Embarrassment of Corpses, An (24 page)

“Ah, then the late Squire Random was the reason for all this, and the other five died to draw attention away from his murder!” cried Ambrose. “How deliciously intriguing!” Oliver glanced unavoidably toward Lorina, who remained impassive.

Mallard smiled for the first time. “I'm not looking for your father's murderer, Mr. Random. I'm about to arrest the person who killed those other five people.”

“You mean there were two murderers?” Ben blurted out.

“Two murderers?” Susie repeated. “I can't take this.”

“No,” Mallard stated emphatically. “I'm not looking for Sir Harry's murderer, because there's no such person. Sir Harry Random wasn't murdered. His death was an accident, as the police believed in the first place.”

With a cry, Lorina tottered. Ben swiftly caught her and, with Effie's help, lowered her to the ground. Ambrose ignored his sister's reaction.

“She'll be okay,” said Effie, cradling Lorina's head in her lap. Mallard responded by strolling over to Geoffrey and laying a hand on his shoulder. Geoffrey gulped apprehensively.

“This morning, Geoffrey Angelwine gave me food for thought,” the superintendent continued, unavoidably remembering the other food he had been given for breakfast. “He said that every time we come up with one solution, the murderer is another jump ahead. Another layer deeper into the onion, if you like. It's like a game, played out between the murderer and the police. And I think Geoffrey's hit on the real reason for these killings.” He let go of Geoffrey, who gratefully dropped back a couple of steps.

“This whole thing has been no more than a giant puzzle!” Mallard proclaimed. “It's a game played across London, just like Oliver's hide-and-seek Snark Hunt, with real people—real human lives—as the expendable pieces. There is no hidden motive for any one of these murders. There is no zodiac serial killer, no Cliff Burbage taking revenge on the jury that convicted his father, no hidden malcontent whose target is Sir Harry Random, or Nettie Clapper, or Mark Sandys-Penza, or Mr. Tradescant here, or Mr. Dworkin, if he'd got that far, or the other jury members. These suspects, these victims—actual or potential—have all been pawns in the murderer's game. The true targets for these vile crimes are still alive, standing here—the police investigators who joined in that game!”

“But who would want to do that?” squealed Susie.

“Who?” cried Mallard incredulously. “Isn't it obvious? There's only one person who had the opportunity and God help me, I gave it to him.”

“Oliver,” breathed Effie.

“Oliver,” Mallard confirmed, pointing at his nephew, “by all that's damnable.”

Nobody seemed to move, but Oliver suddenly found himself standing alone, almost in the center of the group. He brushed his hair from his eyes.

“This is, of course, ridiculous,” he mumbled. “Uncle Tim—this is me, your nephew Ollie. I'm not a murderer. I've been helping you
catch
the murderer. I'm on your side.”

Mallard continued to stare at him, without speaking further. Oliver looked down at Effie, who still held Lorina in her lap. Two pairs of eyes, ice-blue and coffee-brown, gazed back. “Effie, you got the wrong end of the stick the other night, Lorina will tell you! Say you don't believe it!”

Mallard spoke before Effie could answer. “At six o'clock in the morning, eight days ago, Sir Harry Random left the Sanders Club and went out for some air, perhaps to clear his head before going home. After five minutes, Sir Harry found himself in the middle of a deserted Trafalgar Square. We'll never quite know what happened, but he was old and he'd been drinking and I think the temptation to climb onto the rim of this fountain was irresistible, as it is to a child. He lost his balance and fell, striking his head on the stonework, and then rolled into the basin. Any trace of blood or hair on the stone was soon washed away by the overflowing water. It was an accident, a sad, regrettable accident, just as we thought initially.”

“No!” cried Oliver, “I discovered the letter in the lobby of the Club, arranging the meeting. And there was the symbol for Pisces drawn on his dress shirt!”

“Oliver found Sir Harry a few minutes later,” Mallard continued stubbornly, “but he was too late to save him. Oliver was distraught, angry, maybe even slightly guilty for having been asleep while Sir Harry stepped out alone. In those frantic moments, maybe it was understandable that Oliver couldn't accept the banality of his mentor's death by drowning, and that by imagining it as a murder, he was somehow giving Sir Harry more dignity. And then a policeman turned up—Constable Urchin here, who quite rightly refused to believe in a murder for which there was no evidence.

