This Private Plot (4 page)

With a flutter of the hands that may have been a blessing or an apology for the Crusades, Edwards and the verger continued along the lane toward the Square while Oliver, Effie, and Culpepper waited beside the black car.

“So before Uncle Dennis carried his stepladder all the way up to the Shakespeare Race,” Oliver said, “he had to walk to the church to pick it up. At his age. Not to mention finding a rope.”

“He already had the rope,” said Culpepper. He unlocked the car and took a plastic bag from a briefcase on the front seat. It contained what looked like a pair of small, wooden maracas, one with a tie-on label. They were the handles of a child's skipping rope.

“As well as his books, Mr. Breedlove collected a few classic children's toys. He kept them in a small display cabinet. The label says this rope is Victorian, possibly used by the girls of the Liddell family at Christ Church in Oxford. Anyway, Breedlove sliced off the handles with his kitchen knife and used the rope to hang himself. It yielded about eight feet.”

“Enough to strangle him, but not enough to break his neck,” Oliver said.

“I get the sense, Mr. Swithin, that you think I'm missing something here,” said Culpepper as he returned the evidence to his car.

“I just think the whole extravaganza seems too much for a man in his eighties. He should be dangling from a beam in his living room, not trudging all the way up to the Synne Oak with an eight-foot stepladder under his arm and Alice in Wonderland's jump-rope in his pocket.”

Culpepper looked at Effie, and something clearly passed between them using that sixth or seventh or forty-second sense that was reserved for telepathic transmissions of confidence between English police detectives.

“Let's go back inside,” he said.

They stood again among the books and papers in Breedlove's living room, while Oliver repeated the opinion he had given his uncle earlier. Effie listened, clearly weighing her growing interest against the need to avoid encroaching on Culpepper's territory. Culpepper also listened, not looking at Oliver and pulling thoughtfully on his upper lip. When Oliver had finished, he lifted his head.

“Most people I've spoken to describe Breedlove as a likeable chap,” he said. “Always genial, good company. The last person to take his own life. One or two were distinctly cooler. You can't delight everybody, I suppose. But his suicide is a puzzle. And I agree with you, sir—the special effort it required is also a puzzle. Perhaps, though, I can supply the missing motivation.” He strode across to the large bureau where he'd left his papers.

“My uncle mentioned that you'd found a note,” Oliver chipped in. “Was it a suicide note?”

Culpepper didn't reply, but handed him a clear plastic folder that contained a single piece of paper, which once had been folded horizontally into thirds. Oliver and Effie read the text, written in pencil in carefully formed uppercase letters.

DID YOU THINK YOU COULD HIDE YOUR HISTORY? DID YOU THINK THIS WHOLE BLESSED PLOT WOULD BE COVERED UP FOREVER? I KNOW WHAT'S BEEN GOING ON. BUT YOU DON'T WANT OTHERS TO DIG UP THE PAST, DO YOU? SO LET THIS BE OUR LITTLE FAMILY SECRET. I WON'T TELL IF YOU WON'T TELL. ALAS, MY SILENCE ISN'T FREE. THERE WILL BE FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS.

“I found it here, on his desk, as if he'd just opened it,” Culpepper told them.

“No envelope?” Effie asked.

Culpepper shook his head. “I checked the wastepaper bins and the dustbin outside. But maybe the paper was slid through the letterbox just like that. Perhaps the blackmailer was scared that we could get a DNA trace from the dried saliva on an envelope.”

“Not in these days of self-sealing envelopes,” said Effie, “and blackmailers aren't usually worried about the authorities. If they've calculated everything correctly, their victim is going to pay up to keep his secret safe from the world, including the cops.”

“Then I'd say there was a serious miscalculation in this case, Sergeant Strongitharm,” replied Culpepper. “Whatever ‘blessed plot' Breedlove hatched in the past, the merest hint that someone has rumbled it caused him to end it all.”

“Please call me Effie,” she murmured, and Culpepper remarked in turn that his first name was Simon. “But there was no suicide note from Breedlove?” she asked.

“Not on paper. On the other hand, parading up to the Shakespeare Race, dangling himself from the old village gibbet—it's almost a suicide note in performance.”

“I wonder what this ‘blessed plot' was,” said Oliver, speaking for the first time since reading the blackmail letter. He held onto the folder, eyes constantly scanning the capital letters.

Culpepper shrugged. “We may never know.”

“Why? Won't the blackmailer tell us when we arrest him? Or her?”

There was another unspoken communication between Culpepper and Effie. “Arrest him?” she repeated.

“This blackmailer was the cause of Uncle Dennis's death,” said Oliver, tapping on the plastic cover of the note that continued to hold his gaze. “How shall this bloody deed be answered?”

“Cause or not, it was unintentional,” said Culpepper, gently taking the note from Oliver. “Breedlove's suicide is the last thing the blackmailer wanted. No money to be made from a dead victim.”

“Besides,” Effie said, resting a hand on Oliver's shoulder, “how can the police trace this blackmailer, now that Breedlove's dead? All we have are the contents of an anonymous letter and a sample of some heavily disguised handwriting.”

