‘Exciting, isn’t it?’ said the headmaster blandly.
His engine was a powerful one, and he had no difficulty in keeping up with Stagge, though the speedometer needle was hovering round sixty. Ahead of Stagge, the Hispano was slowly gaining. Soon they came to a long stretch of road, straighter and broader than hitherto. At the far end, still diminutive to them, was a bridge even smaller and more perilous than that in Ravensward village. A steep slope fell away to the right of it, protected from the road only by a fragile fence of wooden posts and wire. All three cars rushed towards it.
‘Nearly at the main road,’ the headmaster muttered. He was crouched over the wheel like a racing driver. ‘We’ll lose him there, I’m afraid. Look, he’s pulling ahead already.’
But the end was at hand. It is well known to all motorists that for some inscrutable reason the most gigantic lorries in the manufacturers’ catalogues are invariably to be met with at the most impassable points of the most exiguous lanes, at the unlikeliest hours of the day and night. So it was now. The Hispano was no more than a few yards away from the bridge when a stupendous shape loomed up on the opposite side. The Hispano had slowed down for the bridge, but it was still travelling far too fast to be able to stop in time. They saw it swerve – saw its metal flank punched in like paper by the lorry’s radiator. Then it wheeled, crashed through the fence, and disappeared down the slope. The next moment there was a violent explosion, and the night sky was lit up by fire.
The lorry driver dragged on his brakes and jumped down from his cabin, cursing. The two pursuing cars pulled up, and Stagge and Mr Plumstead, traversing the gap in the fence, raced down the slope towards the burning wreckage. They disappeared into the conflagration, and after what seemed an eternity emerged again, dragging a blackened and distorted figure.
‘Jesus,’ the lorry driver muttered. ‘Poor devil. But it was his own bloody fault.’
There was a second explosion. Heat swept up at the lookers-on. The conflagration became a raging furnace.
And Fen, hitherto motionless in the road, was galvanized into activity. He began to run down the slope towards that core of white heat. But he was not halfway there before his arm was gripped from behind, and he turned to look into the blackened face of Stagge. The superintendent was badly burned, and the glow of the flames made him seem the denizen of some choleric inferno.
‘I shouldn’t, sir,’ he warned. ‘Even if you wanted to sacrifice yourself, you’d never get it out of that. And anyway, it may not even be there.’
Fen halted, recognizing that the attempt was futile. He nodded towards the shrivelled, unidentifiable human form near which Daphne and Mr Plumstead and the lorry driver were standing.
‘Dead?’ he asked.
‘No, sir. Alive. But only just. I must get him to hospital straight away.’
‘Get yourself to a hospital,’ said Fen. ‘He’s going to die in any case.’
‘Nothing seriously the matter with me,’ said Stagge grimly. ‘I can manage.’
He limped away. Fen turned his eyes back to the blazing wreckage. The headmaster came up to him.
‘Who is it?’ he demanded. ‘For God’s sake, Gervase, who is it?’
Fen stared at him almost uncomprehendingly. With even greater urgency the headmaster repeated his question.
‘My dear fellow,’ said Fen. ‘I didn’t realize you were still in the dark…It’s your secretary, of course. Galbraith.’
16
Eclipse
‘So I spent the morning tidying up loose ends,’ Fen said. ‘Saw Weems, saw Stagge, chatted to Etherege – incidentally, he supplied me with one of the missing links – visited Brenda and told her all about it, and wound up by drinking beer at the Beacon with Daphne and Mr Plumstead.’
‘Is Brenda recovering?’ the headmaster asked.
‘Oh, yes. Rapidly.’
‘And Stagge?’
‘He wasn’t as badly burned as I thought at the time. He’s bandaged up, of course, but not in bed. As for Plumstead, getting Galbraith out of that car doesn’t seem to have harmed him in the least. He must be a salamander. He’s taken a liking to the Beacon, and is going to spend the rest of his holiday there.’
