Embarrassment of Corpses, An (3 page)

“When, where, and with whom was this alleged meeting?”

“You're not in court now, Uncle. In order, obviously sometime early this morning, I don't know, and I don't know. Harry was deliberately mysterious, the silly old buffer.”

“Any corroborative evidence?”

“He was waving around a piece of paper—a letter or note. I didn't see what was written on it. I don't think he showed it to anyone else at the Sanders Club, but the porter may have seen him with it just before he went out.”

“The police didn't find any letter on him,” Mallard commented tersely. “Just the usual personal items, some needles and thread, a thimble, and the remains of a small bar of carbolic soap.”

“He had the needles and thread because of his role in the Snark hunt. He was the Bonnet-maker.”

“Which explains the thimble too?”

“No, several of us had thimbles. It's from the verse in the poem:

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care:

They pursued it with forks and hope;

They threatened its life with a railway share;

They charmed it with smiles and soap.”

“I'm amazed you can remember all that,” said Mallard, as Oliver began to fumble through the pockets of his clammy dinner jacket, “but totally forget your aunt's birthday year after year.”

Oliver produced two items: a bluish metal tuning fork and a tiny red plastic telescope. “I had a fork, just as in the verse. And my character carried a telescope in one of Holiday's original illustrations for the poem.”

“Uh-huh. So far, we have a mysterious note that can't be found. You'll have to do better than that if you want to make a case for murder.”

Oliver thrust the objects back into his pocket. “Harry left the Sanders Club at about ten to six, or so the porter told me,” he continued. “I'd fallen asleep in the card room at about four, and woke up at six. I went out to look for him.”

“Why?” Mallard asked.

“I was concerned. The streets are very quiet at that time, especially on a bank holiday. Who knows what could have happened to him? And I was curious about where he was going. The porter said he'd headed in this direction along Pall Mall. I came into the Square at a quarter past six—I heard Big Ben strike. And I saw him floating here.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“No. But there are plenty of places where the killer could have hidden, even if he was still around.”

“So Harry was seen alive by your porter at ten to six,” speculated Mallard, “and it would take him at least five minutes to get here. He was dead before you found him at quarter past. Then the accident—or assault—must have happened between 5:55 and 6:10 a.m. What time do these fountains come on, I wonder?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I think Harry got here, saw the empty fountain, and climbed into it for no other reason than he'd never been in an empty fountain before. And I think he either slipped and hit his head on the edge or the floor—and the evidence of that would have been washed away—or the fountain came on while he was still frisking around. Look at the force of those jets. He could have been knocked right off his feet.”

Mallard indicated the spouting sea creature, but Oliver was shaking his head.

“That's what P.C. Urchin said, but it's not like Harry to behave that way. He was terrified of new experiences. He was a craven poltroon when it came to anything like travel, for example, because he hated to speak any language other than English. And he once told me he took cabs everywhere in London because he had no idea how to pay for a ticket on a bus and didn't want to look a fool the first time he tried. Harry got all his background information for his stories from guidebooks and articles. He liked a quiet life, and the last thing he'd do is clamber into a fountain for the hell of it, especially at his age.”

“Well he didn't
fall
in from this side,” said Mallard. He rested his palms on the waist-high parapet. “He must have been standing up on the rim or actually in the fountain to end up where he did.”

“That's one reason why I say he was hit first and then dumped into the water. And then there are the marks on his shirt. Did you see them?”

It was Mallard's turn to shake his head.

“On the starched front of his dress shirt,” Oliver continued, “there was an odd sign, a series of crossing lines. It wasn't there when I was playing poker with him in the club.”

He felt in his pockets again, but realizing he had no pen, he dipped his hand in the water, bent down, and traced the symbol on the pavement. A straight vertical line, crossed near each end by a semicircle, like a squat, two-ended trident.

“Seen that before?” Oliver asked. His uncle shrugged.

“All right, that's an oddity. But he could have done it himself after you'd fallen asleep.”

