Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  As if the game of the night before had been bundled incontinently out of doors, the firefly-flicker of torches criss-crossed about Rust Park. Patricia’s torch, circling, illuminated Wedge. For a man whose principal asset was at an unknown hazard Wedge looked remarkably composed. ‘Do you’, he asked – and the military nature of the situation seemed to have impressed itself upon him – ‘know this damned terrain?’

  ‘Not well. But we’re still on the drive, and the drive begins by circling the house.’

  ‘And the river? Wedge was a sedentary soul; he had visited Rust for years without straying beyond the gardens.

  ‘Quite a bit away – almost certainly not in the picture.’

  ‘Those confounded action-stories’, said Wedge, ‘put things in people’s heads. I think I’ll transfer to talking-fiction. Come on.’ He lumbered forward and Patricia followed. Wedge had greatness in his kind; this fantastic alarm had really started in his consciousness some Napoleonic change of plan. But Patricia’s own immediate concern was in having lost contact with Belinda. She paused and listened. Behind them the night was filled with distressed murmurs, sudden exclamations of despair. One group of searchers had been betrayed between the false avenue and the true; the luckless fishponds were about them and they were exchanging snow for abundant mud. On this confusion the moon once more emerged, like a farmer popping up his head to view some unseemly scene over a hedge. The reconnaissance had disintegrated badly; the cold and flooding light revealed a scattering of figures arabesqued about the park. It was a composition perfectly picturesque; a junketing, wintry and nocturnal, in the manner of Teniers or Both – macabre and crazy comedy on which the moon appropriately looked down.

  Dethleps summoned his dispersed levies; waving an arm in the air, he clapped a hand on the crown of his head: for Patricia, unversed in the art of war, the gesture held a crowning lunacy. Other senior stones decided that the time had come to shout; commandingly, encouragingly, urgently they bawled the name of Eliot to the stars. A bubble of hysterical laughter grew in Patricia; it was mercifully pricked by a firm clasp on her hand. Mrs Moule was beside her – had grabbed to steady herself while kicking off high-heeled shoes. ‘I don’t think’, said Mrs Moule obscurely, ‘they ought to mind.’ They ran together in stockinged feet. ‘There’, said Mrs Moule triumphantly, ‘is Belinda. I think we should all keep together on a night like this.’

  The drive had taken those who held to it – the party with Dethleps at its head – on a half-circle; the park had wheeled on them as if they were after a hare; the house, momentarily concealed, must still be close to them on their right. Patricia, coming up with Belinda and Timmy in the van, glanced behind her to get her bearings. Everyone else was staring ahead; she alone witnessed the defection of Kermode.

  Kermode was out of condition and laboured in consequence more than people who had never been in it. Patricia’s eye caught him as he had dropped to a walk. His expression could be clearly read; with a troubled face he was staring absently up at the moon. Perhaps he was an anxious as everybody else; perhaps his was merely an intellectual resentment of mystery. He looked from the moon to the ground and then across the park. The line of his gaze was towards a solitary light which shone perhaps half a mile away. Suddenly his expression, as if under the force of some inner illumination, changed to glee. A moment later he had slipped from the drive, climbed a stile or fence, and was sauntering across the snow. Patricia was about to turn back to investigate when she was arrested by the most violent stroke yet achieved on this alarming night.

  From somewhere in or near the house a pistol-shot rang out over the park. Its echoes were blended with a briefly succession of choked and ebbing screams, an agony of sound more horrible, because more urgent of sheer and unhuman pain, than the single cry which had gone before.

  The stones stopped shouting, turned towards the house and ran. The foremost stumbled again upon a clear trail: kitchen gardens, stables, a lawn streamed uncertainly past. Rust rose up before the runners in the unfamiliar aspect of a high blank wall. Ivy-covered, it soared in the moonlight like a frozen and impending sea. Across its waxen glitter the startled bats fluttered, pitching their futile faint exclaimings against unhearing ears.

  In the centre of the wall a single dark door stood open.

