The Morning After Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “Oh, no, it isn’t. My dear Chester, I’ll be quite crude about it. If you were out of the way, out of your mind, in a bin, and your half brother dead, who would get your father’s fortune?”

  A rictus, like a dreadful smile, controlled Chester’s mouth. Two squirrels ran madly up a tree near the lakeside to their left. Two lovers, enlaced, sauntered past, glancing incuriously at Nigel.

  “I thought you were joking the other day when you said I must watch out for Mark.” Chester’s voice was all but inaudible.

  “Did I?”

  “It’s just a theory, isn’t it?” said Chester more strongly. “You don’t really believe it?”

  “Just a theory.”

  As if reassured by Nigel’s last words, Chester jumped to his feet, scuffed childishly for a few minutes in a drift of fallen leaves, and finally suggested they should go and see the sights of Concord. During the short drive Nigel covertly studied his driver’s profile. Chester, seen from this angle, was tolerably good-looking, in a miniature way: thin lips, well-formed nose, small ears. Resemblance to papa? A faint self-satisfaction, maybe, in the set of the mouth? Like his room, Chester’s features were tidy to a fault. Was there a certain quirkishness, all too well controlled, beneath his circumspection and conventionality? He was smooth, certainly; yet today again Nigel had been surprised by the cracks that could suddenly appear in this smooth surface. But what was the pressure that cracked the surface? It was difficult to imagine Chester an emotional volcano, holding himself in by Herculean repression.

  At Concord, with the aid of a town map which Chester took from his glove compartment, they tracked down the houses where Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Louisa Alcott had lived. Then, in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, they found the more permanent residences of those worthies. The graveyard, lying up and down among trees, was dotted with miniature Stars and Stripes marking the resting places of American soldiers. The sightseers, here as in the town, were quiet, orderly, more like researchers in a library than people on a Sunday outing: it was wrong to suppose that Americans lived only in the present and the future; they had, unlike many Europeans, a conscious proprietary respect for their past—perhaps because they were still learning it, recreating it. Nigel thought suddenly of Faulkner in Mississippi, absorbedly tracing the history of one small region, like a lover feeling along the contours of his mistress’s face.

  Chester, who seemed to have quite recovered from the dumps, was very much the guide and teacher and took Nigel firmly to see the bronze statue of the Minuteman by the river bridge, commemorating the first victory of these American farmers in the War of Independence. “‘The shot heard round the world,’” Chester quoted. “From here, we drove your redcoats back onto Lexington.”

  Nigel studied the statue. “That’s not a bad statue, as statues go. Not bad at all. There’s a place for heroics. Though in this case,” he added, “it was brother shooting brother.”

  It was said without arrière pensée, but Chester’s face went small and tight for a moment. Then he relaxed again. “Can’t we forget it, just for an hour?” he asked, smiling ruefully.

  Nigel blinked, then said quickly, “I’m sorry, Chester. I was thinking of that war. It was a kind of civil war, after all.”

  “It was, in a way. It taught us our strength, though. That had to happen.”

  A small boy holding a large camera asked them politely if they would step aside; he wanted to photograph the Minuteman.

  They walked away, past a stand selling hot dogs and peanuts. The leaves were yellow overhead: the river curved an arm behind them, asleep in the late sunshine.

  “Taxation without representation,” Chester persisted. “That’s what we protested. But you Britishers could only treat us as a mob of unruly colonials. The way you did the Irish.”

  “Well, we learned better. We do learn.”

  “You’ve learned how to hand over power gracefully when it has already slipped out of your grasp,” said Chester provocatively. “But you haven’t always known how to handle it.”

  “You’re impressed by power? As such?”

  “Sometimes power is needed. Sometimes the masses want to be governed. Only a few people these days have the flair, or the nerve, for exercising power.”

  “You’d like to go into politics?”

  “Maybe I will, at that.”

  “I’d have thought you were more cut out to be the strong man behind the scenes—an éminence grise—in a country that equates power with money.”

  “What’s wrong with money?” Chester asked sternly.

