Stately Homicide

by S. T. Haymon

  ‘In the dining room at Bullen, over the fireplace, there is a Rembrandt which, turned into cash, could equip a small army – but how, assuming one could remove it successfully, to dispose of a painting known the world over? Ransom, perhaps? But ransom means that one must be prepared, in the last resort, if the deal falls through, to destroy the evidence – and I admit frankly that, given the choice, I would rather murder a man than a Rembrandt. There will be other men: a Rembrandt is irreplaceable.

  ‘The books, on the other hand, were a different matter. I soon discovered that not only did Bullen possess a collection of antiquarian books of superb quality and worth, but one that nobody ever so much as looked at. So long as they were there, on their shelves, no blank spaces, all was well. Who would ever miss one, or two, or three, or four?

  ‘The trustees were delighted with Ferenc’s discovery of me. Old books – this much at least they knew – need looking after, and I was a skilled bookbinder and restorer. A workshop was provided in the Coachyard, the keys to the cases were turned over to me with a trustfulness that was almost embarrassing, and I was in business. For one small Caxton alone, the first English-French vocabulary ever printed, my contact in London obtained £63,000. Not bad, eh? And so it went on. It hardly seemed like theft, so little was anybody deprived. Making up convincing dummies to replace the originals I had abstracted became an enjoyable hobby; one at which I became very proficient. So long as nobody actually took one of my replacements down from the shelf – and nobody ever did – I had nothing to worry about.

  ‘It was too good to last, and the day Miss Appleyard came in with her Book of Hours time began to run again, against me. Francis Coryton was an ignoramus, but Chad Shelden was a serious historian. It was unthinkable that, given such a library on the premises, he would not find occasion to use it.

  ‘So, he had to die.

  ‘The first stage of Mr Shelden’s dying was that I became a cripple. Who would suspect a cripple of murder? First I limped, then I shuffled, then I found it impossible to get along without sticks. Ferenc, poor foolish fellow, was dreadfully upset at my increasing infirmity. I hardly need to tell you, after what he tried to do to me, down there by the sea, that he had no idea what was going on. Hero of the rising he may have been, today he is an ageing buffoon who is so besotted with being an Englishman that he keeps his certificate of naturalisation framed on the wall, and all but crosses himself every time he passes it by, as if it were a holy icon. Besides, to him, Bullen and all it contains is Steve’s patrimony. He would never knowingly allow me to steal any of Steve’s books, even if it was only an old copy of Playboy.

  ‘Ferenc insisted I should see a doctor, and ask him for a letter to the specialists in the Norfolk and Angleby. Making a great thing about not making an unnecessary fuss, I complied: – that is to say, I had him drop me off at the doctor’s surgery, and leave me at the Hospital entrance. When he came by later, to pick me up, I did not, of course, mention that, on both occasions, I had not got beyond the vestibule. Tears came into his eyes when I reported that the doctors had said there was nothing they could do for me.

  ‘The secret of a successful pretence is that the pretender must himself believe in it. I not only acted the invalid, I thought myself into invalidism. I thought myself into pallor and sunken cheeks. Even at the coast, on the marsh and the shore, where there were only the birds to check whether I was lame or leaped like a hart, I moved along painfully on my sticks. Only in the back room behind the printing press, where, late at night and hour after hour, I rode the exercise bicycle I had bought so that my muscles would not waste away and render me incapable of the task I had set myself, did I temporarily become again Jeno Matyas, the whole man.

  ‘For all that I speak of him now so disparagingly, let me make it clear that I have, in the past, been fond of the man, Ferenc Szanto; and – as I have already made clear to you – I shall give you no help whatever should you wish to proceed against him for attempting to murder me. For that I bear him no ill will whatever. What is murder, after all – even one’s own – but an insignificant acceleration of the inevitable? However, let me also make it clear that I am no longer fond of him. There was I, on Hoope beach, calm and contented, waiting for the dawn and the birds, and he comes storming along, wielding the whip which, ironically, I made for him. He had been recalling nostalgically the days at Kasnovar when he and Laz Appleyard, as boys, had ridden on the huge hay waggons, driven by the waggoners with their great whips: and so I made just such a whip, and gave it to him for Christmas.

