Holy Disorders

by Edmund Crispin

  He started when Fen spoke to him. ‘You told the girl?’

  Geoffrey swallowed. ‘Yes; she was in the kitchen here. She – didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, either.’

  ‘And the mother?’

  The Inspector shifted uneasily. ‘Canon Spitshuker has gone. It seemed the best thing.’ For a minute they were all silent. ‘Tomorrow, of course, we shall have to see her ourselves – we shall have to see everyone.’

  Fen said:

  ‘You talked about resurrection men. Was either of the coffins disturbed?’

  ‘No, no, sir,’ the Inspector replied. ‘Not that we could see. A way of speaking merely.’ He sat down, and said suddenly and frankly: ‘I haven’t the beginning of an idea about it.’

  ‘I have glimmerings,’ said Fen. He poured himself out some more whisky. ‘But the whole thing bristles so with problems that one doesn’t know where to begin. Take the most obvious point. All the doors were locked, and not a key in any of them, inside or out. No one except Peace about when we got there. No one in the cathedral when we searched (and, incidentally, no chance for anyone to get out anywhere while we waited for a key). All of which seems to dispose of anyone’s shoving the slab on top of the poor man. And then, in heaven’s name, what murderer is going to get a six-ton slab moved out, climb into a tomb, have the slab put back, and crouch there until his victim happens to come along? It’s daft.’

  ‘What happened to the padlocks?’ asked Geoffrey.

  ‘Don’t introduce irrelevancies,’ said Fen severely. (‘We found them piled in a corner,’ the Inspector explained rapidly.)

  ‘Are you paying attention,’ grumbled Fen, ‘or are you not? I don’t expect anyone to attend to my lectures at Oxford, though heaven knows I try to make them interesting, and it isn’t my fault if I have to talk about rubbish like –’ He checked himself abruptly. ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘Nothing in particular.’

  Fen glared malignantly about him. ‘Well, you say something, then. No,’ he added hastily, suddenly recollecting something, ‘don’t for heaven’s sake say anything. I want to know what happened to your police guard, Garratt.’

  The Inspector moaned dismally. ‘They got a typewritten message, signed by me (not that it isn’t easy for anyone to copy my signature if they want to), telling them to get into the car and meet me at once at Luxford, which is a village about fifteen miles away. Off they went, the cretins, and they’ve only just got back.’

  ‘But who gave them the message?’

  ‘Well – that’s the odd part of it. It was Josephine Butler – Dr Butler’s other daughter.’

  Fen whistled noisily. ‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘This is getting interesting. And who gave it her?’

  ‘We don’t know about that yet. But she told the sergeant in charge that she got it from a policeman.’

  ‘A policeman!’ exclaimed Fen in stupefaction. ‘You’re not wandering in your mind, I suppose, Garratt?’ he added with oily kindness. ‘You didn’t send the message yourself?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t,’ said the Inspector irritably. ‘And that’s what makes it so queer. Why get my men out of the way in order to commit an impossible murder?’

  ‘I should have thought that was an easy one,’ Geoffrey put in. ‘It was to give whoever was responsible a chance to get away with whatever it was they’d got in the Bishop’s Gallery.’

  ‘Lucid,’ said Fen.

  Geoffrey ignored this. ‘It rather makes one suspect that the two things aren’t connected at all. The Precentor may have met his death by accident – in fact, it seems the only possible thing –’

  Fen snorted explosively. ‘Accident!’ he said. ‘Nonsense. Even if he’d unlocked the tomb himself and found the slab was falling out on him, he’d have tried to save himself. And he would have fallen backwards, with his head away from the tomb. In fact he was flat on his face, with his head turned slightly inwards, towards it.’ He reflected. ‘You didn’t find the keys to the padlocks, I suppose?’

  The Inspector made negative signals. ‘Not a sign. That rather puts the accident business out of court, too. Court. Lunacy court, that’s what we shall want. And there’s this Brooks business. We haven’t even made a start on that yet.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ said Fen tediously. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’ A more useful reflection occurred to him, ‘While we’re on the subject of keys, by the way: who got into the cathedral by means of which keys?’

