Holy Disorders

by Edmund Crispin

  Geoffrey felt a sudden sickening premonition. Nobody made any movement, or said a word.

  Fen nodded slowly. ‘No, you’re quite right. We haven’t got them all yet.’ He paused and leaned back against the pillows.

  ‘The murder of Brooks provided no handle. Someone – one of a number of people without alibis – knew of the arrangements at the hospital, slipped into a room and rang the bell for the nurse who was bringing his medicine punctually at six o’clock. Then, evading the nurse as she came up, went down and put atropine in it. There were no fingerprints on the bell; there was no clue of any kind, any more than there was in the first attack on Brooks, in the cathedral. But the death of your father, Frances, was different.’

  Again Fen glanced at them. Again nobody moved or spoke.

  ‘There were two features in that which no sane man could stomach for a moment. One was the method – the tomb-slab; and the other was the fact that Butler quite unexpectedly announced his intention of going up to the cathedral, and must have arrived there only five minutes after the police guard left.fn1 Do you see the point?’

  ‘No,’ said Geoffrey. ‘For God’s sake get on and tell us.’ His voice sounded strained and harsh.

  ‘We heard the slab fall at 10.15 – nearly an hour and a quarter afterwards. The purpose of getting the police away was to remove the wireless. Do you suppose they’d wait an hour and a quarter to do that? Of course not. They’d get on with it at once, which would mean they must have arrived just before, or simultaneously with, or just after Butler. So what was he doing during that hour and a quarter? Looking on and giving helpful advice?’

  Dallow cleared his throat, a little nervously. ‘Surely, my de-ear Professor, it is possible that he was himself involved?’

  ‘I considered that. But other evidence, which I’ll come to in a moment, went against it. No, the plain fact is that he must have been killed almost as soon as he arrived in the cathedral.’

  ‘Then the slab was a decoy!’ Geoffrey exclaimed. ‘No, wait, you can’t counterfeit a noise like that. And, anyway, how was it got to move? There was no one in the cathedral, and no one except Peace could have got out. How was it toppled on top of Butler?’

  ‘I will interrupt the classic perfection of my narrative,’ said Fen severely, ‘to digress on that point. It’s more or less guesswork, and it has no relevance to the identity of the…person with whom we’re concerned. But you should have realized, Geoffrey. What was the one part of the cathedral we paid no attention to, thinking it could have nothing to do with the affair?’

  ‘The organ-loft,’ Garbin put in. His deep voice momentarily startled them.

  ‘Precisely. And you remember there’s a thirty-two foot stop on the pedals which literally shakes the cathedral…’fn2

  ‘Good God!’ Geoffrey exclaimed.

  ‘You remember how delicately that stone was poised once the padlocks were out. Two notes played together at the bottom of the pedal-board would topple it out in a moment. You remember, too, that you noticed a difference between the crash we heard and the Inspector’s experiment. The first crash was preceded by a marked vibration, the second by absolute silence.fn3 That alone made me pretty certain I was on the right track. And you must recall how little attention we paid to the organ-loft. It would have been perfectly possible in the general confusion for anyone to get out of that particular door.

  ‘But that didn’t really matter.’ Fen waved the point indifferently aside. ‘What did matter was why this elaborate business had ever been contrived. Butler was dead a long time ago, you understand. Probably he was thrown over the edge of the gallery immediately over the tomb, and the idea was improvised on account of his position. To move him about would leave dangerous traces. Some pretty quick thinking was done. But why?

  ‘It was not to falsify the manner of death, since the autopsy found no trace of weapons or poison. So it must have been to falsify the time of death. The slab had three advantages (a) it produced the same physical results – crushed and broken bones – as the fall from the gallery; (b) it made medical assessment of the time of death impossible; and (c) it made the devil of a noise. The plan must have been improvised at lightning speed – that was why I emphasized all along that it was never intended. But still – why?

  ‘It might have been to create an alibi; it might have been to incriminate someone else; or both. Before long it became plain that it was the second possibility that mattered. To supply a personal motive for the murder might still divert attention from the spying (they knew nothing about the C.I.D. radio van). So I hunted about for likely personal motives, and, of course, the most glaring was Peace’s money.

