The Corpse in the Cellar (6 page)

‘Unfortunately,' said Jack, lighting his pipe, ‘the role we have in this particular plot is far from ideal.'

‘What do you mean?' said Warnie. ‘I don't follow you, old chap.'

‘I mean that in this particular story we are cast as the main suspects,' Jack replied with a merry twinkle in his eye.

‘What? No. Surely not. But that's absurd,' spluttered Warnie.

‘Well, think about it,' Jack continued. ‘We are outsiders and strangers—in a small town suspicion is sure to fall on us first.'

‘And did you see Constable Dixon whispering to the landlord as we came upstairs?' I asked.

‘I did,' Jack said, ‘and I'm certain the landlord was receiving his instructions. If we three “suspicious characters” should attempt to flee, I'm sure he's been ordered to telephone the police station immediately.'

Warnie began to make ‘harrumphing' noises, but before his indignation could turn into words, Jack said, ‘Don't worry about it, Warnie old chap. Our shoulders are broad enough to carry a bit of local suspicion for a few days.'

‘And after all,' I added, ‘we were the only people in the bank at the time Franklin Grimm died . . . apart from the office girl, and she's a little thing who surely could never have murdered a big chap like Grimm. Oh, and apart from the manager Ravenswood, who was locked behind the brick wall and thick steel door of the vault while the murder was happening. So you can understand them wanting to make sure of us.'

‘It may seem understandable to you,' Warnie protested, ‘but it seems like dashed impertinence to me!'

Jack laughed and said, ‘Come on, let's see if we can get some lunch downstairs.'

Ten minutes later we were seated in the snug with a pint and a pork pie in front of each of us.

Warnie took a long sip from his glass of bitter, smacked his lips and said, ‘That's what I call real ale.'

Jack was wolfing down his pork pie as rapidly as usual when I said, ‘Now, it seems that we have time on our hands, so how about that debate we never quite finished on our walk this morning?' Jack nodded as he swallowed a mouthful. ‘You proposed,' I continued, ‘that there's one way of looking at the world that sees it right, while all the others see it slightly out of focus or distorted in some way.'

‘Indeed,' Jack said, pausing before he took another bite. ‘And I go further by giving that true way of seeing the world a name—Christianity.'

‘And that's where you just can't be right,' I leaped in. ‘You're making the mistake—the arrogant mistake, if you don't mind my saying so—of treating your world view, Christianity, as being somehow “more equal” than all the others. That just can't be the case. All world views are equal, and all should be regarded with respect.'

‘In that case, young Morris,' Jack responded with his booming voice and his big, broad grim, ‘you are respectfully wrong.'

‘Hang it all, Jack, you must see that all these options are pretty much equal. All the major world religions—Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and so on—are ancient and widespread. Each is held to be true by intelligent chaps. And atheism is much the same. There have been atheists since the dawn of time, and there are probably more today than ever. You see what I mean—all equal, all doing the same job of making sense of the world for someone, of providing a picture of what the world is like and how it works. So perhaps it's just a matter of what suits you.'

‘So you're saying, are you, young Morris, that “equal” means “the same”?'

I sensed that I was walking into a trap here, but I couldn't say no because that was pretty much the point I was making. I just nodded.

‘Nonsense!' laughed Jack as if I had just made some hilarious joke. ‘Mind you,' he added more soberly, ‘you're not the first to fall into that trap and you won't be the last. It's becoming more common for people to make the mistake of thinking that “equal” must mean “the same”. Mrs Pankhurst, or at least her more radical suffragettes, made the mistake of thinking that women could only be equal to men if they were pretty much the same as men.'

‘But surely—' I protested.

‘Hear me out,' said Jack. ‘The fact is that “equal” never means “the same”; it always means, and must mean, “equal but different”. That's what the equals sign means in mathematics, and that's what the word means in ordinary language.'

‘Rubbish!' I hooted back at my old tutor. ‘Not only rubbish, but illogical rubbish. Equal means identical. To be equal is to be exactly the same.'

‘Really?' asked Jack quietly with a gleam in his eye. And that gleam told me that my argument might be in trouble. ‘I'm no mathematician, but even I know that in a mathematical formula both sides of the equals sign are not identical, are not exactly the same, but they
are
equal. To give you a simple example, and because I'm hopeless with numbers it will have to be very simple, I could write twenty multiplied by five on one side of the equals sign and the number one hundred on the other—and I'd be perfectly correct. Each side of the equals sign is equal to the other. But they're not the same, they're not identical. In fact, it would be pointless to write down that one hundred equals one hundred. The whole point of the notion of “equals” is that two things are unalike yet equal.'

‘I'm no better at numbers than you are, Jack,' I protested. ‘So forget mathematics. In fact, I suspect that once you move outside of mathematics you won't find a single example of “equal but different”—since that is an expression that makes no sense.'

‘It makes every sense in the world, young Morris. Picture a set of scales, an old-fashioned set of balances, with a pound of lead on one tray balanced by a pound of wheat on the other. You can see that picture, can't you? On one side a bag containing a pound of wheat seeds and on the other a bar of lead. Both weigh one pound. The scales are perfectly balanced because they're equal. But they're certainly not alike: one is mineral, the other is organic, one can be planted and grow, the other can't, one can be turned into food, the other can't . . . '

‘No need to go on—I see the point. But that's an aberration. In most cases “equal” means “identical”. In human affairs, for instance—'

At which point Warnie interrupted to say, ‘I can think of another example, old chap.'

Jack went back to finishing his pork pie and I turned to Warnie. ‘Go on.'

