Stop Press

by Michael Innes

  ‘On the contrary, it may be vital.’

  Winter shook his head. ‘I don’t see it. And, incidentally, I don’t at all see how you got on to me.’

  ‘My dear man, crime is not your pigeon. You have been most suspiciously out of place throughout. Why were you at Rust at all? I asked myself that at the beginning. It wasn’t a bit your business to come and investigate an embarrassing domestic problem of the sort brought to you by Timmy. Unless you had an interest in it your instinct would have been amiably to refuse. I practically put that to you when you came poking in on me after the theft of the Renoir. And the next minute, when I suggested rather gravely that something really serious might happen, you started to out with something and thought better of it. Later you analysed the situation confronting us with quite suspicious clarity: a joke by A, you suggested, might give the notion of a crime or misdemeanour to B. On the other hand there was a suspicious lack of clarity in your first account of the conversation in your common-room when Benton was scared by the mention of the Birdwire. “A manuscript of Benton’s which had been found in the Levant.” I wasn’t clear just how that came in. But – as I said before – your identifying and then dodging the Birdwire was the cardinal point. That helped me to force your first confession. After that a little conversation with Mummery gave me a line on the importance of the Codex. And after that’ – Appleby chuckled – ‘and as one has so often to do in my trade, I guessed.’

  ‘A joke by A may give the notion of a crime or misdemeanour to B. If that is a clear analysis isn’t it as much as to say that my story is irrelevant to what has happened since?’

  ‘It would be nice to be certain of that. It would be nice to think that you and your precious colleagues and your Codex are done with and out of the way. If I could place you well back-stage what you call my role of tidying up would be simpler. Eliminations – the problem more clearly seen; more eliminations – the problem seen more clearly still. The Eliotic manner.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘But, as I say, things may be more closely knit than that. Your burglary may have got you in more deeply than you think. So take warning once more. When standing there by the back-drop while the tidy up goes forward, just look out for knives, pistol shots, or heavy weights being dropped on you from above.’

  ‘I can’t see why – ’

  ‘Bussenschutt, having worked it all nicely out, as good as knows that you were the Birdwire burglar?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And he’s a gossip?’

  ‘Most certainly. But even so–’

  Appleby stood up. ‘I do sincerely believe’, he said, ‘that somebody may attempt to murder you. I admit, though, that it’s a longish shot.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We shall be late for this supper… It has all been rather slow, don’t you think? But it’s a minute by minute affair now. I hope to get early to bed.’

  More than once before in periods of crisis Hugo Toplady had proved his worth. His conversation was sedative; his sense of decorum made him instinctively resist unseemly exhibitions of excitement or agitation. It was perhaps because of this that Belinda contrived to manoeuvre him at supper into a place beside her now frankly alarmed cousin Rupert.

  ‘I cannot say’, said Toplady to Belinda and Rupert indifferently, ‘how much I regret – and particularly in view of the happy way that this one matter at least seems to be turning out – my grandmother.’

  ‘Your grandmother?’ said Belinda blankly.

  ‘The matter of my grandmother. I lent her Timmy’s poems. Not, I really must not omit to plead, without reasonable cause, for my grandmother has always been interested in that sort of thing. Her younger brother had to go into the Home Office, and at that period there was, I believe, a great deal of poetry in the Home Office. It was quite the thing there for a time, and my grandmother became interested in a way. I thought she might find somebody up in it all who could give a considered criticism. But reflection’ – Toplady looked very reflective – ‘has led me to conclude that it was not critical appraisal that Timmy designed. At one time, you know, he gave the poems to – to a person from Nubia, who could hardly be expected to have any nicety in English versification. I have come to think that Timmy likes to give his verses to people he likes: he used to say – I remember now that I have endeavoured to recall the matter – that this black person had some very attractive ways indeed. What I mean is that I am sorry that he has not the verses at hand now when it can hardly be indiscreet to suspect that he may be reflecting that if he did have them his impulse would be – and we are all happy, I think, to feel that we do reasonably suspect this – to give them to Miss Appleby.’

