4 Beyond Belief Read online

  “She was hit on the back of the head,” Dr. Muriel said. “That’s why she fell. She didn’t faint. She feels dizzy because she got a bump on the head, not the other way round.”

  “Does it feel as though you were hit?” Chris asked Emily. He stood up and walked round to the back of her chair.

  “Honestly? I’ve never been hit on the back of the head before so I can’t say. I’ve never been hit anywhere, ever, not even play fighting when I was a child. It felt like I fainted. I lost consciousness.”

  “I’m not surprised. You got hit quite hard.” Chris touched the back of her head very gently, which felt wrong for all sorts of reasons. Emily shivered.

  “Why would someone lure me down to the swimming pool and hit me over the head? To frighten me off? Off what? I have no idea what’s going on. I lost my notebook as well last night.”

  “I wonder if the two things are connected,” said Dr. Muriel. “Peg was talking you up last night, saying how important that notebook was. To anyone listening—to anyone intending to do harm—it could seem that it was full of clues to their identity.”

  “But no one’s been harmed,” said Gerald.

  “Haven’t they? What about Trina?”

  “Suicide, surely. Look, Muriel, don’t go putting these ideas about. You’ll frighten the delegates.”

  Dr. Muriel ignored him and addressed Emily. “What if the intention wasn’t to frighten you but to drown you because of what you knew? You said Bobby and his dachshunds found you. They must have disturbed your attacker before he or she could dump you in the water.”

  “Well, if I was a target because of my notebook, then what about Peg? She was the one who…”

  No need to finish that thought. Emily and Dr. Muriel stood up from the table. Dr. Muriel unhooked her silver-topped walking stick from the back of her chair and held it in front of her like a staff.

  Gerald got out his phone.

  “Gerald, really! This is no time for Twitter,” Dr. Muriel told him.

  But he wasn’t on Twitter. He was calling Peg. He put the phone to his ear when the call connected. But he shook his head to let them know it had gone to voicemail. “Are you going to her room? I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “I’ll go,” said Chris.

  “No,” said Emily. “Gerald might be right. Perhaps she’s just having a lie-in. We’ll come and fetch you if we need your help.”

  First they went to the reception desk to ask Mandy Miller to call Peg’s room. When there was no answer, Mandy got a master key and took them up there.

  The generous-sized bedroom was empty. The double bed was neatly made, as though it hadn’t been slept in. There was a suitcase on the floor, with a handbag on top of it and a pair of shoes beside it. A paisley scarf was draped on an armchair. So far as Emily could tell, the room had been occupied but the occupant had vanished. There was no sign of a struggle.

  Emily looked at Dr. Muriel and Mandy, then she walked the few paces to the adjoining bathroom and pushed the door open, keeping her body as far back from the doorway as possible, as if something—or someone—might jump out at them.

  As the door swung inwards, they stepped back, frightened, though there was no one in there who could hurt them. Peg was lying in a bath full of water, fully clothed, staring straight at them. She was dead.

  While Mandy went into the bedroom to call the police and the hotel manager, Emily tried to take in as much information as possible before the place was sealed off as a crime scene.

  “A heart attack?” asked Dr. Muriel.

  “It looks like she’s been strangled. Look at the burst blood vessels in her eyes.”

  Emily and Dr. Muriel leaned in and inspected the body with their hands behind their backs, like well-behaved children in a museum, so as not to disturb the evidence.

  “No scratches or bruises. You see that red line round her neck, though, Emily?”

  “Someone came right up to her and choked her with something—and she let them do it without putting up a fight.”

  “A ghost?” Mandy had edged back into the bathroom, half turned away so she didn’t have to look at Peg’s body. “A supernatural being? Or…someone takes control of her mind and she lets them do whatever they want with her?”

  Dr. Muriel smiled politely. “Interesting. But I’m not convinced by that theory. Emily?”

  “The bath was filled after Peg got in it.”

  Dr. Muriel and Mandy were impressed by this. “How do you know?”

  “She may not have put up a fight as her killer came toward her, but her limbs would have jerked and she’d have struggled as she died, wouldn’t she? But there’s no water splashed on the floor.”

