Lunch with the Broads was followed by kite flying with Georgie and Alexandra, then a short snooze in their hotel suite before going off to the theatre. Jonty had eschewed all discussion of the case until the following day, insisting that they needed refreshment in body, mind, and spirit, for which a day in London was proving just the ticket.
Orlando wasn’t so sure about the theatrical element, given that he didn’t particularly like musical revues. If he had the choice between going to see one and going to have his teeth drilled, he’d have probably opted for the latter. However, he acknowledged that Jonty had suffered a trying morning and deserved a treat.
The first time he and Jonty had gone to the theatre had been for a production of Hamlet, which had exceeded his wildest expectations, and against which all future productions had to be measured. The fact that this time Jonty had purchased tickets for something frothy and frivolous, starring someone called Jack Buchanan—of whom Orlando had never heard—had horrified him.
What horrified him even more was how much he enjoyed himself. The songs were catchy, especially the one about the man whose fiancée’s mother was quite determined to come along on all of their outings. He was glad that Mrs. Stewart had never wanted to sit on his knee, as the woman in the song had; his dodgy Achilles tendon would never have stood up to the strain.
Jonty told him that the chap who’d written the amusing little ditty was the same chap who’d turned out “Keep the Home Fires Burning” and, rumour had it, his home fires burned in a similar way to the ones at Forsythia Cottage. The only damper on the evening was that they didn’t dare try lighting any romantic fires in their hotel suite, given the remarkable capacity the walls appeared to have for transmitting sound. They’d had to content themselves with warm nostalgia for their bedroom at home. Comparing notes in the train the next day as it sped them northwards produced the same nostalgia but this time for earlier investigations, when they’d used train journeys to discuss their latest case. Somehow it felt as though this case was edging closer to a solution, if only they could select the correct thread to draw the ends together.
“Those capsules being the same colour as the whisky itself seems, if not highly suspicious, then frankly serendipitous,” Orlando observed. “Easy enough to slip the things into a decanter, especially a crystal one in a tantalus, and for them not to be noticed.”
“I wish somebody had bothered to pin down whether the poison was in the drink or just in the capsules. And who had drunk from which glass, but I guess it’s too late now.” Jonty wrinkled his nose. “Do they keep all these specimens, do you know? And is there a limit to the time one can perform tests on them, because of samples denaturing and the like?”
“You’ll have to ask Dr. Panesar. It’s the obscure type of thing he might know about. Or our old friend Inspector Wilson. Although it may not get us any further forward. If the authorities were so slapdash that mistakes were made originally, mislabelling whose glass was which, it would be irrelevant anyway. I suppose everybody was so distracted by those suicide letters that it never occurred to them to test any other thesis.” Orlando tapped the train window in frustration.
“It’s a shame you can’t fingerprint saliva, to find out which glass was which.” Jonty slapped his arm. “Maybe we should get Dr. P. onto developing something along those lines.”
“Don’t encourage him. He has enough daft ideas.”
“Daft? I’m sure that if you went back to Shakespeare’s day, the idea that you could identify a felon by the marks their fingers had left would seem daft. Maybe one day somebody will be able to look back at our cases, the ones we’ve been confident of having solved but without absolute proof, and say ‘Those old duffers were right, that really is what happened to the Woodville Ward’ or whoever else they’re poking about with. Exhuming bodies and comparing their hair or some such clever stuff.” Jonty’s eyes shone.
Orlando snorted. “Forget what you said earlier. You’ve obviously been spending too much time with Dr. Panesar as it is.”
“There are worse people I could spend time with.” Jonty grinned. “There’s nothing wrong with visionaries. And he hasn’t blown me up yet.”
“ Yet. Quite.” Orlando rolled his eyes. “Anyway, until he perfects his time machine and we can go back to see what happened on any given occasion in the past, we have to use our wits to compensate.”
