Toll the Bell for Murder (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

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  Toll the Bell for Murder

  by

  George Bellairs

  To

  PROFESSOR VICTOR LAMBERT, F.R.C.S.

  With Affection and High Esteem

  1

  SOMETHING WRONG IN THE CURRAGH

  IN THE SCHOOLROOM of the village of Mylecharaine, in the north of the Isle of Man, the local women were holding a ‘Tay’—Manx for Tea-in preparation for a jumble sale next day. The proceeds were to go to a fund for decorating the church. There were around thirty there; about a third of them occupied in laying food on long tables, and the rest sorting out the loot which had been collected from their own and neighbouring parishes for the morrow’s big event.

  It was well past tea-time. The sun had just set across the sea behind Jurby Head, which meant it was seven o’clock, the end of a lovely April day. All around the squat little whitewashed school stretched the flat curragh lands, marshy still from the recent rains but green with the onset of Spring, with wisps of mist rising from them with the coming of night. In the background to the south, the great bastion of the Manx hills, ending suddenly and spectacularly where the fenlands began.

  But the assembled women had no time for admiring the evening or the view. They were busy with the spoils, assessing their values with experienced eyes and hands, ticketing them with prices, and maintaining a running commentary on the donors of the jumble.

  A pile of soiled raincoats, some brass fire-irons, a washtub, a heap of bound religious magazines, old boots and shoes, a decrepit carpet-sweeper, a tumbledown chair with a worn horsehair seat, a musical-box, and a hand-driven sewing machine were all swiftly dealt with. Then Mrs. Lace, of Ballagot, wearing a hat which ought to have been with the jumble, opened a parcel and gingerly held aloft a pair of shabby riding-breeches, two soiled old dress-shirts, a grey morning coat and a topper to match, and a velvet smoking jacket with a red lining and the pile suffering from moths or some obscure, mangy disease.

  “I can hardly persuade myself to touch them for fear they contaminate me,” said Mrs. Lace, seeing nothing funny at all in the variety of the bundle or how its contents might be used.

  “Who sent it?”

  “You might know. Who else but a transgressor, a wicked transgressor, would wear such stuff.”

  “Not Sir Martin?”

  “His very self.”

  All work ceased as the women scuffled to inspect the apparel of sin and shame, for Sir Martin Skollick, unofficial squire of Mylecharaine and tenant of Myrescogh House, had a dirty reputation. Two good-looking farm girls had already, it was said, had to go to England to bear his illicit offspring, and no woman was safe from him.

  Here, in the very schoolroom itself, he seemed to have dumped the cast-offs of his sin, and some of the younger and livelier members of the party were already reconstructing Sir Martin in the sporting breeches, the flame-lined jacket, the elegant topper and the shabby Ascot coat, which once he wore in wicked haunts across the water.

  All this rush of dangerous emotion was violently interrupted by a scream from one corner, occupied by Miss Caley, a maiden lady from Ballaugh, who was unwrapping parcels and surrounding herself with their contents. Barricaded by a pile of cracked plates, a black-steel kitchen fender, a pair of old Wellington boots, an ancient object like an accordion marked ‘vacuum-cleaner’, and two flatirons, she was now holding aloft an object which might have been, judging from her handling, red-hot. It was an old fashioned sporting-gun. In the other hand, Miss Caley balanced a cardboard box half full of cartridges.

  “Whatever ’ave you got there?” said a large fat woman with a dead-pan face, called Armistead, who had arrived from England only two years ago, but who nevertheless tried to boss the show. “Give ’ere. Squealin’ like that. One would think you was bein’ murdered.”

  She took the gun savagely. “Where’d this come from?”

  “Mrs. Quayle, from Balladoole.”

  There arose a sympathetic noise, like a dismal cheer, from the onlookers. Mrs. Quayle, following the death of her husband around Christmas, had broken-up her home, sold out, and gone to live with her son at Ballakilpheric.

  “She said she’d no use for it, so we might as well have it.

