“Right. Unpaid babysitter. Changing nappies nonstop. They’re indescribably smelly and nasty, including the instantly disposable ones. I know she’ll be poohing the whole time.”
“She?”
“Mummy pretends to Daddy that she doesn’t know, but she does. It’s a she. And Daddy does desperately want a son and hier. Greenacre Manor will be as dust and ashes without someone to inherit it—and of course to Daddy that means a male. He’s often said he’d like to adopt you.”
I pricked up my ears.
“You’re joking, of course. He hardly notices me.”
“He notices. If he had his way you would be son and hier.”
I considered this.
“Your daddy’s not that rich. It wouldn’t be worth my while. I’ve never really considered him when I’ve dreamed about being adopted by a filthy-rich man or woman.”
“Daddy is high up in the BBC. The BBC is run by families. Dinnersties they call them: the Magnusens, the Dimblebies, the Michelmores. Being child of a BBC person is a passport to a good, cushy job, well-paid and with lots of presteege. And jobs for your kids as well.”
“He’s got you. Why should he need a son?”
“He’s horribly old-fashioned.”
“Well, England has had queens since fifteen fifty-something. You’d think even Uncle Timothy could have got used to the idea by now . . .”
“He did once condesend to ask me if I wanted to work at the BBC.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I wanted to do a degree in the History of Western Art, then go and work in the Queen’s Gallery at Buck House.”
“Beats the corridors of the dear old Beeb.”
“It just occurred to me as he spoke. I’m going to keep all my options open, but those options certainly do not include the Beeb. I said: ‘Give the job to the newcomer, Daddy. He or she is probably thick as pigshit.’”
“How interesting. Come on—that’s Mum calling for lunch.”
“Oh God! Rack of lamb and tiramisu.”
I will slip quickly over what we had for lunch, apart from the lamb and the tiramisu. There was a lot about babies, a lot about the power structures and the behavioural disharmonies (their words) at the BBC, and quite a lot (from my Dad, of course) about the creative urge, and how it needed to be stimulated, not crushed. After lunch Dad and Deirdre did the washing up while Tim and Lois talked in the living room. Tim had a stiff tumbler of white wine concealed between his chair and the wall, and kept taking quick surreptitious gulps. Mum, for some reason, was asking whether he saw a big change in Dad, whether he looked older and whether the nonstop creativity (he’d had a half-hour play on Armchair Theatre on Radio Four in the last two years) wasn’t taking it out of him. When Dad and Deirdre came back in they all four (juniors were not consulted) agreed on a brisk walk up to Trevelyan Cave, and they were just rugging up and putting on walking boots when Deirdre dropped her bombshell.
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you since we arrived, but there hasn’t been a convenient opening. In one of Bernard’s plays there would have been one, but he just forgot to provide one for real life.”
“Deirdre—”
“So I’ll just have to tell you at an unsuitable moment. Bernard and I go back a long time, as all of you know, and we have been meeting up again over the last six months. In grubby little hotel bedrooms hired by the hour. We were taking things up where we left them off twelve or thirteen years ago. This” (patting her stomach) “is Bernard’s. He’d quite like a daughter in place of that little know-all in short pants he has already. He thinks we are going to get married as soon as the divorce goes through. Think on, Bernard. Marriage has outlived its usefulness. So far as I’m concerned sex is a short-term affair, with plenty of swapping. So it’s bye-bye Tim, bye-bye Bernard. And welcome anyone young, fit, and into it for the laughs.”
And she left the room and the house with a merry wave of her hand. The two men hurried after her and Samantha followed them, and we passed all four a few minutes later along Caves Pathway, arguing and jesticulating. Mum didn’t honour them with so much as a glance. She and I were usually together on these walks because we are the slowest. This year we were in front, and well in front too.
“Are they coming?” Mum asked after a bit. I looked round.
“Yes, but quite slowly. They’re still arguing.”
“They would be, wouldn’t they? When is it any different on these reunion days? I could murder Bernard.”
“Well, we’ve come to the right place,” I said, but seriously, not waggish at all. “Sheer drop at several points. Hardly a soul around.”
