The Unburied (50 page)

Unaware of this, his sister and his nephew – who had just strangled him with those strong hands that he stared at in fascination a few hours later when he met Dr Courtine – dragged the old man’s body into the hall. It was then that they must have put the message on the street-door and written the one on the slate in order to lure Perkins into the trap and make him incriminate himself. He took the bait and left, bearing with him the package which – as he realized on Friday night alone and terrified in his cell – would surely have hanged him within a few months.

I believe that at the moment when I arrived at the street-door and read the message which they had not yet removed, the murderers were stripping the old man of his top clothes. When they heard my knock they must have been dismayed for they were at the most vulnerable and incriminating point of the whole undertaking. They probably looked through the door-jamb into the houseplace from the hall and, seeing that it was only a boy, decided to wait until I had gone.

By the time I left, I had made them nearly fifteen minutes late so that they didn’t have time to drag the body along the passage into the dining-room as had been planned. They therefore decided to leave it where it was. (That was why Fickling was so horrified at the idea of going into that room when Dr Courtine expressed a desire to see it.) During this time he had approached the house with Dr Courtine but, failing to see the signal that all was ready, had led him back to his own dwelling.

As soon as I had gone Mrs Slattery, now dressed in her brother’s clothes, cleared the dinner away, dirtying the plates as if Mr Stonex had used them and packing the food into a parcel so that she could take it away with her. Then she set the tea, laying out the cakes she had baked in the early hours of that day – the smell of which had led Dr Courtine to the conspirators’ house. While she was doing this, her son was in the study removing his own outer clothes in order to smash his uncle’s face without getting blood on them.

They must have been alarmed at the delay I had caused because Slattery could not be too late for choir Practice since that occasion, and then Evensong, were to provide him with his unimpeachable alibi. My unwitting intervention also meant that they had only a few minutes to find the will, which was crucial if their crime was not to benefit the Choir School rather than themselves, and it was now that they ransacked the houseplace. Failing to find it, the resourceful actress hit upon the idea of a lost account of the murder of Freeth in order to continue the search right under the nose of Dr Courtine. In their haste they made one small mistake in forgetting to rub out the chalk message and hide the slate.

A minute or two after I had gone, Slattery hurried out of the New Deanery, probably visited a public-house to down a quick glass of beer, and arrived for Practice – as I happened to notice since I was looking in through the window – just a little later than he should have. Only now did his mother light the candle in the window of the dining-room to signal to Fickling that he could arrive with Dr Courtine.

At the end of the charade, Fickling’s guess – based on the poor time-keeping of the clock – that old Mr Stonex might use the same ingenious hiding-place as himself saved the day for the conspirators. As a consequence, the will was safely destroyed and the victim’s sister inherited the estate. There is a curious post-script on that topic. A Swiss newspaper reported that the old lady, having outlived the rest of her wealthy family – and, presumably, having inherited from her son the money they had divided between them – and therefore leaving no heir, had died intestate and her estate had gone to the Swiss Treasury.

By late on Saturday morning the other boys had gone. I was alone and, in the excitement, Appleton and his wife had forgotten that I existed. I was in too much pain from my flogging to be able to spend the afternoon wandering around the town according to my usual custom. I passed it instead gazing out of the schoolroom window, thinking about the events of the previous day. The news of Perkins’s suicide had added mental anguish to my physical suffering. Lying in the little top room under the bed-coverings to try to keep warm, since I was not allowed a fire all to myself, I thought of the miserable Christmas Day I would have alone tomorrow instead of looking at Mr Stonex’s maps and eating his dinner. I was sorry for the old man but most of all I was sorry for Perkins and his widow and children and asked myself over and over again if he would still be alive if I had had the courage to tell someone what I had seen, and shown them the keys. Not everybody had forgotten me. Towards midnight I heard a familiar creaking and knew that Dr Sheldrick was creeping up the stairs to rub embrocation on my bruises.

Philip Barthram, Thurchester, 17 August 1919

The names of characters in historical periods earlier than the late nineteenth century are in italics.

1
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Editor’s Note:
This is the story which Courtine read late on Wednesday night.

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By Charles Palliser

(Select bibliography of titles published in The Murder Room)

Betrayals (1994)

The Unburied (1999)

To E. R.

I am grateful to the following for reading and offering advice on the novel during its period of gestation: Helen Ash, James Buxton, Jane Dorner, Mary Dove, Roger Elliott, Lorna Gibb, John Hands, Tom Holland, Hunter Steele and Janet Todd.

Charles Palliser (1947–)

Before becoming a full-time writer in 1990, Charles Palliser taught literature and creative writing at universities in the UK and the US. He has published four novels:
The Quincunx
,
The Sensationist
,
Betrayals
and
The Unburied
.
The Quincunx
, which has sold over one million copies internationally, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His fiction has been translated into a dozen languages. He has also written for radio and television. He is an American citizen, but has lived in the UK since childhood.

An Orion ebook

Copyright © Charles Palliser 1999

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This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2015
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4719 1747 9

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