This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  Toby shook his head. He swallowed, uncertain how to play the new situation. “Not anymore, Eric. We’re all done with the tunnel. Just this afternoon.”

  “Anything come out yet?”

  “No. It was—”

  “Hang on, I’ll put the kettle on. Won’t keep you.” Mormal slipped out of the room and went into his small kitchen. Toby shifted a pile of dirty clothes from the only armchair and sat down. Effie stayed at the desk, writing. Mormal came back a minute later, throwing his car keys and phone onto the bed. “Spent the day in bed, thanks to this bully,” he explained, with a nod toward Oliver. “First time I’ve been out—nipped into Shipthton-on-Thtour for a latte.”

  “You don’t seem surprised to see us,” Oliver noted.

  Mormal pointed to his bruised jawline. “Thought you were back to gloat over your handiwork. Either that or you’re sniffing for free samples from Doctor Peeper. Give Effie a thrill.”

  “You can thrill me by telling us who killed your business partner,” Effie murmured, without turning round.

  “What are you talking about? Dennis committed suicide.”

  “You know he didn’t, Eric,” said Oliver. “Because you were there that night. You went to Dennis’s house from the dig. You dumped out the earth you’d collected into his front garden, you slipped down the lane to get the church stepladder, and then you drove him up to the Shakespeare Race.”

  Mormal took a deep breath and sat on the bed, lying back on his elbows. “Wow!” he said slowly—and successfully, since the word was free of s’s. For a moment, the scratching of Effie’s pencil was the only sound in the room.

  “Okay, Thyerlock, you got me,” Mormal continued unexpectedly. “That’s all true. My, um, business with Davvy had ended a little sooner than expected, so I went round to work at the dig early and loaded up the van with the day’s dirt. And then I realized it was the first of the month, and I needed to pay Uncle Dennis his monthly stipend. So I popped in on the way home. But get this: He was already dead when I got there.”

  Mormal waited a second, gauging the reactions in the room. They seemed to please him. “Thtrangled,” he resumed. “With a thkipping rope. Gave me quite a turn, I can tell you.” He shook his head. “Who can have done this? I asked myself. And right then, I saw there was a letter on his desk, just like the letter I got when Dennis started blackmailing me. It was clear to me that it was all about Toby’s Shakespeare project. I assumed that Toby had received the letter earlier that day, rushed over to the house clutching it, and killed Breedlove.”

  “I didn’t!” Toby shouted, but Oliver signaled him to be quiet.

  Mormal grabbed a tissue from a box beside his bed and blew his nose. “I didn’t want my dear old school chum to get arrested, so I tried to cover up the murder. I thought if I strung the body up using the same rope, it might hide the strangulation marks and look like he’d hung himself.”

  “Hanged,” Oliver murmured.

  “Hanged? Really? Well, hanging made me think of the old Synne Oak, the village gallows. A good place to leave him, a long way from the real scene of the crime. But in the fuss, I left the letter behind, just like you did, Tobe. Still, I thought, nobody else could connect it to dear my old mate, Toby Swithin.” He sighed deeply and loudly. “Sorry. I reckoned without your smartarse big brother. Can’t choose your relatives, eh?”

  “I was at the dig on the evening of Breedlove’s death,” Toby said, glaring at Mormal, “before you arrived and after you left. The others will vouch for me.”

  “Ah, Toby, Toby, I can see what you’re doing there. But trust me, mate, it won’t stand up as an alibi. Any smart lawyer could sow doubt. ‘Oi, Lord Snooty, are you sure it was the first of May you’re remembering, or was it the second or the third?’” Mormal slipped into an overwrought impression of one of Toby’s fellow Oxford diggers. “‘Oh I say, m’lud, now you mention it, one’s brain does get so bleedin’ fluffy over dates when one’s been sluicing Chateau Lafitte all night, what, what, what?’” He laughed, not caring that the others didn’t join in.

  “Eric’s right, Toby,” Oliver said suddenly. “Breedlove was killed because he’d found out about the tunnel. That letter was sent, just as his ledger shows. And the next day, he was dead.”

