This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  “Then why were your welcoming words to me lifted straight from Dracula? The book, not the old movie.”

  Snopp’s face was immobile, and Effie could guess that his unseen eyes under the shadowy hood were looking intently at her. Then the mouth smiled again.

  “Why? Affectation, my dear. Forgive me for underestimating you. Now if we are finished, even this amount of light may cause skin damage if I tolerate it for too long.” He stood up and blew out the candle, a wraith of white smoke barely visible in the darkened room. Effie stiffened, wondering if some form of attack was to follow in the darkness, the recluse clearly having better night vision. But there was only that voice, odd and strangely familiar, as if his words were the expressions of thoughts he’d had much earlier.

  “If you’ll follow me,” he invited.

  He had turned to go. She stayed in her seat.

  “Was Dennis Breedlove blackmailing you because he knew you didn’t really suffer from XP?” she asked.

  There was silence, then the sepulchral voice again. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Is that a denial?”

  “Not at all. I merely wanted to know how you found out.”

  He strode to the door and turned on the light switch. The sudden glare of a candelabrum above Effie’s head dazzled her dark-adapted eye, and her reflexes prepared her again for a sudden opportunistic assault from Snopp. But he stayed with his back turned to her, his body entirely hidden by the black monk’s habit, those white hands now swathed in the long, wide sleeves.

  “For a start, you have no marks of the disease on your hands,” she said, “not even freckles, and yet the hands get more sun exposure than most body parts. But mainly, you wear an expensive watch—the kind that is hardly likely to be luminous or have a bulb inside. Not much use for a man who needs to live in permanent darkness.”

  Snopp laughed, still without turning round. “Excellent. It took several evening strolls with Dennis before he reached the same conclusion. That was not long after I arrived in Synne. Strange that the first man I befriended in my lonely life was a real blood-sucker, while I was merely a mock one.”

  “Why the pretense though? I assume, despite what you said earlier, that you do, in fact, cultivate the Dracula persona?”

  “It fits with the impression I wish to give, that I do suffer from that heartbreaking medical condition.”

  “But why? Why choose to live this way if you don’t need to?” Effie looked around the illuminated room—it was spacious in the possession of dirt, the dust thick on every surface, and she was sure she’d walked through a cobweb on the way in. She’d need to shower again when she arrived back at the Swithins’ house.

  “Now there, Dennis was ahead of you, my dear,” Snopp answered. “He not only knew what I didn’t have. He knew what I did have, and why I still choose isolation. Not the isolation of darkness, perhaps, but the isolation of loneliness. You see, a case of XP and a few mysterious but rather romantic habits may do no more than raise an eyebrow in such a place as Synne.” He lifted the hood from his face, slid his bent hands back into the opposite sleeves, and turned to Effie. “But my new neighbors may not be so tolerant if they discovered that in their midst, they had a leper.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Thursday afternoon (continued)

  There was a time when every English schoolboy knew that William Shakespeare—the Stratford one, anyway—died on his birthday, April 23, fittingly the feast day of St. George, patron saint of England. But every English schoolboy could well have been wrong: Holy Trinity’s register shows only Will’s baptism, on April 26, 1564, and his burial on April 25, 1616. Those patriotic birth- and death-dates are wishful guesswork, examples of the gaps in the record that frustrate researchers like Toby Swithin.

  No danger of such vagueness in the present day, when we post, text, blog, tweet, like, poke, and generally Facebook our way through our daily lives in a rhapsody of words, most of them spelled incorrectly. Andy Warhol famously said that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes; with the New Narration of social networking, Oliver had heard—and wished he’d said first—that instead, everyone will be famous to fifteen other people.

