The Unburied (35 page)

‘And how many murdered bodies have you seen in that time?’

‘Two.’

‘Were either of them cases of strangulation?’

‘No. One of them was stabbed and the other killed by a shotgun. However, while I was a medical student I had the good fortune to walk the wards for six months as a dresser to Dr Tallentire who is frequently consulted by Scotland Yard. During that period I learnt a very considerable amount about forensic pathology.’

‘While you were a medical student?’ he enquired sarcastically. Without waiting for a reply he said: ‘Thank you for your evidence, Dr Carpenter.’

The young man flushed at the Coroner’s tone and stood down. Mr Attard then asked for Mr Thorrold and he rose and took his place in the witness-box and was sworn in. He explained that he was the lawyer who acted for the deceased and that he had drawn up his will about twenty years before. Under its terms his entire estate was left to the Foundation of Thurchester Cathedral to be used for the benefit of the Cathedral Choir School, which he had attended as a boy.

‘Has the will been found?’

‘It has not.’

‘Who had custody of it?’

‘The deceased himself. He usually kept it in a private strongbox at the Bank, but he recently mentioned adding a codicil and presumably had taken it home to consider it at his leisure. Both the Bank and his house have been searched. I should say that my late client was in the habit of hiding things in strange places, and so the attempt to find it is continuing.’

‘What will be the destiny of the estate if the will is not found?’

‘If Mr Stonex is declared to have died intestate then his heirs will be his next of kin.’

‘And what is known of them?’

‘The only relative he is known to have had is a sister. She would inherit, or if she is herself deceased, any heir she might have.’

I was struck by Mr Thorrold’s failure to mention that the old gentleman had a brother. Could it be that his existence had been forgotten? Quitregard had never heard of him.

‘Is anything known of her?’

‘She left the town at a very early age and nothing has, so far as I know, been heard of her for over thirty years. Mr Stonex referred to her once only in my presence when, about eight years ago he mentioned that she had sent her son to him to – as he expressed it – pester him for money. I received the impression that he had refused the request and he never spoke of the matter to me again.’

Mr Thorrold took his place beside Dr Locard and myself, and the Sergeant was called. As he was walking forward I reflected on what I had just heard. It was becoming harder and harder to resist the hypothesis that if the murderer was not Perkins, it was someone closely related to the victim who therefore stood to inherit his estate provided he died intestate.

‘Have you found the keys in Perkins’s house, Sergeant?’

‘No, sir.’

‘He presumably dropped them after leaving the house since they were damning evidence of his guilt.’

‘If he was guilty,’ the Sergeant said quietly.

There was an outbreak of murmurs in reaction to this among the spectators and jurymen.

‘Have you any reason to suppose that he was not, Sergeant?’

‘There are a number of things that don’t quite fit, sir. The deceased had never invited guests to his house before that day. Moreover, Dr Courtine mentioned to me that the house appeared to have been very thoroughly searched by the time he and Mr Fickling arrived. And he also told me that Mr Stonex was very preoccupied with the time. All of that suggests that there is more to this affair than meets the eye, and I believe it might have been the case that the old gentleman was expecting a visitor and that he was looking for something needed by that person.’

What the Sergeant was implying chimed precisely with the direction in which my own thoughts were moving. The old man had seemed unnaturally bright and animated during the tea-party and that might well have been because he was expecting an important visitor. And it suddenly struck me that he might have been searching for his will and only pretended that he was seeking the eyewitness account of Freeth’s murder. But why should he have needed to find it? And how odd that he could not remember where he had put it.

The Coroner was unimpressed: ‘That seems very tenuous, Sergeant.’

‘There’s more, sir. Mr Stonex changed the date of the tea-party at short notice. It was originally to have taken place today. It’s possible that he did so because of his visitor.’

‘How did he account for this alteration?’

‘Mr Fickling and he met by chance on Wednesday evening and Mr Stonex told him the alteration was because the ceremony for the inauguration of the organ had been cancelled.’

‘That’s very strange,’ I muttered before I could prevent myself.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Dr Locard said in an undertone.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered back. ‘I didn’t mean to say that aloud.’ Austin must be confused. It was of a piece with his behaviour over the last few days and might be explained as the distractedness of a man violently in love. But I could not conceal from myself the recognition that some of his behaviour was disquieting in the light of what had happened. There was the odd business of his sudden insistence, as we approached the New Deanery at half-past four, that the old gentleman was not ready for us although that was the time we had agreed. And the fact that he claimed not to have noticed that the house had been turned upside down before we arrived. That went beyond absent-mindedness.

‘There is also the strange fact’, the Sergeant went on, ‘that the servant, Mrs Bubbosh, insists that she did not prepare the tea or know anything about it. That led me to try to find out where Mr Stonex purchased the comestibles. I have made enquiries of every baker in the town and none of them was the source for the cakes Mr Stonex offered to his guests.’

‘I fail to see the importance of that.’

‘It confirms my view that there was something strange, that Mr Stonex was taking precautions to hide his actions.’

‘Are you suggesting that he baked them himself?’ There was discreet laughter from the audience at this sally. ‘This is all supposition, Sergeant, without a shred of concrete evidence.’

‘But so, with respect, sir, is the idea that Perkins killed the old gentleman.’

‘If it wasn’t Perkins, can you suggest who it was?’

The audience seemed to hold its collective breath. The Sergeant’s face was working and he turned his gaze slowly over the faces of the spectators. ‘No. I can’t say, sir,’ he said at last.

‘Then I don’t think we need spend any more time avoiding the obvious,’ the Coroner said, abruptly dismissing the officer.

I wondered if the Sergeant knew of the existence of a brother and if he had followed the same chain of reasoning as myself: the visitor who was the mysterious brother was the reason both for the victim’s search for the will and for its disappearance; and the battering of the victim’s face confirmed that he was killed by someone with whom he was closely involved. And yet there were some anomalies. Why had the old gentleman looked for his will? Could it be that he had done so in order to show his brother that he was leaving his entire fortune to the Foundation? In that case, had his brother flown into a rage, strangled him and then gratuitously destroyed his face? And then taken the will? And had there been enough time for all that to have taken place between half-past five and six o’clock?

Or perhaps Mr Stonex had wanted to find his will precisely because he was frightened of his brother since he knew that he would inherit his estate if he died intestate, and wanted to put the will in a safe place. In that case, had he hidden it somewhere else before his murderer arrived?

The next person called to the stand was Mr Appleton, a tall, thin, stooping man with a long and intense face, who confirmed that he had seen Perkins at the door of the victim’s house at a few minutes after half-past five.

‘How can you be so sure of the time?’ the Coroner asked him.

‘Very easily. I had come from the Cathedral where Evensong had begun at five o’clock. I had been told by the choirmaster just before the service started, that a particular choirboy had failed to attend. This was a boy who had played truant several times before. Failing to find him anywhere else, I went to the New Deanery.’

‘For what reason?’

‘I had learned that Mr Stonex had struck up a kind of friendship with him and, naturally, I wondered what kind of interest an elderly gentleman might have in a young boy.’ There were murmurs from the audience at this and he said: ‘I felt it was my duty to look into the matter. I approached from the Close and as I was passing the back of the house I met an old woman and asked her if she had seen a boy in the uniform of the Choir School. She said she had noticed one round at the front as she was passing a minute or two earlier. So I went round there and although I did not find the boy, I saw the waiter from the Angel Inn – the man whom I now know to be the prisoner, Perkins – standing and knocking at the street-door. At that moment I looked again at my watch because I wanted to be back at the Cathedral as Evensong ended at about twenty to six in order to talk to the choirmaster before he left. I saw that I only had four minutes before it ended.’

‘So that occurred at precisely twenty-four minutes before six?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Who was the woman? Has she been summoned as a witness?’

‘I have never seen her before or since and was therefore unable to identify her to the authorities.’

‘Thank you, Mr Appleton.’

The prisoner, Perkins, was then led into the witness-box by two police-constables who stood on either side of him throughout his testimony.

‘I’ve allowed you to give evidence late,’ said the Coroner, ‘so that you can hear the case against you and answer it, if you are able to. I must warn you that things are looking bad for you. You are not on trial and my main interest is in finding out how Mr Stonex died. But if the jury returns a verdict that the evidence shows you to have been responsible, you will be charged upon that inquisition and sent for trial. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If you can clear everything up now by telling the truth, so much the better for you, because I have to say that what has a particularly suspicious appearance is the way you have changed your story so many times. Now, I want to begin by going back to when you delivered the old gentleman’s dinner. You told the Major that you found a message from Mr Stonex about the package which was later found hidden in your house. Are you still maintaining that that is true?’

‘Yes, it is. But it wasn’t hidden and I only put it in a cupboard for safe keeping and I never opened it and I don’t know nothing about the blood.’

‘Tell the jury what happened when you went to the New Deanery at four o’clock.’

‘First thing that was strange was, he didn’t answer the frontdoor when I knocked. There was a note stuck up saying “Come in”. I tried the door and, sure enough, it was unlocked. I was very surprised since that had never happened before. He was very particular about locking the doors was Mr Stonex.’

‘So you went in. What happened then?’

‘I put his dinner on the table just like usual. And then I seen the message.’

‘Ah, the famous message. Now let’s be quite clear about this. When you were first questioned, you said nothing about it and denied that you had gone back to the house at half-past five. Then when Mr Appleton informed the police that he had seen you at the street-door at that time, you admitted that you did go back but said it was because of a message you had found at four o’clock. You still said nothing about the package. When your house was searched and the package found, you now confessed that you had taken it but said it was because the message instructed you to do so. Have I stated the facts correctly?’

‘Yes, sir. I was foolish and wrong not to tell the whole truth at once, but I thought nobody would believe me. It looked so bad.’

‘Everything hangs on this message. Do you now have it?’

He gawped. ‘Have it?’

‘Yes, man. Do you have this famous message? Did you take it with you when you left the house?’

‘No, sir. How could I, sir?’

‘Did you not think to take the message with you as proof that you were to remove the old gentleman’s property?’

‘I couldn’t, sir. It was wrote in chalk on a scholar’s slate.’

‘Oh, really? Written in chalk on a scholar’s slate? Was Mr Stonex learning to read and write?’

The jury and the spectators laughed but I was not laughing. I had suddenly remembered an incident that until that instant I had completely forgotten. While we were starting our tea, our host had absent-mindedly rubbed out a message on a slate that was on the sideboard. In that case, was the rest of Perkins’s story true?

I had all the pieces of the puzzle before me but I could not fit them together. Until this moment I thought I had worked out the role of the unknown brother but that hypothesis failed to explain the business of the message and the package. The chalked message and the package looked almost as if Mr Stonex himself had been setting a trap for Perkins. And he seemed capable of it for I remembered the cold-blooded justification for murder which the old gentleman had enunciated just before we left the house. But it was he who had been murdered and whoever had murdered him had had feelings powerful enough to make him batter the corpse’s face beyond recognition.

Beyond recognition
! An astonishing hypothesis occurred to me. It accounted for the battering of the victim’s face as the consequence of fraternal hatred. And it also elucidated the nature and purpose of the trap into which Perkins had been lured. Moreover, I realized, it explained why it had been so important that the will be found – for I was now sure that that was what Mr Stonex had been searching for.

The Coroner continued with undisguised contempt: ‘So the truth is that you did go back to the house at half-past five?’

‘Yes, sir. But though I knocked and knocked, nobody opened the door and this time it was locked. So I took the package home. When I heard that the old gentleman had been found murdered, I didn’t want to say nothing about it. I was afeared. But I didn’t hide the package. I just put it in a safe place in the kitchen.’