There was a crowd of people up there, a crowd that was an abrupt reminder of the gruesome term that had been put to the Scamnum Hamlet… Gott’s Hamlet. And Gott offered another train of thought. What reason could be put forward to himself for retreating from Gott in the bathroom? Perhaps he felt uneasy now at having discussed the man’s absurd hobby with him the other morning. It must, when one thought of it, be an uncomfortable position, this finding himself involved in an extravagant actualization of his own species of fantasy. Rather like a surprised Pygmalion receiving undesired advances from his Galatea…the image was not bad. Or perhaps he had retreated from the bathroom because he felt a little awkward on his own account? Had he not made rather naïve remarks about his own willingness to plunge into a sort of blood and thunder existence if it should turn up in real life – to accept a stray embrace from the other man’s Galatea, in fact? Something about being ready to play pass-the-buck if confronted with a corpse and something about a hankering after picturesque international intrigue – that was what he had said. And it had been very foolish; such conversation was quite embarrassingly foolish in retrospect – reminiscent of the vaguely sinister remarks which everyone had to make in turn, no doubt, near the beginning of Murder at the Zoo. Piper swung up and down – touching his toes, sometimes getting the palms of his hands almost flat on the floor – and Horton Hill swung up and down outside like a green sea across a rolling port-hole.
There was a knock at the door.
It had been Melville Clay’s habit to stroll across the corridor while dressing and consume, amid desultory talk, Piper’s neglected and tepid morning tea. But this morning tea was still an hour off and Clay, like Piper, was newly bathed. He was in beautiful black and white: white slippers, black pyjamas, black dressing-gown with an exaggeratedly robust white cord – and his face almost hidden behind a mass of white lather. ‘How now, Horatio!’ he articulated with odd clarity through the soap, ‘you tremble and look pale: is not this something more than fantasy?’
‘Pale?’ said Piper pettishly but apprehensively – his face was red from the toe-touching – ‘nonsense! Though I’ve had a shocking night.’
‘Never mind. Good copy. Do Gott’s stuff straight from life now. As they say – more than fantasy.’
This sentiment – delivered somewhat in the manner of Clay’s departed colleague, Mr Jingle – hit disconcertingly on one of the thoughts. The reactions of all these people to sensational and mysterious murder would make good watching in the immediate future. But Piper felt the suggestion of copy must be snubbed as unseemly. He continued doggedly at a gesticulating exercise by the window and allowed a minute to elapse before be said briefly: ‘A horrid business.’
‘Horrid.’ Clay had moved over to the other window and begun to shave. He was, Piper thought, a beautiful creature – with the proud bodily beauty that comes from heaven and not from a system of exercises. Perhaps he had a feminine streak – the little silver mirror he had taken from his pocket was too elegant; his deft movement as he caught the light with it under chin and nostril was too much that of a conscious beauty. Piper reflected rather jealously that he had no feminine streak himself – an invaluably informative thing to have.
‘You know, you are quite extraordinarily beautiful,’ said Piper, by way of conscientious experiment.
As experiment it was ill-timed; Clay might have blushed like a girl or he might not – the lather still obscured him. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said indifferently, ‘one grows that way when one’s bread and butter’s in it. And rather showy too. Public means which public manners breeds. I’d as soon be out of it.’
Piper eyed him curiously. ‘You haven’t been in it long. You’ve risen like a rocket.’
‘Soon to decline, perhaps, like a falling star. There may be copy in me too.’
Piper ignored the reiterated jest. ‘But what’, he said, ‘do you think of all this?’
‘I think’ – Clay had finished shaving and turned to look out of the window – ‘it’s already a first-class sensation, if one may judge by that crowd on the hill.’
‘Pretty morbid, isn’t it – turning out just to stare? And they’ve been mighty quick.’
‘Oh, that’s not what they’re about; that lot’s still to come. I guess these are Press people, training all sorts of ingenious cameras on us at this moment. Good publicity – Mr Charles Piper doing remedial exercises at his window shortly after the fatality.’
Piper drew hastily back. ‘Disgusting!’ he said – with some reminiscence of Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt. ‘But I’ve hardly got the hang of what’s happened yet. What was the search supposed to be about? Was someone supposed to be hiding a revolver?’
‘I think something had been stolen – from the body.’
‘Robbery!’
‘I rather gathered from something the Duke let fall – robbery of a special sort. A secret document – that sort of thing.’
‘Spies!’
‘Exactly.’ Clay looked lazily at Piper. ‘Again not in your line, I suppose? The missing treaty. Sort of contemporary version of cloak and sword adventure, you know.’
Piper almost jumped. It was the identical silly phrase he had used to Gott. Slightly fussily he began to get out his own shaving things. ‘I wonder’, he said vaguely, ‘who did it?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Clay.
David Malloch lowered stiff legs from footstool to floor as the little tray was set down beside him. The footman looked without curiosity at the unruffled bed – there was nothing remarkable in anyone’s having done without sleep that night – crossed to the window, drew back curtains, raised the blind. He went out at the other door; in a moment there was the sound of running water; an eddy of steam drifted into the bedroom. Still Malloch did not move. His hands, fingers extended, lay Pharaoh-like along the arms of his chair; his mouth might have been hewn in basalt; his eyes were fixed and sightless as eyes that gaze out over Karnac or Memphis.
