A Routine Infidelity

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  A delightfully sharp and clever murder mystery, perfect for fans of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club

  Private investigator Edwina ‘Ted’ Bristol deals in the cheating spouses and missing chihuahuas of Melbourne, but yearns for the heart-stopping excitement of real crime.

  When Ted discovers her sister, Bob, has fallen prey to an internet catfishing scam, she sets out with her beloved miniature schnauzer and shrewd sidekick, Miss Marple, to catch the swindler. Meanwhile, when conducting routine surveillance on a couple suspected of having an affair, she uncovers a plot to embezzle millions.

  As Bob’s case takes a series of bizarre twists and turns and the embezzlement investigation escalates into murder, Ted finds her own life in peril. Will she crack her first criminal case before it’s too late?

  For Tori. I’m so proud of you.

  We dance round in a ring and suppose

  But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

  Robert Frost

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Bridget

  Then

  So much for binning Froggy yesterday in a failed attempt to make him ‘disappear’. Here he was clutched in Teddy’s little mitt again, showing every second of the four years he’d been sucked and dropped and dragged through the dirt. Filthy, disembowelled Froggy, the victor. Bridget knew she should have hung tough, but poor Teddy had been so bereft, it had brought her undone. And what’s a few million germs, really? Kids had survived a lot worse.

  So she’d caved and miraculously ‘found’ Froggy, and she’d put him through the washing machine again. And now here he was, staring up at her triumphantly with his single plastic eye, as the sun beat down on them at Bushrangers Bay. Teddy was stomping around in her yellow bathers, a Gulliver to the Lilliputian sea life in the rock pools. Splash! Splash! No quietly gathering pretty seashells and arranging them into neat little piles for Bridget’s youngest. She watched Teddy tramp around like a ragamuffin, and her heart turned to mush like it always did. Bloody kid.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ted

  Now

  As Ted laid the photos out on her desk, she heard a scrappy bark assert itself at Wags Away Canine Day Care. Ha! Ted felt a familiar rush of pride, but she kept her face immobile. Across the desk, Chantal was shifting in her chair. She looked worried sick, and Ted couldn’t help feeling sympathy. She focused and opened her report.

  ‘It’s good news. Andrew’s not cheating on you.’

  ‘He’s not?’

  ‘No.’

  Chantal’s face lit up with relief, and Ted felt glad to be bearing good tidings for once. Overwhelmingly, the anxious spouses who employed her surveillance services had their worst fears confirmed. How many times had she sat here in her office at Edwina Bristol Investigations – or EBI, as she thought of it – and watched a client’s face crumble as they sifted through evidence they’d desperately sought but simultaneously dreaded? Women who wanted to torture themselves with too many details, guys who couldn’t get out the door fast enough. You could never predict people’s reactions. Ted’s mind flew back to last week and a bloke whose weathered face was wet with tears he refused to acknowledge, even as she edged a box of tissues across the table at him. It was incontrovertible – infidelity sucked. Chantal was one of the lucky ones.

  Ted watched her client pore over the surveillance pics of her husband, Andrew, visiting a Port Melbourne house for the past five Thursday nights. A woman with sleek dark hair appeared like clockwork and gave Andrew a visitor’s parking permit, but Ted had been forced to take her chances, and last week she’d scored a parking ticket – ninety bucks – an occupational hazard she couldn’t charge to Chantal.

  ‘The woman’s name is Eiko Asaka,’ she told Chantal. ‘She’s a cooking teacher.’

  ‘A cooking teacher?’

  ‘Yeah. At first, I wasn’t sure if that was relevant, but then I posed as a student and found out Andrew’s been having lessons.’

  ‘Oh, thank God. You’ve made my day. But why’s he been doing that in secret?’

  ‘To surprise you. He told Eiko you love Japanese food.’

  ‘I do!’

  Ted was pretty partial to Japanese herself, with one notable exception. She remembered once being offered sea urchin – or ‘uni’ as the Japanese call it – at a tiny restaurant tucked behind the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, on a day so hot she thought her hair might fry. She didn’t know it was served live, and feeling the poor urchin wriggle around in her mouth had made her want to gag … but when in Rome, right?

  She wondered why Andrew Considine thought cooking lessons warranted a surprise? Maybe he was one of those dudes who never graced the kitchen, and just stirring up a teriyaki sauce would make him some kind of superstar in Chantal’s eyes? Although, from what Ted could glean, he already was. Relief was radiating from Chantal, and it sort of illuminated her peachy skin beneath her halo of fluffy blonde hair.

  ‘I can’t believe I doubted him!’

  Out of nowhere, Ted felt a twitch of irritation. Why couldn’t Chantal see the irony? Weren’t ‘mediums’ supposed to be mind readers? But she squashed the thought. It was probably best to cut this short.

  ‘I’ll have to wrap things up, I’m afraid,’ she said politely. ‘I’m due at another job.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Ted gathered up the surveillance shots and slipped them back into her report. She got to her feet and proffered the folder. Chantal stood. She was much taller than Ted, but Ted was used to that because everyone was. People often told her she was pixie-sized, or they said she looked like Snow White, ‘only shorter’. They used adjectives like ‘dainty’ and ‘petite’ that made her sound like she had no agency, when she was actually a kickarse PI. It drove Ted nuts. Her older sister, Bob, had once suggested she wear high heels for added gravitas, but high heels were dumb and they hurt Ted’s feet. She wore black flats on the days she was in the office, along with white shirts under structured pantsuits like this navy one she’d bought from Zara online, because who could be bothered trying stuff on? She was comfier in her ‘uniform’ out in the field – jeans and floppy hoodies that made her disappear, a distinct advantage in her profession. And she always wore runners in case she needed to chase a dangerous crook. As a civil investigator, she hadn’t encountered any actual crooks yet, but you never knew.

  She handed Chantal the report.

  ‘Here’s the overview of the job, the surveillance running sheet and the itemised charges for the report, my cooking lesson and my travel expenses. My invoice is on the last page.’

  As Chantal took the report, Ted felt a familiar tickle rising from her throat to her nose.

  ‘Ah-choo!’

  She skirted her Ikea couch and closed the window on a yellow wattle that was hanging over the side fence. Behind the wattle, Ted could see straight into a room next door. Crystals of various sizes and colours were lined up along a shelf, and pictures of rainbows and angels adorned the walls. A feathered dreamcatcher hung in one corner, and two chairs covered in tie-dyed shawls faced each other intimately. From the window, Ted could just make out a framed New Age quote sitting on a table next to a pack of tarot cards:

  When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside of you as fate.

  ‘Hayfever?’ Chantal asked behind her. ‘Sorry, I’ll cut that wattle back today.’

  The New Age room was Chantal’s office – for want of a better word – in the timber cottage where she and Andrew lived, next door to EBI. Edwina Bristol Investigations was based in an old converted milk bar in Abbotsford, a suburb sandwiched between the verdant Yarra River bicycle trail and the polluted horrors of Punt Road, one of Melbourne’s most loathed thoroughfares. Much of Abbotsford was gentrified, but café culture had somehow escaped this semi-industrial street where the few houses were lost in a clamour of mechanics’ garages and tile warehouses and the
rear entrance to Wags Away Canine Day Care. Ted figured that’s why she could afford the rent, although by the skin of her teeth.

  When she’d first moved in, she’d been intrigued to see a parade of women pass through Chantal’s front room, their faces hungry with need as they clung to her every word. She’d assumed Chantal was some kind of New Age counsellor, but then one day she’d found a business card fluttering in the gutter:

  Chantal Considine, Spiritual Medium. Need guidance from your loved ones who’ve passed over? I can make contact with them on the other side and seek their wisdom for you.

  Wait, what? Ted had thought. So that was how Chantal made her living, by fleecing the bereaved? A ‘medium’? As if! What if the alleged ‘loved ones who’d passed over’ gave Chantal’s vulnerable clients the wrong advice? Who was Chantal to play God? Not that Ted believed in God, but she didn’t believe in mediums either. She wondered how Chantal’s clients could fall for this stuff, but of course, she knew exactly why. Because their hearts were broken after losing a love, and they wanted to believe the end wasn’t the end, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Surely what those people needed was someone who’d gently guide them towards the truth, not exploit their desperation for financial gain? Ted could feel herself getting all worked up about it, but she’d tried to take a step back and tell herself not to judge. Live and let live, right? And how her neighbour made her living was none of her business anyway. But she couldn’t help it, her opinion of Chantal had plummeted that day.

  She watched now as Chantal slipped the report into her droopy beaded bag. The fringe on her rainbow-hued poncho got stuck in the bag’s zipper, and as she bent to extricate it, a pink crystal hanging around her neck dangled briefly in midair. Ted’s thoughts flew to the fortune tellers she’d seen in Jemaa el-Fna Square in Marrakesh, sitting under umbrellas, wearing layers of multicoloured clothes and beads in the searing heat, their wizened faces somehow a testament to their authenticity. Of course, Ted didn’t believe in those ‘seers’ either, but she appreciated the theatre of it.

  ‘I think Andrew’s having an affair,’ Chantal had said when she’d turned up at Ted’s office.

  Who told you that? Ted wanted to ask. Princess Diana? Kurt Cobain?

  Privately, she suspected Chantal would be proven right. Andrew Considine was one of those charming types who seemed to expect Ted to swoon when they passed in the street – and yet, the surveillance had proven Chantal wrong. Her powers as a ‘medium’ had failed her, but she seemed unfazed by that reality. Could she really not see the irony? Or maybe she could, but she didn’t care? Was she that shameless? Ted found herself wondering what the point was to any of this, if Chantal wasn’t prepared to acknowledge what her mistaken suspicions actually meant? If she’d just admit she was a charlatan and show some remorse, they could both move on.

