Murder Knows No Season Read online

  A COLLECTION OF FOUR NOVELLAS

  MURDER

  KNOWS NO

  SEASON

  CATHY ACE

  ***

  Murder Knows No Season

  Copyright © 2018 Cathy Ace

  Four Tails Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at this address: [email protected]

  Cover artwork: Four Tails Publishing

  ISBN 978-1-7751754-4-5 (print book)

  ISBN 978-1-7751754-6-9 (electronic book)

  Novellas in the collection ‘Murder Knows No Season’:

  WINTER: The Corpse with Eight Faces – A Cait Morgan Mystery

  First edition copyright © 2008 Cathy Ace; second edition copyright © 2018 Cathy Ace

  SPRING: The Case of the Desperate Duchess – A WISE Enquiries Agency Mystery

  Copyright © 2018 Cathy Ace

  SUMMER: Out and About in a Boat – A standalone thriller

  First edition copyright © 2008 Cathy Ace; second edition copyright © 2018 Cathy Ace

  AUTUMN: The Fall – A DI Evan Glover Case

  First edition copyright © 2008 Cathy Ace; second edition copyright © 2018 Cathy Ace

  Other works by the same author

  (Information for all works here: www.cathyace.com)

  The Cait Morgan Mysteries

  (Published by TouchWood Editions)

  The Corpse with the Silver Tongue

  The Corpse with the Golden Nose

  The Corpse with the Emerald Thumb

  The Corpse with the Platinum Hair*

  The Corpse with the Sapphire Eyes

  The Corpse with the Diamond Hand

  The Corpse with the Garnet Face

  The Corpse with the Ruby Lips**

  *Winner 2015 Bony Blithe Award for Best Canadian Light Mystery

  **Finalist 2017 Bony Blithe Award for Best Canadian Light Mystery

  The WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries

  (Published By Severn House Publishers)

  The Case of the Dotty Dowager

  The Case of the Missing Morris Dancer

  The Case of the Curious Cook

  The Case of the Unsuitable Suitor***

  ***Finalist 2018 Bony Blithe Award for Best Canadian Light Mystery

  Short Stories

  Murder Keeps No Calendar: a collection of 12 short stories/novellas by Cathy Ace

  (Published by Four Tails Publishing Ltd)

  Steve’s Story in ‘The Whole She-Bang 3’****

  (Published by Sisters in Crime, Toronto)

  The Trouble with the Turkey in ‘Cooked to Death Vol. 3: Hell for the Holidays’

  (Published by Obscura Productions)

  ****Finalist 2017 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story

  ***

  WINTER

  THE CORPSE WITH EIGHT FACES

  A Cait Morgan Mystery

  So here I am, standing over a corpse, and wondering what to do next.

  I teach criminal psychology, so of course I know what I should do; I should steel myself to examine the body. But I don’t want to. Because that means she’s really dead. And I don’t want that to be the truth of it. So I’m just going to have to use my professional background, and not inconsiderable intelligence, to get my head around this entire situation by thinking through what brought me, Cait Morgan, to this point; because only then can I even begin to contemplate what might have brought her to this point.

  Maybe if I’d known I was about to spend a weekend cooped up in a snowbound hunting lodge in the middle of British Columbia with a killer on the loose, I wouldn’t have got onto the minibus that brought me here from the airport. But I didn’t, so I did.

  With hindsight, I suppose I should have seen this coming; I’d agreed to attend a birthday party for someone I hadn’t seen since we’d left school thirty years earlier, and she’d also invited her three – yes three – ex-husbands, her just-fired literary agent, and her estranged mother. Add her current fiancé, whose temper turned out to have a fuse about a quarter of an inch long, and you get the picture.

