The Norfolk Mystery (The County Guides)

by Ian Sansom

  ‘Do you know the tale of the Norfolk mermaids?’

  I wasn’t sure he was speaking to me.

  ‘Sefton? You know the story of the mermaids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They are said to be the souls of the damned, that come up from the sea at night and press against the North Door of the Holy Church from which they are for ever shut out.’ He gestured behind him. ‘Many places have similar legends – the tale of the silkie you may know, from Ireland. Here in Norfolk there is the story of the mermaid who came up and tried to gain entry at the North Door of the church at Cley. She is depicted there to this day. When she was turned away she returned to the sea, where she continues to suck her prey into unseen whirlpools.’

  I was tired and cold and I was thinking of Hannah. I was beginning to feel rather uncomfortable.

  ‘But you know of course, Sefton, the story of Shuck the Phantom Hound of the Stiffkey Marshes?’

  ‘I don’t, Mr Morley, no.’

  ‘Really? But you should! For the County Guides, at least, Sefton. Black Shuck: inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle – great writer, of course. Terrible thinker. Like a lot of creative types, a mind susceptible to nonsense. Anyway, Black Shuck – from “scucca”, I think, from the Old English, for a fiend—’

  ‘Mr Morley, I don’t quite—’

  ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sefton. Inspiration for.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense of course. But the story goes there was a storm, and a ship was wrecked up at Salthouse. And all the crew were lost, including the master and his dog, and at night the dog comes howling, looking for his master. If you hear the call of Black Shuck, they say, you’re doomed. You don’t hear anything do you, Sefton?’

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Me neither. But many years ago, Sefton, as a young reporter, I was called to report on a case at Cromer. A young woman had come to enjoy the summer, and had been drawn out to sea where she couldn’t swim back. The lifeboat was at work elsewhere. And you could hear her scream for an hour before she drowned …’ He gazed again around the foggy churchyard. ‘Real terrors, you see, are much worse than the imagined, Sefton.’

  ‘Is there a reason we’re out here, Mr Morley?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes! Of course. Because we have work to do, Sefton. Work apace, work apace—’

  ‘Honest labour bears a lovely face,’ I added.

  ‘Ah, you know the saying?’ I knew the saying because Morley said it a dozen times a day. ‘So we need corroboration, Sefton. Testis unus, testis nullus. One witness, no witness. We have the Virgin. We have the Bible. But we need something more.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘What we need, Sefton, alas, is the witness of the dead.’

  And so between us, shoulder to shoulder, we wandered among the hundreds of gravestones of Blakeney church with our candles until almost dawn: Sam and William Starling, the crew of the Caroline, who saved the lives of thirty men; Charles William Grant, Master Mariner; James Spooner; Jane Pinney; Robert Jennings; dozens of In Memory Ofs and Sacred to the Memory Ofs; dozens of Here Lieth Interred the Bodies.

  And shortly before dawn, finally, we found what Morley was looking for.

  The stone was clear and clean, as though it had been tended only yesterday.

  ‘Olivia Swain, Beloved Sister, Died April 24th 1924,Aged 20,’ read Morley.

  ‘A long time ago,’ I said.

  ‘Ever lost anyone, Sefton?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’ll know. It might as well have been yesterday.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE MORNING SERVICE at St Nicholas, Blakeney, was conducted by the Reverend Dr Richard Swain, done out in full regalia: cassock, surplice, robe. ‘No expense spared,’ remarked Morley later. And his sermon, apparently, ran the full gamut, from Daniel in the Lion’s Den to the Prodigal Son to the Conversion of St Paul, a ‘good old-fashioned Church of England sermon’, according to Constable Ridley, who was present, in a good old-fashioned church of England. Everyone from the village was there – the Thistle-Smiths; the Chancellors; Miss Harris and Miss Spranzi; the Podgers; Mrs Snatchfold; half of the staff from the hotel – ranked, as is according to custom in an English church, from high to low and front to back, the worthies, best-dressed, up front, and closest to God.

