Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  Noel departed. Appleby was still prodding about the room. Gott sat down beside Gervase’s spacious fireplace and stared thoughtfully at the soot which had been the sole result of Appleby’s explorations there. His inner eye kept turning back to the rear stage in the hall, tenanting it anew with that fairytale squad of detective-officers photographing and vacuum-cleaning round the body of a Lord Chancellor of England. They were a symbol of the clamant fact: a pistol-shot – still utterly mysterious – had tossed Scamnum into a world as fantastic as any in the whole domain of his own Elizabethan drama. His mind switched to the bloody carpet in Elizabeth’s room; that, he felt, had been less a symbol than a menace, a portent of danger lurking no one knew where. And remotely but convincingly before him he discerned the possibility of a reaction to experience that he had never thought to know – the reaction of panic. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I think I’m going to be panicky.’

  ‘You mean you’re anxious about Lady Elizabeth. I hope we’ll be too busy presently to be envisaging unlikely dangers.’

  It was not a very sympathetic speech, perhaps because it had been absently framed. Appleby’s mind too was on the rear stage, a rear stage that kept presenting itself in disconcerting fusion with that other and vaster stage on which he had watched Massine’s obscurely struggling destinies. A queer cinematographic cross-cutting of Hamlet and Les Présages…he dismissed it as the muddle of a brain beginning to grow tired.

  Noel returned. ‘Coming,’ he said. ‘He started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons – I don’t think.’ He paused with relish on the vulgarism and then added: ‘If you ask me, he’s annoyed.’ And Noel sat down on the bed with something the air of an expectant habitué of the National Sporting Club.

  Half a minute went by. There was a brisk but deliberate tread in the corridor. The door opened and Gervase entered. He took an unhurried glance round the room and said: ‘May I have an explanation of this extravagant proceeding?’ It was true that he did not look guilty. But neither did he appear angry – until quite quietly he added: ‘…you imbecile baboon?’

  Noel wriggled luxuriously on the bed. Gott made a deprecatory noise which immediately struck him as donnish and ineffectual to a degree. And Appleby said: ‘Sit down.’

  Gervase’s eyebrows went up, much as Noel’s had done some time before. But his person went down, ponderously into the most comfortable chair. ‘Mr Inspector,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind your gambolling among my things a bit. It’s a comparatively harmless employment until we can get you taken away. But I object extremely to being hunted about the house as I have just been hunted. And my resentment is less with you than with my cousin here, who behaves like a bell-boy while presumably claiming the character of a gentleman. And now, what do you want?’

  ‘The camera,’ said Appleby.

  Gervase’s eyes narrowed. ‘My dear man,’ he said, ‘you’re wasting your time.’

  Imbecile baboon or dear man appeared all one to Appleby. He said: ‘As you probably know, the house is now very efficiently isolated. Go back, please, and bring the camera.’

  What, it occurred to Gott, if the Duke had made a mistake? One cannot tackle the Gervase Crispins of the world like this and escape unpleasant consequences if one’s ground gives way beneath one. But Appleby seemed perfectly assured.

  ‘I have told you that you are wasting your time.’ Gervase paused and shifted his ground slightly. ‘Will you explain just what is in your head?’

  ‘That you brought a document out of the hall, secured a photographic reproduction of it after you had left Mr Gott in Lord Auldearn’s room, and then deposited it where it was eventually found on the stage.’

  It would have been difficult to affirm that Gervase was not dumbfounded. And certainly he was angry; Appleby scarcely remembered an angrier man. He turned on Noel. ‘So that’s what you meant by Ruritanian treaties!’ He turned back to Appleby. ‘Apart from this fantasy about myself, have you any reason whatever to believe that the document has been tampered with at all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have no other line to work on except this that you are putting over on me?’

  ‘At present, nothing so circumstantial.’

  ‘And you’ve been here for – what – four hours?’

  ‘About that.’ Appleby’s resentment in face of this inquisitorial method was all assumed. Let the other man take the lead and there is always the chance of his heading in a significant direction. ‘About that,’ said Appleby in grudging admission.

