Rupert Eliot, who had been shivering slightly in his chair, looked up sharply. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘No need for a washing of this god-awful dirty linen.’
‘Sir Rupert, I think, takes the right line. And you must remember that he has been harried today by Shoon too. But that was a blind… Now let me go on.’ Appleby’s eye went round the room; his voice drove forward; he had achieved an almost hypnotic control of the company. ‘Part of the story, I say, can be only conjecture unless Mr Eliot should come to remember. For the odd point is there: he is powerless to assist us.
‘Here then is a conjectural reconstruction. I learnt from Miss Eliot that her father spent the latter part of his army career in the Military Intelligence in the Near East… Mr Eliot, that is correct?’
Mr Eliot nodded a bewildered and anxious head. ‘That is certainly so.’
‘There – in the East – Mr Eliot came upon one doesn’t know what villainy of Shoon’s. One can only guess that a murder in the desert was involved. No sooner had he done that than he fell ill. I think – for reasons to which I am just coming – that he must have fallen ill actually on Shoon’s hands. When he recovered it was – to Shoon’s immense relief– with a memory entirely blank as to the whole affair. Again, Mr Eliot, you agree?’
‘I certainly fell ill. And my memory was affected. I remember nothing of Shoon. But–’
‘Exactly! Shoon was tolerably safe. Judge then of his consternation when – years later – he learns from Belinda that her father is engaged in writing a novel called A Death in the Desert. Why has he chosen such a theme? Must it not be because buried memories of that real affair of violence are rising up in his mind? Or, if the thing be fortuitous, what buried memories may the mere working on such a theme not revive?’
A spell might have been over the tribune. Peter Holme, leaning forward on a stool by the fire, was staring at Appleby in mere fascination; Miss Cavey’s moans had become intermittent gulps; Rupert Eliot was trembling again in his chair; Archie was staring before him just as he had stared at the inscription on the architrave at Rust two nights before.
‘And so Shoon set about driving Eliot from his book – from all his books. As Winter discovered, everything at Rust could be done from the outside. And the clairvoyance – that was the simplest thing of all. We thought of a number of explanations: hypnotism, for example. But we didn’t think of another abnormal state of mind which might account for the facts: delirium. And it is because of this that we must suppose Shoon to have had access to Mr Eliot during the illness which resulted in his loss of memory. Mr Eliot had not begun to write the Spider stories then – but fragments of the fantasies were already in his mind. And to score the effects that were scored at Rust fragments were all that Shoon required. He got them from the lips of a delirious man.’
Appleby paused to take breath, and as he paused Bussenschutt intervened. ‘I must really–’
‘But’ – Appleby was off again – ‘the attempt to end the Spider stories was a failure. And so Shoon proceeded to more desperate measures. He got us here. He harried Sir Rupert in order – one supposes – to diffuse our anxieties. And then–’
Appleby stopped as if with a full sense of drama. ‘And then the plot miscarried. Sir Rupert – threatened by the various messages about what might happen at nine – had taken refuge in the Collection. Shoon set up one of the infernal machines in which he trades. It was to explode on Mr Eliot when Mr Eliot went to bring Sir Rupert down again. Probably we should have imagined that the wrong man had been killed, and the motive of the whole affair would have been successfully obscured. Or that was the idea. Shoon, you may remember, was a great reader’ – Appleby swung round on Mr Eliot, and Winter had a momentary impression of him as playing some elaborate instrument – ‘of ingenious romances of crime.’
Mr Eliot was again on his feet. ‘John…stop. I–’
‘But Shoon’ – Appleby went grimly on – ‘was hoist with his own petard – literally that. There is a poetic justice in his end which might come straight from fiction.’ Appleby’s eye darted to Kermode, to Bussenschutt. ‘Jasper Shoon will never plot again.’
‘Never again!’
The party jumped. Appleby, if dramatic, had been quiet; now Mr Eliot’s voice rang through the room.
‘Never again will I put pen to paper as a writer! This is the end.’
‘You fool’ – it was Rupert Eliot who had turned on his cousin – ‘you soft fool’ – Rupert’s voice rose in a snarl – ‘will you give over thousands of pounds a year just because–’
Like another explosion Appleby’s hand rang on a table beside him. ‘Sir Rupert, have you not again and again wished the stories at an end? Have you not? And now you would have them go on – and get your money from them? Why?’