  ‘Now I began to understand things – with a vengeance. I remembered that a number of people knew that Peace was going up to the cathedral to meet Butler at 9.20. But in fact he didn’t go then; he went at 10.0. Now imagine the mental processes of the criminals. Butler is dead. They have removed the wireless and locked the cathedral, throwing the key away somewhere, to be found later and used as evidence against Peace. But no Peace appears. Rigor is setting in, and if he does not come up to the cathedral soon it will be impossible to connect him with the crime, on medical evidence alone. Someone returns to the clergy-house and finds he has an infallible alibi, talking to Spitshuker here. What they decided to do, you know. They decided to drop out the slab and create a false impression of the time of death.’

  Fen paused, and lit a cigarette. Geoffrey saw that Frances, crying a little, had crept out of the room. He felt a pang of pity, but worlds would not have moved him from the spot.

  ‘So far I got,’ Fen was saying. ‘And then for a long time – like a fool – no further. Even when Dutton told me that he hadn’t heard the crash of the slab from the clergy-house – right on the edge of the cathedral grounds – I didn’t properly realize its importance. Even when I learned that those grounds were locked at night, so there would be no casual wanderers, I didn’t see what it meant. And then, suddenly, I realized.

  ‘Someone had to hear that slab fall.’

  Fen glanced quizzically around. ‘Someone had to be got up to the cathedral at about the right time – when Peace was up there. Some reliable person – you, Geoffrey, or myself, or Fielding, or even the Inspector. Perhaps all four of us…The crash wouldn’t be heard outside the grounds, and there would be no lovers to listen, since the grounds were locked…

  ‘Do you remember who we saw, when we came back from the Whale and Coffin? Spitshuker, of course, but he had an alibi for almost the whole evening. And Fielding – but if he was involved, why did he prevent you, Geoffrey, from being put out of action at a time when it was essential you should be? There was only one other person to decoy us to the cathedral. That person expressed great anxiety about Butler, and asked us to see that he was safe. That person learned that we were going up to the cathedral on business of our own – very satisfactory information…’

  ‘Stop!’ Geoffrey almost shouted the word.

  Fen turned to him. ‘I’m sorry, Geoffrey,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, I’m very sorry. Of course it was Frances.’

  What Geoffrey thought in that moment he never afterwards remembered. It was too turbulent and too vilely painful. But he left the room at once and went downstairs and out of the house. There he saw Frances again.

  She was walking rapidly towards a car which stood in the drive, a small attaché case clutched tightly in her hand. She swung round as she heard him, and a small automatic was in her other hand.

  ‘Don’t interfere with me,’ she said briefly. ‘Our sentimental relationship is now at an end. A one-sided affair, I’m afraid, but I enjoyed my little piece of acting. If you make the slightest attempt to move, to stop me, or to shout, I shall shoot you without hesitation. One more fool dead will be no loss to me or to anyone else.’

  She got into the car. He stood silent, watching her drive off. There was no movement from inside the house.

  Of course the cordon had not been removed. She drove into the
barrier on the Exeter road at seventy miles an hour. They said afterwards that there was no point in even attempting to shoot. A piece of jagged metal tore open the carotid artery in the left side of her neck, and before they could get her out of the wreckage she had bled to death.

  15

  Reassurance and Farewell

  Should she to death be led

  It furthers justice, but helps not the dead.

  DRAYTON

  A day more, and both Fen and Geoffrey were packing to leave Tolnbridge: Geoffrey with an elaborate, old-maidish care, Fen chaotically. Dutton had been pronounced by the doctor fit to take on the services again until a new permanent organist should be appointed, so Geoffrey was no longer needed; and Fen had to attend an educational conference in London before returning to Oxford.

  Geoffrey’s mind was numb. The three days he had been in Tolnbridge had produced so many shocks that he was incapable of assimilating them. And the death of Frances…For a long time it would be in his dreams. But he knew that sooner or later it must go. It would take months, perhaps, but in the end he would forget. He knew now, too, that he could never have loved her, being what she was. Perhaps it had never been more than an infatuation: love, he remembered, was supposed to triumph over all the defects of its object. But not that; not that. He trembled involuntarily. But it would be all right in the long run. Bachelorhood, with returning confidence, surveyed with new pleasure the green and smiling expanses of his demesne.

