Some of the Characters Appearing or Mentioned:

Mark Henry Foster            The story‑teller

Tristan (Tris) Price‑Williams   His well‑proportioned boyfriend

Gordon Foster     Father of Mark and Francis:  Fiddles for a living

Maria (Angelica Matteoli) Foster  Mother of Mark and Francis: Teaches singing

Francis Michael [Microbe] Foster Alias Toad:  just growing and wondering

Ivo Richie Carr                Mark's cousin:  chunky and cheeky with it  

Adam Benjamin Carr      Ditto, as his twin

Albert Tomkins               A Head Porter with an elephantine memory

Jason Knott                     An Assistant Porter with long antecedents

H.E. Sheik Sayed Al‑Hamed   Erstwhile Ambassador for a Middle‑Eastern State

Khaled Al-Hamed  His elder son:  a financier

Dr Safar Al‑Hamed  His younger son  A knowledgeable Music don

Colonel Lachlan Cameron‑Thomson  Ex‑Military Intelligence

Dr Jacques Thomson  Reader Emeritus in Modern Languages

Dr Francis Thomson   His eldest son

I was back in my study about quarter past twelve and realised I hadn’t collected my post from the Porter’s Lodge.  I had just got out of  the staircase door when the Chaplain came hurrying up.

            “Mark, Mark!” he looked worried, “There’s an awful noise coming from the Chapel.  The organ’s going full blast and the main door and the vestry door are locked and my keys are at home.”]

            “I've got mine,” I said and we ran along the path to the vestry door.  As we got near I could hear the noise.  The organ was wailing.  That is, it sounded as if a good number of stops had been drawn and something was causing a large number of notes to sound at once and the bellows couldn't quite supply enough wind.  I was puzzled.  Who would be there?

            As soon as we got through the vestry door and into the Chapel the noise was tremendous.  Then I remembered who would be there.  I rushed to the organ loft door.  Blast!  That was shut, too, and I had to fiddle with my keys to get the right one.  I unlocked it and scrambled up the stairs.  What I saw confirmed my suspicions.  Lying fully across the pedal board was a body.  I pressed the blower motor button and the noise subsided.  I looked at the body and saw that it’s head was encased in a plastic bag.  The bag was pulled tight round the neck with a drawstring and the body was very still.  The back of the head was dark and looked caved in.  I looked up at the music-rest on the organ.  I knew whose body it was and who the perpetrator was as well.

            I went to the rail of the loft.  The Chaplain was standing below staring at the choir stalls.  All down one side the most beautiful brass and glass candle holder in front of each stall was bent and the glass shattered on the floor.

            I pulled out my mobile.  I knew Dude would be on duty as Adam had said that last night.  As I got up his number I shouted down to the Chaplain.  “Dr Henson!  Please phone for an ambulance!  There’s a body up here.  I’m certain he’s dead and I know who did it and I guess I know where he is.”

            I went carefully down the organ loft stairs then stopped and stared at the damage to the choir stalls as Dude answered.  “I’m in the Chapel,” I said, “There’s been another murder.  The Chaplain’s calling an ambulance and I know where the murderer is.”

            Dude said  “I’m coming!  I’m just by King’s Parade. Stay on line!  I’m listening.”

            Somehow I was so calm and collected.  I don’t suppose the horror of it all had really dawned on me.

            I knew the body must be the Honourable Jeremy Foskett.  The music on the organ had been that old copy of the eight Preludes and Fugues open at the final two pages of the Fugue in e minor.  A rather exuberant Tosser had drawn full organ for the last few bars and that was the last thing he’d done.

            Behind the long pages of the book was the upright copy of George Thalben-Ball’s ‘Elegy’.  Clearly at the top was the stamp of the previous owner.  ‘H P Jones MPS FRCO’.

            The Chaplain had gone.  To the Porter’s Lodge I assumed.  I walked slowly and steadily to the vestry, avoiding the shards of broken glass.  I knew which of the closed doors to try.  That to the tower.  I  turned the heavy handle but it was locked.  I had a key to the  modern Yale lock and hoped and prayed it wasn’t locked with the big key I knew Charles had had.  I breathed a sigh of relief as the key turned and, pulling on the big handle, I edged the door open.  I opened it  fully fairly cautiously.  No one behind it in the passageway, but I saw there was a bunch of keys like mine on the fourth stair up.  I climbed up the winding stair very slowly not knowing what might be waiting.  I kept talking quietly into my mobile saying what I was doing hoping against hope that Dude was still listening and would be here as quickly as possible.

            I passed the room below the bells, this was empty other than with the ropes from the bells above hanging.  No one there.  I peered in at the next level at the bells themselves.  Nobody there also.  The stairs went on until I was at the upper room where the rhyme had been found and the immobile clock mechanism was standing in the middle.  The door to the walkway and the crumbling parapet was open.