  “Nothing. It’s how you get it, or keep it, that can be immoral.”

  “Money,” pronounced Chester, “is the lifeblood of Western civilization—money, and what flows from it—improved communications, medicine, scientific and technological advance, a high standard of living.” Chester’s eyes glittered: he was fairly launched on what must have been a routine pep talk to his Business School students. Nigel listened, not too attentively, fighting down his natural inclination to regard businessmen as the dregs of the earth. This was a very different and for him a much less interesting Chester than the one who could not forget the noise of the clods falling on his brother’s coffin.

  “What will you do with your father’s fortune,” he asked presently, “when it comes your way?”

  Chester grinned an almost puckish grin. “Oh, I have several projects in mind.”

  “Philanthropic?” Nigel grinned too.

  “You could say so. In the ultimate issue, they should prove highly beneficial to the nation.”

  Oh, well, if he wants to be pompous and cagey, let him, thought Nigel; what he means is, after he’s skimmed off the cream, there may be some milk to share out among the rest.

  “It’s at the managerial level,” began Chester, “that so many of even your biggest combines are deficient. . . .” He talked Nigel the rest of the way back to the car and into Concord. To the substance of the discourse, Nigel closed the valves of his attention, as Emily Dickinson said, like stone: to its undertones, though, he remained attentive; Chester’s enthusiasm for his projects was as great as his confidence in his own powers to implement them. Whether it was the self-confidence of genius or the self-dramatizing fantasy of the child, Nigel could not determine. One thing became clear: Chester would be far wealthier than Nigel had imagined; and his approach, in contrast with his father’s technique of grab and shovel, would be that of a highly sophisticated computer. Perhaps Papa Ahlberg had grossly underestimated this son; but equally, it could be that Chester’s financial dream palaces were all too insubstantial, begotten by wishful thinking upon complacent abstraction. . . .

  “I hope you enjoyed your visit,” said Chester, when, after the culture and the high finance, they had picked up Charles Reilly and started the drive home.

  “Enjoyed?” Charles gloomily replied. “I was made to read my poems.”

  “I’d have thought that would suit you down to the ground,” said Nigel.

  “I have no objection to reading my poems when I’m the center of attention,” snarled Charles.

  “But surely you were?”

  “I was not. My host writes verses,” said Charles with a baleful intonation. “The fella just used me as an excuse for weighing in with his own paltry scribbles. He read them for hours and hours last night: he’d be reading them still if I hadn’t pushed over the table with all the drinks on it. By accident.”

  “Irish bards and American poetasters,” laughed Nigel.

  “Mark says Silas Engelbert has quite a reputation,” Chester put in.

  “Silas Engelbert can neither write poetry nor read it, I tell you.” Charles was fierce. “He’s nothing more than a vocal masturbator, in love with his own organ. If you can call a scrannel pipe an organ.”

  They drove steadily on through the darkening countryside. Charles relapsed into gloomy mutterings on the back seat until Chester fished a pint bottle from the glove compartment and handed it to him. “Will this cheer yo
u up, Charles?”

  “A miá’s took me,” growled the poet between gulps.

  “A mee-aw? What’s that?” Nigel asked.

  “An inexplicable mood. I feel fatality closing in on me.”

  “Tell your beads then,” said Nigel rudely.

  “Indeed, I could do worse. I remember, I took a terrible miá one time in Cork. It was the day they shot Kevin O’Higgins. I happened to be in a pub that evening when the news came through—he’d been killed on his way in to Mass. I’d felt desperate all day. And there it was.”

  “It must have been a great shock,” Nigel said encouragingly.

  “Oh, it was. A fella in the pub—we were all sitting around dumb as skates—I remember he upped at last and said, ‘That was a terrible thing to do, a terrible thing. Sure why couldn’t they have waited an hour and shot um when he came out of Mass?’”

  Nigel broke into mirth. Chester asked, in a puzzled voice, “But I can’t see why that would have been any better.”

  “God preserve me from the heathen! Absolution, boy, absolution. And may your sins be forgiven.”

