The Wheel of Fortune (149 page)

“I know you had your troubles with Tom,” said Eleanor, “but I don’t suppose that was all your fault—I know how difficult the old boy could be.” Tears streamed down her weather-beaten cheeks again. “It’s that damned Kester who’s responsible for Tom’s death!” she said fiercely with more truth than she realized. “If he hadn’t been so vilely ungrateful … after all Tom’s loyalty and hard work … oh, I’ll never forgive him, never!”

I said it was bloody awful and gave her my handkerchief. It was a mere conventional gesture but to my surprise Eleanor said unsteadily how kind I was and how she’d always liked me and how I’d been a much better husband than Bella deserved.

“My dear Eleanor …” Really, it’s extraordinary how different people can view a given situation in entirely different ways.

After the cremation Kester waited twenty-four hours and then invited me to Oxmoon for a drink. I accepted. The moment had come when I could no longer postpone the horror of hearing the details of his plot, but I was so cynical by that time that I wondered if he’d already rewritten it.

Taut with dread I drove to Oxmoon.

IV

“Harry, I just can’t thank you enough for—”

“Spare me the gratitude. Give me the truth.”

At my suggestion we were sitting on the bench by the tennis court, a spot that precluded all possibility of our conversation being overheard. The parlormaid had brought out a tray of drinks, and we were sipping gin-and-lime in tall glasses garnished, in acknowledgment of the heat of the summer evening, with ice cubes.

“Well, I know you must want to kill me but I felt I just had to say how grateful I was to you for—”

“No, old chap, I don’t want to kill you. I want to listen. Contrary to what you may suppose, murder isn’t on my list of favorite pastimes. Now cut out all this idiotic chatter and tell me just what the hell was really going on.”

“All right. Well, here goes … I didn’t mean to kill him.”

“Balls. This was a premeditated crime.”

“Well, it was and it wasn’t. I never thought I’d actually go through with it.”

I stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me this was some sort of game which got out of control?”

“Not a game. Therapy.”

“
Therapy
?”

“Yes, my psychiatrist in Dublin kept saying to me, ‘Act out your grief. Don’t just sit around saying life’s finished because that’s a purely negative response. Take positive action and you’ll feel better.’ ”

“My God, these psychiatrists have a lot to answer for!”

“No wait—let me explain.” Kester paused, but it was the pause of someone trying to phrase the truth accurately, not the pause of a storyteller wondering what fable to invent next. “After Anna died,” he said at last, “I became utterly obsessed by that scene in ’39. I’d vowed at the time to avenge her but then the war came and we all went our separate ways, and after the war all I wanted was to get back to my writing. And then … Anna died. And the guilt absolutely overwhelmed me. I felt I’d failed her. I felt … diminished because I’d made no attempt to repay those gross insults to my wife. That was why my grief for Anna was so all-consuming. My guilt was such that I just didn’t know how I was going to live with myself.” He looked directly at me. “Can you understand that?”

“All too clearly.” I thought of Bella.

Kester looked relieved. “Well,” he said, finding himself able to continue more fluently, “the psychiatrist helped, and finally I saw a way I could exorcise this guilt. I wasn’t primarily interested in revenge by this time, you understand—after all, no revenge could bring Anna back. All I wanted was to alleviate the guilt. And I thought: I’ll write about it. I’ll write about this hero who takes an elaborate and masterly revenge on the uncles and cousin who have tormented him for so long.”

“My God—”

“Yes, I know it sounds mad but as soon as I’d made that decision I felt much better. I came back here, held out the olive branch of peace to you and Thomas so that I could have absolute peace, and began. Scribble, scribble. I tossed off a first draft in three months and felt euphoric but that sort of euphoria, the writer’s ecstasy, isn’t to be trusted, and I put the manuscript away for six months so that I could view it with detachment. I didn’t want to make any mistakes in the plotting. Then to pass the time I began another book—the novel about our great-grandparents and Owain Bryn-Davies.”

“I’m beginning to believe the
roman à clef
should be banned by law. All right, go on. How did the manuscript look six months later?”

“Poor. The characterization was all wrong and I knew why. It’s hard to explain to a layman, but to get a character on paper you have to turn off your own personality and turn on the personality of the character you’re trying to capture—it’s a trick of mental projection, and my problem here was that I hadn’t projected myself properly; I’d remained Kester Godwin seeing Cousin Harry as a two-dimensional villain. What I had to do to make you convincing was to put myself in your head and work out what was going on in your life—and of course as soon as I did that, I came up against that incredible fact which defied explanation: your marriage to Bella.”

“I see,” I said, and I did. Kester had played the psychological detective, refusing to abandon the trail until the mystery had been unraveled. “You constructed a theory based on Bella’s remark about ‘another daughter’ and proved it by digging up that birth certificate. And then I suppose you saw how you could incorporate the facts into your story.”

“Exactly. I sat down, tossed off two more drafts, improved the characterization and reworked the plot.”

“Where had the plot got to by this time?”

“Well, Thomas was to be the victim, that was obvious from the start, but my real problem was that I couldn’t think what to do with you. I came to the conclusion that what I really wanted was to give you the devil of a fright and at the same time scare poor old Uncle John out of his wits. I didn’t want to go further than that (a) because I’m fond of Uncle John and (b) because artistically speaking it would have been too melodramatic if I’d had you hanged for a crime you didn’t commit. All you’d done in ’39 was gloat, and that was awful but hardly worthy of a hangman’s noose. So what I planned was a murder which
looked
as if it had been committed by you but which in fact I could turn inside out in the last chapter with the result that all charges against you would have to be dropped.”

“But how on earth could you have achieved that? You’d set me up as the perfect suspect! I had no alibi, and the birth certificate in Thomas’s pocket gave me a splendid motive—”

“Wrong. That certainly suggested a great deal, but there was no real evidence of blackmail, was there?”

“My God! Yes, I see but … wait a minute—my fingerprints were on that club! How did you get me out of that one?”

“Thomas wasn’t killed with the club.”

“
What!
”

“I used a poker,” said Kester serenely, unable to stop himself looking pleased with his inventive powers. “Then I smeared the club and left it as a red herring.” I was speechless.

“The police are very clever nowadays,” said Kester. “They’d assume at first that the club was the weapon but later they’d make tests and find that the club face didn’t match the wound. Then I’d call their attention to the poker, and the whole point of the poker, you see, was that you couldn’t possibly have used it. It came from my bedroom upstairs, as any of the housemaids would testify.”

“But …” I could barely speak. “You could only clear me by incriminating yourself!”

“Yes, but I’d have got off. I’d have confessed to manslaughter and who was going to disbelieve me when I swore I’d struck a violent drunken man in self-defense? I thought the odds were I’d be convicted but discharged without a sentence—or at the most given six months in jail, and that would have been no more than I deserved for failing to avenge Anna while she was alive.”

“But how would you have explained your failure to confess your guilt straightaway?”

“Sheer nervous panic. I thought that would be quite in character. But as soon as I saw you were heading for the gallows I’d do the done thing and own up. That would have been in character too.”

There was a pause. I finished my drink in a single gulp and stood up to mix myself another.

“However, that was just what I planned for the novel,” said Kester. “In real life I never planned to go that far, but in the end—”

“You found you had to make your dream a reality.”

“—I found I couldn’t resist the temptation to see how well the plot worked. The crucial scene was the sacking of Thomas—I was sorry when that lunch party didn’t come off. But later … it was really rather exciting when Thomas came roaring up the drive that night, but then—” He stopped with a shudder.

“Fantasy ended and reality began.”

“Yes. It was very much more than I’d bargained for. He wasn’t just violent. He was
bloody
violent. And I wasn’t just frightened. I was
bloody
frightened. I ran to the billiard room because the weapon was there—I’d acted out the book by getting everything ready beforehand—but right up to the last moment I never meant to do more than knock him out. And then … and then—”

“You found you couldn’t stop.”

