The Floating Body (9 page)

The full width of the square lay between myself and the roof of the Old School where Dave Fowler had died, but the distance was not great, and from where I stood there was a clear view of what Inspector Locke had called ‘the scene of the crime’.

As these thoughts were whizzing through my head I heard a clumping below and a moment later was joined in the loft by David Evans.

‘Ah, Morris, I didn’t expect to find you here.’

‘Just replaying the events of yesterday,’ I said, a rather glum tone in my voice.

‘I see. And this is where you and Lewis stood and saw . . . well . . . whatever it was you saw.’

‘Exactly! And the view from here is excellent, so I can’t see how we could possibly have been mistaken.’

‘It’s all very grim indeed,’ said Evans. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, Morris, I’ll get on with my practice.’

‘Practise all you like, old man. I’ll just hang about for a bit.’

‘Suit yourself.’

And with those words Evans opened up the console of the organ, spread out some pages of sheet music and began to gently play through something I recognised as Mendelssohn.

After a while I grew tired of staring out of the small window, trying to replay in my mind over and over again what I had seen and what it might mean.

I turned away from the window, leaned on the railing of the organ loft, and looked down into the body of the cathedral—allowing myself to be carried away on the wings of the music Evans was drawing out of the cathedral’s beautiful Hill organ.

Then something caught my eye. Among the long shadows that filled the deserted church, a figure was moving—a dark figure, large and powerfully built.

Leaning forward a little over the railing, I squinted into the shadows. As I looked, the figure passed through a beam of light falling through the rose window, and in that brief moment I saw that it was McKell.

Now that may not have appeared startling to some people, but it certainly startled me. I happened to know, from one or two brief conversations I’d had with that prickly gentleman in my short time at Nesfield Cathedral School, that he was about as religious as I was. Which is to say, not very religious at all.

‘Now what,’ I asked myself in the silence of my own mind, ‘is that blighter doing here?’

The cathedral was kept open for prayer, I knew that much. I also knew that folk from the town would, from time to time, drop in—to pray or to arrange flowers or whatever.

But McKell? That struck me as decidedly odd. This grumbling, taciturn man, and his equally ill-mannered sister, were among the least religious people I’d ever encountered.

And yet, here was McKell, coming to the empty cathedral on his own.

As I watched he made his way to one of the rear pews and took a seat. Clearly he was intending to settle down for a period. This was even more extraordinary. Somehow I simply could not imagine McKell engaging in silent contemplation, or meditation, or prayer . . . or, come to that, anything else in that vast, empty building that echoed to David Evans’ exquisite organ playing.

It was while I was wrestling with this puzzle that I saw the south door of the cathedral swing open. This was the door on the town side of the building, the one that locals would use when they visited. It opened only slowly and cautiously. Then a small man stepped into the cathedral and closed the door silently behind him.

He was not a man I recognised. The light was poor in the body of the building, but I could see that he was short, slightly built and had a completely bald head. I could see enough, in fact, to place him if he was someone I knew. He was not.

He paced slowly and silently about halfway down the main aisle of the nave, looking around all the time. Then he appeared to spot McKell sitting, motionless, in a rear pew and hurried to his side.

I dared not move but stood stock still, leaning slightly forward, at the edge of the organ loft railings. I almost dared not breathe. McKell had always struck me as a slightly fishy character in some way, and now it appeared that he was having a fishy meeting with some unknown fishy character from the town. The whole thing smelled as strongly as a fisherman’s pyjamas.

And sure enough—it was a meeting. McKell and the stranger had their heads together. From the bobbing of those heads in the dim shadows of the cathedral, it was clear they were talking to each other. I probably would not have been able to hear them from the height of the organ loft even if Evans had not been playing. As it was, there wasn’t the slightest possibility of catching even a single word.

I comforted myself against this lack of possibly useful intelligence by imagining that they would only be speaking in whispers anyway, so even if there had been no music, and I had been downstairs, I would still—in all likelihood—not have been able to hear them.

Then McKell’s hand darted into his coat pocket and he pulled out a small paper packet. This he handed over to the stranger. A moment later the visitor stood up and left, departing the same way he came in.

McKell waited until the stranger had gone and then made his own exit from the cathedral.

‘Alice would have been able to describe this,’ I said to myself. ‘ “Curioser and curioser!” she would have said.’

That night I was invited to dinner with Dean Cowper and his wife, Ellen—and since Ellen had a reputation as an excellent cook, I was delighted to accept.

Around the dinner table were Cowper and his wife and their guest residents—the two Lewis brothers—as well as myself.

The dinner was, as I had anticipated, outstanding: roast lamb with peas and potatoes followed by a baked rice pudding.

Once the table had been cleared by the maid, Ellen Cowper retired for the night and the Dean brought out a bottle of port and some glasses.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘will you join me?’

We said we would and he poured out four glasses of the ruby red liquid.

‘Very fine,’ said Warnie as he took a sip. ‘Very fine old port indeed.’

After finishing off his first glass and helping himself to a second, Warnie found a copy of the
Times
for that day lying on top of a small bookcase. He settled down in an armchair with his glass and the newspaper, leaving Jack, the Dean and myself to our conversation.

At first this revolved around the impossible murder of Dave Fowler. Those same questions that had popped into my head at the first sight of the body were now on everyone’s lips. And, apart from wild speculations, there was no suggestion of any possible, and reasonable, explanation emerging.

‘This strange matter,’ muttered Dean Cowper, ‘gives every appearance of having defied the laws of nature.’

Jack agreed. ‘If Isaac Newton had been standing on that gravel road at the back of the school he would have found his law of gravity exhibited as effectively by the falling corpse as by a falling apple. But I suspect even Newton’s giant brain would struggle to explain why gravity had not worked twelve hours earlier when we distinctly saw the body begin its fall.’

‘Some of the boys,’ said Cowper, shaking his head sadly, ‘have managed to get hold of the details of this case.’

‘In my short time here,’ I said, ‘I’ve discovered how efficient the gossip network in a small school can be.’

‘Indeed,’ Cowper agreed. ‘That they have found out so much is not surprising. What alarms me is that some of the older boys have been trying to frighten the younger ones by claiming that the only explanation for this impossible event is occult nonsense—lots of stuff about ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night.’

‘If the children are being genuinely frightened,’ Jack said firmly, ‘that needs to be stamped out.’

‘Quite right, Mr Lewis,’ said Cowper. ‘I intend to deal with it in my talk to the boys at chapel tomorrow morning.’

‘And what insights can you give us,’ I asked the Dean, ‘into the mind of the murderer?’

Richard Cowper shook his head sadly. ‘Who can understand what goes on in any human mind that drives it to such an act of savage violence?’

‘Except,’ I suggested, ‘that it must be a badly diseased mind—a human mind that is unnatural, bent out of shape, in some way.’

Jack chuckled and said, ‘Morris is trying to draw you into a debate he and I are engaged in over the truth concerning human nature.’

‘I see,’ muttered the Dean. ‘Well, I’m afraid I have nothing original to add. In fact, I’ve sometimes thought that what is most remarkable about the doctrine of original sin is how unoriginal it is. Throughout human history the basic corruption in human nature keeps showing itself in the same horrible ways over and over again.’

‘So it’s two against one, Morris,’ Jack grinned. ‘You’re outnumbered.’

‘I take it you don’t agree, Tom,’ Cowper said as he refilled our port glasses and offered the bottle to Warnie.

‘Surely,’ I protested, ‘all civilised people agree that human nature is basically, fundamentally,
good
!’

Jack and Cowper glanced at each other.

‘I think,’ said Jack, ‘the Dean and I agree that your confidence in the goodness of human nature does you credit—it shows what a trusting and charitable person you are. But it also, sadly, shows that you just haven’t been paying attention.’

‘To what?’

‘To the patterns of human history, to the stories in your daily newspaper, to the behaviour of those around you—and even to the inclinations of your own heart.’

‘But I keep
seeing
goodness in human beings,’ I thrust back. ‘I see people behaving well and doing the right thing.’

