Holy Disorders

by Edmund Crispin

  ‘I understand, then, sir,’ the Inspector pursued, ‘that there’s no one except yourself and Mr Dutton left in the house?’

  ‘Indeed, that is so. Mr Peace – Butler’s brother-in-law – was here talking to me until five minutes ago, but then he went off somewhere: you must have just missed him. We had a most interesting conversation – most interesting. It appears that he is afflicted by doubts, of a crucial nature, about the validity of his calling, but, as I endeavoured to explain to him, when one is dealing with doctrines about the mind which are, in comparison with those of Christianity, so hazy and unscientific –’

  Frances came to the rescue. ‘Did you know if he was going up to the cathedral?’

  ‘My dear young lady, he may have been. He said nothing about his destination. Perhaps he was intent on enjoying this delightful evening.’

  Fen, who had been pottering about the hall straightening pictures which he fancied were slightly askew, said: ‘I must meet Mr Peace.’ He turned to Frances. ‘He’s staying with your father?’

  Frances nodded.

  ‘A friendly visit?’ Fen went on.

  Frances shrugged. ‘I think he’s here on business. It seems odd, though. I’ve never met him before, and we’ve never visited him when we’ve been in Town.’ Fen made abstracted signs of affirmation: he straightened another picture. ‘Will you be wanting me?’ said Frances to the Inspector. ‘If not, I must go and deal with things in the kitchen.’

  ‘Not for half an hour or so, miss.’

  ‘I’ll be there or in my bedroom if you want me,’ she said; and departed.

  ‘Come on, Geoffrey,’ said Fen, fidgeting about. ‘Let’s get up to the cathedral before it’s too dark to see anything.’ A thought struck him, and he turned to Spitshuker. ‘Do you happen to know if the Bishop’s Gallery has ever been opened or – entered in any way, since it was first blocked up?’

  Spitshuker glanced at him sharply, the sudden shrewdness of his gaze contrasting formidably with the slightly ineffectual mask he presented to the world. ‘The Bishop’s Gallery? – my dear fellow. I think not – no, I think not. At least there is no record of it. It would be possible, I suppose, to climb up from the chancel by means of a rope – one cannot tell if that has been done. But there has been no public – as it were – opening of Bishop Thurston’s tomb, and if it were ever mooted, much local superstition would be against it. The Bishop was, perhaps, not an ornament of the Church he served, and it is inevitable that there should be…tales. With a gallery thus isolated and containing only the corpse of a man, a trick of the light which made it seem as if someone were peering down…’ He stopped.

  Fen showed interest – an unusual spectacle. ‘You fancy you’ve seen something of the sort yourself?’ he asked.

  Spitshuker gestured. ‘As I said – a trick of the light. But we are not forbidden to believe in demons.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘I think not.’

  Fen’s interest rather noticeably waned. ‘So the Bishop looks down into the chancel, does he? He’s never progressed further, one supposes?’

  The Canon laughed, suddenly and harshly. ‘It is said that there are two – a man and a woman. But I shouldn’t bother your head with fairy tales. Dallow will tell you the local beliefs, if you ask him: he is the expert on these things.’ He paused. ‘I doubt if your question was framed with a view to ghost-hunting.’

  Fen answered the implicit question. ‘It’s necessary that we should get into that gallery,’ he said. ‘For that, we shall need the permission of the Dean and Chapter. Unfortunately we can’t afford to wait. Do you think if we climb in over the parapet the Dean and Chapter will wink an eye?’

  ‘My dear fellow, the Church is adept at winking eyes. Among the Jesuits it is known as casuistry. But how do you propose to accomplish this?’

  ‘Geoffrey here will climb up a rope,’ said Fen firmly.

  ‘Oh no, I won’t.’

  ‘Somebody will, then. Of course, there’s the problem of actually attaching the rope. I suppose there’s no one in the town capable of throwing a lasso?’

  Spitshuker looked dubious. ‘Harry James, the landlord of the Whale and Coffin, did some cattle-farming in the Argentine once’ – Geoffrey and Fielding flashed simultaneous ocular signals of triumphant finality at one another – ‘and perhaps you have to be expert with the lasso for that. On the other hand, perhaps not.’ He seemed dejected by his lack of precise information. ‘And besides, I fancy it is an aptitude one can quickly pick up – and equally quickly lose.’

