This Private Plot (25 page)

“Perhaps he was sick,” Effie suggested. “Perhaps those illiterate daughters threw out all the papers with the old bed linen.”

“Perhaps he just wanted a rest,” Oliver ventured. “He'd written getting on for a million words. Thirty-seven plays. Thirty-nine, if you allow for those last collaborations.”

“Do you know of any other writer who didn't keep on writing to the end?” Toby asked. “All those unfinished works—
Sanditon
,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
,
Sunset at Blandings
,
The Salmon of Doubt
. Writers write. Writers can't
not
write. But Shakespeare, the greatest of them all, stopped.”

He lapsed into silence again.

“You think he didn't stop,” Effie said. “You think there may have been manuscripts after all, which were buried with him when he died.”

“I'm not the first person to consider that,” Toby said. “Nor am I the first person to try to look inside the grave to see. Well, when I found that forgotten cellar and the century-old beginnings of a tunnel, I knew what I had to do. I had to finish the job.”

“Surely paper wouldn't survive burial for four hundred years?” Effie said.

“Parchment might,” said Toby. “I had to see. Even if we don't find anything intact, just some hint that there was something, once. A lump of sealing wax, the remains of a leather wallet. Then at least we'd know. I just wanted to know.”

“Which is why your initial team of two or three earth-sifters mysteriously blossomed to ten, no doubt including a couple of civil engineering graduates. How far did you get?”

“We've mostly been tunneling through gravel, although there are one or two spots where we had to go through sandstone. But it's agonizing work—most of the digging is by hand, in a very confined space. The toughest challenge, though, is keeping the noise down. Luckily, we could put the pumps and generators we needed down in the cellar. We haul the earth out in sacks, then winch them up through the cellar opening. Our first thought was to dump it straight into the river, but we were afraid it would clog up the lock.”

“And that's where Eric came in?”

“At first he was there just to help bail out the cellar. But when we found the tunnel and I called in the rest of the team, he was very keen to stay on. I didn't even have to pay him. Every night, close to midnight—and presumably after he'd finished humping whichever Bennet sister had drawn that day's short straw—he'd meet me at the island, and we'd fill up his van with the dirt we'd dug out that day. Just a few wheelbarrow loads at a time, across that rickety bridge. He'd drive me home, then go off and empty out the van. I don't know where.”

I do,
thought Oliver. Wherever it took his fancy. Into road works or country lanes or any other holes opened up by Synne's gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers.

“What happens to the tunnel when you're finished?” Effie asked.

“It's rigged to collapse,” Toby told her. “Set off some minor charges on the key props, and the whole thing comes down. A tiny tsunami on the Avon that nobody will notice, a brief tidal bore that dissipates when it reaches the weir. Nobody will know we were there.”

Oliver scrambled to his feet and offered a hand to Toby.

“Let's go,” he said brusquely. Toby stayed where he was, looking up at his brother quizzically.

“Where?”

“To the island. If there be any good thing to be done, we're going to collapse that tunnel now. Hide every piece of evidence, before it's too late.”

Toby stared at him. “Why are you so angry about this?” he asked.

“Because who knows how many laws you've already broken, little brother.”

“Why, Ollie?” Toby asked again.

Oliver ran his hands through his lank, blond hair. “Because it's dangerous, Toby,” he said, with sad affection. “You could be buried alive down there. And you know that Mother would blame me.”

Toby looked down, wrapping his arms around his knees. “I wasn't, though, was I?” he said, his voice muffled. “Buried alive, I mean. You see, we're finished. We broke through to the grave this morning. I got the call just after you left the church.”

“And?” Effie whispered.

Toby shook his head, still hiding his face. “And all for nothing. Just human remains. The whole escapade's been a waste of time.”

“No parchment?”

“No parchment.”

“Never mind the parchment!” Oliver exclaimed. “Toby, you saw him! You saw Shakespeare. What was that like?”

Toby looked up. “As you'd expect. Old, old bones, nothing more. No epiphanies, no magic. I didn't swoon on the spot with the significance of it all. William died, William was buried, William returned into dust, the dust is earth.” He stretched and stood up slowly.

