Murder by Numbers

by Eric Brown

  Maria looked up as a tap at the door interrupted her reading. She set the manuscript aside with a sigh, regretting telling Crispin Proudfoot that she would be there all afternoon if he needed someone to talk to.

  He appeared at the door, fidgeting like a marionette, then strode across to the fire and stood above her.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he began.

  She sighed. ‘Sit down, Crispin, and we’ll talk.’

  ‘No. I can’t sit down. I can’t stand being cooped up. You’ve no idea what it was like, sitting there in that place in Muswell Hill, just waiting. And it’s the same here. I was in my room, pacing back and forth, back and forth, helpless … Just waiting. I feel like a condemned man.’

  ‘Now, that’s just defeatist talk, Crispin. Do sit down and tell me what you’re reading at the moment.’

  He stood before the fire, cracking his knuckles and looking desperate.

  ‘I need to go out. I need to get some fresh air. Do you think that would be safe? I mean, would the police allow it? I don’t suppose you’d care to …?’

  She sighed again and climbed to her feet. ‘We can go for a stroll up the hill to the folly. The police will be fine with that, just as long as we don’t stray too far.’

  He nodded, gulping so that his Adam’s apple bobbed; he looked pathetically grateful. ‘That’s kind of you. I feel so imprisoned in here. I need to get out.’

  She arranged to meet him in the hallway in two minutes and fetched her coat, hat and gloves from her room.

  As she was passing Pamela’s room, the girl emerged. ‘I thought I heard you. Going out?’

  Maria rolled her eyes. ‘Crispin is in a blue funk. I’m taking him for a walk up to the folly.’

  ‘I’ll join you.’

  ‘There’s really no need, Pamela.’

  ‘In that case I’ll go and ask the waitress for a cuppa. I might wander up later.’

  They walked down the great staircase together and said goodbye in the hallway. Crispin Proudfoot was examining a framed parchment hanging on the wall beside the entrance. He was garbed in a ridiculously oversized tweed greatcoat and silk scarf, and smiled pathetically when she appeared.

  Outside, Maria found one of the officers, who had just relieved Sheppard and Wilson. She told him where they were going, then led Proudfoot around the house and up the hill.

  ‘You don’t know how grateful I am to have someone to talk to,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to be, you know? It’s nice for me, too.’

  ‘Is it really? I mean … Well, you seem to be taking all this in your stride.’

  She paused halfway up the hill and turned to admire the view. The frost of that morning had been burned off by the winter sun; a hazy steam rose from the land. The sky was clear, and it would be bitter and frosty again in the morning.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘Things like this affect everyone differently. People have various strategies to cope with stress.’

  ‘Strategies?’ Proudfoot whinnied. ‘I’m afraid I can’t cope with stress. I fear I go to pieces. How do you cope?’

  She set off again, hiking up the incline. She wondered suddenly what Donald might be doing; she desperately wanted to see him again, and soon.

  ‘I try to take a realistic view, Crispin,’ she said. ‘I look at the facts. We are far from London and there’s no way Fenton can guess our whereabouts. We’re protected by professionals, and the police are working hard to bring him to justice.’

  ‘But do you think all that is enough?’

  She sighed, a little exasperated with his defeatism. ‘Of course I do, and you should, too. It’s no good giving in to despair.’

  He shook his head, staring at the grass as they walked. ‘I suppose,’ he said at last, ‘that we’re all products of our upbringings, aren’t we?’

  ‘Perhaps we are,’ she allowed.

  ‘We’re influenced by what happened to us as we grew up.’

  ‘To an extent, yes.’

  ‘And if we had good, strong people around to guide us …’

  She wondered where this might be leading.

  The poet said, ‘Did you have a good, strong person around to guide you through your youth?’

  She nodded as they reached the crest of the hill, flushed with the exertion. ‘I had my father. My mother died when I was very young, and in fact I don’t remember her at all. A series of nannies brought me up, but my father was always there, and yes, he was strong and loving.’

