The Salisbury Manuscript

Canon Selby’s House

It was easily enough explained, once Tom had got over his first surprise at seeing Helen — his surprise and delight. For it was Canon Eric Selby who had, indirectly, caused Helen to come down from London on a morning train. He was aware that Tom worked for a London firm but hadn’t known that the firm was called Scott, Lye amp;Mackenzie. Many years ago, as Selby hinted to Tom on their cab ride from Salisbury station, he had considered the law as a career before deciding to go into the Church. He was a friend of Alfred Scott, Helen’s father, a good enough friend to have become godfather to Helen. Indeed, she had spent some of her childhood time in Salisbury.

When Canon Selby discovered that Tom was an employee of his late friend’s firm, and apparently distressed at the young man’s predicament, he had telegraphed to his only contact, the formidable Mrs Scott, although without being aware of Helen Scott’s friendship with Tom.

Tom didn’t know — nor did he spend time trying to find out in the first confusion of his meeting with Helen — exactly how events had unfolded when the telegram had arrived at the house in Athelstan Road, Highbury. Whether Helen had informed her mother that she intended to travel down to Salisbury by the first available train, whether she had left with Mrs Scott’s blessing, whether she had slipped out of the house undetected by her mother (a more romantic idea, surely), none of this mattered much. What was important was that Helen was here with him, in Fisherton Gaol.

She sat, upright, slim, bright-eyed and fresh-faced, on the chair which had so recently been occupied by the solid form of Inspector Foster. Mrs Griffiths produced further supplies of coffee as well as some home-made cakes and generally fussed over their lady visitor. A red-letter day for her, it must be, with a lady and a gentleman from London brought together in the prime apartment of Fisherton Gaol.

Once they’d got the preliminaries out of the way, the circumstances under which Helen had discovered what was happening to Tom and her speedy journey from Waterloo to Salisbury, Helen gazed appreciatively round the sparsely furnished room with its whitewashed walls. Her gaze suggested she was visiting a grand house, even a palace. As Tom had half foreseen, she seemed excited by his incarceration. Not, he hoped, the fact that he was languishing in prison under temporary suspicion of a murder but that he was here with her and she was here with him, and wasn’t this all a new experience, a dramatic experience for them both. She said as much.

‘Except that you can leave at any time,’ he said.

‘Oh, Tom, don’t,’ she said, reaching out to grasp his hand.

‘I don’t know why I’m here.’

‘They say that a man was murdered.’

‘There was a murder but I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Dear Tom, of course you didn’t. But you must tell me all about it. Tell me now.’

So Tom described to Helen almost everything which had happened since his arrival nearly three days ago in Salisbury. He talked about his meetings with Felix Slater and the discussion of the Salisbury manuscript. He described his trip to see Percy Slater. He recounted the events of the previous evening at Venn House. How the place had seemed to be eerily empty. How he’d suspected that something was wrong because of the open front door, how he’d discovered Slater’s body, how a policeman called Foster had materialized at the entrance to the study and taken him for a murderer and how it was all an absurd mistake and Foster knew this and promised Tom he’d soon be released from this gaol, to which he’d been taken for his own safety rather than because Foster genuinely suspected him of a crime.

He left out a few details. He didn’t mention, for example, his conversation with Henry Cathcart and the man’s connection with his father. This didn’t seem relevant to the death of Canon Slater. Nor did he say much about Amelia Slater, beyond a reference or two. This was probably relevant but Tom was oddly reluctant to talk of the Canon’s wife, now a widow.

He was gratified when Helen made appropriate responses. She sighed and looked aghast at frequent points in his story. She wiped away what looked like a tear. She rose from her hard prison chair a couple of times and came round the table to hug him as he sat on his hard prison chair. Tom began to see that there were advantages to being an innocent victim.

Things were taking a turn for the better. And they took a better turn still when Inspector Foster came back to announce that Tom was now free to leave the prison. The Inspector looked admiringly at Helen, who swiftly explained why she was there. Tom asked the policeman whether he’d made any progress.

‘You asked before, Mr Ansell, about some papers belonging to Canon Slater. I have now established that they were kept in a chest in his study. The chest is empty. What did it contain, sir? Your attitude earlier today suggested to me that you knew something about it.’

‘There was a memoir written by George Slater, Felix’s father,’ said Tom, ‘and I think there were other items in the chest, loose papers maybe. I had only a brief glimpse of the memoir-book. It is of interest to the Slaters but I don’t believe it would mean much to anyone outside the family.’

