Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

  Death at the President’s Lodging

  First published in 1936

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1936-2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2009 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,

  Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755120027 EAN: 9780755120024

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Author’s Note

  The senior members of Oxford and Cambridge colleges are undoubtedly among the most moral and level-headed of men. They do nothing aberrant; they do nothing rashly or in haste. Their conventional associations are with learning, unworldliness, absence of mind, and endearing and always innocent foible. They are, as Ben Jonson would have said, persons such as comedy would choose; it is much easier to give them a shove into the humorous than a twist into the melodramatic; they prove peculiarly resistive to the slightly rummy psychology that most detective-stories require. And this is a pity if only because their habitat – the material structure in which they talk, eat and sleep – offers such a capital frame for the quiddities and wiliebeguilies of the craft.

  Fortunately, there is one spot of English ground on which these reasonable and virtuous men go sadly to pieces – on which they exhibit all those symptoms of irritability, impatience, passion and uncharitableness which make smooth the path of the novelist. It is notorious that when your Oxford or Cambridge man goes not “up” nor “down” but “across” – when he goes, in fact, from Oxford to Cambridge or from Cambridge to Oxford – he must traverse a region strangely antipathetic to the true academic calm. This region is situated, by a mysterious dispensation, almost half-way between the two ancient seats of learning – hard by the otherwise blameless environs of Bletchley. The more facile type of scientific mind, accustomed to canvass immediately obvious physical circumstances, has formerly pointed by way of explanation of this fact to certain deficiencies in the economy of Bletchley Junction. One had to wait there so long (in effect the argument ran) and with so little of solid material comfort – that who wouldn’t be a bit upset?

  But all that is of the past; when I last sped through the Junction it seemed a little paradise; and, anyway, my literary temper is for more metaphysical explanations. I prefer to think that midway between the strong polarities of Athens and Thebes the ether is troubled; the air, to a scholar, nothing sweet and nimble. And I have fancied that if those Oxford clerks who centuries ago attempted a secession had gone to Bletchley there might have arisen the university – or at least the college – I wanted for this story… Anyone who takes down a map when reading Chapter X will see that I have acted on my fancy. St Anthony’s, a fictitious college, is part too of a fictitious university. And its Fellows are fantasy all – without substance and without (forbearing Literary reader!) any mantle of imaginative truth to cover their nakedness. Here are ghosts; here is a purely speculative scene of things.

  St. Anthony’s College - Location Map

  1

  An academic life, Dr Johnson observed, puts one little in the way of extraordinary casualties. This was not the experience of the Fellows and scholars of St Anthony’s College when they awoke one raw November morning to find their President, Josiah Umpleby, murdered in the night. The crime was at once intriguing and bizarre, efficient and theatrical. It was efficient because nobody knew who had committed it. And it was theatrical because of a macabre and unnecessary act of fantasy with which the criminal, it was quickly rumoured, had accompanied his deed.

  The college hummed. If Dr Umpleby had shot himself, decent manners would have demanded reticence and the suppression of overt curiosity all round. But murder, and mysterious murder at that, was felt almost at once to license open excitement and speculation. By ten o’clock on the morning following the event it would have been obvious to the most abstracted don, accustomed to amble through the courts with his eye turned in upon the problem of the historical Socrates, that the quiet of St Anthony’s had been rudely upset. The great gates of the college were shut; all who came or went suffered the unfamiliar ordeal of scrutiny by the senior porter and a uniformed sergeant of police. From the north window of the library another uniformed figure could be glimpsed guarding the closely curtained windows of the President’s study. The many staircases by which the medieval university cont
rived to postpone the institution of the corridor were lively with the athletic tread of undergraduates, bounding up and down to discuss the catastrophe with friends. Shortly before eleven o’clock a sheet of notepaper – unobtrusive, but displayed contrary to custom outside the college – informed undergraduates from elsewhere that no lectures would be held in St Anthony’s that day. By noon the local papers had their posters on the streets – and in no other town would they have read as discreetly as they did: Sudden Death of the President of St Anthony’s. For in the papers themselves the fact was stated: Dr Umpleby had been shot – it was suspected deliberately and by an unknown hand. Throughout the afternoon a little knot of lounging townsfolk, idly gathered on the further side of St Ernulphus Lane, satisfied their curiosity by staring up at the long row of grey-mullioned, flat-arched Tudor windows behind which so intriguing a local tragedy lay. And local tragedy meanwhile was becoming national news. By four-thirty hundreds of thousands of people in Pimlico, in Bow, in Clerkenwell, in the mushroom suburbs of outer London and the hidden warrens of Westminster, were adding a new name to their knowledge of a very remote university town. The later editions put this public on a level with the local loungers, for the same long line of Tudor windows stretched in photographic perspective across the front page. By seven o’clock quadruple supplies of these metropolitanly-keyed news-sheets were being feverishly unloaded within hail of St Anthony’s itself. The cloistral repose of the college was shattered indeed.

