Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  Mrs Moule devoted a moment to meditation. ‘It’s curious how one can look back on a scene and remember seeing something one doesn’t remember noticing seeing at the time… Oh, dear’ – Mrs Moule shook her form-mistressly head – ‘how very badly expressed!’

  ‘On the contrary, your remark is perfectly lucid.’

  Mrs Moule smiled gratefully. ‘That is said to be the grand test of style, isn’t it… It was just before we came in to luncheon and I was thinking about the strange business of Sir Archibald having been drugged. Dr Chown seemed quite positive about it, and I’m sure so eminent a person couldn’t be mistaken. And yet it is so strange. One sees why he was drugged – or one thinks one does. He was the odd man out, prowling the house, and he had to be eliminated so that the Renoir could safely be stolen. Not’ – Mrs Moule faintly flushed – ‘that it was stolen, quite.’

  ‘Could safely be monkeyed with.’

  ‘That’ – Mrs Moule returned compliments – ‘is a very good way of putting it… So we see, or think we see, why Sir Archibald was drugged. But how was he drugged?’

  ‘Plenty of drinks going round all the time.’

  ‘Yes, but there would be so very little time in which to drug him. It was the odd person out who had to be drugged; not just Sir Archibald anyway. Everybody was off to hide a minute after Sir Archibald was chosen… Do you know anything about drugs?’

  The question was accompanied by a glance so suddenly severe that Winter was startled. ‘Singularly little,’ he replied.

  ‘Mr Eliot and I have had occasion to study them together. And it occurred to me that if Sir Archibald were really drugged in order that the picture might be stolen there and then it would almost be necessary to jab a needle into him; not, you know, just drop something into his glass. A drug in his glass – unless it was really dangerous – would begin to act about the time that Chown noticed something wrong.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So when you come to look at it closely there are difficulties all round. It was only when I came to consider them like this that I remembered that I had seen what really happened. Sir Archibald drugged himself.’

  Winter stared. ‘Dear Lady, you take this very calmly. Do you realize that you have Scotland Yard on the run?’

  Unexpectedly Mrs Moule chuckled. ‘Mr Eliot and I have been having Scotland Yard on the run for years – on paper at least. So I suppose it’s no novelty… Sir Rupert and I, as it happened, were the last out of the room. As we were going out Sir Archie walked over to the drinks and said, “Better have another spot before squaring up to this” – meaning before he started in as hunter. By the time he had poured himself something I had the closing door between myself and him. And Sir Rupert was already outside; he had gone first because he was going to hunt for a wrap of mine. Only Sir Rupert happened to say, “Are you sure you haven’t left it there?” and so I looked back and caught a glimpse of Sir Archibald in a mirror. He was looking about him’ – Mrs Moule considered, summoned her professional vocabulary to her aid – ‘furtively. And then he dropped something into his glass. As I say, Sir Rupert is to blame that such a curious circumstance slipped my mind. I’m afraid it looks as if Sir Archie was responsible for all these annoying incidents.’

  ‘Come, come – what about that aura?’

  ‘I think’ – Mrs Moule was not at all at a loss – ‘it must be a case of possession. After all, why should Sir Archie behave in such an uncomfortable way – even if they do make fun of him as that engineer? In a way I’m rather relieved. Sir Archie may be a little venomous, but I don’t think he’s likely to do anything really violent or fatal.’

  Winter was unable not to pounce on this. ‘But if it’s possession–’

  ‘It has been found’, said Mrs Moule competently, ‘that in cases of possession there is commonly temperamental rapport between the spirits and their chosen instrument.’

  This proposition Winter felt unable to dispute. He glanced down the table. The chosen instrument, rotund and placid, was murmuring into the ear of his crony André.

  Appleby, finishing his coffee in the company of Belinda Eliot, sensed in himself obscure to topographical discomfort. He had set out the evening before for Rust Hall, and Rust Hall now spread its physical framework around him. But in his mind it was growing oddly insubstantial; if he closed his eyes he could almost see it – a sort of dissolving view – fading into the less mellow textures of Shoon Abbey. Appleby, who controlled considerable imagination in the interest of his calling, had a weakness for the big guns, and the big guns – in every sense – were at the Abbey; they hinted that the alarms at the Hall were very much an agitation of small fry. Here a popular writer was being persecuted by disgruntled rivals or resentful relations; there, armoured within his ferro-concrete extravagance or perambulating his expensively symbolical ruins, the cultivated Mr Shoon was contriving his modest but profitable international frictions. Appleby reminded himself that the big guns were in the bush whereas the small fry were in hand – or on his hands: he had undertaken to sort them out. More teasingly, he reminded himself that the two were obscurely involved with one another…

  ‘Belinda,’ he said, ‘was you father ever in the Near East?’

