The Disappearance of Mr James Phillimore

by Dan Andriacco

  I wouldn’t say we were arguing. Her yellow silk pajamas were too cute - not to mention form-fitting - for me to be arguing.

  “Everybody’s a suspect,” I pointed out, “at least potentially. Let’s list the possibilities and consider each one.” Why hadn’t we done this before? It made so much sense. I picked up the pad of paper thoughtfully provided by hotel management. Lynda would have typed on her iPad, but I prefer paper and pen, just as I prefer paper books to e-books. I started writing down names, saying them out loud as I wrote. Lynda helped, contributing names that I forgot.

  The finished list looked like this:

  Heather O’Toole

  Nettie Phillimore

  Roger Phillimore

  Rod Chance

  Aiden Kingsley

  Trout

  Sir Stephen Fresch

  Margaret Carstairs

  “Is that everybody?” I asked.

  “Except for Ralston.”

  “Good. Let’s just go down the names and see what we can come up with for each one. I’ll be the prosecutor and you act as the defense attorney.”

  “Okay. This could be kind of fun.” Lynda wiggled around to make herself comfortable. She has a nice wiggle.

  This isn’t exactly what I thought we’d be doing for fun in bed on our honeymoon, but okay.

  “Heather O’Toole had a great motive to kill Phillimore if she thought she was going to inherit billions of pounds,” I began.

  Lynda shook her head. “She could divorce him with a lot less rigmarole and still walk away with a pile of money. Besides, why would she kill Carstairs?”

  “They had a secret affair,” I suggested.

  “Puh-leeze, Jeff! When was the last time a successful movie actress killed somebody to cover up an affair?”

  “She wasn’t that successful four years ago.”

  “I still don’t buy it. That’s a Victorian motive for a post-modern world. I’m just talking reality. Tabloids like The Daily Eye live on that kind of sleaziness and it hasn’t ruined anybody’s career in decades. No, you can cross HO’T off your list.”

  Thinking that Roger Phillimore would doubtless be disappointed, I did so.

  “On to Mrs. Phillimore number one,” I said.

  “There’s another successful woman, and she already got her pound of flesh from Phillimore in the divorce.”

  “I think it was more like several million pounds of money,” I quipped. “And that actually gives her a motive in the Carstairs killing. Suppose she knew all along about the Ponzi scheme and she killed Carstairs to silence him so that Phillimore’s empire would be intact and he could settle millions of it on her at the divorce.”

  “But Carstairs died two years before the divorce. And then she waited until two years after the divorce and the start of a Scotland Yard investigation to kill Phillimore?” Lynda’s voice was drenched with skepticism. “And how would Nettie know that Carstairs was about to blow the whistle? Whoever he’d planned to report it to, it sure wasn’t Nettie Phillimore.”

  Who had Carstairs planned to inform? That was worth thinking about. Presumably he planned to go to the police, but if so he must have told the wrong person of his intention first. Or maybe he went to the wrong cop.

  “And another thing,” Lynda went on before I got very far with that line of thought. “Why would Nettie, of all people, help him disappear? We’re assuming the killer was also the person who helped him do the Houdini, right?”

  “Yeah, but maybe we shouldn’t. That would rule out most people on the list - certainly Roger Phillimore, given the way he hated his old man.”

  “Or did he?” Lynda raised her eyebrows. “We shouldn’t accept anything at face value. Maybe all that venom he directed at his father was just a show to throw Scotland Yard off the track. He could have been in cahoots with Phillimore in his fraudulent enterprises for all we know.”

  “Well, he is half-American,” I said. “Maybe his mother taught him how to spell.”

  Lynda ignored my lame comment. “Suppose the younger Phillimore helped his father disappear because they somehow knew the police were closing in on him. James expected to leave the country and hide out somewhere, but Roger decided to kill him to make sure that his father could never turn against him.”

  “Okay, that all makes sense. Under this scenario, Roger also killed Carstairs earlier to keep him from blowing the whistle. But who’s the Professor?”

  “Professor Ralston! I don’t suspect Roger Phillimore for a minute, Jeff; I’m just playing the game.”

  Suppressing a sigh, I put a question mark next to Roger’s name.

  “Next,” I said, “we have Rod Chance, Heather’s husband number one. He’s a South African. How do they spell?”

  “I don’t know about that, but we’d have to assume an awful lot to keep him on the suspect list. Granted, he was one of Phillimore victims, so he’d have a nice revenge motive. But that doesn’t get him anywhere near Carstairs or helping Phillimore to disappear.”

  “He could have been helping Heather. Maybe they were still a hot item. I’ve seen your parents in action.” Lynda’s parents have been divorced since she was a little girl, but whenever they get together they still... well, get together. When you’re in a room with them you can practically feel the heat. You want to yell, “Rent a room!” But they can’t be together for more than a week before the passion moans turn to Italian curses (Mom) and military oaths (Dad).

  “Nobody is like my parents,” Lynda said with a shudder. “Thank God and all the saints. But we’ve already ruled Heather out, so even if Rod Chance were still romantically involved with her he wouldn’t be helping her kill Phillimore because she didn’t do it. Besides, Faro reported in The Eye that Heather returned to the movie set in Barbados. I’m sure that if Chance went with her, Faro would have sniffed that out and reported it.”

  “Maybe that’s why he didn’t,” I said. But I drew a line through Rod Chance. “How about Aiden Kingsley?”

  “Oh, yes, our rising young Member of Parliament and brilliant but low-selling novelist. Nettie Phillimore has been boosting him strongly in The Net and we met him as he was coming to her place for cocktails and dinner.”

  “So were they getting together for business or monkey business?” I wondered aloud. “She’s way older than he is, but that’s no barrier. Did you read the story in The Daily Mirror this morning called ‘The Caged Cougar’? It was about this forty-four-year-old office worker who sexually harassed her younger male colleagues at work.”

  “Whatever his connection with Nettie - and I personally think you should get your mind out of the gutter - there’s the same objection as before: We’ve already ruled her out, so that should rule him out. He wasn’t even a victim of Phillimore, according to Faro’s list, so he has even less motive than Chance.”

  Scratch the M.P., reluctantly. My desire to see the little prig trade pinstripes for prison stripes was unworthy, but there it was.

  “How about Trout, then?”

  Lynda rolled her eyes. “The butler did it? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “He may be a small fish in a sea of suspects, but if we were looking for the one person in this whole crew most likely to have helped Phillimore disappear, he’d win hands down. He was on Phillimore’s payroll and he was in the house at the time.”

  “That’s all true, but what about motive?”

  I spread my hands, meaning “Come on!” “Getting the husband out of the way goes all the way back to David and Bathsheba. Trout works as butler, personal trainer, and part-time bodyguard to Heather O’Toole, which is quite a body to guard. Maybe he wasn’t as uninterested in women as Heather thinks. Some people do go both ways, as the Scarecrow said in The Wizard of Oz.”

  Lynda stared at me. I knew my fly wasn’t open because that wasn’t where s
he was looking.

  “What? What did I say?”

  She shook her head. “Sometimes, Jeff Cody, I just marvel at the way your mind works. What about Carstairs?”

  That stalled me, but only for a moment. “Maybe Trout killed him on orders from Phillimore to silence him. Phillimore planned the whole thing. Then Trout turned the tables on Phillimore four years later, killing him in exactly the same way because he didn’t have the imagination to come up with his own plan.” Wait, that actually sounds pretty good. “I’m not crossing his name off the list!”

  “I don’t think you should,” Lynda said mildly. “You do realize, though, that the English-spelling business that works against Professor Ralston presents exactly the same problem for Trout as a suspect - and the last two names on our list as well.”

  “Sir Stephen is not a native speaker of English,” I pointed out.

  “No, but he’s been in the UK a long time. He’s more English than the English. I bet his British spelling is perfect.”

