Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  Winter interrupted. ‘In fact, x was to be murdered by y; and Eliot, the only known quantity in the affair, was not really concerned. Your knowledge was really in a very odd phase.’

  ‘I had made a fair estimate of what was going forward, but I was in the dark as to the agents. And the first hint that came to me was quite fantastic – a sort of etymological clue. Shoon happened to remark – he was speaking of the man he kept to guard the cellarium – that he had reason to know a good deal about hermits. On that my mind took an involuntary dip into its small store of Greek and I reflected that a hermit is a person who lives in the desert… A Death in the Desert. The link became more than merely verbal when I reflected that Shoon in his early days had engaged in a good deal of dubious activity in Arabia and round about.

  ‘Shoon, then, might well be a principal. Perhaps there was something in A Death in the Desert which must not get to him. But, equally possibly, it might be Shoon who was determined that this dangerous matter should not get to somebody else – roughly the theory on which I built my rigmarole after the explosion. In other words, Shoon might be either x or y.’

  Servants had discreetly cleared the little table, the middle-sized table and the big table; candles were being extinguished; Dr Groper had disappeared, only the high lights from his orrery gleaming on the wall. Somewhere a clock struck nine.

  ‘x was the jester – now the potential murderer; y was his likely victim. Of the two, y was still wholly shadowy; of x – because x had been active – I knew a good deal more. I must concentrate on x. Who, then, was this unknown who had so strangely taken upon himself the personality of the Spider? What were the evident clues in that problem?’

  Appleby paused, as if he were asking more than a rhetorical question. But no one answered.

  ‘Perhaps the observation that Rupert Eliot was the Spider.’

  ‘Was the Spider?’ Bussenschutt shook a bewildered head.

  ‘The physical man – the long-limbed sprawling physical man. Perhaps I ought to have reflected that here was a figure who might have been “Spider” from his schooldays. Or, again, there was the matter of the vicar. One of the joker’s first tricks was to embarrass the vicar of Rust. Perhaps I ought to have reflected that Rupert had reason to bear a grudge against the clergy; he had got in trouble for robbing a church as a boy.’

  Mummery gave an impatient snort. ‘These’, he said, ‘are in themselves nugatory considerations.’

  ‘You are quite right; they might have been most delusive thoughts. And, indeed, there was plainly but one grand path to x; that by way of the prescience, the clairvoyance of the joker. That remained the paramount problem throughout. And – maddeningly – solution after solution had to be turned down.

  ‘But there was a second prominent problem. Of what sort could that matter in A Death in the Desert be which must on no account get to the unknown y? I answered this by saying that Eliot must have put into his novel, wittingly or unwittingly, some incident derived from real life, and of which y must not learn. But that turned out – very strangely – to be almost exactly wrong. In creating that damaging matter Eliot, as I now know, was drawing entirely on fantasy.

  ‘I got nearer the truth when I began to wonder: may these two problems – the problem of the clairvoyance and the problem of the dangerousness of the new novel – be interconnected? Might the truth about one give me the truth about the other?

  ‘But I need not make a long business of telling you how I finally managed to place x and y. There was nothing of high-flown logic about it; it simply came to me after a little thought on what happened while we were inspecting the Collection. The first things we were shown were Eliot’s thirty-seven romances. Standing before them, Rupert revealed that he had learnt from Belinda that Shoon sometimes read them. He then went out of his way to make sure that this was so. And Shoon’s reply was explicit: he read them every one and was looking forward to the next… So – on a not too risky inference – Rupert was x and Shoon was y.’

  Bussenschutt sighed happily. ‘Winter, my dear fellow, you were present on this illuminating occasion?’

  Winter nodded. ‘No doubt, Master, I ought to have seen it. But you must remember that by this time somewhat confusing complications had set in.’

