The Morning After Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “And I have to be the casualty?” asked Chester angrily.

  “Oh, now, wait a minute. Our men are young still: boys. The young have no sense of the adult community—why should they? They form gangs, splinter groups; but these are only a projection of the young man’s ego. We hope that unconsciously, while they are here, they absorb the air of freedom, so that later they find themselves sitting easily to it, not exploiting it. You can’t discipline them into accepting the right idea of freedom, any more than you can force them into understanding the nature of true society.”

  “So you would allow any measure of license,” said Chester contumaciously, “as a—a sort of trampoline from which they can spring higher and higher and higher into the pure air of liberty?”

  “No, no. My policy is to give them, subject to the necessary parietal rules, a little more freedom than at first they can adapt themselves to. I see it as a bait for them, rather than a way of life. Treat an adolescent as an adult, and with any luck he’ll grow up quicker. I think it works. Don’t you agree, Mark?”

  “Well, I guess you’re right, Master. But, Chester, I don’t know why you’re beefing about the young; I thought you thought I’d played these practical jokes on you.”

  It was the most embarrassing moment so far. Though Mark had spoken lightly, the rest averted their eyes from him to his brother.

  But Chester appeared to have exhausted his brief spurt of animation. He muttered, “Don’t be absurd, Mark,” in a rather shamefaced way, then relapsed into silence. Mark gave him a puzzled, anxious glance.

  “Maybe we could all use some black coffee. Shall I make it, Chester?”

  His brother nodded. The company, relieved, began to talk again. Nigel unobtrusively followed Mark into Chester’s bedroom, where an electric kettle, an earthenware jug, and some large cups were already set out on a table. Mark grinned at him. “Hi. Things do get het up. Have you come to see I don’t put poison in old Chester’s cup?”

  “Yes.” Nigel smiled back.

  Mark paused a moment in spooning out instant coffee into the jug and then proceeded. “Toujours le phlegm anglais, hein? Poor old Chester’s in a queer state of mind tonight, don’t you think? You know, I’ve never seen him loaded like this. If I’d been Master Edwardes, I’d have got mad at him.”

  “He was rather provocative, I must say.”

  “Oh, sorry, I forgot, you don’t like cream. I’ll boil you up some milk.”

  “Don’t bother,” Nigel protested.

  But Mark was opening a carton and pouring the contents into a saucepan. Presently they returned to the sitting room. Mark put the tray on a side table for a moment, then carried it round to each of the guests in turn. Nigel, who was talking with Charles Reilly, poured himself a cup and added a little hot milk to it: Charles did the same. Mark finally came to Chester. The two visiting instructors were standing in front of the sofa, between Nigel and the Ahlberg brothers, so he did not get a view of the little contretemps. He only heard Chester exclaim, “Oh, damn you, you’ve spilt it all over my jacket!” and the noise of the coffee pot hitting the carpet.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Chester, you jogged my arm though.”

  “No, you did.”

  Chester rose from the sofa and stood swaying, gazing in owlish consternation at his jacket, which was soaked with coffee: some of the hot milk had spilled over it too; the saucepan had fallen onto its side on the tray.

  “Look, you’ve ruined it,” Chester mumbled.

  Mark was dabbing at his brother’s lapels with a handkerchief. The others crowded round.

  “That’s no good. You’ll never get the stain of hot milk out like that,” said the Senior Tutor. “It needs cleaning fluid.”

  “Do you have some, Chester?” asked Mark. “Come along, we’ll look.”

  He supported his brother toward the bathroom. Nigel followed. Mark had found the bottle of cleaning fluid and a large white handkerchief, and scrubbed vigorously at the lapels and chest of his brother’s jacket. Chester was slumped on the lavatory seat, looking very drunk. Mark had to hold him with one hand or he would have fallen off. The little room was airless and steamy-hot.

  “There, that should do it,” Mark said at last. “Now put on another jacket, and come and be sociable again. Hey, buck up, Chester!” He turned to Nigel. “He’s practically passed out.”

  Chester’s face was greenish-white and sweating, his eyes closed. He tried to stand up. “Sorry, I feel so giddy.”

