Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  ‘Mr Tucker’ – Tucker almost started at something subtle that had happened to the young policeman – ‘Mr Tucker, what of the relations of these two people as you have observed them? They have been together, I suppose, rehearsing? And – if you will give me your opinion – what sort of a person is Malloch?’

  Tucker set himself to answer the last question first, and with precision. ‘Malloch is what they call a systematic scholar – and of tremendous eminence, I believe, in his own line. Clear, retentive brain – very retentive – and has had his jacket off working hard for sixty years. Crawls over texts comma by comma, you know, and coaxes surprisingly interesting results out of the process.’

  ‘Rather Gott’s line.’

  ‘Yes. But Malloch is positively an Ober-Gott. Better brain.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby was rather dubious. He knew how Giles’ mind could leap.

  ‘But that’s not all that’s to Malloch. These people usually pay for their concentration in narrowness, it’s said. Illiterate after 1870; never buy a new book.’ Tucker shook a gloomy head. ‘But Malloch’s informed all round and lives quite in the world. Not that his learning’s so relevant as his character, which I don’t know much about. He’s a correct, tartly courteous person, but showing an occasional streak of savage brilliance that suggests those old Edinburgh days. And that comes out in his writing, which can be very good – particularly in a destructive way. I’d like to have him on my list.’ This was obviously Mr Tucker’s furtherest word in intellectual commendation.

  ‘And his relations with Lord Auldearn?’

  ‘I don’t know much about that. Malloch only came down on Friday night and I didn’t see them much in each other’s company – not that I have any impression that they avoided each other. And I’ve never stopped in a house with the two of them before, though I seem to remember their passing the time of day at stray parties. The Duchess would know most about all that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Appleby. ‘Yes…’ He rose with the polite finality of the Prime Minister himself pronouncing brief valediction on a deputation. ‘Thank you very much. Now I must get hold of the document in the case.’

  ‘Anderson’s book?’

  Appleby opened innocent eyes. ‘Dear me, no. Shakespeare’s play.’

  2

  ‘It came into my head,’ said Piper to Gott, speaking across Elizabeth and not very amiably – for like most of the people scattered round the breakfast table he was feeling uncomfortable and frayed – ‘it came into my head that in this business you must feel rather like Pygmalion when his statue came alive. You think out these things – and here you are.’

  ‘A most felicitous idea. And what about the story of Frankenstein? – there is some possible application to be worked out there too. You might elaborate something good.’

  Elizabeth, setting an example in the eating of an unagitated and adequate meal, frowned at her plate over this passage of arms. And Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt, who had been explaining to the Duke how essential it was that she should be allowed to leave Scamnum when she pleased, did not improve matters by attempting a discussion on the dangerous influence of the cinema on the lower classes – so many films full of stuff that was a standing incitement to crime!

  Nave injudiciously rallied her. ‘And what, my dear lady, of the play you came to see? Does that not, according to the argument you suggest, invite us to adultery, incest, parricide, fratricide, murder, and revolution – to say nothing of going off our heads? No, no, these things, films of criminal life, stories of ingenious homicide – they are all safety-valves, madam, safety valves.’

  Gott cracked an egg in gloomy silence.

  ‘But Shakespeare; said Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt – with some obscure sense, apparently, of sustaining an argument – ‘Shakespeare was a poet.’ And this failing to provoke comment she added: ‘And in my opinion the Duke should send for a detective.’

  ‘A detective?’ said Noel politely from across the table. ‘You mean a real detective – not like the police?’

  ‘Exactly – a real detective. There is a very good man whose name I forget; a foreigner and very conceited – but, they say, thoroughly reliable.’

  Gott made the little hair-rumpling gesture which he resorted to when the world seemed peculiarly mad. And unexpectedly Elizabeth murmured: ‘Giles, couldn’t you clear it up – solve it?’

  Gott looked at her with something like alarm.

  ‘I mean that they’re right, in a way. What they’re getting at, it is rather your sort of thing.’

  ‘You mean inspired by sensational fiction?’