The figures in the tribune might have been turned to stone. Only Rupert moved – lurched back into his chair.
‘Why, Sir Rupert – except that Shoon is dead? But Shoon is not dead.’
Rupert’s head jerked back; his jaw fell oddly open.
‘You were given a hint to take the Begonia to New Zealand on the ninth of next month. I advise an earlier boat. Shoon is alive. I have locked him in a cupboard.’ Appleby suddenly chuckled. ‘Alas, it’s the only lock I shall ever turn on him.’
‘You can get him’ – Winter’s voice cut quickly in on the bewilderment – ‘for inciting somebody to shoot at me out there by the tower.’
‘My dear man, that was Sir Rupert shooting at Shoon. And doesn’t Shoon know it!’ He turned back to Rupert. ‘On every account’, he said dryly, ‘an earlier boat seems best.’
Epilogue
Dr Bussenchutt set down his glass. ‘The Smith Woodhouse late-bottled,’ he said. ‘A wine invariably brilliant on the table.’
‘I deprecate’, said Mummery, ‘aroma in ports.’
‘We are to have the Fonseca’, said Winter, ‘on Founder’s Day. Nearly six months to wait.’
The murmur of talk filled the common-room. Appleby’s eye, wandering from his companions at the supernumerary table, communed with the critical gaze of Dr Groper over the fireplace, passed on to distinguish in the shadows variously apocryphal portraits of William of Chalfont, Richard à Lys, Sir Humphrey Bohun. On a lectern at the far end of the room, set out for the inspection and comment of the learned, were the first proofs of Dr Bussenschutt’s critical edition of the Codex. From outside floated in the chatter of undergraduates arguing a choice of cinemas. Beyond them Oxford, river-rounded, branchy between towers, circled beneath the soft summer night, its progress marked by the chime of discreetly emotive bells.
‘Young Eliot’, pronounced Bussenschutt, ‘is said to be doing well. In general I do not approve of undergraduates entertaining thoughts of matrimony while their Schools are immediately before them. But in this instance there would appear to be no deleterious result. I hope that he will go to the Treasury.’ Bussenschutt looked speculatively at Appleby, cautiously across to Benton who was sitting, gloomy and wishful, at the solitude of the little table. ‘That was a curious affair. And the most curious part of it, Mr Appleby, was undoubtedly your own performance at the end.’
Mummery made a short gurgling noise. ‘It was a rigmarole of nonsense.’
‘Ah, yes, my dear Mummery. But Appleby got the pace just right. It would not have withstood inspection for ten minutes; he drove through with it in just over five.’
‘It was nicely done,’ murmured Winter. ‘Even to your looking deadly pale over the supposed death of poor Shoon. However did you manage that?’
‘One nips into a privy’, said Appleby placidly, ‘and tickles the back of one’s throat till one’s horridly sick.’
‘My dear Master’ – Mummery rumbled mysteriously – ‘here is a lesson in laborious thoroughness even for you… But was it not all rather unnecessary?’
Appleby nodded. ‘Perhaps so. But I was on holiday, after all. And I rather wanted to see Rupert Eliot actually crack. Then there was Mr Eliot. One ought not,
I suppose, to teach one’s future brother-in-law’s father little lessons. Still, I thought that a few minutes’ believing that he had inadvertently slaughtered Shoon might do him good. To loose off a couple of bombs while visiting a neighbour’ – Appleby shook his head solemnly – ‘is really a shockingly irresponsible thing to do. As I once said, he is younger than Timmy. When you come to think of it, the heart of the mystery lay in that evident fact.’
‘Ah,’ said Bussenschutt.
‘But the real point of my performance was this. Eliot had come to know that it was Rupert who was persecuting him. And he knew how Rupert was managing it. But he had no notion why Rupert was behaving in such a deplorable way. I thought it would be useful to get that out quite clearly – the anatomy of the camel, you know.’
Bussenschutt passed the decanter. ‘The anatomy’, he said with a great appearance of comprehension, ‘of the camel.’
