MR PERCY PIP had always yearned to be a crime writer. From his careful study of how to break into the market with an eye-catching potential bestseller, he realized that two obstacles lay in his path to stardom. The first was his name, which if displayed in large lettering across the dust-jacket would not instantly attract an enthusiastic readership. The second was somewhat more of a problem. He had learned that rule number one in achieving one’s goal was to write about what you knew, but so far Percy had never committed a murder.
Percy Pip therefore took steps to remedy both of his shortcomings. First, he selected a nom de plume for his new occupation. This would be part-time of course, since rule number two for crime writing was not to give up the day job. When he became a household name, he might reconsider this decision but until then his employers could be reassured of his loyalty, especially as his job dovetailed nicely with his criminal purposes.
Secondly, he began to make meticulous preparations for his first murder. Unfortunately, this would have to be the first of several, since rule number three, so it appeared from his perusal of booksellers’ crime sections, was that a serial killer was an essential feature. The golden days of the lone murder, or even of two (permitted in order to keep the investigation going for 256 pages), were long since over. No, three had to be the minimum, with the necessary clues, preferably gruesome, to indicate that a series was in progress.
“What do you mean, crime scene?”
Dr Jonathan Fuller, the director of Mystery Unravelled: Crime-writing Courses Ltd., looked aghast. He had put on several successful workshops all over the country without the intervention of a corpse, and the cause of his distress hovered between his own position and wondering who amongst his current group might be a real-life murderer. Janice Dove’s dead body had just been removed from the hotel, having been found in her room by his assistant Mavis Sharp, after Janice had failed to appear for breakfast. Since then the work-shop’s peaceful discussion of the criminal viewpoint in fiction had given way to an all too real influx of police, doctors, and scientists clad in white scene suits.
“Just routine, sir,” the investigating officer said reassuringly. “Suspicious death, you see.”
“But surely it was a heart attack or perhaps food poisoning,” Jonathan croaked. “The staff … ”
“Poisoning’s possible,” was the not so reassuring reply. “Was anyone else taken ill?”
“Not to my knowledge. After dinner at 7.30 some people prefer to go their own way or retire early,” Jonathan explained, “but I heard nothing mentioned at breakfast about ill-effects.”
Jonathan’s weekend courses took place in hired conference facilities in a country house hotel in varied locations. In the current one, in Suffolk, the facilities had seemed the best yet, with his party of two dozen completely separated from the rest of the guests, although this, he realized, would focus the investigation on his own pupils. After all, Janice Dove was known from previous courses to several of the participants here. Many of them around him now were eager, no doubt, to pick up such gems of police procedure as they could. He found himself automatically answering the inspector’s questions. No, this was not the first workshop that Miss Dove had attended. Yes, she was an aspiring writer.
“Such a gift,” he added weakly. “She showed me her latest rejection slip, on which the agent had written a personal encouraging comment.”
The inspector was not interested in rejection slips. “We’ll need all the information you have on Miss Dove. Do you know what she ate for dinner?”
Jonathan looked uncertain. “I expect it was the stew. It was a buffet. We were moving around – little tables, you know the sort of thing. Most people—”
“Fish,” one of his group, Paul Merlin, interrupted firmly. “Janice chose the fish. It had prawns in it.”
“She had stew,” Mavis Sharp retorted equally firmly. “I saw this morning that Janice had been sick. It was stew, and plum crumble, I think.”
“Sharp of eye as well as by name, eh?” the inspector said jovially. “You found the body, didn’t you?”
“I did.” Mavis looked modest. “Of course my profession helps.” She was the author of six lurid whodunits, one of which had actually received a review in a newspaper.
“We make a strong team. Miss Sharp is cosy, whereas I am hardboiled,” Jonathan explained, receiving a strange look for his pains.
“The two types of crime novel,” Mavis explained briskly. “The Agatha Christie school versus the tough brigade.”
The inspector’s brow cleared. “Rebus!”
As a hat had been thrown into the ring, Mavis felt the need to distance herself from the cosier cosies. “Of course, I am in the modern Agatha Christie school.”
Another strange look, this time for Mavis. The inspector decided to move on. “And all of you were strangers to each other?” He cast a glance over the crowd before him.
“No.” Jonathan steeled himself to speak for his little flock. “The venue and subject matter of these workshops change, but their value is so great that some of my students come to more than one. I believe there are about eight regulars here today.”