  ‘A strange return for a gift to have a maniac thrashing at your legs and screaming, “Run, damn you! Run!”

  ‘Naturally, I answered him: “Ferenc, what is this? You know I can’t run.” And it was true. I couldn’t. I had thought myself back into being a cripple. The pretence had become real again.

  ‘He did not, would not, listen. “Run, you bastard! Run!” he shouted, the whip whistling through the air and striking my calves, my ankles. I tried to crawl away from him, crying out, “Have you gone mad?”

  ‘After that, he said nothing more. But the whip! The whip spoke for him – my God, how it spoke! – and at last, to my shame, I could stand the pain no longer. The pretence dissolved. I sprang to my feet and ran.

  ‘And so I think, perhaps, when I say that I am no longer fond of Ferenc Szanto – when I say that I hate him more than I thought it possible to hate anybody except a Red or an Avo – it is really myself I hate for my own weakness: – a man ready to give his life for his cause, so I prided myself, who, faced with the test, could not even stand a whipping.

  ‘But that was all in the future. In the meantime, making plans for the death of a man I had not even been introduced to, was rather like making a coffin without knowing the measurements of its prospective occupant. Of two things only was I certain – that my victim would be moving into the curator’s flat in the west wing; and that I must kill him without hanging about: for what more natural than that a writer, so soon as he had unpacked his toothbrush and his pyjamas, should be attracted to the Library as iron filings to a magnet?

  ‘I knew – we all knew – about the state of the Bullen Hall roof. Every now and again we would find a stone that had fallen from the balustrade, and Mr Benby, the estate surveyor, would warn us yet again, if ever we went up there, to stay away from the edge for God’s sake, unless we wanted a nasty accident.

  ‘An accident! That was the answer to my problem. All I had to do was strike Mr Shelden unconscious, carry him up to the roof by the stair from the minstrels’ gallery, and drop him over the end directly overlooking the moat, into which he would fall and conveniently drown, if, by chance, the fall itself were not enough to finish him off. What more natural than that the newly arrived curator should explore his new domain, including the roof above his quarters, and, forgetting all warnings in his eagerness to see all that was to be seen, lean against a parapet which gave way under his weight? That’s life, we would all say, shaking our heads sorrowfully when we heard the news: not to say death.

  ‘As soon as I heard that the Corytons were planning a party to coincide with Mr Shelden’s arrival, I decided that the deed must be done that very night, after the guests had gone. I knew that the Corytons often slept out on the roof on hot summer nights, and I hoped they would recommend the habit to their successor. It would save me a lot of trouble to find him already up there, ready and waiting.

  ‘Well before the great day I managed to get hold of the key to the roof long enough to have a duplicate made, and the original returned with no one the wiser. It was not only a question of needing the roof for the actual act. Shelden would obviously have been expected to lock and bolt his front door once the partygoers had departed, and, if the “accident” was to be credible, those locks and bolts must be found in place in the morning. To go through the main part of the house was out of the question. I had no knowledge of the alarm system, and no means of learning without attracting attention to myself. I had both to come an
d go from my rendezvous with Mr Shelden via the roof.

  ‘There are several skylights and stairs to the Bullen Hall roof in different parts of the building, but, apart from the stair from the minstrels’ gallery, none of them is used to any extent. What’s more, most of them, so far as I was able to make an inspection, are so stuck up with paint or rust as to be useless for my purpose. I would be bound to leave traces which, if noticed, would inevitably prejudice a verdict of accidental death.

  ‘It therefore took a little while to figure out a way of accomplishing my goal; but I found it at last – that same little turret where Francis came upon his precious letters. One side of it fills in a corner of the North Courtyard: the other, as you’ve doubtless noticed, projects out from the west front. I asked Francis for the key quite openly – said I wanted to make sure there were no books stored there – and, again, I was able to get a copy made before I returned it. The importance of the turret is that there is a narrow window at the top, just wide enough for a thin man to squeeze out of – you will be able to verify this for yourselves – from which it is only a short jump to the nearest area of flat roof. Once there, of course, any part of the Bullen roof is equally accessible, all of it covered with a wonderful kind of marl which, in dry weather at any rate, shows not even the shadow of a footprint.

