Scruffy music teacher Charles Meistersinger witnesses a murder, and tries to solve the case before his own unpleasant secrets are dredged up.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
An intimate group, just nine people, had gathered in the hall. They filled two ragged rows of mismatched chairs arranged in a semicircle before a low stage. Despite lively social media promotion and posters in the local bookshop, the Society had attracted only a small, though ardent, audience of poetry devotees. Someone had turned down the all lights, except for a tall lamp positioned stage left which cast a dramatic yellow pool around the speaker.
Thomas Pantile stood on the stage in the improvised spotlight and lifted his gaze towards his darkened audience. Opening a small, well-worn notebook, he flipped through its leaves with an intent gaze, finally alighting on the page he was looking for. Raising his voice a notch more, into that zone of artful declaration suitable for poetry, he began:
‘And so at night / I watch from far / the glisten -’
Charles Meistersinger heard the shot, a soft report which seemed to come from behind his left shoulder. The sound could have been a branch cracking into the high window on the back wall. It was a dark, blustery night. But immediately it became obvious to everyone that the sharp, low, thwack had been caused by a bullet. Pantile stopped speaking, slightly raised his head with a look of startled astonishment, then crumpled to the stage.
Charles thought the rural Masonic Hall an oppressive setting for a poetry reading, the interior a faded duck-poo yellow with dusty bare floorboards. He’d taken a chair at the farthest end of the front row, close to a door which led, he hoped, to the back entrance of the small rural hall. He was uncertain about these poets, and might need to slip away if it all became too grim.
Arriving, he’d looked about the place with some interest. As much as the next person, Charles was intrigued by what went on in a Masonic Hall – the esoteric rituals played out in the meetings of the secret society, the ceremonies, the salute to the monarch, the oaths. On one wall he could see an old-fashioned photograph of a balding fellow in ceremonial robes, and beside him a fresher photograph of the King. Farther along hung a framed block of text, perhaps an Oath. His eyesight wasn’t good enough to read it, even squinting.
Use of the hall had been donated to the poets’ conclave – a monthly gathering of local versifiers who called themselves the Dead Poets’ Society. The poets whose works were read at these meetings did not, necessarily, need to be dead. The name of the society was merely a ruse under which local poets slipped in a few of their own compositions. Now, with this one shocking incident, the name had taken on a wildly sinister portent.
Local poet Thomas Pantile had been the star attraction this evening, the reason Charles was here. When he’d seen the event advertised on a home-made poster in the town bookshop, Charles had leapt at the opportunity to take a good, long look at Thomas Pantile.
Seven others had come along to the hall, possibly with the same objective. Proceedings had begun, and the listeners were treated to one dead poet, read by a female Robbie Burns enthusiast who gave To A Mouse in full Scottish brogue. Charles had hoped there would not be too much more of this.
However, dead Burns was just a preliminary. Soon the platform had been ceded to the star act, Thomas Pantile. The poet was a middle-aged man who lived, Charles knew, in a large restored farmhouse on the edge of town, inherited from an eccentric parent – so local rumour had it.
With longish grey hair, curious trousers held up by suspenders like a nineteenth century landowner, a muscular chest almost bursting through the soft white fabric of his shirt, Pantile turned theatrically to his audience. The Masonic Hall was small and his voice carried easily, much farther than was needed to arrest the attention of his obviously rapt listeners. Charles had narrowed his eyes, examining the poet, and decided the man hadn’t changed much in two years.
As with many poets, Pantile seemed to believe his poem could not stand alone. It required an introduction. He’d begun by relating an anecdote of his father, who had famously been married five times and believed, so he’d always said, in the ‘animal energy of love’. This father, now dead, had also been a poet. Leering a little, Pantile had reassured his audience that he would not be reading his own father’s poems in public, since they were ‘personal’ and ‘erotic’. However he asserted that his own work, which he was about to deliver, had been inspired by the poetry of this parent. He leafed through his notebook.
Then, the shot.
Shrieks followed, a rushing to the body, a bloody patch on the front of his ice-white shirt, chaos and confusion, phones whipped out, ambulance called, police summoned.
Charles pushed to the front, as shocked as everyone. He made sure – Pantile had indeed been shot. The bloodstain right over his heart began the story, and the pale, motionless face told the rest. Charles stood back and considered. He glanced around at his companions. He had his own reasons for wanting to know who had killed this poet.
Leaving the crowd around the body, Charles turned to the back of the hall. With grim intensity he searched behind the two rows of chairs, along the back wall of the hall where spare seating was stacked. He found nothing, no discarded weapon, no footprints on the dusty boards – apart from his own.
Charles investigated the entrance door. No-one had left. The latch was firmly closed. Alert for what might be revealed, he wrenched the door open but found nothing beyond except the small deserted lobby.
Turning back into the hall, he noticed a flash of red lying on the grubby floor under the framed Masonic oath, if that’s what it was. Bending to pick up the bright scarlet object, he examined it. A ribbon, or a string: a flat woven band, probably cotton. It might be a hair ribbon, as children wore. Possibly a memento. Or was it an object forming part of the Masonic regalia, supposed to be locked away in a cupboard along the side wall? Some instinct told Charles the red ribbon was none of these things.
Soon the police arrived, in the person of Mike Wallace, a middle-aged man in a tracksuit, summoned out after hours to deal with a brazen shooting in the small town under his charge. He seemed to find this hard to believe. However, despite a certain air of nervousness Wallace appeared competent enough. Charles noted the way the policeman moved everyone away from the body, told them they must not leave, and began his careful questions. He made notes, took a few photographs, and consulted with the paramedics once the ambulance drew up.