  “Well, he wasn’t high on my list anyway. He has a good revenge motive, having lost a lot of money in Phillimore’s scheme - never mind his reassurances to us about that - but I can’t see him helping Phillimore disappear and I don’t know why he’d kill poor Carstairs.”

  I drew a neat line through his name.

  “So that leaves us with Mrs. Carstairs,” Lynda said. “Take your best shot.”

  “Okay. Let’s say she killed her husband - maybe there was a boyfriend in the wings.”

  “If so, he’s still there. It’s four years later and she hasn’t remarried.”

  “Nevertheless, let’s just say that’s what happened and Phillimore figured it out. Maybe he liked Carstairs and never accepted the suicide theory so he kept poking into his death. Then, like a lamebrain in a mystery novel, he confronted the merry widow instead of going to the police. She killed him the same way she did her husband because it worked the first time.”

  “And how about the disappearance of Mr. James Phillimore?”

  “That was either a joke that Phillimore cooked up to amuse his friends or the first stage in skipping the country because he knew his house of cards was about to fall,” I said. “Either way, it had nothing to do with Phillimore’s murder.”

  “And Mrs. C somehow found out that he was holed up at the Langham, enabling her to go there and kill him?” The doubt in her husky voice was so thick you could cut it with a buzz saw. “And then she told us that her husband’s suicide was a murder, which she apparently had also told the police?”

  Lynda shook her curly head. “You’re wasting your time on true crime, Jeff. You need to get back to fiction.”

  She lovingly removed the pen from my hand and crossed out the name of Margaret Carstairs.

  “That just leaves us with Roger Phillimore and Trout,” I observed, “and I put a question mark next to Roger.”

  Without comment, Lynda used the pen still in her hand to add “Professor Ralston” to the bottom of the list.

  “We’re back to where we started,” I said. “Ralston doesn’t work for me because I strongly suspect she knows how to spell and I don’t buy your idea that Carstairs really did kill himself. You, on the other hand, seem to have a fixation about Professor Ralston. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were jealous.”

  “Jealous? Don’t be ridiculous, darling.” Lynda laughed - a bit hollowly, I thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Bad Behaviour

  When we met the McCabes for breakfast at the Pret a Manger closest to our hotel (a concession to me), Mac was engrossed in reading The Daily Eye. Faro’s lead story carried the headline TOP COP POPPED.

  “Typical tabloideze exaggeration,” Lynda sniffed. “Madigan was only an assistant commissioner, one of four, by no means the top cop. I explained that in my story.”

  “Faro’s piece below the headline is not exactly a model of journalistic restraint, either,” Mac noted. He started reading aloud:

  “Assistant Commissioner Andrew Madigan, a poor boy from Liverpool whose skill as a sleuth earned him a top position in the Metropolitan Police Service, was slain yesterday in his own home by a single shot to the heart from an American-made Colt .32 pistol. This reporter heard the gunfire and helped to find the still-warm body.”

  Mac continued for the next twenty-seven paragraphs. I still have the clipping of the story, so I could quote more, but you already know what happened at Madigan’s house. In addition to the news of the day, the story contained a lot of background on the Phillimore case rehashed from Faro’s previous epics.

  “That’s accurate enough,” I said when Mac had finished, “but Lynda’s story was better.”

  “Faro’s sources - ”

  Whatever Mac was about to say about them was cut off by The Ride of the Valkyries. Mac answered his phone after a brief peak at the screen.

  “Yes, Neville? Yes, I read as much in The Daily Eye. Well, I cannot say that I am surprised. Just now? And what do you deduce from that? I appreciate your confidence and I share your optimism. Indeed, all my instinct - and even Holmes talked about instinct - tells me that the solution is not far away. I promise you shall be the first to know.”

  Mac disconnected with a puzzled look on his face. “As I was about to say, Faro’s sources at Scotland Yard clearly go beyond the late Assistant Commissioner. Inspector Heath himself just received confirmation that the murder weapon was a Colt .32 - which, as you know, Faro already reported in this morning’s newspaper.”

