I replaced it in its envelope and laid it on the table. Brendel looked at his watch and got up.
‘Come,’ he said; ‘there are things which we must do.’
Chapter Seventeen
Brendei’s words roused me to a sudden realization of our responsibilities.
‘We’ve been here half an hour and we haven’t called the police or done anything to get help. What can we have been thinking of? There must be a telephone outside; let’s find it and call them up at once.’
I sprang to my feet in a fury of belated impatience, but Brendel motioned me back to my chair.
‘No, not this time. It will be better if we go to fetch them. For us, at any rate, there is no mystery to solve, and nothing can be done for Mottram. But first put that document carefully in your pocket where it can’t be seen, and the short letter back on the table where we found it. Thank you.’
He looked round the room carefully before we left it, and, from outside, locked the door. Then we stepped out into the night. Eleven o’clock was striking from all the clocks of Oxford as I got into the car and took the driver’s seat. Brendel sat beside me in silence, but we had hardly gone a quarter of a mile when he suddenly told me to stop the car. Too much surprised to question him, I obeyed. He jumped briskly out, opened the bonnet in front, and for a few minutes so far as I could see busied himself with the engine. Then his head re-emerged from the bonnet.
‘Now see if she will start.’
I tried and failed.
‘What the devil have you been doing,’ I exclaimed; ‘are you mad?’
‘Not at all, I’ve been making a little adjustment. Listen to me, and listen carefully. We can’t afford to make any mistake of detail. It may not have occurred to you that, as I have often remarked, Inspector Cotter is a very competent man. He will certainly connect these two deaths with one another, and it may cross his mind to examine our movements to-night rather carefully and to check up the times. If he does that he will certainly notice that we spent about half an hour in Mottram’s laboratory before we sent for the police. How are we going to explain that without telling the truth about Mottram’s confession? We’ve got to gain half an hour somehow. Listen. This is what you must say if you are questioned about our movements.’ He paused and thought carefully for a moment before he continued his instructions. ‘We didn’t look at the time but we left college somewhere after ten and before half past – probably about ten-twenty.’
‘But it was certainly not later than ten past,’ I objected.
Brendel made a gesture of annoyance at my obtuseness.
‘Forget that, please. You will say that we left round about ten-twenty, so far as you remember. The car was cold and wouldn’t start, and ran very badly on the way up. We must have reached the laboratory soon after ten-thirty. That’s a quarter of an hour gained on the journey out. After discovering the body our first thought was to rush down for the police. We started and the car broke down here. For ten minutes we tried everything we could think of to start her up again, and we couldn’t, so we hailed a passing car. Luckily they’re few and far between on this road at this time of night. There’s the other quarter of an hour accounted for. Have you got that all clearly in your mind?’
‘But you want me to perjure myself, Brendel,’ I protested.
‘Of course I do. The important thing is that you should perjure yourself successfully. There mustn’t be any bungling about this.’
‘I can’t do it. I’m no use at deception and I shall break down if I try it.’
‘Rubbish. You can do it and you must. Can’t you imagine what Miss Vereker’s position will be if all the truth comes out? If Mottram was prepared to kill himself rather than let that happen you must be prepared to tell a few very white lies. Are you agreed?’
I nodded helplessly. What else could I do?
‘Very well then. Now repeat the time-table of our movements to make sure that you have it all right.’
Obediently I did so, and Brendel signified his approval.
‘Good. Ah …’
At the end of the stretch he had observed the lights of an oncoming car, and running into the middle of the road he began wildly moving his arms and shouting. The car stopped with a jerk, just in time to prevent a further catastrophe, and a surprised and angry-looking face was thrust out of the window. It was then that I realized what a magnificent actor Brendel would have made. The calm, the lawyerlike precision, the air of command with which he had addressed me were all gone. In a moment he had become an excited and breathless person, who had lost his head in an emergency, and he poured out a flood of words upon the stranger.
