The Ely Testament

by Philip Gooden

  Fort had been dejected and defensive in the Cambridge coffee-house, but once the three of them were on the train and traversing the flat landscape towards Ely he became more animated and even cheerful. As the train was reaching their destination, Fort was expounding on an old and elaborate scheme – ‘German in origin, Mrs Ansell’ – whereby hollow tubes sticking up from the coffins of the recently interred were to be sniffed at by the vicar on his morning round of the graveyard and withdrawn only when the smell of putrefaction was undeniably advanced.

  ‘If there was no smell of decay, then the parson would immediately be on the alert. If that state of affairs continued, then he would command that the coffin and its occupant be exhumed.’

  ‘Let us hope it will not be too late by then,’ said Helen.

  ‘It will be too late for us if we don’t get down now,’ said Tom. ‘We’ve arrived at Ely.’

  From the station Tom and Helen planned to take a cab to the police-house. Eric Fort gave them directions for Mr Chase’s house and said that he would see them there when they had finished their own business. In the police-house the Ansells were informed that Inspector Francis was out and that Ernest Lye had been released earlier that day. This was a relief to Tom. But the sergeant on duty either could not or would not say any more. So Tom didn’t know on what terms the brother of Alexander Lye had been let out, or whether he was still under suspicion for Charles Tomlinson’s murder.

  From the sergeant they obtained directions to Prickwillow Road where the Chases lived. It was a short walk from the police-house. The autumn afternoon was closing in as Tom and Helen waited outside the door of a solid, recently built villa in a street containing a few similar houses and then a scatter of smaller dwellings. A housemaid answered. Was Mr Chase expecting them? No, but they were here to meet both Mr Chase and Mr Fort.

  The maid looked uncertain but nevertheless went ahead to announce their arrival before showing the couple into a drawing room, where a man was reading a magazine called Funereal Matters.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Ansell, is it? You wished to see me?’

  Cyrus Chase was short and quite chubby. He did not fit Tom’s notion of an inventor, even if he could not have said quite what that notion was. The man was polite enough but did not seem pleased to have visitors. Once again, Tom explained they were expecting to meet Eric Fort. Chase looked as uncertain as the housemaid.

  ‘Mr Fort has been sent by Willow & Son in London,’ said Tom.

  A change came over Cyrus Chase, although it was hard to say whether he was gratified by the news.

  ‘Willow & Son? They are responding to my letter?’

  ‘I believe they are. Mr Chase, you are familiar with a Mr Charles Tomlinson?’

  This time there was no doubt about the expression on Chase’s face: it was a mixture of anger and apprehension.

  ‘Yes, I was acquainted with him, to my regret. And I know that he died yesterday – or was murdered, apparently. Inspector Francis from the Isle of Ely constabulary has already talked to me about Mr Tomlinson, and he has talked to my wife as well.’

  Tom glanced at Helen. Chase made no bones about his hostility to Tomlinson. Another suspect to add to the list? Presumably this was the reason for the Inspector’s visit.

  ‘Mr Fort said that Tomlinson, ah, stole an idea from you . . .’

  ‘A device for a security coffin,’ added Helen.

  ‘He did steal it,’ said Chase. Then, more cautiously, ‘Or at least I have good reason to think that he intended to steal it. I don’t suppose it matters so much now that he has been . . . now that he is dead.’

  There was a pause. Then Chase continued, ‘I am afraid I am not familiar with any person by the name of Fort. You say he is on his way to see me?’

  ‘We left him at the railway station about an hour ago.’

  ‘Perhaps he has got lost.’

  There was another silence, as if they were all waiting for the imminent arrival of Eric Fort. It was broken by Helen.

  ‘Mr Chase, we were hearing from Mr Fort about the latest developments in security coffins. I would be interested to have a look at your invention.’

  ‘Well,’ said Cyrus Chase, brushing at his waistcoat. ‘It is not often that the ladies express interest in such things. My wife in particular thinks . . . well, never mind what she thinks. Yes, it would be a great pleasure to show you my creation.’

