C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (34 page)

Jack stopped and drained the last of his tea. Then he refilled his cup and started again.

‘With Connie Worth’s death, Sir William thought he was safe. But he wasn’t. The attempted blackmail resumed. This time the blackmailer was Stephanie Bassett.’

‘Stiffy? But if she was using that same letter to blackmail Sir William, how did she get hold of it? And what makes you think she was also attempting blackmail?’ I was scratching my head at this point, trying to understand everything that had been going on under my nose, as it were, without my being aware of it.

‘Some of what follows,’ said Jack, ‘is speculation. But there’s enough evidence to suggest that the course of events ran thus. Connie Worth was not blackmailing Sir William only. She had other victims. Those receipts for purchases for the kitchen and the cellar we found in her room: they were either evidence of petty dishonesty, of inflating the household accounts, or Mrs Worth thought they were. She was either attempting, or contemplating, using them to blackmail the staff. I suspect she was also blackmailing young Douglas over his gambling debts. That would explain his bitterness towards her.

‘Miss Bassett was another blackmail victim. You and I saw Stephanie Bassett in the arms of David Evans when she was supposed to be engaged to Douglas Dyer. If there was a revealing letter, either from Miss Bassett to Mr Evans or the other way around, and if Connie Worth’s snooping put that letter in her hands, then Stephanie Bassett was also being blackmailed.’

Jack paused to let me take this in, and sip on his tea. Then he resumed.

‘Following Connie Worth’s death, Stephanie Bassett hurried to Mrs Worth’s room to recover the letter with which she had herself been blackmailed. In the course of her hunt through Mrs Worth’s room, she found that other letter—Sir William’s letter to Judith Trelawney. Of Miss Bassett’s moral standards we’ve seen a sufficient demonstration to know that she wouldn’t hesitate to use that letter herself as a blackmail vehicle. So from Sir William’s point of view she became a threat, she stepped into Connie Worth’s shoes, and she too had to die.

‘Of course it was Miss Bassett who hid that letter in the
Romeo and Juliet
in the library. She may have found it amusing to hide a love letter in a play about tragic love. And she believed it would be safe there—at least temporarily. Before she could retrieve it and put it somewhere safer, she was poisoned.

‘Then poor Ruth Eggleston’s conscience began to bother her. Sir William must have met with her secretly at night in an attempt to persuade her not to tell the police to whom she had really supplied the cyanide. When she wouldn’t listen, he poisoned her and threw her body over the cliff.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I replied quickly. ‘The “who” is now abundantly clear. I can see how Sir William had a motive to commit each of the three murders. And the “how” of murders two and three is not at all puzzling—he had ample opportunity to slip some cyanide into Stiffy’s sherry and he must have persuaded young Ruth to drink some brandy laced with cyanide. But how on earth did he kill Connie Worth?’

In my agitation I stood up and began to pace up and down the library.

‘He wasn’t even there, remember?’ I said. ‘He wasn’t at that afternoon tea. He was up in his study on the first floor. I caught a glimpse of him at the window, so I know he was really there. Keggs’s evidence supports that. So how, from that distance, did he get cyanide into one slice, and only one slice, of freshly baked cake? Surely that’s utterly impossible.’

‘Not impossible,’ said Jack, ‘just improbable. But sometimes the improbable happens.’

‘But how?’ I cried, throwing my hands in the air.

‘It was young Will who gave us the first clue when we met him on the terrace. He told us that Edmund, during an earlier visit before his illness, taught both him and Sir William to shoot those South American native weapons. With, he told us, deadly accuracy. And on the wall of Sir William’s study is a South American blowpipe. Furthermore, remember what the chemist, Arthur Williamson, was doing when we visited him in his shop? He was working at a small pill-making hand press. He was pressing powder into small, hard little pills. That’s what Sir William did, with Ruth Eggleston’s help, late one night in the chemist shop when the village was asleep. He used that hand press to turn a small amount of the potassium cyanide powder into a few small, hard pills.’

‘And then?’ I asked.

‘Then he used the blowpipe, with deadly accuracy, to fire one of those pills into the slice of cake on Connie Worth’s plate. He fired from the open window of his study on the first floor. It would have only taken a moment. He had lost none of his old skill, and his aim was excellent. He fired, then returned the blowpipe to its place on his wall before Keggs arrived with his brandy. He calmly sipped his brandy waiting for Connie Worth to bite into her slice of cake—in which the small tablet of potassium cyanide was now embedded. She did, and she swallowed before she realised anything was wrong. As she began convulsing, Sir William and Keggs were standing side by side at his study window.’

‘Ingenious!’ I said. ‘In fact, doubly so. Sir William’s murder method was ingenious, and so is your solution. And this is what you told Inspector Crispin?’

‘It is—inspired, I might add, by that book about William Tell. When I lifted that down from the shelf I saw the point at once.’

‘The point being?’

‘The ability to fire a small missile over a considerable distance with precise accuracy. That put the last piece of the puzzle in place, and I hurried off to lay the matter before the good inspector.’

