The Floating Body (25 page)

I reported that they had just missed McKell by half a whisker as he had been beside me a moment before.

‘He’s just returned to the Common Room,’ I said.

I got a grunt of acknowledgment from Crispin and a sort of half salute from Merrivale, and they plunged into the building in pursuit of the Deputy Head.

Why were these two policemen, at just this moment, in hot pursuit of McKell?

Thoroughly intrigued, I followed close behind them to see what would transpire.

I stepped in through the Common Room door just in time to hear the Scotland Yard man say, ‘Mr McKell, I’m Inspector Crispin—’

Before he could say anything more our Deputy Head interrupted brusquely.

‘Not now, inspector. You’ll have to come back later. I’m busy.’

‘Actually, sir, you’re coming with us. Mr McKell, you are under arrest. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence.’

There was a stunned silence in the Senior Common Room as McKell was led away. What was surprising was that he went quietly without a word of protest. As soon as the party of three—Crispin, Merrivale and McKell—had exited down the corridor, a chorus of voices erupted.

‘I’m astonished,’ said Henry Beard.

‘What was that all about?’ asked Geoffrey Douglas.

‘It’s his sister I feel sorry for,’ said Mary Flavell, the school nurse.

‘You could have knocked me over with a feather,’ said David Evans, the organist, who often joined us when tea was on.

Ryan Carleton just nodded in agreement.

‘Do you think . . . is it possible . . . ?’ murmured our school secretary, Edith Carter. ‘Could Mr McKell really be guilty of the murder of Mr Fowler? Surely not! Not our Mr McKell.’

The mention of Muriel McKell made me hurry to the doorway to see, if I could, in which direction the police officers had marched off with our Deputy Head. I looked both ways and saw they were just disappearing around a corner—not towards the exit from the building, but in the direction of the McKells’ flat.

Walking back into the Common Room, I said, ‘I think they’re going to see Muriel McKell now.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ muttered Beard into his cup of tea.

‘Poor Muriel,’ Mary Flavell said.

‘I suppose they have to inform the sister,’ added Edith Carter.

‘Unless,’ I suggested, ‘they’re about to arrest her as well.’

‘Muriel?’ said our school nurse, a note of outrage in her voice. ‘Of course not! Why on earth would they want to do that?’

Geoffrey Douglas loudly sipped on his tea, giving us his impersonation of a dredging machine working on the bottom of a harbour, and then said, ‘They’re very close—brother and sister are very close indeed. Whatever McKell’s involved in, I can well imagine his sister being in it with him—all the way up to her bushy eyebrows.’

‘But murder?’ protested Mary Flavell. ‘No. No, I can’t for a minute imagine they would be involved in murder. That’s not possible.’

‘Perhaps it’s not murder,’ I suggested.

‘Then what?’ asked Edith Carver.

I chose not to reply and went back to drinking my tea.

‘Aha,’ said Douglas. ‘Young Morris knows more than he’s letting on. You’ve been hanging around with the police quite a lot, Morris. This has been noted, so there’s no point in denying it. You know more about this surprising development than the rest of us. I think it’s time for you to open up the secret scroll, old chap, and reveal its contents.’

This made me feel a bit uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure where Inspector Crispin was up to in his investigations into the diamond smuggling, and I didn’t know what I could reveal. What could I tell my fellow staff members? And what did the police regard as still being confidential?

However, I was rescued from my dilemma by an interruption from the doorway.

‘If you will allow me,’ said Jack’s unmistakable voice—a voice that could be heard clearly at the back of the largest lecture hall at Oxford—‘I think I can explain all.’

Jack and Warnie cruised into the Senior Common Room as part of a small flotilla—they were closely followed by the local police contingent of Inspector Locke and Sergeant Drake.

As Warnie played ‘mother’ and poured cups of tea for these late arrivals, Jack launched into his exposition.

‘Your Deputy Head Master, Gareth McKell, and his sister, Muriel, have both been arrested and charged with diamond smuggling. Although in the sister’s case I believe the actual charge is “handling property knowing it to have been smuggled” or whatever the legal phrase might be.’

There was a stunned silence, and then Henry Beard exploded with a loud protest. ‘But schoolmasters don’t smuggle diamonds! That’s done by criminals! And it happens in London, not in a little place like Nesfield!’

