Embarrassment of Corpses, An (8 page)

“That explains why you're here,” Oliver commented. “Why am I here?”

The superintendent beckoned to Effie, who came over with her usual purposeful stride, aware that she would have to acknowledge Oliver's presence.

“Good evening, Mr. Swithin,” she said coldly. “I've just had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Motley. What a charming gentleman. And something of a celebrity.”

“Hello, Effie…sorry…Sergeant Effie,” mumbled Oliver, studying the corpse's protruding brogues. Her presence always made him nervous. “Some of my friends are quite presentable, you know.”

“I understand he's also your landlord,” Effie replied acidly. Mallard rescued his nephew.

“Let's see those papers, Sergeant,” he said. She took two clear plastic envelopes from her shoulder-bag and passed them across.

“We found both of these on the dead man,” Mallard continued, passing an envelope to Oliver. It contained a white, unlined index card with a single figure drawn in blue ink—an odd symbol like a cursive upper case
T
with a loop attached to the vertical. It might have been a child's attempt at a treble clef or a quaver.

“This was placed on his chest after he fell, so the killer was here for some time. I think there's little doubt that this card connects the death tonight with yesterday's murder at Sloane Square. But that doesn't mean I'm suggesting a link to Sir Harry Random's death.”

Oliver nodded, handed the card back, and took the other, larger envelope. It held a sheet of regular A4 typing paper, with crease marks to indicate that it had been folded in three. A few lines were printed in Helvetica type:

Further to yesterday's phone conversation, please meet me in the Tropical House in Kew Gardens this evening at 6:30 p.m. I hope to have more good news for you.

“Found in his pocket,” Mallard said.

“From a laser printer, I suppose,” Oliver speculated, returning the exhibit.

“As far as I can tell. Now what have you got for me?”

“Me?”

Mallard sighed. It had already been a long day. “Oliver, you first telephoned me at the Yard at half past five this afternoon, long before I called you about this murder—before it took place, in fact. You wouldn't call me at work unless it was urgent. And relevant.”

Oliver blinked inscrutably at his uncle from behind his cheap eyeglasses. Then he reached into the pocket of his blazer and pulled out two pieces of stationery.

The first was a card with a symbol drawn on it—an odd symbol like a cursive upper case
T
with a loop attached to the vertical.

The second was a dirty, crumpled sheet of A4 typing paper, on which the following lines had been printed in Helvetica type:

Further to yesterday's phone conversation, please meet me in Trafalgar Square tomorrow morning at 6:00 a.m. I'm sorry it's so early, but I think the good news will make it worth your while.

“Lord love a duck and the horse he came in on!” bellowed Mallard, gazing at the papers in amazement. The other policemen in the hothouse paused in their duties, staring at the two men. “Ye Gods and little tiddlers, Ollie,” Mallard said more quietly, “if this was the seventeenth century, I could have you burned at the stake.” He passed the paper to Effie, who raised one eyebrow.

“Arrest him,” she suggested dryly.

“He's been arrested once,” Mallard told her.

“I found the letter in the waste paper basket in the Sanders Club,” Oliver explained. “It must be the same letter I saw in Sir Harry Random's possession on Monday morning—too much of a coincidence otherwise.”

“And the symbol on the card?”

“That was a lucky guess that I took before coming out. You see, Ben, Geoffrey, and I were talking about virgins in the kitchen.”

Here he was unable to resist a glance at Effie, whose expression hardened further, making him blush in turn.

“Nice conversations you boys have,” she muttered. “Did you find any?”

“No, no, these were religious virgins,” Oliver said hastily.

“Nuns?” speculated Mallard.

“Blessed Virgin Marys, actually.”

“But there was only one B.V.M. And what was she doing in your kitchen? Has young Angelwine had a visitation?”

“Oliver means paintings,” said Ben, who had wandered over, impatiently fingering his thirty-five millimeter camera. “Paintings of the Virgin Mary and other religious subjects. We're a very devout household.”

“Thank you, Ben,” said Oliver, rather more firmly than he had intended. “Anyway, Geoffrey had also been talking about a twin for Finsbury and it all came together.”

“What came together?” asked Mallard, who was beginning to show some irritation. “The Finsbury twins? Sounds like a music-hall act.”

“What's that got to do with virgins?” Effie asked icily.

“Everything. Twins and virgins. Now do you get it?”

There was a pause. “No,” the other three said simultaneously.

“Gemini and Virgo. The signs of the zodiac.” Oliver snatched the index card from Mallard's fingers and wafted it enthusiastically under their faces. “These drawings you're finding are the symbols used by astrologers for the signs of the zodiac. And it
does
connect Sir Harry Random's death with the others. That symbol drawn on his shirt-front represents Pisces, only we were looking at it sideways—it was in the correct orientation for someone standing or crouching beside a corpse to write it on his chest. The squiggly lines you found yesterday at Sloane Square are Aquarius.” He held the index card steadily in front of Mallard's spectacles. “This is Capricorn. It's the next in the series. I took a chance and copied it out.” He stopped, aware that the others needed to absorb the new information. Then Mallard staggered back a few paces and opened his arms to the iron vault around him.

“Oh, my stars!” he groaned, with unconscious relevance. “You know what this means? We've got a bloody serial killer!”

Chapter Four

The conversation in Kew Gardens had halted when the mortuary attendants, who had come to collect the body of Mark Sandys-Penza, lifted the plastic sheet again, causing Ben Motley to drop his Canon and faint on the spot. So after quickly listening to Oliver's story, Superintendent Mallard had told his nephew to come over to New Scotland Yard the next morning—Thursday—at about eleven o'clock. Oliver, aware that Mallard's team was resentful of outsiders (particularly overeducated, underemployed nephews), had spent the night with visions of himself cowering in the corner of a cramped, smoke-filled room, while twenty shirtsleeved Murder Squad detectives with truncheons and attitudes glared at him. Geoffrey Angelwine, who spent his working day leaping from meeting to meeting, like an inoffensive frog crossing a lily-pond, had coached him over breakfast. “The way to control any meeting is to hop up to the flip chart, get hold of the big felt-tip pen, and hang on to it, at all costs,” he had advised.

Oliver was a little relieved, therefore, when Mallard met him at the reception desk and diplomatically suggested a walk, accompanied by Sergeant Strongitharm, in St. James's Park, coinciding with their morning coffee break. But Effie's presence alone was enough to intimidate him.

Oliver had first met Effie Strongitharm shortly after she began assisting Mallard, nearly eighteen months earlier, and he had thought of her virtually every day since. But although she was otherwise available, Oliver believed very strongly that Effie's professional relationship with his uncle placed her firmly off limits, almost as if she were married, and he had so far kept his captivation a secret. (He had no idea that Mallard had often told his wife, Oliver's Aunt Phoebe, that he thought their vague nephew and his overworked Sergeant would have been good for each other.)

This presented Oliver with a considerable conflict, because from the little he saw of Effie and the more he heard of her and thought about her, the more he became convinced that she could be the next (and first and last) Mrs. Oliver Swithin. And the fact that, even in that espoused condition, she'd undoubtedly choose to be called
Ms
. Effie Strongitharm (what
was
“Effie” short for?) only made him like her more.

Not that Oliver had his sights on a wife. For him, wooing was a strictly sequential process, and pair-bonding for life came only after several earlier fences had been jumped in more or less the right order. It was more that, so far, despite trying hard, Oliver had yet to find any compelling reason why Effie and he
couldn't
spend their lives together, and it intrigued him. Attraction, admiration, respect, hope, desire—they were all there, even though he admitted a slim acquaintance with the slim woman. But they didn't fully explain why it was her face and her voice that echoed in his mind on so many mornings, when he tried fruitlessly to seize the quicksilver memory of a dream, rather than just the memory of a memory; or why the distant possibility of Effie had not been dislodged by the warm reality of the one or two girls he had dated since meeting her, including that editor at Tadpole Tomes for Tiny Tots (and just who was the “Bill” tattooed on
her
creamy thigh, anyway?).

What it came down to, he lamely concluded, was not what Effie was, but who she was. Oliver wanted the exceptional woman who was Effie Strongitharm, and it defied analysis. It wasn't love. Not yet. Oliver knew that, for him, love was a place where two people arrived, not where one person started from. One mile at a time on that journey, and it would start when Effie was somehow a legitimate target, and he would ask her if they could ever be more than friends. He had done so innumerable times in his imagination, inventing replies that ranged from a snorted “With
you
?” to a breathless “At last—take me now, my shy young hero among men.” But to be more than friends, they had to become friends in the first place.

“I hope you got Mr. Motley home safely,” she said stiffly, when Mallard had dropped behind for a moment to observe a widgeon on the St. James's Park lake.

Asking about Ben? Bad start. That is entertainment my bosom likes not. “He was fine after a cup of tea and lie down,” Oliver admitted.

“It's so refreshing to meet a man who doesn't need to mask his sensitivity. He offered to photograph me, you know.”

“I'll bet he did,” muttered Oliver. “He hasn't had a policewoman up to his studio.”

“I think I'll take him up on the offer. It might amuse my friends and family.”

Oliver stopped, aghast. “Oh, Effie…I mean, excuse me, Sergeant. Are you sure you want to do that?”

“It sounds a most interesting project,” Effie remarked, the way Queen Victoria might have commented on high-definition television. She kept walking, smiling privately at the hint of jealousy she had detected.

“But to be seen that way…” spluttered Oliver, trotting after her. He tried to picture it. Then he tried to not picture it. “By everybody. I just…I don't think it's right for you.”

Effie looked indignant. “It's the highest compliment Mr. Motley could pay me, I would have thought, although I am not myself a Catholic.”

“What about your reputation?”

It was Effie's turn to stop. “Mr. Swithin,” she said primly, switching on the Strongitharm Look. She'd spared him during his monologue on virgins the previous evening because she knew Mallard wanted to hear his explanation of the symbols, but really…. “If you think that appearing as the Virgin Mary in one of Mr. Motley's
tableaux
vivants
can damage my reputation, then you must have a very unflattering idea of me.”

“The Virgin Mary,” Oliver echoed with relief, remembering the new project that Ben had mentioned the previous evening. “Oh, that's all right. I'm sorry, I was thinking of you having sex!” he continued with a beatific smile. Effie stared at him without speaking, turned her Look up three hundred percent, and stalked off toward an empty, shaded bench beside the lake. Oliver followed, still smiling contentedly.

When Mallard took his place between them a minute later, it was with a wry comment about the generous amount of space they had left him.

“Let's understand one thing immediately,” he continued. “I am the Law around these parts, and in that capacity, I choose to use Oliver as a consultant for the next thirty minutes.”

“Great, do I get a badge?”

“You'll get a thick ear if you don't tell us all about the stars.”

Oliver opened the time-worn, leather school satchel in which he habitually carried a book and a folding umbrella and very little else. He took out a sheet of lined paper, covered in symbols, and spread it on his lap.

“I copied this from the dictionary. Each of the signs of the zodiac has a symbol, which is used in casting horoscopes. There are signs for the sun, moon, and planets too. The three symbols we've seen so far were Pisces on Monday, Aquarius on Tuesday, and Capricorn yesterday.”

“Now, you said these were in sequence, which enabled you to guess at Capricorn.”

“Yes. But this is weird. Aries is traditionally regarded as the first sign of the astrological year, even though it covers the months of March and April these days. Pisces, our first murder, is actually the last sign. And the sequence—Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn—is going
backward
through the year.”

“What's the next sign?”

Oliver consulted his paper. “In reverse order, Sagittarius.”

“Anything else you've spotted?”

“That's it.”

Mallard stretched self-indulgently. “I've been reading up about serial killers. One thing they have in common—as well as being intelligent, solitary, and principally male, so with due deference to Sergeant Strongitharm, I'm going to refer to the killer as a ‘him'—is that there's a link between their victims that often points to their motivation. A man who feels sexually slighted may target prostitutes. The man who believes he was held back in life because of his social class may choose middle-class college girls. And it's not unusual for him to send letters, or notes, or signs—usually to the police—crowing about his success. But serial killers are generally caught by getting a lead on an individual crime rather than by trying to fathom these crazy messages or by anticipating their patterns. That's why I have a team of a dozen detectives back at the Yard going over the little evidence we have and making all the necessary inquiries, and I need to get back to them fairly soon. Now if you're right, Oliver, and if we have a serial killer who plans to keep to the same schedule, somebody is going to die today and have a Sagittarius sign attached to him. Unfortunately, that's all we can conclude.”

“You mentioned a link between a serial killer's victims,” said Oliver. “Clearly, the three victims we've encountered aren't all prostitutes or college girls. But is there anything else?”