  Dr. Muriel shook her head sadly. “What does it mean, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see what she was choked with, can you? Could be a belt or a pair of tights or anything.”

  They looked on the floor of the bathroom but there was no obvious murder weapon. That was it; their last chance to look and try to determine what had happened, because the hotel manager arrived to shoo them out and lock the door, ready for the police to come.

  They went back to the restaurant to tell Gerald and the others what had happened.

  Gerald loosened his tie. He picked up his napkin and fanned his face with it. He had gone a horrible gray color.

  “Put your head between your knees,” suggested Dr. Muriel.

  “I’m OK. I just can’t believe Peg’s gone.” Gerald’s hands trembled. “You’re sure it couldn’t have been accidental? A heart attack?”

  “No,” said Emily. “It looked as though she’d been strangled. I’m not sure how. There was no sign of a cord or anything nearby. We looked. Whoever did it must have taken it with them when they left the room.”

  “Well, then surely they’d have been noticed, walking around the hotel with a noose.” Gerald was babbling. It was the shock setting in.

  “They wouldn’t have to be carrying something that looked like a noose. It could be…” Emily looked around the room for inspiration. There was Bobby Blue Suit with his dachshunds. He smiled at her and waved. “It could be something innocuous, like a dog’s lead.”

  Dr. Muriel eyed the elegant gray-, green-and blue-striped tie that Gerald had just loosened. “When one looks, one begins to see all sorts of possible murder weapons.”

  “Are you going to cancel the conference?” asked Edmund.

  “There are so many people here,” said Gerald. “How can I? What would I say to them?”

  Edmund wasn’t impressed. “You could say that two women have died, and that’s more important than your conference. Tell everyone to go home, Gerald.”

  Emily stuck up for Gerald. “There’s no point doing that. The police will tell everyone to stay here while they make their enquiries, anyway.” Somewhat illogically, she was annoyed with Edmund for being alive—she must have been in shock, too. “Two women have died, yet you were the one who was supposed to drown, according to Peg’s premonition—or she thought it was you, anyway. Something’s…I don’t know. There are plenty of clues but I can’t make sense of any of them.”

  “Clues?” Edmund smirked.

  “Emily,” said Gerald kindly, “it’s not your fault that Trina and Peg have died. You weren’t supposed to be here to prevent Edmund’s death—or theirs, for that matter. You only have to make a report. Just write up Peg’s prediction and its outcome.”

  The Colonel and Hilary came to join them. Ordinarily, they could have expected special treatment—after all, Trina had died the night before. But, with their competing grief for Peg, everyone at Emily’s table greeted them rather numbly.

  “I need to get out,” said the Colonel when he heard about Peg. “I need to do something. I need to wash away this evil. I need to go down to the water’s edge and find someone who will accept God’s blessing.”

  “Do you have that cheque for me, Edmund?” Hilary asked him.

  “Hilary!” said the Colonel. Hilary’s face sh
ut down, wiping the expression from itself like an Etch A Sketch.

  But Edmund laughed and took his chequebook from the back pocket of his jeans. “April the first?” he said, as he wrote the date on it.

  Hilary nodded and put out her hand for it.

  “I’m tempted to say, ‘I’ll see you in hell first.’ But I don’t believe in it.”

  “I do,” said Hilary as she tucked the cheque into her purse.

  “Come on,” said Dr. Muriel to Emily. “We’ve got a little time before the conference starts. Let’s go into one of the meeting rooms and use one of the whiteboards to get our clues unmuddled.” She shot a quick look at Edmund, to see if he was going to challenge her about her use of the word clues. He was too distracted by Hilary. “We’ll throw out thoughts at random, write the most interesting ones up on a board on the wall. Standard procedure when I’m trying to brainstorm a theory with my students. Soon we’ll have something useful to work with, you’ll see. It’s our best chance until you recover your notebook.”

