Authors: Charles Palliser
Although I had not at the time been aware of the existence of Dr Courtine, he, as I eventually discovered when I read his Account, had noticed the incident involving myself which took place early that morning when Mr Stonex invited me to spend Christmas Day with him. (A day which, in the event, turned out to be the most miserable Christmas of my life.) I was so pleased by the prospect that had opened so suddenly before me that my concentration lapsed and as I was crossing the Upper Close I did not get out of the way of a bigger Courtenay boy quickly enough. He taunted me with a remark about the Gatehouse and when I tried to answer him I stammered badly and he jeered at me and seized from me the sheet of music which I was holding and dropped it into the muddy snow. Then he punched me and put his foot on the music and twisted it so that it became torn and dirtied.
All that day I was in a state of mounting terror about what would happen at Practice in the afternoon.
Miss Napier had managed to find the sister and discovered that she then lived in an enormous villa on the outskirts of Geneva. She had not answered Miss Napier’s requests for an interview, but the indefatigable author had managed to find some of the servants who had worked for her. She had learnt that she had no friends and that the only people she received were those conducting her financial affairs. As far as her servants knew, she had no living relatives. And despite prolonged enquiries which, in the later stages of her research, were made even more difficult by wartime conditions, Miss Napier had been unable to discover anything about her son, who was, she assumed, sole heir to the enormous fortune which the old lady would presumably leave.
A little less than a year ago I received from the Librarian of Colchester College the covering letter written by Dr Courtine. The letter said: ‘Fifteen years having passed since my death, this account may be unsealed – provided the conditions below have been satisfied. When it has been opened and read by the Librarian, the President and the Fellows of the College, any use may be made of it which they think appropriate. The conditions require that both the individuals named below be certified as dead and if either of them is alive then the account can only be opened on that person’s death.’
The Librarian said that one of them was known to be still living but asked for help with the other. In fact, I had corresponded about exactly that issue with Miss Napier without our coming to any conclusion. My interview in Geneva failed to resolve the matter, but the idea that had occurred to me on the journey back turned out to bear fruit. At the end of several months, therefore, I was able to produce proof, which satisfied the Librarian and the President of the College, that the other person on the list was dead.
The Librarian also sent me a copy he had made of a note which Dr Courtine had written on the outside of the package containing his Account. I was intrigued because I knew precisely when and why he had added it. It was because of me – because of something I had told him.
As I grew up, and in the years that followed I tried to find out as much as I could about the people involved in the case. One day, while I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, I learnt a piece of news about one of them and a few days later I took the train to Oxford where Dr Courtine – or Professor Courtine as he now was – had the Chair in Medieval History which he had held for three years since Scuttard, who had obtained the post in 1882, had dropped dead at the age of forty-four. Scuttard had supervised publication of the Thurchester manuscript but Professor Courtine had, in the interval, published his magisterial and absorbing
Life of Alfred the Great.
It was because of that biography that he had at last acquired his Chair, even though some of his colleagues considered his work to be more imaginative than scholarly. I attended a lecture he happened to be giving that afternoon. It was on the reign of Ethelred the Unready and he brought that enigmatic period and its main protagonists vividly to life – perhaps with more freedom of imagination than strictness of scholarship. After it was over I approached him and told him how much I had enjoyed it. When I mentioned that I had been a schoolboy in Thurchester, he immediately invited me to take tea in his study.
I brought the conversation round to the Stonex affair but he made it clear he would say nothing at all about it. And then I mentioned Austin Fickling, referring to him in the past tense. When he queried that, I said I had just seen some sad news about him and showed him the item which I had cut out of the
Thurchester Clarion.
It was a report of the death of Fickling in Rome after a long and painful illness. The journalist reprised at considerable length the Stonex Case and, in passing, mentioned that the Irish actor whose professional name was Valentine Butler, though he also called himself Valentine Ormonde, and who had eloped with Mr Stonex’s younger sister, had died many years before the murder.
