The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

THE NEXT BIG THING by Peter T. Garratt

Peter Garratt (b.1949) is a clinical psychologist who has written scores of stories of fantasy and science fiction since his first sale “If the Driver Vanishes… ” (1985). His mystery stories have also appeared in my anthologies Shakespearean Whodunnits and Shakespearean Detectives.

“This Morrigan May’s husband is here! I think you’d better see him.” Monique said. She’s the de facto head of our partnership, often said to be the best Clinical Psychologist in the UK, not just the best paid. She’s as good a boss as I’m ever likely to get, but does have a thing about bad publicity. It was Friday, the week’s paperwork was heaped up, and a cancellation had offered a mirage of a chance to shut myself in my office and clear it. But an angry widower arriving with news of a dead client, a possible suicide, couldn’t be kept out by a plastic “Engaged” sign.

Still, I sat hesitated, making sure I remembered all I could. Megan May… Morrigan was her writing name… hadn’t come to see me to talk about suicidal feelings. She’d digressed a lot onto aspects of her unusual career, but didn’t make it sound suicidally bad, and I hadn’t bothered with a full history. I feared my notes had been scrappy, and hoped profoundly that she hadn’t hidden some dark pocket of depression which her husband would know about and expect me to have uncovered and in some way dealt with.

Monique led the way to her consulting room. She likes our suite to look respectable but glamorous, her own image. The carpets are blue and the walls white, with pictures of Phraxos and other Greek islands, including one of Monique, dark-haired and tanned, leading a group at the Phraxos Personal Growth Centre.

I flicked my hair and straightened my tie, then realized that wasn’t necessary. The man in Monique’s room was about thirty-five, with long brown hair in a pony-tail, a short beard like stubble gone just beyond designer, and a battered leather jacket over a black T-shirt with part of a lurid red pattern just visible. Monique said: “Mr May, this is Owen GlenMorgan. He did see your late wife once, but only once.”

I extended my hand and said: “I was very sorry to hear about your wife.” I was trying to sound sympathetic, but as in our one meeting Morrigan May had said nothing suggestive of suicide, I felt as much puzzled and alarmed.

“Edwin May. In theory we were separated but…”

“It was a bolt from the blue?” Monique enquired solicitously.

“I knew those bastards at BattleSpear were putting her under a lot of pressure, but… I wouldn’t even put it past them to… no, mustn’t get paranoid!”

As I was trying to remember who the bastards at BattleSpear were, he blinked back tears, reached into a black shoulderbag marked “WORLD SCIENCE FANTASY CONVENTION -BRIGHTON”, and pulled out a book. “This was her.”

It was a hardback called The Merlinus with a battered dust-jacket. The front showed a boy in Druid garb beside a ruin. He was surrounded by warriors and was trying to face down their leader. Edwin May fumbled out the back flap. It had a full-colour picture of Morrigan. I remembered her more clearly now. Like me, she was Welsh but marooned long-term in London. She had a very distinctive hairstyle, bobbed and dyed red near the roots, then a wide blonde band, with the tips a luminous green, so her head resembled a traffic light switched to “Go”. She wore a little black leatherette top and a lot of silver jewellery. I remembered that in our one interview she had touched on her appearance and its relationship to her career: “I’ve been the Next Big Thing in British SF for ten years now. That’s rather a long time to be next. Image helps. If I look like a mixture of punk, pagan and technogoth I sell a few extra copies. I get far enough past the break-even point to stay in print.”

She had made a little knowing smile at that point, and though there was a slight air of sadness about her… she wore a dark outfit even though it wasn’t revealing or leathery… she had a vibrancy which was brittle but real. I liked working with people like Megan, or Morrigan. She’d become epileptic after an accident, and then for some reason dropped out of an academic career to become a writer. She didn’t explain that in detail, because she hadn’t regretted the decision. Like so many creative people, her life had become a constant struggle to do what she wanted and postpone the day when she’d have to appease her bank manager by looking through Sits Vac for a job selling replacement kitchens. She’d put it off for ten years and had sounded pleased with her progress. It was shocking to think she was dead. I said to Edwin May: “Just exactly what happened?”

“It was a week ago. Friday. A day or two earlier, I suppose. I went round on Friday with Dai… our son… Megan was supposed to have him for the weekend. My sister gets him to school, Megan never could get up in the morning. We went round on Friday and rang and there was no answer. Dai had a key and he said it would be OK to let ourselves in and wait. It was about half four. We went into the flat and I put the kettle on and looked at some letters that had arrived. I didn’t open them at that stage, but I was her agent, still am I suppose, there were a lot of letters on the mat and I was looking for publishers’ logos on… there was something I didn’t like about the flat that day. Not the way she kept it… full of BattleSpear crap… the place stank of joss and piss. That wasn’t like Megan… she hated the smell of joss, said it made her feel she was going to fit, and if she did fit, well, she usually did piss herself, but she always cleaned up. She was disciplined like that.”