  Mentally, Geoffrey admitted the justice of this; as a piece of evidence against the landlord of the Whale and Coffin, it was equivocal, particularly since the notion of anyone’s having climbed into the gallery at all was still pure theorizing. But he was reluctant to abandon any scrap of information about that stocky, sinister, slightly ludicrous little figure who had known his name and who had been so astonished at his presence in Tolnbridge.

  ‘…We’ll see,’ Fen was saying ominously, ‘what can be managed. It probably won’t be possible tonight, in any case, but I want a chance to spy out the land. One other thing: the keys of St Ephraim’s tomb.’

  Spitshuker stared at him blankly. ‘The keys…? Oh, ah, yes, to be sure: of the padlocks.’ He became faintly jocose. ‘You are not thinking, I hope, of instituting a general disinterment? The keys were in any case lost or destroyed – I forget which – some hundred and fifty years ago. St Ephraim was originally buried in the chapel dedicated to him – the present tomb is a seventeenth-century erection, to which his remains (not much of them, one fancies) were then transferred. The padlocking is unusual, but not unknown – it’s more normal, of course, with sarcophagi. The keys remained with the successive deans…Yes; I believe I have it. The Deanery was burnt down late in the eighteenth century, and probably the keys were lost then. But there again, Dallow would be the man to ask.’

  ‘It would be easy enough to take impressions,’ said the Inspector.

  ‘But my dear Inspector,’ squeaked Spitshuker, ‘why, I ask you: why? There is nothing of value behind that immense slab. A lead coffin with some dust and hair – that’s all. There were, of course, rich offerings to the shrine, but all were seized by Henry VIII, and afterwards the cult died out, except locally.’

  ‘We have our own ideas about why, sir,’ said the Inspector with traditional gruffness, ‘which, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll keep to myself for the moment.’ Rather insubstantial ideas, Geoffrey reflected, but forbore to comment on the fact.

  Fen, who for the last minute had been rattling the umbrellas and sticks irritatingly about in the hall-stand said:

  ‘Let’s get off, for heaven’s sake. What are we pottering about here for, I should like to know?’ Before anyone could say anything more, he had vanished through the front door. Geoffrey and Fielding followed him. Out of the corner of his eye, Geoffrey saw Spitshuker and the Inspector go into the sitting-room.

  They rounded the house and passed through the back garden amid a cloud of wordy and incoherent apologies from Fielding for encumbering them with his presence. The gate between the garden and the cathedral grounds was locked, but Fen had borrowed Dutton’s key. He was unusually preoccupied and solemn as they climbed the cathedral hill. The ground was dry and hard beneath their feet, the air preternaturally still; Geoffrey strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of the police who guarded the cathedral doors, but dusk was falling, and once one was actually on the hill, he realized, the trees and shrubs made it extremely difficult to see the cathedral at ground level; there were only brief, occasional vistas, which a step further would annihilate. He thought he glimpsed a figure passing round to the north side of the building, but could not be sure.

  They paused by the hollow where the witches had burned. It was overgrown, neglected. Weeds and brambles straggled over it. The iron post stood gaunt against the fading light. They found rings through which the ropes and chains had passed. The air of the place was almost unbearably desolat
e, but in imagination Geoffrey saw the hillside thronged, above and below, with men and women whose eyes glowed with lust and fright and appalling pleasure at the spectacle to be offered them. And a whisper ran through the crowd, swaying and bending their heads like the fingers of wind plucking at a field of corn, as the cart appeared, and they leaned forward to see better – the justices in their robes, the dean and chapter, the squires, and behind them the many-headed beast, the rabble. A woman they had known – a next-door neighbour, perhaps – a familiar face now become a mask of fear in whose presence they crossed fingers and muttered the Confiteor. Who next? And in the breast of that woman, what ecstasy of terror or vain repentance or affirmation? What crying to Apollyon and the God of Flies…? It needed little fancifulness to catch the echo of such scenes, even now. And here, they had accumulated – week after week, month after month, year after year, until even the crowds were sick and satiated with the screaming and the smell of burnt flesh and hair, and only the necessary officers were present at the ending of these wretches, and the people stayed in their houses, wondering if it would not have been better to face the malignant, tangible living rather than the piled sepulchres of the malignant, intangible dead.

  ‘This was the last part of the country,’ said Fen, ‘in which the trial and burning of witches went on. Elsewhere it had ceased fifty or sixty years earlier – and then hanging, not burning, had been the normal method of execution. The doings of Tolnbridge stank so throughout the country that a Royal Commission was sent down to investigate. But when Bishop Thurston died the business more or less ceased. One of the last celebrated witch-trials in these islands was the Weir business in Edinburgh; that was in 1670. Tolnbridge continued for forty years after that, into the eighteenth century – the century of Johnson, and Pitt, and the French Revolution. Only a step to our own times. A depressingly fragile barrier – and human nature doesn’t change much.’

  They moved on up the hill. ‘It’s going to be too dark to do anything elaborate,’ said Fen, ‘and the cathedral isn’t blacked out in the summer.’ He took a torch from the pocket of his raincoat and flicked it on experimentally. ‘It’s quite possible, of course, that we’re wildly astray in all our conjectures – though it seems the good Precentor is with us, up to a point.’

  ‘What do you think he’s doing?’ Geoffrey asked.

  ‘My dear good man, how do I know? Presumably what he said he was going to do – waiting for the ghost and— Hello!’

  They had reached the top of the rise. Over them, immensely high it now seemed, towered the cathedral, sombre and powerful as a couched beast in the gathering gloom. They stood in the angle of the nave and the south transept, on a stretch of green turf. From where they were, three doors were visible; none of them was guarded.

  Fielding gripped Geoffrey’s arm. ‘Geoffrey!’ he whispered. ‘Where are the police?’

  And it was at that precise moment, in the sitting-room of the clergy-house, that Canon Spitshuker happened to remark to the Inspector:

  ‘…And so when I saw you’d taken your men off guard at the cathedral, I assumed…’

  The Inspector was on his feet. ‘When you what?’

  ‘Surely they all left in a motor-car about an hour ago now. Several of us saw them go.’

  The Inspector gazed at him uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then ‘Holy God!’ he whispered, and ran for the telephone.

  For a moment after Fielding’s remark, the three stood stock-still, looking. Then the earth seemed to shake under them. In a moment more there came from within the building a dull, enormous crash. After that, silence.

  Gervase Fen was the first to stir himself. He ran to the nearest door and tried the handle; it was locked. So also with the other two. They pelted round the cathedral to the other side, and there, to their surprise, almost ran into Peace, who was hurrying anxiously in the opposite direction.

  ‘What was that noise?’ he shouted agitatedly. ‘What was that noise?’

  ‘Don’t ask imbecile questions,’ said Fen shortly, and proceeded to try the doors on the south side. Geoffrey discovered one which was open, and gave a crow of triumph.

  ‘That’s no good, you fool,’ shouted Fen. ‘It only leads to the organ-loft. You can’t get into the cathedral that way. Useless here. Every damn door in the place is locked.’ They all rushed round again to the north side, vainly trying the west door on their way, and were there rewarded by the sight of the Inspector running like a madman up the hill, waving his arms and uttering unintelligible cries. Subsequently there appeared two constables, summoned by the Inspector over the telephone in blasphemous terms, and toiling up the slope on bicycles.

  Fen glanced at his watch. ‘10.16,’ he said. ‘And it’s about a minute since we heard that noise. Say 10.15.’

  ‘Can we break one of the doors down?’ asked Fielding excitedly.

  ‘You can try if you like,’ said Fen minatorily, ‘but it won’t do the slightest good. We shall have to get a key – or else a rope, and Geoffrey can climb down into the chancel from the organ loft.’ (‘No,’ said Geoffrey.) ‘I rather suspect we shall find that the clergy-house key has gone again, but each of the Canons has one.’

  The Inspector and the constables arrived more or less simultaneously, all greatly out of breath. Fen, with a rapidity and concision which he could very well employ when he chose, explained things to the Inspector, who nodded.

  ‘Some sort of blasted decoy,’ he said, breathing stertorously. ‘They’re such fools, a little child could take them in. God look down and pity us. Where have they gone? I ask you: where have they gone?’

