Philip Gooden - The Salisbury Manuscript

Before they left The Side of Beef to go to Canon Selby’s house, Tom told Jenkins that he’d be requiring the room for a few days longer. He was going to add that he was staying in Salisbury to assist the police with their enquiries — which was true, more or less — but decided against giving the landlord that pleasure.

Eric Selby did not live in the cathedral close but nearby in New Street. It was the afternoon and the town was bustling. Helen was pleased to be back in a town she remembered from childhood. She was pleased to be with Tom. She was pleased with life because she was hearing about a murder at a safe remove. She looped her arm through his, and he kissed her cheek, glad and grateful that she’d left London to see him in gaol.

‘Riding to the rescue like a knight on a white charger,’ she said. ‘Only that is the wrong way round, since it should be you, Thomas Ansell, who comes to my rescue.’

‘We’ll see,’ he said, more cheerful than he’d been for several days.

‘Tom, I have an idea.’

‘Anything.’

‘Inspector Foster did not seem very glad to be releasing you.’

‘Perhaps no policeman likes seeing a man go from gaol before he’s caught the real culprit. Or perhaps he doesn’t think I am innocent of Canon Slater’s murder and it’s more that he doesn’t have enough evidence to hold me any longer.’

‘Well, in that case,’ said Helen, ‘we should be helping him to track down the person who actually did it. That would put you absolutely in the clear and we would also be bringing an evildoer to justice.’

‘Helen, you are not reading — or writing — one of your sensation novels now. This is real life. A man has been killed. A household has been turned upside down. I’ve spent my first and, I hope, last night incarcerated in a gaol. I’m not sure I want to get any more involved.’

‘You are involved, Tom, like it or not. Canon Slater was a client of your firm — our firm, I should say, since my father was one of the partners. And the book you came to Salisbury to collect has been stolen, most likely by the same person who murdered the unfortunate Canon. So I say you are involved in this affair.’

‘This isn’t like spying on your neighbours,’ said Tom, thinking of Helen’s speculations about the woman who lived across the road on Athelstan Avenue, and trying to shift the argument in a different direction. ‘There are dangers here.’

‘Telling me there are dangers will have the opposite effect to the one you intend. And I don’t spy , Mr Ansell, I observe and draw conclusions.’

‘Or make up stories.’

Helen uncoupled her arm from Tom’s.

‘If that’s how you feel, I begin to regret that I came racing down to Salisbury.’

‘No, no, it’s a good idea in principle, Helen. But I’m not sure how we can proceed in practice with tracking down a murderer or helping the police.’

‘We can begin by talking to my uncle, Canon Eric Selby. He has lived here forever and he knows what goes on in the town.’

‘Uncle? I thought he was your godfather.’

‘He is my godfather. But he told me to call him Uncle when I was little and asked him one day how I should address him. He said he hadn’t any nieces while for my part I hadn’t any uncles, so it all seemed to fit. He is quite avuncular, don’t you think?’

The avuncular Canon Selby seemed genuinely pleased to see Tom Ansell in company with his god-daughter. He commented on the coincidence that he should have been friends with a partner in the firm of which Tom was now a member, and the greater coincidence that Tom should be ‘paying his addresses’ (as he put it) to Helen. He passed lightly over the circumstances under which he’d last seen Tom as he was being escorted away from Venn House, and said, ‘I don’t expect you slept much last night, Tom, if I may call you that now. I know that I did not. It is dreadful to think of what happened to Felix. It is frightening to think there is a madman on the loose.’

‘A madman?’

‘Why yes. Who but a madman could have done this?’

The three of them — Eric Selby, Tom and Helen — were sitting in the drawing room of the Canon’s trim house in New Street. There was a Mrs Selby, a small woman who had made a single appearance to say hello and then disappeared with a bird-like rapidity. A maid served them tea. Talk of a madman went oddly with the tea. Tom hadn’t eaten since breakfast at Fisherton Gaol and his appetite wasn’t really satisfied by sandwiches (cucumber or anchovy) and little cakes. He promised himself a good meal that evening at The Side of Beef. Now Helen, in between delicate bites at her cucumber sandwich, started to quiz her godfather about Felix Slater.

‘I am sorry for his death although it is no secret that I did not see eye to eye with Felix,’ said Selby. ‘In fact, we had an argument of sorts on the day of his death.’

Helen asked him why they’d argued. It was the sort of question which Tom could not have put, or at least not so directly.

‘Lay people often assume that men of the cloth are cut from the same cloth,’ said Selby. ‘but we are not. We’re as different as men are from one another in any other walk of life, and although we may be obliged to love our neighbours, there is no verse in the Bible that says we have to get on with them. Felix seemed to be a spare, dry man. But like a lot of men with that appearance, he had passions. One of them was for digging into the past, for disturbing the dust of centuries. There is nothing wrong with that although I fear he sometimes neglected his duties in pursuit of his passion, his obsession I might say. Felix’s example and encouragement had turned the mind of one of the cathedral sextons, so that the poor fellow spent every spare moment looking for buried treasure or relics.’

Tom recalled the newspaper article which Henry Cathcart had shown him. About a sexton who’d disappeared. Canon Selby himself had been quoted in the article.

‘Now this man North has vanished, gone goodness knows where. And I held Felix partly to blame, not for the disappearance of course but for the mania which seized him beforehand. The fellow was a good and honest worker until Canon Slater infected him with his notions of disinterring the past. I am afraid that I taxed Felix with this very subject on the day he died. Of course, I must now regret that I spoke so directly to him.’

He didn’t sound very regretful. Tom wondered whether there had been more to the argument than Eric Selby was claiming. He said, ‘Canon Selby, do you remember yesterday evening when Inspector Foster arrived at Venn House and I was being put under — when I was being escorted away by him, do you remember hearing someone whisper my name and then “he did it”?’

Selby brushed some cake crumbs off his front. He thought before speaking. ‘I might have heard that.’

‘Was it a man or a woman?’

‘I’m not sure. Did I even hear those words, now I come to think about it? Or was it just a idea hanging in the air, as it were? It did look bad for you, Tom.’

Tom didn’t need any reminding of how bad it looked.

‘So you have no idea who might have committed this murder, sir?’ he said.

‘Even if I did, I would not say. It is not for me to go passing on suspicions, supposing I have any. But I have no idea. A madman, it must have been. Or a burglar surprised in the act and resorting to violence.’

And that seemed to be the general conclusion in the town: that Canon Felix Slater had been killed by an intruder, who was either bent on robbery or, more simply, a homicidal maniac. Certainly, this was the version reported on the front page of the Gazette , which Tom saw on his return to the hotel. Under the headline in large type Dreadful Murder in Cathedral Close was a story which was long on speculation but short on fact. There was a description of how the body of the distinguished cleric had been found by the housemaid and the alarm raised by Mrs Amelia Slater. Death had been produced by a single blow to the back of the neck. The weapon was a flint spearhead, ironically (the newspaper’s word) one of the primitive implements which Canon Slater collected as a pastime. Then there was a paragraph about a burglar or a madman or a combination of the two, necessarily brief because it was all speculation. There was a reference to the other, unexplained robberies in the close. Apart from Mrs Slater, the only people named in the piece were Walter, nephew to the deceased and assistant curate at St Luke’s, and Percy Slater, brother of Felix and owner of the Slater family home at Downton. Of the others on the scene, including Tom, there was no mention.