C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (13 page)

Pressed for details, he said that the dog’s dead body was found among the heather on the moor, killed by a single blow to its head.

‘Not,’ I asked, ‘a blow from the famous blunt instrument so beloved by mystery writers?’

Will nodded.

Douglas gave a loud, rather melodramatic sigh.

The body of Uncle Charles, Will explained, never turned up—even though a hysterical Connie had insisted he too must be dead. In the absence of a body his estate could not be distributed—even though he’d left a will in which he named his wife Connie as his only heir (they had no children).

Suddenly impoverished in this way, Connie Worth, as Will told the story, went to live with another aunt—Judith Trelawney, the beautiful younger sister of Lady Pamela. It seems that Connie Worth appointed herself to the role of friend and companion to the younger woman.

Then Judith Trelawney also died, suddenly and violently. She and Connie were staying in a suite of rooms at a Brighton hotel when Judith fell from the balcony. It was a top floor balcony and the fall was fatal. Although the coroner decided that her death was an accident, it struck me that Connie Worth seemed to attract violence the way a magnet attracts iron filings.

Stiffy rose from her chair with the air of being bored by these family reminiscences, and left the room.

Douglas simply looked impatient.

‘Right,’ he snapped. ‘Have you finished your storytelling now, Will?’

The younger boy shrugged his shoulders and said in a bewildered way, ‘I just thought it might be relevant to the whole murder mystery business . . . sorry . . . I was just trying to be helpful.’

‘And so you were, young Will,’ boomed Jack. ‘Very helpful indeed.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Douglas suspiciously. ‘In what way?’

‘In the change that came over Connie Worth’s fortunes. Following her husband’s disappearance she was so penniless she needed the charity of others, but you tell me, Will, that during her stay here at the Hall she was not short of cash.’

‘She had a wad of big, white fivers,’ said Will enthusiastically. ‘I saw them when I was walking past her room. It was a wad large enough to choke a horse. She was stuffing them furtively’ (he said this word slowly, as if he had just learned it) ‘into her purse.’

‘I still can’t see how it can have anything at all to do with Connie’s murder,’ growled Douglas sullenly.

‘Perhaps,’ admitted Jack, ‘it has nothing to do directly with the murder itself, but it’s puzzling, isn’t it? Both puzzling and interesting.’

The dinner party that night was a rather strained one. Sir William tried to encourage Douglas to discuss life at Oxford with Jack, but Douglas, while polite, seemed to have nothing to say and no questions to ask. He appeared, in fact, to shrink into his shell. That, of course, didn’t stop Jack from giving advice. He pressed upon Douglas the importance, given the Oxford tutorial system, of getting the set reading done during the breaks between terms.

‘In between terms,’ said Jack, ‘you put on the polish; during the terms we put on the shine.’ Douglas nodded but said nothing. ‘And remember,’ Jack continued, ‘you don’t have to work hard if you work steadily. Only innately lazy men are hard workers—they are forever trying to catch up on work they should have done.’ And he went on with a good deal more wise counsel for a young student.

Sir William kept endorsing Jack’s advice with nods, muttered agreements and comments of ‘Did you hear that, Douglas?’

When that stream finally ran dry, Sir William asked me what I’d been doing to keep Jack amused during his time in Plumwood. I could have said, ‘Trying to solve a murder mystery’, but instead I talked about our walks on the moors.

‘One place we got to is that ruined tower,’ I said. ‘I think it’s called the Hunting Tower.’

‘Oh, ah,’ grunted Uncle Teddy from his end of the table. ‘Yes, yes, the Black Tower, that’s what that is. You ask the villagers. Yes, yes, ask them.’

‘And what will they tell us?’ asked Jack.

‘That it’s haunted!’ hissed Uncle Teddy in a theatrical whisper as he leaned forward over his plate. ‘The villagers won’t go near the place at night. Not near it at all. Not even close. After dark they go out of their way to avoid it. You ask them.’

Sir William laughed and said, ‘Village superstition, Uncle Teddy—that’s what it is. And you know that’s all it is.’

Uncle Teddy went back to his meal with a rather grumpy look on his face.

‘What I call it,’ said Sir William, ‘is Bosham’s Folly. It was built by the seventh Lord Bosham as a base for hunting parties on the moors. I understand why—they had to roam a long way from the Hall to find grouse. But even so, why he didn’t build a simple hut or cottage I’ll never know. That monstrosity must have taken a team of stonemasons a year to build. And the seventh Lord Bosham died shortly after it was finished. Hence, Bosham’s Folly.’

‘It did occur to us when we were there,’ I said, ‘that there’d be a superb view from the top of the tower—assuming, that is, the staircase is still intact. Unfortunately, we found the door at the base of the tower locked.’

‘You can see all the way to the coast,’ said Will enthusiastically. ‘When I was a little squirt I used to climb to the top with that old brass telescope we found in the attic. I could see the tops of the cliffs and the fishing boats when they put out.’

‘I never knew you used to climb to the top of the tower,’ said Lady Pamela, with a properly dignified note of concern in her voice. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Years ago,’ said Will. ‘I was only about nine or ten at the time.’

‘Nine or ten!’ Lady Pamela allowed a note of horror to creep into her voice. ‘Climbing those crumbling old stairs. Alone, I take it? If you’d fallen you might not have been found for hours . . . or days!’

‘It was all right,’ Will responded, looking slightly chastened. ‘I was quite safe. That staircase is as solid as rock. It’s a circular stone staircase built into the side of the stone walls. There was never any danger, honestly.’