To Jonathan’s eye they all still looked unlikely candidates for the role of murderer, and none of them so far as he knew had had any close relationship with Janice Dove, who was in her fifties and hardly likely to catch the eye of an idealistic crime writer looking for a model moll.
Among the eight, three were prominent in terms of potential troublemakers, in Jonathan’s opinion. One was David Patterson, an ex-policeman in his forties, who assumed his experience was an automatic gateway to publication. He wrote with enthusiasm, but the result, unfortunately, was not fiction. His stories were turgid dollops of “I proceeded north-west in an easterly direction”.
Paul Merlin was in his early sixties at a guess, an accountant on the point of retiring, with an over-absorbing interest in what he called the psychological approach and Jonathan privately termed the sex-obsessed. He was the ferret breed of student, anxious to display his own superior knowledge while at the same time to winkle out every last drop of knowledge that might be lurking in the recesses of his instructor’s mind.
Luke Hayward was twenty-nine, and a teacher with what seemed such a fanatical dislike of teaching that it was clear what drove him onwards towards the promised land of crime writing. A bad teacher, Jonathan decided, the sort who would demolish his pupils in order to rebuild them in his own image. Jonathan prided himself on his ability to pick out the achievers in his audience, a gift acquired from the auctions he conducted in his other occupation. Achievers were those whose willpower would drive them onwards, no matter what the opposition, and no matter whether they were Eton-schooled, state-schooled or unschooled. The chief achiever of the assembled company around him, including Mavis, would in his estimation be Paul Merlin, although he never underestimated the power of the non-achiever to throw a spanner in the works.
“I’m extremely sorry about Janice,” Paul told him earnestly. “A terrible thing to die amongst strangers.”
“We weren’t strangers,” Luke immediately objected. “We’d all met before.”
“Yes, but we didn’t know each other on a personal basis,” Mavis quickly pointed out. Miss Marple always remained detached from her suspects.
“What did kill her?” Jonathan asked, after the inspector had vanished and they were being ushered back towards their own secluded workshop room for interrogation.
David almost visibly swelled with pride. “We won’t know until the autopsy report.”
“We?” Luke picked up sarcastically. “Didn’t know you were with the Suffolk police.”
David scowled. “Once a policeman, always a policeman.”
“I dislike being treated as though we were all potential murderers,” Paul muttered as a gimlet-eyed policewoman opened the door for them to enter. “How do they know she didn’t take the stuff herself?”
“What stuff?” Luke pounced, as he would on an unfortunate sixth-former. “How do you know it was poison?”
“Even if it was,” David said, “it could have been an accident.”
Mavis drew herself up. “It could not.”
“How—” David began.
“Because there was a distinctive supermarket plastic bag at her side full of some prickly fruit, a knife and spoon, a packet of disposable plastic gloves, and an open window and—”
“Still could have been an accident or suicide,” David interrupted, annoyed at being outranked by a woman.
“And—” Jonathan prompted Mavis to continue.
“A peppermill taped to her chest.”
There was a certain camaraderie about the Mystery Unravelled crime-writing course, held three months later and on this occasion in a Hampshire manor house. Those participants who had attended the previous course, five in all, enjoyed an enviable position so far as the somewhat nervous but excited newcomers were concerned, as they were able to speak with first-hand knowledge of a real-life crime scene.
David in particular came into his own, having come by privileged information gained by bribing former colleagues with beer, flattery and, regrettably, twenty-pound notes.
Even Mavis condescended to listen avidly, as they awaited lunch on the Saturday morning. “So what did poor Janice die of?” she asked.
“Hyoscyamine,” David replied smugly. “Datura seeds grated in the peppermill over, probably, the stew. Clever, wasn’t it? I understand there’s no forensic evidence to indicate anyone else was involved.”
“So it could have been suicide,” Paul said triumphantly.
“Rather a let-down,” Luke sneered, but was disregarded.
“Then why bother to tape the pepper mill on?” David grunted. “Daft. I’m just a straightforward cop. Something like that happens in old Agatha’s stuff, not in real life.”
Mavis took this personally. “Only in this case, it did,” she snapped.
“Still suicide,” Paul maintained, anxious to maintain his lead. “A killer couldn’t guess exactly when she would die in order to creep in to attach the peppermill.”
“The first person to find her could,” Luke said meaningfully. Mavis had criticized the best short story he had ever written. And he knew why: she intended to steal his plot.
Mavis quelled him with a look. “I knew your thinking was wobbly, Luke, but really! Would I go along to Janice’s room armed with a peppermill to check if my victim were dead and then stop to tape it on in order to draw attention to the fact that it was murder?”
