C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (20 page)

His face told us his first reaction: this was a document that should be censored by the Lord Chamberlain and would, in due course, be banned in Boston.

‘The signature is incomplete,’ he said at length. ‘It’s just the one name. Are you quite sure this is Sir William Dyer’s signature, Mr Morris?’

I told him I was quite sure and suggested he obtain a specimen signature for comparison. He said he would.

‘Now, as to the addressee,’ he continued. ‘Again there’s only one name. But you suggest this must be Judith Trelawney, Lady Pamela’s younger sister—now deceased.’

We agreed that, yes, that was what we were suggesting.

‘Have you any proof of this?’ Hyde demanded.

Jack admitted that we did not, and suggested that the county police force might attempt some investigation. Hyde growled in response, and read the letter a third time. Then he closed his eyes, rocked back on his heels again and appeared to drop into a catatonic coma.

Jack and I watched this performance with interest. When Inspector Hyde finally regained consciousness, he said, ‘Now, this suggestion of yours that this letter implies blackmail—surely that’s a leap too far?’

‘How else,’ Jack asked, ‘can you account for its being hidden—presumably by someone who thought they’d found a safe place for it where it could lie undetected until they retrieved it?’

‘Perhaps.’ Hyde was doubtful. ‘If this really is Sir William Dyer’s handwriting, might he have placed the letter where you found it himself?’

‘Unlikely for several reasons,’ said Jack, fixing Hyde with the steely stare he usually fastened on lazy, unthinking students in tutorials. ‘In the first place, if Sir William had got his hands on this document, he would have destroyed it. As you saw, in this letter he asks Judith to burn all his correspondence that might reveal their affair. He had no reason to keep this one incriminating piece of evidence. Second, if for some unimaginable reason he decided to keep it, surely he would put it under lock and key in his own study, not in a book in the library when anyone might stumble across it. And thirdly, he knew that this particular volume, the 1597
Romeo and Juliet
quarto, was being studied by my young friend, Mr Morris. Upon learning of that, he would have immediately removed the letter from its hiding place. He didn’t, because he didn’t put it there.’

The inspector’s brain slowly clanked into gear and processed this argument. There was a good deal of grinding and crunching of mental gears before he asked, ‘If he didn’t hide it there, then who did?’

‘There are two possibilities,’ said Jack, ticking them off on his fingers. ‘Either Mrs Connie Worth in her role as the blackmailer, or else a third party.’

‘So Mrs Worth might have hidden the letter there before she was murdered?’ asked the policeman, like a slow boy repeating a rote lesson.

‘That’s one possibility,’ said Jack patiently, ‘but the other is more likely.’

Inspector Hyde asked Jack to explain, so he did. ‘We have heard from young Will that the impoverished Mrs Worth had come into cash before she was poisoned. That implies that the blackmail had been paid. And a businessman as canny as Sir William would not cough up the cash without receiving what he was paying for.’

I chipped in to suggest that it might have been only a first instalment, in which case the document might not yet have passed from the blackmailer to the blackmailee.

Jack agreed this was very likely and then added, ‘The next possibility is that the letter was uncovered in Mrs Worth’s room after her death by a third party. This third party, looking for a safe and secret place to conceal the letter, chose the old book in the library.’

‘Hang about, hang about,’ protested Inspector Hyde, shaking his head as he tried to keep up with the speed of Jack’s thinking. Nature appeared to have equipped the good inspector with about as much brain as would comfortably fit in a small aspirin bottle. ‘Why would there be a third party involved?’ he asked.

Jack responded to this question with one of his own: ‘Why would a blackmailer have only one victim? And if Mrs Worth had other victims, one of them might have seized the opportunity of her sudden death to quickly search her room to recover incriminating items. In the process that person found this letter, saw its potential, took it and hid it.’

Inspector Hyde looked doubtful. ‘That’s a long chain of supposition there, Mr Lewis,’ he said.

Then he cheered up considerably. A cunning smile spread slowly across his face as he said, ‘Of course, that third party might have been Mr Morris here. Perhaps he was the other blackmail victim. That provides the missing motive for his murder of Mrs Worth.’

Inspector Hyde was almost rubbing his hands together in glee as he chuckled unpleasantly to himself and walked away down the drive towards the Hall.

I watched him disappear with mixed feelings of astonishment and hollow fear. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘Anything that happens he twists around to support his suspicions of me!’

‘Relax, old chap,’ said Jack. ‘Very shortly even Inspector Hyde’s deepest and darkest suspicions will be washed away by a tidal wave of facts. In the meantime, you mustn’t be too worried by what he says. The inspector’s pronouncements are like much modern poetry—they bear a passing resemblance to the English language but don’t actually mean anything.’

I must have still looked worried because Jack immediately continued, ‘Come along, Morris, let’s take a walk across the moors. A good, brisk walk will do you a power of good.’

The suggestion was a good one, so I raised no objection. We set off at once striding across the lawn and within minutes we had passed through a spinney of still bare trees, climbed over a stile and were setting out across the heather-covered moors.

Naturally as we walked my mind trotted back into those grim subjects of death and judgment that had been haunting me ever since Inspector Hyde first fixed me with his gimlet eye.

I remarked to Jack that as far as Hyde was concerned my judgment was well and truly over—I had been tried by a jury of one and found guilty. All that was still in abeyance, as far as Hyde was concerned, was my punishment.

‘And you connect this, I take it,’ said Jack, ‘with our earlier discussion?’

