The Corpse with the Silver Tongue Read Free Page B

wouldn’t?
    â€œWe’ll cover your classes, Cait, and you can represent Frank and the Faculty. You’ll fly out tonight, and arrive in Nice on Thursday. Frank’s paper is due for presentation just before lunch on Friday. The University of Vancouver will be proud of you—I know you’ll do a good job. You only have to formally present the paper and be prepared to answer some very general questions about Frank’s methodology. You can read the briefing papers on the airplane. You’ll have a marvellous time.”
    Those had been the words from my boss that had sent me home on a cloud of dreamy expectations to hurriedly pack and rush off to Vancouver International Airport to undertake the twenty-hour journey. Two changes of airplanes later, I finally emerged from Nice’s airport bleary-eyed, heavily rumpled, and ready to savor all that the Cote d’Azur had to offer. After a good nap and a bit of a wash and brush up, that is.
    If Frank hadn’t gone mountain biking, and if I hadn’t been chosen to replace him, I’d never have been sitting at that bar sipping a glass of wine in the warmth of the May sunshine when Alistair walked by. I wouldn’t have been poisoned, or have been there when Alistair died. Clearly, it was all Frank’s fault. At last—I had someone to blame!
    Oh dear . . . poor Frank. He was probably feeling even more uncomfortable than I was at that moment: it can’t be easy being almost totally immobile down one whole side of your body. For six to eight weeks, they’d said. They also say it does one good to think of someone who’s worse off than oneself. Even though I’d been poisoned and was now a suspect in an unexplained death, Frank certainly fit the bill of someone worse off than me. As was Alistair. After all, whatever I might have thought of him—and none of those thoughts were good—he was dead. And that’s about as bad as it gets.
    I was back to Alistair again.
    Alistair Townsend: I had hated him in life, and I suspected I was going to hate him even more in death. He’d screwed up a part of my life . . . well, okay, just a few years of it, while I’d worked for him. The advertising agency world has always been a pretty cut-throat business, but Alistair was much more of an “I’ll find someone else to stab you in the back” type of operator. People had their careers ruined, they’d lost jobs and seen their marriages dissolve into chaos, and some had lost their homes and businesses . . . all because Alistair wanted to have everything work out to his advantage, and because he had knowledge about people that they didn’t want him to share, so they did his dirty work for him. I’d been told at the time, by someone who had firsthand knowledge of such things, that more than one Alcoholics Anonymous group in London’s Soho, the heart of ad-agency-land, had members courtesy of Alistair’s machinations. And I, along with others I’d known back in those distant days, suspected that he was linked to at least two suicides—indirectly, of course.
    Let’s be honest, the world was unquestionably better off without Alistair Townsend. As I lay wriggling in my blanket I wondered if he’d “retired” from the ad agency world but had maintained his interest in “secret brokering.” That sort of habit is hard to break—and a skill set it must be difficult to put aside. Boy, thinking of it that way made Alistair sound like a character from one of Chuck Damcott’s secret agent books. I wondered if that was why they’d become friends. Maybe Chuck was using Alistair as a model for a forthcoming tome. Maybe the world wasn’t rid of the man after all—maybe he would be immortalized in print. I shuddered at the thought.
    The policeman hadn’t been very illuminating when he told me we’d all been affected by the same