Megan’s main reason for coming to see me had been to discuss the medicine she’d been taking for her epilepsy. As a non-medical psychologist, I could only give her general advice about that, so I’d referred her on to a neurologist, Professor Vron. Edwin went on: “Dai called me to the bedroom. I hadn’t been in there since we split, but… the whole thing was so unlike Megan.

“There wasn’t any doubt… she was cold as… I’d never seen anyone dead before… and for our son to find her!”

Monique offered him a box of tissues, and he grabbed a thick wad and wept into it for a long time. I didn’t know why they had split up, but it didn’t sound to have been an irreparable breach. A hint of jealousy, but more to do with differences in lifestyle and writing policy, she’d said in passing: mainly him differing loudly from her. Now he was crying as though he’d realized for the first time that maybe marriage was about not dying alone because there’s no one to pop in and ask if you want a cup of tea and notice you’re dying.

Megan had been on phenobarbitone, an old fashioned anticonvulsant which had once doubled as a tranquillizer. Its use had long been restricted to a few cases of epilepsy which responded to it best, because people could get too tolerant to it. Eventually, to get an effect a person needed a potentially lethal dose, and if misused, as it often had been in the past, it could be more dangerous than heroin. Morrigan May had insisted that safer and more modern anti-convulsants had less impact on her fits. If she was going to take pills, they had to be phenobarbs, though she would prefer to take none.

He started to calm down and dry his eyes, and I said: “I suppose she must have inadvertently taken an overdose of the phenobarb. I’m surprised she was still on it…I did send her to a neurologist who should have tried to get her onto something safer. In the old days there were lots of phenobarb ODs, and most of them were accidental.”

He stared at me blankly. “She didn’t mention all the strain… all the hassles she was getting from BattleSpear?”

“No.” I added cautiously: “Just who is BattleSpear?”

He didn’t answer but pulled a document out of his bag. “Just look at that!”

The letterhead had a logo of a Conan-like figure hurling an enormous spear. It was a critique of a book, presumably one of Morrigan’s. It was full of comments like: “P3 par 1: Do your homework! Trulls are quite distinct from Urks, the latter being able to use but not service a stun laser, while stupid Trulls are quite unable to comprehend that such a small and shiny item could be a weapon!

P3 par 2: Rubbish! Trulls have enhanced Night Vision, but that does not mean they suffer from snow blindness in good light!”

and in the same vein for seven pages.

“I don’t know why BattleSpear went into publishing! They’re just toy makers, not even games really, toys with rules for playing, ripped off from sensible people. How could a writer, a sensitive artist like her, be expected to tolerate that! They’re men playing in a child’s world and nerds in a grown-up’s! I’m sueing them! They’re responsible for her death, and I need you to help prove it!”

The flat was in Wandsworth, above a shop in a small parade opposite the Common, in an area where the Victorian streets had been ramped and chicaned against speeding motorists by gentrifiers who nevertheless all owned cars. I had once briefly been a police officer, and it felt as if Monique and I were staking the place out, as we waited for Edwin May after our regular day’s work had finished. We were in my reconditioned Morris Minor, rear wheels on a double and the front sharing a Residents Only bay with a Honda Goldwing. Monique had decided against using her Merc… she thought that if he saw it, May might decide to sue us rather than BattleSpear. She said: “Let’s formulate this case before he gets here.”

“We have a writer, published but not especially successful.”

“I’d never heard of her.”

“I did a search on the Internet. Alta Vista found her. She began with a series of eco-SF novels… the Deep Green trilogy. She got rave reviews from small magazines, got nominated for awards no one’s ever heard of. Then she switched to the fantasy historical stuff he showed us, Dark Age, Celtic, slightly more sellable, but not a real breakthrough. Her husband is her agent. He drifts off, perhaps because she signs with a down-market teen-games firm.”

“He really hated them!” Monique said with feeling. “Did she say anything to you, to suggest this firm BattleSpear somehow drove her to suicide?”

“Not exactly. She said they were stressful to work for, but that was why she wanted to come off the phenobarbs, thought she was using them for the wrong reasons. She said she was getting preoccupied with long-term health, holistic approaches to health… even writing a book about holistic health.”

“Doesn’t sound suicidal at all. Isn’t that him? Edwin May?”

Across the street, a man was pushing the bell of Morrigan’s flat. He wore an old leather jacket, brown, and though it was August and a fine late afternoon, the collar was turned up. He looked a bit like Edwin May: I couldn’t see if he had the trademark pony-tail because of the collar, but when he stepped back from the door I saw it wasn’t him. The pale, bony face looked similar, but this man had stubble rather than beard and he wore a collar and tie. He looked up at the flat, at the greengrocer’s below which seemed to have closed, walked slowly away. I said:

“It’s not him. This guy’s ringing, not unlocking.”

“OK! You agree it doesn’t sound like suicide?”

