by Alex Pavesi
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Time passes and they make no progress, so they decide to have a drink. Megan takes the glass that Henry gives her, holds onto it for a minute, and then gives it back. Henry drinks from it. A few minutes later he collapses. It’s clear that he’s been poisoned and Megan effectively admits to doing it. You assumed that she was also guilty of murdering Bunny.’
‘Yes,’ said Grant. ‘What is your point?’
‘The next few lines contradict that idea. Do you remember what she says to him after he collapses?’
Grant shook his head.
‘That’s the thing about lying, Henry.’ She stood up and towered over him. ‘Once you start, you can’t stop. You have to follow it where it takes you.’ Megan finished her drink. ‘Well, I can’t listen to any more. I know you killed Bunny, and you know that I know. I’ll be damned if I’ll let you kill me, too.’
Grant’s eyes widened. ‘So she killed Henry in self-defence?’
‘Yes,’ said Julia, ‘because Henry murdered Bunny. I only realized later that I’d missed out those lines, which changed the whole ending. And yet you didn’t pick up on it. Could you really have forgotten something so deliberate?’
His voice rose. ‘After twenty long years, of course I could.’
‘Yes,’ said Julia, ‘I thought so too. So I reserved my judgement; I decided to test you. I’m afraid to say, you didn’t pass.’
He closed his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My mistake with that first story gave me an idea. We read the second story that afternoon. It was set in a town by the sea, called Evescombe.’
Grant nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘A man called Gordon Foyle is accused of pushing Vanessa Allen from the cliffs. But he claims that it was an accident. All we know for sure is that they passed each other by, walking in opposite directions. The detective is a sobering character, called Mr Brown.’
‘A bulky man in black, I recall.’
‘He finds a lady’s scarf, coiled in the bushes at the top of the cliffs. It has a boot print on it; the heel of a slim Wellington.’
‘And he concludes that she must have been dragged backwards, towards her death.’
Julia nodded. ‘But that’s the only bit I changed. That and the ending.’
Grant stared at her, his face full of questions. ‘You changed the ending?’
‘And a few of the details leading up to it. I did it intentionally this time, when you went for a walk. I sat down with the story and tweaked it slightly. As I said, it was just a test. To see if you’d notice. I was expecting confusion; I was prepared for anger. I thought I could talk my way out of it and that would have been the end of the matter. But in fact you didn’t notice.’
‘You tricked me?’ Grant threw his hat down in protest. ‘And I’ve been helping you. I’ve been kind to you.’
‘You’ve been lying to me.’
‘I’m old, I forget things. Can you really hold that against me?’
‘You’re not that old,’ said Julia, picking up the hat and handing it back to him.
Grant sighed; he sounded both intrigued and nervous. ‘Then how did it end, originally?’
‘So anyway,’ said Inspector Wild, ‘let me enlighten you.’
He struck a match and was about to light another cigarette, when Mr Brown leaned across and flicked the match from his fingers. It smouldered on the red carpet, leaving a black mark that looked like a drop of spilled ink. ‘Wait just one moment,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I don’t want to give you the satisfaction, when I already know what happened.’
Inspector Wild lifted his eyebrows. ‘You can’t possibly know. We agreed there was no evidence.’
‘Well, I found some,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Enough to give me a good idea, at least.’
His friend looked at him suspiciously. ‘Let’s have it, then.’
The ruddy old man sat back in his chair. ‘I present to you the victim’s scarf.’ And here Mr Brown took the folded square of white, stained material from his jacket pocket and handed it to the Inspector, who spread it open on the table.
‘Where did you find this?’
‘It was caught in a heather bush. Your colleagues must have missed it.’
‘And what is it supposed to tell us, exactly?’
‘Here, you’ll see, is a footprint from a Wellington boot. Wide, in a man’s size. I checked it against the prints on a half-page of newspaper in the victim’s cottage and it wasn’t hers. You’ll be able to tell me, no doubt, that Mr Foyle was wearing Wellington boots that morning?’
Inspector Wild nodded. ‘He still had them on when we arrested him.’
‘Very good,’ said Mr Brown. ‘Then answer me this: how can a man step on a woman’s scarf while both are walking past each other? On a windy day, the ends of it would be up in the air; not that it’s really long enough to trail along the ground, anyway.’
Inspector Wild was intrigued. ‘Go on.’
‘The question put a certain image in my mind. Picture Gordon Foyle standing above Mrs Allen, his foot level with her head as she dangles from the cliff, with his boot inadvertently placed on her scarf.’
‘Then you think he’s guilty?’
‘No.’ Mr Brown touched his fingertips together. ‘I think he’s innocent. If he’d pushed her from the cliffs, she certainly wouldn’t have ended up in that position. She’d have gone head first. But if she’d lost her footing and slipped, she might have caught hold of the edge of the cliff. Leaving her scarf trailing over the lip of it, there for him to tread on. Well, what else do we have to explain? The place where the heather was disturbed? Let’s assume he’s being honest about that. He saw her fall, a few yards ahead of him, and pushed through the heather to the edge of the cliff. From there he could see her hanging on, so he ran back to the path and around to the spot where she’d fallen. Does that fit with everything we know so far?’
Inspector Wild looked slightly bemused. ‘I suppose so.’
‘He looks over the edge and sees her there. His first instinct is to help her, of course. But then he thinks again. He doesn’t really want her to survive, all things considered. So he stands there and watches her struggle for a few minutes, until her bloody hands become slippery and twisted and she has to let go, landing fatally a few moments later. The scarf unravels as she falls and blows into a bush. He probably doesn’t even notice it.’ Mr Brown took up his drink. ‘Well, Inspector, now you can enlighten me.’
Inspector Wild gave his friend a wry smile. ‘What can I say? It seems like you got a lot of that from guesswork, but you’re exactly right. The wife of the man with the boat saw just what you described. Gordon Foyle is innocent, in the most unpleasant sense of the word.’
‘I can’t disagree with that. Well then, he’ll walk free?’
The Inspector nodded. ‘Most likely. Though I doubt the daughter will want him back.’
Mr Brown shook his head in sympathy and it was as if his tired, wavering face was a marionette, suspended on strings from his skull. ‘The poor girl, first her mother dies and now she finds out that the man she loves watched it happen and didn’t try to help.’
He thought of her words: I don’t know what I’d do if they hanged him. And he smiled at the irony; the more difficult question was, what would she do when they didn’t?
‘Death is always messy,’ said Inspector Wild. ‘But our duty is to the law and nothing else.’
The two men lifted their glasses in a half-hearted toast, then faded back into their armchairs.
Grant snorted. ‘That’s very clever. But it proves nothing. Most of the story was left unchanged. Are you surprised I didn’t notice the difference?’
‘I’d only just met you,’ said Julia. ‘I wasn’t looking for proof that you were lying, I was hoping to be proved wrong.’
‘Then you admit it’s not conclusive?’
‘No, of course it’s not. But I didn’t stop there.’
Grant snapped his twig in half. ‘Then the
re’s more?’
Julia nodded. ‘That first test was too subtle to prove anything. But it didn’t dispel my doubts, either. I knew that I had to test you again, using the next story.’
Grant moaned. But he couldn’t disguise his interest. ‘That was the ugly one, with the two detectives and the body in the bathtub?’
‘That’s right, the one you found distasteful. I apologize for that. I sat down that afternoon and rewrote it substantially.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Remember, the story is set in a square called Colchester Gardens, in a tall white terraced house where Alice Cavendish lives with her family, the cook and their maid. A man in a blue suit is seen outside the house one morning, talking to her sister. Alice takes a bath that afternoon and somebody steps in and drowns her.’
‘Then those two detectives turn up to investigate.’
‘Laurie and Bulmer, with their brutal methods. They question the maid, the mother and the father, then a young man called Richard Parker, and finally the man in blue. They all have alibis except for the unfortunate soul in the blue suit. Bulmer tortures him until he confesses, then he hangs himself.’
‘A happy ending, all round.’
‘And that’s when we learn that Inspector Laurie is himself the murderer. The poor man in blue has been framed.’
‘And that was all down to you?’
Julia bent forward in a very slight bow. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Then what is the real ending?’
Sergeant Bulmer smoked a cigarette and then stepped back inside the cell. This time he carried a razor blade. Michael Percy Christopher was lying on the floor in the shape of a puddle, breathing through his mouth. His slight moustache was matted with blood. Bulmer towered above him.
At that moment the lights in the room went out.
Bulmer froze, his thumb pressed against the flat cold back of the razor blade. ‘Power’s out again,’ he muttered, speaking to his partner who was standing outside; that part of the building was always having problems. He waited for over a minute but the lights didn’t return.
Bulmer felt all alone in the darkness; the shadow at his feet had already ceased to exist. Then its thin voice spoke to him. ‘Please, I’m ready to talk.’
‘You’re ready to confess?’
The sound of a head being shaken. ‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t kill her. I’m a detective, like you.’
Bulmer sighed. He had no desire to listen, but what else could he do to pass the time? ‘You’re not with the police.’
‘No, a private investigator.’
‘Your card says theatrical agent.’
‘That’s my cover. My clients like me to be discreet.’
Bulmer grunted. ‘Well, what’s your story?’
He heard the man lift himself onto his knees. ‘I’m known for settling blackmail cases. There’s a lot of it in the theatre. Ask around in the right circles, my name will come up. Two men came to see me one day. Their names were Richard Parker and Andrew Sullivan. Alice Cavendish was blackmailing both of them.’
The love interest and the childhood sweetheart. ‘Why?’ asked Bulmer. He spoke without looking down. If the lights had been on, he’d have had this man against the wall. ‘With what?’
‘She wanted Parker to marry her. They’d met once. He’d been drunk and had told her too much about his time in the war. He’d gone out to France with a cousin of his; he’d seen to it that only one of them came back. Well, Alice was the kind of young girl that could get a man to open his mouth, once he’d had a drink or two. So he confessed everything and the next day she demanded they get married. It was a good match for her, but not so much for him.’
‘And Sullivan?’
‘They used to be close. She caught him in a compromising situation once. He’s a man of unnatural tastes, let’s say. With him it was purely for money.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘She was that kind of girl. Entitled, emancipated. You see that a lot when you work in the theatre.’
‘So how do Sullivan and Parker know each other? The two of them are friends?’ Bulmer wondered why Inspector Laurie wasn’t intervening. He must have been listening, somewhere in the darkness.
‘Not quite. Alice got sloppy. They’d leave their messages to her in the park outside her house, in one of the trees there.’ The spot where Bulmer had found the old letter from Richard Parker. ‘But she used the same place for both of them. One day they ran into each other there and started talking. That’s how the whole plot began.’
‘What did they do?’
‘They came to me for help. The way to settle a blackmail case is to turn it back onto the blackmailer, that’s what I told them. If you can find out where they’re vulnerable, that’s usually enough. So I looked around; I asked some questions. It turned out there were other victims. The maid, for one.’
‘Elise?’
Bulmer couldn’t see the man nodding but assumed he was doing so. ‘She’d stolen jewellery from Alice’s mother. Alice found out and threatened to have her dismissed. In that case she didn’t even ask for anything, she just enjoyed the power. The father, too.’
‘Alice’s father?’
‘Stepfather, in fact. Elise told me all about it. Alice had threatened to tell her mother that he’d made advances at her, if he didn’t do what she said.’
‘Stepfather?’ Bulmer sighed. ‘And then what?’
‘I took all four of them on as clients. And I set up the meeting in Alice’s house. She didn’t know it was going to happen, of course. But she was just a spoilt young girl with a strong sense of entitlement. I thought if they confronted her together, she would back down. I brought the two men to the square, sent Andrew Sullivan to get her stepfather from his office and waited for the cook to leave. Then I knocked on the door. Elise answered it. She had her fiancé with her, the man who owns the greengrocer’s shop. She told me Alice was bathing. That was a stroke of luck, I thought. It would make her more vulnerable. So I sent them all inside. All five of them. They went up the stairs to confront her.’ His voice turned quiet. ‘I don’t know what happened after that.’
The lights flashed on, just for a second; Bulmer saw Laurie standing outside the cell, his hands around the bars, that half-smile on his face again. Bulmer didn’t bother to look down at the man in blue before the darkness came back. ‘So you’re an accomplice?’
‘I didn’t know they were going to kill her. I told them to talk to her.’
Bulmer thought back through their alibis; it seemed like he was seeing them from another angle now and each one was false, like a wooden stage set. For Elise, her alibi had been her fiancé. But he’d been involved in the murder as well. With Mr Cavendish and Richard Parker, it had seemed from the state of their hands that they couldn’t have committed the crime. But with three other pairs of hands it would have been no trouble at all. And why hadn’t her mother told them that Mr Cavendish was only the girl’s stepfather? Andrew Sullivan had appeared to be out of the country, but they hadn’t checked; he would only need to hide out in a London hotel for a few weeks with his mother. ‘They held her underwater, then? All of them.’
Something came to him out of the darkness. He spoke again. ‘If you’d known they were going to kill her, you would never have left your card at the scene.’ Deduction, the detective’s art form; Bulmer had got it at last.
He grinned in the pitch black.
‘Yes, yes.’ The voice came from directly below and he felt a pair of hands wrap around his shoes. A warm, pleading cheek pressed against his left calf; it felt as if someone was trying to iron his trousers. ‘Please believe me.’
The lights came back on, brighter than before. They seemed to impose a silence on the room. Laurie had managed to enter the cell without being heard; he was standing a few steps from Bulmer now, looking disdainfully at the supplicant on the floor. Bulmer kicked the man loose and turned to his partner. ‘Did you hear all that?’
Laurie nod
ded. ‘It makes a certain amount of sense.’
‘What do we do, then?’ asked Bulmer. ‘Arrest the five of them?’
‘We have no evidence,’ said Laurie. ‘This man’s testimony won’t hold up in court. Not against five.’
‘Then what?’
‘We have plenty of evidence against Mr Christopher here. It’s best for all concerned if the case is closed as soon as possible. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes,’ said Bulmer. He sighed and lifted Michael Christopher up by the armpits.
‘Good,’ said Laurie. ‘Make sure it looks like suicide.’
The man in blue started to howl. Bulmer hooked a gloved finger through one of his nostrils and held the man’s jaw shut with his thumb. ‘Quiet,’ he said.
Laurie turned to leave. He placed a final hand on his partner’s shoulder. ‘He’s not innocent, you know. He arranged the whole thing.’
Bulmer grunted, then tore off Mr Christopher’s blue suit jacket and tied one arm of it around the man’s long neck. ‘And the damn fool confessed to it, too.’
Grant had his excuses ready. ‘I think I blocked that one from my memory.’
Julia didn’t answer him directly. ‘The case where all of the suspects turn out to be killers.’
‘I see that,’ said Grant. ‘Then it’s the same as the fourth story?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The one with the fire and the party full of actors. Of course, that one was originally something quite different.’
Grant looked defeated. ‘You changed that one, as well?’
‘I had to be careful. I’d worked out this plan of changing the endings, but I was still bound by certain constraints. After all, the stories derive from the mathematical work. I could only change them in ways that were consistent with that. Otherwise, the whole thing would have fallen apart.’
‘You had to stick to the rules, so that I would incriminate myself.’
‘I had to keep you talking. So inventing a whole new ending was never an option. Instead I simply switched the endings to the third and fourth stories.’