by Alan Beechey
“Take him down!” Mallard commanded, concerned for the civilians. The detectives responded, the others backed away quickly. But Effie, on her knees, was encumbered by Lorina, and Moldwarp was chained to Burbage. The limping Welkin was the first to reach Oliver, and was quickly felled when the young man struck him on the head and kicked a crutch away. Urchin came up from behind, but Oliver reeled on him angrily and threw him with brutal strength toward Moldwarp and Burbage. All three men tumbled to the ground.
For an instant, Mallard and Oliver faced each other, almost motionless. Then there were two gleams of silver metal: one from the police whistle that Mallard placed in his mouth, ready to summon other detectives from the north side of the square; the other from the blade that Oliver pulled from the umbrella’s shaft, glittering through the air in front of his uncle.
A fine red mist sprayed from the whistle, but no sound. Instead, Mallard’s breath seemed to hiss wetly from the jagged new mouth that had opened across the folds of his throat. Blood cascaded onto his collar. He dropped.
Oliver was gone, lost among the cars and buses around the square, before Mallard hit the ground. Speckles of rain began to appear on the dusty pavement.
Chapter Twelve
The volume was high on the CD player, perhaps to keep the quieter moments of the string quartet audible through the occasional thunderclap. But there was still only one point in the last movement when the music grew loud enough to mask the cautious opening of the first-floor French window and the sudden hiss of rain, falling in the Twickenham street outside. Surprisingly, the action did not trip the burglar alarm of the smart, eighteenth-century house in Montpelier Row, and the window was closed again before the quartet’s chiming garlands subsided, and the four instruments returned to the steady, tolling pace of the passacaglia, its theme inspired by Venetian church-bells.
In the room, the simple E major melody comforted the ear with its insistent tonality, drawing the listener on to that shattering, consoling, searching final chord of Britten’s final quartet. Not the expected E major, foretold for so long, but a bare triad of C sharp minor for the upper instruments, while the cello descends to the modal D natural that had haunted the movement. Critics question its meaning. Is it death? When he wrote the movement in Venice, Britten was certainly under the sentence of death, delivered by his failing heart, and the quartet quotes from the composer’s last opera, Death in Venice, including Aschenbach’s distraught confession of his impossible love for the passing boy, Tadzio. But death did not come for Britten for a year, and in Aldeburgh, not Venice.
The compact disk stopped, and a very wet Oliver Swithin was forced to choke back a gobbet of illogical outrage that he and the room’s occupant could both take the same pleasure from such a sublime moment of music. Then he stepped out from behind the long wine-colored curtains.
The man standing by the expensive stereo equipment spun around, and for a second Oliver saw terror in his eyes. He enjoyed this. With his inoffensive features and naturally bemused expression, Oliver was not used to intimidating people, although he privately admitted that an unexpected appearance looking like a drowned ferret helped. But the man facing him was too good at this. His instinctive suavity quickly returned.
“I trust you haven’t returned to make good on your biggest mistake,” Edmund Tradescant said, with annoying sangfroid. “It wouldn’t be very tidy to slay a Sagittarius at this stage.”
“I’m not here to kill you,” Oliver told him. Tradescant absorbed this information with a quizzical twist of the head.
“In that case, can I offer you a drink? I was just about to top myself up before going to bed.” He raised a whisky tumbler and rattled the ice cubes.
Oliver demurred, but watched Tradescant closely as he turned his back and fiddled with decanters and glasses on the cocktail cabinet. Was he contemplating hurling the ice tongs at the intruder or smashing his whisky tumbler and grinding the shards into Oliver’s face? But perhaps he thought twice. It was Waterford, after all.
The large room was decorated as Oliver expected. One or two of the pieces of furniture were genuine antiques; the others were period reproductions, or more comfortable modern pieces of an enduring neutrality that work in any setting—like blue denim jeans that match paint-spattered t-shirts and Hermes scarves with equal composure.
“Cheers,” said Tradescant, turning around and sipping from the recharged tumbler. “So if you don’t want to kill me, what do you want?”
“The truth about the murders.”
