Embarrassment of Corpses, An (22 page)

“Yes. She left.”

“You should try a little harder next time, she's very attractive,” Lorina said with a sly grin. “No wonder you didn't want to go to bed with plain old me. Ah well, must rush, I have a late date with a minister. Political, not religious.
Ciao
, sweetcakes.”

And she was gone.

Music began again in the upstairs flat, “Vesti la giubba” from
I Pagliacci
.

“‘On With the Motley,'” Geoffrey translated ironically. He was sitting at the top of the stairs, his chin on his knees, barely visible in the gloom. “Music to get dressed to. A tenor aria, so Ben's client must have finished.”

Oliver turned the latch on the front door, walked slowly to the staircase, and leaned heavily on the banister. “How's your finger, Geoff?” he asked eventually.

“A lot better, thanks.”

Oliver sighed. “I appreciate your trying to head me off.”

Geoffrey shrugged away the acknowledgement. “Want a drink?” he asked.

“No, I'm going to bed,” said Oliver wearily. “Good night.”

***

Sleep was slow to arrive and brought dreams. In the last before waking, Oliver was trying to count the number of people sitting at a dinner table in a large, dark, Victorian greenhouse. He knew there should be twelve, but each time he counted, he could never get higher than six, although out of the corner of his eye, all the seats seemed to be taken. He tried again, recognizing some of the people—Geoffrey was there, Lorina, Sir Harry—but their names were not on the manifest that he found he was clutching. Effie was sitting at a computer a few paces away, and he pleaded with her to help him, but she was staring adamantly at the screen. When he turned back, the greenhouse was gone, and he was in a prison cell, like the one in Bow Street, while his uncle watched him from the doorway.

Oliver came to sudden consciousness in his bedroom, but the blurry image of Mallard did not vanish. He shook his head vigorously. Yes, still the Mallard.

“Good morning, dear nephew,” said the superintendent breezily.

Oliver's curtains failed to meet in the middle, and from where he lay in his bed, he could see watery sunlight falling into the wilderness of the back garden.

“What time is it?” he asked, lifting himself stiffly onto his elbows.

“Half past six,” said Mallard. “I wanted to catch you before you went to work.” He flipped on the light, causing Oliver to groan and dive under the bedcovers.

Mallard stared at the room. His nephew had mastered the subtle distinction between hygiene and discipline; the bedroom was both impeccably clean and hopelessly untidy. Not that Oliver was disorganized; the room was a palimpsest, where a distinct underlying order struggled to show through the randomness on the surface. Inside his wardrobe, the clean clothes were folded or hung neatly, although a batch of freshly laundered shirts lay over a chair, still waiting to be put away from the previous Friday; his personal files within the desk drawer were as clearly labeled as Sir Harry Random's, but Oliver had let the unsorted papers build up on the desk top for several weeks; and while his extensive bookshelves were rigidly categorized (by color—Oliver believed that you always remembered the color of a book-jacket even when you forgot the name of its author), there were telltale gaps, and several piles of books were stacked on the mismatched items of furniture in the room. He had, however, cleared the floor and the bed of debris, his one concession to the possibility of a visit from Effie the previous evening. This allowed Mallard, a rare visitor, an unobstructed path to the window. He threw back the curtains and pushed the sash all the way up.

“What do you want?” moaned Oliver, his voice muffled by blankets.

“Two things,” said Mallard, lifting a large map of London from the room's only armchair and seating himself. Oliver had marked the victims' homes on the map, to see if they formed any geometric patterns. “First, what on earth did you do to Effie last night? I got a very distressed telephone call at about eleven o'clock. Phoebe and I were already in bed. She called you a philanderer and a Lothario.”

Oliver flung back the bedclothes and sat up. “Aunt Phoebe called me that?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. “Then I guess I'm out of the will.”

Mallard tutted impatiently. “Effie called you that, as you can well imagine. She wanted me to cause you physical and psychological damage, as only an uncle can. But I come in peace. What happened?”

