This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  Oliver first thought it was a garish waxwork, dragged out to entice tourists into some sideshow of famous scenes. They began to move around it, when it spoke.

  “Oliver!”

  Oliver started and looked again, taking in eyes that were staring angrily at him and tightly pressed lips beneath a rakish white moustache.

  “Uncle Tim.” Oliver’s heart was thumping. “It must be nice to know the old uniform still fits after all these years.”

  “Never mind the funny, what’s this I hear about you getting roughed up?”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that. I check my phone messages about half an hour ago, and what do I hear? The brigadier exploding with pride because his firstborn, who writes about furry animals, apparently fought off a whole cohort of bashi-bazouks in the dead waste and middle of the night. I eventually got little Angelwine to the phone, who told me where you were.” He took a step closer to Oliver. “Why wasn’t I told about this attack when it happened?”

  “It was nothing…”

  “Bollocks it was nothing! You wanted to hide it from me, didn’t you? Because you’re still going round the village asking questions about Dennis Breedlove. Well?”

  “Well, what?” Oliver replied sullenly.

  “Well, are you hurt?”

  “Just a few bruises. I’ll live.”

  “That’s for me to decide,” Mallard said, masking his relief. He switched his attention to Effie. “And you! This is how you let your own discretion be your tutor, huh? I hope you like moonlighting as a private eye, Frances Erica Strongitharm, because you may need a new job.”

  Effie bit her lower lip and stared at the pavement, but she kept hold of Oliver’s hand.

  “Look, Uncle Tim, doesn’t this prove there’s something to the case?” Oliver asked. “Somebody’s trying to frighten me off. Isn’t this something more than fantasy?”

  Mallard prodded Oliver in the shoulder. “Don’t start all that again. This is the very coinage of your brain. I told you to leave it to Culpepper—”

  “What’s this from?” said a voice. Mallard, in full choleric flow, took a second to register that the interruption had not come from his nephew or his shame-faced sergeant. A small crowd was forming around the group.

  “What?”

  “What play is this from?” the questioner persisted, a balding American tourist in a pastel tracksuit and bright white sneakers.

  “It’s not from a play,” said Mallard brusquely.

  An American woman spoke up. “I think he’s Henry the Fifth and these two are the little princes in the tower.” She was also wearing a tracksuit and rather a large amount of gold jewelry. She nudged the man. “Harry, get my picture with him. Make him pretend to strangle me.”

  Despite the temptation, Mallard remained polite. “Madam, if you don’t mind, this is a private conversation.”

  “Then who are you supposed to be?” asked another passerby, in an Australian accent. Mallard sighed.

  “If you must know, I’m dressed as Osric, from Hamlet. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “I’ve never heard of an Osric,” proclaimed a female English tourist, as if her ignorance merited praise, “and I’ve seen all of Shakespeare’s films.” She smiled proudly.

  “So why’s he dressed that way?” the Australian asked, still addressing Mallard.

  “He’s a fop,” Mallard explained, wondering why he’d been shifted to the third person. More people were stopping to listen to the conversation.

  “What’s a fop?”

  “A dandy, a popinjay—a man who spends too much time fussing over fashion.” Mallard surveyed the crowd, but there was a marked absence of good examples. Quite the reverse.

  “Fashion, you may call it…” muttered the English woman.

  “So he’s a poofter, then?” the Australian continued, with growing interest. “Like Shakespeare himself.”

  “Osric’s sexual orientation is irrelevant,” Mallard began. “These stereotypes don’t—”

  “Now just a moment,” cut in the American woman. “My husband happens to be president of our local school board. I think if Shakespeare were…well…I would have been told.”

  “Oh come on, lady,” said a young man with a Scottish accent. “It’s a well-known fact that half of his sonnets were written to a man.”

  “Oh yeah? What about ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’” Harry’s wife persisted. “That’s one of the greatest love poems ever written.”

  “Colin Firth recited it to Renee Zellwegger in Bridget Jones’s Diary,” said the older English woman conclusively.

