“Open to us the heavenly road
And bar the way to death’s abode …”
No, not a good escape really, for it brought a sudden vision, a youthful obsession, of a short walk at dawn blindfold, of the executioner waiting, of the despairing exultant words of the burial service. For a moment he saw the three figures before him staggering those few steps, all insignia of their professions, all dignity and respect gone. Violently he pulled himself together. “Oh come, oh come, Adonai,” he almost shouted, though how had this charming medieval conception of Deity crept down into the English Hymnal? He shut his eyes to force his mind far away to those gold pillars above the Aegean, to airy gods of woods and hills, of love and laughter and Olympic heights. But that was really not of much avail, for in their glades, flower-crowned, singing, and smiling as she sang, he saw Judith, with her lovely hair alight, her white peplon floating lightly over fields of asphodel. Judith was pagan all right! She was amoral, and from nursery days would do anything to gain her ends. Was it because human nature could or would not detect real cruelty at the heart of beauty, or was it because he couldn’t believe the girl had wits enough to plan murder, on an impulse, achieve it, and then not boast about it afterwards to one chosen confidante at least, that Dick could not focus his suspicions on her? Well, the service was over and much good it had done him! “The Peace of God …” the Bishop was pronouncing, but how much peace would any one have in the Palace to-night?
Dick himself fared badly. In the room on one side of his Canon Wye was pacing up and down murmuring what might be prayers but sounded like curses. The old house with its worn panelling was a sounding board, and in the Bishop’s room on the other side Dick to his surprise heard such bangs and knocks of drawers as usually attend a house removal.
“What is it, dear?” called Mrs. Broome to her husband from the adjoining bedroom to his. She was utterly worn out with the duties and terrors of the last twenty-four hours, bad news about Moira from the hospital, anxiety about her adored, sinful Judith, and most of all the unuttered suspicions of the police which haunted the house like a creeping miasma. “Aren’t you in bed? Are you looking for some thing?”
“No, no!” The Bishop’s denial was unnecessarily vehement.
“But, dear, you are!” Mrs. Broome got out of bed a few minutes later, to see for herself why her husband was still pulling and tugging at his drawers and wardrobe. She stared in blank amazement in the doorway when she saw him poised on the arm of a chair, feeling along the top of a very high chest.
“Mark dear! Whatever is it? Let me help you!”
“No, no, it is only my spectacles!” The Bishop, a strange, prophetic figure in his camel’s hair dressing-gown, descended abruptly, and as abruptly began to search the uneven floor beneath the piece of furniture.
“But, dearest, they are on your dressing-table!”
“My other spectacles!” The Bishop moved miserably to the bureau, and opened and shut the drawers with the helpless hopelessness of those who have already searched a spot again and again.
“But there they are, on the bureau! And you should not read at night, you know, with your tired eyes! And you ought to sleep, you look worn out! Don’t shake your head! Why not come to the other bed in my room and let me give you a somnerell—they are quite harmless—and let me read you to sleep?”
“No one shall ever touch sleeping draughts in my house again,” declared the Bishop vehemently.
“Now, dearest, you must not let this get on your nerves!” Mrs. Broome assumed a cheerfulness which she was far from feeling. “These dreadful times pass and are forgotten, thank Heaven. Why, my old nurse used to tell us of the widow of a man who was executed and yet ended her days in a villa called Hemp View!”
But it seemed that this felicitous reminiscence brought no consolation. She had to leave the Bishop till sheer fatigue drove him to bed at last.
An hour later when the whole house seemed wrapped in slumber, more than one of those who tossed in the light sleep of anxiety seemed to remember that they heard a stealthy footfall creeping along the passages, and the light click of a door in the Bridge wing.
X
FRIDAY MORNING
Though it seemed incredible there was a certain slackening of tension in the Palace on Friday morning. It may be that human nature, after the strain of the shock and horror of the day before, relaxed automatically, or that the desperate appeal of the Litany and the solemnity of the following service, brought comfort. It was certainly reinforced by a telephone message from Mack that he could not reach the Palace till the afternoon, and the impression which Dick confided to Bobs that the old boy was distinctly rattled. The only orders he sent were that no one was to leave the Palace without permission from Tonks and Corn who were coming out to pursue their search for the missing bottle and missing papers. “And Corn started on the Bishop’s sermons in the order of the Church year and hadn’t reached the third Sunday in Advent after three hours at it,” said Bobs.