‘I felt that if I could only suggest to Rupert that the thing was being huddled up in a foggy way without his being suspected he might be tricked into betraying himself. The great difficulty was glossing over the real crime Rupert had attempted to commit: I mean his nipping out of the Collection to the roof, down the bogus-broken wall, and taking a shot at Shoon. The fact that the shot whizzed past Winter, and the further fact that Shoon really had some faint motive for setting a confederate to eliminate Winter, made it just possible to give the thing the necessary twist. My story was, of course, a rigmarole. Eliot did serve in the Near East, and was invalided home after an illness which slightly impaired his memory. But he and Shoon certainly never had the sort of encounter I suggested. Shoon would clearly not have taken Belinda Eliot into the Abbey if there had been anything. of the sort.’
‘You know’ – Bussenschutt was almost bashful – ‘I thought of that at the time.’
Appleby smiled. ‘I was afraid somebody would chip in and explode the whole thing – on any one of a score of counts. I was particularly afraid of Kermode. For of course Kermode knew. About the clairvoyance, I mean. He as good as explained it to me quite early on. He had a start, I suppose; he understands the writing of that sort of stuff. And – in a way – he motivated the whole plot’
There was a meditative pause. ‘Quite so,’ said Bussenschutt. ‘Um, most clearly so.’ An irresolute silence settled on the supernumerary table. Appleby stared demurely at his glass. Mummery emitted that noise, as of an emptying bath, which was understood by his colleagues to indicate curiosity and impatience.
‘The fact is’, said Bussenschutt cautiously, ‘that we have to confess ourselves as still far from clear on – ah – the details of the affair. It would be a kindness – it would gratify what must be now a tolerably harmless curiosity – if you were to offer us, my dear Mr Appleby, an – ah – expository résumé of what must no doubt be called the Eliot Case.’
‘Beginning’, added Winter more frankly, ‘at the beginning and explaining just what it was all about.’
‘By all means.’ Appleby nodded, looked at Bussenschutt, paused. ‘But what’, he asked learnedly and with faint malice, ‘do we imply by the beginning?’
Bussenschutt chuckled with great geniality. ‘We imply the end.’
‘Exactly. No beginning could be made on the mystery until one had a notion of what the mysterious incidents were designed to achieve. If not directed to an end they were meaningless, the work – as was not inconceivable – of a lunatic. I dismissed the lunatic and proceeded to distinguish’ – unconsciously Appleby’s idiom was taking on an academic tinge – ‘between possible ends. In the human psyche two conflicting principles govern: the pleasure principle and the reality principle.’
‘Such a constatation’, interrupted Bussenschutt, ‘may be empirically useful. Nevertheless, I would not care–’ He checked himself. ‘But this is a topic for another occasion.’
‘If the pleasure principle were at work the unknown might be attempting to achieve certain immediate gratifications: revenge upon an enemy, a sense of power, the spectacle of humiliation, bewilderment, terror in others. But if the reality principle were at work we should be confronted with something fundamentally different. The incidents would represent a rational and practical plan to cope with an actual environment; the aim would be not immediate pleasure but survival and adaptation.
‘My own conclusions on this matter became definite with the affair of the middle black. The reality principle was at work.’
Bussenschutt stirred in his chair. ‘But from what I have heard of that incident–’
‘Quite so. It was heavy with malice – with a sheer lust to shock and terrify. But it stopped short of the last act of malice, of revenge, of the assertion of power: murder. It was murderous without a murder. The Eliot children were led for some agonizing moments to think that their father had been killed. The pleasure principle was there. Perhaps strongly there. For notice that the incident came after the breakdown of the unknown’s first plan; came after Eliot’s mysterious rally – when the unknown must have realized that this new demonstration could be of very little use. Substantially it was a malicious fling by the pleasure principle, while the reality principle evolved something else. In the fate of the pig there was a sort of substitutive gratification of the will to murder – as if the pleasure principle were eager for murder if it could go its own way. But there was no murder; the reality principle was still in final control. There was no murder because murder was practically useless. And the joker – as I assured you, Winter – was a practical joker. He was after an actual end – after some definite end in the real world – which Eliot’s murder would not serve. And here Kermode was the key.