Jack rose from his armchair and wandered over in the direction of my desk, still nursing his cup and saucer in his hand.

‘Are you finished here?’ he asked.

‘Completely,’ I replied. ‘I could leave tomorrow.’

‘Then you should. Put all this drama behind you and return to the life of deep thought and profound meditation for which you are best equipped.’

I smiled as I said, ‘And what should I be meditating on?’

‘Why, the subject of our recent discussions, of course. Tell me, Morris, have you ever read the service for the burial of the dead in the Book of Common Prayer?’

‘Not my favourite bedtime reading, I must admit.’

‘You should. It would do you a power of good. You see, dear old Thomas Cranmer wrote that service not for the dead, whose fate is sealed and settled by the time the coffin is being lowered into the ground, but for the living. The great thrust of the service is along the lines of: remember that you too shall also die. “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live,” in Cranmer’s sparkling prose; “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower.” And so on.’

‘Charming thoughts,’ I said sarcastically.

‘Important thoughts,’ Jack retaliated, ‘since all of us shall one day be translated from this life to the next. And if we don’t spend our lives preparing for that, we are wasting our lives.’

He put his teacup down on my desk and smiled at me broadly. ‘Come along, young Morris, grab your hat and coat and come with me down to the pub. Tea is all very well, but there are moments that call for a pint.’

This adventure in which C. S. Lewis helps to investigate a series of three murders is entirely fictitious. However, Lewis was famous for the care and support he showed his friends—in this case his (fictional) former student and friend Tom Morris. In this tale these two, Lewis and Morris, re-encounter several (fictional) characters (mainly police officers) they had previously met in their first criminal investigation together, recorded in
C. S. Lewis and the Body in the Basement
.

This story is set less than twelve months after that earlier case. Once again we are in the middle of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and in the sort of country-house setting so beloved of writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

There are a number of period references in the book worth explaining:

•   ‘Eeyore’ is the gloomy donkey in A. A. Milne’s book
Winnie-the-Pooh
(published in 1926).

•   
Boy’s Own Paper
was a British story paper aimed at young and teenage boys, published weekly from 1879.

•   ‘Mr Marconi’ refers to Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), often credited as the inventor of radio.

•   ‘Dr Havard’ refers to Dr R. E. Havard (1901–1985), Lewis’s GP and a member of his literary club, ‘The Inklings’.

•   Poirot (with his ‘little grey cells’) is the fictional detective created by Agatha Christie.

•   ‘Little Lea’ was the name of the childhood home in Belfast in which C. S. Lewis grew up.

•   Boxen—the writings of the very young Lewis and his brother Warren (‘Warnie’) about their imaginary world,
Boxen
—have now been published (in 1985).

•   PPE is the shorthand way of referring to the Oxford University course that deals with philosophy, politics and economics.

•   Owen Barfield (1898–1997) was a lifelong friend of C. S. Lewis.

•   ‘Tollers’ was Lewis’s way of referring to his friend J. R. R. Tolkien (author of
The Lord of the Rings
).

•   ‘Mr Wells’ scientific romances’ are the early science fiction novels of H. G. Wells, including
The Invisible Man
and
The Time Machine
.

•   Jack’s fondness for science fiction stories: some years after this story is set Lewis wrote his own trilogy of science fiction stories:
Out of the Silent Planet
(1938),
Perelandra
(1943) and
That Hideous Strength
(1945).

•   Adam Fox was Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College during Lewis’s time there. He was a member (along with Tolkien and others) of Lewis’s literary group, ‘The Inklings’.

•   
Union Jack
was a boys’ weekly story paper that published the adventures of fictional detective ‘Sexton Blake’.

•   
Chums
was another boys’ weekly story paper published from 1892 to the Second World War. It was full of adventure stories and informative articles.

•   
Bradshaw’s Railway Guide
was the name of the printed railway timetables published from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century.

•   ‘Tollers and Dyson’—J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, two of Lewis’s Oxford friends.

•   ‘The great Wodehouse’ refers to P. G. Wodehouse, the British humourist, whose 96 books introduced to the world such beloved characters as the scatterbrained aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his unflappable butler Jeeves.

•   Mary Roberts Rinehart was an early twentieth-century writer of murder mysteries, sometimes called the American Agatha Christie.

•   Ethel M. Dell wrote popular British romance novels in the 1920s and ’30s.

•   Christmas Humphreys was a British barrister and judge who became a prominent proponent of Buddhism.

•   
Who Moved the Stone?
by Frank Morrison was published in 1930. It carefully researches and analyses the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

•   John Wesley (1703–1791) was the most widely travelled evangelical preacher of his time and the founder of Methodism.

•   1904, ‘four years before our mother died’—Lewis’s mother (Florence Augusta Hamilton Lewis, known a ‘Flora’) died from cancer in 1908. Shortly afterwards Lewis was sent by his father to an English boarding school (which he hated).