Swan Song

by Crispin, Edmund

  ‘You are an intolerable, pompous ass,’ she was informing him in measured, judicial tones. ‘A jack-in-office. A nincompoop. A giddy-brained pigeon.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ said the Inspector with theatrical restraint. ‘Just you listen to me. I’ve had quite enough of you. You’ve no right to be here, young woman. And if you don’t get out – now: instantly – I shall charge you with obstructing me in the performance of my duties.’

  ‘I’d like to see you try,’ Elizabeth replied, in a voice of such intense malignancy that even Fen was startled. She swung round to face the newcomers. ‘And if you think –’ She broke off, and her face suddenly brightened. ‘Adam!’

  ‘Darling, are you being a nuisance?’ Adam asked. ‘I want you to meet Sir Richard Freeman, the Chief Constable, and Gervase Fen. Elizabeth, my wife.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Sir Richard with manly gruffness. ‘It’s all right, Mudge,’ he added to the enraged Inspector.

  ‘As you say, sir,’ Mudge answered. ‘As you say, of course. As you say.’ He stood back, muttering waspishly.

  ‘Well, well.’ Fen beamed at Elizabeth like an ogre about to gobble up a small boy. ‘I am pleased. I could tell you some things about Adam,’ he went on with great amiability.

  ‘You’ve only rescued me just in time.’ Elizabeth’s voice still held a trace of peevishness. ‘Adam darling, you’re terribly late.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Adam soothingly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Now,’ said Sir Richard, who was plainly not much interested by this interchange, ‘let’s have a few facts, Mudge. Is this where it happened?’

  He gazed about him. The light from the stage faintly illuminated the front rows of the stalls. Half-painted flats projected from the wings. Backstage, the electrician’s gallery was visible. There was a lot of litter and a lot of dust. There were half-effaced chalk marks scrawled on the floor by the producer, to assist positioning at rehearsals. In the orchestra-pit, a tangle of brass stands could be seen. But there was nothing, apart from a good deal of rope, to suggest suicide or violence.

  ‘No, sir,’ Mudge informed his superior with perhaps more testiness than was altogether wise. ‘Not here. In the dressing-room.’

  ‘Well, take us there, then,’ said Sir Richard. ‘It’s absurd to stand about like a set of characters in a melodrama.’

  Mudge sighed, and pronounced, as though it were a rune, the word ‘Furbelow’. The stage-door-keeper materialized from among the peripheral wraiths, and stood blinking at them. ‘Good morning, Mr Langley,’ he said uncertainly.

  ‘Furbelow, you’d better come with us.’ Mudge was peremptory. ‘Sir Richard will want to hear what you have to say.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ Sir Richard demanded with distaste.

  ‘The stage-doorkeeper, sir. His evidence is important.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Sir Richard, like one confronted too suddenly with a freak of nature. ‘Important. I see.’

  ‘Come on, come on,’ said Fen impatiently. ‘Or we shall never get started.’

  They made their way off the stage. Adam wanted to take the lift, but it appeared that the aspen and decrepit Furbelow went in fear of lifts. The machinery broke, he explained, and one was precipitated with violence to the ground . . . In any case, this particular lift was too small to take all of them, so they walked up, encouraged by some remarks from the Chief Constable on the subject of muscular development – the Inspector first, Sir Richard following, Fen at his heels, then Adam and Elizabeth, and finally Furbelow. Having arrived at the second floor, they made their way in single file round an inconveniently placed iron ladder which led to the roof, and at last came to a door bearing a card with the inscription EDWIN SHORTHOUSE on it. The Inspector halted.

  ‘It’s here,’ he said.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Sir Richard, annoyed at the redundancy of this statement. ‘Let’s have a look at it. The – ah – he’s been moved, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’ Mudge was inserting a key into the lock. ‘In fact the post mortem ought to be over by now. I’m expecting Rashmole back here at any time.’

  ‘Have you got in touch with the brother?’

  Mudge paused in his labours, to everyone’s great annoyance; the corridor was undeniably draughty. ‘I wired him earlier this morning, sir,’ he said. ‘And the reply came a few minutes before you arrived just now.’ He hesitated. ‘Rather an odd reply. Unnatural, to my thinking.’

