“You’re from the South, aren’t you, Mr. Ahlberg?”
“From the South? Is that my accent or my reactionary views? Actually my mother was a Southerner. However, my father’s second wife came from the Midwest.”
“What do you think of Susannah Tate? I met her last Sunday with your brothers.”
A positively distraught look appeared on Josiah’s face, to be swept away the next moment.
“Susannah?” he said slowly. “Well now, she’s something of a firebrand, I guess. Maybe she’ll settle down when Mark marries her. If Mark marries her.”
“Oh? Why shouldn’t he? She’s pretty enough.”
Josiah looked uncomfortable. It could be just that academic Americans tended to fight shy of the kind of extramural gossip that was meat and drink to Oxford dons, thought Nigel.
“She is. But she does play the field a bit.” Josiah glanced round uneasily, then lowering his voice said, “You know she had an understanding with Chester last term. I don’t say she’s—well,—a golddigger, but she’s not a very balanced girl—there’s bad blood in that family. I suppose you know that her father was one of the Hollywood directors who got into trouble during the McCarthy investigations.”
“That wouldn’t necessarily imply moral degeneracy on his part,” suggested Nigel gently.
“Oh, no. No, it wouldn’t. No.” The wild vague look was on Josiah’s face. He clearly did not want to pursue the topic.
The party was breaking up. Josiah, waving his pipe at Nigel, asked him to stop by any time he felt like a chat—his office was B.24, and he was usually working there till close on midnight, and the Master invited Nigel to stay behind for a nightcap.
Nigel and the Master had known each other well at Oxford but had seldom met since. Zeke had been a passionate oarsman in those days, and as a result got embroiled with a female tow-path harpy from whose clutches Nigel managed at last to extricate the naïve young American, thus earning his lifelong gratitude and providing material for one of Nigel’s undergraduate bons mots: “’Tis Pity he’s an Oar.”
“I saw you heavily engaged with Josh,” said the Master. “I hope your classical training stood you in good stead.”
“He seems a very anxious man. What’s he so anxious about?”
“Well now, he’s highly conscientious, you know. As a teacher.”
“But not as a scholar, a first-class mind?” Nigel asked.
“I wouldn’t care to judge: it’s not my subject.”
“Evasive as ever, Zeke. I suppose masters have to be diplomatic. Well, it’s the impression I got. And he’s an odd mixture of sour and sweet, isn’t he?”
“He must have got the sweetness from his mother,” said May, who was lying full length on the sofa. “His father’s a pompous old brigand.”
“Now, May!”
“Does he get on all right with his father?”
“So far as I know.”
“He’d better,” May put in. “With all that money coming to him when the old man finally consents to honor the next world with his presence.”
“What? You mean the other brothers are left out of the will?” Nigel asked.
“Oh, no.” Zeke explained that, when the plans for building Hawthorne House were afoot, old Mr. Ahlberg had hinted at his testamentary dispositions. Josiah, his first wife’s son, would receive half the estate, the remainder being divided between Chester and Mark in equal shares. If either of the latter ‘displeased’ him, his share would go to the university for scientific research.”
“What about his second wife?”
“Dead,” remarked May. “She couldn’t abide living with him any longer. You can give me another drink.”
The Master did so.
“But why should he expect the younger sons to displease him?” Nigel asked. “They seem quite inoffensive.”
“Well, Mark was rather frisky as an undergraduate. Got into debt badly—and I heard rumors of something worse. But he’s sobered down now, hopefully,” the Master explained.
“The fact is,” said May, “the old ruffian would jump at a chance to disinherit either of them. He was passionately in love with his first wife, so it seems, and that’s rubbed off on Josiah. Particularly,” she added, “as he killed her.”
“What?”
“Motor accident. He got a fit of conscience about it—the first and last time his conscience gave him any trouble.”
There was a respectful silence.
“Well, anyway,” said Nigel at last, “he surely can’t be expecting Chester to kick over the traces.”
