“No, I’m sorry. None of us have seen him this morning. I wonder what can have happened to him. Of course, he may have taken the morning off from this to go round the other demonstrations and exhibits, or he may have gone to hear a paper read, but I’d have thought that he would have looked in here just to tell us where he would be in case we needed him. However, I expect he’ll be in soon and, if you like, I’ll tell him that you were looking for him. How will that do?”
“I’m afraid, Miss, that we want to see him rather urgently. You are sure you have no ideas where he can be? No?” He turned toward the two assistants, “What about you? Neither of you have any idea where Dr. Swartz is? Hmm.”
He turned sharply and left the room, Sergeant Jenkins trailing along behind him, like a wooden dog on wheels. They walked to the janitor’s cubbyhole. Inspector Hargrave, ignoring the clucks of protest from the outraged custodian, picked up the telephone directory and thumbed his way through it until he found the number he required. He dialed and listened to the buzz at the other end. “Hello, is that Dalston Hostel? Can you get Dr. Herman Swartz for me? What? Say that again. His room has not been slept in? No. That’ll do.”
He slammed down the receiver and glared at the empurpled janitor. “Come on, Jenkins, we must get back to town. Our man’s done a bunk and we’ll need to get a warrant or he’ll skip. It’s a blasted nuisance, for we haven’t got a complete case against him and we’ll need to do all the work after he’s inside.”
A loud voice boomed through the hall into the booth. “All hail, Inspector Hargrave,” it cried jocularly. “How goes the investigation? Are you ready to hang the whole Congress for a conspiracy to murder Ian Porter? What, has someone stolen your toffee-apple? Don’t look so glum or I’ll need to ask Joe Flanagan to give you a dose. Is your inside in tune with the universe? Does inner cleanliness come first? Which sleep-group do you belong to and do you suffer from night starvation?”
Professor Stubbs, with a copy of the Daily Courier crumpled under his arm, was looking very cheerful as he quoted from the advertisement columns. Mentally, the inspector compared him with a well-fed Persian cat which would purr at the earliest opportunity. The stream of tender enquiries after his bile ducts and sluggish liver continued. He swore, using the same words for which, earlier, he had rebuked the janitor. “Have you seen the man Swartz, Professor?” he barked, in a parade ground manner that any military commissioner of police would have admired.
“No. Why?” Professor Stubbs’s face was as innocent as that of an overfed grizzly bear.
“Why? Damn and blast him, he’s disappeared. In connection with what you were telling me last night I wanted to ask him a few questions. Looks as if your suspicions were right after all, doesn’t it, eh?”
“Looks like it? Well, yes,” the professor’s voice was low and his usually fat and creaseless forehead was wrinkled by a frown. He shook himself and growled fiercely. “Why the hell did I want to be clever? Oh, I was so cunnin’ and now this has happened. I must be right and yet.…” He seemed to be speaking to himself and the inspector looked at him suspiciously, and seemed to be just on the point of questioning him as to whether he had made any indiscreet remarks to Dr. Swartz, when he burst out violently, tossing the grey hair back from his eyes, “You must find him, Inspector, and find him quickly. That is imperative. Put every man you can spare on to the job, and for God’s sake don’t waste a minute.”
The inspector was slightly stiff and his tone rebuked, “I know my duty, Professor Stubbs, and you can rest assured that we will waste no time in locating Dr. Swartz. I am just about to proceed down town to apply for a warrant.”
Looking at him gloomily out of one bird-like eye, the professor grunted, “Apply for your warrant if you want to, but I doubt if it’ll be much use.” Inspector Hargrave was puzzled by this statement but had no time to ask further questions, for the professor, ignoring his motions of protest, shooed him and Sergeant Jenkins out of the hall and into the street, and, stopping a passing taxi, bundled them into it, panting, “You can charge this to me if it’s questioned on your expenses sheet. For God’s sake find Swartz as quickly as possible. If you hurry you may be in time to prevent another murder.”