  But instead, Chantal smiled and said, ‘I pruned that wattle a few weeks ago, but it’s going wild.’

  Ted suddenly wanted to punch her in the head, but not as much as she wanted to avoid a negative Google review, so she smiled back instead.

  ‘Yeah, it’d be great if you could cut it back,’ she said, but she could feel all her nerve ends screaming. Woah. She hadn’t realised how much Chantal’s job was pressing her buttons. Of course, it made complete sense when she thought about it, which was why she’d made a point of not thinking about it. And she wasn’t going to start now. She might be a PI, but she knew there were some things that were better left uninterrogated. She walked to the door.

  ‘Well, I’m glad I could set your mind at rest.’

  ‘Me too,’ Chantal said, but then she gave Ted a smile that looked distinctly conspiratorial. ‘And just so you know, I can appreciate the irony.’

  She could? Then why did that make Ted even madder?

  ‘I’m glad about that,’ Ted said recklessly. ‘I can’t help thinking your deceased buddies let you down on this one.’

  She waited for a flash of embarrassment or defensiveness or anything, but Chantal just smiled serenely, and her blue eyes swam in her soft round pool of a face. She was at least ten years older than Ted, maybe late forties, Ted guessed, and there was something about her curvy and comfy vibe that clearly made her clients relax. Not for the first time, Ted was forced to admit that her neighbour looked like the kind of person you’d want to tell your secrets to – that’s if you were the kind of person who wanted to tell their secrets to anyone, which Ted wasn’t.

  ‘It’s different when it’s me. With a client, I’d be able to seek the counsel of a close relative who’s passed over, but my vulnerability impedes my ability to make contact with my own loved ones.’

  ‘Would you like me to pass on a message for you?’

  Chantal laughed.

  ‘Just so we’re super-clear,’ Ted said, forgoing all pretence at professionalism and probably her four-star Google rating along with it, ‘your clients have a right to believe what they like, but I for one, am not buying your chats with dead people.’

  ‘I know that,’ Chantal laughed. ‘I’ve known for months. You stopped bringing our bins in for us.’

  Ted realised with a start Chantal was right. The bins had never crossed her mind, so it must have been some kind of unconscious protest. Wow. She tried to gather her thoughts – where had they got to all of a sudden? But Chantal was already talking again.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m used to it. You’re not the first person to feel threatened by the afterlife.’

  ‘I’m not threatened,’ Ted said, feeling threatened by how threatened she felt. ‘I just think it’s a pile of steaming crap and I don’t want any part of it.’

  Chantal smiled again. Ted had never realised a smile could be so incendiary, especially when it was suffused with … was that sympathy?

  ‘I hear you, Ted, and I feel for you. I can tell it’s a bit too close to the bone.’

  Ted tried to snort but nothing happened. She suddenly wanted this woman out of her office more than she wanted anything else in the world, which was out of proportion to the moment, but that was something else she’d choose not to interrogate later. She opened the door and stepped aside.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’m expected elsewhere.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ted

  Ted was still mad with herself when she crossed the road twenty minutes later and opened the rear door to Wags Away. There was no excuse for insulting a client, no matter what they did for a living. And how was she going to grow the business if she couldn’t control her personal feelings? She wondered how many potential cases she’d lose if Chantal trashed EBI on Google? Just because she hadn’t yet (Ted had been checking every five minutes), it didn’t mean she wouldn’t.

  She stepped inside Wags Away and closed the door behind her. Barks echoed through the building, and a smile found her in spite of everything. Her thoughts flew back to a past gig as a dog walker in Paris, and one particularly snooty poodle called André, who’d tried to mess with her head. Ha! When was that, six years ago? Seven? It was hard to keep count. Her fifteen crazy, amazing years in Europe working as a dog walker, Contiki tour guide, Uber driver and beer-puller were all a bit of a blur now. The only memory still in sharp relief was that awesome feeling of being on the opposite side of the world from home.

  Woof! Woof! That scrappy bark cut through the rest and brought her back to the present. Ted quickened her step to the Small Dogs Room. When she’d returned to Australia three years ago, it had seemed like owning a dog might help her settle down. She’d gone to the RSPCA in search of a kickarse breed like a German shepherd, but all the dogs – even the big ones – had wagged their tails at her needily, as if to say, Please pick me, I’m so lovable. All except for a miniature schnauzer who’d regarded Ted dispassionately, as though she, the dog, were doing the choosing. It had earned Ted’s instant respect. This schnauzer was clearly kickarse, regardless of her size. She was Coco then, but Ted had rechristened her Miss Marple, and Miss Marple had taken to her new name instantly, as if she understood the compliment implicit in its provenance. Miss Marple was six kilos of pure muscle, with a grey coat enhanced by a fluffy white beard and chest, and her ears stood upright and then flopped over themselves. Right from the start, her alert brown eyes had communicated with Ted in surprisingly conversational detail. At first Ted had wondered if she was anthropomorphising, but now she’d stopped asking herself the question.