The Ely Testament (23 page)

‘I cannot say, sir. My investigations are not yet concluded.'

‘Well, you know best, I suppose.'

Inspector Francis left the police-house, hoping to find George Grace still at his home on Palace Green. He wanted to hear from Mr Grace once more his account of seeing Tomlinson and Lye together. As he walked towards the cathedral area he noticed Mrs Lye. No doubt she was on her way to visit her husband. She was on the other side of the street from Francis, and she looked preoccupied. He would have liked to talk to her too, to discover whether she had observed anything out of the ordinary in her husband's manner when he returned from his ‘walk' on the previous afternoon. But, of course, there would be little point in such a conversation since any evidence in her husband's favour was not admissible in court.

Really, Inspector Francis was baffled. Baffled not only by the murder of Charles Tomlinson but baffled by the manner of the man who, he was increasingly sure, was not the guilty party after all. Stephen Francis was used to nailing a felon almost straightaway, since in a small place like Ely it was hard to run or hide. Once caught, the felons tended to cough. On the rare occasions when someone held out against him during one of their ‘talks', the person did it with a mixture of bluster and sullenness which was as good as an admission. Less often, the guilty party was subdued or even cowed, not so much by the presence of the police as by the realization of what he'd done. This was the case with one of the only two murders to have hitherto come Francis' way, a farm labourer who beat his wife to death.

But the case of Ernest Lye was quite different. Lye was not cowed. Nor was he sullen or blustering. Francis had never before encountered a suspect who told him, ‘Well, you know best, I suppose.' The man was not protesting his innocence in loud terms but he definitely expected to be released. Certainly Lye could not remain in the police-house or even be kept in Ely, which had no gaol. Prisoners were transferred to the County Gaol in Cambridge. Was that where Ernest Lye was headed? Unless another witness came forward, the sole testimony against Mr Lye would be Mr Grace's. Which was the reason the Inspector was on his way to see him now.

After the Inspector left the police-house, Ernest Lye gazed at the wall of his cell. He was sitting on the hard bed and not seeing the plain stone or any of the few features of the sparsely furnished room. Instead he was contemplating the events of the previous day and his part in them. He had given a truthful account to the Inspector of his actions, as far as he knew them. He thought he remembered going for a stroll in the Dean's Meadow. He believed he had scraped his hand on the rough metal of a kissing-gate. And he did not recall any meeting with Charles Tomlinson. But he could not be absolutely sure of a single one of these items. Ernest Lye had been suffering more and more often from those lapses of memory, those blank spots of time, which resulted in his being uncertain of his activities or at least of his movements.

Of course, he did not really imagine he had carried out a murder unawares, even if he'd read of such extreme crimes being committed by a sleepwalker or a person under hypnosis. But a small voice inside him, the merest whisper, told him that he could not really regret the death of Tomlinson, that he was almost glad someone else had done it. He'd admitted to Inspector Francis that he did not care for the dead man, even resented him. The source of the resentment was, yes, his sense that there was something fraudulent about Tomlinson. But, if Ernest was honest, he could have put up with the fraudulence. What he did not at all approve of was Lydia's partiality for Tomlinson. Why, if the two had not been cousins, he might have gone so far as to suspect . . .

Ernest Lye glanced down at his hands. They were clenched tight in his lap. He noticed the zigzag weal on his wrist. How had that got there? Then he remembered the injury from the kissing-gate. The story he told to the policeman. Inspector Francis appeared to be a capable man, one who could be relied on to establish the truth. The truth that the murderer of Charles Tomlinson was . . . not him, not Ernest Lye.

So now as Ernest sat staring unseeingly at the blank wall, he could acknowledge to himself that what he felt towards Tomlinson was more than resentment. It was jealousy, hatred. It was quite safe to own up to that now. The man was dead, and he had not done the deed.

Had he?

Inspector Francis sat in the drawing room of George Grace's house on Palace Green. Mr Grace told him that he was fortunate to find him at home, rather than engaged on business (or good works, the manufacturer almost added). But, Francis thought, judging by the well-creased newspaper on the nearby table and the familiar way he was nesting in his armchair, George Grace must be quite often at home in the morning. Sounds could be heard, distantly and intermittently, from other parts of the house. A baby crying somewhere near the top, doors opening and closing at the back.