Luke rallied. “Agatha might have done.”
She capped him. “Agatha always had a rational explanation. I doubt if you do.”
David entered the fray. “Of course, I’m just a plain cop, but in my experience, the first on the scene often is the killer.”
Paul switched tack to leap on the passing bandwagon. “It’s the psychology.”
“Why,” Mavis boomed savagely over him, “should anyone wish to tape a peppermill on to a victim?”
“It’s easy,” Paul persevered. “In the interests of her – or of course his – art.” Two and two for a retiring accountant were permitted to make five.
“Eh?” David looked blank.
“To test us all,” Paul explained. “If you understood the sexual perspective—”
“Balderdash,” David interrupted. “It was a joke.”
Mavis seized her chance. “As I explained in this morning’s workshop, the death itself should never be a joke. A peppermill comes perilously close to it.”
The workshop students took this to heart, and the peppermill at the buffet lunch remained untouched either by hand or in conversation. The wine bottles fared much better. They were all emptied and five more called for, and consequently when the students reassembled for the afternoon workshop, they were some way into discussion of the intricacies of the protagonist’s responsibility towards readers before Charles Beeton, one of the five regulars, was missed.
“He’ll be here somewhere,” Jonathan said anxiously. “He’s probably fallen asleep.” Charles was a gentleman of mature years and girth, and after the lunch they had all enjoyed, this explanation seemed highly likely. “But I’ll check his room to be on the safe side.” When he arrived, however, he found it unlocked, but empty.
Mavis was not so lucky. En route to the ladies’ room in the basement, she stumbled over Charles’s dead body. Her scream could be heard by the group in the workshop, growing ever louder as she rushed back to summon help. “Attack,” she gasped, as she reached the room, panting for breath. “He’s dead. Chest.”
“A heart attack?” Jonathan caught her words as he returned from his fruitless errand, and joined the rush downstairs, already reaching for his mobile phone.
“Attack on the heart certainly,” Luke said soberly, as he reached the body and saw what awaited them. David immediately felt for a pulse, but without success. A knife was protruding from Charles’s chest, and Jonathan could not avoid seeing something else too.
Not only was there a distinctive-looking plastic supermarket bag at Charles’s side, but another knife, shiny and clean, was carefully taped to his sweater.
“Don’t touch the bag,” David ordered, as Luke peered curiously into it. “Evidence.”
In his element, David took charge, seizing Jonathan’s mobile to summon the police; he then deputed Mavis, Jonathan and himself to guard the body while the others should remain together in the workshop room. Any visits to the toilets would be accompanied, according to sex, by himself, Mavis or Jonathan.
The crime scene manager of the police team that speedily arrived fully agreed that the plastic bag was evidence. Inside was a pair of men’s shoes, an old-fashioned plastic mac that appeared slightly stained with blood, and another packet of disposable gloves. The shiny knife too, he agreed, was evidence though its purpose natur ally eluded him, as the knife that killed Charles was declaring its presence so obviously.
“What on earth was the second knife for?” Luke asked, a trifle shakily, after they had been dismissed from the crime scene and rejoined the other students round the table in the workshop room.
“The first one’s easier to understand,” David said ponderously. “Removing it would have covered the killer in blood.”
“But the second?” Luke persisted.
“I think I can guess,” Paul said, with what he hoped was quiet authority.
“Psychologically they carry a sexual implication?” enquired Luke innocently.
Paul stiffened. “It could be,” he replied defensively. “However I am inclined to think these are deodands.” He looked round at their blank faces, and added modestly, “As a solicitor, I have a knowledge of legal history.”
“I thought everyone knew what they were,” Luke immediately put in. “They’re relicts of medieval law which held that the object was a guilty party in the crime and as such forfeit to the crown, sometimes being passed to the victim’s family in compensation.”
“Quite,” Paul said patronizingly. “Not repealed until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a rail company objected to forfeiting one of their express trains. In the case of poor Janice and now Charles, the peppermill and the knife are to be held responsible for their deaths.”
“Try telling that to the Old Bailey,” David snorted. “No way. It’s a copy-cat murder. You’ll see.”
They did. Or rather the Kent police did. This time, excluding Jonathan and Mavis, the number of regulars was down to three: David, who said he had a duty to be present because as an ex-policeman he could keep an eye on things; Paul, who was set on proving his deodand theory; and Luke who was set on disproving anything that anyone else suggested.
Jonathan had considered whether it would be wise to hold this course at all, but he had been heartened to find there was no such thing as bad publicity. So numerous were the applications from newcomers that he was forced to turn students away. Mavis Sharp had hesitated about instructing at another course, but on dis covering that her young friend Beatrice Worthy wished to sign up she decided she would join her. Unfortunately on arrival at the Kentish hotel, she quickly discovered that Beatrice’s motives for wishing to come were mixed. First, she wrung Mavis’s mind dry of every detail about the murders at which she had been first on the scene. Thereafter, Beatrice devoted her attention to Luke, and from Mavis’s glimpse of the canoodling at the rear of the room during the Saturday workshop, she had broadened her sphere of interest.
David, Paul and even Luke (when he could detach himself from Beatrice) were all eager to outdo each other in the “My theory about the murders” stakes, and the newcomers were equally eager to detect which of the regulars could have been the killer.
It made for an interesting forum and Mavis, having recovered from the shock of discovering two corpses earlier in the year, was in her element. Her nose twitched continuously with the sharpness the investigating officer had commented on over Janice’s death.
Discussion continued almost until dinnertime on the Saturday, and then resumed over the meal. Jonathan had abandoned the buffet approach to dinner, to everybody’s obvious relief, after much earlier debate about Janice’s murder. With set places, he could more easily keep an eye on everyone’s presence and prevent any lone excursions.
However, after dinner, he could exercise no such control. When Luke promulgated an evening walk, Beatrice eagerly accepted. Mavis gently insisted that she should accompany them, but when she returned after powdering her nose she was annoyed to find that they had left without her. A mistake she told herself firmly, and spent ten minutes chatting to Jonathan, Paul and David before they parted for their separate rooms.
David, through his special knowledge, had told them that the police were as baffled over Charles’ murder as over Janice’s, even though the Hampshire and Suffolk police forces had consulted their modus operandi files and were in constant contact with each other. Neither the knives nor the plastic mac nor the shoes had revealed any DNA or useful fibres, and thus there seemed to be little progress, though from time to time one or other of the witnesses was thoroughly grilled.
Jonathan himself had endured several such grillings, which was hardly surprising. After Charles’s death, he had feared that the Mystery Unravelled company would be ordered to suspend all further courses, but no such injunction was laid on him although his credit and company details had been checked. What he could not satisfy the police about, naturally enough, was whether any of the participants would have reason to murder any of the others. Was there jealousy over a publishing contract? These students were nowhere near that happy stage, he had explained. Were there any romantic affairs between them? If there were, he would hardly be privy to them, he had reasonably replied. Had he, with his expert knowledge, noticed anything untoward in any of his students’ characters, especially the regular ones? Jonathan hesitated over this. Did Luke’s edginess or Paul’s sexual obsession count? Or David’s need to be involved in police work again? He decided not, and did not mention them.
Breakfast on the Sunday morning was a quiet affair with people arriving in ones and twos between 7.30 and 8.30. Some chose to go for a run first “for inspiration”, Luke had explained, since the workshop this morning would be a set exercise of a short criminal story of a thousand words. Others of the group ran nowhere, or in some cases attended early church services. They were fortunate, because it was Luke who therefore came across the dead body of Beatrice Worthy on the woodland path. His white-faced appearance back at the hotel as he blurted out the gruesome details put the late-comers entirely off their Full English breakfasts.
In the all but certain knowledge that this would surely spell the end for Mystery Unravelled courses, if only because no hotel would offer them any facilities in future, Jonathan alerted the police and the hotel manager, and bravely set off with Luke to guard the body. Mavis, rejoicing that it was not she who had found poor Beatrice, waited for the arrival of the police.
“Round the next bend,” Luke instructed Jonathan, stopping abruptly on the path. At this stage Jonathan too decided to wait for the police, not sure he could face a corpse again. After their arrival, however, he and Luke followed them cautiously to the scene of the crime, watching from the sidelines as they proceeded with their grim task. Even from where they stood they could glimpse the tongue protruding through blue lips, and blood and froth on the face of what had once been an attractive girl. And even from here they could see the distinctive supermarket plastic bag. They could also see something far more horrible.
Taped to Beatrice’s bosom were two severed human hands.
On this occasion by unspoken accord, the workshop was abandoned. No one had the stomach for the intricacies of the psychopathic mind (fictional version) when the factual version was all too prominent in everyone’s thoughts. Nor was there much stomach for lunch either, particularly for those most concerned in the investigation: the regulars.
The Kent police were assiduously interviewing every member of the hotel staff, and everyone at the Mystery Unravelled course. In addition to Jonathan and Mavis, particular attention was paid to David, Luke and Paul as the three present at all the workshops where murders had occurred.
Again by unspoken accord, most of the group drifted back to the workshop after lunch, as if a black cloud separated it from the rest of humanity. As it was hard for the newcomers to voice any natural speculation as to the guilty party, there was silence reigning in the room when David returned from a trip to the crime scene. There he had successfully managed to infiltrate the crime scene and circulate for ten whole minutes until ejected by the crime scene manager.
“He left his socks in the bag this time,” David told them. “And the shoes looked much larger than last time. There was a pair of leather gloves, but no disposable ones.”
“So he went barefoot this time?” Luke asked.
“Or had spare socks with him.”
“What else?” Mavis asked, having had the scene fully described to her by Luke. “An axe?”
Not having been first on the scene, she felt more objective about this murder, even though it was poor Beatrice. She had her suspicions about this case. Miss Marple always did, and even though Luke was the front runner, David and Paul were still in the frame. That phrase pleased her as it showed that she was keeping Agatha’s tradition up to date.
“Yes.” David glanced at Mavis’ large capable hands. “But she was strangled manually.”
“So it couldn’t have been a woman,” Luke sounded disappointed.
“It could. Sex,” Paul announced darkly.
“Charles wasn’t a sex object,” David said scornfully.
“There’s sexual jealousy of the young. And the change of life,” Paul diagnosed.
Mavis bristled with fury. “As I explained, Paul, in yesterday’s workshop, modern medicine and technology have rendered many crime clichés unusable. Real life has moved on. HRT disposes of such problems far more efficiently than carrying out axe murders.”
“She wasn’t murdered by an axe,” Jonathan pointed out in the interests of accuracy. “The hands were taped on, not the axe.”
Paul nodded solemnly. “I’m glad you’re a convert to my deodand theory, Jonathan.”
Mavis frowned. “You said the deodand was the object that committed the crime. But the hands were Beatrice’s own. They’d been chopped off. Are you saying she strangled herself?” The awfulness of it caught up with her, and she began to weep.
Paul was not to be daunted by tears. “No, but it’s part of the psychology of the killer. We all appear quite normal to each other, but so would the psychopath who committed these murders. Two different faces, one for us, and another one for himself.”
His listeners stirred uneasily, avoiding looking at each other.
Pleased that he had made his point, Paul continued: “After all, look at Agatha Christie and her famous disappearance. She took time off to pretend she was someone else.”
“But not a psychopath,” Mavis said sharply. “Poor woman, she was simply—”
“Why?” David cut across the conflict. “Why the hands at all? It’s plain evil.”
“That’s just what Miss Marple would have said,” Mavis said, looking at him very carefully.
It was Mavis who by chance did prove to be an achiever after all. Sharp by name and sharp by nature, as the police had said. When she called in at her local police station over a very trifling point of false claims, it was her sheer perseverance and downright bullying that drove them to look into the matter. By subsequent patient tracking of phone records they reached their quarry and then through sheer chance they discovered the murderer of Janice, Charles and Beatrice.
Mr Percy Pip was rudely awakened from a peaceful doze in which he was being presented with the Crime Writers’ Diamond Dagger award, and was shattered to find upon his doorstep a CID officer plus a uniformed police constable, holding up ID cards.
“Mr Percy Pip?” And when he nodded, he heard those familiar words: “We have a warrant here for your arrest …”
Percy’s face was ashen. He had been given to understand that all policemen were either Plods and thus easily outfoxed, or drunk and disorderly with severe psychological problems. The three investigating officers he had so far met had given no indications to the contrary. What therefore had gone wrong?
“But there was no forensic evidence,” Percy babbled. “No DNA. I was most careful. They were, I assure you, the perfect murders. All of them—”
He stopped, aware that they were looking at him in a strange way. “We’ll look into that, sir, now you’ve mentioned it. Meanwhile, we’re here to arrest you on a fraud charge, identity theft.”
Percy Pip couldn’t believe it. Caught through the mere matter of providing utility bills, driving licence, etc. to establish bank accounts, signatures, accommodation address and rented office and living space, mostly achieved through one simple house clearance. And, he remembered, a false doctorate.
“The identity theft of the late Mr Jonathan Fuller. I have to warn you …”