  ‘Well, what was it?’

  Mudge abandoned the door and groped in his pockets; a telegram was produced; they passed it from hand to hand; it ran:

  DELIGHTED HOPING FOR THIS FOR MONTHS SUICIDE EH QUERY DONT BOTHER ME NOW CHARLES SHORTHOUSE.

  ‘Well, I’m damned.’ Sir Richard was indignant. ‘This thing must be a practical joke.’

  ‘I scarcely think so,’ said Adam. ‘Charles Shorthouse is a very eccentric person, you know. And notoriously he loathed his brother. It strikes me as being exactly the kind of wire he would send.’

  ‘Where does he live, anyway?’

  ‘Near Amersham, I believe.’

  ‘Very well . . . Mudge, will you please open that door?’

  They got inside at last. It was a large dressing-room – like all dressing-rooms untidy, and like all dressing-rooms dirty. Clothes suspended haphazardly from hooks, or lay in heaps on the chairs. The dressing-table was a litter of grease-paints and photographs. A vocal score of Die Meistersinger, tattered and scrawled upon, lay on the floor. There were one or two books, lightly coated with powder; two empty beer-bottles, and one half-full; a wash-basin; a typewriter; some blank sheets of paper. Windows were lacking, so they switched on the frosted bulbs which projected on either side of the mirror; but in one part of the room, where the ceiling was indented, there was a small skylight about three inches square, which could be opened from the roof.

  ‘He seems to have made himself at home,’ Fen commented. ‘Dress rehearsals haven’t started yet, have they?’

  ‘No. But he always spent a good deal of time in his dressing-room,’ said Adam. ‘Drinking, mostly. There ought to be a bottle or two of gin somewhere about. He was very addicted to it.’

  ‘There was,’ said Mudge. ‘And it’s being analysed at this moment. Here’ – Adam was momentarily overwhelmed by the illusion of being on a conducted tour – ‘here is where the body hung. Hang,’ Mudge added uncertainly.

  ‘Hung,’ said Fen kindly. ‘Dear me. It hardly looks as if there’d be sufficient drop for him to break his neck.’

  ‘In the execution shed,’ Elizabeth put in briskly, ‘they allow from six to eight feet, according to weight.’

  Fen regarded her warily. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘You’re quite right. But of course, it’s all a matter of tensions. With luck – I don’t quite know why I should say luck – you might break your neck dropping just a foot or so.’

  They gazed at the stout iron hook from which the rope had hung. It was embedded in the ceiling about a foot from the indentation which contained the skylight, and about seven feet from the skylight itself.

  ‘What’s it there for?’ asked Sir Richard, getting out his pipe. ‘Was it there before?’

  Furbelow, consulted by Mudge, opined that it had not been there before.

  ‘And moreover,’ said Mudge, ‘there’s flakes of plaster on the floor. Evidently a recent job, put there for the purpose. . . . Well, he was hanging from that. There was nothing special about the rope – just a length of ordinary clothes-line –’

  ‘Was there a knot,’ Fen inquired, ‘under the angle of the jaw?’ He had sat down, and was fingering his own jaw, meditatively.

  ‘Why, yes, sir, there was. Whether it was him or someone else that was responsible, they evidently knew what they were about.’ Mudge paused, contemplating retrospectively, Adam fancied, the grammar of this sentence.

  Sir Richard struck a match. ‘Go on,’ he said, waving it encouragingly. It went out.

  ‘The inside of the rope was padded’ – Mudge had
fallen into a kind of sing-song which evidently he considered suitable to his recital – ‘with some old cotton stuff. And – well, that’s really all, I suppose.’

  ‘All?’ exclaimed Sir Richard. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mudge. It can’t be all. Who found the body? And when?’

  ‘It was found,’ Mudge announced, ‘by Dr Shand.’

  ‘Shand?’ Fen had been standing in front of the mirror, painting a large black moustache on his face. He now turned and exhibited the result. Elizabeth uttered a little squeal of delight. Fen frowned at her. ‘Shand’s a reliable man, Dick,’ he continued. ‘But what was he doing here in the middle of the night?’

  ‘For the Lord’s sake, Gervase,’ said Sir Richard, ‘stop playing with the grease-paint . . . Yes, Mudge.’ He turned to the Inspector. ‘What was he doing here in the middle of the night?’

