This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  “Why all the secrecy?”

  “Because if we’d reported the discovery, the Town would have tossed us out and taken over.”

  “And you didn’t want others to dig up the past?”

  “Not till we’ve had our turn.”

  ***

  Effie arrived back from Birmingham with Susie half an hour later, spent ten amused minutes surveying Mormal’s website over a cup of tea, and then drove Oliver to the Stratford excavation.

  “Four of the five Bennet girls are on Doctor Peeper,” he told her, as they sped along the southern approach to the town. “No Lucinda.”

  “Perhaps she’s the one who got the good taste in men,” Effie suggested. “Having met the Honorable Donald, I know that’s hard to believe, but everything’s relative.”

  “Maybe. But do you remember what you said to Ben after that dinner party?”

  “Of course not. I was plastered.”

  “You told him off for using the ‘you look familiar’ line on the Bennets. But they did. Ben was remembering the time a few weeks earlier when Geoffrey showed him Doctor Peeper.”

  “Ben’s a portrait photographer. He’s probably the only man who’d notice that the girls had faces.”

  “Exactly. But here’s the thing: He said on Saturday that they all looked familiar.”

  “Ah, the plot thickens.”

  “I called Ben just now, but he wasn’t in. However, there’s another clue. The website belongs to a company called 740 Ventures, presumably named by Eric. Did you notice at dinner that the girls were wearing fancy initial pins?”

  “Covered in diamonds. If you’re thinking of buying me anything that crass for Christmas, don’t. I’d prefer a book. But not one of yours this year.”

  “And that’s why I love you, Eff. That and the hair. Well, it’s probably a coincidence, but each of the sisters has a name that begins with a Roman numeral: Davina, Catriona, Clarissa, Xanthe, and Lucinda. DCCXL, in birth order. That’s—”

  “Seven hundred and forty.”

  “Exactly. But you need Luce. Without her L for fifty, it would be—”

  “Seven hundred and ten,” Effie confirmed, as they drove into the riverside park where the dig was located. “I don’t know, Ollie—it sounds too cerebral for Eric Mormal.”

  They heard Mormal before they saw him, his voice carrying over the low-frequency chugging of a cabin cruiser in the neighboring lock and the constant static of the downstream weir. He was pushing a wheelbarrow across the plank bridge from the island, yelling back over his shoulder.

  “Listen, Giles or Miles or Niles or whatever-your-name-is, you Oxford prats are so bleedin’ effete, you think manual labor is a Spanish wine waiter.” He walked on along the path, chuckling to himself.

  “Doctor Peeper, I presume,” Oliver said. Mormal looked startled, made an involuntary assessment of who else might be listening, and set down the wheelbarrow. They could see that it contained a few ancient bricks and a sports bag.

  “Blimey, Olls, you’re a bit bashed about the old phizog,” Mormal said, noticing Oliver’s scratches and bruises. His own face was unmarked.

  “The website, Eric…” said Effie firmly.

  Mormal let his eyes drift down Effie’s body, clearly appreciating the skirt she’d put on for Birmingham Tyler. He seemed to reach into his sports bag for something, but his hand was empty when he withdrew it.

  “So who told you about Doctor Peeper?” he asked Oliver. “That mate of yours, Geoffrey Angelwine? Or ‘Flackstud,’ to use his site ID.”

  “Isn’t membership anonymous?” Oliver asked.

  “Not to the man who collects the credit card payments. How many Geoffrey Angelwines do you think there are? So, Effie, are you here to take down my particulars? I should warn you, my lawyer tells me I’m doing nothing illegal, because I’m shooting my little dramas on my own property.” He winked at her and picked up the wheelbarrow. “Come up and see me sometime, I’ve got a good part for you.”

  He began to trundle the barrow swiftly across the grass, and Oliver and Effie had to hurry after his bony form.

  “Do the Bennet girls know they’re on the Internet?” Oliver asked, panting.

  “Of course not!” Mormal scoffed, without stopping. “You know Davina. She’d die if she found out that an immodest percentage of the male population has studied her tan lines.”