“This annoyed Oliver. He wanted to give Urchin something to think about. He'd had cause to remember Sir Harry's birthday, the twenty-ninth of February. He knew this made Harry a Pisces. He noticed the dolphins on the nearby statue—not fish, but close enough. In Oliver's mind, it all came together, and in a fit of willfulness, while Urchin's back was turned, he opened Harry's jacket and scrawled the Pisces symbol on his wet shirt-front.”

“And I just happened to have a blue marker pen on me?” said Oliver sarcastically.

“No. No marker pen was found on you when you were arrested, nor at the crime scene, nor in the fountain.”

“Then I couldn't have drawn it, could I?” Oliver cried in exasperated tones. “The symbol must have been there
before
Harry was thrown into the fountain.”

“The police didn't retain Sir Harry's shirt,” Mallard remarked. “So we assumed the blue symbol on Harry's starched shirt-front was drawn by the same marker pen used for the later zodiac symbols. But maybe it wasn't.”

Welkin handed him a small valise, from which Mallard took a white garment. Then he fished in his pocket for something else.

“This is a starched evening shirt like Sir Harry's,” he said. He held up a small blue cube. “And this is a piece of billiard chalk, used for marking the end of cues. Watch.”

Mallard dunked the shirt in the fountain, wrung it out, and spread it flat on the ground. With the chalk, he scrawled the double-ended fork that represented Pisces. It left a dull blue stain on the white fabric.

“But I didn't have any chalk either!” Oliver insisted.

“Not when you were arrested. You'd already thrown it into the fountain, where it floated with the rest of the debris until it broke up. But you had blue chalk when you left the Sanders Club. It was part of your equipment as one of the characters in Lewis Carroll's
Hunting of the Snark
. Harry had needle and thread in his lapel because he was the Bonnet-maker. And Oliver, you had chalk because you were the Billiard-marker!”

Mallard plunged the shirt into the fountain again and shook it underwater. When he took it out, the blue mark was almost gone.

“As you can see, for the sign to show up, it had to be drawn
after
Sir Harry's body had been taken from the fountain. Oliver was the only person who had the opportunity to do this.”

“What about the letter that was sent to Harry?” Oliver said fiercely. “You saw that!”

“Nobody saw that letter in Sir Harry's possession. Not the club's night porter, nor the fellow Snark-Hunters. You may have recovered it from the club lobby a day or so later, under Mr. Dworkin's eyes, but that's because you printed it and planted it there yourself after Sir Harry was dead.”

“Why? Why would I do all this?”

Mallard passed the wet shirt back to Welkin and rested on the edge of the fountain, staring at his nephew. The others might as well be invisible, a silent audience to a two-character play, the watchers of a film that was unreeling to its climax.

“Here's what I think happened, Oliver. By now, you've inwardly accepted that Harry died accidentally. But it annoys you that Constable Urchin failed to believe you, or that despite your fabricated evidence, the CID don't believe you, and nor do I when I turn up unexpectedly at Bow Street. You wonder what it would take to make us accept your story, even though it isn't actually true. And what it would take, you decide, is more murders.

“What if Sir Harry's Pisces death were only the first of a series? Wouldn't that be fun—to devise a sequence of deaths combining zodiac signs and your detailed knowledge of London? How and where would Aries die? And Taurus? And all the others, one a month, or one a week, or hardest of all, one a day, in strict order. Then in Sir Harry's study, you notice that he kept files on everything, including the names of a jury he once served on. Twelve jurors, twelve signs of the zodiac. Could that add another level of complexity to your puzzle?

