Sunday afternoon
“To be…” pondered Hamlet, “or not to.”
He turned to the audience. “Be, that is,” he clarified. He looked down at the clipboard he was holding.
“The question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the—”
He broke off suddenly, as the Junoesque manicurist from Chigwell playing Ophelia launched herself on cue from the wings and barged into him.
“Mind!” Hamlet remonstrated. He cleared his throat. “To suffer the slings and arrows of…” Again he stopped, noticing that Ophelia was now slowly unbuttoning his doublet.
“Outrageous!” Hamlet complained. He glanced at his clipboard again, and frowned. “Humfrey, darling,” he called out, shielding his eyes as he looked out beyond the footlights, “I’m fine up to here, but there’s something in the next line I really don’t follow. Sorry.”
The slight figure of Humfrey Fingerhood, director in residence of the Theydon Bois Thespians, rose from the front row and darted toward the stage of the cavernous Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The only other audience member that Sunday afternoon was Oliver, sitting a few rows back, and most of his attention was on the index card in his hand. Fortunately, the house lights were up, so he could read the text of Dennis Breedlove’s blackmail note, which he’d jotted down from memory.
DID YOU THINK YOU COULD HIDE YOUR HISTORY?
Nice line in alliteration, Oliver thought. Accidental? Or does our blackmailer have a literary bent? But “history” must surely mean personal history, something from Breedlove’s past that he was intent on keeping a secret.
DID YOU THINK THIS WHOLE BLESSED PLOT WOULD BE COVERED UP FOREVER?
“This blessed plot.” It was a quotation from John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Richard II. A joke, presumably—the “plot” in this case not being a tract of land but some sort of conspiracy or scheme, the “blessed” that most gentle of intensifiers, no doubt a minced oath for “bloody.” Or was “blessed” meant literally, to use Xanthe Bennet’s favorite word? Was there a religious angle? Was Dennis now or had he ever been a Bible-thumper? Edwards the vicar might be able to shed some light on the dead man’s beliefs.
The word “plot” made him turn to the other piece of paper he was holding, the yellowing page of a Shakespeare play from behind Breedlove’s desk, trimmed close to the edges of the text. Well, not trimmed—instead of the straight slice of a razor or scissors, its edges were jagged, as if impatiently stabbed out of the book.
Henry the Sixth, Part Two, Act Two, Scene Two. One of London Will’s most tiresome scenes. Total backstory. Richard, Duke of York—not the “Now is the winter of our discontent” hunchback baddie but his father—explains at tedious length to a couple of sympathetic earls why he, tracing his heirdom to Edward III’s third son, should be King of England instead of the play’s eponymous Henry, son of the stirring “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” Henry but runner-up heir to Edward III’s fourth son. “…and in this private plot be we the first that shall salute our rightful sovereign with honour of his birthright to the crown.”
In other words, the Yorkist Jets get ready to rumble with the Lancastrian Sharks.
Apart from the shared reference to a “plot,” there was nothing that connected it to the blackmail letter. But did it offer a clue into Uncle Dennis’s past? Why had it meant so much to him that he’d gouged the scene from his Collected Works and, presumably, at some time stuck it over his desk? Was it a reminder of some succession issues of his own: a usurped heirdom, a stolen inheritance, a filched family bequest?
On the stage, the actors and Humfrey had been arguing about how you could possibly take arms against a “sea” of troubles, weapons against water. Idiots.
Oliver turned back to the index card propped on his left thigh.
I KNOW WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON.
The first entrance of the blackmailer onto the stage of Breedlove’s drama. Odd. The wrong tense entirely to refer to something that’s supposed to be history. Why not “I know what went on”? Or does the phrase apply to a continuing cover-up?
BUT YOU DON’T WANT OTHERS TO DIG UP THE PAST, DO YOU?
This was Oliver’s lifeline, the single hint that whatever Breedlove’s secret might be, it was accessible if you knew where to look. In the old man’s past, of course, maybe before he took up residence in Synne. Although Breedlove wasn’t universally loved in the village, Oliver had never heard whispers of any scandal or crime. So if Breedlove’s sins were public, they must have been committed before he became an author, during his years as a broadcaster at the BBC, an actor turned storyteller; but if private, they were those of a much younger man, a Londoner, a Cambridge graduate, and who knows what else. Oliver had already called some people he knew at the BBC, but they could only be the first links in a chain of contacts that he hoped would take him back to those days in the sixties and seventies, when a “story on the wireless” meant fifteen breathless minutes in front of the radio, not a snippet of vacuous celebrity chat slurped up in a Starbucks Wi-Fi hotspot. As one child famously said, the best thing about a story on the radio is that the pictures are better.
SO LET THIS BE OUR LITTLE FAMILY SECRET.
A family matter, then. Had Breedlove ever been married? Did he have any children? Not according to the basic reference books or Wikipedia. Or was it the blackmail itself that was presented as a perverted family secret, the blackmailer obscenely claiming the kinship of shared, clandestine knowledge with a man whose Unclehood was universal, more than kith, less than kind?