  This was sedative enough, and Toplady followed it up by turning to Rupert, who was staring glumly in front of him. ‘Sir Rupert,’ he asked with serious courtesy, ‘are you interested in poetry?’

  Rupert started as if from concentrated thought. ‘Poetry? Not in my line – man of the world – never cared for anything’ – his eye went uneasily round the table and came to rest on Appleby just opposite – ‘anything fanciful.’

  He relapsed into silence. Toplady appeared to conduct a brief review of other agreeable and distracting topics. ‘Sir Rupert,’ he said, ‘do you know anything about the anatomy of camels?’

  Rupert dropped his knife and fork and looked as alarmed as if suddenly compelled to doubt his neighbour’s sanity. ‘Belinda,’ he said abruptly, ‘you know about camels – damn it, I mean cars’ – he gave Toplady a sullen glare – ‘and must know what has happened. Can’t a single one be got going?’

  ‘I asked’ – Toplady’s tone held a firm protest against this unmannerly changing of the subject – ‘merely because the matter seems to interest your cousin. I think it must have to do with A Death in the Desert. What writers call, I believe, local colour. Whether the creatures stand up head or tail first – that sort of thing. And I thought that as you knew the Near East–’

  ‘Young man, I don’t know the Near East.’

  Toplady looked solemnly surprised. ‘But my uncle Rudolph,’ he said, ‘who last had the Legation at Teheran, has mentioned you in Indiscretions. I was reading it the other day. He met Sir Rupert Eliot when attached to a military mission to–’

  ‘No doubt. But I can’t help Richard with his damned camels all the same. Whom has he been talking to? If he must write these rubbishing fictions for shop-girls and counter-jumpers let him keep off the subject in decent society. That’s what I say.’ Rupert glared interrogatively at Toplady.

  ‘Really, Sir Rupert, I can conceive more impropriety in certain ways of talking about Mr Eliot’s books than anything that can be imagined of the writing of them.’

  Hugo, Belinda thought, could occasionally summon all the crushing power of a devastatingly right-thinking character in Jane Austen. ‘Daddy’, she said, ‘seems particularly keen on A Death in the Desert. I don’t think he’d ever have scrapped it as he scrapped Murder at Midnight. Not for anything. He very seldom talks about the stories, but he has said the basic idea is just the sort that such books should have – something imaginatively convincing but not actually possible.’

  ‘It must have been Archie’, said Rupert to Toplady, ‘whom your uncle met. Archie’s been in the East often enough. It was where he first met Shoon. And I have reason to believe that in disreputable scrapes he has sometimes taken my name. Just his sense of humour.’

  ‘My uncle, Sir Rupert, is most unlikely to have been associated with Sir Archie in disreputable scrapes.’

  This was almost a quarrel. ‘Something basically fantastic,’ continued Belinda by way of diversion. ‘Like The Trapdoor. A criminal could be imagined as scoring in that way, but no real criminal is ever likely to be in a position to do so.’

  ‘I think’, said Rupert hotly – and Belinda had the satisfaction of feeling that she had successfully drawn his fire – ‘that we have quite enough confounded fantasy round us at the moment without yattering about it. I’m an unimaginative man of affairs myself and I don’t care for
it.’

  ‘But, Rupert – we’re all fantastic. I mean all the Eliots. Think of great-aunt Rachael.’

  ‘Great-aunt Rachael?’ asked Toplady courteously.

  ‘You haven’t met her, but she lives with us. Rupert is her favourite nephew.’ Belinda paused maliciously – as if this were evidence enough of the fantastic nature of the late Timothy Eliot’s widow. ‘She’s ninety-something and ready for any trick one can put her up to. And daddy, even if he stops writing, will certainly grow more fantastic with the years. And Timmy wants to be an ambassador. We really are quite odd.’

  Toplady considered the right reply to this. ‘In my mother’s family’, he confessed, ‘a marked vein of eccentricity has made itself evident from time to time.’

  ‘The Shaping Spirit,’ said Miss Cavey tensely; ‘the Creative Imagination!’ She fixed on Shoon an eye which seemed to calculate whether he were within reach of a clammy paw. ‘I sometimes feel’ – her voice became very solemn – ‘that the Creative Imagination is All!’

