Hindsight

by Peter Dickinson

  You’ll ask, in any case how could he be sure she would have him, with Wither out of the way? But who else was there for her to turn to, what other escape? The bond between them (not, I think, ever a sexual one) was already quite strong. Honestly, that does not seem to me a difficulty, and I do not think it would have to him. The difficulty was to get rid of Wither.

  How shall he do it? He has only an afternoon to plan the act. Time and place are chosen for him. It must be around dusk, at the Temple. Shall it be obviously a murder (e.g. shall he use The Man’s revolver?) or apparently an accident? Even a gambler would surely choose the accident—a murder would automatically entail a thorough investigation. But what kind of an accident is possible at the Temple? As it happens, there is an obvious one. Old Floyd has been attacked there by a rogue stag. Everybody knows about that.*

  So can he fake such an accident? Obviously not, if the result is going to be a body mangled with antler-blows and hoof-prints. But the thrust of a single tine through the eye? (This is more likely in any case, if you think about it—animals don’t go tramping to and fro over dead victims.) I was already considering this problem when I went to Richmond—yes, another instance of my now trying to think true what I previously thought I’d invented!—so I looked carefully at antlers. They are not designed for such a task, though spiky enough. They are shaped to make the most of a forward-and-upward curving stroke, slowish, with the mass of the head and neck behind them. But a man needs a spear, a weapon shaped for the sharp thrust of human arms. A spear is a haft and a point. One could of course use a single tine from an antler as a spear-point—there’s a big one that spikes forward near the root of the antler which would be ideal—and for a haft you would need a stake a few feet long and an inch or more thick.

  Smith has seen a boy holding just such a stake. Moreover it has a length of string attached to it, with which the point could be lashed on. As duty master he could have seen where the boy keeps the thing, in a slot between two racks of lockers. And there are loose antlers, picked up by the boys, with the mound of dead deer in the garage. The weapon, therefore, can be made.

  Do you think it possible that such a man is influenced by omens? I do. The realisation that the tool he needs is already to hand, provided for him, speaks to the gambler, telling him, ‘Yes, now. Your tide is flowing. Take it.’ I think it is at this moment that what had been a mere brooding possibility becomes a definite plan, to be thought out and followed through. The timing of the film show is another such omen. Just when Wither will be at the Temple, waiting for Annette (he has told her to come ‘as soon as possible’—just a guess—so he himself will be there early) the whole school will be in Big Space watching the film. There weren’t many amusements at Paddery. Most of the kitchen staff came, and some of the teachers. Unless there were some unlucky crisis nobody would miss the duty master. Even then he could plausibly have been outside, doing an early check on the black-out.

  One problem arises. The drive is tarmac, but the path up to the Temple, though gravelled, has soft patches. He cannot be sure of not leaving a footprint. When Annette gets to the Temple and finds the body, what will she do? Nearly certainly run to the school for help. There is a danger she will then put a footprint on top of one of Smith’s, making it clear that he has been there first. The answer is for Smith himself to find the body, or rather to claim to have done so (I’ll come to that in a moment). Therefore Annette must not reach the Temple until, say, half an hour after Smith has come off duty. His best hope of that is to get Molly’s help to delay her. You remember I found him coming into Long Passage from the entrance hall when I went to ask permission to go out to tea—there was a telephone in the secretary’s office, unused on Sundays. I have no idea what he told Molly—it depends whether he had already made approaches to her about his plan to marry Annette. He might have. They’d have understood each other, I think, though I now also think he detested her and she was afraid of him. They could have come to some tacit agreement that he could have Annette provided he didn’t enquire where the trust money had been going over the past twelve years. Presumably he wouldn’t actually say now that he was going to kill Wither, but he would still be taking a huge risk, because after the act Molly would know that he had done so. Once again, though, she wouldn’t be able to say, because then he would have no reason to keep quiet about her peculations. They would each be in a position to betray the other.

  (Good lord! A thought! Is it possible that in one of Molly’s unopened trunks you will find her account of all this? This must be why she arranged for you to have them when she died! I would gladly pay a researcher to sort the papers for you, meanwhile keeping an eye open for such a document. Please consider this.) The possibilities of speculation are endless, but not pointless. Because we come back to the fact that Molly did get Daisy drunk, and the result was to delay Annette. (A point I forgot to make when discussing this earlier: Molly had apparently put off guests who might have helped control Daisy, and the officers were due back at base. No, I don’t remember either of these details, but they are there in my novel.)

  Just as he has finished telephoning, Smith is confronted by the boy who regularly attends Molly’s teas. He uses his authority to delay his arrival at the conservatory, on the off-chance that it will also delay his departure, and hence Annette’s. This isn’t important, a mere frill on his plan.

  The plan is, you see, that on handing over as duty master after the film he will walk down the drive to the pub in Paddery Combe. He will see Wither’s car still parked on the grass. He will claim at this point to have made his way up to the Temple and found the body, though he will not in fact do so. Thus one set of footprints will be accounted for, coming and going. His explanation for having gone up there will depend on whether he admits to knowing about the elopement, but mere curiosity would be enough. Having waited for a while on the drive he will hurry back to the school and raise the alarm.

  So he spends the afternoon doing the chores of duty master. At some point he finds time to abstract my ‘gun’ and to go out to the garages, and smash off an antler tine. The tide continues to flow for him. All the school, bar those helping the hunters, are kept in. Outside staff have their Sundays off. He is most unlikely to be noticed doing these things, and if he is, why, he can always give his plan up. He is committed to nothing, yet.

  But the time comes at last. The boys clatter in to the film. Paddery falls silent. Now he goes and makes his weapon, sitting, I think, by an open window facing east so that he can listen for the raucous chatter of the MG’s exhaust. He has about an hour, but he needs to leave the thing as late as possible so that it can be almost dark when he reaches the Temple. So, though he hears the car, he waits still. It is dusk when he goes down the drive. He makes no effort to conceal the sound of his footsteps as he trudges up the gravel path. Deliberately he leaves a footprint in one of the soft patches. Wither is at the Temple, looking south, waiting for Annette. He hears Smith coming, but it is too dark to see that far, so he waits. Smith climbs to the stone platform at the foot of the steps. He stops, calls Wither’s name, his voice hushed with conspiracy. A query floats back. Smith gestures to Wither to come down off the skyline. Wither glances south, no sign of Annette’s torch on the lake path, descends to hear the presumed message. Smith is carrying a sort of pole.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘Nothing. Found it on my way out. One of the brats has made himself a spear. Too dangerous to leave lying around. Look.’

  Automatically Wither cranes in the dusk to inspect the proffered point.

  Thrust.

  Sorry, I seem to have let the thriller-writer take over. I suppose it’s the way I think. Take it that Smith (still allowing that all this is hypothesis) goes back down the path, hurrying so as to give his footprints the impression of just that, then back up to the school to wait for the film show to end. He has his weapon to dispose of. Perhaps he planned to return my ‘gun’ to its plac
e, but there is now so much blood on it that he realises I will notice. You know, trite though the notion is, I think he simply tossed it and the antler-tine—untied of course—in among the bloody bodies in the garage. Neither would look out of place there, as the gun had been used for deer-carrying, and the blood would be accounted for, superficially. Then, taking his time over it, he walks round outside the building, checking the black-out. There is a chink on the first floor, facing east. When he gets in he goes up and closes it. There is about five minutes left of the film show.

  He is coming down, the stairs, thinking perhaps that the gamble seems to be coming off, when he is met by a white-faced boy, the one from the conservatory teas, who blurts out about having been to the Temple and found the body. The boy’s footprints will be on the path, superimposed on his own. His plan is ruined, his gamble spoilt, his own life now in danger. For a moment the instinct to violence almost breaks out, but then he sees it would be no use. There is a chance yet. He can go down the drive and claim to have climbed the path, as planned. He can meet the head­master and confirm what the boy has said, then insist that he alone must go and guard the body till the police come, so as to leave the minimum of confusing tracks. On this supposedly second journey up the path, using the torch he has taken from the boy, he can actually look and see whether any of the boy’s footprints are in fact on top of his own, and if they are he can attempt to alter the effect by standing accurately into his own print. (All right, it wouldn’t stand up to careful forensic inspection, but might with a country sergeant, in wartime, with a death which everybody already assumes is an accident. It doesn’t matter, because when he got there he would have found that the question didn’t arise, as the boy appeared to have run down from the Temple not on the path but on the grass beside it.)

  That’s all, except that I never found my gun again.

  Isn’t writing an extraordinary business? I started this letter almost gaga with horror, despite the whole business being so very much over-and-done-with. Now—at least for the moment—I feel quite calm. It’s as though I’d somehow managed to turn what I think are actual events into fiction. When I started I told you I didn’t believe any of this rationally, but I did emotionally. Now it’s the other way round. Even in the process of writing (as often happens with me) I thought of more and more details which happened to fit in. I think I’ve actually made quite a fair case. I shall be very interested to know what you make of it, and whether you have any suggestions about how I might check further (other reports of the inquest, find out what happened to Daisy, ditto date of the Smiths’ marriage, etc).

  But at the same time I now find that at an emotional level the story has become not unreal but non-real. What, five hours ago, was an accumulation of slimy filth inside me has oozed out into sentences and paragraphs, leaving almost nothing behind. Even supposing you were to find in Molly’s trunks her account of that evening and thus pretty well prove my theory, I don’t think it would make any difference. I would have no instinct to bring Smith to justice, for instance. His act seems to have become somehow aesthetic. If you told me he had saved his soul by it, I wouldn’t think you mad. Do you know Auden, Horae Canonicae? ‘For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.’ Pernicious nonsense, really.

  But do, after all, treat this letter as another instalment of ‘light hospital reading’, or I shall be sorry to have burdened you with it.

  Yours ever,

  Paul Rogers

  I got to bed nearer five than four and suppose must have slept, but rose feeling as though I hadn’t. Yesterday’s brightness was gone. I looked out on a garden sodden by a dour thin rain. My own mood had changed too during my brief oblivion. When I re-read my letter to Dobbs over breakfast I thought that the story it told made a sort of sense in a thoroughly contrived way, but that the contrivance was more likely to be mine than Smith’s. It all felt extremely literary, even to my current reaction—it was as though in the last twenty-four hours I had been living my normal life in a speeded-up version, had had the idea for a book last afternoon, written it last night, and was now experiencing the familiar post-creative dumps. I didn’t change anything, but in the last-but-one paragraph underlined the words, ‘His act seems to have become somehow aesthetic’ and scrawled ‘Rubbish!’ in the margin. It is the type of sentiment of which I passionately disapprove. Art is not life.

  The post-box is cleared at 9.15, so after breakfast I walked up the lane in a north-east drizzle, posted my first letter and picked up my Guardian in the village shop. I stayed there to be out of the wet while I waited for the van to come and go, still uncertain whether I was going to post the second letter. From habit I glanced at the headlines, then turned to McAllister’s pocket cartoon at the bottom of page one. I was half-way through one of his interminable captions when my eye was caught by a name in the News in Brief column next door. ‘Author dies,’ it said. ‘Simon Dobbs, biographer of Wilde, Conrad and other major writers, died yesterday after a severe illness at the age of 55. Obituary page 2.’

  * Footnote, to avoid interrupting the flow, but it’s a vital part of the argument. Stags, even in rut, are probably not dangerous. I have read three books on them and talked to a park ranger at Richmond. All four agree that stags can kill, but it’s very rare. One of the books refers to a man being killed in a park in Devon about forty years back. The two others say that there is one authenticated instance of an attack pressed home and resulting in a death. It looks as if that instance must have been Wither. Of course we all believed stags were dangerous. It’s a widely-held myth—they have boards saying so at all the entrances to Richmond, for instance, though the ranger implied that those were really there to stop the deer being bothered. It was certainly accepted at the inquest on Wither. You might think countrymen would know better, but they didn’t. Look what a shambles they made of the cull, for instance. The inquest, incidentally, was held in Exeter. I remember the coroner only vaguely, as a thin grey man in a black suit—a solicitor, I should think, but certainly a townsman. The whole question whether stags do attack people makes much more sense as soon as you accept that Wither was not killed by one, thus removing the only documented instance of such an attack. This, with Smith’s marriage to Annette and (if you accept it as true) what he told me yesterday, are facts from the real world, not part of my novel, which have to be accounted for. If it weren’t for them I think I could write the whole thing off as my own paranoia.

  14

  It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that ‘Steen’ and ‘Dobbs’ are not merely invented names, but the names of characters who are only loosely modelled on real people. No two such monuments adorn our literary landscape. And ‘Molly Benison’ too. There are echoes in her of more than one (I hope) of the rackety beauties of her period, but which of them it she? If any?

  Is the reader to assume that the whole of this book, with the exception of some decorative details from my childhood, is pure invention, and that the palaver about my ‘novel’ is only a bit of fashionable fooling around with notions of truth and fiction, fun for some, tedious for most?

  Not really. It is all as true as I have been able to make it. I said this on page one, but the phrase is of course ambiguous. Even supposing I had the literary ability to get the whole truth down, there would still have been areas in which I was not able (in another sense) to tell the truth.

  As I have explained, it all began when I was writing a quite different book. I was then asked to recall some trivial details about my childhood and found myself almost unable to do so because of a mysterious blanking-out of memory. I then seemed to myself to overcome this problem by casting my memories into fictional form, and started to write an autobiographical novel. But in the course of doing this discovered (or thought I discovered) that the events I was trying to remember added up to a pattern of some horror. At least one of the people involved was still alive, so the laws of libe
l made it impossible for me to publish my ideas, while the discovery itself made it impossible to finish the novel. And the death of ‘Dobbs’ seemed to me to close, both practically and emotionally, the possibility of further investigation. He had been my reader, the sole audience of my bizarre parade. With him gone there was no point in going on with it.

  But it was not quite laid to rest. Writing of any other kind was clearly impossible until all this material had been put into some kind of self-explanatory shape and tidied away. The quickest solution was to botch together a book out of my MS, letters from and to ‘Dobbs’, and some linking passages. There was clearly no possibility of publication, so I put it all in a drawer and went back to the novel I had abandoned in mid-stream when ‘Dobbs’ first asked me to remember what I could about ‘Molly Benison’. (These quotation marks are a nuisance—perhaps­ the reader will be good enough to supply them notionally for these last few pages.)

  Early on in the book you have in your hands I mention, half-jokingly, my apprehension that ‘my encounter with this enticing but ultimately frigid material might have … the effect of rendering me impotent.’ (I have only now noticed the coincidence between this notion and the affair between Molly and Steen.) The apprehension was justified. I got nowhere. The miseries of not being able for weeks on end to produce one bearable page of manuscript are considerable, but too boring to describe. In desperation I got my botched-up documents out of their drawer and sent them to my long-suffering publisher with a note saying that I knew they were no use but she might like to see what I’d been up to. (I suppose I imagined that having one person read the stuff and thus getting it minimally published might somehow appease the obsession which I felt was still blocking my ordinary work.)

  I think she can’t have read the covering letter, or else thought that my disclaimers were mere self-deprecation. At any rate she seems to have read the book as fiction. Not surprisingly she said she found it ‘confusing’—this was still at the stage when everyone had two names, remember—and doubted the wisdom of using real people in quite the way I had; though most of them were dead, there was still the question of taste, and if anyone was alive there might be libel. But she didn’t see why these difficulties shouldn’t be cleared up. She made practical proposals, and in general wrote as though she were dealing with a novel which was in its last stages of being tinkered with before acceptance for publication.