Closed Casket: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mystery 2) (20 page)

‘I met Iris Morphet when I was studying at Oxford. That is also where, and when, I met Joseph Scotcher. I cannot resist adding, though it is quite irrelevant, that I met them on the very same day, although they did not until later meet each other.

‘Do I wish they had never met? That is a tricky question! How does one choose between the present and what was once a possible future? Very hard indeed.

‘In college, Scotcher and I had rooms that were adjacent to one another. We met one day after both popping out of our little doors at the same time, like the man and woman from one of those old German weather houses! We soon became friendly. Scotcher flattered me most determinedly, and I lapped it up, rotten egotistical creature that I was in those days. I felt that befriending him was the least I could do. At the risk of sounding pleased with myself … well, it was clear to me that everything I was, he desired to be: rich, handsome, confident.

‘You think Joseph is handsome, I suppose? Pretty perhaps—altogether too delicate-looking for a man. And you think he is confident, I dare say? Well, not in those days, he wasn’t. Timid as a mouse! Hung on my every word. In due course, I noticed that a lot of his words were in fact mine. I once heard him tell a mutual friend about something amusing that had happened to him in Sevenoaks, in Kent—except it was an incident that had happened to me, not to him. I’d told him about it and, not knowing I was within earshot, he retold it as if it were his own experience.

‘I soon started to question whether anything I heard from him was the truth. Was it really his grandmother who had once dropped a hairnet into a bowl of rice pudding or was it some other chap’s? Was it Scotcher’s childhood home that had flooded, destroying all his treasured possessions, or that of a train porter who had once carried his suitcase? Was there ever a flood at all? Who could tell?

‘What? No, I never challenged him. Oh, I don’t know. I felt sorry for him, I suppose. I hoped that he mostly told the truth—perhaps he had only got carried away on that one occasion, I told myself, because my caper in Sevenoaks had been such a riot!

‘Then there was the flattery. I wrote something for my tutor that had Scotcher in
raptures
. He asked my permission to have copies made, at his own expense, so that he could share it with his mother and his brother, both of whom would love it, he told me. I thought it rather lumbering and uninspired myself, but a few weeks later Scotcher told me that his brother had declared it to be simply the best prose he had ever read, and what cogent arguments, and what intellectual brilliance …

‘Gentlemen, please remember this brother of Scotcher’s, for I shall mention him again in due course. His name is Blake. Scotcher and he grew up in Malmesbury, and Scotcher was the older of the two—and that is the sum total of what I learned about my new best friend at Oxford, who was remarkably reluctant to talk about himself or his family. I had the sense that they had no means to speak of, and that Scotcher was rather ashamed of them—but, at a distance of this many years, I can’t recall whether he told me anything of the sort. My imagination might have filled in the gaps.

‘It was about two months after I met Scotcher that he first raised the subject of his health. He returned from a trip to the doctor, or what he told me was a trip to the doctor, and announced that he had bad news: there was something wrong with his kidneys—so wrong that it might kill him. Well, I duly felt even sorrier for him! Who wouldn’t? There was I, stepping out with the lovely Iris Morphet …

‘I’m supposed to be telling you about her, aren’t I? Not Scotcher. The trouble is, other people’s romantic histories are so tedious, and the man I was then is not the man I am today. Besides, I’m eager to get to the exciting part of the story. I must, however, lay the foundations.

‘I was in love with Iris and she with me—that is all that needs to be said about that! She was not a beauty like Claudia, and neither did she have Claudia’s alluring quick-wittedness that I find so irresistible, or her sharp tongue. My dearest one is a minx, is she not? I do adore a minx! Iris was more the good girl sort, I suppose, and unfailingly kind. She had big red lips that needed no paint, flawless skin like a statue made of marble, and flaming red hair. There was something comforting about her. She was calm and serene, but passionate too: as if she had claimed and tamed the fire. She seemed to the young Randall Kimpton to be the very essence of womanhood. Once again, quite different from Claudia.

