Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (23 page)

‘Mysterioso and the others know it too.’

‘Some of it,’ said the Inspector. A vain man, Mysterioso, he added, really one of the vainest he had ever known. ‘Of course, as you said, it’s their stock-in-trade.’

‘After what he admitted tonight,’ suggested Mr. Photoze, ‘I think much may be forgiven the old man.’

‘Nevertheless, through his vanity he’s obstructed the course of justice. From the very beginning—from before the very beginning.’

‘You mean—the letters?’

‘The letters—anonymous letters signed, “Her Husband”. In all sorts of different envelopes, in all sorts of different type, posted from all sorts of different parts of the country—’

‘Ye gods! And who travelled all over the country constantly, with his act? And who got all that lovely publicity? You mean he wrote them to himself?’

‘No, I think the letters were genuine,’ said Block slowly. ‘Genuine letters in genuine envelopes. I just think the letters didn’t belong in the envelopes.’

Typed envelopes—envelopes that had previously held circulars, impossible to distinguish, even by the senders, from the myriad of similar envelopes pushed day after day through letter boxes up and down the land. ‘He’d just pick one with a Birmingham postmark or a Glasgow postmark or what you will—put the letter in that, seal it up instead of merely tucking it in—the glue would be still intact—tear it open again and then send it off to the police—first taking care to arrange for the maximum publicity.’

‘The publicity I understand,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘But for the rest—I daresay I’m dense, but why put the letters into new envelopes? Why not just show them as they were?’ And he answered himself immediately, ‘Well, but good God, yes—of course! Because the letters were addressed to someone else.’

Fourteen words: The young man’s father couldn’t have killed Tom. Tom
was
the young man’s father.

While the cat’s away, the mouse will play. How had the indispensable servant spent the long waiting hours, while his master dallied five storeys above?

‘So the letters were really addressed to Tom—Tom Cat, perhaps we should call him from now on. And the shot—But good heavens, that performance at the foot of the cornerstone?’

‘A performance,’ said Inspector Block briefly.

‘With a dying man in his arms—his friend?’

‘I wonder if the poor neutered cat felt so very warmly towards the full Tom after all? And think of the dividends! The photograph—but that was a bonus—of the great, defiant gesture; the reputation ever afterwards for heedless courage. Some defiance!—he knew perfectly well there wouldn’t be another shot. The murderer hadn’t got the wrong man at all. It was meant for Tom.’

‘But Tom himself said—’

‘Just recall the way that went,’ said Inspector Block. ‘The man was bleeding at the mouth, hardly in good shape for clear articulation. Mysterioso listened, then he called the woman to come close. He told her what the man was saying: “Thank God they only got
me
—it was meant for you.” He told them all. The woman listened to the choked-out words, and believed what she’d been told. No doubt Tom gasped out something like, “My God, he’s got me! He really meant it!”—something like that. Don’t you see, the magician forced the card on her?—she heard what he told her to hear, that’s all.’

‘Some opportunist!’

‘He’d shown that in the matter of the letters. This was only an extension of that.’

‘Tom would bring the first letter to his master—I daresay there weren’t many secrets between those two. I wonder,’ said Inspector Block, ‘what Mysterioso’s first reaction would have been?’

‘Jealousy,’ said Mr. Photoze.

‘I think so too; especially after what we heard tonight. I think Mr. Mysterioso wanted those letters for himself. So—all sorts of good reasons to the man: you’re in danger; this idiot, whoever he is, might try something funny. The police won’t bother much about you, but if
I
were to ask for protection—And Tom, after long years in “the business”, would be the first to appreciate, the value of the publicity, the anxious fans, the eager sensation-seekers, flocking to performances with the subconscious hope that something tragic would happen—as they flock to the circus.’

‘Why no letters before that?’

‘I think,’ said Block slowly, ‘that all the way along, this was a crime arising out of opportunity. And here was the first opportunity. The months passed, the baby was born, Robbins fumed and was sick with anger; he couldn’t just go and beat up the seducer—he was in the police, and the police wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing; and more important, he wasn’t going to let the world know of his shame. But then—well, Mysterioso told us that these invitations to lay cornerstones and whatnot were arranged months in advance; and the first people to know about forthcoming events are the local police. Suddenly P.C. Robbins learned that his enemy was coming to Thrushford.