  He found the manuscript jottings for his Passacaglia and Fugue, and his spirits lightened somewhat. There was always work, and his cats, and his garden, and Mrs Body…He snapped the case shut, and after a brief glance round the room to make sure that nothing had been left, went in to see Fen.

  He found the Inspector, Dallow, and Peace with him; Peace newly released, and bearing as ever The Mind and Society. Fen’s ruddy face, still swollen slightly and blue from Savernake’s kick, glowed with effort, and spikes of hair stuck up obstinately from the crown of his head. He was smoking a cigarette, throwing things wildly into a suit-case, striding about the room, and drinking whisky. Geoffrey marvelled at his powers of recovery.

  ‘…So James confessed,’ the Inspector was saying, ‘as soon as he heard Miss Butler was dead. And confirmed pretty well everything you said. It was he who made the first attack on Brooks in the cathedral, and injected the atropine after knocking him out; but it was Miss Butler who put the poison in his medicine at the hospital. And Butler was toppled over that gallery – by Savernake, with Miss Butler looking on. They tried to knock him out and kill him more quietly, but he put up a fight, and it was a near thing that Savernake didn’t go with him. They were expecting him, of course – as soon as she heard he was going up there, she pretended to go to her room, but actually slipped up ahead of him to warn Savernake. James had taught him to use the lasso, you see, and it was he who was deputed to get the wireless out. Well, Butler was killed, and Savernake took the wireless off, while Miss Butler waited in hiding for you, Mr Peace, having conceived the idea of pinning the murder on you. But you didn’t come. She slipped back to the clergy-house and found you talking to Spitshuker, so the second plan – the tomb-slab – had to be improvised.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Peace to Fen, ‘that you thought of the plant in my room as the obvious sequel of the attempt to incriminate me.’

  ‘It seemed likely,’ said Fen mildly. ‘To leave the hypodermic was a mistake, though.’ He shook his pyjama-trousers free of a wasp. ‘But you see why I was so interested in two things: whether James had an alibi for the time of the faking (he had) and whether Peace had gone straight up to the cathedral when he left Spitshuker. Savernake, of course, I didn’t know about at that time, but there was a certain amount of reason for suspecting James. Anyway, it was obvious that he couldn’t have been concerned in the murder of Butler or the faking. Then I remembered that Peace left the clergy-house to go up to the cathedral before we returned there with Frances. To my mind that meant either that it wasn’t Frances who played about with the organ and made the tomb-slab fall out, or else that you, Peace, somehow delayed on your way up to the cathedral, and enabled her to get there ahead of you. (I was a bit worried about whether it was her key you borrowed to get into the grounds, but fortunately, it wasn’t.) Of course, she must have got a frightful shock when she got back to the clergy-house with us and found you’d already gone: because you promised to wait and walk up with her when she got back. That was simply a means of keeping you in situ until she’d collected her witnesses. Savernake, of course, imagined when he left with the wireless that you were going to be there at 9.20 according to your arrangement with Butler, and so never returned. He just disposed of the wireless and provided himself with an alibi for the rest of the time. So she had to do everything herself. That was what made me think she must be the leader – no subordinate would have taken that amount of responsibility.’

  ‘It was an extraordinary chancy affair,’ said the Inspector reproachfully, as though Fen were somehow responsible for this.

  ‘Certainly it was,’ said Fen a trifle irritably. ‘It was a rapidly improvised emergency scheme. Ten thousand things might have gone wrong. We might never have gone up to the cathedral at all. As it happened, it went more or less right. But, of course, it was the merest idiocy to attempt to incriminate the good Peace at all. I think something like personal malevolence may have been involved, to judge from what she said about you the other day in Butler’s garden. Because there was no earthly reason why she shouldn’t have left Butler lying where he was. As an accidental fall, it would have appeared improbable, because the parapet of the Bishop’s Gallery is high, and because of what had already happened to Brooks. But it would have left the murderer in complete obscurity. It was the fatal desire to round things off by incriminating you, Peace, which did for the scheme – a plan much too hastily conceived not to have loop-holes all over.

