C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (22 page)

‘That would fit in with the state of decomposition.’

Then Crispin asked us about our visits to the Hunting Tower or Black Tower or whatever it should be called. In clear, crisp words, Jack told about our first visit when we found it locked, and then went over the events of today once more.

I looked up and saw, in the distance, struggling up the slope towards us, Constable Nile and Dr Henderson.

‘Was anything found with the body?’ Jack asked.

‘Underneath the body there was a walking stick, a long, straight stick such as hiker’s use, and a flask which seems to contain whisky.’

A puffed and red-faced Constable Nile panted up to our side. ‘Here’s the doctor, sir,’ he wheezed, addressing Inspector Crispin, ‘and Inspector Hyde is on his way with some uniformed constables from Market Plumpton. I’ve told Fred Rose at
The Cricketers’ Arms
to direct them up here when they come.’

Crispin led Dr Henderson into the tower and left him there to make his preliminary investigation. Sergeant Merrivale came out and packed away his photographic equipment. After a very short space of time he was followed by Dr Henderson and the inspector.

‘All I can do is pronounce life extinct,’ the doctor was saying. ‘For anything more than that you’ll have to wait until I get him on the slab. In the absence of broken bones or obvious injuries, I can do no more.’

Then Crispin turned to us and said, ‘You’re free to go, gentlemen. Thank you for being so patient with us.’

I turned to leave, but Jack had one last question. ‘If this is not death by natural causes,’ he said, ‘I take it that you’ll consider the possibility that—’

Crispin interrupted him. ‘Yes, I will—the possibility that this is the first in the series of murders that have happened here. The one that began the wave of deaths.’

It was late the following morning before we saw Inspector Crispin again.

I was keen to finish up at Plumwood Hall and leave the place forever. I had arrived at this country mansion looking upon it as a useful stopping off place on my way to writing the Great English Novel—or, at least, something passably publishable. But instead of a comfortable, well-paying way station, it now felt like one of those crumbling castles in Transylvania that any passing tourist would be well advised to leave off the itinerary.

So I spent the morning in the library working at what were almost the last stages of my task of cataloguing the whole collection.

Then I went into the village to have a pint with Jack at the pub. We were engaged in this pleasant task when Inspector Crispin arrived, this time without his faithful bulldog, Sergeant Merrivale, by his side. This surprised me as I had regarded those two as being more or less joined at the hip. Presumably Merrivale had been let off the leash and was doggedly policing elsewhere at the moment.

Crispin joined us in the snug and set a manila folder down on the table before us.

‘This will interest you,’ he said with a gleam in his eye that gave him a resemblance to the sales assistant in the jewellery shop as he plonks down a real sparkler in front of the customer. ‘My sergeant would not approve of my sharing this information with you, but I’m not too proud to confess to being baffled—and I welcome input from the best brains in the vicinity.’

Jack beamed and asked what the information was.

‘The preliminary autopsy report. To be confirmed by an analysis of what remains of the flesh, but the police surgeon in Market Plumpton and Dr Henderson, who carried out the post-mortem jointly, seem pretty confident they know the cause of death.’

‘Which was?’ I asked.

Crispin didn’t reply immediately; instead he resumed his narrative. ‘It appears,’ he said, ‘that there are certain tell-tale signs in the way the organs are damaged that were still visible—or visible enough for both doctors to leap to the same conclusion at much the same moment. As I say, the laboratory analysis will confirm it, but we can take the agreement of both medical men as a starting point in our thinking. The contents of the flask of whisky are also being analysed.’

Jack smiled over the stem of his pipe, which he was in the process of lighting, and said, ‘And are you about to tell us what they are agreed about?’

‘Poison,’ said the Scotland Yard man, leaning back in his chair and waving to the landlord to bring him a pint.

‘That makes three poisonings in this same district,’ I said.

‘Indeed, Mr Morris,’ said the inspector. ‘I counted them several times and got to the same number.’

Ignoring his good-natured ribbing, I said, ‘So are they all linked? Was the murder of Charles Worth the first in this whole chain of murders?’

Crispin took a long sip from his pint of lager and wiped the foam from his upper lip.

‘There is a slight problem,’ he said.

‘I take it, my dear inspector,’ said Jack, ‘that in this case the wrong poison was used?’

‘Precisely,’ the policeman agreed. ‘Charles Worth died from a massive dose of arsenic—not cyanide.’

‘So we either have a killer who changed poisons or two killers,’ Jack said.

‘And that’s as far as we’ve got,’ sighed Crispin, leaning back in his chair.

‘But surely you’ve taken the next step,’ Jack pursued, with a smile. ‘Surely you’ve reconstructed the crime—the murder of Charles Worth—as a thought experiment.’ That was one of Jack’s favourite expressions that he often trotted out in tutorials. He could chew on a thought experiment with as much pleasure as a terrier could chew on a large bone.

Jack continued, ‘We know he went for a walk on the day he died. He set off across the moors in the general direction of the tower where he was found, with his dog by his side. The dog was later found battered to death, and until yesterday the fate of Mr Worth was a mystery. Now we know he has lain dead all this time, locked inside the tower. Upon those known facts, how would you reconstruct the crime, inspector?’

‘I’d much prefer to hear your reconstruction, Mr Lewis. When you run that particular thought experiment in your head, what is the outcome?’

