Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Nicholas Blake
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1. “We Can Wait”
2. Cockroaches and Crusaders
3. The Spooky Treasure Hunt
4. When Did You Last See Your Brother?
5. “Only the Soldered Mouth Can Tell”
6. The Missing Plagiarist
7. The Concupiscent Poet
8. The Superimposed Redhead
9. “A Funeral in My Brain”
10. Confessions and Blackmail
11. The Cup and the Lip
12. “Yesterday Is Mystery”
13. “Danaë, in a Brazen Tower”
14. By Hand
15. Go Go Go!
More from Vintage Classic Crime
Copyright
About the Book
Private detective and poet Nigel Strangeways is staying at Cabot University, an Ivy League university near Boston, while he undertakes some research. There he encounters the Ahlberg brothers – Chester, Assistant Senior Tutor in the Business School, Mark, who lectures in the English Faculty and their half-brother, Josiah, a professor of Classics. When one of the brothers is found murdered, the local police request Nigel’s help in catching the killer, but little does Nigel know just how close he is to the murderer.
About the Author
Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.
Also by Nicholas Blake
A Question of Proof
Thou Shell of Death
There’s Trouble Brewing
The Beast Must Die
The Widow’s Cruise
Malice in Wonderland
The Case of the Abominable Snowman
The Smiler with the Knife
Minute for Murder
Head of a Traveller
The Dreadful Hollow
The Whisper in the Gloom
End of Chapter
The Worm of Death
The Sad Variety
To my friends at Harvard, with apologies for resisting the temptation to put them into the book
The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth . . .
—Emily Dickinson
1 “We Can Wait”
“WHAT ON EARTH is a ‘No Station’?” asked Nigel, reading a huge overhead sign as they drove into the city.
“It’s a station where there are no trains, no platforms, no need to come or go,” Charles Reilly said from the back. “A thoroughly un-American nonactivity.”
“And no birds sing,” added Sukie, trying hard to catch up.
Chester Ahlberg, who was driving, glanced at Nigel. “It’s an abbreviation for North Station.”
Reilly snorted. “There you go, leaking the mystery out of everything! And anyway, if that’s your explanation, why don’t you put a period after No? When I think of the tedious way you Americans dot every i in the course of your alleged conversation, yet you can’t spare one little dot for the purpose of—”
“He’s off again,” sighed Sukie.
“How long have we hired you as our resident poet?” Chester’s brother, Mark, asked Reilly.
“You will benefit by my presence for one whole academic year, and not a day less.”
“My God!” Leaning across Sukie, Mark prodded the elderly Irish poet. “Why aren’t you at Mass, anyway?”
“I was. So now I can enjoy myself. Which is more than you’d have a right to do, you guilt-ridden, transcendentalist, undenominational sons of Puritans.”
“Will you listen to him,” said Sukie. “Charles dear heart, we’re here to show Mr. Strangeways the sights, not to expose him to your fey Irish prattle.”
“There’s no sights for the next thirty miles but eateries disguised as Nantucket whalers, pizza houses, gas stations and all-night doughnut-frying establishments. Now if only, among all these acres of advertisements, you could find one little, little touch of glamour! I don’t hope for sin—that’d be asking too much, you have to have souls before you can sin, and there’s no sign of them growing in this man’s country.”
“You Papists talk about sin as if you’d invented and patented it,” protested Mark. “Over here, we take it seriously.”
“Some of us do,” his brother said. There was at this, Nigel noticed, a slight congealing of the atmosphere as when several people want to change the conversation but no one can think how to do so. On the back seat, Sukie took Mark’s hand.
“I disagree,” said Nigel presently.
“What?” Chester asked.
Nigel, always a compulsive reader, had just noticed, writ large on the wall of a funeral parlor, the legend
DRIVE CAREFULLY. WE CAN WAIT.
“You disagree?” asked Chester, who seemed puzzled.
“Drive carefully. We can wait,” proclaimed Nigel in sinister tones. The effect ran counter to the injunction: Chester jerked the wheel and all but rammed a Cadillac which was passing them in the left-hand lane.
“Ches-ter!” cried Sukie.
“Sorry. What did you say?”
Nigel explained that he had quoted the undertaker’s slogan.
“Well, what do you know? I never noticed that before, and I must have driven this route a hundred times.” Chester’s voice was light; but his knuckles were still white on the wheel. “I guess that’s pretty interesting. I get your point, Mr. Strangeways: you were indicating that there are some interesting sights in this section. Now, if you look to the right you’ll catch a view of the naval yards. And a little farther on—”
Chester Ahlberg was quite in command again, driving efficiently at the exact 50 mph limit allowed, under the bright blue sky of the New England fall. Nigel meditated upon the pleasure afforded by riding in another man’s car, in a strange country, all responsibilities left at home. A womb-like sensation, highly agreeable; the more so because the womb was, as it were, transparent, and one could see what was going on outside without having to make real contact with it. Which went for his companions too, amicable persons in their different ways, whom he could enjoy but need not become involved with. Chester Ahlberg might prove a little boring; and Charles Reilly, whose mental age—like that of most poets—seemed to oscillate wildly between nine and ninety, certainly would be at times. But Mark and his fiancée (but was Sukie his fiancée?) offered plenty of entertaining variety. And yes, thought Nigel, I like them all.
