by Mick Herron
In 2009 Mick Herron won the EQMM Readers Award with the thriller novella “Dolphin Junction.” He returns this month with a case for his popular series characters Zoe Boehm and Joe Silvermann. Zoe features in Mr. Herron’s 2009 novel Smoke and Whispers. His 2010 book, Slow Horses, expected to be released in the U.S. by Soho in June, is a departure for him—a spy thriller, and the first in a new series.
* * * *
We didn’t keep count, but he must have dispatched up-wards of thirty people. Few had given him sleepless nights. Death was part and parcel of what he did, and if some of his initial methods had been a little off the wall (he had once strangled a bus conductor with the sloughed skin of a boa constrictor), he had calmed down since, and now generally shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned his victims to death without undue fuss.
But last night, three in the morning, he’d sat bolt upright in bed thinking: Harry.
Couldn’t even remember Harry’s surname at first, it had been so long ago. Harry Cudlipp. He’d been a nobody, Harry Cudlipp, but he’d seen something he shouldn’t have seen, and reckoned to profit by it, and thus his uneventful life reached its eventful close. All, as stated, long ago.
So why is Harry at the foot of the bed, three in the morning?
Not literally, of course. Not literally. If Nigel Reeve-Holkham believed in ghosts, he’d not have gone in for this particular line.
He’d got up and closed the wardrobe door, hiding its mirror from sight, then returned to his pillows, but sleep held off, only taking him back in its sly embrace moments before the alarm clock screeched the morning into life. He’d risen heavy-lidded, with unresponsive limbs. Black coffee left him just as exhausted but with a tic at his eyebrow. And when he’d shaved, there’d been that nudge from his subconscious again, an awareness of Harry. You couldn’t put it stronger than that. It wasn’t as if Harry Cudlipp appeared in his bathroom cabinet mirror—not even in that classic double-take shock, when you open the cabinet, then shut it again, and yeek, there he is, beside you—but as Nigel put razor to cheek, tracing those bumps on his reflection’s right jaw that were a perfect match for those on his own left, back Harry arrived, swimming into mind as if he were a long-term resident of Nigel Reeve-Holkham’s mental aquarium, instead of a passing guest some sixteen years gone.
Sixteen years gone, Harry had been on a boathouse balcony, looking across the river to the meadow. Quite probably he’d been remembering that thing he’d seen that he shouldn’t have seen, and musing on the profit he might turn. A certain smile had played across his lips. Then Harry Cudlipp—who had not been at the boathouse as a rower, student, or college chap eager to watch his alma mater’s crew put through their paces; he’d been there because that was his job, cleaning out the boathouse of a morning—had stubbed his cigarette in the hanging basket to his left, yawned, stretched, and crack!, a shot had rung out.
Stubbing one’s cigarette out in a hanging basket is impolite but not, perhaps, a capital offence. Still: crack! A shot had rung out.
And Harry Cudlipp had been effectively remaindered.
Nigel Reeve-Holkham sighed, and continued shaving.
He nicked his chin in the process, and bloodied a clean towel.
* * * *
After that, it was all about Harry. Not that Harry dogged his steps (this wasn’t a literal haunting; Nigel Reeve-Holkham was coming to caress that scrap of comfort) but he’d spring to mind a dozen times a day, mostly when Nigel caught his own unexpected reflection—shop windows, mirrored pillars in stores, the distorting surfaces of passing cars. Why was that? Nigel Reeve-Holkham in no way resembled Harry Cudlipp. Harry Cudlipp had been gaunt, with cheeks that sucked in as if he had a lemon drop under his tongue. His hair had been thinning too, catching up with the rest of him; Harry’s hair had been no more than a few stray wisps, brylcreemed into place. He’d smoked constantly. And his clothes had been rubbish: a mishmash of garments over which he pulled a stained apron every morning as he set about tasks which remained, in Nigel Reeve-Holkham’s mind, vague and undefined, but which had doubtless involved the application of industrial-strength cleaning fluids and mops and buckets and other details.
Nigel himself was abstemious; immaculate. His cleaning fluids came in polite plastic bottles with spray-nozzles. They rarely intruded on his consciousness.
But all this Harry stuff: It was getting him down. He was starting to wonder who else was going to turn up out of the long-dead blue—that bus conductor? The one who didn’t like snakes? Or maybe the woman thrown from the roof of that chichi hotel in Paris. She’d landed spread-eagled near a fountain whose reach had been just enough to rinse her life’s-blood from the flagstones and drag it in a pinkening swirl to the gutters of the rue Pigalle. But there was nobody. Only Harry. No one else made a peep.
