Die-Cast (A Peter Marklin Mystery)

by Neville Steed

  ‘...killed him. Only Lavinia got there first,’ Arabella interrupted. ‘A convenient coincidence.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then a thought hit me. ‘Or quite the opposite.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if we are right, Wall must have planned the persecution of Maxwell, and maybe his murder, over a hell of a time, and there is not much satisfaction in vengeance if someone else exacts it, is there? The satisfaction is in striking the blow oneself.’

  ‘You mean, he must have felt robbed?’

  ‘Could be. So he mutilated Maxwell’s face, instead. And maybe even that wasn’t enough. He had to get at Maxwell’s child, as Maxwell had got at his.’

  ‘And what about poor Mrs Wall? Do you think she knew?’

  I pointed to the piece of blotting paper resting on the bedside table.

  ‘Probably. She was just as much a religious fanatic as her husband. Trouble is, you can’t really tell from what little we can decipher of that missing note.’

  ‘Only that she seemed to have suffered some mental problems for years. All that “ills made during the war” bit. I wonder if she was injured or affected by air raids or something.’

  ‘Who knows? I wish she’d written her suicide note fair and square on the blotter, rather than at an angle. Then we’d have had all of it.’

  ‘Where do you think the note went?’

  ‘Well, either Wall had already discovered her body earlier that afternoon, and destroyed the note for some reason, or perhaps she had destroyed it herself, or it’s still somewhere in the house.’

  ‘Or she’d posted it to someone.’

  I leaned forward and picked up the piece of blotting paper. ‘I know you’d like to get a little sleep, but do you mind if we look at these indentations just once more?’

  Arabella shook her head. ‘Read it out again.’

  ‘Okay. First bit of a line, “...d’s sake...” That could be “God’s sake”. Then, second bit of a line, “...on the edge of a cliff...” Third line, “...ills made during the war...”. Fourth line, “...late to save me now...”. Last line, “...ngel...”. Must be “angel” and “Please God forgive me”. I sighed. ‘I can’t make anything more of it than I did before, really. Something like, “For God’s sake, I’m on the edge of a cliff”, or “have been living on the edge of a cliff”, something, something, maybe, “all due to ills made during the war. Far too late to save me now”. Ending with a plea for forgiveness to some unspecified angel and her Maker.’

  ‘Curious use of words, sometimes.’

  ‘Maybe she was already succumbing to her overdose by then.’

  ‘Maybe, but the handwriting, though erratic, doesn’t tail off, nor does the pressure of the pen. The indentations in the blotting paper aren’t any fainter at the end than at the start of the note.’

  I rose and began pacing the room once more. ‘I’ll read it out to Blake on the phone in the morning.’

  ‘Meanwhile, it might mean money by then if you slept on it, you know.’ Arabella smiled, patting the sheets beside her. It was at that moment that the events of that dramatic Sunday finally caught up with me, and, on my next circuit, I just collapsed on to the bed beside her. She said I went out even quicker than a Citroën rusts.

  *

  The three and a half hours’ rest had not made the blotting paper any more meaningful, despite an extra half hour’s examination after tiptoeing down the stairs so as not to wake Arabella.

  Bing greeted me with hooded blue eyes, and an expression that said, ‘Whiskas at dawn is becoming too much of a good thing.’ I subsided into a chair with a Nescafé. I had hardly drained it to the little brown bits, before I was shattered into red alert by a hammering on the front door that could have woken the dead. My immediate reaction was a raising of the heartbeat to a million a minute, until I realised there could be only one person with a knock like that at such a frail hour of the day. And when I unslid the bolts, there he was, strong as an ox and twice as smart.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Gus asked as he trod his usual mud into the kitchen. ‘Arabella wouldn’t bloody tell me yesterday.’

  ‘It wasn’t a case of wouldn’t, it was couldn’t, Gus. Honest, all she knew was that I had gone to make some enquiries in Buckinghamshire.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sniffed, ‘she told me that bit.’

  ‘Well, that’s all she knew. She didn’t hear from me again until after I had left Weymouth police station.’ Gus raised his hedge-like eyebrows and smiled. ‘And what, old lad, were you doing down there, might I make so bold?’

