Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  And that was that. Valuable times had been fixed, and yet Appleby felt that on the whole here was one up to the Black Hand. There was opportunity in London and opportunity near Scamnum – a point all in favour of the unknown.

  Next came Noel’s letter. No time need be wasted on it – nor could; there was nothing whatever to be done. It had been posted in the West End on Friday morning; Noel remembered that. But it requires only the most moderate ingenuity to arrange for the posting of a letter where one pleases. There was no road that way.

  Appleby turned to the gramophone records and the opportunities of access to the radio-gramophone at about two-thirty on the previous morning. If the records were new there would be some chance of wringing information from them. Neither the carillon nor Clay’s reading from Macbeth would be big-selling recordings and the manufacturing company’s files would show what retailers could usefully be questioned. Appleby sent for the records; they were much scratched disks and both recordings were old. If the Black Hand had bought them when new, the transaction probably lay too far in the past to get any line on. And if he had picked them up recently and second-hand there would be needed a very elaborate net indeed, if there was to be even a slender chance of successful inquiry. Nevertheless, Appleby communicated with London at once. He then considered the matter of access to the machine and found no progress was to be made, It stood in a small ante-drawing-room, close to a service door. Anyone could have gone down in the middle of the night, set the machine going, slipped through the door, and returned to an upper corridor by more than one pair of service stairs. Scamnum was a building made for such tricks. And in the alarm, occasioned by the pealing bell, nobody had been on the look-out for suspicious movements. From all this there was derivable only one inference: the Black Hand had a fair familiarity with the house. Which told one really nothing. So far, Appleby said to himself, the enemy was winning all along the line.

  An understanding of Bunney’s box and private access to it some time before breakfast on the Saturday morning, were the next points. The most important witness here was not available; it would be some time before Bunney could again be on speaking terms with the world. But significant facts were to be gleaned. Bunney had arrived after luncheon on Friday and had lost no time in bringing his machine into play – as Gott had discovered on the terrace before dinner. Mysterious phonetic nicety apart, there was nothing particularly novel about the machine, except that it combined recording and reproducing units in an unusually compact way. But Bunney, being proud of it, hawked it round. Late on Friday night he had been demonstrating to all comers in the library; in the library just short of midnight, the somewhat reluctant Bagot had repeated the Lord’s Prayer; and in the library, finally, the machine had been left for the night. The Black Hand had merely to walk in. Which was not helpful, thought Appleby – and turned to his last chance.

  Gervase’s telegram seemed more hopeful. It was the earliest of the messages, having been received at the House of Commons on the Monday afternoon – a week before the play. And the office of origin was Scamnum Ducis. In other words the telegram had been sent from a hamlet within a mile of Scamnum Court – and sent some days before the majority of the house-party was assembled. And Appleby doubted if it could very readily have been telephoned. You can dictate telegrams from the right sort of public telephone-box. And there was such a one, he discovered, some miles along the Horton Road. But from there, it appeared, you would get not Scamnum Ducis but King’s Horton as the office of origin. Another possibility was that a telegram could be telephoned in fair secrecy from Scamnum itself. That depended on just what the domestic arrangements in such matters were and for a moment Appleby debated another interview with the alarming but efficient Mr Rauth. But it occurred to him that the local post office would have to be tackled in any case; and moreover that thirty minutes given to walking there and back might serve instead of the night’s sleep he had missed. So he got his directions and set out briskly through the park, challenged occasionally by one of his own local auxiliaries. He had withdrawn the men from the terraces but was going to make sure, all the same, that nobody now at Scamnum should quit without formal farewells.

  Appleby drew deep breaths of June air as he went briskly down the drive. The summer was advanced in this southland country; from somewhere came the scent of the first hay and already the oak-leaves were darkening. Over his left shoulder he looked up at Horton Hill. Across the crown there must be some right-of-way, for no attempt had been made to eject the people gathering there. It was quite a crowd now: idlers in the neighbowing towns, reading the stimulating news in their morning paper, had hurried to get out the car and motor over to see what they could. And soon there would be similar arrivals from London; people ‘running down for the day’. And portents these, thought Appleby, of a society running down in another sense: clogged by its own mass-production of individuals who, let loose from a day’s or a lifetime’s specialized routine, will neither think nor read nor practise any craft, but only gape. Hence an unstable world, in which Pike and Perch Documents can have a real and horrid power.

