Embarrassment of Corpses, An (21 page)

Behind Geoffrey's back, Oliver checked his watch.

“So, did they fire you?” Susie asked gently.

“Fire me?” Geoffrey said with a bitter laugh. “No, worse. They promoted me. Apparently, it's the best publicity anyone at the firm has managed to engender for a book since Bunty Devereux mistook William S. Burroughs for the author of Tarzan.”

“Then why on earth are you so—”

“Cross?” Geoffrey thrust a bandaged finger under Susie's nose. “That's why!” he cried. “My stitches have been hurting all day. I'm probably going to get rabies. And it's all Oliver's fault.” He turned to look at Oliver as if noticing him for the first time. “What are you all dolled up for?” he asked.

“Oliver has a date tonight,” said Susie proudly. “With—”

“Lorina Random, eh? You sly dog!”

“No,” Susie persevered, “With Effie Strongitharm.”

Geoffrey let out a cry and clutched his heart dramatically. Then he let out another cry, because the action had caused him to squash his damaged finger. “Oh! Oh!
Et tu, Brute!
There I am, suffering for the cause of your literary success, and all the time you're running behind my back, stealing my girl!”

“
Your
girl?” they repeated in unison. The massed doubt caused Geoffrey to modify his indignation, but he remained defiant.

“Absolutely,” he averred. “I rather fancy my chances with Effie. She's come to my aid twice now when I was in great distress. Times like that create a bond between a man and a woman.”

“Let me see,” Susie mused, “she helped you out of a pair of boots when you were scared of imaginary scorpions, and she took you to the hospital because you got a tiny bite from a very friendly ferret. Sounds like the perfect start to a beautiful romance.”

“I was getting around to asking her for a date.”

“And what would that take?” Susie persisted. “To get her out for a drink, you'd probably have to be savaged by a pit bull terrier first.”

“Dinner and dancing would entail the loss of at least one limb to a pack of coyotes,” Ben suggested.

“And I don't think you could propose marriage unless you'd been bisected by a shark.”

“Laugh, I thought I'd never start,” muttered Geoffrey.

“Poor Geoffrey,” sighed Susie as she got up from the table. “Another evening at home, arranging your sock drawer. How are you going to do it this time, in alphabetical order of their pet names?”

“You know your problem, Susie,” said Geoffrey. “You're a woman trapped in a woman's body.”

“Ben, I'm going to freshen up and then we'll head off.” She went out, following Oliver, who had quietly slipped away a few seconds earlier.

“Great,” grumbled Geoffrey to Ben, who was idly picking up the shards of his french fries with a dampened forefinger. “You're all going off and leaving me. This is the story of my life, Ben. I have absolutely no luck with women. Do you know, I didn't undress a woman with my eyes until I was twenty-three.”

“Really?” said Ben absentmindedly.

“Yes. And she was a nun. The religious guilt took away all the enjoyment. Besides she had a terrible figure, even in my imagination.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And I had to give up self-abuse when I caught myself faking an orgasm.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Well, not give it up exactly. Call it something different, which is the politically correct approach to personal transformation. I now refer to it as ‘intracourse.'”

The doorbell rang again, and they heard Oliver's footsteps pass the kitchen door. The front door opened and closed. Geoffrey sighed.

Chapter Ten

“It's not Euphemia?”

“No.”

“And it's not Ephemera?”

“No!” Effie protested, with mock indignation.

“Then I give up,” said Oliver. “What is Effie short for? Effervescence? Effluvium? Effrontery?”

“I thought you'd given up,” she laughed. Their conversation was interrupted by the rare appearance of their waiter, a young man with a mane of blond, curly hair that rivaled Effie's and a sculptured three-day growth of beard.

“Can I interest you in dessert?” the waiter articulated, his attention focused on his reflection in one of the large Victorian mirrors covering the distressed stucco of the restaurant. Narcissism was the principal theme of Gadzooks, the popular restaurant on Kensington High Street, which explained its enduring popularity with the young and fashionable. The lighting was bright, not just for the video cameras, which threw the patrons' frequently famous faces onto large monitors dotted around the restaurant (a tip to the maître d' would secure several instant replays), but also to enable those diners who insisted on wearing sunglasses indoors to read the menus. Where many restaurants allowed palm-readers to drift from table to table, Gadzooks had a psychoanalyst.

Oliver had chosen the restaurant because it was within walking distance of Edwardes Square, entailing a later promenade with Effie in the warm evening air as he escorted her back to her car—and possibly into the house. (He had not anticipated her painful ankle, and she didn't tell him about it.) Susie had helped him get a reservation at short notice, although she had complained that the tryst was not to take place at Raisin D'Etre, “where I can keep an eye on you,” as she had put it.

Oliver and Effie ordered tea only, which caused the waiter to toss his head disdainfully and stalk back to a table of drunken debutantes and their escorts, who had occupied his attention for most of the evening.

“Effie is my initials,” she continued. “F.E. Do you see?”

“Boy, if you use your initials, you must hate your names!”

“I do.”

“So what are they? Ffrydeswyde Eulalie? Faustina Elfleda?”

