The Morning After Death

by Nicholas Blake

  Brady gave him a humoring look “So why, for God’s sake, if his own passport was not stamped twice in London, does he have to burn it?”

  “That was my theory. He could just have lost it, as he said he did.”

  Nigel was too much preoccupied with the elegance of his new theorizing to notice the smile gathering at the corners of Brady’s mouth.

  “It’s very, very ingenious, Mr. Strangeways. You must be a humdinger at building card-houses. So how do we prove it?”

  “That’s simple. You look again at the passenger lists for that Thursday. If you find the same name on a morning flight from London to New York and the midnight plane from New York to London, you’ll know that’s the name and passport under which Chester traveled.”

  “Um-m. You may have something there,” Brady admitted. “If we found any such things.”

  “I’m surprised it didn’t make you sit up and take notice. It must be fairly uncommon for anyone to do the round trip within a period of twenty-four hours.”

  “Oh, I don’t know so much about that. There’s a New York guy who regularly flies to bloodstock sales in Dublin, has dinner in Paris, and is back in his office creating hell next morning.”

  Lieutenant Brady took a sip from his glass, leaned back, and put his hands on his stocky thighs. Nigel glanced at him suspiciously.

  “You’re holding out on me, Brady. I don’t like that innocent gleam in your eye.”

  “I guess I enjoy seeing a mastermind at work.”

  “Oh, come off it.”

  “I wouldn’t like you to think I’ve been kidding you along all this time. But things have been happening today.” Brady had an expression which on a less extravert face would be called “dreamy.” “Yes, sir. First, we had all those glasses and cups from Chester’s room tested. Result, negative. So how was it conveyed to him—whatever produced the coma?”

  “He conveyed it to himself, before the party.”

  “Come again.” Brady’s green eyes had opened wide. Nigel outlined his theory of attempted suicide.

  “You certainly do have your teeth fast in Chester Ahlberg. So he tried to kill himself because he believed we’d caught up with him?”

  “That’s the idea,” Nigel said.

  “Uh-huh. Well, now, as I was saying, I couldn’t figure out how the poison was administered. And then I—I sort of got the smell of something. Remembering that jacket.”

  “Jacket?”

  “Sure. The one he was wearing—we took it away for examination,” Brady explained.

  “Well, it was cleaning fluid, not prussic acid. I was there when Mark rubbed his brother down with it.”

  “So I had a talk with Rivers—he’s the best pathologist in the state. He told me it had been discovered that, under certain conditions, the carbon tetrachloride given off by cleaning fluids can be dangerous. It can produce cirrhosis of the liver or kidneys—damage to the cells. They are not sure yet whether the carbon tetrachloride has a direct effect on these cells or works on them through its effect on the bloodstream. I had him ring the Infirmary. He asked about the symptoms. Greenish-white face, giddiness—you noticed that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And another thing. When they’d pulled Chester ’round, he told the Infirmary doctors that it’d been ‘like bells ringing in my head, louder and louder, the last one a dreadful clang.’”

  “Good Lord!” Nigel exclaimed.

  “Another symptom of carbon-tetrachloride poisoning, apparently.”

  “You said ‘under certain conditions.’”

  “Yep. A large intake of liquor would be likely to aggravate the poison’s effect. And a hot, confined space is necessary if the fumes are to do their work.”

  “Chester’s bathroom.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So,” said Nigel after a pause, “it was accident.”

  “It could be accident.”

  “What d’you mean by that?”

  “Or it could have been rigged to look like accident. By Mark Ahlberg.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You told me Mark spilled the coffee and milk over Chester.”

  “I told you Chester said he did. Mark’s line was that Chester tipped the tray himself.”

  “It would have to be Mark’s line.”

  “Well, I don’t know. It does seem to me a chancy way of trying to murder someone. Have there been any fatal cases of poisoning by carbon tetrachloride?”

