Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  “Did you say lucubrations?” asked David, bethinking himself of a belated pedantry. “Wrong word. Means something done in the night.”

  “Like Umpleby,” said Horace. “He was done-in-nin the night all right. And I’m not convinced he wasn’t really one of Gott’s lucubrations.”

  But David, ignoring this witticism, had produced a map. “Gentlemen,” he said, “let us confer.” They all stared rather vaguely at the map.

  “It is a matter,” said Horace, “of penetrating to the mind of the quarry. Did you ever read The Thirty-Nine Steps, Mike? An altogether healthier type of fiction than the morbid perpetrations of Uncle Gott. Well, there was a man there who wanted to pass as a Scottish road-mender. And he did it by thinking himself into the part. He gave his whole mind to being a road-mender. And as a result he survived the keenest scrutiny of the emissaries of the Black Stone – and all that. Now, all we have to do is to identify ourselves with the criminal; we can then put our finger down quite confidently on David’s map and say: There he is!”

  “It depends on the size of the map,” said Mike. “I think he’s in London.”

  “Too far.”

  “No, not really. And a capital place to hide – to lie concealed, as they say. At his club, quite likely. Terribly close London clubs are about their members if you go to inquire. Very nice point Gott makes of that in Poison at the Zoo–”

  David and Horace gave a concerted groan.

  “Anyway,” said David, “do dons have clubs? I don’t believe they do – except the very old ones who belong to a special place down by the Duke of York’s Steps… But town’s no good: we bank on a radius of about twenty miles. Let’s see what that takes in.”

  He busied himself with a pencil and presently announced: “Just misses St Neots, takes in Biggleswade, goes through Hatfield, misses Amersham, goes through Princes Risborough, misses Kingswood by a few miles and Bicester by a good deal more, just misses Towcester, takes in Olney and a bit beyond–”

  “Got it!” cried Mike suddenly, “and we’re all wrong!”

  “Olney and a bit beyond,” David reiterated severely, “misses Rushden – and so round to just short of St Neots again. And now what is it, Mike?”

  “It is,” replied Mike in bubbling excitement, “that we’re miles out. Olney, you see, made me think of Kelmscott at once–”

  “And why should Olney make you think of Kelmscott, you moron?”

  “Because of the English poets, you ignoramus. And now listen. When I was, as the uninstructed say, a fresher, I made a pilgrimage one vacation to this Kelmscott – a literary pilgrimage. And making my way from Kelmscott to Burford I came to a hamlet of which the name escapes me. And outside the hamlet was a manor house or some such – much retired in its own grounds. And just as I was passing, out he came.”

  “Out who came?”

  “Our quarry – as Horace so picturesquely puts it. And even in those days, when I come to think of it, he nursed a criminal conscience. Because he started perceptibly on seeing me, as they say, and appeared, again as they say, to wish to avoid observation. In fact, he seeped out and was gone before I could really distinguish his features. But I recognized him absolutely and instantly by a trick he has – walking with his fists to his shoulders like physical jerks.”

  “Is this thing true?” demanded Horace.

  “Split true. Old David’s prosing away brought it back to me. Of course it’s miles away. But if my frail old car can get us there – let’s go quick.”

  David nodded his agreement. Horace, who had been lying in his favourite position on the Three Doves carpet, puffing smoke at a sleeping cat, scrambled up, and all three bundled out into the yard. Mike’s frail old car – a thoroughly robust and recent De Dion which had cost a doting aunt a small fortune – was purring in a moment. And presently they were careering exhilaratingly through the tingling winter air in the direction of Farringdon. That there was any sense whatever in their operations none of them believed: they were simply diverting themselves after the complicatedly ironic fashion of their order – the order of more mental undergraduates. To lunch at the Three Doves, to spin through the country drinking the wind of their own speed like Shelley’s spirits, to sing and chant and chatter, and in the intervals play this elaborate make-believe; these were excellent things. And so they ran through Wantage.

