The Salisbury Manuscript (17 page)

He didn’t sound very regretful. Tom wondered whether there had been more to the argument than Eric Selby was claiming. He said, ‘Canon Selby, do you remember yesterday evening when Inspector Foster arrived at Venn House and I was being put under – when I was being escorted away by him, do you remember hearing someone whisper my name and then “he did it”?’

Selby brushed some cake crumbs off his front. He thought before speaking. ‘I might have heard that.’

‘Was it a man or a woman?’

‘I’m not sure. Did I even hear those words, now I come to think about it? Or was it just a idea hanging in the air, as it were? It did look bad for you, Tom.’

Tom didn’t need any reminding of how bad it looked.

‘So you have no idea who might have committed this murder, sir?’ he said.

‘Even if I did, I would not say. It is not for me to go passing on suspicions, supposing I have any. But I have no idea. A madman, it must have been. Or a burglar surprised in the act and resorting to violence.’

And that seemed to be the general conclusion in the town: that Canon Felix Slater had been killed by an intruder, who was either bent on robbery or, more simply, a homicidal maniac. Certainly, this was the version reported on the front page of the
Gazette
, which Tom saw on his return to the hotel. Under the headline in large type
Dreadful Murder in Cathedral Close
was a story which was long on speculation but short on fact. There was a description of how the body of the distinguished cleric had been found by the housemaid and the alarm raised by Mrs Amelia Slater. Death had been produced by a single blow to the back of the neck. The weapon was a flint spearhead, ironically (the newspaper’s word) one of the primitive implements which Canon Slater collected as a pastime. Then there was a paragraph about a burglar or a madman or a combination of the two, necessarily brief because it was all speculation. There was a reference to the other, unexplained robberies in the close. Apart from Mrs Slater, the only people named in the piece were Walter, nephew to the deceased and assistant curate at St Luke’s, and Percy Slater, brother of Felix and owner of the Slater family home at Downton. Of the others on the scene, including Tom, there was no mention.

Inspector Foster was quoted as claiming that the Salisbury constabulary were actively searching for the intruder, for ‘the person or persons who have done this terrible deed’, as if the police could or should be doing anything else. Foster was a shrewd, experienced man. Tom had learned to respect him after a couple of encounters. Tom recalled that Foster had been sceptical about the idea of an intruder. There’d been no sign of a break-in at Venn House, he said, chiming with Tom’s conclusion that Slater was attacked by someone he knew. But, for the newspaper, had Foster deliberately spread the story of an outsider so as to lull the fears of the real killer? A killer who came from within Slater’s own circle of family or neighbours?

Tom had left Helen at her godfather’s house. Selby had pressed him to stay for supper but Tom was tired and, besides, he sensed that the Canon was looking forward to having his god-daughter to himself. He and Helen were to meet the next morning. So Tom enjoyed a good supper at The Side of Beef and retired early to his room. After the excitements of the previous day and the restless night he’d spent at Fisherton Gaol, he slept well, surprisingly.

As for the others involved in this case, those in Felix Slater’s circle of family and acquaintances, how did they sleep on this second night after the murder?

Henry Cathcart, as usual, went to visit Constance in her sick room during the evening. He might have been distracted but she scarcely noticed. She had spent much of the day poring over the news of the terrible murder with Grace, who read and reread the front page of the
Gazette
to her invalid patient. Constance’s normally pallid complexion was flushed, more from the excitement of the murder than the stuffiness of the room. Her large dark eyes were wider than ever. She was too caught up in the drama and outrage over the death of a cleric to make any disparaging comment about Amelia Slater. She was more lively than Henry had seen her for a long time.

Cathcart did not reveal to his wife that he had actually been on the scene when the police arrived at Venn House. If that news had come to light – it might have done, you never knew, Salisbury was not a large town and gossip was rife – then he was ready with a story. A story which was half true: that he had gone to the Canon’s residence on the night of the murder so as to return to Amelia Slater some designs and catalogues which they had been discussing. But the subject didn’t come up. Constance was more concerned about their safety, or rather
her
safety, with a madman on the loose. Henry did his best to reassure her. He would personally make sure the doors and windows in the house were fast before going to bed. And Grace slept in the next room, didn’t she?