“Does the grass never turn green here?” Reilly asked in his barbed Dublin manner, gazing with distaste at the glum, brownish stuff that covered the earth, among boulders and conifers, on either side of the highway. His companions set upon him.
This was nice too—t
he ready acceptance of the stranger. Of course, Reilly had been here since the beginning of the semester and had eased his way in. But Nigel had met the same engaging response from the day he wrote to Ezekiel Edwardes, an old acquaintance from undergraduate days at Oxford, now Master of Hawthorne House, saying he wanted to do a bit of research in the famous library of Cabot University. Ezekiel had at once invited him to occupy a spare suite in the House for as long as he wished, had met him at the airport a week ago, and had introduced him to the resident faculty.
Chester Ahlberg, assistant senior tutor at Hawthorne, taught in the Business School; Mark on the English faculty. Their half brother, whom Nigel had not yet met, was a full professor of Classics, attached to the House but living outside. There was a strong Ahlberg connection with Hawthorne House, the father—a millionaire financier—having built and given it to the university, of which he had been an alumnus. Susannah Tate (“Sukie” to all), a graduate student at the neighboring women’s college, was working for a Ph.D., the subject of her thesis being Emily Dickinson. Hence the expedition to Amherst this afternoon.
On the back seat, Mark and Sukie were wrangling amicably about the presidential election.
“Sure LBJ will sweep the country. So then what? He’s a politician. He’ll go just as far with desegregation as he’s pushed.”
“You’re dead wrong. He went along with Kennedy on that, always. And he’ll get further than Kennedy, because he is a politician; he can handle Congress.”
“Okay, maybe he can, but do you think the South’s impressed by a few blasts of hot air from Washington? Look at the way Wallace has been dragging his feet.”
“Sukie wants to lead a crusade into Alabama and have another Civil War,” said Chester.
“Oh, nuts. All I want is for state legislatures to be told where they get off if they go on acting like—like Belgian slave drivers in the Congo.”
“All!” jeered Mark. “Anyway, the South isn’t all—”
“Now listen, Mark. Is there any other civilized country in the world that would allow a gang of murderous morons like the KKK to terrorize people, and to get back into power after it’d been totally discredited once?”
“You know, children,” said Charles Reilly, “this is something I like about the States. You do take politics seriously. Same as Ireland. I mean, ordinary intelligent people do, not politicians, God help us—to them it’s a game, a rough, tough, sophisticated game, like poetry is to poets.”
“That’s a very interesting point of view,” said Chester, his eyes on the road ahead. “But don’t you take poetry seriously?”
“Oh, it’s not a point of view, it’s the trut’. And will I tell you another thing?”
“Tell on,” said Mark.
“I talked to a fella when I was reading down at Charlottesville—a good liberal Southerner. Oh, they do have them there, Sukie. He said he and many of his students think liberal but can’t get their feelings in line with their intelligence: they’ve inherited this long tradition from their forefathers, living among slaves and then emancipated Negroes. It’s atavistic. They know it’s wrong, out of date, but, you see, they can’t help themselves, can’t smooth out their inner conflict.”
“No, no!” Sukie exclaimed. “We know all that. But do you want us to wait politely till the South gets its emotions in phase with its intelligence? While human beings get lynched and bombed and treated like dirt there? There’s a war on—a war of liberation?—or there should be, only all the fighting’s done by the other side.”
“A Maud Gonne come to judgment,” murmured Reilly.
“Don’t say that, Charles. She was hell on wheels, wasn’t she? And I’ve got to marry this girl,” protested Mark.
“This is a great girl, Mark my boy. If I had your age and my looks, I’d have stolen her from you.”
And he probably would, thought Nigel, glancing round at Reilly’s shock of red hair, his rosy face, brilliant blue eyes and sensual lips. Nigel had noticed, too, how serious had been Reilly’s contribution to this fairly naïve political exchange: with his Irish empathy, he had adapted himself to what seemed to Nigel a basic rule of American conversation—one may be serious or frivolous, but never both in the same paragraph.
“Well, here we are,” said Mark, “approaching the town of Amherst, the historical birthplace of America’s greatest poetess or poet. It’s behind a tall, tall hedge, I seem to remember.”
“What is?” asked Chester.
“The birthplace, you dope.” Sukie laughed. “Drive recklessly; we can’t wait.”
They entered the hilly town, its elegant frame houses spaced out among trees and sloping lawns. Presently Mark cried, “Left! You turn left here!”
