The Floating Body (11 page)

‘Let’s hear it then.’

‘Sin means “ignoring God”. And that’s the defect, the corruption, that lives in the human heart—we, all of us, have this built-in bias, this inclination, to ignore God. To act as if God is not there, or is not paying attention, or has no interest in us and how we treat each other.’

I agreed that many, perhaps most, of my acquaintances never gave God a thought. They just lived their own lives, their own way, without God. So if sin meant ‘ignoring God’ they were sinners.

But then I added in protest, ‘I still don’t see it. How can ignoring God result in someone’s committing a murder? I don’t see the connection between the two.’

Jack chewed on the stem of his pipe for a moment and then said, ‘Warnie once owned a radio, a small mantle radio, which he took from one army supply base to another when he was transferred around. It had a chargeable battery built into it. It could run off mains power, or, if unplugged from the mains, it could run for a time off its built-in battery. We are like that radio. We are designed to run connected to God—plugged into God. When we ignore God, “unplug” ourselves from our life source, we continue to function for a while.’

‘On the remnants of the power that God has built into us?’

‘It’s not a perfect analogy, but something like that. But if we ignore God, if we fail to turn back to God, to reconnect to God, eventually we fail to function properly.’

‘And murder results?’

‘Murders
are
committed by seemingly upright, perfectly normal citizens. Christianity says that sin—ignoring God—is the reason why.’

When Jack and I turned around and made our way back towards the cathedral close, we were joined at the gates by Warnie.

‘I beat him,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I played a singles game against the publican, Trevor Travers. Nice chap. My hand has not lost its cunning. He is demanding a return match tonight.’

A delighted Warnie was chuckling as he told us this.

‘But I’m afraid my brain might have lost its cunning,’ said Jack, smiling grimly over the stem of his pipe. ‘We have encountered the occasional puzzle in the past, but nothing like this.’

‘Nothing like a body that floats,’ I agreed, ‘floats quite invisibly, in mid-air, for twelve hours or so and only then crashes to the ground.’

‘To say nothing,’ Jack added, ‘of how the wound was inflicted. Both Morris and I saw Fowler quite alone on the roof—and then we saw him wounded, and then he staggered and fell. And during all that time there was, apparently, no one else on the roof within striking distance of him to inflict the wound.’

‘Oh, ah, yes,’ muttered Warnie into his moustache. ‘A bit trickier than a game of darts.’ He meditated for a moment and then continued, ‘But I have complete confidence in you, Jack. Brain the size of the Albert Hall. You’ll work it out. I’m certain you will.’

Jack put his hand on his brother’s shoulder as he said, ‘Thanks for your vote of confidence, old chap, but I might have met my match for once.’

‘And then,’ I contributed, raising an issue that was on my mind, ‘there’s the little matter of the motive. Inspector Locke told us that so far he hasn’t found one. And based on what I’ve seen of Dave Fowler over the last few weeks, I can’t even begin to imagine why someone would want to kill the blighter. I didn’t particularly take to him, but he was hardly murder-victim material.’

As we talked we were walking slowly over the old cobblestones of the quadrangle in the heart of the cathedral close. Without having made a conscious decision to do so we were drifting in one particular direction. Somehow our feet were directing us towards the archway and the door that led out to the gravel road behind the school—the place where the body had been found.

Perhaps we were, instinctively, returning to the spot where the mystery had appeared, in the hope that another visit would send a shaft of illumination into our brains.

Pushing open the heavy wooden door, we stepped out onto the road behind the school—only to find that the Head Master, Dr Adrian Rogers, and the Dean, Richard Cowper, were already there, standing in the middle of the road, looking up at the roof of the Old School.

As we walked over to greet them, Dean Cowper said, ‘This place does hold a sort of grim fascination at the moment, doesn’t it?’

We all agreed it did.

Dr Rogers shook his distinguished thick, white hair as he murmured, almost to himself, ‘The impossible simply doesn’t happen. And certainly not in my school! This whole thing is disgraceful. And potentially very damaging for the school. It’s both embarrassing
and
impossible. Most unfortunate. Most unfortunate indeed.’

