The Floating Body (26 page)

‘With the result you saw here today,’ Jack concluded.

‘And that tough we saw in the pub,’ I said. ‘The one we thought beat up McKell—was he from one of the London gangs? Was he trying to track down his rival diamond smugglers?’

‘So the police believe,’ Jack replied.

‘And how were the diamonds delivered to McKell when he was travelling in Europe?’ asked Douglas.

‘That was Roland’s dealer in Amsterdam. He would travel to wherever Gareth McKell was headed and meet him there,’ Jack explained.

The Senior Common Room was so quiet you could have heard one turtledove coughing politely to attract the attention of another turtledove in a subtle way.

At length it was the Head Master who spoke.

‘Well, thank you, Mr Lewis,’ he said. ‘It’s for the best that we understand these things. It’s encouraging to know there was no direct involvement by the school community in any of this.’

‘There was one boy in the school, a boy named Fox,’ Jack said, ‘who was used as a messenger to carry notes between the school and the jewellery shop. But that was the extent of the school’s involvement.’

The Head Master groaned loudly again. ‘Oh, dear me. And to think . . . oh, to think how much I trusted McKell!’

‘Why did he do it?’ asked David Evans. ‘Do we know that?’

Warnie chuckled and said, ‘Money. That’s what lies behind most crimes.’

Jack nodded and said, ‘“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”’

‘Paul’s first letter to Timothy, chapter six,’ said the Dean. He was standing in the doorway. He had arrived quietly while we were all so engrossed in the story we hadn’t noticed.

Just then Sergeant Drake returned. He pushed past the Dean, who was leaning against the doorframe, and hurried across to where Inspector Locke was standing.

The two of them had a hushed conversation, but I picked up a few words—something along the lines of ‘I went to the worksite’—but more than that I couldn’t hear.

But I did notice that Locke caught Jack’s eye and nodded to him.

This must have attracted the attention of the Head Master, because at that point Dr Rogers rose from his armchair to his full impressive height and said, ‘Now, Inspector Locke—I wish that you would do as well as your Scotland Yard colleague. If you can clear up this other dreadful business of the death of Mr Fowler, we shall have a great shadow lifted from the school. Can you do that, sir?’

‘I wish I could. However, at the moment—’ Locke began.

But Jack leaped quickly in and said, ‘May I make a suggestion? If you wish to place the killer of Mr Fowler under lock and key, I suggest you arrest Henry Beard.’

Beard? Beard? I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Why on earth would Henry Beard want to kill Dave Fowler? And, more to the point, how on earth did he do it?

At that point I looked around the group assembled in the Senior Common Room and found that Henry Beard was missing.

Around me voices exploded. Everyone seemed to be asking questions at once.

Raising his voice above the general melee, Warnie said, ‘Of course, Mr Fowler was here as a police spy.’

The silence that followed this announcement was like the echoing silence that follows an explosive thunderclap.

Finally the Head Master said, ‘No, no, no, my dear chap. You must be mistaken. I employed him myself. He came warmly recommended by another head master.’

‘All carefully contrived, I’m afraid,’ Jack explained, ‘by the police. They wanted their man on the spot, in the school, to observe McKell and try to discover his method of operation.’

‘He was what the police call an “undercover man”,’ Warnie explained, trotting out more of his light reading. ‘But before he could report, he was killed.’

‘Then surely,’ said Mary Flavell, ‘as hard as it is to believe, it must have been Mr McKell who murdered Mr Fowler. He must have discovered that he was really . . . and then he must have . . . So why do you say it was poor Henry Beard?’

I was still wondering the same thing, and as I wondered I looked again around the room. Beard was definitely gone. Everyone else was still eagerly gathering around Jack, seeking answers. But of Henry Beard there was no sign.

This, I thought, was where I could help. While the argument and the questions continued, I slipped out into the corridor to go in search of Beard. As an old, and not very old at that, rugby fullback, I thought I should be able to place my hands on Beard and bring him back down to the Common Room, where the police could slap the cuffs on him. If, indeed, they did use handcuffs during arrests anywhere except in those American pulp magazines.

Where would he be?

