Normal Rules Do Not Apply

Peter Guttridge

‘Nobody wants to see a boob frowning,’ Bridget Frost bellowed.

I looked down at my friend, the former Bitch of the Broadsheets, now a TV celebrity of sorts. And at what the Daily Mail would call her ‘ample assets.’ They didn’t seem to be frowning. I glanced at the crowd of people around us. Until this crime festival in this labyrinthine hotel in Cathedral Gardens in Bristol, I hadn’t seen her for ten years. However, age didn’t seem to have withered her nor affected the loudness of her voice one iota.

Aside from my embarrassment, there was a potential Walls of Jericho situation here. As of old, I imagined traffic on other continents screeching to a halt. The floor actually shuddered, as did we all. About twenty of us, waiting now for an irritating length of time for the lift doors to open. We were all trying to get to the Saturday 2.30 p.m. panel featuring U.S. global-best-seller Randall Spear.

‘Botox boobs?’ I said. ‘I thought Botox was for crow’s-feet, lined foreheads, and stuff.’

‘And armpits.’

‘Armpits.’

‘Yeah, have you never seen how wrinkled your armpits can be?

‘To be honest, I don’t look at my armpits much. Plus I’ve got hair in them.’

Bridget snorted. An interesting sound.

‘Armpit hair is the latest trend on Instagram among women. According to the Daily Mail—so it must be true—a quarter of millennial women have hairy armpits.’

‘Okay—but going back to what you were saying…’

‘Botox has taken over from implants for boobs. Painless, scar-free, immediate. Lasts between four and six months.’

‘How’s it work?’

‘I should know that, how? And care, why?’

A skinny American woman with knitting needles sticking out of her shoulder bag (best not to ask) was standing behind Bridget. She chipped in:

‘It weakens the pectoralis minor muscles beneath the breasts which means that the major muscles above have to do more work. It gives your breasts a lift. And you don’t get crepey cleavage. In fact, it knocks years off your cleavage. It works especially well with a large embonpoint.’ She looked at me. ‘Tits to you.’

Well, tits to you too, I thought but didn’t say. I’m a writer, for goodness sake, I know what an ‘embonpoint’ is. More or less. I looked at her bag again. She had so many knitting needles sticking out, it looked like Robin Hood’s quiver of arrows. She indicated her own flat chest. ‘Not that I have that problem.’

What were the chances of two women with a clearly intimate knowledge of Botox boobs meeting at a lift door in a hotel in Bristol hosting a crime fiction festival? Well, quite high, given that in the crime-writing fraternity normal rules about what was…well, normal, did not always apply.

There was momentary silence filled by a tall, bald, stoop-shouldered Canadian saying loudly to his much shorter wife:

‘It’s a de facto monopsony.’

He spoke loudly, I knew, because he was hard of hearing. But all I could think of was reaching over and brushing the flakes of dandruff off his shoulders. I’ve always assumed that dandruff on a bald man can only mean God really has it in for him. This guy looked like he’d been standing too near a log fire where the ash had drifted and settled on him.

‘Obviously,’ his wife said, quietly but fiercely.

‘What?’ he said, stooping more. I saw that her height and (maliciously?) low voice were probably the reasons he was stoop-shouldered. Relationships, eh?

‘I said obviously it’s a de facto monopsony.’

Bridget swung round to face them.

‘What the defuckto are you talking about?’

‘Monopsony—it’s an economics thing,’ the gangly Canadian said. ‘Where a single buyer has a choice of the same product from a number of suppliers. So the convention bookshop has a problem because crime fiction buyers have a range of suppliers to go to and if they are volume buyers, then obviously, they are going to be looking at price—’

I saw Bridget give him a withering look but, foolishly, I paid no heed.

‘Yes,’ I piped up. ‘It’s from the Greek “mono” and–’

‘It’s all Greek to me,’ Bridget snapped.

‘One bit is actually Latin,’ I said. ‘It means—’

She squared off to me. I’d like to say I towered over her, which, theoretically, given I’m six-foot, four, I did. But at this moment think of me as Nick Pisa (Leaning Tower of) rather than my actual daft name, Nick Madrid.

‘Why can’t you guys speak normal English?’ Bridget said. ‘Why do crime authors feel they have to come over as bright and high-falutin’—I’ve read the crap you write.’

