The Religious Body

by Catherine Aird

  “Bullen and I brought it back with us. I kept it in my room until yesterday morning and then we made it up into a guy. It was easy,” said Tewn ingenuously, “because nuns don’t have much of a figure, do they?”

  “And the glasses,” put in Sloan casually. “Where did you pick them up?”

  “What glasses?” asked Tewn.

  “The guy that I rescued was wearing glasses,” said Sloan impatiently. “Where did they come from?”

  Parker nodded. “Yes, it was. They were on her—it, I mean—when Bullen and I carried it out to the fire.”

  “I didn’t see any glasses,” said Tewn. “We put a couple of buttons in for eyes.”

  Bullen stirred. “She was wearing glasses when Parker and I went to fetch her for the fire. We thought you’d put them on her, Tewn—they looked proper old-fashioned.”

  “Not me,” said Tewn. “I didn’t go back to the cowshed at all after we’d made her up in the morning. I was on the pig rota, remember? We had a farrowing at half past six and I jolly nearly missed my supper.”

  “I thought you’d cadged an old pair from Matron,” said Parker. “She wears them just like that.”

  Ranby was right: Parker was the most intelligent of the three. Sloan said, “So you didn’t take them from the Convent with the habit?”

  “Oh, no,” said Tewn quickly. “Besides we wouldn’t have known they weren’t wanted, would we?”

  “Like you knew the habit wasn’t wanted?” suggested Sloan smoothly. “Like you knew the door would be open for you …”

  Tewn’s color flared up again, Parker looked sullen, Bullen quite impassive. All three remained silent.

  “If, by any chance, any one of the three of you remembers how it came about that that cellar door was to be open to you on Wednesday evening, and that an old habit that nobody wanted just happened to be lying there for the taking, perhaps you’d be kind enough to let me know. It might, incidentally, just be in your own interests to do so, if you get me.”

  Sloan and Crosby went back to the study. Celia Faine was sitting by the fire. She smiled at him. “Here’s the inspector again. How did you find Marwin’s little criminals?”

  “Guilty, I hope,” said Ranby. “I don’t think there was any doubt, was there, that they got that habit?”

  “None at all, sir. They admitted it.”

  “Their idea of a good lark, I suppose.”

  “That’s right, sir, but they say they didn’t take the glasses—the ones that the guy was wearing, remember?”

  “Yes, Inspector, I remember. I’m not ever likely to forget, but I don’t know who can help you there.”

  “You can.”

  “Me?” Ranby looked quite startled. “How?”

  “By telling me who could have had access to your cowsheds during the day.”

  “Cowsheds?” His brow cleared. “The guy—of course. Why, anyone, I suppose. There are all those who go in at milking and to clean and those who teach on milk handling and the Milk Marketing Board people. Any number in one day.”

  “The sheds are never locked?”

  “I doubt if there’s even a key,” said Ranby. “There’s nothing to steal, you see.”

  “So anyone could go in there at any time of the day without it occasioning any interest?”

  “Anyone from the Institute, of course. I don’t know about outsiders. The vet’s here often enough, and odd Inspectors—Ministry ones, I mean.”

  “I see, sir. Thank you. I think that’s all I need to know for the present. Goodnight, miss, goodnight, sir—sorry to have to disturb you so late.…” At the door, he turned and looked back. “These students of yours—are they allowed out into the village at all?”

  “Oh, yes, Inspector, but they must be in by nine on a weekday and half past ten at the weekend. That’s early, I know, but we have an early start here. If they’re going to be dairy farmers they might as well get used to it now, that’s the way we look at it.”

  Hobbett lived in a depressed-looking cottage just off Cullingoak High Street. Neither he nor his wife were noticeably welcoming to Sloan and Crosby. They were led through into the kitchen. It was not clean. A pile of dirty dishes had been taken as far as the sink but not washed. Parts of both an old loaf and a new one lay on the table with some more dirty cups. There were two chairs by the kitchen grate. Mrs. Hobbett subsided into one of these which immediately demonstrated itself to be a rocking chair. She went backwards and forwards, never taking her eyes off the two policemen.

