The Case of the Gilded Fly

by Edmund Crispin

  He was discovered in his room, putting the final touches to his notes on the case. ‘The police have definitely decided it was suicide,’ he said, ‘so these’ – he pointed to the small heap of papers – ‘will have to be put in cold storage for a while. By the way,’ he added, ‘I’ve decided what I’m going to do.’ He handed Nigel a small sheet of notepaper.

  On it were three words, from one of the satires of Horace: Deprendi miserum est.

  ‘ “It is horrible to be found out,”’ said Nigel. ‘So – ?’

  ‘So I put this in the post this evening, and hand over my notes to the police on Tuesday morning. That gives h – the murderer a remote chance to clear out. By the way, I rely on you not to let this go any further. I’ve discovered it’s a criminal offence.’ He grinned cheerfully.

  ‘In that case,’ murmured Nigel, ‘do you think it’s really wise – ?’

  ‘Hopelessly unwise, my dear Nigel,’ said Fen. ‘But after all, I’ve got the whip-hand. I can always tell the police I’ve realized my idea was wrong, and that I’m as much at a loss as they are, and no one can prove anything to the contrary. Besides, if one wasn’t a little adventurous sometimes, the world would be intolerable.’ He appeared to be hoisting a symbolic skull and cross bones at the mast-head.

  Nigel grunted, whether in agreement or disapproval it was impossible to tell. Fen wrote a name and address on an envelope, put the paper inside and sealed it up. ‘This shall be delivered into the hands of the G.P.O. after chapel,’ he said, putting it into his pocket.

  ‘Has it occurred to you,’ said Nigel, ‘that you may be endangering the lives of a lot of totally innocent people by setting a murderer on the run?’

  Fen looked suddenly worried. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It has occurred to me. But I don’t think this person will kill again. Tell me,’ he added, hurriedly dismissing the uncomfortable topic, ‘have you still no idea of who did it?’

  ‘I spent last night in the time-honoured stooge’s task of getting out a time-table, and as I expected got no enlightenment from it whatever. Anyway, half the assertions in it are unproved or unprovable, so I needn’t have expected anything.’ He took out a sheet of paper and gave it to Fen. ‘It’s your business now, as the great detective, to glance at it, tap it with your finger, and say “This reveals all.”’

  ‘Well, so it does,’ said Fen, ‘and I can’t help it if you’re so dumb that you don’t see why. I’ve got a similar table, with certain things underlined and a few comments added. Look at it again, dear boy. Doesn’t it leap out at you like a wart on a bald head?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Nigel, staring at the list in a bemused way. It ran:

  From 6.0. Robert, Rachel, Donald and Nicholas in bar of ‘Mace and Sceptre’; Yseut at B.N.C.; Helen in her room; Sheila and Jean in theirs (last three unconfirmed).

  6.25. Donald, Nicholas leave ‘M. and S.’, arriving in college at

  6.30 approx., when Rachel also leaves to go to the cinema (destination unconfirmed).

  6.45 approx. Helen arrives at theatre.

  7.10 approx. Yseut leaves B.N.C.

  7.35–40. Yseut arrives at ‘M. and S.’, puts through phone call.

  7.45. Helen goes on at theatre. Donald and Nicholas cross to room opposite Donald’s.

  7.50 approx. Robert leaves ‘M. and S.’ for college (unconfirmed).

  7.54. Yseut arrives at college.

  7.55. Helen comes off stage.

  8.5. Robert arrives at college.

  8.21 approx. Robert goes down to lavatory.

  8.24. Shot heard.

  8.25. Yseut found dead.

  8.45. Helen goes on again at theatre.

  Jean and Sheila say they remained in their rooms all evening (unconfirmed).

  Rachel says she remained in the cinema until 9.0 (unconfirmed).

  Donald and Nicholas say they remained in room from 7.45 (unconfirmed).

  ‘I don’t see,’ said Nigel, ‘that it’s any use at all. Half the statements may be false.’

  ‘No doubt they are,’ Fen replied equably. ‘But how revealing all those “unconfirmeds” are! It does give the game away, Nigel,’ he added, patting him benevolently on the back. ‘Why did you include Helen, incidentally? You don’t suspect her?’

