“Look away.”
Impulse it was not. These things always appear to happen in slow motion. Patrick had ample time to make his decision. He put a boot against Cape Brown’s arm-pit and pushed with his leg. The fingers clutching the rock could not hold the grip. Cape let go and plunged downwards, out of sight, through the mist. He made no sound.
“He lost his grip,” Patrick said to Ben Tattersall. “He lost his grip and fell.”
Nobody else had witnessed the incident. Linda was far ahead, her view obscured by the mist.
Cape Brown’s body was recovered the same afternoon. Multiple injuries had killed him. The sound equipment in his rucksack was smashed to pieces.
Each of them appeared as a witness at the inquest. Each said that Cape lost his grip before they could reach him. After giving evidence, they didn’t speak to each other. They never met again. Ben Tattersall died prematurely of cancer two years later, and was given a funeral attended by more than twenty fellow bishops and presided over by an archbishop.
Patrick lived on until this year, having, as I explained, confessed to me that he had killed Cape Brown. He need not have spoken about it. How typical of him to want the truth made public.
And there is something else I must make clear. As Patrick explained it to me, his story about the Minister offering to sleep with him to earn her scholarship was pure fabrication. Nothing of the sort happened. “I made it up,” he said. “You see, I had to think of something worse than a bishop telling a dirty joke, just to spare him all that embarrassment. After I’d concocted the story, I knew if it went on television everyone would believe it was true. People want to believe in scandals. Her career would have been ruined, quite unjustifiably. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw that microphone fall out of the rucksack.”
You must agree he was a decent man.
Bertie and the Boat Race
People close to me sometimes pluck up courage and ask how I first became an amateur detective. I generally tell them it began in 1886 through my desire to discover the truth about the suspicious death of Fred Archer, the Tinman, the greatest jockey who ever wore my colours, or anyone else’s. However, it dawned on me the other day that my talent for deduction must have been with me from my youth, for I was instrumental in solving a mystery as far back as the year 1860. I had quite forgotten until some ill-advised person wrote to my secretary to ask if HRH The Prince of Wales would care to patronise the Henley Regatta this year.
Henley!
You’d think people would know by now that my preferred aquatic sport is yachting, not standing on a towpath watching boats of preposterous shape being manoeuvred along a reach of the Thames by fellows in their undergarments.
The mystery. It has a connection with Henley, but the strongest connection is with a young lady. Ah, the fragrant memory of one I shall call Echo, out of respect for her modesty, for she is a lady of irreproachable reputation now. Why Echo? Because she was the water nymph who loved the youth Narcissus. The real Echo is supposed to have pined away after her love was not returned, leaving only her voice behind, but this part of the legend you can ignore.
She was the only daughter of a tutor at Christ Church College, Oxford, and I met her during my sojourn at the University. I was eighteen, a mere stripling, and a virtual prisoner in a house off the Cornmarket known as Frewin Hall, with my Equerry and Governor as jailers. My father, Prince Albert, had rigid views on education and wanted me to benefit from the tuition at Oxford. Sad to relate, he deemed it unthinkable for the future King to live in college with boisterous young men of similar age. Six docile undergraduates of good family were accordingly enlisted to be my fellow students. They attended Frewin Hall and sat beside me listening to private lectures from selected professors. I don’t know who suffered the greatest ordeal, my fellow-students, the tutors, or myself. I was not academically inclined. The only inclination I had was towards the stunningly pretty Echo.
I met her first across the dinner table, Papa having insisted that dinner parties should feature in my curriculum. I was to learn how to conduct myself at table, use the cutlery, hold a conversation and so forth. Most of my guests were stuffed-shirts, the same studious fellows who shared my lectures, together with various professors and clergymen, but, thank heavens, it was deemed desirable for members of the fair sex to be of the party. Some of the tutors brought their wives. One — I shall call him Dr Stubbs — was a widower and was accompanied by his daughter.
Echo Stubbs. My pulse races now at the memory of her stepping into the anteroom, standing timidly so close to her father that her crinoline tilted and revealed quite six inches of silk-stocking — I think the first sighting I had of a mature female ankle in the whole of my life. When I finally forced my eyes higher I was treated to a deep blush from a radiantly lovely face. Her black hair was parted at the centre in swathes that covered her ears like a scarf. She curtsied. Dr Stubbs bowed. And while his head was lowered I winked at Echo and she turned the colour of a guardsman’s jacket.
I shall not dwell on the subtle process of glances and signals that sealed our attachment. She didn’t say much, and neither did I. It was all in the eyes, and the barely perceptible movements of the lips. She enslaved me. I resolved to see her again, if possible in less constricting company. I lost all interest in my studies. Every waking moment was filled with thoughts of her.
My difficulty was that she and I were chaperoned with a rigour hard to imagine in these more indulgent times. If my beautiful Echo ventured out of Christ Church, you may be sure her po-faced Papa was at her side. The only opportunities we had of meeting were after Morning Service at the Cathedral on a Sunday, when every word between us was overheard by General Bruce, my Governor, and Dr. Stubbs. So we spoke of the weather and the sermon while our eyes held a more intimate discourse altogether.
During lectures I would plot strategies for meeting her alone. I seriously considered ways of gaining admittance to the family’s rooms in Christ Church by posing as a College servant. If I had known for certain which room my fair Echo slept in, I would have visited the College by night and flung gravel at her window. But in retrospect it was a good thing I didn’t indulge in such heroics because we had lately been troubled by a series of burglaries and I might have suffered the embarrassment of being arrested. My amorous nature has more than once been the undoing of me and it would have got me into hot water even at that tender age were it not for a piece of intelligence that reached me.
The worthy Dr Stubbs, I learned, was a rowing man. He had been a ‘wet bob’ at Eton and a Blue at the University. For the past two years he had acted as umpire at the Henley Royal Regatta.
I’ve already made clear my views on rowing, but I happened to be in possession of two useful facts about Henley. The first: that it was de rigeur that the fair sex patronised the Regatta in all their finery, congregating on the lawns of the Red Lion, near the finish. And the second: that the umpire followed all the races from the water, rowed by a crew of the finest Thames watermen. Do you see? I had the prospect of Dr Stubbs being aboard a boat giving undivided attention to the races whilst his winsome daughter was at liberty on the river bank.
I devised a plan. I would go to Henley for the Regatta and hire a small craft, preferably a punt, without revealing my identity to anyone. I would furnish it with a hamper containing champagne and find a mooring close to the Red Lion. As soon as Echo appeared, I would invite her aboard my punt for a better view of the rowing. Need I go into the rest of the plan?
Now one of the unfortunates who sat with me through those dreary lectures in Frewin Hall was a runt of a fellow called Henry Bilbo, about five feet in stature, and he happened to be the coxswain to the College First Eight. I’d noticed Bilbo being treated with undue civility by Dr Stubbs long before I learned of his connection with the Boat Club. If anyone else, myself excepted, arrived late for a lecture, he would be severely rebuked. Not Bilbo. He was an arrogant little tyke, too.