C S Lewis and the Body in the Basement (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 1) (12 page)

The police car did seat four—but only just. It was a small, black Ford Popular. Hyde and Crispin sat in the front seat while I squeezed into the back alongside the somewhat bulky form of Sergeant Merrivale. It was like sitting beside a bag of large, lumpy potatoes—potatoes that remained entirely silent throughout the journey, and seemed to concentrate entirely on spreading out and occupying as much of the back seat as possible.

For the last part of the journey we needed to hang on to whatever we could as the small car bumped and bounced over the unsealed cart track that led from the road to the river.

After ten minutes of this we arrived at the old stone bridge that crossed the stream. Seeing the car appear out of a cloud of dust, Constable Dixon rushed towards us with the look of a man delighted to hand over his responsibility to somebody more senior. Dixon led the others to where the body lay on the embankment and stood back.

The tall man, Inspector Crispin, was immaculately dressed and quietly observant. He spoke little, but when he did it was with authority. He looked and sounded more like a school master than my idea of a Scotland Yard detective. At any moment I half expected him to turn to one of the uniformed men and say, ‘You there, the boy at the back of the room—are you paying attention?’

The other policeman from London, Sergeant Merrivale, was very respectful to the taller man, like an army sergeant in the presence of his colonel.

These two, Crispin and Merrivale, crouched over the body, emptying the pockets and examining the wounds. Then Sergeant Merrivale went back to the police car and returned with photographic equipment. He took pictures of the corpse and the surrounding area from every angle, then returned the equipment to the boot of the car.

While this was going on, a breathless and red-faced Sergeant Donaldson arrived, cycling up the towpath and oozing exhaustion from every pore. In a puffed voice, gasping for air, he reported to Inspector Hyde, who turned to Crispin and said, ‘Anything my men can do, sir?’

‘Search the area,’ said the Scotland Yard man. ‘Both banks and in the water as well. You men should look for anything that strikes you as being out of place. And for bloodstains or signs of violence anywhere in this general vicinity.’

Donaldson and Dixon set off to carry out this assignment. Jack, Warnie and I had been standing well back, watching proceedings, but now Jack stepped forward and said, ‘You might like to take a look at the top of the stonework in the middle of that bridge.’

Inspector Crispin said nothing but asked a question by raising his eyebrows.

‘There are fresh scratch marks—could be the scene of a fight, a struggle or some act of violence.’

‘Show me,’ said Crispin. With Jack in the lead we all trooped back to the old stone bridge. In the centre of the arch we stopped where Jack indicated a number of broad scratch marks across one of the large stones. They appeared to be newly made. The dark green moss that covered the stones had been scraped off, revealing the honey-coloured sandstone underneath.

‘Fresh all right,’ Crispin agreed, and set Merrivale the task of retrieving his equipment and photographing these marks.

Jack, I noticed, had lost interest in the scratch marks and was staring intently at the thick branches of the willow tree that hung over the bridge. I was about to ask what was so interesting about the tree when I was stopped by a shout that came almost from our feet. We all hurried to the side of the bridge and looked down.

Constable Dixon had waded into the water almost up to his waist and was struggling to stay upright in the fast-flowing current.

‘There’s something here, sir,’ he was shouting, ‘but it’s hard to reach.’

‘Help him, Donaldson,’ shouted Inspector Hyde impatiently. ‘He’s wet—you might as well get wet too. Wade in and help him.’

Sergeant Donaldson took off his jacket, dropped it on the bank and waded into the cold rushing stream. It took them the next ten minutes, with the aid of a broken tree branch, to fetch out the object Constable Dixon had found. When they finally struggled with it up the bank, it turned out to be an old brown leather suitcase.

Inspector Crispin joined the dripping wet local policemen and said, ‘Open it. Show me what’s inside.’

I felt sorry for our old friend Constable Dixon, whose cold fingers had to fumble with the catches for some time before he got them open. When he did so he flung back the lid to reveal—a suitcase full of large stones.