‘Threats at first, meaningless probably, just to give the seducer a bad time, with the vague hope that when he comes to Thrushford with his master, one may be able to add some small frightening shock just to shake him up. But the seducer turns it all to his own advantage, makes a sort of public joke of it, hands the letters to another man. The rankling anger grows and grows and begins to take on a more positive quality. And then the second opportunity presents itself.

‘I don’t know which came first—the rifle or the post of duty outside the unfinished wing. Either could have been fiddled, I daresay, having achieved the other. Not too difficult, for example, for a policeman to come by a weapon. Some old lady finds the gun after her husband’s death, hardly dares to touch the nasty dangerous thing, knows nothing certainly of numbers and identification marks, hands it over to the first copper, and thinks no more about it. He may have had it stashed away for years, or from the time his suspicions were first aroused; by the time it came to be used, the hander-over could be dead or senile or have moved elsewhere—certainly it was never traced. At any rate, with it in his possession and a perfect place at his disposal for using it, he began seriously to think about taking action. He thought out a plan, worked on it, and brought it off. And damn near perfect it turned out to be.’

‘No one guessed at the time how the thing was done?’

‘My higher-ups may have; but it was all so tenuous. Still, he’d lived in the flats where Mysterioso had visited; they must have had some suspicions—’

‘Only, I had lived there too.’

‘That’s right. And been on the scene of the crime also. So how to choose between the two of you when it seemed impossible for either of you to have done it? At any rate, they cooked up some excuse and got rid of him—I remember him as a difficult chap, brooding and touchy—well, no wonder! I daresay they weren’t sorry to let him go. It wasn’t till tonight…’ He laughed. ‘It hit you at the same moment?—how it had been done. I remember how you stopped and stared and said, “Dear God!” ’

‘But you went on with the theory about possible collusion—’

‘I had to run through all the possibilities. I had to leave no doubts in anyone’s mind. I didn’t want people coming to the boy afterwards, saying, “He never covered this or that aspect.” But by then, I knew. When the boy accused you of making the hole in the roof
before
I saw you apparently making it—’

‘It accounted for the bag of apples and all,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘So simple! Wasn’t it?’

So simple.

P.C. Robbins with hate in his heart and a long-perfected plan of revenge. After the major search of the previous day, concealing the rifle, the rope, the string, the apples, preparing the boards for dovetailing into a tripod. Slipping up when the final inspection had been concluded and they’d all gone off to prepare for the ceremony, erecting the tripod, fixing the rifle, winding a length of twine around the butt to suggest exactly what in fact had been deduced—that some trick with the string had been played. (A bag of apples dropped on to a taut string, jerking back a trigger—the nonsense of it! As if anyone for a moment could really depend on anything so absurdly susceptible to failure!) Down again, unseen because there was as yet nobody on the hospital balcony; or if observed, just another copper going about his business; the police had been up and down all day.

And then—

The sound of a shot—in the unfinished wing. A policeman tearing up, two steps at a time, pausing only to yell out, ‘Watch the stairs!’ and ‘They’ve got him!’ Pandemonium, predictably, on the hospital balcony, everyone talking at once, a lot of people ill and easily thrown into hysteria. Noise and confusion, at any rate, masking the sound of—

‘Of the real shot,’ said Mr. Photoze.

‘How do you hide a brown paper bag?—a paper bag that you’ve blown up and burst, to take the sound of a shot. You fill it with too many apples and leave it prominently displayed, with two or three of them apparently rolled out from the tear in the side.’

‘So his father did commit the murder,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘But in fact he didn’t. Because the man he calls his father, was not his father. So we could all look him in the eye and tell him that his father was innocent.’

‘These trick-psychs!’ said Inspector Block. ‘Oedipal complexes, delusions, paranoia—looking for a scapegoat for his own guilt feelings towards his dead father, because he had resented him in life, his dominance over himself; been jealous of the father’s possession of the mother—all the rest of it. “A long period of treatment!” Damn nonsense! One evening’s straight-forward discussion—merely convince the boy that his suspicions are unfounded, and that’s all there is to it. From now on, he’ll be as right as rain.’