  “Yes. Rivers knows of them. Though the toxicity took between ten and fourteen days to kill. This one was near enough fatal, I guess. And don’t forget, Mark knew he was still under grave suspicion for the murder of Josiah. He had to think up something for Chester that would look like accident.”

  “Or suicide,” Nigel murmured.

  “Sure. But if he’d intended it to be taken for suicide, he’d have faked up a suicide note.”

  Nigel began prowling round the room. He was disagreeably convinced by Brady’s reading of events. The mawkish, basset hound cutout on the mantelpiece caught his eye. “I’ve grown to hate this damned dog,” he exclaimed, and hurled it into the wastepaper basket. “You’re going to charge Mark?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “But the layman surely doesn’t know about this cleaning-fluid danger.”

  “Very few laymen.” Brady was poker-faced. “But after I’d had the talk with Rivers, I came back and did further checking. I found a copy of a medical journal with a page corner turned down at an article carrying an account of experiments on rats with carbon tetrachloride, and pointing out its danger. It was at the bottom of a pile of magazines in his cupboard.”

  “Mark’s.”

  “No, Chester’s.”

  Nigel was startled. “But that looks like suicide again.”

  “Perhaps Mark planted it there to make it look like suicide.”

  “The redhead in reverse,” Nigel muttered obscurely. “He tried to plant that idea on us, yet he forgot to fake a suicide note? It doesn’t sound very efficient.”

  “Well, I have an idea about that. Suppose he was going to return to Chester’s room when everyone had cleared out, and plant a fake note some place—in a desk, maybe. But he went to sleep instead.”

  “Like me. What on earth do you—? Oh, I see. I see. He’d been affected by the fumes too? How simple. Congratulations, Brady. I think you must be right all along the line. The pattern is strangely neat too. Mark tries to go back to Josiah’s room after shooting him. Mark means to go back to Chester’s after poisoning him. In either case, something prevents it. Very pretty. Very symmetrical. Very tidy. Well, then this lets me out, and I can depart for England in peace.”

  “Hold it, Mr. Strangeways! The Homicide Department is greatly appreciative of your cooperation”—Brady put the phrase in sardonic quotes—“but we should like a few more chores from you.” The Lieutenant described them. “We’ve a great deal of detail ourselves to work over before we have the case against Mark Ahlberg sewed up.” He rose to take his leave. At the door he turned and said with a flashing grin, “Oh, I guess I forgot. Your girl friend would like a talk with you.”

  “My girl friend?”

  “Miss Susannah Tate. We’ve released her.”

  “She is not my girl friend.”

  “Is that so? Well, I gather you’re her father figure. Be seeing you.” . . .

  So the Master had been as good as his word, and gone bail for Sukie. What would happen to her brother, Nigel still did not know: he disliked the idea of that intelligent if unreliable young man being held in prison indefinitely, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was a high price to pay for a temporary loss of nerve. But at least there could now be no question of John, or Sukie, having had anything to do with the murder of Josiah: that, and the attempt on Chester, must have been one man’s work; and who could the one be except Mark?

  And if Mark had thought up this bizarre method of poisoning Chester, it must surely have been he who had thought up the no less biza
rre practical-joke campaign. But why? Nigel bent his mind to it as he dug into Wiener schnitzel at a nearby restaurant. One had to revise all one’s feelings about Mark and think of him as an essentially malicious character; or else find some rational link between the jokes and the poisoning. Malicious acts, for their own sake, were totally foreign to anything Nigel knew about Mark’s nature: he never indulged even in the malice with which academic conversation is so liberally spiced. Well, then, what were the practical jokes meant to do to Chester or convey to the police? Drive him into real paranoia? One brother murdered and the other put away in a madhouse? A clear road to Father Ahlberg’s millions? Then why not persevere with the practical jokes? Wait a minute, though: the cleaning-fluid episode might be, not an attempt at murder, but the climax of this joke campaign—to give Chester the impression of some mysterious, implacable hostility always lying in wait for him.

  Nigel paid his check and returned to Hawthorne House. Zeke and May were in their drawing room when he went over.