Dixon straightened up and shook himself like a wet dog—a very disappointed wet dog that had just returned to its favourite hiding place in the garden to discover all its buried bones were missing.

We all stepped back from the fine spray of water coming off the shaking policeman as Inspector Hyde exclaimed, ‘Rocks! Who in his right mind would throw a good leather suitcase full of rocks into the water? It makes no sense. And Dixon—stop that at once! You’re making the rest of us as wet as you are!’

‘Sorry, sir,’ mumbled Dixon, suddenly feeling as unloved as the same wet dog at a family picnic.

Crispin smiled slowly as he said, ‘Rocks—nothing but rocks. And that makes it interesting, doesn’t it?’ Then he leaned forward to examine a small piece of frayed rope attached to the handle of the suitcase.

Clearly Inspector Hyde could find nothing even remotely interesting in a soaking wet suitcase full of rocks, but he made no objection when Crispin ordered the find to be put in the boot of the police car. The two sergeants, Donaldson and Merrivale, between them carried the heavy bag to the car and put it in the boot beside the photographic equipment case.

At this point a loud, rattling petrol engine announced the arrival of the police surgeon, Dr Haydock, in an Austin Seven. He was a cheerful, hearty man who kept addressing the corpse as if it were still alive.

‘Let’s see where you’ve been hurt, shall we?’ he said to the dead man as he rolled the body over. ‘Dear me, you’re not in good shape, are you? What have you been up to, Nick Proudfoot? How did you manage to do this?’

He fingered the wounds on the front and back of Nicholas Proudfoot’s head just as gently as he would have done with a patient in his surgery.

‘Those blows,’ said Inspector Crispin, crouching down beside the doctor, ‘are they pre-mortem or post-mortem?’

‘Hard to tell until I get him on the slab and do a proper examination. The water has washed away most of the blood that would otherwise have indicated which wounds bled freely and which didn’t.’

‘Could
any
of them have been delivered before death?’

‘The one on the back of the head, possibly. But don’t hold me to that. I’ll do the post-mortem as soon as possible.’

‘Any idea whether he died from the blows or from drowning?’ asked the Scotland Yard man.

Dr Haydock shook his head sadly, as if dealing with a recalcitrant patient who was not listening to his instructions.

‘After the post-mortem, inspector,’ he said, ‘and not before. I need to open him up to see if there’s water in the lungs or not. But I can tell you one thing immediately: Nicholas Proudfoot was my patient and I happen to know that he couldn’t swim. So as soon as he went into this cold, fast-flowing water, with no one here to rescue him, he was a dead man.’

This drew a grunt from Crispin, who rose to his feet scratching his chin thoughtfully.

‘Now inspector, my dear chap,’ said Warnie, bustling forward, ‘surely you don’t need us around any longer? Morris and my brother and I are supposed to be on a walking holiday. Inspector Hyde took our statements: surely we can be on our way? What do you say, eh?’

‘I’m sorry, Major Lewis,’ replied Crispin, ‘but not just yet. In fact, I’m calling a meeting at the bank this afternoon to ask all of the principal witnesses to go over their evidence with me at the scene of the crime. Let’s say two o’clock, shall we?’

Warnie’s round expressionless face hid his disappointment as he muttered, ‘Ah well, if you say so . . . two o’clock then.’

Then there arose the question of how we were all to get back to town. Inspector Hyde banned Dixon and Donaldson, both still soaking wet, from riding in the police car and told them they had to walk—or, in Donaldson’s case, ride his bicycle—back into Market Plumpton. Jack, Warnie and I clearly wouldn’t fit in the car with the three policemen so we announced that we too would walk back to town.

We set off down the towpath beside the stream, leaving Dixon and Donaldson waiting for a vehicle to come to pick up the body, and Inspector Hyde making plans to go and break the news to young Mrs Proudfoot at the farm on the drive back to town.

The late morning sunshine was warm and the breeze gentle. The weather seemed to be saying, ‘You’ve had enough grim news for one day, I’ll try to cheer you up.’

