The Unburied

by Charles Palliser

  When I learnt from the Librarian that Dr Courtine’s manuscript would remain sealed until and unless the second person on the list could be shown to be dead, I pondered deeply on my way forward. And then it occurred to me that a passionate love of music was likely to endure. I persuaded a friend of mine, who is a composer of some note, to let me write a letter as if from him which I then sent to all the music-publishers and all the bookshops which specialized in sheet-music. This is the important part of the letter:

  About eight years ago I met a gentleman who showed a profound knowledge and love of the organ and of the music written for it. When he learnt my name he was kind enough to tell me that he knew and admired my compositions – which, as you possibly know, have hitherto been exclusively for the pianoforte – and when I mentioned that I intended to write a piece for the organ he urged me to do so and asked me to send him a copy of it when I had finished it. It has taken all these years, but I am now close to completing a Fantaisie in A Major for the organ.

  Unfortunately, I have mislaid the piece of paper on which I had written the gentleman’s name and address which, to the best of my recollection, was in Rome or, perhaps, Naples. I am venturing to write to you because the gentleman mentioned that while he was living on the Continent he had sheet-music sent to him by your firm.

  Absurdly, I am not even sure that I can remember his name precisely. To the best of my recollection his surname was something like Butler Ormonde or possibly Ormonde de Burgh. And his Christian name was, I think, Martin or perhaps Valentine.

  The surnames were, of course, those of the families with whom ‘Mrs Stonex’s’ lover claimed kinship. My little stratagem worked and one of the publishers wrote back saying:

  We believe you must mean Mr Ormonde Martin, a gentleman who regularly purchased sheet-music for the organ over a long period of years. We are sorry to have to inform you that he died about three years ago, as was learnt when the last parcel of music which was sent to him in Florence was returned – after a considerable delay due to prevailing conditions – by a lawyer dealing with his estate.

  So he had been alive while Miss Napier was researching her book, but dead for a couple of years by the time I made my visit to his mother. Knowing the date and place of his death, obtaining from the British consul in Florence the documentary evidence that I needed was a mere formality. From him, incidentally, I learnt that ‘Mr Ormonde Martin’ had lived the life – the somewhat scandalous life – of a rich idle man in Italy for the last thirty-five years of his existence.

  After retrieving the keys from the basin of the well, I went back to the schoolroom, hid them in my box and waited for the summons to punishment. It did not come that day, for the news of the old gentleman’s murder distracted the Headmaster’s attention from my offence, and the next day he had to attend the inquest. How ardently I hoped that these shocking events had driven the memory of my misdemeanour from his memory. All the rest of Thursday and the next day I anguished about whether I should tell anyone what I knew, but I was frightened to admit that I had befriended Mr Stonex and gone to his house for tea and, above all, that I had entered it again – and uninvited – that afternoon. Of course, I did not understand the significance of the keys.

  And then after breakfast on Saturday the Headmaster called me to his study. He had not, after all, forgotten about me. I am certain that if he had asked me then why I went to the New Deanery during Practice on Thursday afternoon, I would have told him everything I knew, so frightened and upset was I. But he had no curiosity about my motives for absconding and simply set to in a workmanlike way, stinking of brandy and gasping as the blows fell. That afternoon I learned of Perkins’s death when I overheard two of the servants talking about it in shocked tones.

  When I went to Cambridge a few months ago and laid before the President and Fellows of Colchester College the documents from Florence which were the proof that was required, I found that they were fascinated by the case – several of them revealing themselves to have what I would venture to call a scholarly knowledge of it – and were intrigued to learn that I had some undisclosed evidence of my own. With great solemnity the seals of Professor Courtine’s Account were broken and it was read out by the Librarian. This took most of the day, with a break for luncheon. When the reading was completed, the President asked me to withdraw for a few minutes while he and the Fellows conferred as they were required to do by the terms of Professor Courtine’s letter. He then called me back to ask if I would undertake responsibility for editing and publishing the Account and if I would write an ‘Introduction’ to it. I agreed immediately.

  In taking on this task, I set out to explain as much as I could of the events of the crucial period covered by Professor Courtine’s Account, creating a kind of scholarly edition with a commentary. For example, I was curious about the book of fairy-tales which Professor Courtine found in Fickling’s house late on Wednesday night and from which he read a story while waiting for him to return. The book was borrowed from the library of Courtenay’s and it was there that I found it some forty-five years later. (One might speculate as to why the story made such an impression on Dr Courtine.)

  On that Friday night, as he makes clear in his Account, Dr Courtine realized the truth and understood how his old friend – I should say, his former friend – had made use of him. He had been lured to Thurchester and tricked into playing the role of an unimpeachable witness – and yet the witness to a lie. On his first evening, the ghost-story was told him by Fickling merely to entice him into going to read the inscription so that he would meet the old gentleman – or, rather, the person whom he would take to be the old gentleman – and receive the invitation to tea. That meeting, of course, was a charade. The individual impersonating the old gentleman had merely taken up a position outside the back-gate at the time when Mr Stonex was sure to be eating his dinner. The intention was, as happened, that Dr Courtine would assume that the individual who gave him tea was Mr Stonex – though by the time he and Fickling arrived, the old gentleman was dead.

