The Floating Body (6 page)

‘Two separate minds having the same hallucination at the same moment,’ he said through the clouds, ‘is, I think you’ll find, a phenomenon unknown to modern science.’

‘Then—’ I began, but I found myself unable to finish the sentence, so I raised my hands and shrugged my shoulders in a sign of helpless bewilderment.

Jack continued to puff in deep thought as he walked across to the opposite stone balustrade and looked down into the quadrangle of the cathedral close.

As he did this I went over to the deckchair and picked up the book. It was a yellow-jacketed Gollancz thriller,
The Nine Tailors
by Dorothy L. Sayers.

Jack rejoined me, nodding at the book and saying, ‘Quite a well-written book—for a detective novel.’

‘Bother the book! What do we do?’ I demanded irritably.

‘Go to Mr Fowler’s rooms,’ Jack replied decisively. ‘See if he’s returned there, or has attempted to.’

‘But he looked far too badly wounded to . . .’ My voice trailed away. Clearly Fowler was not here on the roof, and clearly he was not where he should have fallen, so his rooms were as good a place as any to begin our search.

Fowler’s rooms were in the single men’s quarters—the end terrace house of the row. I was occupying the rooms of the (temporarily) absent English Master so I was on the ground floor. Fowler was above me on the first floor, and David Evans had the attic rooms, with their low ceilings and dormer windows.

I, of course, had a key to the house. I led the charge up the staircase to the first floor. Here we found, fortunately, that Fowler had left his door unlocked. His quarters consisted of a large L-shaped sitting room-cum-study, a large bedroom and a small bathroom. It took only moments to discover that all three rooms were empty, and there was no sign of Fowler.

Jack lingered in the bathroom, coming out relighting his pipe and saying, ‘No signs of blood. If a seriously injured man had returned here he would have presumably gone to the bathroom to staunch the flow of blood and clean the wound.’

‘But he hasn’t done so,’ I said with my usual gift for pointing out the extremely obvious.

‘Where else might he have gone if he was hurt?’ Jack asked.

‘The matron?’ I suggested tentatively, explaining that the school nurse was a quiet, middle-aged lady named Mary Flavell. She spent her days caring for the grazed knees, cut fingers and upset tummies of schoolboys. The masters would normally take their medical problems to the GP in the town, Dr Marcus Green, but in an emergency . . . Well, it was possible, I said.

Jack asked where she might be found, I said in the dorm building, and we set of again—not running now but walking at a brisk pace.

We found the matron in the infirmary making herself a pot of tea. She asked us to join her, but after introducing Jack, I explained that we had no time—and had she seen the Mathematics Master?

‘Mr Fowler? No, I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of him. Are you sure you won’t have a cup?’

‘Where next?’ I asked Jack after we had made our apologies and returned to the quad.

‘We’ll have to inform the Head Master,’ growled Jack in his rumbling voice. ‘He has to know both what we’ve seen and the inexplicable aftermath.’

‘No, no, no, no—this makes no sense at all, dear boy. None at all,’ moaned Dr Rogers. We were sitting in the Head Master’s drawing room. His distinguished and expressive face had gone white as we told our tale, and then had wrinkled up in worry lines until it resembled a relief map of Switzerland.

‘We saw what we saw,’ I insisted firmly.

‘What you
think
you saw,’ corrected Dr Rogers, desperately trying to hang on to a thin thread of sanity. ‘But in the light of your subsequent observations you can’t possibly have seen what you imagine you did. That would be utter nonsense, and the world would be turned on its head.’

‘You’re perfectly correct,’ responded Jack with considerable energy. ‘It makes no sense at all. At the moment. But young Morris and I certainly saw something that appeared to involve serious injury for Mr Fowler. And now he can’t be found. I think we should inform the police.’

Dr Roger’s pale face flushed pink as he yammered, ‘The police? Whatever for? No, no, no—we can’t have the police invading school premises. No, no, not the right step at all, my dear chap.’

‘Surely,’ I pressed, ‘if Fowler has been injured in any way, or even abducted, we need . . .’

‘Abducted! You’re allowing your vivid imagination to run away with you, Mr Morris. It must be all those dreadful thrillers you young men read these days.’