  ‘And a document – of importance apparently – has been tapped. And your net progress consists in turning this bedroom upside down and asking me fool questions about – a camera, did you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Appleby. ‘The camera. Will you go and get it, please?’

  Noel chuckled audibly. Gervase raised his hands to his head in a sort of despair. ‘And it hasn’t occurred to you that you are building wildly on next to nothing? That against this story of a camera that you’ve got hold of stands the solid blank unlikeliness of my having shot a guest and old friend of the family in order to pick his pocket? Had you not better at least begin with something less improbable and come back to me, you know, if all else fails?’

  ‘I have to begin with what first significantly presents itself. And you rather pile on the unlikeliness. The murder of Lord Auldearn and the tapping or attempted tapping of the document may be matters essentially unconnected.’

  Gervase stiffened. ‘No doubt. And you want me for the tapping?’

  ‘I want that camera. And if you don’t fetch it I must fetch it myself.’

  Gervase sprang to his feet in so evident a passion that Appleby found himself involuntarily bunching his fists. But there was no attack; with a noise that Noel likened to that of a sea lion diving Gervase steadied himself. He walked to the far end of the room, turned, and spoke on the first stride back. ‘Mr Appleby, on my coming in I spoke to you offensively. You’re not a fool.’ There was something about Gervase that made this admission an almost adequate apology for apostrophe as an imbecile baboon. ‘No doubt you know your job and what you must go for. And surely you see that the…matter you wish to discuss is probably irrelevant? Will you take my word as a gentleman that it is so?’

  ‘Mr Crispin, you’re wasting my time. I am aware of the probabilities but I can’t deal in them yet. If I were investigating the loss of my own cheque-book I’d take your word at once. As it is–’

  The sentence was never finished. Without warning the door flew open and Anna Merkalova swept into the room. ‘Gervase,’ she demanded tragically, ‘have they found out?’ And she tossed a small metallic object upon the bed.

  Gott wondered if too much concentration on the Scamnum Hamlet was inclining him unwarrantably to assess things in terms of stage effect. The Merkaiova’s entrance had been excellent theatre. Noel, who had apparently decided for the time being to contemplate the distressing and confusing events of the night with all the aesthetic detachment which an editor of Crucible could command – Noel was obviously gratified by the turn the proceedings had taken. He twisted his neck to contemplate the exhibit which the Merkalova had cast on the bed and then straightened it to observe the more compelling exhibit of the Merkalova herself. She was not very adequately clothed. Perhaps she was content with the garment of psychic virginity piously attributed to her by Gott. But she had none of the appearance of one riven between Artemis and Aphrodite; she was a maturely and unambiguously attractive female, her Russian eye (thought Noel, quoting the poet) underlined for emphasis, and lit up, at the moment, with the most lovely intimations of passion. The lady, he said to himself, is about to throw a temperament.

  ‘It’s a sort of camera,’ said Noel placidly into the momentary silence that had fallen upon the room.

  What followed was not without its perplexities. The Merkalova’s language – addressed to Appleby �
�� was fortunately obscure; or obscure to all but Appleby, who happened to know some Russian. And the camera-business was obscure; Appleby took one step towards the bed, looked at the instrument – and smiled rather wryly. He turned to Gervase. ‘Mr Crispin, I half suspected this – until I felt no man would be obstinate enough to conceal anything so trivial. If my time has been wasted it has been wasted by you. You have played the donkey, sir.’

  Noel sighed happily. Gott listened in some surprise to the urbane Appleby’s apparently joining a slanging-match. But in a moment he saw that the attitude turned on some shrewd reading of character. Gervase, after one indignant shout, was no longer an angry man. He gave a low guffaw of laughter and tumbled into a vein of extravagant humour. ‘In fact, the fable’s of the donkey, the baboon, and’ – his glance went to the still voluble lady – ‘the humming-bird… Anna, for God’s sake be quiet.’

