The Floating Body (27 page)

‘A knife fired from a crossbow?’

‘That’s how Beard murdered Fowler.’

‘But we saw no one on the roof, remember?’

‘That’s because Beard didn’t step onto the roof. He didn’t need to. He had a weapon that could strike across a distance. All he had to do was to push up the flap of the trapdoor leading to the roof and then, while standing on the top step below the trapdoor, fire his weapon—his knife-firing crossbow.’

I was once again shaking my head. Not in confusion this time but in amazement, because this was an explanation of everything Jack and I had seen: Fowler, alone on the roof, standing up and expostulating with someone (obviously Beard, his head visible at the trapdoor), then staggering when the knife hit him in the stomach.

‘But hang on, hang on,’ I said. ‘Fowler then fell off the roof, right?’

‘Quite right. We saw him fall.’

‘But he didn’t hit the ground until the next day. Now that’s just plain impossible. Can you explain that?’

‘I believe I can. The explanation came to me today when you were almost hit by the lorry from the building site—the tip-truck that came up behind us on the gravel road behind the school. What if there was just such a truck passing underneath at the moment Fowler’s body fell? So that instead of hitting the ground, it fell into the back of the lorry?’

‘But wouldn’t the lorry driver feel the thump?’

‘Not necessarily, because of the ruts and gullies on that uneven gravel road. When the body fell into the open back of his tip-truck, he probably just thought he’d hit a large bump in the road.’

I stopped to absorb this, and then I asked, ‘But then the body came back. How did that come about?’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I passed on my truck idea to Inspector Locke and he sent Sergeant Drake to investigate. The result is that we now know the answer to that puzzle.’

Jack, having reached a crucial point in his narrative, stopped to light his pipe—mainly, I believe, to string out the suspense.

‘The story the man eventually, when pushed, told Drake,’ said Jack between puffs, ‘was that he didn’t discover the dead body in the back of his truck until the early hours of the following morning, when he was getting ready to go to work. This driver has a criminal record for minor offences. He panicked when he saw the body. He worked out when it must have fallen into the truck—when he felt a large jolt at the back of the school the afternoon before. So, still in the pre-dawn darkness, he drove back to the same spot, tipped the body out of his truck and drove off.’

Suddenly a light went on, and I said, ‘Stanhope heard him! He told me just as we were leaving the dorms to go across to the cathedral for Speech Night. He told me about a truck he heard moving in the dark. That must have been it.’

‘Undoubtedly.’

I sat in silence for a moment taking it all in. It was all explained—every detail.

A distant hooting told us that Jack and Warnie’s train was approaching.

Jack picked up his battered suitcase, shook my hand and said, ‘Well, I hope you enjoy your second term as a schoolmaster, young Morris.’

‘There won’t be a second term,’ I said with a cheerful smile.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Warnie.

‘I’m not cut out to be a schoolmaster, so I applied for several other jobs, and one came through. I’m joining the staff of the
Bath Chronicle
as a leader writer.’

Jack seized my hand in both of his and shook it warmly.

‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘A start on the road to being a writer?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Now listen, young fellah,’ said Warnie. ‘I insist that once you’re settled in Bath, and they give you a few days off, you must come and visit us in Oxford. Will you do that?’

‘I will.’

‘Is that a promise?’

‘That’s a promise.’

This book, like the others in this series, is by way of being a homage to C. S. Lewis. But this time it is also a nod in the direction of the delightful Frank Richards. Despite the name, Frank was no relation to the author—he couldn’t be since ‘Frank Richards’ was one of the pen names used by the prolific Charles Hamilton. It is the name under which he wrote an astonishing number of school stories, originally published in the
Magnet
story paper for boys, about Greyfriars School, it’s ‘Famous Five’ (Harry Wharton and his friends) and ‘the fat owl of the Remove’, Billy Bunter. In 1935, when our story is set, Billy Bunter et al. were at the top of their form, so it’s appropriate that they are celebrated in this novel.

That said, here are a few things worth noticing:

•    ‘Yarooooh! Oh crikey! Ow! Wow! Beast! Oh crumbs! Ow! Ooooooooooh!’ is a salute to the linguistic inventiveness of the great Frank Richards.

•    ‘Nesfield’ is a fictional cathedral town in the novel
The Weight of the Evidence
by Michael Innes, the pen name of J. I. M. Stewart, a colleague of Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in the English School at Oxford.

•    ‘Quelch’ is another salute, Quelch being one of the form masters at Frank Richards’ fictional Greyfriars School.

•    Hamilton, Clifford, Redway and Cardew—from Charles Hamilton’s real name and three of his (many) pen names: Martin Clifford, Ralph Redway and Winston Cardew. In all, Hamilton appears to have employed at least twenty-five different pseudonyms in his prolific career.

•    
The Nine Tailors
is the eleventh book in Dorothy L. Sayers’ series of murder mysteries featuring her legendary aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. It was first published in 1934.

•    Detective Inspector Sexton Locke has been named in honour of one of the most famous fictional detectives of the 1930s, Sexton Blake. One critic described him as ‘the schoolboys’ Sherlock Holmes’.

•    John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was an American-born mystery writer who lived in England and set many of his stories there. He specialised in ‘locked-room murders’ and ‘impossible mysteries’.

•    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a famous British writer and defender of the Christian faith. Lewis always said that Chesterton played a key role in his own conversion to Christianity.

•    R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943) was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr Thorndyke.

•    
The Hotspur
was a British boys’ paper published by D. C. Thomson & Co. from 1933 to 1959.

•    ‘Tollers’ was J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), author of
The Lord of the Rings
and a good personal friend of C. S. Lewis.

•    Douglas Jardine (1900–1958) was a cricketer who played twenty-two Test matches for England, most famously as captain of the team during the notorious ‘Bodyline’ series of 1932–33. He retired with a batting average of 46.83.

•    Crichton House, Rodwell Regis shares the name of the fictional school in the famous comic novel
Vice Versa
(1882) by ‘F. Anstey’ (real name Thomas Anstey Guthrie). Lewis once described this as ‘the only honest school story ever written’ (reflecting his own unhappy school days, as ‘Crichton House’ is depicted in the novel as an ill-run horror of a school).

•    The Martlets was an undergraduate literary society at Oxford of which C. S. Lewis was an active member in 1919. The story is told in ‘To the Martlets’ by Walter Hooper (in
C. S. Lewis: Speaker and Teacher
, ed. Carolyn Keefe, Zondervan Publishing House, 1971).

•    
The Purple Gang
—A non-existent mystery novel referred to a number of times in the comic novels and short stories of P. G. Wodehouse, and therefore an appropriate bit of melodramatic nonsense to be confiscated from a schoolboy.

•    ‘Cat-like tread’—The song ‘With Cat-Like Tread We Creep upon Our Foe’ comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Pirates of Penzance.

•    (Alfred) Cecil Harwood (1898–1975) was introduced to Lewis by his friend Owen Barfield when all three were undergraduates at Oxford. Harwood had known Barfield from boyhood. Lewis dedicated
Miracles
to Harwood and his wife Daphne, and was godfather to one of their children.

•    Karel Capek (1890–1938), Czech writer. His play
RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots)
put the word ‘robot’ into our language (from the Czech
robota
meaning ‘worker’ or ‘labourer’).