Текст книги "What a cave up!"

Автор книги: Джонатан Коу

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

‘Alright. I’ll take you to see Jason. I’m sure that he’ll be very interested’.

‘That’s good’. He now spoke with an English accent. He sounded much pleasanter. He ripped off a false beard and smiled.

‘I’m very pleased to meet you Mr Marple,’ he said. Richard, being rather surprised held out his hand. They shook hands.

‘I – I’m very pleased to meet you Mr – Mr Whiter’.

‘Please, call me Edward. Now come on, where is Mr Rudd’s house?’

∗ ∗ ∗

‘I wish to tell you a story Mr Rudd. I imagine that it should interest you greatly. Shall I begin?’

‘Most certainly’.

‘Then I shall. It was dark. There was a terrible thunderstorm breaking out over Hacrio Castle. Faint cries were coming from inside. The Black Knight was hammering Walter Bimton to death with a spiked mace. Goodbye Mr Rudd’.

He got up and left the room. Jason heard the front door open and then shut.

‘A most surprising visitor. I wonder why he left so soon?’

‘I don’t know’, said Richard. ‘What do you think of the story?’

‘It was most interesting. We must locate Hacrio Castle. It will be most interesting for us to investigate’.

‘Yes’.

‘However, at present I am more interested in Edward Whiter. Why did he go so quickly? Why, he barely said a few words before he left’.

‘It is so, Jason. I wonder also. Perhaps we will get the answer later’.

‘It may be. Anyway, Hacrio Castle – have you ever heard of it?’

‘No, not at all, and I haven’t got any idea of what it might look like, either’.

‘Neither have I’, admitted Jason. ‘Still I don’t suppose it would be of any use anyway’.

‘You’re probably right. Got any ideas as to what mystery may surround it?’

‘Oh yes, I think I have’.

‘You do?’

‘Yes’. He lowered his voice. ‘I think it’s cursed’.

I closed the magazine, after taking a last look at that silly photograph of me looking precocious and introspective in Mr Nuttall’s cowshed, and put it back on Joan’s bedside table. It was strange reading that story again; like hearing an unfamiliar voice on a tape recorder and steadfastly refusing to believe that it could be your own. The temptation was to think of it as another potential bridge to the past: a way of retracing my steps until I would be brought face to face with the eight-year-old innocent who had written it, and who now seemed such a perfect stranger. But it was obvious enough, even to me, that it actually said less about the kind of child I had been than about the books I was reading at the time: stories of nice middle-class children spending holidays together in rambling country houses which would turn out to be crammed with trapdoors and secret passages; stories of Gothic adventure unfolding in lurid comic strips, their detail hovering just this side of parental acceptability; stories of remote and enviable American teenagers who formed themselves into detective clubs, and seemed to live in unlikely proximity to any number of haunted castles, ghostly mansions and mysterious islands. It was years since I’d read one of these books. Most of my copies had been given away to church jumble sales by my mother. But it was a safe bet, I thought, that there would be a few such items still to be found on Joan’s bookshelf: and I was absolutely right. I plucked at a colourful spine and found myself staring at a cover illustration which instantly gave off the dusty odour of past pleasures. It was tempting to take the book downstairs and start reading it there and then, but some puritanical impulse stopped me, insisting that I had better things to do than to wallow in this sort of nostalgia. So I put it back on the shelf, tiptoed out on to the landing and, resuming my earlier (and certainly no more noble) programme of exploration, pushed open the door to Phoebe’s room.

It was the largest of the three bedrooms; also the most cluttered, because it clearly served as both living quarters and studio space. A variety of paint pots, brushes soaking in cleaning fluid, old newspapers scattered over the floor and rags streaked with multicoloured oils all testified to the nature of her work; and in front of the window, catching the best of the sunlight, there was an easel supporting a large canvas, hidden from view by an off-white sheet. I must admit that I hadn’t been much prey to curiosity regarding Phoebe up until this point: I had noticed, in a superficial way, that she was very attractive (oddly enough she reminded me of Shirley Eaton, whose image had for so long provided my ideal of feminine beauty), but this would probably have had more effect if I hadn’t still been under the spell cast by Alice during our short meeting; and to me, at any rate, she had said scarcely anything of interest – had said scarcely anything at all, if it came to that – since my arrival. And yet there was something irresistible about the idea of spying on her work in progress; something wickedly analogous, I suppose, to the thought of glimpsing her in a state of undress. I took hold of a corner of the sheet and lifted it two or three inches. A tantalizing area of thick, grey-green paint came into view. I raised the sheet some more, until I could just about see a provocative little band of coppery red, placed teasingly on the edge of the canvas. It was more than I could bear, and in one sudden, ruthless movement I whipped the sheet away, so that the entire picture stood exposed to me in all its unfinished glory.

