This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  Toby was silent.

  “You tell everyone that you think Stratford Will is an irrelevance,” Oliver continued, “but you moon over his gravesite like a bereaved puppy. You tell us the island has no connection to Shakespeare, but you and nine other Oxford postgraduates take weeks out of the academic year to dig there.” He prodded Toby in the chest. “You know what I think?”

  “If I say ‘yes,’ you’re still going to tell me.”

  “I think this thesis of yours is really a big chunk of misdirection. Because you don’t want anyone to know what’s really going on at that dig.”

  “I already told you, we uncovered a Victorian cellar.”

  “That’s the half-truth you told me, to fob me off. And that’s what you claim you told Breedlove, but as you said, he wouldn’t resort to blackmail over something as trivial as that. And you were that fifth blackmail victim, Toby.”

  “I don’t have to stand here and listen to this!” shouted Toby, standing there and listening to it.

  “The fifth victim’s payments would have been logged beside a nursery rhyme about a church with a steeple,” Oliver said. “There’s no steeple on the Church of St. Edmund and St. Crispin in Synne. But look down the river—Holy Trinity, where you seem to live these days, has a steeple!”

  “That’s your proof?” Toby began to bluster, but Effie held up a forefinger.

  “I don’t think Oliver’s finished talking,” she said amiably, “largely on the grounds that Oliver’s never finished talking.”

  “Every time I’ve seen you recently,” Oliver went on, “you’ve been wearing that baggy cricket sweater, despite the weather. Yesterday morning, when you were leaving for Stratford, you were carrying your shoulder bag as if it contained something heavy. But when Eric gave me the bag later, it was empty. You’d taken something out of it and hidden it under your sweater before you went into the church, because all bags are searched at the chancel entrance. Something small but heavy that you wanted to keep secret.”

  “Oh, Toby, it’s not one of those ludicrous ghost-hunting devices, is it?” Effie asked.

  “I think it’s an RFID,” said Oliver. “A radio frequency identification device, souped up so that Toby’s position can be read over a short distance, even through walls and solid earth.”

  “But why does anyone need to keep track of Toby?” Effie wondered. “He always seems to be in the same place.”

  “It’s not Toby they want to pinpoint. It’s what he’s standing in front of.”

  Effie nodded slowly. “Shakespeare’s tomb.”

  “Think about the blackmail letter,” Oliver said. “The ‘whole blessed plot’ it mentions could refer to Shakespeare’s grave, using his own words. But it’s no longer ‘covered up forever,’ because somebody’s going to ‘dig up the past.’”

  Oliver moved in front of Toby, forcing him to make eye contact. “Your island may be ten minutes from the church on foot, but it’s less than a hundred yards away as the crow flies. Or the swan swims. Or should I say as the ‘old mole’ digs? Because that’s what you and your friends have really been doing for the past three weeks. That was no priest-hole or larder you found in the cellar of the old house. It was an old tunnel under the river. And you decided to explore it, guided in the darkness by your infernal machine.”

  He grabbed Toby’s shoulders. “‘Open the doors and see all the people,’” he quoted. “You’re trying to dig your way into Shakespeare’s grave!”

  Toby opened his mouth to speak, so Oliver and Effie were both caught off guard when he bolted instead, running away along the towpath toward the boat basin. They watched him hurtle across the footbridge that spanned the lock gates and disappear from view.

  “I was just getting interested,” said Effie. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Ollie dear, but weren’t you the one who said he couldn’t possibly have any secrets?”

  “He won’t go far.”

  They found Toby a few minutes later, sitting disconsolately on a low step in front of the Gower Memorial. He didn’t react as they sat quietly on either side of him.

