This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  “That’s perfectly all right. This is the superintendent’s nephew, Oliver Swithin.” Effie tossed her head in Oliver’s direction, sparing him the ordeal of introducing himself to an authority figure, when he tended to develop a nervous lisp. Oliver shook Culpepper’s hand, willing himself not to exclaim “You’re very tall!”

  “This shouldn’t take long,” Culpepper continued. “Mr. Mallard gave me a good account of the events of last night.”

  He stepped toward the bureau, stooping to avoid a low beam, and opened a manila folder on the cluttered desktop. He read the Mallards’ statements while Oliver and Effie adopted the attitude of airline passengers being quizzed over whether they had packed their own suitcases, nodding solemnly when asked if they agreed with Mallard’s crisp narrative, which, like the previous night’s statement to Constable Bostar, evaded the issue of nudity. Culpepper concluded with Phoebe’s description of the man dressed as a monk spotted on the main road near the edge of the Common. Effie confirmed the observation.

  “What do you make of this apparition, Sergeant Culpepper?” Oliver asked. “Did the ladies see a ghost?”

  “Not a ghost. A vampire.”

  “What?”

  Culpepper grinned. “That’s what they call him, the ‘Vampire of Synne.’”

  Oliver sneezed.

  “Yes, it is a bit dusty in here,” Culpepper sympathized. “Let’s get some air.”

  They filed out through the front door, which Culpepper locked behind them, and strolled along the quiet lane toward the parish church, St. Edmund and St. Crispin. Culpepper walked in the middle, taller than Oliver by the same amount that Oliver was taller than Effie. They looked like an Olympic medal ceremony.

  “Constable Bostar, the local bobby, filled me in about the Vampire of Synne this morning, before he went on a remarkably extended lunch break,” Culpepper told them. “The man you saw last night, Sergeant Strongitharm, is the occupant of Furbelow Hall, that gloomy Jacobean manor house you pass as you drive into the village from the west. He’s lived there for a year or so, alone and never leaving the house during the daytime, like a vampire. The villagers see him wandering around after nightfall, always covered from head to foot in a monk’s robe and cowl. He never speaks to anyone, and nobody has ever seen his face.”

  “Are you going to ask this vampire if he saw anything?” asked Oliver. “Armed with garlic and a crucifix, no doubt.”

  “I’ve already spoken to him on the telephone. His name’s Snopp. Angus Snopp. And he has a perfectly valid reason for living that way, although it’s also somewhat tragic.”

  “May I take a guess?” Oliver asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  “It sounds like he suffers from XP.”

  “XP?” Effie echoed.

  “Xeroderma pigmentosa,” Oliver continued. “It’s a genetic disorder that basically means any ultraviolet light exposure can lead to skin cancers.”

  “How do you know these things?” she muttered.

  “Mr. Swithin’s absolutely right,” said Culpepper, “although I’d never heard of the condition until Mr. Snopp filled me in this afternoon. People with XP can never go into the sunlight, and can even be affected by the UV light from electric lightbulbs. So a dark, seventeenth-century manor house where he can live by candlelight offers ideal protection. He’s had several outbreaks of skin cancer since his childhood, which is why he hides his scarred face, even in moonlight.”

  “A lonely life,” said Effie.

  “I get the sense he’s accepted his fate. And if he can afford to buy or even lease that kind of property, his condition clearly hasn’t affected his finances.”

  “Did Mr. Snopp notice anything last night?” Oliver asked.

  “Well, no sign of Breedlove. Just a couple of cars, tootling along the main road. And a small van, which passed him during the first part of his evening stroll, going rather quickly. He thought he could make out the word ‘Cooper’ on the side, but there’s no local business with that name. Mr. Swithin, you have some knowledge of the locality—have you ever come across a Cooper?”

  Oliver ran through the Coopers in his memory—Gary, Henry, Tommy, Gladys, Alice, Minnie, none of them likely to be driving a van through Synne after dark. He shook his head.

  “Then it was probably just passing through,” Culpepper concluded. “Anyway, Breedlove can’t have driven himself to the Shakespeare Race, or the car would still be parked up there.”

