by Nev Fountain
‘You used me to find that statuette.’
‘I did. Sorry.’
‘You pretended that Marcus had said something to you about the statuette, about its great significance to the Godbotherers, but he hadn’t.’
‘No.’
‘You used me.’
‘Yeah, but I’m sure you had fun, running around like something out of a Dan Brown novel. But I told you the truth didn’t I? I bet the Godbotherers would have loved to find out what Marcus had done. A mysterious secret. A cover-up. Just this time, it was us atheists with the dark secret.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
Mervyn sipped his bottled water. He didn’t feel nervous about drinking it any more, now he knew how the poison got in the bottle.
‘Then there was your other problem. Lionel.’
‘Oh yes. Lionel and his bloody covert filming,’ she gestured to the screen, which was still playing the footage on a loop. ‘Filthy little bastard. Who does this kind of thing? Some people…’
‘So… I’m guessing Robert found the footage first, on Lionel’s laptop.’
‘Can you believe that idiot?’ she shook her head disbelievingly. ‘Robert contacted me, telling me he knew how Marcus was killed, had footage of the murder, and yet he couldn’t even work out it was me who’d done it.’
‘He thought it was Samantha.’
‘Yes. He was very proud of his deduction. He could see it was a woman on the recording, but he assumed it was Samantha, because of the long fingernails. Joanna didn’t have long fingernails. I did, but he never thought it was me, not for a second. He was so keen to catch the killer for me. He even invited me into the gents toilets to show me his discovery. Useful, because it saved me climbing up there.’
‘And you were ready for him. How did you kill him?’
‘It was simple, really. Death by wheelchair,’ she gave a sour grin. ‘I stripped the edges of the rubber from the handles, so anyone who went to push it would automatically touch the metal. Then I rigged up the car batteries that power my chair so they were feeding current into the metal.’
‘Oh! That’s why you didn’t power the wheelchair that day. The batteries were needed for something else.’
‘Robert showed me what he’d found, brought down the flask from the ceiling, rang you to gloat and then started to push me back to the recording suite. The charge knocked him across the room. I didn’t know if it was going to be enough to kill him, but I was in luck. I didn’t know he had a pacemaker, and the charge overloaded it, blowing up and taking him with it. Now that was something else I didn’t expect. Can you believe it Mervyn? Another miracle! Stigmata on the hands and spontaneous combustion! Jesus!’
Mervyn smiled, a very tired smile, and looked at the screen, on which the figure in the trenchcoat was endlessly filling the flask with a never-ending supply of poison. ‘I knew it was you on the tape. The moment I saw it.’
Cheryl smiled bashfully. ‘Really, Mervyn? How did you know?’
Mervyn pointed at the screen, where the tape was still playing. ‘The mark by your thumb.’
Sure enough, when the hand reached up to push the grille back, there was a little mark on the hand, stretching over the knuckle.
‘Awww. The mark you gave me, Mervyn. That day in the production office, when you caught it in the photocopier. I’ve always loved that little mark. It always reminded me of you, Mervyn. Of happier times.’
Mervyn’s heart gave a jolt, as though it had been shocked by an electrified wheelchair.
Cheryl got up from her chair and waved cheerily at Trevor and Mick. Mick, to her credit, waved cheerily back. Mick caught Mervyn’s eye and mouthed something. Something he could easily lip read. Told you so. Henchmen. Evil. Wheelchair. Evil.
Mervyn gestured to Cheryl to sit back down. Cheryl obliged. It was obvious they were both enjoying this. Perhaps too much.
‘Let me guess what happened to Professor Alec Leman,’ said Mervyn.
‘Okay Mervyn. The floor is yours.’
‘I would say that, after Marcus’s death, you needed to go back to the hiding places where Marcus stashed his booze and empty out the poison you put in. You couldn’t risk them being discovered.’
‘Too right. Bloody impossible though, with Aiden watching the house, pining for his dead master, and me having to pretend I needed a wheelchair. I got a few flasks. Not all.’
‘In his will, Marcus left Professor Leman the flask of whisky he kept in his desk drawer in the Spicer Institute. When Leman got to the lecture with us, he went into Marcus’s office. He must have had a quick drink, which you’d presumably poisoned.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You went in there first.’
‘Yes.’
‘You needed to act fast.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘So you grabbed the flask, stuffed it in your chair, grabbed a bottle of open water and threw it on the floor, just as I came in.’
‘Exactly right.’
‘Another miracle.’
‘Another bloody miracle. Can’t get away from them, can I?’
‘And there was another flask you’d forgotten about. The one in Marcus’s book, on your own bookshelf. I discovered it, and the moment I did you realised I’d found it. You had to think fast then, didn’t you?’
‘I’m sorry, Mervyn.’
‘You snogged me just to get the poisoned flask out of my pocket. You accused me of being a drunk… And I fell for it. What an utter booby I am.’
‘I’m so sorry Mervyn. Playing you along… The murders. I didn’t mean any of it to happen. Once the rollercoaster started I just couldn’t get off. I was doing what I had to. But… I thought that was nice too. I wish we could have stayed like that, but I was in too deep. Anyway. Happy times, Mervyn.’
Mervyn’s heart jolted again.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Cheryl’s face creased in thought. ‘Where was I. What happened then?’
‘Lionel.’
‘Oh yes. Lionel. He was very pleased with himself because he worked it out…eventually. He didn’t make a lightning deduction like you, Merv. Or get it hopelessly wrong like Robert. He guessed it was a woman who knew Marcus well. He had the date and time I’d entered the BBC toilets imprinted on the tape. He was an ex-security guard, so he knew what he was doing. He slowly eliminated all the suspects, one by one. Joanna was in America at the time, Samantha was at a convention in Newcastle, Carlene and Siobhan might have had the opportunity, but neither were married.’ Cheryl waggled her ring finger. ‘The woman on the tape wore a wedding ring. How bloody ironic, seeing as I wasn’t even married. Once he started to suspect me, he blew up pictures of the hand on the tape, looked at old newspaper clippings and—finally—noticed the little mark you gave me.’
Mervyn couldn’t help seeking out the mark on her hand.
‘So the old perv contacted me,’ she continued. ‘He’d watched me fill the flask on his grubby little toilet tape, and now he wanted money. I pretended to go along with his demands, arranged to meet him in the hotel. I had to do something about him—another one I had to get rid of. I only wanted Marcus gone, but the whole thing was just becoming a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from.’
She looked up at Mervyn, but he refused to catch her eye. She sighed and carried on.
‘I made sure Lewis Bream was there too, so I had someone to frame. But that wasn’t too hard. I sent him an anonymous gift; three nights in Hambley Hall. All paid for. Well, I thought, if the Godbotherers wanted to take the credit for all these murders, I’d let ‘em.’
‘That wasn’t the only reason you chose Hambley Hall to meet Lionel,’ said Mervyn.
‘God no. I never waste my precious energy. Hambley was where he used to take Joanna for their naughty weekends. Not that I have anything against Joanna; she was welcome to the little shit. But it was another place he hid one of his flasks, and another one which I’d substituted with cyanide. It was the furthest away one I’d done. I’d thought I’d take
a trip, kill Lionel, frame Lewis Bream and dispose of my incriminating evidence.’
‘All in a day’s work.’
‘Exactly. Lionel had booked rooms 81 and 83 like I’d asked him to, but just my luck in a classic fuck-up, he’d taken room 81. The one I wanted—with the flask in the ceiling. And I certainly wasn’t expecting him to book room 79 for Graham as well. And then you turned up instead of that fat idiot… Jesus! After Lionel had talked to you, he came into my room to talk. To try and up my price. I knew I had to work quickly.’
‘Of course,’ said Mervyn. ‘I didn’t see what room he’d gone into after he left me. I just heard a door shut and assumed he’d gone back into his room. When Brian and I went to find him, the door was open, and all we could see was his clothes lying on the floor!’
‘Well, he was hardly what you would call a neat man, Mervyn. What did you expect him to do? Unpack his clothes into the hotel wardrobe and use the hangers provided?’
‘You had to…work…quickly?’ Mervyn’s brain started to catch up with what Cheryl had been saying. He knew what she meant, of course. He just needed her to say it herself.
‘Well, pretty quickly. All the time you were talking to Brian about the Rapture, Lionel was in the room next door, getting strangled by me. When you and Brian left, I dragged him back into his room, retrieved the flask from the ceiling, and left by the window.’
‘Another miracle.’
‘Another bloody miracle. You nearly caught me that night, Mervy.’
‘You move fast for a wheelchair-bound woman on her deathbed.’
‘Yeah…’ She looked at the screen, at herself. The figure in the trenchcoat leaping nimbly onto the toilet and retrieving the flask. ‘Another bloody miracle…’ Her mind was a million miles away.
‘Cheryl? Are you okay?’ said Mervyn.
It seemed an odd thing to say to a woman who’d killed three people and caused the death of a fourth, but the niceties of polite behaviour never left him, even in situations like this.
‘All that bollocks, about Marcus being killed by God. About being killed by a miracle. I asked you if you believed it, Mervyn. Remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘You were surprised I asked the question.’
‘I was.’
‘Mervyn. Marcus would have got everything he wanted. He’d got my notes taken away from me. Just like he stole your notes from you, even though we were both too decent to let the cat out of the bag. We do all the work, he gets all the credit. We’re two of a kind, Mervyn, you and me. We should have stayed together, but Marcus was very persuasive. Yeah, we should have been together you and me, got married properly.’
Mervyn’s heart suddenly put on a lot of weight. It sank into his stomach.
‘Well, maybe not,’ she continued. ‘Maybe it’s not good for writers to be happy. Certainly not with each other.’
Mervyn nodded, but he didn’t want to. He really did not want to nod.
‘So Marcus had it all. He had our notes, he had me trapped, literally and figuratively. And I would be gone soon. His legacy was assured, his fame and his notoriety secure. He’d never have to write another book, just shout on television and opine at book festivals to damp old maidens from the shires. Perfection. His idea of heaven in fact… It was assured. Except for one thing. I recovered.’
‘You…’
‘I got better. I was so gonna die, Mervyn. Everyone said so, all the experts. And then the cancer went away. Something happened, and I don’t know what. I didn’t tell anyone. I swore my doctor to secrecy and kept shaving my head. Made Marcus think I wasn’t going anywhere but the grave.’ She stood up again. Stood over him. ‘Something gave me my health back, my strength to walk, to move about incognito and poison those flasks. Vengeance was mine.’ She looked at him with her big green eyes. ‘So they were right. The Godbotherers were right. A miracle did kill him, Mervyn. A miracle killed him in the end.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Mick called for back-up.
Inspector Eric Preece arrived. After Mick gave him a very forceful account of what had really happened to Marcus, Robert and the others, complete with murderer’s recorded confession and evidence, he grudgingly gave up the ghost and stopped trying to arrest Mervyn.
When Preece left the room, he could swear that Mervyn made a tiny ‘zap’ noise at him, when his back was turned.
* * *
They took Cheryl away, and she was charged with murder. There was a predictable media circus that grew into a carnival the nearer she got to trial.
While she was waiting to go into court, she went to the toilet, escorted by a female police officer. The officer, waiting outside the door, didn’t notice that Cheryl happened to go into the gents rather than the ladies.
Cheryl never came out alive.
Mervyn remembered how Marcus was always ending up in court; being sued by this pressure group or that pressure group for blasphemy, libel or whatever they tried to throw at him that week. He relished it. Every trial gave him publicity for ‘his’ next book.
Obviously, he had liked a drink while he was waiting.
* * *
Brian survived Lewis Bream’s attack, and was instantly plastered over the pages of the tabloids. His glum, bandaged head looked out from the news-stands. The headline was ‘Beware of the God-Botherer’.
The Godbotherers fragmented. A small proportion of them stayed loyal. A much larger proportion, disgusted by Lewis’s behaviour, went away to form another group, called the Jesus Peepers.
Marcus’s Spicer Institute also fragmented. The atheists found themselves in the shoes of the theists they once ridiculed; their titular head was in disgrace, a fraud. Their philosophy, however laudable, was shrouded in deceit. Some lived in denial, and declared that Cheryl hadn’t written the books at all; it was all a theist conspiracy to discredit them. Like the Pope, Marcus had to be infallible or it was all for nothing.
Others, quite rightly, looked over the immediate scandal and said that whatever the individual failings of their heroes, the institution wasn’t at fault. Both the Spicerists and the Godbotherers fell into the predictable patterns of damage limitation, denial and survival.
Samantha found herself still with a huge amount of money, and she was free to indulge her desire to heal the world. Joanna gave up being an agent and joined her, becoming the snarling counterpart to Samantha’s drippy benevolence. Joanna actually seemed to enjoy doing good works for a change. Beneath the trouser suit and the business hairstyle, there was actually a beating heart. Thanks to Joanna, the money actually went to people who needed it.
* * *
‘The Burning Time’ was slipped out in a season four box set, with no DVD commentary. There was a documentary tribute to Marcus on the disc and a sketch about God from The Kenny Everett Show.
* * *
Anyway, for Mervyn it was back to the novel.
Well, not quite. There were the inevitable distractions that went with being a bored writer stuck at home with a magical typing machine that had access to the world’s pornography.
Mervyn didn’t think of himself as a dirty old man. Oh no.
His mind wandered to the possibilities that might be conjured up by his search engine, and he was reminded of the Peek-a-Boob site. Just curious, mind. He wasn’t a D.O.M.
Yet.
Finding the site was easy. He hacked his way through the jungle of pop-up ads, insisting he take detours to this dating site or that saucy webcam, until he found himself facing the cartoon naked lady lounging on the logo.
He was somewhat relieved to find the pictures of him on the toilet gone; he guessed the flare of new publicity surrounding Cheryl’s arrest and the role Lionel’s candid footage played in her capture must have scared the few remaining sites into removing the offending material.
That was a relief.
His relief was short-lived however, when he clicked on a section marked ‘NEW BOOBS!!!’ and was rewarded with the photos of the cleavage of Me
rvyn Stone.
There was a sword in his hand. He was stripped to the waist and fighting a non-existent dragon. He should have known.
Never trust a man called Judass…
AUTHOR’S NOTE EXTRA
* * *
A quick round-up of what’s real and what isn’t in this book…
Betchworth quarry sort of exists. There is a hole in Dorking called Betchworth Quarry, but it’s been largely filled in, so you’re perfectly safe to visit it.
Hambley Hall definitely doesn’t exist, so you’re not safe to visit it. Don’t try staying in one of its rooms, because you’ll just catch cold.
At the time of writing, BBC TV centre exists, but at the time of reading, it could well be a hole in Dorking for all I know.
The Godbotherers don’t exist, neither does the Spicer Institute, and Estuary English water. The Godbotherers’ headquarters, nestling in amongst the naughty shops in Soho is very not real. Don’t try visiting it, or you’ll just catch something far worse than a cold.
God may exist, but I think that’s down to an individual’s ‘personal canon’.