by Alex Pavesi
They seemed to be an unhappy family, but the boy’s bedroom was opposite the bathroom at the end of the hall and in the summer, with the frosted glass window propped open, Lionel would amuse himself by making faces at the child – his wet head becoming a procession of rain-soaked gargoyles – and the boy would always laugh.
‘Can she see the body from there?’ He turned, expecting Goode to reply, but his former partner had vanished as soon as Lionel had noticed the woman.
He looked at the bed. It was blanketed in shadow and the angles convinced him she probably couldn’t. He sighed with relief. It was crucial that nobody should call the police before he had taken the time to investigate. If the body was going to be used to frame him, there must be a reason the police hadn’t been contacted yet. Perhaps the murderer would return later to plant more evidence, or was busy establishing an alibi of their own. He couldn’t act, or allow anyone to intervene, until he understood more of the situation.
The woman appeared to lose interest and turned away from the window. He watched her put a bowl of stew on a tray and leave the kitchen, then he emerged from his hiding place.
He had one advantage over the murderer, it occurred to him: he was home much earlier than usual. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday, a time when he would normally have been at his office. It gave him the chance to catch them off guard.
He walked back into the lounge. Inspector Goode was sitting in an armchair. Lionel sat down opposite him. ‘Where did you go?’
The Inspector smiled. In life, he had always acted as if he’d known the answer to everything; at times Lionel had found him insufferable. ‘I stepped outside for a moment. Did you find the clue?’
‘The lock on the door hasn’t been forced. The murderer must have had a key to my apartment.’ There was no other way they could have got in, since the windows were latched shut. And that meant that someone he knew must have been involved. Paradoxically, he found the thought comforting: it introduced limits to a situation that had previously seemed infinite in its possibilities.
‘Good. Then you don’t need me to tell you the suspects.’
‘The first is Mrs Hashemi.’ His landlady, who lived on the top floor. She was the only person who had a key to his apartment other than himself. ‘But she’s not a murderer, not like this.’
Those last three words seemed to amuse the Inspector. ‘She’s more of the oil on the staircase type, you think?’
Lionel frowned. ‘This is serious, Eustace. Someone is out to ruin me.’
The humbled apparition shrugged its shoulders. ‘Well, what about the young girl?’
‘The second, Hanna.’ Lionel leaned forward in his chair. Hanna was the young woman that came to clean the building and the apartments, several times a week. She took their keys from the landlady’s rooms. ‘She could have given the key to someone.’
Lionel felt sure that neither Hanna nor his landlady wanted him framed, or would be capable of committing murder. But they could still have been involved, providing the key to his apartment in exchange for money. Or maybe they’d been threatened?
‘Should I question Mrs Hashemi?’
‘You would lose the advantage of being home ahead of time. And what if she warns her associates?’
Lionel closed his eyes. Was there anyone else it might have been? There was his neighbour, Mr Bell, a photographer and fellow night owl. A friend, almost; but Lionel couldn’t trust anyone in the circumstances. And Mr Pine, his neighbour downstairs – a quiet, bookish man who worked at one of the universities – but Lionel hardly knew him and hadn’t seen him for weeks. ‘And not one of them has any motive.’
Lionel Moon knew the criminal mind. He knew it to the point of exhaustion. It would take a professional to plot something like this, he was sure of that. So he put the question of the key to one side and asked himself: ‘Who would want to frame me?’
The first man that came to mind was a Hungarian counterfeiter called Keller.
Keller had been leading a counterfeiting ring in London for many years, when one of his associates had tried to take more than his fair share of the profits. Keller had bound the man’s hands and feet and fed him, still alive, through an industrial meat grinder; then he had taken his blood and used it as a replacement for ink, printing a hundred fake pound notes with the victim’s innards. He’d given one of these to each of the men in his gang, to remind them of the price of betrayal. Inevitably, one of them had got drunk and tried to spend theirs.
And that’s how it had come to the police. From the shopkeeper’s description and the broad set of smudges and prints that had covered the note, Lionel was able to piece together the main habits of the gang and then one by one deduce their identities. It was a masterpiece of analytical detective work; like a circle, spiralling inwards. As usual, there was little to incriminate the leader of the gang, so Keller had been convicted on some petty charge.
That had happened four years ago. Keller had been released the previous month and Lionel had been restless ever since. He was too old to defend himself now and, for all he knew, Keller was eager for revenge. After all, Lionel had destroyed his whole livelihood and his reputation.
‘And isn’t Hanna Hungarian, also?’ Lionel wondered if that was just a coincidence.
There were others that held grudges, of course. Too many for him to remember.
Just three weeks earlier he’d been discussing these past cases with his new partner, Inspector Erick Laurent. Some of them had been legendary. There was the case of the prolific art thief Otto Mannering, in which Lionel had deduced the culprit’s profession, education and age from the paintings he had chosen to steal. Then there was the case of the young boy found cut in half in a reservoir north of London: Lionel had established that not only were the two halves parts of two separate bodies, but that the top half was in fact a young girl made up to look like a boy.
‘And was there an original?’ Laurent had asked him. ‘A first case that inspired you to take up detection?’
‘Yes, there was.’ And Lionel had told the tale he’d told a hundred times before.
He was an orphan, he’d said. St Bartholomew’s orphanage was a cruel place and one afternoon he’d run away. He was ten years old. He’d walked about eight miles and had come to the edge of a ploughed field where he’d noticed a small hillock of dirt at the side of a ditch. It had seemed to be a recent addition to the landscape. On top of it was a rose and a child’s toy. He’d brushed away some of the dirt and had found the face of a dead young girl, staring out through the scattered mud. It was his first encounter with death and he’d run to the nearest road and hadn’t stopped running for several miles. He’d been picked up about an hour later and returned to the orphanage.
Since he’d already been in enough trouble, he’d never told anyone about finding the body. Only when he was seventeen years old and had left St Bartholomew’s for London did he find himself, on a rainy Sunday, suddenly struck by a desire to solve the case. There was no record of a missing girl in that area at that time; he’d taken a day trip out to the orphanage, stopping briefly to revisit the rooms he’d lived in as a child, but he hadn’t been able to find the field again and had returned to London disappointed. He knew, of course, that the girl’s family or custodians must have killed her and not reported her death – it was the only possibility that made sense – but he never discovered who she was, or why she’d been buried in such secrecy.
Laurent had stroked his beard. ‘That is most intriguing,’ he’d said.
And the two men had agreed: once tasted, detection was like a drug. The best mysteries – the ones that kept them both awake at night – were the ones where there was an absence not of the perpetrator or of their method, but of meaning. Like the mystery before him now. The dead body on his bed could mean so many things, and he wouldn’t be able to rest until he knew the truth.
Only as he was thinking this did he remember the photograph that he’d received two days before.
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sp; He found the envelope and laid its contents on the kitchen table. A photograph of a photograph of himself, almost unrecognizable in his youth, leaving his building and turning left. What could it mean? And was it related to the body on his bed?
‘Let’s go through this logically,’ he said to himself. If the purpose of a photograph is to depict the brief, restricted episode of reality during which it happened to be taken, then does a photograph of a photograph depict the same moment of reality, the same section of time? Or is it in some way a comment upon the original depiction, intended to be inherently satirical or critical? Is its intention to draw focus towards the fact of the photograph as an actual physical object – a glitter of silver dots nestled in a smear of gelatine – as if someone was saying, ‘Look what I found’? Or had it been taken by someone who didn’t know of any other way to make a copy?
Lionel closed his eyes; the questions were tiring to him now. Both the body and the photograph seemed unreadable; there weren’t enough clues to make sense of either. He wanted badly to smoke his pipe, though he’d given that up years ago.
Somebody slapped the table in front of him and he opened his eyes to see Inspector Goode leaning over him. ‘Wake up, Moon. You’re not finished yet. You’ve identified two suspects, to begin with; so begin with them.’
Lionel said nothing. At that moment he heard the familiar thud of somebody climbing the stairs. It was Mrs Hashemi: he recognized her way of walking. He could picture it from his kitchen table. Her exuberant, ever-smiling mouth, which hung open whenever she was not in conversation with someone, would be bobbing up and down as she took each step. She would stop on the first landing and light a cigarette, and sure enough there was the absence of sound as she stopped to prove him right. It occurred to him then that he surely knew her well enough that if she was somehow involved in this crime, her reaction on seeing him home at such an unexpected hour would make it clear, whether it was excitement or fear or nervousness. ‘I’ll surprise her.’
Goode clapped his hands together. ‘That’s the spirit!’
Lionel crept to the door and waited. When Mrs Hashemi was nearing the top of the steps, about to pass by, he put his head through the door and looked around. He tried to act as if he was expecting someone; when he saw that it was her he smiled politely and wished her a good day. She frowned, and spoke in a near whisper: ‘These stairs. These bloody stairs.’ No anxiety at all, just her usual good humour.
Lionel made no reply; he nodded and stepped back inside his apartment.
So that settled it. His landlady was not involved. The revelation hardly surprised him. ‘Well done, Moon,’ said Inspector Goode. ‘Now go and get the other one.’
Lionel wanted to watch Hanna going about her work, just for a moment. She was a timid girl and he felt sure that if she’d passed the key to his apartment to somebody else she wouldn’t be able to hide the fact; he imagined her checking the time constantly or looking over her shoulder at every sound.
But the risk of him being seen was too great. So he put on a disguise: a simple wig of bright orange curls, to cover his balding head, and a long black jacket that he dug from the layers at the bottom of his closet. It would be enough to disguise him in the dim light of the corridor, which was all he could hope for. There was nothing more ridiculous, he’d often thought, than a detective in an elaborate costume. He was embarrassed just at the thought of it.
He crept softly out of his apartment and stood at the top of the stairs. A sticky scraping sound came from below.
He stepped carefully down the staircase, making as little noise as possible. When he was halfway down he stopped and lowered his head: from there he could see her, at the end of the ground-floor corridor. She was holding a mop and humming to herself, moving it mechanically back and forth. ‘She doesn’t seem nervous, or tense.’ But it was hard to tell from this distance.
He hurried down the stairs and out into the street, as if he was in a rush to get somewhere, glancing at her as he passed. But his impression didn’t change. She seemed relaxed; she didn’t even turn her head at the sound of his footsteps.
He almost ran into Inspector Goode, who was standing by a post box on the pavement outside. ‘It’s not her, either,’ said Lionel.
Goode put his arms out behind him and lifted himself up onto the top of the post box, where he sat with his shoes dangling four feet from the ground. It was the kind of agility only a dead man could achieve. He looked down at Lionel. ‘Then you must ask yourself whether there are any other suspects.’
Lionel Moon returned to his apartment and paced around the lounge. ‘Who else could have done this, then?’
Mrs Hashemi had a friend, the man who owned the florist’s shop at the end of the street. Lionel often passed him climbing the stairs to her room, a bunch of flowers in his hands. His arms were covered in tattoos, remnants of a different life; but Lionel had always found him to be friendly and thought he was probably harmless.
He stopped pacing; he could hear the echoing sound of piano notes coming from somewhere nearby. He stood in silence for a moment. They seemed to be coming from one of the rooms next door. It must be Mr Bell. He tiptoed to the connecting wall and flattened his head against it. He could hear the swell of floorboards moving ever so slightly up and down, and he realized that a piano was not being played at all; a gramophone was being listened to.
The movements ceased and Lionel had the absurd image of his neighbour pressed, like him, against the other side of the wall. Suddenly there was a thundering knock at his own front door. He had been concentrating so carefully on the music that he’d not noticed the footsteps approaching up the staircase.
The visitor knocked again, louder this time. Lionel stayed flat against the wall and tried not to breathe. Then he heard the sound of retreating steps, though they were hurried and he couldn’t tell if they were heading up or down.
He walked over to the kitchen table and laid his gun upon it, pointed away from him. Then he sat down. He waited; he had a hunch that the visitor would return. From this position he could see the whole of the lounge, and the gun was readily to hand. He was mildly disappointed that the case was already entering what must be its final act, before he’d had the chance to solve it. But that disappointment had become a common occurrence lately, as his retirement had approached and his thoughts had slowed down.
The next minute lasted for a long time. Inspector Goode did not appear.
Then the footsteps returned, joined now to those of his landlady. He recognized hers immediately. There was another set of loud knocks, then a pause. Silence. Nothingness. He heard the sobbing panic of Mrs Hashemi as she fumbled to unlock the door; he heard the slow creak as it swung open, then a man walked through the doorway. It was his new partner, Inspector Erick Laurent.
Lionel was so surprised that his hand instinctively went to his gun. But the movement was subtle enough that it wasn’t noticed, and both Laurent and the landlady hurried past him to the bedroom. Neither had seen him sitting there.
‘He’s dead,’ he heard Laurent say, followed by a cry of shock from his landlady. The two of them emerged from the room in hurried conversation and neither looked his way. ‘Please, phone for a doctor,’ Laurent was saying. ‘It looks like murder. Here, Dr Purvis is a friend of mine.’ Laurent scribbled a telephone number on a scrap of paper and handed it to Mrs Hashemi. ‘Tell him that Lionel Moon is dead.’
She ran from the room.
A moment of cold, stalled comprehension passed over Lionel, then his partner’s words sank in. He stood up, weighed down by the gun. ‘Laurent,’ he said; the man didn’t turn around. Lionel walked to where his partner was standing and waved his hand in front of him. But Laurent didn’t seem to see him, he just walked through to the bedroom and looked down at the bed. In a state of desperation, Lionel followed him.
The corpse had seemed familiar, but only now did he recognize it as himself. The swelling hid too much of his face and the scars had thrown him; he’d forgotten about
the fire in the orphanage, when he was only a child. The whole building had burned to the ground. He was shocked, also, by how much older he looked here than in the photograph.
If you enter heaven you’re allowed to forget the pains of your life, but in hell you must remember them. Lionel took it as a good omen that he’d forgotten about the fire.
Something else came back to him and he returned to the lounge. Laurent seemed to follow him. That damn box of chocolates he’d been sent on Monday morning was sitting on the kitchen table, unnoticed until now. Last night he’d come home from work late and a little drunk – Laurent and he had shared some whiskey, to celebrate the end of a case – and he’d forgotten himself and eaten one. Or was it more than one? He looked inside the opened box: there were several missing. Foolish, he thought. A foolish, unforgivable thing to do.
But who would send him poisoned chocolates? And a card signed with a kiss? As one mystery ended, another began. He thought through the possible suspects, searching for someone with motive and opportunity, someone who knew his habits, someone who even knew of his weakness for chocolates. And this time it clicked.
He walked over to the window. The woman in the flat opposite was hiding behind her curtains, peering discreetly at his building. She knew what was happening and was watching the situation develop. He thought of the sickly child and his skin went tight. For months – maybe even years, he wasn’t sure – this woman had been poisoning her own son. And Lionel Moon had witnessed the whole thing, without even realizing it. What was she stirring into his stew? Rat poison or weed killer? He knew of such cases. She must have hated Lionel watching her all the time and so she’d finally decided to do away with him. For her own safety, he assumed. Had she put some of the same stuff – a stronger dose, of course – into the chocolates and sent them to him? ‘There is no other explanation.’