“But it was Shakespeare's dust. The quintessence!” said Oliver breathlessly.

“It's not really the place for a mystical experience, Ollie. You're wearing breathing equipment and overalls and a flashlight on your head, you're toting night vision cameras and radio equipment, it's cramped and dark and dirty and hot and claustrophobic and very, very wet, and you're worn out by the time you get there, and all the while you're wondering if you even have the strength to get back out again.”

He started to walk around the memorial, from Hamlet clutching Yorick's skull toward the draped form of Lady Macbeth, dreaming of washing her hands. The others kept pace, rapt.

“The coffin was pretty well rotted away,” Toby continued, “but the space was still there. We got our geophysics right. We came in from the side, near the head, just intrusive enough to snake in the fiber-optic night vision camera and let it take a good look around. There was nothing. At least, nothing that the worms had left us.”

He turned the corner and headed toward Falstaff.

“What about the curse?” Oliver asked. “You didn't forbeare to dig the dust, as instructed. Aren't you scared now?

“‘Cursed be he that moves my bones,'” Toby quoted. He laughed indulgently. “I told you, Ollie, it was a piece of anonymous doggerel, added so that Will could hold on to his prime real estate. But we didn't move his bones. Not because of the curse. Because of respect. And then we collapsed the tunnel.”

“What?” Oliver and Effie exclaimed simultaneously.

Toby leaned on the jovial bronze Falstaff, turning to face the others with a similarly amused expression. “Yes, Oliver, there's no need to play Big Brother and bury my mistakes for me. As soon as we'd found out what we needed, we got our equipment out of the tunnel and set off the explosives. Tomorrow, we'll finish cleaning up the site as if nothing had ever happened.”

“Something did happen though,” Oliver commented, pinching his upper lip. “Dennis Breedlove tried to blackmail you.”

“That again? I told you, I never received any blackmail note. What could Dennis have got out of me, anyway?”

“Had you found anything in that grave, it would have been worth a pretty penny.”

“None of us was in it for what we could make.”

“Oh yes, you were. What you could make was a name for yourselves. Hide the tunnel, get your cover story straight, and your little team becomes world famous as the discoverers of Shakespeare's missing plays. That's what you all dreamed of, deep inside. That dream may be dead now, but it was very much alive last week when, out of nowhere, a letter arrived threatening to reveal what you're up to unless you pay up thirty pieces of silver. And then what did you do, Toby? Pay?” He leaned forward. “Isn't it safer to track down the blackmailer and kill him?” he hissed.

“I didn't get any letter,” Toby protested. “And I certainly didn't kill Dennis.”

“But he did wheedle the whole story of this foolhardy expedition out of you?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you've been known to drive Eric's van, which was seen going by the Common on the night of the murder, very near the time it must have been committed.”

“I only—”

“And the damp earth from your dig was dumped out of that van into Breedlove's front garden, to make room for the body of an old man and a stolen stepladder.”

“You can't—”

“Even though Eric himself was apparently despoiling Davina at the time.”

“No he wasn't.”

“Yes he was. Geoffrey was watching him till nearly midnight.”

“The time is out of joint,” Toby said. “Eric was at the dig by ten o'clock that night, earlier than usual. I was going to ask him why, but then he got a text and hurried off.”

“Must have been another night.”

“No, it was definitely the night of the murder. Don't you remember? I had to hitchhike home. I told you the next day.”

The brothers continued to stare at each other. Effie watched in silence.

“Ollie, I didn't—” Toby began again, imploringly.

“Didn't kill Dennis Breedlove?” Oliver reached out and straightened Toby's collar. “Of course you didn't, you whingeing little clotpole. I never thought you did. You just needed that smile knocked off your face. Come on, we have an alibi to break.”

He turned away abruptly, heading for the car park.

