The Corpse with the Silver Tongue (22 page)

I had to come clean. “One of the skills I have is reading people. I use it a lot. When I mentioned that your desk had been moved I saw a change in your expression: you knew the person who had used it in its old position, and you felt anger at the thought of that person. Now, most people feel anger toward those who have, at some point, made them feel powerless—so the man was likely your boss. I'm afraid your dislike of him was very apparent—he didn't just make you angry; you also felt indignant that he had held the post. I suspect that you felt he wasn't up to the job, eh?”

“Ah,” was all that Moreau would say, and he winked at me. “You see much,” he added.

“Yes, I do,” I replied, and I dared a wink back at him. I followed Bertrand to a waiting police car, to be ferried back to my hotel and, oh please, please, please, a comfortable night's sleep. I was knackered.

THE SAME GUY WHO HAD
been at the reception desk at my hotel when I'd arrived back from the hospital was there again when I dragged myself out of the police car at two o'clock in the morning. As I smiled weakly at him I wondered if he thought I'd been there all day . . . and night, given that he was the one who'd given me the directions to the police station that morning. He looked surprised and puzzled, but I decided to say nothing and to retain an air of mystery!

I finally got to my room and flopped onto the bed, face first, just glad to be someplace where I could relax. It had been a hell of a day. I had to tell myself quite firmly that I couldn't just lie there like that all night—I had to get myself undressed, into the bathroom and into the bed to try to make sure I slept properly. For once, I listened to myself, and also took the time to remove my makeup and brush my hair. When I got under the covers, I couldn't get my mind to slow down. I lay there staring at the ceiling, wishing I could switch off.

You know what it's like when you can't sleep; it doesn't matter what you do, you just can't get comfy. I'd almost beaten my pillows to a pulp trying to get them to allow my head to nestle just so, but I still felt as though I was lying on a couple of bricks. Eventually, I sat up, turned on the bedside lamp, and reached for my pen. I hoped that doing a “brain dump” would let me wind down a bit.

I scribbled some notes on various bits of paper before I realized that, if I wanted to be able to read what I was writing at some future point, I'd better just open up my laptop and type. You'd be excused for inferring from my handwriting that I was a doctor of medicine, not a doctor of psychology.

Having pulled out all the paraphernalia that I'd managed to stuff into my little laptop case, and having managed to hook everything together, I sat and typed. I was hoping that the process would help me to organize my thoughts, but all it resulted in was a very long list of all the things I didn't know, or things about which I knew a little and wished I knew more. The whole process was rather frustrating.

I looked at my watch—it was three o'clock, so six in the evening in Vancouver. I was pretty sure that Bud would be home, so I called the Anderson apartment, his cell phone, Jan's cell phone, then the apartment again . . . nothing. Still just voice mail. Where the hell was he? For that matter, where was Jan? Again I was struck by the idea that maybe something bad had happened out at Bud's Chilliwack drug-bust operation.

This time, rather than panic, I decided I'd use the “Free Wi-Fi in Every Room” the sign in the hotel lobby promised. I checked the Global TV News website for anything about trouble in the Fraser Valley. There was nothing. I was relieved. I was pretty sure that if anything
had
happened it would have made it onto the news page.

Still not able to sleep, I let my eyes run over the rest of Global's headlines. The area's “Most Searched” stories, sorted by popularity: record amounts of rain had fallen on the Lower Mainland, and areas of Coquitlam and White Rock had flooded—no news there; those areas always flood when it rains heavily; gas had hit record high prices in Downtown Vancouver for the second day running—again, not really news; and a South Surrey woman had been the victim of a targeted shooting. I sat in amazement for a moment—I mean, how can people be more interested in the weather and gas prices than in a fatal shooting? A “targeted killing”
always
means a gang was involved. What
are
these women thinking who marry or go out with gangsters? This victim wasn't the first partner of a gang member to be shot that way; nor, probably, would she be the last. A year earlier a woman had been shot while her two-year-old son was sitting in the child-seat in the back of the car—just to send a message to her drug-runner husband. Terrible, yes, but hardly unpredictable.