He glanced down at my hand, where I was still carrying Dorothy Sayers’
The Nine Tailors
with its vivid yellow jacket.

‘No, no, no, no.’ Dr Rogers was shaking his head to emphasise the negative. ‘Schoolmasters being stabbed, bodies disappearing, vanishing into thin air—these things are the stuff of those crime shockers. And they are certainly not the sort of presumptions and gossip we want to take to the police.’ The Head Master shuddered at the very prospect, and then he continued, ‘Can you imagine those police officers tramping all over our school in their hobnailed boots? Horrible thought—horrible.’

With a final, decisive shudder, he lapsed into silence.

‘Then what do you propose we do?’ said Jack in his brook-no-nonsense lecturer’s voice.

‘Do? Do?’ stuttered Dr Rogers. ‘I’m sure I have no idea. In fact, I can’t see why there is any need to do anything at all. Just go about your business and try to forget about this.’

‘My friend Morris and I,’ Jack replied, speaking in the firm, but gently persuasive, tone he employed with an undergraduate who had just read him a very poor essay, ‘are neither schoolboys playing a prank nor fools. We both clearly saw the same thing. And what we saw involved a man—a member of your staff—apparently being seriously injured. If the police are not to be called, then we must find a way to pursue this matter.’

Dr Rogers nodded his head sadly as he said, ‘Of course, you are quite right, Mr Lewis. Always look to an Oxford man for sound common sense, that’s what I say. So we do need, as you so rightly point out, to take decisive steps.’

He gave himself to silent thought, and then said, ‘What I propose is this: that we gather a group of the senior boys, the most trusted boys, and give them the task of searching the entire school property—and the cathedral too, if it comes to that.’

‘What will we tell them to look for?’ Jack asked.

‘Why, for Mr Fowler, of course. And we may possibly tell them that he may have had an accident, and is perhaps injured. That would be quite sufficient.’

So that is what happened.

I went looking for some of the senior, and more reliable, boys.

I found Hamilton, Clifford, Redway and Cardew walking slowly up from the cricket nets—still deep in conversation with Warnie, who had his jacket draped over one arm and was demonstrating the various wrist movements that impart spin to a cricket ball.

These four boys liked to call themselves ‘The Famous Four’—because they’d been reading too many Frank Richards school stories in
The Magnet
story paper. But despite this one conceit they were solid and dependable young chaps.

I explained that the Head Master had a task for them: namely, to search every room, every cupboard and every space in the school buildings and the cathedral looking for Mr Fowler, who may be injured. They were clearly puzzled by this instruction, but seeing my stern face they asked no questions.

Instead Hamilton, their natural leader, assigned each of the four different quadrants of the cathedral close and its surrounding buildings, and the four of them set off on their task.

‘What was that all about?’ asked Warnie as he rolled down his sleeves and pulled his coat back on.

In a few swift, clear sentences Jack explained what we had seen and what had happened.

A look of complete puzzlement came over Warnie’s rather jolly face, and he puffed out his moustache as he said, ‘Oh, ah, I see. At least I don’t see. I don’t see at all. Seems all topsy-turvy to me.’

‘And to me, old chap,’ said Jack, patting him on the shoulder. ‘So while the boys are conducting their search, why don’t the three of us stroll down to the village and ask the local doctor if he’s had an emergency case this afternoon?’

Once again Jack’s plain common sense had pointed us in the right direction, so we set off at a good pace, through the front gates and down the high street of the town of Nesfield.

Halfway down the street, before we reached the cluster of shops, we encountered Dr Marcus Green coming out of his front gate, carrying his black Gladstone bag and about to set off on a round of house calls.

No, he assured us, he had seen nothing of Fowler, nor had he seen any emergency cases that afternoon, and he was afraid he couldn’t help us. With those words he bustled off up the street.

Warnie had spotted the town pub,
The Pelican
, just ahead of us, and he licked his lips as he suggested we had time to drop in for a print. There was clearly no more constructive action we could take for the time being, so we agreed.

In the bar parlour some of the locals invited me to join them for a game of darts. I offered them Warnie as my substitute—a proposal that Warnie himself endorsed enthusiastically. That left Jack and me sitting in a quiet corner with our pints, chewing over the events of a puzzling day.

