The Floating Body (5 page)

‘I’m not one for games, as you know, Morris,’ Jack said, ‘and I know how badly that can be received by the rest of the school. So that boy has my sympathies.’

The second ball was also a wild swing and a miss by Stanhope.

‘Hey, Clifford—chuck it underarm,’ called Conway derisively. ‘See if he can hit that.’

The third ball went whizzing from Clifford’s hand, and once again Stanhope was slow raising his bat and the ball flew past him into the back of the net.

Wynyard cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, ‘Send him down a grand piano—see if he can play that!’ This was followed by hoots of laughter from the sidelines.

Clifford glanced at McKell to see if there was any point in continuing.

‘Finish the over,’ McKell commanded, so Clifford went back to his mark and commenced his run up once again.

This time the ball was so close to the top of the stumps it was unmissable, and Stanhope, who already had his bat in a backswing as the ball left Clifford’s hand, managed to hit it in the centre of the bat and send it slamming into the side net.

Or would have done—if the bat had not snapped in two.

The moment the bat hit the ball, with a solid ‘thwack’ of willow on leather, the blade of the bat snapped backwards, almost breaking clean off just under the handle.

Stanhope looked confused and uncertain what had just happened, while Conway, Wynyard and Co. were rolling on the grass howling with laughter.

‘That’s enough, Stanhope,’ said McKell, bringing the ordeal to an end. ‘Next boy!’

Stanhope walked miserably from the nets, dragging the broken bat behind him.

When he reached me, he said, ‘I never expected to make the team, sir, but I didn’t expect that to happen.’

‘Here,’ said Warnie, ‘let me take a look at that bat.’

Stanhope handed it over. Warnie examined it for a moment and then passed it to me.

‘Take a look at that, Morris,’ he muttered. ‘The shaft of the handle has been cut halfway through. There are clearly saw marks there. Someone has been playing a nasty trick on this boy.’

And, of course, I immediately knew who that was.

McKell, who had heard none of this, called out, ‘We’ll have a break from medium pace, Clifford. Is there anyone here who can spin the ball at all?’

There was a long silence, so at length Warnie spoke.

‘If you’d like your batsmen to face some spin, I’d be happy to send them down a few of my leg spinners and off breaks.’

McKell scowled, so Warnie continued, ‘In my army cricket team my leg spinners in particular were well regarded.’

‘Very well then, Major,’ said the House Master. ‘You can give our boys a test. Let’s see how they go with spin. Here you are, sir, take the ball. And Redway, you pad up and go into the nets—let’s see how you go facing spin. I’ve heard the Greyfriars team includes a demon spinner, so this will be good practice for you.’

Warnie took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves and tossed the ball from hand to hand while Redway pulled on pads and gloves. Then the boy took his mark and Warnie let fly with a ball that came out of a twisting wrist. It hit the pitch and spun several bat widths to the leg side.

‘Well bowled!’ called out Hamilton from the sidelines. ‘Could you teach me to do that, sir?’

‘Oh, ah, well, I can’t see why not,’ grunted Warnie. ‘If it’s all right with your Master, that is.’

McKell thoroughly approved of his key players being taught how to spin the ball, so Jack and I left Warnie happily giving lessons in the devious art of spin bowling while we went off to continue our tour.

‘Come and have a look inside the cathedral, Jack,’ I said. ‘Quite a fine example of neo-gothic.’

We found the north door unlocked and walked inside the vast, vaulted space of the church. It was a sunny day, and warm sunlight streamed into the building through the tall stained-glass windows, casting a patchwork quilt of rainbow colours over all, and splashing amber light over the towering sandstone columns that supported the arched roof.

Jack politely admired the oldest window in the building—the rose window at the eastern end—and the delicate carving on the choir stalls.

As we strolled the length of the building I pointed out the series of windows portraying the life of Christ along the southern side. Then turning to look at the northern side, I pointed out the tall, multi-panelled window that depicted the martyrdom of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer.

This particularly interested Jack as they were, famously, the ‘Oxford Martyrs’. As an undergraduate I had frequently cycled over the spot in the Broad where they had been burned at the stake—Latimer and Ridley first, then Cranmer some months later.

