Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  Appleby, as he worked out this concise and knotty résumé of the facts, spoke with a shade of reluctance. He was less ready than Dodd for anything savouring of a conventional mystery, and he was inclined to distrust inference from the oddly precise conditions under which Umpleby had apparently been murdered. As Dodd had shrewdly remarked, the affair was obtrusively artificial, as if the criminal had gone out of his way to sign himself both ingenious and grotesque, calculating and whimsical. Within an hour of his arrival at St Anthony’s, Appleby was finding a particular line of action imposed upon him – a line demanding minute and probably laborious investigation into the conduct and dispositions of a small, clearly-marked group of people. He saw that he was confronted, actually, with two propositions. The first was simple: “The circumstances are such that I must concentrate on so-and-so.” The second was less simple: “The circumstances have been so contrived as to suggest that I must concentrate on so-and-so.” In pursuing the first proposition he must, at least, not lose sight of the second.

  Appleby checked surmise and turned once more to Dodd for information. “Which of the Fellows lodge in Orchard Ground?” he asked. “Which of them have keys? How far have you traced their movements after the break-up in the common-room last night?”

  “The four that lodge in Orchard Ground,” Dodd replied, “are Empson, Pownall, Titlow and Haveland. They’re in a building next to, but not communicating with, this Lodging. It’s just through here” – and Dodd tapped his finger stolidly on one of the scrawled death’s heads above the dead man’s fireplace. “The block is called Little Fellows’. There are two sets of rooms on each side of a staircase,” he continued with precision, “and the men live like this.” And with a quick rummage Dodd produced another of his industriously prepared papers.

  Upper floor Empson Titlow

  Ground floor Pownall Haveland

  “We found Empson, Pownall, Haveland each in his own room; Pownall in bed, the others working. About Titlow’s movements you know. Now about the keys; with them we come to the really extraordinary factor. These four people lodging in Orchard Ground all have keys. Being shut off from the rest of the college they naturally have to. And you would expect that for convenience of getting at them, as well as to get in and out of the college by the wicket without rousing the porter, all their colleagues would have keys as well. But they haven’t. You know, they’re an unpractical lot.”

  Appleby smiled a little grimly. “There may be one among them,” he said, “who is – efficient.”

  “Well, for that matter most of them are efficient after a particular fashion. They’re not vague, for instance. They’re keen and precise, really. Only it’s a preciseness, I reckon, that has all run to things a long way off or a long time back. For instance, there’s Professor Curtis. He lodges in Surrey Court. I asked him if he had a key to the gates. ‘Gates, Mr Inspector,’ he said, ‘gates?’ ‘The gates between this and Orchard Ground,’ I explained. ‘Yes, to be sure,’ he said, ‘there’s a story they came from Cordova. The college had them from the third Earl of Blackwood; he served in Sidmouth’s second ministry.’ ‘But have you a key?’ I asked again. ‘I relinquished my key,’ he replied at once, ‘at the end of April, 1911.’ ‘End of April, 1911,’ I repeated a bit blankly. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘at the end of April, 1911. Empson won both Cornwalls that year, you know, and we elected him to his Fellowship at once. He’s done nothing since, either. He’ll make an admirable President, no doubt. You did say poor Dr Umpleby was quite dead, did you not?’ ‘Quite dead,’ I answered, ‘–and you’re quite sure you haven’t had a key since 1911?’ ‘Quite sure,’ he said; ‘I gave up my key to Empson. I remember reflecting what an excellent thing a locked gate between colleagues might be. If you want a key, Inspector, the porter will no doubt lend you his.’”

