Swan Song

by Crispin, Edmund

  ‘I was all the more surprised,’ she was saying, ‘because as I knocked I thought I heard some kind of movement inside the room. But I suppose it must have been next door.’

  ‘You didn’t look in the bathroom?’

  ‘No-no. The door was partly open, but there wasn’t any sound, so I didn’t bother to investigate . . . Professor Fen, what is all this about? Does it concern Elizabeth?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fen. ‘It does. There were two attempts to kill her this afternoon, both about the time you went up to her room. Anonymous attempts, I should add. That’s why your evidence may be important.’

  ‘To kill her? But why? Why?’ Joan had been startled out of her habitual equanimity.

  Fen shrugged. ‘We don’t know. But go on. After you’d left the note –’

  ‘The note?’ Joan spoke confusedly. ‘Oh, yes, of course. I just put on a coat and hat and came round here. That’s all.’

  ‘Now, try and remember, please.’ Fen leaned forward. ‘When you went up to that room, did you see anyone in front of you going in the same direction?’

  Joan considered. ‘No,’ she answered at last. ‘I’m pretty certain I didn’t.’

  Fen suppressed a sigh of disappointment, and fell to recalling the exact topography of the hotel corridor. There was a right-angle bend, he remembered, immediately before one arrived at room 72, so that in approaching from the stairs and lifts one would have to be right up to the door in order to see anyone enter it. Beyond the bend there were a few more bedrooms (among them that of Peacock); then lavatories and bathrooms; and at last the corridor resolved itself into a cul-de-sac, with nothing at the end but a wall, a frosted-glass window, and a radiator. Yet if Joan were telling the truth, the attacker must have come from the direction opposite to that of the stairs and the lifts. He might have been lurking previously in a bathroom or a lavatory – only there was no plausible reason why he should. And on the other hand, he might have come from Peacock’s room . . .

  Fen shook his head. The affair was exasperatingly elusive – the more so as Elizabeth’s assailant had been sufficiently insouciant to give himself away ten times over. Nor, now he came to think of it, had this interview been very much help; its sole justification, in fact, lay in the dispiriting news that Mudge was developing theories of his own.

  Fen got energetically to his feet, becoming once more aware of the distant music; aware, too, that Joan was regarding him curiously.

  ‘Class dismissed?’ she asked.

  ‘With full marks,’ he said. ‘Now I must find someone else to pester. Are you staying here?’

  ‘No. I’ll come down, I think, and see what progress they’re making.’ Fen opened the door for her. ‘Oh, damn,’ she said. ‘I haven’t turned the fire off.’

  Fen went back and turned it off for her.

  ‘It stinks,’ he said gravely, ‘and I am ready to depart.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘ONE OF MY happiest memories,’ said Joan as they descended the stairs, ‘is playing Salome in Strauss’s opera with Edwin in the unlikely role of John the Baptist. It was some time ago, when I really had a figure’ (‘You have still,’ Fen put in gallantly), ‘and I remember it partly because I realized even then that I was the first Salome to give the males in the audience a really good run for their money during the Dance of the Seven Veils. It was at the Paris opera, and I ended up in a condition of nudity which would have made the Windmill girls blush . . . However, that wasn’t what I was going to say. There stood Edwin, sternly resisting my charms, pudgy, half-naked, and with a corpulence barely credible in a man who’d lived so long on locusts and wild honey. And do you know’ – Joan stopped abruptly in front of the door which led into the auditorium – ‘do you know, I found him revolting. “Let thy white body be touched by me”,’ she quoted. ‘And really, if I’d had to touch him, I think I should have screamed . . .’

  ‘All this,’ Fen suggested, ‘being relevant to the attempted rape of Judith Haynes.’