            I kept as close to the wall of the room as possible, not knowing the state of the floor, and looked out of the door very carefully.  There was my quarry leaning over the balustrade, waving his arms and mouthing something silently.

            “Drew!” I called softly, holding the mobile as close to my mouth as I could,  “It’s dangerous up here.  Come down!”

            He heard me, looked at me and retreated further round the tower keeping close to the parapet at the edge of the walkway.  He started to shout and wave his arms.  He was holding up the thing which was looped over his wrist.  “They have perished every one!  All those that blaspheme!  All those who cause hurt to others!  All those who destroy the temples of the body and of the Lord!  I have used my knowledge and my skill.”  He unlooped the object from his wrist and pounded the balustrade about half a dozen times.  He was then staring upwards and waving his arms skywards and the ranting started again.  He yelled out, “We the alchemists of old have harnessed the might of Earth, Air, Fire and Water to conquer the ills of this world and to destroy those who sin!”

            I called out, louder this time, “Drew, stop that, come down!  That parapet isn’t safe.  Don’t lean on the balustrade!”  Alchemists?  Of course, he was a modern alchemist, studying Chemistry.

            He looked at me and at the same time took another step back.  He was really shouting now.  “I have been defiled and I have been the instrument of God’s punishment to those who have sinned.  They did not listen.  Those who have sinned and do not listen will be destroyed!”

            “Drew,” I said as quietly as possible, “Did you kill Brinley Potter?”

            He sneered.  He was quieter.  “He seduced your friends just as his school-friends.....  No!  I will not speak of that!  He needed to sleep and after he had boasted that he knew me and what they did I helped him sleep.  Water was his end.  That was clear, clean water to cleanse his sins. He was asleep and knew nothing.”  He raised his voice.  “I used on him what his friends had used on me!”  He waved the object again.  It looked like a shortened policeman’s truncheon or cosh..

            “Come back here, Drew!” I shouted, too, as he leaned back against the crenellated balustrade and looked as if he might topple backwards.

            Drew started shouting again and was hitting the balustrade again with the cosh in time with his rants.  “They that defile the holy temples are destroyed.  That other fool.  He destroyed his own body.  He pleaded with me to supply him with more of those steroids he needed to build his stupid muscles and his useless aspirations.  His body had already being despoiled.  He was impotent and a wreck.  I helped him complete that task!”

            “Is that your family’s chemist’s shop?”  I asked a bit more quietly.  “H P Jones was an organist, too.  Your organ books?”

            “My grandfather,” was shot back with a shout of pride, then he was silent for a moment.  “He died when I was harmed....”  He waved his arms again and raised his voice.   “Those other fools will rot in Hell one day.  I cannot be the instrument of their deliverance from their evil ways.  The drugs they abuse their bodies with will be their end! ”

            “Keep him talking, Mark,” a quiet hoarse voice came from my mobile which I was holding out in front of me to catch what Drew was saying.  It was Sergeant Woolpit.  “Keep your phone on.   We’ve got it patched into Headquarters.  I’m down in the Chapel now.  I’ll be up there in a moment.  See if you can talk him down.”

            I thought I had better press on as instructed.  “How did you kill Bryce?....”

            He was laughing now.  “That was too easy.  He wanted pills I gave them to him.  I showed my skill but had to wait until he’d swallowed those I’d put with the others and when he was staggering I helped him fall...”

            I flew a kite.  “But you didn’t mean to kill Mr Finch-Hampton...”

            He was silent for a moment, then roused himself and swung the cosh.  “I wanted to warn the fool.  He thought I would help him cast God from the College.”  He was shouting even louder.  “The fires of Hell have him now!...  The pattern was almost complete.  Water, Earth, Fire.....”  He was almost dancing in his frenzy, waving the cosh and bringing it down on the coping of the balustrade with mighty blows.  “Then that other buffoon boasted he knew who had defiled me once he knew who I was.  He jeered and said he had supplied the cannabis they were smoking and the cocaine which addled their wits.  Little did he know I had found that supply he’d left with that other fool and had purified it.  Although I tried it out I couldn’t find a way with him.  But then Air was to be his end........”  His voice rose to a crescendo as he jumped into the air and landed, even for his small frame, very heavily.

            That triumphant dance came to a sudden end.  As I clutched at the balustrade my side so the whole of the stonework where Drew was jumping up and down collapsed away down the side of the tower into the roadway below.  I didn’t see him drop.  I was grabbed by Dude who appeared at the doorway, taking my arm and pulling me through as the whole of the tower seemed to shudder.

