Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  Thus Appleby reflected as he was piloted about Scamnum by Gott in search of the Duchess of Horton. And the nocturnal prowl so tinged his consciousness that he would not have been surprised to find in the Duchess – though he had eyed her attentively enough in the hall – a lady who had sat in Marlborough’s tent or drunk chocolate with Bolingbroke in the seclusion of Chanteloup in Touraine.

  The Duchess had not gone to bed. She was writing letters in a minute apartment which she had made peculiarly her own, a sort of porch-closet in Vanbrugh’s manner, enshrining a bewildering display of photographs such as the most refined of the middle classes – it occurred to Gott – no longer think Good Form. The Duchess indicated two not very comfortable knob-chairs, looked very attentively at Appleby and laid down her pen.

  ‘I’ve written twelve out of twenty,’ she said, counting rapidly. ‘We shall do no more entertaining until Scotland, and people must be let know. I’ve used the same formula twelve times and perhaps at the twentieth it will make me weep; if one could charm oneself into being the weepy sort it would be easier. But it’s some good having something to do.’

  ‘And Elizabeth?’ asked Gott.

  ‘I hope she is asleep. When she came up to her room her maid decided to be rather hysterical. Elizabeth quieted her, got her to bed and then went to bed herself.’ The Duchess turned to Appleby. ‘Have you seen the Duke again?’

  ‘No, madam.’

  The Duchess smiled – a smile which it would have been accurate, if banal, to call sweet. ‘He won’t join in the hunt much, I am afraid; far less for Ian’s murderer than if the victim had been a mere acquaintance. It was different when he thought there was this secret – the paper – at stake. I can’t explain it; his particular vision of good and evil drives that way. I suppose it is that there are people who, when the spectacle of evil opens at their feet, will stand insulated and immobile before that black pit. It appears as a sort of fatalism in face of personal calamity.’ The Duchess sighed. ‘Teddy is Hamlet,’ she said. ‘Which is why he made such a capital Claudius on the stage: Mask and Image.’

  This was a glimpse of what had once made Anne Dillon more than a mere beauty in Edwardian drawing-rooms. It was fascinating and penetrating – but why was it offered? Appleby did not pause to speculate, but it would have been the answer, perhaps, that the Duchess possessed a genius for establishing personal relations. She had discerned in Appleby a certain temper of mind; someone to whom it would be best to present her own mind in its natural movement and colour. ‘I very much hope’. she said, that I can help. I am not Prince Hamlet.’ And she shivered. She had not failed – Gott supposed – to notice her last allusive utterance as a trick bred of long acquaintance with Lord Auldearn.

  Appleby recognized the quotation but not the cause of the shiver. He plunged straight at his matter. And the straightness of the plunge indicated, perhaps, that the Duchess had established herself where she would have wished. ‘You can help at once by telling me about Mr Bose. He too – it is very bad news – has been murdered.’

  For a long moment the Duchess sat quite still and silent. And then it became very clear that if she was without tears she was not without passion. Her eyes blazed. ‘Vile,’ she said, ‘oh…vile!’ Then she controlled herself and added quietly: ‘But, Mr Appleby, this means… a maniac? There is still danger?…you have adequate men? And where did this happen – when?’

  Appleby answered slowly. ‘I do not think that Mr Bose was killed in mere madness and without reason. He was killed – stabbed – not more than half an hour ago in his bedroom.’

  The Duchess’ thought was what Gott’s had been. ‘In Elizabeth’s room!’

  ‘It is very necessary – urgently necessary, which is why I have disturbed you – that I should know about your acquaintance with Mr Bose, in detail and from the beginning. Would it be too much to ask you to attempt that now? And I will put off an explanation of the importance of the matter until afterwards, if I may.’

  ‘You are asking almost for a story.’ Perhaps, despite her real distress, there was a faint undertone of eagerness in the Duchess’ voice, for a story was something she loved. ‘But I will be as brief as I can; you must ask me if I don’t mention the relevant things.