The Chief Constable was one of those Scotsmen who are never so happy as when they feel overworked and meet general opposition, but he was indeed having a little too much of both. The Magistrate, a personal friend of the Bishop, had demanded an interview on Thursday evening in answer to the appeal for a search-warrant, and Mack had been obliged to leave his den, his slippers and his glass of grog to receive a few very outspoken criticisms. “Why, the man wasn’t even officially dead, let alone murdered,” the irate magistrate had declared, “until the police-surgeon had seen the body. We all know dear old Lee is blind and deaf, and till Surgeon Hay had given an opinion you had no official status!” Mack reached his home at eleven o’clock, to find a village Northcliffe in the hall anxious to know what line the Evelake Courier should take over the affair when it appeared on Saturday. Mack, imprisoned all yesterday in the snow-bound Palace, had congratulated himself on the fact that the Press would not interfere with him. He had not realized that the milkcart and butcher’s van had both reached the kitchen wing through the snow, and that Tonks and Corn, however discreet, were both married men. To bristle his eyebrows and storm at the young journalist and demand discretion was useless: “I’ve already sent a short par. to the Daily Wail—it’ll be in time for the second edition if not the first.” Hardly had Mack turned him out than the telephone bell began to ring, first with a promise from the police surgeon to send his final report in next morning, but assuring Mack provisionally, “Morphia-poisoning, not a doubt. …” Second, a severe message from Blacksea to say that glass, tube, and paper alike were so covered with finger-prints that they were valueless—and lastly, by a long incoherent message from a woman whom he identified with great difficulty as the Chancellor’s housekeeper. She had only just got in because her nephew was taken that bad: she knew nothing about bottles and had never touched one. No, she didn’t do the Chancellor’s bedroom—that was the work of the daily woman who came in, and was strict T.T., and had taken the pledge and all like herself. Oh, not that kind of bottle! Oh, she’d seen plenty of medicine bottles and handed over a lot to a rag-and-bone man only yesterday morning. Yes, she did seem to remember young Captain Chailly having a big bottle—malt extract, was it? She couldn’t remember. Oh yes, he’d other bottles, and she might have kept some of them or she might not. And what was all the fuss about anyway, for the Chancellor wasn’t one to go handing his bottles about and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
It seemed to Mack barely a moment before the telephone bell awakened him next morning, and from the moment he reached his office he was knee deep in reports, routine work and unsought interviews. Although the Daily Wail, cautious about local gossip, only referred to the sudden death of the Rev. Thomas Ulder at Evelake Palace under mysterious circumstances, which are, we understand, being investigated by the police, that was enough to rouse a storm of gossip and surmise. Then he hurried out to see the Coroner and arrange for the inquest. There would be no difficulty in collecting a jury, said the Coroner (“A churchwarden, of course, and looks it,�
�� growled Mack to himself), and it was fixed for Monday at one o’clock. “If it suits the Bishop,” the Coroner added, which did nothing to improve Mack’s temper. He returned to find requests for interviews from the Dean of Evelake, the Sheriff and Lord Lieutenant of the County, and an M.P., a local baronet, who was related to the Home Secretary. Nearly every one made use of the plea or implied that the demand was made in view of the indecent publicity of the case. Never again would Mack fail to recognize, or fail to impress on his subordinates, the importance of meeting with and tackling the Press! He had, since his arrival, so often heard criticisms of the Bishop, and jokes about Mrs. Broome, that it astounded him to realize how “these English” rose up as a man to defend their country, their Church, and its local chief.
