The Religious Body

INSPECTOR C. D. SLOAN HAD NEVER BEEN INSIDE A CONVENT BEFORE.

On their part the community of nuns at the Convent of St. Anselm in the village of Cullingoak were equally ignorant of the ways of the police force. When murder brought them together each institution found it had much to learn about the other. Interviewing half a hundred black-habited Sisters as potential suspects for murder was no simple task, especially when Sloan found that, to him, one nun looked very much like the next.

The Religious Body is a thoroughly intriguing British mystery novel which marks the debut of a stylish newcomer. Miss Aird combines sound plotting with well-developed background atmosphere, and a nice sense of character, especially as revealed in the sardonic Inspector Sloan and his amiably brash assistant, Crosby.

For my parents, with love

“What I want to know is:

One—who is the criminal?

Two—how did he (or she) do it?”

—Ernest the Policeman, in The Toytown Mystery by S. G. Hulme Beaman.

1

Sister Mary St. Gertrude put out a hand and stilled the tiny alarm clock long before it got into its stride. It was five o’clock and quite dark. She slipped quickly out of bed, shivering a little. The Convent of St. Anselm wasn’t completely unheated but at five o’clock on a November morning it felt as if it was.

She dressed very quietly, splashing some cold water on her face from a basin in the corner of the little room. The water was really chilled and she dressed even more quickly afterwards. Her habit complete, she knelt at the prie-dieu in front of the window and made her first private devotions of the day. Then she drew back the curtains of the window and stripped off her bed.

It was then twenty-five minutes past five. Utterly used to a day ordained by a combination of tradition and the clock, she picked up her breviary and read therein for exactly five minutes. As the hands of the clock crept round to the half-hour she closed the book and slipped out of the door. It was Sister Gertrude’s duty this month to awake the Convent.

She herself slept on the top landing of the house and she went first of all to pull back those landing curtains. Half a mile away the village of Cullingoak still slept on in darkness. There was just one light visible from where she stood and that was in the bakery. It would be another half an hour before the next light appeared—in the newspaper shop, where the day’s complement of disaster and gossip arrived from Berebury by van. Sister Gertrude arranged the drawn curtains neatly at the sides of the window and turned away. Newspapers had not been one of the things she had regretted when she left the world.

She descended to the landing below and drew back another set of curtains on the other side of the house. In this direction, a couple of fields away, lay the Cullingoak Agricultural Institute. It, too, was invisible in the darkness, but presently the boy who was duty herdsman for the week would start the milking. Occasionally in the Convent they could hear the lowing of the cattle as they moved slowly across the fields. Sister Gertrude turned down a corridor, counting the doors as she passed them. Six, five, fo… four. At four doors away there was no mistaking Sister Mary St. Hilda’s snore.

It rose to an amazing crescendo and then stopped with disturbing suddenness—only to start seconds later working its way up to a new climax. Sister Bonaventure called it the Convent’s answer to the Institute’s cows, but then Sister Bonaventure declared the snore could be heard six doors away on a good day.

She may well have been right. It was true that the only person in the Convent of St. Anselm who didn’t know about Sister Hilda’s snore was Sister Hilda. It was, thought Sister Gertrude wryly, a true test of religious behaviour to sleep uncomplainingly up to four—or even five—doors away from her, and greet the cheerful unknowing Sister Hilda with true Christian charity each morning. She had had to do it herself and she knew. But how she had longed to be able to go in and turn her over onto her other side.

She wished now that she could wake her first but there was a prescribed order for this as there was for everything else in convent life. It was decreed that the first door on which she had to knock every morning was that of the Reverend Mother. Why this was so, she did not know. It may have been because it was unthinkable that the Mother Superior should sleep while any of her daughters in religion were awake. It may have been one of the things—one of the many things— whose origin was lost in the dim antiquity when their Order was founded.

She had to go round two more corners before she came to the Reverend Mother’s door. She tapped gently.

“I ask your blessing, Mother.”

“God bless you, my daughter.” The answer came swiftly through the door in a deep, calm voice. She never had to knock twice to wake the Reverend Mother.

The next door on which she had to knock was that of the Sacrist. She must always be up betimes.

“God bless you, Sister.”

“God bless you, Sister,” responded the Sacrist promptly.

Then the Cellarer. She, too, had early work to do.

“God bless you, Sister.”

And the Novice Mistress.

No response.

Another knock, louder.

“God bless you, Sister,” sleepily. The Novice Mistress sounded as if she had been hauled back from a pleasant dream.

The Bursar and Procuratrix, the Mother Superior’s right-hand woman Sister Lucy.

“God bless you, Sister.” No delay here. She sounded very wide awake.

Then she could start on the ordinary doors, one after the other. There were still fifty to go.

Knock.

“God bless you, Sister,” tentatively.

The unmistakable sound of dentures being seized from a tin mug.

Pause.

Then, triumphantly, “God bless you, Sister.”

Knock, blessing, response. Knock, blessing, response.

In a way the formula made the job easier. “Half past five on a November morning and all’s well” doubtless would have its uses, but hardly in a Convent. She drew back yet another set of landing curtains and was glad she didn’t have to say something about the weather fifty-five times every morning. It wasn’t a particularly nice morning but not bad for November, not bad at all. It looked as if it would stay fine for tonight, which was Bonfire Night. Sister Gertrude had not been so long out of the world that she couldn’t remember the importance to children of having a fine night for their fires. Besides, a damp November Fifth was a sore trial to everyone—then you never knew when they would let their fireworks off. She wondered what the students at the Agricultural Institute were planning. Last year they had burnt down the old bus shelter in the centre of the village. Not before time, she had been told, and now there was a brand new one there.

Knock, blessing, response. Knock, blessing, response.

The older the Sister, the quicker the response. Sister Gertrude had worked that out long ago. She called the older ones first—partly because they slept on the lower floors, partly because she could still remember how much those extra minutes’ sleep had meant when she was a young nun. Sleep had been a most precious commodity then.

Knock, blessing, unintelligible response. That was old Mother Mary St. Thérèse, aged goodness knows what, professed long before Sister Gertrude was born, with a memory like a set of archives. Woe betide any Reverend Mother with an eye for innovation. Mother Thérèse had outlived a string of Prioresses, each of whom, she managed to infer (without any apparent lapse of Christian charity), was not a patch on their predecessor. There were days now when she was not able to leave her room. The Reverend Mother would visit her then, and listen patiently to interminable recitations of the virtues of Mother Helena of blessed memory, in whose time it seemed life in the Convent of St. Anselm had been perfect.

Knock, blessing, response.

She turned back into the corridor where Sister Hilda was the soundest sleeper. The snore was still rising and falling “like all the trumpets,” thought Sister Gertrude, before she realised that it was an irreverent simile, and that custody of the mind was just as important as custody of the eyes even if it was half past five in the morning and she was all alone in the dim corridor.

Knock, blessing, response.

That was the door next to Sister Hilda, Sister Jerome. Sister Gertrude wondered what sort of a night she had had. Perhaps the snore didn’t bother her, but if it did, she couldn’t very well say, not after solemnly undertaking to live at peace for ever with her Sisters in religion.

Knock, blessing, response.

Sister Hilda’s door.

The snore ground to a halt, there were a couple of choking snorts, and then the pleasant voice of Sister Hilda sang out warmly, “God bless you, Sister.”

It was strange but true that Sister Hilda had one of the most mellifluous speaking voices in the Convent. Sister Gertrude shook her head at this phenomenon and passed on to the next door.

Knock, blessing… no response.

Knock (louder), blessing (more insistently)… still no response.

Sister Anne’s teeth were her own. She could think of no other reason for delay in answering and put her hand on the door: the room was empty, the bed made. A very human grin spread over Sister Gertrude’s face. Sister Anne hadn’t been able to stick another minute of that snore and had crept down early. Strictly forbidden, of course. So was making your bed to save dashing up before Sext. She made a mental note to pull her leg about that later, and, taking a look at her watch, hurried along to the next door. There was still the entire novitiate to be woken, to say nothing of a row of postulants—and they never wanted to get up.

At ten minutes to six Sister Gertrude slipped into her stall in the quiet Chapel and went down on her knees until the service began. There was no formal procession into the Chapel for this service. Each Sister came to her own stall and knelt until the stroke of six. She heard the crunch of car wheels on the gravel outside. That was Father MacAuley come to take the service. She lowered her head. She was glad enough to kneel peacefully, her first task of the day completed. Gradually in the few minutes before the service she emptied her mind of all but prayer and worship, and as the ancient ritual proceeded she was oblivious of everything save the proper order of bidding and response.

Until Sister Peter moved forward.

Sister Peter was Chantress, which office weighed heavily on her slight shoulders. She was young still and inclined to start nervously when spoken to.

After the Epistle she stepped into the aisle and walked up to the altar steps for an antiphon. Her music manuscript—hand-illuminated and old—was there, ready open on its stand.

The Sisters rose, their eyes on the Chantress, waiting for her to start the Gradual.

Sister Peter’s voice gave them the note, and the antiphon began. The Sisters sang their way through the time-honoured phrases. On the steps of the altar, Sister Peter put out her right hand to turn the music manuscript over, touched it—and shot back as if she had been stung.

The nuns sang on.

Sister Peter’s face paled visibly. She stared first at the manuscript and then at her own hand. It was as if she could not believe what she saw there. She went on staring at the manuscript. She made no attempt to turn the page over but stood there in front of the stand, an incredulous expression on her face, until the nuns had sung their own way to the end of the Gradual.

Then she genuflected deeply and turned and walked back to her stall, her face a troubled, tragic white, her hands clasped together in front of her but nevertheless visibly trembling.

The congregation settled themselves for the Gospel.

Convent life, reflected Sister Gertrude, was never without interest.

They filed out of the Chapel in twos, hands clasped together in front, bowing to the altar. They proceeded to the refectory where they bowed to the Abbatial chair and then stood, backs to their own benches, while grace was said.

“Amen,” said the Community in unison.

There was a rustle of habits and then the nuns were seated. One sat apart on a little dais, a reading desk in front of her. When all was still she began to read aloud from the Martyrology. The Refectarian stood by the serving hatch, her eye on the Reverend Mother. The Reader started to retail the sufferings of the early Christian martyrs. At the end of the first page she paused. The Reverend Mother knocked once on the table. The serving hatch flew up and the Refectarian seized an enormous teapot, set it down at a table and went back for another. A younger Sister appeared with the first of several baskets of bread. This was passed rapidly down one of the long tables.

The incredible tortures inflicted on the martyrs were obscured by the crunching of crusts and the sipping of hot tea. The Reader raised her voice to tell of boiling oil and decapitation. The teapot went on its second round, the bread baskets emptied. Only little Sister Peter seemed to be with the Reader completely. Her expression would have brought satisfaction to any torturer.

It was at this point that Sister Gertrude noticed the empty place. It was between Sister Damien, angular, intense and exceedingly devout, and Sister Michael, plumpish, placid and more than a little deaf. Sister Anne’s place. She must have been taken ill in the night and whisked off to the Convent’s tiny sick bay. Sister Gertrude’s glance slid along the bench to where the austere figure of Sister Radigund, the Infirmarium, was sitting. She would ask her at the end of the General Silence.

The morning’s quota of bread and tea came to an end. The Reader was tidying up the remains of the dismembered martyrs in a general “And in other places and at other times of many other martyrs, confessors and holy virgins to whose prayers and merits we humbly commend ourselves.”

“Deo gratias,” responded the Community.

At this moment Sister Peter rose, bowed to the Mother Superior and went slowly round the table to stand in front of the Abbatial chair. The Mother Superior looked up at her and nodded. Sister Peter went down on her knees and clasped her hands together in front of her.

“I confess my fault,” began Sister Peter in a voice that was far from steady, “to God and to you, Mother Abbess, and to all the Sisters that I have committed the great sin of damaging the Gradual…” There was an indrawing of breaths that would have done credit to a chorus in their unity. “… by placing a thumb mark on it,” went on Sister Peter bravely. “For this and all my other faults and those I have occasioned in others, I humbly ask pardon of God and penance of you, Mother Abbess, for the love of God.” She finished in a rush and knelt there, eyes cast down.

The Reverend Mother considered the kneeling figure. “May the Lord forgive you your faults, my dear child, and give you grace to be faithful to grace. Say a Miserere and…” she paused and looked across the room, “… and ask Sister Jerome if she will take a look at the mark quickly. It may be possible to remove it without lasting damage.”

In the general bustle and end of silence after breakfast, Sister Gertrude sought out Sister Radigund.

“Sister Anne? She’s not ill that I know of. She might have gone to the sick bay on her own, of course, though it’s not usual…”

It was expressly forbidden as it happened, but it would have been uncharitable of Sister Radigund to have said so.

“… I’ll go up after Office if you like, to make sure.”

“Thank you,” said Sister Gertrude gratefully. She wondered now if she should have reported the empty bedroom. Her mind was more on that than on Sext, and afterwards she waited anxiously at the bottom of the staircase for Sister Radigund.

“She’s not in the sick bay,” said the Infirmarium, “nor back in her own cell either. I’ve just checked.”

“I think,” said Sister Gertrude, “that we’d better go to the Parlour, don’t you?”

They were not the only Sisters waiting at the Reverend Mother’s door. Sister Jerome, the Convent’s most skilled authority on manuscript illumination, and Sister Peter were both there too. They knocked and a little bell rang. Sister Gertrude sighed. That was where the world and the Convent differed so. In the Convent to every sound and every speech there was a response. In the world—well…

The four Sisters trooped in. The Mother Superior was working on the morning’s post with Sister Lucy, the Bursar. There were several neat piles of paper on the table, and Sister Lucy was bending over a notebook.

The Mother Superior looked up briskly. “Ah, yes, Sister Peter. The mark on the Gradual. I’m sure that Sister Jerome will be able to remove it, whatever it is. These culpable faults are all very well but we can’t have you—er—making a meal of them, can we? Otherwise they become an indulgence in themselves and that would never do.” She gave a quick smile. “Isn’t that so, Sister Jerome? Now, stop looking like a Tragedy Queen and go back to…”

Sister Peter burst into tears. “That’s just it, Mother,” she wailed. “Sister Jerome says…” She became quite incoherent in a fresh paroxysm of tears.

“What does Sister Jerome say?” asked the Reverend Mother mildly.

Sister Jerome cleared her throat. “That mark, Mother. I think it’s blood.”

Sister Gertrude’s knees felt quite wobbly. She gulped, “And we can’t find Sister Anne anywhere.”

2

« ^ »

Inspector C. D. Sloan had never been inside a Convent before.

He had, he reckoned, been inside most places of female confinement in his working life—hospitals, prisons, orphanages, offices, and even—once—a girls’ boarding school. (That had been in pursuit of a Ward in Chancery whom a great many other people had been pursuing at the same time. Sloan had got there first, though it had been a near thing.)

But never so much as a monastery, let alone a Convent.

The call came into Berebury Police Station just before ten in the morning. The Criminal Investigation Department of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Constabulary was not large, and as his sergeant was checking up on the overactivities of a bigamist, he had no choice at all about whom he took with him to the Convent: Crosby, Detective-Constable, William. Raw, perky, and consciously representing the younger generation in the force, he was one of those who provoked Superintendent Leeyes into observing (at least once every day) that these young constables weren’t what they were.

“You’ll do, I suppose,” said Sloan resignedly. “Let’s go.” He stepped into the police car and Crosby drove the five and a half miles to Cullingoak yillage. He slowed down at the entrance to a gaunt red-brick building just outside Cullingoak proper and prepared to turn into the drive. Sloan looked up.

“Not here. Farther on.”

Crosby changed gear. “Sorry, sir, I thought…”

“That’s the Agricultural Institute. Where young gentlemen learn to be farmers. Or young farmers learn to be gentlemen.” He grunted. “I forget which. The Convent is the next turning on the right.”

It wasn’t exactly plain sailing when they did find the entrance.

There was a high, close-boarded fence running alongside the road and the Convent was invisible behind it. The double doors set in it were high and locked. Crosby rattled the handle unsuccessfully.

“Doesn’t look as if they’re expecting us.”

“From what I’ve heard,” said Sloan dryly, “they should be.”

Eventually Crosby found his way in through a little door set in the big one.

“I’ll open it from the inside for the car,” he called over, but a minute or two later he reappeared baffled. “I can’t, Inspector. There’s some sort of complicated gadget here…”

“A mantrap?” suggested Sloan heavily.

“Could be. It won’t open, anyway.”

His superintendent didn’t like his wit and his constables didn’t appreciate it: which was, if anything, worse.

“Then we’ll have to walk,” he said.

“Walk?”

“Walk, Crosby. Like you did in the happy days of yore before they put you in the C.I.D. In fact, you can count yourself lucky you don’t have to take your shoes off.”

Crosby looked down at his regulation issues.

“Barefoot,” amplified Sloan.

Crosby’s brow cleared. “Like that chap in history who had to walk through the snow?”

“Henry Four.”

“He’d upset somebody, hadn’t he?”

“The Pope.”

Crosby grinned at last. “I get you, sir. Pilgrimage or something, wasn’t it?”

“Penance, actually.”

Crosby didn’t seem interested in the difference, and they plodded up the drive together between banks of rhododendrons. It wasn’t wet, but an unpleasant early morning dampness dripped from the dank leaves. Nothing grew under the bushes. The drive twisted and turned, and at first they could see nothing but the bushes and trees.

Sloan glanced about him professionally. “Pretty well cared for really. Verges neat. No weeds. That box hedge over there was clipped properly.”

“Slave labour,” said Crosby, crunching along the drive beside him. “Don’t these women have to do as they’re told? Vow of obedience or something?” He kicked at a stone, sending it expertly between two bushes. “Anyone can get their gardening done that way.”

“Anyone can tell you’re still single, Crosby. Let me tell you that a vow of obedience won’t get your gardening done for you. My wife promised to obey—got the vicar to leave it in the marriage service on purpose —but it doesn’t signify. And,” he added dispassionately, “if you think that shot would have got past the Calleford goalkeeper next Saturday afternoon, you’re mistaken. He’s got feet.”

They rounded a bend and the Convent came into view, the drive opening out as they approached, finishing in a broad sweep in front of an imposing porch.,

“Cor,” said Crosby expressively.

“Nice, isn’t it?” agreed Inspector Sloan. “Almost a young stately home, you might say. The Faine family used to live here and then one of them—the grandfather I suppose he would be—took to horses or it may have been cards. Something expensive anyway and they had to sell out.” Sloan was a Calleshire man, born and bred. “The family’s still around somewhere.”

There were wide shallow steps in front of the porch, flanked by a pair of stone lions. And a large crest over the door.

Crosby spelled out the letters: “ ‘Pax Intrantibus, Salus Exeuntibus’—that’ll be the family motto, I suppose.”

“More likely to be the good Sisters’, Crosby. Pax means peace, and I don’t think the Faines were a particularly peaceful lot in the old days.”

“Yes, sir, but what about the rest of it?”

He wasn’t catching Sloan out that easily.

“Look it up, constable,” he said unfairly, “then you’ll remember it better, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sloan climbed the last step and advanced to the door.

“Sir…”

“Yes, Crosby?”

“Er, what gives?”

“Didn’t you get the message?” Sloan pressed the bell. “Something nasty has happened to a nun.”

Unexpectedly a little light flashed on at the side of the door. Crosby peered forward and read aloud the notice underneath it: “ ‘Open the door and enter the hall.’ ”

“Advance and be recognised,” interpreted Sloan, who had done his time in the Army.

They pushed open the outer door and stood inside a brightly-lit vestibule. The next pair of doors was of glass. There was another notice attached to these: “When the buzzer sounds push these doors.” Beyond them was a small hall, and at the other side of this was a screen stretching from floor to ceiling. In the centre of the screen was a grille.

Sloan was suddenly aware of a face looking at them through it. The two policemen were standing in the light, and beyond the grille was shadow, so they could see little of the face except that it was there—watching them. The scrutiny ended with a buzzer sounding loudly—and the lock on the glass door fell open.

Sloan pushed the doors and walked forward into the hall.

The face behind the grille retreated a fraction into the dark background and he saw it no better.

Sloan cleared his throat. “I am Detective-Inspector Sloan from Berebury C.I.D.”

“Yes?” The voice was uninviting.

“I understand that one of the nuns—”

“Sister Anne.”

Behind his right ear he heard Crosby struggling to strangle a snort at birth.

“Sister Anne,” continued Sloan hastily, “I am told has had… has unfortunately met with an…”

“She’s dead,” said the face.

“Just so,” said Sloan, who was finding it downright disconcerting talking to someone he could not see.

“She’s in the cellar,” volunteered the speaker.

“That’s what I had heard.”

The voice attached to the face was Irish and that was about all Sloan could tell.

“I think you had better see the Mother Superior,” she said.

“So do I,” said Sloan.

There was a faint click and a shutter came down over the grille. The two policemen waited.

There were two doors leading out of the hall but both were locked. Crosby turned his attention to the lock on the glass doors.

“Electricity, sir. That’s how it works.”

“I didn’t suppose it was magic,” said Sloan irritably. “Did you?”

This wasn’t the sort of delay he liked when there was a body about. Superintendent Leeyes wasn’t going to like it either. He would be sitting in his office, waiting—and wondering why he hadn’t heard from them already.

They went on waiting. The hall was quite silent. There were two chairs there and, on one wall, a little plaster Madonna with a red lamp burning before it. Nothing else. Crosby finished his prowling and came back to stand restively beside Sloan.

“At this rate, sir, it doesn’t look as if they’re going to let the dog get a look at the rabbit at all…”

There was the mildest of deprecating coughs behind his right ear and Crosby spun round. Somewhere, somehow, a door must have opened and two nuns come through it, but neither policeman had heard it happen.

“Forgive us, gentlemen, if we startled you…”

Sloan had an impression of immense authority— something rare in a woman—and the calm that went with it. She was standing quite still, dignity incarnate, her hands folded loosely together in front of her black habit, her expression perfectly composed.

“Not at all,” he said, discomfited.

“I am the Mother Superior…”

“How do you do…” The conventional police “madam” hung unspoken, inappropriate, in the air. Sloan’s own mother was a vigorous woman in her early seventies. He struggled to use the word and failed.

“… Marm,” he finished, inspired.

“And this is Sister Mary St. Lucy.”

That was easier. He could call the whole world “Sister.”

“Sister Lucy is our Bursar and Procuratrix…”

Sloan saw Crosby’s startled glance and shot him a look calculated to wither him into silence.

The Mother Superior glanced briefly round the hall. “I am sorry that Sister Porteress kept you waiting here. She should have shown you to the Parlour.” She smiled faintly. “She interprets her watchdog duties very seriously. Besides which…” again the faint smile “… she has a rooted objection to policemen.”

It was Sloan’s experience that a lot of people had, but that they didn’t usually say so straight out.

“Not shared, I hope, marm, by all your Sisters——-”

“I couldn’t tell you, Inspector,” she said simply. “This is the first time one has ever crossed our threshold.” She turned to one of the doors. “I therefore know very little about your routine but I dare say you would like to see Sister Anne…”

“Not half,” whispered Crosby to her back.

“And Sister Peter, too, though I fear she won’t be of much immediate help to you. She’s quite overcome, so I’ve sent her to the kitchen. They’re always glad of an extra pair of hands there at this time of the day. This way, please.”

She led them through the nearer of the two doors into what had been the original entrance hall of the old house. It was two storeys high, with a short landing across one end. A pair of double doors led through into the chapel at the other end, but the centre of attraction was the great carved black oak staircase. Its only carpet was polish, and it descended in a series of stately treads from the balustraded gallery at the top to a magnificent newel post at the bottom, elaborately carved, with an orb sitting on the top.

The Mother Superior did not spare it a glance but, closely followed by Sister Lucy, led them off behind the staircase through a dim corridor smelling of beeswax. Sloan followed, guided as much by the sound of the long rosaries which hung from their waists as by sight. Once they passed another nun coming the opposite way. Sloan tried to get a good look at her face, but when she saw the Reverend Mother and her party, she drew quietly to one side and stood, eyes cast down, until they had all passed. Then they heard the slight clink of her rosary as she walked on.

“Inspector,” Crosby hissed in his ear, “they’re all wearing wedding rings.”

“Brides of Christ,” Sloan hissed back.

“What’s that?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

The Reverend Mother had halted in front of one of the several doors leading off the corridor.

“This is the way to the cellar, Inspector. Sister Anne, God rest her soul, is at the foot of the steps.”

So she was.

Sister Lucy opened the door and Sloan saw a figure lying on the floor. Two nuns were kneeling beside it in an attitude of prayer. He went down the steps carefully. They were steep, and the lighting was not of the brightest.

When they saw the new arrivals, the two nuns who had been keeping vigil by the body rose quietly and melted into the background.

The body of the nun was spread-eagled on the stone floor, face downwards, her habit caught up, her veil knocked askew. The white bloodless hands were all he could see of death at first. There was a plain broad silver ring on the third finger of this left hand too.

The Reverend Mother and Sister Lucy crossed themselves and then drew back a little, watching him.

He couldn’t tell in the bad light where the blood on her black habit began and ended, but there was no doubt from where it had eome. The back of her head. Even in this light he could see there was something wrong with its shape. There was a hollow where no hollow should be.

He knelt beside her and bent to see her face. There was blood there, too, but he couldn’t see any…

“We would have liked to have moved her,” said the Reverend Mother, “or at least have covered her up, but Dr. Carret said on no account to touch anything until you came.”

“Quite right,” he said absently. “Crosby, have you a torch there?”

He shone it on the dead Sister’s face. Blood from the back of her skull had trickled forward round the sides of the white linen cloth she wore under her cowl and round her head and cheeks. There was a word for it that he had heard somewhere once… w… w… wimple… that was it. Well, her wimple had held a lot of the blood back, but quite a bit had got through to run down her face and then—surely—to drip on the floor. Only that was the funny thing. It hadn’t reached the floor. He swept the beam from the torch on it again. There was no blood on the floor. That on the face was congealed and dry, but there was enough of it for some to have dripped down on the floor.

And it hadn’t.

“So, of course, we didn’t touch anything until you saw her.” The quiet voice of the Reverend Mother obtruded into his thoughts. “But now that you have seen her, will it be all right for us to…”

“No,” said Sloan heavily. “It won’t be all right for you to do anything at all.” He got to his feet again. “I want a police photographer down here first, and any moving that’s to be done will be done by the police surgeon’s men.”

“Perhaps then Sister Lucy might just have her keys back. Inspector?”

“Keys?”

Sister Lucy flushed. “I lent them to poor Sister Anne late yesterday afternoon. She was going to go through our store cupboards to make up some parcels for Christmas. We have Sisters in the mission field, you know, and they are very glad of things for their people at this time. She did it every year.” She hesitated. “You can just see the edges of them under her habit there…”

“No.”

“You must forgive us,” interposed the Mother Superior gently. “We are sometimes a little out of touch here with civil procedure, and we have never had a fatal accident here before. We have no wish to transgress any law.”

He stared at her. “It isn’t a question of the infringement of any rule, marm. It is simply that I am not satisfied that I know exactly how Sister Anne died. Moreover, you also have a nun here with blood on her hands which you say she is unable to explain…”

“Just,” apologetically, “on one thumb.”

“And,” continued Sloan majestically, “you want me to allow you to move a body and remove from it evidence which may or may not be material. No, marm, I’m afraid the keys will have to wait until the police surgeon has been. Have you a telephone here?”

The Mother Superior smiled her faint smile. “In that sense at least, Inspector, we are in touch with the world.”

3

« ^ »

Wait a minute, wait a minute,” grumbled Sister Polycarp. “I’m coming as fast as I can.” She stumped towards the front door. “Ringing the bell like that! It’s enough to waken the dead.” She stopped abruptly. “No, it’s not, you know. It won’t wake poor Sister Anne, not now.” She drew the grille back. “Oh, it’s you, Father. Come in. They’re waiting for you in the Parlour. It’s about poor Sister Anne. She, poor soul, has gone to her reward and we’ve got the police here.”

“A nice juxtaposition of clauses,” said Father MacAuley.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, Sister, nothing.” Father MacAuley stepped inside. “Just an observation…”

“Oh, I see. I should have kept them out myself, but Mother said that wouldn’t help. Can’t abide the police.”

“You’re prejudiced, Polycarp. Nobody worries about the Troubles any more. You won’t believe this but the Irish Question is no longer a burning matter of moment. You’re out of touch.”

Sister Polycarp sniffed again. “That’s as may be. You’re too young to remember, Father. But I never thought to have the police trampling about again, that I can tell you. Arrest poor Sister Peter, that’s what they’ll do.”

“Will they indeed?” Father MacAuley looked thoughtfully at the nun. “That’s the little one that squeaks when you speak to her, isn’t it? Now why should they arrest her?”

“Oh, you know what they’re like. She’s got some blood on her hand and she doesn’t know how it got there.”

“Tiresome,” agreed Father MacAuley.

“Otherwise it would have been a straightforward fall down the cellar steps and that would have been an end to it. Unfortunate of course”—Sister Polycarp recollected that not only was she speaking about the dead, but the newly dead, and crossed herself—“but we could have sent the police packing. As it is they look like being underfoot for a long time.”

“Do they now?” Father MacAuley took off his coat. “In that case…”

“It wouldn’t matter so much,” burst out Sister Polycarp, “if everyone didn’t know.”

Father MacAuley wagged a reproving finger. “Polycarp, I do believe that you’re worried about what the neighbours will think.”

She bridled. “It’s not very nice, now, is it, for people to be seeing the police at a Convent?”

Where a lesser woman might have bustled into the Parlour, the Reverend Mother contrived to arrive there ahead of her own habit, rosary and rather breathless attendant Sister Lucy.

“Father—thank you for coming so quickly. Poor Sister Anne’s lying dead at the bottom of the cellar steps and we do seem to be in a rather delicate position…”

“Sister Peter want bailing out?”

“Not yet, thank you. No, I fancy it’s not the presence of blood on the Gradual so much as the absence of blood elsewhere that’s going to be the trouble. Don’t you agree, Sister?”

Sister Lucy nodded intelligently. “Yes, Mother.”

Father MacAuley sat down. “Sister Anne, now she was the one with the glasses, wasn’t she?”

“That’s right,” agreed Sister Lucy. “She couldn’t see without them. Missions were her great interest, you know.”

He frowned. “Fairly tall?”

“About my height, I suppose,” said Sister Lucy.

“But older?”

“That’s right. She was professed before I joined the Order. Perhaps Mother can tell you when that would have been…”

“No, no, I can’t off-hand. But I do know how she would have hated having been the cause of all this trouble. She wasn’t a fusser, you know. In fact,” she paused, “she wasn’t the sort of Sister whom anything happened to at all.”

“Until now,” pointed out Father MacAuley.

“Until now,” agreed the Mother Superior sombrely.

There was a light tap on the Parlour door. Sister Lucy opened it to a very young nun.

“Please, Mother, Sister Cellarer says if she can’t get into any of the store cupboards we’ll have to have parkin for afters because she made that yesterday.”

“Thank you, Sister, and say to Sister Cellarer that that will be very nice, thank you.” The door shut after the nun and the Reverend Mother turned to Sister Lucy. “What is parkin?”

“A North Country gingerbread dish, Mother.”

“Eaten especially on Guy Fawkes’ Night,” added MacAuley. “A clear instance, if I may say so, of tradition overtaking theology.”

“It often does,” observed the Mother Prioress placidly, “but this is not the moment to go into that with a cook who can’t get to her food cupboards.” She told him about the keys. “However, Inspector Sloan is telephoning his headquarters now. Perhaps after that we shall be allowed to have them back.”

The Convent keys did not, in fact, figure in the conversation Inspector Sloan had with his superior.

“Speak up, Sloan, I can’t hear you.”

“Sorry, sir, I’m speaking from the Convent. The telephone here is a bit public.”

There was a grunt at the other end of the line. “Like that, is it? Devil of a long time you’ve been coming through. What happened?”

“This nun is dead all right. Has been for quite a few hours, I should say. The body’s cold, though the cellar’s pretty perishing anyway and that may not be much to go on. I’d like a few photographs and Dr. Dabbe, too…”

“The whole box of tricks?”

“Yes, please, sir—she’s lying at the foot of a flight of stairs with a nasty hole in the back of her head.”

“All right, Sloan, I’ll buy it. Did she fall or was she pushed?”

“That’s the interesting thing, Superintendent. I don’t think it was either.”

“Not like the moon and green cheese?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Either it is made of green cheese or it isn’t.”

“N—no, sir, I don’t think so.”

“If it’s not one of the two possible alternatives then it must be the other, always provided, of course, that…”

Sloan sighed. Superintendent Leeyes had started going to an Adult Education Class on Logic this autumn and it was playing havoc with his powers of reasoning.

“I’ve left Crosby down in the cellar with the body, sir, until Dr. Dabbe gets here.”

“All right, Sloan, I know when I’m being deflected. But remember—failure to carry a line of thought through to its logical conclusion means confusion.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, what was this woman called?”

“Sister Anne,” said Sloan cautiously.

“Ha!” The superintendent ran true to form. “Perhaps she didn’t see anyone coming, eh?”

“No, sir.”

“And her real name?”

“I don’t know yet. The Reverend Mother has gone to look it up.”

“Right. Keep me informed. By the way, Sloan, who found her in the cellar?”

“I was afraid you were going to ask me that, sir.”

“Why?”

“You’re not going to like it, sir.”

“No?”

“No, sir.” Unhappily. “It was Sister St. Bernard.”

The telephone gave an angry snarl. “I don’t like it, Sloan. If I find you’ve been taking the micky, there’s going to be trouble, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Sloan…”

“Sir?”

“If you expect that to go in the official report, you had better bring that little barrel of brandy back with you.”

Sloan waited for Dr. Dabbe at the top of the cellar steps and wished on the whole that he was back at the girls’ boarding school. He could understand their rules. Not long afterwards the police surgeon appeared in the dim corridor, ushered along by a new Sister.

“Morning, Sloan. Something for me, I understand, in the cellar.”

“A nun, doctor. At the bottom of this flight of stairs.”

“Aha,” said Dr. Dabbe alertly. “And she hasn’t been moved?”

“Not by us,” said Sloan.

“Like that, is it? Right.”

Sloan opened the door inwards, disclosing a scene that, but for the stolid Crosby, could have come—almost—from an artist’s illustration for an historical novel. The two attendant Sisters were still there, kneeling, and the dead Sister lying on the floor. The solitary, unshaded electric light reflected their shadows grotesquely against the whitewashed walls.

“Quite medieval,” observed Dabbe. “Shall we look at the steps as we go down?”

“There’s not a lot to see,” said Sloan. “Several of the nuns and the local G.P., Dr. Carret, went up and down before we got here, but there is one mark at the side of the seventh step that could be from her foot, and there is some dust on the right shoe that could be from the step. On the top of the shoe.”

“Just so,” agreed Dabbe, following the direction of the beam from Sloan’s torch. “Steps dusted recently but not very recently.”

The Sister with them coughed. “Probably about once a week, doctor.”

“Thank you.” He glanced from the step to the body. “Head first, Sloan, would you say?”

“Perhaps.”

“I see.” The pathologist reached the bottom step, nodded to Crosby, bowed gravely in the direction of the two kneeling nuns and turned his attention to the body. He looked at it for a long time from several angles and then said conversationally, “Interesting.”

“Yes,” said Sloan.

“Plenty of blood.”

“Yes.”

“Except in the one place where you’d expect it.”

Sloan nodded obliquely. “The photograph boys are on their way.”

“I know,” Dabbe said blandly. “I overtook them.” The pathologist was reckoned to be the fastest driver in Calleshire. “Notwithstanding any pretty pictures they may take, you can take it from me that whatever this woman died from, she didn’t die in the spot where she is now lying.”

“That,” said Sloan, “is what I thought.”

If anything Sloan appeared relieved to see another man in the Parlour.

“Our priest, Inspector—Father Benedict MacAuley.” The Reverend Mother’s rosary clinked as she moved forward. “I asked him to come here as I felt in need of some assistance in dealing with—er—external matters. Do you mind if he is present?”

“Not at all, marm. I have left the police surgeon in the cellar. In the meantime, perhaps you would tell us a little about the… Sister Anne.”

Sloan wouldn’t have chosen the Convent Parlour for an interview with anyone. It was the reverse of cosy. The Reverend Mother and Sister Lucy disposed themselves on hard, stiff-backed chairs and offered two others to the two policemen. Father MacAuley was settled in the only one that looked remotely comfortable. Sloan noticed that it was the policemen who were in the light, the Reverend Mother who was in the shadow, from the window. Vague thoughts about the Inquisition flitted through his mind and were gone again. The room was bare, as the entrance hall had been bare, the floor of highly polished wood. In most rooms there was enough to give a good policeman an idea of the type of person he was interviewing—age, sex, standards, status. Here there was nothing at all. The over-riding impression was still beeswax.

The Reverend Mother folded her hands together in her lap and said quietly, “The name of Sister Anne was Josephine Mary Cartwright. That is all that I can tell you about her life before she came to the Convent. We have a Mother House, you understand, in London, and our records are kept there. I would have to telephone there, for her last address and date of profession. I’m sorry—that seems very little…”

Sister Lucy lifted her head slightly and said to the Reverend Mother: “She was English.”

“As opposed to what?” asked Sloan quickly.

“Irish or French.”

“Frequently opposed to both,” said the Reverend Mother unexpectedly. “When all else is submerged, that sort of nationality remains. It is a curious feature of Convent life.”

“Indeed? Now we had a message this morning…”

“That would be from Dr. Carret. He is so kind to us always. We sent for him at once.”

“When would that have been, marm?”

“After Office this morning. We didn’t know about last night.”

“What about last night?”

“That she might have been lying there since then.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Dr. Carret, Inspector. He said that was what had probably happened.”

“I see. But you didn’t miss her?”

“Not until this morning.”

“When?”

“The Caller, Sister Gertrude, found her cell empty this morning. She thought first of all that she had merely risen early, but as she was not at breakfast either she mentioned it to the Infirmarium.”

“Then what happened?”

“After Office the Sister Infirmarium went to her cell to see if she was unwell.”

“And?”

“She reported to me that her cell was empty.”

“Had her bed been slept in?”

“I do not think Sister Infirmarium would have been in a position to know that. All the beds are made by the Sisters themselves…”

“It might have been warm.” Sloan shifted his weight on the hard chair. “You can usually tell with your hand even if the bed has been aired—especially in winter.”