I realized as I read the headline that maybe
that
was what had got Bud caught up at the office, or maybe even at the scene of the shooting, and the grip on my stomach stood down from red to amber alert. I was still a bit miffed that he hadn't followed through on his offer to contact Moreau.

With one concern slightly alleviated I decided I'd better try to give some more thought to
how
the necklace might have been stolen from the Townsends' apartment, rather
why
. If three people had a “why,” then if I spent time working out the “how,” maybe I could narrow things down a bit. I'm good with the “why” because it's what I do—I work out why people do what they do, but I don't usually get involved with how they do it. That's where Bud's lot always took over. I didn't have “Bud's lot,” and Moreau had made it clear that I wasn't going to get any inside information from him, so I made a few notes and came up with some questions that needed answering.

#1 If the necklace was stolen before the party, who could have stolen it? Where were Beni, Chuck, and Gerard on Friday afternoon? Tamsin was out when Beni arrived with the bread, so the apartment was empty—a good time for theft.

#2 If the necklace was stolen at the party, how did the thief get it out of apartment?

#3 Who knew where the necklace was hidden?

#4 Was it even hidden—am I assuming this because it wasn't in view when I arrived, and no one said it was missing then?

#5 How did Tamsin know it was missing? She must have known where it was supposed to be. Why did she bother to check for the necklace when her husband had just died?

I was happy with that list—well, as happy as you can be when you've just written down a bunch of questions that you don't know the answers to. At least my thoughts were a bit clearer, so I followed the same process for the deaths of Alistair and Madelaine.

#1 How did digitalis get onto snails?

I stopped there. With internet access freely available there was no reason why I couldn't bone up on snail rearing and digitalis. It helped a great deal, because suddenly I understood why Alistair had been hosing down the snails he'd had delivered to the apartment days before the party. The snails would have arrived in boxes. Internet photos showed them to be large boxes, with holes in the bottom and the top. You keep the little creatures in the boxes for a few days before they're on the menu so you can purge them of all the nasty stuff that hangs around in their digestive tracts. Yuk—I saw the sense in that! If he'd been feeding them, which Tamsin said he had, it was likely that he'd been giving them dill: I could recall they had indeed been dill flavored. Apparently, snails' bodies
intensify
whatever they ingest. That was interesting.

I moved onto reading about digitalis, which is derived from foxgloves. I love their jolly spikes—they are so common in and around Vancouver, where there are lots of damp spots. I was surprised to find that the whole plant is toxic, not just the flowers. I tried finding out if one could make a toxic substance by drying foxglove leaves then grinding them into some sort of powder. I thought maybe someone could have sprinkled a powder onto the snails after they were cooked. It seemed that all the sources agreed that you'd need a lot of the stuff to make people as ill as we had all been, and a huge quantity to kill someone—and I was pretty sure we hadn't all been eating foxglove leaves in the salad! I couldn't envisage foxgloves even growing in Nice: bougainvillea, yes; mimosa, yes; foxgloves, no. It's just a bit too bright and arid on the Cote d'Azur for foxgloves. It was much more likely that Alistair's stash of digitalis-based pills had been employed.

I wasn't sure
how
the digitalis might have got onto the snails, but I was pretty sure it must have done so sometime between their preparation and their arrival at the table. According to several websites, the correct way to cook snails once they are out of their shells is by simmering them, something I was sure Alistair would have done because he was always one to do things the “correct” way. But even this would not have reduced the toxicity of the digitalis.

So my notes to myself ended up being just a list of words: cleansing, dill, digitalis, pills, simmering.

#2 How did the murderer know that Alistair would take/had taken extra pills?

