The Festival Murders Page 4

  ‘Silly idiot,’ said Ranjit. ‘He’s arseholed. Where’s Bryce?’

  ‘He went back to the hotel,’ Priya replied. ‘I’d better go too. It’s getting late. Have you got a taxi number?’

  Ranjit pulled out his wallet and handed her a card. ‘But don’t leave us yet. The night is young. Come on. Let’s get you another drink.’

  ‘You poor darling, are you OK?’ It was that gossip columnist, Grace, hand on Priya’s arm. Followed by the American, Eva, who enfolded her in a crushing hug.

  ‘I must apologise for my friend,’ Ranjit was saying. ‘He’s like that. Highly emotional and volatile. It’s the Celtic blood.’

  ‘I did go out with him for six months,’ said Priya. ‘I know what he’s like.’

  ‘What a jerk!’ said Eva. ‘He should offer you an apology, at the very least …’

  So Priya, more rattled than she wanted to be, found herself accepting a large glass of wine and following Grace and Eva up the stairs, past the huge stag’s head on the landing, to Ranjit’s room, where a relaxed crowd sprawled out over the chairs and double bed and carpet, retreating every ten minutes in more select groups to take cocaine in the bathroom. Why they bothered to retire wasn’t clear. This wasn’t a public place and everybody knew what was going on. Perhaps it was part of the ritual around a Class A drug that you had to keep it a little bit secret, even if you were in a private house. Priya waved away Ranjit’s offer to join them, then Eva’s suggestion that she try some ‘shroom tea’. Grace, squashed up on her other side on the little yellow settee by the door, was also refusing the narcotics; instead, she was trying to get Priya to reveal what Bryce’s big talk was going to be about.

  ‘He hasn’t told me,’ Priya said. ‘He always keeps his cards close to his chest.’

  ‘I’ll bet you know, though.’

  ‘Honestly,’ Priya laughed, ‘I’m not that bothered. I’ll find out tomorrow anyway.’

  ‘I don’t believe you for a moment.’

  Later they were interrupted by that Rory guy who’d been so rude to Bryce, swerving down towards them in a black velvet jacket and artfully torn jeans. ‘Who wants to come to my room for a magical mystery tour?’ he cried, eyes wide as they spun lecherously from Grace to Priya and back again. He was accompanied by a cackling sidekick called Neville, whose little round spectacles were wobbling with excitement.

  ‘Screw you, Rory,’ said Eva. ‘Nobody’s interested.’

  Priya stayed up there until it was almost 1 a.m. It was time to head home, she told herself. Quite apart from anything else, Eva’s hand was resting on her thigh and she wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  ‘I really ought to call a cab,’ she said. ‘Get back to the hotel.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be a party pooper,’ said Eva. ‘You only live once.’

  SUNDAY 20TH JULY

  FIVE

  In his room at the White Hart Francis Meadowes couldn’t sleep. He had been at the Sentinel party earlier and was now regretting drinking so much white wine. Once it wouldn’t have mattered; he would have crashed out and slept through to breakfast time. In the past few years, though, things had changed. Wine now did this to him: woke him at 3 a.m. and kept his mind dancing around all sorts of pointless subjects. It was as if his own body were saying to him, ‘OK, Francis mate, let’s make sure you’re really not on form tomorrow.’

  What did it matter? He was only a minor crime writer. A junior genre man. Not a big draw like Dan Dickson or one of those telly celebs. That afternoon, having attended the ‘dickson’ talk and witnessed the bust-up with Peabody, Francis had popped into the festival office to see how his own ticket sales were going. Yes, said the young woman at the computer, he was still in the Small Tent, though it was possible that could change. To the School Room. ‘Only twenty-eight sold so far, I’m afraid.’ She made a face. ‘Sorry.’ So now he knew: it was going to be one of those grim sessions where he had a couple of rows of punters and had to keep looking upbeat while everyone thought, Who is this loser? Why did I sign up for this? As if it were his fault that his audience was so paltry. Which in a way it was.

  The main problem was that he was scheduled opposite Bryce Peabody – at 3 p.m. How very unfair was that? After the events of this afternoon, who was going to want to miss Bryce in full spitting form? Laetitia herself had bustled in at that moment and Francis had made the mistake of bothering her about his concerns, going over to her desk while she was on her mobile, then waiting patiently as she made another call on the land line.

