Missing Susan

CHAPTER 4

GATWICK

“EXCUSE ME,” SAID Elizabeth MacPherson to the nearest Gatwick airport official. “I just got off a plane. Do I have to go through customs?”

The guard, or whatever he was, paused in mid-dash to consider her question. “Where did you fly in from?” he asked.

“Edinburgh.”

The man gave her a pitying smile. “Then it won’t be necessary, ma’am. Scotland is a part of this country, you see.”

It was on the tip of Elizabeth’s unrepentant Jacobite tongue to snap back, “Well, it oughtn’t to be!” But she realized that airport officials take a dim view of unsanctioned patriots, and that such a reply could lead to an unpleasant half-hour search of herself and her belongings, on the off chance that she was that rarest of political animals: a Scottish terrorist. In any case, the man looked much too harried to be interested in a discussion of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Rebellion of 1745, so she smiled sweetly, hoisted her bags, and hurried away to find the airport lobby.

It would be several hours yet before all of the tour members’ planes arrived, since they had set out from half a dozen different cities. Elizabeth, the only one not flying in from the United States, had arrived just after nine in the morning, which gave her at least four hours to wait for the coach and guide, scheduled to meet the party at two o’clock. The rendezvous point for the murder mystery tour was to be the luggage carousel on the first floor of the airport. Until then, lacking name tags with which to identify each other as fellow travelers, the early-arriving tour members would prowl the airport shops and restaurants, killing time until someone came to collect them.

Elizabeth first looked round all the eating places, marveling at the exorbitant food prices. Although she had been in Scotland for a little over two months, her mind still ran on the U.S. currency system, which, at the current exchange rate, meant doubling the stated price of everything, in order to get an emotional understanding of how much anything cost. Inevitably, the short answer was: too much. She read the McDonald’s sign with an expression of disbelief usually reserved for UFO sightings.

“They’re charging four dollars for a hamburger!” she muttered. “I wouldn’t pay that if they were making them out of last year’s Derby winner.”

Similar responses to menu prices in Edinburgh had caused Cameron to remark that after only eight weeks in residence, she was out-Scottishing the Scots. Elizabeth replied that it was culture shock, and began muttering threats about CARE packages whenever she went out shopping.

“Anyway,” she said, turning her back on the metaphorical golden arches, “the last thing I want to eat in Britain is American food. I’ll go back to the cafeteria and have tea and scones.”

The return trek to the upstairs restaurant took longer than it should have, because the hallway led past Elizabeth’s main weakness: a row of gift shops. Her cousin Geoffrey liked to remark that had Elizabeth been aboard the Titanic, she would have checked the gift shop for a Going Out of Business Sale before proceeding to the lifeboat. She glanced at an enticing window display of Beefeater teddy bears and scenic linen towels. It wouldn’t hurt to browse for a little while, she thought. It’s not as if I’m short of time.

Once inside she went straight to the postcard rack, assuring herself that she was only looking, because it would be stupid to buy postcards in the airport on the first day of a three-week tour. Well, maybe just a couple, to give herself a head start on correspondence. There didn’t seem to be much point in attempting to correspond with Cameron, who would be at sea for five more weeks, annoying the seals of the north Atlantic. “Perhaps you could toss a note in a Guinness bottle into the sea at Land’s End,” he’d suggested, when she brought up the subject of writing. To which she replied that there’d be enough Guinness bottles aboard the research vessel without her contributing to the supply.

With Cameron incommunicado, the list of correspondents dwindled to her parents, her brother Bill, her insufferable cousin Geoffrey, and her new in-laws. She was searching the postcard rack for cards suitably impertinent for Bill and Geoffrey, when a tall young woman beside her picked up a postcard portrait of Princess Diana and said, “Back in the States we have a mystery writer who looks just like her!”

Elizabeth was unable to think of a reply to this gambit, and she wasn’t entirely sure that this total stranger was addressing her. (There is nothing worse than replying to a stranger’s pleasantry, only to discover that the intended recipient of the remark is the person standing directly behind you.)

She smiled vaguely to indicate polite disinterest, then went back to studying the postcards.

“You’re American, aren’t you?” the woman persisted.

Elizabeth, suspecting insult, longed to reply in the negative, but such an accusation is difficult to deny with a Virginia accent. She took a long look at her interrogator. The woman was the personification of Cheerleader: shoulder-length blonde hair, trim figure, and a perky beauty-pageant smile. Just the sort of person that Elizabeth wished the Japanese would hunt, instead of whales. She summoned up a chilling smile. “I’m from Virginia. How did you guess?”

