by Adam Croft
The momentary silence was broken by Eliza Whitehouse, avoiding the question, resigned to her fate. ‘When the real Oscar came back to England and found me, I immediately fell in love with him all over again. Who wouldn’t, when you’d lived with that oaf Malcolm for more than thirty years? The party on Friday night was put together by Andrew as a bit of a surprise. We took the decision to use it to test the switch on a small group of people, just to see if it would work. To see if anyone would notice if Oscar were to resume his identity again. If it worked, Oscar was going to give up public life and live on his book and TV royalties.’
‘You mean Malcolm’s book and TV royalties,’ Sandy corrected her with a scowl.
‘Well, yes. That way we could minimise the chance of anyone ever finding out the truth. God, we’d considered everything: staging a car accident so he could claim amnesia, inventing some sort of dementia-style illness. The details didn’t matter — all we knew was that we wanted to be together again. We hadn’t planned to kill him that night, but when he came down with that virus it just seemed to make so much sense. It made our job so much easier. When the switch worked and no-one realised Oscar was a different person, we made the decision. It was still a big risk. There was never meant to be a body or any clue anyone had been killed. Not until bloody Dolores Mickelwhite went nosing about at the moment Oscar killed Malcolm. It was just meant to be a simple switching of identities. Switching them back to how they were meant to be. If Malcolm officially never even existed, how could he have been murdered?’
The man in question took up the reins. ‘After I’d killed Malcolm, I hid in the spare bedroom nearest the stairs. When Dolores came upstairs and tried the handle, I panicked. Oddly, he seemed to slip away just at that moment. As if he heard her and thought his saviour had turned up. He stopped struggling and that’s when I knew he was dead. When Dolores ran downstairs I slipped out of the room and hid in the spare bedroom. Before I went, I locked the door and slid the key back under using a photocopy of some sort of contract that was on the bedside table. I saw it in a murder mystery novel once. I thought it was brilliant. Bloody problem is, so did you.’
‘A clever ruse, but not clever enough,’ Hardwick said.
‘When Eliza suggested that everyone went into the drawing room so she could be alone, the vicar stayed upstairs. Not a bad move, actually, as it meant there was a solid witness there the whole time. All Eliza had to do was make sure the vicar didn’t have a view of the bedroom door and that the others stayed out of the way while I slipped downstairs and out into the back garden. Throughout the whole night we made sure Eliza was downstairs in the middle of the party as much as possible, just in case something went wrong. Which it did.’
‘Even so, we thought we were watertight. Everyone had an alibi!’ Eliza cried.
‘The only person who didn’t have an alibi for that night, was a man who didn’t even exist,’ Hardwick said.
‘But I escorted him back upstairs!’ Harry Greenlaw said. ‘Do you mean to say I was escorting a murderer?’
‘It would seem so,’ Hardwick replied. ‘And did you see him go into his bedroom, Mr Greenlaw?’
‘Well, no. He said he needed to use the bathroom first, so I left him to it.’
‘Did it not cross your mind that Oscar and Eliza Whitehouse have an en-suite bathroom, and that he wouldn’t logically be using the one on the landing?’
Harry Greenlaw thought for a moment. ‘I must admit that it didn’t.’
The loud sobbing of Eliza Whitehouse permeated the stunned silence.
‘I never stopped loving Oscar. The real Oscar, I mean. Malcolm was a lying, misogynistic, philandering pig. Sure, it was rough and exciting in the early days, but then reality set in. I couldn’t leave him. How could I? He was the only other person who knew the truth. I couldn’t risk my whole world crashing down around me. It was just easier this way. Easier to stick with it and ride it out. I mean, it had its upsides. The money was good for a start,’ she said, even emitting a slight laugh.
‘But he wasn’t the only other person who knew the truth, was he?’ Hardwick said, as numerous pairs of eyes began to dart around the room. ‘Because after you left the French Foreign Legion,’ Hardwick addressed the killer, ‘you lived for a while in Cyprus. Didn’t you?’
Oscar’s eyes flickered momentarily. ‘Yes. How did you know that?’
