‘But suppose, Mr Appleby, that some sort of secrecy was intended? A point about this out-of-the-way store-room in the tower is that it seems hardly ever visited. Suppose the meteorite was to be some sort of scientific surprise, so that the fellow who found it wanted to keep it quiet for a time–’
‘Then, I agree, this particular store-room wouldn’t be a bad place. But only if the thing could be got unobtrusively up in the lift. To rig up some sort of derrick at a window in broad daylight–’
‘The Wool Court is fairly secluded.’ Hobhouse was obstinate. ‘And the fellow mightn’t mind being seen just by some stray colleague. He’d reckon on simply tipping him the wink not to talk about his innocent little surprise.’
‘Very well. But it’s all slightly improbable?’
‘Yes.’
‘And we are then to suppose that this same fellow panics when the accident occurs, and keeps quiet for more than twenty-four hours thereafter?’
‘Yes.’
‘That in itself being another improbability?’
‘Yes.’
‘And to postulate the coincidence of two minor improbabilities is to establish a major improbability?’
Hobhouse took his pipe from his mouth and smiled. ‘Wasn’t there one of the ancients, Mr Appleby, that always used questions to put one down?’
‘Socrates. And the method must often have been extremely tiresome. But I say that, on the present showing, simple accident is no more than a faint theoretical possibility.’
‘In other words: murder. Someone got this meteorite up to the store-room at the top of the tower, waited until Pluckrose was in position below, and then tipped it out of the window.’
Appleby nodded. ‘Say it looks like murder. And now comes something odd. Actually there are – I think you said four?’
‘Four.’
‘There are four of these store-rooms, one on top of another. And, although not much used, the clerk of works and the head porter check through them once a year. They last did this, as it happens, about three weeks ago. And there was no meteorite. Nothing odd in that. But what is a trifle queer is that there was quite a number of things which would have served equally well. For instance, in the uppermost room but one there was a small steel safe and two deed boxes and a stone cannon-ball and a cast-iron sink. And a dozen miniature reinforced-concrete pillars used by people who study something called the Strength of Materials.’
Hobhouse puffed tobacco smoke approvingly. ‘Very nice, Mr Appleby. A good memory is the most important thing a detective officer can have, if you ask me.’
‘Umph,’ said Appleby.
‘Well, it may be different in London, I don’t know. But you’ve got to the queer part now, all right. There was no need to haul up this meteorite affair at all. Any of those things lying around would have served. The meteorite was a mere wanton freak, like. You agree, sir?’ Hobhouse’s glance was swift and shrewd.
‘Dear me, no. That’s to be in altogether too much of a hurry – lager or no lager.’ Appleby frowned absently at a clout-clutching, sharp-nosed Aphrodite across the room. ‘Perhaps there was little premeditation and the fellow didn’t go up and make an inspection first. He just bundled himself and the meteorite into the hoist, knowing nothing of the safe and the sink and what-not. Or, again, we may be going astray through thinking of quite the wrong type of person. You agree?’
Hobhouse shook a tolerant head. ‘Now, now, there’s no call to go trying to catch each other out. I don’t follow you, I freely admit.’
‘The meteorite didn’t come straight from space. We know that because it was cold and because it shows faint traces of vegetable growth – a lichen or something of the sort. Now, the sort of person we tend to have in mind as the criminal – a scholar or scientist – would at once understand the conclusiveness of evidence of this sort. So, with a little reflection, would ordinary educated people like ourselves. But an uneducated man? Might he not believe that by possessing himself of, and using, this meteorite he was cunningly contriving an almost conclusive appearance of simple misadventure? Might he not, in fact, believe that he was constructing the most irrefrangible of alibis? For no man can be accused of loitering suspiciously in the neighbourhood of Mars or Saturn.’
Hobhouse chuckled. ‘Nor of Venus, for that matter – in just that sense.’ He put down his pipe. ‘You’ve hit on a very important notion there,’ he added soberly.
‘Possibly – or possibly there may be nothing in it. And now consider the topographical layout of the affair.’ Appleby looked at the plan. ‘What’s this thing in the middle of the Wool Court – an aspidistra?’
‘A coconut palm,’ said Hobhouse solemnly.