Then he withdrew to his own bedroom. He could not help thinking of Felix Slater’s death nor of the fact that Amelia was now a widow. By coincidence, the pair of them had been looking at pictures of mourning outfits very recently. What was it Amelia had said? (But he didn’t have to struggle to remember, her words were imprinted on his brain.)
Every woman dreams of how she will look as
a widow, Henry
. How had Henry Cathcart interpreted Amelia’s remark? Had he asked himself whether Amelia meant a ‘dream’in the sense of an idle fantasy or speculation, or a ‘dream’ in the sense of longing?

Amelia Slater really was dreaming. She saw her husband slumped forward over his desk, the spear-head protruding from the back of his neck. She groaned and moved uneasily in her sleep. The doctor had given her something to soothe her nerves and something else to help her sleep. But she could not escape her dreams, which swirled with light and ghastly colour. In the dream, her husband’s study was illuminated not by gaslight but by the unforgiving glare of day. The blood from his wound flowed across the surface of the desk, soaking into papers and blotters, running down the sides and pooling on the carpet. Trying to keep clear of the blood, Amelia reached out to finger the sharp flint. Her fingers touched the makeshift weapon. For an instant, she was undecided whether to pluck it out or even to push it further in so as to seal up the wound. But the flint-head was fixed deep, the damage was already done.

There was no going back. And there was no more time either. The blood was lapping at her shoes and then at the hem of her skirt. She was wearing a dark fabric – crape, bombazine, she couldn’t remember – and the blood did not show at first. But she felt the added weight of it dragging her down as if she was wading in water. She must escape before she was pulled under by the tide of blood. She turned towards the door. Before she could reach it, the door opened. She wanted to shout out a warning to whoever was coming in, that they should beware of what they might see, beware of the taint of blood. But it was too late. A figure stood just outside the doorway. To her surprise she recognized the outline of Walter. She could not make out his expression, could not see whether he was angry or sad or happy at the scene in front of him.

There were other individuals in Venn House too. The maids Bessie and Mary, for example, and Eaves the gardener (although he did not sleep inside the house but in a little store-house where his tools and other gardening equipment were kept). But as for how they slept and whether they suffered from bad dreams, as for what they thought and felt about the murder of their employer, Canon Felix Slater, none of these things is really any of our concern. They were only servants, after all.

Walter Slater was sleeping as uneasily as Amelia. He was not in his comfortable bedroom in Venn House. He had not slept there on the night of the murder and he was not sleeping there now. Instead, Walter had retreated to his church, St Luke’s. He was in the belltower. He had made himself a kind of nest out of old vestments and pieces of curtain and he was curled up in a corner of the ringing room, which was reached by a spiral staircase running up from the corner of the transept. It was a comfortless spot. The loops of the bellropes dangled down like so many nooses. The room was cold despite having only slit windows. But it was a place where Walter Slater knew he should not be disturbed at least until the Sunday morning. There was a creaking door at the bottom of the spiral stairs, so Walter would be alerted if anyone was coming up to the ringing room. No one knew he was sleeping in the church. Walter had managed to carry on with his usual duties during the day following the murder of Felix, and anyone observing his battered, unshaven look and his crumpled clothes would have attributed them to the shock of what had occurred at Venn House. Walter might have been capable of attending to his work during the day but he could not face sleeping under the dead man’s roof.

Percy Slater had now returned to Northwood House. He had remained in Salisbury on the night of his brother’s murder, staying in Venn House. Percy had stayed not so much because there was anything he could do – had he been so minded – in terms of comforting the widow or consoling others in the household or helping in any investigation, but because the fog was too thick to allow him and his driver Fawkes to get back to Downton. Now he was back and sitting in the smoking room where he had greeted Tom Ansell a couple of days earlier. It was nearly midnight, the fireplace was full of ash, the bottle in front of him all but empty, and the house cold and clammy. The rest of his establishment – if it wasn’t absurd call two people, Fawkes and Nan, an establishment – had long since retired for the night. Percy knew that he too would have to stir himself sooner or later and plod along the flagged passageway to his room. But he did not shift from the armchair by the dead fire.