  Sitting on a bench on the village green with a dog-eared gazetteer, a list of neighbors’ names extracted from Hartley Vavasoeur, and his laptop connected to the nearby pub’s Wi-Fi, Oliver had spent a productive hour or two investigating some of the newer villagers who’d left their smutty fingerprints all over the Internet. The children’s book publisher (not Oliver’s) who visited Thailand at least three times a year. The human resources director whose expense claim for his cat’s aromatherapy had been featured in Private Eye. The theater composer whose Barbican bedroom was rumored to be made entirely of black leather. The sexagenarian MP for Pigsneye, whose overpaid, nubile research assistants were reported to have bust sizes that rivaled their IQs. Admittedly, all this was already in the public arena. But was it merely the tip of an iceberg of sin? We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

  Damn it, why did Oliver still care about the old so-and-so’s death? The one victim he and Effie had identified so far had fallen into their lap—perhaps literally, if Oliver had stepped into that room in the vicarage. Maybe the police were right, let just desserts be eaten.

  He picked up a pair of binoculars, which he’d stolen from Toby’s window ledge, and trained them on the Weguelins’ house on the main road, where half an hour earlier he’d watched Lesbia return home after a brief visit to the post office. All he could see now was the small, elderly man he’d noticed while waiting for Breedlove’s funeral to begin two days earlier. The man seemed to be looking back at him, so he hastily switched direction. The sudden magnified image of Effie, approaching from the house, almost provoked a coronary.

  She’d clearly showered and changed since her return from the vampire’s lair; some drips of water were still clinging to the ends of her damp hair, and her bare arms and shoulders had that freshly bathed aura. Her feet were also bare, and she walked toward him in the sunlight with a gentle smile, uncaring that the grass might make them dirty again. How like an angel. If her thin-strapped cotton dress wasn’t the only article of clothing she was wearing, it was unmistakably one of only two. It was another top-ten erotic moment, the second in the same day, and it easily displaced the current tenth-place memory of his college girlfriend, Lorena Random, peeling carrots in her underwear and hiking boots.

  “I found Twinkle,” she said, after he’d kissed her as boldly as he dared for the location.

  “Huh?”

  “I found the Twinkle Twinkle victim. The Vampire of Synne was certainly a sucker, but he was also one of Breedlove’s donors.”

  It took Oliver a second or two to register the news. Then he hugged her again. Back on track! Two victims pinpointed in two days, Sidney and Lesbia almost in the bag, and only halfway toward the Saturday deadline! And the interim is mine.

  “They call it Hansen’s Disease now,” he said after she had briefed him on her meeting with Snopp. “Nobody’s really sure if it’s the same leprosy mentioned in the Bible. But it’s treatable. Why was Snopp so badly affected?”

  “It was a perfect storm of bad luck. Only one person in twenty is susceptible, but he’s one of them. He thinks he picked up the infection when he was working in Africa, but he was late seeking treatment, and then the condition was misdiagnosed. By the time the appropriate medicines were given, he’d suffered permanent disfigurement to his face. He’s as pale as his shirt, and there’s considerable scarring.”

  “But not on his hands, as you’d have expected with XP.”

  “Yes, but in this part of our bat-and-mouse game, he was one jump ahead of me. I didn’t notice until the lights came up that he was wearing white surgical gloves. Mind you, a melanoma or even a batch of freckles would still have shown through the latex.”

  “Why the gloves?”

&n
bsp; “He’s beginning to lose sensation in his fingers. The gloves offer him some mild defense from an accidental scrape or scalding, which he might not notice because he wouldn’t feel the pain.”

  The shadow of the memorial obelisk was creeping toward them across the grass. Effie shivered slightly, a reminder that English spring was not yet English summer.

  “Dr. McCaw will be disappointed, though,” Oliver commented, gathering his equipment. “This is one blackmail situation with no hot love on the wing. But why does Snopp choose to live in extreme isolation? Admittedly, the words ‘leper’ and ‘leprosy’ can still startle us, just like the word ‘plague,’ but society has moved on from the days when he’d have to tinkle a bell and yell out ‘unclean!’” A new idea struck him. “Ah, tinkle. Sounds like Twinkle. Could that be the connection to the verse? Although it’s more likely to be that sentiment in the second line: ‘How I wonder what you are!’ But that could apply to anyone.”