  Shoon, who was looking thoughtfully down the table, murmured a polite response.

  ‘But Mr Winter’, Miss Cavey pursued, ‘points out that there is also the Deep Well.’

  ‘The Deep Well?’

  ‘I call it that. Mr Winter calls it the memory. He points out’ – Miss Cavey looked momentarily dubious – ‘how important somebody – I think it was Proust – thought the memory was.’

  ‘I agree’, said Shoon, ‘ – and Benton here will agree – that memory is very important indeed. I look round my table now; there are familiar and unfamiliar faces; there are, perhaps, faces which one can call neither one nor the other. Benton, do you agree with me?’

  From the other side of Miss Cavey Benton glanced nervously at his host. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I have hardly thought.’

  ‘Faces’, continued Shoon with a flight into elegance, ‘over which there flickers some half-light from the torch of Mnemosyne. Benton’s colleagues, Miss Cavey, are most interesting men. You mention Winter. He is, it seems, a most enterprising fellow. Bussenschutt has given me some curious particulars of his habits – of his technique. I ask myself: is his one of the faces over which that half-light of memory passes? And at the moment I have to answer that it is not.’

  Miss Cavey, because the tenor of these remarks was mysterious to her, looked particularly intelligent and understanding. Benton looked increasingly uneasy.

  ‘Have you’, Shoon continued, ‘met Mrs Birdwire, my dear Miss Cavey? I am sorry she cannot come across tonight; she would enjoy meeting a fellow writer. We are not on confidential terms, but I know her to be discreet. Which is just right for neighbourliness. Benton, you agree that she is an excellent creature?’

  ‘Really, Shoon, it is so many years–’

  ‘Ah, Memory, the fickle jade, once more! There are things, are there not, that we are particularly willing to forget: old humiliations, false starts, risks we were content to run when we were in a small way? Yes, indeed.’

  Benton, who appeared to be masticating desperately without the aid of salivation, looked anxiously from Shoon to a stolidly perplexed Miss Cavey. ‘I wish’, he said, ‘that the moon may come out for this interesting inspection of the tower.’

  ‘For Discretion, too,’ continued Shoon, ignoring this, ‘is a goddess. You will agree, Benton, that there is much in the lives even of the most blameless which they would not care to have pass from the keeping of the discreet to that of the indiscreet among their acquaintance.’ He looked thoughtfully down the table once more. ‘I am almost surprised that Winter’s face is not at least faintly familiar to me. Benton, you are acquainted with his career?’

  ‘I wish I could help your curiosity, Shoon. But really, I have never much enquired.’

  ‘He has never, by any chance, been in – ah – a branch of the government service? Dons sometimes drift that way for a time. I had a dear friend – a scholar of great distinction – who was for a time in the Military Intelligence. A most interesting calling, do you not think, Miss Cavey?’

  ‘Really’ – Benton abandoned the attempt to eat – ‘you take me into very unfamiliar territory. I think it hardly possible.’

  ‘There are matters’, said Shoon, ‘about which it is satisfactory to make sure.’ He picked up and idly toyed with a carving knife before him. ‘Yes, indeed.’ Once more he looked reflectively down the table. ‘What an interesting family the Eliots are.’

  ‘It has occurred to me–’ began Miss Cavey. It had occurred to Miss Cavey that her present hosts at Rust would capitally fill a niche in her projected Season of Mists. But she was not given the opportunity to enlarge on this topic now.

  ‘Look at them, Benton,’ Shoon continued. ‘Regard each in turn. Does nothing come back to you? Scrutinize them, I beg.’

  Benton scrutinized – evidently keenly conscious that meantime he was being scrutinized himself. ‘I wish’, he said, ‘that my memory was not so indifferent. But I am really almost certain that – apart from my pupil – I never saw any of them before they came across today. Except – again – Mr Eliot himself. He did once call on me at college.’

  Shoon shook his head musingly. ‘It is curious,’ he murmured. ‘Like so much that has been happening – and that promises to happen – around us, it is curious. My mind is on Muscat – or was it Dunkot? Benton, does that bring nothing to your recollection? Look again, my dear man.’

