“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.”