“Why?”

Mallard didn't answer, but turned and surveyed the Square, with its monuments and bollards arrayed like condiments on a banquet table. A troop of pigeons strutted past, changing direction together, like a game of Simon Says played by clairvoyants. Eventually, Mallard spoke again.

“Sorry, Oliver, it won't do. There are several unanswered questions here, certainly, but not enough for the Murder Squad to push their noses in where they're neither wanted nor invited.”

“Occam's Razor.”

“What about it?”

“Urchin brought it up just before he arrested me.”

“Really? What is the Met coming to? Most of my lads would assume that Occam's Razor is exhibit A in a G.B.H. trial.” Mallard grinned. “Well, if I understand that principle correctly, it means we first try to solve a problem using the evidence we already have. Now I'm going to check what time these fountains came on this morning, but I've got a feeling it was six o'clock on the dot, exactly the time that Sir Harry was here, unseen by you. A plain, unfortunate coincidence, which doesn't involve notes that nobody can find and invisible murderers given to scribbling cabalistic symbols on their victims.”

“So how does that account for the symbol?”

Mallard glanced down at the diagram Oliver had drawn, but the water had evaporated. He scraped the crude outline again with his toe-cap.

“Try this,” he said. “Harry decides at six o'clock in the morning to get a breath of fresh air and have a few more minutes of Snark hunting. With Carroll's verse rolling around in his befuddled mind, he elects to prepare himself a little better for the fray. He remembers that the hunters pursued their quarry with ‘forks and hope.' So on his way out of the club, he picks up a pen and idly draws a fork on his shirt front. A toasting fork, or a pitchfork—something with three tines. But he catches sight of himself in a mirror and realizes that he's made a mistake. He drew the fork looking down at his chest, so it's upside down to anyone who sees him, like a nurse's watch. To correct the mistake, he draws a couple of tines at the other end. And there you are.”

“A refrigerator light,” Oliver muttered.

“What?”

“How would Occam's Razor account for a refrigerator light. I mean, you see the light on, and you close the door. Then you open it again, and the light's still on. So isn't the simplest explanation that the light is on all the time, even when the door is closed?”

“I know someone whose light isn't on all the time, and I happen to be his uncle, God help me.” Mallard paused and wiped his forehead. “Ollie, you've just lost someone very dear to you, and you had the misfortune to be the person who found him. One moment Harry was a fun-loving playfellow, the next he was gone. It's natural on these occasions to look for some meaning, some explanation beyond the absurdity of the word ‘accident.' But please don't let that seduce you into believing something for which there's no evidence.”

Oliver sniffed the air. A sea gull landed on the merman's head.

“I'll have to go and see Lorina, I suppose,” he conceded at last. Mallard seemed pleased.

“See her tomorrow,” he said gently. “You can't bring her much comfort today.”

“Okay.” Oliver looked over the scene one last time, and started to walk away. “Let's consider Mr. Occam shaved.”

Chapter Two

It was a beautiful Spring day at Thistledown Halt. Mr. Batfowler, the engineer, had decided to stop the train for a few minutes to enjoy a cup of tea and a muffin with his old friend Mrs. Witherspoon, the emancipated station master.

Billy the Field Mouse, the tiniest member of the family of mice who lived on the sleepy, branch-line train, jumped down onto the warm wooden sleepers and scampered along the track until he was underneath the guard's van. He knew by now that he had to run quickly, because if the train started up, he would be left behind, and there would be lots of strange adventures before he was back with Dolores Field Mouse, his mummy, and Henghis Field Mouse, his daddy, and Reginald, his big brother, and their three sisters, Anastasia, Tiffani-Amber, and Tracy. Goodness knows it had happened before.

The guard's van was where his friend, Finsbury the Ferret, lived. Billy was pleased to see the big white ferret, swinging gently in a hammock hung beneath the train.