  ‘Yes. God knows I’m hard boiled enough, and that was on the stage. What she must have felt –’

  They actually found Judith Haynes sitting with Elizabeth, and went to join them. The rehearsal, it was evident, was going with a swing. Adam – who up to now had been playing the entire scene with his gaze fixed unwaveringly on his wife, to the great astonishment and dismay of Rutherston – was singing Walther’s trial-song. The first oboe had not even yet appeared, and Peacock, from the rostrum, periodically supplied his part by a hollow sepulchral chanting which greatly disconcerted everyone. None the less, there was an atmosphere of good-humour about the proceedings now that things were fairly under way – and moreover, a greater air of plausibility than in any of the rehearsals so far. People were acting as well as singing; moves went smoothly; the scenery had crystallized into dim but still unmistakable simulacra of its ultimate forms. Joan realized that a weight had lifted from the production by the death of Edwin Shorthouse, and because she was a loyal member of her profession the realization made her happy.

  She settled down beside Judith Haynes.

  ‘Judith,’ she said quietly, ‘I’m afraid I’ve had to break my promise to you. I’ve told Professor Fen about what happened the other night.’

  The girl turned, and Joan wondered if it was the artificial light or some unguessed-at private reason which made her pretty, youthful features seem momentarily haggard.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been telling Mrs Langley, too. It doesn’t matter now that Boris knows.’

  Instantly she bit her lip and glanced swiftly at Fen. Elizabeth, moved to pity by her anxiety, hastened to break the small, embarrassed silence which followed.

  ‘Edwin,’ she stated, ‘was entirely detestable.’

  Something in the tone of her voice attracted Fen’s attention. He looked at her with mild interest, through half-closed eyes.

  ‘How long have you know Edwin Shorthouse?’ he inquired.

  ‘About as long as I’ve know Adam . . . We had a triangle,’ Elizabeth explained; and then feeling perhaps that this curt geometrical comment might appear unmannerly, hastened to add: ‘Edwin, you see, wanted me for his mistress . . . He wasn’t at all pleased when Adam married me, and for some time he behaved atrociously.’

  ‘Adam didn’t like him, then?’

  ‘Not so much that: he detested Adam.’

  ‘“Detest” is a strong word,’ said Fen.

  ‘In this instance it’s the only possible word.’

  ‘Were they still at loggerheads when Shorthouse died?’

  ‘No,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He apologized to Adam at the end of last year, when they were working together in Don Pasquale.’ She gave Fen an account of the incident. ‘Adam didn’t seem to think the apology was genuine, but we had no more trouble subsequently.’

  This information seemed obscurely to disappoint Fen. He looked back at the stage. Adam had finished the trial-song, and Beckmesser was engaged, with all possible gusto, in pulling it to pieces. The Masters, with the exception of Sachs, shook their heads in disapproval of their Walther’s youthful iconoclasm. A charwoman with mop and bucket peered interestedly out of the wings, and was ordered away by someone invisible behind her. And Judith said to Joan:

  ‘I’m terribly worried about Boris.’

  ‘Worried? Why?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s ill, and he simply won’t see a doctor.’

  ‘There’s some sort of skin-disease, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. He’s had that before, but it’s never made him as ill as this.’

  ‘Why won’t he see a doctor?’

  ‘Because of the opera. It’s his first part – only two words, I know, but still, his first part. He’s afraid of being ordered to bed. And he’s working so hard to make a career for himself – he practises make-up, you know, for an hour every day . . .’

  ‘Do you think that if I spoke to him–’

  ‘No . . . That is, I don’t mean to be rude, but if I can’t p
ersuade him . . .’

  ‘Yes. I quite see that.’ Joan came suddenly to a decision. ‘Come and talk to me privately.’

  They went to the rehearsal-room. Giacomo Puccini eyed them beadily from the wall.

  ‘Judith,’ said Joan without more preliminary, ‘are you living in sin with your young man?’

  ‘I-I – no,’ the girl stammered. ‘That is to say –’

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ said Joan kindly. ‘Have you ever been to bed with him?’

  Judith’s face was scarlet. ‘No, I – I haven’t. He’s asked me to, but I was afraid –’

  ‘That you’d have a baby. Very cautious and commendable. Why on earth don’t you get married?’

  Judith stared at Joan as though she had suggested a trip to the moon. ‘M-married? But we couldn’t afford it –’

  ‘If you can afford to live separately you can afford to live together, provided you don’t saddle yourselves with children straight off.’