  ‘I first came across him in the British Musuem. You see, Nevil – my son, that is, who is abroad – is interested in fish.’ The Duchess paused rather challengingly, as if to assert that fish were a perfectly rational object of interest. ‘And quite often I look things up for him in the library here. But a couple of years ago he became involved in a controversy in something called Zeitschrift für Ichthyologie und tropische Tiefseekunde – you will know it, Giles.’ The Duchess had boundless faith in the universality of the learned of her circle.

  ‘So then, when we were in town, I used to go to the British Museum sometimes and look things up there. I noticed Mr Bose the very first time. There are so many queer-looking people in the Reading Room – sandals, you know, and bearded sages in semi-religious robes and muddled women doing Higher Thought – that anybody who is remarkable rather than queer strikes one at once. And, of course, Mr Bose was remarkable. He used to drift about, very shy and looking rather lost. I don’t know what his work was exactly, but I think it was all half mysterious to him – a ritual that would bring him at last to the secret of the astounding and alarming West. One thought of the Reading Room as a temple whenever one looked at him; and – as you will hear – he thought of it as a temple himself.’ The Duchess paused a little dubiously, as if aware of an incongruity in these reminiscences at three o’clock in the morning. ‘But you cannot want all this, really?’

  ‘Please. Just as it comes to you, cutting nothing out.’

  ‘He worked for the most part in the room behind the Reading Room, where they give you the older books. It is quite a small place, no bigger than an ordinary library like our own here.’ Gott, who was himself a frequenter of the twin vastness of ‘the room behind the Reading Room’ and of Scamnum’s library, smiled at this description, but the Duchess continued unnoticing. ‘Sometimes I went in there myself to look at the big monographs that need a whole great table to lay them on. There was one enormous and lovely thing by a man called Bloch – lovely plates of the most unbelievable creatures – and one day like a fool I tried to carry it back from table to counter myself. And, of course, I dropped it – two great volumes. It was more than rather dreadful! There is a superintendent who sits in a sort of pulpit and he stopped writing and put on an extra pair of glasses and looked at me. And an old gentleman with one of those French ribbons in his buttonhole got up and walked very quietly up and down, waving his hands – quite restrainedly – above his head; I suppose I had broken an important train of thought. I hadn’t felt so bad since I made a perfectly thunderous mistake once, visiting Elizabeth at Cheltenham.’ The Duchess plainly controlled an impulse to diverge on this and continued. ‘Professor Malloch was there and he began to come across at a sort of modified, courteous trot. But the little black man was before him and gathered up Bloch – though I’m sure Bloch was far too heavy for him – and carried it to the counter. After that I felt entitled to get to know him if I could. I thought he might be interesting.’

  The Duchess smiled as she touched on this foible. ‘Unfortunately other people had thought the same thing. One of the Higher Thought women – I discovered afterwards – had invited him to tea and had prepared a room all draped in purple – and with joss-sticks, I think – and asked all her friends to share the mysteries. So he was naturally rather shy. Then one day I happened to take sandwiches, thinking it would be pleasing to eat them on the steps as I did long ago, when I used to take – go with my father for a day with the marbles. You know how people sit on the steps and under the portico and colonnade and feed the pigeons. Well, I noticed Mr Bose and he seemed to be wanting to feed the pigeons. He had sandwiches with him himself – a very small packet – and he seemed several times
to be on the point of throwing something to the pigeons and then to think better of it. I went and joined him and I am afraid my interpretation of his actions was primitive, really gross! I really thought he hadn’t brought enough and was hesitating between his own maw and the birds’. So I said – like a fool – “I have too much here; let’s feed the pigeons.” He was dreadfully worried at having to demur and made a great business of explaining. He regarded the Museum as a holy place and the pigeons were surely sacred birds. And he believed that the Higher Thought ladies who were sitting about, scattering crumbs, had it as a sort of ritual charge to care for them. And because these were not his rites he rather doubted the admissibility of joining in – though he wanted to feed the pigeons. He would have to consult his father, he said, who gave him various dispensations from time to time such as were necessary for moving in Western society.’

  ‘Like the egg!’ said Gott. ‘Do you remember? When winter came he had his father’s permission to eat an egg, if constitutionally necessary.’