“True,” said my mother, also treating the question seriously. “But murder is too good for him. I should leave him alive, to moulder in his horrible skin, with his horrible self and his awful little talent.”
“I think murder would be better.”
At this point in his writing, Morgan laid down his pen. Had he overdone it in directing suspicion on himself? It was a common ploy in crime fiction he had read. Probably it mirrored reality—policemen are really thick and do get it wrong, in all probability. If a reader took it too seriously he had only to read on to change his opinion.
He took up his pen again.
“You’re probably right,” said my mother. “But do you think I’m the murdering type?”
“You’re the Agatha Christie type: least likely suspect.”
“I’m not sure the police would take that line. I don’t get the impression they read Christie.”
“It’s about half an hour to Trevelyan’s Cave. Sheer drop from there. Half the suicides’ bodies are never recovered.”
“Little monster. Have you been planning this? How did you know that?”
“The South Devon Chronicle.”
“Shame on them. . . . I was telling the truth when I said I could murder him. . . . Taking up with that whore, twelve years after he ditched her for me.”
“I thought she ditched him for Uncle Tim, and you got him instead.”
“No . . . Well, have it your own way if you like . . . To go back to her, have regular . . . meetings in gungy hotel rooms—”
“Sex. It’s called sex, Mum.”
“I know, cheeky. Or I remember . . . Well, that’s the end, murder or no murder—and I think I can restrain myself from slortering him.”
I was afraid that was true. But when we got to Trevelyan Cave I was relieved that she went into the dirty little hole and sat down among the rocks. I stood outside where I had a spectacular view of the deadly rocks on Westcot Cove, and also of the path, winding its vert-something-or-other way up to the cave. I was looking for a little party of four, but I soon saw I was mistaken: the party had broken up, with Deirdre, Tim, and Samantha probably going back to the village and then back to their Manor home which one day may be mine. There was one solitary trousered figure trailing his way up to us. All he needed was a nap-sack on his back and he’d be one of your typical boring-as-hell walkers.
“Here comes Dad,” I said. Mum elbowed her way to the front of the cave and I took over the shadows. “He’s going to beg you to take him back,” I said, in case he did.
“He’s got a nerve,” muttered my mother.
But he didn’t do anything of the sort.
“I’m not stopping,” he panted, in the misstatement of the century. “I just wanted to say goodbye. You always knew Deirdre was the one, didn’t you? You always knew I was imagining her when we were . . . you know. It makes me sound a jerk, I know.”
“Not just sound,” said Mum.
“All right, all right. But I’m going to win her back. I’m going to go to her. Tim knows he’s lost her, and I’m not sure he’ll care all that much. He’s told me he always loved you, Morgan—Oh, like a father, you know. I told him to keep his hands off you because we don’t want his bloody Brideshead—”
I shot out of the cave, and the sentence was only completed with an “AAAAHHH.” When I was capable of taking my eyes away from the prospect a
t the bottom of the cliffs Lois was looking around—up, down, and towards the edge—with a gaze of total bewilderment on her face. I felt almost sorry for her.
“Congratulations, Mum. You did it.”
“But I didn’t. I mean I can’t remember that I . . . Did I? Morgan, DID I? Oh my God, I must have. What are we going to do?”
“Go home. Tell people Bernard’s been called away.”
My mother put her hand to her face.
“Australia! He was thinking of going to Australia. He’s writing some material for Dame Edna.”
“Was writing,” I said. “Of course the body might be found.”
“But nothing to connect him to us. It would be much more likely that he committed suicide, or just missed his footing. There’s been no one on the path to say that he ever got as high as Trevelyan Cave.”
“And no one to say we were here. Come on, Mum: Let’s get back home. I think Dad’s going to like Australia so much he’s going to be there for a very long time.”
Morgan stopped writing. He wondered whether it was totally clear what he wanted the reader to think. Well—not totally clear: This was a literary exercise, but one which could result in his being parentless and ripe for adoption. For a literary exercise, it was surely a lot more exciting than most.
