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

Edwin had gone to an area of snapshot photos. “Here’s one of Megan at Lourdes with Lionel Fanthorpe.”

I said: “Did she appear on ‘Fortean TV?”

“A couple of times. She was more of a sceptic than Lionel, though not with a ‘K’ like some of her old uni pals. She was so looking forward to getting her own show, putting over her particular point of view.”

Monique had been looking round the room impassively. Someone who only knew her from the office might have assumed she disapproved, though I happened to know her private life was just as Bohemian as Morrigan’s had been. She said: “I gather you’re implying she believed in faith healing, Mr May.”

He said hurriedly: “Well, she didn’t call it belief, because she’d done a science degree, and unlike a lot of SF writers, she kept up with as much real science as she could. She had a collection of cases where some kind of Healing seemed to have worked, not necessarily Christian or religious, she was looking for ways of assembling some kind of control group when… Oh God! Excuse me a minute!”

He abruptly stopped, as though he had seen something even more terrible than the ubiquitous reminders of his wife’s life and death, and hurried out of the large room, through a door decorated with a seaside cartoon of a girl in a bath. I heard flushing almost at once, and the ugly thought came to me that he was disposing of something… other than some female item which embarrassed him.

I wondered if he could have been overcome with other emotions than grief. In our session, Morrigan had almost dismissed him, an ineffectual old pal she had grown apart from. It had been he who had persuaded her to write fiction and not do postgrad studies, a move which had scarcely justified itself financially after ten years. And the breakdown of their marriage wasn’t only over lifestyle and the BattleSpear situation: “We married for Dai, really. It was meant to be an open marriage, friends co-operating over a son. His idea, but he didn’t like the way it turned out. I went on the pull about once a year, and usually succeeded. He tried it all the time, and hardly ever got anywhere. He didn’t like that.”

He might not have liked her exhibition of art. She’d been a model for most of the oil paintings, originals of book-covers I’d seen on racks, not her own. Usually, model-Morrigan wore something to cover her hair, not much more over the rest of her body, waving a weapon or other fantasy item. The faces were clearly her, though some of the bodies must have been modelled by someone more buxom.

I doubt I’d have suspected Edwin of committing a murder if he hadn’t kept hinting that someone had done so. Megan said that exhibitionistic self-promotion kept her afloat, and he’d have known and lived with that. And he could hardly have killed her for money. She’d died before he knew about the contract. He hoped for it perhaps, but didn’t know. I wasn’t arrogant enough to suppose a man could murder a goose which hadn’t yet laid any golden eggs, then rely on my post-mortem Psychological profile to get the gold from the unlikely mine of BattleSpear.

The bathroom led directly off the lounge: next to it on the same side was the open door to a kitchen. In the opposite wall were two more doors, to bedrooms I supposed, one open, one closed. I went to the open one in search of the source of the draught I’d noticed. I wondered if someone could have broken in that way, looked inside, and found a child’s room. A small casement window was open a crack but locked in position, the main window double-locked shut. I was just examining an oddity, an incense-boat on the ledge of the child’s window, when a doorbell rang loudly. May called from the bathroom: “Could you see who that is?”

I went downstairs and got to the door just as the bell rang again. I opened it to find the man we had seen earlier, while we were waiting. He did look like Edwin May, though the resemblance was increased because both were pale and red-eyed. May wore a short beard, but this man had just shaved rarely and carelessly, with little more than a day’s growth around his lips, but much more in the awkward corners of his face. He glared at me and snarled: “Who the devil are you?”

“I… we are here with Mr May.” Introducing oneself in such situations is never easy. People are funny about being seen around psychologists. He moved to go in past me and I said: “While we’re on introductions, just who are you?”

An awkward thought struck me, and I said: “Mr May’s in the bathroom. You’re not the late Mrs May’s boyfriend, are you?”

“No,” he said, taking advantage of my uncertainty to push past me and on up the stairs. “She never mentioned a boyfriend. I’m a very old friend. Dr Alan Glade. I was Megan’s tutor at LSS… London School of Science.”

I followed him up, feeling out of place. What authority did I have to stop him, a stranger myself in the home of a one-session dead client? Luckily, Edwin emerged from the bathroom as we reached the top of the stairs. His face was dead white and covered in sweat. He saw Glade in a double-take and said: “What are you doing here?”

“I left…” Glade checked, then, seemed to compose himself. “I know I’ve left it a bit late to offer condolences, but I’d like to. I… never quite knew how things stood between you two.”

“How they stand is, I’m a totally unprepared single parent. I’ve not been emotionally able to set foot in this place… now I’m here with two shrinks in tow… this is Owen GlenMorgan… Megan saw him… and Monique de Macaque. I’ve gotta sort out a million things. You… why couldn’t you write? Or e-mail?”

“Well, I lent Megan some research papers and oddments, the Skep Tactics book on so-called healing and some other stuff, and I need to reclaim them for… ”

“ Nothing is going out of here till I’ve done… what you do. Make an inventory, I suppose. E-mail me a list. I have to go through all her stuff with the shrinks… not stuff that’d interest you… Battle-Spear stuff. I have to find out what made her do it.”

Being in the death flat had taken the oddly aggressive drive out of Alan Glade. He looked as deflated as a reveller who had gatecrashed a party, and discovered it was a wake… which was more or less what he was. He said: ‘Well, yes, sorry again, I knew it and you obviously knew it, she should never have got involved with those battleSpear people. I’ll… yes, I’ll e-mail you.”

He went quietly down the stairs and let himself out. Edwin began to explain. “I just saw that, and it was too much for me.” He pointed at a large open shopping bag full of clothes. “Her washing machine had packed up, she never got round to getting it fixed, and she used to get a bag ready for my sister Ann to do… Ann never minds being helpful that way, but this sort of thing, she can’t handle at all!”

He looked about to make another dash for the toilet. Monique intervened: “That’s odd! I looked in the kitchen, and saw an ‘on’ light on the washing machine.” She added: “It’s the same make as mine!” in a tone which said expensive Harley Street shrinks wouldn’t otherwise know much about kitchen equipment.

“That should not be on!” Edwin snapped, rushing to the kitchen.

“Could anyone else have been in here?” I asked.

“No, No! Not even BattleSpear, let’s be realistic! Police at least checked that, though they didn’t look into anything else!”

Which might have been their job, but wasn’t mine. “You’re saying this is a suspicious death, and the police have obviously been here. What did they find?”

“What they looked for, which was nothing! Two constables checked for signs of a break-in, labelled her a hippy who popped pills. That was all they knew, and they decided it was all they needed to know. If she’d been lying there with a bloody great spear stuck through her, they’d have said it was a syringe!”