  Elizabeth considered. ‘No. Murder is obviously inspired by something more solid than that. But the way the thing was done, the setting, the technique – it seems the product of the same sort of mind that writes a complicated story. You might have an insight into it.’

  ‘Not the insight Appleby will have. I don’t think I’d make a very good real-life detective. I’m not foreign and…but come and meet Appleby.’

  They had reached the door when they were arrested by Clay, who had snapped his fingers impulsively and addressed the Duke and the company at large. ‘I say, it occurs to me there is something that ought to have been put to the police. About your apparatus, Dr Bunney. Did anyone explain to them its extreme accuracy? I mean the chance of identifying the voice that used it to deliver one of the messages – “I will not cry Hamlet, revenge,” wasn’t it? Do you believe you could really do that? I remember Miss Terborg suggested something of the sort at the time.’

  Bunney, who had been the dimmest of figures during breakfast, brightened at once. ‘I am sure I could,’ he said eagerly. ‘You see, it’s impossible to disguise the human voice against modern phonometric tests – my phonometric tests. Not even you, Mr Clay, could defeat them. All I should need would be control recordings.’

  It had become a convention at Scamnum to consider Dr Bunney and his black box as a mild joke – which was doubtless why nobody had pursued this possibility before. But Bunney’s confidence had something impressive in it now. Even the Duke was interested. ‘And you’ve kept the cylinder – record, whatever it is – of that message?’

  ‘It’s in my room now.’

  ‘And the machine?’ asked Malloch.

  ‘The officers have that.’

  Gott struck in. All this seemed to him more for Appleby than for the company at large. ‘Then will you come along now? I think this should be put to Mr Appleby at once.’

  Bunney had not thus been in the centre of the picture since the notable occasion on which he had proposed to switch on the Lord’s Prayer. He joined Gott and Elizabeth with alacrity. At the door they met the Duchess, always a late arrival at breakfast. ‘Has anything been discovered, Giles? And what are their plans?’ Gott was already the recognized intermediary between Scamnum and the new power so disconcertingly planted in its midst.

  ‘Nothing startling, I believe. All of us backstage people will be questioned this morning – and meanwhile we and everybody else are fast prisoners. I don’t know what would happen if anybody rebelled, but so far there is only a little grumbling from Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt.’

  ‘And from me.’ Nave had come up behind. ‘But if Mr Appleby will despatch a telegram for me to an exalted patient who must be tactfully put off I shall be placid enough. I will come and see him now if I may.’ Nave plainly liked it to be known that he had exalted patients.

  They found Appleby, who had abandoned the still-populous green-room, sitting dangling his legs over the front stage and absorbed in the prompt-copy of Hamlet. Elizabeth wondered if Mrs Platt-Hunter-Platt would have been impressed; it was somehow distinctly reminiscent of the reliable foreigner. But Gott broke in upon these studies abruptly, anxious to get ahead of Nave and the pother about a telegram. ‘Dr Bunney believes he could identify the voice that used his dictaphone for one of the Revenge mes
sages.’

  Appleby looked at Bunney in surprise. ‘I had hoped we might narrow down the possible access to your instrument, and to the other means by which messages were given. But I understood the Duke to say that the voice was disguised? And surely a carefully disguised voice, coming through the medium of a dictaphone–’

  Bunney broke in impatiently. ‘You don’t understand. This is not a commercial dictaphone. It is an instrument of precision for the scientific study of the minutiae of speech. I should like to explain it to you if you will have it brought here. I have shown several people how it works: it is very easy to understand. It measures, you see – measures relative intervals, stress, which nobody could disguise. Of course one would make no show with such a thing in a court of law: it would be ridiculed. But for us – for you – it can point. All I need is control speeches from everybody concerned. Come to reckon on it, I have got them all already. It is just a matter of comparing each minutely with the cylinder which has the message and the job is done – you see? It’s not a quick business, though, rather a long one. But the cylinders are all up in my room. I may get them? And you have the machine?’