“I’m afraid he has very little respect for Chester,” said Zeke. “He’d have liked one of his sons to go into business—”
“Provided that son was noticeably less successful than himself,” said Mrs. Edwardes.
“You may be right at that, May. Anyway, poor Chester did what he thought his father would think the next best thing. But the old man looks on the Business School as a sort of playing at soldiers. He has no use for it; and Chester feels this very, very badly.”
“Still, he’s obviously good at his job—being called in by a British university,” said Nigel.
“Chester’s a dull, earnest fellow—just the sort of American to impress English university authorities,” said May. “He’s circumspect. He’d never make an advance without first guaranteeing himself a line of retreat.”
“Do you suppose he made his advances to Sukie Tate on that method?” asked Nigel.
“Och, here we are gossiping like old women!”
“You are an old woman, my love,” said Zeke, kissing her brow.
“Away with you!”
Zeke said, “We’ve never really figured out just what the situation was between Sukie and Chester. They were going around, certainly—”
“And then the dashing Mark snatched her up on his horse?” said Nigel. “But it doesn’t seem like that at all. I’ve only spent a day with them, I admit, but I couldn’t make out whether they’re engaged or not. American sexual mores defeat me. Surely to God they know if they’re engaged?”
“Now be sensible, Nigel. She’s a young girl. Why can’t she be taking a little time to make up her mind?”
“All right, May. But I’m wondering if her mind is really on Chester or Mark. She’s such a crusader she may give them both the slip,” said Nigel.
“How do you figure that out?” asked Zeke.
Nigel told them some of last Sunday’s conversation. “And what’s all this between her and Josiah? He seems not to like her.”
He was aware of that silent intercommunication between a long-married couple which does not even need a glance for them to convey it.
Zeke uncoiled from his chair, went to the mantel.
“Plagiarism, Nigel. Her brother.”
“Her brother? He’s an author?” Nigel asked.
“No, no. What you’d call cribbing in Britain. John Tate was one of Josiah’s most promising graduate students. He lifted a chunk of an unpublished essay by Josiah and served it up as his own in a thesis.” A look of melancholy came over the Master’s face. “We had to fire him from the university, of course. Temporarily. He can return in a year or two if he behaves himself.”
“I see. And Sukie takes his side? Did her brother admit it was plagiarism?”
“He couldn’t hope to conceal it—he’d hardly altered a word of the original.”
“Rather surprising if he’s such a bright lad.”
The Master fidgeted with an ornament on the mantel. “Well, his case was that the crucial ideas in the thesis were his own: he’d talked them over with Josiah, who pinched them for this article of his.”
“Oh Lord!”
“You can say that again. It was a very unpleasant situation to deal with. Of course, it was a foregone conclusion. Josiah is a man of probity, whereas John—well, we hadn’t always found him overly reliable in other matters.” The Master sighed.
“If Josiah’s article had not been published at the time, how did
the examiners know the lad had pinched his ideas?”
“One of them told Josh how brilliant the thesis was, outlined some of the points John had made. So Josh smelled a rat and asked to see it at once.”
“As John’s supervisor, wouldn’t he do so anyway?”
“Sure. But later.”
“Sounds as if this John Tate was a crusader like his sister,” Nigel suggested.
“A crusader? Whatever do you imply by that?” asked May sharply.
“Sounds as if he deliberately sought a showdown with Professor Ahlberg. Otherwise, wouldn’t he have altered the wording of Josiah’s article, enough to cover his tracks anyway? After all, with the close relationship you’d get between a student and his supervisor, it’d be excusable, inevitable, for some of the latter’s ideas to have rubbed off on his pupil.”
“And what would this crusade be in aid of?” The Master was frowning.
“To make sure that the right man got in first with his own ideas,” Nigel suggested. “Have you compared the two documents, Zeke?”
“Certainly. And I’m a historian and accustomed, if I may say so, to weighing evidence.”
