Eventually, Bill appeared, followed by Steve Goldberg, who had fetched Manola and Trent from their cabins. Manola’s eyes were rimmed red. Bill perched on the dining-room table and addressed us grimly.
‘This is clearly the worst day in our firm’s history,’ he began. ‘Harald was a great guy, he would have made a terrific partner, and we all miss him. We will all need time to mourn him in our own way. But for now, we have something very serious to consider. I have been speaking with Sergeant O’Leary, and he is of the strong opinion that whoever murdered Harald was staying at the camp. It snowed in the middle of last night and there are no fresh tracks anywhere leading in here. Of course, this suggests that the murderer could have been one of the staff at the camp, and the police are questioning them very closely as we speak. But, and I hate to say this …’ he paused and looked regretfully at each of our faces, ‘it is most likely that Harald’s killer is one of us. Or rather, one of you.’
He waited for our reaction. There wasn’t one for several seconds, before Charlie Cameron spoke. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said.
Bill shrugged. ‘I find it very hard to accept, myself, but there is no other conclusion.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said.
‘Sergeant O’Leary thinks it does,’ Bill said. ‘But I have every confidence in the loyalty and integrity of our people. Before he takes you all off to the nearest police station, I have persuaded him to allow you an hour to discuss it amongst yourselves. You’ve all worked together in the past, I’m sure you can figure out which one of you is responsible. You have an hour.’
With that, he was gone.
He left the rest of us, the five of us, staring at each other. It was an extraordinary situation, totally disorienting. Here we were, miles from anywhere, dealing with the surreal. I couldn’t accept it. ‘This is all bollocks,’ I said. ‘None of us killed Harald.’
‘No,’ said Phil Riviani. ‘None of us can have done. It must have been an outsider.’
Charlie Cameron nodded. Trent and Manola were motionless.
‘So what do we do?’ Phil said.
‘We wait an hour and then talk to the police again,’ I replied.
‘I guess so,’ said Phil.
We looked at each other in silence. The dining room must have been a recent addition to the lodge. It had a high-vaulted ceiling and big picture windows, giving a view of the lake, sunshine glaring white off its flat snowy surface. There were no signs of human habitation. Framed by the window, the winter landscape looked like something out of a Christmas card, not the scene of a murder.
‘You went for a run this morning,’ said Trent to me.
‘As did you. So what?’ I said.
‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘And neither did I.’
‘What did the police say to you?’ Charlie Cameron asked me, carefully.
‘They asked me about my run. Whether I saw anything. Whether I knew any reason why any of us would want to kill Harald.’
‘And what did you say?’ Charlie asked.
‘That I didn’t. Why?’
‘Well, when the police spoke to me, most of the interview was about you. They wanted to know all about your background, your ambitions, about your time working with Harald in London.’
‘They asked if I knew that you had once threatened to kill Harald,’ Phil said.
‘What! Harald and I got on well. I never threatened him.’
‘Until Bill told us that Harald was in pole position for partnership, you were the favourite,’ Trent said. ‘O’Leary asked me lots of questions about your desire to become a partner.’
I looked around the assembled group. They were puzzled, doubtful, but they were also suspicious. I could feel it in the air. All except Manola who was staring blankly ahead of her, blinking.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I didn’t kill him. None of us killed him.’
‘Somebody did,’ said Charlie Cameron in a reasonable tone. There was silence. Charlie, Phil and Trent all stared at me.
‘I know who killed Harald,’ Manola said in a whisper so low I wasn’t sure I had heard it. She was rocking backward and forward in her chair. Her face was red, and her expression tight as a drum, as if she were struggling to hold in a mighty force. ‘Harald and I had a relationship. We were engaged, actually.’ She held up her left hand, revealing a cluster of diamonds around her finger. ‘Of course we had to keep it secret. I put his ring on when I went to my room just now.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Charlie. He and Phil looked completely surprised. Trent slouched back in his chair. His lips weren’t actually smiling, but he seemed, well, satisfied.