But the weather was failing to work its magic on Warnie. ‘Nice day for walking,’ he grumbled. ‘Should be walking. Should be off on our holiday. Shouldn’t be stuck here to answer the same fool questions over and over again.’

‘Think of it as an adventure,’ said Jack, slapping his brother on his back. ‘You must admit the murder of young Mr Grimm is most mysterious and intriguing, and I would have thought, for a passionate reader of detective novels such as yourself, dashed interesting.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ grunted Warnie, a slightly surprised expression on his face. ‘Hadn’t thought of it quite like that. I do love a good mystery.’

We were walking in single file, as we had to do down that narrow towpath, with Warnie in the lead, followed by Jack with me bringing up the rear.

I had had quite enough of violent death in the last two days, and I wanted to throw the switch to some other topic entirely. So I picked up on Warnie’s words and said, ‘I also love a good mystery, Jack—and I find it quite mysterious that an intelligent man such as yourself keeps insisting that only Christianity can see the truth about life in this world.’

‘I have you puzzled, have I, young Morris?’ Jack replied, looking over his shoulder with a cheerful grin on his face.

‘That’s the word! Puzzled. No one—and no one way of looking at the world—can see the whole story and the whole truth. That’s how scholarship works: each researcher contributes a bit of the picture. Remember our discussion of the jigsaw puzzle? Well, if life’s a puzzle, and we each do our bit of puzzling things out, we each have a bit to contribute.’

‘But we need some standard to evaluate each contribution,’ said Jack. ‘Some way of knowing whether an idea is a part of the truth or a pointless blind alley leading us in the wrong direction, or even a flat-out falsehood. Hence my claim that Christianity, in the jigsaw puzzle image, is the “picture on the lid of the box” that the puzzle comes in—the picture that shows us what we’re aiming at with all our ideas and discoveries.’

‘See, that’s what puzzles me,’ I said. ‘That seems like a remarkably arrogant claim to make. You were once an atheist, so you know there are other ways of looking at the world.’ I was groping for the words to express the vague notion floating somewhere at the back of my brain. But my brain was not helping me find it. It seemed to think it had had quite enough shocks for one day and was putting its feet up somewhere in a dimly lit corner of my cerebellum and having a little doze.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘your mention of a “blind alley” made me think of something that might explain what I’m getting at.’

Jack said nothing, but I saw his head nod as he waited for me to go on.

‘You’ve heard the story—we all have—of the four blind men and the elephant.’

‘I’ve heard it,’ said Warnie from his position in the lead. ‘Chappie who’d served in India told it to me. Very clever, I thought. Very interesting.’

‘Remind us,’ said Jack.

‘Well, in the story there are these four blind men—’ Warnie began.

‘No,’ Jack said, ‘I want to hear how young Morris explains it and what he thinks it means.’

‘Oh, all right then,’ mumbled Warnie, slightly miffed.

‘The story I heard,’ I said, ‘went like this. Four blind men were walking down a road and came upon an elephant. They had never encountered an elephant before, nor had the concept of an elephant been explained to them. So they gathered around this animal and each of them grabbed hold of a different part of the beast. Then they argued about what they’d encountered. One blind man was feeling the elephant’s ear and said he’d found a large leaf from a palm tree—the sort of large, flat leaf used as a fan. The second blind man had the tail and said he’d found a rope. The third had the elephant’s trunk and said he’d found a hose. And the fourth ran his hands over one of the elephant’s legs and said he’d found a large tree trunk.’

I paused at that point, so Jack asked, ‘And what do you think the story—or fable, or parable, or whatever you call it—teaches us?’

‘That none of us has an exclusive and complete grasp of the truth. Not one of us can get hold of all of the truth. Each one of us can comprehend only part of the whole, so we have to pool our knowledge—and even then our understanding is likely to be partial and incomplete.’

‘But your conclusion doesn’t fit,’ Jack said. ‘It’s not a reasonable conclusion to draw from the story.’