This Private Plot (11 page)

Toby pointed at the wall to their left. A three-dimensional effigy of Shakespeare from the waist up was fixed to the wall. The statue depicted a full-faced and well-tanned Shakespeare, with moustache and goatee, wearing a red doublet and dark jerkin, clutching a white quill in his right hand and a piece of paper in his left. It sat in a kind of arched booth with miniature blue Corinthian columns on either side. Below it was a base with a Latin phrase and some additional poetry in English that clearly referred to Stratford Will as the famous playwright. Above was a 3­-D­­ carving of the poet's coat of arms between two blank-eyed cherubs, blocking the lower part of a window.

“J. Dover Wilson, the eminent critic and biographer of Shakespeare, said this effigy made him look like a self-satisfied pork butcher,” said Toby.

“Maybe. But even a waste of space like Catriona Bennet could see that this puts the kibosh on your theory. The man on the wall is clearly London Will, not ten feet from where Stratford Will is lying hearsed in death, no doubt nibbled by a convocation of worms, political or otherwise.”

Toby smiled. “Stratford Will died in 1616, as the inscription says. The first reference to any Stratford memorial is in the First Folio of 1623, in a commemorative poem by one Leonard Digges. I think those were the crucial years for the old switcheroo. Until then, zilch. Stratford actually had a ban on theatrical performances in the early 1600s—an odd way of celebrating a local boy who'd already made good by this time.”

They paused as a statuesque middle-aged woman addressed a tour group in loud Russian. One man trained a video camera on Oliver long enough to make him uneasy.

“As you can see, the effigy holds a quill and paper, the tools of the writer,” Toby continued. “But as late as 1656, the first time anyone drew a picture of it, there's no quill or paper, and the face is quite different, with a longer moustache. A bit like Uncle Tim's.”

“Is that the best you've got?”

“Okay, remember what I was saying at supper the other evening, about pregnant negatives? Such as the absence of anything to do with the theater in Stratford Will's will. Here's another example. London Will created some of the most articulate and memorable daughters in literature: Rosalind, Perdita, Innogen, Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona, Marina, Miranda, not to mention Cordelia and her two Ugly Sisters. Yet Stratford Will's two girls, Judith and Susanna—Susanna's grave's right there—were both virtually illiterate.”

Effie wandered away to examine some of the intricately carved misericords in the choir stalls.

“I'll tell you who Shakespeare really was,” Oliver said softly. “He was Alan Smithee.”

“Who?”

“Alan Smithee is the fake name once used by movie directors when they wanted to disown a project. I think ‘William Shakespeare' was the sixteenth-century equivalent of Alan Smithee.”

Oliver fixed his eyes on Toby's face. “You see, Tobermory,” he continued, “there never was a London Will. ‘William Shakespeare' was a pseudonym-for-hire used by anyone who wanted to hide the fact that he stooped to write plays for the groundlings—Bacon, because he was too cerebral, Oxford and Pembroke, because they were too aristocratic, or Marlowe, because he was too dead. William Shakespeare wasn't one of them. He was
all
of them, and more. Surely you don't think the playwright who gave us the hilarious
The Comedy of Errors
was also responsible for the bloodbath of
Titus Andronicus
in virtually the same year?”

“That's ridiculous,” Toby muttered. “Where did the name ‘William Shakespeare' come from then? Are you saying they just made it up?”

“No. There was a man called Richard Field, born here in Stratford three years before Shakespeare. Heard of him?”

“I know the name.”

“Field went to London in 1579 to become a printer, which at that time was synonymous with being a publisher. In that capacity, he would have known many of the most important writers of the day. Isn't it possible that he might have come across, say, the disguised, dead, gay spy Marlowe, still alive and seeking a suitable pen-name? ‘I have a suggestion,' Field might have said. ‘There's this young buck I used to know back in Stratford called Shakespeare. Don't you think that's a good name for a writer? “Shake speare.” Just like “Crapper” would be for a privy-maker. Oh yeah, got any poems you want published, guvnor?' It's the ultimate conspiracy theory. This whole Stratford Will exploitation makes more sense when you realize they're
all
in on it.” He leaned toward his little brother. “Doesn't it make sense? That London Will never existed. Doesn't that explain all your pregnant negatives, Toby?”

Toby didn't answer, but his mind was clearly racing through an internal trove of facts, probing and testing Oliver's theory. Oliver stepped back and smiled, enjoying his brother's consternation. The time he'd spent on the bus to Oxford yesterday with one of Toby's books on Shakespeare stashed in his satchel had been worth every second.
Naked maze-running, eh? Touché, Tobermory.

