The Salisbury Manuscript (19 page)

Clutching his stick with one hand, he got out a hand-kerchief and held it tight against his nose and mouth as he edged his way inside the aperture. The smell was almost overpowering. He paused. There were small sounds, scuffling sounds, which he could just detect over the banging of his heart. He coughed, and the scuffling stopped. Using the walking stick as a probe he pushed forward and it tapped against a hard object. He picked it up. A bone, a human bone he thought. But not recent, because it was white and dry and stripped of everything.

The day was overcast but there was enough light seeping into the entrance of the hole for Tom to get an impression of what was lying deeper inside. More scattered bones, it seemed, and something else in among the bones, not white and sterile like them, but an object which was wrapped up and foul-smelling and too large to be a sheep. An object with shod feet. He prodded at the soles of the feet with his stick. Then he crawled as fast as he could out of the hole, going in reverse. He sat on the chalky slope, gulping in draughts of fresh air, even if that air was still tainted by the scent from the burial chamber. A movement startled him. It was Helen. Worried by Tom’s absence, she had half walked, half scrambled down the slope. Her hair was tumbling out from under her sensible cap and her face was flushed. Seeing Tom, she shrieked because of his appearance. He’d turned a touch green. But Tom hardly noticed her arrival or her shriek. Instead, he was trying to keep his gorge from rising and he was thinking: two bodies in three days. It’s a bit steep.

Somewhere below Tom and Helen, near the eastern base of Todd’s Mound, was a third figure. The discovery of the body – it must have been discovered, judging by the woman’s shriek, sharp as a bird-call – was no surprise to this person, who had been responsible for putting the body in the burial chamber. Well, it would have been found sooner or later. No great harm done.

Canon Selby’s House, Again

Tom Ansell’s thoughts were echoed by Inspector Foster that evening as he sat with Tom and Helen in the drawing room of Canon Selby’s house. They were all sipping brandy, courtesy of the owner.

‘You mustn’t make a habit of this body-finding, Mr Ansell. First Canon Slater and now, well, now whoever the unfortunate individual was out at Todd’s Mound . . .’

‘We think it was Mr North,’ said Helen.

‘Possibly, possibly,’ said the policeman with all his professional caution. ‘But there’s no way of telling, is there? Not until we get some of those clothes cleaned up and give Mrs Banks a sight of them.’

This was true enough. The process of recovering the corpse from the flank of the hill had taken up most of the day. Tom and Helen returned to the town on foot and entered the police house, muddy and bedraggled and breathless. Inspector Foster had to be found and their story told several times over. A trio of constables was gathered and, together with the Inspector and Tom and Helen, they were driven back to Todd’s Mound in a carriage and a cart. A carriage for Foster and the two young people, the cart for the three constables. There was a purpose to the cart, as they realized later. Tom urged Helen to stay behind – he could lead the group to the place by himself – but she insisted on being ‘in at the kill’ (as she said, before clapping her hand over her mouth in horrified amusement).

Tom and she had been content to do no more than guide Foster and his men towards the point above the fallen beech on the eastern side of the hill. They did not see Gabriel the shepherd again. Perhaps he was alarmed by the crowd of police. Tom and Helen watched from the embankment gateway while the constables did what was literally the dirty work down below under Foster’s direction. The first constable to go in, Chesney, came out almost straightaway. He said, ‘There’s two of ’em in there, guv.’ Foster explained that they weren’t interested in bare bones, which might have lain there for centuries, but in fresh (or freshish) corpses. Chesney should go back inside and concentrate on that.

The burial chamber was too small to hold more than a single person at a time so first Constable Chesney and then the other policemen entered one by one, holding their breath and tugging at the corpse until it was brought out, inch by inch, from the interior of the burrow and laid out on the hillside. One of the constables turned away to be sick. Even from a distance the sight was unpleasant. Tom instinctively put up his hand to shield Helen but she had already averted her gaze.

The body was still clothed but the garments were stained and discoloured, and rents in the material showed grey-green flesh underneath. The head, which was the same colour, had little hair left and the face was shapeless and pitted with myriad tiny holes. It was apparent too that small animals must have been feeding on the whole body.

The police had brought with them ropes and a canvas sheet in which they tied the body, and a makeshift stretcher to carry it away on. Foster ordered them to lug their burden to the other side of Todd’s Mound and dump it in the cart. He slapped down the frivolous suggestion of one of his men that it might be quicker to roll the body down the steep incline on this side and collect it at the bottom. After their initial shock and surprise, Tom and Helen had become fascinated by the process, almost against their will. Helen, in particular, had started hanging over the shrouded body in a manner that Tom considered pretty unhealthy. He put it down to her novelist’s sensibility.

