Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  The explosion, though not of shattering violence, was sufficiently alarming. A number of people retreated hastily from the quarter in which they conceived the danger to lie; Timmy Eliot was the first to make a move in the contrary direction. He ran towards the cloakroom – where a glass door could be observed as having been shattered by the concussion – and disappeared within. A shout as of discovery brought others on the scene. In point of sudden shock the effect which the joker had contrived was not altogether incomparable with the affair of the middle black. Rupert had travelled to the Abbey in a vast yellowish overcoat and a bowler hat. These he had hung in a row with other peoples’ s wraps – and it was these alone which had been demolished. The bomb – which must have been a miniature affair – had presumably been slipped into a pocket of the coat; in the result this outermost shell of Sir Rupert was ripped to ribbons – and of the bowler hat the brim and crown were discovered in opposite corners of the room. It was a nicely calculated demonstration. Steering with a hair’s-breadth of mere futility, it contrived to convey the most macabre suggestion of a threatening violent dissolution. And the threat implicit in the explosion was explicitly restated on a second paper spider which turned up in the course of a rummage among the debris. This read:

  It’s coming to you, Rupert.

  THE SPIDER KNOWS ALL.

  Appleby, somewhat bewilderingly transported from those intimations of the higher destructiveness so suavely explained away by Shoon in his boardroom to this petty but efficient petarding among the hats and coats, repeated to himself that it would all link up. Perhaps at some level of his mind not readily available to consciousness it had all linked up already. Or perhaps he was merely enunciating to himself some article of faith. But not only, he told himself, would it all link up; it would also all turn on one cardinal fact. To these scattered events there was a centre: Mr Eliot had really found the joker in possession of an odd insight into his own mind. Amid much mystification this was the mystery. Motive and mechanism, the why and the how, met here. It was this that gave its intellectual interest to a rambling and irregular weekend affair. It was this, too, that Appleby contrived to keep in focus during a curious conversation with Rupert Eliot which followed upon the cloakroom explosion.

  The conversation was initiated by Rupert. He led Appleby aside and enquired, ‘How’s two and two? Have you plumped for four yet, or are you still keeping an open mind on the possibility of three or five?’

  ‘I wish I saw it as simply as that. Perhaps you know more about it than I do.’

  They were parading down a long Gothic corridor rather reminiscent of a station hotel. It was gloomy. But even in the gloom Appleby could see Rupert assume his least engaging smile. ‘Know about it? I know it ought to be stopped.’

  ‘Before nine tonight?’

  Rupert snorted. ‘I’m not scared. I’ve been threatened in my time by more formidable men than Archie. But his foolery ought to be stopped. In other people’s houses. It’s intolerable.’

  ‘You think that two and two make Sir Archibald?’

  ‘I know’ – Rupert combined a further snort with a backward jerk of the head towards the cloakroom – ‘that that was Archie. Who else would mix up a nasty little infernal machine and rubbish out of Donne, or whoever it is? And Archie won’t murder anyone – unless it be Shoon. I needn’t shake in my shoes. It’s just malicious japing. But it should be dropped on all the same. Damned intolerable foolery.’

  ‘Sir Archibald might murder Shoon?’

  ‘Not really. One gets the trick of talking like a story-book with all this about one. But Archie had a vicious quarrel with Shoon at the end of that west tower business. Over the bill, no doubt.’

  ‘I see.’ Halfway down the corridor they had reached the grateful warmth of an enormous log fire and paused before it. ‘By the way, Sir Rupert, your own mathematics are pretty cautious. I gather that your two and two give you Sir Archibald only in this particular joke. Perhaps he just sticks his malicious oar in at this point?’

  ‘Perhaps so. There’s the fact that the previous jokes were directed against Richard. This one is directed against me. The jokes against Richard failed in their object and I shouldn’t be surprised if we’ve heard the last of them. This joke of Archie’s has a different object. Or more probably no object at all.’

  Appleby spread out his hands to the blaze. ‘I am interested’, he said carefully, ‘that you think the jokes were after something and have been a failure. Will you tell me of just what you are thinking?’

