One of Us Is Dead

24 Saturday 1 October 2022

Taylor stared at Debbie Martin for some moments in stunned silence. ‘Barnie didn’t say who he was?’

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No.’

Although he had downed more than he usually did, he wasn’t so drunk that his mind was no longer functioning clearly. He was trying to piece the different parts of the puzzle together.

Barnie had the goods on an old school friend. Someone everyone thought was dead.

And now Barnie was dead.

‘To get this right, Debbie, Barnie thought he could get a big pay-off, presumably by blackmailing this old school friend, and getting enough to make you both rich?’

‘Yes.’

Taylor reflected for a moment. ‘The only person Barnie and I were friends with who went on to become properly wealthy was Rufus.’ He sipped the last drops of his wine. ‘But if Rufus had faked his disappearance for whatever reason, and Barnie had recognized him and was threatening to expose him, then why would Rufus want to risk showing up at his funeral?’

‘Isn’t that something murderers often do? You see it in the true crime stuff on television, it seems to happen a lot. They turn up out of macabre curiosity, or maybe just to gloat, right?’

‘Murderers? Are you suggesting Rufus killed Barnie? I thought he died from mushroom poisoning?’

Debbie said nothing for a moment, waiting while their coffees were served, along with the bill, which Taylor moved to his side plate.

‘It was mushroom poisoning — death cap mushrooms.’ She began rolling her necklace between her forefinger and thumb, and looking a little uneasy. ‘Barnie had formerly been a chef. Recently he’d been trying to build up a following on Instagram showing cheat recipes to impress your friends with. Sure he was a dreamer and a loser, but he wasn’t a total idiot. Maybe he did make a genuine mistake — I’ve read that mistaking death caps for edible mushrooms is easily done. But what if — and I’m just speculating now — Rufus had something to do with it? I get the very distinct feeling the police are viewing his death as suspicious — they’ve interviewed me twice.’

‘They don’t suspect you, surely?’

She shook her head, smiling. ‘No — but isn’t it true that most people who are murdered are killed by a member of their family, or by someone they know? Anyhow, what motive could I have for killing him? He didn’t have any money and we were already happily apart.’

He frowned. ‘Are you suggesting that, if Rufus was the one Barnie was trying to blackmail, Rufus poisoned him to get him off his back? Then turned up to the funeral to — as you said — gloat?’

‘On the very big assumption Rufus is still alive?’

Taylor widened his eyes. ‘Maybe not such a big assumption.’

‘A great shame if that eulogy you did was all for nothing!’

He gave a wry grimace. ‘You could say that...’

She sipped her coffee and continued. ‘I barely knew Rufus, but Barnie always used to say that he was dangerous. He once told me he thought Rufus was a psychopath, and that he was the only person he knew who he thought could actually be capable of murdering someone.’ She glanced down for a few moments, then stared directly at Taylor. ‘Do you share that view?’

This was a moment when Taylor would have loved a cigarette. If Debbie had suggesting stepping outside for one, he’d have joined her in a shot. But she showed no sign of doing that and he didn’t want to ask. ‘How much did Barnie ever tell you about our schooldays?’

‘Very little — other than that you, he and Rufus were tight. Whenever I tried to get him to talk about those days, it was like a shutter came down. I could see it in his eyes.’ She looked at him almost a little sharply. ‘Was there some scandal you three were involved in back then? Something you all did that you can never talk about?’

He shook his head. ‘Not a scandal. But there was something.’

‘Something?’

Taylor hesitated for a moment. ‘You said at Barnie’s funeral that you always felt Rufus had a dark side — that he had something of the night about him, right?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘I always felt that too.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘How much time do you have?’

‘More than enough for another glass of wine.’

‘You’re going to need it,’ he said.

The waiter, still smiling, happily brought them over two fresh, large glasses of white wine. Never normally a big drinker, Taylor was surprised how sober he still felt. Sober, but wanting to tell her. To tell her something he’d not talked about in years. The thing he’d never even told his wife. The trauma that in a strange kind of way — and not a good way — had bound the three of them together since the day it happened.

He picked up his glass and put it down again without drinking. ‘The three of us met when we were eleven. At school we had to do a half-day of some kind of military service every week — it was called CCF, Combined Cadet Force.’

She nodded. ‘I’m familiar with it.’

‘You could choose whether you wanted to do Army, Navy or Air Force. Rufus, Barnie and I all had an interest in aviation. Right back then all three of us had ambitions to be pilots. It was all I’d ever wanted to do since as far back as I could remember. My dad was senior partner of a sizeable family law firm and he’d hoped I would go into that, but I wasn’t interested. I’d set my heart on becoming a pilot. So in my first week at boarding school I enrolled in the RAF section of the Corps, which is where I met Rufus and Barnie.’ He sipped some wine then went on.

‘Barnie was a nice guy, but I always felt he was a bit of a dreamer, I know you feel that too. He once told me very seriously that he believed he’d been a Spitfire pilot in a former life, who’d been shot down and killed in the Battle of Britain, and that it was his destiny to fly again. That was before he told me, some while later, that he’d been an actor in a past life, in the Victorian age, and he realized it was now his destiny to be an actor again.’

She smiled. ‘Sounds like Barnie all over!’

‘I did genuinely like him — I felt I almost wanted to protect him, because he seemed so vulnerable. Rufus was very different, a piece of work, I guess. A strange character, quite aloof — you could never really tell whether he liked you or not. But he kind of latched on to the two of us because he didn’t really have any other friends at school. He lived very much in a world of his own. He was obsessed with how mechanical and electrical things worked, and was always either taking stuff apart or making things.’

‘What kinds of things?’

‘Stuff that worked — I guess you’d call him a boffin. We all had our rooms at school — studies with a bed. Most pupils put pin-ups on the wall — rock stars, adolescent stuff. Not Rufus. He’d turned his room into a miniature rocket science laboratory. There was Dexion shelving everywhere, stacked with half-dismembered television sets and other electrical apparatus. And model aircraft — but not the normal kind that we kids used to make. He built remote-controlled flying bombs.’

‘What?’

‘Yep. There was a big area of wilderness behind our boarding house — we were all in the same house — and he liked to take us out and show us his latest. It would be a radio-controlled single-engine plane packed with gunpowder and a detonator, and he’d let it take off, then a short distance on would nosedive it into the ground and it would explode.’

‘For fun.’

‘His idea of fun. I told him it seems such a waste of effort to spend all that time building the aircraft to then go and destroy it, and he used to tell me not to be so damned dull — that life should be about excitement, about pushing your boundaries beyond your horizon. Anyhow, then he progressed into something that all of us did like. He developed a bit of software that enabled us to download the latest Hollywood movies onto our computers.’

‘Pirated?’

Taylor nodded and drank some more wine. ‘Oh yes. It was the early days of streaming. It would take hours — sometimes a day or more to do the download — but then we would have the latest Batman or Mission: Impossible or whatever. It was actually pretty cool.’

‘And illegal.’

‘Totally. But we didn’t care back then, it was really exciting. And Rufus was making a small fortune selling his software to other pupils — he was minting it! He even sold it to several of the teachers!’

‘Barnie never told me any of this.’

Taylor shrugged.

‘So this was when you saw his dark side?’

‘No. Not then. I thought he was pretty cool at that point and I think Barnie did too. It was what happened when were about fifteen that changed everything.’ He drank some more, and was surprised to see his glass was nearly empty.

The waiter hovered with the bottle, but he politely dismissed him. Debbie’s glass was still nearly full.

‘Which was what?’ she prompted.

‘All of us more senior cadets in the RAF Corps were offered the chance to have a flight in an RAF training aircraft. The three of us jumped at it — wow! We were actually going to fly in a real RAF plane! I’ll always remember the day, a Tuesday afternoon in November. It was overcast and windy. And what made it even more exciting was that it was nothing like the kind of aeroplanes we’d ever been in on holiday.’

He drank another sip. ‘It was a twin-prop aircraft that was used for training the paras. The interior was basic. Totally stripped down, with canvas seating, bare metal cabin and no soundproofing. When the engines revved it was like being inside a boom-box. And when we took off it was lumpy, bumpy and horribly uncomfortable. On top of which, exhaust fumes were leaking in. Then, almost immediately, we hit turbulence and got bounced around for the next half-hour while we tried to look out of the few windows and figure out where we were.’

‘No drinks trolley, eh?’ Debbie jibed. ‘And no air stewards?’

‘Not unless you count one grizzled RAF flight sergeant who thought, probably quite rightly, that we were a bunch of tossers.’ He grinned, fleetingly, then turned serious again. ‘I think we’d all had enough. All of us were feeling sick and just wanting to get back down onto terra firma. There was one guy, one of our classmates, called Will Cooper. He was very quiet, quite bookish — had a mop of hair permanently in front of his eyes, and wonky spectacles — he was blind as a bat without them. He was in particularly bad shape on the plane and had thrown up several times into a sick bag.’

Taylor shrugged. ‘I was close to puking too. We finally landed, and I don’t think any of us could stagger down those steps that were lowered from the fuselage fast enough. I felt woozy as hell. We all did. I think Rufus was in front of me, and Barnie. I could see Will Cooper, who was first out, swaying from right to left on the tarmac, like he was drunk. The steps were at the rear of the plane, behind the left wing. Then I saw he wasn’t wearing his glasses, he was holding them in his hand. He suddenly lurched forward. Straight towards the propellor that was still spinning — the engines were still running. We all saw him. But it was like he hadn’t seen it. I yelled at him. Barnie ran forward to try to grab him.’ He fell silent.

