C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (10 page)

When some mole or badger rustled in the undergrowth, I turned rapidly to look at the source of the sound. Somehow the slow dying of the light focussed my mind on the darkness of death—and the ghost stories of my childhood came creeping out of my memory: tales about the restless dead that made us huddle closer to the nursery fire. Now, remembered in the darkness of a deepening twilight, those tales seemed even stranger—and strangely real.

I gave an involuntary shiver, patted my pockets for cigarettes and then remembered that I’d given up smoking.

The only sounds were the soft clop of our shoes on the road, the distant cries of the night birds and the soft sighing of a gentle breeze as it circled around the bare, black tree branches overhead.

I opened my mouth to make some remark, any remark, just to break the eerie silence when I was stopped by a sound that drifted towards us from around the next bend. It was the sound of two voices arguing.

Instinctively we slowed down and walked more quietly.

As we neared the bend the voices became a little clearer. They were both male. There was one dominant voice—a quietly threatening, belligerent, growling, aggressive voice. It carried most of the conversation. When it paused there were briefer, more submissive responses from the second voice.

Just before the turn in the road we came to a complete halt. I’m sure Jack felt as I did, that to approach any closer would be to invade a private dispute.

Although the tone of the voices was clear it was hard to pick out any words. Once or twice I thought I heard the word ‘money’—spoken loudly, as if to give it special emphasis.

I took a few quiet steps forward until I stood at the bend in the road and peered ahead into the darkness. Underneath one of the tall, dark, leafless trees were two black silhouettes, barely visible against the silvery-purple darkness of the moonlit road. One of the figures was large, tall and broad. It towered over the smaller man in a clearly threatening posture. Judging from the gestures that I could vaguely make out, the larger man was jabbing the smaller one in the chest.

Suddenly Jack grabbed my arm and escorted me forward, taking long, brisk steps. As he did so he spoke in his booming voice, ‘Hello, you two. We didn’t expect to see anyone else out on the road at this hour of the evening.’

The argument, if that’s what it was, abruptly halted. As we drew near, the larger figure turned towards us. We caught a brief but clear glimpse of his face outlined by fugitive moonbeams. For a moment I thought he was going to turn his aggression towards us. But he seemed to think better of this, spun on his heels and marched off briskly down the road. This left the smaller man still standing, trembling, by the side of the road.

As we drew closer I was astonished to discover who this smaller man was—Douglas Dyer.

‘Hello, Douglas,’ I said tentatively. ‘We’re on our way back into the village. Care to walk with us?’

He said nothing, but fell into step beside us. My guess was that he felt our presence afforded him some protection against the thug who had been threatening him.

‘Your friend didn’t seem at all happy,’ prompted Jack. ‘If there’s a problem . . .’

‘If there’s a problem,’ interrupted Douglas, ‘it’s my problem and none of your business.’

‘That’s perfectly true,’ agreed Jack. ‘I am not a proctor and this is not the university. However, when I was a younger don I
was
a proctor for a period, and from that time I recognised our friend. When I had to make my nightly rounds scooping undergraduates out of pubs, he often put in an appearance.’

Douglas sulked silently, so Jack continued, ‘I have no idea what his Christian name is since he only ever seemed to have one name: Sutcliffe. He’s well known to all the proctors as a debt collector for one of the shadier Oxford bookmakers.’

‘As you said,’ snarled Douglas, ‘this is not Oxford and you are not a proctor, so it’s none of your business.’

‘Perfectly correct,’ said Jack soothingly. ‘However, we are both members of the university and I offer you the hand of friendship if there’s anything I can do to help.’

This time there was no snarl, only a long silence, so Jack resumed, ‘Sutcliffe is usually only put on the trail when gambling debts start to mount up—and when they remain unpaid for a longish period of time. Does your father know about your little problem?’

‘No!’ squeaked Douglas in alarm. ‘No, he doesn’t . . . and I don’t want him to . . . he would explode . . . I can deal with it . . .’