  Miss Napier came close to the truth in suggesting that the murderer left the house disguised as the woman seen by Appleton, but in fact that individual was actually a woman. And it was the same woman whom Dr Courtine heard when he watched Fickling through the window of the house in Orchard Street in the early hours of the same day. But she had not acted alone at the New Deanery, of course, for a woman – even one in the prime of life, as this one was not, although she was healthy and active for her age and had certainly not suffered a stroke – would not have been strong enough to overpower Mr Stonex at his front-door, strangle him and drag his body across the houseplace.

  And although Miss Napier was almost right when she guessed that the killer – in fact, the killers – gained entry to the house by knocking at the street-door just a few minutes before Mr Stonex was expecting the waiter, in fact that occurred at four o’clock and not at half-past five. By the time I arrived ten minutes later the old gentleman was dead.

  I imagine he recognized his attackers. One of them he knew well but had not set eyes on for nearly forty years. He had probably only seen the other once at close quarters and that was eight years earlier when he came to demand a share of the money he believed he was entitled to. (It was after that that Mr Stonex started to take elaborate measures for his safety.)

  The killers must have been filled with a sense of righteous vengeance, being convinced of the justice of their brutal act. It was too late for explanations but, ironically, Mr Stonex was very far from guilty of the offence for which they had condemned him. Miss Napier had spent weeks searching through the old records of the Thurchester and County Bank (which had been sold to the Somerset and Thurshire Bank and incorporated into it) and had found that the rumour handed down by Quitregard’s grandfather was correct. When, at the age of twenty-two, Mr Stonex had inherited the Bank on his father’s death, he had made a terrible discovery: it was a sham. Although it had a note circulation of seventy-five thousand pounds, it h
ad huge liabilities and no reserve funds so that it was teetering on the edge of collapse. His father had been pillaging it for years and his defalcations had robbed hundreds of people who had deposited their savings with the Bank or mortgaged properties to it or accepted its notes. Their lives and those of their dependents could be destroyed by its collapse. Moreover, although he had been deeply injured by his father’s treatment of him, he had loved him in a strange way, and he dreaded his memory being besmirched by the revelation of dishonesty. And therefore he had embarked on the endeavour to repair the Bank’s fortunes by performing an elaborate juggling act in which he had to balance monies received against liabilities without giving any sign of difficulty even to his senior clerk. Confidence was everything: so long as all seemed well, the Bank’s notes would continue to circulate. This was the long and secret act of heroism which he had mentioned to me in veiled terms.

  He had not dared reveal the truth to his sister, for he could not trust a high-spirited young miss to keep the secret and if it was suspected that the Bank was in trouble, default would be inevitable. He had therefore had to impose upon her a penitential system of parsimony for which she could see no justification. Similarly, he dared not enter into negotiations on her behalf for a marriage-settlement, and because he could not explain, she never forgave him for ruining her life. Her elopement, though it brought disgrace, must almost have seemed a relief to him. And when he told his sister, on her reaching her majority, that there was no inheritance, he was telling the truth. In fact, it was only after thirty years of hard work, continous worry and lacerating parsimony (which had become an engrained habit long after the need for it had gone) that he had succeeded in saving the Bank and its depositors.

  Unaware of this, his sister and his nephew – who had just strangled him with those strong hands that he stared at in fascination a few hours later when he met Dr Courtine – dragged the old man’s body into the hall. It was then that they must have put the message on the street-door and written the one on the slate in order to lure Perkins into the trap and make him incriminate himself. He took the bait and left, bearing with him the package which – as he realized on Friday night alone and terrified in his cell – would surely have hanged him within a few months.

  I believe that at the moment when I arrived at the street-door and read the message which they had not yet removed, the murderers were stripping the old man of his top clothes. When they heard my knock they must have been dismayed for they were at the most vulnerable and incriminating point of the whole undertaking. They probably looked through the door-jamb into the houseplace from the hall and, seeing that it was only a boy, decided to wait until I had gone.

  By the time I left, I had made them nearly fifteen minutes late so that they didn’t have time to drag the body along the passage into the dining-room as had been planned. They therefore decided to leave it where it was. (That was why Fickling was so horrified at the idea of going into that room when Dr Courtine expressed a desire to see it.) During this time he had approached the house with Dr Courtine but, failing to see the signal that all was ready, had led him back to his own dwelling.

  As soon as I had gone Mrs Slattery, now dressed in her brother’s clothes, cleared the dinner away, dirtying the plates as if Mr Stonex had used them and packing the food into a parcel so that she could take it away with her. Then she set the tea, laying out the cakes she had baked in the early hours of that day – the smell of which had led Dr Courtine to the conspirators’ house. While she was doing this, her son was in the study removing his own outer clothes in order to smash his uncle’s face without getting blood on them.

