Meredith felt happy—quite jubilant, actually—when she reached the Enjollifying ending ofLamberts, but she understands why Josh didn’t. He has no dark side. That’s one of the things shehas always liked about him. Like Champ Lambert himself, Josh Varndall is an entirely benign force for good in the world.
“So we’re agreed we’re not taking it forward,” says Meredith. “Good. And do we think the writer will… I mean, we’re not making ourselves targets or anything, if we say no?”
“I don’t think so—and that you feel the need to ask that question is another good reason to pass on the book,” Josh says. “Imagine the strap-line for our launch: ‘Varndall Miles—home of great books by writers who’d murder us if we didn’t publish them.’”
Meredith almost laughs, then remembers how weird it is that they’re having this conversation. The waiter brings their first course, and she asks him if she can have a knife and fork; she’s never managed to get the hang of chopsticks. Once he’s gone, she says to Josh, “So we’re going to be Varndall Miles, then? It’s official?”
He nods. “Sorry, I thought I’d told you. I decided you were right. You usually are. Posh Vandal is gutsy and sounds like a market disruptor, yes, but as you said—”
“Just because it was a nickname you had at school, that doesn’t make it a great name for a business?” Meredith grins.
“You said Posh Vandal sounds like a fashion label created by twenty-year-olds with tattoos and piercings, operating out of a disused warehouse.”
“Andyousaid ‘she,’” says Meredith. “When you were talking about the author ofLamberts.You think it’s a woman?”
“It’s got to be Sally Lambert, surely? I think it’sallSally,” Josh admits after a brief pause. “I think she killed Tess. Somehow, she must have, I don’t know, got some fish into her. I know, I know, the postmortem. I can’t justify my position, but…” He shrugs. “I thinkit was Sally who set fire to the Gaveys’ house, Sally who wrote the book. The book tells us itself: She wanted to be a famous writer. It also tells us she joined an online writing community at a certain point. The clues are there.”
“See,Ithink it’s all Corinne Sullivan,” says Meredith. “Corinne, or one of her helpers, found a way to kill Tess without it registering as an unnatural death. Corinne then arranged for the fire to be started at the Stables. Again, one of her minions will have done it, not her personally. And maybe Sally wrote some of the book, but I reckon Corinne had a hand in that too. I think she’d be able to produce something as polished asLamberts, whereas I’m not sure Sally Lambert would, especially if she’s never written anything before. Maybe they wrote it together.”
“Maybe they committed the three murders together,” Josh says.
“Why aren’t the deaths of Lesley and Alastair Gavey mentioned?” Meredith asks him. “The fire is, but their deaths aren’t. All it says about the Gavey parents at the end is ‘Very soon after Tess’s death, Lesley and Alastair Gavey left the village.’ Doesn’t mention that they left in body bags. Why not?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” says Josh.
“Is it?”
“Yeah, I think so. You can’t put deaths in a book and not explain them. Tess’s death can be explained—Furbert was responsible, and he can safely admit it, being a spirit in Level 2 and therefore not arrestable for murder.”
“Oh, I see.” This made sense to Meredith. “Yes, and in the writer’s invented point of view for Furbert, he doesn’t want to implicate the other killer, if the arsonist wasn’t him. But he’s mentioning the fire,right? And whoever wrote the book knows that anyone reading it will know about Lesley and Alastair dying in that fire, so…maybe Furbert’s happy to leave their deaths as unsolved mysteries. Are we meant to think he’s doing what Agatha Christie did inThe Rose and the Yew Tree? Remember the bit where he tells us Corinne Sullivan ‘cannot bear mystery books in which the solution is handed to the reader on a platter, having not got where she is today by relying on others to problem-solve for her’? You see, I think Corinne wrote that. Not Sally.”
“It’s clearly a novel written by an obsessive dog-lover, though,” says Josh. “A devoted ‘dog mum’ for whom having her dead pet narrate sections of a book might satisfy all kinds of emotional yearnings, help to process grief…”
“If my dog had died, writing a novel in which he narrates killing a teenage girl as if it’s a great accomplishment… That wouldn’t cheer me up,” Meredith says.
“True.”
“I’m not Sally Lambert, though. I wouldn’t burn my neighbors to death.”
Josh laughs. “If you were capable of doing that, it would have happened by now.”
“True.” Meredith’s next-door neighbors are rancorous head cases. “No, I’m sticking with Corinne, I’m afraid—maybe not as killer but definitely as author. Why is the ‘Never work for someone who can fire you’ poem included in full, apart from to promote Corinne’s worldview, in which anyone who isn’t entrepreneurial is a waste of space?”
The waiter is making his way toward them to clear away their starter plates. Meredith sits and waits, listening to snatches of thevarious conversations that are going on around her. Contracts, software, roll-out, implementation, stag do, appraisal, hangover, pickle ball, consultant, seating plan, implementation again. Everyone is, thank goodness, too busy talking to eavesdrop.
Once the waiter and the used plates are gone, Meredith says, “Any thoughts about who Saul Hollingwood might be?”
“None whatsoever. You?”
She starts to recite from memory: “‘There are causes, and then there are clinchers, and the memory of Lesley’s fake concern—“It’s not fair to give a dog a joke name like that, Sally. It’s disrespectful, actually”—fell decisively into the clincher category. The stark fact is that, if those two sentences had never been uttered, a young man named Saul Hollingwood would have gone to work as usual on 29 June 2024 instead of doing what he did after calling in sick. (He sounds as if he matters to our story, doesn’t he? Yet this is the first and last time his name will appear in these pages.)’”
Josh looks impressed. “I bet you know the whole book by heart, don’t you?”
“I think that passage is digging into the motive for the murders. Thecause, as in the main motive, was everything terrible the Gaveys did to the Lamberts.”
“And the fact that, even though Champ was in the clear, Sally knew Lesley Gavey was so hate-fueled, she might try to harm him in a different way,” says Josh.
“Right. Yes, that also counts as cause. But theclincherwas that particular memory—that Lesley had actually sat in Sally’s living room and said something so insensitive about poor departed Furbert.”
