“Finished!” Lissa cried out. She added the pages she’d been holding to the top of the pile on the table.
“You’ve boiled,” said Bill.
“What?”
“Never mind. Thoughts?” He pointed at the manuscript.
“Connor Chantree didn’t write it, that’s for sure,” said Lissa. “And yet—”
“How sure?”
“Bill, come on!” She stretched out her legs beneath the yellow blanket she’d draped over them hours ago. Pink-painted toes appeared close to the sofa arm. “I can’t think of anyone less likely to have come up with all of that than Connor. Lovely though he is, he’s too normal. There aren’t many people I’d say that about, but he’s one of them.”
“I suppose it could have been his wife,” said Bill. “The chef. How well do you know her?”
“Flo Chantree? No. Not if she named her own catering business, which I expect she did. Anyone who calls their company Scrumplicious would have written a very different kind of book from the one I’ve just read. Trust me, Bill, it’s neither of the Chantrees. My money’s on the mad mum, Sally Lambert, who calls her houses ‘him’ and believes her dogs are her children.”
“Trouble is, there’s no trace of even the tiniest part of that…book document, or anything resembling it, on any of the Lamberts’ devices,” Bill told her. “Please don’t ask how I know, or what resources I put into finding out, or on what false pretexts.”
Lissa looked worried. “I thought the Large-in-Charge era was steering clear of all dodgy practices?”
“Give me a break.” Bill rubbed the stomach that had earned him the nickname “Large,” realizing he was hungry when he shouldn’t be. He’d had a second helping of shepherd’s pie only two hours ago. “I’ve hardly been beating confessions out of people. If Connor Chantree wrote it, which I think he must have, it’ll be on his home computer. He didn’t do it at work.”
“He didn’t do it at all, Bill.”
“But, Liss, he must have. He lied to me: said he’d found the pagesall messed up in a box—dirty, out of their proper order—and all he did was tidy them up to bring and show me. Yet there are chapters written by him—”
“Purporting to be written by him,” Lissa amended.
“—and the pages of those chapters are just as stained and scuffed as all the others. If he’d really written those two sections, why aren’t their pages pristine? And before the pages got dirty, someone numbered them continuously, and numbered the chapters continuously too: the Sally ones, the dog ones, and the Connor ones. Which means whoever wrote the other chapters must have written the Connor bits too—and I still say it was him. Connor. He did it on his home computer, printed it out, and then, for some reason best known to himself, kicked the living daylights out of it to make his found-in-a-box nonsense seem more credible.”
“Bill.” Liss sat up with a groan, swinging her legs round so that her feet were on the floor. She looked ready to dash over and inject him with something painful but necessary. “How much time have you spent on this? Far too much is the answer, isn’t it? Have you asked Connor if he wrote Chapters 23 and 29?”
Bill frowned. “No.”
“Sally Lambert might have thought it was fun to use him as a narrator in her story. She turned her bloomin’ dead dog into a narrator, didn’t she?”
“No. Connor would have said something,” said Bill. “He’d have said, ‘Large, there are two chapters pretending I wrote them, and I didn’t.’ He’s pretty thorough in his approach to things. No way he wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Ask him,” Liss suggested. “Or, and this is the far better option, forget the whole thing.”
“Forget?” Was she serious? “What if Tess Gavey was murdered?”
“She wasn’t: A coroner’s court has said so. Bill, come on. If you think a description of Tess having a scary dream is going to cut it in court… And I mean, the dream’s as ludicrous as it’s frightening, isn’t it? ‘Most of you is fish’ or whatever. Ridiculous! Someone’s trying to waste your time: Sally Lambert. Don’t let her.”
“I could go round Swaffham Tilney, door to door, ask at every house if anyone knows anything about a book calledNo One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done.”
“No, you’re not doing that. I’m not letting you. Bill, it’s a book, not a crime. Ignore it.”
“There’s no point anyway,” he said. “Whoever they are, the culprit will never admit it.”
“Well, that’s culprits for you,” said Lissa. “But please stop suspecting poor Connor Chantree of writing it. He would never describe himself as looking like the brush from a dustpan-and-brush set, and neither would Flo describe him that way.”
“I spoke to the coroner today,” Bill told her. “There’s no getting round it: Tess Gavey didn’t eat any fish or anything else just before she died. There was nothing in her system. Yet she had all the same allergic reaction symptoms as if she’d swallowed a whole bucket of mackerel. Nothing explains it. The only way it makes sense is if…” He broke off.
“Biii…ill,” Lissa said carefully, as if his name were a ticking bomb that required expert handling. “We know the explanation for her death hinted at in the book can’t be true. Don’t we?”
Did he, though? He was aware that he ought to know it, just like he oughtn’t to be hungry after two helpings of shepherd’s pie.