I could see that Professor Courtine was shocked by what he had read. I pretended to think it was the death of his old friend that had so upset him but I knew it was not just that. It must have been after this that he had written the note on the outside of the envelope saying that he had been wrong about the actor. For in the light of the newspaper’s reference to his date of death, Professor Courtine must have realized that he had made a wrong assumption in supposing that the individual who had impersonated Mr Stonex at the tea-party was his brother-in-law. That relationship, he had believed, was the reason for the slip of the tongue in an otherwise faultless performance. After learning that that was impossible, he must have wondered who the impersonator was. He was correct, incidentally, that the impostor made a very revealing slip of the tongue, but he failed to understand its significance.
Professor Courtine was kind enough to say, as I was leaving, that one day I must come to tea at his house and meet his wife and children – more properly, he might have said, his stepchildren.
I was in a state of anxiety, on the day of the murder, because at Practice that morning the choirmaster had announced that the organ was going to be put out of commission from the next day for at least a couple of weeks, and that in order to make up for the lack of an organ-recital at the main Christmas service, we would have to sing unaccompanied anthems. I was to be one of the soloists! He had handed me the music which I would have to sing that afternoon at Practice – the music that the Courtenay boy had torn and muddied a few minutes later. The hated music had now got me into even worse trouble, for the choirmaster became furious if we lost or damaged scores, which had to be returned to him in perfect condition. I believed it was because he wanted to humiliate me that he had chosen me to sing a solo. How much more it would add to his pleasure when I had to show him the music in this condition and he would have a reason to beat me even harder than he usually did. I passed the rest of that day in school brooding on the shame and humiliation that lay ahead of me at Evensong.
Of course, I was not the only person plunged into a state of panic by the decision to shut down the organ from Thursday evening. As Dr Courtine’s Account shows, the conspirators’ plans were thrown into confusion by the postponement of the inauguration ceremony for the refurbished organ.
Although Miss Napier’s book brought to light several startling facts relating to the identity of the murderers and the motive, and put forward a theory which was nothing less than brilliant, she was handicapped by legal constraints arising from her uncertainty as to whether all of those whom she was implicating were still living. By that time she knew, of course, that Austin Fickling was dead and that the old lady was still alive at nearly ninety. She was not sure, however, about the man she was unable to name but referred to as ‘the Arch-Conspirator’ and who, like Fickling, vanished immediately after the murder. It was this individual, she argued, who enticed Fickling into the plot. A suspect to take the blame for the murder was needed, and so Perkins was tricked by the message chalked on the slate into compromising himself in a crime he had no knowledge of. Also required was a highly respectable witness to give evidence against him, and she argued that Dr Courtine was lured into the affair as a completely innocent dupe.
Miss Napier had found a recent reference to the Arch-Conspirator that showed he was alive – now in his middle seventies. She had heard from someone who had known him years before that he had been seen in Naples recently.
It was immediately clear to me who was meant by the Arch-Conspirator and I found I was right when I received Dr Courtine’s covering letter naming the two suspects. Anxious to read the Account, I therefore set out to discover whether or not this individual was still alive. The result of my efforts, following the death of the old lady six months after my frustrating though ultimately profitable visit to her, was that two months ago the President and the Fellows – with myself as the only outsider – assembled in the Combination Room of the College, and the Librarian broke the seal and read out Dr Courtine’s account.
One mystery addressed by Miss Napier was the question of how the killer gained access to the house since Mr Stonex would open the door only to Mrs Bubbosh and the waiter, and only at times when he was expecting them. Miss Napier’s brilliant suggestion that the murderer arrived just a minute or two before Perkins was due at half-past five and so the victim opened the door expecting the waiter, would solve that problem.
Similarly, the puzzle as to how and when the murderer left the house would also be resolved by Miss Napier’s astonishing hypothesis that he did so dressed as a woman and that he might have been the female whom the Headmaster, Appleton, met at the back of the house at about twenty minutes to six and who directed him round to the front in his search for myself.