‘Rubbish.’
‘Actually it’s a fountain. To me, it gives a distinctly watery effect. But I dare say leafy might be applied to it too.’ Hobhouse, now on very good terms with the officer from London, chuckled comfortably. ‘And these things in the angle of the wall are deck-chairs.’
‘Indisputably. What we have, then, is a corner of the ground floor of the main building. It’s like a fat L turned the wrong way round. On the inner side of this is a thin L which represents a corridor. And inside that, again, is the Wool Court and its fountain. The fountain plays?’
‘Commonly it trickles away. But it’s on the main and can make quite a display. And, oddly enough, it was full strength when the body was discovered, and drenching the whole place. Nobody knows who turned it on.’
‘I see.’ Appleby studied the plan again. ‘Now take the corridor. Nothing remarkable about that. Windows looking on the Court–’
‘I wouldn’t say looking. They begin about seven feet up and are full of what is probably called stained glass.’ Hobhouse too, it seemed, was not without his aesthetic reactions.
‘Windows, in fact, that make this corner of the court pretty secluded. Anything else about the corridor? Double doors giving on the court.’ Appleby’s finger moved up the paper. ‘What’s this blob?’
‘It’s not a blob; it’s a telephone. In a little locked box on the wall.’
‘How very odd.’
‘Economy. Pluckrose had to share it with the man next door. Caused trouble, it appears.’
‘But presumably not murder. Pluckrose had this room at the end?’
‘Yes. And then comes Prisk, the professor of Romance languages. And then Pluckrose’s private laboratory.’
Appleby frowned. ‘Aren’t these people oddly mixed up?’
‘Uncommonly, I should say. But, you see, the university has grown pretty rapidly’ – Hobhouse was not without civic pride in this announcement – ‘and at the same time people have refused to budge from their familiar quarters. It seems that in little matters like that there’s nobody who can order professors and suchlike about. So here’s Pluckrose, and then Prisk, and then Pluckrose’s lab and then the photographic room and then–’
‘Wait a minute.’ Appleby had again put a finger on the plan. ‘Whatever is this affair in the corner?’
‘Of the lab?’ Hobhouse puffed at his pipe, much pleased. ‘You’d never guess. It’s a maze.’
‘Ah, for the photography.’
Hobhouse’s face fell. ‘Yes. The dark-room is next door, and the only entrance to it is through this little pitch-black maze. It prevents the accidental ingress’ – Hobhouse paused as if to admire this phrase – ‘of light.’
‘And the dark-room takes up part of the breadth of the building here, and in the other part is the hoist. But the main doors of the hoist open on what is the next room again, a big one in the angle of the building. In fact, the lowest of the store-rooms. And now turn the corner and we come to a man called Marlow.’
‘Yes. But don’t turn the corner before you notice that that lowest store-room had only one pair of doors: on the far side and giving on a road – a public road, that is, but with nothing but university buildings opposite. Here’s the refectory and here’s the Great Hall.’
‘I see. Now Marlow: I think you sai
d he was senior lecturer in English? Good. And next to him?’
‘An aged and bearded person called Murn. Some sort of assistant to Pluckrose. And after that come more labs.’
‘At which we call a halt. But we remember that above the store-room is another store-room, and above that two further store-rooms again. And the two uppermost store-rooms are a bit bigger than those below. In fact there’s a jutting-out or overhanging affair supported on corbels. And at each corner is a further overhang: a little windowed pepper-box affair of a turret. On this final architectural quiddity the whole crime turns.’
‘Just that.’ Hobhouse picked up a match and held it suspended above the table. ‘It meant that Pluckrose, sitting in his deck-chair some feet from the wall of the Wool Court, was directly beneath one of the pepper-box windows.’ He let the match fall. ‘So that once you’d got the meteorite up on the window-sill the thing was a mathematical certainty.’
Appleby sighed. ‘It’s nice that there should be a bit of certainty somewhere. And now I think we’d better go and actually inspect. After that – luncheon.’
‘I hope that you gentlemen will lunch with me?’
They turned round. Hobhouse thrust his pipe in his pocket and scrambled to his feet. Standing in the doorway of the dismal, tank-like room was a tall man dressed in scarlet and gold.