  So I told him. ‘And I’m just sitting here now, Gus, tapping my fingers, whilst Tara-Lee rots away somewhere, Inspector Blake has his three Shredded Wheats before going to the Yard, and Wall stares with the rivets of his eyes into a mirror and says, “Who’s the cleverest lunatic in the world, then?”. Really, if I was a bomb, I’d be in a thousand pieces by now.’

  ‘Calm down, old son,’ Gus said, and went over to the toaster. ‘Can I make you some breakfast? You look as if you need something.’

  I smiled weakly. ‘Okay, Gus, go ahead. I like three thick slices of toast, half an inch of butter, marmalade like it’s going out of fashion and four cups of coffee, half and half.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Gus winked, ‘that’s exactly how I like it.’ He cut two slices of bread and popped them in the toaster. ‘I’ll do yours in a minute. We’ve got a lot of thinking to do.’

  ‘We’ve?’ I queried.

  ‘Well, I’ll do it on my own, if you like.’ Gus smiled broadly. ‘Now let me see that bit of old blotting paper.’ I gave it to him, and his only response was, ‘Well, go on then.’

  ‘Go on with what?’

  ‘Make that call.’

  I looked at my watch.

  ‘It’s still too early to catch Blake.’

  ‘Not Blake, you great berk. Muir, Wall, him.’

  ‘What to say?’

  ‘Get him going. Worry him. Torment him a bit, like you think he was doing to Maxwell.’

  ‘But what good...?’ then suddenly I saw the sense in what Gus was suggesting. I told you everyone should have a pain in the arse like Gus as a friend.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ I smiled.

  *

  It took a little time for him to answer the phone.

  ‘Muir here.’

  ‘Wall there,’ I retorted. ‘How are you feeling this morning, Wall?’

  ‘Tired, Mr Marklin, tired. I didn’t get back from the hospital and the police until 2.30 or so. Mind you, that was mainly my fault. They would have let me go earlier, but because of your wild accusations, I was determined to give a full and frank a report of our tragic past.’

  ‘Forget all that sanctimonious garbage, Wall. Remember your eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Well, I’m taking a leaf out of another book, the gospel according to Marklin, Chapter One, verses one, two, three and four. They read as follows: “And if a man cause a blemish to a little girl of eight; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him. But twice over, breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. And he shall be given no rest, no peace, no, not for a single moment of a single hour, until judgement day...’”

  ‘Don’t be blasphemous, Mr Marklin.’

  I laughed out loud. ‘That’s wonderful, Wall, coming from you. You’re a living, breathing, walking, talking blasphemy. And I can prove it.’ I waited for a reaction to my lie.

  There was silence for a moment, then he said, still as cool as ever. ‘The fact that my daughter had met Maxwell once, you mean. That’s not proof.’

  ‘I wasn’t referring to that, Wall. I found a note your wife had written before her death.’

  ‘A note?’ For the first time I detected a tremor in his voice.

  ‘A note, Wall, and guess what it said?’

  ‘You can’t have. There wasn’t a note.’

  ‘Oh yes there was.’

  ‘There wasn’t. The police searched everywhere.’

  ‘I
’d found it first.’

  Another silence, and then he said, ‘A suicide note?’

  ‘No,’ I tried.

  I heard him draw in a breath.

  ‘It said you had taken Tara-Lee.’

  Another gap, then he muttered: ‘Mr Marklin, if you persist in presenting me with your wild accusations and inventions, I shall have to file a complaint with the police.’

  ‘File it,’ I said, and put the receiver down with a crash. I turned to Gus with a smile of my own.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Now I’m pretty sure that blotting paper has a little more to offer than an apology for suicide.’

  16

  It was Arabella who cracked it. Gus and I had been working on the note for over half an hour when Arabella came downstairs and joined us over yet another (for us) cup of coffee.

  ‘We need a cloning machine,’ I said, as she poured milk on her muesli.

  ‘Like Woody Allen had in Sleeper,’ she grinned, ‘when he was asked to clone a whole president from just the nose.’

  ‘Precisely. Then we could clone the rest of the note. It’s very important we do because...’ And I told her about my telephone conversation with Wall.