As the taxi drew away from the curb Inspector Hargrave glanced at the professor’s face. It was greyish-white in colour and distinct separate drops of sweat were distributed about the cheekbones, like specks of dew on a spider’s web. He turned to the sergeant. “Hmm, so there’ll be another murder if we don’t hurry, will there indeed? If I’m not mistaken, Jenkins, I’d say that the learned and scatterbrained professor knows too damn much about this affair and is afraid that he’ll be the next victim. I wouldn’t have thought that he was the sort of man to be so easily scared, but then it only goes to show that you can’t judge a man from his appearances. The big bluff professor with all his shouting is only a windbag after all, and one that’s punctured by the first threatening of personal danger—not that I believe for a moment that he’s in danger. Well, he’s frightened all right, and it’s up to us to find Swartz and put his mind at rest, bless him.”
“Ah,” said Jenkins, profoundly, “it only goes to show, as you say, sir. You know, sir, I never did like that American. He was holding something back all the time he was speaking. I think, sir,” he added, diplomatically, remembering that it was not good to have sergeants more astute than their inspectors, “that you mentioned something about it at the time, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I believe I did,” replied the inspector, drawing on a nonexistent store of memory. “It’s strange how often one’s first impressions prove right, after all. I don’t think we can have any doubt now as to the identity of the murderer. He’s more or less declared his guilt by doing a bunk. I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty in getting our warrant. Ah, here we are. While I see about the warrant, will you look up the sailings of ships to America? Don’t forget the cargo boats. He’ll expect us to try the liners and will probably try to get a passage on a freighter. If we manage to catch him before he sails it’ll save the expense of extradition, as well as the time that would take. I’ll expect you to have all the necessary information by the time I’ve got my warrant.”
For a man who was supposed to be in terror lest a bogyman should jump out of a corner and stick a knife in his ribs, the behaviour of Professor Stubbs was rash in the extreme. His short pipe sending up showers of sparks, he stumped along the corridors, excusing himself briefly when he blundered into lectures. In any unoccupied room he wandered round, peering shortsightedly into cupboards and under benches. He picked up a length of glass tubing in an unoccupied laboratory and used it as a probe in his searching under benches, and when its point hit anything he bent down and pulled out the obstruction, usually an empty box or a bundle of scientific publications.
When he had finished with the chemistry department he worked his way through those devoted to zoology and biology, ticking each room off on a plan he scribbled on the reverse side of the abstract of a paper on rust in wheat, and methodically noting the rooms which were occupied, so as to pay them a visit later, during lunchtime, when no one would be there. Eventually he came to the smallest of the departments, that which the university had set aside for those students who wished to study genetics and to know more about the heredity of themselves and their fellow creatures than was considered to be quite nice. For, although the university was proud to have a Congress of Geneticists meeting in its buildings, as a prestige-bringer, yet it did not consider that the science of genetics had had time to prove itself. Dating only from the early 1900s as an organised study, it had not yet acquired the requisite number of generations of greybeards that would put it on a level with the other sciences.
The senate of the university, classical by tradition, felt, though they no longer dared to voice the opinion, that after all there was something indecently utilitarian about all these scientists. Of course, one had to give them credit for the fact that they did not mean to be utilitarian; they were
seekers after knowledge for its own sake, but there was always the chance that, by accident, they would stumble on something useful, a cure or something equally vulgar. Now a classical scholar could be relied upon never, under any circumstances, to do anything that could conceivably be of use, though it might be of interest. However, in the middle of the 19th century, they had supposed that they had “to move with the times,” and had, in consequence, erected these brick rabbit warrens on a piece of slum property, at a decent distance from the real university. A decision which had been strongly criticised by certain elderly gentlemen, who had taken advantage of the occasion to point out that the university drew a nice little revenue from the slum property, whereas all the new buildings not only meant that they would lose this, but that they would actually have to spend money.
These thoughts drifted idly through the professor’s mind as he poked his way methodically from dingy little room to dingy little room, pausing to look at the photographs of cocks turned into hens, bulldog calves and the multicoloured skins of budgerigars which hung on the manure-tinted walls.