Chapter Thirty-four

Saturday evening (continued)

Getting no answer to her knock, Effie effortlessly picked the lock of Mormal's flat in Pigsneye, and they trooped into the bedroom, already familiar from DoctorPeeper-dot-com. They found the camera on top of a wardrobe, its lens poking through a hole in an old cardboard suitcase. Beside the wardrobe, just out of the camera's range, was a small desk, on which Mormal had stacked a computer and several external hard drives. Effie flicked on the computer and found a list of passwords and IDs in an untidy drawer. Within a few moments, she had located the video that Eric and Davina recorded on the night of Breedlove's murder and left Oliver and Toby watching in fast-forward while she prowled around the cluttered room, opening more drawers and sniffing inside containers.

At sixteen times the normal speed, the convulsing pair seem to change position every three seconds, but Oliver was still surprised at how much time they spent in post-coital pillow talk. Then they jumped out of bed and dressed. The screen went blank.

“It's over,” he announced.

Effie was peering distastefully into the wardrobe. She shut the door rapidly and checked her watch.

“It can't be,” she said, returning to the desk. “Geoffrey claimed they were at it for three hours.” She pulled her curls back behind her head, snapped an elastic band around them, and started to click her way into the DoctorPeeper logs. Oliver glanced around, noting the odd sensation of seeing the same bed he'd just been watching on the screen, similarly tousled but now unoccupied.

“Okay, here's what happened,” Effie said. “You just saw the live broadcast, which started at about eight o'clock. It lasted an hour and ten minutes. At that point, Eric paused the transmission, uploaded the recording he'd just made to the website's server, and set it to replay continuously. It was turned off at 11:44 p.m. exactly, which is when he must have come home.” She swiveled to face the others. “Pornography is, of course, predictable and repetitive,” she remarked. “That's part of its charm. But you'd think that even a simpleton like Geoffrey Angelwine would notice that he'd witnessed the same performance three times in a row!”

“So where was Eric between 9:10 and 11:44 p.m.?” Oliver said.

“He turned up at the dig at about 9:30 p.m.,” said Toby. “He stayed for about an hour, and then got a call or a text and pissed off. He normally doesn't arrive until elevenish. It looks like Davina cut him off early. She did appear a bit cross in the recording.”

“Geoffrey mentioned the same thing.”

Effie played the closing moments of the video again, this time at normal speed. She froze the playback on Davina. But the camera set-up offered her no close-up, and the young woman's face was distant and indistinct.

“I wonder what caused her to get so angry?” she said.

“Perhaps it just occurred to her that she'd been shagging Eric Mormal?” Oliver suggested.

Effie let the video finish, Davina storming from the room, Eric stealthily approaching the off-screen computer, presumably to stop the recording and arrange to broadcast the replay. Again, Oliver was struck by the dislocation between the real and the recorded. He couldn't help glancing behind him, and recoiled as he came face-to-face with the real Mormal, who had crept into the room without their hearing. Mormal leaped backwards even further.

“Don't you hit me again!” he whined. “You're a bleedin' menace, you are, Oliver Swithin.” Mormal's still-swollen tongue gave him a mild lisp—the last word came out as “Thwithin.” “Oh hello, Tobe,” he continued. “Do you need the van again?”

Toby shook his head. He swallowed, uncertain how to play the new situation. “Not anymore, Eric. We're all done with the tunnel. Just this afternoon.”

“Anything come out yet?”

“No. It was—”

“Hang on, I'll put the kettle on. Won't keep you.” Mormal slipped out of the room and went into his small kitchen. Toby shifted a pile of dirty clothes from the only armchair and sat down. Effie stayed at the desk, writing. Mormal came back a minute later, throwing his car keys and phone onto the bed. “Spent the day in bed, thanks to this bully,” he explained, with a nod toward Oliver. “First time I've been out—nipped into Shipthton-on-Thtour for a latte.”

“You don't seem surprised to see us,” Oliver noted.

Mormal pointed to his bruised jawline. “Thought you were back to gloat over your handiwork. Either that or you're sniffing for free samples from Doctor Peeper. Give Effie a thrill.”

“You can thrill me by telling us who killed your business partner,” Effie murmured, without turning round.

