Murder by the Book, page 24
Mr. Bates whispered imploringly to Troy, “Would you mind? I do so want to have a word—” and she was obliged to introduce him. It was not a successful encounter. Mr. Bates no sooner broached the topic of his Bible, which he still carried, than Mr. De’ath burst into an alcoholic diatribe against superstition, and on the mention of Old Jimmy Wagstaff, worked himself up into such a state of reminiscent fury that Mr. Bates was glad to hurry away with Troy.
They overtook the rector in the churchyard, now bathed in the golden opulence of an already westering sun.
“There they all lie,” the rector said, waving a fatherly hand at the company of headstones. “All your Wagstaffs, right back to the sixteenth century. But no Hadets, Mr. Bates, I assure you.”
They stood looking up at the spire. Pigeons flew in and out of a balcony far above their heads. At their feet was a little flagged area edged by a low coping. Mr. Bates stepped forward and the rector laid a hand on his arm.
“Not there,” he said. “Do you mind?”
“Don’t!” bellowed Mr. Pilbrow from the rear. “Don’t you set foot on them bloody stones, Mister.”
Mr. Bates backed away.
“Edward’s not swearing,” the rector mildly explained. “He is to be taken, alas, literally. A sad and dreadful story, Mr. Bates.”
“Indeed?” Mr. Bates asked eagerly.
“Indeed, yes. Some time ago, in the very year we have been discussing—1921, you know—one of our girls, a very beautiful girl she was, named Ruth Wall, fell from the balcony of the tower and was, of course, killed. She used to go up there to feed the pigeons and it was thought that in leaning over the low balustrade she overbalanced.”
“Ah!” Mr. Pilbrow roared with considerable relish, evidently guessing the purport of the rector’s speech. “Terrible, terrible! And ’er sweetheart after ’er, too. Terrible!”
“Oh, no!” Troy protested.
The rector made a dabbing gesture to subdue Mr. Pilbrow. “I wish he wouldn’t,” he said. “Yes. It was a few days later. A lad called Simon Castle. They were to be married. People said it must be suicide but—it may have been wrong of me—I couldn’t bring myself—in short, he lies beside her over there. If you would care to look.”
For a minute or two they stood before the headstones.
“Ruth Wall. Spinster of this Parish. 1903–1921. I will extend peace to her like a river.”
“Simon Castle. Bachelor of this Parish. 1900–1921. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”
The afternoon having by now worn on, and the others having excused themselves, Mr. Bates remained alone in the churchyard, clutching his Bible and staring at the headstones. The light of the hunter’s zeal still gleamed in his eyes.
Troy didn’t see Mr. Bates again until Sunday night service when, on her way up the aisle, she passed him, sitting in the rearmost pew. She was amused to observe that his gigantic Bible was under the seat.
“We plough the fields,” sang the choir, “and scatter—” Mrs. Simpson roared away on the organ, the smell of assorted greengrocery rising like some humble incense. Everybody in Little Copplestone except Mr. Richard De’ath was there for the Harvest Festival. At last the rector stepped over Miss Hart’s biggest pumpkin and ascended the pulpit, Edward Pilbrow switched off all the lights except one and they settled down for the sermon.
“A sower went forth to sow,” announced the rector. He spoke simply and well but somehow Troy’s attention wandered. She found herself wondering where, through the centuries, the succeeding generations of Wagstaffs had sat until Old Jimmy took to his freakish practices; and whether Ruth Wall and Simon Castle, poor things, had shared the same hymn book and held hands during the sermon; and whether, after all, Stewart Shakespeare Hadet and Peter Rook Hadet had not, in 1779, occupied some dark corner of the church and been unaccountably forgotten.
Here we are, Troy thought drowsily, and there, outside in the churchyard, are all the others going back and back—
She saw a girl, bright in the evening sunlight, reach from a balcony toward a multitude of wings. She was falling—dreadfully—into nothingness. Troy woke with a sickening jerk.
“—on stony ground,” the rector was saying. Troy listened guiltily to the rest of the sermon.