The Mother Superior’s manner stiffened perceptibly. “I do not suppose such a procedure occurred to Sister Infirmarium.”

“Of course not,” appeased Sloan hastily. Did he imagine the priest’s sympathetic glance? For all he knew “bed” might be a taboo word in this Convent— in any Convent. Probably was. He took refuge in a formula. “I should like to see Sister Inf… Infirmarium presently. And this Sister Peter.”

“Ah, yes, Sister Peter.” The Reverend Mother’s eyes rested reflectively on the inspector. “The blood seems to have appeared on her thumb before Mass, and some of it was transferred to the Gradual during the service…”

“You left it?” interrupted Sloan.

“Yes, Inspector,” she said gently, “we left it for you.”

“What did you do when you were told about the blood and that Sister Anne was missing?”

“I asked Sister Lucy here to help look for her.”

“Just Sister Lucy?”

“At first. A Convent is a busy place, Inspector.”

“Yes, marm, I’m sure”—untruthfully.

“When their search failed to reveal her in any of the places where she might have been expected to have been taken ill, I asked other Sisters to go over the house and grounds very carefully.”

“I see.”

“This is a big house and it took some time, but, as you know, Sister St. Bernard opened the cellar door and put the light on… you will want to see her, too, I take it?”

“Yes, please, marm.”

“We telephoned Dr. Carret and he came at once. It was he who was so insistent on our leaving her lying on that cold floor.”

“Very right, marm.” He answered the unspoken reproach as best he could. “I’m afraid this will be a police matter until we find out exactly what happened. Tell me, marm, at what time would everyone have gone to bed last night?”

At the boarding school it had been “lights out.”

“Nine o’clock.”

“And after that no one would have gone into anyone else’s bedroom…”

“No one is allowed in anyone else’s cell at any time except the Caller, who is Sister Gertrude, the Infirmarium and myself.”

“I see. Presumably no one checks that the Sisters are in their cells?”

“No.”

This was not, after all, a boarding school.

“I am seeking, marm, to establish when Sister Anne was last seen alive.”

“At Vespers at half past eight.”

“By whom?”

“Sister Michael and Sister Damien. Their stalls are on either side of Sister Anne’s.”

“And you can tell me of nothing that might have caused Sister Anne to leave her cell last night?”

“Nothing. In fact, it is forbidden.”

That, decided Sloan, settled that. For the time being.

“I see, marm, thank you.” He stood up. “Now, if you would be so kind as to get in touch with your—er —head office…”

“Inspector…”

“Yes, marm?” Sloan was ready with a handful of routine phrases about inquests, post-mortems and the like.

The Mother Prioress’s rosary clinked. “It is one of the privileges of Convent life that strangers do not perform the Last Office. We always do that for our own Sisters ourselves.”

It was something that he had never considered.

4

« ^ »

The cellar was quite crowded by the time Sloan and Crosby got back there. Two police photographers had joined the unmerry throng and were heaving heavy cameras about. Dr. Dabbe was still contemplating the body from all angles. The two Sisters were still praying —and the photographers didn’t like it.

“Hey, Inspector,” whispered one of them. “Call your dogs off, can’t you? Giving us the creeps kneeling there. And getting in the way. I want some pictures from over that side but I’m blowed if I’m going on my knees beside them.”

“It might give them the wrong idea, Dyson,” agreed Sloan softly. “They don’t know you as well as I do.” He glanced across the cellar. “They’re not upsetting the doctor.”

“He’s a born exhibitionist. All pathologists are and nothing upsets him. Nothing at all. I sometimes wonder if he’s human.” Dyson screwed a new flash bulb into its socket. “Besides, I don’t want those two figuring in any pix I do take. Or I’ll be spending the rest of my life explaining that they’re not ravens from the Tower of London or the Ku Klux Klan or something.”

“Too much imagination, Dyson, that’s your trouble.”

Nevertheless, he went back upstairs and found Sister Lucy.

“Certainly, Inspector,” she said, when he explained. “I will ask the Sisters to continue their prayers and vigil in the Chapel.”

Sloan murmured that that would do very nicely, thank you.

At a word from her the two Sisters in the cellar rose from their knees in one economical movement, crossed themselves and withdrew.

“That’s better,” said Dyson, changing plates rapidly. “It’s our artistic temperaments, you know, Inspector. Very sensitive to atmosphere.”

“Get on with it,” growled Sloan.

Dyson jerked a finger at his assistant and crouched on his knees in a manner surprisingly reminiscent of that of the two nuns. Instead of having his hands clasped in front of him they held a heavy camera. He pressed a button and, for a moment, the whole cellar became illumined in a harsh, bright light.

A moment later the pathologist came up to him.

“I don’t know about Mr. Fox over there,” said Dr. Dabbe, “but I’ve finished down here for the time being. I’ve got the temperature readings—did you notice she was in a draught, by the way?—and all I need about the position of the body. It’s cold down here but not damp. At the moment I can’t tell you much more than Carret—a good chap, incidentally—that she died yesterday evening sometime. The body is quite cold. You’ll have to wait for more exact details—which is a pity because I dare say it’s important…”

“Yes,” said Sloan.

“I’ll be as quick as I can.” He paused. “From what I can see from here there’s a fair bit of post-mortem injury—I think she was dead before she was put in this cellar and then damaged by the fall and so forth.”

“Nice,” said Sloan shortly.

“Very,” agreed the pathologist. “Especially here.”

“Cause of death?”

“Depressed fracture of skull.”

“Can I quote you?”

“Lord, yes. I don’t need her on the table for that. You can see it from here. That’s not to say she hasn’t other injuries as well, but that’ll do for a start, won’t it?”

Sloan nodded gloomily.

Dabbe picked up his hat. “I’ve got a sample of the dust from that step and the shoe—I can tell you a bit more about that later. And the time of death…”

The quiet of the cellar was shattered suddenly by a bell ringing. No sooner had it stopped than they could hear the reverberations of many feet moving about above them.

“In some ways,” observed Sloan sententiously, “this place has much in common with a girls’ boarding school.”

“You don’t say?” Dabbe cast a long, raking glance over the body on the floor. “Of course, I don’t get about as much as you chaps… What’s the bell for? Physical jerks?”

“Meditation.”

“They could start on one or two little matters down here. I shall give my attention to a thumb print on a manuscript, and I’ll get my chap to begin on the blood grouping.”

Sloan saw him out and then came back to the cellar. “Dyson…”

“Inspector?”

“The name of your assistant?”

“Williams.”

“I thought so. Who is Mr. Fox?”

Dyson hitched his camera over his shoulder and prepared to depart. “One of the inventors of photography, blast him.”

The cellar door banged behind the two photographers, leaving Sloan and Crosby alone with Sister Anne at last.

“Now, then, Crosby, where are we?”

Crosby pulled out his notebook. “We have one female body—of a nun—said to be Sister Anne alias Josephine…”

“Not alias, Crosby.”

“Maiden name of—no, that doesn’t sound right either. They’re all maidens, aren’t they?”

“So I understand.”

“Well, then…”

“Secular.”

“Oh, really? Secular name of Josephine Mary Cartwright. Medium to tall in height, age uncertain…”

“Unknown.”

“Unknown, suffering from a fractured skull…”

“At least…”

“At least—sustained we know not how but somewhere else.”

“Not well put but I am with you.”

“As I see it, sir, that’s the lot.”

“See again, Crosby, because it isn’t.”

“No?” Crosby looked injured.

“No,” said Sloan.

They waited in the cellar until two men appeared with a stretcher and then gave them a hand with the ticklish job of getting their burden up the stairs. Then…

“Inspector, I’ve been thinking…”

“Good. I thought you would get there in the end.”

“If that was the top of her shoe that hit the seventh step, then she didn’t even die somewhere else in the cellar.”

“Granted.”

“Someone threw her down those steps after she was dead?”

“That’s what Dr. Dabbe thinks.”

“That’s a nasty way to carry on in a Convent.”

“Barbarous,” agreed Sloan, and waited.

Crosby, untrammelled by classes on Logic, should be able to get further than that on his own.

“The fall didn’t kill her?” he suggested tentatively.

“Not this fall anyway.” He looked at the steep stairs. “A weapon more like.”

“A weapon seems sort of out of place here.”

“So does a body in a cellar,” said Sloan crisply. “Especially one that didn’t die there.”

Crosby took that point too. “You mean,” he said slowly, “that they parked her somewhere else before they chucked her down?”

“I do. For how long?”

He was quicker this time. “For long enough for the blood on her head to dry because it didn’t drip on the floor?”

“You’re doing nicely, Crosby.”

Crosby grinned. “So we look for somewhere where someone stashed away a bleeding nun and/or whatever it was they hit her with?”

“If we have to tear the place apart,” agreed Sloan gravely.

In the event they didn’t.

Prowling about in the dim corridor at the top of the cellar steps was Father MacAuley. He was on his hands and knees when Sloan almost fell over him.

“Ah, Inspector,” he said unnecessarily, “there you are.”

“Yes, sir, and there you are, too, so to speak.” He regarded the kneeling figure expressionlessly. “If it will save you any trouble, sir, I have already ascertained that this corridor was swept and polished early this morning.”

“Really?” He got to his feet. “Good. Then we can get on with the next thing, can’t we?”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Finding where they left her until they pushed her down the steps, of course. It must be off this corridor somewhere.”

“Why is that, sir?”

“Too risky to drag a body across that enormous hall, don’t you think? Someone might have come out of the Chapel at any moment and there’s that gallery at the top of the stairs. Anyone might be watching from there. No, I think she was—er—done to death round about here, or perhaps through in the kitchens somewhere.”

“We’ll see, sir, shall we?”

Sloan opened the nearest door, but the priest shook his head.

“No, Inspector, it won’t be there. That’s the—er— necessarium. It’s hardly big enough. Besides, the door only locks on the inside and there would always be the risk of someone wanting to use it, wouldn’t there?”

The second and third doors revealed a small library, and a garden room with outside glass door, sink and vases.

They found what they were looking for behind the fourth door. It opened on to a large broom cupboard. Crosby’s torch played over the brown stain on the bare boards of the cupboard’s floor.

MacAuley peered inquisitively over their shoulders. “Someone kept their head—looks as if she was put in here head first so that the blood was as far away from the door as possible.”

Crosby shifted the angle of the torch’s beam and said, “Those nuns have been in here this morning for these brooms, I’ll be bound.”

Sloan sniffed the polish in the air. “I dare say. They wouldn’t have noticed this blood though, not without a light. We’ll see if the doctor has left.”

“Constable, if I might just borrow your torch…” MacAuley took it deftly from Crosby and began to cover the broom cupboard inch by inch in its beam.

Crosby stepped back into the corridor.

“Inspector…”

“Well?”

“What did whoever put her in here want to go and move her for?”

“Take a bit longer to find perhaps.”

“Would that matter?”

“I don’t know yet, but even the most absent-minded of this crew would have noticed her when they came to do the cleaning this morning.”

Sloan was keeping a close eye on Father Benedict MacAuley withal. “Besides, you do get a broken skull sometimes from falling down the cellar steps but very rarely from tripping over in a broom cupboard.”

“They hoped we would think she had fallen down those nasty steep stairs?”

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Most people expect the police to jump to the wrong conclusions. And if you never do, Crosby, you will end up…” He paused. Father MacAuley was backing out of the cupboard.

“Where, Inspector?” Crosby was ambitious.

Sloan looked at him. “Exactly where you are now— as a Detective-Constable with the Berebury C.I.D.— because you wouldn’t be human enough for promotion. Well, Father MacAuley, have you found what you were looking for?”

“No, I can’t think what has happened to them.”

“Happened to what?” asked Sloan patiently. “Sister Anne’s glasses. She couldn’t see without them, and yet they’re nowhere to be found.”

5

« ^ »

Considering how little of the flesh of a nun could be seen, Sloan marvelled how much he was aware of the differing personalities of the Mother Prioress and Sister Lucy. In both cases good bone structure stood out beneath the tight white band across the forehead.. There was self-control, too, in the line of both mouths’ and, in Sister Lucy’s case, more than a little beauty still. She must have been very good-looking indeed once, and that not so very long ago.

He opened his notebook. “Now, marm, with regard to comings and goings, so to speak—exactly how private are you here?”

That would be the first thing Superintendent Leeyes would want to know—an “inside” job or an “outside” one. On this hung a great many things.

“We are not a strictly enclosed Order, Inspector. Sisters are allowed to leave the Convent for works of necessity and mercy, and so forth. They have interviews here in the Parlour unless it is a Clothing, when they come into the Chapel. Our Chapel was originally the Faine private one, and Mrs. Faine and her daughter still attend services here, as do others in Cullingoak.” She smiled gently. “We are, in fact, to have a rather special service here next month. Miss Faine is to be married to Mr. Ranby, the Institute’s Principal, and the Bishop has given his consent to our Chapel being used—as it would have been had the Faines still lived here.”

“How do they get in?” enquired Sloan with interest.

“There is a door leading outside from the Chapel. Sister Polycarp unlocks it before the service.”

“Tradesmen?”

“We have everything delivered. Sister Cellarer deals with them at the back door, and Sister Lucy here pays them.”

“No one else?”

“Just Hobbett—he’s our handyman. There are some tasks—just one or two, you understand—which are beyond our capacities.”

Sloan nodded. “This Hobbett—does he have to run the gauntlet every day?”

“Past Sister Polycarp? No, his work is at the back. He has his own key to the boiler room and his own routine—dustbins, ladders, cleaning the upstairs outside windows and so forth. And the boiler for three-quarters of the time.”

“Three quarters?”

“Sister Ignatius is the only person who can persuade it to function at all when the wind is in the east. Her devotions are frequently interrupted.”

They found Hobbett in a small, not uncosy room at the foot of a short flight of outside stairs descending to cellar level not far from the kitchen door. It was lined with logs, and a litter of broken pieces of wood covered the floor. There was a chair with one arm broken and an old table. Hobbett was sitting at this having his midday break. There was a mug of steaming tea on the table. He was reading a popular daily newspaper with a tradition of the sensational.

“I am Inspector Sloan.”

The man took a noisy sip of tea and set the mug down carefully on the table. “Hobbett.”

He hadn’t shaved this morning.

“We are enquiring into the death of Sister Anne.”

Hobbett took another sip of tea. “I heard one of ’em had fallen down the cellar steps.” He jerked his head towards the door in the corner. “I don’t go through that far meself or happen I might ’ave found her for you.”

“How far do you go through?”

“Just to the boiler—got to keep that going—and the coke place with kindling and that. Mostly I work in the grounds.”

To Sloan he hadn’t the look of a man who worked anywhere.

“What were you doing yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” Hobbett looked surprised. “I’d ’ave to think.” He took a long pull at his tea. “I cleared out a drain first. The gutter from the Chapel roof was blocked with leaves and I had to get my ladders out. Long job, that was. I’d just finished when Sister Lucy sent for me to shift a window that’d got stuck.”

“Upstairs or down?”

“Up. I’d just put my ladders away, too. She wouldn’t have it left though. Said it was dangerous. One of ’em might have escaped through it, I suppose.” He sank the rest of his tea in one long swallow and licked his lips. “Not that there’s much for them to escape for, is there now?”

“This Sister Anne,” said Sloan sharply. “Did you see her often?”

“Wouldn’t know her if I did. Can’t tell some of them from which, if you get me. There’s about four of them that gives me orders. The rest don’t bother me much.”

“When did you leave last night?”

“Short of five somewhere. Can’t do much in the dark.”

“Nice type,” observed Crosby on their way back.

“And four doors,” said Sloan morosely, “and about thirty windows.”

Sister Gertrude was having a bad day. First, though no one had mentioned it, she was deeply conscious of her neglect in ignoring Sister Anne’s empty cell. And now she was troubled about something else. As a nervous postulant she had fondly imagined that there would be no worries in a Convent, that the way would be clear and that obedience to the Rule would make following that way, if not easy, then at least straightforward.

It seemed she was wrong—or was she?

No nun was meant to carry worries that properly belonged to the Reverend Mother. Her instructions were simple. The Reverend Mother was to be told of them and her ruling was absolute. Then the Sister concerned need worry no longer.

What they had omitted to pontificate on, thought Sister Gertrude, was at what point a worry became substantial enough for communicating to the Reverend Mother. What was bothering her was just an uneasy thought.

It had cropped up after luncheon. There was no proper recreation until the early evening, but after their meal there was a brief relaxation of the silence in which they worked. It lasted for about fifteen minutes until they resumed their duties for the afternoon. And the person who had been speaking to her in it was Sister Damien.

In the tradition of the Convent an empty place was left at the refectory table where Sister Anne had always sat, her napkin laid alongside it. It would be so for seven days and then the ranks of nuns would close up as if she had never been. And Sister Damien and Sister Michael who had sat for several years on either side of Sister Anne would now for the rest of their mortal lives sit next to each other instead at meals, in Chapel, and in everything else they did as a Community.

“I think we will have our cloister now,” Sister Damien had remarked as they tidied up the refectory together.

“Our cloister? Now?” Sister Gertrude stopped and looked at her. The Convent had always lacked a cloister but to build one as they would have liked by joining up two back wings of the house was well beyond their means. “We shall need one very badly if they build next door, but where will the money come from?”

Sister Damien assiduously chased a few wayward crumbs along one of the tables. “Sister Anne.”

“Sister Anne?”

Sister Damien pinned down another crumb with her thin hand. “She knew we wanted a cloister.”

“We all knew we wanted a cloister,” said Sister Gertrude with some asperity. “It’s very difficult in winter without one, but that doesn’t mean to say that…”

“Sister Anne was to come into some money and she’s left it to us.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me,” said Sister Damien simply. “She didn’t have a dowry but she knew she was going to have this money some day.”

Sister Gertrude pursed her lips. Money was never mentioned in the ownership sense in the Convent. In calculating wants and needs and ways and means, yes, but never relating to a particular Sister. And the size of a dowry was a matter between the Mother Superior and the Novice.

“So we’ll be able to have our cloister now and it won’t matter about the building,” went on Sister Damien, oblivious of the effect she was creating. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

Sister Gertrude busied herself straightening a chair. “Yes,” she said in as neutral a voice as she could manage. “Except for Sister Anne.”

Sister Damien wheeled round and caught her arm. “But she is in Heaven, Sister. You don’t regret that, do you?”

But Sister Gertrude did not know what it was she regretted, and at the first sound of the Convent bell she thankfully fled the refectory.

It was unfortunate for her peace of mind that the first person she bumped into was little Sister Peter. She was walking up the great staircase looking rather less cheerful than Mary Queen of Scots mounting the scaffold at Fotheringhay. She was holding her hand out in front of her with her thumb stuck out in odd disassociation from the rest of her body.

“Hasn’t the Inspector finished with your thumb, Sister?” Sister Gertrude asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said mournfully. “He’s fingerprinted my hand, and confirmed that the blood did get on the Gradual from my thumb.”

“Well, then,” said Sister Gertrude a little testily, “surely you can put it away now?”

Sister Peter regarded the offending member. “He doesn’t know how the blood got on it and neither do I. I’ve shown him everything I did this morning after you woke me—my own door, two flights of stairs to the long landing, the gallery, this staircase and straight into the Chapel. The Chapel door was open, Sister Polycarp does that. Sister Sacrist had got the Gradual ready like she always does. Besides everywhere’s been cleaned by now. I just don’t know…” This last was said tremolo.

