The Weight of the Evidence

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

  The Weight of the Evidence

  First published in 1943

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1943-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755121171 EAN: 9780755121175

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Map

  1

  It was soon apparent that Pluckrose had been murdered. A brief inspection of the corpse suggested that the only other possibility was what lawyers call an Act of God – and that of the kind which patently violates Natural Law. Of those concerned perhaps only Professor Prisk considered the fatality so felicitous as to make this explanation plausible. And yet between Prisk and Pluckrose there was, so far as was generally known, no deep-seated occasion of malice. Simply, these two had been required to share a telephone. Such are the antipathies of the cloister.

  Not that the place was in fact cloistered in any substantial sense. The provincial universities of England, although often abundantly medieval in point of architectural inconvenience, have little of the organization characteristic of traditional places of learning. The staff – a word which at Oxford or Cambridge might be used of persons employed in a hotel – is not accommodated in spacious common rooms and cosy suites. Sometimes it is provided with a cellar in which the extravagant may drink coffee-essence at eleven o’clock; sometimes there is also an attic with chairs, where meetings may be held; a midday meal is obtainable by those who will grab from a counter with one hand and from a cutlery basket with the other. The scholars live in remote suburbs, often surrounded by two, three, or even four children and a wife; they ‘come in’ three times a week (giving it out to be four) or four times a week (giving it out to be five). To warm the sombre private rooms with which they are provided small gas stoves are supplied; but lurking caretakers pounce with an extinguishing hand upon these should a few minutes’ absence justify the economy; nor has the sternly pencilled notice Don’t touch the stove! ever been known to restrain such cold and flint-hearted janitors. In short, the amenities of communal life are scanty, and perhaps the professors and lecturers are expected to go much out and acquaint themselves with the world. Unfortunately neither Pluckrose nor Prisk nor many of their colleagues has list or talent for this; for them the Scholar, as for Chaucer the Monk, is of little estimation without his right professional seclusion. But although they cannot bring with them from Oxford and Cambridge the immemorial organization of a learned community, they can and often do bring the somewhat attenuated charities which such societies produce. The matter of the telephone had rankled, as it might not have done in a larger air.

  The death of Pluckrose, a beguilement from the first, was presently a sensation. Everybody was scared and shocked; everybody was literate; the result was a lavish expenditure of that sort of wit by which – psychologists assure us – the bewildered mind endeavours to maintain a perilous equilibrium. ‘Gather the rose,’ murmured young Roger Pinnegar as he swept gowned down windy corridors; ‘gather the rose of love.’ And ‘Gather the rose of love while yet is time,’ he said aloud to Mr Marlow under the great clock; ‘Gather the rose of love while yet is time while loving thou mayst loved be with equal crime.’ ‘Vivez,’ said Mr Marlow readily; ‘vivez si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain, cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie. ’‘Mitte,’ said old Tavender, popping out of the Classics lecture room; ‘mitte sectari rosa quo locorum sera moretur.’ All three academic gentlemen giggled – Marlow and Pinnegar the more loudly in that their Latin was uncertain. ‘And I stick by that,’ said Tavender, waving his hand in what was presumably the direction of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. ‘Chuck it. Leave it alone. Forget about it. He’s horribly dead. Well, let it go at that.’

  ‘Go, lovely rose,’ said Pinnegar automatically.

  ‘Pluckrose is in his grave,’ said Marlow.

  ‘Professor Pluckrose Pounded to Pot-pourri,’ said Pinnegar.

  ‘Deceased Savant Smells Sweet,’ said Marlow. ‘Dead Biochemist Blossoms in Dust.’

  ‘Pounded?’ asked Tavender, lowering his voice; ‘really pot-pourried?’

  ‘Absolutely so.’ Pinnegar nodded almost soberly. ‘And by the Martians. There’s the rub. By an inhabitant of earth – yes. W
hy not? Pluckrose was like that. But the Martians, so inappropriately named –’

  ‘Lucus’, said Tavender, ‘a non lucendo.’

  ‘–the Martians, stolid and phlegmatic by their dull canals: why should they take to pounding Pluckrose with their planetary artillery? Ask Orson Welles.’

  ‘When you come to think of it,’ said Tavender, ‘Pluckrose was pretty close. What did one know of him. Not much.’

