C S Lewis and the Body in the Basement (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 1) (21 page)

I stepped inside the dim coolness of the pub and said to Frank Jones behind the bar, ‘Did you see that?’

The publican looked up from the glass he was wiping with a tea towel and replied with a grin, ‘He’s not a happy man is our bank manager.’

I asked what the problem was and the publican replied, ‘It seems there’s been some sort of falling out between Mr Ravenswood and his wife. He came here asking if we’d seen her—or if she was staying here.’

‘That sounds like more than a falling out,’ I commented. ‘It sounds rather more like she’s left him.’

Jones grinned salaciously but said nothing. Then I asked him where the Lewis brothers were, and following his directions found them seated in cane chairs in the sunshine on the lawn behind the pub. Both were reading books. Jack had a pocket edition of Spenser while Warnie was turning the pages of
It Walks by Night
.

‘Ah, the traveller returns,’ grunted Warnie.

‘Was my absence noticed?’ I asked. ‘Was I missed?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Jack. ‘In fact, the good Inspector Crispin was rather miffed to discover you’d slipped the net. He calmed down a little when I promised that you’d return shortly. He left here only ten minutes ago, muttering darkly about the calamities that might fall upon your head.’

‘Should I go and see him at the police station?’ I asked nervously. I didn’t fancy the idea of upsetting policemen—especially senior policemen from Scotland Yard.

‘We all have to, old chap,’ said Warnie, putting down his book and levering his bulk out of the low-slung cane chair. ‘We three are under instructions to present ourselves at the police station the moment you return.’

‘And we shall,’ said Jack, ‘but first I’d like to hear your report, Tom.’

So I narrated my adventures, providing a complete and unabridged edition. I have the ability to recall and report conversations verbatim, and this is what I did. When I finished, I apologised for my total and abject failure.

‘Not at all, old chap,’ said Jack heartily, ‘not at all. In fact, I think you did very well—and I believe you discovered enough for me to slide another probable piece into place in the jigsaw puzzle. Now, off to confront our unhappy inspector.’

‘And have you heard the news?’ I said as Jack rose from his chair. I told them about Mrs Ravenswood apparently leaving her husband. In response Jack shook his head sadly and Warnie muttered something about Ravenswood being ‘a pompous, unpleasant man’.

Before we left the pub I went upstairs to shed my now unnecessary coat. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and decided that I looked like a corpse that had just been fished out of a river—or, more alarmingly, like someone whose face belonged on a ‘Most Wanted’ poster on the walls of a Chicago police station. Not wanting to create a bad impression at my interview with the inspector, I had a quick wash and brushed my hair. Checking the results in the mirror, I decided I still looked like a corpse—but a neater, more cheerful corpse.

As we left the pub I felt like a Christian in ancient Rome about to shake hands with one of the lions.

At the Market Plumpton police station, the sergeant on the desk kept us waiting in the lobby for almost twenty minutes. Then our old friend Constable Dixon emerged from somewhere deep within the bowels of the station and said, ‘Detective Inspector Crispin will see you now—if you’ll just follow me, gentlemen.’

He lifted the flap on the front desk and we filed through. Dixon led us to a small room towards the back of the building with the words ‘Interview Room’ painted on the door. It was bare and had a single high window. It was furnished with a plain deal table and half a dozen straight-backed chairs. Dixon left us there and closed the door.

‘Now I really feel like a suspect,’ grumbled Warnie. ‘No doubt we’re about to be interrogated. We’ll be given what the American detective novels I read call a “grilling”. They also refer to this process as the “third degree”—which I’ve never understood. They never seem to give anyone the “first degree” or the “second degree”. Puzzling.’

Jack and I took our seats and waited patiently, but Warnie paced around the small space muttering, ‘This is not an interview room, it’s an interrogation chamber!’

Warnie continued grumbling in this gloomy fashion until the door opened to admit Detective Inspector Crispin and his faithful assistant, Sergeant Merrivale.