  They must have been alarmed at the delay I had caused because Slattery could not be too late for choir Practice since that occasion, and then Evensong, were to provide him with his unimpeachable alibi. My unwitting intervention also meant that they had only a few minutes to find the will, which was crucial if their crime was not to benefit the Choir School rather than themselves, and it was now that they ransacked the houseplace. Failing to find it, the resourceful actress hit upon the idea of a lost account of the murder of Freeth in order to continue the search right under the nose of Dr Courtine. In their haste they made one small mistake in forgetting to rub out the chalk message and hide the slate.

  A minute or two after I had gone, Slattery hurried out of the New Deanery, probably visited a public-house to down a quick glass of beer, and arrived for Practice – as I happened to notice since I was looking in through the window – just a little later than he should have. Only now did his mother light the candle in the window of the dining-room to signal to Fickling that he could arrive with Dr Courtine.

  At the end of the charade, Fickling’s guess – based on the poor time-keeping of the clock – that old Mr Stonex might use the same ingenious hiding-place as himself saved the day for the conspirators. As a consequence, the will was safely destroyed and the victim’s sister inherited the estate. There is a curious post-script on that topic. A Swiss newspaper reported that the old lady, having outlived the rest of her wealthy family – and, presumably, having inherited from her son the money they had divided between them – and therefore leaving no heir, had died intestate and her estate had gone to the Swiss Treasury.

  By late on Saturday morning the other boys had gone. I was alone and, in the excitement, Appleton and his wife had forgotten that I existed. I was in too much pain from my flogging to be able to spend the afternoon wandering around the town according to my usual custom. I passed it instead gazing out of the schoolroom window, thinking about the events of the previous day. The news of Perkins’s suicide had added mental anguish to my physical suffering. Lying in the little top room under the bed-coverings to try to keep warm, since I was not allowed a fire all to myself, I thought of the miserable Christmas Day I would have alone tomorrow instead of looking at Mr Stonex’s maps and eating his dinner. I was sorry for the old man but most of all I was sorry for Perkins and his widow and children and asked myself over and over again if he would still be alive if I had had the courage to tell someone what I had seen, and shown them the keys. Not everybody had forgotten me. Towards midnight I heard a familiar creaking and knew that Dr Sheldrick was creeping up the stairs to rub embrocation on my bruises.

  Philip Barthram, Thurchester, 17 August 1919

  List of Characters

  The names of characters in historical periods earlier than the late nineteenth century are in italics.

  Adams: the Police-Sergeant.

  Alfred: King of Wessex in the ninth century.

  Antrobus, Major: the Police Superintendent.

  Appleton: the Headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School.

  Attard: the Coroner.

  Barthram, Philip: the Editor of the Courtine Account.

  Beorghtnoth: the nephew of Alfred, according to De Vita Gestibusque Alfredi Regis.

  Bubbosh, Mrs: Mr Stonex’s servant.

  Bullivant, Giles: the correspondent of the antiquarian, Ralph Pepperdine.

  Bulmer: the Surveyor of the Fabric.

  Burgoyne, William: the Canon-Treasurer.

  Burgoyne, Willoughby: the Parliamentary officer who is the Canon’s nephew.

  Carpenter, Dr: the physician.

  Champniss: the Sacrist.

  Cinnamon: the Precentor.

  Claggett: the head-verger.

  Courtine, Edward: the author of the Account.

  Fickling, Austin: the Schoolmaster at Courtenay’s Academy who was at Cambridge with Courtine.

  Freeth, Launcelot: the Sub-Dean who becomes Dean and is murdered.

  Gambrill, John: the Cathedral Mason.

  Gazzard: the head-verger.

  Grimbald: the assumed author of De Vita Gestibusque Alfredi Regis (Life of Alfred the Great).

  Hollingrake: the Librarian who becomes Treasurer.

  Leofranc: the Bishop of Thurchester in the early twelfth century.

  Limbrick, Alice: the mother of Thomas.

  Limbrick, Robert: the father
of Thomas who was the Deputy Cathedral Mason.

  Limbrick, Thomas: Gambrill’s foreman.

  Locard, Mrs: the wife of the Librarian.

  Locard, Robert: the Librarian.

  Napier, Miss: the author of The Thurchester Mystery.

  Pepperdine, Ralph: the antiquarian who finds in the Library in 1663 the document Courtine is looking for.

  Perkins, Eddy: the waiter at the Angel Inn.

  Pomerance: the second assistant-librarian.

  Quitregard: the first assistant-librarian.

  Sheldrick: the Chancellor.

  Sisterson: the Sacrist.

  Slattery, Martin: assistant-organist and teacher at the Choir School.

  Stonex: the old banker who is murdered.

  Stonex, Mrs: the mother of Slattery.

  Thorrold: Stonex’s and the Cathedral Foundation’s solicitor.

  Wattam: the senior-clerk from Stonex’s bank.

  Wulflac: according to De Vita Gestibusque Alfredi Regis, the martyred Bishop of Thurchester in Alfred’s time.

  Endnote

  1. Editor’s Note: This is the story which Courtine read late on Wednesday night.

  ››› If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to discover more great vintage crime and thriller titles, as well as the most exciting crime and thriller authors writing today, visit: ›››

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  By Charles Palliser

  (Select bibliography of titles published in The Murder Room)

  Betrayals (1994)

  The Unburied (1999)