  “Just a few more questions, Hobbett,” said Sloan mildly.

  “Well?”

  “We’re interested in this key of yours to the Convent.”

  “What about it?”

  “Where do you keep it for a start?”

  Hobbett jerked his thumb over towards the back door. “There, on a hook.”

  “Is it there now?”

  “You’ve got eyes, haven’t you? That’s it, all right.”

  “Is it always there?”

  “Except when it’s in my pocket.”

  “You never lend it to anyone?”

  “Me? What for? Catch people wanting to go in one of them places? Never. And it’s my opinion that some of them that’s inside would a lot rather be outside.”

  “Nevertheless, you always lock up before you go every night?”

  Hobbett scowled. “Yes, I do, mate. Every night, like I said.”

  Sloan was quite silent on the way back to Berebury, and Crosby couldn’t decide whether he was brooding or dozing.

  “Hobbett’s the best bet,” said Sloan suddenly.

  Brooding, after all. “Yes, sir.”

  “He could have got into that garden room without it seeming odd and taken the habit down to the cellar. Then all he has to do is to leave the door unlocked when he goes home.”

  “Doesn’t that dragon at the gate—”

  “Polycarp.”

  “Doesn’t she check up on that door?”

  “No need, Crosby. The door from the cellar to the Convent proper is always kept locked. The Reverend Mother said so.”

  “Why didn’t he just take the habit, then?”

  “Him? Catch him doing anything that’ll lose him that nice soft number of a job he’s got? Don’t be daft. Look at it this way. All he has to do is to shift an old habit from that garden room—or whatever you call it—to his little lobby place. Nothing criminal in that.”

  “Then give the key to those lads?”

  “Give nothing, man. He just forgets to lock the door, that’s all. Nothing criminal in that, either. ‘Ever so sorry, Sister. It must have slipped my mind. Won’t happen again.’ That’s if they ever get to know, which they stood a good chance of not doing. Besides, that way Tewn, Parker and Whatshisname—”

  “Bullen.”

  “—Bullen have all the fun of going inside themselves. Much more daring, blast them. Heroes, that’s probably what they think they are. Brave men. They’ve been inside a Convent. Something to tell their grandchildren about. I wonder what Hobbett got out of it?”

  “A few drinks?” suggested Crosby.

  “And,” said Sloan, still pursuing his own train of thought, “he didn’t think he would be doing any harm because he knew they couldn’t get any further.”

  “Because the cellar door was always kept locked,” supplied Crosby. “I say, sir, that’s a point, isn’t it? I mean, who opened the cellar door in the first place?”

  Sloan grunted. “We might make a detective out of you yet, Crosby. Who do you think opened it?”

  Crosby subsided. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Neither do I,” retorted Sloan briefly. “The important thing is that it was opened from the inside.”

  “That narrows the field a bit, sir, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it, Crosby?”

  “Well, you couldn’t have just anybody walking about inside, could you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, sir.…”

  “You’re forgetting Ca
esar’s wife, Crosby.”

  Crosby doubled-declutched to give himself time to think. “Who, sir?”

  “Caesar’s wife. She was above suspicion.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the beginning Saturday morning resolved itself into routine.

  Harold Cartwright had a large mail delivered to him at The Bull, and spent many more than the usual three minutes on the telephone to London. Mrs. Briggs at the Cullingoak Post Office was hard put to it to keep up with his calls as well as serve her usual Saturday morning customers.

  That part of the Agricultural Institute on early call got up and began to go about its business, regretting being born to the land and married to the land, wishing that it led urban lives when it wouldn’t have had to get up early ever and not get up at all on Saturdays.