She laughed again. “No, they're Frances Erica,” she confessed, sipping from the single glass of wine she had conscientiously allowed herself as an off-duty policewoman who may have to drive later. She was having fun without alcohol, enjoying Oliver's attentiveness, and almost forgetting the soreness of her scraped hands.

Oliver looked puzzled. “Those are nice names,” he said. “Why not use them?”

“My father's name is Francis Eric Strongitharm,” Effie replied. “And every time I use my full name, it reminds me that he really wanted a son instead of a daughter.”

“I'm delighted he didn't get one,” said Oliver gallantly. “In fact, I doubt I would be sitting here if he did.”

This remark pleased Effie. She had concluded several days earlier that Oliver's immunity to the Strongitharm Look was attributable to the young man's basic innocence, and she was almost pleased that her defenses had not proved impregnable to this rare property. Perhaps there were other men she had judged too hastily in her twenty-seven years, but Oliver may have been worth waiting for.

“But you use a different name too, for your writing,” she was saying. “O.C. Blithely. Where does that come from?”

“Blithely is just a made-up name that my editor thought sounded good for a children's author. She said I do everything blithely.” Oliver thought back to the particular activity his ex-girlfriend had been describing and chose not to elaborate. “And O.C. are my real initials. O.C. Swithin.”

“What does the C stand for?”

“Chrysostom. It's not that funny,” he complained as Effie spluttered into her napkin. “It was one of Mozart's middle names.”

“One of them?”

“Yes, he had three. Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus. His first name was really Johann. I wonder why he dropped it?”

“Well, why did you drop
your
real name?” she persisted. “If you wrote as Oliver Swithin, you wouldn't be mistaken for a woman so often.”

Oliver looked soberly at the candle on their small table. “Because ‘Oliver Swithin' wouldn't write second-rate rubbish about a pernicious ferret and a family of peripatetic field mice,” he said.

“I read the book you signed for me.”

“What did you think?” Oliver asked cautiously.

“I thought it was the best book I'd ever read…about a pernicious ferret and a family of peripatetic field mice,” she replied, her eyes twinkling.

“A dubious achievement.”

“But why resent it? Why does Oliver Swithin disparage O.C. Blithely, the hugely successful children's writer?”

“Do you like O.C. Blithely too?” the waiter chipped in as he arrived with a tray of too many items for just two cups of tea. “I think she's marvelous. Perhaps we could discuss this over a mochaccino later, when your friend goes home. You've noticed the debt that Finsbury owes to the writings of Derrida, of course. I've been asked to deconstruct
The Railway Mice and the Bloated Stoat
for Granta, you know.”

“The bill, please,” said Oliver firmly. The waiter shrugged and walked away, leaving Oliver and Effie wondering which of them he had been talking to.

“I don't resent being a children's writer,” Oliver said. “But it's not what I want to be when I grow up.”

“What do you want to be?”

“I don't know. And the way things are going, I'll have my midlife crisis before I finish my identity crisis—the psychological equivalent of going straight from puppy fat to middle-age spread. Ben Motley lives and breathes photography. No amount of commercial failure will deter Susie Bassett from opening restaurants. Geoffrey will always hate his job, but he loves his career. They know what they want. I envy them. I envy you.”

“Me?” Effie exclaimed.

“Oh yes. I love taking part in these mysteries. I've had more fun in the last week, pretending to be a detective, than I ever have tapping out the Finsbury stories. You get to do it all the time.”

“I've enjoyed your company,” Effie found herself saying, causing Oliver's heart to lurch. “Oh, by the way, Tim said to call him tomorrow. There may be some more detective work for you.”

***

Effie's weak ankle had made her reach for his arm as they left the restaurant, and Oliver had folded her hand tightly in the crook of his elbow on the way back to Edwardes Square, as if he were afraid that she might otherwise float away into the night. As they entered Edwardes Square, they were talking about the murders, but Oliver's mind was half on the future. Was this the evening to attempt a goodnight kiss, in front of his house, beside her red Renault? If on the lips, which way would her nose go, to the right, or was she a southpaw? Where could he put his hands, on her upper arms or could they grasp her shoulder blades?

“There was an unbroken string of six consecutive birth signs among the jury members,” he said. “What were the chances of that?”

“Pretty high, if you don't specify which six signs or which six of the twelve jurors have to have them.”

Oliver thought about this. “Even so,” he objected, “I still say the murderer was rather fortunate that his particular target jury had such a sequence.”

“Ollie, you're still thinking astrology first, jury second,” Effie sighed. “That's because we discovered the threads in that order. But for the murderer, it was different. He already knew whom he wanted to kill. He just had to find some elaborate pattern that would hide the true connection between his daily victims.”

They had stopped in front of Oliver's house. The curtain at Geoffrey's bedroom window twitched.

“Well, I enjoyed our conversation, but here's my car and here's your home,” Effie said, slowly searching in her handbag for her keys. Oliver swallowed.

“We could go on talking indoors,” he stammered nervously. “Over another cup of tea, I mean. Or coffee—I could make coffee. If we have any…”

Effie looked up at him with amusement and cocked her head on one side. “You're not very good at this, are you?” she said.