While his men were dealing with the corpse, the Inspector and the others returned to Salisbury. By now it was growing dark. Foster promised he would call on them at Canon Selby’s to give them his news.

Foster was as good as his word even if he didn’t have much to convey. Identification of the corpse was almost impossible, said the Inspector, and in any case it would have to be cremated as soon as possible in the interests of public health. Identification could only be done through the dead man’s garments which, when cleaned up, would be shown to Mrs Banks in the hope (or rather the fear) that she might recognize some article belonging to her brother. He thought it likely that the corpse was North. The Inspector had already informed Mrs Banks of this because, chancing to meet him in the street, she had badgered him with questions. He had no choice but to tell her they had unearthed a body which was probably Andrew’s.

‘Mrs Banks is naturally distressed,’ said Foster, ‘but when she found that it was you two, Mr Ansell and Miss Scott, who had made the discovery, she was grateful you had gone to such trouble after you visited her. I didn’t know you had called on Mrs Banks.’

‘It’s not against the law, Inspector,’ said Tom.

‘Of course it’s not, sir, but I must say that we do not much approve in this part of the country of members of the public involving themselves in police business. Asking questions, finding corpses and the like.’

‘Is there evidence of foul play on the body, Inspector?’ said Tom quickly.

‘Foul play?’ said Foster, pulling at his great side-whiskers and gazing into space as if the words were spelled out there in capital letters. ‘You mean murder, Mr Ansell. There’s no evidence one way or the other, I’m afraid, not on the body itself. It’s in far too decomposed a state for us to tell anything from it, whether the chap was throttled or bashed over the head or stabbed in the back. But I don’t think that Mr Whoever-he-was crawled inside that burial place by himself. Someone pushed and shoved him inside so that he was lying next to the remains of some other gent, who is none of our concern since he died long before the Salisbury police was a gleam in anyone’s eye. But the pushing and the shoving to Mr Whoever-he-was suggests to me that
he
was done away with.’

‘Not Mr Whoever-he-was but Mr North. We know that North was in the habit of visiting Todd’s Mound, Inspector,’ said Helen, repeating what she’d said to Tom earlier that day. Helen was back on an even keel. A hot bath, a change of clothes, a light supper and some of her godfather’s brandy (taken by Helen against Eric Selby’s advice) together with the basic excitements of the day recollected in tranquillity, had brought her back to her usual self.

‘Just because we’ve found a body in a solitary place which a man was accustomed to visit doesn’t mean that body and man are one and the same, Miss Scott. After all, it could be that a second individual had an interest in that burial place. In fact, we know a second individual had an interest because one of them had to kill the other in order to leave the first one there. If you see what I mean.’

‘You mean that Andrew North might be the murderer himself,’ said Tom, ‘and that the body which isn’t yet identified could be someone else?’

‘I am not going to start accusing people of murder, Mr Ansell, without a little more evidence. You should be glad I follow that policy. Remember, sir?’

And of course Tom did remember his treatment at Foster’s hands, fair treatment on the whole, when he’d been put in Fisherton Gaol.

‘Has either of you seen Walter Slater?’ said Foster, in an unexpected change of subject.

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘He lives at Venn House, doesn’t he, with his aunt and uncle?’

‘He does normally,’ said the Inspector. ‘But he hasn’t been there since the night of his uncle’s murder.’

‘Perhaps he has gone back to his father’s house in Downton,’ said Tom.

‘No. I have established that Walter Slater is not at Northwood either.’

‘His church? He is a curate in the town.’

‘Yes, at St Luke’s. He was seen there the morning after his uncle’s murder but he has not been sighted since.’

Despite the warmth of the Selbys’ drawing room, and the sense of having eaten and drunk well at the end of a long and anxious day, Tom Ansell experienced a sudden chill. He had liked Walter Slater on the strength of a single meeting. He hoped nothing had happened to the fellow. Of course, there was another explanation why the curate might have gone missing after Felix’s murder but Tom was reluctant to give it house room.

‘By the way, Miss Scott,’ said Foster, ‘where is your godfather? Here we are sitting in his house and warming ourselves by his fire and drinking his brandy, but there is no Canon Selby.’

‘He had to go out on business, I believe,’ said Helen. ‘Church business, that is.’

‘Just as long as he hasn’t disappeared too,’ said the Inspector. ‘Well, I’d better be making myself disappear. I will keep you informed of any discoveries we make about the body from Todd’s Mound. But don’t go tripping over any more remains, Mr Ansell.’

After Foster had gone, Tom and Helen remained sitting near the fire, sipping at their brandy and musing over the events of the day.

‘How do you suppose this second murder of Mr North is connected to the murder of Canon Slater, Tom?’

‘Perhaps it isn’t.’

