The Salisbury Manuscript (28 page)

(Or almost clear and out in the open. Cathcart had been frank with Foster, up to a point. He’d hinted, man to man, that he had a partiality for Mrs Slater, a partiality which had always stayed strictly within the bounds of respect-ability. He described how he had paid her the occasional visit, or she him, to discuss the stock in his store and the clothing catalogues, for he valued a lady’s perspective. He mentioned that he’d dropped a personal item in Venn House on the evening of the murder, a handkerchief which had subsequently been returned to him. He admitted this only so as to guard himself against further . . . insinuations from Amelia. If the police were aware of the full story, then the widow could not exert any pressure on him. In truth, Foster had not been very interested and listened to Cathcart with scarcely concealed impatience. He had bigger business to attend to.)

Finally, Henry Cathcart described to Constance how he had ‘seen through’, as he put it, Mrs Amelia Slater. She was a – he hesitated before saying this – an unstable woman, perhaps a dangerous one. He had witnessed for himself her hysterics earlier that day. She seemed to be obsessed not so much with her dead husband but with her absent nephew. He didn’t know what to make of her or of the situation in general.

(Which was more or less true.)

Constance heard him out. It did not take very long, for Henry had not a great deal of substance to say. Her great eyes grew wider and she nodded once or twice as if what she was hearing wasn’t much of a surprise. Then, looking more animated than Henry had seen her in many months, she leaned forward and patted her husband’s hand where it lay on the bed-cover.

‘There, there, my dear,’ she said in a tone which suggested that he rather than she was the invalid. ‘I perhaps know more about what’s been going on than you think. Long ago I concluded that Mrs Slater was the kind of woman that you have just discovered her to be for your-self. I’m glad your eyes have been opened. Now perhaps we can talk about making that trip to London to see Mr Moody and Mr Sankey . . . ’

Cathcart sighed, whether with relief or vexation he couldn’t have said. He half expected her to make some comment about there being more joy in heaven over a single sinner that repenteth, etc. Instead Constance glanced at the
Gazette
.

‘The authorities do not seem any nearer to discovering the murderer of Canon Slater.’

‘No. It is a mystery still.’

Although for Tom Ansell and Helen Scott, the mystery was almost solved.

The Spire

Tom and Helen were witness to a peculiar sight as they approached Venn House at a brisk walk. Far from having to search out Adam Eaves in his lair in the garden – as they expected to do if they were to find him at all – the very man appeared before them. He burst out of the gate in the wall when the couple were a hundred yards or so away. Instinctively they halted and Tom flung out his hand as if to protect Helen. Tom wasn’t quite so hot on the chase as he had been when he’d first grasped the gardener’s secret from what Jenny had revealed. The few minutes which it had taken him and Helen to cover the distance between The Side of Beef and the West Walk had given Tom the space to think of Helen’s warning of danger. Yes, it was dangerous. This was a likely murderer they were seeking. Yet, Tom told himself, the man had probably fled in the interim since they had glimpsed him that morning.

But, no, he was fleeing now, at the very instant when Tom and Helen arrived at the place. Another figure rushed out behind him, looking to neither right nor left but intent on the man in front. There was fury in his every movement. He was waving an arm in the air, almost shaking his fist. This person too looked familiar. It was – although this was hard to explain – the coachman to Percy Slater. Fawkes, he was called.

The two ran across the secluded lane like men in a race who are nearing the finishing line and putting on a final spurt. They were black shadows in the red twilight. Both men wore the little caps known as billycocks, which some-how added to their malevolent, pantomime look. Tom recalled that scene at Salisbury station on his arrival a few days earlier. Two figures, silhouettes in the fog, playing some peculiar game on the plaform, the way one of them had toppled on to the railway line while the other merged into the shadows. He couldn’t explain this either but he was convinced it was these two, Eaves and Fawkes, that he’d seen.

A low wall separated West Walk from the great stretch of lawn which fronted the western end of the cathedral, and this wall Adam Eaves now vaulted. There was something animal-like in his speed and agility. But the man at his heels was only a little less quick and lithe. He, too, cleared the wall and soon both men had the look of malevolent children cavorting on the lawn.

‘What is happening, Tom? I recognize your gardener but who’s the other one?’

‘It looks as though someone has got to Eaves before us. Percy Slater’s man, in fact. Perhaps the gardener is looking for sanctuary in the cathedral. I’ll see where they’re going while you get help.’

‘There must be people in the cathedral. They could help stop them.’

Tom visualized a clutch of ancient reverends and canons raising a hue and cry. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you go to the police house while I try to keep track of Eaves and Fawkes. Don’t worry, I will not go near them.’

