The Disappearance of Mr James Phillimore

by Dan Andriacco

  I groaned inwardly. This was like chess on steroids and I was about two moves behind. Lynda is smarter than I am, so maybe she was right. Mac seemed to agree. At least, I thought that’s what he meant when he said, “I would like to speak with Professor Ralston again. I have a few questions for her. No, actually, I just have one question.”

  But he wouldn’t say what it was.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Hostage

  Things moved quickly from there. Back at the hotel, Mac privately made what I later learned were three phone calls. Within fifteen minutes he was knocking at our door to tell Lynda and me that we were meeting some other “actors in this little drama” at the Brigadiers Club.

  “Don’t tell me you’re handing Faro a piece of this story!” Lynda exclaimed.

  “I assure you he is a most necessary participant.”

  “And why Fresch?”

  “All will become clear very shortly, I promise.”

  Kate insisted on coming along because she wanted to be in on the end of the business, a desire that we would all soon regret.

  A friendly, dark-haired young man in round glasses welcomed to the Brigadiers Club this time. He showed us into a small meeting room behind the morning room. Sir Stephen sat in a well stuffed chair. Inspector Heath and Welles Faro were settled in on opposite ends of a long leather couch. Curiously, Faro was still holding on to that fat book, The Napoleon of Crime, just as he had been the last time I’d seen him.

  We all murmured the usual platitudes of greeting and shook hands before finding places to sit, Kate next to Faro and Mac on the other side next to Heath. Lynda and I claimed chairs.

  My brother-in-law looked around, as if counting the crowd. “Well, we are all here, so let us begin.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lynda protested. “Where’s Professor Ralston?” She stressed the title slightly, a subtle nod to the mysterious “Professor” of the coded message.

  “Althea will not be coming,” Mac said. “She answered my question on the phone. All I wanted to know is whether the death of Peter Carstairs spontaneously emerged from her memory banks or someone reminded her of it. If the latter, you see, it could have been another plant, a false clue.”

  “And was it?” Sir Stephen asked.

  I focused on the unlikely tycoon with his bald head, thick mustache, and faint Eastern European accent. And with a jolt it hit me: He must be the murderer. Why else would Mac have invited him instead of Ralston for this corny confrontation scene?

  “No,” Mac said. “Althea is convinced that she remembered the first murder on her own. And it was a murder, the first of three. Lynda gave me a singularly important clue when she referred to ‘the big story.’ I recalled then that Peter Carstairs used that very phrase, according to his wife.”

  He paused, as if he had just said something dramatic. We all looked at him blankly.

  “Think about it,” he continued. “When Carstairs talked to his wife about blowing the whistle on Phillimore’s Ponzi scheme, he talked in terms of ‘a big story.’ Why did he do that? Because he planned to tell what he knew to a journalist, not to the police.”

  “But obviously he was killed before he could do that,” Faro said.

  Mac shook his head. “On the contrary. I believe that Peter Carstairs did tell his story to a journalist - who subsequently killed him. Have you ever noticed that reading habits tend to run in the family? Margaret Carstairs reads The Daily Eye. I would wager that her husband did as well.”

  “Good taste in that household then,” Faro said with a forced chuckle.

  It didn’t work. I stole a glance at Heath. His body appeared tensed as if ready to spring. He hadn’t yet said a word, and I had a feeling he wasn’t going to. He was waiting for Mac to play this out.

  Mac turned to Sir Stephen Fresch. “Sir Stephen, you approached me via e-mail with the happy thought that you and I engage in a debate here in London. Was that debate your idea?”

  The entrepreneur looked slightly uncomfortable. “I never claimed it was, did I? No, it was Faro here who suggested it to me. To tell you the truth, he also gave me the winning argument. That was very clever of him, I thought.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mac said, “Welles is a very clever killer.”

  “What!” Faro said. “Are you daft, man?”

  Ignoring him, Mac continued to address Sir Stephen. “Did he also introduce you to Phillimore?”

  Sir Stephen had to think about it. “Why, I’d almost forgotten, but yes, he did.”

  “I don’t know the exact relationship, but somehow you were involved in Phillimore’s Ponzi scheme, weren’t you, Welles?” The coldness in Mac’s voice sent a chill up my spine. “You killed Carstairs, Phillimore, and Madigan.”

  “That’s impossible,” I blurted out. “Lynda and I were with him when Madigan was shot. We heard the gunshot.”

  “Right you are,” Faro affirmed with a smile. “I guess that’s pretty much the perfect alibi. That should end this nonsense. ”

  “We heard a noise, anyway,” Lynda said. “But Faro put the idea in our heads that it was a gunshot, didn’t he? And we never questioned it. I bet Madigan was already dead when you and I arrived, Jeff.” Now you tell me.

  Okay, that was unfair. Faro was the first person Lynda suspected. I’d pooh-poohed the idea, arguing that he wouldn’t have written “honor” by mistake. And, of course, he didn’t. We knew now that the killer did that on purpose. My logic as impeccable; it just led to the wrong answer.

  “This is absurd!” Faro exclaimed with a great imitation of ruffled dignity. “Andy Madigan was a friend of mine. I was going to give him this book.” He pointed to The Napoleon of Crime, sitting in front of him on a table. “It’s a biography of Adam Worth, the real-life Moriarty.” He opened the book - and pulled out a gun. He stood up and pointed it at Inspector Heath, the only other person in the room who was armed.

  “Colt .32, I presume?” Lynda said. “You must have had it in that book the entire time we were in Madigan’s house.”

  Faro smiled. “And Sebastian McCabe, Mr. Bloody Great Detective, didn’t have the slightest idea, not to mention Scotland Yard.”

  Mac bowed slightly as if to acknowledge the gloat. “That part never occurred to me, I must admit.”

  Heath picked this moment to break his strategic silence. “You’re a right bastard, Faro.”

  “Yes, and I would urge all of you to remember that.” With sickening swiftness, he reached out his left hand and grabbed Kate by her right shoulder. “This gun, acquired along with its twin through the help of some Irish friends, has already fired one fatal shot. It still works. But as long as we all keep our cool and you don’t attempt to stop me from leaving, the lovely Kate will be unharmed.”

  She pressed her mouth together, as if determined not to give Faro the satisfaction of showing fear. Mac wasn’t that disciplined. For the first time in the two decades that I had known him, Sebastian McCabe seemed human. The color drained out of his face. He looked like I felt - totally wrenched by the situation. “If you so much as bruise Kate - ”

  “You’re in no position to threaten, you pompous bore. I was rather sure our meeting today would take this turn, but thank you for providing such an excellent hostage. Well, isn’t somebody going to say, ‘You’ll never get away with it.’?”

  “We’ll leave the clichés to you,” Lynda said. Good one, Lyn!

  Faro’s grip on the Colt tightened. For a moment, I was afraid she’d overreached. He seemed to be fighting to stay in control of his anger issues.

  “I will get away with it, though. Don’t you think I saw this day coming? I’ve had an exit plan for years, and today is the day to execute it. I’ve been ahead of you the entire time, all of you - the insufferable McCabe, the dullard Heath, and, of course, our relentless journalist Ms. Teal. I did kill Carstair
s. Then I cut myself in on Phillimore’s action and paid Madigan lavishly for protection. When the house of cards began to fall, I knew it was time to get rid of both of them. I decided to have a little fun with you while I was at it, McCabe. Pity that part didn’t work out so well.”

  He began to walk backwards, pulling Kate with him.

  “Unless you try something foolish, you’ll get a call in a few minutes telling you where to find her. Goodbye, losers.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The Wait

  As Faro and Kate disappeared from view, Lynda said, “I never did like that asshole.”

  “What do we do now?” I said.

  “The hardest thing possible,” Mac replied, pulling one of his damned cigars out of his pocket. “We wait.”