‘Well, if death is followed by judgment, as you insist,’ I replied, ‘it surely follows that we must understand something of the potential rewards and punishments that follow.’

‘Indeed, and in order to do that we need to think clearly about death itself.’

I asked him to explain, and he responded with a question. ‘How would you explain or define death, young Morris?’

‘The end of life,’ I suggested.

‘However,’ Jack protested, ‘that suffers from being circular, doesn’t it? “What is death?” The end of life. “What is life?” That which ends in death. If life and death are both defined in terms of each other, we fail to get at the inner nature of either.’

‘Well, does this get us any closer?’ I suggested, closing my eyes for a moment to concentrate on an appropriate formulation of words. ‘ “The final cessation of the vital functions of a plant or animal.” How’s that?’

‘Much better. Of course, we still haven’t really got to the heart of the matter until we’ve unpacked the notion of “vital functions”. But there’s a good deal in what you say.’

This expression was the highest praise Jack ever employed in his tutorials. However, I had no time to feel a glow of satisfaction because, still having my eyes closed in concentration, at that point I fell headlong over a tussock of grass.

Jack lent me a hand and pulled me back to my feet. As I brushed down my clothes I asked, ‘Do you have a better definition?’

‘There is one idea I’ve done a good deal of thinking about, although I’m still wrestling with it. Does it help if we think about death as
separation
?’

He paused as we both clambered over a low dry-stone wall, and then resumed, ‘Death most certainly is separation in many ways, so does that notion get to the core of the idea? I think it might. For a start death is separation between loved ones. The death of my mother from cancer when I was a child was a painful separation. The more recent death of my father was less painful, as it was not unexpected and came at the end of a long life. But it still cuts us off from each other—as long as I am in this world, the separation remains.’

‘What about the other aspects of death?’ I asked.

‘They too may be different aspects of separation. For instance, it’s still normal to think of the moment of death as the moment of separation between the soul and the body. Everyone from Plato to mediums conducting séances to millions of Christians over the ages has seen death in terms of that separation—the soul, the consciousness, leaves the body.’

After another pause, in which his brain was clearly whirling, he said, ‘Even the kind of physical dissolution you were hinting at with your definition of death, young Morris, could be described as a body dissolving, or separating, into its component elements. Death as
separation
.’

At this point we reached the top of a low hill. In the distance we could see, stark against the horizon, the ruins of the Hunting Tower.

‘Let’s head for that,’ I said. ‘The key was missing from the board behind the kitchen door, so perhaps the door to the tower is now unlocked.’

As we started down the slope of the first of the intervening valleys, Jack said, ‘But there is a deeper and more profound understanding of death as separation: namely, separation from God. That’s what Christians regard as spiritual death.’

‘But what about those people who choose to live their lives in this world ignoring God—wanting to be independent, wanting to be separated from God?’

‘The Christian would say such people have chosen spiritual death. The alternative is to choose re-connection—spiritual life. And that’s what’s reflected in the judgments, the rewards and punishments, after death.’

‘So you suggest that at death the separation, or connection, chosen in life comes into effect?’

‘There is certainly a division, a separation, that appears at death. Jesus describes the judgment as consisting of separating, or dividing, the “sheep” from the “goats”.’

‘The good from the evil?’

‘Or better still: the forgiven from the unforgiven.’

I had to think about this for a while. Eventually I said, ‘So you’re suggesting that the rewards and punishments that follow our post-mortem judgment are connected to this notion of separation, or its opposite—connection.’

‘It seems a reasonable supposition to me that all the language of hell that we encounter—picturing a fire that is never quenched, a bottomless pit, an outer darkness and so on—is metaphor. It’s picture language suited to our level of understanding. The most literal statement of hell that we get comes from Jesus, who, incidentally, speaks of hell more often than any other figure in the Bible.’

‘What literal statement is that?’

‘When he says that the punishment at judgment is pronounced in these words: “Depart from me, for I never knew you.” Those are words of banishment, of exile. If I’m right in reading those words as a literal judgment, as words of condemnation, then people in this life, this world, who have chosen separation from God, in the next life, the next world, are treated as adults and given exactly what they’ve chosen—complete, total and ultimate separation from God, and his people, forever. Banishment. Exile.’

We walked in silence for a while, and then I asked, ‘If you had to choose your own metaphorical or poetic language to describe the punishment of hell as you understand it, what sort of word picture would you paint?’

He thought for a moment before he replied, ‘Perhaps one of those bleak, dreary northern industrial towns where the local industries have died and the place is deserted and empty. On a rainy Sunday afternoon. Dingy lodging houses, small shops that have all closed, old newspapers blowing down the street—that sort of thing. But I stress that’s just a metaphor for the real thing: an awful, isolating separation.’

‘You make it sound as if the people who choose separation from God are choosing an eternity of loneliness—a bit like choosing an eternity in solitary confinement. That certainly sounds like sheer hell to me,’ I added with a humourless laugh.

‘I’m sure,’ said Jack, ‘there are many metaphors that could be used to convey the same basic idea: namely, that the eternal judgment that follows death is entirely just.’

‘I’m not sure that follows,’ I protested.

‘W. S. Gilbert insisted that the punishment must fit the crime,’ said Jack. ‘Well, in this case the punishment not only fits the crime, the punishment
is
the crime. The punishment for choosing to be separated from God
is
to be separated from God, cut off from the Creator—and, incidentally, from the life and love and purpose of the universe—forever. What you choose in the way you live is what you get. What could be fairer than that?’