Philip Gooden - The Salisbury Manuscript

Tom and she had been content to do no more than guide Foster and his men towards the point above the fallen beech on the eastern side of the hill. They did not see Gabriel the shepherd again. Perhaps he was alarmed by the crowd of police. Tom and Helen watched from the embankment gateway while the constables did what was literally the dirty work down below under Foster’s direction. The first constable to go in, Chesney, came out almost straightaway. He said, ‘There’s two of ’em in there, guv.’ Foster explained that they weren’t interested in bare bones, which might have lain there for centuries, but in fresh (or freshish) corpses. Chesney should go back inside and concentrate on that.

The burial chamber was too small to hold more than a single person at a time so first Constable Chesney and then the other policemen entered one by one, holding their breath and tugging at the corpse until it was brought out, inch by inch, from the interior of the burrow and laid out on the hillside. One of the constables turned away to be sick. Even from a distance the sight was unpleasant. Tom instinctively put up his hand to shield Helen but she had already averted her gaze.

The body was still clothed but the garments were stained and discoloured, and rents in the material showed grey-green flesh underneath. The head, which was the same colour, had little hair left and the face was shapeless and pitted with myriad tiny holes. It was apparent too that small animals must have been feeding on the whole body.

The police had brought with them ropes and a canvas sheet in which they tied the body, and a makeshift stretcher to carry it away on. Foster ordered them to lug their burden to the other side of Todd’s Mound and dump it in the cart. He slapped down the frivolous suggestion of one of his men that it might be quicker to roll the body down the steep incline on this side and collect it at the bottom. After their initial shock and surprise, Tom and Helen had become fascinated by the process, almost against their will. Helen, in particular, had started hanging over the shrouded body in a manner that Tom considered pretty unhealthy. He put it down to her novelist’s sensibility.

While his men were dealing with the corpse, the Inspector and the others returned to Salisbury. By now it was growing dark. Foster promised he would call on them at Canon Selby’s to give them his news.

Foster was as good as his word even if he didn’t have much to convey. Identification of the corpse was almost impossible, said the Inspector, and in any case it would have to be cremated as soon as possible in the interests of public health. Identification could only be done through the dead man’s garments which, when cleaned up, would be shown to Mrs Banks in the hope (or rather the fear) that she might recognize some article belonging to her brother. He thought it likely that the corpse was North. The Inspector had already informed Mrs Banks of this because, chancing to meet him in the street, she had badgered him with questions. He had no choice but to tell her they had unearthed a body which was probably Andrew’s.

‘Mrs Banks is naturally distressed,’ said Foster, ‘but when she found that it was you two, Mr Ansell and Miss Scott, who had made the discovery, she was grateful you had gone to such trouble after you visited her. I didn’t know you had called on Mrs Banks.’

‘It’s not against the law, Inspector,’ said Tom.

‘Of course it’s not, sir, but I must say that we do not much approve in this part of the country of members of the public involving themselves in police business. Asking questions, finding corpses and the like.’

‘Is there evidence of foul play on the body, Inspector?’ said Tom quickly.

‘Foul play?’ said Foster, pulling at his great side-whiskers and gazing into space as if the words were spelled out there in capital letters. ‘You mean murder, Mr Ansell. There’s no evidence one way or the other, I’m afraid, not on the body itself. It’s in far too decomposed a state for us to tell anything from it, whether the chap was throttled or bashed over the head or stabbed in the back. But I don’t think that Mr Whoever-he-was crawled inside that burial place by himself. Someone pushed and shoved him inside so that he was lying next to the remains of some other gent, who is none of our concern since he died long before the Salisbury police was a gleam in anyone’s eye. But the pushing and the shoving to Mr Whoever-he-was suggests to me that he was done away with.’

‘Not Mr Whoever-he-was but Mr North. We know that North was in the habit of visiting Todd’s Mound, Inspector,’ said Helen, repeating what she’d said to Tom earlier that day. Helen was back on an even keel. A hot bath, a change of clothes, a light supper and some of her godfather’s brandy (taken by Helen against Eric Selby’s advice) together with the basic excitements of the day recollected in tranquillity, had brought her back to her usual self.

‘Just because we’ve found a body in a solitary place which a man was accustomed to visit doesn’t mean that body and man are one and the same, Miss Scott. After all, it could be that a second individual had an interest in that burial place. In fact, we know a second individual had an interest because one of them had to kill the other in order to leave the first one there. If you see what I mean.’

‘You mean that Andrew North might be the murderer himself,’ said Tom, ‘and that the body which isn’t yet identified could be someone else?’

‘I am not going to start accusing people of murder, Mr Ansell, without a little more evidence. You should be glad I follow that policy. Remember, sir?’

And of course Tom did remember his treatment at Foster’s hands, fair treatment on the whole, when he’d been put in Fisherton Gaol.

‘Has either of you seen Walter Slater?’ said Foster, in an unexpected change of subject.

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘He lives at Venn House, doesn’t he, with his aunt and uncle?’

‘He does normally,’ said the Inspector. ‘But he hasn’t been there since the night of his uncle’s murder.’

‘Perhaps he has gone back to his father’s house in Downton,’ said Tom.

‘No. I have established that Walter Slater is not at Northwood either.’

‘His church? He is a curate in the town.’

‘Yes, at St Luke’s. He was seen there the morning after his uncle’s murder but he has not been sighted since.’

Despite the warmth of the Selbys’ drawing room, and the sense of having eaten and drunk well at the end of a long and anxious day, Tom Ansell experienced a sudden chill. He had liked Walter Slater on the strength of a single meeting. He hoped nothing had happened to the fellow. Of course, there was another explanation why the curate might have gone missing after Felix’s murder but Tom was reluctant to give it house room.

‘By the way, Miss Scott,’ said Foster, ‘where is your godfather? Here we are sitting in his house and warming ourselves by his fire and drinking his brandy, but there is no Canon Selby.’

‘He had to go out on business, I believe,’ said Helen. ‘Church business, that is.’

‘Just as long as he hasn’t disappeared too,’ said the Inspector. ‘Well, I’d better be making myself disappear. I will keep you informed of any discoveries we make about the body from Todd’s Mound. But don’t go tripping over any more remains, Mr Ansell.’

After Foster had gone, Tom and Helen remained sitting near the fire, sipping at their brandy and musing over the events of the day.

‘How do you suppose this second murder of Mr North is connected to the murder of Canon Slater, Tom?’

‘Perhaps it isn’t.’

‘It must be.’

‘It’s only in a story that deaths and murders have to be tied together.’