The Paperchase

by Marcel Theroux

  *

  FINIS

  TWENTY-THREE

  I MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP in the armchair. It had carried on raining during the night and I was vaguely aware of drops drumming on the window. I found the noise consoling. I woke up when it seemed to begin again, this time louder. Gradually, it resolved into an insistent banging at the kitchen door.

  The pages of Patrick’s stories were scattered around the armchair. I gathered them up quickly and put them on a high shelf. I assumed my visitor was Nathan, coming round to pick up the money I owed him.

  Mrs Delamitri stood outside the kitchen door in a dazzling white jacket. It was already sunny and the light bounced off her clothes so that I had to squint to look at her. Seen in silhouette she looked like a quarterback, because of her huge shoulderpads and the way she pressed her handbag along the inside of her left arm like a rugby ball.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said.

  I remembered the unsuccessful pass I had made at her on the beach. What had seemed spontaneous and feasible then, now felt like a moment of toe-curling embarrassment.

  ‘About the painting,’ she said. She pronounced it without the t: paining. ‘There’s no need to look so worried. Oh my God, Damien, did you think I wanted to go to bed with you? You did, didn’t you? Oh my. Go get dressed and I’ll make us both some coffee.’

  She had a way with the recalcitrant kitchen that made me realise just how well she had known Patrick.

  ‘I was thinking it over,’ she said a little later, when I had changed and the coffee was made. ‘And do you know I thought that once you’ve left I probably won’t ever come here again. I wanted to have something – a memento. I’m sorry I came by so early, but I was afraid you might have already left.’

  I told her not to worry about it. I couldn’t leave until I had got hold of a new passport. I mentioned that I had found some stories that Patrick had been working on.

  ‘Stories? By Patrick?’ She couldn’t have looked more excited if I’d told her I’d found fragments of the true cross in the attic. There was a fervour in her voice – almost a tone of veneration. ‘Where were they?’

  ‘In one of the boxes.’

  ‘I’d love to see them,’ she said.

  ‘They’re in a very rough state.’ I was reluctant to let her see the manuscript. I had found the implications of the final story too unsettling. There was something obsessive about the violence in it, as though Patrick had been trying to write one story but in spite of himself had written another.

  ‘Damien, this is so exciting.’ She put her cup down so quickly that a little of the coffee slopped on to the table. She didn’t notice. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I took them into town to have them copied.’ I looked at my watch. It was half past nine. ‘Just got back about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘You left an original manuscript at a copy shop in Westwich? Oh, Damien. Was that smart?’

  I tried to reassure her. ‘They’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I gave them to Mr Diaz to copy. There’s no way he’ll lose them.’

  ‘For a moment, I thought you’d just dumped them at some Korean grocery shop,’ she said. ‘What a relief.’

  I told her I’d had trouble reading Patrick’s handwriting so I didn’t know what the stories were about. Her surprise was genuine, I decided. I don’t think she had any idea that he had been working on the Mycroft stories.

  She took the painting and began talking about the friend she was staying with up at the War Bonnet Cliffs. She said she was a sculptor, and began describing how she used driftwood that she collected from the beach.

  I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. The coffee had revived me, but my thoughts were all about my uncle’s strange story.

  The tone was strangely confused – after a dark opening, it had reverted to jokes and soft pornography. But an unsettling mood had come over it with the arrival of Abel Mundy. It was a different atmosphere from the previous stories – the darkest they’d got was a kind of melancholy, the wistfulness of a self-described failure looking back on his life with regretful humour. This was something else: vengeful, active. It was almost as though there was too much anger for one character to contain. Mundy’s violence seemed to infect Mycroft, and by implication, Patrick. I thought about what Mrs Delamitri had said about Patrick’s baseless guilt. ‘There was always this feeling that he’d done something awful.’

  I began to wish Mrs Delamitri would go away so that I could reread the story and consider what I had found upsetting about it.

  ‘It’s a quality the light has here, apparently,’ she was saying as she stood gazing out of the window over the garden. ‘She came out here from Wisconsin and just fell in love with it.’

  The detail that stood out for me was the deaf family. Although they had been transposed in time and place and re-upholstered as a different ethnic group, I felt they were still recognisably my neighbours, the Fernshaws. It wasn’t just the deafness. The sexes and relative ages of the children were the same in both families as well. It meant Abel Mundy might be a portrait of their father.

  ‘… built up in layers of impasto on scrunched-up newspaper. They’d make lovely gifts.’

  ‘You know the Fernshaws, don’t you,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Mrs Delamitri turned round from the window and let the lace drape fall back across the glass.

  ‘You told Nathan to say hi to his sister.’

  ‘Oh, sure. I met them a couple of times. They seemed like nice kids. Patrick got close to them after their father died. The girl is beautiful. She’d be more your type, Damien. Closer to your age, too.’

  ‘She’s got a boyfriend,’ I said.

  ‘Really? What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s an academic. Name’s Michael. Quite a bit older than her.’

  ‘That figures,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, the old cliché about looking for a father figure, I guess.’

