Death At the President's Lodging

by Michael Innes

  “There was never any relapse,” the Dean was continuing. “The whole thing has been long ago overlaid and forgotten – until Haveland and Pownall so deliberately dragged it up. You will realize that it has been so when I tell you that Haveland has been regarded as a not unlikely successor to Umpleby – despite the fact that he is, as you know, uncompromising in certain social matters. Haveland’s attack was regarded at the time as the aftermath of war-time strain, and he is a thoroughly equable person.”

  There came back to Appleby upon this his first impression of Haveland, shortly before. Was it exactly of an equable person? He was even, yes. But was he even as a result of some constant control? Somewhere in the man there was high pressure – and where there is such pressure there may, conceivably, be chronic latent instability.

  A few minutes only had passed since the break-up in the other common-room, and now, after the ritual interval, the other St Anthony’s Fellows (who, while divorced from their seniors, had tonight been without the compensating advantage of an extra moment with the port) came in to coffee. The company split into small groups and Appleby presently found himself taken possession of by Professor Curtis. It seemed likely that he alone was to be privileged to hear in full the curious legend of the Bones of Klattau. But it was something else that the savant had in his head.

  “May I ask, my dear sir,” he began mildly, “if you have ever condescended to interest yourself in the imaginative literature of your profession?”

  Curtis, Appleby reflected, should be approaching Dodd. But he answered that he was not altogether ignorant of the field.

  “Then,” said Curtis, blinking amiably over the top of his steel-rimmed glasses, “you may be acquainted with Gott’s diversions? I am not giving away any secret here, I think, when I tell you that Gott is Pentreith, you know. I suppose his stories are now fairly well known in the world?”

  Appleby agreed that they were, and looked round with interest for so distinguished a story-teller. But Gott, being a proctor, had departed on his nocturnal disciplinary perambulations of the city.

  “It is a curious branch of literature,” Curtis was continuing; “and I must confess, I am afraid, to being an indifferent scholar in it. Would you be inclined to maintain that Wilkie Collins has ever been bettered? Or Poe? Not that Poe is not, I always feel, inconsiderable – how curiously his reputation has been foisted on us from France! You younger men, I suppose, have passed beyond the Symbolists? But The Purloined Letter now; don’t you think that is a little – steep, as they say?”

  Appleby agreed that he thought it was. Curtis was delighted.

  “I am glad to have my amateur’s opinion – so to speak – professionally endorsed. Yes, I think I should have spotted the letter myself – almost at once. But I wonder if it was Poe’s idea? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the basis of it was as old as the hills, would you? There is an interesting story they relate in the Basque country… But I will tell you that another time, if you will let me. What Poe put it in my mind to say was that these bones we hear of might neither be meant to incriminate somebody nor be evidence of any sort of mental unbalance. Not of mental unbalance in the strict sense, I mean. They might be – how shall I put it? – some perfectly sane man’s idea of the humorously grotesque… Do you know Goya’s sketches? In the – dear me, what are they called? Barocho, those war-things of Goya’s…”

  And Professor Curtis wandered away.

  Looking round the room, Appleby now saw standing conveniently in one group three members of the common-room of whom he as yet knew nothing: Lambrick, Campbell and Chalmers-Paton. He was particularly interested in Lambrick, the married member of the college who retained a key to the fatal gates. And something about Campbell was familiar. Feeling that he might usefully pile up a little more in the way of impressions before retiring to sort them out, he approached this group and was presently sitting smoking and talking with them. Nothing could well have been more irregular. But St Anthony’s had enough of its own conventions to care very little, it seemed, for those of the world. The college was taking it for granted that it should treat a detective-officer come up to investigate a murder just as it would treat an architect come up to design it a new kitchen or an Academician making watercolours of its courts. It was an attitude that made a superior technique of investigation possible, and Appleby was not going to quarrel with it.