  But his immediate concern with that was over. Appleby’s eye, travelling along the hill, rested on a red and white object moving towards the crowd on the summit. It puzzled him for a moment; then he saw that it was an ice-cream barrow. Commerce follows sensation.

  Scamnum Ducis is a tiny village; the cubic space of all its buildings put together would go several times into one of the wings of Scamnum Court. A queer proportion of things, thought Appleby, still in sociological vein and yet not so blighting as the constant proportion of biggish villa and smallish villa that now makes up most of presentable England. He looked about him. There was – inevitably – a Crispin Arms: he noticed in a quartering the three balls that told how an early Crispin had married a decayed Medici. There was no church, for the church was within the park; it was more convenient for the family so. There was an institute erected by the belatedly romantic duke, with a bas-relief of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Lord Macaulay holding a committee-meeting. And there was a post office, the sort of post office that is also a general shop. There were picture postcards of Scamnum and cardboard boxes of slowly melting sweets in the window and the whole was of such modest proportions that Appleby, who remembered the classics of his nursery, would scarcely have been disturbed to find it presided over by Ginger and Pickles or Mrs Tabitha Twitchit. But it wasn’t. It was presided over by a young girl most startlingly like the Duke of Horton.

  Genetic law makes no scruple to confront you with embarrassing memorials of your ancestors, thought Appleby – and introduced himself. But the girl, on learning that she was in the presence of Scotland Yard, gave out a scared, gulping sound unworthy of the Crispin spirit and disappeared into the recesses of the shop. Her place was presently taken by a venerable but sharp-eyed woman who studied Appleby with the greatest concentration. And Appleby regarded her in turn with considerable hope. A knifelike and restlessly curious old body, she might just possibly represent the sudden downfall of the Black Hand. ‘I’m tracing the sending of a telegram,’ he told her; ‘a telegram sent from this office not very long ago. I’m going to ask questions. But I don’t want anyone to begin thinking they remember what they don’t remember. I’ve come in just on the off chance – you see?’ Appleby had found this a useful technique in the past; people’s memories are better when they don’t feel something urgently expected of them. But the sharp-eyed old person looked at him with some indignation. ‘There’s not many telegrams come into this office that I don’t remember,’ she said firmly.

  This was excellent – though scarcely an attitude that would have been endorsed by the Postmaster General. ‘It’s rather a curious telegram, too,’ said Appleby. ‘It was just two words: “Hamlet revenge.”’

  ‘Ah,’ said the old person; ‘there’s been plenty like that.’

  Appleby was taken aback. He had been hoping a good deal from the wordin
g of Gervase’s message; it should have held attention in transmission. But he had forgotten something which the Black Hand had not: for some weeks past Scamnum had been sending out telegrams about the play with all the prodigality of a great house. And in these, as often as not, the word ‘Hamlet’ had occurred. As the old woman said, there had been ‘plenty like that’ and the message ‘Hamlet revenge’ would not in itself attract particular attention.

  ‘Plenty like that,’ said the old woman. ‘A fortnight come tomorrow, now, Mr Rauth himself came in with two. One was to Jolce and Burnet, St Martin’s Lane: ‘Reference Hamlet duelling properties not delivered please check despatch – Gott.’ And the other was to Miles, Oxford Street: ‘Despatch ten copies New Cambridge Hamlet by return – Horton.’ And the same afternoon a stranger came in – a tall gentleman in a grey suit and a green tie, just the height of our Tim, who’s six foot exactly, with grey eyes and one or two freckles across his nose like a girl – and he stood over there making up his telegram and putting his hand through his hair. And then he brought it across. It was to Malloch, Rankine Lodge, Aberdeen: ‘Hamlet revived and Hamlet revised stop our motto back to Kyd exclamation looking forward discussion – Gott.’ Then the next morning…’