It was the afternoon of the day following the speeches, and Fen and the headmaster were seated in the study in Davenant’s. Beyond the windows the site was almost deserted, for most of the boys were spending the day with their parents. Last night’s rain had broken the spell of fine weather, and the sky was overcast. A cool, steady wind was blowing – so cool as to have induced the headmaster to light his fire. And Fen’s long, lanky body was sprawled almost horizontally in the leather-covered armchair, his green tie with the mermaids flowing over his left lapel, his undisciplined brown hair projecting in spikes from the crown of his head, and his ruddy, clean-shaven face warmed to a comfortable glow by the combined effects – gastronomically somewhat nightmarish, but pedantry in drinking bored him – of Mr Beresford’s bitter and the headmaster’s Haut-Brion.
‘Galbraith…’ the headmaster murmured. ‘I still can scarcely believe it.’
‘Why?’ Fen demanded. The psychology of the affair interested him, and he was anxious to hear the headmaster’s views.
‘Because I’ve worked with the man for so long, in close collaboration, without ever dreaming he had such atrocious potentialities. I can’t think, you know, that this is a case of “there, but for the grace of God”. He must have been abnormal – and I never suspected it for a moment. I used to imagine I was a tolerable judge of character, but I shall never trust myself again.’
‘Did you, in fact, know very much about him?’
‘Nothing,’ said the headmaster. ‘I’ve been thinking it over, and I realize that I knew precisely nothing, except for a few vague and innocuous details about his past. If I’d appointed him myself I might have known more, but I simply took him on trust from my predecessor, who recommended him highly. And he was an efficient secretary – quiet, competent, tactful, unobtrusive. Too efficient, I suppose. If I’d thought about it, I would have realized that something must be going on behind the professional façade. But apparently he was quite normal until this business of the manuscripts came up. I can only suppose that he had persistent dreams of moneyed grandeur, and that the huge sums involved simply knocked him off his mental balance.’
‘And Somers? Are you surprised at his being involved?’
‘Not so much. I disliked him, as I’ve told you, but he hadn’t been here long, and I didn’t know him well…But look here, Gervase, you promised at lunch to give me a complete account of the business. This morning’s papers had nothing but a bare statement of the facts, and there are a great many things I don’t understand.’
‘What exactly do you want to know?’ Fen asked, yawning. He was a heavy sleeper, and two truncated nights had made him very drowsy.
The headmaster got out his pipe. ‘First of all, how you reached your conclusions – step by logical (I trust) step. Then a chronological narrative of events, bringing in the whole background.’
‘That’s a large order,’ Fen murmured. ‘It’ll keep us here till teatime.’
‘No matter. My hands are tied till I get a substitute for Galbraith. Do you know’ – the headmaster strayed momentarily to the consideration of his own troubles – ‘the only stopgap I could find was some dimwitted girl from the local commercial college. Things are going to be chaotic for the next few days. And I know what tomorrow’s postbag will be like: endless letters from parents who’ve read the papers, ranging in tone from nervous apology to downright abuse.’
Fen stretched out his hand to take a cigarette from the silver box on the desk.
‘The key to the whole business,’ he said, ‘can be summed up in two words: invisible ink.’
‘I’d gathered that,’ said the headmaster, offering matches. ‘But begin at the beginning, please.’
Fen looked rather surly at this injunction, but his sigh indicated resignation.
‘Very
well. The first news I had of the case – you told me almost as soon as I arrived – was of Brenda Boyce’s assignation in the science building, her subsequent alarm and refusal to explain it, and the breaking open of the cupboard in the chemistry laboratory. Later on we heard of Brenda’s disappearance on the way home from school. Well, there was plenty of material for conjecture in all that, but, as I said at the time, the number of possible explanations, sinister and otherwise, was legion. I made a provisional interim assumption that the two things were connected – that Brenda had seen the burglar and been frightened into silence. But it was no more than the vaguest of unconfirmed hypotheses, and I was perfectly ready to abandon it at any time if necessary. Besides, at that stage the theory presented a number of difficulties – obvious difficulties enough, and so I needn’t expatiate on them now. In particular, Brenda’s disappearance, combined with Miss Parry’s view that the farewell letter was a fake, made it clear that if she had witnessed the burglary, then it had had implications beyond and above the implications of common theft, since those who commit petty larceny very seldom go to the trouble of kidnapping witnesses and fabricating elaborate hoaxes to account for their disappearance. I concluded, therefore, that – granted Brenda had witnessed the burglary – it was a crime of more than ordinary importance. Beyond that, everything was hazy and obscure.’
