After the Exhibition: A Jack Haldean 1920s Mystery (A Jack Haldean Mystery) (28 page)

‘Okay. I’ll need a few sheets of paper though, to show you properly. Have you got some letter paper?’

Bill rummaged in his desk and produced a pad of Basildon Bond. ‘Will this do?’

‘That’s perfect,’ said Jack, putting the pad on the sofa beside him. ‘Now, let’s pretend this room is the chantry.’

Bill shuddered. ‘God forbid. I thought the place was a nightmare. Go on.’

Jack picked up an armful of cushions and laid them on the carpet in a line. ‘I want you to imagine these cushions are the empty tomb with the picture of the chantry at the bottom.’ He quickly drew a picture of the chantry on one of the sheets of notepaper and placed it at the bottom of the line of cushions. ‘You see?’

‘Tomb, picture. Fine. What next?’

Jack picked up the pad of paper. ‘The flagstones in the chantry with the mottoes on them were laid out like this.’

Tearing off sheets of paper, he moved round the cushions. ‘Now, tell me what you see, Bill.’

Jack had laid out the rectangles of paper on the carpet. They formed two sideways-on V shapes. The point of both V’s pointed to the picture of the chantry at the base of the tomb.

Bill looked at the sheets of paper on the floor. ‘It’s obvious,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s like two arrowheads pointing to the chantry flagstone.’ He glanced at Jack, his frown deepening. ‘I went over the chantry with a fine-tooth comb. How come I didn’t see where the inlaid slabs were pointing?’

‘The shape is much easier to see here than it is in the actual chantry,’ said Jack. ‘They’re a lot further apart there. However, you agree, don’t you, that the inlaid slabs act as pointers?’

‘Of course,’ said Bill. ‘Laid out like that you can’t miss it.’

‘Good. Now for what was written on the inlaid flagstones. We’ll start with the arm of the left-hand V furthest away from the tomb and work up and round. Here goes.’

He picked up a piece of the letter paper from the carpet and, with his notebook beside him, wrote:
The church is your true and worthy treasure
, then replaced it. He worked his way up the V until the papers read, in order:
The church is your true and worthy treasure. Stop, my son, to pause and pray for treasure. A far lesser treasure also behold
.

At the point of the V he wrote:
Worldly goods will always fade and wither
, then continued down the other side with:
Art which is wrested from that evil root. That doorway, greater than man can measure
, and finished with:
The doorway’s here to eternal life!
Moving to the other side, and once more starting from the left-hand side of the V, he wrote:
Open – look! – to all curious eyes
,
continuing with:
It is yours, O my son, but for your soul. Be wise. Shun greed, let avarice be mute
. At the point of this V he wrote:
But true metal wrought, cast, forged, small in size,
then carried on down the other side with:
Is opened for you after earthly strife. Not copper, silver, precious stones or gold
and finished with:
In penitence here’s shown the greater whole
.

Bill pointed to the paper with:
Not copper, silver, precious stones or gold
written on it. ‘I see why you guessed the treasure was platinum, Jack. Once you’ve taken out copper, silver, precious stones and gold, there’s not a great deal left.’

‘Got it in one. My thoughts exactly,’ agreed Jack. He cocked his head to one side. ‘Can you see anything else significant about what we’ve got here, Bill?’

Bill gazed at the sheets of paper. ‘I’m sorry, I’m stumped,’ he said after some thought.

‘How many sheets of paper – that’s inlaid flagstones in reality, of course – are there?’

Bill puffed his cheeks out. ‘There’s seven sheets or flagstones in each V. Three down each side and one at the point of the V.’

Jack nodded. ‘And that gives us fourteen inlaid flagstones altogether.’ He stepped back from the pieces of paper and lit a cigarette. He glanced across to his friend and raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t suppose the fact there’s fourteen means anything to you, does it?’

‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t,’ said Bill after some cogitation.

‘How about,’ said Jack, ‘if you stop thinking of these lines as mottoes, as Henry Cadwallader describes them, and think of them as poetry?’