Now that was a tough one. Either the murderer had depended on Alistair's apparently erratic dosing habits, which seemed unlikely, or they had somehow actively encouraged him to take more pills than usual that particular day. The second option seemed much more plausible. And it meant the murderer must have spent time with the victim on the day he died. I wrote down all the suspects' names, then thought about each of their whereabouts on Friday. As I worked through what I already knew, which wasn't much, something else suddenly dawned on me. I needed to find out where everyone had been on Friday after lunch, not only to know if they'd been in contact with Alistair, but also to determine whether they might have had access to the Townsends' apartment, giving them time to steal the necklace before the party.

I went back to my list. Tamsin, of course, would have had any number of chances to urge Alistair to take his pills, but I was still wondering why she'd want to steal a necklace that was going to be hers anyway. Beni had told me he'd been to the Townsends' apartment some time after four o'clock but no one was home. Presumably, he'd been at the museum before that, and he'd told me he'd gone back there between delivering the bread and catching a cab to the party. He'd seen Gerard at the apartment when he'd left the bread with him—so had Gerard been at the Palais all day? Had he seen Alistair later on, after Alistair left me? Where was Chuck all day? I assumed he worked from home, but I guessed writers do more than just write. At certain points in their creative cycle they must do other things, like carrying out research or checking drafts of their manuscripts. So maybe he'd been elsewhere that day. Madelaine—what about her? I knew as much about her whereabouts as I did of Tamsin's—nothing.

Yes, I decided I'd do some research when I'd had some sleep. But, how? How was I going to come up with a reason to talk to any of these people ever again? They weren't my friends or anything. We'd been brought together originally by Alistair, and now thrown back together because of the horrible occurrences since my arrival at Tamsin's birthday party. I'd somehow have to come up with an excuse to talk to them all.

I finally realized I was getting sleepy. I hoped that if I made a quick dive into the bed, I might actually drift off for a few hours. I powered down the laptop, unhooked all the leads, and clambered in between the sheets, where I lay for a few moments fantasizing about something sweet to nibble on, before finally drifting off to sleep. Dreams about giant snails chasing me through skyscraper-high grass didn't wake me, though I was briefly roused by the noise of the garbage collectors outside my window at about four-thirty. I managed to slip back to my dreams, which were now populated by foxglove flowers eating pasta . . . in the way they can when you're asleep and dream-logic rules.

When my bedside telephone rang at nine o'clock, I awoke with a start to discover that the birthday cake I thought I'd been munching was, in fact, my pillow, and it didn't taste at all good. A dry mouth was the least of my problems. When I picked up the phone I heard sobbing, followed by Tamsin's high-pitched whine. “Oh, Cait—I'm so glad I got hold of you . . . Please come, come quick . . . It's Gerard, something terrible has happened . . .” And with that, she hung up.

Oh, whoop de bloody doo!

Good morning, Cait Morgan—this is your wake-up call . . . and off we go again!

I WASN'T REALLY WITH IT
for a moment or two, which was understandable given that I'd had less than six hours' sleep, and none of those hours seemed to have been particularly reviving. I forced myself to the bathroom, where I showered, washed my hair, dried it, and put on my makeup—all of which gave me the chance to gather my wits about me to face whatever the day might hold.

Remembering that Tamsin was nothing if not a drama queen, I tried to find her phone number and call her back before I went storming up to Cimiez again, maybe on a fool's errand, or maybe to be confronted by yet another dead body. It was a fifty-fifty chance, I reckoned. My room didn't have a telephone directory, so I went down to the hotel lobby to be greeted by the now familiar face of the receptionist, who pulled a tired old book from under the desk and handed it to me with a suspicious look. I rustled through the pages until I got to the “T's,” but there were no listings at all for “Townsend.” Of course not. I tried “Damcott”—nothing—then finally “Fontainbleu.” Of course, there were dozens! I finally found Gerard's number and entered it into my cell phone. On a final whim, I tried “Brunetti”: there were a few, but only one with the initial “B,” so I saved what I hoped was Beni's number and gave the receptionist back his book. He looked relieved. Maybe he thought I was some weird type of criminal who would have made off with it given half a chance.