            “Let’s get down, Mark,” he said, “Before the whole place collapses.  He’s gone.”

            We scrambled down the stairs to be met by the Chaplain and his wife with Tris, an ashen-faced Jason and two police constables, one covered in white masonry dust.  There was a hole in the roof of the Chapel and several large pieces of stonework were lying on the floor.

            The next few hours were a whirl.  The Chaplain’s wife took me with Tris and one of the Constables over to their house where I just sat and then the emotions flowed.  I felt I had been so calm and collected in finding the body and then confronting Drew with the four murders, but now I shivered and shook.  All those suspicions of mine before.  They all pointed to Drew but something held me back from voicing them.  If I had, would I have saved any of the victims?  Or him?  Our group had come so near as well and I was certain the police had their suspicions too.  But why?  Why had it all been allowed to proceed almost inexorably to the bitter end?

            It was now so obvious that Drew was the victim of that dreadful assault we had heard about.  Brinley must have been at the school at the time and now we knew definitely that Tosser was the pusher.  Those overdoses were caused by Drew trying out a way of getting at Tosser somehow, but then Air was the final link in his deranged thinking.  It was lack of Air which must have killed Tosser, helped by the cosh.  That damage to Brinley’s skull and the witness’s report of the raised arm, too.  The cosh.  Drew had said it had been used on him in the attack.  I shuddered as I knew where.

            I didn’t want anything but to know Tris was by my side.  The Chaplain’s wife was a tower of strength, too.  She knew I would want no fuss.  Strong coffee, rather than tea, and quiet.  The Constable sat and looked pensive.  At last he couldn’t contain himself.

            “Excuse me asking, Mr Foster,” he said, looking very puzzled.  “There was you and Sarge up the tower but I could have sworn there was someone else just behind you and held onto you when the parapet collapsed.”

            “But it didn’t collapse my side,” I said.

            “Yes, sir, it did, and we had to get out of the way mighty quick as two great lumps came down into the quad and one sort of exploded by me.”  His uniform, though brushed still had plenty of white dust on it.  “There’s that hole in the Chapel roof, too, from the bits round the corner.”  He paused.  “So we missed seeing who it was.”

            “But the Sergeant pulled me in..”

            “....No he didn’t,” came Sergeant Woolpit’s voice.  He had just come into the room behind where I was sitting.  “Someone was there and handed you to me.  And that won’t be going into any report, alright, Constable!”

            Tris gripped my hand.  I knew, and he knew, that a firm, but gentle, hand had been there when needed.

            There was complete silence in the room.  Our hands were clasped and we both said our silent thanks to Piers.  The dark clouds had been lifted as forecast.  I was no longer shaking and shuddering.  What had happened had happened and my involvement was over and done with.  Yes, there would be statements to be made and the whole business would be reopened and discussed but as far as I was concerned, as soon as things were settled, then a clear line could be drawn.

            I was asked if I wanted to go home for a few days.  No.  I wanted to stay.  My College life must go on.  I expect people thought I might be bottling things up.  They would have been quite wrong.  I suppose my only regret was not acting on first impulses but I concluded that life is just not as simple as the detective stories make out.

            I was only required to sign a statement which included the interchange between Drew and myself recorded by the Police Control Centre.  We heard that Boz’s father had been the psychiatrist who first interviewed Drew after the assault, but then Drew had been sent off to another part of the country to complete his schooling.  True, his grandfather had died a few months after the incident, but that was of old age.

            What was horrifying were the details of the assault.  It transpired that Drew had been fishing happily by himself  in a small lake in a glade of surrounding trees.  Five pupils from the Public School had been in another glade further on, smoking cannabis and all had snorted cocaine as well. They had  found him as they wandered around in their drugged-up, stoned state.   It was easy  for the five, bigger and older than him, to overpower him.  They had then stripped him completely and made him suck each of them off to begin with.  Two had gone off back to the school and the other three had then tied him down over a fallen tree and two had raped him and the third, too far gone and impotent, had stuck the cosh up his rectum as his contribution.

            Somehow Drew had freed himself and got himself home in a very distressed state.  The local doctor had examined him and found what had happened and then Drew had flipped.  He was taken to the hospital where Dr Johnson had been called in.  He said he could not get anywhere as he had almost immediately retreated into almost a catatonic state and then began to show symptoms of more than one personality.  Against his advice Drew had been sent off almost secretly to stay with other relatives and Dr Johnson lost touch with him.  Drew was just fourteen when all this happened.

            Although the police had been called in there were no clues, except for the cosh which somehow Drew had got hold off after the investigation.  He had seen nothing having been blindfolded and gagged with his own underpants and socks.  No one at the school knew anything.  ‘It couldn’t be any of our pupils!’  At least that was the story.  By the time Drew left the hospital it was summer vacation time and all the pupils were scattered

            The relatives he was sent to were very religious and this very bright, very musical boy, found refuge from his torments in what they thought was a marvellous conversion to their beliefs.  A refuge which did nothing for the underlying results of the traumatic happenings he had experienced.  On the surface, it was concluded, he could cope by his exhortations and rantings and by his obsession to be a good Chemistry student and an excellent organist just like his grandfather.  Underneath, when the raw nerves were touched, his unresolved hatreds and desire for revenge were unleashed.  A second vengeful personality was freed from any restraint.

            Of course, once Drew’s locker at the Chemistry Laboratories and his other room at the Christian Hostel were searched all was revealed.  A very old poison bottle contained a small amount of the substance which had helped to kill Bryce.  There were numerous more diabetic syringes.  It hadn’t been known that Drew was diabetic.  Perhaps even brought on by the shock of the attack.  He had cleverly injected the vitamin pills with the poison.  His size six trainers were also at the Hostel - no one at College knew he went running swathed in those sweats but someone at the Hostel had seen him, but thought nothing of it.  Many students there went running, so?

            There were a couple of the canisters of vitamin pills there, too.  It was thought he had taken these and the sleeping pills when he had helped out at the family pharmacy during a Christmas break.  It was suggested he might even had thought of overdosing himself with the Luminol if his mania got worse, but would  he have known if his second personality was taking over?.  His lab bench showed evidence of cocaine and he had purified the cut cocaine into a very refined version which even to seasoned users would have had quite adverse effects.  There were some notes culled from the Internet on fire-setting and a small notebook listing names and the sins he imagined were committed.

            Luckily the newspapers didn’t get the whole sorry story.  Someone in the publishing world must have had close links with the Foskett family as there was a bare mention of his death in one paper.  The tabloids weren’t interested.  As far as they were concerned it seemed that a student had been climbing up the unsafe tower and had fallen to his death.  The police had drawn a line under all the happenings so there would be no publicity.  Subsequently there were a couple of paragraphs about the four deaths but there were no awful details.  I was not mentioned.  The Chaplain held a short service to pray for the souls of all the victims, including Drew.  He also went to see Drew’s parents and said they were devastated, but Drew had left their care well before he was fifteen and they had seen little of him since.   I conquered any other terror I might have felt by going the next day after the fall and, although workmen were already there clearing the broken masonry and the ruined candle holders, with others on the roof pulling tarpaulins over the hole, I played for over two hours dispelling any feelings I might have had about that body.  Our organ did need some attention.  There was dust everywhere and the bellows had been overstrained but that was soon put right.  Charles arranged, with or without the Bursar’s knowledge we didn’t know, for the organ builders to come and repair things immediately.

            Dude came to see us the night after the incident.  He said I hadn’t realised the whole walkway and parapet was crumbling and falling away.  “When I took your hand,” he said, “there was nothing under your feet!”   Tris and I told him who we thought the other person was who held me.  In fact, just before Easter the four of us, including Adam, went over to Ulvescott Manor for the weekend.  Tris and I slept in Piers’ room and Dude and Adam were in the Horsebox.  Early on Saturday morning both Tris and I were still asleep when Adam and Dude came through and got into bed with us.  Very gently they woke us, then, Tris with Adam, I with Dude, made quiet but fervent love.  Dude whispered that he felt so safe and secure and caressed me and I hugged and nuzzled him and together we brought each other to tremendous orgasms.  We heard the others reaching their own orgasmic release then four bodies twined and intertwined sharing our love and respect for each other.  As I held the other three I said aloud a grateful thankyou to Piers. 

            The whole weekend was a quiet and peaceful respite for each of us but especially for me.  Our reason for being there was known but not discussed.  I know Tris was especially calmed by the trip as he was worried how I would cope but I knew I was OK now.  I think I also knew that both of us would be successful in our exams at the beginning of next term. 

            It was also on that trip that Dude and Adam told us about the offer that had been made.  Commander Mackenzie was being promoted to be an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard.  He needed the equivalent of an aide-de-camp.  Dude had been recommended and had applied to return to the Metropolitan Police and having already passed the requisite exams would be transferred with the rank of Inspector.  We felt so pleased for him, but also sad as he and Adam would be parted.  But both said, as they had before, that although they were extremely fond of each other it wouldn’t have been a permanent commitment for either of them.  They would remain good friends.  Dude said the weekend had been perfect.  He knew now who had been on the crumbling tower with me and he was convinced he was also doing the right thing.  “There are more things in Heaven and Earth....” he quoted, and we knew that that Old Bill was right!!