Kill Claudio

Book 315: Murder Room

by P.M. Hubbard

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

While hunting in the English countryside, Ben Selby stumbles upon the murdered body of Peter Gaston, a friend of some twenty years earlier. As they had both been agents in a clandestine organisation, he is convinced that Peter was killed to prevent their meeting and sets out to question his widow. What she tells him is the beginning of a perilous and exasperating search for something buried long ago on a remote island headland.

Release date: July 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

I did not mean to kill the rabbit, but it ran suddenly across the track at a nice distance, and my gun came up without any conscious decision on my part. The rabbit vanished
into the rough, but I knew I had hit it, and it could not be far off, so I went to look for it. I never found it, because I found the man instead, and that put the rabbit out of my head. If I had
not shot the rabbit and gone to look for it, I should never have found the man, and neither would anyone else, or not until the scavengers had removed any great hope of identification, and probably not even then. Not many people go that way. The heather would have grown up through the picked bones, and the bones would have gone neatly down into the peat along with
all the other riff-raff of the centuries. But I had to go and shoot the rabbit, and had now found the man, and here I was, stuck with him. He was no possible concern of mine, but to report him was
the civilised thing to do, and there was even the possibility that not to report him might land me in trouble. So I took a fairly good look at him (there was still no reason not to), and then
walked back to get in touch with the police. But I walked at my own pace, and was conscious of no special excitement, let alone of any concern. I remember there was one moment when I checked in my
stride, because something I had seen in the man’s face made me wonder a bit, but I could not put my finger on it, and just went on walking.

I made my report and put the police on their way, and left them to it. I had nothing to tell them that they could not see for themselves. Later, quite a lot later, a fairly senior policeman and
inspector, or somesuch, came and took my statement, but that was the merest formality. When it was finished, he put his things away and sat back in his chair. He crossed one leg over the other,
which made him look a lot less formal, and sat there looking at me. Then he turned his head sideways, as if merely to be looking at me like that was an intrusion, and said, “You’ll
pardon my asking, sir, but you don’t know of anyone who might wish you ill for any reason?”

It was so much a standard line of dialogue that he seemed to find it embarrassing, and I was sure that the curiously stately “wish you ill” was the deliberate avoidance of a
cliché. All the same, it jolted me fairly out of my mood of determined detachment. I leant forward, as if to cancel out the effect of his sitting back, and said, “Good God, you
don’t mean–?” Then the obvious illogicality of what I had been going to say stopped me in my stride, and my question hung there until he came in again.

This time he took refuge in cliché as clearly as he had avoided it before. He said, “We are treating the case as one of murder, yes, sir.”

I nodded and then frowned at him. The frown was meant to express honest bewilderment, but I was suddenly conscious of my heart beating. I said, “But you asked– I mean, it was him that
got murdered, not me. I don’t know who he was, but–”

He did not wait for me to make the obvious point. He said, “That is so, sir, yes. And we know who he was, and we don’t know why anyone should want to kill him. But it seems he was
killed yesterday evening, possibly in the dusk, and he was certainly killed from behind, and not far from your cottage. And you wouldn’t have noticed it, but he was dressed very much as you
are and was about your size and build. So it did occur to us to wonder whether he might have been killed in mistake for you. And about you, sir, of course, we know next to nothing, only that you
come from the south and have taken Mr. Morton’s cottage for a bit, and made the booking through his agents in Brancastle. So it seemed worth asking.”

He was so apologetic about it that he almost disarmed me, but not quite. So far as the unknown up in the heather was concerned, there was nothing on my conscience, and so far as I could see
nothing to get me involved beyond the mere fact of my finding him. But I was damned if I was going to discuss my past with the inspector, and saw no good reason why I should. I smiled at him, and
this time the smile came with a more practised assurance. I shook my head at him almost gaily. “I don’t expect I’m more universally loved than anyone else,” I said,
“but I can’t really believe anyone would bother to follow me all the way up here to do me in. Apart from the fact that on one knows I’m here, I mean except the agents and
presumably Mr. Morton.” I thought for a moment. “Incidentally,” I said, “do we know what the murdered man was doing here, whoever he was? I mean, was he a local? I’ve
certainly never seen him around. But then I haven’t been here long.”

My assurance seemed to take a weight off his mind, though that did not make much sense either because he must have been badly in need of some explanation. At any rate, he shook his head almost
as cheerfully as I had. “Not a local man,” he said. “Or not what you’d call local. He came from Brancastle. A Mr. Mowbray. We got on to him pretty quickly, in fact. There
was a tailor’s tag in his jacket pocket which somebody seems to have overlooked. They’re not so common as they were, of course. What I mean is, there wasn’t anything else on him
at all to show who he was, and most of us carry something, even if it’s only an old envelope, but here there was nothing but the tag, which looks as if someone went over him, but not quite
thoroughly enough. But what he was doing here we can’t say. Unless he was brought, of course.”

I looked at him with friendly interest, and listened to him with only half my mind. I was picking over my memory for Mowbrays, and could not come up with a single one. And yet I felt I ought to
be able to. I would not have had the inspector think so for the world, but I had a feeling I ought to know this Mr. Mowbray, who had come here from Brancastle only a few days after I had. But even
with only half my mind working on it, the lack of Mowbrays in my past seemed singularly complete.

I smiled a sort of respectful smile, partly for the dead man’s sake and partly for the inspector’s, and said, “Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of more use, and I’m
sorry for the chap, whoever he was. Any family?”

“A wife,” he said. “No children.” I nodded with a proper relief, and he got up to go. He said, “I don’t know what you have in mind.” He was all
hesitation again. “I mean,” he said, “I don’t know if you’ll feel like staying on here after this has happened?”

I was not going to tell him what I felt like, but clearly there was only one thing I could say, and I said it, looking at him with a sort of mildly indignant surprise. “Oh, but – of
course,” I said. “I mean, I can see no reason to change my plans, as long as you don’t mind my being here. I was only going to be here a fortnight anyway. Will that be all right
for you?”

For the first time he did not wholly disguise the speculation in the way he looked at me. “That’s up to you, sir,” he said. “But you’ll be reasonably careful, if
you don’t mind. I’d rather you locked your doors at night and didn’t go out walking in the dusk, as Mr. Mowbray seems to have done. We’ve no reason to think you’re at
any risk whatever, but we don’t know much yet, and that’s the truth, and we don’t want a second murder on our hands, and I assume you don’t either – especially not
yours. So, as I say, be a bit careful, and let us know you’re around. I won’t ask you to report formally every day, but if you can, make sure somebody sees you, or we’ll be having
to send a man up to look for you, and frankly we’re going to have enough on our hands without that.”

I promised him all he asked, and he took himself off. I shut the door and went back to my chair, and it was only then I really started to wonder. I wondered what the inspector was really
thinking. I wondered if I had done and said the right things. In particular, I wondered if I had been right not to ask for more details of the murder. I wanted to know them rather badly, but they
would be published, and I could wait. The only thing was whether my not showing more curiosity had struck the inspector as odd, especially when I had found the body in the first place. But it was
too late to worry about that now.

In the meantime, I assumed what I had, without examining the assumption, assumed from the start. By now, after all, I knew that the man had been killed – and killed from behind. I did not
think there had been any shooting, and I had seen enough for myself to exclude blunt instruments or any form of strangulation. There was nothing to exclude my original immediate assumption of the
small, almost bloodless puncture between the ribs, and the upward-sloping incision just deep enough to reach the heart. The fact remained that I had assumed it from the start, and the next thing I
wondered about was why.

I had seen enough of it at one time, heaven knows, but it was a long time ago now. It was years since I had even seen one of those long steel blades, let alone handled one. As for the people,
they were further back still, a list of names printed on a white ground, because that was the only way I remembered names (there had certainly been no such lists at the time), or a row of faces,
bunched or in line, familiar faces, but each with its own familiar inscrutability. The faces in the line had come and gone over a period of time, and those that went never came back, so that when I
recalled them, as I did sometimes, even now, I never got the same bunch of faces twice, nor could I really be sure that any particular bunch of faces had ever co-existed, as a bunch, in my actual
experience. The visual memory, I find, is a powerful and accurate instrument, but it takes little count of time. I have known middle-aged men whose visual image in my mind has never succeeded in
superseding their remembered appearance at fourteen or fifteen, and this is bound to make for confusion.

Meanwhile, I had found a dead man lying on his back in the heather with nothing but a mild surprise showing on his face. For all appearances, he could perfectly well have died of heart failure,
but I had assumed as the manner of his death a particular way of killing which I had hardly thought of in the last twenty years, and as I say, I wondered why. That was why my mind had gone to work
so eagerly on the name Mowbray when the inspector had mentioned it, but there was no Mowbray on my imagined lists, and never had been. I gave it up, and went about my business in the cottage.

It was quite late in the evening when I remembered that moment on my way down the hill, when I had checked in my stride because something in the dead face had worried me. When I did remember it,
I sat down to think it over. I wondered if my memory had been up to its tricks again, trying subconsciously to make a connection between the new dead face and a face I had once known living, but
failing to convince my conscious mind. I tried, inevitably, but inevitably with no success, comparing the dead face with my bunches of remembered faces, conducting a sort of supernal identification
parade in my head and trying to establish a doubtful identity across what Prospero calls the dark backward and abysm of time. But I knew from experience that this was no job for the conscious mind,
and that wrestling with it might do more harm than good, and after a bit I gave it up and put the thing out of my head.

More practically, I wondered what the inspector was doing about me, and how far he would push his enquiries. For all his kindly concern, I did not for a moment suppose that he had excluded the
possibility that I might have killed the man myself, and the fact that I had not would not, as I knew very well, necessarily prevent complications which I was in general anxious to avoid. To the
best of my belief, I had nothing to fear from the law, but that did not mean that I was anxious to tangle with it.

I did not go walking in the dusk, and I did lock my doors and windows before I went to bed. I even shifted my bed from where I had found it when I came to a corner not directly covered from any
of the windows, and put the gun, loaded, beside it. Needless to say, I was not doing all this to please the inspector. I did it as a matter of ingrained routine, because wherever the truth lay I
found myself, in my mind, back on what might be called a war footing, and I simply acted accordingly. I did not seriously expect to be attacked. Other things apart, if the inspector was right, and
the man Mowbray had been killed in mistake for me, I did not think that the case had had enough publicity yet for the killer to realise what he had done. I took my precautions as easily as you slip
into a particular set of old clothes when there is a particular dirty job to be done. Having taken them, I went to bed and slept quite peacefully.

I do not know what time of the night it was, but it was still pitch dark, when I woke up and rolled over on to my back and opened my eyes and said, “Mowbray be damned. That’s Peter
Gaston.” I said it out loud in the utter stillness, which was foolish of me, or at least inconsistent with my earlier precautions. Anyone might have been listening, and I should have been in
much worse difficulties if there had been someone. The important point, of course, was not that the dead man was Peter Gaston, but that I knew he was. In fact, no one was listening, and I started
out with the advantage which my undisclosed knowledge gave me.

That apart, I knew several other things once I had the name. I knew that Peter had come up here because I had. Anything else would be too wild a coincidence to be acceptable. I did not know why
he had come up, or what he was intending to do, but he had been up here because I was. Knowing Peter, I had no doubt that so far as I was concerned his intentions had been friendly. I also knew he
had been killed because he had come up here. It was still possible that he had been killed by mistake, but he would not have been killed at all if he had stayed on quietly in Brancastle as Mr.
Mowbray, whom nobody had any reason to harm. But what Peter had wanted with me, and what somebody else had wanted with Peter or me or both of us – of that I had no idea at all.

I knew, well enough, when I had last seen him, but I had not known him very long. I had not known him in the Army (we had all started in the Army, Commandos mostly), and I do not think he was
very long with the Establishment. We called it the Establishment more in self-derision than in derision. I never remember more than one or two of us at any time who took ourselves seriously. So far
as I know, it never had a name of its own. It merely existed and functioned as a series of personal contacts and cash transactions. In recent years there has been all this talk of mercenaries, but
that is nonsense. It is a mercenary age, and whatever it is we do, all but a tiny minority of us are in it for the money. Beside that, as I see it, what you actually do for the money is of minor
importance. We certainly never did anything against the law in our own country. We did not even work in our own country, or not as far as I ever heard. If we had, it would probably have been
illegal, but what we did elsewhere was for the local authorities to judge, and it was very seldom the local law that caught up with us.

I had been on several jobs with Peter during his time with the Establishment, including my last. We had agreed about a lot of things, and one of the things we had agreed about was leaving the
Establishment, but, in fact, I had left before he had. I never to my knowledge saw him again, but if for any reason he had wanted to keep tabs on me, he would have had no special difficulty in
doing it. As I say, we were not really undercover men. We merely signed off and got ourselves, if we were lucky, more ordinary jobs. I had not even changed my name, as he for some reason had. If
there had been something Peter had known about and I had not, and which he had later decided to bring me in on, there was nothing to stop him getting in touch with me. I wished I knew what it was
he had tried to tell me about, only when he had tried, someone had stopped him once and for all, and now I could never ask him. If I wanted to know, there was nothing for it but to find out for
. . .