by Alex Pavesi
Grant couldn’t help but smile. ‘That is very clever. Then the fourth story?’
‘It originally had the ending I gave to the third. It starts with a party in a restaurant. A nearby department store is on fire. Helen Garrick is asked to look after the crime scene until the police arrive. She examines the body: the host has been beaten to death with a hammer.’
‘In a toilet, locked from the inside.’
‘The other guests at the party are all actors. Each tells Helen their own tall story, until the whole scene is mired in chaos and confusion. Time passes and the police don’t show up. The suspects grow restless.’
‘And the perceptive reader will have noticed that if Helen was downstairs when the murder was happening, she should also be considered a suspect?’
‘And that’s the ending that I gave to the previous story: the detective did it.’
Helen interrupted proceedings by toppling the bottle of red wine onto the floor. It landed with a concussive smash, leaving a stain not unlike the one in the toilet, all thin blood and fragments of glass.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I’ve sat and listened to your theories all evening. I don’t want to hear any more.’
If there was any doubt that she’d knocked the wine to the floor on purpose, she dispelled it by nudging a wineglass over the edge with her fingertips. She sat in an island of smashed glass.
‘I don’t believe we’ve met.’ James approached her and offered his hand. ‘I’m James.’
‘My name is Helen. I’m supposed to be in charge here.’
‘Ignore her,’ said Griff. ‘She’s drunk. A friend of the restaurant manager, I think.’
‘Well, why not?’ asked Helen. ‘The world is ending outside. Who wouldn’t want a drink, under the circumstances?’
‘Finally,’ said Scarlett, taking her coat from behind the door. ‘I think we have permission to leave.’
‘I wouldn’t, if I were you.’ Helen kicked some of the smashed glass towards the door, like a child playing in a puddle. ‘You’ll miss all the fun.’
Andrew Carter stepped in front of his sister Vanessa. ‘What are you up to? Have you gone mad?’
Griff peered at Helen’s pupils. ‘You’re gone,’ he said. ‘You ought to lie down.’
‘But don’t you want to hear my confession?’ Helen got to her feet, then climbed on top of her chair. ‘You’ve been trapped in this room with me for several hours now and not one of you has thought to ask me why I was at this restaurant by myself, when I live more than twenty miles away. Nobody has asked me why I volunteered to keep watch on this crime scene, when my last train home leaves in a few hours. Didn’t that strike you as a little suspicious?’ The six faces looked blankly at one another. ‘Did it not occur to any of you that it might have been me that killed him? You could at least have shown a little bit of gratitude.’
A gasp filled the room. Somebody at the back of the circle dropped a glass in shock. With the sun in decline and the windows almost black with smoke, she was speaking to an audience of blurred silhouettes.
‘I’ve spent the last hour or so searching for a way to explain this crime. Something I could give to the restaurant manager, to divert attention away from myself.’ She thought of demon dogs, figures crouched on rooftops, vast conspiracies; none of them seemed any good. ‘So I’ve patiently listened to everything you’ve had to say. It’s been like an afternoon in school. Stories of Harry’s womanizing, of being paid to pose as his bride. Well, I can’t take it any more.’
‘Then you murdered him,’ said Vanessa. ‘But why? Who are you?’
Helen sat down and put her head in her hands. Why didn’t she save this for a cosy conversation with a police detective, over a cup of tea? But she was too drunk to stop.
‘Oh, just Helen. Helen Rhonda Garrick. One of Harry’s women, like the rest of you. I’d heard he was having a party. He didn’t want me to come, of course. So I booked a table downstairs. I came up here between courses and saw you all looking out of the window. That was a stroke of luck. Harry wasn’t with you. Then I heard a flush and he emerged from the lavatory. The men’s, of course, in the corridor outside. He wasn’t pleased to see me but I followed him into the room and ushered him into the women’s toilet, without any of you turning around. I told him I wanted to speak to him in private. Well, you can imagine what happened next.’