  “We’d best put him to bed, Nigel, don’t you think?”

  They half carried Chester into the bedroom, took off his jacket, trousers and shoes, and laid him on the bed. Then Mark solicitously pulled a blanket over him, and they went back to the sitting room.

  “Chester’s passed out. We’ve left him to sleep it off.”

  “He was certainly hitting it up with the liquor tonight,” said the Senior Tutor.

  “Well, it was a great party while it lasted,” said Martin Blair.

  The Master gave Nigel an indecipherable look, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

  “I’m sorry Chester got so tough, Master,” said Mark. “Too much alcoholic content, I’m afraid.”

  “Think no more of it,” Zeke protested. “But I must be saying good night.”

  The other guests took their cue from him. Nigel left last, with Mark and Charles Reilly.

  “He’ll have a whale of a hangover tomorrow,” said Charles.

  “I can’t think how I could be so clumsy,” Mark commented. “I must be a bit pissed myself. I thought it was Chester who knocked the tray, just as I was going to pour him the coffee. He is accident-prone, poor old boy.” . . .

  Nigel let himself into his apartment, but did not go to bed. He was feeling far from sober himself, but sensible enough to realize that Chester, in his present condition, would be defenseless against anyone who wanted to do him harm. Though it was probably making Everest out of a molehill, precautions must be taken. Nigel would go out in five minutes’ time, borrow the spare key from the Superintendent’s office, get into Chester’s apartment, and spend the night there on guard, ensuring that no one went in—or out.

  At this point Nigel fell asleep.

  He was awakened by his telephone bell ringing. An almost unrecognizable voice croaked at him. “Feel dreadfully ill. . . . Come quick . . . Poisoned . . . Quick . . . Help.”

  12 “Yesterday Is Mystery”

  SOME EIGHT HOURS later Nigel was sitting in his own room again, trying to make some sense of an event which had run so counter to his cherished theory of all that had previously occurred in Hawthorne House.

  In response to the phone call Nigel had rushed to Chester’s apartment and had found him there in a semicomatose condition. Nigel had rung for a doctor, whose name he found in Chester’s address book, and had waited. The doctor had come, had examined Chester, kept his conclusions to himself, and sent for an ambulance. Chester was now in the Cabot Infirmary—still, so far as Nigel knew, alive.

  There was little else he could congratulate himself on. He had been asleep for less than an hour that night when the telephone had rung; but that hour would have been plenty of time for a killer to have entered Chester’s room and to have poisoned the defenseless man. If that was the way it was done. The bottles, cups and glasses from the party had still been there, of course, when Nigel arrived. Brady, who had come right after the ambulance, had taken them all away for chemical analysis of what was left in them, and taken the coffee pot, the saucepan, and Chester’s jacket, for the same purpose.

  “So your hunch was right,” the Lieutenant had said sourly when there was time for a chat. “You just picked the wrong victim.”

  “So it seems.”

  “All that spiel about giving him rope. I guess I gave you too much.”

  “Well, it’s saved you from arresting the wrong man. For a second time,” said Nigel.

  Whatever was the vehicle of the poison, Nigel was thinking now, it could not be the liquor they had
all consumed: Chester had punctiliously poured it for his guests. Nor the coffee, the cream or the hot milk, for each of them had taken some without ill effects, while Chester’s had been spilled over him before he could drink any. If X had introduced something—some barbiturate, say—into Chester’s tumbler, it would surely be in such great quantity, to produce so drastic an effect, that he could not have failed to notice it before he refilled his glass. And if Chester was the victim, not the murderer, X should be Mark—of whom Nigel had told Chester to be wary.

  But Mark might have gone back to Chester’s rooms, while Nigel was asleep, and somehow poisoned his unconscious brother It was a grand guignol thought which Nigel shied away from.

  Nigel shook his head. It was bewildering. Chester had croaked over the telephone “poisoned.” This was odd in itself. A man who came briefly to consciousness out of a drunken stupor would surely ascribe his symptoms merely to the drink; particularly if he had never drunk so much before. Of course, Chester was highly sensitive to his physical condition, as the contents of his medicine cupboard so evidently showed: and he had been warned; and he had been poisoned.