Tom didn’t add that the book was the principal reason why he’d come to Salisbury. But he couldn’t resist saying, ‘If things have been taken, doesn’t that show the murderer is the same thief who’s been working in other houses?’

‘Possibly, possibly. Though there was no sign the house had been broken into.’

‘Anyway, I haven’t got any papers. You are welcome to search my room at The Side of Beef,’ said Tom, reflecting that Foster had probably done just that already.

‘I have been taking formal testimony from some of the household, Mr Ansell,’ said Foster, not responding directly to Tom’s invitation. ‘You were seen making your way to Venn House by Mrs Slater and by Bessie the maid after they had found the body of Canon Slater. They passed you in West Walk going in the opposite direction.’

‘A pity they did not say so earlier.’

‘They were understandably too distressed to speak last night. You should be grateful to Mrs Slater for positively identifying you, for all that it was dark and foggy. Besides, it is always possible that a murderer may return to the scene of his crime. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, Mr Ansell. And, as you said, you had no motive to kill Canon Slater. Nevertheless I must still request you remain in Salisbury for a few days more.’

‘How is Mrs Slater?’ said Tom, feeling guilty that he’d criticized her. It was her witness that she’d seen him yesterday evening going towards (rather than away from) the house that had apparently exonerated him. That, and the absence of any motive.

‘Under the circumstances, she is quite composed,’ said Foster. ‘Now I suggest that you leave with this delightful young lady. Where are you lodging, Miss Scott?’

‘With my godfather, Canon Selby. I have already left my luggage there. He told me where Tom was, ah, staying. I too will remain in Salisbury for a time. I have pleasant memories of the town, Inspector, from when I was young. It must be nice to live here.’

This was the right remark to make. Foster tugged at his side-whiskers and beamed. He ushered them through the door. Tom and Helen were seen out of Fisherton Gaol by Mr and Mrs Griffiths as if they’d been regular visitors. The only thing missing was the hope that they might return again soon.

The day was clear and bright. They were not far from the town centre and The Side of Beef. Tom’s first wish was to go back to his hotel room and change his shirt. He might have spent only a short time in the best apartment of Fisherton Gaol but he still felt the prison taint clinging to him.

So, while Helen sat in the lobby, Tom quickly washed and changed upstairs. Jenkins seemed surprised to see the couple. The landlord knew what had happened — hardly surprising, everyone in the town must know of the brutal murder of one of the residentiary canons — but he avoided referring to it directly, instead wringing his hands and saying, ‘Terrible, sir, terrible, that event in the close last night,’ while casting sidelong glances at Helen. Jenkins was presumably aware of the fact that Tom had spent the night elsewhere (and in the county gaol) but, if so, was too tactful to mention it.

Before they left The Side of Beef to go to Canon Selby’s house, Tom told Jenkins that he’d be requiring the room for a few days longer. He was going to add that he was staying in Salisbury to assist the police with their enquiries — which was true, more or less — but decided against giving the landlord that pleasure.

Eric Selby did not live in the cathedral close but nearby in New Street. It was the afternoon and the town was bustling. Helen was pleased to be back in a town she remembered from childhood. She was pleased to be with Tom. She was pleased with life because she was hearing about a murder at a safe remove. She looped her arm through his, and he kissed her cheek, glad and grateful that she’d left London to see him in gaol.

‘Riding to the rescue like a knight on a white charger,’ she said. ‘Only that is the wrong way round, since it should be you, Thomas Ansell, who comes to my rescue.’

‘We’ll see,’ he said, more cheerful than he’d been for several days.

‘Tom, I have an idea.’

‘Anything.’

‘Inspector Foster did not seem very glad to be releasing you.’

‘Perhaps no policeman likes seeing a man go from gaol before he’s caught the real culprit. Or perhaps he doesn’t think I am innocent of Canon Slater’s murder and it’s more that he doesn’t have enough evidence to hold me any longer.’

‘Well, in that case,’ said Helen, ‘we should be helping him to track down the person who actually did it. That would put you absolutely in the clear and we would also be bringing an evildoer to justice.’

‘Helen, you are not reading — or writing — one of your sensation novels now. This is real life. A man has been killed. A household has been turned upside down. I’ve spent my first and, I hope, last night incarcerated in a gaol. I’m not sure I want to get any more involved.’

‘You are involved, Tom, like it or not. Canon Slater was a client of your firm — our firm, I should say, since my father was one of the partners. And the book you came to Salisbury to collect has been stolen, most likely by the same person who murdered the unfortunate Canon. So I say you are involved in this affair.’

