Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  “Almost satisfactory,” said Appleby, “and yet not quite. The man disappears into his study just too soon. If he was home at ten to ten and reading by ten, then ‘a little before eleven’ might be twenty to eleven. And with the possibility of some emergency sort of conveyance that is just not good enough. And we don’t know that he hadn’t got the tenth key.”

  “Just not a good enough alibi. And Campbell’s at that club looks an uncommonly good one. Always sound to suspect the good alibi.”

  Appleby smiled. This was the storybook Dodd speaking. But he did not altogether disagree. He turned to his next note.

  “Lambrick, Arthur Basset (54). Fellow of the college for twenty-four years. Married and lives next door to Chalmers-Paton. Has had a key to the gates for a long time. Said to Inspector D.: ‘I cannot persuade myself that it was I who murdered our poor President.’”

  “9.30. Went home and stayed at home, ‘not knowing there was anything on.’”

  “Our humorous friend,” murmured Appleby. And he listened to Dodd’s reading of Constable Sheepwash’s researches. There seemed no doubt here. Lambrick had got home shortly before ten, played shove-halfpenny with his eldest son till eleven and danced to the wireless with his eldest daughter for half an hour after that. A housemaid who had still been up thought both proceedings immoral and consequently had them firmly fixed in her head.

  “Not much good suspecting that good alibi,” admitted Dodd. “But he might always have lent his key, you know.”

  “And danced, so to speak, while Umpleby was cooling? It is possible. He might have lent his key, for instance, to Chalmers-Paton next door.” Appleby’s tone was absent and it was a moment before he came back to his sheaf of papers.

  “Gott, Giles (32). Came to St Anthony’s six years ago. Has had key to gates since becoming Junior Proctor this year. Can give no information about Umpleby’s death.

  “9.15. Left St Anthony’s by the wicket gate and proceeded to the Proctors’ office. Transacted university business there until 11.15. During this time he was quite alone.

  “11.15. The Senior Proctor returned from his rounds, accompanied by the four university officers on duty. Gott then took over, proctorizing various parts of the city in turn. He was later than usual, only dismissing the officers outside St Anthony’s at about twenty past twelve.”

  Appleby finished this recital with a shake of his head. “No alibi there,” he said, “nor the shadow of one. He was alone in his office until fifteen minutes after the shot and the discovery of Umpleby’s body. And by way of the wicket that office is not more than seven or eight minutes from Orchard Ground.” Appleby’s topography was remarkably sure. “I don’t see that your sleuth can have done anything useful about Gott?”

  “Kellett has simply been round the town inquiring about the movements of the Proctors the night before last. It all squares so far. Between nine-thirty and eleven the Senior Proctor was patrolling about here and there. And after that Gott did apparently take on, going to various places until well past midnight. He wasn’t seen before about eleven-thirty, but he might have slipped down from the office to St Anthony’s and back easily enough without being recognized. It was a pretty dark night. Kellett, incidentally, hasn’t made any inquiries direct at the Proctors’ office, or seen the four officers. That would have to be done formally and openly, I think. As you say, there’s no alibi – or rather any alibi there is is for the wrong time: it begins too late. Kellett has followed it all up, but it seems irrelevant.”

  “Kellett has followed Gott up after eleven-fifteen? Better let us have it.” There were times when Appleby was a stickler for routine.

  “Well, Gott must have gone straight to the railway station first. He and his men were there meeting the eleven thirty-two from town. Then he went straight back to Town Cross and was seen by one of our men on duty there just after eleven-forty. He turned up Stonegate and must have gone straight ahead, because just on midnight he was at the Green Horse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a dubious pub out the Luton Road and a likely place to proctorize after hours. But Gott didn’t spend long there, for he was back at Town Cross by twelve-fifteen and went down Schools Street, presumably to St Anthony’s as he said.”

  “About this Green Horse business. Did Kellett get his information from the people of the pub?”