“It obsesses you. Back home on that Monday afternoon, a clever series of telephone calls tracks down the jury members and elicits their birthdays. And lo and behold, you can get a sequence of five more consecutive zodiac signs, stretching away from Sir Harry—Aquarius, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, and Libra. You have to go backward through the year, not forward, but still…How easy would it be, you wonder, to get Aquarian Nettie Clapper up to Sloane Square, to die near the River Westbourne, her skull smashed with a length of lead pipe? You call again, this time pretending to be a solicitor with good news of a bequest. She takes the bait. There isn't much time, so you run out to Harold Wood that night and drop off a letter, arranging a meeting early the following morning.”

“This is all so far-fetched,” Oliver complained, with a mute appeal to the watchers. But each face was expressionless. Mallard lowered his voice, like a priest reaching the holiest point in the liturgy. His eyes never left Oliver's scowling face.

“On that Tuesday morning, you turned up at Sloane Square, only one stop from South Kensington, where you work. Until then, I think you just wanted to test the extent of your ingenuity, to see if you could make the pattern work. But when it did, when poor Nettie Clapper stood before you expectantly, you couldn't resist. It's no longer about the indignation of not being believed. It's about power, the power of mischief, the power of the puzzler. One swing of that pipe into an old woman's face and the game would begin—the race to get through your sequence of five daily murders before Scotland Yard could solve the mystery. You couldn't resist. And may God damn you, you succeeded!”

“I was helping you!” Oliver shouted tearfully. “I was the one
solving
the mystery, not creating it.”

Mallard advanced a step toward his nephew, which emphasized his greater height. “We didn't get to Gemini, the Twins. But you could be their symbol, Oliver—so arrogant that you even challenged your own intellect to a duel. Could you, the killer who already knows the solution to the puzzle, get to the end of the sequence before you, the stand-in detective, found the answer?” He thrust a pointing finger behind him. “The dolphin statue as a fish. The wrong name for the Kew Gardens greenhouse. You were very quick to spot those erroneous connections.”

“I know a dolphin's not a fish,” Oliver growled. “And the murderer's letter spoke of the ‘Tropical House.' Just because I try to follow his thinking, that doesn't turn me into him! I was with you! I was on your team!”

“You weren't with us when any of the murders took place. You don't have a single alibi!”

“Effie! Tell him he's wrong!” Oliver pleaded.

Effie continued to watch him coldly, stroking Lorina's head. “It's you, Oliver,” she said viciously. “You knew you only had to dangle the suspicion of a pattern in front of the police and, superstitious creatures that we are, we would go hunting mythical serial killers. And all the time, it was your smug, dirty secret that at the core of this mystery was a meaningless accident—Sir Harry Random's random death!”

“But it was a second-rate job, Oliver,” snarled Mallard. “Too many mistakes. You even killed the wrong person. Even now, even with five murders behind you, you're still second rate.”

Oliver's abrupt scream of animal rage froze them. Almost in slow-motion, they saw his hand go into his satchel and pull out the omnipresent folding umbrella. He began to flail it crazily above his head, as if swatting invisible demons. It was a ludicrous, pathetic sight.

“Take him down!” Mallard commanded, concerned for the civilians. The detectives responded, the others backed away quickly. But Effie, on her knees, was encumbered by Lorina, and Moldwarp was chained to Burbage. The limping Welkin was the first to reach Oliver, and was quickly felled when the young man struck him on the head and kicked a crutch away. Urchin came up from behind, but Oliver reeled on him angrily and threw him with brutal strength toward Moldwarp and Burbage. All three men tumbled to the ground.

For an instant, Mallard and Oliver faced each other, almost motionless. Then there were two gleams of silver metal: one from the police whistle that Mallard placed in his mouth, ready to summon other detectives from the north side of the square; the other from the blade that Oliver pulled from the umbrella's shaft, glittering through the air in front of his uncle.

A fine red mist sprayed from the whistle, but no sound. Instead, Mallard's breath seemed to hiss wetly from the jagged new mouth that had opened across the folds of his throat. Blood cascaded onto his collar. He dropped.

Oliver was gone, lost among the cars and buses around the square, before Mallard hit the ground. Speckles of rain began to appear on the dusty pavement.