  Pinnegar nodded. ‘Most secret and inviolate Pluckrose. Did he keep a mistress? Was he quietly devoted to a mother of incredible age? Had he formed a curious private collection of–’

  An electric bell of ingeniously piercing quality shrilled overhead. Doors banged. Students filled the corridors. Girls hurried past, bespectacled, note-booked, serious; girls loitered past, nudging, giggling, powdering; men skylarked, shouted, bit into sandwiches. Down the five ill-disposed wings of Nesfield University, vaulted, machine-carved, echoing, and damp, surged conflicting columns of adolescent humanity, a rout of jostling automotive sponges hurried from pool to pool of a knowledge codified, timetabled, and approved. Islanded in the midst, like three jackdaws among a charm of lesser fowls, Tavender, Marlow, and Pinnegar maintained their own characteristic and esoteric jabber. Outside, in a little plot of ground known as the Wool Court, Pluckrose, pounded and pashed, lay with a tarpaulin between him and a smeared and smoky sky.

  ‘A couple of years ago I had to do with a university murder,’ said Appleby. ‘But that was in the south. Oxford, was it – or Cambridge? I forget. So many of these things happen.’

  ‘Umph,’ said Inspector Hobhouse. The sound indicated that for him the humour of New Scotland Yard was without appeal.

  ‘Anyway, the corpse was called Umpleby. A good North Country name.’

  Hobhouse rose massively to a repartee. ‘There’s a fair number of us managing things down there.’

  ‘To be sure. Well, I sat with the local inspector just as I’m sitting with you now. And he explained the affair just as you’ve been doing. Not so lucidly perhaps, but competently enough.’

  ‘Umph,’ said Hobhouse. His voice held an appreciable change of tone.

  ‘We sat and studied a plan just like this one.’ Appleby tapped a sheet of paper before him. ‘But there was one difference that I remember. Beer.’

  ‘Beer?’

  ‘They sent us in beer.’ Appleby’s eye traversed the empty table. ‘Two uncommonly handsome tankards.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Hobhouse was impressed but cautious. ‘You wouldn’t say that a thing like that was lowering to the dignity of the force?’

  ‘Not the way it was done. With the compliments of the College – that sort of thing. Do you know, I remember that beer better than I remember the crime. It was a confused affair.’

  ‘Umph.’ Hobhouse too scanned the long bleak table, momentarily depressed. ‘When we go out to lunch,’ he said, ‘I think I can find you–’

  ‘Capital. But first perhaps we’d better go over the ground again. I’m rather slow, as you’ve seen.’

  ‘Not a bit.’ Hobhouse was almost genial. ‘But if you ran over the facts as you’ve had them so far–’

  ‘Pluckrose was a biochemist of some eminence. Nobody on the scientific side here is in quite the same street. There may be something in that.’ Appleby felt in his pocket. ‘Why not light your pipe?’

  ‘I suppose they wouldn’t object?’ Hobhouse looked doubtfully round the room. ‘It’s not what you’d call a very homey spot, is it?’

  Appleby too looked about him – thoughtfully, as if here might be an unexpected key to the riddle which lay in front. The place was some species of boardroom; presumably the professors of the university, as also the council of local notabilities by whom they were controlled, held their deliberations here. Large and square and high and gloomy, with walls of oily brown paint relieved by inconsequent outcrops of bare stone, it would have, if disfurnished, much the appearance of a sanitarily conceived receptacle for polar bears or hippopotami in a nineteenth-century zoological park. Gothic windows, anxious to present a symmetrical effect when viewed from without, had disposed themselves into a bewildering chaos when viewed, as now, from within; rafters, obedient to the necessities of some warren of rooms and corridors superimposed, edged themselves into positions suggestive of an obscure system of antipathies and affinities above; there was a fireplace so large that it held a massive bookcase stuffed with fading university calendars and superannuated reports. Above this last hung a sizeable canvas by Burne-Jones: an affair of enigmatic and epicene figures wandering amid a complicated system of trellises and vines. The rest of the wall space was covered up to a height of some twelve feet with a jumble of mutton-chopped or bewhiskered worthies in photogravure and daguerreotype and oil; similar worthies, more substantially commemorated in gleaming white marble, were dotted round the room on pedestals, while here and there a nymph or goddess, fashioned in the same forbidding medium, cowered and postured in futile pudicity and alarm. The whole evinced that curious unawareness of even the elements of aesthetic decorum to which the learned seem peculiarly prone. The room was itself a sort of murder; was a clumsy bashing of the simple rules of seemliness; was a brutal bludgeoning of the innocent and unoffending eye. Enormously criminal – thought Appleby extravagantly – must be the people who tolerated such a horror. Murder – yes. But murder considered as one of the fine arts? Surely not. But yet – Appleby frowned. But yet to kill a man seemingly out of interplanetary space – He struck a match, puffed, and turned to Hobhouse once more.