‘Do tell us,’ said James, who hadn’t seen the state of the body and was captivated by Helen’s performance.
She blushed. ‘I dropped my bag on the floor. Harry, always the gentleman, bent down to pick it up. I pulled the hammer from my sleeve and struck him on the back of the head. Just once and he fell like an ice cube out of a tray. It was incredibly satisfying, that first hit. After six or seven more his head was a bloody mess.’
Vanessa fainted into her brother’s arms. Scarlett turned to Griff and raised her eyebrows. Wendy stepped forward. ‘I knew it was you. The woman that Harry wanted to get rid of. You’re the reason he asked me here.’
‘Yes, quite probably. It didn’t work though, did it? The noise of the fire and the commotion outside covered the sound of the killing. Then I smashed the window and moved the pieces of glass inside. I climbed out through the frame, scratching my thigh on a shard of glass, then went across the roof and down the fire escape, leaving the toilet door locked behind me. Then I went back into the restaurant and sat down, just in time for my second course.’
Scarlett sounded unimpressed. ‘Why are you telling us all this?’
Helen put her head in her hands. ‘Because I want to confess. I thought I could do this, but I can’t. The guilt, it’s too much.’ She closed her eyes and saw the Sisters standing around her in a circle, the same disapproving glare on each of their faces. ‘Not about Harry, you understand. I feel no guilt about that. He deserved to die, for the way he treated me.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Griff. Andrew shook his head.
But the women of the group simply looked at one another.
Wendy spoke for all of them. ‘Then what is it you feel guilty about?’
Helen sobbed; she could feel the machinery of judgement that she’d grown up with finally taking hold of her. ‘I needed a diversion. Something to keep everyone occupied while I killed him.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It was me that started the fire in the department store.’
At that moment there was a loud thump on the door. It creaked open. The restaurant manager’s head appeared, with a grin on his impish face. ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but we have been told we must evacuate the building immediately.’
He disappeared down the stairs; Helen turned back to face her confessors. They stared at her, too shocked to speak. James broke the silence. ‘Well, what a strange day this has been.’ He picked up his hat and coat. ‘You’re insane.’
Vanessa was in tears, propped up by her brother. Griff and Scarlett looked appalled. None of them spoke to Helen as they filed out of the room.
‘He really was an awful man,’ she said to Wendy, the last of them to leave. ‘My intentions were good, at least.’
Wendy departed and Helen was alone.
Her hands were shaking with alcohol and adrenaline. She picked herself up, put on her coat and left. The restaurant was eerily empty as she passed down the stairs and out of the door. She helped herself to a half-finished glass of wine. Courage, she thought. Then she walked along the street and stepped into the burning building.
She felt the heat wash her clean.
‘That fourth story took a lot of work. On the first afternoon, while you were sleeping, I was writing as feverishly as I could manage. And again that evening after our meal.’
Grant narrowed his eyes. ‘Is there more, then?’
‘I gave you yet another chance to prove your innocence with the fifth story. I rewrote the ending to that one yesterday before lunch, working in the bright sun until the backs of my hands burned.’
‘What did you change this time?’
‘The story has a man a
nd his wife exploring an island, finding all of its occupants dead.’
‘Charles and Sarah. I remember.’
‘There were ten people on the island, including two servants. They were all invited there for different reasons, by a mysterious man named Unwin. But when they arrived, Unwin was nowhere to be found. The point of the story was that all of the suspects were victims, so it was easy to switch the killer from one victim to another. That’s how I ended up with Stubbs as the culprit.’
Grant closed his eyes. ‘But originally it was someone else?’
They went back downstairs, to the lounge covered in ash and fragments of wood.
‘The chronology is fairly easy to establish,’ said Sarah. ‘But let’s be explicit about it and the rest should fall into place. The first day is for arrivals, then there are all the accusations over dinner and the first death, the woman who swallowed her fork. I imagine they retire early, too shaken to spend an evening talking to strangers.’
‘Shock can be exhausting,’ said Charles.
‘Meanwhile, two of the guests are poisoning themselves with candles. The five remaining guests wake up the next morning and make their way down here. The servants are missing and so are the two guests. They search the rooms and then the island, finding the four bodies. That’s when things must have broken down. Half of the inhabitants had been found dead already. But they discover no one else on the island, so they know that one of the five of them must be up to something. Rather than trying to find safety in numbers, they gather supplies and lock themselves in their rooms. Do you follow me so far?’
Charles nodded eagerly.
‘At some point the two ladies leave their rooms and move their stash of supplies to the study next door. But why? That’s not exactly clear to me yet. At the same time, one man is being boiled in his bath and another is slowly bleeding to death inside his bed. Both are behind locked doors. The man on the grass outside is the only other person alive at this point.’
‘Then how did the two ladies die?’
Sarah walked to the mantel and pulled out a loose brick. ‘When this is pushed in it opens a hatch at the back of the chimney and smoke pours through a hole into the room next door. The door to that room has no lock, but it locks whenever the window is open.’
‘And the window is too small to climb through. So if anyone is being asphyxiated by the smoke, the only way they can save themselves is by closing the window? It’s sickening.’ Charles shook his head. ‘Then the man lying outside was the killer? He’s the only one left.’
‘Let me think about that for a moment.’
Sarah sat down in one of the plush armchairs and began applying pressure to her forehead to induce concentration, this time with the base of her palm. Charles stared at her, slightly repulsed.
‘No,’ she said, ‘he wasn’t the killer. His death is the hardest to explain. But that’s because there is so little of the mechanism left. We found his body by the place where the boats are usually tied up. How do you induce a man about to take a trip by boat to put a wire around his own neck?’
Charles had no answer for her.
‘By handing him a life jacket, with a wire in the lining. All it would take is some cardboard and cheap fabric. It goes over the head, then the wire is around the man’s neck and the weight is released.’
‘Then if he wasn’t the murderer, who was?’
‘If one of the ten was the killer, they must have killed themselves afterwards. Whose death looks the most like suicide?’
Charles shrugged. ‘Stubbs, I suppose.’
‘And surely the complexity of these crimes means they would have required two people working together. Who might have had an accomplice?’
Charles gasped. ‘Stubbs and his wife, you mean?’
‘Almost, but not quite. Stubbs would make perfect sense as the culprit, except he’d never have had the money to pull off something like this.’
‘Then who?’
‘Who else? When the motive for a crime is to pass judgement, look for the most judgemental. That old lady in there, Mrs Tranter. She killed the lot of them, with the help of her companion, Sophia.’
Charles shook his head. ‘But how?’
‘I won’t forgive myself for missing it,’ said Sarah. ‘The one thing that seemed to have no explanation. Why did they leave the security of their locked bedrooms for that meagre study next door?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No, it makes no sense. Unless they knew that they would be safe walking around the house. And then later, much later, they went to that room to die.’
‘But smoke inhalation is no way to kill yourself.’
‘It’s not. And that’s not how they died. They must have taken something, when all the killing was done with. Arsenic or something similar. They lit the fire and lay down in that room so that the smoke would mask the smell, burying their secret alongside them.’
‘But what was their motive?’
Sarah thought about it. ‘I think Mrs Tranter was dying. There was coughing, at night. And we found a napkin under her handbag, on the dining table. It was spotted with blood. What if she decided to take some others along with her? People guilty of unpunished crimes. She must have persuaded her companion to help, or coerced her in some other way; but only someone steeped in gossip would know so many secrets. She was a devout, austere woman. Remember the bible we found by their bodies? There was a bottle of pills beside it. Whether she saw her mission as justice or revenge, I can’t say.’
Charles was almost too shocked to speak. ‘I don’t believe it. Could a woman really be so evil?’
Sarah gave him a look of sympathy. ‘That’s a lesson you’ll have to learn one day, Charles.’
‘Then I did the same with the sixth story,’ said Julia. ‘That was the one we read last night, where the matriarch of a country house was smothered in her bed for the sake of some diamonds. The main structural feature of that story was that roughly half the suspects turned out to be killers.’
‘Yes,’ said Grant. ‘I can see where this is going.’
‘That’s the same structure it had originally, only I switched the halves.’
Grant laughed, his laughter full of despair. ‘That’s very fine work indeed. I told you the ending was effectively arbitrary. And you put my words into practice.’
‘In that story a young woman called Lily Mortimer visits Dr Lamb. She is hoping to solve her grandmother’s murder, which happened six years earlier. The two of them discuss their memories of the incident. There are nine suspects, each with their own alibis. Lily, who was a child at the time, was playing with her cousin William. Her sister Violet was asleep on the sofa. Her uncle Matthew was walking to the train station to meet the victim’s sister, Dorothea. The other suspects are Dr Lamb, Matthew’s wife Lauren, the gardener Raymond, and a local man with a romantic interest in Violet, called Ben.’
‘And the doctor, his mistress, William and Ben turned out to be the killers. But the real ending was the opposite?’
Dr Lamb had a view of the twilight in two rectangles. He was looking out of the window, through his glasses. He’d written her name and nothing else. ‘Dearest Lily.’
Then sadness had consumed him. He felt like he would be destroying something inside her by writing this letter. But the truth had to be told.
‘Five years ago you came to me with questions about your grandmother’s murder. I did not tell you everything I knew at that time, for reasons that will become clear. You were an impressive young woman and I hope the intervening years have served you well.’ He was delaying the moment of revelation and he knew it. ‘At that meeting you led me to confess to one of my biggest sins, my affair with your aunt Lauren. But I must tell you about a time, five years before that, when I myself played the role of confessor.’
He’d been walking past the war memorial one autumn day when Violet Mortimer had called out to him. ‘Dr Lamb, do you have a moment?’
He’d stopped and turned towards h
er. ‘Violet, what’s the matter? You look like you haven’t slept.’
The young woman burst into tears. ‘It’s Agnes,’ she said. ‘I need to tell someone. I need to tell someone everything. Oh, Dr Lamb, I need to confess.’
‘So you see,’ wrote the doctor, ‘Violet told me the whole truth of the matter. And that’s what makes this letter so painful to write, Lily. It was your own family that murdered your grandmother. Your own family that smothered her. Squashed her, almost, like an insect in her bed.’
It had started with Dorothea and Matthew.
The first time Dorothea had visited her sister after the stroke, she’d taken her nephew to one side and told him about the diamonds. ‘I’ve always known she still had them, but she won’t tell me where they are. What if she dies and takes the secret with her to the grave?’
Matthew was appalled at the idea of so much wealth going to waste. ‘Don’t worry, Auntie. We’ll persuade her. They’re my rightful inheritance.’ He looked up and swore at the ceiling. ‘This house isn’t human, after all. She’s no right to bequeath them to it.’
But his confidence was misplaced. When Agnes was visited that afternoon by her sister and her son, the dinner tray balanced awkwardly between them, she was feeling weak and dizzy and their talk of diamonds made her angry.
‘You’re no better than thieves,’ she whispered, spitting her glass of milk over the pillow in protest. ‘I’m not dead yet, you know. And all you care about is my money.’
Matthew took Dorothea to one side, later that day. ‘Help me get those diamonds, Auntie Dot. Before she goes. I’ll share them with you, half and half. But I must have them.’
Dorothea smiled. ‘The only thing I ask is that you take care of me in my old age.’
‘Of course.’ Matthew took her wrist. It was close enough to shaking hands on the deal.
They made their second attempt a few weeks later. Dorothea came to the village and pressed a sedative into Matthew’s hand. ‘When you get to my age, the doctor will prescribe you anything.’
He’d slipped it into Agnes’s tea and spent the evening searching her room, but to no avail. ‘I’m sorry, Auntie. I’ve let you down.’