I looked at it for several minutes before it started to make any sense. All I could see at first was this random patchwork of colour, striking enough in itself, but oppressive and disorientating. Then gradually, as I began to make out certain curves and boundaries, it came to seem less like a patchwork and more like a vortex, and I felt myself caught up in a giddying swirl of movement and energy. Finally, some shapes started to emerge, and I began the treacherous business of trying to put a name to them: that globe, which dominated the left-hand side of the painting, and what seemed to be some sort of netted implement … Could it be anything as mundane as a clogged and muddled still life? A roughly sketched scrub of waste land – in the corner of Joan’s back yard, say – with a football and an old tennis racket in it? It seemed increasingly likely, and I felt my excitement begin to subside, when …

‘Please don’t look at that.’

Phoebe stood in the doorway, clutching a paper bag to her chest.

There was nothing I could say, except, ‘I’m sorry, I – I was just curious.’

She carried the paper bag to her desk and took out a drawing pad and some pencils.

‘I don’t mind you coming in here,’ she said. ‘But I don’t like people looking at my work.’

‘I’m sorry, I should have just … asked you or something – ’

‘It isn’t that.’ She pulled the sheet back over the canvas and started to rearrange the bunch of wilting gyp which stood in a jam jar on her window-sill.

‘It’s very good,’ I said. I could feel her grow suddenly tense, but persisted in blundering on: ‘I mean, to fill a picture with so much drama and power, when you’re dealing with a couple of everyday objects like that; it’s remarkable. I mean, a football and a tennis racket – who would have thought it …?’

Phoebe turned to face me, but her eyes remained lowered and her voice muted. ‘I don’t have much confidence in my abilities as a painter.’

‘Well you should.’

‘It’s the last in a series of six pictures inspired by the Orpheus legend.’

‘And if the others are as good as th–’ I stared at her in surprise. ‘Pardon?’

‘It shows his lyre and his disembodied head being carried along by the waters of the Hebrus.’

I sat down on the bed. ‘Ah.’

‘Now you see why I don’t like to show people my work.’

There was little prospect of an end to the ensuing silence. I looked blankly into the middle distance, too flustered to manage anything in the way of an apology, while Phoebe sat down at her desk and started to sharpen one of the pencils. I had almost come to the conclusion that it would be best if I got up and left without another word, when she said abruptly: ‘Has she changed much?’

This threw me at first.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Joan. Has she changed much, since you knew her?’

‘Oh. No, not really.’ Then I thought about it. ‘Well to be honest, I can’t really say. I mean, I’ve never really known her as an adult, only as a child. It’s been a bit like meeting her for the first time.’

‘Yes, I’d noticed. You’re almost like strangers.’

I shrugged: but in a rueful rather than a nonchalant way. ‘Perhaps it was a bad idea for me to come.’

‘No, I don’t think so. She’s been looking forward to this for weeks. And she loves having you here, I can tell. She’s very different with you around. Graham thinks so too.’

‘In what way different?’

‘Less … desperate, I suppose.’

I didn’t like the sound of that.

‘I think she gets lonely up here, you see. And her work can be very demanding. We both do our best to jolly her along. I know she’s dreading the summer, when we’re not going to be here to keep her company. Not that we find it a strain, or anything,’ she added earnestly. ‘We both get on with her all right, and there are really only one or two things which seem – well, beyond the call of duty … Like when we have to play games.’

‘Games?’

‘Quite often, after dinner, she wants us to play board games. Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, things like that.’

I said nothing; just shuddered, for some reason.

‘Anyway, that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. She won’t be doing it while you’re here, that’s for sure. Doesn’t have to.’

∗

‘Now – who’s for a quick game of Scrabble?’

Joan beamed expectantly around the table, and all three of us did our best to avoid meeting her eye. Graham resorted to his trick of stacking the plates again, Phoebe concentrated on slowly draining what was left in her wineglass, and I developed a sudden interest in translating the Polish Trade Union poster which had been staring me in the face for the last three evenings. But then, after a few seconds, I began to sense that the other two were relying on me to come to the rescue, so I said: ‘Actually I could do with an hour or two alone with my notebook, if that’s all right. The ideas have been coming thick and fast today.’

