Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Annual, No. 3, 1973

Farewell Message by Jeff Peters

I read the note, and suddenly I knew. I was a dead man. But — dead men sometimes tell.

The rat gnaws in the wainscoting. He is one of many. I should like to poison them, yet I dare not go to the chemist and say, “I am troubled by rats. I want some poison to get rid of them.” You see, it could be used. I don’t know how exactly but it could be — of that I am sure.

I am hungry, but it is scarcely worth the effort of eating. First I should have to wash my hands with the soap I carry always with me and then unlock the steel trunk to which I keep my food. I chew my pen handle and then I throw it down from me.

Perhaps it is? One simply doesn’t know. It lurks everywhere. Last week I told the milkman riot to call. I use condensed: milk now and I buy my food at a different shop every day and sometimes in the next village.

I get a new pen from the drawer. Think, man, where did you buy it! In London? Yes, I’m sure now. It’s probably all right then. I should have bought a typewriter for correspondence, but it is too late now.

Sometimes I try to paint. Another ten days or so and my masterpiece would be finished. But I cannot settle to it any longer. Perhaps it will never be finished now. Yet I dare to hope it will be.

It started one evening just over a year ago.

“Have another whisky?” asked my next-door neighbor, Richard Parker, screwing up his little eyes, and getting ready to pour

“No, thanks,” I said, a little gruffly. I did not like Parker and I did not want any more of his whisky. I did not know why I had accepted his invitation.

“Go on, have another,” he said, fingering the crystal decanter. “You must have another.”

“I’ve had to drop it,” I said. “The wolf is up the path — if not on the doorstep.”

“Bad luck,” he said. But he did not mean it. He slumped his overfed figure in the arm chair. It pleased me to see he was going bald very quickly. “Still all trials are good for the artist, no doubt. From them often comes his best work.”

It was the usual unthinking, unfeeling business man’s cant and because I had heard it a thousand times now, I should have let it go. Instead, I snapped back.

“You subscribe to the idea of pinching the belly of genius, do you?”

“My dear fellow,” he drawled lazily, moving the plump diamond ring round his finger, “I don’t subscribe to anything. I have no theories about art, though I like it well enough. From time to time I buy a picture, when I see something I like.”

“Is it good for your prestige, then, to be considered a patron of the arts?” I asked.

Parker spun his whisky round in his glass. His fleshy face showed a tinge of color. His lids closed down over his small pale blue eyes as he made an effort to keep his temper. He spoke slowly after a pause of perhaps another half minute. “I say, old chap, are you trying to pick a quarrel with me? I quite like you, you know.”

“When one is rich it is easy to quite like people,” I said hotly, splitting an infinitive.

He got up out of the chair and walked across the Persian carpet which would have fed me for a year, fingered the ring which would have kept me for five, nodded in fat well-fed synthetic sympathy.

I had known Parker for six months, ever since in fact he had bought the large house next to my Wiltshire cottage and we had got into casual conversation over the garden wall.

I had disliked him from the first. It wasn’t merely because he had money. Lots of people have money. It was because he had something more precious — leisure, unlimited leisure, and did nothing with it.

So I lost my temper with him and cried, “I have genius and cannot use it. You have nothing. You’re a parasitic clod and do nothing but loaf about on your late wife’s money.”

“Leave her out of this!” he cried.

I felt a hot flush of pleasure. Now I’d stung him. Then I heard my voice saying something I had no thought of saying.

Like all artists I am intuitive and now I heard myself saying: “It is just as well for you that coroners in little sleepy villages like ours aren’t inquisitive! Perhaps, that’s why you came down here to live before she... she died. I wonder if that was your wife’s handwriting in the suicide note?”

Parker’s face was pale. He put out a hand on the mantel to steady himself. His eyes looked wildly at me.

“You... you—”

“Yes, I guessed,” I said. “I knew.”

But I hadn’t. It was a brilliant shot in the dark.

It began then. I hadn’t thought of it before he was offering me money to buy my silence. He was quicker brained than I was.

“Thirty pounds a month,” he said.

“All right,” I said. I was still a bit dazed.

He smiled and then set his mouth. I realised he would have gone more but I was not greedy about money. With me it was but a means to an end.

