22. Heathcliff

Morrie and I watched Mina stride off across the graveyard with Oscar at her side and Quoth on her shoulder. I could sense that she was annoyed at all this ‘secret wedding business,' but there was no way I'd get her involved in our quest to find the saboteur.

When they were safely out of earshot, we turned to each other. Morrie's villainous smile tugged at the edges of his mouth.

Wayne tried to push his way out the door, but I blocked it with my body.

I cracked my knuckles.

"Now that we're alone," Morrie said, "the two of you need to come clean about a few things."

"We don't need to do anything for you." Wayne glared at both of us, but it was ruined by the tremble in his fingers as he grabbed Dorothy's wrist and tried to ram me. He glanced off my chest and fell back into a stack of gardening implements. I barely felt a thing.

"I have spent the night in jail. I'm in no mood to mess about," I growled. "Someone has been sabotaging our wedding, intercepting chair cover deliveries, destroying our wedding cake, and leaving threatening notes addressed to Mina. Whoever did this killed Iwan and left the same kind of note on his body. And we want to know what you two know about it."

"Nothing!" Wayne cried.

"I already told you that I have nothing to do with any of that," Dorothy said.

"Then why did you drive to a secret bothy behind the Lachlan estate right when the murder went down, and then leave in a hurry? The two of you were in it together, weren't you? You hate Mina and you'd do anything to destroy her happiness, even murder an innocent man?—"

"We had nothing to do with Iwan's death," Dorothy spluttered. "Tell them, Wayne. I can't bear it any longer!"

She threw herself down in the blankets and buried her face in her hands.

Wayne picked himself up, rubbed a cut on his arm from an inappropriately-hung rake, and went over to her. He rubbed Dorothy's shoulders as his eyes met mine. The fight had left him. He looked resigned and very, very afraid.

Good.

"You have to understand. I love my Nora, but she's so involved in her knitting circle and running around with her friends, I've been feeling like I don't matter to her. I thought I'd get a hobby of my own, so I joined DIABLO?—"

"Please don't call it that," Dorothy scolded him. "We're the Defense against Immorality, Adultery, Bestiality, Lucifer and the Occult."

"—and one thing led to another, and Dorothy and I…" Wayne swallowed. "Well, you know. As I said, Dorothy and I have been sneaking into this shed every chance we got. I told Nora that I was off hunting, and Dorothy told anyone who asked that she was looking after her sister. No one has guessed the truth until now, although you actually came close to catching us two nights ago."

"They were under the blankets!" Morrie's eyes gleamed at me. "Of course!"

"After that close call, we decided to find a new meeting place," Dorothy said. "Wayne does some hunting in the woods on the Lachlan estate. Deer control, that kind of thing. They have a small bothy that he uses sometimes if he stays the night. He gave me a key to the bothy, and another key for the gate on the road. We went up there to try it out yesterday morning. We heard from Mabel that you had some sort of important delivery up at Lachlan Hall, so we figured you wouldn't be around to harass us."

"I arrived at the bothy first," Wayne said. "I left my work van at home – too easy for someone to spot me – and took Nora's runabout. I wanted to set it up all romantic for Dorothy. I had candles, nice sheets, a little cheese platter…"

Dorothy blushed a deep red. She was actually touched by this. I didn't know Dorothy Ingram's craven heart could feel passion. I guessed we misjudged her.

I shook my head. This woman once held a gun to Mina's head. I would never, ever catch myself feeling sorry for her.

"—but as I opened the door," Wayne was saying, "I saw that the bothy was occupied."

"What?"

"Someone was living there. They weren't inside, but their stuff was strewn everywhere. There were a pile of black trousers and white shirts, all different sizes, and a pyramid of boxes from Oliver's bakery. On one wall someone had taped up a picture of your wedding announcement from the gazette and had been throwing darts at it. And weirdly, on the bed was a pile of magazines all cut up with scissors."

My blood ran cold.

Morrie looked at me. "The wait staff uniforms. The packages stolen from people's doorsteps."

"It's him," I growl. "It's the saboteur."

"It ain't no hunter," Wayne said. "Cynthia didn't want anyone hunting up there this week, not with the conference and the wedding. That's why Dorothy and I thought we wouldn't be disturbed. Whoever was there was squatting illegally, and judging by the dart sticking out of Mina's head, I thought them unhinged. I didn't want Dorothy anywhere near them, so I ran back to my car and tried to call her. Of course, the reception's poor in the woods, so I had to wait for her to show up. I grabbed her and told her we needed to leave, and we did."

I regarded Morrie. He nodded along with their story, slotting all the pieces together in his mind and comparing them with the information we had. Everything fit with what Quoth observed that day – the car we didn't recognise, the conversation he overheard with Dorothy. He didn't see Wayne there, but he'd been hiding in the bushes so he didn't have a clear view of the whole place.

If Dorothy and Wayne were both at the bothy…they couldn't have murdered Iwan.

"You won't tell anyone, will you?" Dorothy said in a small voice.

"It's not our story to tell," I snapped. "But if I were you, Wayne, I would speak to your wife. She doesn't deserve this."

"And if she comes to me as a potential client looking to take revenge on her cheating husband," Morrie's whole face broke out into a devilish grin, "I'll be happy to oblige."

