Chapter 1

Thursday April 15 

 It is not every day one finds a dead body under the ping pong table in a seniors’ activity centre. The day I found Emily there was one of the worst days of my life. Before the weekend was over it would all get worse. Much worse.

 I had gone to the games room in the basement to look for my cane. “Must have left it there earlier this morning,” I told Violet Onyango, the young cleaner in the centre, who had offered to help me find it. “Stupid, I know. I took in half a dozen framed prints I’m donating for the summer fair. We’re meant to leave them down there.”

She had insisted on coming with me. In part, I thought, bless her heart, to ensure I didn’t fall on the stairs. I am, alas, growing a tad forgetful in what some are pleased to call our golden years. I sometimes think they are more like our gilded years. The surface may shine brightly, but behind it everything is rusting away, and we need our visits to the doctor, our grumbles, our naps after lunch and our daily medications to keep us going.

I opened the door to the games room. Inside, it was dark. There was a musty smell of old clothes, dust and of something sweet and sickly. I turned the lights on. We looked around. Violet saw it first.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing to the ping pong table. “There. Under the—"

My eyes followed her pointing finger. “It’s only a…oh, my God!”

We stared in shock. Two legs protruded from the shadows under the table. One shoe was hanging half off a now still foot. I recognized the skirt, the blouse and then the clearly dead face, with gaping mouth and staring eyes. Blood streaked down her left cheek, filling the wrinkles like heavy rain in a ploughed field.

My heart thumped against the wall of my chest. Pounding like the music in the knife-in-the-shower scene in the movie Psycho. I knew who it was. My dear friend Emily. The lifeless eyes and blood-soaked grey hair told us all. Someone had bludgeoned her to death.

Violet stifled a scream. She gulped, looked at me sharply and gathered herself. She quickly knelt beside the body to check for signs of life. Then she sat back on her heels, sighed and shook her head.

“I’ll get help,” she said, albeit a little shakily, but recovering far more quickly than me. She pulled out her cell phone and called the office.

“Violet here. Yes, Violet the cleaner. You must call the police right away,” she said, in a tone far removed from the submissiveness I would expect from a mere cleaner. “Why? Because there has been a…an accident. There is a body in the games room. A body. B…o… d…y. Yes, body. We think it’s Mrs. Foster. You should call the police. As soon as you can. And an ambulance, but I don’t think…It might be too…. Then please find Mrs. Sung as quickly as possible and let her know.”

There was nothing more we could do for poor Emily. After I found my cane, we went up to the lobby, Violet bounding up the stairs before me. She hurried to the office on the main floor to report in more detail. How simple those words are and yet how upset, moved and, yes, emotional, we both were. As I expected, there was shock and consternation among the volunteers. In all good faith, you volunteer in your seniors’ activity centre office expecting to file papers, renew memberships, photocopy bulletins and socialize. Then you hear that one of the members, a friend to everyone, has been found killed, brutally and bloodily. I felt sorry for them.

Violet and I sat on one of the sofas in the lobby and waited for the police. She took out her cell phone again and started scrolling through her texts. Perhaps most of her friends in Africa would shortly be learning about our gruesome discovery.

Samantha Sung, the executive manager of the centre, soon came bustling in from her lunch-time shopping, looking flushed and upset. Her cell phone was still in her hand. She was one of those bustling people who always have a cell phone in their hand while walking, often speaking into it as they go. Makes her feel important, my friend Judy Jenkins used to say. She looked a little furtive. Almost guilty. But I was so jumpy myself I may have been wrong.

“Have the police been called?” she demanded loudly of no one in particular, nervously jangling the bangles on her wrists like alarm bells on the Cornish coast warning that pirates were coming. “Someone phone the police.” It was pointless to tell her they were on their way.

Of course, she then had to go to check on the body herself. She was never one to take anyone’s words on trust, let alone those of a mere cleaner. She was, I had always thought, not quite sure about me. I think she felt I didn’t give her the respect she believed she deserved. There was a wisp of mystery about her, much like a discreet French perfume you can’t identify. I had always thought this was a secret sadness. I didn’t find out until later, though, what it was. But—and there always is a ‘but’ with her—she was extremely efficient and ran the centre well. “I believe,” she had said on many occasions, “you should run a non-profit as you would a successful business. No happy-clappy amateurs or busy-body interference.” This attitude had not made her friends. She returned from the basement a few minutes later, visibly shaken.

Judy and I called her Samsung, with the emphasis on the ‘Sam’ like the company. Not to her face, though, because she had a temper and didn’t like being teased about her name. “Watch out for her barbed wire,” Judy used to say. “She sharpens the spikes after brushing her teeth every morning.” This had got her into trouble with the directors of the centre, of whom Judy was one, more than once before now. And would again.

Craving quiet to deal with our feelings, Violet and I sat in the lobby waiting for the police to arrive. We stared at the light rain falling outside, a sweet April shower that was ending the drought of March. And violence had ended the placid peace of our little world. Someone had come among us—brutal, dangerous and possibly still here.

I don’t think either of us had grasped that someone capable of murder and such violence could still be in the vicinity. And still dangerous.

Pacing up and down, Samsung alone broke the troubled quiet. “Poor Emily! Who could have done it? Did she deserve this?” She was a great one for questions. Her entire conversational repertoire seemed to be composed of them. She often ended her sentences with the uptick that becomes so tiring after a while. She kept saying, “Who could have done it? Here? Of all places? This will be terrible for us. In our basement? But, why?”

She was very annoying with her bleating. But she was not wrong.

Who could have killed such a nice old lady? And why?

© Geoff Mynett July 2026