  Was he, last night, intuitively expecting some such attempt on his life? There had been that desperate look on his face now and then—the look of some creature that stands at bay: and the alternation of truculence with a kind of sodden lethargy.

  Or, again, might not the “poisoning” have been purely accidental? With all those drugs in his bathroom, Chester could easily have dosed himself before the party with some drug (stimulant? sedative?) which became lethal if too much alcohol were poured on top of it. That happened fairly often even though it would seem that every American pill-taker had been warned about the liquor-barbiturate danger.

  They would be checking on possibilities at the hospital. Was it accident? Suicide?

  Nigel was looking out over the court. Down below, even at this early hour, a man was at work. He had spread a huge sheet over the grass, and was now trundling round it what appeared to be a vacuum cleaner in reverse: instead of sucking in the multitude of fallen leaves, it was blowing them onto the sheet. What a splendid, elementary invention, thought Nigel, who had suffered all too often in the past from the leaves which littered his Greenwich garden in autumn and had to be removed between two pieces of wood.

  Then his body grew tense in the chair. Why not suicide? I’ve been assuming murder: but why not violence in reverse this time? The desperation on Chester’s face last night—easily interpreted as the look of a man who has decided to put an end to himself: desperation and a touch of recklessness as well. And, when he rang me and said he’d been poisoned—that was the crisis so many would-be suicides undergo, when they see Death in close-up and wish they had not beckoned to him; and when a flicker of pride prevents their confessing what they have done. Instead, the man projects his violent impulse onto an imaginary other. A classical example of the schizoid process.

  But why should Chester have set out to kill himself? The only possible motive is that he killed Josiah and knew Brady and I were close on his heels. He must have perceived that I had drawn the correct inference from that slip he had made on the journey to Concord. And when I warned the two brothers to be on guard against an attack, he would assume that it was Mark I warned against him. Perhaps he had even got wind of Brady’s latest investigations. Anyway, he felt he’d run his course, been driven into a blind alley with high walls on either side.

  Of course there’s no proof. It’ll all depend on what the policeman sitting beside Chester’s bed may hear. And did he leave a suicide note? Brady examined his rooms very carefully, but does not seem to have found one.

  Nigel stretched wearily. He went out for breakfast; then, returning, lay down on the sofa and slept for four hours. . . .

  At five past six that evening his telephone bell rang again. It was Clare, speaking from London. He put pencil and paper in readiness beside him. She talked for five minutes: Nigel took a few notes, and asked a few questions.

  “So I’m afraid it’s pretty inconclusive,” she ended. “But I hope it helps some. You do get into things. And I miss you. When are you coming home, darling?”

  “In a few days, I hope. And thank you for trying. It needn’t have been a waste of time. We’ve had a most dramatic night. Chester tried to kill himself.”

  “Did he now?”

  “Yes. Damn! Someone’s at the door. I love you. ’By.”

  Nigel opened the door, and Lieutenant Brady strode in. Nigel sat him down with a drink. “How is he?”

  “They’ve pulled him through. I thought I heard you talking to someone just now?”

  “That was Clare. From London.”

  “Oh, yeah? From London? Uh-huh.” However, Brady did not sound madly interested.

  But Nigel plowed ahead. “She got our friend, Chief Inspector Wright, to have inquiries made at the airport hotel where Chester checked in. They bore out his statement to you, more or less. He arrived when he said he did, early on the Thursday morning. Registered. Told the receptionist he was going to put the ‘do not disturb’ notice on his door and sleep round the clock. For all we can prove, he did just that. Our people found no one who noticed him leaving the hotel shortly after he arrived—but it’s a busy foyer, people coming and going all the time, and Londoners are totally unobservant anyway. On the other hand, there’s no record of his having taken a meal in the hotel, either that night or the next morning. Which is more than a little odd.”

  “And no one noticed him entering the hotel on the Friday morning with a reeking revolver?” asked Brady.

