The Religious Body (17 page)

“And the third?”

“The third is that whoever killed Tewn might not have known until yesterday the name of the student who went inside the Convent. He might not have known who it was he had to kill, just as we didn't know ourselves until yesterday evening. Just as you didn't know who it was either, sir.”

“But I did,” Cartwright said unexpectedly.

“You did? Who told you?” Sloan snapped into life.

“He did himself. At least I take it it was the same lad.”

“When?”

“On Thursday night at the fire. They were all standing round watching—like you do with a bonfire—waiting for the guy to catch alight. It was before you came along and did your brand-snatched-from-the-burning act.”

“Well?”

“I was standing with a bunch of 'em when I realized they'd got a nun up top as a guy. I made some damn silly remark about that being a path not leading to Rome and how had they managed to get the full rig. One of them said he and another chap had done it and it had been dead easy.”

“The vocabulary rings true,” said Sloan, leaning forward. “Now what else did he say? Think very carefully, sir, this may be important.”

Cartwright frowned. “Blessed if I can remember. No, wait a minute. There was something. The other chap with him made some sort of remark … ‘Easy as stealing milk from blind babies.' That was it, and the first chap—the one who told me he'd got the habit …”

“Tewn.”

“He laughed and said he reckoned it was all a matter of getting the milk warm enough—if you did that everything else was all right.”

“Do you know what he meant?”

“No, Inspector, but the others all laughed at that. It sounded like some sort of Institute joke. Or even an agricultural one.”

Sloan made a quick note. “Now, about the fire, sir. You did tell me how it was you came to be there, didn't you?”

“I did, Inspector,” he said without rancor, “but I will tell you again if you wish.”

Sloan inclined his head; and then regretted it. The eternal politeness of the nuns was quite infectious. He, a hardened Police Officer, would have to watch it.

“I was sitting in the bar of The Bull,” said Cartwright, “on Thursday evening at something of a loose end. It is very unusual for me to have any free time, you understand. Also, I had only a few hours before been told by you of my cousin's premature death and I was not quite sure what was to be done about it. I meant to go out for a walk round the village to clear my thoughts a bit in any case, but when I heard some old man in a corner of the bar talking about a big bonfire at the Institute I thought I might walk that way.”

“Substitute ‘dirty' for ‘old,'” said Sloan, “and you could be talking about a man I want to see.”

“Hobbett was the name,” said Cartwright. “I found that out afterwards. Contentious fellow. He was sitting there dropping hints about fun and games at the Institute. Apparently last year on Bonfire Night the students—”

“I know all about that,” said Sloan wearily.

“This man was saying more-or-less that for the price of a drink he could tell a tale, and I decided to take my walk.”

Sloan nodded. You could see why Cartwright was a captain of industry. He didn't waste words and he stuck to the point. He was giving just the right impression of anxious helpfulness, too, and so far had told Sloan just one thing that he didn't know already. Sloan eyed his visitor's figure. Business luncheons hadn't left too much of a mark there. He was only medium tall but strong enough to swing a weapon (somewhere between a paperweight and a cannonball) down on the head of an unsuspecting woman. Not everyone's cup of tea, but then not everyone could run one of the largest private companies in the land either. You couldn't begin to work out where scruple and resolution came in—perhaps not too much of one and plenty of the other for both. He didn't know. He was only a policeman.

“But it really comes down,” Cartwright was saying, “to asking who could possibly have wanted to kill my cousin Josephine.”

“Just you,” said Sloan pleasantly.

There was no spluttering expostulation. “I didn't kill her,” said Harold Cartwright.

“Perhaps not,” said Sloan. “But it's saved you a lot of trouble, hasn't it?”

The man eyed him thoughtfully. “I'm not sure, yet. That's why I've come to see you. To ask for something.”

“You don't want,” said Sloan gently, “the chairman of Cartwright's Consolidated Carbons to be publicly connected with the late Sister Anne of the Convent of St. Anselm at Cullingoak who died in dubious circumstances on Wednesday—which is why you have stayed here in this village holding yourself ready for questioning rather than gone back to London where we should have had to come to see you.”

