C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (15 page)

Hyde opened his mouth again and was clearly about to repeat his refrain when he thought better of it and kept quiet.

Inspector Crispin turned to me and said quietly, ‘What did really happen, Mr Morris?’

Feeling a little embarrassed by the whole incident, I explained that I had walked into the library one day, about a month ago, to see Connie Worth slipping a small volume into her handbag. She knew at once she had been seen and didn’t resist when I reached over and took the small, leather-bound book from her hand. It was a first edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Sonnets from the Portuguese
—worth a good few pounds on the auction market.

She pretended that she just wanted to borrow it, but the surreptitious manner in which she was secreting it in her handbag while looking over her shoulder lest she be seen made it clear to me that something more permanent than borrowing was on her mind. I pretended that I needed the book for cataloguing purposes and that therefore she couldn’t borrow it at the moment.

‘That’s right,’ volunteered Sir William. ‘Connie came to me and told me that story exactly in reverse—with Tom as the would-be thief and her as his discoverer. I didn’t believe it for a minute—I know what Connie’s like. But I called Tom in, he told the story you’ve just heard, and I believed him. It didn’t bother him, and it didn’t bother me. We all know how Connie scratches around for a few pounds here and a few pounds there. But she’s family—or, rather, she
was
family—so we put up with it. I told Tom to keep an eye on her and keep anything valuable in the library under lock and key. And that was the end of the matter.’ Then he turned a withering glance on Inspector Hyde and added, ‘Anyone who imagines a connection between that small incident and a motive for murder has the IQ of a sea anemone.’

As Jack and I walked back towards the village later that night I asked, ‘Do you believe Inspector Hyde was satisfied? Or does he still think he’s found my motive for murdering Connie Worth?’

Jack chuckled quietly and said, ‘What Inspector Hyde thinks is one of the great mysteries of the universe. One day they’ll probably write books about him—
Great Mysteries of Our Time: including the Marie Celeste and Inspector Hyde’s Brain
.’

We were walking down the long, winding drive with Plumwood Hall behind us and the bare skeletons of tall, sentry-like poplars on either side. Our way was lit by pale, silvery moonlight. Having declared the Mind of Hyde to be one of the Great Unknowables, Jack puffed on his pipe in silence.

‘Speaking of great mysteries of the universe,’ I said, ‘where is the late Connie Worth now? In what state or condition? If there is that in every human being which survives death, has she survived death well? Or is she an unhappy soul right now?’

‘From what we’ve heard so far, Mrs Worth seems to have been an unhappy soul during her lifetime,’ said Jack thoughtfully.

‘True. But does death alter that for the better? Do all the ills of this life fall away at death?’

Jack sighed deeply and said, ‘There are certainly some people who think that. Suicides, for example. For myself I believe that every suicide is a tragedy, but for those sad souls who choose to take their own lives, they must do so believing that death will end all their sorrows and all their woes.’

‘And does it work?’ I pursued. ‘Does death shake off all that is bad and leave only the good? We put
Rest in Peace
on tombstones—well, do they? Rest in peace, that is?’

Jack turned to face me and chortled into his pipe stem, his face wreathed in smiles. ‘I know you too well, young Morris,’ he said. ‘My recollection is that during our tutorials whenever you asked a direct question it was because you already had an answer bubbling away in your brain. So what is your answer this time?’

‘I’ll tell you, if you promise not to think me foolish.’

‘The one thing I never think of you as being, young Morris, is foolish. Let’s hear your ideas.’

‘Well . . .’ I paused reluctantly, and then plunged into it. ‘I got dragged along to a spiritualist meeting once. It was Standforth who took me. He was a fellow undergraduate at Magdalen. You wouldn’t have known him—he was mathematics. Anyway, he got interested. Actually, I think his girlfriend at the time was interested so he had to be. But the upshot was that Standforth insisted that I accompany him to this spiritualist meeting—something he’d promised to go to while his girlfriend was away, and report on when she got back. He didn’t want to go alone, and I was curious enough to agree to tag along.’

‘I think I’ve now heard more about your social life than I ever wanted to know, Morris. This, I take it, is leading somewhere?’

‘It’s leading to what happened at the spiritualist meeting.’

‘Was it one of those séance events with a Ouija board or a medium? One knock for yes, two for no—that sort of nonsense?’

‘Nothing like that. It was a lecture. A lady who was some sort of important figure in spiritualist circles had come up from London to lecture on the afterlife—and on the state of those who had “passed over”, as she put it.’

I told Jack the story. The lady, as it happened, shared my surname, so Standforth spent the evening pretending that this ‘Mrs Morris’ was a relative of mine. Probably, he suggested, an aunt. That, I said, is a terrible thing to say of any woman. Aunts as a species, I pointed out, are wild creatures who normally address their nephews as ‘fathead’ and reduce all those around them to a nervous state known to medical science as the heebie-jeebies.

Mind you, she dressed like an aunt. This particular Mrs Morris was so fond of floral decoration on her clothing, her shoes and her millinery that she looked like a perambulating rose garden.