There was a collective gasp and not a little tutting (there were ‘cosy crime’ fans among us). There was also nervous laughter, not least from me, but then Bridget always has made me nervous.

‘You’re not a fan of the genre?’ asked the American woman with knitting needles sticking out of her shoulder bag.

‘Genre—see, there you go again,’ Bridget harrumphed. ‘What’s wrong with using an English word? Like rubbish, for instance. Are you a fan of this rubbish, Bridget? I mean it almost becomes a rhetorical question then, doesn’t it? Why would I want to read made-up stuff with all the real stuff going on in the world that you just couldn’t make up?’

‘But of course you’ve read Nick’s stuff,’ the Canadian said. ‘True crime—and featuring you, after all.’

‘Best not to go there,’ I said quickly.

Bridget Frost, the Life Force embodied in one feisty, promiscuous, hard-drinking, vulgar, loud-mouthed, loving, irresistible woman, with whom I had stumbled over various crimes in the course of our friendship. Stumbled over far too frequently, frankly, but, hey, I’ve got six books out of them.

I’ve been promoting the books at crime fiction festivals around the world with some success and a lot of pleasure for the past ten years. Every year, here at Bristol CrimeFest. Although, prior to this, Bridget has never accompanied me to any other festival, even though she loomed large in the books (and my life).

The truth is I hadn’t seen Bridget for almost ten years, because she finally got round to reading the first of my books based on our adventures. She wasn’t happy.

‘We could walk up the four floors,’ I said as the lift doors remained closed and there was no movement on the floor indicator above.

As if I’d said abracadabra, the lift door slid open. And there was a collective gasp as we all looked at the spread-eagled body of Randall Spear, on the floor of the lift, a knitting needle sticking out of his throat and an enormous pool of blood soaking into the carpet around him.

Not a totally collective gasp. Bridget sniffed. Then tottered away (in her usual unfeasibly high heels), muttering (loudly): ‘So that event isn’t happening. Let’s go back to the bar.’

And the woman with the knitting needles said: ‘That looks like my number three!’

‘Who would want to murder Randall Spear?’ I said as we settled at a table on the terrace so she could smoke one of many cigarettes.

‘You’ve obviously not been to bed with him,’ Bridget said, blowing smoke in my face.

True. Hang on.

‘Bridget?’

She just looked at me. Well, I suppose we had been here two days.

Bridget’s shoulders suddenly slumped.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘I can’t believe you would describe me like that in your books. What have I ever done but given you love and affection?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said meekly. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m managing,’ she said, her voice breaking.

‘Bridget,’ I said, putting my arm around her, ‘it must have really got to you.’

‘Another triple vodka and a bowl of pistachios, handsome,’ Bridget said, as the barman walked by. Emphasising the request by nipping his bum.

‘Really got to you,’ I muttered.

The barman returned with her drink. He smiled; she smiled; I paid. Life, as I know it. When the barman had gone, she said: ‘Saying I have no dress sense—how fucking dare you?’ Given it was through gritted teeth, the volume was impressive. She saw my look. ‘And don’t think that coming over all meek is going to make any difference.’

Coming over all meek? I am meek. That’s a good thing…isn’t it? But actually my expression was bemusement. I’d been worrying about describing her promiscuity, drunkenness, and vulgarity and she was more concerned about a throwaway remark about something she was wearing.

‘What was Randall Spear like?’ I said, attempting to shift the subject.

‘That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?’ she said, looking over my shoulder to see if someone more interesting was around. ‘The usual disappointment,’ she added absently.

‘I didn’t actually mean that, I meant what kind of person was he?’

‘I would know that how?’ she said.

‘Well, you must have had a conversation with him. How did you meet him?’

‘In the underground car park. He helped me with my luggage.’

‘Did you know who he was?’

More smoke in the face.

‘I still don’t know who he is. Then I saw him later out here. He was with that enthusiastic man full of conspiracy theories. Who in turn was sharing a water bottle with a Cockney geezer who writes Westerns—the bottle was full of gin and tonic.’

‘How did you know it was gin and tonic?’

She looked at me.

‘Good gin too. Twelve quid for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in this place? No wonder people bring their own.’

