The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  IV

  “Harry, I just can’t thank you enough for—”

  “Spare me the gratitude. Give me the truth.”

  At my suggestion we were sitting on the bench by the tennis court, a spot that precluded all possibility of our conversation being overheard. The parlormaid had brought out a tray of drinks, and we were sipping gin-and-lime in tall glasses garnished, in acknowledgment of the heat of the summer evening, with ice cubes.

  “Well, I know you must want to kill me but I felt I just had to say how grateful I was to you for—”

  “No, old chap, I don’t want to kill you. I want to listen. Contrary to what you may suppose, murder isn’t on my list of favorite pastimes. Now cut out all this idiotic chatter and tell me just what the hell was really going on.”

  “All right. Well, here goes … I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  “Balls. This was a premeditated crime.”

  “Well, it was and it wasn’t. I never thought I’d actually go through with it.”

  I stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me this was some sort of game which got out of control?”

  “Not a game. Therapy.”

  “Therapy?”

  “Yes, my psychiatrist in Dublin kept saying to me, ‘Act out your grief. Don’t just sit around saying life’s finished because that’s a purely negative response. Take positive action and you’ll feel better.’ ”

  “My God, these psychiatrists have a lot to answer for!”

  “No wait—let me explain.” Kester paused, but it was the pause of someone trying to phrase the truth accurately, not the pause of a storyteller wondering what fable to invent next. “After Anna died,” he said at last, “I became utterly obsessed by that scene in ’39. I’d vowed at the time to avenge her but then the war came and we all went our separate ways, and after the war all I wanted was to get back to my writing. And then … Anna died. And the guilt absolutely overwhelmed me. I felt I’d failed her. I felt … diminished because I’d made no attempt to repay those gross insults to my wife. That was why my grief for Anna was so all-consuming. My guilt was such that I just didn’t know how I was going to live with myself.” He looked directly at me. “Can you understand that?”

  “All too clearly.” I thought of Bella.

  Kester looked relieved. “Well,” he said, finding himself able to continue more fluently, “the psychiatrist helped, and finally I saw a way I could exorcise this guilt. I wasn’t primarily interested in revenge by this time, you understand—after all, no revenge could bring Anna back. All I wanted was to alleviate the guilt. And I thought: I’ll write about it. I’ll write about this hero who takes an elaborate and masterly revenge on the uncles and cousin who have tormented him for so long.”

  “My God—”

  “Yes, I know it sounds mad but as soon as I’d made that decision I felt much better. I came back here, held out the olive branch of peace to you and Thomas so that I could have absolute peace, and began. Scribble, scribble. I tossed off a first draft in three months and felt euphoric but that sort of euphoria, the writer’s ecstasy, isn’t to be trusted, and I put the manuscript away for six months so that I could view it with detachment. I didn’t want to make any mistakes in the plotting. Then to pass the time I began another book—the novel about our great-grandparents and Owain Bryn-Davies.”

  “I’m beginning to believe the roman à clef should be banned by law. All right, go on. How did the manuscript look six months later?”

  “Poor. The characterization was all wrong and I knew why. It’s hard to explain to a layman, but to get a character on paper you have to turn off your own personality and turn on the personality of the character you’re trying to capture—it’s a trick of mental projection, and my problem here was that I hadn’t projected myself properly; I’d remained Kester Godwin seeing Cousin Harry as a two-dimensional villain. What I had to do to make you convincing was to put myself in your head and work out what was going on in your life—and of course as soon as I did that, I came up against that incredible fact which defied explanation: your marriage to Bella.”

  “I see,” I said, and I did. Kester had played the psychological detective, refusing to abandon the trail until the mystery had been unraveled. “You constructed a theory based on Bella’s remark about ‘another daughter’ and proved it by digging up that birth certificate. And then I suppose you saw how you could incorporate the facts into your story.”

  “Exactly. I sat down, tossed off two more drafts, improved the characterization and reworked the plot.”

  “Where had the plot got to by this time?”

