Embarrassment of Corpses, An

by Alan Beechey

  “You’ll be late for your own funeral,” said Mallard humorlessly. He, too, was dodging Oliver’s gaze. “I think the one person you don’t know is Clifford Burbage, there in the bracelets,” he added. Oliver nodded amiably, but Burbage seemed preoccupied with avoiding Welkin’s continual glare.

  “Thank you all for coming,” the superintendent announced. “However, I have to say that one of you is going to regret accepting my invitation. Before we leave this place, I plan to arrest the zodiac murderer, as we persist in calling him.”

  He allowed the group time to react. “Him?” echoed Ambrose over the general murmurs of surprise.

  “We’ve been using ‘him’ as shorthand. I’ll keep that up for now, but we’ll soon see if the male truly embraces the female.”

  Mallard began to wander through the small audience. “Untangling this case has been like peeling back the layers of an onion,” he said. “We think Sir Harry Random’s death in this fountain is an accident, but it isn’t. We think Nettie Clapper’s murder is an isolated mugging, but it isn’t. Then we think we have a serial killer using the signs of the zodiac, but there’s more. We find a jury, but maybe that’s not the solution either. Now we’re looking at the murders individually, but we have no clue where to start. Oh, we’re dealing with a very clever murderer here.”

  He paused, allowing his gaze to sweep across all their faces. Then he slowly stretched an arm toward Edmund Tradescant.

  “But the fact that Mr. Tradescant is still with us is living proof that the murderer, while clever, is not perfect,” Mallard continued. “And I’ve come to realize that the shooting of Gordon Paper in Piccadilly Circus was by no means the murderer’s only mistake. Let’s see some more evidence of his failings.”

  He walked to the fountain and pointed at a statue that rose from the water—an open-mouthed merman, clutching two dolphins, with water streaming from their mouths into the overflowing basin.

  “Sir Harry Random died here, near that waterspout. When we looked for a connection to Harry’s birth sign, Pisces, we found it in those fish.”

  Ambrose Random snorted suddenly.

  “Fish?” he echoed, in a voice that, in one syllable, moved from baritone to falsetto and back again.

  Mallard turned to him. “Something wrong, Mr. Random?” he asked innocently.

  “Anyone with an atom of intelligence can tell you that a dolphin is a not a fish.”

  “He probably thinks it’s a bird,” Oliver whispered to Ben.

  “A dolphin is a mammal,” Ambrose announced smugly, looking around for approval.

  “So you’re saying this statue is not the most accurate representation of Pisces?” Mallard asked. “I agree. If anything, it works better as Aquarius, the Water-bearer. But the Aquarius death happened the next day at Sloane Square station, near the duct that carries the River Westbourne across the railway line. This second murder was flawless. The only trouble is, poor Nettie Clapper, the Aquarian victim, wasn’t really an Aquarius. Like Oliver, she was born in the blurry boundary between two birth signs known as a cusp. But most newspaper and magazine horoscopes would put her birthday, January 20, in Capricorn. On that day in 1932, when she was born, the sun was definitely in Capricorn. So why select Nettie for the Aquarius death, when there were two other jury members available who were decidedly Aquarian? I suggest the answer is carelessness.”

  He took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Let’s move on to death number three. This is the letter that was sent to the Capricorn, Mark Sandys-Penza. It invites him to a meeting at the ‘Tropical House’ in Kew Gardens. We rather slavishly picked up the killer’s terminology, thinking the name ‘Tropical’ was our link to the birth sign, as in the Tropic of Capricorn. But I checked this afternoon with the Royal Botanic Gardens. There’s no such place as the Tropical House. It’s actually called the ‘Temperate House.’”

  Mallard paused, but there were no comments from the group. All except one, they were mentally willing him to continue, to present the solution to the mystery.

  “Death number four was the biggest mistake of all, which we’ve already acknowledged: The murderer killed the wrong man. Death number five, in contrast, was immaculate—although our genius had to dredge up an ancient connection between Scorpio and an eagle to make it work. There are scorpion images in London, as Oliver himself discovered.

