by Alex Pavesi
The younger man put his hand on the other’s shoulder. ‘Worth the climb, don’t you think?’
Grant nodded. ‘To the very edge then, since we’ve come this far.’
He started to walk forward. Francis followed, with a hand clamped to his hat; the wind at this height was unpredictable. ‘Not too close, Grant. We need some room for the sheet.’ In his other hand he held a wicker basket, with a blanket balled up under his arm.
Grant briefly surveyed the breathing, monstrous sea and then turned back to his companion, who was busy clearing the area of stones, kicking them down the hill.
‘Help me,’ said Francis, turning back to Grant. He held onto one end of the peach-coloured blanket and threw the other into the air; the wind took hold of it, twisting it into a knot. It looked for a moment as if Francis had thrown a bucket of paint at Grant. The older man caught the other end, finding the corners and holding them out at arm’s length. Together they spread it neatly over the grass and took off their shoes to weigh down the ends.
Then Grant sat down with his back to the sea. Francis was facing him. ‘Don’t you want the view?’
Grant shook his head. ‘I have a view of the trees. And a glimpse of the town. It’s the difference between us, Francis. I like to look at the things that are mine, you like to look at what’s just out of reach.’
‘Do you include me in the things that are yours?’ The wind was so loud that he had to shout and the question sounded rhetorical. ‘You’re in a literary mood this morning,’ he added.
Grant frowned. ‘It’s cold up here.’
Francis wedged the brim of his hat under a weighted corner of the blanket; it immediately began to twitch in the gale, up and down like the lid of a saucepan. He took off his jacket and gave it to Grant, the fragile fabric almost torn away from them as they passed it from one hand to another. Grant wriggled his arms into it. ‘Thank you.’
Francis started to lay some of the food out on the blanket; a pot of honey and a loaf of bread. He tore the end from the loaf, then took a hard-boiled egg from the basket and placed it at Grant’s feet, taking another for himself. Grant picked his up and tapped it sharply against the edge of his wristwatch, then started to peel the shell.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
The two men ate in silence. While Grant was close enough to the cliff edge that he could simply throw his pieces of eggshell behind him and let the wind carry them out to sea, Francis was carefully dropping his into an empty wineglass. He was concentrating on removing a particularly sticky fragment from his fingertip when he heard a loud crack that came from somewhere behind him. The earth started to shake and the wineglass fell over; Francis tutted and set it right, as if that should be the end of the matter. But the shaking was followed by a horrific, magnified rasping sound that rose from the ground underneath him.
He looked up in disbelief and realized what was happening. The last two yards of the clifftop were falling away from him, falling in one piece like the hunk he’d broken from the end of the bread. And Grant was falling with it, his face showing only an instant of surprise as it dropped out of sight.
Francis blinked, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. The line of the cliff now ran directly under the square of the blanket, cutting it in half; the sheet hung down over the edge for a second – a defeated flag – until the wind lifted it up again and held it in the sky. The situation seemed to come crashing over Francis then and he threw himself forward to the edge of the cliff. He won’t still be falling. He won’t still be falling. That was his single, absurd thought as he closed his eyes and leaned over. But the shock had muddied his sense of time and when he opened his eyes there was Grant, still falling, spinning in circles through the air. A pair of shoes and the white speck of a boiled egg were falling beside him, with Francis’s hat dawdling in the air above his head; Grant’s face was a shrinking picture of terror. Did the two men make eye contact, or was that just a trick of perspective?
The falling rocks hit the water first, breaking the surface apart, so that Grant seemed to land a moment later on a cushion of soft, white spray; it was a jarring incongruity as his body snapped in half.
‘That’s horrible,’ said Julia.
‘Yes, it was devastating.’ Francis stared at the nearest tree, his eyes refusing to focus. ‘They’d heard the rockfall in town, so there was nothing suspicious about it. It was just an accident, a freak thing. I told the police exactly what had happened. But either they had trouble understanding my accent or I had trouble understanding theirs, because the next time I heard about the incident it was Francis Gardner that had died, tragically.’
‘And Grant McAllister that was still alive.’
‘I’d left my wallet in the jacket, you see, with my name and identification. And he was wearing it when he died. So they assumed that his body was mine. I was going to correct them, to begin with.’
‘But you thought better of it?’
‘It all seemed to work out so neatly. We were living off Grant’s money; I didn’t have any of my own. His uncle would send it to him, every month or so. All Grant had to do was write to him occasionally. Well, I could mimic his handwriting well enough.’
‘So you became Grant McAllister?’
‘And continued taking the money. It’s what Grant would have wanted, I’m sure of that.’
‘Then what about the book?’
Francis gave her a look of contrition. ‘When you wrote to me and said your colleague had found an old copy of The White Murders and wanted to publish it, the temptation was overwhelming. Grant’s money doesn’t go far these days. Besides, I’d been using his name for so long anyway, it seemed the obvious thing to do. And where’s the harm in me having something to live off?’
Julia ignored this question. ‘But you’d never read the stories before?’
‘No, that was the only problem. I knew he’d written some. But Grant didn’t bring a copy of The White Murders with him when he moved out here. And he never seemed inclined to get hold of one. I think the fact that nobody had been willing to publish it was a source of pain to him. At one point he’d dreamed of literary fame and fortune.’
‘Then did you really think this would work?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid I did.’ Francis nudged a stone with his shoe. ‘We lived together for years; we discussed just about all of Grant’s work in mathematics. And that included his paper on murder mysteries. So I know the mathematical ideas very well and I thought I could bluff the rest. I never imagined you’d go to so much trouble.’
‘Yes, well,’ Julia picked up her bag, ‘there’s a lot you don’t know about me.’ She lifted the strap over her shoulder and brushed the dust from the bottom. ‘I just have one last question, before I go.’
Francis nodded. ‘What’s that?’
‘There’s only one piece to this puzzle that I can’t make sense of. The White Murder. Why did Grant fill his book with references to that crime? Is there really nothing you can tell me about it?’
Francis shrugged. ‘We never discussed it. But I knew Grant and I know his sense of humour.’ He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘It was almost certainly a joke. He could be very macabre, at times. It would have been just like him to put in all those references as a way of keeping himself amused. The more insensitive the better; that’s just how he was.’ Francis sighed. ‘I wouldn’t go looking for any deeper meaning to it. A red herring, that’s all.’
‘I understand.’ Julia smiled. ‘That’s a relief, I suppose.’ She hovered at the edge of the clearing, hesitating before speaking again. ‘I think this is the last time we’ll see each other, Francis. I did enjoy some of our conversations, but I wish I’d never met you.’
And then she was gone.
16. The First Ending
Thirty minutes later, Julia Hart was again climbing the dim staircase that led to her hotel room. She entered the shaded room with a hint of triumph. Her plan had worked; she had definitively outsmarted the man who was trying to dece
ive her. As if in celebration, she opened the shutters covering the window and let the brightness inside. A perfect square of clean white light appeared on the opposite wall.
Outside, the dreamy blue sea and the white cubes of the waterfront were becoming lively with human shapes. The hottest part of the afternoon had passed and life was returning to the little town. Julia took two steps backwards, away from the window, and sat down on the bed; the last few days had exhausted her. She lay back and kicked off her shoes and soon fell asleep, fully clothed, cradled in the arms of the sunlight.
She woke up twenty minutes later to find she had been crying; she could already feel the lines of salt forming on her skin. She took the nearest corner of the top sheet and laid it across her face – the triangle of white cotton pressed lightly against her eyes – and left it there until the sun had dried her tears.
Then she pushed herself up to a sitting position.
On a table beside the bed was her leather-bound copy of The White Murders. She picked it up and opened it on her thigh. The book had been given to her about six months earlier in another room with similar dimensions, with a bed and a window of about the same size. Though in that case the sky had been grey and the only thing to be seen outside was a pigeon perched on a streetlight. Julia’s mother had been dying in that room, in the small house in Wales where Julia had spent her childhood. She’d sat by her mother’s side, holding her hand.
‘There’s something you need to know.’ The older woman’s breath rattled and sputtered; after a lifetime of smoking, her lungs were finally failing. ‘Please.’ She pointed at an unassuming book on a shelf beside the bed and Julia stepped over to retrieve it. It was a slim volume called The White Murders. The book was bound in leather, but Julia recognized the thick pages and wide margins as being indicative of private publication. Julia was an author herself, with three romance novels to her name. She handed the book to her mother, who lifted the cover and slid her yellow forefinger over the name of the author, where it was printed on the title page.
‘Grant McAllister,’ she coughed. ‘That man is your father.’
Tears had come to Julia’s eyes then; she’d always been told that her father had died during the war, when she was a small child. ‘Is he still alive?’
The older woman closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know. He might be.’
‘Then where does he live?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Her mother shook her head. ‘He left us, when you were very small.’ She squeezed her daughter’s hand. ‘He probably won’t want to see you.’
Julia considered this in silence, then answered so quietly that her mother couldn’t possibly have heard. ‘I’m not sure I’ll give him any choice.’
The day after her mother’s funeral she’d worked out a plan. She knew enough about crime fiction to be able to fabricate a letter from a specialist publishing house, expressing an interest in Grant’s old collection of stories, The White Murders. She’d given herself the title of editor and written under her middle name, Julia. The other details had come easily enough: ‘Victor’ and ‘Leonidas’ were the names of her two cats and ‘Blood Type Books’ was a simple pun. After a few weeks, Grant had written back asking about money. She’d replied under Victor’s name and had promised him whatever he wanted, if only he would agree to meet her. Grant had suggested she come to the island. So she’d had the book typed up in manuscript form and set out on her trip: she would observe him for a few days while they worked on it together, then she would decide what to do next, whether to walk away or to confess everything.
And that was how she’d ended up here, lying on a bed in a dim hotel room after finding out her father had been dead for ten years. She turned to the first page of The White Murders and ran her finger over his name. Grant McAllister. And she realized, with a crushing sense of disappointment, that she was no closer to him now than she was when she’d first seen it. She would never get to meet him and would never know him at all, except through these stories. But at least she understood now why he’d left her and her mother and had come to live on this island. It wasn’t to escape from an unwanted daughter, as she’d feared it might have been; it was to live openly with another man. That meagre consolation would have to be enough.
A flock of seagulls landed on a nearby roof and startled her from her thoughts.
She closed the book and placed her palm on top of it. The dark green leather was warm to the touch. Then she lay back and listened to the sound of the gulls.
It sounded like they were in terrible pain.
17. The Second Ending
Adrenaline had dragged Francis through that final conversation with Julia and soon after she left him – sitting alone in the clearing, halfway up the hill – he walked back to the cottage by himself, drank a large glass of gin and went straight to bed, exhausted. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. He slept for twelve hours and woke up early the following morning, when the island was at its coldest and darkest. His dreams had been of Grant, living out his life at the bottom of the sea; the man he’d loved, sitting underwater and staring mutely at the passing fish. The shredded skin around his wounds had looked like coral. Francis was glad to be awake.
He hauled himself out of bed and sat down beneath the porch of his house with a cup of coffee. He thought about what he would do for money, now that the book wasn’t going to be published. He turned and looked at the small wooden hut, where he’d sat with Julia two nights before. It was just about visible in the moonlight, a quarter of a mile along the beach. It was full of things that he no longer used. Surely there was something in there that he could sell?
He closed his eyes and finished his coffee.
Two hours later the sun was rising and Francis set out along the shore, whistling to himself. At that time of the morning it was impossible to believe that the day would ever be warm; it felt as if the summer had ended overnight. He decided to save some time and cut across the gentle curve of the beach, so he took off his shoes and held them in his hands as he walked out into the cold, shallow water. It felt like he was walking on ice.
A few minutes later he arrived at the patch of sand in front of the hut and let the shoes fall from his hands. Then he opened the two wooden doors as wide as they would go. There was no light inside and the boat was before him in silhouette. If I get desperate, he thought, I can always sell the boat.
He squeezed past its cartoonish nose to a pile of old cardboard boxes that was hidden behind it. It was dark back there, even with the doors fully open, so he took down the antique lamp that was hanging from the ceiling and filled it from a small can of kerosene. He lit the wick and balanced it on the upturned hump of the boat, then knelt down and began to look through the boxes.
The first was full of books. That was no surprise to him – he’d looked in here only last month, searching for a copy of The White Murders – but he wondered if any of the volumes had any monetary value. He picked some out at random, but his eyesight made it difficult to work out the titles and he soon gave up in frustration.
The next box was full of musical instruments, most of them broken. A fiddle, a drum and a lute without any strings. Grant had insisted he would mend them one day, but had never found the time. The third contained fishing equipment, in good condition; he would return to that one later. The fourth was packed with various oddities. A telescope, a candlestick and several packs of playing cards.
The fifth box brought him to a halt. He’d forgotten about this one, though he’d gone through it a few weeks earlier. It was a box of Grant’s papers, together with a number of handwritten notes. Some of them must have been thirty years old. But there’d been nothing in there about The White Murders – no early drafts or structural notes – and nothing of any value, of course.
Then he remembered something.
Tentatively, he ran a fingertip down the side of the yellowing stack until he felt the hard edge of a sheet of card. He pulled it out and held it up in front of the light. It was a black and white p
hotograph, cut from the pages of a magazine and glued to a white square of cardboard. A large photograph of a young woman. Francis didn’t recognize her, but she was very beautiful and looked like she could have been an actor. In the bottom right corner was a tangle of black lines, written in thick, dark ink, that he’d previously thought to be illegible. But now he could just about see that they formed the name Elizabeth White. Then it wasn’t a coincidence and Grant really had named the book after her? Francis turned the cardboard over and found that there was a note written on the back, in faint blue pen. If he hadn’t known Grant’s handwriting so well, he wouldn’t have been able to read it at all.
‘Hampstead Heath. August 24th, 1940. Her final signature.’
One of the doors to the hut blew closed and its sudden shadow fell across the white square, hiding those words from view. Francis let the piece of cardboard fall to the floor and scrambled to his feet in recoil from it, stumbling backwards against the boat. The whole vessel shook: the oil lamp slid from its place on top of the hull and fell directly into the box of papers, which immediately burst into flames. It was such a neat, self-contained calamity that Francis could only stand there at first, watching it burn. Then in the fresh light of that miniature fire he saw the note illuminated once again. The words were still there and the date hadn’t changed.
The twenty-fourth of August, nineteen forty. The day of the White Murder. If she had signed the photograph on that date, then he must have been with her just before she was killed. Taken together with everything else – the title of the book, the clues in the stories – it was too much to be a coincidence. ‘Grant, what on earth did you do?’
Francis knelt down again and picked up the photograph, folding it into his back pocket. A black circle of hot mould was spreading across the side of the boat where it was nearest to the flames; he saw it and started to panic. The bottom half of the cardboard box was yet to catch fire, so with his bare foot outstretched he nudged it away from the boat and across the room, all the way to the half-open door. Then he bent down, picked it up and threw it towards the sea. When it bounced on the sand a moment later, the whole thing seemed to burst into a cloud of burning fragments; ash and sparks rained down onto the beach.