‘Yeah that’s how it works in real life too,’ says Harbinder. ‘Always.’
‘Well, I started putting the books in boxes. Then I got bored and started to read bits of them. Then I noticed something.’
‘What?’ says Harbinder. Natalka is obviously trying to string the story out but Harbinder is in a tolerant mood.
‘They are all written to her. Mrs Smith.’
‘Written by her?’
‘No.’ Natalka clicks her fingers, trying to come up with the word. ‘They are written to her. To Mrs Smith, without whom . . . et cetera, et cetera.’
‘Dedicated to her?’
‘Yes! Dedicated to her. All these murder books are dedicated to her. Isn’t that strange?’
‘I suppose so. Are they written by different people?’
‘Yes, lots of different people. But lots by Dex Challoner. He’s famous. I googled him.’
Harbinder has heard of Dex Challoner. He’s a local author and his books are piled high at every bookshop in the country. They seem to feature a private investigator called Tod France who doesn’t look like any PI Harbinder has ever met.
‘And they’re all dedicated to this Mrs Smith?’
‘Some are. Some just mention her in the back pages, you know.’
‘The acknowledgements?’
‘Yes. Thanks to Mum and Dad. Thanks to my publishers. And thanks to Mrs Smith.’
‘I wonder why.’
‘I know why,’ says Natalka, with the air of one putting down a winning hand. ‘Mrs Smith is a murder consultant. I found this. It was on the table next to her chair. The chair she died in,’ she adds, with what seems like unnecessary relish.
Natalka puts a small white card in front of Harbinder. Sure enough, in small Gothic print it says, Mrs M. Smith. Murder Consultant.
‘Murder consultant?’ says Harbinder. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Natalka. ‘But it’s suspicious, isn’t it? A woman dies and then it turns out that she’s a murder consultant.’
‘We need to find out what it means before we decide if it’s suspicious,’ says Harbinder. ‘And why does it say M. Smith? I thought you said her name was Peggy.’
‘Peggy is sometimes short for Margaret,’ says Natalka. ‘English names are odd like that.’
‘I am English,’ says Harbinder. She’s not going to let Natalka assume otherwise, just because she’s not white.
‘I’m Ukrainian,’ says Natalka. ‘We have lots of strange names too.’
Harbinder thinks of Ukraine and a series of ominous images scrolls through her head: Chernobyl, the Crimea, Ukrainian airline crash. She wonders whether Natalka will prove similarly bad news.
‘How did Peggy Smith die?’ she says.
‘Heart attack,’ says Natalka. ‘That’s what the doctor said. I was the one who found her. She was just sitting in her chair by the window.’
‘So no sign of anything suspicious?’
‘I didn’t think so at the time. Nor did my boss. But now I’m wondering. I mean, how do you know what’s suspicious and what isn’t?’
‘That’s a good question,’ says Harbinder.
She thinks about this conversation on the drive home. On the face of it, a ninety-year-old woman dying in her chair does not seem particularly suspicious. But maybe the mysterious Natalka (mysteriously attractive Natalka) is right. Maybe they should look below the surface of things. It does seem odd that an elderly lady should be mentioned in so many books. And ‘murder consultant’ does have a very sinister ring to it. Harbinder tells her phone to ring Clare. She’s still old enough to get a buzz out of hands-free stuff. Her nieces and nephews take it all for granted.
‘Hi, Harbinder.’ Clare’s voice – confident, slightly impatient – fills the car. ‘What’s up?’
‘Have you ever had a book dedicated to you?’
‘What?’
‘You read a lot. You teach creative writing. Has anyone ever dedicated a book to you? For Clare, without whom this book would have been finished in half the time.’
Clare laughs. ‘No, I’ve never had a book dedicated to me.’
‘Not even Henry’s?’ Clare’s boyfriend is a Cambridge academic.
‘I might get a mention in the acknowledgements of the new one, I suppose.’
‘Would you think it was odd if someone, quite an ordinary person, had lots of books dedicated to them and was mentioned in lots of acknowledgements?’
‘Unless they were a copy editor, yes.’
‘What does a copy editor do?’
‘Are you thinking of going into publishing? A copy editor checks a manuscript for mistakes, names changing, timelines going wrong, that sort of thing. Then a proofreader checks it again. Except they don’t seem to use proofreaders as much as they used to.’
Could Peggy Smith have been a proofreader? It’s possible, she supposes. It sounds like the sort of job a retired person might do. But the card hadn’t said ‘proofreader’. It had said ‘murder consultant’.
‘What’s all this about?’ says Clare. ‘Are you going to come over? I’ve made pasta. There’s loads left.’
‘Sounds tempting,’ says Harbinder, ‘but I should be getting home. See you soon. Love to Georgie and Herbert.’
It’s nearly ten o’clock by the time that Harbinder parks in the underground garage near her parents’ house. She still thinks of it like that although she lives there too. Sometimes she says to herself, in suitably shocked tones: ‘Harbinder Kaur was thirty-six years old, unmarried, and still lived with her parents.’ If she read that in a book, she’d lose all sympathy with the character. Mind you, Harbinder doesn’t read that sort of book. But, apart from a brief period when she’d shared a flat with other police cadets, she has lived in the flat above the shop all her life. In some ways, it suits her very well. Harbinder actually enjoys her parents’ company and it’s nice having someone to cook for you and generally look after you. But there are other drawbacks. Her parents don’t know she’s gay, for one thing.
She hopes that the house is quiet. The shop shuts at nine-thirty, her mother will probably be dozing in front of the TV, having left Harbinder something delicious warming in the oven. Her father will be getting outraged about the evening news and Starsky, their dozy German shepherd, will be nagging for his last walk. But, as she climbs the stairs, she can hear voices talking in Punjabi. Oh no, her parents must have friends round. How did two such sociable people produce a daughter who prefers Panda Pop to humanity?