Meade gestures to Harold to join him, and hands him the earpiece.
‘Yes?’ Harold says, with a slight tremble in his voice. ‘Yes, this is Harold James Holt.’
‘Harold James Holt,’ Blackstone said. ‘Like all good passwords, it was simple and innocuous — so simple, in fact, that I didn’t recognize it for what it was at the time, though looking back, it’s obvious.’
‘This is insane!’ George said.
‘I must admit, you put on a good double act in that saloon,’ Blackstone continued, ignoring him. ‘You with your concern for your brother’s safety; him nervous, yet determined to go through with it. But that’s all it was — an act!’
‘So what you’re saying is that there were no kidnappers in Moore’s?’ George asked.
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘Then what happened to the money?’
‘Interesting question,’ Blackstone said. ‘The disappearance of the money is crucial to the illusion you wanted to create, because it was meant to prove that the kidnappers were there.’
‘Well, exactly!’ George said. ‘I mean, there wasn’t an illusion, but-’
‘So it’s possible that, in order to make it disappear, Harold simply threw it on one of the fires that were blazing merrily away on Moore’s fourth floor.’
‘You’re saying that he would have been willing to burn half a million dollars?’
‘Then again, it’s possible that on the journey between the police station and the saloon you switched the money for dollar-sized pieces of paper, and that was what Harold threw on to the fire. I don’t know which of those two things actually happened, but I expect, now they know what they’re looking for, the fire department should be able to tell us in a day or two.’
‘So we took Father’s ransom money and either burned it or hid it?’ George asked.
‘Now you’re catching on,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘After all, why would you want to pay a ransom for a man who’s been dead for seven years?’
‘Dead for seven years! Father was alive four days ago,’ George protested. ‘He may still be alive — and you should be looking for him now, rather than wasting time by persecuting us!’
‘The man in the bunker wasn’t your father,’ Blackstone said. ‘And once we’d realized that, a number of things that had been puzzling us suddenly started to make sense. For instance, we wondered why you would have employed such a lifeless creature as Judith to clean your father’s apartment, and, of course, it was her very lifelessness — her lack of interest in anything — that recommended her. She never questioned that the man she was cleaning for was Big Bill Holt. Bloody hell, he could have had two heads and I doubt she’d have noticed.’
‘The thing you did have to be worried about was the laundry,’ Meade said. ‘Although none of the staff had ever met your father, it was just possible that one of them would have heard he was a big man, and have started to wonder why the clothes he sent to the laundry in the basement were so small. That’s why none of the clothes from the bunker ever did go to the laundry.’
‘What happened to his dirty clothes?’ Blackstone asks Judith. ‘Someone must have taken them away for laundering, mustn’t they?’
‘I saw Mr Fanshawe with a bag of his laundry, once or twice,’ the reluctant parlour maid admits.
‘And Fanshawe, of course, was what we British would call “your loyal retainer”, bound to you both by his sense of duty and by the fact that you probably somehow found out that he was wanted for murder in England, and thus had him completely in your power.’
‘Fanshawe — a murderer! I don’t believe it!’ George said.
‘Now that wasn’t really convincing, was it?’ Blackstone asked Meade.
‘Not convincing at all,’ Meade replied.
‘If it wasn’t our father in there, why did we pay the Pinkertons a small fortune to guard him?’ asked George, changing tack.
‘The Pinkertons were there to keep out unwanted visitors, who might discover the truth,’ Blackstone said. ‘Besides, it all contributed to the illusion — the place wouldn’t be worth guarding if Big Bill wasn’t there, but it was being guarded, so he must be there.’
‘Let me see if I understand this,’ George said. ‘You’re saying that our father died seven years ago, and that we’ve been keeping his death secret since then. Is that right?’
‘Half-right,’ Blackstone said. ‘You had to keep his death a secret, because the business was your father, and your father was the business, and if it had become common knowledge that he was dead, the shares would have collapsed. That’s when you came up with the idea of him becoming a hermit, and, I must say, you played that out to perfection.’
‘How can you say that Father was cowardly to take the precautions he did?’ Harold demands angrily. ‘And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it — calling him a coward?’
George’s expression softens. ‘I never used that word, little brother,’ he says, in a much gentler voice. ‘What he did was weak, rather than cowardly.’
‘You get the point?’ Blackstone asked Meade. ‘As long as they were discussing him in those terms, the main question we would be asking ourselves was which one of them was painting a more realistic picture of their father. And whatever side of the fence we eventually came down on, our automatic assumption would be that their father was still alive.’
‘Very clever,’ Meade said, with mock admiration.
‘You said I was half-right about your preposterous theories,’ George said.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘So in what way was I half-wrong?’
Blackstone walked over to the window, and looked out. Virginia and Elizabeth were walking in the garden. Virginia had her hand firmly on Elizabeth’s arm, and was talking earnestly to her. Elizabeth, for her part, looked as if she might collapse at any moment.
Blackstone ran his hand across his forehead. The room was hot and sticky with guilt and denial, and what he really needed at that moment, he decided, was a breath of fresh air.
‘So in what way was I half-wrong?’ George repeated, from behind him.
Blackstone turned around.
‘You were wrong to assume that I believe your father simply died,’ he told George.
‘But I thought you just said that he-’
‘He didn’t simply die at all. You murdered him.’
TWENTY-NINE
The four men walked slowly through the gardens which overlooked the ocean. They were not entirely alone. Posted at a discreet distance were several uniformed policemen. But the officers weren’t really necessary, Blackstone thought — because George wouldn’t try anything without Harold’s say-so, and Harold was too smart for that.
‘Do we have to go through this charade?’ George asked.
‘No, it’s entirely your choice,’ Blackstone told him. ‘If you’d prefer it, we can have the conversation in Coney Island police headquarters.’
‘Oh, get it with it, then,’ George said.
‘I intend to,’ Blackstone said, coming to a sudden halt. ‘It was roughly on this spot that I had my talk with Fanshawe, no more than an hour before he died. He’d come up to the room that you’d assigned us, to ask if we wanted anything to drink. Did you know that?’ He paused. ‘But of course you knew it — because one of you had sent him up there to be noticed.’
‘Perhaps, rather than that, one of us sent him up there to see if you were thirsty,’ Harold said.
But he didn’t say it as if he expected to be believed, because — unlike his brother — he already knew the game was lost.
‘You sent him so he could be noticed,’ Blackstone said firmly, ‘and so he could deliver the script which you had written for him — a script which you hoped would establish that you stood to gain nothing by your father’s death.’
‘So Big Bill’s still running the business?’ Blackstone asks, looking out over the ocean.
‘Not really,’ Fanshawe replies. ‘Mr George and Mr Harold make mo
st of the decisions since he signed the company over to-’
‘Since he signed the company over to them?’
‘For God’s sake, don’t tell anybody I told you, or I’ll lose my job.’
‘It must have been while Fanshawe and I were talking that you realized he had made a big mistake earlier that morning,’ Blackstone said to Harold.
‘Really? And what mistake might that have been?’
‘Fanshawe hadn’t taken a breakfast tray down to the bunker — which meant he already knew, before he even got there, what he would find. If you could spot that mistake, the chances were that I would too, and Fanshawe suddenly stopped being a valuable asset and became a very dangerous liability. He had to die, so George — I assume it was George — lured him into the woods, half strangled him, and then hung him from the tree.’
‘So now it’s not our father you’re accusing us of killing, it’s our butler,’ George said.
‘I’m accusing you of killing both of them,’ Blackstone replied. ‘And those two murders are just a start.’ He lit up a cigarette. ‘I think we’ll go down to the bunker, next.’
‘I. . I don’t want to go down to the bunker,’ George gasped, in a half-strangled tone.
‘For God’s sake, George, be a man for once!’ Harold said.
There was very little room for four men to stand in the small guard room, but though George and Harold seemed uncomfortable about rubbing shoulders with the others, Blackstone himself appeared to be perfectly at ease.
‘I can’t tell you exactly what happened that night, but I think I can give you a rough outline,’ Blackstone said.
The guards have been told to expect two visitors — the first visitors, apart from his ladies, that Mr Holt has ever had — but when they arrive, it is a shock, because they look like such rough types that it is hard to imagine Holt ever wishing to associate with them. But Fanshawe is there, and Fanshawe says these are the people Holt wants to see, so it must be all right.
‘Take them through into the boss’s suite,’ the butler says.
And that is strange, too, because neither of the guards has been inside the suite before.
They open the door, and step to one side to let the visitors enter first.
‘You lead the way,’ Fanshawe tells them.
The guards enter the suite. The boss is sitting behind his desk.
Up until this moment, they have only ever caught the occasional glance of him, when one of the Persons Permitted to Enter visited. Now, for the first time, they get a proper look at the man, and it occurs to both of them that he seems very unprepossessing for someone with so much power.
‘Stand in front of my desk,’ the boss says.
‘Us?’ one of the guards asks.
‘You,’ the boss replies.
The guards do as they’ve been ordered, and two seconds later they are gasping for breath as sharp knives slash across their throats.
The guards crumple to the ground.
‘You ready?’ one of the visitors asks the man behind the desk.
‘I’m ready.’
‘Then let’s get the hell out of here.’
They meet Fanshawe on the way out. He is carrying several suits — which clearly belong to a big man — over one arm. He enters the suite, steps around the dying guards, and walks into the bedroom. He opens the wardrobe and hangs up the suits, then removes a second set of suits — made for a much smaller man — which had been hanging there. By the time he returns to the study, the guards are already dead.
‘That about covers it, don’t you think?’ Blackstone asked.
‘And just who is this man behind my father’s desk supposed to have been?’ George asked.
‘Arthur Rudge, of course,’ Blackstone said.
‘But Rudge is-’ George began.
But when Blackstone held up his hand for silence, he obeyed.
‘Once you’d come up with your bunker idea, you had the problem of who to put in it — because there did have to be somebody there,’ Blackstone said. ‘And you had a second problem — who would actually run the company now your father was gone. The solution to the second problem was obvious — Arthur Rudge would do it. He was more than just the head bookkeeper — he was at least half of your father’s business brain. You admitted that yourselves — or, at least Harold did.’
‘If Father’s enemies were brave enough to murder someone as important to the company as Rudge-’ Harold says.
‘He wasn’t important to the company!’ George interrupts. ‘Hell, we’ve managed well enough without him, haven’t we?’
‘We’ve certainly managed,’ Harold agrees cautiously. ‘But it wasn’t that easy at first. We made mistakes which cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars — mistakes which we’d never have made if we’d had Rudge to advise us.’
‘There’s that clever trick again,’ Blackstone told Meade. ‘Just as they talked about Big Bill as if he was alive, when in fact he was dead, they talked about Rudge as if he was dead, when the truth was that he was very much alive.’
‘Rudge died in a fire in his apartment,’ George said. ‘Read the police report. They found his body in his bedroom.’
‘They found a body in the bedroom,’ Blackstone corrected him. ‘Or rather, since the fire had been so fierce, they found the dead man’s bones. And those bones, according to Dr Carr, who’s recently read the report, belonged to a much bigger man than Rudge.’ He paused again. ‘That, of course, would explain the two men with the armoire.’
‘What two men with the armoire?’ George asked.
‘On the day of the fire, two men arrived at Rudge’s apartment while he was still at work, carrying the armoire. Twenty minutes after he’d got back, they left again, taking the armoire with them. And what was in that armoire? When they arrived, it was your dead father. When they left, it was Rudge.’
‘Rudge did die in that fire in his apartment,’ George said stubbornly. ‘Your doctor’s wrong about the bones.’
‘I don’t imagine he was entirely happy with the idea of living underground, but you probably gave him no choice in the matter,’ Blackstone said. ‘However, you had to do something to make his life bearable, and that’s why you allowed him a visitor once a month — a visitor who Fanshawe brought from the Blue Light Club, and who Rudge asked to call him “Daddy”.’
‘Rudge’s parties were a positive disgrace,’ Mrs Fairbrother, the neighbour, says. ‘There were only women invited — sometimes half a dozen, sometimes even more. You’ll have noticed I said “women” and not “ladies”? That’s because that’s exactly what they were. Harlots! Painted Jezebels.’
They’d certainly been painted in the photographs that Mrs Fairbrother had shown him, Blackstone thought. And tall, too — tall enough to be men!
‘It was because of Rudge’s “lady” friends that the guards had to die, wasn’t it?’ he asked. ‘I imagine your original plan was just to drug them — that would certainly have been easy enough. But then you learned — perhaps through Fanshawe — that Joseph Turner knew all about the Blue Light Club on the Lower East Side.’
‘Turner had never met your father, so he didn’t know that Big Bill’s taste would never have run to “fairies”,’ Meade said. ‘But there was always the danger that he’d talk to someone else about it, and that that someone would draw the correct conclusion — which was that if the man in the bunker liked fairies, then that man could never have been William Holt.’
‘So Turner had to die,’ Blackstone continued. ‘There was simply no alternative. And by incorporating his murder into the kidnapping, you not only gave the killer a perfectly understandable motive for that murder, but you made the kidnapping seem much more real, too.’
A fatuous smile — half-relief, half-triumph — suddenly appeared on George’s face. ‘I’ve just found a big hole in your theory,’ he said.
‘Have you?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Indeed I have. According to you, we covered up our father’s death to safeguard the
value of our shares. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet we were prepared to fake a kidnapping, which was bound to have a similar effect. How do you explain that?’
‘You’ve had seven years to re-jig the company so that you could protect yourselves from a fall in share prices,’ Meade said. ‘You told us yourselves that you signed an agreement with another company the very day your “father” was “kidnapped”.’
‘But you’d have had to fake it even if it ruined you,’ Blackstone added. ‘You had no other choice — because your father was about to be subpoenaed by the grand jury, and there wasn’t any way of explaining why he couldn’t appear without implicating yourselves in his murder.’
George’s smile had already faded away into nothingness, but he made one last attempt to fight back.
‘If Rudge didn’t die in the fire, but lived here instead, where is he now?’ he asked.
‘He died in the woods outside this house, four days ago — just as you intended him to — and now he’s in the Coney Island mortuary,’ Meade said.
George looked thunderstruck.
‘You didn’t know we’d found the body, did you?’ Blackstone asked. ‘But your brother did. He realized quite a while ago that that was the only possible way we could know so much.’
They had returned to the parlour, but now, instead of occupying a sofa each, the two brothers had decided to sit side by side.
‘Your path has certainly been littered with bodies,’ Blackstone said, looking down at them. ‘Let me see if I can remember them all. There was Fanshawe and Rudge, Turner and Cody-’
‘Mad Bob and Jake the Snake,’ Meade interrupted.
‘Yes, it’s quite true that you hired a second set of killers to rub out your first set,’ Blackstone said to the brothers, ‘but we’ll never be able to prove that, and anyway, rubbing out Bob and the Snake was almost a public service — so you get a free pass on those two.’
‘How very kind of you,’ Harold said.
‘And now we come to the big one — the one that started everything,’ Blackstone continued. ‘I mean, of course, your father’s murder. Would you care to tell us about it?’
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