“For goodness’ sake, Bill. Whatever killed Tess Gavey, it wasn’t a ghostly visit from the vengeful spirit of Furbert Herbert Lambert, and it wasn’t anything to do with ‘fish’ being part of ‘selfish.’ Physical allergic reactions are not caused by wordplay.”
“When you put it like that…” Bill smiled. “Though they could actually be caused by serious psychological trauma. Remember that book I read about how to heal back pain, which said it was all caused by repressed emo—”
“Here’s what I think,” said Lissa. “Sally Lambert probably believes Tess deserved to die after what she tried to do to Champ. Would she admit it, though? Probably not, because…well, a teenage girl is dead. She had her whole life before her and now that’s just gone. Snuffed out, and no discernible cause. That’s a tragedy, however nasty and conniving Tess’s worst behavior was. Everyone who hears about her death is going to think, ‘Oh, how awful, poor girl. Poor family.’”
“And…therefore what?” asked Bill. He didn’t have the heart to tell his wife that “What a tragedy” was certainly not what everyone was thinking and saying about the demise of Tess.
“Well, none of that will sit well with Sally Lambert, will it?” said Lissa. “She might well be keen to control the narrative around Tess’s death, and the story has a clear moral lesson if Furbert heroically punishes Tess and it’s all part of evil being defeated by good. This version of the story is exactly the one Sally Lambert would want to put out there: her darling Furbert Herbert as an agent of justice.”
Bill wasn’t convinced. “You may be right,” he said. “But look,whoever wrote it, why toss the pages into a box and bury it first, then dig it up?”
“Was anything printed on the cardboard box? Company name or anything? Stickers? Postage labels?”
“Nothing. Just a plain, brown cardboard box.”
Lissa hauled herself into a standing position. “I need to go to bed, Bill. It’s late.”
“I’m starving. Is there any shepherd’s pie left?”
“Stacks. I’ll put some out for you in the kitchen before I go up.”
A few seconds later she reappeared. “Bill. Don’t just sit there going round in circles all night, fretting about it. Your brain’ll work better after a good night’s sleep. And remember: There’s no crime involved—nothing that meets the legal definition of a crime. You’re not duty-bound to pursue this, and there’s a strong chance you’ll never know the truth, so save yourself the bother. Night!”
Bill thought his brain was working pretty well. He didn’t feel tired. He felt easily up to the task of trying to figure out why the manuscript had been buried in a box and then, later, dug up.
Obviously dead dogs didn’t write books. Bill knew that. But what if a living person, temporarily possessed by a spirit that’s not his own, could maybe have… I mean, the Connor chapters contained some words that Bill was sure Connor Chantree didn’t know and would never use. So what if Connor’s hands did all the typing, but Furbert Herbert Lambert was the book’s true author?
And then maybe… Yes! It made sense: What if Sally Lambert somehow got her hands on the manuscript and read it. She might have panicked and buried it in her garden to protect Furbert’s reputation. At which point Furbert, stubborn and proud—also,crucially, spirit rather than flesh and therefore untouchable both by the law and by conventional morality—dug it up and dropped it between Connor Chantree’s car and his garage, believing it deserved a wider audience.
Ridiculous! Bill scolded himself. Utterly, embarrassingly absurd. How could he be sitting here coming up with theories that involved supernatural possession? It felt almost as if he’d been possessed himself—by idiocy. He was supposed to be sensible. He was a senior police detective, well respected by his colleagues. Lissa was right. Enough of this nonsense.
He stood up and staggered a few paces before his limbs unstiffened and he was able to walk normally to the kitchen. This brought to mind a funny poem he’d read years ago and had remembered ever since:
In youth, before I knew the cares
of middle age, I never dreamt
that getting out of comfy chairs
could take me more than one attempt.
In the kitchen, he found a small peach on the table, positioned at the center of one of his and Lissa’s largest dinner plates. It looked a little like a contemporary artwork of the sort he enjoyed sneering at. He squeezed it and his thumb broke through its furry skin.
No shepherd’s pie in sight.
Bill frowned. He’d told Lissa he planned to return to his healthy eating protocol as soon as work felt more manageable. He’d meant it, too—there had been no slackening of his good intentions—sothere was no need for her to drop pointed hints like this. Still, this peach needed eating now that he’d tunneled into it with his thumb. It could be his pre-bed snack starter, he decided. He’d dig the shepherd’s pie leftovers out of the freezer afterward and heat them up. There was no defeating Bill Wendt’s appetite at its most determined.
A minute or so later, he descended, with great care, the bumpy stone steps that led to the lower part of the kitchen (Lissa called it “the Galley,” a name that was too pretentious for Bill). The steps were a disaster waiting to happen, but Bill had been forbidden from doing anything to make them safer. According to Lissa, they were made from imported Cornish stone and contained fossils. Why anyone would bother bringing Cornish stone to Cambridgeshire, Bill had no idea—nor why Lissa thought it meant he ought to be willing to risk breaking bones.
On his way to dispose of the peach stone, he caught sight of something silver and shiny in his peripheral vision. He turned and saw another dinner plate from the too-big-to-fit-in-their-dishwasher set, bearing a mound of something he couldn’t see, wrapped in cling film. It was sitting across the tops of two of the four rectangular straw basket-drawer things, in the alcove next to the bin, where Lissa kept things like Sellotape, paper clips, and clothes pegs.
Bill threw away the peach pit, reached for the plate, and lifted the cling film. Shepherd’s pie! Joy of joys—even more so because he’d imagined a puritanical attempt to deprive him of it.
Good old Lissa. But why had she put it there, where he could so easily not have spotted it, after saying she’d leave it in the kitchen where the microwave was?
Bill smiled. He knew why. She wasn’t normally absent-minded, but her head had no doubt been too full of Lamberts-related theories and speculation to attend properly to practicalities.
Anyway: shepherd’s pie!
