Chapter Wednesday 19 March 2025 London Meredith and Josh #2
“It’s got to be Sally Lambert, surely? I think it’s all Sally,” Josh admits after a brief pause.
“I think she killed Tess. Somehow, she must have, I don’t know, got some fish into her.
I know, I know, the postmortem. I can’t justify my position, but…
” He shrugs. “I think it was Sally who set fire to the Gaveys’ house, Sally who wrote the book.
The book tells us itself: She wanted to be a famous writer.
It also tells us she joined an online writing community at a certain point. The clues are there.”
“See, I think it’s all Corinne Sullivan,” says Meredith.
“Corinne, or one of her helpers, found a way to kill Tess without it registering as an unnatural death. Corinne then arranged for the fire to be started at the Stables. Again, one of her minions will have done it, not her personally. And maybe Sally wrote some of the book, but I reckon Corinne had a hand in that too. I think she’d be able to produce something as polished as Lamberts, whereas I’m not sure Sally Lambert would, especially if she’s never written anything before. Maybe they wrote it together.”
“Maybe they committed the three murders together,” Josh says.
“Why aren’t the deaths of Lesley and Alastair Gavey mentioned?
” Meredith asks him. “The fire is, but their deaths aren’t.
All it says about the Gavey parents at the end is ‘Very soon after Tess’s death, Lesley and Alastair Gavey left the village.
’ Doesn’t mention that they left in body bags. Why not?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” says Josh.
“Is it?”
“Yeah, I think so. You can’t put deaths in a book and not explain them. Tess’s death can be explained—Furbert was responsible, and he can safely admit it, being a spirit in Level 2 and therefore not arrestable for murder.”
“Oh, I see.” This made sense to Meredith.
“Yes, and in the writer’s invented point of view for Furbert, he doesn’t want to implicate the other killer, if the arsonist wasn’t him.
But he’s mentioning the fire, right? And whoever wrote the book knows that anyone reading it will know about Lesley and Alastair dying in that fire, so…
maybe Furbert’s happy to leave their deaths as unsolved mysteries.
Are we meant to think he’s doing what Agatha Christie did in The Rose and the Yew Tree?
Remember the bit where he tells us Corinne Sullivan ‘cannot bear mystery books in which the solution is handed to the reader on a platter, having not got where she is today by relying on others to problem-solve for her’?
You see, I think Corinne wrote that. Not Sally. ”
“It’s clearly a novel written by an obsessive dog-lover, though,” says Josh. “A devoted ‘dog mum’ for whom having her dead pet narrate sections of a book might satisfy all kinds of emotional yearnings, help to process grief…”
“If my dog had died, writing a novel in which he narrates killing a teenage girl as if it’s a great accomplishment… That wouldn’t cheer me up,” Meredith says.
“True.”
“I’m not Sally Lambert, though. I wouldn’t burn my neighbors to death.”
Josh laughs. “If you were capable of doing that, it would have happened by now.”
“True.” Meredith’s next-door neighbors are rancorous head cases.
“No, I’m sticking with Corinne, I’m afraid—maybe not as killer but definitely as author.
Why is the ‘Never work for someone who can fire you’ poem included in full, apart from to promote Corinne’s worldview, in which anyone who isn’t entrepreneurial is a waste of space? ”
The waiter is making his way toward them to clear away their starter plates.
Meredith sits and waits, listening to snatches of the various conversations that are going on around her.
Contracts, software, roll-out, implementation, stag do, appraisal, hangover, pickle ball, consultant, seating plan, implementation again.
Everyone is, thank goodness, too busy talking to eavesdrop.
Once the waiter and the used plates are gone, Meredith says, “Any thoughts about who Saul Hollingwood might be?”
“None whatsoever. You?”
She starts to recite from memory: “‘There are causes, and then there are clinchers, and the memory of Lesley’s fake concern—“It’s not fair to give a dog a joke name like that, Sally. It’s disrespectful, actually”—fell decisively into the clincher category.
The stark fact is that, if those two sentences had never been uttered, a young man named Saul Hollingwood would have gone to work as usual on 29 June 2024 instead of doing what he did after calling in sick.
(He sounds as if he matters to our story, doesn’t he?
Yet this is the first and last time his name will appear in these pages.)’”
Josh looks impressed. “I bet you know the whole book by heart, don’t you?”
“I think that passage is digging into the motive for the murders. The cause, as in the main motive, was everything terrible the Gaveys did to the Lamberts.”