  Morley and I missed the service. We were outside, Morley explaining his theory to the Deputy Detective Chief Inspector for the Norfolk Constabulary, while I absented myself and took a final turn around the graveyard, smoking, thinking of all that had happened there, coming back round upon the two men in the final throes of their conversation.

  ‘Methinks not, Deputy Detective Chief Inspector. E contrario. I simply do not believe that a man would commit suicide for no reason. Ex nihilo nihil fit. And if we find ourselves a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi, so be it!’

  The deputy detective chief inspector called me over.

  ‘He’s speaking foreign languages again. What did he just say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was too tired for Morley’s word games. ‘Mr Morley, could you—’

  ‘Between the devil and the deep blue sea, gentlemen,’ said Morley.

  ‘Well, you’re right there, Mr Morley,’ said the deputy detective chief inspector.

  ‘I think, Inspector, it must be your decision, what action is to be taken.’

  ‘I’m not sure it all adds up, Mr Morley.’

  ‘I know,’ said Morley, ‘but a few crumbs of information, gathered all together, do add up to a sizeable loaf, do they not?’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right, Mr Morley. And you can be on your way.’

  We entered the church as the Reverend Swain concluded the service with the blessing: ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore.’

  There were suspicious glances as Morley and the deputy detective chief inspector made their way up to the pulpit while the congregation chimed in on the final ringing ‘Amen’.

  ‘Beautiful pulpit,’ said Morley, to no one in particular. ‘Late Victorian?’

  The deputy detective chief inspector spoke briefly with the Reverend Swain, and then explained to the shocked congregation that Morley had an announcement to make.

  Morley took centre stage in his tweeds and brogues and his bow tie, Christ on the cross above him, the congregation before him, and the chequerboard stone floor shining beneath his feet in the morning sunlight.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, for all the world as if he were addressing a meeting of the Workers’ Educational Association and was about to deliver nothing more shocking than a talk on the poetry of Wordsworth, or the history of antimacassars, or the characteristics of rock formations around the British Isles. ‘It has been my great pleasure this week to spend time here with you in Blakeney, and I would like to thank you for making me feel so welcome.’

  Professor Thistle-Smith was set a boiling in his pew.

  ‘The deputy detective chief inspector has been kind enough to invite me this morning to say a few words about the tragic death of the Reverend Bowden. My assistant and I, Mr Sefton, must leave this afternoon in order to resume our literary labours—’

  There were groans from some members of the congregation.

  ‘And so I shall be brief in my comments.’ He relaxed his shoulders and folded his hands before him, the Twelve Apostles on the pulpit flanking him as he spoke. ‘I must be honest with you, ladies and gentlemen, as I have been honest with many of you, that it did occur to me, on discovering the poor reverend’s body with Mrs Snatchfold last week, that it was a possibility that he had been murdered.’

  There came a groan from Dr Sharp.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘There was something odd about the circumstances of his death,’ continued Morley. ‘Something like an itch that made me want to scratch. Now you may think it the product of a febrile
mind—’

  ‘Correct,’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘But I wondered perhaps if what we had here was a classic locked room murder. Could it have been that the reverend had been poisoned and then strung up, to make his death look like suicide?’

  ‘Absolute rubbish!’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Morley. ‘I may be a non-consenting Nonconformist but even I know that according to the rites and rituals of the Church of England, any remaining communion wine must be drunk by the officiating minister, and so it struck me that there was a possibility that someone might have put poison in the chalice—’

  ‘Preposterous!’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘I agree,’ said Morley. ‘It seemed unlikely. Could there, then, I wondered, have been someone in the vestry with him, who assaulted him, and hung him up? Choirboys, perhaps?’

  The choirboys sitting in the chancel, beyond the rood screen, could be heard to gasp.