  But let’s get back to the minibus . . . I’d just got off a flight from Vancouver to Kelowna; it only takes about an hour, so you’re longer at the airport than in the air, which is pretty annoying. But it was better than having to fly all the way to the UK for the party, which was where it was originally supposed to be; back in the Land of My Fathers. Not that I ever had more than one dad, of course, but that’s what we Welsh people call Wales. Back in the Land of my hostess’s Fathers, too, if you catch my drift. You see, Meg Jones and I went to school together in Wales, where we grew up two streets apart – both apparently poor, but certainly happy.

  While there’s no denying that my position as Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Vancouver means I’ve certainly fulfilled my late-parents’ hopes and dreams for me, it’s equally unquestionable that Meg has far surpassed all possible expectations any of us from Manselton in Swansea might have had for her – she’s one of the world’s wealthiest authors, with a string of bestsellers to her name and a few movies too. You know her, I’m sure.

  Yes, that Meg Jones, romantic novelist par excellence.

  Anyway – the minibus.

  Initially the Big Birthday Bash was going to be at the old house she’d bought in Wales, but the renovations weren’t finished in time, so she’d rented an old hunting lodge outside Kelowna, BC, close to where she’d just bought herself a vineyard. Yes, I know most of us are happy with buying wine one bottle at a time, or maybe by the case at a push, but Meg never was one to stint – as evidenced by the three ex-husbands – so I guess she thought that buying a whole vineyard was the way to go. Given there aren’t many choices of route to Kelowna, and the Coquihalla Highway is a slippery mess for most of December, all her guests were meeting at Kelowna Airport, so we could travel to ‘McKewan’s Lodge’ together.

  I was the last one getting onto the minibus; living by my mother’s dictum that you should always go before you leave, I’d been going . . . and they’d almost left without me. Which, upon reflection, might not have been a bad thing – but I do agree that hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

  As I stood at the top of the minibus steps, trying to spot a place to sit, I ran my psychologist’s eyes over my fellow guests; Meg had told me who would be there in one of her emails, which had popped up in my ‘inbox’ from time to time over the last year or so. You see, we’d only recently got back in touch after pretty much thirty years of not having so much as spoken to each other on the phone.

  To cut a long story short, I’d spotted Meg promoting the first movie to be based on one of her books on a late-night chat show. Having overcome my initial disbelief that it was, in fact, the girl who’d been my best friend at school, I emailed her via her website, and, eventually, she phoned me.

  That first phone call was odd; she was apparently sitting in her mid-town condo overlooking the Manhattan skyline, while I was at the kitchen counter in my little house on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia . . . but we could have been back at Llwyn-y-Bryn School, ducking out of gym class and sneaking a smoke behind the bike sheds. It was great to hear her voice, to hear her news, and to discover she hadn’t changed at all, really. She was the same old Meg, and I was the same old Cait – Best Friends Forever . . . and we’d been that when the phrase actually meant something. But, of course – as Best Friends do – we’d drifted apart as the years had passed;
inseparable between the ages of five and eighteen and after that – well, we were certainly going in different directions. Like I said – long story, short.

  Okay – that minibus . . .

  I grunted general greetings as I pushed along the vehicle’s little aisle, which was barely wide enough to cope with my hips and winter coat, but I persevered because I thought it would be fun to sit at the back and try to work out who everyone was as we drove to our final destination. Some people acknowledged me as I passed, but most were peering out of the steamy windows at the surrounding mountains, which were missing their summits; it was three-ish and the sky, while still holding some promise of maybe another hour of daylight, was thickening with blue-black clouds. Upon reflection, I should have seen them as metaphorical, but at the time I only saw them for what they were – storm clouds gathering, ready to dump a whole lot of snow on us.

  Sitting at the rear of the bus I could see the backs of heads, and that was about it. From the sketchy explanations Meg had sent me I was pretty certain that the bald, liver-spotted head belonged to Joe Gray, Meg’s New York-based ex-literary agent, and I assumed it was his wife, Martha, sitting next to him. He was apparently well into his seventies, and looked to be one of those types who’ll retire when they die. Maybe. His features reminded me of a garden gnome, but without the whiskers or the bonhomie. And there was no red, pointy hat, of course. He wasn’t the warm, fuzzy type, to be sure. At least, that’s what Meg had said in an email to me when she told me she’d fired him, about a month earlier. I wondered why on earth she’d invited him.

