The Floating Body (14 page)

We entered the comfortably furnished room to find History Master Geoffrey Douglas sprawled in a leather-covered armchair marking a pile of essays. He had often told me that he’d rather work in a room with company around him than alone in his flat. Douglas was rather like a large, elderly dog—perhaps an English sheep dog—but definitely a pack animal.

The school nurse, Mary Flavell, was at the coffee table pouring herself a cup of tea, and in the far corner there was someone who was largely invisible behind a copy of the
Times
. But the legs that protruded from beneath the spreading newspaper were legs I recognised. So I walked up and said, ‘Afternoon, McKell.’

He lowered the paper, revealing a more fully developed and deeply purple bruise around his eye, glowered at me for a moment, muttered, ‘Afternoon, Morris’ and went to raise his newspaper again.

But before he could do so, Warnie, in his most affable manner, said, ‘Dreadful business this, isn’t it? Shockin’ business. Oh dear me, yes, just shockin’.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ growled McKell, looking puzzled.

‘The murder, of course,’ said Warnie, pulling up a chair.

‘Oh, that,’ spat McKell in disgust. And he would have gone back to his newspaper reading if Warnie had let him. But he didn’t.

‘Young man,’ Warnie continued, ‘prime of life and all that sort of thing. Who could have wanted to kill a young chap like that, eh? Got any theories, McKell?’

Common decency compelled the Deputy Head to lower his newspaper and engage with the three of us, who were now seated around him.

‘No,’ said McKell. ‘I have no “theories”, as you put it. I leave all of that to police.’

‘But he was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ I asked, trying to make my question sound as innocent as possible.

‘A friend? Of course not! Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘Just that I seem to remember him talking to you rather a lot.’

‘He was a pest, I grant you that much,’ said McKell. ‘He was always hanging around—trying to engage me, or poor Muriel, in conversation.’

His description of his sister as ‘poor Muriel’ amused me, as my experience had always been that she was a dragon lady who was even more ready than her brother to snap one’s head off at the slightest provocation.

‘So he was trying to cultivate your friendship, was he?’ asked Jack, making the question sound entirely innocent.

‘Perhaps,’ McKell conceded. ‘Perhaps he just wanted company.’

‘But you didn’t encourage him?’ Jack continued.

‘He was a nuisance,’ grumbled McKell. ‘A junior master in his first year? Why did he imagine I might be the least bit interested in him?’

‘Well, if you weren’t Fowler’s special friend,’ Jack asked, ‘who was?’

McKell rustled his newspaper loudly as a hint that it was time for us to leave him alone, and he was even starting to raise the paper once more as he said, ‘Ask Beard. He was always dropping in on poor Henry.’

With that the paper came up and the bruised visage of Gareth McKell disappeared from sight.

Jack, Warnie and I then took off in search of Henry Beard—and this time we struck lucky.

As we stepped out into the cathedral close, Beard and the Head Master were standing in the middle of the cobblestone square engaged in a quiet, but intense, conversation.

At least it was intense on Beard’s side. His arms were flapping and his head was nodding back and forth, as if he was engaged in attempting to plead or persuade.

Dr Rogers, on the other hand, was his usual, unflappable self.

We walked across towards to them in time to hear the Head’s response to whatever Beard had been saying.

‘I’m sorry, Beard,’ said Dr Rogers, ‘but there’s no point in our discussing this matter any further. I simply have no time on my hands to personally pick up any of Mr Fowler’s mathematics classes. You know, my dear chap, that I would help if I possibly could. But I am far too busy—far, far too busy. No, I’m very much afraid you will simply have to cope with the load for the next two weeks. I’m quite sure you can do it, my good chap—quite sure.’

With those words, rather like a ship catching the wind in its billowing sail, the Head Master turned and cruised across the square.

A red-faced Henry Beard stood there, quivering slightly, then noticed us approaching.

‘Still not having any luck then?’ I asked before he could turn and flee.

‘I’m still stuck with Fowler’s classes, if that’s what you mean!’ he growled in response.

‘Oh, ah, poor young fellah,’ said Warnie. Then when Beard’s eyes opened wide in astonishment, Warnie went on, ‘Oh, not you, old chap. Sorry if you thought I meant you. I was thinking about the murder victim. Such a young chappie to die so violently. Terrible business.’