‘What surprises me,’ said Sir William, ‘is that you found the tower locked.’

‘There’s a heavy wooden door that rattled in its doorframe when I shook it,’ I said, ‘but—securely locked.’

‘As young Will said, it was never locked in the past. Anyway,’ Sir William continued, ‘might you return to the tower on one of your future rambles on our moors?’

Jack and I both agreed that we might.

‘In that case you should take the key to the tower,’ volunteered Sir William. ‘There is a key, I’m sure of that. The last time I saw it, it was hanging on the key rack in the kitchen. Mind you, that would have been a year or two ago. But it might be worth checking.’

This was my employer telling me what I should do, so naturally I agreed. Then Sir William asked where else we had got to in our walks.

‘We found a cottage—a quite remote and isolated cottage,’ said Jack. ‘We stumbled across it entirely by accident. I would assume that in normal circumstances it would be almost invisible—from up on the moors, that is. It’s in a kind of narrow valley or deep fold in the hills. We only found it because of my young friend’s spectacular lack of any sense of direction.’

‘It was dark,’ I said in my defence. ‘Pitch black. We’d been caught in a sudden rain squall and I rather lost my sense of direction, what with the rain and the dark and all, so instead of heading back towards the village I led Jack in entirely the opposite direction.’

‘Still, it was a nice, brisk walk in the fresh evening air,’ said Jack, with a grin on his face.

As this exchange was going on, a look passed between Sir William and Lady Pamela that I couldn’t quite interpret but that seemed to be, somehow, significant.

‘That’s the old gamekeeper’s cottage—’ began Will, always eager to display his knowledge.

Lady Pamela interrupted him before he could say more. ‘And what did you find at the cottage, Mr Lewis?’

‘A most exotic gentleman,’ Jack replied. ‘He answered our persistent knocking at his front door and gave us very helpful directions to get back to the village.’

‘He was certainly a colourful character,’ I commented. ‘Covered in tattoos.’

‘I didn’t know there was anyone living in the old gamekeeper’s cottage,’ Douglas complained. Will joined in the complaint, saying he’d like to meet this chap—whoever he is.

‘His name is Drax, I believe,’ I said.

‘That’s right, Mr Morris,’ said Lady Pamela. Her surface dignity was intact, but I thought I detected an almost panicking sense of fluster seething underneath. ‘He is a native from South America.’ Then addressing the whole dinner table she said, ‘He brought your Uncle Edmund’s body back from the upper reaches of the Amazon River. It was an extremely kind thing for him to do, and he expressed a desire to stay here for a while, so we’ve let him have the gamekeeper’s cottage.’

‘I knew nothing about this,’ Douglas grumbled, with Will seconding the motion.

‘You boys were both away at school at the time,’ Lady Pamela explained. ‘We did bring you back for Edmund’s funeral, you may recall.’

‘There wasn’t any tattooed South American native at the funeral,’ said an aggrieved Douglas.

‘Drax didn’t want to attend so naturally we didn’t force him,’ Sir William said, with the air of coming to his wife’s rescue.

‘Why didn’t you tell us about him?’ Will complained.

‘There was nothing really to tell,’ murmured Lady Pamela, waving her hands in the air with a delicate gesture of brushing away annoying insects.

‘I remember him,’ grunted Uncle Teddy. ‘Dark chap. Brown as a walnut. Didn’t have much to say for himself. In fact . . . I don’t think I ever heard him utter a single word. Ugly looking chap, I thought.’

‘I say, Douglas,’ said Stiffy enthusiastically, ‘let’s go out to this old gamekeeper’s cottage and meet this wild tattooed native. He sounds fascinating.’

‘Stephanie, my dear,’ said Lady Pamela firmly, ‘I’m afraid I must discourage you strongly from any such action. The man doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in our society. He’s a very solitary man. It probably comes from living in those remote jungles all his life. He prefers to be alone, and I don’t think we should violate his privacy. Don’t you agree, my dear?’

‘He asked to be left alone,’ said Sir William from the head of the table, ‘and we’ve respected his wishes. I would ask all of you to do the same.’

He looked around the table, and then added, ‘Now I think it’s time we all retired to the library—there’s something I want to show you.’

Chairs were pushed back and the members of the dinner party made their way out of the dining room and into the library, wandering slowly but purposefully—like the cattle being called home across the Sands of Dee.

‘I think we may say, Tom,’ Sir William proclaimed as he threw open the double doors of the library of Plumwood Hall, ‘that this is your realm, your little kingdom. At least it has been for many months past.’

‘The only king I’ve resembled here,’ I replied, ‘was King Canute trying to hold back the rising tide of paperwork and cataloguing cards.’

I walked him over to the desk where I had done most of the work and where the thick book containing the catalogue of the contents of his library was almost complete. I began to explain the process and the results, but I was interrupted by his cries of ‘Excellent! Excellent!’ Clearly Sir William did not want to be overly bothered with the details. He had bought a house with a great library and now he had a catalogue of its contents. The point was to own a lot, and to have a clear record of exactly what one owned. The pleasure was in the possession.

‘And now,’ he said, turning to face the room, ‘I have an announcement to make.’

Silence fell and the small party turned to face their host.

‘In the course of his work in this library our resident scholar, Mr Tom Morris here, has made a very significant find. In a remote and, he tells me, dusty corner of the library . . .’

‘. . . buried under a pile of old law books . . .’ I added.

‘. . . he has found a rare and valuable volume. Show them, Tom.’

I went to the sideboard and picked up the clearly very old, but otherwise unremarkable, leather-bound book lying there.