Missing Susan Read online

  Rowan Rover hazarded another sip of his Scotch. “You want me to kill your niece.”

  Kosminski fingered his butter-soft leather gloves with a thoughtful expression. “Perhaps I could rephrase it. My niece Susan will embark on your murder tour of England this fall, and I would like her, while on this tour, to have a fatal accident, which shall be viewed by the police and all concerned as a regrettable but wholly unavoidable mishap. In return for your orchestrating this event, I am prepared to pay you the sum of fifty thousand dollars, whatever that happens to be in pounds at the time of the transaction.”

  Rowan Rover blinked. “Why do you want to kill your niece?”

  Kosminski sighed. “It is apparent, Mr. Rover, that you have never met my niece. But apart from aesthetics, the answer is the usual one: money. Dear Susan, her personal failings aside, has inherited the family money from her doting, but misguided grandfather. My father, a shrewd businessman, but with a dangerous flaw of sentimentality.”

  “No family resemblance there, then,” said Rowan cheerfully.

  Kosminski ignored the interruption. “Rather than sensibly investing this money into the family business, my niece Susan has decided to-as she puts it-retire.”

  “How old is she?”

  Kosminski’s frown deepened. “Thirty-six.”

  “I see. So she has a good bit of time in which to frivol away the family fortunes.”

  “We rather hope not, Mr. Rover,” said Kosminski with a piercing stare. “That is where you come in.”

  Rowan squirmed under the businessman’s earnest stare. “Pardon my curiosity,” he said timidly, “but why bring me into this? Surely as an American you have access to any amount of professional assassins.”

  Kosminski sighed. “Not in Minneapolis,” he said, in the tone of one who is loath to admit his hometown’s inadequacies. “Besides, hit men usually use guns, making it all too obvious that a murder has been committed. That would mean an investigation. What we want is an unfortunate accident. And the farther from home the better.”

  “Preferably in rural England, I take it.”

  “Precisely. When Susan announced that she wanted to waste yet more of her inheritance on this frivolous mystery tour, I came over to make inquiries. A background check on the proposed guide indicated that you might be eminently suitable for our purposes, and that the offer of a large sum of cash might be most welcome.”

  “A large sum of cash is always welcome,” said Rowan evasively.

  “This much money should last you a good while. That is, if you don’t invest in any more wives,” said Kosminski with a nasty smile.

  “No, it’s a bad habit,” said Rowan. “I’ve forsaken it. I smoke now instead. Packs and packs a day. Would you care for one? Cigarette, I mean. Though I’ve wives to spare as well.”

  “Fifty… thousand… dollars,” said Kosminski slowly.

  Somehow, between the double Scotches and Aaron Kosminski’s quiet insistence, Rowan Rover had found himself tentatively agreeing to accept employment. It had seemed rather logical at the time. After all, the tour was months away, and just as likely to be canceled as not. Besides, Kosminski had done a thorough job of researching his prospective assassin. When the preliminaries were over, he had produced a budget of Rowan Rover’s projected yearly income, offset with his ominous new expenditures. The resulting deficit was so crushing that murder seemed a small price to pay to make it all go away. By the time Kosminski had finished his murder talk, and was advising his hired assassin on sound investments and the virtues of a strict budget, the whole interview had assumed the surreal quality of one of Richard Jones’ well-planned practical jokes. Rowan had found himself agreeing as if the conversation were part of a script. In time, the incident became just another pub conversation.

  Until today.

  Today he found in his mailbox a business envelope bearing American postage stamps, with a post office box for a return address. Inside the envelope was a cashier’s check for ten thousand pounds, and a note that said, “Remainder upon completion of the task. Bon voyage. A.K.”