As Oliver and Effie left the chancel, leaving a discomfited Toby staring at the effigy, the jovial attendant stopped them.

“Pardon me, sir and madam,” he asked, “but is the gentleman you were just talking to a friend?”

“He's my brother.”

“Ah.” The man paused and scratched his head. “A bit…touched is he, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Well…” Oliver began.

“He's perfectly normal,” Effie insisted. “What makes you ask that?”

The jovial attendant looked a little less jovial. “Oh, no offense, ma'am. It's just that he's here almost every day. Stands there for hours, not moving, not talking to anyone. We all wonder about him.”

“He's writing a thesis about Shakespeare,” Effie explained. The jovial man looked jovial again.

“Ah, now I get it. Student. Brainy type. Thinks a lot. For this relief, much thanks, lady and gentleman.”

“I heard what you were saying to Toby,” said Effie as they walked out of the church. “Why did you have to be so mean? The poor lamb was quite bewildered.”

“Oh, there's a flaw in my argument, which he'll spot soon enough. London Will existed all right. He wasn't just a playwright; he was also an actor, in the company of the King's Men, no less. You don't trick James the First into giving the royal warrant to a fictional character. Not if you want to keep your head.”

They had wandered through the churchyard to the riverside pathway. The grass around the mottled gravestones was speckled with tiny wild daisies. To the left, the river curved away, weeping willows masking any view of the theater. To the right was the weir. Toby's island site was almost directly opposite, just a little downstream—a short trip for a rowboat, but a good mile distant along the footpaths and across the bridge. It was five o'clock, the sun was still warm. A light breeze came from the water.

Oliver sneezed, his first of the day. As he pulled a tissue from his satchel, it brought a folded sheet of paper with it, which floated across the terrace toward the river. He ran after it. It was the torn page from Dennis Breedlove's Shakespeare, the extract from
Henry VI, Part Two
. He'd forgotten all about it.

“What's that?” Effie asked.

An inner voice begged him not to tell her, not to remind her of the Breedlove investigation after this flawless afternoon (and while you're at it, you dolt, why not really ask her to marry you, here, in this perfect spot, in this perfect weather, with her hair and her Look and her mathematical genius and her karate black belt and her bottom and that smile?)

He stopped, staring at the paper, not looking at the text for once but at the page itself, as if seeing the jagged outline, the absence of margins for the first time.
Dear God, it's the dirt from a grave. What an ass I am!

“What is it, Ollie?” Effie asked again. He'd have to answer her now. What had he been thinking before the idea came to him?

“It's the Grand Canyon,” he answered. “It's what's not there.”

***

Half an hour later, Oliver and Effie jumped out of her car and ran up the short path to Dennis Breedlove's front door. The pile of dirt in the front garden had been turned into a children's play area, complete with muddy pools of water. The door stood open, yellow police tape still dangling from one side. They rushed into the house without knocking.

One of the older women challenged them first, looking up from where she was rifling through Breedlove's bookshelves.

“What do you want?” she snapped. “This isn't your house.”

The large man broke off from searching through the author's piles of research papers and took a long sip from a beer bottle, staring at them mutely. Many of Breedlove's papers had slewed across the floor, and were now covered in muddy shoeprints. One boy was crouching in a small nest of folded paper airplanes. His thin mother was sitting at the bureau fingering a calculator, the dead man's personal documents splayed out in front of her like a Tarot deck.

“Well?” the old woman repeated. Her clone stepped into the room, holding Breedlove's silver hairbrush and glaring at the newcomers. Another child, sticky-mouthed and dirty-fingered, came into view from behind the sofa and put her tongue out at them.

“Police business,” Effie announced, without bothering to show identification. She and Oliver ignored the reaction and the rudely shouted questions and headed for the ‘S' section of the bookcases. There was one Complete Works of Shakespeare, leather-bound, old and oversized. Oliver lifted it off the shelf and opened it slowly.

As they'd expected, the volume was hollow. The central rectangle from each page had been crudely cut out and discarded—most of them dropped into the wastepaper basket, no doubt. But one, containing a prosaic excerpt from one of the least-performed plays, must have floated across the author's desk and dropped unnoticed into the slim void behind it. Its words were meaningless.

And inside the cavity—what? A typed confession to a childhood crime? A detailed journal? Cash? The last will and testament that Breedlove's kin were clearly hunting?

Oliver lifted out the small book that had been cached in the secret space and showed it to Effie.
Uncle Dennis's Nursery Rhyme Book.

“That's mine!” snapped a female voice. Again, they disregarded the claim.

