The Morning After Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “But why did he wait all this time before coming to you?”

  “He says he was in a state of shock. Only realized we wanted him when he picked up a paper this morning.”

  “What’s he been doing in the meanwhile?”

  “Wandering about in the city. Eating and sleeping in the Negro quarter. That’s his story. It’d have given him plenty of time to hide the gun.”

  “He admits he took a gun to the interview?” asked Nigel.

  “He’s not all that crazy. And I’m not satisfied with this story of him spending days in a state of shock. I can’t shake it yet. I’m getting a psychiatrist to work on him. That’ll sort him out. My own belief is that someone was hiding him.”

  “Who?”

  “His sister, could be.”

  “But I thought you’d searched her apartment,” said Nigel.

  “We did. She wouldn’t hide him there, though.” Brady gave Nigel a long, ruminative stare. “What d’you think of this story of his about discovering the body?”

  “As you narrate it,” replied Nigel smoothly, “it does sound quite plausible. Did you believe it?”

  “I don’t know. He sure had it pat. As though he’d tried it out on someone before. He remembers every detail, yet doesn’t have more than a vague impression of his movements during the subsequent period. There’s something wrong here. If only we could trace the purchase of a gun by him! Trouble over here, Mr. Strangeways, it’s as easy to buy a gun as a sack of peanuts.”

  “By the way, you know Chester Ahlberg has lost his passport?”

  “That stuffed shirt? No. Well, we’ll keep an eye out for it. But it’s father Ahlberg has me worried. Keeps ringing me, asking me why haven’t I brought his son’s murderer to justice, threatening to have my head if I don’t solve the crime within a week. That old man’s a heller, believe me.”

  “If anyone found a passport, he’d send it to the owner or hand it in somewhere, wouldn’t he? It’d be no use to the finder.”

  “Normally, sure. But there’s quite a trade in them. Substitute your own photograph. Forge the stamps over it. Delete the physical details chemically, and substitute your own. It’s professional work, though. You telling me Chester Ahlberg has an expert forger lined up?”

  “Not exactly. But it would have been possible for him to take the next plane back here, shoot his brother, fly to London again the same night, and turn up all present and correct at his first conference there next morning. Possible, with the time differences in the two countries.”

  Lieutenant Brady laughed shortly. “You kidding me, Mr. Strangeways? That’s for the birds.”

  “You mean, obtain a phony passport with a false name, so that the airport people would have no record of a Chester Ahlberg flying in that night and flying out again?” asked the Master soberly.

  “Something like that.”

  Brady laughed again. “So, why would he lose his real passport? It’s the faked one he’d have to get rid of.”

  “Yes. That’s just the trouble. Still, it might be worth inquiring from the international airlines at Charlton airport if a man answering his description came in from Britain that Thursday night.”

  “It’s crazy,” the Lieutenant protested. Then, with a hard look at Nigel, “You’re trying to sidetrack me from your own client.”

  “John Tate’s not my client. Will you have the inquiries made—if only to stop up that hole?”

  “All right. I’ll put someone onto it.” Brady got up and stretched. “I must be on my way. Would you do one little thing for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t seem to get any place with Mark Ahlberg. Maybe you can. There’s a discrepancy of evidence—”

  “Yes. John Tate says he found the office door unlocked at 10:30. Mark said it was locked at 10:15.”

  “What it is to have brains! Good night. Be seeing you. Good night, Master.” . . .

  “One thing you and Sukie’ll have in common.”

  “What’s that?” asked Mark abruptly. He was sitting at his cluttered desk after dinner, studying a pupil’s essay.

  “Total chaos.”

  “Uh-huh. Be with you in a minute.”

  Nigel prowled quietly around the disordered room. Gramophone records lay on books which lay on papers which as often as not lay on the floor. He turned over the pile of journals on a side table: the copy of Playboy was no longer there: he selected an issue of the Sewanee Review.

