Crime Read online

  I kept my eye roll to myself. Because stealing your parents’ diamond was definitely going to make everything right in the world again… That was so Cordelia.

  “When they made their threats, she stuck to her story. She said that her great-grandfather had won the gem in a card game. She gave his name - Tobias Wrexton. The sharks ignored her. In the end, they told her to get lost and make sure she had something real to give them in a week. She was pretty upset about it. I went over and asked if she was all right and then…” He shrugged.

  Apparently that was their big ‘how we met’ romantic story.

  “She got called back in before her week was up. She called me, freaking out that they were going to do something terrible to her before she’d got things together. I wasn’t in too great a place myself, but I said I’d go with her. These guys must have been paying more attention than they’d been making out the first time, because when we got there, they were suddenly all interested in the card game story and her great-grandfather. They asked how she was related to him exactly, but she said she didn’t know. She’d never met him. It was just an old family story… but the diamond existed. She’d seen it.”

  Harrison seemed to sink even lower. “The men said her debts would be paid off in full, if she could help their professional guy to get in and out with the diamond without being seen. When she worried about betraying you all, they asked if the gem was insured and she told them she thought it probably was, although she couldn’t exactly ask without raising suspicion. That did seem to reassure her. That way, it was win-win. No money was actually lost, you see? But then…” He didn’t seem to want to say anymore.

  “But then you got involved,” I supplied for him.

  He nodded grimly. “My week’s grace was almost up. This time, there’d be no coming back from it… except coming back missing several extremities. They had me right where they wanted me. My debts were just so large…” He shut his eyes. “They said they’d noticed I was friendly with Cordelia. They wanted me to get really cosy with her and be her boyfriend. Then they told me I would be the one to break into the safe she’d told them about. Only… I needed to take one more thing as well as the diamond, if I found it in the safe. And there was something else that I had to do…” His eyes widened with the horror of it.

  “You had to kill my husband,” Gillian finished for him. “Did it never occur to your leash-holders that he had nothing to do with any of this?”

  A glance was exchanged between the two other men. It was clear that they were still catching up on that, even now.

  “I understand the confusion,” Gillian said. “It wasn’t Bill’s grandfather whose name you recognised because of the work he did to take down your organisation… it was mine. And I am proud to carry on that work.”

  “I didn’t want to do it. I promise you. I was just so scared… and I needed a fresh start. My business is a good business. It’s doing great now… but those debts! No one could pay them off!” Harrison said, seeming to talk to himself rather than anyone else. “You understand, don’t you, Diana? You’re just like me. You know how important business can be. It’s my passion… my life! I couldn’t let it go.” He turned his gaze to his girlfriend. “Cordelia, I’m so sorry. I know you knew about the diamond, but I never wanted to lie to you... I just wasn’t allowed to say what I did.”

  I silently shook my head. I was nothing like Harrison, or even George, or Samuel. I did love my business and my work… but some things did come at too great a cost. That was something all three men should have considered before they messed things up.

  “You thought taking out my husband would avoid a scene like this. If you’d planned the same fate for me, it might have worked. The secret I guarded may have been lost, but I doubt it. When has a sledgehammer ever worked for your organisation when a needle does the job far more efficiently? Your group used to understand that. It used to be how you wielded power. But I suppose desperate times bring desperate methods…” She shot Harrison a disapproving look when she said it.

  Inside, I was still kicking myself for not figuring it out sooner. I’d had my eyes too firmly fixed on Samuel, George, and even Cordelia herself. To be fair, Cordelia wasn’t guiltless in the murder of her father, but I found I did believe Harrison when he implied she’d had no idea of anything beyond the planned diamond theft. She hadn’t known the kind of man her boyfriend truly was. Although I really thought she should have figured that much out. Who meets their ideal date at some shady place where loan sharks like to hang out?

  Samuel had muddied the waters by sticking his conspiracy theory nose in and pushing me to believe that a petty competition between theorists had got out of hand. Then there’d been George, whom I’d never believed would possess the guts to pull off such a well-planned crime, but he’d been kept in the running when I’d realised his strings were being pulled by someone else… someone who’d been able to force him to do all kinds of out-of-character things.

  I hadn’t considered that there was more than one puppet at the Merryfield Ball. Harrison had never appeared to be a criminal mastermind, but that was because he wasn’t one. He’d been moved around like a piece on a chessboard from the very start.

  “Who are you really?” Fergus asked Gillian, looking more curious about that than anything else.

  She gave him a smile made of ice. “We’ve already discussed this. You don’t need to know. I was someone else, and then I became who I am today. Bill changed everything for me… even his family name. We took our name from my grandfather as a tribute to him, but even that indulgence I see now was enough of a mistake to get us found. We erased all of our families’ history and replaced it with lies. I thought it would be enough.”

  I suddenly remembered Deirdre mentioning the name of Bill’s mother. Her last name had been Northwood, not Wrexton. I hadn’t given it a thought at the time. Even if I had, I’d have probably just guessed she’d separated from his father.

  “I did notice you appeared to be the most average family in Britain. There’s no trace of how you got your fortune either,” Fergus added, a flash of suspicion dancing in front of his eyes for just a moment.

