Margaret Chen-Williams adjusted her reading glasses and clicked the blue "Join Meeting" button with the practiced ease of someone who had, over the past eighteen months, become rather more proficient with technology than she had ever intended. The familiar gallery view populated with faces that had become as dear to her as any she'd known during her thirty-seven years at the British Library.
"Good evening, everyone," she said, her voice carrying that particular quality of crispness that comes from years of maintaining order in reading rooms. "Or should I say good morning to you, Dr. Okonkwo?"
From his box on the screen, Rashid Okonkwo smiled, the early Copenhagen sunlight streaming through his study window. "Good morning indeed, Mrs. Chen-Williams. I've already had my first coffee in preparation for today's discussion."
"Agatha Christie's 'The ABC Murders,'" announced Elena Volkov, holding up her battered paperback to the camera. Her New York apartment backdrop had become as familiar as wallpaper. "Though I must confess, I've always found the twenty-sixth victim more interesting than Poirot's systematic approach."
Margaret's fingers, which had been reaching for her own copy of the book, paused imperceptibly. The ABC Murders had no twenty-sixth victim. The victims followed the alphabet—Alice Ascher, Betty Barnard, Carmichael Clarke, and the attempted murder of George Earlsfield. She made a small note in her leather-bound notebook, the same one she'd used for decades to track library acquisitions.
"Quite right," James Thornbury wheezed from his care home in Devon, his face too close to the camera as always. "Though I've always maintained that the evidence was there from the beginning, if only one knew where to look. Page 195, wasn't it? Or am I thinking of another case entirely?"
"Page 195," Dr. Okonkwo confirmed, though Margaret knew perfectly well that page 195 of the standard edition contained nothing more remarkable than Poirot discussing train timetables with Hastings.
This was the seventh time in as many weeks that the book club's discussion had taken these peculiar turns. At first, Margaret had attributed it to the natural confusion that comes with age—after all, she herself sometimes mixed up plot points from Christie's extensive catalogue. But there was something too deliberate about these errors, too consistent in their inconsistency.
That Thursday evening, after the others had signed off with their usual pleasantries, Margaret remained at her desk in her tidy flat overlooking Hampstead Heath. She opened a new browser tab and began to search, her librarian's instincts fully engaged. "Twenty-sixth victim" + "1995" yielded nothing. But "26th" + "journalist" + "1995" brought up something quite unexpected.
The article was from a newspaper archive, dated September 26th, 1995:
"Young Journalist Vanishes Without Trace. Priya Desai, 26, an investigative reporter for The Evening Standard, has been missing for three days. Colleagues report she had been working on a sensitive story involving corporate malfeasance. Police are appealing for witnesses..."
Margaret's pulse quickened in that particular way it did when, in her library days, she would uncover a rare manuscript or solve a particularly thorny cataloguing problem. She read on, her tea growing cold beside her.
The next Thursday arrived with unseasonable rain drumming against her windows. Margaret joined the meeting five minutes early, as was her habit, and found Dr. Okonkwo already waiting.
"Rashid," she began carefully, "I've been thinking about our discussion last week. About the twenty-sixth victim."
His face, pixelated slightly by the connection, remained admirably composed. "Oh? What about it?"
"There is no twenty-sixth victim in The ABC Murders. But there was a twenty-six-year-old victim in 1995. A journalist named Priya Desai."
The silence stretched between them, across the digital space that connected London to Copenhagen. Then, quite suddenly, three more participants joined the call simultaneously—unusual, as Elena was always precisely two minutes late, and James typically required multiple attempts to connect.
"I think," said James Thornbury, his voice steadier than she'd ever heard it, "that it's time we had a different sort of discussion."
Elena's expression had lost its usual sardonic amusement. "Margaret, how much do you know about investigative journalism in the mid-nineties?"
"Rather less than I know about the Dewey Decimal System," Margaret replied, her tone matching the gravity of the moment. "But I'm an excellent researcher, and I suspect that's precisely why I'm here."
"You noticed," Dr. Okonkwo said simply. "We thought it would take longer."
"My dear doctor, I spent nearly four decades helping people find information they didn't even know they were looking for. I can certainly spot when someone is looking for something specific." She adjusted her glasses again, a gesture of preparation. "Now, why don't you tell me what really happened to Priya Desai?"
The story that unfolded over the next hour was worthy of Christie herself, though with the untidy edges that real mysteries possess. Priya had been investigating a construction company called Meridian Developments, which had been winning suspicious numbers of government contracts. Three days before her disappearance, she had contacted Dr. Okonkwo, who had been her psychiatrist—though really, he admitted, more of a friend who happened to have psychiatric training.
"She was frightened," he said, his usual philosophical demeanor cracking slightly. "She said she had documents, proof of kickbacks going all the way to Westminster. But she needed one more piece of evidence."
"My mother was her editor," Elena interjected. "She told Priya to wait, to be careful. But Priya was twenty-six and fearless and thought she was invincible."
James had been a detective inspector at the time, three years from retirement. "The case was shut down from above after two weeks. Insufficient evidence, they said. No body, no crime. But I knew better. I kept my own files."
"And you've all been... what? Investigating ever since?" Margaret asked.
"Not investigating, exactly," Dr. Okonkwo said. "Waiting. Watching. The construction company collapsed in 2008 during the financial crisis, but the key players all walked away clean. We started this book club during the first lockdown as a way to share information without drawing attention. Who would suspect a bunch of retirees discussing murder mysteries?"
"Ingenious," Margaret murmured, already seeing the patterns. "And the coded messages—page numbers are dates, character names are locations?"
"You are rather quick," James said with admiration. "Though we've been at rather a standstill lately. The trail's gone cold, as they say in my former line of work."
Margaret stood up, disappearing from camera view for a moment. When she returned, she was carrying her laptop. "Not necessarily. You've been thinking like investigators from 1995. But I think like a librarian from 2021. Everything leaves a digital footprint now, even things from the past."
She shared her screen, showing them something she'd discovered during her week of research. "The British Library has been digitizing regional newspapers from the 1990s. It's a massive project, not well publicized. But I still have my access codes. And look what I found in the Croydon Advertiser, of all places, from September 30th, 1995."
The advertisement was small, easy to miss: "PD seeks new horizons. The zebra changes its stripes but not its nature. Contact Box 2619."
"My God," Elena breathed. "That's her. That's Priya's writing style—she always used animal metaphors."
"Box 2619," James muttered, scribbling notes. "That's a London postcode structure from the classified ads system. We could trace—"
"No need," Margaret interrupted gently. "I already did. The box was paid for by someone named Patricia Dawson. Currently living in Wellington, New Zealand. Runs a small independent bookshop called 'The Mysterious Affair.'"
The silence that followed was profound. Then Dr. Okonkwo began to laugh, a sound somewhere between joy and disbelief. "She's alive. After all this time, she's alive."
"The question is," Margaret said, "what do we do with this information?"
It was Elena who responded first, her practical nature asserting itself. "We need to be careful. If she's been hiding for twenty-six years, she had good reason. The people she was investigating—some of them are still around, still powerful."
Over the following weeks, their Thursday meetings took on a new intensity. Margaret used her research skills to carefully trace Patricia Dawson's life in New Zealand. She had arrived in 1995, claiming to be a British backpacker who had fallen in love with the country. She'd worked in various bookshops before opening her own in 2010. She had never married, lived quietly, and was known locally as an expert on crime fiction.
"It has to be her," James insisted during one particularly heated discussion. "The timing, the bookshop, everything fits."
"But how do we contact her without putting her in danger?" Dr. Okonkwo asked. "If we've found her, others could too."
It was Margaret who proposed the solution, elegant in its simplicity. "We don't contact her. We let her contact us."
She had been researching Patricia Dawson's bookshop and discovered that it had a small online presence, including a monthly newsletter about new crime fiction releases. Margaret subscribed, using an email address that included her maiden name—Chen—and her British Library identification number. If Priya was as smart as they believed, she would investigate any new subscriber. She would find Margaret's history, her connection to the library, and hopefully, feel safe enough to reach out.
The waiting was agony. Two weeks passed with no response beyond the automated welcome email. The book club continued their Thursday meetings, ostensibly discussing Dorothy Sayers, but the conversations were stilted, distracted.
Then, on a rain-soaked Monday morning, Margaret received an email. The subject line read: "Regarding your interest in rare Christie manuscripts."
The message was brief: "Mrs. Chen-Williams, I understand you're part of a book club that discusses classic mysteries. I have a first edition of 'The ABC Murders' that might interest your group. It contains some unique margin notes about a twenty-sixth victim that Christie had originally planned. Would your club be interested in a virtual presentation this Thursday? - P. Dawson"
Margaret's hands trembled as she forwarded the email to the others.
That Thursday, they gathered as usual, but the atmosphere was electric with anticipation. At precisely 7 PM London time, a new participant joined their Zoom call. The woman who appeared on screen was in her fifties, her once-black hair now streaked with silver, her face carrying lines that spoke of years of caution and careful living. But her eyes—her eyes were the same ones that stared out from the newspaper photograph Margaret had found.
"Hello," Priya Desai said softly. "I understand you've been looking for me."
Dr. Okonkwo made a sound that might have been a sob. "Priya. My dear child. We thought—we feared—"
"I know," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry for what I put you all through. But I had to disappear. They made it very clear that if I published the story, not only would I die, but so would everyone who had helped me."
"The evidence," James said urgently. "Do you still have it?"
Priya smiled, a expression both sad and triumphant. "I've had twenty-six years to improve on it, Inspector Thornbury. Yes, I retired when you did, but I kept watching. Digital records, financial transactions, property deals—I've documented everything. The construction company may have collapsed, but the players just moved on to new schemes."
"Why now?" Elena asked. "Why reveal yourself now?"
"Because three of the key figures have died of natural causes in the last two years. The remaining two are in their eighties. Their protection network has crumbled. And because—" she paused, looking directly at Margaret, "—because when I saw a British Library identification number from someone who had never subscribed to my newsletter before, who happened to be in a book club with some very familiar names, I realized that perhaps the universe was telling me it was time."
Margaret felt a warm glow of satisfaction. Her instincts had been correct.
"So what happens now?" Dr. Okonkwo asked.
"Now," Priya said, "we finish what I started twenty-six years ago. But this time, I'm not alone. I have a book club of detectives, each with their own expertise. Margaret with her research skills, James with his police connections, Elena with her tech knowledge, and Rashid with his understanding of human psychology."
"Rather like something out of Christie," Margaret observed. "A group of unlikely allies solving a mystery together."
"With one difference," Priya said. "In Christie's novels, the murder has already happened. We're preventing future ones. The construction schemes I was investigating have evolved into something much worse—human trafficking routes hidden in development projects. Every month we delay is potentially lives lost."
The book club that had started as a pandemic distraction had become something none of them had anticipated—a vehicle for justice delayed but not denied.
Over the following months, their Thursday meetings took on a dual purpose. They would spend the first half hour genuinely discussing their chosen mystery novel—keeping up appearances, as James put it—and the remainder carefully building their case. Margaret's research skills proved invaluable, uncovering connections in archived documents that others had missed. Elena worked her technological magic, recovering deleted emails and tracing cryptocurrency transactions. James reached out carefully to former colleagues, finding allies in unexpected places. Dr. Okonkwo provided psychological profiles of their targets, predicting their moves with uncanny accuracy.
And Priya, from her bookshop in Wellington, coordinated it all like a conductor with an orchestra spread across the globe.
The breakthrough came, appropriately enough, during a discussion of "And Then There Were None." Margaret had been cross-referencing property records when she discovered that all the shell companies they'd been tracking traced back to a single law firm—one that specialized in, of all things, literary estates.
"They've been hiding their money in fake publishing houses," she explained, sharing her screen to show a complex web of connections. "Publishing houses that exist only on paper, supposedly managing the rights to obscure Victorian novels."
"Brilliant," Elena said, her fingers already flying across her keyboard. "Literary estates are perfect for money laundering. Large, irregular payments, international transfers, and very little oversight."
"And I know someone at the Serious Fraud Office who specializes in exactly this kind of scheme," James added.
It took another three months to compile everything into a package that couldn't be ignored or suppressed. Priya wrote the story she had started twenty-six years ago, updated with everything they'd uncovered. But this time, instead of taking it to one newspaper, they released it simultaneously to journalists in five different countries, with all the supporting evidence available on a website Elena had built with multiple backup servers.
The Thursday when the story broke, they met as usual. Priya was still in New Zealand, but she had promised that once the dust settled, she would return to London.
"I owe you all more than I can say," she said, her voice thick with emotion. "Especially you, Margaret. Without your noticing our clumsy codes, we might have spent years more in limbo."
Margaret adjusted her glasses, a gesture she'd performed thousands of times over thousands of days, but which now felt like the conclusion of something significant. "My dear, I spent my entire career helping people find information. It's rather fitting that my most important discovery came after retirement."
"What will you do now?" Dr. Okonkwo asked Priya. "Will you return to journalism?"
"I think," Priya said slowly, "I'll keep the bookshop. But perhaps I'll also write. Fiction this time. I have an idea for a mystery novel about a book club that solves crimes."
"How very meta," Elena laughed. "Make sure you give the librarian all the best lines."
As the call wound down, Margaret looked at the faces on her screen—these people who had started as strangers, became friends, and were now something more like family. They had solved their mystery, exposed the villains, found their missing friend. It was, she thought, exactly the sort of ending Dame Agatha would have approved of.
"Same time next week?" James asked, as he did every Thursday.
"Of course," Margaret replied. "I believe we're discussing 'Murder on the Orient Express.' And this time, shall we actually discuss the book?"
"Where would be the fun in that?" Dr. Okonkwo said with a grin.
As she closed her laptop, Margaret glanced at her bookshelf, where her complete collection of Christie novels sat in pristine order. She thought about all those carefully crafted mysteries, where observant elderly ladies and fastidious Belgian detectives noticed what others missed, where justice always prevailed in the end, where groups of strangers on trains or islands could work together to uncover the truth.
Perhaps, she thought, real life could occasionally be as satisfying as fiction. It just required the right people, paying attention to the right details, at precisely the right moment.
Outside her window, Hampstead Heath was settling into evening, and somewhere in Copenhagen, Wellington, New York, and Devon, her friends were returning to their own lives. But next Thursday, they would gather again, drawn together by pixels and broadband, by shared purpose and unexpected friendship, by the enduring belief that mysteries—whether in books or in life—were meant to be solved.
Margaret smiled to herself as she headed to the kitchen to make a proper cup of tea. After all, every good detective needed their thinking time, and she had next week's book to consider. Though perhaps this time, she thought with a small chuckle, they really would just discuss the plot.
Then again, where would be the fun in that?