  “But—”

  “But you didn’t kill him. I know. Because even if you had opened the letter, you couldn’t have known who sent it. In fact, if you think about it, the only people who could have identified Breedlove as the author were his previous victims, who’d have recognized the style and the handwriting.” (The vicar, the vergers, the vampire, and the vulgarian, Oliver thought.)

  “Yeah, but I told you,” Mormal cut in nervously, “I never saw that letter until I went to Breedlove’s house that night. And he was already dead.”

  “Of course you saw it. If Breedlove had stuck to his usual habits, he’d have dropped that first letter through our letterbox after dark on Wednesday night, exactly as he recorded in his secret ledger. It was probably on the doormat when you came to pick up Toby for an early morning session at the dig. You recognized it for what it was, you opened it, and you kept it.”

  “Why would Eric do that?” Toby asked.

  “Oh don’t be so bloody naïve,” Oliver snapped. “Your problem, Toby, is that you’re too honorable, too trusting. Somebody else in this room thinks so too.”

  “Effie, you mean?”

  “Eric, I mean.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re one in a million, Tobe,” Mormal piped up. “A diamond.”

  “Why do you think Eric’s been providing his haulage services for nothing?” Oliver continued. “Because from the moment you found that tunnel, Eric’s been planning to make off with whatever came out of the grave. Who knows what that potential treasure trove might have been worth—ancient manuscripts, forgotten plays? And you and your merry band of tomb-raiders could hardly protest as he heads off into the sunset with your swag. So the last thing Eric wants is for you to get a guilty conscience and shut down the dig, before the tunnel is complete. And so he took the letter, to keep you in the dark.”

  No reaction from Mormal this time.

  “But how did it get back to Breedlove’s house?” asked Toby.

  “Breedlove is killed. That changes everything. Now, Eric needs to frame someone for the murder, and who better than you, the newly minted blackmail victim?”

  “But the letter doesn’t mention me.”

  “True. In fact it’s so obscure that we started out thinking it was sent to Breedlove—a little bonus misdirection that I don’t think Eric intended.”

  “Then what was the point of bringing it back?”

  “Just to let the police know that a letter existed—that a fifth victim was in play. Remember, Eric doesn’t know about Breedlove’s secret ledger. And then he disposes of the body at a local landmark called the Shakespeare Race, another subtle pointer to the obsessions of his old school friend, Toby Swithin.”

  “But none of that is enough to identify me, even with the nursery rhyme.”

  “Of course not. As I said, Eric still needs you to finish that tunnel. But once it’s completed…”

  “Then what?”

  “Come on, Toby, what’s missing?”

  Toby thought for a second. “The envelope?” he ventured.

  Oliver smiled. “The concomitant envelope, which will mysteriously turn up when the work at the tunnel is all done. And its addressee, Master Toby Swithin of Oxford and Synne, gets hung out to dry.”

  “Hanged,” murmured Mormal.

  “Darling, did you work all that out by yourself?” asked Effie, looking around from the desk. “Just you and your brain?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Oh, well done, you.” She beamed at him, unable to console him with the news that the “bonus misdirection” had come from Simon Culpepper. She held up
a sealed envelope, torn across the top edge. Oliver could see the odd, penciled capital letters in the address. Toby’s name.

  “How long ago did you find that?” he asked.

  “About three minutes after we got here. Top drawer, left hand side, when I was looking for Eric’s passwords.”

  “Never underestimate the methods of a police officer,” Oliver muttered.

  “Not just any police officer,” Effie prompted.

  “A police officer with naturally curly hair.”

  “Good boy,” she said. “Eric, you’re just not very good at this, are you?”

  “You put that there,” said Mormal. “Police, planting evidence.”

  She swiveled on the office chair and glared at him. “Oh, no, you did not just go there.”

  “It’s your word against mine,” Mormal maintained. “And your discovery process is hardly kosher.”

  “Your process of discovering what women are wearing under their skirts is totally legit, is it?”

  “I have my rights,” he snapped, jabbing a forefinger toward her face. Including the right to throw us out, long ago, Oliver thought, but he hasn’t. Odd.