  Suddenly Mike threw out his clutch and jammed on his brakes with a reckless abruptness that made Horace shut his eyes in the expectation of catastrophe. But the De Dion merely glided smoothly and instantly to a standstill. Over the way was an unbeautiful brick building announcing itself as a Steam Laundry.

  “Here,” Mike explained, “we make a purchase.” And he climbed out. “You may come too, if you like,” he added politely

  And so the three crossed the road and entered a damp and forbidding office, presided over by a severe – and already surprised and misdoubting – lady of uncertain years. Mike had already removed his hat. Now he bowed – the same bow he was accustomed to give nightly in his character as bible-clerk to the St Anthony’s high-table.

  “I wonder, madam, if your establishment uses – I believe they are called skips?”

  “Skips? Yes, of course.”

  “Of course you use them?”

  “Of course they are called skips. And of course we use them.”

  “Will you sell one?”

  “Sell one, sir! This is a laundry, not a basket-maker’s. We haven’t any spare skips.”

  “My dear madam, are you sure? It is really quite urgent. May I explain? My grand-aunt – you may know her: Mrs Umpleby of St Anthony’s Lodge – is sailing for India tomorrow, and she has always been accustomed to pack blankets and eiderdowns and things of that sort in a skip. And she has just discovered that her own skip has been damaged by mice, so she asked me–”

  “Mice!” interjected the misdoubting lady incredulously.

  “Asked me to see what I could do. I understand the usual price is about five pounds–”

  Mike produced his pocket-book, and the misdoubting lady, now no longer misdoubting, produced the skip. It was an enormous wickerwork thing, secured by a formidable iron bar, two staples and a padlock. Mike gravely superintended the hoisting of it into the back of the car, paid the surprised lady, assured her of his grand-aunt’s gratitude, distributed substantial tips and waved his friends aboard. The De Dion purred on.

  Mike, Horace thought, was probably Aristotle’s Magnificent Man. His fun was on a lordly scale… But the expenditure on the skip had rather shocked him. “What’s it for?” he asked.

  “One cage for Bajazeth,” Mike replied – and continued cryptically: “one city of Rome, one cloth of the sun and moon, one dragon for Faustus…” The day before he had been deep in the study of Elizabethan stage properties. And presently he was declaiming:

  And there, in mire and puddle, have I stood

  This ten days’ space; and, lest that I should sleep,

  One plays continually upon a drum;

  They give me bread and water, being a king…

  Tell Isabel the queen, I look’d not thus,

  When for her sake I ran at tilt in France…

  And Horace, behind, was thumping the skip and answering:

  I am Ulysses Laertiades,

  The fear of all the world for policies,

  For which my facts as high as heaven resound.

  I dwell in Ithaca, earth’s most renown’d

  All over-shadow’d with the shake-leaf hill,

  Tree-famed Neritus…

  And then David started on Pindar, and remembering a lot grew more and more excited in the effort to remember more. And the De Dion sang through the air like a thing of victory, and the other two listened much as when the world was young. And so they came to Lechlade and stopped in the square to consider. Presently they were nosing up narrow lanes and for a long time were completely and oddly silent.

  “There has come upon us,” said David, “a nasty sense of the possible
reality of our quiet fun.”

  And it was true. After all, it was true that Mike had once seen him near here…

  “This,” announced Mike presently, “is my hamlet – and there is the house.”

  The hamlet was small and unremarkable. The house was large, gloomy and repellent – a raw red brick affair not unreminiscent of the steam-laundry, and an offence in this country of mellow stone. But it was decently hidden away behind a large well-timbered garden and high brick walls. There was a lodge with high iron gates and a postman’s bicycle leaning against an open wing.

  “I think,” said David, “we will put a question or two in the village.” Mike backed the car out of sight of the lodge and they all got out. It seemed an ill-populated hamlet. No one was visible except two very aged men, sitting against the side of a house and sunning themselves in the bleak and diminishing November sun. These worthies David approached.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “We are rather lost: can you tell us the name of this village?”

  One of the very aged men nodded vigorously.

  “Oi, oi,” he muttered, “powerful great pigs. True it is, there was never such come I was a lad. True it is.”

  Conjecturing that this was part of an interrupted conversation rather than directed to his own question, David tried again – loudly.

  “What place is this, please?”

  Both aged men looked at him kindly and comprehendingly. The second appeared to be on the verge of revelation. But when he spoke it was himself to take up some anterior theme.

  “And do ’ee tell oi so!” said the second aged man. “And do ’ee tell oi so!”

  Horace was giggling. Mike was making unintelligible signs. And then the first old man suddenly made contact with the new factor in his environment.

  “This be Lunnontawn,” he said.

  “London town!” repeated David and Mike blankly together.

  “Noa! Not Lunnontawn; Lunnontawn.”

  “And what,” asked Mike, taking up the running and slightly changing the subject, “and what is that house there?” And he pointed to the aggressively red, steam-laundry-like building amid the trees.

  “That be White House,” said the second old man, darkly and unexpectedly – and spat.

  “White House: who lives there?”

  The two aged men looked at each other apprehensively. And then, mysteriously moved by a common impulse, they both struggled to their feet. They were old, old men – gone at the knees and with hands like claws. And they tottered away. The first disappeared at once into the house against which they had been sitting. The second made for a decrepit cottage next door. But on the threshold he paused and shuffled himself painfully round.

  “A terrible haunt of wickedness that do be,” he said. He spat, and disappeared.

  Mike was shaking his head sadly at Horace. “I heard the old, old men say, All that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters… Chaps, let us drift away.” And the three moved back, rather uncertainly, towards the big house.

  “We will go straight in,” said Horace, “and inquire.”

  “Horace,” said Mike, “scents une maison mal famée.”

  “Come on,” said David, “he was lurking here once and may be lurking here again.” The gate was still open and the postman’s bicycle still leaning against it. No one noticed them as they went in, but they caught a glimpse, over a low hedge, of the postman gossiping with someone at the back door of the lodge. “Straight on,” said David. The drive wound among shrubberies. Presently they rounded a bend and saw the White House – saw, that is to say, in addition to the large and garish red structure which was alone visible from the road a long, low and rather dubiously white residence on to which it had been built. It was a depressing place; house and grounds alike seemed decently but lovelessly and unenthusiastically kept. From somewhere behind the shrubbery came a murmur of voices. The three stopped to listen.

  And then an odd thing happened. Round the final curve of the drive in front of them there swung the figure of a man, coming from the house. But no sooner had he seen the three intruders bearing down on him than he plunged into the bushes – from the crashing noise that resulted, apparently the thick of the bushes and disappeared.

  “Was it him?” cried David. It had all been tremendously sudden.

  “Of course it was him,” shouted Mike, and started blindly forward. He didn’t really know, but he did want excitement. All three went galloping up the drive, Horace making blood-curdling noises by way of ironic reference to the sport of fox-hunting. The fugitive, by plunging through a few yards of laurel, had gained a narrow winding path and disappeared. But he could be heard still retreating rapidly, in a direction roughly parallel to the drive, and towards the house. The pursuers followed in single file.

  But presently the little path branched – and just ahead both branches could be seen branching again. And the hedges were high and thick. Horace, who was ahead, stopped, and pulled up the others. “Bless me,” he exclaimed, “if it isn’t a regular maze!”

  It was. And the fugitive could now be heard more faintly, as if he had put several thicknesses of hedge between himself and his pursuers.

  “Split up!” cried Mike, jumping with excitement.

  “No,” said David, “keep together. We’ll know then that any noise is him.”

