The Case of the Gilded Fly

by Edmund Crispin

  ‘People appear to get married,’ said Nicholas to the blonde, ‘for no reason at all. The reasons adduced by Christ’s church on earth have become, thanks to the march of science, grossly inadequate. I like to observe, though, the way the standards of the church have dropped. Originally, complete continence was the standard of virtue, and marriage a derogation of it. Now, marriage is the standard of virtue, and unmarried love the derogation. No one nowadays takes seriously the imputation of feebleness contained in the words “such persons as have not the gift of continency”.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a great pity no one has any regard for chastity nowadays; even the church has more or less abandoned it, along with Commination Service and other inconvenient and uncomfortable parts of its rites.’ He smiled benevolently. ‘Of course, there are advantages to marriage: it eliminates the tedious and anaphrodisiac process of wooing, for one thing.’

  ‘Oh, don’t try to be clever, Nick,’ said the blonde disgustedly.

  ‘On the contrary: I was trying to bring my conversation down to a level where it would be comprehensible to you. Have another drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ The blonde crossed her very attractive legs and adjusted her skirt over them with meticulous care. ‘Tell me about the murder. I want to hear all about it.’

  Nicholas emitted a snort, of disgust. ‘I’m fed up with the murder,’ he said, ‘I never want to hear another word about it to the end of my life.’

  ‘Well, I do,’ the blonde persisted. ‘Do they know who did it?’

  Nicholas was sullen. ‘Fen thinks he knows,’ he said. ‘I know he’s been right on other occasions, but I don’t believe in the infallibility of detectives.’

  The blonde was emphatic. ‘If he says he knows, then believe me, he does. I’ve followed all his other cases, and he’s never been wrong yet.’

  ‘Well, if he does, I hope he keeps quiet about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you mean you don’t want to see the murderer arrested? A nice thing,’ said the blonde indignantly, ‘if people can go about killing girls and getting away with it.’

  ‘With some girls,’ rejoined Nicholas severely, ‘it appears to be the only way.’

  ‘Who do you think did it?’

  ‘Who do I think did it? Good heavens, girl, I don’t know. I expect I did it myself, in a moment of mental aberration.’

  The blonde looked suitably alarmed. ‘No, really,’ she said anxiously.

  ‘Lots of people had reason to, and half the town seems to be incriminated one way or another. Jean Whitelegge took the gun, Sheila McGaw owned the ring that was found on the body, Donald and Robert Warner and I were all about when it happened, and Helen and Rachel have no alibis. I plump for Helen, myself. She had the only real motive – money. And Fen’s been running about after her with his eyes goggling and his tongue hanging out. He’s always particularly nice to his murderers – before he has them arrested. Yes, I think Helen’s the obvious choice; she’s just the sort of sentimental, ignorant little thing who’d do something primitive like that.’

  ‘I suspect sour grapes,’ said the blonde with unusual acumen. ‘She’s been going about with that good-looking young journalist recently, hasn’t she?’

  Nicholas sneered. ‘Well, really,’ he said, ‘if that’s your standard of male beauty –’

  ‘All right, Mephistopheles,’ the blonde interrupted with spirit, ‘we know anything outside your infernal, Byronic charm is anathema. You can get me another drink now, if you like. I’m going to gold-dig you for all I’m worth this morning.’

  Nicholas rose with reluctance. ‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when I wish that Timon’s comments on Phrynia and Timandra had been a little more subtle and a little less openly offensive. They’d come in so useful.’

  Robert and Rachel progressed in circles round Addison’s Walk, the soft, clean, effeminate beauty of Magdalen just beyond them.

  ‘Are you nervous about tomorrow?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Not exactly nervous; excited, though. I think it’s going to be a good performance. The company’s played up brilliantly, and you, my dear, are God’s own gift to a producer.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said prettily.

  ‘A first performance,’ he said. ‘Ridiculous effervescence of personal vanity. “Look at me, the brilliant Mr Warner, showing off with a gang of actors and actresses” – that’s all it really amounts to. I remember the first play I ever had put on – at a little theatre club in London, when I was still a struggling, insignificant repertory actor of twenty-one. Lord, but wasn’t that exciting! I went about pretending that it was the sort of thing that happened to me every day, and weaving fantastic daydreams about a year’s West End run – which, I may say, never materialized.’

