Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  ‘Dr Biddle, who is police-surgeon, has done me the honour to include my signature on the preliminary report that must be signed, it seems, before the body is moved. That is why we are here. But Dr Biddle proposes, I understand, to offer a contribution to knowledge as well.’

  The tone insinuated that country doctors – even those who attend on dukes – do not commonly make contributions to knowledge and it almost sent Biddle off his balance again. He contented himself with a frown – but the anger was there, and apparently it was going to unleash itself on the police. ‘I wish to say’, said Biddle belligerently, ‘that it would have been proper in you to consult me at once on the cause of death.’

  ‘The cause of death!’ said Appleby in genuine astonishment. ‘Tcha! The manner of death, if you prefer it. Suicide. I am convinced that Lord Auldearn committed suicide and that this intensive police investigation is unnecessary and…and highly indecorous.’

  ‘Suicide…unnecessary…indecorous!’ It was Nave who broke in, and for a moment he seemed angrier even than before. Was it, Appleby wondered, the common enough irritation of an able man before a donkey-colleague? And was Biddle a donkey?

  Biddle continued resolutely. ‘Suicide, I say. Lord Auldearn was a sick man; a dying man, in fact. He was suffering from a not common but nevertheless unmistakable’ – he shot a venomous glance at Nave – ‘unmistakable disease which has only one end. And he took a quick way out.’

  Appleby glanced at Nave. ‘You disagree about his having been mortally ill?’

  ‘Most certainly I do not. But clearly–’

  Appleby interrupted smoothly. ‘I see, you were discussing the technical details when we came in. But, Dr Biddle, have you any reason to suggest for Lord Auldearn’s choosing such – well – such a striking occasion for his deed?’

  ‘He had a damned queer humour,’ retorted Biddle. And beneath the competent and humane, if momentarily upset, old practitioner Appleby seemed to see for a moment a raw medical student to whom most sophisticated attitudes would be inexplicable.

  Nave said drily: ‘And so – if it was suicide – must other people have had – damned queer. Somebody, for instance, picked up the revolver and humorously hid it in Yorick’s skull–’

  Appleby whirled on him. ‘How do you know that?’

  Nave looked mildly surprised. ‘The Duke told me –my good sir!’ He turned back to Biddle. ‘Your skull, by the way, Dr Biddle. And then that somebody, or another somebody, fell into the spirit of the evening and stabbed the unfortunate little Indian.’ He looked blandly from the startled Biddle to Appleby. ‘Dr Biddle and I were so absorbed in scientific talk that I forgot to tell him. Somebody has thrust a dagger into Mr Bose’s heart. And I have come to the conclusion – mere student of the mind that I am – that the result has been death.’

  Biddle, shocked apparently by the news and goaded afresh by Nave’s irony, again exploded against the police. ‘If there has been another death I should have been sent for at once. I shall speak to the Chief Constable. And I want to know if I am to be detained throughout the night I have had a message that a bedroom has been got ready for me. I don’t want a bedroom! I want to go home! In fact I demand to leave! I have my practice to attend to. I don’t even know what urgent calls there may have been.’

  The first rumpus, thought Gott – and said aloud: ‘Hadn’t you better stay? Then you can be led to the deaths as they occur.’

  Biddle jumped. ‘Deaths?’

  ‘There is an unknown person, callous of human life and apparently utterly reckless, at large in this house. I don’t know what may happen but I do know that in such a situation it is – well – highly indecorous to badger the police. Unfortunately by this time we are all thoroughly tired and on edge.’

  ‘Mr Gott is right,’ said Nave. ‘And – Dr Biddle – we have been hasty. I apologize.’

  Appleby seized upon this favourable moment. ‘I am afraid, Dr Biddle, that it may be necessary to detain everybody for some time. I am very sorry. Any urgent messages would have come through by telephone and been referred to you at once. And any message you wish to send out may be sent out through the police.’ It was not a generous concession but Appleby made the most of it. And presently, sure enough, Biddle was wooed to something like amiability. But he reiterated his conviction of suicide. Auldearn’s choosing to shoot himself in the middle of the Scamnum theatricals was queer; but sick men do queer things. Whereas murder would be sensational and appalling; and the sensational and the appalling simply had no place at Scamnum. As for the violent death of Mr Bose, Biddle was obviously unprepared to believe in it without the evidence of his own senses. And to acquire this, and make appropriate official memoranda, he was presently successfully despatched under the guidance of a now courteous and remotely amused Nave.

