“Donald said…” Agnes began. Suddenly there it was, all of it, laid out in front of her. “Scott came back. He found you. He knew the whole story.”
“He was broke. He wanted money. He came back thinking I’d pay up to keep my secrets. I just wanted it all to go away. We went drinking, Sunday night. I spiked his beer. Led him to the river. But it’s different now. They can see so much. CCTV, you know. It’s a matter of time until they catch me. I know that now.”
They sat in the rain, gazing at the rosebush.
Agnes touched Annette’s arm. Annette reached up and grasped her hand tight.
***
Two days later, Annette was arrested. She pleaded guilty, and was remanded in custody.
“Donald still won’t have it,” Agnes said to Athena, as they arranged the last few books on the shelves. “I keep saying to him, you fought the man who’d caused your brother’s death. That’s your only sin. You have nothing to fear apart from death itself.”
“Which we all bloody fear,” Athena said. “Don’t expect me to be all noble and peaceful about the ending of this life. And anyway, I can’t die yet. Chanel have just brought out a fab new range of anti-aging skincare products.”
“He says he wishes he could take the blame for Annette.”
“Sweet.”
“She won’t have it. She seems relieved it’s all over.”
“Is Julius back? What does he say?”
“He is back. He just said it was typical of me to find the mystery that no one else could see.”
“Ah. Bless.”
“I’m not sure it was a compliment.”
Athena picked up the Asphodel drawing. “You should frame this, you know. Look after it properly.”
Agnes shook her head. “I know what I’m going to do with it.”
***
Later that day, Agnes went out. She passed Mary Magdalene sitting on the stairs, looking hunched and frail. “I’m not long for here,” she said to Agnes. “You’ll be here and I’ll be gone.”
Agnes sat down next to her. “So—where are you going?”
“Wherever souls go when they’re no longer wanted,” Mary said.
Agnes looked at her, the bright eyes in the sunken face, the tufts of gray hair. “You mean…”
“Being rehoused,” Mary said. “They’ve decided to put me somewhere else.”
“Oh. I thought you meant—”
Mary laughed, a hoarse burst of merriment. “You thought I meant…” She leaned back against the wall. “You nuns. Can’t wait to see us dead and gone. Nah,” she said, “the good Lord is going to have to wait. I’m just changing postcode.”
“I’ll miss you.” Agnes got to her feet.
“No, you bleeding won’t.” She laughed some more, sitting on the staircase, her hand raised in a wave, as Agnes went out into the street.
“It’s a beautiful picture,” Donald said. “Where did you get it?”
He sat by the window, holding the drawing in his long fingers. Buses passed, flashing sunlight.
“From another life,” she said.
“You shouldn’t waste it on me,” he said. He studied it some more. “Where the souls of ordinary people go,” he said. “Is that what you said?”
She nodded.
“Annette—she wrote me a letter. Must have been just before they came for her. Look.” He drew some pages out of his pocket. “She says she’ll do her time in this world, not the next.” He looked up. “The funny thing is, I knew, deep down, that I hadn’t killed him. The minute she told me, I knew it was true. But I didn’t want her to be guilty. Couldn’t bear the thought of it. So I carried it with me, weighing me down.” He smiled. “And that’s what she writes. She says, ‘At last, you’re free.’ ”
Outside, the trees were snowy-white with blossom. Two girls teetered past, laughing, looking at their phones.
Darkness in the City of Light
Rhys Hughes
The seven members of the Reconstruction Club were all present at the same time, and this was an occurrence unusual enough for Rufus to remark on it, but Pollard smiled and said, “In fact, I have to leave. I just dropped by to find out who else had read the story about the strange murder in Paris.”
He waved his rolled-up newspaper as if batting a moth.
“Yes, I have,” said Rufus.
It turned out the others had too. This was why they had made the trek to the house in Livingstone Street that served as their headquarters, to see who might be there to discuss the case. Pollard had an appointment with the dentist. With a vague wave, he rushed off and abandoned his colleagues.
The front room of the small house was almost bare of furniture. Jaspers was sunk on a cushion on the best side of the old sofa, his arms and legs still bandaged; Gertie occupied the other end, a more threadbare and uncomfortable perch. Rufus, Chunder, and Diggs stood, leaning against the walls.
Beastly was in the kitchen, brewing a large pot of tea.
“Strange isn’t the right word.”
He spoke from the kitchen and they all heard him clearly, the same way he heard everything they were saying, because the house was a small one and the sound didn’t have far to travel. The doors were wide open too. When Beastly brought in the tea on a large silver tray, Rufus said, “I agree.”
“What is the right word?” demanded Chunder.
“Absurd,” replied Rufus.
Jaspers, who was recovering well from his recent accident but still found it quite painful to shift his position, croaked, “Nightmarish too,” and they all digested this. It was absurd and nightmarish, yes, but the details of the murder were also unreal, as if they had been lifted from a cheap detective novel, the kind of novel that the members of the Reconstruction Club claimed to despise but in fact relished in secret, translated from French and sold only in one bookshop known to them, and that down a Norwich alley that had an unsavory reputation.
