I am slow to respond in the mornings. I like to wake up and bestir myself in small steps. It’s a gradual process, slow and if performed at the right pace pleasurable. I suspect ‘perform’ is an appropriate description, since the possibility of dynamic action is always available as an option, but one I rarely select. Jo has been accustomed to my withdrawn morning state for many years, and leaves me to it. We hardly ever meet for more than a brief hello in the mornings. Light food, dark coffee, social media and the online newspapers are all part of the steady adjustment to the new day. Barmi the cat likes me like that – he often curls up on my lap at this time. Today, he had torn himself away from me as soon as he heard Spoder’s motorcycle,
Spoder was the antithesis of a gentle awakening, with his noisy motorbike, his clattering around, his loud voice and the immediacy of his expectations about my response. I could cope with Spoder at midday, but at this early hour he was a challenge.
‘I need to finish what I’m doing,’ I said, returning to my chair in front of the laptop. ‘Sit down. Wait. Drink coffee. Tell me about the case in a few minutes.’
‘I need to tell you now. We have to go somewhere.’
‘Is it a murder?’ I said. ‘Not a suicide that is mistaken for a murder?’
‘No – this is the real thing. But it is not without a few strange features. When I read through the file yesterday my first thought was that you and I should travel immediately to Salay Sekonda, the second. There are several shuttle flights this morning, so we can leave now. The crime scene can still be visited. Once you know the details you will feel as anxious as I am to see where it took place.’
I thought: No more travel. At least not with someone like Spoder. The luxury of sitting around at home had not started to wear off yet.
‘What would be the point of visiting a crime scene so many years after the event?’ I said.
‘It’s still there to be seen. More or less untouched.’
‘Spoder – I’ve other work I must do.’
‘This is work too.’
‘The crime scene can wait.’
‘Sir, I have to say you are disappointing me. You would be investigating an extraordinary crime.’
‘What are the unadmitted motives?’ I said, thinking of Jo and what she said about my acting like an amateur sleuth. I was also trying to change the subject.
‘This was almost certainly revenge! A classic case of one person settling an old score against another.’
‘That is the admitted motive,’ I said. ‘But there would have been more to it than that. There always is.’
‘I think so too. This is why we must visit the scene.’
Spoder had started pacing impatiently around my patio, his mouth full of the croissant he had lifted from my plate without my noticing. He advanced towards me.
‘I think with respect you should get your priorities sorted, sir,’ he said. He leaned towards me, hands resting on the edge of the table, still chewing. Flakes of fine pastry floated down.
I said: ‘So how long ago was the murder? If I’m right, this person, Dever Antterland, killed his brother Lew about fifteen years ago. If the crime scene is still intact, and we’re talking about someone killing Dever in revenge, it can only have happened recently.’
‘The file says it was about ten years ago.’
I was aware that Spoder and I had been duplicating our research efforts, at least in part, but it sounded as if he had turned up rather more, as often happened.
I said: ‘So Dever was killed, what, about about five years after Lew died?’
‘Yes. I heard about it at the time. The Salay forces talk to each other, you know. I wasn’t involved in the case, no one on the Raba force was directly involved apart from having to file paperwork and copies. But in the police stories are passed around all the time. The main thing I remembered about it was that the victim, Dever Antterland, had a twin brother who had committed suicide by somehow managing to bash his own brains out.’
‘He was murdered,’ I said. ‘By Dever.’
I assumed that after Dever killed his brother he made good his escape, either carrying all the cash he had stolen, or making some arrangement with a bank on Hames to transfer the money to an account he controlled. He would then have laid low while the Salay Hames police fumbled around, failing to solve the case. But I also assumed that people other than the police would be looking for him. Whoever they were they eventually caught up with him and delivered swift rough justice. But for some reason that took another five years.
‘Tell me more about the crime scene,’ I said. ‘Are you saying it has remained untouched for ten years?’
‘It is apparently still exactly as it was on the day the body was found. This is why we must visit it.’
‘Murder is always messy,’ I said. ‘You know how disgusting crime scenes can be. No one could leave the place exactly as it was.’
These thoughts were discordant while breakfasting at the beginning of a day that had promised to be peaceful and lovely. I decided against eating the rest of my food.
I had never in fact visited a real crime scene, but had seen many photographs and reconstructions. Of course I had written about them. It was always tempting to over-describe the chaos and horror of the aftermath of a murder. I had succumbed to that temptation when I was writing my early books. Spilled blood and dismemberment, dropped weapons, cartridge cases, blood-covered knives, deadly clues, all these were interesting to write about and brought a sense of visual excitement to a story.
Thrillers are for much of the time internalized: the characters wonder and speculate, hide secrets, worry about what will happen next, form suspicions. The sleuth theorizes about motives and methods, calculates who was where and when, notices accidental revelations of clues, carries out interviews with recalcitrant witnesses, obsesses over railway timetables. Thrillers are not especially thrilling.
