by L. C. Tyler
‘So that’s the famous Madonna?’ asked Sly contemptuously.
‘Yes,’ said Fay. ‘That’s it.’
‘And, as I have explained to these good people, I want no part of it,’ said Sammartini. ‘The deal is very much off, Dr Tomlinson. And, if you’ll excuse me, I am very much off to Penzance.’
‘What if we did a discount?’ asked Sly.
‘Not at any price,’ said Sammartini. ‘It’s the real Maltese Madonna or nothing. And you don’t have one.’
‘That’s the end of that, then,’ said Polgreen.
‘Hold on,’ said Fay. ‘Mr Sammartini may not want the statue, but it’s valuable nevertheless and I still have my own contacts. That is a unique piece of English church silver. Ownership is still a bit iffy, but certain museums would fight for it. If we all agree to keep quiet and split the proceeds between us, it must be worth fifty or a hundred thousand each. That’s still worth having.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘We could split the proceeds between us all.’
Polgreen looked at me as if I had just passed wind, but Fay nodded approvingly. ‘Now you’re talking, Ethelred,’ she said.
‘All of us except one,’ I said.
Fay frowned. ‘OK. But who are you saying gets nothing?’
‘One of us here killed Hilary Joyner,’ I said. ‘I think we should agree, however we divide up the money, that person gets nothing. And this is perhaps as convenient a moment as any to tell you all who that was.’
‘Because all of the suspects are rather improbably gathered in your garden?’ asked Aaron.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. It was just something Elsie said earlier – about boy statues and girl statues. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but the final piece of the jigsaw has fallen into place.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ethelred
‘When Hilary Joyner’s body was found,’ I said, ‘I thought, as did the police, that it must be an accident. Of course, almost everyone there could have killed him. As we eventually worked out, nobody was actually in the sight of the others for the whole time. For a while I thought that Professor Cox and Dr Tomlinson could vouch for each other, but later they both said that the other had been out of their view for long enough to commit the murder. Nobody accused Tertius Sly of being close to the well, then he said he’d been close enough to see Henry Polgreen there. I’d seen Henry too – or maybe Iris. Increasingly almost everyone seemed to have had an opportunity. The problem was that nobody really had a motive.
‘For example, while it is true that, after the argument that he and Elsie had had on the train, Joyner might have considered murdering her, she had no reason to kill him.
‘Similarly, Tertius Sly might have had a grudge against a number of people, but Joyner was, in effect, his only ally in his campaign to resume excavations. Despised though he was within the village generally, Joyner treated him seriously.’
I paused and allowed Sly to look daggers at me, but this was no time for mincing my words. Iris had already put Sly right on how the village saw him.
‘We know that Joyner was aware that Professor Cox was negotiating with Mr Sammartini to sell the Madonna illegally to the Stephenson Museum. According to Fay, Joyner could have informed the university authorities and ruined Cox. But at that stage no sale had been agreed with Hadleyburg. Professor Cox had done nothing more than seek the opinion of the Ashmolean Museum on a statue that had been discovered in an ice house in Sussex. That was scarcely a sacking offence.
‘Henry Polgreen and Hilary Joyner were, of course, on opposite sides in the long argument over renewed excavations at the Abbey. Tertius Sly specifically accused Henry of killing Dr Joyner to prevent his support for excavations that might reveal that Henry had stolen items from the site. But Henry Polgreen’s only excavations were to establish that Barclay-Wood did indeed dig up the statues himself. His objections to a further dig were purely professional. He had nothing to fear personally or any reason to want Hilary Joyner dead. I thought at one stage that I might have seen Henry’s white jacket ahead of me in the garden, very close to the well. I think now that it was Iris. As it happens, I was not the only one to make that sort of mistake.
