“And previously you had exhorted him to repentance? Was that the main purpose of your visit?”
“It was—to some extent.” The Bishop moved uncomfortably.
“And had he come here merely to receive your exhortation?”
“There were other reasons, but as I said, he is dead and the memory can be buried with him.”
“Not if we have reason to believe that his death took place in very curious circumstances! Bishop, I must ask you to be frank. What was that business?”
“Really—” the Bishop glanced despairingly at Dick but gained no reassurance there. For Dick seemed suddenly to see, as with some sixth sense, not what the Bishop did or said, as much as the impression made by his attitude on the Chief Constable. Up to that minute Dick had not even contemplated the possibility of the Bishop’s guilt; he did not do so now, but an inner voice began to comment on every remark the Bishop made. “Really,” the prelate began feebly, “it is no concern of yours now, Major Mack.”
(“He is fencing. Why doesn’t he come into the open?” Dick’s voice suggested.)
“But you would agree it was my concern if we had some suspicion of foul play. I will be frank with you, sir. We have found one of Ulder’s papers, which shows he was here for one purpose only, that of blackmail. We have on this paper the names of his victims, beginning with your own. Was he in possession of any other incriminating documents?”
“No, no!” For a moment Dick thought the Bishop would faint, for he sagged over so heavily in his chair. “I cannot understand all this. Pray make yourself clear.”
(But could anything be much clearer than those words Foul Play?)
“Well, sir, I’ll speak out. We doubt if Ulder committed suicide. We have reason to think he was murdered.”
“But who—who?” gasped the Bishop. (But surely how or why would be the obvious questions of any one to whom the pronouncement came as an overwhelming shock!)
“That, Bishop, we don’t know yet?” said Mack fiercely. “But we shall discover it, never fear!”
“But surely everything pointed to suicide?” Dick hardly listened while the Chief Constable tersely related the reasons for his suspicions. His eyes were fixed upon the Bishop’s trembling hands. The fire flickered on the amethyst of the pastoral ring; the fingers and knuckles stretched tautly and nervously, livid in the uncanny snowlight from the window, as if they were striving to seize and manipulate the whole dreadful situation. If only the Bishop would show a little surprise or horror, thought Dick despairingly. Who can blame Mack if he thinks he is watching a criminal being unmasked?
“Then whom do you suspect?” asked the Bishop at length.
(But why should an innocent man stammer out these words? Why not protest, as Dick had, that such a crime was unthinkable as far as the house-party was concerned?)
“Someone in this house will be found to have morphia in his possession. Somewhere we shall find Mr. Ulder’s missing bag and the incriminating papers,” answered Mack weightily. “That person will obviously be open to the gravest suspicions.”
“Someone—some enemy of Ulder’s—might have got in last night?”
“I’ve considered that possibility, Bishop, but it’s an untenable hypothesis. How was any enemy—and I admit he seems to have had enough of them—to know he was coming here last night? He only thought of staying at the last moment, I gather? His room was booked at his hotel and he only had his luggage with him because he never let it out of his sight, or so he told your butler, I believe? How was any one outside the Palace to know that he would be taken ill, and given enough morphia to make a second dose, even a small dose, fatal? Dr. Lee is of the opinion that it must have been administered not long before midnight. Up to that hour, as far as I can gather, the house party was crossing and recrossing the corridor outside his room and looking in for these most curious interviews. Mrs. Broome and the servants assure me that all doors were found locked and bolted on the inside as usual this morning. Could any one have climbed in at his window, having forced it open, by the way, in that snow-storm, and left no traces on the carpet or furniture? No, it was not an outside job. That’s certain. And now, my lord, I think you see it is necessary I should ask you what hold Ulder had, or fancied he had, over you?” Dick put down his notebook and strolled away to the window, unreproved, as the Bishop stammered out his daughter’s unedifying story. He had no wish to hear it again, or Mack’s comments and questions. To Dick, Judith was just a freak in this setting, one of those exquisite will-o’-the-wisps, born without a soul to beckon men after them. One could only blame the irony of Fate that she had been born in this setting. At least she was showing some concern about her own fate, and that of her future child, and that was an advance in morality for her.
