The Morning After Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “You—how can you know?—it isn’t true, it isn’t true!” Her voice had slurred up an octave. She gripped the edge of the door as if without its support she would collapse.

  “You’ve done enough for him,” said Nigel equably. “Now let me try. Go and fetch him. If you don’t, I will.”

  By now the girl had no resistance left. She withdrew, presumably to fetch her elusive brother. Or maybe she was telling him to beat it before Nigel sent for Brady. Nigel contemplated the risk with equanimity. There was also the risk that, since he was the only person who knew of John’s whereabouts, this rather unreliable young man might dash in and silence him with a revolver. Minutes passed—five, ten. Nigel began to fear he had misjudged. Then the door opened and Sukie entered, hand in hand with a young Negro.

  “This is my brother,” she announced rather breathlessly.

  “I’m happy to know you, Mr. Strangeways.”

  “I very much doubt it, but still—” said Nigel, shaking hands. “Now, Sukie, what about those omelets? And no tomato for me—I can’t abide the vegetable. While you’re fixing them, John might go and wash that stuff off his face.”

  “We thought it a good—”

  “Please, Sukie dear, spare me the story of your brilliant devices for outwitting the police,” interrupted Nigel, succumbing (as he frequently did) to the temptation to show off. “You’ve been hiding your brother with a Negro family upstairs, who are devoted to you because of your work for desegregation. You blacked his face and hands in case the police should come poking about in your friends’ apartment. Silly girl. What I could see through in five seconds, Brady would in three—or maybe ten.”

  “I told you, John,” said Sukie. “He’s the Wizard of Oz. He ought to be suppressed. It’s those hypnotic X-ray eyes.”

  “I’m hungry,” Nigel roared.

  But he was deadly serious when half an hour later, the meal over and coffee before them, he faced brother and sister.

  “Now I want you to tell me everything that happened the night you visited Josiah Ahlberg.”

  John glanced at Sukie; his intelligent brown eyes still had traces under them of whatever he had used to make up as a Negro. The small jaw was quite firm, but the eyes tended to shift away from the person he was talking to: simple nervousness, Nigel wondered, or natural shiftiness? It was, inevitably, an immature face. And here John was, silently appealing to his sister for direction. She was leaning back, collapsed in her chair like a frowning pretty doll.

  John turned to Nigel. “I don’t see why you should believe me,” he muttered.

  “I’ve an open mind.”

  Sukie gave an overwrought sigh. “And then you’ll hand him over to Brady.”

  “No. He’ll hand himself over.”

  “Thus establishing my innocence. Like in a suspense novel,” remarked John truly.

  Sukie reached out a hand and gripped his. “Go on, sweetie. Get it over with.”

  She held John’s hand all through the narration which, supplemented by a few answers to questions from Nigel, ran as follows:

  He had entered Hawthorne House by the main gateway that night, choosing a moment when he could see the man in the lighted lodge turn his back to take a telephone call. He had met no one in the courtyard on his way to Josiah’s office. He arrived there perhaps a minute or two after 10:30, the time of the appointment. He knocked, but there was no answer, which made him wonder if Josiah, notoriously fussy about punctuality, had already left. Knocking again, he turned the handle: the door was not locked. John went in, and found his ex-tutor lying on the floor beside his desk, with a hole in his temple.

  “Did you touch him then?”

  “Not immediately, sir. I—I was sort of stunned.”

  John’s first impulse was to beat it fast. He tried to remember if he had left fingerprints on anything except the outside doorknob. Panic began to close round him. Here he was, with the corpse of a man everyone knew he had cause to hate. He made a strong effort to keep the panic at bay. All he could think of was how to buy himself time—time to get far away from this hideous room.

  “You never thought to give the alarm?” Nigel interrupted.

  “Well, I ask you!”

  “But you’d not brought a revolver with you?”

  “I certainly had not,” the boy heatedly replied.

