Without troubling to light a candle, Percy crossed the smoking room and unlocked the glass cabinet which contained a pair of shotguns. He took one from its resting place and hefted it in his hand. He opened a drawer and, again working by touch, drew a handful of cartridges from a box and slipped them into his trouser pocket. Then he left the smoking room and went down the flagged passage to the kitchen quarters. He found his way with the merest brush of his free hand against the wall.
In the lobby he took a coat from a peg and let himself out of the side door of the house. The night air blew away the fustiness in his drink-fuddled head. He paused for an instant then loaded the shotgun, knowing that if he delayed until he was closer to his quarry the sound of the action would carry across a still night. ‘Quarry.’ The word amused him but it also stirred something within.
Slater crossed the yard and made a circuit round the side of the house. Like his man Fawkes, he was very familiar with the house and grounds. It was where he’d grown up and although he’d never had his brother Felix’s taste for rummaging about the estate, he could still have found his way about blindfold – or after dark.
Percy Slater stood on the weed-encrusted terrace and stared into the night. The light on top of the hillock known as Hogg’s Corner glowed with a fire-fly’s persistence. Percy considered for a moment summoning Fawkes from his snug in the stables to deal with these trespassers. But he was fairly sure that one of the shapes he’d seen dropping over the ha-ha was Fawkes himself. Something about the angle of the body, its outline, caused Percy to think that one of the night wanderers was indeed his own man.
Percy trusted Fawkes. Or, perhaps more accurately, he had never had any reason to distrust him. Fawkes had worked for his father, as had Nan, and on George’s death he had inherited the old retainers along with the estate. Fawkes was of a similar age to himself but whereas Percy had grown slow and was running to fat, the coachman had kept a youthful slightness even as his face had become more aged and disagreeable.
If it was Fawkes out there in the cold and dark, on top of Hogg’s Corner, then the question was, who was his companion? At once Percy remembered that odd and unsettling fellow who Fawkes had claimed could get into that lawyer’s room in The Side of Beef, the fellow who’d popped up out of nowhere at the dog-fight the other night. Not only had Percy taken against him personally, the fellow hadn’t even discovered anything in Ansell’s room. But if it was Fawkes together with Adam creeping about the edges of Northwood, what were they doing there?
There was only one way to find out. Percy Slater felt some old instinct uncoil inside him, the instinct to follow a trail, to track down its source, to . . . kill.
Moving lightly on his feet, for all his bulk, and wide awake now, Percy Slater reached the boundary between the garden and parkland. He placed the shotgun carefully on the upper ground and slipped, almost tumbled, on to the rougher grass beneath. When he’d recovered his breath and smoothed his clothes down, he retrieved the gun and set off.
The light in the centre of Hogg’s Corner vanished as he drew nearer, since the lie of the land got in the way. But there could be no doubt that there was someone up there. Scraping and scrabbling sounds alternated with subdued grunts or curses. Percy Slater gripped the shotgun in both hands and moved closer still, his breath coming shorter with the exertion and anticipation. He heard a hissing, and the sounds of scraping ceased. Something about the hissing enraged him. If it was his man Fawkes up there, he’d soon sort him out. Him and his companion. Let them know what was coming to them.
‘Fawkes!’ he said. He was almost shouting. Why shouldn’t he shout? This was his house, his land.
If, a few minutes after this, you had been standing on the terrace of
Northwood House, you would have heard the sounds of voices raised in threat or anger. It was a still night and the sound travelled easily from Hogg’s Corner. The next sound you would have heard from inside or outside the house, since it was the boom of a shotgun going off. Would have heard, unless you were Nan, whose hearing was poor and who slumbered on undisturbed in her room.
A House by the Arno
‘It’s a very extraordinary story,’ said Eric Selby. He’d already given a brief account of how he’d been summoned by Miss Nugent to see Walter, intimating that he had a great deal more to say. ‘What I have to say is quite shocking in its way, especially for you, Helen.’