“I think she cut the tablets down too quickly, had a fit, then put them back up too quickly. So the fact that working for Battle-Spear was not a paradise, and her hubby seems to have had a better deal lined up which has now gone down the drain, is just unlucky coincidence.”

“Here he comes. We’d better handle him carefully, Owen. He’s got all her problems and his own, and he thinks she was Marilyn. In his paranoid moments, he even plays with the idea some BattleSpear conspirator killed her.”

We got out and crossed the road. Edwin May came to a halt in front of the narrow entrance to the flat. He looked at that chipped green door with its tarnished brass knocker as if his whole life lay behind it, and that life was over. He said: “I can’t put it off any more. I haven’t been in since… all that ghastly nonsense with the police.” He pulled out a Yale key and made a stab for the lock, hitting the metal surround and pushing it in with a scrape.

Inside the door was a heap of letters, bills, and free papers. He said: “You know, the contract must have come through this door while she was… lying there.”

“Which contract, sorry?” I asked.

“The one I told you about. The joint contract with Robinson’s and Meridian TV. A novel, ‘The Healer’, a TV series, and a factual show and a factual book about faith healing to go with it. Lots of TV personals for her. The whole thing well into six figures. After all her work, she’d really arrived, and then…”

We followed him cautiously up a dark stairway. I said: “Mr May, did I hear you say Morrigan was working on a factual book about faith healing, or just a novel?”

“Both. She did a hell of a lot of research on it. Let’s see.” A bright light flicked above, and I realized the stairs led to a big open-plan lounge. “I think there’s a picture here…”

The room was full of odd pieces of furniture, none very new, which looked to have been bought separately for price rather than style or even function. The only expensive items were the TV and video, though there was a fairly new games console in another corner. The walls were stacked with books, mostly not in cases, almost to eye-height: above them the room was decorated with a wide variety of artwork: bookjackets… I recognized the one from The Merlinus… photographs, and a number of large framed or blockmounted oil paintings on fantasy themes. It was the kind of room my own circle of friends were only just starting to settle out of; though it had a distinct and unpleasant smell of urine, as though an unhousetrained cat lived there. If there was also a hint that joss sticks had been burned there, it was very faint, perhaps because there was a draught.

Edwin had gone to an area of snapshot photos. “Here’s one of Megan at Lourdes with Lionel Fanthorpe.”

I said: “Did she appear on ‘Fortean TV?”

“A couple of times. She was more of a sceptic than Lionel, though not with a ‘K’ like some of her old uni pals. She was so looking forward to getting her own show, putting over her particular point of view.”

Monique had been looking round the room impassively. Someone who only knew her from the office might have assumed she disapproved, though I happened to know her private life was just as Bohemian as Morrigan’s had been. She said: “I gather you’re implying she believed in faith healing, Mr May.”

He said hurriedly: “Well, she didn’t call it belief, because she’d done a science degree, and unlike a lot of SF writers, she kept up with as much real science as she could. She had a collection of cases where some kind of Healing seemed to have worked, not necessarily Christian or religious, she was looking for ways of assembling some kind of control group when… Oh God! Excuse me a minute!”

He abruptly stopped, as though he had seen something even more terrible than the ubiquitous reminders of his wife’s life and death, and hurried out of the large room, through a door decorated with a seaside cartoon of a girl in a bath. I heard flushing almost at once, and the ugly thought came to me that he was disposing of something… other than some female item which embarrassed him.

I wondered if he could have been overcome with other emotions than grief. In our session, Morrigan had almost dismissed him, an ineffectual old pal she had grown apart from. It had been he who had persuaded her to write fiction and not do postgrad studies, a move which had scarcely justified itself financially after ten years. And the breakdown of their marriage wasn’t only over lifestyle and the BattleSpear situation: “We married for Dai, really. It was meant to be an open marriage, friends co-operating over a son. His idea, but he didn’t like the way it turned out. I went on the pull about once a year, and usually succeeded. He tried it all the time, and hardly ever got anywhere. He didn’t like that.”

He might not have liked her exhibition of art. She’d been a model for most of the oil paintings, originals of book-covers I’d seen on racks, not her own. Usually, model-Morrigan wore something to cover her hair, not much more over the rest of her body, waving a weapon or other fantasy item. The faces were clearly her, though some of the bodies must have been modelled by someone more buxom.

I doubt I’d have suspected Edwin of committing a murder if he hadn’t kept hinting that someone had done so. Megan said that exhibitionistic self-promotion kept her afloat, and he’d have known and lived with that. And he could hardly have killed her for money. She’d died before he knew about the contract. He hoped for it perhaps, but didn’t know. I wasn’t arrogant enough to suppose a man could murder a goose which hadn’t yet laid any golden eggs, then rely on my post-mortem Psychological profile to get the gold from the unlikely mine of BattleSpear.