‘Was he stabbed?’ I asked as I sipped on
The Pelican
’s excellent local brew. ‘Was Dave Fowler really stabbed?’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ Jack replied, his baritone voice rumbling with sombre concern. ‘We both saw him double up with pain. Only I could make out the knife handle, but we both saw the blood streaming down. Yes, I have no doubt in my own mind that he was stabbed.’

I mulled this over in silence for some minutes, and then I said, ‘Supposing it wasn’t an accident . . .’

‘Whatever we saw, young Morris, it wasn’t an accident,’ Jack assured me.

‘Supposing that’s right—and, like you, I’m sure it is—how could anyone do that? Just try for a moment to imagine thrusting a knife into a man’s stomach. That’s a vicious and violent attack. I could never do that. I don’t believe any normal person could. It goes against the very grain of normal human nature.’

Jack’s eyes sparkled as he lowered his glass onto the table, but his voice was heavy as he said, ‘The grim truth, Morris my friend, is that we are all capable of murder. Within every normal human heart and mind there lurks a murderer—who, given the right circumstances and the right provocation, will escape and create mayhem.’

‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing,’ I said with astonishment. ‘You seem to have a very low view of human nature.’

‘A very realistic view. The first crime, if you remember your Bible, was a murder, and every page of human history has been splashed with blood ever since. Darkness, anger, even violence are a normal part of every human personality.’

‘But human nature is fundamentally
good
,’ I stressed. ‘Surely you, as a Christian, would agree with that.’

‘Precisely the opposite is the case,’ said Jack with a rather grim chuckle. ‘It’s because I am a Christian that I know human nature to be fundamentally defective.’

The next morning the air was still cool and the dew was still on the grass when I walked down the front steps of my residence and turned towards the Dean’s house to rouse out Jack and Warnie.

The previous night had ended with ‘The Famous Four’ failing to find any trace of the missing Dave Fowler, despite, they told us, a most thorough search. They were responsible boys and I trusted their diligence. If they couldn’t find Fowler, or his body, then he was nowhere to be found.

When the Mathematics Master was missing from the evening meal in the dining hall, and then when it was clear that his rooms were still unoccupied, even Dr Rogers began to show signs of agitation.

‘It’s most unlike Mr Fowler to simply disappear like this,’ the Head Master complained to me as we walked across the moonlit cathedral close later that evening. ‘Like yourself, Mr . . . ah . . . ah . . . Morris, he hasn’t been with us very long. But in his short time here Mr Fowler has shown himself to be entirely dependable. And now this! Who will take his classes in the morning? I must speak to McKell about that.’

With those words he ambled back to his house and left me standing in the purple moonlight wondering what development we might expect to come with the morning.

And it was my concern over what should happen next that sent me in search of Jack and Warnie even before breakfast.

The maid who answered Dean Cowper’s front doorbell told me that Warnie had not yet risen, but that Jack was in the morning room with an early cup of coffee. She showed me in, and I found Jack draining the last of his drink.

‘Delighted to see you so bright and early, Morris,’ he declared heartily. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing his hat and walking stick, ‘let’s go for a walk around the school grounds before breakfast. You know my brain always works best when my legs are moving.’

‘Do we have time?’

‘The maid told me that breakfast is not served here for another half an hour. When do you have to be in the hall for the school breakfast?’

‘Not until after chapel.’

‘Come along then,’ boomed Jack as he rose and strode to the door, looking more than ever like a ruddy-faced, prosperous farmer about to stroll around his farm.

As we walked down the front steps of Dean Cowper’s house, Jack asked, ‘There’s no more news on Fowler, I take it?’ And then he added before I could reply, ‘Of course not—you would have told me at once if there was.’

As we began to stroll across the quad, a movement on the far side of the close caught my eye. The sun was still low in the sky and the shadows were long, but there, in the grey shadows, were two figures close together in conversation. And their body language somehow conveyed the impression that their meeting was a clandestine one.

One of the figures was a schoolboy—the other was Muriel McKell. But who was the schoolboy she was talking to at this early hour of the morning? Their heads were close together and their conversation never rose above a whisper. Then it ended and Muriel McKell turned to go back inside the flat she shared with her brother.