  “I was well-paid in my past life,” was all Gillian would say to answer that.

  I looked at the men held in a line by the suited ones. I found myself wondering, just for a moment, if we were the good guys or the bad guys. Had Fergus and I inadvertently chosen the wrong side in a war we hadn’t even known existed prior to today? We had no way of knowing, because no one was going to tell us the whole truth.

  Fergus had other ideas. He strolled over to one of the bland-faced men being restrained.

  “Are you part of the illuminati?” Fergus asked, before bending down to speak directly in his ear. “It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Get away from me you weirdo,” the man said, lurching to the side when Fergus got too close. “And let us go! We were walking out across the country when all of a sudden someone shot at us. Next, we’re being dragged in here. This guy sounds like a real sicko, but we’re nothing to do with him. I guess we must have got lost and accidentally trespassed. Sorry about that,” he said, not even bothering to keep the smirk from his face.

  This, too, had been part of the plan, I realised. By separating the crime itself from the handover, these two men were able to claim that they couldn’t possibly have anything to do with anything. If anyone were to get in trouble, it would be Harrison for possessing stolen goods. Even if he’d managed to hand it over before they were caught, they’d just claim they hadn’t known that they were taking something stolen. It was perfect. The real criminals were going to get away without so much as a proper questioning.

  Gillian’s expression was wan. She’d known from the start that she wouldn’t be able to get them for anything significant. If they set them free, I’d wager she’d have even less time to work out what to do to avoid any repercussions. Even the thought of potentially seeing the back of misguided Cordelia didn’t cheer me up the
way it would have once done.

  “You’ve got nothing,” the other man echoed. “Let us go, or we’ll press charges.”

  “But what about the diamond you stole?” Fergus asked.

  “The what?”

  “The diamond,” he repeated. “You must have stolen it… it’s in your pocket right now. I just saw it there.”

  The bland-faced man looked down. “You’re kidding. This won’t stand up in court for a second!”

  “Maybe not, but it’s enough to bring you in for questioning. Unlike some organisations, we like to respect the laws of the land,” the man in charge of the group of white-suits informed him. “We’ll take them down to the local police station, show our ID and seek permission to question them as a matter of national security.”

  The men had turned pale. “You can’t let them do this. Do you see what you’ve done? They’re lying to you! They’ll take us from the station and then we’ll never see the light of day again. They don’t play by any rules. They’re the real problem and you just… Mmph!” a balaclava was shoved in his mouth.

  “We’ll handle this now,” the man in white said, smiling insipidly at those who weren’t being restrained, before tapping the gun on his hip reassuringly.

  “What about Harrison?” Cordelia asked, still looking with love towards her treacherous boyfriend, in spite of everything he’d done.

  “We’ll drop him off at the station where he’ll then be tried for murder… and whatever else they want to throw at him. He was unlikely to get away with it from the start. These people always have their fall guys. I guarantee there’ll be something at the scene of the crime that gives away his identity once you start digging… something he’ll have left there that he won’t even have known had a trail attached to it that leads back to him.” He looked down at Harrison. “They give you anything, Son?”

  “The… the knife,” he stuttered.

  “There you go. It’s probably registered in your name, or something stupid like that. Sorry, kid. They took advantage of you. But you’ve still got to be a real piece of work to kill someone to save your own skin.”

  “W-what about me?” Cordelia said. I noticed she hadn’t denied anything.

  The man in white looked at Gillian who simply shook her head in response. She wouldn’t be taking any action against her daughter. I could only hope that Cordelia’s regret over the mistake she’d made, which had led to her father’s death, was great enough punishment.

  I shared a look with Fergus, before turning back to the strange ensemble before us. I knew that neither of us was sure about what was happening in front of us… what we were letting happen.

  “You’ll have your diamond back in no time at all, Mrs Wrexton. The police will just want to examine it, but I doubt they’ll find anything at all. No fingerprints?”

  “Nothing that can’t be explained by family and friends,” Gillian assured him.

  The man in white nodded before looking us each in the eye. “Everything is going to be fine. Just leave it to us.”

  As we watched them lead the crooks away to be processed, I felt a chill run up my spine. Those sounded like the kind of well-rehearsed words that were usually delivered right before something terrible happened. Perhaps it was happening right in front of our eyes… and we knew too little to be able to do anything about it.

  * * *

  When I woke up later in the morning, it all seemed like a bad dream… except for the fact that my surroundings were different from usual. After the operation had been a success, Gillian had decreed that we should stay the night in a spare room. Cordelia had run off as soon as the men and women in white had left, distraught that this whole thing was, in part, due to her. Gillian had let her go. We’d accepted her invitation to stay, and that had been the last thing I’d known until now.

  I rolled over and discovered Fergus was lying on a bed across the room from me. I vaguely remembered that the twin room had been the only one made up for guests. I got out of bed and walked across to where he was sleeping. His face was so peaceful when he wasn’t awake… it was also completely devoid of any nutty theories exiting his mouth. I could really get used to…

  “Stop staring at me whilst I’m sleeping.”

