by Alex Pavesi
‘Well,’ began Inspector Wild. ‘It seems we’ve wasted your time. Through no fault of our own, at least. But now we know exactly what happened on that cliff in Evescombe. Would you believe it: the boat he saw really does exist? It’s called the Retired Adventurer; it arrived in Southampton yesterday.’
‘I’ve believed more outlandish things, I have to say.’
‘But rarely with as much consequence as this, I’d wager. The owner and his wife crossed the Channel last week. They didn’t hear anything about the case until he happened to glance at an English newspaper in Guernsey. His name is Symons. He seems a respectable type. It turns out that his wife had seen the whole thing and told him about it, but she’d been at the bottle and he hadn’t believed her. When he saw the newspaper he put two and two together. Then sailed back immediately, feeling terribly guilty. His wife’s still in Guernsey, but she told him all the details.’
‘That sounds like quite an ordeal. He’ll make a sympathetic witness, at least.’ And both men exhaled smoke in lieu of laughter.
‘Anyway,’ said Inspector Wild, ‘let me enlighten you.’
He struck a match and was about to light another cigarette, when Mr Brown leaned forward and blew it out. ‘Wait just one second,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I wouldn’t want to give you the satisfaction. I already know what happened.’
‘But you can’t possibly know. We agreed there was no evidence.’
‘Well, I found some. Enough to give me a good idea, at least.’
Inspector Wild looked at him suspiciously. ‘I see. Let’s have it, then.’
The large sallow man sat back in his chair: ‘There were only two options in this case. It was either an accident, or Gordon Foyle was guilty. All it would take to decide between these two possibilities was one definitive clue.’
‘Yes, I can see that. And did you find such a clue?’
‘I did.’ And here Mr Brown took the folded square of white, stained material from his jacket pocket and handed it to the Inspector, who spread it open on the table. ‘I present to you the victim’s scarf.’
‘Where did you find this?’
‘It was caught in a heather bush. Your lot must have missed it.’
‘And what is it supposed to tell us, exactly?’
‘Here, you’ll see, is a footprint from a Wellington boot. Slim, in a woman’s size. It matches the prints on a half-page of newspaper in the victim’s cottage. You’ll be able to tell me, no doubt, that she died in a pair of Wellington boots?’
Inspector Wild nodded. ‘Yes, she did.’
‘Very good. Then answer me this: how does a woman falling suddenly to her death manage to put a footprint on her own scarf? On a windy day, the ends of the scarf would be behind her. And then the only way to make a print on it, and a heel print no less, would be by walking backwards. Or by being pulled backwards.’
Inspector Wild was hesitant. ‘Go on.’
‘What I think happened on that cliff is this: Gordon Foyle and Mrs Allen passed each other by, some impolite words were exchanged. And then it must have occurred to him that he could put an end to the whole situation. So he turned back, approached her from behind, and took her by the neck. She resisted, of course. But he pulled her backwards. That’s when she trod on her own scarf and it came off and was blown into the bushes. He wrestled her through the heather and threw her off the edge of the cliff. That dip in the path was a mere convenience: the murder happened where the heather was disturbed.’ He took up his drink. ‘Well, Inspector, now you can enlighten me.’
Inspector Wild looked slightly bemused. He gave his friend a wry smile. ‘What can I say? It seems like you got a lot of that from guesswork, but you’re exactly right. The wife of the man with the boat saw everything that you’ve just described. Gordon Foyle is as guilty as a louse. The only thing I don’t understand is why he told us about the boat in the first place, if he was guilty the whole time.’
Mr Brown touched his fingertips together. ‘I suppose he saw it out in the bay and thought it added a nice bit of colour. The implication that his story could in theory be corroborated lent a kind of credence to it. He probably thought there was no chance at all that they’d actually seen anything. The odds were against it, weren’t they?’
‘Undeniably.’
‘It was just bad luck for him that they did.’ He pictured the young man’s pleading blue eyes. ‘Well then, he’ll hang?’
