The First Murder

by The Medieval Murderers

  Despite the gloom, she could make out a tall elegant figure, shrouded in a heavy coat similar to Joe’s garrick. He was apparently poking and prodding with one hand at the surface of the obelisk. He held a cane in his other hand, which was pressed against the surface of the obelisk for balance.

  As Doll observed him, he looked nervously down the length of the obelisk towards where Joe would emerge. He must have heard something. She decided to act before he got worried and ran for it. She stepped out from the base of the stone and strode towards the figure.

  ‘Hello, Étienne. What have you found? Cleopatra’s cartouche?’

  The Frenchman spun round, astonished at Doll’s presence.

  ‘Cleopatra? What do you mean?’

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it? Who stole Joe’s notebook with my translation of the cartouche in it. You could tell from the different handwriting that it was my discovery, not Joe’s. And that my experimental replacement of the two “ke”s at the end of the word with “a”s gave me most of a familiar name. Cleopatra. That is why you decided to murder me at the Royal Coburg. You could not bear the thought that a mere Englishwoman would beat you to the great prize of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. Unfortunately for you, and Morton Stanley, the bath I was in was misplaced. So your heavyweight trap fell on the wrong person. You even absented yourself from the theatre at the moment the apparent accident was to take place so as not to be suspected of foul play.’

  Quatremain sneered, recovering his sang-froid.

  ‘Yes, I invited myself to Bankes’s celebration of the arrival of the obelisk to these shores.’ He patted the prostrate stone. ‘So neither of us was at the theatre when the . . . accident happened.’

  He took a step away from the obelisk, and closer to the quayside.

  ‘No one could accuse either of us of dropping the counterweight on you. And neither of us would be suspected of knowing enough of backstage matters to set the trap, if it was seen as something more than a mere accident.’

  ‘Except you made the mistake of telling me that your uncle was once the manager of the Comédie Française in Paris.’

  Quatremain poked with his cane at the gaps in the stone slabs of the quay. His right hand was behind his back.

  ‘Ah. I had thought that you would not remember me saying that. Now I have two reasons to kill you.’

  ‘Before you do, do tell me what you were doing to the obelisk.’

  ‘I was trying to obliterate the Cleopatra cartouche so that neither you nor Bankes would see it and get to decipher hieroglyphs before I did. Now I must use this hammer for another purpose.’

  He brought his hand from behind his back, and swung the hammer he held in it high in the air. But before he could bring it down, Malinferno, who had been sneaking up behind Quatremain as Doll diverted his attention, grabbed at his arm. However, the Frenchman must have seen the look in Doll’s eyes, betraying her accomplice’s presence to him. He twisted round at the last moment, and Malinferno missed Quatremain’s upraised arm. Instead he caught his shoulder, and the Frenchman stumbled sideways. He dropped the hammer, and reached out to break his fall. But there was nothing behind him but air. He teetered on the brink of the quay, and his elegant shoes slipped on the wet, rainy surface. The edge of the dock was curved and did not help him regain his balance. For a long moment he hung in the air. Then he moaned and, still clutching his cane, fell into the waters below.

  Cautiously, both Joe and Doll stepped to the edge of the quay, and peered into the inky Thames. The tide was fast flowing out to sea, and Quatremain had already disappeared into the river’s depths. Malinferno ran up and down the quayside for a while, but could see nothing of the Frenchman.

  Then Doll cried out, ‘Look!’

  She pointed downstream at the middle of the torrent. Malinferno gazed hopelessly into the teeming rain, the gap between the downpour and the river hardly discernible. Then he spotted what Doll had seen. An elegantly clad arm was raised above the waves holding on to a silver-topped cane. To Malinferno, it resembled the outstretched arm of the Lady of the Lake holding Excalibur. But then, he had been embroiled in several Arthurian escapades lately, and his fevered fancy was aroused. As they both watched, the arm slid slowly beneath the waters, still clutching the cane.

  Malinferno and Doll Pocket met Augustus Bromhead in the eerily silent Royal Coburg Theatre the following day. Will Mossop was supposed to be present, but had left a note with Job, the stage-door man. It apologised for his absence due to ‘pressing matters’. Bromhead sighed.