  ‘The confusing complications’, said Appleby, ‘made – in a negative way – my next task. Rupert was anxious to know if Shoon did really read the novels. That gave the first clear outline of the situation, and I had simply to keep clear of what may be termed the secondary elaboration: the confusing fact that it now seemed to be Rupert who was being threatened. Rupert was the joker – or the original joker.’ He paused and smiled at Winter. ‘Or again almost the original joker. For consider that Rupert had one very strong position: when the first manifestation occurred – I mean the Birdwire burglary – Rupert was in Scotland. That is why Winter here had his vital place in the puzzle. When I got at the truth of the burglary Rupert’s grand alibi crumbled. And he had himself told me that upon the news of the Birdwire affair he hurried back to Rust. The burglary, in fact, had given him his idea.

  ‘I added one or two points against him. x had a knowledge of Rust, a knowledge of a certain habit of Archie Eliot’s which made the odd little drugging business easy. Rupert fitted well enough. I could see Rupert as priming André in the matter of Miss Cavey’s dogs; he had admitted to a long conversation with André on the plans for the night; Belinda and I saw him watching with the grimmest satisfaction André’s going off in quest of his stuffed animals. And later I noticed another significant point. It concerned the secondary elaboration – the threatenings of Rupert which began when we got to the Abbey. Rupert really believed that they were Archie’s work. And he betrayed at the beginning of our discussing them a conviction that the earlier tricks against Eliot himself were by another hand. One sees now how his mind worked. He himself had originally taken a hint from what he must have thought of as a piece of mere mischief: the Birdwire burglary. From that he had built up his own strictly practical plot. He now believed Archie to be reversing the process – to be taking a hand in the game out of mere malice. Because of that it was some time before the threats against him really began to work on his nerves. But later he was nervous. When I deliberately took up the attitude that the threat against his life was very real I found that he could be soundly rattled. He was aware that he was playing a desperate game against a dangerous man: perhaps Shoon had suspected him, and perhaps it was Shoon who was after him – meaning business.

  ‘Here I was, then, with almost everything – and with almost nothing. If Rupert, and Rupert alone, was x, how had he contrived the business with the Renoir – an affair for which Mrs Moule gave him an alibi? And – far more vital and beguiling – how had he managed to build up something reminiscent of his cousin’s unwritten story, The Birthday Party? I was back here with the first grand riddle, that of the clairvoyance. And why should Rupert so fear A Death in the Desert getting to Shoon? Here was the second riddle again. And what was Eliot’s position? He had crumpled before the clairvoyance – or before that and the haunting notion he had got from Chown – the notion that some split personality of his own was at work. Why had he rallied on the morning after the Renoir affair? What had he learnt? What was he up to now? And where’ – Appleby looked cautiously around the deserted common-room – ‘was the place of your colleague Benton?’

  ‘Benton?’ Winter was startled. ‘He has a place – apart from the domestic affair of our Codex?’

  ‘Assuredly. I had from Miss Cavey – who has plenty of wits – the most curious account of a sort of baiting of Benton put up by Shoon. Shoon was becoming uneasy about the Eliots – or about an Eliot; he was inviting Benton to recollect some association with an Eliot. Benton had a place in the equation.’

  ‘And of course Benton’ – Bussenschutt amiably smiled at Winter – ‘has a secret.’

  ‘The secret’, said Appleby, ‘of the anatomy of the camel?’

  Bussenschutt looked doubtful.
‘I have no doubt’, he replied guardedly, ‘that he may have that secret too.’

  ‘I have never considered whisky’, said Bussenschutt as he depressed the lever of a syphon, ‘proper to the character of a common-room. And even less am I disposed to sanction those preliminary or pre-prandial potations obscurely known as cocktails. But in one’s own fastness’ – he gestured round the sombre walls of his study – ‘and on an occasion so notable for the diffusion of knowledge–’ He reached for the decanter. ‘An aposiopesis’, he said, ‘may well conclude the meaning of what I have to say. And now, my dear Mr Appleby, camelus saltat. Which I would translate as the camel is on the jump to be out of the bag.’

  ‘The camel is about to appear. But first let me pause to note where we have arrived and what are the signposts forward.