  “I just don’t see it,” Chester persisted. “Are you telling me this O’Higgins would go to hell or something because he hadn’t made his confession? Really, Charles, must you be so superstitious? If O’Higgins was a good man—had been—why should he be punished?”

  “But who knows what crimes, what secret sins another man may have on his soul?” replied Charles somberly.

  “Oh, nonsense!” Chester burst out, his black-gloved hands firm on the steering wheel. “Sorry, I did not mean to offend against your faith. And I suppose for all we know O’Higgins would have had a good many murders on his conscience.”

  “Murders?” Charles’s voice was loud and deep as a stag’s belling.

  “Well, I mean—in the Troubles, you know—and then your Civil War.”

  With a titanic effort, Charles got himself under control. “Do you suggest that, when a soldier in a war for freedom kills an enemy it is murder?” he asked dangerously.

  “Oh, was your Civil War a war of freedom? Freedom for whom? From what I’ve read, it was just a paying off of old scores.” Chester’s pugnacity quite startled Nigel, who said lightly,

  “You must realize, Chester, the Irish held permanent shooting rights over the English.”

  Charles turned on him. “And why not? For three hundred years you English were a hostile garrison in my country. Will nothing get that into your thick heads? Though I’d rather have Cromwell or the Tans than high-minded bastards like Charles Wood or Trevelyan, who committed genocide in Ireland when the potato famine broke out—all for the sacred principle of Free Trade.”

  “But what’s all this to do with your Civil War?” asked Chester.

  “That was different. The country had to be settled. And I’m told you had a Civil War over here. Do you call the soldiers who fought in that war murderers?”

  “All right, all right. I’ll modify my statement.” Chester shook his head. “O’Higgins must have had many deaths on his conscience. All right?”

  “On his mind, not on his conscience. The Hierarchy approved the steps which the Free State government took to restore order.”

  “Which they did not do when the Sinn Fein rising took place in 1916,” said Chester firmly. “The Church was against you then.”

  “So you’ve read some history. Ah, well, bishops are not infallible. But they came round. Do you remember Yeats’s lines?—

  “An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand

  Blessing the Tricolour. ‘This is not,’ I say,

  ‘The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland

  The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.’

  “Yes, even Willie Yeats came round in the end.”

  Listening to them Nigel realized how much they had been on edge—all three of them. Why? Perhaps it was the mood of soldiers who are going back into the firing line after a leave. On the seat behind, Charles had audibly returned to the bottle; he did not attempt to offer it ’round. The instrument-panel light cast a faint glow on Chester’s face, its features inscrutable. Nigel himself felt uneasy. All that talk about shooting and murders—how had the conversation taken so sinister a turn? And in the artificial light of head lamps and road lights, the built-up area as they approached the city—those extraordinary gas stations, eating houses, wooden shacks, kiosks, blaring bill-boards—took on a purely grotesque aspect, so that it seemed less the shoddy purlieus of a city than a fantasia of the unconscious.

  And when they got out at the great gate of Hawthorne House, the Superintendent stopped Nigel. He handed him a piece of paper. It was a message from Lieutenant Brady, asking him to ring. Nigel went hurriedly up to his room.

  “Lieutenant Brady, please. This is Nigel Strangeways, calling from Hawthorne House. . . . Hello, Brady, I’m just back from the country.”

  “I thought you’d like to know. We found the gun.”

  “You did? Where?”

  “It was hidden among a stack of old cartons in the yard of one of the downtown cafés John Tate told us he’d visited.”

  Nigel was silent, dumfounded. Fantasy had caught up with him, turned into reality, and kicked him in the teeth.

  “Can you hear me?” Brady asked.

  “Yes, I heard you,” said Nigel. “How do you know it’s the gun? Got Tate’s name embossed on it?”

  “It’s the same caliber as the murder weapon.”

  “So are several million other pistols. Fingerprints?”

  “None. It’s been cleaned, inside and out.”

  “How thoughtful of someone. And I must say John Tate was most considerate to tell you where to look for the weapon. I do like murderers who cooperate.”