  “Well, Thomas was to be the victim, that was obvious from the start, but my real problem was that I couldn’t think what to do with you. I came to the conclusion that what I really wanted was to give you the devil of a fright and at the same time scare poor old Uncle John out of his wits. I didn’t want to go further than that (a) because I’m fond of Uncle John and (b) because artistically speaking it would have been too melodramatic if I’d had you hanged for a crime you didn’t commit. All you’d done in ’39 was gloat, and that was awful but hardly worthy of a hangman’s noose. So what I planned was a murder which looked as if it had been committed by you but which in fact I could turn inside out in the last chapter with the result that all charges against you would have to be dropped.”

  “But how on earth could you have achieved that? You’d set me up as the perfect suspect! I had no alibi, and the birth certificate in Thomas’s pocket gave me a splendid motive—”

  “Wrong. That certainly suggested a great deal, but there was no real evidence of blackmail, was there?”

  “My God! Yes, I see but … wait a minute—my fingerprints were on that club! How did you get me out of that one?”

  “Thomas wasn’t killed with the club.”

  “What!”

  “I used a poker,” said Kester serenely, unable to stop himself looking pleased with his inventive powers. “Then I smeared the club and left it as a red herring.” I was speechless.

  “The police are very clever nowadays,” said Kester. “They’d assume at first that the club was the weapon but later they’d make tests and find that the club face didn’t match the wound. Then I’d call their attention to the poker, and the whole point of the poker, you see, was that you couldn’t possibly have used it. It came from my bedroom upstairs, as any of the housemaids would testify.”

  “But …” I could barely speak. “You could only clear me by incriminating yourself!”

  “Yes, but I’d have got off. I’d have confessed to manslaughter and who was going to disbelieve me when I swore I’d struck a violent drunken man in self-defense? I thought the odds were I’d be convicted but discharged without a sentence—or at the most given six months in jail, and that would have been no more than I deserved for failing to avenge Anna while she was alive.”

  “But how would you have explained your failure to confess your guilt straightaway?”

  “Sheer nervous panic. I thought that would be quite in character. But as soon as I saw you were heading for the gallows I’d do the done thing and own up. That would have been in character too.”

  There was a pause. I finished my drink in a single gulp and stood up to mix myself another.

  “However, that was just what I planned for the novel,” said Kester. “In real life I never planned to go that far, but in the end—”

  “You found you had to make your dream a reality.”

  “—I found I couldn’t resist the temptation to see how well the plot worked. The crucial scene was the sacking of Thomas—I was sorry when that lunch party didn’t come off. But later … it was really rather exciting when Thomas came roaring up the drive that night, but then—” He stopped with a shudder.

  “Fantasy ended and reality began.”

  “Yes. It was very much more than I’d bargained for. He wasn’t just violent. He was bloody violent. And I wasn’t just frightened. I was bloody frightened. I ran to the billiard roo
m because the weapon was there—I’d acted out the book by getting everything ready beforehand—but right up to the last moment I never meant to do more than knock him out. And then … and then—”

  “You found you couldn’t stop.”

  “I meant to stop, I meant to, but then—oh God, Harry, I never knew it could be like that. I suddenly found that once I’d set my plot in motion there was no way back; it—it was as if I’d crossed some final crucial line which couldn’t be recrossed. I’d never thought I’d actually commit murder, but once that die was cast I’d crossed that line, and then I could only move forward to destruction—”

  “Shut up. I can’t stand that kind of melodramatic talk. Save it for your next book.”

  He tried to check the emotion, and when I finally realized it was genuine I added more gin to his glass.

  “Two questions,” I said when the glass was empty. “One: did you destroy the manuscript of this masterpiece?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God. Two: where’s the poker? I want to make sure you haven’t spun me the biggest fairy tale of all time.”

  Abandoning his glass he led the way past the patch of uneven turf that covered the foundations of the old summerhouse, and the next moment we were entering the woods. Kester counted ten trees back and stopped. At that point we both glanced at the house far away across the lawn but we were in shadow among the trees and I knew we would have been invisible to any distant observer indoors.