Tradescant shrugged dismissively. “I thought your actions this afternoon were tantamount to a confession. Is there a word for murdering your own uncle? ‘Avunculicide’ or something?”
“He is dead?”
“No doubt about that from where I was standing. I think that brings your tally to seven.”
“I did not commit the zodiac murders,” said Oliver emphatically.
“Then you have a peculiar way of protesting your innocence.”
Without asking, Oliver fell into the armchair that Tradescant had just vacated, with his back to the door, and ran his fingers through his fine, damp hair. Tradescant didn’t move, but stood nursing his glass. Oliver had noted that he was too wise to play the outraged householder, leaping for the telephone or his burglar alarm’s panic button. “He wants to hear what I know,” he thought.
“Uncle Tim made me angry,” Oliver said wearily, as if he were finally speaking words that he had been rehearsing silently for several hours. “He said the one thing he knows I hate to hear—that I’m ‘second rate.’ I know I’m second rate, for God’s sake: I live with that self-reproach every day. I’m a second-rate writer, who can’t do better than stupid stories for children. I’m a second-rate lover, who finally meets the perfect woman and doesn’t bring himself to act because of some prosaic ethical code. Now, I’m supposed to be a second-rate murderer, too, who can’t even fool himself. When Uncle Tim said those things about my being two people, one who murders and one who solves the murder, I thought for one brief second that it might be true—that there is indeed another Oliver, dancing beyond my reach. Perhaps that other Oliver finally erupted to the surface in Trafalgar Square, settling the score for twenty-five years of failing to make my mark on the world, of secretly knowing I was truly second-rate.”
Tradescant stared into his drink. “In a case of multiple personality,” he said, “which is what you seem to be suggesting, there’s a school of thought that believes you—the sane, gentle Swithin, who wants to help the police—aren’t guilty of the murders committed by the other Swithin, the gamester, the trickster.”
“But neither Swithin is guilty of the zodiac murders,” Oliver replied. “I was confused when Uncle Tim threw those accusations at me. Now I think I can refute them.”
“You mean, you’ve found an alibi?”
“No. It was an odd coincidence that I wasn’t with my uncle or my friends at the time of the deaths. Listen, though. Uncle Tim said I devised the murders after I was supposed to have spotted a file on jury duty in Harry’s office on Monday afternoon, the day of his death. But I didn’t go to Harry’s home until Tuesday, and by then, the Aquarius death had already taken place!”
“Perhaps you saw the file on an earlier occasion,” said Tradescant, drinking again.
“I hadn’t been to Harry’s house in years. And what about the morning of his death. Uncle Tim claimed I had a cube of blue billiard chalk in my pocket because I was playing the Billiard-marker in the Sanders Club’s Snark Hunt. But I wasn’t the Billiard-marker! I was the Banker. The other Snark-hunters will vouch for that. So will the police—I had Monopoly money in my pocket as a prop, which the police found when I was arrested.”
“I doubt the police will be forthcoming with a defense, given that you’ve slain one of their own.”
Oliver ignored the comment. “I also had a toy telescope, because Henry Holiday’s illustr
ations for the poem show the Banker with a telescope. And anyway, a Victorian billiard-marker wouldn’t carry chalk. His job wasn’t to chalk the cues, it was to keep score of the game.”
“A little arcane,” Tradescant muttered. “Had you been playing billiards that evening?”
“No, Harry and I played poker. We didn’t go into the club’s billiard room.”
“You could still have slipped a cube of chalk into your pocket. Not that it matters, because the police think Sir Harry was the one person you didn’t kill.”
Oliver shook his head. “I didn’t kill any of them.”
“Then who did?”
“You did.”
Tradescant raised his eyebrows, but did not look at Oliver. “Ah, now I see why you’ve come here,” he said. “Well, if you’re going to accuse me, perhaps I may sit down. I prefer to be comfortable when I’m listening to fiction. Although I should tell you immediately, I have alibis for several of the deaths.”
He sat upon a damask-covered sofa, almost underneath a shaded standard lamp, the room’s only illumination. Damn him, Oliver thought, he was so bloody collected, placing his drink neatly on a coaster on the mahogany end table. But Oliver also noted Tradescant’s arm, casually draped over the back of the sofa. What was he reaching for?
