This Private Plot (16 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Friday morning (continued)

“I'm fine, Mother,” Oliver said for the fourth time in five minutes. “It's just a few bruises and a cut on the ear.”

“I still say we should get you to a doctor,” said Chloe. “And we should call the police.”

“The house is full of police already.” Oliver was lying on a couch in the Swithins' sitting room, while his mother fussed over him.

“It's appalling!” Chloe was muttering, rearranging the piled-up cushions behind his head and tucking a throw over his knees. “People coming onto our property, assaulting members of the family. Who knows what would have happened if he'd actually got into the house?”

“You think I surprised a burglar then?” He hadn't told her about the assailant's hissed warning.

“Of course,” she answered, kissing him on the forehead, “that's why I want to call in Constable Bostar.”

Oliver knew better, and the last thing he wanted was Bostar—or Culpepper or even his uncle—swooping in and shutting down his investigation when he was evidently getting closer to the heart of the business. (Not that the bone-idle Bostar had ever swooped in his life.) Word had clearly escaped that he was asking pertinent questions about Breedlove's death, and one of the blackmailer's victims wanted to stay undiscovered. In fact, Oliver was convinced the figure in the nighted color was Sidney Weguelin, who must somehow have perceived that he was being watched.

Finally persuaded there was nothing more she could do for her firstborn, Chloe slipped out of the room. At least her ministering angel act had been more tolerable than his father's brief visit, half an hour earlier. “I hear you gave a good account of yourself,” the brigadier had grunted, a rare smidgen of paternal pride. “Can't wait to tell Timothy that you saw the bugger off.” Fortunately, Mallard hadn't heard about the attack; like the other houseguests, he'd gone to bed before Oliver had stumbled indoors and had slipped out that morning before the household woke, heading for Stratford for another all-day rehearsal.

Effie's head appeared around the door. “You up for a visit?” she asked. Oliver pulled the throw up to his chin.

“I think so.” He shuffled further upright, with an exaggerated flinch and coughed a couple of times. “I believe I'm feeling a little better,” he whispered, laying a hand limply across his forehead.

Effie smiled. “He's ready for you,” she called. The door opened, and the two guests who'd arrived the previous afternoon, Oliver's London flatmates and longtime friends Susie Beamish and Geoffrey Angelwine, burst noisily into the room.

“Mission accomplished,” Susie caroled, oblivious to Oliver's suffering, real or fake. “It went like a charm.”

“You should have seen us, Ollie,” said Geoffrey. “If I say so myself, I gave a standout performance as a downtrodden, cack-handed nonentity. Wasn't I good, Susie?”

“You had me totally convinced. But Ollie, darling, if that was Sidney the Organist you thumped last night, he must have a nose of iron. There wasn't a mark on him.”

Geoffrey passed Effie a paper bag containing the spare CD that he'd given to Sidney to hold. She lifted out the disc and breathed on its shiny surface. “Okay, there are some good prints here. I hope none of them are yours, Geoffrey.”

“I held it by the edge, as instructed. I'm not a complete prat.”

“Not yet, dear, but we have high hopes for you,” said Susie.

“I can compare these with the bloody fingerprints we found on the kitchen window,” said Effie. “Good job it didn't rain during the night.”

“Not the only thing that didn't happen last night,” grumbled Oliver.

Geoffrey passed over a second paper bag, and Effie withdrew the headphones. “There are several of his hairs stuck in the adjustable sidepieces,” he reported.

“As long as I get the root.” Effie carefully detached the hairs with a pair of tweezers and dropped them into another paper bag. “Okay, I'll get them to the lab, in case the fingerprints aren't good enough. We can compare the DNA in these hairs with the attacker's blood. Ollie managed to keep a sample of it isolated from his own blood.”

“How long's that going to take?” Oliver asked.

“Normally, several days. But I know a young man in the Birmingham crime lab who'll do anything for me. We can get the beginnings of a PCR test going in a few hours, and he can probably give me some preliminary results tomorrow. If Sidney isn't the attacker, we'll know immediately. If he is, it'll take a bit longer to get incontrovertible proof.” She collected the paper bags. “I'm going to put on a short skirt, and drive to Birmingham. An hour to get there, an hour letting young Tyler gaze at my hair across a café table, an hour driving back—I should be home again mid-afternoon. I'll get Tyler to goose up the prints on the CD at the same time.”