Chester, who had overshot the crossing, did a hurried U-turn; and was instantly halted by a policeman on a motorcycle who had been following him. The officer poked his head in at the driver’s window, and pointed silently to a notice at the roadside, which, in large letters, forbade U-turns.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Chester. “Now look, you don’t want to give me a ticket. I’m really awfully sorry, I didn’t see the notice. I am so sorry; you see, I overshot the intersection—”
The officer, after walking very slowly round the car to examine its registration plates, gave Chester a ticket. When the sordid procedure was over, Mark asked the man:
“Can you please tell us just where in this law-abiding town is located the birthplace of the great American poetess, Emily Dickinson?”
The man looked at him suspiciously, but could not think up any valid reason for bringing a further charge. He had to content himself with a piercing stare at Mark and a “never heard of her.”
“Sure, they’re all scared blue of the police over here,” Reilly murmured to Nigel. “Now, did you ever hear anyone so apologetic?”
“That’s because they’re uncultured Irishmen and tote firearms,” said Mark, who had overheard him. “Hey, don’t look so worried, Chester. It might have happened to anyone. Come on, forget your persecution mania.”
“I do not have persecution mania. I am persecuted. That is quite different.”
“Have it your own way, brother.”
After they had cruised around awhile, Mark found the house. They walked up the sloping lawn toward it.
“Are you quite sure it’s empty?” asked Chester apprehensively. “We don’t want to go bursting in on—”
“Take it easy,” Mark reassured him. “We’re pilgrims. Pilgrims rate special treatment.”
“Of course it is,” Sukie, who had scampered ahead, called over her shoulder. In a clear, toneless voice she chanted
“There’s been a death in the
opposite house
As lately as to-day.
I know it by the numb look
Such houses have alway.
“Just get a load of that numb look, will you?”
Empty it certainly was and securely locked, as Mark proved by trying each of the ground-floor windows in turn.
“D’you think that’s the door she hid behind when her parents were having company?” asked Sukie, peering in. “It all looks so swept and garnished. Sort of impersonal.”
“It’s her poems she inhabits,” Mark said gently. “And do you remember?—one Sunday she refused to go to church, whatever her father said, and they couldn’t find her anywhere, and when they got back, there she was in the cellar in a rocking chair, rocking away. Do you know her work well, Mr. Strangeways?”
“She was one of my favorites, in Oxford, in the twenties.”
“A terrible hit-or-miss lady she was,” said Charles Reilly. “Morbid too. She’s a one got more kick out of corpses than anything. And she’d no respect for God at all at all. ‘Papa up there’ indeed!—the pert little madam.”
“Oh, Charles!” protested Sukie.
“Oh, she’d a great turn of phrase. Like a precocious child. But sure she was no artist,” Charles persisted.
Sukie’s eyes flashed. “That’s ridiculou
s. D’you know what she said?—‘Art is a house which tries to be haunted.’”
“Did she now? Did she say that now?” Charles ruminated. “That’s good. I like it. That’s very good indeed. Very well, I’ll not say a word more against her.”
Nigel sat them down for a photograph on the front steps. Peering into the magnifying view finder, he saw the four of them, tiny and sharp, in brilliant color. Reading from left to right: Chester, Mark, Sukie, Charles. Chester, with his small neat face and small neat body, a tentative smile on the one, gray-green English tweeds on the other. Mark, larger, not so tidy, corduroy trousers and a blue sports jacket, smiling broadly out of a round face. The streamlined figure of Sukie, gray eyes, black hair, vivid as a cardinal bird in her scarlet skirt and white sweater. Charles Reilly, pushing out his sensual lips as if to shape a wisecrack or a line of verse.
“A historic photograph,” said Nigel, happily unaware how the future would take up his innocent words.
They walked to the Amherst cemetery and found the family graves of the Dickinsons. Some misguided culture lover had twined the railings around them with artificial morning-glories.
Mark shook his head. “Will you look at this! It’s nauseating! It’s uncouth. It’s a scandal. If there’s one thing Emily couldn’t have tolerated, it’s artificial flowers.”
Sukie wasted no words. She began stripping the offensive floral tribute from the railings.
“Oh, now, Sukie—” Chester looked uneasily round—“I don’t think you should do that. It’s sacrilegious; and they don’t belong to you.”
“Don’t be so stuffy, Chester. They’re a desecration. Aren’t they, Charles?”
“Whoever strung them up had a right to do it. And you’ve a right to remove them.”
“Oh glory!—now he’s getting gnomic.” Sukie swathed the string of flowers round and round Mark’s neck. “Now rid me of them. Under that tree will do.” Her lithe body swung forward to Nigel. “Tell me you approve.”
“I approve.”
Her gray eyes were in no hurry to withdraw from his. Mark had disappeared with his trophy behind a yew tree.
The Morning After Death Page 1