  ‘My good sir’ – Rupert was impatient – ‘it’s as obvious to you as it is to me. Richard was to be thrown off his rocker. Or alternatively he was to be manoeuvred int the resolution to drop scribbling those rubbishing books – as one heartily wishes he would. And the thing has been a failure simply because he is a stronger and more obstinate man than one would guess.’

  ‘I have thought of that, I admit. Such seems to have been the object. But what was the motive?’ Appleby glanced up from the fire and rapidly answered his own question. ‘It was either business or pleasure.’

  ‘Quite so. Either the joker would merely be pleased to see the end of the Spider, or he would think to gain by it. It’s nice’ – Rupert grinned wolfishly – ‘to be able to keep up with the thought of the police. But I don’t know that it’s a very helpful line. We should all be pleased to see the end of the Spider. But I don’t know that any of us would gain. I, for one, should lose.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Appleby was boldly interrogative.

  ‘A delicate matter, my dear Mr Appleby. I have no doubt that it has been explained to you by Archie and others that my circumstances are necessitous. In fact I am maintained by the generosity of my cousin Richard. And what he allows me is two per cent of his royalties. I have his word that I shall always have that – and Richard is monotonously honourable. But I wouldn’t swear that he hasn’t repented of his promise since. For me, the passing of the Spider means the passing of a certain income. I hand you all this, of course’ – Rupert chuckled delightedly – ‘as a defence of myself against the suspicions which I don’t doubt you have been harbouring.’

  ‘I’m glad to be handed anything. May I ask if Sir Archibald is in a position similar to yours?’

  ‘He is not. He just extracts what he can from Richard from time to time. And of course he just hates the Spider – that engineer, you know, got right under his skin. I really think he’s your best suspect for the tricks – for the whole sorry series of them, after all. For instance, if there weren’t the odd fact that he had been drugged, how clearly he would stand out as the one person who could have monkeyed with that picture. When you come to think of it, he may have drugged himself.’

  ‘As it happens, he was seen to do so.’

  Rupert jumped. ‘Then–’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘It doesn’t greatly help. But drugs reminds me of something. Can you think of anyone concerned, other than Chown, who has a medical training?’

  ‘A medical training – do you mean chemicals? Dabbling in explosives?’

  ‘Not at all. I mean actually qualified to practise medicine.’

  ‘The police draw ahead at last. You baffle me. But the answer, I believe, is the little bounder André. He was a doctor until he found there was more money in the Spider.’

  ‘What a lot of people have done that: engineers, doctors, men of the world–’

  Rupert frowned. ‘Young man, I have been as helpful as I could and need not be repaid by impertinence.’

  Appleby apologized cheerfully. ‘And I believe,’ he said, ‘there is one other piece of information which would help. I understand your cousin’s habit is to write two novels simultaneously. Was there a companion manuscript to Murder at Midnight, do you happen to know?’

  ‘There was. Indeed, there is – locked up in a safe. Murder at Midnight has been abandoned, but the other, I suppose, will go on when all this blows over.’

  ‘Do you know the theme – or title?’

&nb
sp; ‘The theme, no; the title, yes. A Death in the Desert.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘Literary but unilluminating. If it were called, now, Annihilation at Nine. Or even The Corpse in the Cloakroom.’

  ‘I tell you, there’s no mystery about the cloakroom business. I’m convinced it’s Archie’s joke.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Appleby.

  3

  The majority of the Friends of the Friends of the Venerable Bede had departed – presumably after having been addressed by Dr Bussenschutt the evening before. Those who remained seemed disposed to extreme reticence. At luncheon the party from Rust were slightly the more numerous, and it was to them that Shoon directed most of his conversation.

  ‘I must warn you’, said Shoon, ‘about the Hermit.’ He glanced round gravely and his eye fell particularly on Miss Cavey, as if commerce with anchorites might be supposed peculiarly attractive to her. ‘The poor fellow has been of uncertain temper for years now. When I installed him I doubted if he had a vocation for the contemplative life. And I may fairly claim some experience of hermits.’

