Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  Appleby turned into the dining-room. At one end of the table the sad sergeant was gathering together a bundle of papers. At the other end sat Dodd, apparently in meditation. And on the polished mahogany between them lay a tiny gleaming revolver – a delicate thing with a slender barrel of chilly blue steel, a slender curved ivory butt. Barely a serious weapon – but at three or four yards just serious enough.

  Appleby was analysing his surprise at this appearance when Dodd awoke from his meditations and beamed. “The coppers,” he said, “have managed a little more of the rough work for you” – he waved his hand at the pistol – “and will now withdraw.” And he began gathering his own papers together.

  “Without divulging the hiding place of this interesting object?”

  “To be sure – I was forgetting. We found it among the Wenuses and other fabulous animals.” Inspector Dodd had his own power of literary allusion.

  “Quite so,” said Appleby; “among the Wenuses. What could be more obvious?” And even the sad sergeant joined discreetly in the mirth. Then Dodd explained.

  “Babbitt found it in the storeroom of Little Fellows’. You know how a passage runs back on the ground floor to the little staircase that goes down to the servants’ basement pantry and so on? Back there on the ground floor itself, just over the pantry, there is a little storeroom or big cupboard full of all manner of junk. Babbitt” – Dodd continued with a momentary return to the meditative manner – “was routing about there before you were facing that breakfast of yours… Well, there is all manner of stuff, apparently, including a good many of Titlow’s cast-off oddities. Quite a museum of a place: there’s statues and mummy-cases and bits of an old bathroom floor – or so Babbitt says, but your learning will doubtless recognize a Roman pavement or such-like. And the door is more or less blocked by an old bath chair that Empson used to use (it seems) when he was lamer than he is. And behind that are these heathen females, and the revolver had been chucked behind them again. Not a bad hiding place, really.”

  “It no doubt had its points,” Appleby agreed rather dryly. He was staring thoughtfully at the little weapon. And for some moments he continued to stare.

  “You seem to be waiting for it to jump up and out with the whole story,” said Dodd.

  “I have a feeling that it has already told me something just as it lies. But I can’t fix it. Abondance de richesse again. A few minutes ago I was feeling that perhaps I had learnt nothing after all. And now in a minute I learn far too much.”

  “The approved cryptic manner,” said Dodd with a chuckle.

  Appleby almost blushed – and certainly became brisk. “Got a railway timetable, Dodd? Good. Sergeant, have you had a jaunt to town recently? Go over, will you, and get my suitcase from Six-two.”

  “The Yard in action,” continued Dodd in the same humorous vein. “And now, in my own humble way, I’m off after my burglars. Kellett will be here presently to continue taking statements and so forth as you want them. I think you said you were going to take a nice walk. Don’t let them bludgeon you again in our rural solitudes. And if your learned friends aren’t claiming you, will you meet Mrs D over supper?”

  Appleby accepted cordially: it would be a failure in propriety, he felt, to appear at the St Anthony’s board again. The arrangement was just completed when the sergeant returned with the suitcase, and Appleby fell rapidly to work before a lingering and attentive Dodd.

  “You don’t think he’ll have left fingerprints, do you?” the latter asked incredulously.

  “You never can tell.” Appleby’s fingers were busy twisting up a stout length of wire.

  “I never heard of dusting for fingerprints with a sort of rabbit-trap before.” Dodd was amused and impressed and happy in the contemplation of these mysterious proceedings.

  “Good Lord, Dodd; how out of date your shockers must be! You don’t think I’m going to tackle what may be a hundred-to-one chance myself, do you? It’s a job for the best chemists and photographers we have. And they will want the bullet too, by the way, when it’s available.” The little wire cage was finished as he spoke; the revolver, delicately lifted, fitted miraculously into it; the whole, together with the notorious tenth key, fitted into a small steel box. The box was locked and handed to the sergeant; its key pocketed. “There you are, Sergeant, and there’s the timetable. The first train to town and then a taxi to the Yard. Mr Mansell in the east block. Time is an element in these diversions – so off with you. And you’d better stay the night: you might be useful to bring back reports. So have a good time.”