  Kate is my bossy big sister, older by all of thirteen months, so I’ve known her all my life. When we were kids, it was Kate who told me to eat my vegetables, not my indulgent mother.

  I waited as long as I could stand it, maybe another half a minute. “The hell we wait,” I said, and took off running out the door and down the steps. Heath was right behind me. Despite my longer legs, the inspector kept up with me as I ran out the front door. Without saying a word, Heath peeled left and I went right.

  The rain that had plagued our whole trip was just a drizzle. The concrete Pall Mall sidewalk was wet beneath my feet but fortunately not slippery. I suppose we had some vague, unspoken notion of trying to see in which direction they went, but no plan. It didn’t matter. When I got to the corner I looked as far as I could in both directions and I didn’t catch a glimpse of them.

  Heath was shaking his head, coming from the other direction, when I got back to the Brigadiers Club.

  By the time we rejoined the others, I had worked up a pretty good anger at my brother-in-law.

  “If you knew that Faro was the killer, why did you bring Kate with you? She’s the most innocent bystander in this whole mess. All she wanted was a nice vacation in London and now she’s in the hands of a multiple killer.”

  Mac closed his eyes. “She wanted to be part of the denouement.”

  Lynda put a comforting arm around me.

  “It never occurred to me that Faro would take such a drastic action,” Mac added.

  “That wasn’t a good thing to not think of,” I said acidly.

  “You certainly underestimated the man,” Heath piled on. He put down his cell phone, which he had been using to order up whatever Scotland Yard does when they want to follow a desperate man and not let him know that he’s being followed. “Apparently you got the rest of it right, though.”

  Mac grunted. “That will be a bitter triumph if he harms Kate.” He stuck the cigar in his mouth and smoked grimly, never mind the “No Smoking” law.

  “How did you figure it out?” Sir Stephen asked, wiping sweat off of his bald head with a handkerchief.

  “The real question is how I failed to figure it out sooner,” Mac said. “And the answer goes back to Poe. Faro was hiding in plain site, just like the purloined letter in Poe’s story. He had so many different connections in this case that we didn’t even notice him. In addition to suggesting the debate and preparing you for it, Sir Stephen, Faro also arranged our lunch with Phillimore that was the prelude to his disappearance, after first putting the idea in our heads that we would like to meet him.

  “After the disappearance and then the murder, he reported things that only the murderer or Scotland Yard would know. We assumed that he got all that from his source, presumably Madigan, but he did not. That is why he was able to confirm that the murder weapon was a Colt .32 even before Neville received the report.”

  “And before that,” Lynda broke in, “he must have been the one who tipped Scotland Yard that you owned a gun identical to the murder weapon.”

  “The tip came in the form of an anonymous e-mail on a Yahoo account,” Heath said.

  Mac nodded. “I am not surprised. He sent you the message, Neville, and then reported it as if he had received the information from a Scotland Yard source.”

  I left the little room and hit the bar in the foyer. With no bartender in sight, I poured Lynda an Old Ben on the rocks - her second favorite brand of bourbon. I’d tell the club to put it on Faro’s tab. It felt good to be up and doing something, anything, while we waited.

  “He would have known about Mac’s gun from reading my books,” I said, handing Lynda the drink as I re-entered the room. She smiled at me in silent gratitude. She looked like she could also use a cigarette, never mind that she’d quit more than a year ago.

  “He also knew that Neville was a fan of my Damon Devlin mysteries - he had told me that,” Mac said. “Therefore, he could be sure that his contrived parallels to my books Nothing Up My Sleeve and Sleight of Hand would suggest themselves to the inspector. He arranged for me not to have an alibi for Madigan’s murder by getting us tickets to the theater. Kate was so grateful.”

  His voice cracked a little as he said that. I went back to the bar to fix myself a drink, bourbon and ginger ale. I don’t care much for the taste, but I wasn’t going to taste it anyway. There was a two-hundred-year-old clock behind the bar in the meeting room. The hands seemed to crawl as I waited for Mac’s phone to ring.

  “I do enjoy a good detective story,” Heath said. “That’s what bothered me from the beginning. It all seemed too much like a detective story.”

  “Faro shot himself in the foot by overplaying his hand,” Mac said, mixing metaphors in a way he would never do in print. “His attempt to frame me not only failed miserably, it ultimately pointed right to him. His planted clue based on English versus American spelling, for example, almost had to have been dreamed up by someone who worked with words and was keenly aware of the language differences. Who else in this case matches that description?”

  Lynda surprised me by saying, “Nettie Phillimore!”

  That gave Mac pause. “By thunder, you are right! She is something of a wordsmith. However, she had no animus against me, no conceivable reason to wish that I should be suspected of her ex-husband’s murder. The same goes for Althea, who lives by words as well.”

  “And what reason did Faro have?” Heath asked.

  “I suspect that he held a juvenile grudge against me because I embarrassed him in a literary duel.” Mac repeated the story he had told me some months ago about Faro and his theory that Holmes couldn’t be Holmes without Moriarty. “Apparently he believed this quite passionately. He even gave his Sherlock Holmes group a name that referred to Moriarty, the Binomial Theorists.” He studied his cigar. “And yet, at least two members of the group, Madigan and Kingsley, seemed to know and care little about Sherlock Holmes. That still bothers me.”

  “Who was the Professor?” I asked. “And how does the coded message fit in?”

  “I do not - ”

  Mac’s phone erupted. I was never so glad to hear Ride of the Valkyries in my life. The phone was sitting on the table in front of him. He hesitated, as if afraid of what news it might bring, then picked it up. “Yes? Thank God! I love you, too. Stay put. We shall be there in moments!”

  He disconnected. “Kate is safe. Faro left her at Trafalgar Square and disappeared into the crowd.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Ah, Love

  “Look,” Lynda said, “this is where we came in.”

  She pointed along the banks of the Thames at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, which we had first seen on our arrival in London.

  It was just the two of us on a romantic cruise down the river. After what Mac and Kate had been through, they needed to spend some time alone. So did we.

  If you’re expecting me to tell you how Scotland Yard caught Faro at the border and stopped his escape, I’m sorry. He got away clean. Mac would have to wait a few days to have his few unanswered questions answered.

&
nbsp; Meanwhile, I had my arm around my bride and she was cuddled up against me as we floated down the Thames. The river was high because of all the rain that month. Our guide pointed out the historic buildings along the banks, with informative and humorous commentary, as lights of the city shimmered on the river in the dusk.

  During a lull in the guide’s patter, I whispered in Lynda’s ear:

  “Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

  Lynda pulled away a little to look at me. “What a load of crap. Where did you get that?”

  “From Matthew Arnold, the English poet,” I said. “It’s the last stanza of his poem ‘Dover Beach.’ I learned it in high school or college, I forget which.”

  “Oh. I thought it sounded familiar. Well, I don’t know who pissed in old Matthew’s beer, but he had it all wrong - except for the first line.”

  “I think so, too. I’ve always loved the words but not the meaning, if that makes any sense. The world is not an easy place in which to live, but life is still pretty swell anyway.”

  “And that’s a good thing because tomorrow we get on a plane and head back to the real world. This is the last official day of our honeymoon, tesoro mio.”

  “That’s right.” I drew Lynda closer to me again. “Back we go to Oscar the grouch, the college, Ralph Pendergast, and my little apartment.”

  “And budget cutting, reporters who can’t write, and publishers who don’t understand what news is.”

  “I can’t wait,” we both said at once.

  After a long flight to New York the next day and then on to Ohio, we arrived in town to find that Erin hadn’t changed much. It never does. But somehow the seventeen steps to my carriage house apartment above Mac and Kate’s garage looked higher than ever as we stood at the bottom with our luggage.