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

Then I remembered where I had seen them before and sat back down.

“You got the rest of this?”

“In the trash basket, help yourself. Coral’s on a work slowdown, she only empties it once a week.”

I pawed through the papers and found the missing news section for the paper on Harrison’s desk. I had to leaf through it twice before I realized what I was looking for.

Then I figured I knew how. I also doubted there was any jury on God’s green earth that would send Sally Fitzgerald or Mike Breall to the slammer.

I went back to the Harrison mansion the next day, along with O’Brien – I hadn’t told him much and he was dying of curiosity – and a couple of uniforms just in case.

Sally had let her hair down – a nice cascade of blonde – and changed out of her suit-like uniform into something looser and more appealing. For mid-thirties, she was doing very nicely. Breall had ditched his chauffeur uniform and looked more like an ageing delinquent than he had the day before. His personality fit his appearance – surly, apprehensive, defiant and if he had been any younger, I would have called him snotty.

I looked at Sally and said how sorry I was she had lost such a good friend and employer.

“I’ll live,” she said.

She was handling her grief real well, I thought.

“Mr Harrison died of natural causes,” I said.

That cheered them both up, though Sally still looked uneasily at the two uniforms by the door. I stared at Breall.

“How badly did you hate Mr Harrison?”

“I told you I thought-” He caught the warning look from Sally and shot a quick glance at the uniforms. “Not that badly.” Then, blurting: “I thought you said he died of natural causes?”

“Falling down a flight of stairs can be an accident,” I said. “Unless somebody pushes you. And for a guy with a bad heart, walking up behind him and yelling ‘boo!’ might qualify you for a homicide rap.”

A frown. “I didn’t-” And then he caught another look from Sally and shut up. He could drive a limo and he must have been good in bed, otherwise I couldn’t understand why Sally put up with him. But then, she hadn’t planned to for very long.

I took the piece of crumpled paper out of my pocket and pushed the yellow tablet to the front of the desk. I crooked my finger toward Breall and he reluctantly walked over.

“Do me a favour, Mike, and write the following numbers on the paper.” He hesitated, then picked up the pencil. “Thirty-six,” I said. “Fifty-four, twelve, eleven, forty-five and twenty-two.”

He slowly printed them out and I compared them to the figures on the paper. The handwriting experts could probably prove they matched up.

Now it was Sally’s turn.

“Would you call Mr Harrison a gambler?”

She shook her head. Cool but wary.

“Not at all. He was very shrewd in making investments-”

“But it amused him to play the state lottery, didn’t it?”

She froze. “I… really don’t know.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do,” I said. “He never left the house so you would’ve had to buy the lottery tickets for him. You or Mike. There were a lot of discarded tickets in the trash.’

Her face was a mask.

“I bought him anything he wanted. I might have bought him some tickets.”

I wasn’t paying much attention to either she or Breall – that was the uniforms’ job. I opened up the drawer where Harrison had kept his pills. Three tickets; I had spotted them when I’d first checked for his pills but hadn’t thought anything of them. One of them had all the numbers that Breall had written down.

I sighed and leaned back in the chair, fanning the tickets between my fingers, then opened the three-day old section of newspaper that I’d found in O’Brien’s office.

“When Harrison found that the Local News section was missing from his newspaper – the section that always prints the lottery results, the section you removed before giving him the paper, Mike – he asked you to find out the winning numbers. Sally knew the numbers on his tickets – she had seen them when she refilled his prescription. She gave you a set of six, you copied them down and gave them to Harrison. What was the jackpot? Fifty-five million? Harrison was a businessman so he always went through the financial pages first, before he indulged himself and checked the numbers you gave him against his lottery tickets. Of course, he didn’t have the winning numbers. He just thought he did.”

I looked up at the now-pale Breall. “Harrison thought he’d finally hit the Big One and the excitement was too much for his heart.”

Sally was acid.

“That’s not much of a case.”

“You were with him for sixteen years, Sally, you probably knew his medical condition better than he did. For a heart patient, good news can be as bad as bad news. Harrison had to avoid stress – and you hit him with a ton of it.”

“The old bastard died happy,” Breall chimed in, bitter.

“Shut up,” Sally said dully. “They can’t hold us.”

I nodded to the uniforms. “Not for me to judge,” I said. “But I think you’ll have to delay that trip to the Bahamas.”

Breall was a quicker study than I thought. He whirled on Sally. “What trip?”

I played it innocent.

“Lois at the travel agency said that you would be gone for a month, right, Sally? A real gossip, Lois. She couldn’t understand why you’d be going by yourself.”

The uniforms grabbed Breall just as he lunged at her.

“That was dirty pool,” O’Brien said. We were at the local McDonald’s and O’Brien was on his second Big Mac and fries.

I’d ordered coffee and was nibbling on some of the fries out of his basket.

“Murder’s murder, whether Harrison was cheated out of two more days or another decade. Sally got impatient – she could see the best years of her life slipping by. Breall was a wild card. He was a recent hire and as the chauffeur probably had as much face time with Harrison as she did. She had a foolproof plan and enlisted Mike to cover all bases just in case.”

“Flimsy stuff,” O’Brien said around his hamburger. “It won’t stand up.”

I shrugged. “A lot of murder cases are made of flimsy stuff. But if they get off, they still won’t be a pair of happy campers. I suspect by now that love has turned pretty sour.”

O’Brien blinked owlishly at me.

“They’ll be at each other’s throats.”

I sprayed one of his fries with catsup.

“Ain’t that a shame,” I said.

Edward Marston is the best known pseudonym of author and playwright Keith Miles (b.1940). A former lecturer in modern history, Miles has written over forty original plays for radio, television and the theatre, plus some six hundred episodes of radio and television drama series. He has also written over twenty-five novels. These include a series featuring Nicholas Bracewell and his company of Elizabethan actors, which began with The Queen’s Head (1988), plus a series featuring Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret, who resolve crimes as they travel the country helping compile the Domesday Book in 1086. That series began with The Wolves of Savernake (1993). For a change, however, the following story is not historical.

The first explosion came at midnight. No warning was given. Oxford Street was surprisingly busy at that time on a Saturday. People waited for buses, hovered for taxis, searched for somewhere to eat, headed for nightclubs or simply walked aimlessly along. Drunks relieved themselves in dark corners. A man with an accordion played evergreen favourites with fitful enthusiasm. A group of young women, fresh from a hen party, laughed and joked their way boisterously along the pavement. Curled up in sleeping bags, self-appointed tenants of the various shop doorways had already counted the day’s takings and turned in for the night. Two burly uniformed policemen studied the suits on display in Next and shared their misgivings about the prices. A lone cyclist headed towards Marble Arch.