  ‘Rupert Eliot, mysteriously checkmated in his attempt to drive his cousin from his books, is proposing as an alternative road to safety the murder of Shoon. This was the murder arranged, and I confess that I was able to look forward to its possible achievement without much distress of mind. The motivation of the crime was – if only in general terms – intelligible. Shoon is a ruthless and – as Archie Eliot had been told – pertinaciously vengeful man. And in A Death in the Desert was something which – somehow – would give Rupert away.

  ‘Now the problems. There was the increasingly prominent secondary elaboration: the campaign against Rupert. The signposts here, when I came to read them aright, were the literary tastes of Rupert and a question about what happened in Eliot’s Grand Tarantula.

  ‘The next problem was that of Eliot’s rally: that queer peripety which followed upon the affair of the Renoir. Here there proved to be only one signpost, and all it said – if I may keep to my metaphor – was Proceed via Clairvoyance.

  ‘The third problem was that of the mysterious dangerousness of Eliot’s projected novel. And here was the same signpost. Proceed via Clairvoyance. Not very helpful you will agree.

  ‘And then – once more – the final problem of the clairvoyance itself; all along the very heart and citadel of the mystery. How did Rupert manage it? And here, fortunately, there were several signposts: the character of Richard Eliot’s imagination; the conversation of Kermode on artists; an aphorism of Proust’s on art. Of these it was Proust – speaking to me through the lips of Winter – who was most illuminating. Let me put the question. Where does the Spider come from?’

  There was a little silence – broken by something like a shout from Winter. ‘Patricia!’ he cried. ‘Appleby, your sister asked just that question while we were playing billiards. And Peter Holme answered out of Wordsworth – not Proust. From hiding places ten years deep.’

  ‘Just that. Only the years are nearer fifty. As Mrs Moule acutely remarked, Eliot has something the air of bringing his stuff rather disdainfully out of the nursery cupboard. Such fantasies as Eliot’s stories build themselves up out of the buried fantasies of childhood; they are the blood-and-thunder imaginings of children in the first grip of the gangster instinct; they are that with an adult veneer. For that sort of writing, Kermode profoundly remarked to me, one is too old at ten. “Kids,” he said. “The secret’s in that.” And it certainly is.’

  ‘Here’, said Bussenschutt approvingly, ‘is sound psychology indeed. But when you distinguish between the reality and the pleasure principles–’

  ‘Eliot’s tremendous success’, Appleby pursued unheeding, ‘results from his having an imagination like a cold storage chamber; from his possessing his boyish fantasies in a beautiful state of preservation, but ready to submit, for fictional purposes, to an adult critical control. And what he thought he was inventing he was is often as not remembering. He was remembering the inventions of childhood.’

  ‘The Muses’, quoted Winter, ‘are the daughters of Memory. No art without recollection.’

  ‘Yes. And in these first inventions Rupert Eliot was a partner. The two boys were brought up together: Richard a day-dreamer merely; Rupert inclined to put lawless fantasies into practice. The stuff of Eliot’s stories is drawn from what Miss Cavey is pleased to call a deep well – and Rupert is at the bottom of the well. There too lies the truth of what Dr Bussenschutt calls the Eliot Case.’

  Appleby knocked out his pipe. ‘And now you will find that of the tidy-up which I began after the explosion surprisingly little remains to be done. Rupert remembered a fantasy which went by the name of The Birthday Party. In a fragmentary way he remembered a good deal; quite enough to score the clairvoyant or prescient effects. But his plan, being subtle, was – I say – double edged. At any time his cousin might hit upon the truth. And that is what happened in the affair of the Renoir. The picture turned up, you remember, in the footman’s bed. Eliot rallied hard upon that, declaring that his mind could not have evolved what he clearly felt to be a coarse joke, and that therefore no metaphysical quiddities or questions of a split personality were involved. It was specious reasoning and it cloaked the truth. He had remembered. He remembered that this was a lewd twist which Rupert had given to some fantasy of theft – the Birthday Party fantasy – long ago. An unsuspected mechanism in the creation of his stories was revealed to him – his Muse was indeed a daughter of Memory. And he saw how, in what had been happening at Rust, Rupert was at work.