“Neither do I,” said Sister Gertrude firmly. “But you’ve helped all you can…”

“I can’t think why anyone should want to harm poor Sister Anne.”

“Neither can I,” said Sister Gertrude somewhat less firmly. “It might have been an accident, you know…”

Sister Peter looked unconvinced and continued on her way.

“Now, Sister St. Bernard, I realise that this business must have given you an unpleasant shock, but I would like you to describe how you found Sister Anne.”

Sloan was back in the Parlour with Crosby in attendance facing the Reverend Mother with Sister Lucy at her side. Sister St. Bernard was standing between them. There would come a time when he would want to see a nun on her own but that time was not yet. Sister Lucy looked anxious and strained, but the Reverend Mother sat calm and dignified, an air of timelessness about her.

Sloan was being the perfect policeman talking to the nervous witness. There was no doubt that Sister St. Bernard was nervous. Her damp palms trembled slightly until she hit on the idea of clasping them together in front of her, but she could not keep a faint quaver out of her voice so easily.

“We were asked to help look for Sister Anne about an hour after Mass this morning in case she had been taken ill anywhere. Sister Lucy and the others were going through the upstairs rooms and Sister Perpetua and I were doing the downstairs ones…”

Sloan was prepared to bet that Sister Perpetua was as young as Sister St. Bernard and that no one had expected either of them to find the missing Sister.

“I don’t know what made me open the cellar door… I had been in all the rooms along that corridor and—”

“Was it closed?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Yes.”

“Was it locked?”

“No.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Oh, yes. It was because it was usually locked that I put the light on when I opened it. Otherwise I don’t think I would have seen Sister Anne.”

“The door is normally kept locked, Inspector,” explained the Reverend Mother in a very dry voice, “on account of the danger of falling down the steep steps in the dark.”

“I see, marm, thank you. Then what did you do, Sister?”

She had done very little, decided Sloan, except give the alarm and encourage the destruction of useful clues by opening and shutting the cellar door and fetching people who went up and down the steps.

And Sister Peter had been scarcely more helpful.

When she had gone the Reverend Mother beckoned Sister Lucy to her side. “What was that address?”

“Seventeen Strelitz Square, Mother.”

The Mother Prioress nodded. “Inspector, that was the address from which Sister Anne came to us.”

“It’s a very good one,” said Sloan involuntarily.

“She was a very good nun,” retorted the Reverend Mother dryly. “It was, of course, some time ago that she left home, but in the normal course of events I would telephone there to establish whether or not she still had relatives.”

Sloan took a quick look at his watch. “Perhaps I’ll telephone myself, marm.”

Standing in the dark corridor where the nuns kept their instrument he wondered if it wouldn’t have been wiser to go to London. When he was connected to 17 Strelitz Square he was sure.

“Mrs. Alfred Cartwright’s residence,” said a female voice.

“May I speak to Mrs. Cartwright, please?”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“The Convent of St. Anselm.” That would do to begin with.

“I will enquire if madam is at home.”

There was a pause. Sloan heard footsteps walking away. Parquet flooring. And then they came back.

“Madam,” said the female voice, “is Not At Home.”

“It’s about her daughter,” said Sloan easily. “I think if she knew that she—”

“Madam has no daughter,” said the voice and rang off.

Sloan went back to the Parlour. Only Crosby was there now.

“A bell rang, Inspector, and they both went—just like that. I didn’t know if you wanted me to stop them.”

“You? Stop them?” said Sloan unkindly. “You couldn’t do it. Now, listen…”

There was a knock on the Parlour door and Father MacAuley came in.

“Ah, Inspector, found the glasses?”

“Not yet, sir,” said Sloan shortly. It was bad enough investigating a death in the alien surroundings of a Convent without having a priest pattering along behind him. And MacAuley wasn’t the only one who wanted to know where Sister Anne’s glasses were. Superintendent Leeyes would be on to their absence in a flash, and a fat lot of good it would be explaining to him that he and Crosby had looked everywhere for them.

“Did you get anything out of Lady Macbeth?” asked the priest.

“We confirmed all of Sister Peter’s statements,” said Sloan stiffly.

“She’s walking up and down the corridor muttering ‘What! Will these hands ne’er be clean?’ ” He squinted at Sloan. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that little hand.”

“No, sir? The Mother Prioress tried an old Army remedy.”

“She did?”

“Spud bashing.”

“A fine leader of women, the Mother Prioress.” Father MacAuley grinned suddenly. “I hear that the chap across the way—Ranby at the Agricultural Institute—he’s gated his students for the evening. All to be in their own grounds by four o’clock this afternoon.”

“Can’t say I blame him for that,” said Sloan. “Last year they burnt down the bus shelter and there was hell to pay.”

“Nearly set the Post Office on fire, too,” contributed Crosby.

“Polycarp says all buildings burn well, but Government buildings burn better,” said the priest.

Sloan rose dismissively. “I don’t think Bonfire Night at the Agricultural Institute will concern us, sir.”

Wherein he was wrong.

6

« ^ »

It was still damp in the grounds, and for that Sloan was grateful. It meant that the footprints Crosby had found not far from the cellar door were perfectly preserved.

“Two sets, Inspector.” He straightened his back. They were in the shelter of one of the large rhododendron bushes. “One of them stood for a while in the same place. The earth’s quite soft here…” He slipped out a measure. “Men’s…”

“Perhaps.”

“It was a man’s shoe, sir…”

“But was there a man inside it? Don’t forget that this lot wear men’s shoes—every one of them.”

Crosby measured the depth. “If it was a woman, it was a heavy one.”

“Get a cast and we’ll know for certain.” He looked round. “It would be a good enough spot to watch the back of the place from.” From where he was standing he could see the kitchen door, the cellar steps, a splendid collection of dustbins and a small glass door which presumably led to the garden room. A broad path led round towards the front entrance of the house, and along this now was walking the Caller, Sister Gertrude.

“Inspector, Mother says will you come please? She’s had a letter.”

“It was handed to Sister Polycarp a few minutes ago,” said the Reverend Mother, “by one of the village children from a gentleman who is staying at The Bull. He says in his letter that he proposes to call at the Convent at four-thirty this afternoon in the hopes of being able to see Sister Anne.”

“Does he?” said Sloan with interest. “Who is he?”

The Mother Prioress handed over the letter. “It’s signed ‘Harold Cartwright.’ A relation, presumably.”

“Do you know him? Has he been here before?”

She shook her head. “No. I do not recollect Sister Anne having any visitors. Do you, Sister?”

Sister Lucy looked up. “Never, Mother.”

“Would she have seen this man in the ordinary way?”

“Not if she did not wish it, Inspector. Nor if I did not wish it. Sometimes visitors are no great help— especially to young postulants and novices, and are therefore not allowed.”

“He says here he hopes no objection will be raised to his visit, which is of considerable importance,” said Sloan, quoting the letter.

“To him,” said the Reverend Mother. “Visitors are rarely important to us. Nevertheless, I think in this instance that we had better ask Sister Polycarp to show him to the Parlour when he comes.”

He arrived promptly at four-thirty, a man aged about fifty-five in a dark grey suit. He was heavily built and going grey. He wasted no time in getting to the point.

“I am Harold Cartwright, the cousin of Sister Anne, and I would very much like to see her for a few moments…”

“I am afraid,” said the Reverend Mother, “that that will not be possible…”

“I know,” said the man quickly, “that she probably does not wish to see me or any of her family, but it is on a matter of some importance. That is why I have travelled down here in person rather than written to her…”

“When did you travel down here?” asked Sloan.

Cartwright turned. “Last night. I stayed at The Bull.”

“What time did you arrive?”

“Is that any concern of—”

“I am a police officer investigating a sudden death.”

“I see.” Again the man wasted no time in coming to the point. “I got to The Bull about seven-thirty, had a meal and a drink in the bar and went to bed.”

“Straight to bed?”

“No. If you’re interested I went for a quick walk round the village to get a breath of air before going to my room.”

“I see, sir, thank you.”

“Mr. Cartwright,” the Mother Prioress inclined her coif slightly, “how long is it since you last saw Sister Anne?”

“Almost twenty years. I went to another Convent to see her. Hersely, it was.”

“That would be so. We have a House there.”

“I went to ask if there was anything she wanted, anything we could do for her.” His mouth twisted. “She said she had everything and I came away again.”

“Mr. Cartwright, you must be prepared for a shock.”

He laughed shortly. “I know she’ll be a changed woman. No one’s the same after twenty years. I’m not the same man myself if it comes to that.”

The Mother Prioress lowered her head. “I have no doubt that great changes have been wrought by the passage of time in you both but that is not the point. I am sorry to have to tell you that the sudden death into which Inspector Sloan is enquiring is that of your cousin, Sister Anne.”

Harold Cartwright sat very still. “You mean Josephine’s dead?”

“Yes, Mr. Cartwright.”

“When?”

“She died last night.”

“Why the police?”

“She was found dead at the foot of a flight of steps.”

“An accident, surely?”

“We hope so.”

“It couldn’t be anything else here. I mean, not in a Convent.”

“I would like to think not,” agreed the Mother Prioress, “but that matter is not yet resolved.”

Cartwright turned to Sloan again. “Why might it not be an accident? Would anyone want to harm my cousin?”

“I don’t know, sir. I was hoping that you might be able to tell us.”

“Me? I haven’t had sight nor sound of her for twenty years.”

“You’re not her only relation?”

“No. Her father—my uncle—died years ago, but her mother’s still alive…”

“Mrs. Alfred Cartwright, 17 Strelitz Square?”

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“The Convent records,” said Sloan briefly.

“They didn’t get on.”

“I inferred that.”

“My aunt is a very strong-minded woman. She greatly resented my cousin taking her vows. I don’t think she has ever forgiven her.”

“I am sure she has been forgiven,” interposed the Reverend Mother.

“I beg your pardon?”

“By Sister Anne.”

“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, of course.” It didn’t seem as if Harold Cartwright had thought of this at all. He waved a hand vaguely. “Before she died, you mean…”

“Many years ago,” said the Mother Prioress firmly. “It would not be possible to live the life of a true religious and harbour that sort of unforgiveness.”

“No, no, I can see that.”

Sloan coughed. “Now, sir, perhaps you’ll tell us what it was that was so important that you had to see her about after all these years.”

But that was something Harold Cartwright obviously did not want to do. “What? Oh, yes, of course. What I’d come to see her about?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s not really relevant now she’s dead. Just a family matter, that’s all. Nothing that would concern anyone now, you understand.” He gave a quick smile. “Death cancels all that sort of thing, doesn’t it?”

“No,” said the Mother Prioress directly. “Not in my experience.”

“No? Perhaps not, but it does alter them, and it has altered all I had come to see her about.”

Sloan let it ride. This was only the beginning. “Will you be leaving Cullingoak tonight?” he asked him.

“No. Not now—I think I’d better stay on, don’t you?” He frowned. “Though there’s my aunt. Perhaps I ought to go back to tell her…”

“I’ll do that,” said Sloan suddenly.

Harold Cartwright said, “Thank you.” He looked back to the Mother Superior and said diffidently. “There’ll be a funeral, I take it—would I be allowed to come to that?”

She nodded briskly. “Of course, Mr. Cartwright. But first there is, I understand, to be a post-mortem…”

Cartwright looked quickly at the inspector.

“To establish the exact cause of death,” said Sloan.

It was dark when Sloan came out to Cullingoak for the second time that day. There were bonfires and fireworks all about as the police car slipped through the streets of Berebury and out into the open country towards Cullingoak.

“Get a move on, man,” he muttered irritably, as Crosby slowed down for a crossroads. He sat beside the constable, his shoulders hunched up, hands sunk deep into his pockets, thinking hard.

As they swept into Cullingoak High Street he heard the clang of a fire engine’s bell. He saw the engine careering along ahead of them, firemen pulling on their boots as they clung to the machine. It did a giant swerve and headed unerringly between the gates of the Agricultural Institute. Crosby followed suit and bumped up the drive after the fire engine.

The fire was over on their right, away from the Institute’s buildings. It was well alight, with flames leaping high into the air. Standing round it like a votive circle were the students. Their faces stood out in a white ring in the darkness, the dancing flames reflected in them.

Sloan burst from the car and ran over to the fire brigade.

“I want that fire out,” he shouted. “Quickly.”

“Blimey,” said a Leading Fireman. “It’s only a bonfire.”

“I know it is,” snapped Sloan, “but I want it out before the guy is burnt. This is a police matter, so look sharp. I want that guy in one piece whatever happens.”

“You’ll be lucky,” said the man over his shoulder, and was gone.

Round the other side of the fire boys were still feeding the flames, and Sloan shouted at them too.

The fire brigade were running their hoses towards the fire, lacing them in and out of the spectators. The boys divided their attention between them and the fire. The latter was of magnificent proportions now, the flames licking their way to the figure lashed to the top.

There was a sigh from the crowd as the first flame lapped round the feet of the guy.

“Hurry,” urged Sloan.

He squinted up through the smoke and blackness. Impossible to tell if the material was alight or not. A tongue of flame ran up behind it towards the head. Sloan very nearly plunged into the flames himself to rescue it.

Suddenly some boys on his left moved quickly to one side and he saw the hose leap into life.

The noise of the bonfire gave way to the noise of water hissing upon flame, and the delectable smell of bonfire was succeeded by an acrid mixture of smoke and steam. The flames fell back.

“Don’t hit the guy if you can help it,” said Sloan to the man struggling with the hose.

“You don’t half want a lot, guv’nor,” retorted the man,, continuing to play the hose where he wished. “If it falls, down in the middle of this you’ve had it. Besides, a drop of water won’t do it no harm, will it? I reckon she was pretty warm where she was.”

Minutes later the Leading Fireman came up to him with the guy lying in his arms.

“Daftest rescue job I’ve ever done, but here you are.”

Sloan found himself nursing the damp, faintly charred effigy of a nun. There was a pair of spectacles tied ridiculously across the mock face.

A man came up to him. “Inspector? I’m Marwin Ranby, the Principal of the Institute. I’m very sorry about all this. I feel I’m in some way to blame. You see, last year…”

“I know all about last year,” said Sloan grimly.

He had just seen a sight which made him feel very uneasy indeed: Harold Cartwright.

Marwin Ranby led the way into his study. He was hovering round the forty mark, Sloan decided, with a head of fair hair that made him seem younger than he probably was. The study was a pleasant room, with a fire burning at one end, a sofa and chairs round it. At the other end was a desk and bookshelves loaded with heavy agricultural tomes. Over the fireplace hung a Rowland Ward, and in one corner was a tray set with decanter and glasses.

Ranby waved Sloan to a chair and made for these.

“What will you have, Inspector? No? You don’t mind if I do, do you?” He groaned. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when Celia hears about this. Or the Mother Superior.”

Sloan laid his burden down on the sofa as tenderly as if she had been human. It wouldn’t do the chintz much good, but Ranby wasn’t in a position to complain.

“I blame myself,” went on the Principal. “I gated them, you know, because of last year. I hoped that way we could minimise any damage done. You’d have thought that bus shelter was an Ancient Monument the way the bus company carried on. And look what happens.” He stared at the guy and shuddered. “I’m to be married at the end of the month in the Convent Chapel by special permission of goodness knows who, and they go and burn a nun on Guy Fawkes’ Night. What will Celia—Miss Faine, you know—say? And what will the Mother Prioress think?”

He started to pace up and down. Sloan examined the guy closely. The habit was genuine and it was the same as that worn by the nuns next door. The face had been made out of an old stocking, stuffed, with a couple of black buttons sewn on for eyes and the glasses kept on over these with a piece of string tying the ends together at the back. The rest of the habit was spread over a tightly stuffed large sack. No attempt had been made to make feet, and the figure—squat and dumpy—had a distinct resemblance to that of Queen Victoria towards the end of her Sixty Glorious Years.

“I suppose I should have expected something like this,” said Ranby after a minute or two. “They are none of them old. Besides, they took the news of the gating too well.”

“When did you tell them, sir?”

“After supper on Sunday evening.” He laughed shortly. “Gave them a day or so to hatch something up. She smells a bit, doesn’t she?”

“The flames caught a little.”

“Inspector…”

“Sir?”

“Don’t think me inquisitive but how did you come to hear about this? You’re from Berebury, aren’t you?”

“That’s right, sir. Someone telephoned us.”

“The devil they did! Who on earth would do that? And why?”

“The caller didn’t leave his name, sir. Just said he thought we’d be interested.”

“But why? It’s not a crime, is it, to burn a guy? Or is it sedition? Or an anti-Popish Plot or something obscure like that?”

“No, sir, not that I know of.”

“Well, Inspector, while I don’t blame you for rescuing it, I’m not sure that it might not have been better from my point of view if it had been burnt to cinders. Then there would have been no chance of either the Big House or the Dower House seeing.” He finished his drink. “But they’d have heard in the end, I suppose.”

“Do you know which of your students would have been responsible for this—the idea, getting the habit and so forth?”

“No.” The Principal frowned. “We’ve got about a hundred and fifty men here with about a dozen natural leaders among them. They’re here for three years, but the freshmen have only been in residence a month, so I would say a second- or third-year man for sure. That’s a point. The habit… Don’t say they took that from the Convent!” He ran his hands through his hair. “I’d never live that down. But they couldn’t, Inspector. How would they get in or out?”

“I don’t know if the habit came from there or not, sir, but I will find out presently.”

“And I’ll find out the man responsible for the guy and take him round to the Convent in the morning to apologise. I think I’d better tell Miss Faine myself. She’s a very devout girl, you know.”

“She didn’t come round this evening?”

“No, thank God. No, she’s gone to London for the day to have a fitting for her dress.”

Sloan straightened up. “Thank you, sir, you’ve been most helpful. There’s just one thing. This ring-leader. I want to talk to him myself—before anyone on the staff, I mean. That’s important.”

“I’m a bit bewildered, Inspector, but if that’s how you want it, I’ll track him down and send him to you.”

“If you would. My constable’s already seeing how far he can get tonight.”

“Is he?” Marwin Ranby looked momentarily annoyed, and then smiled again. “Perhaps he’ll be successful, though I fear we both represent authority. But, Inspector, why this interest in a guy? It’s not usual for the police to—”

“Hadn’t you heard, sir? One of the Sisters at the Convent died last night from injuries that we can’t immediately account for.”

“No!” He looked down at the travesty on the sofa. “We are in trouble then. That makes this very much worse, doesn’t it?”

“More interesting, too, sir, wouldn’t you say? Now, if you would just hold the door open I’ll put her in the car.”

The Fire Brigade had gone now and a few boys were trying to coax the damp fire back into life. Crosby loomed up out of the near darkness and helped Sloan lay the guy on the back seat of the police car.

“Watch her carefully, Crosby.”

“Inspector Bring-’em-back-alive,” murmured Crosby, but fortunately Sloan was out of earshot. He was stumbling among the trees looking for Harold Cartwright. He found him at the far corner of the reviving fire and drew him to one side.

“There’s just one question I want to ask you, sir. Did you or did you not telephone us about this guy?”