The boy was as right as rain. He was bending over the Grand Mysterioso, lying back helpless in the big armchair. ‘If they didn’t do it—then you must have. Of course it wasn’t you that was meant to be killed—I can see that now; it was Tom. Because it was you that killed him—wasn’t it? It has to be. There’s nobody else. You were dependent on him—you hated him for that, to be humiliatingly dependent, like a child;
I
know about that, I know what that’s like, to be a child and—and hate someone, underneath: and to be helpless. And jealous of him—you were jealous because he was a man and you weren’t one any more; you told us about that just now, you and that woman: you gave away how ashamed you were. I know about that too. I was only a child but my—my father was a man.

‘I was angry with my father about that, but you—you were ashamed. And so you killed him; it must have been you, there’s nobody else. Oh, don’t ask me how—you’re the magician, you’re the one that knows the tricks; you said it yourself, things like melting ice and burning-down candles and a lot of others, I expect, that you carefully didn’t mention; but you’d know them all, all right. And there you were with your big cloak, even on such a hot day—all pockets and hiding places…

‘And you were on your own—they left you alone when they went down the corridor and hoisted Mr. Photoze up on to the roof and shot the bolt after him; quite a while they must have been there and by the time they came back you were waiting for them, standing in the doorway of the room—standing in the doorway, blocking off their view into that room with your big body and your big cloak. If you could get across the room from the window to the door, then you could do other things—oh, I don’t know how and I don’t care; you’re the magician, you do tricks that nobody ever sees through and this was just another of them. But you did it. If that fool with his bangles and his photos didn’t, well then, there’s no one else.’

No one else. For a moment there had been no one at all and that had been the worst, that had been the most terrible of all. So this one must not escape. Deep, deep down, perhaps, below conscious calculation, lay the cold knowledge of how tenuous a tether held this last scapegoat safe, the knowledge that this sacrificial goat must be placed beyond power of redemption or he too would be gone. ‘It was you. And for what you did, my father suffered for the rest of his life; it was dreadful, we were so poor, they were always fighting and my father—wasn’t always… Well, sometimes he was unkind, a bloody little bastard he used to call me, and my mother used to cry and cry…’

He went on and on, face chalk white, scarlet-streaked. But he was all right now, ‘as right as rain’. He had found his scapegoat and now forever made his scapegoat safe; and so might love his mother and be loved by her without feeling guilty that his father was dead and could rival him no more. His father had suffered and died, and it had been—horrible—to go on resenting his memory; but now he had avenged his father and he was free.

The spittle ran down from his gibbering mouth and fell upon the upturned face of the Grand Mysterioso. But Mysterioso made no move to prevent it. The boy had his hands around his throat and he was dead.

T
HE ROLLING SUMMIT OF
the bare Welsh mountain was patched with gorse, standing like sparse tufts of hair on a bald man’s head. ‘Come in by the bushes, Gwennie,’ said Boyo. He had been nerving himself for this for a long time. When they were safe from observation, he blurted it out at last. ‘Gwennie! Show me?’

‘Show you what?’ said Gwennie. There’s dense, for a girl of nearly six.

He went very red, having to say it outright but he summoned up all his temerity. ‘Show me your chest.’

Gwennie seemed not unduly offended. But…‘How can I show you up by here?’ She peered out from the frail shelter of the prickly patch. ‘Someone might see us.’ And indeed from where they crouched they could see across the valley to her farm, Penbryn. Mam and Da had gone over to Llangwyn for the mart. Ianto would be out in the woods with Llewellyn the Post and Blodwen off somewhere with Nancy James; but their big brother Idris had been left to work in the yard, cleaning out the silo pit, shifting the hay, ready for the new crop. ‘Not up here, Boyo. Come down to the cave.’

‘If we go to the cave—will you show me?’

In the yard outside the hay-barn, her swing hung idle. ‘If I show you, Boyo, will you push me on the swing?’

‘Yes, all right,’ said Boyo.

‘A hundred times?’

‘All right, all right,’ said Boyo. But a hundred times!