  Effie had already strewn the mental breadcrumbs so that she could find her way back to Oliver’s original question.

  “Right or wrong, Mr. Snopp is unshakably self-conscious about the stigma. And, despite what he says, I think he rather enjoys the Nosferatu alter ego.”

  “Could he have killed Dennis Breedlove? Could he have carried that little man up to the Synne Oak and dropped him into the noose?”

  “I think so. He seems fit enough. It doesn’t mean he did.”

  “Let’s go indoors and have a cup of tea before our guests arrive.” Oliver glanced across the street. The elderly man was still there, peering into the window of Hartley’s tearoom.

  “I know I’ve seen him before,” Oliver murmured.

  “Who?”

  “Tea!” he exclaimed.

  “Yes,” replied Effie, with exaggerated patience, “we’re going indoors to have tea, don’t worry.” She’d noticed he referred to the Swithin house as “indoors.” He never called it home.

  “No, it’s the twinkling of the tea,” he said. “The Mad Tea Party. Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Hatter’s song at the concert for the King and Queen of Hearts—that parody of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’”

  “Go on.”

  “It goes ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, how I wonder what you’re at!’ Bat! Like you said. Fits the Vampire of Synne perfectly!”

  Effie absorbed the information. “So should we be looking for famous parodies of the other rhymes?” she asked. “Is there a variant of Jack and Jill that applies to a bunch of pope-pleasers in a rectory? ‘Jack and Jill required a thrill…’”

  “I don’t know. But it proves that the rhymes can connect to the blackmail victims. At least in this case.”

  Breadcrumbs, thought Effie. “Who did you say you’d seen before?” she asked again, as they walked to the house. Oliver looked around, but the man had gone.

  “He was standing across the street. Seemed familiar.”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  Oliver shrugged. “It’s probably nobody.”

  ***

  The man who had been studying Oliver in the reflection of Hartley’s window had slipped into the tearoom. As he stood by the door, unsure if he should sit at one of the empty tables or go on waiting for his host to notice him beside the potted ficus, he was asking himself a similar question: where had he seen Oliver before?

  He would have been astonished to find out that it was a similar question. Underwood Tooth had long ago assumed that nobody ever remembered meeting him. That’s because Underwood was the world’s leading expert on being ignored.

  Or used to be.

  Underwood had no idea that he had superpowers. Throughout his sixty-seven years, he had assumed that everyone spent hours of their day on hold, on line, on order, on the sidelines. (But always on time: Underwood was never late for a disappointment.) He was quite unaware that he possessed a unique combination of inoffensiveness, timidity, and drabness that rendered him virtually invisible. Like a gray ghost, he drifted through the spaces between people, blindly bumped into and unrepentantly trodden on, never advancing from the back of the queue, never getting through to a live operator, never catching a bartender’s eye. Underwood might have been the patron saint of waiting rooms.

  But then, just three months earlier, his life changed forever. He opened an Internet account.

  He would never forget that extraordinary morning when he’d logged on to check the weather, and a wondrous strange male voice from his computer said those three little words he’d longed all his life to hear: “You’ve Got Mail.” He opened his mailbox to see a message from a Pertinence Q. Sanctimony offering him a free sample of Viagra. “No thank you,” he typed back. But the next day, Pertinence had returned, making the same generous offer (judging by her name, from a Quaker pharmacy).

  Underwood had never been badgered before in his life; he found it refreshing. He began to answer every piece of junk mail, usually with a polite no, although he was a little firmer at declining the racier enticements from young ladies in former Iron Curtain countries—not so much for the services they sportingly offered, but for the spelling. He wondered for many hours what made a girl “sluty,” and he eventually gave up on the phrase “skank hos,” although he guessed that it was Lithuanian for “thank you.”

