PATERNOSTER

A murder mystery by Sophie Hannah and Leah Holroyd

Offices of Unwin- Carruthers & UnwinCarruthers, Solicitors, April 1930 “Philip…”

“Hm? Oh. Good morning, Miss Marfleet.” She looked troubled.

“I see. You’re back to addressing me as Miss Marfleet. No more Alice. Am I to stop calling you Philip?”

“I’m sorry. I never know what to call you, or how to think about our… predicament.” My own grumbling bored me. The trouble with complaint is that it does not move things forward. “Do you have good news for me?” I asked. One might as well remain optimistic for as long as is feasible.

“Philip, I can’t bear this uncertainty. I must decide. I have decided. I can’t marry you. Not with Father’s passing still unresolved. Don’t you see? It’s bad enough to live with one unanswerable question. Endless not-knowing is a torment.”

“Well, true, but… you could say yes. Then I could refer to you as Mrs UnwinCarruthers — no more Miss Marfleet! Yes is as firm an answer as no, and one that would prove more satisfying for us both.”

“I’m not fit to be anyone’s wife, Philip, not with this horrible… question looming over me. Tell me truthfully: do you still believe that we will one day know who killed Father?”

I left my desk and walked over to the window. Was it time to risk unvarnished honesty? “I believe that if you sincerely wished to know, then you could.”

“What do you mean?” Alice said sharply. For some ten years before his death, I had looked after the legal affairs of Stanley Marfleet, Alice’s father. I had become well acquainted with all three of his daughters and fallen in love with Alice, his youngest. I sought Stanley’s permission to ask for her hand in marriage, and he granted it. I duly made my proposal and Alice told me, eyes a-sparkle, that I would receive her answer very soon.

Instead, three days later came the news that Stanley Marfleet had been found bludgeoned to death in his study. A blood-encrusted poker lay on the carpet beside his body. No fingerprints were found upon it. Nothing useful was discovered by the police, apart from one peculiarity that nobody could explain: on Stanley’s desk was a cup, a matching saucer, and a quantity of tea.

Let me be clear: I do not mean that there was an undrunk cup of tea resting upon a saucer; there would have been nothing remarkable in that. The saucer was sitting on the desk and the cup was perfectly centred upon it, but upside down. A little of the tea was in the saucer but most of it was in a large pool on the desk.

Alice had become obsessed with this detail. Dozens of times she’d asked me, “Isn’t it possible that Father knocked over the cup while he was being attacked and it simply landed that way?” I always gave the same answer:

“I suppose so, just about” — to which Alice always instantly replied, “No. It’s impossible. If you accidentally knock a cup, it couldn’t land back on its saucer in a way that looks so carefully positioned. Never.”

Now, aware of Alice awaiting my response, I said, “I believe you could know the truth if you wanted to. But you fear it.” “Philip, if the police can’t —” “The police don’t know your sisters as you do.” “Lily and Julia were nowhere near Father’s house on that day. It’s been proven. And Father’s will hardly shocked them. They expected it. He was married to their mother only for a short time, and he was never a true father to them. My mother was the great passion of his life.”

Evidently she did not see that these circumstances could equally explain why her sisters might find the will especially intolerable. “You need to think more clearly and… factually,” I told her.

“Alibis can be manufactured. And the cup must have landed upside-down by accident. Your father was hardly the puzzle-leaving sort. On the contrary: he loathed silly puzzles. And the way Lily spoke to you about that silly magic square, which you’ve conveniently erased from your memory…” “But, Philip, you don’t remember either!” “I know, but… why go over this again? I should give up — on marrying you, on justice for Stanley, on everything I’ve hoped for!”

I scarcely recognised myself during this outburst. Love can do strange things to a chap.

“Please, Philip, don’t be angry,” Alice cried. “Might we go over that strange afternoon once more? You say I fear the truth, but you’re wrong. I wish I could know!”

“Do as you please,” I snapped, turning away from her. “We were in this room: you, me, Lily, Julia and Edward.” I shuddered at the mention of Julia’s guttersnipe husband.

