“Who are our suspects?” Quoth stood in front of a large canvas he’d dragged down from his room and set up on the easel beside the fire. He tapped the board with his pen, the sliver of moonlight from the open window bathing his hair in highlights of coral red and blush pink. “Mina, did you talk to Jo?”
It was odd to see Quoth standing up there, taking charge of our investigation, in the position where Morrie would have stood if he’d been here. From the way the orange fire flared at the edges of his irises, I got the sense Quoth was almost as determined as I was that we’d be the ones to solve this.
After calling my mum and the police to let them know I was okay, I spent the afternoon reading and snuggling with Quoth, trying (and failing) not to think about what Morrie might be getting up to in that cabin with Sherlock. Heathcliff stomped around the shop, slamming books down and swearing at inanimate objects. He called this ‘working,’ but I got the feeling his agitation had something to do with the absence of a certain annoying master criminal.
Now, we ate a dinner of fish and chips around the fire while we tried to come up with a plan for clearing Morrie’s name. I held up my cup, sloshing cheap wine down the front of my Distillers t-shirt.
“I talked to Jo briefly. She’s doing the final work on Kate Danvers’ autopsy tonight, otherwise she’d be here with us. She said she couldn’t tell me anything about the case beyond the fact that Ms. Danvers was stabbed with a long, narrow, double-edged blade, and it definitely wasn’t suicide.” My best friend, Jo Southcombe, was the Barchester county medical examiner, which meant when we met up for a drink, she always had the craziest work stories. Usually, she couldn’t wait to dish the dirt on the corpses that ended up on her table, but now she held Morrie’s liberty in her hands, she’d become strangely taciturn. I didn’t want to think about what that meant for the case.
Everything will work out okay. Morrie’s innocent, and the evidence will show that.
“Long, double-edged blade…” Heathcliff grabbed a handful of chips and stacked them on top of a slice of buttered bread. He folded the bread over and dipped the end of his chip butty into ketchup. “Perhaps a sword?”
“Jo said they found what they think is the weapon in a rubbish bin in Barset Reach, and it was a small decorative blade, probably a letter opener, like that one you have lying around downstairs. Our killer needed access to this weapon. Does it take a strong person to stab someone with a letter opener?”
“Not if the blade is sharp,” Heathcliff muttered. “It would slide right in. After all, that’s what blades are designed to do. Only when it hits bone do things get tough.”
“I’m not sure if I love that you know that, or think it’s freaky.”
Heathcliff leaned down to kiss my cheek, his scraggly beard grazing my skin. “You love it,” he whispered, kissing a trail across my cheek to bite my earlobe.
I nodded.Mmmmhmmmm.
Grimalkin made a gagging noise. Quoth cleared his throat. “Do I need to add a note about the blade?”
“Yes.” Heathcliff leaned back, although his hand lingered on my shoulders. “Write that the killer had to know what they were doing. What more we can make of it will depend on what Jo says about the depth and ferocity of the cut.”
My chest constricted as I took another swig of wine. I felt the loss of Morrie keenly. If he was here, he’d be bossing us all around, throwing around facts about murders, and telling us how brilliant he was. He never would have let Heathcliff open this £6.50 bottle of plonk.
“Agreed. Add another column for the body. We’ll fill in the details when I hear from Jo. What about suspects? Sherlock and Morrie are going over Morrie’s criminal buddies, looking for grudges, but I think we need to consider Kate’s role in all this. I think she’s the key. Any thoughts?”
“I think you all should hand me your uneaten fish,” Grimalkin purred, crossing her long legs as she peered at me with wide eyes.
I tossed my grandmother my battered haddock. It bounced off the edge of the table and rolled across the rug. She pounced on her prey and held it between her red-painted nails, tearing into the flesh with her teeth. She still hadn’t quite got the hang of eating like a human.
Heathcliff grabbed the wine from the table and skulled straight from the bottle. Tension rolled off his body in waves, and I wondered if he too felt Morrie’s absence more than he was letting on. “I got nothing. We don’t know this girl.”
I grabbed Heathcliff’s phone and scrolled through the articles I pulled up about Kate Danvers’ death. Quoth’s art teacher, Marjorie Hansen, was blind – she showed me how to use the text-to-speak function on a phone, which read out the navigation menus and text on the screen so I could find my way around without sight. It was still a bit confusing learning to listen to my phone instead of look at it, but I was getting better at it.
Grimalkin grew bored with rending the flesh of her fish and batted it across the rug, squeaking with delight as she smeared a trail of crumbs into the weave. Heathcliff tossed her a plate, and she shot him a filthy look.
“You have your vices, human, and I’ll keep mine.”
I cleared my throat just as Heathcliff picked up a fork to throw at her. “Here are the facts I’ve found from the papers. Kate worked for a big tech company called Ticketrrr. One of the perks of her job was getting to attend a week-long Leadership Summit with twenty leaders from her company. Last year, that summit was a wilderness survival course at Wild Oats, which Morrie said Kate had a hand in organizing. On the last night, her instructor took her out to a predetermined campsite. She was supposed to build a makeshift shelter, make a fire, cook a dinner of cockroaches… all the wilderness skills she’d learned over the week. Instead, when they returned to collect her in the morning, they found her camp abandoned and a note pinned to her shelter. A suicide note.”
“Except it wasn’t a suicide,” Quoth reminded me. “Morrie smuggled her away.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Morrie said he whisked her to the airport and sent her to the Philippines. Apparently, that’s the best place to go when you want to disappear. She left behind a husband, Dave. Morrie said Dave would have cashed in Kate’s life insurance policy by now.”
“I thought life insurance didn’t pay out on suicides?” Heathcliff lifted his head.
“Ithought you weren’t helping,” I teased.
“Maybe I just want this to be over so I can go to bed.”
“Mmmm hmmm. I believe you. Anyway, I researched this, too. Health insurancewillpay out – provided the policy is more than two years old and you haven’t recently tried to increase it. Morrie says they’ll send investigators for cases where the sum insured is huge, so he advises his clients to keep things modest. He said people got caught by being greedy.”
Heathcliff snorted. “Classic Morrie. He runs a secret death-faking business where he fleeces clients for thousands of dollars, then tells them not to be greedy.”