‘This isn’t like spying on your neighbours,’ said Tom, thinking of Helen’s speculations about the woman who lived across the road on Athelstan Avenue, and trying to shift the argument in a different direction. ‘There are dangers here.’

‘Telling me there are dangers will have the opposite effect to the one you intend. And I don’t spy, Mr Ansell, I observe and draw conclusions.’

‘Or make up stories.’

Helen uncoupled her arm from Tom’s.

‘If that’s how you feel, I begin to regret that I came racing down to Salisbury.’

‘No, no, it’s a good idea in principle, Helen. But I’m not sure how we can proceed in practice with tracking down a murderer or helping the police.’

‘We can begin by talking to my uncle, Canon Eric Selby. He has lived here forever and he knows what goes on in the town.’

‘Uncle? I thought he was your godfather.’

‘He is my godfather. But he told me to call him Uncle when I was little and asked him one day how I should address him. He said he hadn’t any nieces while for my part I hadn’t any uncles, so it all seemed to fit. He is quite avuncular, don’t you think?’

The avuncular Canon Selby seemed genuinely pleased to see Tom Ansell in company with his god-daughter. He commented on the coincidence that he should have been friends with a partner in the firm of which Tom was now a member, and the greater coincidence that Tom should be ‘paying his addresses’ (as he put it) to Helen. He passed lightly over the circumstances under which he’d last seen Tom as he was being escorted away from Venn House, and said, ‘I don’t expect you slept much last night, Tom, if I may call you that now. I know that I did not. It is dreadful to think of what happened to Felix. It is frightening to think there is a madman on the loose.’

‘A madman?’

‘Why yes. Who but a madman could have done this?’

The three of them — Eric Selby, Tom and Helen — were sitting in the drawing room of the Canon’s trim house in New Street. There was a Mrs Selby, a small woman who had made a single appearance to say hello and then disappeared with a bird-like rapidity. A maid served them tea. Talk of a madman went oddly with the tea. Tom hadn’t eaten since breakfast at Fisherton Gaol and his appetite wasn’t really satisfied by sandwiches (cucumber or anchovy) and little cakes. He promised himself a good meal that evening at The Side of Beef. Now Helen, in between delicate bites at her cucumber sandwich, started to quiz her godfather about Felix Slater.

‘I am sorry for his death although it is no secret that I did not see eye to eye with Felix,’ said Selby. ‘In fact, we had an argument of sorts on the day of his death.’

Helen asked him why they’d argued. It was the sort of question which Tom could not have put, or at least not so directly.

‘Lay people often assume that men of the cloth are cut from the same cloth,’ said Selby. ‘but we are not. We’re as different as men are from one another in any other walk of life, and although we may be obliged to love our neighbours, there is no verse in the Bible that says we have to get on with them. Felix seemed to be a spare, dry man. But like a lot of men with that appearance, he had passions. One of them was for digging into the past, for disturbing the dust of centuries. There is nothing wrong with that although I fear he sometimes neglected his duties in pursuit of his passion, his obsession I might say. Felix’s example and encouragement had turned the mind of one of the cathedral sextons, so that the poor fellow spent every spare moment looking for buried treasure or relics.’

Tom recalled the newspaper article which Henry Cathcart had shown him. About a sexton who’d disappeared. Canon Selby himself had been quoted in the article.

‘Now this man North has vanished, gone goodness knows where. And I held Felix partly to blame, not for the disappearance of course but for the mania which seized him beforehand. The fellow was a good and honest worker until Canon Slater infected him with his notions of disinterring the past. I am afraid that I taxed Felix with this very subject on the day he died. Of course, I must now regret that I spoke so directly to him.’

He didn’t sound very regretful. Tom wondered whether there had been more to the argument than Eric Selby was claiming. He said, ‘Canon Selby, do you remember yesterday evening when Inspector Foster arrived at Venn House and I was being put under — when I was being escorted away by him, do you remember hearing someone whisper my name and then “he did it”?’

Selby brushed some cake crumbs off his front. He thought before speaking. ‘I might have heard that.’

‘Was it a man or a woman?’

‘I’m not sure. Did I even hear those words, now I come to think about it? Or was it just a idea hanging in the air, as it were? It did look bad for you, Tom.’

Tom didn’t need any reminding of how bad it looked.

‘So you have no idea who might have committed this murder, sir?’ he said.

‘Even if I did, I would not say. It is not for me to go passing on suspicions, supposing I have any. But I have no idea. A madman, it must have been. Or a burglar surprised in the act and resorting to violence.’

And that seemed to be the general conclusion in the town: that Canon Felix Slater had been killed by an intruder, who was either bent on robbery or, more simply, a homicidal maniac. Certainly, this was the version reported on the front page of the Gazette, which Tom saw on his return to the hotel. Under the headline in large type Dreadful Murder in Cathedral Close was a story which was long on speculation but short on fact. There was a description of how the body of the distinguished cleric had been found by the housemaid and the alarm raised by Mrs Amelia Slater. Death had been produced by a single blow to the back of the neck. The weapon was a flint spearhead, ironically (the newspaper’s word) one of the primitive implements which Canon Slater collected as a pastime. Then there was a paragraph about a burglar or a madman or a combination of the two, necessarily brief because it was all speculation. There was a reference to the other, unexplained robberies in the close. Apart from Mrs Slater, the only people named in the piece were Walter, nephew to the deceased and assistant curate at St Luke’s, and Percy Slater, brother of Felix and owner of the Slater family home at Downton. Of the others on the scene, including Tom, there was no mention.

Inspector Foster was quoted as claiming that the Salisbury constabulary were actively searching for the intruder, for ‘the person or persons who have done this terrible deed’, as if the police could or should be doing anything else. Foster was a shrewd, experienced man. Tom had learned to respect him after a couple of encounters. Tom recalled that Foster had been sceptical about the idea of an intruder. There’d been no sign of a break-in at Venn House, he said, chiming with Tom’s conclusion that Slater was attacked by someone he knew. But, for the newspaper, had Foster deliberately spread the story of an outsider so as to lull the fears of the real killer? A killer who came from within Slater’s own circle of family or neighbours?

Tom had left Helen at her godfather’s house. Selby had pressed him to stay for supper but Tom was tired and, besides, he sensed that the Canon was looking forward to having his god-daughter to himself. He and Helen were to meet the next morning. So Tom enjoyed a good supper at The Side of Beef and retired early to his room. After the excitements of the previous day and the restless night he’d spent at Fisherton Gaol, he slept well, surprisingly.

As for the others involved in this case, those in Felix Slater’s circle of family and acquaintances, how did they sleep on this second night after the murder?

Henry Cathcart, as usual, went to visit Constance in her sick room during the evening. He might have been distracted but she scarcely noticed. She had spent much of the day poring over the news of the terrible murder with Grace, who read and reread the front page of the Gazette to her invalid patient. Constance’s normally pallid complexion was flushed, more from the excitement of the murder than the stuffiness of the room. Her large dark eyes were wider than ever. She was too caught up in the drama and outrage over the death of a cleric to make any disparaging comment about Amelia Slater. She was more lively than Henry had seen her for a long time.

Cathcart did not reveal to his wife that he had actually been on the scene when the police arrived at Venn House. If that news had come to light — it might have done, you never knew, Salisbury was not a large town and gossip was rife — then he was ready with a story. A story which was half true: that he had gone to the Canon’s residence on the night of the murder so as to return to Amelia Slater some designs and catalogues which they had been discussing. But the subject didn’t come up. Constance was more concerned about their safety, or rather her safety, with a madman on the loose. Henry did his best to reassure her. He would personally make sure the doors and windows in the house were fast before going to bed. And Grace slept in the next room, didn’t she?

Then he withdrew to his own bedroom. He could not help thinking of Felix Slater’s death nor of the fact that Amelia was now a widow. By coincidence, the pair of them had been looking at pictures of mourning outfits very recently. What was it Amelia had said? (But he didn’t have to struggle to remember, her words were imprinted on his brain.) Every woman dreams of how she will look as a widow, Henry. How had Henry Cathcart interpreted Amelia’s remark? Had he asked himself whether Amelia meant a ‘dream’in the sense of an idle fantasy or speculation, or a ‘dream’ in the sense of longing?

Amelia Slater really was dreaming. She saw her husband slumped forward over his desk, the spear-head protruding from the back of his neck. She groaned and moved uneasily in her sleep. The doctor had given her something to soothe her nerves and something else to help her sleep. But she could not escape her dreams, which swirled with light and ghastly colour. In the dream, her husband’s study was illuminated not by gaslight but by the unforgiving glare of day. The blood from his wound flowed across the surface of the desk, soaking into papers and blotters, running down the sides and pooling on the carpet. Trying to keep clear of the blood, Amelia reached out to finger the sharp flint. Her fingers touched the makeshift weapon. For an instant, she was undecided whether to pluck it out or even to push it further in so as to seal up the wound. But the flint-head was fixed deep, the damage was already done.