‘There’s been an awful accident. For Heaven’s sake take us to the police station. A terrible tragedy. A man’s killed himself, and our car’s broken down. Get us to the police station as quickly as ever you can. He’s killed himself and we must get help from the police …’
‘What’s it all about?’ said the stranger. ‘Has there been a car crash, and who’s hurt, anyhow?’
‘No, no,’ I interposed, ‘a man has committed suicide in his laboratory – at least we think so, and we were going to the police station to get help when our car broke down. Can you run us down there?’
‘Righto. Jump in. The station’s just by the Town Hall, isn’t it?’
Five minutes later we were standing before the sergeant on duty in the police station.
There, and during our drive back to the laboratory, Brendel poured out his story once more, and I corroborated the details. Yes, he had become very friendly with Mottram during his stay in Oxford. He was interested in his work too, and had often visited him in his laboratory to talk about it, and to see how he was getting on. He had been worried a good deal by Mottram’s bad state of health and particularly by his obvious mental depression during the last few days. (The Herr Inspektor would remember that there had been a mysterious murder at the dead man’s college, which had doubtless preyed on his mind.) That very morning he had persuaded Mottram to take a long drive with him out into the country in the hope that he might cheer him up, and he had seemed, certainly, happier when they came back. But he, Brendel, was still anxious about his friend, and had arranged to go up in the evening to the laboratory to fetch him home when he had finished his work, because he thought that Mottram should not be left too long alone. It was a fine night and Mr Winn (‘who is sitting by you’) had offered to accompany him. Yes, they had left college about twenty minutes past ten. Then, followed the tale, as he had taught it to me. I winced as the sergeant jotted down the false times and details, but I corroborated each of them in turn.
‘We reached the laboratory about half past ten,’ Brendel was saying. ‘I had the keys because Mottram had given them to me that afternoon, in case he didn’t hear me from his room when I arrived, so we walked straight in, Mr Winn and I. We found his body in his chair, and a letter lying on the table, saying that he couldn’t bear it all, and that he had committed suicide. I’m afraid that the terrible shock made us lose our heads rather; we ought to have found the telephone and called you up, but we were so upset and horrified that our first thought was to run to the car and drive down to the police station for help. You see I am a foreigner and don’t know about things in this country, and Mr Winn’ (his voice sank to a whisper which I imagine I was not supposed to hear) … ‘was an old friend and colleague and temporarily quite unfit to think of what should be done. Yes, I did remember to lock up the room before we left. Then the car broke down on the way to the police station, and we couldn’t make it start again, so we had to hail the first car that passed. You know the rest.’
The car stopped. We entered the building, and once more we stood in that room of death.
It was long past midnight when at last we returned to my rooms, but sleep was impossible, and I implored Brendel to stay with me for a time.
‘At least,’ I said, ‘tell me how you discovered all this.’
‘All right,’ he replied, ‘but first oblige me by
locking up that letter in a place where no one save yourself can find it. That at least we owe to Mottram.’
I obeyed, and we settled down once more into the armchairs from which we had so often before discussed the problem of the murder.
‘When did you first know that Mottram had done it?’ I asked.
‘This morning, to be exact, just before noon, when he told me so. But that’s starting at the end. If you had asked me when I first guessed who it was the answer could have been equally precise. I should have said at about twenty-five minutes past ten on the night of the murder, when you and I and Hargreaves stood looking at Shirley’s body. Yes, I guessed then … but let me explain.
‘The moment that Hargreaves came back and told us what he had found in his rooms one thought flashed through my mind; it was exactly that thought which Prendergast put before us the next evening. Who knew that Shirley was in the Dean’s rooms, and who knew too that a loaded revolver was lying on the table? The answer was instantaneous. Of course there was no certainty, but I knew that it was overwhelmingly probable that murder had been committed by one of those who had dined with us that night. Immediately, therefore, I bent all my energies to fixing in my mind the picture of those diners, of their expressions, their behaviour, and their words. I tried to photograph them in my mind before the impression had time to fade. Of course I was a stranger and, with a party of thirteen, some of the impressions were inevitably dim, but I am an observant man, and of most, indeed of nearly all, of those thirteen, I had a clear mental picture. In the minute or so that elapsed while we ran to Hargreaves’ room (and you ran faster than I did!) I had already passed them under review, and I was sorting them out even while I was looking at the body.
‘It’s a way of mine to think of men in terms of natural objects. Sometimes I see them as trees or shrubs or flowers, sometimes as hills and mountains, but most often of all as streams and rivers. Often in the course of my work at home I have to travel from Vienna to Prague, and from Prague to Dresden and Berlin. Have you ever travelled that way? You should, for it’s grand country. Ein selten gesegnetes Land. At Prague I’ve watched the Moldau a hundred times; it’s a fine stream, broad and beautiful, and spanned by one bridge at least that’ll bear comparison with any. Yes, a fine and worthy stream, and impressive, too, in its way. And then further on in my journey, half-way to Dresden, perhaps, I’ve looked out from the carriage window and seen the Elbe. At first sight, in some places, it isn’t much to look at; as it runs down the gorge between the hills it seems narrow and smooth and not very big – but wait! I notice a great powerful steamer, tugging and straining against the stream, with the waters, elsewhere seemingly quiet, surging at its bows. Then I know that beneath the Elbe is a mighty river, full of hidden power and energy, and I recollect that it carries in it its own waters and all those of my poor Moldau as well. A mighty river, strong and secret! And perhaps next day I am in Berlin, looking at the poor little Spree, all banked and controlled and conventionalized. Don’t think me an imaginative idiot; men’s minds, you know, all work in different ways.
‘Well, I thought of those thirteen diners just like that. How many had left on my mind the impression of power beneath the surface! Shirley, certainly, but he was dead; Prendergast, for that clear intellectualism often masks a drama of feelings and desires; Mottram, for I had marked the play of emotion on his face whilst he sat so strangely silent at dinner; Hargreaves without doubt and perhaps one or other of the scientists, but I couldn’t tell. But the rest? Doyne, for example. He may be a great man some day, for he has character, but it’s not fully developed. For me he’s “the stripling Thames at Bablockhythe” – a great river later on but not yet. And Mitton – he was just a pleasant babbling brook. And Trower? – well I can’t quite describe him; he was like a river on the films, great waterfalls and acres of water, but really all an elaborate pretence – not a real river at all. Of them all, Mottram and Hargreaves were the most incalculable, full of rapids and whirlpools and hidden sunken rocks. So it was on these two chiefly that my thoughts centred as we climbed the stairs. Remember that repressions and inhibition are the forerunners of excesses.
‘When we entered the room and looked at the body, I said to myself, “Mottram,” and I said it for one reason and one alone. Shirley’s shirt was open at the front. If you killed a man in cold blood your first instinct would be to get away from the body. A kind of repulsion, a sort of fear, perhaps, would come over you. I don’t think you would touch the body if you could possibly avoid it. But Mottram had had a medical training, and with him habit would be too strong. His first and overpowering instinct would be to assure himself that the victim was dead. He would feel his heart – he could not do otherwise. Already that night then I had guessed the truth; Mottram had shot Shirley, though of his reasons I had no inkling.
‘On Thursday night at dinner I watched him with absorbed interest, and the conviction grew upon me with irresistible force that though he might be, and probably was, a murderer, he was most certainly not a criminal by nature. That was why I tried to keep out of the investigation, and why I told you that I was afraid of what I should find. You compelled me to explore the mystery, and I couldn’t refuse.
‘Of course I was still in the realm of guesswork, and I had to be sure that I was not making some ghastly mistake. On one pretext or another I began to interview everyone who had been present that night, in order to confirm or adjust my first impressions of them. Those interviews didn’t change my mind at all, but I soon saw that, if my theory was correct, it was of primary importance to know, if possible, exactly who was in possession of all the relevant facts before the murder took place. That was the reason why I made my map of the college and staged that little game on Saturday night. It was a very useful piece of reconstruction, too, and your recollection of the course of events was invaluable. For one fact of immense significance emerged, and it was this, Mottram had gone out of Common Room before Shirley announced that he was going up to Hargreaves’ rooms. That fact, once I had established it, gave me something new to work on, and I made certain deductions from it. Of course it was possible to take the view that it cleared Mottram of suspicion; he could not suppose that Shirley would be there, and therefore he would never have gone there to shoot him. That, I must admit, was my own first reaction. Yet, as I considered all the other possibilities, I remained convinced that Mottram was still the most likely murderer. I couldn’t get that open shirt out of my mind. And so gradually I came to the true answer – supposing that Mottram had intended to shoot Hargreaves, and had shot Shirley by mistake? That was surely very unlikely, but it was not impossible. Mottram was a myope, as I had observed, and he would probably have been in a state of nervous excitement when the tragedy occurred. As to the lights – well there I do give myself some credit for an imaginative reconstruction – it did occur to me, though Cotter missed the point, that though all the lights were on when Hargreaves found the body, they might have been turned on by the murderer after the crime was committed.
‘Granted the truth of my assumption the whole nature of the problem had altered. I had to find a motive for Mottram’s intention to shoot Hargreaves, whereas before I had been trying to find out why he should have shot Shirley. The obvious answer seemed to be sexual jealousy. That’s a powerful incentive to crime, and it seemed to be the only explanation which was at all likely to fit the facts. You see why I wanted to interview Miss Vereker, and why I had to do so on the pretext of talking to her sister.’ Brendel paused and shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘And, I must confess it to you, that wasn’t my only reason for wanting to interview Miss Vereker. I may as well make a clean breast of it now, though I took some care to keep you in the dark about it at the time. The truth is that I had an uneasy suspicion of her all the time at the back of my mind.’
‘Of Mary Vereker?’ I exclaimed in amazement.
‘Yes. Don’t think too hardly of me; I’d not met her then. I couldn’t help feeling that my original theory might be all wron
g, and if it was, then suspicion must turn on her. That door into the President’s Lodgings fascinated me. She herself fulfilled, too, so many of the necessary conditions. Shirley was her brother-in-law, and she must have known him very intimately; there might well have been family quarrels of long standing, or hidden tales of jealousy and hate. Besides how easily she could have done it! I could picture her slipping out from her father’s house to pay a brief visit to her fiancé; finding her brother-in-law there instead of him – and the revolver on the table. And all the details presented no insuperable difficulty; ladies are more likely to carry gloves than men, and Shirley, who would naturally jump up from his chair if a stranger entered, might well have remained seated when his sister-in-law came in. Besides I know well that there are many women with nerves of steel, and determination which nothing will shake. She must often have walked across to Hargreaves’ room; who was likely to suspect her? And she would have been back in her father’s house long before her absence would be noticed. Well, I went to see her, and, thank God, I came away from that rather uncomfortable interview with an impression that amounted almost to certainty that Miss Vereker, even if she was the innocent cause of a deadly rivalry between two men, knew nothing about the matter whatever, and had no suspicion of the truth. Don’t let us speak of that ugly thought of mine. After I had seen her and spoken to her I put it from my mind and I felt doubly certain that my original theory must be the true one.
‘As you know, then, I eliminated all the other possibilities except Hargreaves and Mottram, and more and more I became convinced that suspicion rested far more heavily on the latter. But it was still all a matter of guesswork and surmise, and beyond that I couldn’t get. Cotter was perfectly right; there were no clues to follow up at all, and I began to despair of getting any confirmation of my theory.
An Oxford Tragedy Page 16