Beastly poured tea for all of them and then served himself and stirred sugar lumps into the brew with a sour expression.
“Any ideas?” he asked.
Rufus shrugged. “The facts of the case, if they have been reported accurately, and there’s a good chance they haven’t, would indicate either that the murderer is a lunatic or that the victim was killed in an accident that only has the semblance of murder, an accident too unlikely to be considered as tragic and thus interpreted as a symbolic act and the result of a murderous impulse.”
“If only we had the resources to take a trip to Paris!”
That came from Diggs, the baker.
He was perhaps the most financially successful of them all, yet without exception they were lower-middle-class gentlemen, bound to their trades as if by shackles, not poor by any means, but with little surplus income to fritter away on foreign travel and other such inessentials. None of them had been to Paris. Everything they knew about it came from books, newspapers, and radio programs. Rufus, a shipping clerk, worked with the names of distant locations every day, but not with the places themselves, and Paris wasn’t one of those names anyway.
“We will do things the way we always do them,” he replied.
Diggs nodded. “That’s for the best.”
“We reconstruct, we don’t replicate,” wheezed Jaspers.
“Indeed,” said Beastly.
Rufus finished his tea, wiped his lips with a handkerchief. “My friends, it seems no great hardship for us to turn Norwich into Paris for a few hours or so. But it will be easier and smoother if we repair to a spot just outside our noble city for the task of reconstruction, when the time comes.”
“Which spot exactly?” the others wanted to know.
Rufus smiled; his free hand delved into the spacious pocket of his jacket, and he groped for the briar pipe there. He lifted it out and, just before inserting it into his mouth, said in
a casual tone of voice:
“There are many windmills in our county and several are very close to Norwich. Of course, most are defunct in this day and age, but the one at Little Melton is large, powerful, in fine condition, and it turns.”
“I cycled through the village last week,” said Gertie.
“Then it’s settled?” asked Rufus.
They all nodded, even Jaspers, who winced as he did so.
“Next weekend, gentlemen?”
“Saturday or Sunday?” asked Chunder.
They briefly debated this point and decided finally that Sunday was the more suitable day. It was nearly always a Sunday when they performed the reconstructions that gave their club its name and character. Sometimes one or two of them would be free for an attempt on a weekday, and they wouldn’t worry about including the others. It depended on the nature of the crime.
Certain crimes required more participants than others. This Paris murder fell into the “more” category. It would be best if all seven of them were free. As Rufus chewed his pipe, which he never lit or even filled, he tried to imagine how it would be when they all embarked for Little Melton, which was only a few miles beyond the western edge of Norwich, and stepped off the bus together.
The driver would be sure to make a joke, the other passengers might be amused, bewildered, or even disgusted, but his colleagues had no inkling of this yet, for Rufus was a man in the habit of making plans for them and keeping those plans to himself until the day of truth dawned. He smiled.
A smile that expressed itself in the shifting of the pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. But his colleagues were no fools. They knew Rufus was capable of some monstrous decisions, and they respected him for it. Any price to pay was worthwhile in the fight against crime. They were amateurs and had much to prove to themselves, if not to outsiders, and they had been toughened by the war anyway, by the epidemics that had followed, by the responsibilities of British life at a time when politics was in a state of radical transition. Monstrous decisions could be just what was required as the Empire began its long decline unnoticed.
“Now,” said Chunder, consulting his wristwatch, “it’s time for me to be off too. I will be back here next Sunday at what time?”
“Early,” replied Rufus.
He spoke with the pipe still between his lips and the word came out of the empty bowl as if from a very distant megaphone with a slightly whistling quality, as if taken and twisted a little by the wind.
“Seven o’clock in the morning?” asked Chunder.
Rufus nodded, and his nod included them all. This was the most important task of this particular convocation. It was highly unlikely any of them would see each other again before the scheduled date. Only Diggs possessed a telephone. Communication was the biggest obstacle in the smooth running of the club, and yet the club operated well enough as it was, having solved many crimes in its particular way. Chunder put on his hat and went out the front door.
“Anyone else have a pressing engagement?” asked Rufus.
“Not me,” said most of them.
“I promised to take the wife to visit her mother in Yarmouth,” said Beastly, and he also picked up his hat from the little table that served in lieu of a hat stand, but he was less eager to cram it down on his head than Chunder had been. It was obvious that he wanted to linger, to hear what else Rufus might have to say. Rufus wasn’t the leader, a notion that would have embarrassed him and them, but somehow he had evolved into the role of an oracle or consultant.
“Don’t keep her waiting,” was his only remark.
And Beastly went off too.
The five who remained formed an irregular circle, there in the front room of that cramped but mostly empty house in Livingstone Street, a building that had been left to Rufus by his aunt, who had never liked it and never had a use for it, and that’s how it ended up as the base for an association of sleuths of limited means but sharp minds, all of whom abided by the ideals of modelling an event or incident in order to learn a revelatory truth about it. Rufus said:
“It wouldn’t be the first time that a person was killed by the sail of a windmill, but this fact doesn’t mitigate the awkwardness of what happened. The windmills in Paris aren’t strictly functional, for one thing.”