  “Then aren’t you afraid someone will recognize her?”

  “Not really. Most of my members wouldn’t know her from Adam. And who looks at the faces, anyway?”

  And that’s what makes it pornography, thought Oliver: you don’t care who owns the body. When you do, it becomes eroticism.

  They had reached the parking area where they’d left Effie’s Renault. Mormal set down the wheelbarrow behind his van—or more appropriately, the van that belonged to Pigsneye Organic Cooperative Farms. He opened the rear doors and began to throw the bricks into its empty, dirty interior.

  “Dennis Breedlove was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?” Oliver said.

  Mormal paused, feeling the heft of a brick in his palm.

  “Don’t deny it, Eric,” said Effie.

  Mormal remained silent. He let go of the brick, placed his sports bag on the grass, walked around to the driver’s side door of the van, and reached inside. After a moment or two, he emerged with another bag, which he handed to Oliver.

  “Toby left this in the van,” he said sourly. “He was in such a hurry to piss off to that church that he left it behind. Now I know what the rush was all about. Tell the old mole he’ll have to cadge a lift home with one of his poncy friends.” He looked from one to the other of his accusers. “All right, I’ll give you five minutes.”

  “How long have you been paying Breedlove?” asked Effie.

  “A couple of years.”

  That ties in flawlessly with the “Mary, Mary” victim, thought Oliver, “pretty maids all in a row.” Three out of five, then, and he was still counting on Sidney Weguelin as Tweedledum. And if we identify the four existing victims, do we need to figure out who that undelivered letter was supposed to go to—to dig up the past?

  “So Dennis saw the website and knew it was you?” he ventured.

  “Nah, this all began long before the website. He just discovered that I was, shall we say, servicing more than one of the Bennet girls.”

  “How did he find out? From one of the girls?”

  Mormal was already shaking his head, prodding his sports bag gently with his foot and moving it a few inches away from where he was standing. “I’m afraid it was me, boasting of my gifts that have the power to seduce. A moment of sympathetic bonding with an old man who seemed wistful for his romantic past. He got me. He got me good, that smiling damned villain.” He laughed sharply. “No, I don’t think Davvy or Xan or Cat or Clarrie are proud enough of their association with me to fess up to a third party. I do know what I am, Effie: I’m a bit of rough who’s prepared to give some man-hungry but plain young ladies secret sex on a weekly basis. I’m the nasty skeleton in their closets, and I make it easy for them to keep its doors closed, especially from each other. That’s how it works.”

  “Very altruistic of you,” said Effie. “Although with the website, there’s clearly more in it for you than a regular supply of fornication.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t discount the fornication. But then my pleasure grew into my business.”

  “Which would never have started if Dennis Breedlove had told the girls they were sharing what, for the sake of this conversation, I’ll call a ‘lover,’” Oliver commented. “Isn’t that what he threatened?”

  Mormal stared at Oliver with amusement. “You don’t get it, do you? What’s the worst that could have happened? Oh, the girls would get all huffy for a while, but they’d privately crawl back into my bed for that little touch of Eric in the night. Every dog
will have his day. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Clarissa.” He leaned toward Effie with what he thought was a seductive expression. “I’m hard to get over.”

  “So’s a yeast infection,” she replied.

  “Then why did you pay Breedlove?” Oliver inquired, distracted by the continuing hum of the weir, which he thought was too far from the car park to be audible.

  “Because of their mother.”

  “You think she’d be scandalized?”

  “Well, at first I think she’d be jealous.”

  Oliver looked about to speak, but Effie placed a hand on his arm.

  “No,” she said. “Just don’t go there. I don’t want to know.”

  “You see, Dennis wasn’t expecting me to pay,” Mormal continued. “I didn’t have any money back then. Dennis thought I could get Wendy Bennet to cough up a bob or two, rather than see the tabloid headlines of ‘Shame of f-four debs in the single bed.’ But I had my own reasons for keeping Wendy in the dark. In every sense.”