Chapter Twelve

The volume was high on the CD player, perhaps to keep the quieter moments of the string quartet audible through the occasional thunderclap. But there was still only one point in the last movement when the music grew loud enough to mask the cautious opening of the first-floor French window and the sudden hiss of rain, falling in the Twickenham street outside. Surprisingly, the action did not trip the burglar alarm of the smart, eighteenth-century house in Montpelier Row, and the window was closed again before the quartet's chiming garlands subsided, and the four instruments returned to the steady, tolling pace of the passacaglia, its theme inspired by Venetian church-bells.

In the room, the simple E major melody comforted the ear with its insistent tonality, drawing the listener on to that shattering, consoling, searching final chord of Britten's final quartet. Not the expected E major, foretold for so long, but a bare triad of C sharp minor for the upper instruments, while the cello descends to the modal D natural that had haunted the movement. Critics question its meaning. Is it death? When he wrote the movement in Venice, Britten was certainly under the sentence of death, delivered by his failing heart, and the quartet quotes from the composer's last opera,
Death in Venice
, including Aschenbach's distraught confession of his impossible love for the passing boy, Tadzio. But death did not come for Britten for a year, and in Aldeburgh, not Venice.

The compact disk stopped, and a very wet Oliver Swithin was forced to choke back a gobbet of illogical outrage that he and the room's occupant could both take the same pleasure from such a sublime moment of music. Then he stepped out from behind the long wine-colored curtains.

The man standing by the expensive stereo equipment spun around, and for a second Oliver saw terror in his eyes. He enjoyed this. With his inoffensive features and naturally bemused expression, Oliver was not used to intimidating people, although he privately admitted that an unexpected appearance looking like a drowned ferret helped. But the man facing him was too good at this. His instinctive suavity quickly returned.

“I trust you haven't returned to make good on your biggest mistake,” Edmund Tradescant said, with annoying sangfroid. “It wouldn't be very tidy to slay a Sagittarius at this stage.”

“I'm not here to kill you,” Oliver told him. Tradescant absorbed this information with a quizzical twist of the head.

“In that case, can I offer you a drink? I was just about to top myself up before going to bed.” He raised a whisky tumbler and rattled the ice cubes.

Oliver demurred, but watched Tradescant closely as he turned his back and fiddled with decanters and glasses on the cocktail cabinet. Was he contemplating hurling the ice tongs at the intruder or smashing his whisky tumbler and grinding the shards into Oliver's face? But perhaps he thought twice. It was Waterford, after all.

The large room was decorated as Oliver expected. One or two of the pieces of furniture were genuine antiques; the others were period reproductions, or more comfortable modern pieces of an enduring neutrality that work in any setting—like blue denim jeans that match paint-spattered t-shirts and Hermes scarves with equal composure.

“Cheers,” said Tradescant, turning around and sipping from the recharged tumbler. “So if you don't want to kill me, what
do
you want?”

“The truth about the murders.”

Tradescant shrugged dismissively. “I thought your actions this afternoon were tantamount to a confession. Is there a word for murdering your own uncle? ‘Avunculicide' or something?”

“He is dead?”

“No doubt about that from where I was standing. I think that brings your tally to seven.”

“I did not commit the zodiac murders,” said Oliver emphatically.

“Then you have a peculiar way of protesting your innocence.”

Without asking, Oliver fell into the armchair that Tradescant had just vacated, with his back to the door, and ran his fingers through his fine, damp hair. Tradescant didn't move, but stood nursing his glass. Oliver had noted that he was too wise to play the outraged householder, leaping for the telephone or his burglar alarm's panic button. “He wants to hear what I know,” he thought.

“Uncle Tim made me angry,” Oliver said wearily, as if he were finally speaking words that he had been rehearsing silently for several hours. “He said the one thing he knows I hate to hear—that I'm ‘second rate.' I
know
I'm second rate, for God's sake: I live with that self-reproach every day. I'm a second-rate writer, who can't do better than stupid stories for children. I'm a second-rate lover, who finally meets the perfect woman and doesn't bring himself to act because of some prosaic ethical code. Now, I'm supposed to be a second-rate murderer, too, who can't even fool himself. When Uncle Tim said those things about my being two people, one who murders and one who solves the murder, I thought for one brief second that it might be true—that there is indeed another Oliver, dancing beyond my reach. Perhaps that other Oliver finally erupted to the surface in Trafalgar Square, settling the score for twenty-five years of failing to make my mark on the world, of secretly knowing I was truly second-rate.”