Helen saw the sense in what he was saying but she put her hand on Tom’s arm and told him to be careful, before walking back down West Walk at a rapid pace. There was a handful of other afternoon strollers further up the road but none of them appeared to have noticed anything odd about the sight of two men running in the cathedral precincts.

Tom Ansell didn’t have to leap the boundary wall since he was standing conveniently near a gap in it which opened on to one of the several gravelled paths criss-crossing the lawn. By now the figures of Eaves and Fawkes were black specks against the immensity of the west facade, which was receiving the full force of the setting sun. The clere-story windows burnt like fire and left red spots dancing in front of Tom’s eyes.

He started to run across the grass and the effort and excitement of the chase drove all caution out of him. He observed the two in front veer to the left as they neared the steps leading to the double doors in the western porch. The doors were shut fast, presumably locked. No entry or escape that way. The man in front – gardener Eaves – rounded the north-western corner of the church and vanished from sight. Something about his movement suggested that he knew where he was going, that he had a particular destination or bolt-hole. His pursuer – coachman Fawkes – was only a few seconds behind him and he too slipped round the corner.

Tom was able to save time by changing course and going on a diagonal across the grass after the first two. He ran towards the northern flank of the cathedral and halted when he had a clear view of most of that side. The area lay in the shadows cast by the great bulk of the building and it took his eyes an instant to adjust to the change of light. There was no one to be seen lurking among the buttresses of stone soaring above him, no one moving on the open lawn that lay on this side too. No shelter or hiding place apart from a fringe of trees and a scatter of houses and gardens which were several hundred yards off to the east and north.

That left the cathedral itself. There was a porch just beyond the north-west corner, providing a more convenient and less imposing access to the interior than the main doors. Tom went warily towards the side entrance, conscious that someone might be lurking in the gloom of the porch. But that too was empty. The door was ajar. He pushed his way inside, still with caution.

Once there he moved quickly into the open spaces of the nave, away from the shadows of the great pillars which stretched towards the east. He paused again. It was the first time he had entered the cathedral. Despite the circumstances he stood still for an instant, overwhelmed by the airy spaces of the vaulting above his head, the vista along the nave. A few candles twinkled in the distance at ground level but they were feeble by contrast with the shafts of red-gold sunlight that came through the clere-story. A voice from the region of the choir was intoning something – a prayer perhaps – but Tom could not distin-guish the words. There was a scattering of people down there too, but no one at this western end.

If an evening service was in progress, then perhaps Eaves and Fawkes had concealed themselves among the congregation. But there were other, more immediate places for desperate men to hide. In the shelter of the pillars which were thick as tree trunks or in the depths of the side chapels. And there must surely be further exits on the south side of the building and elsewhere.

Casting his eyes around, Tom searched for some hint, some clue as to his quarry. And found it almost straighta-way. He heard a groan. A dozen yards behind him a body lay slumped against a low outcrop of stone which ran into the narthex and supported the base of a lone pillar. The body was garbed in black and at first he thought it was one of the men he was pursuing. But as he drew nearer he realized that it was a cathedral official. A verger probably, to judge by his dark clothing.

The man was moaning and clutching at his head with a bloodstained hand. He was elderly and almost bald, with a few strands of white hair. The blood came from an injury to his scalp. Tom crouched down on his haunches.

‘Are you all right, sir?’

The verger took his hand away from his head and looked at it, puzzled. The injury was not so bad, more of a scrape than a deep cut. Tom assisted the old man to climb to his feet. He stood, propping himself against the pillar, and gazed around as though the place was as unfamiliar to him as it was to Tom Ansell.

‘Have you seen two men?’ said Tom.

‘What do you say?’

‘Men running.’

The verger dabbed at his head and examined his hand once more before replying, ‘One of them pushed me in his rush. I fell and hit my head.’

‘Where did they go? Did you see?’

The man did not answer but sank down until he was sitting on the stone surround of the pillar. Tom did not think he was badly hurt but merely shaken up. He sensed rather than saw someone to one side and spun round. But it was only another verger, a younger man hastening to the aid of his fellow. Tom did not want to stay to explain what had happened. Every moment’s delay reduced the chance of finding the two fugitives. Or rather, one fugitive and one pursuer.

‘If you see them, give them a piece of my mind,’ said the sitting man. ‘I do not know what they expect to find in the triforium.’

He gestured behind him and Tom, glancing up, noticed a wooden enclosure that formed a kind of internal porch in the north-western corner of the building. There was a door, slightly open. Tom might have suspected a trap but he reasoned that men in such a hurry that they shoved aside a harmless old verger would not take time to close doors after them. By now, the younger verger had reached the injured man. Tom nodded to him and moved away before he could be asked any questions.