“And the fact that, even though Champ was in the clear, Sally knew Lesley Gavey was so hate-fueled, she might try to harm him in a different way,” says Josh.
“Right. Yes, that also counts as cause. But the clincher was that particular memory—that Lesley had actually sat in Sally’s living room and said something so insensitive about poor departed Furbert.”
“Sounds like you agree Sally Lambert’s the murderer, then,” Josh points out. “Because that would be a clincher for Sally, but not Corinne. That’s Sally’s memory, not Corinne’s.”
“Very true,” Meredith concedes. “And yet…I’m also keen on the theory that Saul Hollingwood is one of Corinne’s many flunkies—the one who was given the arson assignment.”
“Sally and Corinne working together,” says Josh, nodding. “Writing together, murdering together… Thinking about it, Corinne must have been involved. I doubt Sally would have been able to find out that we’re about to launch a new publishing company.”
Meredith nods. “Corinne’ll have people on tap to look into everything for her. She’ll have contacts who have contacts.”
“Exactly.”
“Josh, I need to tell you something. I went to Cambridgeshire last week. To Swaffham Tilney. I…spoke to people.” This is the other thing Meredith has been scared of: admitting how far she has taken her interest in the Lamberts and the Gaveys.
Josh looks alarmed—excited, maybe—but not annoyed, not worried about her sanity. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Mainly because I felt like a deluded, naive schoolgirl trying to have some kind of stupid adventure. I doubted I’d find out any more than we’d already got from your call to Cambridgeshire Police. But…I think I found out quite a bit. Which maybe matters less now that we know we’re not publishing—”
“Tell me,” says Josh. “Every single detail.”
“Okay, so…we already knew Bill Wendt is real. I spoke to him. Believe me, he couldn’t have cared less, just wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible.
He’s not a lovable shepherd’s-pie-eating chubster.
He’s thin. I don’t know, maybe he lost weight, which he’s allowed to, but I was disappointed.
I was looking forward to meeting ‘Large’ and having a jolly chat.
No such luck. He’s a jobsworth and an arsehole.
He told me what he’d told you and no more: Tess died roughly two hours before Lesley and Alastair did.
There was no smoke in her lungs and evidence of an allergic reaction of the kind she’d had before, to fish.
The fire was started deliberately, and no one beyond Lesley and Alastair Gavey had ever been considered as a possible suspect.
The police were satisfied that it must have been one of the Gavey parents who did it. ”
Meredith waits while their main courses are laid out on the table in front of them: more dim sum for her, with delicious steam rising from them.
“Once Wendt had washed his hands of me, I asked for Detective Connor Chantree, and guess what? He’s a real cop too, works for Cambridgeshire Police, but he’s not the one who went round to the Lamberts on 17 June to say that Champ had been reported for biting Tess. Guess which cop he is?”
“Um…a different one?” says Josh. “He and Large are the only two police characters in the book.”
“A third one gets a quick mention,” says Meredith.
“The one who pulled Sally Lambert over for using her mobile phone while in a traffic jam. That was Connor Chantree. Who does, it has to be said, look a little like the brush from a dustpan-and-brush set and whose wife, Flo, runs a catering company called Scrumplicious.”
“You met Connor Chantree? Spoke to him?”
Meredith nods. “It was one of the dullest experiences of my life. I had to listen to nearly ten minutes of waffle about why it was, actually, very vital to write up all incidents of people looking at their phones while in traffic jams.”
Josh smiles. “Oh, dear.”
“Yeah. Not the most fascinating exchange I’ve ever had.”
“Interesting that the writer or writers of Lamberts didn’t just use the name of the officer who came round on 17 June, though.”
“So then I went to Shoe Cottage, ‘Shukes,’ and spoke to none other than Sally Lambert herself.”
“Really? Is that…”
“A good idea?” Meredith finishes Josh’s question for him.
“It turned out to be, yes. Sally, Ree, and Champ Lambert were the only ones home. Champ is absolutely adorable, by the way. Even the cutest of the pictures on his website don’t quite do him justice.
Sally was interesting. She was super-friendly and lovely—offered me tea, homemade scones, a cuddle or a walk with Champ, whichever I preferred—but she was adamant that she wasn’t willing to talk about anything connected to what she called ‘that horrible time.’ I went for a walk with her and Champ, round and round the village green, and every time I tried to sneak in a question, she instantly repeated the same thing: ‘I’m so sorry, and I know how frustrating it must be for everyone, but I won’t be speaking about any of that again. Ever.’”