  Appleby moved towards the rear stage looking faintly perplexed. ‘I suppose’, he said, ‘that Harley Street ideologues and Sussex GPs are naturally a sort of pike and perch. But it seems to have been an unnecessary flare-up.’

  ‘I suspect Nave of having forgotten a good deal that lies outside the psychiatry he makes his money by. And if he was simultaneously cocky and hazy that would infuriate Biddle.’

  ‘What was Biddle in the play?’

  ‘He petitioned to come in at the last minute. We made him an attendant lord.’

  ‘Well, he seems just such a minor figure. Only not very strong, perhaps, in the courtier’s patience and self-control. And now, Giles, for the constabulary’s star turn; scientific detection. But I’m afraid you’ll find it lacking in novelty.’

  The rear stage was certainly a highly conventional effect. In one corner a lounging young man stood amid a litter of those large glass bulbs, filled with a gleaming silver-foil, used by press photographers; he was loosing them off in a bored way for two muttering and exclaiming persons with large cameras. Looking up, Gott saw a third camera peering down from the trap-door of the upper stage, and the head of a third muttering and exclaiming person bobbing about behind it. A severe little man with glasses and a bald head, very like a distinguished scientist discoursing on shaving-soap in one of Diana Sandys’ advertisements, was industriously and impassively applying a miniature vacuum-cleaner to the surroundings of the corpse. In the background a brother scientist was puffing some sort of powder through a machine at the faldstool. To one side stood Sergeant Trumpet and two local constables, impressed, respectful but latently antagonistic. It was nothing if not a highly coloured scene. Gott ran an agitated hand through his hair, indicated the manipulator of the vacuum-cleaner with a polite little-finger. ‘John – I say – is that Dr Thorndyke?’

  ‘It must be,’ said Appleby.

  Dr Thorndyke switched off his machine and addressed Gott with a disturbing fusion of American camaraderie and London accent. ‘There was an old girl once thought her husband a bit dusty-like. Laid him down on the mat just like this ’ere’ – Dr Thorndyke jerked a thumb innocent of irreverence at the body – ‘and vacuumed him proper. Twisted all his po’r bleeding inside and he had to go into ’orspital. Almost knocked him off. Yes, siree.’

  This was presumably Dr Thorndyke’s favourite semi-professional anecdote; all his colleagues had plainly heard it before. ‘You see,’ murmured Appleby, faintly apologetic, ‘they go to study these things in New York.’

  But Gott had turned to the person puffing at the faldstool. ‘And I take it’, he said, ‘that this contrivance is…is what I call an insufflator?’

  Appleby looked with subdued irony at his friend. ‘I suppose it is rather macabre; the Gott genera coming alive, so to speak.’

  ‘It’s like stepping through the looking-glass,’ said Gott morosely. He had never seen Appleby in this full professional setting before.

  Appleby raised his voice. ‘Nearly through?’ There were affirmative noises. The young man with the flashlights draped himself in flex and depar
ted. The faldstool was carried out to be photographed elsewhere. The army of criminologists melted away.

  ‘Is all that useful?’ asked Gott.

  ‘Your insufflator’s useful; fingerprints still catch criminals by the pint. And an expert gunsmith is useful. And good photographs serve sometimes to hold the attention of a tired jury. The rest’s hooey, more or less. But I have to think of the fuss there’s going to be if we’re held up for long. Questions in Parliament: was such-and-such attempted and does the Home Secretary know of the advanced methods of the Kamchatkan police? I’ve been caught before by scamping the window-dressing. But now I must have a word with them and then we can look round.’

  When Appleby returned he was carrying the heavy iron cross that the Duchess had obtained along with the faldstool from Hutton Beechings. ‘Found on the floor,’ he said. ‘It was part of the rear-stage set?’

