The Dark Side of the Mirror

by Pat Herbert

  Anbolin’s little black eyes gleamed, however, as she took the food from him eagerly.

  The two men watched her munch happily for a few moments, and then asked her again. “Come on, Anbolin,” said Bernard. “Tell us. We’re all agog. How have you managed to find out all this?”

  “Because,” she said through a mouthful of pie, “I have been in contact with the other twin, Danton.”

  “Oh,” said Robbie. “I never thought of that, I rather assumed he was dead as well.”

  “Oh yes,” said Anbolin triumphantly. “He is. Completely dead.”

  Summer, 1956

  Chief Inspector Neverholme was fidgety. It had been a quiet few months, with no juicy murders to get his teeth into, not even an armed robbery or a daring bank raid of any sort. Why, he grumbled to himself, do the local citizens have to be so law-abiding? There had been that nasty business last year in Bockhampton Road, but Scotland Yard had muscled in on that and left him stewing on the sidelines. It didn’t seem to matter that the double murder had occurred on his patch; the business was much too high-profile for a mere local plod to deal with. Or so he was told, in a roundabout way.

  He stared out of the window. The weather was almost beating him as well. He had removed his jacket and tie, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Sweat was pouring from his forehead and causing his shirt to stick to his back. He was very uncomfortable but, more annoyingly, he was bored. The heat wouldn’t bother him so much if he had some difficult case to solve.

  But then, as if in answer to his unspoken prayer, a rather unkempt looking individual popped his head around his office door.

  “Watcha, Tone,” said the head. “How’s tricks?”

  Anthony Neverholme turned to see the head enter his room attached to the body of Max Bucket, private investigator. He knew Max of old, and rather liked him, even though he was often a thorn in his side, hampering his methodical police work by cutting corners and turning up the culprit first.

  “Hello, Max. What brings you round here? Thought you’d be sunbathing in the park on a day like this. After all there’s no murders to investigate, as far as I’m aware.”

  Max Bucket sat down in the chair facing Neverholme’s desk. “No murders, eh?” he grinned. He, like the Chief Inspector, was reduced to his shirt sleeves, and his tie was tucked into his trousers pocket. He was of middle height and middle years, with middling complexion and middle parting in his sparse hair. He had a round open face with a Cupid bow of a mouth that made him look like a disreputable cherub.

  “That’s what I said.” Neverholme stood up. “Tell you what, let’s get a couple of beers and go and sit in the park. I hope you’ve got something interesting up your sleeve, because I’m bored out of my brains sitting here.”

  Max Bucket stood up at once. “After you, squire,” he said brightly. “I think you’ll find what I have to tell you interesting – very interesting indeed.”

  Little more than fifteen minutes later, they were seated on a park bench, beer bottles in hands.

  “Ugh!” said Neverholme, swigging his beer and wiping the froth from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Warm beer! Nothing worse.”

  “Well, nothing keeps cold this weather,” observed Bucket, swigging his beer contentedly. It was a bonus to get bought a drink on a day like this, and by his old sparring partner, Tony Neverholme. He liked and admired the man enormously, even if he was a trifle curmudgeonly at times.

  “True, I suppose,” sighed Neverholme. He wasn’t looking forward to being home on time that evening, but with nothing to occupy him at work he didn’t really have much choice. His wife was always nagging him, and the meals she cooked weren’t worth clocking in for either. Most of the time his work detained him at the station and her food saw the inside of the dustbin which, in Neverholme’s opinion, was where it belonged. Now, he hoped, Max Bucket was bringing him something to keep him from going home to his family at six o’clock.

  “Now, what is it, man? You’ve had my beer, now spill the beans. You look like a cat that’s got the cream.”

  “Well, it is interesting, that’s for sure. It concerns a possible miscarriage of justice. Well, two, in fact.”