  “If you’d rung for help from the office, they’d have found you with a dead man but no gun you could have shot him with. You’d have been cleared. They’d have searched the ground beneath the window. No gun there.”

  “Okay, okay, I guess you’re right. But my brain probably wasn’t in working order,” said John ruefully.

  Then he remembered the locker room. It was near Josiah’s entrance, in the basement, and never used now. He bent to lift up the dead man, noticed bloodstains on the wooden floor beneath his head, put Josiah down again, pulled a mat over the stains, examined desk and chair for other stains, and found none. He opened the door cautiously. All was quiet outside.

  He humped the body again—it was dreadfully heavy for so small a man—released the door catch so it would lock behind him, and was about to leave when it occurred to him that Josiah might well have recorded his appointment with John in a diary or memorandum book.

  So he laid the body down a second time and began to examine Josiah’s desk. There was an office diary there, but no record of the appointment—nor, at a cursory glance, on any of the other papers lying around. John even steeled himself to take Josiah’s private diary from a jacket pocket. No appointment there.

  “I realized I was just putting off the moment when I’d have to carry him from the first floor, past other people’s doors, down the steps to the basement.”

  Nigel still had to remind himself that the first floor in the States was the ground floor in Britain.

  “So at last I carried him through the door and downstairs. I was very lucky. The locker room was open. I hadn’t thought of that. Then I pushed the body into a locker—that was awful—and clicked the door shut.”

  “Was he stiff?”

  “Stiff? No. No, he wasn’t stiff. But he was still warm. That unnerved me. I thought all dead bodies got cold at once. His hand swung against my face as I lifted him in. It was awful. I thought perhaps he wasn’t dead after all.” The boy’s mouth began to quiver. “He was dead, sir, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes. The shot would have killed him instantly.”

  John had stood in the dark, not daring to switch on any lights. His relief at having smuggled the corpse away unobserved was giving way to a paralyzed mental despair. He recalled—what he had quite forgotten in the horror of his discovery and its aftermath—that Josiah’s brother knew about the appointment. Sukie had told him over the long-distance telephone that Chester would be in London on the day of it: but he would return early the next week. By hiding the body, John had bought himself only a few days. He must get away from Pittsburgh, to which he could so easily be traced once the alarm was given. He would go far west: but he hadn’t enough money for the journey.

  “So you went to Sukie?”

  “Honest, I didn’t want to get her into trouble. I just wanted the loan of some money. I never meant to—”

  “It’s all right, sweetie.” Sukie turned her candid gray eyes on Nigel. “John was all in—all upset—when he arrived here. I just couldn’t let him leave when he told me what had happened. It was my idea that he should hide out here for a while. He didn’t want to.”

  Crusading again, thought Nigel.

  Sukie went on: “I thought the cops would never look for him here—not upstairs among our Negro friends. And they didn’t.” She returned Nigel’s sardonic look rather shamefacedly. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m liable to have got them into trouble.”

  “They knew it was John when they agreed to shelter him?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, eyes downcast. “I didn’t tell them the real truth, though. I made up a story about John’s having to hide for a few days beca
use—”

  “Do you believe me?” John burst out. “D’you believe what I told you?”

  “It’s possible,” Nigel returned coolly. “But you’re a fearful pair for making up stories.”

  “Now don’t you go bullying my sister!” John stood up, fists clenched.

  Nigel ignored him. “So now you’ll have to make up another story—to guard your Negro friends from being arrested as accessories. And it’d better be good.”

  There was a long silence in the tawdry little room. At last Sukie said, “What do you plan to do? Tell the police?”

  “No. John’s going to do that.”

  “You’re deserting us!” Her eyes flashed.

  “My dear child, it’s John’s best hope. Don’t you see? John must tell Brady he’d been wandering about in a state of shock since the discovery. He’s forgotten—repeat, forgotten—what happened to him in the interim. This morning he picks up a paper and reads that the police are looking for him. So he goes straight to the precinct and describes everything that happened, from the moment he entered Hawthorne House that night to the moment he left.”