‘Very well, then,’ said Jack cheerfully, ‘if you insist. In such a poisonous attack the first question to ask is Cicero’s famous question,
cui bono
? We have already been told that under his will the financial benefit—apparently a substantial financial benefit—would go to his wife. So it was in the interests of Connie Worth for her husband to die and for his body to be found. The first happened, the second didn’t.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Inspector Crispin, ‘that makes it interesting, doesn’t it? How do you imagine that may have come about?’

‘If Connie Worth had, indeed, poisoned her husband’s whisky flask, my guess would be that she herself was also out on the moors that day—not too far behind her husband.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ I protested. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘To retrieve the whisky flask from her husband’s dead body as soon as he collapsed,’ Jack replied. ‘Her plan may then have been to leave the body to be discovered by someone else while she disposed of the incriminating poisoned flask.’

‘That’s exactly how I imagined it,’ said the inspector, looking as pleased as punch. ‘I’m delighted to hear you confirm my suspicions. So, if that was the plan—what went wrong?’

‘I’m no expert in these matters,’ said Jack, ‘but I’ve heard that arsenic is not a quick acting poison. That being so, Mr Charles Worth may have begun to realise that something was wrong, but by the time he did so he was too sick—and too far out on the moors—to make it back to the house.’

Jack puffed in silence on his pipe for a moment and then continued. ‘What if he caught sight of his wife? What if Connie Worth drew near to the fatally ill man, near enough for him to see her, and perhaps in the circumstances—let’s assume she had given him the flask or had filled it for him—he suspected her of poisoning him.’

I tried to picture the scene: the fatally ill Charles Worth catching sight of his wife and suddenly understanding that she must have poisoned him. If they had stood there, on those remote moors, eye to eye, it must have been one of those rather moist domestic moments that make a man see the woman he has married in an entirely new light.

‘If,’ Jack resumed, ‘in that confrontation, he set his dog on Connie Worth, she would have had to fight the animal off with whatever weapon she had ready to hand—a good, stout stick or something of that sort. While this is going on, Charles Worth flees, reaches the tower and locks himself inside. Whether his dying mind thought he was protecting himself from Connie or whether he was thinking clearly enough to want to prevent his body being found and Connie reaping the benefit . . . well, we can’t know.’

‘That entire scenario,’ said Inspector Crispin, ‘strikes me as being entirely plausible. So what happens then? Mrs Worth has disposed of her husband but has missed out on inheriting his wealth because neither she nor anyone else knows where his body is. What then?’

‘We know what happened then,’ I said. ‘She started sponging on her family. She went to live with her cousin Judith Trelawney—Lady Pamela’s younger sister.’

‘And that,’ said the Scotland Yard man, ‘brings this letter into play.’ With a flourish he produced from his pocket the letter Jack and I had discovered the day before hidden in the pages of
Romeo and Juliet
in the library.

‘We know,’ said Jack, ‘the letter must have been obtained from Judith Trelawney, for it was she who had it. And we know that Connie Worth was with Judith Trelawney at the time of her death. We may, therefore, reasonably assume that it was Connie Worth who took that letter and who used it to blackmail its sender, Sir William Dyer.’

‘Wait on, wait on!’ I interrupted. ‘What if Judith Trelawney’s death is part of all this?’

‘Carry on, young man,’ said the inspector.

‘Well, there they are—these two women—in a hotel in Brighton, sharing a suite of rooms on the top floor. Somehow Connie Worth must have become aware of the letter—otherwise how did she know to take it after Judith Trelawney’s death? How that happened we can never know. Did she secretly search through her cousin’s possessions? Did Judith come to trust Connie and tell her about the affair and show her the one remaining letter she’d kept—her one keepsake that she couldn’t bring herself to destroy? I suppose either of those things is possible.’

Both Jack and the policeman listened but didn’t say a word, so I kept talking. Not that I needed any encouragement—I now had up a head of steam and my imagination was racing at a hundred miles an hour.

‘So, supposing all that,’ I continued excitedly, ‘might Judith Trelawney’s death also have been murder? However Connie Worth got that letter, once she had it she had another source of income—a potentially substantial source of income, given Sir William’s wealth. Did Judith Trelawney discover what Connie was up to and object? Instead of falling from that hotel room balcony, was she pushed? Was she another victim of Connie Worth’s greed?’

I paused, took a deep breath and finished off the last of my tankard of beer.

There was a long, thoughtful silence. Finally Jack said, ‘You paint a very black picture of Connie Worth’s character, young Morris. Unfortunately, it’s quite a convincing picture. If, for the moment, we accept your sketch of her murderous blackmailing nature, we have to ask ourselves this question: who else was she blackmailing?’

That proved to be a question that kept us talking all through lunch. We reached no definite conclusion, but I had the impression that Jack was keeping his own counsel, and I would have given more than a penny to know his thoughts.

That afternoon I spent, once again, in the library at Plumwood Hall, working on what I knew would be the last pages of the catalogue. That night I excused myself from dinner at the Hall in order to dine with Jack at the village pub.

Alfred Rose, the landlord of
The Cricketers’ Arms
, did us proud: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Not a patch on Mrs Buckingham’s, of course, but still an excellent meal.

Then we retired to the armchairs in the snug with a brandy and soda each, and Jack lit up his pipe.

‘What I can’t be certain about,’ I said, ‘is that it will all happen.’