  Gott nodded. ‘Yes. Standing on the little ledge of the faldstool.’

  ‘Then it just conceivably suggests a slight scuffle – or it may have been knocked over during the get-away. They thought Auldearn might have snatched it up to defend himself. But it’s clear of fingerprints.’ Appleby paused to pace out the dimensions of the rear stage. ‘They agree with me about the shot Getting on for close-up but distinctly outside suicide range – nothing in Biddle’s theory. And certainly not from as far as the shelter of the curtains. But just conceivably from as far as the trap immediately above.’

  They both looked up to where the trap-door had been left open. ‘Still the spot, then,’ said Gott, ‘from which a venerable Royal Academician may have committed the first of two imbecile and beastly murders. Shall we go up?’

  They went behind scenes and climbed to the upper stage. Cope’s easel and canvas were still in position in a corner and his palette and a wooden box, with about a dozen very large tubes of paint, lay on the floor. Appleby took up a position behind the easel and looked out over the body of the hall. ‘Was the lighting like this? He could be seen, surely, by the audience?’

  ‘Yes, just like this – a half-light representing the battlements at night. The true Elizabethan upper-stage must, I think, have been pretty shadowy. But even so, he could, as you say, be seen. He wanted to paint from here and I felt that his presence, just discernible in the shadow, wouldn’t spoil the play.’

  ‘The question then would be whether he could get to this trap-door in the middle without being detected. I’ll give the fellow at the far end of the hall there a shout. It would be from the back that he could be seen, if from anywhere. Just get behind the easel, Giles, move about a bit and then make for the trap-door as well as you can.’ Appleby advanced to the low balustrade of the upper stage and called out to a constable at the extreme end of the hall: ‘Just look up here, will you, and tell me what you can see besides myself in the next two minutes.’

  The constable looked – open-mouthed but keen-eyed. Gott stood behind the easel; moved right and left of it once or twice; withdrew behind it; got cautiously down on his knees, on his stomach; squirmed towards the trap. Gaining it, he paused a moment, wriggled round, returned as he had gone and in a moment was appearing right and left of the easel again as if studying the composition before him.

  ‘Well?’ called Appleby.

  The constable lumbered up the hall and climbed on the front stage. ‘I saw the gentleman dodging about behind the picture,’ he said. ‘Then he disappeared for a bit like, and then he showed up again, dodging about as before.’

  ‘What do you mean – disappeared for a bit?’

  ‘Well, sir, happen he were just standing still behind the picture. It’s all in shadow and hard to tell.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘Well, that’s all right; quite possible. So tell me about Cope.’

  Gott hesitated. ‘He’s imbecile, or thereabout. Which need not suggest the perpetration of imbecile crime. It’s simply that the age is in and the wits are out. And there is a sense in which one feels that he might do any crazy thing. One’s not a considerable artist without plenty of inner stress, and when one’s mind and control begin to break up conceivably the stress may let fly in a perfectly helter-skelter way.’

  Appleby looked dismayed. ‘This latest tendency to psychologize your fictions, Giles. It sounds well, but I don’t know that there’s much record of considerable artists embracing the straight-jacket by way of multiple homicide.’

  But Gott was pursuing his thought soberly. ‘No, but there are plenty of suicides recorded among them. And the two mechanisms are not altogether remote. However, it’s the Bose factor that seems vital.’

  ‘Quite so, Cope could have shot the recumbent Auldearn from here and nothing neater. But could Bose have known? You must do that reconstruction all over again, Giles. When I say Go.’

  Appleby descended from the upper stage and took up Bose’s position on the prompter’s stool between the two thicknesses of heavy curtain. Applying his eye to the peep-hole commanding the rear stage he cried: ‘Go!’ And within a few seconds something significant happened; he was conscious of a stealthy slithering noise from above – Gott crawling cautiously over the boards. So far good; Bose, who as prompter would be giving his whole consciousness to sound, might well have had his attention attracted in this way to the upper stage – and so, by a natural transition, have directed his glance through the peephole and upwards. So he peered in and up. And in a moment he saw some movement in the shadows – it was the trap-door sliding back – then, clearly, a pointing hand. It was Gott’s, a finger extended as if aiming to shoot. Bose, then, could have known. What was more important, as explaining his presumed reluctance to speak, he could have suspected without knowing positively. A revolver thrust through the trap from the upper stage must almost certainly have been in the hands of Cope. Bose could have almost known. But how could Cope have known that Bose almost knew?

