Arrest the Bishop?

by Peck,Winifred

  “So it would have been to others! You were not the only one concerned!”

  “You are right—they were the words of a poison pen. They have caused death, the cruellest kind of death, to the soul!”

  “Look here, sir, just keep to plain language.” Mack’s eyes were gleaming, for now with that word poison he seemed to be on the track at last. Mad this fellow was, of course, stark, staring mad! He had killed Ulder in that very spirit in which men had burnt heretics at the stake, and “That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t do nowadays”—so he pursued the tenor of his thoughts aloud. “Do you stand here telling me that you murdered Ulder because of those papers, and that you’ve burnt the lot? Wait, you can ask for a solicitor if you want one, and if not—”

  “Murdered Ulder! Ulder’s letters!” said the Canon, with an outraged surprise which convinced even Mack of his sincerity. “It was my book I burnt, The Questioner, the book of which you heard yesterday morning. I found a copy in the Bishop’s library to-day: I re-read it, and in my shame and disgust set fire to it at once!”

  “Well, whyever!” This anti-climax left Mack staring almost foolishly.

  “It could do, has done, far more harm than any of Ulder’s foolish and wicked bids for mere money, than was done by the removal of Ulder from this world. That book may, must, have killed faith and poisoned souls. How can I ever hope for forgiveness?”

  “If you ask me, Canon, you exaggerate.” Mack pulled himself together to try to get some sense into this extraordinary fellow’s head. “Don’t suppose it was read as widely as you think—never heard of it myself! And any way, remember this. I’m a plain ordinary man and no theologian. When I read a book in defence of the Presbyterian Church I don’t think it has a leg to stand on. When I read an attack on it I rise up ready to fight for every word in the Shorter Catechism. I expect this book of yours turned lots of young men to the Church, for we’re all alike, Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians. We won’t have our nests fouled by our own species and that’s a fact.”

  This incursion into theology had a slightly mollifying effect on Mack himself, but hardly helped to advance the case. He must have a chat with Dick over this absurd episode, and he would waste no more time with the Canon, who seemed inclined to start an argument on the probability or improbability of his book buttressing the faith of its readers.

  “You just think over your sins, and a bit more quietly,” was Mack’s advice as he turned to cut the Canon’s answer short. “And if you’ll excuse me just think over the sixth commandment and make sure you didn’t murder Ulder!”

  But Mack could only feel, as he returned upstairs to find Tonks, that both the Chancellor and Canon were not really likely suspects. He’d never believed it of Chailly, he told himself and, whether Wye were mad or no, no man who was taken up with this book of his and felt it so appalling a lapse in his past, could readily dismiss a crime like murder so lightly. And besides—always Mack returned to this point—was Wye likely to have come prepared with morphia, and if not, where could he have got it? Meanwhile, slightly at a loss for occupation, the constable determined to use his search-warrant on a thorough search upstairs.

  “Dick! I want to speak to you!” Dick and Sue and Bobs had fingered gossiping in the hall after Judith’s departure, and Dick was about to make for his turret retreat when the Bishop called him into his room. “I want to see you. Ah yes, my boy, I have been telling myself that in all this turmoil I have not seen as much of my candidates as usual, but I must indeed hear your thoughts and schemes sometime. You will be a brave and faithful soldier of the Cross, I know, not such as I, not such as I. Dick, I can bear this no longer—I can speak to no one else, involved as we all are in this terrible business. I—I have a terrible confession to make.”

  “My lord!” Dick’s brain whirled as he told himself the Bishop was suffering from delusions—delirium, self-hypnotism. “I don’t think you should talk! I think you should rest.”

  “Rest!” The Bishop strode up and down the room. “As if I had any rest day or night since that awful disclosure yesterday. No, Dick, I must speak or I shall go mad. Let me begin by owning to you what no human being has hitherto suspected, not even I myself, that I am a coward!”

  Dick said nothing. He only hoped that his attempt at surprise and polite protest covered his sudden memories of the St. Blaze estimate of Dithers.