  “And victim number six, the Libra, was found outside a library. A nice verbal link, which Sergeant Strongitharm spotted first. Except the word ‘library’ takes its root from the Latin word liber, meaning a book, while libra is a different Latin word, meaning a balance. The similarity between these two words is a phonetic coincidence. You can trace them all the way back to their Indo-European roots, and you won’t find any connection.”

  “Would you count that as an error?” asked Lorina.

  Mallard paused, looking at her carefully. “There are two or three big mistakes, there are perhaps insignificant lapses. My point is that our killer is not as clever as we thought he was. In fact, I could argue that every single murder was flawed in one way or another. Rather a second-rate job.”

  “This is getting too complicated for me, Uncle Tim,” Susie complained, “and poor Geoffrey’s little brain is getting decidedly fuzzy.” Geoffrey scowled at her.

  “Bear with me, Susie, I’m nearly finished,” Mallard said. “We come now to the biggest lapse of all—biggest, because it affected all the murders. The killer was working the wrong way through the zodiac, backward not forward. That remains a conundrum. After all, there was a continuous sequence of six birth signs among the jury members—Libra to Pisces. Why go backward? Oliver’s explanation, which we were quick to accept, was that Pisces is traditionally the last sign of the astrological year. But what if there’s another explanation? What if the killer had no choice over his first victim? It had to be Sir Harry Random, here in Trafalgar Square.”

  “Ah, then the late Squire Random was the reason for all this, and the other five died to draw attention away from his murder!” cried Ambrose. “How deliciously intriguing!” Oliver glanced unavoidably toward Lorina, who remained impassive.

  Mallard smiled for the first time. “I’m not looking for your father’s murderer, Mr. Random. I’m about to arrest the person who killed those other five people.”

  “You mean there were two murderers?” Ben blurted out.

  “Two murderers?” Susie repeated. “I can’t take this.”

  “No,” Mallard stated emphatically. “I’m not looking for Sir Harry’s murderer, because there’s no such person. Sir Harry Random wasn’t murdered. His death was an accident, as the police believed in the first place.”

  With a cry, Lorina tottered. Ben swiftly caught her and, with Effie’s help, lowered her to the ground. Ambrose ignored his sister’s reaction.

  “She’ll be okay,” said Effie, cradling Lorina’s head in her lap. Mallard responded by strolling over to Geoffrey and laying a hand on his shoulder. Geoffrey gulped apprehensively.

  “This morning, Geoffrey Angelwine gave me food for thought,” the superintendent continued, unavoidably remembering the other food he had been given for breakfast. “He said that every time we come up with one solution, the murderer is another jump ahead. Another layer deeper into the onion, if you like. It’s like a game, played out between the murderer and the police. And I think Geoffrey’s hit on the real reason for these killings.” He let go of Geoffrey, who gratefully dropped back a couple of steps.

  “This whole thing has been no more than a giant puzzle!” Mallard proclaimed. “It’s a game played across London, just like Oliver’s hide-and-seek Snark Hunt, with real people—real human lives—as the expendable pieces. There is no hidden motive for any one of these murders. There is no zodiac serial killer, no Cliff Burbage taking revenge on the jury that convicted his father, no hidden malcontent whose target is Sir Harry Random, or Nettie Clapper, or Mark
Sandys-Penza, or Mr. Tradescant here, or Mr. Dworkin, if he’d got that far, or the other jury members. These suspects, these victims—actual or potential—have all been pawns in the murderer’s game. The true targets for these vile crimes are still alive, standing here—the police investigators who joined in that game!”

  “But who would want to do that?” squealed Susie.

  “Who?” cried Mallard incredulously. “Isn’t it obvious? There’s only one person who had the opportunity and God help me, I gave it to him.”

  “Oliver,” breathed Effie.

  “Oliver,” Mallard confirmed, pointing at his nephew, “by all that’s damnable.”

  Nobody seemed to move, but Oliver suddenly found himself standing alone, almost in the center of the group. He brushed his hair from his eyes.

  “This is, of course, ridiculous,” he mumbled. “Uncle Tim—this is me, your nephew Ollie. I’m not a murderer. I’ve been helping you catch the murderer. I’m on your side.”