“No,” Oliver replied immediately with an embarrassed laugh. “Chalk it up to inexperience.” He cleared his throat. “Effie, I'm having such a good time that I don't want you to go yet,” he stated. “There, how was that?”

“Let me ask you something,” she said, idly tossing the car keys in the air and catching them with the same hand. “When you signed that Finsbury book for me, you thought for two hours and then wrote ‘To Effie, best wishes, Oliver.' And I have to say, I was severely underwhelmed. So tell me, Ms. Blithely, how are you going to sign the next one?”

He took a step toward her. “I'm not going to sign it at all,” he said softly. She raised one eyebrow. “I won't need to,” he continued, “because I'm going to dedicate it to you.”

The smile crept across her face in slow motion. “In that case, some more tea would be very nice,” she said, taking his hand despite her sore palm and leading him up the steps. But as Oliver fumbled for his keys with his free hand, the front door was abruptly opened in their faces.

“Hello, you two,” said Geoffrey, too enthusiastically. “Are you both coming in? Or does Effie have to leave? It's getting really late, Effie.”

“We're going to have some tea, Geoff,” said Oliver firmly, using every movable feature in his face to signal outrage at his friend's intrusion.

“Oh, are you sure?” Geoffrey blabbered, glancing anxiously behind him. But Oliver pushed past him and ushered Effie into the house. Upstairs, in Ben's studio, the stereo was playing an opera aria—“Ritorna Vincitor” from
Aida
. A second voice was singing along with the recording. Geoffrey shut the door and tried to get ahead of them again. “Look, tell you what, why don't you two go off to Oliver's room and let me bring the tea to you. Wouldn't that be nice? No need to go into the kitchen or anything like that.”

“That's kind of you, but I'm quite capable of making a pot of tea,” said Oliver, irritated at Geoffrey's behavior. Did he think this was going to make a difference with Effie? And what was this nonsense about not going into the kitchen? There could be nothing in there that Geoffrey didn't want him and Effie to see, Oliver thought, stubbornly opening the door, apart from…

“Lorina!” he almost shouted.

She stood up from the table, a dark vision in a black taffeta dress, gusting her expensive perfume in his direction. Unusually for her, she was wearing make-up, which gave her eyes a feline, predatory quality. Oliver froze in the doorway.

“I had to see you, Oliver,” she said quickly, the words coming in a rush. “Ever since Saturday, I've been thinking about you. It's not every day you find an old boyfriend on your doorstep, begging to come into your home in the middle of the night, but I wanted you to know how much I appreciated what you did for me that night—you were so kind, so gentle, so loving.”

Lorina broke off, catching sight of Effie watching the scene over Oliver's shoulder. Geoffrey had slunk away.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Lorina said contritely, “I didn't realize you had a guest.”

Oliver stood aside mutely and let the women gaze at one another. He knew he should attempt an introduction, but in his confusion, he suspected that he would stumble over Effie's name. Lorina covered his hesitation, striding across the kitchen with an outstretched hand.

“My name is Lorina Random,” she announced kindly. “Oliver and I are old friends.”

Effie shook Lorina's hand, clearly recognizing the woman she had first seen that morning. “My condolences on the loss of your father,” she said coolly. “I'm Effie Strongitharm.”

“A new friend of Oliver's, perhaps? I don't recall his ever mentioning you,” Lorina said, with polite curiosity. Oliver fought to find his voice.

“That's because I've hardly seen you in recent years,” he said purposefully.

“Apart from Saturday night,” Effie muttered. Lorina smiled self-consciously.

“I do apologize for turning up unannounced,” she said. “It's not like Oliver to be out this late, and when Geoffrey said you were expected back soon, I rather bullied him into letting me wait. But I've said what I came to say. Oliver was very kind to me the other evening, and I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated it, for old time's sake. Now I must go.”

“Oh, there's no need to rush,” said Effie sharply. “Stay and have some tea with Oliver, he was just about to make some. Unfortunately, I have to leave.”

She was at the front door before Oliver caught up with her. The soprano lirico spinto upstairs was into a cadenza comprising a series of sustained high Cs, although the recording had stopped. “Please don't go,” he entreated, gently holding Effie's arm. “There's been a terrible misunderstanding.”

The singing stopped. Effie stopped and turned slowly. Her eyes were wet. This hurt more than her skinned hands.

“I believe the cliché now is to say ‘there certainly has, and I'm guilty of it.'” Effie said in a controlled voice. “I'm sorry—you have every right to have a girlfriend, of course, but I wish you hadn't lied to me this morning, when you said you broke up with Lorina a long time ago. Thank you for dinner, Oliver. Goodbye.”

He dropped his arm, knowing he could not find the words to convince her that she was wrong. He was still staring at the back of the door when he heard her car start and head noisily out of the square.

“I'm sorry, Ollie, I can't stay for tea,” said Lorina, coming up behind him. She kissed him briskly on the cheek, leaving a pink lip-print. “But now we're alone, I also wanted to say I may have implied a few things in the middle of the night that I'd prefer we forgot about in the cold light of dawn. You behaved like a perfect gentleman, as always. Did your friend leave already?”