‘And the opposite, of course,’ said Cowper gently. ‘Or do you find you never need to discipline your class?’

‘Well . . . of course . . .’

‘And that’s the whole point, young Morris,’ said Jack, leaping gleefully into the battle. ‘Human nature is this strange mixture. As a Christian, I believe we are made in the image of God; but this image is now sadly marred, deeply corrupted, by the rebellion of our primeval parents against God. Furthermore, their nature we have inherited, and hence we too are by nature corrupt.’

‘But there’s still good there,’ I insisted.

‘Chesterton put it best,’ Jack responded, ‘when he noted that the good that remains in human nature is like the goods Robinson Crusoe found on his beach—something salvaged from a wreck.’

‘Pascal said something similar,’ Cowper volunteered. ‘He said that human nature contains these contradictory elements of nobility and wickedness.’

‘Precisely!’ Jack leaped in, seizing the point with delight. ‘Pascal said something along the lines of
Quelle chimère est-ce donc que l’homme? quelle nouveauté, quel chaos, quel sujet de contradictions
.’

‘I’m sorry, my French is not . . .’

‘ “What a chimera is man!” Jack translated. “What a novelty, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction.” ’

Dean Cowper was nodding enthusiastically as he added, ‘Pascal’s point is that man’s greatness lies in his capacity to recognise his wretchedness.’

‘But I
don’t
recognise it,’ I protested before he could go any further. ‘Human nature is
not
basically wretched!’

‘There is an apparent paradox here,’ said Jack, putting down his port glass and reaching for his pipe. ‘The seeming paradox is that human beings exhibit qualities of both greatness
and
wretchedness.’

‘So what do you really think, Tom?’ asked Cowper. ‘Are human beings glorious, exalted creatures with tremendous potential or wretched beings desperately in need of rescue?’

‘Well, listen to a Mozart symphony or look at a Rembrandt painting—you can see and hear how glorious the human spirit is,’ I said.

Jack looked at me from under his lowered eyebrows and said seriously, ‘Now look at the path of destruction wrought by Jack the Ripper and see the wretchedness.’

‘But that’s my whole point,’ I said, seizing on the comparison. ‘Mozart was normal—extraordinarily gifted, but normal—while Jack the Ripper was abnormal, unnatural.’

‘I believe,’ said Dean Cowper quietly, ‘that Mozart was also an adulterer. Surely that corruption, that defect of character, is present in
every
human being?’

‘Come back to literature, which we both know,’ chimed in Jack. ‘Charles Dickens, you and I agree, was a writer of genius. But in order to carry on an affair with a young actress, he expelled his wife from his home and even commanded his children not to visit their mother. There are clearly two sides to human nature.’

‘But the most basic side is the nobility,’ I insisted, determined not to surrender my argument. ‘No one’s perfect after all, even the best of us.’

‘I think you’ve just given the game away, Tom,’ Cowper said with a gentle smile. ‘If nobody is perfect then the shadow of corruption lies across the human heart. There is a defect at the very core of human nature.’

‘And that means that our murderer,’ said Jack, leaning forward in his armchair, ‘is no oddity of nature, but a normal human being showing what our nature is capable of.’

The next morning I was busy with classes. At first I found the boys of the Fourth Form unsettled and restless. I could hardly blame them—the murder of a schoolmaster in such a baffling manner must mean that some of them would be losing sleep, some would be having nightmares, and all of them would be writing highly melodramatic letters to their parents at home.

To get them focussed on
Macbeth
I started a debate over the identity of Shakespeare’s mysterious, unnamed ‘third murderer’. This turned out to be the right manoeuvre, and soon they were throwing suggestions across the room that the third member of the murder squad might have been Macbeth himself, or possibly the bloodthirsty Lady Macbeth.

‘But,’ protested Stanhope, blinking furiously through his large, round spectacles, ‘no lord of the manor would wun awound doing his own dirty work when he had paid servants to do it for him!’

This provoked howls of protest from other members of the class and debate was well and truly joined. So much so that after about ten minutes the classroom door swung open to reveal McKell frowning in the doorway.