The Unburied (49 page)

Although I knew how frightened of the choirmaster I should have been if I had been inside, the scene looked cosy. The gas-lights were turned up, there was a stove burning brightly in the corner, and I could faintly hear the music. Yet I knew that the charm was an illusion and I preferred the cold and darkness outside.

Shortly before five I saw Appleton arrive for Evensong just as Practice was ending, and I watched the choirmaster take him aside and the Headmaster’s face darken, and I guessed that they were talking about me. Now my sense of detachment vanished, and when I saw Appleton stride towards the door I was sure that he was going to look for me. It suddenly occurred to me that the best way to avoid being found was to follow him.

For more than half an hour I trailed him around the darkening streets. I found that I was enjoying the game and yet I was possessed by a growing sense of dread as to the outcome, for eventually I would have to declare myself and accept a flogging. At about twenty past five, Appleton was walking along St Mary’s Street when he met the friendly young man who worked at the Dean and Chapter’s Library. I could not hear their conversation but I later guessed that Mr Quitregard mentioned – quite innocently – that he had seen me talking to Mr Stonex early that morning and that is why Appleton now hurriedly directed his steps towards the Close. At just after half-past five I found myself passing the back of the New Deanery about fifty feet behind the Headmaster. We must have missed seeing Dr Courtine and Austin Fickling leave by the back-door by no more than two or three minutes.

I was just level with the back-door when Appleton turned suddenly so that I had to press myself against the gates to avoid being seen. I was terrified that he was going to retrace his steps in which case he would find me, but he had heard footsteps behind him. It was an old woman. He accosted her and, as he said at the inquest, asked her if she had seen me. She said she thought I might be round at the front-door. I did not know what they were saying to each other, of course, but to my relief he cut through the alleyway where, as he said at the inquest, he found not me but the waiter, Perkins, knocking at the street-door. (I believe it was in order that he should see him that the woman had sent Appleton round there.)

What Appleton did not realize – but what I had perceived, being some yards behind him – was that the old woman had come from the back-gate of the New Deanery itself.

Miss Napier guessed that the old woman was crucial to the mystery and assembled much of the information required for the solution, but she put several of the pieces in the wrong place and failed to find others. For example, she did not understand why the victim’s face was so hideously battered. Crucially, she left out of her account the doctor’s conviction that the deceased died much earlier than seemed consistent with all the other evidence. And the departure from the house at twenty to six – when Appleton and I saw the woman leave – was impossible if the murderer’s entry was as late as a mere ten minutes before that time, as Miss Napier assumes: the murderer would not have had time to batter the victim’s face (somehow avoiding getting covered in blood) and ransack the house in the search for the will.

When I realized that the woman had just left the New Deanery, I was intrigued, because I knew how solitary and ordered a life the old gentleman led and that the house had been silent only an hour earlier. So I abandoned the pursuit of the Headmaster and followed her instead. She walked the few yards to the door into the Cloisters and disappeared. I advanced and watched from the doorway – hidden by the gathering darkness – and saw that she leaned over the stone wall that separated the Cloisters from the ancient well of St Wulflac and threw something towards it. Then she walked quickly towards the door into the Cathedral and passed through it. I hurried up to where she had stood. The well had – and still has to this day – a big stone conical basin surrounding it and the object had landed on its edge and was sliding towards the centre where it would fall hundreds of feet. I scrambled over the wall and, somewhat recklessly, reached down to save it just as it was about to slide out of reach for ever. It was a set of keys: two big old ones on a metal ring.

When I learnt from the Librarian that Dr Courtine’s manuscript would remain sealed until and unless the second person on the list could be shown to be dead, I pondered deeply on my way forward. And then it occurred to me that a passionate love of music was likely to endure. I persuaded a friend of mine, who is a composer of some note, to let me write a letter as if from him which I then sent to all the music-publishers and all the bookshops which specialized in sheet-music. This is the important part of the letter:

The surnames were, of course, those of the families with whom ‘Mrs Stonex’s’ lover claimed kinship. My little stratagem worked and one of the publishers wrote back saying:

So he had been alive while Miss Napier was researching her book, but dead for a couple of years by the time I made my visit to his mother. Knowing the date and place of his death, obtaining from the British consul in Florence the documentary evidence that I needed was a mere formality. From him, incidentally, I learnt that ‘Mr Ormonde Martin’ had lived the life – the somewhat scandalous life – of a rich idle man in Italy for the last thirty-five years of his existence.

After retrieving the keys from the basin of the well, I went back to the schoolroom, hid them in my box and waited for the summons to punishment. It did not come that day, for the news of the old gentleman’s murder distracted the Headmaster’s attention from my offence, and the next day he had to attend the inquest. How ardently I hoped that these shocking events had driven the memory of my misdemeanour from his memory. All the rest of Thursday and the next day I anguished about whether I should tell anyone what I knew, but I was frightened to admit that I had befriended Mr Stonex and gone to his house for tea and, above all, that I had entered it again – and uninvited – that afternoon. Of course, I did not understand the significance of the keys.

And then after breakfast on Saturday the Headmaster called me to his study. He had not, after all, forgotten about me. I am certain that if he had asked me then why I went to the New Deanery during Practice on Thursday afternoon, I would have told him everything I knew, so frightened and upset was I. But he had no curiosity about my motives for absconding and simply set to in a workmanlike way, stinking of brandy and gasping as the blows fell. That afternoon I learned of Perkins’s death when I overheard two of the servants talking about it in shocked tones.