“You see,” said Oliver, “there’s one person I can’t get out of my mind.”
“And that is?”
“Your colleague Gordon Paper, struck by a crossbow bolt that was aimed at you. What an astounding coincidence that he happened to walk up to you at that crucial moment.”
Tradescant smiled suddenly, as if suppressing a hiccough. “They say Piccadilly Circus is the place for coincidental meetings,” he remarked.
“I don’t think Gordon Paper was a coincidence. Or a mistake. I think he was the point of all this. And our biggest mistake was losing sight of him when we found out he wasn’t on that jury.”
“Tell me, Mr. Swithin,” said Tradescant, after a pause, “since you seem rather a bright lad for your age, why on earth would I want to kill Gordon? He was the Company’s most valuable asset—and I’m a company man.”
“It’s obvious now,” Oliver answered immediately. “A travel-sick recluse turns up in Piccadilly Circus. Why? We thought at first that the killer was showing us how clever, how manipulative he could be. But ‘why?’ was the wrong question. We should have asked ‘how?’ And we should have asked it even after we decided Paper was a mistake. He would need more than a couple of Dramamine to get himself down to London. There can only be one explanation: Gordon Paper had found his permanent cure for travel-sickness. He must have told you, and you decided to kill him and take it for yourself.”
He paused, expecting some comment, but Tradescant said and did nothing.
“Paper turned up unexpectedly in London a week before his death, a personal demonstration that he’d found his cure,” Oliver continued, keeping an eye on the other man’s nonchalant arm. “You were the first person he contacted. You told him to lie low for a few days. Perhaps you tempted him with promises of a grand unveiling to your senior management, a congratulatory viva, with the newly mobile Mr. Paper as a surprise guest. But the only thing you were planning was his death.
“Paper was an eccentric inventor, a man so valuable to his employer that if he were to die under mysterious circumstances, you and other colleagues would inevitably become part of the investigation. You had to find a way to kill him that would avoid any police scrutiny of his private life. An accident, perhaps, where he’s one of many to die? A seemingly random act of terrorism? No, you dream up something much better: Gordon Paper will die because of an apparent mistake made by an obsessed serial killer who had very well established reasons for murdering someone else. That someone else was you, in fact. Because you speculate that the safest place for a murderer to hide is behind the mask of his own intended victim.
“You had the freedom to play with a hundred biographical details about yourself before lighting on two that could be woven together into a suitably elaborate pattern: that you’d served on a jury, which had been obliquely threatened on television; and that your birth sign was Sagittarius. You researched it quickly—it wasn’t difficult, you already knew who the other jury members were and what they were like. You executed your pattern, one by one, complete with little errors. It’s quite easy for the executive of a pharmaceutical company to get his hands on some ‘squidgy,’ on the fast-acting poison that killed Vanessa Parmenter, on the dart gun used to deliver it. Then, when your turn came to die, you stepped out of your place in the charmed circle and threw Gordon Paper in instead, and the switch is perceived as just another of the murderer’s mistakes. Even if the police had seen beyond the zodiac connection and the jury connection—and they did—you were still safe. Because any further investigation would involve looking for someone who wanted to murder you, Edmund Tradescant, not non-Sagittarian, non-jury-member Gordon Paper!”
Tradescant shuffled on the sofa, crossing one leg over another, but keeping his hand out of sight.
“You forget,” he said quietly, “I was standing in front of Gordon when he was shot from behind. From a rooftop on the far side of Piccadilly Circus. How am I supposed to have accomplished that?” He thrust his visible hand into the pocket of his fawn cardigan and straightened his arm. Oliver could tell from the garment’s bagginess that this was a regular habit, a rare lapse from his studied correctness. He could tell, too, that the small pocket was empty.
“You claimed he was struck by the bolt as you moved toward one another. But that wasn’t what happened. You called Paper at his hotel and told him to meet you in Piccadilly Circus. You got there early and planted the crossbow on the roof, with the Sagittarius symbol taped to it. Then you came down to face Paper.”