‘The career of Kermode – that was the first clue. If Eliot died Kermode was to carry on. So one sees something which Eliot’s death would not serve: the disappearance of the Spider. Only if Eliot himself, while still living, said “No more of these books shall appear,” would the career of the Spider cease… Not Eliot’s death, then – though the unknown might like that – but the death of the Spider: that was conceivably the end. And behind the elaborate effort which was being made I felt justified in looking for an urgent motive. And – again – a practical motive; not an impulse of intellectual snobbery, the desire to get out of a theatrical contract, or anything of the sort.’
‘Surely,’ said Bussenschutt, ‘Kermode himself–’
Appleby nodded. ‘I had to keep Kermode in mind. His was a special case. He described himself as waiting on the touch-line; he was eager to take over; and I had overheard him lament the fact that Eliot had rallied from the first onslaught. Kermode wanted Eliot’s Spider to die, and for a motive which might be reckoned urgent and practical. I completely eliminated him only when the affair entered on its second phase; when the unknown began to operate in a direction which could not benefit Kermode at all.
‘But meantime I had this general problem: what urgent and practical motive could there be for killing the Spider, for stopping Wedge’s presses for good and all? The answer was not hard to seek, Those presses were proposing to publish something which the unknown could not afford to see published.’
Appleby paused, aware of a great silence about him, and with a disconcerting feeling that the whole common-room must be listening. But the big table, the middle-sized table and the little table were all deserted; his companions’ colleagues had dispersed.
Winter was leaning forward ‘The mainspring of the whole plot was fear of something which seemed about to crop up in a book? That is a variation on the motive you imputed to Shoon in your fantasy.’
‘Quite so. But Shoon in my fantasy was going to escape from his predicament simply by murdering Eliot. To the unknown, on the contrary, such a cause was useless; the affair of the middle black – the whole elaborate campaign indeed – showed that. From this there was a clear conclusion. The thing which must not be published already existed. Once more, Kermnode was the key. For we know that not only was he to carry on with Spider stories of his own; he was to complete and publish Elio
t’s unfinished manuscripts. And one such manuscript was known to exist: the novel, A Death in the Desert. Eliot had been writing this at the same time as Murder at Midnight, but of these two it was only Murder at Midnight that the unknown ventured to bring into prominence by monkeying with. Eliot destroyed Murder at Midnight when first disturbed by what was happening. But A Death in the Desert, with some basic idea in which he was particularly pleased, he preserved and was resolved – after that mysterious rally to which I shall come – to go on with. Moreover, it was securely in a safe; if Eliot died the thing would go straight to Kermode to complete. Indeed Kermode, who assisted in miscellaneous ways in the Spider concern, may very well have had the gist of it communicated to him by Eliot or Wedge.
‘So you see the point at which we have arrived. Wedge’s presses are waiting – with all that hunger which so amuses Winter – for this new book. But this new book must not appear. Elaborate efforts are therefore made to disgust Eliot with his work, to play upon his nerves so that – in effect – he will cry: “Stop Press”. Neither by Kermode nor by himself will any more Spider stuff be printed. To get him to that point was the object, and the unknown’s efforts were, I say, elaborate. They were also subtle. But, being subtle, they were double-edged. The plot failed when it seemed on the very point of success. Eliot went to bed a defeated man, knowing – as he told us – what he must do: and by that he meant, surely, the consigning of the Spider to oblivion. The next morning he had rallied and was proposing to go straight ahead. It was now the unknown who was defeated: he could almost hear, if he was an imaginative man, Wedge’s presses beginning to turn. But, very clearly, he had a second string to his bow.’
Bussenschutt drained his glass and nodded. ‘A process of communication was to be prevented. And a technique which was inapplicable at one end might nevertheless be successfully applied at the other.’
‘Just that. It was no good murdering Mr Eliot. A Death in the Desert, with whatever dangerous matter it contained, was safely locked up and in certain eventualities Kermode would simply carry on. But the person – presuming it to be a single person – to whom the dangerous matter must not come: murder was a possible technique there. When the scene shifted abruptly to the Abbey I had a strong sense that the mystery was entering on this second phase. A murder had been arranged.’
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