The lady, however, proposed an interesting theory: namely, that ‘passing over’ is the great escape from the burdens of this life to a more elevated and placid life on a higher plane. She talked of her discussions with those who were approaching death. They told her, at least the ones still capable of speech, that they felt a gentle warmth and saw a welcoming light.

Furthermore, this information had been confirmed in later discussions she had with the same persons some time after their ‘passing over’. Clearly, dying was not, in itself, sufficient excuse for not talking to the lady from the Spiritualist Society. And the information she gathered in these chats in darkened rooms was all positive and encouraging. She assured us that good things were waiting for us.

Her advice to us was that at the moment of death we should ‘go towards the light’ and all would be well.

‘Despite the eccentricities of the lady herself,’ I concluded, ‘much of what she said got me thinking. If we all have that spiritual core which is us—our energy, spirit, soul, imagination, love—then surely it makes sense to hold that shaking off the weight of physicality can be nothing but release and relief.’

Jack responded with what I had long since come to think of as his ‘rhetorical guffawing’. He threw back his head and laughed heartily. ‘So you think that death is like Father Christmas, do you? That everyone who dies will get gifts and be happy? Ho, ho, ho! My dear Morris, for years that tired old idea has been going around with holes in its socks and by now it’s so exhausted it’s about due to hand in its dinner pail.’

‘What’s wrong with the idea of death being good for everyone? What’s wrong with everyone surviving death well? What’s wrong with death being a happy release, and a great relief, for everyone?’

‘Since you’re putting that to me seriously, let me reply seriously. The problem arises from the need for justice. The hunger for justice lies deep within the human heart. When someone does the wrong thing, we leap in and say, “You shouldn’t have done that.” In those words we are appealing to a standard of justice beyond ourselves. If death is a good experience for everyone then the universe is fundamentally unjust.’

‘How so?’

‘Do you really believe that death meant a comforting warmth, welcoming voices and a beckoning light for Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Vlad the Impaler?’

‘Well, no—there needs to be an allowance for those who have been evil.’

‘What, then, would happen to those?’

‘Some sort of punishment, I suppose. The spiritualist lecturer touched on the idea, but she didn’t go into any details. For the most part she painted death as a good experience for the majority, but hinted at a time of suffering, weeping and wailing for the few.’

‘Why only “the few”? There’s the rub, Morris! There’s the hidden assumption that whatever unpleasantness awaited Vlad the Impaler at the time of his death, you and I will be all right. But think for a moment about that appeal for justice that is so common among us—the “You shouldn’t have done that” complaint. The standard we appeal to in those words, our personal standard of right and wrong, is one that we fail to live up to as consistently as we’d like. In our most honest moments we will speak about letting ourselves down. We will admit this, if not to others, at least privately to ourselves.’

‘And the justice we all hunger for in our hearts is something we can expect to encounter at death?’

‘If not at death, then when? When would those guilty of undetected murders—or any undetected crimes—logically face justice and be held accountable? I think we intuitively see death as the moment when that happens. And that is certainly what the Christian faith teaches: “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” And if that is what will happen at death to those guilty of gross offences, then it will happen to us also—with our long litany of smaller failures and failings. Not just “the few”, Morris, but all of us.’

He paused to relight his pipe, which had gone out, and then continued, ‘Judgment is what gives human beings dignity and worth. When we are treated as moral beings and held responsible for what we have done and what we have failed to do, we have dignity and value. Judgment is what makes us, and our actions, really matter.’

‘That’s the second time you’ve trotted out that rather grim quotation about judgment. I think I’d rather hear something encouraging.’

‘You want an encouraging quotation? Consider this one: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” That bears thinking about, young Morris.’

I was silent for some time thinking about the complexity of Jack’s argument.

It dawned upon me, although I didn’t feel like saying it out loud, that the spiritualism I’d heard about that night—with all its talk of comforting messages from the dear departed—was more about wishful thinking than the reality of an ultimately just universe in which human beings matter because they are treated responsibly.

I was about to ask Jack another question when a movement in the shadows, among the trees off to our right, caught my attention.

‘Did you see that?’ I asked.

Jack turned and we both peered in the direction I was pointing. What we could see were mottled layers of darkness: thin streaks of silvery moonlight, the blackness of trees and their shadows and, behind it all, the dark blue night sky with rolling banks of grey clouds. But there was clearly something else out there. We caught occasional glimpses of movement and heard the crackling of dead leaves and twigs.

Then whatever it was appeared, just for a moment, in a clearing among the trees. It looked like a man—but a man hunched down and running like an animal. Then it was gone.

‘What on earth was that?’ I muttered.

My question was answered at the village pub about half an hour later.

‘That was the wild man of the woods, that was,’ said Constable Charlie Nile, speaking like a man who’d been reading too many Tarzan comic books lately.

We were sitting in the front parlour of
The Cricketers’ Arms
, each with a brandy and soda, and I’d just narrated our bizarre experience of seeing a creeping man in the shadows.

‘That’s what every village needs,’ said Jack, with a serious expression on his face but a mischievous glint in his eye, ‘its very own wild man of the woods. Mind you, not every village has one. Some villages have to make do with a panther in the woods—usually one that’s escaped from a passing circus and hangs around to slaughter the occasional goat or infant.’