The Floating Body (22 page)

Her eyes were moist and she was blinking rapidly as she asked, ‘Have they arrested the . . . the murderer?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘The murder is still unsolved. We have no idea who did it.’

‘Oh. Oh, I see,’ she murmured.

‘Look, you’re clearly very shaken up,’ I said, ‘and I feel it’s my fault. You need a brandy or something.’

‘An excellent idea,’ said Jack heartily. ‘
The Pelican
is just a few steps away. Morris, you take Mrs Beard into a quiet corner of the snug, and I’ll go and fetch a small brandy for her from the bar.’

As we walked up the steps of the pub, Samantha was still leaning heavily on my arm.

‘I just need to sit down for a little while,’ she said in a quiet voice that was little more than a whisper.

The snug was deserted, so I settled her in a corner and then took a seat facing her. She sat very still, her hands clasped in her lap, trembling slightly.

Jack came into the snug, carrying her small suitcase in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other.

‘Here,’ he said as he offered her the glass and placed the suitcase on the floor. ‘Sip this very slowly—it will make you feel a little better.’

Samantha raised the glass to her lips, sipped and then coughed. She put the glass down on the table in front of her and blinked her eyes. Tears were starting to run down her cheeks.

I picked up the glass and held it out to her. She accepted it with trembling hands and drank a little more.

When she put it down she groaned aloud, ‘Oh . . . oh . . . this is . . . this is . . .’

Then she buried her face in her hands and began to sob uncontrollably.

Jack and I looked at each other, both feeling awkward and embarrassed. As single men we felt uncomfortable in the presence of a crying woman. If we could have thought of how to comfort her without embarrassing her—or ourselves—we would have done so.

But we couldn’t, so we just sat and waited until the sobbing subsided.

After a few minutes Samantha dug a small, lace-edged square of fine linen out of a pocket and dabbed at her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she wiped her nose. ‘You must think me very foolish. It’s just that the news came as such a shock.’

‘That’s my fault, I’m afraid,’ I confessed. ‘I suppose we’ve lived with this—well, this tragedy, really—for so long that it didn’t occur to me what a shock it must be hearing about it for the first time.’

‘It’s not your fault, Mr Morris,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself. I’m just feeling a little delicate at the moment. Tell me: how . . . how did it happen?’

‘Mr Fowler was on the roof of the Old School building,’ Jack explained. ‘He’d gone up there to catch some sun and read a book.’

‘Yes, he did that sometimes,’ said Samantha quietly.

‘Morris and I were, as it happens, in the organ loft of the cathedral so we could see him—and we saw all that happened. He appeared to be attacked.’

‘Who by?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Well, that’s part of the problem—we could see no one on the roof with him. Despite which he appeared to be stabbed and then to fall off the far side of the roof. Morris and I, of course, hurried to the gravel road behind the school where his body should have fallen—’

‘But it wasn’t there!’ I said, leaping in to contribute my piece to the narrative. ‘But the following morning it turned up, lying exactly where it should have fallen the afternoon before.’

‘I don’t understand,’ murmured Samantha, looking puzzled.

‘None of us understand just at the moment,’ said Jack. ‘That’s the whole point. Inspector Locke is leading the investigation, and he confesses himself to be as baffled as we are.’

‘Was it the fall that killed him?’ she asked.

‘He was stabbed,’ I said. ‘So it was a combination of the knife wound and the fall that killed him—at least that’s what we’ve been told.’

She finished off the brandy with one last, large gulp and then asked, ‘And no one knows who killed Dave?’

‘Not at this stage,’ Jack admitted. The colour had returned to her face, so he said, ‘If you feel up to it, we can walk you back to the school.’

She said yes please, rose from the table and picked up her small suitcase.

We walked beside her in silence as far as the cathedral close and saw her enter her front door.

‘She was very shaken,’ I said, turning to Jack.

‘Yes,’ he nodded, a thoughtful look in his eye. ‘Very shaken indeed.’

Later that day it was my turn to supervise prep. As I walked down the corridors making sure the students were in their study cubicles with heads down over books, I once again encountered the odious Conway and Wynyard.

They were walking towards me carrying a pair of old boots.

‘Why are you two not in your study?’ I demanded. ‘And where did those boots come from?’

The two Bounders knew they were late for evening prep but at least they had the grace to look embarrassed at being caught.

‘Ah, they’re M-M-Mr McKell’s boots, s-s-sir,’ stuttered Wynyard.

‘He told us to clean them for him,’ added Conway hurriedly. ‘Truly, sir.’

‘But he didn’t mean clean them during prep,’ I snapped. ‘Get off to your study now, both of you, and get to work! There’s an exam tomorrow, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ came their rapid responses as they hurried away with their heads down.

When I saw their study door close behind them, I continued on my way.

Just as I was completing the last of my rounds I saw McKell at the far end of the second floor corridor.

‘Excuse me, Deputy Head Master,’ I called out. McKell turned around, displaying his usual welcoming expression of a dark scowl. Somehow he managed to create the impression that he’d eaten a bad oyster and the taste lingered.

‘I’ve just encountered Conway and Wynyard,’ I explained as I caught up with him, ‘and they were carrying a pair of boots: your boots, so they told me.’

‘Yes, I’m trying to work out what punishment to give them for that tarradiddle of lies they told about young Stanhope. While I consider what sentence might be appropriate, I’m making them fag for me—giving them all the unpleasant little jobs I can think of.’

We fell into step beside each other, walking towards the Senior Common Room where, at this time of day, we should find a fresh pot of tea.

‘Those two bounders seem to be set in their ways,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that any punishment will reform their characters.’

This was greeted by a moment’s silence broken by McKell, surprisingly, asking for my opinion on the subject.

‘What do you think, Morris? What can be done about them? What steps can be taken?’

‘It’s too late,’ I said, shaking my head sadly.

‘Too late?’

‘They both should have been strangled at birth,’ I explained. ‘A golden opportunity missed.’

McKell actually raised a wry smile at my words.

Thus encouraged I continued, ‘Surely the real problem here is that they might have actually, temporarily, absconded with that exam paper they accused Stanhope of taking. It might have been in their possession for some time.’

I didn’t let on that I knew more about the history of the exam paper and its travels than I had revealed. Instead I continued, ‘If they had their hands on that paper they will certainly have written out a copy of the questions, and they’ll be planning to cheat in tomorrow’s exam.’

‘That possibility had occurred to me, Morris,’ McKell replied dryly, ‘so I’ve taken steps.’

I asked him what steps and he explained that since there had not being sufficient time to write a whole new paper, he had dug out an old paper from some five years ago.

‘None of these boys were in the school then, so the questions will be unfamiliar to them,’ he added. ‘The answers, however, should be no problem—as long as they’ve been paying attention in class and doing their prep.’

This old paper McKell had given to the ever-efficient Edith Carter to type out and duplicate on her Gestetner machine.

‘With the result,’ McKell said, ‘that tomorrow in the exam room Conway and Wynyard will be faced with an unfamiliar paper. That will block their cheating and really test their mettle.’

The following morning I had the task of invigilating that particular term exam.

Fifteen minutes ahead of the starting time I had the classroom monitors top up the ink wells and put a supply of paper on each desk. Then I placed a copy of the exam paper, face down, on each pile of writing paper.

As the clock tower on the cathedral stuck half past nine, the classroom doors opened and a parade of glum-faced, nervous pupils filed into the room and took their seats.

Conway and Wynyard, I noticed, sat together on the far side of the room with cocky expressions on their faces. When everyone was seated and settled, I checked the time on my watch and told them they could turn over their exam papers and have ten minutes reading time before they started writing.

I kept an eye on Conway and Wynyard as this process began, and I was delighted to see their cocky, over-confident expressions disappear to be replaced by pure, wide-eyed panic. One moment they were swaggering bulldogs, the next they were rabbits caught in the headlights of life.

They looked at each other and began a tense, whispered conversation.

‘Silence at the back there!’ I called out sternly, delighted at being able to put those two in their place.

A few minutes later I looked at my watch again and announced, ‘Reading time is over—you may now begin writing.’

Across the room heads went down and pens began scratching across pages. All, that is, except for Conway’s and Wynyard’s.

Conway was squinting at the Gestetnered page of questions in front of him—apparently wondering if the instruction at the top of the page, ‘Five questions only to be attempted’, could possibly be reinterpreted to mean ‘or none at all, if that’s how you’re feeling’.

Wynyard, meanwhile, was displaying a settled gloom closely resembling, in the weather forecaster’s nicely turned phrase, an ‘intense low-pressure system’.

Their punishment, I thought, was entirely just since, if their scheme against Stanhope had worked, the younger boy would have been expelled. They had gone beyond mere schoolboy japes into an action of real wickedness. This, of course, reminded me of my ongoing debate with Jack—and, if anything, seemed to strengthen his case, not mine.

For the next hour and a half I patrolled that classroom relentlessly, walking down the narrow aisles between the desks and keeping an especially sharp eye on Conway and Wynyard.

Finally the ordeal was over, and I was able to announce, ‘Time’s up. Pens down. Stop writing.’

I walked around the room distributing paper pins as I explained, ‘Pin your pages together, and be sure to write your name in the top right hand corner of the top page—if you haven’t already done so.’

A few minutes later this was done and the boys were sitting quietly—some confident and others looking anxious or depressed.

I dismissed them and walked around the empty room collecting the completed exams. Most boys, I noticed, had managed to write ten or twelve pages. Conway and Wynyard, on the other hand, had managed to write three and four pages respectively.

I sorted the exam papers into four bundles so that McKell, Beard, Douglas and I could share the marking equally. This is the point where exam depression shifts from the boys to the masters.

I put the bundles into manila folders and set out to distribute them, looking forward to telling McKell that the trap he had set for Conway and Wynyard had sprung tightly closed with a satisfying clunk.

Those two young gentlemen could look forward to nothing but bad news when the exam results were posted on the school noticeboard.

It being an exam day, with normal classes suspended, I had an hour to spare before lunch, so I roused out Jack and invited him to join me for a walk along the banks of the River Ness.

Jack should, according to the original timetable, have returned to Oxford by this time, but Inspector Locke had asked both him and Warnie to stay on for a few days in case he needed to interview them again.

We left the cathedral close through the main archway and headed down the slope, not towards the town this time but in the other direction, heading for the fields that fell gently down to the water’s edge.

Small, white clouds were sailing through a mostly blue sky, spreading moving patches of pale shadow amidst the yellow, buttery sunshine across the valley that morning.

As we walked, I talked to Jack about the behaviour of Conway and Wynyard.

‘But you see,’ I concluded at the end of my story, ‘most of the boys in our school don’t behave like that. There are many decent boys—Hamilton, Clifford, Redway, Cardew and countless others. I can’t accept that Conway and Wynyard are a good example of normal human nature.’

‘So you’re telling me,’ replied Jack with a twinkle in his eye, ‘that if you walked out of your classroom and left your class alone and unattended, unsupervised, they would do the right thing? Are you saying they would all put their heads down and do whatever work you’d left them to do? All of them? Or even most of them?’

‘Well . . . not necessarily. Not in those circumstances.’

‘Isn’t it more likely that you’d come back to find your classroom in chaos, the work being ignored and ink darts being tossed back and forth?’

I would have liked to have strenuously denied Jack’s calumny on the character of the schoolboys I taught. But I was rather restrained by my memory of an incident that occurred early in the term—more or less along the lines that Jack was sketching out.

‘Most schoolboys are like most adults,’ said Jack. ‘They behave well not because they have no inclination to indulge themselves but because they fear being caught.’

‘But we all do have good instincts within!’ I protested vigorously.

‘Exactly!’ Jack replied, seizing on my words. ‘We have both good and bad instincts within—we are “a good thing spoiled”.’

Pointing at a Guernsey cow grazing peacefully in a field on the other side of the river, he said, ‘It’s not all brown and not all white—there are patches of both. Your claim that human nature is basically good falls at this fence: namely, when we see that human nature is
both
basically good
and
basically evil. Human nature consists of both characteristics.’