Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  8

  It was perhaps twenty minutes later that Jane knew she had progressed from warm to hot. Not only the case-marks but the titles glinting on the old leather spines told her as much. She had come to that wide field of learning upon which the late Dr Undertone had turned himself out to grass in his ripest years.

  Sure Sanctuary of a Troubled Soul… Preces Privatae… An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness… Bowels Opened… The ancient hortatory voices seemed to murmur endlessly on the shelves, as they must have come to murmur ceaselessly in the ear of the dead scholar.

  She was on the ground floor of the vast chamber. Remnant’s quest had taken him higher, and into a remote corner. They were like Adam and Eve in the Garden, when they had separated the more efficiently to cultivate its fruits. Jane’s mind, drawn to this analogy by the Biblical cast of the acres of old print around her, for a moment elaborated the fancy. It was by taking advantage of that rash isolation of our first parents that the serpent –

  Suddenly she knew that she was uneasy. But that was foolish. There could be no serpent in Bodley. She brought her mind back to her task. An Apologetical Narration… The Sinner’s Mourning Habit… A Buckler against Death. She halted, and gave a low cry. The first of the books she sought was there in front of her. God’s Terrible Voice in the City. She stretched out her hand to take it from the shelf. The hand trembled, so that she could hardly hold the volume securely. It was the excitement of the discovery, she told herself, that made her tremble. The book was quite small. She opened it, shook it, ran through the pages. There was no lurking paper.

  And now for the second book, which she knew could not be far away. Peering at the shelves, she moved along the stack in front of her. A Large Theatre of Divine Judgments… Enthusiasmus Triumphatus… The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation… Her excitement must be mounting, for now she was trembling all over. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality… It was not excitement that had taken command of her. It was fear.

  It was the same fear that had reached out and seized her in the dark when she had been left alone outside St Gregory’s. And it was fear of something very evil and very close to her. Her senses, she knew, had brought her no report of this presence. But her certainty was entire. She fought against it. She forced her eye to travel over two more books. Joy in Tribulation… An Examination and Censure of False Devotion… She could hardly breathe. She looked at the next book, and put out her hand to it with a gasp. Then her senses did speak. One of the iron platforms above her had creaked, vibrated. She turned her head, and something moved on the very fringe of her vision. She looked up. Danger threatened her – not, as she had irresistibly felt, close at hand, but from high on a remote gallery. There, framed at the end of a vista of stacks, a man had appeared. He was looking at her directly and fixedly, and she saw that it was not Remnant. The platform creaked again beneath the weight of the man standing on it. He was Mark Bultitude.

  At least she must have the book. She grasped it and pulled it from the shelf. Bultitude was raising an arm as if to point at her. She remembered that she could shout.

  ‘Roger!’

  As if she had spoken a magic word, the books immediately in front of her moved. Thrust at by an unseen hand on its farther side, the stack glided away on its rails. And in the gap stood a man – a man with a pale, freckled face.

  ‘Geoffrey!’

  As once before that day, she stretched out a hand to her lover. And Geoffrey Ourglass too stretched out a hand. But it was not to her. It was to the book.

  The movement was a blinding revelation – instantaneous and final. The foundations of Jane’s world had crumbled as in some fantastic spectacle on a stage. She gave one protesting cry, and then acknowledged the truth. Geoffrey took a step forward and with horrible dexterity, like a low thief on a racecourse, drew the book from under her arm. He stepped back and the stack moved again. In a fraction of time she was once more confronting only a wall of books. She heard a woman’s voice calling for help in a strong, clear voice. It was her own.

  The place was suddenly full of voices: her brother’s, Remnant’s, Bultitude’s – and another, elderly and authoritative, that she knew to be that of the Bodley Librarian. At the end of the long lane of books in which she was standing she glimpsed one and then another hurrying figure in uniform. The police had come. Over the dark surface of the great horror that Jane confronted, a tiny and momentary horror rippled. It was very shocking that the Bodleian should be turned over to this sort of thing.