  “Exactly.” Mrs. Harry leaned toward the young Scotsman. “You can’t tell me that was meant for a man.”

  “Actually it was,” said Oliver. “But it’s not a love poem.”

  “Huh?”

  “On the surface, it’s a poem about poetry, and the way it may confer immortality on someone long after his earthly beauty has faded, and even after his death. But it comes in a sequence of the early sonnets in which Shakespeare is urging his patron to find a wife and start breeding, no doubt because his patron’s mother wants some grandchildren.”

  “I can totally relate,” declared Mrs. Harry, nudging her husband again.

  “So we have the brilliant ambiguity in the phrase ‘eternal lines to time’ which can mean both lines of poetry but also bloodlines, carrying the patron’s beauty generation-by-generation into the future. But a declaration of romantic love—no.”

  Oliver had stepped in to deflect attention from Mallard, but the audience seemed appreciative. He chose not to mention his own literary qualifications, although there was a good chance that more of the crowd had heard of Finsbury the Ferret than of Froth or Fortinbras. Meanwhile, Mallard had slipped away from the center of the group to a more removed ground, tugging Effie with him.

  “I have to get back,” he whispered. “We’ve made Ophelia’s grave straight, but we haven’t finished burying the rest of the play. The rehearsal breaks for dinner at five. I’ll meet you in Synne at six. You’re going to tell me everything that’s been going on or you’ll be back in uniform and doing crowd control at Millwall home games. I may be the light relief in Hamlet, but in real life, I’m not joking.”

  He strutted back toward the theater, his green ostrich feather bouncing in the sunlight.

  “No, I know you’re not,” she said miserably.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Friday evening

  There was enough loneliness, disillusion, and alcoholism in Synne to sustain two pubs, both on the main road—The Seven Wise Virgins at the western end of the Square’s hypotenuse, and The Bear Without A Head, close to the Swithins’ house. The tourist trade divided itself evenly between them, according to whether needing a drink was the initial reaction to arriving in Synne or the final desperate act before departing.

  Like many traditional pubs—indeed, like England itself—The Bear Without a Head was divided by class. A frosted-glass screen separated the comfortable “saloon bar” at the front from the chilly “public bar” at the rear, with its own entrance and more spartan furnishings for soiled farm laborers and self-deluding Tory candidates. So when the landlord of the Virgins tried to gain a slight edge by installing a karaoke machine, the Bear’s tight-fisted counterpart had fitted his little-used “public” with some secondhand track lighting from a car boot sale in Edgbaston, and announced that from now on, Friday nights were stand-up comedy nights.

  “I’ve always thought I’d be good at stand-up,” said Geoffrey. Mallard’s inquisition was taking place in the saloon, but the PA system was broadcasting that night’s performance at a low level to the entire pub.

  “You?” exclaimed Susie. “You can’t tell jokes.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, stop me if you’ve heard this one…”

  “Stop!” said
Oliver.

  “But you don’t know what it was going to be,” Geoffrey complained.

  “Be quick, then.”

  “Right, well, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and—”

  “Stop!” said Susie.

  “Oh, you’ve heard it?”

  “No, I just want you to stop. I’m being cruel to be unkind.”

  Geoffrey grabbed the beermat that Oliver had been idly flipping and catching in one hand, and began to scribble some notes on the back. Mallard smiled faintly, checking the change from the second round of drinks, which Oliver had just fetched from the bar. His afternoon anger had faded now that he knew Oliver hadn’t been seriously hurt. But the midnight assault was no fiction, and he needed to find out more. And he had no idea what to do about Effie. True, she had been insubordinate. But he also trusted her nose for wrongdoing, and surely the previous night’s bloodshed had confirmed that something was indeed rotten in the state of Synne. During the first round of drinks, he’d made the quartet report on their activities over the last two days—the two days, he reminded himself, since he’d forbidden any further inquiries into Breedlove’s death.