  “You’re crazy,” muttered Sukie.

  “No, he’s not,” said John. “That would stop you and the family upstairs getting mixed up in the thing at all.”

  “No, I won’t have it. They’ll beat you up at the station house. Till they find out where you’ve really been. You’d never get away with saying you lost your memory.”

  “Now take it easy, sis. I’m not getting you in any more trouble, see? They’ll be much more interested in what I have to tell them about finding the body than in trying to trace my movements afterwards.” Some of Sukie’s steel was evident now in John’s determined mien.

  “Must he go now?” she asked Nigel.

  “The sooner the better. But he must prepare his script first—in what paper did you read about the crime? haven’t you any recollection of where you’ve been sleeping and eating?—that sort of thing, because they’ll ask you.”

  “Let’s see, the Negro quarter in the city,” John promptly supplied. “It’s all pretty hazy, I guess: but—well, I remember taking a bus ride out into the country one day and wandering round in the woods. And, yes—”

  “Keep it for Brady. Or get Sukie to test out these interesting fictions, if you like. I must be off.” Nigel gazed directly at the young man. “And don’t let her persuade you into any more disappearing acts. I’m gambling on you, remember.”

  And that’s about the wildest gamble I’ve ever made, thought Nigel, striding along an hour later between the river and the humming traffic. John appeared to be honest; but, if he possessed any of his sister’s talent for misleading, Nigel would certainly lose. What he had gambled on was John’s evident desire to keep Sukie out of trouble; but had John the moral stamina to go through with the plan, and not make another break for freedom?

  His story of discovering the body had rung true enough, confirming Nigel’s previous hunch that it had been hidden to buy someone a respite. And, if John was telling the truth about the time he’d arrived at the office, he was unlikely to have been the murderer: a gunshot would surely have been heard by someone at that hour of the night. His successful attempt to enter the House unobserved had rebounded on him in a way he could not have foreseen—if he was innocent.

  John had said that the body was still warm when he touched it. This detail, as he had described it, carried a genuine conviction; and, a dead body’s temperature falling one degree an hour on the average of time taken to fall to the temperature of the surrounding medium—in this case, a small, centrally heated room—did not conflict with the hypothesis that Josiah had been shot during the Food Man’s clamor, roughly half an hour before John claimed to have discovered him. If he had killed Josiah, he was surely intelligent enough to have said the body was cold when he found it.

  Nigel’s long-odds gamble proved a winner, though, when the Master rang that evening to ask him over for a drink.

  “Brady’s just telephoned me,” said Zeke. “He’s on his way here. John Tate has given himself up.”

  7 The Concupiscent Poet

  THE MASTER AND his wife were talking over drinks with Chester Ahlberg when Nigel arrived.

  “But doesn’t that prove young Tate is innocent?” Chester was saying strongly.

  “Ah, here you are, Nigel. May I pour you some bourbon?” asked Zeke.

  “Thanks. Good evening, May. Hello, Chester.”

  “It’ll clear the air anyway,” said May. “I feel I’ve been walking about in a thick fog these last days.”

  “You like ice, don’t you, Nigel? Adapted yourself fast to our barbarous American habits.”

  “It’s self-evident,” Chester pursued. “No guilty man gives himself up to the police of his own free will.” The Business School tutor’s usual pompousness was laced with an almost aggressive sincerity.

  “I only had a few words with Brady. He said nothing about John’s having confessed—just that he walked into the precinct house this afternoon and made a statement,” said Zeke urbanely.

  “That boy’s no murderer,” May opined.

  “I certainly hope not.” Chester shook his head. “It would lie heavy on my conscience if I thought I’d encouraged an interview between poor Josh and—and the person who killed him.”

  “My dear Chester,” said May, a trifle tartly, “there’s no need to overburden us with your conscience as yet. I am much more concerned with the treatment poor John may get at Police Headquarters. I gather their methods are notoriously crude.”

  “Now, now, May, my dear.”