  The conversation was running on the proctorial activities of Gott. The walk from hall to common-room had revealed a raw, unpleasant night, cold and with a lurking vapour that caught at the throat. And to Appleby’s companions, comfortably smoking cigarettes in large leather chairs, with a leaping fire, more generous even than in the outer common-room, pleasantly warming their legs, the thought of their colleague pacing round the streets at the head of a little bevy of university police appeared to be particularly gratifying.

  “Think of it,” Lambrick, a large dreamy mathematician with a primitive sense of the humorous, was saying; “in he goes to the Case is Altered – two men drinking egg-hot – men duly proctorized and out goes Gott into the night, thinking of egg-hot. He goes across the way to the Mucky Duck (good pub that) – two men playing shove-halfpenny over a little rum shrub – proctorized – and out comes Gott thinking both of rum shrub and shove-halfpenny (capital hand he is, too). Over he goes to that flash place at the Berklay – half a dozen smart men having a little quick champagne. Old Gott half hoping for a rough house. ‘Your name and college, sir?’ – all answer like lambs. Then out again to prowl around that college next my tailor’s (never can remember its name) until the Hammer and Sickle Club is out and safely tucked away in bed. What a life!”

  “Did you ever hear,” asked Campbell, who was a dark and supple Scot, “did you ever hear how Curtis when he was Senior Proctor proctorized the Archbishop of York?”

  It was an excellent anecdote, but over-elaborate for Lambrick, who vanished suddenly as he sat into some impalpable mathematical world. But Chalmers-Paton kept the theme going by remembering an exploit of Campbell’s. “I say, Campbell, do you remember your climb up St Baldred’s Tower after that pot?” And despite something approaching positive displeasure on Campbell’s part Chalmers-Paton told the story. It represented Campbell as a daring, even reckless man – and as a skilled climber. And then Appleby remembered.

  “You went high, didn’t you,” he quietly asked the Scot, “in the Himalaya in ’twenty-six?”

  Campbell flushed and seemed for a moment almost disconcerted. “I was there,” he said at length. “Didn’t you and I once do the Pillar Rock together when I hit your party in Wasdale?”

  Appleby in his turn admitted to this – much as he might have admitted to Mr Bradman that they had once played rounders together at a Sunday School picnic. But a subject had been started, and for a few minutes there was climbers’ talk. Then Appleby dropped a casual question.

  “Is there any roof-climbing in St Anthony’s in these days?”

  “I believe not,” replied Chalmers-Paton. “A few years ago there was a club, but undergraduates come and go, and I believe it has lapsed.”

  His companions, Appleby noticed, were quite evidently aware that something had at length been said relevant to the President’s death. Addressing Campbell, therefore, he came more directly to his point. “What is St Anthony’s like for climbing in, out, or about?” he asked.

  Campbell laughed rather shortly. “I’m a mountaineer at times, as you know. But I assure you I’m not a housebreaker – or a steeplejack, and I don’t see that I’m qualified to give an opinion. Anyone could get on to the roofs through some trap door or other and scamper round; but I should say, for what it is worth, that that would be about all. I should imagine that climbing up or down, in or out, is almost impossible.”

  “Even to a skilled climber?”

  Campbell answered steadily.

  “Even to a skilled climber.”

  5

  Appleby sat in his bedroom and took stock – first, and by long habit, o
f his immediate surroundings; then of his mind. The room did not occupy him long. It was about eight feet square, eight feet high and for window it had a bewildering maze of traceried glass sweeping in a Gothic curve from the floor in one corner to the ceiling in another. St Anthony’s, willing to cram into its venerable fabric an extra dozen of undergraduates, had carried out some curious internal alterations in the venerable fabric’s structure. The room bore traces of its regular occupant in the shape of an empty jar labelled Rowing Ointment, a religious text decorated with an exuberant floral border, a half-tone representation of Miss Mae West, and ten uniform photographs in uniform frames of exceedingly uniform young men – the other ten, doubtless, of some school eleven of the recent past. Why the owner of these keimelia was not in residence among them had not been explained: perhaps he had had some difference of opinion with authority; perhaps (Appleby speculated) he was having measles or mumps.