  ‘Of course not, but it filled it out a bit. It was rather thin otherwise. Look here, Fen: I don’t want to know who did it, but I should like to know it wasn’t Helen.’

  Fen grinned. ‘No, of course it wasn’t Helen.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve just asked her to marry me.’

  Fen fell into a mild ecstasy. ‘My dear fellow!’ he shouted. ‘I’m delighted! We must celebrate – but not now,’ he added with a reluctant eye on the clock. ‘Evensong awaits us.’ He picked up a surplice which was lying over the back of a chair. ‘This thing,’ he said, putting it over his arm as they went out, ‘puts me in mind of shrouds.’

  As he entered the chapel, Nigel had the comfortable sense of one who returns to a remembered spot in the certainty that it will not have been altered. On the whole, he had always been inclined to agree with old Wilkes that the restorations had been well carried out. The place had a clean, finished look about it without being aggressively new, and it fortunately lacked the faint odour of corruption which is generally present in old churches. The glass, while not being of the sort to attract connoisseurs from all parts of the country, was pleasing enough, and the organ, a new instrument put in seven years previously and occupying the gallery on the north side of the chancel, had plain gold pipes charmingly arranged in a simple geometrical pattern. The organist – and his mode of exit, an iron ladder leading down to the vestry – was hidden from view by a large fretted wooden screen (his means of ascertaining what was going on below being a large mirror suspended above his head); and from the instrument there issued now one of those vague opiate improvisations which organists appear to consider the limit of their responsibilities before the service actually begins.

  Fen departed to the seats reserved for the Fellows, Nigel settled himself close by the choir. There were few people in chapel that evening. The President glowered morosely from his box; there was a small number of undergraduates and visitors. Before long, the choir and the Chaplain came in, and the improvisation performed a rapid, pyrotechnical series of modulations into the key of the first hymn and stopped. Announcement. First line of ‘Richmond’. Then Samuel Johnson’s fine hymn:

  City of God, how broad and far

  Outspread thy walls sublime …

  For once Nigel was unmoved by what he considered one of the best pieces of religious verse in the English language. As he held the book up, making conventional noises in his throat and opening and shutting his mouth in a rhythmic but improbable way (to the alarm of one of the smaller Decani boys, who stared at him with mingled horror and fascination), his thoughts wandered to the events of the past few days. Who had killed Yseut Haskell? Robert Warner was the most likely candidate, but it was difficult to see how even he could have done it. Was the suicide perhaps faked before the girl was shot? But no, ridiculous; unless she was hypnotized, Yseut would never have allowed herself to be put through the necessary rigmarole. He wondered, as the Doctor in illustration of his thesis demonstrated the vanity of the surge’s angry shock, whether she had ever known who killed her, and then realized that she must, for one terrible moment, have seen the murderer. Those powder-burns – she had been shot point-blank in the middle of the forehead …

  ‘Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places …’ Nigel hastily kicked a kneeling-mat into position, and as he dropped down on to it, glanced across at Fen. But the Professor seemed preoccupied. The Fellows’ stalls were cleverly designed so that no one outside could see whether they were kneeling or not, with the result that most of them had developed the lazy and irreverent habit of simply slumping forward on the desks in front of them during prayers. Old Wilkes, a short distance away, was apparently sunk in a deep coma. Nigel remembered hi
s story, told on that fatal Friday evening (only two days ago? It seemed more like two years) and looked instinctively into the antechapel where John Kettenburgh, too-militant champion of the reformed faith, had been hunted to death by Richard Pegwell and his associates. ‘Cave ne exeat…’ ‘Vex not his ghost …’ Nigel dismissed these unprofitable reflections to admire the singing of the psalm, and the musicianship that had gone into it; just that touch of preciosity, that lengthening, shortening or corruption of vowels which is the prerogative of a good choir. The boys were good – even the head boy showed none of the all too common tendency to exert his authority by hooting. Here, Nigel felt, Donald was in his element; outside he was ineffectual, incompetent in his affairs, foolish in his relationships; here he had unchallenged mastery.

