This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  “Not the only thing that didn’t happen last night,” grumbled Oliver.

  Geoffrey passed over a second paper bag, and Effie withdrew the headphones. “There are several of his hairs stuck in the adjustable sidepieces,” he reported.

  “As long as I get the root.” Effie carefully detached the hairs with a pair of tweezers and dropped them into another paper bag. “Okay, I’ll get them to the lab, in case the fingerprints aren’t good enough. We can compare the DNA in these hairs with the attacker’s blood. Ollie managed to keep a sample of it isolated from his own blood.”

  “How long’s that going to take?” Oliver asked.

  “Normally, several days. But I know a young man in the Birmingham crime lab who’ll do anything for me. We can get the beginnings of a PCR test going in a few hours, and he can probably give me some preliminary results tomorrow. If Sidney isn’t the attacker, we’ll know immediately. If he is, it’ll take a bit longer to get incontrovertible proof.” She collected the paper bags. “I’m going to put on a short skirt, and drive to Birmingham. An hour to get there, an hour letting young Tyler gaze at my hair across a café table, an hour driving back—I should be home again mid-afternoon. I’ll get Tyler to goose up the prints on the CD at the same time.”

  “I’ll keep you company, Effie,” said Susie, following her to the door. “But should I change for Tyler, too? Do these jeans make me look fat?”

  “They don’t need to,” Geoffrey murmured, although Oliver noted that he’d waited for the door to close before making the comment. “Okay, Ollie, where does it hurt?”

  “I took a couple of big punches to the side of the head, and my ear’s still ringing a little. Oh no, wait—that’s your voice. Otherwise, the soreness is evenly spread all over, like butter.”

  “You spread butter on your body?”

  “No, like butter on a slice of bread. I drew my metaphor from sandwich-making. Who spreads butter all over their bodies?”

  Geoffrey was silent, thinking of a forfeit at his PR agency’s Christmas party a couple of years earlier. The front door opened and closed. Oliver pulled off the throw and ran to the window, in time to see Effie’s car reach the main road and turn right.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s go for a walk.”

  ***

  Half an hour later, they were sitting on a stile on a small rise behind Furbelow Hall. The view wasn’t as expansive as the three-county panorama that could be enjoyed from the Shakespeare Race, but they could see much of the village, straggling away along the single main road, with the pale green Common shimmering on the horizon beyond it. The squat tower of the church poked above the tree line. The field in front of them, like most open land in the area, had been left to pasture, and although only a few bemused sheep could ever be seen around the village, the grass was always mown when it reached knee-level. The economics of farming always puzzled Oliver, but Synne farming—or the absence of it—required its own branch of the dismal science.

  “You seem pretty certain that your pummeling last night was the work of Sidney-slash-Lesbia,” Geoffrey commented, sucking a long stalk of grass. “He didn’t look tough enough to me. And as Susie said, there were no signs that he’d been in a fight. Or should I say she?”

  “He,” Oliver said flatly. The idea of striking a woman hard enough to potentially break her nose was not to be entertained.

  “Getting up in drag, though,” Geoffrey continued, “it seems a bit tame for blackmail.” He took a deep, satisfying breath of the clean air, enjoying the undiscovered country.

  “If Sidney Weguelin were just a transvestite, I doubt that it would be a big deal, not even in Synne. Especially not in Synne. But I’m convinced he’s one person pretending to be two, Sidney and Lesbia, and that makes all the difference. Whatever the reason, it’s exactly the kind of secret that Breedlove could wheedle out of him.”

  “What if the secret is that Sidney bumped off the original Lesbia and is now pretending to be her to cover up her disappearance?”

  “If Sidney were a murderer, Breedlove would have thought twice about blackmailing him. Kill once—”

  “Shame on you,” Geoffrey chimed in, exhibiting his habit of finishing other people’s sentence, usually inaccurately. Oliver glared at him.

  “I was going to say ‘kill once, and you can kill again.’”

