Philip Gooden - The Salisbury Manuscript

‘Why?’

‘Because although my immediate enquiries concerning you, Mr Ansell, may be nearly finished, there is no saying whether you won’t be called to contribute to the investigation in future. If so, it would be handier to have you on the spot rather than sending to London.’

Foster looked genial enough as he said these words but he tugged at his side-whiskers as if in emphasis. Tom sensed that he might be prevented if he tried to leave the city. And, in fairness, he might have some work to do in attending to Felix Slater’s estate.

‘Did you find any documents in the study, Inspector?’ he said. ‘Or, to be more exact, did you see a volume rather like a diary with a hasp and a lock?’

‘I don’t think so. Why, is it important?’

‘Not especially,’ said Tom.

Foster looked as though he didn’t quite believe Tom but he said nothing. Instead he drained his coffee cup and stood up. He stretched out his hand and shook Tom’s, saying, ‘An hour or two, sir, and we shall have you out of here.’ The gesture and words were reassuring.

But once Foster had left the prison apartment, Tom couldn’t be certain whether or not he had turned the key after him. If he had, it had been done in a discreet fashion. Tom was reluctant to try the door in case it was locked, which would indicate that the policeman still regarded him as a prisoner. Nevertheless, he did get up and test the door. It was locked. He sat down again and picked up his cup. The coffee was cold. He tried to steer his mind on a different course, away from himself, now that the first shock of Slater’s murder and his own incarceration had worn off.

Tom started to wonder why Slater had been killed. Was it connected to the disappearance of the Salisbury manuscript? Or something different altogether? More important, who had done it? Who had felt sufficient coldness or fury towards Felix Slater to take a flint spearhead from the display case and plunge it into the nape of the man’s neck? The Canon had surely been taken off his guard. That suggested that whoever was in the study with him was someone he knew, someone he was not expecting to harm him. Therefore, not a stranger or an outsider, which tended to confirm what the Inspector believed: that this was not the individual who’d been breaking into other houses in the close. So, a friend or a fellow cleric, a member of the family, a servant?

Tom ran his mind back over the group gathered in and around the entrance to Venn House. Leaving aside Bessie, the maid with the crooked collar, and Eaves the gardener, together with some other servants he didn’t know, there were Felix’s wife and his nephew and his brother, as well as Canon Eric Selby and the store-owner Henry Cathcart.

He remembered what Inspector Foster had said, the words whispered into the air, the words which had enabled Foster to call Tom by name. ‘Mr Ansell, he did it!’

Tom had shivered when Foster said that. Why? Some sixth sense? He was seized by the feeling that it was the murderer himself who’d spoken, in an attempt perhaps to imprint his guilt on the minds of those standing around. The murderer himself. Or the murderer herself since the Inspector hadn’t even been sure whether the voice was male or female.

The only woman in question, Amelia Slater, she had quite a deep voice. And her behaviour on their only two previous encounters was definitely odd. That teasing meeting near The Side of Beef and then her plea to him outside the gate of Venn House next morning that he should say nothing of that first, chance event, her pretence the next day that they’d never met at all. She’d pretended well, better than he managed to pretend. Had Amelia Slater got something to hide? Was she afraid of her husband or was she merely tired of him? Was she conducting some kind of liaison with another man? But it was a leap from that to murder.

Out of the various men who’d been on the scene, he had little knowledge of their relations with Canon Slater. True, Percy hadn’t cared for his clerical brother, had told Tom not to be taken in by his ‘holy act’. And he’d demanded that Tom get back the papers which had been passed over to Felix. And now the papers, their father’s memoirs, were gone. Did Percy travel to Salisbury to recover them in person? Had he confronted his brother and killed him following an argument?

Too many questions and absolutely no answers.

There was Walter, Felix’s nephew. The curate seemed on friendly enough terms with his uncle, the two had talked easily at the lunch table a couple of days before. There could be no motive there, surely?

Tom was aware that Eric Selby did not like his fellow Canon. He recalled the look of distaste which crossed Selby’s face when he was asking directions to Venn House. Walter Slater had said that there was a coolness between the two men, although without enlarging on the reason. He found it hard to believe that old Selby could have plunged a flint into the bare neck of a fellow churchman. Yet, though it was hard to believe Selby was capable of such a deed, it was strangely easy to visualize him doing it.

As to the next man on the scene, Henry Cathcart, Tom didn’t know what to think. His impression was of a kindly man who, at their only meeting, had been deeply affected by memories of Tom’s father. Yet this prosperous store-keeper and citizen of the town had once been a soldier. He must be familiar with killing at first hand. But what was his link, if any, to Felix Slater?

And then Tom recalled that there had been another individual standing near the porch at Venn House as he was being so ignominiously escorted away by the police. A fifth man. It was Fawkes, the servant to Percy Slater. There was something unsettling about Fawkes. ‘You have a care, sir,’ he’d said to Tom at Downton station the previous day, as if issuing a warning. But he knew nothing further about the fellow. Fawkes was on the spot because he was with Percy Slater, his master from Northwood House.

Tom spent an hour or more on speculations about who might have murdered Felix Slater, and why. He got nowhere. His mind wandered in other directions. He suddenly remembered the old woman who’d been travelling in his compartment on the Basingstoke train. She’d said something, wished him ‘Good luck’ perhaps. He searched for other portents to this ill-fated trip. He wondered when the moment of his release would arrive. If Foster required him to stay in Salisbury, would the policeman take the easiest course and keep him clapped up in Fisherton Gaol as a potential suspect? The next time Griffiths or the gaoler’s wife appeared, Tom would ask for pen and paper and write to David Mackenzie with a full account of what had happened. An intervention by Mackenzie might have some effect on the provincial police. Yet Foster hadn’t seemed the kind of person to be swayed like that.

Tom’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the door opening. Mrs Griffiths stood there.

‘A visitor, Mr Ansell,’ she said.

Tom resigned himself to another interview with Foster.

‘A lady, it is,’ added the gaoler’s wife, glancing to one side before moving away from the cell door.

And he thought, for no good reason, that the visitor was that new widow, Mrs Felix Slater.

But when the person who’d been standing next to Mrs Griffiths appeared in the doorway, he gasped. A younger woman stood there.

It was Helen.

It was easily enough explained, once Tom had got over his first surprise at seeing Helen — his surprise and delight. For it was Canon Eric Selby who had, indirectly, caused Helen to come down from London on a morning train. He was aware that Tom worked for a London firm but hadn’t known that the firm was called Scott, Lye amp;Mackenzie. Many years ago, as Selby hinted to Tom on their cab ride from Salisbury station, he had considered the law as a career before deciding to go into the Church. He was a friend of Alfred Scott, Helen’s father, a good enough friend to have become godfather to Helen. Indeed, she had spent some of her childhood time in Salisbury.