  ‘Loving,’ he said wistfully, as if unfamiliar with the word.

  Maria indicated the stone folly, and they crossed to it and sat down.

  ‘Is your father still alive?’

  ‘He is, and he’s in London.’

  ‘Do you see him often?’

  ‘Every other week, as it happens. He’s the French cultural attaché, though he’s due to retire next year.’

  ‘That must be nice. Having him so close, I mean.’

  ‘It is,’ she said. ‘And you?’

  ‘I beg your …?’ he began; he had been staring into the distance, and now he brought his focus back to her, and smiled. ‘Oh, my father. No, my father is dead, now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

  ‘I hardly knew him,’ he went on quietly. ‘You see, I was brought up in an orphanage.’

  She shook her head, found herself saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ again, and realizing how inadequate the words were.

  ‘My mother couldn’t keep me,’ Proudfoot said. ‘She was married, and had had an affair, and her husband wouldn’t allow her to keep her children. She had twins, but was forced to put my sister and me up for adoption.’

  She nearly said, ‘I’m sorry,’ for a third time, but instead said, ‘That must have been terrible.’

  ‘We were put in an orphanage, but my sister was taken away when I was four. I was heartbroken.’

  ‘I can imagine. How terrible.’

  ‘It was. Terrible; you don’t know how terrible …’

  ‘But your father?’

  The poet shrugged forlornly. ‘My father was a great man, a truly great man. He wanted to keep us, he really did. But he wasn’t allowed to. He told me that: he said that because of what had happened to him, the authorities wouldn’t let him have custody of his children.’

  Maria shook her head. ‘So … you knew your father? You met him?’

  ‘I met him for the first time last year. I traced my mother and asked her about my father. I wanted to meet him, you see; I wanted to know what kind of man he was.’

  ‘It’s good that you did meet him, before …’ She trailed off, watching the poet as he stared into the distance, his pale grey eyes liquid with unshed tears.

  ‘I discovered that he was a good man, a great man.’ He stopped, swallowed, and pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, wiping away the tears. ‘But he was very ill. He was dying. Can you appreciate the irony? At last I had found my father, only to discover that he had only months to live.’

  ‘At least,’ she murmured, ‘you did meet him before the end, and found that he was a good man.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘At least I did do that. And I am so very glad that I did.’

  A silence came between them. She felt uncomfortable witnessing the young man’s distress. She stared down at the house, at the police car stationed by the gate. She expected to see the officer down below, behind the house, watching them as the conscientious Sergeant Sheppard had done, but there was no sign of the young man.

  ‘I … I asked him why he’d been unable to look after my sister and me when we were young,’ Proudfoot went on. ‘I wasn’t accusing him; I was curious. I wanted there to be a good reason, you see, not just … not just apathy or indifference on his part. I wanted him to have had a valid reason for his being unable to take us from the orphanage and love us.’

  ‘And was there?’

  ‘Oh, there certainly was,’ he said. ‘He told me that the authorities wouldn’t allow him to
take my sister and me because he was deemed unsuitable.’

  Maria looked at the young man. ‘Unsuitable … in what way?’

  ‘You see, over the years he had tried to take us in. He told me that he had first tried when we were just babies, and again when we were three. And then my sister was taken away. But my father said that he tried, again and again. He wanted to take me in, be a loving father to me. But the authorities just wouldn’t have it.’

  ‘You said they found him unsuitable?’ she said.

  He smiled at her, tears glistening in his eyes. He lifted a bony finger to his narrow forehead and tapped his temple. ‘Up here. They said he was … unstable, unbalanced.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘This summer, when I came to know him a little more. He was an artist, you see, and you know how some people – people in authority, who don’t really understand creative types – you know how they regard artists?’

  Maria shook her head, trying to find suitable words of sympathy, but failing.

  ‘And do you know what he told me?’ he asked.

  She shook her head again. ‘No. Go on.’

  ‘He told me why he had become unstable.’

  He slipped his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat and sat back against the grey stone parapet, staring at her.