‘If you’re quite sure. We are, as I said, members of the same university—albeit of different colleges. If I can help you myself, or if I can speak to your moral tutor on your behalf, I’m happy to do so.’

After a lengthy silence Douglas said, ‘I realise you mean well, Mr Lewis, and I appreciate it. I really do. But I have resources. I can deal with this problem, trust me.’

‘If you say so,’ my friend replied. ‘So then, let’s speak of something else instead—this tragic murder that has come upon your family. The local police seem determined to show my friend Morris here as the guilty party. I’m hoping that the arrival of Scotland Yard will put an end to all such nonsense. And I’m here to do my best to see that it does.’

‘I’ve never heard of a don who played Sherlock Holmes,’ said Douglas.

‘Lewis has done it once before,’ I said. ‘Last year, over at Market Plumpton.’

‘However,’ Jack intervened, ‘this time I’m puzzled, and perhaps you can help me, young Douglas.’

‘I will if I can . . .’

‘My puzzle concerns the motive. Why would anyone want to murder Mrs Worth?’

Douglas laughed cynically and said, ‘How long have you got? Aunt Connie was not a likable person, and sooner or later she crossed swords with everyone.’

‘But people are not murdered,’ Jack objected, ‘simply because they’re irritating or unlikable. There must be something much more powerful behind this death.’

‘You just don’t know how detestable the Black Widow was,’ snapped Douglas, a deep bitterness in his voice. A moment later he seemed to regret this outburst and said more quietly, ‘Anyway, I wish you well in your detecting, Mr Lewis. And I hope you escape the noose, Tom. Now, I’ve got to get back—Stiffy is waiting for me.’

With that he took off at a rapid trot and soon disappeared into the darkness.

We stood there while Jack lit his pipe. The wind was rising again, so this took several minutes. As Jack fiddled with tobacco and matches, turning his back to the wind, I looked up at the black clouds rapidly rolling across the face of the moon.

That’s when the first heavy drop of rain fell.

A moment later the rain was coming down in torrents. Lightning flashed somewhere in the distance. Then, after a long wait, came the thunder—crashing and rolling across the sky.

‘We’ll get soaked if we stay here in the middle of the road,’ I said, pointing out the obvious. ‘We need to find shelter.’

The lightning came to our rescue. The next flash showed a break in the hedge close to where we stood, and beyond, in a field, a large, spreading evergreen tree heavy with leaves.

‘That tree,’ I said, pointing. ‘The lightning’s far enough away. The tree should be safe.’

Jack didn’t argue, but joined me in pushing through the hedge and running across the field. We sloshed through wet grass and splashed through shallow puddles, unseen in the darkness, until we reached the shelter of the tree.

Its wide arc of thickly leafed arms created a dry circle in the midst of the storm. We caught our breath, shook the rain off our clothes, stamped the mud off our shoes and looked around.

The damp made me feel chilly, so I buttoned up my coat again as I asked, ‘What kind of tree is this?’

‘The very welcome kind,’ chuckled Jack, who always seemed indifferent to bad weather or physical discomfort. He ran his hand over the trunk, then reached up over his head and plucked a leaf.

‘I claim no expertise as an arborist,’ he said, ‘but I suspect this is a box tree.’

‘Can’t be! The box is a dwarf; they grow them as hedges. This thing is—what? Twenty-five feet tall?’

‘What you say is usually true. But that’s only because they’re trimmed to keep them as dwarves and shaped into hedges. Left untrimmed, to grow wild in the middle of a field as this one has been, they grow to a considerable height. Our gardener at Little Lea gave me a lecture on the common box when I was about ten years old. Bits of it stuck. See this leaf—small, stiff and leathery: that’s the leaf of the common box. And the leaves grow close together, very thickly over the whole branch. That’s what makes them such good hedges, and, in our case, such a perfectly efficient umbrella from the rain.’