  Benton looked again – fixedly at Belinda. ‘No,’ he declared with an attempt at finality, ‘I can discover no link of association at all.’

  Shoon shook his head in perplexity. ‘Miss Cavey,’ he said as if politely abandoning a barren subject, ‘I am very interested in plots. Let us talk about that.’

  3

  The little man André raised a hand and pointed the index finger into space. He paused dramatically; the hand moved slowly on a horizontal line above his head; the index finger, working from the first joint, made arabesques in air the while.

  ‘This’, said André, ‘is Folly Hall.’

  The moving finger ceased to write; the hand made a showman’s flourish. André in disfavour with his own party from Rust, was beguiling himself by recounting the tale of its embarrassments to the Friends of the Venerable Bede.

  ‘And this’ – Timmy heard Patricia’s voice in his ear – ‘is Nightmare Abbey: come and explore it.’ She spoke urgently, as if André’s description of the affair of the architrave had brought something suddenly to her mind. ‘And don’t worry. I’ll see you don’t miss the west tower.’

  They slipped from the room and rambled hand in hand through the great shadowy house. They passed through raftered galleries, panelled halls, armouries where the moonlight streaming through stained glass threw irregular splashes of colour on Patricia’s frock. They went up great carven staircases past bedroom floors where servants were scuttling about with manchets and chet-loaves and hot water bottles; up an uncarpeted staircase to a deserted floor; and from there up a winding staircase to a little round empty room. They were both panting slightly by the time they had got so far, but above this Timmy presently heard a curious sighing sound.

  ‘The wind is rising,’ said Patricia in an absent, conversational voice. She was climbing a loft-ladder in the centre of the room. ‘Help, Timmy.’

  Timmy held her ankles to steady her, watching with a dubious interest as she strained her slim figure backwards and pushed up the trapdoor above her head. The sighing of the wind became a loud alarming moan. They were on the roof.

  Great expanses of lead swam in the full winter moonlight like a calm sea – with here and there the incongruous swell of a frozen and suspended wave where the roof rose in a ridge. In front were battlements, waist-high. Timmy stepped forward, put his hands on the clammy stone to steady himself, and looked down. Far below was something slightly swaying in the wind: it was the topmost bough of a tremendous oak. And then Timmy saw that they were very high, that they were on the highest turret of the main building. There was only one
higher point at the Abbey – the great west tower which dominated the ruins.

  He turned round. Patricia was leaning on her back against the final pitch of the turret, her feet braced in the leaden gutter. Her body was like a recumbent shadow, her face was pale to the moon, her eyes were following some star through a racing labyrinth of little clouds. ‘I suppose,’ she said raising her voice against the wind, ‘you’ve got a fair head?’

  ‘Of course I’ve got a fair head. I’ve–’ He paused in quick suspicion. ‘But what about you? I’ve a notion Belinda said–’

  ‘Come round this side.’ Patricia vanished as she spoke; Timmy scrambled after her to the other side of the turret. She took his hand. ‘I promised you fun… You see?’

  Timmy saw. This was the point at which the house and ruins touched. From the point at which they stood a great bogus-broken wall swept down and away into the darkness. It was without rail or parapet; it was, however, broad and well cemented, though with an irregular surface. Up and down, but always gradually sinking like a giant dipper, it swooped away into the night. There was nothing suicidal about what could be seen of it: granted nerve, that was to say, it would require some element of ill-luck to bring disaster.

  Patricia went first. It took them ten minutes to reach solid earth in the large ruined cloister. ‘Now,’ she said.

  Now was the real thing. The great west tower had an inspection ladder – iron rung upon iron rung running to an altitude from which one could survey five counties. ‘About Jasper,’ said Patricia, clasping the ladder, ‘I’ve come rather to think that you’re right. It is all most disturbingly spurious.’ She waved her hand at the monstrous pseudo-ruin that stretched for acres around them. ‘Even the Collection, I don’t doubt.’ She began to climb. ‘So it’s something to get something real out of him.’ She was gone.