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“Is that what Hugh did to you, Vivianne?” Morrie cut in. “He embarrassed you with his goings-on with young women and his frequent missteps when handling his affairs. You were young when he married you, weren’t you? You were a writer. You gave him three novels you’d written to publish, and he made you sign over your rights to them to him. He made his fortune on your books, and you didn’t see a single pound.”
Oh, that’s awful.
I couldn’t imagine someone betraying me like that.
“And what of it?” Scorn dripped from Vivianne’s voice. “So my husband stole my work and make a fortune off it, and he didn’t even have the decency to attempt to hide his multiple indiscretions. That’s ‘the business,’ as dear departed Hughey Boy was so fond of saying.”
“You made no secret of the fact that you hated him,” I said. “I’ve read articles about you attacking him at a book launch. So whydidyou write a novel under a pen name just so he would accept you on the retreat? Why did you tell us all that you had a revenge plan? Could it be that you planned to kill him?”
“That kind of sentimental reasoning may work in one of your books, but this is the real world,” Vivianne smirked. “My revenge was so much more enjoyable than simply killing the man. In fact, the person who killed him has robbed me of the joy of seeing my plan through to fruition, although they’ve possibly also helped me make millions.”
Morrie leaned forward, steepling his fingers on the table. The Napoleon of Crime was intrigued. “I think you’d better explain.”
Vivianne sighed, as though it was hell for her to be surrounded by such simpletons. “The book I submitted to be accepted was a ruse. I knew Hugh would recognize my writing and wouldn’t accept my real work. Would you believe that I had AI software write it for me? It’s amazing what computers will do these days. My real book is the one I read aloud tonight – it’s an autobiography about my years with Hugh, all the rotten business deals he made, every desperate young writer he slept with and lured into his circle with promises of fame and fortune only to set them to work as writers for his real stars.” Vivianne glanced over at Christina. “Sorry, my dear.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Christina said through gritted teeth.
“Of course you don’t. All those nights that Hugh came back to bed drunk as a skunk and told me about the mischief he got up to…I put it all in the book. And I even added some particularly personal details, like how one of his testicles is misshapen from when it got jammed in a printing press, and how he’s got a birthmark on his ass that he likes people to lick. It gets him all excited. Did he make you lick it?”
“No,” Christina said in a voice that clearly implied ‘yes.’
“So I put this book together, and I made it my finest work. It paints those retreats at Meddleworth House in quite a different light than Donna’s starry-eyed history book. We already have a six-figure deal with Red Herring’s biggest competitor. When the book comes out, it would have destroyed Hugh’s reputation. He’d be dragged through the press and I would have enjoyed every single moment of it.” She glared at me. “But then Mina had to go and murder him and ruin my plan.”
“I didn’t murder him!” I cried. “What reason could I possibly have to kill Hugh?”
“Of all of us, you’re the one with the most plausible motive,” Killian jumped on. “Hugh’s been rubbishing your novel all weekend. If he said those things about Christina’s book, I’d want to stab him, too.”
“Is that you making a threat?” I tried to deflect attention back to Killian. “You’re trying to throw attention on me, butyou’rethe one promising violence.”
“And the only actual violence we’ve encountered this weekend was when your boyfriend attacked Hugh!”
“But Heathcliff wasn’t in the room with us.” An idea occurred to me. “But Oscar was. He was lying at my feet, with no gap between my legs and the coffee table. If I murdered Hugh, I’d have to stand up, get over Oscar, move around the table, find Hugh, and manage to stab him in the neck in theexactspot to piece his artery, in the dark, as a blind woman…”
“You led the way to the door,” Donna pointed out.
“Oscarled the way,” I corrected. “I’m used to not needing my eyes to navigate a room, but I didn’t train my guide dog to locate the artery on a man’s neck. To kill someone in that way would require a considerable amount of force, and the blow would have to be precise. Otherwise he wouldn’t die.” I turned to Charlie. “What do your years of experience as a detective say?”
Charlie was probably too stupid to know it, but this was a test. I knew that my guys had inspected the body carefully, and I wanted to make sure they all came to the same conclusions.
“Not necessarily,” Charlie said. “My conclusion is that this was a lucky swing from someone who lashed out in anger, taking advantage of the darkness to get their revenge but not intending to kill Hugh…”
“Ah, but you’re forgetting another detail,” Morrie placed an object on the table. “Hugh Briston’s lucky pen.”
“That’s…the murder weapon? You pulled it out of his neck?”
“I used gloves.” Morrie raised his hands to show the white kitchen gloves he’d found. “And I sealed it in a Ziploc bag. The police will still be able to get DNA and fingerprints from it. It’s the key to this mystery.”
“How so?” Charlie sounded wary.
Morrie leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “I consider myself an expert when it comes to deadly blows. I inspected the wound, and I do not believe Hugh died from blood loss caused by the injury.”
That was news to me.
“At first, I thought Hugh had been killed from the pen being shoved in his carotid artery,” Morrie began. “But as Mina suggested, that’s an incredibly difficult way to kill someone, especially in the dark. It’s usually done by dragging a knife across the throat to sever the artery, but this was done by stabbing the pen, which means that the killer would have to be deadly accurate.”
“That’s right,” I jumped in, remembering a discussion about this very subject with Jo and Morrie at the Rose & Wimple one night. “And the more common way to cut someone’s throat, according to our friend Jo the medical examiner, is from behind. Even in the dark, Hugh would have noticed someone directly in front of him as they would have blocked the light from the fire, and he seemed like the kind of man to say something, but none of us heard a word. So I think it’s safe to assume that the murderer came up behind Hugh. But how would they have known where to stab him? That would require extensive medical training, not to mention sight…”
“Ah, but that’s onlyifHugh was killed by the pen stabbing his carotid artery.” Morrie opened the top of the bag containing the pen. “And I don’t think that’s what happened. There’s simply not enough blood. What there is, is the distinct scent of almonds.”