  ‘He now knew it was Rupert – that capital fellow, as he liked to think. He knew how Rupert contrived it. But he had no notion why. It seemed utterly wanton. No wonder that he informed his cousin through Shoon’s precious press that he was a nuisance… And Eliot, having a distinctly juvenile and irresponsible strain, hit on a plan for what he called a big mop-up. He resolved to turn the tables on Rupert; to set the Spider, in fact, to scare him away. This was the secondary complication. He warned Rupert there would be trouble at nine. He hinted he had better take himself off to New Zealand on the ninth of December… And then he planned a really big scare.

  ‘He had noticed that in the Collection Rupert glued himself to the curiosa – the indecent books – in a steel bay at one end of the gallery. He rifled the cellarium – he was seen emerging by my sister – and stole a time bomb. He got into a discussion with Shoon over the plot of Grand Tarantula, and thus gained renewed access to the Collection: the point in dispute would have to be verified there. He hid the bomb near the letters – which he had come to regard as a good deal more indecent than the curiosa. Rupert, he reckoned, could not be much more than deadly scared; he would be safe behind that buttress of steel… And then on the pretext of getting his cousin to a safe refuge, he had him shut up in the Collection shortly before the inspection of the tower. It was all brilliant and crazy enough. In fact it was the author of the thirty-seven romances in his best form. Just consider the rapidity and skill with which he must have worked havoc among the Abbey cars and telephones.

  ‘Rupert, uncertain whether it was Shoon or Archie who was threatening him, still knew that he must get Shoon. He chose the moment when he seemed to have an alibi in the Collection, got to the roof and thence down a fake-ruined wall. He shot at Shoon; I scared him off by a volley of my own in air. And now he really was in some danger – an undesigned danger: he was making his way back to the Collection just on nine o’clock. And in fact the bomb, which was a good deal more powerful than Eliot doubtless thought, nearly got him… But all this, though distinctly uncomfortable for Rupert – and for a time for his cousin too – was mere embroidery on our main theme.’

  Winter sighed. ‘And I thought’, he said, ‘of setting up in the detective line. Lord, lord, lord… By the way, what about that Renoir alibi?’

  Appleby chuckled. ‘At least you have a nose for the loose threads. The answer to that one – and to the nonsense of the clarinet and the blind secretary’s stick – is the husband of our dear queen.’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Another irresponsible Eliot, with an uncertain sense of time. Mrs Timothy in the attics had been Rupert’s crony as a boy. They contrived jokes together in the distant past. Only Mrs Timothy is quite u
naware that the distant past isn’t about her still. She is hearty, suffers from senile masculinism, and thoroughly enjoyed impersonating Rupert and scaring Mrs Moule in the dark… Her importance came to me when, on the way to the Abbey, Timmy inaccurately remarked that all the Eliots were en route.’

  ‘It is all over’, said Bussenschutt, ‘bar the camel.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘The camel is perhaps not so very interesting after all – or not from my point of view. The news that Eliot was wandering about the Abbey enquiring about the anatomy of the camel put Rupert in rather a striking stew, and I wondered just what was behind it. But my knowledge of the actual function of the beast is the product of confession – Rupert’s eventual confession – rather than of detection. What is interesting is where I went wrong.

  ‘I reckoned – not unnaturally – that Eliot, by design or inadvertence, must have put into A Death in the Desert something which had really happened within his actual experience. Not a bit of it. He put in a bit of sheer fantasy – what was, though he didn’t know it, one of those buried fantasies of boyhood which he had shared with Rupert. And it was this fantasy which, by an extraordinary paradox, was potentially dangerous to Rupert. For Rupert had once actually employed the same fantasy against Shoon. It was his instinct to actualize day-dreams.’

  Appleby paused. ‘Dr Bussenschutt,’ he asked solemnly, ‘what does the camel keep in its hump?’

  Bussenschutt opened his mouth to speak, checked himself, looked very wary. ‘I have never’, he pronounced, ‘made the subject a topic of investigation.’