  He led them through the house and out into the garden. A winding path ended in a good-sized brick outbuilding. Cyrus explained that the building pre-dated his house, which was relatively new. It was a suitable place, he said, for him to get on with his work alone and undisturbed. Undisturbed by his wife, Tom guessed.

  He unlocked the door and ushered them in. He pulled back a curtain covering a barred window which gave a view on to open country. The light in the interior was still poor so Cyrus Chase lit an oil lamp. There was an odd, faintly disagreeable odour in the room. On a large table in the centre of the room was a coffin. An unusual coffin, a security coffin, since it was surmounted with a couple of constructions like miniature towers at the top end. Also, several tubes protruded from various points along the sides of the coffin.

  Lifting up the lamp so that it shed a better light, Cyrus Chase gestured with his free hand towards his creation. As if giving a public address, he outlined its salient points, the tubes, the bell-tower, the little bird that could be rotated from underground. He invited them to step closer, to see for themselves. Helen went forward while Tom hung back. He was not especially interested in the subject of burial. He thought of his father being dropped clean over the side of a ship.

  ‘Mr Chase,’ said Helen. Her voice was strained.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Chase.

  By now the inventor was standing next to Helen. Tom was facing them across the coffin. He saw that the lid was not fitted properly but overhung slightly on his side. Helen was staring down, her eyes wide, a gloved hand to her mouth. Cyrus Chase was bending forward, angling the light so that it shone more directly into the gap between the coffin lid and the interior.

  ‘Good heavens, there is someone inside here,’ said Chase. He looked across at Tom, who felt the hairs rising on the nape of his neck. ‘There shouldn’t be anyone inside.’

  Tom pulled at the lid so that, with much clattering caused by all the metalwork that was fixed on the top, it moved clear of the coffin. Helen gasped and stepped back. Chase remained bent forward, the arm bearing the oil lamp as stiff as a statue. By its light, Tom saw a body laid out in the coffin. He recognized it. He had last seen the owner of the body alive and well at Ely Station a little more than an hour ago.

  The Second Murder

  Two murders on the Isle of Ely in two days was as many murders as Inspector Stephen Francis had dealt with in the space of twenty years of police work. Those killings, of a labourer’s wife and of a servant’s master, had been straightforward in execution, easy to solve. The guilty parties, one male, one female, had been apprehended straightaway. But the deaths of Charles Tomlinson and Eric Fort were genuine mysteries. In the morning and afternoon he was investigating the first murder, by the evening he was looking into the second. He wondered whether any British policeman had ever had so much on his plate. Nevertheless, Francis proceeded in his usual calm fashion.

  The deaths of Tomlinson and Fort were connected mysteries, surely? For one thing, the two events had various characters in common. There were Mr and Mrs Chase, who each had some involvement with Charles Tomlinson even if both husband and wife had been wary and evasive when he spoke to them earlier on the Monday. And now the body of this Fort fellow had been discovered in an outbuilding in the Chases’ garden.

  Mr Chase claimed never to have heard of Fort before, let alone seen him. As for Bella Chase, she was so overcome by the discovery of a dead body on her husband’s property that she retreated to her room. From there she conveyed the information, via her maid, that she could not possibly converse with the Inspector, not at present. He reflected
that he had already talked with her about one murder today. The latest killing could wait until tomorrow.

  It was fortunate – but it was somehow suspicious as well – that the other couple, the Ansells, who had some connection with Tomlinson or at least with Ernest Lye, were not only on the spot when Fort was discovered in the security coffin but had actually travelled to Ely with him.

  The Ansells were able to identify the dead man and give his occupation. They explained that Fort was intending to visit Cyrus Chase on some business to do with a London undertaker. They helped to fix the time of his death too. The three of them arrived together at the railway station at four o’clock and Fort had been found in his coffin not long after five o’clock. Like an efficient train company, the murderer was working to a very tight timetable.