“Me, Inspector? No. No, I heard about it in The Bull and came along to see what was going on. I would have rung you as soon as I saw the guy, of course, if I hadn’t heard the fire siren.”

“Of course.”

Cartwright gave him a tight smile. “I’m glad to see the Lady’s Not for Burning. Funny thing for them to do, wasn’t it?”

“Very.” Sloan stumped back to the car and climbed in beside Crosby. He sniffed. “Something’s burning— the guy…”

“No, sir, it’s me.” Crosby flushed in the darkness. “A jumping cracker. One of the little perishers tied it to my coat.”

“Get him?”

“No.”

“Let’s hope it’s not an augury, that’s all.”

7

« ^ »

Back in Berebury Sloan dissected the guy with the same care that Dr. Dabbe had gone about his post-mortem. He was joined by Superintendent Leeyes.

“Who is this man Cartwright?” he demanded.

“He says he’s her cousin, sir.”

“And he just appears out of the blue asking to see her the afternoon after she’s killed when he hasn’t seen her for twenty years?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What does he want to do that for?”

“I don’t know yet, sir.”

“Find out about him for a start. If he hadn’t come to the Convent this afternoon was there anything to connect him with this woman?”

“Only his name and address in the hotel register. It needn’t have been the right one but it was.”

“So he has a reason—a good reason—for coming, Sloan, hasn’t he? Otherwise he would have cleared off as soon as he could.” Leeyes grunted. “Perhaps it was to make sure she was dead.”

“Or that he’d clobbered the right one.”

“If he’d waited to hear in the ordinary way about that death he might have waited quite a while, of course. There’s no obligation on their part to tell anyone, I suppose.” He shrugged his shoulders. “They call it a Living Death so perhaps there’s not a lot of difference.”

“We’ve got a lead, anyway, which is something. I’ll go to see the mother in the morning and also find out a bit more about this man. We’ve checked on The Bull already. He arrived at about seven-thirty, spent an hour over his meal, had a couple of drinks in the bar and then went out for a stroll.”

The superintendent’s head went up. “When did you say she was last seen alive?”

“About a quarter to nine—at the end of Vespers.”

“When did he get back?”

“The landlord didn’t notice. Says he was busy with the usual crowd.”

“What’s he like?”

“Not a fool.”

The superintendent wasn’t a fool either. “What was he doing at this bonfire?”

Sloan shook his head. “I don’t know, sir.”

“And who rang here and told us about it?”

“A man’s voice, it was, but that’s all that switchboard can tell us.”

Leeyes indicated the guy. “Someone wanted us to see this before it was burnt to a cinder. Why?”

“I don’t know, sir. Not yet. There’s one thing—the footprints we found weren’t Cartwright’s.”

“Those glasses—are they the missing ones?”

“I don’t know that either, sir, yet.” Sloan undid them very carefully. “We’ll try them for fingerprints, but I doubt if we’ll get anything worth while.” He undid the habit and coif and slipped them off, leaving a large stuffed farm sack lying on the bench. The habit, deeply scorched in places, was old and darned. He felt its thinness between his fingers.

Superintendent Leeyes grunted. “I don’t get it, Sloan. This woman, Sister Anne, she wasn’t naked or anything?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Sloan, deeply shocked. “It’s not that sort of place at all.”

“Perhaps she was killed in her Number Ones,” said Leeyes. “Or perhaps this tomfoolery has got nothing whatsoever to do with it and you’re wasting your time, Sloan. In that case,” he fingered the charred habit, “it would seem that the wrong one’s wearing the sackcloth and ashes—eh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Sloan dutifully.

Sloan had been married for fifteen years.

Long enough to view his wife’s nightly ritual with face cream with patient indifference.

Long enough for her to be surprised as he slipped into bed beside her when he pulled the white sheet right round and across the top of her forehead.

“Denis, what on earth are you doing?”

He tucked the blanket as far under her chin as it would go and considered her.

“That’s all you can see of a nun.”

“I should think so, too. What more do you want?”

“Funny what a good idea of a woman you can get from this bit.”

She shook her head. “Don’t you believe it, dear. Men always think that. It’s not true.”

“No grey now.”

“Beast,” retorted his wife equably. “On the other hand, you can’t see my ankles.” Margaret Sloan had very good ankles and very little grey hair.

He relaxed his hold on the sheet and lay on his back. “Margaret…”

“Well?”

“What would make a woman go into a convent?”

“Don’t they call it having a vocation or something? Like nursing or teaching.”

“They can’t all have felt a call, can they? There’s over fifty of them there.”

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Perhaps they were religious-minded anyway and then something happened to drive them there.”

“Like what—as Crosby would say?”

“Being lonely, would you think, or jilted perhaps, or the man in their life loving another. That sort of thing.” She tugged at the pillow. “Or not having any man there in the first place, of course.”

Sloan yawned. “Escape, too, would you say? Not facing up to things. Running away from life.”

“There’s always that, I suppose.”

“Not my idea of a life. The superintendent called it a living death.” He pulled the eiderdown up. “Can’t see you going in one either, dear.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said his wife.

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose something had happened to you after we got engaged. What should I have done then, do you think? A living death wouldn’t have mattered very much then, would it?”

He turned to face her, oddly disconcerted. “I… I hadn’t thought of that.”

She snuggled down in the bed. “Mind you,” she said sleepily, “I don’t think I would have made a very good nun.”

Marwin Ranby’s study at the Agricultural Institute looked almost as comfortable in daylight as it had done in the cosy, shaded light of last evening. There was a young woman with him. She had pale, auburn hair and the delicate, almost translucent skin that often goes with it. The clothes she was wearing were deceptively, ridiculously simple, and Sloan was not at all surprised to find himself being introduced to Miss Celia Faine, the last of her line and Marwin Ranby’s fiancée.

“I have been telling Miss Faine something of last night’s excitement,” said the Principal.

“But, I suspect, not everything,” said Celia Faine with a smile. She had a pleasant, unaffected voice. “Marwin’s being very discreet, Inspector.”

“I’m glad to hear it, miss,” responded Sloan.

“Or should I say ‘mysterious’? It’s because he thinks I should mind. But I know his boys get up to all sorts of things. They wouldn’t be boys if they didn’t, would they? I don’t think the Sisters would mind either if they did hear about it—they’re perfectly sweet, you know, and so—sort of balanced, if you know what I mean. You feel they are finished with the petty, trivial things that don’t matter. It isn’t as if it was a demonstration against them or anything. Nobody minded them coming to Cullingoak, and we had to do something with the house. In fact, I think people are glad they’re there in a way.”

“Celia thinks their sanctity balances out the devilment in my young men,” said Ranby lightly, matching her tone, “but I’m not so sure myself. Until last night I wouldn’t have thought they were even aware of them. We hear their bell on a clear day—that usually provokes a crack or two about getting the cows in—but nothing more.”

“What about last night?” asked Sloan.

“No news, Inspector. None of my staff knew anything about the guy.”

“You have other means of finding out?”

“Naturally. I can if necessary interview the whole lot, but that takes time. I was hoping to appeal to them at supper tonight—it’s the first meal that they will all be at together. I have already checked that no one had a late pass on Wednesday night.”

“Is that infallible? My experience is that it isn’t as a rule.”

“Rumour has it the Biology Laboratory window can be persuaded to open if pressure is judiciously applied in the right place.”

“I’ll get my constable to fingerprint it straight away.”

“You really want this chap, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Sloan shortly. “We do.”

Strelitz Square was still a square in the sense that its Georgian creator had intended, and there was still a garden in the middle. The houses were tall, dignified and—most significant of all—still lived in. Number Seventeen was on the north side, facing the thin November sun. Sloan and Crosby rang the bell at exactly ten-thirty the next morning. An elderly, aproned maid answered the door.

He didn’t mention the Convent this time. “Detective-Inspector Sloan,” he said, “would be obliged if Mrs. Cartwright would spare him a moment or two.”

The woman looked them over appraisingly and then invited them in. She would enquire if Mrs. Cartwright was at home.

“Funny way of carrying on,” said Crosby.

“You’re in Society now, constable, and don’t you forget it. Plenty of money here.” Sloan looked quickly round the room into which they had been shown. “Pictures, china, furniture—the lot.”

Crosby fingered a finely carved chair. “Is this fashion, sir?”

“It was,” said Sloan, “about two hundred years ago. It’s antique, like everything else in the room.” He pointed to a set of Dresden shepherdesses. “They’ll be worth more than your pension. Don’t suppose they picked up that walnut bureau for five bob either or those plates…”‘

“Good morning, Inspector.” An elderly figure appeared in the doorway, “Admiring my Meissen? Charming, isn’t it?”

“Good morning, madam,” said Sloan, not committing himself about the Meissen, whatever that was.

Mrs. Cartwright was old, ramrod-backed and thin. She rested a claw-like hand on the back of the chair just long enough for Sloan to see the battery of rings on it and then she sat down. She was dressed—and dressed very well indeed—in grey with touches of scarlet. Sloan searched her face for a likeness to Sister Anne but found only heavy make-up and the tiny suture marks of an old face-lift. Her hair was a deep mahogany colour and the total effect quite startling.

“You have something to say, Inspector.”

“Yes, madam.” Sloan jerked his mind back. She must be over eighty, and he thought he had bad news for her. “I understand you had a telephone call yesterday afternoon from the Convent of St. Anselm.”

Not a muscle on her face moved.

“And that you refused to take that call.”

“That is so.” Her voice was harsher than he expected.

“Why, madam?”

“Is it anything to do with you?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“Really, Inspector, I can see no reason why…”

“You had a daughter there.”

Mrs. Cartwright rose and walked towards a bell by the fireplace. “I have no daughter.”

“One moment, madam. You are quite right…”

She stopped and looked at him.

“You have no daughter. But you had one.”

She stood rigidly in front of the fireplace and said , again in a well-controlled voice, “I have no daughter.” She put her finger towards the bell.

“Mrs. Cartwright!”

“Well?” Her finger was poised.

“You had a daughter called Josephine Mary.”

A spasm of emotion passed across her face. “Inspector, I lost my daughter thirty years ago.”

“Lost her?”

“Lost her. She left me, she left everything.” Mrs. Cartwright waved a painted fingernail round the room. “Abandoned. Moreover, Inspector, her name has not been mentioned in this house from that day to this. I see no reason to discontinue the habit. Now, if you will either state your business or leave.”

“When did you last see her, madam?”

‘The day she left home.”

“Thirty years ago?”

“Thirty-one. She was eighteen and a half.”

So Sister Anne had been forty-nine. She hadn’t looked as old as that.

“And you, madam, hadn’t seen her yourself since then?” Sloan hoped he was keeping the wonder out of his voice.

“Not once. I told her that she needn’t expect me to visit her. And I never did.”

“Had—have you any other children?”

“She was the only one, Inspector, and she left me. She was a convert, of course. Nothing would persuade her. Nothing.” The old eyes danced. “She wanted to eschew the World, the Flesh and the Devil, Inspector, and she did. At eighteen and a half, without knowing anything about any of the three of them. I hope she’s enjoyed it, that’s all. Being walled up with a lot of other women praying all day long instead of getting married and having children. What’s she done, Inspector? Run away after all these years?”

“No, madam.”

“Because if she has, you needn’t come looking for her here.” There was a gleam of satisfaction in her voice. “She wouldn’t come back here, Inspector. I can tell you that. Not if it was the last place on earth.”

“No, madam, it’s not that at all…”

“Don’t say she’s done something wrong! That I would find hard to believe. I shouldn’t imagine you arrest many nuns, Inspector, but if she was one of them I must say I would derive a certain amount of amusement from the fact. She was so very pious.”

“I’ve come to tell you that she’s dead.”

The old mouth tightened. “She died as far as I’m concerned the day she left home.”

“And that she was probably murdered.”

“Poor Josephine,” she said grimly. “She didn’t escape the wicked world after all then, did she, Inspector?”

They were back in Berebury by lunchtime.

“Get anywhere?” asked Superintendent Leeyes.

“I don’t know,” said Sloan. “Can’t say I blame her for leaving home. I’d have gone myself. Mother hasn’t seen her for thirty years—or so she says anyway.”

“Check on that.”

“Lots and lots of money there.”

The superintendent’s head came up. “Is there now? Check on that, too, Sloan. Money is a factor in the crime equation.”

“Yes, sir.” Last winter the superintendent had attended a course on “Mathematics for the Average Adult.” It had left its mark.

“Who inherits?”

“I’ll find out.”

Leeyes looked sharply across at him. “It could be the Convent, I suppose?”

“Not now she’s dead, would you think?”

“Perhaps not. It would be interesting to know if she would have inherited had she lived. This mother—is she old?”

“Very. And she wouldn’t have made her the sole heir—not from the way she was talking.”

“Cut off with the proverbial shilling, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

Leeyes granted. “She mightn’t have had any say. She a widow?”

“Yes.”

“Where does cousin Harold come in then?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Find out then, man. It could be important.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And find out who gets it if the Convent doesn’t. That could be important, too.” He drammed his fingers on the desk. “I don’t suppose you’ll get out of anyone at the Convent what sort of dowry Sister Anne brought with her.”

“Dowry?”

“Gifts in money or kind brought to a marriage contract, Sloan. They have the same custom when a girl goes into a Convent. In India it’s a couple of cows or some sheep. My father-in-law gave me some dud shares.”

Sloan flushed. There had been a pair of brass candlesticks that his wife had brought from her home, ugly as sin, that had dominated the mantelpiece of their best room all their married life. “I know what you mean, sir. I’ll try to find out.”

“Of course,” said Leeyes, off now on a different tack, “this lot may have taken vows of perpetual poverty or something idiotic like that.”

“I hope not,” said Sloan piously. “Upset all the usual motives too much, that would.”

“What’s that? Yes, it would. We must hope that they haven’t done anything so foolish.”

Sloan went back to his own room.

Crosby came in. “Dr. Dabbe wants to talk to you, sir, and there’s a message from the Convent.”

Sloan lifted his head. “Well?”

“Please may they have their keys back?”

8

« ^ »

An unused knife, fork, spoon and table napkin marked the place at the refectory table where Sister Anne had sat for most of her religious life. Sister Michael and Sister Damien sat on either side of the gap—the one professed immediately before Sister Anne, and the other immediately after. It was the midday meal and the Reader was pursuing her way through the Martyrology.

The vicissitudes of the early faithful seemed to be as nothing compared with the trials of working through today’s pudding. A reasonable stew had been eaten with the relish of those who have been up since very early morning, but today’s pudding was obviously different.

Custom decreed that it should be eaten (many a martyr had died of starvation—or poison); their creed forbade criticism. So fifty-odd nuns struggled with a doughy indefinable mixture lacking the main ingredients of a sweet course.

Sister Cellarer was at the Parlour door immediately the meal was finished.

“Mother, I hope I am lacking in neither ingenuity nor humility but I find it exceedingly difficult to cook without the basic essentials.”

“Not ingenuity, my child. No one could say that.”

Sister Cellarer flushed. “It’s quite impossible to…”

“Nothing is impossible, Sister. It may be difficult but impossible is a word no true religious should use lightly.”

“No, Mother.” Sister Cellarer lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry…”

“As to humility, I’m not sure.” The Mother Prioress contemplated the hot and ruffled cook. “Did you feel the Community would blame you for the shortcomings of our dinner? If so, Sister, I suggest you examine your motives in complaining. I think if you look at them closely you will find an element of pride. Pride in personal skill is a dangerous matter in a Convent. All work and skill here should be offered to our Lord from whom our strength to do it comes. The sin of pride is not one I should have to look for in you.”

A diminished Sister Cellarer was on her knees. “I ask forgiveness, Mother. I should have thought.”

The Mother Prioress waved a hand. “May God bless you, Sister. As it happens I have sent a message about the keys, but it may well be that we will not have them yet. I can see that the police would need to know if they had any significance.”

“They didn’t have anything to do with Sister Anne at all,” said Sister Cellarer. “Sister Lucy lent them to her just for the evening.”

“I have told them that,” said the Reverend Mother patiently, “but until they know how it was that Sister Anne died I think they are justified in retaining them.”

Sister Cellarer rose. “Of course,” she said soberly. “That is what matters. Poor Sister Anne. It doesn’t seem possible that only the day before yesterday none of this had happened at all.”

“The day before yesterday seems a very long time ago now.” The Mother Prioress gathered her habit up preparatory to going somewhere at her usual speed. “Will you ask the Sacrist to come to see me in the Chapel, and the Chantress, too, if she’s about?”

Sloan got Dr. Dabbe on the telephone.

“Sister Anne died from a depressed fracture of the skull,” said the doctor, “caused by the application of the traditional blunt instrument. She had a postmortem fracture of her right femur almost certainly caused by the fall down the cellar steps, and also sundry haematoma…”

“Heema what?”

“Bruises. Also mostly caused after death. You don’t bleed much then, of course.”

“No.”

“I would say she was hit from behind and slightly above—perhaps by someone taller.”

“Man or woman?” asked Sloan eagerly, and got the usual medical prevarication.

“Difficult to say, Inspector. She wasn’t hit so hard that only a man could have done it—on the other hand there were unusual features. The coif, for instance, and the complete absence of hair. It was a heavy blow, but in a good position with a wide swing it wouldn’t have been out of the question for a woman—especially a tall one.”

“Weapon?”

“You want to look for something round and smooth and heavy.”

Sloan flipped over a page of his notebook. “Time of death?”

“Between six and seven night before last.”

“When?”

“I can’t tell you to the minute, you know. Let’s put it this way—she had been dead approximately sixteen to seventeen hours when I saw her just after eleven o’clock yesterday morning.”

“But they have supper at quarter past six and—”

“She’d had supper,” said the pathologist laconically. “She died on a full stomach, if that’s any consolation to anybody. The meal was quite undigested. Shouldn’t have fancied it myself. Too many peas.”

Sloan turned back to his notebook. “But she was at some service or other—I’ve got it here—Vespers—at half past eight.”

“Not if she had steak and kidney pudding and peas at six-fifteen,” said the pathologist. “The process of digestion had barely started. I’ll put it all in writing for you.”

“Thank you. This alters some of my ideas.”

“Post-mortems usually do.”

Sloan set down the telephone receiver very thoughtfully indeed.

Sister Polycarp satisfied herself with a quicker scrutiny this time. “It’s yourself, Inspector. And the constable. Come in. You’ll be wanting the Parlour, I suppose?” She shut the grille and appeared in person through one of the doors. “This way. Mother Prioress is in the Chapel but Sister Lucy will see you.”

They followed her through to the Parlour.

“I don’t suppose you show many men through these doors,” ventured Sloan tentatively.

“The plumber,” said Polycarp tartly. “Can’t do without him, and the doctor. He comes to see old Mother Thérèse.”

“What about the Agricultural Institute? Do you have any visitors from there?”

She shook her head. “That we do not. Young limbs of Satan, that’s what students are.”

“What about Mr. Ranby?”

“Oh, he came the other day to see about the wedding. I took him through to the Parlour to talk to Reverend Mother and the Sacrist. We haven’t had a wedding here before, you see. I think Mr. Ranby comes to the Chapel, too, but of course I hadn’t seen him before.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

She stared at him. “The grille. Across the Chapel. Haven’t you been in there?”

“Yes, I saw the grille.”

“Well, the Community sits in front and then there’s this screen and then the public.”

“So you can’t see them?”