‘And Randall was with them?’

‘There was a gang of people. He left when that very tall man who is played by a midget in films…’

‘I think you mean his character is played by a midge—Bridget, we don’t use that word these days.’

‘You just did.’

‘I meant horizontally challenged,’ I said.

Bridget smirked.

‘I think you mean vertically challenged. But let’s agree on “that short Scientologist,” shall we?’

‘And you mean Lee Child. Any of the organisers?’

As I said this, the CrimeFest team—Adrian, Myles, Donna, and Liz—came onto the terrace and fanned out. Individually, they went up to each group of crime writers and readers in turn.

‘Tell Bridget who Randall Spear is,’ I said as Adrian, the organiser with the shaved head, came over to us. ‘It’s her first time at a crime festival.’

‘Was,’ he said. ‘And it’s a convention not a festival.’

‘He’s Dutch,’ I said to Bridget by way of introduction. Both looked at me bemused. ‘You know…so a stickler for accuracy,’ I added weakly.

‘Why is it called CrimeFest if it’s a convention?’ Bridget said. Adrian frowned but ignored the question.

‘Anyway, I just want to reassure you that events will continue as soon as possible but when they do, people will have to use the lifts at the back of the hotel as police have cordoned off the lifts at the front as a crime scene. But in the meantime we all have to stay in the bar. They’re going to want to interview everyone who had any dealings with him.’

‘That’ll take hours,’ Bridget said. ‘Are the drinks on the house?’

‘We’re working on that,’ Myles said as the other three CrimeFest folk joined us.

‘Tell Bridget who Randall Spear was.’

‘I thought I saw you with him,’ Donna said cautiously.

‘So?’ Bridget said airily.

‘Randall Spear wasn’t his real name,’ Adrian said. ‘Though that’s the name his books are marketed under. Probably the most successful crime writer in the world, though it has never been clear whether he was one man or an army of writers all writing under the same brand. And, of course, nobody could be sure he was a he at all.’

‘Bloody gender fluidity,’ Bridget muttered.

‘I just meant he might be a woman writing as a man,’ Adrian said.

‘Theories abound,’ Liz chipped in. ‘He’d hidden behind anonymity for years. No photographs, no interviews until he turned up here. This would have been his first interview. At least we know now he wasn’t Stephen King writing under another name.’

‘Or a literary author slumming it, as John Banville says he does,’ I added.

‘I always thought that rather than a posse of writers, he was two writers,’ Myles said. ‘Relatively common in crime and mystery fiction.’

‘So why didn’t both of them come, like Michael Stanley?’ I said.

Bridget looked puzzled. ‘I met Michael Stanley. I’m pretty sure he’s one person.’

‘You met Michael not Stanley.’

‘How many Lee Childs are there?’ Bridget said. I recognised that predatory glint in her eye.

‘Is that a metaphysical question?’ Adrian said.

‘He’s married,’ I said.

‘There’s nothing metaphorical about it,’ Bridget said.

‘Metaphysical,’ I murmured.

‘Let’s just keep it at physical, shall we?’

‘So when did Randall Spear arrive?’ I said, trying to get the investigation back on track.

‘Yesterday midday,’ Liz said. She turned to Bridget. ‘I liked you on Countdown.’

Countdown was a long-running UK afternoon show involving two contestants making words out of random letters and adding up long strings of numbers. It was news to me that Bridget had been on it.

‘I don’t know why they took such offence,’ Bridget sniffed.

‘Unprecedented number of complaints,’ Myles said.

‘For what?’ I said.

Bridget shrugged.

‘It was probably the first time either “fisting” or “rimming” had appeared on the Countdown board,’ Myles said. ‘And certainly never in the same show.’

‘It was the sums that let me down,’ Bridget said. ‘They’ve never been my strong point and when they confiscated my calculator just before the game started, I knew I wasn’t going to win.’

‘Your maths were very entertaining,’ Myles said drily. ‘And that randy comedian Russell Brand in Dictionary Corner was equally entertained by your word choices.’

‘That could have been interesting after the show but I was fourth on his list and I wasn’t having that,’ Bridget said. ‘Which, mind you, was a step up from sixteenth in the queue he proposed after I was part of the audience on Big Brother’s Little Brother years ago.’