  ‘He means he is busy finding a replacement for The Play of Adam, which has been cancelled.’

  Doll joined her sigh to Bromhead’s as she scuffed at the chalk cross on the stage that was to mark the place of her death.

  ‘I suppose that, after losing the leading man, today’s news was the final straw for the production.’

  Everyone knew to what she was referring. Since the farce of the King’s coronation, and her failure even to gain access to the Abbey, Queen Caroline had taken to her bed. She complained of persistent stomach pains, for which she took copious amounts of milk of magnesia laced with laudanum. Late on the previous night, when Joe and Doll were struggling with Étienne Quatremain in Deptford Docks, Caroline had given up her struggle to live. Her death had put an end to Mossop’s topical version of Augustus’ rediscovered play. No one was in the mood to satirise a dead queen. Actually, Doll was not too disappointed.

  ‘I don’t think I’m cut out to be an actress, Joe. It’s too much like hard work.’

  Bromhead also expressed some relief at the demise of the project.

  ‘My heart ceased to be in the production ever since Mossop changed it into a modern satire, I must say. And as for the curse of “Cain and Abel”, it has convinced me to lock the manuscript and the old book in a box well away from prying eyes. As I have no children, I have bequeathed all my books to the boy of my second cousin. Thackeray by name. Young Will is a bit of a ne’er-do-well and I don’t suppose he will amount to much, or even read any of my collection. Though he may pass it on to a library, if he has any sense. Personally, I hope The Play of Adam is never found again, or if it is, that no one tries to revive it. The first murder in history should be the only one associated with this cursed play.’

  Surrey, July 1944

  He limped into the Senior Common Room and tossed a file of dog-eared lecture notes onto the stained table near the door. This held a kettle simmering on a gas ring, a collection of odd cups and saucers, a battered tin tea-caddy, a large brown china tea pot and a tin of National Dried Milk donated by the assistant librarian, who had small children.

  ‘Harry’s had another of his brain-storms,’ the newcomer announced glumly, as he poured himself a cup of over-stewed Brooke Bond and stirred it vigorously to break up the lumps of milk powder. ‘He’s decided the college needs a diversion from the Second Front, so we have to put on a medieval play to entertain visitors at the Open Day next month!’

  The only other occupant of the SCR groaned.

  ‘Why the hell can’t Harry stick to The Importance of Being Earnest or Jack and the Beanstalk, like any normal person?’

  ‘Harry’ was the covert nickname for Dr Hieronymus Drabble, the Reader and Head of the History Department at Waverley College, beloved by none of his small staff. The first man sank into a sagging armchair of worn Rexine and sipped his tea as he stared around the room. The grand title of Senior Common Room, which conjured up visions of a sedate chamber in a venerable Oxford college, seemed misplaced for this seedy place more suited to an inner-city secondary school. But Peter Partridge was not looking at the familiar décor and furnishings, but was casting a critical eye at the windows. In charge of Air-Raid Precautions at the college, he stared at the wide strips of sticky tape that crisscrossed the panes of glass to minimise the possibility of blast injuries and then at the heavy curtains of black cloth that had to blank out the slightest glimmer of light after dark. Obsessive about his responsibilities, he satisf
ied himself that a broken hook on one rail had been replaced by the college caretaker.

  ‘What’s brought this on all of a sudden?’ demanded Loftus Maltravers, Senior Lecturer in the History Department. ‘Harry’s not angling for a professorship again, is he?’

  ‘Only God knows how his mind works!’ growled Partridge. ‘But you might be right. No doubt some of the members of Council will turn up for it. Anyway, he’s called a meeting for three o’clock to discuss it. Every one has to be there, it’s a three-line whip.’

  Peter was a big man in his late twenties, with red hair parted in the centre and Brylcreemed down flat on either side. A lecturer with a special interest in the plays of Molière, he had heavy features and an aggressive manner, which made him unpopular with his colleagues, who tried hard to make allowances for his club foot and the consequent three-inch-thick sole on his left boot. Like most of the college staff, either on health grounds or from being overage, he was exempt from military service.