  So it hadn’t been a practical joke, after all. That gave him pause. For several minutes he stood there with the letter in his hand, staring stupidly into space while he considered all the implications of the message. How could he possibly have allowed himself to get mixed up in such lunacy? Finally he put the letter aside, and withdrew the rest of the mail from the box. There was the usual assortment of bills, a window-enveloped letter from the bursar’s office of Sebastian’s public school (marked URGENT), and a circular from a company that specialized in boat repair. Rowan Rover glanced at his watch. There was still time to deposit the cashier’s check before the bank closed. At least that would eliminate all his nagging financial problems, leaving him with one enormous moral one: the contemplation of murder.

  Now, ten thousand pounds richer and on the verge of paying his debts, he was solvent, but no less apprehensive. He began to contemplate his next course of action. “After all,” he told himself, as he nervously rearranged the books in his suitcase, “I am an authority on murder. I’ve written books on British murder cases. Don’t I stand up and tell people that if Crippen hadn’t used hyoscine-of all the improbable poisons!-he’d have gone free? Don’t I laugh when I talk about that stupid solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong, who kept inviting his enemies to tea long after they’d begun to notice that having tea with Herbert gave them stomach cramps symptomatic of arsenic poisoning? And he paid for his stupidity on the gallows, right enough.” The thought of the gallows was chilling, but, after all, Britain had abolished capital punishment in the early Sixties, and, much as the public wanted it back when they caught the Moors Murderers, it had stayed abolished. No worries about the hangman, then.

  Rowan Rover was an expert on every tantalizing murder Britain had ever seen. He knew who was caught and why, and in most of the so-called unsolved cases, he knew who had done it and how they managed to get away with it. This knowledge was, after all, the reason he had been engaged to host the September murder tour. “If I wanted to,” he told himself cautiously, “I’m sure I could get away with murder. I’ve been studying it all my life.”

  Then in his best imitation of American ex-president Richard Nixon, he shook imaginary jowls, and said, “But it would be wro-ong!”

  He picked up the paperback encyclopedia of crime and stared at its cover, a collage of murderers’ faces, all very ordinary and respectable-looking. “Still,” he said thoughtfully, “it would be interesting to see if I could stage a convincing accident. I could certainly name a few killers who managed it. I wouldn’t mind seeing if I could get away scot-free.”

  Suddenly he pictured his own face adorning the cover of a future edition of the encyclopedia of crime: the carefully dyed black hair, the distinguished bulbous nose, and his dark eyes narrowed into the menacing slits indicative of a merciless killer. It didn’t bear thinking about. He buried the offending volume beneath a couple of handkerchiefs in the suitcase, then turned his attention to the Guide to England. It was all very well to speculate on the fanciful, but his immediate responsibility was to lead a well-researched and entertaining tour for the travel company. They, after all, might wish to hire him again. Whereas the Kosminski offer was, while generous, hardly the thing he would wish to turn into a career. (He pictured himself in a cell next to the surviving Kray twin, swapping grisly business tips. No, definitely not a career.)

  He took out his tour itinerary and hotel brochures, supplied by his employers. There were to be eleven travelers, and, judging from the names, ten of them were women. After he met them, he could make decisions about how strenuous the tour could be. If most of them were upwards of seventy, then he must curb his desire for three-mile walks before lunch. Also, before he planned a detailed list of places to visit, he must gauge their knowledge of and interest in true crime. (Would they want to see the pond where Agatha Christie began her famous disappearance? Or would they want seamier stuff-the field near Alton where Sweet
Fanny Adams was dismembered in 1867, thus giving the Royal Navy a new slang term for canned meat? Truthfully, Rowan Rover hoped for the former: the case of poor, young Fanny Adams sickened even his Ripper-hardened soul.)

  The tour would begin with a two-night stay in Winchester, in the hotel next to the cathedral. From there he could plan day-trips to nearby places of interest. He consulted the atlas to see what locales lay within an hour’s drive of Winchester. He wouldn’t think about Susan just now, he decided. There would be time enough to worry about that once he got the tour well under way. Besides, Rowan Rover was from Cornwall; Hampshire was not familiar country to him. Accidents would be much easier to arrange on home turf, he thought. Wait until we get to the West Country. The phrase poor Susan went west sprang unbidden to mind, and he actually laughed out loud-before the implication of the entire plan sent him pawing through the guidebook for safer subjects to contemplate. He found the assassination of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury; the Peasenhall case: throat-cutting in Suffolk; ritual sacrifices at Stonehenge. No matter where he looked, it all came back to murder.

  “Let him go abroad to a distant country;

  let him go to some place where he is not known;

  Don’t let him go to the Devil, where he is known!”

  – JONATHAN SWIFT

  CHAPTER 4

  GATWICK

  “EXCUSE ME,” SAID Elizabeth MacPherson to the nearest Gatwick airport official. “I just got off a plane. Do I have to go through customs?”

  The guard, or whatever he was, paused in mid-dash to consider her question. “Where did you fly in from?” he asked.

  “Edinburgh.”

  The man gave her a pitying smile. “Then it won’t be necessary, ma’am. Scotland is a part of this country, you see.”

  It was on the tip of Elizabeth’s unrepentant Jacobite tongue to snap back, “Well, it oughtn’t to be!” But she realized that airport officials take a dim view of unsanctioned patriots, and that such a reply could lead to an unpleasant half-hour search of herself and her belongings, on the off chance that she was that rarest of political animals: a Scottish terrorist. In any case, the man looked much too harried to be interested in a discussion of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Rebellion of 1745, so she smiled sweetly, hoisted her bags, and hurried away to find the airport lobby.

  It would be several hours yet before all of the tour members’ planes arrived, since they had set out from half a dozen different cities. Elizabeth, the only one not flying in from the United States, had arrived just after nine in the morning, which gave her at least four hours to wait for the coach and guide, scheduled to meet the party at two o’clock. The rendezvous point for the murder mystery tour was to be the luggage carousel on the first floor of the airport. Until then, lacking name tags with which to identify each other as fellow travelers, the early-arriving tour members would prowl the airport shops and restaurants, killing time until someone came to collect them.

  Elizabeth first looked round all the eating places, marveling at the exorbitant food prices. Although she had been in Scotland for a little over two months, her mind still ran on the U.S. currency system, which, at the current exchange rate, meant doubling the stated price of everything, in order to get an emotional understanding of how much anything cost. Inevitably, the short answer was: too much. She read the McDonald’s sign with an expression of disbelief usually reserved for UFO sightings.

  “They’re charging four dollars for a hamburger!” she muttered. “I wouldn’t pay that if they were making them out of last year’s Derby winner.”

  Similar responses to menu prices in Edinburgh had caused Cameron to remark that after only eight weeks in residence, she was out-Scottishing the Scots. Elizabeth replied that it was culture shock, and began muttering threats about CARE packages whenever she went out shopping.

  “Anyway,” she said, turning her back on the metaphorical golden arches, “the last thing I want to eat in Britain is American food. I’ll go back to the cafeteria and have tea and scones.”

  The return trek to the upstairs restaurant took longer than it should have, because the hallway led past Elizabeth’s main weakness: a row of gift shops. Her cousin Geoffrey liked to remark that had Elizabeth been aboard the Titanic, she would have checked the gift shop for a Going Out of Business Sale before proceeding to the lifeboat. She glanced at an enticing window display of Beefeater teddy bears and scenic linen towels. It wouldn’t hurt to browse for a little while, she thought. It’s not as if I’m short of time.

  Once inside she went straight to the postcard rack, assuring herself that she was only looking, because it would be stupid to buy postcards in the airport on the first day of a three-week tour. Well, maybe just a couple, to give herself a head start on correspondence. There didn’t seem to be much point in attempting to correspond with Cameron, who would be at sea for five more weeks, annoying the seals of the north Atlantic. “Perhaps you could toss a note in a Guinness bottle into the sea at Land’s End,” he’d suggested, when she brought up the subject of writing. To which she replied that there’d be enough Guinness bottles aboard the research vessel without her contributing to the supply.

  With Cameron incommunicado, the list of correspondents dwindled to her parents, her brother Bill, her insufferable cousin Geoffrey, and her new in-laws. She was searching the postcard rack for cards suitably impertinent for Bill and Geoffrey, when a tall young woman beside her picked up a postcard portrait of Princess Diana and said, “Back in the States we have a mystery writer who looks just like her!”

  Elizabeth was unable to think of a reply to this gambit, and she wasn’t entirely sure that this total stranger was addressing her. (There is nothing worse than replying to a stranger’s pleasantry, only to discover that the intended recipient of the remark is the person standing directly behind you.)

  She smiled vaguely to indicate polite disinterest, then went back to studying the postcards.

  “You’re American, aren’t you?” the woman persisted.

  Elizabeth, suspecting insult, longed to reply in the negative, but such an accusation is difficult to deny with a Virginia accent. She took a long look at her interrogator. The woman was the personification of Cheerleader: shoulder-length blonde hair, trim figure, and a perky beauty-pageant smile. Just the sort of person that Elizabeth wished the Japanese would hunt, instead of whales. She summoned up a chilling smile. “I’m from Virginia. How did you guess?”

  The woman shrugged. “You just look American, I guess. Anyway, you’re wearing a fairystone necklace, and you can only get them in Virginia. They’re a natural crystal formation, right? Only found in the mountains. I know because I traveled the Blue Ridge Parkway with my parents when I was twelve.”

  “Good detective work,” said Elizabeth grudgingly, fingering her staurolite necklace. She made a mental note to give fairystones to every British woman she knew next Christmas. (Take that, Sherlock!)

  “I guess some of it rubbed off,” came the complacent reply. “I read a lot of murder mysteries.”

  Elizabeth stared at her and at last the penny dropped. (Or, at the current exchange rate, two cents did.) “Are you, by any chance, with the murder mystery tour that’s meeting here this afternoon?”

  “That’s right!” said the woman, beaming. “My name is Susan Cohen. Are you on it, too?”

  Elizabeth nodded slowly. “Elizabeth MacPherson,” she said, withholding her title in a rare gesture of modesty. “Where are you from?”

  “Minneapolis,” said Susan eagerly. “Have you ever been there? It’s in the Midwest, but it isn’t at all provincial like the coastal people think it is. It’s the most gorgeous city in the world.”

  Elizabeth managed to refrain from asking why Susan had bothered to leave this Shangri-la for a mere excursion to England. “I’m from Virginia originally,” she said, “but I just got married in July, so now I live in Edinburgh. For a while, at least. We’re still negotiating careers.”

  Susan looked around. “But your husba
nd didn’t come on the tour?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “He had better fish to fry.” She explained about the oceangoing expedition, and the six-week separation that she decided to fill with a package tour. She looked appraisingly at the youthful Susan. “So I’m not man-hunting or anything on this trip. In fact I was sure that everyone else on this tour was going to be much older than I.”

  “I expect they will be,” said Susan Cohen complacently. “After all, we can’t all be heiresses.”

  We all are so far, thought Elizabeth, mindful of the receipt of her great-aunt Augusta’s money which came to her upon her marriage. She didn’t think it was a topic you ought to broach with strangers in an airport, though. “I was just going to get some tea,” she said.

  “Great!” said Susan, cheerfully abandoning the postcards. “The airline breakfast was lousy. The French toast tasted like they made it with Play-Doh. I’m going to write a letter of complaint to the airline.”

  They started off together down the hall, dodging baggage-laden passengers. “It sounds like a very interesting tour, doesn’t it?” said Elizabeth.

  “The perfect combination,” Susan agreed. “I just love England, and I love mysteries. My uncle Aaron says that my house will probably collapse under the weight of all the books I have. See, I used to read all the time. I mean all the time. I was an only child, you know, and I didn’t have a lot of friends.” She laughed. “I guess I was kind of an ugly duckling.”

  Whereas now you are a nonstop parrot, thought Elizabeth. But, she had to admit, a pretty one. Aloud she said, “You seem to have made a satisfactory transition to swandom.”