The Morning After Death

by Nicholas Blake

  Nigel’s pale-blue eyes held an expression of guilenessness; which had been misinterpreted by many and had been the downfall of some.

  He bent his mind now to two queer ambiguities in the story Sukie had told. First, how very strange that Josiah Ahlberg should have agreed to an interview with an ex-pupil he had been instrumental in suspending. Whether he or John was the guilty party, an interview seemed equally unlikely. If Josiah had stolen John’s ideas, he would hardly wish to talk it over with the young man; unless, of course, John had since found some lever, some way to blackmail his tutor. And if John had in fact committed plagiarism, why should Josiah be willing to see him again?

  In any case, according to Sukie, it was not John who had begged for an interview, but Chester who had arranged it. Why? And how? Did he have so much influence with Josiah? Was he so eager to do a service to the boy’s sister, with whom he was no longer on intimate terms—if ever he had been? Or could it be to get back into her good graces and supplant Mark who had supplanted him? It did seem out of character—with what one knew about Chester.

  And, then, the timetable. If Josiah was shot at 10:08 or thereabouts, under cover of the Food Man’s shouts, and if Mark and John were both telling the truth when they said they’d arrived at Josiah’s office, at 10:15 and 10:30 respectively, and if some third person had shot Josiah, and arranged for the other two to turn up shortly afterward and smear themselves with suspicion—no, too many indeterminate ifs.

  The body having been removed to the locker room seemed to point a finger at John: he’d be the one who needed to gain time, to get as far away as possible from the scene of the crime, to establish an alibi maybe. But John was still in Pittsburgh when Sukie rang him yesterday. Surely a guilty man would not have gone straight back to his last known address? Well, he could suppose he was safe there till the body was found; and he had to husband his money. And, if John or any other member of the House was the killer, what advantage was it to defer the finding of the body, particularly when carrying it down to the basement must have involved great risk?

  There was one permutation, Nigel reflected, which would ravel things up even worse. A shot Josiah and left him in the room: B or C (Mark or John) did not find the door locked, went in, discovered the corpse, and losing his head, carted Josiah down to the locker room: out of sight, out of mind. A man who could later be proved to have had an appointment with Josiah for that night could conceivably have lost his head thus. Mark destroyed the note from Josiah, said nothing to the police, and possibly would never have done so but that a student had spotted him leaving B entry.

  All this was spinning theories out of thin air, as Nigel well knew. He spun another one: let A be Chester. He writes a note on Josiah’s typewriter, signs it with Josiah’s initials, puts it in Mark’s mailbox: that gets one suspect on to the scene. He says to Sukie that he’s fixed the interview with Josiah—untrue, but it gets suspect C on to the scene (loathing Josh as she did, Sukie would be most unlikely to verify with him that he is giving her brother an interview). Chester then flies off to London, and with a well-aimed shot from a space gun drills a hole in Josiah’s skull at the range of several thousand miles.

  That of course is not on. But how do we know that Chester did fly to London on the night before the crime?

  5 “Only the Soldered Mouth Can Tell”

  AN ANSWER TO one of Nigel’s questions was furnished that same evening. Risking dinner in Hall (a risk he at once regretted), he met Chester and Mark on their way out.

  “So you’re back. I must tell you how deeply sorry I am about your brother’s death.” It was the sort of thing one said to Chester quite compulsively.

  “I appreciate your expression of sympathy. It’s a great loss to us and to Cabot. A shocking loss.”

  “Shocking indeed. I wondered if you and Mark would come and have a drink with me later. Ten o’clock, say.” . . .

  Equipped with liquor—Nigel was sure it was far from being Mark’s first drink of the evening—the brothers sat side by side on the green sofa. Chester looked a bit heavy-eyed still, his features taut and pale.

  “I’m afraid you must have had to cut short your stay in Britain,” Nigel suggested.

  “Well, no, fortunately not. We’d finished our conferences: just a little private business to clear up, and that can be done by correspondence. Right now we have to make arrangements for the interment.”

  “A painful task.”