The book dated back to Dennis's BBC days. Just a cheap, quick issue of some popular rhymes, a Christmas stocking filler—unexceptional cover art, no commentary, no introduction. Big black-and-white studio photograph of a much younger Breedlove on the back, tinted brown, looking as smug as a man should look who'd probably earn ten times as much from the book as the subeditor who'd assembled it.

Effie held it by its board covers and shook it toward the floor. Nothing fell out, no letters between the pages, nothing hidden beneath the dust jacket. She began to riffle through the pages. Only about thirty rhymes. One rhyme per page, large type, white space. Every third rhyme had a whimsical two-color linocut by an artist fashionable fifty years ago. Nothing else. No writing—no, wait!

She flicked back a page and looked a second time at “Mary, Mary, quite contrary.” There were faint, penciled notes in the ample margin. Mainly numbers, not words. She turned the pages slowly. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” more numbers—dates, amounts of money, a couple of words in capitals, the square handwriting familiar.

She opened the book wide, bending it back against its spine until the binding protested, and held it up in front of Oliver's face. He studied the pencil marks, frowning. Then he met Effie's eyes.

“I think we've identified the blackmailer,” she said.

Oliver nodded. “Yes,” he replied. “Dennis Breedlove.”

Chapter Eleven

Wednesday morning

“So he was blackmailing himself?” said Culpepper, frowning at a photocopy of the letter found on Breedlove's desk. “Had he lost his marbles?”

“He wasn't blackmailing himself!” Oliver snapped, flashing a look of scorn at the tall detective. “That letter was meant for somebody else. He'd written it, but he hadn't sent it.”

Mallard cleared his throat. “I think, dear nephew, Detective Sergeant Culpepper is, uh, teasing you with the ‘marbles' reference.”

“Oh, so we're back to that, are we?” Oliver adjusted the ice pack in his trousers.

“Just a little fun, Oliver,” said Culpepper, sipping some tea. “Don't get your knickers in a twist.”

“Or your knackers,” Effie added helpfully. Oliver bit at a slice of toast.

Ironically, because he was the only person at the garden table who wasn't a police officer, he had sustained his injury the previous evening because he'd been mistaken for one. One of the younger Hull visitors had taken a signed first edition of Oliver's
The Railway Mice and the Fretful Porcupine
to Breedlove's bedroom, where he sat eating crisps and idly adding moustaches to Amelia Flewhardly's delicate illustrations. When he returned to the living room in search of more junk food, he heard his parents and great-aunts grumbling about the intrusion of the police into what they felt was morally, if not yet legally, their private property. And so he followed his native instincts for dealing with the boydem. Bypassing the slender, curly-haired lady, who was clearly well too hot to be Babylon, he ran over to Oliver and kicked him in the groin.

Oliver rapidly lost interest in the Breedlove case, and when he crawled into bed later, it was with a jockstrap filled with crushed ice and a decidedly dampened ardor. Meanwhile, Effie summoned her boss and Simon Culpepper to a meeting the next morning. Chloe Swithin had set up a table for them in a sunlit corner of the Swithins' walled garden.

“The handwriting inside the old book,
Uncle Dennis's Nursery Rhyme Book,
matched the blackmail letter,” Effie was saying. “The same squarish block capitals.”

“We never thought to check Breedlove's writing,” Culpepper confessed. He tore a piece off a flaky croissant and spread it with some of Chloe's homemade damson jam. “So what's in the book?”

Effie blew some crumbs off the book's cover. She had placed several torn-paper bookmarks between its pages.

“Five pages have records of dates and payments written in the margins,” she remarked. She pushed aside a basket of muffins and lay the volume open at the first bookmark. “This one seems to be the oldest, the page with ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee.'”

“Is that a nursery rhyme?” asked Culpepper. “I thought it was from
Alice in Wonderland
.”

“Lewis Carroll fleshed out the characters of Tweedledum and Tweedledee for
Through the Looking Glass
,” said Oliver, “but the rhyme already existed. He also used old rhymes as the inspiration for Humpty Dumpty and the Lion and the Unicorn. Interestingly, he hadn't done this for the earlier
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, where his character names tended to be personifications of well-known idioms and phrases—to grin like a Cheshire cat, to ‘send in' a bill, mock turtle soup, mad as a march hare, mad as a hatter. Did you know that Carroll never calls him ‘the Mad Hatter' in the book, just ‘the Hatter'? Anyway, back to Tweedledum—the origin of the rhyme dates back to the early eighteenth century. It refers to—”

“Enough,” yelled Mallard. “Words, words, words! You're as bad as the vicar. Why couldn't that kid have kicked you in the voice box, instead of the nadgers?”