  ‘Hell! Let me have it,’ she said, ‘and let’s see if my few more hours’ sleep have added any charge to my brain cells.’ I gave her what we had made of the note so far, which was basically the same as we had deduced the previous evening. I wondered how she could think over the noise of Gus slurping, but suddenly she remarked, ‘Maybe we’re missing a trick. We’re assuming only the obviously unfinished words are incomplete — for instance, “ds” being “Gods” and “ngel” being “angel”.’ She looked across at me. ‘But take that odd phrase “ills made during the war”. It’s puzzled me since the beginning. Wouldn’t it be more usual to have said “ills created during the war” or “caused by the war” or “originated through the war”, if she was referring to some mental or physical problem caused by it?’

  ‘What are you getting at, dear?’ Gus mumbled.

  ‘Well, it’s occurred to me that “ills” could be an incomplete word too. I mean there are quite a few words that end in “ill”.’

  ‘Thrills,’ I said. Then more seriously, ‘Pills.’

  ‘Ah,’ Gus perked up. ‘She could have been referring to the pills she took.’

  ‘I would doubt they were made as long ago as the forties, Gus.’

  ‘Lots of mine are,’ Gus grinned. ‘Me cascara tablets, for a start.’

  ‘Drills. Sills. Tills,’ I continued, ignoring him. ‘It has to be a noun.’

  ‘Gills. Hills,’ Arabella continued.

  ‘Hills. That would go with the “cliff’ of the line above, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘But hills weren’t made during the war.’

  ‘Only little ones,’ Gus smirked, ‘for gun emplacements.’

  I suddenly sat bolt upright. ‘What did you say, Gus?’

  He looked startled. ‘Only mentioned little hills, old lad, gun emplacements, you know. Ones made in the war, like at Osmington...’

  ‘...Mills,’ I shouted. ‘That could be it, don’t you see?’ I leapt up from the table. ‘From Muir’s reaction to my mentioning the possibility of another note, about Tara-Lee, I guessed his wife might have been writing a note about her. And that note, if we were lucky, might mention where she might be found.’

  ‘“On the edge of a cliff”,’ Arabella read out, ‘at Osmington Mills. That makes sense. But “made during the war” still doesn’t.’

  ‘It might,’ I countered, ‘if more of the note was missing than we assumed. For instance, it could be something, something, something “on the edge of a cliff’, like, “You’ll find Tara-Lee hidden” etcetera. Then the “somethings” before “ills” might be “in a gun position” or whatever “at Osmington Mills made during the war” — almost like Gus said just now about little hills.’

  Arabella leant over and kissed Gus. I missed his reaction, as I was hell-bent for the phone. For I knew I had some vital calls to make.

  *

  We went in Arabella’s Golf. Not because it was pouring with rain, but because it was fast and Wall had never seen it. Gus, naturally, insisted on riding in the front. I didn’t mind so much this time, as I saw from the bulge near his crutch that he had brought along his clandestine Colt that a soldier had sold him for a fiver during the war.

  We took the first of the turnings down to the sea, the one that led to Ringstead Bay, for the gun emplacement we had earmarked for exploration was the one on the cliff that formed a bridge between there and Osmington Mills itself — the very emplacement near which Tara-Lee had spotted the ghostly white figure the hide-and-seek afternoon. For, whilst even that route would not afford us much of an element of surprise, we guessed it was a tidy bit more discreet than climbing up from Osmington itself — the route that Wall would most likely assume we would choose.

  We parked opposite one of the holiday homes by the beach, all now locked and shuttered and rather eerie, waiting for the spring to bring back laughter and light, cars for their garages, dinghies for their drives.

  ‘Now, you must promise to stay here, Arabella.’ I climbed out of the car after Gus, and saw him wince as his gun obviously caught on something it shouldn’t. (I prayed he had the safety catch on.)

  ‘But it’s safer with three. He wouldn’t kill three, would he?’ she said, in reality, knowing the answer.

  ‘If he’ll kill two, he’ll kill three. And, anyway, you will be needed here. If there’s an emergency, Gus will fire his gun into the air. You’ll hear it.’