  But it is a troubled quiet that much of the university enjoys in the twentieth century. Day and night the vast aggregation of London, sixty miles away, clamours for supplies; day and night it sends out products of its own. And day and night the venerable streets, up and down which so many generations of scholars and poets have sauntered in meditative calm, re-echo to the roar of modern transport. By day the city is itself a chief offender; local buses and innumerable undergraduate-driven cars jam and eddy in the narrow streets. But by night the place becomes an artery only; regularly, remorselessly, with just interval enough to allow uneasy expectation, the heavy night-travelling lorries and pantechnicons of modern commerce rumble and thunder through the town. And day and night as the ceaseless stream goes by, the grey and fretted stone, sweeping in its gentle curve from bridge to bridge, shudders and breathes, as at the stroke of a great hammer upon the earth.

  St Anthony’s is fortunate amid all this. Alone among the colleges that front the worst of the hubbub, it presents on this aspect a spacious garden, the famous Orchard Ground. Behind the privacy of a twelve-foot wall, topped by lofty ornamental railings, a spreading lawn thickly set with apple trees runs back to meet the first and most massive group of college buildings: the chapel, the library and the hall. Beyond the great screen of these, in Bishop’s Court, the hum of traffic scarcely penetrates. And beyond that again the oldest part of the college, the medieval Surrey Court, with its high Early English archway and main gates giving on St Ernulphus Lane, almost touches the inviolate calm of King Alfred’s Meadows. The ancient town has its haunts for the dreamer still.

  But the great garden of Orchard Ground had proved from time to time the haunt of anything but quiet activities. The St Anthony’s undergraduates had rioted in it, hunted a real fox in it, smuggled into it under cover of darkness a very sizeable sow on the verge of parturition. Orchard Ground, therefore, had long been locked up at night; junior members of the college had no access to it after ten-fifteen. The senior members, the Fellows, could use a key: for four of them who lodged in Orchard Ground a key was essential… And upon Orchard Ground, thus peculiarly insulated at night, opened the French windows of the study in which Dr Umpleby’s body had been found.

  II

  It had been a quarter past two when the great yellow Bentley swung out of New Scotland Yard; it drew up outside St Anthony’s just as four o’clock was chiming from a score of bells. Seldom, Inspector John Appleby reflected, had he been so expeditiously dispatched to investigate a case of presumed murder beyond the metropolitan area. And indeed, his arrival in the Yard’s most resplendent vehicle was sign and symbol of august forces having been at work: that morning the Dean of St Anthony’s had hastily seen the Vice-Chancellor; the Vice-Chancellor had no less hastily telephoned to the Lord Chancellor of England, High Steward of the university; the Lord Chancellor had communicated quite briskly with the Home Secretary… It was not unlikely, Appleby thought as he jumped out of the car, that local authority might feel central authority to have been pitched somewhat abruptly at its head. He was therefore relieved when, on being shown by a frightened parlourmaid into the deceased President’s dining-room, he discovered local authority incarnated in no more formidable shape than that of an old acquaintance, Inspector Dodd.

  These two men offered an interesting contrast – the contrast not so much of two generations (although Appleby was by full twenty years the younger) as of two epochs of English life. Dodd, heavy, slow, simply bred, and speaking with such a dialectical purity that a philologist might have named the parish in which he was born, suggested an England fundamentally rural still – and an England in which crime, when it occurred, was clear and brutal, calling less for science and detective skill than for vigorous physical action. He had learned a routine, but he was essentially untrained and unspecialized, relying upon a pithy if uncertain native shrewdness, retaining something strong and individual in his mental, as in his linguistic, idiom. Beside him, Appleby’s personality seemed at first thin, part effaced by some long discipline of study, like a surgeon whose individuality has concentrated itself within the channels of a unique operative technique. For Appleby was the efficient product of a more “developed” age than Dodd’s; of an age in which our civilization, multiplying its elements by division, has produced, amid innumerable highly-specialized products, the highly-specialized criminal and the highly-specialized detector of crime. Nevertheless, there was something more in Appleby than the intensely taught product of a modern police college. A contemplative habit and a tentative mind, poise as well as force, reserve rather than wariness – these were the tokens perhaps of some underlying, more liberal education. It was a schooled but still free intelligence that was finally formidable in Appleby, just as it was something of tradition and of the soil that was finally formidable in Dodd.

