‘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.
‘That’s my opinion, Damien. I majored in Business Administration, not English Literature. In fact, I got an F in Great Books. I can frame a legal document that’s watertight, but if you want literary criticism you should be talking to someone else. That sound funny to you?’
‘You remind me of someone,’ I said, thinking of my father.
‘I’ve lived on Ionia seven years. Fernshaw died before I even came to the island. I’ve never heard that there was anything suspicious in it. I’ll ask my wife if you like, but I’d say you’ve been on your own in that house for too long.’ He smiled at me to show it wasn’t meant unkindly.
‘It’s not my theory,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I just wanted to be able to set her mind at rest.’
‘If you really want the scuttlebutt on the Fernshaws, come by and talk to my wife. She’s an authority on island gossip. She’ll tell you what’s true, what’s not true, what might be true, and a whole lot besides.’
TWENTY-FIVE
I WOULD HAVE GONE to see Mrs Diaz sooner, but I had to go to the mainland to get a new US passport. I had promised Nathan that I would take him with me. He wanted to buy an inflatable boat from a shop in Hyannis. He had called it a turtle boat. I asked him what that was.
‘It’s a boat shaped like a turtle. It’s got feet and a head, and on the bottom it says, “Help”, in case it flips over, so the Coast Guard can come and rescue you.’
‘And what if you don’t need to be rescued?’
He shrugged. ‘You flip it over and get back in.’
My motives for taking him weren’t purely altruistic. I think I hoped to learn something from him that would allay my anxieties about his father. Whenever I was with him now, I found myself checking him over for psychological scars. Aspects of his behaviour which had previously seemed mildly eccentric began to strike me as neurotic.
Nathan was meticulous about his appearance. Whenever the slightest bit of dirt touched him, he broke off whatever he was doing and went to clean himself up — even when he would inevitably get dirty again, minutes later. He spent so much time traipsing across the lawn to wash his hands that I had bought him gloves for outdoor work, which he never took off. Each time I saw him, he was wearing fresh clothes, which was a reproach and an example to me, who tended to wear the same paint-splattered clothes for days. He had a horror of insects and anything rotten: he would go to great lengths to avoid touching decayed apples with his hands, generally spearing them with a stick to propel them into the marshes. Once he shuddered and turned pale after he brushed against some cobwebs in the garage.
Occasionally, I found my mind wandering off in directions that were just plain crazy. At one point, I envisaged a murder scene where Nathan was reluctantly assisting his mother and sister dispose of his father’s body. Perhaps he had contracted his squeamishness from handling his dead father’s severed limbs.
But as soon as I thought about the real Mrs Fernshaw — plump and friendly, moving gracefully around her kitchen — I knew she was incapable of a violent act and felt slightly ashamed of myself. I knew nothing about Mr Fernshaw’s death. My idle brain had daydreamed a set of incidents that had no basis in reality.
At times, I wished I could unread the story. It depressed me. There was something grim and unforgiving about it — the way an intimation of death can make everything else seem foolish or inconsequential beside it. But like an ordinary depression, my anxious thoughts receded altogether sometimes. I had hours without thinking about it when I felt relatively happy. But I only had to remember the vivid and clumsy murder of Abel Mundy and the worries would begin again. As with the first fragment, something in the tone of it was all wrong. The violent murder was as under-explained as Mycroft’s abandonment of Serena Eden.
My speculations weren’t confined to Nathan. I tried to fit his sister’s behaviour into patterns suggested by the story.
I built my obsession on tiny details. The innocuous Michael Winks made better sense as a partner for Terry if you considered that her father had been an ogre. Her insecurity, her eagerness to please her boyfriend seemed to point to a fraught relationship with the dead man. And she hadn’t hesitated about leaving me with Nathan on the day we went to the cinema — I put that down to an abused child’s antennae for a potential abuser.
I know they don’t mean anything — these observations were trivial. You could turn them round and use them to support a contrary argument. But the suspicion remained with me — like one of those obsessive worries which defeat all attempts at reasoning — that it might be based on truth.
*
Winks had hurt his foot and couldn’t drive. He was lying full length on the sofa in the Fernshaws’ TV room with his leg on a pile of cushions. Terry and her mother had gone into town to go shopping, he said.
‘Back-to-school sales?’
‘Yeah. Wish they wouldn’t call them that,’ he said, as he flipped disconsolately between channels. ‘Makes me feel like a prisoner on furlough.’
‘That looks like a bad sprain,’ I said.
‘Tell me about it. The Fernshaws are discovering that stoic fortitude is not my strong suit. Personally, I think these shopping expeditions are just an excuse to get away from me. It’s Nathan’s fault. We were playing wiffleball in the yard. I ran backwards for a pop-up and must have stepped on the side of my foot. Felt like I’d broken it.’