The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

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