This is supposed to help me to fathom the plot of The Family Plot, but now that I look at it it seems only to make things even more confusing. Comments, questions, cash donations are all welcome.
Renfield, the private detective, hurried lightly along Marine Drive, the lift provided by his umbrella and the salt-soaked onshore blast both exhilarating and frustrating him. Never had he been more convinced of the tenuousness of the boundaries between sea, earth and sky: it had crossed his mind before, looking down from some Boeing or other, that here we all were in a kind of elemental soup – that it should be easy, in theory, to move through the sky or the earth or the water just as easily as walking along the crust of the ground. The idea that we had all missed something, somehow; something that would enable some other, easier, elemental, higher life tormented him. What was he here in this shabby raincoat and this cheap suit under this shapeless brown hat for? He eyed the sea and questioned it. The sea, here, now, in Whorlton, was whipped into a frenzy by the storm and it was impossible to tell where it ended and the sky began, such was the density of the sea spray; the wind, pulling Renfield up by his umbrella, made it seem that earth and sea and air were all one, an elemental emulsion normally settled and separated, but now within an ace of being shaken-up enough to allow – what? Renfield shook his head. He hadn’t been sleeping. He would ask the old man, if his mood appeared good. He expected it wouldn’t be. He had failed. He had failed and the old man was angry.
Renfield stopped beneath the shelter of the café’s fluttering red-white striped awning, furled his umbrella, narrowed his eyes against the icy water-laden wind, and pushed the flimsy plywood leaf aside. A bell above the door rang when he stepped through the opening but nobody paid it or him any attention; the door flapped shut, dimming the roar of the infuriated sea and left him in the dank half-light, paused somehow, full of doubt. There were no lights, despite the grim day. A crumpled shadow of a man was moving a dry mop around on the linoleum at the back of the room. A grim room – the size of half a squash court, at most; panelled in painted pine, an inexpertly fitted tongue and grooved tribute to a packing crate; the ceiling the colour of toffee; the floor the colour of coffee; the plywood tables veneered unconvincingly in a marbled pattern that merged to make a symphony of dereliction with the tea rings and the congealed ketchup; the orange plastic chairs – some stackable, like those found in schools and prisons, some bolted down, like those found on ferries; a sad, small Christmas tree crouched ready to jump from the empty glass display counter at the back of the café; garishly sparkling streamers of highly inflammable plastic soared heavily above the grill and the space where customers should be. A radio cassette player with auto-reverse played Telstar continuously. It felt as though the café were hurtling through space – not on Earth at all, and as though it never had been.
There was only one customer, nursing a pot of tea with his back to the constellations of condensation that crowded the window and gazing into his cup: the old man. Renfield crossed and bid the old man a good morning. The old man’s large watery eyes scanned Renfield’s face without emotion. He looked tired, Renfield thought. The old man’s white suit was singularly out of place in the crumbling café, the red silk handkerchief that sprouted from his breast pocket doubly so; his luxuriant white beard and bald head made him resemble, ironically enough, Charles Darwin.
“Sit,” said the old man.
Renfield sat. The old man pointed a bony white finger at the mopping man and he vanished. Another gesture of the hand made a plate of biscuits and another cup of tea appear. Renfield took off his hat and coat. Despite the weather and the dampness, he was warm. Frightened, even.
The old man dipped a biscuit in his tea and nibbled the corner contemplatively. The rain assaulted the windows. A car sighed past. Renfield waited.
“Do you know why you’re here?” asked the old man, once his biscuit was gone. He gestured that Renfield could take one, if wanted. Renfield did not feel like eating. He felt trouble brewing.
Renfield suspected he knew, but said that he did not.
The old man raised his white eyebrows. “To learn!” he exclaimed, and began tracing a tea-ring on the table with his left index finger.
Renfield made a sound of acquiescence and waited. He hated these little instructive meetings.
“Now,” said the old man, “tell me all about it.”
