Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  Pownall had stooped down instantly. His fingers, gathering the cigarettes, ran here and there over the carpet. And when he straightened himself again his face, which might have been flushed with the exertion, was even paler than before. For a moment the two men looked into each other’s eyes. And then – obliquely – Pownall answered the question which had been directed to him a minute before.

  “I can throw no light, by way of evidence, on the death of the President. But there have been certain matters, connected with his death but not elucidating it, that I have considered it my duty to myself not to advance up to the present.”

  “What you have signed before Inspector Dodd can be used in court, Mr Pownall. You must know that. And the fact of your having omitted material facts from your statement can be used too.”

  “It is not perjury, Mr Appleby, to make one’s own decisions as to what is relevant in a statement offered to a police-officer.”

  Appleby bowed his acceptance of this proposition. But an edge had come into his voice when he spoke. “A course far short of perjury may, under certain circumstances, be very injudicious. It is injudicious, for instance, to spend the night following a murder in doctoring the floor of your room. As you have guessed, from every spot where you put ink I have taken a specimen; and what is under one or more of those spots analysis will reveal.”

  Appleby had a good deal more faith in extracting a revelation from Pownall himself than from any chemical analysis. Pownall would realize that the doctored carpet was a most uncomfortable fact in itself, irrespective of what the doctoring might be proved to conceal. And he did realize. Coldly, abruptly came the confession. “The ink covers blood.”

  There was a pause, and then Pownall made his first movement since he had sat down again – something like a gesture of resignation over what he had just said. And then he went on.

  “You will wonder how an intelligent man could act in so foolish a way as I have been acting. Well, the answer is – blood. They say that to shed blood is an intoxicant – that one feels like an angel. I have been drunk too, and drunk from – blood. But not blood that I had shed. And I have not felt like an angel… No.”

  There was another of the pauses which seemed characteristic of any conversation with this dim, still, clumsy creature. But this seemed – despite the incoherence of what had just been said – a pause of intense calculation, as if the man had made a first move at some intricate game of skill and was striving with complete concentration to assess the result.

  “It was blood on the carpet. Just here” – and Pownall rising, strode almost to the middle of the room and pointed with his foot. “Not much, a little pool – two inches perhaps…and half clotted. I took blotting paper. I remember wondering if it would work; if blotting paper would absorb blood – clotting blood. It did, and there was left just half an inch of stain. On the black, it didn’t show – only on the pale blue there. So I took the ink, a dead black Indian ink I have, and enlarged the pattern. It was a panic action – the fear of what had been planted on me drove me. And the panic kept coming back. Every time I looked at the carpet yesterday the irregularity – the minute half-inch irregularity – seemed to leap at me. But the ink on the blue seemed a perfect dye, giving exactly the normal black of the carpet. And it worked on me till I went over the whole carpet in the night, making it regular. It was only when I had made all those half-inch blots that I found it would smell. But with the windows open…”

  Pownall stopped. He seemed simply lost in thought. And this time Appleby had to speak.

  “Will you please give me a more coherent – a less dramatic – account?” Expressed in Appleby’s tone was the conviction that the pressure under which Pownall appeared to speak was a fabricated pressure, that the man was playing a part. And yet he was not sure; the strange blend of agitation and impassivity with which he was confronted was almost baffling. And now Pownall took up the request simply.

  “Yes,” he said, “I will.” And after that pause which had established itself as an essential rhythm of the proceedings he added, “It began, really, with a dream.”

  Inspector Dodd, had he been treated to these confidences an hour before, would undoubtedly have betrayed some impatience at this point. Appleby did not. But he took a notebook and pencil from his pocket and began to make a shorthand entry. The action seemed to stimulate Pownall, who plunged into something like connected narrative.