‘What on earth was a ten-year-old boy doing talking to a gardener about box trees?

‘I think I must have asked him—perhaps because of a fantasy world Warnie and I invented when we were young. It was a place called Boxen, and at one stage I thought it should be thickly covered with box trees. So I asked about them, you see.’

I kept learning surprising things about Jack.

‘What kind of a place was Boxen?’ I asked.

‘It started out as a sort of medieval animal-land,’ replied Jack, and then added with a warm smile of fond remembrance, ‘then Warnie added trains and steamships. It was a delightful place for a child’s imagination to roam around in.’

The lightning and thunder were receding further into the distance. I pointed this out to Jack and commented that this was a good thing, since the usual advice was not to be under a large tree during a thunderstorm as trees can become lightning rods.

Jack agreed, but pointed out that while the thunder and lightning were less, the rain was heavier than ever.

‘We may be trapped here for some time,’ he remarked. And it was true that the darkness around us was filled with the smell of rain and the sound of the torrential downpour.

Jack relit his pipe, and by the dim glow of the match I saw his round face looking positively cheerful. It was almost as if he relished English weather at its worst.

‘So now, let’s fill our time waiting for the rain to stop with good conversation, young Morris,’ he boomed at me. ‘Where were we up to in our debate on death?’

‘I have reached the point,’ I admitted, ‘where I will grant that there is that in us that can pass on to another kind of existence when the body dies—the part Socrates called “the higher part of man”. I think I am persuaded that “Tom Morris, the person” will in some way, in some form, survive death.’

‘All to the good,’ chortled Jack. ‘We make progress.’

‘But . . . but . . .’ I interrupted, ‘the whole question is in which way, in which form, will the inner person who is the real Tom Morris survive death?’

‘And I take it you are about to suggest an answer?’

‘I am—reincarnation.’

‘Metempsychosis is, I believe, the technical term—the transmigration of the soul from one body to another.’

‘Exactly. Do you remember Vishal? He didn’t read English with you, but he was an undergraduate at Magdalen at the same time as I was. He was reading PPE, I think. We used to say that he was the son of a Rajah. I don’t know if that was true or not.’

‘I believe he was some sort of Indian prince. But how does he come into your story of metempsychosis?’

‘Several of us went to tea in his rooms one afternoon and he explained the Hindu concept of reincarnation. It all sounded jolly strange. But now, well . . . ’

‘Hence your suggestion that it might be the best way to survive death?’

‘Exactly. It solves the problem of the disembodied survival of the soul, or mind, since it goes from one body to another. At least I think that’s how Vishal explained it. Have you come across the notion? Have you ever looked at it at all?’

‘I had to, I had no choice. I had to understand the whole concept—and what’s wrong with it—in order to survive my Great War with Barfield.’

‘Owen Barfield? The man I met in your rooms once?’

‘That’s the chap. A thoroughly delightful man. Pity you never got to know him; you would have liked him. By the time you’d arrived he’d moved to London and become a solicitor. I learned a lot from Barfield about the depth and richness of words and language; about how poetry shapes words as much as words shape poetry. Tollers says the same—shaken to the roots he was by Barfield’s insights.’

‘So what kind of a “Great War” did you have with him?’

‘The kind of war I’m having with you right now, old chap—a war of words and ideas.’

‘And this involved reincarnation?’

‘It did, among many others things. Barfield became an Anthroposophist—a follower of a German chap named Rudolf Steiner. This meant that Barfield rattled on about the reincarnation of the human spirit. The human being, he said, passes between stages of existence, in an earthly body living on earth, then leaving that body behind and entering into the spiritual world before returning to a new life on earth.’

‘That’s the sort of thing Vishal talked about over that afternoon tea in his rooms—more or less.’

‘And you find the idea persuasive?’

‘Well, it strikes me there are good reasons for taking reincarnation seriously.’

‘List them for me, young Morris. Let me hear them.’