  Bunney’s eye was gleaming. He was a detective in his own line and now the instinct was up in him. His slightly comical pomposity was gone; the words tumbled out impressively. And Appleby was prepared to suspend disbelief. ‘Get them by all means,’ he said. ‘It’s something wholly new in criminology – at least in England.’ And at this gracious speech, Bunney bounded away like a schoolboy.

  ‘It seems worth Dr Bunney’s working on,’ said Appleby candidly to the others, ‘while the very laborious business of sifting movements – both in relation to the messages and the murders – goes forward. For we are up against a long job, I am afraid, and people must be patient.’

  Gott looked curiously at his friend during this speech and the subsequent negotiations over the telegram. He had told the Duchess that nothing startling had been discovered; now he was not so sure. He suspected that something had turned up sufficiently odd to catch at Appleby’s imagination. And Appleby’s next words scarcely seemed to lead directly to the laborious investigation he had promised. ‘Giles, what would you say was the chief problem in Hamlet; the thing one puzzles over when one begins to analyse the play?’

  ‘I suppose one is chiefly troubled to account for Hamlet’s delay in revenging himself upon King Claudius. There seems no reason for it. That was almost the first difficulty raised by early critics of the play. And it has been discussed ever since.’

  ‘Delayed revenge.’ Appleby swung upon Nave. ‘Now what if Lord Auldearn was murdered as he was murdered – right in the heart of Hamlet – in order to make the statement: “Thus dies Lord Auldearn, by a long-delayed revenge”?’

  Nave’s eyelids drooped over alert eyes. ‘Are these professional consultations that you are holding? Are Mr Gott and I going to unite our crafts and work the thing out together?’

  ‘Perhaps something of the sort. I feel that Lord Auldearn’s death and the play Hamlet may be in some way implicated with each other, and that the manner of death constitutes a statement, a statement intelligible and satisfactory to the murderer though necessarily enigmatic to us. And conceivably the statement is just this: “At last, long-delayed revenge!”

  ‘This is much better than turning our pockets out and so on last night; it should get you much further!’ Nave was obviously stirred to interest. He leant against the stage, hands deep in pockets, and knit his brows at the floor. ‘A statement, yes: nearly every homicide has its aspect as a statement, a manifesto. And here that seems to be pronounced. At once pronounced and enigmatic; a clamant riddle. There really is matter for a psychological approach.’ He glanced keenly up at Appleby as if assessing the policeman’s ability to conduct anything of the sort. ‘A riddle to which the solution lies deep within an unknown mind – it is an interesting idea. Not an affair as in your stories, Gott; no footprints, no flakes of that unique East Loamshire clay.’

  Appleby smiled. ‘You are behind the times in that sort of thing, sir. Stories of the kind always have a psychological drift now.’ He looked mischievously at Gott and added mendaciously: ‘For instance the elaborate analysis of the gorilla-mind in Murder at the Zoo–’

  Nave turned to Gott. ‘Dear me – I had no idea! Another use, it seems, for psychology; just as with the advertising.’ This was a neat retort upon a joke now some days old and it seemed to put Nave in good humour. ‘But what exactly is the problem for the psychologist here? The likelihood, I presume, Mr Appleby, of the sort of “statement” you suggest. “At last, long-delayed revenge!” I don’t know if you have some particular suspicion in mind – but I see the general idea as possible enough. Suppose someone with a lust for murder; suppose him directing it on a particular victim and crediting himself with a motive which he calls “revenge”. His head is full of revenge and he nurses the idea. He thinks of himself as delaying his vengeance and finds pleasure in that. He is playing cat and mouse–’

  ‘Which’, interjected Elizabeth, ‘is one interpretation of Hamlet’s conduct.’

  ‘Very true, my dear Lady Elizabeth; perhaps an important point. In any case, the delay has been part of his pleasure; his sense of power is implicated with it; he could strike but he has delayed. And then remember, as I said, that nearly every murder is a manifesto – and nearly always a manifesto – so to speak – of self, a piece of exhibitionism. The criminal looks forward to his appearance in the dock as the martyr to his martyrdom – and for exactly the same reason: it is limelight, it is a supreme manifesto of self – nothing more.’ For a moment there was a fanatical gleam in Nave’s eye – but he came back to his reasoning swiftly enough. ‘He is proud of the power, the control that has gone to his delay. And so the delay must go into the statement. It may be gloried in in the dock or – better – it may be declared doubly in the way of the killing itself. Hamlet, revenge! And Hamlet procrastinates – and then at length kills.’