Instead, he thought of his late brother. He had never liked Felix, regarding him as a sanctimonious hypocrite. He asked himself what he felt now that the holy Felix was no more. The answer was, he did not feel a great deal. There was no point in pretending to a piety that didn’t exist in him. He was, however, sorry about Walter. Not so much that Walter should have, like him, been so violently bereaved, but that he had gone to see the young man on the afternoon before Felix’s death. The visit had been the result of an impulse, a disastrous impulse. He recalled the look of shock on Walter’s face after they’d had their quiet chat in the gloom of the cathedral, the way Walter had gripped his knee as if he could not believe the other’s words, the way that Walter had sprung to his feet and rushed off into the gloom of the aisle. Percy hadn’t seen him again, or rather he had had only a brief glimpse of him when they were all crowding about the porch of Venn House, watching the lawyer fellow being taken away by the police. Walter had not looked well but sick and pale. Hardly surprising. Percy supposed that none of them looked any different.

Percy wondered about the circumstances leading up to Felix’s murder. He thought about his own involvement. He reached for the bottle and poured out the last bitter dregs.

Canon Eric Selby was the final person to have been present at the entrance to Venn House when Tom Ansell had been brought out like a man under arrest. Selby recalled the words which Tom claimed to have heard. The exclamation, surely involuntary, ‘He did it!’ Selby might even have uttered those words himself. It was, as he’d said, an idea which was in the air. Seeing a man with bloody hands escorted out of a house where a murder had occurred, anyone might have reached the same conclusion.

But none of this affected Eric Selby’s comfort. He had dined and drunk well in the company of his god-daughter or ‘niece’ Helen (and his wife, of course). They had talked about Helen’s father, Alfred, and recalled childhood holidays in Salisbury. When Helen had gone to bed, Eric Selby stayed up, musing on the death of Felix Slater. A terrible event, needless to say. But he could not find it in himself to summon up much grief for the man.

Mrs Banks’s House

It was Helen who came up with the idea that she and Tom should go off and see Mrs Banks, the sister of Andrew North, the sexton. From their conversation with Eric Selby, it was evident that North’s strange behaviour before his disappearance was being laid at Felix Slater’s door. There’d also been Selby’s mention of buried treasure and relics. This had gripped Helen’s imagination. She referred to it several times as the couple were walking through the close in search of the row of artisan cottages which lay tucked away out of sight of the cathedral and the grander houses. Tom thought of reminding Helen, again, that she wasn’t composing a melodramatic novel but in fact the words had pricked his curiosity too.

They found North’s dwelling in the middle of a neatly kept terrace. Here lived some of those who did manual work, both menial and skilled, in the cathedral and its precincts. Mrs Banks was a widowed woman who kept house for her brother and who, according to Selby, eked out a meagre income by taking in needlework. She had the look of a withered apple, red and wrinkled in the face. Once Helen had explained that they’d been directed there by Canon Selby, Mrs Banks’s attitude towards these well-dressed visitors shifted from wariness to welcome.

She invited them into a tiny parlour which doubled as a dining room. She apologized for the absence of a fire but it was early in the day and she was not expecting visitors. Tom and Helen were directed to sit on what was obviously her best bit of furniture, an old chaise, while Mrs Banks prepared the tea. Tom looked round. The room was spotless, the dining table polished like a mirror. By the sofa there were a few books on a shelf, more volumes than the Bible and a prayer book. Tom picked one up. He was slightly surprised to see that it was a history of Salisbury. Surprised that a cathedral sexton should possess such a thing. Yet who was to say that a man who earned his living with his hands shouldn’t also use his head? The book certainly belonged to the man for he had written his name in full – Andrew Herbert North – on the fly-leaf. The handwriting was neat and fluent, not that of an uneducated individual.