Obviously the first place to look was his flat.

I hurried across the cathedral close and up the front steps of the terrace house in which Henry and Samantha Beard had their flat.

Stepping in through the entranceway, I stopped at the front door of the Beards’ flat. I could hear voices from within. And one of them, I thought, sounded like an angry voice.

I knocked on the door.

There was no response, but the voices fell silent.

I waited as long as I dared, then I knocked again.

From within I heard a woman’s voice—Samantha’s, I presumed—but speaking so softly I couldn’t make out the words. A man replied—it must have been Henry—and while his voice was too muffled by the thick door to be able to make out the words, he sounded angry, very angry.

I knocked a third time.

‘Beard,’ I called out. ‘It’s me—Morris. Open up, please, Beard.’

From within the flat came the sound of footsteps, and then other sounds that weren’t so clear. But they might have been the sounds of a scuffle.

Then came a woman’s voice—crying out, I thought, crying to me for help. The cry stopped abruptly.

Or, rather, it was stopped—by what sounded like a slap, or possibly even a punch. It was certainly the sound of flesh hitting flesh.

What followed was the sound of a woman sobbing.

I could bear this no longer.

‘Come on, Beard, open the door,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t stay in there all day. You’ll have to open up sooner or later.’

Complete silence fell. What had Beard done to young Samantha? Or what was he doing to her now?

Then I did what I should have done at the beginning: I tried the door knob. It was unlocked.

I opened the door and walked in.

Samantha was on the far side of the sitting room facing me. Tears were streaming down her face and she was shaking with sobs. There was a red weal down one side of her face, and an ugly red mark on her arm.

I turned and discovered that Henry Beard was standing right beside me. He leaned over and pushed the door shut.

‘You’re a busybody, Morris—a fool and a busybody,’ he snarled, his face contorted with anger. ‘Pushing yourself in where you’re not wanted. Well, you’re in now . . . and I’m not so certain you’ll get out again.’

He raised his right hand to show me what he was holding—a large, ugly-looking fishing knife.

‘Move,’ he commanded. ‘Go and stand beside Samantha.’

I did as I was told.

Beard advanced towards us, gripping that dangerous-looking knife very tightly.

‘What am I going to do with you?’ he asked.

‘Don’t be so foolish, old chap,’ I pleaded. ‘If you keep going this way, it can’t end well. You can’t really get out of the building, you know. There are police officers on the school premises. Why don’t you just put that knife down and we can talk about it?’

Beard muttered something under his breath. Then he changed course.

He was no longer edging towards us but towards a cupboard in the corner of the room.

When he reached the cupboard, without taking his eyes off us, he flung open the door and reached inside.

I must admit that my heart missed a beat when he drew out from behind that cupboard door a wicked-looking crossbow.

I mean to say, Tom Morris is as chivalrous as the next man when it comes to rescuing a damsel in distress, and I’d opened the door and stepped in because young Samantha Beard was clearly in distress and needed a knightly rescuer. But just at that moment I would have been quite happy if someone else had stepped into that knight errant role.

Beard had dropped down on one knee, reached into the darkness of the cupboard and pulled out an arrow. Well, it’s what I would have called an arrow, but I think strictly speaking the things they fire from crossbows are called ‘bolts’, not ‘arrows’. Anyway, whatever it was, it had a sharpish-looking point, and, still without taking his eyes off us, Beard was loading this thing into his crossbow and pulling back the loading mechanism.

I was hoping he’d have to take his eyes off us, or put down the knife, in order to do this. But this crossbow had some sort of lever mechanism that enabled him to do it one-handed. Then he was on his feet again.

And he was holding the crossbow.

‘Hey! Come on, Beard,’ I protested. ‘Don’t point that thing at me! It might go off!’

Some guttural sounds came out of the back of Beard’s throat, but they didn’t quite amount to being words. This wasn’t Henry Beard the schoolmaster I was facing; this was Henry Beard the primitive hunter. And I didn’t much like the look of him.

‘Look, old chap—violence doesn’t really solve anything, does it now? You know that,’ I felt like an idiot mouthing such clichés, but somehow I needed to distract Beard from doing anything irreparably violent—especially to me.

‘Mr Beard,’ came a sharp, commanding voice from the doorway. I looked across and there was Inspector Sexton Locke.

‘Just how many eyewitnesses do you want, Mr Beard,’ asked Locke, ‘to your second murder?’

And then it was all over. Beard’s nerve failed, and he sagged like a punctured balloon.

He lowered the crossbow.

Locke was across the room in an instant and took the weapon out of his nerveless hand. Samantha collapsed on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.

I just stood where I was with a large band of energetic butterflies beating enthusiastically at the walls of my stomach.

That was when I realised that I’d been holding my breath, and I opened my mouth and gasped in fresh oxygen.

I felt like a man slowly coming out of anaesthetic.

Others crowded into the room.

Sergeant Drake had Beard by the arm and was leading him away. Nurse Mary Flavell was sitting next to Samantha with an arm around her.

The explanation of what had happened and what it all meant came much later that afternoon. I heard it, oddly enough, in the waiting room of the Nesfield railway station.

I was with Jack and Warnie, who were waiting for their train back to Oxford.

‘Morris, stop shaking your head backwards and forwards like that,’ said Jack in a warm friendly tone.

I hadn’t even realised I’d been doing it. I felt as though my brain was lost somewhere in the Hampton Court Maze and couldn’t find its way out again.

‘Just lean back on this nice, comfortable wooden bench,’ Jack said, ‘and I’ll explain it all to you.’

So I leaned back, and I think I even closed my eyes, the better to concentrate.

‘Henry Beard,’ Jack began, ‘has confessed to the murder of Dave Fowler.’

‘Yes, I understand that much,’ I said, a touch irritably. ‘But that’s the bottom line of the equation. What I don’t understand is the algebra that fills the rest of the page and gets us to that result.’

‘His motivation,’ Jack resumed patiently (years of dealing with students having taught him that logic simply sails over irrational outbursts), ‘his motivation was violent jealously upon discovering that his wife, Samantha, had begun an affair—or at least some sort of romantic relationship—with Mr Fowler.’

‘How did this come about?’

Jack paused, gathered his thoughts, and then resumed in the steady, carefully-chosen-words style for which he was famous.

‘I am told that Beard had what is called “a bad war”. He was wounded in the trenches, and diagnosed with shell shock after the war. He became a morose, withdrawn and lonely man. You knew him as a grumpy, surly schoolmaster. And he had very little life outside of schoolmastering. Apart, that is, from regular fishing holidays. He stayed in the same remote village every year, and stayed in the same farm house with the same couple. This couple had a daughter.’

‘Samantha?’

‘Precisely. In the village there was a shortage of young men of her own age, again because of the devastation of the war. But there was Henry Beard—older, not a happy man, but a man who was offering to marry her.’

‘Which is how she turned up here as Mrs Henry Beard?’

‘Indeed. But the marriage was not, by all accounts, an altogether happy one. Then along came Dave Fowler—younger, good looking, more ebullient. And he took an interest in her—an interest that flattered her, and to which, against her better judgment, she found herself responding.’

‘How far did it go?’

‘We’ll probably never know. But it certainly went far enough to disturb the balance of Henry Beard’s mind. How he made his discovery of the relationship we still don’t know, but he did. His first reaction was to send his young wife home to her parents, on the pretence that her mother was ill and needed nursing. Then he carefully planned to murder Dave Fowler.’

‘But when we saw Fowler that day on the roof—when you and I were in the organ loft of the cathedral—Beard wasn’t on the roof with him. There was no one on the roof with him.’

‘No one we could see,’ Jack responded, his eyes sparkling. ‘Because Beard was using a weapon that could strike at a distance.’

‘What weapon?’

‘The same weapon with which he threatened you.’

‘The crossbow?’

‘The very same.’

‘But Fowler was stabbed with a knife, not shot with a crossbow bolt. Can you explain that?’

‘I can now. Beard had modified a knife, fitting a kind of notch protruding from one side of the handle. This could be inserted into the slot that usually held the bolt, and thus fired from the crossbow.’