  ‘He came here,’ Mudge explained hurriedly, ‘in response to an urgent message from Shorthouse.’

  ‘Ah. You say “message from”. Who was responsible for the message?’

  ‘That’s just it. He doesn’t know. It was a phone message.’

  ‘This becomes interesting,’ said Fen. He had applied removing-cream to his upper lip, and now looked as if he had been eating blancmange. ‘So Shand turned up here. When, by the by?’

  ‘About eleven-thirty. He came straight up here – up to the corridor outside, that is – and found Furbelow sitting in his bedroom opposite.’

  ‘But look here,’ said Adam suddenly, ‘I was in the theatre last night.’

  ‘Oh, Adam, so you were,’ said Elizabeth in frank admiration.

  ‘Good heavens, Adam, what were you doing?’ Fen asked.

  ‘I was fetching my notecase. I left it in my dressing-room during the afternoon rehearsal, and then forgot it. There was a lot of money in it, and things tend to disappear from dressing-rooms, so I came back for it as soon as I remembered. I must say, I never dreamed Edwin Shorthouse was here at all, let alone dead. What an appalling thing.’

  Mudge appeared to be suffering from some obscure emotional upheaval. ‘Now, sir,’ he began, glancing uneasily at the Chief Constable, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t quite grasped who you are–’

  ‘This is Adam Langley,’ Fen said indistinctly through a towel, ‘who’s singing the part of Walther in Die Meistersinger.’

  ‘The only first-rate tenor of reasonable girth,’ Elizabeth added proudly, ‘in Europe.’

  ‘You fetched your notecase, sir. Very well. What time would this be?’

  ‘Oh . . . twenty or twenty-five past eleven, I should say.’

  ‘And your dressing-room is –?’

  ‘On the floor below this.’

  ‘Quite.’ Mudge nodded sagaciously. ‘Now, did you do anything else while you were in the theatre?’

  ‘I went for a ride’ – Adam spoke a little doubtfully – ‘in the lift.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘I went for a ride in the lift,’ Adam repeated more firmly. ‘I like lifts. They give me a queer feeling inside.’

  ‘I should have thought that for that very reason –’

  ‘A pleasant feeling, of course.’ Adam explained what he had done. ‘I talked to Furbelow,’ he concluded, and added irrelevantly: ‘Apparently he sits all evening with his door open because of the gases which are exuded by electric fires.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Sir Richard with incisive common sense.

  ‘Did you meet anyone other than Furbelow during your visit here?’ Mudge demanded.

  ‘No one. When I’d had my joy-ride, I went straight home . . . Oh, there’s one thing, though. As I was leaving, I did see a car draw up outside the stage-door. But I dare say that would have been the doctor.’

  Fen did not appear greatly interested by these haphazard recollections. ‘Well, that’s enough of that,’ he said brusquely. ‘Let’s get back to Shand’s arrival, and the discovery of the body.’

  Mudge coughed, and adopted an attitude suggestive of the elocution-school. ‘Dr Shand opened the door’ – he paused impressively – ‘and saw Shorthouse hanging from the spot which I indicated.’ He indicated it again. ‘He immediately called to Furbelow, who as we know was in his bedroom opposite, and together they got the unfortunate gentleman down.

  ‘Now here is the point.’ Mudge shook his index finger at them, admonishing, it seemed, their inattentiveness. ‘At this time Shorthouse was technically speaking still alive. That’s to say that although breathing had stopped, his heart was still beating. I’m told that on occasions this happens in cases of judicial hanging. Dr Shand cut’ – the Inspector consulted some kind of mental tablature – ‘a radial artery, and circulation was still going on. Of course it was impossible to revive the man – the heart stopped only a few moments after he’d been got down. And I understand that this business of the heart beating after death can only last for a very few minutes – at most.’

  No one spoke. Sir Richard was applying a match to his pipe, the light of it flickering fitfully over his brown, lined face, with its iron-grey hair and moustache. Fen had stopped fidgeting, and was sitting on the edge of the dressing-table, his pale blue eyes intent, his usual fantastic naivety for the moment in abeyance. Elizabeth was seated, with Adam leaning on the back of her chair. Furbelow, near the doorway, shifted from one foot to the other. And in the midst of them stood the Inspector, like a minor devil enumerating the canons of hell to a coven of particularly obtuse witches.