‘This exposition is overcautious,’ the headmaster commented. ‘After all, it’d be stretching coincidence too far to suppose that Brenda’s kidnapping wasn’t connected with the burglary.’
‘Coincidences do happen,’ said Fen. ‘And I’m trying to keep to what was plain and unarguable. I want, in fact, to emphasize that every conclusion I reached in this instance was perfectly obvious and incontrovertible, and we didn’t actually come on anything incontrovertible until we investigated the murders of Love and Somers.
‘You remember that while we were waiting for Stagge to arrive you filled in the victims’ background for me. Two things you told me proved important later on – though remember, I paid no special attention to them then. They were first the regularity of Love’s habits, and second Love’s puritanism. I stored them in my mind, along with all the rest, for future reference, and when the police turned up, we all went across to the common room.
‘Now, the first and most startling oddity about Somers’ murder was that electric fire, and I was thinking about it while they took their photographs and went through all the other routines. In the first place, of course, it might have been some sort of a red herring; the problem about that theory, however, was that the fire didn’t suggest anything; it was pointless. Can you think of any reason, however fantastic, why, having shot a man, you should switch on an electric fire in order to mislead the investigators?’
The headmaster, after a moment’s rather perfunctory thought, admitted that he could not.
‘Very well, then. I didn’t entirely dismiss the red herring theory, but it seemed more likely that the fire had been used. Only – used for what?
‘Bodily heat? Of course not; it was a stifling night. Cooking? Well, there was no evidence of cooking – as there would have been if the cooking had been innocuous; and how cooking could be sinister, and connected with a shooting, I was at a loss to see. Warming the corpse? But as I pointed out at the time, the fire was too far distant. No, the thing had to be considered in broader terms. Scientifically speaking, the function of heat is to produce chemical change. And that reflection, I need hardly say, rang a bell: chemical change – the cupboard in the chemistry laboratory – Brenda’s rendezvous in the science building. But chemical change in what, and for what purpose? Someone might have been burning papers, but an electric fire isn’t at all a convenient agent for that purpose…And so forth. I won’t weary you with a complete list of the possibilities, and the objections to them. I was led at last to a consideration of the reports and you’ll agree that as regards the reports, chemical change by means of heat could only mean invisible ink.
‘Was there any confirmation of this possibility? There was. I refer, of course, to the sheet of clean blotting paper, similar in kind to that which Wells had put in the pads earlier that evening, which was found in Somers’ breast pocket. The top of the pad at which he was working, you recall, was covered with mirror images of the comments he had written on the report forms; and Wells reported that each and every pad had its exact quota of blotting paper. Now – I argued – if Somers had, for some reason, written the reports in invisible ink and warmed them up at the fire (while wishing, as he obviously did, to give the impression that he had written them normally between ten and eleven), he would have to do something about the blotting which could not plausibly be left virgin and unsullied; and what he would do would be to take a sheet of the stuff at some previous time – the identical brand being supplied by the school stationer to boys and staff as well as to Wells for use in the common room – cover it with the appropriate marks of his writing, bring it along inside his mark book, and pop it into the pad. Only – knowing Wells’ meticulous habits – he’d be careful to remove a clean sheet from the pad to take away with him, in case someone should count the sheets and discover an extra one. Do you follow me?’
‘Perfectly,’ said the headmaster. ‘And I can see more confirmation coming.’
