Eight Perfect Murders(11)
The same dream I have every night of my life.
It was still snowing when I left my apartment in the morning, but it was a light, drifting snow, half of it kicked up by a wind that was still gusting. There was about two feet already on the ground. The roads had been plowed but no one had been out yet to shovel the sidewalks, so I walked in the middle of the street, careful going down the steep hill to Charles. Even though the skies were blanketed in clouds, the day was bright, maybe from all that pristine snow. I carried my old bike messenger bag, its strap over my shoulder.
I got to the hotel early. The Flat of the Hill was a recent addition to my part of Boston, a boutique hotel inside a refurbished warehouse just off Charles. It had a high-end restaurant and a pretty bar that I occasionally went to on Monday nights when oysters were a dollar each.
“I’m meeting someone for breakfast,” I said to the lone employee, a sad-eyed woman behind the check-in desk, and she directed me past the bar into a small dining area with about eight tables. There was no one there to seat me so I sat myself at a corner table by a large window that looked out onto a wall of brick. I was the only one in the room, and I wondered if anyone was actually working there, or if all the staff were unable to make it to work because of the snowstorm. Then, simultaneously, a man in a crisp white shirt and black pants pushed through a pair of swinging doors, while Agent Mulvey appeared at the entrance to the dining room. She spotted me and came over, just as the waiter was dropping off menus. We both ordered coffee and juice.
“The FBI has a decent travel budget,” I said.
She looked confused for a moment, then said, “Oh. I booked this place myself because it was close to your store. Who knows if they’ll reimburse me.”
“How’d you sleep?” I asked. She had dark purple shadows under her eyes.
“Very little. I was reading.”
“Me, too. What book did you read?”
“The Red House Mystery. I thought I’d start at the beginning.”
“What did you think?” I said and took a sip of my coffee, scalding the tip of my tongue.
“It was good. Clever, I guess, and I didn’t guess the ending.” She touched the side of her porcelain coffee cup then leaned down, pursing her lips, and sipped a little bit from the top. The maneuver made me think of a bird.
“Honestly,” I said, “I know I included it on my list, but I don’t remember the exact details. I read it a long time ago.”
“It’s pretty much how you described it. It’s a country house mystery that is kind of ludicrous. I kept thinking about Clue, the game—”
“Colonel Mustard in the library.”
“Exactly. But it was better than that.” She described to me the basic plot, and it started to come back. There’s a rich man named Mark Ablett who lives in a country house, the kind of English one that seems specifically designed to have a murder occur in it. He gets a letter from his estranged no-good brother, saying he’s coming to visit from Australia. When the brother arrives, he’s told to wait in the study for Mark Ablett. Then a shot is heard. The brother from Australia is dead and Mark Ablett is missing. It seems clear that Mark has killed his own brother and fled.
The detective in the story is actually just a passing acquaintance of one of the country estate’s guests. His name is Tony Gillingham and together with his friend Bill they begin to investigate. It turns out that there is a secret tunnel that runs from the study underneath the house and all the way out to a golf course, and there are, of course, multiple suspects.
“There’s no brother, right?” I said, interrupting her.
“Right, exactly. The real brother died years ago and isn’t part of the present action. Mark Ablett had been talked into impersonating him, and then he’s killed. But that wasn’t the part of the murder that I found clever. Did you?” She was talking fast and only after she paused did I realize that she was expecting an answer.
“I think I put it on the list because the murderer had basically provided a corpse and a killer at the same time. They were the same person, but only the killer knew that.”
“Can I read a section I underlined last night?”
“Sure,” I said, and she pulled the paperback from her bag and began flipping through pages. I could see from where I was seated that she’d underlined several passages. I thought of my wife, the way she would always read with a pen in her hand, ready to write in whatever book she was reading. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t given Agent Mulvey the expensive first edition of Strangers on a Train.
“Okay. Got it,” she said, flattening the book on the table and leaning forward to read. “‘The inspector had arrived in it,’ the house I think he’s talking about, ‘to find a man dead and a man missing,’” she began. “‘It was extremely probable, no doubt, that the missing man had shot the dead man. But it was more than extremely probable, it was almost certain that the Inspector would start with the idea that this extremely probable solution was the one true solution, and that, in consequence, he would be less disposed to consider without prejudice any other solution.’” She finished reading and closed the book. “It’s got me thinking,” she continued. “If you were going to commit a murder based on this book, how would you do it?”
I must have looked confused, because she added, “Would you shoot someone in the study of a country house?”