“Now don’t go stuffy on me, old friend. Forget that one was written by a professor, who has probity and tenure and all that jazz, and the other by a graduate student of questionable morality—forget all that and tell me which was the better essay.”
“But now look—”
“Which was the more convincing in its arguments, the better structured, the more scholarly?”
The Master made a long pause. “Well, if you put it that way, John Tate’s. But—”
“Okay, okay, that’s what I wanted. You don’t have to tell me all the arguments on the other side. Very likely John’s just the more persuasive writer of the two, and set out Josiah’s points better than he could himself. Has Josh published his article yet, by the way?”
“No, he told me he wanted to keep it awhile for further consideration.”
“You’re not going to dig it all up, are you, Nigel?” said May suspiciously. “I don’t want Zeke to go through that trouble all over again: it nearly drove him to tranquilizers.”
“Good God, no. I’ve come here for pure escape, and to take a peek at your Herrick manuscript. Don’t worry.”
But even the smallest mystery had about as much chance of survival where Nigel Strangeways was present as an ant in a cage of anteaters. . . .
The House was quiet as Nigel made his way across the court to his own staircase. But lights were on behind the shades of almost every room. Very different from the sounds of revelry that used to cleave the air at night in his own Oxford college in the old days. They were a serious lot here: except for the Saturday dances and the occasional outbreak after a university football game, the long evenings of the fall were given up to study.
A couple of undergraduates coming in through the main gate, which was open all night, gave him a polite “Hi, Mr. Strangeways.” It was wonderfully agreeable to be living among the young, but with no obligations to them or to any curriculum.
The great tower of Hawthorne House loomed above him. Who had given it that name? Surely not the founder? Old Mr. Ahlberg did not sound like a reading man.
Nigel took out his key, and let himself into his rooms. Paneled walls, two armchairs, three hard chairs with the arms of Cabot University on them, a sofa, an almost empty bookcase, a letter from Clare, which had arrived after lunch, on the desk. Somewhere above, a gramophone was playing, only just audible to him, the fourth Brandenburg. Presently even this fell silent.
He opened Henderson the Rain King and started to read; but this admirable work failed to take his mind off the strange story of the professor of Classics and the graduate student. There were several other things he should have asked Zeke, but the Master was evidently reluctant to be pumped about an episode which still gave him pain.
The Ahlberg brothers . . . So unlike one another in character and appearance . . . It must be difficult to be the sons of a millionaire and a tough old tycoon at that, by all accounts. Yet none of them, not even Mark, had settled down to the life of a playboy, as might have been expected . . . If there was anything spoiled in them, any inherited vice or conditioned weakness, it was not apparent. Each was making his own way. . . .
Suddenly there was the sound of footsteps beneath, and a yelling, bawling voice shattered the calm.
“Food Man! FOOD MAN! Hot dogs! Coke! Coffee! . . .”
Nigel still, after a week of it, leaped nervously in his chair every time he heard the appalling racket. Punctually at 10:15 P.M. every night the Food Man cried his wares at Nigel’s entrance. Students, who had dined at 6:30, rushed to fortify themselves against another hour of work. The Food Man was himself a student, who at the start of term had bid highest for the job and the modest profits it brought in—an example of private enterprise which would have shocked Oxbridge dons to the marrow. His bawlings could now be heard diminuendo as he went from entrance to entrance toward the far end of the court.
The only comparable din in this sedate home of learning was the bells of a neighboring house. They had been brought, apparently, from a derelict monastery in Russia, and had been set up in the great tower. And a derelict monk had been hired to come over and teach the undergraduates to ring them. Either the monk was past his work or the tradition had been lost during the thirty years since the bells had been hung; for the present team which rang them from 12:40 to 12:50 each Sunday morning, produced an extraordinary sort of campanological pandemonium: Charles Reilly had described it as “an avalanche of ironmongery falling from heaven, like Lucifer.”
When the yells of the Food Man had at last died away, Nigel went to bed. He felt too sleepy to face the usual encounter with his shower—a treacherous mechanism which, after he had regulated it (standing well away) to the desired temperature, would suddenly emit scalding water when he was defenseless beneath it.
In bed, drifting toward sleep, he heard the distant wailing of a siren. It was either a fire engine or a rescue truck: he was not yet able to distinguish between the two sounds. He remembered Charles Reilly, who flatly refused to believe it was either rescue truck or fire engine which produced such uncanny howls, saying, “It’s a banshee, Nigel, and you know what that means. A death in the House. You’d think they’d be more nervous.”
3 The Spooky Treasure Hunt
SOMETIME DURING THE next five days Charles Reilly’s gloomy prognostication did in fact come true, though nobody was aware of it because nobody missed the victim.
It was not till the Monday after the Edwardes’ party that any uneasiness began to be felt in Hawthorne House, where, if a Faculty member’s office door bears a notice saying “All appointments canceled for next few days,” the docile undergraduate accepts it and carries on with his assignments. The more demanding students, if there were any, would have knocked on the door, and receiving no answer, have gone away.
Nigel, coming in to lunch on Monday, sat down at a table beside Mark and Charles, who were already in conversation.
“. . . well, I haven’t seen him lately,” Mark was saying.
“It’s a damned nuisance. He asked me to dinner, and I can’t remember was it for today or tomorrow. Hello there, Strangeways. I rang up his office, and his apartment. Twice. No answer. Where else would I try?”
“The Faculty building perhaps.”
“Did he say he was going away anywhere for the weekend?”
“Not to me.”
“Whom are you talking about?” asked Nigel.
“Josiah.”
“Better try his apartment again after lunch,” suggested Mark. “His cleaning woman comes in the afternoon.”
“Would he have gone off for the weekend with a woman, and be wanting to keep it dark?” Charles Reilly’s blue eyes twinkled.
“Oh, come. I am not my brother’s keeper,” said Mark, “but I guess that is about the unlikeliest thing in the world.”
When they had finished their meal th
ey went first to Josiah’s office on the first floor of B entry, and saw the notice.
“That’s peculiar,” said Mark.
“He doesn’t often cancel appointments?” Nigel asked.
“No. He’s a conscientious s.o.b. I’ll give him that.”
“No date on it, either,” said Nigel.
“Why don’t we go in?” asked Reilly. “The fella might have been lying dead on the floor for days.”
Mark looked at him. Then his hand went toward his pocket, stopped halfway, then moved on and took out a pack of cigarettes. “We’ll ask the Superintendent for the spare key, maybe. But let’s try Elsa first.”
Elsa, the Negro cleaning woman, whom Mark rang up, said that Mr. Ahlberg had not slept at home since Wednesday night, and had left no message for her: letters were beginning to accumulate in the mailbox. Josiah, Mark told Nigel and Charles, had a bed in his office and sometimes slept there if he had been working late.
Finally they fetched the spare key from the Superintendent in the gate lodge, and returned to B entry. Mark inserted the key and gently opened the door.
It was an austere room, a few yellowing prints of Greek antiquities on the brown-paneled walls, a filing cabinet, a desk with a carpet under the desk chair—the usual office fittings—a low bookcase filled with classical texts all round the walls.
Its usual occupant was not there. Nigel poked his nose into the small washroom next door. This too was empty. Mark was riffling through the papers on the desk. “No message here,” he said.
“What’s this?” Nigel pointed to a large, squared worksheet pinned to one of the walls.
“That’s Josh’s schedule of seminars and individual pupil appointments for the term.”
“And the ticks in red ink?”
“He makes them at the end of each tutorial period: if any student fails to turn up, he puts his initials in the appropriate square. Why?”
“There are no ticks after Thursday last,” Nigel said. “He had appointments for Friday, but they are not ticked. So he must have put that notice on the door on Thursday night or early Friday morning.”
The Morning After Death Page 3