Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  Bagot was already performing his first duty of the day – superintending the arrangement of a little ocean of silver on the breakfast-table. He was a silvery and ineffective old person – rather more like a domestic chaplain, Appleby thought, than a butler – and extremely bewildered. And in his bewilderment he was inclined to retreat on an anxious maintenance of Scamnum customs and forms. Of course he could go round with Appleby and arrange effective police supervision of all comings and goings in the offices. But he ventured to think it might really be Mr Rauth’s province. Would the inspector see Mr Rauth? Mr Rauth had risen; indeed, Bagot had just seen him in his room – Mr Rauth never, of course, left his room – and he was very upset, exceedingly so. The inspector had better, perhaps, remember that Mr Rauth was exceedingly upset.

  Very naturally, agreed Appleby – and asked to be directed to Mr Rauth, whom he conjectured to be someone in the exalted position of a house-steward or major-domo. A footman conducted him; nothing easier than to find old Mr Rauth, he said, because Mr Rauth never left his room – had never been known to. But everyone had his own idea of what you might call a life, he supposed – and tapped respectfully on a door.

  Mr Rauth, certainly, had all the appearance of a picturesque recluse: he was lank and dim and dusty, with a sort of peering stoop and the gentle voice of one who for long has communed only with abstractions. But he was distinguished, suggesting a librarian, perhaps, or an eminent antiquarian bookseller. And somehow one guessed that here was the very hub of Scamnum and that in the extreme neatness of the clerical paraphernalia by which he was surrounded was symbolized that virtuoso efficiency which made Scamnum among other things a great smooth-running machine. Behind Mr Rauth – around Mr Rauth – one sensed the accumulated experience of generations on the job.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mr Rauth. ‘Yes…?’ He shambled forward, peering up at the visitor. Then he shook his head. ‘No, sir, no. I really couldn’t do it. Science may be science, sir, and co-operation co-operation; but this morning No. I am too upset.’

  Having an active mind, Appleby presently realized that he was being taken for the philologically zealous Dr Bunney – doubtless notorious below stairs since his treatment of Bagot. Laboriously he explained himself and Mr Rauth at length understood. But the only immediate result was that Mr Rauth removed his glasses, polished them, and reiterated: ‘I am very Upset.’ The voice was gentle but its weight was great. Mysteriously, every sentence of Mr Rauth’s had an august and solemn close.

  ‘A great shock,’ said Appleby, paying a timely tribute to the proprieties before getting on.

  Mr Rauth at last looked at his visitor approvingly. ‘As you say, a great Shock. Such a thing has not happened here – if my memory is sound – for Years.’ He returned his glasses to his nose – or rather his nose to his glasses, with a disconcerting ducking motion. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I know that it is often Done. I know that sort of thing Occurs. As a general thing, we cannot Deny It.’

  Appleby looked at Mr Rauth a little blankly. He hardly seemed a helpful ally; one might almost suspect that he had indulged the whim of never leaving his room to a point which had endangered his sanity. ‘Of course,’ said Mr Rauth, ‘it is the younger people who Do These Things. One hears Stories. There was the venison party at Hutton Beechings. There was the grassy corner pudding at poor Sir Hubert Tiplady’s. One acknowledges the Fact.’

  ‘The fact?’ said Appleby. Scamnum, it seemed, always had a trick up its sleeve with which to overwhelm one. This was more unnerving by a long way than Max Cope.

  ‘But,’ said Mr Rauth, his voice mysteriously diminishing in volume as it gained in emphasis, ‘here there is always ample provision made. Two bath olivers, two rich tea, and two digestive in every room. Replenished daily and changed three times a week. The bath olivers go to Mr Bagot – he has a Partiality for Them – and the others to the servants’ hall. I am Dumbfounded. And at the very moment when there has been a death almost in the Family! I am more than dumbfounded; I am Aghast.’

  ‘And all despite the fact’, said the now enlightened Appleby gravely, ‘that an ample variety of sandwiches was served shortly after the late Lord Auldearn’s death – decease.’