‘Of course, Iris might have been the killer. She knows the garden better than anyone and could have sneaked back to the well. But I do not think that she would have wanted to commit a murder in this way and repeat the traumatic circumstances that led to the death of Walter Sly, her grandfather and her grandmother. Nor did she need to kill anyone. The museum was always going to deny she had sold anything to them – unless the police obliged them to reveal the source in the course of an investigation into a bigger crime. A murder investigation would have made it more likely that the sale would come to light, rather than less likely.
‘Which is where I come to you, Fay. You are the sort of woman that my mother should have warned me about and didn’t. Fortunately, I have an agent who takes care of stuff like that. But other men have not been so fortunate. You ensured that Anthony Cox would tell you of his plans and would cut you in on the deal. Later you flattered Tertius Sly into helping you. But they were not your only partners, were they? Before that you had been working with Hilary Joyner. You knew he was planning to steal the statue, because you’d already told him when it would be safe to do so. You alone, out of all of us, knew that he almost certainly had the statue with him when he travelled down here. But he was about to double-cross you, wasn’t he? He had no intention of sharing the proceeds or anything else with you. He didn’t want to sell the statue quietly. He wanted it found in a blaze of publicity that would sell his book – preferably he wanted both statues found. We now know he hid the Madonna here, where you would not be able to find it, while he continued his search for the second statue. You appeared to be angry with Anthony Cox that afternoon at the Priory. But actually your irritation was directed at Dr Joyner, who refused to tell you where the loot was hidden.’
‘You think you’re very clever, don’t you?’ said Fay.
‘Yes,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s one of his more annoying habits. Really, you’d have got bored with him very quickly. Especially somewhere as small as Antigua.’
‘St Lucia’s a bit bigger,’ said Fay.
‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘It’s all true isn’t it, Fay?’
‘What if it is?’ she demanded. ‘Joyner had the statue. I didn’t. But I had other ways of getting what I wanted. I didn’t need to kill him. Quite the reverse. I’d have talked him round. You men are all so vain. It’s pathetic, really. His death has been very inconvenient for me, and you know it. So, why are you dragging it out like this? Is it because you’re annoyed that I ditched you for Tertius Sly?’
‘Yes,’ said Elsie. ‘He is. Annoyed and jealous. I’d have nothing more to do with him, Fay. You are so well out of that one. Much better to stick to that nice Mr Sly. You were made for each other.’
‘So, she didn’t do it,’ said Sammartini. ‘What about me? Do I get a clean bill of health too?’
‘I’ve just made a phone call to the police,’ I said. ‘You didn’t arrive in London until the day after the murder.’
‘What about me?’ asked Aaron.
‘You’re only the intern,’ said Elsie. ‘You don’t get to kill people. The murderer is never the intern.’
‘Sorry,’ said Aaron. ‘I didn’t mean as the killer. I know I didn’t do it. I mean, weren’t you going to ask me if I’d worked out who it was?’
‘Do you know?’ asked Elsie.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Ethelred has established that none of you had any motive for killing Hilary Joyner. Some of you may have disliked him. He might have caused some of you a little embarrassment. But it would have not been worth the risk of murdering him, with the very strong risk of being found out. Nevertheless, one of you did kill him. And the white jacket is one big clue. And, like Ethelred, I noted Elsie’s remark that, in the gloom, one stat
ue looked very much like another – you probably couldn’t have even told which statue was male and which female. In the gloom by the well, one person in a white jacket would have looked very much like another.
‘Hilary Joyner was not the only person in a white jacket that afternoon. Henry Polgreen was also wearing one. So was Iris Munnings. Iris Munnings was also of a similar height to Dr Joyner. Both were wearing panama hats. For anyone coming into the glade from the very strong sunlight outside, Hilary Joyner hunched over the well would have looked very much like Iris Munnings hunched over the well. It would be easy to confuse the two, at least for a moment. Long enough to strike the person over the head with a brick … wouldn’t it, Mr Sly?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Sly.