  ‘But – but my parents wouldn’t want –’

  ‘They’ll get over it,’ said Joan ruthlessly, ‘when they find it’s a fait accompli. Are you both over twenty-one?’

  ‘Yes, but you see –’

  ‘If I get you a special licence, will you be married at once?’

  Judith no longer stammered. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

  ‘Good for you.’ Joan smiled. ‘Talk it over with Boris, and let me know. If you really think it would be unwise, don’t do it. But if you’re just being careful, stop being careful and be happy instead.’

  Judith kissed her impulsively. They returned in silence to the others.

  Act one was nearly at an end. Adam, with an angry gesture, left the stage. The Masters crowded out after him, jostled and buffeted by their apprentices. Sachs alone remained, while for three bars the orchestra recalled the trial-song. Then he strode after the others, as the music swept on to its final F major chord. There was a general sigh of relaxation. The players began groping hopefully for their instrument cases; the cast drifted back into view.

  ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Peacock. ‘We’ll leave it at that for this evening. I’m afraid this snap rehearsal has inconvenienced many of you, but I hope you’ll forgive me, in view of the difficult circumstances and the nearness of opening night. I’m cancelling the rehearsal tomorrow morning because of the inquest, but I hope we may be able to resume in the afternoon on the old schedule as posted by the stage-door. Thank you all very much.’

  He disappeared into the well of the orchestra-pit and shortly came to join Elizabeth, Joan, Judith and Fen in the auditorium. His hair was tousled, he was sweating and exhausted, but he was nevertheless triumphant.

  ‘It’s pulling together,’ he said to Joan. ‘Didn’t you think so?’ She nodded, smiling a little at his excitement. ‘George Green,’ he went on, ‘is God’s own gift to a conductor. He seems to know what I want by sheer instinct. And the nuances Langley gets into the trial-song . . . If he hadn’t looked all the time as though he were seeing a ghost, it would have been perfect.’

  ‘My dear,’ said Joan warmly. Almost involuntarily she touched his hand with hers. He looked at her sharply for an instant, and then laughed.

  ‘I’m very naïve, aren’t I?’ he said charmingly. ‘I can’t think how you all manage to put up with me.’

  Adam and George Green arrived, and conversation became general. Fen, observing that it was concerned solely with operatic matters, took the opportunity of a word with Judith Haynes. For the opening of this brief interview he deliberately employed every resource of charm and tact he could muster, since he knew he must go warily.

  ‘Just one question,’ he said, ‘if you’ll allow me to be a nuisance . . .’ And then he stopped, for he saw that Judith was happy – so happy as to make charm and tact a trifle redundant. He proceeded more boldly.

  ‘Will you tell me,’ he said, ‘if you and Stapleton came to this rehearsal together?’

  ‘If – if what?’ She was hardly listening. Then she hurriedly collected her wits. ‘Oh . . . I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Would you mind saying that again?’

  Fen repeated the question.

  ‘Oh. No, we didn’t. Boris went for a walk this afternoon and came here directly. He heard about the rehearsal from someone in the orchestra.’

  ‘He was here when you arrived?’

  ‘No, he came in a few minutes after me . . . Is that all?’

  ‘That,’ said Fen rather sombrely, ‘is all.’ A walk, he reflected: Stapleton’s habit of going for a walk whenever some crux occurred was decidedly discouraging.

  He went back with Adam, Elizabeth and Joan to the door of the ‘Mace and Sceptre’. Before saying good night:

  ‘Joan,’ he asked, ‘what was it you said to Judith?’

  ‘I advised her to marry her young man at the earliest possible moment!’

  Fen made no reply. Joan added with a touch of asperity: ‘Don’t you approve?’

  ‘There’s just this about it,’ said Fen slowly, ‘that we’re up to our necks in a murder case, and it would be only an elementary precaution to avoid a decisive step of that kind until it’s been solved.’

  Elizabeth unexpectedly lost her temper. ‘Don’t you think, Professor Fen,’ she snapped, ‘that you’re better qualified to get on and solve it than to offer silly advice about people’s personal affairs?’

