‘‘Was there any evidence that the car had been tampered with?” I asked.
Trevor-Finch gave me a horrified stare. “Who would have tampered with the parson’s car? And why should anyone want to kill an innocuous chap like the parson?”
I didn’t attempt to answer that, but the parson was the third “innocuous” scholar to have his career cut short since I’d reached a crucial point in my research. There’d be scant chance of getting hold of the parson’s tapes now: his murderers would surely have seen to that.
The professor and his daughter left for Creypool. I poured myself another cup of coffee and paged through the professor’s Guardian. Presently Mrs. Mortimor came in to remove the breakfast dishes.
“Wasn’t that a dreadful thing about poor Parson Tompkins?” she asked me, and I was surprised to see her eyes were red and moist.
“Very sad,” I said. “Were you one of the parson’s admirers too?”
She sniffled over a clatter of cups and saucers. “I only knew him from his visits here, sir, but he was such a fine gentleman I’m sure he gave lovely sermons. I always wanted to attend services at Creypool, but Mr. Mortimor wouldn’t hear of it.”
I watched her wipe the crumbs from table to apron. “I guess most people don’t pay too much attention to religion anymore,” I said.
“A person don’t have to go to church every Sunday to have a sustaining faith in the Lord. I don’t know how I’d have managed all these years if I hadn’t had my faith, and that’s a fact.”
“You’ve had quite a lot to put up with, then?”
“If you only knew! But you don’t want to hear about my troubles.”
“I can tell by looking at you, Mrs. Mortimor, that your difficulties have only enriched your character. I believe you mentioned some problem with your son which caused you to leave Wopping?’’
“Them’s family matters, sir, and family matters is best left in the family, Mr. Mortimor says. But I can tell you I’ve suffered a good deal for that boy. And for his father too.” She wound her large red hands in her apron and bit her thick lower lip. “It ain’t been no holiday, lookin’ after the likes of them two.”
“I guess it’s fortunate that you’ve been able to keep Jamie with you at Abbotswold,” I ventured.
She sighed. “You don’t know the half of it. They’ve tried to take him away from us any number of times. Wanted to put him in hospital, they did, or in one of them horrid schools for them as are a bit slow. But Mr. Mortimor wouldn’t hear of it. He was always determined the boy would stay with us. I give him credit for that.”
‘‘Commendable, I’m sure—though you know that such places often can help a person with Jamie’s problem. Was he always . . . different, even as a child?”
“He weren’t so far behind the other boys his age when he was a little one. Not till he were eight or nine, and then we began to notice something strange about him. Almost uncanny, it were, as if he could hear things and see things we couldn’t—and somehow they scrambled his poor brain so that he couldn’t do what other boys his age could do.”
“And did you have him looked at by a doctor?”
“Mr. Mortimor was against it, but I snuck the lad to a doctor in Salisbury. He said our boy had been ‘traumatized,’ whatever that means. I knew it was bad when he wouldn’t say it straight out in plain English.”
“Psychiatrists use the term to describe a severe emotional shock, Mrs. Mortimor—one which may have lasting effects on the personality. Do you recall anything like that in your son’s background?”
“Well, it did seem the whole thing may have started with that trip the boy took to Brixton Barrow with his father.”
“Brixton Barrow? That’s an ancient Celtic burial ground, isn’t it? With some prehistoric megaliths?”
“Great big stones, sir, up on this funny little hill. It was an outing of the club Mr. Mortimor belonged to in Paxton-Brindley, the one I told you about. I said the boy was too young to go on an overnight trip, but Mr. Mortimor insisted. And then, when they got back, I saw right away—’’
But at this moment we heard footsteps in the pantry and Mrs. Mortimor shut her lips and looked at the door with a most revealing expression. The door opened and Giles Mortimor looked in on us.
“What you be doin’, gossipin’ with the professor’s young guest when you should be attending to your chores?”
“It’s all right, Mr. Mortimor,” I said. “I was just asking your wife if she could tell me where I might go for a walk this morning.”