  It was difficult, he reflected, to get a grip on Mark. A good English scholar who subscribed to Playboy and apparently had no objection to its being seen that he did. A couldn’t-care-less character, who had come to blows with a drug peddler because of a friend’s downfall. A young man who had won a girl away from his brother, yet seemed not to value his winnings overmuch. Mark was something of an enigma: was this the natural outcome of his personality or a deliberate covering up? If the latter, it would be the most successful kind, which drapes itself in a quite transparent manner, free and easy, innocent seeming, uncomplicated. Yet it was a far from negative personality: it persuaded you into acceptance, compelled you into its own idiom.

  “Well, that’s that,” Mark said, laying down the essay. “A beautiful, ardent girl. And the sooner she becomes a wife and mother, and abandons academic hopes, the happier we shall be.”

  He took bottles from a cupboard and poured drinks.

  “How is she?” asked Nigel.

  “Blooming, I’ve no doubt. Oh, you mean Sukie. She’s in a tizzy about John—imagines they’ve got him in a cellar, with electrodes clamped on his foot.”

  “Where’s he been all this time?”

  “Either Sukie won’t tell me, or she genuinely doesn’t know.”

  “I’d have thought she’d confide in you.”

  Mark took a meditative sip. “You would so. But she and I don’t seem to get around to confidences much. I guess she ought to marry her brother.” It was said without resentment.

  “Did she tell you his account of what happened that night?”

  Mark nodded.

  “Seem to you convincing?”

  “Why not? John wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s too high-minded. I’d as soon think Charles Reilly had done it. Sooner, in fact.”

  “What an extraordinary notion! Why Charles, of all people?”

  “This was something Sukie did confide. Soon after Charles came over, he and Sukie were at some party or other in the House. He invited her to his rooms for a final drink and to show her a rare, privately printed edition of Yeats, ha! ha! Then he made a strong pass at her—the old fellow was half-stoned, mind you.”

  “But what’s this to do with Josiah?”

  “Patience, dear sir. Charles was getting a darned sight too close, and the rape might have been consummated, when Sukie broke away for a moment and yelled out the window. Who should happen to be passing but brother Josh? He hurried in, banged on the door, and found Sukie in tears and a state of extreme déshabillé.”

  “It seems an occasion for someone to have slain Charles, rather than vice versa.”

  “Well, you know, this talk about American violence is exaggerated. And Josh doesn’t—didn’t work that way. Oh, you mean me? By the time Sukie told me, it had all blown over for her, and Charles had apologized profusely, and they’d made it up. I suspect Sukie rather enjoyed the experience—in retrospect, anyway. Not every graduate student is near-raped by a distinguished Irish poet. She’s got very fond of Charles, as you’ve noticed. Still and all, perhaps she’d have admired me more passionately if I’d called him out even then: they say women do love being fought over.”

  “But Josiah—”

  “I’m coming to that. I’d not drop dead with amazement if you told me he was putting the bite on old Charles.”

  “Kindly explicate.”

  “If Josh had told the Master about this, he’d have had to kick Charles out. Now Charles may be a distinguished Irish poet but he’s far from being a rich man, and he makes his living by s
pending the winter months over here—lucrative readings and lectures. So, if it got about that he was in the habit of assaulting innocent young students, his main source of income would dry up on him.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Well, Josh could be very mean. As I discovered quite young. He was also a sexual puritan. Add those two qualities up, and what do you get?—the possibility he might have been holding Charles’s outbreak over his head. Not necessarily for money. For some subtle satisfaction, maybe. All I’m saying is, Charles had as good a motive as John Tate—and a more likely disposition—for stopping Josh’s mouth.”

  “I think I need another drink after that,” said Nigel at last.

  “Your servant, sir.”

  “How would you account for Charles’s waiting so long before he decided to silence your brother? A month or more?”

  “The Irish have long memories. And he’s a devious sort of fellow, wouldn’t you say? Maybe Josh had given him some sort of final ultimatum—excuse the pleonasm. I just don’t know.”

  “But it wasn’t he who had made the appointment.”

  “How do you know he hadn’t made an appointment? Anyway, what was to stop him from walking right in? The door was open.” For the first time this evening, Mark looked appalled. His sallow cheeks darkened.

