Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

the original investigators, and you didn’t tell us during that long rant you had while you were in my car. In fact, all you did do during that rant was point the finger at Penelope Peach.”

“You’re grasping at straws, Detective.”

“Am I? How about if I tell you that I recognized you?”

“What?”

“You have very short eyelashes. Helena has quite long ones. Your eyes are blue, hers are a deep brown. You screwed up your doses of whatever it was you were feeding me, Peter. What was it, ketamine? I’m a big man. You needed a higher dose. Look at me, I am up and about just a few hours later! I told you at the time I recognized you, and you thought I had fallen for your dumb trick and recognized Helena. But I hadn’t, I had recognized you.”

“That’s absurd. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I recognized you, Peter!”

“That’s not possible!”

“Why not?”

“Because… Because I wasn’t there!”

“Where?”

“Wherever it was that you thought you recognized me!”

“In your cellar.”

He swallowed hard. I waited. He swallowed again.

“How about it, Peter? Want to show me your cellar, and prove beyond any doubt that I was never there and it wasn’t you?”

“You’re out of your mind. Go and get a court order if you think you can. And now I want you out of my house!”

I stood. “Peter Heseltine, I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Jack Connors, the murder of Ebba, Helena’s maidservant, the kidnapping and attempted murder of Detective John Stone and the kidnapping and attempted murder of Helena Magnusson.”

He screamed. He screamed like a cornered animal, a rat or a ferret, and he sprang at me with his fingers hooked like claws. Smashing my fist into his face was one of the most satisfying moments of my life. His legs turned to spaghetti and he dropped to the floor with a whoomph!

EPILOGUE

Helena was still alive, though she had been tied to the same table where I had been tied, and the cheese cutter was poised to sever her head at any time. She was taken away in an ambulance and Deputy Inspector John Newman assured us, with some enthusiasm, that he would happily take her statement himself, in person.

After that, and after we had had a word with Joe, who was heading up the crime scene team, Dehan drove us home, set me up in a deck chair, gave me a large glass of Bushmills and set about lighting the charcoal in the barbeque. I watched her do it with an idiot grin on my face and listened to the birds preparing for bed in the trees.

“You have to tell me, Stone, when did you realize it was Peter?”

I sighed and thought about it.

“Too late. He was right there on her list of pupils, and neither of us registered it until it was too late. He was always there in my mind, like a dull toothache. He was so insignificant, so non-descript, yet so eager to discredit Jack Connors and point the finger at Penelope.”

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

“It was a kind of drip, drip. I realized from the start that Jack had not been the real target. It had been Helena. There had been an attempt to communicate something to her. Of course it might have been Penelope telling her, ‘If I can’t have him, neither can you!’ But as it turned out, Penelope did have him, and it was Helena who had lost him. So it made no sense for her to kill him.

“Then there were Grant, Lenny and Alornerk. They all had possible motives to kill Jack, but not to send that message to Helena. Grant’s motive for killing Jack would have been so that he could have Penelope for himself. So Helena would have been of absolutely no interest to him. He would be more likely to keep the head as a trophy than send it to her.

“Again, Lenny would have had no reason to send her Jack’s head. If he had, what would the message have been? It was not a gesture, or a statement, that would mean anything to Lenny.

“As for Alornerk, the statement might have had more meaning to his mind, but the act of killing Jack was a senseless one for him. They remained friends, but he made no attempt to get back together with her, and besides, as we later found out, he was in fact in bed with her at the time that Jack was killed, so his loss was not so great as to drive him to murder. And in the circumstances, sending her Jack’s head would have been pretty senseless if they had just been in bed together.

“It began to seem that the most compelling theory was that Helena had done it herself, and your argument that sending herself the head provided a powerful defense on top of a double alibi was pretty persuasive. But there were problems. If she had killed him herself, it meant that Alornerk was in it with her, providing her with not one, but two false alibis: that they had gone to lunch with fictitious European friends and that they had been in bed together. So, if he was going to stick to the second alibi, why blow the first? Why tell us the European friends were fake if he was then going to tell us he was in bed with her?

“Plus, every description of her supposed accomplice said he was average height and nondescript. Alornerk was tall and thin and had a face like an upside-down pear. So Alornerk was not her accomplice, which meant the second alibi was true.

“And all the while I had this nagging in my mind. We kept saying it, remember? We have to take another look at the list