2
The tall man doffed his robes and threw them over a chair. The only bright thing about him now was his eyes, which were of a startling blue and deep-sunken in massive but finely chiselled bone. An odd fact about Henry VIII’s upstart nobility, thought Appleby, is that in under a mere four centuries they have come to approximate so closely to the old Norman type. The Duke of Nesfield looked every inch a duke, and he contrived to suggest that this feat in itself was one man’s sufficient achievement. But that might be a trick, a sort of hereditary pose of proved utility. There was a cold glitter in those eyes which spoke of other things.
‘Conferring degrees.’ The Duke moved across the room and without facetiousness clapped his academic cap on the bald head of a conveniently offering bust. ‘I always do it myself when I’m about. It’s what a Chancellor is for. That and putting his hand in his pocket. If he has one left. Horrible room.’ He paused, and his eye was still the dominant thing; it was searching and utterly remote from the inconsequence of his speech. ‘One stands like a macaw.’ He paused again and suddenly smiled. ‘Like a macaw,’ he repeated delightedly, ‘–that’s it! Mr Appleby, Mr Hobhouse, don’t you agree?’
The image was undoubtedly exact. And as undoubtedly a triumph of efficient dukeishness was the care to place nobody, even for a couple of minutes, on a plane of mere anonymity. Automatically he would inquire the names of the obscure and tiresome policemen he was about to meet. And now it was necessary to speak up – an activity to which Hobhouse appeared momentarily unequal. So Appleby tried. ‘A little bright plumage, sir, must be all to the good. But in here one could scarcely feel at home unless one was – well, say a dodo and pretty effectively stuffed.’
‘Quite so,’ said the Duke – gravely but smiling still. ‘It is like a municipal museum. If only we could rebuild in a pure taste! I agree with dear old Pam that nobody has improved on the Palladian style. But of course I live in it and may be prejudiced by that.’
Palmerston, Nesfield Court – the man did perhaps in his own way put the duke business rather heavily across. Appleby, who distrusted the ruling classes as chronically concerned to hush things up, decided that enough small talk had passed. For a moment there was silence. And then the Duke spoke again. ‘A macaw,’ he said. ‘And the Vice-Chancellor beside one like a great crow. Very apprehensive lest the undergraduates should smoke or throw things or otherwise misbehave. And yet only a few minutes before he was telling me that there had been – a murder.’
Appleby looked quickly up. The Duke’s voice had dropped on the last two words, had dropped with a betrayal startling in one so consummately of the world. He had been greatly shocked. And something more than that.
Again there was a brief silence. ‘A scholar. And in the university! Professor–’ There was the tiniest hesitation. ‘Professor Pluckrose.’
That surely was it. Professor Pluckrose was nothing to the Duke of Nesfield; was no more to him than was Appleby or Hobhouse. But that a crime of violence should occur among men wedded to the pursuit of knowledge, and should occur here in the University of Nesfield. The shock lay there. Or so it was reasonable to guess. But now a servant had come into the room carrying a coat and hat, and it was clear that Hobhouse’s lager must give place to whatever beverage it is proper for dukes to offer the higher constabulary. They went out amid a staring of students and scurrying of porters; a press-photographer, receiving a complex gesture which combined an affable nod and a firm shake of the head, put his camera down, resigned; there was an enormous and quite unreticent lemon-coloured limousine; they sank down as if embedded in the strawberry leaves of nobility. The car purred. Behind them was the sprawling university, garish here and dingy there. In front, humped and lurched against a long, gentle hill, was the town: not very dirty – for wool is cleaner than cotton – but dirty enough to satisfy the most devoted painter of a soiled urban world. How long would it last? thought Appleby, forgetting all about Professor Pluckrose. The lines of back-to-back houses sprawling in a sort of brittle corruption over the obliterated hills and cluttered valleys – how long could they endure? Not long. That was the certain answer. They were a temporary apparition, the rash of a disgusting but mercifully passing disease. They would go and their inhabitants would go and the university would grow enormous and there would be a universe of high-school children and well-soaped engineers. And the man who failed to acknowledge that this would be a bit better was a fool. Would the Duke go too? Probably he would. And he would take with him much of the world’s arrogance and independence and eccentricity – there would be something to deplore in that. But at the moment he had little appearance of evanescence. Perhaps he no longer owned the chaos which sprawled and spewed about them. But he looked very comfortably in control.