  ‘You’re a stubborn idiot, you know,’ she said, through the open driver’s window. ‘You should have let the police handle the whole of this. If Tara-Lee’s there, that’s it. You didn’t need to stick your neck out.’

  ‘It’s not it, and you know it.’ I leaned forward and kissed her. ‘If a battalion of police storms the place, and he’s there, he’s crazy enough to kill her, if he hasn’t done so already. And secondly, when he sees them coming, he can pretend he’s just on a cliff walk, and what a coincidence, Tara-Lee is found just as he’s passing.’

  ‘The last bit he could bluff out with you, too.’

  ‘I don’t think so. If he thinks I’ve come alone...’ I stopped suddenly, as I could see the alarm mounting on Arabella’s face. ‘Anyway,’ I said quickly, ‘we’re wasting time. Now remember, stay by the car. That’s where you’ll be most help.’

  I waved, and then Gus and I sprinted along the dirt road in front of the empty homes, which soon narrowed into a footpath to start its curve up the cliff. The bushes each side of the path thinned, Gus and I parted as planned, and I continued alone along the main path up the incline, but now at only a brisk walking pace.

  Although the rain had now eased off into that thin, grey drizzle that is so typical of the south-west, drips constantly ran down my face, sometimes blurring my vision for a split second, as they welled around my eyes. And I remembered the night it had really all begun, the night of the party, of Longhurst’s outburst and the night of the first ghost. As I climbed, my confidence began ebbing, the confidence that I would find Tara-Lee at all, let alone alive, that I could force a confession out of Wall, and even that I would survive any kind of encounter. Suddenly a shrill cry startled me. I peered ahead, but it was only a seagull complaining that winter was on its way. I wondered who might be the next to scream.

  *

  The gun emplacement seemed to be embraced by its very own veil of mist, almost like a ghostly halo, and I shivered, but not from the wet and the cold. I maintained my pace towards it as if I were some late autumn tourist, fascinated by the relics of wars long over. I looked around carefully, but there was no sign of life, just the mound, the concrete and the black slits through which death would have been delivered, had an enemy dared to land on the coast.

  Before I actually attempted to enter, I looked over to the left towards Osmington Mills, nestling
in the valley beneath, but it was shrouded in mist, and I cursed the fact that visibility was now reduced to only about two hundred yards, and rapidly getting worse. I crossed my fingers, prayed Gus knew what he was doing, and dropped down into the shadowy concrete interior.

  I took a torch out from my anorak pocket, and shone it around. There was some straw, an old Coke can or two, and the inevitable old rubber sheath, but no sign of anything that indicated Tara-Lee might have been there at any time. To say I was disappointed was certainly the understatement of my time. I peered out of each of the slits to check whether anyone was about, but the mist now had closed in even more, and I felt unbelievably isolated and alone. I shone my torch once more around the graffiti-covered walls, but there was no place a child or a body could have been hidden that I could see. But, though sick with disappointment and frustration, I was not over-surprised, as I realized the gun emplacements could well have been searched already in the police hunt for Tara-Lee.

  I was about to return outside to check the turf in the immediate surroundings of the pillbox, to see if it had been recently disturbed, when I spotted something that seemed slightly odd. The straw on the floor came from a bale that some local farmer had obviously placed there many months, or even years, before. What was left of it (about half) was propped up opposite one of the gun-slits, through which rain was driving, leaving the floor in that area dark with damp. But it was obvious the bale had been moved very recently indeed, as the damp area alongside it was very uneven.

  I bent down and moved the bale a foot further along. It was even wetter under the bale than beside it. I got up again, put my arms around the straw, and lifted it across to the other side of the pillbox. Then I knelt down and explored with my torch the area of floor where it had been resting. When I brushed away the damp pieces of straw and debris, the floor seemed to be composed of large concrete sections, cemented together, but the pointing around one smaller section seemed to have been disturbed. I took a small penknife from my pocket, and inserted it along one edge. It sank in without resistance. But before I could fully appreciate my discovery, I heard a grating noise behind me. I whipped my head around and saw, with horror, that one of the gun-slits was now being used for its original purpose — only this time, the firearm was not pointing out. It was pointing in — and at me.