  Loftus, who suffered from bouts of severe asthma, was a thin, morose fellow nearing fifty, with black hair and a Clark Gable moustache. He was an expert in the history of stage scenery and pantomime throughout the ages. The two men always seemed ready to snipe at each other, contradicting and arguing over trivialities.

  ‘So what play do we have to do?’ he demanded. ‘Not another bit of the Townley Cycle, surely? We were stuck with that two years ago. I’m not building another bloody Noah’s Ark for it.’

  Partridge sighed and shook his head. ‘No need to get yourself in a lather, Loftus! Harry said he’d found something very interesting in an old journal. He seemed quite excited about it, said we ought to follow it up and maybe get up a paper for one of the Yank publications.’

  ‘Nice to see that plagiarism is still alive and well,’ observed Loftus, with his habitual cynicism.

  They broke off their conversation as the distant ululations of air-raid sirens began broadcasting their warning to a wide area of northern Surrey and South London. The college was a few miles south of Croydon, having been evacuated in 1940 from the main university campus in Lambeth to this shabby Victorian mansion in the supposedly safer Green Belt.

  ‘Bit early for them, isn’t it?’ asked Loftus, uneasily. With part of the northern coast of France already liberated following D-Day the previous month, the Luftwaffe air raids had almost ceased, but the unmanned V-1 missiles were still coming from launching ramps in the Pas de Calais.

  The wailing sound faded and nothing further disturbed the peace of the morning, though until the steady tone of the All Clear sounded forty minutes later, both men had half an ear listening for the throbbing drone of the pulse-jet engine that signalled the approach of a ‘doodlebug’, to use the derisory but fearful term for Hitler’s no-longer secret weapon.

  Loftus carried on reading some essays he had set during term time to the few undergraduates that had either escaped the call-up or had been invalided from the Forces. In the armchair, Peter Partridge scanned the four thin pages of the morning newspaper. As a drama historian, he found the news that Stalin had once more attacked Finland and invaded the Baltic States of less immediate interest than reports of the London premiere of Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

  The door opened again and a very thin elderly woman came in, hugging a briefcase under her arm. She had a severe face devoid of make-up and wore old-fashioned pince-nez on a cord pinned to her mannish grey costume. Dr Agatha Wood-Turner, Senior Lecturer in Religious Art, was inevitably known by the nickname of ‘Lathe’, from both her surname and her body shape.

  Scorning the motley collection of crockery on the table, she sat on an upright chair and delved into her case to retrieve a tartan Thermos flask. Unscrewing the Bakelite cover, she poured some murky brown fluid into it and then produced a small bottle of milk, two sugar cubes and a paper bag containing three digestive biscuits. Only when she had organised her ‘elevenses’ did she acknowledge the presence of the two men.

  ‘I hear that Doctor Drabble is intending to put on a play for Open Day,’ she said, as if she was reading the one o’clock news on the BBC Home Service.

  Maltravers nodded. ‘We’re on parade at three o’clock. A hundred lines for any absentees,’ he added sarcastically, but the prim and proper woman ignored his attempt at levity.

  The door opened again and a very different sort of female entered. Christina Ullswater was the archetypal fluffy blonde – petite, blue-eyed and shapely. She wore a fussy pink floral dress with ruffles at the neck, a white cardigan thrown artfully over her shoulders and unsuitably high-heeled shoes. At twenty-six, she was a postgraduate working on her doctoral thesis, and in spite of looking like an escapee from a Chelsea tennis club, was in fact a very clever young woman, already making her mark in the rarified world of early medieval poetry.

  It was a matter of covert speculation in the college as to why she was not a Waaf or Wren, and opinions varied from having a daddy who was ‘something in the War Office’, to having being the mistress of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The most popular theory at the moment was that her first war job had been filling shells at a munitions factory, but that she had been asked to leave after a fortnight, due to fears for the safety of the establishment!

