The Zig Zag Girl by Elly Griffiths

met her husband. What had drawn her back there?
    ‘She left the next day,’ said Michael Williams. ‘Left a note saying that she was going back to the stage. Said she wanted to forget all about her life here.’
    ‘Did you hear from her again?’
    ‘No. Not till you telephoned to tell me she was … to tell me that you’d found her. I assumed she was with him.’
    ‘She wasn’t.’
    ‘But there was something between them, wasn’t there? He paid for the headstone and everything. Why would he do that if he didn’t feel guilty?’
    Max did feel guilty, thought Edgar. He knew that he was to blame, even if he didn’t know the details of it. He knew that Ethel had died because of her connection to him.
    ‘Max Mephisto isn’t a bad man,’ he said. ‘He didn’t even know that Ethel had left you. He was terribly upset when he found out that she was …’
    ‘That she was murdered,’ finished Williams grimly. ‘There you are again. People like us just don’t get murdered.’
    ‘Anyone can get murdered,’ said Edgar. ‘Believe me.’

Chapter 10
    Edgar thought about Ethel a lot over the next few days. The trip to the Isle of Wight, though illuminating in some ways, hadn’t really got him much further in the investigation. Ethel Townsend had met Michael Williams at Butlin’s Ocean Hotel in the summer of 1938. The next year war broke out, and Williams went to fight fires on the mainland. Ethel had stayed on the island in the company of her religious and disapproving mother-in-law. After the war, she and Williams had tried to ‘start again’. Ethel had got pregnant, but had lost the baby. In a doomed attempt to cheer her up, Williams had booked tickets to see Max Mephisto perform on the pier. The next day, Ethel had left him. A year later, she turned up in Brighton again, cut into three.
    ‘She never got in touch with me,’ said Max, when they met for a quick drink before the first house on Friday night. ‘I wonder why.’
    ‘We don’t know what she was doing between leaving Williams and answering that advertisement. We’vechecked and there’s no record of her appearing in any shows.’
    ‘How long had she been in Brighton?’
    ‘Just a few weeks, her landlady said.’
    ‘And you’ve no idea where she was before?’
    Edgar bristled slightly at Max’s tone. ‘It’s harder than you think to trace someone. We contacted her father in Margate, but he said he hadn’t seen her for years.’
    ‘No. They weren’t close.’
    ‘Her landlady thought she might have been up north somewhere. And there was that clipping from Manchester.’
    ‘You think she was there in the audience? Watching me?’
    Edgar thought about how Max put this.
Watching me
. Was that what he thought it was all about, Ethel watching him? Perhaps he thought that was what everyone in the audience was doing, watching him to the exclusion of everyone else. And he could be right at that. Certainly, Ethel had left her husband the day after seeing Max on stage. Had she spent the next year following him around the country? It was possible, but Edgar didn’t think that Ethel was in love with Max. Because, if so, wouldn’t she have contacted him before? She certainly would have contacted him once she had left her husband. No, the truth was more complicated than that.
    ‘The clipping was from November,’ he said. ‘She turned up in Brighton at the beginning of July. We’ve no idea what she was doing between those dates.’
    Max sighed and drained his glass. ‘I’d better go. Are you coming to the show tonight? I could get you a comp.’
    Edgar shook his head. ‘I’m exhausted. I’m going to head home.’
    ‘I don’t blame you. Life’s too short to watch Tony Mulholland trying to guess people’s star signs.’
    As he walked home, Edgar wondered why he hadn’t accepted Max’s invitation. All he knew was that the last few days had given him a slight distaste for the theatre. Its lure had led Ethel to her death, that much was