  “You’re looking tired, Nigel,” May said sympathetically.

  “Didn’t get enough sleep last night. And I’m afraid I’m the bearer of evil tidings.”

  “But they said Chester would be all right. Zeke called to inquire this afternoon.”

  “It’s about Mark. Lieutenant Brady is convinced he tried to kill Chester.”

  “The man must be mad,” exclaimed May tartly.

  Zeke had closed his eyes, as if he foresaw the blow. He suddenly looked his age, and more: his long body was collapsed in the chair. “You’d better tell us,” he murmured at last, in an exhausted tone.

  Nigel summarized the evidence. “You see, it does look bad for Mark,” he ended.

  “I don’t believe it, Nigel,” May said. “It would mean Mark was either a fiend or a madman. It must have been accidental.”

  “Yes, May, but you can’t get round the article about carbon tetrachloride found in Chester’s cupboard. Either he’d read it, and would be extremely careful about the use of cleaning fluid; or Mark had read it, and planted it there to give us the impression of suicide.”

  “In point of fact, they both knew,” said the Master wearily.

  “What? How?” Nigel’s voice was sharp.

  “It was at a party here, during the last semester. One or two of the Medical Faculty came along. There was a discussion about the possible toxic effects of cleaning fluids under certain conditions. Mark and Chester were both present. Don’t you remember, May?”

  “No. I wasn’t there. Remember, it was a stag party?”

  “To be sure. So it was.”

  “Did either of them show particular interest, Zeke? Ask questions?” Nigel asked.

  “I guess not. It’s not their line, after all. It’s difficult to remember so far back. No, wait a minute. By God, I think Mark did say at some point it would be a cunning method if you wanted to murder someone. But it wouldn’t have meant anything. I’m sure he was just aiming to turn the conversation into a lighter vein: all that technical detail became a bit tedious for us laymen.”

  May gazed anxiously at Nigel. “You mean, they’ll arrest him any moment now?”

  “Not quite. There’s a lot of practical investigation to be done first. Looking for fingerprints on the magazine. Interviewing everyone who was at the party last night. Everything really hinges on that.”

  “The tray?” Zeke asked.

  “Exactly. If they can get firm evidence that it was Chester who knocked the coffee over on himself, it’s a point in Mark’s favor.”

  “A point! It’d be decisive,” said May stoutly.

  “Would it? We all know Chester is accident-prone. And he was abnormally squiffed too. Mark might well have banked on his doing something clumsy,” Zeke said.

  “Och, you’re the devil’s advocate.” His wife sighed.

  “I doubt if the police will get any definite lead from the eyewitnesses. Did you see how the tray got tipped, Zeke?”

  “No. I was talking to Charles Reilly when it happened.”

  After a pause, May said, “It’d come hard for Mark, whatever happens.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Mr. Ahlberg senior has a scunner of drink, since—but you know all about that. And he just needs an excuse to get his knife into poor Mark again. He’d work it up into a drunken brawl, with Mark throwing coffee at his brother. Disgraceful behavior in public again.”

  “Oh, come, May! Mark was sober enough.”

  “Well, then, the old ruffian will say he was sober enough to remember the dangers of carbon-whatever-it-is, and was criminally negligent to drench his brother with the stuff. The bathrooms are far too hot here anyway, Zeke. You should do something about it. The young men should be clean, not steamed alive like lobsters.”

  “I’ll bear the point in mind, my dear,” Zeke said dryly.

  “Have you seen Mark today?” asked Nigel.

  “No. He rang to beg off a Humanities tutors’ meeting this morning. Said he was not feeling too grand.”

  “No wonder. He must have inhaled some of the fumes too.”

  “Did he know about his brother being taken to the Infirmary?” May asked.

  “No,” said Zeke. “I told him.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Shocked. Distressed. Naturally.”

  “His actual words—d’you remember them? This is important,” Nigel said.

  The Master was silent a moment, trying to recollect. “He said, ‘Oh, not again.’ Then, ‘The Infirmary, did you say? But I thought he’d just passed out. Is he seriously ill? I must get along to see him.’”