  Appleby turned to his thoughts. He was feeling, on the whole, more confident than when he had parted from Dodd. Going over Dodd’s facts had given him certain physical contours of the situation – contours that must be regarded as significant by reason of the definition with which they appeared to point, limit, exclude. But around them Appleby had felt a complete darkness; they were no more than a sort of braille recording of the facts. But later in the evening he had begun to see light, or the possibility of light – light flickering and uncertain, no doubt, as the dying fires in the common-room must be at this moment. From the stage and décor – that so elaborately constructed stage, that gruesome décor – Appleby had arrived at some view of the dramatis personae; at some glimpse, perhaps, of the protagonists…

  A certain amount of Appleby’s work lay among persons of considerable cunning. Occasionally he had the stimulus of crossing swords with a good or excellent natural intelligence. But for the most part he dealt with sub-average intelligence, or with normal intelligence circumscribed and handicapped by deficient training and knowledge. And here was what might be intellectually the case of his life. Here was a society of men much above the average in intelligence, the product of a variety of severe mental trainings, formidably armed with knowledge. The secret was hidden amongst them and intelligence and athletic thinking would be needed to reveal it.

  Of one thing that evening he had begun to feel convinced. His earlier cautious refusal to take as conclusive those physical facts that cried “Submarine!” to Dodd might almost certainly be abandoned. The extraordinary fact of the freshly fitted locks and freshly issued keys had been almost conclusive of that in itself. Directly or indirectly, the murder had been brought about by one or more of the persons with keys. The only alternative – that a malefactor had climbed out of the locked orchard – was sufficiently unlikely to be put last in any line of investigation. The keys held the key. They gave a formula:

  Deighton-Clerk, Empson, Gott, Haveland, Lambrick, Pownall, Titlow, the college porter, a hypothetical X (possessor of the missing tenth key); one, or some, or all of these murdered Umpleby – or so disposed of a key as to be able to throw light on the murder.

  Appleby looked mentally at this and saw that he had missed something. He brought out pencil and paper and wrote an elaborated formula down:

  Slotwiner; Deighton-Clerk, Empson, Gott, Haveland, Lambrick, Pownall, Titlow, the college porter, a hypothetical X (possessor of the tenth key); one, or some, or all of these murdered Umpleby, or one of the ninth last so disposed of a key as to be in a position to throw light on the murder. So far, none can be excluded, but if Slotwiner and Titlow are telling the truth they corroborate each other’s alibis… Dodd is having certain further alibi statements checked.

  So much he had learned that afternoon in the President’s Lodging – and so much his subsequent impressions had come to confirm. But what else had he learned later? What had he learned from his interview with the Dean? First, certain facts about the Dean himself. He had been anxious to have it found that the murder was an outside murder – that was natural enough. And he had advanced an argument which was simply in effect, “Such things do not happen among us. And the quality of our knowledge that they do not so happen is really safer evidence than arbitrary physical indications to the contrary.” Appleby had given the argument fair weight, but he was abandoning it now – and the Dean, he suspected, was doing the same… What else had transpired? The Dean was apprehensive that routine investigation would bring to light matters of petty scandal within the college. And he had recently had some sort of quarrel with Umpleby himself. That was about all. As to more general impressions, they were difficult to form as yet. The man was upset – even thrown off his balance. He would not have given way slightly to a latent pomposity, would not have made pointless reference to the celebrations in which St Anthony’s was soon to indulge, had that not been so. But that he was insincere, that he was concealing any material information – of anything of this sort there was no evidence.

  Appleby next passed to a review of the events in hall or rather to the one significant event: the odd behaviour of Barocho. The Spaniard had possibly only the vaguest ideas on the circumstances of Umpleby’s death, and was aiming something at random and for reasons of his own – at Titlow, had it been, or at Haveland? Or had there been no specific application; merely something tossed into the air for the purpose of watching the general reaction? Not much useful thinking, probably, could be done on the incident at present.