He stepped through the door of the enclosure and shut it behind him. He was standing in a stone-flagged lobby which, through a vaulted opening, showed the beginning of a flight of spiral stairs. There was no other exit, no different direction in which Fawkes and Eaves could have gone. Tom took the stairs two at a time, but the tight turns in the staircase and the smoothness of the old, worn steps caused him to lose his footing more than once. A little light came squeezing through slit windows.

He reached the top and paused to catch his breath and work out where to go next. But, again, there seemed to be little choice. A narrow passage led off to a railed gallery overlooking the nave. Was this what the old verger had called the triforium? After the dimness and constriction from the ascent to this level there came an abrupt burst of light and space. To his right the sun streamed through the windows, some of clear glass, some stained. To his left were the airy upper reaches of the nave. A small part of him that wasn’t preoccupied with keeping his balance – the guardrail was low – was aware that the sound of prayer had been replaced by singing which was thin and distant.

At the far end of the gallery was another lobby and a second spiral staircase. Tom halted for an instant. Each time he was listening out for sounds coming from ahead or above. Scuffling steps, the noise of a struggle perhaps, for he was convinced that Fawkes intended to do harm to Eaves. But there was no sound.

On the next level, Tom found himself above the vaulted ceiling of the nave. By now he was well out of the public area of the cathedral. The light, strong at this western end, was swallowed up among the massive timber frames that receded into the depths of the roof. It was like being inside an upturned ark. The wind, more evident at this height, rattled at the myriad of small panes in the west-facing windows. There was a walkway along one side of the roof, stretching above the pale domes of the vaults. Tom couldn’t be sure but he thought he detected a flicker of movement at the far end.

He started off along the walkway. It swayed slightly underfoot. This, and a rope strung between timbers which provided the only handhold, reinforced the feeling of being aboard a ship. It grew darker as Tom got closer to the end of the roof of the nave and he had to stoop slightly to enter a short passage where the walkway finished. This time he emerged into a large white-walled chamber which, he realized, formed one of the floors of the tower. A loud click startled him until he saw its source was an arrangement of wheels and cogs and cords that stretched through holes in the ceiling to the next storey. Above him must be the bells of the cathedral clock.

Tom was about to give up his quest, wondering whether Fawkes and Eaves had eluded him and taken an altogether different path through or out of the building, when he heard a distinctly human sound from the staircase which led to the floor above. It was a shout of alarm or a loud curse – he could not decide which – muffled but also magnified by the twists and turns of the stone spiral. Not the sound of an elderly verger or a discreet keeper of the bells. Tom approached the staircase, which was contained within one of the four great columns that ran up the corners of the tower.

He wished he had some object with him which might be used as a weapon. Even an umbrella would have given him confidence. But he had nothing. He could have gone off to get assistance or at least waited for it to arrive: Helen must have reached the police house by now. He might have delayed at the bottom of the spiral stairs, to intercept whoever emerged. But suppose there was some other route down from the tower?

Tom, torn between retreating and advancing, couldn’t recall a time in his life when he’d so consciously put himself in danger. There was a killer up the tower, there was another man (with God knows what driving
him
) on his tail, and Tom behind them both.

He took the next set of stairs, passing an entrance to a second white-walled chamber which, a brief glance was enough to tell him, contained nothing except a set of bells, and so continued up an even narrower stone flight. He must nearing the top of the tower. He slowed, partly because his breath was running short, partly because he could hear voices.

He rounded a final twist in the spiral and his head came level with a floor which was of wood not stone. This was the topmost point of the tower and the base of the cathedral spire. If Tom had looked up he would have seen a central wooden column from which sprang a branch-like jumble of scaffolding and small platforms, used for repairs to the inside or access to the outside of the spire. The column soared up straight as a tent-pole and as thick as the main-mast of a ship. Near it was a great treadmill-like wheel which must have once been used for hauling blocks of stone.

But Tom did not look up to where the inside of the spire disappeared into dizzying darkness. Instead his eyes were fixed on the two men who stood facing each other a few strides away from the place at which his head protruded above floor level. It was Eaves the gardener and Fawkes the coachman. They were panting, both of them, and glaring at one another. Luckily for Tom, they were so busy breathing and glaring that they were quite unaware of him.

Fawkes was holding something in his hand. It might have been a knife. Tom could not tell since the light was poor up here. But, as if conscious that he was playing to an audience, Eaves said when he’d recovered his breath, ‘You won’t do much harm with that, Seth. It’s only a trowel.’

‘I grabbed it from your store,’ said Fawkes. ‘It’s got a pointy tip. You come near and try it, Adam.’