None of us could think of an answer to that. I knew something of Bridget’s various TV appearances. She had told me on the phone, when she agreed to come to Bristol to do an event with me about our adventures, that she’d surfed the zeitgeist of reality television as if it had been created for her. (Well, okay, her actual words were: ‘I decided that if all those D-list morons could make it work for them, so could I.’)

She’d explained that she’d toyed with X Factor but decided she couldn’t figure out an angle. She had the ‘winning would mean the world to me’ stuff down pat (she’d already used it in four other shows) but the problem was that she had a perfectly pleasant singing voice. So she couldn’t steal the show as one of the self-deluded idiots who sound like cats in a sack or drone on as if their medication has kicked in big-time, but nor could she hope to win because her voice wasn’t fantastic. And the last thing Bridget would ever admit to being was average.

She’d been trying to reach a tipping point where she could move into the celebrity versions of reality shows. She was eager to go into the Australian jungle for I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here and even to eat a kangaroo’s testicles if that’s what it took.

Alas the opportunity never arose on screen, even though she had done something not altogether dissimilar in private with some Antipodean guy who’d claimed to be a TV producer and had promised her a shot on the show in return for a sexual favour. She was livid when she realised he’d conned her, but with age had come cunning, and she went through the procedure with him again. This time, however, he ended up in hospital. Percy would never be pointed at the porcelain in quite the same way again.

‘Did Spear arrive alone?’ I said, trying to get the investigation back on track.

‘We’ve told all this to the police, you know,’ Myles said.

‘Of course he arrived alone,’ Bridget said. ‘I told you I met him in the car park.’

‘Oh, the police will definitely want to talk to you,’ Adrian said. ‘How long were you with him alone?’

‘Bit longer than usual but not by much,’ Bridget said.

‘He meant in the car park, Bridget,’ I said quickly as the four of them exchanged glances. Well, they had read my books and now they were meeting her in the flesh.

‘Men are a constant disappointment,’ Bridget continued. ‘As you ladies will know if you’ve ever wasted your time getting up close and personal with Nick here. But at least with him it hardly takes any time.’

‘Me with Nick?’ the women said in horrified unison. Which hurt really.

‘Can we get on with solving this crime?’ I said, trying not to harrumph. Bridget looked at me. Okay, so I’d harrumphed. ‘When you’re ready,’ I said quickly.

‘Why did he break cover here?’ Bridget said.

Adrian shrugged. ‘He just e-mailed out of the blue. Said he was going to be over in the UK and could he come. Then he turned up.’

‘He got off to a flying start with the ladies,’ Donna said. ‘I suppose he had a kind of roguish charm.’ She nudged me. ‘Shame he wasn’t around long enough for you to learn a trick or two, Nick.’

‘I have charms for those who have eyes to see,’ I said.

‘I do need new specs,’ she said.

‘I did see him engrossed in conversation with Viz, that Found poet turned crime writer,’ I said. To protect Bridget’s feelings, I didn’t add that I’d seen them head off to the lifts with their arms around each other’s waists.

‘Just the word poet makes me want to vomit,’ Bridget said sharply. I remembered she rates poets about as highly as paedophiles, serial killers, and former boyfriends. ‘Is she the one who bills herself as a class warrior? I can’t decide whether to admire or pity someone in their forties who still bangs on about class war and the evils of capitalism.’ Bridget wasn’t one to keep up with politics so probably didn’t even know about the current Labour leader and his shadow chancellor. ‘So what is a Found poet anyway?’

‘She does cut-up poetry,’ I said. ‘She takes random lines from newspapers then shuffles them until she gets something.’

‘Something that makes sense?’ Bridget said.

‘Depends what you mean by sense,’ Myles muttered.

‘She performs with another poet with a disability but nobody likes to ask what his disability is,’ I said.

‘Well, he can’t write poetry,’ Liz chipped in. ‘Does that count?’

‘Does she knit?’ Bridget said. We all shrugged.

‘What about the knitting needle lady?’ I said.

‘Margot?’ Adrian said. ‘She’s being interviewed now. Can’t see how she would do something like that.’ His phone rang. He listened and nodded then ended the call. ‘They’ve found a name tag under the body. It might be open and shut.’