  ‘Never mind all that,’ said Fen rudely. ‘What we’ve got to do is to get into the cathedral.’ A constable was dispatched with instructions to get a key; he careered off down the hill at a fine pace.

  ‘I’m going up to the organ-loft,’ said Fen, ‘to find out what can be seen from there.’ They all followed him, toiling up a long spiral staircase. Then, abruptly and without warning, they were there.

  The cathedral was sunk in intense gloom. A few last rays of light still struck through the clerestory windows, resting upon capitals stiff with foliage. Enormous shadows moved and flitted with terrifying quickness. Geoffrey could dimly see the big four-manual console of the organ, the structure overhead which bore the tall, painted pipes, and, on his left, a large music cupboard standing against the brick partition which separated the organ-loft from the Bishop’s Gallery. He went with Fen and the Inspector to the high wooden fencing which overhung the chancel, and, hoisting themselves up, they peered down. Fen’s powerful electric torch cut into the darkness; motes of dust glittered and drifted in the beam; the light created a new world of shadows about them.

  And so it was that Geoffrey, looking down, and a little to the left below the Bishop’s Gallery, saw the great stone slab which lay poised and rocking, so gently and slowly, on the ground below; glimpsed the huge cavity – the tomb of St Ephraim – which it had filled; and, as the light shifted, saw the black shoe of a man projecting from beneath that immense stone.

  A stifled exclamation came from the Inspector: ‘There’s someone under there. It’s…’

  He stopped. On the far side of the chancel rattled the wards of a lock, and a door was pushed open. The returning constable, finding no one about, was entering the cathedral. He stopped, startled by the torchlight, looked swiftly up at the organ-loft, and, hand on truncheon, advanced a few steps into the nave.

  ‘Potter!’ the Inspector shouted. ‘Stay by that door! We’ll be round in a moment. Don’t move from it, and don’t let anyone out!’ His voice awoke a thousand mocking echoes in the empty building. The constable saluted and returned to the door.

  In three minutes they were standing about the stone slab, and the thing which lay under it. Every possible exit from the cathedral was guarded, and no one could get out. The united efforts of all the men had failed to shift the stone more than an inch or two.

  ‘It’s uncanny,’ Fielding whispered to Geo
ffrey. ‘No one here, and that damn slab bursting out of the wall as if…’ He stopped suddenly, and they both glanced at the ugly black cavity in the wall. In the circumstances no further comment was needed.

  The Inspector wiped his brow.

  ‘We shall need a crane to get this thing off,’ he muttered. ‘And there’s no chance he’s still alive: it must have smashed every bone in his body. I suppose there’s no doubt –?’

  Fen shook his head. ‘Not very much, I should think…First Brooks, and now Dr Butler, the Precentor…’

  7

  Motive

  Look always on the motive, not the deed.

  YEATS

  When Fielding had finally been persuaded to go home:

  ‘Resurrection men,’ said the Inspector agitatedly. ‘That’s what’s going on. Two tombs opened in less than an hour.’ He banged angrily on the table. ‘I went up that rope into Bishop’s Gallery myself – like a Model Home Exhibition, it was. Dust and cobwebs of centuries neatly swept into corners. And nothing there. Nor in that smelly tomb-place down the staircase. The bird’s flown. Whatever it was, gone.’ He lit a cigarette with as much ferocity as if it had personally offended him.

  Fen, his long, lanky body stretched in one of the clergy-house armchairs, drank some whisky and stared blankly in front of him. ‘Well, that’s what we should have expected, isn’t it?’ he inquired. ‘It shows at least that we’re on the right track.’ His face hardened. ‘A strange business, Garratt – very strange. Almost too strange to be real. Accident? No, no. Suicide? Ridiculous. Murder impossible, I should have said – and what a method!’ He swallowed more whisky, and gently mused.

  It was close on midnight. With tremendous efforts the slab had finally been moved, and the pitiful, mangled remains of the Precentor taken away. Inch by inch, the doors guarded every moment, the cathedral had been searched, and without result; Geoffrey felt he would never forget that grotesque, torch-lit hunting. And now the cathedral was to be watched all night – a further search to be made in the morning. For, unless there was someone still trapped there, what explanation could there be…?