Beard more or less snorted in reply, as if his sole concern was the extra workload he had to carry, with Fowler’s death being significant only as the incidental cause of this truly major disaster.

‘Did you know him well?’ asked Jack affably.

‘Know him? Know who?’ asked Beard, whose mind was still on other matters.

‘The murder victim,’ Jack explained.

‘Him? No—barely knew him at all.’

‘But McKell said that he often dropped in to visit you,’ I said.

‘Rubbish!’ snapped Beard. ‘Complete rubbish. McKell’s a fool if he’s saying things like that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a mountain of work to do.’

And with those words Beard stalked angrily away across the quad. With his short stature and broad shoulders, his retreating back gave him the appearance of an angry dwarf spoiling for a fight.

‘Didn’t get too far with him, did we?’ wheezed Warnie, puffing out his moustache. ‘Where to next, Jack?’

‘Morris,’ said Jack turning to me, ‘whereabouts is the school office?’

‘On the ground floor of the Old School building—at the far end,’ I replied. ‘Why?’

‘When he applied for a job here, Fowler must have supplied some references, some information about himself. I wonder if his staff file would tell us anything about the man?’

The school secretary was a lady, now somewhat beyond middle age, by the name of Edith Carter. She had devoted her whole life to the school, and she was known to the boys as a ‘soft touch’. When they wanted money for confectionary or comic books, if they went to her with a tear in their eye and a sad story about their latest postal note from home being held up, she almost always came good with a ‘loan’ of a few pennies, or even, on special occasions, a sixpence.

She looked up from clattering away on her typewriter to say, ‘Oh, Mr Morris, what can I do for you?’

I introduced her to Jack and Warnie, and then said, ‘As you know, we’ve spent a lot of time talking to the police about the murder of Dave Fowler.’

‘Oh, yes, a shocking business. I do hope the whole matter is resolved very soon, otherwise a shadow will hang over the school—and that would never do.’

‘To that end,’ said Jack carefully, ‘we are doing all we can to assist the police with their enquiries. With that in mind, may we have a look at Mr Fowler’s staff file, please?’

A cloud passed over Miss Carter’s face as she said doubtfully, ‘Well, I’m not sure if—’

Warnie chimed in to say brightly, ‘We have just been with the Head Master . . .’ He left the sentence hanging as if to imply official approval, without bothering to mention that all we’d had was a brief, chance encounter in the quad.

‘Well, in that case,’ said Miss Carter. She turned around, slid open a filing drawer and pulled out a manila folder. ‘And anyway,’ she said as she produced the file, like a magician producing a stout rabbit from a top hat, ‘the police have already looked at this and made their notes.’

I took the folder from her outstretched hand and flipped it open. It contained very little. There was a London address for Dave Fowler—presumably the place where he’d been living before coming to the school. There was a letter of application saying he was a graduate of the University of Liverpool, and one letter from a previous employer.

‘Only one reference?’ Jack asked Miss Carter.

‘Well, he was a young man, only at the beginning of his teaching career. In that case one reference is all that can be expected.’

Jack turned the letter of reference over in his hands. It was a single sheet, typewritten. The address at the top said ‘Crichton House, Rodwell Regis’ and the signature at the bottom said ‘Grimstone’. In between were a few brief paragraphs saying only that Fowler was of good character and was an excellent mathematics teacher.

‘I knew a chap named Grimstone some years ago,’ said Jack thoughtfully. ‘There was a Grimstone who was an undergraduate with me. In fact, we were both members of an undergraduate society called the Martlets. He became a schoolmaster. I wonder if it’s the same chap? It’s a pity I don’t have his phone number here—I know I had it once.’

‘Ah, but I almost certainly will have it,’ huffed Warnie with a cheerful grunt. Then he turned to me and said, ‘One of us has to be properly organised, so I keep track of things.’

Out of the top pocket of his coat he pulled a small, thin, black-covered booklet. He opened it up, revealing a long list of names, addresses and phone numbers.

‘What’s the name again?’ he asked, and then began searching for ‘Grimstone’ in his list. A few moments later he cried triumphantly, ‘I’m sure this is it.’ He handed the small book over to Jack, pointing, as he did so, to a particular entry.

