Death on Allhallowe’en (21 page)

‘You may not believe it,' he said to the CID man, ‘but this is exactly what I expected to find.'

‘I
don't
believe it,' the man replied, though quite good-humouredly. ‘You can pick it up, if you want. It's been under water for over a week.'

Carolus did so and studied it.

‘It is, you know. Down to the last detail.'

'Well, I'll tell you what you didn't expect to find, though you can't see that and wouldn't want to, I reckon.'

‘Human remains?' asked Carolus calmly.

‘Oh, you've been told, have you? Remains is right. You've never seen…'

‘Do you mind? I've just had my tea. Were they weighted?'

‘Yes. With a chain.'

‘Been there about twenty years?'

‘They haven't been properly examined yet. But that's the first impression.'

‘Of a woman?'

‘You know a lot, don't you? Yes. A woman. So they say.'

‘Thank you for showing me this and give my regards to the Inspector. I don't expect I shall see him again. I'm leaving here tomorrow.'

‘All right. I will. He'll be sorry to have missed you.'

‘If he should want to ask me anything, tell him to phone me at the rectory tonight.'

‘I don't expect he will,' said the CID man, and Carolus went out.

When later that evening Carolus and John were deep in armchairs, the door closed against eavesdroppers, the fire flickering brightly, drink and smokes beside each of them, Carolus kept his promise and told his friend the whole ugly story.

‘It became fairly obvious in the course of this case that behind it there was what is called in the language of the cinema a master-mind. Clumsy work contrasted with intricate and adroit planning, amateurism with skilled artistry. It should have been equally obvious, even to the most casual observer,
*
that the owner of this mind was Xavier Matchlow. No one but he had the intelligence, the experience in diabolism, the means, the motive—as one saw in time—to direct the others involved. Who these were, and the parts they played and why they played them, were the basic problems.

‘It has seemed to be a case of black magic—it could far more fittingly be called a case of blackmail.

‘To understand the death of Cyril, and later of Horseman and finally of William Garries, it was necessary to go back into the past and here I came on the first anomaly. Elsie, the wife of William Garries and the mother of George, was a flighty woman who had gone off with a Canadian officer just after the war. Garries, according to Canon Copely, was desperate and near suicide. Yet when she returned three years later he forgave her, or at least restored her to her position as his wife. She was with him only a year and then, although
we have no evidence that she had been hearing from Canada, she went again in such a way that it caused talk and even, Canon Copely thought, some official enquiries. These were set at rest, however, by a letter from Elsie in Canada, which Garries produced, saying that she would never come back to him.

‘As a normally sceptical man I did not believe that Elsie had gone off with a Canadian, stayed with him three years, returned to her husband for a year, and had then gone back to the Canadian. It simply did not ring true. I believed that in all probability she had been unfaithful with some other man, or had threatened to leave Garries for the second time with another man, and that Garries had murdered her and disposed of the body. This had caused some questioning at the time, but Garries fortunately had a letter sent to him by Elsie during her stay in Canada, saying she would never return to him. Women of her kind rarely date their letters and the envelope could be destroyed. This satisfied whoever was making enquiries. The merest guesswork, you say. Well, yes, but there was more to follow. And although the truth of it has been confirmed only today it proved to be a useful hypothesis throughout the investigation.

‘Did it ever occur to you to wonder how Xavier Matchlow achieved his extraordinary ascendancy over the Garries? William and he were friends at the time of Elsie's disappearance and William even then was drinking heavily. It doesn't take much imagination to suppose that William, a lonely and emotional man and something of an alcoholic, confided in Xavier that he had killed his wife and dropped her weighted body in the disused well called the Bottomless Pit. Or that Xavier, when one comes to consider the character of the man, as we shall have to do, pointed out that no well is bottomless and blackmailed the wretched William ever after.

