Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  Amanda whispered, ‘That must be Vernon-Jones’s dog . . .’ but was prevented from saying more by Mrs Munns, who came into the room with the coffee.

  ‘You’ve met Rowley, I see. Disturbingly well-bred, isn’t he? Probably an eighteenth-century earl in his previous incarnation.’

  ‘He’s lovely,’ said Amanda. ‘How old is he?’ Dogs, Dougal thought, were an even safer subject of conversation than the weather.

  ‘He’s over eight years old now. Age just seems to make him more stately. The only person he unbends a little with is Lina. We’ve only had him for a month or so, in fact.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Dougal seized the opening. ‘Mrs Livabed mentioned he used to belong to Canon Vernon-Jones.’ Rowley raised his head a fraction above his paws. ‘We were reading his guide to the cathedral last night, actually, and Mrs Livabed told us he had died recently. She suggested we come and see you – not just for the history angle but for information about Rosington as a whole.’

  ‘You’d better tell me more about what you want to do,’ said Mrs Munns calmly. ‘How do you like your coffee?’

  They all had their coffee black, which drew from Mrs Munns the approving remark that she couldn’t understand why most people had to murder the taste of perfectly good coffee with milk and sugar. Dougal and Amanda explained the idea behind the documentary between them. Mrs Munns asked sharp questions, and Dougal found that it was impossible to be as vague as with Mrs Livabed. In the end, they presented themselves as tyros in the business – Dougal merely claimed the credit for the script of the Traditional Crofter’s Breakfast Cereal advertisement, which showed a kilted Highlander quoting Burns to a bowl of oats with Loch Lomond in the background.

  ‘You know the sort of thing,’ he finished, ‘a combination of predigested culture, nostalgia and the past adapting to the pressures of modern society, in the context of cathedral cities. It would be nice to have someone like the Poet Laureate introducing each programme. Have a shot of the tomb of the Jacobean Dean next to a shot of the girlie magazines in the newsagent’s in the High Street. Snippets of history, lots of pretty pictures and portentously meaningful reflections on present day trends.’

  For a moment Dougal wondered if he was being too flippant, if he had misjudged the character of his listener. But an impish grin flashed across Mrs Munn’s face.

  ‘The idea sounds as if it should make someone a good deal of money. But I don’t really see what I can do . . . you seem to have everything pretty well worked out already.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dougal, before he was interrupted by the doorbell.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Mrs Munns. ‘Do excuse me.’

  9

  They agreed sometime afterwards that the moment when Lee walked into Mrs Munns’s sitting room was the moment when they should have left Rosington and put their involvement with Caroline Minuscule into the mental lumber room reserved for memories one wants to discard.

  It was at this point that their belief in coincidence became untenable. Lee in the hotel was one thing; Lee in the cathedral was another; but Lee at Mrs Munns’s house, though explainable by the fact that he could have discovered Vernon-Jones’s connection with the widow as easily as they had, was carrying synchronicity too far.

  Hindsight later suggested that Lee must have started thinking about them then. Not that his behaviour on the occasion had been in any way disturbing – he introduced himself as an old friend of the Canon’s, curious to know how he had died. (Mrs Munns had accompanied him to the hospital after his final heart attack, and was firm in her assertion that the dying man had never regained consciousness.) Lee recognized Amanda, and Dougal by association, and was politely interested in the projected series. He had accepted a cup of coffee – with milk and sugar.

  Lee was pleasant to everyone; soft Irish charm oozed out of him, so much so that Dougal found it hard to remember that the man’s eyes were narrow and cold, and that his voice had the flatness of an automaton’s. Without Hanbury’s letter, it would have been difficult to think badly of him.

  He left before them, but Dougal and Amanda followed soon afterwards. Mrs Munns lent them the authoritative history of the cathedral – Vernon-Jones’s chief source – and they arranged to return at tea time tomorrow and discuss the projected programme in more detail.