  ‘I do not, however, recommend that you attempt literally to follow in my footsteps. The distance from turret window to rooftop is short, but not as short as all that, especially from a standing start on a narrow, sloping window ledge. I practised it many times in the small hours, and more than once found myself hanging by my fingernails from a ledge that threatened to give way at any moment. But there, all life is a gamble, and I felt supremely confident that all would come right on the night.

  ‘As indeed it did, give or take the odd unforeseen hitch which, I have come to believe, is so much part and parcel of all such enterprises as not to be, except at the conscious level, unforeseen at all. Inspector Jurnet will confirm that the party was a great success. For me, the main interest was in meeting Mr Shelden face to face for the first time. Although the man himself was a disappointment – a shallow person, I thought, and tainted with ambition – the sight of him in the flesh challenged and excited me. Waiting for the party to end, I found it hard to play the cripple. I felt stretched, larger than life – though not too large, I hoped, to go through that turret window!

  ‘I wouldn’t, by the way, want the Inspector to think that I misled him completely when, later, I told him what I had seen during the early hours of that fateful morning. I did indeed settle my gear in my car, since I intended to leave for Hoope as soon as I had finished my business with Mr Shelden: and I did indeed, as I told him, see, coming from the direction of the west wing, the figure of a weeping woman who could well have been Anne Boleyn bewailing her fate. Except – and this last small detail I must confess I omitted when recounting the story – that suddenly, when it had almost passed from my astonished view, this same mournful apparition raised one of its arms, whipped off its head of luxuriant dark hair, and ejaculated, in the unmistakable tones of Master Mike Botley, the single word, “Shit!”

  ‘I gave the young fellow a few minutes; started up the car and parked it at the bottom of the drive, out of sight of the house: then set out for my turret. I unlocked the door, ran up the spiral stair with mounting elation; swung myself out of the window and across the intervening space with an easy abandon that made me want to shout with laughter. As you can imagine, I restrained myself, moving swiftly and silently in my dark track suit like a hunting cat, and only slowing down when I came to the chimney stack which all but cuts off the view of that peninsula of roof above the curator’s flat. There, I edged round the chimneys and, to my delight, saw Chad Shelden standing at the balustrade with his back to me.

  ‘True, it was the south-facing wall instead of the one giving directly on to the moat: but there, one can’t have everything. I’ve been trained in unarmed combat, and Mr Shelden would never have known what hit him had I not stumbled over a corner of the mattress which I hadn’t noticed spread out on the marl. Even so, he had no more than a fraction of a second to turn and stare in astonishment before I was on him with a lightning movement that up-ended and tossed him over the parapet. Anyone hearing the sound he made as he fell would have taken it for a wood owl calling its mate.

  ‘I heard him thud on the grass below, and, looking over the edge could see his ankles gleaming with a surprising whiteness. The feet were not moving: but the man had seen me, and I had to make sure he was dead. I stayed on the roof only long enough to push out a couple of stones from the west-facing parapet, then went down the stairs into the flat.

  ‘The door was unlocked, and I did not need to use my key after all. The Long Chamber smelled stale after the party. I wore rubber gloves but, even so, was careful to touch nothing. Except that when I came into the hall, I saw that the bedroom light was on, and, when I peeped inside, there on the dressing table was Mr Shelden’s wallet as well as a handsome-looking pair of gold and sapphire cuff links. There were three fifty-pound notes in the wallet, and I took two of them, fearing that a complete absence of paper money might excite suspicion. I also helped myself to the cuff links, all grist to the mill, and continued on my way downstairs, to tuck their owner into that bed where he would sleep sound and safe, the moat.

