Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  No glimmer of light came from Little Fellows’ as Appleby stepped into the stone-flagged lobby. Little Fellows’ was a modern building, but it had been constructed on the old orthodox plan. Right and left of Appleby as he entered were the heavy outer doors of a set of rooms: Pownall’s, as he knew, upon the left; Haveland’s upon the right. Both doors were ajar and Appleby’s torch ran cautiously round the little inner lobby revealed beyond each. Within the lobbies was one single door only; this would lead to the owner’s sitting-room, from which an inner door, in turn, would serve as the only entrance to the bedroom beyond. In front of Appleby, and against the right-hand wall, the staircase ran up into the darkness to a similar lobby on the upper floor – the floor on which were the rooms of Titlow and Empson. Again in front of Appleby, and along the lefthand wall, a short passage led to a flight of stairs running downward – no doubt to some small service basement. There was little to explore here, but Appleby made a minute examination first of the paved floor of the outer lobby and then of the wooden floors beyond. Outside, it was slightly damp underfoot and there was the chance that a fresh footprint might give some clue to who had been stirring in the small hours.

  But a careful search revealed nothing, and Appleby started on the staircase. Softly he mounted the bare wooden treads, scrutinizing them one by one. Half-way up was a small landing with a coal-locker, and then a full turn brought him to the upper lobby – and still nothing. He began to think that this in itself might be evidence, for in the lobby down below, and on the first few treads of the staircase, his own feet had left distinct traces. If anybody had passed indoors within the last two hours it seemed likely that traces would remain. But it was a doubtful point. Appleby himself had been walking a good deal on the grass; if his assailant had kept to the gravel paths his shoes might have remained comparatively dry. Or it was not unlikely that a careful man would have removed his shoes on the threshold.

  And now Appleby decided to make sure that the occupants of Little Fellows’ were indeed all in the building. He quietly opened the door of Empson’s sitting-room and slipped inside. His flitting torch revealed a large book-lined room, handsome rugs on a polished floor, deep leather chairs, and, by the door where Appleby stood, a bronze bust on a pedestal. By an impulse of artistic curiosity that was natural to him he turned his torch for a moment full on this. The head, obviously, of a savant – and then he noticed a plaque on the pedestal: Charcot. Empson’s master, perhaps – and Freud’s.

  Next – and again characteristically – the torch ran over the books. It was a severe library, almost without digressions, hobbies or loose ends of any sort… Ancient philosophy, massed together. Modern philosophy, similarly massed. The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method – uniform, complete, overwhelming. Academic psychology – what looked like a first-class collection. Medical psychology – a great deal of this, too. General medicine – something like the nucleus of a consultant’s library. Criminal psychology. Straight criminology… And that was all. Now for the bedroom.

  Stepping deliberately from rug to rug, like a child on the pavement baffling the bears, he reached the inner door and heard, his own breath suspended, low regular breathing from within. He turned the handle and opened the door a couple of feet until the bed was visible. Then he shone his torch upon the ceiling of the sitting-room behind him: the light was just sufficient to reveal Empson clearly. He was sleeping soundly, and in his sleep he looked worn and delicate. The lines of his mouth suggested pain; the skin stretched tight in a clear pallor over the cheek-bones and the jaw. Appleby recalled a slight hesitation – barely a stutter – in Empson’s speech; recalled too that he was lame, walking with the assistance of a stick that even now stood beside his bed. The two disabilities were perhaps symptomatic of some congenital delicacy, and the dry, slightly acrid spirit of the man was the protective shell over a suffering and perhaps morbid sensibility. Appleby’s mind went back to the books in the room behind him. The mainspring of such a personality as Empson’s would be described there as the restless urge to power of one who feels in certain physical particulars subnormal. He softly closed the door on the worn, almost bitter figure. He felt an unprofessional impulse of shame at his spying: a man appears so helpless in sleep – so helpless and so revealed… Appleby passed out to the landing once more and entered Titlow’s rooms.

