David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

A whole circle of suspects floated past Powerscourt’s brain. Horace Aloysius Buckley, on his knees at Evensong. He remembered Inspector Maxwell telling him that a man called Johnston from the National Gallery had been the last person to see Christopher Montague alive. He could see Roderick Johnston, a great bear of a man, turning over a length of picture cord in his hands. Someone from Clarke’s or Capaldi’s or de Courcy and Piper, peering intently at a scene from one of their paintings, a Cain and Abel maybe, David and Goliath. Ever present in his mind were the terrible marks on Christopher Montague’s neck.

Mrs Imogen Foxe was sitting in the morning room of her great house in Dorset. The wind was swirling round the terrace outside the tall windows, blowing the leaves away. Beyond it lawns and gravel stretched for a hundred and fifty yards to a small lake with an island in the centre. In her left hand she held a bundle of letters. The top one was from her mother – how well she knew that handwriting – probably another missive telling her to be a proper wife. The next one was from her sister, and probably carried the same message. The third was from a cousin in America, the fourth was in an unknown hand, almost certainly male. As she opened it, two letters fell on to her lap. She almost stopped breathing. Then her heart was beating very fast. She looked around to make sure she was alone and hurried out into the garden, clutching the letters in her hand.

The first was a very formal note, indicating that if she wished to reply to the other letter, she could do so to the above address. The correspondence would be sent on. The second was from her former lover, Orlando Blane.

‘My darling Imogen,’ it began, in Orlando’s rather flowery hand,

I cannot say what I feel because others are going to read this letter. I cannot say where I am. I cannot say what I am doing. But I am well and I long to see you. The people here say they will consider allowing you to come and stay here or nearby. I do hope you will say yes. I am not allowed to write any more. Remember the sonnets. Orlando.

Imogen felt her emotions running away with her. She read the letter again. It was all very mysterious, very romantic. Sonnets. She remembered the trip up the Thames from Windsor, Orlando rowing away, looking impossibly beautiful with those blue eyes sparkling against the water. When she was twelve years old she had decided that she could only ever fall in love with a man with blue eyes. She hadn’t broken her vows yet. Sonnets, Shakespeare sonnets, whispered under the leaves of a weeping willow on the bank, her hand trailing in the cool water.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

It sounds as if Orlando is a prisoner somewhere, she said to herself. He cannot say where he is or what he is doing. Why would anybody want to kidnap Orlando and lock him up in a dark tower? She remembered the man who had paid his debts in the casino. Maybe he had Orlando under lock and key. Imogen peered closely at the letter to see if there were any clues as to its origins. There were not. She set off to walk to the lake, holding the letters very tightly in case the wind blew them away. She shivered slightly, not only from the cold.

We’re both prisoners, she thought. Orlando is locked up somewhere unknown, I am locked up inside a marriage to a man my parents forced me to marry. She had resigned herself to her fate. She went to the local dinner parties, full of hearty squires and their buxom wives, talking endlessly of hunting and the threat of higher taxes under a Liberal government. She received her husband’s guests, drifting through the evenings as if she were in a dream, her mind far away. She knew that most of the neighbouring families thought Granville Foxe had married a mad woman, seduced by her beauty into forgetting the vagaries of her temperament, the odd silences, the lack of attention she paid to local affairs. And, they said, she reads poetry, sometimes in foreign languages like French. No greater proof of insanity or mental decay could have been produced in hunting country than that. But on one point Imogen had remained absolutely firm since the wedding night. She locked her bedroom door.

When she reached the lake, the surface was choppy, a couple of ducks bobbing up and down by the water’s edge. She began composing her reply to the letter. She would make it very formal, she decided. Mrs Imogen Foxe thanks Mr Peters for his invitation to visit Mr Orlando Blane and has great pleasure in accepting.

Powerscourt found Chief Inspector Wilson pacing up and down the late Thomas Jenkins’ room in the Banbury Road. Wilson was looking perplexed.

‘There’s not a lot of progress, my lord,’ he said, ‘apart from a couple of people who remember seeing Buckley in Oxford on the day of the murder. We have talked to everybody who lives round about, all the streets for a hundred yards or so from here, and nobody saw anything unusual on the day the unfortunate Jenkins was killed. No strangers. Nobody out of the ordinary at all.’

Powerscourt produced his photograph of Horace Aloysius Buckley in his cricket flannels. He told him of his conversation with Buckley’s partner and the secret passion for Evensong.

‘All the cathedrals in England, did you say?’ Chief Inspector Wilson’s reaction was the same as Powerscourt’s own. ‘How many are there altogether, for God’s sake?’

‘I was trying to count them on my way here on the train,’ said Powerscourt. He fixed his mind on an imaginary rail map of England. ‘St Paul’s and Southwark in London wouldn’t be much of a problem. Rochester, Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury, Exeter, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Coventry, Peterborough, Ely, Norwich, Lincoln, York Minster must count as a cathedral as it’s got an Archbishop, Ripon, Durham, Carlisle, Christ Church here in Oxford. That’s nearly twenty-one of them, probably some more I’ve forgotten.’ Did Bury St Edmunds have one? Did Manchester? Did Birmingham? It seemed a bit unfair for the west of England to have three close together at Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford when the north was scarcely supplied. Were the people more pagan north of the Wash?

Chief Inspector Wilson rubbed his hand across his forehead. ‘Evensong or no Evensong,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind telling you, my lord, that my superiors think we should issue a warrant for Buckley’s arrest. It’s the tie, my lord. Mrs Buckley told us that the Trinity College, Cambridge tie we found on the floor in Jenkins’ room belonged to her husband. She recognized a dark stain near the bottom.’

‘But you can’t arrest a man because of a tie, Chief Inspector. Hundreds of people must have those ties and some of them will have stains near the bottom,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I know that as well as you do, my lord,’ said Chief Inspector Wilson. Powerscourt suspected Wilson might often have trouble with his superiors. Wilson would never become a professor in his native city but he could be obstinate, stubborn, reluctant to admit he was in the wrong.

‘They say, my superiors,’ he went on – was that a faint note of sarcasm in the way he said superiors, Powerscourt wondered? – ‘that it all has to do with motive. This Buckley man finds out that his wife has been carrying on with the first corpse, the man Montague.’ Powerscourt shuddered slightly at the thought of carrying on with a corpse. ‘So he kills him. Then he discovers that she’s been coming to Oxford to see this man Jenkins. Maybe she was carrying on with him as well. So Buckley kills him too. You have to admit the motive looks pretty strong.’