“The Rosamonde—I know the story,” said Wimsey, gently. “It called, ‘Help, Jehan! Help, Jehan!’ It gave me the grues, too.”
“That’s the one, my lord. Anyhow, I got the body down, as I said. I opened the grave and was just going to put him in—”
“You used the sexton’s spade, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir. The key of the crypt was on Rector’s bunch. As I was saying, I was going to put it in, when I remembered that the grave might be opened and the body recognised. So I gave it some good, hard blows with the spade across the face—”
He shuddered. “That was a bad bit, sir. And the hands. I’d recognised them, and so might other people. I got out my jack-knife, and I—well, there!”
“‘With the big sugar-nippers they nipped off his flippers,’” quoted Wimsey, flippantly.
“Yes, my lord. I made them into a parcel with his papers and slipped it all in my pocket. But I put the ropes and his hat down the old well. Then I filled up the grave and put the wreaths back as tidily as I could, and cleaned the tools. But I can tell you, I didn’t care about taking them back into the church. All those gold angels with their eyes open in the darkness—and old Abbot Thomas lying there on his tomb. When my foot crunched on a bit of coke behind the screen, my heart was in my mouth.”
“Harry Gotobed really ought to be more careful with the coke,” said Wimsey. “It’s not for want of telling.”
“That damned parcel of stuff was burning my pocket, too. I went up and had a look at the stoves, but they were all stoked up for the night, and the top nowhere near burnt through. I didn’t dare put anything in there. Then I had to go up and clean down the belfry. There’d been beer spilt on the floor. Fortunately, Harry Gotobed had left a bucket of water in the coke-house, so I didn’t have to draw any from the well, though I’ve often wondered if he noticed next day that the water was gone. I made everything as clean as I could, and stacked the planks up where I’d found them, and I took away the beer-bottles—”
“Two of them,” said Wimsey. “There were three.”
“Were there? I couldn’t see but the two. I locked up everything tight, and then I wondered what I’d better do with the keys. Finally, I thought I’d best leave them in the vestry, as though Rector had forgotten them—all but the key of the porch, and I left that in the lock. It was the best I could think of.”
“And the parcel?”
“Ah! that. I kept the papers and a lot of money that was with them, but the—those other things—I threw into the Thirty-Foot, twelve miles off from Fenchurch, and the bottles with them. The papers and notes I burnt when I—I got back to London. There was a good fire—for a wonder—in the waiting-room at King’s Cross and nobody much about. I didn’t think anybody would look for them there. I didn’t quite know what to do with Will’s coat, but in the end I posted it back to him with a note. I just said, ‘many thanks for loan. I’ve put away what you left in the belfry.’ I couldn’t be more open you see, for fear Mary might undo the parcel and read the letter.”
“I couldn’t write much to you, for same reason,” said Will. “I thought, you see, you had somehow got Deacon away. It never entered my head that he was dead. And Mary usually reads my letters through before they go, sometimes adding a bit of her own. So I just said: ‘Many thanks for all you’ve done for me’—which might a-been took to refer to you nursing me when I was ill. I see you hadn’t took the £200, but I supposed you’d managed some fashion, so I just put that back in the bank where it came from. It was a queer thing to me that your letters had grown so short all of a sudden, but I understand it now.”
“I couldn’t just feel the same, Will,” said Jim. “I didn’t blame you, mind—but that rope stuck in my gullet. When did you find out what had happened?”
“Why, when the corpse came up. And—you’ll have to forgive me, Jim—but, naturally, I fancied you’d done the job yourself, and—why, there! I didn’t rightly feel the same, neither. Only I kept on hoping, maybe he’d died natural.”
“He didn’t do that,” said Parker, thoughtfully.
“Then who killed him?” demanded Jim.
“I’m sure you didn’t, for one,” replied the detective. “If you had, you’d have accepted the suggestion that he died of exposure. And somehow I’m inclined to believe your brother didn’t do it either—though you’re both accessories after the fact to Deacon’s crimes, and you aren’t clear of the other thing yet; don’t think it. You’d have an awkward time with a prosecuting counsel, both of you. But personally, I’m inclined to believe you both.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“How about Mrs. Thoday? The truth, mind.”