  ‘And I remember,’ said Rachel, ‘my first part in London – a very tarty Helen in a production of Troilus. I imagined all the critics would give me flattering bit-part notices – “special attention should be given to Miss Rachel West, who makes a brilliant miniature of an unsympathetic part” – but in fact none of them said anything about me at all.’

  Robert eyed her whimsically. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘It’s all vanity really. Costals, in Montherlant’s novel, is the quintessential type of the artist – the self-sufficient, childish, ruthless egotist. Pulled to pieces, that’s certainly all I amount to.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, no, my Robert,’ she said, taking his arm, ‘no fishing for compliments. I’m not going to swell your vanity any further.’

  He sighed. ‘How well you know me, my dear.’

  ‘After – what is it? – five years I ought to.’

  ‘Rachel,’ he said suddenly, ‘would you consider marrying me?’

  She stopped and looked at him in amazement. ‘Robert, my sweet,’ she said, ‘what has come over you? Is this a belated consideration for my honour? I warn you, if you say that again, I shall take you at your word.’

  It was his turn to look surprised. ‘You mean you would?’

  ‘Why the astonishment? My feminine instinct has always been to get married, only you don’t want to, and anyone else would have been intolerable.’

  ‘You realize it will involve a lot of rather tiresome gossip? About the imminence of little strangers and so on?’

  ‘That can’t be helped. If people want to gossip, let them.’

  He made her sit down on a bench facing the river. ‘For a long time now,’ he said, ‘I’ve been lusting after permanence. It’s wearing to hold out against the conventions of society indefinitely.’

  ‘That does a little take the edge off the compliment.’

  He grinned. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I think it would be rather a good marriage, don’t you? – one of those tranquil, permanent affairs. We know enough about one another to respect each other’s madnesses and obsessions.’ He mused. ‘Perhaps, like Prospero, I’m developing an obsession about marriage.’

  She took his hand. ‘Has Yseut’s murder got anything to do with this?’

  ‘Oh, a little, perhaps. An object lesson in the awfulness of unregulated sex.’

  ‘Robert’ – her voice was serious – ‘what is going to happen about that – the murder, I mean? Do you think this man Fen really knows who did it?’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I hope he keeps it under his hat till after tomorrow night, anyway.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if it were cleared up – rather than have it hanging over us?’

  ‘My dear, it might be one of the cast – you or me, for that matter. If it were Donald or Nick, I suppose it wouldn’t matter. But if you asked me, he’s not going to do anything about it at all.’

  ‘Yes, what are you going to do about it, Gervase?’ asked Mrs Fen.

  Fen absently retrieved a ball hurled more or less in his direction by his small son, and threw it back again. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘I’m sick to death of the whole business.’

  ‘It’s no good to keep on saying that,’ said Mrs Fen reasonably, rescuing her kni
tting-wool from the attentions of the cat. ‘You’ve got to make up your mind one way or the other.’

  ‘Well, you advise me.’

  ‘I can’t possibly advise you unless I know who did it.’

  Gervase Fen told her.

  ‘Oh.’ Mrs Fen paused in her knitting, and then added mildly: ‘But how extraordinary.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? Not what one would have expected.’

  ‘I won’t question you as to why and wherefore,’ said Mrs Fen. ‘No doubt I shall hear all about it eventually. But I suggest you drop a gentle hint.’

  ‘I thought of that. But don’t you see, whatever I do, I shall have it on my conscience till I reach the grave.’

  ‘Nonsense, Gervase, you’re exaggerating. Either way you’ll have forgotten completely about it in three months. Anyway, a detective with a conscience is ludicrous. If you’re going to make all this fuss about it afterwards, you shouldn’t interfere in these things at all.’

  Fen reacted to this bit of feminine common sense in a characteristically masculine way. ‘You’re most unsympathetic,’ he said. ‘Everyone is. They advise me to read Tasso.’ He evoked the image of a monstrous and far-reaching persecution. ‘Here am I on the horns of a Cornelian dilemma – torn between duty and inclination –’ He wavered, forgot what he was talking about, and seized on the last thing he could remember. ‘Why has a dilemma horns, by the way? Is it a sort of cattle?’

