Trick of the Mind

by Cassandra Chan

  Carmichael, having got over the difficult bit of his visit, relaxed in his chair, setting his briefcase aside on the floor and crossing his legs, while he watched Gibbons with a concerned eye.

  But Gibbons did not seem any more bothered by this evidence of the violence done to him than was Bethancourt. His eyes moved rapidly down the first page and as he laid it aside, he said, “These are just the notes I took at the scene on Monday—I remember that part. Oh, and this next page and I believe the next two—yes, two more—are my notes while I was swotting up on gemstones.”

  “That was on Monday as well?” asked Bethancourt, and Gibbons nodded, never lifting his eyes from the page.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Davies and I went out to the scene and met James and the Colemans there. Then we came back and he went over some of the basics with me. I made some notes then, but most of these are from the research I did once I got home. Ah, here we are: this looks like the notes I took at Grenshaw’s office on Tuesday morning.”

  He fell silent while he read and the others were quiet, too, lest they disturb his concentration.

  “Well,” he said after a time, “I don’t know that there’s much here—most of it seems to be in the report I wrote. You can tell from this”—and he laid a finger on the page—“that I was surprised to find out there was virtually nothing left of the estate except the jewels themselves. And I’ve made a notation here that says old. I’m not sure what I meant by that.” He looked up, as if inviting suggestions.

  “Possibly,” suggested Bethancourt, “that everyone connected with Miranda Haverford—with the exception of the Colemans—was exceedingly elderly. It does rather explain why they were her heirs.”

  Gibbons nodded. “Very likely,” he agreed, returning his attention to the next page of the facsimile. “This must be the interview with the Colemans,” he said in a moment. “Here, just let me read through it.”

  On the verge of proposing that he read it aloud, Bethancourt bit his lip and managed to remain silent. He glanced at Carmichael, but that gentleman seemed well content with the way things were proceeding. He was slouched comfortably in the chair, holding some papers in his lap, which he glanced down at occasionally, though most of his attention remained on Gibbons.

  Gibbons skimmed through his notes, carefully laying aside the pages as he finished with them. When at last he looked up again, Carmichael said, “There’s a lot there we couldn’t make out, particularly all the notations in the margins.”

  “Oh, I often do that,” said Gibbons, reassembling the pages. “I note down the salient points in an interview—the stuff I’m going to put in the report—and then in the margins I make notes about what I’m thinking about it all. Like just here”—he searched for a moment for the place on the page—“here, where I’ve written £££! next to the note that says the Colemans had only recently moved to England.”

  “Yes,” said Carmichael dryly. “That was one of the things we couldn’t make out.”

  Gibbons looked surprised. “I thought that one was clear enough,” he said. “I obviously thought they had come in order to ensure their inheritance.”

  “If that’s true,” pointed out Bethancourt, “then your impression of them was less favorable than was conveyed in your report.”

  Gibbons shrugged. “Probably. You don’t put your feelings into a report.”

  “So,” said Carmichael, firmly pulling them back to the subject, “you thought it likely that the Colemans’ motive in coming here was to ensure Miss Haverford did not change her will. Does that mean you had some intimation that she might?”

  “Not that I know of, and I think I would have made a note of something like that,” answered Gibbons. He was silent for a moment, looking down at what he had written. “I think,” he said at last, “that the £ sign refers to my estimation of their character. It’s hard to tell,” he said, looking up, “since I only remember meeting them briefly on Monday afternoon.”

  “What the hell do the triangles mean?” asked Carmichael. “Nobody could make that out.”

  “Triangles?” Gibbons looked down at the sheet before him as if surprised to see that there were any triangles contained in it. “Oh, that. It’s the symbol for change in chemistry—I use it as an abbreviation.”

  Carmichael muttered something and made a note. “What about the rest of the annotations?” he asked.