  Timmy and Belinda – because they knew the ground or because, unlike the others, they had hesitated for no fraction of a second – were through first. A dozen people followed; there was a wary flickering of torches; the party discovered itself as being in Sir Gervase Eliot’s theatre once more. The unexpected familiarity of the place was momentarily bewildering, and in a moment’s bewildered pause the theatre made itself felt. High up, the narrows sea-green windows faintly pricked the dark; transparent fingers of sea-green light groped down the walls, grew insubstantial and faded, still high overhead. Dead, chill, and vacant, the theatre was as eerie as an intralunar cage. The acrid smell of gunpowder added its suggestion of some subterraneous mineral recess and from somewhere, like a moist exudation through stratified rock, came the slow drip of liquid falling from a height…

  The torches explored a litter of chairs, a glove, a scattering of the programmes which had explained the problematical little play – the debris of the ruined evening. The torches crept farther, searched for the curtain which had been rung down on the confusion of Miss Cavey. It had vanished. Like startled hands which in the dark fail to meet expected resistance, the torches tumbled their light beneath the proscenium-arch and conjured up a cast of shadows in the depth beyond. This was the end of the trail; this was the entertainment to which the evening and the night had moved. The Rust theatricals were over and there had succeeded a show more exquisitely conceived. On the deserted boards Drama in invisible robes sat throned.

  For a moment the searchers wavered; then they ran forward and took the line of footlights like the last breastwork in an attack. Timmy and Belinda were in front; Belinda, outstripping her brother, slipped and fell on hands and knees amid a sprinkling of Dismal Desmond’s sawdust. Timmy’s torch flashed downwards. Hard by the sawdust a pool had formed on the floor. Belinda’s trailing white frock was stained with blood.

  Again there came a tiny plash of falling liquid and the pool at their feet stirred in little circles. Torches flashed upwards and probed, amid suspended canyons of darkness, the confusion of joists, runners, and hangings. The first through caught, immensely high, the grotesque posteriors of an enormous dog; swept on to catch another creature’s paws, the drooping tail of a third. But Desmond himself was gone; a shout from the wings told that he had been discovered on the floor; his body, horridly eviscerated, was immediately floodlit by a dozen torches, and as immediately disappeared into darkness when the torches swept aloft once more. Stark realization came to almost everybody at once. It was with purpose that Desmond had been removed from his hook. Beside the three noosed, dumpy dogs hung a long darker figure. There was a second’s agonized doubt and a torch, deftly directed, caught amid the obscuring hangings a circle of black and braided cloth.

  Chill confusion was cut by the voice of Winter, calling for help with the ropes. Dethleps was beside him; Wedge came up. The dark figure above stirred, sickeningly rotated, began to descend. A pulley creaked – unendingly, like a tumbril heard in some dream of terror.

  The body sagged to the floor. Timmy threw himself down beside it; appeared to be hurled by some physical impact once more to his feet.

  Before them, transfixed by the great hook and grotesquely bagged in evening trousers, lay the carcase of a middle-black pig.

  PART THREE

  Shoon Abbey

  1

  ‘Length and depth.’

  England, unwearied and infinitely various mistress, had turned again from darkness to the sun. Never had she yawned and stretched herself in just these diaphanous robes before Time, rolling back beyond the building of the temperance institute at Pigg, beyond the arterial roads, beyond the vanished turnpikes, beyond the bridle paths which had wound
through unenclosed pastures; time, retracing the generations of the cattle until they grew long and lank and lathy; time, fading finally away in geological eternities: time had never witnessed just this configuration of light and shadow, just these driftings of mist and vapour over the land; had never garnered in its winter harvests just this November day.

  ‘Length and depth,’ repeated Mr Eliot. ‘Length and depth, and the back slightly roached.’

  The great car consumed the miles.

  ‘Climate’, said Winter at the back – and one gathered that he was presenting an apologia for being an archaeologist – ‘climate is all. Wedge would have me write a book; I reply that were I to go after self-expression it would be in paint. But climate forbids the development of plastic art in this country.’ He swept a theoretical eye over the landscape. ‘If only one were an Eskimo.’

  ‘If only the Curly Coated were a little less coarse in the bone.’

