Oh my God there's more. When will it end? Where is it all going? Does anyone know what I've done with the car keys? These questions and more I put to you, dear reader, although really it's only the car key one I'm bothered about.
In the cold dark of the corridor outside the bathroom Alistair found his plan to visit the undertaker obstructed by two important points of fact: first, the man whose funeral he was in Whorlton for was not dead and, second, he did not know which undertaker it was that would be burying the not dead man or where that undertaker was. He paused in the damp breath of the hotel and thought, hard. He had, he reasoned, been called to Whorlton for a funeral; he would, then, go to a funeral, whoever’s – it didn’t matter – and then he would go back to his furniture free, Lauraless cell in Crakethorne to await the arrival of Detective Inspector Spectre.
He drifted along the corridor, abandoned his bathtime paraphernalia in his room and drifted down the stairs into the reception lobby, still damp from the bath and the hotel generally. There in the lobby his nebulous, sandy-founded plan foundered. There was a policeman there, resplendent in silvered uniform and bullet-helmet, talking in a serious voice to Stillings and taking notes in a little flip-back notebook. Also there, crumpled drunkenly on a collapsed sofa, was an unfamiliar man with a very very neat moustache and shoes that seemed to absorb all the light in the room, multiply it somehow within themselves and fire it out again with the intensity of prison-camp spotlamps. They were like little black leather suns. Standing by the plate glass window by the door was another unfamiliar figure, a woman, who wore her black-grey hair in a tangled bun and a long houndstooth coat. She smoked a cigarette and looked out at a ship that was gambolling in an out of control way in the purple rags of the bay.
Then, just as Alistair had taken in this little tableau, which he immediately knew would scupper his plan, Coggs the builder emerged from the dining-room and pinioned him with a difficult to understand stare. Coggs, to whom Alistair owed money and who he had thought safely out of the way in Crakethorne, advanced upon Alistair’s position with purpose and discipline, resolve and confidence like a panzer-division in a sports jacket. Alistair gave a small cry and took one step back up the stairs. The policeman looked over and Alistair fell silent. Coggs would not grind his bones to make his bread with a policeman watching, surely.
“I am Mr Smith,” said Coggs, seizing Alistair’s hand and crushing it whilst looming over him menacingly, despite the fact that Alistair was stood on the bottom step of the staircase.
“Mr Carolgees,” said Alistair. “Bob, if you like.”
Coggs’ huge face twitched to convey his confusion. It was a big face. Unreal: like a billboard or bit of Mount Rushmore gone walkabout.
“Holiday?” asked Alistair, his voice small and frightened.
“Business,” said Coggs. When he said it he opened his eyes wide as though to emphasise the fact that the business he referred to was the deprivation of one of Alistair’s dimensions. Depth or height or width, he hadn’t decided. Flattening of some order was definitely on the cards, though.
“And where did you hear of this fine hotel?” asked Alistair. He wanted to know who had betrayed him – offhand, he couldn’t remember telling anyone where he was going. Coggs still had hold of his hand.
“Ursula,” said Coggs. “She’s here with me.”
Alistair didn’t know an Ursula, and said so.
“You do,” said Coggs, the grimace that passed for a smile in the family Coggs creasing his features.
Alistair made a show of thinking, but still didn’t know any Ursulas. The man with the neat moustache and the shiny shoes appeared from the lee side of Coggs and caught hold of Coggs’ and Alistair’s arms. He looked a lot, thought Alistair, like Hercule Poirot would look if deprived of sleep for a few days.
“I,” said the limpet-like shiny-shoed man, throwing Alistair into a tailspin of confusion, “am Hercule Poirot. Bonsoir to you both.”
“But it’s the morning,” said Alistair.
“Well bon fucking jour, then,” replied Poirot, rolling his eyes.
“Are you French?” asked Coggs, horrified to be this close to a garlicky frog-botherer.
“Belgian,” said Poirot.
Alistair was going to respond by introducing himself as Bob Carolgees (after all, he reasoned, this little man wasn’t Hercule Poirot), and Coggs’ facial contortions suggested he was going to ask very nicely if Hercule Poirot wouldn’t mind buggering off if he did want to be thrown through a window (he set Belgians below even the French because of a disappointing childhood holiday in Bruges), but neither man was given the chance to speak. Hercule Poirot fixed Coggs with a glassy stare and said: “You, sir, are Lobby Ludd, and…”
“No I’m not,” insisted Coggs, instantly.
Alistair thought for a moment that Lobby Ludd sounded familiar from somewhere.