“Not now, but once they were, and they are certainly the same structures in terms of sheer power as before,” said Diggs, who as a baker had a particular interest in such things, and when he felt the pressure of all eyes upon him, he added, “I mean that the internal workings are serious machines.”
“Dangerous if a person fell into them?” said Gertie.
“Would grind a man to sludge.”
“But no one fell into anything, and there’s the problem,” declared Rufus, and with a grotesque lunge he snatched the newspaper Pollard had left for them, rolled it up as Pollard had rolled it, then began whirling his long arms in front of him, mimicking a windmill but with only two asymmetrical sails. The effect was disturbing, the pipe at the end of one arm, the newspaper at the end of the other, and Rufus making a series of clanking noises at the back of his throat.
Then he stopped. There was no applause, but Jaspers coughed.
“Very good,” offered Gertie.
“The victim,” persisted Rufus, jamming the pipe back into his mouth and letting the newspaper fall to the floor, “was snatched up by one of the sails and spun round and round and then hurled away over a roof. He was found in a courtyard, mangled, broken, barely alive, and with his dying breath, he was unable to give an explanation for what had happened. Which means?”
“He didn’t fall into anything but onto something,” said Diggs.
“A cobbled surface,” finished Gertie.
“The sails of windmills are usually situated high above the heads of anyone who might be passing them. The clearance is considerable. People have reported feeling a rush of wind, but it’s very rare to be clobbered on the skull by one. It has occurred in a few instances, yes, and in the old days when riders on horses were more common, the risk of passing under one was greater.”
“But this victim wasn’t on a horse of any kind.”
“Thank you, Jaspers. Quite so.”
Gertie turned to Diggs and asked with a smirk, “And how do you know anything at all about the windmills of Paris?”
“From books.” The baker was unashamed.
They all knew what kinds of books, they were men, but they had strong loyalty to each other, they were discreet, they were all readers of those books, and the inside of the bookshop that supplied them was more familiar to each of them than the interiors of any of the city churches. Rufus made a gesture of support. “Expand,” he said, and Diggs gave them a brief lecture on the topic.
“The windmills of Paris were like the windmills one finds anywhere. Some grind corn into flour, others operate pumps to drain soggy land. As Paris grew, as centuries passed, many of the windmills were dismantled, just as they were here in Norwich. A couple remain. Moulin de la Gallete is one of the most renowned. It has appeared in paintings by Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh. It is picturesque. It grinds flour still. Another famous example is Moulin Rouge, and this is the one that most interests us at this specific juncture. It grinds nothing.”
“I wonder,” said Rufus very quietly, and Diggs continued:
“It’s an attraction of a different kind.”
“Painted red, it should loom but it doesn’t,” said Gertie. “I have seen photographs, and it is shorter than the buildings that surround it. That struck me as odd back then. I believe it would be an easy matter to hurl oneself out of a neighboring window and snag oneself on one of the sails. As the contraption rotated, you might work loose and momentum would fling you elsewhere.”
“Hurl oneself or be hurled by another,” replied Diggs.
Rufus began pacing the room.
“But t
he victim wasn’t in another building. He was seen leaving the club, the club that is the main reason for the existence of that windmill, and a few moments later he screamed and was seen rising into the sky. Round he went several times before flying off to his doom. He had no time to enter an adjacent building and climb the stairs to a point above the windmill. This suggests to me that he was snatched or snared. But the question remains, why, as well as how?”
“That’s simple,” croaked Jaspers. “Someone hated him.”
“Yes, that’s the usual reason.”
Gertie shook a finger at Rufus. “You think you already know, but you’re keeping it to yourself. Fair enough. I suppose we will learn everything when we go to Little Melton and until then we’ll be kept guessing.”
“I never know anything for sure before a reconstruction,” said Rufus, “and that’s the reason for recreating murders in the first place. But yes, I do have ideas. Yet what are ideas if they are never applied?”
“Vacuous oddities,” suggested Diggs.
“Mainly,” said Gertie.
There was little more to be done here, in the house. Rufus declared the session over and they all departed. Nobody helped Jaspers up from the sofa. He had found his own way here and it was assumed he could manage to find his way out too. Thus he was abandoned there in that bare room, his face slicked in perspiration as he tried to stand, the effort sending pains shooting through him. He would lurch very slowly to the door and along Livingstone Street to Dereham Road, from where he could catch a bus. His home life was dull and lonely.
He was in no rush. With a gasp, he stood upright.
And now he swayed like a mummy.
Jaspers had been injured in a previous reconstruction. These men took their hobby very seriously indeed. It added color to their mundane realities, brightened the gray of Norwich life with the tints of other climes. What would he do when he reached his home? He looked forward to being well enough to return to work. He would sit, just as he had done here, but maybe read poetry too. And the hours would pass, his bones knitting together just a little more securely.
The Book of Extraordinary Amateur Sleuth and Private Eye Stories Page 3