The woman shrugged. “You just look American, I guess. Anyway, you’re wearing a fairystone necklace, and you can only get them in Virginia. They’re a natural crystal formation, right? Only found in the mountains. I know because I traveled the Blue Ridge Parkway with my parents when I was twelve.”

“Good detective work,” said Elizabeth grudgingly, fingering her staurolite necklace. She made a mental note to give fairystones to every British woman she knew next Christmas. (Take that, Sherlock!)

“I guess some of it rubbed off,” came the complacent reply. “I read a lot of murder mysteries.”

Elizabeth stared at her and at last the penny dropped. (Or, at the current exchange rate, two cents did.) “Are you, by any chance, with the murder mystery tour that’s meeting here this afternoon?”

“That’s right!” said the woman, beaming. “My name is Susan Cohen. Are you on it, too?”

Elizabeth nodded slowly. “Elizabeth MacPherson,” she said, withholding her title in a rare gesture of modesty. “Where are you from?”

“Minneapolis,” said Susan eagerly. “Have you ever been there? It’s in the Midwest, but it isn’t at all provincial like the coastal people think it is. It’s the most gorgeous city in the world.”

Elizabeth managed to refrain from asking why Susan had bothered to leave this Shangri-la for a mere excursion to England. “I’m from Virginia originally,” she said, “but I just got married in July, so now I live in Edinburgh. For a while, at least. We’re still negotiating careers.”

Susan looked around. “But your husband didn’t come on the tour?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “He had better fish to fry.” She explained about the oceangoing expedition, and the six-week separation that she decided to fill with a package tour. She looked appraisingly at the youthful Susan. “So I’m not man-hunting or anything on this trip. In fact I was sure that everyone else on this tour was going to be much older than I.”

“I expect they will be,” said Susan Cohen complacently. “After all, we can’t all be heiresses.”

We all are so far, thought Elizabeth, mindful of the receipt of her great-aunt Augusta’s money which came to her upon her marriage. She didn’t think it was a topic you ought to broach with strangers in an airport, though. “I was just going to get some tea,” she said.

“Great!” said Susan, cheerfully abandoning the postcards. “The airline breakfast was lousy. The French toast tasted like they made it with Play-Doh. I’m going to write a letter of complaint to the airline.”

They started off together down the hall, dodging baggage-laden passengers. “It sounds like a very interesting tour, doesn’t it?” said Elizabeth.

“The perfect combination,” Susan agreed. “I just love England, and I love mysteries. My uncle Aaron says that my house will probably collapse under the weight of all the books I have. See, I used to read all the time. I mean all the time. I was an only child, you know, and I didn’t have a lot of friends.” She laughed. “I guess I was kind of an ugly duckling.”

Whereas now you are a nonstop parrot, thought Elizabeth. But, she had to admit, a pretty one. Aloud she said, “You seem to have made a satisfactory transition to swandom.”

“I know. Isn’t it amazing? After Grandpa Benjie died and left me a fortune, one of the girls down at the library where I worked-her name was Claire, and she was the children’s librarian-anyway, Claire said, ‘If I were you, I’d take some of that money and become gorgeous.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, why not?’ Because in Minnesota, even though it’s cold for a lot of the year, we have gyms and health clubs, so there’s really no excuse not to exercise.” She looked appraisingly at Elizabeth. “I suppose you haven’t found any gyms yet in Edinburgh? Anyhow, I’d never bothered before, because I went to an all-girls’ college, and I was so shy and all, that there really didn’t seem to be any point in it. But about a year ago, after Grandpa Benjie left me his money, I could afford to quit my library job…”

By this time they had found the cafeteria, selected their tea and scones, and paid for them, found a table and settled in for elevenses, during the course of which Susan had recited her biography without pausing for breath. Three weeks, Elizabeth kept thinking. Three weeks. “Look at this passport picture,” said Susan triumphantly. “It stops them cold in customs.”

Dutifully, Elizabeth accepted the blue passport booklet, and turned to look at Susan’s photograph. “This is you?” she blurted out. Sure enough, the identification page said Susan Cohen, 420 North Fifth Street, Minneapolis, but the face that looked back from the passport was a round-faced woman with short mouse-brown hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses balanced on a Roman nose. Her protruding front teeth made her look like an intellectual beaver. Elizabeth could see why the photo gave the immigration people pause. The Susan Cohen who sat across the table from her wolfing down a scone bore little resemblance to the dumpling girl in the passport. “That’s quite a change,” she murmured, handing it back.

