The Corpse in the Cellar (8 page)

‘What's the alternative?' I asked.

With glee Warnie replied, ‘We step in and do something about it ourselves.'

At this point Frank Jones arrived with a tray bearing three pints of bitter. As he placed drinks on our table I asked, ‘Do what, Warnie, old chap?'

‘Well, Jack has twice the brains of any Scotland Yard fellow,' replied Warnie with brotherly loyalty. Although it was more than that, I knew: my old tutor had a brain the size of the Albert Hall.

‘And you are suggesting that Jack do what exactly?' I asked.

‘Solve the murder!' spluttered Warnie. ‘Jack can solve this puzzle faster than anyone else, and get this shadow of suspicion off us, and get us released to resume our holiday.'

All of this the publican Frank Jones followed with great interest, so Jack turned to him and said, ‘Mr Jones, would you like to pull up a chair and join our conversation?'

Jones glanced back at the kitchen window before he replied, ‘Don't mind if I do. It's either this or peel potatoes, and I know which I'd prefer.'

‘Now, Mr Jones,' Jack continued, in his hearty, friendly manner, ‘what we need is local information, and a publican knows everything about a town. Will you help us?'

‘It would be my pleasure, gentlemen,' replied a grinning Mr Jones, looking as happy as a rabbit offered a particularly large and enticing lettuce leaf. ‘Although whoever killed Franklin Grimm should probably get a medal.'

‘You didn't like him?' I asked.

‘No one did,' the publican replied. ‘Well, the young women of this town did.'

‘And I take it,' said Jack, ‘that as a result the men of the town didn't.'

‘You have put it in a nutshell, Mr Lewis—in a nutshell. But that wasn't the only thing that caused resentment.'

Our silence encouraged him to continue. ‘Well, he grew up on a farm, you see. And there he was, working in the bank—going to work each day in a suit and collar and tie. He really thought he was a cut above the rest of us. And everyone knows he only got the job because he's Ravenswood's brother-in-law.'

‘Is he indeed?' said Jack. ‘Now that's very interesting.'

‘Oh, yes. It was Edith Ravenswood who badgered her husband into hiring Franklin. But he never really came to terms with the responsibilities of the job.'

‘In what sense?'

‘He used to make snide remarks, Mr Lewis, to this one or that about the state of their account. Well, that's confidential, isn't it? That's something that shouldn't be spoken about outside the bank. Highly improper, I considered it. He was a young man inclined to put on airs, and sneer at others. You can take it from me: there are quite a few in this town who won't shed a tear over the death of Franklin Grimm.'

‘You mentioned his popularity with young women. Will any of them shed a tear?'

‘That's a good point, Mr Lewis. Well spotted. He was devilishly good looking, and a big, strapping lad was Franklin. And he had a way with him. He could be charming when he wanted to be—when he thought it was in his interests. So he sort of hypnotised quite a few young women in this town. Not all of them were single neither—there were a few young married women who fell under his spell. Whether any of their husbands ever suspected or not I don't know. Of course, if one of them did, and took his revenge, well . . . '

He left the sentence hanging and tapped the side of his nose as he gave a knowing wink. Then he returned to the subject of the young women themselves, the victims of Mr Grimm's apparent ability to cast a spell.

‘I'm not sure if they all knew just how many women he was friendly with at the same time. Some of them may have thought they were the only one.'

‘And we know one of his young women was Ruth Jarvis,' muttered Jack thoughtfully, speaking more to himself than the rest of us.

‘It all sounds terribly complicated and messy to me,' I said.

‘There was a very hot-headed young man we saw earlier today,' Jack said, changing the subject. ‘A young farmer named Nicholas Proudfoot. He burst into the bank and was shouting threats at the manager.'

‘At Edmund Ravenswood?' said the publican. ‘That does surprise me. I would have expected him to be after Franklin Grimm, not Mr Ravenswood.'

We nodded for him to continue. ‘Well, Nick Proudfoot has a pretty young wife—very pretty, if you ask me. Her name's Amelia, and she's as beautiful as one of them pin-up girls. You know how people talk in small towns: well, the talk is she might have an admirer. And if she has surely it'd Grimm, the local Lothario—the local man about town, as it were.'

‘What Proudfoot said in his angry outburst in the bank seemed to have more to do with a loan,' Jack suggested. ‘Does that make any sense to you, Mr Jones?'

‘I know the Proudfoots had to mortgage their farm a year or two back. And since then the seasons have been bad, so he may have been struggling with payments. But that's not the bank's problem. I can't quite see why he'd be shouting at Mr Ravenswood.'

‘Perhaps we should ask,' said Jack. ‘Can you give us directions to Nicholas Proudfoot's farm?'

‘No problem.' And with these words Frank Jones dug a scrap of paper out of his pocket and began scribbling a rough map. Then came a flood of instructions that involved marking where we were with an X and explaining how many left- and right-hand turns we had to take.

When he'd finished his explanation, he added, ‘But will Bill Dixon be happy about you leaving town, even if it's only to walk out to a local farm?'

‘Ah, that's a thought,' murmured Warnie. ‘If he sees us going he might try to stop us.'

‘Well,' said Jack with a gleam in his eye, ‘we must see about that.'

We took our half empty pints of bitter through into the front bar and looked out of the window. Sure enough, Constable Dixon was settled in his observation post on the opposite side of the street.

‘They seem to be serious about our being suspects,' groaned Warnie.

However, Dixon did not appear to be a happy policeman. As we watched, a gust of breeze pulled at the policeman's jacket and made him grab his helmet. I wanted to hum a few bars of ‘A Policeman's Lot Is Not a Happy One'—but seeing Warnie's grumpy face I thought better of it.