“You read us Father’s will. I assured everyone that I’d make things right and equal. Julia hugged me. Edward said I’d made an honourable decision. Oh!” Alice stopped.

“You must help me to give Lily and Julia their shares of my share. It’s wrong to make them wait any longer. I know you suspect Lily, but… I don’t.”

“Julia and Edward were grateful,” I agreed. “They had many times tried and failed to persuade Stanley to make things more equitable. Lily had done no such thing, and she was ungrateful. She said, ‘If Paternoster didn’t want me to have it then I don’t want it.’”

“Yes, and then she explained that Paternoster »

means ‘Our Father’ in Latin. Edward was offended, said he knew fine well what it meant, and asked if she knew about the magic square of Pompeii.” Alice leaned over, took a pen and a sheet of paper from my desk and recreated the magic square.

“Then Edward rearranged the words in a cross shape…” she said, “…with ‘Paternoster’ going across and down, sharing the letter ‘n’, and with two As and two Os left over, which apparently makes it a secret symbol of Christianity somehow. Edward said the square was a palindrome. Lily sneered that only the middle word, TENET, was a palindrome. That’s where both our memories grow hazy. The next thing I remember is you, red-faced, telling Lily and Julia that if either of them spoke to me like that again, you would throw them out on the street. Edward said, ‘ What on earth do you mean?’ Lily asked if you’d gone mad and… oh!” “Alice, what is it?” “TENET,” she whispered. “It’s the only palindrome — that’s what Lily said. While AREPO is simply OPERA reversed.” “Darling, what’s wrong?” “I know who killed Father,” Alice said… … “Philip…” “Alice, darling.” She sat down opposite me. I examined her face, its contours so familiar to me now.

“Something troubling you, my dear?” Like a moth to a candle, one’s thoughts were inevitably drawn to Stanley’s murder and the awful trial that followed.

When she remained silent, I added, “Dearest, this year has been ghastly. But you must remember that you did the right thing. You unravelled the mystery the police could not and achieved justice for your father!” Alice smiled uncertainly. “Truly, darling, it was ingenious of you to figure it out.”

She nodded slowly, not looking at me. As though telling herself a story, she said: “Of course, it wasn’t the words themselves, but the way Lily said them that put the idea into my head…”

Alice’s mother had insisted on elocution lessons for her daughter; Lily and Julia had concealed their envy behind sneers and cruel jibes.

“That was what sparked that awful row. You asked a perfectly reasonable question about Latin and Lily had the nerve to mock you – after you had been so generous! I’m afraid I saw red.”

Alice smirked. “Father and I used to joke about it. ‘Aren’t those two clumsy! Always dropping their ‘T’s.’”

I smiled appreciatively. “That was it. Stanley may not have liked puzzles, but he was a clever chap. He knew he’d been poisoned and left a clue to implicate them.”

Alice nodded again, seeming eager to confirm this. “Yes, it was clever of father. If he’d knocked the cup over, we would have thought it an accident. He had to make sure I would

notice: the dropped tea.”

I thought back to the final day of the trial, the two sisters in court, their faces twisted in defiance as the guilty verdict was handed down. They had protested their innocence to the last.

“They knew poisoning was a woman’s crime and that when the police saw the…” Alice faltered momentarily, “... the injury, they would assume that was the cause of death.”

“Just as you say, darling. You really are the cleverest, bravest woman I know. I can’t wait for you to become Mrs UnwinCarruthers.” A shadow passed over Alice’s face. “Oh Philip, I can’t...” I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach, but tried to keep my voice level. “Whatever do you mean? You accepted my proposal!”

She closed her eyes. “I will marry you. But don’t ask me to take your name. I could not bear that.” I began to object: “But…” Suddenly, she opened her eyes and looked directly at me, her gaze piercing. A shiver ran down my spine.

“Philip Unwin-Carruthers. PUC. Or ‘cup’ reversed.”

I stared at her, desperately hoping that I had misunderstood.

“Oh, you needn’t look so frightened, Philip. Telling the truth won’t bring father back. And I always hated Julia and Lily.” She rose and kissed me coolly on the forehead. “Your secret’s safe with me, darling.”

THE END