This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  Oliver assessed the effects of last night’s violence on his body—inflicted by supposedly friendly members of the police force, he noted. Had Effie taken a perverse pleasure in finding an excuse to flatten him on the grass? He’d certainly hoped to end the night spread out and exhausted because of her efforts, but under different circumstances.

  To be or not to be.

  That dream. It had been about the phantom fifth victim, the most and least likely killer—most likely, if he or she had just received that final blackmail letter; least likely because it was never sent. The Schrödinger’s Cat of suspects. Unless, for some peculiar reason, the addressee took it back to Breedlove’s cottage to wave in the face of the blackmailer, and in the excitement of the rash and bloody deed that followed, left it on the desk. Who would be that clumsy?

  The fifth victim was unique in another way: Oliver knew both the contents of the initial blackmail letter and the nursery rhyme that Breedlove had chosen as his private aide memoire. But where was the overlap? The letter spoke of history and plots and, notoriously, a family secret. But the rhyme was church, steeple, door, people. It seemed to indicate some involvement in church life, but the vicar was Jack and Jill, the sexton and organist were…well, could they still be Tweedledum and Tweedledee, despite Culpepper’s revelation?

  Breedlove was finicky, selecting only one new victim a year, like an Incan sacrifice. With the income from Doctor Peeper, he clearly didn’t need a victim this year—and yet he chose one. No doubt it was now a ritual, a game, a foolish celebration of a little old man’s power over his sinning neighbors, an old man being twice a child. How many wheedling tête-à-têtes with unsuspecting villagers would it take for him to pinpoint a suitable target for that dubious annual honor, now chosen for sheer sport? Even dim-witted Cat Bennet had fallen under Uncle Dennis’s spell.

  Ah, maybe those references to “history” and “family” had something to do with the Bennet fortune, supposedly flowing from their grandfather’s groundbreaking laxative. Or did Cat blab about the hoped-for blue-blood betrothal for Lucinda, officially a virgin? Breedlove knew better, and he knew whom to target. Frailty, thy name is Wendy.

  So was “hiding your history” a reference to removing an activity record from a web browser? Was Luce the “little family secret”? Did the nursery rhyme’s “Open the doors and see all the people” refer to that society wedding?

  But then was it worth slaying the lucrative bird in the hand of Doctor Peeper for the two in the Bennets’ bush? Probably not. The Mormal was right—making Dennis a partner in porn was a stroke of genius.

  Tobe or not tobe.

  Cat wasn’t the only person at the Bennets’ dinner table reporting heart-to-hearts with sweet old Uncle Dennis. Finsbury hadn’t lied in his limerick: Oliver was secretly worried that that this year’s target was his own little brother.

  Admittedly, the letter referred to something that had happened in the past, and Toby wasn’t old enough to have a past. He said that he and Breedlove had discussed Shakespeare. But had he unwittingly passed on tidbits about the rest of his family—about his parents, those regular churchgoers who might well fit the last nursery rhyme? Oliver was unaware of any Swithin family secrets, although he knew little enough about his father’s military service. Or would “family” include an uncle by marriage, opening up the long career of Detective Superintendent Timothy Mallard to some scrutiny? The blackmail letter’s “blessed plot,” the little family secret that might be revealed by digging up the past…was that why Chloe had clammed up? To protect the brigadier or Uncle Tim?

  Toby or not Toby?

  That was the question.

  And if, as Oliver hoped, the answer was that his brother was innocent, why was Toby so obviously lying about his thesis?

  Oliver swung himself out of bed and dressed as quickly as he could, using his time-honored method of brushing his hair by pulling on a sweatshirt.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Susie and Geoffrey were sitting close together at the counter, feeding each other muesli from the same bowl and giggling with every mouthful. Oliver filled his mug at the coffeemaker.

  “We have something to tell you, Ollie,” said Geoffrey, with a smirk.

  “Do your worst.”

  “Susie and I have, uh, buried the hatchet.”

  “The hell you say,” Oliver replied, sipping his coffee. He saw the self-conscious amusement in Susie’s dark-brown eyes.

  “I’m sorry if we disturbed you last night, Ollie,” she said.

  “Think nothing of it,” Oliver said, with a gallant gesture. He picked up the morning newspaper and scanned the headlines.

  “Does that mean you heard something?” asked Geoffrey.

  “Every squeak and gibber.”

  “I say, being overheard, that makes it all a bit embarrassing,” Geoffrey remarked, not entirely convincingly. “But it does remind me of a joke I could use in my next performance. Did you hear the one about the—oh, let me get this right—the dyslexic…agnostic…insomniac? He used to lie awake at night, wondering if there was a God.”

  “Dog,” Oliver murmured, not looking up from the paper.

  “What?”

  “Dog, not God. He’s dyslexic.”

  “Dog,” repeated Geoffrey. He kissed Susie tenderly and stood up, without letting go of her hand. “Darling Susie, I need to use the bathroom. This is the first time in twelve hours we’ll have been apart.”

  “I’ll be waiting, sweetie,” said Susie, ignoring Oliver’s mime of incipient nausea behind Geoffrey’s back. Geoffrey reversed out of the room and blew her a kiss at the door. Oliver dropped the newspaper.

  “So what’s it all about, Susie?” he asked.

  Susie wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Geoffrey came to my room last night to apologize. He said all the right things and, well, one thing led to another.”

  “And another and another and another.”

  She laughed. “I’ve always said that Geoffrey was fucking hopeless. But not vice versa, as it turns out.”

  Oliver gulped some more coffee. “So do you think you’ll become an item?” he asked, slightly warily. He had just remembered that Geoffrey’s room was directly above his in the Holland Park house they shared with Susie and Ben. Maybe those floors were thicker.

  “It has a certain rightness to it. But it’s also odd, our being best friends already. I know I have a reputation for kissing more than my fair share of frogs, but what if your Prince Charming is already in your life?”

  “Are you implying that Geoffrey is not the amphibian he so closely resembles?”

  “Why do we do that, Ollie?” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Why do we let Love’s blind, meretricious chemicals fool us into believing that strangers may be soul mates, when surely friendship is the better guide? I never thought of Geoffrey ‘that way’ before. But this morning, I woke up outrageously happy. All trembly and heart-thumpy and fixated.”

  “And off your food?”

  “Let’s not get carried away.”

  “Well, I wish you the best. But I don’t recall your ever describing Geoffrey as your best friend. In fact, you’ve tended to imply that you loathe him.”

  Susie shrugged. “Hate and love. They’re often the same thing, aren’t they?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there’s always an element of competitiveness in relationships, isn’t there?”

  “No.”

  “No? You ask Effie if she agrees. And don’t be so judgmental about my love life,” she added, flicking at him with her napkin. “You had your chance with me.”

  “When?”

  “When we were at Oxford. You were three sheets to the wind in your college buttery, and you said you wanted to make love to me very badly. Because I thought you probably would, I demurred.”

  They heard rapid steps on the stairs. Geoffrey slipped
into the room again and reclaimed his place beside Susie.

  “Miss me, darling?” he asked.

  “Not in the slightest,” Oliver answered quickly. “Have either of you seen Toby?”

  “He left for Stratford about ten minutes before you came down,” Geoffrey informed him. “One of his college friends picked him up.”

  “Eric Mormal hasn’t forgiven him, then?”

  “Apparently, Eric’s taken to his bed since you decked him yesterday,” reported Susie.

  “Blast. I really need to talk to Toby. And Effie’s not here to drive me.”

  “Geoff and I were going to Stratford this morning for a little sightseeing. We can take you. Can you be ready in about a quarter of an hour?” Geoffrey whispered something into her ear. “Actually, make that forty-five minutes,” she added, as they both hurried from the room.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Saturday morning (continued)

  A hundred yards beyond the Jacobean hulk of Furbelow Hall, a gap in the drystone wall, marked for some reason by a pile of earth, gave access to a small lane, shaded by dark Scots pines, which led to the back of the manor house. Mallard eased his Jaguar onto a rough gravel parking area. Tire tracks showed that other vehicles had used the space recently.

  The Hall’s rear entrance was at the end of one of its long projecting wings. Effie reached for a bell-pull, but Mallard stopped her.

  “Let’s not be in too much of a hurry to announce ourselves,” he said, with a brief grin.

  It was a hint of their usual working relationship, and it made her want to sing. Mallard pushed at the door, and they stepped into a small entrance hall and listened. Not a mouse stirring. They set off cautiously down the long, dim corridor, occasionally shining a flashlight into empty side rooms. The corridor was oak-paneled, but bare of the paintings, stuffed deer heads, and sentinel suits of armor often found in period houses. Its flagstones were uncarpeted.

  They reached the crosspiece of the house’s H-shaped plan, the corner where Effie thought she’d glimpsed a man during her earlier visit. They turned left, past the closed door to the room where she’d conducted her interview with the Vampire of Synne, and through the heavy curtain that brought them into the main entrance hall.

  “Mr. Snopp!” Effie called, following Mallard’s nod. There was no answer. She took a few steps across the checkerboard tiles and called again. Mallard stepped back into the shadows. They could hear hasty footsteps from the upper floor. Then, slightly breathless, the cowled figure of a monk seemed to materialize on the landing high above their heads. He made no attempt to descend the stairs.

  “Who is it that disturbs my tranquil and solitary life?” Snopp intoned, in his odd, richly layered voice. As before, his hands were pushed into the opposite sleeve openings, creating the impression of a single arm that looped from shoulder to shoulder.

  “It’s Detective Sergeant Strongitharm, Mr. Snopp.”

  “Of course,” Snopp replied. He paused, like an actor unsure of his lines. “You choose an odd hour to visit a nocturnal wanderer. And this time, you come unannounced.”

  The reproof was clear. The vampire still held his position at the top of the stairs, upright but a little fidgety, hood low over his face, so none of his disfigured skin could be seen.

  “I apologize for that, sir, but I have a few additional questions about the Breedlove case. Just routine you understand.”

  Again, a long pause. Snopp seemed to be weighing the situation. “It shall be so,” he said at last. “Pray find your way to the same chamber in which we held our brief conference on Thursday. I will join you in a matter of a few moments.”

  The hooded head turned to one side. “And yet I see you are not alone, my dear,” he crooned. “Who is it that hovers in the shadows beyond? Kind sir, will you come forward and declare yourself, that we may embark in a true spirit of forthrightness and candor?”

  Mallard took a couple of steps across the tiles and stood beside Effie, looking up at Snopp.

  “Hello, Reg,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”

  The Vampire of Synne threw back the hood to reveal a beaming, middle-aged face, without a trace of a scar. “Mr. Mallard!” he cried, in a strong west-London accent. He spread his arms, the loose sleeves of the robe waving like brown wings. “I’m undead.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Saturday morning (continued)

  Oliver found his brother once again among the tourists in the chancel of Holy Trinity, gazing at the Shakespeare burial site with its doggerel curse.

  “Will’s will,” he said in Toby’s ear.

  “Will’s will’s what?” Toby seemed sleepy and irritable. His clothes were muddy from the dig, and he pulled awkwardly on the oversized cricket sweater he insisted on wearing despite the warm weather.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Oliver went on in a low voice. “The last will and testament of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, which you brought up the other day. It mentions a famous second-best bed and quite a lot of other things. Including the crucial evidence that links Stratford Will to London Will. Evidence that you claim doesn’t exist.”

  “Go on.”

  “London Will had three great friends, his lead actor Richard Burbage and the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who assembled the First Folio of his plays after his death.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re mentioned in Stratford Will’s will!” Oliver’s voice echoed off the stone walls. A group of Japanese tourists looked at him with curiosity. He continued quietly. “He left them each twenty-six shillings to buy memorial rings. You must have known that. It completely undermines your thesis that there’s nothing to connect Stratford Will to the London playwright.”

  “Contrariwise, it’s a key piece of evidence that supports it.”

  “Explain.”

  “That bequest was written into the will between the lines, in a different handwriting and at a later date. It wasn’t initialed by Stratford Will or by the witnesses, which was the usual practice. As you say, these were London Will’s greatest friends—the actor who first played Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Richard III, and two men who devoted themselves to preserving his Complete Works for posterity. And they’re merely an afterthought, in a will made just a month before Shakespeare’s death? Isn’t it more likely that this is yet another clumsy postmortem attempt to dress the upstart Stratford Will in London Will’s feathers?”

  Oliver could not resist a glance up at the memorial on the wall. The polychrome effigy of Shakespeare, quill in hand, gazed into the mid-distance.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” Toby added. “The will has another late bequest. Hamnet Sadler’s name was written in, replacing the name of another man. Now, this Sadler was a friend of Stratford Will’s parents. Will had known him all his life and even named his only son after him. Sadler was also a witness to the will. So you’d think Will, of all people, would know how to spell the name Hamnet. But in the addition to the will’s text, it’s written as ‘Hamlet.’ Rather a crude and, if I may say, obvious attempt to forge a connection to the playwright.”

  “Yes, but in that First Folio of London Will’s plays, there’s a poem by Leonard Digges. It mentions this memorial, to Stratford Will.” Oliver pointed to the effigy. “Doesn’t that prove that Heminges and Condell knew the author of the plays came from Stratford?”

  Toby laughed softly. “No, the only question is what did Heminges and Condell know and when did they know it. Digges, interestingly, was the stepson of one of the will’s overseers.”

  “Are you suggesting they were all part of the conspiracy to elevate Stratford Will?”

  “Maybe it suited their purposes, for some unknown reason.”

  “Careful, you’re getting perilously close to my Alan Smithee theory.”

  “As if I wouldn’t remember th
at London Will was real enough to be a Groom of the Chamber to King James,” Toby snorted. “Along with Burbage, Heminges, and Condell, incidentally.”

  Oliver gazed down at the tomb. A rope barrier swagged across the chancel a foot or so in front of the altar rail. Toby’s shoulder bag was slumped against a brass pole at one end.

  “Why didn’t you mention the suspicious amendments to the will at the dinner party?” he asked.

  “What am I guilty of now—précis? You remember the audience that night. Most of them couldn’t follow your little essay on bananas.”

  “Did you discuss these issues with Dennis Breedlove?” Oliver continued, hoping to make the transition sound casual.

  “Yes. He didn’t keep interrupting the way you do.”

  “When you had these chats, did Dennis ever ask you anything about the family? Mother, the brigadier, Uncle Tim, or Aunt Phoebe? Even me?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Olivia, but I don’t remember your name coming up. Nor any other relative.”

  “So Breedlove didn’t get you to admit something that, in retrospect, you wished you’d kept quiet?”

  “Nothing that he’d blackmail me for, since that’s clearly where you’re going with this.”

  “But there was something he got out of you?”

  Toby glanced around the chancel. There were no tourists within earshot, apart from an old, balding man with his back to them, who was studying the choir stalls. Toby didn’t seem to notice him.