‘I am not a little girl any longer, Uncle.’
‘Well, I would normally have some doubts about telling either of you, but Walter Slater said that he does not care now who knows his secret. His confession. He told me I might as well shout it from the rooftops. Once I had persuaded him to talk, it poured out of him like – well, like water from a breached dam, like blood from a wound. The poor fellow.’
‘Where is he now?’ said Helen. ‘He is not still in the bell-tower at St Luke’s surely?’
‘I accompanied him on his way back to Venn House though I didn’t see him right to the front gate. Nevertheless he promised me that he would return home and sleep in his own bed, not in the damp and discomfort of the ringing chamber.’
Canon Selby was sitting with his god-daughter and Tom in the seclusion of his drawing room. The rest of the household had long since gone to bed. Selby no longer looked so distracted as when he’d first appeared at the door. A good measure of brandy and Helen’s solicitous words had restored him to his usual humour.
‘Walter Slater has made a confession, you say?’ said Tom.
‘Yes, but it was not what you might think. Nothing to do with Felix’s death. At least I do not think so. It wasn’t even Walter’s confession in a sense but another’s. All I can say is that his father behaved very badly, his uncle too.’
‘Percy and Felix Slater?’
‘The pair of them,’ said Selby, shaking his head. ‘Mind you, I had had my suspicions once upon a time. There’d been rumours around the close many years ago. I’d put them to one side though.’
If all this had been designed to sharpen the curiosity of his listeners, it was succeeding. Both sat on the edge of their chairs, while the Canon leaned back in his and took another sip from his glass.
‘It appears that Walter Slater is not the nephew of Felix,’ he continued. ‘He is not the nephew but the son.’
‘What?’ said Tom.
‘There is more. Nor is Amelia the aunt of Walter. Rather, she is his mother.’ He paused to let this sink in. ‘Walter was in complete ignorance of his real parentage until the other day, the day of Felix’s death in fact. Percy travelled to Salisbury to tell him. It seems that something had prompted Percy to do this, to put the record straight once and for all.’
Helen said nothing. Tom felt himself go cold.
‘I called on Percy Slater that day,’ he said. ‘He invited me to go to Northwood House. I don’t really know why. He talked about his brother in quite bitter and sarcastic terms, venting his feelings. He told me not to be taken in by his holy act.’
‘Implying that Felix was a hypocrite,’ said Canon Selby. ‘Well, there’a a grain of truth in that. But we should not judge the dead too harshly.’
‘My God,’ said Tom, ‘do you suppose it was something I said which caused Percy to go off and reveal the truth to Walter?’
He struggled to remember in detail what had passed between him and Percy Slater. There’d been talk about gambling and an argument about the material which had been transferred to Felix, together with some general aspersions on the character of the Canon. Had Tom said something which caused the Canon’s brother to go straight to Walter and tell all? If so, Tom realized with dismay, then he must bear a share of the consequences. Whatever those consequences had been, exactly. He put that disturbing thought to one side.
Selby noticed his agitation and said, ‘Don’t worry, Tom. If you did make some remark – if, I say – then it was surely unintended. Like a man walking along a mountain path who idly kicks a stone over the edge and starts a landslide.’
; ‘Thank you, sir, but that’s not a very comforting reflection,’ said Tom.
‘I mean that someone would have kicked the stone over sooner or later. It was bound to happen. From what Walter told me, his father – his uncle, I should say – had been on the verge of informing him of his true parentage on several occasions. He was merely waiting for the right provocation.’
‘Which I provided.’
‘We don’t know that, Tom,’ said Helen.
‘It is enough to say that Percy acted rashly, even dangerously, by telling this story when he did,’ said Eric Selby. ‘Yet he cannot be altogether bad, for he brought up Walter as if he were truly his son.’
‘What is the story?’ asked Helen. ‘Tom was only just now describing to me the Slaters’ marriage. How they met in Florence and so on. A ‘strange union’, you said.’
‘That was no secret,’ said Tom. ‘Both Walter and Percy said as much.’