The old man glared at me, his pipe clenched between broken teeth. “A smart lot she’d know about that,” he said. ‘‘My wife scarce sets foot outside this house. Now, Jamie and me, we get around the countryside a good deal, and we could tell you where to go, if you’d come to us.”
“That’s what I’ll have to do, then,” I said, returning his hostile squint with a bland and cheerful smile.
The old man seemed to consider the possibilities, then motioned his wife into the pantry, where I heard something that sounded very much like a blow. I finished my coffee, left the dining room and crossed the hall to the stairs. To the best of my knowledge, I had never looked a killer in the eye before, and it left me feeling a bit giddy, as if I’d bet on filling an inside straight and won. But did I have the courage to cash in my chips?
On my way to my room, I noticed that the professor’s door, which I’d seen him unlock before entering, was ajar. He would be gone for another hour at least, and such an opportunity seemed too good to pass up. I went to the door and debated. Of course, it was distasteful to snoop on one’s host; it was equally distasteful to bring a guest into one’s home for reasons one refused to reveal. The hall was empty, the house silent. I knocked once, just to make sure there was no one within, and the door swung open another foot. I quickly stepped in and shut the door behind me.
The room was large and sunny, with bed and dresser at one end, desk and chairs arranged around a fireplace at the other. The professor’s pipe and slippers and a collection of scientific journals waited at an easy chair beside the hearth. A game of chess was in progress at a small table. The arrangement of the pieces looked familiar. Beside the chessboard there was a pad of paper on which the professor had worked out the consequences of several moves, all of which led to white’s mate.
Two photographs on the desk: Stephany and Grand-mama Trevor-Finch (or so I guessed) as a stunning young woman. On the dresser I saw a thirtyish Trevor-Finch in uniform, holding the hand of a pretty child of seven or eight. The photograph had been cropped to delete a third person, whose fingers still clung to the child’s other hand, as if attempting to draw her away from her father and into the void of those whose images are no longer cherished.
I tried a couple of desk drawers, found the usual chaos of paper clips, pencil stubs, defunct fountain pens, and a few pages of rough draft from one of the professor’s articles on quantum physics—or so I supposed, for it was somewhat less intelligible than Greek to me.
I listened at the door and checked the hall to make sure the Mortimors were still downstairs, then went back to the chessboard. White was in serious trouble, all right, but there seemed obvious remedies to his dilemma. Why couldn’t he save his queen by moving it two or more spaces, out of the black knight’s reach? Or why couldn’t the white bishop move down from his position across the board to take the knight and put the black king in check?
Of course! It struck me with the force of inspiration that the game was being played by medieval rules, in which neither queen nor bishop was allowed to move more than one square at a time. Now I knew where I’d seen this game before. In fact, I’d seen it twice: once in the study of the Reverend Samuel Stemp, and once in my own notes to the Westchurch poem.
The professor had had a chessboard set up in his room at Bromley House on the night those notes were stolen.
It took ten minutes of searching to locate the sliding panel in the professor’s closet, another five to find the key in a
dish of pins on the dresser. I unlocked the panel and then held my breath, sure I had heard a footstep in the hall. For several minutes I cowered in the closet, then crept across the room to check the door once more. The hall was empty.
Back in the closet, I slid open the panel, to find a small compartment filled with what seemed at first merely a collection of books. Was the professor a closet pornophile? But no; these were books on medieval history, astrology, witchcraft and the occult—shameful possessions for a man of the professor’s persuasion, nonetheless. I glanced through them and found that a certain Robert Trevor-Finch had put his signature on the inside cover of each. The dates of copyright were old enough to support the thesis that Robert was the professor’s father.