“What are you talking about? Dennis committed suicide.”

“You know he didn't, Eric,” said Oliver. “Because you were there that night. You went to Dennis's house from the dig. You dumped out the earth you'd collected into his front garden, you slipped down the lane to get the church stepladder, and then you drove him up to the Shakespeare Race.”

Mormal took a deep breath and sat on the bed, lying back on his elbows. “Wow!” he said slowly—and successfully, since the word was free of s's. For a moment, the scratching of Effie's pencil was the only sound in the room.

“Okay, Thyerlock, you got me,” Mormal continued unexpectedly. “That's all true. My, um, business with Davvy had ended a little sooner than expected, so I went round to work at the dig early and loaded up the van with the day's dirt. And then I realized it was the first of the month, and I needed to pay Uncle Dennis his monthly stipend. So I popped in on the way home. But get this:
He was already dead when I got there.”

Mormal waited a second, gauging the reactions in the room. They seemed to please him. “Thtrangled,” he resumed. “With a thkipping rope. Gave me quite a turn, I can tell you.” He shook his head. “Who can have done this? I asked myself. And right then, I saw there was a letter on his desk, just like the letter I got when Dennis started blackmailing me. It was clear to me that it was all about Toby's Shakespeare project. I assumed that Toby had received the letter earlier that day, rushed over to the house clutching it, and killed Breedlove.”

“I didn't!” Toby shouted, but Oliver signaled him to be quiet.

Mormal grabbed a tissue from a box beside his bed and blew his nose. “I didn't want my dear old school chum to get arrested, so I tried to cover up the murder. I thought if I strung the body up using the same rope, it might hide the strangulation marks and look like he'd hung himself.”

“Hanged,” Oliver murmured.

“Hanged? Really? Well, hanging made me think of the old Synne Oak, the village gallows. A good place to leave him, a long way from the real scene of the crime. But in the fuss, I left the letter behind, just like you did, Tobe. Still, I thought, nobody else could connect it to dear my old mate, Toby Swithin.” He sighed deeply and loudly. “Sorry. I reckoned without your smartarse big brother. Can't choose your relatives, eh?”

“I was at the dig on the evening of Breedlove's death,” Toby said, glaring at Mormal, “before you arrived and after you left. The others will vouch for me.”

“Ah, Toby, Toby, I can see what you're doing there. But trust me, mate, it won't stand up as an alibi. Any smart lawyer could sow doubt. ‘Oi, Lord Snooty, are you sure it was the first of May you're remembering, or was it the second or the third?'” Mormal slipped into an overwrought impression of one of Toby's fellow Oxford diggers. “‘Oh I say, m'lud, now you mention it, one's brain does get so bleedin' fluffy over dates when one's been sluicing Chateau Lafitte all night, what, what, what?'” He laughed, not caring that the others didn't join in.

“Eric's right, Toby,” Oliver said suddenly. “Breedlove was killed because he'd found out about the tunnel. That letter
was
sent, just as his ledger shows. And the next day, he was dead.”

“But—”

“But you didn't kill him. I know. Because even if you had opened the letter, you couldn't have known who sent it. In fact, if you think about it, the only people who could have identified Breedlove as the author were his previous victims, who'd have recognized the style and the handwriting.” (
The vicar
,
the vergers
,
the vampire
,
and the vulgarian
, Oliver thought.)

“Yeah, but I told you,” Mormal cut in nervously, “I never saw that letter until I went to Breedlove's house that night. And he was already dead.”

“Of course you saw it. If Breedlove had stuck to his usual habits, he'd have dropped that first letter through our letterbox after dark on Wednesday night, exactly as he recorded in his secret ledger. It was probably on the doormat when you came to pick up Toby for an early morning session at the dig. You recognized it for what it was, you opened it, and you kept it.”

“Why would Eric do that?” Toby asked.

“Oh don't be so bloody naïve,” Oliver snapped. “Your problem, Toby, is that you're too honorable, too trusting. Somebody else in this room thinks so too.”