  The sad sergeant went off transformed. And Dodd went off too. He carried away with him for meditation a new image of Appleby – an image, momentarily caught, of a startled and startling eye.

  9

  Undergraduates were strolling through Bishop’s – more of them than usual, perhaps, and more slowly than the bite in the air might seem to warrant. Some lingered to converse with friends at windows – and the windows of the court were remarkably peopled too. But Appleby, pacing in the filtered winter sunshine where he had before paced in darkness, was oblivious of his character as a spectacle. The excitement detected by Dodd was on him still.

  To Dodd he had complained earlier of too much light – but it had been light, or a multiplicity of lights, playing brokenly and confusedly on a blank wall. Now the light had suddenly concentrated itself and revealed an opening, an uncertain avenue down which it might be possible to press. He was beginning that exploration now. And as he went cautiously forward the avenue narrowed and defined itself; the light grew…

  He knew now something that he ought to have known the moment he first entered the President’s study. The shot heard by Titlow and Slotwiner could not have been the shot that killed Umpleby. Barocho’s gown was next to absolute proof of this. Appleby had found it – carefully replaced as it had first been discovered – swathed round the dead man’s head. And for this the murderer had surely had no time. Between the report from the study and the entry of Titlow and Slotwiner scarcely a quarter of a minute could have elapsed. To scatter the bones, to scrawl however hastily on the wall and then to escape into the orchard would take every available second. The murderer would have had no time to wrap a gown round his victim’s head – and he would have had no motive to do so either.

  And all this, which should have come home to Appleby at once – which must, indeed, have been lurking deep in his mind from the first – it had needed a chance piece of information from Dodd to bring to consciousness. And it had come to consciousness in the form of a vivid picture. For as he had stood in Umpleby’s dining-room his inner vision had recreated for itself all the impenetrable darkness of a moonless November night – darkness such as he had himself experienced a dozen hours before. And through the darkness had lumbered a dubious shape, creaking and jolting – a shape indefinable until, stopping by the dim light from a pair of French windows, it revealed itself as a bath chair in which was huddled a human body, its head swathed in black…

  And as the picture came now once more with renewed conviction to Appleby’s mind he turned round and hurried into Orchard Ground. A minute later he had found the storeroom of which Dodd had spoken. The bath chair was there. Would it be possible to say that it had recently been used – that it had recently been outside? He fell to an absorbed examination. It was, even as it had presented itself to his imagination, an old and creaking wickerwork thing – a hair-raising vehicle for the purpose to which he suspected it of having been put. But it was in sound enough order. He studied the hubs. There was no trace of oil – slight evidence, perhaps, that if the chair had been used it had been used in an emergency, without previous plan. And nowhere was there any blood. That, of course, would give the motive for the swathed head: nowhere must there be blood except in the President’s study… And next, Appleby turned his attention to the tyres. They were old and worn, the rubber hard and perished, with a surface to which little would adhere. But here and there were minute cracks and fissures which o
ffered hope. In these, in one or two places, were traces of gravel – but all bone dry. Supposing this gravel to have been picked up a couple of nights before, could it be as dry as this? Appleby thought it could – and searched on for better evidence. And when he had almost finished minutely scanning the perimeter of the second wheel he found it. Between tyre and rim, caught up as the chair had scraped against the border of some lawn, was a single blade of grass. And that clear green, which clings even in mid-winter to an immemorial turf, was on it still. Recently – very recently – the bath chair had been used.