Debbie was staring at him. ‘What happened?’

He took a long time to answer. Over twenty years later, the image was still so raw in his mind. ‘He walked straight into the propellor. Straight into. He sort of tripped as he reached it and tumbled forward. He...’ Taylor’s voice choked and he took some moments to regain his composure. ‘He just — sort of — disappeared, from the waist up, into a pink cloud. For a fraction of a second. Then we were all spattered with bits of him — bone, blood, flesh, brain, everything.’

He put his glass down and sank his face into his hands. After some moments he looked up. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve not talked about it in years.’

She gave a gentle smile. ‘You don’t have to apologize. That’s just... unbelievable. Horrific. I can’t imagine how... how you could ever unsee that.’

‘I can’t. I can’t ever unsee it, however much I’ve tried. And God knows I have.’

‘And the others?’

‘Several of us — including Barnie and myself — had mental breakdowns afterwards. There were ten boys and five girls on the plane — and it was mostly the boys that suffered the worst. The females seemed tougher.’

She smiled. ‘Maybe we are tougher.’

‘I’ve never doubted it.’ He smiled back.

‘And Rufus?’

Taylor turned to look for the waiter, who magically appeared and refilled his glass. After he had walked away, he said, ‘Rufus reacted in a very strange way. It was like he wasn’t affected at all. He said, a few days later, that Will had been a bloody idiot. I thought at first that was just his bravado, his way of dealing with it, but later on I realized I was wrong. He genuinely thought Will had been an idiot. There was no empathy, no sense that he was sorry for Will — nor for the guy’s family. He even made crude jokes about sending Will’s parents the dry-cleaning bill for his clothes.’

‘Seriously?’

‘That was Rufus all over. Will had been an only child. His parents had lost... everything. Rufus had zero empathy.’

‘I’m shivering,’ Debbie said. ‘I can’t believe Barnie never told me about this. But, at the same time, I suppose I can. He had a way, if he didn’t like something, of sort of pretending it had never happened. But what you’re saying about Rufus’s reaction — that to me fits the mould of a psychopath — or sociopath — or whatever the term is.’

Taylor sat, frowning, for some moments. It was not something he’d ever thought of. ‘I remember at school Rufus always got his way. He was cunning and manipulative. I had a sense back then that he would be highly successful one day. But would he go as far as killing?’ He shrugged, then gave a wan smile. ‘I guess that’s an opinion that, as the saying goes, is above my pay grade.’

She smiled. ‘So to recap on where we are on this: shortly before he died, Barnie claimed to have something big on a rich former school friend who everyone thought was dead. The only friend you guys had who became rich was Rufus. But we were both actually at Rufus’s funeral two years ago — how could it be him?’ She paused. ‘Oh my God, do you think he really might not be dead?’

Taylor shrugged. ‘It was a no-body funeral. There was no coffin. It was more like a memorial service, I suppose.’

‘How much do you know about how he died?’

‘Rufus apparently fell off a yacht in darkness, in the middle of the night, somewhere off the coast of Barbados. I don’t know all the details, but that’s what his wife — widow — Fiona, told me before the funeral.’

‘His body was never found, was it?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. But if you go overboard in the middle of the night, in shark-infested Caribbean waters, maybe your chances of being found intact aren’t great.’

‘Do you have any other evidence that he might still be alive?’ she pressed.

‘Only that I was certain I saw him at Barnie’s funeral.’

‘But you could have been mistaken?’

‘I tried to catch him at the end of the service, but he’d vanished. I later asked the vicar if he had CCTV of the service and he showed me the footage of the mourners arriving and leaving.’

‘You saw him?’

‘No. But the vicar did say if someone wanted to avoid being caught on camera, it was unlikely but possible.’

‘Have you thought about going to the police, James?’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure if there’s a lot of point. Telling them I think I might have seen him in church but he didn’t show up on CCTV is hardly going to float their boat.’

‘Are you really, really sure it was him you saw in the church?’

‘I’m beginning to doubt it. And yet I don’t know. I really do think it could have been him. Nothing’s making sense at the moment.’

She shook her head. ‘Let’s think this through logically. Let’s say he faked his death in order to get out of some kind of trouble. Maybe his wife colluded and covered for him. She might be a good starting point.’

‘Fiona? I doubt it. I heard they’d not been getting on so well in the months before he died — disappeared — whatever. And she didn’t waste any time changing back to her maiden name of Davies.’

Debbie Martin gave a wry smile. ‘Seems none of you Three Musketeers turned out to be so great at relationships.’

‘All for one and one for all,’ Taylor quoted. ‘That was our motto, once.’

‘And now carved on a headstone in the graveyard of good intentions?’