  ‘There are, as you know, windows in the downstairs hall on either side of the front door. I had just reached up to pull back the upper bolt when some protective fate nudged me to glance out of one of them. I drew back my hand just in time.

  ‘Outside, bending over Shelden where he lay sprawled on the grass, was Miss Appleyard, dressed in a handsome housecoat, with a shawl over her shoulders. As I watched, she reached for an arm and felt for a pulse, quite as if she were a professional. Then she listened for a heartbeat. In another moment she straightened up, quite composedly – but then, I imagine, it would take more than death to frighten Miss Appleyard – wrapped her shawl more closely about her, turned and walked away, I could only imagine to call the police.

  ‘I gave her time to turn the corner of the house, then quickly undid the bolts, opened the door, and hurried outside to see if Shelden were still alive. He was, but deeply unconscious, his breathing shallow and irregular.

  ‘He didn’t look as if he could last long. Still, I couldn’t take the chance that there might be some brief recovery of consciousness during which he might name me as his attacker. Notwithstanding that the intervention of Miss Appleyard now meant it would be known that the man had not fallen straight off the roof into the moat, I dragged him down to the water just the same, as being the easiest way of finishing him off without inflicting some injury which one of your clever forensic surgeons might diagnose as being man-made. Miss Appleyard would be bound to say that she had found the man alive. All to the good! It was surely conceivable that he had come round after her departure, tried to crawl to get help, and, in his agony, not knowing what he was doing, had ended up in the moat. When later, after all my careful attention to detail, the police nevertheless declared that Chad Shelden had been murdered, I was amazed. How could you possibly know? – until you released the information that Shelden had been paralysed by the fall, and so could not possibly have dragged himself over the grass, not so much as an inch. Then, too late, I told myself off for the fool I am, not to have thought of such a possibility.

  ‘There were still things I had to do. I had to go back indoors so that the door could be bolted on the inside; which meant making my way upstairs, and over the roof again, back to my turret, and so down to the ground. I made the jump back from roof to turret with as little thought for the danger as when I had done it in the reverse direction. Despite Miss Appleyard’s unexpected appearance, I remained unalterably convinced that it was my night.

  ‘And so it was: my night and my day. I came out of the turret door, locked it, and ran with all speed along the west front, past the spot where I had dumped Shelden in the mo
at, round to the front of the house, and so to my car. No police had arrived. I started up the car as quietly as I could, and didn’t switch on the lights until I was well along the road. No police passed me on their way to Bullen, no vehicle of any kind, all the way to the coast.

  ‘When I got to Hoope, I parked the car, and hobbled on my two sticks down to the beach. I was a cripple again. I could no longer remember when I hadn’t been a cripple. When, settled cosily in my hide, I saw, just as the sun was coming up, a Dusky Warbler, a bird all the way from the Himalayas which has only been recorded at Hoope three times before, my happiness was complete.

  ‘As for Percy Toller, his death was the real accident, a quite fortuitous concatenation of circumstances which, to my regret, left me with no alternative but to kill him. He was an uneducated man, but a true lover of books – not only their contents, but the look of them, their feel, their mystery. He often came into the Coachyard to watch me at work, or to repeat to me his quotation of the day. Did you know he used to learn a fresh one every day out of the Oxford Book of Quotations?

  ‘He told me, shyly, that he had enrolled in the Open University, and, when I didn’t laugh at his aspirations, was emboldened, I think, to let me know how much he wished the Bullen Hall books were available for private reading. The thought of studying the set texts in first editions or in handsome library bindings seemed quite to intoxicate him. Ironical, was it not, that this ignorant little fellow, totally lacking in educational advantages, was the one person at Bullen interested in the books?

  ‘I think he had hopes that I, with full access to the collection, would offer to get him a few books on the side, but of course I was always the soul of rectitude and never took the hint, however broad. Once he told me – possibly in jest, possibly not: you will know the truth of it – that in his younger days he had been a burglar, and only the influence of his wife, Mollie, kept him from a relapse into his old bad ways, and from taking by stealth some of the books he longed most to read.