Mr. Bates emerged on the balcony. He laid his Bible on the coping and looked at the moonlit tree tops and the churchyard so dreadfully far below. He heard someone coming up the stairway. Torchlight danced on the door jamb.
“You were quick,” said the visitor.
“I am all eagerness and, I confess, puzzlement.”
“It had to be here, on the spot. If you really want to find out—”
“But I do, I do!”
“We haven’t much time. You’ve brought the Bible?”
“You particularly asked—”
“If you open it at Ezekiel, chapter twelve. I’ll shine my torch.”
Mr. Bates opened the Bible.
“The thirteenth verse. There!”
Mr. Bates leaned forward. The Bible tipped and moved.
“Look out!” the voice urged.
Mr. Bates was scarcely aware of the thrust. He felt the page tear as the book sank under his hands. The last thing he heard was the beating of a multitude of wings.
“—and forevermore,” said the rector in a changed voice, facing east. The congregation got to its feet. He announced the last hymn. Mrs. Simpson made a preliminary rumble and Troy groped in her pocket for the collection plate. Presently they all filed out into the autumnal moonlight.
It was coldish in the churchyard. People stood about in groups. One or two had already moved through the lychgate. Troy heard a voice, which she recognised as that of Mr. De’ath. “I suppose,” it jeered, “you all know you’ve been assisting at a fertility rite.”
“Drunk as usual, Dick De’ath,” somebody returned without rancour. There was a general laugh.
They had all begun to move away when, from the shadows at the base of the church tower, there arose a great cry. They stood, transfixed, turned toward the voice.
Out of the shadows came the rector in his cassock. When Troy saw his face she thought he must be ill and went to him.
“No, no!” he said. “Not a woman! Edward! Where’s Edward Pilbrow?”
Behind him, at the foot of the tower, was a pool of darkness; but Troy, having come closer, could see within it a figure, broken like a puppet on the flagstones. An eddy of night air stole round the church and fluttered a page of the giant Bible that lay pinned beneath the head.
It was nine o’clock when Troy heard the car pull up outside the cottage. She saw her husband coming up the path and ran to meet him, as if they had been parted for months.
He said, “This is mighty gratifying!” And then, “Hullo, my love. What’s the matter?”
As she tumbled out her story, filled with relief at telling him, a large man with uncommonly bright eyes came up behind them.
“Listen to this, Fox,” Roderick Alleyn said. “We’re in demand, it seems.” He put his arm through Troy’s and closed his hand round hers. “Let’s go indoors, shall we? Here’s Fox, darling, come for a nice bucolic rest. Can we give him a bed?”
Troy pulled herself together and greeted Inspector Fox. Presently she was able to give them a coherent account of the evening’s tragedy. When she had finished, Alleyn said, “Poor little Bates. He was a nice little bloke.” He put his hand on Troy’s. “You need a drink,” he said, “and so, by the way, do we.”
While he was getting the drinks he asked quite casually, “You’ve had a shock and a beastly one at that, but there’s something else, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” Troy swallowed hard, “there is. They’re all saying it’s an accident.”
“Yes?”
“And, Rory, I don’t think it is.”
Mr. Fox cleared his throat. “Fancy,” he said.
“Suicide?” Alleyn suggested, bringing her drink to her.
“No. Certainly not.”
“A bit of rough stuff, then?”
“You sound as if you’re asking about the sort of weather we’ve been having.”
“Well, darling, you don’t expect Fox and me to go into hysterics. Why not an accident?”
“He knew all about the other accidents, he knew it was dangerous. And then the oddness of it, Rory. To leave the Harvest Festival service and climb the tower in the dark, carrying that enormous Bible!”
“And he was hellbent on tracing these Hadets?”
“Yes. He kept saying you’d be interested. He actually brought a copy of the entries for you.”
“Have you got it?”
She found it for him. “The selected texts,” he said, “are pretty rum, aren’t they, Br’er Fox?” and handed it over.
“Very vindictive,” said Mr. Fox.
“Mr. Bates thought it was in your line,” Troy said.
“The devil he did! What’s been done about this?”
