C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (25 page)

And I proceeded to tell Jack the whole story.

At the end of my colourful yarn Jack was quietly thoughtful for a long time. We had some time ago passed the end of the village street and kept on walking down the narrow country road with high hedges on both sides.

‘Well, Jack?’ I prompted when I grew tired of the silence being broken by nothing more than a lark giving an impromptu encore to its dawn chorus.

‘There’s one explanation that would fit your observations of last night,’ he said quietly, in a kind of thoughtful rumble. ‘But I don’t see how it fits in with the murders. Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps it has no connection at all.’

Then he lapsed into silence again. I was reluctant to speak, seeing that Jack’s mighty brain was busy firing away on all cylinders, but I couldn’t restrain myself. ‘Well?’ I asked, ‘What about the murders? Can you see any light at the end of that particular tunnel?’

‘Just possibly, young Morris,’ Jack said. ‘You know—I think I mentioned to you once—as an undergraduate I read philosophy as well as Greats and English. In fact, my first job was as a tutor in philosophy.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘It wasn’t at Magdalen—it was at University College. I mention this only because this puzzle looks rather like one of those algebraic formulas we use in formal logic. There are times when it looks like a problem in propositional calculus and sometimes rather more like predicate calculus.’

‘I’ve never read philosophy so none of that means anything to me.’

‘It doesn’t need to. I’m simply saying that I see a glimmer of light—of logical light—that may make complete sense of everything. However, I need more information. There are still pieces of the puzzle missing.’

With that Jack lapsed back into ruminative silence, puffing furiously on his pipe, as if the clouds of smoke were trying to keep up with his whirling mental processes.

‘Do you think Inspector Hyde is still after my head?’ I asked, unable to keep my anxieties to myself.

‘Probably,’ said Jack. ‘But there’s no need to worry about Hyde.’

No need? Easy for him to say. I was the one Hyde wanted to see strung up. Was Hyde at that meeting in Market Plumpton with Crispin and the Chief Constable? Was he, even now, arguing that an arrest warrant be issued for that well-known homicidal maniac, Tom Morris?

Jack was deep in thought so I held my peace and looked around me.

The day was entirely out of keeping with my inner sense of gloom and confusion. If the weather had mirrored my soul it would have been dark and stormy. It wasn’t. Showing marked insensitivity, it had swung in entirely the opposite direction.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, birds were singing and a gentle breeze was sighing softly through the undergrowth. It was the sort of morning that gets poets scribbling down notes and muttering, ‘I can get something good out of this.’

But not for me. In fact, if the poet Browning had, at that moment, leaped out from behind a bush and said, ‘The lark’s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn: God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world!’ I would probably have socked him on the jaw and told him he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Jack was a sensitive soul, and the moment he emerged from his deep reverie he picked up on my mood.

‘Unburden yourself, young Morris,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You look as though you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.’

Slowly, and uncertainly, I began to speak of the things that troubled me.

‘Under the shadow of the scaffold,’ I began, ‘and don’t try to reassure me, Jack, for I know how narrowly the odious Inspector Hyde is pursuing me. If the Scotland Yard man can’t solve this baffling case, Hyde will, most likely, get his way. So, as I say, under the shadow of the scaffold I must face the prospect of death.’

I kicked at a stone in the road, and then resumed. ‘And my problem, Jack, is that I don’t like any of the options.’

Jack nodded sympathetically, so I continued. ‘If the Materialist is right, at death I will be annihilated. Quite frankly, that’s most unappealing. I don’t want to be snuffed out like a candle—either from a hangman’s noose or from old age. If the real me, the person that I am, is going to be extinguished, I can’t see that my life means anything. My life would be nothing more than a brief spark in a dark vacuum. That’s a most unattractive option. I quite hope that’s not true.’

‘In so thinking,’ Jack replied, ‘you stand with most of humanity. It’s normal to feel the flicker of eternity—the deep desire, the longing, in the human heart for that which is greater. Last year I went to a funeral in the college chapel for a former fellow who was a pronounced atheist. He’d been a belligerent philosophical materialist all his life. And yet, at his funeral, people spoke as if he still existed. “I’m sure he’s looking down on us now and smiling,” I heard someone say. No one embraces annihilation, and few genuinely believe in it.’

‘And you say that our longing for something more is evidence that there
is
something more?’

‘Our hunger for food is evidence that food exists; our hunger for more than this life is evidence that this life is not all there is.’

‘But, you see, I’m not sure I like
any
of the options. If annihilation is, thankfully, untrue, I don’t like the option the spiritualists offer me either. They speak of some sort of disembodied existence. They talk about spirits drifting, unseen, around the places they occupied during their embodied lifetimes—popping into the occasional séance to pass on a message or two. Well, I’m quite fond of this body of mine, and any existence in which I’m a mere wraith, a floating, disembodied soul, seems pretty hollow.’

‘The good news is that ghostly haunting is not the future that awaits us. Christian teaching is that our future can be far, far better than the unsatisfying shadowy one you’ve just sketched.’

‘But I don’t like your option either!’ I protested. ‘Sitting around in clouds, wearing wings, strumming on a harp—that certainly doesn’t appeal to a red-blooded person like me!’

Jack threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘My dear Morris, you mustn’t be led astray by medieval artists and modern cartoonists,’ he hooted.