When Morgan was called into Miss Trim’s office he knew exactly what he was going to say. The end of his father had been to a degree impovised, as he called it, but the broad outlines had been with him (as a fantasy hardening to a project) for some time. He could cope with the likes of Miss Trim.
“I must say, Morgan, that your essay bewildered me, even shocked me.”
“Oh? Why was that, Miss Trim?”
“I expected it to be a factual, that means truthful, account of what you did on the last day of your holiday.”
“You didn’t say that, Miss Trim. And I expect you know that my father is an imaginative writer.”
“Well, your father wasn’t—”
“He makes it up. I find it runs in the family. I get to a certain point and then my imagination takes over.”
“Ah!” It was a sigh of relief. “So you made a little play out of your day, so to speak?”
“A little story, Miss Trim. A play would be all dialogue and stage directions. I hope you enjoyed the story.”
“Oh, I did,” said Miss Trim untruthfully. “But of course it made me uneasy, since all the others were truthful accounts of their day.”
“They’re not a very imaginative lot, 6A.”
“Tell me, Morgan, why did you decide to write a story in which your father got . . . well, killed?”
Morgan shrugged.
“Well, it’s just one sort of story, isn’t it? They call it a whodunit. You don’t know till towards the end who did it. My father’s never had much time for me. Oh, he’s there if I need him, but he hopes and prays I don’t need him too much. Same with my mother. He cares more about the characters in his piffling plays. He’ll pack a few things and take off at the drop of a hat. You wouldn’t know this, Miss Trim, because he never comes to parents’ days or anything like that. Doesn’t care.”
“Oh, I’m sure he does. Some people find emotional things very difficult. Well, I think that was all. You’ve cleared up things nicely. I think I’d better ring your mother in case she hears rumours—gossip from your classmates or their parents.”
“They wouldn’t know fact from fiction,” said Morgan contemptuously. He got up and walked towards the door. “Thank you for being so understanding, Miss Trim.”
As he opened the door he saw her hand straying towards the telephone. His face was suffused with an expression of sublime self-congratulation. He stood outside the door, his ear close to it.
“Mrs. Fairclough? Oh, it’s Edith Trim, from Westward School. I’ve just been talking to Morgan, always a pleasure. Sophisticated without being, well, snooty with it. He’s written this essay about the last days of the school holidays, and he turned it into a really promising little story—he must be reading Agatha Christie and writers like that . . . Oh, he is! I guessed well. Now, there’s a murder, of course, and it’s quite intriguing and exciting, but I just wanted to tell you, in case rumours come back to you that he is writing gruesome stories which gave kids sleepless nights and all that. Parents tell all sorts of silly tales about any child who makes up stories. It’s really not that sort of story at all . . . I hope you can make it to the next parents’ evening, Mrs. Fairclough. We could have a good talk. And do try to bring your husband. I know Morgan would appreciate his being there. Oh . . . Oh . . . Oh, Australia. I see. Well, I’m sorry. We’ll hope to see him next term.”
Morgan heard the receiver being put down. He started walking along the corridor, the smug expression still suffusing his face. This was going to be one of those sub-genre stories, in this case one of those in which the wrong suspect is fitted up for a murder he, or in fact she, didn’t do. And it was going to be one in which the murderer is the one telling the story. Morgan was enormously pleased with himself for thinking of that. It was exceptionally clever, and something he was quite sure would never occur to a pedestrian mind like Agatha Christie’s.
Copyright © 2011 by Robert Barnard
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Fiction
No Mystery
by Terence Faherty
Terence Faherty has three series currently running in EQMM: that to which this new story belongs, following a Star Republic reporter; the tales featuring post-WWII Hollywood P.I. Scott Elliott; and the series that launched his career, starring former seminary student and sometime sleuth Owen Keane. The first Keane novel, Deadstick, was translated into Italian in 2009. In 2011, there will be two new Scott Elliott novels: Dance in the Dark (Five Star Press) and The Hollywood Op (Perfect Crime Books).