  ‘But once gangs of choirboys start committing murder in England, then we really are in trouble,’ said Morley. There was absolute silence in the church. ‘So I discounted the choirboys.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘Then it did occur to me,’ continued Morley, ‘that there might have been some kind of hidey-hole in the roof of the vestry, where a murderer might have hidden and sprung out, unexpectedly. And I noted that there is indeed a small entrance hole between the beams of the roof of the vestry. Blakeney was known at one time as the haunt of smugglers. Could the church tower have been a place for smugglers to hide their contraband, I wondered, and now for a murderer to hide himself?’

  ‘Really, do we have to listen to any more of this nonsense?’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘Let him go on,’ said Miss Harris, who was seated in a pew by the Lady Chapel. ‘Personally, I am a great admirer of the work of lady detective novelists, Mr Morley. Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham—’

  ‘Ngaio Marsh?’

  ‘Not Ngaio Marsh, no, Mr Morley. But I do hope you are going to thrill us with some elaborate theory about the murder of the reverend.’

  ‘Well, there I’m afraid I shall have to disappoint you, Miss Harris. Because I have simply come here this morning to say that there is no doubt in my mind that the Reverend Bowden … hanged himself.’

  There was a sigh of relief among the congregation.

  ‘Well then!’ said the professor, rising to leave. ‘I think we might be excused and you, sir, have been wasting our precious—’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind hearing Mr Morley out, please, Professor,’ said the deputy detective chief inspector.

  ‘Sit down!’ called Mr Hackford, the bell-ringer, from the back of the church.

  ‘Thank you, Deputy Detective Chief Inspector,’ said Morley. ‘Assuming he had committed suicide, I then began to wonder about what the poor reverend’s suicide note might say.’

  ‘But there was no suicide note,’ said Dr Sharp.

  ‘That’s correct. So I had to imagine one.’

  ‘Rather ghoulish, Morley, isn’t it?’ said Juan Chancellor, who sat towards the back of the church, his wife Constance, in a brimless green suede hat, beside him.

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘An act of imagination, merely, Mr Chancellor, which, as artists – accomplished, versatile artists – I think you and your wife might appreciate. So I tried to compose a suicide note in my mind. “Dear So-and-so—”’

  ‘This is outrageous!’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  Morley continued. ‘“I didn’t want to do this … but—”’

  ‘But what?’ said Mrs Thistle-Smith, who sat timidly beside her husband.

  ‘That was enough, in fact,’ said Morley. ‘I needed to imagine little else. The but is the bottom of it, you see.’

  ‘The but?’

  ‘The reason behind most suicides. Everything was fine, but, or except that … X, Y or Z.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow,’ said the deputy detective chief inspector.

  ‘You’re not alone,’ said the Reverend Swain, who had remained silent up until this point, but whose robed presence remained a kind of ecclesiastical threat at the front of the church.

  ‘“I would not be committing suicide except for the fact that you had run off with another chap,”’ said Morley. ‘The but, the except that, in this instance being a form of direct accusation. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the deputy detective chief inspector uncertainly.

  ‘Or alternatively, the but, the except that, might be an apology. “I would not be committing suicide except for the fact that I had run off with another woman.” Or, indeed, an excuse. “I would not be committing suicide except for the fact that I haven’t paid my bills on time. ”’

  ‘None of which circumstances apply to the reverend, I think,’ said Dr Sharp.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Morley. ‘So the question remained: what was his but? There had to be one. “I would not be committing suicide except for the fact that …” It seemed very unusual to me, you see, that the reverend should have chosen to take his own life. Perplexing. Everything to live for, and what have you. And then I remembered the passage from the Bible that the reverend had left for us to read. Judges 16. Samson, eyeless in Gaza. “And they called for Samson out of the prison house: and he made them sport: and they set him between the pillars.”’

  ‘Lost us again,’ said Professor Thistle-Smith.

  ‘Well, let me put it as clearly as I can, Professor. Unlike all of you, I was in the position of coming to know the Reverend Bowden only after his death, and only through the information and facts supplied by those of you here today. A brilliant classical scholar, the Reverend Swain told me.’