  His wife was swathed in real furs and, almost literally, dripping with diamonds; her small, chubby hands sparkled as she fiddled about with her hairdo, trying to ensure the headrest didn’t mess it up at the back.

  Across the aisle was a woman sitting alone; I was surprised that I didn’t recognize her, because I was pretty sure it was Meg’s mother, Jean Jones. Of course I’d known her when I was growing up, but I couldn’t place the woman at all; I remembered Meg’s mum as short and round with a red face and thick, dark hair. This woman might well have been short – it was difficult to tell given that she was seated – but she was extremely thin and had snow-white hair cut in a ‘pixie’ style. I’d noticed as I’d passed that her face was pinched into a look of disapproval, and that she had a sallow complexion to boot. Sour-faced would just about sum it up. And that wasn’t how I remembered Meg’s mum at all. Odd for me, given that I’ve got this famous ‘photographic memory’ thing.

  Directly in front of me was a man I had no trouble recognizing; Luis Lopez, Meg’s fiancé, and a world-famous TV cop – thanks to a highly-rated series where every conceivable type of crime committed in LA was solved by Luis, pretty much single-handedly, and with a ‘suspend your disbelief’ reason for him to have to remove his shirt in each episode. Like the rest of the world I was glued to the screen every week as Luis strutted his unquestionably well-worked-out, thirty-something-year-old stuff for all to see.

  Now here I was, little Cait Morgan, sitting within a foot of the man many women would like to kidnap and make their love-slave. Truth be told, knowing he would be there had meant I’d made up my mind to definitely come; of course I wanted to see Meg again, but to see Luis Lopez in the flesh? Well, a girl would fly a lot further than an hour from home to do that. I could even smell his aftershave wafting back toward me; like him it was dark and exotic.

  Alongside Luis was a tall, round, ruddy man with a thatch of unruly iron-gray hair, a checked three-piece suit, and a bow tie. Given that I work at a university, it didn’t take much of a stretch for me to peg this man as Dan James, Meg’s husband number three, a professor of English at Harvard, and the man Meg had walked out on before she’d set off on her now-famous epic journey across the USA. He was the one who’d told her she’d never hold down a job for more than a week because she was too dumb. Oh boy, must he be eating his words.

  In case you haven’t been keeping up with your supermarket magazines, that was how Meg came to write her first bestseller; the day after her fortieth birthday she walked out on husband number three – Dan – took herself off across the USA on a series of buses, and wrote as she travelled. Upon her eventual return to New York, she quite literally bumped into Martha Gray in the hat department at Macy’s, they’d struck up a conversation, Martha introduced Meg to her agent husband who read Meg’s manuscript, and the rest – as they always say – was history. Except, of course, that in this case is was herstory, with Meg’s first book – about a forty-year-old woman walking out on her husband, taking a bus trip across America and finding true love – becoming a bestseller for months, and then a mega-grossing movie.

  I suspected that Meg didn’t need to put pen to paper ever again, she’d probably made so much money from that one book; but she did keep putting pen to paper, and each book became yet another ‘fastest-selling-ever’ volume. A signed copy of a first edition of ‘The New Meg Jones Book’ could become serious collateral in certain circles.

  So, if the fat, ruddy guy dressed like a professor was the professor – and husband number three – then the other guy with what appeared to be a wife must be Peter Webber, husband number one – with his now-wife, Sally. Once again, I felt a bit wrong-footed, because I thought I should have met Peter when we were all growing up in Manselton together; apparently he’d lived in the street behind Meg’s, but she’d assured me I’d never known him, though we both suspected I must have known of him. In my defense, Peter was a popular name at the time. However, he looked so old that I struggled to imagine he was only my age; I mean, forty-eight isn’t old, is it? No, the sandy-haired guy with the sandy-haired wife beside him definitely looked a lot older than me . . . at least, he looked a lot older than the person I see in the mirror in the morning when I’m not wearing my reading cheats.

