Guests were gathered in the living room. The conversation stopped midsentence, and they all turned to look at us. Drinks had been served, and a platter of flatbread and cheeses and bowls full of olives and nuts were on the big round glass table in the center of the room. As well as my friends and family, Grant’s parents were here.
Pippa was returning to the main room with a bottle of wine in hand. Grant gave her a kiss, and I offered a guilty grin. “Sorry we’re late. My fault entirely.”
“I have absolutely no doubt about that,” my sister said. “I seriously do not want to know why you were, as Grant put it, assisting the police with their inquiries, but I suppose I must.”
“You didn’t actually phrase it like that, did you?” I said to Grant.
“I might have been trying for levity,” he said.
“If you were,” Pippa said, “you failed miserably.” She lifted the bottle. “Glasses are in the kitchen. Beer in the fridge along with tonic and a bottle of very good gin, courtesy of Dad, on the counter. Help yourselves.”
“Gemma, Donald, get you something?” Grant asked.
“A G and T would be delightful,” Donald said. We’d only been in England a day and a half, but Donald’s Massachusetts accent was beginning to take on a distinctive London tone.
“Gemma?” Grant asked as Ryan came up to me.
“White wine, thanks.”
“Everything okay, Gemma?” Ryan asked.
“I’m okay. We’re okay.”
“Pippa told Henry you were witnesses to a crime.”
“Unfortunately, yes. Give me a minute, please, and then I’ll join you. I need to wash my hands.”
“Second door on the right,” Ryan said.
I went into the loo and shut the door. I ran water into the huge bowl of a sink for a long time and used a lot of soap, scrubbing my hands thoroughly beneath the wide-mouthed tap. Like Donald and Grant, I’d been fingerprinted at the station. “For elimination purposes,” DI Patel had said. I hadn’t minded. I knew, unfortunately, how these things worked. As I washed my hands, I studied myself in the mirror. My usual out-of-control curls were even more out of control than usual. My eyes were tinged red and the delicate skin under my brown eyes was smudged. I’d barely slept in three days, and it showed. I thought over what we’d walked into at the bookstore. Paul. Dead.
Having had some time to think it all over, I still maintained it had not been a burglary gone wrong. No one in their right mind would have thought that store would have anything worth stealing. At first, I’d thought Paul must have known the killer well enough to allow that person to walk up behind him when he was seated in his chair. But on further thought, if he’d been sound asleep—or passed out—the killer might have been able to nip silently around him and slip something over his head and around his throat. The door to the alley was unlocked. Likely no way of telling if it had been unlocked when the killer entered the premises or if they left it that way on their departure.
A light rap on the door, and Pippa said, “Gemma? Are you okay? Mum sent me to check on you.”
I opened the door and gave my sister a weak smile. “I’m fine. Just trying to process what happened.”
“You look dreadful.”
“Thank you so much for pointing that out. It has been a rather hectic few days. I’ve been meaning to mention something to you. That young woman who sat at our table last night, calling herself Millicent’s daughter. She did a good job of pretending to be a bored teenager, but it was too good, if you know what I mean.”
Pippa’s eyes narrowed and she cocked her head at me. “Whatever do you mean?”
“She was far too blasé. Said she was Millicent’s daughter, but I didn’t meet anyone named Millicent. In particular, she didn’t drink her Dom Perignon, although she clearly wanted to, and she was the first one to her feet when that waiter dropped a tray. First after you, that is. You conducted a training exercise? At your own wedding?”
“Where better? I’ll pass on your observations to her and tell her to be less obvious next time.”
“Glad to be of help. One more thing, that Champagne you served last night must have cost a bundle and there was a lot of it. I doubt Grant could afford it. Can you?”
“Someone I work with gave it to us as a wedding present.”
“Someone you work with. Did that person come to the wedding?”
“I admitted to the training exercise. Anything else is none of your business, Gemma.”
“I guess not.”
