Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  ‘You met nobody you knew during this walk?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘You could have been outside Lord Auldearn’s flat off Piccadilly a little before two o’clock and tossed a message into his car?’

  ‘If I had known Auldearn’s car was standing off Piccadilly I could no doubt have kept an appointment with it.’

  ‘Thank you. There is only one other relevant time, that concerning the telegram sent to Mr Gervase Crispin from Scamnum Ducis. Can you take your mind back to the Monday of that week – eight days ago?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Malloch. ‘That was the day I went down to Horton races.’

  The lead of Mason’s pencil snapped on the page: it might have been a revolver shot. Then Appleby said : ‘And you still reject the idea of a plant?’

  ‘Yes. No danger of drowning would make me clutch at it. I am convinced that nothing but coincidence is involved.’

  ‘Will you give us an account of your race-going experiences?’

  But Malloch was not to be shaken by sarcasm. ‘Certainly. I like – perhaps because I am a man of the people – to mingle with common life. It is not a matter of curiosity and observation; it is just that I like a vulgar crowd. I keep it a private foible – a matter of occasionally slipping away. And on the Monday I simply went down with the crush on the excursion train, mingled with the crowd on the course, and returned as I went.’

  ‘And you met, of course, no one whom you knew?’

  ‘Fortunately not. Or perhaps unfortunately not. For I take it I really am one of those who fulfil all the conditions you want – who could, in fact, have done everything?’ Malloch was stony still but pale.

  ‘Professor Malloch, supposing all these acts to be by one hand, you are the only person who could be responsible.’ Appleby paused. Then, in a deadly stillness, he enumerated: ‘The two murders, the assault on Bunney, the five messages–’

  Sharply, the house-telephone interrupted: an urgent buzzing at his side. Appleby picked up the instrument. ‘Hullo–’ His chair fell backwards with a crash; he sprung to his feet. He depressed the receiver-arm, released it, was calling urgently: ‘House-exchange …where was that call from…where...?’ He put the instrument down, looked at his companions. ‘The sixth message,’ he said; ‘another line from Hamlet and again about revenge: “The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.” It looks as if there may be miching mallecho still.’

  Mason put his notebook in his pocket; Sandford swore. ‘Where from?’ he cried. ‘In heaven’s name – did they know?’

  Appleby hesitated. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘plainly not from Professor Malloch.’

  And he ran from the room.

  Ten minutes later Appleby came downstairs and ran into a gracefully dinner-jacketed Gott.

  ‘Now that Sandford’s here I daren’t approach,’ said Gott. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Backwards. No beer-bottles sitting on the wall. Malloch was the last and he’s just had his accidental fall. So it’s as you prophesied. As far as a one-man show goes everybody is eliminated. Conspiracy is now the word.’

  Gott shook his head. ‘If I prophesied that I was wrong. And I don’t think I did. My point was that in all this eliminating business there were too many quirks. One might trip. And one has. I can find you a single-handed murderer yet.’

  Appleby stared at his friend. ‘The dickens you can! And, I suppose, tell me all about the sixth message?’

  ‘There’s been a sixth message? Perhaps I can tell you what it was. “The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.”’

  Appleby fairly jumped. ‘Giles! how did you know?’

  ‘By applying your own favourite method, John. Elimination.’ Appleby took him by the arm. ‘This’, he said, ‘is where the shy scholar has a quiet talk with the police.’

  6

  ‘I am sure’, said Colonel Sandford, square before the fireplace and speaking in a politely diffident yet discreetly fatherly way, ‘that it has been a very trying time for you all – very trying indeed.’

  The arrest had been made; the news had gone round; the first stupefaction was abated, and in its place was dawning an enormous relief: the nightmare of uncertainty and suspense was over. And now at half past nine the Chief Constable had collected a small group of people in the little drawing-room. Plainly he was pleased – exultant in the knowledge that he had taken action and that there was calm in Whitehall. But he was decently subdued, semi-official to just that degree which becomes a soldier playing policeman at Scamnum Court – in fact altogether correct. The Duke might have repented about his dispositions in the matter of port.

  ‘A time of bewilderment and anxiety,’ amplified Colonel Sandford, ‘and I think you are entitled to some explanation of how the matter has been cleared up.’ He considered for a moment. ‘That is perhaps a prejudical expression – let me say rather – entitled to an explanation of how we have reached our present position. And as all of you here will, in the nature of the thing, be required as witnesses I don’t think I ought to risk the appearance of laying down the police case to you now. It might not be quite correct – not quite correct. But I am going to ask Mr Gott – who pieced things together, you know, pieced them together – to give you his own brief outline of the affair. If you would be so good, Mr Gott.’

  Mr Gott looked as if he had very little impulse to be so good. But around the room was a little circle of expectant faces from which there was no decent escape; to decline would be the part of a conjuror who walks off the stage with a much-advertised trick still in his pocket. Gott edged himself a little further into the shadow of a generous chair and began cautiously and informally.