They all went off, leaving Bridget and me alone. We went back into the bar and surveyed the scene. It was packed and the noise level made even Bridget sound timid. Over there was a gang of hard-boiled writers, men in their thirties and forties, one of them wearing shades despite the gloom, drinking beer out of bottles. They were regulars here, but some of them never went to panels, preferring to stay in the bar, sometimes late into the night. A couple of them, I believe, had learned to exist without any sleep at all for the length of the weekend.

There were excitable groups of men and women in their twenties chattering together—a mix of writers, editors, and PRs. There would be a certain amount of pairing off later. And some broken hearts and marriages when texts sent to arrange an intimate late-night rendezvous with a new acquaintance went in error to the wife or husband back home.

There was a small gaggle of committee members of the Crime Writers Association. (The CWA had just recently decided to drop the apostrophe from Writers’. That apostrophe, only introduced by a syntactical purist some fifteen years after the association was founded, had been the bane of sub-editors in the national and local press for decades and now troubled the work-experience tykes who produce those newspapers these days.)

A temporary guardrail had been put along the space between the bar and the corridor beyond it. A policeman stood there, currently bending to speak to a tiny, elegant woman wearing what looked like enormous ear muffs or headphones.

Over in the far corner I could see a bunch of familiar, friendly faces from America, a mix of readers and writers, all of them into cosy crime. I led Bridget over there, figuring they would know about Margot, the knitting needle lady.

An energetic woman with neat clothes and hair was saying: ‘My bookmark is currently in a cat quilter novel but I’m afraid it will be a DNF book.’

Bridget glanced my way as we hovered behind their chairs.

‘Did Not Finish,’ I murmured.

‘The two cat characters are a ragdoll and a savannah. Excellent casting but I’m not sure the author actually knows cats. I mean she puts clothes on the cats so they can model them—which is fine—except that she does it in front of strangers. I can’t see cats being comfortable with that. In addition, it’s proselytising. If I want to be “saved” I know where my local church is.’

The woman next to her, hugging a bag of books, said: ‘I’m reading a book about Graycie, the killer parrot. It’s called Winging It and it’s very funny. And next up is one about Diesel, the Maine Coon.’

Bridget started to move away. I put my hand on her arm—very lightly—and leaned in. ‘This is pet noir—the latest thing.’

‘The latest thing is my need for another exorbitantly priced drink,’ Bridget said, shrugging my hand off and manoeuvring back to the bar.

‘Hello ladies,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you knew whether Margot was okay?’

A white-haired older woman in a tracksuit looked up at me. She had a sweet face.

‘You should ask her friend, Diane. They’re the knitting bee here this weekend.’

‘And where might I find her?’

She shrugged.

‘Follow the clews of wool.’

I laughed.

‘Were you at the craft-based mysteries panel this morning?’ the sweet woman said. ‘Diane was on the panel.’

I shook my head.

‘What kind of crafts?’ I asked.

‘Knitting, miniatures, and cheese.’

‘Cheese?’

She nodded.

‘Lots of cheese recipes,’ she said. ‘Rather than B and G.’

It took me a second to get that one.

‘And miniature what?’ I said.

‘Houses.’

‘Oh, you mean like dolls’ houses? So are these just small crimes?’

She gave me a quick smile in response to the ‘small crimes’ but I noticed it didn’t reach her eyes.

‘She doesn’t like to call them dolls’ houses because she doesn’t much like dolls or people in them—though she does put miniature dirty dishes in the sinks of her houses, as if people do live there.’

As I was digesting that, I thought I should introduce myself.

‘I’m Nick, by the way,’ I said.

‘I know who you are,’ she said. ‘Even without your name tag. Your reputation precedes you.’

I decided not to follow that up—I’ve been bitten that way before. Especially as her sweet face was suddenly not looking quite so sweet.

‘Well, I’ll go in search of Diane,’ I said, waving good-bye to the group, most of whom had ignored me anyway.

Bridget was at the bar with two drinks in front of her, a man either side of her. That figured. I started to go by but she gestured at me to come over.

‘This guy has written this novel which, if I’ve got it right, is the conscious evolution of the staid three-act horror narrative.’

I looked at him and nodded. He looked normal enough—but then so do most serial killers.