  “He stopped, Ollie,” Toby said at last, with a backward nod toward the figure of Shakespeare, seated high on the plinth behind him. “Words, black as blood, dripping from the end of his quill, roared from the mouths of the finest actors of his time, moving a queen to laughter and a king to tears. He was so great that he must have known his greatness. And he just stopped. By 1613 at the very latest, not even fifty years old. He left the stage and the city of London, the center of the universe, and came back to this footling market town where he merely happened to be born. He stayed here in obscurity until he died. Silent. A man who had that muse of fire, now content to see out his days as a petit bourgeois. Without writing another line.” He took a deep breath of evening air. “There were no manuscripts, no plays, no poems discovered after his death. Nothing passed on to the Widow Anne or to Susanna or Judith, the daughters he never taught to read. Nothing mentioned in the will. It’s never made sense.”

  “Perhaps he was sick,” Effie suggested. “Perhaps those illiterate daughters threw out all the papers with the old bed linen.”

  “Perhaps he just wanted a rest,” Oliver ventured. “He’d written getting on for a million words. Thirty-seven plays. Thirty-nine, if you allow for those last collaborations.”

  “Do you know of any other writer who didn’t keep on writing to the end?” Toby asked. “All those unfinished works—Sanditon, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Sunset at Blandings, The Salmon of Doubt. Writers write. Writers can’t not write. But Shakespeare, the greatest of them all, stopped.”

  He lapsed into silence again.

  “You think he didn’t stop,” Effie said. “You think there may have been manuscripts after all, which were buried with him when he died.”

  “I’m not the first person to consider that,” Toby said. “Nor am I the first person to try to look inside the grave to see. Well, when I found that forgotten cellar and the century-old beginnings of a tunnel, I knew what I had to do. I had to finish the job.”

  “Surely paper wouldn’t survive burial for four hundred years?” Effie said.

  “Parchment might,” said Toby. “I had to see. Even if we don’t find anything intact, just some hint that there was something, once. A lump of sealing wax, the remains of a leather wallet. Then at least we’d know. I just wanted to know.”

  “Which is why your initial team of two or three earth-sifters mysteriously blossomed to ten, no doubt including a couple of civil engineering graduates. How far did you get?”

  “We’ve mostly been tunneling through gravel, although there are one or two spots where we had to go through sandstone. But it’s agonizing work—most of the digging is by hand, in a very confined space. The toughest challenge, though, is keeping the noise down. Luckily, we could put the pumps and generators we needed down in the cellar. We haul the earth out in sacks, then winch them up through the cellar opening. Our first thought was to dump it straight into the river, but we were afraid it would clog up the lock.”

  “And that’s where Eric came in?”

  “At first he was there just to help bail out the cellar. But when we found the tunnel and I called in the rest of the team, he was very keen to stay on. I didn’t even have to pay him. Every night, close to midnight—and presumably after he’d finished humping whichever Bennet sister had drawn that day’s short straw—he’d meet me at the island, and we’d fill up his van with the dirt we’d dug out that day. Just a few wheelbarrow loads at a time, across that rickety bridge. He’d drive me home, then go off and empty out the van. I don’t know where.”

  I do, thought Oliver. Wherever it took his fancy. Into road works or country lanes or any other holes opened up by Synne’s gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers.

  “What happens to the tunnel when you’re finished?” Effie asked.

  “It’s ri
gged to collapse,” Toby told her. “Set off some minor charges on the key props, and the whole thing comes down. A tiny tsunami on the Avon that nobody will notice, a brief tidal bore that dissipates when it reaches the weir. Nobody will know we were there.”

  Oliver scrambled to his feet and offered a hand to Toby.

  “Let’s go,” he said brusquely. Toby stayed where he was, looking up at his brother quizzically.

  “Where?”

  “To the island. If there be any good thing to be done, we’re going to collapse that tunnel now. Hide every piece of evidence, before it’s too late.”

  Toby stared at him. “Why are you so angry about this?” he asked.

  “Because who knows how many laws you’ve already broken, little brother.”

  “Why, Ollie?” Toby asked again.

  Oliver ran his hands through his lank, blond hair. “Because it’s dangerous, Toby,” he said, with sad affection. “You could be buried alive down there. And you know that Mother would blame me.”