  “Imagination breeds cowardice,” the Bishop went on, as if by generalizations he hoped to avoid his main theme. “I suffer from the acutest, yes, even absurd apprehensions for those I love. And now in this ghastly tragedy in the Palace I see myself suspected, arrested, brought to justice. No doubt you will assure me that Mack’s insulting manner and questions to me, from the first, are due to his prejudice against our Church and its servants. To me it has seemed more, and I have been afraid, I own it. In my few snatches of sleep, Dick, I have seen the condemned cell, the last walk, heard the last prayers!”

  “My lord!” Dick sprang forward as the Bishop swayed on his feet, groaning, and helped him into his chair. “Indeed you are torturing yourself wrongly! The only unfortunate circumstance in this case for you is that you, like others, had a motive for wishing Ulder—well, out of your way! But no man is brought to trial when motive is the only plea—that you know yourself in your sober senses. You have let your imagination run away with you—” (And what candidate for the priesthood, wondered Dick desperately, had ever so spoken to his Father in God in the past?)

  “Listen, my boy!” The Bishop shaded his face with his hand, and Dick saw the long fine fingers grip the amethyst ring in anguish. “That is not all! I—I have withheld a certain piece of information from the police.”

  Then the Bishop had somehow got hold of Ulder’s papers—or at least those which related to Judith! That could be the only meaning of such a confession, but how and when had he managed it? Not that Thursday morning: the door had been locked on him. Could he, fantastic as the idea seemed, be in some sort of collaboration with Soames? But after all the question of what the Bishop had withheld, and how or why, mattered not at all compared with the urgent necessity of persuading him to own his error, his stupid, even fatal error, to Mack himself. Stammering in his earnestness Dick set himself to the task, using every conceivable variation of the old theme that honesty is the best policy, but the Bishop not only gave him no answer, but made no apparent attempt to attend to him. He sat back with his face still hidden in his hand, his body huddled so helplessly in his chair that it almost seemed as if his fatigue had overwhelmed him and he was asleep. But he must not sleep yet on any account, not yet!

  “If you would tell me, my lord, if you would trust me!” Dick switched on the electric lamp beside him so as to arouse the Bishop. “If you would let me break this—this piece of information to Mack for you—”

  Suddenly the Bishop sat up and held up his hand, listening. “That is Mack!” he said with dilated eyes. “What has he been doing? Where has he been searching? What has he found?”

  “But, my lord, if you’ve any evidence, any papers, you have surely hidden them or kept them on your person!” Dick was at sea now indeed, and a very stormy sea.

  “I mislaid it—I could not find it. It had disappeared.”

  There was a knock at the door and Mack entered, followed by the cowed and miserable Tonks. Why had Dick unluckily turned on the light just at this minute, for if ever a model was wanted for a picture of a convicted and guilty criminal discovered in the act, one was provided at that moment by the Bishop of Evelake.

  “Bishop, I have come to ask you a question!” By the restraint in Mack’s manner Dick realized the importance of his discovery. “Would you like to have Chancellor Chailly here as your legal representative, for I am bound to tell you that anything you say may be used in evidence.”

  “No, no! Do not fetch him!” the Bishop muttered, as Dick sprang up. “No one else must know my weakness, except Bobs. Bobs,” he called through the intervening door, “come here! Let me tell you, M
ajor Mack, that I have just been admitting it to Mr. Marling here and was about, by his advice, to confess my oversight to you!”

  “Then you know what I’ve found?” asked Mack grimly, while Bobs exchanged questioning glances of surprise and dismay with Dick.

  “I think so, I think so, though how or where I cannot imagine. I could not find it myself in its usual hiding-place!”

  “But you recognize it all right?”

  Dick could hardly restrain a cry of horror as Mack displayed, carefully wrapped in a handkerchief, a thin, tiny tube covered with a paper label. The print was very small, but, as it lay beneath the light, Dick clearly made out the words printed in red on a folding label—“Poison—Morphine.”

  “Yes, yes, I do. But I kept it always in the secret drawer of my bureau, in the right-hand side wall behind the well of the writing-table. I have searched there again and again, and—there was nothing.”