At the inspector’s insistence Warnie took a seat beside Jack and me on one side of the table while Crispin and Merrivale sat on the other.

‘By rights,’ said Crispin in a quiet but grim voice, ‘I should interview each of you three separately—but time is pressing and we need to get on, so we’ll do it this way. And we’ll begin with you, young Morris. What did you mean by fleeing the district when I explicitly told you not to leave without informing us?’

‘I didn’t flee,’ I protested. ‘I paid a brief visit to Plumpton-on-Sea, that’s all. I was only gone one night—less than twenty-four hours in all. And I came back. That hardly qualifies as “fleeing”.’

‘I take it you didn’t go to paddle in the waves, so why did you go?’

On our walk to the police station we’d agreed that we’d be completely frank with the inspector, so I told him about my attempts to locate Amelia Proudfoot.

‘Mr Ravenswood,’ responded Crispin, ‘who dealt with the foreclosure, told us that she’s returned to her relatives up north. I’ve asked the Yorkshire constabulary to try to locate her.’

‘They won’t,’ said Jack confidently.

‘Explain,’ snapped the Scotland Yard man.

‘She’s down on the coast.’

‘But your friend here looked and failed to find her!’

Inspector Crispin leaned back in his chair and stared at Jack for the better part of a minute, trying to make him out. I could almost hear the thoughts running through his head: is this just an Oxford don playing clever games? Or does he really know something? Or does he have a theory of the crime that would make sense of all the puzzles?

In the absence of a question Jack said, ‘Mr Ravenswood seemed most unhappy when he visited
The Boar’s Head
this morning.’

‘Mr Ravenswood’s marital difficulties have no bearing on this investigation,’ Crispin responded.

‘She’s left her husband then?’ I asked.

Sergeant Merrivale broke his silence to say, ‘We knew before he did.’ He said this with a rather smarmy smile on his face, so I asked him how he knew.

‘Well, sir,’ he replied, with the smile still firmly in place, ‘we do keep an eye on the key witnesses in a case like this, and our man saw her leave their flat above the bank before dawn this morning. She was carrying a suitcase. He followed her to a boarding house on the other side of town. It seems that now she’s in line to inherit the money that was coming to her late brother, so she’s decided she no longer needs to put up with that unpleasant man.’

Inspector Crispin expressed his displeasure at this revelation by saying ‘Thank you, sergeant’ through gritted teeth. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘we’ll go back over your evidence. I want a moment-by-moment account of what happened, and what you observed and what you heard, on the day of the murder.’

And that’s what he got. It took us until lunch time and consisted of treading and re-treading over highly familiar territory.

When he was finally satisfied that there was no new information to be squeezed out of us, Inspector Crispin told us we could leave. As we rose to go he added, ‘And don’t forget you’ll be required at this afternoon’s inquest.’ I must have looked puzzled because he explained, ‘Into the death of Nicholas Proudfoot. You three discovered the body—your evidence may be required.’

On that coldly formal note we left.

Lunch was once again served in the sunshine on the lawn behind the pub. Mrs Jones had made us a large plate of generous sandwiches filled with slices of cold roast beef and lashings of hot English mustard.

‘Now that’s what I call real mustard,’ said Warnie with a satisfied snort. The mustard that so delighted him seemed to be clearing my sinuses, turning my tear ducts into flowing cisterns and burning a large hole in the roof of my mouth. I went into the bar and returned with a tray bearing three pints of ale.

As the beer extinguished the fire and I leaned back in my comfortable cane chair, I decided that I wanted to think, and talk, about anything other than baffling murder mysteries and investigations that led to dead ends. So I turned to Jack and said, ‘I wonder if, in the end, this Christian religion that you keep going on about is really part of a greater crossword puzzle—the crossword puzzle of life.’

He told me that was a comparison he’d never heard before and invited me to explain.

