Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  “You did not notice it please, Titlow, Empson, Pownall, I beg? You did not see me put the gown down, Pownall, at all – Titlow no?”

  The appeal was not very politely received. A sardonic person who was to reveal himself as Professor Empson murmured that Barocho might well have mislaid his head, a response which the Spaniard at once contrived to muddle. “Ah, yes, you said our dead Head!” – and he crossed himself and looked solemn over what he apparently took to be some obscure reference to the late Dr Umpleby. Then a thought seemed to strike him and he turned to Titlow. “One thing I want to ask you. You speak of Heads of Houses and that is university Houses – Colleges – no? And then you speak of Safe as Houses, and that is university Houses too, Titlow – verdad? You call this House safe?”

  Barocho’s mind seemed to work not so much differently as weirdly – or it had a whim for appearing to do so. Several people were looking at him with the sort of half-irritated tolerance which one bestows upon a familiar oddity. But one member of the high-table, an impassive featureless person who was to turn out to be Haveland, seemed, to Appleby’s eye, to be attending with considerable concentration. The Spaniard was now embarked on random philological speculation and inquiry. For a minute his voice was lost, save to his immediate neighbours, amid such subdued talk as the high-table was allowing itself. And then, in a pause, it rang out in question:

  “Do I say, then, that you will be hanged, or that you will be hung?”

  Titlow’s glass came down abruptly; equally abruptly Haveland’s went to his mouth – it was impossible to tell to which the fantastic question had been addressed… Had the round innocent eyes of Barocho, Appleby wondered, meditatively sought his own in that disturbing moment? The Spaniard, he suspected, was neither witless nor concerned deliberately to give offence. He had simply conducted an experiment. Why?

  In an instant Deighton-Clerk had taken charge, subtly but absolutely, of the whole table. He seemed to dictate alike the subdued conversations and the interspersed silences which marked the rest of the meal. He had determined, clearly, that there was to be no further incident – and there was none. Half an hour after dinner had begun, and without allowing a suspicion of haste towards the close, the Dean rose and murmured two words of grace. Chairs were drawn back, caps were handed, the occupants of the high-table filed out through the rows of standing undergraduates. Hall was over.

  II

  The little file of dons streamed over the narrow neck of Bishop’s Court separating hall from common-rooms: Appleby, with his instinct for observation, brought up the rear. Away to the left, and clearly illuminated by a brilliant lamp, was the big, unimpeded archway between Bishop’s and Surrey. To the right, close by, but illuminated only accidentally by a light streaming from the open common-room door, were those problematical gates which had been locked at ten-fifteen the night before, and which were locked still now. Through the elaborate iron-work there flowed a velvet blackness, and the faint sighing breeze that must be stirring the mist around the invisible trunks and branches of Orchard Ground. None of the little procession, Appleby saw, looked that way. But through that gate some lurking minion of Dodd’s would presently have to admit Empson, Titlow, Pownall and Haveland, if these were to pass the night in their own rooms… It was an awkward arrangement at best, this nightly splitting of the college in two with lock and key. It was a piece of practical awkwardness typical perhaps of the place. Had it been exploited with an equally typical intellectual finesse? This question took Appleby, in the wake of his host, into the smaller of the St Anthony’s common-rooms.

  The room had the air of somewhat desiccated luxury characteristic of such places, but it was pleasant enough. A long mahogany table, lit by candles in heavy silver candlesticks, glowed with the ruby and gold of port and sherry, glittered with glass, broke into little rainbows of fruit. The only other light was from a generous fire in a generous fireplace. The walls, covered with innumerable portraits of Fellows dead and gone, swam in and out of shadow, surrounding the living with a company of fleeting ghosts – Victorian ghosts looking like Mr Deighton-Clerk; eighteenth-century ghosts sitting in libraries, walking in parks, striking postures amid fragments of the Antique; a few seventeenth-century ghosts holding prayer-books. The great of St Anthony’s hung in hall; these were her illustrious obscure, appropriately perpetuated on a miniature scale. It was like a cloud of witnesses.