  ‘Hi, I’m Francis Meadowes,’ he said, when she was done.

  ‘Of course you are.’ Laetitia flashed him a worn smile; then gazed hopefully at both her phones, as if someone more interesting might rescue her.

  ‘Your assistant told me you could be moving me. From the Small Tent to the School Room. Is that likely? I just want to know as I like to check the venue before the talk.’

  ‘I seriously hope not, er, Francis. But I’ll make that call tomorrow morning. Sorry, I’ve got to dash.’ And she was off, punching numbers into her mobile as she went. Rude cow, Francis thought. You asked me down here. You charge punters £10 each to listen to me. The least you can do is be civil.

  Now, at 3 a.m., this encounter whirred pointlessly round Francis’s head. He shouldn’t have gone over. If anything were going to go wrong it would be the thing he least expected. His laptop wouldn’t work, like that time at Dartington, when his visuals had been continually interrupted with Windows updates. Or he would get in there and clam up. Be unable to go through with the ordeal of standing up, just him, for fifty minutes, spouting on about himself. He would stop mid-sentence and break into a Tourette’s style string of obscenities. He would pick on the one person he knew in the audience and reveal their intimate secrets to the crowd at large. He would break down in tears …

  Come on Francis, he told himself, pull yourself together. His talk, his saner self knew, was perfectly well-structured and entertaining, an historical canter through the subject of the amateur in crime fiction: from the very earliest examples in The Thousand and One Nights and the Chinese detective fiction of the Ming dynasty, through European beginnings, Voltaire’s Zadig, early nineteenth-century Danish and Norwegian writers, Poe, Sherlock Holmes, the ‘Golden Age’ of Wimsey and Poirot and Marple, right up to contemporary television’s Jonathan Creek and Jackson Brodie. It was of course a way of showcasing his own series hero, George Braithwaite, a retired professor of forensic science, and his feisty wife and sidekick Martha, who had done well for him over a run of seven books. Though to be perfectly honest, he was a little sick of them now, was wondering if the time had come to kill at least one of them off. Having said that, his publishers loved the idea of more of the same. At a recent lunch, his ever-upbeat editor Nigel had pretty much begged him to keep the pair alive. No, a new detective would not be a good idea. Nor would Francis’s ambitious plan to abandon the genre altogether and attempt something more like literary fiction.

  ‘I’m never going to win the Booker Prize with George Braithwaite,’ he’d said. To which Nigel had sighed deeply and replied: ‘So, how d’you feel about a pudding?’

  Let’s face it, if he got really stuck, there were always questions.

  Now Francis leaned over and switched on the bedside light. He got out of bed and wished he were back home in his flat in Tufnell Park, where he could make himself some hot milk, with honey and nutmeg, his sure-fire cure for small hours insomnia. As it was, there was a bizarre choice of coffee and tea: Nescafe Instant, Kenco Smooth, Clipper Decaffeinated, Yorkshire Gold, Tetley’s Green, Twinings Digestif and Tranquillity. Only that last one offered even the vaguest promise of sleep. Perhaps he should risk going downstairs, finding the kitchen, raiding the fridge. But what if there were a fire alarm?

  Whoo-ooo-ooo-oosh! How loud the little kettle sounded at this time of the morning. Francis tiptoed to the window. Even the last revellers had gone to bed now. It would be dawn soon. Out here in the country, the noise would beg
in early.

  As the kettle clicked off, he heard a footstep in the corridor outside. Then, ‘Shit!’ – a man’s voice – ‘Shit, shit, shittety-shit!’ Somebody back late from one of the parties, he presumed. The celebrated Bryce Peabody perhaps. Francis had been introduced to him at the Sentinel do, then run into him half an hour later in the hotel lobby, pacing up and down like the White Rabbit, staring at his watch. He had looked at Francis as if he’d never seen him before.