  Dougal found the interlude at Mrs Munns’s refreshed him, even though it got them no further. It was hard to be worried about the possibility of evil in that comfortable room with the central tower framed in the window and Lina chattering away to herself on the stairs. Lina was five, Mrs Munns told them, but small for her age; she was very imaginative – ‘One’s own child always is!’ It was difficult to keep up with the identities of her toys, which were subject to ruthless and frequent alteration. At present she ran a bus garage in a model of the cathedral. It was necessary to be particularly deferential to her largest teddy bear who had been installed as Queen Mother on Wednesday.

  ‘Lives in a world of her own,’ said Amanda with a laugh. ‘Like William.’

  Afterwards, Dougal and Amanda strolled through the close arguing about Vernon-Jones. She was finding it increasingly difficult to equate the popular, septuagenarian canon with the éminence grise of the criminal information world.

  Dougal supported Hanbury – largely on the grounds that money and murder lent an air of plausibility to his interpretation. And, if Hanbury was right about Vernon-Jones’s past, he was probably right about the existence of the diamonds.

  The walk through the close failed to bring them any inspiration. They saw the original of the Rosington Augustine in the Chapter House museum. In Infirmary Lane they found Bleeders Hall. The house was shuttered and deserted. The guidebook said the monastic leech had plied his trade there, which Dougal thought was an appropriate description of the house’s last occupant.

  If nothing else, the walk gave them an appetite for lunch.

  As the only other occupant of the dining room of the Crossed Keys was the Church Dormant, slurping soup of the day in the corner, they felt able to discuss the morning’s progress, such as it was. Mrs Munns had been friendly but had produced no revelations. The original of the photograph had been completely uninformative – Dougal argued that it might well be irrelevant: ‘Maybe the photo was given to Hanbury and the key to some sort of cryptogram to Lee. It could be a Cardano grill.’

  ‘What?’ Amanda looked puzzled.

  ‘It’s a sheet of paper the same size as the page with numbered, letter-size windows. You put the two together and read off the letters which aren’t blocked out, in the order shown. And there’s your message . . . I read about it in an annual I had for Christmas when I was ten.’

  Amanda laughed. ‘But if codes were Vernon-Jones’s hobby, you’d expect something much cleverer. He wouldn’t have wanted to make it easy.’

  But none of this was helpful: they simply didn’t know where to begin. Dougal was aware that Lee’s presence had brought a touch of fear to the proceedings, which was sapping his enthusiasm. Secretly he admitted to himself that he wanted to leave Rosington, but found it impossible to say to Amanda: ‘Look, I’m scared. We’re leaving this afternoon.’ Those dark, fine eyebrows would arch themselves and . . . oh, God, why was he such a coward? It made him angry and despairing at the same time. All of which led quite naturally to him resting his elbows on the table and saying quietly:

  ‘I’m going to break into Bleeders Hall this evening.’

  Dougal left the hotel at seven-thirty promptly. By this time the inhabitants of the close should be sitting down to their evening meals, watching television or listening to the concert in the cathedral.

  He was well prepared physically for the expedition. He was wearing the duffel coat, jeans and a pair of boots with soles which were not only air-cushioned but virtually noiseless on hard surfaces. During the afternoon he had bought a small torch, some brown paper and glue, and a pair of fine rubber gloves. He had felt self-conscious about it, for life was imitating art, but in the absence of any
other model, what else could life do? His purchases were distributed among his pockets.

  With Amanda he had reconnoitered the rear approach to Bleeders Hall before doing the shopping. The house had a small garden, bounded on one side by the building itself; the second and third walls divided it from neighbours’ gardens, while the fourth separated it from Canons’ Meadow. This was a large, bumpy field which sloped down to the river. It was the site of the monastic fishponds: shallow, grass-covered depressions marked the spots where carp and pike had waited for the fatal Friday. The eastern border of the meadow was formed by Bridge Street, a long thoroughfare which ran parallel to the river. There were two entrances to the meadow from the close which the public could use: one was a narrow footpath which ran from the door at the southeast angle of the cloister, skirted the Canon’s residence at the southwest corner of Infirmary Lane and debouched into the meadow by way of a stile; the other lay in the south part of the close, remote from the cathedral.