He also summoned his junior, a pimply young fellow who arrived five minutes later in jeans and a football jersey. Apparently he was a Sydney Swans supporter. Charles observed these details, and noted that the junior policeman, whom Wallace addressed as ‘Kev’, became pop-eyed with shock at the sight of the body. Wallace instructed him to search the audience members, presumably for a weapon. Kev took on this task with an air of excruciating embarrassment, asking the men to empty their pockets and tentatively patting down the women, not very thoroughly. The poetry lovers submitted to this search with varying degrees of cooperation. Nothing of interest was found.
Charles watched all this activity intently, considering the people who had formed the small audience. He knew something of each, as one knew one’s neighbours in a small town. But mysteries remained. As well as he could, he eavesdropped as Wallace asked his questions and recorded the answers.
After all, one of them must be a murderer.
The erstwhile audience had formed small clusters. Fred Buckmaster had his arm around his wife, Pam, who was weeping noisily. Charles couldn’t tell if her emotion was caused by shock, or grief. He supposed it could be both – the woman had apparently known Thomas Pantile quite well, so Charles had gathered from a conversation he’d overhead earlier. Fred Buckmaster seemed less upset.
In a corner near the front entrance, a tall rangy man was comforting a young girl. Charles knew the man, Will Groggin, a teacher, and a rival poet of Pantile. Groggin’s face was a mask, cold and serious. The black-haired girl was hidden under his protective arm, her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs.
Charles also noted the pair of women speaking animatedly near the back door. They were sisters, Flora and Lily Bertram. He knew them both slightly. Flora ran the bookshop, and she’d organised tonight’s event. Her sister Lily was younger, known around town as a livelier personality. In fact, something of a loose cannon, so Charles had heard. There’d been that incident with someone’s husband – he’d forgotten the details.
When it came Charles’ own turn to respond to Wallace’s questions, he explained frankly that he was a pianist, who taught music lessons at the private college which stood in palatial grounds on the edge of town, as well as to individual pupils in his own home. He’d moved to the town two years ago, having previously lived in the city. As a local man, Wallace already knew all this. With little sign of real curiosity, he enquired why Charles had come to the meeting tonight, and seemed content to accept the answer: to hear the poetry of Thomas Pantile.
‘Did you know the man personally?’ the policeman asked.
‘No,’ Charles replied. He volunteered nothing more.
He did, however, pull from his pocket the red ribbon he’d picked up. He showed it to Wallace and told him he’d found it on the floor under the framed text. Wallace took the scrap of scarlet from Charles, examined it, and shrugged.
‘Might it be a clue?’ Charles asked.
Wallace chuckled, dismissive. ‘A red herring, more likely. Some kid has dropped it, days ago probably.’ He thought so little of the ribbon that he tossed it into a rubbish bin standing by the wall.
When the paramedics had removed the body and driven it away, Wallace announced to the small assembly that he’d be calling headquarters to have city detectives take over the case. Charles was unsurprised. Wallace had looked like a swimmer out of his depth from the moment he’d walked in.
The policeman paused in the act of closing his notebook and raised his head, as if he’d just had a thought. Wallace’s eyes swivelled to the back door, the one at the end of the row in which Charles had sat. He walked over and peered at the floor near the doorway – uncovered dirty boards, like the rest of the place – then reached for the door handle. He tugged, but it appeared to be locked. Charles gave a small nod to himself. It was as he’d thought. There was no escape that way.
Turning from the back door, the policeman gave a shrug. He and the junior policeman shepherded all the suspects from the hall, locking the front door behind them and keeping the keys.
Wallace had not used the word ‘suspects’ but Charles knew that was their true status.
Charles Meistersinger, pianist, rented a weatherboard cottage in the town, far enough from the main street to be quiet, yet close enough to make it possible to walk almost everywhere. He owned a car, old but reliable, using it mainly to get to classes at the college. Walking home from the Masonic Hall after the dreadful event at the poetry reading, he hunched against the dark and the wind, his hands shoved in the pockets of his overcoat.
As he rounded the corner into his quiet street, he was startled by the crunch of a footstep behind him. A heavy grip descended on his shoulder. He turned abruptly, and faced the sandy-haired figure of Will Groggin.
Groggin taught at the same college as Charles, and had been sitting in the front row at the Dead Poet’s Society – in prime position to have seen exactly what happened to Thomas Pantile. As he was accosted, Charles suppressed an exclamation of surprise. He growled at Groggin.
‘Will, what is it? Why have you followed me?’
Charles knew Groggin slightly from staff room encounters, but there was much he didn’t know. For example, could the man be dangerous? Could he be – a killer?
‘Glad I caught you,’ Groggin said, affecting a friendly tone. ‘I thought we should talk over what we saw tonight. Okay if I walk with you?’
They were close to Charles’ house, but no way was he going to invite this near-stranger in. ‘We can talk here, Will, if there’s anything to say.’ He stood still on the gravel pathway, the pale yellow glow of a streetlamp forming a cone around them. ‘Did you see anything? You were sitting right in front of Pantile.’
Groggin shoved his hands in his pockets and looked ill at ease, standing in the quiet night. ‘I saw the bullet hit him, if that’s what you mean. My concern is, who was sitting behind me? I thought you might have noticed.’