‘Two chaps I know in my regiment—Ted and Alf. Thoroughly nice chaps, both of them. As it happens they joined the army on the same day . . . I've heard them say it in the mess more than once. Both have the same rank—they're both majors, like me. And they both have the same length of service, and the same pay and benefits. Absolutely equal in every respect. But they're not interchangeable. Ted is an army surgeon and Alf is an army engineer. Isn't that Jack's point, old chap? Equal but different?'

Jack had finished his pork pie and was sweeping up some crumbs with his napkin. He chuckled and said, ‘Warnie made my point better than I could. There would never be any reason to put an equals sign between two things, or people, that were identical. We only use the word “equal” to indicate that these two things or people that are different are of equal weight in the scheme of things.'

He paused to take a deep draught from his pint. ‘So,' I said, gathering my thoughts, ‘you're claiming that even if we say every way of looking at the world is to be given equal respect and consideration, we're not bound to think they're all the same or have the same explanatory value, hence “equal” doesn't mean they're all true.'

Jack set his glass back down on the table and said, ‘Precisely. And the next step is that it can't be just a matter of what suits you. That's relativism, and relativism kills rationality—'

Before Jack could finish what he was about to say we were interrupted.

‘I have it!' cried Warnie, his voice vibrating with discovery.

Jack and I both turned to look at him. ‘Have what?' I asked.

‘I know who murdered Franklin Grimm!'

We looked at him expectantly.

‘It was Boris,' he said. ‘You know, the ghost of the butchered footman. Today is the anniversary of his slaughter, so he was due to reappear. And he did—and murdered the bank teller.' Having delivered this pronouncement, Warnie sat back with a satisfied grin on his face.

A stunned silence followed Warnie's pronouncement. Jack and I both stared at him while Warnie finished off the last of his pint oblivious to our amazement.

‘In other words,' Jack said to his brother, ‘We're not caught up in an Agatha Christie murder story but in an M. R. James ghost story? Or a macabre tale by Edgar Allan Poe?'

‘Well, look at the facts, old chap,' Warnie responded. ‘Bank cellar sealed up tighter than a drum. No way in, no way out. Only one person in the cellar. That one person dies violently—and no weapon is found. I should think Edgar Allan Poe would be cracking his knuckles with delight and breaking out the good brandy to celebrate a plot like that.'

‘The point is,' said Jack, ‘it's not a story. It may be a plot, but it's a murderous plot that obeys the laws of physics, and the laws of logic.'

Before Warnie could respond I glanced through the window and interrupted to say, ‘Look who's outside.' The others turned to peer through the small, diamond-shaped panes of the snug window. And they saw what I saw: Constable Dixon, lounging on the other side of the street, trying, without success, to look inconspicuous.

‘Keeping a watchful eye on the chief suspects,' muttered Jack quietly.

‘Treating us as if we're bally criminals,' muttered Warnie. ‘Have a second pint, Jack?'

‘Later,' Jack replied.

At that moment the phone in the front bar began to ring loudly. It rang for so long I was rising to answer it myself when a flustered Annie Jones, wearing an apron and carrying a tea towel in one hand, rushed in from somewhere in the back of the pub and picked it up. She listened for a moment and then went to the front door.

‘Bill!' she called out to Constable Dixon on the other side of the street. ‘Telephone for you.'

The constable flushed a bright pink at having his surveillance advertised in this way, but hurried across the road.

‘Hello?' he said tentatively as he picked up the phone. He listened for a minute, punctuating his listening with the occasional muttered ‘Yes, sir', then put the phone down with a final, ‘Very good, sir.'

All of this we saw and heard through the open doorway between the snug and the front public bar. A moment later Constable Dixon was looming over us, saying, in his most official voice, ‘Inspector Hyde has just telephoned, gentlemen. He requests your presence back at the bank premises please.'

‘What now?' moaned Warnie, but we all dutifully rose and followed Dixon out onto the street and down the few short blocks to the bank. Here we found the street door still closed and a handwritten sign pinned on the door: ‘Bank closed until further notice.' After a few firm and officious knocks by the constable the door was opened by Sergeant Donaldson, who waved us inside.

He ushered us into the customers' waiting area and told us to take a seat. Several minutes passed in dull silence, broken only by the loud ticking of the bank's office clock.

I turned to Jack and complained, ‘This is like waiting at the dentist.'

He smiled grimly and said, ‘And there's no promise the procedure will be painless when it happens.'

Then the front door opened again and Inspector Hyde bustled in, accompanied another man in a pin-striped business suit.

‘Ah, you're here, you're here,' said Hyde, seeing us seated and waiting. ‘Be with you in a moment, gentlemen.' Then he ushered his pin-striped visitor behind the counter and through the door leading to the cellar steps. Sergeant Donaldson went with them, leaving us to our own devices. We looked at each other, wondering what was going on.

‘Well, I don't know about you,' said Warnie, rising from his seat and obviously still feeling keenly the insult of being a suspect, ‘but I'm not waiting here like a shag on a rock.'

Jack also stood to his feet adding, ‘Well said, Warnie. Let's see what they're up to.'

A moment later all three of us were through the door at the back of the bank office and standing at the head of the cellar stairs. Instinctively we moved quietly down them, not wishing to attract too much attention.

The pin-stripe-suited gentleman was standing in front of the vault door. He first felt the locking bars and checked the door. It was, he found, securely and fully closed and locked. Then he drew a piece of paper from his pocket and, consulting this from time to time, began manipulating the dials of the combination locks. There were two of these, one above the other. He operated each in turn, twisting them to the right and the left and bringing them to rest on a particular number with each turn. This operation took a couple of minutes.