  The occupant of Bleeders Hall had access to the meadow by a door set in the garden wall. Dougal had tried it, but found it locked. The wall itself, however, had not looked an impassible obstacle. It was perhaps seven feet high, but it sloped gently inwards with age and the mortar which held the jumble of stone and brick had in places crumbled away, leaving convenient holes for the hands and feet. Peeping surreptitiously through the keyhole, Dougal had seen the house itself – a back door on the right, and three large windows on the left. The windows were unshuttered and within easy reach of the ground.

  Dougal set off down the High Street, feeling at once lonely and conspicuous, as if he were a leper wearing a placard round his neck in a crowd. It had not been a pleasant afternoon. Having announced his plan, Amanda’s enthusiasm had made it impossible to change his mind. She wanted to come as well, but Dougal had opposed this, strongly and successfully. She was far too valuable to be risked and in any case he preferred to go alone. If he had to be afraid, he would rather be so without witnesses. She would dine at the hotel, keep an eye out for Lee and, if necessary, explain his absence by saying that he had succumbed to Nausea in F-sharp Minor.

  He passed the marketplace – the violin-playing vagrant had gone; Dougal had dropped some change into his cap while out shopping in the afternoon. He imagined the man snug in a public bar, his overcoat open to the warmth and a pint glass in front of him. But the glow of philanthropy which this image conjured was shortlived. It left him as he walked down River Hill towards Bridge Street – the least conspicuous way of reaching the Canons’ Meadow. He passed a pub; he was tempted to go in for a drink or two and then return to Amanda with the lie that Bleeders Hall had been impossible to break into.

  He forced himself onwards – how mature of you, commented the mocking, inner voice of unreason. No, it’s not, he thought, if I were mature I wouldn’t be here in the first place. Maturity was a stage you were always going to reach in a couple of years. Dougal rather doubted he would ever get there. Perhaps maturity wasn’t so much a state as an illusion – a condition of social beatitude which had its only reality in the minds of other people.

  The wind hit him as he turned into Bridge Street. He huddled into his duffel coat and felt like a character in one of those French films whose charm resided in the fact that you never knew quite what was happening but you did know it must be extraordinarily meaningful.

  The meadow was protected by a wall of roughcast stone topped with broken glass. Dougal walked along until he came to the gate – a grandiose, mock-Gothic erection which looked as if it had strayed into the Fens from a pantomime version of Robin Hood.

  He plodded into the field, his pace slowing automatically as the ground began to rise and the street lighting receded. It was suddenly very dark. He knew the cathedral was up there in front of him, though he found it difficult to tell which of his senses was supplying the information. Gradually he began to pick out lights in the nave and choir windows – probably dim at the best of times and filtered through paint and a film of dirt on the glass. Several of the visible windows of the houses in the close were alight, including two in Infirmary Lane. The patch of darkness between them must be Bleeders Hall.

  He tripped over a fallen branch on the ground and swore. He made himself go more slowly. It was unexpectedly eerie out here in the open, though the feeling decreased as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light.

  The wall which ran along the backs of the gardens gradually unscrambled itself from the shadows. Dougal stretched out his right hand and felt the rough surface of the door in the wall; the old paint flaked beneath his touch. He congratulated himself with disproportionate fervour. It seemed very important that, although he was as scared as ever, he was still capable of finding his way in the dark.

  The evening was reassuringly quiet; the only sounds were remote, emphasizing rather than punctuating the overall impression of silence. A train was clattering along the railway on the far side of the river; car engines grumbled like urban indigestion in the center of Rosington; and the wind provided a gentle background, as undefinably present as the background hiss on a record. Dougal could hear nothing, human or otherwise, which qualified as a risk for him. He told himself firmly that, if the worst came to the worst, one of the three exits from Canons’ Meadow should give him an escape route.

  He pulled himself slowly up to the top of the wall, the surface of the mortar crumbling slightly beneath his touch. He sat on the top for a moment, listening and peering down at the blackness on the other side. He counted three, like someone preparing to get into a cold bath, and jumped.

  The pile of wet, dead leaves cushioned his fall. The heap skidded under his impact, and sent Dougal sprawling on to grass. He stood up cautiously. The lighted windows of the houses on either side were curtained; nothing to fear there – and no one could possibly have heard his fall.

  A path bisected the garden, leading up to the house. Dougal walked up it, at first on tiptoe but then ordinarily, as he realized that his boots were perfectly equipped to deal with this kind of surface.

  The path led to the back door, which was locked. Dougal moved to the left and came to the first window, which was set back from the door. The window refused to budge. As far as he could tell, it served the kitchen.

  There were two more windows further to the left. He pushed tentatively at the lower half of the next one and, to his surprise, it moved. So brown paper and glue wouldn’t be necessary after all, which was probably just as well, since it would be a messy business, especially in the dark, and would probably leave traces. He wondered briefly whether there was any significance in the fact that the window had been left open, but dismissed the thought before it had had time to take root. The people of Rosington would be less security conscious than those of London, and presumably whoever was responsible for Bleeders Hall had discounted the risk of someone wanting to burgle an empty house.

  Dougal raised the window noiselessly, swung his leg over the low sill and slipped into the room beyond.

  He stood up, fumbling in his pocket for the torch, and full of a strange excitement, which carried him back to childhood explorations in empty houses. Anything might be waiting for him here. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he felt a sudden, fierce gladness that he had come.

  He was in a long dining room which stretched back into the house. A quick survey of its contents, using the torch where necessary with its beam shielded, showed that the executors had not yet removed the furniture. Ornaments and pictures had gone, but the carpet, curtains, sideboard, table and chairs remained. The last three were of solid mahogany resting on claw feet. Already the table had a layer of dust which Dougal carefully avoided. The dust reminded him of his gloves and he pulled them on, wiping the surfaces he might have touched with his handkerchief. He obviously had a long way to go before reaching a professional standard of housebreaking.

  The door was to Dougal’s right at the end furthest from the windows. He moved towards it, diligently opening drawers and cupboard doors but o
nly being rewarded by brittle twenty-year-old copies of the Rosington Observer. On reflection, a dining room seemed a most unlikely place to hide things and in any case a sense of urgency was creeping up on him.

  The door wasn’t locked, but it creaked as it opened which made him jump. He told himself firmly that there was no one to hear it, but he couldn’t help regretting having broken the specious security of silence.

  On the right was a green baize door. To the left, on the same wall as the dining room’s entrance, was another door. Dougal could vaguely discern further doors opposite him, and a flight of stairs going up beyond the baize door. A faint glow filtered through the fanlight above the door, an exit to the outside world which forbade the use of the torch. Dougal decided that he would move methodically round the hall, in a clockwise direction, searching each room as he came to it. He noticed unthinkingly that the floor surface had changed from carpet to stone flags.

  The door on the left led to a large, square room with two shuttered windows overlooking Infirmary Lane. The sofas and armchairs made its purpose obvious. There was a grand piano, with a forlorn aspidistra on top of it, in the corner by the left-hand window. Dougal had a sudden desire to play something on it – Ain’t Misbehavin’ would be appropriate – which he murdered at birth. He made a quick circuit of the room. It was as cold and featureless as the dining room. There was a little secretaire by the other window which seemed promising, but closer inspection showed that it was completely empty. If only he had been here earlier, before the more mobile of Vernon-Jones’s possessions had been moved.

  He left the drawing room and crossed the hall to the door opposite. It opened into what must have been the Canon’s study: it was a narrow room, rather like a corridor lined to the ceiling with book shelves denuded of books. A leather-topped desk stood near the door, a chair behind it and a long table in front of it stretching towards the window. Dougal was disappointed – he had cherished an obscure hope that the Canon’s books might provide a clue – some knowledge of his interests, at least.