  “Strangely enough, no. The housemaid went into his bedroom about eleven on Friday. The bed appeared to have been slept in. His clothes were lying about. She assumed, quite naturally, that he’d forgotten to take the notice off the door when he went out.”

  “Well, it seems to sew up that end okay. He might have flown back to the States, killed Josiah, and returned to Britain, all within twenty-four hours. Or he might not. Big deal.”

  “What about your end?” asked Nigel.

  “Not much more conclusive. He could have flown back to New York on the Thursday, taken the shuttle plane here, killed Josiah, shuttled back to New York, and caught a plane getting him to London in time to attend his first conference. Your point about his ‘losing’ the passport was a good one. We’d have been bound to examine it, and seen that it was stamped twice by the British authorities. Time-wise, the thing was just possible—we’ve checked it very carefully, though the schedule would be tight for the return via New York. He shoots Josiah at 10 P.M., takes a taxi to the airport, catches the 10:30 shuttle to New York, arrives at 11:30, boards the transatlantic plane which leaves at ten after midnight. He’d be taking a big risk: any delay along the line would wreck his schedule. Still, in theory it was possible.”

  “But your chaps have found no evidence of it?”

  “Nobody who will swear to identification. They found a taxi driver who took up a fare from the stand in the Square at approximately 10:05 and brought him to the airport. He says the man was a bit out of breath, about the right size physically, but he didn’t particularly notice his face. Same with the hostess on the shuttle planes he could have caught: we showed them the photographs of Chester: one of the girls thought he might have been on her ship, but she didn’t pay him any attention apart from selling him a ticket.”

  “You’ll have an identity parade, though, in due course?”

  Brady gave Nigel an unfathomable look. “Sure. Yeah, we could do that thing.”

  “Papa Ahlberg permitting?”

  Brady ignored the provocation. “The problem is the transatlantic flights. The shuttle ones are as impersonal as a ride in a crowded subway. But when you fly the Atlantic, you get more personal attention. We’ve questioned very closely the steward and hostesses who were on the one midnight flight from New York he could have taken. None of them appears to have recognized Chester as one of their passengers.”

  “He could have p
ut on some rudimentary disguise.”

  “I’ll give you that. And there was one guy who put his hat over his face and slept all the way through till they woke him with a breakfast tray.”

  “Chester told me he could never sleep on a plane. Did this fellow have a beard or something?”

  “A mustache. We painted a mustache on a photo of Chester. One stewardess thought it might be—no, she couldn’t swear to it—she’d seen hundreds of passengers since then—and this guy, she seemed to remember, had his face averted when the tray was passed to him.”

  “I see. Of course, Chester comes two-a-penny. He’s a type of the American businessman. What about the baggage?”

  “Baggage?”

  “Chester’d left his things in the London hotel. Wouldn’t a fellow flying the Atlantic without any baggage arouse some comment?”

  “I’ll inquire about that.” Brady made a note. “But where you fall down, Mr. Strangeways, is the passenger lists. It’d be okay for him with the shuttle flights—you don’t book for them. But you must have a reservation for a transatlantic flight. And Chester Ahlberg’s name does not appear on the passenger list of any transatlantic plane he could have taken.”

  “What’s to stop him booking a reservation under a false name?”

  “It’d be checked against his passport.”

  “Are you sure? When he buys the ticket, you mean?”

  “It should be,” said Brady uneasily. “Anyway, it’d be checked against the passenger list by the immigration authorities, on both sides.”

  Nigel was silent for a few moments. “Suppose he’d ‘borrowed’ a friend’s passport. Paid for the reservation in cash—in some other city—New York, maybe—so there’d be no question about the wrong name on a check. Chester’s a very common American type, so the passport photograph could fit him reasonably well at a glance—the authorities don’t pore over these photos. Yes,” said Nigel, warming to his work, “he pinches a friend’s passport; he’d only have to keep it for six days—oh, and perhaps a brief period beforehand when he bought the reservations. He flies to London under his own passport, uses the friend’s for the trips to and from New York, then flies back to the city airport here four days later under his own passport again.”