  David had the master mind: his would be the best First in Schools at the end of the year. Obediently bundled together, they explored ahead, stopping constantly in an endeavour to locate such noise as the fugitive made. Sometimes it was ahead and sometimes to the side; now it was fainter and now louder. But presently it became clear to the pursuers, as they swung round the abrupt angles of the maze, that they were astray. It could hardly be otherwise if the man ahead had his bearings. And at length the sounds died away just as the trio, turning a final corner, found themselves in a little clearing. It was the centre of the maze.

  “What a mess!” gasped Horace. “He’s clean away – which will take us some time.”

  But David pointed and ran forward. In the centre of the little clearing was a raised wooden platform reached by a ladder – a sort of gazebo from which wanderers in the maze might, if necessary, be directed. David was up in a flash.

  “I can just see him,” he called down presently. “He’s nearly out too. Listen, Mike. Have you got any paper? We’re for a paper chase now. Out you both go and I’ll direct you. And leave a trail so that I can follow.”

  It was the most efficient plan, but a tedious business nevertheless. The afternoon was already fading into twilight and David from his perch was only just able to trace out the path that led from the maze. It took him some twenty minutes to get his companions out and five minutes to follow by the aid of the paper trail himself. Finally they found themselves reunited on the main drive, a little farther from the house than where they had broken off.

  “Poor show,” said Horace.

  “Distinctly where we step off,” said Mike.

  “Down to the lodge,” said David: “he’s likely to have made a complete break away. Come on.”

  And down they went. And just as they came within sight of the gates they heard a loud and angry voice exercising itself in picturesque imprecation in front of them. It was the postman. And he was lamenting the disappearance of his bicycle. “Come on!” cried David – and all three dashed into the road, with no more than a fleeting glimpse of the gesticulating official, a scared and surprised woman by the lodge, a gardener or groom hurrying up from a side path. On the open road no bicyclist was in sight – and indeed the fugitive might have pedalled off a good twenty minutes ago. The postman seemed just to have become aware of his loss: he had followed up his gossip, perhaps, by going within for a little refreshment.

  “Which way – that’s the question! Which way?” Mike, as he made for his car with his companions at his heels, threw the question desperately to the wind. But it was answered in an unexpected fashion – by nothing less, in fact, than the appearance of the t
wo very aged men, gesticulating excitedly. They were old, old men; their hands were like claws and their knees were gone. But they shuffled rapidly up the road, waving their sticks that were as crooked as themselves and screaming together in a weird, unpremeditated unison.

  “There ’ee do be gone, there ’ee do be gone, zurs! There ’ee do be gone in his wickedness away!” And they pointed ahead down the narrow country lane.

  In a moment the De Dion was purring. Another moment and it was roaring up the lane. “I rather think,” Mike shouted, “that this runs without a break to the Lechlade-Burford road. That’s in about two miles. We ought to get him.” He was right in his bearings. The lane ran winding between low hedges for something under a couple of miles, with no more break than here and there a gate giving upon bare fields. It seemed likely enough that the fugitive had ridden straight on. David was studying his map and by the time the car had slowed down to swing into the main road he had located their position.

  “Left for Lechlade,” he said, “with a crossroad about a mile along from Bampton to Eastleach. Right for Burford, and no crossroad until the Witney-Northleach road just short of the village. I vote for Burford.”

  “Wait a minute,” exclaimed Horace. “Here’s a bobby who can probably tell us for certain.” A very fat policeman was cycling slowly towards them from the Burford direction. David called out to him.

  “I say, constable, have you met anyone on a bicycle along this road?”

  The fat policeman got off his machine with slow dignity. “Yes,” he said, “I ’as.” And his attention being directed to the matter, a new aspect of it seemed to strike him. “Come to think on it,” he added, “’twas Will Parrott’s bicycle.” He paused, broodingly.

  “Will Parrott the postman?” David asked.

  The policeman nodded. “But ’twern’t Will on un.” He brooded again over this reflection, and as he did so vague possibilities, undefined implications seemed to be hovering on the borders of his consciousness. “Come to think on it,” he added slowly, “fellow on un were going fast and wild. Happen–”