  Now, overcome by his usual curiosity, Francis opened his door a crack and peeped out. Nothing. Just the green carpet stretching away to the steps at the end of the corridor and the arrow pointing, one way, to ROOMS 26–8, FAMILY SUITE and the other, ROOM 29. That was where Peabody and his pretty young girlfriend were staying. You had to wonder what the attraction was for her: fame, presumably, or fortune. Perhaps she just wanted to get on in journalism. Maybe – who knew? – she was escaping from an arranged marriage. When Francis had been researching his last but one Braithwaite novel, A Matter of Honour, he’d come across many extraordinary examples of what young Asian women would do to get away from the unions the more traditional of their families still demanded of them.

  Francis got back into bed with his tea and the chocolate that had been left on his pillow earlier, which was decorated with a tiny purple sugar rose. Then he pulled out the stack of cards on which he’d typed his talk. Was he really only going to scrape thirty punters? When he’d made a special effort to do more than the usual festival dreariness of a reading from the book you were promoting followed by a Q&A? Oh well, he decided, however many there were he would do them proud. That was the key to being professional in these situations. Even if it were just a handful, you had to treat them as if they were the centre of your world.

  SIX

  A piercing scream rang through the room. A girl in a green tulle dress ran in and threw herself down on the hearth rug.

  ‘Healp! Healp!’ she cried, banging her head on the floor like a toddler. ‘That Rory guy just tried to kill me. With a noyf.’

  ‘Cool it, Birgit,’ said Eva, who was still at Priya’s side. They were downstairs now, with the last few survivors, strewn on armchairs and settees in front of the dying log fire. ‘It’s fine. He’s just had too much coke or something. He’s like that. He goes a bit psycho when he’s overdone it.’

  ‘A bit soyko?’

  Her accent was Australian, Priya thought; that or Kiwi – she never could tell the difference. ‘He’s in the kitchen waving a farking Global noyf. D’you know how dangerous those things are? I’m going, back into town. Anyone want a lift? I’m driving nye-ow.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Priya said, leaping up. She had discovered – an age ago, it seemed – that both Mold’s taxi firms packed up before one o’clock. That this had left her stranded at Wyveridge hadn’t seemed to bother her host one jot. ‘You can always crash on a sofa,’ Ranjit had said, genially. ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘Let’s go then,’ said Birgit, ‘my car’s out back.’

  Eva looked disappointed, but Priya gushed her way out of any awkwardness, pecking her new friend on the cheek, squeezing her hand and promising to hook up with her tomorrow at the festival site. Then they were gone, bumping down the potholed drive in Birgit’s gleaming red Mini.

  It was 4 a.m. and just starting to get light. The birds were singing their hearts out in the empty fields. Over the river was a long low sliver of mist. A big ochre moon sank towards the horizon.

  ‘Thank fark for that!’ said Birgit, whose hands were trembling on the wheel as she drove. ‘What a bunch of drongos.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘That Rory freak only tried to kill me because I wouldn’t root him in the larder. What a dag. What was he thinking? One moment I was snogging him, the next he had a noyf out.’

  ‘Why did you snog him in the first place?’

  ‘I was only doing it as a thenk you. He gave me a couple of lines of coke, which was nice. But then he got all horned-up and tried to give me, like, acid. He had these tabs right there in his wallet. Little white postage stamps with strawberries on them. He told me the last time he’d had a trip he’d seen Mylene Klass playing chess in the nude with Lily Allen – and they’d both ignored him. I was laughing my head off. But then he was going on about how, like, really nice I was and how awesome it would be if we were tripping together at sunrise, especially if we were up on the roof, where there’s some amazing view over five counties or something. When I said I wasn’t interested, he told me not to be so uptight, so I told him to eff off. Then he flipped.’

  ‘How did you get away?’

  ‘Kneed him in the goolies and ran for it. He was well gone anyway. He just groaned and crashed to the floor. But he’s a big bloke. He could have done what he’d liked with me if he’d been a bit more together.’

  ‘It does seem like a rather decadent scene.’

  ‘Posh Pommie weirdoes, if you ask me. Now I’ve got to wake up this other guy who’s after me and beg to sleep on his floor.’

  ‘Out of the frying pan …?’

  ‘Donald wouldn’t dare. But I’ll still have to put up with him hanging around me all tomorrow.’

  Soon they were driving down the long hill into Mold; then over the quaint little stone bridge and right round the mini-roundabout onto the empty main street, straight to the White Hart on the bend.