‘Oh, just a little bit of backward deduction, Mr Whitehouse. Let me see… do we know anyone else with links to Cyprus? How about you, Mr Karagounis?’ Christos Karagounis’s eyes met Hardwick’s. ‘When I first spoke to you, I noticed something a little odd about your accent and turns of phrase. A certain je ne sais quoi, if you’ll indulge in my humour. I’m a well-travelled man, Mr Karagounis, and one who can spot a French lilt in a Cypriot accent a mile off. But why would a native Cypriot have a French lilt to his accent? Perhaps you can explain, Mr Whitehouse.’
Oscar sighed and bowed his head once more, resigned to his fate. ‘When I left the Legion, I got involved with a French woman. We ended up moving to Cyprus.’
‘But that’s not all, is it? When you say you “got involved” with a French woman, what you mean is you had a child together.’
‘Yes. He was five when we left France for Cyprus. His mother and I split up a few months later and she re-married a Cypriot man. Even though we kept in touch, my son took his surname. When he was eighteen, he changed his forename from Christophe to Christos. Christos is my son.’
Christos Karagounis bowed his head.
‘And it was your son, the humble Cypriot gardener, who you sent to work at Westerlea House, in order to feed you information, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. He told me about Malcolm and Eliza’s relationship and I slowly came to realise that I could put a stop to things. I could finally get the ultimate revenge and win back the woman I loved. So I came back to England. I laid low and eventually made contact with Eliza. The spark was still there and we realised we were both still in love with each other after all those years.’
‘So you hatched your plan to kill your brother and reclaim your original identity. And when it all went wrong, the whole plot started to run away with you, didn’t it? Malcolm went to see the vicar a few years ago and told him about what happened in the seventies. When you noticed the vicar starting to put the clues together, you realised that the vicar, too, had to die. And when Dolores Mickelwhite saw him at the scene of the vicar’s murder… well, what’s a third murder when you’ve already committed two?’
‘It was meant to be so easy. We were going to kill Malcolm silently and dispose of the body. Then I could become Oscar again. No-one would ever have known a murder had even been committed! It would have been the perfect murder.’
‘Except when you entered your brother’s bedroom and began to kill him, you weren’t counting on Dolores Mickelwhite walking past the door at that exact moment.’
‘Bloody meddling woman! If she had been downstairs like she was supposed to be, Malcolm would be buried under eight feet of topsoil in the rockery by now.’
‘And you would be Oscar Whitehouse once again. Except things started to spiral out of control, didn’t they? Because your brother’s conscience got the better of him and he explained his story to the vicar in confession. The vicar knew Oscar Whitehouse was actually Malcolm Whitehouse, and that’s why you killed him.’
Oscar looked at the floor and nodded.
‘And when Dolores Mickelwhite got in your way, yet again, by declaring that she had seen Oscar Whitehouse’s double at the vicarage on the night the reverend died, you knew that she had to be next.’
Oscar nodded solemnly. As the room began to relax and come to terms with what had happened, he turned with the speed of a gazelle on a lion-covered plain and darted out of the door, knocking both DI Warner and DC Kerrigan to the floor as he did so. Before the two officers could even register what had happened, Hardwick hurdled over the pair and gave chase.
32
The dew had already be
gun to settle on the grass, making traction difficult, as Hardwick clambered over the uneven terrain on the upper reaches of Tollinghill Common. The pitch-black night meant his only way of following the killer was to listen keenly for his own grunts and heavy footsteps, the moon providing little in the way of natural light. Hardwick felt the lace on his right shoe loosen at the most inopportune time, and he resisted his natural urge to bend down and re-tie it.
As the killer made his way into the woods, Hardwick was thankful for the heavy foliage and dried twigs, which made following the sounds much easier. Exiting the woods on the far side, Hardwick was struck by the glow of the full moon reflecting off the quarry as he stood a few feet from the edge.
‘It’s over, Oscar,’ Hardwick panted. ‘Come with me and we can sort everything out.’
‘You seem to have underestimated me, Hardwick,’ the killer said, trying to catch his breath. ‘I’m an escapist. That’s what I do. I run away from things.’
