by Alan Beechey
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
Urchin tucked his notebook into the breast pocket of his tunic and placed his hand grandly on Swithin’s shoulder.
“In that case, Oliver Swithin, alias O.C. Blithely, I arrest you for the murder of Sir Hargreaves Random. By the way,” he added quickly, as the ambulance team descended on the body, “can I have your autograph? It’s for my nieces, you understand.”
***
Unlike Police Constable Urchin, Detective Superintendent Timothy Mallard had seen it all during his thirty-five years with the Metropolitan police force, and the deep creases etched into his forehead showed how much of it had challenged his dogged belief in the basic decency of the human animal. Otherwise, he appeared younger than his age, which was closer to sixty than fifty. His milk-white hair, which showed no signs of thinning, always looked a fortnight overdue for the attentions of a barber, and his handsome features were decorated with plain spectacles and a slightly rakish moustache. Tim Mallard’s slim frame, military posture, and remarkable vigor continued to win him decent roles with his local amateur dramatic company, the Theydon Bois Thespians, and also discouraged his superiors at New Scotland Yard from starting conversations that might involve the word “retirement.” (Through a clerical oversight, which had muddled Mallard’s personnel file with the criminal record of a video bootlegger from Streatham, the system had so far failed to pension him off.)
The superintendent was currently rehearsing the role of Banquo for the Theydon Bois Thespians’ autumn production of Macbeth, and, although resentful that this wouldn’t involve any swordplay, he was comforted that the character’s early death would allow him to play a “blood-baltered” ghost in the third act and a ghastly apparition in the fourth and still get to the local pub before closing time, if he didn’t wait around for the curtain call. (The audience rarely did.) He was pleased to get such a large part; it was a standing joke in the company, which was exclusively Shakespearian, to give Mallard roles that slyly reflected his profession, such as the Constable of France, Snout, Pinch, or Paroles. (Alas, not Dogberry yet.) For the current production of Macbeth, he had narrowly avoided being cast as the Bleeding Sergeant.
On this scorching bank holiday Monday morning, Mallard would much rather have been sitting under a tree learning his lines in his North London garden than standing in a cell in Bow Street police station staring at the alleged murderer of Sir Hargreaves Random.
Oliver Swithin, feeling Mallard’s eyes upon him, stirred and turned over awkwardly on the narrow bed. The single blanket fell onto the floor.
“Hello,” he said huskily to the frowning policeman. He ran his tongue over his lips and scowled. Mallard closed the door behind him and leaned against it.
“Ollie, I wish you’d accept it that alcohol is not one of the major food groups,” he said. Oliver lifted his head from the grubby pillow.
“I didn’t know this was your manor, Uncle Tim,” he said, registering pain as he sat up.
“It isn’t. Your friend Geoffrey Angelwine called me in a panic and said you’d been arrested. I thought I’d better come and bail you out. I was expecting a ‘drunk and disorderly,’ but you certainly don’t do things by halves. Murder of a Knight of the Realm—I wonder if that means you can be hanged by a silken rope. Or is that reserved for peers? Perhaps they’ll attach a tassel, anyway.”
Oliver slowly dropped his feet to the cold floor of the cell. Without replying to his uncle, he reached for the trousers of his dinner suit, dragged them over his damp underpants, and stood up, clutching the waistband. (His braces and shoelaces had been removed to prevent any self-administered justice before the Crown could make its case.) Still half a head shorter than Mallard, Oliver yawned and pushed the fair fringe off his forehead with his free hand.
“God, you look awful,” said Mallard distastefully. “And would you mind staying downwind of me until you’ve brushed your teeth. Preferably your tongue and tonsils, too. I brought you a toothbrush. And a sweater. And you’ll need these.”
He reached into his breast pocket and handed Oliver his glasses.
“What are the charges?” the young man asked.
“No charges. Not a stain on your character, which is more than can be said for that suit.”
“Not even resisting arrest?” Oliver persisted.
Mallard smiled for the first time. “Oh, they were considering it. But not after the statement you gave that young constable—what was his name?—Urchin. How did it go? Something like ‘It’s a fair cop, guv. Gorblimey, I reckon you busies ’as got me bang to rights, so ’elp me, I should cocoa.’”
Oliver grinned as he pulled his laceless suede shoes onto his bare feet. He slipped the damp socks into a jacket pocket.
“Urchin took it all down,” Mallard continued, knowing better than to upbraid his nephew for wearing Hush Puppies with a tuxedo. “And I can just see the magistrate’s face. So the locals have decided not to press charges, providing you turn up at the inquest and say all the right things.”
“Thanks, Uncle.”
“Oh don’t thank me. Believe me, I had little enough to do with it. I’m as welcome here as a fart in a spacesuit. The last thing any local shop wants on a bank holiday Monday is a visit from the Yard.”
“Not even when Sir Harry Random has been murdered?” asked Oliver quietly, without looking up.
“Now don’t start that again,” snapped Mallard. “I’ve heard about that story you were trying to spin earlier, and I put it down in equal parts to the alcohol and your diseased imagination.”
“‘Judgment of beauty can err, what with the wine and the dark,’” Oliver quoted. “Ovid,” he added smugly. Mallard stared at him.
“Maybe they should keep you here, after all,” he murmured.
Still clutching his trousers, Oliver followed his uncle out of the cell, and after a brief visit to the washroom, joined him in the main public room of the police station. Mallard was deep in conversation with one of the detectives who had responded to Urchin’s call earlier that morning, and who, despite the warm weather, was still wearing his belted Burberry.
“Mr. Swithin, sir?” A stout, shirt-sleeved policeman behind a counter was waving a mustard-colored envelope at Oliver. “Your belongings, sir, if you’d just sign for them.” He smiled in a macabre manner, showing too many teeth, and Oliver found himself thinking inexplicably of the lyrics to “Mack the Knife.” (Although for some reason, he was hearing them to the tune of “Clementine.”)
The policeman tipped the contents of the envelope onto the counter and checked them off on a clipboard. “Handkerchief, still rather soggy, I’m afraid, sir.” He smiled again, and Oliver shivered. In the local pubs, P.C. Axelrod was very successful at selling raffle tickets for police benefits. “One pair of braces, pink; one pair of shoelaces; one digital watch; one bunch of keys on an ornamental key ring.”
He lifted it to his face, with a frown of feigned concentration. “Ah, I see. The young lady’s bathing costume sort of trickles off when you hold it up the right way.”
“It was a present,” said Oliver weakly.
“What’ll they think of next, that’s what I say, sir,” said Axelrod with another smile and returned to the list. Oliver took off his jacket and pulled on the sweater that Mallard had brought him.
“One diary—rather spoilt by its illegal dip in a municipal waterway; one similarly sodden membership card to what seems to be the Sanders Club; one jelly baby; one small plastic telescope; one red plastic clown’s nose; one tuning fork; and several slips of paper in different colors that appear to me to be counterfeit banknotes.”
“Monopoly money, actually.”
“Some of us just live for pleasure, don’t we, sir?” Axelrod swiveled his clipboard. “Right, sign here.”
Stuffing his belongings into the pockets of his dinner jacket, Oliver rejoined his uncle. They stepped o
ut into the blazing midday sunshine of Bow Street and walked toward Covent Garden.
***
A nation’s character is the child of its climate, which probably explains why conversing in the open air has never been an English habit. Unlike the squares and marketplaces of Europe, public spaces in England are designed as places to go past rather than places to go to. When reluctant Londoners got their first Italianate piazza, in the seventeenth century, the empty space made them so nervous that they quickly filled it with fruit and vegetable stands and called it Covent Garden, convincing generations of tourists that the English speak better than they spell. Now the original Inigo Jones houses that first framed the piazza have all gone, and its main attraction is the renovated Victorian market building that was eventually built in the middle. Covent Garden’s architectural history always reminded Oliver of the ingenious American company that sells blobs of batter as the holes from long-departed doughnuts.
A handful of tourists, with Nikes and Nikons, were straggled in a loose, sweating crescent around a young man who was trying to juggle meat cleavers under the portico of Jones’s barnlike church.
“Are you hungry?” Mallard asked Oliver as they stopped to watch.
“Not really.” A cleaver clanged onto the cobbled pavement and skidded into the sunlight. The tourists moved away, to seek the shade of the shops and stalls in the old market building.
“Good,” Mallard continued unpleasantly. “Because I have strict instructions from your Aunt Phoebe to bring you back for Sunday lunch, and I don’t want to. You’re her favorite nephew, although I can’t think why. Personally, it’s part of my daily routine to thank the Almighty that I’m only related to you by marriage. By the way, Oliver, I’m sorry about Harry.”
Oliver smiled, and not just because he had made eye contact with a big-haired American teenager, who had blushed and cracked her chewing gum. He knew he was the favorite nephew of both members of the Mallard partnership.
“Thank you. And you’ll get to the bottom of his murder, I know.”
Mallard sighed. “Before I got you released,” he said quietly, “I had a long talk with the CID officer who’s in charge of the case. Harry’s death is easily explained as an accident, there’s nothing to indicate foul play, and you said yourself that you didn’t see anyone around.”
“But, Uncle…”
“But since you seem determined to but me buts and uncle me uncles, I’ll give you five minutes of my professional ear.”
“Fine,” said Oliver irritably. “Let’s revisit the scene of the crime.”
A few minutes later, the two men were scooting through the ring of slow-moving sightseeing buses that by this time were besieging Trafalgar Square. Several hundred tourists had slipped through these defenses and were commemorating England’s greatest dead naval hero by feeding the pigeons that besmirched his statue. There was no sign of the more recent death.
Oliver and Mallard stood beside the fountain where Sir Harry had been found, watching water gush from the mouth of a dolphin, held tightly by an ornamental merman. The water level was high, and occasional wavelets spilled over the stone rim. Spray from the huge central element of the fountain blew in their faces. For Mallard, the spritzing was a welcome relief from the midday heat; Oliver, still wearing damp clothes next to his skin, hardly noticed.
“There’s a Sherlock Holmes story in which Holmes sarcastically asks Inspector Lestrade if he’s dragged the Trafalgar Square fountains in his hunt for a missing woman,” Oliver mused.
“Are you keeping me from lunch just to tell me that?”
“No, but I’ll tell you something I didn’t tell Urchin. Harry had some kind of meeting arranged for this morning. We were going to have a late night anyway, so he decided to stay up.”
“When, where, and with whom was this alleged meeting?”
“You’re not in court now, Uncle. In order, obviously sometime early this morning, I don’t know, and I don’t know. Harry was deliberately mysterious, the silly old buffer.”
“Any corroborative evidence?”
“He was waving around a piece of paper—a letter or note. I didn’t see what was written on it. I don’t think he showed it to anyone else at the Sanders Club, but the porter may have seen him with it just before he went out.”
“The police didn’t find any letter on him,” Mallard commented tersely. “Just the usual personal items, some needles and thread, a thimble, and the remains of a small bar of carbolic soap.”
“He had the needles and thread because of his role in the Snark hunt. He was the Bonnet-maker.”
“Which explains the thimble too?”
“No, several of us had thimbles. It’s from the verse in the poem:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care:
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.”
“I’m amazed you can remember all that,” said Mallard, as Oliver began to fumble through the pockets of his clammy dinner jacket, “but totally forget your aunt’s birthday year after year.”
Oliver produced two items: a bluish metal tuning fork and a tiny red plastic telescope. “I had a fork, just as in the verse. And my character carried a telescope in one of Holiday’s original illustrations for the poem.”