  ‘The affair has been full of contradictions; even now it’s difficult to thread one’s way through them. For instance, there was all the appearance of premeditated murder – and of murder heralded, almost literally, by a blast of trumpets. But I don’t know that murder was intended. And I am quite certain that there was no intention of shooting Lord Auldearn. It was when one had a first suspicion of that, indeed, that one might have seen a first gleam of positive light.’

  A murmur, discreet and fragile as the Ming and ’Tang about the walls, ran round the little drawing-room – a muted version of the expectant buzz that greets the entrance of the Disappearing Lady.

  ‘Again, the mystery appeared baffling. But in a sense it wasn’t meant to be that. And it was when one got the idea that it wasn’t meant to be baffling that there was a chance of its ceasing to baffle. If that is rather enigmatic I will put it this way. The thing was theatrical. It had, as we all felt from the first, an element of showmanship or display. Just what was being displayed? On that question I was present at an interesting conversation between Mr Appleby and Sir Richard Nave. We explored the notion that a motive was being displayed, that the peculiar circumstances in which Lord Auldearn died constituted a cryptic but very real manifesto of motive. Well, there was the motive – already declared in the messages – of revenge. And taking the central problem of Hamlet into account we hit on the conception of a delayed revenge. We were not altogether astray there, for that notion did, I think, come in. Nevertheless the pursuit of a displayed motive was, in a way, an obscuring factor. It obscured the question: Was anything else displayed?

  ‘And failing an answer to that question, a solution was, I believe, a very long way off. Mr Appleby, after analysing the entire series of events with which he had been confronted, came to the conclusion that an element of conspiracy was essential in the case. And he was finally faced with a considerable number of people – I think ten – any one of whom might have been Auldearn’s murderer, but each one of whom would have required a confederate to carry out one or more of the other actions which appeared to be bound up with the case. Now, inquiry strictly along those lines would eventually have exhausted itself – for the simple reason that there was no conspiracy. And after that
it would have been natural to inquire by what device the criminal succeeded in doing everything himself while making it appear impossible that he could have done everything without a confederate. But that inquiry would have been unsuccessful too, because it would have been wrongly grounded. The facts are these: it appeared to Mr Appleby that no one of the persons involved could have done everything; actually one of the persons involved could have done everything; but the appearance to the contrary was something not devised by the criminal but fortuitous.

  ‘I say, then, that a solution was far off – failing an answer to that obscured question: Was anything else besides motive deliberately displayed? And that question was not adequately pursued; it just happened that at a certain stage an answer to it thrust itself under my own nose. You will see the point that I am making here – though to make it is really to anticipate. There has been in this affair an element of deliberate duel. The criminal displayed certain things which one might or might not spot – introduced, in fact, a perverted sporting element. And in the whole conduct of the affair the criminal made no mistake: only where a clue was offered has a clue been found.

  ‘But now let me take up certain questions in the order in which they presented themselves.

  ‘Why was Lord Auldearn killed in the middle of Hamlet? That was the first question and one couldn’t look at it long before feeling it to be insufficiently precise. It was better altered to: Why was Lord Auldearn killed at Act III, Scene iv, line 23 of the Scamnum Hamlet? For then there was an obvious answer: Because Lord Auldearn was alone in a small enclosed space, and because at that moment he was expected by everyone within ear-shot to act in a particular way. He was expected to call for help.

  ‘Now, from technical evidence – a matter, I believe, of slight powder marks – we know that Lord Auldearn was shot at fairly close range. Barring a suggestion that he was shot from above, it is certain that the murderer walked out to the middle of the rear stage. That gave a second question. Why did the murderer do this? Why forsake the safety of the curtains, from the shelter of which it would be possible to shoot, and walk out under the possible observation of the prompter? Three things suggested an answer: the messages; the answer to the first question; and a certain haunting memory, confessed to by Mr Appleby, of the ballet called Les Présages. Mr Appleby’s memory was of Fate or Destiny, a figure of whom one suddenly becomes aware as standing, threatening, on the edge of the stage. Fate, retribution, revenge – you see how Mr Appleby’s mind had moved. And you see, too, what was designed to happen on the rear stage. The avenger, who had already so explicitly threatened Auldearn in the message thrown into the car, was to step boldly out – at whatever substantial risk of observation by Mr Bose – and confront the victim. And you see the peculiar pleasure proposed. In those agonized seconds in which Auldearn recognized his attacker and his attacker’s intention he would be helpless. He might cry out for assistance in the instinctive words that would come on such an occasion – and not a soul in all the hall would take it to be other than as Polonius that he was calling. “What, ho! Help, help, help!” That, structurally, was why the murder occurred where it did in Hamlet, and to that any decorative notion of a manifesto of motive inhering in the play was secondary. It was a diabolically conceived thing.’

  Gott paused – and paused amid a dead silence. For a moment the nightmare had darkened even as it was being dissipated. But presently the quiet, almost reluctant voice continued.