The bathroom led directly off the lounge: next to it on the same side was the open door to a kitchen. In the opposite wall were two more doors, to bedrooms I supposed, one open, one closed. I went to the open one in search of the source of the draught I’d noticed. I wondered if someone could have broken in that way, looked inside, and found a child’s room. A small casement window was open a crack but locked in position, the main window double-locked shut. I was just examining an oddity, an incense-boat on the ledge of the child’s window, when a doorbell rang loudly. May called from the bathroom: “Could you see who that is?”

I went downstairs and got to the door just as the bell rang again. I opened it to find the man we had seen earlier, while we were waiting. He did look like Edwin May, though the resemblance was increased because both were pale and red-eyed. May wore a short beard, but this man had just shaved rarely and carelessly, with little more than a day’s growth around his lips, but much more in the awkward corners of his face. He glared at me and snarled: “Who the devil are you?”

“I… we are here with Mr May.” Introducing oneself in such situations is never easy. People are funny about being seen around psychologists. He moved to go in past me and I said: “While we’re on introductions, just who are you?”

An awkward thought struck me, and I said: “Mr May’s in the bathroom. You’re not the late Mrs May’s boyfriend, are you?”

“No,” he said, taking advantage of my uncertainty to push past me and on up the stairs. “She never mentioned a boyfriend. I’m a very old friend. Dr Alan Glade. I was Megan’s tutor at LSS… London School of Science.”

I followed him up, feeling out of place. What authority did I have to stop him, a stranger myself in the home of a one-session dead client? Luckily, Edwin emerged from the bathroom as we reached the top of the stairs. His face was dead white and covered in sweat. He saw Glade in a double-take and said: “What are you doing here?”

“I left…” Glade checked, then, seemed to compose himself. “I know I’ve left it a bit late to offer condolences, but I’d like to. I… never quite knew how things stood between you two.”

“How they stand is, I’m a totally unprepared single parent. I’ve not been emotionally able to set foot in this place… now I’m here with two shrinks in tow… this is Owen GlenMorgan… Megan saw him… and Monique de Macaque. I’ve gotta sort out a million things. You… why couldn’t you write? Or e-mail?”

“Well, I lent Megan some research papers and oddments, the Skep Tactics book on so-called healing and some other stuff, and I need to reclaim them for… ”

“Nothing is going out of here till I’ve done… what you do. Make an inventory, I suppose. E-mail me a list. I have to go through all her stuff with the shrinks… not stuff that’d interest you… Battle-Spear stuff. I have to find out what made her do it.”

Being in the death flat had taken the oddly aggressive drive out of Alan Glade. He looked as deflated as a reveller who had gatecrashed a party, and discovered it was a wake… which was more or less what he was. He said: ‘Well, yes, sorry again, I knew it and you obviously knew it, she should never have got involved with those battleSpear people. I’ll… yes, I’ll e-mail you.”

He went quietly down the stairs and let himself out. Edwin began to explain. “I just saw that, and it was too much for me.” He pointed at a large open shopping bag full of clothes. “Her washing machine had packed up, she never got round to getting it fixed, and she used to get a bag ready for my sister Ann to do… Ann never minds being helpful that way, but this sort of thing, she can’t handle at all!”

He looked about to make another dash for the toilet. Monique intervened: “That’s odd! I looked in the kitchen, and saw an ‘on’ light on the washing machine.” She added: “It’s the same make as mine!” in a tone which said expensive Harley Street shrinks wouldn’t otherwise know much about kitchen equipment.

“That should not be on!” Edwin snapped, rushing to the kitchen.

“Could anyone else have been in here?” I asked.

“No, No! Not even BattleSpear, let’s be realistic! Police at least checked that, though they didn’t look into anything else!”

Which might have been their job, but wasn’t mine. “You’re saying this is a suspicious death, and the police have obviously been here. What did they find?”

“What they looked for, which was nothing! Two constables checked for signs of a break-in, labelled her a hippy who popped pills. That was all they knew, and they decided it was all they needed to know. If she’d been lying there with a bloody great spear stuck through her, they’d have said it was a syringe!”

Monique nodded. “But you feel her death resulted from a kind of negligence?”

“BattleSpear negligence! That’s a good word! I went to the station and asked for someone in charge. I wanted to explain that they’d harassed her till she flipped and gave up and muddled her pills. Harassment’s a crime isn’t it? All I got was some sergeant who’d tried to turn his memoirs into a novel, and he said that if they locked up all the rude, grasping, shortchanging publishers in London, they’d have no cells left for other kinds of crime. But I managed to get the inquest adjourned and if you can do me a profile of how they upset her frame of mind, treating an artist like a shopgirl, I might get a sensible verdict!”

I had my doubts. I glanced at Monique. She was listening with the interested, compassionate, otherwise expressionless poker face she uses for all awkward clients. I’m told I use it too. Edwin turned back to the kitchen. “What’s in here!” He opened the washing machine and let out an incredibly vile smell of old urine.