  ‘And why was that, Crispin?’

  He said, ‘I think it was Sartre who said that hell is other people, wasn’t it? Well, people were certainly hell in my father’s case. You see, other people made his life hell. Certain people. Enemies. Terrible people who cheated him, lied to him, denied him love, hurt him.’

  ‘And your father told you this?’

  ‘He did. He told me before he died.’

  A chill stole upon her suddenly, a cold that had nothing to do with the weather. She sat very still, unable to move, oddly detached from the scene as if she could not possibly be part of what was happening here.

  She said in little more than a whisper, ‘Who was your father, Crispin?’

  His watery eyes fixed on her. ‘I think you know,’ he murmured, smiling at her. ‘He was Maxwell Fenton.’ Then he added, quickly, ‘Don’t move!’

  She wanted to move; she wanted to stand up and run, to get as far away from the poet as she could, but she was frozen to the seat, paralysed with fear and disbelief as she stared at the young man.

  She tried to discern any emotion in his face as he regarded her: hatred, rage, satisfaction that he had her where he wanted her. But she could detect none of these things, simply a cold, staring vacancy which she found even more terrifying.

  He went on. ‘I found my father at last, and he told me he was dying. Then he told me about his life, why he had not been allowed to rescue me …’ He almost choked on a sob, then gathered himself. ‘Do you have any idea what that was like? Learning that I’d had a father who had wanted to love me, but had been prevented from doing so by the actions of other people?’

  Maria had the sudden urge to say that Fenton had lied to his son, that the artist was not the aggrieved victim he had claimed to be; that he was a manipulating egotist who had abandoned his children to the orphanage without a second thought.

  She kept quiet, knowing full well that the wrong word now, the wrong move, would only hasten her end.

  ‘He told me all about the people who had failed him down the years,’ the poet said. ‘He told me about the actor, Edgar Benedict, and how he’d cheated my father out of thousands, and Doctor Bryce, whose incompetence had led to the death of someone my father had loved dearly, and my father could never forgive him for that. Then there were the Goudges, George and Hermione. My father was in love with Hermione, at one time, and then George stole her from him, and later Hermione turned against him and traduced his reputation. And Holly Beckwith, the actress who destroyed some of my father’s finest paintings just before he was due to have an exhibition in London …’

  He stopped, then smiled at Maria. ‘And then,’ he went on, ‘there was you. Of all the people who had turned against him down the years,’ the poet said, ‘he saved his greatest rancour for you. Because it was you who struck the blow – the literal blow – that most affected him. He was never the same, after that, you know. He suffered headaches, blackouts, fits of depression and melancholia. And it was this,’ Proudfoot seethed, ‘that turned the authorities against him and told him he was unsuitable to take me from the orphanage.’

  Maria licked her lips and found her voice. ‘So … you and your father killed these people?’

  Proudfoot shook his head, surprising her. ‘Not my father, no. He knew nothing about it. Oh, speaking to me over the course of his final weeks, as I nursed him, he expressed the desire to see you all rot in hell. He truly wanted to see you dead, but at that point he hardly had the strength to kill himself, never mind the people who had tormented him.’

  From his coat pocket Proudfoot pulled a revolver and clutched it in his thin white hand. He looked up from the weapon resting on his lap and smiled at Maria.

  ‘My father begged me to put an end to his suffering. I nursed him at Winterfield over the course of the last few months, but there came a time when the drugs, the painkillers, were ineffective, and my father wanted nothing but to die. He begged me to kill him, begged me. So I bought a gun – this gun.’ He shook his head, openly weeping now. ‘Can you imagine what that was like for me? Can you? I had at long last found my father, only to discover that he was dying, and was pleading with me to end his life!’