A couple of afternoons after that first visitation, Nigel took his newspapers to the recycling bins near the local park. There were a lot of them; his haul included Oxford’s daily Mail and weekly Times as well as the decent nationals, not that either had given him joy. And as he was hoisting them through the letter-box mouth of the bin, he saw Harry again. There were swings and roundabouts over at the park’s far side—the infants’ play area was fenced off, to keep monsters at bay—and that was where Harry stood, leaning against that very fence, smoking, and wearing rubbish clothes. He was staring in Nigel’s direction.
And then Nigel blinked, and he was gone. There was a man over there, that was all—a man who not only wasn’t Harry, he wasn’t even smoking. Nigel shook his head. It was early, but already he knew today would be a wasted day. He’d spend most of it gnawing on this new non-encounter, a reminder of something that had been put to rest years ago, but apparently wouldn’t lie down.
He was beginning to think that in killing Harry Cudlipp, he’d made a terrible mistake.
* * * *
What Joe Silvermann liked to say was, there was no such thing as an ordinary case. “People, they come in all sizes. Their problems, likewise.” This was largely theoretical, because he didn’t work much. And the problems that didn’t come in different sizes—the problems that were always the same: the credit checks, the reference evaluations, the child-support defaulters—were dealt with by his wife and partner Zoe Boehm, on the grounds that they paid the rent and didn’t need screwing up.
Her words.
Where she was right now, he didn’t know. As for Joe, he was in the office of a couple of upstairs rooms on North Parade, which was a confusing mile or so south of South Parade. And he had a client with him. His client was a small man, sinisterly well-dressed: He had long fingers and small teeth, and a tic at his left eyebrow. And he’d just told Joe he was being haunted.
“Haunted?”
“Not literally.”
Joe nodded sagely. He didn’t believe in ghosts—Zoe would have given him a hard time if he had—but didn’t mind talking to people who did. He just had to be careful not to absorb any supernatural beliefs by mistake. Like any virtue, empathy had its downside.
“It’s more of an . . . awareness.”
“Ah.”
“You see?”
Joe nodded politely, but didn’t have a clue. He was hoping matters would become more specific. Otherwise—well, this wouldn’t be the first interview with a prospective client where he’d never worked out what he was being hired for.
“But some things trigger that awareness more than others.”
“And they would be . . . ?”
“Well—when I’m shaving. I’m reminded of him when I’m shaving.”
“You see him when you look in the mirror.”
“I’m reminded of him when I look in the mirror.”
Joe raised a finger to make his point. “There’s a difference.”
There followed a slight pause during which both men became aware of a bluebottle on the window, fizzing like an electric charge.
“I know,” said Nigel Reeve-Holkham at last. “That’s why I made the distinction.”
“As you say,” said Joe. Positive responses, he’d read, were a good thing, so he’d memorised a couple. “But I’m wondering how you think I can help.” Less positive, but it had to be asked.
“You’re a detective.”
“I am,” Joe said.
“You solve problems.”
“Mmm.”
“Well—this is a problem.”
“But you don’t think it’s one perhaps better addressed by a . . . “ A slight nervousness had him split the word in two. He was as good as calling the client a nutter. “Psycho analyst?”
“I have an analyst. We’ve discussed the matter.”
“And he, ah—?”
“She thinks it’s guilt.”
Analyst, thought Joe. He/she. Schoolboy error.
“But you disagree,” he said.
“Well, obviously.”
“And what do you think it’s down to?”
Nigel Reeve-Holkham said, “I think I made a mistake in killing him. And I need to know what it was, so I don’t make the same mistake again.”
“Pardon me one small moment,” Joe said. He rose, walked round his desk, and raised the sash window six inches; enough that a brained creature would take the hint. But the bluebottle rose with the glass and continued to rage against its invisible enemy. Still: a step forward had been made. An opportunity offered. There was a chance that within the next little while the bluebottle would find freedom.
Joe returned to his chair.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Where were we?”
* * * *
For a while after his new client left, Joe sat listening to the bluebottle buzz. Eventually he decided that opening the window had only irritated the creature, and tested this theory by closing it. The bluebottle subsided. Problem solved. The fact that the bluebottle remained on Joe’s side of the glass was a matter to be dealt with later.
This new client, though. This new client presented a problem unlike any Joe had come across before.