“I meant to stop, I meant to, but then—oh God, Harry, I never knew it could be like that. I suddenly found that once I’d set my plot in motion there was no way back; it—it was as if I’d crossed some final crucial line which couldn’t be recrossed. I’d never thought I’d actually commit murder, but once that die was cast I’d
crossed that line,
and then I could only move forward to destruction—”

“Shut up. I can’t stand that kind of melodramatic talk. Save it for your next book.”

He tried to check the emotion, and when I finally realized it was genuine I added more gin to his glass.

“Two questions,” I said when the glass was empty. “One: did you destroy the manuscript of this masterpiece?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God. Two: where’s the poker? I want to make sure you haven’t spun me the biggest fairy tale of all time.”

Abandoning his glass he led the way past the patch of uneven turf that covered the foundations of the old summerhouse, and the next moment we were entering the woods. Kester counted ten trees back and stopped. At that point we both glanced at the house far away across the lawn but we were in shadow among the trees and I knew we would have been invisible to any distant observer indoors.

Kester scuffled around amidst last autumn’s leaves, burrowed into the earth and produced the poker wrapped in newspaper. Thomas’s gore, dried and crusty, was well preserved at one end.

“All right. Bury it again. It’s as safe there as anywhere else.”

He reburied it. Slowly we returned to our bench by the tennis court. In front of us Oxmoon basked peacefully in the hot evening light but as we drew nearer I saw the sunset reflected in the western windows. The sky looked as though it had been massacred.

We drank for a while in silence but suddenly I said, “I’ll tell you something, old chap. You’d have been hanged.” As I turned to face him I saw his stunned expression. “Yes,” I said, “you made a mistake—all in accordance with the best traditions of detective fiction. Isn’t the fictional murderer always supposed to make one fatal mistake?”

“But my God—what was it?”

“The poker. You said it came from your bedroom—‘as any of the housemaids would testify,’ you added just now. But how do you reconcile that poker with your story that you killed accidentally in self-defense? If you took the poker from your bedroom and put it in the billiard room beforehand, that implies the crime had been premeditated.”

“Christ!” He nearly fainted with horror. Then he tried to drum up an explanation. “The billiard room has no set of fire irons. I brought the poker down because I wanted to burn some papers in the fireplace.”

“Very implausible. Why pick the billiard room? Why not pick a room that has a set of fire irons? Why not burn the stuff in your bedroom, where the poker belonged?”

Kester began to shiver. I poured him some more gin.

“But how
could
I have overlooked that, how could I—I worked everything out so carefully—”

“Even a genius can have a blind spot when constructing a supposedly infallible theory, and you’re no genius, Kester. Stick to writing books. Editors are much kinder than the police when they spot an error and a rejection slip is so much more acceptable than the gallows.”

Kester drank all his gin straight off. Eventually he managed to say: “So I owe you my life.” He couldn’t have sounded more horrified.

We sat there, staring at the house. The sun had sunk a little lower, and all the windows looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse.

“I suppose it would sound too melodramatic,” said Kester at last, “if I said I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, old chap,” I said. “The last thing I’d ever want from you is repayment. I might wind up as the corpse in your next novel.”

Silence. We both went on sitting there side by side, both went on watching that sinister sunset.

“However,” I said idly after a while, “if you press me, I daresay I could think of a good turn or two you might do.”

Another silence.

“Purely to assuage your conscience, of course,” I added, voice still immaculately idle, “and to help you to live with your guilt.”

It took Kester twenty-four seconds to reply. I was counting. Probably we were both counting. Twenty-four seconds is a very long time to be sitting in silence with a murderer while the clouds appear to be committing mayhem in a crimson sky overhead.

At last he whispered: “What do you want?”

“Oh, just a little favor, old chap. Just an unmistakable clarification that Hal’s your favorite nephew.”

Kester swallowed. “You mean—”

I terminated the delicate sparring match and prepared to slug it out. “Look. If we want to survive this disaster we’ve got to find a way we can live with each other without going berserk, and Hal’s that way, Kester. If you change your will and make Hal your heir I swear I’ll never move against you. Then you can relax—and once you relax I can relax and we’ll be at peace.”