He had unwittingly echoed almost exactly my own reaction, and Warnie’s comments, when we first heard of the case Crispin was investigating and the precise nature of his suspicions.

‘It’s true,’ said Inspector Locke. ‘This diamond smuggling business is the case that Detective Inspector Crispin of Scotland Yard has been here investigating, and he now has it wrapped up and his suspects charged and under arrest.’

Silence once more descended on the Common Room. I looked around and saw my fellow staff members of Nesfield Cathedral School looking like a row of stunned mackerel in a fishmonger’s window.

Speaking more to himself than to the room, Inspector Locke muttered, ‘Now, if only I could tie up the loose ends of my murder case as neatly as Crispin has tied up his smuggling case—well, I’d be a happy man. But until I can explain how a corpse can float in the air, invisibly, for hours . . .’ His voice trailed away.

At this point Jack intervened to say, ‘Actually, on that subject a thought has occurred to me, inspector, that you might like to check out.’

Jack took the inspector by the elbow and led him to a quiet corner where they fell into a huddle in subdued tones.

Around me a hubbub of shocked conversation broke out, expressing a mixture of consternation and disbelief.

I stood back to watch and listen. Which was why I was the only one who saw Sergeant Drake being summoned to join the colloquy involving Jack and Inspector Locke. Drake was then, it appeared, dispatched to carry out a task, and Jack and the inspector returned to the main group.

Questions were fired at them from every direction, in a jumble of voices.

Jack raised a hand to hush the group and was about to speak when the Common Room door flew open once again and the Head Master burst into the room.

I say ‘burst’, but everything Dr Rogers did, he did with dignity. Better, perhaps, to say that he steamed into the room like a battleship going at its top rate of knots.

All eyes were fixed on him as he began to speak.

‘I take it that you are all now aware of this second, awful tragedy that has befallen our beloved school. First, the death of that wretched man Fowler, and now this!’

Clearly the Head Master was blaming Dave Fowler for getting himself murdered on school property. He was probably thinking that there were perfectly good back alleys in which one could have oneself murdered without allowing it to happen in
his
school.

‘The police have not yet revealed all the details to me,’ the Head was continuing, ‘which they assure me they will do in due course. However, what we do know at this stage is that Mr McKell, aided and abetted by his sister, has been engaged in a criminal activity for some time. Of course, this has no direct bearing on the operation of the school—and Mr McKell has carried out his duties towards the school in a thoroughly efficient manner throughout. His other . . . ah . . . criminal life has not impeded any of his work at this establishment. I will be writing to the parents today to make this abundantly clear.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ someone asked.

‘And how? How did he . . . ?’ asked another.

‘And why would he do it?’ asked a third.

Dr Rogers ran a hand over his distinguished brow and said, ‘Sadly I can answer none of those questions at this time. They will have to wait until the police make some sort of announcement, which, oh dear me, will no doubt be published in the popular press.’

‘Actually,’ said Jack from his inconspicuous position near the tea urn, ‘I think I can explain.’

All eyes in the Common Room immediately swivelled towards Jack, who allowed for a suitably dramatic pause before he continued. He always had a sense of the dramatic, which is part of what made him such a good lecturer.

‘This story begins,’ he said, ‘with the local jewellery shop in the town of Nesfield.’

‘You mean Jarrett Brothers’ Jewellery?’ asked Henry Beard.

‘That’s the name over the shop,’ Jack agreed. ‘But I gather from my good friend Inspector Crispin that there hasn’t been a Jarrett involved in the business for some time. The shop has passed from hand to hand over the years without the trading name being changed.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Mary Flavell said.

Ryan Carleton agreed, saying, ‘I always thought that nice little man behind the counter was Mr Jarrett. It always says “Jarrett” on the receipts.’

‘As it would,’ Jack continued, ‘since that’s the trading name of the business. But the current proprietor is a man named Roland McKell.’

‘Ah,’ sighed Geoffrey Douglas, ‘we begin to see the light. This man is . . .’

‘A cousin, as it turns out,’ Jack resumed, ‘of Gareth and Muriel McKell. And it was this man, cousin Roland, who first proposed the notion of a diamond smuggling operation based here in Nesfield.’