  Life at the Convent proceeded very much as usual. Sister Gertrude woke the Community at the appointed time and they began to work their way through their immemorial, unchanging round. With one difference. Each Sister had to write on a piece of paper her secular name and address, date of profession and precise location immediately after supper on Wednesday evening. Only old Mother St. Thérèse, to whom all days were the same, found this difficult.

  It was routine, too, at the Berebury Police Station to begin with. Superintendent Leeyes sent for Sloan as soon as he got to his office. He was at his worst in the morning. That, too, was routine.

  “Seen the papers?” Leeyes indicated a truly sepulchral photograph of Sister Polycarp behind the grille, caught in the camera flash with her eyes shut and mouth open. Under this was a much more sophisticated picture taken from a long distance with a telephoto lens of the outside of the Convent through the trees. The effect was sinister in the extreme.

  “Pursuing your enquiries, Sloan, that’s what they say you’re doing.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan bent over to read the report. He was too good a policeman to scorn any facts newspaper reporters might dig out. Besides, they were free men by comparison—no Judges’ Rules for them.

  There wasn’t very much in the paper. The brief news that a nun (unnamed) had died in the Convent of St. Anselm at Cullingoak (short historical note on the Order and its Foundress—see any reference book) once the family seat of the Faines (three paragraphs on the Faine family straight from the nearest Guide to the Landed Gentry), and what they were pleased to call a startling coincidence—the burning of a nun as a guy the very next night—at the nearby Agricultural Institute (run by the Calleshire County Council, Principal, M. Ranby, B.Sc., formerly Deputy Head of West Laming School). Mr. Ranby, said the report, was not available for comment at the Institute yesterday. “Wise man,” thought Sloan. Then followed a highly circumstantial account of the burning of the guy by “a student” who preferred not to give his name. The story wound up with a few generalizations about student rags and the information that an inquest was to be held on Monday morning next in the Guildhall, Berebury. Sloan straightened up.

  “Could be worse.”

  Leeyes grunted. He did not like the Press. “Wait till you’ve seen the Sundays. Especially if they get hold of this time business.”

  “Or the trio who got the habit. A pretty picture they would make. By the way, sir, it was Bullen and Tewn’s footprints Crosby found. He’s just checked. Bullen stood in one spot under the rhododendrons while Tewn went down in the cellar for the habit. That’s what they told us, and the footprints tie up with that.”

  “Not Harold Cartwright’s?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Can’t understand what the devil he’s doing here, Sloan.”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s working,” said Sloan. “I’ve got a man keeping an eye on him. Lots and lots of paper work, telephone calls, tape recorders, the lot.”

  “He’ll be lucky if he gets anything done that way. I never do. Quiet thinking is what gets things done, Sloan. More things are wrought by—er—quiet thought than you would believe.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Logical thought, of course, Sloan.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “There’s one aspect of this case I’ve been thinking about a lot.…”

  “Sir?”

  “This weapon that Dabbe talks about.…”

  Sloan nodded. “He said it was something smooth and round and heavy.”

  “That describes a paperweight and a cannon ball,” said the superintendent testily. “We haven’t found it yet, have we?”

  “Not yet, sir.” Sloan liked the “we.” “We instituted a search on Thursday morning but found nothing. That Sister Peter wasn’t what you could call a good witness. Too worked up for one thing. Swore she showed us everywhere she’s been, and that wasn’t very exciting, but no sign of any blunt instruments.”

  “It must have been there, Sloan.”

  “It must have been there when she touched it, sir. Crosby and I didn’t see it. We went back for another look afterwards when she’d gone off to tell her troubles to somebody else, but we couldn’t pick any lead up anywhere.”

  “Narrows the field a bit, doesn’t it?” said Superintendent Leeyes, just as Crosby had done.

  “I don’t see why,” said Sloan obstinately. “Someone had only to know what it—whatever it was—was there, hadn’t they? Comes to the same thing.”

  Leeyes pounced. “Ah, so you think it’s an outside job, do you?”

  Sloan shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. Not yet. I’ve an open mind.”

