The Garrick residence at Number 9 Heatherton Close was a mirror image of the Aldridge home, but where Clara had filled her windows with light and flowers, Helen Garrick had chosen blinds. Vertical blinds, the kind found in dental surgeries and government offices, their slats perpetually half-closed against the sun. The front garden was neat but anonymous, the kind of landscaping achieved by a hired service rather than a devoted hand.
DI Lyall stood on the doorstep at seven-fifteen in the morning, less than thirty-six hours after the solstice massacre. She had not slept. The memory stick Vernon Creech had provided was still warm in her pocket, its contents already copied to the secure server at headquarters. The footage showed exactly what Vernon had described: Helen Garrick arriving at the Aldridge kitchen at six-oh-eight, leaving at six-thirty-one, her bag conspicuously absent. The meeting in the park was grainier, the timestamp reading eleven-forty-two PM, three nights before the party. The hooded figure was a silhouette, genderless and menacing.
Lyall rang the bell. A long pause, then footsteps.
Helen opened the door wearing a dressing gown in faded lavender, her hair unbrushed, her eyes rimmed with red. She looked, Lyall thought, like a woman who had been crying for hours or a woman who had been practicing the appearance of grief in a mirror. The line between authentic sorrow and its performance was thinner than most people imagined.
"Inspector." Helen's voice was hoarse. "It's very early."
"I'm sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Garrick. I have a few additional questions. May I come in?"
A flicker of hesitation, so brief that Lyall almost missed it. "Of course."
The interior of the house was as anonymous as the exterior. Beige walls, furniture that had been chosen for durability rather than beauty, the faint smell of lavender air freshener that did not quite mask something sour underneath. Lyall noted the absence of family photographs. A few generic landscapes hung on the walls, the kind that came with the frames.
"I wanted to ask about your brother," Lyall said, settling into a chair that was slightly too firm to be comfortable. "Leon. He was at the party with you."
"Yes. He was visiting from the northern provinces. He arrived two days before the solstice."
"What does he do for work?"
"He's in pharmaceutical supply. He manages distribution networks for a company called MedNorth Logistics."
Lyall kept her expression neutral. Pharmaceutical supply. The precursor chemicals. The synthetic tetrodotoxin. The pieces were aligning with an almost theatrical precision.
"Where is he now?"
Helen's hand tightened on the arm of her chair. "He left. This morning, very early. He said he couldn't stand being in the city after what happened. He went back to the north."
"Without giving a statement to the police?"
"He was traumatised. We all were. He saw people die, Inspector. He held a woman while she convulsed."
"Which woman?"
"I don't know her name. One of the caterers. He tried to help."
Lyall made a note, though she did not believe a word of it. "And where exactly in the northern provinces does Leon live?"
"Mirefield. It's a small town about two hours from the coast."
"I'll need his address and contact information."
Helen stood and walked to a small writing desk in the corner. Her movements were stiff, deliberate, the movements of a woman who was thinking about every step before she took it. She wrote something on a piece of notepaper and handed it to Lyall. The handwriting was cramped and spiked, as if the letters were trying to escape the page.
"There's something else," Lyall said, accepting the paper. "Mr. Vernon Creech, your neighbour, told us he saw you enter the Aldridge kitchen at six-oh-eight on the evening of the party. He said you were carrying a bag. A toiletry case. And that when you left at six-thirty-one, you no longer had it."
Helen's face went very still. It was not the stillness of confusion but the stillness of someone running rapid calculations, weighing options, constructing a response.
"Vernon Creech," she said finally, "has been spying on this neighbourhood for three decades. Everyone knows it. He watches people through his windows with binoculars. He keeps files on all of us. If you're going to take the word of a voyeur over a resident who has lived here for eight years, then perhaps I should call my solicitor."
"You're welcome to call your solicitor, Mrs. Garrick. But I'd appreciate an answer to my question first. What was in the bag?"
Helen's jaw tightened. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then, with a visible effort, she relaxed her shoulders.
"It was a gift. For Clara."
"A gift?"
"A bottle of perfume. We had a private joke, Clara and I. Years ago, when we first became friends, she told me she had never found a perfume that suited her. I found one, a limited edition from a boutique in the city. I wanted to give it to her before the party, privately, so it wouldn't look like I was trying to outshine the other guests."
"Can you describe the bottle?"
"It was made by a company called Scent & Stone. Glass, with a silver cap. The scent was called Midnight Garden. It had notes of jasmine and bergamot."
Lyall wrote it down, though she was already calculating how easily the story could be verified or disproven. "And what happened to the perfume bottle? We found nothing matching that description in the Aldridge kitchen."
"I don't know. Perhaps Clara moved it. Perhaps one of the other caterers packed it away. Perhaps the person who poisoned the wine took it."
It was clever, Lyall thought. Deflect, introduce doubt, redirect toward the unknown assailant. Helen Garrick was either innocent or exceptionally practiced at deception.
"There's one more thing," Lyall said. "Do you know a woman named Marta Kessler?"
The reaction was immediate and unmistakable. Helen's composure cracked, just for an instant, a flash of raw panic that she suppressed almost before it surfaced. But Lyall had seen it.
"The name sounds familiar. I think Leon may have mentioned her once. Why?"
"We believe Marta Kessler is the woman who called herself Elara at the party. The woman who poisoned the wine. And we believe your brother, Leon, was the lead investigator on a case involving her three years ago in the northern provinces."
Helen stared at her. The silence stretched.
"I don't know anything about that," she said. "Leon doesn't talk about his work. He never has."
"But you knew Marta Kessler's name. You said it sounded familiar."
"Because I think I heard it on the news. After the party. Someone mentioned a suspect."
"No one has released that name to the press, Mrs. Garrick. The only people who know Marta Kessler's name are the police and the person who helped her infiltrate the Aldridge party."
The room seemed to contract. Helen's face had gone pale, the red rims of her eyes standing out like wounds.
"I think you should leave now, Inspector."
Lyall stood, but she did not move toward the door. "Mrs. Garrick, I understand that you've been through a great deal. The divorce, the alimony termination, the custody modification. I understand that you've been angry. Anyone would be. But if you know something about what happened at the Aldridge house, if you were involved in any way, even unintentionally, now is the time to tell me. Once this goes further, there's no going back."
Helen rose from her chair. "I have nothing more to say to you. If you want to speak to me again, you can do it through my solicitor."
Lyall left the house and stood on the doorstep for a moment, letting the morning air clear her head. Across the street, she saw a curtain twitch in the Creech residence. Vernon was watching, as always.
She walked to her car and called DC Mehta.
"Pull the phone records for Helen Garrick and Leon Ashworth. I want to know every call they've made in the past month. And get someone to check with every boutique in the city that sells a brand called Scent & Stone. I want to know if anyone purchased a bottle of Midnight Garden in the past two weeks."
"And if no one did?"
"Then we'll know Helen Garrick is lying about more than just perfume."
She ended the call and sat in the car, staring at the neat houses of Heatherton Close. The morning sun was climbing higher, burning off the last of the night's rain, and the street was beginning to stir. A few neighbours had emerged to walk dogs or collect newspapers. They moved with the cautious steps of people who had been reminded that safety was an illusion.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Dr. Vance, the forensic linguist.
"I've completed the comparative analysis of Merlin73's posts versus the writing samples from potential suspects. The results are definitive. Call me."
Lyall dialled immediately.
"Tell me."
"Merlin73 is not Helen Garrick," Dr. Vance said. "The linguistic patterns are entirely different. Helen's writing—I've looked at her social media posts, her emails, even old nursing notes—is functional, straightforward, with occasional emotional outbursts. Merlin73 writes with cold precision, with legalistic argumentation, with the kind of structural discipline that comes from formal rhetorical training. Whoever Merlin73 is, they are not a former nurse writing in her spare time."
"So if Helen isn't Merlin73, then who is?"
"That's the question, isn't it? But there's something else. I compared Merlin73's most recent posts—the ones after the massacre—with the earlier material. There's a subtle shift. The sentence structures are slightly less formal. The vocabulary is slightly less precise. It's as if someone else has started using the account."
"Or Merlin73 is under stress."
"Possibly. But the shift is consistent across the last three days. I'd say there's a strong chance that the original Merlin73 has handed over control to someone else, or that there are now multiple people posting under the same handle."
Lyall absorbed this. A network, not an individual. A virus that replicated itself. "Keep working on it. I want to know who Merlin73 was before the massacre, and I want to know who's posting now."
She drove back to headquarters, her mind churning. Helen Garrick was connected to the poisoner, Marta Kessler, through her brother Leon. But she was not Merlin73. The Glass House forum had been founded by someone else, someone with legal training, someone who had built a community of angry, dispossessed people and weaponised their grievances.
And somewhere in that community, the conspiracy had taken shape. Marta Kessler, the disgraced chemist, had provided the toxin. Leon Ashworth, the pharmaceutical supply manager, had provided access and logistics. Helen Garrick had provided local knowledge and inside access to the party. But who had provided the vision? Who had written the script that turned private resentment into public slaughter?
Lyall arrived at headquarters to find DC Mehta waiting at the door of the incident room, his expression troubled.
"We got a hit on the Scent & Stone inquiry," he said. "No one in the city has purchased a bottle of Midnight Garden in the past six months. It's a seasonal scent, only released in winter. It wouldn't have been available anywhere in Eldoria in June."
"Which means Helen Garrick was lying about the gift."
"It gets worse. We ran the phone records. Leon Ashworth made seventeen calls to a prepaid mobile number in the ten days before the party. That same prepaid number was purchased three weeks ago at a shop two blocks from the industrial district where Marta Kessler was last known to be living."
"Location data?"
"The prepaid phone was active in Heatherton Close on the morning of the solstice. And we found one more thing. Leon Ashworth didn't go back to the northern provinces. His car was captured on a traffic camera at four-thirty this morning, heading east. Toward the coast. Toward the border."
Lyall felt the case shifting beneath her, the ground turning treacherous. "He's running."
"It looks that way. But there's something about the route he's taking. It goes through a town called Eastmere. And do you know who has a holiday cottage in Eastmere?"
Lyall closed her eyes. "Tell me."
"Marcus Aldridge. The judge. He bought the property eight years ago under his wife's maiden name. Almost no one knows about it. Except his family, his closest friends, and the people who have been researching his life for months."
On the whiteboard, the faces seemed to shift and rearrange themselves. Helen Garrick, the bitter ex-wife. Leon Ashworth, the protective brother. Marta Kessler, the chemist who had once been investigated and then released. And above them all, the ghost of Merlin73, the unseen architect, still typing in the darkness.
"Get a tactical unit to Eastmere," Lyall said. "And bring Helen Garrick back in. She lied about the perfume. She lied about her brother. She knows more than she's telling us, and I want to know everything before this network claims another victim."
But even as she spoke, she knew the truth was more complicated than a simple conspiracy. The Glass House had hundreds of members. Merlin73's message was spreading. And somewhere out there, another feast was being planned.
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