“That’s all right, sir. She was uneasy in her mind—I won’t say she wasn’t, seeing me so queer, especially after the body was found. But it was only when she saw Deacon’s handwriting on that paper that the meaning of it all come to her. Then she asked me, and I told her part of the truth. I said I’d found out that the dead man was Deacon and that somebody—not me—must have killed him. And she guessed that Jim was mixed up in it. So I said, maybe, but we must stand together and not make trouble for Jim. And she agreed, only she said we must get married again, because we were living in sin. She’s a good woman, and I couldn’t reason her out of it, so I gave in about that, and we’d fixed to get it all done quiet-like in London—only you found us out, sir.”
“Yes,” said Blundell, “you’ve got to thank his lordship here for that. He seemed to know all about it, and very sorry he was to have to stop you, I must say. Seemed to think whoever put Deacon away ought to get the Wedding March out of Lohengrin and flowers all down the aisle.”
“Is there any reason why they shouldn’t go on and get married now, Superintendent?”
“I don’t know as there is,” grunted Mr. Blundell. “Not if these two are telling the truth. Proceedings there may be—you two ain’t out of the wood yet, but as to getting married, I don’t see no great harm in it. We’ve got their story, and I don’t know as poor Mary can add very much to it.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” said Will again.
“But as to who did kill Deacon,” went on the Superintendent, “we don’t seem very much forrarder. Unless it was Potty or Cranton, after all. I don’t know as I ever heard anything queerer than this business. All these three, a-dodging in and out of that old belfry, one up t’other come on—there’s something behind it yet that we don’t understand. And you two—” he turned fiercely on the brothers—“you keep your mouths shut about this. It’ll have to come out some time, that’s a certainty, but if you get talking and obstruct us in our duty of laying hands on the rightful murderer, you’re for it. Understand?”
He ruminated, sucking his walrus moustache between his large yellow teeth. “I’d better go down home and grill Potty, I suppose,” he muttered, discontentedly. “But if he done it, how did he do it? That’s what beats me.”
IV.
A FULL PEAL OF KENT TREBLE BOB MAJOR
(Three Parts)
5,376
By the Course Ends
65432
34562
23645
35642
42356
8th the Observation.
Call her before, middle with a double, wrong with a double and home; wrong with a double and home with a double; middle with a double; wrong and home with a double; before, middle with a double, wrong and home with a double; before, middle with a double and wrong with a double. Twice repeated.
(J. WILDE)
THE FIRST PART
THE WATERS ARE CALLED OUT
Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of everything that creepeth upon the earth there went in two and two unto Noah into the ark.
GENESIS vii. 8, 9.
The public memory is a short one. The affair of the Corpse in Country Churchyard was succeeded, as the weeks rolled on, by so many Bodies in Blazing Garages, Man-Hunts for Missing Murderers, Tragedies in West-End Flats, Su
icide-Pacts in Lonely Woods, Nude Corpses in Caves and Midnight Shots in Fashionable Road-Houses, that nobody gave it another thought, except Superintendent Blundell and the obscure villagers of Fenchurch St. Paul. Even the discovery of the emeralds and the identity of the dead man had been successfully kept out of the papers, and the secret of the Thoday remarriage lay buried in the discreet breasts of the police, Lord Peter Wimsey and Mr. Venables, none of whom had any inducement to make these matters known.
Potty Peake had been interrogated, but without much success. He was not good at remembering dates, and his conversation, while full of strange hints and prophecies, had a way of escaping from the restraints of logic and playing gruesomely among the dangling bell-ropes. His aunt gave him an alibi, for what her memory and observation were worth, which was not a great deal. Nor did Mr. Blundell feel any great enthusiasm about putting Potty Peake in the dock. It was a hundred to one that he would be pronounced unfit to plead, and the result, in any case, might be to lock him up in an institution. “And you know, old lady,” said Mr. Blundell to Mrs. Blundell, “I can’t see Potty doing such a thing, poor chap.” Mrs. Blundell agreed with him.