  Effie held the envelope up to the overhead light. “Then if what you say is true, Eric, you’ve never touched this envelope, and so these grubby fingerprints can’t possibly be yours, right?”

  Mormal paused, finger still raised. Then he snatched the envelope from Effie’s grasp, screwed it into a ball, and stuffed it into his mouth, wincing as he tried to accommodate both the dry paper and his swollen tongue. Effie leaned back in her chair, momentarily startled. They watched with fascination as he chewed and champed.

  “I think that answers your question, Effie,” said Toby.

  Mormal tried to respond to Toby, but the words were incomprehensible. He attempted a swallow, coughed, and spat out a bolus of soggy paper onto the bed.

  “I said it still doesn’t prove a thing,” he gasped.

  “I agree,” said Effie, “especially since you’ve just chewed up a blank envelope I found in your drawer and wrote Toby’s name and address on.” She waved another envelope, identical to the first. “This is the real one, and I wouldn’t recommend your trying to take it, Eric, on the grounds that I don’t wish you to.”

  Mormal glared at her, but chose the path of discretion.

  “You’re wrong,” he said with a sneer. “I didn’t steal the letter from the doormat. Dennis gave it to me to deliver. He didn’t drop it off at the house, because he was afraid that someone else might open it by mistake. He didn’t know that I’d joined Toby’s team of tunnel-diggers and so had a vested interest in not delivering it. Well, what am I, a fucking postman?”

  Oliver whispered something in Effie’s ear. She nodded.

  “Are you going to arrest Eric?” Toby asked Effie.

  “What for?”

  “Breedlove’s murder, of course.”

  “Oh, Eric didn’t kill Dennis Breedlove. He just tried to cover up the murder, exactly as he said.”

  “Who for?”

  “For Jesu’s sake, forbeare,” said Oliver.

  “Well, it’s an obvious question, there’s no need to be rude.”

  “‘For Jesu’s sake, forbeare.’ It’s part of that curse on Shakespeare’s tomb. Davina used the phrase the other day. An odd expression, unless you’ve been talking about graves and bones and curses.” Oliver stepped over to the bed and leaned his face into Mormal’s. “She knew all about the tunnel, didn’t she?”

  Mormal seemed to make a calculation. “Yeah, I told her,” he admitted.

  “Why would you tell Davina?” demanded Toby. “You were supposed to keep it secret.”

  “I love her, Tobe,” Mormal said, with uncharacteristic sincerity. “I’ll always tell my Davina the truth. Well, apart from the bit about bonking her sisters and broadcasting it live, of course.”

  “And they say romance is dead,” said Effie.

  Mormal ignored her. “I’m sorry it had to be you who got screwed over, Tobe,” he said. “But if that grave holds what you think it holds, we’ll be rich, Davina and me. Really rich.”

  “Davina’s already rich.”

  “Richer, then. And now. Not beholden to her moody Daddy’s checkbook or to trust funds that don’t mature before menopause. I’ll be able to buy her anything she wants. We can get married.”

  Effie revolved in the office chair, clicking the mouse to summon the final minutes of Eric’s dalliance with Davina.

  “I think you can actually pinpoint the moment when you tell her that Breedlove has found out about the tunnel,” she said, as the naked figure of Davina stiffened and then turned angrily toward Mormal. “What a falling off was there. Don’t think we need a lip-reader to see how that went down.”

  They watched again the silent, irate conversation and the decisive departure of Davina from the bed. She pulled her clothes on, elegant even at low resolution, and rushed from the room, while Mormal approached the desk and stopped the recording. Effie turned off the playback and clicked another control on the screen.

  “We know Eric went straight to the dig at that point,” Oliver said. “But we haven’t asked where Davina went. She’s angry. And about an hour later, Eric gets a text and he hurries off, leaving Toby stranded in Stratford. It was from Davina, telling you to come to Breedlove’s cottage, wasn’t it, Eric?”

  Mormal nodded.

  “Davina knew that even if Toby could be kept in ignorance of the blackmail, Breedlove still had to be reckoned with.”

