‘You might even be eating poison at this moment,’ he said.
‘Why should you try to poison me?’
‘Because you foolishly told us that you knew who killed Flaveen Mills and that you were keeping the knowledge to yourself.’
The crunch of the peppermint.
‘That is the trouble with this logic that you believe in so much,’ said Mr Utamaro.
A trace of exasperation.
‘Either you said that because you did kill Miss Mills and have tried to poison me,’ Mr Utamaro said, ‘or you said it because you hope that I will not believe you. But it is just as likely that if you did kill her you would hit on the second alternative as a means of persuading me against my better judgement.’
He heard Alasdair’s fingers scuffling in the peppermint bag again.
‘So you tell me you know who killed the girl, but you’re not going to let me know whether you think it’s me or not,’ Alasdair said.
‘Exactly.’
‘And nothing I can say will make the slightest difference to you because it might be bluff or double bluff.’
‘Or double double bluff,’ said Mr Utamaro.
The smell of peppermint in the darkness.
‘Then how do you know who killed her?’
‘Because of the things I heard before she was killed, and because of things people have said in unguarded moments.’
‘And you’re perfectly happy about your conclusions.’
‘Perfectly.’
‘But you don’t intend to tell the police?’
The question as it might have been put by a machine.
‘I intend to do nothing,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘Intention for me is action. When I intend I act – at the same moment.’
He stood motionless in the darkness. Alasdair a yard away chewed his peppermints and moved restlessly.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said, ‘I was wandering down to see if there was anything readable in that ghastly library. Then I heard you and I thought “Why the hell should he tell me what I am and what I ought to do? ” I’m sorry if I hit you.’
‘I’m glad you tried,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘Glad?’
‘Of course, it shows you are getting near the end of your tether.’
‘I thought we’d finished with all that,’ Alasdair said. ‘I thought after that business this afternoon that I was through with my Zen cold douche. I can’t say I felt much better for it, though.’
‘But you are not through with it, are you?’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘I wish to hell we could have some light,’ Alasdair said.
A spurt of petulance.
‘I can’t see you at all,’ he added. ‘Every time you speak your voice seems to come from somewhere else.’
‘And yet I’m standing still,’ Mr Utamaro said.
Alasdair made no attempt to find the switch.
After a minute he said:
‘It’s all very well telling me all that you did this afternoon, but it leaves things just as they were. I am what I am. It’s made no difference. It’s worse if anything. I can’t kid myself there’s a way out now.’
‘It has made a little difference, you will find,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘But you have not broken through yet. You are still concealing something. Carrying a weight.’
‘Concealing something? We never seem to get far away from the murder, do we?’
‘Is that strange?’
‘Not if you had done it, I suppose.’
‘A statement which if I were interested in logic I would have to discount as an attempt to shake my confidence, providing always I believed you had killed Miss Mills.’
‘Do you?’
The words shot out. An ambush.
‘It is not the time to say. I am silent.’
‘It’s getting chilly. I think I’d better get to bed,’ Alasdair said.
‘Good night,’ said Mr Utamaro.
Alasdair stayed where he was. Silent in the dark.
‘Do you mean that I am concealing something that may have nothing to do with the murder?’ he said.
‘I mean you are concealing something. Anything more is a tissue of thought. And until you stop concealing it incidents like that business with Miss Mills are bound to occur.’
‘Incidents like that business with Flaveen? Surely you don’t think of murder as an incident.’
‘It is an incident,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘just like the way you snubbed her when she congratulated you on climbing the cedar tree is an incident.’
‘Oh lord,’ said Alasdair, ‘you noticed did you?’
‘One would not need to have trained oneself to see things as they are in order to notice that,’ Mr Utamaro said.
‘No, I suppose not. Dammit, I can never apologize to the poor kid now. Why do I do things like that?’
‘You know,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that I’m the only one who can do anything about it,’ Alasdair said.
He waited in the darkness for Mr Utamaro to tell him.
It was fully five minutes before he realized that the Japanese was no longer there.
Chapter 19
The wind veered during the night. The buffeting, warm, rainy south-wester went and in its place there came a steady piercing wind from the east. The sky was overcast, frigidly grey. The temperature dropped until it was near freezing.
In the dining room a black oil-stove near the table was dissipating its heat almost ineffectually. The German girls wore heavy sweaters for their expeditions to the table with porridge plates, tea, and small helpings of scrambled eggs on toast. Only in the kitchen it was warmer. The blonde girl had begun her day by lighting every source of heat there was. The big gas oven was slowly working up to its maximum heat and the generous dish-warming cupboards were standing with their doors wide open each wafting a broad band of heat across the kitchen. The eight rings on the gas stove were all burning at full pressure.
Honor, sitting next to Gerry, moved her chair until it was touching his, and huddled close to him miserably.
Miss Rohan gave a sharp little cough.
‘It certainly is cold–’ she began.
A silence.
‘You were saying that it is getting colder?’ said Mr Applecheek.
‘Was I? Oh, yes, I was, Father. It is.’
She broke a piece of toast into fragments.