  Appleby turned to the back. The chair was propelled by a single horizontal handle of the kind that can be removed by unscrewing a knob at each end. Mechanically, following the routine search for fingerprints, Appleby unscrewed. And then he glanced round the little room. It was, as Dodd had reported, full of lumber – and obviously of Titlow’s lumber chiefly. There was a harquebus. There was a meek-looking shark in a glass case. And there were one or two plaster casts, including one of a recumbent Venus – the goddess, no doubt, behind whom the revolver had been found. Appleby, not venturing to sit down on the chair, sat down on this lady’s stomach instead – and thought hard.

  Umpleby alive in his study at half-past ten. Umpleby shot, elsewhere, between that hour and eleven… And suddenly there came back to Appleby another impression of the night before. The quiet of Bishop’s, protected by the great barrier of chapel, library and hall. The intermittent rumble and clatter of night traffic heard in Orchard Ground, increasing to uproar as one came nearer and nearer Schools Street. Every five minutes there must come, even in the night, a moment in which it would be safe to fire a revolver without fear of detection.

  Umpleby killed here in Orchard Ground and his body trundled back to his study. Umpleby killed at one time and place and given the appearance of being killed at another time and place. At another time and place and therefore by someone else. Alibi…no, that wasn’t it: there had been the second shot. Stay to fire a second shot and you can’t be establishing an alibi. Destroying someone else’s alibi…that was better… And then to Appleby’s picture of that grim conveyance emerging from the darkness there was added a new detail. At the feet of the dead man was a box – perhaps a sack – filled with bones.

  He heaved himself up from the chilly and unyielding abdomen of Aphrodite and went slowly out of the storeroom. In the lobby he paused. On his left, Haveland’s rooms: the bones had lived there. On his right, Pownall’s – and on the carpet, blood. He turned into Orchard Ground once more and fell to pacing among the trees – this time a spectacle to none. His mind was absorbed in testing a formula – a formula which ran:

  He couldn’t prove he didn’t do it there and in twenty minutes’ time – were some indication left that he was guilty. But he could prove he didn’t do it here and now.

  And he added a rider: An efficient man; he reloaded and let the revolver be found showing one shot. And then he added a query: Second bullet? And finally, and inconsequently, he appended a reflection: Nevertheless I must take that walk still – best do it now.

  II

  Appleby had not set foot outside St Anthony’s since the big yellow Bentley had deposited him at its gates the afternoon before. And he was beginning to feel the need of a change of air. He had planned a little itinerary for himself which was to subserve both business and pleasure; the carrying out of it had been interrupted by the discovery of the revolver; he was resolved not to delay it longer now. A sandwich and a pint of beer at the Berklay bar and he would be off. He was just slipping through the archway to Surrey when he became aware of the approach of Mr Deighton-Clerk. And on Mr Deighton-Clerk’s countenance there showed, in addition to its customary benevolent severity, the clear light of St Anthony’s hospitality. Appleby’s heart sank – justifiably, as it quickly appeared.

  “Ah, Mr Appleby, I have just been seeking you out. Pray come and take luncheon with me if you can spare the time; I should much like to have another talk with you. Something simple will be waiting in my rooms now.”

  Appleby scarcely had the time – and certainly not the inclination. But he lacked the courage to say so. Perhaps long-buried habit was at work: the habit of intelligent youth to jump to the invitation of its intelligent seniors. Or perhaps the detective instinct subterraneously counselled a change of plan. Be this as it may, Appleby murmured appropriate words and followed Mr Deighton-Clerk meekly enough. He took some pleasure in the mysterious handle of the bath chair which he carried delicately with him. It would puzzle the Dean.

  The luncheon was doubled fillet of sole, bécasse Carême and poires flambées – and there was a remarkable St Anthony’s hock. College cooks can produce such luncheons and undergraduates – and even dons – give them. But it was an odd gesture, Appleby thought, with which to entertain a bobby off his beat – or on it. About Deighton-Clerk there was some concealed uncertainty. His beautiful but rather precious room, his excellent but untimely woodcock, were the gestures of an uncertain man. And, once again, his conversation began uncertainly. With his colleagues, even in a difficult and untoward situation, the Dean was efficient, easy and correct. But add to the untoward situation a stranger whom he had difficulty in “placing” and he was frequently a shade out. During the meal his talk held frequent echoes of the formality and pomposity which had appeared in his first exchanges with Appleby. But now, as then, he managed finally to achieve forthrightness. He talked at length, but without more than an occasional suggestion of speech-making.