  “No, he got it from a farm-hand who had left a bicycle in the yard and was collecting it at midnight when Gott more or less ran into him. Kellett was uncommonly smart to tap him. The fellow knew what was up, of course: everybody in these parts knows the Proctor in his gown. And when he got out of the yard there were the four ‘cops’ as he called them waiting.”

  Appleby had got up and was striding restlessly about the room, seemingly in more perplexity than the St Anthony’s mystery had yet driven him to. Suddenly he halted.

  “Dodd, you haven’t by any chance got a street map on you?”

  Without a word Dodd produced a map. Appleby opened it and pored over it for a minute. “Odd,” he murmured, “distinctly odd. And the first oddity that hasn’t pretty well been thrust at us. And at the same time, as you say, irrelevant. I tell you, Dodd, there is too much light in this case – too many promising threads.” And he fell to striding up and down the room once more.

  “Well,” asked Dodd, slightly aggressively after an interval of silence, “what are you going to do now?”

  “I think I’m going to go for a walk. But there is one other matter first. Can you spare a little more time this morning…? Well, I want you to send for Pownall to Umpleby’s dining-room and take his formal statement. And I want the proceedings to last something over half an hour.”

  II

  Mr Raymond Pownall’s was a colourless room. The books looked drab and were interspersed with unbound journals that looked drabber. The few pictures were of classical statuary – the kind of photographic reproduction in which the marble is thrown against an intensely sooty background. The carpet was a discouraged blue and a still aggressive black.

  It was the carpet that interested Appleby. Secure in the knowledge that its owner was closeted with Dodd, he crawled over it with every bit as much concentration as he had witnessed in the small hours of the morning. First, he studied the design, – a largish floral one. Then, guided by the pattern, he made sure that his eye travelled over every inch of the surface. At the end of twenty minutes he had covered the whole area – and found nothing.

  He straightened up, sat down, and thought. And then suddenly he shivered; his adventure of the night before had left him susceptible to cold… Cold. He looked round the room. On this bleakly sunny and decidedly chilly morning every window of Pownall’s room was open to its fullest extent. He began again, crouched over the carpet, not looking this time but smelling… After a few minutes he sprang to his feet and, stepping into the orchard, sent a lurking subordinate with a message to Dodd. He must have another hour. And he fell to the carpet again.

  Pale blue had been turned to black. In eight symmetrical places the pattern had been minutely altered – and in eight places the faint smell of ink remained. A brisk rub with a handkerchief produced from eight places a faint but amply confirmatory smear: Indian ink.

  “Of all the tricks…!” murmured Appleby – and proceeded to rummage a packet of envelopes from Pownall’s desk. Presently he was on his knees once more, industriously plying a pocket scissors.

  III

  In Two-six in Surrey the immemorial System was in operation. Mr David Pennyfeather Edwards, the Senior Scholar of St Anthony’s and owner of the rooms, was squatting in front of the fire – appropriately, he had just pointed out – upon a large copy of the Posterior Analytics, superintending the preparation of a simple matutinal beverage mainly compounded of milk and madeira. Mr Michel de Guermantes-Crespigny, the cherubic bible-clerk of the evening before, was lying on a window-seat with Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader upside down upon his stomach. Mr Horace Kitchener Bucket, an exhibitioner of the c
ollege, was playing a rather absent-minded game of patience – involving four packs of cards and every inch of space – round the chairs and tables on the floor. And all three were improving themselves by conversation.

  “The elimination of the Praeposital Pest,” said Mr Edwards, “suggests a number of nice speculations. For instance, what would you do, Inspector, if you knew who had performed this useful and sanitary act?”

  Mr Bucket, referred to as Inspector in allusion to the immortal masterpiece of Charles Dickens, wriggled a few inches across the floor to impound a ten of hearts, and shook his head.

  “Dunno, David. Wait and see if there was a reward, I suppose.”