  Chester bowed his head.

  “I hope father will get here in time. I’ve reached him at last,” said Mark.

  “It would be an ordeal for him at his age.”

  “So it will, Chester. Seeing the apple of one’s eye shoveled into the earth.”

  Chester gave his brother a shocked look. “The ceremony will be more dignified than that. I’ve no doubt the President of Cabot will attend, and the Heads of Faculties.”

  “Big deal. That will be a great consolation to Josh.”

  “Now don’t be bitter, Mark. It won’t get us any place.”

  Mark shrugged, giving his brother a satirical look. In his dark, neat suit, his face somber, Chester possessed an authority, or at any rate a decisiveness, which Nigel had not felt till now.

  “Have you any theories about who could have done this dreadful thing?” he asked Nigel. “Mark tells me you have some previous experience in criminal investigation.”

  Nigel smiled faintly: it was amusing to be treated like a junior executive interviewed for a post.

  “I leave the theorizing to Lieutenant Brady. Have you met him yet?”

  “Old Ches has had a real workout with him,” said Mark in a dégagé manner. “Brady’s been barking up Chester’s alibi. Well, you don’t have to look so stuffy. I kept him off you till you’d had your sleep out, didn’t I, Ches?”

  “Yes, yes. But I don’t like this talk about alibis.”

  “I’d have thought you would. You weren’t in—what do they call it?—the vicinity of the crime, as I was. And how! Or did Brady suspect you’d arranged for your Doppelgänger to stop over in Britain while you perpetrated the—”

  “Can’t you ever be serious, Mark? Naturally, Brady had to check up on my movements in Britain. He’ll find they tally with my statement.”

  “Well,” said Mark after a pause, “it’s not a deadly secret between you and Brady, is it? Restate your statement, for Nigel’s benefit.”

  “Why not? I didn’t know you’d be interested. I flew over last Wednesday night, went straight to the airport hotel, where I’d engaged a room, and slept round the clock. I’m not so good on air travel, Nigel—can’t get to sleep in the damned things—so I take a strong sedative after a flight and put up the ‘Do not disturb’ notice on my door. My first conference was not till the Friday afternoon, so I’d plenty of time to get in shape again. We had conferences over the weekend, through Monday. They’re all down in my diary, together with the names and addresses of the organizers: Brady is checking on them as a formality. Early Tuesday I got this call from Mark.”

  “And were you in a tizzy!” offered Mark, his voice beginning to slur. “Why hadn’t I got in touch with you sooner! Good God, man, we’d had Brady round our necks for hours after midnight. You’re not the only one who needs sleep.”

  “I realize that. I didn’t realize that at the time.”

  Mark, who had been helping himself freely to bourbon, spilled some on his tie and began dabbing at it with a silk handkerchief. He looked up owlishly at Nigel. “Crack that alibi if you can! What’re you smiling at? When private eyes are smiling, the crocodiles weep no tears. What is your stance toward crocodiles, Nigel? Myself, I like them in alligator bags. And when I’m a rich man, Sukie, dear Sukie, shall have an alligator bag.”

  “You’d better go to bed,” said Chester repressively.

  “I guess I better had—had better, if you prefer it.” Mark rose uncertainly to his feet. “Poor old Josh. ‘That short potential stir/That each can make but once’ . . . He’s made it. What
is he now—a meek member of the resurrection?—who knows? Good night, Nigel, and good night, Chester, and good night, ladies. ‘How many times these low feet staggered/Only the soldered mouth can tell.’ We all come to it.”

  Mark lurched to the door: they heard his feet staggering down the stone staircase. Chester glanced apologetically at Nigel. “He feels this more than he cares to admit.”

  Going to the window, Nigel let up the shade and looked out. A new moon showed Mark tacking across the court.

  “Let’s take a stroll down to the river. It’s a lovely night. If you’re not too tired.”

  “Suits me.”

  They walked along a street of elegant frame houses, gleaming chalkily in the moonshine, and turned left. The Cabot bridge was a few hundred yards ahead. A jalopy, boys and girls perched all over it like birds in an aviary, sped past them.

