The Corpse in the Cellar (9 page)

‘Are you saying there's no truth in any belief system other than Christianity?' That question, I thought, would put him on the spot.

‘I would make the assumption,' Jack replied with energy, ‘that any belief that has enjoyed wide currency over many centuries must contain some truth. Such a belief system must have some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life. In a similar way, your secular atheism—now held so enthusiastically by some intelligent and thoughtful people—must contain some truth: some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.'

‘Then what we need to do is to put all our pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together!' I cried triumphantly, gleefully seizing on this new metaphor. ‘Which is what I think I was saying at the start of this conversation.'

‘However,' said Jack, holding up a finger and urging me to be patient, ‘what if it's the case that each of these world views contains some genuine and some false pieces of the puzzle? How then do you sort out which pieces to include and which pieces to discard?'

I didn't have an immediate answer. Jack continued, ‘What if your own popular “scientism” contains some truthful bits (about how the physical world works, for example) and some false bits (such as the claim that there is
nothing but
the physical world, meaning that categories such as “mental” and “aesthetic” and “spiritual” are imaginary)? A mixture, you see, of true and false.'

Jack gave me a moment's silence to mull this over. Warnie had completely lost interest in our discussion and had pulled a pack of grimy old cards from his pocket and begun to play solitaire.

Jack resumed, ‘Is it not possible that this is the case—that many world views, including your own, might be a muddled mixture of bits of truth and bits of falsehood? How do we sort out the true and helpful bits from the false and mistaken bits in order to put the jigsaw puzzle together?'

It was happening again! I had started asking questions, and within a minute I was being put on the spot and asked to come up with answers. Well, I wasn't falling for it this time. This was one of those occasions when the best answer to a question is a question.

‘So what's your answer to that question?' I asked. ‘How would you sort out the pieces of the puzzle? How would you know which to discard and which to keep?'

‘My answer is that we use what we always use with a difficult jigsaw puzzle: the picture on the top of the box. That will show us the whole picture and how everything fits together—or is meant to fit together. And Christianity is “the picture on the top of the box”. When an atheist is converted to Christianity, as I was, what he finds is not that he's lost everything he once believed but that it now fits into a larger picture—the picture towards which it had been pointing all the time. And the same is true for Christian converts from a Hindu or Buddhist or whatever background. Jesus does not come to destroy but to fulfil.'

‘You know what I think?' said Warnie as he scooped up his cards. Jack and I both looked in his direction. ‘I think it's time for dinner.'

And it was. Warnie had picked up the delicious aromas drifting out of the kitchen of
The Boar's Head
. Ten minutes later we were feasting on roast beef and potatoes with Yorkshire pudding. This occupied our full attention for some little time.

As Warnie sopped up the last of his gravy with a piece of bread, he said, ‘Now let's talk about a mystery really worth puzzling over.'

‘Meaning?' I asked as I poured a second cup of tea out of the large, old-fashioned floral teapot in the middle of the table.

‘Meaning the mystery of who killed Franklin Grimm, and why, and how.'

‘I think we have to leave the how to one side for the moment,' Jack suggested, lighting his pipe. As always he had finished his meal while Warnie and I were still ploughing through our roast beef.

‘In the end,' Jack continued, taking a few puffs and sending clouds of blue smoke into the air of the snug, ‘in the end either knowing
who
will answer the question of
how
they did it, or discovering
how
will tell us
who
did it.'

‘Whodunit,' I corrected. When both Jack and Warnie raised their eyebrows I explained, ‘Well, that's how they say it on the back jackets of all the detective novels. It's always “whodunit”.'

‘No need to lapse into grammatical absurdity, young Morris,' Jack responded in his most tutor-like manner. ‘Since the scene of the crime is occupied by the police and not accessible to us, we leave aside the question of
how
—at least for the moment—and focus on
whom
.'

‘And that means . . . ?' prompted Warnie.

‘That means that tomorrow morning we escape from police surveillance and make our way out of town to interview the volatile Mr Nicholas Proudfoot.'

‘Hear, hear,' Warnie applauded. ‘In the meantime, how about another pint of bitter?'

The next morning after breakfast we took our cups of tea through into the front bar and looked out of the window. Sure enough, Constable Dixon had once again taken up his post on the opposite side of the street.

‘Has he been there all night?' groaned Warnie.

‘Perhaps another constable did the night shift,' Jack suggested. ‘Either that or Inspector Hyde decided we were unlikely to do a midnight flit.'

‘How do we get past him?' I asked.

Jack grinned and replied, ‘We don't. We take him with us—at least for a while. Finish your tea, and then follow me.'

With those words he stepped out into the street, waved at the policeman and said loudly, ‘Good morning, Constable Dixon. We're just going for a little stroll around your town. Do a bit of sight-seeing. Care to accompany us?'

Dixon shuffled his feet uncomfortably. He looked as guilty as a cat caught crouching over the remains of the fish you'd been planning to eat for dinner. Caught in the act, a cat will usually raise one eyebrow as if to say, ‘Fish? What fish? Oh,
that
fish. I hadn't noticed it before. I wonder who left it here.'

All of those emotions and attempts at looking innocent flitted over the policeman's face one after another like the changing traffic lights at an intersection.

For a while he opened and closed his mouth soundlessly as he struggled to find something to say. Eventually he touched his helmet and said, ‘Good morning, sir' as he ostentatiously turned his back on us and stared off into the far distance. Or at least as far as the other end of the street.

Jack waved us on and the three of us headed up the street towards the town square.

