by Kim Ekemar
The true chain of events read the last headline:
Seven patients escaped from the mental hospital in Dartmund three months before the events in question, and they have not yet been found. These mentally ill fugitives compare favorably with Ferguson's description. Based on this important fact Ferguson’s testimony should be considered as veracious. It was these men who committed the deeds as explained by Ferguson.
Justine du Lac sighed inwardly at the inept defense. The arguments lacked in strength and conviction. They were not reassuring. Well, it was her obligation to change that. The prosecutor had had no trouble in proving the validity of those of his statements that the defense had attempted to argue as improbable. Justine continued to read the passages she had underlined in the prosecutor’s concluding speech, comparing them mentally to Ferguson’s version of the truth.
Ferguson has not been appraised to possess the traits murderers in crimes of passion normally are thought to possess. This is of course not evidence that he did not commit the acts he is accused of. He was not known as a violent person. Still there lurks a thief, a rapist, a murderer and who knows what else in the soul of this man. This generally well behaved and civilized man lost all his restraints, and governed by jealousy and deep fury he raped, robbed and killed his two colleagues.
One has to consider that the murders took place under extreme conditions. The four men – Ferguson, Forster, Buckley and Harbinger – had during several months been isolated from civilization with the woman – Forster’s fiancée who Ferguson admittedly coveted. On the return trip they were subject to a breakdown in a snowstorm, and the accused has recounted how they quarreled about whether they should remain in the van or continue on foot. When Forster left with the woman, something snapped inside the abandoned Ferguson. The killings, which nobody thought this timid man capable of, became a fact.
That Ferguson is not cunning enough to devise and execute the story he later told the police is not true. Both he himself and various colleagues have testified that it was Ferguson who actually administered the work at the institution, not Forster who was his superior. He is sufficiently intelligent to have manipulated Forster to run the operation according to his wishes. Ferguson was the gray eminence behind Forster the dummy. That night in the snowstorm he saw a possibility to conquer what he lusted after: Oona Vermeil and the better-paid position as director of the institution. That is why he killed Forster.
The objections, that circumstances make it improbable that Ferguson concealed the crimes the way he is accused of, are not accurate. The anchor found on the sea floor originates from another ship than the one Ferguson claims burnt down. It is not damaged by fire, and the corrosion suggests that it has been lying on the location for many years. There was plenty of fuel in the van for the bonfire he lit. The trees were full of dry branches easy to break off. During freezing degrees, the humidity of falling snow does not penetrate wood. Ferguson brushed off the snow, fetched a spare tank from their vehicle, poured the petrol over the firewood and lit the fire. Since no traces have been found on land he obviously made the fire on the ice from where it later disappeared when warm weather arrived.
It was not difficult to estimate the time of Buckley and Harbinger's arrival. Ferguson knew how long it had taken them to reach the location. As soon as the tempest began to subside, he could calculate how many hours he had at his disposal for the final preparations. He broke the lock of the van and carried away everything he has maintained was stolen from their vehicle. With all evidence removed and the burnt off ropes tied around his body, he probably waited in the van with the heat on until it was time to go out into the snow. Since they had researched for months among the Inuit, he was quite familiar with the igloo effect. That is why he buried himself in the snow - to better conserve his body warmth.
It is easy to show that the course of events maintained by Ferguson is not true. The rope he tied himself with, as well as the axe he used to kill Forster, came from the van they traveled in. Ferguson's clothes were awash with blood from Forster and from the same blood group as Vermeil's. The blood also shows that Vermeil was menstruating at the time, which proves the rape. There was no trace of blood belonging to any other person besides Forster, Vermeil and himself, which makes it evident that Ferguson is lying about the men on the ship.
It has been confirmed that Forster wore a ring, a watch and a chain of gold when he left the Inuit village. When his corpse was discovered, neither these nor any other valuables were encountered. Consequently, Ferguson looted the corpses of their valuables and hid these in some safe place to retrieve them later.