  “I keep early hours, usually breaking the back of my day’s private work before breakfast. It is a habit I got in hot countries: I have done a good deal of archaeological research in Egypt as well as Greece. I am up normally before five and therefore I go to bed fairly early. The evening before last I got back from the common-room perhaps a few minutes before half-past nine. I sat here reading for about twenty minutes. Then I got some hot water from the servants-pantry out on the landing there, washed, and went to bed. I must have been asleep before ten-fifteen: I like to be asleep a quarter of an hour earlier than that if I can.

  “Well, it began, as I said, with a dream. I was a rowing man as an undergraduate and this dream was about the river. We were practising just as they are practising now – in tub fours. Our coach was shouting to us and I remember being worried by some quality of his voice – perhaps he was using a megaphone – I know I was unreasonably worried by something about the shouting… We were practising starts and the same shout ran through the dream again and again: ‘Come forward – Are you ready? – Paddle!’ The last word was a tremendous shout, like the crack of a whip, and then we were straining up the river. There were other things that I forget, or perhaps the dream lapsed. But anyway, the same situation came back again, a sort of recurrent nightmare. And presently some stiffness seemed to come over me and interfere with my stroke. The coach was calling to me over and over again, ‘Drop them, Bow! Drop them, Bow!’ – meaning my wrists. But I couldn’t get them away and finally I caught a crab.

  “And that woke me up with a start. I was in a cold sweat of terror. But not terrified enough not to be puzzled by my terror. For though I sometimes have nightmarish dreams they don’t leave me really scared. And then I knew somebody had been in the room. I don’t know how I knew, but I suppose that my sleeping consciousness somehow told me. And a moment later I received confirmation. I heard a distinct, heavy sound from this sitting-room. If I had been in an accessible part of the college I might have suspected an undergraduate joke, although such things are rare. But only one of my colleagues, or the porter, could normally be in Orchard Ground at that hour. And although a colleague might quite naturally and properly enter my sitting-room, he would hardly be likely to come secretly into my bedroom while I was asleep. And I concluded therefore that a burglar had broken into Little Fellows’.

  “I am not a particularly courageous man. It took me perhaps two minutes to compel myself out of bed and into the sitting-room. As I entered I was aware of a streak of light from the lobby beyond – and then the streak disappeared. Somebody had just closed the door. Oddly enough, I think (for I am, as I say, a coward), I went straight after him. And I got out just in time to see someone disappear into the darkness–”

  “Which way?”

  The sudden question came from Appleby like a pistol shot. But he could not feel with any certainty that it had caught Pownall out. The man hesitated, but only for a moment. “There is only one path,” he answered, “and he was lost to sight long before it branches. I shouted, and I know he heard me, for he instantly broke into a run.”

  Appleby’s question was soft this time. “Who was it, Mr Pownall?”

  And this time Pownall did really hesitate – the old trick of marked pause again. Once more he seemed to be calculating effects and chances before he finally replied, “I don’t know.”

  “You have no idea? It was just a back? What about the build, the clothes?”

  Pownall shook his head – and returned abruptly to his narrative.

  “I went back to my room, meaning to telephone to the porter at onc
e. But as I glanced round to see if anything had been rifled or upset I saw–”

  “You saw the blood, Mr Pownall – two inches of half-clotted blood. And you mopped it up with blotting paper and got out your bottle of ink… What else?” Appleby was really formidable now. The cold, measured disbelief in his voice might have unnerved a hardened criminal. But Pownall was entirely master of himself.

  “That is so,” he said. “I discovered the blood – and something else. Two charred pieces of paper in an ashtray caught my eye – an ashtray which I knew had been empty when I went to bed. And when I examined them I found that they were two pages torn from a diary – nearly all burnt, but not quite. There was a corner preserved with a fragment of the President’s writing.”

  Appleby, in whose pocket the dismembered diary of the dead man reposed at this moment, knew that here at least was something not sheer fiction. But he showed no sign of being impressed. “This might have come out of the brain of Mr Gott,” he said – and half started at the unintentional two-edged nature of the remark. “And you immediately concluded from these indications…what?”

