Susan started at the sudden knock at the front door, knocking over her freshly-made cup of coffee in the process. It had been six weeks since the death of her rich, eccentric and despicable uncle Bartholomew, whom everybody had hated because he was so obnoxious. In the intervening time, she had been in mourning – as anyone would be – although she had harboured a secret sigh of relief which she didn’t even like to admit to herself: she would never, ever, have wished anyone dead, but at the same time, there was nobody she would have wished deader than he. Or him. It was the ninth coffee of the morning and her thoughts were a little fractured.
The door knocked again, as a result of someone standing the other side of it and hitting it with something hard, perhaps their knuckles or the spine of a phone book or even a brick. Her shoulders sagged: it was probably somebody trying to get her to change her gas supply or sign up to a charity or something. Or maybe.
Bang, bang, bang.
She got up, walked down the hallway to the door, and was just about to open it when the thought crossed her mind to look through the small peephole – she’d once been told it was called a “whoozit” – her brother Paul had helped her to install the previous year. She peered through it, and saw it was Paul.
“What do you want?” she said, not opening the door.
“Let me in,” his voice came back. “It’s bloody raining out here.”
She opened the door. Paul, speckled with fine droplets and looking like a duck in an overcoat, crossed the threshhold and stamped his muddy boots on the doormat. “Bollocks,” he huffed. “My car’s broken, I had to walk.”
He lived the other side of town – at least a ten-minute car journey, so it must have taken him forty minutes or so to walk it. “Can I get you some tea?” Susan offered. “What’s wrong with the car?”
“Wouldn’t start,” Paul shrugged. “But I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t had something I needed to see you about. I’d love a cup of tea, thanks. I can’t remember if you have the internet here?”
Of course he could remember: he’d helped her to install it only the previous summer. “Yeah, I do,” she replied, stretching to the top shelf in the cupboard to reach the crappiest, brownest mug she could find. It was a family tradition that they treated each other like shit, in the nicest possible way; ever since they had been barely old enough to laugh at words like poo and willy they had delighted in stitching each other up in any way that could think of. It was possibly due to the fact they were so close in age, or then again maybe it was because their father, who had died tragically in a human cannonball accident, had been a circus clown into his 70s and never seemed to hurt himself when he took a tumble. She kept a mug she hardly ever washed on the top shelf specifically for when he came round to visit, which had caused problems when her last boyfriend had been almost seven feet tall and almost ran away because he’d thought she was so unclean. Then again, he had turned out to be a bit of a freaky kind of guy, in his way. The 18-inch height gap between them hadn’t helped either.
“I read something about Bartholomew in the paper today,” Paul said abruptly. “I thought you’d be interested.”
Susan cocked her head like a perplexed basset hound. “Really?” she said. “What?”
“I wanted the full text from the internet,” Paul explained, “because I can’t remember the ins and outs. You know how bad my memory is.”
She knew, only too well: she’d helped him lose it only the previous summer, or maybe the one before, she couldn’t remember – when they’d hooked up with some friends and spent a delirious six weeks ripped to the tits on magic mushrooms, peyote and speed. Don’t do it, kids. Her own dependence on caffeine, she was sure, was probably due to the after-effects of this reckless abandon, in the same way that heroin addicts often have to climb down gently from their addiction by using morphine or ketamine or Sudafed® mixed with Nyquil™. “Can you remember the gist of it?” she wondered out loud, for his benefit so he’d be able to hear what she was thinking and say something in reply.
But he was already grubbing about on the sideboard – her flat wasn’t large, so things didn’t really have much of a place – and eventually located her battered laptop underneath a pile of books and coursework. She was, it’s probably useful to mention at this point, doing a part-time masters’ course in Victorian history. The full title of her dissertation was, at least at the moment: “The British East India Company: An Historical Fulcrum in the Development of Postmodernist Irony, 1967-1975”. She didn’t have a clue what the hell she was going to do with it when she’d finished, or even if she was going to do anything with it. But she’d been able to secure a small amount of funding for it, and it certainly beat having to bother going to work or concentrating on anything she didn’t want to do. It was quite fun being totally skint but feeling that you were doing it for a cause, rather than just because you couldn’t be arsed to get a job.
Paul had turned the laptop on. “What’s your password?” he asked.
“You know what it is,” she sighed. “You helped me to set it up a few months ago.”
“Ah yes,” he remembered, and typed in PASSWORD. While he was waiting for the internet to fire up, he reached into his pocket and drew out a stubby pencil and a sheaf of scrap papers, formed from torn-up sheets of highly-classified A4 which he’d been meant to shred, but hadn’t bothered to. He worked at the local council, and God knows what would have happened if news of the planned changes to Byelaw 139.11.(c).iv had leaked out into the local press: there would have been a public outcry, a smear campaign, leafletting, demonstrations, rationing and mass suicides. He drew a couple of stick figures and a crappy diagram on one of the sheets of paper and handed it to Susan. In return, she handed him a cup of tea with salt in it instead of sugar.
“This is something like the sketch of the people in court I saw on the website of the local paper,” he explained, sniffing his tea absently and putting it down on the sideboard, where it would never be touched again and in three weeks would be almost vomited on by a slightly wiser Susan, who would at that point vow never to leave dirty cups lying around like that again. “The guy on the left is Basil Unctuous, he’s Bartholomew’s lawyer. The one on the right is I think meant to be somebody called Filimore Thimble, but I don’t think I’ve quite got his jawline right.”
“Who’s Filimore Thimble?” Susan wanted to know, almost without meaning to want to.
“Filimore Thimble,” Paul said carefully, “is the guy that they now think killed Bartholomew.” Susan gasped. “Or he might have tried to save him, or perhaps I think he was Bartholomew’s butler and didn’t know anything about it. Anyway, this is what I need the internet for. Hang on.”
He found the local paper’s website, and after a bit of digging around located the page he was looking for, buried on the site’s equivalent of page 14 next to an advert for replacement car exhausts. “There,” he said, carefully passing the laptop to Susan so she could have a look, “I thought so.”
Susan read:
New Twist in Rich Dead Guy Case
Opocapopopoulos’s Gardener “May Have Ignored Body”
New evidence has come to light this week in the case of expired banking magnate Bartholomew Opocapopopoulos, whose deceased corpse was found six weeks ago in woodland which he happened to own. As reported in this paper at the time (“Cops Cop Copse Corpse”, 12th April), Opocapopopoulos was allegedly discovered wearing full equestrian clothing, despite having shot his last horse only days before, and with a sealed envelope in his hand addressed to Filimore Thimble, his gardener, the contents of which have never been revealed. Legal pressure on Thimble to reveal the contents of the envelope has been mounting ever since the non-revelation of the contents, if there even are any contents, was revealed. But new evidence from a man out walking his dog, who up until now was too scared to admit he was trespassing on Opocapopopoulos’s land, has now come to light. The man, who can’t be named more than once for legal reasons, told this paper that at 8.33am he had just stooped to pick up a dog muck nugget, when, upon straightening, he glimpsed through the emerging verdant canopy a boot sticking out at an angle which suggested that its occupant was lying down. On further investigation he realised that it belonged to Opocapopopoulos, and using his 30 years’ experience as a forensic pathologist he deduced that the man had been dead for at least four days, had been dragged there to where he lay, and also hadn’t been wearing those clothes when he died from what must have been a rather painful blow to the head. Dodecahedrus Grunt, 65, told us that he also noted that nobody else had raised the alarm, but that from what he knew about the routine practised at the Opocapopopoulos mansion, Opocapopopoulos’s gardener must have known about the body for days but not done anything about it. He told us all this down a crackly telephone line from the Azores to where he had escaped out of fear for his life, fearing that associates of Opocapopopoulos would be after him or whatever. This artist’s impression of the recent court hearing involving Thimble and Opocapopopoulos’s lawyer, Basil Unctuous, clearly shows the two men facing each other wearing suits, and is available as a podcast from our website.
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