  “But you said it was locked when you tried it at 10:15.”

  “Look here, I’m not accusing Charles. I was stating a hypothetical case.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Okay. Then Charles locked it after he’d killed Josiah.”

  “But John Tate arrived after you, and he found it open. Do you mean there was yet another person in this drove of visitors who somehow unlocked it between 10:15 and 10:30, leaving it open for John?”

  There was a long pause. “Oh, deary me, and I thought we were having such an amiable conversation,” said Mark finally.

  “So you found the door unlocked,” Nigel prompted.

  Mark remained silent, in a rigid pose.

  “All right. I’ll tell you,” Nigel went on. “You’d received a typewritten note from your brother, asking you to call in at 10:15. You did so. You found the door was not locked. You walked in. And—?”

  Mark still did not utter a word.

  “And we get alternative possibilities. Either you had already visited him earlier, and shot him while the Food Man was bawling. The note never existed. You forgot to lock the door behind you when you left. So why did you return to his staircase a quarter of an hour later, as you were seen to do? Perhaps you remembered you’d left some incriminating clue in the room. Perhaps you were already possessed by the murderer’s compulsion to revisit the scene of his crime. The second alternative—”

  “No, I’ll tell you what happened. I did receive the note. I did walk into the office. I found Josh dead.” Mark spoke slowly and bleakly. “Why didn’t I give the alarm? You’d think it was such a simple, obvious thing to do, wouldn’t you? The fact is, I disliked Josh thoroughly. I hated him. D’you know my first reaction when I saw him there dead? Relief. Pleasure. And then, because I’d hated him so much, I felt as if everyone else must know it, and would assume it was me who killed him. He was dead, anyway: I couldn’t do anything for him, and—”

  “—and, in short, you were afraid?”

  “I expect so. Yes, I expect so.”

  “You deceive yourself then. Hate sounds more respectable than indifference.” Mark took his head out of his hands, looking startled. Nigel went on: “You are a cold man. Sukie realizes this instinctively. It’s probably your father’s treatment of you, but you want to go your own way, to sidestep trouble, not to be involved. I suggest your basic reaction when you saw your brother dead was one of self-defensive indifference—let somebody else take care of this.”

  “That’s a harsh verdict,” said Mark musingly: he had the good scholar’s power to examine evidence dispassionately. “But analysis of my character is not so urgent right now. The point seems to be, what are you going to do about—?”

  There was a loud knocking at the door. “Oh, hell, why can’t they leave me alone?” said Mark, rising to open it.

  Charles Reilly entered, on a waft of liquor. “What’s this I hear about Sukie’s brother?” he asked belligerently.

  “Well, what do you hear?”

  “He’s been arrested. Would you believe it? Will they hang him, will they?”

  “Don’t get so excited, Charles,” said Mark.

  Nigel briefly explained the situation, while Charles took pulls at a half-tumbler of neat whisky he’d poured himself, unasked.

  “Well, don’t that beat all?” said Charles, running his hand through his thick red hair. “The poor gerrul, to have her brother disgraced!”

  “All that’s proved yet against him is withholding evidence.”

  “Ah, now, Nigel me lad, there’s no smoke without fire.”

  “Have you ever sat in a station waiting room, with an alleged fire smoking in the grate? Anyway, we’ve got smoke rising from too many different places.”

  “Is that so?” said Charles comfortably. “Well, it must make things more exciting for our resident criminologist.”

  “But not for our resident poet?”

  “I’m sitting out this dance.”

  “You’re remarkably unconcerned, Charles, for someone who had a motive for killing Josiah Ahlberg.”

  The poet’s blue eyes turned from fire to ice. He took another gulp of whisky, and set down his glass very slowly on the table. “Motive? What can you be blathering about? Sure I hardly knew the fella.”

  “As St. Peter more or less remarked on another occasion.”

  “No blasphemy now!”

  “I heard today you’d once made a violent pass at Sukie.”