‘It must be.’

‘It’s only in a story that deaths and murders have to be tied together.’

‘So you think there are two different murderers wandering about Salisbury, Tom? That makes things worse.’

‘No, I don’t really think there are two murderers. The law of chance and probability would argue against it.’

‘But as a certain lawyer said to me this afternoon, ‘I’m not sure that law has ever been enacted in Parliament.’’

‘Oh dear,’ said Tom. ‘Tell me I don’t really sound so pompous.’

‘You don’t. Not very often anyway. Now you tell me something. You said you had a look inside this book, this memoir, which Canon Slater wanted to entrust to the firm. Now the book has gone, taken by whoever killed him, I suppose. So the book must have contained something valuable, some secret maybe. What did you see in it?’

Tom recalled glancing through the Salisbury manuscript, reading the anecdotes about Byron and Shelley, the other little item about the woman who’d danced in the nude and posed for George Slater and his friend. The reference to the prostitute in Shepherd Market and George’s fears that he’d contracted some disease from her.

Tom said, ‘It was an interesting book.’

‘I can see from your expression, Tom, what “interesting” means. It means scandalous and compromising, doesn’t it?’

‘Well, there were some stories in the memoir about meeting famous poets and the like. There was a story about Shelley sailing a boat on a pond made out of a fifty-pound note. The boat, I mean, not the pond.’

‘But there were other, less respectable things too, Tom. Was the Canon’s father’s book like the kind of thing they sell in Holywell Street?’

Tom might have asked Helen how she knew about the type of books which were for sale, on the sly and under the counter, in a particular stretch of Holywell Street near Exeter Hall in the Strand, but he saw the look on her face – somewhere between amusement and determination – and said, ‘Yes, there were some details in George Slater’s memoir which would not be publishable. Adventures with women of a certain sort, and so on.’

Helen put down her brandy glass and clapped her hands in delight.

‘Why, Tom Ansell, I wish I had had a sight of the – whatd’youcallit? – the Salisbury manuscript!’

‘That’s as may be, Helen, but a brief glance was enough to tell me why the Canon wanted the book out of his house and in safekeeping in our vaults.’

‘He could have destroyed it without going to all the trouble of summoning you to Salisbury.’

‘He would not destroy it because he had too much respect for the past, but neither did he wish to keep it. He wanted it to be seen by no one except his nephew Walter. Walter was to have the final decision on what happened to it, but only after his uncle’s death.’

‘And now his uncle’s dead and the book is gone.’

‘I don’t see how the book gives a motive for his murder though.’

‘And I don’t understand,’ said Helen. ‘Everything you’ve said suggests that the Salisbury manuscript was somehow dangerous. Why, it might have contained something about the Canon himself.’

‘Then why did he allow me to look at it? Anyway I don’t think old George Slater would have had much to say about a son who went into the Church, except a few words of dismissal or contempt.’

They were silent for a moment, trying to work their way through the tangle of confusion and doubt.

‘No, no one would have killed to get it,’ said Tom. ‘What it contained was compromising, true, but the writer was dead and the events he referred to took place many years ago. But I can see it the other way round. Felix Slater might have resorted to – to extreme measures to keep the book.’

‘Even murder?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom, surprising himself as he said it. The residentiary canon might have looked like a venerable churchman but he had been tough and wiry as an old bird. Perhaps ruthless underneath it. ‘But there’s a problem.
He
didn’t murder anyone. He was the victim.’

‘So perhaps Canon Slater was murdered after a tussle.’ said Helen. ‘Perhaps he was killed by someone who wanted the book.’

‘Which wouldn’t be of much concern to anyone outside the family. Who didn’t know what was in it. Walter had never seen it while Felix Slater told me that his brother Percy passed it over to him as part of his father’s effects, though some years after old George Slater died. I got the impression that Percy hadn’t been interested.’

‘You said you went to see Percy and that he wanted the stuff back.’

‘That’s true. But I think he was saying it out of a general dislike of his brother and the wish to cause trouble.’

‘Couldn’t this Percy Slater have gone to the Canon’s house and demanded the manuscript back? Couldn’t there have been a fight and so on?’

‘Possibly,’ said Tom, sounding to himself like Inspector Foster in a cautious mood. ‘Only there were no signs of a fight or a struggle in his study. He was taken by surprise. Someone he trusted, or someone he knew at any rate.’

‘What about Mrs Slater?’

‘Amelia? I don’t think so.’

‘Because she’s a woman, Tom? And because we all know that the gentle sex cannot plunge the knife in any more than they can be familiar with the books for sale in Holywell Street. So is Mrs Slater some pious clergyman’s companion, retiring and docile, like my godfather’s wife, Mrs Selby?’