We left the pair of them trembling in the shed and wandered back towards the green. Morrie tapped away on his phone. We passed Grimalkin trotting off towards the church, her tail held high and quirked on the end like a periscope.

"What mischief are you up to now?" I glared at her, but she turned her nose up and sauntered past, completely ignoring us.

Morrie didn't even look up from his phone. I glared at him. "What are you doing? This is no time for playing Crushing His Candy."

"It's called Candy Crush, and I stopped playing that. It was making me crave sugar all the time, and I have to maintain my trim figure for the wedding photos. What I'm doing is texting Jo," Morrie said. "Because she has a car. Well, a WWII tank disguised as a car. We're going to go and have a look at that bothy."

Jo pulledup outside the Rose Wimple in her WWII tank. Morrie and I squeezed into the cab of the truck while she executed a 72-point turn in the one-way street and drove out the way she came in. Morrie insisted on sitting in the middle, long legs akimbo, stroking the gearstick lasciviously and leaving me to pack myself into the seven inches of remaining space.

"If what Morrie told me is true, then we really should call Hayes immediately," Jo said as she leaned forward to peer over the steering wheel.

"But you didn't." Morrie dug his elbow into my ribs.

"If someone's after Mina, and they've already killed once, then I feel better if we check things out first, make sure there's nothing…otherworldly."

Jo was still coming to terms with the fact that Nevermore Bookshop was magical and her best friend was the daughter of Homer and the three of us were fictional characters brought to life. She was handling it better than most people would, but then, Jo had seen some shit in her job.

Jo followed Morrie's instructions. We lurched and rattled out of the village, pulling off the lane before we reached the main driveway of Lachlan Hall onto the dirt road that led into the woods. After a mile or so, we came to the gate that Quoth had described. Morrie reached across and opened my door, forcing me to roll out. He jumped out after me, jangling a keyring in his long fingers.

"I swiped these from Wayne's shirt pocket while he was scrambling to put his boxers on," he grinned. "I knew they'd come in handy."

Morrie unlocked the gate while I leapt into the bed of the truck. I held onto the edge as Jo bumped her way along the unkempt track. The air smelled of yesterday's rain – fresh and crisp and bright. The kind of place where I felt at home.

No, not the only place.There was a chair by the fireplace in a certain bookshop, and a bright-eyed, infuriating woman snuggled under my arm, that gave me the same feeling of home.

And tomorrow, I was going to marry her.

The bothy came into view – a squat A-frame structure made of rough-sawn oak, of a type used by hunters to kip or butcher their quarry. There were no other cars here, but in the drying mud out front, I could make out tyre tracks from two vehicles. Dorothy and Wayne.

Whoever else was here had walked in.

I leapt out of the bed and circled around the back of the building. Morrie strode to the front door and unlocked it. I readied myself in case the killer tried to escape out of the open back window.

But no one appeared. Jo followed Morrie inside.

"Heathcliff, you'd better see this."

I leapt up the stairs and shoved my way inside. The bothy was exactly as Wayne described – the pile of black-and-white uniforms thrown in a corner beside the fire, flies worshiping at the pyramid of white bakery boxes, the magazines cut up to make the sinister notes we found, the wall covered in scraps from the Argleton Gazette. Articles, photographs, and advertisements pinned around a single central image.

Mina's smiling face, with a red-tipped dart in the center of her forehead.

Rage sprang to life inside me, like a wild bear waking from winter slumber to discover his cave had been invaded. My blood quickened, the boiling sensation bubbling through my body until I no longer felt like a man in control of my person, but a beast acting on pure instinct. I gnashed my teeth. I wanted only one thing – to maim, hurt, kill this monster who wanted to hurt my Mina.

A hand fell on my shoulder. I whirled around, swinging my fist. Morrie ducked just in time to save his head from being separated from his neck.

"Save your strength, friend. The killer isn't here." Morrie nodded at the food packages. "Judging by the maggot count, I'd say they haven't been back since Dorothy and Wayne showed up and they realized they'd been discovered. They didn't even stop to remove their Mina wall."

I glared at the clippings on the wall again. They were all about Mina in some way. The criminals she helped put away, the kids read-a-thon she organized at Nevermore Bookshop, our wedding announcement. In several of the pictures, Mina's face had been scratched out with crayon.

This killer was obsessed with Mina. Who knew how long they'd been plotting this? And we were no closer to catching them.

I hate this.

I'm so helpless.

I opened my mouth to say something, but all that came out was a wild roar.

Jo stepped towards me. "Heathcliff, maybe?—"

I threw a chair against the wall. It shattered into pieces, the crack of the splintering wood arcing through my skull. It didn't make me feel any better. I grabbed for another chair, but Jo held it out of the way.

"Destroying this place won't help me find evidence. I'm calling Hayes and Wilson," Jo said. "Heathcliff, you have my promise. I'm going to SOCO the shit out of this cabin. I'll spend every spare moment I have going over every detail. The killer will have missed something. A hair, a fingernail. We'll find something that will give us an ID."

But as the three of us waited outside for the detectives and the rest of Jo's team to arrive, a stony silence settled over us. We all knew that even if Jo's team finished collecting evidence today, the SOCO examination and test results would take time we didn't have.

We were getting married tomorrow, and we had no idea who the killer was or what they had planned next.