Charles had noticed, but he wasn’t going to discuss it with Groggin, who was as much a ‘suspect’ as any of them – possibly with more motive, if staff room gossip could be believed.
‘Can’t help you there,’ Charles said. ‘Best leave it to Wallace, and the city detectives. If they turn up.’
‘You think they might not?’
‘Eventually, I suppose they will. I don’t know how high this will be on their priority list.’
Groggin lifted his chin, looking surprised. ‘But Pantile was an eminent poet. I would’ve thought they’d send their best people here, first thing.’
Eminent? Charles almost snorted. Still, he was interested in this concern on Will Groggin’s part. What was behind it?
‘I have to go, Will. Let’s leave it to the professionals.’ He turned away, leaving the man standing under the street light.
In her study, an ornate octagonal room in the garden she likes to call her ‘writing shed’, Marcella Patton leans back in her replica Eames chair. Not for the first time, she wonders why she works so hard. Through the windows of the ‘shed’ she can see into the bush. Birds are audible, but not visible. Marcella wonders if she can make a metaphor out of that. She’s a novelist, and today is one of those days when nothing is coming easy.
Three novels, that’s how many Marcella has published, and the sales have not been spectacular. In fact, unless this next one turns out to be a hot prospect, her agent says she might not be able to find a publisher at all.
Irritated, Marcella stands and paces about the ‘shed’. It baffles her why more people don’t want to read her novels. Maybe she should try TV, or film scripts. Or something for the streaming platforms, something that would sell. This business of slaving away on a novel for years then begging people to read it – this has grown old fast.
Now, however, Marcella has come up with what she hopes is a solution. Modelling her work on the ‘golden age’ writers of detective fiction, she’s decided to try her hand at a Christie-esque story. She realises she’ll have to spend a lot more time plotting things out. Her usual method is to leap right in and follow her muse, wherever her imagined characters take her. For detective fiction, she knows, she’ll need to make a list of suspects, and motives, and clues, and so on. Possibly draw diagrams.
This is the story she has underway at the moment, and which causes her to leap up in frustration.
Gazing into the bush, towards the invisible birds, Marcella has an epiphany. What she needs is a forceful but personable detective, a figure to hook readers’ imagination, and possibly sympathy. A strong silent type, she decides, with a dark backstory, hinted at and only gradually revealed.
Marcella feels she is on to something. Creative inspiration courses through her. She’s a fan of classic detective fiction, of authors like Christie, but not so much of the confrontational blood-and-gore in dark crime fiction. She will, however, obviously need a corpse if this is to be a murder mystery. Hitchcock, she remembers, employed what he called a ‘MacGuffin’. ‘The thing the spies are after,’ he said, ‘but the audience doesn’t care about it.’ Her corpse will be a MacGuffin – simply there to kick off the plot. The blood will be minimal.
Perfect.
Marcella is especially intrigued by the figure of the fictional detective. She now yearns to create one of her own. She understands that he – she decides on a male, as being more psychologically straightforward – will require certain tropes and props: his car, the music he likes, his favourite drink, his mysterious and possibly tragic backstory.
Yes, he’ll need a favourite tipple, and a favourite chair in which to contemplate the crime. Does he like jazz? Inspired, Marcella returns to her desk and starts furiously typing notes.
Her detective, she decides, has a mole below his right ear, about which he’s self-conscious. He drives an ageing BMW convertible, and drinks shiraz, exclusively. He enjoys Sudoku and crosswords, indicating a sharp analytic mind. He reads Homer, because he’s intelligent, and plays the piano, because he’s sensitive.
Marcella is averse to the work required in researching police procedure, so she decides her detective will be an amateur, thrust into an investigation by a chance occurrence, and a mysterious connection to the victim.
Now, for a setting. Christie often used the country house, cut off by snow, or perhaps an island. Whatever could substitute in this day and age? At the very least, she decides, Marcella’s story will be set in a small rural town. Fewer suspects, everyone knows each other’s secrets, the local policeman is incompetent.
Marcella recalls a poetry reading she once attended, in a Masonic Hall in the countryside. No-one had been murdered, but the place had a kind of possibly-murderous vibe. And there were always very few people at a poetry reading.
Perfect.
Once he reached his sitting room, Charles switched on a lamp and drew the curtains. His piano, a second-hand upright of brown wood veneer, stood against one wall. Under the tall lamp was the chair where he liked best to sit. It was a replica grasshopper chair, the famous design of mid-century architect Eero Saarinen, rescued from the market on the edge of town where people sold all kinds of second-hand trash and treasure. These days, the chair was close to being his prize possession.
With Dave Brubeck playing softly on the turntable, Charles sat with a glass of local shiraz. He lifted the bowl of his wineglass to the light of the lamp before his first sip. He liked to do this, to immerse himself in the ruby beauty of the wine, admire the jewel flashes produced by the light, savour the sight, the scent, and then the taste. The scarlet glints reminded him of the thin, flat ribbon he’d found at the scene of the crime and retrieved from the rubbish bin. He drew it from his pocket. Dangling it in the lamplight, he thought of red herrings, and the policeman’s dismissal. He dropped the ribbon to the lamp table.
Charles sat back and sighed. He had no confidence that Kevin Wallace, or the city detectives for that matter, would be able to solve the puzzle of the guilty party. He himself would have a better chance. After all, his hobbies included solving the most difficult Japanese Sudoku. When he wasn’t reading his favourite poetry – not Robbie Burns, but Homer.