“Hello, Finsbury,” the little fellow cried gaily. “Isn't it a lovely spring morning? The pussy-willows are bursting on the branch, the coltsfoot is in the meadow, the daffodils are splashing the embankments with their bobbing yellow heads, and the leaping woolly lambkins will soon be off to the abattoir. Aren't you glad to be alive on such a beautiful day, Finsbury?”

The ferret turned his bleary pink eyes on the tiny mouse. Were they even pinker than usual?

“Piss off, Billy, you annoying little wanker, or I'll devour you,” Finsbury drawled in his bored patrician tones. “Stanford the Stoat slipped some 'ludes into my Stoli last night and next thing I knew I was…I was…trying to…What? Come on, Ollie, something suitably lubricous. And do you mean ‘patrician'? You know you always have to look that one up.”

Oliver grumpily erased the last paragraph, got up from his desk, and stumbled over to the shelf where he kept the thesaurus. It was ten o'clock on Tuesday morning, the day after he had found his old friend, Sir Hargreaves Random, taking his final early morning dip, and Oliver was back in the small suite of offices off the Cromwell Road, occupying his role as general assistant and sole employee of the firm of Woodcock and Oakhampton, Ltd. Or rather, because neither Mr. Woodcock nor Mr. Oakhampton ever gave him any work to do, he was back in the persona of O.C. Blithely, using the firm's word processor to write the next novel about the Railway Mice, and wondering what foul deeds Finsbury would be up to in this story. Last time, the vicious creature had introduced little Billy to glue-sniffing, got young Tracy Field Mouse drunk on hazelnut gin, and attempted to open a brothel for badgers in the station waiting room. And once again, the Mouse family had thwarted him and made him see the error of his ways. So what now? Depravity never came easily to Oliver. He often wished he had never created Finsbury the Ferret.

Finsbury's birth had been an accident. Oliver had made up a few picaresque tales about a family of mice who lived on a train to entertain his young godson, and at Sir Harry's urging, he had submitted them to a children's book publisher, which bought them and wanted more. It was easy enough—only a few thousand words and a ready-made denouement: Get Billy Field Mouse safely back on the train before it left. With an old Bradshaw's guide and his
AA Book of the British Countryside
for technical reference (Oliver rarely ventured outside London, to his rural parents' relief), he was able to keep Tadpole Tomes for Tiny Tots supplied with a fresh story every couple of months. The income just about paid his gas bill and gave him an excuse for not thinking about a career.

But then came the Day of the Ferret.

Frustrated with yet another tale of Billy, who this time was trying to help some Boy Scout voles deliver mushrooms to old Mrs. Quackenbush, the motherly Aylesbury duck, and reeling from a bagful of snooty letters informing him that bluebells are not to be found in March, as he had stated in
The Railway Mice and the Tender-Hearted Tortoise
,
Oliver had let fly. He typed a few paragraphs about a foulmouthed, chain-smoking, ex-public-schoolboy ferret called Finsbury. For ten inspired minutes, Oliver indulged his alter-ego, giving the beast all the vices he had never possessed, and one or two he couldn't even spell. Finsbury sang the praises of Oliver North, coconut-flavored chewing tobacco, video-nasties, Japanese whisky, the piano-accordion, and brown polyester safari suits; then he bit Mrs. Quackenbush and slipped a magic mushroom into Billy's basket. And then Oliver deleted him. Or so he thought.

Unfortunately, Oliver's ignorance of Woodcock and Oak-hampton's cheap word processor caused the words to disappear from the glowing screen but not from the document. Finsbury was alive and well on the page when Oliver hurriedly printed out the story and sent it, without a glance, to his hungry publisher. His editor, trusting Oliver's formula, handed the manuscript unseen to a clueless sub-editor, who massaged Finsbury's transition in and out of the story without a raised eyebrow. And so the Ferret survived, through typesetters, proofreaders, and layout artists. Because the usual illustrator of the Railway Mice series was drying out in hospital, the task of giving Finsbury an appearance went to an arrogant art student on half pay, who felt that any consultation with editor or author was irrelevant to the creative process.