Wedged into one of the books—Witchcraft Then and Now, by Sir Aubrey Rice Poulter—was a narrow strip of photograph, clearly the cropped portion of the family portrait on the dresser. The young, attractive woman who had been holding the child’s hand certainly had Stephany’s sensuous mouth and crystalline complexion, and in her anxious, apologetic smile I saw a restless and unhappy spirit already contemplating the desertion of her family. A portion of Sir Aubrey’s text had been underlined on the page marked by the photo, and ran as follows：
The most common drugs employed by witches of the middle ages, and still in use today, are the mandrake root, henbane, monkshood and thornapple, the last of these commonly applied as an ointment in preparation for the witches’ sabbath. Among its effects are extraordinarily vivid sexual hallucinations, the illusion of extrasensory perception, and the sensation of flying. Visions of a most unsavory sort (frequently involving intercourse with Satan or his representative) were followed by great guilt and a compulsion to confess. One can only wonder at the sado-masochistic impulse which could lead young women of excellent families to engage in such debasing and self-destructive practices . . .
One could only wonder, indeed, and I put the book away with the sense of having probed deeper than I wished into the professor’s private sorrows.
The last item I found in the closet hiding place greatly eased my conscience. It consisted of several of my very own six-by-nine index cards—my missing notes on the Westchurch poem’s game of chess. It was the game recreated on the professor’s board—a game in which the white queen falls to the black knight while the white bishop is left futilely stranded across the board. At which point black has only to advance another pawn and the game is over. Occurring near the end of the poem, the passage marked a climax and ended with those mysterious lines concerning the appearance of a new star in the sky.
It was more than I could put together at present, and the professor and Stephany would be returning soon from the village. I copied down the material on my cards before returning them to the closet cabinet. Then I drew a diagram of the game on the professor’s board. I made sure the room was just as I’d found it, and slipped out. Only one of the Mortimors’ cats, perched lazily on the window ledge where I had seen Abbotswold’s ghost, observed my departure.
~§~
Trevor-Finch was gloomy and distracted at luncheon, unable to muster a single cliché with which to delight and instruct us. Over coffee he announced that he was leaving immediately for London. There were some calculations he wanted to make which would require a special computer.
“Another visit to his shrink,” Stephany said after the professor had gone off. ‘‘Poor Daddy. He’s taking the parson’s death awfully hard.”
“The bad luck of the Trevor-Finches seems to be catching,” I remarked. “Your father has had young men from the College down before, I gather. Have they all made it back alive?”
“Our misfortunes are no laughing matter.”
“So who’s laughing? Stephany, I’ve really got to talk to your grandmother, preferably before your father gets back tomorrow afternoon. Will you see what you can do?”
“I owe Grandmama another visit, anyway. I’ll spend the afternoon with her—she likes that. If you can exist that long without me.”
“I’m going out for a ramble. If I’m not back by sundown, send out the Saint Bernards.’’
The Mortimors, father and son, were working in a flower bed at the other end of the long lawn. The old man turned the soil while Jamie stood by, a two-hundred-pound bag of fertilizer held effortlessly in his massive arms. I didn’t think they saw me round the house.
I went up the old road which Stephany and I had used the day before. Well beyond the woodcutter’s cottage it left the woods for an open pasture. I followed it to a high point about a mile from the house and saw that it eventually joined the highway. If I had my geography straight, Creypool wasn’t more than three miles to the southwest, the abbey somewhat closer. The road was decrepit, but still passable. All of which meant that the abbey was more convenient to Abbotswold than I’d realized.
A few sheep gazed sluggishly at me as I headed back; a billy goat brayed a warning but, seeing that I could outrun his horns, returned to his feast of spring grass. It was a gorgeous day, and I found it sad and not a little silly that, with all this lovely countryside at their disposal, the Trevor-Finches had never succeeded in being anything but miserable. What would it take, I wondered, to lay old ghosts to rest and give this land back to the living?
There were fresh tire tracks in the mud. They turned off the road and followed an overgrown lane to the woodcutter’s cottage. Cautiously, I proceeded to the verge of the clearing. Cords of wood were stacked in the yard. The cottage had a heavy padlock on the door. I went up to one of the small, dirty windows and cupped my hand at the glass to peer in, but the darkness was impenetrable. I was becoming quite a hand at snooping into people’s private affairs, and I felt sure the Mortimors’ would prove more interesting than most.