  He made no pause this time to scrutinize the sitting-room, for he wanted to be downstairs again without delay. Tiptoeing over to the bedroom door, he bent down to listen. There was no sound from within. And Appleby’s ear was almost abnormally acute. Either Titlow was an exceedingly light sleeper or… Appleby boldly opened the door. The room was empty. The bedclothes were disarranged and Titlow’s evening clothes lay on a chair – but Titlow himself was missing.

  There was as yet no faint glimmer of light in the eastward-fronting windows of the rooms, and Appleby kept his torch burning as he made his way thoughtfully downstairs. He would wait for Titlow, and while waiting he would have a look at the two men below. He had recovered from his compunctions; if sleep was revealing he wanted more of it. Turning right as he got to the foot of the stair, he had his hand on Pownall’s door, when he checked himself. Beneath the door was a thin luminous line. Within, someone had turned on the electric light.

  Appleby’s first thought was that it might be Titlow: while he himself was in Empson’s rooms Titlow might have slipped down to Pownall’s for purposes of his own. There was no murmur of voices from within: only the sound of slight physical movements. Was Pownall still in bed and asleep, unconscious that he had a visitor – even as Empson had been a few minutes before? Appleby tried the keyhole – unenthusiastically. No aperture is more exasperating to the would-be spy than is a keyhole. It gives him a strip of floor, a strip of wall – even a strip of ceiling; but its lateral range is wretched. The thicker the door, moreover, the narrower the view – and college doors are commonly good stout barriers. Through Pownall’s keyhole Appleby could just discern movement, and no more. It seemed to be a case of either walking in or going away uninstructed. And then it occurred to him that the windows might be more hopeful. He slipped out into the orchard and was rewarded. The curtains of Pownall’s room were drawn, but from one cranny there came a streak of light and by standing on tiptoe in a flowerbed he could just peer in.

  Something large and black was moving about the floor, and it took a moment to sort out this appearance from its surroundings and impose an intelligible form upon it. Analysed, it proved to be a pair of human buttocks, the curve of a human back and the soles of two human feet. A dinner jacketed form, in fact, was kneeling on the floor and crawling slowly over the carpet. It could not be Titlow – unless he had unaccountably changed out of one dinner jacket into another. But at this moment the form circled round and rose to its feet. It was Pownall himself.

  Inadequate as was his means of vision, Appleby was struck by the concentration on the man’s face. Pownall was a clumsy man, and possessed at once of the bluest and the slowest eyes that the detective remembered. These eyes were cold now – were felt as cold even through the little chink of window-curtain – and the brow above them was heavy with effort. There seemed no fear that he would spot the dim face at the window. His gaze was intently fixed upon the floor; without shifting it he sidled out of range for a moment, and returned holding some small object with which he sank down upon the floor once more. Inch by inch he was going over his own carpet.

  Appleby was as absorbed as Pownall – so absorbed as to start almost violently at the sudden murmur of a pleasant voice behind him. “Ah, my dear Mr Inspector, you begin early – or continue late!”

  Switching on his torch, Appleby swung round. It was Titlow – Titlow in pyjamas and a frayed but gorgeous silk dressing gown, regarding him over that weak nose, through these luminous but fathomless eyes. There had been amused irony in the voice, in the “Mr Inspector.” But suddenly there was concern as the Senior Fellow added, “But bless me, man, are you no
t hurt – injured in some way?”

  Appleby, pale, exhausted, with a bloody bandage round his head and clotted blood down his face, was discernible in the ray of light from the window as a sorry sight. He admitted dryly that an unexpected misadventure had befallen him. Titlow continued concerned. “If you have concluded your momentary observations, will you not come upstairs to my rooms? I have just been fetching myself a tin of coffee from the basement pantry here – I have wakeful fits sometimes. But you, if I may say so, need something stronger. And after that, I doubt if you could do better than go to bed… Now, come away.”