There was no going back. And there was no more time either. The blood was lapping at her shoes and then at the hem of her skirt. She was wearing a dark fabric — crape, bombazine, she couldn’t remember — and the blood did not show at first. But she felt the added weight of it dragging her down as if she was wading in water. She must escape before she was pulled under by the tide of blood. She turned towards the door. Before she could reach it, the door opened. She wanted to shout out a warning to whoever was coming in, that they should beware of what they might see, beware of the taint of blood. But it was too late. A figure stood just outside the doorway. To her surprise she recognized the outline of Walter. She could not make out his expression, could not see whether he was angry or sad or happy at the scene in front of him.

There were other individuals in Venn House too. The maids Bessie and Mary, for example, and Eaves the gardener (although he did not sleep inside the house but in a little store-house where his tools and other gardening equipment were kept). But as for how they slept and whether they suffered from bad dreams, as for what they thought and felt about the murder of their employer, Canon Felix Slater, none of these things is really any of our concern. They were only servants, after all.

Walter Slater was sleeping as uneasily as Amelia. He was not in his comfortable bedroom in Venn House. He had not slept there on the night of the murder and he was not sleeping there now. Instead, Walter had retreated to his church, St Luke’s. He was in the belltower. He had made himself a kind of nest out of old vestments and pieces of curtain and he was curled up in a corner of the ringing room, which was reached by a spiral staircase running up from the corner of the transept. It was a comfortless spot. The loops of the bellropes dangled down like so many nooses. The room was cold despite having only slit windows. But it was a place where Walter Slater knew he should not be disturbed at least until the Sunday morning. There was a creaking door at the bottom of the spiral stairs, so Walter would be alerted if anyone was coming up to the ringing room. No one knew he was sleeping in the church. Walter had managed to carry on with his usual duties during the day following the murder of Felix, and anyone observing his battered, unshaven look and his crumpled clothes would have attributed them to the shock of what had occurred at Venn House. Walter might have been capable of attending to his work during the day but he could not face sleeping under the dead man’s roof.

Percy Slater had now returned to Northwood House. He had remained in Salisbury on the night of his brother’s murder, staying in Venn House. Percy had stayed not so much because there was anything he could do — had he been so minded — in terms of comforting the widow or consoling others in the household or helping in any investigation, but because the fog was too thick to allow him and his driver Fawkes to get back to Downton. Now he was back and sitting in the smoking room where he had greeted Tom Ansell a couple of days earlier. It was nearly midnight, the fireplace was full of ash, the bottle in front of him all but empty, and the house cold and clammy. The rest of his establishment — if it wasn’t absurd call two people, Fawkes and Nan, an establishment — had long since retired for the night. Percy knew that he too would have to stir himself sooner or later and plod along the flagged passageway to his room. But he did not shift from the armchair by the dead fire.

Instead, he thought of his late brother. He had never liked Felix, regarding him as a sanctimonious hypocrite. He asked himself what he felt now that the holy Felix was no more. The answer was, he did not feel a great deal. There was no point in pretending to a piety that didn’t exist in him. He was, however, sorry about Walter. Not so much that Walter should have, like him, been so violently bereaved, but that he had gone to see the young man on the afternoon before Felix’s death. The visit had been the result of an impulse, a disastrous impulse. He recalled the look of shock on Walter’s face after they’d had their quiet chat in the gloom of the cathedral, the way Walter had gripped his knee as if he could not believe the other’s words, the way that Walter had sprung to his feet and rushed off into the gloom of the aisle. Percy hadn’t seen him again, or rather he had had only a brief glimpse of him when they were all crowding about the porch of Venn House, watching the lawyer fellow being taken away by the police. Walter had not looked well but sick and pale. Hardly surprising. Percy supposed that none of them looked any different.

Percy wondered about the circumstances leading up to Felix’s murder. He thought about his own involvement. He reached for the bottle and poured out the last bitter dregs.

Canon Eric Selby was the final person to have been present at the entrance to Venn House when Tom Ansell had been brought out like a man under arrest. Selby recalled the words which Tom claimed to have heard. The exclamation, surely involuntary, ‘He did it!’ Selby might even have uttered those words himself. It was, as he’d said, an idea which was in the air. Seeing a man with bloody hands escorted out of a house where a murder had occurred, anyone might have reached the same conclusion.

But none of this affected Eric Selby’s comfort. He had dined and drunk well in the company of his god-daughter or ‘niece’ Helen (and his wife, of course). They had talked about Helen’s father, Alfred, and recalled childhood holidays in Salisbury. When Helen had gone to bed, Eric Selby stayed up, musing on the death of Felix Slater. A terrible event, needless to say. But he could not find it in himself to summon up much grief for the man.