“My wits keep telling me we’re just being blind. That the answer is glaringly obvious but we’re not looking in the right place.”
“Maybe the glaringly obvious itself is the answer. Two suicides. All the rest is coincidence.” Orlando peered out of the window again, suddenly feeling a weariness that couldn’t just be ascribed to a busy day and a late night. “We need something tangible.”
***
As Jonty might have put it, their guardian angels had clearly been listening.
He and Orlando called into St. Bride’s on the way home, to collect their college post and drop in a copy of the programme from the revue for the porter Summerbee’s sister, who had a bit of a thing for Ivor Novello. Although much good that “thing” would ever do her.
Summerbee took it with profuse thanks. “And I’ve something for you in return, Dr. Stewart.”
He disappeared into the back of the porters’ lodge, returning with a large, sturdily wrapped package.
“From Mrs. Sheridan.” He laid the parcel on the counter with great care. “She said you were to have them as soon as possible.”
“Thank you. They’re documents to do with our latest case,” Jonty added, since while the porters were models of discretion outside of their lodge, they gossiped like old women within it and would have been madly speculating on what the contents could be.
“Nothing to do with goat husbandry?” Summerbee grinned.
“If it were, I’d come and practice here. Too long since this place has seen livestock.” Jonty scooped up the parcel with as much dignity as he could muster, then went to scoop up Orlando, who’d been waylaid by one of his research students.
The parcel, once opened in the safety of their own home, proved to be what they’d expected: Atherton’s manuscript, or at any rate some pages from it. As Ariadne’s accompanying letter explained, Blackett had gladly gone on the hunt, not least because anything that might hasten a solution to the case was in his best interests. His wife’s continued speculation as to her brother’s fate was becoming a constant theme of conversation.
“I’d find that lady a touch wearing at the best of times.” Jonty took off his spectacles and polished them in preparation. “Can you read the rest of that letter? Somebody seems to have been eating their breakfast off these.”
“It wasn’t me.” Orlando sniffed. “She says that Blackett discovered his wife had destroyed all the documents she’d found, both in her house and at Atherton’s London flat. That strikes me as highly suspicious.”
“Especially if they’d have supported her theory of his being a murder victim. I wonder what was in them she didn’t want the world to see?”
“We might find out from what remains. Wilshire had these.” Orlando tapped the parcel. “Thank goodness Blackett had the common sense to ask him about them.”
“Thank goodness Wilshire had the common sense to see they might be important.” Jonty gave his spectacles a final wipe, in defiance of Orlando who always averred this was illogical, his point being that without having the things on, how could Jonty see they really were clean? “Although, again, why didn’t he tell us he had them? They can’t be that secret if he readily handed them over to Blackett.”
“I bet your Phyllis had a word with him in advance.”
“Doesn’t that rather scupper your theory that she and Wilshire were in the business of murder together?”
“Not necessarily.” Orlando spoke with a touch of bluster. “They might have thought it less suspicious to hand over any papers which wouldn’t incriminate them.”
Jonty reached across. “Give me your hands.”
“Why?”
“Because then I can stop you clutching at straws.”
Orlando’s face, so crestfallen, like a child whose favourite toy has just been broken, filled Jonty with thoughts of consoling him. Thoughts not appropriate to someone who had a pile of work he really should look through before bedtime. Maybe he could rise early, instead, and tackle the stuff at the breakfast table. Orlando normally wouldn’t approve at such goings-on but if that was the recompense for a spot of passion, he’d no doubt make an exception.
“Let’s see what this manuscript has got to say, Orlando. Incomplete or not, this is tangible. Unless, we must note, the pages have been faked by Phyllis Chambers, who could have typed up anything to replace the originals with.” Jonty didn’t believe that. Or maybe he didn’t want to believe it unless and until he had no other option.
“Shall I read them aloud if you’re struggling to see?”
