C. S. Lewis 03 The Floating Body by Kel Richards

Author:Kel Richards [Richards, Kel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2015-10-14T21:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

~

Later than night, after another evening meal of school sludge, I was sitting alone in my room trying to sort out the confusing, interlocking pieces of an increasingly complicated puzzle.

My mind kept drifting back to our Deputy Head Master, Gareth McKell, and his sister, Muriel. They both had personalities as indigestible as cold toast. But was that sufficient reason to suspect them of involvement in the murder of Dave Fowler?

I was supposed to be preparing a lesson on Matthew Arnold and Sohrab and Rustum lay open before me. But I was as restless as Sohrab in the Tartar camp and gave up my fruitless efforts at concentrating on the task at hand. For a while I paced around my study, then I decided that a pint at The Pelican might settle my unquiet heart and grabbed my coat.

I emerged into the moonlit cathedral close and came to a halt in the doorway to my terrace house. Standing there in the shadowed stoop, I was facing the flat occupied by the McKells—directly opposite me on the far side of the quad—and what I had come to think of as the ‘The McKell Mystery’ once again started thumping away at my brain.

I rather fancied walking across, knocking on the door of their flat, fixing them with a frosty glare and demanding, ‘Now, then, just what are you two up to, and why did you kill Dave Fowler?’

However, good sense prevailed and I chose not to follow this attractive scenario.

As the moon drifted behind scudding clouds, the door to the McKells flat opened and both brother and sister emerged. They looked around but failed to see me standing as still as a statue in the distant darkness. Then they headed for the gateway leading out of the cathedral close and into the town.

I decided to follow them.

Exactly why I made this decision I couldn’t have explained. Except that I felt certain that in similar circumstances Sherlock Holmes would have instructed Watson to ‘follow those two suspects, and don’t let them out of your sight’. So I chose to follow my Holmesian instincts, and my two suspects.

The night was chill, the clouds were coming and going across the face of the moon—as if uncertain as to where exactly in the sky they were meant to be—and the breeze was rising. My mind went back to the lesson on Alfred Noyes I’d taken my junior form through the week before. The wind had, indeed, become a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, and the moon now clearly resembled a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

I buttoned up my coat, pulled my scarf out of the coat pocket and wrapped it around my throat.

The McKells had now left the quad, so I slipped as quietly as I could across the cobblestones. At the gateway I stopped and looked ahead.

The mysterious couple were well ahead of me, on their way down Nesfield’s high street. As I watched, they passed through the pale patch of light cast by a street lamp.

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