‘Poetry?’ repeated Bill in surprise. ‘What, as in “
Drake is in his hammock and a thousand miles away. Captain art thou sleeping there below?
” type of thing, you mean?’

‘I was thinking about a form of poetry a step or two up from “Drake’s Drum”,’ said Jack with a grin. ‘Not that I’ve got anything against “Drake’s Drum”
,
you understand. But think of Shakespeare, Bill.’

‘Er …
Hamlet
,
Romeo and Juliet
,
Macbeth
, you mean?’

‘Not plays but poetry,’ said Jack. ‘What form of poetry do you associate with Shakespeare?’

‘Blimey, I’m blowed if I know.’ Bill shrugged. ‘The sonnet, I suppose.’ He stopped. ‘Hang on a minute! I
do
know! I remember learning this in school. A sonnet’s got fourteen lines, hasn’t it?’ He looked at the sheets of paper laid out on the carpet and snapped his fingers together. ‘Jack! There’s fourteen flagstones!’

‘Give that man a cigar,’ said Jack with a broad grin. He indicated the sheets of paper. ‘These aren’t random jottings from the loony bin as we first thought, but the fourteen lines of a sonnet.’

‘You’re not telling me Shakespeare wrote this,’ said Bill in frank disbelief. ‘He wrote things like, “
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
”.’

‘Well, only if you feel you must,’ murmured Jack. ‘It’s a little fulsome, but I’m touched.’

‘Idiot! What I mean is, is that Shakespeare’s good. This is a bit – well, not so good.’

‘That’s because old Josiah Lythewell wrote it, and Bill, my old pal, I bet Lythewell thought his sonnet was every bit as good as anything the Bard ever produced. Modest self-effacement doesn’t seem to have been one of old Lythewell’s chief characteristics.’

‘
Not judging from the chantry, no.’

‘The thing is that a sonnet, the classic Shakespearian sonnet, I mean, follows a very set pattern. There’s fourteen lines, each line containing ten syllables. There’s a pattern of an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable, which is repeated five times. The last two lines are a rhyming couplet which is usually a reversal of what the sonnet’s been saying and, at the same time, an affirmation of the theme of the poem.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Bill, blinking. ‘Can you say that again, but slowly?’

‘Well, take a classic, that sonnet that starts,
“
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
”.’

‘Hang on, that’s one I know.’

‘Can you remember it?’

‘Not to quote great chunks from, no.’

‘I can manage a couple of lines from memory, I think. “
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red than her lips’ red
,” and so on. “
I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground
”.
Shakespeare gives us all these extravagant comparisons and says his girlfriend’s nothing like that, then he flips it over in the last two lines by saying, “
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare
”
.
You see? The sincerity of the last two lines reverses and yet affirms what he’s been saying.’

Bill nodded. ‘I do see that, of course. But how did that help you with working out what old Lythewell was on about, Jack?’

‘Well, once I’d noticed there were fourteen lines and had the idea it was a sonnet, I had a set pattern to follow. Lythewell wanted to hide what he was up to, so it was obvious that he’d mixed the lines up, so they appeared disjointed. To put the sonnet back together again – which sounds as if Humpty Dumpty, to quote more poetry, had a hand in it, all I had to do was follow the rules. I didn’t do all this off the top of my head, of course. I lugged out my old guide to Eng. Lit.’ He reached for his notebook again and found the page he wanted. ‘And my old guide to Eng. Lit. tells me that the rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is
a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g
, where the two a’s rhyme, the two b’s rhyme, and so on.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ said Bill.

‘And that rhyme scheme,’ said Jack with a grin, ‘helped me rearrange Lythewell’s sub-Shakespearian sonnet into its proper order.’

He picked up the sheets of paper from the floor and, referring to his notebook and numbering the sheets as he went, laid them out on the floor once more. Once he had finished, he stood back. ‘There you are. One sonnet as written by Josiah Lythewell, to be used for reflections on life and the afterlife, with directions to the discovery of treasure thrown in as a bonus. Not bad, eh?’

Bill stood up and raised his glass in salute. ‘That is brilliant, Jack,’ he said sincerely.

Jack flushed. ‘Come off it, Bill.’