“Inspector, should you ever leave the police and want a job, come to see me.”

“Thank you, sir, but I feel I've earned my pension. And I'm going to enjoy it. This request for no publicity—I take it that you would like it to hold good until after one minute past ten on Thursday morning?”

Cartwright exhaled audibly. “Just until then, Inspector. It's very important.”

“So,” said Sloan, “is murder.”

Bullen came to the telephone readily enough.

“Warm milk?” he echoed stupidly.

“Something about milk,” said Sloan. “Think, man, think. What exactly did Tewn say about warm milk?”

“Nothing,” said Bullen promptly.

Sloan sighed. “A witness has told me that while you were watching the guy burn, Tewn made some remark about warm milk.…”

“Oh, that,” said Bullen. “I didn't know you meant that.”

“I do mean that.”

“I should have to think. Inspector.”

Sloan waited as patiently as he could while Bullen's thought processes ground their way through his memory.

“There was this man there …”

“What man where?”

“Some town fellow, a stranger, who came to see the fire. He made some sort of crack about the nun's habit and our getting hold of it. I said it was dead easy.”

“As easy as stealing milk from blind babies?”

“That's right, Inspector, and Tewn said it was all a matter of getting the milk warm enough.”

“What did he mean?”

“He was being funny, Inspector. We'd been having a study lesson on feeding calves that afternoon. We'd all been having a bash—all the second year that is—when the Principal came in and said it was all a matter of getting the milk warm enough and then everything else would be all right.”

“Oh, I see,” said Sloan.

“Jolly clever of poor old Tewn, wasn't it? Made us all laugh at the time. All the second year anyway. Was there anything else, Inspector, that you wanted to know?”

“What? No, no thank you, Bullen. That was all.”

Luston was the biggest town in Calleshire. Calleford had its Minister, its county administration, its history. Luston got on with the work.

Sloan and Crosby found Frederick Street in the decayed, once genteel, now shabby quarter of the town, bypassed alike by the glass self-service stores and the council's redevelopment schemes. They were there well before four o'clock, having fought their way through the crowded shopping center into the suburbs. Most of the inhabitants of Luston seemed to be out shopping—but not the occupant of 144 Frederick Street. The lace curtain twitched as the car drew up at the door, but for all that it seemed an age before the door was opened. A woman stood there, ineffectually dressed in clothes off the peg, her hair combed oddly straight.

“Good afternoon?” she said uncertainly.

“Miss Eileen Lome?” It couldn't be anyone else, thought Sloan, not with that hair.

She nodded.

“I wonder if you could spare us a moment or two? We want to talk to you about the Convent of St. Anselm.”

Her face lit up spontaneously and then darkened. “You're not from the Press?”

“No, I'm Detective-Inspector Sloan of the Berebury C.I.D. and this is Constable Crosby, my assistant.”

“That's different. Won't you come in?” She led the way through to the sitting room. “I don't want to talk to the Press. It wouldn't be right.”

“We quite understand.” Sloan was at his most soothing. “We shan't keep you long.”

The sitting room was aggressively tidy. Miss Lome ushered them into easy chairs and chose a wooden one for herself.

“I can't quite get used to soft chairs yet,” she said.

Sloan stirred uncomfortably in a chair he wouldn't have had inside his own home let alone sat in. “No, miss.”

“Can I make you some tea?” suggested Miss Lome. “My sister's not back yet, but I think I know where everything is.”

“No, thank you, miss. We'd like to talk to you instead.”

She cocked her head a little to one side attentively. Sloan put her at forty-five, perhaps a trifle more. There was a youthful eagerness about her that made guessing difficult.

“When did you leave the Convent?”

“Twenty-four days ago.”

“Why? I'm sorry—it's such a personal question, I know, but we have to …”

“I began to have doubts as to whether mine was a true vocation.”

“How long were you there?”

“Twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-five years?”

“Time has a different meaning there,” she said tonelessly.

“Nevertheless,” persisted Sloan, not unkindly, “it's quite a while, isn't it? One would have thought …”

“It's different,” she said defensively, “for those who come in later. They seem more—well—sure, somehow. They know that all they want then is to be there, and they've proved it to themselves, and in any case they're older.”

Sloan nodded. The word she was looking for was “mature.” He did not supply it.

“But for the rest of us,” she said, “who think we are sure at seventeen—you can't help but wonder, you know. And it grows and grows, the feeling that you aren't a true daughter of the Church.” She shook her head sadly. “It is a terrible thing to lose your vocation.”

Crosby's face was a study.

“I'm sure it is, miss,” said Sloan hastily. And it was no use asking a policeman where to find one of them. They didn't deal in lost vocations. “So they let you out, miss?”

“It wasn't quite as simple as that, but that's what happened in the end.” She brushed a hand across her straggly hair. She made it into a gauche, graceless gesture. “It's getting a bit less strange now. My sister's taken me in, you know. She's being very kind though she doesn't understand how very different everything is. Every single thing.”

“Yes, miss, it must be.”

The disaffection of the former Sister Bertha, now restored to her old name of Eileen Lome, seemed unlikely to have any bearing on the death of Sister Anne. In that the Mother Superior appeared to be quite right. Sloan sighed. It had seemed such a good lead. Apart from making quite sure …

“I don't know if you've had any news from the Convent lately,” he said.

“You mean about Sister Anne? My sister showed me the newspaper this morning.” She smiled wanly. “She thought it would interest me.”

“You knew her well, of course?”

“Of course, Inspector. We had shared the same Community life for over twenty-five years.”

“Tell me about her,” urged Sloan gently.

Miss Lome needed no persuading. “She was professed about four years before me—the year I became a postulant, I think it was, though it's rather a long time ago for me to be sure. She had given up a very gay life in London, you know, to become a nun.” Miss Lome glanced round the modest sitting room, economically furnished, plainly decorated. “Dances, parties, the London Season—that sort of thing. Her family had money, I think.…”

Sloan nodded.

“It used to worry Sister Anne a lot,” volunteered Miss Lome.

“What did?”

“All that money.”

Sloan read the look on Crosby's face as easily as if it had been the printed word. A lot of money wouldn't have worried him, it said. Just give him the chance and he'd prove it.

“In what way did it worry her?” asked Sloan.

“It was where it had all come from, Inspector, that was what she thought wrong. It was some sort of manufacturing process that was very valuable in making munitions in the First World War. But half the firm was to be hers one day, and then she intended to make restitution.”

Sloan felt a momentary pang of sympathy for Cousin Harold.

“She always took an interest in foreign missions,” continued Miss Lome. “She thought it was a way in which she could atone.”

The look on Crosby's face, still easily readable, had changed to incredulity.

“She intended to sell out her interest in the firm?”

“That's right. As soon as it came to her.”

“And this was common knowledge?”

Miss Lome gave a quick jerk of her head. “We knew it was something that worried her.”

“All those years?”

“Time,” said Miss Lome again, ruefully, “has a different meaning in a religious house.”

She might have left the Convent but she had brought with her the training of a lifetime. When not speaking her eyes dropped downwards, and her hands lay folded in her lap. In gawky, unsuitable clothes, face and figure innocent of makeup or artifice, the mannerisms of the nun bordered on the grotesque.

“Nevertheless,” said Sloan pedantically, “you must have been very surprised and shocked to read about the murder.…”

Another quick jerk of the head. “I've been trying so hard not to think about the past—until today. Now, I can't think about anything else except poor Sister Anne.” She brightened with an effort. “But one mustn't dwell on the bad things, must one? There were some very happy times, too.” She stared at him through a mist of tears and said wistfully, “When everything seemed quite perfect.”