Or both—maybe the blackmailer was a long-lost family member with a grudge, a black sheep, a skeleton in Dennis’s closet, returning to haunt…who? His deadbeat Dad? His unwitting birth father? His wicked uncle? (And why “his,” Ollie, not “her”?) Hidden history, silenced for a while in a blessed plot, a private plot.
Oliver sneezed. Humfrey, privately glad of the distraction, glared at him.
I WON’T TELL IF YOU WON’T TELL. ALAS, MY SILENCE ISN’T FREE. THERE WILL BE FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS.
But there won’t be now. Dead end.
“Enjoying the play?”
Mallard slid into the seat behind him. Oliver quickly slipped the index card and page into his satchel. The action on the stage had resumed, Humfrey having persuaded Hamlet that Shakespeare was probably thinking of some sort of torpedo or underwater spear gun.
“Humfrey’s original idea was to do a silent version,” Mallard whispered. “The actors would just mouth the words.”
“Dumb show,” Oliver commented.
“Indeed. But then he changed his concept and decided that everything in the play happens in Hamlet’s imagination.”
As if to illustrate, Hamlet had reached the phrase “Ay, there’s the rub,” and Ophelia was suiting the action to the word, in sweaty haste.
“The murder, the ghost, the incestuous marriage—all in the mind’s eye,” Mallard added. “Claudius is actually Hamlet’s real father, not his uncle.”
“So Hamlet thinks he’s Claudius’s nephew, but he’s really his son?”
“And there, but for the grace of God, goes Tim Mallard. Only I’m merely your uncle-in-law, hyphenated.”
“Whom do you play?”
“Polonius. I’m also Osric and the gravedigger.”
“Is that also essential to Humfrey’s interpretation?”
“No, it’s because we don’t have enough actors in the company. The budget’s so tight, we can’t even afford a real skull for Yorick in the graveyard scene, just some Styrofoam concoction that’s gradually turning into confetti.”
“Alas, poor Uncle Tim,” muttered Oliver.
Hamlet now got to “with a bare bodkin” and the two men chose to look away.
“Where’s Effie?” Mallard asked.
“Out with Ben. He’s photographing Cotswold wool churches, and she’s carrying his tripod.”
“That’s what the kids are calling it today, eh?” Mallard looked up at the grunting and sweating on the stage, winced, and began to study his lines in his Penguin edition of the play.
Oliver had welcomed Effie’s decision to spend the afternoon with his handsome friend without a flicker of jealousy. It gave him a chance to think about the suicide and her a chance to drive along winding country lanes in a Lamborghini Gallardo, Ben’s hesitant reward for her assistance.
Effie would not have been the best company anyway. She was still smarting from her treatment at the ten hands of the Bennet sisters. As they’d driven home from Pigsneye the previous evening, Ben piloting Effie’s Renault, Oliver sitting nervously beside him, she had launched into an inebriated recount of all the slights she’d received at the dinner party, delivered from a prone position in the back seat, pausing only to demand they stop so she could be sick in a hedgerow.
“I’m sorry, Ollie,” she had slurred as they drove off again, “I know the Bennet harpies are your friends, but really, they’re about as much use as a chocolate condom.”
“They’re not my friends. They’re friends of the family. It’s not as if I particularly enjoy being thus Bennetted round at these supper parties.”
“Don’t you mean ‘supper potties’?” Effie snapped, copying the Bennets’ starchy pronunciation. “Appropriate term ‘potties,’ considering they serve up shit. I’d sooner eat a crocodile. Potties!” Repeating the word several times seemed to distract her for a second.
“I thought snobettes like that had died out with girdles and rationing,” she continued. She assumed a voice that sounded more like the Queen sucking a mint than any of the Bennet girls. “‘Oh, Effie, didn’t you go to U-ni-ver-si-ty? Then I suppose I’d better talk very slowly.’ Well, screw them.” She hiccupped.
“They didn’t go to university either,” Oliver said. “Davina claims an affinity with Oxford because she attended a posh secretarial college near the city. She only lasted two months. She flunked greeting. The others went to an overpriced Swiss finishing school.”
“I’d finish them. I’d push them off an Alp.” She found her comment amusing and abruptly dissolved into giggles.
“That was funny, Eff,” said Ben, speaking for the first time since leaving the Bennets’ house. He’d been covering his discomfort at the lovers’ quarrel by peering intently through the windshield as he drove, as if terrified that the car’s headlights might suddenly illuminate a stegosaurus in the road ahead.
“And as for you,” Effie snapped, pulling herself upright and prodding the back of Ben’s neck, “what’s all this crap about ‘haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’? Isn’t that hoary old pickup line permanently retired by now? Call yourself a player, Benjamin Motley?”
“But it was true,” Ben protested. “Their faces were familiar. All of them. Don’t forget, I do a lot of portrait photography—I have a good memory for faces, and those Bennet faces were, uh, distinctive. I’ve never shot them myself…”
“Just lend me one of those Purdeys,” Effie muttered.
“…but I may have seen them in the ‘Bystander’ section of Tatler or in some other society magazine. Recently. I can’t remember where.”
He swerved rapidly, as a van overtook them and held a position just a few yards ahead, straddling the middle of the narrow road. The passenger-side window was wound down, and Eric Mormal’s naked buttocks emerged from the interior, white and spotty in the Renault’s beams. Then the van sped away into the night.
Oliver turned to Ben. “I suppose you’re going to say that was a familiar face, too.”
Ben frowned. “As a matter of fact…”
Back in Oliver’s bedroom, Effie tossed her sundress into a corner and clambered into bed in her white underwear, lying as far from Oliver as she could, her back turned to him.
“Maybe I just don’t belong in your privileged world, Ollie,” she had said, her voice half stifled by her pillow, long after he thought she had passed out.
“Privileged?” he repeated, staring into the darkness. “I wasn’t to the manner born. My father was an army officer all his life. And until she met him, my mother was an impoverished stage performer.”
“Are you going to tell me the one about the Actress and the Brigadier? Because I could use a laugh.”
He smiled. “He was only a captain then. It’s a sweet story. My mother and Aunt Phoebe, being identical twins and also fairly limber, were working for a conjuror. They could do all kinds of teleportation fakes—you know, the same girl disappears from the cramped box on stage and pops up two seconds later in the back of the auditorium. But they could never let the audience know there were two of them, which meant that whenever they were on tour, one sister had to travel in disguise. Well, about thirty years ago, they were part of a Combined Services Entertainment show that came through Cyprus, where Captain Robert Swithin was stationed. The night they met, it was Chloe’s turn to take the bow and fraternize with the officers in the mess, while Phoebe had to hide in the hotel room. Otherwise, history could have been very different. Mother and Father got married in a double wedding, with Phoebe and Tim, who’d had a whirlwind romance that still seems to be going on. I arrived on their first wedding anniversary. They bought this old house with their savings and a moderate mortgage when Bob retired. Eve, Toby, and I never went to private schools or anything like that.”
“Not even a Fish Swinish-ing school?”
Oliver laughed in the dark at the swinish phrase. “Do you know where the Bennet money comes from? The girls’ grandfather patented a particularly effective and disturbingly appetizing laxative. They tend to keep quiet about that.”
Effie was silent for a while. “The thing that bothers me, Ollie, is this,” she continued sleepily, “when the passion wears off, what will we have to talk about?”
Oliver had slipped from the bed early, leaving her gently snoring, oblivious to the single tolling bell summoning the few churchgoing Synners to St. Edmund and St. Crispin. He started making his phone calls about Dennis Breedlove, apologizing to old college friends with BBC connections or fellow authors from the Sanders Club for disturbing their Sunday morning. Effie had appeared much later, moving cautiously through the kitchen, sucking on a hot and full cup of coffee and allowing him a weak smile of greeting.
He was irritated to hear that he had missed Mallard, whose Jaguar had sped away before breakfast, heading for an all-day rehearsal. So after Effie had left with Ben, he was forced to accept a ride to Stratford with Toby in the Co-op farm delivery van that Eric Mormal drove, squashed onto the front bench between the two men because the rear compartment was full of organic burdock and unable to forget that Mormal had dropped his trousers in the same place twelve hours earlier. They deposited Oliver at the theater before heading off to the dig.
“Neither Effie nor Simon Culpepper think Dennis Breedlove could have been killed by his blackmailer,” Oliver said to Mallard. “What do you think?”
Mallard looked up from his book. “Are we back to that? Ollie, Breedlove committed suicide. Didn’t Culpepper convince you of that?”
“He convinced me that Uncle Dennis had a motive for taking his life, although there was no suicide note. But I still don’t think Dennis could have done it without some assistance.”
“Blackmailers aren’t murderers. They threaten exposure, not death.”
This one is, in my book, Oliver thought. Aloud, he asked, “What if Dennis had threatened to go to the police instead of paying up?”
“Blackmailers assume their victims want to keep their secrets. But just in case, they typically don’t reveal their identities until they’ve hooked their victim. Culpepper showed you that letter. Was there anything that indicated who the writer was?”
“I don’t remember.”
“No? Then why don’t you check that copy you have hidden in your bag.”
“Lovely, darlings, lovely,” cried Humfrey Fingerhood, leaping from his seat and applauding the post-coital actors lying in a fleshy heap on the stage. “Ophelia, nice baring of your fardels, but put them away now, dear. Now, while watching you, I’ve had the most wonderful idea. I want to do the whole speech as a PowerPoint presentation…”
Mallard scribbled a name and telephone number on a page in his notebook, which he tore out and handed to Oliver.
“If you want to know about blackmail, call this number,” he said, standing up and sidling out of the row.