‘Too much time spent in the French military,’ Hardwick quipped, bending over with his hands on his knees. ‘You can’t run away from this, though. Too much water has passed under the bridge. Do the right thing and hand yourself in.’
‘No. You’re right,’ Oscar said, apparently coming to his senses as he walked towards Hardwick with his arms outstretched, palms up, as if requesting arrest. Hardwick recognised the look in his eyes a moment too late, as Oscar’s outstretched arms rammed into his chest, pushing him off balance and onto his back, his body teetering over the edge of the cavernous quarry.
As he struggled to keep his balance and crawl back to safety, Hardwick clambered onto all fours, his eyes fixated on the enormous chalky drop below him. As he managed to avert his gaze from his imminent certain death, Hardwick felt a shadow fall across him as the light of the moon was blocked by the looming figure of Oscar Whitehouse, who stood at his feet.
‘I’m trained to kill a man, you know, Hardwick. I killed in the Legion and I killed in Tollinghill. A nice fitting end to the story, don’t you think?’
Hardwick said not a word, instead grunting with angst against his impending death, as Oscar Whitehouse bent down and grabbed hold of his foot. As Oscar widened his legs, Hardwick’s breath stopped sharply and both men sensed the quarry edge give way beneath them.
Oscar’s grip on Hardwick’s ankle tightened as his balance disappeared over the edge of the quarry. Mere nanoseconds later, Hardwick felt time slow as the weight of Oscar Whitehouse’s falling body tugged on his ankle. Sensing this was the end, a thousand thoughts flashed through Hardwick’s mind as he prepared to meet death.
Just as the jolt of the falling weight of Oscar Whitehouse took hold, Hardwick felt five large digits clasp around his own left hand, the equilibrium restored as time sped up and Hardwick sensed Oscar’s grip on his ankle transferring to his right shoe, which promptly slipped off, taking Oscar Whitehouse with it, as both Oscar and the patent-leather Oxford plummeted to the bottom of Tollinghill Quarry.
33
‘I think you’ll find you owe me one, Hardwick,’ DI Warner said as the men both clambered to their feet.
‘In addition to solving three murders, Detective Inspector?’ Hardwick asked, removing his sock, which was now wet from the dew-soaked grass.
‘Yes, well I’m sure we would have got there eventually.’
‘Eventually,’ Hardwick accentuated. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have to walk round to the bottom of the quarry.’
‘There’s no point, Hardwick. It’s a two-hundred-foot drop. There’s no way he will have survived that.’
‘Oh, I’m not worried about him. I want to retrieve my shoe.’
Death Under The Sun
1
It had never occurred to Ellis Flint to put the lid back on the bottle before shaking it, and he cursed his momentary lapse of concentration as he scraped tomato ketchup from the Artex ceiling with a palette knife. Mrs Flint would never have made a mistake like this. Though Mrs Flint was, of course, hopelessly at work.
The ringing of the doorbell jolted Ellis, causing the palette knife to jab into the ceiling and a lump of ketchuppy plaster to plop gracefully into one of the mugs of freshly-brewed coffee that adorned the kitchen table.
Alighting the wooden chair, Ellis made his way carefully across the laminate flooring and towards the front door, careful to avoid getting ketchup on his socks. Kempston Hardwick was, of course, expectedly early. And Ellis Flint was expectedly late.
Hardwick smiled as he greeted Ellis, who noted the distinct lack of ketchup stains on Hardwick's immaculate clothing.
‘I’ve made you a coffee,’ Ellis said, gesturing for his friend to sit at the table as he spooned the customary six sugars into his own mug.
‘Of sorts, yes,’ Hardwick said, his nostrils flaring as the bitter steam assaulted his olfactory system.
‘I know you’ve always been telling me I should get some decent coffee in, like the stuff you make at home, so I did. Trying this Nescafé stuff now.’
‘Yes, well I was thinking perhaps something a little less… granulated.’
‘Come off it!’ Ellis said, stirring his own coffee as he plonked himself down on the wooden chair. ‘You’ve seen the adverts. It’s the same coffee, just in granules.’
‘I haven’t, actually,’ said Hardwick, who didn’t even own a television. ‘And that wouldn’t really go any way to explaining why it’s half the price and a tenth of the taste, would it?’