There was some satisfaction in finding that Blacksea had managed to get a sergeant over, who could look after the office, and pursue enquiries about these sinister (and almost certainly imaginary) strangers. Tonks had left a report of a conversation with Canon Wye’s housekeeper, a tart, austere ritualist, who said that no medicine was taken or needed at the clergyhouse, for all her gentlemen rose too early and worked too hard to bother their insides with these patent stuffs, unless it were a dose of salts! But that report could not wholly clear a man whose work often took him to London, and, moreover, in Mack’s opinion, looked the most murderous of the lot.
The result of the autopsy, which arrived unexpectedly soon, cheered him considerably. The full report was to follow but provisionally Dr. Lee’s verdict was confirmed—morphia-poisoning, three grains—a fatal dose.
“At last they’ll all recognize that wilful murder has been done,” Mack growled to the Sergeant who had been sent from Blacksea. “I’ve told the Magistrate in confidence it couldn’t be an outside job—(though these people have been in to report sinister strangers in the local bars, of course)—or suicide—but you can see the big idea in this confounded little Church nest is to hush things up. Look at this.” He rumpled his hair and eyebrows till they bristled like quills as he picked up a letter. “This is from the deceased’s cousin and housekeeper and surviving relative: ‘Thanks for communication re death of my cousin Ulder. Please arrange everything with his solicitors, Messrs. Bushy. Cannot attend funeral or pretend to be surprised at news. My cousin had so many enemies and indeed I often felt I could murder him myself.’ There’s a nice womanly woman for you! Mad, of course, like her deceased cousin, mad and bad, I expect. Still murder is murder and the Law’s got to get hold of the murderer.”
Three miles away at the Palace the stricken peace reigned till the arrival of the newspapers and post at an unusually late hour. After one glance at the Daily Wail in the hall, Bobs summoned Dick.
“Look here, you’d better get out to your hermitage as soon as you can. There’ll be no peace after this!”
“They won’t want me, I suppose? I mean I can’t be any good.”
“I don’t think so. The Bishop will be kept at the end of the telephone, I expect, with messages of sympathy and condolence and the best thing for him! Mrs. Broome says he’s hardly slept for two nights and he just sits in his arm chair brooding. Canon Wye’s shut up over his sermon, and poor old Chailly’s keeping his bed till lunch. I’ve got to face this music—you do a bunk. I told Soames to have the room ready for you and there he is coming from the ruins now. What shall I say to these blasted reporters?”
“Forget Alfred the Truthteller, and let them infer that the police think it’s an outside job!”
“I’d lie for the Bishop, let alone imply inferences,” said Bobs, watching Soames as he approached.
“Good man, Bobs!” smiled Dick. “What’s Soames got a bucket for? He needn’t have scrubbed the room!”
“Coal, I think—I told him to try to get the fire going in the prehistoric stove there. Jove, what a little worm that chap looks among the ruins! Hullo! There’s Judith!”—and “Hullo, there’s Sue!” came simultaneously from the young men, as Dick stepped from the window and terrace across the lawn, and Bobs most reluctantly went off with the letters and papers to the Bishop.
The wind was still high but at the moment it was tossing the storm-clouds away from the sun, and the remaining patches of snow, the bare grey-gold stone and yew-trees, sparkling with rain drops, all seemed to shimmer and dissolve into a misty radiance round the two girls with their bare curly heads and big fur coats. Sparrows were twittering, doves were murmuring round the old dovecot, and away across the valley they could see a flight of wild duck. I don’t feel much like a parson or a sleuth this morning, thought Dick. Oh dear, listen to our wild goose!
“So please understand, Soames,” Judith was saying, “that when Mr. Fitzroy comes you’re to bring him straight to the new wing drawing-room. Mrs. Broome says we may have it quite to ourselves, and you must send lunch and tea for us there. You’re going out to Evelake for an hour or two after lunch? Oh good! Then you may bring me back a tin of verbena bath salts—why does Mother have that sickly rose now, Sue?—and two packets of invisible hair-pins—black not bronze—oh, and a solicitor if you see one about, because Clive will harp on that, Sue darling! And Soames, bring out a tin of weed-killer for the Chief Constable! Come on and let’s see your dugout, Dick? Oh, clumsy!”