Hearing Mrs Banks returning, Tom quickly put the book back on the shelf. The sexton’s sister came into the parlour with a tray, on which was a teapot and china cups. She served Tom and Helen and perched on a wooden chair facing them. Tom explained that he was acting for the lawyers who had represented Canon Felix Slater. He implied that he was looking into the Canon’s affairs, which was true enough, and that they’d been told that Mrs Banks might be able to help them, particularly over the link between her brother and the Canon. Mrs Banks’s face wrinkled still further at the mention of Felix Slater – by now Tom was getting used to this response to Slater’s name – but she just about managed to express regret and horror over the terrible murder.

‘None of us have slept safe and sound in our beds since it happened,’ she said. ‘Mind you, I haven’t slept sound neither after my brother Andrew went off. It is over four weeks since he left here saying he was going for a walk, and he has never come back and I do not know that he ever will come back. I missed my husband Banks when he was gone but, truth be told, I miss my brother more.’

She was close to tears. Helen got up and put her arm round the older woman and produced a handkerchief. Mrs Banks put aside her teacup on the dining table. She dabbed at her eyes and then admired the stitching on the handkerchief while she composed herself and Helen sat down again next to Tom.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ she said, and then to Tom, ‘Forgive me, sir, but sometimes it is all too much to bear. Inspector Foster has been kind in his official way and says that he is still making enquiries about my brother, but in the next breath he will say that Andrew is a grown man and he cannot have come to much harm and no one bears a grudge against him and he is no one’s enemy and he will surely turn up one day and walk through that door there.’

She glanced towards the tiny hallway beyond the parlour, as if she expected her brother to appear at that instant. Once Mrs Banks had overcome her initial reserve, she started talking in long breathless stretches. Tom thought it was a relief for her to have sympathetic listeners.

‘Your brother was not in any kind of trouble?’ said Helen.

‘No, miss, he is an honest workman. Everyone speaks well of him.’

Tom said, ‘We have heard that Mr North used to do some work for Canon Slater.’

‘The Canon employed him to do odd jobs. Mrs Slater’s dog died not very long ago and Andrew dug a grave for him in the garden. But he did other things as well.’

‘Other things?’

‘Canon Slater is – no, he was, I should say the Canon
was
– a man who went digging and delving in the country around here. He was looking for old arty – arty somethings.’

‘Artefacts,’ prompted Tom.

‘That’s the word. Being a gentleman, Canon Slater didn’t do much of the digging and delving himself but got my brother to do it instead.’

‘What did they find?’ said Helen. ‘They must have found things.’

‘It didn’t look like much to me, miss, but then I expect the Canon took the best pieces for himself.’

‘So you saw items which your brother dug up,’ said Tom. ‘Maybe he showed them to you.’

‘I remember an evening, last spring it would have been, when Andrew came in like a blast of cold air, all high-coloured in the face and excited. He and Canon Slater had been out somewhere beyond the city and they had uncovered . . .’

Mrs Banks hesitated. Helen, with her cup lifted halfway to her lips, smiled in encouragement. ‘Please tell us, Mrs Banks.’

‘. . . an old grave or tomb, Andrew said. It seems awful to go disturbing people who’d been minding their own business underground for hundreds of years, but my brother said they weren’t people with flesh and feelings but no more than a pile of old bones and anyway he was used to dealing with dead bodies, wasn’t he? They didn’t mean much to him. Canon Slater would say a quick prayer over them and the two of them never carried anybody’s bones off but allowed the people to go on resting in peace, so it was all right.’

‘On this particular evening you said your brother showed you something?’ said Tom when Mrs Banks paused for breath.

‘It was a bracelet which he said was gold. It might have been, I don’t know, Mr Ansell. To me, it looked like a circle of muddy yellow, tarnished and dented. But Andrew said that when it was cleaned up, it would fetch a few quid.’

Mrs Banks’s free hand flew to her mouth, as if she’d said more than she intended. She added quickly, ‘I do not mean my brother was after money. It was more that he was trying to show me that he wasn’t wasting his time. In fact, it was the excitement of finding buried things which he really liked.’