  “You may remember my saying yesterday evening how particularly unfortunate the President’s death was at this particular time – just before our celebrations. It was an odd and irrelevant thing to feel – or to imagine I felt – and I have been thinking it over. And it seems to me that I was really trying to invent worries that didn’t exist in order to cloak from myself the worries that did – and do – exist. I was determined to repulse the idea that our President could have been murdered by any member of his own Society; I was anxious – at the expense of logic as you no doubt felt – to see the murder traced out and away from St Anthony’s.

  “I am impressed now by the extent to which – quite involuntarily – I ignored or even distorted evidence. I was inclined to see those bones, for instance, as evidence of some irrational outbreak from without upon the order and sanity of our college. I contrived to ignore the reflection that the interests of a number of my colleagues made it possible that they should have bones in their possession. And – what is more remarkable – I succeeded in repressing my memory of poor Haveland’s aberration.”

  There was a pause while the Dean’s servant brought in coffee. Appleby remembered the periodical pauses in Pownall’s room that morning. But while Pownall’s pauses were involuntary, Deighton-Clerk seemed to contrive his for the purpose of underlining a point. If not an outside madman, then at least an inside madman. That, in effect, was what the Dean was saying – and his motive, as before, was thought for the minimum of scandal… But now he was continuing.

  “But what I want to say is this: that last night I failed in my duty. The urgency of my feeling that this or that event or situation in St Anthony’s could not bear any correspondence to murder made me, I am afraid, insufficiently communicative. I tried to impress upon you the fact that such disharmonies as have existed here are on another plane from murder. I would have been better leaving that – which I still of course believe – to your own common sense when you had heard a dispassionate account of what those disharmonies have been. That account I want to give you now.”

  Most long-winded of the sons of St Anthony – Appleby was murmuring to himself – get on with it! Aloud he said, “It is difficult to tell what may be helpful – directly or indirectly.”

  “Quite so,” responded Deighton-Clerk – much as he would reward a discreet observation by an undergraduate – “quite so. And I must tell you first – what indeed I hinted at before – that for some years now we have not been an altogether happy society. You he
ard the shocking remark that Haveland tells us he made to Umpleby, and you will have noticed other signs of friction. I mentioned to you a dispute I myself recently had with the President – of that I must tell you presently. But the first thing I must say is that for the disputes we have had amongst us I am unable to apportion blame. Irritations arising one cannot tell how have hardened into quarrels, enmities, accusations. There have been accusations – a thing shocking in itself – and accusations of mild criminality. But it is significant of the scale of the whole miserable business that a dispassionate mind would find it difficult, I believe, to say where the blame really lies.

  “I should tell you something of Umpleby himself. He was a very able man – and in that, perhaps, lies the essence of the situation. We have no other intellect in St Anthony’s which could touch his – unless, it may be, Titlow’s. But Titlow’s is an intellect of fits and starts compared with Umpleby’s. Umpleby had all but Titlow’s ability, and far more intellectual tenacity. The great strength of Umpleby lay in his being able to cover a number of fields – of related fields, I mean, and organize useful affiliations between workers in one and another. And here in St Anthony’s he had gathered together a team. Only the team fell out.

  “As I told you last night in the common-room, Haveland, Titlow, Pownall, Campbell and Ransome were all pretty closely associated – and the association was really thought out and organized by Umpleby. I was interested in the work myself, in an inactive way – or at least in those aspects of the work that touched the Mediterranean syncretisms. So I had an eye on the relations between Umpleby and the others from early on and was aware of the trouble pretty well from the beginning.”