  “Well,” said Gibbons, referring back to the facsimile, “I think all this here”—and he held up the sheet, pointing to some scrawling down the right side of the margin—“must be questions I had about the jewelry. You can see in the body of the notes that we were discussing the various pieces, and the Colemans and James were probably using terms I didn’t know. And there are question marks next all these jottings—I usually do that when there’s something I have to look up.”

  Carmichael was nodding and looking down at the papers he held. “You seem to have discussed the details of the jewelry pretty thoroughly,” he said.

  “There’s a lot about it here,” admitted Gibbons. “But I probably would have made more extensive notes about that, since the jewelry was the thing I knew least about.”

  “Of course,” murmured Carmichael.

  “But in that case,” said Bethancourt, “there might be things you spoke about which you wouldn’t have made note of at all.”

  Both detectives looked at him.

  “Well, of course,” said Gibbons. “I’m not a stenographer—I jot down pertinent facts or anything that strikes me. Half this stuff I probably wrote after the fact.”

  “Oh,” said Bethancourt, a little crestfallen.

  “It’s always like that,” Carmichael told him. “I did the same when I was a sergeant. Did you think that every word would be in there?”

  Bethancourt grinned sheepishly. “I suppose I didn’t really think at all,” he said.

  Carmichael smiled at him sympathetically while Gibbons snorted.

  “To get on,” he said, “we also went over the timing of the burglary—that’s this bit here—and when it might have happened, if there had been anyone suspicious about, the usual stuff.”

  “We reconstructed most of that,” said Carmichael. “It was all in your report in any case.”

  “Mmm,” said Gibbons, who was reading again. “Now here,” he said, “at the bottom of this page, I think these must be notes from my lunch with James. Yes, and on this next page, too.”

  “We read that as more information about jewels and jewel thieves,” put in Carmichael. “Inspector Davies was a great help there—I couldn’t make head nor tail of the stuff.”

  “I’m having rather a difficult time of it myself,” admitted Gibbons. “Since I can’t remember what the notes refer to, it’s hard to make out my own abbreviations.”

  “Most of them seemed to make sense to Davies,” said Carmichael, glancing down at the papers in his lap.

  “Is that what you were able to work out from Jack’s notes?” asked Bethancourt, craning to get a look.

  “That’s right,” said Carmichael. “All typed out in ordinary English by Constable Lemmy, who has a real future in word processing if you ask me.”

  Bethancourt laughed, but Gibbons was more intrigued with the translation Carmichael had managed to make. He winced as he leaned forward in an effort to read it upside-down, but Carmichael immediately covered it with one hand.

  “No, no,” he said. “Some of this may be quite wrong, and I’m not having you influenced by it until you’ve told me what you think it all means.”

  “Oh,” said Gibbons, who had been forced to abandon his inspection in any case by the pain in his belly. He was rather pale as he leaned back against the pillows again. “I suppose,” he said grudgingly, “that only makes sense.”

  “It most certainly does,” said Carmichael firmly, ending further discussion of this point. “So,” he continued, “do you think you stopped somewhere to make notes of what you had discussed over lunch with James, or were these all taken
at the lunch itself?”

  Gibbons frowned and studied the pages in front of him again.

  “There’s too much here,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t have written all of it down in the middle of lunch. Did I leave the restaurant with James? I can’t remember what Davies told me.”

  “I believe you left together,” replied Carmichael.

  “Then I probably stopped at a caff to make these notes,” said Gibbons. “I’m sure I was alone when I made them, because they’re too elaborate. Like here, where it looks like I’m drawing parallels between theft and murder investigations. I wouldn’t have written that down while I was talking to James.”

  “Where?” asked Carmichael. “I don’t think I have that.”

  Gibbons turned the facsimile sheet so they could see it.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to a passage that read:

  3: Info CS—where? → transport.

  Benefits? Motive? Emo.

  “And what does that mean when it’s at home?” demanded Bethancourt.

  “Three ways to come at theft: info gathered from crime scene, ultimate destination of the goods, and how it gets there. Like murder, who benefits? Motives very different; not emotional,” Gibbons read. “You see? That’s a reminder to myself not to think like a homicide detective, that the two kinds of investigations are different in very specific ways.”

