The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

He stopped and shuddered. “Sounds like that last call.”

I said: “Do you recognize the number?”

“No. Do you think we should try it?”

“Why not?” I didn’t want Megan to have made a last, despairing call to someone who failed to help; but my reputation, and therefore my living, depended on being prepared to ignore what I wanted to believe and find out what really happened. I got Edwin to show me the phone in the lounge and the number to dial. It rang twice, then an automated voice began: “The Department of Clinical Biochemistry of St Dunstan’s University Hospital is closed. Please leave a message after the tone. If you need to make urgent contact, the following staff members have mobiles: Dr Alan Glade, Senior Lecturer and Director of the…”

“Our old friend Dr Glade. Let’s just get this mobile number. Shall I ring it?” Edwin nodded, and I dialled the number. It was another answering service. I left him a message to contact us, then looked back at the phone bill.

“Apart from the Glade call in the late afternoon, we only have three calls, all to one number, all late morning.”

Edwin May looked over my shoulder. “I think that’s her Internet Service Provider. She’d have been logging on. That’s it… why didn’t I think of it! Her last message must have been an e-mail.”

“They were some time before the call to Dr Gla…” I petered out, as Edwin hurried to the bedroom and started booting up the PC. I followed, wondering uneasily what he would find. If she had died by her own hand, I cursed my incompetence in not adequately evaluating the risk. She just hadn’t seemed like a danger to herself. Could someone have somehow fed her extra pills? I had suspected Edwin May himself, but it was a farfetched theory, inspired by his own odd idea that BattleSpear could have been directly not indirectly responsible. But May seemed far more excited by her professional than her sexual life. He found something on the computer and said: “Look at this: ‘It’s a real downer that everything I write for BS has to be redone so often. I do have other projects and the stress is undermining my health’”

“What e-mail is this?” I asked. “Is it dated?”

“It’s to her friend Molly Brown, another top pro writer, someone who’d understand!” he said in a tone which implied a mere psychologist had no hope of understanding any writer. “It’s quite recent. Not Wednesday. One pm Monday. Oh, God, listen to this, they were really upsetting her! ‘Things have been a lot worse since 20K got going! Everything has to be redone twenty thousand times!’”

“What’s TwentyK?” Monique asked. “Some kind of Millennium project?”

“No, futuristic BattleSpear. Really, it’s just the usual Trulls and Urks with ray- guns. But some of it is seriously pervy, not really pre-teen stuff. The ironic thing is, Megan rather threw herself into BS, till they started hassling her. She joined SLOBS… that’s the Super League of BattleSpear, watched their videos… I think she’s still got the latest crud in the video now! You need to see this!”

He jumped up and hurried back to the lounge. On the shelf between TV and VCR, there was an open cassette case, depicting the usual leatherette-clad woman in conflict with some humanoid monstrosity, both armed with futuristic weapons. “Let’s see.”

He remoted the set and it rapidly flickered to life. Flickered was the word. The picture on the screen flashed on and off like a strobe as heavy nightclub music thumped through the flat. Edwin could just be heard above it: “That’s crap! They’ve really done it now! How can BS have sent her something like this! Strobe lights brought on her fits like crusties give you nits!”

I was starting to make out the picture from the brief flashes of moving image. It didn’t look like a futuristic battle scene. A girl was dancing wildly, dressed only in a red and green bikini with gold tassels and matching gloves. Behind her, other girls danced in similar outfits without the gloves, around a muscular black youth with multi-coloured dreadlocks. They appeared to be on the stage of a club.

Monique said: “Isn’t that the Glove Girl?”

I nodded, pleased she’d spoken first. “The Glove Girl and Clive” is one of those nocturnal shows respectable psychologist types seldom admit to being up late enough to know about.

Suddenly the music stopped and the Glove Girl was shown mopping the sweat off her face and starting to interview one of the dancers. Just as suddenly the screen went grey and snowy, then another flickering began, not strobe-like this time, but the usual damage one gets on a tape which has been partially over-recorded. This settled to show figures armed with rayguns against a crude graphic of spaceships landing.

Monique asked: “Could she have surfed onto the show with the strobe, had a fit, then accidentally pressed ‘record’?”

I wondered. Someone had stopped recording “The Glove Girl” when the strobe ended. Before I could comment, the doorbell rang. Edwin was so stressed he didn’t move at first. I said: “I’ll deal with it.”

The caller was Alan Glade. The sight of him filled me with irritation and suspicion, though as he wasn’t suspected of anything, and in fact had lost his earlier belligerent manner, politely waving his mobile and saying: “This thing’s bust. I keep meaning to get it fixed. It takes messages but I can’t ring out. So, when I saw you wanted to contact me and I was still in the area…”

Uncertainly, I invited him up, explaining that Megan’s last call had been to his lab. He said: “Actually, that was me,” then paused, looking alarmed, and went on: “She was sort of OK when I left, though I was worried about the way she mucked about with her medication. She’d been totally taken in by this healing crap and got out of her depth. That’s why I stayed so long.”

Edwin said anxiously: “You mean she didn’t make a last phone call? After she’d taken the overdose?”

“Not to me. I don’t think she had the lab number. As for overdose, well, I think it was more an accident than something planned.

“We’d been meeting to talk about this bloody faith healing book. Frankly, she’d got the emphasis all wrong. She talked about a control group, but she didn’t have one. She was just collecting cases, isolated one-offs. I went round, it would have been the Tuesday, to show her some real evidence and talk it over.

“Megan was in an odd mood. She wouldn’t listen to reason. She’d been using faith healing and other quack techniques to control her fits, and it hadn’t worked. She’d gone back on anti- convulsants, too many as far as I could see, her system wasn’t used to the dose she’d gone back to.

“I was so worried, I stayed over on Tuesday night.” He glanced anxiously at May. “Not in the bedroom. I dozed off in here on the couch. Megan slept very late in the morning… it was hard to wake her. I decided to take the day off work. When she woke up, I went and did some shopping for her, then spent some time trying to get her to see someone to get the medication changed. She said it was only stress, she was trying to write two books at once, the healing book…”he indicated a blue folder on a low desk in one corner, “… and the next BattleSpear book. Well, at least that one was meant to be sci-fi. She said she’d soon have it sorted out. Actually, she was looking a bit better when I got a call on this.” He held up the defective mobile. “It doesn’t ring out… can be handy sometimes, but that time, there was a serious problem at the lab. I had to get over there.”

I glanced at Monique. Reason told me we should make an excuse and leave. No note, no last call, no last e-mail.

But I didn’t like Glade, and I especially didn’t like the way he was obsessively trashing those of his dead ex-student’s beliefs which he hadn’t drilled into her. I didn’t necessarily disagree that faith healing was a kind of placebo: but if some people could direct the placebo, what harm could they do?

I opened the blue file. The top document was headed: MYOWN CASE. It began: “Twice now, I have succeeded in going for six months without having epileptic fits or taking damaging medication. I attribute this partly to meditation and holistic techniques, but also to the power of Healing… not explicitly religious, but a power science cannot yet explain, but should start trying to explore.”

Next to the folder was a lurid paperback. It was called The Warrior. The cover had a BattleSpear logo and showed the usual black-suited and helmeted figure,