  Mrs Fen ignored the digression. ‘And to think,’ she said, ‘that I never even remotely suspected. Mr Warner was lecturing me on the murder, by the way, while you were downstairs. He said he thought the killer had come in by way of the West courtyard.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Fen vaguely. ‘That was very lucid of him.’

  ‘As far as I could see, that was impossible, and I told him so. He seemed very disappointed.’

  ‘I imagine that was only politeness. He’s quite genuinely not interested in the investigation. Not really surprising, when he’s got a first night coming off on Monday.’

  ‘Is it a good play?’

  ‘Brilliant. Rather in the Jonsonian tradition of satire.’

  Mrs Fen shuddered elaborately. ‘I never did like Volponei. It’s cruel and grotesque.’

  Fen snorted. ‘All good satire is cruel and grotesque,’ he said. ‘John,’ he added to his offspring, ‘you mustn’t take the cat by the tail and dip it in and out of the pond like that. It’s cruel.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Mrs Fen, ‘I shan’t come and see it.’

  ‘You can’t come and see it,’ Fen answered rudely, ‘there’s no room.’ The phraseology of the more abominably offensive of creatures in Alice tended to insinuate itself into his conversation.

  ‘Who are you going with, then?’

  ‘Nigel and Sir Richard.’

  ‘Nigel’s a nice boy,’ said Mrs Fen reflectively. ‘Didn’t you say he was going about with Helen?’

  ‘No doubt he’s gadding about somewhere with her now,’ said Fen gloomily. ‘Anyway, he borrowed my bicycle. I hope he looks after it. People are so careless.’

  Fen’s bicycle was a large, uncompromising affair apparently constructed out of pig-iron. Nigel, as he toiled down Walton Street on it with Helen at his side, regretted, not for the first time, Fen’s monastic indifference to scientific progress. Once they reached the tow-path, however, the going was easier, and they bowled along merrily enough towards their destination, the ‘Trout’.

  ‘I wish,’ said Nigel, panting heavily, ‘that you didn’t imagine you were in for a track-race.’

  Helen grinned back at him over her shoulder. ‘All right, slow-coach!’ she shouted, and slowed down to allow him to catch up with her. ‘Honestly, though,’ she added, ‘I have a conscience about this expedition. Yseut killed only the day before yesterday, and here am I cycling about Oxford in a pair of red corduroy slacks. Everyone who’s passed has looked profoundly shocked.’

  ‘That’s the trousers,’ said Nigel with some justice, ‘not your unsisterly behaviour. I wonder if Fen ever oils this thing?’ He appeared to be searching for traces of this activity.

  ‘Look out!’ said Helen. ‘You’ll be in the water in a minute.’

  Nigel altered his direction with as much dignity as he could muster. ‘I’m not going to talk,’ he said, ‘until we arrive. This is too exhausting. Then a drink – several drinks in fact – and we’ll have our lunch somewhere in the meadows beyond. What time have you got to be back for your dress-rehearsal?’

  ‘I ought to be in the theatre by half past five.’

  ‘I’ve got Evensong at six, so that will fit nicely.’ They rode on enjoying the clean tang of the air and watching the perilous manoeuvres of two undergraduates in a sailing-boat.

  At the ‘Trout’ they found Sheila McGaw with a miscellaneous party. ‘Hello,’ she said, waving to them. ‘Are you taking the opportunity of getting out of Oxford, too? What with policemen and one thing and another, it’s getting to be unlivable in.’

  ‘Don’t talk to us about policemen,’ said Nigel. ‘Like the Foreign Legion, we’ve come out to forget.’

  They had their lunch on the bank of a tiny tributary stream which meandered absurdly over a muddy bottom. There they ate sandwiches and tomatoes and apples. Helen, raising herself on one elbow, remarked:

  ‘It’s extraordinary how hard the ground can be.’

  ‘Don’t slide off the mackintosh, silly,’ said Nigel. ‘The ground’s still damp from yesterday’s rain. Is there another tomato?’

  ‘You’ve had four already.’

  ‘I asked for a tomato, not a lecture.’

  ‘I gave you the lecture in default of the tomato. There aren’t any more.’