As regards the Thodays, the position was highly unsatisfactory. If either were charged separately, there would always be sufficient doubt about the other to secure an acquittal, while, if they were charged together, their joint story might well have the same effect upon the jury that it had already had upon the police. They would be acquitted and left under suspicion in the minds of their neighbours, and that would be unsatisfactory too. Or they might, of course, both be hanged—“and between you and me, sir,” said Mr. Blundell to the Chief Constable, “I’d never be easy in my mind if they were.”
The Chief Constable was uneasy too. “You see, Blundell,” he observed, “our difficulty is that we’ve no real proof of the murder. If you could only be sure what the fellow died of—”
So a period of inaction set in. Jim Thoday returned to his ship; Will Thoday, his marriage ceremony performed, went home and went on with his work. In time the parrot forgot its newly-learnt phrases—only coming out with them at long and infrequent intervals. The Rector carried on with his marryings, churchings and baptisms, and Tailor Paul tolled out a knell or two, or struck her solemn blows as the bells hunted in their courses. And the River Wale, rejoicing in its new opportunity, and swollen by the heavy rains of a wet summer and autumn, ground out its channel inch by inch and foot by foot, nine feet deeper than before, so that the water came up brackish at high tide as far as the Great Leam and the Old Bank Sluices were set open to their full extent, draining the Upper Fen.
And it was needed; for in that summer the water lay on the land all through August and September, and the corn sprouted in the stocks, and the sodden ricks took fire and stank horribly, and the Rector of Fenchurch St. Paul, conducting the Harvest Festival, had to modify his favourite sermon upon Thankfulness, for there was scarcely sound wheat enough to lay upon the altar and no great sheaves for the aisle windows or for binding about the stoves, as was customary. Indeed, so late was the harvest and so dank and chill the air, that the stoves were obliged to be lit for the evening service, whereby a giant pumpkin, left incautiously in the direct line of fire, was found to be part-roasted when the time came to send the kindly fruits of the earth to the local hospital.
Wimsey had determined that he would never go back to Fenchurch St. Paul. His memories of it were disquieting, and he felt that there were one or two people in that parish who would be better pleased if they never saw his face again. But when Hilary Thorpe wrote to him and begged him to come and see her during her Christmas holidays, he felt bound to go. His position with regard to her was peculiar. Mr. Edward Thorpe, as Trustee under her father’s will and her natural guardian, had rights which no court of law would gainsay; on the other hand Wimsey, as sole trustee to the far greater Wilbraham estate, held a certain advantage. He could, if he chose, make things awkward for Mr. Thorpe. Hilary possessed written evidence of her father’s wishes about her education, and Uncle Edward could scarcely now oppose them on the plea of lack of funds. But Wimsey, holding the purse-strings, could refuse to untie them unless those wishes were carried out. If Uncle Edward chose to be obstinate, there was every prospect of a legal dog-fight; but Wimsey did not believe that Uncle Edward would be obstinate to that point. It was in Wimsey’s power to turn Hilary from an obligation into an asset for Uncle Edward, and it seemed very possible that he would pocket his principles and take the cash. Already he had shown signs of bowing to the rising sun; he had agreed to take Hilary down to spend Christmas at the Red House, instead of with him in London. It was, indeed, not Mr. Thorpe’s fault that the Red House was available; he had done his best to let it, but the number of persons desirous of tenanting a large house in ill-repair, situated in a howling desert and encumbered with a dilapidated and heavily mortgaged property, was not very large. Hilary had her way, and Wimsey, while heartily wishing that the whole business could have been settled in London, liked the girl for her determination to stick to the family estate. Here again, Wimsey was a power in the land. He could put the property in order if he liked and pay off the mortgages, and that would no doubt be a satisfaction to Mr. Thorpe, who had no power to sell under the terms of his trust. A final deciding factor was that if Wimsey did not spend Christmas at Fenchurch, he would have no decent excuse for not spending it with his brother’s family at Denver, and of all things in the world, a Christmas at Denver was most disagreeable to him.
Accordingly, he looked in at Denver for a day or two, irritated his sister-in-law and her guests as much as, and no more than, usual and thence, on Christmas Eve, made his way across country to Fenchurch St. Paul.