‘I found evidence that this blackmail was going on. The relationship between Matchlow and Garries was scarcely explicable otherwise. Garries was a short-tempered man, given
to sudden quarrels, yet he never fell out with Matchlow, and became insanely angry when I suggested that he was under his influence. Moreover, I overheard a telephone conversation between the two which convinced me of it. I knew it was Garries who phoned because Matchlow said, “You had better remember that, next time you lose your temper,” and this was on the day after Garries had been in a rage with me and ordered me out of his house instead of following Matchlow's policy with me, the
gent glace.
At the same time Matchlow said, “You'll do exactly as I tell you. Both of you.” This told me not only that Garries was being blackmailed—for he would not have accepted this from any man otherwise—but that he had brought up his son to the same recognition of Xavier's authority.

‘Yes. I admit there was an element of that kind of guesswork which Sherlock Holmes called deduction. But it will be finally confirmed as soon as the human remains found in the Bottomless Pit have been properly examined. A first examination has shown that they are those of a woman and they have been found weighted with a chain, and this may well be identified as having belonged to Garries, if further proof is thought necessary.

‘The undeniable fact is that when Garries knew that the well was to be pumped dry and its secrets revealed he shot himself, having sent his son out of the way for the afternoon. As he told me in a drunken telephone call before doing so, he was not going to spend the rest of his life in prison while he had this way out.

‘Xavier's blackmail was not for money, but for compliance in what was dearer to him, his occult practices. William was a superstitious Guysman, already half won to notions of black magic and the mystical significance of the Beacon. He became, and taught his growing son to become, a collaborator in these rites, as Alice Murrain already was, having been initiated by Matchlow himself, with whom she had always been half in love.

'If you have studied a life of Aleister Crowley, of whom, as you know, Matchlow was a disciple for many years, you will remember that the Black Mass played a large part in his preposterous make-believe and it seems possible that he actually had a sort of twisted faith in the efficacy of this Mass offered to Satan. Matchlow certainly had. I will not go into the disgusting and blasphemous nature of the thing, but tell you that some harmless animal—in Crowley's case a cat, in Matchlow's a goat—is slaughtered and offered to the Prince of Darkness amid paternosters said backwards, inverted crosses and other monstrous absurdities. It was for this rite that Matchlow led his little group of disciples, the two Murrains and the two Garries, to the Beacon each year on Allhallowe'en. On that ancient stone, probably once an altar, he carried out his ceremonies. The thought of it makes me quite sick, but there have been other cases of this which have come to light in quite recent times.'

‘Time for a drink,' said John.

‘Quite time, after what I have told you. Thanks.'

After a long pause Carolus continued.

‘This went on for several years and restored to the Beacon some of its old reputation.
Papier-maché
masks of animal heads were obtained for the worshippers and perhaps someone daringly approached the Beacon closely enough to get a glimpse of the grotesque occasion. At any rate, it was spoken of in the district with bewilderment and awe.

‘It might have continued uninterrupted but for two things. Its fame reached a man who was critically interested in black magic and had already written a book on that scourge of the witches, Mathew Hopkins. He resolved to look more closely and took a house in the village of Clibburn with the idea of joining in the ceremony at least enough to observe it. His wife, a commonplace woman, took no part in this.

‘The other interruption came from a little boy who, with his playmate, ventured near the Beacon on the appointed night. His playmate, one of Ebby Smith's many children, lost his
courage and turned back, but little Cyril Gunning went on. This happened on Allhallowe'en of last year.

‘Connor Horseman, cold-shouldered by the participants, as his wife told me, conceived a way of spying on them. He could not join them, he dared not follow them, but he would
hear
what went on. Before the ceremony he concealed a microphone and tape recorder at the Beacon. The beastly words, and Matchlow's dramatics and rhetoric, at least would be on record.

‘But there was more on that recording than even he had hoped, for during the ceremony the peeping boy was observed and caught.

‘Xavier, as I decided when I met him, was a dangerous paranoiac. His hour as the priest officiating was infinitely precious to him—he saw himself as the devil's representative on earth as he once had been taught to believe that the Pope was the mouthpiece of God. He was in a state of exaltation, possibly drug-induced. No earthly consequences of his action had any meaning for him, fortified by the anonymity which his mask gave him and by his lunatic belief in his calling. He ordered the boy to be placed on the stone, wholly or partially undressed and anointed with the blood of the sacrificed goat. Later, as Cyril told his father when he was found some distance away, he managed to escape, but exposure and fear had made him dangerously ill and before he could give any coherent account of what he had suffered he went into delirium and died of pneumonia.