Tradescant stared into his drink. “In a case of multiple personality,” he said, “which is what you seem to be suggesting, there's a school of thought that believes you—the sane, gentle Swithin, who wants to help the police—aren't guilty of the murders committed by the other Swithin, the gamester, the trickster.”

“But neither Swithin is guilty of the zodiac murders,” Oliver replied. “I was confused when Uncle Tim threw those accusations at me. Now I think I can refute them.”

“You mean, you've found an alibi?”

“No. It was an odd coincidence that I wasn't with my uncle or my friends at the time of the deaths. Listen, though. Uncle Tim said I devised the murders after I was supposed to have spotted a file on jury duty in Harry's office on Monday afternoon, the day of his death. But I didn't go to Harry's home until Tuesday, and by then, the Aquarius death had already taken place!”

“Perhaps you saw the file on an earlier occasion,” said Tradescant, drinking again.

“I hadn't been to Harry's house in years. And what about the morning of his death. Uncle Tim claimed I had a cube of blue billiard chalk in my pocket because I was playing the Billiard-marker in the Sanders Club's Snark Hunt. But I wasn't the Billiard-marker! I was the Banker. The other Snark-hunters will vouch for that. So will the police—I had Monopoly money in my pocket as a prop, which the police found when I was arrested.”

“I doubt the police will be forthcoming with a defense, given that you've slain one of their own.”

Oliver ignored the comment. “I also had a toy telescope, because Henry Holiday's illustrations for the poem show the Banker with a telescope. And anyway, a Victorian billiard-marker wouldn't carry chalk. His job wasn't to chalk the cues, it was to keep score of the game.”

“A little arcane,” Tradescant muttered. “Had you been playing billiards that evening?”

“No, Harry and I played poker. We didn't go into the club's billiard room.”

“You could still have slipped a cube of chalk into your pocket. Not that it matters, because the police think Sir Harry was the one person you
didn't
kill.”

Oliver shook his head. “I didn't kill any of them.”

“Then who did?”

“You did.”

Tradescant raised his eyebrows, but did not look at Oliver. “Ah, now I see why you've come here,” he said. “Well, if you're going to accuse me, perhaps I may sit down. I prefer to be comfortable when I'm listening to fiction. Although I should tell you immediately, I have alibis for several of the deaths.”

He sat upon a damask-covered sofa, almost underneath a shaded standard lamp, the room's only illumination. Damn him, Oliver thought, he was so bloody collected, placing his drink neatly on a coaster on the mahogany end table. But Oliver also noted Tradescant's arm, casually draped over the back of the sofa. What was he reaching for?

“You see,” said Oliver, “there's one person I can't get out of my mind.”

“And that is?”

“Your colleague Gordon Paper, struck by a crossbow bolt that was aimed at you. What an astounding coincidence that he happened to walk up to you at that crucial moment.”

Tradescant smiled suddenly, as if suppressing a hiccough. “They say Piccadilly Circus is the place for coincidental meetings,” he remarked.

“I don't think Gordon Paper was a coincidence. Or a mistake. I think he was the point of all this. And our biggest mistake was losing sight of him when we found out he wasn't on that jury.”

“Tell me, Mr. Swithin,” said Tradescant, after a pause, “since you seem rather a bright lad for your age, why on earth would I want to kill Gordon? He was the Company's most valuable asset—and I'm a company man.”

“It's obvious now,” Oliver answered immediately. “A travel-sick recluse turns up in Piccadilly Circus. Why? We thought at first that the killer was showing us how clever, how manipulative he could be. But ‘why?' was the wrong question. We should have asked ‘how?' And we should have asked it even after we decided Paper was a mistake. He would need more than a couple of Dramamine to get himself down to London. There can only be one explanation: Gordon Paper had found his permanent cure for travel-sickness. He must have told you, and you decided to kill him and take it for yourself.”