Brazen falsehood though it was, it was the only excuse Joan was likely to accept. ‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I’d hate to come between you and your Muse. But if this is a new book you’re working on, you must make me a promise.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That I can be the first person to read it when you’ve finished, of course.’

I smiled awkwardly. ‘Well, this is something of a long-term project: I doubt if it’ll see the light of day for years. In the meantime I’ve got something else to be thinking about. I’m contemplating a move into non-fiction.’ It was hard to tell, from her expression, whether Joan was impressed or baffled by this revelation. ‘I’ve been offered the job of writing the history of a certain eminent family. It’s quite a distinction, if you must know.’

‘Oh – and who might they be?’

I told her, and Graham snorted with incredulous laughter.

‘That bunch of vampires? Well, you must be on your uppers, that’s all I can say.’ He disappeared into the kitchen, carrying our plates and the remains of Phoebe’s excellent parmigiana. As he left he could still be heard muttering, ‘The Winshaws, eh? That’s a good one.’

Joan stared after him, her eyes wide with incomprehension.

‘Well I don’t understand what he meant by that. What’s so special about the Winshaws?’ She turned to me for enlightenment, but Graham’s reaction had stung me into sulky silence. ‘Do you know what he was talking about?’ she asked Phoebe. ‘Have you heard of the Winshaws?’

Phoebe nodded. ‘I’ve heard of Roderick Winshaw. He’s an art dealer. He was meant to come and give a talk to us a few weeks ago, actually, about survival in the marketplace, but he never showed up.’

‘Well, Michael,’ said Joan, ‘you certainly are a dark horse. I want to hear all about it. I insist.’

‘Oh, it’s all quite – ’

‘Not now, not now.’ She held up a restraining hand. ‘You’ve got work to do, I realize that. No, we’ll have plenty of time to hear the whole story tomorrow. We’ll have all day, in fact.’

That sounded ominous. ‘We will?’

‘Did I not tell you? I’ve managed to get the day off, so we can go out to the dales for a picnic, the two of us.’

‘Mm. Sounds lovely.’

‘And rather than take the boring old car, I thought we’d cycle.’

‘Cycle?’

‘Yes. Graham’s said that you can borrow his bike. Isn’t that nice of him?’

Graham, returning to the table to collect the cutlery, flashed me a malicious grin.

‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Very nice indeed. Is the weather going to be good enough?’

‘Well, it’s funny you should mention that,’ said Joan, ‘because there are storms forecast for the end of the day. But we should be fine if we set off in plenty of time. I thought if we got up at, say … six o’clock?’

The will to resist had deserted me. ‘Why not?’ I said, and handed Graham my fork and empty glass.

∗

That night I found it impossible to get to sleep. I don’t know what it was: maybe the thick summer heat, or perhaps simply the knowledge that I had to get up early the next morning, but I lay on that sofa for more than an hour, each position more uncomfortable than the last, until there was nothing for it but to try and find something to read; something to clear my mind of the tired spiral of thoughts which seemed to be clogging it up. But there were no books downstairs: only the ones I had brought with me, and three or four vegetarian cookbooks in the kitchen. That wasn’t what I needed at all. I needed something undemanding but compulsive, and immediately I found myself thinking of the children’s mystery story I’d rediscovered in Joan’s room today. If only I’d brought it down with me while I had the chance.

Ten minutes later, I knew that the only solution was to steal up to her room and fetch it.

I was in luck. Her door had been left a couple of inches ajar, and I could tell that her curtains were open, letting in a good deal of light from the street lamps. Since the bookshelf was right next to the door, there should be no problem slipping in there without waking her up. I paused on the landing for just a second or two, listening, then eased the door gently open and stepped inside. It was about half past one in the morning.

Joan was lying on her back, her skin grey and luminescent in the silver lamplight. She was not wearing any nightclothes, and had thrown off most of the duvet in her sleep. It was eight years since I’d seen a naked female body, in the flesh, as it were; and I think it’s true to say that I had never seen one as beautiful as this. Verity had been slender, strong-boned and small-breasted; by comparison Joan, basking without shame in the fullness of my hot gaze, seemed almost immorally ample and voluptuous. The word ‘generous’ came to mind: it was a generous body, both in the heavy grace of its proportions and in the uncomplicated readiness with which it submitted to my scrutiny. I stood there, transfixed, and it seems to me now that those few guilty moments were among the most glorious, the most unlooked-for, the most thrilling of my life. And yet it was all over so quickly. In no time at all, Joan had stirred, turned towards me, and I backed out of the door without making a sound.