I was a little put out by this reaction, and I think my face must have shown it.

Still chuckling, Jack said, ‘It’s not your fault, Morris. Popular misconceptions circulate so widely and run so deeply we can absorb them uncritically without ever seriously examining them. I suspect we absorb the clouds-wings-harp parody of eternity in childhood and never think about the subject seriously as adults.’

‘Very well,’ I challenged, feeling in a belligerent mood, ‘give me an option for the future that is neither unpleasant nor unappealing.’

‘Certainly,’ the beaming Jack replied. ‘The answer is found in the word resurrection. We need to understand that our individual stories make sense precisely because they are part of a much bigger story.’

He paused to relight his pipe. As he did so we turned off the road onto an even narrower country lane that curved back towards the village.

Jack took a deep breath and said, ‘The big story runs something like this. God is the Loving Maker and Ruler of this world. What he made was all this.’ He gestured at the rolling fields around us and the sky above us. ‘In other words, a physical world inhabited by physical beings. Among those physical creatures were human beings. Those human beings had a special role to play—as God’s agents or representatives, managing this world according to his directions. That was where it began. It’s a picture of perfection. But then it went wrong. Or rather, we went wrong. Our primeval parents, those first human beings, rejected God’s directions and went their own way.’

‘You see,’ I objected, ‘that’s the bit I don’t understand. If God is perfect, and his creation was perfect, how could that sort of rebellion happen? Does God have limitations?’

‘As it happens, God has one limitation: he cannot act against his own nature. When God gave the first human beings freedom, it was perfect freedom, real freedom—not fictional freedom, not pretend freedom. He made people, not puppets. And our primeval parents abused that freedom by freely choosing to reject God. For God’s own people, God’s own representatives and agents, to reject his rule was a major breakdown—a tear in the fabric of space and time. And through that tear in space and time, death entered.’

Jack paused to look at me. He gave me the same sort of quizzical, questioning look I had seen so often in tutorials. Seeing that I was keeping up with his argument, he continued.

‘That gives us the bookends to the big story—it travels from Creation to New Creation. Human history is a story that travels through the dark valley of a corrupted, fallen world—but it’s travelling towards a future in which Creation is restored.’

‘But this world is a good place!’ I protested.

‘Quite correct, Morris,’ Jack agreed. ‘It is a good place. It’s just not good enough. Along with the sunshine, the love and the laughter, there are pains, anxieties and tears—evidence that this world is damaged and that history is sweeping us along towards a time when the hurts will be healed. That’s why the long-term promise for Christians is one in which our post-mortem existence occurs in bodies made new and whole—resurrected bodies.’

‘Not that I see a lot of resurrected people walking around just yet,’ I sneered cynically.

‘Renewed Creation, resurrection, is the bookend at the far end of the story of human history. But its promise makes it clear that there is something more substantial planned than strumming harps in clouds.’

‘Well, if that were true it would be most comforting,’ I said, still feeling in a rather cynical mood. ‘But in the meantime, what happens?’

‘We’re not told exactly,’ Jack replied, quite comfortably. ‘I doubt we’d understand if we were. But we can be safe in the hands of a God who loves us and made us for relationships—with himself and with each other. Remember what Jesus promised to the repentant thief on the Cross beside him: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” The Christian’s immediate future is in safe, powerful hands. And his long-term future is restoration to a restored physical world in a new restored body.’

‘That’s rather a novel idea, isn’t it?’

‘It’s in all the Christian creeds. And the idea itself is many thousands of years old. Millennia ago, poor old Job, surrounded by his comfortless comforters, said, “Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” Does resurrection in a restored, perfected physical world appeal to you as an option?’

‘More than any of the alternatives,’ I admitted.

We got back to the Plumwood pub—
The Cricketers’ Arms
, Alfred Rose prop., licensed to sell beers wines and spirits—in good time for lunch. Mrs Rose offered us bread, cheese, pickles and cold ham. That particular combination of ingredients is, I’m told, called a ‘ploughman’s lunch’. I’m not sure how the law stands on this matter, since neither Jack nor I are ploughmen. But we were hungry enough to regard ourselves as honorary ploughmen, at least until after lunch.

We took our plates of food and pints of bitter out into the sunshine of the beer garden behind the pub. The spring weather was still in an extremely jolly mood and kept nudging us with stray sunbeams and puffs of soft breezes to join in the fun. Relax a little, it seemed to say—what can you worry about on a day like this?

Even I was finding it hard to stay glum with a pint of bitter in my hand and the sun in my face.

After a few minutes Inspector Crispin and Sergeant Merrivale arrived. Jack beckoned them to join us at our table. As the inspector walked over, he gave us a detailed weather report.

‘Nice day,’ he said.

Then Jack asked, ‘How goes the investigation?’

‘Frustratingly slowly,’ the Scotland Yard man admitted as he pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘And I had to spend my morning saving your hide again, Mr Morris.’

‘How so?’

‘I thought my use of the word “hide” might give you a clue,’ Crispin smiled.

‘Oh, I see,’ I mumbled. ‘Inspector Hyde is still on my trail, I take it?’

‘Oh, he fancies you for these murders, sir,’ growled Sergeant Merrivale, with an unpleasant smile on his face. ‘There’s no doubt about that.’