“Before we join the others, I got a text from Uncle Arthur earlier, telling me to tell you not to worry. Violet will be fine. Who’s Violet again?”
“Our dog. One of our dogs. What does that mean? What happened to her?” I started to worry.
“He didn’t say.”
“Why didn’t he call me?”
“He didn’t say. It was a PS to a congratulations on our marriage.”
“I’ll have to call him. Now I’m worried.”
Pippa and Grant’s flat was absolutely spectacular. The outer wall was all glass, forming a sweeping curve with four distinct terraces. White wicker furniture with colorful outdoor cushions and iron tables were arranged on the terraces. The view looked straight down to the water and west across the twisting river and the city, flooding the rooms with light even as the sun sank in the distance. Inside, the floors were all dark hardwood, dotted with white and blue rugs. The ultramodern kitchen was open plan, no walls separating it from the dining area and sitting room. The comfortable furniture was in shades of white and navy blue. The walls were painted a gentle cream, the large-scale modern art mostly blue. I thought about my own saltbox house in West London. Buit in 1756, it was positively ancient by North American standards. I decided I liked it better than this place. Our house had been modernized with the times, but much of the old charm still remained.
This flat was gorgeous, but I found it cold and overly efficient. It was, in fact, my sister in concrete.
I didn’t detect the scent of dinner cooking and when I took a peek into the immaculate kitchen as I passed, I didn’t see any pots and pans on the stove. Nothing bubbled or fried or simmered, and the oven was off. The dining room table was set for dinner. We’d be having take-away, I assumed. Grant could whip up a casual dinner, but he’d been out all afternoon. Pippa was not known as a cook, and clearly she didn’t mind her mother-in-law knowing that.
Grant handed me a glass of wine, and I sat on the white leather couch next to Ryan. I couldn’t help but think that with two dogs I could never have furniture like this in my house. Which reminded me of Violet. It was after six. Early afternoon in West London. The Emporium would still be open. I sent a quick text to Uncle Arthur: ?????????? 🐶. That task attended to, I took the first welcome sip of my wine. Cool and crisp and delicious.
“Are you going to tell us what happened this afternoon?” my father said.
“Best let Gemma do that,” Grant replied. “She organized the outing. Donald and I were merely bystanders.”
“Do I want to know?” Ryan asked.
“Probably not,” Grant said.
“I cannot believe you’ve done it again, Gemma,” Pippa said.
“Sorry,” I said. Although I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.
“Again?” Grant’s mother, Linda, asked. “What do you mean again? Has this happened before? Whatever this is? Henry said something about you being witnesses to a crime.”
“We had an encounter with the police when we were here for that convention, Mom,” Grant said. “Nothing of significance.”
We all smiled at her. Mrs. Thompson didn’t look entirely comforted.
I sipped my wine. “Okay. First, this time, we were not witnesses to any crime per se, but we did happen upon the aftermath. When I left the hotel last night a man by the name of Paul Erikson was waiting for me in the lobby.”
My father groaned. My mother said, “Good heavens. Please, no.” Pippa said, “And so he rears his foolish head one more time.” Jayne said, “Isn’t that—?”
“Ooookay,” Ryan said. “Some of you obviously know that name. I do not. Are you going to fill me in, Gemma?”
“Paul Erikson is my ex-husband.”
“You’ve been married?”
“A youthful indiscretion.”
“I can testify to that,” Pippa said.
Roger and Linda Thompson exchanged confused looks. Andy was sitting on the couch next to Jayne. He whispered, “Did you know this?”
She gave him a guilty shrug.
“Why did you not tell me?” Ryan asked.
I struggled to answer. I’d put my marriage to Paul behind me and wanted to get on with my new life. I’d been young (although not that young) and foolish (extremely foolish), and I suppose I was embarrassed about how wrong I’d been. I’m the one everyone thinks is so smart, so observant, so clever. “The time never seemed right,” I said.