“The village policeman was in the church. They sent for the doctor. And—well, you see, Mr. Bates had talked a lot about you and they hope you’ll be able to tell them something about him—whom they should get in touch with and so on.”
“Have they moved him?”
“They weren’t going to until the doctor had seen him.”
Alleyn pulled his wife’s ear and looked at Fox. “Do you fancy a stroll through the village, Foxkin?”
“There’s a lovely moon,” Fox said bitterly and got to his feet.
The moon was high in the heavens when they came to the base of the tower and it shone on a group of four men—the rector, Richard De’ath, Edward Pilbrow, and Sergeant Botting, the village constable. When they saw Alleyn and Fox, they separated and revealed a fifth, who was kneeling by the body of Timothy Bates.
“Kind of you to come,” the rector said, shaking hands with Alleyn. “And a great relief to all of us.”
Their manner indicated that Alleyn’s arrival would remove a sense of personal responsibility. “If you’d like to have a look—?” the doctor said.
The broken body lay huddled on its side. The head rested on the open Bible. The right hand, rigid in cadaveric spasm, clutched a torn page. Alleyn knelt and Fox came closer with the torch. At the top of the page Alleyn saw the word Ezekiel and a little farther down, Chapter 12.
Using the tip of his finger Alleyn straightened the page. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the thirteenth verse. “My net also will I spread upon him and he shall be taken in my snare.”
The words had been faintly underlined in mauve.
Alleyn stood up and looked round the circle of faces.
“Well,” the doctor said, “we’d better see about moving him.”
Alleyn said, “I don’t think he should be moved just yet.”
“Not!” the rector cried out. “But surely—to leave him like this—I mean, after this terrible accident—”
“It has yet to be proved,” Alleyn said, “that it was an accident.”
There was a sharp sound from Richard De’ath.
“—and I fancy,” Alleyn went on, glancing at De’ath, “that it’s going to take quite a lot of proving.”
After that, events, as Fox observed with resignation, took the course that was to be expected. The local Superintendent said that under the circumstances it would be silly not to ask Alleyn to carry on, the Chief Constable agreed, and appropriate instructions came through from Scotland Yard. The rest of the night was spent in routine procedure. The body having been photographed and the Bible set aside for fingerprinting, both were removed and arrangements put in hand for the inquest.
At dawn Alleyn and Fox climbed the tower. The winding stair brought them to an extremely narrow doorway through which they saw the countryside lying vaporous in the faint light. Fox was about to go through to the balcony when Alleyn stopped him and pointed to the door jambs. They were covered with a growth of stonecrop.
About three feet from the floor this had been brushed off over a space of perhaps four inches and fragments of the microscopic plant hung from the scars. From among these, on either side, Alleyn removed morsels of dark coloured thread. “And here,” he sighed, “as sure as fate, we go again. O Lord, O Lord!”
They stepped through to the balcony and there was a sudden whirr and beating of wings as a company of pigeons flew out of the tower. The balcony was narrow and the balustrade indeed very low. “If there’s any looking over,” Alleyn said, “you, my dear Foxkin, may do it.”
Nevertheless he leaned over the balustrade and presently knelt beside it. “Look at this. Bates rested the open Bible here—blow me down flat if he didn’t! There’s a powder of leather where it scraped on the stone and a fragment where it tore. It must have been moved—outward. Now, why, why?”
“Shoved it accidentally with his knees, then made a grab and overbalanced?”
“But why put the open Bible there? To read by moonlight? My net also will I spread upon him and he shall be taken in my snare. Are you going to tell me he underlined it and then dived overboard?”
“I’m not going to tell you anything,” Fox grunted and then: “That old chap Edward Pilbrow’s down below swabbing the stones. He looks like a beetle.”
“Let him look like a rhinoceros if he wants to, but for the love of Mike don’t leer over the edge—you give me the willies. Here, let’s pick this stuff up before it blows away.”
They salvaged the scraps of leather and put them in an envelope. Since there was nothing more to do, they went down and out through the vestry and so home to breakfast.
“Darling,” Alleyn told his wife, “you’ve landed us with a snorter.”