  There was a moment of confusion. As Mr Deighton-Clerk crossed the threshold of the common-room, his authority – or rather the authority of the dead President now vested in him – was by some inviolable custom suspended. It fell to Mr Titlow to dispose the company around the table. But Titlow was still plainly in a state of agitation and he showed every sign of making a bad job of it. His gestures were vague and contradictory and there was a generally embarrassed shuffling and shifting before the company was settled down. Appleby found himself oddly placed at the head of the table, facing the single figure of Haveland at the other end – a double line of dons between them.

  A modicum of confusion Mr Deighton-Clerk had suffered in the name of the prescriptive, but when the table was once settled he resumed control. He whispered to Titlow; Titlow and he severally whispered to the servants; and cut glass and decanters, fruit and finger bowls, vanished untouched. It was a portentous symbolism – and it induced a portentous silence. The ritual of dessert had been metamorphosed into the ceremony of a meeting. The servants had withdrawn and the Dean spoke. He spoke, Appleby noticed, without the slightly strained formality which unfamiliar colloquy with a policeman had induced earlier in the evening.

  “We have here tonight Mr Appleby of the London police. Mr Appleby has been sent on our direct application to the Home Office, and we will help him in every way. He is staying in college, in the rooms just opposite my own, until matters clear up. We realize, I think, that that may take a little time. It is useless to disguise from ourselves the fact that the circumstances in which the President has died, as well as being quite evidently sinister, are possibly complicated. Mr Appleby will no doubt wish to see us all severally and discover what, if anything, we have to tell.

  “Mr Appleby, I will name my colleagues. On your left is Mr Titlow. Dr Gott, Professor Empson, Professor Curtis, Mr Chalmers-Paton…”

  And so the Dean went right round the table. It was an uncomfortable proceeding, but sensible and efficient, and Deighton-Clerk went through it with level severity. It was not, Appleby decided, exactly a matter of introductions, and the process was completed without bow or word spoken. Most of those named looked direct at Appleby; a few kept their eyes on the bare table in front of them. Only Barocho’s eyes went circling round with Appleby’s, and he smiled amiably on each of his colleagues in turn, giving much the impression that he regarded the roll-call as preliminary to the starting of some pleasant paper game.

  For a moment there was silence, and then Haveland suddenly spoke from the lower end of the table. He was a pale, almost featureless person, but there was a rigidity about such features as he had that suggested a quality of intensity or concentration. He was dressed, as the Dean had foretold, in morning clothes – clothes which conveyed, in their soft but clear colouring and negligent flow, something of consciously-worn aesthetic sensibility. But the hands were lifeless and the voice cold, thin, impassive as the features. He addressed the Dean.

  “I take it that you are not suggesting that Mr Appleby should begin by holding a conference. What information each of us may have, what impressions each of us no doubt has – all that Mr Appleby had better get by going round privately.”

  Beneath the flat words, beneath the flat tone in which they were uttered, there was discernible some latent cutting edge waiting to come into operation. “Information,” “impressions,” “going round” –there had been scepticism, irony, contempt delicately perceptible behind the successive words. Haveland continued.

  “But there is something I take this chance of saying to everybody. It may deprive one or two of you of the pleas
ures of suddenly realizing that two and two are four, and give you an impression the less to convey to Mr Appleby. Please forgive me.

  “You all know that Umpleby’s study has been found littered with bones. I wonder where they came from… Empson, can you think?”

  There was some hidden art in this appeal: Empson seemed momentarily confused. But Haveland at once went on.

  “I am sure you can. But I don’t know if Mr Appleby understands as yet the significance of bones amongst us? I am certain it is a point his rural colleague – with whom I am afraid I shall reveal myself as having been improperly reticent this morning – would scarcely appreciate. I suggest you say a word to Mr Appleby on that, Deighton-Clerk.”