  “Right,” he said. “I’ve got twenty minutes before I have to get back to Stratford. So let’s suppose that Oliver was attacked by one of Breedlove’s victims, because he or she…”

  “He,” muttered Oliver.

  “…didn’t want to be found out, even though Breedlove is dead. Who could it have been?” Mallard took a gulp of lemonade and referred to his notebook. “First up, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

  “We know it wasn’t Sidney who attacked me,” said Oliver.

  “Might have been Lesbia,” said Geoffrey.

  “There is no Lesbia! And I didn’t hit a woman.”

  “Sidney and Lesbia, big question mark,” Mallard dictated to himself, stabbing the final dot into his notebook with a flourish. “Now, what about number two, the vicar’s Jack and Jill group, a vile phrase.”

  “Even the open-minded Mr. Edwards would be hard put to rationalize the beating of a parishioner,” said Oliver. “Besides, I already knew his secret.”

  “How about one of the other members of his club?” suggested Susie.

  “Edwards swore they didn’t know about the blackmail.”

  “Has anybody seen Edwards today?” Mallard asked. “Does he look as if he’s been in a fistfight? For that matter, is there anyone in the village sporting cuts and bruises, apart from Oliver?”

  There was no response.

  “Then on to Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary—Eric Mormal, number three.”

  “I think of him as number two,” grumbled Effie, breaking a long silence. “What a piece of work. As far as I’m concerned, you can lock him up right now and throw away the key.”

  “So you think he’s the attacker?” asked Susie.

  “The what?”

  “Eric wasn’t the attacker,” said Oliver. “There were no marks on his face. At least not before I punched him this afternoon.”

  “Oliver,” said Geoffrey, reaching for another beermat, “you keep making the questionable assumption that you’re capable of hitting somebody hard enough to leave a mark.”

  “Ollie drew blood,” said Effie loyally.

  “So can a mosquito. Ha! Improv.”

  Oliver ignored him. “However, I spotted something when Eric drove off this afternoon,” he told them. “He works for a co-op farm. That’s spelled with a hyphen, or it’ll be read as ‘coop,’ a place where you keep chickens. Of course, you might find coops on a co-op farm.”

  “Is this going anywhere?” asked Mallard, looking again at his watch.

  “Sorry. But when we use the full word, ‘cooperative,’ we drop the hyphen.”

  “So?” asked Susie.

  “The name of the farm is painted on the side of Eric’s van: Pigsneye Cooperative Organic Farms, with ‘Cooperative’ in larger letters than the rest, because they like to flaunt their socialist credentials. The first two syllables of the word ‘Cooperative’ can be read as ‘Cooper,’ which is the word that registered with the Vampire of Synne when a van flashed past him on the night of Breedlove’s murder—a van that could easily have been on its way to or from that service road that leads up to the Shakespeare Race. At the very time the suicidal and octogenarian Breedlove was supposed to be dragging his stepladder up the steep slope of Synne Common.”

  “And?”

  “I suggest he was stuffed into the back of Mormal’s van for the trip instead, alive or pre-deceased. Culpepper confirmed that Breedlove’s clothes were dusty and soiled. The back of Eric’s van is dirty, because of the farm produce he carries.”

  “Ingenious,” said Geoffrey.

  “Thank you, Geoff.”

  “And totally wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Breedlove died a week ago tonight, right?”

  “Yes, May the first, Friday night.”

  “Then even if it was Eric Mormal’s van that your vampire saw, Mormal wasn’t driving it. He was driving Davina Bennet at the time.”

  “I think you’d better explain,” said Mallard.

  Geoffrey gathered the beermats he’d been annotating and tapped them on the table, as if straightening a pack of playing cards. “Last Friday, I came home from work and decided to check on Doctor-Peeper-dot-com,” he reported. He’d been forced to admit to his online activities during the earlier part of the conversation. “Eric started broadcasting live with Davina at about eight o’clock, and they went on for well over three hours. And before anyone starts judging me,” he added swiftly, “may I remind you that was the time when all of you, minus Susie, plus Phoebe, were prancing around the Shakespeare Race in the buff.”

