A delicious tomatoey, garlicky smell wafted from the kitchen. “You’re forgiven.”
I slid into the table while Jo bustled around, piling generous servings of pasta and Bolognese sauce onto plates and setting out garlic bread and parmesan. “What did you get up to today?”
I shrugged. “Oh, you know… the usual.”
“Shelving books, sticking your nose in police business, shagging your hot boyfriends, that kind of thing?”
“Exactly. Boring stuff, unlike your day. You did the autopsy on Danny Sledge,” I said nonchalantly. “Find anything interesting?”
“Mina Wilde, you’re not using me to get confidential information on a murder victim in order to further your own ends.”
I smiled sweetly. “I’m just chatting with my flatmate about her day, trying to show an interest in her work.”
“Sure.” Sarcasm dripped from Jo’s voice. She set down her wine glass and steepled her fingers. “However, I’m a sucker, because I’mdyingto talk to someone about it.”
I sprinkled a generous handful of parmesan over my Bolognese and dug in. It tasted even more delicious than it smelled. “Go on, spill.”
“Well, as you know, Danny was garroted. The evidence on the body suggested that someone snuck up behind him and wrapped the piece of material around his throat. But he didn’t die from asphyxiation as I’d first thought. The killer used the murder weapon to lift Danny off his feet, and the pressure was enough to sever his carotid artery. He died from bleeding internally.”
I shuddered. “That sounds brutal.”
“It is. The person who did it would have to be relatively strong. We don’t like to make assumptions these days, but it’s most likely we’re looking at a male assailant.”
“So Mrs. Ingram is free, then?”
Jo shook her head. “The scarf you found was the murder weapon, all right. Numerous witnesses claimed to have seen that scarf around Beverly’s neck at the reading the night before, including me. And it also happened to be the same scarf used to kill Beverly’s daughter all those years ago. I found traces of Abigail’s blood that match her file, and the description of the scarf is the same – it was leopard-print.”
“What did Beverly say to that?”I can’t believe she didn’t mention this to me.
“She said she had no idea where that scarf came from. She admitted she wore a leopard-print scarf, but it wasn’t her daughter’s. As far as she knew, the police still had that. She said she purchased hers from the charity store a week ago, in the hope it would make Danny remember.”
“But that can’t be true. Was there a mix-up somehow? How else would the scarf have got out?”
“Nope. According to their records, Beverly checked that scarf out along with some of Abigail’s other belongings fifteen years ago.”
Shit. This was sounding worse and worse. “And there’s no way to prove the murder weapon was the same scarf Beverly wore that night.”
“She says she threw it at Brian Letterman at the party. When Hayes questioned him, he said that it dropped on the ground and he didn’t pick it up. We’ve got officers emptying rubbish bins in case some well-meaning citizen tossed it out, but more likely than not it’s lost forever, or…”
I finished. “…or, Beverly Ingram is lying, and she went back early that morning with Abigail’s scarf and killed Danny Sledge.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Ijust don’t believe it,” I said.
In what felt like a way too common occurrence, the four of us were slumped around the empty bookshop, discussing a murder. I sat behind the desk, a ledger open in front of me as if the very presence of our dwindling accounts might somehow miraculously will a customer to show up. Morrie perched on the edge of the velvet chair, his body trembling with nervous energy. Heathcliff paced between the shelves, unsure of what to do with himself now that I’d all but usurped his chair. Quoth perched on the chandelier, chewing on a stash of cranberries he’d secreted away up there.
“What’s not to believe?” Heathcliff grumbled. “She killed the guy with her daughter’s scarf in revenge for her murder.”
“But if you’re going to kill someone, why show off the murder weapon to a hundred people the night before? And besides, Beverly knows Danny couldn’t have done it. He was in a jail cell at the time.”
“Then she did it because he wroteThe Somerset Strangler,” Morrie piped up. “She said so herself – Danny got rich off Abigail’s death, and Beverly couldn’t abide it.”
“How could he get rich off that guff?” Heathcliff picked up a copy of Danny’s book and slammed it down on the counter. “Its ineptitudes are so many in number that to account for them would produce a tome more than double its size. And I only read the first page. How anyone could finish the thing is a mystery to me.”
But he said he liked it the other day,I remembered. Heathcliff wastryingto pick a fight with Morrie.
“Actually,Iread it on the train down to London.” Morrie held up his phone. “It’s good, though brutal as hell. It won’t help us much because in it the coroner was the murderer, and we know Jo’s no killer. I was looking forward to discussing it with you all but it appears no one else is as dedicated to solving this murder as I am.”