  Pownall rose to his fence as Haveland had done the evening before. “I concluded,” he said, “that someone had murdered the President and was trying to blame me.”

  “It is in Chicago surely, and not here, that that sort of conclusion is lying ready to come into people’s heads? You seriously put it to me that you thought of that?”

  Pownall looked coldly at his guest. “I thought just that.”

  “These rather odd facts – a spot of blood, a couple of scraps of paper, a night-prowler of some sort – actually suggested murder and conspiracy?” Appleby’s tone was openly incredulous.

  Pownall did not hesitate this time. “It was the blood,” he said. “It threw me off my balance – made me, in a way, drunk, as I told you. My actions became abnormal. The attempt at concealment was abnormal. But my inference was perfectly sound and reasonable. From these facts – the clandestine visit to my rooms, the blood, the half-destroyed fragments of Umpleby’s writing – induction could take me to only one conclusion: Umpleby, incredible though it was, had been attacked or murdered – and the blame was in course of being put upon me. Probably the blood, the diary pages, were only first steps. Probably I had interrupted the plot. I ought to have been still asleep, allowing further stages of the plan – but now the plotter knew I was awake. Probably he had relied on the fact that I am a notoriously heavy sleeper to enable him to leave yet further traces in my bedroom. It is worth while remarking, by the way, that when we had an alarm of fire some years ago I slept so soundly through the hubbub as to become a college jest.

  “I guessed, then, that the plotter intended to leave the body near at hand and then give the alarm and somehow direct the search to my rooms. And these things would be found, like fatal traces I had overlooked before going callously to bed. If I had not awakened when I did, the first thing I should have been aware of would have been being hauled out of bed to face a murder charge.”

  Pownall spoke confidently and – beneath the resolute chill – even passionately. Almost, thought Appleby, like a man speaking the truth. And yet Pownall, in rising so resolutely to that fence, had made a mistake. And Appleby, with that effect of intuitive awareness that experience and training bring, knew that Pownall knew that he had made a mistake. (He thought, said Appleby to himself, that a knowledge of Umpleby’s murder was necessary to explain his getting into a panic and monkeying with the carpet. So he has invented this story of guessing at it. And in doing so he has landed himself in simply psychological impossibility. He ought simply to have put up the story that he was scared by what had happened and acted out of mere indefinite, massive sense of danger. He has made a mistake which no talk about inference and induction can cover – and he knows it.)

  Aloud, Appleby said: “And you gave no alarm?”

  The mention of Chicago had been one absolute point. This was another. And Pownall took a moment to square himself to it.

  “My hands were tied. Once I had – unnerved by the blood and with, I admit, the gravest folly – used that ink, I dared not risk another move. Hiding the bloodstain had been the result of some morbid streak of fear rising up in me: it rose again the next night when I continued to tamper with the carpet. And I felt at the time, I think, that I would rather be hanged than admit to it.”

  The man could make a good come-back – knew what and when to concede. They were all able…what a case it was…! And suddenly Appleby found himself shocked at the quality of pure intellectual pleasure that he himself could get from this wretched business – this wretched murder where murder had no reason to be. He remembered thoughts which had come to him pacing up and down Bishop’s in the darkness that morning. The darkness, the silence, pregnant somehow with the spirit of the place, had brought him momentarily a strange bitterness – bitterness that he had come to these courts he knew as an instrument of retributive justice. And that mood had been succeeded by anger. He remembered touching the cold carved stone of an archway and feeling a permanence: something here before our time began; here while our time, as Titlow was to paint it, moved fearfully and gigantically to its close; to be here in other times than ours. He remembered a significance that the light over Surrey archway, shining steadily amid the darkness and vapour, had taken on. And he remembered how he had sworn to drive out the intrusive alien thing… And now here he was with the problem coldly before him again – a frankly enjoyable intellectual game…

  And yet it was impossible altogether to suppress the element of emotion – of piety. Why was this scholar sitting here coldly telling fibs – in a matter of life and death? Had he taken a revolver and shot Umpleby in the head? After all, why should he do such an idiotic thing? A little wave of exasperation came over Appleby and he let himself go farther than he had yet done.

