The Salisbury Manuscript (11 page)

He must have been gone from The Side of Beef for half an hour or so. When he returned there was a welcome smell of supper wafting through the ground floor. He went upstairs to wash and change before the meal. The door to his room was slightly ajar. At first he thought the maid must be inside. But, when he pushed at the door, the room was empty. Someone had been there, however. Tom’s clothes had been taken out of the wardrobe and were scattered across the bed or on the floor. His case had been upturned and the papers which it contained were strewn about the place. His initial reaction was surprise followed by anger. He gathered the papers together. They mostly related to Canon Slater’s affairs. Nothing seemed to be missing. The document he’d just drawn up and its copy were still there. He was baffled. He had nothing of value, nothing worth stealing. He remembered to be glad that he hadn’t yet taken possession of the Salisbury manuscript.

Without stopping to pick up any of his garments, he strode into the passage and almost collided with the landlord.

‘All is well, Mr Ansell?’ said Jenkins, although the man could see that it wasn’t.

‘Is this a den of thieves, landlord?’

They stood on the threshold of the room, gazing at the mess. Jenkins stroked his moustache furiously.

‘You have lost something, Mr Ansell?’

‘You mean, has anything been stolen from me? I am not sure. I do not think so. But this could be a police matter.’

‘If you have lost nothing, there is no harm done and no need to summon the police, sir. This is an honest house, Mr Ansell. We’ve never had any trouble here.’ A wheedling note had entered the landlord’s voice, as he saw ways of retrieving the situation. Then, in a more calculating tone, ‘Did you lock your door, sir?’

‘Yes, I did – but why should I need to if this is an honest house?’ said Tom, fingering the room key in his pocket. Had he locked it? He couldn’t be sure. He asked, ‘Who else has rooms along here?’

‘You do not suspect the other guests,’ said Jenkins. He sounded genuinely indignant.

‘An outsider then?’

‘I keep a very careful watch on things, Mr Ansell. No one gets inside or comes upstairs without me knowing it.’

‘I’m sure they don’t. Well then, what access is there is to this floor apart from the front stairs?’

‘There is a back staircase down there.’

And at that moment, as if on cue, the maid appeared at the other end of the passage. Catching sight of Tom and her employer, she halted and gave a sneeze. Seeing someone on to whom the guest’s anger might be deflected, Jenkins beckoned to her.

‘Still got that cold, Jenny?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘You’d better get rid of it, hadn’t you,’ said the landlord in a tone that suggested it was either the girl or the cold that was leaving. Having established how things stood, Jenkins waved an arm at the open door to Tom’s room.

‘What do you know about this, Jenny?’

She too came to inspect the room. She wrung her hands and looked mournful. Eventually she came out with, ‘I don’t know nothing, sir. I’m terribly sorry, sir. Do you want me to tidy up?’

‘No, I’ll do it,’ said Tom. The irritation and bafflement had gone. He felt weary and did not want to make trouble for the harassed chambermaid. Jenkins, in contrast, looked relieved.

‘When you are done, Mr Ansell, please come down and have supper and a bottle – on the house, of course.’

Tom nodded and retreated into his room. It took him only a few moments to straighten his clothes and fold and hang them up. It was disagreeable to think they’d been thrown around by a stranger but, as the landlord had said in his self-interested fashion, no harm had been done. Tom remembered the odd robberies he’d heard about at Venn House, the theft of jelly moulds and cutlery. Perhaps there was an impish thief at work in the town.

Tom took a bath in the shared bathroom at the end of the passage. The gas geyser chuntered away while Tom soaped himself and pondered the mystery of the break-in without coming to any conclusion. He changed his shirt, although it was almost as creased as the one he was replacing, and put on his spare jacket. Taking care to turn the key firmly in the lock – despite the chances of being broken into twice on the same evening being vanishingly slight – Tom turned right to the head of the stairs. A man had just reached the top. He was limping slightly and panting after the exertion of the climb. Tom recognized him, despite the dimness of the passageway. It was the gentleman who’d taken an interest him during last night’s supper. Cathcart, Henry Cathcart.