  Toby looked down, wrapping his arms around his knees. “I wasn’t, though, was I?” he said, his voice muffled. “Buried alive, I mean. You see, we’re finished. We broke through to the grave this morning. I got the call just after you left the church.”

  “And?” Effie whispered.

  Toby shook his head, still hiding his face. “And all for nothing. Just human remains. The whole escapade’s been a waste of time.”

  “No parchment?”

  “No parchment.”

  “Never mind the parchment!” Oliver exclaimed. “Toby, you saw him! You saw Shakespeare. What was that like?”

  Toby looked up. “As you’d expect. Old, old bones, nothing more. No epiphanies, no magic. I didn’t swoon on the spot with the significance of it all. William died, William was buried, William returned into dust, the dust is earth.” He stretched and stood up slowly.

  “But it was Shakespeare’s dust. The quintessence!” said Oliver breathlessly.

  “It’s not really the place for a mystical experience, Ollie. You’re wearing breathing equipment and overalls and a flashlight on your head, you’re toting night vision cameras and radio equipment, it’s cramped and dark and dirty and hot and claustrophobic and very, very wet, and you’re worn out by the time you get there, and all the while you’re wondering if you even have the strength to get back out again.”

  He started to walk around the memorial, from Hamlet clutching Yorick’s skull toward the draped form of Lady Macbeth, dreaming of washing her hands. The others kept pace, rapt.

  “The coffin was pretty well rotted away,” Toby continued, “but the space was still there. We got our geophysics right. We came in from the side, near the head, just intrusive enough to snake in the fiber-optic night vision camera and let it take a good look around. There was nothing. At least, nothing that the worms had left us.”

  He turned the corner and headed toward Falstaff.

  “What about the curse?” Oliver asked. “You didn’t forbeare to dig the dust, as instructed. Aren’t you scared now?

  “‘Cursed be he that moves my bones,’” Toby quoted. He laughed indulgently. “I told you, Ollie, it was a piece of anonymous doggerel, added so that Will could hold on to his prime real estate. But we didn’t move his bones. Not because of the curse. Because of respect. And then we collapsed the tunnel.”

  “What?” Oliver and Effie exclaimed simultaneously.

  Toby leaned on the jovial bronze Falstaff, turning to face the others with a similarly amused expression. “Yes, Oliver, there’s no need to play Big Brother and bury my mistakes for me. As soon as we’d found out what we needed, we got our equipment out of the tunnel and set off the explosives. Tomorrow, we’ll finish cleaning up the site as if nothing had ever happened.”

  “Something did happen though,” Oliver commented, pinching his upper lip. “Dennis Breedlove tried to blackmail you.”

  “That again? I told you, I never received any blackmail note. What could Dennis have got out of me, anyway?”

  “Had you found anything in that grave, it would have been worth a pretty penny.”

  “None of us was in it for what we could make.”

  “Oh yes, you were. What you could make was a name for yourselves. Hide the tunnel, get your cover story straight, and your little team becomes world famous as the discoverers of Shakespeare’s missing plays. That’s what you all dreamed of, deep inside. That dream may be dead now, but it was very much alive last week when, out of nowhere, a letter arrived threatening to reveal what you’re up to unless you pay up thirty pieces of silver. And then what did you do, Toby? Pay?” He leaned forward. “Isn’t it safer to track down the blackmailer and kill him?” he hissed.

  “I didn’t get any letter,” Toby protested. “And I certainly didn’t kill Dennis.”

  “But he did wheedle the whole story of this foolhardy expedition out of you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And you’ve been known to drive Eric’s van, which was seen going by the Common on the night of the murder, very near the time it must have been committed.”

  “I only—”

  “And the damp earth from your dig was dumped out of that van into Breedlove’s front garden, to make room for the body of an old man and a stolen stepladder.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Even though Eric himself was apparently despoiling Davina at the time.”

  “No he wasn’t.”

  “Yes he was. Geoffrey was watching him till nearly midnight.”