“And who killed him?”
“You did. You had the crossbow bolt in your pocket. As Paper walked up to you, you took it out, plunged it into the back of his neck, and dragged his dying body down on top of you, crying for help, as if he’d been shot from a distance.”
“You’re doing very well, but you still haven’t told me why I should want Gordon’s formula.”
Oliver hesitated, wondering if he had just heard the admission he had come for. “Presumably it was worth a lot of money,” he said. “Oh, there may be plenty of products that relieve motion sickness or vertigo. But a total cure…I imagine you wanted to claim that you had invented it and get all the rewards yourself.”
Tradescant started to shake his head emphatically before Oliver finished speaking, before he had even had time to process the young man’s language. Oliver had always hated that particular habit.
“Wrong, I’m afraid,” sighed the older man, reaching languidly across his body for the glass of whisky. “You disappoint me, Swithin. Let me explain. The company might make a billion dollars from the worldwide sales of a permanent cure for acute travel sickness. But we’d lose the ten billion dollars we already make from those other products you mentioned, which offer only temporary relief. We couldn’t allow Gordon Paper’s drug to be manufactured. It would be like that legendary everlasting light bulb. And we knew it was no use buying Gordon off—he’s too devoted to the purity of science. So we killed him, in a way that was guaranteed never, never to draw attention to his work.”
“‘We’?” Oliver repeated, startled. Tradescant looked at him with exaggerated puzzlement, as if his visitor were stupid. Oliver did not feel stupid and resented it.
“Surely you don’t think I could do this alone?” Tradescant asked, with scornful surprise. “I told you I had alibis. Yes, I killed Sir Harry Random, with the same lead pipe I used the next day on Nettie Fisher. I just had time to draw that symbol on his chest—with a pen, incidentally, not chalk, your late uncle was overstretching himself there—and push him into the fountain before you blundered into the Square. I hid behind the lions and slipped away while you were fishing
his body out of the water. But it was a pretty female colleague who lured Mark Sandys-Penza to Kew Gardens, hence the importance of the breath mint. And I can’t ride a motorcycle—we had an enthusiastic young management trainee shoot Vanessa Parmenter.”
“Your victims were innocent people, with real lives. You speak about them as if they were characters in a book.”
“Oh, don’t be melodramatic, Mr. Swithin. There was nothing personal about this. I even gave you an opportunity to stop the murders after Gordon’s death, by dropping a big hint about my serving on a jury with Sir Harry, but I was rather rudely cut off by that pert little policewoman, the one with all the hair. You must understand, these murders were company business, pure and simple. Decisions like that are taken at board level.”
He flung his whisky into Oliver’s face and lunged out of his seat.
Tradescant’s hidden hand was wrapped in the flex of the standard lamp. It went out, and in the darkness Oliver heard it crash heavily into his stereo equipment. He tried to jump out of the chair, but Tradescant got to him first, pushing him back into place with strength that Oliver didn’t expect. Tradescant was still dragging the lamp. As Oliver struggled to sit up, he felt the cable go across his neck. He flailed his legs, but Tradescant twisted his body aside and the impetus of the empty kick pressed Oliver back into the chair.
The cable was cutting hard into his windpipe. He tore at it helplessly, scratching at his neck to slide a finger under the taut plastic. Then he tried to dig his nails into Tradescant’s hands on either side of his throat. It suddenly occurred to Oliver that he was in pain, rather more than he had expected when he first clambered up to the window. It also occurred to him, as he became aware that consciousness was leaving him, that the time had come to put an end to the struggle.
“Effie!” he managed to gurgle.
There was an ear-splitting scream behind them. Oliver felt the cable suddenly relax against his throat. A body shot by him in the dark, and he heard the deeply satisfying noise of a pharmaceutical executive smashing into a cocktail cabinet. The room’s main light was switched on by somebody near the door. Oliver tried to shake awareness back into his head, but found he was too dizzy to stand. He watched Tradescant stagger to his feet, swinging a decanter wildly. There were two sudden, balletic blurs of blue denim, and two more lung-emptying screams.