The weather seemed to have picked up something of Warnie's mood. The sunny, smiling face of the morning had disappeared and been replaced by gloomy, grumpy clouds. It was as if the weather had said, ‘That's your lot! No more Mr Sunny from me today!' We stood at the window of the public bar watching the late afternoon breeze slowly gathering strength, picking up leaves and scraps of paper and pushing them over the cobbles.

‘Now, this investigation of our own that we've thought of conducting,' said Jack quietly.

‘That I thought of!' blustered Warnie with a laugh. ‘I suggested it first.'

‘I speak, of course, of the investigation proposed by the senior officer in our ranks,' Jack responded with a grin.

‘A jolly good idea too,' I added. ‘The sooner this mysterious tragedy is investigated and solved, the sooner we can have a real holiday.'

‘Hear, hear,' said Warnie, raising his glass in a toast.

‘To this I add a further proposal,' Jack resumed, ‘that we begin tomorrow morning—when the wind has died down, the sun is back out, and there just might not be a policeman on watch. Come on, let's take our drinks into the snug.'

We did, and to our great delight we found a log fire blazing in the small fireplace. Glancing through the diamond-paned window, I saw that Constable Dixon was now beating his arms against his sides and stepping back into a doorway to avoid the worst of the wind.

With a poker I pushed around the cheerfully glowing logs in the fire. Not that I really know anything about fires, but it was burning so well I thought it deserved a bit of encouragement. I returned the poker to its rack and fell with a sigh into a seat in the ingle nook.

‘Now, Warnie,' I said with a cheeky grin, ‘don't go balancing anything on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.'

Warnie went pink. He huffed and puffed a bit, and then murmured, ‘I still feel a bit stupid about that.'

Jack leaned over and patted his knee saying, ‘Nonsense, old chap! You've got to stop thinking about it.'

Warnie shook his head sadly, grumbled under his breath into his beer, and wandered over to the grey, twilit window to commiserate with the miserable weather outside.

‘Now, Jack,' I said, ‘this business of your saying that Christianity is true in a way that no other world view or religion is true—it just won't wash. This claim to exclusivity that you Christians make is both muddled nonsense and offensive nonsense.'

Jack leaned back in his armchair and took his pipe from his jacket pocket. ‘I can see, young Morris,' he replied, ‘that you've come out of your corner with your fists up ready to battle this one out. So let's hear your argument.'

‘I grant you that there is objective, knowable truth in lots of areas of life—there's only one Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and so on. But belief systems are different. They're more like poetry than arithmetic. They're more like music than geometry. Having a preference for one set of beliefs over another is like having a preference for Beethoven over Bach.'

‘So it's really just a matter of taste and preference? It's aesthetic rather than logic?'

‘Yes, something like that. Belief systems are based on the visions and philosophy and experiences of their founders. Buddha had certain experiences and ideas and founded Buddhism. Mohammad had certain other experiences and ideas and founded Islam. Rudolf Steiner had different experiences and ideas and founded Anthroposophy, which your friend Barfield keeps banging on about.'

Jack laughed heartily, but said nothing, so I continued, ‘And the same could be said of Confucius and all the rest. You can't say one set of those experiences, those ideas, was in some sense “right” and the others “wrong”. It makes more sense to say that these are different poetic visions of the same large, difficult-to-see truth.'

‘So in your view they're all just different roads up the same mountain?'

I thought for a moment about this suggestion and then said, ‘Yes, that's a good way to put it. That paints a mental image for me. When you say that, I picture a mountain the way a child would draw one—simple and conical. And winding around that mountain is an interconnecting set of roads, tracks and pathways. Some of them zigzag up the slope; others cling precariously to the steep sides. Some are broad and well-travelled; others are narrower, less well known and less often found. But what matters is getting to the top, not which road you take to get there.'

‘And what you are claiming is that you are superior to all of these different “visions”, as you call them?'

‘No . . . no,' I said hesitantly. ‘That can't be right. I'm certainly not intending to say that sort of thing at all. I'm not claiming any sort of superiority.'

‘Oh, but you are!' Jack pounced, like a batsman seeing a loose ball coming down the wicket towards him just begging to be whacked to the boundary. ‘You're claiming to see the whole mountain, and to see the many different paths leading to the top, while everyone else is on their own narrow path, blind to the bigger picture that you see. You are claiming access—based, presumably, on your reason, your rationality, your intelligence and your education—to a universal truth, a bigger truth, that devout Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, even Anthroposophists, and all the rest are missing.'

‘Now, hang on a moment,' I said as I gathered my thoughts. ‘It may well be the fact that a secular mind—an atheist mind, if you prefer—using reason alone, or reason supported by good information, may well be able see a greater truth than any ancient belief system. Particularly in the light of the dawning scientific age all around us.'

‘So what you're now saying is not that all the great world religions are equality right, but that they're equally wrong—and that only your scientific atheism is right. Am I understanding you correctly?'

I felt backed into a corner. I felt like a slightly dazed lamb pushed up against the side of a pen by an experienced sheep dog. This conversation had begun with me accusing Lewis of arrogantly trumpeting Christianity's exclusive access to the truth. Now he had somehow reversed the charge and was accusing me, as a secular rationalist, of making that same offensive claim of sole access to the truth.

I wasn't quite sure how the tables had been turned, and I thought it was time I pinned him down to some firm answers on his own position.

‘My turn to ask the questions,' I said as I drained the last of my pint of bitter.

‘Fire away, young Morris,' said Jack with a cheerful grin. Lewis was what my grandfather would have called a ‘bonny fighter'—someone who relished a good scrap over serious ideas.