Una Maggott was sitting at her desk in front of her computer when Holly came into the room. She looked up, her lips faintly smiling, her small eyes cold. Holly felt that atavistic repulsion, that instinctive distrust, that she had felt the very first time she saw this woman, and had suppressed so many times since.
‘So you came back,’ Una said. ‘I thought you might.’
‘I found the Andrew mug,’ said Holly, lifting her hand to display the mug.
‘So I see. A bit late, though, don’t you think?’
‘A bit late, yes. If I’d found it before I’d have smelled a rat much sooner. The fuel stove was a ridiculously obvious hiding place. Anyone searching the kitchen would have found it. And it’s inconceivable that a woman like you, however besotted, would buy a clumsy, kitschy thing like this as a gift unless there was a very good reason for it. As you told Cliff Allnut, Una, when you lie it’s a mistake to over-elaborate.’
Una’s eyes strayed back to her computer screen. ‘It’s a shame Dulcie insisted on taking that boy away,’ she murmured. ‘He’s a sharp one. A real Maggott. I could have used him.’
‘Like you use everyone,’ Holly said. ‘Like you used Andrew McNish. And me!’
Una shrugged. ‘McNish was in a hole and I offered him a way out of it. He knew exactly what he was doing.’
‘But I didn’t,’ said Holly.
‘Yes, well . . .’ Una’s lip curled.
Holly felt her face grow hot, and fought down her anger. ‘You even used yourself, Una, when it suited you,’ she said. ‘You told me a very personal story about seeing your father for the last time. You did it to play on my feelings. You’re good at seeing people’s weaknesses—or what you think of as weaknesses. You wanted to make me feel sorry for you, to make sure I’d keep my promise to search the house, so I’d find the things you and Andrew had planted between you to make the police believe your crazy story he’d been murdered!’
Una turned to look at her. ‘You seem to have it all worked out, Ms Cage—oh, I’m sorry, it’s Ms Love, actually, isn’t it? I still haven’t got round to talking to the police about that.’
Holly refused to be diverted by the implied threat. Una wasn’t going to go to the police.
‘I believed you completely when you told me about arguing with your dying father. You were so upset—so obviously upset. But that was because what you told me was the truth.’
‘Indeed it was.’
‘Except for one thing. The secret your father told you on his deathbed wasn’t that Lois had had a child. It was that Lois hadn’t run away thirty-five years ago, but had been killed when the chandelier fell. And that he’d embalmed her body and hidden it in this house!’
Una’s mouth twitched.
‘Just thinking about it made you angry all over again,’ Holly went on. ‘That’s why you were so convincing. As if it wasn’t bad enough that your stepmother’s body was hidden somewhere in the house you were about to take possession of at last, that dying old man told you he’d disposed of Lois as if she were an Egyptian queen, with all the treasure he thought she deserved. All the jewellery he’d heaped on her while she was alive. All the cash he’d been able to scrape together, converted to gold sovereigns. The Anubis statue, which I’ll bet is the genuine article—’
‘You surprise me, Ms Love,’ Una Maggott sneered. ‘To be able to tell a real antiquity from a cheap copy! You appear to have hidden depths.’
And the supercilious contempt in the woman’s voice was enough to make Holly throw away all thought of sparing her anything.
‘But the thing that really got under your skin, Una, was that you knew that by that time Rollo Maggott was so far gone that he thought he was talking to Sheena—Sheena who he loved, and wanted to provide for, and to whom he’d left the entire contents of this house! And you were angry, so angry, because he was rambling and confused and wouldn’t get to the point about where Lois’s body actually was, no matter how you raged at him, no matter what you did . . .’
‘Are you trying to blackmail me, Ms Love?’ Una asked curtly. ‘Because if you are, I can assure you—’
Holly felt her hands curling into fists. Deliberately she 341 relaxed them.
‘You can’t think of anything but money, can you?’ she said. ‘You can’t think of a single reason why anyone would do anything, except for money.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘Because I wanted to face you with it. I wanted you to know you didn’t get away with it. I wanted you to know I know.’
It sounded feeble, when she put it into words. And suddenly all the things she’d been planning to say seemed pointless. You had to be so patient, at first. Knowing Cliff All-nut, the bequest to Sheena would have been watertight. You had to persuade Sheena to sign over her inheritance to you.And only after that was done, done by Allnut again, in exactly the same punctilious, watertight way, could you begin searching for Lois’s body and the goodies buried with it. You had the garden dug up first, and when Martin didn’t strike gold, you started clearing out the attic, the storerooms, everywhere a body could possibly be hidden. And when still nothing was found, you hired a pest exterminator to poke into all the secret holes and corners in the house.