“I know. Isn’t money wonderful? I went to a dear old plastic surgeon in Long Beach. My doctor recommended him. He’s a friend of the family. I’ve always called him Uncle Bob, and he told me to go to this friend of his up the coast. Anyhow, I went to see him for a consultation. He took this computer thingamabob and scanned in a picture of me, and then he adjusted the machine to show me various changes that we could make. Noses, jawline, everything! Do you like this nose? It’s Katharine Hepburn’s. After that, I had my teeth fixed, and I went to one of those fat farms, and got a wardrobe consultant, and now I’m perfect.”

“How amusing for you,” said Elizabeth, who had heard that the Queen said that to people who were being completely obnoxious.

The sarcasm was lost on her table partner. “I suppose so,” said Susan. “If you can afford it, you ought to give it a try. I think they all did a nice job on me, but I’m not sure what to do next. It’s not like I want to be an actress or anything. And I don’t need a job. I mean, sometimes I say to myself: what’s the point? But you know what? People are nicer to you if you’re pretty. Isn’t that weird? It seems so unfair, doesn’t it?”

Elizabeth managed to get a nod in edgewise.

“Actually, I haven’t exactly turned into a party girl. I guess I was too old to learn to like it. What’s the point of talking to a bunch of boring strangers while you overeat? So I do my exercises and read my books and stay at home with my cats-there’s Dickens and Waldo and Wilkie and Trollope. Trollope is female, get it? I had her fixed, though. And as I said, I read a lot. I think people are much nicer in books than they are in person, don’t you?”

At least, thought Elizabeth, they are easier to shut up. Aloud she said, “Actually, in the books I usually read, the people are nowhere near as nice as those I meet in real life. I like true crime.”

Susan appeared less than thrilled by this revelation. “True crime? That’s pretty ghoulish. Sort of perverted, I mean. How did you get interested in that?”

“I am a forensic anthropologist,” Elizabeth reminded her in icy tones, “but actually, it all began a few years ago on an archaeological dig in Scotland. One of the other diggers was a crime buff and he sparked my interest.” She neglected to mention what fate befell this crime buff. Besides, the truth was that Elizabeth’s fervors were short-lived, lasting for approximately six months each. Having gone through her Brontë phase, her sea lion fixation, and her most recent (and to her loved ones particularly trying) royal flush, she was now occupying her intellect with murder most foul, until the next idée fixe happened along.

“In fact, I brought along a true crime book today. I kept it with me in case I had time to read.” She reached into her purse and brought out a copy of Death Takes A Holiday: A Murder Guide to Britain by Rowan Rover. “It covers old murder cases in just the areas we will visit on this tour.”

“Do you think the guide will take us to those?” asked Susan. “I hope not. I wanted to see things of real cultural importance, like Agatha Christie’s home, and the cathedral of Brother Cadfael, and-”

“But those aren’t real crimes!” Elizabeth protested.

“But they were set in real places,” said Susan with unshakable logic. “And they’re much more famous. Besides, those PBS Mystery! adaptations are always filmed on location. Wouldn’t it be great to visit a movie set?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I want to see the roof where Charles Bravo threw up the poison his wife gave him. And I thought that as long as I was here early, I’d use this book to find some other places of interest to the group-just in case the guide isn’t familiar with this text.”

“Lucky for you that I turned up, isn’t it?” said Susan. “Imagine being stuck here all day with that nasty reference book. I find it impossible to read in airports with all the noise and confusion.”

Elizabeth managed a feeble smile. “Lucky me,” she said.

Elsewhere in the airport Alice MacKenzie, her finger inserted in a cup of ice water, was debarking from a flight that had seemed to last six months. Under these circumstances, she bore a newfound indifference to the charms of Britain.

Alice was a gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties with a penchant for pantsuits and sensible shoes, and she was not the least bit embarrassed to enter Great Britain wearing a Dixie cup on her forefinger. It would be silly to value appearances more than comfort, in her oft-stated opinion.

Alice had boarded the plane many time zones earlier in southern California, full of excitement about the upcoming murder mystery tour of England. A retired teacher from San Diego, she was a mystery buff who combined a keen love of travel with an interest in the island origins of her MacKenzie ancestors. When she read about the tour in a local newspaper, it seemed the perfect combination of both her passions.

“Go,” said her second husband Richard, who was not retired. “I have enough work at the office for two people. Besides, as long as the sports channel doesn’t go on the fritz and the pizzeria doesn’t stop delivering, I can manage.”