For his part, he recognized Tom for he said, ‘Mr Ansell? Thomas Ansell? But you must be. You’re the spit of your father. The living spit.’

The Nethers

On the eastern fringe of the city was a public house which went by the name of The Neat-herd but which was known almost universally as The Netherworld or simply The Nethers. No one remembered when the name had changed, or rather slipped, to its new form but it suited the people who frequented the place. It was a favourite with beggars and hawkers and petty thieves, together with women who were sometimes keeping them company and sometimes striking out on their own, glugging down their profits or fortifying themselves before going out on the town in search of more.

The Neat-herd, originally a straggle of low narrow cottages which had been knocked through to form a drinking area like a railway carriage without compartments, lay down a muddy lane. The lane petered out in marshy ground, adorned with the carcasses of carts and ploughshares rusting under nettles. To the rear of the public house was another dilapidated building, of wood not stone, perhaps a barn at one time.

Having safely within one basket so many bad apples (as Inspector Foster described The Nethers and its clientele) was convenient for the Salisbury police, who went to the public house in search of information or occasionally to lay hands on a convenient rogue.

At about the time that Tom Ansell was being greeted on the stairs in The Side of Beef, a police constable was leaving The Nethers. It was the same constable whom Tom had glimpsed that morning standing outside the Anstruthers’ house in the cathedral close. Constable Matthew Chesney did not visit the public house in uniform. That would have been a provocation too far unless he was going to arrest someone, and then he wouldn’t have gone alone. Instead he disguised himself in a working man’s garb which fooled nobody. Constable Chesney knew that the disguise fooled nobody, since the male and female customers – the females especially – tended to greet him with mock salutes or pretend-expressions of terror and alarm when he walked through the door.

However, Constable Chesney’s appearance at The Nethers in the guise of an artisan had this advantage: the drinkers and the landlord (a fellow called Jerry Reynolds) were aware that any visit like this was harmless. He wasn’t after anybody, he was merely in quest of a bit of knowledge. And so they permitted him a few questions and even threw him a titbit from time to time. The quid pro quo for this was that Chesney and Inspector Foster left the occupants of The Nethers alone, unless they were really compelled to make an arrest in the place.

Chesney was departing The Nethers this evening in a dissatisfied frame of mind. He’d been detailed by his Inspector to see what the word was in the lower quarters of the town about the thefts from the houses in the close. The word from the Nethers drinkers was: nothing. Oh, Chesney’s informants had heard that a couple of the fine drums near the cathedral had been turned over and that items, piddling items, had been snaffled. Jelly moulds, toasting forks and the like. ‘Honest, Matt,’ said one of the drinkers who made a point of being over-familiar with Constable Chesney when he was out of uniform, ‘this will make our business a laughing stock. To break a drum and come off with swag like that’ll do us no good at all, Matt.’

Chesney heard two or three other comments to this effect. Whoever was going to the trouble of breaking into the houses of the well-to-do folk should take a pride in their work, for gawd’s sake, and do some proper thieving. But there was a lack of hard information, a lack of any information at all, and Constable Matthew Chesney was going to have to report to his Inspector that he had got nowhere.

The constable steered himself out of the front door of The Nethers. The cold evening air hit him full in the face, after the fuggy warmth and smell of the pub. He might have had a bit more to drink than he intended in his quest for information, and The Nethers was the third public house he had visited. Of course, you had to buy drinks for people while you were pumping them, and those people made sure they drank quick and provided their information (which they usually didn’t have much of) slow. And then you had to show you had a head for drink yourself, since no one was going to give out information to a peeler who looked as though he was about to sign the pledge. In theory, Chesney disapproved of drinking, certainly drinking to excess, and as a God-fearing man he had sometimes felt like quoting to the habitués of The Nethers that verse from Proverbs about the glutton and the drunkard coming to poverty. Strangely, Constable Matthew Chesney only felt like doing this when he was himself a little the worse for wear.

The policeman went round to the side of The Nethers and unbuttoned himself to take a piss against the wall. He looked up to see the stars wheeling over the gabled end of the pub. He looked sideways in the direction of the other, barn-like edifice set further back from the lane. Gleams of light were visible through cracks and holes in the planking. There was the occasional yap of a dog and a shout or cheer from inside, which competed with the noise from the pub. Aha, thought Chesney, I know what’s going on in there. It’s none of my business, though.

As he was turning back towards the track which would lead to the town, he almost collided with someone. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. The figure – it was a man – said nothing but brushed past Chesney, heading towards the wooden building. If the light had been better or Chesney less in-ebriated, the constable might have recognized the figure. But he didn’t. Instead he staggered on his way towards the lights of the town.

The figure, however, did recognize Chesney although it took him a moment. He stopped to grin in the dark at the sozzled man’s back before resuming his progress. As he drew closer to the barn, he heard a single shout which was echoed straightaway by other answering shouts. To an outsider the shouts would have been indecipherable or meaningless, for they sounded like ‘Blow on ’em! Blow on ’em!’, but the man was familiar with the words and quickened his step so as to be in time for the kill.

There was a person lounging by a small side door to the building. ‘Evening, Jack,’ said the man. The other might have been a block of wood for all the response he made but he let the man pass through the door unhindered. The interior of the barn was illuminated with a mixture of oil lamps and candles – the latter very dangerous in the event of an accidental spill although no one had given much thought to that – hanging from beams or fixed into niches and crevices in the walls. The flaring lights cast a golden glow over the proceedings, which was further softened by tobacco smoke. This, and the hush which had suddenly fallen, might have suggested a tranquil scene. All the man could see at first was an arc of backs in the centre of the beaten-earth floor and, through the huddled shoulders, glimpses of fixed countenances on the other side, seemingly looking down at the floor. There were other observers too, standing on a couple of broken-down carts and a discarded table, with the younger and more agile ones even sitting astride the rickety rafters.

Their entire attention was concentrated on an area not much more than six feet in diameter at the centre of the barn. Here was a circular wall of stout wooden boards, rising to a little below chest height. The wood had at one time been painted white but it was now stained and flaking. The interior was well illuminated by a cluster of oil lamps hanging from a beam overhead.

Inside the ring a small dog, a terrier, was busy disposing of a pack of rats. The rats were running around the pit, some trying to get away from the terrier by squeezing into the gaps between the boards, others massing together in a kind of defensive heap against attack. But the lad who was standing in the pit, and who acted like a boxer’s second in relation to the dog, prevented the rats clinging together for long either by giving them a flick with a dirty handkerchief or by puffing out his cheeks and blowing at the pile – as the shouts of ‘Blow on ’em!’ from the group of watchers had instructed him to do. This threw the animals into confusion, causing the the heap to collapse and giving the dog the chance to snap at one, then another, then a third, each time twisting his little body about, until he managed to seize a rat in his mouth and break its neck. Then the boy would shout at the dog: ‘Drop it! Drop it!’ and the terrier went searching for a new victim.

The man who’d just entered the barn jumped on to the back of one of the dilapidated carts, which stood at a little distance from the wooden ring or pit. He was nimble and reached it in a single leap. The cart swayed under his weight and the handful of other men already standing there shifted slightly to make space for him. Not one of them shifted his gaze from the pit, however.

The man was interested enough in the spectacle of rat-killing although it did not engross him as much as it did the other spectators. For one thing, he was not a betting man. For another, this was not an interesting fight between evenly matched opponents, each of them risking death or serious injury. The terrier would almost certainly come off quite unscathed after disposing of a dozen or more of the rodents. The real contest was between the dogs (and their owners) as to which of them could kill the most in an allotted period of time. So while this particular terrier was despatching fresh rats, the man cast his eyes over the company from the vantage point of the cart. There were no women in the crowd and the men were predominantly of the same type and class as those who filled the pub which stood a few dozen yards off.

The newcomer soon saw on the far side of the ring three individuals who were better dressed than the rest of the crowd. Gentlemen, perhaps, though more on account of their clothes than anything else about them. They too were absolutely absorbed by the contest, their faces tilted forward and etched by shadows, their extended arms braced on the rim of the pit.

The man waited until the match was declared over, which happened after someone called out ‘Time!’ as a signal to the boy who was acting as a second to catch up his dog by the scruff of the neck.

In the pause before the next bout, the man leaped down from the cart and circled round the barn. The trio of gentlemen, for want of a better word, were now standing a little away from the pit, exchanging sporadic comments among themselves but not talking to any of the others in the barn. The man tapped the shoulder of the individual he wanted to speak to.

This one spun round, instinctively raising the walking stick which he was carrying. Then, squinting through the hazier light beyond the perimeter of the ring, he relaxed and lowered his stick.

‘Ah, Adam, it’s you.’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ said the man.

‘What have you got to report?’

‘Here?’ said the man. ‘Now? In front of your friends?’

‘These aren’t my friends,’ said the gentleman, looking over his shoulder at his companions. ‘Never seen them before in my life.’

‘Funny, isn’t it,’ said the man who’d been addressed as Adam. ‘A funny thing, a queer thing. Birds of a feather and all that. Sticking together.’

‘I dare say,’ said the gentleman, perhaps irritated by Adam’s familiarity. ‘And here’s another funny, queer thing, Adam. Look in the pit there. Look at the rats.’

The boy and the terrier were still inside the ring, the boy holding the dog, which hadn’t yet taken its eyes off the surviving rats. The boy, meantime, was conferring with a heavy-set man leaning on the rim of the pit. Judging by the way he was looking at the terrier – with a touch of pride in his face – he was most likely its owner. For their part, the few rats which remained had started to clean themselves or to nibble the ends of their tails or even to sniff around the lad, who had prudently tied string round the bottom of his trousers to prevent them scrabbling up his legs. The rats got on with their existence despite the corpses and the fearsome face of the terrier looming only a couple of feet above them.

‘They are ignorant of their fate, Adam,’ said the man, gesturing at the rats with his walking stick. ‘See the way they play around the feet of their destroyer. See how quickly they get back to their normal business, as if there were nothing but unclouded blue sky above them.’

‘Very poetic,’ said Adam.

‘There’s a lesson for us here.’

‘Well, I am buggered if I know what that lesson is,’ said Adam.

‘I only say this sort of thing to you because I believe you can appreciate it,’ said the man.

At this point the two men had to move out of the way while the terrier was borne off from the pit, cradled in the arms of the heavy-set individual as lovingly as if he were carrying a baby. The boy was sweeping the corpses of the rats to one side but not troubling to remove them from the little arena. Another dog was being ushered towards the ring from some dark corner of the barn, a small white bulldog this time, walking in his stumpy fashion rather than being lifted. And the proprietor of the rat-killing forum (who was a cousin to Jerry Reynolds, landlord of The Nethers) was bringing up the rear, supporting a large wicker basket on his outstretched arms. Despite the dimness of the lamplight it was possible to make out, through the hinged metal grid which formed the lid of the basket, mounds of close-packed rats. They looked like so many sweetmeats being brought to market. Moving sweetmeats.

The man called Adam said, ‘I’m not staying to see more. I don’t bet.’

‘You don’t bet?’ said the other, with genuine surprise.

‘It’s a mug’s game.’

‘There is the sport too.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Then tell me quickly, Adam, what you found in The Side of Beef,’ said the well-dressed man, glancing round to see that no one was within earshot. He was obviously eager to turn his attention back to the wooden pit, but not so eager that he didn’t take time to bring out a hip flask and have a swallow from it before asking, ‘What have you got to report?’

‘I found nothing.’

‘You were recommended to me as a man who could find things. I paid you on that understanding.’

‘Can’t find nothing if there’s nothing to find. I turned over the room and there was nothing there, I say. Nothing we would be interested in, leastways.’

‘Then why in God’s name did you come to disturb me here if you had nothing to say?’ said the man, letting the irritation back into his voice. Perhaps he’d picked up on the shared ‘we’ in Adam’s answer and did not care for the implied equality.