Fall of Angels
Page 35
“The ones that are visible are bad enough! Have you seen her wrists? Cut to shreds! She struggled, poor child! He tied her to the door handle with fishing wire that he’d brought in his pocket and abandoned her in the Daimler, a hundred yards down the road. She heard all the awful noises—the trumpet call, the hooter, shots and screams—knowing she was next. I want to tell you, John, that her—um, friendship with the master was not cultivated at our request. We had no idea. I can only hope that she hadn’t got too fond of him.”
“We may never know. I suspect she did have regard for him. So did I. He was a likeable man. His students all respected and admired him. But he was certainly spying on her, using her as a source of information. She may tell us how much she did let slip when she’s had the chance to recover and give it some thought.”
“She survived. That’s enough.”
“Only just. In fact, she very nearly did die at his hands. I haven’t told her, and I don’t want her to know . . . Aunt! Do you hear me? It didn’t strike me until later, nearly too late. That Sunday morning when I went to tell her the news of the discovery of Venus’s body, he was coming to visit her. I’m sure now that he intended to kill her that day and arrange that her death would be assumed to be the work of the man who’d killed Venus the previous night. Getting reckless! But a nosy cleric neighbour stopped him for a gossip. Telling him, I’m sure, that a policeman had called and was still with her. He was a man who could put on quite a performance, the master.”
“And he gave a particularly good version of a man suffering the effects of a close call with a poison.”
“Yes, all that hocus-pocus with the inhaler! His faked sniff at the salts and the subsequent attack of the collywobbles! He was well aware of the symptoms of accidental poisoning by mercury cyanide—as a patient being prescribed the noxious stuff, he must have had warning enough from his doctor. The cyanide was his plan B, in case the fall down the stairs that he knew the girls had planned proved not to be fatal.”
“Plan B, you call it? How do we know that he didn’t carry it always with him on the off chance?” Henrietta said, her tone scathing. And, chillingly, “How do we know he hadn’t used it before?”
Always the one to stop him short with a thought going off at a tangent, Aunt Hetty.
Redfyre went on uneasily. “He may have been fooling people for longer than we’re aware . . . He fooled young Tyrrell as well. Tyrrell would have been very surprised to see the charming master, who’d agreed to see him and hear his complaints though supposedly suffering from Montezuma’s revenge at the time, spring into action the moment he left and make off on his bike in the direction of Louise Lawrence’s house. The house whose location Tyrrell had just revealed. He followed her to Bensons’, where she took refuge. He lurked about a bit, and when she emerged, escorted by her boss and her dog, he cycled off ahead of her down the main road and had installed himself right in her own front porch. She came running up thinking the gent who waved at her was her own father, looking out for her.”
Hetty shuddered. “How appalling! To be taken by surprise like that, and by a man of some consequence whom you respected! No wonder she didn’t fight back.”
“I thank the lord for our sharp-eyed coppers on the common and the fingerprint department, who lifted his prints from the handlebars of the bike they enabled us to find.”
“You knew when you turned up at the party that he was responsible? And why?”
“Yes. Though stupidly and sentimentally hoping against hope that I’d got it all wrong. There were ends I had to tuck in or cut off before I could slap him with a warrant.”
“All satisfactorily resolved?” she asked, sensing his hesitation.
“One end is still sticking out. Henningham can no longer tell me, but there is a man who can. Scrivener. I didn’t have time to engage Henningham in a discussion of the press, but apart from the hexagon of plotting women, Scrivener was the only person who’d been shown the poison-pen letters and had an inkling of the plot. I believe he couldn’t resist speaking to the master to hear his views. Probably mouthing some nonsense about striking a balance. ‘This is their point of view, now would you like to give the readers your riposte?’ You can imagine! Henningham was a smart man. He’d have extracted whatever information he needed with flattery and a disarming smile. It was in Scrivener’s interest to foment discord between the town and the university. It sells newspapers. That’s all he cares about. He measures his ego in numbers of copies sold. Today’s fish and chip wrapper, oozing with grease, was yesterday’s stunning news.”
“The girls trusted Scrivener. But if Henningham knew what was being planned, why didn’t he just put a stop to it? Cancel the concert? It would have been difficult and embarrassing for the college, but he could have done it.”
“It suited him wonderfully for it to go ahead! It played right into his hands! It was his alibi. He was away in India at the start of the plot when the dean succumbed to blackmail and gave consent. The supposed attempt on Juno’s life was already arranged by others before his return. The first of the poison-pen letters had been delivered, and he’d had an account of them from Scrivener. Any subsequent missives of his creation would be ascribed, of course, to the original plotter. When it came to the delivery of the thoroughly nasty funeral wreath for Juno, he had merely to step outside into the court and help himself to a selection of seasonal vegetation. He took great care tying the bow by flattening it, as you do, with his rather large ex-artilleryman’s thumbs. The black satin ribbon gave us two beautiful prints whose hoops and whorls corresponded exactly with the prints we found on the handlebars of the cycle sold to Doctor Henningham two years ago.”
“So he was clear of all suspicion of the first murder attempt. And the thickheaded police—that’s you, darling—would assume the second, the third, the fourth were by the same hand and therefore unconnected with him.” Henrietta touched her throat briefly, eyes widening in horror.
“It’s all right, Aunt. You were very low on his list, I should imagine. Wouldn’t you say there was a sort of hierarchy of hatred about his choice of victim? Juno was the instigator, the one who was throwing a direct accusation of prejudice at him. The one who challenged him in public, thrilling an audience in his own chapel by exercising what he regarded as a man’s art. She came in for his most concentrated hatred, I think. He was determined to kill her even though he had to beat his way through Aethelwulf to get at her.”
“And that’s a puzzle. Wulfie may be one-handed these days but he’s no slouch with his left. What ever happened to him?”
“He, er, isn’t keen to talk about it. Relying on the ‘concussion resulting in lapse of memory’ excuse, I think. He did divulge to me, however—”
“Under duress, would that be, darling?” she asked with a touch too much eagerness.
“You might call it that,” he said with a smile, not wishing to disappoint. “Wulfie was standing whistling to himself and warming his bum downstairs at the fire, wondering if it would be acceptable to shout up a third time to Juno telling her to get a move on, that they risked missing their cue, when in strode Henningham. A bluff and breezy presence introducing himself as the master of St. Barnabas who had been present when Juno had had her accident was not in the least troubling. A bit of a nuisance perhaps, as they were in a hurry, but no more than that. The master extended his left hand, grasped Wulfie’s only hand tightly and promptly clouted him hard with his own free right.”
“Oh, dear!”
“More harm done to Wulfie’s pride than his skull, I think. Though the master had hands like sledgehammers. His strong thumbs certainly squeezed the life out of poor Louise Lawrence, who was no pushover. He quickly identified her as Juno’s accomplice, thanks to Thomas Tyrrell. By subjecting the dean to a grilling, he discovered it was Venus who had engineered the granting of permission for the concert.”
“Urgh! We were unravelled bit by bit.”
“It makes me feel old and useless. How far would he have gone?”
“I daren’t think. He was growing less controlled. The effects of the disease are unpredictable. Sometimes the sufferer has a surge of energy, physical or mental, sometimes at the same time and, on these occasions, he believes himself to be a hero, a demi-god, a god even. Henningham wanted to use his surges of remaining physical strength to do as much damage as he could. At least now he’s dead, we’ve been granted sight of his doctor’s notes. He was entering the third—and final—stage of the disease, and he’d been informed.”
“Why was he so charming to you, John? He really seemed to like you.”
“I could have liked him. Funny thing, Aunt. He was playing a game with nothing to lose. I think he was enjoying the skirmish. Though it was probably not the man I was fighting, but a myriad ghastly little killer bacteria. I’d rather think that was so. And that’s what I shall tell myself and anyone else who speaks of the master in terms of horror and evil. He too was a victim, confused and ultimately consumed by the very worst that nature has to chuck at man or woman.”
The cheerfully amateur sound of a band of Christmas carollers, performing to the accompaniment of handbells under the lamppost at the end of the street, chased away the nightmare and brought him back down into a blessedly mundane place. “Ouch!” he said, and, quoting with mischief from Rupert Brooke:
“And things are done, you’d not believe,
At Madingley, on Christmas Eve!”
“I could arrest them for grievous auditory harm and wilful assault on the herald angels!”
He finished his tea and asked casually, “Is Earwig all right? I haven’t heard from her.”
“Ah! That’s because she’s in Paris, darling. Aethelwulf got himself patched up—it takes more than a smack on the head to lay out that thug for long. He gathered up Juno and Earwig and a nurse from an agency and took them all off to stay at the Ritz to take their minds off the unpleasantness. Though Earwig did have time to wrap up a present for you and ask me to hand it over!”
He decided to unwrap the small parcel then and there because he sensed his aunt’s bright-eyed curiosity was stronger than his own need for discretion. “Well, it’s very nearly Christmas. We’ll take a look, shall we? Ah. It’s a book. A novel by H. G. Wells. His latest. I haven’t got it yet. So—good thought, Earwig! Yes, a good thought. Probably a good read, too—she seems quite the reader. I shall enjoy this on my one day off!”
“Men Like Gods?” Hetty read out the title aloud. “Isn’t that a bit unclear? ‘Like’—is that a verb or a preposition? What can it mean?”
“Haven’t a clue! Science fiction is my guess. It seems to be all the rage at the moment. I’ll let you know when I’ve read it. There’s a card. On it she says, um . . . ‘When you’ve found your Utopia, I’ll join you there. Possibly sometime in the New Year.’ Puzzle this! She’s making a date with me in the snug at the Pike and Eel? What on earth does she mean?”
“Oh, I think I can guess,” Henrietta said, nodding.