  “I really believe,” murmured Mr Crespigny from the window-seat, “that such is our Inspector’s petty-bourgeois passion for the till that he would accept blood-money without a qualm. You shock me, Horace… How’s the drink?”

  Horace, peering round the sofa in hope of a clinching ace, answered without heat. “Aristotle – or perhaps it was Plato – was a shopkeeper – or perhaps the son of one: I forget. And your own namesake, dear Mike, the sage of Perigord, was a fishmonger. And you are a nasty, unwholesome, misshapen, degenerate and altogether lousy scion of outworn privilege. And the increasing unpleasantness of your personal habits, your thick and incoherent utterance, your shambling gait, and above all your embarrassing and indeed painful inability to talk sense have long since convinced David and myself – though we have striven to conceal it – that you are already undermined beyond human aid by the effects of retributive disease. And your tailor – whose taste perpetually astonishes me, let me add – would be grateful for any blood-money you might raise on Umpleby: it would help feed the eight children your bad debts are depriving of sustenance.”

  Long before Horace had finished these remarks he appeared to have lost interest in them. The words came automatically from his lips as his hands deftly manipulated the cards round the coal scuttle. But presently he added, “Who did kill Umpleby?”

  “Umpleby,” Mike ventured, “was stabbed by a dishonest serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd loves, and died swearing. Don’t you think, David, that it must have been that Crypto-Semite Slotwiner? Passion had run high between them over Mrs Tunk the laundress. And all to no purpose, for Mrs Tunk is firmly pledged to our own omnivorous and promiscuous Horace,”

  “But what would one do,” asked David, suddenly jumping up to distribute the adulterate madeira; “what would one do if one did really know?” Whereupon Mike swung himself erect on his window-seat, closing Sweet with a snap; Horace scrambled up from the floor, scattering his cards as he rose; and all three eyed each other attentively over their mugs. A moment before the rules of the game had required the slackest sort of interest, the laziest, sleepiest sort of wit. Now interest was allowed. It was rather like a flock of birds rising abruptly from the ground at the instance of a sudden and mysteriously communicated excitement.

  “Would it depend,” asked Horace, “on how bad we knew Umpleby to be?”

  “Or on how good we knew the murderer to be?” asked Mike.

  “What d’you mean – how good?” demanded David. “If he was a good man and in murdering Umpleby did a bad act, his goodness couldn’t be a relevant point to our decision, could it? He would have to be good in his character as a murderer, not simply in his character as a man, before we should have to begin reckoning with his goodness. I mean that if he murdered from some sort of ethically pure motive – then we should have to consider.”

  Horace protested. “Can one murder from a pure motive?”

  “Well, suppose Umpleby were a very bad man in ways the law couldn’t touch. Suppose he did things, and was bound to go on doing things, that would inevitably result in other people committing suicide and smothering their babies and being ruined by fraudulent speculation and all that. Would eliminating him be ethically pure?”

  “Would the motive but not the deed be ethically pure?” asked Mike, who was untrained in these disputes but always put in a word.

  “But suppose Umpleby were a good man,” suggested Horace, “chiefly a good man, but with…but with a kink or something. Suppose him a split personality – yes, now, suppose him just that – one of those people Morton Prince studied: one person one day and another person the next–”

  “Jekyll and Hyde,” said Mike, very pertinently – and was ignored.

  “Suppose he had two personalities, a and b. And a was, say, a blackmailer. And a knew about the existence of b but b didn’t know about a. And now suppose his murderer happened to be a split personality too – with three personalities: x knowing about y but not z, y knowing–”

  “Steady,” said Mike. “Stick to the corpse – and to who stuck Umpleby. When we find out that it will be time enough to debate whether we can morally seep in and collect the cash. And why shouldn’t we find out – if Gott doesn’t?”

  “What d’you mean, if Gott doesn’t?” asked both his companions.

  “Gott could find out if he wanted to,” maintained Mike, who had boundless faith in his tutor; “only quite likely he doesn’t want to.”