‘I’m convinced that Claudia is merely disguised as a beautiful young woman and is in fact a cruel Roman Emperor, fixated upon revenge. She is never happier than when she decides the world has done her a grievous wrong—which is every day, as reliable as the rising of the sun. Iris was different: grateful for a smile or a pleasant word, rarely angry or ill-tempered.

‘You might think it strange that I was drawn to two so different women. I disagree. Opposites attract, as everyone knows—but there is also something satisfying about meeting the female version of oneself. Claudia is, quite simply, a version of me that I wish to defile in all the usual enjoyable ways. Really, what could be better?

‘Do I shock you, gentlemen? I apologize. It’s only that I’m rather keen on the truth. If it’s true, then one ought to be able to come out and say it. I don’t give a fig for virtue—who can say what that is, anyway?—but without truth, we are all doomed to live out our days in darkness. And all this talk of truth brings me back to Scotcher.

‘The news he brought back from his medical consultations grew progressively worse. Many people in Oxford knew about his kidney condition by now, but I was closer to him than anybody in those days, and no one else monitored him in quite the way I did. What? Oh, yes, he had met Iris by now, many times. And I do her an injustice by saying that
I
was closer to Scotcher than anyone else. Iris took more of an interest in his ailing, failing kidneys than I did. She was always fussing over him—our poor, sick friend—always fetching things for him and inflicting her sensible advice on him: he must be stoical and optimistic, but at the same time practical; he must make sure to have fun and enjoy life, but not
too
much fun—on and on
ad nauseam
. It reached the point where I was sick of hearing about Scotcher’s blasted kidneys.

‘Being an observant fellow, I couldn’t help noticing that having the most wretched kidneys on this fair isle—
that
fair isle, I should say, since I’m talking about England—never stopped Scotcher from doing any of the things he most wanted to do. Whereas it regularly prevented him from undertaking life’s more tedious tasks. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, I became suspicious. I shared my suspicions with several friends and one university official, and quickly learned that most people would much rather not know an inconvenient truth—and besides, what was I able to prove? Scotcher by now was flattering everyone he met, it seemed, where once he had only bothered to flatter me, and nobody wanted to think ill of him. Think ill—oh, the irony! Most people did not want to consider that he might be perfectly well and thoroughly dishonest. They preferred to take their Joseph Scotcher sick and saintly.

‘I said nothing about any of this to Iris, which was silly of me, but she was forever telling me I ought to be softer, kinder, more like her.

‘One day I followed Scotcher, without his knowledge, to what he had told me was a meeting with his doctor. Unsurprisingly, he went nowhere near a surgery or hospital. He met the wife of the master of … well, I won’t say which college it was, for I have no wish to cause trouble for the lady in question. The point is, while Scotcher was supposed to be consulting a kidney specialist—a man—he was strolling through the botanic garden, exchanging confidences with another man’s wife.

‘Naïvely, I assumed that if he was busy with her, he would not also be busy with Iris, but I was wrong. I had not yet proposed marriage to Iris. Like a damned fool, I took too long about it, waiting for some sort of sign that she was the right girl for me. Imagine my shock when one day she announced that Joseph Scotcher had proposed to her and she had accepted him! Scotcher needed her so much more than I did, she explained tearfully. I was strong, whereas he was weak.

‘You’re going to ask me if I told her then of my suspicions. I did not. I had not done so before, and to announce them now, suddenly, would have made everybody question my motives and my honour. Iris would have thought I was prepared to say anything to discredit Scotcher. I did not wish to lower myself, and, as I have already said, I did not know for certain. What if I was wrong? I would have looked like a prize blockhead! Surely no one would tell a lie of such enormity, I kept trying to persuade myself.

‘To be frank, I was so angry with Iris that I found the idea of her marrying a complete charlatan rather entertaining. She and Scotcher deserved one another, I thought.

‘Scotcher threw himself upon my mercy. All I had to do was ask, he said, and he would explain to Iris that he could not marry her after all, though they were desperately in love. Ha! Called his bluff, I did! “I should very much like you to call off your engagement and return my young lady,” I told him. You should have seen the look on his face. He started to splutter. He assured me that once I thought about it, I would realize that I could never be truly happy with a woman who had betrayed me—and with my closest friend, too.