  It was after the theatrical and triumphant strains of the Dyson Magnificat had reached their elaborate conclusion that a sense of unease first became discernible. For one thing, the boys seemed unusually fidgety; they scratched their ears and gaped about and whispered and dropped their books to such an extent that even the lay clerks, who had the prerogative of poking them ferociously from behind when they misbehaved, seemed unable to restore order. Then the senior scholar, who was reading the lessons, dropped the marker out of the book and seemed to take minutes finding the place again. Finally, it was discovered that the head boy had forgotten, for some reason which remains unknown to this day, to give the men their copies of the anthem. So at the beginning of the Nunc Dimittis, the second boy was sent out to the vestry by the Cantoris tenor to fetch them. He astonished the gathering by returning empty-handed during the Gloria and fainting before he got back to his place. There was some confusion. Two of the men took him out and left him in charge of the porter, returning hastily at the end of the Collects with the necessary copies.

  For a while all was well. The anthem – Charles Wood’s ‘Ex-pectans Expectavi’ – passed without incident, as did the subsequent prayers which preceded the final hymn (there was to be no sermon that evening). Order appeared to be restored. ‘…In Hymns Ancient and Modern No. 563, in Songs of Praise …’ The choir awaited the statement of the tune. There was no sound from the organ.

  Eventually the Decani tenor, a fat authoritative man in full command, gave a note and a signal and the hymn went forward unaccompanied. The Chaplain, the President, and the Fellows were staring in a puzzled way at the organ loft. Out of the corner of his eye Nigel saw Fen leave his seat and slip out of the chapel. Stealthily he followed, catching him up as he entered the vestry by the outside door and switched on the light. On his face Nigel saw an expression of mingled anger and anxiety that was so unusual and so intense that it shocked and alarmed him.

  There was no one in the vestry, and Fen made straight for the small arched doorway on the right whence an iron stairway ran up to the organ loft. Nigel followed at his heels, his thoughts unpleasantly full of the recollection of John Kettenburgh … ‘There had been teeth and bones, and a great many of these appeared to be broken …’ The stairway was dark and chill, running up through an unpierced well of damp stone, and once he looked back over his shoulder.

  They arrived in the organ loft. It resembled many another such. There were framed photographs of other organs – St Paul’s, Truro, King’s, Cambridge – cases and shelves of music and hymn books, an old comfortable chair for moments of inactivity, a primus stove on which Donald had been accustomed to make tea during the President’s rather lengthy sermons.

  What else he had expected to see, Nigel never knew. What they did see was Donald Fellowes, lying across the organ stool with his throat cut from ear to ear, and a blood-stained knife on the floor near him.

  The next few hours had for Nigel, in retrospect, the proportions and inconsequence of a nightmare. He remembered Fen saying, in tones of bewilderment utterly uncharacteristic of him: ‘I couldn’t have known! God help me, I couldn’t have known!’; remembered the words of the Benediction, rising up out of infinite stillness: ‘The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost…’; remembered his whispering, in a voice that he could not prevent from trembling a little: ‘Could a woman have done this?’ and Fen’s grim but abstracted reply: ‘It has been known.’

  Then there was the business of getting rid of the choir when they returned to the vestry, of informing the college authorities, of keeping away unwelcome sightseers, of telephoning the police. Fen went immediately and interviewed the boy who had fainted during the service. His story was incoherent, but they were able eventually to elicit the main facts. He had entered the vestry at the chapel end and found it in darkness; the light switch was by the outer door. He had been about to walk over and put it on when he had heard a slight movement in the darkness, and someone, or something, had whispered to him an invitation to come in and shake hands, a thing which he had felt little inclined to do. He had stood for a moment in a fright, and then run back again into the chapel, after which he remembered nothing more. Asked whether the voice had been that of a man or a woman, he replied reasonably enough that when a person was whispering it was impossible to tell, and added that he thought it had been neither. At which Fen, who had recovered something of his normal manner, went away snorting with annoyance and deploring the influence of M. R. James on the very young.