‘The Club?’ said the Duke, as if somebody had asked a question. ‘I think not. The Club is a very good sort of place. Clubs are a very good sort of place in general, I should say. But we have never taken to them. I go to the hotel.’
They went to the hotel – vast, a sort of Egyptian or Babylonish Gothic, a dream of aimless commercial opulence. There was a railway station buried in it; when war came it would be bombed – so it too was fated to pass. Meantime the Duke had his own room and – Appleby presently suspected – his own cellar. They helped themselves to bread and cheese, to a dark, acrid Italian wine miraculously transported and preserved. No servant showed his nose. The duke made coffee and said what he had to say.
‘You know, the old Nesfield is going. It won’t survive this coming war. And I for one shan’t mourn it. A nasty rabbit-warren of a place.’
Hobhouse, rather inclined to sit on the edge of his chair, opened wide eyes like a shocked child. Appleby looked thoughtfully at the heavy hotel cutlery: this all seemed remote from the Pluckrose affair, but it was close to what he had been thinking half an hour before.
‘And we shall have a sort of dog-kennel civilization instead. Every man, every family-unit in a nice drudgery-proof kennel with plenty of bright paint and a good high fence round. Do you ever look at the bookstalls? All those magazines about homes and gardens and refrigerators and furniture polish? It’s not a dream world, like the cinema. It’s a world on the verge of becoming real. And, to my way of thinking, not a bad thing. But desperately insulating and unsociable. The rabbit-warren is at least a shoulder-rubbing sort of place, but that breeds communal feeling, ideas, discontents – the things which make the individual life get somewhere. What I fear is a vast bourgeois stagnation, with the discontents all snugly in the refrigerator and the frictions which alone make possible any effective movement industriously furniture-polished away. That’s why our university – this sort
of university – is so important.’
‘I see,’ said Appleby.
‘Well, not many people do. All these little Toms and Dicks and Harrys – and Susans and Josephines and Gladyses too – come from the workers and the lower middle class; from the people who, a couple of generations from now, will be absorbed in an amorphous and classless material prosperity. Not, mark you, a prosperity running here and there to wealth. Just a nice whack all round and perhaps half as much again for the bureaucracy policing it. Now, where is a little breadth of mind going to come from all this? From Susan and Harry, if you ask me. Lord knows what they’re taught: Anglo-Saxon, Fitting and Turning, Political Economy – it doesn’t matter very much. The point is that for several years, and when almost grown-up, they rub along in coteries and crowds, and sit chattering on benches which never see furniture-polish from one year’s end to another. Moreover they are in contact with scientists and scholars – a sort of people who often don’t very clearly know whether they possess homes and gardens or not. In fact, these universities may temper the coming, attractive materialism rather as chapels and institutes and so forth a little tempered the disgusting materialism of the last century. So I always support any extending of our university, even if the extension is just another dodge.’
‘A dodge?’ said Appleby.
‘A dodge by industrial people to get necessary training and technical research done partly at somebody else’s expense. I always support it just the same. It keeps the young people together for a bit in something which at least isn’t a factory and hasn’t got a boss. Gives them a chance to hatch things.’
And the Duke of Nesfield chuckled with a certain malice. The truth was, thought Appleby, that he enjoyed still being a boss himself, and the local university was one of the instruments left to him. No doubt the Toms and Susans ought to be grateful – but it was doubtful if they would quite like that malicious chuckle and that masterful tone. And meantime there was the curious problem of what this was all about – for it was beyond even the aplomb of the Duke to disguise the fact that his luncheon had been something out of the way. Was he in the habit of buttonholing all and sundry – the fathers and uncles of Susan and Tom – for the purpose of airing views on the provincial universities of England? Almost certainly not. And Appleby stood up and spoke at a gloomy guess. ‘You think, sir, that it will be a great pity if a struggling institution becomes the centre of some vulgar scandal; that it will be extremely fortunate if the affair turns out to have been an obscure accident?’
The Weight of the Evidence Page 2