  ‘How,’ said Gott, coming down, ‘how could Cope have known Bose knew – supposing, I mean, it was so?’

  ‘Exactly. But the answer is simple enough if you psychologize. A single glance between the two afterwards would have told him.’

  ‘Yes, a look could no doubt tell all. But the Cope theory, remember, is another thrust towards oblivion for the spy theory. I don’t know Cope’s subsequent movements, access to Auldearn’s body and so on; but if one shot to grab, one would hardly shoot from another storey.’

  ‘Perhaps the grabbing is another story, very little connected with the shooting? And though the Cope theory is beguiling it’s the grabbing I must hold on to now. And for that the vital point is the hermetic sealing.’ And on the hermetic sealing, Appleby went to work. The structure of the hall, the floor, the doors, the windows; the chance of throwing something through a window, of thrusting something through a ventilator, of catapulting something through the darkness of the rafters to the far end of the hall – everything was considered. It was plain, to begin with, that nobody could have got away. There were only two exits from the hall. That behind the green-room had, as it happened, been under the observation of Gott, Noel, Elizabeth, and Stella Terborg at the moment the shot was heard and Gott had stood by it until the Duke arrived, locked it, and sent him to see to the other door – that behind the audience. And at this second door there had been a fireman, who could speak absolutely to nobody’s having come or gone. Until the Duke dismissed the audience, therefore, nobody had left the hall except Gott and Gervase Crispin when they went to Auldearn’s room.

  ‘It seems a hundred to one’, said Appleby – and to Gott he appeared almost restless – ‘that it’s as you say. Either this Hilfers person has made the merest muddle or there really were people after the document and one of them, being in the audience and seeing what happened, jumped to conclusions and sent an over-confident message to his pals. And yet–’

  ‘But any danger is gone, surely. The thing is in your pocket; Bose turns out overwhelmingly unlike a spy and so it’s
irrelevant that he had a memory like a photographic plate–’

  ‘And so’, said Appleby, ‘we might turn to this: Sergeant Trumpet’s instinct was sound.’

  Gott frowned – and started. ‘To hang on to anyone who had left the hall! John, have you got your eye on me?’

  ‘I have not. But there was also–’

  He paused at the startled look on Gott’s face and then swung round to confront the advancing figure of the Duke. And the Duke, who had been so impassive in the contemplation of murder, was moving in something between daze and distraction. He walked straight up to Appleby and spoke as if out of a trance. ‘Mr Appleby, I have just been to my cousin Gervase Crispin’s room. I happened to go in quietly by the dressing-room and he failed to notice me. I came away at once. He failed to notice me because he was sitting at a desk manipulating…an instrument.’ For a moment the Duke’s knees seemed to sway beneath him.

  ‘It was a little camera,’ he said.

  There was only one question on which to pause. And the answer to it was uncompromising: it had certainly been Gervase’s suggestion that Auldearn’s room should be inspected and guarded. At this Appleby hurried behind-stage with directions; half a minute later he and Gott were running upstairs. Neither said a word but Appleby noticed that Gott was almost as disturbed as the Duke. In a night that had included two murders and the rumour of more than private calamity there had been nothing as simply dark as this. That an enigmatical Indian should have a memory like a photographic plate and employ it in mischief-making had been one suggestion; that Gervase Crispin might have been about the same job with an actual camera was another. It belonged to a different world of blackness. And to the quick imagination of Appleby the dimly lit vistas of Scamnum, as they flowed past once more, took on a new unsteadiness, as if the foundations of the place were rocking above a subterraneously exploded mine. But Gott, as he ran up the great staircase, was hearing again the frantic bell that had pealed so wildly there just twenty-four hours before and the voice that had rung out in sequel: