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savored that slice while considering my suspects. So far, no one stood out. But maybe meeting Liam Taylor would change that.

Four
    I couldn’t get away to meet Jeremy’s trainer. I was called back to Primrose instead, to troubleshoot a batch of failed brownies. Those are the breaks of chocolate whispering, though.
    When I arrived, the shop was nearly devoid of customers but chockablock with the dizzying fragrances of chocolate, butter, and sugar. Also, a faint undercurrent of burnt brownies. Uh-oh.
    It hadn’t been a false alarm, then. I’d hoped that my high standards might have affected the staff’s assessment of the situation, leading them to call me to deal with a minimally flawed batch of crumbly or overly moist sweets. I guessed not.
    I stepped past a mother with a portable pram and a businessman with a copy of the Financial Times tucked under his suited elbow. I spied a customer with a tabloid paper, too.
    The press’s take was that Jeremy Wright had been murdered ( IN COLD BLOOD ! the headlines hollered) by any number of suspects. An angry employee. A deranged fan. A jilted would-be lover. One “source” even envisioned a secret plot by MI6. (Now known as “SIS,” the British Secret Intelligence Service, by the way. James Bond movies had been altered forever, it turned out.)
    The tabloid press definitely stood to gain from an event like Jeremy’s suspicious death. After all, nothing stoked the public’s prurient interest as much as a celebrity’s untimely death did. The free papers given away on street corners would benefit from increased ad sales—sales that would buy them another year or two of operations, despite the encroachment of Wi-Fi on the Underground luring away their (former) readers to cell phone games and texting. The legitimate press would benefit from runaway sales, period. Even TV broadcasts were going crazy.
    For all kinds of media, Jeremy’s demise was a win-win.
    That macabre situation brought up more than a few ghoulish questions. Could someone in the press have been desperate enough—or motivated enough—to have engineered Jeremy’s murder, I wondered? Or, given Jeremy’s supposedly legendary temper, to have actually bludgeoned him to death themselves? I doubted it.
    But seeing those tabloid papers at Primrose, I couldn’t discount the possibility altogether. The next time I returned to the Wrights’ guesthouse, I needed to talk to a journalist.
    In the back of the house—where the shop’s kitchens, work space, ovens, walk-in refrigerator and freezer, and office were all shoehorned into far too little space—the bakers all made room for me. I grabbed an apron and pulled it over my head.
    The full sheet pan of brownies in front of me was . . . abysmal. The brownies smelled nicely chocolaty, so that was a plus. But they lacked the glossy, crackly surface that all good brownies should have. When I cut one, it mushed to bits, too soft to hold together. When I sniffed it, I detected hints of charred sugar.
    That might not have been all bad. Technically, caramel is burnt sugar — expertly burnt sugar—mixed with cream and butter. But these brownies had not been expertly made. Not in the least.
    The assembled bakers shifted, staring hopefully at me. I couldn’t bear to disappoint them. That was no way to teach.
    â€œNot bad,” I told them with an encouraging smile. “Ten minutes less baking time, a slightly heavier hand with the flour, and more time spent whisking the eggs with the sugar, and you’d have a wonderful fudgy brownie here.” I tasted a crumb. “The chocolate must have burned in the bain-marie.” That was the first step—melting at least two kinds of chocolate together with butter in a bowl set over simmering (never boiling!) water. I rolled up my sleeves. “Let’s try again. Together this time.”
    Hugh Menadue hesitated beside me, tall and