  Neverholme’s heart sank. Miscarriages of justice in his experience generally fitted into the nine to five category with no bother. He wanted something that would burn the midnight oil, something that couldn’t wait. He loved his wife and his son, Terry; at least that is what he told himself. But time spent away from them was usually the time he enjoyed the most. Terry, especially, was a difficult teenager; but then he had been a difficult child from the beginning. It would have helped if his wife had let him take the strap to the boy once in a while. A good hiding never did anyone any harm, he said. And he should know. He was regularly beaten as a child, but it hadn’t affected him, except his rump resembled that of a rhinoceros’s.

  “Okay, I’ll buy it,” he said, finishing his beer, and reaching for a cigarette. “Chapter and verse, Max, if you please.” He looked at his watch hopefully. Still only ten to three. “Take as long as you like,” he added.

  Carl Fentiman wasn’t sure what Anbolin Amery-Judge was doing. She had had conversations with his father’s ghost and seemed to be hot on some trail or other, but whether she was making any progress in the matter was something known only to her. In fact, he had heard nothing more from the old dear since her last visit to his garden shed several weeks ago. It was now the middle of August and he was getting fed up with seeing his father hanging there every time he entered the shed to retrieve some gardening implement or other. And it wasn’t always just his father’s ghost. Sometimes it was his uncle’s and, sometimes, both of them together. He had expected Anbolin to have exorcised the ghosts by now; surely she had been able to reassure them that she was doing her best to help them? They both seemed to think they had been wrongly convicted and hanged and Carl, at first, was eager to clear their names, especially his father’s. After all, it reflected badly on the family altogether.

  But now, as he entered the shed for the in search of a rake, he dreaded seeing their ghosts, whining and complaining, demanding some form of action and recompense for their wrongful deaths. Now all he wanted was for them to dematerialise for good and leave him in peace. Whether they were guilty or innocent, he neither knew nor cared now. Why couldn’t they go and harass Basil, he wondered. After all, he had a perfectly good garden shed too, almost identical to his own.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when neither ghost appeared as he entered. He took his rake and made to leave quickly. But just as he opened the door he heard his father’s voice.

  “Any luck yet, son?” it asked faintly.

  He turned, but could see no sign of his father. That was an improvement at least. No body, just a disembodied voice. He could live with that, he thought. But, after a time, he knew that would get on his nerves just as much. It was time for action.

  So he decided to call on the services of Max Bucket, private investigator, who was now telling the story to Chief Inspector Neverholme in the park.

  “So, if you could just look up the file on the Dulcie Mortimer murder,” said Max, concluding his narrative. “See what you can come up with… Fentiman is keen to clear his father’s name, not only for the sake of his family’s reputation, but also so that he could get on with his life without contending with ghosts all day long.”

  “I don’t see how I can be of use, Max,” said Neverholme, stretching out his tweed covered legs and lighting another cigarette. “That was twenty years ago. I wasn’t even in the force then. My predecessor, Ernie Flagg, was heading up that inquiry. I knew him briefly before he retired. Good bloke.”

  “So you think he got it right, then?” asked Max.

  “I’m not saying that, but the case was brought to trial and the man convicted. The twin angle was a complication, but that was overcome.”

  “And then there’s the other murder,” continued Max. “This Flagg bloke would have been on that as well, seeing as how it hap
pened at almost the same time. Bit of a coincidence that one twin should hang for murder and then it turns out that the other twin was a murderer too. Seems a bit too much of a coincidence to my way of thinking.”

  “Maybe so,” said Neverholme thoughtfully. “But coincidences do happen, you know.”

  “They do,” agreed Bucket amiably. “But then there was that serial killer going about at the time, of course.”

  “Serial killer?”

  “Yes. Surely you remember? It was back in the mid-1930s. Three women – all, shall we say, of easy virtue – murdered à la Jack the Ripper. Not all that intestinal stuff of course, but nasty stab wounds in the abdomen. They never caught him. Isn’t it just possible that he should be added into the equation? After all, the murders were committed in the Tooting and Balham areas, I believe.”

  Neverholme couldn’t but admire the man’s thorough knowledge of all things macabre. It certainly bore investigation, that was for sure. He would send for the file on the Dulcie Mortimer murder as soon as he got back to the station, and see if there were any similarities to the serial killer’s victims. He’d need that file, too. It was going to be an interesting afternoon, after all. He might even have to work on into the evening. What a shame.

  Winter, 1937

  It was a bitterly cold, bleak January morning when Ernie Flagg knocked on Beryl Chambers’ front door. He stamped his feet to try to drum some warmth into them as he waited for the door to open. He saw a solitary robin pecking at the hard, unyielding earth and he wished he had some breadcrumbs about his person. Poor little chap, he thought, winters can be so hard for them. He thought with fondness of his little budgie waiting for him at home.

  After a few moments, Beryl opened the door, looking anything but pleased to see him. She was already late for work, and here was this stupid police inspector again. She’d told him all she could and regretted not being able to identify Robespierre Fentiman when faced with his twin. But what could she to do? She had only seen the supposed culprit once, and that wasn’t for more than a few minutes, if that. Her friend Dulcie had dismissed her after a very brief introduction. She had only been brought along in case he didn’t turn up.

  “I’m sorry if this is an inconvenient time for you,” he said meekly, “but I’d just like a chat with you, if I may.”

  “Well, I’m rather late,” she said, flicking her hair back in a somewhat defiant gesture. “But I suppose I might as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb.”

  She stood aside to let him in and he was relieved to see a cheerful fire in the grate of the pristine front parlour. Mrs Chambers, Beryl’s mother, was seated in front of it, reading the paper. She peered up at him over her spectacles as he came towards the fireplace.

  “You must be Mrs Chambers,” he said with a friendly smile. “Please forgive this intrusion but I rather wanted a word with your daughter, if I may.”

  Mrs Chambers did not return his smile. She didn’t like the look of him much, but then she didn’t like the look of many men much. Her own husband had abandoned her after only three years of marriage, leaving her with a small baby, to go off with a hairdresser. Beryl, herself, had been jilted at the altar and, since then, had been stood up by more men than she had had hot dinners.

  “I suppose I can’t stop you if Beryl says it’s all right,” she said grudgingly. She folded her newspaper and got up. “I’ve got the housework to see to anyway.”

  “I hope I haven’t offended your mother,” he said, after she had left the room.

  “Oh, take no notice of her, Inspector,” she said, warming her hands by the fire. “She doesn’t like men – any men – so don’t take it personal.”

  “I see,” he said. “I won’t. Although most women don’t like me, actually. I sometimes think even my wife doesn’t like me.”

  Beryl smiled. He was rather nice, she realised, with those twinkly blue eyes and round, open face. He wasn’t all that old, either; not more than forty she reckoned. Shame he was married.

  “Anyway,” she said, “please sit down. Now what can I tell you? I’ve already said that it’s impossible for me to distinguish between those men. They are like two peas in a pod.”

  “Peas in a pod,” he echoed. “Yes, that about sums them up. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t any little thing that could distinguish them for you. I know you didn’t get much of a look at him, but was there anything at all? A mole, something like that?”

  “Come, inspector,” she said, sitting down in the chair opposite, “I really didn’t get that good a look at him. I didn’t know there would be two of them turn up, now did I?”

  “No it was a bit of a facer,” he replied grimly. “But one of them is guilty as hell and I’d happily hang the other one as well for perverting justice.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Ernie, who was just thawing out and not ready to go back out into the cold, welcomed the idea. “But aren’t I holding you up?”

  “Well,” she said, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece, “I’m going to be hung for an elephant now, never mind a sheep, so I may as well stay at home all day and tell them I was sick. Besides, I don’t particularly want to go out in this weather.”

  “Awful, isn’t it?” agreed Ernie Flagg. “A cup of tea would be very welcome.”

  Beryl went to the kitchen and busied herself preparing the tea. When the tea was brewed she brought it through into the parlour. There was also some fruit cake and biscuits on the tray.

  “This looks a positive feast,” said Ernie appreciatively.

  When the tea was poured, Ernie studied his notebook. “May I ask what work you do – when you go there, that is.” He gave her a friendly wink.

  “I’m a librarian – well, library assistant, I should say. But I’m taking my chartered librarian exams so will be one day.”

  “A librarian, eh? Here in Tooting?”

  “No, Balham, actually. There weren’t any openings at Tooting.”

  Ernie studied the girl closely. She was quite pretty in an understated sort of way, with her best feature definitely being her hair, which was long and lustrous and a rather fetching shade of chestnut. She had an intelligent face, and he put her age at around twenty-five.

  “I see,” he said, making a note in his little book. “I thought you would be a barmaid like Dulcie,” he said. “It seems odd that you should be friends with the likes of her.”

  “That’s a snobbish thing to say,” said Beryl, arching her eyebrows at him. “Don’t you think barmaids should mix with librarians, then?”

  “No, you misunderstand me,” said Ernie, unhappy that he had said the wrong thing. He found he wanted the good opinion of this woman, even though there was no future for them. He thought of his complaining wife at home and compared her unfavourably with this well-spoken young lady who was pouring out his second cup of tea.

  She handed him his refilled cup. “Well, what exactly did you mean?”

  “Just that I can’t quite see how you two would have met – being in such different walks of life.”

  “It’s quite simple, inspector. We were at school together.”

  “Ah, I see. And you accompanied her on her dates with this man Fentiman? Did you like playing gooseberry?” A girl like Beryl had no business being a gooseberry at all; she was much too attractive for that.

  “I wasn’t exactly playing gooseberry, as you put it,” she smiled, relaxed now. “Dulcie asked me to go with her to make sure he hadn’t stood her up. She wanted to make sure he was there as she had something very particular to say to him. She didn’t want him ducking out of it, like.”

  “Something ‘very particular’?” Ernie’s ears pricked up.

  Beryl flushed. “It was a private matter, inspector.”

  “I must remind you, young lady, that this is a murder case. I think you should tell me what this ‘very particular’ matter was.”

  “Look, I promised her that I wouldn’t tell a soul…”

  “But the poor
lady is dead, so it can’t hurt her now. And what you say may help nail her killer.”

  “Well, all right,” she said hesitantly. “She was going to tell him that she was going to have a baby – his baby.”

  Ernie thought as much. This piece of news fitted in with the pathologist’s report, but had been kept out of the papers. “And did she tell him?”

  “She told me that she had told him and that he had ordered her to get rid of it.”

  “All the more reason to kill her if she had refused,” said Ernie, scribbling in his notebook. He still didn’t know how this information would further his cause, but he made a note of it anyway. He put his book back in his inside pocket and thought about going.

  There was an awkward silence between them now, broken only by the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. Ernie still couldn’t quite make up his mind to leave, but knew he had to. He wondered why Beryl wasn’t married, a nice girl like her.

  Back out in the street once more, he sighed as he raised his collar to keep out the biting wind. There was a pile of paperwork at the station waiting for him and he really didn’t want to even think about tackling it, let alone do it.

  He walked slowly towards the station, turning over in his mind the absurdity of the case. Just how could two men, identical as these Fentiman twins were, be able to run rings around the police like this? Then he made a decision. He would charge the man called Robespierre Fentiman and let the other one off with a caution. He knew he had to act soon as he would have to let them both go in another couple of hours. But then he stopped in his tracks. There was a difficulty as they both refused to divulge which one of them was which. So how could he let one go? It could easily be the wrong one. All right, he’d charge both of them, and then see what happened.

  Back at the police station, he made a beeline for the cells where the Fentiman brothers were being held.