‘You do not remember him?’
‘He was a — he was no more than a presence when I was small. A tall man in a blue uniform. That’s all, I’m afraid,’ said Tom, recalling that he’d given the same inadequate description of his father to Mrs Mackenzie a couple of days earlier.
‘Ah, we did like wearing the uniform,’ said Henry Cathcart. ‘The women liked it too.’
Tom looked at the man sitting opposite him. Henry Cathcart was plump and well fed, every inch the leading citizen of the town as Jenkins had characterized him. Tom had some difficulty imagining him wearing a soldier’s outfit. But then perhaps his father would have grown stout, had he lived. He was thinking like this in order to hold at bay other, more painful thoughts. He wanted to ask, ‘My father, what was he like?’ or ‘Did my father ever mention me?’ but these questions would have come too early in the conversation. Instead Tom Ansell said, ‘Were you there when he died?’
‘Not at the very moment,’ said Cathcart. He paused and Tom thought that he wasn’t going to say any more. But Cathcart swallowed half his glass and refilled it from the bottle then went on: ‘He fell ill of a fever shortly before we reached the Dardanelles. He wasn’t the only one to die on board and there was no time to put in and bury him and the others on one of the little islands in those parts. Your father was not a navy man, of course, but he had a sailor’s burial. We thought he had escaped the sickness. Others had gone ahead of him and Lieutenant Thomas Ansell seemed to be on the mend. But he went in the early hours of the morning, quite suddenly. He was the last to die on the voyage and so had the distinction of being buried alone.’
‘Can you describe it?’ said Tom. He was curious and at the same time half ashamed of his curiosity. Yet Henry Cathcart seemed pleased enough to talk about it. He told of how Thomas Ansell had been sewn up in a hammock which was weighted with a bag of sand at the foot; of how a plank had been prepared with one end over the side of the vessel; of how the men had been paraded on deck and the colours flown at half-mast. Prayers were said over the body by the chaplain. The men stood with heads bowed. A volley was fired. The order was given to tilt the plank. Hardly an order, said Cathcart, just a small upwards gesture of the hand by the ship’s captain.
Henry Cathcart paused again. Saying, ‘I turned my head at that point for I could not look,’ he turned his head away, in imitation of his action more than twenty years before. Still with face averted he said, ‘I heard the splash as my friend’s body plunged into the water. Though I heard much worse than that in battle, and in the aftermath of battle too, I will never forget that splash.’
When he turned back, his eyes were moist, and Tom felt the water gathering in his own. Both men resumed their drinking in earnest silence.
‘Your mother,’ said Cathcart eventually, ‘is she still. .?’
‘Yes, thriving.’
‘Good, good. I am glad of that. I remember Marian Ansell clearly.’
There was a wistful note to his voice and Tom wondered whether this portly middle-aged gent had been soft on his mother. He said, ‘Except that she is Marian Holford now. She remarried after my father’s death.’
‘Your stepfather was in the army?’
‘He was an attorney. Though he is dead too now. He was some years older than my mother.’
‘Ah, so you have followed in your stepfather’s steps, Tom. The landlord here told me that you worked for a London law firm.’
‘The landlord here is altogether too curious. But, yes, I followed my stepfather. He always said that the law was a safe trade since people would never tire of litigation.’
‘He was right enough there. So, tell me, you are down here on business?’
‘Yes. We have a client who lives in the close. And you, sir? What happened to you after. . after your army service?’
‘I was wounded in the Russian War,’ said Henry Cathcart, clasping a plump hand to his upper thigh. ‘Nothing serious, though it was enough to disable me from further service and to leave me with a gammy leg. I was fortunate compared with many of my fellows. Now I own a store on one of the principal thoroughfares of this town. We sell not single things but several in different departments, clothes and drapery mostly and furnishings. I like to think that enterprises like mine are the wave of the future, places where people may buy everything they want under one roof. But owning a store is a far cry from the glory of war. Wasn’t it Bonaparte who called us a nation of shopkeepers?’
‘Shopkeepers who defeated an Emperor,’ said Tom.
‘Good, good,’ said Cathcart, dividing the rest of the bottle of wine between Tom and himself. ‘Shall we get another?’
‘The landlord owes me a drink,’ said Tom. He described how Jenkins had promised him a bottle on the house after his room had been broken into. Cathcart was all concern although Tom said that nothing seemed to have been taken. His anger and unease at the incident had dissolved under the influence of a few glasses. He was inclined to take Jenkins’s view that no harm had been done. Certainly he would not be alerting the police. He felt an odd wish that Henry Cathcart should not think that he, Tom, had a low opinion of the town.
‘Salisbury is a law-abiding place in general,’ said Cathcart, ‘although I hear there have been some robberies in the close.’
‘As recently as last night,’ said Tom.
‘Well, here is another mystery,’ said Cathcart after they’d started work on a second bottle of wine and pondered the puzzle of why a thief would want to take jelly moulds and toasting forks. The store-owner reached across to a neighbouring table and picked up a discarded copy of the Salisbury Gazette.
After casting his eyes over the front page, he passed it to Tom, indicating a couple of paragraphs.
Under the headline Developments in Search for Missing Sexton, Tom read the following item: We are assured by Inspector Foster of the Salisbury police that investigations are continuing into the mysterious disappearance of Mr Andrew North, one of the sextons at the cathedral church of St Mary. According to Inspector Foster, developments in the case are expected soon although he declined to say what they were. Our readers will recall that the sexton disappeared sometime during the night of October the fifteenth of this year. Mr North, who shared a cottage in the cathedral grounds with his widowed sister, failed to report for duty on the morning of the sixteenth although the alarm was not raised until later that day since it was assumed by his superiors that Mr North was ill at home and by his sister Mrs Banks that he had already departed for work. Mr North was last seen by Mrs Banks on the late afternoon of the previous day, telling her that he was going out for a stroll and that she was on no account to wait up for his return. We understand that Mr North had fallen into the habit of walking late and that there was nothing unusual in his request.
There was speculation that Mr North might have suffered a serious accident or fallen victim to a sudden illness, but the absence of any report or sighting has deepened fears for the safety of the sexton. Mr North has been described as a man in good health and someone who has, in the words of his sister,‘all his wits about him’. Canon Eric Selby told the Gazette that Mr North was a good worker and a valued servant of the cathedral church, adding that he very much hoped the mystery of the sexton’s disappearance would soon reach a happy and satisfactory conclusion.
Tom put the local paper back on the table. The main thing of interest to him was the mention of Canon Selby.
Henry Cathcart said, ‘You’ll notice that they talk about developments without saying what they are. Inspector Foster probably hasn’t got a clue but it gives the impression he’s getting somewhere just as it provides the Gazette with a peg to hang the story on. A more honest headline would have been No Developments in Search for Missing Sexton.’