The Cilla Rose Affair by Winona Kent

Mrs. Darrow, discovering the aphids…she sees the bee—”
    He turned up the volume.
    “Hear that?”
    “Buzzing,” his son said, nonplussed.
    The buzzing faded as the bee flew out of range.
    “Now…Nora Darrow walks into the shot again…Darrow embraces her…they turn…There.” Evan froze the frame. “That’s the point where he’s stung.” He rewound the tape and played it again. “Listen.”
    Ian watched, and listened, intently.
    “What?” he asked, confounded.
    “No buzzing,” Evan replied.
    He rewound the tape a third time, and replayed it, pausing intermittently, for his son.
    “Watch him. Watch her.”
    “Arm around wife…” Ian said. “Turning…walking…he’s blocking our view of her—”
    “There’s something in her hand. Look—there—hand coming up—” Evan froze the picture. They both peered at the TV screen.
    “What is she doing?” Ian said.
    “I don’t know…” Evan said. “It looks to me like some sort of…syringe.”
    “I’ll be damned,” Ian said, slowly. “She poisoned him.”
    “It does look that way, doesn’t it, old son. Not the flu at all…but something more insidious.”
    Ian was perplexed. “They didn’t talk at all about your meeting at Tower Bridge. They didn’t discuss him agreeing to be interviewed by you. They didn’t talk about the Cilla Rose …He kept her totally in the dark.” Ian looked at his father. “Who, besides you, me and Nicholas Armstrong, knew about this assignment?”
    “Only Simon Darrow.”
    “But he didn’t tell anybody. He didn’t meet anyone, he didn’t leave any messages anywhere—We had him under surveillance the entire time.”
    Evan was thinking.
    “He went to the theatre on Monday night…”
    “But you followed him there. You told me: he went straight to his seat. He had a drink during the interval and chatted with his wife about nothing at all, and then he sat down again.”
    “I may have done a good job watching them, Ian, but it would have been impossible for me to hear everything they were saying to one another while they were sitting together in the audience.”
    Evan’s oldest son looked at him. “Nora Darrow?” he said, disbelieving the logic of his father’s statement. “KGB? Protecting her own skin?”
    “It certainly wouldn’t be the first time we had a husband and wife team operating in our midst.”
    Ian shook his head in disgust. “I should have known.”
    Evan rewound the videotape. “I’ve got a chap in a white sweatshirt and another in a tweed cap to vouch for the fact that we’ve touched a raw nerve somewhere. Let’s have a look at her file.”
    The PC was user-friendly, with a laminated self-help instruction card propped on top of its monitor, a red Canadian maple leaf decal affixed to the mouse and a little Mountie keychain doll, in a brown hat and dress red uniform jacket, standing guard over the keyboard.
    Evan signed in, and called up Nora Darrow’s dossier.
    “Maiden name, Maynard,” Ian said, reading the screen over his father’s shoulder. “Fifty-six years old…born and bred in Beckenham…the usual school and employment stuff…nothing exceptional here. No cross references, no flags. An ordinary, upstanding citizen of the United Kingdom.”
    “Who’s just done away with Britain’s best loved DJ,” Evan added. He sent the file to the printer and accessed a blank screen that demanded the details of his next inquiry.
    Darrow , he typed. Simon .
    The last update had been made several years earlier. Appended to the Activities Summary was a flagged warning to the researcher that the first set of entries—those that concerned themselves with Darrow’s alleged movements aboard the Cilla Rose —were unsubstantiated.
    Evan accessed “Personal”, and the barebones details of Simon Darrow’s private existence paraded themselves before him—date and place of birth, past and present addresses and telephone numbers, his employment record, the registration numbers of his