  She was frozen with indecision. She could dive at him now, while he was racked with grief and distracted; but at the same time she knew that if she failed to wrest the gun from his grip, if he lifted it and fired …

  Then the moment was over as the poet gathered himself, gripped the weapon even tighter and said, ‘So I agreed. I said I would end his suffering – and, oh, the joy that suffused his face at that moment, the relief. I felt truly honoured then to be his son, to be able to do his bidding. And that morning, one month ago, we went on his favourite walk through the woods, and we sat down on a fallen tree trunk and talked for the very last time. Then I took the revolver’– he lifted the weapon from his lap, staring at it – ‘and my father closed his eyes, and I put the gun to his temple and told him that I loved him, and then I pulled the trigger …’

  Maria was aware of the silence as the poet stopped speaking; even the birdsong had ceased. She was suddenly aware, also, of the intense cold that surrounded them.

  To her left, far below behind the house, she saw movement. She turned her head minimally and with a mixture of relief and dread saw that Pamela was making her way slowly through the rockery towards the sloping greensward. The girl saw Maria and raised an arm in greeting.

  Maria sat, frozen, unable to respond – not knowing whether to acknowledge the girl, and so alert Proudfoot to her presence, or to stay very still. Did her very inaction endanger Pamela? But if she called out for the girl to run, then she would be endangering herself.

  She must keep him talking. If he were distracted, he might not notice Pamela’s approach …

  She said, ‘And then, after killing your father, you decided to avenge him, kill the people he claimed had turned against him?’

  ‘I buried my father in the forest he so loved,’ said the poet. ‘But do you know something … I had no intention at the time of killing you and all the others. That only came later, as I grieved for my father, and I came to realize that while it had been so hard to kill the man I loved, it would be so easy to kill those people I now hated. So easy morally, of course – I would be doing the world a service, after all – but how to go about these executions?’

  She glanced beyond the poet. Pamela was a hundred yards away and climbing steadily, her eyes on the grass.

  ‘I wanted these people to know why they were going to die. I wanted them to dwell on the wrong they had caused my father, and to regret their sins. But how might I do that?’

  Maria licked her lips, her heart pounding. Donald ha
d ascribed insanity to Maxwell Fenton, but it was his son who was truly insane.

  ‘Then it came to me in a euphoric flash of inspiration. I would invite you all to Winterfield, and have that fine actor Edgar Benedict play the part of my father, and confront you with your sins and issue his threats – and then conclude the evening by killing himself!’

  His grip tightened on the gun. ‘So I hired Edgar Benedict to play the part of Maxwell Fenton. I told him that Max was ill and hospitalized, but would forgive Benedict all his misdemeanours once the little charade was over. And the actor was so pathetically grateful at the thought—’

  Maria said, ‘You gave him a loaded gun, without his knowledge?’

  Proudfoot smiled. ‘He deserved nothing else for what he did to my father!’

  Maria shook her head. ‘And Doctor Bryce was complicit in all this?’

  ‘He had little option, after all. My father told me all about how Bryce’s incompetence in treating a woman during the war had led to her death. My father, in his magnanimity, did not declare him to the authorities at the time. However, I used this knowledge to gain his assistance.’

  ‘He told the police that Benedict was Maxwell Fenton?’ Maria said. ‘But you had him where you wanted the poor man – why kill him?’

  Proudfoot gave a sickly smile. ‘He drank – he drank to excess – and he was far from comfortable acceding to my little game, so how could I trust him to keep his silence in future?’

  ‘So you cold-bloodedly staged his suicide.’

  ‘He was responsible for the death of my father’s lover!’ he spat, as if this justified his actions.

  Maria glanced beyond the young man.

  Pamela had almost reached the crest of the hill by now, hands in pocket, head down.

  ‘I couldn’t do it all alone, of course,’ Proudfoot went on. ‘I had help.’

  ‘Help?’ Maria said, shaking her head. ‘Who …?’

  ‘Who else,’ he said, ‘but my sister?’

  The red-headed woman, she thought.

  She said, ‘You found her, and she agreed to …?’

  ‘Found her? She was never really very far away. She was always with me, you see, in here.’ He raised a finger and tapped the side of his head. ‘In here, talking to me all the time, guiding me, encouraging …’