  Meg had told me in a recent email that the only reason she’d married husband number one, Peter, was so they’d have enough ‘points’ to be able to emigrate to Canada in the early 1980s. Of course I’d known at the time that about two weeks after we’d finished our A-level exams in the June she’d gone and got herself married, and had been out of the country before I’d even left for university in the October. Finding that out had floored all of us who knew the girl for whom hedonism was an art form, and the idea of being married was something she’d laughed at, almost as hard as she’d laughed at the idea of having children.

  But, at the age of eighteen she was married and gone . . . and I’d left Swansea for university in Cardiff, where I met new people with whom I’d share stories over a few pints about the ‘Deadly Duo’, which was how Megan Jones and Caitlin Morgan – Meg and I – had been referred to since we’d met on our first day at school.

  I was always sure Meg would make her own inimitable way in the world . . . and I’d been right. Straight out of school she’d married Peter, and they’d moved to Vancouver where he’d worked as a lighting technician in the booming movie industry of the day, which Meg and I had agreed in recent emails was ironic, given that was where I was living now. Then she’d moved to New York, as Peter followed various movie shoots, where she’d divorced him – I had no idea why – and had taken up with, then married, someone called Adrian, husband number two. He wasn’t mentioned on her website as anything more than a name; ‘Adrian, a musician’. I guessed he was the wrinkly guy sitting at the front of the bus.

  Meg had never mentioned him in any of her emails to me, so I knew nothing about him. There was something vaguely familiar about his face, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Despite the darkening skies, he’d been wearing sunglasses when I got onto the bus, and had a deerstalker pulled down on his head. It takes some nerve to wear one of those things, so I suspected he was no shrinking violet. (We psychologists are good at spotting that sort of thing, you know.) He was thin, almost to the point of emaciation, gray-haired, and had long, tapering fingers . . . I’d noticed them right away. Why did he look slightly familiar? A photographic memory is all well and
good – except when it lets you down.

  Anyway, then Meg had gone on to divorce this ‘Adrian’ person, husband number two, after a few years, and married Dan James, husband number 3, who eventually took up a professorship at Harvard. He’d been offered the post thanks to the phenomenal success of some poems he’d written. I’ve recently read them, by way of research, and they are . . . well, I suspect ‘puzzling’ would be the kindest word, because he likes to use a lot of Greek quotations; not allusions, which I could probably cope with, but actual Greek. All very Ezra Pound-like. He was the husband Meg had left to take to the road, after which she met the Grays, acquired great fame and wealth for herself, and she’d just recently announced her engagement to the ravishing Luis Lopez, who’d played the lead in the movie they’d made of her first book.

  Quite a life for a girl from the terraced streets of Manselton.

  Our arrival at McKewan’s Lodge was pretty chaotic; the huge, log-built edifice, named for the man who’d built it back in the 1930s, rather than for the family which now owned it, had a large covered porch, which proved useful because it took forever to get all our bags off the little bus. Finally over the threshold, and out of the swirling snowflakes, Luis offered to carry our bags to our rooms.

  Meg, our hostess, was nowhere to be seen; I thought at the time she could have made a bit more of an effort to be there as we arrived, but it turned out she’d been tied up in the kitchen with the caterers, who were just finishing their preparations and keen to get away before the snow really settled in.

  It took about half an hour, but eventually we’d all worked out which rooms we were in (at least Meg had possessed the foresight to pin names to doors) and we’d all pulled out of our cases whatever it was that needed pulling out of our cases. The lodge was pleasant enough; it was old, and there hadn’t been many updates made during the previous seventy years or so, but it was spotlessly clean. I discovered later that the current owners used it as their summer home, and it did, indeed, feel truly homey, though it had clearly originally been built to accommodate guests, which was handy.