The Telling Error

by Hannah, Sophie

  Tasker’s enduring devotion to cannabis is an open secret in the literary world, as is his belief that the drug expands his imagination. He’s on record as saying he doesn’t think he’d be able to write a book worth anyone’s time without it. Assuming some or all of this year’s other Supernatural/Horror contenders are tediously abstemious on the narcotics front, doesn’t that mean that Tasker’s drug-taking might have given him an unfair edge over the competition? Shouldn’t he have to give back his prize money, arrange a head-hung-in-shame photo-shoot and sob within dampening distance of Piers Morgan?

  Did this dilemma cross Keiran Holland’s mind even for a fleeting instant? Did it occur to him retrospectively, as condemnations of Bryn Gilligan poured forth from his keyboard, that he was one of a panel of judges that awarded a prestigious prize to a law-breaking substance abuser?

  Before everyone jumps down my throat: yes, of course I can see that the two cases are different – cannabis is not as unambiguously performance-enhancing as whatever it was that Gilligan took. One writer’s prose might be boosted by illegal drugs, another’s by instant Nescafé or the sugar rush from a packet of Minstrels. My own reaction to cannabis is to fall asleep within ten seconds of ingesting it, so it wouldn’t do anything for my writing style, whereas a strong cup of brick-coloured tea is all I need in order to be able to produce the seamless brilliance you’re reading now.

  So, yes, it’s different. But is it different in a way that matters, assuming one doesn’t believe rules should be adhered to simply because they’re there? I don’t think it is. I think it’s crazy that sportspeople are subject to such different constraints from writers and artists when it comes to professional competitions. How can the discrepancy be justified? More interestingly, how can Keiran Holland’s hypocrisy be justified?

  ‘He’s a liar and a cheat.’ Yes, Keiran – you are, aren’t you?

  2

  Monday 1 July 2013

  ‘Than,’ said DC Simon Waterhouse. He turned away from the red letters on the wall of Damon Blundy’s study. He was sick of looking at them, must have read the words more than a hundred times since arriving at 27 Elmhirst Road earlier in the day: ‘HE IS NO LESS DEAD.’

  ‘Than?’ DS Sam Kombothekra repeated.

  ‘Yeah. It’s the most important word. The silent “than”. You can’t see it.’

  ‘You mean …’ Sam approached the wall to inspect it more closely. ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘No.’ Simon smiled at his skipper’s confusion. ‘Because it’s not there.’

  Neither was Damon Blundy’s body, not any more. It had been photographed, examined and removed. Yet the chair beside the desk didn’t feel empty; it still contained the solid idea of a dead man. It was the perfect illustration of murder, Simon thought: someone once present who was now absent. A space where a person ought to be, a perceptible negative. Simon could see the deceased Blundy in his mind as clearly as if he’d still been slumped there. Parcel tape on his face, the knife taped tight against his mouth … The picture was as vivid to Simon as the missing ‘than’ on the wall.

  As always, he was more interested in what he could imagine than in what he could see. The props still present in the room – the knife sharpener, the tin of red paint, the brush – no longer held his interest. Even the photograph that the killer had sent to Damon Blundy, the password painted on A4 paper and left beside Blundy’s laptop to ensure the police would find the email containing the photograph … Simon could happily have spent days pondering the meaning of these two things in combination, but he felt no need to look at either one again. Why waste his time? Sam and the rest of the team could scour all that was clearly visible while he looked behind and beyond, trying to coax hidden motives and grudges out of the shadows.

  ‘I see what you mean. A “less” implies a “than”.’ Sam sounded relieved to have finally worked it out.

  ‘He is no less dead than what, though?’ said Simon. ‘Whoever painted those words knows the answer, and chose to be cryptic instead of letting us in on the secret. Which means either he wants us to work it out or he wants us to fail. If we fail, he gets away with it, proves he’s cleverer than us.’

  ‘And if we succeed?’

  ‘Then he’s going down for murder.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sam said. ‘All these … weird features might be clues to something – to motive, perhaps, or something about Damon Blundy – but not necessarily to the killer’s identity.’