‘Do you need to be so snobbish about everything?’ Ellis asked, his head bowed slightly at what he saw as a personal affront.
‘There’s a big difference between being snobbish and having standards, Ellis. I am not a snob; I just have higher standards than most.’
‘If you ask me, it’s all down to stress.’
‘Stress?’ Hardwick asked, one eyebrow raised.
‘Yeah, it’s in this book I’ve been reading,’ Ellis replied as he leaned over to grab an almost pristine paperback from the kitchen dresser and plonked it on the table in front of Hardwick. ‘It says that stress is the silent killer. Usually, other people are the first ones to notice that the stressed person is behaving a little oddly.’
‘I see. And you think I’ve been “behaving a little oddly”, do you?’
‘Well, no. Sort of. Actually, I don’t know what would be considered odd for you, Kempston, but de-stressing never hurt anyone, did it?’ The resultant silence would’ve been obvious enough to anyone else to have signalled Hardwick’s disagreement, but Ellis Flint was not just anyone else. So he continued. ’I’ve been thinking, actually.’
Hardwick made an uncomfortable grunting noise, seemingly at the thought of another worrying brainwave from Ellis Flint. ‘Go on…’ he said as he eyed the suspicious reddish-white blob floating in his coffee mug.
‘Well, like I said, you’ve had a tough time of it lately, haven’t you?’
‘No I haven’t.’
‘Personally, I’d call two murder investigations pretty damned tough,’ Ellis insisted, referring to the previous cases on which they’d worked over the past couple of years. The first, the murder of former light-entertainer Charlie Sparks, had given them the cause to meet and become friends. The second, a case involving the murders of three residents in the sleepy market town of Tollinghill, had been particularly taxing.
‘Personally, I’d call it my duty to have investigated them,’ Hardwick replied. ‘Besides which, I fail to see what you’re getting at.’
‘Well, I just thought you might need a holiday. That’s all.’
‘A holiday?’
‘Yes, Kempston, a holiday. You know, going away somewhere and enjoying yourself. Not moping about Tollinghill waiting for people to die.’
‘I do not mope, Ellis,’ Hardwick replied. ‘Nor do I wait for people to die. If people have the unfortunate habit of dying within my general proximity, I’m rather at a loss to do anything about it.’
Ellis Flint took a sip of his coffee, himself rat
her at a loss to do anything, having been once again bamboozled by Hardwick’s characteristic way with words.
‘Anyway, I think a holiday would be a good idea,’ he finally said.
‘And I don’t.’
‘But why not? The prices are very good this time of year, for starters. John Tyler’s in Shafford have some great deals on at the moment. I saw one deal to Egypt, a fortnight in an all-inclusive resort complex, for just—‘
Hardwick’s coffee mug hit the coaster a little harder than it usually would have done. ’Ellis, I do not want to go on holiday.’
‘At least hear me out, Kempston. I mean, look outside. The weather’s grotty in Tollinghill at the moment. Can’t you just imagine yourself lying on a beach somewhere? Or sitting on a sun-kissed verandah reading a good book, drinking a nice cold lager?’
Hardwick raised one eyebrow.
‘Or a Campari and orange,’ Ellis added.
‘Yes, I can, and I’m sure it would all be very nice but it really is unnecessary. I don’t need a holiday.’
Ellis Flint sighed and stood up to fetch the sugar jar. This was going to be an eight-spoon affair.
‘Kempston, you’re not exactly short of money are you?’
‘I am a man of independent means if that’s what you're insinuating, Ellis.’
‘Right, well why not splash some of that cash on a nice holiday? Come on! Palm trees and warm breezes, foreign culture and architecture. What more could you want?’
Hardwick thought for a few moments. ‘Well, I have always wanted to visit the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa in northern Egypt.’
‘That’s the spirit! So is that a yes?’ Ellis said.
‘I suppose so, yes. I can go down to John Tyler’s this afternoon and see what they’ve got. Listen. Thank you, Ellis. You’re a good man,’ Hardwick said, before taking another mouthful of his coffee.