  Perhaps Gervase was brusque because he had been caught in what was essentially a chivalrous action, or perhaps that was the suggestion which – amid much outré humour – he was now contriving to establish. Gott, noting these alternatives for future consideration and wondering if Appleby were doing the same, eyed the tiny camera and listened to the chivalrous story. And certainly the two fitted together. The camera might be presumed capable of photographing documents, but that certainly was not the purpose for which it had been designed. The Duke had called it ‘small’; actually – while being obviously an instrument of precision – it was a mere matchbox of a thing. In fact it was a spy’s camera in a very special sense: the sort of camera with which audacious persons obtain for public gratification pictures of occasions too intimate, awful, or exalted for overt recording. Gott remembered a recent batch of such snapshots in a magazine: surprising glimpses of what had been called a ‘cheery party for sub-debs’. And the smart journalizing Merkalova, desiring doubtless with laudable. independence to earn her own guineas, had apparently adopted the not-laudable plan of introducing such a machine to profane the wholly decorous, but intriguing mysteries of the Scamnum Hamlet. There would be a handsome cheque in it and no particular mischief beyond a gross abuse of hospitality. So it was a likely enough tale. And so was Gervase’s account of subsequent events. The Merkalova, thoroughly scared after the pistol-shot, had thrust the embarrassing apparatus upon him and begged him to get it away. He had realized what she had been about, foreseen the possibility of search, and taken the opportunity, incidental to his suggestion of visiting Auldearn’s room, to throw the mildly incriminating object into his own. Later – and this was what the unfortunate Duke must have happened upon – he had thought it discreet to remove the film pack from the camera, chop it up, and put the fragments down a drain.

  Thus Gervase’s story, which he concluded with the vigorous symbolism of pulling an imaginary plug. And plainly the story had to be accepted, as Appleby had ingeniously accepted it before it was told. It covered the facts. And, as Gervase went on to point out in his own peculiar idiom, it covered the facts in a probable and almost prosaic way. ‘I’m afraid, Mr Appleby,’ he said with a grotesque gesture over his face, ‘that it strips away the false whiskers and the sinister leer of the unscrupulous magnate. I suppose unscrupulous magnate was the phrase in your head? Well, well – the melodrama turns limp comedy. A pity…such a damned good story it would have made – eh, Giles? But elderly back-benchers with drab City backgrounds just don’t cut out for that sort of part. The whiskers sit awry on the blunt and honest face and the leer turns out to have been all in your own mind. And though Anna is quite the sinister Roosian–’

  ‘She is nevertheless’, Appleby took him up with a polite inclination to the lady, ‘as English as you are; is that it?’

  Evidently, it was not it. Gervase’s expostulation was brief, the Merkalova’s was sustained – but the indignation of both was extreme. Appleby made apologetic murmurs. He had been quite wrong in this as in the major issue, the matter was irrelevant anyway, everything had been explained. He made tentative movements as if to gather up Gott and Noel and leave the room. But the Merkalova had been touched in the vitals – with a nice economy, Gott felt – and now, very decidedly, she had something to work off. What it was emerged in a variety of the languages of Europe. But it was not philological interest in a virtuoso display of cosmopolitanism that caused Appleby to give some attention as the harangue progressed. It was the matter. How infamous – so ran the gist – and that the police should waste their energies trumping up a tale about Gervase carrying off a document and photographing it when a little inquiry would satisfy them of the guilt of somebody else. Whom else? Whom, of course, but the Sandys – cette saligaude!… Búrlak!

  A diversity of responses followed this outburst. In Gervase there was uncomfortableness and impatience, as if the wrong coda were being clapped on a hitherto well-constructed piece. Noel manifested rage as extreme as Gervase had been displaying some time before. Gott felt mild distress and traced it down to resolutely romantic views on what Bunney, he unjustly suspected, would call Woman’s Higher Moral Number. But Appleby’s reaction was to frame particularly careful questions. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said: ‘now we come to something important. Can you remember, please, exactly what Mr Cope said?’

  It pulled the Merkalova up. ‘Cope?…ce radoteur-là…! I know nothing of Cope, Isprávink-Mudr’yónui.’

  ‘Then you saw the burning yourself?’