  “You’re sure it was Davina?” asked Oliver.

  “I didn’t know her name then, but it was definitely the one you said was Davina. She’s the only sister with dark hair.”

  “How do you know it was live, not a recording?”

  “Their television was in the shot when they started. I’d been watching the same program.”

  “And this went on for nearly three hours?”

  Geoffrey nodded. “It was quite a marathon session, even for Doctor Peeper. They did it three times. After each bout, Davina seemed to get cross about something, and they both got dressed and left the room. But then he persuaded her to come back, and they undressed and started all over again.”

  “He’s so leisure,” snorted Effie.

  “Hang on, we’re missing something,” said Susie, turning to Geoffrey with astonishment. “You stayed in all evening and watched the same two people boink three times in a row? Have you no life whatsoever, young Angelwine? Why not just sit in a lawn chair and shout at traffic?”

  “I will not be disparaged by a woman whose best skill at university was to disguise herself as an unmade bed,” Geoffrey retorted. “Honestly, there was nothing she wouldn’t show you for a half of shandy and a Nuttall’s Minto.”

  “Virgin,” Susie muttered, with a suppressed grin.

  “Slapper,” Geoffrey shot back.

  “Let’s move on,” Mallard cut in wearily. “Okay, victim number four, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Mr. Snopp, the Vampire of Synne. Had he the motive and the cue for passion? He’s already fessed up to Effie about his true condition, believing that she was on official police business. Which she wasn’t. Why would he then choose to send Oliver a message about keeping away?”

  Effie, the only member of the group to have met Snopp, shrugged without speaking.

  Mallard dropped his notebook onto the table. “Well, Ollie, I have to congratulate you. You did it. These are the players. But now you don’t think any of them had either the opportunity or the guts—or both—to beat you up. Is there anything to be gained from identifying that fifth victim?”

  “I don’t think we need worry about th
at now,” said Oliver. “The letter was never delivered.”

  Effie stared at him, but he didn’t meet her eye. “Didn’t you say your Dr. McCaw wanted you to identity all five?” she asked.

  “That was when we didn’t know who the other four were. Now that we do, we can leave number five in peace. Because no matter who attacked me, one of those four must have murdered Breedlove.”

  “If being blackmailed was the motive,” said Geoffrey.

  “If he was murdered,” said Mallard.

  “We’re not certain about Sidney and Lesbia,” Susie said. “If they’re never seen together, it may not be because they’re the same person. They may just hate the sight of each other. Like Geoffrey and me.”

  “There aren’t too many other candidates for the Tweedles,” Oliver sighed. “Breedlove started to blackmail them four years ago, which rules out a lot of potential sins.” He gulped some beer. “Potential sinners, too. The way people move in and out of this village, it’s hard to find residents who go back that far. After only ten years, my parents are almost the village elders. I was just saying that to Mr. Tooth.”

  “Who?” asked Susie.

  “Mr. Tooth. Old acquaintance of mine. You remember, Eff, we met him in Plumley last Christmas. Nice old chap.”

  Effie shook her head.

  “Mr. Tooth’s the man I’ve seen around the village in the last couple of days,” Oliver continued. “He was waiting to get a drink at the bar. Hope you don’t mind, Uncle Tim, but I treated him to a slimline tonic out of your twenty. Apparently, he’s trying to locate residents who are committed to staying in the village, but everyone seems to be either just arriving or planning to move on. It’s the one way Synne is like Manhattan. Well, that and the skyscrapers.”

  “Skyscrapers?” Geoffrey asked.

  “A surreal joke, Geoff,” Oliver explained. “The point being that Synne is completely unlike Manhattan in the vertical architecture department. There isn’t even a steeple on the church.” He took another sip from his glass.

  “I don’t get it,” Geoffrey admitted.

  “Ah, Geoff,” sighed Susie, “I always feel that there’s less to you than meets the eye. You have hidden shallows.”