Chapter Forty-One
Pluck looked up from his papers, which he’d glanced over hundreds of times anyway, never taking very much in, at the sound of indignant protest coming their way. The door to the interview room flew open, and Modeste, the sometime cleaning lady of that establishment, was shunted in by two porters, one on each side of her, holding tightly to the ends of two or more bedsheets which had been, on Pluck’s orders, by Bartoff’s request, wrapped round the poor woman and pinned so as to construct a huge sumo-style diaper.
“I beg you to sit and becalm yourself, girl,” said Pluck with his most charming smile. “This should only take a moment.”
She sat. “I don’t know nothing about the murder, sir. You can rely on that.” The shadow forged by the fireplace’s flames creeping over the diaper was of a monstrous shape, swallowing the floor.
“The evidence suggests otherwise, woman,” countered Pluck, quickly forgetting his promises of old to serve as her devoted knight. “For a forensic examination of the corpse has revealed traces of very implicating faecal matter upon the person.”
“Would you be so kind as to translate, sir?”
“Human excrement,” Enid explained. “On Mister Snede’s body.”
“‘Williams’,” Pluck corrected her. “But the name of the deceased is hardly our concern; that is a matter for the registry officers and clerks and those sort of, frankly, boring people of the world to deal with. No, our concern here is the question of how your excrement ended up on Mister Williams’ body.”
“How do you know it was mine?” Modeste wished to know; she felt her modesty, as it were, insulted.
“The body?” asked Pluck. “No, no, you misunderstand: the body was Williams’. The faeces were yours.”
“I get that,” she said. “I meant the faeces.”
Pluck sighed. “The body I refer to is that of the dead man. It can hardly have been yours, girl, now could it? If it were, then you would be a dead man, rather than a, well, vaguely living woman, and we couldn’t very well be having this conversation. Am I getting through?”
“I believe she understands that,” Enid put in. “She understands that the dead man’s body is not her own.”
Pluck rephrased his remarks so Modeste might have a chance of gleaning these difficult ideas: “You did not share a body. You and Larry Williams have always been, to the best of my knowledge, distinct individuals—in body and soul.” (Emphasis his.)
“I know that, sir. The dead man, who you call ‘Williams’ but was actually ‘Snede’, is no relation of mine.”
“I don’t just mean you weren’t kin,” Pluck, sighing and throttling his pencil in his fist, continued, “I mean that you are separate people—entirely.”
“Aye, sir. Snede was Snede, and me am me. I got it.”
“No, no, I don’t think that you do.” The inspector was growing increasingly frustrated, and took it out on various papers he scrunched up, pencils he snapped and glasses he knocked to the floor.
“She’s well aware of this,” Enid told him, her hand on his arm. “She’s never claimed to be Mister Snede. She knows she was never he.”
“Well, she’s sure acting like she thinks she is.” He couldn’t look at any of them. He kept his blazing eyes fixed on the tabletop in front of him. Then he stood, grabbed a piece of paper and started furiously scribbling lines thereupon. “Look—just, look, damn you!” he shouted at Modeste while he drew. “This is Adam, all right?! And this is Eve. Cain, Abel, Moses, Jesus, and all the rest of it—do you see?! Look, damn you!”
“I’m looking, sir.”
“But look and see, you stupid cow, don’t look and not see! This dot, here, represents, let’s say, your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. And this dot here, all the way over here, represents Wipp Billiams’ great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. All right?!”
“Aye, but what about me great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, now, sir? I hardly think me great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather could have made much of a go of having me without her help. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, yes, all right, all right! Have it your way! I need a bigger piece of paper.”
An hour later, the blackboard had been wheeled in once again, and a series of papers had been tacked over it, pasted to others which ran down along its legs, over the floor, and were generally scattered all over the room, on walls and on furniture—one piece was even stuck to Sam, who pranced about the room—in mad yet ingenious disarray.
“. . .And so, finally, Miss Snede, these two lines here”—he drew them as he cited them—“prove, once and for all, that this final, large dot here”—he scribbled his crowning achievement—is none other than Mister Snede Williams, and yourself.” He tripped over his own ankle in shock, then jumped back up and stared, panicked and appalled, at his calculations. “By God!”
“What is it?” asked Enid.
Pluck turned to stare at her, terror-eyed: “They really are the same person!” He turned to Modeste. “Mademoiselle. . .forgive me. . .I’m so sorry to be the bearer of evil tidings, but: you are Larry Snede, and—you are dead!” To the porters, he ordered: “Take this corpse to lie with the other.”
“But sir—” one of the porters began.
“No, no, no, you degenerate!” Pluck had anticipated the remainder of the man’s protest. “By ‘lie’, I do not mean ‘enjoy necrophiliac intercourse with’! Just lay them side by side. Given their condition, neither is likely to object.”
“Inspector,” Enid interrupted. “Would you like to take a closer look at this lady, and determine more accurately whether she’s alive or dead?”
“I hardly think that is necessary, mademoiselle, when the mathematics have proved it.” He gestured to the board.
“And yet,” Enid contended, “she appears to be breathing, and looking, and moving about, and even speaking, when you give her a chance to do so.”
Pluck looked over at Modeste, and nodded. “You might have something there after all, Miss Trojczakowski. Yes. I dare say.” He nodded to the porters: “Remove her diaper.”
“We cannot, Inspector,” protested the porter.
“Are you aware that this is a matter of official police business?!” Pluck screamed.
“Official police business!” Bartoff shouted.
“I shall only disrobe if I’m allowed to defecate on the floor!” Modeste declared. At the mental image, Bartoff began to feel queasy; he clasped his abdomen with both hands and started to swivel in his chair at the waist.
“Shall we have an adjournment?” suggested Enid. “So that everyone might calm down?”
“I beg that we might,” put in Bartoff.
“Very well,” said Pluck. “Everyone meet back here in thirty seconds.”
“Perhaps a little longer?” asked Enid.
Pluck shook his head. “Twenty-seven seconds, now. Would you like to spend the remainder of the adjournment arguing over timekeeping? Or perhaps, as I suggest, we all make use of the remaining twenty-one seconds by freshening up and calming down?”
Twenty seconds later, the group reassembled in the interview room.
“Thank you, everyone, for arriving back so promptly,” Pluck began. “I hope we’re all relaxed and better able to focus on the task at hand.” He’d been scanning the room, and suddenly his eyes lit upon Modeste. “What’s that?”
“Do you mean Mademoiselle Cranat?” asked Enid.
“No—I mean that dead woman stuffed in a diaper.”
“Perhaps we might, for the sake of argument, presume she is still living—all your evidence to the contrary—and proceed from the forensic discovery of faeces on the dead man’s body.”
“You mean, her body.”
“No—I mean the body of Charles Snede.”
“You mean, the first murdered man.”
“Yes.”
“Ah. All right. For, as you’ve said, argument’s sake.”
“That would be splendid.”
“Very good.” Pluck cleared his throat, and turned to Modeste. “Girl—let us proceed on the assumption that you’re not dead.”
“Very well, sir. Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome. Ahem. Could you please tell me, in your own voice and using your own words, how your excrement came to violate the person of Charles Williams?”
“But how do you know the excrement was mine, sir?”
“Oh, come now, woman! Can you name me another member of staff or guest in this hotel, children excepted, who so audaciously relieves himself in public as you?” He turned and said softly to Bartoff: “Sorry, monsieur; you might wish to cover your ears about now.”
“I’ll be all right,” his friend whispered back. In truth, he had closed his eyes and was busy picturing his beloved Sam cavorting through a field of daisies in some more agreeable world far off from the execrable one into which they had both had the foul luck to be born. Only when, in his master’s daydream, Sam ceased his frolic and begin to unburden his bowels onto the outraged heads of the flowers, did Bartoff call a premature halt to that vision and commence a fresh one centred more wholesomely on rugby.
“You’ve got me there, sir,” Modeste had to admit, answering the question Pluck had put.
Pluck bowed. “And now, if you would kindly admit your guilt in this murder-suicide, we might be able to enjoy an early supper.”
“But I didn’t kill no one, Inspector—Snede or myself.”
“Then how do you explain the faeces on the dead man’s body?”
“Just a minute,” Enid interrupted. “You say that faeces were found on the dead man’s body, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Just how much?”
Pluck shrugged. “Trace amounts. What does that matter?”
“Where?”
“Pardon, mademoiselle?”
“Where were the faeces found?”
“On the body. I fear we’re really not getting anywhere with this line—”
“Pardon me for interrupting, Inspector, but where on the body?”
“Pardon?”
“Where on the body?”
Pluck shrugged. He began to sweat. He took a few moments—about three minutes, rounding down—to wipe the sweat off his brow, and his palms; he twisted up his handkerchief and stuck it in first one ear, then the other; then reached inside his shirt and dried both armpits. When he was done, he wrung out the handkerchief on the guest register before him, turned to Enid, and asked: “What was the question?”
“Where on the body were the faeces found?”
He shrugged, and answered, but at such a minute volume that no one could hear.
“Pardon, Inspector?” Enid asked.
He answered again, no more loudly.
“Could you speak up, please?”
He sighed, and declared: “Inside his rectum! All right?!”
“You mean his bum-hole?!” Modeste queried. “There was excrement up his bum-hole?”
“And I submit that you put it there, mademoiselle!” Pluck screamed at her.
“You shat up his arse!” Bartoff boomed.
“Really, Mister Bartoff! Inspector Pluck!” Enid had not thought their outbursts at all proper.
Pluck turned to her, and pleaded, “But don’t you see, Enid? It’s the only explanation! I’ve thought it through, time and again, and it’s the only scenario which fits the facts! Look, would you like me to work it all out on paper? Have you got a few hours to kill?”
Enid gave him her best unimpressed-schoolmistress’s glare. “I think you should dismiss Miss Cranat, now, Curtis.”
“But—!”
“Now, Inspector.”
Pluck closed his eyes, gulped, and muttered to the porters: “Take her away.” Then, as an afterthought: “And see that she hasn’t soiled the bed linen.”