  “But where’s he been all this time?” asked Chester.

  “The Lieutenant did not vouchsafe me that information. All will be made plain in a few minutes. We must curb our curiosity till then.”

  “Does Sukie know about this yet?” May asked.

  “Brady said he’d spoken to her over the telephone,” Chester said.

  “Very thoughtful of the man.”

  “She wanted to rush down at once, but he discouraged it. She’s been seeking the advice of a lawyer instead.”

  “I hate to think of her suffering under such terrible stress of mind.”

  “Well, Chester,” remarked May, who was for some reason at her most formidable this evening, “let us divert our thoughts to less painful matters. No doubt Mark is looking after her. Nigel, you are very silent: have you no contribution to make to our symposium?”

  Looking noncommittally down his nose, Nigel, who seldom lost an opportunity for introducing a cat into a pigeon loft, said, “I was thinking how disinterested Chester is.”

  The person named gave him a wary glance. “I don’t quite follow you there.”

  “In rejecting the notion that John Tate is guilty.”

  “Well, of course he’s not.”

  “Because, if he isn’t, it has to be Mark. Hasn’t it? Or is there some other candidate I haven’t heard of?”

  The Master looked shaken; his wife raised her eyebrows. Chester took some time to reply; but then he often did, as if he had to shape a sentence in his mind before entrusting it to his tongue. “Now that is a suggestion no sane person could accept for an instant,” he said firmly. “I am astonished to hear you make it. You surely cannot believe that Mark, my own brother—”

  “I don’t believe anything. I merely ask, if it wasn’t John or Mark, who was it? Who else had motive and opportunity?”

  “It’s a very, very offensive suggestion.” Chester was beginning to wind himself up. “I don’t think you should bring such charges without Mark’s being present.”

  “They’re not charges,” said Nigel wearily. “But if you prefer to stick your head in the sand, that’s your affair.”

  “But, Nigel,” Zeke objected, “what conceivable motive could Mark have?”

  “He comes in for a share of Josiah’s prospects.” Nigel was tempted, and fell instantly. “Then there’s only Chester between him and the father’s fortune. You’d b
etter watch out, Chester my boy.”

  “I consider your remarks to be in the worst possible taste,” Chester replied heatedly.

  “This symposium,” remarked May, “should not degenerate into a Borgia supper.”

  “If this is by way of being a specimen of your humor—” Chester was cut off by a loud ring on the bell.

  “That’ll be Brady,” said the Master, going out to open the door. When he returned, he beckoned to Nigel. “The Lieutenant would like a word with both of us. We’ll go to the study.”

  Now I’m for it, thought Nigel. But Brady, sitting square and solid on a hard chair, flipped a hand at him amiably enough, refused a drink, and got down to business.

  “We’re holding John Tate.”

  “On what charge?” asked Zeke.

  “You’ll know when I tell you his statement. I’m afraid Mr. Strangeways will have to hear it again.”

  This sighting shot was unexpected, but not too hard to steer away from. “Again? What’s all this?”

  Brady’s piercing green eyes flicked onto Nigel. “As the guy came to us only today, I figured he must have had some good advice recently.”

  “It’s the advice I certainly would have given him if I’d had the opportunity,” Nigel equivocally replied.

  “Well, isn’t that nice! So where did you find him, to give him this good advice you’d have given him if you’d found him?”

  “Your dialectic has me groggy, Lieutenant. Is it your devious way of breaking it to me that John says I found him?”

  “Well, that’ll keep.”

  “No, it won’t. Does he?”

  “He does not.” Brady gave Nigel a hard smile. “I guess he’s been well coached.”

  “When you two have finished sparring, could we hear John’s statement?” put in the Master.

  Brady recounted it straight, without attempting to dig any more pitfalls for Nigel.

  “Good God, the poor boy!” said Zeke. “What a horrible experience for him! So you’re charging him with concealing information relevant to the crime?”

  “That’s the charge, as of now.”