  Emboldened, Underwood moved on to newsgroups, those bulletin boards for enthusiasts of every complexion, especially blushing. It is common for the younger sort to lack discretion, he reflected. But he found a literary group devoted to Robert Browning, his favorite poet, and lurked for many days, watching with fascination as the threads of conversations cascaded down the screen and invariably deteriorated into pseudonymous name-calling and inane, long-distance threats of physical violence. And then some cheeky wag mentioned he’d like to see a nude picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Another poster had replied “me too.” Underwood was suddenly struck by what he thought was an original and witty response. Tentatively, he typed “me three” and hit the reply button. Fifteen people flamed him within the hour. He responded to each of them, analyzing each insult and explaining why it applied more to the writer than to himself. And so, immune to identity theft, “UTooth” gradually become an online presence, bold and witty, his quips quoted and requoted across the Usenet.

  Underwood assumed that this newborn fame was what had attracted the email from a mysterious organization known only by its initials “P.S.” It didn’t seem like spam or a scam, and it mentioned his full name, spelled correctly, which is more than his credit card company had ever managed. He was sufficiently intrigued to attend the meeting, in a McDonald’s near Finchley Central Underground station, where he first encountered the massive, white-haired monk, morosely eating a Quarter Pounder. He seemed to have trouble sitting comfortably.

  “Are you familiar with sin?” the pale-skinned man had seemed to demand, in a thick French accent. A quailing Underwood had just begun to confess the time he’d accidentally Googled the word “erotica” when he was looking up Beethoven’s third symphony, when the monk interrupted him.

  “I speak of Synne, a small village in your War-wick-shire,” he said, crossing his legs with a wince. Underwood had to admit that he had never heard of the place.

  “This is to the good,” the monk continued, nodding. “For it is better that Synne is not so, how you say, notorious.” The man leaned forward across the table and lowered his voice. “I represent an ancient society, the Priory of Synne. We are guardians of a great truth, an unbroken line of servants to an ancient secret. The Secret of…Synne.” He burped. Underwood held his breath—and not just because of the wafts of garlic—spellbound and only slightly conscious that staring back into the bulky monk’s purplish eyes was like being menaced by a large white rabbit.

  “And we have chosen you, uh…” The monk paused, consulted a small notebook, and continued. “We have chosen you, Underwood Tooth, to joi
n our brotherhood.”

  It was a pivotal moment for Underwood, diminished a little by hearing his name pronounced “Toot.” He listened to the tale of a secret society that had been founded at the time of Shakespeare to protect an astounding fact about the insignificant Cotswold village, sustaining the community through the centuries and providing clandestine funding at times when its inhabitants might have abandoned it in search of better prospects in the towns and cities. He learned that he was to become one of only four Grand Masters of the order: the monk and another man in France and two men in England, only one of whom ever lived in Synne.

  “Do you accept this ’oly task, Underwood Tooth?” the monk asked, squirming again on the plastic bench. Underwood agreed and inquired meekly after his companion’s comfort.

  “It is nothing,” the monk boomed. “My cilice is particularly mortifying this morning, that is all. You will hear from us only when it is required.”

  He rose awkwardly. Underwood asked when he would learn the secret, and the monk slapped a hand to his broad forehead. “Mon dieu, I’d forget my name if I hadn’t carved it into the living flesh of my torso as a penance for existing,” he muttered and handed Underwood an envelope. Then he left, forgetting to clean up the table.

  Underwood was surprised when, only a few weeks after his accession to the P.S., he received a call from the other Grand Master in Rennes-le-Chateau, who informed him that the long-serving G.M. in Synne, a man called Dennis Breedlove, had died. Underwood’s task was to go to Synne and find a replacement. Underwood had little idea how to choose a suitable Grand Master from a village of strangers. Yet once again, his anonymity became his strength, because he found that he could sit unserved and unobserved in tearooms and coffee shops and pubs, soaking up the imprudent remarks and gossip until he felt he knew them all—certainly well enough to exclude that shameless vicar as a candidate for a post of the highest discretion.