‘It seems that Felix not only met Amelia when he was visiting Florence many years ago. Her parents had a house by the Arno. It seems that they became – well . . . that they became . . .’
‘Lovers,’ said Helen.
‘Thank you, my dear. Yes, they became lovers. Shortly after Felix returned to England, Amelia suffered a double shock. Her parents died in an outbreak of cholera. No sooner had she lost them than she discovered that she was with child. Having no one else to turn to, she eventually travelled to England to find Felix Slater.’
‘To throw herself on his mercy,’ said Helen.
‘Why, yes, that is how it must have been. We can have no idea of what words passed between Felix and Amelia, but we do know the result. Felix was a rising churchman in the town, fixed on a respectable course of life after all his – his gadding about on the Continent. Of course, he’d been a clergyman when he went abroad but possibly the warmer air – or the looser customs of foreigners – or something else, I don’t know what – caused him to forget his vows and his vocation. But he paid the price after he returned for here was a woman, half English, half Italian, on his doorstep, pleading for his protection.’
‘Couldn’t they simply have married and have done with it?’ said Tom. ‘If Amelia was expecting a child then, when it came, they could have claimed . . . they might have pretended . . .’
‘That the baby was premature,’ said Helen.
Both men looked at her, Tom with new respect, Eric Selby with a kind of relief at his god-daughter’s plain speaking.
‘Amelia was not precisely with child when she arrived in Salisbury,’ said the Canon. ‘You might say that the child was with her. By this time, Walter had already come into the world. She turned up with a three-month-old baby. Or six months old. Walter can’t be quite sure. You understand that he was in a distressed and confused state when he was telling me all this. What he knows, from Percy, is that his mother travelled through Italy and France by herself, a baby son in her arms.
‘Though he might agree to marry Amelia, Felix could not – or would not – acknowledge the child as his. At least he did not do so publicly, no doubt thinking of his position. Instead he turned to his brother for help. Percy and his wife had recently lost their own son in infancy. Whether the idea came from Felix or from Percy doesn’t matter, but it was the older man who offered or was persuaded to take Walter as if he were his own child. As you’ve discovered, Tom, Percy isn’t a man who has much time for convention. Perhaps he was pleased by this evidence that his clerical brother was – how should I put it? – capable of being a sinner. Perhaps he was moved to pity by the sight of the baby. Perhaps his wife, his first wife, was eager to adopt little Walter as her own. But, whatever the reason, it was an act of kindness that they took the boy. Took him quietly and without fuss and brought him up as if he were truly their own child. At the time they lived in London, far enough away from Salisbury for gossip and rumour not to travel. Though, as I’ve said, there had been a little whispering in Salisbury itself. He could not keep everything concealed. Felix and Amelia were married in due course. Percy soon afterwards lost his first wife, the woman whom Walter had always been led to believe was his mother. Later Percy married again. I do not know whether Percy’s second wife is aware of the truth – that she is a step-aunt rather than a stepmother.’
‘And meanwhile Walter grew up believing that Felix was his uncle and Amelia was his aunt?’ said Tom.
‘It is an extraordinary situation, is it not?’
But there had been little signs and pointers, thought Tom, there’d been puzzling moments which were now explained.
Such as the affectionate way that Amelia had bade farewell to Walter in the porch of Venn House the first time he’d encountered them. or the young man’s reference to her as not being especially ‘aunt-like’, which Tom had taken as being no more than a comment on her age and manner. Then there had been Percy Slater’s odd attitude to his ‘son’, the dismissive way he’d talked about him. Tom had put it down to disapproval of Walter’s decision to go into the Church and to lodge with Felix.
But, regarded in this new light, the situation suddenly became plain. Felix’s saying that Walter was just the son he would like to have was the nearest he had come to admitting the truth. There was a kind of daring hypocrisy in the statement. Similarly, hadn’t Canon Slater mentioned his happiness when Walter came to live with him? With them, of course, with the unacknowledged father and mother. What was Amelia Slater’s attitude to all this? She must surely have been delighted to have her son under her own roof for the first time. What was her part in all of this? How easy or hard had she found it to remain silent all these years? Was it part of the understanding between the couple that she should never refer to Walter’s true parentage?
He was suddenly aware that a silence had fallen and that Helen and Eric Selby were looking at him curiously. Rapidly, he explained how the story they’d just heard had thrown light on several small incidents or remarks which he’d noticed since his involvement with the tangled affairs of the Slater family. He had one final question for Canon Selby.
‘Do you think that George Slater, the father, was in on the secret?’
‘Who can tell, Tom? It is possible he was kept in ignorance. His older son lived in London while George did not, by all account, have much to do with the younger one. Perhaps he also took Walter for the son of Percy.’
‘Why do you ask, Tom?’ said Helen.
‘Because if George Slater did know, then he might have made some reference to it in his manuscript, his memoir.’
And, Tom thought without saying it out loud, that might have been a motive for the theft of the Salisbury manuscript and the murder of Felix.
Running over the events of this dramatic day as he lay, restless, in his bed at The Side of Beef, Tom Ansell realized how the revelation of Walter’s parentage had shaken everything up. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope. New patterns emerged. But they were ugly patterns, with a bloody red and a jealous green the predominant colours.
Canon Slater emerged in a new light. Tom wasn’t sure whether it was a flattering light or not. The passion that had run in his veins hadn’t simply been for the artefacts of the past. He had once, in his younger days, been the lover of a woman – a girl, in fact, for Amelia could have been little more than that when they met in Florence by the Arno – a girl whom he had got with child, as the expression goes. Tom wondered whether the Canon’s preoccupation with the past, with digging up remains, was somehow related to his having buried the scandalous part of life, if only as a kind of reverse image of it. Then he recalled Slater saying that he’d always been interested in disinterring the past from his earliest days, that he’d enjoyed fossicking round the Downton estate as a child. Well, Felix Slater was dead now and there’d be no more fossicking.
If there’d been a shortage of suspects or motives for the murder of Canon Slater before, there were now several to be drawn directly from Felix’s own family.
Tom had scarcely known his father – not much more than a tall m
an in a blue uniform, as he’d described him recently to Henry Cathcart – but at least he could recognize him as a father. He tried to put himself inside the mind of a man of about the same age as himself who, with brutal suddenness, discovers that the gentleman and lady he’s been brought up to treat as his uncle and aunt are his actual parents. It was as if he’d discovered that the man his mother had taken for a second husband – Martin Holford, a kindly but somewhat aloof figure who’d steered Tom into his career in law – was revealed to be his actual father. How would he, Tom, respond? Disbelief at first, yes. And then . . . what? The effect would surely be overwhelming.
Walter’s reaction had been a compound of anger and dismay. His immediate instinct had been to run away from Venn House and hide himself in the comforting surroundings of St Luke’s. But had that really been his immediate instinct? Had he rather been driven by fury or distraction to go straight to Venn House and confront the man now revealed as his father? Did he kill the cleric while his mind was turned by the news, and then flee to the shelter of the bell-tower?
Tom thought again. If Walter Slater had endured a distraught encounter with Felix, then there would have been the sounds of it reverberating round the household on the evening of Felix’s death. Raised voices and angry tones would have been overheard by the servants. And by Mrs Slater too, surely. Unless she was somehow involved in her husband’s death, an accomplice to his murder. Tom had a vision of Walter storming into the house and confronting his mother. Of tears and embraces coupled with garbled explanations and infinite regrets, while anger bubbled away underneath. Had they together gone to see Felix? Together brought about his death?
The strain on Amelia over the years must have been immense too. If Walter had been subject to a violent shock, she had had to endure many years of pain. To have surrendered her son all those years before and then to have him return home as a kind of guest, but without being able to acknowledge him for who he was, must have added to an almost intolerable burden.
The Salisbury Manuscript Page 22