Una was sneering at her again. ‘And what do you know, Ms Love?’
‘For one thing, I know you can’t be nearly as rich as people here think you are,’ said Holly, stung into speech. ‘If you have money to burn, why would you bother hiring a small-time detective you thought you could get cheap, then work so hard to keep her? Why are your clothes expensive, but slightly out of date? Why would you live with these—’ she gestured at the stalking gods on the walls ‘—when you obviously loathe them, and a decent paint job would cover them up?’
Una abruptly turned her chair around and wheeled herself to the window. The back of her neck was rigid. Holly felt a little rush of triumph. She knew she was right.
‘Your money was supposed to have come from shares in that company you ran with Alexis Delafont. But maybe that company wasn’t as solvent as people thought. Maybe you and Alexis took one too many risks, went a bit too close to the edge. And when he was killed it all fell in a heap.’
There was silence in the room. The Egyptian figures stalked towards the bay window. The snake’s forked tongue flickered in and out, tasting the air.
At last, Una stirred.
‘The French taxation people were vicious,’ she said, staring through the limp lace curtain, the smudgy glass, the black iron bars. ‘They took everything. I lost my Paris apartment. My shares were worthless.’
‘Then Cliff Allnut rang and told you your father was dying.’
‘Yes. The old cochon was finally on his last legs. I thanked le bon dieu, sold the last of my jewellery and came home.’ Una laughed bitterly. ‘Home! A draughty ruin in the middle of nowhere. But worth a bit of money, at least, I thought. Enough to give me a roof over my head, and some sort of income. And then, when I got here—’
‘You found out there was buried treasure in the house too.’
‘Yes!’ The voice was like a sigh. ‘The fortune everyone thought had been stolen by that little whore Lois. It was here, buried with her! All I had to do was find it. As soon as Sheena’s claim had been sorted out, I started looking.’
‘And you never told anyone what you were really doing,’ Holly said, shaking her head. ‘I suppose even you didn’t have the stomach to admit you’d tricked Sheena out of what your father meant her to have.’
‘Not till I’d secured it, anyway,’ Una said coolly. ‘Sheena was useful to me. So was Eric. And they were cheap. I wanted to hold on to them for as long as I could. I was starting to run out of money. Then I saw a television program about sniffer dogs and realised that was the answer. If I could get some trained corpse dogs into this house, they’d find the woman’s tomb for me. And it would cost me nothing.’
She swung her chair around. Holly saw that she was grinning, and felt cold fingers run down her spine.
‘They all thought I was mad, like my father,’ Una said. ‘I let them think it. What did I care, as long as I got what I wanted? Now I can sell this house and get away from here. When I’m back to somewhere civilised, I can buy as much help as I need.’
‘You are mad, Una,’ said Holly evenly. ‘Or what I call mad. No sane person would have staged a charade like you did with Andrew McNish. No sane person would invite guests into her house specifically to accuse them of murder! You even kept Lily on when you obviously despised her, to give yourself another potential suspect. And I suppose you drugged Cliff Allnut, to make sure he stayed overnight.’
‘It was just a couple of my sleeping pills. They didn’t do him any harm.’
Holly shook her head. ‘No one with any sense of reality at all would think a plan like that would work. I’m sure Andrew didn’t. He just went along with you for what he could get out of it.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Una, her face darkening. ‘What a twister that man was! He cheated me, as well as lying about his contacts. He didn’t sprinkle blood on the bedclothes as he was supposed to do before he came down to dinner— too squeamish, I suppose, to cut himself. And he left his phone in a stupid place, where it could be brushed back by the opening door. He could have ruined everything. He nearly did!’
She leaned back in her chair, perfectly relaxed now. ‘But in the end the plan did work, Ms Love, thanks to you. I must admit it wouldn’t have occurred to me to use a psychic to locate the tomb. I’d assumed all psychics were frauds.’
‘You’re the fraud, Una!’ Holly spat, finally losing control of her temper. ‘You’re the fraud, and the user, and the snake! You accused six people of murder—including Eric, who really cares about you. You even staged a little accident to yourself to convince me there was a killer in the house. And planted a dead rat and a warning note for me, because you knew I’d react just the way I did to being threatened. How could you do it? If Andrew had left blood on the bedclothes, Eric and all the others might have been living under a shadow for the rest of their lives!’
Una snorted. ‘Now you’re lurching into melodrama, Ms Love. Andrew McNish is certain to surface sometime. He’s too cocky to do otherwise. Eric and the rest of them would have been exonerated eventually.’
‘It might have taken years—’
‘Oh, stop whining!’ Una snapped, wheeling herself back to her desk. ‘Sentiment has no place in matters of business. Now, will you please leave? I’m expecting a visitor. And you have nothing to complain of. You were paid for your services— that two hundred and fifty I gave you was the last ready cash I had.’
She turned back to the computer screen, but Holly stood her ground.
‘And what did you pay Andrew for his . . . services?’
‘It’s none of your business, but I’ll tell you if that will get rid of you. He got what he asked for—money, in the form of my mother’s rings, a new phone, and a car he’d taken a liking to, full of petrol and parked in the lay-by, ready to go.’
Her lip curled. ‘A secondhand gold Mercedes is not the vehicle I would have chosen if I wanted to disappear, but McNish is far from prudent. It’s in very good condition, apparently, according to the mechanic in Springwood who checked it over. He’s a surly type, but seems to know what he’s about. So McNish told me, anyway.’
Holly considered the irony of her own sighting of what was almost certainly Andrew’s getaway car at the Springwood service centre, and decided it was not worth mentioning.
‘So you just let Andrew out of the gates on Tuesday night, after all the others had gone to bed, and off he went,’ she said instead. ‘Where is he now?’
Una shrugged. ‘I have absolutely no idea. As far as he can get from our thuggish friends of yesterday, I suppose.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Not perhaps, as far as he’d like,’ she added. ‘The best of the stones in my mother’s rings were replaced with imitations long before I left France.’
‘Maybe you and Andrew are related after all,’ Holly said, and left her.
Returning to Stillwaters Road, Holly found Mrs Moss and Abigail waiting for her in Mrs Moss’s blue and beige living room. Rufus the cat sat on guard by the security screen, gazing across the stairwell, his amber eyes fixed on the red heart door behind which the parrot was singing variations of ‘My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean’.
‘Well, I’ve never heard of anything so devious!’ said Mrs Moss, when Holly had finished telling her story. ‘More tea, dear?’
‘The woman’s a snake,’ Holly agreed, accepting her refilled cup with a smile of thanks.
‘I suppose she was desperate,’ said Abigail. ‘And reading about Andrew McNish at the critical time—’
‘Actually, I think Lily was her first candidate as a potential murderee,’ said Holly. ‘Una would have sized Lily up as someone who had her eye on the main chance, and Lily had told her she had no ties. She got Lily installed in the house, established herself as Lily’s doting patron, and was probably just getting ready to put the idea of playing the disappearing protégée to her when Allnut ferreted out the information that Lily in fact had plenty of ties in the area—a mother and aunties, not to mention a coven! Una would have realised then that whatever else Lily might do for money, she wasn’t going to disappear. So she was back to square one.’
‘Bummer,’ said Mrs Moss, pouring more tea for herself.
‘Yes,’ Holly agreed. ‘Her money was running out. She didn’t have time to develop another believeable protégée. Then she read about Andrew, and got the idea of pretending she believed he was her half-brother. That would make a very quick decision to write a will in his favour seem quite natural. Well, natural for Una, anyway.’
The mobile phone rang in the kitchen. Mrs Moss didn’t move.
‘I must have forgotten to turn it off,’ Mrs Moss said, noticing Holly’s enquiring look. ‘All the excitement. But I never work on Sundays. I don’t feel it’s appropriate. Going back to what we were saying before, I just hate to think of that woman getting away with what she did.’
‘She won’t get away with it forever, Enid,’ said Abigail serenely. ‘There is such a thing as karma.’
‘Possibly,’ said Mrs Moss, looking unconvinced.
‘It might be working already,’ Holly told her. ‘It turned out Eric was eavesdropping. He heard everything she said. He’s furious, and he’s leaving. Today. He and Cleopatra are going to move into his old dad’s garage till he’s fixed something else up, and he’ll buy a tarpaulin for the hearse. Una won’t find life so pleasant all alone in that house, with no one to run her messages for her.’
‘She’ll have her money to comfort her,’ snapped Mrs Moss.
‘Not for quite a while. The police will probably hold on to the things that were buried with Lois for ages. And the house will take a long time to sell, according to Len Land. He’s the real estate agent Una’s using. I met him on the way out.’
She smiled involuntarily, thinking of Len Land’s startled look of recognition, of his hand reaching into the breast pocket of his sagging suit jacket, and the rather worn-looking, yellow-stickered envelope he handed over.
‘This was in the letterbox at Clover Road when I called in there yesterday, Miss Love,’ Land said. ‘Redirected mail for you. I thought I’d have to return it to sender, but here you are! What a coincidence, eh?’
‘It’s a small world,’ Holly had agreed faintly, tearing the envelope open and finding inside, to her great surprise, a note from her cousin Liz.
. . . snail mail because your phone seems to be off, and emails keep bouncing. What do you think about Lloyd and Angie getting engaged? I was so surprised. Hope you’re not upset. Also, I don’t know if you’re still seeing Andrew McNish, but if you are, could you possibly remind him that he owes Leah forty dollars for that sponsorship thing?I know it’s a lot, but he did promise and Leah’s already written to him twice . . .
Forty dollars . . .
‘Well, it’s nice to see you smiling, anyway, dear,’ said Mrs Moss.
‘It’s good to get the loose ends tidied up,’ said Holly. ‘Most of them, anyway.’
‘And you will stay, Holly, won’t you?’ asked Abigail. ‘Till old Droopy Drawers comes for the rent at the end of the month, anyway? Someone’s got to look after the parrot, after all. I feel you two have formed a genuine bond.’
‘I’d love to stay,’ Holly said sincerely. ‘But I really think I‘d better go. Una won’t report me to the police, and Dulcie’s taken Sebastian back to Queensland, but Cliff Allnut isn’t going to let it drop.’
‘Oh, I think he will,’ said Mrs Moss complacently. ‘I had a little word with him. I told him that there’s nothing illegal about using a pseudonym for professional reasons, as long as you diligently perform the service you advertise, and pay your taxes.’
Holly smiled at her. ‘That’s really kind of you, Mrs Moss, but I don’t think . . .’
‘It’s not as if Cliff and I are strangers,’ said Mrs Moss. ‘We’re quite old friends, in a way. I knew it the very first time I heard his voice—probably because he was saying something about chains at the time.’
‘Oh, Enid!’ cried Abigail, clasping her hands. ‘You don’t mean . . .’
‘Certainly,’ said Mrs Moss, beaming. ‘Cliff—every Tuesday night, around ten-thirty, almost without fail. Mind you, I mightn’t be hearing from him again. I think he was quite surprised to find out how old I was. I thought he was going to faint when he heard my voice, the naughty boy. And when I told him my second name was Natasha, after my mother’s sister, he—’
‘Enid, you blackmailed him!’ Abigail shrieked joyfully, and from behind the red-heart door the parrot screeched a maniacal reply, in a sort of Indian love call across the stairwell.
‘Abby, really !’ said Mrs Moss with dignity. ‘I would never put the black on a client. I simply told poor Cliff that Holly was a good friend of mine, and reminded him that we all have our little weaknesses, which it was just as well to keep private, between friends. Especially when we are solicitors, and respectable members of the golf club, with reputations to keep.’
Holly stared at her, open-mouthed.
‘So you can stay, Holly!’ said Abigail.
‘And you mustn’t worry about money,’ Mrs Moss chimed in. ‘On the way back from breakfast we ran into that lovely girl Dimity—who looks so much better now she’s got two eyebrows, by the way, doesn’t she, Abby?’
Abigail nodded. ‘And Dimity told us that her grandmother thinks someone is embezzling the church funds, and she wants to hire me to find out who it is. So of course I told her that wasn’t a job for me. It was a job for a private detective, and it just so happened that I knew the perfect—’
‘Abigail, I’m not a detective,’ Holly protested, laughing.
‘Well, you do a very good imitation of one,’ said Mrs Moss. ‘And you get results. That’s all that counts. After all, I’m not a dominatrix or a busty blonde with a warm, caring nature, but I get by.’
Holly slumped back in her chair. She felt dizzy again.
‘Give us a biscuit!’ the parrot shrieked across the stairwell.
‘O’Brien senses you’re staying,’ said Abigail. ‘He’s overjoyed.’
‘Bless him,’ said Mrs Moss fondly. ‘More tea, anyone?’