  I jumped back in surprise. “You can’t have been sleeping if you knew what I was doing.”

  “Not true. I’ve been trained to sense if I was ever being watched whilst sleeping. You can do that, you know.”

  “Oh really? Show me the science,” I muttered before smiling. In spite of everything, some things just wouldn’t change.

  I sat down on the edge of his bed and thought about everything that had happened last night and the many unanswered questions I was still holding onto. One of them towered above the rest and I couldn’t get it out of my head. “What do you think Elephas meant?”

  That word, scrawled on a piece of jotter paper, had been important enough for Bill Wrexton to write it, even as he was bleeding to death from a mortal wound. It had to mean something important.

  “I do have a theory,” Fergus said, making me smile all over again. “It’s actually a very old theory, and supposedly completely debunked. It would have been popular about one hundred years ago, to give you an idea of the time scale we’re talking about. I’m not sure if it’s relevant, but I’d say that the suits and the secrecy mean I might not be too far off the truth.”

  “Just tell me the theory!” I said, desperate to know.

  “Back then, there was a school of thought that the government had an elephant in the room. The elephant was a pressure group who were able to manipulate the government’s every move, without anyone openly acknowledging that it was happening.”

  “It was debunked?”

  “Thoroughly. People took it very seriously at the time and several independent bodies were employed to find out the truth. They didn’t find anything - no trace at all of anyone pulling the government’s strings. The elephant in the room seemed to be gone for good.”

  “That does seem tenuous,” I confessed, thinking that the link from the latin word could refer to many different things. “It’s too bad that we weren’t able to get a look inside that dossier. It might have answered all of our questions.”

  “It might have got you killed.” The door opened and Gillian entered the room. “Eavesdropping is a nasty habit, but I haven’t quite got rid of some of my old habits yet… no matter how much I try to change.” She folded her arms and looked despairingly in Fergus’ direction. “Is there anything I can say to you to make you let this go?”

  “Only the truth. Otherwise I’ll look forever,” Fergus promised her. I believed him. He’d been searching for a theory to prove for such a long time... and now, finally, he might actually be onto something.

  “I can’t tell you everything. You don’t understand how dangerous this is… how high up it goes.” Gillian wrung her hands.

  “I think we have a pretty good idea,” I commented, thinking about the military style skills of those who'd taken down the crooks and their unique uniform.

  Gillian sighed and walked deeper into the room, seeming to come to some sort of decision. “I will tell you enough for you to understand why you shouldn’t go any further down this path. It leads only to misfortune of the gravest kind. I also need to get some of it off my chest. I suppose to discover if I really am as guilty as I believe…”

  She shook her head and shut her eyes for the briefest of moments. “Bill never knew anything about what I’d done before I married him. That was part of our arrangement - he’d never ask, and I’d never tell. We told the rest of his family that it was tradition for him to take my name… my supposedly ‘made-up’ name. I won’t tell you what it was before then, it doesn’t matter now, but it was traceable. That was what mattered. In the end, I picked my grandfather’s name and erased the rest. I was related to him through my mother, so there was no name correlation there. As I’ve already mentioned, I wanted to honour him, but in the end…”

  She
sighed again. “I don’t know how Bill knew to write that word. All I am able to imagine is that he’d looked in the safe without my knowledge before. It wasn’t a particularly hard safe to crack. Harrison proved that. He probably just followed the instructions he was given. It was never supposed to be foolproof because it was never supposed to be found.” She pulled a face. “It all sounds so foolish now. Bill must have looked. Perhaps he even looked in the folder and then kept quiet about it. Who can blame him for being curious about the life of a wife who didn’t have a history before she met him? When he wrote that word, I’m sure he was trying to tell me what they’d taken… as if I wouldn’t immediately have known what this was really about. But he did confirm it. When Bill wrote that, I knew for sure that they’d found me. The hard part was keeping the truth from the normal people who were curious about what happened. I truly mean no offence,” she added, before pacing up and down.

  “The dossier will go somewhere else now. I have no idea where, and the organisation looking for it will know that I’m no longer a part of it. That’s the way we work. I can run and hide and start a new life again, or I can stay here and fend for myself. I’m on my own now. No help will come if anything happens. I’m no longer a priority, as I have nothing of value.” She took a deep breath. “But I’m not ready to leave here yet. They can try to come for me, but they’ll get nothing in return. And I can take care of myself.”

  “I’m sure you can,” I said, pointedly.

  “Cordelia,” Gillian said, picking up on my meaning. “It really is time for her to fly the nest. I’m sure that will take years before it happens.” She looked at me with thought in her features. “Perhaps we did give her too much. I think I was compensating for the tough life I’d had before I had her. I’d wanted to protect her, but instead, I may have turned her into…well… into a bit of a brat.”

  “With the right encouragement, I think she’ll do just fine,” I said, surprising myself. I realised I did believe it. At the moment, Cordelia put most of her energy into being nasty, but if she managed to get through everything that had just happened and her own guilt, I thought she’d end up stronger for it, and who knew what could happen if she focused even half of that energy into something productive?