Embarrassment of Corpses, An (7 page)

“I hear Ben's on the job again,” Oliver commented, tipping his curried chicken onto a plate and mixing rice sadly into the indeterminate curry sauce. As an excellent practitioner of Indian cookery, the mere existence of anything as vague as curry powder depressed him. The groaning above them rose to a deafening scream and then stopped abruptly.

“I hope he's not weakening the joists,” Geoffrey murmured. “My bedroom's directly underneath.”

“Those clients keep the rent down.”

“Yes, but can the floor take it? I don't want some gorgeous starlet and half a ton of plaster to land on my bed some night. I can do without the plaster, anyway.”

“Who is it this time?” asked Oliver.

“Just some businessman's wife. Oh, your uncle telephoned. He wants you to get back to him as soon as you can.”

“I'll call him after I've finished—”

“—listening to my idea for Finsbury,” Geoffrey cut in. Oliver was going to say “eating my dinner,” but he let it go. It was noted that Geoffrey often used his conversational tic to his own advantage.

The arrival of Finsbury the Ferret had caused the Railway Mice books to shoot to the top of the best-sellers lists, snapped up by the kind of parents who make their kids call them by their first names and take showers with the bathroom door open. Almost overnight, the albino beast had ironically become the leading bête noire for the preteen set—and a cultural folk hero for many childless adults—and so Tadpole Tomes for Tiny Tots decided they needed a public relations company to develop a marketing campaign for the character. Geoffrey persuaded Oliver to suggest his employer as a candidate, and Hoo, Watt & Eidenau went on to win “the Blithely Account” as it was known, based on Oliver's pseudonym. Geoffrey's reward was to be co-opted as the most junior member of the HW&E team, and in hopes of career advancement, he had been firing off suggestions for Finsbury ever since.

“So this is my idea,” Geoffrey said enthusiastically, bringing his soup over to the large pine table and sitting beside Oliver. “You've seen television soap operas, right?”

“Never.”

“Well, you've heard about them. And you know how soap operas use ‘evil twins.' It gives an actor a chance to play two roles, one good, one bad. Lots of fun with trick photography and mistaken identities. Quite an old convention, I believe.”

“Goes back at least to P—”

“Peyton Place?”

“I was going to say Plautus. What's your idea?”

Geoffrey smirked. “Let's give Finsbury an evil twin.”

Oliver, whose mind had been partly on his discovery at the Sanders Club, eyed his friend with sudden suspicion. “What for?” he asked cautiously.

“Everything's relative. If Finsbury has an evil twin, he'll look good by comparison. Improve his chances in the soft toy market.”

Oliver dropped his chapati and stared at his friend. “Geoff,” he began, “Finsbury is already just about the most debauched and dissipated animal in the history of children's literature. He has introduced perversions that psychiatry has yet to find names for, he has personally discovered that there are, in fact, forty-three deadly sins, and he has a criminal record as long as a damp Sunday in Carlisle. Furthermore, he chews gum with his mouth open. Now can you think of anything—
anything
—that an evil twin could do that would make Finsbury seem virtuous by comparison?”

Geoffrey was silent for a moment. Then he brightened. “Okay, then let's give him a
good
twin. A paragon of animals, as it were. Someone for the kiddies to identify with.”

“And what would this good twin do?”

“Oh, I don't know. Wear a sailor suit and ringlets. Eat kale. Floss. Recycle. End global warming. Buy the Cratchits a goose for Christmas. Be polite about the French. That sort of thing.” He trailed off, frowning into his soup. “Now I think about it, I'd rather identify with Finsbury,” he mumbled ruefully.

Oliver patted his friend on the shoulder. “So would the readers, Geoffrey. But keep trying.”

They heard footsteps on the stairs and through the half-open door to the hall, they caught a glimpse of a passing fur coat, followed by the permanently bejeaned form of Ben Motley. The front door opened.

“I hope he doesn't have any more appointments tonight,” sighed Geoffrey, as the noise of a car door slamming drifted in from the street. “I need to get to bed early. By the way, Ollie, where does that phrase ‘paragon of animals' come from? Is it George Orwell?”

“Sounds more like Oscar Wilde to me,” said Ben, wandering into the kitchen. Oliver raised his eyes to the cracked ceiling.