  “Unless he had a chauffeur,” Oliver murmured. Culpepper didn’t comment.

  They had reached the low wall that surrounded the churchyard, with its honor guard of black poplars and the occasional yew. The church itself came into view through the trees, a late perpendicular nave attached to a squat early perpendicular tower, the crenellated base for a spire that was never built. Two people in black cassocks were coming out of the main door. Culpepper halted, as if to maximize the time before the churchgoers would reach them on the lonely road.

  “When Phoebe Mallard and I spotted this vampire,” Effie said, “he was just standing there, staring across the Common.”

  “Yes. Snopp was on his way home by then, after a walk that took an hour or so, his daily exercise. He stopped because he thought he saw something. I wasn’t going to mention it, because I can’t imagine it was relevant to Mr. Breedlove’s death.”

  “But what was it?” Effie persisted. Culpepper assumed a fascination with a stone cherub on an overgrown gravestone.

  “He says he saw naked women running among the bushes.”

  Effie was abruptly silent. The two people had come through the lych-gate and were now approaching them—a white-haired middle-aged man in a clerical collar, and what seemed to be a woman in her thirties with black-framed glasses and a severe bob cut. Oliver rapidly assumed the overly delighted expression that the English always exhibit when meeting members of the clergy.

  “Oliver, my dear fellow, I heard you were in town,” cried the man, shaking Oliver’s hand and assuming the overly delighted expression that the clergy always exhibit when meeting members of their flock. “No chance of seeing you and your young lady in the pew for the morning service tomorrow, I don’t suppose? Probably not, eh? You youngsters don’t want to be bothered with all this religious mumbo-jumbo, and I can’t say I blame you for your better wisdoms, I’m sure.”

  Using the clergyman’s monologue as cover for a private rehearsal, Oliver did a creditable job of introducing the Reverend Gibeon Edwards, vicar of Synne, to his companions in more or less the right order. They were in turn introduced to the other newcomer, revealed as Mrs. Lesbia Weguelin, the church’s verger, before Edwards remarked that Culpepper was very tall and asked him if he played basketball.

  If you shaved Santa Claus and put him on a treadmill for a year or two, he’d probably shrink down to resemble the ever-genial Reverend Mr. Edwards. The vicar flattered himself on his skill at striking up an immediate rapport with anyone, even the fiercest critics of his calling. This usually took the form of swiftly conceding the other person’s point of view—so swiftly, it was often in advance of their saying anything at all. During a teatime chat with Oliver on an earlier visit, Edwards had preemptively pooh-poohed the biblical accounts of the nativity, the resurrection, and most of Jesus’s miracles, and then went on to list the many advantages of atheism, all before Oliver had opened his mouth to offer him a toasted tea cake. It was assumed by his parishioners that Edwards didn’t actually agree with these heretical positions, but by the time he’d finished ingratiating himself with his opposition—in a talk or in a sermon—he’d usually drifted so far from his own beliefs that there was no room to backtrack. This habit had earned him the nickname of Edwards the Concessor.

  The fact that the verger had not flinched when she was introduced suggested to Oliver either that she was a powerful personality who had learned to rise above the discomfiture of an ill-chosen Chr
istian name or that she had no sense of humor. He suspected the latter. After a gruff “hello,” Lesbia made no further contributions to the conversation, but Oliver kept glancing at her, wondering if the crisp, flawless blue-black bob was actually a wig—Effie would know—and trying to get some measure of her features behind the thick-rimmed plastic frames, intense burgundy lipstick, and caked-on foundation. He had only the vaguest sense of a certain squareness of jaw and a self-confident nose.

  The group headed back toward Breedlove’s cottage, Edwards quizzing Culpepper about the likelihood that the late writer’s family would want a space in the churchyard, “suicide being no impediment to burial in sacred ground these days, not like that churlish priest in Hamlet, wittering on about Ophelia’s doubtful death. Indeed the courage of the suicide may well be thought of as an example to us all…was it not Camus who said it was the only truly serious philosophical problem, although I believe he came out against it ultimately, but then so many families choose cremation anyway, so it becomes a moot point, not to mention this new corpse-composting alternative, very interesting, if they take a green outlook, and who’s to blame them? Oh, about our stepladder…”

  Even the urbane Culpepper was momentarily baffled.

  “Stepladder?”

  “I heard from Constable Bostar that Dennis used a stepladder when he made his quietus, another Hamlet reference, as I’m sure you know, but what a fool I must seem to a young chap like yourself, quoting a man who’s been dead and buried these four hundred years. Well, it seems the church stepladder has gone missing. We store it outside the south chancel. Putting two and two together, I was wondering if they might make one and the same, as it were. Will it become Exhibit A, and should we, therefore, purchase a new one, pro tem?”

  “I’m not aware that any crime has been committed in Mr. Breedlove’s death,” said Culpepper, “so if the stepladder turns out to be yours, Vicar, I’ll make sure you get it back.”

  With a flutter of the hands that may have been a blessing or an apology for the Crusades, Edwards and the verger continued along the lane toward the Square while Oliver, Effie, and Culpepper waited beside the black car.

  “So before Uncle Dennis carried his stepladder all the way up to the Shakespeare Race,” Oliver said, “he had to walk to the church to pick it up. At his age. Not to mention finding a rope.”

  “He already had the rope,” said Culpepper. He unlocked the car and took a plastic bag from a briefcase on the front seat. It contained what looked like a pair of small, wooden maracas, one with a tie-on label. They were the handles of a child’s skipping rope.

  “As well as his books, Mr. Breedlove collected a few classic children’s toys. He kept them in a small display cabinet. The label says this rope is Victorian, possibly used by the girls of the Liddell family at Christ Church in Oxford. Anyway, Breedlove sliced off the handles with his kitchen knife and used the rope to hang himself. It yielded about eight feet.”

  “Enough to strangle him, but not enough to break his neck,” Oliver said.

  “I get the sense, Mr. Swithin, that you think I’m missing something here,” said Culpepper as he returned the evidence to his car.

  “I just think the whole extravaganza seems too much for a man in his eighties. He should be dangling from a beam in his living room, not trudging all the way up to the Synne Oak with an eight-foot stepladder under his arm and Alice in Wonderland’s jump-rope in his pocket.”

  Culpepper looked at Effie, and something clearly passed between them using that sixth or seventh or forty-second sense that was reserved for telepathic transmissions of confidence between English police detectives.

  “Let’s go back inside,” he said.

  They stood again among the books and papers in Breedlove’s living room, while Oliver repeated the opinion he had given his uncle earlier. Effie listened, clearly weighing her growing interest against the need to avoid encroaching on Culpepper’s territory. Culpepper also listened, not looking at Oliver and pulling thoughtfully on his upper lip. When Oliver had finished, he lifted his head.

  “Most people I’ve spoken to describe Breedlove as a likeable chap,” he said. “Always genial, good company. The last person to take his own life. One or two were distinctly cooler. You can’t delight everybody, I suppose. But his suicide is a puzzle. And I agree with you, sir—the special effort it required is also a puzzle. Perhaps, though, I can supply the missing motivation.” He strode across to the large bureau where he’d left his papers.

  “My uncle mentioned that you’d found a note,” Oliver chipped in. “Was it a suicide note?”

  Culpepper didn’t reply, but handed him a clear plastic folder that contained a single piece of paper, which once had been folded horizontally into thirds. Oliver and Effie read the text, written in pencil in carefully formed uppercase letters.

  DID YOU THINK YOU COULD HIDE YOUR HISTORY? DID YOU THINK THIS WHOLE BLESSED PLOT WOULD BE COVERED UP FOREVER? I KNOW WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON. BUT YOU DON’T WANT OTHERS TO DIG UP THE PAST, DO YOU? SO LET THIS BE OUR LITTLE FAMILY SECRET. I WON’T TELL IF YOU WON’T TELL. ALAS, MY SILENCE ISN’T FREE. THERE WILL BE FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS.

  “I found it here, on his desk, as if he’d just opened it,” Culpepper told them.

  “No envelope?” Effie asked.

  Culpepper shook his head. “I checked the wastepaper bins and the dustbin outside. But maybe the paper was slid through the letterbox just like that. Perhaps the blackmailer was scared that we could get a DNA trace from the dried saliva on an envelope.”

  “Not in these days of self-sealing envelopes,” said Effie, “and blackmailers aren’t usually worried about the authorities. If they’ve calculated everything correctly, their victim is going to pay up to keep his secret safe from the world, including the cops.”

  “Then I’d say there was a serious miscalculation in this case, Sergeant Strongitharm,” replied Culpepper. “Whatever ‘blessed plot’ Breedlove hatched in the past, the merest hint that someone has rumbled it caused him to end it all.”

  “Please call me Effie,” she murmured, and Culpepper remarked in turn that his first name was Simon. “But there was no suicide note from Breedlove?” she asked.

  “Not on paper. On the other hand, parading up to the Shakespeare Race, dangling himself from the old village gibbet—it’s almost a suicide note in performance.”

  “I wonder what this ‘blessed plot’ was,” said Oliver, speaking for the first time since reading the blackmail letter. He held onto the folder, eyes constantly scanning the capital letters.

  Culpepper shrugged. “We may never know.”

  “Why? Won’t the blackmailer tell us when we arrest him? Or her?”

  There was another unspoken communication between Culpepper and Effie. “Arrest him?” she repeated.

  “This blackmailer was the cause of Uncle Dennis’s death,” said Oliver, tapping on the plastic cover of the note that continued to hold his gaze. “How shall this bloody deed be answered?”

  “Cause or not, it was unintentional,” said Culpepper, gently taking the note from Oliver. “Breedlove’s suicide is the last thing the blackmailer wanted. No money to be made from a dead victim.”

  “Besides,” Effie said, resting a hand on Oliver’s shoulder, “how can the police trace this blackmailer, now that Breedlove’s dead? All we have are the contents of an anonymous letter and a sample of some heavily disguised handwriting.”

  Oliver was silent, still staring glumly at the letter in Culpepper’s grasp. Effie took her hand away.

  “Oliver, the person who killed Dennis Breedlove was Dennis Breedlove,” said Culpepper. “He took his own life rather than face up to something he’d done in his past. Any police investigation into why he was being targeted for blackmail is bound to turn up some unpleasant truths about your friend. Maybe they’re best left buried.”

  He placed the letter carefully in
his manila folder and began to gather up the notes and papers that had escaped across Breedlove’s desktop. Oliver closed his eyes, lost in thought.

  “Tell you what,” Culpepper added, trying to break the tension, “I didn’t look behind this bureau for the phantom envelope. Could you help me move it?”

  The two men dragged the large, wooden desk several inches from the wall, cockling the well-worn carpet. Culpepper produced a pocket torch and shone it into the space. Among the dust-balls and cobwebs, there sat a bright nest of paper clips, some moldy candy wrappers, and a length of telephone cord. The only piece of paper was a yellowing cutting from a printed book, which had clearly lain behind the bureau for several years. Oliver fished it out. It was a page from an old printed volume of Shakespeare, trimmed tightly around the text so that the play title and even the header showing the Act and Scene were missing. From the character names it seemed to come from one of the Henry VI plays. A shame—if it had been Richard II, he’d have a link to the blackmail note’s “blessed plot” reference. Maybe Breedlove had taped it to the wall above his workplace, but it had lost its stickiness and slid down into the gap?

  “No envelope,” said Culpepper. “I bet he tore it up and flushed it down the crapper.”

  Ah, now there’s a bit of anti-trivia, thought Oliver. All those eager people who’ll tell you that the word “crap” and its variants come from the Victorian eminence Sir Thomas Crapper, supposedly the inventor of the flush toilet. In reality, the vulgarism is far older. The gentleman was never knighted; he was merely the originator of the floating ball cock, and his name is an unfortunate, if risible coincidence. Unless, of course, it had dictated his path in life.

  “Can I keep this?” Oliver asked, resurfacing after this momentary meditation. Culpepper nodded.

  “Why would you want to?” Effie inquired, sliding the bureau back into place alone.

  “I don’t know. A souvenir of the sheeted dead, I guess.”