Oliver was silent, still staring glumly at the letter in Culpepper's grasp. Effie took her hand away.

“Oliver, the person who killed Dennis Breedlove was Dennis Breedlove,” said Culpepper. “He took his own life rather than face up to something he'd done in his past. Any police investigation into why he was being targeted for blackmail is bound to turn up some unpleasant truths about your friend. Maybe they're best left buried.”

He placed the letter carefully in his manila folder and began to gather up the notes and papers that had escaped across Breedlove's desktop. Oliver closed his eyes, lost in thought.

“Tell you what,” Culpepper added, trying to break the tension, “I didn't look behind this bureau for the phantom envelope. Could you help me move it?”

The two men dragged the large, wooden desk several inches from the wall, cockling the well-worn carpet. Culpepper produced a pocket torch and shone it into the space. Among the dust-balls and cobwebs, there sat a bright nest of paper clips, some moldy candy wrappers, and a length of telephone cord. The only piece of paper was a yellowing cutting from a printed book, which had clearly lain behind the bureau for several years. Oliver fished it out. It was a page from an old printed volume of Shakespeare, trimmed tightly around the text so that the play title and even the header showing the Act and Scene were missing. From the character names it seemed to come from one of the
Henry VI
plays. A shame—if it had been
Richard II
, he'd have a link to the blackmail note's “blessed plot” reference. Maybe Breedlove had taped it to the wall above his workplace, but it had lost its stickiness and slid down into the gap?

“No envelope,” said Culpepper. “I bet he tore it up and flushed it down the crapper.”

Ah, now there's a bit of anti-trivia, thought Oliver. All those eager people who'll tell you that the word “crap” and its variants come from the Victorian eminence Sir Thomas Crapper, supposedly the inventor of the flush toilet. In reality, the vulgarism is far older. The gentleman was never knighted; he was merely the originator of the floating ball cock, and his name is an unfortunate, if risible coincidence. Unless, of course, it had dictated his path in life.

“Can I keep this?” Oliver asked, resurfacing after this momentary meditation. Culpepper nodded.

“Why would you want to?” Effie inquired, sliding the bureau back into place alone.

“I don't know. A souvenir of the sheeted dead, I guess.”

They walked out of the house again and paused on the porch while Culpepper locked the bright blue door and positioned a strip of broad yellow tape across the door and its frame. It gave the scene a nautical look, despite the fierce POLICE – DO NOT ENTER message, a welcome splash of color in Breedlove's dismal front garden. Oliver noticed again the mound of damp earth that sat beside the garden path. It was darker than the ground it lay on, and since Oliver could see no corresponding hole, he guessed that it been delivered for some landscaping purpose, now gone with Breedlove to his grave. It reminded Oliver that he'd noticed some caked dirt on his own hands the previous evening, shortly after grabbing onto the swinging body in the tree.

“When Dennis was taken down from the tree, were his clothes dirty?” he asked Culpepper.

“Yes, they were, almost muddy, as if he'd been lying in it. He probably fell down a couple of times on his way across the Common.”

Oliver nodded. The damp mound in front of him showed no signs of any collision with a suicidal, eighty-year-old expert on children's literature. But when had it rained last? The dust from the Common, which had swirled off his feet in the shower last night, was lighter in color.

“So these naked women observed by the Vampire of Synne?” Effie began.

“Merely a trick of the light,” said Culpepper quickly. “It certainly isn't worth putting into my report, and Superintendent Mallard agrees with me.”

“I can see why my uncle took a liking to you, Detective Sergeant Culpepper,” said Oliver, shaking hands with the tall policeman.

“Oh well, it never hurts to have friends in high places.”

“And vice versa.”

Culpepper frowned. “I'm not with you, I'm afraid.”

“A little joke…” Oliver began, with a smug smile.

Chapter Four

Saturday afternoon (continued)

Visitors often mistake the tall stone obelisk in the middle of Synne's Square for a war memorial, erected during the spate of numb memorializing that followed the First World War. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your perspective—there wasn't a single villager who'd even joined up to fight the Great War, let alone given his life for King and country. But not to be out-commemorated by the neighboring village of Pigsneye, which had sacrificed half its male population at Passchendaele, the Parish Council of the time erected this monument to the one Synne resident who had gone down on the Titanic in 1912, two years before the war began (or five years before, if you're one of Synne's frequent American tourists).

After the Second World War, which also found Synne unrepresented in the armed forces, the Parish Council discovered that a man born in the village had died in the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937, oddly enough, two years before the war began (or nearly five years before, if you're an American tourist) and his name was duly added to the memorial, conveniently omitting the fact that he had been part of the cabin crew and a keen member of the Nazi Party.

Oliver and Effie were sitting on the steps in front of the obelisk, sharing a stale jam doughnut they'd bought from the village post office across the street. In the afternoon sunlight, the stone cottages facing the Square exhibited a range of shades from cream to pewter, from ivory to amber, spattered with the seasonal primaries of window boxes and hanging baskets of petunias, and, in the case of one house that juts into the road, paint samples from many European car manufacturers.