  The Duchess nodded. ‘And then he talked to me very simply about caste and about his family – very old landowners, it seemed – and finally he told me that I was like his mother. At that I felt the horrid triumph of the successful collector; just like Mrs Leo Hunter, no doubt, when she had secured the exotic Count Smoritork. But I was mistaken. Mr Bose led me a long dance after that.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Appleby, ‘that you had great difficulty in…in carrying the acquaintance further?’

  The Duchess raised a whimsical eyebrow. ‘It wasn’t quite a matter of pestering him; indeed, Mr Appleby, I would try not to do that. He liked me, I believe, and was always pleased when we met and he would talk very much as if I had been truly his mother. But afterwards he would retreat slightly and I had to begin all over again. He had learnt that I was what he called a ranee and perhaps he felt that I ought to make all the advances. So it was slow and difficult. You see, I didn’t just want to trap him in a room with purple curtains and flummery.

  ‘But we finally cemented our friendship one afternoon in Rumpelmayer’s. I felt it as rather tragic at the time that his Achilles’ heel was, so to speak, his stomach after all. It was when I had introduced him to that paradise of sweet and sticky delights – and particularly to the chestnut things that Elizabeth became so fond of in Vienna, Giles – that he finally opened his heart to me.’ The Duchess pulled herself up. ‘But his heart is not part of the story. Well, even later it was extraordinarily difficult to get him to come down and stay here. And when he came it was to his death. Invading him as I did seems. terribly wanton now. He enjoyed himself, I think, and it was because I knew he would that I brought him. But now–’

  The Duchess, despite the animation of her narrative, was clearly exhausted and only by an effort remaining other than distraught. Appleby rose. ‘You have told me all I wanted to know. And if you will excuse me?… Minutes may be valuable now.’

  ‘Then go at once. Servants will be up all night; coffee, anything you may require, they will bring. And there will be a man continuously in the telephone-exchange; anybody in the house you will be able to rouse instantly from such sleep as they are likely to get. And now, I will finish my letters.’ The Duchess, seeing that Appleby wanted to waste no more time with her, wasted no more time on him.

  ‘Now…the terrace.’ Appleby, as he made his way down the great staircase with Gott, appeared lost in thought. Presently he roused himself. ‘It makes the position no better; what do you think, Giles?’

  ‘Once more, that the spies are a fable. Bose was no spy. That was not the story of how a spy worms himself into a house.’

  ‘Quite so. That was the first fact I wanted; that the Duchess went after Bose and not Bose after the Duchess. And – you know – we had an instinct that Bose was all right when we were getting his body decently on Auldearn’s bed.’

  Gott gave a sort of sigh of relief. ‘Not a Bath Mat Oriental’ – and without pausing to explain – ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘And we have learnt why he was killed.’

  ‘Yes.’ Gott had no flair for being a Dr Watson. ‘He was sending the whole story of murder to his father – thousands of miles away – and imploring guidance. But it seems pretty mad.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘Not mad. Only – as we said – very remote. I thought he evaded a question of mine; he would not, I think, tell a direct lie. We were a very queer people to him, I suspect – despite his labours in the British Museum. He was not sure if I realized that the prime fact of the matter was that something evil had been done. And imagine yourself in a rajah’s palace, Giles – a rajah’s palace in a rajah-ruled world. You peer through a curtain in the middle of certain crazy proceedings and you see A wipe out B. I think you would be in some doubt. And Bose may have had fundamental philosophical difficulties; rather like those the Duchess attributes to the Duke, but more so. With what ought one to meet a particular sort of evil, and in particular circumstances as a guest? – and so on. If his code required him to consult paternal authority before feeding a pigeon or eating an egg, one can imagine its requiring something of the sort in the face of bloodshed. And so the murderer, who knew Bose knew, got his chance.’

  ‘And Bose memorized nothing; that was just my novelist’s fancy. And the spies are a fable.’

  They had emerged on the terrace – to be pounced on by a constable. He recognized and saluted Appleby. ‘Your photographers are in the theatre, sir – in the little stage place, with the sergeant. And the ambulance has come and we’ve sent it into the court. All been quiet apart from that, sir.’