  There was a moment’s attentive silence. Appleby looked from his host to Rupert Eliot. But he saw neither. What he saw was himself in a school library twenty years before, with his pen in his mouth and both hands turning the pages of an enormous book… Sherlock Holmes had declined to burden his memory with elementary astronomy. Appleby, contemplating the first ray of positive light which had broken in upon the affair of the Spider, thanked his stars for a memory which refused to shed the traditional lumber of a liberal education.

  ‘I doubted, I say, if he was the right man. But he himself was so sure of it – he had failed, he said, at so many things and he was sure he would make a success of meditation. So I put him in. Since then my doubts have been vindicated; he has not been a success. I fear the necessary spiritual qualities have been denied to him.’ Shoon assumed a look of growing thoughtfulness which was now familiar to Appleby. ‘Sloth is the danger in such a situation – inner sloth.’ He made an expressive gesture. ‘I have, of course, done all I could do help the man. When he has complained about the quality of the herbs and the straw and so forth I have always gone into the matter myself. A hermit on an estate should always be regarded as the direct responsibility of the owner.’

  Shoon’s guests murmured their approval of this sentiment.

  ‘Finally he complained that his cell was damp. Frankly it was damp; one could hardly have a hermit’s cell constructed in any other way. But if this miserable man was without such ghostly promptings as would enable him to rise above – nay, to glory in – coughs and cramps, what was one to do? Consider’ – and Shoon made a sign that more claret should go round – ‘consider the position of an unusuccessful hermit out of employment. The openings are very few. My responsibilities were correspondingly great.’

  The guests murmured again and Benton was heard to wish that all employers were so benevolently disposed.

  ‘And so I let him have his way. He has moved from his cell, which was by the river, across to the ruins. Which is why the ruins, I must explain to you, are – so to speak – out of bounds. He is so touchy that I find it better that we should keep away. It is a pity: the cellarium would be particularly worth your inspection. I find it a little hard myself.’ Shoon smiled with suave brilliance at Appleby. ‘Ruins are my hobby. But so it is. And I fear the man is now a hermit in no more than name. You may still see him in the distance in devotional attitudes–’ He broke off and there was a little silence. The luncheon-table was confronted – chasteningly – with the story of a human failure.

  ‘Alas!’ said Shoon, ‘I fear he is only acting the part.’

  ‘That hermit’s cell,’ said Bussenschutt to his companions at a corner of the table; ‘I have a fancy to bespeak it for Benton. Never did a man look so unsociably disposed.’

  Appleby, thus prompted, studied with a good deal of interest the dim-looking scholar who had once peddled arms for Shoon. Benton was certainly glum – as glum as a bankrupt company promoter or a boy who has lost his first mistress. And his glumness at a guess – such analysis is not easy with strangers – was compounded of equal portions of apprehension and anger.

  ‘Moreover,’ continued Bussenschutt, ‘he was most reluctant to come down to the Abbey. Shoon, I understand, wired him – as also Mummery – a most cordial invitation to inspect this important papyrus shortly after he invited me. But it was only after I telephoned him myself yesterday evening that he agreed to join us.’ Amiable and threatening, Bussenschutt peered at Winter. ‘Is not that, now, a very strange thing?’

  ‘Odd, no doubt.’ Winter was transparently cautious. ‘But Benton has been mixed up in certain questionable activities of our host’s. He may have been reluctant to renew doubtful communications.’

  ‘Ah!’ Bussenschutt was heavily deliberative. ‘I had in mind myself rather his curious relationship to Mrs Birdwire. We know how her name disturbed him. He may well have been reluctant to risk a meeting here.’

  ‘Like Winter.’

  Appleby had spoken. From now onwards, he was promising himself, a share of the bomb-dropping was going to be his.

  ‘My dear Mr Appleby’ – Bussenschutt had turned towards him in cordial surprise – ‘can I have mistaken you, or did you say–?’

