‘I don’t believe there, ever were any Irish heretics, but we’ll see. If we really do get a tie-up, I shall consider our theory proved, and we will go gunning for James and Mrs Schumann in the biggest possible way.’
She returned on the following evening in high feather.
‘There’s no doubt Otto’s out of it,’ she said. ‘He’d never go to all this bother, I’m perfectly certain, but whether the answer is James or Mrs Schumann I wouldn’t care to say. The two of them in collusion is the other answer, of course.’
‘What have you unearthed this time?’ asked Dame Beatrice.
‘Enough to make your hunch a certainty. It can’t be coincidence. You remember the P in front of the 431? Well, listen to this: it’s all about a heretic named Pelagius. He was born in Britain and, although there’s no certainty that he was either Irish or Welsh, there’s a strong tradition that he was of Irish origin and settled in Wales. He was a student, not a priest, and he attacked some of the other heretics, notably the Arians and the Manichaeans, but he fell foul of Saint Jerome at Bethlehem after Saint Augustine had also objected to his opinions. Unfortunately for him, his followers seem to have perpetrated acts of violence, and in the year A.D. 418 the Emperor Honorias ordered him to be exiled, and Pope Zosimus, who had some sympathy with his views, (which rejected the doctrine of original sin, among other things), was persuaded to condemn him. The church by no means rejected him, however, and, although nobody knows for certain what happened to him, he wasn’t executed, but is thought to have died in exile some two years later. But – this is the point – his opinions were finally ditched by the General Council of Ephesus in 431.’
‘Well,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘I am very much obliged to you for your researches. Unfortunately, it seems to me that these extraordinary murders could continue until the supply of heresies gives out. I imagine there are others?’
‘Good gracious, yes! I got interested and looked up a book on the history of the early church. There were Docetism, Gnosticism (which came in three waves, all a bit different from one another, so far as I can make out), Macedonianism, Donatism, Manicheeism, not to mention downright paganism. This carries us up to about the year A.D. 500 and is probably not an exhaustive list, at that, and there were still the heresies of the Middle Ages to follow, not to worry about the Reformation itself, and the teachings of Calvin and John Knox, and so forth.’
‘Enough,’ said Dame Beatrice, with her reptilian smile. ‘We will now step in and put an end to these matters. I think we know enough to begin to make things very uncomfortable for our suspects.’
Fergus walked over to her and pushed his muzzle adoringly into her thin ribs. She laid a yellow claw on his head.
‘As for you,’ she remarked, ‘you are undoubtedly a heretic in your own right, for whereas, by all the canons of decency and good taste, you should cleave unto Laura, who is your meat, drink and comfort, you prefer to pursue strange gods who do not even care very much about you.’
The dog sighed, lay down at her feet and thrust his head hard against her knee.
‘How do you mean, you are going to begin making things very uncomfortable for our suspects? You’ll be careful, won’t you?’ said Laura anxiously. ‘Somebody who has committed five murders isn’t going to worry much about a sixth.’
‘Have no fears for me. I shall keep all my wits about me. I am suffering from a bad attack of conscience. You see, I have felt almost certain, from the time of the first death, that I knew who was responsible, and although, in view of the lack of concrete evidence, I do not see how it could have been done, I feel I ought to have been able to prevent four of these five deaths by denouncing the murderer of Karen Schumann.’
‘We still don’t know whether all the murders were done by the same person, don’t forget.’
‘I am certain that they were, and I shall now take the necessary steps.’
‘Do I ask for details? You see, I’m responsible for your safety, and if you’ve really rolled your sleeves up and are going into action, it might be as well for me to be within hailing distance.’
‘That evening, the evening of Karen Schumann’s death,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘when Fergus left you and went off across the common …’
‘Yes?’
‘It was misty and beginning to get dark?’
‘Yes. I lost sight of Fergus in less than a hundred yards – in not more than fifty or sixty yards, perhaps.’
‘That is what I wanted to be sure of, although I took it that such was the case.’
‘If you’re thinking of Mrs Schumann, I don’t think she owns a bike.’
‘That is my point. If the mist and the darkness made visibility a matter of less than a hundred yards, whoever enticed Fergus away from you could have been on foot. If Mrs Schumann is the murderer, she would have blown her personal call on the dog-whistle, and the dog, who had been trained at her kennels to respond to it, would have obeyed the summons immediately. The visibility was such that you could not see her, for she could have been two hundred yards or more from where you stood, and she knew that, although the dog could hear the whistle, you could not. All she had to do, after that, was to walk the dog across the common as far as the woods, following the path which would still have shown up sufficiently in the darkness and which, doubtless, she knew well, lead him to the body and command him to stay. He obeyed this order, as we know, until I came along and countermanded it.’
‘There are a lot of objections to