‘No, really. Everyone but everyone, including me, has looked at those flagstones and thought they were nothing more than random lines meaning God knows what, if anything, but you’ve teased the meaning out of them.’ He read through the sonnet once more. ‘Take me through it,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got the gist of the thing, but poetry isn’t my strongest point.’

‘Okey-doke,’ said Jack obligingly. ‘I think there’s no doubt that it’s addressed to Daniel Lythewell. “
Stop, my son, to pause and pray for treasure
”, is a real instruction. The doorway, as you guessed before, is the doorway to eternal life or heaven, where old Lythewell
clearly
thought he was bound for, with no quibbling from the choirs of angels at the back.’

‘And the “
far lesser treasure
” is the platinum?’ asked Bill with a grin.

‘Yep, that’s how I see it. He tells us it’s not copper, silver or gold, but “
true metal
”. Then, I think, he registers his claim to enter the heavenly kingdom, as shown in its full splendour in that appalling painting by Henry Cadwallader, by saying that the “
true metal
” was placed there because he’s penitent.’

‘He wasn’t penitent enough to own up to what he’d done, though, was he?’

‘Steady on, Bill,’ said Jack with a smile. ‘There’s no point overdoing this penitence lark. But you see how he describes his picture of the chantry inlaid into the flagstone? At least, I’m fairly sure that’s what he’s describing, at any rate. “
The greater whole
” is the chantry depicted by “
art which is wrested from that evil root
”. The evil root just has to be the love of money, which is the root of all evil, as even Henry Cadwallader saw, turned into art by none other than J. Lythewell, Esquire, and passed on to Daniel Lythewell. “
It is yours, O my son
”. Now there’s a piece of straightforward parental advice. For the sake of Daniel’s soul, he tells him not to be avaricious or greedy but to be wise.’

‘So Daniel Lythewell can have the treasure as long as he doesn’t get too excited about it?’

‘More or less. I think, to be fair, he’s telling Daniel not to let the treasure take over his life, which is good advice, even if it is old Lythewell giving it. That’s backed up by the penultimate line,
“
Worldly goods will always fade and wither
”, which sounds wonderfully Victorian, if true enough for all that, but I’m sure the last line is a pun or a play on words, at least, where the two sorts of treasure, eternal life and worldly wealth, come together. “
The church is your true and worthy treasure
” makes a lot of sense if the church is a platinum slab.’

‘A platinum slab,’ repeated Bill in a dazed sort of way. ‘Good grief. My father had plenty of good advice to pass on, but he was a bit short in the platinum slab department.’

‘It’d be worth listening to all sorts of good advice, even from a sanctimonious old beggar like Lythewell, to get your hands on that, wouldn’t it?’

‘I’ll say …’ Bill hesitated, stroking his chin. ‘The thing is, Jack, was it old Lythewell’s to pass on? I mean, we know that his wealth – this wealth – came from his career as a forger.’

‘He was found innocent at his trial,’ Jack reminded him. ‘In the eyes of the law, he was an innocent man.’

‘We know damn well he was no such thing, though.’ Bill indicated the sheets of paper. ‘How come, if old Lythewell was so keen for his son to have the treasure, he hid its location so well? I can see that he’d want to conceal it, to keep it out of the hands of his fellow crooks, but you’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that he might have dropped a hint to his son that there was a fortune in platinum lying on the floor of the chantry.’

‘That’s something I just don’t know,’ admitted Jack. ‘I think that this treasure was something Daniel Lythewell was supposed to inherit.’

‘Well, of course it was. You’ve just explained all that.’

‘What I mean is, it’s something that old Lythewell was perfectly happy for his son to have once he, Josiah, was dead and gone. He obviously didn’t leave instructions in his will, otherwise Daniel Lythewell would surely have followed them and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘Or,’ said Jack, ‘old Pop Lythewell was so far off his crumpet that he expected Daniel to be able to read the sonnet and follow the instructions, but that seems a bit unlikely, I agree.’ He shrugged. ‘You might find, once you tell Mr Lythewell that there’s a fortune in the chantry floor, that old Lythewell did leave instructions that simply weren’t understood.’