“Oh, ha-ha.” Jonty held out his hand. “We can both go through them. Shout out if there’s anything relevant to the case. I’m not interested in a load of ‘I cut my first teeth when I was eight months old’ nonsense.”
Five minutes into reading, Jonty’s heart had sunk with the awful feeling that autobiographical stuff was all they’d get. Autobiographical stuff that was annoyingly lacking in anything sensible—like an adherence to a timeline—or helpful, like page numbering. Maybe he’d just been unlucky in his batch of pages and Orlando would prove to be more fortunate, a hope that appeared to be fulfilled when Orlando remarked, “There are several pages here about his girlfriend and how she’d introduced him to the Llewelyn Davies family. He clearly loved her very much, and through her had grown fond of them. It says that’s why he promised to help George.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know from my papers.” Jonty sighed in frustration. “Unless it’s about schooldays and university pranks like having competitions to see how far you could spit melon seeds, and playing Snapdragon until they burned themselves, because that’s all I’m turning up.”
“Any goats involved in Atherton’s undergraduate japes?” Orlando jerked his legs under his seat, probably an involuntary guard against a shin whacking.
“They’ll no doubt engrave something about goats on my gravestone.” Jonty groaned. “Still, I think it shows how I was the life and soul of St. Bride’s back in my undergraduate days. As I’ve often said, it cost me a gating and a crate of beer, but it was worth every penny.”
“You can always comfort yourself that your bits of Atherton’s manuscript show how much he enjoyed living life. No wonder he felt so distressed at the changes in his capabilities. Wouldn’t anyone?”
“True.” Jonty, with a shudder, remembered some of the limbless veterans he’d seen, and went back to his reading. Conflict didn’t stay out of his thoughts long, as Atherton’s notes reached wartime, detailing his experiences of signing up, being trained, deployment, and being invalided home. Stories of life in the army that swamped Jonty with uncomfortable thoughts about his own promise to a fellow soldier, still unfulfilled. “Why did he want a record of all this? Not for his family, as his sister clearly didn’t want what she found.”
“Maybe she didn’t find the relevant bits. By which I mean maybe Atherton suspected she’d get rid of his memoirs and made sure he left them with Wilshire. Or Phyllis to give to Wilshire.”
“Which is odd in itself. Why leave your most intimate memories with your servant?” Jonty held the pages up to the light, in the vain hope something of significance might have been hidden in the watermark. “Unless Atherton never intended them to be left as a memento. That he intended to live on and edit them for private publication. Sorry, I’m speculating without evidence again.”
“Not entirely without evidence.” Orlando held out a sheet of paper. “Have a look at this odd piece, stuffed in amongst some of the autobiographical material.”
In the event that my death be proven to be by natural causes or at my own hand or at my own instigation, I would like all my notebooks and papers to be either buried with me or destroyed.
Jonty whistled. “Interesting, given what’s happened to them. Does it suggest Wilshire, the man who was first on the scene, had suspicions this wasn’t actually suicide?”
“Of course he did.” Orlando slapped his thigh. “Remember the thing about the liquorice allsorts? How Atherton had asked Wilshire to buy some that day? Read on.”
In the event of my death being proven to be at the hands of another person and not at my instigation, these same papers are not to be destroyed, in case they are needed by the relevant authorities.
“As before, they haven’t been. Given to the authorities. And if Mrs. Blackett believes the death wasn’t suicide, why has she destroyed material she possessed? Nobody seems to act logically in this case.” Jonty laid the paper down. “Where are we?”
“Pedalling furiously and getting nowhere,” Orlando replied with a smile. “Except that it sounds like Atherton was worried somebody might be intending him harm. We need to keep reading. What we’ve come across so far doesn’t seem to contain anything which would be of interest to any authorities, unless it’s something peculiar to do with his conviction he was gassed during the war.”