Around in back I found a lean-to shed, the door of which was unlocked. The shed was full of axes, saws, sledges, scythes—but there was also a box of candles and a door into the cottage proper where a broken lock might not be noticed for quite some time. I lit one of the candles and went to work with a crowbar, prying out the iron plate that held the lock. The door opened on creaking hinges and I stepped into a vile-smelling darkness and raised the candle.
What I saw was hard to believe; it might have come straight out of Sir Aubrey Rice Poulter’s account of the eccentric pastimes of witches and assorted ghouls. At the hearth was a cauldron and in the cauldron some tarry substance which explained the offensive odor of the place. The beams and rafters were adorned with spider webs. Laid out on several tables were the dried corpses of snakes, bats, toads and lizards, along with several cages which hissed and squeaked at me as I passed the candle before beady rodent eyes. On a set of shelves I saw bunches of herbs and weeds, jars filled with powders and pastes. Farther along these shelves I found bones, scraps of fur and skin, jars of internal and sexual organs from what must have been a great variety of beasts. In the first cabinet I tried there were horns and masks, black robes, whips and straps and several large phallic objects. It was almost laughable, this grotesque collection of lunatic treasures, but what I discovered in the next cabinet gave me an ugly jolt. Weren’t those human teeth, fingernails, locks of hair? Then—I couldn’t side-step recognition now—those other things the cabinet contained—bones, skin, shriveled organs, jars of blood and what appeared to be semen—were also likely human, and a large bottle of pickled eyeballs stared back at me like the condensed essence of some fiendish massacre. I shut the cabinet in a hurry, and turning away, encountered a leering, ruddy, blank-eyed Satan, the mask hung just above an upside-down crucifix.
I was already heading for the exit when the sound of an approaching engine came dimly through the stone walls. I shut the door and fit the iron plate and lock back in place. The broken lock would no longer catch and a breeze would have blown the door open. I held it shut with my shoulder as footsteps approached the cottage. A car pulled into the yard; its door opened and closed.
‘‘Well, Giles, right on time, I see,” said a pleasant and cultivated voice.
“Aye, sir. Did you have a good trip?” I was surprised at the note of cordiality, even servility, in the old man’s voice.
“All but the last few miles. I’ll be glad when your employer leaves and I can come up the main drive.”
“He’s gone off to London to see our friend the doctor, but Miss Trevor-Finch and the Yank are still here.”
There was a sound of a key in the front padlock. They entered the cottage and I could hear their voices quite well by putting my ear to the door. By the sound of those heavy footsteps, Jamie was with them.
“Well now, Giles,” the gentleman said, “the business with the parson—it was successfully handled, I take it?”
“It was, sir. The parson’s out of our hair for good.”
“And the tapes?”
“We’ve got them with us. Jamie, give Mr. Regis the bag like a good boy.”
“Hmm. Should make interesting listening,” the gentleman said. “Now we’ll know if we have any tattletales in the coven—right, Giles?”
“Just you tell me who they are. I’ll take care of ’em; you can count on that.”
“I’ve always been able to count on you, Giles. You and the boy have proved invaluable. It was a brilliant stroke, getting you this position. Has the professor given you any trouble?”
‘‘Not since we let on how much we knew about him. ’Course, we keep him in the dark as much as possible, and he’s a cowardly soul in any case—would rather not know about the likes o’ us. But if I might make one suggestion, your honor?”
“Yes, Giles?”
“It’s the Yank. He’s been talkin’ to my missus, tryin’ to pry things out of her. There’s little enough she knows—we needna worry on that score—but the Yank’s got his suspicions. He knows too bloody much already, and it’s time we went to the root o’ the problem, as you might say. ’Twould be easy enough to put a little pinch o’ this or that into his food, and—’’
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