Mr Applecheek, who was wearing an old grey scarf across his shoulders, said:
‘Yes, it is colder. And a very interesting and natural subject of conversation it makes. In a moment we could get on to the likelihood of snow.’
‘Snow?’
Honor jerked her head up from her scrambled egg.
‘You’re not serious, are you?’
‘A clergyman not serious, my dear Mrs Manvers, how can you suggest such a thing?’
Honor looked out of the window.
‘I believe you’re right,’ she said. ‘What a bloody day.’
‘Exactly so,’ said Mr Applecheek.
‘Oh come,’ said Alasdair, ‘a nip in the air, what could be better? Sets the blood tingling and all that.’
‘It may set your blood tingling,’ Honor said, ‘but it certainly doesn’t do anything of the kind to mine. However I’ve got a flask of something, thank goodness.’
‘Alcohol in the morning?’
Alasdair shook his head. Roguishly.
‘I wouldn’t touch a drop of alcohol before midday at the earliest for anything,’ he said.
‘All right, all right,’ Honor said, ‘there’s no need to make such a declaration about it.’
‘I wasn’t making a declaration,’ Alasdair said. ‘It happens to be perfectly true. The cold doesn’t affect me, except that I feel in rather good form. It’s a fact.’
‘Well, it affects me,’ said Jim.
He stood up and looked round.
‘Is there anywhere at all in this house where it’s going to be warm?’ he said. ‘If I can’t
think for coldness the work will go to hell.’
‘Each time the door to the kitchens is opened I feel a wave of hot air,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘If you are really worried by the cold, I should try to find a nook in there. But you ought not to be troubled by it. It comes of splitting up life.’
‘It comes of a fall of so many degrees in the air temperature immediately surrounding me,’ said Jim.
The sharp Ulster vowels.
Mr Utamaro chuckled.
‘You’re incorrigible, Mr Henderson,’ he said. ‘Do you really think that a scientific observation has anything to do with the feeling of depression you are suffering from?’
*
At ten o’clock the class assembled in the common room. They each took one of the canvas chairs and sat on them in a short line facing the trestle table in front of the fireplace. Gerry brought in a chipped blue saucer and put it on the floor beside him to use as an ashtray.
Mr Utamaro came in at three minutes past ten. He went to the table and stood facing the students.
‘This morning,’ he said, ‘I am to give you a lecture on the Haiku. The haiku, as some of you may know, is a short poem which is the concrete evidence of the experience of satori. It must be in three lines, the first of five syllables, the second of seven, and the third of five again.’
‘Just a moment if you don’t mind,’ said Alasdair.
He took an envelope from his pocket, brought out his pen and scribbled a note.
Mr Utamaro chuckled.
‘Five syllables, seven syllables, and then five,’ he said. ‘You will get nowhere without that. Now here is a haiku.’
Alasdair poised his pen. Crouched with his envelope on his knee, peering up at Mr Utamaro.
Miss Rohan sat with her head at a slight angle and inclined in a hint of a bow. About to receive a presentation. Gerry cupped both hands behind his ears.
Mr Utamaro said:
‘The firefly
As.it fell down from a leaf,
It darted away.’
Along silence.
‘But that hasn’t got five syllables in the very first line,’ said Alasdair.
Mr Utamaro laughed.
‘It makes it a better haiku,’ he said.
The others joined the laughter. Alasdair smiled uneasily. Tears were roll ing down Mr Utamaro’s cheeks. He wiped at them. And suddenly stopped.
‘But I have two pupils missing,’ he said. ‘I forgot to call the roll. I think I used the book to stop a little table wobbling in the kitchen. I had it in my hand as I was passing through. Now, Miss Brentt told me she would be absent, but where is Mr Henderson?’
‘He left us after breakfast,’ said Miss Rohan. ‘I think he went into the kitchen with his books. It seemed rather hard on the domestic staff, but I thought it best to say nothing.’
‘Yes, of course, the kitchen,’ said Mr Utamaro.
He walked out of the room.
He went along the corridor, entered the chill dining room and went across to the door into the kitchens. He found Jim sitting on the floor in a corner next to the big oven.
‘It is time to tell you something,’ he said.
Jim closed his book and put it on the pile by his feet.
‘I hope you’re not complaining about me sitting here,’ he said. ‘That blonde girl turned off all the gas points when I came in but apparently there’s a rice pudding cooking in the oven here, so I can get a bit warm somehow.’
‘Miss Mills told me that it was you who stole the sword,’ said Mr Utamaro.
Jim scrambled up.
‘She told you what?’ he said.’ Is it a joke you’re having?’
Mr Utamaro grinned.
‘When the hell did she tell you?’ Jim said.
‘Shortly before she was killed,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘I saw you immediately afterwards and asked you if you had the sword. You denied it.’
‘Sure, I denied it. Why wouldn’t I? I didn’t have the sword then. I didn’t have it ever.’
‘It is time you said where you went after you left me on the morning of her death, when you got so angry with me for accusing you of stealing the sword,’ Mr Utamaro said.
A flat statement.