  ‘This is me,’ said Priya. ‘Thanks so much. I thought I was stuck there for the night.’

  ‘No worries. You’re well out of it.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll see you around the festival site?’

  ‘If I don’t head straight back to London. I’ll see how I feel in the morning. I tell you what, though. I never want to clap eyes on that Rory jerk ever again.’

  Reaching the hotel, Priya rummaged around in her big red Mulberry bag for the front door key. There it was, at the bottom, under her make-up. But when she tried it in the lock it wouldn’t turn. Shit. That kooky waitress must have given her the wrong one. She was going to have to ring the bell.

  She had to press three times before anything happened. Finally a light clicked on in the hallway and a face appeared at the door. It was the hotel manageress, in a hairnet and black silk dressing gown. She didn’t look happy.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Priya. ‘I stupidly let my boyfriend come back with our key. This one doesn’t fit.’

  The manageress took it from her. ‘Who gave you that?’

  ‘The Eastern European girl.’

  ‘How much more can I take?’ she muttered. Then, to Priya, almost as if it were her fault: ‘This is the key to the back door. Come on in then. Quick as you can. You’re the third tonight. Some of us have to be up at six.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Priya repeated, even as she thought, Stupid cow, no need to get stroppy with me; if you don’t want to answer the door yourself, get yourself a night porter.

  ‘Thanks again!’ she called, as she hurried on up the green carpeted stairs.

  Along the corridor she went and turned right for Room 29.

  SEVEN

  Francis was back with the love of his life. He was in a dark street and Kate was right beside him. ‘Come on,’ she said, tugging at his hand, ‘let’s go home.’ She leant in to kiss him and he was crying with happiness to think that she was alive and they were still living in that tiny basement in Kennington.

  It was where they had rented when they first came to London, two English grads fresh out of York. Kate had been doing a conversion course to become a lawyer, and Francis had taken a bar job in Soho while he struggled to get going as a writer. They had lived on nothing, vegetable soup and bread and cheese and the occasional bit of marked-down meat past its sell-by date. Towards the end of that happy time, they had got married, exchanging their vows in a sunlit, wood-panelled room in Totnes Town Hall, ten miles from where Kate’s parents lived, in a lovely old house on the river Dart. Kate had worn a slinky white sheath of a dress that had looked just perfect; he could still se
e her dancing by the rose bushes in the twilit garden.

  Then he had a terrible thought. Hadn’t she drowned? In that felucca in Egypt he had tried so hard to stop them going on. Hadn’t he seen her naked body laid out, as dead-eyed as a fish, on the brown Nile mud?

  But no, no, she hadn’t, she couldn’t have, because she was still there with him. ‘Come on!’ she cried, eyes bright, her hand tight in his. ‘I want to show you something.’

  Now the sky was darkening and people around them were running for their lives. A woman screamed, loudly.

  ‘Oh my go-od!’

  ‘Kate! Kate! Come back!’ She was sprinting away from him now, far too fast for him to catch up with her, down towards the river. He was right by the dark water, which swirled powerfully past the concrete bridge supports. Where was she?

  ‘Oh my go-o-od!’

  Francis woke abruptly, his eyes wet with tears. He wasn’t in London with his long-dead wife. He was in a room with the curtains half open. Outside birds were singing. It was getting light. He was at the Mold-on-Wold literary festival. Where he was due to talk. Tomorrow. Today. This afternoon at 3 p.m.

  Even as his heartbeat slowed, the scream came again.

  ‘Oh my g-o-o-od!’

  It was coming from inside the hotel. A woman was being attacked, right outside his room. Francis leapt from his bed and ran for the door in his pyjamas. Outside, at the end of the corridor, the pretty Asian girl was collapsed on the stairs.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked, running to her. She was in a crimson silk dress and sheer black tights, no shoes. She smelt of alcohol, perfume, sweat, smoke.

  ‘I – I – I –’ she gasped.

  ‘Come on, you’re all right,’ he said, kneeling to hold her. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He’s dead. My – my – boyfriend. Bryce. He’s out cold on the bed. He came back early. I was at the party. At Wyveridge Hall. I couldn’t get a taxi. I just got back. He – he’s lying there, on the sheet, dead.’