When I went to Cambridge a few months ago and laid before the President and Fellows of Colchester College the documents from Florence which were the proof that was required, I found that they were fascinated by the case – several of them revealing themselves to have what I would venture to call a scholarly knowledge of it – and were intrigued to learn that I had some undisclosed evidence of my own. With great solemnity the seals of Professor Courtine’s Account were broken and it was read out by the Librarian. This took most of the day, with a break for luncheon. When the reading was completed, the President asked me to withdraw for a few minutes while he and the Fellows conferred as they were required to do by the terms of Professor Courtine’s letter. He then called me back to ask if I would undertake responsibility for editing and publishing the Account and if I would write an ‘Introduction’ to it. I agreed immediately.

In taking on this task, I set out to explain as much as I could of the events of the crucial period covered by Professor Courtine’s Account, creating a kind of scholarly edition with a commentary. For example, I was curious about the book of fairy-tales which Professor Courtine found in Fickling’s house late on Wednesday night and from which he read a story while waiting for him to return. The book was borrowed from the library of Courtenay’s and it was there that I found it some forty-five years later. (One might speculate as to why the story made such an impression on Dr Courtine.)

On that Friday night, as he makes clear in his Account, Dr Courtine realized the truth and understood how his old friend – I should say, his former friend – had made use of him. He had been lured to Thurchester and tricked into playing the role of an unimpeachable witness – and yet the witness to a lie. On his first evening, the ghost-story was told him by Fickling merely to entice him into going to read the inscription so that he would meet the old gentleman – or, rather, the person whom he would take to be the old gentleman – and receive the invitation to tea. That meeting, of course, was a charade. The individual impersonating the old gentleman had merely taken up a position outside the back-gate at the time when Mr Stonex was sure to be eating his dinner. The intention was, as happened, that Dr Courtine would assume that the individual who gave him tea was Mr Stonex – though by the time he and Fickling arrived, the old gentleman was dead.

Miss Napier came close to the truth in suggesting that the murderer left the house disguised as the woman seen by Appleton, but in fact that individual
was
actually a woman. And it was the same woman whom Dr Courtine heard when he watched Fickling through the window of the house in Orchard Street in the early hours of the same day. But she had not acted alone at the New Deanery, of course, for a woman – even one in the prime of life, as this one was not, although she was healthy and active for her age and had certainly not suffered a stroke – would not have been strong enough to overpower Mr Stonex at his front-door, strangle him and drag his body across the houseplace.

And although Miss Napier was almost right when she guessed that the killer – in fact, the killers – gained entry to the house by knocking at the street-door just a few minutes before Mr Stonex was expecting the waiter, in fact that occurred at four o’clock and not at half-past five. By the time I arrived ten minutes later the old gentleman was dead.

I imagine he recognized his attackers. One of them he knew well but had not set eyes on for nearly forty years. He had probably only seen the other once at close quarters and that was eight years earlier when he came to demand a share of the money he believed he was entitled to. (It was after that that Mr Stonex started to take elaborate measures for his safety.)

The killers must have been filled with a sense of righteous vengeance, being convinced of the justice of their brutal act. It was too late for explanations but, ironically, Mr Stonex was very far from guilty of the offence for which they had condemned him. Miss Napier had spent weeks searching through the old records of the Thurchester and County Bank (which had been sold to the Somerset and Thurshire Bank and incorporated into it) and had found that the rumour handed down by Quitregard’s grandfather was correct. When, at the age of twenty-two, Mr Stonex had inherited the Bank on his father’s death, he had made a terrible discovery: it was a sham. Although it had a note circulation of seventy-five thousand pounds, it had huge liabilities and no reserve funds so that it was teetering on the edge of collapse. His father had been pillaging it for years and his defalcations had robbed hundreds of people who had deposited their savings with the Bank or mortgaged properties to it or accepted its notes. Their lives and those of their dependents could be destroyed by its collapse. Moreover, although he had been deeply injured by his father’s treatment of him, he had loved him in a strange way, and he dreaded his memory being besmirched by the revelation of dishonesty. And therefore he had embarked on the endeavour to repair the Bank’s fortunes by performing an elaborate juggling act in which he had to balance monies received against liabilities without giving any sign of difficulty even to his senior clerk. Confidence was everything: so long as all seemed well, the Bank’s notes would continue to circulate. This was the long and secret act of heroism which he had mentioned to me in veiled terms.

He had not dared reveal the truth to his sister, for he could not trust a high-spirited young miss to keep the secret and if it was suspected that the Bank was in trouble, default would be inevitable. He had therefore had to impose upon her a penitential system of parsimony for which she could see no justification. Similarly, he dared not enter into negotiations on her behalf for a marriage-settlement, and because he could not explain, she never forgave him for ruining her life. Her elopement, though it brought disgrace, must almost have seemed a relief to him. And when he told his sister, on her reaching her majority, that there was no inheritance, he was telling the truth. In fact, it was only after thirty years of hard work, continous worry and lacerating parsimony (which had become an engrained habit long after the need for it had gone) that he had succeeded in saving the Bank and its depositors.