‘On this occasion I understand the crime scene has been preserved, almost exactly as it was discovered,’ Spoder was saying. ‘Whatever mess there was has been cleaned up long ago, of course. But the place, the scene of the murder, is as it was on the day. I assure you this is a truly unusual and astonishing story. I am indebted to you for bringing me in on it. All will become clear as soon as we reach Sekonda.’
‘Spoder, if you go to Sekonda you go without me.’
He took one of my bread rolls, split it in half and smeared some fruit preserve across it. He took a huge mouthful. Then he licked his long fingers and ferreted around inside the file. He pulled out what looked like two pieces of card. He slapped them down on the table and covered them with his free hand before I could pick them up.
‘Here is the proof of twin brotherhood you have secretly been worrying about,’ Spoder said. ‘This is a photograph of Lew Antterland, taken in the same year he died.’
He turned over the first picture. I had not formed any kind of mental image of the dead man, so the head and shoulders photograph that Spoder now showed me was a revelation. Lew Antterland was a young man, in his mid-twenties. He had a rather square face with noticeable jowls, pale blue eyes spaced well and with a direct look. His short hair was combed forward. He was clean-shaven. His face was unlined.
‘Now look at Dever. This was taken about five years later. Again, I think this must have been not long before he died.’
The second photograph that Spoder turned over was just as clear, taken from a different angle, a studio portrait. The physical resemblance between the two men was immediately obvious. Dever looked older than his brother, but not greatly so – the picture was obviously taken later. Dever appeared to be in his early thirties. His hair was longer than Lew’s and combed differently, but the similarity was striking. He had the same jowly face, but wore a narrow, well trimmed moustache and a goatee beard.
The principal difference between the two was that Dever was wearing a silky top hat, with a narrow line of reflected light down the vertical crown. In his left hand, held up for the camera to see, w
as a tall wine glass with two white and black dice lying at the bottom. In his right hand, Dever was holding a short wooden stick, a magician’s wand, painted black with white ends. Somewhere behind him, obviously superimposed after the picture was taken, there were a number of glittering stars, in different colours.
‘Dever was a well known illusionist on Salay Sekonda,’ Spoder said. ‘He performed in clubs and theatres all over the island, as well as sometimes visiting schools where he had an act suitable for children.’
‘And he performed as Dever Antterland?’
‘His stage name was Willer the Wonder. There are several newspaper reviews in the file, if you’d like to read them.’
‘Willer the Wonder!’ I suddenly wanted to laugh aloud.
‘Yes.’
‘So – when Willer the Wonder was murdered, did they ever catch whoever did it?’
‘No, but this is one of the extraordinary features of the case. The murderer was actually seen and spoken to at the crime scene!’ Spoder’s voice was raised with excitement. ‘Several witnesses saw him and spoke to him after the killing, but no one knew who he was or what he had done. Because Dever’s body was not discovered straight away, they didn’t realize a murder had taken place. By the time the body was found, the killer had made a clean getaway.’
‘There must be descriptions of him.’
‘There are some in the file, but you’ll see they are not specific enough. Average build, no distinguishing features, dressed in the same clothes you might see every day in the streets. There were no other clues, no other suspects, no known motives. It is a cold case, still unsolved.’
I thought for a few moments.
Then I said: ‘If the killer was disturbed at the scene, and people saw him leaving, why did it take so long for the body of the victim to be found?’
‘Ah,’ said Spoder, taking the last of my croissants, and crushing it into his mouth. ‘This is why we must go to inspect the crime scene ourselves. The murder was carried out inside a locked room. There was no way in or out.’
I said: ‘That’s it. You can forget the whole thing, Spoder. I’m not going to believe in a locked room mystery. It’s a hoax of some kind.’
‘I promise you this is serious. Look – I only downloaded the file last night. It is exactly as I found it.’
‘And I promise you that locked room mysteries are entirely a figment of the imagination of crime novelists. And even then, only from a small minority of crime novelists. Impossible crimes don’t happen in the real world – they can’t happen in the real world. Murder is brutal, irrational, usually impulsive. Murderers don’t hatch complicated schemes to baffle people who come along later. They are out to kill. They kill, then they try to get away. If it is planned at all, a murder is worked out in the vaguest way. To the typical murderer preparation and planning mean finding out when the victim routinely comes home from work. Or the licence plate number of the victim’s car. Or the lonely walk the victim takes every weekend. Other than that the motives are basic: money, sex, revenge, and so on.
‘Locked room mysteries are planned meticulously, often with almost mathematical precision. They are contrived, made up, invented, they have outrageous and insanely complicated explanations. Bullets shaped from frozen blood taken from the victim earlier under a pretence, clocks with microscopic poisoned darts that shoot the victim on the stroke of midnight, icicles that can be shot from hidden crossbows. That sort of thing. The locked room mystery depends on intense and detailed planning, logistics, exact timing of both the weapon and the behaviour of the victim. Everything has to happen precisely according to the plan. For that reason alone the entire subject is nonsense. The real world is too random and unpredictable. Things go wrong.’
Spoder listened to this in silence.
I went on: ‘If it’s recorded in the police file that Dever Antterland was murdered inside a locked room it means some hoaxer has accessed the file and made changes. Perhaps it was meant as a laugh. If the police actually found the room locked with Dever’s body inside, it can only mean the room was locked after the crime took place. Or it means they made a mistake and the room wasn’t locked at all. Or Dever’s body was found somewhere else and the file is wrong.’
‘I think the file is genuine,’ Spoder said, sounding crestfallen. ‘I recognize some of the names of officers who worked on this. In Raba as well as Sekonda. They weren’t the sort who made simple mistakes, or who would put false material on file.’
‘Well, I don’t want to be drawn into this. If you want to go over to Sekonda and see what happened then of course you’ll get your usual hourly rate.’
‘This locked room was different,’ Spoder said. ‘Really different.’
‘They all are,’ I said. ‘Every impossible crime is a novelty. It has to be.’
‘I think you should see this, sir. The room that was locked was part of a museum, a museum of magic. The magician’s apparatus was used in the crime. It’s still there.’
16
The Temple of Wonders
I rode pillion on Spoder’s motorbike, wearing his spare crash helmet, a size too large, loose on my head and hurting my neck, the strap too tight and chafing beneath my chin. At the last moment I had conscientiously stuffed my laptop into my computer tote, slinging it diagonally across my back, but already I realized that it was going to be a day dominated by Spoder and having to make this sudden journey. He was not going to stop talking long enough for me to do any reading, let alone any work, now or ever. He was talking as we roared down the road following the edge of the forest reserve in the zone beyond my house. He kept swivelling his helmeted head a quarter turn, shouting at me incomprehensibly as we rushed along. I don’t know what he was saying.
We soon came to the part of the freeway skirting around the edge of Raba City, the tall shining towers of the renowned financial quarter basking in the hot morning sun. Raba was officially the clearing centre for most transactions and banking investments in this part of the world, but its reach was extending ever more widely. Financial institutions even in Muriseay, largest island in the Dream Archipelago and de facto administrative centre, were now said to be routing transactions in increasing quantities through the Raba fund houses. The Raba bourse had been the focus of share and investment dealing throughout the islands for several decades.
The activities of the finance houses brought incredible wealth and monetary power to the Salay Group, or so it was popularly believed. The reality, as I saw it as a long-term resident of Salay Raba, was that little of the wealth created in the tower zone of polished steel, mirrorglass and aluminium leaked out to the island itself. The more cynical islanders sometimes referred to the place as Robber City.
Many social problems beset Raba. There were beggars in the streets of Raba City and homeless people were found in most of the smaller towns along the south and eastern coasts. Many families lived in poverty. Disaffected minorities, originally transported in for manual work and service jobs, existed in an extensive area of poor housing on the edge of the city. Crime rates were high. Alcoholism and substance abuse were worsening problems for the civic authorities, whose offices, situated within sight of the skyscrapers of the financial district, were permanently underfunded and ill equipped.
On the western coast of the island, on the far side of the forest reserve, was a place called Ocean Domaisne, an immense concentration of neo-vassalage. It extended some fifty kilometres down a reconstructed shoreline largely reclaimed from swamps and tidal basins. This was where the wealthy bankers, brokers, fixers and entrepreneurs lived. In effect gated and managed by commercial security operatives, it was a long strip of luxury hotels, mansions and skyscraper condos, with marinas, sports arenas, casinos, golf courses, private airstrips and retail malls. (To my certain knowledge from the trade there was not a single bookshop anywhere along the strip.) Some of the territory had been extended out into the sea on artificially built islands and peninsulas. The largest of these used as foundations the rubbl
e from the demolition of several centuries-old fishing settlements which formerly worked the coastal shallows, and was constructed in the shape of the thaler sign.
Ordinary residents of Raba knew of these places, these sumptuous resorts and palaces of leisure, but few of us ever went there. I was one such. I had seen photographs and images on television, but I had never yet had direct contact with anyone who was resident.
The freeway at Raba went nowhere near Ocean Domaisne, which was on the coast further to the west, but ran alongside the cluster of towers in the financial district. Spoder speeded up and we were past it within a minute. The airport was not far beyond – the constant movement to and fro of money operatives meant that there were regular shuttle services to the other Salayean islands.
We bought tickets for the first available flight, and an hour later we had landed on Sekonda.
Spoder wanted us to rent another motorcycle, but I insisted on a car. He had no licence to drive a car – I did.
It was several years since I had visited Sekonda. As we drove out of the airport I was looking around with interest. Although there were major industrial towns in the interior of the island large sections of the shoreline had been left undeveloped. Sekonda was famous for its deep-sea fishing and scuba diving. On the eastern promontory, close to where a meeting of two oceanic flows created cross currents, rough water and high waves, there was surf riding and a variety of other beach pursuits.
Over the past century five separate areas of the coastline had been developed as holiday resorts, catering for all. It was possible to find inexpensive camping grounds or pensions close to the sea, but also mid-price hotels, holiday let cottages and houses, as well as more expensive rentals and luxury hotels. In the interior of the island there were several designated nature or wilderness parks. Sekonda was now a popular holiday destination, and in the five coolest months people travelled great distances to stay there.
The Evidence Page 13