‘Miss Carter,’ said Jack, ‘may I impose on you once more, please, to make use of your telephone?’

‘Certainly, Mr Lewis,’ said that agreeable lady. ‘The telephone is next door in the Head Master’s office. But as Dr Rogers is not there at the moment, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you used it.’

Jack thanked her effusively and went through the door she held open for him.

He returned five minutes later with a thoughtful look on his face. He thanked Miss Carter for all her assistance and led us outside.

In the corridor he handed the black booklet back to Warnie and said, ‘Now that is very interesting. It’s the same Grimstone, all right. He seemed pleased to hear from me again, and was happy to answer my questions—until I raised the name of Dave Fowler. Grimstone said he’d never heard of any such man and never employed a teacher by that name. Then, when he learned where I was calling from, he went silent and was reluctant to tell me any more.’

‘Do you think he knows any more?’ I asked.

Jack said that, yes, he almost certainly did know something that he believed he could not, or should not, pass on.

This was one more puzzle to pile on top of the already complex web of puzzles that were making this murder mystery so utterly inscrutable.

‘A forged reference?’ I asked as we walked back out into the cathedral close.

‘Almost certainly an unreliable and untrue reference,’ Jack replied.

‘But why?’ asked Warnie, his voice filled with exasperation. ‘And who was Dave Fowler really? And what was he doing here?’

‘And what,’ I added, ‘does Grimstone know that he won’t even tell his old colleague?’

‘Well, I never . . . well, I never . . .’ Warnie muttered to himself several times. Then he stopped and said, ‘I can tell you one thing for nothing—this murder mystery is making my head hurt. I think I need a drink. Shall we walk to the village, Jack?’

Later than night, after another evening meal of school sludge, I was sitting alone in my room trying to sort out the confusing, interlocking pieces of an increasingly complicated puzzle.

My mind kept drifting back to our Deputy Head Master, Gareth McKell, and his sister, Muriel. They both had personalities as indigestible as cold toast. But was that sufficient reason to suspect them of involvement in the murder of Dave Fowler?

I was supposed to be preparing a lesson on Matthew Arnold and
Sohrab and Rustum
lay open before me. But I was as restless as Sohrab in the Tartar camp and gave up my fruitless efforts at concentrating on the task at hand. For a while I paced around my study, then I decided that a pint at
The Pelican
might settle my unquiet heart and grabbed my coat.

I emerged into the moonlit cathedral close and came to a halt in the doorway to my terrace house. Standing there in the shadowed stoop, I was facing the flat occupied by the McKells—directly opposite me on the far side of the quad—and what I had come to think of as the ‘The McKell Mystery’ once again started thumping away at my brain.

I rather fancied walking across, knocking on the door of their flat, fixing them with a frosty glare and demanding, ‘Now, then, just what are you two up to, and why did you kill Dave Fowler?’

However, good sense prevailed and I chose not to follow this attractive scenario.

As the moon drifted behind scudding clouds, the door to the McKells flat opened and both brother and sister emerged. They looked around but failed to see me standing as still as a statue in the distant darkness. Then they headed for the gateway leading out of the cathedral close and into the town.

I decided to follow them.

Exactly why I made this decision I couldn’t have explained. Except that I felt certain that in similar circumstances Sherlock Holmes would have instructed Watson to ‘follow those two suspects, and don’t let them out of your sight’. So I chose to follow my Holmesian instincts, and my two suspects.

The night was chill, the clouds were coming and going across the face of the moon—as if uncertain as to where exactly in the sky they were meant to be—and the breeze was rising. My mind went back to the lesson on Alfred Noyes I’d taken my junior form through the week before. The wind had, indeed, become a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, and the moon now clearly resembled a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

I buttoned up my coat, pulled my scarf out of the coat pocket and wrapped it around my throat.

The McKells had now left the quad, so I slipped as quietly as I could across the cobblestones. At the gateway I stopped and looked ahead.

The mysterious couple were well ahead of me, on their way down Nesfield’s high street. As I watched, they passed through the pale patch of light cast by a street lamp. The dim glow, roughly the colour of clotted cream, seemed to penetrate the gloom only some six feet from the lamp and no further.