  “Yes, I see.” Carmichael nodded, making a note of his own. “You were still trying to change gears, so to speak.”

  “Right.” Gibbons had moved on to the next page and was frowning over it. “I’m not sure what this next bit is,” he said slowly.

  Bethancourt could restrain himself no longer.

  “Do you mind awfully if I come and look?” he asked.

  Gibbons looked contrite. “Of course not,” he said. “I should have said.”

  Bethancourt rose and positioned himself so that he could see over Gibbons’s shoulder, being careful not to jar the bed. As he had expected, the writing was just so much gibberish to his eyes, but one marginal notation did jump out at him.

  “That ‘MH-NC,’” he said. “Couldn’t that be a reference to Miranda Haverford?”

  “Very likely,” agreed Gibbons. “I wonder what I meant by ‘NC,’ though. I must have thought it important—I’ve underscored it heavily.”

  “And you’ve got exclamation points by ‘4 mos!!!,’” pointed out Bethancourt.

  “I’ve no idea what I meant by that either,” said Gibbons. “Or by ‘Bs—j fake.’ What’s a ‘B,’ for heaven’s sake?”

  “Book,” supplied Bethancourt readily. “Banger, box, birth, binge—”

  “Or,” interrupted Carmichael, stemming this flow, “Bethancourt.”

  The two younger men looked at each other.

  “But I hadn’t spoken to you,” said Gibbons. “I hadn’t even left that message for you yet.”

  “We talked on Sunday,” said Bethancourt. “But I don’t think you said anything about the Haverford case then.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have, would I?” said Gibbons. “I didn’t know about it then. We didn’t get called out to it until Monday afternoon.”

  “Oh, right,” said Bethancourt. “I’d forgotten. But look here,” he added as another thought came to him, “if I were making a note about you, I wouldn’t use the initial ‘G.’ I’d use ‘J’ for ‘Jack.’”

  “Oh,” said Gibbons, struck by this. “That’s absolutely true. If I’d been referring to you, I would have put down ‘P.’”

  “We don’t have your afternoon completely filled in yet,” said Carmichael. “It could be that these are notes you made later, somewhere else.”

  “And about something else,” said Gibbons gloomily.

  “Well,” said Bethancourt, endeavoring to look on the bright side, “these notes are pretty brief—not much there, really.”

  “But they could be important,” said Gibbons. “In fact, if we’re right about their referring to something I did or thought in the time that’s still missing, they’re important by default.”

  Bethancourt had to admit that this was true.

  “We’ll look for the café where you stopped,” said Carmichael. “Perhaps we can get a line on where you went from there.”

  “Right,” said Gibbons, a little gloomily. It had not occurred to him before that his notes might be obscure to him, although it seemed obvious now. By definition, notes were made to jog one’s memory; if one had no memory, the notes would be meaningless.

  “Well, let’s get on,” said Bethancourt, sensing his friend’s despondency and making his tone determinedly cheerful in consequence. “What does ‘WC’ mean, or is that just a reminder to fix your loo at home?”

  Gibbons frowned at it. “Is it ‘WC,’ or is it ‘NC’?”

  “It’s ‘W,’” said Bethancourt firmly.

  “I took it as a ‘W,’” said Carmichael, once again referring to his notes. “I had rather discounted it, to be truthful. There are quite a few notes which obviously have nothing to do with work. That first page has a grocery list on it.”

  “Well, it’s natural enough to write things down where I’m used to writing them,” said Gibbons defensively. “It’s not as though I was expecting to have other people going through my notebook.”

  “Of course not,” said Carmichael soothingly. “I only meant that I assumed ‘WC’ stood for ‘water closet’ and referred to something you meant to pick up for your bathroom.”

  “Well, it can’t have been that,” declared Gibbons. “There’s nothing wrong with my bathroom.”