“Naturally not.”

“And they can’t see you?”

“Of course not. That wouldn’t be proper, would it?”

“Therefore you have no idea at all who comes in at the back?”

“Except that they are local people who always come —no. I open the side door before the service and lock it up afterwards.”

“Every time?”

She looked him straight in the eye. “Every time, Inspector. And I do a round of doors and windows last thing at night.”

“When would that be?”

“Eight o’clock.”

Sloan reckoned he had been in short trousers when eight o’clock had been “last thing at night.”

“And Hobbett?”

“He comes and goes according to his work and the weather. He has his own key to the boiler room.”

Polycarp shut the Parlour door behind them.

Crosby tapped the bare, polished floor with his foot and pointed to the plain walls. “Bit of a change from Strelitz Square for that Sister Anne.”

“I expect that’s why she came.”

Sister Lucy came into the Parlour with Sister Gertrude. They bowed slightly, then sat down, hands clasped together in front, and looked at him expectantly.

Sloan undid a brown-paper parcel he had brought with him.

“This habit. Can you tell me anything about it?”

Sister Lucy leaned forward, and Sloan got a good look at her face for the first time. The bone structure was perfect. He didn’t know about Sister Anne, but Sister Lucy would have cut quite a figure in a drawing-room. He tried to imagine hair where there was only a white coif now. With Sister Gertrude it was easier. Hers was the round jolly face of a “good sort,” the games mistress at a girls’ school, the unmarried daughter…

“Yes, Inspector, I think I can.” Sister Lucy’s voice was quiet and unaccented. “This is the spare habit that we keep in the flower room. Should any Sister get wet while out in the grounds she can slip this on instead while she asks permission to dry her own habit in the laundry. It is kept behind the door on a hook.” She turned it round expertly. “You see, here is the hook. It is very old and worn now, but none the less blessed for that.”

“Thank you, Sister. Now take a look at these.”

“Sister Anne’s glasses!” Sister Lucy and Sister Gertrude crossed themselves in unison.

“You both confirm that?”

The two nuns nodded. Sister Lucy said, “She wore particularly thick glasses, Inspector. I think she is the only member of the Community with them as thick as that.” Her hand disappeared inside her habit and emerged again. “Most of us wear glasses like these. For reading and sewing, you know, but Sister Anne had poor eyesight. She couldn’t see anything at all without her glasses.”

“Thank you, Sisters. You have been very helpful.”

They acknowledged this with another slight bow. (“Like talking to a couple of Chinese mandarins,” said Sloan later.)

“Now I would like to tell the Mother Prioress where they were found.”

“She is in the Chapel,” volunteered Sister Lucy, “arranging the Requiem Mass for Sister Anne. And the Great Office of the Dead. When a Sister dies violently there are certain changes in the responses and so forth.”

Sloan permitted himself a bleak smile. “That can’t happen often.”

“On the contrary, Inspector. We sang just the same service at Midsummer.”

“You did? Who for?”

“Sister St. John of the Cross.”

“Why?”

“She was hacked to death with a machete.”

“What! Where?”

“Unggadinna.”

Sloan breathed again. “That’s different.”

A faint chill came into the atmosphere. “Not so very different, Inspector, for us.”

“There was Mother St. Theobald, too, just after Easter,” put in Sister Gertrude diffidently. “I was a novice when she was professed so I remember her well. She died in prison, you know, in Communist hands.”

“We assumed,” said Sister Lucy astringently, “that she died violently, though we have had no exact details yet.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sloan awkwardly.

“And, of course,” persisted Sister Lucy, “there are members of our Order who were in China. We have no means of knowing whether or not they are accomplished among the elect.” They rose. “We will see if Mother has finished in the Chapel…”

Crosby stirred in his hard chair. “Funny thing, sir. They don’t ask any questions. Most people would have wanted to know where you got those glasses and that gown thing, wouldn’t they?”

“Unless they knew.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

The Mother Prioress came back with Sister Lucy. “You have news for us, Inspector?”

“I don’t know if it is news or not, marm, but we think Sister Anne was murdered.”

He was conscious of Sister Lucy’s sharp indrawn breath, but the Reverend Mother only nodded.

“No, Inspector, that is not news. Father MacAuley had already intimated to me that Sister Anne died an unnatural death. He has also told me about last night’s bonfire.”

“Sister Lucy has just identified the habit and Sister Anne’s glasses.”

“How very curious that both should be found on a guy at the Agricultural Institute. Do you connect them with Sister Anne’s death?”

“I can’t say, marm, at this stage. The glasses were hers, she couldn’t see without them; she was killed on Wednesday evening, and on Thursday evening they were found on this guy.”

“If,” said the Mother Prioress slowly, “the whole episode of the guy had been an anti-papist demonstration we, as a Community, would have been aware of feelings against us. After all, they are quite common. Sisters in our other Houses have them to contend with—but not without knowing the feelings existed. Hate is so very communicable. Mr. Ranby would have known, too, I think.”

“Granted, marm. But somebody took both the old habit and the glasses.”

She inclined her head. “It would seem that the world has been to us or that one of us has been into the world.”

Sloan had reached this conclusion himself the evening before and turned to another matter.

“Going back to Sister Anne, herself, marm, can you tell me anything about her? As a person, I mean.”

The Mother Prioress smiled faintly. “We try so very hard not to be persons here, you know. To conquer the self and to submerge the personality are part of our daily battle with ourselves in the quest for true humility. I would say that Sister Anne, God rest her soul, succeeded as well as any of us.”

“Er—yes, I see.” It was patent that he didn’t. “Now about her actual death. Did anyone stand to gain by that?”

“Just Sister Anne.”

“Sis…”

“It is part of our conviction, Inspector, that all true Christians stand to gain by death.”

He smiled weakly. “Of course. But apart from Sister Anne herself?”

“I cannot conceive that anyone could gain from her death.”

“In the worldly sense, perhaps?”

“I take it that you mean financially? That is what people usually mean.”

“Yes.”

“The disposition of any material wealth would be entirely a matter for the Sister concerned.”

“Was Sister Anne wealthy?”

“I have no idea, Inspector.”

“She came from a wealthy home.”

“That is not always a measure.”

“Who would know?”

“Just the Mother Prioress at the time she took her vows.”

“And that was?”

“Mother Helena…”

“And she’s dead?”

“… of blessed memory,” finished the Mother Prioress simultaneously.

That meant the same thing. Sloan was getting frustrated. “Is there no way of finding out?”

Sister Lucy coughed. “Mother, the Bursar’s accounts. They might show something at the time. We know the date of profession. It would take a little while, but if a dowry had been received it would show in the figures.”

“Thank you,” said Sloan, taking the Mother Prioress’s concurrence for granted. “That would be a great help. Now, what about a will?”

“That,” said the Reverend Mother, “would be at our Mother House. It is no part of our intention not to conform to the Common Law of the land in which our House is situated.”

“Quite.”

“Sister Lucy shall telephone them for you presently.”

“Marm, there’s another matter that has been troubling us. You told me that Sister Anne was at Chapel on Wednesday evening and that that was the last time she was seen alive.”

“That is so. At Vespers by Sister Michael and Sister Damien.”

“Do you remember what you had for supper on Wednesday?”

It was clear that she didn’t. She turned to Sister Lucy, who frowned. “It wasn’t a fast day, Mother. Was it steak and kidney pudding? I think it was. Yes, I’m sure. With peas and potatoes. And then a bread and butter pudding.”

“Thank you. Yes, I remember now. Is it important, Inspector?”

“What time did you have it?”

“At a quarter past six. That is when we always have it.”

“And then is when Sister Anne had hers?”

“Yes, naturally.”

“She couldn’t have had hers later?”

“Not without my knowing.”

“What happens immediately after supper?”

“Recreation. From a quarter to seven to eight o’clock. Sisters bring any sewing or similar work to the old drawing-room and they are permitted to move about and talk there as they wish.”

“I see,” said Sloan. Nice for them, that was. “And then?”

“They have various minor duties—preparing the refectory for breakfast, locking up the house, general tidying up at the end of the day and so forth. As they finish these the Sisters go into the Chapel for private meditation until Vespers at eight-thirty.”

“Thank you, marm, that is what I wanted to know. And Sister Damien and Sister Michael sat on either side of Sister Anne at Vespers?”

“That is so.”

“With the greatest repect, marm, that is not so. Dr. Dabbe, the pathologist, tells me that Sister Anne died immediately after supper. Her meal was quite undigested.”

There was a silence in the Parlour, then, “Someone sat between Sister Michael and Sister Damien.”

“So you tell us, marm.”

“So they told me, Inspector.”

“Where was Sister Anne’s place in the Chapel?”

“In the back row.”

“No one else need have noticed her then?”

“No. No, I suppose not. As I said, the Sisters come in when they are ready and kneel until the service begins.”

“I think we should see the Chapel and the two Sisters.”

“Certainly. Sister Lucy will take you there now.”

The Mother Prioress sat on in the empty Parlour, deep in thought. She almost didn’t hear the light tap on the door. She roused herself automatically. “Come in.”

It was Sister Cellarer. “Did he bring the keys, Mother?”

She stared at her. “Do you know, Sister, I quite forgot to ask him.”

9

« ^ »

Father MacAuley was the next visitor to the Parlour. Sister Gertrude brought him along.

“I had quite a job getting in. Polycarp thought I was the Press at first. I’ll have to have a password. ‘Up the Irish’ or some such phrase pleasing to her ear.”

“There were two reporters and a cameraman this morning,” said the Mother Prioress, “but she sent them away.”

“So she told me. She didn’t know if the photographer got his picture of her or not before she shut the grille. The flash, she said, reminded her of the dear old days in Ireland. Apparently the last really good flash she saw was the day the I.R.A. blew up the bridge at—”

“I have warned the Community,” continued the Mother Prioress, “that they may have to go in the grounds in pairs as a precaution against their being— shall we say, surprised—by reporters. I feel there will be more of them.”

“They do hunt in packs as a rule.”

“Also there has been what I understand is called a new development in the case.”

“There has?”

“The pathologist has said that Sister Anne died immediately after supper which finishes at a quarter to seven. Sister Michael and Sister Damien say she sat between them at Vespers at eight-thirty.”

The priest nodded sagely. “The Press would like that.”

“I do not, Father. The implications are very disturbing. If Sister Anne was dead at half past eight, who sat in her stall at Vespers?”

The priest sat down heavily. “I don’t know. The fact that we do not believe in—er—manifestations will scarcely influence the public—who don’t know what they believe in. They, and therefore the Press, dearly love a ghost. Can’t you see the headlines?”

The Mother Prioress winced.

In intervals between inspecting the Convent Chapel, Sloan took one telephone call and made another from the old-fashioned instrument in the corridor. Both were London calls, but neither would have conveyed very much to Mrs. Briggs at the Cullingoak Post Office, who monitored all calls as a matter of course.

“With reference to your enquiry,” said the London voice, “we have found a very interesting will in Somerset House, made by one Alfred Cartwright, father of Josephine Mary Cartwright. It was made a long time ago, and, in fact, several years before his death. Sounds as if he and his brother Joe were pretty cautious blokes. They’d got everything worked out carefully enough. If Alfred died first his widow was to have the income from his share of the Consolidated Carbon partnership for her lifetime. If he had children they were to get the share when their mother died. If he didp’t have any children or if those children predeceased him or his brother, Joe, then the share in the Cartwright patent was to go to Joe and then his heirs and successors.”

“Keeping it in the family,” said Sloan.

“That’s the spirit, old chap. Well, they seem to have gone along fairly slowly with the business—all this was just after the old Queen died, remember. Turn of the century and all that. Then suddenly—and without any warning either—Alfred ups and dies. Pneumonia, it was. We looked up the death certificate, too, while we were about it…”

“Thank you.”

“He doesn’t leave very much but not to worry. Not many years afterwards along comes World War One and Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons can’t help making money. Lots and lots of it. Of course, our Alfred doesn’t get the benefit being dead by now, but the stuff keeps on coming in. Must have been pretty well running out of their ears by 1918.”

“What about brother Joe?”

“There’s no will registered of his, so presumably he’s still alive. He probably made a reciprocal will at the same time as his brother, but of course he could have altered it since… By the way, we confirm Mrs. Alfred Cartwright’s statement that there was only one child of the marriage. This girl Josephine. Her husband died soon after the baby was born.”

“And brother Joe?”

“He had one son by the name of Harold. He must be all of fifty-five now.”

“We’ve met son Harold.” A thought struck Sloan. “So Joe Cartwright will be quite an age.”

“Practically gaga, I should say,” said the voice helpfully.

“What about the firm now?”

“Ah, you want he whom we call our City Editor. I’m only an historian. Fred Jenkins is the chap for the up-to-the-minute stuff. The only policeman who does his beat in striped pants and a bowler. No truncheon either. Says his umbrella’s better. I’ll give you his number.”

“Much obliged,” said Sloan. He rang it immediately.

“Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons? Very sound, Inspector. Good family firm. A bit old-fashioned but most good old family firms are these days. Well run, all the same. Not closed minds, if you know what I mean.. They’re not entirely convinced that one computer will do the work of fifty men, but if you prove it to them they’ll buy the computer and see the fifty men don’t suffer for it.”

“The family still manage it?”

“Lord, yes. Harold Cartwright’s the M.D. Knows the business backwards. Learnt it the hard way, I should say. Let me see now, I think there are two sons and a daughter. That’s right. The daughter married well. Iron ore, I think it was. The boys went to a good school and an even better university. The elder boy had a year at Harvard to see what our American cousins could teach him about business, and the younger one a year on the Rand.”

“You know a lot about them off the cuff.”

“One of the largest private companies in the country, Inspector, that’s why,” retorted Jenkins promptly. “They’re always getting write-ups in the City pages suggesting they will be going public but they never do. They’d be quite a good buy when the time comes, of course, that’s why there’s the interest.”

“I think,” said Sloan slowly, “I can tell you the reason why they’ve stayed private all these years.”

There was no mistaking the interest at the other end of the line. “You can?”

“There was a residual legatee here in Calleshire in a convent.” There was a lot of satisfaction in being able to tell London something.

“That’s it then. What sort of share?”

“If she survived her uncle I’d say she was stuck in for half.”

Jenkins whistled. “Buying her out would upset the applecart. I don’t suppose they would have enough liquidity to do it. That’s the trouble with that sort of heavy industry. On the other hand, if they go public and leave her in they could be in a mess. They might lose control, you see. Tricky.”

“Not quite so tricky now,” said Sloan. “She was killed on Wednesday evening. I don’t know how these things are managed, but I would like to know if this question of going public comes up again now.”

“I’ll have a poke round the Issuing Houses. Might pick something up. Where can I get you?”

“Berebury Police Station.”

Sloan collected Crosby and Sister Lucy from the Chapel. She accepted the money he offered her for the telephone call without embarrassment or demur. “Thank you, Inspector. Bills are quite a problem.”

All three of them went back to the Parlour.

“It would seem, Mother,” said Sister Lucy carefully, “that Sister Anne brought no dowry with her when she came. The Bursar’s accounts for that year show no receipt that is likely to be hers.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

“I have had her will read to me over the telephone,” went on Sister Lucy. “It was made at our Mother House the year she took her vows. It bequeaths all of that of which she died possessed to our Order.”

“How much is likely to be involved?” asked Sloan casually.

Sister Lucy looked at him. “As far as I am aware, nothing at all. Sister Anne brought nothing with her and had no income of any sort while she was here.”

Father MacAuley coughed. “Aren’t we forgetting the potential?”

“What potential?” asked the Mother Prioress.

“Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons. That right, Inspector?”

“That’s right, Father. I don’t know where you get your information…”

“You don’t live in Strelitz Square on twopence ha’penny a week.”

The Mother Prioress leaned forward enquiringly. “Had Sister Anne something to do with—er—Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons?”

“She did, marm. They are a chemical company formed by her uncle and father to exploit an invention of theirs of a method of combining carbon with various compounds for industrial chemists.”

“I see.” The Mother Prioress nodded. “That presumably was the source of the family income?”

“Yes, marm. You didn’t know?”

“Not personally. My predecessor might have been told by Sister Anne. I do not think,” she added gently, “that it would have concerned us in any way.”

“Yes,” interrupted Sister Gertrude unexpectedly. “Yes, it would, Mother.”

Suddenly finding herself the object of every eye in the Parlour, Sister Gertrude blushed and lowered her head.

“Pray explain, Sister.”

“This potential that you are talking about was some money that Sister Anne was to come into, wasn’t it?”

Sloan nodded.

“Well, she knew about it. She told Sister Damien that the Convent would have it one day and then we could have our cloister.”

There was silence.

Sister Gertrude looked from Inspector Sloan to Father Benedict MacAuley and back again. “I don’t know if there would have been enough for a cloister or not,” she said nervously, “but Sister Damien thought so, and so did Sister Anne.”

“I think,” said the Mother Prioress heavily, “that we had better see Sister Damien and Sister Michael now.”

Sister Damien came first. Tall, thin and stiff-looking even in the soft folds of her habit, she swept the assembled company with a swift look and bowed to the Mother Prioress.

“The inspector has some questions for you, Sister. Pray answer them to the best of your recollection.”

Sister Damien turned an expectant glance to Sloan.

“I want you to take your mind back to the events of Wednesday evening,” he began easily. “Supper, for instance—what did you have?”

“Steak and kidney pie, and bread and butter pudding. The reading was of the martyrdom of Saint Denise.”

“And Sister Anne sat next to you?”

“Naturally.”

“Did you speak to her then?”

“Talking at meals is not permitted.”

There was an irritating glint of self-righteousness in her eye that Sloan would dearly love to have squashed. Instead he said, “When did you see her again?”

“Not until Vespers.”

“What about Recreation?”

“I didn’t see her then. I was talking to Sister Jerome about some lettering ink for prayer cards. We are,” she added insufferably, “permitted to move about at Recreation.”

“When did you go into the Chapel?”

“About a quarter past eight.”

“Was Sister Anne there then?”

“No. She came much later. I thought she was going to be late.”

“But she wasn’t?”

“No, not quite.”

“Did you speak to her?” asked Sloan—and wished he hadn’t.

“Speaking in Chapel is not permitted,” said Sister Damien inevitably.

“Did you notice anything about her particularly?”

“No, Inspector, but we practise custody of the eyes.”

“Custody of the eyes?”

The Mother Prioress leaned forward. “You could call it the opposite of observation. It is the only way to acquire the true concentration of the religious.”

Sloan took a deep breath. Custody of the eyes didn’t help him one little bit. “I see.”

“There was just one thing, Inspector…”

“Well?”

“I think she may have been starting a cold. She did blow her nose several times.”

“About the cloister…”

An entirely different sort of gleam came into Sister Damien’s eye. She smoothed away an invisible crease in her gown.

“Yes, Inspector, we shall be able to have that now. Sister Anne said that when she was dead we should have enough money to have our cloister. She told me so several times. And there would be some for the missions, too. She took a great interest in missionary work.”

“Did she tell you where the money was to come from?” asked Sloan.

“No. Just that it would be going back to those from whom it had been taken.” Sister Damien seemed able to invest every remark she made with sanctimoniousness. “And that then restitution would have been made.”

