‘Guess who’s invited me to lunch on Thursday?’ Patrick Butler had just hung his hat and coat in their usual place in Anne Herbert’s hall.
‘The Dean? The Bishop? I’m not sure bishops ask people like you to lunch, Patrick,’ said Anne, smiling as she brought in the tea.
‘No,’ said Patrick Butler, laughing. ‘Much better than that.’
‘You can’t get much more important than the Dean and the Bishop round here,’ said Anne, offering him a piece of cake.
‘Powerscourt,’ said Patrick Butler proudly. ‘Lord Francis Powerscourt has invited me to lunch at the Queen’s Head at one o’clock.’
‘Why do you think he wants to do that, Patrick? You’re not a murder suspect or anything like that, are you?’ She looked at him carefully.
‘I would think,’ said Patrick with his man of the world air, ‘that he wants to pick my brain. Local knowledge, that sort of thing.’
‘If you were an investigator, Patrick, would you ask yourself to lunch? Yourself, the newspaper editor, I mean.’
‘I’m not sure I would,’ said Patrick Butler thoughtfully. ‘Unless I wanted something, some information maybe. Or unless I wanted to see what would happen if some story was printed in the paper. Maybe that’s what he wants.’
‘Is there any news about the death of that poor man in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall?’ Anne Herbert was wondering, as she looked at Patrick, if she should suggest buying him some new shirts. His present collection were rather frayed. Better wait, she said to herself, he won’t want to talk about shirts just now.
‘Not as far as I know,’ said Patrick Butler, unaware that he had narrowly escaped ordeal by shirt and collar. ‘I had a word with that policeman this morning, Chief Inspector Yates. Do you know what he said? I thought it was rather good, but he won’t let me use it in the Mercury. “Look at these vicars choral when they are singing,” said the Chief Inspector. “Look at how wide they open their mouths. The effort seems to exhaust them for the remaining part of every day. The rest of the time their mouths are very firmly, very tightly shut. They don’t tell you a bloody thing.”’
Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking yet again the short distance between Fairfield Park and Dr Blackstaff’s house. Only this time he was going inside, by appointment with the good doctor in his room full of medical prints.
‘Dr Blackstaff,’ Powerscourt began, ‘do you know of that passage between the library and the church up at the Park?’ He wanted to test the butler’s assertion that everybody in the locality knew about it.
‘Oh yes,’ said the doctor, ‘most people round here know about that passage. How did you find out about it?’
‘I discovered it by accident the other night,’ Powerscourt said, accepting a small glass of the doctor’s whisky. ‘I thought it interesting because it showed that some outside body could have gained entry to the house in the middle of the night. All they had to do was to walk into the church, lift up the trapdoor, make their way down the passageway and into the library. Nobody inside the house would have heard a thing. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr Blackstaff?’
‘It seems perfectly possible, I must admit. But why do you ask, Powerscourt?’
‘I am thinking of the suspicions of my employer, Mrs Augusta Cockburn. She suspects that her brother may have been murdered. Until now I have always been sceptical of that theory. I do not believe that any of the servants would have murdered him. I could not work out how any outsider might have gained entrance to the house when all the doors and windows were still bolted the following morning. Now I am not so sure. As you know, it would take less than a minute to walk out of the library, up the back stairs, and into Eustace’s bedroom.’ Powerscourt paused and looked across at Dr Blackstaff, sitting on the other side of the fire. ‘Do you follow me, doctor?’
‘I do,’ said Dr Blackstaff, ‘but I do not see the relevance of all this. John Eustace died here in this house, as you know.’
‘But he could have been killed in his own house, could he not, and then brought over here already dead by one of the servants, the butler, for example. Is that not so?’
Dr Blackstaff smiled. ‘In your profession, my friend,’ he said, ‘you are accustomed to looking for the darkest possible interpretation of events. I am sure that you could make a very credible case for saying that our late Queen was murdered in her bed by the agents of some wicked foreign powers. But John Eustace died here in this house, as you well know.’
Powerscourt changed tack. ‘Have you heard, doctor, about the death of Arthur Rudd, the vicar choral found strangled in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall?’ Dr Blackstaff nodded. ‘And have you had a chance to talk to Dr Williams, the medical man from Compton who attended on the dead person?’ Powerscourt believed that if the two doctors had met, the true facts surrounding the terrible demise of Arthur Rudd would have been exchanged. The medical profession might pride itself on its tact and discretion when dealing with their patients and people outside their own circle. But doctor will gossip unto doctor just as surely as lawyer will gossip unto lawyer. Blackstaff’s reply was a relief.
‘I have not spoken to Gregory Williams for some weeks now, not since we met at a party in the Bishop’s Palace, to be precise.’
Powerscourt found himself wondering briefly precisely what a party in the Bishop’s Palace might be like. Quizzes on the names of the Old Testament prophets? Or which came first in Egypt, the death of the first born or the plague of locusts? He pressed on. ‘Let me tell you, in confidence, if I may, the facts that have not been made public about this death.’ Powerscourt paused. ‘The body was actually found attached to the roasting spit in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall. There was a powerful fire burning. The body had been roasting in the flames for a number of hours, five or six probably, before it was discovered. Somebody killed the poor man and then roasted him as if were an ox or a stag or a deer. I do not need to tell you, doctor, the condition of the body when it was found.’
‘How terrible, how absolutely frightful,’ said the doctor. Even he, Powerscourt noticed, turned rather pale. ‘But why are you telling me all this?’
Powerscourt was looking very sombre. ‘Let me be perfectly frank with you, Dr Blackstaff. I have to admit that there were certain inconsistencies, certain discrepancies, between your account of what happened on the night of John Eustace’s death and the account of the butler Andrew McKenna.’ Powerscourt had no intention of spelling out what the inconsistencies were. If he did, he suspected that the leaky vessel that was their story might be hastily repaired. Dr Blackstaff looked as if was about to speak, but Powerscourt held up his hand to stop him.
‘Please hear me out, doctor. And please make your own allowances for the tendency of my profession to be forever looking at the darkest sides of human nature. But suppose for a moment, if you will, that my employer’s suspicions are correct, that her brother was murdered. Now we have not one death but two. And in the case of the second one we know that there is a murderer on the loose with a macabre, not to say demented, method of killing his victims. Suppose the two deaths were linked in some way. Suppose that it was the same motive that led to the deaths of John Eustace and Arthur Rudd. And suppose that the murderer has not yet got what he wanted. Suppose there are going to be more victims in the days and weeks ahead, bodies discovered nailed to a cross on the Cathedral Green, maybe, or hanging in chains from the roof of the chapter house. I put it to you, Dr Blackstaff, that anybody in possession of any information that might be relevant to these inquiries should unburden themselves of it immediately. I put it to you that anybody in possession of such information who chooses to remain silent, may be contributing to another terrible death, or even deaths, in Compton and its surroundings. And I would remind you that any such information passed on to me would be treated in the strictest confidence.’ Powerscourt stopped for his words to sink in. Then he asked very quietly, ‘Is there anything you would like to tell me, Dr Blackstaff?’