‘Oh, dear me, dear me,’ groaned the Head Master as he sank into a vacant armchair.

Jack ignored this punctuation in his narrative and continued, ‘Crispin tells me that Roland McKell was once in the jewellery trade in London. And there he became involved in handling smuggled diamonds.’

‘In fact,’ said Warnie with a chuckle, putting in his sixpeneth worth, ‘Roland moved here to Nesfield when things got too “hot” for him in London.’ And then he muttered, ‘I know about these things, you see. Read a lot of crime novels . . .’

Jack picked up the story. ‘Roland realised that Gareth’s frequent trips to the continent provided a perfect cover for a diamond smuggling operation, and by working from an out-of-the-way place such as Nesfield, he could operate without the powerful London gangs realising what he was up to. Gareth was carrying a new load of gemstones every time he returned from the continent. Muriel would take the stones to Roland, who would clean them and re-cut them if necessary, and then pass them on to his old contacts in the illicit diamond trade in London.’

‘You mean this has been going on for some time?’ asked Edith Carter.

‘It would appear so,’ said Jack.

‘It just gets worse and worse,’ groaned the Head Master.

‘Of course this sort of trade can’t continue undetected forever. Crispin tells me it was a major London gang that first became aware of illicit diamonds coming onto the market outside their control. They began asking questions.’

‘And this often involved beating people up,’ Warnie volunteered. ‘You’d know all about this sort of thing if you read crime novels.’

‘What was happening in the London underworld alerted Scotland Yard that something unusual was going on in the illicit diamond trade. An informer told Crispin of the arrival of gems in London from Nesfield.’

‘He’s called a “fence”, Warnie explained. ‘The man who handles stolen property is called a “fence”. And it was one of these fences who alerted Crispin to the source of the diamonds.’

‘Working from the London end,’ Jack resumed, ‘Crispin discovered that Gareth McKell was the only resident of Nesfield who made frequent, and regular, trips to the Continent. With his suspicions aroused, he arranged for McKell’s rucksack and belongings to be thoroughly searched by customs each time he made the channel crossing. And, of course, he discovered the connection with Roland McKell at Jarrett Brothers’ Jewellery in the town.’

‘The only thing left,’ said Warnie, ‘was to discover how the blighter did it. Customs never found the jewels despite the most careful searching. So how was he getting them in? It was Jack who tumbled to the answer, wasn’t it, Jack?’

‘But it was Morris who put me onto it,’ Jack said modestly.

‘Me?’ I was surprised. ‘How did I do that?’

‘By telling me about the unusual way McKell treated his boots.’

‘His boots?’ asked Henry Beard. ‘How do his boots come into this?’

‘Morris told me that McKell returned to the school with mud and clay still caked around the spikes of his climbing boots. Keen rock climbers such as McKell would normally take much better care of their equipment than that. Diamonds are small and can be hidden underneath—and covered up by—clay and dried mud. So Morris’s report aroused my suspicions.’

‘You didn’t tell me!’ I protested.

‘I passed my thoughts on to Detective Inspector Crispin,’ resumed Jack calmly, ignoring my outburst, ‘who thought there might be something in the idea. Then when Morris told me that McKell had handed his boots over to two of the boys here to be cleaned, I realised that the current load of diamonds must have been removed from the clay and mud they had been embedded in around the spikes—and was most probably already at Roland’s shop in the town, being prepared for shipment.’

‘Very clever chap, my brother,’ said Warnie, rocking back on his heels and looking as pleased as punch.

Jack had begun to pace the room, which he often did when he lectured. The more engrossed in his topic he became, the more he was inclined to pace up and down the lecture platform—or, in this case, the floor of the Senior Common Room.

‘When Morris mentioned the boot cleaning to me, I hurried into town and alerted Crispin to the news. He decided it was time to act.’

‘They conducted a “raid”,’ Warnie explained. ‘That’s what it’s called in police circles. They took some uniformed officers and raided the jeweller’s shop. They caught Roland red-handed, packaging up the gems for shipment to London. And Roland turned out to be a bit of a weedy, spineless chap—under interrogation he told them the whole story.’