His normal reaction to a new problem was to seek Zoe’s input, ideally without her noticing that he was unsure what to do next. The word “ideally” was unavoidable here, as Zoe not noticing never actually occurred in practice. But somehow Joe felt that this situation wasn’t one Zoe would find sympathetic. Zoe’s qualities, all of which he theoretically prized, included a low tolerance for the supernatural, and when Zoe’s tolerance was low, matters swiftly became critical. By and large, it was Joe they were critical of. This looked like being a solo job.
Which left Joe’s fallback position: What would Marlowe do? To which the answer was obvious. Marlowe would get out on the mean streets.
Even if those streets weren’t actually streets.
* * * *
Now this—this was something you did not see every day.
Had Joe’s thoughts been broadcast alongside footage of the scenery he was gliding through, many would agree with him. Here were trees bending low over the water, as if stooping to drink; and beyond the bushes lining the riverbanks, meadows stretched into a friendly distance. Cows could be spotted, grazing and suchlike, and Joe had seen a small animal scrabble into a muddy hole in the bank. And not long since, a heron had flown overhead. Joe was almost certain it had been a heron. For some seconds before its appearance he’d been aware of its flapping, deep and hungry as a monster’s heartbeat, and just for a moment he’d suspected there was something he’d never been told about Oxford: that it involved the occasional unexpected hazard, such as a giant bat. But then the heron had flown round a bend in the river and passed no more than two yards over his head, its stick-legs trailing in its wake like a kite frame. Its wing-breeze had ruffled his hair. That, too, didn’t happen every day.
But what he actually meant by this, the this you didn’t see much, wasn’t the trees or the water or the cows or even the heron; it was this: Joe Silvermann in a punt. Poling upriver. With water rolling up his arms. And how did that happen, anyway, water rolling up his arms? It must be a punting thing; some freakish bending of the laws of physics. Because every time Joe lifted the pole clear of the water (which almost made him fall over, because this was not a steady surface: It was like balancing on three planks of wood, which he had nobody’s word for but the young woman hiring out punts at the Cherwell Boathouse were riverworthy anyway) he felt his elbows getting wet, even though they were raised at this point. Five minutes in he’d had to stop to remove his jacket, and the punt pole had rolled into the river, and it had taken another ten minutes’ paddling to retrieve it, all of which had taken place within clear view of that same young woman, who was either finding all this very amusing or was remembering something funny that had happened to her once.
And now his jacket was folded and carefully placed on the bench in the middle of the punt; his sleeves were rolled up; the riverbank was gliding past in a reasonably steady, panic-free manner; and Joe had to admit there was a certain elegance to this mode of travel. From a distance, he probably looked in control of things. Which was just as well, because if his mental map was working, he must be approaching the place he’d been looking for.
What Nigel Reeve-Holkham had told him was that the boathouse where Harry Cudlipp had worked had stood just beyond the bridge across which the main road rumbled. “On the left. As you’re heading upriver.”
“But it’s not there anymore,” Joe had said. Just to be clear on this point.
“No.”
This was a thing about boathouses in Oxford. They had a tendency to burn down.
“And this happened . . . ?”
“The same year.”
“And you think there’s a connection between, ah . . . “
Nigel Reeve-Holkham had stared at him as if he’d sprung a leak. “How on earth could there be?”
“No. Good point.”
The bluebottle had rattled the glass again.
Joe had said, “You’ll excuse me, I can be slow.” Then mentally kicked himself: not a great admission to make to a client. “But my being there? This place that burned down, sixteen years ago? How precisely might this help? There’ll be evidence?”
Any remaining evidence, he’d been told, was of the circumstantial kind. The boathouse might not be there any longer, but the river hadn’t changed. And it was from the river that the bullet that had killed Harry Cudlipp had been fired.
“From a punt, to be precise,” Nigel Reeve-Holkham had said.
“I see.” A longtime resident of Oxford, Joe had never been nearer a punt than looking down on one while crossing Magdalen Bridge. “And that was—that was a straightforward business? Was it?”
“I thought so at the time. But now I’m worried that it wasn’t. That something in fact went wrong, without my realising it.”
“And you think that’s why Harry Cudlipp is haunting you now?”
“Yes.”
Joe had nodded.
“But not literally.”
Joe had kept nodding.
“Do you think you can help?”
Well, no. No, he didn’t. How could he help? This was outside sense. But there was no doubting Mr. Reeve-Holkham needed somebody’s aid, and if his analyst couldn’t supply it, Joe felt duty-bound to step in. People, he hadn’t forgotten, came in all sizes. Their problems likewise. The sign on his door didn’t specify that some of those problems, Joe didn’t want to know about. The sign in question had actually fallen off the door some weeks ago, but that didn’t alter the facts. The bluebottle had buzzed again. Joe had taken a deep breath. “Yes,” he’d said. “Yes. I can help.”
And so here he was. This was the place Nigel Reeve-Holkham had meant. It was where the old boathouse had stood.
He raised the pole from the water and the punt came to a gentle halt. Or that was the plan, but in fact the punt continued to glide upriver. For a moment Joe simply stood, confused by the way things weren’t turning out as he’d intended. And then the familiarity of this circumstance asserted itself, and he groped for a contingency plan. Sooner or later, the punt would run out of steam. It was, after all, headed upriver. There were only so many laws of physics one punt could break. So thinking, he lowered the pole into the water again, to act as a drag, and steered into the bank.
Okay. That worked, too.
A few minutes of uncoordinated flapping about later, Joe had the punt more or less stationary; its pole jammed into the riverbed, acting as a kind of anchor. A tree spread low overhead, its branches gnarled and stumpy. Joe sat in its shade, in the punt, facing the far bank. Somehow, before he’d set off on it, this had seemed a sensible venture. Now he was here, the theory—that punting upriver to look at something that wasn’t there anymore would cast light on events buried way in the past—held less water than the punt. He’d been reminded of how much this was when he’d sat and put his feet into the puddle. (“It’s sinking,” he’d pointed out to the woman at the boathouse, to which she’d replied, “It’s got a bit of water in the bottom, that’s all.” “That’s how sinking starts,” Joe had said. But she’d sworn this was normal.)
Not far away, the pleasant whizz of cars was a reminder that mechanised life carried on. Across the river, long grass bent in the breeze. Nothing else happened. There were no other boats on the water, and nobody walking the fields either side. Cows didn’t count. Marlowe, Joe guessed, would have savoured the moment. Marlowe would have lain back in his bone-dry punt, pulled a hat over his eyes, and smoked himself to sleep. Joe didn’t smoke, didn’t wear a hat, and having a nap wouldn’t help. He checked once more that there was no one around and raised an imaginary rifle to his eyes. Sighted down its imaginary scope. Over there—on the long-gone balcony—Harry Cudlipp stood smoking like Marlowe gazing across at a landscape which must have been much the same as it was now. He’d been remembering something he’d seen which he wasn’t supposed to have seen, and a certain smile had played across his lips, because Harry Cudlipp had been sure that his knowledge was going to make him rich. Instead, it made him dead. He had stubbed the cigarette out in the hanging basket to his left, yawned, and stretched. Joe squeezed an imaginary trigger. Bang. A shot had rung out. And Harry Cudlipp died.
Sixteen years ago, this had been. He’d been dead all that time. Why would he stand up now?
Joe toyed again with his imaginary rifle. Maybe it was as simple as this: that hitting a stationary target from a floating boat was a lot trickier than pretending made it seem. With the thought, he shifted position, and the punt shied like a pony. That would be enough to take the edge off a sharpshooter’s talent, wouldn’t it? He counted out loud and made it a full sixteen seconds before the punt settled down. And then he raised the imaginary rifle again. Bang. That would rock the boat even more. And would the rocking start a nanosecond before the bullet left the barrel—enough to throw it off—or would the bullet be long gone before its departure made waves? “Bang,” he whispered. What sort of distance was involved? Where precisely had the boathouse stood? How high was its balcony?
And then he put down his imaginary rifle and shook his very real head. Joe, Joe Joe, he told himself. This is not the answer. The answer is not, Harry Cudlipp didn’t really die. We know Harry Cudlipp died. The question is, what went wrong?
He turned and surveyed the nearer side of the river, the side where his punt was moored. The bank rose steeply for a yard or so, and he had to stand to see the view. When he did, it hadn’t changed: same fields, same long grass. Same buzz of cars in the distance. Light flashed from windscreens where the road dipped. He sat down, gazed back at where the boathouse once stood. There is more than one kind of ghost, he decided. Not that ghosts exist, he noted, in case Zoe ever acquired a transcript of his thoughts, but still: There’s more than just one kind of thing we might describe as a ghost. Places, too, can have spirits. Maybe this place still missed its boathouse. A shiver ran down his spine then; a shiver the punt felt too. It wobbled once more on the water.
Joe stood, unfixed the pole from the riverbed, and pushed off from the bank.
Heading back was easier than heading out. Partly, this was because he was now going with the flow, but mostly it was down to increased competence. Any form of transport in which the human was in control—that is, any which didn’t involve animals—and a learning curve was there for the taking, any competent person—hard to avoid the word “male” here, but Joe managed it—could pick up the basics of something like punting within a very short space of time. One little trip upriver was all it took. Heading to the boathouse that was no longer there, he’d been an amateur. Poling back to the one he’d hired the punt from: You couldn’t say expert. But experienced, yes. An experienced puntsman. This time, he knew what he was doing.
* * * *
Zoe said, “So you fell in.”
“There was some kind of surge.”
“A tsunami.”
“You can mock, but there’s a special wave, there’s a word for it—what do they call it? The Cherwell Bore? I think that’s what I encountered.”
“They’ll probably cover it on Newsnight. What were you doing on a punt anyway?”
“Nothing,” said Joe bravely.
The fifteen-minute walk back from the boathouse had taken thirty. He’d not have thought the human form, with just the usual number of clothes on its back, could absorb so much water—water he’d shed like a colander all the way. Hey, mister? You’re melting. Joe, not normally one to shun an opening gambit, had tried to pretend he hadn’t heard. But it was difficult maintaining a lofty dignity with your underwear growing tighter at every step.
At least Zoe wasn’t around, he remembered thinking as he’d reached the office at last. At least he had that to be thankful for, he congratulated himself as he dripped up the stairs. But of course there she’d been, at her computer, watching as he opened the door.
“Nothing?” she repeated.
“Just punting.”
“Punting’s almost a sport.”
“So?”
“An athletic activity.”
“So?”
“So when they wanted you for the Rose and Crown darts team, Joe, you turned up with a doctor’s note. You don’t do sports. What the hell were you doing on a punt?”
“Oh,” Joe said, as if remembering. “I was on a case.”
“Why does that not surprise me?”
“You’re an astute and—”
“Don’t.”
“Just telling it like it is.” The best they’d managed for a towel on the premises was hand-sized and not especially clean, but Zoe had found an old Sticky Fingers T-shirt in a drawer, which Joe now wore. His trousers were draped over the windowsill in the faint hope this might dry them out a little. Bare-legged, he was perched on a wooden stool. He’d felt more ridiculous, but not since turning ten. “But it’s an interesting business, Zoe. When I tell you about it, you’ll be . . . interested.”
“The only interesting thing so far is the way you’re avoiding telling me anything.”
“Our new client. He has a situation.”
“Leaving ‘our’ aside for the moment, and without bothering just yet to tell me about the client, what’s ‘situation’ mean?”
“He’s, ah . . . haunted.”
“Haunted?”
“But not literally.”
“Well, I’m glad not literally, Joe. Literally would mean he’s mad and you’re bonkers. Who’s he not being haunted by, then? Literally?”
“One of his murder victims.”
Zoe opened her mouth, then closed it again. Looked as if she regretted being there. Then said, “Joe? We really need to talk.”
* * * *
“‘A shot rang out?’” Zoe asked.
“He’s a writer.”
“You think? ‘A certain smile played across his lips’?”
“He’s not on the syllabus,” Joe conceded.
“I doubt he could spell ‘syllabus.’ And as for the sex scene . . . “
Joe’s noncommittal look was the big giveaway.
“You haven’t actually read this, have you?”
“He provided the essential details.”
N. R. Holkham’s Death at the Boathouse sat on Zoe’s knees, a shadowy figure in a punt gracing its front cover. It had taken her roughly half an hour to get through the 250-page paperback—Joe suspected she hadn’t read every word—and as soon as she’d reached the end, she’d flipped back to the crucial passage where Harry Cudlipp had his drop-dead moment. “Hell, Joe. He finds out you haven’t bothered to read it, he’ll probably come round and commit murder in real life.”
Joe said, “I’ve been busy. Is it any good?”
“Those were the best bits. A shot rang out. A certain smile played across his lips.” Zoe slapped the book on the desk. “And this is it? He wants you to investigate a murder that happened in one of his own books? It didn’t occur to you to suggest that he might be better off having his head examined?”
“Well, I—”
“But oh no, that’s not your way, is it? The brilliant detective, Joe Silvermann. No problem too small, no client too flaky. He is paying for this, isn’t he?”
“Of course,” said Joe, with some dignity.
“Well, that’s a start. So what’s your plan?”
“My plan,” Joe said carefully. Then he nodded. “It’s, ah—not fully formulated yet.”
“But it involves ridding Mr. Reeve-Holkham of his troublesome ghost.”
“That would be the ideal outcome.”
She shook her head. “Are you aware how crazy this is? Your client writes a book sixteen years ago. Some character—and I’m being generous here, because Holkham’s a better typist than he is a writer—some ‘character’ gets shot dead three chapters in. A murder that’s solved by chapter twelve. And now Holkham’s waking up nights thinking he’s made some dreadful mistake? Damn it all, Joe, if he’s sorry he killed the guy, why not just bring him back to life? Write another book. Put Harry in it.”
“That would be cheating.”
“He could set it earlier in time.”
“Unworthy gimmick,” Joe sniffed. “Besides, you’re missing the point. Mr. Reeve-Holkham doesn’t care about Harry Cudlipp. He’s just worried that when he described Harry’s murder, he made a mistake of some sort. That what he wrote couldn’t actually happen. And that bothers him because he takes great pride in his research. Apart from anything else, when you make mistakes, readers send letters pointing it out. Or pencil snide comments in library copies.”
“Readers actually do that?”
“Apparently.”
“What a bunch of losers. And has he had many letters?”
“He didn’t mention receiving any, no.”
“I guess that makes him a bigger loser. What’s that buzzing noise? Is that you?”
“Not me, Zoe. I don’t buzz.”
She picked up last week’s Oxford Times, which was topmost of the pile of newspapers waiting to go for recycling, and rolled it into a tube. Then she swatted the bluebottle and flicked its mangled corpse into the wastepaper basket.
“One problem solved,” she said. “When did this trauma start?”
“A week or so ago,” Joe said.
“And this non-ghost, this not-quite-literal haunting, it mostly happens when Holkham’s looking into mirrors.”
“Reflections set it off, is what he tells me.”
Zoe shook her head. “People lose cats every day of the week. But do they come to you for help? No, you have to end up with the lunatic fringe. No client too flaky.” She was repeating herself. Never a good sign. “Did your trip upriver help?”
“It’s always useful to view a crime scene,” Joe said.
“I’ll take it that’s a no.”
“It was a thought, that’s all.”
“I’d not dignify it quite that much. When are you seeing your client again?”
Your, Joe noted. Not our. Your. “Tomorrow morning.”
“Well,” Zoe said. “Good luck with that.”
She stood, still holding the rolled-up newspaper.
“You might want to mop the stairs dry before then.”
And off she went.
* * * *
The tic at Nigel Reeve-Holkham’s eyebrow had got no better. Joe found it difficult not to address his opening remarks to it. “Please,” he said. “Please—take the weight off. Have a seat.”
“Thank you, Jack.”
“It’s Joe.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“An easy mistake to make.”
Both men sat, and it was a toss-up which looked worse for wear. Joe himself had been awake much of the night. Partly this was due to worrying that he might have contracted something unpleasant in the Cherwell. Rats swam in it, and even the less obviously disgusting river-dwellers such as ducks did not lead hygienic lives. There was a medical dictionary somewhere, and Joe would have had an anxious browse through it over breakfast if he’d felt like breakfast, and if Zoe hadn’t hidden the book because reading it affected his blood pressure. But the other worry, of course, was the client.
“If I believed in ghosts,” Nigel Reeve-Holkham had said, “I’d not have gone in for this particular line. I’d have written horror stories.”
And that was the problem in a nutshell. How did you get rid of a ghost when the haunted didn’t believe in them? The attitude rendered traditional cures useless. Exorcism demanded the cooperation of all involved. Even the ghost.
“I take it the problem’s no better,” he said.
Though the tic had already answered that one.
The client said, “I cut myself shaving again.” He tilted his chin so Joe could see a nasty-looking nick from an old-fashioned cut-throat razor. Something larger than a duck walked across Joe’s grave. “It’s not that he looms up behind me or anything. He’s not a physical presence. Nor even a spiritual one. He’s just . . . there. The memory of him is there. And I don’t understand why.”
“I went to the boathouse yesterday. To where it used to be, I mean,” Joe said.
“And what did you think?”
“Well, it occurred to me that it wasn’t such an easy thing to do, to shoot a man from a punt. Maybe this is the mistake, in a nutshell. That you chose a murder method that was not so simply done. That wasn’t entirely . . . “
He trailed away, the effort of avoiding the word “credible” getting too much for him.
“The killer,” Reeve-Holkham said, “had SAS training.”
“Of course,” said Joe. “I hadn’t forgotten that.”
This was true. He hadn’t forgotten because he’d never known it.
“One of the world’s finest marksmen.”
“So a shot from a punt . . . “
“Would have been child’s play,” Reeve-Holkham confirmed. “And besides. If that were the trouble, why would it wait sixteen years to disturb my sleep? I publish a book a year. I’ve lost count of the number of murder victims, and not one has come back to haunt me except Harry. Not one. No, the solution lies in the more recent past.”
The pair fell silent. The problem with this problem, Joe thought, was that it fell outside the realm of clues and answers. Nigel Reeve-Holkham was a writer. His troubles would be best addressed by medication.
Downstairs, the door opened. He recognised Zoe’s footsteps.
“I perhaps should warn you,” he said, “that my partner—”
But it was too late. Zoe had arrived.
“You’d be the writer,” she said.
“Well,” Reeve-Holkham demurred modestly. “I’m a writer, certainly. Only my agent thinks I’m the—”
“That’s what I meant.”
Zoe was wearing jeans, a red top, her black leather jacket. She was reaching into her jacket pocket now, pulling out a folded-up page from a newspaper. “Do you read the local press, Mr. Reeve-Holkham?”
“Nigel. Please.”
“Do you read the local press, Nigel?”
“Not usually.”
“How about last week? Did you see the Oxford Times?”
“Well, yes. Yes I did, as a matter of fact.”
“New book out?”
“I thought it might be carrying a review,” he admitted.
“But it didn’t.”
“It’s hard to get your books noticed these days, if you’re not a celebrity,” he said. “But I’d have thought the local press would at least—”
“That must be a drag. So you didn’t actually read the paper? After finding out there wasn’t a review of your latest in it?”
“Well, I probably leafed through it. But I didn’t read every word, no.”
Joe, listening to this exchange, began to nod. He had no idea what Zoe was about, but didn’t want to feel left out.
Zoe unfolded the page, which came, Joe saw, from last week’s Oxford Times. The Times had a supplement: arts and culture; local events; and if N. R. Holkham’s latest had been awarded a review, this was where it would have appeared. He’d have thumbed through it to the books section, then put it aside, disgruntled. Zoe spread the page on the desk. It hadn’t been torn cleanly, and a triangular inch was missing from one edge, but there was no mistaking what the article was about. The upper half of the page was a photo of a boathouse.
“There are plans to build another one on the same site,” Zoe said. “Hence the article.”
Nigel Reeve-Holkham picked the page up and studied it carefully. He wasn’t reading the article, just looking at the picture.
Joe was nodding more vigorously now. This, he knew, was a clue. He had been mildly off-target a short while ago when he’d toyed with the idea that this was not a case in which there could be clues; on the other hand, he’d been bang-on yesterday, visiting the scene of the crime. That was exactly the approach to be taken: the business-as-normal approach. Nigel Reeve-Holkham’s problem, he now realised, fell precisely within the domain of the detective. Its exact location, Zoe was about to reveal.
But the client didn’t need further explication. Already he was shaking his head. “I’m an idiot,” he said. “Something as simple as that? I’m an idiot. I’m surprised I didn’t get letters.”
He sat back in his chair, allowing Joe a clearer look at the photograph.
Which revealed little. There wasn’t a lot of variation when it came to boathouses. They all tend to have big doors at ground level, behind which lurks a garagey space full of long canoes and racks of oars, and a balcony upstairs. The glass doors on this particular balcony, Joe supposed, would lead to a bar, but the photo didn’t penetrate that far.
What could be seen quite clearly was the hanging basket to the left of the door. The basket Harry Cudlipp had stubbed his cigarette in as he stepped outside.
Nothing that amounted to a clue, as far as Joe was concerned.
Something in his face must have betrayed this, because Nigel Reeve-Holkham said, “You don’t see?”
Joe said, “So, this SAS-trained marksman—”
“He’s pulling your leg, Nigel,” Zoe said. “Joe read your book as carefully as I did. We all know this photo makes it look like you got things wrong.”
Nigel Reeve-Holkham said miserably, “Harry steps through the balcony doors, and stubs his cigarette out in the hanging basket. On his left.”
“On his left,” Zoe repeated.
“Then he’s shot dead.”
“It burned down before you wrote the book, didn’t it?”
“That’s what gave me the idea to use it as a setting,” Reeve-Holkham said. “I put the fire in the final chapter. I’d never even been inside, but I’d punted past a time or two. I could have sworn I had a perfect mental image of it. But I must have got it twisted. The hanging basket wasn’t on Harry’s left. It was on his right.”
“That’s it?” said Joe. “That’s the mistake?”
Nigel Reeve-Holkham stared at him. “Isn’t that enough? I research my books thoroughly. Down to the finest detail. I’m not the kind of writer who makes elementary mistakes, Jack.”
“Joe.”
“That’s what I said.” He picked the page up, studied it closely, then put it down again. “I must have seen this last week. I didn’t pay it any attention. But it took root in my subconscious.”
Zoe said, “And that’s why reflections keep reminding you of Harry. It’s the left/right switch. When you look in the mirror, your reflection’s right is your left. A dormant part of your brain’s picking up on this and nagging you with it. You just didn’t know why, that’s all.”
“Or didn’t know you knew,” Joe said brightly.
It felt like the right moment to make a contribution. It was, after all, his case.
“Well,” Reeve-Holkham said after a while. “At least that explains why Harry Cudlipp’s been on my mind. So thank you for that. But it doesn’t really help, does it?”
But Joe had seen films with psychiatrist heroes. “I think you’ll find,” he said, “that now you know why you’ve been bothered, it’ll stop bothering you.”
“No,” Reeve-Holkham said. “Now I know for sure I made a mistake, I think I’ll find it’ll bother me even more.”
“Except you didn’t make a mistake,” Zoe said.
Joe wished he’d said that.
Reeve-Holkham’s finger jabbed the photograph. “Nice thought. But here’s the picture. And there’s the book. It’s black and white. The hanging basket is on the left of the door. I made a mistake. I misdescribed the scene.”
“No, you got it right,” Zoe said. She took the page and held it in front of her so the two men could see the picture. “It’s the photo that’s wrong. It’s been flipped.”
As far as Joe could see, the hanging basket hadn’t changed position. But enlightenment was beginning to spread across the client’s face.
“Flipped,” he said.
“Flipped?” Joe said.
“Left and right have been transposed,” Zoe said. “It’s a common enough practice in newspapers. Sometimes for artistic reasons. And quite often by mistake. With this one, I don’t suppose anyone noticed, or cared. But it’s been flipped. It shows everything in reverse. The hanging basket isn’t to the left of the door at all. It’s to the right.”
“So,” Joe said, light dawning, “it would have been to Harry’s left as he stepped outside.”
“Exactly as you described in your book,” Zoe said.
And at that moment, the tic in Nigel Reeve-Holkham’s eyebrow ceased.
A little later, Joe sat musing over the photograph.
“It’s lucky you happened to notice this,” he said to Zoe.
Zoe was in the reception room, bent over her computer, but the door was open.
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” she said. “It was obvious something recent triggered this ‘haunting.’ And odds on it was local, because the book was set in Oxford. So the recent edition of the local paper’s the first place to look for clues, wouldn’t you say?”
“It was the very next thing on my list,” Joe agreed. “Except you’d walked away with it.” He fingered the triangular inch that was missing from one edge of the photo. “There’s a bit torn off here.”
“I was in a hurry.”
“Not like you to be careless.”
“I tend to be busier than you, Joe. Doing the work that keeps us afloat.”
This would have been grossly unfair were it not manifestly true.
He examined the rip more closely. It had been quite neatly torn, in fact. Almost deliberately.
“How easy is it to tell if a photo’s been flipped?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Zoe?”
“I’m busy.”
“But how easy is it to tell?”
He waited.
“Depends,” she said at last.
“On what?”
“Well,” she said. “If there’s any writing in the photo. That would be a giveaway.”
“You mean, if there’d been a sign in this missing bit, for instance, that read, say, Mind the Step—that would have come out backwards, would it?”
“Precisely.”
“If the photo had been flipped.”
“Are you trying to make a point, Joe?”
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
He slipped the page into his desk drawer. It wouldn’t be hard, he supposed, to track down another copy of last week’s Times; take a look at the intact photo. But really, what use would that be? Problems came in different sizes. Solutions, likewise.
At the window, another bluebottle began to buzz.
“Don’t worry, Zoe,” Joe said, getting up. “I’ll take care of this.”