He paused, expecting some comment, but Tradescant said and did nothing.

“Paper turned up unexpectedly in London a week before his death, a personal demonstration that he'd found his cure,” Oliver continued, keeping an eye on the other man's nonchalant arm. “You were the first person he contacted. You told him to lie low for a few days. Perhaps you tempted him with promises of a grand unveiling to your senior management, a congratulatory
viva
, with the newly mobile Mr. Paper as a surprise guest. But the only thing you were planning was his death.

“Paper was an eccentric inventor, a man so valuable to his employer that if he were to die under mysterious circumstances, you and other colleagues would inevitably become part of the investigation. You had to find a way to kill him that would avoid any police scrutiny of his private life. An accident, perhaps, where he's one of many to die? A seemingly random act of terrorism? No, you dream up something much better: Gordon Paper will die because of an apparent mistake made by an obsessed serial killer who had very well established reasons for murdering someone else. That someone else was you, in fact. Because you speculate that the safest place for a murderer to hide is behind the mask of his own intended victim.

“You had the freedom to play with a hundred biographical details about yourself before lighting on two that could be woven together into a suitably elaborate pattern: that you'd served on a jury, which had been obliquely threatened on television; and that your birth sign was Sagittarius. You researched it quickly—it wasn't difficult, you already knew who the other jury members were and what they were like. You executed your pattern, one by one, complete with little errors. It's quite easy for the executive of a pharmaceutical company to get his hands on some ‘squidgy,' on the fast-acting poison that killed Vanessa Parmenter, on the dart gun used to deliver it. Then, when your turn came to die, you stepped out of your place in the charmed circle and threw Gordon Paper in instead, and the switch is perceived as just another of the murderer's mistakes. Even if the police had seen beyond the zodiac connection and the jury connection—and they did—you were still safe. Because any further investigation would involve looking for someone who wanted to murder you, Edmund Tradescant, not non-Sagittarian, non-jury-member Gordon Paper!”

Tradescant shuffled on the sofa, crossing one leg over another, but keeping his hand out of sight.

“You forget,” he said quietly, “I was standing in front of Gordon when he was shot from behind. From a rooftop on the far side of Piccadilly Circus. How am I supposed to have accomplished that?” He thrust his visible hand into the pocket of his fawn cardigan and straightened his arm. Oliver could tell from the garment's bagginess that this was a regular habit, a rare lapse from his studied correctness. He could tell, too, that the small pocket was empty.

“You claimed he was struck by the bolt as you moved toward one another. But that wasn't what happened. You called Paper at his hotel and told him to meet you in Piccadilly Circus. You got there early and planted the crossbow on the roof, with the Sagittarius symbol taped to it. Then you came down to face Paper.”

“And who killed him?”

“You did. You had the crossbow bolt in your pocket. As Paper walked up to you, you took it out, plunged it into the back of his neck, and dragged his dying body down on top of you, crying for help, as if he'd been shot from a distance.”

“You're doing very well, but you still haven't told me why I should want Gordon's formula.”

Oliver hesitated, wondering if he had just heard the admission he had come for. “Presumably it was worth a lot of money,” he said. “Oh, there may be plenty of products that relieve motion sickness or vertigo. But a total
cure
…I imagine you wanted to claim that you had invented it and get all the rewards yourself.”

Tradescant started to shake his head emphatically before Oliver finished speaking, before he had even had time to process the young man's language. Oliver had always hated that particular habit.

“Wrong, I'm afraid,” sighed the older man, reaching languidly across his body for the glass of whisky. “You disappoint me, Swithin. Let me explain. The company might make a billion dollars from the worldwide sales of a permanent cure for acute travel sickness. But we'd lose the ten billion dollars we already make from those other products you mentioned, which offer only temporary relief. We couldn't allow Gordon Paper's drug to be manufactured. It would be like that legendary everlasting light bulb. And we knew it was no use buying Gordon off—he's too devoted to the purity of science. So we killed him, in a way that was guaranteed never,
never
to draw attention to his work.”