“You, sir,” repeated Hercule Poirot, “are Lobby Ludd, and I claim the…”
“I am not Lobby Ludd,” said Coggs. He was getting annoyed, annoyed enough to release Alistair’s arm and turn to face Poirot with his spade-like hands on his hips. This was generally, for Coggs, a preamble to throwing someone through a window, so Alistair moved around the distracted Coggs and made off across the lobby in the direction of the dining room. Unfortunately he was intercepted by Stillings and the policeman.
“This, Mr Carolgees,” oiled Stillings, “is Constable Landscape. He’d like a word with you.”
Constable Landscape allowed himself a small cough of mirth as he noted Alistair’s false name. “Spit the Dog with you, sir?” he asked.
“No,” said Alistair, “shouldn’t you be in the National Gallery?”
Constable Landscape was not young. He had not the meagre intelligence required to rise to through the bubbling glop of the police force. He was one of those that float at the bottom, and as such he had not the intelligence to apprehend Alistair’s meaning. He knew, like a dog who’s being discussed, that he’d been ridiculed, though, and immediately became as businesslike as a policeman can be.
“A man died here last night,” he said, consulting his notebook for no particular reason, “did you see or hear anything unusual?”
“Unusual?” asked Alistair. “I don’t know what’s usual here – I only arrived last night.”
Constable Landscape was going, it looked like, to take exception to Alistair’s inadvertent facetiousness, but at that moment Hercule Poirot flew through the narrow space that separated them and crashed against a rack of leaflets. Coggs was the Cape Canaveral of this brief flight, and Constable Landscape was swiftly there and uttering Sweeny-style You’re Nicked Sunshine clichés. Hercule Poirot picked himself up and disappeared into the dining room, apparently none the worse for his brief flight. Stillings retreated behind the rampart of his desk and the smoking woman followed Poirot into the dining room. Constable Landscape led Coggs outside.
The woman had headed to the table where a selection of sawdust-cereals and sad-looking pastries were laid out for the guests’ breakfast grazing pleasure. She piled up a plate with the pastries, beat some coffee out of the cylinder at the end of the table and went off to sit down with her spoils. Alistair worked his magic with a teabag and crossed to the table in the bay window that the woman had chosen. She was writing in a hardback notebook but she stopped and flipped it shut when Alistair approached.
“Mind if I sit here?” asked Alistair. “Bob Carolgees – not that one.”
The woman looked at the rest of the dining-room, empty except for Poirot, who was asleep in an armchair at the other end of the room, and said that she didn’t care what he did. She looked like she meant it. She was perhaps forty, forty-five, and looked as though she’d led a life defusing new types of land-mine or testing experimental hyper-sonic intercontinental jet-bombers: lined, her face was, and she looked like she needed to catch up on a few weeks’ sleep.
“Are you Ursula?” asked Alistair, confident that she was.
“No,” she said, “Ursula who?”
Alistair was taken by surprise and made it clear by emitting a little syllable and jerking his head like a turkey.
“You look like a turkey,” said Not Ursula. “Who’s this Ursula? I haven’t seen any Ursula. Why would I have? I haven’t seen anyone. I just got here.” She seemed on edge.
“Ursula,” said Alistair, “is someone who Coggs knows.”
“Coggs?” said Not Ursula. “Don’t you mean ‘someone who cogs know’? But then why would a cog know anyone? What are you talking about? Do you work here? Where’s my wine?”
Alistair felt he was rapidly getting out of his depth.
Constable Landscape came in and took Poirot out with him. On his way out he said: “And don’t you go anywhere, I want a word with you.” Outside there were two police cars visible, one contained Coggs and the other, now, contained Poirot. In the bay the ship still churned; people could be seen running up and down her decks. An overwhelming sense of something being wrong somewhere ran up Alistair’s leg and caused his testicle to ache.
“That man,” said Alistair, gesticulating with his teacup at Poirot, “says he’s Hercule Poirot, but he can’t be, and he says that other man, the one who threw him across the lobby, is Lobby Ludd, which he isn’t because I know he’s called Coggs even though he just told me he was here as Smith.”
Not Ursula nodded sagely. “I’m Nancy Gold,” she said, and extended a collection of bones wrapped in grease-paper for Alistair to delicately shake. Her red nails emphasised the pallor of the rest of her skin and made her veins look black beneath it. Alistair thought of Frankenstein’s monster.
They both stared out of the window for a time, listening to Coggs shouting in the police car and the crash of the waves at the foot of the cliff. It looked windy out, cold. Little wisps of smoke were torn from the funnel of the ship. The crewmen were still running up and down. A light flashed from the bridge.
“Is Nancy Gold a pseudonym?” Alistair asked, suddenly.
She nodded: “For wine reviews.” She seemed abruptly calmer.
“And why does he call himself Poirot?”
She smiled and looked from the ship to Alistair and back to the ship. “They do murder weekends here, he’s the resident Poirot. Didn’t you see his photograph in the leaflet?”
Alistair asked what leaflet.
She rummaged in her bag and produced a creased pamphlet that bore a picture of the Hotel Atlantis (taken, judging by the automotive cavalcade captured creeping along Marine Drive, in about 1960 and with ‘Hotel Atlantis’ written across the top in Bauhaus-type script), a picture of Lionel Stillings (gurning, recent – poster for Chuckle Brothers inadvertently caught behind his head) and a photograph of, Alistair realised after a moment’s giddy thought, the interior of the very dining room that they were now seated in, but full of people and freshly decorated (also about 1960 – the little boys wore blazers and their fathers’ wore shirt and tie and their mothers wore huge floral-print summer dresses and they all looked like they’d just had a jolly good dose of Prozac). On the back page was a list of events, one of which was the Murder weekend, with ‘Resident Poirot’ proudly emblazoned above the absurdly optimistic price-list.
Alistair handed it back and she secreted it deep within the confines of the bag. Her hand remerged with a cigarette and, once she’d got it lit in the damp air, she asked: “so, who is this Ursula, then?”
“I don’t know. Who’s Lobby Ludd, who’s Nancy Gold and who’s Alistair Caine? Who’s anybody?” Alistair drank the rest of his tea and looked at the woman who said she was Nancy Gold. “What are you doing here,” he asked, “writing wine reviews? I’m going for more tea, not going anywhere, are you?”
She shook her head and looked out of the window while Alistair fetched more tea.
“That ship’s aground out there,” she said when he returned.
Alistair looked at the ship. She looked much as she had before. The men still ran up and down the deck and smoke still scudded from her funnel. He found it difficult to work up any interest in the ship. Stillings came in and looked out at her intently for a few moments and then went away again. Alistair drank some tea but it was too hot.
“So, you’re Alistair Caine,” she said.
Alistair looked at her, startled. The police cars were still outside (the policemen were watching the ship, ignoring their captives), and Alistair was suddenly frightened that this woman might tell them who he really was.
“Or did you just pick that name out of the air?” she suggested.
“Picked it out of the air,” sighed Alistair.
“Funny how things stick,” she said, pausing to draw on her cigarette, “names we hear on the news.”
“Been on the news, that name, has it?” asked Alistair, trying to look disinterestedly out of the window.
The woman hummed a confirmation and smirked. “Don’t worry,” she said, immediately causing Alistair to worry, “I’m not interested in you.”
Alistair didn’t know what to make of that.
“Tell me about Coggs,” she said.
“Coggs?” repeated Alistair, wondering what she could possibly want with him. “He’s a nasty piece of work, that’s all you need to know. I owe him some money and he’s followed me here somehow. This Ursula woman told him where I was but I didn’t tell anyone where I was going and I don’t know any Ursula. Why do you ask about Coggs?”
Nancy ignored his question and responded with another: “Don’t you think it’s odd that there’s nobody but us staying in this hotel?”
Alistair thought for a moment. “Not really,” he said after a moment’s blankness, “it’s a crap hotel and it’s January. Who’d be here in January if they didn’t have to be?”
Nancy seemed unperturbed by this unassailable logic. “It’s a front,” she said, leaning forward and whispering, “it’s a front for smugglers and thieves.”
“Smugglers and thieves?” Alistair was unconvinced.
“Yes,” she nodded emphatically. “International ones. I’ve tracked then from Marseilles.”
“Marseilles?” said Alistair.
“It’s in France,” she clarified.
Alistair looked from the depths of his teacup, where he had been concentrating his gaze and thinking about a dream he’d had in which a crocodile had appeared in a cup of tea, to Nancy’s face. He saw that her ringed eyes were ablaze with some sort of maniacal fire and he suddenly wished that he hadn’t sat down with her. He felt the need to change the subject and, since it was the first thing that entered his tired brain, he asked her if she knew where the undertakers were in the town.
She darted him a look that suggested that what he’d said had just confirmed some long-standing suspicion he’d had of him. “Undertakers!” she exclaimed. “There’s only one! Gregory Andrews’, and it’s just round the corner!” she patted her papery paws on the edge of the table and set the crockery clinking. “Let me come with you,” she whispered, narrowing her eyes with some enigmatic meaning.
Alistair couldn’t imagine why she’d want to come, but since Andrews was the one who’d been at the bar with Stillings the previous night he felt that some company might do him some good. Nancy tapped the side of her nose in a conspiratorial way when he said as much and they rose to leave, but just as they reached the door to the lobby they found their way barred by Constable Landscape.
“Ho!” he said, in best Stilton Cheesewright fashion.
There were few responses appropriate to that, thought Alistair, and so he said nothing. Nancy, though, felt that there was a need for a response and said: “Mr Carolgees and I are going to the undertaker’s.”
“Ho!” repeated Landscape, “and after I said I wanted a word with you, too.”
“Yes, I’d forgotten about that.”
“Well I hadn’t,” said Landscape, proudly opening his notebook to display ‘interview ginger man’ scrawled in red biro.
Alistair bridled at the word ginger. It was auburn. Auburn, not ginger.
“If you’d care to come this way sir,” said Landscape, indicating the dining-room, which they were already in. There was a moment of hesitation in which all three of them waited for one of the others to move, and then they all tried to fit through a gap in the tables that really only one of them could have fitted through at once. Some cutlery clattered to the carpet and Landscape scowled as he picked it up.
“There,” he said, pointing at a table in the window, “sit.”
Alistair and Nancy sat at one side of the table and Landscape sat at the other.
“I might as well interview you both at the same time,” said Landscape, jabbing his temple with the end of his biro and leaving a matrix of little red dots there. He snapped his notebook shut decisively looked at them both and said: “Last night, I assume you are not aware, a man was killed in this hotel.” He gestured around him at the hotel to bring home his point.
“Killed?” repeated Alistair. He was reminded of the mysterious telephone call that had brought him to Whorlton – killed, that word filled with deliberation not accident, had been used then, too.
“Killed,” repeated Landscape, making a little note of something or other and then leaving a redundant pause.
“Who?” Nancy asked. She had got out a little notebook of her own; a fact which was noted by Landscape in his own notebook, whose noting of the noting was also noted by Nancy.
Once the vicious circle of note-taking had worn itself out, Landscape elaborated. “A certain Professor Plum was killed in the library, he was found there only…” he looked at his watch, shook it, held it to his ear and tutted “…about fifty minutes ago.”
“Who?” Alistair repeated, incredulous. “Professor Plum? In the library? With the lead pipe, I suppose?”
“Ho!” said Landscape, and noted this joke vigorously.
“Is this Cluedo?” demanded Alistair, “What’s going on here? You do realise I’m not here on one of your stupid murder weekends, don’t you?”
“Murder weekends, sir?” Landscape was foggy eyed. He was losing any sense of certainty of what was going on that he had had.
“Yes,” said Alistair, “I’m here for a funeral – don’t you get a list of people who are playing?”
Landscape took charge. “Now, sir, I’m not very certain what it is that you’re talking about. I understand that you need to visit the undertaker and that it quite alright by me, but I really must take a statement from you first. As I have said, a man was killed here. There’s no suspicion of foul-play at this stage but I must have a statement from you, nevertheless. Now, did you or did you not notice anything at all out of the ordinary during last night?”
“No,” said Alistair.
“No,” said Nancy.
“Right,” said Landscape. “If we need anything else we’ll be in touch. I’ve got your addresses from the hotel register. You’re a lucky man, Mr Carolgees, Crakethorne is a nice town. I’ll bid you good day then.” He rose, screwed his helmet onto his head and made for the door.
Alistair was in a daze, but Nancy was not. “Constable,” she called, “what did the professor die of?”
Landscape paused with his hand on the door. “Looks as though he fell and banged his head.”
Nancy allowed herself a small noise of sympathetic horror and then asked: “was he an old man?”
“Oh no, miss,” said Landscape, coming a little way back into the room, “not at all. Young, I’d say, for a professor – looked a little like you sir, he did.” The policeman indicated Alistair with the end of his biro and nodded, a regretful nasty-business-this expression on his face, and then went out. A moment later the police cars droned away. In the bay the ship was still, though the men on her deck still ran.
“What’s up?” asked Nancy.
He looked to her, frightened, and said: “I didn’t write Crakethorne in the hotel register, I wrote that I’d come from Puerto Oro, Tierra Del Mar.”
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