The Mystery of the Missing Pages (The Casebook of Atticus Priest 1) by Mark Dawson

Author:Mark Dawson [Dawson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unputdownable
Published: 2024-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

7

We stayed in the snug while Atticus conducted the remaining interviews. Clara Wainwright, the screenwriter, was brisk and no-nonsense. She stated plainly that she hadn’t seen anything of interest during the evening and said that she had been with someone else who would be able to vouch for her ever since she had arrived at the house. Atticus told her he’d read she was upset that her pitch for an adaptation of Solstice had been rejected; Clara said she’d been fine with that, but not when key ideas she said she’d come up with had been included in the screenplay that was eventually filmed. But, as she said, ‘that was years ago, and it doesn’t bother me anymore.’ There was a prickly irritation in her answer that made me wonder whether that was really true.

“She’s the least suspicious of the lot,” Atticus said afterwards. “It’ll be easy enough to confirm her alibi, and, if it stacks up—and I don't really have any doubt that it will—it’ll rule her out as the one who removed the manuscript.”

Heather Winslow was a different matter entirely. The retired journalist turned memoirist admitted to wandering the house earlier in the day, claiming she had been ‘seeking inspiration.’ She went on in the same vein for five minutes.

“She over-explained her movements,” he noted to me afterwards. “It’s often as good as admitting guilt. I’d put decent money she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been. The question is whether it was the study or somewhere else.”

Both Heather and Clare were withering in their opinion of Simone and her husband. Heather suggested she was ‘as self-serving as they come,’ while Clare said Simone was jealous of Eleanor’s success and despised the literary establishment that she clearly felt shunned her. Both confirmed, though, that at least one of them had been with the pair—save bathroom breaks—ever since lunch.

The two of us sat quietly in the snug while Atticus, with no shame or fear of being discovered, took out a packet of rolling papers and a bag of marijuana and started to roll another spliff. He fell silent, staring into the fire absent-mindedly as he rolled the joint between his fingers and thumbs. The flickering light cast shadows across his face, and I knew better than to press him further. He had a habit of letting the pieces arrange themselves in his mind, revealing patterns no one else could see.

We were still sitting there when Lydia appeared in the doorway. Her usually composed demeanour was rattled; her cheeks were flushed, and her lips were pressed into a tight line. Atticus had lit the joint, but she didn’t mention it.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, her voice clipped, though she was clearly holding back some urgency. “There’s something you need to see.”

Atticus stood. “The manuscript?”

“No,” she said. “But I think we know who might have taken it.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.