Afterwards, I fumbled through the pockets of his coat for his cheroots and matches. As I placed one between my lips, I tasted the blood on my fingers and a shiver went through me.
All my preparations had come to this. I had planned to offer him exile, but I had beaten him to death with a trick and his blood was all over me. And yet, until I said the words aloud I did not believe them myself: I meanto killyou, Abel Mundy. From that moment, all the fear left me and I knew I would succeed, because, for all his strength, my will was stronger.
About the warehouse were several empty barrels into one of which, with much effort, I forced Abel Mundy’s body. I had no means of sealing the barrel, and the corpse’s hand continually dropped out as I rolled it along the floor, until I no longer bothered to push it back inside, so that it lashed the dirty ground with every revolution of the cask. I was some time wondering how I could make the barrel sink, and I further knew that the gas building up inside the dead man would tend to raise him, barrel and all, to the surface, unless there were a counterweight sufficient to keep him down. I was fortunate, indeed, to find a great stack of lead blocks each marked for half a hundredweight and used for weighing cargo.
I rolled the barrel into a skiff that was among several kept by on the wharf, and placed the blocks in after, as many as I could safely put in it, then fastened all with lengths of rope.
Fog had obscured the opposite bank and was closing fast, lessening my danger of being observed, but rendering my navigation more perilous. I took up the oars and rowed my cargo out to where I could see neither bank; here buoys were fixed in the deepest part of the river.
My ballast was so heavy that there was barely freeboard between the gunwales and the water, and I shipped a little water with each stroke. When I had reached what I took to be the centre of the river, I stove in the bottom of the skiff with a hatchet, until the river boiled up through it, sucking down the little boat and the barrel. The water was icy and dank, and all the harder to negotiate because of my heavy clothes and shoes. Having reached the farther bank, I struggled through the mud up to the nearest stairs, and as I reached out to steady myself on the stone, I saw my hands had been washed clean of blood, and with the darkening effect of the water on my clothes, it was impossible say which liquid was the Thames and which Abel Mundy.
I made my way home by back streets, and was helped by the weather, which had turned to rain and rendered my sodden attire less conspicuous.
Abel Mundy’s body was never found. Suspicion fell upon Mrs Mundy, but she claimed, with justification, that her husband’s disappearance was as much a mystery to her as to anyone else. By a circuitous coincidence, several months later my brother was employed by Abel Mundy’s insurers to ascertain whether or not the man was indeed dead. This was a kind of loss-adjusting work well suited to deductive reasoning which he frequently undertook, but which was of more significance to his finances than to his hagiographers.
I had continued at Fernshaw’s for a short while after, but found that I had lost the taste for combat. I grew lethargic and, after a while, ran to fat. An acquaintance from school had set me down for membership of the Diogenes Club, and I began to pass my evenings there, in the panelled silence of its library. It was here that I was summoned one evening to receive two visitors in the only room of the club where talking was permitted.
My brother was there, along with his lumpen sidekick. He had come, it turned out, to seek my advice about the Mundy case.
‘I knew the fellow,’ I said, before he had gone beyond the details of the disappearance. ‘Boxed with him for a year or more.’
‘You … boxed?’ cried Watson, unable to conceal his surprise. I had, as I mentioned, run somewhat to fat.
‘Took a Blue, old boy. Don’t do it nowadays of course.’
‘A Blue! As did your brother.’ He made a note on a piece of paper which he had taken from his pocket.
‘My brother boxed, Mr Watson, but he did not take a Blue.’
My brother looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘What sort of a fellow was he?’
‘You should be able to tell me that yourself.’
‘Well, yes, of course. I merely meant to ask you for your opinion. Did he strike you as the type of chap who’d pull a jape like this? Disappearing into thin air.’
‘The police found blood and traces of a struggle, did they not?’ I said.
‘Blood, yes. But whose blood? The blood of what? He wouldn’t be foolish enough to disappear without an alibi. A clever criminal could have disposed of him without a trace of blood.’
‘If I understand you rightly, brother, the absence of blood you take as evidence of a murder. The presence of blood you take as proof that no murder happened. If your reasoning is correct, we must be witnesses to a massacre. Why, look at my hands!’ And I held up my fingers to him in the lamplight.
*
FINIS
TWENTY-THREE
I MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP in the armchair. It had carried on raining during the night and I was vaguely aware of drops drumming on the window. I found the noise consoling. I woke up when it seemed to begin again, this time louder. Gradually, it resolved into an insistent banging at the kitchen door.
The pages of Patrick’s stories were scattered around the armchair. I gathered them up quickly and put them on a high shelf. I assumed my visitor was Nathan, coming round to pick up the money I owed him.
Mrs Delamitri stood outside the kitchen door in a dazzling white jacket. It was already sunny and the light bounced off her clothes so that I had to squint to look at her. Seen in silhouette she looked like a quarterback, because of her huge shoulderpads and the way she pressed her handbag along the inside of her left arm like a rugby ball.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said.
I remembered the unsuccessful pass I had made at her on the beach. What had seemed spontaneous and feasible then, now felt like a moment of toe-curling embarrassment.
‘About the painting,’ she said. She pronounced it without the t: paining. ‘There’s no need to look so worried. Oh my God, Damien, did you think I wanted to go to bed with you? You did, didn’t you? Oh my. Go get dressed and I’ll make us both some coffee.’
She had a way with the recalcitrant kitchen that made me realise just how well she had known Patrick.
‘I was thinking it over,’ she said a little later, when I had changed and the coffee was made. ‘And do you know I thought that once you’ve left I probably won’t ever come here again. I wanted to have something — a memento. I’m sorry I came by so early, but I was afraid you might have already left.’
I told her not to worry about it. I couldn’t leave until I had got hold of a new passport. I mentioned that I had found some stories that Patrick had been working on.
‘Stories? By Patrick?’ She couldn’t have looked more excited if I’d told her I’d found fragments of the true cross in the attic. There was a fervour in her voice — almost a tone of veneration. ‘Where were they?’
‘In one of the boxes.’
‘I’d love to see them,’ she said.
‘They’re in a very rough state.’ I was reluctant to let her see the manuscript. I had found the implications of the final story too unsettling. There was something obsessive about the violence in it, as though Patrick had been trying to write one story but in spite of himself had written another.
‘Damien, this is so exciting.’ She put her cup down so quickly that a little of the coffee slopped on to the table. She didn’t notice. ‘Where are they?’