  As Dodd concluded this remarkable feat of witness-box memory, he produced yet another paper. “Here,” he added impressively, “is a table.” And he laid it before Appleby.

  x Deighton-Clerk Bishop’s

  x Empson Orchard Ground

  x Haveland Orchard Ground

  x Pownall Orchard Ground

  x Titlow Orchard Ground

  Barocho Bishop’s

  Campbell married; Schools Street

  Chalmers-Paton married; suburb

  Curtis Surrey

  x Gott Surrey

  x Lambrick married; suburb

  “I’ve put a cross,” said Dodd, “against the people who have keys. There seems to be no system in it. For instance, Lambrick, who is married and lives out of college, keeps a key, but Campbell and Chalmers-Paton, who are in just the same position, get along without one. Gott and the Dean live in college and have keys; Curtis and Barocho also live in college and have not. So much for how the keys are distributed. And now for their history.” At this point Dodd broke into an unaccountable chuckle. “You know, I was reading a story the other day which turned on keys – the provenance of keys, as you call it in your learned London way. It was the key of a safe that it was all about, and it couldn’t have been stolen – had literally never been in unauthorized hands. And yet it had been copied. Do you know how?”

  Appleby laughed. “I could give a good guess, I think. But we don’t know we have to search for any fancy tricks here. A key might very easily have been stolen and returned in the recent past.”

  “Yes,” Dodd replied; “recent past is the word.” And he looked almost slyly at Appleby as he spoke. For with a nice sense of the dramatic he had delayed the climax of his narration. “The keys were all changed yesterday morning!”

  Appleby whistled. Dodd when he had heard the same news had sworn. It was the final and overwhelming touch of that topsy-turvy precision that seemed to mark the St Anthony’s case.

  Briefly Dodd explained. No one had taken much care of his key. A key is not at all the same thing to a scholar that it is to a banker, a doctor or a business man. The possessions of the learned classes are locked up for the most part in their heads and to a don a key is more often than not something that he discovers himself to have lost when he wants to open a suitcase. And those Fellows of St Anthony’s who possessed keys to the gates which had suddenly become so tragically important had for long been careless enough with them without anybody worrying. But recently there had been a scandal. An undergraduate had got into serious trouble during an illicit nocturnal expedition, and the mystery of how he had made his way in and out of St Anthony’s had not been satisfactorily cleared up. The President had decided that a key had been copied. He had ordered fresh locks and keys for the three vital gates – and the locks had been fitted, and the keys distributed to the people concerned, only the morning before he met his death.

  It was Dodd’s view that this circumstance, though extraordinary in itself, introduced a welcome simplification into the case. It seemed likely to save an enormous amount of laborious and difficult inquiry – for nothing, as he had found in the interviews he had already conducted that morning, could well be more difficult, delicate and tedious than pursuing a number of academic persons with minute questions as to their material possessions. Moreover, the circle of possible suspects seemed at once to be narrowed in the most definite way. If Dodd at that moment had been called upon to write a formal report on the progress of the investigation he would have risked a categorical assertion. Dr Umpleby could have been murdered only by one of a small group of persons definitely known.

  And Appleby, as he reviewed the situation while pacing restlessly but observantly round the fantastic death-chamber, had also reached one definite conclusion. Mystery stories were popular in universities – and even among the police. Dodd, who still kept so much of an English countryside that read Bunyan and the Bible, and who was, besides, a monument of efficient but unimaginative police routine, was a case in point. His native shrewdness had at once led him to note the artificiality of the present circumstances. But (and such, Appleby reflected, is the extraordinary power of the Word) he was half-prepared to accept the ar
tificial, the strikingly fictive, as normal. And he seemed in danger, as a consequence, of missing that most important Why in the case: Why had Umpleby met his death in a storybook manner? For that his death had been set in an elaborately contrived frame seemed now clear: the circumstance of the changing of the locks made this evident almost to the point of demonstration. Umpleby had died amid circumstances of elaborate ingenuity. He had died in a literary context; indeed, he had in a manner of speaking died amid a confusion of literary contexts. For in the network of physical circumscriptions implicitly pointing (as Appleby had put it to himself) to so-and-so there was contrivance in a literary tradition deriving from all the progeny of Sherlock Holmes, while in the fantasy of the bones there was something of the incongruous tradition of the “shocker.” Somewhere in the case, it seemed, there was a mind thinking in terms both of inference and of the macabre… A mind, one might say, thinking in terms of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, come to think of it, was a present intellectual fashion, and St Anthony’s was an intellectual place…

  An intellectual place. That was, of course, a vital fact to remember when proceeding a step further – when attempting to answer the question of which Dodd was perhaps insufficiently aware: Why had Umpleby met his death like a baronet in a snowstorm? There were two tentative answers: (1)because, for some reason, it was useful that way; (2) because it was intellectually amusing that way… Intelligence, after all, had its morbid manifestations.