  “Have you?” Leeyes glared at him. “I hope that you don’t mean an empty one.”

  “No, sir. On the contrary, the possibilities are still infinite.”

  The concept of infinity had already come up in the superintendent’s Logic course. It was now a word he treated with respect and no longer understood. He let the inspector get as far as the door. “Sloan …”

  “Sir?”

  “Do you know what they make nuns’ habits from?”

  “Wool, I suppose, sir.”

  “Ah, but what sort of wool?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir.”

  “From black sheep, Sloan.”

  The day was still relatively young when Sloan and Crosby reached the Convent. The Mother Superior and Sister Lucy received them as if it was already half over. The Mother Superior handed him a list of names.

  “Thank you, marm. I feel we need all the information we can get in this matter.”

  “Such knowledge as I have is, of course, at your disposal, Inspector.”

  “First, marm, I have some news for you. Mr. Ranby has traced the culprits of Thursday night’s incident—three of his students were responsible for making the guy. He intends to bring them over this morning to apologize in person.”

  She inclined her head graciously. “There is no need for him to go to such trouble, but if he wishes it.… Has their escapade any bearing on Sister Anne’s death, would you say?”

  “If,” countered Sloan carefully, “she had happened upon them in the grounds or in the Convent itself it might have—but I think it unlikely.”

  “So do I,” said the Mother Superior firmly. “Sister Anne—God rest her soul—would have reported such intruders to me immediately. I do not like to think that the students would have reacted to discovery with murder.”

  “No, marm, nor do I.”

  They faced each other in the small Parlor. Irrelevantly it spun through Sloan’s mind that he had never seen such fine skin on two women before. The older, more flaccid face of the Mother Superior reminded him of cream, the younger, firmer skin of Sister Lucy of the peaches that go with it. He remembered reading somewhere that good skin—like a good car—only needed washing with water. He must make a note to tell his wife about their complexions.

  “Marm, there is a question that I must put to you.”

  “Yes, Inspector?”

  “Do you have anyone here who would rather not be here?”

  “I do not think so.”

  “No one who would—er—figurativ
ely speaking, of course—like to leap over the wall?”

  “No, Inspector. We are a Community here in the true sense. I do not think any Sister could reach a state of wanting to be released from her vows without the Community becoming aware of it. That is so, Sister Lucy, is it not?”

  “Yes, Mother. It is something that cannot be hidden.”

  “Likes and dislikes?” put in Sloan quickly.

  The Mother Superior smiled faintly. “Neither are permitted here.”

  “You realize, marm,” he said more crisply, “that any—shall we say, disaffection—would be pertinent to my enquiry, and that my enquiry must go on until it determines how Sister Anne died.”

  She inclined her head. “Certainly, Inspector, but if we had any disaffected Sister here, or even one unable to subdue her own strong likes or dislikes, she would have been sent away. There are fewer locks in a Convent than the popular Press would have one believe.”

  Sloan looked up suddenly. “Has anyone left recently?”

  “Yes, as it happens they have.”

  “Who?” He should have been told this before.

  She looked at him. “I cannot see that the departure of a Sister from the Convent before the unhappy events of the past week can pertain to your enquiry.”

  “I must be the judge of that.”

  She gestured acquiescence. “Sister Lucy shall find her secular name for you. It was Sister Bertha.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “About three weeks ago.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I do not know.”

  “You don’t know?” echoed Sloan in spite of himself.

  “It was not properly our concern to enquire,” said the Mother Superior. “She felt that she could not continue in the religious life and asked to be released from her vows. This was done through the usual channels and she left.”

  “Just like that?” asked Sloan stupidly.

  “Just like that, Inspector.”

  He pulled himself together. “Had she any special connection with Sister Anne? Was she a friend of hers, for instance?”

  “Friendship is not permitted in a Convent. We are all Sisters here. She would have known Sister Anne to just the same extent as we all knew Sister Anne. No less and no more.”