Page 19

Miranda leaned in to read from the page that had been pierced to the author’s heart.

The shaft of the arrow acted almost like a bookmark, holding it open.

“ ‘Tough guys don’t last,’ said Mick Hardy as he regained consciousness .

” Kane’s blood had soaked through the paper, was trickling between the pages, only now starting to thicken.

She stepped back. “Hmm.”

“Seems sorta random to me,” said Ned.

“Random is never quite as random as you might randomly think!” she declared.

The book was the key. It had to be. It couldn’t be mere chance that it was one of Kane’s own novels he’d died with. It had to explain how the murder had occurred. Miranda was sure of it, even if she didn’t know how.

“Four,” said a voice from the doorway. “You missed one, champ.”

It was Lachlan Todd, leaning against the side of the door with his usual snigger of a smile, smarmy as ever.

“Stay back,” said Ned. “This is a crime scene.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of interfering with your ‘crack’ police work.” (The air quotes were evident in his tone.) “I was listening to your theories with mounting amusement, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that there are actually four points of entry. You missed one.”

“And which one would that be, friend?” said Ned.

“The radiator below the window!”

“The radiator? How is that an entry point?”

“That’s a hot water radiator, I presume?

Which are known to be—mark this!— hollow .

One could snake a flexible dental mirror up from below, through the steam pipes, having earlier removed the radiator cap, and then turn the mirror once it emerges until the light from the standing lamp bounces off it and focuses the beam onto a thin flammable thread tied to the cabinet door, wherein a booby trap lies hidden!

The heat burns through the thread, which then springs open the cabinet door.

Shocked, Kane naturally holds up the first thing he can find to protect himself—one of his own books, as chance would have it—and the arrow fired from the booby trap stabs through him like a literary shish kebab.

Meanwhile, the booby trap that fired the arrow, being cleverly constructed from tightly rolled flash paper, the kind that magicians use, flares up and disappears in an instant.

The dental mirror is then withdrawn through the radiator—which is hollow, remember!

—as the cap is screwed back into place using a high-powered magnet from below, after which a second stronger magnet is then used to partially unlock the latch on the transom as an act of cunning misdirection.

Radiator, dental mirror, magnets. What could be simpler?

You want your culprit, look for the nearest dentist!

” Lachlan’s eyes narrowed. His attention was now focused specifically on Doc Meadows.

“Which leads to my final question.” He was building up a head of steam for his big Aha!

moment. “Exactly what sort of ‘doctor’ are you, Mr. Meadows—if that really is your name?”

“Me? GP and obstetrics, mainly. I’m not a dentist, no. And yup, Meadows is my real name. Ned can vouch for me, seeing as how we grew up together.”

“Oh,” Lachlan said. “Not a dentist? Well, there goes my theory. Carry on.”

He traipsed back to the main room to antagonize his fellow writers with further theories of magnets and mirrors.

It might have been risible were it not for the fact that Lachlan Todd, as was later revealed, was absolutely correct in one aspect of his suggested solution.

In among the verbiage was a cold hard nugget of truth.

“The scripts Lachlan used to hand in for Pastor Fran Investigates were equally convoluted,” Edgar complained, like the former head writer he was.

“If the arrow was fired at Kane from the transom, and if he did fall backwards into the chair, he must have crossed the room, past the chair, to be thrown into it when he died,” said Miranda. “Otherwise, as Ned pointed out, he would have fallen against the back of the door instead.”

She studied the body sprawled out in the chair facing the cabinet. Something was wrong, something about the ankles...

“Oh my god,” said Edgar. “I was so distracted by the John D. Ross first editions Kane was flinging about that I forgot about the manuscript!” He stepped over Kane’s feet, avoided looking at the corpse itself, and peered inside the cabinet.

He breathed a sigh of relief. The glass door to the cabinet was now open, but the manuscript was still there, still safe.

“Untouched,” he said.

“Not quite,” Miranda noted.

The thick stack of papers had been turned over inside the cabinet. They now lay face down, and the rubber band that had once been around them was now gone. It would later be found inside Kane’s overcoat pocket, alongside his trilby hat.

Ned Buckley warned Miranda away. “Don’t touch anything!”

“You touched the grate,” she said.

“That’s different. I’m a police officer.”

“ Chief ,” said Miranda. “You are the chief , not a bushel. One does not hide one’s light in such a manner, remember? Live bushel-free, Ned! Bushel-free.”

She inched closer to the cabinet, but Ned stopped her.

“We should at least check that the entire manuscript is there,” Edgar said, his curiosity overcoming his discomfort at sharing a room with a corpse. “The last page, Ned. Can you check? Does it say fin— or The End or something—at the bottom ?”

Ned checked. “Nope. The typing runs right to the end of the page, cuts off in mid-sentence.”

Edgar and Miranda crowded closer, but Ned shooed them back.

“Hey. Don’t jostle the body,” Doc said.

“The page number,” said Edgar. “What’s the number of that last page in the manuscript?”

Ned checked. It was 297.

“There’s a page missing!” said Edgar. “When the manuscript arrived, there were 298 pages. You said the typewritten text goes to the very end of the page. What does it say?”

Ned read the last lines out loud. “ Trevor Lucas, the world’s most lethal ex-Navy shore patrol Korean War vet turned burglar for hire, stared at the woman across from him.

‘You want to know who was behind it? Every one of the killings? Every one of them, right from the start? I'll tell you who, and I’ll tell you now. It was—’”

And there it ended.