  Mr Rauth looked at Appleby as if he had at last found an embodiment of Perfect Comprehension. That an unknown reprobate – certainly a guest – should asperse the hospitality of Scamnum by breaking into a pantry in the night and purloining half a tin of biscuits – this was very terrible to Mr Rauth. But there was something comforting – soothing indeed – in the ready understanding of this sympathetic stranger. ‘But let that Pass,’ said Mr Rauth, with a friendly peer at Appleby and returning to his interrogative manner. ‘Yes…?’ And in a couple of minutes he was being a most effective ally after all. He flicked out a plan of Scamnum, telephoned to the lodges, the bailiff, the home-farm, the kitchens, the King’s Arms; directed the locking and unlocking of doors. In ten minutes the complicated traffic of the Scamnum offices was reorganized on a basis of easy and adequate police supervision. Perhaps Mr Rauth had a hope that it would all lead to the unmasking of the violator of the pantry; certainly, he worked with a will. And Appleby got away from him under twenty minutes all told – the morning’s last fragment of time to be sacrificed to the ghostly suspicion of spying that still clung to Gervase and the Merkalova.

  Very soon the unwieldy household would be beginning to assemble for breakfast. Appleby wished he could observe their reactions to each other but failed to see how this could comfortably be managed; no doubt Giles would report. So he went to the green-room and set about organizing it as a sort of headquarters. He made various routine arrangements with the local men. He sent off several telegrams; one of these it rather pleased him to hand to Sergeant Trumpet – for it read with a fine mysteriousness: advise h huttons size in hats. If Happy, that very minor fish, could be proved an illicit swimmer in the waters of Scamnum he might as well be caught. And then Appleby returned obstinately to the rear stage. Here – he reiterated perserveringly – lurked the heart of the mystery. On this place – on all the implications of this place as the site of the murder – he must concentrate his mind. And suddenly Appleby felt enormously hungry.

  He had enjoyed a not particularly substantial dinner just thirteen hours before. Since then there had been various excitements: ballet, a ride behind a fire-engine with the Prime Minister, murder, spy-hunting, and a number of interviews, all of a more or less exacting and lively kind. During this time he had had no sandwiches, neither had he broken into any pantry for biscuits – and he was just allowing his thoughts to stray a little anxiously to the problem of how Scamnum was likely to treat detective-inspectors within the gates when he heard a gentle but unmistakable rattle in the green-room. He hurried. An expansive breakfast was being wheeled in on a series of trollies – and under the superintendence not of Bagot but of an ugly and cheerful person in tweeds. Sergeant Trumpet was looking doubtfully at the ugly and cheerful person; much less doubtfully at the breakfast. And the ugly and cheerful person gave the advancing Appleby a friendly wave. ‘I’m Timothy Tucker – late Guildenstern, of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, twisters,’ he said amiably. ‘It occurred to me you might like to be in advance of the pack and I dropped a hint to Bagot and here we are. And I’m uncommonly hungry myself; I wonder if I might join in? Gott may come, but family ties are around him – if only by adumbration, you know… Obviously, there are kidneys.’

  Gott, it was presumably indicated, was going to breakfast with his Lady Elizabeth. And Appleby was in no mood to reject the appositely named Mr Tucker. ‘I shall be very glad,’ he said. ‘My name is Appleby. I’m frightfully hungry.’

  The long tables – already cleared of the properties which the police had removed, searched, and inventoried – were spread with a magnificent meal. There was a table for a little shifting army of constables, a table for Appleby’s men now returning from labours in Auldearn’s room, a table that was a sp
ecies of sergeants’ mess and a table for Appleby himself, Tucker, and Gott if he came. And Appleby surveyed the scene wryly; it suggested that a riot rather than a murder-investigation was the business in hand. When he got rid of this crowd he would begin to feel the possibility of getting on.

  Timothy Tucker swallowed much tomato juice, buried much butter in the warm heart of a roll, and halted a descending fish slice to point at the group of burly constabulary. ‘And are those’, he innocently enquired, ‘what you call the Flying Squad?’