‘It’s a savage indictment of the corporate mentality,’ he hissed. ‘A challenging, twisted book that assails the underpinnings of modern society and does so much more than spit in your face.’

So much for normal. I turned to the other man. Ditto, normal looking.

‘I was just saying that I write crime reviews for one of the nationals, though I’ve got a book deal,’ he said. He showed a lot of teeth beneath a curled lip as he talked, which reminded me of some ancient TV series about a talking horse called Mr Ed. ‘I just had a falling out with a sub-editor. You may not understand this, but I know Bridget will. He made so many mistakes. And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittiest of all, he removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “dosh” is lost and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable.’

He looked at me fiercely.

‘Terrible,’ I agreed, singing to myself a bit of the theme song from Mr Ed (‘a horse is a horse, of course, of course’ if you must know). He nodded vigorously.

‘When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Couldn’t he hear? Couldn’t he hear that it’s wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 crime reviews and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable.’ He took a swig of his beer. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’

Bridget picked up both her glasses and leaned in to whisper in my ear: ‘Can we go back to Planet Earth, please?’

I smiled cheesily at the two men, saying: ‘Really got to go now.’

I steered Bridget away.

‘This is Planet Earth,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you noticed how the world has gone bonkers since we last saw each other?’

We went back outside and Bridget handed me one of the wineglasses, which was unusually unselfish of her. I wondered briefly what she was after. But she just lit another cigarette, so I looked on my laptop and saw that every person and their dog had been tweeting from the festival about Randall Spear’s death. I imagined the press would be arriving in force any time now.

Usually, the crimes Bridget and I had got involved with had been away from the police, but here the police were on the spot so there was nothing for us to investigate. Even so…

I Googled Randall Spear. Wikipedia had no photo, of course, and scant biographical details. Internal evidence from his novels apparently suggested he was familiar with Nebraska thirty years ago. He’d looked to be in his forties when I’d caught sight of him—I’m pushing fifty, which these days is about the only exercise I get, aside from a less rigorous yoga than I used to do, a couple of times a week.

Each of his novels were set in different parts of America so it was hard to pin down where he lived. His novels were gruesome—more Thomas Harris than Michael Connelly—but he definitely nailed the psychopathic mind and, globally, readers responded to that. Personally, I didn’t think there was a posse of writers behind the brand because the consistency of the darkness of vision and gruesomeness seemed to suggest a single viewpoint, or at most, two people who were very close. All of it sick, of course.

‘A knitting needle—is that a weapon of deliberation?’ I said.

‘He’s off,’ said Bridget, from behind her phone as she was busy tilting her head this way and that to take selfies.

‘I mean if you were going to commit an impulsive act wouldn’t you be a bit more…savage? This was so precise, from what we could see—straight into the throat below the Adam’s apple.’

‘I didn’t see,’ Bridget said, showing me the screen of her phone. ‘Which is best?’

I looked at the images of Bridget she paraded before me.

‘They’re all great. So this was planned. And, assuming Margot didn’t do it, was that part opportune for the killer, nicking the needle from her quiver?’

Bridget was still fiddling with her phone.

‘Well, here’s a thing,’ she said. ‘Randall Spear has just tweeted that the announcement of his death is fake news.’

Back in the bar, there was a hubbub among all the Twitterers. The hapless policeman on the makeshift barrier at the bar had to confirm that, yes, there was a dead body in the lift but, no, he couldn’t confirm that person’s identity.

‘He’s supposed to be a writer, for goodness sake,’ someone was grumbling. ‘Why couldn’t he quote Mark Twain about the news of his death being greatly exaggerated? “Fake news”—hate that expression.’

‘You go to the trouble of killing someone and you don’t get the right person,’ said some woman with a strong Birmingham accent. ‘That’s a bummer.’

Viz, the Found poet she was talking to, nodded her head in vehement agreement, which made all the metal piercings in her face and ears sway and jingle.

I saw the coven of quilters and cosy crime aficionados all atwitter—in the old-fashioned sense of the word—on the other side of the room. The sweet-faced, white-haired woman looked quite put out.

‘So the guy was an imposter,’ I said to Bridget.

‘If you mean he pretended how good he was in bed beforehand, I don’t fall for that anymore.’