  The two men were likely enough to clash; with a little goodwill they were equally likely to combine. And now Dodd, for all his fifteen stone and an uncommon tiredness (he had been working on the case since early morning), sprang up with decent cordiality to welcome his colleague. “The detective arrives,” he said with a deep chuckle when greetings had been exchanged, “and the village policeman hands over the body with all the misunderstood clues to date.” As he spoke, Dodd turned towards the table, on which a pile of papers evinced his industry during the day. They were flanked on the one hand by a hastily-made but sufficiently clear ground-plan of the college and on the other by the remains of bread and cheese, and beer in stout academic pewter – refreshments which it had occurred to Dr Umpleby’s servants, round about three o’clock, that the inspector might stand a little in need of. “The St Anthony’s beer,” Dodd said, “is a good feature of the case. The village policeman is baffled, but he gets his pint.”

  Appleby smiled. “The village policeman has notably mastered his facts,” he replied, “at least if he’s the same policeman I knew a couple of years ago. The Yard still talks about your check-up on those motor-thieves…you remember?”

  Dodd’s acknowledgment of the compliment in the reminiscence took the form of wasting no time now. Drawing up a chair for Appleby he placed the pile of papers between them. “I’ve been going a bit fast today,” he said abruptly, “and what I’ve got here is limited by going fast. It’s short all round but it gives us bearings. There has been ground enough to cover, and first on the spot must get quickly over all, you’ll agree. I’ve taken dozens of statements in a hasty way. Any one of them might have put me direct on somebody making out of the country. But none of them has
. It’s a mystery right enough, Appleby. In other words, it looks like one of your cases, not mine.”

  Dodd’s handsome speech was sincere but not wholly disinterested. Fortified by the St Anthony’s ale, he had been spending the last hour thinking, and the more he had thought the less he had liked the results. His mind, indeed, had begun to stray, shying from this case on which he could see no beginning to another case of which he hoped soon to see the end. For some time he had been working on an extensive series of burglaries in the suburbs and this baffling matter of Dr Umpleby, obviously urgent, had come to interrupt his personal control of a round-up from which he saw himself as likely to gain a good deal of credit. He put his position to Appleby now and it was agreed that the latter should, for the time being, take over the St Anthony’s mystery as completely as possible. As soon as they had come to an understanding on this, Dodd placed the plan of the college in front of Appleby and proceeded to outline the facts as he knew them.

  “Dr Umpleby was shot dead at eleven o’clock last night. That’s the first of several things that make his death something like the storybooks. You know the murdered squire’s house in the middle of the snowstorm? And all the fancy changes rung on that – liners on the ocean, submarines, balloons in the air, locked rooms with never a chimney? St Anthony’s or any other college, you see, is something like that from half-past nine every night. Here’s your submarine.” As he spoke, Dodd took up the ground-plan and ran a large finger aggressively round the perimeter of the St Anthony’s buildings. “But in this college,” he went on, “there’s more to it than that.” This time his finger ran round a lesser circuit. “In this college there’s submarine within submarine. At half-past nine they shut off the college as a whole from the world. And then later, at ten-fifteen, they shut off one bit of the college from the rest. That is almost a pure storybook situation now, isn’t it? Nobody gets in or out of the college after half-past nine that the porter doesn’t know of – with certain exceptions. Nobody got in or out from half-past nine last night to this present moment that we don’t know of – with the same possible exceptions. And after ten-fifteen, nobody can go to and fro between the main body of the college (submarine) and this additionally shut-off Orchard Ground (submarine within submarine) with, again, the same possible exceptions. Only” – and here Inspector Dodd suddenly spoke with a vigorous irritation – “none of the exceptions appears to be a homicidal lunatic! And therefore the lunatic who did that” – and here Dodd jerked his thumb in the direction of the next room – “ought still to be on the premises. I haven’t found him, Appleby. Every man alive in this college is saner and more blameless than the rest.”