  ‘Oh, yes, you were right there,’ said the Inspector grudgingly. They waited until he should explain this gnomic pronouncement, Fen muttering ‘I’m always right’ under his breath. ‘The clergy-house key was gone again, and what’s more this time it hasn’t turned up; so presumably the criminal or criminals used that. As to Dr Butler, he used his own key. It was found’ – he hesitated, as at a distasteful memory – ‘among his clothes. So that, again, is that.’

  Fen nodded. ‘No leads anywhere, it seems. A weird business.’ He gestured impatiently. ‘I can’t somehow get over the feeling that the whole thing’s an accident – that it wasn’t intended that way…’

  ‘One other thing occurred to me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘And that is that anyone who was in the cathedral might have got out by climbing up a rope into the organ-loft, hiding there when we first came in to look round, and then getting out when we left.’

  ‘Not possible, sir,’ said the Inspector, relieved at the opportunity of making some contribution, however negative, to the proceedings. ‘For one thing, we should certainly have seen if anyone had been there. For another, there’s nothing in that loft or around it to attach a rope to. The organ-seat’s loose, and can’t be fixed, or at any rate hadn’t been – I had a look for that – and there’s nothing else that would take the strain, or that isn’t out of the question for some reason or other. I shall go over the ground again tomorrow, of course, but you can take my word for it there isn’t a chance.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be possible to get in from the Bishop’s Gallery?’

  ‘Not unless you flew. You can’t see round that partition between them, let alone climb – it projects quite a way, you’ll find.’

  ‘So there’s absolutely no way from the organ-loft – or the stairway leading up to it – into the main part of the building?’

  ‘None, sir; you can rest assured of that.’ Geoffrey sighed, and abandoned his idea to the limbo of wasted and well- meaning endeavour.

  ‘And in that case…’ said Fen and the Inspector simultaneously; they hooked little fingers. ‘Shakespeare,’ said the Inspector. ‘Herrick,’ said Fen. ‘And I wish,’ he added, ‘that someone would come into this room now who would tell us what this thing is that everyone’s so anxious to do murder for.’

  There was a knock on the door. If the Archangel Gabriel had appeared to announce personally his intention of blowing the last trump in ten minutes’ time, Geoffrey could not have been more surprised. What actually happened was that a pale, spectacled young man put his head round the door, and having apparently ascertained that no special perils lurked within, followed it into the room. He was dressed in a slightly greasy overall suit, and carried in one hand a length of wire and in the other an open penknife. A cigarette hung unregarded from a corner of his mouth. When he spoke, it was in a vague, abstracted murmur, slightly tinged with a cockney accent.

  ‘Inspector Garratt?’ he inquired generally.

  The Inspector rose.

  ‘Name’s Phipps,’ murmured the young man, scraping at the wire with his penknife. ‘C.I.D., radio. Told me at station I’d find you here. Front door open, nobody about, so just walked in.’ The telescoping of inessential words gave his conversation a curiously telegrammatic effect. ‘Mind if I speak to you alone a moment?’ The Inspector made brief apologies and followed the young man into the hall. For some minutes Fen and Geoffrey sat in silence, broken only twice, once by Fen saying ‘Wires’, and later by his pointing to the ceiling and remarking: ‘
Privet-Hawk Moth, Sphinx ligustri.’

  In due time the Inspector returned, without the young man; plainly he was much moved. He sat down with caution, stared at the carpet, and said: ‘That’s torn it!’ Fen sang a little tune to himself; when he had finished he said cheerfully:

  ‘If it’s what it obviously is, no wonder you look glum.’

  The Inspector looked up. ‘See here, sir, I oughtn’t to tell you this, nor you, Mr Vintner; but I’m damned if I’ll keep it to myself, all the same. You’ve probably guessed. They’ve located an enemy transmitting-set here, and they’ve been trying to narrow it down for the last two days. Pretty unobtrusively they’ve worked, too – our people never noticed them. There’d been nothing for forty-eight hours, and then suddenly this evening there was a short flash.’ He nodded grimly. ‘Just after my men at the cathedral went off on that fool’s errand. So it’s obvious now what there was in the Bishop’s Gallery, isn’t it – or, rather, in the tomb down the spiral staircase? And as pretty a hiding-place as you could want, too. But what a nerve – phew!’ He mopped his brow.

  Fen nodded gently. He was engaged in a remote and pleased contemplation of the moth on the ceiling.