  ‘County police, Mr Tucker. I have a great many men at the moment patrolling the outside of the house. When there has been murder, you see, it is always possible that someone is thinking of slipping quietly away.’

  ‘Come, come!’ Tucker, imitating the Duke, smiled inoffensively.

  Appleby smiled too. ‘Have you come to pump the police?’

  Tucker shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Not that at all. Egg?’ He waved a hand in the direction of the sergeants. ‘They stopped me telephoning a telegram – or rather they censored it. Ultra vires I’m sure, Mr Appleby. Not that I complain – nor am curious about that side of it, rumours of missing papers and so on. But I expect you’ve been sending telegrams or telephone messages yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Appleby, wondering where this led.

  ‘People’s careers, interconnexions, all particulars; that sort of thing?’

  ‘Just that,’ said Appleby. Tucker, he noticed, was no longer exuding easy cheerfulness; he had thrust away his fish and was stabbing half-heartedly at Scamnum’s celebrated pork cheese as if some considerable weight were on his mind.

  ‘Last night,’ said Tucker, ‘you said something about speaking up. I rather took it to be a walk-into-my-parlour move. Inviting the criminal to pass the buck.’

  ‘Possibly so,’ said Appleby.

  ‘But, of course, one must speak up all the same. I don’t mean that I saw anything in particular last night – not that at all. Do you know Spandrel?’

  ‘The publisher?’ Appleby shook his head.

  ‘Yes, the publisher. I’m one too. Spandrel and I both do a fair amount in the way of memoirs; mismemoirs, a good many of them – but all the thing just now. You know: Recollections of a Political Scene-Shifter and My Long Life of Love.’ Mr Tucker shook his head mournfully – presumably over the depravity of the reading public. ‘Well now, about a year ago an old gentleman called Anderson sent me a manuscript called A Waft from Auld Reekie – an excellent title, for it was a distinctly highly flavoured book. I don’t know that there was anything positively actionable in it when it came to me, but it was plainly full of lies. So I sent it back.’ Tucker paused over his modestly insinuated glimpse of virtue and then added with some complacence: ‘After that, of course, Anderson had a shot at Spandrel.’ He paused again, this time to reach for a bone and investigate the Devil sauce; once launched on the process of speaking up he seemed to have recovered his spirits. ‘Spandrel, as you may know, is a rash young man. He agreed to publish the book. Whereupon old Mr Anderson died – and exchanged Edinburgh, I don’t doubt, for all the sad variety of hell. And that didn’t leave Spandrel in too good a position. He was contracted with Anderson’s spawn, administrators, assigns, and so forth, and he was left, of course, to stand any racket himself. So he cut a bit and delayed a bit – and the result is that the book is coming out next week. In other words there are scores of advance copies floating about England at this moment.’ Tucker took more coffee. ‘So you will understand my position. If I had refused the book and it had then gone into limbo I should be the possessor of confidential information of a sort and in a difficult position. As it is, I am merely telling you of what you can read for yourself in a day or two. Because whatever Spandrel has cut out I think it very unlikely that he will have cut out all the business of Auldearn and our good Professor Malloch.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Appleby with a becoming inscrutability. He reached for the marmalade – a beautiful dark kind with whole quarters of peel.

  ‘One needn’t suppose’, Tucker went on, ‘that Malloch knows about the book yet. And if he doesn’t it will be a bit of a jolt – and would have been for Auldearn too. This Anderson had a flair for the ridiculous and he succeeded in making something quite tolerably diverting out of the relations of these people getting on for fifty years ago.’

  Appleby looked curiously at Tucker. ‘Fifty-year-old stuff? And ridiculous and diverting merely?’

  ‘In the main, ridiculous and diverting merely. But shading off finally into hints of darker matter – matter that might smoulder till the end of a lifetime. That’s what I didn’t like about friend Anderson; his dropping hints. The courts don’t like it, you know.’

  ‘Quite so. But failing a copy of A Waft from Auld Reekie will you give me some details?’

  ‘Sure Auldearn – Ian Stewart, as he was then – and Malloch were contemporaries at Edinburgh University. Auldearn was by some years the older; had been three or four years, I think, in a country solicitor’s office first. Anyway, they both started square and on the same line – the grand old fortifying classical curriculum. One doesn’t know how much’ – said Tucker with the placid assumptions of the Cambridge man – ‘of how these Caledonian academies conduct themselves. But I gather there is a great deal of top-boy feeling all through. No waiting three or four years to see who is the better man but much importance given to the results of Professor Macgonigal’s fortnightly test.’

  ‘Dear me!’ said Appleby.

  ‘Yes. Well, Ian Stewart and David Malloch were twin top boys from the start and remained so all the way through. And – what didn’t necessarily follow – they were rivals – and enemies. Not real enemies from early on, I suppose, or they would probably have ignored each other. They were friendly rivals at first, but with a real and deepening spirit of antagonism between them which they cloaked for a time in various boisterous ways. Both, as it happened, were distinguished in the primitive sports of the day, and were rivals there too. And that helped to make their rivalry a matter of public concern to the whole student body. There were two factions: the Jacobites, supporting Stewart; and the Mallets.’

  ‘Mallets?’

  ‘Yes. It was a joke, apparently, thought of by Stewart. Some time in the eighteenth century there had been a person called David Malloch occupying an obscure position in the Edinburgh High School; he went to London and set up as a literary man and changed his name to Mallet. And Dr Johnson, it seems, objecting to disguised Scots, made fun of him and his name in the Lives of the Poets and elsewhere. It was just the sort of little literary joke to annoy David Malloch the younger. Anyway, the Jacobites and the Mallets were famous in their day. There were wild doings – both between the factions and between the principals themselves. Malloch captured Stewart and hung him in chains – not by the neck, fortunately – over something called the Dean bridge. Later Stewart captured Malloch and succeeded in conducting him, tied head to tail on a donkey, a good way down Princes Street. Later still, there were rumours of a duel. And then their time was over and Stewart came straight to read for the English Bar and that was an end to it.’

  Tucker was filling his pipe. Appleby regarded him curiously. ‘And you are putting forward these events, which happened nearly half a century ago, as a possible motive for murder?’

  ‘I am putting them forward’, said Tucker placidly, ‘as a subject for laudable curiosity in policemen. But when I said that was an end of it I meant that was an end – or all but an end – in friend Anderson’s narrative. Anderson writes all this up and then leaves off with a hint: so much for the amusing doings of these wild young men; how sad that a darker turn to it all was to follow – that sort of thing. Well, I went after a little information on my own and it was partly what I came on that made me finally turn down Anderson’s book. All this talk of wild students now grown to eminence one could get away with. But if there had been any
thing serious, anything that this gossip and hinting might tend to rake up, then the thing would be highly offensive and it would be mug’s work to touch it. So I found a Modern Athenian of enormous age who had been in on the doings of that time and he told me a lot – without vouching for the truth of what he was telling me. Anderson’s stuff was more or less true, if a bit coloured up. But beyond that there was rumour of matters that had been kept very dark. A girl had come into the affair and complicated it. Or rather she had simplified it, making the rather involved, half make-believe enmity wholly deadly. The two men fought a solemn duel by moonlight on Cramond sands – it was the period of R L Stevenson come to think of it – and Malloch got the bullet and Stewart got the girl. And after that Stewart came south in a hurry – which is why he ended his days as Lord Chancellor and not as Lord Justice General. So there you are. And if Spandrel knew there was this lurid legend on the fringes of this book he’s putting out he wouldn’t be at all happy.’ Tucker smiled comfortably.

  Appleby was silent for a minute, contemplating the extraordinary motive for murder which Tucker – wasting little time – had presented to the policemanly curiosity. Revenge delayed through almost a lifetime: it was a thing fantastic enough to contemplate – and yet not unknown to criminal science. But revenge, when it was long delayed, was commonly delayed because of some physical barrier, some long-standing practical obstacle. Men had paid off old scores after ten years in prison; emigrants, after far longer periods overseas, had come home and rekindled within themselves the lust for some half-remembered rival’s blood. But in such a case as was here to be supposed delay would be inexplicable, unmotivated…