  The Inspector, the doctor and the ambulance arrived in a very short time, and immediately afterwards Sir Richard Freeman appeared apocalyptically from nowhere, somewhat to the Inspector’s annoyance. Their investigations proved to be of little value; Nigel remembered Fen showing them a few faint but unmistakable red stains on a copy of the Respighi Prelude which lay open on the organ desk, but at the time he did not realize their significance; he remembered, too, a casual, irrelevant remark on the oddness of the registration which Donald had prepared for the last hymn. The time of death, even apart from the doctor’s contributory evidence, was easy to establish; it had been somewhere between the anthem and the last hymn, that was to say, somewhere between 6.35 and 6.45. The Inspector inquired how it was that no sound of a struggle had been heard, but Nigel, who had visited the organ loft several times during his undergraduate days, remembered that in fact very little was audible even from immediately below, and a few experiments proved this to be correct.

  As to the weapon, its provenance was easily discovered. It belonged to the kitchen, situated near the chapel, which served the Senior Common Room, and was a sharp, thin-bladed affair of a fairly common type. The kitchen had been left unattended since 5.30 that afternoon, and there were no fingerprints on the knife except some old ones belonging to one of the kitchen-men. On the iron staircase some traces of rubber-soled shoes were found, but they had been partly obliterated by Fen and Nigel, and it was impossible to tell either their type or their size; in the vestry, apart from a few smears made by someone wearing gloves, there was nothing. Fen turned the loft inside out in a fruitless search, and then asked the Inspector:

  ‘When did you take your guard off Fellowes’ room?’

  ‘At 4.30 this afternoon.’

  ‘Then,’ said Gervase Fen, ‘I fancy we shall find that has been searched too.’ (Quaeram dum inveniam! thought Nigel). Investigation proved him to be right, but they discovered nothing to help them there any more than they had elsewhere.

  The porter was questioned as to the presence of strangers in the college that evening. He had seen no one, but he pointed out that there were half a dozen side entrances by which anyone could have come in unobserved. Those undergraduates and dons who had been in college but not in chapel were then assembled in hall and asked if they had seen anyone in the college between five and seven whom they did not know, but again with negative results. This series of frustrations was beginning to harass the Inspector exceedingly; Sir Richard maintained a gloomy silence; and Fen, while following the proceedings with sufficient attention, seemed little concerned about the outcome.

  The culmination of the Inspector’s troubles came with the visit to the dress-rehearsal wh
ich they made towards eight o’clock. Conveniently enough, all the possible suspects were there, including Nicholas, who had come to watch; inconveniently enough, none of them could be eliminated, since not a single one had an alibi which would bear investigation. A few who claimed immunity were rapidly shown that they had nothing of the sort. Most of them had not arrived at the theatre until 6.45, and some later; and as the theatre was only five minutes’ brisk walking from St Christopher’s, nobody could be freed from suspicion. When Robert assembled the company on the stage at the end of the first act to give them his notes, they were told what had happened, but apart from a manifest unease there had been no special reaction; only Jean gave a little strangled cry of dismay and went straight to Fen, remaining talking to him incoherently for some time. Nigel had no opportunity to see Helen alone, but he read the fear and dismay in her eyes. It was a dispirited little party that returned to St Christopher’s.

  Back in Fen’s room, the Inspector frankly admitted himself at a loss. There was no more talk of suicide, and obviously all he now cared about was getting the whole business cleared up and done with as soon as humanly possible. He appealed direct to Fen.

  ‘We’ve absolutely nothing to go on, sir,’ he said, ‘and if you can’t help us, nobody can. In its own way, this is a perfect crime; not a handle anywhere.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fen slowly, ‘a perfect crime because a lucky crime. The murderer entered the college by a back way – unobserved; took the knife from the kitchen and went up to the organ loft, frightening away that boy on the way – still unidentified; then killed Fellowes and left – still unobserved. The murderer had fantastic luck, and if it had been a murder in isolation, I think it would have been insoluble. Whoever killed Fellowes saw to it that his (or her) buttons were properly sewn on before leaving, refrained from smoking, and failed to catch his (or her) clothing on projecting nails. All very excellent. But because of the murder of Yseut, there’s no doubt at all who that person was.’ He mused. ‘It’s my fault that Fellowes was killed, but I couldn’t have foreseen it; it was impossible to foresee. Only, if I’d acted sooner, I could have prevented it.’