  ‘An Eskimo?’ Appleby spoke not at all because he wanted Winter to continue his reflections. The interjection had been required and was offered as a matter of social duty. His mind was on the problematical territory before them.

  ‘An Eskimo,’ repeated Winter. ‘To live perpetually enveloped in that stainless and radiant white which is the symbol of eternity. In Labrador great art must be possible – nay, must inevitably exist: an art wholly unsensuous, abstract, moulded by that one dazzling discipline of the senses to the service of transcendental truth.’ He gestured patronizingly at the fading patches of snow about them.

  ‘I am looking forward to the Tamworths,’ said Eliot. ‘And to the Collection, of course.’

  ‘As certain a supersensible art on the fringes of the polar circle as an art richly sensuous, brilliantly spectroscopic, on the fringes of the Mediterranean. All right to be an Eskimo, all right to be a Titian or’ – he hesitated – ‘Renoir. It is this half-world of mist, of muted and fugitive colour’ – and he gestured again – ‘that is the devil.’

  Mr Eliot twisted round in his seat beside Patricia at the wheel. ‘I hope’, he said – and it seemed to be the mention of Renoir which momentarily diverted him from his theme – ‘that Rupert will come on with the others. I should particularly like him to see the Abbey.’

  ‘Climate’ – Winter was an insistent as a lecturer driving home his topic sentence – ‘is all.’ He turned to Mrs Moule. ‘Consider the unblushing fore-and-aft voluptuousness, the full-buttocked and high-bosomed yakshi of the most sacred Indian Buddhist art. Observe them transplanted along with the religion of Buddhism to China. Within a couple of generations acclimatization is at work, whittling at those prodigal hips, deflating those balloon-like breasts, attentuating to the rhythms of the Chinese visual scene that more than Rubensish exuberance of the flesh.’

  ‘The flesh?’ Mr Eliot again twisted round. ‘It must be firm. Freedom of movement is therefore essential. Plenty of ground and plenty of routing. It is there that the modern intensive methods fail.’

  He paused, lit up all over. ‘I think you will all agree that there are few more interesting subjects than pigs.’

  Appleby reviewed the night. The thing was engineered economically enough. Rust had two independent telephones and the joker had rung from one to the other. He asked the servant who answered for Sir Archibald Eliot and when Archie spoke begged that Mr Eliot would come at once to Mr Laslett’s house across the park; there had been a serious accident and Laslett wanted the security of a Justice of the Peace at the witnessing of a hasty will. Archie found his cousin, who set out at once, accompanied by Appleby as an obvious measure of prudence. Mr Eliot’s message of apology to his guests had been entrusted to Archie – and no sooner had they parted than Archie was hit on the head. The joker then followed Mr Eliot’s and Appleby’s tracks and rapidly faked the appearance of a struggle in the snow. He continued this to the point where they had left the drive: it was here that Kermode was to read the traces accurately and saunter off to meet Mr Eliot and Appleby returning from their fool’s errand. The joker then contrived to cut off the electricity supply where it crossed the drive, and continued to make some sort of trail to the theatre. He went some way across the park; waited for the right moment to give his single alarming cry; hurried back to the theatre; killed a pig held in readiness, extracting from the brute as much noise as possible; clothed it in trousers and slung it up in place of Dismal Desmond.

  It was all so simple that it could be conjecturally reconstructed like this in a few sentences; but its simplicity had depended on time-table work the virtuosity of which roused Appleby’s professional admiration. The mechanics had been good; and so, for that matter, had been the psychology. The subtle mind which had so quickly seen how Timmy could be goaded by Henry and Eleanor had made a number of chancy but accurate calculations here too: that the evidence of the servant who answered the telephone would not get through to any responsible person in time; that under the influence of the stones-in-the-rain the party would behave as, in fact, it did; that anyone endeavouring to find out who had kept an eye on whom would meet with impressions which were hopelessly contradictory and confused… The hoax of the middle black had been as clever as it was essentially brutal; nevertheless some ground was cleared.

