Pageant of Murder

the river at the end of the Colonel’s grounds wouldn’t really implicate one person more than another. Anybody could have gone along that path and got rid of it there, as you pointed out to me earlier.”

“So he could,” Dame Beatrice agreed. “By the way, does anything strike you about the way in which the three bodies were treated after death?”

“How do you mean?”

“Falstaff? Cast your mind back to poor Mr Luton.”

“Stabbed cleanly through the heart—must have died instantaneously—body dumped in Thames, but not otherwise ill-used—is that what you mean?”

“Splendid. What do we deduce from that?”

“Goodness knows!”

“Compare it with the treatment meted out to Henry VIII, in the person of Mr Spey.”

“Well, yes, I begin to see what you mean. Probably beheaded before Spey was quite dead—the head put in a weighted covering and chucked into the river—the body left almost contemptuously in a private road where anybody might have come upon it…”

“We make progress.”

“I do, you mean. What exactly are you getting at?”

“You said that you saw what I meant. Continue to express your very valuable thoughts.”

“Don’t be unkind. It’s indelicate to make academic rings round morons.”

“Recount what happened to Edward III, and show, in your answer, in what respects, if any, the treatment meted out to Mr Gordon after death differed from that of the bodies previously under review.”

“Well, it was nastier and more spiteful than that meted out to Falstaff, but, I would say, not as vicious and horrid as in the case of Henry VIII. Of course, we can’t take the head in the river as having any real significance.”

“Can we not?”

“Well, the body was decapitated and the head disposed of in order to disguise the method of murder.”

“That does not make sense, you know. Why should the murderer go to all that trouble in the case of one of his victims when he did not attempt it in the case of the other two?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Neither had I, at first, but, when one comes to think of the matter, it does seem sufficiently interesting to merit closer attention.”

“That’s true, but my mind’s a blank. However much closer my attention, I still wouldn’t get any nearer an explanation.”

“Oh, but, surely! Think of the three personages involved.”

“Well, we did agree that they were all involved with women in a way which society still deprecates.”

“With one substantial and one minor difference.”

Laura made a face at her employer and then grinned.

“Aren’t you really going to tell me?” she asked. “You might just as well, and stop taking the mickey, you know. I’m all befogged.”

“But that is just what you are not!” said Dame Beatrice. “What was the substantial difference, in literature and history, between Falstaff and Henry VIII, going back to your last argument?”

“Women…women… Oh, I see what you’re getting at! In The Merry Wives, Falstaff is anything but a success with Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, except as a figure of fun, whereas Henry VIII—well, I don’t know how successful he was, from one point of view.”

“By that you suggest…?”

“Well, I don’t suppose any of the six wives married him for love. It was a case of not having been able to refuse, if he asked them, I gather. All the same, he did have the six, and got rid of four of them exactly when and how he chose. He certainly couldn’t be called a figure of fun.”

“He was a great and powerful king; one who, in spite of his excesses, appears to have won the approbation of the majority of his subjects.”

“Well, people do tend to admire those who are larger than life, and Henry was certainly that. What about Edward III?”

“So we exchange roles and I become the examinee. The body of Mr Gordon was not maltreated more than the murderer deemed necessary in order to maintain the fiction that the crimes were the work of a madman.”

“But isn’t the murderer a madman?”

“According to psychiatry, yes, I think he is, but, under the McNaughton Rules by which the law still holds, undoubtedly he is not. He is perfectly aware of what he has done, and he knows that what he has done was anti- social and wrong. He knew this, too, at the time when the acts were committed.”

“We know the motive, too. Luton had threatened to expose him to his uncle and aunt because of his hobby of getting girls into trouble. If that happened, he felt he might be disinherited, and as he has no prospects other than to be kept by his uncle and aunt and to inherit Squire’s Acre later on, naturally he felt he couldn’t let Luton blow the gaff on him. We’ve already agreed that the other two men were killed because, somehow or other, they knew who Luton’s murderer was.”

“Even about that I have had a slight change of mind. I agree that we have hit on the right motives for the