  ‘I believe that Mr Appleby – though he will say nothing about it – had arrived at all this long before I had. But the next point was peculiarly my opportunity. Just as he had an obstinate sense of that fleeting parallelism with Les Présages, so I had an obstinate sense that – somehow and in terms of our own show – the thing hadn’t gone right. The effect had not been as it should be. I puzzled over this and could make no headway with it for a considerable time. As directed against Lord Auldearn the thing had been perfectly effective. And then I saw that there was something lacking to it in another aspect – its aspect as something presented to the audience. For something was assuredly being presented to the audience; we are all certain of the sense of showmanship involved. An artist was at work and I felt – being keyed up, I suppose, in matters of theatrical effect – that something had fallen out as this very formidable mind could not have designed. And I hunted it down at last. It was the way the murder announced itself in a pistol-shot. The pistol-shot was startling enough – but how much more effective if Hamlet had simply drawn back the curtain in the normal course of the play and found Polonius – Auldearn – really dead! Why was Auldearn killed so noisily – why not, for instance, quietly stabbed and left for Hamlet to reveal to the audience? I looked at that question for a time and thought I found it, as you may find it, fanciful – a mere imaginative refinement. So I put it by. I didn’t realize that in contemplating it I was contemplating the heart of the case.’ Gott paused again. ‘I didn’t realize’, he added – absorbed and wholly unconscious of contriving a grotesque effect – ‘the essential connexion between Auldearn’s having been shot and Mr Appleby’s friend Happy Hutton’s not having left a hat at Scamnum after all.’

  There was another silence. Somewhere at the back of the room Peter Marryat, who had slipped in uninvited, sighed in perplexity. All this was running away from him.

  ‘I don’t know that one could have hit on the truth at that point. But in the early hours of this morning I overheard a conversation which really should have given a key. If either Mr Appleby or I had contrived to leap upon that we should have solved the mystery in something like a dramatic manner – and not, as it has been solved, on evidence which the murderer, in that pervertedly sporting manner, has deliberately provided.

  ‘Now let me turn for a moment to motive. The pursuit of motive, I have said, in a sense obscured one question – the question of other things that the murderer might have built into the manifesto, the display. Nevertheless the pursuit of motive did take us somewhere. The crime – the original murder of Auldearn to which the subsequent murder of Bose was merely consequential – seemed to be a passional crime; one, likely enough, of revenge or retribution such as the face-value of the messages suggested. Revenge or retribution over what? And, if one of the implications of the Hamlet situation was to be accepted, delayed or suspended revenge over what?

  ‘I think Mr Appleby, though conscious of the structural reason for Auldearn’s death taking place where it did – the getting the victim, I mean, in a situation in which he could call for help in vain – retained some faith in what may be called the manifesto-significance of the situation. He took as dominant in the play the notion of delay and then tried to interpret the crime as an act of vengeance for a certain personal injury that occurred a very long time ago indeed. But, for my part, I was impressed by something said by Sir Richard Nave in a conversation I have already mentioned. He implied, I took it, that a very long-delayed revenge would be – at least at a certain intellectual level – surprising, unless the cause of the supposed injury were still in some way present: he instanced a stolen thing still flaunted. Now, in the case Mr Appleby was tentatively constructing, and which I need not particularize, there had been – according to a legend that came his way from Mr Tucker – a stolen thing. But there was every reason to suppose that this stolen thing had disappeared from the picture long ago. So I was inclined to ponder another suggestion Nave put forward. Delayed revenge, he suggested, might be the consequence of some deadly and irreconcilable ideological conflict which had extended over many years. I say that interested me. For whereas Mr Appleby’s theory involved a young and passionate Ian Stewart from very long ago – too long ago, it seemed to me – this other suggestion might involve the contemporary Lord Auldearn – I mean the statesman, the philosopher – and the man who sometimes invoked his power as a statesman to enforce his philosophy in its practical implications. In fact I felt that, seeking some such motive as this, I was approaching – if only ap
proaching – psychological probability in respect of the intellectually and speculatively inclined people gathered in this house. You will say that men do not commit murder to defend an ideological position – much less as a sort of demonstration in its favour; they commit murder out of fear or cupidity or some variety of sexual passion. But perhaps that is not fully to take account of our time.’

  Gott hesitated, as if seeking some brief expression of what lay in his mind. ‘All over the world today are we not facing a rising tide of ideological intolerance, and are not violence and terrorism more and more in men’s thoughts? And this dressing-up of the lawless and the primitive as a ruthless-because-right philosophy or world-picture or ideology that must and will prevail – is this not something to haunt and hold naturally unstable men, whatever their particular belief may be? The modern world is full of unwholesome armies of martyrs and inquisitors. We bind ourselves together by the million and sixty million to hate and kill – kill, as we persuade ourselves, for an idea. Are we to be surprised if here and there an individual kills simply because he hates – and simply because he hates an idea?

  ‘At this point it would I believe have been possible, granted a good enough brain, to solve the mystery. But I was far from having such a brain and Mr Appleby, all this time, was preoccupied with an alien, but very grave matter on which I shall presently have to touch. And so the solution came not dramatically but by chance. I say chance without exaggerating one iota. It so happens that the criminal has a certain relative. That relative does not impinge upon the case in the least. But if that relative did not exist, we might never have discovered – and it is a humiliating thought – that the criminal had boldly signed to the murder, not once, but again and again.’