  Mr Eliot himself was let out. Neither under Winter’s wildly conjectured hypnotic influence nor in the much more subtle fashion supposed by Dr Chown could he be responsible for persecuting himself. Appleby said goodbye to this theory with a sigh – the same sort of sigh with which Mr Eliot himself might have dismissed a plot too exquisite for his capacities… Mr Eliot, now so placidly discoursing to Patricia on his favourite rural themes, had played no tricks on himself. Nevetheless Appleby could not feel that he was done with Mr Eliot; that the owner of Rust had ceased to puzzle him. There had been a point at which the joker had got Mr Eliot down; had driven him to speculations which had trembled on the edge of mental chaos. The joker had played a number of vexatious and spectacular tricks, but analysis showed that his single effective weapon had been his uncanny command of matter which Mr Eliot believed had never passed the boundaries of his own mind. This was what had driven Mr Eliot to the wall and almost ended his career as a writer; it was from this that he had mysteriously rallied. Mysteriously. Appleby found that the lapse of twenty-four hours had set the events of Saturday morning in a new focus, and that in this his host’s rally showed as inadequately motivated. The manifestations at Rust were not an irruption from the world of imaginative creation; not were they the result of the Spider’s inventor’s developing a secondary and purely Spidery personality. From each of these nonsensical but haunting speculations Mr Eliot had abruptly broken free – and broken free because the Renoir had been found bedded with Joseph. Mr Eliot’s explanation of his new rationality had been specious: his Spider, he implied, never behaved in quite that unrefined way; neither could he do so himself even in a fragmented psychological state.

  Because Mr Eliot’s and Dr Chown’s speculations had been so extravagant in themselves it had not been immediately observable that this avenue of escape from them was, at the lowest, intellectually inadequate. And Mr Eliot, though volatile, was clearly a highly intelligent man: had he really satisfied himself with such a line of thought? It now seemed hard to believe. Yet his rally – the breakdown of the campaign against his mental balance – unquestionably dated from the recovery of the stolen picture. And from the same point dated what Appleby obscurely distinguished as a growing purposefulness in the man. This talk of good baconers – one had come to recognize it as a sign that Mr Eliot’s wits were at work.

  But from the centre of the picture – or from the centre of the picture as it had hitherto been composed – Mr Eliot was now displaced. So were his children. And who else?

  The more Appleby reflected on this – the more he reviewed the brief enquiries he had been able to make – the less certain did he become. Was Kermode out? Patricia’s eye had been on him disappearing across the park seconds before the shooting of the middle black. But if Kermo
de was the joker – and Appleby recalled the ambiguous conversation he had overheard – he had an assistant at a pinch in Gib Overall. How drunk had Overall really been? Too drunk to slip to the theatre and there to shoot, spit, and hoist the pig? Drunk enough not to realize the outrageousness of the act? It had been a good joke of its kind – and all on Timmy and Belinda: a great deal of trouble had been taken to persuade them that they had witnessed the murder of their father. It was a point that the joke was an improvisation; it had sprung from André’s joke – itself an improvisation – against Miss Cavey and her unfortunate experience in the barn. It was a point too that the joke had been a joke; nobody had, in fact, been murdered at midnight. Was this because an intended victim was not then readily murderable, or because the joker intended no more than to go on joking? The temper of the joke had been murderous. One could almost feel the middle black as a sort of totem animal, a sacrificial substitute for Mr Eliot himself – a Mr Eliot whom the joker was at once wishful and afraid to kill… Fantastic thus to introduce primitive anthropology into the problem. And the affair of the pig had been, surely, purposive rather than ritualisatic; it looked much like another attempt to disgust Mr Eliot with the mileu of his professional imaginings.

  These were ragged reflections; Appleby turned back to possible eliminations. Archie Eliot. The first picture which had sprung to Appleby’s peculiarly schooled mind had been of Archie strolling quietly from one telephone to intercept a servant answering at another. Simple enough. How badly then had Archie been wounded? Could the wound have been self-inflicted? What had happened to him when he had been left in charge of Chown? Could he have got away in time for the cry, for the final business with the pig? This remained to discover, and it meant – what Appleby had not so far contrived – another conference with Chown.