  Deighton-Clerk, thus appealed to, looked first puzzled and then startled. “Mr Haveland no doubt means,” he said, “that anthropology is a strong subject with us at St Anthony’s. Haveland is an anthropologist himself. Titlow’s classical archeo1ogy has got mixed up – please excuse the expression, Titlow! – with anthropology of late. And Pownall’s ancient history and Campbell’s ethnology have linked up with the subject too. The linking-up was fostered by the late President. Dr Umpleby himself came to anthropology through comparative philology, as did his pupil, Ransome, who is now abroad. In fact, St Anthony’s has been famous for teamwork on ancient cultures for 57 years now. As a student of comparative religion I have been interested myself. I suppose that is what Haveland means by the significance of bones amongst us – though such an odd notion would never have occurred to me… And now, Haveland, if you have something to say, pray say it.”

  Haveland had that look in his eye which a man might have who is putting a horse for a second time at a very stiff fence.

  “Empson knew that I had a collection of bones in college. I wonder if anyone else knew?” His eye ran round the table, making a fleeting point before he continued. “The bones are my bones.”

  The common-room was hushed. None of Haveland’s colleagues said a word, and Appleby said no word either.

  “At least I presume they are my bones, for my bones have disappeared. And as mine happen to be of Australian aborigines they will be fairly easily identified… I wonder if any of you has any thoughts as to how these exhibits of mine have come to be put to such picturesque use?”

  There was absolute silence.

  “Or perhaps I might ask not how they came where they did, but why? What do you think…Empson? Would you care to advance any theory?”

  “I have nothing to advance… Ask Titlow.”

  Why, thought Appleby, ask Titlow? And Titlow seemed to think the same. He was looking with much the same indignation at Empson as Empson was looking at Haveland. A little more of this and all the subterraneous currents of this little community would be rising to reveal themselves on the surface.

  “I can imagine their being put there to incriminate you, Haveland,” Titlow put in. “Pownall, does that not seem possible to you?”

  Pownall, thus dragged in (why drag in Pownall?), responded: “I can imagine an explanation which is at once simpler and odder. Can you not, Haveland?”

  It was as if Barocho had been right and some round game – a round game of which only a fragment of the rules was known to any one player – was in progress in the common-room. But now a venerable and bearded person sitting opposite the fireplace took up the conversation. “I wonder if any of you know the curious Bohemian legend of the Bones of Klattau…?”

  This was Professor Curtis, and to Appleby’s ear and mind his perfectly irrelevant interjection had a curious effect. Its innocence – and, in the circumstances, absurdity – threw into sudden clear relief the animus with which the previous play of conversation had somehow been heavy. Pownall’s “Can you not, Haveland?” had had it, and now Haveland, ignoring Curtis and the Bohemian legend, squared himself to reply.

  “Certainly I can imagine another explanation. There is a concatenation of circumstances that comes to my mind at once. Empson, I think you should give some account of a conversation I had with Umpleby in your presence a month or two ago. You know what I mean. And I don’t think anyone else knows of it.”

  “Pownall knows: I told him next day.” Empson had replied impulsively, and seemed to regret it. “I don’t see,” he continued, “that I need give any account of anything here. If you want all that out, out with it yourself.”

  The Dean stirred in his seat – half uneasily, half authoritatively. “Haveland,” he said, “is this expedient? If you insist on telling us something, tell us outright.”

  “I am going to tell you something outright.” The retort was a neat and venomous imitation of the Dean’s slightly magisterial accents. Haveland was certainly not playing for sympathy: the common-room could be felt to shudder at the impropriety of his tone. But he had controlled himself instantly and now continued unmoved. “I am going to tell you – as Empson seems reluctant to do it – of a certain occasion on which I quarrelled with Umpleby – badly.”

  From several quarters there rose protesting murmurs. The Dean, in evident perplexity, half-turned to Appleby. But Appleby seemed lost in absorbed contemplation of the table-edge in front of him. And Haveland continued unchecked.

