Murder Your Darlings by Mark McCrum

Author:Mark McCrum [McCrum, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448303663
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2017-09-25T23:00:00+00:00

NINE

Sunday 30 September

The scream that rang through the villa the following morning was louder and more sustained than the one that Belle had claimed as a nightmare four mornings before. Francis knew immediately that something terrible had happened. He threw down the remaining pages of Zoe’s memoir, sprang from his chair and ran down the corridor. The last door on the left was swinging open. Botticelli. Sasha’s room. It was one of the best in the villa, with two tall windows looking down over the valley.

Sasha lay central on the king-sized bed, her fuchsia scarf beside her. But she was no longer going to leap in with a quirky intervention or remark. Nor was she going to surprise them with a searching character analysis, nor cartwheel across the bedroom or do a handstand by the writing table. Though her mane of frizzy hair was just the same, her big brown eyes stared lifelessly up at the ceiling, bloodshot and no longer beautiful. The golden-brown skin of her neck was marked with a smudged, encircling line of red, no stronger than a pale blush. All around were scattered those pinky-orange mushrooms she had found in the woods, some whole, some broken in two, some with bite-sized pieces taken out of them, as if she had sampled them and these were not the harmless Caesar’s mushroom she had thought, the ovolo buono, but the deadly lookalike, the ovolo malefico, aka the Death Cap.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Francis.

It must have been Stephanie who had screamed. The look she gave him now was one of blank horror. At her side, still holding her hand, was Gerry; silent and appalled.

‘Sasha,’ muttered Stephanie, shaking her head backwards and forwards, bewildered. ‘I just knocked on her door. I was going to ask her if she wanted to organize some sort of exercise class.’

‘We must phone the police,’ said Gerry.

Outside, on the windowsill, a bird chirruped incongruously.

The scream had brought others to the door. Tony, Roz, Zoe.

‘Oh my God!’ said Zoe.

‘What’s going on?’ It was Liam, striding in past the others. ‘Mary, Mother of God, what is this?’ As everyone else stayed where they stood, he walked over to the bed. ‘It’s like a stage set,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t touched these mushrooms, has she?’ He looked round. He was right. That was the word for it. Staged. If she had eaten a poisonous mushroom, it wouldn’t have acted that quickly. Or cleanly. Francis needed to do his research, but he was fairly sure there would have been gastro-intestinal disorder first. You didn’t just eat a toadstool and die, like the victim of some bad fairy in a children’s story – or cyanide for that matter. ‘What is this?’ Liam went on, bending towards her neck. ‘Looks more like strangulation.’

‘No!’ Francis heard himself cry. ‘Don’t touch her. We need to be very careful here. We need to back out, all of us, and leave this situation exactly as it is. The police need to see this, absolutely as it is.

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