The Floating Body (19 page)

This, of course, made me thoroughly intrigued. Would I mind a private conversation about his mysterious parcel? Of course I wouldn’t mind! In fact, I was rather looking forward to what the inspector would produce from the strange package.

‘Why don’t we go back to my rooms?’ I suggested. ‘We won’t be disturbed there.’

Jack and Warnie rose from their armchairs and I was about to lead our little group out of the Senior Common Room when I found the doorway blocked by Gareth McKell.

I have to say that he was looking no prettier, the purple bruise on his face now being in full bloom and showing no sign, as yet, of starting to fade away.

‘I was told the policeman was here . . .’ McKell began, then he spotted Locke over my shoulder. Pushing past me, he said, ‘Inspector, I have been the victim of a theft.’

I was about to protest at this rudeness, but when I turned around I saw that the inspector was responding quite differently.

‘Really, Mr McKell? What has been stolen?’ he asked as if his plans for continuing the murder investigation were of no consequence, and nothing could interest him more than investigating a minor theft to please our odious Deputy Head.

We all went back into the heart of the Senior Common Room and sat down. All except McKell, who restlessly paced the carpet.

‘My haversack has been stolen!’ McKell complained.

‘Your notebook, Sergeant,’ said Inspector Locke. Sergeant Drake obediently whipped his small black notebook out of his top pocket and began writing down McKell’s complaint.

‘It’s the haversack I take on walking and rock-climbing expeditions. Only two weeks ago I took it with me to the Continent.’

‘And it’s now missing, is it, sir?’ asked Sergeant Drake, his pencil poised.

‘Of course it’s missing! That’s why I’m here complaining!’ growled McKell.

‘Where was it taken from, sir?’ Inspector Locke asked.

‘From my flat. In between trips it sits in the bottom of a wardrobe. But I went to fetch it this morning and it’s gone.’

‘So someone has broken into your flat, sir?’

‘So it would appear, and I want you to do something about it!’

‘Sergeant Drake,’ said Locke, ‘would you accompany Mr McKell back to his flat and conduct a thorough investigation, please?’

Drake pocketed his notebook and rose to his feet.

‘You’re not coming yourself?’ McKell protested to the inspector.

‘I assure you, sir, Sergeant Drake is a thoroughly competent investigator—he will find out whatever there is to be found out.’

McKell reluctantly led the sergeant out of the Senior Common Room.

‘Now,’ Inspector Locke said, ‘if you would lead the way please, Mr Morris.’

I led the small group across the cathedral close and into my ground floor flat. Once we were there, the door was securely closed, and Jack, Warnie and I were seated, Inspector Locke produced his parcel from underneath his arm and placed it on the coffee table.

Then he proceeded to carefully unfold the brown paper wrapping to reveal—a blood-stained knife.

Warnie let out a long, low whistle. ‘Is that what I think it is, inspector?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir—that is the murder weapon.’

Without thinking, I reached out my hand to pick it up, but then stopped and drew back.

‘It’s all right,’ said the policeman, ‘it’s safe to touch it. The weapon has been dusted for fingerprints.’

Given permission, I picked up the blood-stained weapon, delicately—holding one end of the hilt between my fingertips.

‘It’s very light,’ I said, surprised by the weapon’s lack of weight.

Jack, who had been sitting very quietly taking all this in, suddenly said, ‘Could it be a throwing knife, inspector?’

‘Ah, my good friend Crispin of Scotland Yard told me what a sharp brain you have, Mr Lewis. That same thought crossed my mind, so I consulted an expert. It turns out that this weapon doesn’t have the balance that a throwing knife needs. So, no, to anticipate your next question—it rather looks as though this knife could not have been thrown into the victim from a distance.’

‘Why are you showing this to us?’ Jack asked.

‘Since you two are the only eye witnesses to the actual murder,’ said Locke, nodding at Jack and me, ‘I was hoping the sight of the weapon might trigger some memory, some detail of that moment that you’d forgotten until now.’

I let the knife or dagger or whatever it was dangle from my raised hand—turning it around and examining it from every angle.

‘No,’ I said at length. ‘This tells me nothing more . . . opens no hidden doors of memory. I’m afraid I can’t add anything to what I’ve already told you.’

Jack, meanwhile, was staring very closely at the knife.

‘Morris—turn it around again, will you?’ he said. ‘When the light caught it, I thought I noticed something.’

‘Quite observant of you, Mr Lewis,’ commented Inspector Locke. ‘We, of course, noticed the same thing in the police laboratory.’

Then I looked down at the spot on the hilt Sexton Locke was pointing at. It was a small protuberance sticking out at right angles to the hilt.

‘That’s odd,’ Warnie remarked. ‘Jolly odd. I’ve seen a few weapons in my time, but never a knife with a little rod, or notch, or whatever it is sticking out like that.’

‘That’s what my people in the police laboratory thought,’ said Locke, nodding his head in agreement. A long silence followed, broken by the policeman when he asked again, ‘No memories? No inspiration? This triggers no thoughts?’

I shook my head, as did Warnie. Jack looked puzzled and thoughtful.

‘In that case,’ said the inspector, ‘I’d better be going across and seeing how my sergeant is coping with Mr McKell and his stolen rucksack.’

He carefully wrapped the knife back in its brown paper covering and took his leave.

Jack was quiet and seemed to be deep in thought when Warnie looked at his watch and exclaimed, ‘Ah, there’s another try-out at the cricket nets this afternoon. Will you join me there? I’m rather hoping my young protégé, Stanhope, is given a chance to bowl at either Conway or Wynyard.’

Jack and I agreed that we would be there to see the results of Warnie’s coaching.

As we walked down the stairs from my front door, I said quietly to Jack, ‘You’ve thought of something, haven’t you?’

‘It’s just possible that I have, young Morris,’ he said with a smile, ‘. . . just possible.’

Third school was followed by lunch in the dining hall (the usual: sludge with potatoes followed by sludge with custard). After this I dug Jack out of the Dean’s house—where he’d been quietly reading Trollope’s
Barchester Towers
—and dragged him off in the direction of the cricket nets. Jack was not a man for games, but he was a stout supporter of his brother and so came without protesting. Warnie, he told me, was already at the nets.

As we ambled slowly across the quad, I said, ‘That weapon—the one Inspector Locke showed us this morning—did that strike you as a weapon that had been specially prepared?’

‘Well done, young Morris,’ Jack responded. ‘That’s exactly the thought that crossed my own mind.’

‘So the murder was no outburst of sudden anger but something planned in cold blood?’

‘And, I would suggest, meticulously and carefully planned.’

‘But that’s horrible!’ I protested. ‘After our recent discussions I’m prepared to grant that there’s some deep, subterranean level in human nature that is ugly and dangerous—and it may spontaneously erupt if sufficiently provoked. But this is different. This is someone sitting in an armchair, quietly plotting and planning a murder—and perhaps carefully crafting that murder weapon we saw.’

‘And that sheds deeper, darker light on human nature, doesn’t it?’ said Jack. ‘That’s a demonstration of how corrupt human nature basically is at its very heart—would you agree?’

‘No, no, no,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Anyone who can coldly plan a murder is not normal—and what they’re displaying is not normal human behaviour.’

‘Not, you claim, the nature that all human beings are born with?’

‘Certainly not!’ I said emphatically.

Jack paused to light his pipe and then said with a smile, ‘I remember being at tea at Tolkien’s house once, and after the adults had been served there was only one piece of cake left to be shared between his two boys—both quite young at the time. His wife—very wisely, I thought—told one boy to cut the cake and the other boy to choose first which piece he wanted. She was carefully allowing for the natural human tendency towards selfishness.’

‘Yes, all right then,’ I responded a little irritably. ‘We’ve all seen children behave selfishly—refuse to share toys and so on. But that’s childishness, not corrupt human nature.’

‘Really?’ said Jack with a smile. ‘So you’re saying that very young children have been shaped by culture and not by nature?’

‘Well . . . not very young children. No, I suppose not.’

‘So what we see in the very young must be the human nature we all come equipped with?’

I could see I was walking into some sort of trap, but I felt I had to say, in all honesty, ‘Yes, I suppose that must be so.’

Jack seized the opening and plunged in. ‘The Hardwoods—Cecil and Daphne—told me a story about one of their children. This child was only about three years old when this happened. Cecil and Daphne walked into the kitchen to see the boy sitting in the middle of the floor with his Teddy Bear clutched tightly in his arms. On the floor beside him was a spreading pool of thick, sticky syrup next to an upturned bottle. The Harwoods said nothing for a moment—they just looked at the child. Finally he said, “Teddy did it!” ’

I laughed and said, ‘Well, that’s small children for you.’

‘Exactly,’ said Jack, seizing the point. ‘That’s what small children are like. No child ever needs to be taught to lie. They all do it automatically, naturally. Lying is just part of human nature, because human nature has this built-in level of corruption.’

I opened my mouth to respond but couldn’t think of anything to say. I was rescued from the need to counter Jack’s argument by our arrival at the cricket nets.

McKell, still nursing his swollen, purple eye, was sitting in a canvas chair supervising proceedings. Warnie was waiting patiently on the sidelines.

We saw several batsmen, and several bowlers, come and go. Then McKell called on Conway to go to the crease and take his stance in front of the wicket.

As he did so, Warnie leaned over and whispered something in McKell’s ear. The Deputy Head appeared to be surprised by what Warnie was suggesting. There was a look of utter astonishment on his face as Warnie went on quietly and insistently saying whatever it was he was saying.

I caught the last four words of Warnie’s soliloquy: they were, ‘Trust me on this.’

McKell apparently decided that he would indeed trust Warnie because, to the surprise of all the boys gathered at the nets, he called out, ‘Stanhope! Come over here and take the ball. I’d like to see you bowl to Conway.’

Young Stanhope, blinking furiously through his large glasses, did as he was bid. He accepted the ball from Hamilton, who had bowled the last over, and advanced towards the nets.

Conway grinned triumphantly at his friends behind the netting as he called out, ‘This should be good! Watch this!’

As a slow bowler Stanhope took only a short run up and let fly with a ball that was straight and accurate—aimed directly at the off stump, on a yorker length. But to my surprise there was no spin, no deviation, no turn at all—and Conway had no difficulty in whacking the ball decisively.

I looked over to Warnie and shrugged my shoulders as a way of asking a question.

In response Warnie gestured with his hand and mouthed the word, ‘Wait.’

So I waited.

The same thing happened with the next ball, and the next few balls after that. But then, on the second last ball of the over, Stanhope did something different. I saw him adjust his grip and glance down at his fingers.

And when he released the ball, it hit the pitch just behind Conway’s legs, bounced, skidded and turned sharply around the batsman’s legs straight onto the stumps. Middle and off stump both went spinning out of the ground.

Conway stared behind him unable to believe what had just happened. He stood there, frozen to the spot and looking completely bewildered.

Seeing him fail to move, McKell raised one finger and called, ‘Out! Next batsman.’

The boys around the nets who were not friends of the Conway-Wynyard group broke into spontaneous applause—and Stanhope was grinning from ear to ear.

Warnie wandered over to say, ‘That’s what I told him to do—lull the batsman into a false sense of security and then hit him with a demon ball.’ Warnie rocked back on his heels with a big grin on his face as he added, ‘And it worked! By golly, did it ever work!’

Jack was smiling too as he remarked, ‘That does seem to be an entirely suitable form of revenge.’

‘Stanhope!’ called out McKell, ‘who taught you to spin the ball like that?’

‘It was the Major, sir. He taught me the tricks of the spinner’s trade, didn’t you, Major?’

Warnie just chuckled.

‘Let’s see you do it again, boy,’ said McKell, ‘against another batsman.’

And he did do it again. And again.

Finally McKell said, ‘I think we’ve found someone to play at number eleven in the school team. We can’t have you bat any higher than eleven, boy—you’re a rabbit with the bat. But as a bowler you might just be our secret weapon against Greyfriars.’

Conway and Wynyard, I noticed, had their heads together. Conway’s face was black with fury, and the two were muttering conspiratorially.

After their intense whispered conversation they approached McKell.

‘Sir, sir,’ said Conway with an urgent ring in his voice.

‘What is it, boy?’ growled McKell. ‘That was a perfectly legitimate ball Stanhope bowled you with.’

‘That’s not it, sir,’ Conway said. ‘It’s something else, sir.’

‘Well, what is it? Spit it out, spit it out.’

At this point I suspected something serious might be up. Turning around I caught Hamilton’s eye and beckoned him and the other members of the Famous Four to gather closer. I wanted them within earshot of what was about to be said.