  “Who the devil told you that?” exclaimed Charles Reilly, turning a suspicious eye upon Mark, who visibly relaxed when Nigel answered, “I heard it through Sukie herself.”

  Charles was not in a state of mind capable of noticing the curious preposition. “You can never trust a woman not to blab. Or exaggerate. I did lose my head a little one night. But it was nothing—”

  “An attempt at rape, and you call it nothing?” cut in Nigel.

  Charles’s ruddy face darkened. “Now don’t you browbeat me. I’m not in the dock. I was about to say, ‘it was nothing’—”

  “You mean, she rather enjoyed the experience?” said Mark.

  Charles shrugged this aside with his bulky shoulders. “Nothing to do with the case of Josiah Ahlberg. Sukie and I—we’re on the friendliest terms now, and you know it. All’s forgiven and forgotten.”

  “Forgotten? Including the fact that Josiah caught you with your pants down, so to speak?” asked Nigel.

  Charles Reilly glared at him; then, with one of his quick, brilliant smiles, said, “So that’s my motive? May God forgive you! Wait now, will I tell you what’s in your mind? Josiah used this knowledge to blackmail me, so I stopped his mouth for him.”

  “Did he?”

  “He did not. He was heartless as a dead skate, God rest his soul; but no blackmailer.”

  “That’s true, I’m sure,” said Mark.

  “Not for money, perhaps. What else might there be? . . . Did he approve your engagement to Sukie?” Nigel asked.

  “I can’t say he did. First there was the row over her brother. And then he didn’t like her father’s having been a Red. He told me there was bad blood in the family. I daresay he’d warned Chester off Sukie before.”

  “And your own father would have blown up if Josiah had revealed the scandal? Particularly if he’d put Sukie into a bad light—said she’d welcomed Charles’s advances?”

  “He certainly would have.”

  Charles Reilly pushed out his thick lips. “This is all terrible nonsense. Are you saying that Josiah— If he wasn’t blackmailing me for money, what in the name of the saints was he trying to get out of me?”

  “That’s easy. He wanted you to tell his father a story, wh
ich he himself would confirm—that Sukie had attempted to seduce you. This would compel Mark to break off the engagement. If you refused, Josiah would tell the real facts to the authorities: you’d lose your job—and the chance of any more such jobs in the States. Moral turpitude is something the immigration people don’t care for.”

  Charles had been studying Nigel with mounting astonishment and admiration. “Now that’s the most ingenious tale I ever heard. You should be writing books. Though I will say, if Josiah had tried anything like that, I’d have been sorely tempted to shoot him. We had a short way with informers in the Trouble.”

  “You were in the I.R.A., Charles?”

  “I was. Where else would I have been?”

  “Well, I’m an informer myself. I’ll be passing on your stories to Lieutenant Brady. You both know that.”

  Mark volunteered the comment that Lieutenant Brady could stuff it. Charles began to protest, but then fell silent. Turning at the door Nigel said, “I hope, for your sakes, both your stories are true. Brady’ll be interviewing you tomorrow, I expect, and he’s a very intelligent man.”

  “And you said I am cold” was Mark’s parting shot.

  But they are intelligent men too, Nigel reflected as he crossed the court: so it’s strange how relatively painless it was to extract this new information from them. It’s more understandable with Mark; he’s an academic, with a built-in escape route from the real world; but Charles had once been a man of action. Neither of them seems to realize the danger he is in. Perhaps it’s because they’re both innocent and cannot take the idea of their being under suspicion at all seriously. Perhaps one of them was playing a deep game with me, concealing his actual moves beneath a flow of easy patter.

  Nigel opened his door, turned on the light, and went to the telephone.

  8 The Superimposed Redhead

  ARRIVING IN HALL next morning for breakfast, Nigel saw the Master and the Senior Tutor at a distant table. Most of the students had already breakfasted and left for their first lectures or seminars of the day. Zeke beckoned to Nigel to join him: Nigel carried his tray, piled high with two miniature cartons of cornflakes, milk, two glasses of fruit juice, two fried eggs (sunny side up), and several slices of bread, and sat down.