‘He’s right, though,’ said Elsie. ‘That’s exactly what must have happened. I don’t like to take all of the credit myself, but Aaron is, after all, my intern.’
‘Somebody else with no experience of the real world,’ sneered Sly.
‘But nevertheless, with a cynicism and lack of trust honed by years of reading classic detective fiction and a month working for Elsie,’ I said. ‘We know that you’d just had an argument with Iris, in which she told you in no uncertain terms how you were seen by the village. And you were not pleased. I saw the same flash of hatred from you when I said the same thing a moment ago – that was the final confirmation I needed. And when you get angry you get very angry, don’t you? After all, you’d already had one warning for a road rage incident. You didn’t intend to kill Hilary Joyner – your one friend in your campaign against Henry Polgreen – but that’s what you did. Afterwards, you looked more upset than anyone about his death. Not because you’d lost a friend, but because you’d killed him and expected that somebody might have seen you. Later still, you kept asking me whether the police thought that it was an accident. You even went so far as to accuse Henry Polgreen in the hope of drawing attention from yourself.’
‘To think I supported your application to join the committee,’ said Sly. ‘And that I might have made you secretary in due course. You’re just like the rest of them. Iris’s grandfather killed my grandfather. He pushed him down the well. But the judge who found him not guilty was part of the same middle-class mafia that you all belong to. Yes, I argued with Iris. I came after her and saw what I believed was her white jacket by the well. So, I thought, why not? You’ll never get a better chance. And, if it had been her that went down the well, she would have deserved it.’
‘That sounds like a confession to me,’ said Iris.
‘You wish!’ said Sly. ‘If you try to tell the police that, I’ll say that it’s a conspiracy. I have something on all of you, and Ethelred has told you exactly what those things are. Not enough for any of you to kill Joyner, perhaps, but enough for you all to want to stitch me up if that’s what it took to keep me quiet about your dirty deals. That’s exactly what I’ll tell the police. Lots of witnesses who are quite clearly biased against me. You’ve no forensic evidence at all. That’s the joke that I’m really going to enjoy – you all know the truth but there will be nothing any of you can do about it. If you had thought of recording this, you might have had a chance. But you didn’t. So, you’re not as clever as you think, for all your university education. I’m in the clear.’
There was a cough behind us. We turned to see Joe there. He’d responded quickly to my call. He’d probably been there a while now, quietly in the background. He looked at Sly and pointed to his own chest.
‘Body cam,’ he said. ‘You’re nicked.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ethelred
‘So, what do we do now, Iris?’ I said, after almost everyone had gone. ‘It’s a very fine piece of silver that you have there. It’s not one of the statues that the King claimed back in the 1540s. It certainly never belonged to the Knights of St John. There’s no proof it was ever anywhere other than your ice house. The complications of disposing of it are nothing like those of disposing of the real Maltese Madonna. As Sammartini pointed out, you just have the red herring in Barclay-Wood’s story – the false trail that the Abbot created for the King and the one that’s confused all of us, including Joyner, in our own searches. Unlike the Maltese Madonna, I think that you could sort out the ownership of the Maltese herring fairly easily. Whether it’s judged a treasure trove and goes to a museum, or whether you get to sell it yourself, you won’t do badly.’
‘I don’t think I’ll let Sammartini have it,’ said Iris, ‘whatever happens.’
‘He wouldn’t appreciate it?’ I said.
‘He’s already on his way to the railway station. He’s off to Penzance. He reckons Cornwallis may have sold one statue to raise capital, but the other could still be somewhere in the garden of that expensive house. If it is, Sammartini plans to strike a deal with whoever owns the house now.’
‘So, where would you like it to go?’
Iris picked up the statue and looked at it with affection.
‘Not Byzantine, but English,’ she said. ‘Almost certainly unique. It deserves to be somewhere that it’s loved. Shame about the curse, of course.’
‘But it isn’t cursed,’ I said. ‘Not this one. I’m not sure any of the statues were cursed, actually. When you think about it, if both of the gold statues made it to Sussex, then neither can have been sold to the Turks as the knight’s ransom. There was no betrayal to merit several hundred years of misfortune. So the whole curse story is likely to be pure invention on Barclay-Wood’s part.’
‘Well, you certainly can’t deny they were bad luck for most of their owners, including Barclay-Wood himself.’
‘Not Cornwallis,’ I said.
‘True. But there’s no proof he took the statues – only that he’d worked out what they were. I admire Aaron’s detective work, but he’s still guessing about how Cornwallis made his money. It may have been entirely legit.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘For all we know Barclay-Wood may have sold the real Madonna back in 1940. Or he may have hidden it in your garden – he was obviously thinking of doing so. Or maybe it went off as scrap metal with everything else that was cleared from the church and vicarage.’
‘Well, I’m certainly not looking for it. Truly, Ethelred, for all your scepticism, my family has had more than enough unfortunate events while we’ve had this one. You know my parents were killed in a car crash?’
‘I’ve wondered what happened to them. I’m very sorry. But objects – like this or like the Maltese Madonna – are just that: objects. They have no power to do anything. Unless we let them. I’ve had it in my own garden and all that happened was that one of my roses died. They do that sometimes, however well you take care of them. Apuldram Roses replaced it free of charge.’
‘Well, I’m going to give the statue to a museum, anyway,’ she said. ‘Also free of charge. I want no part of it, and I want none of the rest of you to have any part of it either. It’s not worth the risk.’
‘And the house? How will you pay for repairs?’
‘I’ll struggle on for a while. I fear I’ll have to let Pia go. But even then I can’t see how I pay for builders. Maybe I can sell off part of the garden for development. Then one day I’ll sell the house too. It’s always been a bit big for me on my own. I’m going to resign from the Abbey committee, by the way. I can hardly stay on once my role in the sale of the pyx and chalice and the rest of it becomes public.’
‘It may not. Joe says that he didn’t get the body cam switched on until Sly was confessing to murder. He clearly missed any earlier stuff that might have incriminated you. I don’t know what Sly’s defence is going to consist of, but it can’t be that Joyner’s killing was in some way justified by your exporting goods without a licence, and he’ll have difficulty proving it if he does argue that. The Stephenson Museum isn’t going to admit anything, and Fay abandoned Sly the moment he admitted to murder. She went back to Oxford in Cox’s car. They’re quite pally again. I don’t think she’ll give
evidence against anyone.’
‘But I know I did it. You don’t fancy being treasurer, I suppose? Or secretary. Sly was disqualified from office, under the rule he recently made up, the moment he was arrested.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be on the committee or involved with the Madonna in any way at all. Money corrupts. That’s why I’m lucky to be a writer.’
It is seldom that I return to dine at my old College without my thoughts turning to death. It is not the coffin-dark panelling. Nor is it the faces of former Principals, staring down, gowned, laced and bewigged, from the walls. It is that I feel the ghosts of past fellows, passing to and fro amongst the living, and among them the ghost of Dr Hilary Joyner. There is a picture of him now on the wall, with a small brass plate recording the years he was a Fellow of the College, and sometime Deputy Principal and Tutor for Admissions. He is spoken of as one of those people who humbly devoted their careers to the college and to teaching undergraduates, rather than seeking fame through ground-breaking research or publications or television work. A new Fellowship in history has been named after him. It is currently occupied by Dr Fay Tomlinson. It is as well that there are now three history fellowships, since Professor Cox’s television work keeps him away from Oxford seven or eight months of the year, filming in Europe and China and India, signing copies of the book of the TV series in Canada, Australia and South Africa, giving guest lectures in Hawaii and Bali. Trailers for the third series of Cox’s History of the World are appearing on BBC Two as I write. He still takes occasional tutorials on Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It is, he says, a period of great interest to him. One in which the British character was made what it is today.