It appeared that the Head Master saw himself, rather than Dave Fowler, as the real victim in this baffling crime.

‘It’s not impossible,’ responded Warnie. ‘It can’t be—it happened!’

‘Of course, my dear chap, of course,’ Dr Rogers said. ‘Impossible is entirely the wrong word. I should have chosen my words more carefully. Inexplicable is the word we want at the moment. Fowler’s death is both inconvenient and inexplicable.’

‘I keep wondering,’ said Cowper, raising his eyes to the roofline, ‘if there might not be some piece of masonry on the side of the building on which a body might have become lodged, only to fall off later—either from its own weight or from a gust of wind.’

Jack put his pipe back in his pocket and gazed off into the distance. On his face was the look I had seen many times before—the look that told me his mighty brain was at work.

With Jack distracted in this way I chipped in to offer my thoughts.

‘You’re not the first person to come up with that idea, Dean,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t really solve our problem. Jack and I looked up at the building as soon as we arrived here and saw that Fowler’s body was missing from where we’d expected to find it.’

‘Exactly!’ Warnie added. ‘If there was a body dangling from a protruding piece of masonry, Jack and Tom would surely have seen it. A body hanging off a cornice on a building of this size would certainly be visible to the naked eye.’

‘There’s a further problem with your admirable theory, my dear Dean,’ said the Head Master. ‘This part of the Old School is Georgian. There are many windows, but the building is symmetrical and has a smooth face. There simply are no protruding bits of stonework.’

‘How far might it have fallen?’ asked the Dean as he turned around and looked at the wide field that bordered the road. ‘Might a gust of wind have carried it away from this road and into the long grass of the field?’

‘Jolly interesting thought,’ said Warnie. ‘Hadn’t occurred to me. Is it possible, Jack?’

I looked out across the field. On the far side were some workmen with picks and shovels and beside them a large, yellow earthmoving machine—standing idle at that particular moment.

‘There was no wind on the day of the murder,’ said Jack. ‘Certainly nothing strong enough to carry a human body any considerable distance.’

‘And Fowler was a very solidly built young man,’ said Dr Rogers. ‘I can’t imagine any wind strong enough to lift such a weight so far as to be out of sight.’

‘Not a very helpful suggestion, then?’ concluded Dean Cowper.

‘What’s happening on the far side of the field?’ I asked, pointing to the workmen.

‘It’s going to be a new housing estate,’ the Dean explained. ‘This field was part of the church property for the past two hundred years. About twelve months ago a builder approached us and offered a considerable sum of money for the field. He’s planning a mixture of villas and smaller cottages. The Chapter wrestled with the question of selling or not selling for a long time. But eventually . . .’

His voice trailed away, as if he was still doubtful about the decision.

‘I know you were never keen,’ said the Head Master warmly, ‘but we made the right decision. The cathedral repair fund desperately needed an injection of cash, and selling this field provided exactly what was needed.’ Turning to Jack, Warnie and me he added, ‘These old buildings look beautiful, but they cost a devil of a lot of money to maintain.’

A silence descended on our small group—a heavy silence that weighed upon us for several minutes. During that time we looked again at the facade of the Old School, and the empty gravel of the roadway—at that entire scene that was refusing to reveal whatever secrets it might hold.

Having read, marked, learned and inwardly digested what little these locations had to tell us, we silently made our way back into the school.

The rest of that afternoon I was rostered on to supervise prep. This involved patrolling the corridors that bordered the students’ studies to ensure diligent quiet prevailed.

Only once did I have to exercise my authority when I heard subdued laughter followed by gasps of surprise in the Fifth Form corridor, coming from the study shared by Conway and Wynyard. Throwing open the door, I discovered them chortling over
The Hotspur
, a boys’ story paper—which I immediately confiscated.

‘But that cost me tuppence, sir!’ Conway protested.

‘We’re in the middle of a story about Bill Samson of the British Intelligence Corps!’ complained Wynyard.

‘You’ll get it back at the end of term,’ I replied. ‘Give you something to look forward to, won’t it? Now, what are you two meant to be working on?’

‘Latin,’ growled Wynyard.

‘Get your textbooks out then. Come along, quickly.’