3

‘Look at these arms,’ she said, squinting at them irritably and pinching the pale flesh until it blushed pink. ‘Like an Italian peasant woman. I just tell myself it’s in the genes and there’s no point in fretting.’ She spread raspberry jam thickly on to a slice of granary loaf and bit into it, then wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Do you think I’m overweight?’

‘Of course you aren’t. You know, your body is something you should feel comfortable about. It doesn’t have to be a particular shape.’

The shape of Joan’s body was very much on my mind that day, I have to admit. It was another hot summer morning and it had taken us nearly two hours to cycle out into open country. As soon as we reached what Joan deemed to be a suitable location we threw ourselves down upon the ground, and for the next few minutes, in spite of my fatigue, I was acutely conscious of the lazy pleasure with which she was stretching her limbs, the movement of her breasts as her breathing rose and fell, the thinness of the pink and blue blouse which she had untucked from her jeans and rolled up at the sleeve. For my part, I was bathed in sweat and panting noisily. For the first part of the ride I hadn’t been sure that I was going to make it. Joan had led me on a steady climb, choosing the steeper road every time we came to a junction: sometimes the incline had been so fierce that I nearly keeled over, it was so hard to keep moving. (Graham’s bicycle, I need hardly mention, was not equipped with gears.) But then I found myself getting more confident and the going became easier. Soon the terrain had levelled out, and at one point we hit upon a fabulous stretch of road – downhill but not too steep, just enough to get a bit of speed up, take your feet off the pedals and coast forward with the wind skimming your face and rushing through your ears, sweet tears of excitement welling at the corner of each eye. For a brief instant I felt the years slipping away, like a heavy burden which had been breaking my back, and we were children again, Joan and I, riding down the lane towards Mr Nuttall’s farm. She told me afterwards that I had let out a whoop of joy. I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

‘So,’ she said, ‘are you going to tell me about this mysterious new project of yours?’

‘It’s not definite yet,’ I insisted, and then gave her a full account of my extraordinary meeting on the train.

Joan gasped when I got to the part about sharing a carriage with somebody who was reading one of my books. ‘How amazing!’ she said. As soon as I had finished, she wanted to know, ‘I suppose she was pretty, was she, this Alice woman?’

‘No, not especially.’ It was surprisingly difficult to say this. The mere act of telling the story had brought Alice’s beauty vividly back to mind, and Joan at once seemed as plain and ungainly as when I had first caught sight of her on the station platform. I fought hard against this realization but there was no stopping it: I felt a shiver of desire pass through me as soon as I remembered the laughter and the teasing invitation I had glimpsed in Alice’s eyes.

‘Cold?’ said Joan. ‘Surely not.’

We talked a little more about the Winshaws and my writing and this somehow got us on to the subject of the stories we used to make up when we were children.

‘I suppose it’s rather exciting,’ Joan said, ‘to think that I once collaborated with a famous author.’

I laughed. ‘Jason Rudd and the Hampton Court Murders. I wonder what happened to that little masterpiece. I don’t suppose you kept it, did you?’

‘You know very well that you had the only copy. And you probably threw it away. You were always ruthless about things like that. I mean, fancy having to come to me for that photograph.’

‘I didn’t throw that picture away, I lost it. I told you that.’

‘I don’t see how it could have just got lost, I really don’t. Anyway, I remember you throwing all your Jason Rudd stories away when you started on your science fiction phase.’

‘Science fiction? Me?’

‘You know, when you wouldn’t write or talk about anything except Yuri Gagarin, and you tried to make me read that long story about him flying to Venus or something and I wasn’t interested.’

The shapeless memory of some ancient but wounding disagreement arose before me and prompted a smile. For the first time I realized how nice it was to be with Joan again; to be able to feel that life did in fact have a sort of continuity, that the past was not an ignoble secret to be locked away but something to be shared and wondered at. It was a warm, uncomplicated feeling. But then Joan, having finished her meal, turned over and lay at my feet, resting on her elbows, cupping her chin in her hands and affording me a panoramic view of her cleavage; and suddenly I was caught again in a tangle of different impulses, urging me to look and not to look. Of course I turned away, and pretended to be admiring the scenery, so that a difficult silence descended until Joan gave up and asked the inevitable question: ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I was thinking about my review. He’ll have read it by now. I wonder how he’s taking it.’

Joan rolled on to her back, plucked a long blade of grass and began chewing it. ‘Do you really suppose people care what you say about them?’

‘In this case,’ I said, my eyes still fixed on the horizon: ‘Yes, I do.’

∗

Storm clouds gathered. There was a black bank of them, ranged so threateningly in the western sky that by four o’clock in the afternoon we both decided it would be sensible to head for home. Besides, it was Joan’s turn on the cooking rota again. ‘It wouldn’t do to let them down,’ she said. ‘They’ll be counting on me.’

When we got back to the house she went straight into the kitchen and started chopping vegetables. I was so tired by this stage that my legs would barely support me. I asked if she would mind me lying down on her bed for a little while and she said no, of course not, fixing me at the same time with a look of such concern that I felt obliged to say: ‘It’s been a great day, though. I really enjoyed it.’

‘It has, hasn’t it?’ She went back to her chopping board and added, half to herself, ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you till Sunday. Two more lovely days.’

On my way through the sitting room I passed Graham, who was busy reading the film reviews in the paper.

‘Have a good trip, did you?’ he asked, without looking up.

‘Very nice, thank you.’

‘You got back just in time, I reckon. It’s going to piss down in a minute.’

‘Looks like it.’

‘I’ve just been reading your piece.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Very enigmatic.’

I lay on Joan’s bed for about twenty minutes wondering what on earth he could have meant by that remark. Enigmatic? There was nothing enigmatic about what I’d written. I’d gone out of my way to make my feelings plain, in fact. If anything it was Graham who was being enigmatic. I knew the piece off by heart and went through it, sentence by sentence, to see if there was anything that might have thrown him. This drew a blank, and for a while I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, but still his peculiar phrase nagged away at me. Finally I knew that it wouldn’t give me any more rest, so I went back downstairs to see if there was an explanation.

Graham was watching a local news programme on Joan’s television. I picked up his discarded paper and glanced at my review, pleased to see that it had been laid out prominently at the top of the page.

‘I don’t see what’s so enigmatic about this,’ I said, reading the first paragraph to myself and admiring the quietly sarcastic note I had managed to inject into a simple plot summary.

‘Look, it’s no big deal,’ said Graham. ‘It’s only a bloody review, after all. I just couldn’t see what you were getting at.’

‘Seems fairly clear to me.’ I was on to the second paragraph, where the tone began to get more explicitly frosty. I could imagine my subject starting to bristle with apprehension at this point.

‘Look, there’s obviously some clever metaphor or figure of speech that I’ve missed out on,’ said Graham. ‘I’m sure your metropolitan friends will understand it.’

‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. I couldn’t help smiling at some of the digs in the third paragraph; they looked even more pitiless in print.

‘I mean, what are you trying to say, exactly?’ said Graham. ‘That this bloke is never going to write a really good novel, because he doesn’t own a pen?’

I looked up sharply. ‘What?’

‘The last sentence. What does it mean?’

‘Look, it’s simple. He obviously wants to write this fantastic, funny, angry, satirical book, but he’s never going to do it, because he hasn’t got the necessary –’ I was about to read the word aloud for confirmation, when suddenly I saw what they had printed. I froze in amazement: it was one of those moments when the reality is, literally, so horrific that it staggers belief. Then I screwed up the newspaper and threw it across the room in an involuntary fury. ‘The bastards!’

Graham stared at me. ‘What’s the matter?’

I couldn’t answer at first; just sat there and chewed my nails. Then I said: ‘Brio, is what I wrote. He doesn’t have the necessary brio.’

He retrieved the newspaper and examined the sentence again. A smile began to dawn on his face.

‘Oh, brio ...’ Then the smile became a chuckle, the chuckle became a laugh, and the laugh became a helpless, deafening, maniacal roar which brought Joan, ever anxious to be in on the joke, running from the kitchen.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Look at this,’ said Graham, handing her the paper and struggling to speak through his choking laughter. ‘Take a look at Michael’s review.’

‘What about it?’ she said, scanning it with a frown which struggled for precedence with her anticipatory smile.

‘The last word,’ said Graham, by now gasping for breath. ‘Look at the last word.’

Joan looked at the last word, but still she couldn’t fathom the mystery. She looked from me to Graham, from Graham to me, more puzzled than ever by our different reactions. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said at last, after reading the sentence one more time. ‘I mean, what’s so funny about a biro?’

∗

It was another subdued meal. We had red kidney bean stew followed by pineapple jelly; the noise of us all eating seemed louder than usual, interrupted as it was only by Joan’s occasional abortive attempts to get a conversation started, and Graham’s sporadic fits of laughter, which he seemed to be containing only with the greatest difficulty.

‘Well I still don’t think it’s very funny,’ said Joan, after his fourth or fifth eruption. ‘You’d think they’d have proper proof readers or something, on a national newspaper like that. If I were you, Michael, I’d have a jolly good go at them on Monday.’

‘Oh, what’s the use,’ I said, pushing a bean idly around my plate.

The lashing of rain against the windowpane intensified, and as Joan served us a second helping of jelly there was a flash of lightning, followed by a terrific thunderclap.

‘I love storms,’ she said. ‘They’re so atmospheric.’ When it became clear that nobody had anything to add to this observation, she asked brightly: ‘Do you know what I always feel like doing when there’s a storm?’

I tried not to speculate; but the answer turned out, in any case, to be fairly innocuous.

‘I like a good game of Cluedo. There’s nothing to beat it.’

And this time, for some reason, our opposition was ineffectual, so that after the plates had been cleared away we found ourselves setting out the board on the dining-room table and squabbling over who should be assigned which character. In the end Phoebe was Miss Scarlet, Joan Mrs Peacock, Graham the Reverend Green, and I was Professor Plum.

‘Now, you’ve got to imagine that we’re all stuck in this big old house in the country,’ said Joan. ‘Just like in that film, Michael, that you were always telling me about.’ She turned to the others and explained: ‘When Michael was little, he saw this film about a family who all got killed one stormy night in this rambling old mansion. It made a big impression on him.’

‘Really?’ said Graham, pricking up his cinéaste’s ears. ‘What was it called?’

‘You wouldn’t have heard of it,’ I said. ‘It was in English, and it wasn’t made by Marxist intellectuals.’

‘Ooh, touchy.’

Joan fetched a couple of candlesticks, placing one on the table and another on the mantelpiece, and then turned out all the lights. We could hardly see what we were doing, but the effect, it had to be said, was suitably eerie.

‘Now, are we all set?’

We were ready to start, except that Joan, Graham and Phoebe were each provided with pens or pencils to tick off the suspects on their murder cards, and I wasn’t. Typically, it was Graham who noticed.

‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘I think Michael lacks the necessary biro.’

Even Joan collapsed into giggles at that, and Phoebe permitted herself an apologetic smirk which soon, in the face of the others’ hilarity, turned into laughter too. I fetched myself one of the coloured pens from beneath the rota board in the kitchen, then sat down and waited composedly for the hysteria to subside. It took quite a while, and in the meantime I made a firm, silent resolve: from that day on, I would write no more reviews for the newspapers.

We played three games, each of them fairly long because there were some quite sophisticated bluffs and counter-bluffs going on, usually between Graham and Joan. As for Phoebe, I had the impression that her heart wasn’t really in it. Neither was mine, at first: I tried to treat it as no more than a mathematical puzzle, an exercise in probability and deduction, but then after a while – and I suppose this will seem childish – my imagination began to assert itself and I became thoroughly absorbed. Helped along by the cracks of thunder and flashes of lightning which would momentarily flood the room with garish contrasts of light and shadow, I had no difficulty in believing that this was a night on which terrible things might happen. In my mind, Professor Plum began to take on the characteristics of Kenneth Connor, and once again I had the sense (the sense which had never been far away, ever since my birthday visit to the cinema in Weston-super-Mare) that it was my destiny to act the part of a shy, awkward, vulnerable little man caught up in a sequence of nightmarish events over which he had absolutely no control. The posters on the wall came to resemble ancient family portraits, behind which a pair of watchful eyes was likely to appear at any moment, and Joan’s tiny house began to feel as vast and sinister as Blackshaw Towers itself.

Joan won the first game: it was Mrs White, in the study, with the lead piping. Then Graham decided to take a more rigorous approach and fetched himself a clipboard and a large sheet of blank paper, on which he carefully recorded the transactions which took place between every player. He won the second game this way (it was Colonel Mustard, in the billiard room, with the revolver) but was then unanimously disqualified from using similar tactics again. The third game was closely fought. It soon became obvious that the crime had taken place either in the lounge or the conservatory, and either with the dagger or the candlestick; but I was at a significant advantage when it came to naming the murderer, because I held three of the relevant cards in my hand. While the others were still floundering and firing off wildcat suggestions at each other, the solution slowly revealed itself to me: the culprit, of course, was none other than myself, Professor Plum.