  ‘So far, so good,’ he went on. ‘And I’d ask you to notice that there was no one in here apart from Shorthouse when Dr Shand arrived. Being a sensible man, he took the precaution of making sure of this, but you can see for yourself that there isn’t a hiding-place anywhere. Moreover, there’s literally no way in or out except by the door.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MUDGE SIGHED. ‘WE now come,’ he said with obvious reluctance, ‘to Furbelow. It’s on his evidence, so far as I can see, that the verdict for suicide must depend.1 Furbelow came up to his bedroom at a quarter to eleven. He settled down, as was his habit, with the door open.’

  ‘It’s the gases,’ said Furbelow, eyeing Sir Richard defensively.

  Mudge ignored this. ‘At five to eleven,’ he went on, ‘a certain individual arrived and, after knocking, entered this dressing-room. As far as we know at present, that individual was the last person to see Mr Shorthouse alive.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Sir Richard demanded.

  ‘His identity we haven’t yet discovered.’ Mudge was apologetic. ‘Perhaps Mr Langley can help us there. A young man, as I gather, and a member of the chorus.’

  ‘Dark he was,’ Furbelow supplied. ‘Dark and foreign looking.’

  ‘Oh, I think I know who you mean,’ said Adam. ‘He’s one of the apprentices. Boris somebody.’

  ‘You can’t remember the surname, sir?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. But I can point him out to you as soon as we get another rehearsal – or for that matter Furbelow can.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ Mudge nodded his satisfaction. ‘As you’ll find in a moment, it isn’t as urgently important as it might at first seem . . . This young man, then, was in here for about ten minutes, and –’

  ‘Just one moment,’ Fen interrupted. He turned to Furbelow. ‘Did you hear them talking?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Furbelow. ‘But then, likely I wouldn’t ‘ave. These doors is thick.’

  Mudge continued his narrative. ‘When the young man at last emerged from this room, at about five past eleven, Furbelow – ah – accosted him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Fen, ‘but I must interrupt again . . . Furbelow, when the door of this dressing-room is open, can you see into it from your room?’

  ‘No sir. It’s at a bit of an angle, like. I can just catch a glimpse of one corner, that’s all.’

  ‘I see . . . Go ahead, Inspector.’

  ‘Furbelow,’ said Mudge, ‘accompanied the young man down to the stage-door and said good night. He then immediately return
ed to his bedroom, and, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece saw that the time was ten minutes past eleven. He calculates that he can’t have been away for more than three minutes at the most.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Furbelow admiringly. It was evident that he regarded this account as a marvel of accurate recollection.

  ‘Finally,’ Mudge announced climactically, ‘he’s prepared to swear that no one entered or left this room from ten minutes past eleven until the arrival of Dr Shand at half-past.’

  ‘Did he watch the door,’ Fen asked, ‘while he was talking to Adam?’

  ‘I ’ad it in the corner of me eye,’ said Furbelow.

  ‘Anyway,’ Adam interposed, ‘I can vouch for that half-minute or so. I should certainly have seen if anyone had gone in or come out – there was plenty of light from the door of Furbelow’s room.’

  A faint but unmistakable expression of pleasure appeared on Fen’s ruddy countenance. ‘Two questions, Inspector,’ he said. ‘First: was there a chair, or anything, from which Shorthouse could have jumped, if he committed suicide?’

  ‘Yes, sir. One of those tall stools they put in front of bars, so you can never get a drink for the people sitting on them. According to Furbelow, it came from the property room. It’s been taken away to be tested for footmarks and fingerprints. It was lying on its side just by the body.’

  ‘Yes. And while we’re on the subject of fingerprints, was there anything on that hook in the ceiling?’

  ‘Nothing you could identify. Just a few smudges.’

  ‘I see. Furbelow, did you hear a bump at any stage, such as might have been caused by the stool falling over?’

  ‘I did, sir.’ Furbelow was markedly respectful. ‘Though I can’t say I took any notice at the time.’

  ‘When was this?’