  “It was a matter, of course, of one of Umpleby’s usual thefts.”

  If there was anything, Appleby decided, to be discerned in the expressions of the late President’s colleagues at this opening, it was comprehension rather than perplexity. The Dean, however, was moved to some attempt at remonstrance. Haveland – and with a trace of unrestraint – thrust it aside.

  “Deighton-Clerk, don’t be a fool. Consider what we are up against. Umpleby, I say, had been stealing again. I needn’t go into it all. Empson was there, and if he were not so uneasy about it could give you a cooler account than I. But I do remember one very definite expression I used.”

  Haveland’s fence, Appleby sensed, was full in front of him now. And the whole room seemed to feel the strain that was in the air.

  “When I taxed him with it he simply would not meet my point. He talked about his own work among the tombs down the Gulf. And I said I would like to see him immured for good in one of his own grisly sepulchres… That is correct, Empson, is it not?”

  Empson made no reply. There was absolute silence. Haveland was impassive still, but even down the candle-lit table Appleby thought he could discern the drops of sweat that stood upon his brow. At length a voice broke the spell.

  “Haveland, what madman’s trick are you suggesting?”

  It was Pownall who spoke. And if there had been silence before, there was utter stillness now. Appleby had the feeling of a sudden horrid sense of understanding, a catastrophic dark enlightenment, running round the table. But Haveland had suddenly got to his feet. He looked directly across at Appleby, and seemed now to address him rather than the room.

  “And there you have material for two theories. Titlow said something about ‘incriminating’: you can reflect on that. And Pownall said something about ‘simpler and odder’: you can reflect on that too. Good night.”

  And Haveland swung out of the room. For a moment the company sat staring rather blankly at an empty chair. But Deighton-Clerk had whispered to Titlow and Titlow had pressed a bell. Some soothing fragment of ritual was again being resorted to.

  The door of the inner common-room was thrown open and the unemotional tones of a servant announced: “Coffee is served!”

  III

  The Dean motioned to Appleby and the two of them, together with Titlow, Barocho, and a silent person who had proved to be Dr Gott, passed into the next room – Deighton-Clerk because he was Dean, Appleby because he was the Dean’s guest, Titlow because he was Senior Fellow, Gott because he was at present a proctor and Barocho probably because he had simply forgotten to remain behind. Appleby was helped to coffee by the Dean, and the others helped themselves. Deighton-Clerk made no secret of his distress to Appleby.

  “Mr Appleby, it is a horrible business. Pray heaven you clear it up quickly! I am coming to fe
el some wretched tone or atmosphere spreading itself around us.”

  Little more than an hour before Deighton-Clerk had been elaborately impressing upon Appleby, in direct contradiction to the strongest physical appearances, that Umpleby’s death was the deed of some Unknown who had no part or lot in the life of St Anthony’s. Plainly, he was not a little shaken from that confidence – if genuine confidence it had been – now. He had drawn Appleby into a corner and was continuing with increased distress.

  “It was a most improper observation of Pownall’s. Even if Haveland was inviting accusation, it ought not to have been put to him by way of insinuation like that. We were all exceedingly shocked.”

  Appleby was in the dark as to the significance of this speech, but in a moment the Dean enlightened him. “I am afraid it is my duty to explain to you, Mr Appleby, though it has much upset me. I had quite forgotten… Did I remark earlier this evening when we were speaking of the bones that they were mad whereas we in this college were all demonstrably sane? At any rate, I think I implied it. And of course I had forgotten – though I was dimly aware of some sinister thing. I had forgotten the trouble poor Haveland had had. Some years ago, Mr Appleby, he had…a severe nervous breakdown, and behaved for a time very oddly. Actually, he was found behaving very oddly among the sarcophagi in the Museum… Where will this lead us?”

  It might lead, Appleby thought, in more directions than one – but it did not look, at present, as if it would lead straight out of St Anthony’s.