“It's
Hamlet
,” he groaned. “Didn't you chaps learn anything at Oxford?”

Ben and Geoffrey looked at each other with puzzled expressions. “Were we supposed to?” Ben asked tentatively. He peered cautiously at the remaining soup in his friend's saucepan and then reached for the kettle.

“Business still booming?” Geoffrey asked.

“That last one was easy, anyway,” Ben replied. “She brought her own Walkman. I'm really getting bored with orgasmic women, Geoff. I want to do some religious work.”

“Some might say you were,” Geoffrey giggled. “So what do you mean, religious work?”

“Well, I was in the National Gallery yesterday and I had this amazing idea. You've seen those wonderful late gothic and early renaissance altarpieces—you know, Adoration of the Magi, Virgin—”

“…on the Ridiculous,” interrupted Geoffrey. Ben grimaced.

“No, Virgin and Child,” he said firmly. “I want to recreate those images in modern
tableaux vivants
, and then photograph them with a large-format Polaroid camera. We could get our friends to play various parts. Can you see Susie Beamish as a Virgin?” He referred to the fourth member of the quartet of friends who shared the house.

“Frankly, no, but then I've only known her since she was twelve. The whole thing sounds a bit postmodern to me. What do you think, Ollie?” But Oliver, who had been brooding over his empty plate, seemed not to hear. “Ollie, you have to call your uncle, remember?” Geoffrey reminded him.

Oliver stood up suddenly, sending his chair crashing to the floor. “Virgin!” he shouted.

Geoffrey looked embarrassed. “There's no need to be personal,” he said in a hurt voice. “I've had my moments.”

“What?” said Oliver, frowning at his friend. “Oh, sorry, Geoff, I wasn't listening. But thanks, you've given me a great idea.”

“About virgins?”

“No, about twins. Ben supplied the virgins. I have to call my uncle.”

He ran from the room, and they heard him pick up the telephone in the hall.

“Did I miss something?” Geoffrey asked.

“Is the Pope Jewish?” said Ben laconically.

“After a year of ferrets, he gets to twin virgins and he doesn't stop to tell us about it,” Geoffrey grumbled. “And he didn't put his plate in the dishwasher.”

Oliver rushed in again. “I have to go out,” he cried breathlessly. “To Kew Gardens. Can someone lend me the taxi fare until I get to the bank tomorrow?”

“I'll drive you,” said Ben.

“Great, just give me five minutes to check something.”

“Can I come?” asked Geoffrey.

“It's only a two-seater, sorry,” shouted Ben, as he and Oliver hurried from the kitchen. Geoffrey sighed and picked up the dirty china.

***

Tall, dark, muscular, and square-jawed, Ben Motley attracted women like a sale in a shoe shop (and mainly the kind of women who like a sale in shoe shop), but his professional success had been entirely on the operating side of the camera. A keen photographer while still a student, Ben had tried to explore every possible photographic style. His one attempt at pornography had been an experimental roll of his university girlfriend while in the heat of passion, but being an instinctive gentleman, he took the pictures from the neck up only. Finding the contact sheet unflattering—and blurry—he promptly forgot about it and moved on to still lifes of parsnips. The girl later married a film producer and became a well-known and celebrated movie actress in America, and so, when Ben came across the pictures one day, he felt it diplomatic to send her the contact sheet and the negatives in a plain envelope. The husband intercepted the package, but far from being horrified, he sold the photographs to a leading pictorial magazine.

“The image of woman,” the magazine had rhapsodized in its captions. “She is unaccommodated. She is feral. She is beautiful. It is the power and the passion of creation—the Promethean scream that steals the fire-seed from Man and creates her own world within. Touch her. Touch her not….” And so on, for several pages of 24-point copy.

The edition sold out in three days. Suddenly, every fashionable woman wanted to be photographed at the height of sexual abandon by the handsome young photographer, who had learned a lot about controlling camera shake since his college days. Ben's appointment book rapidly filled with the names of actresses, singers, dancers, wives of the leaders of industry, and socialites (a word whose very existence made Oliver shudder), all of whom wanted a crisp, black and white eight-by-ten for the drawing room Broadwood, plus a few wallet-size prints for their husband to show his colleagues. And it had to be a Motley—no other photographer had the cachet. Several men wanted to be pictured too, but Ben had refused point blank. “So call me a sexist,” he had spluttered to Oliver one evening, after putting the phone down on a bishop.