  “You need to be careful along the river at night. There’ve been some muggings recently,” said Chester nervously.

  “I wanted to ask you something without Mark present. Did he have bad trouble with Josiah?”

  Chester’s tone was stiff. “I don’t know that I care to enter into that subject.”

  “You understand, don’t you, that Mark could be in a bit of a jam? If I’m to help him—and Sukie—I need to anticipate the sort of things the police might bring up against him.”

  Chester was silent for a few moments. “Well, if it’s not telling tales out of school . . . Josh was a bit hard on him—on us both, I guess. After our mother died, when Mark and I were in our teens, father was away a great deal of the time; and Josh behaved as if he were in loco parentis. He disciplined us some, and Mark wasn’t the kind to lie down under that. So, when he found he was cutting no ice with Mark, Josh—I shouldn’t be saying this—but he did some talebearing to father. I’m afraid he could be very, very mean in those days. It was just boyish escapades on Mark’s part—I don’t want to create a wrong impression: he was a bit frisky, nothing more.”

  “But your father threatened to cut him out of his will, didn’t he?”

  “How in the world d’you know that?”

  “People gossip in these academic communities.”

  They were leaning over the parapet of the Cabot bridge, the water splintering into jags of light beneath them, the university boathouse a dark hump against the skyline on their left.

  “Funny you should mention it here. When he was a senior, Mark beat up a man and flung him over this bridge.”

  “Out of high spirits?”

  “Oh, nothing like that, believe me,” Chester solemnly replied. “This man was a drug peddler; sold heroin and pot to students—you know, marihuana.”

  “Our old friend, Marihuana of the Moated Grange.”

  Chester laughed politely. “Mark said this man had gravely damaged a friend of his—given him an addiction.”

  “Well, it seems a commendable action on Mark’s part, then.”

  “Father didn’t take it like that. You see, the man threatened to make a public scandal of it. He said Mark was one of his—well, clients. I guess it was a piece of blackmail—he’d known father was a rich man and thought he’d pay up to avoid the drug scandal.”

  “And did he?”

  “You don’t know father! No, but he was furious with Mark for taking the action he did. He tried to keep the incident out of the press, but some tabloid gossip writer got hold of the story and went to town on it.”

  “I see. And did Josiah come into this?”

  Chester held back his answer, then said slowly, “I don’t have any firsthand knowledge—I wasn’t brought in on the family discussions. But Mark did tell me later that Josh took a very antagonistic view, in fact that he credited the drug peddler’s story rather than Mark’s.”

  “And passed on his own conviction to your father?”

  “He would do that. But I don’t believe he persuaded father that Mark had ever taken drugs: it was Mark’s violence that upset the old man. He heard Mark was a bit stoned when he beat up this man, and he’d had a traumatic experience himself which gave him a somewhat warped point of view toward liquor.”

  “Yes?” said Nigel patiently.

  “When his first wife was killed, father was driving the car, and it transpired he wasn’t quite sober.”

  The water slurred and slurped against the piers of the bridge. A fitful wind rustled the sycamores along the bank.

  “And what about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Did Josiah try to get you in bad with your father too?”

  “I guess I was a more docile type than Mark. He couldn’t stand for being disciplined, whereas I—well, I let the storms blow themselves out over my head. I am speaking of the period when we were adolescents, you’ll appreciate. Frankly, father didn’t give a row of beans for me at that time. And Josh couldn’t see me as any sort of competitor, so he left me alone for the most part.”

  “Competitor for what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Dad’s favor maybe,” said Chester uncomfortably. “And Josh was an overly ambitious character.”

  Ambitious enough to steal a pupil’s glory? Nigel wondered, but he did not broach that subject immediately.

  As they strolled back to Hawthorne House, Nigel asked Chester if he had ever had a key to his brother’s office.

  “No. I don’t quite understand what you mean though.”

  “Each room has a spare key, which is kept in the Superintendent’s room?”

  “That is so.”