  There were now other sounds as well as the shouting: a low rumbling, at first intermittent and then rapidly becoming – almost continuous; a succession of dull thuds, with now and then a clash of metal, as one massive and buffered rampart of books came up hard against another. It was Roger Remnant’s grotesque game come true. The place had become a vast maze, through which Geoffrey fled and the mustered forces of society pursued. But it was a moving, a protean maze, a kaleidoscopic or mutable labyrinth, changing its form from moment to moment as, now here and now there, one or another gap opened or closed between the stacks. It was like a chase through a surrealist nightmare – a chase down endless corridors in which every yard of wall could become at any moment an opening valve, a sliding door.

  They were closing in. They were driving him towards the centre of the great, dimly vaulted chamber. Jane moved towards the centre too. She had no awareness of what she was doing. Her lover had been a criminal. And now he was become a hunted man.

  In the middle there was a small clear space – a sort of well up one side of which a spiral staircase climbed through tier upon tier of books. Geoffrey had leapt out of hiding and was at the foot of it. He started to climb. The book was still in his hand. He went up with incredible speed, so that as her eye followed him the surrounding books seemed to take on a spiral motion of their own. There were two figures pounding after him. He was high – very high. Not far above his head must be the cobbles of Radcliffe Square, where the other hunted man had lain… From somewhere on a lower level she heard a shouted summons, and in an instant two further figures had appeared at the head of the stair. Geoffrey saw them, ducked under the rail, and leapt perilously to the top of a stack. He swayed, steadied himself, prepared for another leap. In the split second before his taking-off the book dropped from his hand. His foot caught on it and he fell.

  He fell sheer – and into a great darkness that now flooded up over Jane. But for a second yet her inward eye could see him – plunging down through a million books, rank upon rank of books, armies of unalterable law.

  9

  ‘Thank you.’ Bodley’s Librarian took the book from Appleby, laid it on his desk, and examined it carefully. ‘The joints are cracked, I fear. But, on the whole, we must congratulate ourselves on getting off fairly lightly.’ He turned to Remnant. ‘I suppose,’ he asked mildly, ‘that you came in by the Mendip cleft?’

  For the first and only time during the events here chronicled, Roger Remnant was staggered. ‘Yes, sir – we did. But surely you don’t–’

  ‘My dear boy, I first entered Bodley that way myself. It was what first drew my interest to the Library. So it is very possible, you see, that one day this room will be your own. I had supposed, I confess, that the Mendip cleft had long since passed out of mind. Otherwise, no doubt, I should have felt constrained to have something done about it. As one grows old, you know, one becomes very cautious and curmudgeonly.’ Bodley’s Librarian picked up the book again, adjusted his system of spectacles, and again examined it. ‘This is now something of a bibliographical curiosity, Sir John. It cannot be often that a book has proved lethal – in a direct physical sense, that is to say. Curious, too, that it should be this book. You have looked at the title?’

  Appleby shook his head.

  ‘A Thunderbolt of Wrath against Stiff-Necked and Impenitent Sinners… Whether the young man was indeed impenitent at the last it is not for us to say. But his persistence in crime certainly suggests that
he was stiff-necked.’

  Bultitude was turning over the leaves of the book. ‘Not a neck stiff enough to stand that drop. It was broken and he died instantly…And here is what it was all about.’ He drew from the book a folded sheet of quarto paper, smoothed it out, and laid it on the desk. For a few seconds he studied it silently. ‘Interesting,’ he murmured. ‘And extremely complicated – in fact, quite beyond me.’

  ‘There is much that is beyond me.’ Bodley’s Librarian was courteous but firmly curious. ‘You say that this young man had actually succeeded in becoming the directing mind behind a formidable scientific conspiracy?’

  Appleby nodded. ‘He was known to have been a first-rate scientist – as brilliant as we now realize him to have been unscrupulous. His adventures during the war had brought him into the way of conspiratorial activity. We don’t know how he uncovered this organization, or how he managed, within no more than a couple of months or so, to force himself to the top of it. But I suspect the key to his sinister success lay simply in his being very clever. A man may be both able and brilliant without being that. Young Ourglass held all three of these cards.’