  Kester scuffled around amidst last autumn’s leaves, burrowed into the earth and produced the poker wrapped in newspaper. Thomas’s gore, dried and crusty, was well preserved at one end.

  “All right. Bury it again. It’s as safe there as anywhere else.”

  He reburied it. Slowly we returned to our bench by the tennis court. In front of us Oxmoon basked peacefully in the hot evening light but as we drew nearer I saw the sunset reflected in the western windows. The sky looked as though it had been massacred.

  We drank for a while in silence but suddenly I said, “I’ll tell you something, old chap. You’d have been hanged.” As I turned to face him I saw his stunned expression. “Yes,” I said, “you made a mistake—all in accordance with the best traditions of detective fiction. Isn’t the fictional murderer always supposed to make one fatal mistake?”

  “But my God—what was it?”

  “The poker. You said it came from your bedroom—‘as any of the housemaids would testify,’ you added just now. But how do you reconcile that poker with your story that you killed accidentally in self-defense? If you took the poker from your bedroom and put it in the billiard room beforehand, that implies the crime had been premeditated.”

  “Christ!” He nearly fainted with horror. Then he tried to drum up an explanation. “The billiard room has no set of fire irons. I brought the poker down because I wanted to burn some papers in the fireplace.”

  “Very implausible. Why pick the billiard room? Why not pick a room that has a set of fire irons? Why not burn the stuff in your bedroom, where the poker belonged?”

  Kester began to shiver. I poured him some more gin.

  “But how could I have overlooked that, how could I—I worked everything out so carefully—”

  “Even a genius can have a blind spot when constructing a supposedly infallible theory, and you’re no genius, Kester. Stick to writing books. Editors are much kinder than the police when they spot an error and a rejection slip is so much more acceptable than the gallows.”

  Kester drank all his gin straight off. Eventually he managed to say: “So I owe you my life.” He couldn’t have sounded more horrified.

  We sat there, staring at the house. The sun had sunk a little lower, and all the windows looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse.

  “I suppose it would sound too melodramatic,” said Kester at last, “if I said I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, old chap,” I said. “The last thing I’d ever want from you is repayment. I might wind up as the corpse in your next novel.”

  Silence. We both went on sitting there side by side, both went on watching that sinister sunset.

  “However,” I said idly after a while, “if you press me, I daresay I could think of a good turn or two you might do.”

  Another silence.

  “Purely to assuage your conscience, of course,” I added, voice still immaculately idle, “and to help you to live with your guilt.”

  It took Kester twenty-four seconds to reply. I was counting. Probably we were both counting. Twenty-four seconds is a very long time to be sitting in silence with a murderer while the clouds appear to be committing mayhem in a crimson sky overhead.

  At last he whispered: “What do you want?”

  “Oh, just a little favor, old chap. Just an unmistakable clarification that Hal’s your favorite nephew.”

  Kester swallowed. “You mean—”

  I terminated the delicate sparring match and prepared to slug it out. “Look. If we want to survive this disaster we’ve got to find a way we can live with each other without going berserk, and Hal’s that way, Kester. If you change your will and make Hal your heir I swear I’ll never move against you. Then you can relax—and once you relax I can relax and we’ll be at peace.”

  “But you can’t move against me,” said Kester. “You daren’t. You’re in this with me up to the neck.”

  “True. But that still leaves my head above water, and you’ll never be able to convince yourself that there’s really nothing I can do to you. But if you make my son your heir—”

  “You’ll kill me and move in here with Hal!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, if I did that I’d wind up on the gallows because the police would immediately find out I was a trained killer with a motive the size of an elephant. Now pull yourself together, Kester, and think. Think. I’m offering you the only available olive branch of peace. For Christ’s sake grab it before the men in the white coats arrive to lock us both up in the nearest asylum.”

  Kester chose that moment to go to pieces. He shuddered with dry sobs and whispered, “Oh God, oh Christ, what have I done.”