  The midday sun was bright and warm. A car rolled along the main road below them, the only sound on the windless air.

  “So you have two victims formally identified, and Sidney and Lesbia as a third,” Geoffrey said. “Any other suspects?”

  Oliver reached into his pocket for a small notebook and squinted at his spidery handwriting. “I’ve done some modest research. There’s an actuary who moved into the old Forge. He used to be an accountant, but he found the work too exciting.”

  “That’s an old joke.”

  “No, he was an accountant for Hezbollah. And there are a couple of other prospects worth sniffing around. But my best bet is the local MP, who lives—”

  “In Synne. That’s funny.”

  “He lives in Pigsneye,” Oliver continued firmly, “but I suppose that’s in Breedlove’s catchment area.”

  “That reminds me. Didn’t you inveigle Ben Motley into some fancy dinner party in Pigsneye last week?”

  “Yes. Why? Was he complaining?”

  “Quite the reverse. Ben thought it was the funniest evening he’d spent in months. But he asked me to give you a message. Let’s see: ‘I told you Mormal’s arse looked familiar.’ Does that mean something? He wanted me to show you a website.”

  “Okay, we’ll check it out when we get back.”

  Oliver sat silently, watching a distant kestrel hook itself onto the air and wait, flapping, until the sudden abseil down the sky, swift as quicksilver, into the poppy-splashed grass far below. This time, the shrew or vole that had caused the infinitesimal quake of a stalk escaped. Watching birds was one of the few consolations of being away from his London home; he regretted it was still too early in the year to enjoy the spectacle of swallows reenacting low-level Star Wars dogfights over the Square.

  The black car he had noticed earlier had come back into view, parking behind the manor house. A figure emerged, dark and elongated through the heat haze, and went into the building.

  “So do we assume that last night’s show of violence was provided by the murderer?” Geoffrey asked. “If so, you got off more lightly than Uncle Dennis.”

  “The attacker told me to stay away, so it wasn’t one of the blackmail victims Effie and I have already identified. But he didn’t have to be the killer. It could have been someone who wants to keep his secret safe, now that Breedlove is dead, and has somehow heard about my interest in the case.”

  “So the attacker’s not necessarily the murderer, and the murderer’s not necessarily the attacker. Hardly worth your getting black and blue. What I don’t understand, though, is why any of Breedlove’s established victims would suddenly turn on him.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Then this year’s new victim still seems the obvious suspect. Are you sure he didn’t know he was about to be blackmailed?”

  “The letter was lying on Breedlove’s desk, presumably undelivered. It was folded, but hadn’t been put into an envelope yet.”

  “Did you find an envelope?”

  “No.”

  “Odd. People don’t generally fold letters until they have the envelope ready.”

  “Breedlove’s annotation in the nursery rhyme book said the letter was dispatched two days before he died. We assumed he’d got a bit ahead of himself, or had second thoughts. But it’s not as if the recipient is going to bring it back and deliberately leave it at the scene of the crime when he kills Dennis.”

  “Why not? You said the contents were pretty cryptic. You’re no closer to guessing who it was meant for,
are you? Does it work for Sidney?”

  Oliver shook his head. “Sidney and Lesbia’s situation doesn’t fit the letter or the new victim’s nursery rhyme, ‘Here’s the church, here’s the steeple.’ On the other hand, that rhyme works perfectly for the vicar—‘open the door, see all the people.’ But going by the timing, the Reverend Mr. Edwards should be ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill.’ Only it doesn’t work.”

  “Sure it does,” said Geoffrey absently.

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what those groups are called.” Geoffrey looked at his friend with surprise. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “Didn’t I know what, damn it?”

  “Oh. Well, when men and women get together to, uh, air their differences, it’s known as a Jack and Jill club.”

  Oliver stared at his friend for a moment. Then he slipped down from the stile and performed a brief jig, before he remembered that it would cause him pain. He limped back.

  “Oh my God, it works!” he cried. “It works! Geoffrey Angelwine, you’re a pervert and a genius.”

  Geoffrey smiled, happy to see his friend happy. “Oh, not really a genius,” he disclaimed.

  “No, not really.” Oliver searched in his pockets. “I should call Effie, but I’ve left my phone at the house. Let’s go back. I am too much in the sun, anyway. And we can look at that website of Ben’s.”

  ***

  “Double-you, double-you, double-you, dot doctor dash peeper—no spaces—dot com,” said Oliver, copying the URL from Geoffrey’s scribbled note into his laptop’s browser. A home page filled the screen, dotted with several thumbnail images of couples engaged in sexual activity.

  “You didn’t tell me it was a pornographic website,” Oliver complained to Geoffrey.

  “Did I hear you spell out Doctor-Peeper-dot-com?” asked Toby from his chair by the fireplace. He had been reading a book quietly when Oliver and Geoffrey ran into the sitting room and claimed a socket for the laptop. “You do know that’s Eric Mormal’s website, right?”

  “I didn’t, but I’m not surprised,” said Oliver, squinting at the pictures and clicking around the page. It always led to the same pop-up screen, demanding a password or a payment to a company called 740 Ventures, no doubt so that, unlike Doctor Peeper, it wouldn’t raise any blue flags when wives scrutinized their husband’s credit card bills. “What does he have on it?”

  “I have no idea,” said Toby. “Eric won’t tell me, and he said he won’t let me join. Not that I’d ever try. I mean, I know online porn is a multibillion dollar industry, but there’s so much free stuff out there, only an idiot would pay for something like Doctor Peeper.”

  “Yeah. Geoff, what’s your Doctor Peeper password?”

  Geoffrey leaned over the keyboard and sheepishly tapped a few keys. “It’s for research purposes,” he said.

  The screen changed, and an organized menu appeared on the left side of the page, while the remaining space became the frame for a video. Geoffrey clicked over a line of text saying “Most recent” and the blank frame snapped into life. Toby put his book aside and joined them.

  They were looking down on a bedroom from a high camera angle, which seemed fixed and unchanging. Most of the picture was the surface of a bed, but a bedside cabinet supporting a lamp and a television set on a low cupboard showed around the edges of the frame.

  “That looks like Eric’s bedroom,” said Toby, peering over Oliver’s shoulder.

  As the three men watched, a man and a woman came into the room and climbed onto the bed. Over several minutes, they removed each other’s clothes, pausing to pay attention to selected body parts as they were denuded. None of these actions involved looking up toward the ceiling—quite the reverse—and so their faces were never clearly picked up by the camera. But they looked young, the blond man much thinner and spottier than the dark-haired woman, and seemed to be enjoying the encounter. Eventually they were both naked, and in what is known as the missionary position.

  “I think that was the bum that Ben recognized,” Oliver said. “So I’m assuming our host here is Eric Mormal himself.”

  “Never mind Eric,” said Toby. “Look at the girl.”

  The dark-haired woman’s face could be clearly seen at last beside the back of Mormal’s bobbing head. There was no mistaking Davina Bennet. Oliver stopped the playback.

  “Is there an archive?” he asked Geoffrey, an idea dawning. Geoffrey mutely clicked on a link that listed dozens of other available videos, distinguished by their dates, which went back more than two years. Oliver selected one at random. The same overhead picture of Mormal’s bedroom came into life. This time, his visitor was blond, although the activities proceeded in much the same order. And this time, she was clearly Clarissa Bennet.

  “Cheeky bugger,” said Toby with a bitter laugh. “He’s recording every sexual encounter and charging people to watch them. What a world!”

  “But do his partners know their most intimate moments are being splashed all over cyberspace?” Oliver asked softly. “There doesn’t seem to be any awareness of the camera.”

  He stopped the video too late to ever forget what Clarissa’s naked body looked like beneath the Lanvin dress—an intrusive knowledge of blemishes and the uneasy truce between breasts and gravity.

  “How many girls are there, Geoffrey?” he asked.

  “Half a dozen. Ten at the most, maybe. The same ones keep coming back for more. Look, I thought it was a setup,” he continued. “I thought it was a professional series, using established porn actors. Only the gimmick was to act like it was a purely amateur affair, caught on a fixed hidden camera, in order to appeal to the voyeur in all of us. That’s why I showed it to Ben a couple of weeks ago, to see if he recognized any of the models.” He swallowed. “I didn’t know it was real. It looked too genuine to be real.”

  “Ben did say the Bennet girls seemed familiar to him,” Oliver said. “I guess it wasn’t from the pages of Tatler. Well, we have two Bennets out of five—do we dare complete the set?”

  He began to click through the archive methodically, fast-forwarding to the earliest point when the female’s face was in view and ending the playback as soon as she could be identified. All the Bennets, apart from the youngest, Lucinda, had given in to Mormal’s rough-trade charms, most of them frequently and appreciatively. There were also appearances by other girls, whom Toby recognized as old school-friends or workers on the cooperative farm in Pigsneye that employed Mormal during the day.

  “‘And pretty maids all in a row,’” Oliver quoted to himself. His mobile phone rang, displaying Effie’s number. He turned off the computer, giving him an abrupt reflection of his own features in the polished screen, flanked too closely by the mesmerized faces of Toby and Geoffrey.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Watching Internet porn with the guys.”

  “I wish you’d waited for me. But I never had you pegged for an enthusiast.”

  “I’m not. I didn’t see my first dirty movie until I was twenty. I was quite enjoying it until someone gave away the ending. But listen, I think I’ve found—”

  “No, you listen,” Effie interrupted. “I’m about to get into the car for the drive back. Sorry, Ollie, but I regret to inform you that your attacker last night was not Sidney Weguelin. The prints don’t match.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m afraid so. We don’t need to bother with that DNA test. So you’d better take care, my poppet. Because somebody else is out to get you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday afternoon

  Toby was leaving for the Stratford dig when Oliver hauled him into the sitting room.

  “Listen, Toblerone,” he whispered, “don’t mention what we saw on that website.”

  “If you’re trying to protect the good name of Les Bennettes, you’re shutting the stable doo
r a little late. Not that I’m comparing them to horses. Although…”

  “I mean don’t tell Eric we know about his foul practice. I don’t want him making himself scarce until Effie and I ask him a few questions.”

  Toby nodded. “You think Uncle Dennis found out about the girls’ being such, uh, good sports?”

  “It would explain something Eric said at dinner last week. When I mentioned that letter, he exclaimed, ‘He was being blackmailed?’ The emphasis sounded as if it contradicted something he already knew—that Dennis was himself a blackmailer.”

  “If Scotland Yard knew about you, Olivia, they’d surely snap you up. Oh wait—they do, and they haven’t.” Toby shifted the strap of his bulky shoulder bag. “So you want me to suppress all my loyalty to my childhood friend?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Oh, no trouble at all.” Toby grinned. “Serve the puffed and reckless libertine bloody well right. The only risk I can see here is Eric’s embarrassment, two words that have never appeared together in an English sentence before. Feigned obliviousness coming right up.”

  Not a stretch for you, Oliver thought with affection. “Why is Eric helping you at the excavation anyway?” he asked. “Didn’t you say it was only sifting through the topsoil?”

  Toby stepped across to the door and closed it. “Listen, Ollie, can you keep a secret?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway. We found something unexpected when we started to dig. There’s a hidden cellar beneath the foundations of the old house. That was a bit of a surprise, given the seepage problem on a river island. It needed baling out, and because there were only three us on the project at the time, I asked Eric if he could lend a hand. He’s stayed with us ever since.”

  “Did you find anything down there?”

  “No, after all that, it was empty. But the cellar was interesting in itself. There’s an odd sort of alcove in the wall, and if the house was older, I’d have said it was a priest hole, but it was only built a couple of centuries ago—certainly not from Shakespeare’s time. Probably meant for cold storage, from the days before refrigeration.”