  ‘Oh.’ Nigel silent for a moment. Then he said: ‘Helen, will you marry me?’

  ‘Darling, I was hoping you were going to say that. No, you can’t kiss me now, my mouth’s full.’

  ‘You will, then?’

  Helen considered. ‘Will you make a good husband?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Nigel, ‘abominable. I’m only asking you because you’ve just come into such a lot of money.’

  She nodded gravely. ‘Would you be likely to interfere with my career?’

  ‘Horribly.’

  ‘How soon do you want to get married?’

  Nigel shifted uneasily. ‘I wish you wouldn’t scrutinize my proposal as if it were a length of bad cloth. The proper thing to do is to fall rapturously into my arms.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Helen complained. ‘All the food’s in the way.’

  ‘Well, we’ll move the food, then,’ shouted Nigel, exhibiting a sudden energy and hurling it wildly in all directions. ‘Void, ma chère.’ He took her in his arms.

  ‘When can we get married, Nigel?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘Can it be soon?’

  ‘As soon as you like, my very dearest.’

  ‘Don’t there have to be banns and licences and things?’

  ‘You can get special licences,’ said Nigel, ‘in fact if you pay twenty-five pounds for an Archbishop’s Special Licence you have powers of life and death over every clergyman in the country.’

  ‘How nice.’ She snuggled down comfortably in the crook of his arm. ‘You do make love beautifully, Nigel.’

  ‘Darling, you should never say that. Nothing goes to the head of the male species more disastrously. Of course,’ he said, ‘although you’re now disgustingly rich, I shall insist on supporting you.’

  Helen sat up indignantly. ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. What, let all that money go to waste!’

  Nigel sighed happily. ‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ he said, ‘but I thought I’d better say the proper thing.’

  She burst out laughing. ‘You beast,’ she said happily. Then, when he had kissed her: ‘You know, I don’t think the open air is a good place for making love.’

  ‘Nonsense, it’s the only place. Look at the eclogues.’

  She said meditatively: ‘I think Phyllida and Cor
ydon must have ended up with a lot of bruises.’

  ‘What is the best place to make love, then?’

  ‘Bed.’

  ‘Helen!’ said Nigel in shocked tones.

  ‘Darling, we are husband and wife in the sight of God,’ she said solemnly, ‘and these things are a fit subject of discussion between us.’ Her tone changed suddenly to one of dismay. ‘Oh, Nigel, look what a mess I’m in!’

  ‘A sweet disorder in the dress,’ said Nigel, ‘kindles in clothes a Wantonness –’

  ‘No, Nigel, remember you promised – no Elizabethan verse. Oh dear, why do you literary young men always quote? Stop it, darling!’ She put her arms round his neck, and Herrick was very appropriately smothered in a kiss. They lay back, laughing and exhausted, and gazed at the cream-soft clouds which hung motionless in the pale blue sky above their heads.

  13. An Incident at Evensong

  A dirty pillow in Death’s bed.

  Crashaw

  Nigel reflected, as he turned into St Christopher’s at twenty to six that evening, that there was something extraordinarily school-boyish about Gervase Fen. Cherubic, naïve, volatile, and entirely delightful, he wandered the earth taking a genuine interest in things and people unfamiliar, while maintaining a proper sense of authority in connection with his own subject. On literature his comments were acute, penetrating, and extremely sophisticated; on any other topic he invariably pretended complete ignorance and an anxious willingness to be instructed, though it generally came out eventually that he knew more about it than his interlocutor, for his reading, in the forty-two years since his first appearance on this planet, had been systematic and enormous. If this ingenuousness had been affectation, or merely arrested development, it would have been simply irritating; but it was perfectly sincere, and derived from the genuine intellectual humility of a man who has read much and in so doing has been able to contemplate the enormous spaces of knowledge which must inevitably always lie beyond his reach. In temperament he was incurably romantic, though he ordered his life in a rigidly reasonable way. To men and affairs, his attitude was neither cynical nor optimistic, but one of never-failing fascination. This resulted in a sort of unconscious amoralism, since he was always so interested in what people were doing, and why they were doing it, that it never occurred to him to assess the morality of their actions. This fuss about what he shall do in connection with Yseut’s murder, thought Nigel, is entirely characteristic.