  ‘Which he was,’ agreed Swain.

  ‘A pullover wearer, Miss Harris told me. A man of great personal charms, according to Mrs Snatchfold. Yet unmarried. And so I began to build up a picture of this man. I imagined those Oxford vacations, all those years ago, when he would come to Blakeney to stay with his friend and fellow student, Swain. I imagined how he might have been welcomed into the Swain family. Welcomed in particular by the four Swain sisters.’

  There were glances between the women in the congregation.

  ‘What are you suggesting, Morley?’ said the Reverend Swain.

  ‘Not suggesting, Reverend. Imagining. Imagining how a young, brilliant Olivia Swain, the youngest sister, might fall in love with such a man, this young Oxford scholar, a friend of her brother’s. And how she might have become pregnant with his child, and then how she might have died tragically in childbirth. Your sister died in 1924, Reverend, isn’t that correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Swain, ‘it is.’

  ‘So her child would now be … what? Thirteen years old,’ said Morley.

  There were glances again among the choirboys, but most eyes in the congregation fell immediately upon the boy, Thomas, Teetees, the quail-egg peeler who I had met at the Thistle-Smiths’ sherry party, and who was seated next to Mrs Thistle-Smith. He was wearing corduroy knickerbockers, a Norfolk jacket, and his long hair was swept back over his collar. He seemed oblivious to people’s stares.

  Professor Thistle-Smith began to rise up from his seat.

  Morley held up a finger, glared at him. ‘Think!’ he said.

  ‘Let him finish,’ said the deputy detective chief inspector.

  The professor sat down.

  ‘I imagined then how the Swain family might have felt about the loss of their sister. The disgrace of the pregnancy. And the betrayal, by this so-called friend of their brother. The sense of tragedy. I imagined them going on to their lives and careers. One of them as an actress, perhaps. One of them married to a professor, raising a son. And one of them an artist.’

  The Reverend Bowden

  ‘Is this the best you can do, Morley?’ said Miss Harris, with characteristic bravura.

  ‘There’s more,’ said
Morley. ‘Much more. I imagined, for example, that these sisters might have extracted from the young Bowden a promise to change his ways, to follow the path of their brother, even, into the Church? To devote his life, indeed, to the people of the village they had grown up in, and whom he had so bitterly betrayed? Might they have even had painted an image of their beloved sister Olivia as the Virgin Mary, so that the reverend, as he became, might never forget her presence? “I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”’

  Mrs Thistle-Smith had begun to cry.

  ‘And all, I imagine, had been forgotten. Until the Reverend Bowden employed a new housemaid, young and attractive, and the two of them dream of starting a new life together. Except that the reverend, a good man, is so bound by his conscience, so torn apart and tormented, and thus unwilling to pursue or consummate the relationship, that he is urged finally to self-destruction and commits the ultimate crime against himself.’

  There now came a sobbing from all three women: Mrs Thistle-Smith, Miss Harris and Constance Chancellor.

  ‘A suicide pact,’ said the deputy detective chief inspector.

  ‘No,’ said Morley. ‘A pact implies a mutual arrangement between two people who resolve to die at the same time, and in the same place. After the reverend’s death, poor Hannah, I think, was merely alone, a Jewess in a foreign country, in a place where she was unwelcome, preyed upon by unscrupulous individuals, and so, facing these insurmountable odds, she too decides to take her own life, though not before destroying the image of the woman she has been judged to usurp …’

  There was a coughing from Juan Chancellor at the back of the church.

  ‘In a sense,’ said Morley, ‘I was entirely wrong about Blakeney, and about the death of your reverend. No crime has been committed here. No one is guilty. Except perhaps, in a sense, if I might borrow the language of your Book of Common Prayer, we have all erred, and have strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.’

  The professor rose again from his seat. The congregation sat in silence.

  ‘You certainly have a vivid imagination, Mr Morley.’

  ‘Thank you.’