Sister Michael was fat and breathless and older. She did not hear at all well. Panting a little she agreed that Sister Anne had been very nearly late. The last in the Chapel, she thought. She hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary but then she never did. She was a little deaf, you see, and had to concentrate hard on the service to make up for it.

But Sister Anne was there?

Sister Michael looked blank and panted a little more. One service was very like the next, Inspector, but she thought she would have remembered if Sister Anne hadn’t been there, if he knew what she meant.

But she had just told him that Sister Anne was late.

Yes, well, Sister Damien had reminded her about that this morning.

What about yesterday morning when Sister Anne definitely wasn’t there. Had she noticed then?

Well, actually, no. She wasn’t ever very good in the mornings. It took her a little while to get going if he knew what she meant. Deafness, though she knew these minor disabilities were sent purely to test the weak on earth and were as nothing compared with the sufferings of saints and martyrs, was in fact very trying and led to a feeling of cut-offness. Of course, in some ways it made it easier to be properly recollected, if he knew what she meant.

He didn’t. He gave up.

10

« ^ »

Harold Cartwright received them in his bedroom at The Bull. He appeared to have been working hard. The table was strewn with papers and there were more on the bed. There was a live tape recorder on the dressing-table and he was talking into it when the two policemen arrived. He switched it off immediately.

“Sit down, gentlemen.” He cleared two chairs. “It’s not very comfortable but it’s the best Cullingoak has to offer. I don’t think they have many visitors at The Bull.”

“Thank you, sir.” Sloan took out a notebook. “We’re just checking up on a matter of timing and would like to run through your movements on Wednesday again.”

Cartwright looked at him sharply. “As I told you before, I drove myself down here from London…”

“When exactly did you leave?”

“I don’t know exactly. About half past four. I wanted to miss the rush-hour traffic.”

“Can anyone confirm the time you left?”

“I expect so,” he said impatiently. “My secretary, for one. And my deputy director. I was in conference most of the afternoon and left as soon as I’d cleared up the matters arising from it. Is it important?”

“And how long did it take you to arrive here?” He grimaced. “Longer than I thought it would. Several hundred other motorists had the same idea about leaving London before the rush hour. I drove into The Bull yard a few minutes before half past seven.”

“Three hours? That’s a long time.”

“There was a lot of traffic.”

“Even so…”

“And I didn’t know the way.”

“Ah,” said Sloan smoothly. “There is that. Did you by any chance take a wrong turning?”

“No,” said Cartwright shortly. “I did not. But I was in no hurry. I had planned to have the evening to myself and most of the following day. I don’t know enough about the routine of convents to know the best time to call on them—but in the event that didn’t matter, did it?”

“This business that you had come all this way to talk to your cousin about, sir, you wouldn’t care to tell me what it was?”

“No, Inspector,” he said decisively. “I should not. I cannot conceive of it having any bearing on her death. It was a family affair.”

“But you’re staying on?”

“Yes, Inspector, I’m staying on.” He sat quite still, a figure not without dignity even in an hotel bedroom. “The Mother Prioress has given me permission to attend Josephine’s funeral but not—as you might have thought—to pay for it. Apparently a nun’s burial is a very simple affair.”

Superintendent Leeyes was unsympathetic. “You’ve had over twenty-four hours already, Sloan. The probability that a crime will be solved diminishes in direct proportion to the time that elapses afterwards, not as you might think in an inverse ratio.”

“No, sir.” Was that from “Mathematics for the Average Adult” or “Logic”?

“And Dabbe says that she died before seven and these women say they saw her after eight-thirty?”

“Just one woman says so, sir.”

“What about the other fifty then?”

“They’d got their heads down. Sister Anne sat in the back row always and apparently it isn’t done to look up or around. Custody of the eyes, they call it.”

Leeyes growled. “And this woman that did see her then, what was she doing? Peeping between her fingers?”

“She could be lying,” said Sloan cautiously. “I’m not sure. She could be crackers if it came to that.”

“They can’t any of them be completely normal, now can they?” retorted Leeyes robustly. “Asking to be locked up for life like that. It isn’t natural.”

“No, sir, but if there had been someone—not Sister Anne—at Vespers it would explain the glasses, wouldn’t it?”

“It’s better than ‘Sister Anne Walks Again’ which is what I thought you were going to say.”

“No, sir, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Neither do I, Sloan,” snapped Leeyes. “I may be practically senile, too, but I don’t see how it explains the glasses either.”

“Disguise,” said Sloan. For one wild moment he contemplated asking the superintendent to cover his head with a large handkerchief to see if he would pass for a nun, but then he thought better of it. His pension was more important. “I reckon, sir, that either there wasn’t anyone at all in Sister Anne’s stall at Vespers or else it was someone there in disguise.”

“Well done,” said Leeyes nastily. “You should come with me on Mondays, Sloan. Learn a bit about Logic. And was it Cousin Harold who was standing there?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“If it was, why the devil didn’t he clear off? We didn’t know he was there. We might never have found out.”

“Those footprints aren’t his.”

“You’re not making much headway, Sloan, are you?”

“Not since I’ve heard from Dr. Dabbe, sir.”

For the first time he got some sympathy.

“It’s usually the doctors,” grumbled Superintendent Leeyes. “Try to pin them down on something and they’ll qualify every single clause of every single sentence they utter. Then, when it’s a blasted nuisance they’ll be as dogmatic as… as…” he glared at his desk in his search for a comparative “… as a lady magistrate.”

Sloan watched the superintendent drive off towards his home and next meal, and went back to his own room. Crosby was there with two large cups of tea and some sandwiches.

“Well, Crosby, what did you make of Sister Damien’s story?”

“Someone wanted us to think Sister Anne was still alive at eight-thirty.”

“Ah, yes, but was it Sister Damien who wanted us to think that? Or was it someone else?”

Crosby took a sandwich but offered no opinion.

“And why did they want us to think that?”

“Alibi?” suggested Crosby.

“Perhaps. No one missed Sister Anne at Recreation so presumably they can move about then more or less as they like.”

“More or less, sir,” echoed Crosby darkly.

Sloan grinned. The man had a sense of humour after all. “Did you give them back their keys?”

“Yes, sir. I went round all their cupboards with that Sister Lucy and opened them up. Nothing much there —food, stores and what have you. It was a hefty bunch of metal all right. Sister Lucy wears it round her waist all the time. They were certainly glad to have them back again.”

“What about their local standing?”

“High, sir. I checked with quite a few people in the village. They like them. They aren’t any trouble. Their credit is good and they pay on the nail for everything. They live carefully, not wasting anything, and they do as much of their shopping as possible in Cullingoak.”

“That always goes down well.”

“I got on to Dr. Carret, too. Only on the telephone though. He was out when I went there. He was called to the Convent when Sister Anne was found, realised she hadn’t fallen downstairs in the ordinary way and sent for us.”

“Very observant of him, that was. Is your standing with the canteen manageress good enough for another couple of cups?”

Apparently it was, for Crosby brought two refills back within minutes.

Sloan picked up a pencil. “Now, Crosby, where are we now?”

“Well, sir, yesterday we had this body that we thought had been murdered. Today we know it has been. Weapon, something hard but blunt, probably touched by Sister Peter early yesterday morning.”

“And still to be found.”

“Yes, sir. We know that Sister Anne was also Josephine Mary Cartwright and that her mother said ‘Never darken these doors again’ a long time ago. And that when her mother dies she was due to come into a lot of money.”

“Only if she outlived her, Crosby. If she died first it reverts to Uncle Joe and his heirs, one of whom is camping at The Bull for some reason not yet revealed tous.”

“Well, there’s money for someone in it somewhere, sir.”

“Show me the case where there isn’t, Crosby, and I may not know how to solve it.”

“Sir, did that thin one, Damien, know that if Sister Anne died before her uncle, the uncle got the lot?”

Sloan nodded approvingly. “That is something I should dearly like to know myself. You realise we have only got her word for it that Sister Anne—or someone she thought was Sister Anne—was at Vespers at eight-thirty? The other one—Sister Michael—what she said wasn’t evidence. More like hearsay.”

Crosby stopped, his cup half way to his lips. “You mean Sister Damien might be lying about that?” It was clearly a new idea to him.

“Don’t look so shocked, Crosby.”

“I didn’t think they would lie, sir.”

“Someone, somewhere,” he said sarcastically, “is being untruthful with us, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yes, sir, but I didn’t think nuns would lie.”

“Not quite cricket, Crosby?”

“Yes, sir—I mean—no, sir.” Until he joined the Police Force, Crosby’s ethics had been of a Sunday School variety—“speak the truth and shame the devil.”

“If,” went on Sloan, “Damien knew only that the Convent was to come into a lot of money when Sister Anne died—or thought that was so, she could just have thought she was doing the Convent a good turn— and Sister Anne, too if it came to that—by hurrying things along.“ He finished his tea and said profoundly: ”Who can tell what people will do if they are cooped up together like that for year upon year without any sort of outlet? What do you do, Crosby, when you start getting on each other’s nerves? Say a few more prayers?”

“I saw a film about a prisoner-of-war camp once,” volunteered Crosby helpfully, “where they killed a chap because he sniffed.”

Three loud knocks on the table at the end of a meal by the Mother Prioress indicated that she wished to speak to the Community. Half a hundred female faces turned attentively towards the Abbatial chair. There were round faces, oval faces, faces of the shape known outside the Convent (but never, never inside) as Madonna-type, fat faces, thin faces.

There were as many faces looking expectantly at the Reverend Mother as there were types of woman—almost—from the neat face of Sister Ignatius to the cheerful visage of Sister Hilda; from the calm features of Sister Jerome to the composed efficiency of Sister Radigund, the Infirmarium; from the still anxious look of Sister Peter to the intense concentration of Sister Damien.

“My daughters…” The Mother Prioress surveyed the dim Refectory. It was long since dark outside, and the mock electric candles in their sconces on the wall provided only the minimum of light. “My daughters, through the centuries those of our Order have gone through many trials and tribulations, compared with which our present discomforts are as nothing. What we now endure is unfamiliar and distasteful to us—intrusion and enquiry are an anathema to the religious life—but it is not for us to complain now or at any time of what we suffer.” Her gaze travelled down the ranks of nuns. “When we renounced the world we did not automatically leave doubt and sorrow behind. Nor are we immune from the physical laws of cause and effect. Nor should we wish to be.”

One of the novices, she who was sitting nearest to the pepper-pot, sneezed suddenly. The Novice-Mistress leaned forward slightly to identify the culprit.

“Sister Anne,” went on the Mother Prioress unperturbed, “died on Wednesday evening some time after supper, probably in the corridor leading from the Great Hall to the kitchens. Her body was put into the broom cupboard and later thrown down the cellar steps. As you know, she was found there after a search on Thursday morning. It is now Friday evening. I should like you all to go back in your minds to Wednesday evening and consider if you saw or heard anything out of the ordinary pattern of religious behaviour.” She did not pause here as she might have done but went straight on to say, “On Thursday evening, Guy Fawkes’ Night, the effigy of a nun was burnt on the bonfire lit by the students of the Agricultural Institute. In the ordinary course of events I should not have troubled the Community with this information, believing that the incident was more in the nature of high spirits than bigotry, but the guy was dressed in the habit that normally hangs behind the door of the garden room.”

It was evident that this was news to some of the nuns.

“Moreover, the guy was wearing Sister Anne’s glasses.”

This was a bombshell. Heads went up. Grave glances were exchanged between the older Sisters. The younger ones looked excited or frightened, according to temperament.

“You will not, therefore, be surprised to know that the police require to know the exact whereabouts of every Sister from supper-time on Wednesday until they retired to their cells. If you spoke to Sister Anne after supper, or if you have any other information, it should be communicated to me, and only to me. I shall be in the Parlour until Vespers.” She paused. “The police also wish to be told the secular name of every member of the Community, the date of her profession, and the address from which she came to the Convent of St. Anselm.”

The dining-room at the Agricultural Institute was also known as the Refectory, but there the resemblance ended. It was brightly lit and very noisy indeed. One hundred and fifty healthy young men were just coming to the end of a substantial meal. Fourteen staff were having theirs at the High Table on a dais at one end of the long room. Sundry maids were rattling dirty dishes through a hatch into the kitchen, and making it quite clear that they thought any meal which began at seven-fifteen should end by eight o’clock.

Marwin Ranby, sitting in the centre of the High Table, let the maids finish before he stood up. Students were easy to come by, maids much more difficult.

“Gentlemen, in its short life this Institute has acquired a reputation for outrage on the night that commemorates the failure of the Gunpowder Plot…”

There were several cheers.

“Usually the damage can be repaired by the use of one simple commodity. Money.” More cheers.

“And apologies, of course.”

“Good old Mr. Ranby, sir,” called out a wit. Ranby gave a thin smile. “Well, it isn’t good old anyone this time. Granted, in the ordinary run of events, we might have got by with a handsome apology to the Mother Prioress and an even more handsome contribution to the Convent funds…” Loud groans.

“This time it’s much more serious…” More groans.

“Yesterday, as you know full well, was November the Fifth. The evening before that—Wednesday—a nun died in the Convent. The police, who, as you know, performed an excellent rescue job on the guy…”

Loud laughter, interspersed with more groans. “The police,” said Ranby firmly, “tell me that that habit came from the Convent, probably the same day the nun died. Now, they’re not accusing anyone of being implicated in this death but they do need to know who it was who was in the Convent, how they got in and when. I think you can all understand that,” He looked quickly from face to face. “Now, I’m asking those responsible—however many of you there are with a hand in this—to come to my study at nine o’clock tonight.”

11

« ^ »

Celia Faine was in the Principal’s study with Marwin Ranby when Sloan and Crosby arrived. A maid had just deposited a tray of coffee on the table.

“Come in, Inspector, come in. How’s the chase going?”

“Warming up nicely, sir, thank you.”

Ranby eyed him thoughtfully. “I’m glad to hear it. I’ve got good news for you, too. We’ve got the culprits who made the guy.” He turned. “Celia, my dear, will you be hostess while I tell the Inspector about Tewn and the others?”

Celia Faine smiled and took up the coffee pot. “Don’t be too hard on them, will you? They’re nice lads and I’m sure they meant no harm.”

Ranby frowned. “No, I don’t think they did, but you can’t be too sure. William Tewn is the chap you’re looking for, Inspector. As far as I can make out, three of them initiated the scheme—a third-year man called Parker, and Tewn and Bullen, who are second year. Parker’s the cleverest of the three—clever enough to organise the expedition without going to any risk himself, I should say. Bullen and Tewn went over the fence into the Convent property on Wednesday night, while Parker kept watch. Bullen went as far as the outside wall, and Tewn went inside the building. He came out with the habit.”

“One moment, sir. How did you discover this?”

He gave a wry laugh; “They—er—gave themselves up so to speak, in response to my appeal after supper this evening. I’ve just been speaking to them and they’re waiting in my secretary’s room for you.”

“Sugar?” Celia Faine handed round the coffee cups expertly. Sloan saw she would be a great asset to the rather too-efficient Principal. “Tell me, Inspector, where do you think they kept the guy until Thursday evening?”

“I know the answer to that one,” said Marwin Ranby rather shortly. “In one of the cowsheds. That’s where they made it up from the straw and the old sack. They had their firewood all ready. I hadn’t raised any objection to a straightforward bonfire, you see…”

“No one thinks it’s your fault, dear,” she said soothingly.

“Nevertheless,” went on Ranby, more philosophically, “I suppose I should have thought something like this might happen… all the same, I don’t like it. What I would like, Inspector, are those three men over at the Convent first thing in the morning to apologise in person, to the Mother Prioress and the Community. It’s the very least we can do…”

“Certainly, sir,” agreed Sloan peaceably. Ranby had good reason for wanting to keep on the right side of the Reverend Mother. “If you want it that way. I don’t see that it can do any harm.”

But once again he was wrong.

Messrs. Parker, Bullen and Tewn were not too dismayed to find Sloan and Crosby taking an interest in their escapade.

“Just our bad luck that we chose a night when one of the nuns goes and gets herself killed,” grumbled Parker. “Otherwise we stood a good chance of getting away with it.”

“You must admit it was a good joke, Inspector.” Tewn was a fresh-faced boy with curly hair and a few remaining infant freckles. “Especially with old Namby-Pam… with the Principal going to be married at the Convent at the end of the month. Sort of appropriate.”

It was a long, long time since Sloan’s idea of a good joke had been anything so primitive.

“And?” he said dispassionately.

“Well,” said Tewn, “it was a piece of cake, wasn’t it?”

The other two nodded. Bullen, a slow-speaking, well-built boy, said, “No trouble at all.”

“Come on then,” snapped Sloan. “How did you go about it? Ring the front door bell and ask for a spare habit?”

“No, we went to the back door,” said Tewn promptly. “At least to the sort of cellar door.”

“And just opened it, I suppose. Without knocking.”

“Yes,” agreed Tewn blandly. “Yes, that was exactly what we did.”

“At what time was this excursion?”

“About half past nine on Wednesday evening.”

“And you expect me to believe that this door was unlocked?”

“Oh, yes,” said Tewn. “I just put my hand on the door and it opened.”

“And the habit?”

“That was there.”

“Waiting for you?”

Tewn’s freckles coloured up. “That’s right.”

“And you just picked it up and came out again?”

“That’s right.” Tewn poked a finger at Bullen. “I was only inside half a minute, wasn’t I?”

“Less if anything,” said Bullen. “Like I said—no trouble at all.”

“No trouble!” echoed an exasperated Sloan. “That’s where you’re wrong. There’s lots of trouble.”

“But if Tewn was only inside half a minute and Bullen confirms it,” said the third young man, “they can’t have had anything to do with this nun, can they?”

Sloan turned towards him. “You’re Parker, I suppose? Well, there’s just one flaw in your reasoning. How do I know that they’re not both lying? Suppose you tell me where you were at the time?”

“Here in the Institute,” said Parker.

“In the Biology lab, I suppose.”

Parker flushed. “Yes, as it happens I was.”

“Any witnesses to prove it?”

“No… no. I don’t think anyone saw me there.”

“Well, then…” Sloan let the sentence hang unfinished while he surveyed the three of them. “So you three arranged the snaffling of the habit, did you? And you carried out the operation according to plan without any sort of hitch?”

“That’s right,” said Tewn. “We never saw a soul.”

“When you got the habit, what next?”

“Bullen and I brought it back with us. I kept it in my room until yesterday morning and then we made it up into a guy. It was easy,” said Tewn ingenuously, “because nuns don’t have much of a figure, do they?”

“And the glasses,” put in Sloan casually. “Where did you pick them up?”

“What glasses?” asked Tewn.

“The guy that I rescued was wearing glasses,” said Sloan impatiently. “Where did they come from?”

Parker nodded. “Yes, it was. They were on her—it, I mean—when Bullen and I carried it out to the fire.”

“I didn’t see any glasses,” said Tewn. “We put a couple of buttons in for eyes.”

Bullen stirred. “She was wearing glasses when Parker and I went to fetch her for the fire. We thought you’d put them on her, Tewn—they looked proper old-fashioned.”

“Not me,” said Tewn. “I didn’t go back to the cowshed at all after we’d made her up in the morning. I was on the pig rota, remember? We had a farrowing at half past six and I jolly nearly missed my supper.”

“I thought you’d cadged an old pair from Matron,” said Parker. “She wears them just like that.”

