The Salisbury Manuscript by Philip Gooden

Author:Philip Gooden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2009-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Canon Selby’s House

It was easily enough explained, once Tom had got over his first surprise at seeing Helen – his surprise and delight. For it was Canon Eric Selby who had, indirectly, caused Helen to come down from London on a morning train. He was aware that Tom worked for a London firm but hadn’t known that the firm was called Scott, Lye &Mackenzie. Many years ago, as Selby hinted to Tom on their cab ride from Salisbury station, he had considered the law as a career before deciding to go into the Church. He was a friend of Alfred Scott, Helen’s father, a good enough friend to have become godfather to Helen. Indeed, she had spent some of her childhood time in Salisbury.

When Canon Selby discovered that Tom was an employee of his late friend’s firm, and apparently distressed at the young man’s predicament, he had telegraphed to his only contact, the formidable Mrs Scott, although without being aware of Helen Scott’s friendship with Tom.

Tom didn’t know – nor did he spend time trying to find out in the first confusion of his meeting with Helen – exactly how events had unfolded when the telegram had arrived at the house in Athelstan Road, Highbury. Whether Helen had informed her mother that she intended to travel down to Salisbury by the first available train, whether she had left with Mrs Scott’s blessing, whether she had slipped out of the house undetected by her mother (a more romantic idea, surely), none of this mattered much. What was important was that Helen was here with him, in Fisherton Gaol.

She sat, upright, slim, bright-eyed and fresh-faced, on the chair which had so recently been occupied by the solid form of Inspector Foster. Mrs Griffiths produced further supplies of coffee as well as some home-made cakes and generally fussed over their lady visitor. A red-letter day for her, it must be, with a lady and a gentleman from London brought together in the prime apartment of Fisherton Gaol.

Once they’d got the preliminaries out of the way, the circumstances under which Helen had discovered what was happening to Tom and her speedy journey from Waterloo to Salisbury, Helen gazed appreciatively round the sparsely furnished room with its whitewashed walls. Her gaze suggested she was visiting a grand house, even a palace. As Tom had half foreseen, she seemed excited by his incarceration. Not, he hoped, the fact that he was languishing in prison under temporary suspicion of a murder but that he was here with her and she was here with him, and wasn’t this all a new experience, a dramatic experience for them both. She said as much.

‘Except that you can leave at any time,’ he said.

‘Oh, Tom, don’t,’ she said, reaching out to grasp his hand.

‘I don’t know why I’m here.’

‘They say that a man was murdered.’

‘There was a murder but I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Dear Tom, of course you didn’t. But you must tell me all about it. Tell me now.

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