“All about it,” repeated Renfield.
“All about it,” confirmed the old man.
Renfield reflected a moment. “I don’t suppose there’s a lot to tell. It’s fairly complicated, I grant you, but not especially unusual, all this confusion. This is why I don’t like twins.”
The old man nodded in agreement and Renfield went on: “It started, the most recent episode, at about three in the morning on New Year’s Day when Alistair Caine took a telephone call from his twin brother, Andrew. The notable thing about that is that at up until then Alistair and everyone else had presumed Andrew to have been dead for nearly four years.”
“Yes,” said the old man. “That is correct.”
Renfield wondered why it was that the old man wasn’t explaining this to him, rather than vice versa. Presumably that was what he had meant when he had said he was there to learn. He had to think it through for himself.
Renfield continued: “Whether or not this telephone call actually took place or not was unclear to Alistair, since he was in the middle of an experiment devised by him in order to test a new system of measuring time that he had come up with – International Decimal Time or some such nonsense – and he was suffering from lack of sleep. He was uncertain, in a nutshell, whether or not he’d dreamt the whole thing.”
“And yet he went to Whorlton anyway,” interjected the old man. “Why?”
Telstar reached its climax, there was a brief hissing silence, and then away it went again, pushing Renfield back in his chair like an acceleration of the whole Earth.
“Well,” Renfield said, holding up a biscuit to illustrate his point, “Alistair owed a great deal of money to a chap called Seamus Coggs, and this Seamus Coggs was beginning to make threats – it was all to do with some sort of property developing fiasco – plus, the police were beginning to take more of an interest in Alistair and the disappearance of his wife.”
“His wife?” queried the old man.
“Yes, Laura,” said Renfield, covering the table with crumbs. “It turns out that Alistair killed her – her body was found the day he went to Whorlton and Detective Inspector Spectre decided he wanted to arrest Alistair. Both Spectre and Coggs thought Alistair had left Crakethorne to get away from them, when actually he left to see who it was that was pretending to be his brother.”
“And was someone pretending to be his brother?” asked the old man.
“It’s difficult to say,” said Renfield. “I think that the telephone call did come from Andrew, otherwise it would have had to come from Stillings or Andrews.”
“Andrews as opposed to Andrew?” asked the old man. “Who’s Andrews, and who’s Stillings?”
Renfield rolled his eyes and moved his hat. “This is where it began to confuse me. At first I thought this chap Andrews was the same as Andrew, but he isn’t at all. Andrews is Gregory Andrews and he’s an undertaker who worked with Stillings, who ran the Hotel Atlantis (just up the road). The confusion was extenuated…”
“Exaggerated,” corrected the old man, automatically.
“…exaggerated, then, by the fact that this fellow Andrews carried a walking cane, and after he’d been killed I overheard a conversation about getting rid of Andrews’ cane, which would be incriminating evidence if they left it on the Trincomalee, thinking that they were on about getting rid of Andrew Caine, who was already dead.”
“The Trincomalee?” asked the old man.
“It’s a ship, which I’ll get to in a minute,” said Renfield, and paused, his thoughts momentarily scattered.
“So Andrew Caine couldn’t have made that telephone call – being dead,” said the old man, pouring more tea.
“No, he could,” said Renfield, refocused, “because he wasn’t dead then. The coroner said he died on the morning of the fourth of January some time between eight and half past nine from a heavy blow to the back of the skull. So he could have and most probably did make the call – as I said, the alternatives don’t stack up.”
“Right,” said the old man.
Renfield detected that the old man’s attention was drifting away and waited a moment.
The old man’s attention returned from the Chinese aeroplane disaster and Renfield went on: “So Alistair went to Whorlton, where there was a room booked for him at the Atlantis by someone called Marie Caine, who was Andrew’s wife.”
“Andrews’ wife or Andrew’s wife?” asked the old man, conjuring more biscuits and a fresh pot of tea from thin air.
“She was Marie Caine, Andrew Caine’s wife,” clarified Renfield, carefully. It was all beginning to confuse him again. He paused a moment to check he was correct, sipped some tea and went on: “So Alistair arrived here in Whorlton, went to the Atlantis and found the room was booked, which meant that he hadn’t dreamt the telephone call. He also found, when he checked-in to the hotel, that there was someone there under his brother’s name – in fact, why did I say it like that? – his brother was there under his own name, but he was, as I have said, already dead, although Alistair didn’t know that then. Ventnor Gilbert had just found his body when Alistair arrived and although Marie and Alistair met by chance in the lobby they could not talk because at that same moment that they saw one another this woman called Galadriel Sheer came in and caused a ruction.”
“Who is Ventnor Gilbert?” asked the old man, dropping sugar-lump after sugar-lump into his tea.
“He’s Hotel Atlantis’s resident Poirot. They do murder weekends.”
The old man nodded, then asked whether Marie and Alistair had met before.
Renfield nodded vigorously. “Yes, they knew one-another from before Andrew was thought to have died – Alistair thought she had died at the same time as Andrew. They were thought to have been in a car accident on Corsica but hadn’t been, actually. I’ll get to that in a moment.”
“And who is Galadriel Sheer?” asked the old man.
“She was sent,” said Renfield, anticipating the next question, “by a chap called Frederick Truss to try to persuade Alistair to sell a piece of land to him. She was a prostitute, in essence, and this Truss fellow is a complete fruitcake. It is Truss that owns the Atlantis, and it seems he’s had some kind of dealings with Andrew. Andrew appears to have tried to help Alistair out if his financial chasm by getting Truss to buy that piece of land from him, but Alistair didn’t know that – after all, how could he? He thought his brother was dead – and wouldn’t sell it. Truss thought Andrew was trying to pull a fast one on him but couldn’t work out why, mostly because he wasn’t, and the doubt seems to have sent him over the edge. Apparently he developed some kind of belief that he was Andy Pandy, went about the place in a striped smock and kept a donkey in his office that he called Muffin.”
“So who killed Andrew Caine?” asked the old man. He knew that asking anything else at this stage would baffle Renfield entirely.
“Gregory Andrews,” replied Renfield. “Apparently there was a mistake made by Stillings. Stillings works for Truss and Truss wanted Andrews – Gregory Andrews, not Andrew Caine – killed. It was something to do with the way Andrews was threatening to go to the police about Truss’s importing of drugs through Peasefurnace and Whorlton. I should say that before the order was given that Andrews should be killed they had tried to persuade him to see things their way by kidnapping his wife, Helen, but that hadn’t worked because they were on the verge of divorce anyway. So when Truss told Stillings to get Andrew to kill Andrews, he misheard him and ordered Andrews to kill Andrew. Andrews did it because Stillings threatened to kill Helen if he didn’t kill Andrew, and although Andrews didn’t like his wife, he didn’t want her dead. He hoped if he did this one thing for Stillings and Truss then he would be allowed to stop helping them with their drug running.”
The old man took out a notebook and wrote a few names down. He was beginning to lose the thread of who was doing what for who and why, when.
Renfield sipped some tea and ran over it all in his head, checking he hadn’t confused anything.
“What about the Trincomalee?” asked the old man, studying his list.
“The Trincomalee is out there,” said Renfield, and gestured through the window at the foaming crescent of Whorlton Bay. A ship, now broken into two pieces, lay in the centre of the bay aground on a gravelly shoal: the Trincomalee.
The old man did not look round. He knew the ship was there; he didn’t need to see it again; he knew the story. Telstar stopped and restarted. Renfield poured more tea and gathered his thoughts to go on telling the tale anyway.
This, you might be able to guess, isn't all of it. I'll put the rest on when I've done it, which may be friday or may be never. We'll just have to see, won't we?
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