“Talking of peculiar, there’s a bit of ranting in his wartime stuff about the Angel of Mons, whom he seemed to believe was St. Michael coming down to avenge the innocent. There are Michaels everywhere in this case. And Georges.” Jonty shuddered again, remembering Atherton’s promise on the battlefield, and his own. “Keep reading it is, then.”
Among the papers they found things to confirm Atherton had been so deep in despair at times he’d wanted to take his own life, but equally other things to support the theory he’d had second thoughts. The fractionated nature of the material suggested either some of it was missing or Atherton had never got round to filling in the narrative gaps.
“This conversation with the nun. This manuscript says it made Atherton change his mind about suicide,” Jonty stated, coming up for air. “I think he had another incentive not to kill himself. Wanting to find out if Paul really was involved in those drownings and bring him to justice. St. Michael avenging young Michael, for George’s sake.”
“I’ve not found anything relating to either of the Robertsons in my stuff. Have you?”
“Not a jot or tittle. If it meant so much to Atherton, why not mention it amongst all this annoyingly trivial stuff?” Jonty took off his glasses and cleaned them again. “Do you think someone has conveniently removed it or burned it or both? Oh hell!” Jonty grabbed at the pages as they slid off his knee mid-wipe. “Well, they were in a mess to start with. Dropping them can’t make it worse. Oh.”
“Oh?”
“Look at this.” Jonty passed Orlando a sheet of paper covered in lines of what appeared to be random letters. “Code, do you think?”
“It could well be.” Orlando studied the document, his puzzled look gradually metamorphosing into a delighted grin. “I can imagine a man with an active mind trapped in a useless body turning to this kind of amusement.”
“Well, you can amuse yourself with it for the rest of the afternoon. I’ll stoke up the fire and plough through the rest of this nonsense while you decode that tarradiddle.” Jonty scooped up the papers Orlando had yet to read, then got to work with the poker, frustrated that he couldn’t just feed the flames with what he was carrying. They’d make better fuel than evidence.
“I’ll get Mrs. Ward to stoke us up with tea while we’re at it. This will be hungry work.”
“You do that.” Jonty’s will to live revived a touch. “And cake. That’s what a man needs on a Sunday afternoon.”
Cake, tea, and a well-banked fire in place, Orlando got his head over his code, while Jonty ploughed on with his documents, frustrated at the lack of progress. Watching his lover was much more interesting, as Orlando scribbled on pieces of paper, scattered them all over the place, then picked them up for comparison.
“Got it!” Orlando shouted, after about half an hour of activity. “It’s a neat little code, mainly a letter substitution with an element of a keyword.”
“I’m sure it is. What does it actually say?”
“Give me ten minutes and another bit of caraway cake and you’ll know.”
Jonty happily supplied both, then went off to get a fresh pot of tea to stop him chomping at the bit throughout those ten minutes.
“I’ve done it.” Orlando’s face was particularly sombre when Jonty returned with the brew.
“You look like you’ve lost five pounds and found sixpence.” Jonty poured his lover a consoling cup.
“Something like that. At first I thought it was just more useless stuff. The first few lines sound like they’re from a nursery rhyme. ‘There was a little man who wooed a little maid, and he said, “Little maid, will you wed, wed, wed?”’ And lots more like it, although perhaps that was just as well, as the repeats helped me solve the code.” He took a sip of tea. “Thank you.”
“No clues in the rhyme itself?”
“Not so far as I can see, but there’s a bombshell after it. Atherton had set up a trust, quite separate from his last will and testament. For people he felt had helped him in his hour of need.” Orlando was evidently fighting to hide a grin.
“You were right, then, if those people turn out to include Phyllis and Wilshire. Don’t look so smug.”
“Sorry.” Orlando didn’t look remorseful at all. “This legacy was to be paid out six months after his demise, or after the outcome of any inquest into said death.”
“Not paid out yet, then?”
“So it would seem. Dr. Robertson had originally been named in it, but he’d been expunged once Atherton found out about the Michael Llewelyn Davies business.”
“At last a mention of that. I was beginning to think the Oxford element was all a mare’s nest, based on nothing more than connecting the two brothers.” Jonty cradled his cup. “Did the people named know about this trust? It could give another motive for the doctor killing Atherton.”
“I don’t think Robertson did.” Orlando’s brows knitted together. “Wilshire may have done, he being in there from the start and not expunged. Phyllis Chambers took Robertson’s place.”
Jonty almost upended his cup. “Really? Is this trust worth a lot of money, do you know?”
“Not exactly, but hundreds, if not more. Enough to kill for,” Orlando added, bleakly.
“Indeed. If known about. I wonder if Phyllis could break codes?”
“Don’t forget the Room 40 connection.” Orlando sighed. “She would no doubt be bright enough, and this one wasn’t that difficult. It could be decoded by anyone who had two brain cells to rub together, even one of my dunderheads.”
“Although why include this page in what Wilshire handed over if it’s so incriminating?” Jonty put his hand to his heart. “I confess to being biased. I naturally mistrust any theory involving the only two people I particularly like in this case.”
“Typical.” Orlando scowled at him, but only in jest. “Maybe they just missed the sheet concerned, given the mess this was in.”
“Maybe the manuscript was in a mess because somebody had gone through it and picked out anything incriminating. Like I shall do when I finally dispose of you.” Jonty laid down his cup, shuffled his papers into a neat pile and put them back in the packet they’d come in. “We’ll keep your decoded version out so we can read it again later. There’s not a lot else we can do for a few days. Far too much on my plate to go witness chasing until the weekend. It’ll keep. Atherton and Paul Robertson aren’t going anywhere.”
“No, but Wilshire could cut and run if he knows we’re on his trail. Dragging young Phyllis behind him.”
“She’d be the one doing the dragging, I suspect.” Jonty sighed. “I wonder if Atherton was being funny with his rhyme about asking a little maid to wed. Wilshire being the little man and Phyllis the maid. In any case, we’ll just have to hope the fact we’re not haring straight back to see them lulls people into a false sense of security. Was Charles named in the trust, by the way?”
“No, nor Mrs. McGinley. Just our two lovebirds, if lovebirds they are. Why?”
“The quicksand. Robertson’s death. Our lovebirds wouldn’t have had a motive to do him in, would they?” Jonty’s spirits rallied at the idea.
“Unless it was merely coincidental. Maybe they didn’t expect him to drink from the whisky. No,” Orlando raised his hand, “I’ve just realised that doesn’t work. Why put poison in a man’s decanter and then expect him only to offer it to guests?”
“Why murder Atherton in that way at all? Why not in his flat, where it would all be easier to arrange?”
“Easier, yes, but it would have made their involvement more obvious. Better the locked consulting room, which they couldn’t have been in, therefore they couldn’t have done the murder.” Orlando wagged his finger. “And having what appeared to be a doctor’s involvement would be a bonus. An apparent mercy killing.”
“With the apparent remorseful suicide of the person who carried it out? It would act as an effective smoke screen.” Jonty sighed.
“It’s all coincidental, but there’s a list of points in favour of this theory.” Orlando counted off on his fingers. “They had access to the scene, access to the manuscript, were in a position where their trustworthiness wasn’t doubted . . .”
“I know. Don’t go on. I have an awful feeling Wilshire and Phyllis have become your most obvious suspects now.”
“I’m sorry. You really don’t want it to be them, do you?” Orlando looked so sad Jonty had to go over and kiss him, risk of being intruded on by Mrs. Ward in search of dirty plates notwithstanding.
“I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stand in the way of establishing the truth. Not all the caraway cake in Cambridge could make me do that. Talking of which,” Jonty added, with another peck on Orlando’s lips, “how about one more slice? That should elevate my flagging spirits.”
“As long as that’s all it elevates.” Orlando grinned. “I’m exhausted.”