So Alice had boarded the plane with last minute instructions about the houseplants and the cat, and promises to call each weekend to check on him and give him tour updates. Once the plane began to taxi down the runway, Alice relegated the cat, the houseplants, and Richard to a mental broom closet. She settled back happily with her guidebook to anticipate the coming adventure. She was going to keep a journal of the trip, so that she could relive it privately in the months to come. Perhaps she would write it up for her book club. She pictured herself guest speaker at one of the winter meetings, regaling her friends with details of her sojourn in England.

Several cramped, monotonous hours later, Alice was beginning to feel like the modern equivalent of a wagon train pioneer. At least the forty-niners got more to eat than salted peanuts and Diet Coke. And they didn’t have to sit next to a snoring businessman for three thousand miles.

As the plane droned on toward Chicago over dark empty prairies, she found herself wondering if it would have been faster to get to England from the other direction. She supposed not. The Pacific was rather large, not to mention China and Russia. Still, it did seem to take forever to inch across North America and finally into the sky above the vast blackness of the Atlantic.

To make matters worse, just about the time she could have gone to sleep from sheer exhaustion, she managed to burn herself on that stupid light fixture above her seat, causing her to spend most of the Atlantic stretch of the journey in absolute agony. She was trying to turn off the light so that she could sleep, she explained tearfully to the flight attendant. On other airlines (better airlines, her tone suggested) the switch was beside the bulb. In this plane, it was on the arm-rest, but how was she to know that? In groping for it, she had put her forefinger directly on the white-hot bulb, sending a wave of unbelievable pain through her body. It seemed hours before a flight attendant strolled by to answer her call button. She asked for ice for her finger, which was by now beginning to blister. The stewardess brought it with all the casualness of someone indulging an irrational whim. Alice, mindful of her dependence on this creature’s goodwill for more ice, managed to thank her politely.

Ice, she discovered, made it possible for her to stand the pain without weeping, but she was still unable to sleep. She stared at the meager cup encasing her enflamed forefinger and watched the ice melt and turn tepid, sending stabs of pain through her injured flesh.

The necessity of staving off the pain forced her to make quite a nuisance of herself with the cabin crew for the remainder of the flight, ringing them whenever her balm melted, and in one instance, when no one answered her summons, venturing for ice herself, much to the dismay of the stewardesses, who were lounging around gossiping in the galley.

Alice remained civil to these slackers, but she was firm in her request for assistance in her medical dilemma. That’s what they were paid for, wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t they help a stricken passenger?

She supposed that they were delighted to see her go when the plane finally touched down at Gatwick. For once she didn’t fret about the plane crashing on the runway. Now, however, she was having considerable misgivings about her ability to enjoy the tour. She exited the plane with her finger thrust into a cup of rapidly melting ice, wondering what would become of her next. An airport attendant told her that Gatwick had a first-aid station-not that anything could be done for minor burns, he added. His directions on how to get there were so endless and complicated that Alice resolved to look for a restaurant instead. Surely someone would sell her some ice.

But first she had to get through customs. Before the plane landed, the flight attendant had recited some carefully memorized instructions on how to proceed. It boiled down to: get your luggage, stand in the appropriate line.

Alice wondered how she was going to carry two suitcases with her finger in a paper cup. She managed to find the metal shopping carts, and was debating the best way to steer one with a hand and a foot, when a slender auburn-haired woman of about her own age approached her. “You look like you could use some help,” she said in familiar California English.

Alice heaved a sigh of relief. “I sure could,” she said. “I burned my finger on the airplane reading lamp! Did you just get here, too? Were you on Flight 304?”

The woman picked up Alice’s suitcases and set them on the cart. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Frances Coles, from La Mesa. I’m taking a mystery tour of southern England.”

After they had expressed delight and astonishment that they were both on the same tour, Alice reflected that it was not such a remarkable coincidence after all, since they were both from southern California. The travel agency had quite naturally booked them on the same flight, albeit twenty rows apart. But she was nonetheless delighted to find an ally so soon.

“I’ll hold your passport for you,” said Frances, as they waited in the nonresidents’ line for customs.

“Thanks,” said Alice. “I hope we get through fast.” She indicated her paper cup. “My ice is melting.”

“That would be a great way to smuggle diamonds into the country,” Frances remarked. “Burn your finger and hide the diamonds in the ice.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Alice said. “After this experience, I wouldn’t burn my finger on purpose for all the diamonds in South Africa.”

The customs official was cheerful, but brisk, and apparently unthreatened by a couple of middle-aged women with well-worn suitcases, one of whom had a finger immersed in a cup of ice. He was an expert on American eccentricities. He wished the ladies a pleasant stay in England and waved them through.

Frances Coles glanced at her watch. “We still have four hours before the tour assembles. How is your finger feeling now?”

Alice took a deep breath and eased her finger out of the puddle of ice. She shut her eyes, waiting for the stab of pain. Instead there was only a mild twinge of discomfort. “It’s better,” she admitted.

“Good. I think you should switch from ice to something else now. Aloe, if we can find any. Do you suppose there’s a drugstore in the airport?”

“Bound to be,” said Alice. “I suppose we’d better change some money first.”

Together they trundled off down the halls of Gatwick. The adventure had begun.

At two-fifteen that afternoon a small group of travelers began to assemble in the ground-floor lobby of the airport: a married couple, an English-looking mother and daughter in tweeds and sensible shoes, a pretty young nurse, a Canadian doctor’s wife, a silver-haired lady from Berkeley, Frances Coles, and her new friend Alice MacKenzie, whose burned finger was now shiny with aloe ointment.

Elizabeth MacPherson was the last to arrive, followed by the beautiful Susan Cohen, who had reached chapter thirty-one in the oral history of her life. “And then I got my second cat, Wilkie. He’s the tortoiseshell one with the yellow eyes. I have a picture of him somewhere-”

“Oh look!” cried Elizabeth, more with relief than surprise. “This must be the rest of the tour!” She wondered hopefully if any of them were hard of hearing. “Mystery tour?” she asked, striding toward the group.

Several of the travelers nodded.

Elizabeth and Susan added their suitcases to the pile of luggage in the circle.

“Is the guide here yet?” Elizabeth inquired.

“Not yet,” said the tall silver-haired woman consulting her watch. “Oh dear,” she said. “It’s still on Berkeley time.”

The rest of the tour members offered her local times ranging from two-twenty to two-forty. Elizabeth noticed that there was only one man in the group, a tanned and genial-looking gentleman with peppery hair. He wore a T-shirt that proclaimed ERIK BROADAXE RULES PRETTY GOOD. From this evidence, Elizabeth deduced that he was an American; that he had been to the Jorvik, the Norse exhibit at York (whence the T-shirt); and that he had a good sense of humor, always a pleasant discovery in a fellow traveler. His wife, who was half a head shorter than he, was blonde and smiling, and looked equally good-tempered.

“Is everybody here from California?” asked Mrs. Broadaxe (as Elizabeth had begun to characterize her).

“San Diego,” said the pretty, dark-eyed nurse.

“So am I!” said Alice MacKenzie. “And Frances is from La Mesa, which amounts to the same thing.”

“We’re from Colorado,” said the lady in tweeds. Her daughter nodded and smiled.

“Vancouver.”

“Berkeley,” said the silver-haired woman, eldest of the party.

“I’m from Minneapolis,” said Susan, “and our airport, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International, is much more-”

“Edinburgh,” said Elizabeth MacPherson-and instantly regretted it. She then had to admit that she was, in fact, an American; she started to explain how she came to be living in Scotland and why her new husband hadn’t come along.

She was still relating all this when a man in a beige leisure suit approached the group, carrying a canvas shoulder bag and a sheaf of typed papers. “Tour?” he said briskly. “South of England mystery tour? I am your guide.”

There was a moment of silence while the assembly took in the sight of their guide. He was a desperately stately five feet, eight inches, with longish blue-black hair that conjured up images of shoe polish in the minds of the beholders. Such a hue did, of course, exist in nature. Innumerable species of crows possessed it without resorting to artifice, and, among homo sapiens, certain bands of Comanches may in their youth rejoice in a similarly stygian shade; but in an aging Englishman whose face sported the crow’s-feet to accompany the crow’s color, the shade suggested hairstyling of a suicidal nature: dyed by his own hand and with a reckless disregard for plausibility. His eyes behind dark-framed glasses were similarly dark, and his expression radiated a confidence and self-esteem that belied his unevenly cut, safety-pinned trousers.

“My name is Rowan Rover,” said the personage.

With an exclamation of surprise Elizabeth held aloft her copy of Death Takes a Holiday. “Yes, I’ll sign it for you later,” said Rowan Rover soothingly. “Now, I’ll just read out the names on my list to make sure that we are all here. Elizabeth MacPherson?”