‘He was right. I told him he was welcome to Iris, and she to him. As for me, I wanted nothing to do with the pair of them and I made sure I got what I wanted. I successfully avoided them both thereafter, with the exception of a few chance glimpses in town.

‘A few months later, I received a letter from Iris. She was no longer engaged to be married to Scotcher, she wrote, though of course she would not allow herself to hope that I might forgive her and take her back. I did not bother to reply. I wondered if she had come to suspect him as I had. Her letter made an oblique reference to trust … oh, I can’t remember the details. I tore the infernal thing into many pieces and threw them on the fire.

Shortly after Iris’s letter, another one arrived—this one was from Scotcher’s younger brother, Blake, requesting a meeting with me. How could I resist? Surely the man’s own brother would know if he were truly ill, I thought.

‘Blake Scotcher suggested we meet at the Turf Tavern. I objected to his choice—dreadful place!—and named Queen’s Lane Coffee House instead. He agreed, and a date was fixed.

‘I’m not sure how to tell you what happened next. It matters, doesn’t it,
how
you tell a story. One has sometimes to make a random choice and hope for the best.

‘Well, when I arrived for our meeting, he was already there. My first thought was, “Strong resemblance, though this one has a darker complexion, and a coarser accent. There’s no doubt he and Scotcher come from the same stock, but why on earth does the man not trim his beard?” It was an appalling growth, red in the middle with grey outer edges. It looked like the sort of thing you might see on a pirate!

‘I soon forgot about his excessively whiskered face when he told me that his brother Joseph was dying, and that what he wanted most in the world was my forgiveness. He should not have allowed his friendship with Iris to develop in the way that it had, knowing she was mine, or almost mine.

‘I asked if it was his kidneys. The brother told me that it was. I asked how much time Scotcher had left and the answer was, “Months. A year at the outside.”

‘I can honestly say that for the first and last time in my life, I did not know what to do. I had been wrong about Scotcher, I realized—gravely wrong; I must have been. Filial loyalty was one thing, but surely no man of honour would agree to tell a stranger that his brother was dying if it were not so.

‘But, wait (I argued with myself)—that was a feeble contention if ever I had heard one. If one Scotcher brother could be a shameless blackguard, why could not another be cut from the same cloth? I soon saw that my theory did not hold water.

‘As I was pondering all this, Blake Scotcher started to speak more quickly. This is odd, I thought to myself.

‘I am trying to tell the story exactly as it happened to me, but it’s very hard. I must try, though.

‘It was as if something had suddenly made Brother Blake nervous, but what could it have been? Was it that I appeared to be thinking a little too long and hard? Was it that he had come to meet me assuming that I would rush with him to Scotcher’s bedside, crying, “All is forgiven”, and I was showing no sign of doing so?

‘“If you cannot bring yourself to pay Joseph a visit, would you consider writing him a letter?” asked Brother Blake, who appeared to be in more of a hurry with each word he spoke. “I hesitate to ask, but it would mean so much to him. Even if you do not feel able to say that you forgive him—you might simply wish him a peaceful passage from this world to the next. Only if you were to feel comfortable doing so, of course. Here, take my card. You may send your letter to me and I will see that Joseph gets it.”

‘And with that Blake Scotcher was gone—
if he was ever there in the first place.
Which of course he was not!

‘Don’t look at me like that, gentlemen. If I had told you too soon, I would have undermined the dramatic impact of the story. I wanted you to experience the incident as I did. Imagine
my
shock when Brother Blake handed me his card and his sleeve rode up his arm a little to reveal a wrist and lower forearm that was a quite different colour from his hands, neck and face. The beard, the dark skin and the coarse voice were a reasonable disguise, but as I sat at the table and went over everything that had happened,
I became absolutely convinced that the man who had just left Queen’s Lane Coffee House was not Blake Scotcher, but his devious older brother
—Fake Blake, as I have thought of him since, with great affection.