“I'll keep you company, Effie,” said Susie, following her to the door. “But should I change for Tyler, too? Do these jeans make me look fat?”

“They don't need to,” Geoffrey murmured, although Oliver noted that he'd waited for the door to close before making the comment. “Okay, Ollie, where does it hurt?”

“I took a couple of big punches to the side of the head, and my ear's still ringing a little. Oh no, wait—that's your voice. Otherwise, the soreness is evenly spread all over, like butter.”

“You spread butter on your body?”

“No, like butter on a slice of bread. I drew my metaphor from sandwich-making. Who spreads butter all over their bodies?”

Geoffrey was silent, thinking of a forfeit at his PR agency's Christmas party a couple of years earlier. The front door opened and closed. Oliver pulled off the throw and ran to the window, in time to see Effie's car reach the main road and turn right.

“Come on,” he said, “let's go for a walk.”

***

Half an hour later, they were sitting on a stile on a small rise behind Furbelow Hall. The view wasn't as expansive as the three-county panorama that could be enjoyed from the Shakespeare Race, but they could see much of the village, straggling away along the single main road, with the pale green Common shimmering on the horizon beyond it. The squat tower of the church poked above the tree line. The field in front of them, like most open land in the area, had been left to pasture, and although only a few bemused sheep could ever be seen around the village, the grass was always mown when it reached knee-level. The economics of farming always puzzled Oliver, but Synne farming—or the absence of it—required its own branch of the dismal science.

“You seem pretty certain that your pummeling last night was the work of Sidney-slash-Lesbia,” Geoffrey commented, sucking a long stalk of grass. “He didn't look tough enough to me. And as Susie said, there were no signs that he'd been in a fight. Or should I say she?”

“He,” Oliver said flatly. The idea of striking a woman hard enough to potentially break her nose was not to be entertained.

“Getting up in drag, though,” Geoffrey continued, “it seems a bit tame for blackmail.” He took a deep, satisfying breath of the clean air, enjoying the undiscovered country.

“If Sidney Weguelin were just a transvestite, I doubt that it would be a big deal, not even in Synne. Especially not in Synne. But I'm convinced he's one person pretending to be two, Sidney and Lesbia, and that makes all the difference. Whatever the reason, it's exactly the kind of secret that Breedlove could wheedle out of him.”

“What if the secret is that Sidney bumped off the original Lesbia and is now pretending to be her to cover up her disappearance?”

“If Sidney were a murderer, Breedlove would have thought twice about blackmailing him. Kill once—”

“Shame on you,” Geoffrey chimed in, exhibiting his habit of finishing other people's sentence, usually inaccurately. Oliver glared at him.

“I was going to say ‘kill once, and you can kill again.'”

The midday sun was bright and warm. A car rolled along the main road below them, the only sound on the windless air.

“So you have two victims formally identified, and Sidney and Lesbia as a third,” Geoffrey said. “Any other suspects?”

Oliver reached into his pocket for a small notebook and squinted at his spidery handwriting. “I've done some modest research. There's an actuary who moved into the old Forge. He used to be an accountant, but he found the work too exciting.”

“That's an old joke.”

“No, he was an accountant for Hezbollah. And there are a couple of other prospects worth sniffing around. But my best bet is the local MP, who lives—”

“In Synne. That's funny.”

“He lives in Pigsneye,” Oliver continued firmly, “but I suppose that's in Breedlove's catchment area.”

“That reminds me. Didn't you inveigle Ben Motley into some fancy dinner party in Pigsneye last week?”

“Yes. Why? Was he complaining?”

“Quite the reverse. Ben thought it was the funniest evening he'd spent in months. But he asked me to give you a message. Let's see: ‘I told you Mormal's arse looked familiar.' Does that mean something? He wanted me to show you a website.”

“Okay, we'll check it out when we get back.”

Oliver sat silently, watching a distant kestrel hook itself onto the air and wait, flapping, until the sudden abseil down the sky, swift as quicksilver, into the poppy-splashed grass far below. This time, the shrew or vole that had caused the infinitesimal quake of a stalk escaped. Watching birds was one of the few consolations of being away from his London home; he regretted it was still too early in the year to enjoy the spectacle of swallows reenacting low-level
Star Wars
dogfights over the Square.

The black car he had noticed earlier had come back into view, parking behind the manor house. A figure emerged, dark and elongated through the heat haze, and went into the building.

“So do we assume that last night's show of violence was provided by the murderer?” Geoffrey asked. “If so, you got off more lightly than Uncle Dennis.”

“The attacker told me to stay away, so it wasn't one of the blackmail victims Effie and I have already identified. But he didn't have to be the killer. It could have been someone who wants to keep his secret safe, now that Breedlove is dead, and has somehow heard about my interest in the case.”

“So the attacker's not necessarily the murderer, and the murderer's not necessarily the attacker. Hardly worth your getting black and blue. What I don't understand, though, is why any of Breedlove's established victims would suddenly turn on him.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then this year's new victim still seems the obvious suspect. Are you sure he didn't know he was about to be blackmailed?”

“The letter was lying on Breedlove's desk, presumably undelivered. It was folded, but hadn't been put into an envelope yet.”

“Did you find an envelope?”

“No.”

“Odd. People don't generally fold letters until they have the envelope ready.”

“Breedlove's annotation in the nursery rhyme book said the letter was dispatched two days before he died. We assumed he'd got a bit ahead of himself, or had second thoughts. But it's not as if the recipient is going to bring it back and deliberately leave it at the scene of the crime when he kills Dennis.”

“Why not? You said the contents were pretty cryptic. You're no closer to guessing who it was meant for, are you? Does it work for Sidney?”

Oliver shook his head. “Sidney and Lesbia's situation doesn't fit the letter or the new victim's nursery rhyme, ‘Here's the church, here's the steeple.' On the other hand, that rhyme works perfectly for the vicar—‘open the door, see all the people.' But going by the timing, the Reverend Mr. Edwards should be ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill.' Only it doesn't work.”

“Sure it does,” said Geoffrey absently.

“Why?”

“Because that's what those groups are called.” Geoffrey looked at his friend with surprise. “Didn't you know that?”

“Didn't I know what, damn it?”

“Oh. Well, when men and women get together to, uh, air their differences, it's known as a Jack and Jill club.”

Oliver stared at his friend for a moment. Then he slipped down from the stile and performed a brief jig, before he remembered that it would cause him pain. He limped back.

“Oh my God, it works!” he cried. “It works! Geoffrey Angelwine, you're a pervert and a genius.”

Geoffrey smiled, happy to see his friend happy. “Oh, not really a genius,” he disclaimed.

“No, not really.” Oliver searched in his pockets. “I should call Effie, but I've left my phone at the house. Let's go back. I am too much in the sun, anyway. And we can look at that website of Ben's.”

***

“Double-you, double-you, double-you, dot doctor dash peeper—no spaces—dot com,” said Oliver, copying the URL from Geoffrey's scribbled note into his laptop's browser. A home page filled the screen, dotted with several thumbnail images of couples engaged in sexual activity.

“You didn't tell me it was a pornographic website,” Oliver complained to Geoffrey.

“Did I hear you spell out Doctor-Peeper-dot-com?” asked Toby from his chair by the fireplace. He had been reading a book quietly when Oliver and Geoffrey ran into the sitting room and claimed a socket for the laptop. “You do know that's Eric Mormal's website, right?”

“I didn't, but I'm not surprised,” said Oliver, squinting at the pictures and clicking around the page. It always led to the same pop-up screen, demanding a password or a payment to a company called 740 Ventures, no doubt so that, unlike Doctor Peeper, it wouldn't raise any blue flags when wives scrutinized their husband's credit card bills. “What does he have on it?”

“I have no idea,” said Toby. “Eric won't tell me, and he said he won't let me join. Not that I'd ever try. I mean, I know online porn is a multibillion dollar industry, but there's so much free stuff out there, only an idiot would pay for something like Doctor Peeper.”