  Appleby regarded the sharp-eyed old person, thus steadily forging through a fortnight’s telegrams, with something like professional envy. Her description of Gott was only a shade less miraculous than her verbatim memory of a piece of academic banter that must have been incomprehensible to her. His hopes soared once more. Even if there had been ‘plenty like that’ the old person seemed to have a virtuoso gossip’s grip of the whole corpus. ‘Then’, he said, ‘you may remember this telegram, “Hamlet revenge”, and its sender.’ But a puzzled, almost cheated look had come over the old person’s face; she shook her head sombrely. ‘It’s not long ago,’ he said encouragingly; ‘just eight days – a week ago yesterday.’

  ‘Monday!’ The old person was extremely indignant. ‘You expect me to remember anything about a telegram handed in here on the Monday? Have you never heard of Horton Races?’

  So that was it. That was why Gervase had received his message when he did. There was one day in the year on which anybody could send off a telegram from the little post office of Scamnum Ducis without the slightest chance of being remembered. And that was on the day of the local race-meeting, when the village became an artery for streams of cars, and when scores of these stopped hourly at the post office to enable their owners to wire or telephone bets. Not only could anyone have driven down from London or anywhere else and sent the telegram in perfect safety; anyone from Scamnum could safely have sent it too. For there had been two strange assistants working hard, and the Duke himself could have handed a telegram to one of these without anyone being the wiser. And, finally, the message had been handed over the counter, not telephoned. The old person found it without difficulty, duly endorsed as having been despatched at two-fifteen p.m. It was a common telegraph form with the message pencilled in neat block capitals – a thing with which nothing could be done outside a fairy-story.

  Appleby walked back to Scamnum with the feeling that in the matter of the messages he had come off second-best. All he had gained was certain exiguous facts of time and place. Setting aside the thoughts of agents and accomplices, he had it that the Black Hand had been in Scamnum Duds post office at two-fifteen on the Monday before the murders and that a few days later – on the Friday – he had been either outside Auldearn’s London home just after two or in the neighbourhood of the Scamnum south lodge just after four or – less probably – somewhere on the route between these places at the time of the passing of Auldearn’s car. But this information, if slight, was not valueless; it might serve to eliminate – at least in a tentative way – this person and that from what was an alarmingly large body of suspects. And in conjunction with the other similar tests a good deal of progress might be made. Take, for example, Malloch as a suspect. One would ask could he, on his verifiable movements, have (a) thrown the message into the car, (b) sent the telegram, (c) shot Auldearn, (d) stabbed Bose, and (e) attacked Bunney. By this means, laborious as it would be to apply to over a score of people, one should get a long way. And this was a fact that the murderer must have reckoned on; it was his rashness again. And suddenly Appleby halted in his stride; he thought it likely that he had got somewhere already – and not where he wanted to be.

  He had taken Malloch as an example – involuntarily. Tucker’s story had been extraordinary; quite extraordinary enough to make him, in the almost complete obscurity in which the case was still enveloped, eye the subject of it as a benighted traveller eyes a glimmer of light in the east. At the moment he would be sorry to see Malloch go. And Malloch, it suddenly came to him, lived in Aberdeen. He was said to have arrived from Aberdeen late in the evening of the Friday on which the message had been pitched into the car. Unless he had faked his movements – and to do so beyond the likelihood of detection would be difficult – he must have been hurtling through the midlands in an express train at the moment when Gott was smoothing out the crumpled message in Auldearn’s car. And what about the previous Monday afternoon – the relevant time for Gervase’s telegram? Would Malloch prove to have been south of the Tweed? Appleby – rather regretfully, rather irrationally – doubted it. Here was the technique of elimination beginning to work – and to dispel what hope of light there had seemed to be.