‘I meant not really Randall Spear at all.’

‘Any of them?’ Bridget said.

That was a point. If I was wrong and there was actually a Randall Spear posse, maybe the victim was one of them officially or unofficially masquerading as him.

‘Bridget, is there anything about him that struck you as odd?—no, I don’t mean anything sexual.’

‘Not really. Though I did think he was from Birmingham when I met him in the car park.’

‘He had a Brummie accent?’

‘I thought so. It was only when I realised I was wrong I let things go further.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t sleep with a Brummie because of the accent?’

‘Would you?’

I thought of the woman in the bar with the Birmingham accent I’d heard a few minutes earlier. I’d never seen her before but she wasn’t wearing a name tag so I hadn’t known who she was. She was a bit of a looker with her Louise Brooks bob and ripped jeans.

‘Well…’

‘Oh, yeah, of course,’ Bridget interrupted, ‘you’re so desperate you’d sleep with anyone.’

Ordinarily I would have protested, especially as these days I rarely got up to any shenanigans, but I was thinking about the Brummie woman in the bar and who she was with. All kinds of conspiracy theories were forming in my head.

‘Nick, what is it?’ Bridget said.

‘I’m thinking,’ I said.

‘Thank God. I thought from your expression—well, let’s just say you’re still a bit young for incontinence pads.’

‘I think I’ve got it,’ I said. I saw Bridget start to speak. ‘No cheap comments.’

‘I don’t do cheap,’ she sniffed.

‘Let’s suppose he was from Birmingham.’

Bridget grimaced. ‘I don’t want to hear that.’

‘He conned everybody—nothing easier when you’re pretending to be somebody no one has ever seen or met.’

‘But why?’

‘For the fun of it. The prestige. The sex.’

Bridget grimaced again.

‘But supposing he’s married or has a partner and she finds out about it and follows him here?’

‘I heard a Birmingham voice in the bar a minute ago,’ Bridget said slowly.

‘Exactly.’

‘I knew that city wasn’t to be trusted.’

I let that go.

‘That woman in the bar was with the Found poet.’

‘Where’s she from?’

‘Richmond-upon-Thames. Her daddy was a banker,’ I said.

‘Fucking figures. But you said you’d seen her with the Spear character. You think wife and poet were in cahoots?’

‘Works for me,’ I said, looking over to the policeman. ‘Come on.’

‘Nick, it’s a bit thin,’ Bridget said as we headed towards the copper.

‘Wafer thin,’ I agreed as Adrian led in two plainclothes and two uniformed policemen and looked round the bar.

‘They’ve figured it out, too,’ I said. ‘Must be the name tag Adrian said they’d found.’ I looked to where the Birmingham woman and Viz were, and gestured Bridget to move aside so we weren’t in the policemen’s path. As I did so, I tried to catch Adrian’s eye and point out where the culprits were.

Bridget and I ended up beside the cosy crime ladies as my gestures to Adrian and the police got increasingly large. They saw me, the lead plainclothes policeman frowned, and they all headed towards me.

‘They’re over there,’ I said to Adrian as the policemen barged past me and surrounded the sweet-faced, white-haired lady sitting in her chair behind me.

‘Matilda March, would you come with us please,’ the lead policeman said.

‘Method, means, and opportunity,’ Matilda said, smiling, well, sweetly. ‘I stole the knitting needle from Margot’s bag when I was standing behind her waiting to go to the craft event; I was staying on the same floor as that man; and I seized the opportunity as we both got into the lift.’

‘But why?’ I blurted, earning a scowl from the policemen.

She stood, holding her wrists out in front of her as if expecting to be cuffed.

‘I told you—I don’t like B and G in crime novels. It’s abhorrent to me. And his were full of it.’

B and G: blood and gore.

‘You stabbed somebody in the throat and left him bleeding to death because you didn’t like the blood and gore in his novels?’ I said.

‘You look puzzled,’ she said as the police began to lead her away.

‘No, no. If it makes sense to you, it makes sense to me.’ I turned to Bridget. ‘Right?’

She shrugged and watched Matilda March leave the bar.

‘My starting point is that you’re all fucking nuts, so normal rules do not apply,’ she finally said. She looked around. ‘Now where’s that Lee Child?’