The view through the sash window was of the cathedral green. There were a few sightseers, gawpers, in the area of the Crimean cannon. But no constable now. On his way here, Francis went to examine the spot once more. The ground round the cannon was churned up, the grass worn away and gouged, with footprints overlaying each other. Such blood as was shed by Tomlinson had soaked away. Any evidence was obliterated. It occurred to the Inspector that this could scarcely be the first time that a body had been found in the region of the cannon, at least in other lands.

Now, sitting in George Grace's drawing room, Inspector Francis took the witness through what he'd seen and heard the day before. He consulted a notebook. In one hand he was holding a pencil. He found his notebook useful, a kind of professional prop. Sometimes it reassured those he was questioning, sometimes it discomfited them, especially if he looked at it for a long time or if he wrote down what seemed to be a trivial detail. In fact, Francis had written only two words on the page in front of him. He'd come to those two words in a moment.

‘So yesterday afternoon you were sitting there, Mr Grace, reading the paper? Just where you are sitting now. And, when it got too dark for you to continue reading, you got up to light the lamp. And then through the window, you observed – what did you observe?'

‘I observed Mr Tomlinson and Mr Lye walking past. Is it true that Mr Lye is in custody, Inspector?'

‘We will come to that in due course, sir. First I want to pin down exactly what you saw.'

‘I saw exactly what I said I saw, Inspector.'

‘You identified Mr Tomlinson by his appearance and his voice. But the other individual, the one walking on the far side of him . . . what can you say about that person?'

George Grace shifted slightly in his armchair. ‘I did not see a great deal of him.'

‘Any impression of what he was wearing?'

‘No.'

‘Was he tall or short? Fat or thin?'

‘He was short and thin,' said Mr Grace finally.

‘You must have had a fair sight of him to see that much, sir.'

‘I am
deducing
it, Inspector. Isn't that what you fellows do? Deduce, deduce?'

Francis said nothing. The tetchy tone of the other man was revealing. The Inspector pretended to write in his notebook. He glanced through the window. He had already noticed that the strip of garden which separated the front of Grace's house from the railings was well planted with shrubs. In addition, the iron railings were entwined with some sort of creeper whose leaves were turning a tawny autumnal orange. He wondered how clearly Mr Grace had been able to see through these impediments. He thought of the late afternoon light, the gathering mist.

After a pause, during which Mr Grace did some more shifting about in his chair, he said, ‘If I am to be completely frank, I did not actually see the fellow who was with Tomlinson. He must have been short and thin because Tomlinson was quite a large man – or a tall one at any rate – and therefore anyone walking alongside him would be largely obscured when seen from the angle provided by my window here. And another thing. Tomlinson was walking with his head tilted slightly to one side, from which I also deduce that he was listening to a slightly shorter companion. There you have my reasoning, unfolded for you stage by stage.'

George Grace sat back with arms folded as though he had scored a decisive point.

‘Very good, sir. You would make a fine detective.'

‘One tries one's best to help the forces of law and order.'

‘You say Mr Tomlinson's companion must have been small, and I concur with your reasoning. Is it possible this companion was a woman?'

‘No, you're quite in the wrong there. Remember I heard Tomlinson call him ‘Lye'. No mistake there.'

‘Yesterday, I believe you stated –' and here Francis earnestly studied his notebook – ‘yes, you stated that Mr Tomlinson said, “Mr Lye”. Which was it? “Lye” or “Mr Lye”?'

‘Does it make a difference?'

‘Please try to remember, Mr Grace.'

‘Tomlinson said – well, now that I come to think of it – he said simply “Lye”. No “Mr” was involved.'

‘And you heard no other bits and pieces, not a single fragment of conversation, from either individual?'

‘Only the word “Lye”.'

‘Because it was uttered with some force?'

‘Yes.'

Francis glanced down at the two words pencilled in his pad. They were LYE? and LIE? He closed the book with a snap and tucked his pencil away. He got up.