  “The time is out of joint,” Toby said. “Eric was at the dig by ten o’clock that night, earlier than usual. I was going to ask him why, but then he got a text and hurried off.”

  “Must have been another night.”

  “No, it was definitely the night of the murder. Don’t you remember? I had to hitchhike home. I told you the next day.”

  The brothers continued to stare at each other. Effie watched in silence.

  “Ollie, I didn’t—” Toby began again, imploringly.

  “Didn’t kill Dennis Breedlove?” Oliver reached out and straightened Toby’s collar. “Of course you didn’t, you whingeing little clotpole. I never thought you did. You just needed that smile knocked off your face. Come on, we have an alibi to break.”

  He turned away abruptly, heading for the car park.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Saturday evening (continued)

  Getting no answer to her knock, Effie effortlessly picked the lock of Mormal’s flat in Pigsneye, and they trooped into the bedroom, already familiar from DoctorPeeper-dot-com. They found the camera on top of a wardrobe, its lens poking through a hole in an old cardboard suitcase. Beside the wardrobe, just out of the camera’s range, was a small desk, on which Mormal had stacked a computer and several external hard drives. Effie flicked on the computer and found a list of passwords and IDs in an untidy drawer. Within a few moments, she had located the video that Eric and Davina recorded on the night of Breedlove’s murder and left Oliver and Toby watching in fast-forward while she prowled around the cluttered room, opening more drawers and sniffing inside containers.

  At sixteen times the normal speed, the convulsing pair seem to change position every three seconds, but Oliver was still surprised at how much time they spent in post-coital pillow talk. Then they jumped out of bed and dressed. The screen went blank.

  “It’s over,” he announced.

  Effie was peering distastefully into the wardrobe. She shut the door rapidly and checked her watch.

  “It can’t be,” she said, returning to the desk. “Geoffrey claimed they were at it for three hours.” She pulled her curls back behind her head, snapped an elastic band around them, and started to click her way into the DoctorPeeper logs. Oliver glanced around, noting the odd sensation of seeing the same bed he’d just been watching on the screen, sim
ilarly tousled but now unoccupied.

  “Okay, here’s what happened,” Effie said. “You just saw the live broadcast, which started at about eight o’clock. It lasted an hour and ten minutes. At that point, Eric paused the transmission, uploaded the recording he’d just made to the website’s server, and set it to replay continuously. It was turned off at 11:44 p.m. exactly, which is when he must have come home.” She swiveled to face the others. “Pornography is, of course, predictable and repetitive,” she remarked. “That’s part of its charm. But you’d think that even a simpleton like Geoffrey Angelwine would notice that he’d witnessed the same performance three times in a row!”

  “So where was Eric between 9:10 and 11:44 p.m.?” Oliver said.

  “He turned up at the dig at about 9:30 p.m.,” said Toby. “He stayed for about an hour, and then got a call or a text and pissed off. He normally doesn’t arrive until elevenish. It looks like Davina cut him off early. She did appear a bit cross in the recording.”

  “Geoffrey mentioned the same thing.”

  Effie played the closing moments of the video again, this time at normal speed. She froze the playback on Davina. But the camera set-up offered her no close-up, and the young woman’s face was distant and indistinct.

  “I wonder what caused her to get so angry?” she said.

  “Perhaps it just occurred to her that she’d been shagging Eric Mormal?” Oliver suggested.

  Effie let the video finish, Davina storming from the room, Eric stealthily approaching the off-screen computer, presumably to stop the recording and arrange to broadcast the replay. Again, Oliver was struck by the dislocation between the real and the recorded. He couldn’t help glancing behind him, and recoiled as he came face-to-face with the real Mormal, who had crept into the room without their hearing. Mormal leaped backwards even further.

  “Don’t you hit me again!” he whined. “You’re a bleedin’ menace, you are, Oliver Swithin.” Mormal’s still-swollen tongue gave him a mild lisp—the last word came out as “Thwithin.” “Oh hello, Tobe,” he continued. “Do you need the van again?”