Tom recalled the passion with which Canon Slater had spoken about the subject. The effect on Andrew North had obviously gone deep, becoming an obsession and even the ‘infection’ mentioned by Selby. But he trusted Mrs Banks’s view of her brother even if it was biased. There were simpler ways of making money than fossicking around old tomb sites with the distant expectation of coming across brooches and rings. Those who did such things must be motivated more by the excitement of the hunt rather than by any idea of profit.

‘Did your brother sell the bracelet?’ he said.

Mrs Banks answered more confidently. ‘I don’t believe so. It is probably still up in his room. I have not been to Andrew’s room since he – since he left – except to dust it and sweep it and air it. I would not dream of disturbing his things. He would be angry when he comes back.’

Once again, she looked towards the little hall with a forlorn expression.

‘Before Andrew . . . disappeared . . . did he give any indication of what he was doing?’ said Helen. ‘Still searching for hidden things, buried things?’

‘I dare say, miss. But if he was, he had stopped telling me about it. He knew I didn’t approve for all that Canon Slater said it was all right. Andrew turned a bit peculiar in the summer. He went off for long walks in the evening, after he’d done a full day’s work. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going but I think he was up to his old tricks because his clothes were sometimes dusty or muddy afterwards. He tried to pass it off as dirt from his ordinary work, but I knew better. The clothes had a fusty smell, not like you get from fresh, honest-turned soil. And
he
smelled of drink sometimes.’

‘Perhaps he was out getting oiled with some of his fellows,’ said Tom.

‘My brother did not get “oiled”, as you put it, Mr Ansell, with anyone. He preferred to drink by himself. He had a little flask containing brandy.’

There was an awkward silence after Tom was put in his place over the ‘oiled’ remark, before Helen said, ‘Was Canon Slater with him when he went out on these summer evenings?’

‘I do not think so, miss. My brother turned in on him-self and got impatient with the company of others, not that he’d ever been much of a one for company in the first place. Andrew made one or two remarks about Canon Slater which seemed to say the two weren’t as friendly any more. Andrew spent time poring over old books too – he was always a good reader, unlike me. In the old days, he used to read the Bible. He could recite it off by heart. But lately he has not seem so bothered with the scriptures. Instead he has been taken up by big books with maps and such inside. I came in here once to see him with a great volume open on his knees, his nose as close to it as if his life depended on it. He was making notes, always the methodical man. He glared at me so I left.’

‘Did you have a glance at the book?’

‘Like I say, it was maps and writing together on one page, but I could not see clearly.’

‘Where would he get such a book?’ said Helen.

‘There are books in the cathedral,’ said Mrs Banks, as if the question was a surprising one. ‘There is a whole library of old books in the cathedral somewhere.’

And there are old books in Felix Slater’s study, thought Tom. Perhaps North had borrowed from the Canon – or stolen – some volume which might lead him to more tombs and artefacts.

There seemed to be little more that Mrs Banks could tell them. Tom and Helen might have asked to look at North’s bedroom but, if the sexton’s sister was reluctant to do more than sweep in there, she certainly wouldn’t have allowed strangers to poke around the place.

Mrs Banks handed the handkerchief back to Helen, who said, ‘Thank you for seeing us, Mrs Banks. By the way, you said that your brother and Canon Slater had been somewhere near the city when they discovered a burial place. Do you know what direction it was in? North of here? South?’

‘I can’t tell you exactly where that was, miss. But I do know where Andrew was going more recently, at the end of the summer. He let it slip. It’s Todd’s Mound, outside the city.’

‘Did you tell the police?’ said Tom

‘Inspector Foster said he would send one of his men to look round up there, but I do not know whether he was speaking just to soothe me.’

‘We’ll have a look,’ said Helen, ‘and we will tell you what we have found. Even if it is nothing.’

‘Oh, I hope it is nothing,’ said Mrs Banks, tears forming afresh in her eyes. ‘I hope it is nothing!’