‘I must not take up any more of your time or detain you from your business, Mr Grace.'

George Grace also rose to his feet. He looked so dissatisfied that Francis threw him a titbit.

‘You have been very helpful.'

‘Mr Lye is safe in custody?'

‘He is safe,' said Francis, adding to himself, but he will not be in custody for much longer.

As he walked across Palace Green and past the site of the murder, Inspector Francis summarized what he had learned from the interview with George Grace. Or, rather, what he had unlearned.

He did not doubt that the tannery owner had glimpsed Charles Tomlinson passing his window late on the previous afternoon, nor that Tomlinson was in the company of someone else. The fact of the murder a few minutes later indicated as much. The policeman was even prepared to accept that Tomlinson's companion was someone relatively slight and short. The probability was that it was a man, given the nature of the attack. But a woman could not be ruled out altogether. Of the two murder cases which Stephen Francis had hitherto investigated during his time in Ely, one concerned the farm labourer who'd killed his wife while the other involved a female servant who knifed her employer when he broke a promise to marry her after his wife's death. The ferocity of that attack shocked even the hardened members of the constabulary. Francis was shocked too but it told him nothing new. Women were as capable of violence as men, even if they did not resort to it so often.

As for the LYE question . . . Inspector Francis was as sure as he could be that the word which George Grace heard through his drawing-room window was actually LIE. Charles Tomlinson had been arguing with his companion and rebuking him – or her – for lying, which was why he was speaking loudly. It was an argument or a rebuke which would shortly lead to his murder.

Monkey Business

F
rom Cambridge early on the Monday morning, Tom Ansell posted his account of the Ely events to David Mackenzie in London. Since a letter seemed almost too leisurely, even though it would arrive the same day, Tom also sent a telegram to the senior partner. Knowing how many hands a cable passed through, he wanted to avoid spelling things out in black and white but he also wanted to alert Mackenzie to the trouble that was coming. Keeping within the twenty-word limit that was covered by a single shilling, Tom dictated the following to the clerk in the telegraph office: E.L. DETAINED IN ELY AFTER VERY GRAVE PROBLEMS UNRELATED TO MY MISSION. LETTER FOLLOWS WITH FULL DETAILS. PLEASE ADVISE. T.A.

Tom expected the postal letter to arrive at the office in Furnival Street that afternoon, which meant that he would not hear back from Mackenzie before the next day. He was surprised therefore to receive a cable at the Devereux Hotel during the late morning. It was in answer to his telegram. HAVE ALREADY GLEANED SITUATION FROM REFERENCES IN PRESS. STAY THERE. HELP AND INVESTIGATE. D.M.

‘There must have been some newspaper stories,' said Helen. ‘Murder in Ely, local man detained, that kind of thing, but without naming names.'

‘Yes,' said Tom. ‘Mackenzie tells us to stay but we couldn't leave anyway. Not at this juncture.'

‘Who are we meant to help?' said Helen.

‘The Lyes, surely, not the police?'

‘The police are the ones doing the investigating.'

‘I think he means me to do it too,' said Tom, recalling Mackenzie's reference to his dab hand at investigating.

‘Means us, perhaps.'

‘Yes, us.'

‘This is turning into another drama, Tom.'

‘I know.'

Yet Tom and Helen were able to continue their investigation into the murder of Charles Tomlinson without leaving their hotel, without making much effort at all in fact. The cheerful and rotund John Jubb, senior clerk at the firm of Teague and Bennett in Cambridge and boyhood friend of Jack Ashley back in Furnival Street, suddenly turned up outside their rooms. They invited him in, pleased enough to see someone without homicidal connections. But, before they even sat down, Jubb explained that he was visiting the Ansells with what might be significant information about the murder in Ely. Although it was an ordinary working day, he had taken time off to do so.

‘When you have been with a firm as long as I have, Mr and Mrs Ansell, you acquire a little latitude in setting your own hours.'

Tom noticed that while he addressed both of them he kept his eyes on Helen, in a puppyish sort of way. Mr Jubb had obviously fallen a little under her spell.