  “Nothing on the right hand but this was on the left—the top drawer—rolled under a bit of loosened paper, very cleverly concealed. Perhaps you would like to tell me why you did not inform us of this tube when we were hunting the house for poisons yesterday?”

  “Because I could not find it,” repeated the Bishop almost stupidly.

  “All the more reason to tell us. We should have assumed then,” said Mack with great emphasis on the last word, “that someone else had got hold of it and hunted him down. Such secrecy is open to the gravest construction, as you can see for yourself.”

  “No one could have got hold of it!” If the Bishop were a criminal, Bobs thought passionately, he was an amateur at the job, for surely he should see for himself that he should allow Mack to believe that others had access to his secret! “My wife knew nothing of it.”

  “Could Soames have found it when he was valeting your clothes?” broke in Dick, disregarding Mack’s frown. “He has a passion for spying and picking and stealing, as we all know.”

  “He was never allowed near my room,” replied the Bishop, ignoring Dick’s life-line. “As he came to us with none too good a character my wife arranged that Doris should have complete charge of brushing my clothes, keeping my drawers, packing, unpacking, and so on. It is most improbable that so honest and superior a woman would pry her way into the secret drawers of my bureau, and she has no conceivable connection with Mr. Ulder.”

  “Could old Moira have got hold of it when her pains began, before she owned up to them? Isn’t that just possible?”

  “No, indeed. She would never have taken any property of another on any provocation. She had too an almost morbid horror of drugs. I remember that my wife and Dr. Lee had great difficulty in persuading her to have her first injection though the poor soul was in torments. Besides, she had been bedridden for weeks and it was only last night that I missed it.”

  “We have only your word for that,” said Mack, eyeing the Bishop curiously. “Would you care to tell us how it came into your possession, and what use you made of it?”

  “It—it’s a story of my weakness,” said the Bishop slowly, to Dick rather than Mack. “I was in London when war broke out in 1914, and the stories of invasion, rapine, and this new and terrible air weapon of the Germans alarmed me. Not for myself so much, I humbly trust, as the thought of my wife and daughters at the mercy of invaders or trapped in our old home’s ruins! I appealed to my old friend, Hartley Head, a brilliant surgeon, lost to us here now alas, and he gave me a small tube containing just such small morphia tablets as my wife was given by Dr. Lee. I put them away safely in a secret hiding-place and as you know there was no such use for them as I had imagined. But when this memory came to me my horror was too great for words. Major Mack, I could see you had suspected me from the first. You would like a Bishop to be guilty of crime—oh yes, I know it! I was sure that your two clumsy minions would never find my cache, but I did not dare to go near it till they were all safely out of the house and my wife occupied. Then I went to the secret drawer of my bureau, intent on destroying it with no more ado, for I knew I had never had such recourse to it as you would imagine. And it was gone, Dick, gone!”

  “So that’s your story,” said Mack, rolling the little bottle in the handkerchief under the light. “Well, no doubt your cloth makes a difference but I can’t see any jury finding it very convincing, Bishop. Your memory has played such odd tricks it would seem—you forgot you had it on Thursday morning, remembered it, and concealed your knowledge from us, found the bottle mislaid from its usual drawer (but in another close by, close by mark you!) forgot to mention all this to the police, and ask us to accept your information. I should be glad if you would refresh your memory and answer my next question very carefully. You say you alone knew of this drug and that no one else can have obtained possession of it.”

  “My lord, you should send for Mr. Chailly.” Bobs had kept silence by the Bishop’s wish till now, but he could not restrain himself. But the Bishop spoke with sudden vehemence.

  “I should only be told that I arouse more suspicion! No! I am telling the truth and shall continue to do so. I could do no more if the whole Bench were here. What do you want to know, sir?”

  “This, Bishop. Has this case been opened and how many tablets were in it?”