  Bodley’s Librarian elevated one pair of spectacles to his ample brow. ‘In what,’ he asked, ‘was this cleverness instanced?’

  ‘Notably in the measures he took to retrieve the mistakes of less intelligent colleagues. There was a fellow called Squire who was inclined to take the bit between his teeth in the dangerous business of kidnapping people or luring them into Milton. Ourglass, who kept himself quite aloof and concealed, had a wary eye on that. Three times he met, or tried to meet, critical situations of the sort by exploiting the flair he had for character acting. Squire brought in the foreign physician, Dr Tatistchev, thinking that she might eventually be corrupted into a valuable member of the gang. When Ourglass gathered that she might be unreliable, he put himself in her way as a victim of the place and endeavoured to find out where she stood. Again, Squire brought in the little man Routh, and then let him escape again, with this paper in his possession, and with a corpse, it seems, to his credit. That was the grand disaster. Before Routh was recaptured, he had hidden the paper – as we now know, in A Thunderbolt of Wrath. Before licensing more brutal methods, Ourglass seems to have tried the same bogus-prisoner trick. But his most brilliant – and blackguardly – application of it was on the island, after the fight. There was a matter of minutes left to him if he was to get away. And he thought it likely that Routh would have parted with his secret to his rescuers. So he put up a show of making a desperate bid to escape. He knew, you see’ – Appleby’s tone was grim – ‘the sort of person my sister is. And he’d have had her – and any secret she possessed – if I hadn’t myself nipped in just in time. As it was, he failed – and simultaneously gave the whole show away.’

  ‘He almost gave the show away to me.’ It was Remnant who spoke. ‘You see, I’d rigged up a bit of a periscope and caught a glimpse of the fellows who had been shooting from behind the pillars of the little temple. And I had the impression – no more than that – that the fellow who rushed out as a fugitive had been one of them. It put me in a very wretched doubt. But I don’t see how you could have known.’

  ‘It was no great feat of detection.’ Appleby smiled. ‘He came running from the place, you remember, in a ragged shirt, and holding out his arms. His right arm was blackened right up to the elbow. In other words, this supposed helpless fugitive had been firing with a revolver in a confined space. There was smoke on his face too.’

  Bultitude began flapping about his person, produced a cigarette case, caught the eye of Bodley’s Librarian, and hastily stuffed it away again. ‘So you, my dear Appleby, had certainty. I had only suspicion. It was born the moment I heard of this able young scientist’s being seen in the neighbourhood where Cline and his queer lot were working. But it was not a nice thing to speak up about until one was sure. I was feeling very cagey – I believe that is the word – when we met this morning. Later, when your sister came to tea and I heard about the incident in the upper reading-room here, I saw that I must get all the information about it that I could. I got hold of Miss Butterton on the telephone. She had noticed a little man, and seen him doing something at old Undertone’s desk. It was not difficult to guess what he had been up to. Not being of a very active disposition – a fact, Appleby, which your sister has very frankly pointed out to me – I enlisted the help of young Ourglass’ uncle. If my suspicions were correct, he was going to suffer a great family humiliation, and I judged that it would be easier for him in the end if he could look back upon having a little helped in the cleaning up. Eventually, and in our own way – much less spectacular than Mr Remnant’s here – we got a list of the books in which the secret, whatever it was, was likely to be hidden. I then sent old Ourglass home to bed – things might well begin to happen which would not be fit for him to witness – and contacted Bodley’s Librarian and yourself.’

  Remnant was frowning. ‘I don’t understand how young Ourglass got after us.’

  ‘No difficulty about that.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘He still felt that you might have got the whereabouts of the paper from Routh. And he was, of course, desperate about it. Without it, apparently, nothing could be retrieved from the ruins of his organization at all. Well he got out of his helicopter – I don’t yet know where – in time to have Jane trailed in Oxford. Later, he joined in on that himself, and went down your so-called Mendip cleft after you… Only, of course, I was having Jane trailed too.’