  10 Confessions and Blackmail

  THE WHOLE THING is preposterous, Nigel meditated as he shaved next morning. Quite meaningless—except to demonstrate the power of sheer coincidence. Young John Tate invents a story to account for his whereabouts after the murder and, lo and behold, the police find a gun of the right caliber in one of the cafés he invented visiting.

  But is it meaningless, after all? I have only John’s word, and Sukie’s, that she had him hidden in her house all the time. He, or she, could have stepped out and stashed the gun in that downtown café: they wouldn’t want it lying about in her own apartment block. That darned girl cannot be relied on to tell the truth for three minutes on end: and her lies, so far, have been in direct ratio to the disinterestedness of her motive for telling them.

  Well, the test will be easy. They’ll fire specimen bullets from the .25 automatic pistol they’ve found, and the markings on them will or will not be identical with those on the bullet which killed Josiah. Either way, it will not be necessary for me to confess to Brady about having found John in Sukie’s house. “On a bullet we find the sum total of the peculiarities of the particular barrel,” as Söderman and O’Connell eloquently put it: what trouble it would save if one could examine human peculiarities under a microscope.

  A thought came to Nigel. He rang the Master’s number, but it was May who answered.

  “Zeke’s just left. He’s flying the shuttle to New York for a conference. I expect him back late this evening. Can I help you, Nigel? Are you there still?”

  “Oh? Hm. Yes, May. Sorry. I just remembered something Zeke told me when I first came over.”

  “You sound very peculiar. Are you all right?”

  “Fine, thanks. Except for feeling sore where I’ve just kicked myself.”

  Nigel rang off. He had an appointment with Brady at ten o’clock, which gave him time for breakfast and a visit to the Cabot Travel Bureau. Taking a taxi into the city, he then presented himself at Brady’s precinct house.

  “Looks like being another fine day,” said the Lieutenant. He eyed Nigel in a calculating manner, as though deciding just where he should insert a stiletto.

  “Have you identified the gun yet?” Nigel asked.

  “Its numbers have been
filed off. I should hear the result of the bullet tests any minute.”

  “Are you a betting man?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll lay you fifty to one that the gun you found didn’t kill Josiah Ahlberg.”

  “Not taken. But you seem very sure of yourself, Mr. Strangeways.”

  “John Tate wouldn’t have given you the name of that café if he’d killed Josiah and hidden the gun there. He’s not that stupid.”

  Brady offered no comment. He took out a pack of Chesterfields and flipped one to Nigel across the desk.

  “Any café proprietor, or customer even, would be likely to hide his gun when he heard the cops were nosing around the cafés in the district,” Nigel went on.

  “Sure, sure.”

  “You sound remarkably indifferent,” said Nigel, somewhat exasperated.

  Brady gave him one of his steeliest looks. “You did say that the Tates are not your clients, didn’t you? Neither of them?”

  “I’m interested in them. But they haven’t hired me.”

  “That’s tough on Miss Tate, maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “You see, she’s just confessed.”

  “Confessed? Sukie?” Nigel assumed she had confessed to sheltering her brother after the murder. Fortunately he did not make this apparent to Brady. “You must be out of your mind.”

  The Lieutenant took a folder of typewritten sheets from a drawer and placed it on the desk. Then explained that John Tate’s lawyer happened to be visiting him the previous night when the searchers brought in the gun. Tate had disclaimed all knowledge of it; but the lawyer must have communicated the new information to Sukie, for she had come into the station early this morning and made a statement. “Here it is.” Brady tapped the folder.

  “But you can’t take it seriously,” Nigel protested. “You know what she’s like—madly quixotic. She’ll do anything to protect her brother.”

  “Okay, the dame’s screwy; but I questioned her for a couple of hours, and she’s got the whole story pat. Which is interesting as we monitored her interviews with him here: he told her nothing about his discovery of the body. Now, if she wasn’t in touch with him between then and giving himself up, how in hell could she have got every last fact about the killing correct?”