Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

I glanced at Monique. Reason told me we should make an excuse and leave. No note, no last call, no last e-mail.

But I didn’t like Glade, and I especially didn’t like the way he was obsessively trashing those of his dead ex-student’s beliefs which he hadn’t drilled into her. I didn’t necessarily disagree that faith healing was a kind of placebo: but if some people could direct the placebo, what harm could they do?

I opened the blue file. The top document was headed: MY OWN CASE.It began: “ Twice now, I have succeeded in going for six months without having epileptic fits or taking damaging medication. I attribute this partly to meditation and holistic techniques, but also to the power of Healing… not explicitly religious, but a power science cannot yet explain, but should start trying to explore. ”

Next to the folder was a lurid paperback. It was called The Warrior. The cover had a BattleSpear logo and showed the usual black-suited and helmeted figure, brandishing a laser-sword and charging down the gangplank of a spacecraft. Unlike the other Morrigan May books, it was one I had seen in shops… indeed, indeed, huge displays of them. I was about to say that it must have been a stress on a writer to work on two so contrasting projects, when Glade went on: “Y’know, the tragic thing was, she was never the same after her accident.” He indicated the area of wall with her personal photos. “Back then,” pointing to shots of a slightly younger Megan in obvious fancy dress, Vampirella, Magenta from “Rocky Horror”, “She dressed up, but she knew it was a game. Later, this… madness!”

He was indicating a group photograph, Megan in the centre of smiling thirty-somethings clustered round a motorcycle. All wore bike-gang gear, but the black leather had been replaced by white. May said defensively: “White Riders. Well, Megan was obviously a pillion rider. They wanted to get magic and spirituality away from the Satan-idiots on one side, and the china teacup set on the other.”

Glade ploughed on: “It’s as if the real Megan died in the accident. As if her damaged brain wasn’t her real self. The real Megan did not believe in Magic.”

The words came into my mind then, like a strobeflash, that if her mind was dead, he had only killed her body. That hadn’t been the part of her he needed, or not officially.

Intuition wasn’t something I liked to rely on, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s all one has. I realized that when the thought came, when Glade spoke, I had been looking at a Radio Times , which was on the table by the couch, open to Tuesday night late. The item I was looking for was there, and with a cold feeling of disgust I realized it had been underlined.

I said: “Well, at least something can be salvaged. Just think of the publicity: ‘Healer Author met mysterious, Marilyn-like death.’” I looked at Glade and tapped the blue file. “I’m sure the publishers can edit her book up from these notes. And the TV, there’ll be out-takes from other shows she did, all these stills. She didn’t live for nothing!”

“But that’s madness! Publish the ravings of a demented, braindamaged…” He strode toward the desk as if meaning to grab the blue file and run with it. I held it up and said: “You’d like to destroy this, wouldn’t you! I should think that’s why you came back! To destroy it, that and the tape!”

He made a grab at it, but I was bigger than him, and held it over my head. I feared he would have a go at me, and I might need to bring it down sharply as a weapon, but he just stood there breathing heavily and shaking with anger. May was staring, totally bewildered: I noticed Monique slide silently to the phone. I said: “You remind me of an Evangelical Christian I once treated.” He opened his mouth and I cut him off: “He wouldn’t learn Yoga or anything similar because it was Hindu, Pagan, Unchristian, and therefore of the Devil!”

“There’s no Devil!” he said. “There’s no Christ. There’s no proof of any of the things she was asserting in that bloody book!”

“That’s what you told her on Tuesday, but she wouldn’t listen. Brain-damaged. That was what she’d been, since she had her accident and stopped being your student.”

“She was my best ever student! She should have been a scientist… not this! The real Megan would never have…”

“That’s what you thought, when she wouldn’t listen to you on Tuesday and crashed out on her pills. You lay down on the couch. You tried to sleep, but you were just thinking, watching TV. Looking through the Radio Times. You saw a warning that a show was due to come on with dancing to strobe light.

“Then it came to you. You grabbed the remote and recorded the strobe, recording it over whatever was in the video. Maybe you didn’t know then if you were going to do it. But the next day she was still ignoring what you said. She wasn’t your student any more, your scientist. It was her life’s work or yours, and yours was more important. You rang off work, and went shopping. You bought some joss sticks and lighted them in the spare room.” I thought I saw him nod then, but he stiffened and began to disagree. I spoke over him: “Megan began to panic. She thought she was having the aura for a fit. You said, ‘Don’t worry, take your pills, maybe have one extra’… of course you didn’t remind her, she’d have had some already, she was taking too many. You said, ‘Sit down, take you pills, let’s watch a video.’ And as soon as she’d taken them, before they could take effect, you put on the tape with the strobe, and it must have worked and given her a fit.

“I don’t suppose it made it more difficult, watching her convulsing, wetting herself, brain-damaged and no longer a scientist. You turned off the video, and as soon as she came to, you said: ‘You’ve had a fit, you must have forgotten your pills!’ Of course, by then she’d forgotten she had taken them!

“You began to clean up. You got her out of her jeans and pants and put them in the washing machine. You didn’t know it was broken.

“You got Megan into bed. You didn’t take her top off. I don’t know if you realized she usually slept nude… it was one detail that wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t had the call from work. You made the mistake of calling back from here. Something important, was it?”

He stood silent for a second. I guessed he wasn’t used to lying about killing, or to killing itself for that matter. In the end he said: “It was a serious problem. Contamination caused by a spillage. One of my students had made a total lash-up.”

“Even your students make lash-ups. Now it was your turn to panic. You had to get back to the lab and not say where you’d been. You rushed off and the door locked behind you. Later, you realized you’d left the doctored tape in the machine, other odds and ends like the joss sticks. You came back saying it was for your notes. My guess is you came back several times when no one was here.”

He looked terrified. I can only say, he didn’t look like an innocent man. All he could say was a cliche, especially for him. He said: “You can’t prove any of this…” but as he said it, not actually denying his guilt, Edwin May charged at him, sending him flying. He crashed into the desk, smashing it and knocking the Warrior book to the floor. But they were not warriors, and I found it relatively easy to separate them while Monique phoned the police.

All he would say later was repeat: “There’s no proof.” I thought it ironic, as well as sad. Morrigan May had gone from a world in which proof, or at least disproof, was considered possible. She had dared to go into a world where there was no proof of anything. And he had followed her.