‘Does that mean he's not following us after all?' asked Warnie.

‘Oh, he's following us all right,' replied Jack. ‘If you glance over your shoulder from time to time you'll see what I mean.'

For the next ten minutes Jack led us on a merry chase. Instead of heading directly towards the town square, he backtracked and wove in and out of the narrow streets of the oldest part of Market Plumpton. And from time to time I looked over my shoulder—usually just in time to see a flash of blue police uniform darting behind a lamp post. Unfortunately, a lamp post was never quite enough to hide the rather bulky shape that was Constable Dixon.

‘Rather nice lamp posts, aren't they?' said Jack with a wicked grin, seeing the same bootless manoeuvre. ‘Rather handsome old cast iron affairs. I take it they began life as gas lamps and have since been converted to hold electric lights.'

He patted the next lamp post we walked past, saying in a loud voice, ‘Very nice piece of late Victorian industrial design. There are hints of the William Morris arts and crafts influence in that wrought iron. You know what I think I'd like to see? I'd rather like to see a lamp post like this transported into a different environment—perhaps into a woodland setting somewhere, perhaps a woodland under a blanket of snow. That would create a very nice image, don't you think? That's the sort of mental picture that starts the imagination ticking over.'

Jack kept prattling whimsically like this as we walked, sometimes striding rapidly ahead and sometimes dawdling so that poor Constable Dixon on our trail never knew whether he was about to lose us or bump into us.

At last we came out into the town square and began a slow stroll around the shopfronts, just as if we were the idle tourists we were pretending to be. As we made our way towards the church on the far side of the square, I glanced back to see that Constable Dixon had taken up his post in front of a millinery shop. As I looked back he turned his attention to the shop window and appeared to become deeply engrossed in ladies' hats.

‘So what's the plan, Jack?' hissed Warnie in a theatrical whisper.

‘We shall do what any tourist would do. It's a very old church—we'll take a look around.' And as we walked through the lychgate into the churchyard, Jack said in a loud voice, ‘Very old. The main part of the building might be Norman.'

We made our way to the free-standing bell tower and made a slow circuit around it. There was a wooden door on one side, but when Warnie tested it, it proved to be locked. I hurried to the corner of the tower and looked around it in time to see Constable Dixon striding rapidly across the square in some panic, apparently fearing he might have lost us. As he was looking desperately left and right, Jack stepped out from the behind the tower and gave him a cheerful wave. He responded with an embarrassed nod, and then ostentatiously turned his back on us and began to swing his truncheon rhythmically like a constable walking his beat.

We ambled slowly across the churchyard, stopping to comment on the oldest of the headstones on our way to the church door.

‘Look at this one,' said Warnie. ‘I rather like this.'

I stood beside him and looked down at the epitaph on the old, weathered headstone: ‘W
E ALL HAVE A DEBT TO NATURE DUE
. I'
VE PAID MINE AND SO MUST YOU
.'

‘A bit grim,' I said.

‘True, nonetheless,' Warnie chuckled. ‘And here—this one's an even more awful omen: “Grim death took me without any warning. I was well at night, and dead in the morning.” Does that come from the man's family, do you think? Or did some stonemason with a sense of humour suggest it?'

Then we noticed that Jack was not with us—he had disappeared inside the church and we hurried to follow.

It was a nice little church interior, although very plain, apart from some whimsical carvings on the lectern. Jack walked the length of the aisle and then turned and said, ‘Warnie, take a look out of the window and tell me what our friendly policeman is doing.'

As Warnie edged along the pews to a window, I muttered, ‘This is like a scene from a Ben Travers farce.'

Warnie sidled up slowly to a window so that he could see out without being seen, and then said in a low voice, ‘He's in the churchyard now. He has his hands in his pockets. He has his back to the church. And he appears to be whistling.'

‘Excellent,' said Jack. ‘This is our chance. Let's see if the vestry door is unlocked.'

It was. And we left the church on the far side of the building, away from the churchyard. Ahead of us was a narrow lane that ran between the back fences of two rows of terrace houses. We three trotted up this as quickly as we could.

Several minutes of rapid walking brought us almost to the edge of town. Jack fished Frank Jones' scribbled map out of his pocket and looked at it for a moment.

‘It appears that we keep going this way for the next block,' he said, ‘then turn left and that should put us on the northern road out of town.'

A few minutes later we were walking down a narrow country road between high hedgerows, and still going quite quickly—aiming to put as much distance between ourselves and a possibly pursuing Constable Dixon as we could.

When we reached a low rise, I looked back down the hill towards the town. I could see a lot of winding country road from that height, but no policeman—it was deserted.

‘We seem to have lost our faithful constable,' I said. ‘Now, what direction do we head in?'

‘Not entirely certain,' Jack admitted. ‘Warnie, you know more about maps than I do—take a look at this.'

Jack handed over the scrap of paper that was our guide and Warnie studied it for a minute. ‘Hmmm, I'm not sure, old chap. I'm used to army maps, not sketch maps like this.' He glanced up at the sky and then said, ‘I wish Mr Jones had seen fit to indicate which way was north on his little map.'

‘Here, let me have a look,' I said. Warnie happily handed it over. At first it looked like just a series of squiggly lines wandering across the page. I tried turning it upside down and then sideways. I held it at arm's length and squinted at it as if trying to bring a blurred picture into focus. Then I turned it back so that the X that marked the position of
The Boar's Head
was at the bottom. That was when it seemed to start making sense to me.