  I refilled the kettle from the tap. ‘What happened to her actual father?’

  ‘Don’t quote me on this, Damien, but I believe he drowned.’

  *

  Mrs Delamitri left before lunch. The pistols were in the chest of looted possessions that I had stored up in the attic. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to learn from them, but I found myself examining them again closely. They did look like murder weapons. That was what I had found unpleasant about them in the first place. They had the same grubbily practical quality as the objects in Ziploc bags that attorneys brandish in courtrooms. They were cruel and ordinary – like a pair of bread knives, or screwdrivers, like the chair legs Mycroft uses to finish off Abel Mundy.

  Nothing in the previous stories had prepared me for the violence Mycroft unleashed on the wounded man. It was completely unexpected. It also seemed unnecessary. Surely Mycroft the egghead could have come up with a more elegant way of disposing of his man than bashing his brains out with a lump of wood?

  I cocked and fired the faulty pistol. Still no click. Had it been damaged in a fall? Rust seemed a more likely answer. And who in their right mind would plan to carry out a murder with an unreliable antique? I told myself it was a prop from the costume box, not an exhibit in a murder trial.

  I found it hard to admit to myself what the story made me think.

  Mycroft had said he was offering Mundy a choice: if Mundy left the country, he wouldn’t kill him. But the more I reread the story, the less the offer seemed sincere. Mycroft had planned to kill him all along. And the sinister part was that he seemed to enjoy it. He was thrilled by the taste of the dead man’s blood. By comparison, the account of disposing of the body was totally dispassionate. It had a weird detachment, as though it were written by a character in shock.

  Down in the basement, Patrick had saved copies of his rage-filled letters like trophies, like so many scalps that he’d taken from his victims. And to Patrick each of them represented a wrong righted, a humbug exposed, a slight avenged. Mycroft would undoubtedly h
ave approved. He was everything Patrick felt about himself, raised to heroic size: the neglected genius, the avenging angel, the scourge of the powerful, the mould-breaking intellectual. And when Patrick was in a manic, morally indignant frame of mind, he shared Mycroft’s confidence that no problem was so complex that it wouldn’t benefit from his interference.

  And even the more low-key Mycroft recalling his adventures in old age bore similarities to my uncle: the erudition, the reflective melancholy, the obssession with success and failure, the hinted-at burden of guilt.

  But Mycroft was a murderer.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MR DIAZ WAS SORRY when I told him I would be leaving in about a week. I said I might be back the following summer, but secretly I felt this would be the last time I would ever visit.

  ‘I’ll have it winterised,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the police to stop by once a day. We don’t want another break-in.’

  ‘You might invest in a burglar alarm,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll put it to the trustees.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘I came across this story while I was going through my uncle’s things. I’d like you to read it. I’d like to know what you think of it.’

  He looked at me with a slightly puzzled smile. ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ I told him. ‘I’d like you to read it with an open mind. I found it somewhere that makes me think Patrick felt it was important.’

  ‘Moby-Dick important, or Headline Rate of Inflation important?’

  ‘That’s why I wanted you to read it,’ I said, and he slapped my back and chuckled.

  He met me the following afternoon at one of the harbour bars in Westwich. I had arrived slightly early and got a bowl of wilted-looking yellow popcorn and a pitcher of frothy lager.

  ‘Well, what did you make of it?’

  He took a handful of popcorn from the bowl. ‘You trying to get me in trouble with my wife?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘“Her hand roused my naked yard to stiffness.”’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

  Mr Diaz snorted with laughter and a popcorn kernel got stuck at the back of his throat. ‘I was quoting from the story!’ he wheezed.

  ‘I know, I know. I didn’t want your opinion on his sexual braggadocio. What did you think of the rest of it?’

  ‘Well, it’s all kind of mixed up. I mean, one guy’s called Fernshaw, but the Fernshaw character’s called something else.’

  ‘Mundy. He transposed the names.’

  ‘Right. I’ll tell you another thing, from what my wife tells me, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out Dicky Fernshaw was a thug.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It was well known.’

  ‘Really?’

  Mr Diaz nodded.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Drowned, I think. I don’t know too much about it. This is old island stuff. You should really talk to my wife. She was in high school with all the Fernshaws.’

  I found myself too ashamed to admit to the thoughts I had been having about Patrick and had to resort to a fictional device to make me feel less uncomfortable.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I showed the story to an old friend of Patrick’s and she was quite upset by it. She felt that the story wasn’t one hundred per cent fiction. I have no idea myself. She even – I know how ridiculous this must sound to you – she even thought Patrick might have been somehow involved in Mr Fernshaw’s death.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No. That’s what she thought. I didn’t know enough about the background to it to tell her she was wrong.’

  ‘I mean,, the story is ten per cent jokes, ten per cent porno, eighty per cent whatever. But it’s not evidence that anyone’s killed anybody.’

  ‘It’s not evidence you could use in court,’ I said. ‘But it’s still a “confession”.’

  ‘That’s right. “The Confession of Sherlock Holmes.”’

  ‘Mycroft Holmes, actually. Sherlock’s older brother.’ It somewhat undermined my confidence in Mr Diaz that he couldn’t even get the title right and didn’t seem to have grasped that Sherlock wasn’t the protagonist.

  ‘Well, let me ask you this,’ he said. ‘Do you think Dick Fernshaw’s body is in a barrel at the bottom of the Thames?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. Mr Diaz was looking pleased with himself, as though this observation was conclusive. ‘The point is the story made her feel uncomfortable, and so I thought it was worth running past you.’

  I knew that the inference I was putting on the story depended on being selective about what was literally true, but I found this difficult to explain to Mr Diaz. He had a point, of course. Wasn’t it either all true or all false? Then I would remember the haunting line in the story that began And I beat him until he moved no longer and get uneasy.

  ‘That’s my opinion, Damien. I majored in Business Administration, not English Literature. In fact, I got an F in Great Books. I can frame a legal document that’s watertight, but if you want literary criticism you should be talking to someone else. That sound funny to you?’

  ‘You remind me of someone,’ I said, thinking of my father.

  ‘I’ve lived on Ionia seven years. Fernshaw died before I even came to the island. I’ve never heard that there was anything suspicious in it. I’ll ask my wife if you like, but I’d say you’ve been on your own in that house for too long.’ He smiled at me to show it wasn’t meant unkindly.

  ‘It’s not my theory,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I just wanted to be able to set her mind at rest.’

  ‘If you really want the scuttlebutt on the Fernshaws, come by and talk to my wife. She’s an authority on island gossip. She’ll tell you what’s true, what’s not true, what might be true, and a whole lot besides.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I WOULD HAVE GONE to see Mrs Diaz sooner, but I had to go to the mainland to get a new US passport. I had promised Nathan that I would take him with me. He wanted to buy an inflatable boat from a shop in Hyannis. He had called it a turtle boat. I asked him what that was.

  ‘It’s a boat shaped like a turtle. It’s got feet and a head, and on the bottom it says, “Help”, in case it flips over, so the Coast Guard can come and rescue you.’

  ‘And what if you don’t need to be rescued?’

  He shrugged. ‘You flip it over and get back in.’

  My motives for taking him weren’t purely altruistic. I think I hoped to learn something from him that would allay my anxieties about his father. Whenever I was with him now, I found myself checking him over for psychological scars. Aspects of his behaviour which had previously seemed mildly eccentric began to strike me as neurotic.

  Nathan was meticulous about his appearance. Whenever the slightest bit of dirt touched him, he broke off whatever he was doing and went to clean himself up – even when he would inevitably get dirty again, minutes later. He spent so much time traipsing across the lawn to wash his hands that I had bought him gloves for outdoor work, which he never took off. Each time I saw him, he was wearing fresh clothes, which was a reproach and an example to me, who tended to wear the same paint-splattered clothes for days. He had a horror of insects and anything rotten: he would go to great lengths to avoid touching decayed apples with his hands, generally spearing them with a stick to propel them into the marshes. Once he shuddered and turned pale after he brushed against some cobwebs in the garage.

  Occasionally, I found my mind wandering off in directions that were just plain crazy. At one point, I envisaged a murder scene where Nathan was reluctantly assisting his mother and sister dispose of his father’s body. Perhaps he had contracted his squeamishness from handling his dead father’s severed limbs.

  But as soon as I thought about the real Mrs Fernshaw – plump and friendly, moving gracefully around her kitchen – I knew she was incapable of a violent act and felt slightly ashamed of myself. I knew nothing about Mr
Fernshaw’s death. My idle brain had daydreamed a set of incidents that had no basis in reality.

  At times, I wished I could unread the story. It depressed me. There was something grim and unforgiving about it – the way an intimation of death can make everything else seem foolish or inconsequential beside it. But like an ordinary depression, my anxious thoughts receded altogether sometimes. I had hours without thinking about it when I felt relatively happy. But I only had to remember the vivid and clumsy murder of Abel Mundy and the worries would begin again. As with the first fragment, something in the tone of it was all wrong. The violent murder was as under-explained as Mycroft’s abandonment of Serena Eden.

  My speculations weren’t confined to Nathan. I tried to fit his sister’s behaviour into patterns suggested by the story.

  I built my obsession on tiny details. The innocuous Michael Winks made better sense as a partner for Terry if you considered that her father had been an ogre. Her insecurity, her eagerness to please her boyfriend seemed to point to a fraught relationship with the dead man. And she hadn’t hesitated about leaving me with Nathan on the day we went to the cinema – I put that down to an abused child’s antennae for a potential abuser.

  I know they don’t mean anything – these observations were trivial. You could turn them round and use them to support a contrary argument. But the suspicion remained with me – like one of those obsessive worries which defeat all attempts at reasoning – that it might be based on truth.

  *

  Winks had hurt his foot and couldn’t drive. He was lying full length on the sofa in the Fernshaws’ TV room with his leg on a pile of cushions. Terry and her mother had gone into town to go shopping, he said.