“That's what I was hoping we might find out.” Mallard turned to his sergeant. “What do we know, Effie? Effie?”

Effie, at the far northeast end of the bench, had been staring distractedly at Buckingham Palace across the lake. She was worried. For the first time since she had perfected the Look at age sixteen, after a long-haired classmate had single-handedly unclipped her brassiere through her school blouse at a carol concert (he had entered a seminary shortly afterward), her defense mechanism seemed to have failed. Oliver hadn't cringed. In fact, his inane grin had only broadened since their unfortunate conversation. Hearing Mallard call her name, she started and swiftly pulled several lime-green cardboard folders from her capacious shoulder bag.

“The lady at Sloane Square was called Nettie Clapper,” she reported quickly, reading from one of the files. “She lived in Harold Wood in Essex. She was sixty-two years old, a part-time home help, married, with five grown children, none of them residing with her. I spoke to her husband yesterday evening—he's a retired bricklayer. He says she got a telephone call on Monday evening telling her that a distant relative had died and left her a large sum of money. What sounded like a man's voice said she had to go to a solicitor's office in the Sloane Square area the next morning. Nettie was very enthusiastic, Mr. Clapper said, because they'd just moved to Harold Wood from Brentford, and they could use the money for decorating their new home.”

“Our man knows how to push the right buttons,” Mallard remarked sadly.

“Later that night,” Effie continued, “this note was pushed through their door.”

She passed over a photocopy of a sheet of A4 typing paper, on which a few lines had been printed in Helvetica type:

Further to this evening's phone conversation, please meet me tomorrow at Sloane Square Underground Station at 9:15 a.m. I'll show you the way to our offices. I'll recognize you.

“Nettie didn't take the note with her, and because she was being met at the station, she didn't get the address of the supposed offices, either. Mr. Clapper doesn't remember the name of the person who called, or even if he gave a name.”

“I suppose the husband's clean?”

“Oh yes. The CID started a thorough investigation, because we thought it was a one-off murder. Mr. Clapper had a confirmed alibi, and Mrs. Clapper didn't have an enemy in the world.”

“All right, what do we know about last night's Tropical House high-diver?”

Effie changed files. “Mark Sandys-Penza, aged forty-two, married with two young children. His second marriage. Had his own estate agency firm in Richmond. Detective Sergeant Moldwarp's done some checking and he gets a few suggestions of shady property dealings and the suspicion of a mistress.”

“Hardly a likely reason for murder,” said Mallard.

“He apparently got a phone call at home on Tuesday night, asking him to meet a potential new client, who wanted to be anonymous for a while. The letter we found on him, which confirmed the appointment, was delivered at his office yesterday morning.”

“Anybody remember who delivered it?”

She shook her head. Mallard turned to Oliver, who had been wondering how far he could run his fingers through Effie's hair before they became hopelessly entangled in her curls. “Want to tell us about Sir Harry Random?” he asked.

Oliver cleared his throat and attempted to concentrate. “Well-known writer, seventy-eight years old, widowed twice with two grown-up children, a son and a daughter, one from each marriage. The daughter still lived with him in Barnes. I would imagine that the killer knew about our Snark Hunt on Sunday night. How else would he expect Sir Harry to be up so early in the morning? I have no idea when Harry got that letter I found, nor what he was expecting from the meeting. Lorina didn't mention it either.”

“Lorina?” Effie queried. Why was Oliver still articulate? By now, he should be remembering the time his godmother spotted him scanning a naturist magazine at a station bookstall.

“Harry's daughter,” Mallard told her. “An old flame of Oliver's,” he added mischievously, watching his nephew shudder. Effie chose not to react.

“So we have an eminent writer, a home help, and an estate agent,” Mallard continued. “Not much in common there.”

“Maybe their residence has something to do with it,” Effie speculated. “Until the Clappers moved recently, they all lived in west London—the Pisces in Barnes, the Aquarius in Brentford, and the Capricorn in Richmond.”

“Probably just a coincidence,” said Mallard, yawning. “But put it all in the computer, Effie, and see what comes up.”

They paused while a uniformed nanny pushed an enormous perambulator along the path in front of them. A large head in an oversize baby's bonnet poked up momentarily, and then ducked again. Oliver rubbed his eyes, trying to convince himself that he had not seen a thick ginger moustache above the pacifier jammed into the baby's mouth. Mallard and Effie had not noticed.