‘I took them into town to have them copied.’ I looked at my watch. It was half past nine. ‘Just got back about twenty minutes ago.’
‘You left an original manuscript at a copy shop in Westwich? Oh, Damien. Was that smart?’
I tried to reassure her. ‘They’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I gave them to Mr Diaz to copy. There’s no way he’ll lose them.’
‘For a moment, I thought you’d just dumped them at some Korean grocery shop,’ she said. ‘What a relief.’
I told her I’d had trouble reading Patrick’s handwriting so I didn’t know what the stories were about. Her surprise was genuine, I decided. I don’t think she had any idea that he had been working on the Mycroft stories.
She took the painting and began talking about the friend she was staying with up at the War Bonnet Cliffs. She said she was a sculptor, and began describing how she used driftwood that she collected from the beach.
I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. The coffee had revived me, but my thoughts were all about my uncle’s strange story.
The tone was strangely confused — after a dark opening, it had reverted to jokes and soft pornography. But an unsettling mood had come over it with the arrival of Abel Mundy. It was a different atmosphere from the previous stories — the darkest they’d got was a kind of melancholy, the wistfulness of a self-described failure looking back on his life with regretful humour. This was something else: vengeful, active. It was almost as though there was too much anger for one character to contain. Mundy’s violence seemed to infect Mycroft, and by implication, Patrick. I thought about what Mrs Delamitri had said about Patrick’s baseless guilt. ‘There was always this feeling that he’d done something awful.’
I began to wish Mrs Delamitri would go away so that I could reread the story and consider what I had found upsetting about it.
‘It’s a quality the light has here, apparently,’ she was saying as she stood gazing out of the window over the garden. ‘She came out here from Wisconsin and just fell in love with it.’
The detail that stood out for me was the deaf family. Although they had been transposed in time and place and re-upholstered as a different ethnic group, I felt they were still recognisably my neighbours, the Fernshaws. It wasn’t just the deafness. The sexes and relative ages of the children were the same in both families as well. It meant Abel Mundy might be a portrait of their father.
‘… 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.
TWENTY-FOUR
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.’