Kate Carlisle - If Books Could Kill

Now I wondered if maybe it was Helen on the other end of the phone call Kyle had received. He’d certainly run out of the pub in a hurry, and maybe that was a sign that he really did have warm feelings for her. I hoped so. I’d like to think that Helen had been happy with Kyle after putting up with Martin for as long as she did.

I would have to remember to tell MacLeod about that phone call Kyle received. The police would be able to check Kyle’s cell phone. Sadly, they probably wouldn’t let me in on who’d called.

The door opened and MacLeod came back in.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, his expression falling somewhere between disapproval and condemnation. He laid that same manila envelope on the desk, then reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a rubber glove and snapped it onto his left hand.

“Can you identify this, please?” he asked as he pulled a blood-splotched hammer out of the envelope and dangled it carefully between two fingers. The look he gave me turned my toes to ice.

“It appears to be a hammer,” I said cautiously, then took a slow breath. “Is that the murder weapon?”

“Why don’t you look at it a little more closely?” he suggested, and moved the hammer so I could see it from several different angles. Icy tendrils slithered from my toes up to my spine and into my neck so quickly, I thought I might freeze and shatter into a thousand pieces.

The hammer was a familiar style. Too familiar. Unlike a typical hammer, this one was lightweight, with a shorter handle, a longer claw with a blunt end, and a smaller, dome-shaped nose.

A bookbinder’s hammer.

There were initials engraved at the base. I didn’t have to look any closer to recognize them.

The initials were BW.

The hammer was mine.

I coughed to clear my suddenly dry throat. “It’s a… a bookbinder’s hammer.”

He looked at it more closely. “Odd sort of shape.”

“Yes.” I took another breath. “Its shorter length and lighter weight allow for more accuracy and efficiency when pounding and rounding the spine of a book.”

Did my words sound as dully rote to him as they did to me?

“Thank you for the information.” He peered at the object, then pointed to something he saw near the edge. “There seems to be a design here on the end. Or are those initials? BW? Ach.”

Now he was just showing off. He knew they were mine. Spots began to circle and fade in and out of my field of vision. I took a huge gulp of air and let it go. I refused to further disgrace myself by fainting.

“Ms. Wainwright, have you ever seen this hammer before?”

“Yes, of course. It’s mine. It was a gift from my teacher. Part of a set.”

He nodded sagely. “I see.”

“What do you see?” I shook my head, still not believing any of it. “What are you saying? That Kyle was killed with my hammer? Who would do that? I wouldn’t do that! What am I, stupid? Do you think I had anything to do with it?”

“We’re still determining that,” he said calmly, and slipped the bloody hammer carefully back into the envelope.

Great, they were still determining how stupid I was. Watch me burst with pride.

“Did you loan your tools to someone recently?”

“No, absolutely not,” I said.

“They’ve been in your possession all along?”

“Yes, they’ve been in my hotel room since I arrived yesterday.” So I was the only one with access to my tools. Could somebody lend me a shovel so I could dig a deeper hole around me?

He started to make a note.

“Wait,” I said. “Sorry. I’ve got my days a little wrong. I just arrived this morning. Around noon.” I shook my head, a bit dazed. Had it been only ten hours since I’d checked into the hotel? It felt like I’d been here a month.

So in the space of a few short hours, someone had entered my room, stolen my hammer, then lured Kyle deep into that dark, bleak tenement and killed him in cold blood without anyone noticing?

And they’d used my hammer?

Why?

Was it in incredibly bad taste to feel almost as sorry for myself as I did for Kyle?

Obviously, I was being set up. Obvious to me, anyway. Detective Inspector MacLeod didn’t seem to be seeing it my way. No, he was eyeing me with barely concealed glee, as though he were picturing me inside my very own jail cell while he received the thanks of a grateful nation for saving them from a homicidal maniac who looked a lot like me.

Who would kill Kyle like that? And who would want to frame me? Of course, the first person who leaped to mind was Minka. She would love to see me framed. But Kyle would never have gone anyplace dark with that woman. He had taste, after all.

So who else was there?

I thought of Perry McDougall. Would he go to all that trouble to implicate me just because I’d waved his paper around earlier? Had I infuriated him so much that he broke into my room to steal my hammer? Was he that nutso?

And then there was Martin, who didn’t like me very much at all. Martin had the perfect motive for killing the man, but Helen had already filed for divorce, so it wasn’t like she’d go crawling back to Martin if Kyle were out of the picture. But for some men, it wasn’t enough that they couldn’t have a woman; they didn’t want anyone else to have her, either. Still, Helen had sworn that Martin didn’t know about her affair with Kyle. Of course, she wasn’t the best person to judge whether Martin knew or not.

But then, why would Martin frame me? He was basically a lazy rich boy. I couldn’t see him going to all that trouble to break into my room and steal my stuff.

Did Martin know about the Robert Burns book? He was a bookseller. Would Kyle have consulted him? I couldn’t imagine him going anywhere near the man whose wife he was pursuing. He wasn’t that foolish. Or was I being naive?

I had to figure out the other two people Kyle had confided in. It was more than likely that one of them, or Perry, had killed him.

I couldn’t believe it was possible that Kyle had been killed over Robert Burns’s illicit connection to the English throne. The story might be considered scandalous to some die-hard Anglophile, but would it really drive someone to murder?

Who in the world was so afraid of something that happened three hundred years ago that they’d actually kill another human being? And why had they taken the time and the risk involved to sneak into my hotel room and set me up to take the fall? Whose toes had I stepped on so badly that I’d earned the rage of a cold-blooded killer?

“Do you always travel with a hammer, Ms. Wainwright?”

I flinched as his voice brought me back to my present predicament. “Of course.”

“Really?”

His withering sarcasm made me mad, and I had to wrestle with myself to keep my anger from gushing forth like a geyser. I seriously needed a good night’s sleep.

But of course I traveled with hammers and other tools of my trade. What if I found a book in need of repair? It was my job to fix it. Was I supposed to feel guilty about it? Just because some evil creep had stolen one of my tools?

But I did feel horribly guilty. And I wasn’t even Catholic, so it wasn’t like I’d be going to hell or anything. I wasn’t Jewish either. From what I’d heard, they had to deal with a lot of guilt. No, I’d been raised in the guilt-free environment of a new-age spiritual commune where we were free to worship any number of gods and goddesses, take your pick. And none of them spouted eternal damnation, so there was never any reason to feel guilty, right? But here I was, riddled with guilt over way too many things. Abraham’s death. Kyle’s death. Helen’s pain. My tools.

Maybe I needed to see an exorcist or something.