  Beside all this easy benevolence, Appleby discerned, was the same nervous excitement, the same irritability and impulsiveness that had struck him in Titlow already. And Titlow, if no more intense than say Empson or Haveland, was deeper than the others: there was layer upon layer to him – the several layers none too firmly bound together perhaps into any coherent personality. But he was smiling urbanely now, simply amused, it seemed, at having detected a detective in an absurd situation. And Appleby did feel a little uncomfortable. He experienced an idiotic satisfaction that Titlow had not come upon him while he was at the keyhole: there were several shades of ignominy, somehow, between keyholes and windows. He pulled himself together. “I shall be delighted,” he said, “if you will excuse me one moment.” And turning into the lobby of Little Fellows’ once more, he went straight into Haveland’s room, straight into his bedroom, discerned him indubitably asleep, and came straight out again. And this gesture accomplished, he followed the now frankly smiling Titlow upstairs.

  II

  Titlow’s whisky was very good – or so it seemed to Appleby, who would have consumed the rankest poteen with relish at this melancholy hour of four-thirty on a November morning. Stretched in front of a large electric radiator, he sipped, munched biscuits from a large tin delusively labelled “Msc. clay-tablets: Lagash and Uruk,” and looked round him with interest. He had already – although Titlow did not know it – had a glimpse of this room; now he scrutinized it in detail. A living-room is always revealing, and particularly so when clothed with books. Titlow’s books, like Deighton-Clerk’s, and unlike Umpleby’s and Empson’s, came up only waist-high round the room, but they were two deep everywhere on the broad shelves – an arrangement the inevitable inconvenience of which seemed enhanced by the completely haphazard arrangement of the volumes. Carelessly disposed along the tops of the low bookcases was a mass of ancient pottery – shapes subtle, free and flowing; shapes angular, abstract and austere; brilliant glazes, delicate crackles; textures that flattered the sense of touch through the sense of sight. Above the pottery on one wall was an enormous ground-plan of some large-scale excavation, a yearly progress marked on it in coloured chalks. Next to this, and set up for study it would seem rather than for ornament, was a series of large and technically magnificent aerial photographs of the same site, with sundry lines and crosses delicately traced on them in chinese white. And next came a perfect miniature picture gallery, photographs and colour-prints covering a vast field of art – or covering rather all that field of prehistoric, barbaric and pre-Hellenic culture which is still “archeology” to most although it has become “art” to some. All the forms of natural life, the human figure chief among them, stylized and distorted to convey implications of permanence, rigidity, abstraction: the art of peoples who feared life. And hard upon these, in subtle juxtaposition, an art despising it: the art of the Middle Ages – an erudite collection, dominated by a big German Dance Macabre. And, single against this, in violent disharmony upon the opposite wall, all the physical glow and warmth of the Renaissance pulsating from a colour-print of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus.

  Titlow in fact – it came to Appleby – was dramatizing an inner incoherence in this room. And in addition to the deliberate sounding of major disharmony there had been a scattering of little grace-notes of pure oddity. There was a stuffed dog, oddly reminiscent of Queen Victoria (who would scarcely have felt at home here); there was a small cannon; one of the chairs was simply hollowed out of some porous stone. But Appleby looked chiefly at the Dance Macabre and then at the Sleeping Venus. And he sipped his whisky and finally murmured to Titlow, with something of the whimsicality that Titlow had been adopting a little before, “What truth is it that these mountains bound, and is a lie in the world beyond?”

  There was silence while Titlow’s eye dwelt meditatively on a policeman conversant with Montaigne. Then he smiled, and his smile had great charm. “I wear my heart on my wall?” he asked. “To project one’s own conflicts, to hang them up in simple pictorial terms – it is to be able to step back and contemplate oneself. You understand?”

  “The artist’s impulse,” said Appleby.