“Then you do think—?”
“There’s a certain degree of fishiness. Now, see here, wouldn’t somebody have noticed little Bates get up and go out? I know he sat all alone on the back bench, but wasn’t there someone?”
“The rector?”
“No. I asked him. Too intent on his sermon, it seems.”
“Mrs. Simpson? If she looks through her little red curtain she faces the nave.”
“We’d better call on her, Fox. I’ll take the opportunity to send a couple of cables to New Zealand. She’s fat, jolly, keeps the shop-cum-post-office, and is supposed to read all the postcards. Just your cup of tea. You’re dynamite with post-mistresses. Away we go.”
Mrs. Simpson sat behind her counter doing a crossword puzzle and refreshing herself with liquorice. She welcomed Alleyn with enthusiasm. He introduced Fox and then he retired to a corner to write out his cables.
“What a catastrophe!” Mrs. Simpson said, plunging straight into the tragedy. “Shocking! As nice a little gentleman as you’d wish to meet, Mr. Fox. Typical New Zealander. Pick him a mile away and a friend of Mr. Alleyn’s, I’m told, and if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times, Mr. Fox, they ought to have put something up to prevent it. Wire netting or a bit of ironwork; but, no, they let it go on from year to year and now see what’s happened—history repeating itself and giving the village a bad name. Terrible!”
Fox bought a packet of tobacco from Mrs. Simpson and paid her a number of compliments on the layout of her shop, modulating from there into an appreciation of the village. He said that one always found such pleasant company in small communities. Mrs. Simpson was impressed and offered him a piece of liquorice.
“As for pleasant company,” she chuckled, “that’s as may be, though by and large I suppose I mustn’t grumble. I’m a cockney and a stranger here myself, Mr. Fox. Only twenty-four years and that doesn’t go for anything with this lot.”
“Ah,” Fox said, “then you wouldn’t recollect the former tragedies. Though to be sure,” he added, “you wouldn’t do that in any case, being much too young, if you’ll excuse the liberty, Mrs. Simpson.”
After this classic opening Alleyn was not surprised to hear Mrs. Simpson embark on a retrospective survey of life in Little Copplestone. She was particularly lively on Miss Hart, who, she hinted, had had her eye on Mr. Richard De’ath for many a long day.
“As far back as when Old Jimmy Wagstaff died, which was why she was so set on getting the next door house; but Mr. De’ath never looked at anybody except Ruth Wall, and her head-over-heels in love with young Castle, which together with her falling to her destruction when feeding pigeons led Mr. De’ath to forsake religion and take to drink, which he has done something cruel ever since.
“They do say he’s got a terrible temper, Mr. Fox, and it’s well known he give Old Jimmy Wagstaff a thrashing on account of straying cattle and threatened young Castle, saying if he couldn’t have Ruth, nobody else would, but fair’s fair and personally I’ve never seen him anything but nice-mannered, drunk or sober. Speak as you find’s my motto and always has been, but these old maids, when they take a fancy they get it pitiful hard. You wouldn’t know a word of nine letters meaning ‘pale-faced lure like a sprat in a fishy story’, would you?”
Fox was speechless, but Alleyn, emerging with his cables, suggested “whitebait.”
“Correct!” shouted Mrs. Simpson. “Fits like a glove. Although it’s not a bit like a sprat and a quarter the size. Cheating, I call it. Still, it fits.” She licked her indelible pencil and triumphantly added it to her crossword.
They managed to lead her back to Timothy Bates. Fox, professing a passionate interest in organ music, was able to extract from her that when the rector began his sermon she had in fact dimly observed someone move out of the back bench and through the doors. “He must have walked round the church and in through the vestry and little did I think he was going to his death,” Mrs. Simpson said with considerable relish and a sigh like an earthquake.
“You didn’t happen to hear him in the vestry?” Fox ventured, but it appeared that the door from the vestry into the organ loft was shut and Mrs. Simpson, having settled herself to enjoy the sermon with, as she shamelessly admitted, a bag of chocolates, was not in a position to notice.