The first Oliver knew that his creation had survived was when copies of the new book arrived in the mail, smelling of fresh ink. In two minutes, he was on the telephone to his editor, who was also his current girlfriend. For three days, they had gone into hiding, sharing the expense of the hotel room. And then, shortly after the current girlfriend transformed herself into the embittered ex-girlfriend, the reviews appeared.

“Ms. Blithely has succeeded where Milton failed,” trumpeted
The Times Literary Supplement
. “She has created an evil character with no perverse appeal whatsoever.”

“The sins of Finsbury the Ferret have no vicarious attraction,” cried
The Spectator
. “Destined to become a classic.”

“Just the thing for the Christmas stocking,” hailed
Woman's Realm
. “It's
Lord of the Flies
with rodents.”

Finsbury was acclaimed as the perfect tool for exposing the children of Britain to evil and immorality without making them want to try it. Every publication raved about the ferret's “refreshing honesty and realism,” a phrase that occurred verbatim in seven reviews. (Only
Animal Rights Now!
dissented, noting yet another misrepresentation of a mammal that was affectionate and essentially harmless, once would-be handlers had learned the simple pinch that would cause it to release body parts from its relentless bite.) And after Oliver had finished grumbling about the reviewer's assumption that he was a woman (and about some of the criticism that had been voiced in the hotel room about his intelligence, creative talents, and personal hygiene), he realized he was on to a winner.

Since then, in successive best-sellers, Finsbury had exposed the infants of England to the evils of alcohol, drugs, pornography, promiscuity, soccer hooliganism, smoking, and country and western music (an unpublished moment of self-indulgence by the author). But this morning, the iniquity wasn't flowing. All Oliver could think of was the death of his friend and mentor, Sir Harry Random. The symbol scrawled in blue on the dead man's shirtfront—where had he seen it before?

“How are my woodland chums today?” asked the ever-gleeful Mr. Woodcock, hovering near Oliver's cubbyhole as the young man gloomily closed the thesaurus. “That waggish Billy Field Mouse…ah, how I love his antics!”

Oliver's employer was a stout man in his late seventies, with as much gray facial hair as it was possible to sprout without actually having a beard and moustache. It was always Mr. Woodcock who represented the firm to Oliver, usually encouraging him to spend all his time writing children's novels. His partner, Mr. Oakhampton, rarely put in an appearance at the office, and on the one day a month when he did materialize, he would hurry past Oliver's desk with the merest nod and duck into his own sanctum, where he would remain behind closed doors all day.

“I'm not really in the mood for writing about Finsbury today, Mr. Woodcock,” Oliver said. “Is there anything I can do for you? Some filing perhaps?”

A look of horror crossed the old man's face.

“Goodness gracious me, no!” he cried emphatically. “My dear Oliver—I may call you Oliver?—I trust I haven't indicated that I might want ‘filing' to be undertaken when there is that young scamp Finsbury to be evinced. And this,
this
is tamping your fecundity? Culpability! I name the guilty man, and it is Woodcock!”

Oliver assured his distressed employer that he was not to blame for the lack of enthusiasm and told him about the events of the previous morning.

“Yes, I read Sir Harry's obituary in this morning's
Times
,” Mr. Woodcock's sherry-cherished voice confirmed. “Such a full life. But I had no idea you reposed in the Random bosom, as 'twere.”

“Harry and I have known each other for several years, since I became romantically involved with his daughter, Lorina,” Oliver confided. “It was Harry who encouraged me to write
The Railway Mice
and recommended me to my publisher.”

“Romantically involved,” the old man echoed awefully. “You make it sound both wonderful and clinical in the same breath—ah, the talents of the true wordsmith! But I trust you have commiserated with this sweetheart?”

“
Former
sweetheart. I was planning to go round after work today.”

Mr. Woodcock flung his arms into the air, as if trying to capture a high-flying beach ball, and addressed the ceiling.