“That’s terrible!” I said, hastily adding: “What is in there?” before he could back away and make me investigate myself.

He held his nose and looked inside. “Just her jeans and panties. She must have had a fit and forgotten it was bust. The fits affected her memory, you see. That must be why the place smelled bad.”

“Not entirely.” Monique said. “I think the smell we noticed earlier came from this couch.” She went into the living room and pointed at a black, leather-look settee which faced the TV.

“So she had a fit watching TV. She must have remembered to try and wash her clothes, but forgotten to clean that up. God! If only someone had been here!”

He again looked ready to rush for the toilet. To distract him, I said: “Did you say there was also a smell of joss incense? I think I’ve found out why.”

I indicated the open bedroom. It had a single bed, made, and was decorated with childish posters, mostly of fantasy adventures and carrying the BattleSpear logo. There was a large table on which a game based on such scenes had been set out with metal figures and toy scenery. I expected Edwin to complain at this invasion of his son’s room, but he refrained: presumably it was allowable for children to enjoy BattleSpear. I indicated the incense boat on the window ledge. Two joss sticks had burned right down. Edwin said: “Beats me! It’s unbelievable. Megan hated the smell of joss, ever since her accident. She never used it.”

I knew the smell of joss sometimes came as an aura before her fits. “This accident. Did it have anything to do with her epilepsy?”

“It did. Megan did a hard course, Joint honours, no bloody puns, Envo’ Sci’ and Biochemistry. She was told… Glade told her… she was heading for a First on the strength of a project. She went out to celebrate with some of her course, got slewed, went to someone’s room, rolled up and lit up. Lots of joss but not much dope, I heard. I wasn’t there, myself, that time.” He stopped abruptly, I suppose numbering the times in Megan’s life when he wasn’t there. “So they ran out of dope and Megan set out on a bike to get some more. No one knows exactly what happened. She was found by the road. When she came to, she couldn’t remember.

“Not long after that she started getting the joss… aura, they call it… and then getting fits. Totally buggered her exams. Memory was a sieve made of Swiss cheese. Oddly enough she was better on those pills. Most of the time. She’d oversleep and couldn’t get up to do a job, so she started writing seriously. Didn’t totally swear off dope, just bicycles. And joss, more to the point.”

“Did anyone but your son use this room?” I wasn’t that interested in joss sticks. I wanted to access and assess his jealousy.

“I suppose so. Not lately. She was so into researching the bloody BattleSpear game… she used to play it by e-mail, for Christ’s sake… at least she didn’t let the nerds get up here!”

Monique asked: “How about that character who was here just now? The old friend… ex-tutor?”

“Doubt it. He was even more anti-joss than she was. Spent all his time trying to keep her away from what he called hippies. Me, mostly. I suppose you’d better see where I found her.”

He went back to the living-room, then stopped abruptly. “Of course Glade felt she had to be an academic like him. Kept telling her to get a medical cert and sue the uni if they wouldn’t let her do a Ph.D. I don’t know if that’s relevant.”

I doubted it. I sensed he was stalling, not wanting to go back into that room. He went on: “Luckily, she got a break almost at once. She got a story in Interzone… top SF zine… and that led to her getting a novel contract. Pissed Doctor Glade off… we didn’t see him for ages. Anyway, he…”

Monique took charge. “Were you going to show us where you found her?”

“Yes.” He took a deep breath.

I felt desperately sorry for him. “Look, I know this isn’t easy.”

He opened the door to the last room. The curtains were open, but not the windows, which had ventilating fans set into two panes. It was dominated by a large double bed, with the covers thrown back. There was a computer, another games table, even some BattleSpear posters, though these had adult… or at least teenboy… themes, women warriors in leather or rubber armour. Most of these weren’t modelled by Morrigan, but over the bed was a large painting on glass. It showed her underwater, appearing to rise through the sea toward the sunrise… or sunset, I realized. The picture was so positioned that the light of the setting sun through the window might sometimes reach it. Morrigan’s hair was uncovered, the green ends blending with the water, the red and yellow with the sunset. It was the only picture I saw in the flat in which she appeared to be entirely naked, though it was hard to be certain, as seaweed and fish were floating strategically.

He caught the direction of my gaze. “The original cover painting from the Morrigan May special issue from Interzone. It’s by Sexton, the top fantasy artist.”

While not exactly provocative, I felt the nude image would remind anyone who entered the room that it held potential for other games than BattleSpear. I said: “I never quite understood what caused the two of you to split up.”

“Nothing!” he shouted. “Oh, odd differences over this and that, not even real quarrels. We never stopped getting on, helping each other…”

Monique said quickly: “So! It’s dramatic and ironic… you found her lying like Marilyn Monroe, dead from barbiturates.”

“Not exactly. There was no last call… I swear it! Not to me, anyway. Maybe to someone dodgy… no. No!” He blinked, then said: “But there is another odd thing. What was it… ‘all the morning papers said, was that Marilyn, was found in the nude!’? Well Megan used to like sleeping nude, in fact she always did in summer, unless she thought she might fit, in which case she’d wear a thick pair of panties.

“This was different. She was naked below the waist, even though she’d probably just fitted, but she had on a sweatshirt and even a bra. She never normally wore a bra to sleep.”

“OK, OK, this was an odd situation,” I said. I’d liked Megan, and nothing I’d seen in the flat suggested she was a person who would kill herself deliberately and leave her body for her son to find. I thought Edwin disliked that idea as much as I did, but he was afraid of the more logical formulation of an accident. If Megan’s faith in healing had led her to prematurely abandon her drugs, then lose track of the safe dose and overdo them, her life’s work was in vain. His continual flirting with the idea of an impossible murder told me this was a safer theory for his peace of mind. Unfortunately, publishers tend to prefer their authors alive. Once they’re famous they can die and someone will keep on writing their books, but no one would ghost-write and publish Megan’s healing theories under these circumstances. So I added with feeling: “And a tragic one! But how do you know it wasn’t just unusual? She wasn’t expecting you… do you know exactly when…”

“No. Like I said, she didn’t phone… post-mortem suggests… late Wednesday or early Thursday.”

“Did she call anyone at all?”

“I don’t know… hold on… wasn’t there a phone bill in that heap I just brought up? That’ll be itemized!”

He went to get it. I tried to imagine the scene in that room: above, the peaceful image of Morrigan floating up toward the sunrise, unsuspecting as the nude in Jaws; below the real Megan, troubled in ways I could not analyze, sinking far too deep into the sea of sleep.

“It is a phone bill… that’s good, it’s itemized right up to last Friday, when… no, those look like the calls I made… nothing for Thursday and not much Wednesday either… wait a minute… there’s one some hours after the rest.”

He stopped and shuddered. “Sounds like that last call.”

I said: “Do you recognize the number?”

“No. Do you think we should try it?”

“Why not?” I didn’t want Megan to have made a last, despairing call to someone who failed to help; but my reputation, and therefore my living, depended on being prepared to ignore what I wanted to believe and find out what really happened. I got Edwin to show me the phone in the lounge and the number to dial. It rang twice, then an automated voice began: “The Department of Clinical Biochemistry of St Dunstan’s University Hospital is closed. Please leave a message after the tone. If you need to make urgent contact, the following staff members have mobiles: Dr Alan Glade, Senior Lecturer and Director of the…”

“Our old friend Dr Glade. Let’s just get this mobile number. Shall I ring it?” Edwin nodded, and I dialled the number. It was another answering service. I left him a message to contact us, then looked back at the phone bill.

“Apart from the Glade call in the late afternoon, we only have three calls, all to one number, all late morning.”

Edwin May looked over my shoulder. “I think that’s her Internet Service Provider. She’d have been logging on. That’s it… why didn’t I think of it! Her last message must have been an e-mail.”

“They were some time before the call to Dr Gla…” I petered out, as Edwin hurried to the bedroom and started booting up the PC. I followed, wondering uneasily what he would find. If she had died by her own hand, I cursed my incompetence in not adequately evaluating the risk. She just hadn’t seemed like a danger to herself. Could someone have somehow fed her extra pills? I had suspected Edwin May himself, but it was a farfetched theory, inspired by his own odd idea that BattleSpear could have been directly not indirectly responsible. But May seemed far more excited by her professional than her sexual life. He found something on the computer and said: “Look at this: ‘It’s a real downer that everything I write for BS has to be redone so often. I do have other projects and the stress is undermining my health’”

“What e-mail is this?” I asked. “Is it dated?”

“It’s to her friend Molly Brown, another top pro writer, someone who’d understand!” he said in a tone which implied a mere psychologist had no hope of understanding any writer. “It’s quite recent. Not Wednesday. One pm Monday. Oh, God, listen to this, they were really upsetting her! ‘Things have been a lot worse since 20K got going! Everything has to be redone twenty thousand times!’”

“What’s TwentyK?” Monique asked. “Some kind of Millennium project?”

“No, futuristic BattleSpear. Really, it’s just the usual Trulls and Urks with ray-guns. But some of it is seriously pervy, not really pre-teen stuff. The ironic thing is, Megan rather threw herself into BS, till they started hassling her. She joined SLOBS… that’s the Super League of BattleSpear, watched their videos… I think she’s still got the latest crud in the video now! You need to see this!”

He jumped up and hurried back to the lounge. On the shelf between TV and VCR, there was an open cassette case, depicting the usual leatherette-clad woman in conflict with some humanoid monstrosity, both armed with futuristic weapons. “Let’s see.”

He remoted the set and it rapidly flickered to life. Flickered was the word. The picture on the screen flashed on and off like a strobe as heavy nightclub music thumped through the flat. Edwin could just be heard above it: “That’s crap! They’ve really done it now! How can BS have sent her something like this! Strobe lights brought on her fits like crusties give you nits!”

I was starting to make out the picture from the brief flashes of moving image. It didn’t look like a futuristic battle scene. A girl was dancing wildly, dressed only in a red and green bikini with gold tassels and matching gloves. Behind her, other girls danced in similar outfits without the gloves, around a muscular black youth with multi-coloured dreadlocks. They appeared to be on the stage of a club.

Monique said: “Isn’t that the Glove Girl?”

I nodded, pleased she’d spoken first. “The Glove Girl and Clive” is one of those nocturnal shows respectable psychologist types seldom admit to being up late enough to know about.

Suddenly the music stopped and the Glove Girl was shown mopping the sweat off her face and starting to interview one of the dancers. Just as suddenly the screen went grey and snowy, then another flickering began, not strobe-like this time, but the usual damage one gets on a tape which has been partially over-recorded. This settled to show figures armed with rayguns against a crude graphic of spaceships landing.

Monique asked: “Could she have surfed onto the show with the strobe, had a fit, then accidentally pressed ‘record’?”

I wondered. Someone had stopped recording “The Glove Girl” when the strobe ended. Before I could comment, the doorbell rang. Edwin was so stressed he didn’t move at first. I said: “I’ll deal with it.”

The caller was Alan Glade. The sight of him filled me with irritation and suspicion, though as he wasn’t suspected of anything, and in fact had lost his earlier belligerent manner, politely waving his mobile and saying: “This thing’s bust. I keep meaning to get it fixed. It takes messages but I can’t ring out. So, when I saw you wanted to contact me and I was still in the area…”

Uncertainly, I invited him up, explaining that Megan’s last call had been to his lab. He said: “Actually, that was me,” then paused, looking alarmed, and went on: “She was sort of OK when I left, though I was worried about the way she mucked about with her medication. She’d been totally taken in by this healing crap and got out of her depth. That’s why I stayed so long.”

Edwin said anxiously: “You mean she didn’t make a last phone call? After she’d taken the overdose?”

“Not to me. I don’t think she had the lab number. As for overdose, well, I think it was more an accident than something planned.

“We’d been meeting to talk about this bloody faith healing book. Frankly, she’d got the emphasis all wrong. She talked about a control group, but she didn’t have one. She was just collecting cases, isolated one-offs. I went round, it would have been the Tuesday, to show her some real evidence and talk it over.

“Megan was in an odd mood. She wouldn’t listen to reason. She’d been using faith healing and other quack techniques to control her fits, and it hadn’t worked. She’d gone back on anti-convulsants, too many as far as I could see, her system wasn’t used to the dose she’d gone back to.

“I was so worried, I stayed over on Tuesday night.” He glanced anxiously at May. “Not in the bedroom. I dozed off in here on the couch. Megan slept very late in the morning… it was hard to wake her. I decided to take the day off work. When she woke up, I went and did some shopping for her, then spent some time trying to get her to see someone to get the medication changed. She said it was only stress, she was trying to write two books at once, the healing book…”he indicated a blue folder on a low desk in one corner, “… and the next BattleSpear book. Well, at least that one was meant to be sci-fi. She said she’d soon have it sorted out. Actually, she was looking a bit better when I got a call on this.” He held up the defective mobile. “It doesn’t ring out… can be handy sometimes, but that time, there was a serious problem at the lab. I had to get over there.”

I glanced at Monique. Reason told me we should make an excuse and leave. No note, no last call, no last e-mail.

But I didn’t like Glade, and I especially didn’t like the way he was obsessively trashing those of his dead ex-student’s beliefs which he hadn’t drilled into her. I didn’t necessarily disagree that faith healing was a kind of placebo: but if some people could direct the placebo, what harm could they do?

I opened the blue file. The top document was headed: MYOWN CASE. It began: “Twice now, I have succeeded in going for six months without having epileptic fits or taking damaging medication. I attribute this partly to meditation and holistic techniques, but also to the power of Healing… not explicitly religious, but a power science cannot yet explain, but should start trying to explore.”

Next to the folder was a lurid paperback. It was called The Warrior. The cover had a BattleSpear logo and showed the usual black-suited and helmeted figure, brandishing a laser-sword and charging down the gangplank of a spacecraft. Unlike the other Morrigan May books, it was one I had seen in shops… indeed, indeed, huge displays of them. I was about to say that it must have been a stress on a writer to work on two so contrasting projects, when Glade went on: “Y’know, the tragic thing was, she was never the same after her accident.” He indicated the area of wall with her personal photos. “Back then,” pointing to shots of a slightly younger Megan in obvious fancy dress, Vampirella, Magenta from “Rocky Horror”, “She dressed up, but she knew it was a game. Later, this… madness!”

He was indicating a group photograph, Megan in the centre of smiling thirty-somethings clustered round a motorcycle. All wore bike-gang gear, but the black leather had been replaced by white. May said defensively: “White Riders. Well, Megan was obviously a pillion rider. They wanted to get magic and spirituality away from the Satan-idiots on one side, and the china teacup set on the other.”

Glade ploughed on: “It’s as if the real Megan died in the accident. As if her damaged brain wasn’t her real self. The real Megan did not believe in Magic.”

The words came into my mind then, like a strobeflash, that if her mind was dead, he had only killed her body. That hadn’t been the part of her he needed, or not officially.

Intuition wasn’t something I liked to rely on, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s all one has. I realized that when the thought came, when Glade spoke, I had been looking at a Radio Times, which was on the table by the couch, open to Tuesday night late. The item I was looking for was there, and with a cold feeling of disgust I realized it had been underlined.

I said: “Well, at least something can be salvaged. Just think of the publicity: ‘Healer Author met mysterious, Marilyn-like death.’” I looked at Glade and tapped the blue file. “I’m sure the publishers can edit her book up from these notes. And the TV, there’ll be out-takes from other shows she did, all these stills. She didn’t live for nothing!”

“But that’s madness! Publish the ravings of a demented, braindamaged…” He strode toward the desk as if meaning to grab the blue file and run with it. I held it up and said: “You’d like to destroy this, wouldn’t you! I should think that’s why you came back! To destroy it, that and the tape!”

He made a grab at it, but I was bigger than him, and held it over my head. I feared he would have a go at me, and I might need to bring it down sharply as a weapon, but he just stood there breathing heavily and shaking with anger. May was staring, totally bewildered: I noticed Monique slide silently to the phone. I said: “You remind me of an Evangelical Christian I once treated.” He opened his mouth and I cut him off: “He wouldn’t learn Yoga or anything similar because it was Hindu, Pagan, Unchristian, and therefore of the Devil!”

“There’s no Devil!” he said. “There’s no Christ. There’s no proof of any of the things she was asserting in that bloody book!”

“That’s what you told her on Tuesday, but she wouldn’t listen. Brain-damaged. That was what she’d been, since she had her accident and stopped being your student.”

“She was my best ever student! She should have been a scientist… not this! The real Megan would never have…”

“That’s what you thought, when she wouldn’t listen to you on Tuesday and crashed out on her pills. You lay down on the couch. You tried to sleep, but you were just thinking, watching TV. Looking through the Radio Times. You saw a warning that a show was due to come on with dancing to strobe light.

“Then it came to you. You grabbed the remote and recorded the strobe, recording it over whatever was in the video. Maybe you didn’t know then if you were going to do it. But the next day she was still ignoring what you said. She wasn’t your student any more, your scientist. It was her life’s work or yours, and yours was more important. You rang off work, and went shopping. You bought some joss sticks and lighted them in the spare room.” I thought I saw him nod then, but he stiffened and began to disagree. I spoke over him: “Megan began to panic. She thought she was having the aura for a fit. You said, ‘Don’t worry, take your pills, maybe have one extra’… of course you didn’t remind her, she’d have had some already, she was taking too many. You said, ‘Sit down, take you pills, let’s watch a video.’ And as soon as she’d taken them, before they could take effect, you put on the tape with the strobe, and it must have worked and given her a fit.

“I don’t suppose it made it more difficult, watching her convulsing, wetting herself, brain-damaged and no longer a scientist. You turned off the video, and as soon as she came to, you said: ‘You’ve had a fit, you must have forgotten your pills!’ Of course, by then she’d forgotten she had taken them!

“You began to clean up. You got her out of her jeans and pants and put them in the washing machine. You didn’t know it was broken.

“You got Megan into bed. You didn’t take her top off. I don’t know if you realized she usually slept nude… it was one detail that wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t had the call from work. You made the mistake of calling back from here. Something important, was it?”

He stood silent for a second. I guessed he wasn’t used to lying about killing, or to killing itself for that matter. In the end he said: “It was a serious problem. Contamination caused by a spillage. One of my students had made a total lash-up.”

“Even your students make lash-ups. Now it was your turn to panic. You had to get back to the lab and not say where you’d been. You rushed off and the door locked behind you. Later, you realized you’d left the doctored tape in the machine, other odds and ends like the joss sticks. You came back saying it was for your notes. My guess is you came back several times when no one was here.”

He looked terrified. I can only say, he didn’t look like an innocent man. All he could say was a cliche, especially for him. He said: “You can’t prove any of this…” but as he said it, not actually denying his guilt, Edwin May charged at him, sending him flying. He crashed into the desk, smashing it and knocking the Warrior book to the floor. But they were not warriors, and I found it relatively easy to separate them while Monique phoned the police.

All he would say later was repeat: “There’s no proof.” I thought it ironic, as well as sad. Morrigan May had gone from a world in which proof, or at least disproof, was considered possible. She had dared to go into a world where there was no proof of anything. And he had followed her.