In a large, fairly well-lighted room he came across Peter Hatton, seated at a bench under the window surrounded by milk bottles, with an inch of agar-agar in the bottom and stopped with plugs of cotton wool. Inside these bottles whole generations of the vinegar fly, drosophila melanogaster, were breeding, spending their lives and dying, while eager eyes watched for a variant of the wild type, a white or a brown eye in place of the scarlet, or a notched or wrinkled wing.
Peter picked up one of these bottles and skillfully inverted it over a jar, inside which there was a copper gauze funnel. He shook the flies from their home into this and waited for a moment until the ether in the cotton wool at the bottom of the jar had taken effect, then he tipped the anaesthetised drosophila out on to a sheet of glass and, with a camel-hair brush, selected one or two which he placed on a slide under a binocular microscope.
“Humph,” said Professor Stubbs, “when did you see Dr. Swartz last?”
Peter, fiddling at his microscope, did not look up at the question. “Really,” he said, “I suppose I should be wearing pale-blue silk and you should be a Roundhead. Actually I saw Swartz last night at the Gene-group meeting. He got up to leave at the same time as I did, about a quarter to ten. I had to leave before the end because I was meeting Mary, who’d been seeing a girlfriend, and I might just as well have waited till the end, for she was nearly half an hour late. Why do you want to know about Swartz?”
With a steel needle he centered a fly on the slide and applied his eyes again to the microscope. Professor Stubbs snorted, “Humph. He’s disappeared and the police are on the lookout for him.” He looked round the room and rumbled, “Lot of cupboards in here. Wonder what’s in them.” Peter continued to examine the flies while the professor stumped solemnly round the room, opening cupboards and looking into them inquisitively, replacing the things that his curiosity dislodged.
“What’s in this?” he bellowed suddenly, and Peter turned round, startled, to see him pointing at a long narrow cupboard beside the door. “Oh, nothing much. I think it’s the place where Fielding, whose room this is, keeps his overalls and so on.”
The professor did not seem to be listening. He was leaning forward and examining the keyhole, which was blocked with a bright fragment of broken metal where someone had snapped the key in the lock. Straightening up, the professor stumped round the room, examining the benches with the air of one who does not quite know for what he is searching. His eyes fixed on a Bunsen burner and he disconnected the rubber gas pipe from the heavy metal base and picked it up by the thin brass neck and returned to the cupboard, swinging the burner in his hand like a man testing the weight of a hammer. He examined the lock and lifted the Bunsen burner.
“Look here, sir,” said Peter, anxiously, “you can’t do that. This isn’t my room. I’ve just borrowed it. We can’t break up a man’s room.”
“Oh, can’t I?” remarked the professor fiercely, and he smashed the burner down on the lock. Peter looked on, feeling very worried at this desecration of another man’s property, while Professor Stubbs rained sledgehammer blows on the lock, panting between them. “It shouldn’t stand much of this…it’s not a good lock…another two or three should do the trick….”
The door creaked faintly under the assault and he raised the Bunsen burner and sighted carefully on the crack he had made beside the lock. The heavy base sunk into the opening for a distance of about a couple of inches and the professor leaned his weight upon it, using it as a lever. The wood groaned and then there was a sharp crack as the lock gave way, having proved unequal to the strain.
Puffing like a walrus, the professor stood back and laid his makeshift hammer down on the table. Slowly, ever so slowly, the door swung open, and a figure which had been crammed inside toppled forward. Peter jumped up to catch it, but the professor stood in his way, making no movement. The face of the figure was a dark purple in colour, but even if nothing else had been identifiable, Peter would have known it by the empty corncob pipe clenched tightly in the set teeth. The body of Herman Swartz thudded to the ground and still the professor made no other movement than to take his pipe out of his pocket and start to scrape it methodically.