  Francis might have considered the Ansells under the heading of suspects were it not that they had the most convincing alibi. The couple took a cab from the station to the police-house, where they asked to see him, Francis, as well as making enquiries from the sergeant about Ernest Lye. They obtained directions to Prickwillow Road, walked to the Chases’ house, were shown in by the maid to talk with Cyrus, taken out to the garden shed, and the rest of it. There was no possible interval of time during which Mr and Mrs Ansell could have carried out a murder, either singly or together. He wondered why the Ansells wanted to see him but since, whatever the matter was, it could have no bearing on the death of Eric Fort, Inspector Francis decided to leave the question for the time being. One murder a day was sufficient.

  As for Ernest Lye, he had been released earlier on the afternoon of Fort’s murder. One of the reasons for letting Lye go was that Francis had returned to the Lion Hotel to talk not with his brother-in-law, Salter, but with an ostler who worked in the stables behind the Lion. What the ostler said threw even more doubt on the case against Ernest Lye.

  Yet although Inspector Francis did not believe Lye to be guilty of Tomlinson’s murder, or at least not on the basis of George Grace’s account, he was not convinced of his innocence either. And now the death of Eric Fort made things more complicated. Ernest Lye had apparently returned to Upper Fen with his wife. Francis wasn’t aware of any link between Lye and Fort, but then he knew almost nothing about Fort. It would be only prudent to establish Lye’s whereabouts during the late afternoon. If the gentleman claimed once more to have been wandering about Ely, well . . .

  The connection between Tomlinson and Fort might also be found in the way they’d died. Fort was lying in the coffin, which contained a fair quantity of blood. Once again, this seemed to have come from wounds in the area of the head or neck. But until Doctor Wallace had a look, Inspector Francis decided to form no opinion at all. There were other matters he could investigate.

  One of them was how the body had been conveyed to the outbuilding. Or rather how Eric Fort was enticed into the building and then persuaded or compelled to lie down, still living, inside the security coffin. There was no trace of blood or any kind of struggle in the workshop itself, so Fort must have been alive when he lay down to die, or to be killed.

  Once the body was removed, Francis examined Chase’s workshop with the help of several lamps. Then, with Constable Collis, he came back the next day and went over the scene again. After that he questioned Cyrus Chase about the access to the outbuilding. Chase said that there was only one key for the padlock, which he kept in his possession, but that he had reason to believe that lately someone might have made a copy. He rather thought one or two items had been disturbed inside the building. Why hadn’t he changed the lock? asked the Inspector. He’d been intending to, was Cyrus’ simple answer.

  The possibility that Cyrus or Bella (or both) murdered Fort was one of the first that Francis considered. He talked to the servants in the Prickwillow Road house but nothing much came of it. The staff who tended on Mr and Mrs Chase were as affected by the murder as their mistress, and were busy either having the vapours or attending to those who were having them.

  From Mattie, Inspector Francis learned that she had not seen Mr Chase during the afternoon until the Ansells arrived at around five o’clock. Cyrus was sitting in the drawing room and reading a periodical. Mattie said that she rather thought her employer might have been dozing when she knocked to announce the visitors. If this was the behaviour of a murderer, then it was astonishingly cool and calm behaviour. And Cyrus didn’t strike Francis as especially cool and calm. Having discovered what Cyrus Chase did, he thought of the inventor merely as being a bit odd. Premature burial did not rank highly on the Inspector’s list of worries. From Mrs Chase’s personal maid, Francis discovered that Bella spent the afternoon in her room. She had gone there after he’d talked with her about the first murder, that of Charles Tomlinson, in order to establish her whereabouts on the Sunday afternoon (at Evensong etc.).

  If the murderer of Eric Fort was not someone from within the Chase household then it must have been an outsider. No one had been seen, no suspicious figures lurking outside the house, no interlopers in the garden. Yet it had been a gloomy afternoon, with dusk beginning to come down. Though the trees were not thick with leaves any more they would still provide some cover for anyone determined to sneak on to the Chase property.

  By the light of the following day, Francis, accompanied by Constable Collis, walked very carefully around the house and the garden. There were quite substantial gaps between the villa and the adjoining houses on both sides. One of them was fenced with a gate, though the gate was latched rather than locked. The other side was open but planted up with shrubbery. It was easy to gain access to the garden and to Chase’s workshop by either route, without disturbing anyone inside. In fact a trespasser would only be seen by someone looking out of the window at the moment he happened to pass, and as there were only a few small windows to the sides, the chances of going undetected were high.

  The whole thing was baffling. Francis was happy to admit to Collis that he was baffled. He had no false pride. He was even in the dark about why Eric Fort was planning to call on Cyrus Chase. The inventor of the security coffin informed him that he believed it was to do with a device which he was developing to reduce the risk of premature burial. Fort represented an important London firm interested in the device as a commercial prospect. Chase claimed not to know any more. In any case, Fort never got to him but was intercepted before arrival. Francis made a mental note to ask the Ansells whether they were aware of any more details concerning Fort’s trip, since they had shared the train journey to Ely.

  Otherwise, he was in the dark. Then he received another visitor. This one wished to talk not about the Fort murder but the Tomlinson one. He was a clergyman from St Ethelwine’s in the village of Upper Fen. His name was George Eames. His first words, once the introductions were made and the niceties exchanged, were, ‘I have a confession to make, Inspector.’

  Sleuth hounds

  Tom and Helen Ansell returned to Cambridge on the evening following the discovery of the body of Eric Fort. It was the second time they had gone back to the Devereux Hotel and discussed a murder to whose aftermath they were witnesses. Another murder occurring in the same town and at around the same time of day and being investigated by the same Inspector. If it were not so grim, the situation might have been almost comic in its coincidences.

  The Ansells had given some preliminary details to Inspector Francis – about their visit to the police-house, about finding Fort’s body in the company of Cyrus Chase, and the likely timing of the murder – but had so far said nothing concerning John Jubb’s tale of George Eames and the stuffed monkey. There had not been the opportunity, since the policeman was otherwise occupied.

  Tom thought he ought to write again to David Mackenzie with the news that they would be detained in Cambridge for a while longer. Although Ernest Lye was free, he and Helen were likely to be required as material witnesses to this second killing. How should he phrase it? Mr Mackenzie might start to wonder why this stretch of the fen country was suddenly becoming so mur
derous. And why the Ansells, apparently by chance, were to be found on the scene of every serious crime. Tom and Helen were certainly wondering.

  ‘You’ve recovered?’ Tom said to his wife.

  They had managed to eat a little supper – appetites better than they were yesterday after Charles Tomlinson’s death – and were now fortifying themselves with brandy. Helen said brandy was more effectual than smelling salts as a restorative. They were comfortably ensconced in armchairs on either side of a slumbering fire in the sitting room of their hotel suite.

  ‘Almost recovered. It’s not the first time we’ve stumbled across a body, Tom. Not even the first time this week. I wouldn’t say I am getting used to it but . . .’

  ‘If you wrote it in a story, it would scarcely be believed.’

  ‘Do not be so sure,’ said Helen. ‘You can get away with a great deal of implausibility between hard covers.’

  ‘Anyway, we must go back to Ely tomorrow—’

  ‘Back again . . .’

  ‘Back again, to see that Inspector Francis, and this time tell him everything.’

  ‘You’re making it sound as though we set out to conceal things.’

  ‘We haven’t deliberately been concealing anything,’ said Tom. ‘It’s just that this business has grown so tangled. It’s like . . . like the maze in Ely Cathedral.’

  ‘That is a labyrinth rather than a maze,’ said Helen. ‘And the cathedral labyrinth was not tangled. The path may be tortuous but it is clear. You will reach the end if you do not deviate from the right course.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Tom, who had been pleased with his maze analogy and was less pleased to be put right. ‘In that case, perhaps you’d like to conduct us to the end, Mrs Ansell.’