The ship, and the seven men aboard it, is pure imagination on Ferguson's behalf. No ship of this description has been reported missing. The mental hospital from which seven patients disappeared earlier that year is situated close to a thousand miles from the scene of the crime. Some weeks before he left for the Inuit village in the company of his colleagues quite a lot was written about the runaways. It is from the papers that Ferguson has gotten his information about the mentally disturbed men.
Even if by some remote chance a shipwreck existed in the area, it was Ferguson who set it on fire. An action like this would have been consistent with his cunning stratagem – to conceal his guilt of murdering Irving Forster and Oona Vermeil.
Justine du Lac looked up from the papers and again contemplated the client seated in front of her; his quiet behavior, his frightened appearance, and his general background. To her it appeared impossible that this man could have committed the murders and then have spent an entire night in a snowstorm attempting to disguise what actually had occurred. On the other hand, she felt confounded by the fact that he never had shown any grief over his deceased colleagues.
Provided he was guilty, could she claim he was mentally disturbed and needed medical attention in an asylum?
Justine abruptly shrugged off her conjecture. Pure speculations, she thought. She was not employed to determine whether her client had committed the acts or not. Her assignment consisted of attaining his acquittal by successfully arguing that some psychopaths were guilty of the deaths of Forster and Vermeil. She had to convince the court that the factual circumstances were those her client had related, and that tide and currents had carried away the corpses and the shipwreck.
It would certainly not be an easy task. In absence of something irreproachable to sustain her defense, her only weapon would be the conviction she could project with her arguments. More so, as one year had elapsed since Ferguson had been found in the snowdrift. And, most important, since that day there were still no clues of the seven vanished psychopaths.
A final note on the compilation of these documents
During my last conversation with JP he revealed certain information essential to understand the full extent of the Paul B. Crimson affair. I have not been able to find that he ever made any written record of it. The reason for this I don’t know, but on the other hand he never asked me not to disclose any of what he told me.
Three days after JP had received the news about Paul’s death there was a package waiting for him on his desk when he arrived at his office. It contained the last five chapters of Paul’s book and seventy-odd diaries in assorted sizes. All of them had been neatly written in printed letters using a blue ink fountain pen. They smelled of smoke and looked as if they had been soaked in water. The latter circumstance made it difficult to leaf through them since the humidity had glued the pages together and made the brittle paper easy to tear. It was obvious they had been salvaged from the fire in the McPherson house three months earlier.
There was also a brief letter from Paul that read:
Dear JP,
I think I owe you the remaining chapters of The Ship, because without you the story wouldn’t have been written in the first place. Of course the work was delayed because of the fire, but without the fire it wouldn’t have been finished at all. Please do with the manuscript as you feel fit.
I have few possessions, and the diar
ies that I’ve kept through the years are probably the only things I care about. I can’t think of anyone but you in whose care I would like to leave them. For good or for worse you were always there to support me. Do what you want with the diaries.
Lately I’ve had this strong feeling that my future as a writer is behind me. Please forgive me for all the sorrows I’ve caused.
Your friend Paul
P.S. The events on board the ship? I must admit I thought you’d find them provoking. Take note: they are, in more ways than one. If the ship stands for the soul, then my soul has suffered the carnival of … (you add the words here). I think that is how my last book should be read.
JP discussed this letter, and the package containing the diaries, at length with me. He told me he had read the letter several times over the years, and despite in-depth analysis he could not determine whether the letter was in fact a suicide note or not. If it wasn’t, it would shed a different light on the events Paul had been involved with, like remorse and guilt. On the other hand, if the note was written with suicide in mind, it could indicate that Paul had either been mentally ill or confused, or even that he had imagined certain entries in his diaries and their self-confessed murders of Inocencia McPherson and Brett Moorefield.
The one thing, however, that bothered JP more than anything, was that he hadn’t read Paul’s diaries until over two years after receiving them. As always there was so much work, he said, in particular the summer that Paul died. JP didn’t even browse them because of the difficulty involved. The pages were stuck to each other because of the water damage, and in places the ink had run making the text hard to read. Not until he went on an extended vacation in August 1975 did he finally sit down to read them.