  Fen answered without a trace of resentment. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that I’m very well qualified for anything . . . Well, I’ll see you at the inquest. Good night, and sleep well.’

  ‘Oh, Elizabeth,’ said Adam sadly, ‘I don’t think you ought to have said that.’

  Then they quarrelled. It was their first quarrel since marriage. For an hour they sulked, and at the end of an hour were rapturously reconciled. Adam got so drunk celebrating this latter event that they quarrelled again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IT WAS LATE on a Monday night that Edwin Shorthouse met his death; on the Tuesday afternoon Elizabeth was attacked; and the inquest was arranged for the Wednesday morning. An hour before it was due to begin, Fen arrived at the ‘Mace and Sceptre’ to see Peacock.

  This, he hoped, would be the last interview necessary, apart perhaps from a few words with Karl Wolzogen; and he was obliged to admit to himself, as he entered the familiar foyer, that the progress he had made so far was uncommonly small. It had become gradually evident that the official theory could be summed up as suicide; Mudge had explained over the telephone that morning that he regarded the Nembutal in the gin-bottle as unconnected with the hanging. And when asked how he accounted for the marks of tying on Shorthouse’s wrists and ankles, and for the dislocated skeleton, he had replied somewhat curtly that he was unable to account for them and that moreover, being likewise unable to shake Furbelow’s evidence, he could see no possible answer to the problem beyond felo de se. At this Fen’s heart misgave him; it was by no means impossible, he reflected, that Mudge was right and that he himself was re-enacting the error of the preposterous Mr Blenkinsop. And so it was only because he had an innate detestation of abandoning anything in mid-career that he went ahead with his inquiries.

  He found Peacock without difficulty, and they went to the residents’ lounge to drink coffee. As opposed to the bar – which was darkly gothic, suggestive of oubliettes, halberds, ceintures de chasteté and other fearsome medieval contrivances – the room offered, despite its size, an approximation at least of bourgeois domesticity and comfort. There was even, about its solid, magazine-littered tables, its soft carpets and rugs, and its flowered chintz ottomans and armchairs, a suggestion of unintended parody, which was accentuated by the spasmodic apparition of incongruously dinner-jacketed waiters, bearing that variety of metal coffee- and tea-pot which seems designed specifically to burn the fingers. A perennial quiet invested it, emanating perhaps from the one or two old gentlemen who are always to be found in such places, nodding their lives out over newspapers, to the rat
tle of coffee-spoons and the periodic heavy vibration of buses passing outside the windows. Conversation, within its walls, became muted automatically to an undertone.

  Peacock showed great willingness to be questioned. ‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘I’ll help you in any way I can, though I must confess to start with that I regard Short-house’s death as an almost unmixed blessing . . .’ His voice had a curiously hollow, rasping quality. ‘Obviously I had no reason to be fond of him . . . You’ve probably heard about my unfortunate outburst at rehearsal the day before yesterday. Luckily I have an alibi for the time he was killed.’

  ‘Let me congratulate you,’ said Fen dryly. ‘You seem to be the only person in the whole of Oxford who has.’

  ‘It’s fortunate,’ said Peacock. ‘Decidedly fortunate.’ He paused to pay the waiter. ‘Just as it happened I was in the hotel manager’s sitting-room, chatting and drinking beer, right up to midnight. Either he or his wife was with me the whole time.’

  Peacock enunciated all this with the naïve triumph and self-importance of a Hellenic scholar who has unearthed some remote mythological allusion from the works of Hesiod. But Fen was comparatively unimpressed. After all, it was by no means necessary for a gamekeeper to be present whenever a rabbit fell into a trap . . . This train of thought, however, suggested an entirely fresh set of possibilities which plainly could not be examined at the moment.

  ‘That is very lucky,’ he agreed. ‘In point of fact, though, I’m rather more interested in yesterday afternoon than in the time of Shorthouse’s death.’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon? But why?’

  They all ask that, thought Fen sadly: they all ask that, and in each and every case I’m obliged to make some evasive and unlikely reply which puts them instantly on guard . . . ‘For a reason,’ he said with an effort, ‘which I’ll explain in a moment.’