“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.