  ‘When you appeared on the terrace yesterday Winter here identified you all three at once: Shoon conjecturally and yourself and Mrs Birdwire outright. He then retreated hastily into the house. I thought the retreat odd; hitherto Winter had been all for poking about. Hadn’t you, Winter?’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘So I made what enquiries I could. And I found that when Timmy Eliot first mentioned Mrs Birdwire’s name Winter replied with some form of words which distinctly implied that he had never set eyes on her.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Bussenschutt. ‘Interesting, indeed. Winter, am I mistaken in thinking that those are almonds at your left hand?’

  Winter passed the almonds, glanced at Appleby with a look which contrived to be ironically impressed. ‘So what?’ he said.

  ‘It was clear’ – Appleby continued to address Bussenschutt – ‘that Mrs Birdwire represented a dark page indeed in Winter’s past. He couldn’t face her. And since we arrived at the Abbey he has been quite pathetically keeping his eye on the middle distance, ready to bolt again should the woman pay Shoon a visit. One feels that intrigue is not his element.’ Appleby shook a solemn head.

  Winter showed no signs of restiveness under this banter. He drained his glass, nodded resignedly, glanced quickly about the table and said simply: ‘I robbed her.’

  ‘You robbed her?’ Bussenschutt had sat back in his chair in abrupt indignation. ‘You mean to say that the burglary which you so brazenly recounted to us the other night–’

  ‘My dear Master!’ Winter looked startled. ‘You mistake me. In the burglary the good lady was not robbed at all; everything was grotesquely returned to her. I am confessing to a real robbery. What I stole is in my room at college at this moment. And it was a robbery with violence.’

  Bussenschutt glanced across the table. ‘I am so sorry for Mummery,’ he said. ‘How much he would like to be in on all this.’

  Winter shook his head. ‘I will confess. With Appleby baying on the trail like this it is my only chance. But not in undertones over the remains of Dover sole. You must restrain your impatience.’

  With unruffled composure Winter continued his meal.

  They retreated, not very sociably, to Bussenschutt’s bedroom. Bussenschutt indeed, whose humour it was to regard Winter as a captive, conducted this retreat with such circumstance that at the break up of the luncheon table even an idle eye might have spotted that something was afoot. But the majority of Shoon’s guests were being invited to conduct themselves informally round Shoon’s pictures; it was unlikely that anyone would be missed until the grand assembly for the purpose of inspecting the Collection later in the afternoon.

  ‘In Aleppo once
– ’ said Winter, and paused to light his pipe.

  Appleby, whom forty-eight hours at Rust Hall had made abnormally sensitive to literary allusions, looked at Winter suspicously. ‘You are sure,’ he asked, ‘that you are not muddling yourself up with Othello? He made a strikingly similar remark.’

  ‘In Aleppo once,’ reiterated Winter unheeding, ‘it happened that I ran into this appalling lady. Why I was there I have forgotten, and why she was there I never knew.’

  ‘The inhabitants of that once flourishing city’, interpolated Bussenschutt, ‘are famous throughout the East for the elegance of their manners. And this, I conceive, might be an attraction – but for which of you I will not venture to say.’

  ‘We met while making the inspection of the aqueduct, the prime antiquity of the district. Mrs Birdwire–’

  ‘Stay!’ said Bussenschutt. ‘There are some vivid chapters on Aleppo in Circumcised Dogs. But I recall nothing of an encounter with Mr Winter.’

  ‘Mr Winter never revealed his name; it was an irrelevance which the lady’s expansive nature crowded off the stage from the first. But our friendship matured with remarkable rapidity. By the time we had finished examining the aqueduct I was being favoured with the sort of racy reminiscences in which you, my dear Master, have been so interestingly soaking yourself during the last few days. We then got into a carriage – a ramshackle but rubber-tyred carriage with which she had contrived to provide herself – and were driven to her house. She had been in Aleppo some months and – what is vital to my story – had come there direct from Greece; I think she was proposing to write a book about Greece in Aleppo, and then a book about Aleppo when she had moved somewhere else. Meanwhile she had made herself uncommonly comfortable; there is any number of stately houses and she had nosed out one which was in excellent repair. I remember walking about the pistachio plantation which surrounded the place and reflecting how surprisingly secluded it was. Without knowing it, I was taking my first step towards crime.’