  Mallard continued to stare at him, without speaking further. Oliver looked down at Effie, who still held Lorina in her lap. Two pairs of eyes, ice-blue and coffee-brown, gazed back. “Effie, you got the wrong end of the stick the other night, Lorina will tell you! Say you don’t believe it!”

  Mallard spoke before Effie could answer. “At six o’clock in the morning, eight days ago, Sir Harry Random left the Sanders Club and went out for some air, perhaps to clear his head before going home. After five minutes, Sir Harry found himself in the middle of a deserted Trafalgar Square. We’ll never quite know what happened, but he was old and he’d been drinking and I think the temptation to climb onto the rim of this fountain was irresistible, as it is to a child. He lost his balance and fell, striking his head on the stonework, and then rolled into the basin. Any trace of blood or hair on the stone was soon washed away by the overflowing water. It was an accident, a sad, regrettable accident, just as we thought initially.”

  “No!” cried Oliver, “I discovered the letter in the lobby of the Club, arranging the meeting. And there was the symbol for Pisces drawn on his dress shirt!”

  “Oliver found Sir Harry a few minutes later,” Mallard continued stubbornly, “but he was too late to save him. Oliver was distraught, angry, maybe even slightly guilty for having been asleep while Sir Harry stepped out alone. In those frantic moments, maybe it was understandable that Oliver couldn’t accept the banality of his mentor’s death by drowning, and that by imagining it as a murder, he was somehow giving Sir Harry more dignity. And then a policeman turned up—Constable Urchin here, who quite rightly refused to believe in a murder for which there was no evidence.

  “This annoyed Oliver. He wanted to give Urchin something to think about. He’d had cause to remember Sir Harry’s birthday, the twenty-ninth of February. He knew this made Harry a Pisces. He noticed the dolphins on the nearby statue—not fish, but close enough. In Oliver’s mind, it all came together, and in a fit of willfulness, while Urchin’s back was turned, he opened Harry’s jacket and scrawled the Pisces symbol on his wet shirt-front.”

  “And I just happened to have a blue marker pen on me?” said Oliver sarcastically.

  “No. No marker pen was found on you when you were arrested, nor at the crime scene, nor in the fountain.”

  “Then I couldn’t have drawn it, could I?” Oliver cried in exasperated tones. “The symbol must have been there before Harry was thrown into the fountain.”

  “The police didn’t retain Sir Harry’s shirt,” Mallard remarked. “So we assumed the blue symbol on Harry’s starched shirt-front was drawn by the same marker pen used for the later zodiac symbols. But maybe it wasn’t.”

  Welkin handed him a small valise, from which Mallard took a white garment. Then he fished in his pocket for something else.

  “This is a starched evening shirt like Sir Harry’s,” he said. He held up a small blue cube. “And this is a piece of billiard chalk, used for marking the end of cues. Watch.”

  Mallard dunked the shirt in the fountain, wrung it out, and spread it flat on the ground. With the chalk, he scrawled the double-ended fork that represented Pisces. It left a dull blue stain on the white fabric.

  “But I didn’t have any chalk either!” Oliver insisted.

  “Not when you were arrested. You’d already thrown it into the fountain, where it floated with the rest of the debris until it broke up. But you had blue chalk when you left the Sanders Club. It was part of your equipment as one of the characters in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. Harry had needle and thread in his lapel because he was the Bonnet-maker. And Oliver, you had chalk because you were the Billiard-marker!”

  Mallard plunged the shirt into the fountain again and shook it underwater. When he took it out, the blue mark was almost gone.

  “As you can see, for the sign to show up, it had to be drawn after Sir Harry’s body had been taken from the fountain. Oliver was the only person who had the opportunity to do this.”

  “What about the letter that was sent to Harry?” Oliver said fiercely. “You saw that!”

  “Nobody saw that letter in Sir Harry’s possession. Not the club’s night porter, nor the fellow Snark-Hunters. You may have recovered it from the club lobby a day or so later, under Mr. Dworkin’s eyes, but that’s because you printed it and planted it there yourself after Sir Harry was dead.”

  “Why? Why would I do all this?”

  Mallard passed the wet shirt back to Welkin and rested on the edge of the fountain, staring at his nephew. The others might as well be invisible, a silent audience to a two-character play, the watchers of a film that was unreeling to its climax.