  Titlow shook his head. “I am not an artist – it seems. I am an archaeologist, and perhaps that is not a very healthy thing to be – for me. It is unhealthy to be something that one can be only with a part of oneself. And it is with a very small part of myself, I sometimes think, that I have become what I am. By nature I am an imaginative and perhaps creative man. But it is difficult to become an artist today. One stops off and turns to something else. And if it is something intellectual merely, so that other impulses lack expression, then perhaps one becomes – freakish. Irrational impulses lurk in one, waiting their chance…do you not think, Mr Appleby?”

  Odd the abruptly pitched question. And odd the whole man, talking thus under some queer compulsion to a stranger – and a policeman. Appleby’s answer was almost at random: “You think the thwarted artist…unstable?” But it set Titlow off again.

  “Artists or scholars, Mr Appleby – we are all unstable here today. It is the spirit of the age, the flux growing, the chaos growing, the end of our time growing nearer hourly! Perhaps one has not to live in imagination much amid the long stabilities of Egypt and Babylon to know that? But it is to the scholars, the men of thought, of contemplation, that the first breath of the whirlwind comes…”

  And pacing nervously, convulsively up and down Titlow talked…of the rhythm of history…the rise and fall of cultures…das Untergang des Abendlands, Decline of the West. He talked well, with a free, unashamed rhetoric, at once logical and full of bold ellipses. And Appleby listened quietly to the end. Titlow was talking as he was because Umpleby had died as he did.

  “You know where we come from here – whence we derive, I mean. We are clerks, medieval clerks leading this mental life that is natural and healthy only to men serving a transcendental idea. But have we that now? And what then does all this thinking, poring, analysing, arguing become – what but so much agony of pent-up and thwarted action? The ceaseless driving of natural physiological energy into narrow channels of mentation and intellection – don’t you think that’s dangerous? Don’t you think we could be a dangerous, unbalanced caste once the purposes have gone and the standards are vanishing? Don’t you think it?”

  Titlow had paused; he was perched outlandishly on his outlandish little cannon. What was the compulsion behind this queer talk – talk that was indeed but contemporary commonplace in substance but, in some personal relationship in which the man now stood to it, so decidedly queer? Appleby remembered Deighton-Clerk talking – talking, it had seemed, to convince himself. And somehow – surely – Titlow was doing the same? Again he had concluded on a question, an appeal for corroboration. Again Appleby had to evolve a reply.

  “No doubt it is, as you say, the scholars and men of thought who feel the whirlwind coming. But do they really – give way? Is it not they who survive – survive because they are removed from the world? Do they not – well – guard, hand down?”

  What, Appleby was wondering as he spoke, would Dodd think of all this as a technique of investigation? But his eyes were as searchingly on Titlow as if his question had related directly to the President’s death. And there was strain, something even of anxiety or alarm lurking in Titlow’s eyes as he replied.

  “It should be as you say, Mr Appleby. Indeed, it is so – essent
ially.”

  There was a silence of calculation. It was as if Titlow were feeling his way, testing the ground he would be on were he to abandon some position to which he had trusted – and all this with no reference to how he stood with Appleby. “It is so – really,” he reiterated.

  “But you think that a society such as this, in what you see as a disintegrating age, is unstable, erratic?”

  Titlow made a gesture almost as of pain. And when he replied it was with an impersonality that plainly revealed the intellectual man’s habit of striving for objectivity, for dispassionate truth. The personal pressure he had contrived for the moment to sink.

  “Erratic, yes. But I have been overstating – or oversuggesting – greatly. Any fundamental unbalance there is not. What there is, is – nerves. And personal eccentricity, perhaps some degree of irresponsibility – our modern scholarship, I know, is essentially irresponsible. But basic instability – no. Except perhaps” – softly, firmly Titlow added – “in such a one as myself…” Again he made his little gesture of pain.

  “You would not say – regarding the matter untemperamentally – that the spirit of the age, and the rest of it, is likely to incline any of your colleagues to homicide?”

  If there was a hint of irony in Appleby’s question it was lost. Standing now before the fire, Titlow weighed it. And replied: “No.”