Kit Handsome and the busy day at the Big Hotel 7

Back at the hotel, Anderson had set up an incident room set up where the breakfast room had been. The room was a hive of activity, with Anderson’s team universally busy and not a breakfast sausage in sight.

“Well?” Anderson asked.

Kit summarized the conversation with the tortoise thief. “Just a drunken prank,” he concluded. “I’m keeping him locked up, we don’t want him here, getting drunk and creating additional chaos. What’s been happening in my absence?”

“Theobold’s story checks out, well not the bit about the tortoise breaking into his room, his revised story. We’ve checked the CCTV and there was a group of potato marketing board executives who left the hotel noisily around midnight, and Theobold was seen returning around two with an armful of garden gnomes. And the post mortem results are back. Time of death is between 3.00 and 9.00 in the morning.

“Anyone come into the hotel between 3 and 9?”

“No, not a sausage. It looks as if the killer must have been one of the hotel guests. We’ve interviewed everyone in the hotel now.”

“And?”

“Nobody with a record, but then if there is a killer among them he’s very likely to be using an assumed name. We took fingerprints from the breakfast things and we’re running them through the database.”

“Anything else?”

“Quite a lot, actually. We ran the prints on the victim. Turns out he wasn’t really a Mr Griffiths, he was using a false ID.”

“Then who was he?”

“Alan Stanton, a convicted thief. He specialized in antique book thefts.”

“An antiquarian book thief?” repeated Kit, puzzled. “What on earth is there for him to steal on Boonhill, we don’t have any books here, just the visiting library on Tuesdays, and that only has Agatha Christies, Jackie Collins, 3 Jeffrey Archers and a box set of Mrs Brown DVDs.”

“In other news,” continued Anderson, “I’ve got the results back from the penguin’s bank account. The payment comes from an account linked to a company in Lichtenstein, which is linked to a drug cartel.”

“So a drug cartel hire a penguin to follow an antiquarian book thief? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“I’ve been talking to a guy in the FBI who’s an expert on the drug cartel. Apparently, they’ve started branching out recently, they’ve moved into the rigged gambling market. Specifically, they’ve been kidnapping animal Olympic winners.”

“The hedgehog!”

“Exactly.”

“Is there a lot of money in the hedgehog Olympics?”

“Not in the sport, Holly won a princely £10 with her medal, but betting on the sport is big business.”

“So they kidnap the favourite in a bid to fix the results.”

“Exactly.”

“So Griffiths was here for the tortoise. And when he couldn’t find it the cartel pressured him by hiring a man in a penguin suit to follow him around. That doesn’t explain why he was murdered.”

“I’ve got Wilson looking into Griffiths finances, but suppose he’d been working for a rival cartel.”

“So we’re looking at two international drugs cartels both chasing the same tortoise.”

“Exactly.”

At that moment, Wilson interrupted.

“Sorry guv, and other guv, but we’ve got new on the prints. We’ve found our killer.