  ‘You were!’

  ‘Certainly. I know my sister pretty well. And I didn’t quite trust her to stop in Somerville.’

  Remnant rose. His face had gone very still and grave. ‘You say you know Jane well. Will she…get over it?’

  ‘In time she will.’ Appleby looked at the young man swiftly. ‘But I think I understand what you mean. I don’t know. Perhaps.’

  ‘Ought I to go away?’

  Bodley’s Librarian too had risen. ‘I take it, Mr Remnant, that you are not a married man?’

  ‘No, sir. I put up a bit of a yarn to Jane about the missis and the twelve kids. But I’m not.’

  ‘The other side of the world. For a year.’

  ‘Write?’

  ‘Picture postcards every three weeks. A letter from time to time.’

  ‘Then I’ll be off.’ Roger Remnant moved to the door. He had the habit of not wasting time. ‘I suppose, sir, they’ll let me out?’

  ‘I am sure they will.’ Bodley’s Librarian dropped a pair of glasses on his nose and smiled. ‘But I doubt whether they will let you back again.’ He advanced and shook hands. ‘If, when you do return to this country, you are minded to pursue your studies here at irregular hours, will you please ring me up? I have a telephone beside my bed. Goodbye.’

  The door closed. Mark Bultitude looked at his two companions with a light of sudden speculation on his face. ‘A very good boy,’ he said. ‘I wonder, by the way, if he’s a Remnant? It hadn’t occurred to me.’

  Bodley’s Librarian had moved over to a window and opened it. ‘I don’t know how you people feel. But to my mind there’s been a good deal in this that needs blowing away with a breath of fresh air.’

  They crossed the room and stood beside him. A wind had risen and dispersed the vapours shrouding Oxford. Before them were the spires and towers of the city. They looked up, and could distinguish a few stars. Directly below the window there was a dull red glow. It was the night-watchman’s brazier, and the night-watchman was sitting beside it, stuffing a pipe. He glanced up at the sky – an old man, unambitious and serene.

  The wind was blowing hard, and licked the charcoal to a fuller glow. A puff of it blew through the room; there was a flutter of papers behind them; something white floated past their heads into the open air and drifted down towards the ground. Before they realized the significance of what had happened it had come to rest, close by the old man’s feet. He stooped to it. Appleby leant out, prepared to shout – and stopped as
Bultitude murmured something in his ear. The old man picked up the scrap of paper – it was simply the first thing to his hand – folded it, thrust an end into the brazier, and lit his pipe. Then he tossed the remaining fragment into the flame. He drew at the pipe and again looked at the stars. His face appeared yet more serene than before.

  Bodley’s Librarian closed the window. ‘We can go to bed,’ he said. They left the room in silence, and in silence walked through the immemorial place, empty and yet so tremendously thronged. ‘I’m fond of Bodley,’ Bodley’s Librarian said casually. ‘And particularly of Bodley by night.’

  Note on Inspector (later, Sir John) Appleby Series

  John Appleby first appears in Death at the President’s Lodging, by which time he has risen to the rank of Inspector in the police force. A cerebral detective, with ready wit, charm and good manners, he rose from humble origins to being educated at ‘St Anthony’s College’, Oxford, prior to joining the police as an ordinary constable.

  Having decided to take early retirement just after World War II, he nonetheless continued his police career at a later stage and is subsequently appointed an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, where his crime solving talents are put to good use, despite the lofty administrative position. Final retirement from the police force (as Commissioner and Sir John Appleby) does not, however, diminish Appleby’s taste for solving crime and he continues to be active, Appleby and the Ospreys marking his final appearance in the late 1980’s.

  In Appleby’s End he meets Judith Raven, whom he marries and who has an involvement in many subsequent cases, as does their son Bobby and other members of his family.

  Appleby Titles in order of first publication

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels