Embarrassment of Corpses, An

by Alan Beechey

  “I don’t resent being a children’s writer,” Oliver said. “But it’s not what I want to be when I grow up.”

  “What do you want to be?”

  “I don’t know. And the way things are going, I’ll have my midlife crisis before I finish my identity crisis—the psychological equivalent of going straight from puppy fat to middle-age spread. Ben Motley lives and breathes photography. No amount of commercial failure will deter Susie Bassett from opening restaurants. Geoffrey will always hate his job, but he loves his career. They know what they want. I envy them. I envy you.”

  “Me?” Effie exclaimed.

  “Oh yes. I love taking part in these mysteries. I’ve had more fun in the last week, pretending to be a detective, than I ever have tapping out the Finsbury stories. You get to do it all the time.”

  “I’ve enjoyed your company,” Effie found herself saying, causing Oliver’s heart to lurch. “Oh, by the way, Tim said to call him tomorrow. There may be some more detective work for you.”

  ***

  Effie’s weak ankle had made her reach for his arm as they left the restaurant, and Oliver had folded her hand tightly in the crook of his elbow on the way back to Edwardes Square, as if he were afraid that she might otherwise float away into the night. As they entered Edwardes Square, they were talking about the murders, but Oliver’s mind was half on the future. Was this the evening to attempt a goodnight kiss, in front of his house, beside her red Renault? If on the lips, which way would her nose go, to the right, or was she a southpaw? Where could he put his hands, on her upper arms or could they grasp her shoulder blades?

  “There was an unbroken string of six consecutive birth signs among the jury members,” he said. “What were the chances of that?”

  “Pretty high, if you don’t specify which six signs or which six of the twelve jurors have to have them.”

  Oliver thought about this. “Even so,” he objected, “I still say the murderer was rather fortunate that his particular target jury had such a sequence.”

  “Ollie, you’re still thinking astrology first, jury second,” Effie sighed. “That’s because we discovered the threads in that order. But for the murderer, it was different. He already knew whom he wanted to kill. He just had to find some elaborate pattern that would hide the true connection between his daily victims.”

  They had stopped in front of Oliver’s house. The curtain at Geoffrey’s bedroom window twitched.

  “Well, I enjoyed our conversation, but here’s my car and here’s your home,” Effie said, slowly searching in her handbag for her keys. Oliver swallowed.

  “We could go on talking indoors,” he stammered nervously. “Over another cup of tea, I mean. Or coffee—I could make coffee. If we have any…”

  Effie looked up at him with amusement and cocked her head on one side. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” she said.

  “No,” Oliver replied immediately with an embarrassed laugh. “Chalk it up to inexperience.” He cleared his throat. “Effie, I’m having such a good time that I don’t want you to go yet,” he stated. “There, how was that?”

  “Let me ask you something,” she said, idly tossing the car keys in the air and catching them with the same hand. “When you signed that Finsbury book for me, you thought for two hours and then wrote ‘To Effie, best wishes, Oliver.’ And I have to say, I was severely underwhelmed. So tell me, Ms. Blithely, how are you going to sign the next one?”

  He took a step toward her. “I’m not going to sign it at all,” he said softly. She raised one eyebrow. “I won’t need to,” he continued, “because I’m going to dedicate it to you.”

  The smile crept across her face in slow motion. “In that case, some more tea would be very nice,” she said, taking his hand despite her sore palm and leading him up the steps. But as Oliver fumbled for his keys with his free hand, the front door was abruptly opened in their faces.

  “Hello, you two,” said Geoffrey, too enthusiastically. “Are you both coming in? Or does Effie have to leave? It’s getting really late, Effie.”

  “We’re going to have some tea, Geoff,” said Oliver firmly, using every movable feature in his face to signal outrage at his friend’s intrusion.

  “Oh, are you sure?” Geoffrey blabbered, glancing anxiously behind him. But Oliver pushed past him and ushered Effie into the house. Upstairs, in Ben’s studio, the stereo was playing an opera aria—“Ritorna Vincitor” from Aida. A second voice was singing along with the recording. Geoffrey shut the door and tried to get ahead of them again. “Look, tell you what, why don’t you two go off to Oliver’s room and let me bring the tea to you. Wouldn’t that be nice? No need to go into the kitchen or anything like that.”

  “That’s kind of you, but I’m quite capable of making a pot of tea,” said Oliver, irritated at Geoffrey’s behavior. Did he think this was going to make a difference with Effie? And what was this nonsense about not going into the kitchen? There could be nothing in there that Geoffrey didn’t want him and Effie to see, Oliver thought, stubbornly opening the door, apart from…

  “Lorina!” he almost shouted.

  She stood up from the table, a dark vision in a black taffeta dress, gusting her expensive perfume in his direction. Unusually for her, she was wearing make-up, which gave her eyes a feline, predatory quality. Oliver froze in the doorway.

  “I had to see you, Oliver,” she said quickly, the words coming in a rush. “Ever since Saturday, I’ve been thinking about you. It’s not every day you find an old boyfriend on your doorstep, begging to come into your home in the middle of the night, but I wanted you to know how much I appreciated what you did for me that night—you were so kind, so gentle, so loving.”

  Lorina broke off, catching sight of Effie watching the scene over Oliver’s shoulder. Geoffrey had slunk away.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Lorina said contritely, “I didn’t realize you had a guest.”

  Oliver stood aside mutely and let the women gaze at one another. He knew he should attempt an introduction, but in his confusion, he suspected that he would stumble over Effie’s name. Lorina covered his hesitation, striding across the kitchen with an outstretched hand.

  “My name is Lorina Random,” she announced kindly. “Oliver and I are old friends.”

  Effie shook Lorina’s hand, clearly recognizing the woman she had first seen that morning. “My condolences on the loss of your father,” she said coolly. “I’m Effie Strongitharm.”

  “A new friend of Oliver’s, perhaps? I don’t recall his ever mentioning you,” Lorina said, with polite curiosity. Oliver fought to find his voice.

  “That’s because I’ve hardly seen you in recent years,” he said purposefully.

  “Apart from Saturday night,” Effie muttered. Lorina smiled self-consciously.

  “I do apologize for turning up unannounced,” she said. “It’s not like Oliver to be out this late, and when Geoffrey said you were expected back soon, I rather bullied him into letting me wait. But I’ve said what I came to say. Oliver was very kind to me the other evening, and I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated it, for old time’s sake. Now I must go.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to rush,” said Effie sharply. “Stay and have some tea with Oliver, he was just about to make some. Unfortunately, I have to leave.”

  She was at the front door before Oliver caught up with her. The soprano lirico spinto upstairs was into a cadenza comprising a series of sustained high Cs, although the recording had stopped. “Please don’t go,” he entreated, gently holding Effie’s arm. “There’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”

  The singing stopped. Effie stopped and turned slowly. Her eyes were wet. This hurt more than her skinned hands.

  “I believe the cliché now is to say ‘there certainly has, and I’m guilty of it.’” Effie said in a controlled voice. “I’m sorry—you have every right to have a girlfriend
, of course, but I wish you hadn’t lied to me this morning, when you said you broke up with Lorina a long time ago. Thank you for dinner, Oliver. Goodbye.”

  He dropped his arm, knowing he could not find the words to convince her that she was wrong. He was still staring at the back of the door when he heard her car start and head noisily out of the square.

  “I’m sorry, Ollie, I can’t stay for tea,” said Lorina, coming up behind him. She kissed him briskly on the cheek, leaving a pink lip-print. “But now we’re alone, I also wanted to say I may have implied a few things in the middle of the night that I’d prefer we forgot about in the cold light of dawn. You behaved like a perfect gentleman, as always. Did your friend leave already?”

  “Yes. She left.”

  “You should try a little harder next time, she’s very attractive,” Lorina said with a sly grin. “No wonder you didn’t want to go to bed with plain old me. Ah well, must rush, I have a late date with a minister. Political, not religious. Ciao, sweetcakes.”

  And she was gone.

  Music began again in the upstairs flat, “Vesti la giubba” from I Pagliacci.

  “‘On With the Motley,’” Geoffrey translated ironically. He was sitting at the top of the stairs, his chin on his knees, barely visible in the gloom. “Music to get dressed to. A tenor aria, so Ben’s client must have finished.”

  Oliver turned the latch on the front door, walked slowly to the staircase, and leaned heavily on the banister. “How’s your finger, Geoff?” he asked eventually.

  “A lot better, thanks.”

  Oliver sighed. “I appreciate your trying to head me off.”

  Geoffrey shrugged away the acknowledgement. “Want a drink?” he asked.

  “No, I’m going to bed,” said Oliver wearily. “Good night.”

  ***

  Sleep was slow to arrive and brought dreams. In the last before waking, Oliver was trying to count the number of people sitting at a dinner table in a large, dark, Victorian greenhouse. He knew there should be twelve, but each time he counted, he could never get higher than six, although out of the corner of his eye, all the seats seemed to be taken. He tried again, recognizing some of the people—Geoffrey was there, Lorina, Sir Harry—but their names were not on the manifest that he found he was clutching. Effie was sitting at a computer a few paces away, and he pleaded with her to help him, but she was staring adamantly at the screen. When he turned back, the greenhouse was gone, and he was in a prison cell, like the one in Bow Street, while his uncle watched him from the doorway.

  Oliver came to sudden consciousness in his bedroom, but the blurry image of Mallard did not vanish. He shook his head vigorously. Yes, still the Mallard.

  “Good morning, dear nephew,” said the superintendent breezily.

  Oliver’s curtains failed to meet in the middle, and from where he lay in his bed, he could see watery sunlight falling into the wilderness of the back garden.

  “What time is it?” he asked, lifting himself stiffly onto his elbows.

  “Half past six,” said Mallard. “I wanted to catch you before you went to work.” He flipped on the light, causing Oliver to groan and dive under the bedcovers.

  Mallard stared at the room. His nephew had mastered the subtle distinction between hygiene and discipline; the bedroom was both impeccably clean and hopelessly untidy. Not that Oliver was disorganized; the room was a palimpsest, where a distinct underlying order struggled to show through the randomness on the surface. Inside his wardrobe, the clean clothes were folded or hung neatly, although a batch of freshly laundered shirts lay over a chair, still waiting to be put away from the previous Friday; his personal files within the desk drawer were as clearly labeled as Sir Harry Random’s, but Oliver had let the unsorted papers build up on the desk top for several weeks; and while his extensive bookshelves were rigidly categorized (by color—Oliver believed that you always remembered the color of a book-jacket even when you forgot the name of its author), there were telltale gaps, and several piles of books were stacked on the mismatched items of furniture in the room. He had, however, cleared the floor and the bed of debris, his one concession to the possibility of a visit from Effie the previous evening. This allowed Mallard, a rare visitor, an unobstructed path to the window. He threw back the curtains and pushed the sash all the way up.

  “What do you want?” moaned Oliver, his voice muffled by blankets.

  “Two things,” said Mallard, lifting a large map of London from the room’s only armchair and seating himself. Oliver had marked the victims’ homes on the map, to see if they formed any geometric patterns. “First, what on earth did you do to Effie last night? I got a very distressed telephone call at about eleven o’clock. Phoebe and I were already in bed. She called you a philanderer and a Lothario.”

  Oliver flung back the bedclothes and sat up. “Aunt Phoebe called me that?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. “Then I guess I’m out of the will.”

  Mallard tutted impatiently. “Effie called you that, as you can well imagine. She wanted me to cause you physical and psychological damage, as only an uncle can. But I come in peace. What happened?”

  Oliver gloomily outlined the events of the previous evening, causing Mallard to replace his expression of avuncular concern with one of enjoyment, and finally to break into sustained and uncontrollable laughter.

  “And I thought Geoffrey Angelwine and the ferret was the funniest thing I’d heard in days,” he said when he had recovered his breath, wiping his eyes on a large cambric handkerchief. “But you beat it, Ollie. I mean, I’m worried that there aren’t enough girls in your life, and suddenly they come pouring out of the woodwork. My nephew, the Casanova.”

  Oliver glared at him humorlessly from the bed. “Thank you for your concern,” he muttered. “Making Effie unhappy is the last thing I wanted to do.”

  “No, no, my dear lad—making Effie unhappy is the second to last thing. Making Effie angry is the last thing you should want to do. She came top of her class in karate.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “All right, don’t worry,” Mallard continued, as his amusement died down. “I’ll tell Effie that I asked you to go to Lorina’s house on Saturday night. And that Welkin picked you up more or less immediately, before you had time for any rumpy-pumpy. But after that, you’re on your own.”

  “You implied that there was some other reason for your intolerably early visit?” Oliver said with as much dignity as a young man in yellow pajamas could muster. He groped for his glasses on the bedside table. Mallard stood up slowly and moved to the window, watching the sparrows playing in the dry earth outside.

  “I spoke to my superiors yesterday afternoon,” he said eventually. “They don’t think I’ve made enough progress. So I’m going to be replaced on the case. Today’s my last day.”

  “You cracked the case—” Oliver began, but Mallard’s abruptly raised finger silenced him. The superintendent breathed deeply.

  “They’re right, of course,” he continued reasonably, still with his back to his nephew. “The trail’s gone cold with the Burbages. Now we’re down to guessing who may have been politically motivated to kill the Burbage jury. Perhaps another mind will find something I missed.”

  How like Mallard to deal with Effie’s distress before revealing his own agony, Oliver thought. He knew that Mallard had never been taken off a case in his entire career.

  “But what could we possibly have missed?” Oliver asked, trying to share the responsibility. He climbed out of bed and put on his toweling bathrobe.

  “I must have missed something, clearly. After all, the killer makes mistakes. But if he’s that clumsy, that stupid, why haven’t I caught him?”

  “It was his marksmanship that failed in Piccadilly Circus, not his intelligence,” Oliver replied steadily.

  Mallard turned around. The white hair that fell over his forehead, the straggling wh
ite moustache, and gold-rimmed glasses often obscured his facial expressions, and Oliver could not be sure if his uncle was challenged or defeated by his superiors’ ultimatum.

  “Oliver, I appreciate your trying to bolster my sagging spirits,” he said, with a smile. “You always have so much enthusiasm for the game, when your old Uncle Tim just gets rather tired of it all. But remember what Doctor Johnson said: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ You see, I’ve been thinking. I’ve been trying to think like the murderer. And I think that with the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve good men and true on the jury, there are far too many twelves in this puzzle. So I’ve decided to ignore them both.”

  Oliver sat down abruptly on the bed, bouncing several times, and clutched his head.

  “Let me understand this,” he whimpered. “You’re saying that the daily schedule of the murders, the locations, the methods of death, the victims’ birth signs, their jury duty—none of these matter? That there’s yet another connection still to be discovered?”

  Mallard chuckled wickedly. “No. No more connections. No connection at all. That’s the point. But if I’m right, we’ve only got a day to prove it.”

  ***

  A few minutes later, Susie Beamish, who had just arrived home, was cheerfully preparing scrambled eggs, a task that was barely within the limits of her culinary skills. “I add chives,” she reported ominously. Mallard managed to warn her not to ask Oliver about the previous evening’s date with Effie, before his nephew appeared in the doorway, dragging a sweatshirt over his tousled fair hair.

  “Here’s what struck me last night,” said Mallard, taking a gulp of tea. “Suppose you’re the killer. You want to kill twelve people who have a specific connection—they served on a jury. So you look for an alternative pattern such as the signs of the zodiac, which you emphasize very strongly in your murders, in the hope that it will hide the original connection. Okay so far?”