The Floating Body by Kel Richards Page A

small man stepped into the cathedral and closed the door silently behind him.
    He was not a man I recognised. The light was poor in the body of the building, but I could see that he was short, slightly built and had a completely bald head. I could see enough, in fact, to place him if he was someone I knew. He was not.
    He paced slowly and silently about halfway down the main aisle of the nave, looking around all the time. Then he appeared to spot McKell sitting, motionless, in a rear pew and hurried to his side.
    I dared not move but stood stock still, leaning slightly forward, at the edge of the organ loft railings. I almost dared not breathe. McKell had always struck me as a slightly fishy character in some way, and now it appeared that he was having a fishy meeting with some unknown fishy character from the town. The whole thing smelled as strongly as a fisherman’s pyjamas.
    And sure enough—it was a meeting. McKell and the stranger had their heads together. From the bobbing of those heads in the dim shadows of the cathedral, it was clear they were talking to each other. I probably would not have been able to hear them from the height of the organ loft even if Evans had not been playing. As it was, there wasn’t the slightest possibility of catching even a single word.
    I comforted myself against this lack of possibly useful intelligence by imagining that they would only be speaking in whispers anyway, so even if there had been no music, and I had been downstairs, I would still—in all likelihood—not have been able to hear them.
    Then McKell’s hand darted into his coat pocket and he pulled out a small paper packet. This he handed over to the stranger. A moment later the visitor stood up and left, departing the same way he came in.
    McKell waited until the stranger had gone and then made his own exit from the cathedral.
    ‘Alice would have been able to describe this,’ I said to myself. ‘ “Curioser and curioser!” she would have said.’

EIGHTEEN
~
    That night I was invited to dinner with Dean Cowper and his wife, Ellen—and since Ellen had a reputation as an excellent cook, I was delighted to accept.
    Around the dinner table were Cowper and his wife and their guest residents—the two Lewis brothers—as well as myself.
    The dinner was, as I had anticipated, outstanding: roast lamb with peas and potatoes followed by a baked rice pudding.
    Once the table had been cleared by the maid, Ellen Cowper retired for the night and the Dean brought out a bottle of port and some glasses.
    ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘will you join me?’
    We said we would and he poured out four glasses of the ruby red liquid.
    ‘Very fine,’ said Warnie as he took a sip. ‘Very fine old port indeed.’
    After finishing off his first glass and helping himself to a second, Warnie found a copy of the
Times
for that day lying on top of a small bookcase. He settled down in an armchair with his glass and the newspaper, leaving Jack, the Dean and myself to our conversation.
    At first this revolved around the impossible murder of Dave Fowler. Those same questions that had popped into my head at the first sight of the body were now on everyone’s lips. And, apart from wild speculations, there was no suggestion of any possible, and reasonable, explanation emerging.
    ‘This strange matter,’ muttered Dean Cowper, ‘gives every appearance of having defied the laws of nature.’
    Jack agreed. ‘If Isaac Newton had been standing on that gravel road at the back of the school he would have found his law of gravity exhibited as effectively by the falling corpse as by a falling apple. But I suspect even Newton’s giant brain would struggle to explain why gravity had not worked twelve hours earlier when we distinctly saw the body begin its fall.’
    ‘Some of the boys,’ said Cowper, shaking his head sadly, ‘have managed to get hold of the details of this case.’
    ‘In my short time here,’ I said, ‘I’ve discovered how efficient the