‘Of a lesser sort. You mean, of course, the insistence on times. But don’t let’s go ahead too fast. I was convinced that invisible ink had been used – but why? It required no very great effort to decide that Somers wished it to be thought that he had been busy in the common room between ten and eleven when in fact he had plenty of time to be away from it on some private errand. And what errand? Well, presumably something illegal. He had carefully supplied himself with an alibi; if he were to come under suspicion he could make exactly the suggestion I made, rather maliciously, to Stagge – namely, that his efforts be imitated and the minimum time needed for their accomplishment ascertained. That minimum would be arranged so as to be close on an hour. And Somers could then say, “You see? I just shouldn’t have had time to do” – whatever it might be.
‘And other evidence strengthened this hypothesis – the fact that Etherege knew exactly how many reports Somers had still, apparently, to write, the fact that Somers asserted he’d have them finished by eleven, the fact that he asked Wells to call him at eleven, the fact that he could rely on Wells being about at ten to witness his arrival and the start of his supposed labours. But what – I asked myself – was all this for? Why did Somers want an alibi?
‘Well, I’d already heard about the second murder, and in the absence, so far, of contradictory evidence, I thought it eminently probable that Somers had wanted his alibi in order to commit that. But there was an unknown quantity in this carefully contrived equation: someone had murdered Somers himself. And I felt that I mustn’t accept unreservedly the explanation I’ve just postulated of the invisible-ink business without examining the possibility that this x – this unknown – had had a finger in it. There were, it seemed to me, two alternatives: either the invisible-ink business had been deliberately contrived by x in order to be discovered and so point to Somers as the murderer of Love; or the invisible-ink business had been contrived by x so as to give himself an alibi for the murder of Somers.’
‘Both of which theories,’ the headmaster interrupted, ‘would necessarily involve Somers’ complete innocence.’
‘Exactly. And they would also involve his cooperation. There was never any doubt that the writing on the reports was his.’
‘I suppose they might have been forged,’ said the headmaster apologetically.
‘Oh, my dear Horace,’ Fen groaned. ‘Forging a signature effectively is one thing, forging ninety-seven separate reports is quite another. And besides, have you ever tried forging in invisible – that’s to say, colourless – ink? Virtually impossible, I assure you – it’s difficult enough when you can see what you’re doing.’
‘All right,’ said the headmaster hurriedly. ‘I agree that Somers must ha
ve written the reports.’
‘I’m glad you agree,’ said Fen, without, however, displaying any special jubilance at the event. ‘And – I repeat – the two alternatives I outlined a moment ago must therefore have involved Somers’ innocent cooperation. Now – I ask you – is that possible? What conceivable tale could our x have invented in order to induce him to embark, unsuspicious, on such an elaborate and incredible scheme? If anyone approached you with such a suggestion – whatever the pretext – you’d think him insane. No, I was forced back on my original idea that Somers had contrived the whole business to provide himself with a colourable alibi.
‘So what? The next oddity was the broken wristwatch, and the dilemma which that implied I indicated at the time. Somers had, of course, said it was broken in order to get Wells to call him at eleven, but it would have been quite unnecessarily thorough for him to have broken it himself, since watches are inexplicable things which stop and start again for no reason perceptible to the lay mind. Besides, he would not have put it back on his wrist the wrong way round. I’ve worn my watch as Somers wore his for as long as I can remember, and for as long as I can remember I’ve never once caught myself absent-mindedly strapping it on in the unaccustomed though more usual way. Clearly x had tampered with the watch. But – in heaven’s name – why?
‘The position of the hands made no kind of sense and offered no kind of clue, and the only conclusion I could reach was that x had been intent on confirming Somers’ alibi, in order to give himself an alibi for Somers’ murder. You see, it cut both ways. If it could be proved subsequently, from the reports, that Somers had done fifty-five minutes’ work, then clearly no one could have killed him, on the face of it, before five to eleven, and x could be supplied with an unbreakable alibi for that time – sufficient reason, I thought, to make him anxious that the invisible-ink camouflage should not be discovered, and to suggest to him that he should finish the scene-setting which Somers had begun.’
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