  ‘But there’s another thing,’ the Inspector went on, ‘which makes it nastier. That set could only have been operated at nights, and that means someone connected with the cathedral must be an enemy agent – someone with access to a key…’ His voice tailed off; in a little while he said: ‘Brooks found out what was going on, and he had to be silenced. And so, I fancy, did Dr Butler. You understand, sir, that this puts things on a different footing altogether. I shall have to ask the Yard to come down now, as fast as they can travel. I can’t deal with this. I should have had a job dealing with the murders, but spying…’ He shook his head. ‘It’ll have to be the Yard.’

  Without shifting his gaze, Fen drank half a glass of whisky. ‘How annoying,’ he said mildly.

  ‘Really, Gervase,’ said Geoffrey in exasperation. ‘Surely, when matters are as serious as this, purely personal considerations…’

  ‘No!’ Fen howled; he howled it with such suddenness that he startled even the moth, which dashed itself frantically against the window-curtains. ‘I will not be lectured! I know it’s very grave, and all that, but I shall only fuddle myself if I try to get solemn about it. I’m not going to abandon the habits of a lifetime just because a lot of rattish transcendentalist Germans happen to be pottering about in my neighbourhood. Kant!’ he hooted disgustedly. ‘There’s a passage in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft where –’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the Inspector. ‘But the fact remains: it’ll have to be the Yard.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that,’ replied Fen irritably. ‘Who will they send, anyway? I hope it’s someone I know. If I get some results before they arrive,’ he added hopefully, ‘they might let me be in at the death.’

  The Inspector got up. ‘I’m going to write up my notes and go to bed,’ he said. ‘It’s no use trying to interview anyone tonight. I’ll be round here at 9.30 tomorrow morning, and I shall be very grateful for any ideas you may have. The Yard people may be there by then’ – (‘It’ll have to be the Yard,’ said Fen irritatingly) – ‘and we shall see,’ concluded the Inspector without much confidence, ‘what we shall see.’ He picked up his hat and moved to the door. ‘Good night, gentlemen. Not much sleep for me, I fear.’

  Fen waved a languid hand from the depths of his chair. ‘Good night, sweet Inspector,’ he called. ‘Good night, good night.’ He finished his whisky; furrows of earnest concentration appeared on his brow. ‘An odd climax, that wireless business – or anticlimax. Unsatisfactory, like the end of Measure for Measure. This is a complex business, Geoffrey. There are oddities…’

  Geoffrey yawned. ‘Lord, but I’m tired. What a day! I can’t believe it’s only this morning I got your telegram and that letter. God grant I never go through a day like this again.’ He rubbed his thighs ruefully, and wandered to the door. ‘Two threatening letters, three attacks; and then on top of that I meet an earl serving in a shop and a landlord like something out of Graham Greene, and I overhear a murder.’

  Fen smiled sweetly. ‘I wonder if you’re right,’ he said. ‘Good night, Geoffrey. Let no lamenting cries, nor doleful tears be heard all night within, nor yet without, nor let false whispers, breeding hidden fears, break gentle sleep with misconceived doubt; let no deluding dreams, nor dreadful sights make sudden sad affrights…’

  Geoffrey left him trying to catch the moth in an empty matchbox.

  Grotesque, thought Geoffrey as he lay in bed next morning, gazing with earnest fixity at the ceiling: a preposterous gallimaufry of hobgoblins and spies. The murders were very well in their way; at least it was demonstrable that they had occurred. But ghosts were inconceivable, enemy agents almost equally so. Daylight, he reflected, restores us to sanity, or at least to that blinkered and oblivious condition which we call sanity. Impossible murders, even, would find it difficult to withstand the penetrating virility of morning light. Plainly, something had been overlooked, or absurdly misinterpreted. The German transmitting set would prove to be the fumblings of a schoolboy of mechanical proclivities. When one came down to facts – well, what? When one came down to facts, Geoffrey was forced to admit, the notorious antisepsis of daylight seemed somehow lacking in effect. Nothing, essentially, had changed since the previous night; the events of yesterday, which, it was evident, the mind was only too willing to write off as perfervid delusions of its own, stood dismayingly impervious to such high-handed attempts at erasure; furthermore, they intruded distressingly upon the mind’s naïf and virginal projects for its own placidity during the coming hours – a moral hangover, a blotted and scrawled-upon sheet of the copy-book defying removal. It poisoned all enjoyment. Geoffrey’s mood became noticeably more atrabilious. He contemplated with nothing less than malevolence the ravaging incursions of Id upon the tranquil expanses of his personality.