  ‘Joking, aren’t you? Crime scene like this –’ Simon gestured around the room ‘– motive’s going to be as unique as a fingerprint. Soon as we know why, we’ll know who.’ How soon? Simon could feel his impatience overheating already, and this was only day one.

  Not knowing the answer always put him in a foul mood, especially in the hours immediately following a murder. The disappointment of arriving at the scene and not being able to work it out straight away, the feeling of failure, the fear that he’d never get to the truth if it didn’t leap out at him in the first five minutes … He clung to the hope that it would happen to him one day, the ideal scenario he always prayed for: a revelation in those first few precious moments, before all the major and minor players started chucking their lies at him.

  He walked over to one of Damon Blundy’s overcrowded bookshelves, half pulled out a pale-blue-spined paperback – P. G. Wodehouse – then pushed it back in again. The sight of so many books made Simon think about authorship. ‘This killer’s invested a lot of time and effort, planning and execution,’ he said. ‘He’s proud of his handiwork. Wouldn’t want us to work out why in isolation, without knowing who – that’d feel like Mr Nobody getting the credit.’

  ‘So he wants to be caught?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that strongly.’ It bothered Simon that Sam was treating his ill-thought-out ramblings as statements of fact. He was too proud to say, ‘I’ve no idea if I’m right – this is pure speculation,’ so said instead, ‘He doesn’t want to be caught, no, but he’s prepared to be. He wouldn’t bother with the cryptic clues if he didn’t want to give us a chance of working it out, however unlikely he thinks it is that we will. No fun for him to outwit us if it’s a foregone conclusion.’

  ‘Couldn’t he outwit us more easily if he didn’t leave us any clues at all?’ Sam asked.

  Simon nodded. It was a good point. ‘But he also wants acknowledgement – of his grievance as well as his cleverness. So maybe he does want to be caught – maybe I got it the wrong way round and getting away with murder would be the consolation prize. Or he might be equally happy with either outcome: win-win for him. Either we’re too stupid to interpret his clues and he gets away with it – massive ego boost – or he has the consolation of police and media attention for his cause, whatever it is – political or personal.’

  ‘Political?’ Sam sounded surprised.

  ‘Could easily be,’ said Simon. ‘I’ve been working my way through Damon Blundy’s columns from the Herald. His vocation was pissing off as many people as possible: women, Jews, Muslims, atheists, pro-choice-ists, left-wingers, right-wingers, journalists, dog-owners – you name it. Someone’s going to have to read every word he’s ever published, and all the comments threads online. We’ll probably find at least five hundred people who’ve threatened to kill him at one time or another.’

  ‘I’ve been assuming this is personal,’ said Sam. ‘The strange quirks of the murder scene …’ He ran his gloved hand over the jukebox in front of him. It was impressive. Simon had never seen one close up before. If Sellers were here, he’d suggest they took turns to choose songs.

  ‘What if all the cryptic stuff’s a smokescreen?’ Sam said. ‘Designed to look as if it means something when it means nothing at all?’

  The idea turned Simon’s stomach: deliberately staged false significance. It was a possibility he couldn’t bear to consider, let alone discuss, but since Sam had raised it, he had to conquer his phobia and answer. ‘No. If the killer wanted to send us on a wild-goose chase, he might have l
eft us one cryptic mislead – the words on the wall, or the photograph … One. Not this many. The paint, the brush, the knife sharpener … It’s too much to be fake. And we know one thing the killer left us was genuine: the password for the laptop. It got us into Blundy’s email. He wants us to know he knew Blundy well enough to know his password.’

  ‘Or he forced the password out of him at knife-point, once he’d taped him to the chair,’ said Sam.

  ‘Possible. Unlikely, though. This killer’s demonstrating that he’s the expert: on Blundy, his computer password, why he deserved to die. He’s boasting. Look around you: this whole room’s a display of self-congratulation in crime-scene form. He knows everything; we know nothing. Or she.’

  ‘You think it’s a woman?’

  ‘Did I say that? Still, Blundy’s wife’s more likely to know his password than anyone else, isn’t she?’

  ‘Is she?’ Sam asked. ‘If you password-protect a laptop that lives in your house, aren’t you mainly protecting your privacy from the person or people you live with?’

  ‘How long before I can talk to her?’ Simon asked.

  Sam looked towards the open door of the study. ‘There’s no point in either of us trying until she’s capable of stringing a sentence together.’

  Hannah Blundy was two floors below, in her converted basement kitchen-cum-dining room with a family liaison officer. She’d found her husband’s dead body at ten thirty this morning when she’d brought him up a mug of tea that never made it into the room. Hannah hadn’t yet calmed down sufficiently to tell anyone anything useful, but judging by the mess on the landing, it seemed likely that she’d got to the top of the stairs, seen Damon framed in the doorway of his study, murdered and bound by tape to his desk chair, and dropped the mug where she stood.

  Shock. Or designed to look like shock by the same person who had so carefully orchestrated the rest of the murder scene. Simon wanted to know which.

  ‘If Hannah Blundy calmly and methodically murdered her husband and then staged the distraught meltdown we witnessed when we arrived—’ Sam broke off, shook his head. ‘She’d almost deserve to get away with it if she can act that well. I don’t really mean that,’ he qualified quickly.

  ‘Anyone can weep and collapse on the floor,’ said Simon, though in fact he couldn’t imagine ever managing to be so emotionally unrestrained in public, however distressed he was. ‘Especially a murderer surrounded by police, terrified they’ll see through her act.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Sam. ‘I can’t see Hannah Blundy as a killer.’

  ‘I can. If I had to lay a bet now, my money’d be on her.’

  ‘For any other reason than that she’s his wife?’

  ‘I haven’t met any other suspects yet, have I?’

  Sam’s face reddened.

  Simon took pity on him. He was too easy to wind up. ‘Actually, it’s not that. Or that she’s his wife.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘She’s a psychotherapist. Her website says she specialises in relationship and familial issues.’ Seeing that Sam was about to object, Simon said, ‘I know – it doesn’t mean anything. Except … she’s chosen to devote her life to helping people who hate the people they’re supposed to love. Maybe she did too – hated her husband, wanted him dead.’

  ‘I think that’s … a stretch, simply from her choice of profession,’ Sam said after a few seconds.

  ‘Well, I’m not wrong about the missing word,’ said Simon, keen to return to safer ground. ‘What might come after the “than”?’

  Sam shrugged helplessly. ‘There must be infinite possibilities. How can we narrow it down?’

  ‘A person’s name,’ said Simon. ‘“He is no less dead than … Fred.” Let’s say it’s that, for the sake of argument. What would that mean? That he’s more dead than Fred? Or the same amount dead? There’s no such thing as more dead,’ he answered himself.

  ‘If it’s a name – Fred or Mary or whatever – that could suggest other victims,’ said Sam. ‘Each one no less dead than the one before.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Simon nodded slowly. ‘I like that.’ A bit. Not a lot, not enough to stick with it. ‘Or how about another meaning: “He is no less dead than he was while alive”? No, that’d make better sense if it was “no more dead”.’

  ‘Simon, it could be anything.’

  ‘I know that, and I know your shall-we-just-give-up? voice.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t—’

  ‘We need to think of every single thing it might be, anything and everything that could conceivably come after “than”.’ Simon walked over to the desk, nearly tripping over the knife sharpener on his way. It was black, heavy and could have doubled as a doorstop. ‘Too much and too many to be meaningless,’ he muttered, ‘but maybe only one meaning … Yeah. One.’

  ‘Explain?’ said Sam.

  ‘All the things the killer’s left us are different routes to the same information – different prompts. Whatever that shit on the wall means, whatever it means that he could easily have stabbed Blundy with the knife in the photo but chose instead to suffocate him with a knife and some tape … he’s given us lots of clues, but it’s not like a crossword, where each one’s designed to give you a different answer. Imagine a crossword with numbers one to twenty across and numbers one to twenty down and in all forty cases it’s the same nine-letter word we’re trying to guess.’

  ‘Why nine letters?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Random,’ said Simon impatiently. ‘Call it eight or ten if you like. Point is, the crossword creator really wants us to guess the answer – this ten- or nine- or eight-letter word’s important to him. He thinks we need to know it, but he also thinks we’re stupid – unlikely to twig unless he gives us lots and lots of clues.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘So this is our way into the “than”,’ said Simon, feeling positive for the first time since arriving at 27 Elmhirst Road. ‘“He is no less dead than …” Whatever comes afterwards, the meaning has to be the same as the meaning of the paint, the brush, the photo, the knife … They’re all problems with the same solution.’

  ‘What about the laptop password?’ said Sam. He walked over to Damon Blundy’s desk, picked up the red-painted page and held it in the air. ‘Riddy111111. Does that also mean the same thing?’

  ‘If it’s a new password, thought up by the killer, then yes,’ said Simon. ‘If it was Blundy’s choice of password and nothing to do with the killer, then no. Even so – it has to mean something. Riddy one-eleven one-eleven. Riddy triple one triple one.’

  ‘Damon always claimed it meant nothing,’ said a woman’s voice from the landing. ‘It’s been his password for a long time – at least a year.’

  Simon turned. Hannah Blundy was standing at the top of the stairs, holding on to the bannister with one hand. She was still crying, but more passively now; the tears seemed to be doing their thing without her involvement or attention.

  She was an odd-looking woman: broad-shouldered, square and stocky from the waist up, with long skinny legs. Her round face, if it were all that you saw of her, would make you think she must be fat, but she wasn’t. Looking at her made Simon realise how well designed and coordinated most people’s bodies and faces were. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone before whose top half clashed so markedly with their bottom half, and both halves with their face.

  Having said all that, Hannah Blundy wasn’t ugly. Her features were inoffensive, and her shiny dark brown shoulder-length hair was attractive. It looked like hair Simon had seen on TV advertisements and rarely in real life.

  ‘I never believed him,’ she said. ‘Whatever “Riddy one-eleven one-eleven” means, or even if it means nothing, he must have got it from somewhere, otherwise why those letters? Why those numbers?’

  ‘So you knew it was his password?’ asked Sam.

  Hannah nodded. ‘I made him tell me what it was. I told him mine. If he had no secrets from me, why would he mind me looking on his laptop? He said it was ju
st random, Riddy111111. It was a lie, but I can’t prove it. I … Please, if you find out …’ She bit her lip and looked down at the floor, as if she’d lost confidence in the rest of her sentence.

  Simon took a step towards her. ‘Find out what?’

  ‘About the password. What it means. I want to know.’

  ‘More than you want to know who murdered your husband?’

  ‘Simon …’ Sam murmured.

  ‘No, I want to know that too,’ said Hannah. She looked surprised. ‘Of course I want you to find out who killed Damon. That’s part of it, I’m sure, and the password is part of it. I never imagined the police might one day help me solve the mystery. This is my chance.’ She sniffed, wiped her face with the back of her right hand.

  Since she didn’t seem stupid, Simon assumed she would have known as soon as she discovered his dead body that the unlawful suffocation of her husband would attract serious and immediate help from detectives. And her ‘one day’ suggested something that had been bothering her for a long time, not a crime that had been committed between half past eight and half past ten this morning. Therefore … the mystery Hannah Blundy was referring to couldn’t be Damon’s murder. That, in her eyes, was the chance to solve the puzzle; it wasn’t the puzzle itself. Interesting.

  ‘What do you mean, Hannah?’ Sam asked. ‘This is your chance for what?’

  ‘To find out the truth that my husband was so determined to keep from me,’ she said, staring down at her feet. ‘Whatever it is, I hope it’s what got him killed. If it wasn’t – if that was something completely different and unrelated – then whatever you find out about the murder won’t help me. I’d given up hope of ever knowing, but now …’ She stopped with a ragged gasp, wide-eyed. ‘Promise me you’ll tell me the truth if you find out.’