  “Here’s what I think happened, Oliver. By now, you’ve inwardly accepted that Harry died accidentally. But it annoys you that Constable Urchin failed to believe you, or that despite your fabricated evidence, the CID don’t believe you, and nor do I when I turn up unexpectedly at Bow Street. You wonder what it would take to make us accept your story, even though it isn’t actually true. And what it would take, you decide, is more murders.

  “What if Sir Harry’s Pisces death were only the first of a series? Wouldn’t that be fun—to devise a sequence of deaths combining zodiac signs and your detailed knowledge of London? How and where would Aries die? And Taurus? And all the others, one a month, or one a week, or hardest of all, one a day, in strict order. Then in Sir Harry’s study, you notice that he kept files on everything, including the names of a jury he once served on. Twelve jurors, twelve signs of the zodiac. Could that add another level of complexity to your puzzle?

  “It obsesses you. Back home on that Monday afternoon, a clever series of telephone calls tracks down the jury members and elicits their birthdays. And lo and behold, you can get a sequence of five more consecutive zodiac signs, stretching away from Sir Harry—Aquarius, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, and Libra. You have to go backward through the year, not forward, but still…How easy would it be, you wonder, to get Aquarian Nettie Clapper up to Sloane Square, to die near the River Westbourne, her skull smashed with a length of lead pipe? You call again, this time pretending to be a solicitor with good news of a bequest. She takes the bait. There isn’t much time, so you run out to Harold Wood that night and drop off a letter, arranging a meeting early the following morning.”

  “This is all so far-fetched,” Oliver complained, with a mute appeal to the watchers. But each face was expressionless. Mallard lowered his voice, like a priest reaching the holiest point in the liturgy. His eyes never left Oliver’s scowling face.

  “On that Tuesday morning, you turned up at Sloane Square, only one stop from South Kensington, where you work. Until then, I think you just wanted to test the extent of your ingenuity, to see if you could make the pattern work. But when it did, when poor Nettie Clapper stood before you expectantly, you couldn’t resist. It’s no longer about the indignation of not being believed. It’s about power, the power of mischief, th
e power of the puzzler. One swing of that pipe into an old woman’s face and the game would begin—the race to get through your sequence of five daily murders before Scotland Yard could solve the mystery. You couldn’t resist. And may God damn you, you succeeded!”

  “I was helping you!” Oliver shouted tearfully. “I was the one solving the mystery, not creating it.”

  Mallard advanced a step toward his nephew, which emphasized his greater height. “We didn’t get to Gemini, the Twins. But you could be their symbol, Oliver—so arrogant that you even challenged your own intellect to a duel. Could you, the killer who already knows the solution to the puzzle, get to the end of the sequence before you, the stand-in detective, found the answer?” He thrust a pointing finger behind him. “The dolphin statue as a fish. The wrong name for the Kew Gardens greenhouse. You were very quick to spot those erroneous connections.”

  “I know a dolphin’s not a fish,” Oliver growled. “And the murderer’s letter spoke of the ‘Tropical House.’ Just because I try to follow his thinking, that doesn’t turn me into him! I was with you! I was on your team!”

  “You weren’t with us when any of the murders took place. You don’t have a single alibi!”

  “Effie! Tell him he’s wrong!” Oliver pleaded.

  Effie continued to watch him coldly, stroking Lorina’s head. “It’s you, Oliver,” she said viciously. “You knew you only had to dangle the suspicion of a pattern in front of the police and, superstitious creatures that we are, we would go hunting mythical serial killers. And all the time, it was your smug, dirty secret that at the core of this mystery was a meaningless accident—Sir Harry Random’s random death!”

  “But it was a second-rate job, Oliver,” snarled Mallard. “Too many mistakes. You even killed the wrong person. Even now, even with five murders behind you, you’re still second rate.”

  Oliver’s abrupt scream of animal rage froze them. Almost in slow-motion, they saw his hand go into his satchel and pull out the omnipresent folding umbrella. He began to flail it crazily above his head, as if swatting invisible demons. It was a ludicrous, pathetic sight.