  But on coming to the events in the common-room Appleby faced a complexity which made him feel suddenly cramped. He sprang up and passed into the absent undergraduate’s sitting-room – a big, rather dingy apartment, its walls entirely panelled in wood that had been overlaid with chocolate-coloured paint. Turning on the reading lamp, Appleby began to pace softly up and down.

  The outstanding fact was Haveland’s admission – that oddly public admission – of the proprietorship of the bones. He ought to have admitted this earlier to Dodd. That the bones would be traced to him he must have known as fairly certain: why then had he delayed owning to them? Obviously, in order to do so under the particular circumstances possible in the common-room, with all his colleagues around him. He had wanted to show himself publicly as aware of the existence of a case against himself. He had appealed to Empson to reveal a most damaging story that he believed only Empson knew – the story of a quarrel with Umpleby which had led to his expressing a malevolent wish now almost literally fulfilled: “I said I would like to see him immured in one of his own grisly sepulchres.”

  It was a terrific admission to have to make, and Haveland must have been aware that Appleby would soon be in possession of information which would make it doubly – and more than doubly – terrific. Haveland had once experienced a fit of serious unbalance – and the circumstances had apparently suggested some morbid attraction to symbols of physical dissolution.

  What had happened, then, was this. Confronted by these disquieting facts, Haveland had come forward and said, “You are at liberty to believe that in a fit of aberration last night I killed the President and made good my wish as to his lying amid a litter of bones. Or you can suspect that somebody aware of all this has put a plant on me.”

  Somebody aware of all this… “Empson knew I had a collection of bones in college: I wonder if anyone else knew…?” Empson, you know what I mean, and I don’t think anyone else knows of it…” “That is correct, Empson, is it not…?” Haveland had, in fact, as good as pointed to Empson. And what had Empson done? Perhaps the most striking fact, Appleby reflected, was that Empson, aware enough of the insinuation, had not pointed back. Empson had, after a manner, pointed sideways. “Ask Titlow…” There was nothing in the words, but there had been no mistaking the existence of some significance behind them. There had indeed been an electrical atmosphere round that table, and now Appleby was feeling his way to recreating it – conjuring it up imaginatively in order to test and explore it anew.

  The facts pointing at Haveland. Haveland pointing at Empson. Empson (like Barocho?) point
ing at Titlow. And Titlow himself? “I can imagine their being put there to incriminate you, Haveland. Pownall, does that not seem possible to you?” Had there been anything in that? Appleby thought there had – but amid all these charged utterances was he now reading a charge into something uncharged, casual merely? Anyway, Pownall in his turn had certainly pointed. It was he who had, at length, pointed back at Haveland: “I can imagine an explanation which is at once simpler and odder…” “Haveland, what madman’s trick are you suggesting?” Appleby knew how, on the level of intellectual dispute, these men would toss a ball around in just that way, each trying to embarrass the other. It was the habit in any mentally athletic society, no doubt; and no doubt the same process would have its pleasures on the level of scandal and gossip. But when it was a case of murder that was in question…?

  Appleby felt that he had run over the salient facts. Now he turned to contemplate those less obtrusive. And the less obtrusive facts, he well knew, were often finally the vital facts: the neglect of some minute observation, the leaving of a single fugitive query unattended to, was often the ruining of an elaborate and laborious detective procedure.

  The candle-grease. Slotwiner and the candles. The Deipnosophists upside down. The safe. Barocho’s gown. The Dean, hitherto so reticent about college scandal, describing Haveland’s old attack. Curtis so casually, so vaguely making sure that Appleby should know that Gott was Pentreith… And finally there was Campbell, the man who had gone high; more significantly, the man who had scaled St Baldred’s tower. He was married and lived out of college. He had no key. But he was an ethnologist and so connected with the Umpleby group. And although Appleby did not believe in the probability of Campbell scaling the heights of St Anthony’s as it were alpenstock in hand, probability was not enough. Troublesome red herring as he might be, he must be kept in mind.