‘Some time after the end of the ceremony that night Cyril's father had found him and taken him home, but on his way to the Beacon Albert Gunning had met Horseman returning from it with a suitcase, which must have contained his recording apparatus. Gunning never forgot that encounter and was convinced that Horseman had been responsible for the death of his son. This had ugly consequences later, as I shall tell you.'

‘But didn't Gunning tell the police he had met Horseman?'

‘Yes, and they questioned Horseman. He gave an explanation which entirely satisfied them, perhaps because, as Albert
told me, they didn't
want
to think anything had happened at the Beacon that night. Perhaps they too were Guysmen. There was certainly no very senior officer investigating the matter because Cyril's death was a clear case of pneumonia, with only a few words spoken in delirium to suggest it was any more.

‘Horseman told them he had heard stories about the Beacon on Allhallowe'en and had gone up there to take flashlight photographs if anything happened. But it didn't. He had been there since eleven o'clock and seen nothing, he said. He wasn't going to tell the police of his recording and lose all the power it gave him.'

‘How do you know that about the police?'

‘Well, I have nothing but a nod from Inspector Porritt to prove it, but it was a very meaning nod. When I was giving him my account of the case I suggested this was the substance of the notes made by the police at the time. Porritt has studied these notes and signified his agreement.

‘Let's return to Horseman and his recording. It was unexpectedly interesting because it not only recorded the whole revolting ceremony and Xavier's voice repeating the abracadabra he had learned from Crowley, but also Xavier giving those orders about the boy, and these might be said to have caused Cyril's death.

‘But Horseman overplayed his hand. Now he would see whether these people would exclude him from their rites, whether they would dare to cold-shoulder him again. He was rash enough to call on Xavier to inform him of what he possessed and insist on being taken into his confidence.

‘Xavier Matchlow, having blackmailed William Garries for twenty years, was in no mind himself to be blackmailed. There was, as we know, a flaming row between the two men, after which Horseman hired a strong-box in which to keep the recording. I was fortunate enough to discover the whereabouts of this with the help of Mavis Horseman, and I have had the loathsome experience of listening to the whole thing. I am not surprised that the five participants in the Black Mass
were all determined to obtain possession of it at any cost.

‘This was all in the past, John, when I came to stay with you…'

‘Have a break, Carolus. I wouldn't miss a word of this, but you're going too fast and too far. Did you tell the police all this?'

‘Yes.'

‘You've talked for an hour, and I still don't know who murdered Connor. Or how.'

‘Nor did I, for certain, when I went to the police.'

‘But you do now?'

‘Yes, John. I do now.'

They were silent, but Carolus, after helping himself to another drink, continued.

‘This is how matters stood when you asked me to come. You had certain forebodings about the coming of Allhallowe'en and I didn't blame you when I began to find out how things were.

‘I don't suppose there was any conference between Xavier Matchlow and his four confederates. On the contrary, it was Xavier's principle not to let his left hand know what his right hand was doing, not to tell the Murrains of his instructions to the Garries and
vice versa.
But he used them all in a very elaborate plan to get rid of Horseman and the telltale recording.

‘First he wanted a go-between, someone to obtain certain results by bribery from Drummer Sloman. He knew Drummer perfectly well—the young man was partially employed as his gamekeeper—but he did not think of intervening himself. He knew that Gerald Murrain kept his acquaintance with certain criminal associates of his past, and he instructed him to find among them a youngish man of some presence and intelligence whom he would employ. Brandt, the son of a man who had long ago worked with Gerald Murrain, was to come to the district and under an alias, that of Poley Grant, a press and television man, make friends with the Slomans. All this ran
very smoothly. Brandt agreed to do what was wanted for a large fee and went to stay at the Pemberton Hotel, Girdlestone, under the name of Arthur Rudd. Using a hired car, he came over to Clibburn on several evenings and, helped by his patron's generosity, got into the confidence of Drummer and his brother.