  “It’s an old-fashioned one.”

  It was. An ancient breech-loading pin-fire about a hundred years old. All the same, it was in good condition.

  “Two pounds?” said one of the assessors, and the rest nodded.

  “And the cartridges?”

  “I’d throw that lot in. Like as not they don’t make that sort anymore and they’ll be needed if somebody buys the gun.”

  The weapon was labelled £2 and left, with its ammunition, leaning against an old chair in one corner.

  “Tay’s ready.”

  A woman arrived with a huge urn and set it at the head of the table, which was covered to capacity with plates of food. Bread and butter, jam, Manx soda cakes, scones, buns, shortbread, potato cakes and large currant slabs like solid blocks of concrete. And on top of that lot, a strapping girl entered, struggling with a huge steaming cauldron which she had to put on the floor, for there was no room on the table. It was the hot-pot.

  “Where’s pazon? We want him to say grace before the hot-pot gets cold.”

  “He’s in church. Prayin’, leek as not. He’s in one of his bad moods to-day, poor man.”

  Another melancholy and sympathetic cheer from the company.

  The Rev. Sullivan Lee, vicar of Mylecharaine, had arrived from London during the war, after the death of his wife in an air raid. He had been a nervous wreck and it had been thought that this scattered parish, entailing a lot of walking in good air, would do him a world of good. Now and then, Mr. Lee had relapses and behaved a bit wildly. Otherwise, he was a good priest and was well-liked.

  “Somebody go get him.”

  Miss Caley scuttered off, chattering to herself, and the rest took their places round the table. It was almost dark outside. Lights twinkled from the scattered cottages sprinkled over the curraghs, where the menfolk were entertaining themselves whilst the women were away.

  The Rev. Sullivan Lee entered. He blinked as the light of the room caught him and he looked around him as though he’d never seen the place before. A tall, well-built man, with a great dome of a head, almost bald, hollow cheeks and a Roman nose. He wore a sad, tortured look and his dark eyes might have been those of a blind man. There was no recognition or light in them. Then, suddenly, it was as if a shutter had clicked open, and he smiled at the company. It lit-up his whole face and completely changed him.

  “I’m so sorry. Mustn’t let the hash get cold.”

  “It’s ’at-pot,” corrected Mrs. Armistead.

  Lee took his place at the top of the table. He said grace and they all fell-to. He presided like the head of some strange order. He wore a cassock with a leather belt and this, combining with the natural tonsure of his hair, gave him a monastic appearance. He enjoyed his food. They all did, and continued eating until far into the early night. Then they set to work again and he helped them. Nothing exciting happened until long after the party had dispersed.

  Then, as the clock at Ballaugh was striking two musical notes which floated across the flat curraghs in the stillness, there was a terrific explosion. It seemed to hang on the air for a good half minute and then it died away.

  Lights went
on one after another in the upper rooms of the scattered cottages, until the curragh around Mylecharaine seemed infested by swarms of fireflies.

  Mr. and Mrs. Armistead, retired from an eating-house in Oldham, awoke. He was as big as his wife and their joint bed looked like a great tent pitched in a desert of oilcloth in the low-roofed room.

  “It’s an atom bomb,” said Armistead, pulling his trousers over the vest and long pants in which it was his habit to sleep.

  He was the first abroad and the road was deserted as, shod in his carpet slippers, he gingerly made his way to the garden gate. Around stretched the dark countryside, fragrant with the scents of bog-plants, dotted with the lighted bedroom windows of the startled homesteads. Overhead swept a magnificence of stars. In the northern distance, the lighthouse at the Point of Ayre swung its great beam, like a huge besom pushing rubbish from the land into the sea. To the west, the far-off lights of the Irish coast.

  Mrs. Armistead appeared at the door, her heavy features embellished by a nimbus of curl-papers. Armistead turned his head to address her.

  “There’s a light on in th’ church. I’d better go and see what’s the matter. Stay where you are, mother. Leave this to me.”

  By this time, others were afield. They assembled round the telephone kiosk, which shone like a beacon at the crossroads in the middle of the village, and formed themselves in a silent group without even greeting one another. They looked in each other’s faces questioningly and then someone spoke.

  “What was that explosion? Think it was a mine at sea?”

  “Too loud for that. Sounded like someborry blastin’.

  Like as if there was quarryin’ goin’ on.”

  “There’s a light on in the church.”

  They went off like one man. It gave them a lead, something to do. They marched to the door of the church, a motley little army, braces dangling, some of them with their raincoats over their night clothes and without collars and ties, wearing carpet slippers or unlaced boots. Two of them had hurried out without putting in their dentures. Only Mr. Jeremiah Kermode, an eccentric, was impeccably turned out. He wore his best suit and billycock, his shoes were bright with polish, and he even seemed to have had a wash and a shave. Nobody ever knew or asked how he’d done it.

  The church was a little stone building, a solid-looking oblong, with a simple bell-tower rising at the west end and carrying a small bell rung by a rope which dangled outside the door. A dim light shone through the east window, illuminating the old gravestones of the churchyard and the great square vaults of the families of Mylecharaine and Myrescogh, now long departed from the neighbourhood and from human memory.

  The little squad of men halted at the iron gates of the churchyard, whence a paved path, now framed in daffodils shaking in the night breeze, led to the church door. They were like visitors hesitating on the threshold of a sick-room, wondering what they would find inside. All around them’ stretched the graves of the silent dead, their memorials silhouetted against the background of the night, some new and upright, others askew or fallen and forgotten altogether. Their hesitancy lasted just long enough to give dramatic pause for the final stroke of terror which was a prelude to what was yet to come.

  A dark shadow emerged from the open door of the church.

  It seemed, for a moment, to flutter like a great bat, and then shaped itself into the form of the vicar, his tall body leaning forward, groping for something in the darkness like a blind man. He quickly found what he sought, grasped the dangling rope, and began to ring the bell. He did it in a frenzy of despair, panting as he pulled and leaping in the air as the bell swung back and shortened the rope. Across the silent marshes, fields, roads and homesteads the silvery note floated. It wakened everybody for miles around. Those aroused from peaceful sleep to practical everyday things thought of a fire or a shipwreck. Others, less clear in their minds, fumbled about for reasons, imagined invasion tocsins or practical jokes. The superstitious-and they were thick on the ground in the curraghs-surmised the work of fairies or Things far worse. And two very old people, patiently waiting for the ebb-tide to carry them home, died, thinking they heard the bells of heaven.

  The solitary ghostly note was heard for miles before the waiting men sprang to life and clawed down the frenzied parson, who seemed to be floating and flapping in mid-air in the vigour of his efforts. Silence fell, however, before the intruders gathered the Rev. Sullivan Lee in their arms and tried to calm his still jerking body, for the bell, in the fury of the attack, had finally made a complete circle over the beam, entangled the rope in its wild flight, and come to a dead stop.

  The whole countryside was now sparkling with lights.

  Jurby, Ballaugh, Sulby, Ballamanagh in the dark hills; some in distant Kirk Michael, and even six miles away in Ramsey heard it, too. There was a lot of quarrelling and arguing in the light of succeeding days as to who did hear it, but in the nearer places, the illuminations were proof enough that it reached them.

  “Somethin’s wrong in the curragh,” said those who knew the unique note of the Mylecharaine bell, the like of which there was not in any other part of the isle. It was said to have been cast from the metal of an earlier one, that of the monastery of Rozelean long lost in the bogs.

  Meanwhile, the men in the churchyard were trying to make head or tail of the strange behaviour of their priest. His own flock dealt more sympathetically with him than some of their nonconformist companions who, on account of his style of dress and his fondness for ritual, (mee-maw, Mr. Armistead called it) accused him of being an idolater and capable of any folly.