Chapter 11
Calico Pie
NEITHER OF THEM said anything for a full minute. The silence seemed the deeper for the sound of the professor’s penknife scraping away the clotted carbon on the bowl of his pipe. As he scratched a match between his fingernails to light it, it sounded like the breaking down of a vast machine. He sighed, “Well, when Inspector Hargrave said he’d gone I was afraid of this. I don’t see what I could have done to prevent it. Peter.” The young doctor jumped smartly to attention at the parade ground sergeant-major roar. “Will you go and phone the inspector and tell him what we’ve found? I’ll wait here till you come back. Don’t use the janitor’s phone but go across to the common room and use one of the boxes, and don’t mention it to anyone, not even to Mary.”
Glad of the excuse to leave the room, Peter tilted his flies back into their bottle and corked them up with a fresh wad of cotton wool. “I won’t be long, sir,” he said and closed the door gently behind him. Alone, the professor bent down over the body of Swartz and, removing his pipe, sniffed at his mouth. He screwed up his face in distaste and murmured to himself. “Cyanide again. The damned fool.” Feeling through his pockets he unearthed a powerful magnifying glass and, grinning a little to himself at the thought of playing Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Thorndyke, he examined the skin about the nose and the upper lip and found it slightly abrased. “Hmm,” he grunted and replaced his glass in his pocket, “I thought as much. Oh, the devil—and all so unnecessary.”
He straightened up again and relit his pipe, which had gone out. Looking down at the body he sighed and mumbled, “What? Frightened by false fire?” Then he recommenced his peering round the room, looking anxiously at the bottles with their families of red-eyed flies as if imploring them to speak and tell him what had happened in the room.
The door opened quietly and the professor turned to face it. The eager face of Professor Silver appeared with the cockatoo lock of hair dangling over his forehead. He grinned at Professor Stubbs in a friendly manner, “Dr. Fielding not in? How are you this morning? I’ve just sent the corrected proofs of my book back to my publishers and felt that I could do with a little entertainment. Fielding told me that he’d come across some inexplicable things in a wild population of drosophila subobscura and invited me to drop in some time.”
His harsh voice was as disturbing as the croaking of frogs on a summer’s night and Professor Stubbs said nothing. He seemed to be listening to something with his head cocked to one side. Silver did not seem to be the least put out by his inattention but advanced further into the room and the door, worked by a spring, closed slowly behind him, disclosing the body of Swartz lying on the floor.
Silver stared at the body for a moment and then screeched, “God, what
’s happened to Swartz? He’s dead—dead like Ian.” He looked across at Professor Stubbs and his eyes narrowed and his eyebrows seemed to meet in a straight line. “What do you know about this?” His grating voice was crafty and he took a step forward toward the professor, who remained silent and as still as the Bass Rock. Silver looked down at Swartz once more and then turned toward Professor Stubbs, his voice breaking as he screamed, “You murdered him and you murdered Ian. You swine! You can’t get away with it, you won’t get away with it.”
While he was speaking his feet were slithering over the floor and, as he finished, he jumped awkwardly at the professor, who stuck out a short thick arm and pushed him over bellowing, “Don’t be a bloody fool, man.” Silver collapsed like a punctured motor tire and sat down on a low stool, covering his face with his hands. For a moment or two he sobbed dryly and then, opening his fingers, he glanced up at Professor Stubbs suspiciously. The professor did not seem to be paying much attention to him but was still looking down at Swartz with a strange, quizzical smile twisting his usually cheerful face.
He swung his bulk round to face Silver and roared, “Stopped being a damned fool, eh? You know as well as I do that I have had no hand in either of these murders. It doesn’t do anybody any good to have you throwin’ hysterical fits.” His voice dropped to a low rumble. “I think I’ve got a pretty fair idea of the murderer and, while I might have had some doubts about helping to hang anyone for the murder of Porter, who was askin’ to be murdered anyhow, I’ll have no scruples about helpin’ to hang that same person as high as Haman for the murder of Swartz. The first murder was excusable, but this is not. A dog can have one bite by law, and though we may disapprove publicly of its bitin’ we may be quite pleased secretly because it has bitten someone we all dislike, but when that dog bites someone we like we demand that it be muzzled, at the least. I know who murdered Porter and Swartz and I’m goin’ to prove my case.”
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