“And now I must go—I must go and pray in the Chapel!” The Bishop tottered from his seat like an old man.
“Well, not a word, please, about this conversation till I have seen your colleagues. Dick, help the Bishop!”
That apparent consideration was, of course, to see that the Bishop reached his canopied stall without speech to any one.
“Damn it, Dick!” Mack was pacing about the room on Dick’s return. “I forgot to ask him about the papers you say Ulder must have brought with him. To get hold of them was motive enough! Go and get the Bishop back to tell me what they were.”
“Is it necessary, sir? I saw them all last night. The Bishop, Canon and Chancellor took it into their heads to consult me—I’d been in the Ulder trouble before, you see.”
“A Daniel come to judgment! Well, go ahead. I must tell my men at once what sort of papers to look for. Whoever finished Ulder off, took them, bag or no bag!”
“Ulder proposed to show the Bishop the signatures of Clive and Judith Mortimer, which he’d torn out of the Blacksea Grand Hotel book—a clean page as it happened. Also a signed statement from the chambermaid that one set of luggage had the initials C.F. and the other J.M. stamped on them. The woman also picked up a letter addressed to Colonel Fitzroy. She will recognize them anywhere on oath. And then there are letters dealing with the old affair showing how the Bishop condoned Ulder’s faults to avoid scandal. Ulder had sworn to destroy them all.”
“Couldn’t show them anyhow or he’d have been prosecuted for theft and so on, surely?”
“No, that’s why he waited till he was leaving this country, I imagine.”
“And Canon Wye? Same sort of thing? I must tell the men.”
“The same and—and a newspaper cutting. But he will tell you himself. Probably there will be smallish packets of letters in envelopes. And the Chancellor the same, but his might be larger. I can’t tell you more, sir. I was told in confidence.”
“Good enough,” grunted Mack when he had sent the message.
There had been tragedy in the Bishop’s departure, but there was none in the scene which now took place. Canon Wye answered the Chief Constable’s summons at once, and he stormed up and down the room like a caged lion.
“I have nothing to tell you, sir. The man was a disgrace not only to the Church but to humanity itself. I can only wonder that man, let alone God, tolerated him on this earth so long. Why should I regret his killing himself? He should have been put down with poison like a rat long ago!”
“So that’s your view!” sneered Mack. “The view of a preacher of the Gospel too! Well, well, it will be no surprise to you to hear the truth, and I think in view of it you’ll see that your business with Ulder is my business too!”
What would Mack make of Canon Wye’s demeanour, as Mack briefly recapitulated the conclusions of the police? To Dick it seemed as if Torquemada himself, tall and incredibly thin in his black cassock, with fierce eyes and tight lips, were listening to the account of a heretic’s end with business like satisfaction. He made no sound of pity or horror, and merely stood staring from the window at the snow-covered lawns and phantom arches of the old Abbot’s gateway, when Mack ended his tale. But when his interlocutor shot out the question:
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“And now, Canon, you’ll tell me perhaps of Ulder’s business with you?” Wye turned round in a fury.
“You’d have known it shortly in any case, I had determined to take Marlin’s advice and communicate with the police. I told Ulder so last night. It was fantastic that he should consider he had any hold over me at all!”
(Then did Canon Wye know that the papers were destroyed? If not, how could he, thought Dick, expect the Chief Constable to believe this defiance? There had been no such desperate challenge in the Canon’s manner when he laid Ulder’s letter to him before Dick in this very room last night. Dick had a good visual memory and once more the threats, in erratic type on cheap note-paper, danced before his eyes. “Dear Canon Wye,” so the letter had read roughly, he remembered, “you may be surprised to hear from me but I am winding up my affairs here, as I propose to pay a long visit to America. I can no longer endure the sense of hostility and suspicion which pursued me even after my triumphant vindication five years ago: this has, I know, been rife in high quarters. And yet which of us has not some secret failing which he trusts to time to conceal? Are you, my dear Canon, blameless? It has come to my notice (after, I admit, a little research on my part) that you were the anonymous author of a work which roused the righteous indignation of the orthodox, ten years ago? I refer to The Questioner. I remember among the many hostile reviews one which stated that the author, a heretic if not an agnostic, could never hope for preferment in the Church. The Deanery of Starre is vacant and I have heard your name mentioned—what a pity if your secret became known and thus deprived you of promotion, and the Church of an earnest believer in high places. May we meet to discuss the whole question? I need but remind you of the proverb that ‘silence is golden’ and you will understand my point. Yours truly, Thomas Ulder.” P.S. £2,000 is a good round sum.)