The Inspector nodded. ‘Most likely. By the neck until dead.’
Mr Brown shook his head in sympathy and it was as if his tired, wavering face was a marionette, suspended on strings from his skull. ‘That is a shame, I rather liked him. My only solace is in knowing that I’ve saved Jennifer Allen from marrying a murderer.’
He thought of her words. I don’t know what I’d do if they hanged him. And he smiled at the credulity of youth.
‘Death is always messy,’ said Inspector Wild. ‘It’s for the culprit to bemoan the consequences, not us.’
The two men lifted their glasses in a half-hearted toast, then faded back into their bright red armchairs.
That night Mrs Daisy Lancaster, of Station Road, Evescombe, woke in her bed and went to the window. The sea was there before her, as calm and comforting as the glass of water on her nightstand. She had dreamed that the face of the man she’d met on the seafront the other day, the man whose photograph was in the papers as an ‘assistant to the police,’ a Mr Winston Brown, was rising above the water like a pale moon, his probing eyes fixed on her window, and his impossibly long cane reaching across the bay to bang against her front door, with an expression as cold and uncaring as the waves.
She shivered and closed the window.
4. The Second Conversation
Julia Hart couldn’t help speeding up as she reached the last page. ‘With an expression as cold and uncaring as the waves,’ she read. ‘She shivered and closed the window.’
She placed the manuscript on the ground beside her, then poured herself a glass of water. That story reminded her of the Welsh coast, where she’d grown up. Grant sat tapping his foot, seemingly deep in thought.
‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.
His head jerked upwards, as if he was surprised by the question. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I forgot myself for a second. That one really takes me back.’
‘Then is it based on something true?’
He shook his head. ‘It reminds me of something that happened to me once, that’s all. It brought back some memories.’
‘It reminds me of Wales,’ said Julia. ‘My family moved there when I was very young.’
Grant smiled at her, trying to appear interested. ‘Then where were you born?’
‘Scotland, actually. But I haven’t been back there since.’
‘And I’ve never been to Wales,’ he sighed, wistfully. ‘Do you miss it?’
‘Sometimes. Do you miss Scotland?’
Grant shrugged. ‘I hardly ever think about it now.’
Julia felt she should change the subject. ‘So Gordon Foyle was guilty all along? I suppose there was no other way it could have ended. If it had turned out to be an accident, the ending would have lost its impact. Don’t you think?’
Grant pushed himself up with his fists and turned his back to the sun. ‘I don’t approve of happy endings in crime stories.’ Now his head was in silhouette. ‘Death should be shown as a tragedy, never anything else.’ He picked up a lemon from the ground and started to spin it between his fingers. It was as if all these frantic movements formed a sort of apology for letting his attention drift earlier.
Julia tapped the manuscript with her pen. ‘You also seem to dislike the idea of the heroic detective? Mr Brown is a sinister creation. And he seems to be improvising. There’s not much method to his madness, even his colleague acknowledges that.’
‘Yes.’ Grant shrugged. ‘I suppose I was pushing back against the idea that detective stories are about logical deduction. As a mathematician I can tell you they�
��re about nothing of the kind. Inspired guesswork is all that most fictional detectives do. And seen in that light, there’s something fundamentally dishonest about the detective character. Don’t you think?’
They were sitting in a grove of lemon trees, a short way up the hill from his cottage. Grant had left her there alone, after they’d eaten lunch together. ‘I’d like to take a short walk,’ he’d said. ‘Would you care to join me?’
But Julia wasn’t used to the heat yet and the skin on her face felt tight from the morning sun, so instead she’d stayed with the lemon trees, where there was plenty of shade and the cooling breeze could still reach her. She’d sat down on the sloped earth and made some annotations on the story they’d just read.
Grant had returned thirty minutes later. She’d watched him approach from the direction of the cottage: perspective had shown him first the same size as a leaf, then as a lemon, and finally as one of the diminutive trees. He’d been carrying a carafe of water – it seemed he would take one everywhere now – and had placed it at her feet. She’d poured herself a glass and started to read.
‘Are fictional detectives fundamentally dishonest?’ She thought about the question. ‘That could be the title of a doctoral thesis.’ He waited for her to answer, the silence punctured by birdsong. ‘I would say no. No more than fiction itself.’
Grant closed his eyes. ‘That’s a wise answer.’
She poured herself another glass of water. She hadn’t relished reading out loud again, not with the day as hot as it was; her throat had dried up by the end of the first page. But Grant had confessed to her that morning that his eyesight had grown very poor in the last few years. There was no optician on the island and he’d broken his glasses some time ago.
‘I read rather slowly as a result. Painfully so, I’m afraid.’
‘You don’t write any more, then?’
He’d shaken his head. ‘I neither write nor read. Except when I have to.’
So she’d felt she had no choice; she’d indulged him and read the first two stories out loud. Now she was exhausted.
The breeze picked up, bringing with it the faint smell of the sea. It was invigorating, but ever so slightly putrid. It was the smell of life being renewed. Against this the lemons gave off a cloud of sweet scent, like lamps glowing in a mist.
‘I’ll fall asleep if we sit here too long,’ said Grant, getting to his feet and hopping from one foot to the other. He was wearing a blazer over his white shirt, again showing no sign of being bothered by the heat. ‘Let’s get started, shall we? Is there anything you’d like to change about that story?’
Julia looked up at him. ‘Nothing significant. A few phrases. But I did notice another inconsistency. Again, I think it’s an intentional one.’
He turned towards her, the hint of a smile on his face. ‘Are you going to tell me that the town in this story is another depiction of hell? Damnation could start to sound quite appealing in that case, like a holiday camp.’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘It’s near the end. When Mr Brown returns to the bench by Whitestone House, after his walk along the clifftops, the church bell is tolling half past nine but he finds the bench empty. And yet Mrs Epstein has just gone to great lengths to tell us, a few pages earlier, that she should be sitting there at that time. Do you see what I mean? Why mention her routine at all, if not to highlight the discrepancy?’
Grant paced back and forth, still in silhouette. ‘Then the implication is that she’s been abducted, or something like that?’
‘No,’ said Julia. ‘I think the implication is that it’s actually half past nine at night when he returns from his walk. If you read the surrounding sentences very closely, they’re clearly describing moonlight on a dark sea. Then there’s a clue in the name of the town itself.’
‘Evescombe?’
‘Evening has come.’
‘Ah,’ he clapped his hands together. ‘That’s just the sort of joke I would have enjoyed when I was younger.’
‘Then what did Mr Brown do with the rest of his day?’
‘That’s a mystery, I suppose.’ Grant stood with his loose clothes rippling in the breeze, his eyes wide with excitement. ‘But you’re right, I must have added that on purpose. To see if the readers were paying attention. I don’t remember it, but then I barely remember writing these stories at all.’ He sat down again. ‘You ought to be explaining them to me, not the other way around.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, here’s something you can explain to me.’ Grant took off his hat and leaned towards her. ‘You told me this morning that a group of suspects is the first requirement for a murder mystery, and that there must be at least two of them. But this story appears to have only one.’
He tilted his head back and grinned at the sky. ‘Yes, it’s made to look that way. But it’s just sleight of hand. I’ve always liked the idea of a murder mystery with a single suspect, it’s a sort of paradoxical take on the genre. But to explain how it satisfies the definition, I first have to explain the second ingredient.’
Julia held her pen in one hand and had her notebook open on her lap. ‘I’m ready,’ she said.
‘The second ingredient of a murder mystery is a victim, or group of victims. Those characters that have been killed in unknown circumstances.’
Julia wrote this down. ‘The first ingredient is a group of suspects, the second a group of victims. I might be able to guess what the others will be.’
He nodded. ‘I told you it was simple. The only requirement we make of the group of victims is that there must be at least one of them. After all, without a victim there can’t be a murder.’
‘Not a successful one, at least.’
‘So in this particular story, we have a victim, Mrs Allen, and a suspect, Gordon Foyle. And it turns out that he did kill her, but there were other alternatives. It could have been an accident, the victim could have lost her footing.’
Julia made a note. ‘Death by misadventure. I’ve always enjoyed that phrase. I like the implication that adventure is something you can do correctly or incorrectly.’
Grant laughed. ‘Certainly. My prolonged sojourn on this island, for instance. That was an adventure once. But as I grow old I wonder if it hasn’t, perhaps, been done incorrectly.’
My time on this island, too, thought Julia; she was tired and her throat was still sore. She smiled at him. ‘It could also have been suicide, though the possibility is never mentioned.’
‘That’s true,’ said Grant. ‘And in both of those cases, accident and suicide, who would we consider most responsible for the death?’
‘I don’t know. The victim, presumably?’
‘Yes, Mrs Allen herself. Which means that either Mr Foyle was responsible for her death, or she was responsible for it herself.’
‘Then she is the second suspect?’
‘That’s correct. Our definition requires a group of two or more suspects and a group of one or more victims, but it doesn’t say that they can’t overlap. So she can be the second suspect, even though she’s the victim.’
‘Wouldn’t it be a little strange to call her a murderer, if she’d slipped and fallen?’
‘That particular word would be inappropriate, of course. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that of all the characters she would have done the most to cause her own death. She went for that walk along the path, to begin with. And therefore it doesn’t seem unreasonable to consider her a suspect. It simplifies things.’
‘I see,’ said Julia, as she wrote this down. ‘Then this is another example of a murder mystery with two suspects?’
‘Yes, with the qualification that one of them is the victim. So it’s a murder mystery with a single suspect, except for the victim themselves.’
‘That seems to make sense.’ Julia took a lemon from the ground and inhaled its sweet smell. ‘There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you.’
Grant nodded. ‘What’s that?’
‘You called this collection of st
ories The White Murders. I’ve spent some time over the last few weeks trying to work out why.’
Grant smiled. ‘And what conclusion did you come to?’
‘Well, here we have Whitestone House.’
‘And the previous story took place in a whitewashed villa in Spain.’
‘And that theme continues through the rest of the stories. But I wondered if there might be something more to it than that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The name seemed familiar, somehow. And then I realized why.’ She left a momentary pause. ‘Are you aware that there was a real murder, a number of years ago, that became known colloquially as the White Murder?’
‘I was not. That’s an interesting coincidence.’
‘Then you’ve never heard of it?’
Grant’s smile had gone by this point. ‘It does sound vaguely familiar, now that you mention it.’
‘We’ve published several books on unsolved murders at Blood Type, so I’d read about it before. That’s how I knew the name. It happened in North London, in nineteen forty. It was one of those murders that the press likes to obsess about: the victim was a young woman called Elizabeth White. She was an actor and playwright and she was very beautiful. She was strangled on Hampstead Heath late one evening. The newspapers called it the White Murder. It was before I was born, but I understand it became quite a famous case at the time. They never managed to find her killer.’
‘How unpleasant.’
‘Yes, it is rather. But is it really just a coincidence?’
Grant put his hand to his chin. ‘What else? Do you think I named the book after the crime?’
Julia tilted her head to one side. ‘It would have been in all of the papers, around the time you were writing.’
‘The London papers,’ said Grant. ‘But I was in Edinburgh, I’d have had to go looking for it. Certainly if I saw the name written down somewhere it might have affected me unconsciously. Either that, or it really was just a coincidence.’ He shrugged. ‘The truth is, I chose The White Murders because I found the name evocative. Poetic, almost.’ He spoke like a man reciting a quotation in a foreign language, adding emphases that weren’t really there: ‘The White Murders. But it could just as easily have been The Red Murders or The Blue Murders.’