‘Perhaps what it gives us are clues to what is hidden in the human heart, and to whatever it is that lies at the heart of the universe. You keep talking about how satisfying you found Christianity, how it answered all your questions. Well, perhaps I’ve been too harsh. Perhaps Christianity
does
contain some useful clues—but they are buried underneath a lot of supernatural mumbo jumbo.’

I thought for a moment Jack was going to let my ‘mumbo jumbo’ crack go through to the keeper. But looking at me kindly, and using the gentle words that turneth away wrath, he said, ‘Perhaps when all the other clues are understood, the supernatural element ceases to be mumbo jumbo and emerges of part of the larger, more complex picture.’

I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. ‘You’re missing my point,’ I insisted.

‘Which is?’

‘That all we should expect from your Christianity is a few clues to the crossword puzzle of life. That’s all the Christian belief system in the end delivers—a few clues.’

‘Quite possibly every world view and every belief system attempts to do that,’ Jack suggested. ‘They all point to a hunger of the human heart—a hunger we have for meaning and a need to understand our purpose in life. There was certainly a deep longing in my heart when I was an atheist, and I was startled to discover that Christianity satisfied that longing.’

‘So you were looking for something and you didn’t know what it was that you were looking for?’

‘It was as though,’ said Jack thoughtfully, ‘I kept catching fragments of music, or a haunting melody, heard only faintly when the wind was blowing in the right direction. In Christianity I discovered the entire satisfying symphony.’

‘But my point is a bit different,’ I protested. ‘I admit there are some clues around to the universe we live in—more than there used to be—but still not enough. The puzzle is not complete. Perhaps one day modern science will discover enough to tell how the world works and why.’

‘Science will never answer why,’ Jack said confidently.

‘That’s a bold claim,’ I laughed.

‘No, it’s just a logical one. You stop and think about what science is and how it functions. What, for example, does science study?’

‘Well, the universe around us. From the largest component to the smallest, from the stars to the molecules.’

‘All of which are . . . ?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Physical. Science studies the physical universe—it’s make-up and its machinery. To understand the mechanisms of the universe we turn to science. But science only studies matter, and the universe is more than matter.’

‘I’m not sure you can say that so confidently. Philosophers have been debating that for centuries, and the more modern science discovers, the more is explicable in terms of matter.’

‘If you don’t believe me,’ said Jack confidently, ‘then explain poetry in purely material terms.’

I opened my mouth and quickly shut it again. I wasn’t sure what to say.

‘Poetry,’ continued Jack, ‘is more than matter; it’s more than black marks on white paper. Music is more than matter; it’s more than vibrations in the air. And the whole of philosophy from Plato onwards has acknowledged that.’

‘So what
can
science do?’

‘It can explain the material universe, what it’s made of and how it works. And it does so brilliantly. But beyond the physical universe is the metaphysical. Beyond the black marks on paper is the poem itself.’

I stopped to drink my beer and think about what Jack was saying. After a lengthy silence I said slowly, ‘But there must be more to it than that. Surely science is the peak of the hill the human race has been climbing for centuries. In
The Golden Bough
Frazer shows that ancient humans lived in what he calls the “age of magic”, which evolved into the “age of religion”, and that in turn has developed into the “age of science”. That’s progress, isn’t it? Isn’t science the knowledge the human race has been seeking for and aiming at for millennia?’

Lewis threw back his head and laughed heartily.

‘You certainly know how to ask a big question,’ he said, still chuckling. ‘You are walking in my footsteps, young Morris—you are standing where I once stood. As a young atheist I proudly waved my copy of Frazer’s big book as proof that all religions and all mythologies were just human inventions—the products of human imagination.’

‘Well, perhaps they—’ But I didn’t finish the sentence for Lewis was ploughing on.

‘But Frazer’s great weakness is that he is writing anthropology. That is to say, he’s writing about human beings and the ideas inside their heads. He gives us a vivid description of how he thinks human heads have changed over the years, but he never examines the truth of the ideas inside those heads. The
history
of an idea and the
truth
of an idea are two separate things.’