  “That all?”

  “About Chester, yes. Perfectly natural, innocent words. Well, Nigel, surely you agree?”

  “It’s what he didn’t say that worries me. Isn’t it strange he didn’t ask what was wrong with Chester? Suggests he already knew.”

  “Oh, really, Nigel, that’s being too clever altogether. He’d just waked up. He was dazed.”

  “What puzzles me is the ‘Oh, not again,’” May put in. “But it doesn’t sound to my ear like the remark of a guilty man. More like a first spontaneous reaction: ‘Oh, Lord, now we’re in trouble again—we—Chester and I.’”

  Nigel glanced at her with respect. The Master broke out, his bony head wagging in bewilderment, “It’s getting more difficult every day to talk to those two naturally. First you tell me Chester is the chief suspect, then Mark. And I’m supposed to meet them as if none of this had happened.”

  “Don’t meet them then,” said Nigel heartlessly. “It won’t go on much longer, anyway.”

  “I certainly hope not. Just now I feel as if it’s a crime that will never be solved, and I’ll have to go through with the rest of my Mastership knowing I have a murderer on my staff.”

  “Better than having a murder on your conscience,” said May in her matter-of-fact way.

  “I don’t think that’s a very helpful contribution, May.” There was a vibration of anger beneath Zeke’s level voice.

  “Well,” replied his wife comfortably, “I shall just go on treating Mark and Chester as I’ve always done. There’s no use imagining bogles—wait till one jumps out at you.”

  A studious silence prevailed as Nigel strolled around in the great court. But for chinks of light showing beneath shades here and there, Hawthorne House might have been deserted—the scene of some terrene catastrophe, loitering through the night like an abandoned Marie Celeste. The town traffic could be heard distantly, a sea sussuration rising and falling. The stars were visible in their thousands; beyond them, invisible, millions more. “A worm’s-eye view,” Nigel muttered. Everything here was so clean, so clear-cut and lucid: he felt a pang of nostalgia for muddled, smoky London. The clarity of New England was deceptive, though; not because it concealed dark mysteries, but because the sophisticated European projected his own subtleties and velleities upon it.

  The American mind, Nigel thought, was not subtle. It could be extremely complex, bu
t it worked efficiently by delimiting its activities: like a child setting out all its toys on the nursery floor and moving in due order from one to another. It seemed to him that an American had a built-in appointments book, which told him what he should be doing at every hour of the day: his constitution was a written one, as his private life was a mass of neatly interlocking schedules. There was not enough “play”—in the physicist’s sense—in his microcosm. That probably explained, Nigel felt, what he’d decided was a nationwide recourse to psychoanalysts, and the outbreaks of violence by those who could not afford them. It was this rigidity of mind, this lack of “give,” which drove men mad—an excess of mental orderliness spilling out into psychic disorder.

  “. . . while of unsound mind,” he mused. It was not the passionate, unpremeditated act, though, which should be defined thus, but the long, warped course of action. “In dreams begin responsibilities”; and in fantasy begins a murderer’s irresponsibility. The murderer here is a child, a clever child who never doubted he could make his fantasies come true; a pure egotist unable to take seriously the pitfalls through which he will pick his way, though his precocious intellect may plan carefully to avoid them.

  And whom does all this point to?

  Nigel went up to his room, with one last look at the night sky. He was undressing when the telephone rang.

  “I’ve been trying to get you for ages—” the pure contralto voice seemed to be throbbing right against his ear, as if she had put her lips to it. “Can you come and have lunch here tomorrow?”

  “Yes, I’d like to. By the way, how are you?”

  But Sukie rang off without another word.

  13 “Danaë, in a Brazen Tower”

  THREE STUDENTS JOINED Nigel at his table in the House dining hall. They set down their loaded breakfast trays and punctiliously shook hands with him.

  “I hear Mr. Ahlberg is sick,” said Philip.

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Well, he’s in the Infirmary, but—”