‘I’m sorry, Manola,’ I said.
She ignored me and took a deep breath. ‘They say it’s stupid to enter into a relationship with someone at work. In the case of Harald I don’t regret it for a moment, he was a wonderful man, but sometimes they are right.’ She sniffed. ‘What was stupid was the night I spent with Trent. It was eighteen months ago, before Harald. We were on a trip to Angola, we’d had a few too many drinks in the hotel bar. It was an awful mistake as I told Trent right afterwards. But he wouldn’t accept it.’
‘Are you saying I killed Harald?’ Trent said with scorn.
‘You were jealous. You were insanely, stupidly jealous, especially when you realised that Harald and I were having a relationship and that that relationship was serious.’
‘I was just kidding,’ said Trent, looking uncomfortable.
‘You stalked me! You followed us when we went out on dates. You called me up in the middle of the night. You sent me flowers, letters. You know you did all that, Trent.’
Now it was Trent’s turn to blush.
‘But there was no need to kill him,’ Manola’s voice was speeding up. She began to shake. ‘What did you think would happen when he was dead? Did you think I would fall into your arms, my fiancé’s killer? Did you think I would ever speak to you again?’
‘Hey, I didn’t kill him!’ Trent protested.
Manola was on her feet. ‘Of course you killed him! Peter didn’t, why would Peter do something like that? But he saw you out running by the lake, didn’t he? You killed him. You’re a murderer, Trent!’
She was screaming now, her face red, spittle flying from her lips. She launched into a tirade of Spanish, and lunged towards him. I stood up and took her by the arm. ‘It’s okay, Manola,’ I tried to say. ‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s not okay, Peter,’ she said, but she was sobbing. ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t stand being in the room with him.’
‘Here, I’ll take you back to your cabin,’ I said. I led her out of the dining room. The policeman guarding the door was about to stop her, but I glared at him. He stepped out of our way. I took her to her room and left her there, promising I would be back in a few minutes.
As I walked back to the lodge I wondered what to do. I had no doubt that Manola was right, that Trent was jealous of her affair with Harald. But had he killed him? It just seemed so absurd, so unreal. The whole thing seemed unreal.
I saw the policeman waiting by the door. He was tall and nervous; Manola’s hysterics had clearly shaken him. He didn’t look like a country policeman at all. He was soft, no tough guy. I stared at him. A policeman, even in rural New Hampshire, should be able to handle angry women better than he had. Suddenly I knew where I had seen Sergeant O’Leary before.
‘Where’s your squad car?’ I asked the policeman.
‘Out back,’ he said.
‘I’m going to see it,’ I said. ‘And I’m going to take a look at where Harald was killed.’ I turned towards the path around the side of the building.
‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, sir,’ he said, stepping in front of me.
‘How can you stop me?’
‘I can restrain you, sir. I’m a policeman.’
‘Are you quite sure about that?’ I said.
I burst into the manager’s office. Bill, ‘Se
rgeant O’Leary’ and Steve Goldberg were sitting watching a small video screen on which was a view of a heated discussion between Trent, Phil and Charlie.
Bill turned around, and smiled when he saw me. ‘Well, well, well. I thought if anyone figured it out it would be you. How did you do it?’
‘You’re an actor, aren’t you?’ I said to the man in the bad suit. ‘You had a bit part in The West Wing a few years ago.’
‘You remembered that?’ said O’Leary. ‘I’m impressed. No one ever recognises me from that. I was only in one episode.’
‘Where’s Harald?’ I asked.
‘He’s fine,’ Bill said. ‘He’s at the motel in town. We whisked him away in the middle of the night. He has no idea what’s going on here. Poor fellow never was on the partnership track, but I needed a fall guy to play the favourite.’
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I demanded, making no attempt to hide my anger.
‘Calm down, Peter,’ Bill said, giving me his warmest grin. ‘This was the ultimate partnership test. We wanted you to be the chief suspect, and I must say you handled it pretty well. But that affair between Manola and Harald was quite unexpected. I wouldn’t have thought he was her type. And I’ve learned a lot about Trent as well.’