  “Well, let me see!” Bobs and Dick exchanged horrified glances as the Bishop hesitated and stammered like one prevaricating. “I will tell you the truth. I never had through the mercy of God to use the morphine for the purpose for which it was intended. But of late years I have suffered at times from gall-stones, and I can only hope you may never know the agony caused by that complaint. On the first occasion I was alone, my wife was speaking to some society at Blacksea, and I was terrified. I took one of those tablets and got relief. When I consulted the doctor, he disapproved strongly, and temporarily he cured me. But I lived in terror of that pain attacking me when I was staying in some far, lonely rectory for a Confirmation service, and made a rule to take it with me—”

  (Did Mack notice, thought Dick miserably, that only a little while ago the Bishop said he had never thought of the tube for years?)

  “—Twice I was forced to use it, and neither my wife nor the doctor discovered that I had done so, so it can have done no harm. Recently I have had an operation and fear the trouble no longer. So you may find three of the tablets missing.”

  “Three!” said Mack, “oblige me by a glance at the label—ten pellets, each containing half a grain!” He emptied the bottle gently over the handkerchief, and before their eyes lay only one tiny tablet. It was then that the cowardice which had darkened his spirit swept in a wave over the poor prelate, leading him to stammer out the most unwise and unavailing prevarication of his life.

  “I—I do not understand. Perhaps it was more often—I recollect, I think, another time at Compton Wyck.”

  “It is what happened to those other three tablets on Wednesday night that we wish to hear about,” said Mack.

  “Bobs, help me!” The Bishop rose and staggered as he did so. “Help me to my wife’s room. God pity her! Bobs, help me to my wife.”

  To Dick’s surprise Mack made no objection as the old man dragged himself heavily away on the Chaplain’s arm. But Mack made no move save to close the door behind them. Then he turned upon Dick and said doggedly—“Well, you can see for yourself, Dick, there’s only one course open to me. I must arrest the Bishop.”

  XII

  FRIDAY EVENING

  Dick had served in the Yeomanry in Flanders in the darkest hours of 1914 and 1915: he was to spend the rest of his life in war against the Devil and his angels, but he often told himself that he had never fought a tougher engagement than that against Mack, in the half-hour which followed.

  “Why should I delay?” repeated Mack. “It’s all clear against the Bishop now—motive—opportunity—weapon. If he were a labourer or a shop-keeper you wouldn’t ask me to hesitate. It’s my duty to arrest the Bishop!”

  “The whole argument is wrong—the facts don’t tally: half the business is still u
nexplained. I’d say as much for an old lag,” urged Dick, “not because we’re speaking of a man who has served God and never harmed his neighbour all his life, and not because he’s a Bishop! Give me till to-morrow anyhow. Do nothing to-day! Give me till to-morrow evening.”

  “Leave him till to-morrow to make a get-away!”

  “He won’t! Listen, sir, how do you account for his keeping the bottle if he’d done the murder? Why on earth didn’t he throw it away? No one would have discovered it.”

  “He was keeping what was left to finish himself off with if he were found out! He can’t get at it now anyway!” Mack fingered his handkerchief.

  “Someone may have known of it, realized the danger and hidden the morphia, and then replaced it. Someone may have taken it and used it—it’s been there for years, the Bishop admits. You’re no nearer proving that he gave the poison!”

  “He had every motive and every opportunity, and he had morphia in his possession,” repeated Mack stubbornly. “He got it for use in a possible Zeppelin raid: he never was in one. Do you ask me to believe a sane man would ever dose himself with the stuff without doctor’s orders?”

  “Soames could have taken it!” suggested Dick hurriedly. “You haven’t even examined him yet.”

  “I shall examine him about his pilfering, but again I ask you why on earth should he risk his life to murder Ulder? He didn’t stand to gain or lose a penny by it. Ulder wasn’t bullying him about his past!”

  “Wait till to-morrow!” Wait till you’ve consulted higher authorities was what Dick tried to imply, and probably the memory of his morning had some effect on Mack. For just when Dick had almost given up hope he said brusquely:

  “Very well, I’ll take no steps till to-morrow evening. It can’t be later, for how can a murderer take this service of yours at the Cathedral? Do you want to be ordained priest or whatever you call it by a murderer?”