  Mormal nodded again.

  “But she didn’t go to negotiate terms, did she?”

  Mormal shook his head.

  “I expect she tried at first to threaten him—with exposure, with disgrace, with social ostracism, even with physical violence, before she realized that none of these could keep a shameless old man quiet.”

  Mormal nodded.

  “There were only two ways to stop him. Pay him or slay him.”

  Mormal shrugged.

  “And Davina wasn’t prepared to part with a penny.”

  Mormal shook his head.

  “So when Uncle Dennis wasn’t looking, she took that priceless Victorian skipping rope from his display case and strangled him with it.”

  Mormal glanced at his watch.

  “And then she texted you to come over and clean up for her. Which you did, picking up Toby’s blackmail letter on the way, in case it came in handy. Or perhaps that was her idea, too. And the business of taking the body to the Shakespeare Race. No wonder she was so matey with you at the dinner party on the following evening. Private jokes, conspiratorial glances, a marked desire to avoid talking about the recent death. You scored a lot of brownie points with the divine Davina. But what’s she going to say when she finds out you just pinned the murder squarely on her?”

  “She’s not going to know, is she?” Mormal replied, looking around in triumph. “Because this conversation ain’t happening. It has no existence in legality. Effie didn’t read me my rights. You shouldn’t be here without a search warrant. Everything’s hearsay. Nothing’s gonna stick to me or Davina. I’m bleedin’ Teflon.”

  Another example of MindSpam, thought Oliver—that Teflon was a byproduct of the space race. He wisely chose not to mention it.

  Mormal laid his index finger against the side of his nose. “But even so,” he continued, “you’ll notice that on the matter of who killed Dennis Breedlove, I haven’t spoken a word. So who’s to say I accused anyone?”

  “Currently, about four hundred puzzled perverts out there in cyberland, probably waiting for something interesting to happen,” said Effie, reading a statistic on the monitor. She gestured casually to the camera on top of the wardrobe. “We’ve been broadcasting for five minutes.”

  ***

  Ben Motley woke suddenly from his doze when
his telephone began to play the sound of Doctor Who’s Tardis materializing. Mallard glared in his direction from the stage. Still only in Act II. Ben answered the phone quickly.

  “Effie? Wait, I should take the call outside.”

  “No, stay there. Listen, do you remember which of those Bennet creatures is Davina?”

  “Yeah, dark hair, short, current possessor of the only family brain cell. Looks a bit Scandinavian.”

  “Hardly.”

  “No? I think she has a face like a Norse.”

  “Cut the gags. Can you see the Bennets from where you’re sitting?”

  Ben looked to his left, across the impinging heads of Susie and Geoffrey. “Yep, pretty maids all in a row. Plus their mother. But minus Davina.”

  “What?”

  “She got a phone call or something about twenty minutes ago. Hasn’t returned yet. When are you lot coming back?”

  But Effie had rung off.

  ***

  She looked thoughtfully at Mormal, who was sitting on the bed, muttering about seeing a lawyer. Then she made a sharp grabbing motion toward his crotch. He rolled instinctively, and she picked up the cell phone he had been sitting on and flicked it on.

  “You people just don’t respect a citizen’s rights!” he yelled, trying to seize the phone back. Oliver pushed him away.

  “He sent a text,” Effie reported. “It must have been just after he arrived, when he slipped out to the kitchen. It says: ‘There thru. Dont w8 4 me.’” She pushed some additional keys. “And that number belongs to… Davina Bennet.”

  “But the tunnel’s gone,” breathed Toby. “We collapsed it.”

  “What?” shouted Mormal. “You didn’t tell me that! You said you hadn’t taken anything out yet.”

  “Because there was nothing to take out!”

  For Jesu’s sake, forbear. . .

  Effie hit the redial key. She heard the ringing tone several times before it flipped to Davina’s mailbox.

  “Come on,” said Oliver, heading for the door. “We’ve got to go back to Stratford. Now I know why Eric didn’t throw us out. He was stalling, trying to buy time for Davina to get to the tunnel. Only by now, there is no tunnel.”