  “Shut up.” I shook him. “It’s the future not the past that matters now.” One of my father’s well-worn catchphrases slipped into my mind. “Hold fast!” I urged, and Kester, in an eerie echo of the upbringing we had shared, automatically responded: “Stand firm. Soldier on.”

  This sort of talk eventually doused the hysterics. He mopped himself up and said, “Very well, I’ll do as you say. I’m fond of Hal. But if I die before he’s twenty-one, don’t expect my will to appoint you to be a trustee. I’m going to make very sure you never get your hands on my Oxmoon.”

  “Your privilege, old chap. Suit yourself.”

  We sat there hating each other, two men locked up in a steadily shrinking cell, and the next moment we again saw the double image and sensed the terror that had no name.

  “Erika told me once,” said Kester in a shaking voice, “that the Germans have a peculiarly vile legend about Doppelgänger. They say—”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to know.” I stood up. “We’re not Doppelgänger,” I said. “I absolutely refuse to sink to your over-emotional melodramatic level. The plain truth of the matter is that we’re just two cousins with a fatal amount in common.” I began to walk away from him. “Send me a copy of your new will,” I said over my shoulder, “and send it soon. My reserves of patience are very far from endless, I assure you, and I feel I now need a prompt gesture of good faith to soothe my nerves.”

  “I’ll see Fairfax tomorrow.”

  We said nothing else. He remained slumped on the bench, I went on walking away across the lawn, and seconds later I was driving erratically back to Penhale.

  Did I really think our mutual interest in Hal would keep the peace between us? No. But at least I’d bought myself a little time so that I could work out how to lock Kester up in the nearest madhouse.

  Of course he was a cer
tifiable lunatic.

  V

  I was now in the most unenviable position because although I knew Kester was crazy I couldn’t prove it without disclosing my own role in Thomas’s murder. I was not only an accessory after the fact. I was guilty of that offense which I believe is called ‘misprision of a felony,’ the concealment of a serious crime. There was also the possibility that if I openly accused Kester of murder he would deny it and cook up a new plot in which I’d killed Thomas with the golf club and threatened to kill Kester as well unless he helped me cover up the crime. And in addition to all these hair-raising dilemmas, at least one member of my family thought I was paranoid about Kester and would be certain to believe Kester’s story in preference to mine. To use a cricketing metaphor, I was on the stickiest of sticky wickets and no matter how hard I tried to hook my way out of trouble I ran a heavy risk of being clean-bowled.

  There was only one person who would believe me, but how could I ever explain to my father why I hadn’t drawn the line immediately I found Thomas’s body and summoned the police no matter what the possible consequences to myself? Useless to say that I thought I was being framed for a murder I hadn’t committed. He would reply that the police would have sorted out the muddle—as indeed they would have done, once they had uncovered Kester’s mistake with the poker. Then I would have been proved innocent and Kester certifiable and that would have been that. But as it was … I was in my usual big mess. And what was worse, I couldn’t see my way out; I couldn’t see how the mess could be terminated. Every instinct suggested that Kester would take another swipe at me in the future; I knew too damned much for his peace of mind so I had to get him locked up, had to, but how? How?

  Obviously it would help if I convinced my family that I was a sane rational man instead of a paranoid neurotic; but this exercise in public relations would take time, and meanwhile Kester might murder me. I wasted many hours picturing my own murder, but at last I pulled myself together sufficiently to perceive two important and reassuring truths. The first was that I suspected Kester had frightened himself so much by his bizarre behavior that it would be some time before he had the nerve to start plotting his next novel. And the second was that I sensed he would be reluctant to move against me while my father was alive. He might want to, but I thought sheer terror of being exposed to my father as my murderer if anything went wrong would be a powerful deterrent to him. If Kester grew desperate I knew he’d say “To hell with Uncle John!” and take a swipe at me. But if I handled him with kid gloves and kept desperation at bay I thought my father’s powerful influence might prevail for a long time.