  ‘A scientist of eminence. You know, they very seldom go in for the sort of thing that leads to a sticky end. Jealousies sometimes – but not very often. Personal irritabilities and squabbles often enough. But such things with them are commonly peripheral.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hobhouse.

  ‘I mean that they exist only on the fringes of the mind, on those borders of the whole psychical field where there isn’t enough energy or attention or whatever it be to produce any very drastic consequences. It’s with other types – artists, for instance – that you sometimes get odd shifts of energy to those fringes. Then you may find mere irritations and obscure antagonisms suddenly issuing in violence, vendetta, a settled and effective hate. But not on the whole with scientists. And another thing. Commonly they are either moral – sexually, I mean – or immoral in a methodical, businesslike, and undangerous way.’

  Hobhouse looked up. ‘You don’t’, he said somewhat unexpectedly, ‘paint a very attractive portrait.’ His eye went gloomily round the worthies on the walls. ‘And, by the way, is this what you call running over the facts?’

  Appleby grinned, unoffended. ‘It’s what I call running round them. Winding into the subject, you might say.’

  ‘I see.’ And Hobhouse’s gaze transferred itself fleetingly to a hideous and Gothicized clock – uselessly, for the clock was of the kind which has exchanged time for eternity long ago. ‘A kind of lager is the best beer we brew down here.’

  ‘Very well. You tell me that Pluckrose, eminent scientist, was killed by a meteorite – a giant meteorite. It fell plop on him yesterday morning as he was sitting on a deck-chair in the little quadrangle called the Wool Court. There was no pretence that the fatality was actually an astral affair. A mass which had in fact fallen through the entire stratosphere–’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hobhouse.

  ‘–which had in fact fallen right through the air from outer space would, of course, be fairly hot, and would pretty well bury itself where it fell. Neither of these phenomena was observed. We must conclude, then, that someone took this massive and unlikely object and deliberately pitched it down on top of the victim. Why?’

  ‘Why indeed, Mr Appleby. Why indeed.’

  ‘I don’t mean what was the motive for the total crime. I mean simply, what was the motive for proceeding in just this way? It cut out – or, speaking theoretically, all but cut out – the best security which a murderer can achieve: the appearance of natural death. Pitch
a coping-stone at a man – or a piece of lead roofing or a shower of tiles – and it may remain possible so to fix things that the appearance of accident results. But this does not apply to a meteorite, because meteorites are not part of the customary furniture of roofs.’ Appleby paused. ‘You must forgive the obviousness of all this. We’re considering the facts. And what, when one comes to think of it, constitutes a thing a fact? Its obviousness, I should say. Do you agree?’

  Hobhouse, very properly ignoring this invitation to metaphysical discussion, shook his head. ‘You might be hoisting a meteorite to a museum or store-room or such like on an upper storey. And it might fall and kill somebody. And then you might be so scared–’

  ‘Quite so. In theory the possibility of simple misadventure remains. But, in practice, wouldn’t you say it could be ignored?’

  ‘I don’t know as to that.’ Infinite caution was plainly Hobhouse’s line. ‘After all, there is a sort of store-room just in the appropriate place. You can’t quite ignore that.’ And he laid the stem of his pipe on the plan before them.

  ‘True enough. And in a tower which actually overshadows the spot where Pluckrose was sitting. But there is no provision for hauling up heavy objects from the Wool Court. What is provided is a sort of lift or hoist inside the building itself. One could hardly rig up a heavy affair of beams and pulleys on an outside wall without being spotted. Nor, when the lift was available, would it be sensible.’

  ‘Unless the meteorite was too heavy for the lift.’

  ‘To be sure. Suppose, then, that somebody about the university had a meteorite he wanted to store, and that he decided on this place in the tower. The lift is too small, or otherwise unsuitable. Wouldn’t he then find some more convenient place altogether? Or, if he decided to persevere, is it believable that he would attempt the whole laborious business himself, rather than call in porters and so forth, who would make comparatively light of the job?’