“They seem,” said Wimsey, “to keep a special brand of disgusting weather in these parts.” He thrust up his hand against the hood of the car, discharging a deluge of water. “Last time it was snowing and now it’s pelting cats and dogs. There’s a fate in it, Bunter.”
“Yes, my lord,” said that long-suffering man. He was deeply attached to his master, but sometimes felt his determined dislike of closed cars to be a trifle unreasonable. “A very inclement season, my lord.”
“Well, well, we must push on, push on. A merry heart goes all the way. You don’t look very merry, Bunter, but then you’re one of those sphinx-like people. I’ve never seen you upset, except about that infernal beer-bottle.”
“No, my lord. That hurt my pride very much, if I may say so. A very curious circumstance, that, my lord.”
“Pure accident, I think, though it had a suspicious appearance at the time. Whereabouts are we now? Oh, yes, Lympsey, of course; we cross over the Great Leam here by the Old Bank Sluice. We must be just coming to it. Yes, there it is. By Jove! some water coming through here!”
He pulled up the car just beyond the bridge, got out and stood in the downpour staring at the sluice. Its five great gates were open, the iron ratchets on the bridge above drawn up to their full extent. Dark and menacing, the swollen flood-water raced through the sluices, eddying and turning and carrying with them the brown reeds and broken willow-stems and here and there fragments of timber filched from the drowned lands of the Upper Fen. And even while he watched, there came a change. Angry little waves and gurgles ruffled the strong flow of the river, with an appearance as of repressed tumult and conflict. A man came out of the gate-house by the bridge and took up his position by the sluice, staring down into the river. Wimsey hailed him.
“Tide coming up?”
“Yes, sir. We has to watch her now if we don’t want to get the water all across the causey. But she don’t rise very far, not without there’s an extraordinary high spring tide. She’s just coming up to springs now, so we has to do a bit of manipulation, like.” He turned, and began to wind down the sluices.
“You see the idea, Bunter. If they shut this sluice, all the upland water has to go by the Old Leam, which has enough to do as it is. But if they leave it open and the tide’s strong enough to carry th
e flood-water back with it through the sluice, they’ll drown all the country above the sluice.”
“That’s it, sir,” said the man with a grin. “And if the flood-water carries the tide back, we might drown you. It all depends, you see.”
“Then we’ll hope you manipulate things in our favour,” said Wimsey, cheerfully. The rush of water through the arches was slackening now with the lowering of the sluice-gates, the whirlpools became shallower, and the floating sticks and reeds began to eddy against the piles of the bridge. “Just hold her back for a bit till we get to Fenchurch, there’s a good fellow.”
“Oh, we’ll keep her level, don’t you be afraid,” said the man, reassuringly. “There ain’t nothing wrong wi’ this here sluice.”
He put such marked emphasis on the word “this” that Wimsey looked sharply at him.
“How about Van Leyden’s Sluice?”
The man shook his head.
“I dunno, sir, but I did hear as old Joe Massey down there were in a great taking about they old gates of his. There was three gentlemen went down yesterday to look at ’em—from the Conservancy or the Board or something o’ that, I reckon. But you can’t do nothing much for they gates in flood-time. Mebbe they’ll hold, mebbe they won’t. It’s all according.”
“Well, that’s jolly,” said Wimsey. “Come on, Bunter. Have you made your will? We’d better go while the going’s good.”
Their way this time lay along the south bank or Fenchurch side of the Thirty-foot. Dyke and drain were everywhere abrim and here and there the water stood in the soaked fields as though they needed but little more to sink back into their ancient desolation of mere and fen. There was little movement on the long, straight road. Here a shabby car met them, splashed with mud and squirting water from every pot-hole; here a slow farm cart plodded ahead with a load of mangel-wurzels, the driver huddled under the rough protection of a sodden sack, and deaf and blind to overtaking traffic; there a solitary labourer, bent with rheumatism, slouched homeward dreaming of fire and beer at the nearest pub. The air was so heavy with water, that not till they had passed Frog’s Bridge did they hear the sweet, dull jangle of sound that told them that the ringers were practising their Christmas peal; it drifted through the streaming rain with an aching and intolerable melancholy, like the noise of the bells of a drowned city pulsing up through the overwhelming sea.
Wimsey 009 - The Nine Tailors Page 31