“You will let me have a painting for each cheque and just to be business-like, give me a receipt.” He went over to the whisky and poured a drink for each of us.

“To our partnership,” he said. “And before you go I must pay you for your first picture.”

He was himself now and, no doubt, telling himself he had made a good bargain.

“Now write me out a receipt,” he said later, holding the check out and blowing on it. “You can leave the painting with Rodgers.”

Rodgers was his driver-valet.

For three months he paid me my money. I had no scruples about it. The world, I’d learned, was dog eat dog. I happened to be a genius and Parker wasn’t. I knew no laws as ordinary men know them. Oh, I’d give the world good value. I worked hard and slept easily.

With leisure my art grew and developed. I could sense a new maturity in it, a surety, a heady delight in my released powers.

Then suddenly I started to worry about Parker. I called on him.

“Materials have gone up and also I must have a few more creature comforts,” I said. “You must pay me five hundred a month.”

“Your paintings are going up in value,” he said, smiling.

He paid, of course. I lived as soberly as before. The extra two hundred a month I used to pay a private detective to watch Parker. Put it down to my intuition, but I was suddenly suspicious of what he might be planning. The detective discovered nothing.

After seven weeks he demanded more money and I agreed. It was not my money, so why should I lose his services? Parker agreed readily to pay more. The detective deceived me for four months before I realised that he was working for Parker:

“Two can play at this game,” I told myself and kept the detective on — and employed another.

Parker bought him too.

My relations with Parker remained cordial but distant. He posted me a check each month; I wrote him a receipt; and delivered a painting to Rodgers. I thought once or twice of cutting out this hypocrisy, but I had a stack of old canvases, worthless things that I despised. I know now why Parker wanted the receipts.

I met Parker occasionally. We spoke no more than “Good day” to each other.

Three months ago I started my masterpiece. It is a large allegorical painting to show the dichotomy in human nature, in Life itself. In the gross flesh of my sensual beings lurked the soul, in the sensitive eyes and the mysterious corners of the mouth.

But I put it badly. My vision was compelling and from deep inside me. For weeks I worked as in a dream, scarcely stopping except to snatch some food and a few begrudged hours of sleep. My dream began to take shape, to be frozen on the canvas. With my goal in sight at the end of last week, I eased up a little to gain strength for the last surge.

I had taken no notice of Parker or anything else for that matter. But now I observed that he went away for the weekend. During Saturday afternoon I found myself staring at the windows of his house and I knew suddenly what I had to do. I had to break in. I watched until I saw the housekeeper go off to the local at seven o’clock and an hour later when it was dark I burgled my way in. It was simple enough. I found a window unlocked, almost as though it had been left for me. I think now it had.

I had a small hand torch and I muffled its light in my handkerchief. I went to his study first. I found them in the first drawer of the desk I pulled back. It was the top right-hand one and unlocked, almost as though I was intended to find what was there. In a manilla folder were some sheets of paper covered with a hand-writing that seemed familiar. It wasn’t Parker’s. I read the top one:

I felt the back of my neck going cold and the hair stiffening. It was my writing! Or, rather, Parker’s imitation of it and a diabolically good one, too. And there was my “signature” — my bank would have paid on it.

On impulse I took one of the notes — all were phrased much the same, and in some my “handwriting” was better, if possible — and stole back to my cottage. I had no conscious reason in taking the forged note and its theft has undoubtedly made my death even more inevitable. Parker will not spare me now.

On the Monday another check was due from Parker. Instead I received an unctuous note regretting that he could no longer buy my paintings. I knew then that the blow would come swiftly. But from whence?

That was yesterday. I thought of going to the police, in my first moments of panic. Then I realised that in the eyes of the law a blackmailer is little better than a murderer, whatever his motives. If I went to the police I should never finish my great picture. I should spend years of cruel, frustration in jail that would erode my talent.

Since I made the decision I have worked frenziedly on my masterpiece. In it lies my immortality. A few hours and it will be finished.

The rat scampers in the ceiling. Today I posted a letter to my solicitor, to be opened after my death. It contains an account of all this and the forged note I stole from Parker. It is enough to hang him.