Lessons for Sleeping Dogs (Cambridge Fellows, #12) by Charlie Cochrane

Author:Charlie Cochrane [Cochrane, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2015-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

Jonty woke with a start, out of a dream in which Peter Pan and the Lost Boys had lured him into their camp with the promise of showing him letters that proved Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, really was the beautiful boy of the sonnets. Once there, they announced that Tinkerbell had declared Jonty the double of Wriothesley as a young man, and as he’d failed to buy the pair of earrings she’d requested, he had to be sacrificed in order to please her. They’d chased him down the road, with the intention of sticking him in their cooking pot. Luckily the porcine noises of the pack in pursuit, and that carried on into his waking world, turned out to be nothing worse than Orlando’s snores. Jonty poked his lover sharply in the side, not just to get him to cease the cacophony, but to wake him. Jonty’s thoughts had crystallised in the night and now he had a theory to share.

“Eh? What?”

“Morning, Orlando, lovely to see you. Only while it might be morning it isn’t getting-up time and, to be technical, I can’t actually see you.” Jonty nestled in closer.

Orlando groaned. “Then why on earth have you woken me? Is the house on fire?”

“No, but my wits are. Atherton. I have an idea.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?” Orlando yawned. “No, don’t answer that. I need to know your idea, now.”

“What if this is neither a double suicide nor murder followed by suicide, nor indeed double murder?” Jonty murmured into Orlando’s chest.

“Say that again, slowly.” Orlando sounded a touch addlepated. Funny how sex seemed to either fire up his wits—among other things—or render him incapable of any logical thought processes at all.

“You really are befuddled, aren’t you? I can remember you being like this the first time we indulged in the pleasures of the double bed.” A frisson of delight crept up Jonty’s spine in fond remembrance. “Although I seem to remember it was a narrow, cold, little college bed.”

“Of which you took up more than your allotted space. Get back to the subject in hand.”

“Only if you promise to listen carefully.” Jonty eased out of the embrace; maybe that would help his lover to regain his wits. “What if we’ve got two separate murders here? Paul Robertson murders Atherton to guard his great secret, but unbeknownst to him the whisky he has a tot of in celebration was already poisoned—by Charles. Paul departs this world and we can haul ourselves from the quicksand surrounding his apparent suicide.”

“That’s remarkable. It could work, because the motives would be in the right places and so would the means. And it would perhaps explain the confusion about whether the poison was in the drink or taken with it. Assuming cyanide stays active in alcohol, naturally.”

“If it doesn’t you could put it in a slow dissolving capsule.” Jonty was certain that there was a clever pharmaceutical way around any problems.

“Hmm. Is that a fact or one of Dr. Panesar’s little gems? And there’s still the issue of those suicide letters.

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