Signs and displays in the windows added more color, since many of the restless homeowners, unable to abandon their entrepreneurial pasts and desperate for fresh company, had turned front parlors into antique “centres” or estate agencies showing pictures of thatched cottages for sale (of which Synne possessed nearly one) or cramped art galleries for the residents' watercolors of the same buildings. Tourists pausing for refreshment in one of Synne's five tearooms were often baffled to find that their twelve-pounds-fifty didn't just buy them a pot of Earl Grey and a powdery scone, but also a lecture from the proprietor on current trends in conditional variance swaps.

Effie turned and looked at Oliver for several seconds, with a mixture of affection and pity.

“I can't believe you told Simon that he was very tall,” she said.

“I was explaining the joke,” Oliver bleated. “With Simon, Uncle Tim also has a ‘friend in a high place,' as it were.”

“I can't take you anywhere,” Effie sighed, licking sugar from her fingers. The distant purr of a car engine began to drown out the conversation some rooks were conducting in a nearby hornbeam.

“Tell me something,” said Oliver. “How did Culpepper get away with calling you ‘Curly'? Why didn't you put him in his place with that magic Look of yours?”

“My what? What on earth are you talking about?” She screwed up the empty paper bag and tossed it into a rubbish bin a few feet away, beside the bus shelter built to celebrate the Festival of Britain in 1951, although Synne had never had a bus service before or since.

The car was louder now, clearly a sports car, clearly being driven too fast for England's meandering country roads. It was approaching from the west.

“No, I chose to give Simon a chance to explain himself,” she continued. She smiled contentedly. “It was worth it,” she added, remembering the tall detective's compliment.

There was a cinematic squeal of tires and another throaty roar, suggesting that the car had reached the pointless double bend in front of the manor house.

“So I have competition, do I?” said Oliver, pretending to be fascinated by a pigeon that was ambling past them.

Before she could answer—before he knew whether he was going to get an answer—a black Lamborghini sped into view, barely slowing as it hurtled along the stretch of road in front of them, raising clouds of dust and rattling crockery on the small tables outside the tea shops. A small, elderly man stepping out of the post office leaped backwards in alarm and dropped an ice cream cone. Oliver thought he looked vaguely familiar, but not from Synne. The pigeon flew off, affronted. With a shriek of brakes, the car swerved onto the footpath that led to the Swithins' house. The driver gave one more unnecessary prod to the accelerator and then turned the engine off.

“Ben's arrived,” said Oliver. He stood up and offered a hand to Effie. She let him pull her to her feet, and then slipped her arms around his waist and kissed him briskly on the chin.

“Are you even slightly jealous?”

“Not a bit,” Oliver lied.

“Good. I don't play those games, Ollie. If I ever want someone other than you, you'll be the first to know.” She kissed him again, while he registered the fact that she'd said “if” and not “when.”

Ben Motley was Oliver's friend and landlord, a photographer whose studio occupied the top floor of the Edwardes Square townhouse they shared with their friends Geoffrey Angelwine and Susie Beamish. Ben oozed his tanned and well-toned body out of the Lamborghini and reached behind the driver's seat for a leather overnight valise and an aluminum case of photographic equipment. He caught sight of Oliver and Effie across the Square and waved delightedly, pulling his sunglasses from his handsome face.

“Tell me again where we're going this evening,” Effie asked as they walked toward the house, trying to avoid the broken sticks, bedraggled paper flowers, discarded straw hats, and the occasional shard of a beer bottle left over from the previous morning's May Day event, the annual Beating of the Morris Dancers.

“You and I and Ben and the egregious Toby are having dinner with some old family friends, the Bennets, over at Pigsneye.”

“Does Ben know them?”

Oliver spotted her subtext:
Am I the only stranger?

“No, but Mother let slip that he was staying with us, so Wendy Bennet issued a very insistent invitation. She and her husband have five unmarried daughters, and a famous and famously single fashion photographer is irresistible husband material in these parts.”

“Hang on. A family called Bennet? Living in the country?”

“That's right.”

“With five unmarried daughters?”

“Er, yes.”

“Is this some kind of put-on? Their names aren't Elizabeth, Jane, Mary, Kitty, and whatever that slutty Lolita who runs off with Mr. Wickham was called, are they?”

“No.” Oliver cleared his throat. “They're Davina, Catriona, Clarissa, Xanthe, and Lucinda.”

“Great. I can see I'm going to fit right in.”

She strode ahead to greet Ben. Oliver hung back, using the few extra seconds to recall the text of the blackmail note once again. It was probably the twentieth mental review, with increasing intervals, and he thought he had it by heart.

He didn't agree with Culpepper. Whoever had sent Dennis Breedlove that letter drove the old man to his death. It was the moral equivalent of murder. And if the Warwickshire police couldn't spare the manpower for moral equivalencies, and Scotland Yard was forced by etiquette to sit on his and her hands, then maybe it was up to him to find the murderer.

Did you think you could hide your history? Did you think this whole blessed plot would be covered up forever…?