We were halfway down the nave when we heard the north door click open behind us. We turned and saw the organist, young David Evans, striding down the aisle in our direction. Seeing us, his face broke into a sunny smile.

‘Jack,’ I said, making the introductions, ‘this grinning Welshman is David Evans—a very fine organist. And David, this is C. S. Lewis, my old Oxford tutor.’

‘You can drop “old” as an adjectival qualifier, young Morris,’ chortled Jack as he and Evans shook hands.

‘Doing the tour?’ Evans asked.

I said we were, and asked if he had arrived for organ practice.

‘Just a quick run through on the Tallis anthem for Evensong,’ he said. ‘You’re welcome to stay and listen if you wish.’ He gestured at the pipes on the north wall as he added, ‘It’s a Hill organ. Quite a fine instrument. Come on up to the organ loft and I’ll show you.’

Jack was quite the music enthusiast and happily accepted the invitation. So we climbed up the steep, narrow stairs to the loft.

Jack chatted to Evans about the organ for a while. Having no particular interest, I stepped to the end of the loft and slid open the narrow window there to let in a little fresh air. From where I was standing, high up in the cathedral, I was almost exactly opposite the roof of the Old School.

I could see Dave Fowler lying back in his deckchair, book in hand, straw hat shading his eyes.

‘What words will the boys be singing to the Tallis?’ Jack asked.

‘It’ll be the Winchester hymn “Glory to Thee, My God, This Night”,’ Evans replied.

As they were speaking, I watched Fowler rise from his deckchair and try to rearrange it at a lower angle. For a minute or two he struggled with the recalcitrant chair. Its awkward hinges flopped in all the wrong directions as the Mathematics Master wrestled with it. Eventually he got it unfolded and refolded, and set up at a more comfortable angle. Then he flopped back into the chair and dropped the straw hat onto his face and the book onto his chest. He appeared to have little intention of doing much more in the way of actual reading.

Meanwhile, David Evans settled himself at the console of the organ, made a few tentative stabs at the pedals with his feet, raised his hands and began to play.

He had only opened a few of the stops and was playing the melody softly and sweetly.

Jack strolled over to join me at the window, commenting on the quality of the music as he did so.

‘It’s the words of the hymns I object to,’ I said. Jack raised a questioning eyebrow, so I continued, ‘Well, some hymns anyway.’

‘You never miss an opportunity to have a sly dig, do you, young Morris?’ Jack responded with a broad grin on his face. He was clearly relishing the prospect of a lively debate. ‘Give me an example.’

I wasn’t quite ready for that, so I hastily groped around for one. ‘Well, we had a thing by Watts at Morning Prayer recently, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”. The words of that hymn—quite frankly, Jack—are very demeaning of human nature. All that stuff about pouring contempt on all my pride. That may be all right for convicted murderers, but for ordinary, decent, upright citizens it is definitely demeaning.’

Jack then engaged in what I call his ‘rhetorical guffawing’. Throwing back his head he came out with, ‘Ho, ho, ho! You have a remarkably sanguine view of human nature, young Morris.’

I would have responded to his words but my attention was drawn at that moment to movement on the rooftop opposite.

Fowler had risen from his deckchair and seemed to be waving his arms at someone I couldn’t see from where we stood.

‘Something seems to have upset him,’ I remarked. Jack joined me and we stood side by side at the tall, narrow window. Which is how we came to be eyewitnesses to the inexplicable, and fatal, melodrama that followed.

Fowler’s mouth was opening and closing vigorously. Of course, no sound carried to us, but at a guess I would have said he was shouting.

‘Something has definitely annoyed your friend,’ boomed Jack by my elbow without taking his eyes off the roof opposite.

It was impossible to make out the exact expression on Fowler’s face—he was too far away for that—but it appeared to be contorted with emotion. However, whether that emotion was anger or fear I couldn’t have said.

‘What’s puzzling is who he’s talking to,’ I remarked. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone on the roof except Fowler.’

Behind us Evans was oblivious to what was going on. He was lost in the world of music, and the lovely sounds that filled the vast, cavernous interior of the cathedral were totally at odds with the inexplicable but highly emotional scene being acted out on the rooftop on the opposite side of the quad.

‘Is he drunk?’ I asked.

‘He was perfectly sober when we spoke to him in the quad,’ said Jack.

‘Is he hallucinating then?’ I puzzled aloud. ‘I can’t see anyone but Fowler on that roof, but he is clearly violently upset about something.’

I was about to suggest he had been stung by an insect, perhaps a wasp, but his movements were clearly not those of a man suffering from a wasp sting.

At that moment he suddenly doubled up, as if he had been punched in the stomach. He staggered several steps sideways, then turned around in our direction. He tried to straighten up and was looking down at his stomach.

I took a sharp breath: even from where we were, on the other side of the quad, it was clear that blood was streaming down from some sort of wound.

Jack, who has sharper eyes than mine, said, ‘I can see a knife handle protruding from his stomach.’

Fowler staggered unsteadily across the roof, then seemed to lose his balance—and disappeared from view as he plunged over the far side of the roof.

‘Come along,’ said Jack urgently, ‘we must go to his aid.’

‘What’s up?’ cried a startled David Evans, abruptly taking his hands off the organ console as Jack and I half stumbled, half sprinted down the steep stairs from the organ loft.

‘Something’s happened to Dave Fowler,’ I called up from halfway down the stairs as my feet rattled on the wooden steps. Reaching the bottom I added, ‘It looks as if he needs help.’

Jack and I ran down the nave and out through the north door. I sprinted across the old cobblestones of the quad, with Jack close behind me. It took us only a moment to hurry through the archway under the Old School, push open the heavy wooden door on the far side and step out onto the gravel road that ran behind the school building.

That was where we came to a sudden halt.

Here, lying on the gravel road, we had expected to find the body of Dave Fowler, severely injured and in need of urgent assistance. But it wasn’t there. The road was empty—both immediately under the rear wall of the school building and in every direction.

It was just a bare, gravel road.

‘I . . . I don’t understand,’ I gasped. ‘We clearly saw him go over the edge of the roof. He should be here.’

Jack paced out into the middle of the road. He stood with his hands on his hips and a deep frown on his face. He looked up at the roof and then to the left and right.

‘There don’t appear to be any projecting cornices that might have snagged the body on the way down,’ he said.

‘There aren’t,’ I said. ‘This part of the building is Georgian—no gothic decorations or gargoyles. Nothing, in fact, for the body to catch on.’

I joined Jack in the middle of road. ‘And there hasn’t been time for anyone to remove it,’ I continued. ‘He must have fallen no more than a minute ago at the most.’

Jack said nothing but continued to survey the scene.

‘Besides which,’ I resumed, ‘there’s no conceivable reason why anyone would want to remove the body.’

‘Up to the roof,’ Jack snapped decisively. ‘The answer must be up there.’

We hurried back into the school, and I led the way past the classrooms and down the long corridor to the entrance to the narrow back stairs—normally used only by the servants—that led up to the roof.

Beyond the topmost occupied floor of the building, these stairs kept going. They ended at a landing, with a door leading on one side to the box room and on the other to a ladder-like set of wooden steps bolted to the wall that went up to a trapdoor in the roof.

I had never before been up to the roof myself, but the trapdoor above our heads was clearly the way, so I climbed the steps. Reaching the top, I pushed up the trapdoor and saw sky above me. I clambered out onto the roof with Jack following close behind.

‘Well, this is where he was,’ I said, pointing out the obvious. On the flat leads of the roof was Dave Fowler’s deckchair. Beside it lay a book and a straw hat. But apart from those objects the roof was empty.

Jack stuffed his hands into his pockets and began prowling around.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

‘Some sort of gutter or channel your friend might have fallen into when he appeared—to us at least—to fall off the roof.’

But there was nothing of the sort. Together we patrolled the whole of that flat roof area, and there was no body, and nowhere a body might have fallen into. Standing side by side at the stone parapet, Jack and I peered over, looking down onto the gravel road we had been standing on moments before.

The road was still deserted and there was no body on the roof.

‘Well, did we imagine it then?’ I said, throwing my hands in the air.

Jack pulled his pipe out of the pocket of his old tweed jacket, filled it, lit it and began to puff great clouds of blue smoke.