  No lust for the hunt, no anguished endeavour to discover the truth possessed him, he observed; and that, presumably, was why he was still in bed. The room had the pervasive melancholy aura of the almost permanently unoccupied; a few personal belongings, scattered about, battled bravely but ineffectually to make of it a habitation. Plainly the atmosphere would drive him out of it fairly shortly. But before that happened, something remained to be debated. Long experience had taught Geoffrey that mental colloquy, however confidently embarked upon, generally ended in irrelevancy, divagation, and chaos; he did not, however, quite realize that it is impossible for a man to think clearly and rationally about a woman when lying in bed. The subsequent proceedings of his mind were therefore confused and for the most part unworthy of attention. It did, however, emerge from them that although he might be in love with Frances it seemed in the highest degree doubtful if she was in love with him; that the thing to do was to find out about this; and that the time to do it was not the morning after her father had met with a violent death. Thus supplied with a course of action and an excuse for putting off embarking on it almost indefinitely, Geoffrey decided that there was no point in lying on his back any longer, and got up.

  He careered down the corridor to the bathroom, sponge-bag and towel flowing gently behind him. A faint scuffling from within, as of rats disturbed at a meal, showed it to be occupied, conceivably by Fen. Geoffrey cautiously pushed open the door, and was confronted by the spectacle of Dutton, his face covered with soap, a cut-throat razor brandished suicidally in the region of his jugular vein, and making gestures of vague pudency; Geoffrey retreated. ‘Breakfast in three-quarters of an hour’s time,’ a voice pursued him back to his room. ‘Good morning,’ it added as an afterthought.

  Dutton having taken himself off, Geoffrey lay in a hot bath and reflected further on the events of the previous night. And as he reflected, an idea came into his mind. It was an idea so simple, so plain, so obvious, that he was unable to imagine why it had not occurred to him before. And the more he considered it, the more lik
ely it seemed, though certainly there were smaller problems which it left unsolved. Not quite a closed box, after all; in fact, not a closed box at all…

  He was almost amiable when Fen came in, wearing a violent purple-silk dressing-gown, and looking ruddier, lankier, and more irrepressible than ever.

  ‘I’m going to shave while you’re having your bath,’ he announced threateningly. ‘Otherwise I shall be late for breakfast.’ He lathered soap all over his face, flinging it freely about the room, and began making long, tearing passes at his cheeks and throat with a safety-razor. ‘Did you have a good night? That moth I caught is dead this morning.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Why do you pretend to be interested in insects?’

  ‘Pretend?’ Fen examined his face without much enthusiasm in the mirror. ‘I don’t pretend. Essentially I am a scientist, beguiled by chances into the messy, delusive business of literary criticism. You can see that from the clarity and precision of my mind.’ He beamed at this triumph of autology. ‘And I don’t deny there’s a romantic interest as well. Life in the insect world is all melodrama – The Revenger’s Tragedy without any of the talk.’

  ‘And a pretty daft business that would be,’ said Geoffrey. He fished for some invisible object by the side of the bath. ‘Here’s a toy boat.’ He put it on the water and pushed it to and fro.

  ‘The Elizabethans’ – Fen was evasive – ‘were not strong on plot…The strength of their drama lay in the now lost art of rhetoric. They recognized the superiority of word over action as a means to enjoyable sensations. The Elizabethan groundling was a superior person, in point of culture, to the educated bourgeois of today.’ He paused, and dabbed styptic pencil on a cut. ‘Whose boat is that, I wonder?’

  ‘Josephine Butler’s, I expect: a relic of nonage.’ Geoffrey was engaged in squeezing water on to it from his sponge, in the hope of capsizing it. ‘Your groundling had no sense of humour, though. Otherwise he’d never have put up with Beatrice and Benedick.’ He surveyed the boat thoughtfully, and balanced a piece of soap on the deck; it fell off. ‘You heard about Josephine’s burning her father’s manuscript?’