  “Quite likely it was Gott,” declared David. “The man must have a morbid mind, turning out such tripe. A man who could write Murder among the Stalactites, with all that stuff about how long a well-nourished, middle-aged man would take to petrify, must be capable of anything. Did I tell you I tried pumping old Curtis yesterday evening, and he said the President had been murdered with ‘grotesque concomitant circumstances’? What do you think that meant? I wonder if Gott disembowelled him?”

  Mike, ignoring this offensive suggestion, pressed his own point. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t amuse ourselves by finding out. We haven’t got the facts, but I expect a lot can be done just by intelligent thinking. And you and I are intelligent, David – and even Horace has his moments.”

  Horace, secure in the classical man’s consciousness of a superior training, was undisturbed. “No doubt we’re brighter than the police,” he said, “although this Scotland Yard man is probably smart in a ferrety way. But we’re no brighter than Deighton-Clerk or Titlow, and they know more of the facts.” Horace, in his turn, would maintain the almost ideal intelligence of his preceptors. “They’re more likely to guess than we are.”

  There was a brief pause. Then David said, “I have a fact.” There was another pause and he added, “But what’s more interesting: I have a notion too.”

  In all tiny coteries there is always a leader, and David was the leader here. Attention was immediate. “It’s what no one will have thought of – and it opens a line. I’ll tell you.”

  And he did.

  8

  Pownall, irritated and pale after his long interview with Inspector Dodd, halted, suddenly paler still, on the threshold of his room. For from beside the fire there rose to greet him Inspector Dodd’s colleague, Mr Appleby of Scotland Yard.

  Appleby was, as the occasion demanded, politely and conventionally apologetic. “I hope you will forgive my waiting for you in your room. I thought I would wait a few minutes on the chance of your coming back. And I was tempted to sit down by your fire. It is a chilly morning.” And Appleby’s eye, moving as lightly as his apology, swept the uncompromisingly open windows of the room.

  Rather slowly, as if gaining time to collect himself by the act, Pownall shut the door. And having closed it he seemed to realize, with a fresh failure of composure, that he had thereby closeted himself with the detective. But he kept his eye steadily on his visitor as he crossed the room and sat down. He was a grey, dim creature, Appleby thought; his beardless, fresh complexion the sort that makes a close guess at age impossible; his greying hair cropped Germanically short. His head went a little to one side and his hands had a trick of falling lightly into each other in front of his chest – a gentle, almost feminine attitude that was strangely at variance with the hard chill of the slow blue eyes. The eyes, so cold in the small hours, were indeed cold again now – and they were unwavering as the man sat do
wn opposite Appleby. He sat absolutely still. He was clumsy – and it was as if he feared that a single clumsy movement of body would bring some fatally clumsy revelation in its train.

  “I have just signed a statement for your colleague, and been questioned at great length. And now, can I help you?”

  Pownall spoke quietly and colourlessly – severity only hinted at in his choice of words. But as he spoke he let his glance glide over his room, a resolutely casual, yet cold and searching glance. And all the time his head kept its fixed, slightly sideways-inclined posture – oddly like the sooty photograph of Alexander the Great on the wall behind him.

  “You have been unable to add anything to your informal statement yesterday?” Appleby too spoke colourlessly, but the question took an emphasis not of his giving from the pause of silence that followed it. At length Pownall replied.

  “I have added nothing.” And again there was a pause.

  “You are aware of no circumstances connected with the President’s death that would be useful to us?”

  “No.”

  “In effect, you have just sworn to that position?”

  Again there was a pause. And then Pownall suddenly sprang up and crossed the room. His objective turned out to be a little glass box containing cigarettes, which he apparently intended to offer to Appleby. But the oddly-timed gesture of hospitality never accomplished itself: the box suddenly slipped from Pownall’s fingers and its contents were scattered on the floor. The touch of clumsiness about the man made the accident seem natural enough. But to Appleby there was no accident – only a fresh illustration of the general proposition that in St Anthony’s minds worked well.