  So Emily and Dr. Muriel went to the Winston Churchill room. Chairs had been laid out ready for the conference that morning, with overhead projectors, whiteboards and flip charts set up in the room. A fresh pack of chunky red, blue, black and green marker pens had been supplied with each flip chart. A thick black pen and an eraser had been set out with each whiteboard. Everything was neat and orderly as it should be. But this left the question of who had drawn the obscene picture of a man’s private parts on the whiteboard.

  Dr. Muriel attempted to wipe it off, but unfortunately the artist had used one of the permanent markers supplied with the flip charts, rather than the wipeable whiteboard pens. The picture would have to remain there until the offices of the local supplier of conference equipment reopened after the Easter weekend and some special solvent was brought from Exeter.

  “Never mind, we’ll use this,” said Dr. Muriel, flipping back the cover of a flip chart pad with a flourish and taking up a pen. “Now, what are your thoughts about the drownings?”

  But Emily wasn’t able to articulate her thoughts. She was distracted by the picture on the whiteboard.

  With the sigh of a woman who has done this many times before in one classroom or another over the years, Dr. Muriel turned to the whiteboard, pen in hand, and prepared to transform the picture into something less distracting. She began to add a few artistic flourishes of her own. But just then a porter shouldered open the door, a jug of water in each hand. He took one look at the obscenity that confronted him and deduced, not unreasonably, that Dr. Muriel was responsible for it. He shot a jaded, seen-it-all-because-I-work-in-a-hotel look at Emily and backed quietly out of the room.

  Job done, Dr. Muriel returned to the flip chart. Behind her, the whiteboard now depicted a space rocket—with “#BeliefandBeyond” written up the side—propelled from a launchpad toward the stars by two great balls of fire.

  “Now, what are your thoughts about the drownings, Emily?”

  “It all seems to have begun with Madame Nova. No…it seems to have begun with the posters. Edmund Zenon walking on water. As soon as she saw those, Madame Nova started emailing Peg and their network psychics, and I’m pretty sure she called Gerald, too, though she denies it.”

  “But was she threatening them or warning them?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll tell you something else interesting. She and Hilary are connected somehow. Hilary called her ‘Vivienne’ like they were old friends.”

  “What is Hilary up to with that postdated cheque? She can’t seriously believe she’ll get Edmund to walk into the water? It would help our case enormously if one could say that as soon as Madame Nova saw that poster, she knew her old friend Hilary would be down here making a wager with Edmund that she could get him to walk into the water, and she wanted to warn him off in case he drowned.”

  “Wouldn’t it! Except he hasn’t drowned. And what about Peg and Trina? Who strangled Peg? It would have to be someone strong.” Emily thought of Madame Nova twisting the metal top off a new tomato ketchup bottle without first running it under hot water and then bashing it with a knife.

  “Not that strong, if they’d drugged their victim first. You were in the bathroom when Peg and Hilary pulled Trina out of the water, but I stayed in the bedroom. Yes? Well, there was an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the bedside table. A classic suicide, you may say. But there was no note. Just the empty bottle with the label turned out. It seemed staged to me.”

  “So that’s why you were asking about sleeping pills last night.”

  “You noticed! I wondered if someone had slipped them to her; if Trina could have taken them unknowingly. Or if someone had talked her into taking them—young women can be very fragile, emotionally. Poor Trina would have been susceptible if someone had tried to destroy what was left of her self-esteem. But most of the women had a supply of tablets, so that didn’t get me anywhere.” Dr. Muriel turned to her flip chart, pen in hand. She hadn’t yet written anything on there. “We could do a timeline to find out who had the opportunity to get to Trina and feed pills to her or persuade her to take them.”

  “I’m not sure there’s any point doing a timeline—nearly everyone left the bar at some point last night after Trina had gone upstairs. And that doesn’t help us find out what happened to Peg. Anyone staying at the hotel could have gone to her room last night while everyone else was asleep. And Madame Nova conveniently fell down the steps, so she had to stay at the hotel. I still think all this is something to do with Madame Nova.”

  “Did she fall? Or was she pushed? Hmm? Hilary gave her a good shove while she was ‘rescuing’ her from Edmund and Chris—did you notice?”

  “You’re right. But why? Was she trying to keep her away from the hotel, or find an excuse for her to stay here? You think they could be in this together?”

  “Well, let’s not close down our list of suspects too soon. Did you see anyone wandering about while you were looking for your notebook in the early hours of the morning? Preferably, as Gerald put it, someone wandering around with a noose.”

  “Only the night porter. And Bobby Blue Suit.”

  “Bobby and Madame Nova working together?” asked Dr. Muriel. “What do you think?”

  “If Hilary and Madame Nova were working together, that would make more sense.”

  “What about Hilary and the Colonel? He’s certainly very keen on submerging people in water.”

  Emily’s hand went to the bump on the back of her head. Could the Colonel be the monster who had sent one woman—perhaps two—to her grave? Could he have strangled Peg and filled her bath? Could he have drowned Trina in her bubbles? Could he have been about to do the same to her in the pool when Bobby Blue Suit and his dogs interrupted him?

  “He seems to be in a hurry to get to Africa,” said Dr. Muriel. “Did you hear him tell Hilary it was no place for a woman?”

  “When he said it’s no place for a woman, I think he meant it’s no place for Hilary.”

  Dr. Muriel laughed. “Perhaps you’re right. What about Joseph Seppardi? I’m not sure what to make of him. It seems Sarah’s signed him up for the paranormal challenge, but he doesn’t want to do it. Yet when he ‘made contact’ with Liam, it seems the boy wanted them to come here. If he doesn’t want to do Edmund’s challenge, he must have some other reason for being in Torquay.”

  “Unless he’s for real.”

  “Joseph Seppardi?” Dr. Muriel laughed at that, too. “Look, I need to get to the Ballroom in a minute. But here’s a question for you: If Edmund was supposed to die when he did his walking-on-water trick, then why didn’t he?”

  “Apart from the influence of Peg’s positivity circle, you mean?” Emily couldn’t quite laugh at that, with Peg so recently dead. She and Dr. Muriel exchanged a rueful smile. “Well, Chris stepped in at short notice because Edmund’s technical manager was called away to Brazil—Edmund said he couldn’t have done the trick without him. So maybe someone was planning to sabotage it, but Chris prevented it
from happening.”

  “Chris as a one-man version of Peg’s positivity circle? That’s a very nice idea. He’s a dear boy. I like him ever so much, don’t you?” Dr. Muriel beamed. “Well, I’m so glad we’ve done this. It’s been very useful, don’t you think?”

  But all she had written on the flip chart was: Why?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  HE’S NOT WORTH IT

  At the hotel reception, Emily told Mandy Miller she was thinking of booking a ticket to Rio de Janeiro.

  “You want Fly Me to the Moon just off the High Street,” Mandy told her. “Ask for Dawn, she’ll give you a discount.” She held up a notebook. “Is this yours? Cleaners handed it in this morning.”

  “Thank you!” Emily was relieved and only slightly offended that whoever had stolen it—if it had been stolen—hadn’t seen anything important enough in it to destroy it or do a better job of hiding it. “I got a call in the middle of the night to say it was in the Lost Property Office. But when I went down to the basement, it wasn’t there.”

  Mandy’s eyes widened. “You heard a voice in the night that told you to go down to the basement?”

  Emily laughed. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “However did you find the Lost Property Office anyway?”

  “The night porter showed me.”

  Mandy stared at her blankly.

  Emily wondered if she was using incorrect terminology. “The guy on Reception last night, wearing the hotel livery. He showed me where it was.”

  “A night porter? In a uniform? We haven’t had one of those since the Second World War!”

  Now it was Emily’s turn to stare. Had she seen a ghost? But hadn’t the same night porter been on duty when she’d come back to the hotel with everyone else? Emily looked back through the memories she had created last night, trying to remember.

  “Nah! Just kidding about the night porter. That’ll be Len, probably. Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. I do love a good ghost story. Used to work in a place with a headless knight in armor that walked around clanking. Never saw it personally but them who did said it’s not as scary as it sounds once you get used to it.”