  Belinda opened her eyes wide beneath her bumpy forehead. ‘He was stationed there for a bit right at the end of his army career – when he was in the military intelligence. But he fell ill and was invalided home. He’s never said much about it; I have an idea that the illness was severe and rather affected his memory. It was quite before my time, so I’m pretty vague on it anyway. I’m almost sure he’s never been there at any other period.’

  ‘What about Rupert and Archie? Have they ever been in the Near East – and could either of them have been there at the same time as your father?’

  ‘I don’t know. There is a veil – probably blessed – over much of their lives. But wait a minute. Yes, I do know something about Rupert.’ Belinda calculated rapidly. ‘As I say, I’m not an eye-witness. But I do know that Rupert can’t have been in the Near East at the same time as daddy. You see, he was in gaol.’

  ‘That does seem conclusive. And I’m sorry to stir up the skeletons. Just one further question: does your father know a Horace Benton – now a colleague of Winter’s?’

  ‘Timmy’s moral tutor? He’s called on him at Oxford as a matter of politeness. I’m almost sure they’d never met before. You’re being frightfully mysterious.’

  ‘It’s things that are mysterious; not me. When you got your job with Shoon: was that because your father and he had been associated in any way?’

  ‘A favour to a pal? Distinctly not.’ Belinda was momentarily indignant. ‘They’d met in a dim county way; nothing more. Daddy’s never been to the Abbey. He says it would remind him of Wembley or a sort of Luna Park. Tomorrow, though, you’ll watch him being impressed by the Collection.’ She smiled at herself cheerfully… ‘As questions are going: do you keep Patricia at the Abbey as a spy?’

  ‘No,’ said Appleby very seriously. ‘I do not.’

  They were silent for a moment as a fragment of the party drifted past. ‘But you really are being mysterious, John. I don’t at all see how Jasper and the Spider business connect up.’ Belinda conveyed that this defect of vision was tiresome indeed.

  ‘No more do I. Your Jasper, like the unregenerate Spider, sits at the centre of a web. But that’s hardly helpful. By the way, have you found Blake or Lawrence yet?’

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘Found a real genius to mother amid all your father’s cheap friends.’

  ‘Lord, lord, lord.’ Belinda was dismayed rather than indignant. ‘Did I talk like that? I must have been het up.’

  ‘If you want a tip, I should go for Kermode; he has an original mind. But the question is, are we all to be het up again? The clocks have sounded a sort of warning gong, but people are being rather slow to move. Notice how much it depends on your father. Because he was jumpy yesterday everybody was ready to be stampeded at once. T
he clarinet and what-not had it all their own way. There was an obscure but general feeling that it was coming to us. Now, because he has contrived some sort of masterly retreat on the pigs, the tone of the party is more robust. A retiring man, your father; but he must have what Mrs Moule calls an aura – a powerful one. Can we all be rattled again before tonight? The joker’s resources must be getting a bit low, and he is taking cumulative risks. Have you heard about the middle blacks? Like the writing on the architrave, that was a big risk for the sake of something merely stylish. If he goes on like that he’ll simply be seen.’ Appleby frowned across the living-room at the Renoir, now restored to the wall. ‘So what next?’

  ‘There’s activity out on the drive, if that’s any good.’ Belinda was looking out of the window and through sheeting rain. Appleby turned round and followed her glance. The panes were fluid as a windscreen in a cloudburst; nothing could be distinguished but a moving cream blur. Belinda pushed open the window and their faces were splashed with raindrops. They could see Mr Eliot’s largest car drawn to a halt and the chauffeur, dogged for ritual, climb out and open a door. A small figure, ulstered and in a tweed cap so large that it looked half-brother to a fantastic umbrella, ran down the steps and jumped in. ‘André,’ said Belinda. ‘I wonder if he can have been called back to town.’

  ‘If he’s departing it’s not unsped.’

  They could see, sheltering on the edge of the terrace and looking after the departing car with the grimmest satisfaction, the figure of Sir Rupert Eliot. ‘A minor purge,’ interpreted Belinda. ‘The squirearchy – if on an inadequate scale – unscums itself. Eight bounders instead of nine.’ She snapped the window to. ‘As you were saying, what next?’

  Appleby turned back into the room and reassuringly smiled. ‘No more pinpricks,’ he said.

  Throughout the afternoon the rain continued to fall – continued to fall as the moment of anniversary approached. Twenty-one years before – and it might be on just such a wet afternoon as this – the printers of Sunday newspapers had been locking up in their formes brief but appreciative notices of the first activities of the Spider. And now the retainers of the Spider were preparing to celebrate; were preparing to celebrate – it might be presumed – the staying power of Mr Richard Eliot. They were going to celebrate as prosperous people, with leisure and floor space and plenty of oddments put away in unwanted rooms, often celebrate domestic occasions in rainy weather. They were going to have theatricals. The word is old-fashioned and was not actually used. But it covered all the fuss of preparation for the evening which was now going forward. They were going to have theatricals in what was almost a real theatre.

  Timmy – as if Winter’s statement that he had the instinct of showmanship rankled – was taking Patricia over this structure in irony and gloom. The irony was all in Timmy; Patricia was equably interested. The gloom was diffused through the large tank-like apartment in which this amenity of Rust lurked. The theatre had been the innovation of Sir Gervase Eliot, and because of Sir Gervase’s straitened circumstances it had an obstinately pinchbeck appearance which a certain amount of random expenditure by Mr Eliot had pointed rather than obscured. Sir Gervase had been mildly stage-struck; his servants had objected to living in a dampish vault hitherto appropriated to them: Sir Gervase had the happy inspiration of transferring them to a dilapidated gunroom and making the vault into a little theatre. He had knocked out the floor – it had come away easily enough – and thus added to the Cimmerian vault a positively Tartarian cellar. In the resulting cube the theatre had been rigged.

  ‘Melancholy, indeed,’ said Timmy.

  ‘But an empty theatre is always melancholy.’

  ‘Not so melancholy as this.’

  ‘They explored for some moments in silence. ‘Well,’ said Patricia, ‘if I owned a theatre I would try to look on the bright side of it.’ To soften this sarcasm she added, ‘By the way, what is the bright side?’

  Timmy glanced at her suspiciously. ‘Technically? I suppose its height. One doesn’t often get that in a stage just knocked up in a house. But this is two storeys.’ They were on the stage and peered up through a formidable muddle of joists and pulleys to a shadowy ceiling. Almost touching the roof were a few windows of sea-green glass; there was no other daylight. ‘It’s like being deep in an ice-cleft,’ continued Timmy – thus unwittingly reviving in Patricia’s mind the Eliots in their disagreeable character as Barbary apes. ‘But there is this big height above the stage; one can haul whole flats up and out of sight. Not that I suppose they will do anything elaborate tonight’ – from what was to be done it was plain that the young squire was elaborately disengaged – ‘or anything more than messing about with charades and a little play they’ve been giggling over ever since they came. Whether it’s about the luv’ – he carefully repressed the savagery which it was nevertheless plain he would have liked to hurl into the word – ‘or something else in the books it’s pretty sure to be filthy fun.’

  ‘I often think’, said Patricia, ‘that I don’t a bit know how absurd I am. Do you ever feel like that?’

  ‘Patricia – ’ The syllables sounded neither outraged nor wounded. They echoed for a moment in the tank with a resonance which was unmistakable; just so, in following the history of Eleanor, does the inner ear hear Henry speak.

  ‘I mean’, said Patricia, sudden panic driving her into tumbling speech, ‘that a moment ago I was idiotically scared. Just standing on the stage staring up at that mass of stuff. Quite meaningless scare – and it was whole seconds before I realized I was simply being a fool. Your theatre, if you like, is melancholy. It gives me the girlish creeps.’

  ‘Oh, I say – I’m frightfully sorry. Silly of me to be so glum.’ Timmy was puzzled and anxious. ‘Let’s cut out of it.’ He took a step backwards and completed his own confusion by tripping and falling off the stage.

  They sat down on the edge of it, Patricia in charge and making an obscure joke about chamois. ‘And about the fun tonight,’ she presently said, ‘I gather you’ve got it wrong. There’s going to be nothing about the books at all. That was just your André’s little jape as with the Cavey.’

  Timmy stared at her. ‘Nothing about the books? But there’s always something about the books. It’s a recognized insitution.’