  “What are you doin’ here at this time of night, reverend?” asked Armistead, who seemed to have elected himself leader of the posse. He was wearing a cloth cap pulled down to his ears and a long woollen muffler. He sneezed, and wound the muffler tighter round his fat neck.

  The vicar did not answer. Instead, he regarded his questioners with glazed eyes, holding his long hands before him as though to fend them off.

  “’ow dare you make all that row in the middle of the night, scaring the women and the little children? And what was all that bang about, too?”

  Still the Rev. Sullivan Lee said nothing. He rolled his head from side to side like someone being tortured, until one of the men made for the church porch through which the light was still streaming. Then the vicar moved. He ran to get to the door before the other, turned the key, and put it in his pocket.

  “You’ve left the lights on.”

  Armistead looked from one to the other of the surrounding faces under the glow from the windows. He seemed to be seeking help or inspiration as to what they should do next. “Hadn’t we better put out the lights?”

  But Mr. Lee was on his way home to the vicarage, standing surrounded by a circle of dark trees behind the church. The little group of men remained under the window, their bewildered faces illuminated in dim blues, yellows, purples and reds from the stained glass given in memory of a dead and gone Myrescogh and depicting Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. He held a long knife and in the eerie glow looked alive and resentful and about to set upon the gang of interlopers who were disturbing him at his sacred task. Mr. Jeremiah Kermode sadly tried to restore his bowler to its original shape. It had been trampled on in the commotion.

  Then, suddenly, one of the twinkling lamps on the curragh began to move, drew nearer and nearer, (and so did the scared men), burst into noise as well as light, and a motor-bike took shape, ridden by a shadow in a helmet.

  “What’s goin’ on there?”

  Some of the men almost cried with relief. It was as if, in a realm of hopeless shades, one living, useful, human form had intruded with help and news of another world they loved.

  P.C. Killip silenced his bike, dismounted, and approached the party. They all began to talk at once, like a crowd in a theatre scene, unintelligible gibberish, with here and there an odd dear word. All except Mr. Jeremiah Kermode, who was still mournfully remodelling the hat he had bought for his wedd
ing forty years last Easter.

  “Parson’s gone balmy and been firin’ guns and ringin’ the bell,” said Armistead above all the rest.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Gone ’orne,” said a man without his dentures and therefore unintelligible.

  “Eh?”

  “Gone ’ome,” translated Armistead.

  “And left the church lights all on?”

  “He wouldn’t let us go in. He locked the door.”

  “He did, did he? We’ll soon see about that.”

  P.C. Killip tried the door just to be sure and then he tipped his helmet from behind and scratched the back of his head. This was like a nightmare. Cycling on patrol from Jurby to Ballaugh, he had suddenly heard a loud report which reminded him of attack fire during the war. Then a lot of lights had gone on across the curragh. And to cap the lot, bells had started to ring. He’d wondered at first if it was some sort of celebration, perhaps a royal birth. Or even God forbid! -Russian space-men invading the Island. He’d got there as quickly as he could, no easy matter among the maze of ditches, hedges, swamps and narrow roads of the curraghs. And here he was. The vicar had gone off his rocker. He hadn’t thought of that one!

  “I’d better go and see if things are all right and get the key at the same time. Light is too dear to waste. Some of you had better stick around. If he’s gone mad, he might get a bit rough and I’ll need help.”

  They were only too glad to find a leader. They agreed with acclamation to remain.

  “Blow yer whistle if you want us,” shouted Armistead, in a voice intended to convey that he wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody.

  P.C. Killip gingerly made his way across the parson’s path between the graves to the vicarage. He was a reliable officer, solid in mind and body, red-faced, beefy, a good husband and father of four, and a good churchman, as well. He kept his mind on his job, too, otherwise he would have halted transfixed by the horror of parading among the rows of the dead he had once known, at such an unearthly hour. He protected himself from evil in the Manx fashion by holding his thumbs between his index and second fingers in the form of a cross.