The ledge or viewing platform was scarcely a yard across and little more than half a dozen yards in length, broken up by buttresses which turned the spaces in between to small bays. There was a parapet of stone but it was less high than a ship’s rail. Tom, his eyes still dazzled by the light, instinctively grasped at the parapet. He glanced to left and right from his vantage point in the middle of the ledge. He could see nothing, and believed for an instant that the two men, Eaves and Fawkes, had somehow effected a miraculous escape.
But no. From behind one of the buttresses to his left there came thumps and groans, and two black-clad figures fell writhing to the ground in a curious, sideways, rag-doll fashion. One of them — Tom could not discern which of the two, since the man’s back was to him and he was still wearing the billycock hat — scrambled to his feet and started to kick at the other. The space was so limited that the kicker could not get much force or swing behind his attack. Then there was a swiping arm, a flash of metal in the sun, and the kicking stopped. Tom guessed that the weapon was the trowel which Fawkes had been wielding. Now the one on the ground dropped the trowel, grabbed hold of the other’s legs and clasped them to him, causing the upright figure to fall back against the parapet.
Tom’s attention was distracted for an instant by a clattering in the chamber behind him. The sounds of panting, of voices straining to call out his name after the rapid climb to the top. He twisted his head and shouted out into the darkness over his shoulder, ‘Here we are!’
When he turned back, he saw that the figure who’d been on the ground and grasped the other by the legs was now rearing up. He was still holding his opponent’s legs below the knee. With a great heave, by bracing himself against the wall, he pushed himself fully upright and seemed to pour — there was no other word for it — seemed to pour his opposite over the parapet, as if he was tipping liquid out of a jug.
In a single, fluid motion the other man pitched over the edge and tumbled outwards into space. With all sense of himself suspended, Tom was barely conscious of what he could see: amid the sun-spots that danced in front of his vision, there was a collection of black rags and sticks (the limbs, he realized, yes, the arms and legs) which grew smaller as it fell towards earth. Or not the earth, precisely, but the sheer flank of the cathedral roof.
Then he felt hands grasping his shoulders and pulling at him and he was afraid that he too was going to be thrown off into nothingness. Automatically he gripped the sides of the doorway. But the hands went on dragging and a voice said, ‘Come inside!’ and another said ‘Get out of the way!’ and they were different voices, neither of them belonging to the two men who’d been struggling on the parapet.
Tom fell back into the chamber at the bottom of the spire. He lay there, as several shapes crowded past him and out through the doorway. His confused state was worsened by several great blows struck on a giant gong, sounds which it took him a moment to identify as the cathedral clock. Then he felt his head being lifted gently, almost cradled.
‘Are you all right, Tom?’
It was Helen. She was kneeling on the floor. He felt the softness of her hands, the fabric of her coat brushing his cheek. He was going to tell her to stand up, otherwise she’d get her clothes dusty and dirty, but instead he said, ‘What happened?’
‘I was going to ask you that,’ she said, leaning forward and kissing his forehead.
Then the crowd who’d gone out on to the viewing platform returned. Only three of them, as it turned out. Inspector Foster, Constable Chesney and another police-man whose name Tom didn’t know.
‘Nobody there,’ said Foster.
Tom stood up. He gripped one of the scaffolding beams, not so much for help in staying upright but so as to hold on to something solid.
‘But I saw them,’ he said. ‘They were fighting.’
‘I mean there’s nobody up here,’ said Foster, pulling on his side-whiskers for emphasis. ‘Down there — ’ now he jabbed with his forefinger towards the imagined ground many hundreds of feet below where they were standing — ‘down there’s a different story, and not a very pretty one either.’
And, standing next to his superior officer, Constable Chesney rammed his fist into his open palm to simulate the sound of bodies striking the ground.
Salisbury Station
Or the sound of a body, rather than bodies, and one striking not the ground but a lower roof.
A single corpse was recovered that afternoon as the sun fell and darkness rose in the cathedral close. It was badly battered and disfigured, like a mariner thrown from a ship and tossed among the rocks before arriving on shore. The damage to the mortal remains of Adam Eaves — or Adam Fawkes as he should more properly be called — had been caused by the force of impact against the stone outcrops, the buttresses and finials, in the lower stretches of the cathedral. The black shape which Tom saw plunging to its doom had soared outwards as it went down and then must have bounced and tumbled like a climber falling from a precipice, before landing finally on the roof of the cloisters.
There could not be much doubt that the remains were those of the gardener to Canon Slater. There was Tom’s evidence, that he had seen an improvised weapon (the trowel) in the hands of Eaves’s assailant, and that it was those hands which were responsible for throwing the other off the spire. But, more conclusively, there was a statement, almost a confession, which was found in a pocket of the dead man’s clothing.
It was brief and ill written but clear enough. It told how he, that is Adam Fawkes (also known as Adam Eaves), had murdered both the Slater brothers. Felix had been killed when Eaves had been surprised in the act of stealing the papers from the chest in the Canon’s study, searching for documents and plans which would show the whereabouts of a supposed hoard of ancient treasure buried in the Slater estate at Northwood House in Downton. Slater was sitting down, about to write a note of dismissal, unwisely taking his eyes off the gardener. Then a few days later Percy Slater, the owner of Northwood House, had died not by his own hand but killed by Adam as he was attempting to dig up the place where this treasure was rumoured to be, a spot known as Hogg’s Corner.
There was no mention in the confession of the so-called Salisbury manuscript, whose disappearance (in Tom’s eyes at least) might have been a motive for the murder. But the handwritten memoir of the Slater brothers’ father was discovered among various items in the queer little lodging occupied by Adam in the garden of Venn House. The lock which secured the book from prying eyes had been forced by Eaves. The other items in his stash included bits and pieces of tarnished gold — rings, bracelets, brooches — which had undoubtedly been excavated from burial sites around the town.
With the discovery of Eaves’s body, it was equally beyond doubt that the gardener had been responsible for the death of Andrew North, the sexton. If North had been seized by the mania — which he’d caught from Felix Slater — for digging up old items, stealing them if necessary, then Eaves had obviously seen a way in which he might take a short cut, by thieving from the thief. Even if he had to commit a murder in the process. North, who’d worked for Felix Slater, must have encountered Adam Eaves, must have grown to fear him and to identify the gardener with Atropos, the wielder of shears.
And more bizarrely, the stolen hoard found in the gardener’s lodge also contained toasting forks and jelly moulds together with other kitchen implements which dated back not thousands of years but no further than a few months.
Inspector Foster scratched his head and tugged his side-whiskers over this but he was able to offer some explanation to Tom Ansell and Helen Scott while he was bidding them goodbye on the platform at Salisbury station.