That the story of the levitating rocks in Yellowwood State Forest had been reported first by a Bloomington paper, the Herald, didn’t bother E.N. Boxleiter, my editor. He considered our employer, the Star Republic, to be Indiana’s newspaper of record. Nothing that happened in the state, not even a gubernatorial election, was really official until the Star Republic mentioned it, in Boxleiter’s view. Other papers’ headlines were only slightly better than anonymous notes.
The headline from the Herald was a simple one: “The Yellowwood Mystery.” The accompanying story was a little more complex. It described how a man named Gordon Guilford, who was hunting deep in the Brown County woods, had discovered a large “boulder” high in a chestnut tree. Forty-five feet off the ground, in fact. This had aroused the hunter’s curiosity, naturally enough, and he’d returned with friends the next weekend. They’d located the original stone and while getting slightly lost on the way back to their car, they’d stumbled across a second example, this one in a sycamore tree. Since then, a search of the area by state conservation personnel had turned up three more high-rise rocks, for a total of five.
A Department of Natural Resources spokesman was quoted as estimating the average weight of the stones to be four hundred pounds. He also insisted, a little defensively, that the stones had been placed very recently. Otherwise, the forest’s civil-service caretakers would certainly have noticed them first.
The article was accompanied by a photograph that clearly showed a large rock high in a tree. The photo’s caption, like the story, called the rock a boulder, but it was actually a flat slab wedged into the tree at the point where the trunk split into multiple branches. The slab sat perpendicular to the trunk, giving it the look of a crow’s nest on a sailing ship.
Several explanations for the phenomenon were given, ranging from the impossible—that the trees had lifted the rocks as they grew—to the highly unlikely—that the slabs had been blown into the trees by a passing tornado. UFOs were mentioned, if only to be dismissed. The dismissing was done by the Brown County sheriff, who thought the flying stones were more likely the work of “kids mixed with beer.” Though why they’d
done it and how they’d done it the sheriff couldn’t say.
His scepticism was seconded by a professor from Indiana University, Kevin Karnes, who was described as a “hoax buster” by the Herald’s reporter. Karnes scoffed at the idea that the rock placements were supernatural or extraterrestrial. He went on to predict that the hoaxers, whoever they were, would be “caught and soon. The mystery will turn out to be no mystery at all.”
Professor Karnes was the man Boxleiter had arranged for me to interview. I gathered that my editor was at least as intrigued by the hoax buster as he was by the Yellowwood mystery. “Get his autograph,” was how Boxleiter expressed it.
I visited the IU campus at Bloomington on a mild day in early December. Karnes’s office was in the Physical Sciences Building, which was on the same hill as the massive football stadium and built of the same brown concrete. The professor’s second-floor office had a poster taped to the front of its open door. It featured a flying saucer with a line drawn through it below three large letter A’s. Beneath the saucer were the words “Alien Abductees Anonymous.”
I found Karnes seated at a desk in the comfortable space beyond the open door. He was reviewing some papers while a dark-haired young woman in a wildly oversized sweatshirt stood at his elbow. She looked up at me, smiled, and nudged the reading man. He looked up, too, processed the information, and said, “You’re the reporter.”
When he stood to shake my hand, I was surprised by his height or lack thereof. I’d been deceived by the size of his head, which wouldn’t have been out of proportion on a basketball center. His regular features were handsome enough to remind me of Boxleiter’s joke about the autograph.
Karnes introduced the woman who now stood a respectful step behind him as his graduate assistant, Gennetta Jones. Jones wasn’t given any lines in the scene. I soon learned that, around Karnes, few people were.
“The Yellowwood business is on the Internet already, did you know that? A UFO website, of course. Encounters close dot com, or something like that. It’s listed right after a story on strange cases of dog amnesia in Wisconsin. And there’s a link to a site that claims the pyramids were built using a ‘lost science’ of levitation. I’ve personally participated in several demonstrations showing how large stone blocks can be moved around using a whole lot of manpower and ropes and pulleys. We conducted one at a limestone quarry over in Bedford last year. Last May, wasn’t it, Gennetta?”
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Page 20
