by Alex Pavesi
He was growing impatient and his hand hurt.
‘Lauren seemed to lose interest in me after the murder. I think the guilt was too much for her. So I left her with Matthew and I came here, to London, where there was no one to notice the sudden change in my fortunes. And I lived comfortably, that’s all. I think that’s the most that any of us got out of the murder: just a bit of comfort. I wish I could say it was all worthwhile, but I’m not sure that would be the truth. I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive us. Yours, Dr Godwin Lamb.’
He put the pen down and stared sadly at the darkness outside. Then he began to cough. He coughed for several minutes. Then he went to the bathroom, leaving a dot of bright red blood by his signature.
12. The Sixth Conversation
Julia Hart ran her finger along the final paragraph. ‘He coughed for several minutes. Then he went to the bathroom, leaving a dot of bright red blood by his signature.’
It was late and her eyes had started to feel heavy halfway through that last page. ‘Forgive me,’ she yawned.
Grant filled the silence. ‘Another sordid tale. We’ve discussed the definition of a murder mystery already, so perhaps the most helpful thing I can do now is to describe how this story derives from it.’
‘Yes,’ said Julia, picking up her pen. ‘I would be interested to hear that.’
They were sitting in a wooden hut, a few hundred yards along the beach from Grant’s cottage. Inside it was a rack where a single small boat was stored, with space for another. They’d opened the wide doors that faced the sea and were sitting just inside, on two wooden folding chairs. Before them the perfectly smooth sand ran down to the water, as neat as a carpet.
‘We’ve looked at several stories now where just one of the suspects turned out to be the killer. And this morning we looked at a story where all of the suspects turned out to be killers. Well, it’s immediately clear from the definition that there’s also a halfway point. We can have exactly half of the suspects turn out to be killers, or any other proportion.’
‘And here we have Ben, Lauren, William and Dr Lamb,’ said Julia. ‘The shadowy stranger, the young boy, the doctor and his mistress. Four killers. And I counted nine suspects, in total.’
Grant nodded. ‘The point is that any subset of the suspects could turn out to be guilty. It could be a quarter of them, a half, or even all but one of them. All of these solutions are equally valid, according to the definition. This story simply illustrates the point.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘I told you the definition was liberating, and this is why. It almost creates a new genre: now, instead of guessing who the killer is, the reader must guess for each individual suspect whether or not they were involved in the crime. The number of possible endings increases exponentially.’
Julia looked thoughtful. ‘Don’t you worry that it’s almost too much freedom? If a whole group of the suspects were guilty then it would be next to impossible for the reader to guess the solution exactly, which might make it feel arbitrary.’
‘It’s a challenge for the author to make an ending like that feel satisfying, that’s true. But in itself it’s no more arbitrary than any other ending. Remember that I’ve rejected the view of detective stories as logical puzzles, where the clues define a unique solution and the process of deriving it is almost mathematical. It’s not, and they never do. That’s all just sleight of hand.’
She was writing down everything he said. ‘It’s certainly an interesting way of looking at it.’
‘We mustn’t forget,’ Grant continued, ‘that the central purpose of a murder mystery is to give its readers a handful of suspects and the promise that in about a hundred pages one or more of them will be revealed as the murderers. That’s the beauty of the genre,’ his eyes drifted to the sea, as if it would have been impolite to say the word beauty while looking at her. ‘It presents the reader with a small, finite number of options, and then at the end it just circles back and commits to one of them. It’s really a miracle that the human brain could ever be surprised by such a solution, when you think about it. And the definition doesn’t change that, it just clarifies the possibilities.’
Julia nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve never thought about it like that. The craft, then, is in the misdirection: in picking the solution that in some ways seems the most unsuitable to the story you’ve written, but in other ways fits perfectly.’
‘Yes,’ said Grant. ‘And that’s what differentiates a murder mystery from any other story with a surprise at the end. The possibilities are presented to the reader up front. The ending just comes back and points to one of them.’
An antique lamp was hanging from the ceiling behind them. The sun had set while Julia was reading and now the hut was a box of sour yellow light buried in the astral blue of the evening, like a gemstone in a cave. Julia felt that it was her turn to speak.
‘Just like the other stories,’ she said, ‘this one has a small detail out of place. It took me a few readings to notice it.’
Grant was nodding. ‘I would like to hear it.’
Julia turned the pages of her notebook. ‘The first thing that struck me was the many references to strangulation, though Agnes was killed by being smothered. First the squirrel was found strangled. Then we see the doctor explaining strangulation to William. The house itself is even described as being strangled by trees. It’s as if these details were put there to foreshadow something that never comes to pass.’
‘Yes,’ said Grant. ‘That’s interesting. I didn’t notice that.’
‘And then on a second reading I realized that every single death that occurs in the story is described with at least one symptom of strangulation, even when it makes no sense. The doctor at the start is presumably dying of cancer of the liver or pancreas, but his voice is hoarse. Agnes has bruises along her neck, but there’s no explanation for them. And when Raymond is stabbed, Lily imagines him with his throat constricted, unable to breathe. Even Lauren’s corpse had bloodshot eyes and a swollen neck and she died of a virus.’
‘Yes,’ said Grant, ‘that is very puzzling. It’s more subtle than the others, perhaps.’
The lamp was flickering behind them. Grant reached up and lifted it down from the ceiling. It was running low on oil. He extinguished it, leaving only the moonlight.
‘Have you always lived alone out here?’
‘Yes, I have,’ said Grant. He pushed himself up in his chair and turned towards her. ‘Earlier you asked me if I was obsessed with the sea. I have an answer for you.’
‘I’d be interested to hear it.’
‘To me, the sea is like having a pet dog asleep on the hearth. When I’m near it, even inside my cottage, it’s like I can feel it breathing. It’s a companion, of sorts. It’s less lonely to live alone by the sea.’
Julia shook her head. ‘I’m afraid that I can’t relate to that.’ The faint smell of rotten flesh came back to her on the breeze and she looked at the sea and couldn’t help but imagine herself drowning in it. ‘To me the sea has always been mildly terrifying. It moves like a set of jaws, chewing on everything inside it. Doesn’t it remind you of death, sometimes?’
Grant’s response was enigmatic. ‘You’d think it would, but it doesn’t.’
Julia said nothing.
Thirty minutes later Julia Hart returned to her hotel room, making her way up the stairs in the dark. She turned on the electric light and sat down at the desk by the window. The bright reflection blocked her view of the stars, except the few she could see where the room was in shadow. She rubbed her eyes and opened the window, so that the cool night air would keep her awake. Then she picked up her pen.
On the desk in front of her was a small book, bound in green leather. It was an original copy of The White Murders. She slid it towards her and opened it near the end, weighing it down with a pebble. She picked up her notebook and turned to a blank page. She tore two squares from the edge of the page and wrote out a question on each of them, then she leaned forward and pinned them to th
e windowsill. One read, ‘Who was Francis Gardner?’ The other, ‘Did he have anything to do with the White Murder?’ She thought for a moment and then added a third, this one a reminder for the morning: ‘Talk to the hotel manager.’
She turned to a fresh page and checked the time. There was so much that she still had to do. She inhaled and held her breath for a moment, trying to focus her thoughts; the buzzing of the electric light made it sound like the walls were full of insects.
Then she breathed out and started to write.
13. The Shadow on the Staircase
It was a Monday morning: the first opportunity for anything interesting to happen after the stifling quiet of Sunday. Before midday, the great detective Lionel Moon received two deliveries that made no sense to him.
He found the first as he was leaving for work. A box of chocolates and a card. He stepped into the corridor outside his apartment and saw the shallow, rectangular box sitting in the middle of his doormat. It looked like a model of a farmhouse in a field of wheat, with the card as a kind of roof. As he picked it up he felt the chocolates rattle inside and had an image of bones bouncing around in a coffin. The card was signed with an X, in two swoops of dark blue ink.
‘Is this a gift,’ he asked himself, ‘or some kind of warning?’
Lionel Moon had very few friends and none that he could imagine buying him chocolates. He stepped back into his apartment and placed the box on a small table next to the door. Then he locked his apartment and left the building.
He found the second delivery that evening, as he was arriving home from work. An envelope was taped to his door, with his name written on it in large, wandering handwriting. He opened it, still standing in the corridor; inside was a photograph of a photograph of himself, leaving the building. It had been taken from the street outside or perhaps from the shop over the road. He knew it was a photograph of a photograph because the image within the image was slightly distorted, as if it had been laid on a table and tilted back away from the camera. It had a thick white border that wasn’t quite straight. There was a vague shadow covering both the border and the image inside it.
‘A picture of a picture,’ he said to himself. ‘What on earth does that mean?’
If he’d given it any thought, he might have assumed that these two deliveries, the chocolates and the photograph, were in some way related. But in fact the effect of the photograph – of seeing himself both in profile and in miniature, striding purposefully across the palm of his own hand as he held it out in front of him – was that he forgot about the chocolates altogether and didn’t even notice them as he entered his apartment.
‘A message. But what is it trying to tell me?’
He took the envelope and its contents through to the kitchen, then sat down to study them while waiting for a pan of soup to warm on the hob. The pan was a knotty, metal thing and the soup inside it was yellow. Though he was considered one of the best detectives in Europe, Lionel Moon lived a very simple life. He rented a few rooms – a lounge, with a kitchen at one end, and a bedroom – in a tall apartment building on a handsome street that led off from a London square. At the end of the hall was a shared bathroom. His landlady – Mrs Hashemi, a widow – lived alone on the top floor.
He heard the soup bubbling and took the saucepan off the flame, then poured its contents into a chipped white bowl. He ate his dinner while examining the envelope, careful not to spill anything on what might later become evidence. There were no unusual markings on it and nothing to say where it had come from. He put it down and picked up the photograph. Not so different from an envelope itself, he thought, with one image contained neatly inside another. Only there was no way to open it and examine the contents.
‘It seems vaguely threatening.’
If someone had sent him an ordinary photograph of himself, he would have assumed that it was meant as a warning: a message that someone was watching him, delivered in pictorial form. But a photograph of a photograph felt much more ambiguous. He looked closely at it and realized that it was a picture of a page in a magazine. There had been a few magazine profiles of him over the years, when his name had come up in celebrated cases. There were some black marks along the bottom that must have been the top of a line of text. Someone had opened the magazine on a table and photographed the page.
‘But why?’
He had grown tired of the detective’s life, but the mystery still managed to captivate him; he forced himself not to think about it. He rinsed the bowl and saucepan in cold water and put them away in a cupboard, then put the photograph back in its envelope and placed it on a shelf in his lounge. Then, because he’d come home from work rather late, he turned out the lights in the kitchen and went straight to bed.
Like all of the most effective nightmares, this began with an absence of meaning where meaning should have been present: the photograph of the photograph was still a mystery to Lionel Moon when two days later he returned home and found a third delivery waiting for him. Fate seemed to have become a cat, leaving these curious, mangled items at his door. This time it was a dead body.
He had passed through the door to his apartment without noticing anything unusual; it was only when he’d reached the kitchen that he realized something was amiss. The door to his bedroom was standing open, though he knew he’d carefully closed it that morning. He always did, to keep in the heat; the rooms were cavernous and the building was often cold. But now there was half a foot of empty space between the door and the doorframe, a dark rectangle as tall and thin as a lamp post. Lionel took his gun from inside his jacket and held it in his right hand, then peered through the gap in the doorway.
A dead body lay on his bed. It was the body of a man: fully clothed in a dark brown suit, middle-aged, unshaven and tough-looking. Lionel noticed with distaste that the dead man was still wearing his shoes and the sheets of the bed were bunched into wrinkles beneath their weight. His face was swollen beyond recognition and his skin was a velvet purple. He’d been poisoned, most likely, or had possibly fallen ill with some disease. There were no obvious signs of a struggle; the man could have been put there before or after he died, it was hard to tell.
One side of his face was extensively scarred with what seemed to be burnt skin: those unmistakable patterns of blistered and buckled flesh, though they were old and only slightly visible. The scarring extended to his hairline, which was covered by a hat. Inspector Goode, who had been Lionel’s partner for many years, had a saying, that ‘if you enter heaven, you’re allowed to forget the pains of your life, but in hell you must remember them’. Lionel thought of that every time he saw the tortured face of a freshly dead body. Were those contortions the effects of painful memories being lived through all over again, or just the effects of death? He reached across and closed the corpse’s eyes, sealing the truth behind them.
‘Where do you think he is then, heaven or hell?’
The words came from behind him. Lionel turned and saw Inspector Goode standing in the doorway. Lionel’s breathing faltered, as it always did, because the Inspector had been dead for almost a year. There’d been a gas leak in the building where he lived; Lionel had found the corpse himself and a few days later had helped carry his coffin to a slot under the eaves of a small church. It was as if the dead man had chosen to huddle there out of the rain and smoke a cigarette for all eternity.
But that hadn’t stopped the Inspector from coming back to continue their partnership, just as if he’d never died. It had started straight after the funeral. Lionel thought he’d seen the dead man standing in the crowd, smiling at him. Now it would happen during the most innocent, domestic moments; whenever Lionel was alone, the Inspector was likely to appear. He had long ago given up wondering whether he was losing his mind and had now just come to accept it.
‘Afternoon, Goode.’ He turned back to the corpse. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘He swallowed something that didn’t agree with him. Check his pockets, will you?’
Lionel did
as his dead partner asked. There were no further clues, either to the man’s identity or to where or how he’d been killed.
‘Why do you think the body was brought here, to me?’
‘I can think of three possibilities.’ Inspector Goode held up three fingers and Lionel noticed that they cast no shadow on the wall behind him. Just a figment of my imagination, he thought. ‘It could be a warning,’ the Inspector said. ‘Or a partial confession, by the killer.’
‘Or an attempt to frame me for murder?’
‘Yes, that’s the third option. But be stoic about it, why don’t you? It’s hard to frame someone for murder. And besides, you have the upper hand. There’s a clue you haven’t noticed yet.’
Lionel spoke defensively. ‘I’ve barely had time.’ He left the bedroom and examined the door to his apartment. It was untouched; the lock was still working and there were no marks upon it. Then he checked the windows, even though he lived on the second floor. A ladder or a length of rope could have been used to climb up to them; it wasn’t impossible. But they were all latched shut and none of them were damaged.
Inspector Goode watched him from the doorway; he was whistling impatiently.
As Lionel was checking the furthest window in the corner of his bedroom, he noticed movement in the building opposite. The woman that lived there was standing at her kitchen window, looking vaguely in his direction as she prepared a stew. He stepped to one side, hoping that she hadn’t seen him, and watched her through a gap in the curtains.
The building that she lived in was less distinguished than his own and the walls facing him were more brick than window, but through years of observation he had created a convincing picture of the family that lived there. There were three of them. The father worked long hours and came home late; his wife spent her days on domestic chores and in caring for their child, a young boy, who was perpetually in bed with some illness or another.