‘Did you see what you did to her?’ I demanded.
‘Manola has a tendency to lose her cool; that’s really her biggest weakness. She’ll be fine this afternoon once she knows Harald is okay. And she’ll be laughing about it next week.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I really don’t think so.’
‘My God, look!’ We both turned to see Steve Goldberg pointing to the video screen. It was a good picture, in colour. Manola was walking towards Trent, her back to the camera. Behind her back she was clutching a long carving knife from the ham platter. Trent hadn’t seen it yet, his expression was a mixture of embarrassment and complacency.
I ran for the door and sprinted across the hallway to the dining room. And then I heard Trent scream.
‘Whew,’ I said, when Peter had finished.
‘Are you still going to join Labouchere?’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘So, that’s why you quit, then?’
‘Yes. As did Harald, and Manola, of course. They split up.’
‘Understandable, I suppose. Did she actually kill Trent?’
‘Yes. It was covered up. It required all Bill Labouchere’s considerable organisational skills and influence. We all felt complicit so we all helped. We thought Manola had suffered extreme provocation, but we couldn’t be sure the courts would see it that way. In my opinion it was Bill who really killed Trent.’
‘But Labouchere Associates is still going strong?’
‘Going from strength to strength. The others stayed on as if nothing had happened. Charlie Cameron was even made a partner. No one mentions Lake Lenatonka. Ever.’ Then Peter frowned. He had seen someone over my shoulder. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘I forgot we arranged to meet here. For God’s sake, don’t mention any of this, will you?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said. I turned to see who Peter had spotted. Coming towards us was a dark-haired woman in an expensive low-cut cream suit and high heels. She was drop-dead gorgeous and the noise level in the bar dropped as every man turned to watch her make her way across to us.
She smiled when she saw Peter, a wide warm smile and kissed him quickly on the lips. Peter swallowed. ‘Mike, I don’t think you’ve met my wife, have you?’
She turned her smile to me. ‘Hi,’ she said, in an American accent. ‘I’m Manola. I’ve heard so much about you.’
‘Likewise,’ I said. ‘Likewise.’
A TOOTHBRUSH
H.R.F. Keating
Henry Tailor, assistant inspector in the Small Branches Division of mighty H.J. Manifold’s, arrived late at his house in sweetly suburban Harrow-on-the-Hill. Victim of the hospitality of the over-anxious manager of the Bedford branch, he had missed, by a minute, his train back. He had had then to sit for a whole hour in the station waiting room, thinking how much nicer it would be to be looking down at his Alice, his quiet little wife of three years, an early-to-bedder if ever there was, as she lay innocently asleep.
Home at last, totally weary, when he did stand there beside her he found himself in a dilemma. Go to the bathroom and get rid of any trace of alcohol on his breath – Alice hated it – by quickly brushing his teeth? Or, forgetting his toothbrush, the green one, side by side in the mug with Alice’s pink one, put his clothes neatly on his chair, slip his pyjamas from under his pillow and just slide in beside her as she slept on?
Modest intake of wine still coursing through his veins, he finally decided. Be a devil. Alice will never know.
But next morning, leaving Alice still snugly there for her few extra minutes, as he stepped into the bathroom he saw at once, in the familiar scratched blue plastic mug on the shelf above the basin, a totally alien toothbrush.
It came as a shock. As if … As if, he was to say afterwards, it had been left there by a real alien, a little man from Mars. In a moment, of course, various explanations occurred to him, likely or unlikely. The likeliest – he could not even think the brush might belong to someone Alice had invited in – was that she had bought herself a new one. But that, in fact, was not at all likely. For one thing he was almost sure she had acquired her pink-handled brush only a month or so ago – she had always said it was better to have a different colour from his – and in any case the alien brush was not at all like anything Alice would ever buy.
