Philip Gooden - The Salisbury Manuscript

‘So you think there are two different murderers wandering about Salisbury, Tom? That makes things worse.’

‘No, I don’t really think there are two murderers. The law of chance and probability would argue against it.’

‘But as a certain lawyer said to me this afternoon, ‘I’m not sure that law has ever been enacted in Parliament.’’

‘Oh dear,’ said Tom. ‘Tell me I don’t really sound so pompous.’

‘You don’t. Not very often anyway. Now you tell me something. You said you had a look inside this book, this memoir, which Canon Slater wanted to entrust to the firm. Now the book has gone, taken by whoever killed him, I suppose. So the book must have contained something valuable, some secret maybe. What did you see in it?’

Tom recalled glancing through the Salisbury manuscript, reading the anecdotes about Byron and Shelley, the other little item about the woman who’d danced in the nude and posed for George Slater and his friend. The reference to the prostitute in Shepherd Market and George’s fears that he’d contracted some disease from her.

Tom said, ‘It was an interesting book.’

‘I can see from your expression, Tom, what “interesting” means. It means scandalous and compromising, doesn’t it?’

‘Well, there were some stories in the memoir about meeting famous poets and the like. There was a story about Shelley sailing a boat on a pond made out of a fifty-pound note. The boat, I mean, not the pond.’

‘But there were other, less respectable things too, Tom. Was the Canon’s father’s book like the kind of thing they sell in Holywell Street?’

Tom might have asked Helen how she knew about the type of books which were for sale, on the sly and under the counter, in a particular stretch of Holywell Street near Exeter Hall in the Strand, but he saw the look on her face — somewhere between amusement and determination — and said, ‘Yes, there were some details in George Slater’s memoir which would not be publishable. Adventures with women of a certain sort, and so on.’

Helen put down her brandy glass and clapped her hands in delight.

‘Why, Tom Ansell, I wish I had had a sight of the — whatd’youcallit? — the Salisbury manuscript!’

‘That’s as may be, Helen, but a brief glance was enough to tell me why the Canon wanted the book out of his house and in safekeeping in our vaults.’

‘He could have destroyed it without going to all the trouble of summoning you to Salisbury.’

‘He would not destroy it because he had too much respect for the past, but neither did he wish to keep it. He wanted it to be seen by no one except his nephew Walter. Walter was to have the final decision on what happened to it, but only after his uncle’s death.’

‘And now his uncle’s dead and the book is gone.’

‘I don’t see how the book gives a motive for his murder though.’

‘And I don’t understand,’ said Helen. ‘Everything you’ve said suggests that the Salisbury manuscript was somehow dangerous. Why, it might have contained something about the Canon himself.’

‘Then why did he allow me to look at it? Anyway I don’t think old George Slater would have had much to say about a son who went into the Church, except a few words of dismissal or contempt.’

They were silent for a moment, trying to work their way through the tangle of confusion and doubt.

‘No, no one would have killed to get it,’ said Tom. ‘What it contained was compromising, true, but the writer was dead and the events he referred to took place many years ago. But I can see it the other way round. Felix Slater might have resorted to — to extreme measures to keep the book.’

‘Even murder?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom, surprising himself as he said it. The residentiary canon might have looked like a venerable churchman but he had been tough and wiry as an old bird. Perhaps ruthless underneath it. ‘But there’s a problem. He didn’t murder anyone. He was the victim.’

‘So perhaps Canon Slater was murdered after a tussle.’ said Helen. ‘Perhaps he was killed by someone who wanted the book.’

‘Which wouldn’t be of much concern to anyone outside the family. Who didn’t know what was in it. Walter had never seen it while Felix Slater told me that his brother Percy passed it over to him as part of his father’s effects, though some years after old George Slater died. I got the impression that Percy hadn’t been interested.’

‘You said you went to see Percy and that he wanted the stuff back.’

‘That’s true. But I think he was saying it out of a general dislike of his brother and the wish to cause trouble.’

‘Couldn’t this Percy Slater have gone to the Canon’s house and demanded the manuscript back? Couldn’t there have been a fight and so on?’

‘Possibly,’ said Tom, sounding to himself like Inspector Foster in a cautious mood. ‘Only there were no signs of a fight or a struggle in his study. He was taken by surprise. Someone he trusted, or someone he knew at any rate.’

‘What about Mrs Slater?’

‘Amelia? I don’t think so.’

‘Because she’s a woman, Tom? And because we all know that the gentle sex cannot plunge the knife in any more than they can be familiar with the books for sale in Holywell Street. So is Mrs Slater some pious clergyman’s companion, retiring and docile, like my godfather’s wife, Mrs Selby?’

‘Not at all,’ said Tom carefully. He recalled that Helen hadn’t yet caught a glimpse of Mrs Slater. ‘It’s a strange kind of union. Mrs Slater is half Italian. Apparently Felix met her when he was travelling on the Continent. Met her in Florence where she lived with her parents. When they died she came to England and she. . she. .’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, how Percy Slater put it was that she threw herself on Felix Slater’s mercy since she had no one else to turn to. And so they married and have lived in Salisbury ever since.’

‘Happily ever after?’ said Helen.

‘That’s what Percy said. Only he spoke the words with a kind of sneer. I thought perhaps he was envious of his brother. Mrs Slater is an attractive woman, Helen.’

‘I can tell that by the way you refer to her. But isn’t it odd, Tom, that she should have travelled from Florence to “throw herself on the mercy” of a cathedral canon?’

‘Maybe they had some kind of understanding. But we’ll never know, since I’m not going to ask her and he is dead.’

‘We’re going round in circles here,’ said Helen. ‘Talking of understandings, Tom, we were having a conversation before you left London. .’

Tom got up and went over to where Helen was sitting on the other side of the fire. He knelt down and took both her hands in his. Her hands were warm.

‘Shouldn’t you be on one knee though?’ she said.

Tom was about to say that this wasn’t, perhaps, the most propitious moment to be talking about marriage and that he merely wanted to be near her when they heard the front door closing quietly as someone came into the house. Before Tom could rise to his feet again, the door to the drawing room opened. It was Eric Selby. If he saw anything strange in the sight of the young lawyer kneeling before his god-daughter, her didn’t say so.

In fact, he said nothing, but simply stood in the doorway with a peculiar, abstracted look in his eyes Underneath his shovel-hat, his white hair stuck out in disordered tufts as though he’d jammed the hat on in a hurry.

Eventually Helen said, ‘What is it, Uncle? What’s wrong?’

Earlier that evening Henry Cathcart had had a visitor. It was Bessie from Venn House. She was wearing a black armband and a doleful face. She carried a letter from Mrs Slater. Henry had of course written a note of condolence to the widow. Now he had a reply on black-lined notepaper, asking him to call on her straightaway. She did not have to say that she was not free to leave her home. A new widow is not at liberty to come and go as she wishes, not without exciting comment.