Ranby was right: Parker was the most intelligent of the three. Sloan said, “So you didn’t take them from the Convent with the habit?”

“Oh, no,” said Tewn quickly. “Besides we wouldn’t have known they weren’t wanted, would we?”

“Like you knew the habit wasn’t wanted?” suggested Sloan smoothly. “Like you knew the door would be open for you…”

Tewn’s colour flared up again, Parker looked sullen, Bullen quite impassive. All three remained silent.

“If, by any chance, any one of the three of you remembers how it came about that that cellar door was to be open to you on Wednesday evening, and that an old habit that nobody wanted just happened to be lying there for the taking, perhaps you’d be kind enough to let me know. It might, incidentally, just be in your own interests to do so, if you get me.”

Sloan and Crosby went back to the study. Celia Faine was sitting by the fire. She smiled at him. “Here’s the inspector again. How did you find Marwin’s little criminals?”

“Guilty, I hope,” said Ranby. “I don’t think there was any doubt, was there, that they got that habit?”

“None at all, sir. They admitted it.”

“Their idea of a good lark, I suppose.”

“That’s right, sir, but they say they didn’t take the glasses—the ones that the guy was wearing, remember?”

“Yes, Inspector, I remember. I’m not ever likely to forget, but I don’t know who can help you there.”

“You can.”

“Me?” Ranby looked quite startled. “How?”

“By telling me who could have had access to your cowsheds during the day.”

“Cowsheds?” His brow cleared. “The guy—of course. Why, anyone, I suppose. There are all those who go in at milking and to clean and those who teach on milk handling and the Milk Marketing Board people. Any number in one day.”

“The sheds are never locked?”

“I doubt if there’s even a key,” said Ranby. “There’s nothing to steal, you see.”

“So anyone could go in there at any time of the day without it occasioning any interest?”

“Anyone from the Institute, of course. I don’t know about outsiders. The vet’s here often enough, and odd Inspectors—Ministry ones, I mean.”

“I see, sir. Thank you. I think that’s all I need to know for the present. Goodnight, miss, goodnight, sir— sorry to have to disturb you so late…” At the door, he turned and looked back. “These students of yours— are they allowed out into the village at all?”

“Oh, yes, Inspector, but they must be in by nine on a weekday and half past ten at the weekend. That’s early, I know, but we have an early start here. If they’re going to be dairy farmers they might as well get used to it now, that’s the way we look at it.”

Hobbett lived in a depressed-looking cottage just off Cullingoak High Street. Neither he nor his wife were noticeably welcoming to Sloan and Crosby. They were led through into the kitchen. It was not clean. A pile of dirty dishes had been taken as far as the sink but not washed. Parts of both an old loaf and a new one lay on the table with some more dirty cups. There were two chairs by the kitchen grate. Mrs. Hobbett subsided into one of these which immediately demonstrated itself to be a rocking chair. She went backwards and forwards, never taking her eyes off the two policemen.

“Just a few more questions, Hobbett,” said Sloan mildly.

“Well?”

“We’re interested in this key of yours to the Convent.”

“What about it?”

“Where do you keep it for a start?”

Hobbett jerked his thumb over towards the back door. “There, on a hook.”

“Is it there now?”

“You’ve got eyes, haven’t you? That’s it, all right.”

“Is it always there?”

“Except when it’s in my pocket.”

“You never lend it to anyone?”

“Me? What for? Catch people wanting to go in one of them places? Never. And it’s my opinion that some of them that’s inside would a lot rather be outside.”

“Nevertheless, you always lock up before you go every night?”

Hobbett scowled. “Yes, I do, mate. Every night, like I said.”

Sloan was quite silent on the way back to Berebury, and Crosby couldn’t decide whether he was brooding or dozing.

“Hobbett’s the best bet,” said Sloan suddenly.

Brooding, after all. “Yes, sir.”

“He could have got into that garden room without it seeming odd and taken the habit down to the cellar. Then all he has to do is to leave the door unlocked when he goes home.”

“Doesn’t that dragon at the gate—”

“Polycarp.”

“Doesn’t she check up on that door?”

“No need, Crosby. The door from the cellar to the Convent proper is always kept locked. The Reverend Mother said so.”

“Why didn’t he just take the habit, then?”

“Him? Catch him doing anything that’ll lose him that nice soft number of a job he’s got? Don’t be daft. Look at it this way. All he has to do is to shift an old habit from that garden room—or whatever you call it—to his little lobby place. Nothing criminal in that.”

“Then give the key to those lads?”

“Give nothing, man. He just forgets to lock the door, that’s all. Nothing criminal in that, either. ‘Ever so sorry, Sister. It must have slipped my mind. Won’t happen again.’ That’s if they ever get to know, which they stood a good chance of not doing. Besides, that way Tewn, Parker and Whatshisname—”

“Bullen.”

“—Bullen have all the fun of going inside themselves. Much more daring, blast them. Heroes, that’s probably what they think they are. Brave men. They’ve been inside a Convent. Something to tell their grandchildren about. I wonder what Hobbett got out of it?”

“A few drinks?” suggested Crosby.

“And,” said Sloan, still pursuing his own train of thought, “he didn’t think he would be doing any harm because he knew they couldn’t get any further.”

“Because the cellar door was always kept locked,” supplied Crosby. “I say, sir, that’s a point, isn’t it? I mean, who opened the cellar door in the first place?”

Sloan grunted. “We might make a detective out of you yet, Crosby. Who do you think opened it?”

Crosby subsided. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Neither do I,” retorted Sloan briefly. “The important thing is that it was opened from the inside.”

“That narrows the field a bit, sir, doesn’t it?”

“Does it, Crosby?”

“Well, you couldn’t have just anybody walking about inside, could you?”

“No.”

“Well, then, sir…”

“You’re forgetting Caesar’s wife, Crosby.”

Crosby doubled-declutched to give himself time to think. “Who, sir?”

“Caesar’s wife. She was above suspicion.”

12

« ^ »

In the beginning Saturday morning resolved itself into routine.

Harold Cartwright had a large mail delivered to him at The Bull, and spent many more than the usual three minutes on the telephone to London. Mrs. Briggs at the Cullingoak Post Office was hard put to it to keep up with his calls as well as serve her usual Saturday morning customers.

That part of the Agricultural Institute on early call got up and began to go about its business, regretting being born to the land and married to the land, wishing that it led urban lives when it wouldn’t have had to get up early ever and not get up at all on Saturdays.

Life at the Convent proceeded very much as usual. Sister Gertrude woke the Community at the appointed time and they began to work their way through their immemorial, unchanging round. With one difference. Each Sister had to write on a piece of paper her secular name and address, date of profession and precise location immediately after supper on Wednesday evening. Only old Mother St. Thérèse, to whom all days were the same, found this difficult.

It was routine, too, at the Berebury Police Station to begin with. Superintendent Leeyes sent for Sloan as soon as he got to his office. He was at his worst in the morning. That, too, was routine.

“Seen the papers?” Leeyes indicated a truly sepulchral photograph of Sister Polycarp behind the grille, caught in the camera flash with her eyes shut and mouth open. Under this was a much more sophisticated picture taken from a long distance with a telephoto lens of the outside of the Convent through the trees. The effect was sinister in the extreme.

“Pursuing your enquiries, Sloan, that’s what they say you’re doing.”

“Yes, sir.” Sloan bent over to read the report. He was too good a policeman to scorn any facts newspaper reporters might dig out. Besides, they were free men by comparison—no Judges’ Rules for them.

There wasn’t very much in the paper. The brief news that a nun (unnamed) had died in the Convent of St. Anselm at Cullingoak (short historical note on the Order and its Foundress—see any reference book) once the family seat of the Faines (three paragraphs on the Faine family straight from the nearest Guide to the Landed Gentry), and what they were pleased to call a startling coincidence—the burning of a nun as a guy the very next night—at the nearby Agricultural Institute (run by the Calleshire County Council, Principal, M. Ranby, B. Sc, formerly Deputy Head of West Laming School). Mr. Ranby, said the report, was not available for comment at the Institute yesterday. “Wise man,” thought Sloan. Then followed a highly circumstantial account of the burning of the guy by “a student” who preferred not to give his name. The story wound up with a few generalisations about student rags and the information that an inquest was to be held on Monday morning next in the Guildhall, Berebury. Sloan straightened up.

“Could be worse.”

Leeyes grunted. He did not like the Press. “Wait till you’ve seen the Sundays. Especially if they get hold of this time business.”

“Or the trio who got the habit. A pretty picture they would make. By the way, sir, it was Bullen and Tewn’s footprints Crosby found. He’s just checked. Bullen stood in one spot under the rhododendrons while Tewn went down in the cellar for the habit. That’s what they told us, and the footprints tie up with that.”

“Not Harold Cartwright’s?”

“No, sir.”

“Can’t understand what the devil he’s doing here, Sloan.”

“I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s working,” said Sloan. “I’ve got a man keeping an eye on him. Lots and lots of paper work, telephone calls, tape recorders, the lot.”

“He’ll be lucky if he gets anything done that way. I never do. Quiet thinking is what gets things done, Sloan. More things are wrought by—er—quiet thought than you would believe.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Logical thought, of course, Sloan.”

“Of course, sir.”

“There’s one aspect of this case I’ve been thinking about a lot…”

“Sir?”

“This weapon that Dabbe talks about…”

Sloan nodded. “He said it was something smooth and round and heavy.”

“That describes a paperweight and a cannon ball,” said the superintendent testily. “We haven’t found it yet, have we?”

“Not yet, sir.” Sloan liked the “we.”

“We instituted a search on Thursday morning but found nothing. That Sister Peter wasn’t what you could call a good witness. Too worked up for one thing. Swore she showed us everywhere she’s been, and that wasn’t very exciting, but no sign of any blunt instruments.”

“It must have been there, Sloan.”

“It must have been there when she touched it, sir. Crosby and I didn’t see it. We went back for another look afterwards when she’d gone off to tell her troubles to somebody else, but we couldn’t pick any lead up anywhere.”

“Narrows the field a bit, doesn’t it?” said Superintendent Leeyes, just as Crosby had done.

“I don’t see why,” said Sloan obstinately. “Someone had only to know what it—whatever it was—was there, hadn’t they? Comes to the same thing.”

Leeyes pounced. “Ah, so you think it’s an outside job, do you?”

Sloan shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. Not yet. I’ve an open mind.”

“Have you?” Leeyes glared at him. “I hope that you don’t mean an empty one.”

“No, sir. On the contrary, the possibilities are still infinite.”

The concept of infinity had already come up in the superintendent’s Logic course. It was now a word he treated with respect and no longer understood. He let the inspector get as far as the door. “Sloan…”

“Sir?”

“Do you know what they make nuns’ habits from?”

“Wool, I suppose, sir.”

“Ah, but what sort of wool?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

“From black sheep, Sloan.”

The day was still relatively young when Sloan and Crosby reached the Convent. The Mother Superior and Sister Lucy received them as if it was already half over. The Mother Superior handed him a list of names.

“Thank you, marm. I feel we need all the information we can get in this matter.”

“Such knowledge as I have is, of course, at your disposal, Inspector.”

“First, marm, I have some news for you. Mr. Ranby has traced the culprits of Thursday night’s incident— three of his students were responsible for making the guy. He intends to bring them over this morning to apologise in person.”

She inclined her head graciously. “There is no need for him to go to such trouble, but if he wishes it… Has their escapade any bearing on Sister Anne’s death, would you say?”

“If,” countered Sloan carefully, “she had happened upon them in the grounds or in the Convent itself it might have—but I think it unlikely.”

“So do I,” said the Mother Superior firmly. “Sister Anne—God rest her soul—would have reported such intruders to me immediately. I do not like to think that the students would have reacted to discovery with murder.”

“No, marm, nor do I.”

They faced each other in the small Parlour. Irrelevantly it spun through Sloan’s mind that he had never seen such fine skin on two women before. The older, more flaccid face of the Mother Superior reminded him of cream, the younger, firmer skin of Sister Lucy of the peaches that go with it. He remembered reading somewhere that good skin—like a good car—only needed washing with water. He must make a note to tell his wife about their complexions.

“Marm, there is a question that I must put to you.”

“Yes, Inspector?”

“Do you have anyone here who would rather not be here?”

“I do not think so.”

“No one who would—er—figuratively speaking, of course—like to leap over the wall?”

“No, Inspector. We are a Community here in the true sense. I do not think any Sister could reach a state of wanting to be released from her vows without the Community becoming aware of it. That is so, Sister Lucy, is it not?”

“Yes, Mother. It is something that cannot be hidden.”

“Likes and dislikes?” put in Sloan quickly.

The Mother Superior smiled faintly. “Neither are permitted here.”

“You realise, marm,” he said more crisply, “that any—shall we say, disaffection—would be pertinent to my enquiry, and that my enquiry must go on until it determines how Sister Anne died.”

She inclined her head. “Certainly, Inspector, but if we had any disaffected Sister here, or even one unable to subdue her own strong likes or dislikes, she would have been sent away. There are fewer locks in a Convent than the popular Press would have one believe.”

Sloan looked up suddenly. “Has anyone left recently?”

“Yes, as it happens they have.”

“Who?” He should have been told this before.

She looked at him. “I cannot see that the departure of a Sister from the Convent before the unhappy events of the past week can pertain to your enquiry.”

“I must be the judge of that.”

She gestured acquiescence. “Sister Lucy shall find her secular name for you. It was Sister Bertha.”

“When did she leave?”

“About three weeks ago.”

“Where did she go?”

“I do not know.”

“You don’t know?” echoed Sloan in spite of himself.

“It was not properly our concern to enquire,” said the Mother Superior. “She felt that she could not continue in the religious life and asked to be released from her vows. This was done through the usual channels and she left.”

“Just like that?” asked Sloan stupidly.

“Just like that, Inspector.”

He pulled himself together. “Had she any special connection with Sister Anne? Was she a friend of hers, for instance?”

“Friendship is not permitted in a Convent. We are all Sisters here. She would have known Sister Anne to just the same extent as we all knew Sister Anne. No less and no more.”

“And you knew she wanted to leave—as a Community, I mean?”

“Yes, we knew she wanted to leave.”

“If, marm,” he persisted, “Sister Anne had been in a similar frame of mind, do you think you would have known?”

“Yes, Inspector,” she said with certainty. “You probably do not realise how close are the lives we lead here. Private life, in the usual sense, does not exist. One therefore becomes very aware of the thoughts, not to say the spiritual condition, of one’s Sisters. It is inevitable, and often does not even require formulation into words. Sister Anne, I do assure you, was not contemplating renouncing her vows.”

Sloan and Crosby went back to Berebury Police Station. Sloan spread out on his desk the list of names that the Reverend Mother had given him. They had barely sat down when the telephone beside Sloan rang.

“Yes. Speaking. Who?” It wasn’t a local call.

“Jenkins,” said a voice. “You rang me in London yesterday, remember? About a family called Cartwright. You still interested?”

“I am. Go on.”

“I think you’re on to something, Inspector. Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons have made a move.”

“Have they?” asked Sloan cautiously. “What sort of a move?”

“Towards going public. It seems, and I think this will interest you—that they have had everything prepared for some time.”

“Just waiting for someone to say the word?”

“So it would seem,” said the London man. “These things take time, you know. Bankers to be instructed, brokers to be interested and so forth, to say nothing of organising some useful advance publicity. Sounds as if they’re going to chance their arm about the publicity build-up and go all out for speed. They’ll get a good bit from the Sundays, of course. They’ll be laying that on now.”

“How much speed do they want?”

“According to my informant, and he’s usually reliable,” said Jenkins, “applications will open at ten o’clock next Thursday morning and close at one minute past. I don’t know at what sort of figure but I dare say they’ll be over-subscribed. They’re a well-organised firm.”

“You can say that again,” said Sloan dryly.

“What’s that? Oh, yes, I was forgetting your end.”

“So they’ll be a public company at one minute past ten next Thursday morning?”

“That’s it. Provided they deposit the necessary Articles of Association, seals and what-have-you with the Registrar and comply with all the rules and regulations and keep up with their paper work.”

“Oh, they will,” Sloan assured him. “They will. I don’t think we need worry about that.”

“Going to put in for some?” asked Jenkins.

“Some what?”

“Shares.”

Sloan laughed. “I’m not a betting man.”

“There’s no risk,” said the other seriously. “Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons must be one of the safest firms in the industry.”

“I wasn’t thinking about their carbons.”

“No, no, of course not. There’s just one thing, Inspector, though. If you’ve got any reservations about the company and the City gets to hear about them before Thursday it’ll cost someone a great deal of money.”

“And after Thursday?”

“It’ll still cost a great deal of money but different people will lose.”

“And that’s business?”

“That’s business, Inspector.”

“I think I’ll stick to police work.”

“I should,” agreed Jenkins. “Much cleaner.”

Sloan put down the telephone. “Curiouser and curiouser, Crosby. That needs a bit of thinking about.” He smoothed out the list of nuns for the second time. “Have you got the name of the one that got away?”

Crosby produced his notebook. “Miss Eileen Lome, no fixed address…”

“Surely…”

“Last known address, then, sir.”

“That’s more like it.”

“144, Frederick Street, Luston. Sister Bertha that was.”

“We must see her, Crosby, just in case she can tell us anything.”

“Yes, sir.” The telephone rang again. Crosby answered it, and then handed over the receiver. “For you, sir, I think. I can’t quite hear who it is—it’s a bit faint like.”

“Inspector Sloan here. Who is that?”

“The Convent of St. Anselm, Inspector. It’s Sister Gertrude speaking. Can you come quickly, Inspector, please? It’s Sister Ninian. She was walking through the shrubbery…” the voice faded away.

“What happened to her?” asked Sloan urgently.

“Hallo, Inspector, are you there? This is Sister Gertrude from the Convent. It’s about Sister Ninian…”

“I heard that bit. What has happened to Sister Ninian?”

“Nothing, Inspector, not to her. To somebody else…”

“What has happened?” shouted Sloan.

“Another accident,” came the voice of Sister Gertrude distantly.

“Listen carefully, Sister. Keep the lower part of the telephone in front of your lips while you are talking and tell me who the accident has happened to.”

The answer came so loudly that he jumped.

“We don’t know who he is.”

“He? You mean it’s a man?”

“That’s right, Inspector. He’s dead in the shrubbery as I said. Sister Ninian found him.”

“This is very important, Sister. What sort of a man? Can you describe him?”

“Oh, yes, Inspector, easily. Young, with curly hair, oh—and a few freckles. Do you know him?”

Sloan groaned aloud.

13

« ^ »

It was a subdued Polycarp who opened the grille and then the Parlour door, and a white and slightly shaking Sister Lucy who greeted them there. A young, silent Sister was with her.

“Mother said to take you straight to the shrubbery, Inspector, as soon as you arrived.” The religious decorum was still there but it was wavering a little in the interests of speed. “It’s quickest if you come through the house and out through the garden room.”

She led the way through the building, past the magnificent staircase, down the dim corridor where Sister Anne had died and through a door into the room of the flower vases.

She turned a drawn face to him. “We don’t know what happened at all, Inspector. Or when.”

He nodded without slackening his pace.

“You probably haven’t met Sister Ninian, Inspector. She’s one of our older Sisters. She is very fond of gardening and she often takes a turn through the grounds to keep an eye on things. She was just walking along this path when she turned down here.”