The earliest diary had been written during Paul’s high school days and did not contain much of interest. JP’s curiosity was stirred when he began to read the diaries from Viet Nam, fifty-three notebooks in all. After all, he had edited the book that had been published as a result of these experiences. Then he read about Paul’s travels on the West Coast and how he squandered his time and money in Los Angeles.
It wasn’t until he came to the last three notebooks, those depicting Paul’s time in Harbor, that the content made his hair stand on end. He slowly came to realize two things. Firstly, in his determination to get his protégé to produce a sequel to his first success, he had been pushing Paul to commit acts that he later converted into fiction. Secondly, had he read these diaries when he received them, he would have prevented an innocent man from going to jail for murders he most likely did not commit.
He immediately started to track Xavier Solera down. It took him two weeks of investigation before he received the information that Solera had been stabbed in a prison brawl five months earlier. Shortly afterwards he had died from his wounds. ‘A violent man who met a violent death’, was the laconic comment from the prison administrator who gave JP the details.
JP said he now faced another aspect of an increasingly complex situation. If he went to the police with his knowledge there was nothing to gain from it. Provided Paul’s diary confessions reflected the truth – and how could it be otherwise, the way Paul had described the manner the victims had died and where their bodies had been hidden? – Xavier Solera’s case had to go through a retrial. But he had died in prison where he anyway would have spent time for other crimes. Paul’s name would be sullied, as would his own. JP might even be accused of trying to promote public interest in Paul to boost waning sales of Velvet Nights. He decided to bury his knowledge with the dead.
What about the manuscript, then, that Paul finished days before his death? In the fall of 1973 JP spent time making preparations to have The Ship published posthumously. There was pressure from his bosses to have it out by Christmas. They wanted to cash in on Paul’s previous success, the publicity that had surrounded his participation in the McPherson fire murders and Paul’s untimely death. Bradley & Brougham’s legal department meanwhile tried to untangle the copyright situation, which remained unclear since the heirs were fighting fiercely over the inheritance. Paul’s parents had both died by then. Since he didn’t have any sisters or brothers, an amazing number of uncles, aunts and distant cousins claimed title to Paul Crimson’s earthly belongings.
After several attempts to buy the rights from the estate, JP’s superiors reluctantly had to give in and told JP to put The Ship aside until the estate had been cleared. The matter wasn’t settled until three years later. Meanwhile the momentum had gone out of Paul Crimson’s brief celebrity, and a larger competitor had bought Bradley & Brougham. The new managers had other projects they cared more about. The Ship became forgotten by all except for JP, who retired when the publishing house that employed him was sold.
In 1977 the estate was settled between the members of the surviving Crimson family. JP contacted each of them and personally bought the rights to The Ship for an exorbitant sum considering he had no intention to publish it. The manuscript and the diaries were left in his safe until that day, a few summers ago, when he decided to call me.
Works by Kim Ekemar
THE CALLAGHAN SEPTOLOGY
The Lost Identity Casualties
Where the Bones of a Buried Rat Lie
The Quarry at the Crossroads
The Tollbooth in the Labyrinth
Callaghan in the Cross Hairs
The Hourglass Running out of Sand
The Final Facedown
OTHER NOVELS
The Patricide: A Locked-room Mystery
The Murders on Three Bridges: A Locked-room Mystery
The Crimson Blueprints
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES
Graveyard Grapevine
The Game & the Challenge
At the Heart of the Ivory Maze
Destiny Comes with Strings Attached
The Word Jugglers
Death is Either Certain or Unexpected
Tales of War
Tales of Revenge & Deception
Tales of Greed & Wishful Thinking
Tales You Never Suspected
WORDS ON THE WING
When the Reds Fade from Purple (You’re Left with the Blues)
Riddles & Madness
Dovetail Deals by the Devil’s Door
Life in the Rearview Mirror
LIBROS EN ESPAÑOL
El Reino del Terror
Escrito con Sangre
Más Allá del Límite
La Cara Oscura de la Moneda