  ‘Akh! Bozhe moï! Burning? Aber geh…n’en sais rein. She was writing – she. Scribbling…no? Deprisa, ligera, heimlich, in piccolo… no-no? Secret writing – bátiushki moi!… Voilà la conduite qu’elle tient, the smug pug, salope!’ The Merkalova turned passionately to Gervase. ‘Golubchik – próshol!… Proshtchaï!’

  And having delivered herself of this reckless linguistic grand tour the Merkalova swept from the room with a final ‘Ukh!’ followed by a dubious Gervase and a resolved Noel. Gott and Appleby were left as they had been – lords of Gervase’s ravished apartment.

  Gott looked at his watch. ‘A grain of comfort’, he said, ‘lies in the unfaltering approach of the Scamnum breakfast. But what do you make of all that? And why was the lady so angry when you doubted her true-blue hyperborean blood?’

  Appleby got up. ‘As you say, breakfast. Now I wonder–?’ He disappeared into the bathroom and emerged a minute later lathering his face with two fingers and brandishing one of Gervase’s razors. ‘Must keep smart for your friends, Giles. Well, as we were saying – did you look at the lady’s legs?’

  Gott raised an austere eyebrow. ‘They were certainly there to be looked at,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t find them suggestive?’

  ‘My dear John!’

  ‘Think of Degas, Giles. And moonlight and muslin.’

  ‘Ballet!’

  ‘Yes. The Merkalova’s past is in ballet. You remember the only juryman to laugh at Serjeant Buzfuz’s joke about greasing the defendant’s wheels in Bardell Against Pickwick?’ Appleby could be like this when excited – or baffled. ‘He laughed because he’d greased his own chaise-cart that morning. I spotted the Merkalova – that turned-out stance of hers – because I’ve just come from ballet. And I happen to have enough Russian to notice that her Russian is just two streets ahead of mine. I expect she was in the Imperial Schools for a bit before the war. And – as a point of minor psychological curiosity – I expect her profession explains old Sir Richard What’s-his-name’s puzzlement over the happy couple’s love-life. Ballet people are a species by themselves, getting all the common relations of life a bit odd.’ Carefully – for strange razors are tricky things – Appleby finished shaving. ‘But where are we, Giles? Where are we now?’

  Gott looked at his watch again. ‘For one thing, we’re at five-fifteen. And our other whereabouts are up to you. I should put them at the moment as somewhere between pillar and post. Where are we, indeed, with Gervase and the Sandys and Cope and Happy Hutton and Timothy Tucker–’

 
‘Who’s Timothy Tucker?’

  ‘One of the dozen or so exhibits not yet shown.’

  Appleby waved Mr Timothy Tucker aside. ‘Order,’ he said; ‘method; the little grey cells! Or in other words we are where we are and have to begin from there. Now Gervase–’

  ‘Haven’t we moved – or been moved – on to the Sandys? Are you not hurrying after her at once?’

  ‘I think that’s what your Noel’s doing, and she’ll keep for a little as far as I’m concerned. Hold on to Gervase for a moment and give me your estimate. Imagine yourself editing a text in your own learned way. There’s a disputed reading. One variant is: “Gervase’s story of the Merkalova sneaking photographs of Scamnum celebrities for gossip-papers is true.” And the other variant is: “Gervase was after the document either with this camera or another, and his story represents either a planned get-away or a brilliant improvisation.” Now bring all your knowledge to bear and attempt a numerical estimate of the probabilities involved.’ Appleby, though putting the matter in this odd way, was obviously wholly serious.

  Gott considered. ‘Allowing pretty generous weight to everything against Gervase – a certain pat quality about the Merkalova’s appearance, for instance, that may well have been fortuitous – allowing that I should still put the odds at about forty to one in favour of Gervase’s story being the true reading.’

  ‘I was going to say fifteen. But it’s impressive odds at either estimate, particularly if you remember the first effect on us of the Duke’s disclosure about the camera. Anyway, as soon as I saw that snapshot-snooping toy I knew there was no further pushing that way; the story would be watertight. The long chance remains and all we can do is to note it and look elsewhere. But pushing the spies into limbo again, what about an estimate of Gervase simply as a murderer?’