Moreover, he had personal reasons for wishing to investigate this crime, and solve it.
But undoubtedly it was a difficult puzzle. It was a classic locked-room scenario, and he could not, as yet, see any clues. Motives, yes – but how could the shooter have pulled it off?
Of the nine people who had been present at the poetry reading, one was dead, and one was himself – which left seven suspects to consider. Musing, Charles regretted he had not tried the back door himself, to check if it were locked or merely jammed. Wallace had tugged at it – but perhaps it opened outwards. Still, the door might be unimportant; he doubted anyone could have moved in or out of that entrance without him noticing. He’d been sitting closest to it.
He thought back on the seating arrangements. The chairs had formed two semicircular rows, five in front and four behind. The victim, as guest of honour, had been placed in the centre of the front row. Beside him had sat the organiser of the evening, Flora Bertram, the middle-aged woman who owned the local bookshop. She had been the reader of To A Mouse. Charles himself had been sitting on her right.
He frowned, thinking back. Flora’s sister Lily had been seated behind her, in the back row. When the policeman Wallace spoke to her, Lily had told him the poet was nothing to do with her, she was just helping out her sister with the event. She didn’t even like poetry, so Lily Bertram had said.
Who had been sitting on the other side of the victim? Charles concentrated. Yes – the teenaged girl, the one with trailing black hair and facial piercings. Summoning her in his memory, he realised he knew her from the college where he taught – though in college uniform she removed the metal jewellery from her nose and lips, and tied back her long hair. This evening her face had been heavily made up with dark eyeliner and black lipstick, a look he’d thought had long since gone out of vogue. He’d hardly recognised her. Jeannie Small, that was her name.
The seat beside Jeannie, at the other end of the front row, had been occupied by Will Groggin. For a moment, Charles wondered if Will and the girl had come to the reading together, but he’d observed nothing which would confirm this.
He took a contemplative sip of his wine, and a detail came back to him. He’d overhead the policeman Wallace ask Groggin why he was at the hall that night, and Will had replied that he’d unlocked the place for Flora. He was a member of the Masonic Lodge, and the Worshipful Master had asked him to hold the keys. The policeman had then demanded those keys and Will had drawn them from his pocket. Charles had heard him say, ‘That’s odd! The cordon is missing.’ At the time, Charles had not understood the reference, but now his eyes slid to the red ribbon lying under his lamp.
The two seats behind Groggin had been filled by the husband and wife, Fred and Pam Buckmaster. The woman was a teacher, Charles remembered. Earlier, he’d heard the couple bickering and had edged away.
In his grasshopper chair, Charles refilled his wineglass. He’d considered all the audience, except one – the person behind him in the back row. He’d glanced at her when she first sat down, an elegant middle-aged woman wearing a black high-necked sweater. Cashmere, if he was any judge. Her hair was beautifully cut, and he’d found her attractive enough to introduce himself. In response, she’d smiled and given her name as ‘Marianne’. She had not offered a surname, but this had been revealed when Wallace questioned her. She was Marianne Pantile, the poet’s third, and last, ex-wife. It seemed Thomas Pantile had shared his father’s addiction to marriage.
When the policeman had enquired why she was there, Marianne had assured him she was on perfectly good terms with her ex-husband. She lived in the city and was a novelist, she said. As if that were reason enough to drive an hour and a half to attend a poetry reading in a rural hall.
Thinking back on this exchange, Charles swiped his device and searched for her profile. He found information about her three novels, none of which seemed to have made much impression on the reading public. ‘Failed novelist’ might be a better description of Marianne Pantile.
As he tipped his wineglass and finished his third drink, Charles reflected that every person in the hall had some connection to the victim.
Except him – but even that was not quite true.
The next morning brought an improvement in the weather. Spring was on its way and the breeze, though still brisk, was much warmer as Charles set out to walk to the main street. Having slept on the problem, he’d decided to speak to the other suspects.
He had no concerns the police would include him as one of those ‘suspects’, even if they were more thorough than he expected and managed to unearth that business two years ago. Charles preferred not to linger on those past events, tied up as they were with the bad months when Audrey’s pregnancy had turned from blessing to nightmare, and Audrey herself had seemed to become another person, one he didn’t know at all, blaming him for everything. Then the trouble at the city university where he’d been teaching, the plagiarism allegations – the timing could not have been worse.
He’d always believed Pantile had known that.
At the local bookshop, which occupied a narrow three-storey premises sandwiched between a café and a boutique, he pushed open the door and found Flora Bertram at her station behind the till. Arranged in front her were a selection of recent releases – a variety of genres, none too dauntingly thick, a smorgasbord intended to entice book buyers.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ve recovered from that terrible business, Flora.’ He kept his tone sympathetic and friendly, though she wasn’t a woman to inspire chumminess. Charles had always been put off by her self-regard, the way she usually managed to bring any discussion back to her.
This morning, Flora smiled wanly and inclined her head to indicate, Charles thought, it was unlikely she’d ever recover. ‘Poor Thomas.’ She pressed her hand to her lips.
The bookshop proprietor was unmarried and lived with her younger sister Lily. Charles knew she’d ‘published’ Pantile’s poems in a home-made chapbook. He’d seen it for sale at the shop a couple of months ago, pages bound with flat, red string and the title printed with hand stamps: Ariel. Unoriginal, Charles had thought at the time. When Wallace had questioned Flora at the Masonic Hall, he’d asked about her connection to the victim and she’d replied, breathlessly, that she was his ‘patron’.
After a few more expressions of spurious sympathy, Charles slipped in his questions. Idly flipping through a volume of erotic short stories from the counter display, he asked:
‘What’s your theory, Flora? I know you’re sharp-eyed. Which direction do you think the shot came from?’
But he’d been a little too forensic for Flora. She sniffed, as if his question was in bad taste. ‘It came from well behind me,’ she insisted. ‘I assume the monster shot through the back window.’
Charles decided not to point out that the back window was about two metres above the floor and a mere slit. Those inside had no view out of it – it was too high – and anyone outside would have to be standing on a ladder to see in. What’s more, the window had been tightly closed, possibly even painted shut.
‘You were Pantile’s main sponsor, I believe?’ Charles went on, ingratiatingly. ‘You must have known him well.’
There was a pause, another pressing of the hand to the lips, this time clutching a balled-up tissue. ‘Not all that well,’ she said. ‘I admired his poetry, of course. Now we will have no more.’ She suppressed a small sob.
‘Hmm. I wonder whom he appointed his literary executor?’ Charles threw this out as bait. In his opinion, a two-bit poet like Pantile would have no cause to appoint such a person.
Flora Bertram reacted to his question with coy disinterest. ‘I wonder?’ she said, and pulled from under the shop counter a small pile of chapbooks, bound with red string. As Charles turned to depart, she spread out Ariel in a reverent display.
The café on the corner served the best coffee in town. Charles walked in and gave his order at the counter, an almond flat white. Turning to find a seat in the crowded place, he noticed Lily Bertram with a group of women her own age, three or four friends, it seemed.
Lily helped out at the bookshop. She was much younger than Flora, also single as far as Charles knew – at least, he’d heard no rumour of a boyfriend. At the bookshop, he’d heard Lily praise Pantile’s poetry on several occasions. At the time, he’d assumed she was either a poor judge of poetry or else was trying to help her sister sell a few copies of the grim Ariel.
This morning, Lily didn’t notice him take a seat at a vacant bench behind her shoulder, close enough to overhear the conversation at her table. She was, naturally, recounting the events of yesterday evening, not without a note of gothic drama.
‘And then, just as he started speaking’ – she gave an excellent mocking impersonation of the poet and quoted his first line – ‘POW! A gunshot! Someone sure didn’t like that poetry!’
The women listening gave appropriate small shrieks. Although Lily was joking around, her friends seemed genuinely horrified. After all, a man had died. Lily seemed less grieved. From her mocking send-up, Charles surmised she would not be amongst those who would miss Thomas Pantile.
‘I know it’s bloody awful,’ she said to her friends in a lower voice, ‘but you have to admit he was a dickhead.’ They nodded soberly. ‘And imagine – I don’t know who fired that bullet, but it must’ve been someone in the room!’
The women fell to speculation. None had noticed Charles seated nearby, gazing through the café windows so as not to be caught eavesdropping. They ran through each of those present at the poetry reading, coming to few rational conclusions. The most likely suspect, they decided in the end, was ‘that creepy piano teacher’.
Charles had vaguely intended to have a word with Lily, to find out if she had any substantial theory about the crime. Now he decided to leave that for later, when she was alone. He finished his flat white and slid out into the street. As he pushed open the café door, he glanced over his shoulder. Lily looked up and caught his eye. Her expression registered surprise, but she didn’t speak. Then her face relaxed into a knowing smile and she turned back to her friends.
Charles decided he must have been mistaken – surely she hadn’t winked at him?
A few days later, with her new detective story half-composed, Marcella Patton receives an invitation to a poetry reading at a local café. The event is run by a group calling itself the Dead Poets’ Society. Marcella seizes on the name. A working title?
Perfect.
At the reading, she finds herself amongst a small group of eight comprising the audience. Inevitably, she can’t resist running her eyes over each of them in turn, considering if she can use her observations to create the suspects in her story. Two people form an obvious couple, a middle-aged man and his blowsy wife, simpering after the poet. A tall ginger-haired type escorting a young girl – shades of impropriety? A couple of officious women bustling about.
One shaggy-looking man sitting at the end of the front row looks particularly interesting, with a brooding expression and his arms crossed over his chest. His hands, clutching his elbows, have long tapered fingers, like those of a musician. She notices that he stares at the poet who is now reading as if he wished him – well, dead.
Perfect.
The encounter in the café had left a bad taste in Charles’ mouth. Even his flat white seemed sour this morning. To clear his head, he strode along the edge of the lake outside of town. He often walked by the water when he wanted to think. There were ducks in the marshy shore, and the breeze ruffled the reeds.
The Bertram sisters seemed to him unlikely killers. Although they had both known Pantile – one admiringly, the other mockingly – neither had, as far as he could see, any motive for wishing the poet dead. Unless one – or both? – suffered unrequited love for the man. He had no evidence for such an assumption.
He would need to talk to Lily. That wink bothered him. Perhaps it was meant to indicate she knew something she’d like to share.
He fell to considering the girl, Jeannie Small. It was obvious, from her rapt attention, the child was besotted with Thomas Pantile, though the man had been at least thirty years her senior. In the hall last night Jeannie had hurried, Charles remembered, to grab the seat next to the poet. And he’d also noticed her squirm as Pantile discussed his father’s erotic poetry. Puppy love, he’d thought at the time, and grimaced to himself.
As he mused on this unsavoury situation, two things seemed likely: if the girl had thrown herself at Pantile, the man would almost certainly have taken advantage of her. And if that were so, the gunman could be a third party bent on protecting – or avenging – the girl. An image of Will Groggin rose in Charles’ mind.
The child herself, sitting in the front row, could hardly have fired a shot without detection, even if she had a hidden killer streak in her.
He thought again of his fellow teacher at the college. Though their paths did not often cross, Charles knew Groggin also considered himself a poet. Ostensibly he was a friend of Thomas Pantile, but from staff room gossip Charles was aware of a secret and bitter rivalry, disguised by the bonhomie both poets adopted towards each other in public. He remembered a rumour, something about a thwarted publication, or was it a rigged poetry prize? Charles had not been surprised to see Groggin in the audience that night – know thine enemy was a wise directive.
And what was he to make of Groggin approaching him on his walk home, trying to angle an invitation to visit Charles’ house? Possible motives for Groggin were swarming: to protect the girl – was Groggin involved with her? To avenge himself for some poetry-related wrong? A mysterious Masonic ritual of some unknown kind? Charles mentally admonished himself for that last one, accusing a perfectly innocent a men’s club. Yet what did he know about the Masons?
It might be prudent to watch Groggin. He could be trying to frame someone, to divert suspicion. He could be trying to frame Charles himself.
As he rounded the end of the lake and headed uphill towards town, his steps took him past the low buildings and asphalt playground of the local primary school. Children were beginning to flow out of the double doors, racing with lunchboxes to form huddles on the playground benches. He recalled then that Pam Buckmaster, who had been sitting with her husband in the back row last night, was the headmistress of this school.
Before the poetry event had begun, as everyone milled around in the hall, Charles had overheard Pam in conversation with Pantile. She’d been urging him to come to her school to do a poetry reading for her students. Pantile had resisted. As Charles recalled the scene, the woman had seemed pushy, almost threatening. Yet Pantile’s poetry was hardly suitable for young children. What could her agenda have been? Nothing Charles could imagine translated into a motive for murder.
He’d also seen Fred Buckmaster pull his wife aside, and heard him ask her what she was thinking? Pantile’s poetry was smut, not fit for primary-aged children, Fred had said. She’d protested he hadn’t read any of it, so how would he know? As Pam turned away in a domestic huff, Charles had overheard Fred mutter, ‘I’ve read that one he wrote about you.’ His acid comment had been too low for his wife to hear.
Mentally, Charles allocated Fred Buckmaster to his ‘possible’ list. The man had been sitting in the last seat of the back row.
Marcella Patton decides to mimic Christie and entitles her story ‘The Case of…’ something. To be decided. She sends her agent the first draft, and waits impatiently for a response. Every morning she hurries to her laptop to check for the email telling her she’s on to a winner.
The email arrives. ‘But why should we care about this amateur detective?’ asks her agent.
Time to up the ante on Charles Meistersinger. He won’t know what’s hit him.
That evening, in the sanctuary of his weatherboard house, Charles received a phone call from Lily Bertram.
‘I need to talk to you. Can I come over?’
With this abrupt request, conveyed in a tone of conspiratorial urgency, Lily piqued Charles’ interest. As she probably intended, he thought ruefully, as he waited for her. She soon arrived.
Ushering her into his sitting room, he offered to pour her a glass of shiraz. His own was sitting on the lamp table in a pool of dull golden light. She accepted. They sat opposite each other, Charles in his grasshopper chair and Lily leaning back on the old couch.
‘I know you’re investigating the murder,’ she began. ‘You questioned my sister. And you were listening in the café this morning.’ This was said in a pleasant tone, without menace. In fact, thought Charles, the next thing will be an offer to ‘help’ me.
‘I can help you,’ Lily said, leaning forwards. She rested her elbows on her knees, her wine glass cradled in her hands. Charles began to consider how he could get rid of her. He wasn’t about to confide anything at all in this flighty woman.
Lily smiled at his expression. ‘You don’t believe me. But just listen to my story.’
By the end of her meandering tale, Charles had to readjust his thinking. This is what she told him:
Her sister and Thomas Pantile had been lovers, more than fifteen years ago. In fact the affair had begun while Pantile was still married to his third wife, Marianne. Did Charles know Marianne had been present in the hall last night? He did.
The affair, said Lily, ended badly when Flora fell pregnant. Pantile had wanted nothing to do with the child. To Flora, becoming a mother had seemed a miracle, and she kept the baby, but with Pantile’s abandonment she’d been forced to raise the child on her own. It was a daughter – the girl had lived with Flora and Lily’s mother, at her home interstate, until Flora had enrolled her in the boarding school just outside of town. The school at which Charles taught – he may even have given the girl piano lessons. She was musical.
Charles, shocked at these disclosures, disclaimed any knowledge of Flora’s daughter. Though what did he know of the antecedents of all the children at the school?
When Flora had taken it into her head to open a bookshop in the town where Thomas Pantile lived, Lily had moved with her, anxious to protect her sister. She was afraid Flora had never recovered from Pantile’s allure – whatever that was – and she, Lily, had spent many anxious moments trying to douse any reviving flames.
Charles thought of Flora that morning, sniffing and sobbing over Pantile’s death. He remembered how he’d dismissed it all as crocodile tears, and felt ashamed. The woman had lost the father of her child, seen him shot before her eyes. Occasionally Charles’ analytical mind could betray, cause him to miss seeing things which were right in front of him.
‘Why are you telling me all this, Lily?’
‘Because I know you’re investigating, and I want you to find the real killer before the police dig up all this about Flora.’
It seemed to Charles that if the police chased up every affair Thomas Pantile had ever conducted, they’d be a long time over their investigation. He didn’t say this to Lily, merely assured her he’d do his best, and saw her to the door. He returned to sit under his lamp and consider.
By his fourth glass of wine, Charles thought he’d worked it out. He took out a notebook and jotted a list.
Firstly, the victim. Pantile was a scoundrel. That much Charles had known even before he’d heard the stories of the others present last night. Two years ago, the poet had been a member of the faculty at the city university when Charles had been teaching there. Charles’ wife Audrey had taken a poetry workshop with the man. Then she lost their baby, and her mental balance had become fragile, and for reasons Charles had never been able to understand, it had been Pantile to whom she turned for comfort. His pleas for an explanation had meant nothing to her; she became different person.
Then the scandal – Charles was accused of plagiarism in his composition Ariel which he’d written for performance by the student string quartet. He was never sure who had raised the accusations, though he’d always suspected Pantile. In fact, he was sure that was where the blame lay. Charles had lost both his job and his marriage.
The shot in the dark last night had been a shock at the time, but it was no surprise to Charles.
As to the suspects, Flora Bertram could have carried a grudge against Pantile for abandoning her, ending their affair and disowning his daughter. Lily had suggested Flora might be carrying a torch for the poet, but this could be a ruse to get close to him and find an opportunity to do him harm. After all, it had been Flora who organised the poetry event. She had opportunity to inspect the hall, perhaps planting the weapon used.
Then her sister, Lily – she said herself that she wanted to protect her sister from the influence of Pantile. If she thought the affair was about to reignite, she would have a motive to get rid of the man once and for all.
Charles thought then of Will Groggin, who had a professional grudge against Pantile – was it that rigged poetry prize? Charles thought so. He could ask around the staff room. It was also possible that Will was protective of the girl Jeannie, besotted as she was with Pantile – enough to kill him? As a Mason, Will also had access to the hall.
And Jeannie Small herself? Charles could not credit the young girl with the mind of a murderer, though it was true that adolescents could be unpredictable. He could not remember having given the girl piano lessons at the college, but she could have been a member of the choir he led. How old was she? It struck him then – could she be the lost daughter of Flora and Thomas? It was a shocking idea. Surely Lily would have told him if it were so.
The Buckmasters – Charles had not yet questioned them, but it seemed that Pam Buckmaster had an unhealthy obsession with Pantile. If the poet had immortalised her in verse, as Charles had overheard from her husband, it was likely she was another amorous connection. Love affairs could turn sour quickly, especially if the less-loved felt the sting of rejection. It was possible Fred Buckmaster knew of his wife’s involvement with Pantile and he could have been goaded by jealousy. Would Fred go as far as murder?
Charles completed his list and closed his notebook. He was aware that one person remained to be investigated, but he didn’t have enough information about her. He flopped into bed, the rising wind howling around the eaves of the house, and thought deeply about Marianne Pantile.
In the morning Charles made a phone call, then took his old BMW and drove to the station parking lot. The earlier promise of spring had given way to dark clouds scudding across the afternoon sky. He managed to catch the mid-afternoon train which would take him to the city in a little over an hour. There he hoped to find Marianne Pantile, the only non-local who had been at the poetry reading last night.
His phone call had been to his favourite city bookshop, Turning Pages. The owner, Todd Piston, was well-known to Charles, who had patronised his shop for years before moving to the country.
Yes, Todd had told him, he had Marianne Pantile’s three novels in stock, and providentially she was doing a reading this evening at Charles’ old university, for the Creative Writing faculty. Charles hadn’t returned to campus since that day he walked out, two years ago. He told himself this was because he had no reason to go back. In fact, there was more to it. Even thinking of the place, and what had happened, triggered a deep anxiety, manifesting as nausea and an odd trembling of his left hand. Absent-mindedly, he scratched at the mole below his right ear, and wondered if he’d be alright. Returning to campus, sitting in a lecture theatre. It was bound to bring back bad vibes.
At the bookshop, Todd greeted him with a slap on the shoulder and a grin. He’d been a good friend to Charles during the divorce and the minor scandal. A tall, gangly fellow, he wore his greying hair in a ponytail, a choice a bookseller could get away with.
Pulling the three Marianne Pantile books from the shelf, Todd said they were ‘not exactly best sellers’ but there was a niche reader who sometimes asked for them. He described the genre as ‘literary-who-knows-what’. Charles leafed through them, but decided there was no necessity to make a purchase. They were not stories he wanted to read – family dramas, by the looks of them. He’d had enough of that sort of thing in his own life.
Todd offered to come with him to the reading. He locked up the shop and they set out along York Street in the dusk. Todd asked about the shooting.
‘How could it have happened? I heard there were only eight people in the hall and no-one went in or out.’
Charles wondered how Todd had learned these details, but he saw no reason to obfuscate. ‘Yes, it’s obvious someone in the audience managed to fire the shot undetected. The ambulance men suggested it was a small calibre bullet, well-aimed directly at the heart. The gun must have been small, easy to conceal, and with little recoil.’
‘Still,’ Todd objected, ‘how could no-one have noticed?’
Charles hunched in the evening air and glanced at his friend. They were approaching their favourite pub and had time for a drink. ‘Perhaps someone did,’ he said, ‘but is keeping quiet about it.’
Todd’s eyebrows raised in astonishment as they pushed through the doors of the Slip Inn on Sussex Street. Over their red wine they discussed the possible mechanics of the shooting but reached no firm conclusions. Todd maintained it couldn’t have been done without someone noticing. Though Charles nodded in agreement, he had his personal reservations.
Their thirst slaked, they caught a bus up Broadway and made their way to the university auditorium. Marianne drew a larger crowd than her ex-husband – there were perhaps thirty people present in the raked benches. As they took their seats, Charles asked Todd how long ago Marianne had divorced Pantile.
‘The other way around,’ Todd said. ‘He threw her out, that’s what I heard. Gossip was, she’d found a younger specimen. But she never did remarry.’
The lights dimmed and an MC appeared to introduce Marianne, who stepped to the lectern, as elegant as Charles remembered her. She soon launched into a reading from her latest book, due for publication next month, she told them. As the audience fell silent, her pleasant voice carried through the auditorium. The acoustics were good.
Charles found himself lulled by her voice. Was it something about the lilt of it, or was it the heating in the place, or the beers he’d had? As to the substance of her story, he soon forgot to follow closely. He fell to musing yet again on the events in the Masonic Hall.
Marianne droned on. In the back row of the auditorium, Charles had stopped listening. His thoughts focussed on that bastard Pantile, and beautiful Audrey, who had fallen – like so many others – under the spell of the dissipated poet. Charles used to think he’d beaten this habit of raking over the details of the scandal which saw him sacked from this very institution on trumped up allegations.
As Marianne read her story, he heard her mention Homer, and the piano, and something about police procedure. He experienced a vague sensation of having heard a similar story somewhere before.
Why had Marianne been at the Masonic Hall that night?
As this thought darts into his mind, he hears the author use the words ‘Masonic Hall’ and his attention returns fully to the reading. From what he can gather, her new novel is set in a Masonic Hall. He wonders if that was the reason she drove to the town and attended the Dead Poets’ Society gathering – was she seeking some kind of local colour for her story? Was it coincidence that her ex-husband had been reading that night? And was shot?
In the university auditorium Marianne pauses, looks up at her audience, and closes the advance reading copy of her new novel. Her smile suggests that if they want to know more, they’ll have to buy the book.
In the back row, Charles frowns. He has a sense he should have paid more attention, not gone off daydreaming about the ghastly Pantile.
‘Did you follow all that?’ he asks Todd.
‘Yeah. Sounds like the new novel could be better than the others. I like a good detective story. They sell well. It’ll depend if she manages to pull off the fictional detective. Make him likeable.’
Charles grunts. ‘Hmm. Likeable.’
Todd gives a chuckle. ‘I’m not sure, though, about the character of the writer – is the fictional Marcella Patton meant to be a stand-in for Marianne Pantile? Might be a bit too meta for some readers. Many people find that stuff too clever by half.’
As they stroll out to the lobby where glasses of cheap wine are spread on a side table, Charles asks when the new novel is due to be released.
‘Next month,’ Todd answers. ‘I’ve got some on order. You interested in reading it?’
Charles nods. ‘Oh yes, I am.’
As Todd hands him a glass of nameless red, Charles looks up and into the eyes of Marianne Pantile, novelist. She smiles enigmatically and tosses her dark hair away from one cheek. She’s holding a glass of wine in one hand and her book is clutched under her arm.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘I don’t recall your name, but I know you were in the hall when Thomas was shot.’ The inflection in her voice suggests Charles has done something wrong. He stares back at her, taking his time.
‘Mrs Pantile,’ he says slowly, after a moment has elapsed. ‘I hope you’ve recovered from the shocking events.’ She looks calm and collected to him.
She sips at her glass and eyes him over the rim. ‘Why were you there?’ she asks.
‘I wondered the same about you,’ he replies. ‘Research?’
At that, she laughs lightly, throwing her head back. ‘Touché! Insightful. I would expect nothing less of my murderer.’
The hairs stood up on the back of Charles’ neck and he rubbed self-consciously at the mole under his ear. There had always been risk that he’d be blamed. He’d seen that from the beginning. That was why it had been so important to him to solve the crime, to lay the blame where it belonged. Now here was this woman trying to frame him.
At that moment, Todd joins them, introducing himself.
‘So,’ he says cheerily, whodunnit? And how?’
The author laughs lightly. ‘I’m not going to give away the ending of a mystery novel not yet published!’ she says.
‘I didn’t mean the novel,’ Todd says. ‘I meant the dead poet. Your late lamented ex-husband.’
Marianne looks at Charles directly, and, he thinks, with a challenge.
’In my opinion,’ she says, ‘the crime was committed with a small purse-sized pistol secreted in a pocket.’
Charles is breathing heavily now. ‘But we were all searched.’
She smiles. ‘Only by that tentative young policeman. I saw you show him the contents of your pockets. Would you say he was thorough?’
Perspiration breaks out under Charles’ collar. They both know that search had been perfunctory at best. He can feel the noose tightening.
Todd interjects with lively questions. He seems to mistake the affair of the dead poet with a fictional detective story. ‘But where is the weapon now? The killer must dispose of it. Once the city detectives get involved, they’ll be searching houses and cars and workplaces.’
‘Probably at the bottom of the lake by now,’ says the author, ‘if I had to make up a plot point.’
She throws back the last of the wine in her glass, replaces it on the table and saunters off, her book wedged firmly under her arm. No-one is going to learn the ending of that novel before it’s published.