  They walked the breadth of the upper terrace and turned to look back at the house. It rose before them, a great expanse of stone still fretted with half a score of lights, colossal and mysterious as a liner looming out of the night – the soft line of encircling illumination bathing the terraces like foam. But Gott, watching the steady pace of the patrolling police, had another Image in mind. ‘A platform before the castle,’ he said. ‘Quiet guard…not a mouse stirring… The play haunts us still.’

  Appleby laughed harshly. ‘Hamlet?… Spy-stuff off a bookstall. Sprung to life with God knows what ingenuity.’ They made the long round of Scamnum, verifying the efficiency of the cordon, before he spoke again. ‘I may have been too late with this guard,’ he said, ‘and it may be all over now. Or I may be losing the game this moment through having an insufficiently elastic mind. Giles, do you know anything about wireless?’

  Gott exclaimed: ‘It doesn’t fit…it’s nonsense! We’re faced with some private, passional thing.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘You forget–’ He broke off to stare into the darkness and then back at the house, his gaze travelling between the twin bulks of Scamnum and Horton Hill. ‘Do you see any light – any flicker of light – on that hill?’ He called up a sergeant – the place seemed now swarming with police – and spoke rapidly.

  ‘We thought of it, sir,’ said the man, stolidly but with pride. ‘There’s a man far out to each quarter watching the house and others on the roof looking the other way. If they see anything but steady lights they’ll report.’

  Appleby moved off a few paces with Gott and sighed with satisfaction. ‘And the Duke thinks the county police should be immobilized? Perhaps they’re not quite adequately energetic in the matter of poachers. But it may all be too late. Back to your play-box now.’

  ‘Are you not putting rather a lot of faith in your telephone friend? His report stands alone now against all appearance; and I suspect that sort of person is oftener wrong than right.’

  ‘No doubt. Read unvarnished accounts of spy-work and you see that muddle’s it’s middle name. And I have no doubt that if Auldearn were being stalked with the object of theft and then this killing happened, a spy in the audience might jump to the conclusion that his friends had acted a little more vigorously than expected and send off a rash promise from the first callb
ox. In fact Auldearn’s death may have been, as you say, a private affair and the document never got at all. But I can take no chances. And so, back to your theatre.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Three o’clock.’

  6

  The door of the hall, thrown open by a discreetly impassive constable, became – disconcertingly – a valve for the release of exceedingly angry voices. ‘Hamlet and Laertes,’ said Gott, ‘quarrelling by Ophelia’s grave.’

  And certainly the scene revealed looked like a quarrel in a play. Dr Biddle and Sir Richard Nave, undeterred by the dubious glances of another constable in a distant corner, were standing plumb centre of the front stage, under the full glare of the still burning arc-lamps, and only too evidently very much displeased with one another indeed.

  ‘Clearly the localized form,’ Nave was vociferating. Recently so cool among the corpses, he was now quivering like an athlete on his mark. ‘Leontiasis Ossium–’

  ‘Leontiasis fiddlestick!’ Dr Biddle, an amiable little old gentleman to all normal seeming, was dancing – dancing in something grotesquely like a low-comedy convention of indignation. ‘Simple, generalized Paget’s – plain as a pikestaff? If Harley Street ideologues–’

  ‘Sir,’ thundered Nave, ‘you are impertinent!’

  Appleby nudged Gott briskly forward. ‘What they call consultation, no doubt,’ he murmured, ‘but of whom this honourable interest in diagnostic minutiae?’ When Appleby fell to sarcasm it was a sign of outrage; and indeed the scene was more indecent than funny. A few yards away, behind the rear-stage curtain from which there came a low murmur of voices, lay the body of Lord Auldearn, with a bullet in his heart and surrounded by police photographers. High words in such a presence were sharp exemplification of something Appleby knew well enough; that the shock of violent death will obliterate and transform social responses in a very remarkable way. But now both men made an effort to control themselves, and it was in his normal manner that Nave addressed Appleby.