  ‘Actually, the loop-holes made it all the more confusing. And I admit that (but for one point) my own processes of deduction were chancy, too. When you’re dealing with a gang of unspecified dimensions they have to be. That’s one reason why I hope this affair won’t go into the Chronicles of Crispin.fn1 Still,’ Fen went on indignantly, like one accused of some disgraceful negligence, ‘they weren’t as chancy as all that. Once one had grasped the reason for the use of the tomb-slab, and the fact that someone had to be about to hear it fall, it became pretty clear. Spitshuker couldn’t have been involved. Nor could Fielding, because he rescued you, Geoffrey, from being knocked out when it was most desirable that you should be. And that left Frances. She had no real alibi for the crucial times. She tried to make certain that you, Peace, didn’t leave until she got back with us – another point. And the last confirmation was when I found out from Mclver that there weren’t more than three agents working here in all. I saw Savernake and James with my own eyes when they kidnapped me, suspecting I already knew too much. Both of them had alibis for the time of the faking, so that, again, left Frances.’

  ‘Some supplementary questions,’ put in Geoffrey. ‘Was the wireless found?’

  ‘It had been taken to bits, sir,’ said the Inspector, ‘and hidden in various parts of the Whale and Coffin. One of the women in the bar there, by the way, knew something was going on and cooperated with James, but didn’t know what. We pulled her in. The stuff they used – materials for making keys to the tomb, atropine, radio parts, and so on – must have been smuggled over here from Germany before the war.’ He gestured, as though in apology for making so elementary a point.

  ‘That’s another thing,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Why make keys to that tomb?’

  ‘I got that from James,’ the Inspector replied. ‘In case of an invasion, it was to be filled with explosive, and the whole cathedral blown sky-high, as a signal. Nasty, isn’t it? You see, they had to get the stuff in there beforehand, since it had to be ready at a moment’s notice, any hour of the day or night. But they hadn’t started on that when the attack on Broo
ks was made, and afterwards, with the police guard and so on, it was impracticable.’ He smiled grimly. ‘The whole business is a very pleasant commentary on the celebrated German efficiency. A flop.’

  ‘You might remember,’ said Peace, ‘that I was nearly indicted for murder.’

  Fen took a cardboard box and emptied the dead bodies of a number of insects out of the window. ‘I’ve finished with these nasty things,’ he said. The butterfly-net, forgotten and unused, stood in a corner. He glared at it for a moment, then broke it across his knee; subsequently he deposited Social Life in the Insect World in the water-jug. ‘Like Prospero,’ he announced, ‘I have broken my staff and drowned my book.’ He looked round complacently, but no one was paying much attention.

  ‘One thing more,’ said Geoffrey, ‘and that’s about Josephine and the Black Mass.’

  ‘James disapproved of all that,’ the Inspector explained. ‘The devil-worship business was a private toy of Miss Butler and Savernake. Of course, sir’ – turning to Fen – ‘it was Savernake shot at you – in a panic, more or less.’

  Fen nodded. ‘I thought so. A recusant priest is supposed traditionally to celebrate the Mass.’

  ‘As to drugging that kid,’ the Inspector went on, ‘and initiating her into their filthy goings-on, I confess I can’t understand it. Of course, she was useful as a tool – as in taking that message to my men at the cathedral – but it seems to me most of it was just sheer devilry.’

  ‘The manuscript had nothing to do with it, then?’ Peace asked.

  ‘No,’ said Fen, ‘I think that was probably just a fit of blind rage at being deprived of the stuff too long. It was given her in cigarette form, you know. Marihuana generally is.’

  Peace sighed. His plump, red face was creased with worry, and his grey eyes were sad. ‘It’s going to be a business looking after Irene,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t very fond of Butler, but Frances she loved. I’m taking her – and Josephine, when she’s better – under my own wing, you know. Of course the money comes to me – not that I want it, now.’