The exclamation was indeed justified, for Dick had tripped over a very obvious stone pedestal in the grass, and knocking against Judith, in an effort to retrieve his balance, had kicked over the bucket which Soames was carrying.
“Sorry,” he said. “Thanks for cleaning out the stove, Soames. Is the fire burning? Lord, what a mess!”
“But you’re only making it worse!” said Judith, as Dick thoughtfully shuffled the embers into the lawn. Yes, they were warm! He thought he had seen a faint wisp of smoke in the bucket. What had Soames been burning, and why?
“Dick was quite right to knock into you and silence you!” said Sue. “You really shouldn’t joke about poisons to Soames just now.”
“Darling! What a perfect parson’s wife you’ll make some day; such a one for tact! Is this your home from home, Dick?”
The twisting gap between elders and brambles had brought them again to the outer walls of the Abbey which overlooked the little dark river in the snow, and the pleasant valley of Evelake below. Amid the remote, crumbling melancholy walls the newly repaired turret looked as out of place as a cake-stand in a dungeon. The interior was at first sight even less inviting, for the ground floor, half-cleared of rubble, had evidently been used as a tool-shed by the excavators of the ruins, and from it, as Bobs had said, a rickety wooden staircase led up to the floor above: the flight led from the corner where the old twisting stone steps curled upwards, blocked now with stones and rubble. The top step was level with the tiny rounded door of the upper room. The floor was boarded with rough deal, and the stone walls had a coat of plaster. Three slits of windows allowed a watcher to survey any comer from east, north or west. No doubt it was for the children of that prolific Bishop Main that this retreat had been thus sketchily restored, and a hideous little black stove fitted in it. Mrs. Broome’s mark was to be seen in a small chintz-covered sofa and arm chair, the Bishop’s in a plain deal table, a bookshelf and a prie-dieu.
“Oh, what a smell!” cried Sue, thrusting back the slender lattice windows. “Is it mould or rats, or dead monks, Dick?”
“Burnt leather, I fancy,” said Dick, looking grimly at the stove. It was ready laid, and Sue was on her knees with a match to light it at once.
“I think it’s rather marvellous,” said Judith. “Couldn’t you say your prayers indoors and let Clive and me sit here this afternoon? Goodness! I must fly to meet him in the hall, in case he meets Papa and leads the candidates into bad ways! Come along, Sue! Dick wants to tell his beads. Or do you want her to stay?”
“Well, at least she doesn’t buzz,” said Dick, but Sue declared, blushing a little, that she must go and do the flowers, so Dick was left to make his much needed retreat.
Very few people were in the dining-room when he e
ntered it two hours later, save for the candidates who had evidently enjoyed a lazy, unorganized morning. The Bishop had hardly moved from his own room where, Bobs reported, he had brooded silently, save when now and again he went suddenly up to his bedroom to pace up and down, according to Mrs. Broome, refusing to answer letters or the telephone. Canon Wye strode in, ate fish at the sideboard and disappeared. The Chancellor sat sunk in silence beside his hostess, a fatigued old man. Only Doris and Mrs. Briggs waited: Soames had, it appeared, squared Tonks, and gone off on his bicycle to the Hospital. Mrs. Broome and Sue were mournful and abstracted after the Matron’s answer to their enquiries on the telephone. Moira, unfortunately, had contracted a chill, and in her fragile state they feared bronchitis and pneumonia. “Some discomfort and a little homesick,” the Matron said. “And one knows that means acute pain and utter misery,” diagnosed Moira’s mistress sadly. Dick himself had only a very sketchy meal, for he was summoned away to a telephone call from Scotland Yard.
“That you, Dick?” asked his friend, Herriot. “The Chief wants to know if your Chief Constable feller is likely to want our help? We’re expecting he will!”
“He won’t want it, yet I think he needs it personally.”
“Stupid? Obstructive?”
“Oh no, just anti-clerical. Wants to hang a Bishop!” (With Soames safely out of the house, and everyone at luncheon, Dick felt safe on the Chaplain’s telephone.)
Arrest the Bishop? Page 16