Edmund Crispin - Holy Disorders

In this, as it happened, he was wrong.

Any visit which you make to Tolnbridge you will regret .

Nothing explicit about it, of course, but it had a business-like air which was far from inspiring confidence. He noticed with that peculiarly galling sense of annoyance which comes from the shattering of some unimportant illusion that the paper and envelope were distinctive and expensive and the typewriter, to judge from its many typographical eccentricities, easily identifiable – provided one knew where to start looking for it. He abandoned himself to aggrievedness. Criminals should at least try to preserve the pretence of anonymity, and not flaunt unsolvable clues before their victims. The postmark, too – thanks to the conscientiousness of some employee of the GPO – read quite legibly as Tolnbridge; which was what one would expect.

The telegram, loosely held in his left hand, fluttered to the floor. He picked it up, shook it fastidiously free of dirt, and read it through automatically, perhaps hoping to extract from the spidery, insubstantial capitals of the British telegraph system some shred of significance which had previously escaped him. That air of callous gaiety, he reflected bitterly, could have emanated from no one but the sender. It ran:

I AM AT TOLNBRIDGE STAYING AT THE CLERGY HOUSE PRIESTS PRIESTS PRIESTS THE PLACE IS BLACK WITH THEM COME AND PLAY THE CATHEDRAL SERVICES ALL THE ORGANISTS HAVE BEEN SHOT UP DISMAL BUSINESS THE MUSIC WASN’T AS BAD AS ALL THAT EITHER YOU’D BETTER COME AT ONCE BRING ME A BUTTERFLY NET I NEED ONE WIRE BACK COMING NOT COMING PREPARE FOR LONG STAY GERVASE FEN

Accompanying this had been a reply-paid form allowing for a reply of fifty words. It was with a sense of some satisfaction that Geoffrey had filled it in: COMING VINTNER – a satisfaction, however, tempered by the suspicion that Fen would not even notice the sarcasm. Fen was like that.

And now he doubted whether he would have sent that reply at all had it not been for the telegraph-boy hovering about outside the door and his own natural reluctance to take it to the post office later on. Most of our decisions, he reflected, are forced on us by laziness. And, of course, at that stage he had not yet opened his letters.… There were compensations. The Tolnbridge choir was a good one, and the organ, a four-manual Willis, one of the finest in the country. He remembered idly that it had a horn stop which really sounded like a horn, a lovely stopped diapason on the choir, a noble tuba, a thirty-two-foot on the pedals which in its lower register sent a rhythmic pulse of vibration through the whole building, unnerving the faithful…But were these things compensation enough?

In any case – his mental homily prolonged itself as the taxi shot round Trafalgar Square – here he was, involved against his will in some sordid conflict of law and disorder, and in some considerable personal danger. The letter and the telegram in conjunction were proof enough of that. What it was all about was another matter. The telegram, suitably punctuated, suggested that some enemy was engaged in a determined attempt to abolish, by attrition, the church-music of Tolnbridge – the reason, presumably, why his own proximate arrival was so much resented. But this seemed unlikely, not to say fantastic. The organists had been ‘shot up’ – what on earth did that mean? It suggested, ominously, machine-guns – but then Fen was notoriously prone to exaggeration, and cathedral towns in the West of England do not normally harbour gangs. He sighed. Useless to speculate – he was in it, with at least nine-tenths of his boats burnt and the rest manifestly unseaworthy. The only thing to do was to sit back and rely on fate and his own wits if anything happened – neither of which aids, he remembered without satisfaction, had done him any very yeoman service in the past. And what was all this about a butterfly-net…?

The butterfly-net. He hadn’t got it.

He glanced hastily at his watch, and banged on the glass as the taxi rounded Cambridge Circus preparatory to entering the Charing Cross Road.

‘Regent Street,’ he said. The taxi performed a full circle and headed down Shaftesbury Avenue.

A following cab altered its course likewise.

The Regent Street emporium which Geoffrey Vintner eventually selected as being most likely to house a butterfly-net proved to be surprisingly empty, with assistants and customers sweltering in a mid-morning lethargy. It seemed to have been designed with the purpose of evading any overt admission of its function. There were pictures on the walls, and superfluous furnishings, and fat gilt cherubs; while vaguely symbolical figures, standing stiff as Pomeranian grenadiers, supported insouciantly in the small of their backs the ends of the banisters. Before going in, Geoffrey paused to buy a paper, reflecting that any intimations of gang warfare in Tolnbridge would certainly have reached the Press by now. But the Battle of Britain held the headlines, and after crashing into two people while engaged in a search among the smaller items, he postponed further investigation for the time being.

A gigantic placard showing the location of the various departments proved useless from the point of view of butterfly-nets, so he resorted to the inquiry counter. What Fen could want with such a thing as a butterfly-net it was impossible to imagine. Geoffrey had a momentary wild vision of the pair of them pursuing insects across the Devon moors, and looked again, even more doubtfully, at the telegram. But no; it could not by any stretch of the imagination be a mistake; and lepidoptery was as likely to be Fen’s present obsession as anything else.

Butterfly-nets, he learned, were to be had from either the children’s or the sports department; fortunately both were on the same floor. He examined the lift-girl with a professional air of suspicion as she closed the gates on him, and was rewarded with an exaggeratedly indignant stare (‘’aving an eyeful,’ she confided to a friend). Thereupon he retired hastily into his paper, and as he was borne upward through the building, discovered and read the following:

ATTACK ON MUSICIAN

The police have as yet no clue to the assailant of Dr Denis Brooks, Organist of Tolnbridge Cathedral, who was attacked and rendered unconscious while on his way home the evening before last.

Geoffrey cursed the papers for their lack of detail, Fen for his exaggeration, and himself for becoming involved in the business at all. This private ritual of commination concluded, he scratched his nose ruefully; something was going on, anyway. But what had happened to the deputy organist? Presumably he had been banged on the head as well.

The lift came to a shattering stop, and Geoffrey found himself precipitated into the midst of a vast mellay of sports equipment, tenanted only by one plump, pink young assistant, who stood gazing about him with the resignation and despair of Priam amid the ruins of Troy.

‘Have you ever noticed,’ he said gloomily as Geoffrey approached, ‘the way no sports apparatus is ever a decent, symmetrical shape? You can’t pile it up neatly like boxes or books – there are always little bits sticking out on all sides. Roller-skates are the worst.’ His tone deepened, indicating his especial abhorrence of these inconvenient objects. ‘And footballs roll off the shelf as soon as you put them up, and skis you are bound to fall over, and the moment you lean a cricket-bat against the wall it slides down again.’ He looked unhappily at Geoffrey. ‘Is there anything you want? Most people,’ he went on before Geoffrey could reply, ‘have given up sports for the war. I expect they’re better off for it in the end. Muscular development only provides a foothold for fat.’ He sighed.

‘What I really wanted was a butterfly-net,’ said Geoffrey absently; his mind still dwelt on the problem of the organists.