‘I can’t see that the situation has been altered at all,’ Jim said. ‘And I refused to say before.’
‘The situation is always altering,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘If we’re going in for more talk about Zen,’ Jim said, ‘I’m going to sit down where I was warm. Look out of the window there. It’s snowing.’
Jim slumped back into his corner by the oven. Mr Utamaro turned to the kitchen window. Across the small stable yard a few pellets of snow scurried. In the kitchen the warm odour of rice pudding.
Jim settled his back against the wall.
‘I’ll tell you one time the situation stops altering,’ he said.
‘It stops just like a clock – when the mainspring goes.’
Mr Utamaro turned round from the window.
‘With death,’ said Jim.
‘Yes,’ Mr Utamaro said, ‘I know that is what you have been thinking. You have been seeing everything as frozen, caught at the instant of Miss Mills’ death.’
‘That’s the way it was. There was a relationship – developing, as they say. All relationships go on developing all the time. That’s a sociological fact. They go on until down comes the chopper, and then you’re left with whatever there was.’
‘No,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘Of course you say no. You’ve got a vested interest in saying no.’
Mr Utamaro grinned.
‘But I have just proved you wrong,’ he said. ‘When I told you that Miss Mills believed you had stolen the sword didn’t I alter the relationship between you and her?’
‘All right, you did. But only because of an accident. The stopped clock has been jogged. The minute hand has ticked forward a bit. And now the clock’s as much stopped as ever it was.’
‘I will tell you what really happened to the sword,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘It was taken from my room and hidden in the cedar tree. Miss Mills found it there. She later got it into her head that you had stolen it from me and hidden it. She was going to put it back for you if you did nothing about it yourself. She promised me that the sword would appear again.’
Jim bit his lower lip.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘that’s all new to me. You’re telling me something. The clock has ticked on another couple of times.’
‘It has never stopped,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘I have shown you how easy it is to see that it is still going. But you are determined not to see it.’
‘Nobody ever called me pig-headed,’ said Jim.
Mr Utamaro laughed happily.
‘Pig head,’ he said.
Jim stood up abruptly and moved away from the oven.
‘It’s getting too bloody hot down there,’ he said. ‘And the smell of rice pudding’s enough to make a cat sick.’
‘If you try to isolate events and put them in a compartment all of their own,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘you deceive yourself into thinking that it is possible for something to stay still.’
Jim strolled over to the window, shoved his hands into his pockets and stood staring out.
A thin layer of hard powdered snow on the cement of the yard.
‘You’re maybe right,’ Jim said.
Inside the oven the wide dish of rice pudding bubbled slowly.
There was a faint plopping sound.
Jim jingled the coins in his pocket.
Silence.
The kitchen pleasantly warm. Outside another burst of snow pellets rattled against the windows.
Jim turned from the window. A resolution taken.
‘I was waiting for Flaveen up in her room, from half past twelve to one o’clock, the time she was murdered,’ he said. ‘She asked me to come up.’
Mr Utamaro said nothing.
‘I suppose you pretty well know all this,’ Jim said.
‘It is better for you t
o tell me,’ said Mr Utamaro.
Jim looked out of the window again.
‘That snow will never lie,’ he said.
‘No. It is too late in the year.’
‘I couldn’t see why the hell anyone should have the satisfaction of calling the poor kid a whore,’ Jim said. ‘All right she hadn’t known me above a couple of days and she was prepared to go to bed with me. Maybe she was a bit readier for that sort of thing than’s supposed to be polite. Well, I don’t care. She’s entitled to her privacy just the same. If she hadn’t been killed no one would ever have known. I don’t see why they need to know now.’
‘Because she was killed,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘I was up with her in her room on the evening the sword was stolen, too,’ Jim said. ‘I told her it would be noticed if we weren’t down to hear your announcements at nine o’clock. That was why we made another date.’
He went across the kitchen and crouched in front of the oven warming his hands at it. The sound of steady bubbling.
‘I wonder is that pudding cooking too fast?’ he said.
‘Do you know how to turn the heat down?’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘There ought to be a control of some sort.’
Jim examined the oven.
‘This should be it,’ he said.
‘Then make it a little less hot.’
‘You’re sure it’ll be all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Utamaro.
Knowledge.
Jim turned the knob a little and stood up. Still facing the oven he said:
‘I suppose you could put it that she seduced me. But she was a decent sort of kid.’
‘You must give the superintendent all the facts,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘You will find him in the warden’s office.’
‘I hope to hell he’s got it warm,’ said Jim.
He picked up his books from the floor in the corner by the oven and, carrying them in a pile in front of him, went out.
*
‘All the time the telephone in the warden’s office keeps ringing,’ said the dark girl.
‘What do you expect?’ said the blonde one. ‘You don’t think it’s your parents all the way from Hamburg, do you?’
‘Yes,’ said the dark one.
A small voice.
The blonde laughed.
‘If Superintendent Padbourne had sent them a telegram about our little escapade in the larder they would have rung up long ago,’ she said. ‘No, you can settle down to wait for the end now.’
Zen there was Murder Page 21