  “Maybe something went wrong with it that afternoon,” suggested Bethancourt, but Gibbons only gave him a scornful look.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “I wouldn’t have stopped at home after lunch when I meant to head back to the Yard. And my landlady didn’t ring to say there was a problem, because there would have been a record of the call on my mobile.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Carmichael thoughtfully. “And the notation stands alone just there—it’s not as if it’s part of a shopping list or anything. Perhaps it has to do with the case after all.”

  “I think it must do,” said Gibbons. “I’m damned if I know what, though.”

  “Well, let’s take the thing as a whole,” said Bethancourt, adjusting his glasses and peering down at the page on Gibbons’s lap. “We’ve got ‘Bs—j fake, 4 mos!!!, WC,’ and whatever this is here.”

  Gibbons squinted at it. “It’s hard to make out,” he said.

  “I think that might be another B,” said Bethancourt, pointing.

  “And it’s connected to something with a tail,” said Gibbons. “It might be a note to do a background check on somebody or something.”

  “On WC?” asked Bethancourt.

  “It could be. It seems to be grouped with that note. But this is the worst part of the page—I think it might say ‘Bgr-US.’”

  “So you were going to do a background check on someone with the initials ‘WC’ in the United States,” said Bethancourt.

  “I suppose,” said Gibbons doubtfully. “At least, I could have been.”

  “That,” said Carmichael dryly, “is hardly a resounding endorsement.”

  “Well, really, it could say almost anything,” apologized Gibbons.

  “On the other hand,” said Bethancourt, “it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with details of the jewelry. There’s a lot of that in the rest of it.”

  “That’s true,” said Gibbons, looking back at the page. “If you’re right and ‘MH’ stands for Miranda Haverford, then it almost seems like these were thoughts I had about the situation the jewelry was in. Perhaps I was trying to draw a connection between Miss Haverford’s friends and relations and the burglary.”

  “Or at least trying to rule it out,” said Carmichael. “Unlike murder, these crimes are usually committed by professional thieves, or so Davies gives me to understand.”

  Gibbons nodded. “Yes, I remember discussing that with
him when I first got assigned to him. Oh!”

  Both Bethancourt and Carmichael were instantly alert, but Gibbons’s exclamation stemmed from a mental surprise, not a physical pain.

  “That’s what this on the next page means,” he said, laying aside the current sheet in favor of the one beneath it.

  Bethancourt stooped to look at the stained picture of a mostly blank sheet of paper with two columns in Gibbons’s cramped writing at the top.

  MURDER THEFT

  Plan Plan

  Kill Steal

  Hide Fen/despo

  Acquire £

  hide

  Under that, after two blank lines, was “Imps? Con? C-prfl,” and after that, “Fun., 2-fence.”

  “What does which mean, exactly?” said Bethancourt.

  “Well, in the chart here,” said Gibbons, running his finger down the list, “I seem to be further delineating the differences between investigating a murder and investigating a burglary. This is basically saying that after the initial crime, for a murderer the end goal has been accomplished—the only thing left to do is try not to get caught. But for a thief, the initial crime is just that, the first of several steps to the end result of money in hand. I think I was trying to find the right angle to come at the whole thing from. That would be very like me.”

  “Would it,” murmured Carmichael, somewhat bemused by this.

  Bethancourt was nodding. “Yes, of course,” he said. “I see what you mean. You’re saying murder is the end of a chain of events; burglary is the start of the chain. Yes, that makes perfect sense.”

  Carmichael supposed that it did, but it didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere.

  “So where are we, then?” he asked. “I can’t see myself that any of this tells us what you were doing in Walworth getting yourself shot. Who could you have been following?”

  Gibbons suddenly looked tired.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, a little hopelessly.

  “Well,” said Bethancourt, returning to his chair and settling into it comfortably, resting his elbows on the arms and folding his hands across his chest, “let’s see. We’ve got a better idea of what you were thinking. And one of those last notes must have been the one you made in the pub—you know,” he added as Gibbons looked blank, “the one the bartender told O’Leary he saw you make after O’Leary left.”