“Uh-huh. So far, we have a mysterious note that can’t be found. You’ll have to do better than that if you want to make a case for murder.”
Oliver thrust the objects back into his pocket. “Harry left the Sanders Club at about ten to six, or so the porter told me,” he continued. “I’d fallen asleep in the card room at about four, and woke up at six. I went out to look for him.”
“Why?” Mallard asked.
“I was concerned. The streets are very quiet at that time, especially on a bank holiday. Who knows what could have happened to him? And I was curious about where he was going. The porter said he’d headed in this direction along Pall Mall. I came into the Square at a quarter past six—I heard Big Ben strike. And I saw him floating here.”
“Did you see anyone else?”
“No. But there are plenty of places where the killer could have hidden, even if he was still around.”
“So Harry was seen alive by your porter at ten to six,” speculated Mallard, “and it would take him at least five minutes to get here. He was dead before you found him at quarter past. Then the accident—or assault—must have happened between 5:55 and 6:10 a.m. What time do these fountains come on, I wonder?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I think Harry got here, saw the empty fountain, and climbed into it for no other reason than he’d never been in an empty fountain before. And I think he either slipped and hit his head on the edge or the floor—and the evidence of that would have been washed away—or the fountain came on while he was still frisking around. Look at the force of those jets. He could have been knocked right off his feet.”
Mallard indicated the spouting sea creature, but Oliver was shaking his head.
“That’s what P.C. Urchin said, but it’s not like Harry to behave that way. He was terrified of new experiences. He was a craven poltroon when it came to anything like travel, for example, because he hated to speak any language other than English. And he once told me he took cabs everywhere in London because he had no idea how to pay for a ticket on a bus and didn’t want to look a fool the first time he tried. Harry got all his background information for his stories from guidebooks and articles. He liked a quiet life, and the last thing he’d do is clamber into a fountain for the hell of it, especially at his age.”
“Well he didn’t fall in from this side,” said Mallard. He rested his palms on the waist-high parapet. “He must have been standing up on the rim or actually in the fountain to end up where he did.”
“Th
at’s one reason why I say he was hit first and then dumped into the water. And then there are the marks on his shirt. Did you see them?”
It was Mallard’s turn to shake his head.
“On the starched front of his dress shirt,” Oliver continued, “there was an odd sign, a series of crossing lines. It wasn’t there when I was playing poker with him in the club.”
He felt in his pockets again, but realizing he had no pen, he dipped his hand in the water, bent down, and traced the symbol on the pavement. A straight vertical line, crossed near each end by a semicircle, like a squat, two-ended trident.
“Seen that before?” Oliver asked. His uncle shrugged.
“All right, that’s an oddity. But he could have done it himself after you’d fallen asleep.”
“Why?”
Mallard didn’t answer, but turned and surveyed the Square, with its monuments and bollards arrayed like condiments on a banquet table. A troop of pigeons strutted past, changing direction together, like a game of Simon Says played by clairvoyants. Eventually, Mallard spoke again.
“Sorry, Oliver, it won’t do. There are several unanswered questions here, certainly, but not enough for the Murder Squad to push their noses in where they’re neither wanted nor invited.”
“Occam’s Razor.”
“What about it?”
“Urchin brought it up just before he arrested me.”
“Really? What is the Met coming to? Most of my lads would assume that Occam’s Razor is exhibit A in a G.B.H. trial.” Mallard grinned. “Well, if I understand that principle correctly, it means we first try to solve a problem using the evidence we already have. Now I’m going to check what time these fountains came on this morning, but I’ve got a feeling it was six o’clock on the dot, exactly the time that Sir Harry was here, unseen by you. A plain, unfortunate coincidence, which doesn’t involve notes that nobody can find and invisible murderers given to scribbling cabalistic symbols on their victims.”
“So how does that account for the symbol?”