  Appleby caught himself up. He was trying somewhat wildly, he saw, to find an approach to his problem on a human or psychological plane. He knew it to be at once his strength and his weakness as a detective that he was happier on that plane than on the plane of doors and windows and purloined keys. The materials of the criminologist, he used to declare in theoretical moments to colleagues at Scotland Yard, are not fingerprints and cigarette ends but the human mind as exposed for study in human behaviour. And of human behaviour he had as yet had nothing in the present case. He had been met, so far, not with human actors, but with a set of circumstances – once more the storybook approach, he told himself.

  With an odd effect of thought-reading Dodd spoke. “You’ll be beginning to look for some of the livestock.” And as Appleby, startled by the odd ring of the phrase in the presence of what had been Josiah Umpleby, turned back from the window through which he had been staring, his colleague crossed the room to ring the bell. “We’ll have in a witness,” he said. And the two men adjourned again to the dining-room.

  II

  Mr Harold Tapp had been waiting for half an hour to be interviewed in connection with a murder, but he was not in the least nervous as a result. He was a sharp, confident little person; he had all the appearance of being reliable and, according to Dodd, he enjoyed the reputation of being an excellent locksmith. Very little prompting was necessary to get him to give a tolerably connected account of his recent dealings with St Anthony’s. His statement was impressively recorded by a sad and portly sergeant summoned for the purpose.

  “The late Dr Humpleby,” said Mr Tapp, “sent for me a week ago today. To be exack – which is what you want, you know – the late Dr Humpleby gave me a ring-hup.”

  “To be more exact still,” said Appleby, “did Dr Umpleby ring through to you direct, can you tell, or did somebody else make the call before Dr Umpleby spoke?”

  The question found Tapp decided – the only point it was designed to test. Umpleby himself had summoned the locksmith, who had immediately presented himself at the President’s Lodging. “You see,” said Tapp, “the late Dr Humpleby was in a flurry. He was in a nurry and a flurry about them locks. I don’t think flurry’s too strong to describe his ’urry: he was hanxious for the change. He explained the why and wherefore of it too – a nundergrad having been getting hout and all. Hanxious was the late Dr Humpleby.”

  Appleby was regarding Mr Tapp with more interest than he had expected to feel.

  “Well, you see,” continued the locksmith, “it weren’t what you’d call a big job nor it weren’t rightly what you’d call a little ’un. So I fixed yesterday morning for fitting, and the late Doctor said it would serve so. Very interested he was in the way of the work too, and particular over the keys. Very proper notions over keys had the late Doctor. Ten keys there were to be and all going to him direck. And ten he got yesterday morning as soon as the locks were fitted and tested by myself.”

  “Just how did he get them,” asked Dodd; “and just how safe had you been keeping them?”

  “Well, you see, I’d been on them all week myself and done all the assembling and finishing. And the drawing was in the safe, and the locks and keys in the safe, as often as they weren’t in my ’ands. All that’s a nabit, you see, with a nigh-class locksmith. Not that all my business is ’igh-class, you know. Still, this was – and treated accordingly. I fitted the locks yesterday morning and then I saw Dr Humpleby ’imself and gave him the ten keys as required. And from the moment I set file to them to the moment I ’anded them hover every one of them keys ’ad been treated like a bag of golden sovereigns. And they’re not a thing you often see nowadays,” Mr Tapp concluded somewhat irrelevantly.

  A little questioning substantiated the fact that the new locks and keys had been prepared under completely thief-proof conditions. Appleby’s problem of “provenance” was proving very simple indeed. He turned to the point in Tapp’s statement which had particularly arrested his interest. “You say that Dr Umpleby appeared anxious about the keys and gave you a reason – something about an undergraduate? Just how anxious was he? Would you describe him as agitated – really worried about the matter?”

  Tapp answered at once. “Hagitated, sir, I wouldn’t nor couldn’t rightly say. But he was in a nurry and a flurry – and that I do say.”

  Appleby was patient. “Not really agitated, but flurried. I wonder if you can make that a little clearer? Agitation and flurry seem to me very much the same thing. Perhaps you can give me a clearer idea of what you mean by flurry?”

  Tapp reflected for a moment. “Well, you see, sir,” he said at length, “by flurry I wouldn’t quite mean scurry, and by scurry I would mean hagitation. I ’ope that’s clear. And certainly Dr Humpleby was in a nurry.”

  This was as much information as was to be obtained from the locksmith and, after he had signed a correctly aspirated version of it prepared by the lugubrious sergeant he was dismissed.

  “Just how odd is it,” asked Appleby, “that Umpleby should give the excellent Tapp reasons for changing the locks and keys? I don’t see that, Dodd, do you? It strikes me as just a shade queer. It’s a queerness that may be nothing more than a minute queerness of character. I may be noticing only a minute way in which Umpleby’s behaviour has differed from the dead normal behaviour of a dead average Head of a House – or I may be noticing something much more significant. And the same thing applies to the other interesting point – that Umpleby was in what our friend called a flurry about the business; that he was within some recognizable distance, measured by flurries and scurries, of being agitated.”

  “There’s something strikes me as more significant than that.” Dodd was very stolid. “There was an extra key.”

  Appleby gave his second whistle of the afternoon. “Your point again! The Dean, Empson, Gott, Haveland, Lambrick, Pownall, Titlow, one for the head porter… Hullo! That’s only eight. Surely there were two extra keys?”

  Dodd shook his head. “The head porter got one for his ring and another went as a spare in the safe in his lodge. But one key does remain to be accounted for. And an awkward complication it makes.”

  “Umpleby himself perhaps kept a key?”

  Dodd again made a negative gesture. “I don’t think so. At least he never, according to the Dean, used to. He had no need of one. He could walk out of his own Lodging into either Orchard Ground or the main courts. And similarly his own back-door let him out on the street. And, of course, we’ve found no key in his belongings.”

  “A missing key,” murmured Appleby.
“Do you know, I’m rather pleased about the missing key. It represents a screw loose somewhere – and so far your submarine has been screwed down uncomfortably tight.” But he was speaking absently, and pacing about as he spoke. Then, with a sudden gesture of impatience, he led the way back to the study.

  III

  The black gown which had been found swathed round the President’s head, and which had been replaced there, following police routine, after the police-surgeon had certified life to be extinct, Appleby now carefully removed. It was caked with blood, but only slightly, and Appleby laid it on a chair. He gazed with some curiosity at the dead President. Umpleby’s was a massive and, for the spare-bodied man that he was, a surprisingly heavy head, with bone structure prominent about the brow and commanding nose – fleshy and heavy-jowled below. The mouth, sagging in death, had been rigid in life; firm to the point perhaps of some suggestion of cruelty; ruthless certainly rather than sensual. The eyes were open, and they were cold and grey; the features were composed – oddly at variance with the tiny but startling hallmark of violence in the centre of the forehead. And death had brushed away a load of years from the pallid face: it was some moments before Appleby saw clearly that Umpleby had been an old man. At the moment he made no examination but picked up the gown again to do the office of a temporary shroud. As he did so something about it held his attention. “I take it this is not Umpleby’s gown?” he asked Dodd.

  “No, it’s not. And it has no name on it. I haven’t, as a matter of fact, questioned people about it so far.”

  “You needn’t, I think, expend much effort on that. It’s Dr Barocho’s gown.”

  A second thought and Dodd had taken the point neatly. “You mean it’s some sort of foreign gown, not an English one?”