  “So you commercialized your sex life in order to pay for his continuing silence,” Oliver said.

  Mormal laughed. “You really don’t get it, Olls. Dennis wasn’t blackmailing me, at least not technically. He was my business partner.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know, did you? Yeah, that was my stroke of genius. Dirty old Dennis liked to make money out of sin in Synne. So instead of blackmail payments, I offered him fifty percent of the new Doctor Peeper website.”

  “Surely Doctor Peeper doesn’t pay much?” Effie commented. “When it’s the same girls, in the same place, doing largely the same things with the same man, for want of a better word?”

  “In the world of cyberporn, Effers, that’s a winning formula. The Bennets are popular with the punters, because they’re genuinely posh, genuinely amateur, and genuinely unaware of the camera. And they’re clearly real sisters, which adds to the piquancy. Horses for courses. All I need is a few hundred obsessive sads around the planet coughing up their monthly £12.95 and we’re in clover. I’d give Dennis a hundred quid or so a month in pocket money, as arranged, but there’s more than fifty thou in the bank that’s rightfully his, and his shares could be worth fifty more.”

  “And now he’s dead, you get to keep it all for yourself.” Do we have a motive for murder? Oliver wondered.

  Mormal looked hurt at the insinuation. “That money isn’t mine. I’ve already notified those relatives of the secret part of Dennis’s fortune. Not telling them how he earned it, of course.”

  “Won’t they figure that out?”

  “No, the shares are in a holding company, which Dennis insisted on setting up. He called it 740 Ventures—some private joke of his own. He liked private jokes.”

  Tell me about it, “Mary, Mary,” thought Oliver. “Do you think the girls would still forgive you if they found out about Doctor Peeper?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t. But why should they find out?”

  “Because somebody’s bound to recognize them sooner or later. Ben Motley did. I did. It only takes one slumming Tatler reader to spot demure Davina Bennet, her chaste treasure open, in flagrante delicto with a local yahoo. No offense, Eric.”

  “Oh, none taken, Foureyes.” He gently nudged his sports bag again. “But let’s do a test. Do you want to tell your friends, the Bennets, that you stumbled across them while visiting Internet porn sites, Oliver?”

  Oliver was silent.

  “Effie,” Mormal continued, “are you going to be the one to tell the girls their private parts are available for public viewing, knowing they’ll never recover from the humiliation?”

  It’s a temptation, thought Effie, but she knew her limits. “You have it all figured out, don’t you, you little shit?” she said.

  Mormal seemed unconcerned. “We let sleeping dogs lie, don’t we? And incidentally, just because I’ve been forced to make a few quid off these dogs, it doesn’t mean I don’t really care for them. I love them. Truly. Some more than others, admittedly.”

  “Including the lissome Lucinda?” Oliver asked.

  “Lucinda? Luce was never part of Doctor Peeper. She’s practically engaged to that prick Quilt-Hogg.”

  “Bullshit,” Oliver riposted. Now he knew that the trickster Breedlove had come up with the name, he was confident that 740 Ventures did indeed stem from the initials of all five Bennet girls, converted into Roman numerals.

  Mormal swallowed and seemed to reconsider. “All right, fair play, but I’ve taken down all her videos. And Luce was always legal.”

  “For sex, maybe,” conceded Effie, “but not for pornography. Gotcha.” Mormal didn’t speak.

  “Why did you take her off the website?” Oliver asked. “Were you afraid that Dennis would trade Doctor Peeper for a fresh crack at the Bennet family fortune, once he heard that Luce was a potential Countess of Yateley?”

  “No,” said Mormal quietly. “I was afraid that somebody would recognize her and tell the Quilt-Hoggs that Luce was no virgin bride, and then we will have no more marriage. My courtesy to Wendy Bennet may not extend to keeping my hands or indeed my glands off her daughters, but it’s quite another thing to ruin her heart’s desire. Your five minutes are up.”

  He carefully picked up his sports bag. It seemed to Oliver that the noise of the weir changed tone slightly, from a hum to a whirr.

