Poison Pen (7 page)

She stood for a few moments, surveying the upturned faces in the lobby below. Then, with a perfect sense of dramatic timing, she descended the stairs.

When we left the hotel, the fans outside dropped all pretence of moodiness: they clapped and screamed almost as loudly as the pink princesses had done for Zenith. Unlike Zenith, however, who’d basked in the attention (until the manure incident had dampened her spirits), Esmerelda Desiree seemed almost indifferent. Accepted it as her right. She was regal. Stately. The very essence of Cool. She walked forward, Graham and I trotting behind like a pair of poodles, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea.

We crossed the road without incident and were just about to enter the town hall when Max Spectre suddenly leapt from the shadows to block our way. One of the security guys moved forward to intercept him, but Esmerelda laid a pale, manicured hand on his arm and said in a deep, husky voice, “No. Let the man speak.”

Max looked weary. Despairing. He held up his plastic bag and said, no doubt for the umpteenth time, “I’ve written this book. I need some help getting it published. I heard you—”

“I’m a little busy right now,” Esmerelda interrupted, but then she gave him a gracious smile. “I have a reading to do. Maybe later.”

Hope flared in Max’s eyes. He’d clearly expected her to brush him off the way the others had. His sudden eagerness was pitiful. “You’ll look at it?” he asked. “Really?”

Esmerelda was startled by the intensity of his response and took a step back, spiking the security guard’s foot with her stiletto. He winced.

“Yes, well, see you…” Esmerelda said uncertainly.

By now, Viola had appeared and was coming down the town hall steps with the speed of an avalanche. Before Max could say anything, she bustled him out of the way. “I will not have my authors pestered,” she barked. Meekly, we followed her in.

Esmerelda’s event was in the same room as Zenith’s had been the day before. The stage had been thoroughly scrubbed, but I thought I could detect a faint whiff of manure.

Tim, the technician, fixed a wire contraption around Esmerelda’s neck, just above her collarbone. The mike nestled against her pearly white neck like a rather large cockroach.

“All set?” asked Viola.

“Absolutely,” nodded Tim.

They both seemed quite wound up, but after yesterday’s dramas it was hardly surprising. Tim sat down at the control desk and it was then that disaster struck. He went to pick up his coffee, but the cup slipped and hot liquid splashed over all the electronics.

Esmerelda’s mike let out the most hideous screech, then crackled and died.

Tim looked as if he was going to be sick and all the colour drained from his face. When he said weakly that he didn’t have a spare, Esmerelda replied graciously, “Don’t worry. I was at drama school before I started writing. I know how to project my voice. I can manage without a mike.”

Although Esmerelda seemed totally cool about it, I thought Viola was going to faint or have a heart attack or both. “No!” she gasped. “No!” The mike’s demise seemed to have tipped her over the edge. “I can’t bear it,” she said in a cracked, despairing voice. “Not after all my hard work. That’s it. I’ve had enough. I give up.” She broke into loud sobs and Tim had to find Sue Woodward, who led her off to lie down in the green room.

Graham and I looked at each other uncomfortably, but we didn’t have time to talk about Viola. Esmerelda’s event was due to begin.

The doors opened, the goths poured in and, after the usual introduction by Nigella Churchill, Esmerelda Desiree started to talk. Once again, I was astounded. The other events I’d seen had been a bit dull, to be honest. Unless you were a mad-keen fan, none of the authors were exactly gripping. Esmerelda Desiree, however, was different. She was electrifying. Mesmerizing. When she read an extract from
The Vampiress of Venezia,
her audience hung on every word. I was spellbound.

Towards the end she asked for questions from the audience. There was the usual sort of stuff: what books did she like reading? Who was her favourite author? How long had it taken her to write the book? Where had she got the idea from? They’d all been asked that one. Katie, Muriel and Francisco had given virtually the same vaguely mystical answer as Charlie Deadlock – that stories just seemed to be Out There Waiting to Find an Author. Esmerelda, on the other hand, was very specific, describing in gripping detail a visit she’d made to Venice and how she’d walked the streets at night thinking up the plot.

Then a girl in a black cape asked if there was going to be a sequel.

Everyone in the room leant forward with eager anticipation.

Esmerelda didn’t answer at once, clearly enjoying the moment. Then she said firmly, “No. I won’t write a sequel.”

A deep, disappointed sigh was expelled from every chest. The breeze rippled Esmerelda’s raven hair.

“My publisher would love me to write another,” she explained, “but I feel the book stands alone. I want to explore other subjects.”

Nigella asked, “Are you working on something now?”

“Yes,” breathed Esmerelda huskily. She cast down her eyes and added mysteriously, “But I’d rather not say what it is. All I will tell you is that it’s a very different novel from
The Vampiress of Venezia
.”

That seemed to bring the event nicely to an end. “I’m sure we’re all looking forward to reading it,” Nigella said smoothly. “Esmerelda Desiree, thank you.”

“It’s been a pleasure.”

There was a long, loud, rapturous round of applause, and then Graham and I had to scarper to the book-signing table.

Apart from the hitch with the microphone, Esmerelda’s event had passed entirely without incident. I commented on it to Graham as we walked along the line of goths handing out Post-it notes.

“It may well be because of the increased security measures,” he replied. “The opportunities for an attacker will be extremely limited now.”

“Mmm … maybe. Or it could be because Esmerelda was nice to Max Spectre.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, now we know he talked to the others, too,” I said. “What if he’s been attacking people who won’t help him?”

“Esmerelda Desiree may well be safe if that’s the case,” said Graham, frowning. “But Trevor had better take care. Max approached him, too, didn’t he?”

I felt a sudden stab of anxiety for Basil’s publicist. He wouldn’t be covered by Viola’s increased security measures – those were just for the authors. Was he OK? I became more and more worried as the signing went on. It took ages. The queue of moody goths seemed to go on for ever, and they weren’t content just to get their book signed and move off – they all had to have great long conversations with Esmerelda about life essence and the undead. I got quite twitchy.

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.

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?”