  “Well, Mr Pownall, did your observation extend to the hour at which these interesting events took place?”

  But Pownall was not to be rattled by a tone of contempt any more than he was to be shaken by disbelief. “I looked at my watch as I got out of bed. It was ten forty-two.”

  “Ten forty-two.” Irony emphasized the precision. “But was not ten forty-two, sir, eighteen minutes before we knew that the President was shot? Just how was the living Dr Umpleby, do you think, persuaded to part with – well, even two inches of blood? There seems to be some difficulty.”

  “I suppose it needn’t have been Umpleby’s blood. I suppose the plotter – whoever he was – was laying as many false clues beforehand as possible. Then he would simply have to kill Umpleby somewhere close at hand, run, and then cause the alarm to be given.”

  “But we know that the President was shot in his study, where the shot would almost certainly be heard and mark the time. And then the President’s body was found there, surrounded by Mr Haveland’s bones. Does that square?”

  “Yes, it does. Remember, the plotter knew that I had found out what was afoot. He had heard me call after him. And so he might abandon the plan of putting the crime on me and attempt to put it on Haveland instead.”

  There was a long pause. Resolutely Appleby said nothing. And eventually Pownall added something more. “Or the murderer might abandon his plan of fathering the murder on someone else. If he were an unbalanced person, for instance, and his elaborate plan miscarried, then–”

  “He might turn round on himself and leave his own signature, as it were, openly on the deed? I see.”

  Appleby got up. And then a thought seemed to strike him. “By the way, if your first suggestion holds – if the murderer, knowing he had failed to frame you, decided to frame Mr Haveland, he must have counted on your unlikely folly in concealing what you ought immediately to have revealed.”

  “I do not suppose my first suggestion to hold,” said Pownall.

  II

  It was a thoughtful and perplexed Appleby who walked slowly back through Orchard Ground to the President’s Lodging. He felt a disposition to react
against these odd little interviews by which the case seemed to be conducting itself. He had an uneasy feeling that his own favourite technique, which was that of sitting back and watching and listening, was somehow inadequate – dangerous, indeed – in this case: something more aggressive was required. In discussion, all these people would be endlessly plausible – and they would hardly ever make a mistake.

  What had he really learnt? Or what, rather, had he really learnt that he was not meant to learn? His one success, so far, had been in this last encounter with Pownall: he had at least forced Pownall from one position to another – convicted him of very injudicious conduct. But that success had been the result of orthodox police methods: a little successful prying through a window, a little successful bullying. Had he made a mistake in trying to follow these people over their own discursive ground? And these palavers took time; the morning had slipped away without appreciable gain. He would not have another of these face-to-face interviews until he had done a little preliminary backstairs work. And the need for one piece of concrete investigation was pressing upon him vividly – had been pressing upon him when he told Dodd that he was presently going to take a walk. He had to solve a puzzle that seemed at once irrelevant to the case and at the same time too near the case to be really irrelevant… And meantime he turned into the President’s Lodging to persuade Dodd, if Dodd himself was impatient to be gone, to provide another officer sufficiently senior to go on with the business of taking formal statements. He was not yet prepared to give time to that himself.

  He was still somewhat gloomy as he crossed the President’s hall. Quick results were not to be looked for, to be sure, in a case so complicated as the present. Nevertheless, certain things should now have emerged or be beginning to emerge that had not in fact done so. Certain threads of motive there should be by now – and, actually, what was there? Umpleby had been disliked by Haveland and others, and there was a dubious story of his having made free with other people’s intellectual property. Very insufficient, so far. What else might have emerged? The weapon…?