The man came out of the bathroom, moved towards the door. ‘There is no change in the hour of breakfast, sir.’
Malloch inclined his head and the man went away. For a long time there was neither sound nor movement in the room; next door the water ran unchecked. Presently Malloch’s eyes, staring through the window as if across some vista of desert, faltered and changed focus. He got painfully to his feet – it was breaking the posture of hours – and moved slowly across the room. From the centre of the white blind, in silhouette against the light, hung a slender cord and silken tassel. He took the cord in his hands, looped it, thrust the head of the tassel within the loop. The head tilted to a macabre angle: it was a manikin that he held suspended in a little silken noose. For a moment his mouth tightened another shade; then he tossed the tassel lightly in the air and it fell to its normal position, straight and free. He turned and hurried to his bath.
PART THREE: DENOUEMENT
See you now;
Your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth:
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.
1
Once more Appleby stood on the rear stage. Here, he knew, lurked the heart of the mystery; as often as he moved from this spot, so often he was in danger of losing himself in a maze of irrelevant or subsidiary detail. Here, during Act Three, Scene Four of an amateur performance of Hamlet, Lord Auldearn had died. This was the one fact; as yet all else was speculation. And the fact was of an extraordinary fascination. To begin with, it was bizarre – almost as bizarre as any criminal act he could remember. And the place and the victim – Scamnum, a Lord chancellor of England – gave it a colouring alien to mere police news, threw over it a half-light of history that was not without its own beguilement for an imaginative mind.
But it was the technical problem that was absorbing. What could one get from t
he specific way in which the thing had happened? The odd locale, the dramatic moment – were these things, a structural part, so to speak, of Auldearn’s murder, or were they decorative merely? Gott had talked of feeling behind the catastrophe the working of a mind theatrically obsessed; a mind outlandishly absorbed, over and above any practical motive for murder, in the contriving of an astonishing effect. And certainly it would be hard to deny at least an element of mere display in the circumstances surrounding the deed. The threatening messages of the preceding days could only be interpreted as a preliminary flourish of melodrama, a prologue to the melodrama being prepared within the framework of the Scamnum Hamlet. Sand that framework had been itself more simply melodramatic, apparently, than modern Hamlets commonly are. The show of violence…and then a show of violence within the show.
The show of violence…in the small hours Gott had quoted the context of that – a speech by Marcellus when the guard had tried to stay the Ghost:
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
For it is, as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
You can’t beat Shakespeare, thought Appleby irrelevantly – and for a minute his mind strayed over what he could remember of that tremendous opening scene – the scene in which they bring the sceptical young student Horatio to confront the uncanny thing that walks the battlements of Elsinore at night:
How now, Horatio! you tremble and look pale:
Is not this something more than fantasy?
More than fantasy…that was the next point. Was there something more than a mere effort after fantastic effect behind the manner of Auldearn’s murder? Had it been exactly so because, for some reason, it had to be exactly so? By every conceivable theory save one – the theory implicating Cope ‘aloft’ – the deed had been extraordinarily hazardous. Was that hazardousness gratuitous – something accepted, it might be said, for fun – or had it been accepted after calculation as necessary to some specific end? The murder of Bose was evidence here. For Bose’s murderer had dragged the body of his victim with a crazy bravado down a long corridor, known to be tenanted, in order to pitch it wantonly on Auldearn’s threshold – and Appleby’s. Bose had been murdered, almost certainly, because he knew – or almost knew; his murder was a crime of calculation and prudence. But to swift and efficient action had been added this grace-note of pure sensationalism: the body had been moved, at great risk, for the single pleasure, apparently, of securing a momentary effect. Might there be a similar mingling of motive, then, in Auldearn’s murder? Had the deed itself been rational, directed to some practical end, and the hazards accompanying the specific manner of its accomplishment been accepted for the sake of added melodramatic colour? Or had – conceivably – the melodrama been all, an end in itself; had the effect been the sole motive; had the whole thing been the resultant of some ghastly perversion of aesthetic instinct?
Or – third and final possibility – was Auldearn’s murder rational through and through; had there been – once again – cold reason for every hazard? These were the questions, it seemed to Appleby, which lay at the centre of the case. What, then, of the business of the document?
It was very difficult to connect the facts he had been considering with any designs upon the Pike and Perch paper. Spies, he had agreed with Gott, do not go about their work to an accompaniment of threatening messages. They rarely shoot; they very rarely shoot eminent statesmen; positively, they do not shoot in circumstances which make their chances of subsequent successful theft exceedingly tenuous. Even if spies had broken into the safe in Auldearn’s room and, having drawn blank, concluded that the paper they wanted was on his person – even so, and even supposing them prepared for desperate measures, they would hardly have chosen to shoot when and where Auldearn had been shot – at excessive risk and in a hall that could instantly be sealed like a strong-room. And there was no reason to suppose that it had been spies who cracked Auldearn’s safe. Three safes in all, it had turned out, had been cracked and Happy Hutton was in all probability responsible. Indeed – once more Appleby came back to this – there was no reason to suppose the presence of spies at all – except for the intercepted message which Hilfers had reported. Save for that the spy-theory had its sole origin in the Duke’s first alarm. That alarm had been reasonable, but it had been based on no positive evidence beyond the cracked safe and the unsuccessful search of Auldearn’s body. And when the document had turned up – in a sufficiently ingenious hiding-place – that alarm had been allayed. Gott had revived it with his startling leap upon the possible significance of Bose’s photographic brain. Then the Duchess had dissipated that possibility; Bose was not a spy, nor the kind that makes a spy. After that there had been two further alarms: the Duke’s alarm over Gervase, Cope’s and the Merkalova’s alarm over Diana Sandys. But if Miss Sandys – and it seemed next to impossible – had contrived to copy the document before Bose discovered it, she had subsequently had to destroy her notes and no harm was done. Besides, which, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation of her conduct to which Appleby, who knew something of advertising people, had jumped at once. And Gervase and the Merkalova, similarly, had a perfectly reasonable if equally embarrassing story. Only one thing gave Appleby pause here; he had mentioned it – with a mischievous obliqueness – to Gott.
There was a slightly disturbing coincidence between the two stories – the Merkalova’s and Diana’s. Both ladies had been pursuing an essentially innocent, but nevertheless uncomfortable professional activity: the Merkalova taking press-photographs. on the quiet; Diana getting down a commercially useful suggestion which had been prompted, presumably, by some aspect of the murder in the hall. It was not a startling coincidence; nevertheless it was something on which to pause. Suppose that Gervase or the Merkalova had detected Diana making professional hay, so to speak, by the lurid glow of Auldearn’s murder: might this not have suggested to them their own story when they came to feel that a story might have to be put up? But at most this was to say that to Gervase and the Merkalova there still clung some fragment of suspicion: with the Merkalova’s or another camera the document might have been photographed after all. And it seemed to Appleby that while this one conceivable channel did remain, he must maintain his blockade of Scamnum; or maintain it, at least, until he had positive orders from the Prime Minister himself to desist. Again there was no evidence; nothing but suspicion – and his suspicions of Gervase Crispin as a spy continued to be tenuous. If the Merkalova had appeared at moments to be putting up a set show – and this was the only point of significance he could find – that might well be because she was, just as much as Melville Clay, a creature of the stage.
All of which was not to say that the spies had no probable existence. Appleby was less disposed than Gott had been to dismiss Hilfers’ report as unreliable. That there had been spies about he believed – and one of them had doubtless sent away an over-sanguine message. But the spies represented a different thread from the murder – just as there was a third thread in Happy Hutton. These three threads might not be tied up with each other at all; were probably quite without significant interconnexions. Happy Hutton, indeed, appeared the merest sideshow. He had wormed himself into Scamnum, cracked three safes, left a bowler-hat – and left no other mark on the case. But the spies, though their presence might have been ineffective in the end, had complicated the whole affair – had already given a peculiar twist to the conduct of it.
Appleby had abundantly gathered that for the Prime Minister the safety of the document was an issue to which even the apprehending of Auldearn’s murderer came second. And he had placed it first himself; was still proposing to maintain elaborate precautions over it. But, in point of the murder, it was a distorting factor in the investigation, a red herring. And now Scamnum spies were fading fast into ineffectiveness – and six hours were gone since Appleby had arrived on the scene. On
the business of the document he had gone – as Gott had hinted – from pillar to post and it was impossible to tell what he had missed that he would not have missed had his attention been concentrated on the single issue of murder. Now, given the maintenance of the blockade and a careful watch on Gervase and the Merkalova, he could concentrate on that issue in security. And the first step to the finding of Auldearn’s and Bose’s murderer would be a careful sifting of movements among that unwieldy crowd of backstage suspects – Gott’s twenty-seven suspects together with old Max Cope ‘aloft’.
So Appleby paced the little stage, reviewing a tolerable confusion of materials and planning the morning’s attack upon them. He was interrupted by Sergeant Trumpet, who brought news of difficulty with Scamnum’s awakening domestic staff. You may isolate some two hundred people without much inconvenience during the hours of the night, but in the morning what of the butter, the milk, and the eggs; what of those outdoor servants who came into the servants’ ball for meals; what of the bevy of chauffeurs at the Scamnum Arms who would expect breakfast in the steward’s room; what of the guests, not involved in the play, who would presently be proposing to pack? The last question, obviously, was one for the Duke when he should be available: the others Appleby resolved to turn to the solution of himself. He would hold the blockade rigidly if possible till noon, by which time he should be able to report comprehensively to, and get further instructions from, London. Meantime it was simply a matter of organization; butter and eggs and chauffeurs must come in and nothing must go out. Appleby went in search of Bagot, whom he supposed the fountain-head of authority of Scamnum’s menial affairs.
Hamlet Revenge! Page 19
