Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

‘… built up in layers of impasto on scrunched-up newspaper. They’d make lovely gifts.’

‘You know the Fernshaws, don’t you,’ I said.

‘Excuse me?’ Mrs Delamitri turned round from the window and let the lace drape fall back across the glass.

‘You told Nathan to say hi to his sister.’

‘Oh, sure. I met them a couple of times. They seemed like nice kids. Patrick got close to them after their father died. The girl is beautiful. She’d be more your type, Damien. Closer to your age, too.’

‘She’s got a boyfriend,’ I said.

‘Really? What’s he like?’

‘He’s an academic. Name’s Michael. Quite a bit older than her.’

‘That figures,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Oh, the old cliché about looking for a father figure, I guess.’

I refilled the kettle from the tap. ‘What happened to her actual father?’

‘Don’t quote me on this, Damien, but I believe he drowned.’

*

Mrs Delamitri left before lunch. The pistols were in the chest of looted possessions that I had stored up in the attic. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to learn from them, but I found myself examining them again closely. They did look like murder weapons. That was what I had found unpleasant about them in the first place. They had the same grubbily practical quality as the objects in Ziploc bags that attorneys brandish in courtrooms. They were cruel and ordinary — like a pair of bread knives, or screwdrivers, like the chair legs Mycroft uses to finish off Abel Mundy.

Nothing in the previous stories had prepared me for the violence Mycroft unleashed on the wounded man. It was completely unexpected. It also seemed unnecessary. Surely Mycroft the egghead could have come up with a more elegant way of disposing of his man than bashing his brains out with a lump of wood?

I cocked and fired the faulty pistol. Still no click. Had it been damaged in a fall? Rust seemed a more likely answer. And who in their right mind would plan to carry out a murder with an unreliable antique? I told myself it was a prop from the costume box, not an exhibit in a murder trial.

I found it hard to admit to myself what the story made me think.

Mycroft had said he was offering Mundy a choice: if Mundy left the country, he wouldn’t kill him. But the more I reread the story, the less the offer seemed sincere. Mycroft had planned to kill him all along. And the sinister part was that he seemed to enjoy it. He was thrilled by the taste of the dead man’s blood. By comparison, the account of disposing of the body was totally dispassionate. It had a weird detachment, as though it were written by a character in shock.

Down in the basement, Patrick had saved copies of his rage-filled letters like trophies, like so many scalps that he’d taken from his victims. And to Patrick each of them represented a wrong righted, a humbug exposed, a slight avenged. Mycroft would undoubtedly have approved. He was everything Patrick felt about himself, raised to heroic size: the neglected genius, the avenging angel, the scourge of the powerful, the mould-breaking intellectual. And when Patrick was in a manic, morally indignant frame of mind, he shared Mycroft’s confidence that no problem was so complex that it wouldn’t benefit from his interference.

And even the more low-key Mycroft recalling his adventures in old age bore similarities to my uncle: the erudition, the reflective melancholy, the obssession with success and failure, the hinted-at burden of guilt.

But Mycroft was a murderer.

MR DIAZ WAS SORRY when I told him I would be leaving in about a week. I said I might be back the following summer, but secretly I felt this would be the last time I would ever visit.

‘I’ll have it winterised,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the police to stop by once a day. We don’t want another break-in.’

‘You might invest in a burglar alarm,’ I said.

‘I’ll put it to the trustees.’

‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘I came across this story while I was going through my uncle’s things. I’d like you to read it. I’d like to know what you think of it.’

He looked at me with a slightly puzzled smile. ‘May I ask why?’

‘I’d rather not say,’ I told him. ‘I’d like you to read it with an open mind. I found it somewhere that makes me think Patrick felt it was important.’

‘Moby-Dick important, or Headline Rate of Inflation important?’

‘That’s why I wanted you to read it,’ I said, and he slapped my back and chuckled.

He met me the following afternoon at one of the harbour bars in Westwich. I had arrived slightly early and got a bowl of wilted-looking yellow popcorn and a pitcher of frothy lager.

‘Well, what did you make of it?’

He took a handful of popcorn from the bowl. ‘You trying to get me in trouble with my wife?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘“Her hand roused my naked yard to stiffness.”’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

Mr Diaz snorted with laughter and a popcorn kernel got stuck at the back of his throat. ‘I was quoting from the story!’ he wheezed.

‘I know, I know. I didn’t want your opinion on his sexual braggadocio. What did you think of the rest of it?’

‘Well, it’s all kind of mixed up. I mean, one guy’s called Fernshaw, but the Fernshaw character’s called something else.’

‘Mundy. He transposed the names.’

‘Right. I’ll tell you another thing, from what my wife tells me, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out Dicky Fernshaw was a thug.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It was well known.’

‘Really?’

Mr Diaz nodded.

‘What happened to him?’

‘Drowned, I think. I don’t know too much about it. This is old island stuff. You should really talk to my wife. She was in high school with all the Fernshaws.’

I found myself too ashamed to admit to the thoughts I had been having about Patrick and had to resort to a fictional device to make me feel less uncomfortable.

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I showed the story to an old friend of Patrick’s and she was quite upset by it. She felt that the story wasn’t one hundred per cent fiction. I have no idea myself. She even — I know how ridiculous this must sound to you — she even thought Patrick might have been somehow involved in Mr Fernshaw’s death.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No. That’s what she thought. I didn’t know enough about the background to it to tell her she was wrong.’

‘I mean, the story is ten per cent jokes, ten per cent porno, eighty per cent whatever. But it’s not evidence that anyone’s killed anybody.’

‘It’s not evidence you could use in court,’ I said. ‘But it’s still a “confession”.’

‘That’s right. “The Confession of Sherlock Holmes.”’

‘Mycroft Holmes, actually. Sherlock’s older brother.’ It somewhat undermined my confidence in Mr Diaz that he couldn’t even get the title right and didn’t seem to have grasped that Sherlock wasn’t the protagonist.

‘Well, let me ask you this,’ he said. ‘Do you think Dick Fernshaw’s body is in a barrel at the bottom of the Thames?’

‘Of course not,’ I said. Mr Diaz was looking pleased with himself, as though this observation was conclusive. ‘The point is the story made her feel uncomfortable, and so I thought it was worth running past you.’

I knew that the inference I was putting on the story depended on being selective about what was literally true, but I found this difficult to explain to Mr Diaz. He had a point, of course. Wasn’t it either all true or all false? Then I would remember the haunting line in the story that began And I beat him until he moved no longer and get uneasy.