Eight Detectives

by Alex Pavesi

  ‘Next time,’ said Dorothea. ‘They have to be somewhere.’

  Soon after that they made their third attempt. Matthew went to meet his aunt at the station. Dorothea took his hand as she lowered herself from the train. ‘This time we’ll succeed,’ she said, a knowing smile splitting her wide face. She told him her plan as they walked through the fields. ‘Violet was always Agnes’s favourite. She will tell Violet where they are.’

  Matthew nodded. ‘It might work.’

  When they got to the house they found Violet asleep on a couch. Dorothea woke her and told her about the diamonds and what she must do. ‘Otherwise, they’ll be lost forever. A small fortune, taken from this family and given to nobody.’

  Matthew’s attempts to look earnest hardly helped, as he nodded along with a glint in his eye. But Violet saw the sense in what they were saying. ‘But why do I have to do it?’

  ‘You’re the only one she trusts.’

  All the more reason for it not to be me, thought Violet. ‘I want to talk it over with Raymond.’

  ‘What on earth for?’ Matthew was aghast; his niece and the gardener were too close as it was. Raymond was married. A scandal in the family would be no good for any of them. ‘It has nothing to do with him. He’s just the gardener.’

  Violet was insistent. ‘He’s my friend.’

  But, as it happened, Raymond advised her to do as her uncle suggested. ‘It’s your inheritance, too,’ he said. ‘You have a right to it.’

  So the four of them – Matthew, Dorothea, Violet and Raymond – met outside Agnes’s room, late that morning. Violet looked up at the three faces, each expecting so much of her.

  She was terrified.

  She stepped into the room alone. Agnes was awake. The old woman smiled sweetly. ‘Violet, dear, what a nice surprise.’

  ‘I’ve come to collect your breakfast things.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the tray. ‘And I wanted to ask you something. About the diamonds Grandpa gave you.’

  As soon as she said the word Agnes sprang forward and grabbed hold of her granddaughter’s wrist. The breakfast tray fell to the floor. ‘You too!’ The old woman was hysterical. ‘It was you that tried to kill me. You that put something in my drink. You and Matthew and my sister.’ Violet screamed. Raymond ran into the room, followed by the other two. He pulled Agnes from her.

  Agnes looked at the four of them. ‘All of you. Thieves, nothing more. I shall have you taken out of my will.’ She turned to Raymond. ‘And you can find employment elsewhere, immediately.’

  The gardener shrugged. He picked up a knife from the floor, where it had fallen from the breakfast tray, then leaned across the bed and held it to Agnes’s eye. ‘Where are the diamonds, you old witch? I’m fed up with the way you treat me.’

  Agnes whimpered. She waited for the others to step forward and help her, but none of them did. Then she raised a fragile finger and pointed at the window. ‘In the frame, on the left.’

  Matthew checked the place she’d indicated. ‘They’re here,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Raymond, stepping away from the bed.

  Agnes turned to her granddaughter and sister, who were standing quietly at the side of the room. ‘You’ll burn in hell for this, both of you.’

  Raymond took a pile of blankets from the nearby chest of drawers and threw them over the bedridden woman. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we can’t leave her alive.’

  Agnes screamed when she heard this; Violet gasped in shock. Her grandmother’s fragile shape wriggled frantically under the blankets. Raymond climbed on top of the squirming pile and put his weight on her shoulders. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘All of you.’

  ‘We must,’ said Matthew, ‘there’s no choice now.’ He ushered the two women towards the bed, taking their hands. The three of them fell onto the pile of blankets and closed their eyes, holding firm until eventually the movement beneath them stopped and there was no further sound.

  Violet spoke softly. ‘Do you think she’s all right?’ But nobody answered her.

  ‘Look,’ said Matthew. He opened the canvas pouch he’d taken from the window and poured the contents into his hand. Diamonds fell through his fingers. ‘It’s a fortune.’

  ‘And so,’ wrote Dr Lamb, as the light in his room grew dim, ‘it didn’t feel like they were committing murder at all, or so Violet told me. They split the diamonds four ways. They hadn’t planned to include Raymond, but the circumstances had changed. Dorothea crept out of the house and returned an hour later, making sure she was seen by Lauren. Matthew hung around downstairs and Violet went back to her couch. Raymond returned to his leaves. And that was that. Dorothea was sure someone else must have known about the diamonds, so she raised them herself to deflect suspicion. The rest was just a pantomime. Of course, Violet couldn’t keep her composure for long after that and soon she was racked with guilt. She could no longer look at Raymond, let alone be friends with him. So she came and confessed everything to me. I believe she married Ben as a kind of penance; he was obsessed with her, always watching her through his binoculars. Raymond took it terribly and moved away. Later he tried to sell his share of the jewels in some ghastly slum; he was stabbed and killed in the process. Dorothea died before she saw any of her fortune. Matthew was content with inheriting the house and went back to his quiet life. I don’t know what he did with his diamonds. It’s true, then, that crime doesn’t pay. There’s a lesson for us all.’

  Dr Lamb massaged his hand; he’d covered four pages already. He wanted to get it all down before dark. He picked up the pen again.

  ‘Lily, it pains me to tell you this horrid truth.’ He sighed, wondering if he really cared. So close to death himself, he still found it a struggle to speak honestly. ‘I’ve been protecting you for a long time now. We’ve all been protecting you. Lauren knew too, of course. I told her about it. And Violet confessed everything to Ben. But we all decided it would hurt you too much, if you knew. That’s why we kept it from the police. Even young William worked it out, when he found that diamond ring in one of Matthew’s pockets; maybe he would have told you the truth, if Raymond hadn’t taken him away. Well, you’re old enough now to make your own decisions. You must do what you feel is right.’

  He’d wanted to end the letter on something hopeful. That would have to suffice.

  ‘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.

  ‘So there you have it,’ said Julia. ‘Once again, you failed to notice that the ending had changed.’

  Grant avoided her eyes. ‘My memory is much worse than I’ve made out.’

  ‘And that takes us up to last night.’ Julia was talking to the side of his head. ‘I went back to my hotel, sure that my hunch was correct. We’d read six stories, all of them with their endings changed, some of them substantially. And you hadn’t noticed a single one. Twenty years is a long time, but you should have remembered one of them. At least one, I was sure of that. You must have had a favourite. Still, I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. We only had one story left. I would try one final test.’

  Grant turned back to her. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘It didn’t seem like enough just to change the ending again. So instead I threw out the original story altogether and wrote an entirely new one to replace it. I went through your research paper, The Permutations of Detective Fiction, and picked out one of the structures described there. Then I wrote it up as a story of my own. I was awake almost all of the night working on it. By this morning I had a completely new story. And yet still you claimed it as your own.’

  ‘The one we read an hour or two ago?’

  Julia nodded. ‘Lionel Moon, the dead detective. I wrote that story myself.’

  ‘Then what was the story it replaced?’

  ‘It was a short one,’ said Julia. ‘It h
ad two detectives. Both men, both well-known amateurs. They are investigating strange goings-on in a supposedly haunted building, an abandoned orphanage called St Bartholomew’s.’

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Eustace Aaron and Lionel Benedict. They cannot agree on the existence of the supernatural, so they make a pact to spend the night in the attic. That should settle the matter. So they set up their camp beds and wait for the sun to set, drinking cocoa made on a portable stove. The building is derelict. After a while they both begin to smell smoke. They realize that there is a crack in the wall leading through to the chimney and someone has lit a fire downstairs. The room is gradually filling with smoke. They try to leave but discover that the door is locked and the key has vanished. They stay calm and assume that the fire will burn itself out. They smash the window. They shout for help, but the orphanage is deep in the countryside.’

  ‘Then how does it end?’

  Lionel Benedict stood at the window. He could feel the cloud of smoke building behind him.

  ‘It’s not enough,’ he said, looking at the hole in the glass. It was about the size of a fist. The window’s diagonal was about the length of his forearm. He punched out the rest of the glass, cutting his knuckles. ‘It’s still not enough.’

  He turned to his companion. ‘Aren’t you interested? We might die here.’

  Eustace Aaron was looking in the mirror of a splendid blue vanity table, the only piece of furniture in the smoky room beside the camp beds that they’d brought with them. It was either old and impractical or built for a child; he had to lean down to see his face in it.

  ‘I’m ahead of you, Lionel. We are going to die here, it’s inevitable now. The smoke is building up. I’m trying to come to terms with it.’

  Lionel watched as his younger counterpart studied his own features, the fearsome eyes and sharp teeth, as if they somehow summarized the life he had lived.

  He turned to the crack in the wall. It reached from the floor to the ceiling, with numerous branches. A tree in winter. Smoke was seeping from every inch of it and there was no way they could block or cover the whole thing. Lionel closed his eyes; the thought of his death terrified him.

  ‘There’s a locked drawer here,’ Eustace said over his shoulder. ‘A locked drawer in an abandoned house. That’ll be our last mystery. Will you help me to solve it?’

  Lionel walked over to his companion and together they kicked at the dressing table until it leaned awkwardly to one side and the drawer could be manoeuvred out of it. Inside was a dark blue cardboard box. ‘Maybe it’s a key,’ said Lionel.

  Eustace shook his head, feeling the contents rattle softly as he picked it up. ‘Chocolates,’ he said, and he lifted the lid to confirm his hypothesis. They had paled with the passing of time, but each one was in the shape of a fruit and the fact that they hadn’t shrunk or dried out seemed to make them look obscenely, lusciously turgid in their individual compartments. ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘They must be twenty years old.’ Lionel’s face showed his repulsion and Eustace put the box down on the dressing table, picking out one for himself. ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Lionel. ‘It might make you ill.’

  Eustace laughed, as if Lionel had made a joke. He bit the chocolate in half. Lionel watched him eat, expecting some kind of comment. When none came he spoke wearily, as if to fill the silence. ‘Eustace, I have to tell you. It was me that lit the fire downstairs. I was hoping to force us out, so we couldn’t finish our investigation. I thought it would add to the mystery. Someone must have seen me do it and taken the opportunity to lock us inside. Someone who wanted us dead.’

  ‘I know who tried to kill us,’ said Eustace, swallowing the last of the chocolate. ‘I’ve already worked it out.’

  Even though he was about to die, Lionel Benedict couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. He turned away from his friend and examined the chocolates, wondering if there was a clue on the box. Even at arm’s length, its colour was dulled by the smoke. He found nothing. Then, reluctantly, he took one of the chocolates and bit into it. The inside tasted of sour cherries.

  ‘You still don’t believe in ghosts?’ he asked. Lionel was trying to distract his friend, to give himself time to solve the case.

  ‘No, I don’t. Do you, Lionel? Even after this?’ Eustace gave him an ironic smile. ‘You’re not convinced now that life is meaningless and cruel?’

  Lionel walked over to the window and spat the chocolate out through the stream of smoke. He watched the grey clouds that were taking shape outside the window. ‘Now more than ever.’

  ‘Of course.’ Eustace shrugged. ‘You’re hoping to come back as one.’

  Lionel shook his head. He searched his pockets and found a publicity photograph of himself; he kept it there in case he was ever asked for one. He closed his eyes and let it drop from the window, an attempt to preserve a small fragment of himself. The fresh air widened his lungs and when he next inhaled he took a mouthful of smoke deep into his chest. He started to cough. He stumbled to Eustace’s side. ‘My head is light, I can’t think. Tell me who it was. Who locked us in here to die?’

  ‘It was me.’ The other man shrugged. ‘I wanted to make sure we stayed here the whole night, to settle the case forever. So I locked the door and got rid of the key. We’ll be rescued in the morning.’

  ‘We’ll be dead by then.’

  ‘Yes, from smoke inhalation. I didn’t know that you’d lit the fire downstairs when I locked us in. That was unfortunate.’

  ‘What happened to the key?’ Lionel took the other man by the lapels.

  ‘It’s gone,’ said Eustace. ‘I kicked it under the gap in the door. It’s no more than four yards away from us, but we can’t get at it.’ He smiled, as if this was funny.

  Lionel went over to the door and put his head against the ground. He could see the key, resting on the second of several steps that led down from the attic. Eustace was right, it was out of reach. He shook the door once again, but found it as huge and immovable as before. It was made of both metal and wood.

  ‘You fool,’ said Lionel, getting to his feet. ‘You did this to us.’

  Eustace reached back and touched the slanted mirror of the dressing table, then angled it so that Lionel could see himself in it. ‘And so did you,’ he said, as he started to cough.

  The two of them died a few hours later. By that point the room was thick with smoke and they’d both begun to cough up black phlegm. There was no moon and the night was dark. They were found the next morning, with their fists bloody from beating on the door.

  ‘I see,’ said Grant, coming to life. ‘Then Aaron and Benedict are the suspects, killers, victims and detectives, all in one. It’s another limiting case. Here the Venn diagram is a simple circle.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘And it’s nothing at all like the story I wrote, which we read together this morning. You were lying then and you’ve been lying to me for the last two days. Are you still going to deny it, even after this?’

  Grant slid down from the rock; he stood in front of her with his hands in his pockets. ‘Does it make any difference if I do? You seem convinced.’

  ‘I’d say the evidence is overwhelming.’

  He shook his head. ‘Then what happens now?’

  ‘I want you to tell me the truth. Then I will go back home. Publication of the book is cancelled, of course.’

  ‘Cancelled?’

  Julia nodded. ‘What did you expect? Our agreement was with Grant McAllister, not with you.’

  ‘Will you go to the police?’

  She shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start with an accusation like this. Besides, I don’t speak the language.’

  ‘Then no,’ Grant sighed, ‘there’s no point in me denying it now. I’m not Grant McAllister and I didn’t write these stories. I expect you’ll want to know who I am?’

  The sun passed behind a cloud and the darkened clearing came alive with the sound of birds.

  ‘I know w
ho you are,’ said Julia. ‘Your name is Francis Gardner.’

  The man across from her fell back against the rock. ‘How can you possibly know that?’

  ‘This island has a memory, even if you don’t. And the old man who owns the hotel I’m staying at was only too happy to talk to me this morning. I heard all about the two foreigners that used to live together in a cottage by the sea, just off the path that leads to the church. How they were inseparable, indistinguishable even, until one day one of them died. He couldn’t give me a name. But I’d seen the cigarette case in your kitchen. And I checked the gravestones in the churchyard, where you walk every day. There was only one English name among them.’

  ‘Francis Gardner.’

  ‘With the date he died written underneath. Ten years ago, here on this island. Only it wasn’t really him, was it?’

  Francis shook his head. ‘It was Grant McAllister. Though in a manner of speaking, Francis also died that day. I haven’t used the name since.’

  ‘Then who are you? And what were you to Grant?’

  ‘I was a mathematician. I met him at a conference in London, a long time ago. We kept in touch, afterwards. He was in Edinburgh and I was in Cambridge. We started out as collaborators, but soon became more than that.’ Francis shrugged. ‘His marriage was a sham and one day he moved out here to get away from it. That was just after the war. I gave it some thought and decided to follow him.’

  ‘Then you were more than just friends?’

  ‘Yes. I loved him. And he loved me.’

  ‘And yet when he died you took his name, his identity and no doubt his money?’

  Francis turned a shrewd eye towards her. ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘I’m asking the inevitable question. Did you murder him?’

  ‘Murder him? No. Good god, no. It wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  Two men emerged from the line of trees, both dressed formally though the day was bright and warm. Before them a grassy slope ran for about thirty yards to the edge of the cliff; beyond that was the cold, shining sea.