Chloe emerged from the house, carrying a tray with fresh breakfast supplies.

“Now does anybody need anything?” she inquired, gently stroking the back of Oliver's head. “Sergeant Culpepper, can I press you to a sausage?”

“No thank you, Mrs. Swithin,” he replied, half rising out of his seat. “You've already spoiled me quite enough.”

She looked down indulgently at her son. “What about you, Ollie?” she asked. “Can I whip you up a couple of eggs?”

“
Et tu
, Mother?”

Chloe smacked him lightly on the head and turned back to the house.

“Breedlove starts with notes about his initial contact with the victim,” said Effie. She pointed with the blunt end of a pencil to the open book. “See here ‘FIRST LETTER SENT' and the date, about four years ago. There's a second letter, and then the monthly payments begin and are duly logged. In this case, he starts off with £100 a month. After a year, it jumps to £120, after another year £150, then £175. He didn't get around to noting this year's increase.”

“And the other pages are the same?” asked Culpepper.

“They all start with a letter sent around this time of year. One shows three years of payments, another two years, and another just one year.”

“An interesting way of celebrating May Day,” said Oliver through a mouthful of orange-and-raisin scone.

“It's a bit more lucrative than gathering nuts,” said Mallard.

“The fifth page has only one line of writing, noting an initial letter sent,” Effie resumed. “It was dated two days before his death.”

“Then why was the letter still on his desk?” Oliver asked.

“Perhaps he hadn't got around to sending it,” said Culpepper, producing a photocopy of the letter. “Or could it be sudden remorse? It's consistent with suicide: Breedlove, ashamed of what he had become, chooses to take his life rather than continue this unpleasant hobby.”

“It wasn't a hobby,” Oliver said. “It was his livelihood. According to my mere acquaintance Scroop, Dennis was scheduled to run out of income about five years ago, having bet all his annuities on a seventy-five-year lifespan. With only a pittance from royalties for his nonfiction books, he needed alternative sources of money. And what does everyone say about him? That he was easy to talk to. It's quite possible that in a quarter of a century of living in Synne, he'd collected a juicy confidence or two. Time to cash in.”

“A big moral jump,” said Mallard.

“It was that or starve.” Oliver noticed Culpepper laughing. “Okay, Lofty, what testicular pun did I make without intending to?”

“No, it was ‘living in Synne,'” said Culpepper. “I'd never thought of it that way.”

“That's probably enough for the coroner, right there,” said Mallard, stretching. “Dennis Breedlove, blackmailer of four unknown victims, would-be blackmailer of a fifth, takes his own life for reasons unknown, but possibly because he was old, poor, tired, and disgusted with himself.”

“Case closed,” added Culpepper.

“No it isn't,” Oliver snapped. “I've been saying all along that Dennis couldn't have hanged himself without help. Four blackmail victims give us four suspects.”

“Suspects for…?”

“Murder. Murder most foul.”

“But Ollie,” said Effie, “these people were coughing up a hundred quid or more a month, just to keep him quiet about their crimes.”

“Or sins, perhaps,” Mallard speculated.

“If Breedlove's targets are terrified of public exposure,” Effie continued, “they're hardly likely to find the
cojones
to break the world's greatest taboo.” She gasped and lifted a hand to her lips. “Oh sorry, darling, that one was unintentional.”

“Besides, why now?” Culpepper asked. “The time when a potential victim is most likely to bump off the blackmailer is when he or she is first approached. Which makes this year's appointed King or Queen of the May the most likely culprit. But that initial letter was never sent, despite the entry in Breedlove's book.”

“Maybe one of the existing victims found the annual cost-of-living adjustment too much to take?” Oliver persisted. “Maybe they'd had enough of being a cash cow in Breedlove's personal pasture?”

“Look, Ollie,” said Mallard, “if it is murder we're dealing with—mind, I said
if
—then we have the same problem we had before. Just as we couldn't identify the blackmailer from the text of that letter, we can't identify his victims from a list of cash payments. And the site of Breedlove's death, up there at the Shakespeare Race, is already too contaminated to get any viable evidence. As for his cottage, presumably his starting point that evening, it's been trashed.”

Culpepper poured himself some tea, and Oliver had a sudden vision of the endless al fresco tea party in the first Alice book, posing pointless riddles and going round in circles. Effie would be a curly-haired Alice, Culpepper the lanky hare, Mallard clearly the hatter, even though he'd placed his panama under the chair. Did that make Oliver the Dormouse, with his slow movement and sour mood that morning? About to be stuffed into a teapot by the two detectives?

“But we do have some clues,” he protested, grabbing at the nursery rhyme book. “Why did Dennis use
this
to record his income? Why not a ledger book or blank paper?” He flicked through the pages. “He didn't start at the beginning of the book. Or even put the victims in order of their start dates.”

“So?” said Culpepper.

“I suggest that Dennis Breedlove, whose life was steeped in the world of children's folklore and fable, chose each page for a reason. There was something about that particular nursery rhyme that reminded him of his victim. He had that sort of mind. It may seem like madness, but there's method in it.”

The Dormouse strikes back
. Oliver flattened the book at one of Effie's bookmarks, the victim who had first been contacted two years earlier, and read:

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.”

“Somebody called Mary?” Mallard offered, checking his watch. He was already late for his
Hamlet
rehearsal, and parking in Stratford was a bugger. “That really narrows it down. I bet it was the most popular girl's name in Britain in the year Breedlove was born.”

“Ah, but we're not looking all over Britain. Breedlove rarely left the village. The people of Synne confided in him during personal chin-wags.”

“And during one of those chats, one of his neighbors let on that his second cousin on the Isle of Skye was supplying half the Hebrides with hooch. ‘Mary' could be five hundred miles away.”

Oliver shook his head. “The victims are local. And maybe it's not the name. ‘How does your garden grow?' Is somebody in the village raising a crop of marijuana among her runner beans and lobelias, the blossoms of my Synne?” He threw the book onto the table, rattling plates and cups. It almost went into the butter. Culpepper winced and fumbled in his briefcase for an evidence bag.

“Too neat,” said Mallard. “Breedlove's not going come across somebody called Tom whose guilty secret is that he stole a pig, or a pervert called Georgie who kisses girls and makes them cry. Yes, when he caught the first fly in his web, four years ago, he probably decided it would be amusing to keep track of the payments in his old book of nursery rhymes. But the victims are who they are, and if his choice of pages has any significance, it'll be something obscure, a contrived and opportunistic fit. You'd need to read Breedlove's mind to get it. And for that, you need a crystal ball. Or two.”

Culpepper claimed the book, slipped it into its bag and then into his briefcase, and stood up, brushing croissant flakes off his well-cut suit. Mallard also got to his feet and retrieved his hat.

“So that's it?” Oliver cried. “You're leaving?”

Culpepper snapped the briefcase shut. “Oliver, nothing's changed,” he said quietly, without looking up. “I know you feel that when a blackmail victim kills himself, his blackmailer bears a moral responsibility for the death, and I agree with you. But when it's the blackmailer himself who commits suicide, whom can we say drove him to it? I doubt some foul play ever happened.”

“If he was murdered, I most powerfully and potently believe that we must find the murderer. That's our duty. No matter what kind of ugly, reprehensible villain Breedlove turned into.”

Culpepper finally turned his dark-eyed gaze to Oliver's face. “I still have no evidence of murder,” he said firmly. “I have no suspects. Dennis Breedlove is dead and, as of yesterday afternoon, finally buried. Let's leave this investigation with him.”

He offered his hand to Oliver. For the first time in his life, Oliver was angry enough to consider not returning a handshake; but he also knew he would never sink that low. Culpepper and Mallard walked toward the kitchen door.

Oliver reached for his orange juice, only to see several unidentifiable things, rank and gross in nature, now floating on its surface. “Why can't I get your pal Simon the Giant to take this seriously?” he asked Effie.

She chose to ignore the lingering hint of jealousy. “Are you surprised? As far as the police are concerned, the only good blackmailer is a dead one.”

“But Uncle Tim—”

“Tim has no jurisdiction here. Simon didn't have to be as accommodating as he was. It just shows he's a gentleman.”

Oliver sniffed. “Your so-called gentleman friend never wanted to explore the possibility of murder, even when he thought Breedlove was an innocent victim.”

“Yes, because that blackmail letter seemed to be a very powerful motive for suicide.”

“And now that we have a very powerful motive for murder instead?”

Effie was silent, watching a thrush peck at some early fruit on an espaliered apricot plant growing on the sun-drenched garden wall. A wood pigeon in the horse chestnut began its distinctive call.

“Understand what you're asking Simon to do,” she said. “You want him to identify four unknown blackmail victims who, by definition, have very good reasons for not wanting to be found. Then you want him to ask them, one by one, if they murdered an awful little man who may not have been murdered anyway.” She shook her head. “No overstretched police detective can give that much time to a case. And that's not a reference to Simon's height.”