Oliver gloomily outlined the events of the previous evening, causing Mallard to replace his expression of avuncular concern with one of enjoyment, and finally to break into sustained and uncontrollable laughter.

“And I thought Geoffrey Angelwine and the ferret was the funniest thing I'd heard in days,” he said when he had recovered his breath, wiping his eyes on a large cambric handkerchief. “But you beat it, Ollie. I mean, I'm worried that there aren't enough girls in your life, and suddenly they come pouring out of the woodwork. My nephew, the Casanova.”

Oliver glared at him humorlessly from the bed. “Thank you for your concern,” he muttered. “Making Effie unhappy is the last thing I wanted to do.”

“No, no, my dear lad—making Effie unhappy is the second to last thing. Making Effie
angry
is the last thing you should want to do. She came top of her class in karate.”

“I'll remember that.”

“All right, don't worry,” Mallard continued, as his amusement died down. “I'll tell Effie that I asked you to go to Lorina's house on Saturday night. And that Welkin picked you up more or less immediately, before you had time for any rumpy-pumpy. But after that, you're on your own.”

“You implied that there was some other reason for your intolerably early visit?” Oliver said with as much dignity as a young man in yellow pajamas could muster. He groped for his glasses on the bedside table. Mallard stood up slowly and moved to the window, watching the sparrows playing in the dry earth outside.

“I spoke to my superiors yesterday afternoon,” he said eventually. “They don't think I've made enough progress. So I'm going to be replaced on the case. Today's my last day.”

“You cracked the case—” Oliver began, but Mallard's abruptly raised finger silenced him. The superintendent breathed deeply.

“They're right, of course,” he continued reasonably, still with his back to his nephew. “The trail's gone cold with the Burbages. Now we're down to guessing who may have been politically motivated to kill the Burbage jury. Perhaps another mind will find something I missed.”

How like Mallard to deal with Effie's distress before revealing his own agony, Oliver thought. He knew that Mallard had never been taken off a case in his entire career.

“But what could we possibly have missed?” Oliver asked, trying to share the responsibility. He climbed out of bed and put on his toweling bathrobe.

“I
must
have missed something, clearly. After all, the killer makes mistakes. But if he's that clumsy, that stupid, why haven't I caught him?”

“It was his marksmanship that failed in Piccadilly Circus, not his intelligence,” Oliver replied steadily.

Mallard turned around. The white hair that fell over his forehead, the straggling white moustache, and gold-rimmed glasses often obscured his facial expressions, and Oliver could not be sure if his uncle was challenged or defeated by his superiors' ultimatum.

“Oliver, I appreciate your trying to bolster my sagging spirits,” he said, with a smile. “You always have so much enthusiasm for the game, when your old Uncle Tim just gets rather tired of it all. But remember what Doctor Johnson said: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.' You see, I've been thinking. I've been trying to think like the murderer. And I think that with the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve good men and true on the jury, there are far too many twelves in this puzzle. So I've decided to ignore them both.”

Oliver sat down abruptly on the bed, bouncing several times, and clutched his head.

“Let me understand this,” he whimpered. “You're saying that the daily schedule of the murders, the locations, the methods of death, the victims' birth signs, their jury duty—none of these matter? That there's yet another connection still to be discovered?”

Mallard chuckled wickedly. “No. No more connections. No connection at all. That's the point. But if I'm right, we've only got a day to prove it.”

***

A few minutes later, Susie Beamish, who had just arrived home, was cheerfully preparing scrambled eggs, a task that was barely within the limits of her culinary skills. “I add chives,” she reported ominously. Mallard managed to warn her not to ask Oliver about the previous evening's date with Effie, before his nephew appeared in the doorway, dragging a sweatshirt over his tousled fair hair.

“Here's what struck me last night,” said Mallard, taking a gulp of tea. “Suppose you're the killer. You want to kill twelve people who have a specific connection—they served on a jury. So you look for an alternative pattern such as the signs of the zodiac, which you emphasize very strongly in your murders, in the hope that it will hide the original connection. Okay so far?”