In fact, both of those suggestions – ingenious though they are in their knitting together of known facts – are mistaken, although each of them comes close to the truth. The female seen by Appleton was certainly a real woman and Mr Stonex did not open the door to his killer at half-past five for he was dead by then. But Miss Napier had correctly guessed the means of entry to the house and was right that the figure seen by the Headmaster had impersonated the opposite sex.
Having brooded over my dilemma all day, I made a sudden decision as afternoon-school ended: not only would I mitch off Practice but I would also cut Evensong. I had never done that before and I could not imagine the consequences of such an offence, but they seemed less real than the certainty of the humiliation that would occur if I went.
I persuaded myself that Mr Stonex had, indeed, invited me to call on him that afternoon to look at the new atlas and so, without quite deciding to go there, I found myself outside the street-door of the New Deanery.
It was within a minute or two of ten minutes after four as I know for sure since school ended at a quarter to and I was thinking all the time of how the other boys were arriving for Practice and the choirmaster would be checking attendance, and I calculated the exact moment when he would realize that I was missing. Just as I reached Mr Stonex’s front-door I saw the unfortunate Perkins leave the house to carry the dirty pans and dishes from the previous day across to the inn.
I went closer and noticed that there was a scrap of paper pinned to the door on which was written in small letters that would only be read from close to: ‘Come in.’ Although I guessed that this was addressed to the waiter, I permitted myself to believe that it was an invitation to myself and therefore, after knocking without result, I tried the door and finding it unlocked, went in.
The houseplace was deserted and looked exactly as it had when I had last seen it – except that the table was not laid for tea but for dinner. The food left by Perkins was sitting there getting cold. Beside the plates and dishes was a large leather-bound volume which, greatly daring, I opened and found to be an old atlas with hand-coloured plates of the most fascinating nature. It was clearly the one the old gentleman had mentioned that morning and I was sure that he must be elsewhere in the house, and so I decided to wait until he came into the room for his dinner.
I must have looked at the atlas for about ten or fifteen minutes. Then I began to feel the awkwardness of my position. Perhaps Mr Stonex would not be pleased to find me waiting there. It began to seem increasingly odd that nobody came into the room, the food was sitting there uneaten, and the house was utterly silent. I dared not venture beyond the room I was in. I looked around and there on the sideboard I saw the slate with its chalked message exactly as the waiter later described it. I know that Perkins summarized it accurately for I recall thinking that if Mr Stonex was busy I should wait no longer, and so I walked out into the street.
Now I was in a dilemma. Until it was darker I could not wander around in the dress of a choir-school boy – a plain black jacket and salt and pepper breeches with a white stock – without attracting attention for it would be generally known that I should be at Practice at that hour. I had an idea. Very cautiously – because I could not allow myself to be seen by anyone who knew me – I went round to the side of the Cathedral where I could look in through a window of the Chapter House where Practice took place. I could see the choirmaster standing at the piano – he never sat because it would have been harder to hurry over to a boy and cuff him. The fact that he was playing the piano meant that Mr Slattery had not arrived and that did not surprise me for he was often late. A few minutes later I saw him come hurrying in – at about twenty minutes to five – looking as always defiant and yet lazy at the same time. The choirmaster glared at him but, with a vulpine smile, Mr Slattery pulled over the stool and seated himself at the keyboard. I should state that I noticed nothing untoward about his appearance. He was dishevelled – but then he always was. His pasty face seemed flushed – but that might have been with drink. In short, he looked as if he had spent the afternoon innocently enough in his customary fashion – sitting in a public-house. For the next twenty minutes I watched the other boys and the men singers doing the things I should be doing with them and had a strange sense of no longer being one of them, almost as if I had died. And the fears about the ruined sheet of music that had preoccupied me suddenly seemed absurdly petty.