Shakespeare has a line somewhere about the schoolboy dragging himself snail-like to school, and it was with snail-like slowness that those two produced their books. I left them in sullen silence with their Latin primers open on their desks and vacant expressions in their eyes.

Later that evening, school dinner in the hall was one of those meals that made me hope that I never see a Brussels sprout again. Not that I have anything against Brussels sprouts personally—it’s just that school dinners have made me happy to donate my lifetime supply to the starving poor of Africa.

After dinner I was walking across the close back to my room when I heard hurrying footsteps, and Henry Beard caught up with me.

‘Morris, old chap,’ he said, his grumpy face lit up by an ineffective attempt at a smile. ‘About these extra mathematics classes I’ve been lumbered with for the next two weeks.’

I stopped in midstride and turned to look at him. Beard was not a warm and engaging man. In fact, if anything, he was usually silent, sullen and withdrawn. Someone had told me that he had had a ‘bad war’ and had never entirely recovered.

But I felt sorry for him having to cope with this extra burden. Schoolmastering, I had learned to my cost, was quite taxing enough without having extra tasks thrust upon one.

‘If you could see your way clear to taking just a few of them—the extra maths classes, that is—’ Beard began.

I interrupted him before he could go further.

‘I’m afraid I’m not your man,’ I said hastily. ‘The reason I did English language and literature at Oxford was that I’m hopeless with numbers. Sorry, old man, but I could as easily teach trigonometry as fly to the moon.’

As Beard turned away he muttered loudly, ‘I should have known you’d prove to be a broken reed.’

He shuffled off into the gathering darkness, and I was about to turn towards my own rooms when Jack and Warnie emerged from the Dean’s house.

‘Aah, ooh, Morris old chap,’ hooted Warnie cheerfully. ‘We’re both off to
The Pelican
—I’m giving Travers the return darts match he asked for. Won’t you join us?’

I thought about the papers sitting on my desk that required marking. I thought about them for a small fraction of a tenth of a second, and then I said, ‘Yes, of course, I’d be delighted.’

In the warm, cheerful atmosphere of the local pub we ordered pints and stood watching for a moment while the publican, Trevor Travers, called on his barmaid to take over serving so that he could ‘teach this visitor a lesson in darts’.

Warnie and he then rolled up their sleeves and tackled what was looking rather like a grudge match—with enthusiastic locals watching on, offering a constant running commentary along with coaching advice on the correct stance and the best wrist movement.

Neither of the two darts players seemed entirely to appreciate the contributions of the sideline experts.

Jack and I left Warnie to his game in the bar parlour and retired to a quiet corner of the snug to enjoy our pints.

After several silent minutes, Jack said, ‘Why so quiet tonight, Morris?’

‘Human nature,’ I said, by way of cryptic reply.

Jack raised an eyebrow, so I continued, ‘If this unknown murderer of Dave Fowler is not some freak, some sport of nature, but is simply an expression of all that is bad in ordinary human nature, then I feel most unhappy about my
own
nature. If my heart were an apple it would have a worm burrowing through it, slowly corrupting it. It’s not a happy discovery.’

‘It’s better than the alternative,’ said Jack firmly.

‘Which is?’

‘To live with the illusion that we have the hearts of angels.’

Jack was thoughtful for a moment, and then he said, ‘Have you ever had the experience of seeing someone who’s been discovered doing the wrong thing, acting badly towards another, and they respond with the explanation, “I made a mistake”?’

‘Yes, yes, I’ve certainly heard that. I remember my landlady when I was in digs in Oxford. Her son was caught stealing from a local ironmonger and sentenced to a prison term. Her explanation to me was that her Albert had “made a mistake and I suppose he has to pay for it”. But, Jack, stealing is not some sort of “mistake”—it’s wrongdoing! Does a thief really say to himself, “What am I doing with this stolen money in my hands? Whoops! Bit of a mistake there!” ’

Jack laughed heartily. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself. The man who killed your Mr Fowler was not “making a mistake”—he was committing an evil act because he chose to. And that sort of honesty about human nature is better than living in an unreal dream.’

‘But also very depressing. As a result of our discussions I’m finding my view of human nature to be rather bleak.’