“It’s what I wanted to show you. This is the Doomsday Book. it records the property of every man in England during the reign of William the Conqueror.”
“The title sounds ominous.”
“It was called thus because it constituted what was seen as an accurate account of holdings and values, so William could determine the taxes owed under Edward the Confessor and reassert the rights of the Crown. Its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, were unalterable.”
“And you keep this tome around for a little light reading?”
“I wanted to see if had a record of this property.”
“In 1086? But this building is Georgian and Victorian.”
“Yes, but there have been many buildings on this very spot. You can see at least two different layers of Tudor walls in the basement.” Heathcliff opened the cover. It thumped on the desk, sending up a cloud of dust. He ran his finger down a list. “On this spot in 1086… was the office of Herman Strepel, bookseller and copyist. Strepel’s team would take orders from the clerics and canons for particular volumes and then have those volumes made up in the client’s chosen style. Basically, the medieval equivalent of a bookshop. Would you like to see? How’s your Medieval Latin?”
“I was sick the day we had Medieval Latin class at fashion design school. Is its news weird?”
“For a building to have the exact same function for many hundreds of years? A little weird, yes.” He slammed the book shut, raising a cloud of dust that set me off in a coughing fit.
Heathcliff leaned back in his chair, his eyes swiveled to the ceiling. “Mina, I—”
Morrie strutted in and threw his arm around Heathcliff’s shoulders. A raven fluttered down from the shelves and perched on the armadillo.
“You hollered for us, gorgeous.” Morrie’s grin made my chest tighten.
“There was shrimp for the starter at the gala,” I held up my phone. “Ashley was so excited because she’d never had shrimp before. She talked about it over and over and it turns out the shrimp was completely disgusting. But this is how she’s getting messages to her guy!”
“Say what?”
“I’ve figured it out. Look.” I tapped the screen. Morrie peered over the railing to glance at the phone. Heathcliff remained where he was, his expression unreadable. “She’s using her social media. In this photo she tells the buyer to meet her at the gala dinner, and that she’ll make the drop after the first course. That’s why she mentions the shrimp. I bet there are other messages buried in the photographs, too.”
I scrolled right to the end of the feed. I stopped on the very last photograph, the snap she’d taken right here in the shop on the day of her murder. I hadn’t wanted to read the caption the other day, too afraid of what it might say about me, but now the words filled me with a weird exhilaration.
“Dropped off a very special illustrated book at this quaint bookshop in my hometown. I also found a copy ofHigh Fashion and the Culture of Excess, a classic for any fashionable minx!”
“That’s how the buyer knew to come to the bookshop to pick up the pictures. He was following her Instagram feed.” I paused. “But if this message is correct, Ashley collected the money and dropped the picture in the afternoon, so why was she in the shop that night?”
“Perhaps she wanted to confront him, or she was hoping to get the pictures back off him and keep the money?” Quoth offered.
I handed the phone to Morrie. “Can you get an IP address for these comments?”
“I can, but it’s useless.” Morrie tapped away on his phone. “It’s a residential proxy. Tracking the real IP will take me some time, and even then it’s not a guarantee.”
“What would we do with this person’s address, anyway?” I rubbed my temple. “Go over to his house and beat him until he confesses? We can’t exactly speak to the police about Ashley’s conspiracy. They’re never going to believe us based on some drawings and an Instagram post.”
“There’s got to be a way we can trick him into confessing,” Morrie said. “My nemesis fooled many of my contemporaries in such a way.”
“But how? He obviously knows Ashley’s dead. It’s not like we can just send him another message saying – omigod, that’s it. That’s exactly what we can do.” I tossed the phone to Morrie. “You’ve already hacked into her Instragram, right? So I can post something and it will appear as her?”
Morrie tapped a few buttons on the phone and handed it back to me. “There you go.”
“I need paper and a pencil. And somewhere to sit.”
Without a word, Heathcliff swept his arm across the desk, sending a cascade of pens and papers and books onto the floor. Morrie grabbed the monitor before it joined the rest. Quoth crept upstairs and returned with some fancy art paper and pencils. I slid into Heathcliff’s chair and sketched out a design. It was one of my own, for a figure-hugging fishtail dress with leather and lace inserts that matched the general style of Marcus’ latest collection. When I was done, I arranged a few books around it, making sure to include the volume where we’d found the money. I snapped a picture, added a filter and enough hashtags to make it look legitimate, and uploaded it to Ashley’s site.
“That’s quite clever, gorgeous,” Morrie said.
“Now for the final touch.” I typed a message that sounded pure Ashley. “Hey twats. I might be dead, but I’m not buried yet. You’ll find me under the full moon, in the place where we last met. This zombie bitch is ready to kick some serious arse.”
I hit publish and the post appeared in Ashley’s feed. Immediately, people started liking and commenting. “There. Now whoever turns up at this store tomorrow night, we know they were the one who killed Ashley.”