  Lynda expressed her frustration at the Anglo-American’s scoop, using several impolite words. “We’ve got to figure this out so I can beat him on the big story.”

  Mac’s eyes opened wide and he broke into a smile. “Yes, of course - the big story. That explains Carstairs, by thunder! Thank you, Lynda.”

  Whether he would have explained himself at that point is doubtful. But I’ll never know for sure because he got derailed by Kate before Lynda or I could beg for more.

  “Darned autocorrect,” she muttered, completely oblivious to her husband’s expostulating. Mac raised an eyebrow, which Kate couldn’t see because she was working her smartphone with both thumbs. She expounded anyway. “I guess that’s what I get for trying to be cute. I was writing to Mac’s mother that I hope the kids are on their best behaviour - with i-o-u-r on the end, the British way - but my phone keeps correcting the spelling to i-o-r.”

  Mac thumped the table, shaking the water glasses. “I am an idiot! Why did I not think of that before? Phillimore’s smartphone was British. It would autocorrect h-o-n-o-r to h-o-n-o-u-r. The person sending the message would have to retype the word to change the spelling back. That means the American spelling wasn’t just a mistake. The killer wanted it to be that way - another false clue!”

  This struck me as being brilliant, but possibly untrue. “Maybe he - or she - just automatically changed the spelling,” I protested.

  “That is highly unlikely. Most people do not notice autocorrects. Reflect on your own experience. How many times have you sent or received a text in which the phone had autocorrected one or more words to ludicrous effect?”

  I looked at Lynda, almost blushing. A couple of weeks before our marriage, I had sent her a text in which the word “laptop” had been autocorrected to “lapdance.” I hadn’t noticed the change. Lynda had, to her concern.

  “Good point,” she told Mac dryly.

  Kate pushed the “send” button on her smartphone and looked up. “Let me get this straight. The killer faked a suicide and then planted a clue in the suicide note to make sure that the police knew it wasn’t a suicide? That makes no sense. Who would do that?”

  “Someone with a very devious mind who wanted to indicate that the killer was an American,” Mac said. “The unsuccessful attempt to frame me for Phillimore’s murder was no afterthou
ght. It was part of the plan from the beginning. This only confirms what I already knew, but it increases my confidence that I am on the right path. ‘The thing takes shape, Watson. It becomes coherent.’”

  “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Lynda said.

  I stared.

  “Well, I just read it two nights ago,” she said defensively. “That was one of the books I picked up at the Sherlock Holmes Museum.”

  “But who would want to frame you, Sebastian?” Kate asked, sounding totally puzzled. She thinks he’s totally loveable, of course, and has no clue as to his propensity for driving less tolerant souls crazy.

  “It was probably some academic jealousy thing that Professor Ralston had going,” Lynda said.

  She gave a synopsis of our detective work that morning in talking through all of the suspects and crossing most of them off the list. I gave my best pitch for Trout, but Lynda still wasn’t having it. She argued that Ralston was the strongest candidate of the three still in the running.

  “And now that we know that the American spelling was a false clue, Professor Ralston - ‘the Professor,’ get it? - is a better suspect than ever. She’s English, trying to put the blame on an American. And take the business of committing the crime with the Colt .32. She would have known that Mac owned one from reading Jeff’s books.” Lynda turned to me. “I’m sure you remember that she made it quite clear that she was a fan of yours at dinner before the debate, the part where she was fawning and flirting.” Hey, not my fault!

  “And I’m sure you remember my previous objection,” I countered. “Ralston argues that Phillimore’s death really was suicide. The murderer wouldn’t say that. Scotland Yard was only supposed to think it was suicide at first, but then realize it was murder and suspect Mac. That was the whole point of a suicide note with what we now know was a deliberate misspelling.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lynda nodded as if I had proved her point. “That’s just what the Professor wants you to think. Like Mac said, this killer has a very devious mind.”