  There was one further immediate inquiry to make in connexion with the messages. Appleby made a detour and visited the south lodge. It was, as Gott said, a curious twin affair, bridged across on the upper storey – one dwelling, apparently constructed on this fantastically inconvenient plan to gratify a melancholy taste for symmetry. And there were two pairs of twin staircases: a pair going up from within the park walls and a pair going up from the public road. Anyone who wished could go up and prance on the lodge-keeper’s roof. Appleby, whom ill-success was making more and more radical-minded, felt that he could work out this gesture as a pretty symbol of what Crispins offer the world. But instead he ran up the steps and pranced on the roof himself – or at least walked round it and lay down on it. The bridge-affair had a three-foot parapet; by simply sitting down and appearing to sun oneself against the wall one could lie in wait, concealed from the road. It was the ideal place from which to launch Auldearn’s message.

  Appleby went down to the lodge and made inquiries about the Friday afternoon. But nothing had been observed. The gates stood open all day and when a car drove – through it was not, it seemed, part of the lodge-keeper’s duties to appear. You could hear people on the roof sometimes – walking-folk mostly – if you were in the upper rooms. But nobody would carry such a recollection in his head; there might have been somebody up there on the Friday or there might not. So Appleby came away not much wiser. That, for a moment at least, was the end of the messages.

  And now to take up what Mason had been beginning to attack: the accounts people could give of their own or others’ whereabouts at the time of the murders. And there was a considerable difference between the two. For the shooting of Auldearn there was an exact moment fixed; for the stabbing of Bose there was no such precision. Auldearn had been shot when everybody concerned was confined within the restricted area of the backstage part of the hall; Bose had been stabbed when these same people had scattered to their rooms. The crucial moment, then, was the moment of the shooting. Who had been there – with whom – seen what? And here, Appleby felt, one might reasonably suppose oneself to be on extraordinarily promising ground. But he had a doubt. And he was canvassing this doubt in his mind when, approaching the house, he noticed Nave pacing moodily about the upper terrace. With a sudden thought he ran up the shallow steps and joined him. ‘I wonder if you would allow me another professional consultation?’

  For a second Nave looked at Appleby vacantly, as if the question had broken in upon some more than commonly absorbing train of thought. And for that second it seemed
to Appleby that he saw more in those eyes than vacancy – he saw what might have been the hint of some intolerable strain. But Nave was alert in a moment. ‘I will help if I can,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I have just been reflecting on the moment of the murder – Lord Auldearn’s murder. There were nearly thirty people in the comparatively restricted area round about. And the murderer, even if he had been lurking within the curtains for some time. before the shot, must have slipped away from them immediately after. He must have slipped out of them immediately after the murder had announced itself resoundingly. And yet nobody appears to have seen any suspicious movement – or at least nobody has come forward with anything of the sort. That seems to me strange. Surely the murderer was taking a tremendous risk? Or rather two risks: the risk of being immediately detected and the risk of the other people being able to vouch for each other’s whereabouts so readily that one could come down to him by a process of elimination? What I am wondering about, you see, is the quality of people’s attention and memory. Here was this shattering event. Would not the moment, the visible scene, be vividly printed upon every consciousness present?’

  Nave took time to consider. ‘It is an interesting point. And the answer depends entirely on the magnitude of the shock. If something interesting, surprising, or even thoroughly disconcerting happens one tends to remember the setting, the concomitant circumstances, more or less detailedly and vividly. That is true of everyone almost without exception. But it is a different matter when one comes to a substantially traumatic event – an event, I mean, involving a very considerable degree of shock. When that happens we are found to be split into types. Take being run over by a bus in the street. Some will have afterwards a complete picture of the occurrence down to the position, looks, gestures of the bystanders, and so on. Others will come from the same experience either in a state of amnesia about the whole affair – completely without memory of it, that is – or, what is more common, with a memory for it which is distinctly confused and unreliable. It is venturesome to attempt a numerical estimate, for there has really been no reliable statistical work done. But the people who remember vividly are certainly a minority.’