“Effie, you mean?”

“Eric, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“You're one in a million, Tobe,” Mormal piped up. “A diamond.”

“Why do you think Eric's been providing his haulage services for nothing?” Oliver continued. “Because from the moment you found that tunnel, Eric's been planning to make off with whatever came out of the grave. Who knows what that potential treasure trove might have been worth—ancient manuscripts, forgotten plays? And you and your merry band of tomb-raiders could hardly protest as he heads off into the sunset with your swag. So the last thing Eric wants is for you to get a guilty conscience and shut down the dig, before the tunnel is complete. And so he took the letter, to keep you in the dark.”

No reaction from Mormal this time.

“But how did it get back to Breedlove's house?” asked Toby.

“Breedlove is killed. That changes everything. Now, Eric needs to frame someone for the murder, and who better than you, the newly minted blackmail victim?”

“But the letter doesn't mention me.”

“True. In fact it's so obscure that we started out thinking it was sent
to
Breedlove—a little bonus misdirection that I don't think Eric intended.”

“Then what was the point of bringing it back?”

“Just to let the police know that a letter existed—that a fifth victim was in play. Remember, Eric doesn't know about Breedlove's secret ledger. And then he disposes of the body at a local landmark called the Shakespeare Race, another subtle pointer to the obsessions of his old school friend, Toby Swithin.”

“But none of that is enough to identify me, even with the nursery rhyme.”

“Of course not. As I said, Eric still needs you to finish that tunnel. But once it's completed…”

“Then what?”

“Come on, Toby, what's missing?”

Toby thought for a second. “The envelope?” he ventured.

Oliver smiled. “The concomitant envelope, which will mysteriously turn up when the work at the tunnel is all done. And its addressee, Master Toby Swithin of Oxford and Synne, gets hung out to dry.”

“Hanged,” murmured Mormal.

“Darling, did you work all that out by yourself?” asked Effie, looking around from the desk. “Just you and your brain?”

“Well, yes.”

“Oh, well done, you.” She beamed at him, unable to console him with the news that the “bonus misdirection” had come from Simon Culpepper. She held up a sealed envelope, torn across the top edge. Oliver could see the odd, penciled capital letters in the address. Toby's name.

“How long ago did you find that?” he asked.

“About three minutes after we got here. Top drawer, left hand side, when I was looking for Eric's passwords.”

“Never underestimate the methods of a police officer,” Oliver muttered.

“Not just any police officer,” Effie prompted.

“A police officer with naturally curly hair.”

“Good boy,” she said. “Eric, you're just not very good at this, are you?”

“You put that there,” said Mormal. “Police, planting evidence.”

She swiveled on the office chair and glared at him. “Oh, no, you did
not
just go there.”

“It's your word against mine,” Mormal maintained. “And your discovery process is hardly kosher.”

“Your process of discovering what women are wearing under their skirts is totally legit, is it?”

“I have my rights,” he snapped, jabbing a forefinger toward her face.
Including the right to throw us out, long ago
, Oliver thought, but he hasn't.
Odd
.

Effie held the envelope up to the overhead light. “Then if what you say is true, Eric, you've never touched this envelope, and so these grubby fingerprints can't possibly be yours, right?”

Mormal paused, finger still raised. Then he snatched the envelope from Effie's grasp, screwed it into a ball, and stuffed it into his mouth, wincing as he tried to accommodate both the dry paper and his swollen tongue. Effie leaned back in her chair, momentarily startled. They watched with fascination as he chewed and champed.

“I think that answers your question, Effie,” said Toby.

Mormal tried to respond to Toby, but the words were incomprehensible. He attempted a swallow, coughed, and spat out a bolus of soggy paper onto the bed.

“I said it still doesn't prove a thing,” he gasped.

“I agree,” said Effie, “especially since you've just chewed up a blank envelope I found in your drawer and wrote Toby's name and address on.” She waved another envelope, identical to the first. “This is the real one, and I wouldn't recommend your trying to take it, Eric, on the grounds that I don't wish you to.”