“Here,” mumbled Elizabeth, chagrined at having been mistaken for a groupie. She wondered if she could arrange for him to sit with Susan on the bus trip to Winchester.

“It may take me a while to learn your names. Ah, only one gentleman, I see. That should be easy.” He beamed at Erik Broadaxe. “Charles Warren, I presume?”

“That’s right, and this is my wife Nancy.”

“Martha Tabram?” The well-dressed woman from Vancouver raised her hand.

“Frances Coles? Alice MacKenzie? Ah, there you are together. Very convenient. Both from California, aren’t you? How lovely. And two Colorado ladies, where are they? Miriam Angel and Emma Smith?”

“We’re mother and daughter,” said Miriam Angel.

“Splendid. No one’s mistaken you for the Judds, have they, dear?” Rowan said under his breath. He had become conversant in country music during the period he referred to as his exile in the academic gulag, by which he meant the state of Wisconsin. “Any more Californians? Kate Conway?”

The pretty young nurse in the red sweater raised her hand.

“And one more-Maud Marsh.” He nodded toward the silver-haired lady from Berkeley. “That’s it, I think.”

“Excuse me. You forgot me.”

Rowan Rover looked up from his list. “Did I? I thought I had read out all the names. You are…”

“Susan Cohen. From Minneapolis.”

Rowan Rover’s smile faded as he stared at the belligerent-looking blonde. He made a show of consulting his list again. “Susan Cohen. It’s here, of course. It’s just that I thought I’d already said it. No, I wouldn’t forget you.”

After a moment’s silence, during which the color grudgingly returned to Rowan Rover’s face, the members of the group picked up their belongings and surged at him with questions.

He held up a hand to forestall the onslaught. “I am told that the tour coach will be waiting for us in the loading zone just outside. Our driver should be there now unless he has been delayed in the interminable traffic that one inevitably encounters on the motorway. I don’t know who thought up the road system out here, but he evidently came from a family not known for precognition, because he certainly didn’t foresee-”

Alice MacKenzie interrupted his tirade. “Do you want us to go outside now?”

“Yes,” said Rowan. “Let us be optimistic.”

“And will there be a sign on the side of the bus that says MURDER TOUR?”

Rowan Rover sighed. “No, madam. Definitely not. We don’t want to be mistaken for the IRA.” He ended further discussion by turning and marching for the glass doors of the exit, while the tour members scrambled behind him, balancing suitcases and handbags as they ran.

Once assembled on the sidewalk outside, Rowan Rover turned and faced his charges. “Ladies,” he intoned, “and Charles.” He nodded toward the lone gentleman in the party. “If you will all stay here, I will attempt to locate the coach.”

With a reassuring wave, Rowan Rover hurried away. Once out of sight of the party, he took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling hands. Susan Cohen. There she was: undeniably real and unavoidably doomed. He had three weeks in which to kill her. Somehow, despite the arrival of a fiscally sound ten-thousand-pound check, the murder scheme had never seemed more than an idle exercise in theory. Until now. Rowan Rover had spent the past few years making a living out of idle murder theories, and this one had seemed little different from the others. “Suppose Florence Maybrick knew that her husband was an arsenic eater,” he would say in one of his crime lectures. “It would be very easy then for her to purchase some arsenic, or even to steal some of his own private stock…” It was great fun to speculate. But he, Rowan Rover, had never had to buy any arsenic. Or to watch the death throes of the subsequent victim. Now, suddenly, he had to move from the theoretical to the practical-and to accomplish the task before ten potential witnesses, all of them avowed crime buffs. Was he mad?

He looked up to find that a large tour coach had pulled up alongside him. “Mr. Rover?” the driver inquired in a working-class twang. “Mystery tour?”

Rowan took a long drag on his cigarette. “Right,” he wheezed. “They’re just around the corner.”

“Climb aboard, then, and we’ll go and get them.”

Rowan Rover hesitated. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Not me, mate. But if you’re ferrying about a load of American ladies, there’s sure to be objections. Regular health nuts, some of them.” He was young and blond and he looked as if he should be running across a rugby field rather than driving a bus. He smiled again as Rowan Rover mounted the steps to the coach. “My name’s Bernard,” he said. “I’m from Kensington.”

“And you know where you’re going, I take it?”

“Complete instructions,” said Bernard. “Not as if it ever changes, though. All the tourists want to go to the same dreary places.”

Rowan Rover smirked. “I think this lot may surprise you.”