“And you discussed this with Ulder last night? You threatened to prosecute him for blackmail? Did you imagine when you heard of the suspicion of suicide that you had driven him to his death?”
“No! I was surprised that he had the courage to end himself. I gave him a week to leave the country before I made any move, and he had booked for his voyage.”
“And he only threatened you with his old story of exposing the incompetence and cowardice of the clergy as I see it, as most laymen would see it? He had no personal hold over you?”
“To some small extent.” (The Bishop’s very words and almost as untrue, thought Dick—it was pretty ghastly to discover how truth was the first bit of Christian ballast to be thrown overboard in a crisis! And Canon Wye had not in his composition one streak of that moral cowardice which his old pupils had discerned unfailingly in the Bishop!)
“Well—” with a sudden glance at Dick the Canon realized that secrecy was impossible. (Or was it, hoped Dick, that he meant to speak out before he remembered that Dick of course knew of the letter.) “He had a hold over me I already admit. Fifteen years ago as a young priest I was assailed by doubts. I immersed myself in science and philosophy—those temptations of the devil to those who call themselves liberal and progressive, as I did then. I was foolish, nay wicked, enough to publish my speculations in a book entitled The Questioner-—Is There Any Answer? I did not use my own name, and enjoined the strictest anonymity on my publishers, for well I knew it would lay me open to the charge of heresy.”
Was it a slight shock to the Canon that Mack had never heard of the work which had fluttered Anglican dovecots so severely in Dick’s youth? Probably now, in 1920, it would not cause such a stir: there were only too many others who had questioned the validity of the records of the Virgin Birth, the Miracles and the Resurrection. But at the time it had been a major scandal in the Church and the origin of a lengthy controversy which led many, valued for their intellects and influence, into the Church of Rome. It was written with an acidity, a hostility towards revealed religion, and so deep a disbelief in the honesty of its conventional supporters that the very name of Questioner was anathema to those in authority. It would be hard for Mack to realize that the Canon’s confession seemed far more shocking, even degrading to his audience last night, than any fault of Judith’s.
“They are not my views now: they have not been so indeed ever since,” continued the Canon. “I sought an interview with the Dean of St. Ruan after reading his criticism in the Literary Supplement, and he changed my whole outlook. He bade me start anew and hold my peace about the authorship of the book.”
“To save scandal again?” suggested Mack acidly.
“I refused to allow any further editions or any sale to America: what money I had made I gave to charities. It was no small atonement for I have no means of my own.”
“Hmhm!” The Scotsman was obviously impressed by such a financial sacrifice. “Well, sir, I really don’t see why you had anything to fear from Ulder after such restitution. No bishop would unfrock you”—he glanced distastefully at Wye’s cassock—“or sequestrate your living because of a youthful indiscretion if you can call it so. And—damn it all, a book is—well merely a book!”
The Canon had reached the fireplace in his fierce parade of the room, but he turned now and strode away to the big window at the other end. Across the long glimmering oak floor, against the white snow and black trees, he stood gazing out at the ruins for a long minute as if he too were a leafless tree in the snows of adversity.
“We call those ruined choirs peaceful,” he broke out. “How many of those old Abbots burnt their hearts and faith out in scheming and struggling to gain their high post? By that sin fell the angels! It was not necessary to speak out my thoughts last night on this topic. What was it the Bishop said: ‘Such a revelation might prejudice your chances of preferment, my dear Canon’. … Only later, most tactfully later, the Chancellor said that he had heard my name mentioned in connection with a vacant Deanery. You, Marling, said nothing, of course, but I saw you looking at me as a young man looks at his elders when they have made a mess of their lives, with pity, oh yes, but a touch of contempt too. At the time of my conversion, for only so can I describe the blinding light which struck me after my visit to the Dean, I asked no more than to serve as a humble priest in the Anglo-Catholic Church. And then preferment came, ambition awoke, and I knew myself ‘the most offending soul alive’.” (How these tags of Shakespeare haunted the poor fellow, thought Dick.) “It even led me to come to you with a lie on my lips—that I had, I mean, no personal animus against Ulder. Now you know the truth and I will leave you to draw what conclusions you will. All I have to tell you of last night is that I visited Ulder, that we had a stormy interview, and that I refused to consider his terms, partly because I could not raise such a sum, partly because I had no reason to believe he would keep his word or leave off his activities from America—why should he?—and partly because my conscience forbade it. I told him I would give him a week to get away, and after that prosecute for blackmail. I left the room knowing that he could ruin me, and hoping that he would never recover from his illness. That was at about half-past ten or a little later. And now I will leave you!”
“One moment, sir! Have you any drugs with you, sleeping draught or so on?”
“Neither I nor the curates in my clergy house touch them!” snapped the Canon as he strode away.
“Another case of going to pray in Chapel, I fancy,” said Mack dryly, ringing the bell. “That fellow wouldn’t stick at a murder if he had convinced himself he was doing God service! Jael and the butter knife, you know,” he added vaguely, as Soames appeared, and was sent off to fetch the Chancellor. “So that little rabbit of a butler is your fancy, Dick? I can’t see him in the role, though of course poisoners are a class of their own. But why pick on him without any conceivable reason for the crime? For I can’t call a bag of night kit a reason for murder, and he couldn’t have been wise to the fact that at least five other people here wanted Ulder out of the way. But you go off and make contacts with your C.I.D. friend—do them no harm to have a spot of work at the Yard. And say your pr
ayers if you must! They need them here! Better not take notes for the Chancellor in this interview anyway.”
“What shall I say if Herriot asks if you need their help, sir, as you’re so short-handed?”
“Tell ’em nothing,” said Mack testily, as the Chancellor entered the room.
“Well, sir!” Mack’s voice showed his relief at a change from cassocks and clerics. Though he would hardly have admitted it, he felt it most improbable that a layman and a lawyer could be guilty of so sordid a crime as this murder. He watched the Chancellor closely, indeed, as he broke to the newcomer the result of his investigations and the suspicion of murder, and murder by someone in the Palace. The Chancellor exhibited, it seemed to him, just the amount of surprise, shock and bewilderment which he would expect from a wholly innocent man. Of course, Mack reminded himself conscientiously, no crime, not even murder, could seem as appalling and bewildering to a lawyer as to one of these parsons who had, he considered, been wrapped in cotton-wool all their lives. But Mack all the same began to feel a certain resentment as the Chancellor, his legal rubicund mask unperturbed, rapped out a series of questions to him, instead of answering meekly, extracting a far clearer aperçu of the affair than from the tortured clerics. Was he not a little too much master of himself and the situation? Was he not too clearly proving his own case and his own alibi? Better turn on him with a few questions, and see how he liked them for a change!
“Now, sir, I’d like your help in clearing up some points. When did you last visit Mr. Ulder last night?”
“About nine-thirty when the others were all in Chapel. May I say that if you are attempting to throw suspicions on me”—the Chancellor’s cheeks grew purple and he pulled out those neat whiskers—“I should like to summon my solicitor here at once.”
“Well, you can, of course, but I’m not asking for anything but a story from you as a witness so far. If you won’t answer me I can only suppose you have your own reasons for suppressing evidence.” (Mack hurried on quickly feeling that this old gag would hardly impress a lawyer.) “We know that Mr. Ulder was attempting to blackmail you.”
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