“Crystal clear,” Susie brayed from the stove, scraping at the contents of the frying pan with a level of energy that could only mean the eggs had stuck to the bottom. Oliver merely nodded.

“Now let me ask you this,” Mallard continued slowly. “There are twelve signs of the zodiac. And there are twelve members of a jury. But if you
really
wanted to disguise the jury connection, why would you choose an alternative pattern with the same magic number, especially when it failed to work for more than six of the intended victims? Why not a set of six or seven…or ten, such as Lewis Carroll's Snark-hunters?”

“So you're saying that the killer
wanted
us to find the jury,” said Oliver.

“Yes.”

“Because he wanted us to believe that the deaths had something to do with the Burbage trial?”

“Yes.”

“But now you're saying that the jury isn't the real reason why these people are being killed, no more than their birth signs?”

“It doesn't look like it.”

“Yet there's no additional connection to be found among the victims?”

“No. A third thread would be almost impossible.”

Oliver sat back in his chair and stared at his uncle. “Then I don't get it,” he said helplessly. “The only possible explanation takes us back to the mischievous serial killer playing Consequences—that it's a game for its own sake.”

“Of course that's not the only explanation, silly!” exclaimed Susie, bustling over to the table with two plates, each bearing several steaming yellow pellets with green flecks and brown stripes. She placed them smugly in front of the two men. “Oliver, it's perfectly obvious what Uncle Tim's getting at. Ever since you spotted your precious patterns, you've been looking for reasons why a
group
of people had to die. Apart from the first one or two victims, you haven't looked at any of them as individual cases. Sorry about the eggs, darlings, they caught a bit.”

Mallard stared at the food, wondering how he could avoid eating it under the watchful eye of its perpetrator. Oliver, better prepared for Susie's cooking, absentmindedly smothered the scrambled eggs in tomato ketchup. At that moment, Geoffrey Angelwine walked into the kitchen. Mallard and Susie greeted him, but Oliver was still thinking about Susie's outburst. Eventually, he spoke:

“The murderer wants to kill only one person. But he hides his real victim somewhere within an elaborately contrived sequence of deaths. Two sequences, in fact. And we spend so much time looking for the key to these sequences that we totally ignore any individual motivation.”

“That's it,” said Mallard and Susie simultaneously. She waved Geoffrey to help himself to the rest of the scrambled eggs.

“So when, for example, poor old Archie Brock turns up in St. James's Square,” Oliver continued, “we were conditioned by that stage to say said ‘Oops, another one for the zodiac murderer.' We never bothered to ask if he might have any personal enemies down in Kent who wanted to kill him.”

“It would seem so,” grunted Mallard through a mouthful of egg, which was strangely crunchy. He reached quickly for his tea again.

“And so it didn't matter that the murderer could only manage six murders out of a potential twelve,” cried Oliver, as Geoffrey joined them at the table. “As long as the intended victim was one of the six, he didn't actually
need
to go any further. It all fits! Very good, Susie!”

Susie covered her flush of pleasure by taking her plate to the sink. While her back was turned, Oliver grabbed his uncle's plate and with a wink, scraped the offensive eggs onto Geoffrey's, who immediately ate them. Oliver threw Mallard a slice of dry toast in compensation.

“So who's the murderer?” Susie asked as she returned.

“Someone who had a personal motive to kill one of the six victims, evidently,” said Oliver.

“I think we can narrow it even further,” Mallard claimed, munching contentedly on the toast. “Until we spotted the zodiac pattern, we were looking at each victim rather searchingly. We had quite a few suspects for Mark Sandys-Penza, the Richmond estate agent, for instance—his wife, his secretary's boyfriend, his business partner, several competitors. But the murderer would want to avoid that kind of scrutiny. Now, I don't think he'd have expected us to tumble to the zodiac connection until the fourth murder. So I think we can ignore murders one, two, and three.”

“But the fourth one was Sagittarius, the mistake,” said Oliver.

“That doesn't matter, we know the
intended
Sagittarius victim was Edmund Tradescant. Is there anyone who might want to kill him? We never actually asked.”