No, this brush, the alien one, was, well – alien. It had a very broad long white handle, looking something like a spatula. Its head, too, was large, larger than that on any toothbrush he had ever seen, and its bristles, thick, and somehow aggressive, were noticeably longer than the ones on Alice’s or his own.
He wanted, and did not want, to touch it, to pick the thing up and examine it more carefully. But in the end, after taking his shower, thinking hard the while, all he did was delicately to extract his green brush from the scratched old mug, use it, more hastily than usual, and slip it back into the mug close beside Alice’s, almost touching in fact. Then, standing rather far back from the mirror, he started his razor buzzing.
But, dressing finished, just as Alice stirred he made a sudden dash into the bathroom again and – he did not really know why – snatched up the alien thing, stood for just one moment looking at it, and then stuffed it – it was quite dry – into the inner pocket of his jacket next to his wallet.
Sitting in the kitchen over his two quick cups of tea and one thick slice of toast and marmalade, with Alice opposite in her pink-roses housecoat – her library job did not start till ten – he managed to slant his tentative inquiries about how she had spent the time while he had been in Bedford into the subject of shopping. Then, when this produced nothing, he asked whether she had remembered to renew … Not, absolutely not, her quite new toothbrush but, randomly hit on, the half-empty jar of marmalade.
‘No,’ Alice said, in her usual neatly efficient manner, ‘if we’re careful we won’t need more till we go for the big shop on Saturday.’
Henry would have liked to have tried some other approach. Each time he thought about that wide, gleaming white toothbrush he had seen planted between the two of theirs in the mug, he felt a dart of disquiet. But time was getting on, and he was never, except when there was a strike on the Underground, late for work.
So he swallowed the last of his tea, folded his napkin, put it in its ring and went to collect his briefcase from its place in the hall, calling out his customary ‘Goodbye, darling, see you about six.’
Then, as he closed the hall door, as usual firmly, a new thought struck him.
He hauled his key from his trouser pocket, the right-hand one of course, handkerchief always in the left, slid it into the Yale, opened the door, and, shouting out the first thing that came to mind, ‘Forgotten something’, he thrust his head into the sitting room, glanced rapidly round – windows al
l intact, latches in place – before running upstairs, heedless now of any noise he might make, and taking an equally quick survey of the windows there.
Yes, each one properly closed, as Alice always made sure they were before going to bed. So, how …? But no time to think about that now.
‘Got it,’ he called out (What can I say it is, if Alice …?) and in a minute he was striding down the road towards the station, briefcase swinging from his hand.
At his desk in Manifold House he found it hard to concentrate on his report on the Bedford branch. The thought of the alien toothbrush kept flicking up in his mind, like a colour TV ad during an old black-and-white film, momentarily startling and then back to the monotone world of yesteryear. But the puzzle of that mysterious arrival in the scratched old plastic mug seemed to be without any practical answer. Earlier in the train, when in putting his wallet back after tucking his travel card away he had just touched it, he had felt so dazed he had been unable to bring his mind to consider it at all. But now, for minutes-long spells, he found himself doing nothing but grinding and grinding away at the out-of-this-world puzzle.
But is it really out-of-this-world, he asked himself almost every other time the image of the over-large white toothbrush entered his head. Can it be? Can my house, our own little house, have actually been invaded by Martians? By toothbrush-using Martians? No, ridiculous. Impossible. But then had Alice, for some unfathomable reason, really gone out and bought such a strange object? As totally unlikely.
Once even he went to the toilets and, in a safely locked cubicle, took out the monster brush and peered and peered at it. But no enlightenment came. A burglar? A burglar, while sleepy Alice slept and slept? No. All the windows had been shut and intact, and no sign either of the back door or the front having been forced. And, anyhow, why should a burglar do no more than just put that extraordinary object into the mug?
So did this thing in my hands, he thought, somehow just materialise, there where I saw it as I stepped into the bathroom? Where I snatched it up before Alice could see it? For heaven’s sake, science fiction is fiction, pure fiction, and I, Henry Tailor, am real. As real as— As this toothbrush I’m staring at.
The Detection Collection Page 3