  “Just a minute,” he said and snatched the bag from Mormal’s hand. Mormal tried to grab it back but he found his thin wrist being gripped tightly by Effie.

  “That’s mine!” he shouted. “You have no right to take it!”

  “So sue me,” muttered Oliver, unzipping the bag and peering inside. He reached in and pulled out a camcorder, still running, its red recording light masked with black electrician’s tape. Inside the bag’s dark interior, a makeshift cradle of short bungee cords had held the camera more or less vertically, peeking through a thin mesh wafer that covered a hole in the bag. The arrangement would have let the camera record anything that was immediately above it.

  Effie let go of Mormal, took the camera, and calmly removed the small DVD that was storing the images of her thighs and underwear.

  “You’re well out of order,” Mormal continued to protest. “I’m in a public place here, I’ve a right…”

  Effie snapped the disk in half and handed the camera back to Mormal without speaking. This merited more than the Strongitharm Look, thought Oliver. But Effie seemed only thoughtful and a little embarrassed. She stepped away, breaking the disk into quarters, trembling slightly. Oliver knew this was the emotional self-control of the martial arts expert and police officer who dared not lose her temper in case she lashed out and broke Mormal’s neck with the side of her hand.

  “It’s all part of the Doctor Peeper expansion,” Mormal stuttered. “Up-skirts, down-blouses, all original, all anonymous—none of this lifted off the Internet and recycled schmutter. It wasn’t just you on there, Effie—when those twenty-year-old Oxford girls bend over to trowel through the foundations—”

  “Eric,” said Oliver, holding the open mouth of the bag toward him. “Put away the camera.”

  Mormal opted to pay attention to the soft, unexpected menace in Oliver’s voice. He placed the camera in the bag. Oliver slid it into the back of the van, removed his glasses, and slipped them into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  “Now defend yourself,” he said to Mormal.

  “What are you talking about?” Mormal asked with a mocking laugh, with the result that his mouth was still wide open when Oliver’s fist slammed into his cheekbone. The momentum spun him around and into the open rear of the van, leaving only the lower half of his body in daylight. The protruding posterior was a tempting target, but Oliver believed in fair play.

  “Respect,” Mormal spluttered around his swelling tongue. “Massive.”

  “Never mind that. Get up.
”

  But only Mormal’s legs began to move, like a toad’s, squirming to find a firm grip on the ground and then edging his body further into the darkness of the van. Oliver slammed the doors closed. A few seconds later, the engine started up.

  “That’s interesting,” Oliver said as he watched the vehicle drive away, leaving the empty wheelbarrow. Effie, who had been staring at him in astonishment, reached for his hand and kissed his stinging knuckles one by one.

  “Didn’t I tell you that’s a good way to break your fingers?” she scolded. “You never listen to me.” She leaned against him, closing her eyes as he put his arms around her shoulders and letting the fragments of the broken disk drop onto the ground.

  “I don’t need you to defend my honor, you know,” she whispered, slipping her arms around his waist.

  “I wasn’t. That was entirely for my benefit.”

  She smiled. “I’m so glad you don’t know how to lie,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Friday afternoon (continued)

  If Toby’s hard-working colleagues thought of Shakespeare’s tomb as the bourn from which no traveler returns, they wouldn’t have been referring just to its occupant. Toby’s truant disposition meant that Oliver and Effie faced another trip to Holy Trinity to return the shoulder bag he’d abandoned in Mormal’s van. The chain ferry across the Avon wasn’t operating, so they were forced to take the much longer route over the bridge. At least Toby’s bag seemed empty.

  As they passed the Gower memorial statue, they found their path suddenly blocked by a Shakespearean character. It was a male figure in a tall capotain hat with a dyed-green ostrich feather, a large cartwheel ruff like a gigantic coffee filter, and a tooled, tan leather jerkin worn over a scarlet doublet. Below the waist, it wore yellow and orange pumpkin breeches, saggy purple hose, and high-heeled shoes with oversized silver buckles. The codpiece was pink.