  Christina gave a big smile to the others and dropped into another mismatched armchair. Though technically not on the teaching staff, the exigencies of war allowed her to use the SCR, as out of term time the students’ meagre facilities were closed down.

  ‘Hear the sirens earlier on?’ she asked brightly. ‘Less often now than last month, thank heaven. Why they bother with sirens, I can’t imagine. When the motor stops, we’ve got only half a minute left, so what’s the point?’

  Listening to doodlebug engines was now a serious pastime. If the noise continued when directly overhead, you were safe, but if it cut out before it reached you, you could well expect half a ton of high explosive to be dropped at your feet.

  Agatha Wood-Turner preferred not to dwell on instruments of violent death, unless they were medieval tortures portrayed in stained-glass windows.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be cast as the Virgin, and I’ll get Noah’s wife, as usual,’ she said bitterly.

  The blonde batted her long eyelashes at the speaker in a parody of puzzlement.

  ‘What on earth do you mean, Agatha?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard yet on the college grapevine? Our lord and master wants to put on a Miracle Play for the Open Day.’

  Christina shrugged philosophically. ‘Oh well, it beats having to listen to Harry making more speeches about how studying art history furthers the war effort!’

  She groped in her own document case and pulled out a shapely bottle of orange Tizer and a glass. Filling it and raising it to the others, she proposed a toast.

  ‘Here’s to Adam and Eve, then. On with the motley, the paint and the powder!’

  ‘I thought we needed something essentially British in these dangerous times,’ said Hieronymus Drabble, doing his best to sound Churchillian. ‘Something from our glorious past, like a medieval play from the Old Testament.’

  ‘That would be essentially Hebrew, not British,’ muttered Partridge, but Drabble ignored him. He was a fat man with a bald head and a double chin, having a passing resemblance to the Prime Minister, which he cultivated. Approaching sixty, he saw his coveted professorship slipping beyond his grasp, and this soured his whole nature.

  ‘Are you talking about another bit of the York or Chester Cycle?’ demanded Agatha, referring to a couple of the well-known collections of religious plays from the Middle Ages. ‘We’ve done a few of those over the years, even going back before the war,’ she pointed out, to emphasise her seniority in years of service.

  Drabble shook his head, his jowls flapping above his spotted bow tie.

  ‘No, no! I came across something new quite recently.’

  He reached across his paper-strewn desk and picked up a few pages of foolscap, pinned together in one corner. ‘I
was in Oxford the other day, as an external examiner for a dissertation, and took the opportunity to call into the Bodleian to look up a few references.’

  He looked at the fifth member of his captive audience, who were all seated on hard chairs around the other side of his desk. This was Blanche Fitzwilliam, the assistant librarian, a short, dumpy lady with a pleasant manner.

  ‘As you know only too well, our own library is woefully short of many historical journals,’ he said heavily.

  Blanche was a war widow, having lost her RAF husband in the Battle of Britain, and was not going to be brow-beaten by the likes of Harry Drabble

  ‘And it will remain woefully short until the war is over!’ she said spiritedly. ‘We lost half our stock when that incendiary bomb came through the roof three years ago.’

  The Reader raised a hand in surrender. ‘Of course, dear lady! I’m not blaming anyone, apart from Adolf Hitler – just stating a fact. Anyway, I found one of the papers I was looking for in an 1894 volume of the Quarterly Journal of Historical Research, but serendipitously noticed another title on the Contents Page that was of even more interest!’

  He waited for an excited reaction, but there was a sullen silence.

  ‘It was a translation and a commentary by Austin Dudley Price of something he found in the London Library archives the previous year. An Early Middle English script – the twelfth-century original and a Jacobean translation of The Play of Adam.’

  This time, Loftus Maltravers showed some reaction, albeit negative.

  ‘The Play of Adam? Never heard of it. Not in any of the well-known Cycles, is it?’

  Christina chipped in, ‘Couldn’t be, it’s too early. Where did it come from originally?’

  ‘Oseney Abbey, according to Dudley Price,’ said Drabble. ‘It’s got the usual subjects in it – the Creation, the Fall of Lucifer, Cain and Abel, the Flood.’