“Oh, Woodcock, Woodcock, you are once again keeping this fine young man from his manifest destiny,” he exclaimed to the chandelier. “No, no, my dear Mr. Swithin, Oliver, you must not put the affairs of this establishment before your desires—nay, your
duty
—as a friend. Eschew the trivial round, the common task! The maiden must be comforted! You must leave immediately!”

“But it's only ten o'clock in the morning.”

“And the sun is over the yard-arm in Mandalay. Leave these fripperies, I say.” Mr. Woodcock's chubby hands fluttered over Oliver's cubbyhole like pink bats. Oliver shrugged, thanked his employer, and flicked off the word processor without saving the morning's work. Only as he left the building five minutes later and headed for the tube station did he remember that he still hadn't heard from his uncle.

***

Superintendent Mallard had remembered his promise to tell Oliver what time the Trafalgar Square fountains were turned on, but other events had intervened. When Oliver left the premises of Woodcock and Oakhampton, Mallard was only a quarter of a mile away, at Sloane Square Underground station, and he was not pleased, for two reasons. First, the previous evening's rehearsal of
Macbeth
had not gone well. And second, he was staring at a dead body that had bled profusely on the westbound platform of the District and Circle Lines.

There was an odd connection between the sources of Mallard's irritation. The Theydon Bois Thespians were trying out a new director, who had clearly seen too many Hammer films in his youth. As Humfrey had revealed last night, his “concept” of “the Scottish Play” (he insisted on maintaining the precious superstition of not uttering the title) was to set it in Transylvania at the end of the nineteenth century, with the witches portrayed as sexy succubi, and Macbeth's retreat into paranoia and solitude interpreted as the vampire's fear of the daylight. The giggling Thespians were already referring to the production among themselves as “Drac-beth.”

But what had driven the last tooth into Mallard's jugular was the director's insistence that every character who died should immediately become undead, wandering aimlessly through the production—and sometimes the audience—until the final curtain. This, and the amount of fake blood Humfrey had promised (‘Darlings, I want your
teeth
to bleed!'), suggested to Mallard that his dreams of an early escape to the pub stood as much chance of survival as Bela Lugosi on a tanning bed.

Staring at real blood seldom affected him. If anything, he was more nauseated by the color of the station's walls, a hue known as “avocado” when used for bathroom fittings. But his habituation to the horrors of real death never stopped his offering a brief prayer for the deceased before the professional in him took over.

In defiance of its name, the Underground railway was open to the sky as it passed through Sloane Square station, although a long, curving roof covered each platform. The police had erected a low barricade of orange plastic around the body, a woman in her late middle age. Despite the blistering weather, she was wearing a head scarf and woolen coat, which indicated to Mallard that she had risen early and possessed the natural meteorological pessimism of the British working class. She lay on her back, dead from a single, massive blow to the forehead that distorted her features and had clearly shattered her skull.

Behind him, an eastbound train trundled slowly through the station without stopping. Westbound trains had been halted on both the Circle and District Lines.

“Why am I here?” Mallard muttered to himself. Getting no answer, he decided to ask his sergeant, who was talking to the scene-of-crime officer a few yards away. “Strongitharm!”

Detective Sergeant Strongitharm, Mallard's assistant for the last eighteen months, hurried over to the superintendent, taking the low makeshift fence in a single stride. This action caused several other police officers to catch their breath, not so much because of the quality of Strongitharm's legs—although the policemen were unstinting in their silent admiration—but because of the abruptness of their revelation. A second later, and Effie Strongitharm's pleated skirt had returned to her knees. Most of her colleagues knew better than to make any audible comment, and the one detective constable who did let slip an involuntary grunt was immediately treated to a glare from Effie's large, light-blue eyes. For some reason, he suddenly found himself remembering the impulse he'd had as an eight-year-old to be a missionary to the Congo, and wondering if he'd forgotten his parents' wedding anniversary again.