  ‘But’, Gott objected, ‘here it was Polonius who was killed, whereas in the play Hamlet is out for the blood of the king – it is there the revenge lies – and the killing of Polonius is merely an accident.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nave vigorously. ‘Yes! But in acts like this, remember, it is not wholly the rational waking mind that is in control. The primitive is at work. And the primitive uses – just as dreams use – rough and ready symbols – and uses them illogically. Here, it would be quite enough for the purpose of statement, of manifesto, that the murder should take place in a context of delay; in the middle of a play the main problem of which is procrastination.’ Nave made an excited and nervous gesture; obviously he had a pleasurable feeling of power himself in this analysis. ‘Yes; I believe you may be on it, Mr Appleby!’

  Appleby was drumming a finger on his copy of the play. ‘But can we come down to types, Sir Richard? What sort of person nurses thoughts of revenge – and for how long – or about what? Lord Auldearn has been shot by someone of whom we know only one thing: that he or she is what ordinary people call “normal”. There was nobody in the hall who is not commonly regarded as a responsible agent. Very well–’

  ‘What’, Nave put in drily, ‘of the eminent Mr Cope?’

  ‘An old man grown eccentric, no doubt. But what I am trying to put is this. Here are so many people we may suspect and all of them are – within certain elastic limits doubtless – normal people with normal lives behind them. How does our idea of darkly declaring a nursed revenge and so on accord with this very rough limitation of types that we can establish? Would you expect to find such a thing only in subjects patently unbalanced?’

  ‘Certainly not. A very normal-seeming type might, I believe, do just such a thing. Strange things bubble up even in the godly, you know – uncommonly strange things.’

  ‘No doubt. But can you imagine this: a normal-seeming person – indeed, an intellectually distinguished person – nursin
g the idea of revenge for some passional injury over a very long period of time; husbanding up murder and finally producing it from hiding-places more than forty years deep?’

  Nave looked startled, and so did Gott and Elizabeth. Plainly, Appleby was not intending to use a mere figure of speech. And to look for a motive for Auldearn’s death more than forty years back, was drastically to narrow the field. Nave straightened himself. ‘You have some specific thing in mind,’ he said, ‘and it would not do to give any sort of scientific opinion rashly. I don’t know. But I should venture that murder voluntarily delayed over forty years, and by such a type as you describe, would be disconcerting even to a morbid psychologist – and, believe me, we are not disconcerted readily. But do not misunderstand. I am speaking of a murder in which the motive centres wholly in a remote past. One can imagine a longstanding, but still present motive – some stolen thing still flaunted, some deadly and irreconcilable ideological conflict even, which might span a great stretch of years. But such speculation is worthless; we have nothing sufficiently precise before us. Here is Bunney.’

  The approaching footsteps, however, were those of Sergeant Trumpet. The Prime Minister was on the telephone.

  Appleby had already sent a message that the document was in safe keeping. And now, excusing himself, he hurried to the green-room without enthusiasm. During the last hour he had been feeling that the hunt was up – and it was a hunt that had nothing to do with Pike, Perch, or Prime Ministers. Despite the continuing blockade the whole spy-business had been becoming progressively unreal.

  ‘Well,’ came the Prime Minister’s voice, ‘you’ve got it and so far good. Hilfers is going down for it straight away. Can we be easy in our minds? From this second intercepted message I rather suppose we can.’

  ‘I haven’t had any second intercepted message,’ said Appleby. ‘Haven’t? Then I suppose Hilfers is bringing it down to you. It says something like this: “Regret premature advice have to report failure and no further opportunity probable.” Some fool, you see, thought that because a shot was fired his friend had certainly got what they were after. Surprisingly stupid some of them are. Not like the police, Mr Appleby.’