“The time doesn’t exactly seem right now.” He indicated the circle of curious faces. “But I have to ask what else you haven’t told me.”
“You two can sort that out later. In private,” Mum said.
I was not anxious to get into that conversion, so I gave my mother a grateful smile. She did not smile in return.
“What did Paul want?” Dad asked.
“Money, what else,” Mum said.
“No. Not money.” I glossed over how he said he still loved me and simply told them he had a book he wanted to show me. “The ‘real deal’ he called it.”
“What did you make of that?” Dad asked.
“I believed he’d come into possession of a potentially valuable item he didn’t know what to do with. The shop is now mostly a used bookstore. I assumed he was sold a used book that turned out to be worth a lot more than the original seller knew and Paul wanted an evaluation. It was late, I was tired, and seeing Paul came as a surprise. All I wanted was to get out of there. I agreed to stop by the shop at noon today. I am not a rare book expert, so I asked Grant to come with me.”
Pippa glared at her new husband, and he winced.
“I’m not a rare book expert either,” Donald added, “but I was hoping it would be something to do with Sir Arthur. We are in London after all, and I must follow—”
“Thank you, Donald,” Mum said. “Henry and I admire your depth of knowledge of Conan Doyle and his work.”
“You do?” Linda said.
“We went to the shop, as arranged, and found Paul dead,” I said. “We called the police and were interviewed as witnesses, that’s all.”
“Dead,” Ryan said. “Do you mean murdered?”
“It would appear so.”
“Strangled,” Donald added.
“Who’s the detective in charge?” Dad asked.
“Jasmine Patel. She was working with Morrison as a DS, and she’s now a DI.”
“She remembered us.” Donald cut himself a generous slice of Stilton. “Gemma, in particular.”
I took a piece of flatbread. Lightly grilled, sprinkled with grated parmesan and herbs. Absolutely delicious. Pippa might not be much of a cook, but she knows how to lay out a good charcuterie tray.
DI Sam Morrison had been the detective involved in the case when we’d all previously been in London. He had a long-standing grudge against my father and had been looking for a way to railroad him. Patel, Morrison’s junior at the time, had not been happy with the way he conducted the investigation. Morrison had eventually been removed from the case because of that personal conflict and been persuaded to take early retirement.
“What did you three do while you were waiting for the police to arrive, Donald?” Ryan asked.
Donald popped the cheese into his mouth. “We searched the premises, of course. Gemma did, that is. Grant and I guarded the door.”
I wouldn’t have put it quite like that. My father and Ryan exchanged looks I could only call exasperated.
“I didn’t interfere with anything,” I said. “But I must admit I had a quick little nose about. I found nothing, nothing at all, worth bringing to police attention. Other than the unlocked back door and the dog prints. If I had, I would have done so.”
“Dog prints?” Ryan asked. “The killer brought a dog with him? Any place a dog has been is a gold mine of DNA.”
“Prints outside, in the alley. Not inside as though brought by the killer. I thought they might help establish the time of death.”
“What about this book?” Mum asked. “Was it there?”
“It was a bookstore,” Donald said. “Plenty of books.”
“Nothing stood out,” I said. “Nothing on the desk, and Paul didn’t have a book on his person.”
“You know that because you didn’t interfere with a crime scene,” Dad said.
“Grant, honey,” Linda said with an excessive amount of midwestern sweetness. “Might we have a word?”
“Now?”
“Yes. Now.”
Grant put his glass down and slowly stood up. He looked as though he was about to be reprimanded for reading under the covers with a flashlight after lights-out. He followed his mother into the kitchen. We all tried not to hear what she was saying, although the tone came through loud and clear.
“He’s still her little boy,” Roger said. “Always will be. She doesn’t like this talk of murder.”
“None of us do,” Dad said.
Pippa said nothing. She just watched me over the rim of her wine glass, her brown eyes, same shade as mine, sharp and narrow.
“I might have had a quick look around Paul’s office,” I said. “I didn’t search him, though. He was wearing a T-shirt, and his jacket was tossed over the back of the chair. No place to hide a book of any size. I’d expect a rare and potentially valuable volume to be a hardcover at least.”
“Not necessarily,” Grant said, coming back into the room. He had a chastised expression on his face, and he avoided his wife’s eyes. Linda sat down with a huff. She took a piece of flatbread. “Can I cut you some cheese, dear?” she asked Roger.
“No, thanks, hon.”
“Anyone?”
We all demurred. Donald speared an olive with a toothpick.
“An extremely old book, something earlier than, say, the eighteenth century, could be very small,” Grant said. “Tiny to our eyes.”
“A volume like that would never come into Paul’s hands,” I said. “I was assuming he found something in a box of secondhand books someone decided to get rid of when they downsized.”
“The point,” Grant said, “is we don’t know what he had. Or how it came into his possession.”
“True,” I admitted.
“Never mind the book for now,” Ryan said. “Did the police give any indication you might be a suspect in this?”
Linda Thompson sucked in a breath. Her husband patted her hand.
“No,” I said firmly. “She asked for the usual information like phone numbers and the address of where we’re staying, in case they have more questions. It was obvious Paul died a good while before we arrived. Likely not long after I encountered him at the hotel, at a guess. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been in when I saw him.”
“As I’m sure Ryan and Henry can tell us, ex-spouses are often the most likely suspects,” Donald added helpfully, “and for good reason.”
“Thank you for those words of support,” I said.
“I don’t mean you, Gemma. Simply making a general observation.”
“I hope you told the detective you had no contact with this guy for several years until last night,” Ryan said.
“I did. And because it’s true, she won’t find otherwise. Before anyone asks, I did not get up in the middle of the night and make my way to a back alley near Trafalgar Square to sneak in the rear door of a secondhand bookshop and murder anyone. For revenge on a cheating man or possession of I don’t even know what. Or anything else.”
“Is that a possibility?” Linda stared at me, wide-eyed.
“No, Mom,” Grant said, “it most definitely is not. Gemma is eliminating that line of inquiry.”
“Because it’s impossible,” Donald said. “I am confident the police of Scotland Yard have learned a thing or two since Holmes’s day. When you’ve eliminated the impossible, all else that remains must be considered probable.”
“Huh?” Roger Thompson said.
“You mean Sherlock Holmes was a real person?” Linda said. “I always thought he was made up.”
Pippa’s phone buzzed. She pressed a key and stood up. “At last. Dinner has arrived.”
“Great,” Andy said. “I’m starving.”
Pippa and Grant went to the door together. They spoke in low voices. She was, I suspected, asking him if I’d told them the whole story.
“Gemma,” Ryan said. “What are you planning to do?”
“Do?” I said sweetly.
“About Paul’s death.”
I leaned back in my chair and cradled my wine glass. The door opened; Grant accepted a stack of brown bags. Fabulous scents drifted into the flat. Andy leapt to his feet. “I’ll help serve. Come on, Jayne.”
“What? Oh, you want me to help too? Right. Got it.”
Roger and Linda stood up. “I’ll wash my hands before dinner,” Linda said.
“Donald,” Jayne called, “can you bring the wine bottles to the table?”
Soon only Ryan, my parents, and Pippa were watching me.
“Do?” I repeated. “I loved Paul once. And in return he loved me. Or he thought he did, at any rate. It didn’t work out, and to be completely honest, I doubt it would have worked even if he hadn’t taken up with a shop clerk beneath my very nose. The bloom was off the rose even before that, which was why I didn’t make much of an effort to keep the marriage together. We had no children; we went our separate ways. We settled our financial affairs, meaning the co-ownership of the shop, without rancor. I moved to West London. Paul married Sophie.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Pippa said.
“I’d like to do what I can for him. One last time.”
“He doesn’t deserve it, love,” Mum said softly.
“He wasn’t a bad man,” I said. “Never violent, never abusive. He wanted to make a go of the shop, but he simply wasn’t capable of keeping his mind on one thing at a time. He constantly leapt from one great idea to another, never finishing the first.” Judging by what I saw last night, that hadn’t changed.
“I don’t like it,” Ryan said.
“Neither do I,” Dad said. “Leave it to the police, Gemma.”
“How many cases would you guess DI Patel has on her plate at any one time, Dad?”
“More than one,” my father admitted.
“And how many do I have?”
“None,” Ryan said. “As in zero. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“We get your point, love,” Mum said. “But this should not be up to you.”
I glanced around the flat. Jayne passed steaming serving dishes across the kitchen counter. Andy placed them in the center of the table, while Donald arranged wine glasses. Roger and Linda were standing close together, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows over the city. Darkness had fallen, and lights stretched to the horizon. Grant had his head buried in the fridge.
“Why don’t I ask a few innocent questions?” I said. “See if I come up with anything obvious the police don’t have the time or the resources to get. I should call on Paul’s mum at the very least. Extend my condolences. She was rather fond of me, although that might have changed. Maybe I can locate this book, and it will turn out to be a find of great historic and literary significance.”
“Paul’s father’s a senior clerk in the chambers next to mine,” Mum said. “I should also express my condolences. I believe his parents are long divorced.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “No one can deny you have an uncanny way of finding out things the police cannot, Gemma. And I include myself in that statement.”
“Nothing uncanny about it,” I said. “I simply observe what others do not.”
“Not to mention there’s no stopping you when your mind is set on something. Guess our fishing trip is off, Henry.”
Dad’s face fell. He’d booked three nights at a fishing lodge in Derbyshire for himself, Andy, and Ryan.
“No need to do that,” I said. “As I said, I’ll only be asking questions. It would probably be best for you not to come with me to Grant’s mum’s place, Ryan. She was not happy when Paul and I split. Not at all. I have Grant and Jayne if I need someone to accompany me. Even Donald.”
“Like Jayne’s going to be helpful in a fight,” Dad said. “Or Donald.”
“I don’t intend to get in any fights,” I said.
“That’s good to know,” Mum said.
Ryan looked dubious.
“After dinner, I’ll put some feelers out to friends I still have in the Met,” Dad said. “And to Jasmine Patel herself. I remember her from when she was a rookie constable, and we got on well back then. I’ll try to find out what’s up with this case. If it looks like it’s being handled well, you are not under suspicion, and there’s no hint of it being more than a normal killing, whatever normal means, I’m okay with going fishing. Up to you, Ryan.”
“I have to admit, I am looking forward to it,” Ryan said. “If Gemma agrees to two things.”
“What?” I asked.
He counted off on his fingers. “One, you’ll check in with me every day. Two, you’ll walk away and hand everything you’ve learned over to the police at the merest hint that whoever killed this guy might be planning to kill again to stop from being found out.”
“I agree.”
“Three—”
“You said two conditions.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of changing my mind. You have to agree to do research only. Speak to people, but no crafty disguises. Nothing illegal like break and enter.”
“Promise,” I said.
“I have a condition also,” Dad said, “If DI Patel tells you to get lost, you do.”
“Okay.”
“I and my office must not be involved in any way,” Pippa said.
“You won’t be.”
“That’s what you said the last time. My ears are still ringing from the words I heard when I returned to my desk from participating in a police action on the river in front of the Tate Modern … as photographed by half the tourists in London.”
“I neglected to extend my condolences on the death of your late boss,” I said. “I trust you’re now reporting to the replacement.”
Pippa looked at me. “I have absolutely no idea to whom you are referring, Gemma.”
Ryan was interrupted from asking who we were talking about when my phone buzzed to tell me I had a text. Uncle Arthur. “Excuse me,” I said. “It’s from home. This might be important.” I read the message quickly.
You mean the skunk encounter? V chastised. House being cleaned now. Love to all.