  ‘Well, it’s being dropped. With these discomforts your father has been suffering it’s thought more civil to drop it out.’

  Anger long simmering in Timmy Eliot rose and declared itself – declared itself in language rather impressively free from facile curses. ‘I hate this party. I do hate it. It’s like their cheek. Letting daddy down nicely. Buckets of consideration. Who are they to decide there are discomforts? A harmless frolic at the bedside I suppose! Nothing upsetting… Lord, lord–’

  ‘Lord,’ said Patricia. It was absurd and utterly unreasonable. But she found that she liked Timmy better than she had ever done; it was as if his mind had tumbled out and proved to be just like the back of his neck where it emerged above his elegantly untidy collar. She stood up, suddenly dangerous, and glanced round the theatre. ‘When I show you the Abbey’, she said, ‘we shall have much more fun.’

  As the afternoon wore on the theatre became increasingly the centre of activity at Rust. Dr Chown’s observer, had he been modish enough to play at anthropologizing an unknown culture, would have discerned something of the muddled concentration that goes before totemic ceremony or corroboree. Social consciousness, struggling against the over-developed individual consciousness which the party represented, achieved intermittent and ramshackle organization. People whose energies had hitherto been expended on impressing themselves by soliloquy and disquisition now harassed each other with orders and suggestions. Movement, so far a matter of gesture and of forming and reforming in knots and eddies, became more purposive; in straight lines, or threading themselves through contrary streams like ants, both sexes went to and fro with burdens and messages. Diffused through the house was the pleasant consciousness that by each his bit
was being done. This made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to hold aloof. Winter found himself – on the strength of some acquaintance with the Attic stage – directing in the construction of masks those two young women from Chelsea who had once proposed to paint the Spider on soup tureens and egg-cups. Sir Rupert Eliot was to be seen – amazingly – going about with a contrivance like a small porter’s barrow. Sir Archie – whose placidity, unnerving courtesy and power of leisured quotation seemed to grow with the excitement – had bent his professional skill to what looked like preparations for a trapeze act or the descent of a god: Winter found himself hoping that his knowledge of that prosaic branch of engineering known as Strength of Materials would bear him out on this occasion. About tea-time the sense of preparation was intensified by the return of André with four enormous brown paper parcels. And at this point it became plain that the party was less a single organism preparing for ritual than a number of factions preparing for tournament – possibly for almost gladiatorial encounter.

  Among a few André’s parcels were a whispered triumph; to others mystification which might mean discomfort as well. Appleby, apparently absorbed in tinkering with a switchboard in the wings, was moved to reflect on the brute dimensions of the party; on this and on its hopeless fluidity. There were facets which he could not remember as present the night before; there was an answering absence of faces which had fixed themselves in his memory shortly after his arrival. Mr Eliot’s was distinctly not a mystery of the sealed-room type, nor was it even a mystery with a decently circumscribed dramatis personae. Appleby beguiled himself by deciding on the dimmest person present and picked on a nervous young man whose business it was to wander about taking notes for Mr Wedge. The young man appeared sub-acutely aware of the appallingness of his employment, and this gave him a vaguely criminal air: might he not be the lurking joker who was disturbing the peace of Rust?

  This was not a method of thinking which could be described as analysing things out. It occurred to Appleby – perhaps because he was bent on an interview with Dr Chown – that it was a species of dream analysis which was required. For again he had the sense that the Spider’s party was taking on the quality of dream; it had at once the unreality and the baffling urgency of a dream from which one is just about to wake up. It was partly this dreary and yet obscurely dramatic setting to which Mr Eliot’s guests had removed themselves. The high pale panels, chill and flaking; the sea-green light percolating faintly from above; the gloom and the grey tones strangely shot with harsh blacks: all these made a composition which was at once vibrant and repelling, like one of those pictures of the Spanish School in which dwarfish figures, sinisterly employed, are posed in Baroque agitation between imprisoning, blindly towering walls. Or the dream was monstrous – one in which human fish moved in the depths of an aquarium: Sir Archibald Eliot a globular creature formed by nature to anticipate the bathysphere; Miss Cavey, involving herself in a length of green silk, like some giant cod peering with clammy intelligence through the algae. Only the silence of the aquarium was lacking. Nearly everyone was talking, and talking in an unnaturally brisk and directive manner. It was, Timmy darkly said in passing, like a congeries of lunatics loosed on a quarter-deck.