  “If Josiah was expecting a visitor, would he usually push the catch on the lock, so that the chap could walk in?”

  “Sometimes maybe. I’d say not as a general rule.”

  “He seems to have been expecting two people that night.”

  “Two?”

  “Mark was one.”

  “Oh, sure. John Tate. It had slipped my memory.”

  “How did you manage to make him agree to giving Tate an interview?”

  Chester’s face—he was passing under a street lamp—looked confused. He stumbled on the uneven sidewalk, and recovered himself after gripping Nigel’s arm.

  “Oh, Sukie talked me into doing it. I’m not too happy about my share in the—well, it wasn’t exactly deception, but I did suggest to Josiah that John had latterly been feeling contrite about the affair and wanted to work his passage back to Hawthorne, and was hoping Josh could give him some assignment in the meantime.”

  “How did your brother react to this?”

  “He agreed, though he was pretty grudging about it.”

  “Rather surprising that he agreed at all, wasn’t it?”

  “It certainly surprised me. You know, what has occurred to me since is that Josh may have suspected John had found some fresh piece of evidence against him, and he just had to find out from the boy what it might be.”

  “So you believe your brother was the villain of the plagiarism scandal?”

  “No, no, I did not say that,” Chester protested.

  “His death is not on your conscience?”

  “Now, just a moment! I will not permit you to talk that way! I—”

  “But you arranged the interview with the man who may well be his murderer.”

  Chester’s indignation collapsed. He gave a shaky little deprecatory laugh. “Well, frankly, Nigel, I won’t say that’s not occurred to me once or twice. But I refuse to credit that Sukie’s brother would do such a thing.”

  “Not to a man who’s ruined his career at the start?”

  “His career’s not been ruined, only checked. He’s not the type to—I’d as soon believe Mark had done such a dreadful thing.”

  “Well,” said Nigel flatly, “Mark seems to be the other most likely candidate.” . . .

  Dressing the next morning, Nigel let his mind run over the conversations of the night before. Surprisingly, it did seem that Mark was reacting more strongly than Chester to their brother’s death; of course it might be because he’d had more to drink, but Nigel doubted th
is. Chester, though he’d unbuttoned quite a bit during their walk, had kept himself, unlike Mark, under control. He had been evasive over one or two points; and there was something brittle about him—he seemed to carry his personality with gingerly caution, as if it were a priceless vase, but one could understand this in a man who had a mild persecution mania and was accident-prone. Mark was the wild one, something of an escapist. Emotionally immature (as no doubt the censorious Josiah had dinned into him often enough), but with a good crop of emotion waiting to mature. Of the three, Josiah was the real enigma. Ambitious, his father’s favorite, fidgety, sardonic, bossy to his brothers, uninterested in women, but surely no homosexual, a heavy pipe smoker—the things Nigel knew about him did not add up to a coherent character. And he could gain no more firsthand evidence now: which was a nuisance, because the character of a murdered man may lead one to the identity of his murderer.

  What was it, for example, that had made Josiah go talebearing to his father (if he did) or to show hostility to Mark (if he had) over the drug-traffic episode? Personal dislike? A sense of responsibility as the eldest son? Pure malice? Why, after all, should a man who was already the apple of his father’s eye put in overtime courting his father’s favor? . . .

  As Nigel approached the dining hall, he saw a group of students clustered round the partition which divided it from the lobby. Elections for the Student Council were soon to take place, and upon this wall were pinned what might be called the campaign manifestoes of the various candidates, some earnest, some fairly frivolous.

  The young men politely made way for Nigel, giving him good morning, covertly watching his face while he moved up to the wall.

  Dead center was an item which certainly had not been there yesterday—a large and eye-catching montage. It was a photograph of Chester Ahlberg, blown up from a House group, and wearing an anxious expression. Across his knees had been superimposed a cutout apparently from Playboy—a totally naked redhead sprawled in a totally abandoned fashion, pushing up her enormous breasts at Chester as if inviting him to eat them. Beneath, in black-crayon capitals, ran the legend: