Closed Casket

by Sophie Hannah

  “What you must understand, Edward, is that Michael was there, hiding in my room, in order to save not only me, but Joseph too. Mainly Joseph. Picture the scene: Michael springs out from behind the curtain and seizes the knife or gun or whatever it might be from Joseph’s hand. I sit up in bed and am told by Michael what has occurred. What would Joseph do then, once he had been caught in the act of trying to kill me—his employer, his friend? Perhaps then he would admit all and beg to be forgiven, and then I could help him.

  “You see, in the normal run of things, people who lie as easily as they breathe never admit to it. They have an endless capacity to invent new lies to explain the old ones. It is not a moral problem, in my opinion, so much as a mental illness. I see that you disagree, Edward, but I am right about this and you are wrong. In any event . . . catching Joseph red-handed and on the verge of committing murder was perhaps the only way to force the truth out of him, I thought. Because, you see, he might then have offered up his long-standing deception and his desperation to conceal it as mitigating factors, once he was accused of attempted murder—which is so much more serious than lying. He may have been willing, at that point, to say anything to make me believe he wasn’t simply a callous killer who wanted to get his hands on my money as soon as he could. And then, once he had admitted to his true problem, he and I could have addressed, together, the unhappiness that must have been plaguing him for so long. With my help, Joseph Scotcher could have become the man he was destined to be. But instead . . .

  “My plotting proved inadequate, as we now know. I never dreamt that anyone would . . . that anyone would . . . kill my darling Joseph.

  “I must say, Edward, I had not anticipated that you would prove quite so unsympathetic an audience. Can you not understand that Joseph, for me, was like a magician? He transformed my whole life, using nothing more than his words. Even his big lie, once I tumbled to it, felt like the most amazing feat of magic. Ah—you are confused. Well, I guarantee you will look at me as if I am a lunatic when I explain, and who knows? Maybe I am! All right, then: quite simply, Joseph had cured a fatal illness for which there was no cure. The world’s most brilliant kidney specialists had failed to find one, but Joseph Scotcher—my devoted, talented secretary—had succeeded! Do you see? He cured his Bright’s disease by turning out not to have it after all!

  “Don’t! There is no need to tell me that turning out to be a liar is not the same as curing an illness. I know that as well as you do. I merely mean to say that the effect upon me was that one minute I was in anguish because I was about to lose my beloved Joseph, and the next I learned that he was not dying after all and was very likely in perfectly sound health! It was as if he had cured a fatal illness. I meant it as a metaphor, not as a summary of the facts of the matter.

  “Look at your disapproving face, Edward! I wonder if you are angry with Joseph for misleading you too, in the short time that you knew him. Please try to see: he did not lie to you, or to me, or to anybody in particular. He simply . . . altered the truth, because he felt more comfortable doing so. And now I shall never get to the bottom of it. I shall never understand why he did it.”

  32

  The Kidnapped Racehorse

  “My very first suspicions about Scotcher’s integrity and decency, or lack thereof?” said Michael Gathercole. It was the next day. He and I had left Lillieoak and ventured as far as O’Donovan’s Hotel in Clonakilty. It was a great relief to be able to sit and talk and drink tea in a room where we would not at any moment be ambushed by an aggrieved Claudia or a fretting Dorro.

  The lounge at O’Donovan’s smelled musty and was stuffed too full of faded furniture. The curtains had lost any color they had ever had, but the tea and cakes could not have been better and, in all honesty, I would cheerfully have sat on a packing crate in order to spend an hour or two in a relaxed and pleasant atmosphere. I could tell that Gathercole felt it too: as if something dark and heavy had been temporarily removed. He seemed more at ease than usual.

  “I remember the very moment,” he said. “For a long time, it made no sense to me. Now it does. Scotcher said something about one of the Shrimp books—this was while the two of us were waiting to be interviewed by Lady Playford—and it was incorrect in every particular. He said, ‘Which is the book about the racehorse that gets kidnapped? The title escapes me.’ I thought it odd, because he had said only a moment before that he knew all of Lady Playford’s books by heart, and I had told him I did too—and the thing is, there is no Shrimp book about a kidnapped racehorse, so he must have known that I would know that. Much later, I tumbled to what he was up to. He knew I would assume it was a mistake, albeit a rather inexplicable one. No civilized fellow would turn to a chap he’s only just met and say, ‘That’s a lie. You’re a liar.’ And actually, I did assume it was a mistake at first.”

  “So did you set him straight?”

  “I tried to, yes. I said the only Shrimp book featuring a horse—in a very minor way—is Shrimp Seddon and the Voyage Around the World. The shipbuilding chap, Sir Cecil Devaux, has a horse named Sapphire, and Shrimp solves the mystery when she realizes that Mr. Brancatisano, being Italian, pronounces Sapphire’s name incorrectly—‘fear’ for the second syllable instead of ‘fire,’ making it sound like Sphere, Sir Cecil’s shipbuilding company, and causing no end of bother and confusion.”

  “Do you know, I think that is one of the Shrimp books I’ve read,” I told him.

  “It’s one of the very best.”

  “Is there a dreadful person in it called Higgins, who ends up falling into the sea, never to be seen again?”

  “That’s the one!” Gathercole smiled. “Well, you know more about Lady Playford’s books than Scotcher did when I first met him. I can see now that he asked his question about a kidnapped horse to draw me out. In correcting him, and in the conversation that followed, I provided him with enough detail to pass himself off, during his interview with Lady Playford, as someone who knew more about Shrimp Seddon and her exploits than anyone else in the world. Do you know what he said after I told him all that about Sapphire and Sphere and Sir Cecil Devaux? He said, ‘Oh, yes—of course.’ That was when I first suspected he was not so much an odd chap with a poor memory as a bit of a scoundrel. Only suspected, you understand. But an honest man would have said, ‘Golly, I got that quite wrong, then, didn’t I? I wonder how I could have misremembered so badly.’ Instead, Scotcher’s ‘of course’ implied he had known all along, and simply needed to be reminded. Tripe and twaddle! Anyone who had read Voyage Around the World would not have misremembered it in that particular way.”

  Gathercole seemed to want to say more, so I waited. A young woman came to ask if we would like more tea, and I told her that we would.

  “By then it was too late. I had already told Scotcher too much about Lady Playford’s work and all my bright ideas about it. When the time came for me to be interviewed, she barely asked me anything. I had to sit and listen as she told me about Scotcher—how awfully perceptive he was, and wasn’t it clever of him to notice this and that about the structures and the themes of her novels? All, needless to say, were things he had heard from me an hour or so earlier. Oh—did I not say? His interview lasted a full hour. Mine took only twenty minutes.”

  “But . . . did you not tell Lady Playford what had happened?” I said.

  “No. I do not like to disparage others, and I have never forgiven myself for not speaking up—for failing to protect Lady Playford from that fraud Scotcher. Still, I doubt she would have listened to me.”

  “She most certainly would not have,” I assured him.

  “Well, in any event, I was duly sent away after my short interview, and Scotcher got the job. And then four years later—no, almost five—Lady Playford summoned me and said, ‘I did not give you a fair chance, Michael. I see that now. I should like you to become my lawyer and handle my affairs henceforth—that is how I intend to make it up to you!’ I was delighted, naturally. She had already arranged for Orville Rol
fe to employ me, almost immediately after not giving me the job as her secretary.”

  “Yes, she told me.”

  “I owe everything to her.” Gathercole frowned. “Everything. She also told me, that same day, that even though I was to be her lawyer and nothing to do with her writing, she intended to test out her Shrimp stories on me from now on—me and nobody else. The way she said ‘nobody else’ so pointedly made me think that she was referring to Scotcher. And . . . well, now, many years later, I know that is precisely what she meant. ‘You are my number one, Michael’—that is what she said. I believe she meant it. Scotcher was her secretary, but he was not the one she confided in about her books. Never.”

  I nodded, seeing that this was important to Gathercole.

  “That same day, she told me about Scotcher’s Bright’s disease, only she related the news in a most unusual way. Instead of saying, ‘He is dying,’ she said, ‘Joseph has told me that he is dying.’”

  “She wanted to indicate to you, without saying so explicitly, that she did not believe him.”

  “Yes, and I am afraid I could not restrain myself,” Gathercole said. “You will think me petty, but I was as sure as I could be that Scotcher had still not read a single word Lady Playford had published, nearly five years after becoming her secretary. He could easily have read them all as soon as he got the job, but he did not. He preferred to fool everybody. I believe he reveled in his own dishonesty, though I have no evidence, just a feeling. Do you remember at dinner, the night he died, when he revealed the solution of The Lady in the Suit in front of Poirot, who had not read it?”

  “‘Hirsute,’ not ‘her suit,’” I said. “How could I forget?”

  “That alone ought to be all the proof anyone needs that Scotcher cared not one jot for Lady Playford’s books! No one who cares about mystery stories would reveal a solution in such a cavalier fashion. And his advice to Poirot about reading the books in the wrong order, not chronologically, because that would be more akin to real life? I have no proof, but Joseph was forever producing fascinating insights and theories about the Shrimp books that cannot have been his own. I strongly suspect he got them from letters, which he then destroyed.”

  “Letters to Lady Playford?” I said.

  “Yes—as her secretary, Joseph dealt with all her correspondence. He saw all the letters that came from readers before she did. Her publisher sends them in sacks. Joseph waded through them all—until he became too pretend-sick and Sophie took over. My uncharitable guess is that he stole those that were particularly interesting, memorized the opinions contained therein, then burned the originals. I recall walking into the drawing room once and catching him throwing a pile of paper on the fire. He looked startled and began to stammer about something quite irrelevant.”

  “You said that you could not restrain yourself, when Lady Playford told you about Scotcher’s allegedly fatal illness,” I reminded him. “What did you do?”

  “What did I . . . ? Oh, yes, that. I said, ‘Forgive me, Lady Playford, but what do you mean “If Joseph dies”? Is he going to die or is he not?’”

  “How did she reply?” I asked.

  “She smiled sadly and said, ‘That is the question, Michael. Oh, indeed, that is the question.’”

  33

  The Two True Things

  Poirot returned two days later, in the morning. I had overslept, and was woken late by the sound of rapping on my bedroom door. I put on my dressing gown, went to open it, and found Poirot outside on the landing. “You’re back! Thank goodness.”

  This greeting seemed to please him inordinately.

  “I am back, mon ami, oui. And we can once again make progress. What do you have to tell me since we spoke on the telephone?”

  I told him about my conversation with Gathercole. Then I asked him if he had found what he was looking for in Malmesbury.

  “Yes—I learned much that was relevant and interesting, but I suspected most of it already. Get dressed, mon ami. I shall await you in the library. There we will talk. I have left out the copy of Shakespeare’s King John that I have been reading.”

  “Why are you reading it?” King John—could that be the work of literature to which Poirot had alluded, the one that he thought relevant to Scotcher’s murder?

  “Dr. Kimpton has been trying to draw it to our attention since we arrived,” he said. “You have not thought to read it yourself while I have been away?”

  “No. If you wanted me to do so, you should have said so.”

  “Never mind, mon ami.” With that, he turned his back on me and started to move towards the stairs.

  I washed and dressed quickly, and joined him in the library twenty minutes later. He was ensconced in an armchair in the corner, with King John on the table beside him.

  “Well, here I am,” I said. “Tell me, then: why Malmesbury?”

  “It is where Joseph Scotcher’s mother lives. With the help of the local police, I was able to find her.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “It is interesting that you ask that. Would you not expect the mother of Scotcher to be beautiful, like a delicate angel? This woman was not. She was not pleasing to the eye. Also, she had . . .” Poirot pointed to the top of his nose.

  “One eyebrow that went all the way across her face?” I guessed aloud.

  “Yes. Like . . . a mustache above her nose instead of below!” Poirot sounded delighted to have found the perfect description. I could not help smiling. “How did you know, mon ami?”

  I told him the one detail that I had omitted to mention over the telephone: that the woman Claudia Playford had seen in Scotcher’s company at the Randolph Hotel had appeared to have one long, continuous eyebrow.

  Poirot threw up his hands. “Did I not ask you to tell me everything? And you leave out this piece of the story? Sacré tonnerre!”

  “Accidentally,” I told him, unwilling to feel remiss when I had done nothing but cooperate. “You deliberately did not tell me why you were at the hospital or who this eminent doctor was. Incidentally, how many patients died in the corridors after you commandeered that office to talk to me for an hour?”

  “Died?” Poirot frowned in puzzlement. “No one died. Now, I have made some important discoveries. I will tell you. Blake Scotcher, the younger brother of Joseph. He is real.”

  “Then it was not Joseph Scotcher in disguise who met Randall Kimpton at Queen’s Lane Coffee House?” I said.

  “On the contrary, I am certain that it was. And if I am wrong . . . well, whoever it was that met Mr. Kimpton, it was not Blake Scotcher, the younger son of Ethel Scotcher of Malmesbury.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he died when he was six years old, from influenza.”

  “Goodness!”

  “Mrs. Scotcher, having lost one son already, is beside herself with grief at losing another. This is made worse by the guilt that for so long she has felt on Joseph’s account. She neglected him as a child, she told me. He seemed always to be well and happy, while his brother, Blake, was sickly and needed her attention. He was forever coming down with one illness after another.”

  “I say!”

  “Oui. And Dr. Kimpton says that the psychology cannot be proof of anything!”

  “Anything else from Mrs. Scotcher?”

  “No. But interesting details from elsewhere. I went to Balliol College in Oxford, where both Kimpton and Scotcher studied—where they met, also. Did you know that before Scotcher took the position as Lady Playford’s secretary, he was what you might call ‘a Shakespeare man’?”

  “What? Like Kimpton was, before he went into medicine?”

  “Précisément. Many at Balliol remember both young men very well. The consensus of opinion is that Scotcher idolized Kimpton, and modeled himself upon him.”

  So Phyllis had been wrong about the direction of mimicry: she had naturally assumed that the man she loved was, as it were, the original, and Randall Kimpton the imitator—but it had been the ot
her way round.

  “That must be the reason Kimpton changed course and moved over to medicine,” I said. “Especially when you think about Scotcher snatching Iris from under Kimpton’s nose as well. What if that was about Kimpton more than Iris?”

  “You mean that Scotcher did not so much want the girl as he wanted to be Randall Kimpton? He could not be someone he was not, but having Iris by his side helped him to believe that he could?”

  “Something like that, yes. If Scotcher wanted Iris purely because Kimpton had her, and if he became a Shakespeare scholar only because Kimpton was one, that must have been enraging for Kimpton. No one could bear to be imitated in that way. And Kimpton’s story about giving up Shakespeare because others in the field disapproved of him for liking King John better than the other plays—that always struck me as claptrap.”

  “But Scotcher could have followed him also into the study of medicine, non? And maybe he would have, if he had not thought of something even better. Kimpton, once Iris was, as you English say, ‘out of the picture,’ transferred his romantic attention to the dazzling Mademoiselle Claudia Playford, aloof and apparently unattainable, daughter of a viscount and a famous novelist. Kimpton works hard and eventually succeeds in convincing her to become engaged to be married to him. Scotcher, who moves in the same circles in Oxford, sees that Kimpton has, after much effort, won the heart of this young beauty—and, as luck would have it, Claudia’s mother, the authoress, is at the same time advertising for a secretary . . . oh, yes, this has much more appeal for Scotcher than the pursuit of a career as a doctor. Speaking of doctors . . .” Poirot shook his head.

  “Are you going to tell me at last?”