Ben had rapidly needed a larger studio, and with his first month's income, he had made a down-payment on the Edwardes Square townhouse, using the top floors as combined living and working space, and letting the lower floors to three of his old friends from university. Oliver Swithin, Geoffrey Angelwine, and Susie Beamish were now used to the parade of well-known ladies who trooped up the stairs alone, spent an hour or two in Ben's company, and came downstairs freshly showered with private smiles on their faces. The three tenants had long given up speculating on Ben's methods, but they knew he always kept his jeans on and needed two hands to operate his Hasselblad.

Ben was also the only one in the house who could afford a car, and he ungrudgingly offered his services to his friends as part-time chauffeur in times of emergency. In Oliver's case, however, his good nature was mixed with a dash of opportunism. Ben knew that if Mallard ever summoned his nephew at short notice, there was always a chance that the young photographer could find himself at a crime scene in advance of his Fleet Street colleagues. So he was delighted, on reaching the Kew Bridge entrance to the Royal Botanical Gardens as darkness fell, to find himself and Oliver waved onto a winding route that had been marked with red flares. He followed them past the dim, phantasmal outline of the Palm House and then piloted the black Lamborghini slowly along the gravel paths toward the other Victorian hothouse, until their way was blocked by a fleet of official vehicles. The carnival of the cars' revolving red, white, and blue lights swept across the hothouse's skeletal facade, causing it to flicker patriotically in the darkness. The bright temporary lighting among the plants was like a fire in the building's rib cage.

A uniformed policeman carried the message to Mallard that a Mr. Swithin had arrived, and few minutes later, Oliver, with Ben following cautiously, was ushered beyond the rope barrier, to the annoyance of the reporters and photographers kept behind. Inside the greenhouse, the floodlights caught Mallard's untidy white hair and lined face. He seemed tired. Effie Strongitharm, noticing Oliver's entrance, busied herself with her notes.

Mallard greeted Ben distractedly and drew Oliver over to a huddled lump on the dirt, covered with a black plastic sheet. The other detectives around the dead man withdrew to a discreet distance. At Mallard's signal, a uniformed policeman pulled back the sheet to reveal the broken body, which had bled a little from the ears and nose. Oliver, who had seen corpses before—including one only a couple of days earlier—did not flinch.

“His name's Mark Sandys-Penza,” said Mallard. “He's an estate agent. We learned that much from his wallet.”

“Where did he come from?”

Mallard pointed vertically. “Up there, most recently. Before that, Richmond. Not too far away.”

Oliver looked up at the catwalk, picked out starkly by a spotlight, high up under the ethereal metal vault. Despite the stifling humidity, he shivered and looked down again. The plants gave him the odd sensation of still being in the open air, as if the enormous glass and wrought-iron structure were a wire net, suddenly dropped over the jungle by a giant botanist.

“Pushed, jumped, or fell?” he asked.

“Fell, but as good as pushed. Park attendant by the name of Prussia says Sandys-Penza seemed drunk and kept talking about some treasure hunt. There's a set of stairs to the highest catwalk, normally locked, but someone had picked the padlock. And whoever opened up the gate to the stairs also smeared the lower rungs with motor lubricant. Get that stuff on your shoes and you're sure to fall over sooner or later. Up there, blind drunk, and skidding like shit off a shiny shovel, Mr. Sandys-Penza was bound to come a cropper, as fast as you can say
Brunfelsia Abbottii
.” Mallard looked smug. “That's the name of this plant that our late friend here smashed into twigs on his descent.”

“Yes, I can read the little labels too,” Oliver remarked caustically. “Any witnesses?”

“Only this said Prussia. He adds that he may have seen someone with the deceased before he started his climb and he may have seen someone run over to the body after it landed, but in neither case is he sure of height, weight, race, or even gender.” Mallard nodded to the policeman, who covered the dead estate agent again.

“Poor Prussia took a tumble and knocked himself out. It was half an hour after the death before anyone found him and the police were called.”