Ngaio Marsh - Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh

“Yes,” Troy swallowed hard, “there is. They’re all saying it’s an accident.”

“Yes?”

“And, Rory, I don’t think it is.”

Mr. Fox cleared his throat. “Fancy,” he said.

“Suicide?” Alleyn suggested, bringing her drink to her.

“No. Certainly not.”

“A bit of rough stuff, then?”

“You sound as if you’re asking about the sort of weather we’ve been having.”

“Well, darling, you don’t expect Fox and me to go into hysterics. Why not an accident?”

“He knew all about the other accidents, he knew it was dangerous. And then the oddness of it, Rory. To leave the Harvest Festival service and climb the tower in the dark, carrying that enormous Bible!”

“And he was hell-bent on tracing these Hadets?”

“Yes. He kept saying you’d be interested. He actually brought a copy of the entries for you.”

“Have you got it?”

She found it for him. “The selected texts,” he said, “are pretty rum, aren’t they, Br’er Fox?” and handed it over.

“Very vindictive,” said Mr. Fox.

“Mr. Bates thought it was in your line,” Troy said.

“The devil he did! What’s been done about this?”

“The village policeman was in the church. They sent for the doctor. And—well, you see, Mr. Bates had talked a lot about you and they hope you’ll be able to tell them something about him—whom they should get in touch with and so on.”

“Have they moved him?”

“They weren’t going to until the doctor had seen him.”

Alleyn pulled his wife’s ear and looked at Fox. “Do you fancy a stroll through the village, Foxkin?”

“There’s a lovely moon,” Fox said bitterly and got to his feet.

The moon was high in the heavens when they came to the base of the tower and it shone on a group of four men—the rector, Richard De’ath, Edward Pilbrow, and Sergeant Botting, the village constable. When they saw Alleyn and Fox, they separated and revealed a fifth, who was kneeling by the body of Timothy Bates.

“Kind of you to come,” the rector said, shaking hands with Alleyn. “And a great relief to all of us.”

Their manner indicated that Alleyn’s arrival would remove a sense of personal responsibility. “If you’d like to have a look—?” the doctor said.

The broken body lay huddled on its side. The head rested on the open Bible. The right hand, rigid in cadaveric spasm, clutched a torn page. Alleyn knelt and Fox came closer with the torch. At the top of the page Alleyn saw the word Ezekiel and a little farther down, Chapter 12.

Using the tip of his finger Alleyn straightened the page. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the thirteenth verse. “ My net also will I spread upon him and he shall be taken in my snare .”

The words had been faintly underlined in mauve.

Alleyn stood up and looked round the circle of faces.

“Well,” the doctor said, “we’d better see about moving him.”

Alleyn said, “I don’t think he should be moved just yet.”

“Not!” the rector cried out. “But surely—to leave him like this—I mean, after this terrible accident—”

“It has yet to be proved,” Alleyn said, “that it was an accident.”

There was a sharp sound from Richard De’ath.

“—and I fancy,” Alleyn went on, glancing at De’ath, “that it’s going to take quite a lot of proving.”

After that, events, as Fox observed with resignation, took the course that was to be expected. The local Superintendent said that under the circumstances it would be silly not to ask Alleyn to carry on, the Chief Constable agreed, and appropriate instructions came through from Scotland Yard. The rest of the night was spent in routine procedure. The body having been photographed and the Bible set aside for fingerprinting, both were removed and arrangements put in hand for the inquest.

At dawn Alleyn and Fox climbed the tower. The winding stair brought them to an extremely narrow doorway through which they saw the countryside lying vaporous in the faint light. Fox was about to go through to the balcony when Alleyn stopped him and pointed to the door jambs. They were covered with a growth of stonecrop.

About three feet from the floor this had been brushed off over a space of perhaps four inches and fragments of the microscopic plant hung from the scars. From among these, on either side, Alleyn removed morsels of dark-colored thread. “And here,” he sighed, “as sure as fate, we go again. O Lord, O Lord!”

They stepped through to the balcony and there was a sudden whirr and beating of wings as a company of pigeons flew out of the tower. The balcony was narrow and the balustrade indeed very low. “If there’s any looking over,” Alleyn said, “you, my dear Foxkin, may do it.”

Nevertheless he leaned over the balustrade and presently knelt beside it. “Look at this. Bates rested the open Bible here—blow me down flat if he didn’t! There’s a powder of leather where it scraped on the stone and a fragment where it tore. It must have been moved—outward. Now, why, why ?”

“Shoved it accidentally with his knees, then made a grab and overbalanced?”

“But why put the open Bible there? To read by moonlight? My net also will I spread upon him and he shall be taken in my snare . Are you going to tell me he underlined it and then dived overboard?”

“I’m not going to tell you anything,” Fox grunted and then: “That old chap Edward Pilbrow’s down below swabbing the stones. He looks like a beetle.”

“Let him look like a rhinoceros if he wants to, but for the love of Mike don’t leer over the edge—you give me the willies. Here, let’s pick this stuff up before it blows away.”

They salvaged the scraps of leather and put them in an envelope. Since there was nothing more to do, they went down and out through the vestry and so home to breakfast.

“Darling,” Alleyn told his wife, “you’ve landed us with a snorter.”

“Then you do think—?”

“There’s a certain degree of fishiness. Now, see here, wouldn’t somebody have noticed little Bates get up and go out? I know he sat all alone on the back bench, but wasn’t there someone ?”

“The rector?”

“No. I asked him. Too intent on his sermon, it seems.”

“Mrs. Simpson? If she looks through her little red curtain she faces the nave.”

“We’d better call on her, Fox. I’ll take the opportunity to send a couple of cables to New Zealand. She’s fat, jolly, keeps the shop-cum-postoffice, and is supposed to read all the postcards. Just your cup of tea. You’re dynamite with postmistresses. Away we go.”

Mrs. Simpson sat behind her counter doing a crossword puzzle and refreshing herself with licorice. She welcomed Alleyn with enthusiasm. He introduced Fox and then he retired to a corner to write out his cables.

“What a catastrophe!” Mrs. Simpson said, plunging straight into the tragedy. “Shocking! As nice a little gentleman as you’d wish to meet, Mr. Fox. Typical New Zealander. Pick him a mile away and a friend of Mr. Alleyn’s, I’m told, and if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times, Mr. Fox, they ought to have put something up to prevent it. Wire netting or a bit of ironwork; but, no, they let it go on from year to year and now see what’s happened —history repeating itself and giving the village a bad name. Terrible!”

Fox bought a packet of tobacco from Mrs. Simpson and paid her a number of compliments on the layout of her shop, modulating from there into an appreciation of the village. He said that one always found such pleasant company in small communities. Mrs. Simpson was impressed and offered him a piece of licorice.