Hamlet Revenge!

by Michael Innes

  ‘I see, I see. In fact if these four establish themselves as in the second group you’re back nowhere.’

  ‘Not at all, sir,’ said Appleby patiently. ‘We should merely be back with a larger group of people – ten, to be precise – who might have shot Auldearn but who could not have done one or more of the other things; for whom, in fact, we should have to find an accomplice or accomplices.’

  ‘Yes, I see. You mustn’t expect me to be as quick as you are. I see. But, if these four make their get-away to the second group, at least it’s a set-back?’

  ‘Quite so, sir. And we’re now at our last chance. The four remaining people were the head-gardener, Macdonald; old Mr Cope; the American lady, Mrs Terborg; and Professor Malloch.’

  ‘Cope – that old fellow? He painted my grandfather – deuced well.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Appleby politely. ‘Well, we were interested in Macdonald because he behaved in a suspicious way early this morning – he was found prowling about the hall and invented some story of looking for a snuff-box. But I hadn’t much hope of him because of the message that was thrown into Lord Auldearn’s car. He could only have had an opportunity for that when he passed the car some way up the south drive and it would have been exceedingly difficult. And, in fact, Macdonald routed us. He couldn’t have murdered Bose; he couldn’t even have sent the telegram from Scamnum Ducis. So he goes very clearly into Group Two.’

  ‘But still suspect of something? What about this business of skulking about the hall?’

  ‘I got an explanation out of him about that – though with a good deal of difficulty. It’s odd – quaint indeed – but I feel inclined to accept it. A few days ago Macdonald was induced, it appears, to repeat the shorter Catechism and one of Burns’ poems for the American philologist, Dr Bunney. And he discovered afterwards, to his great annoyance, that these recitations had been recorded by Bunney’s apparatus – the machine, as you know, sir, through which one of the messages was delivered. And when Macdonald heard about that – about Bunney’s machine being mixed up with the messages – he got really worked up. For he believed that we would try to trace the perpetrator by means of Bunney’s record – which is just what we were going to attempt when Bunney was attacked – and that everything about the machine would inevitably be exhibited in court. Well, he wasn’t going to stand for the outrage of his versions of Burns and the Catechism being reproduced at the Assizes and he determined to get possession of the relevant cylinder – which he conceived to be still in the machine. The machine was in the green-room and that was what he was stalking. As I say, it’s odd. But it’s true to character, it seems to me, and I don’t disbelieve it.’

  ‘Well I’m dashed,’ said Sandford. ‘I suppose he ought to be prosecuted. But if that’s all there was to it, I think we’ll let it alone. I don’t altogether blame him.’

  ‘No, sir. And the immediate point was that as a single-handed criminal Macdonald was out. And – to be brief – Cope and Mrs Terborg have established themselves clearly enough in Group Two as well. So it’s a case of one beer-bottle sitting on a wall.’

  The Chief Constable meditated the proprieties for a moment and decided to laugh. He laughed loudly. ‘And if that beer-bottle has an accidental fall – well, there was more than one person in the game. Malloch, you say? Is he any more hopeful than the rest?’

  ‘Yes, sir – in a way. I’ve left him till the end on the chance that it may rattle him. He’s in a special position – the only person against whom there’s any suggestion of motive so far.’

  ‘Ah, motive!’ said Sandford eagerly. ‘Motive; yes, of course – enormously important. Glad you’ve been on to motive. I’d forgotten it. Shocking thing – my mind hadn’t turned that way. Motive.’

  ‘Yes, sir. There is a story – with considerable foundation apparently – of something like deadly enmity between Malloch and Auldearn. Something dating from their student days.’

  ‘I say!’ said Sandford. ‘Better have Malloch in. Embarrassing, chivvying gentlemen – but it must be done. I’ll keep quite quiet, you know – just sit by. Better have him in.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Nave entered his bedroom and closed the door. A sunbeam, dropping towards the horizontal, broke upon the dress-clothes laid out on chairs; the man had been and gone.

  He moved to the window and looked out for a moment abstractedly; then his gaze travelled to the summit of Horton Hill. The crowd, the ice-cream barrows – they were there still. He smiled grimly at the distant audience, smiled as the student may smile at a predicted result. Then he turned and paced the room – up and down in some mounting agitation: it might have been anxiety, bewilderment, some ungovernable impulse from within. He halted as if to steady himself, undressed deliberately, went into his bathroom, and turned on the bath. He came back.

  Standing in the middle of the bedroom he let his eye travel – but reluctantly, mesmerically – to a far corner. Resolutely, he brought it back to the business of cuff-links; uncontrollably it strayed again.

  He strode to the bookshelf. And warily, as if it were a forbidden act, he took down a book.

  With serious politeness Mason set a chair.

  ‘Professor Mallet?’ said Appleby.

  ‘Malloch.’ Malloch was not more severe than an eminent savant should normally be. And he did not seem disturbed.

  ‘Malloch – I beg your pardon. And I am sorry to have left you till the last – and so near dinner-time. We have asked people to come in and discuss matters in quite a random order, I am afraid.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Malloch. And he looked square at Appleby across the table. It was to be a real duel – this Appleby instantly knew, and knew that Malloch had deliberately given away that fact to him. It was a declared duel, with buried deep in it the strange enjoyment that such things can have.

  ‘Mr Malloch, you have particularly interested yourself in Hamlet, and came to Scamnum to take part in the late production for that reason?’

  Malloch considered this line of attack carefully. Appleby wondered if he would protest at once, as he well might. It was an opening more proper to a barrister in a court of law than to a policeman soliciting statements from possible witnesses. But Malloch replied deliberately and fully. ‘Yes, I have published a study of the play called The Show of Violence – chiefly in the province of literary criticism.’ Literary criticism, the tone implied, was a scholar’s relaxation from severer things. ‘And when I was invited to come up I was very glad to accept. Mr Gott, though chiefly a textual worker, has stimulating ideas about the drama generally. I welcomed talk with him.’

  There was a pause. It was rather – Sandford reflected – like the opening of a test-match: slow and infinitely cautious. And, forgetting his conviction that the Home Secretary expected immediate action, he settled down to listen.

  ‘And, like most of the other people, you had agreed actually to take part in the play before you came?’

  Malloch answered both question and implication. ‘Yes, I did not think I should feel awkward in it. There was to be sober company enough.’ Which was true. There could be no ground for saying that he had shown a suspiciously unprofessional levity in getting himself where Auldearn’s murderer had been – in the play.

  ‘By the way, you knew the family?’

  ‘I knew the Duchess slightly. But I came, as I have said, chiefly through the instrumentality of Mr Gott.’

  ‘You knew Lord Auldearn?’

  ‘We were students together at Edinburgh. And we have met fairly frequently since.’

  ‘And you know Mr Cope well?’

  ‘Cope? Only by reputation. I am not aware of having met him before.’

  ‘I see. I thought you might be friends, since you were going up to visit him on the upper stage, it seems, almost at the moment of Lord Auldearn’s death. Might your visit to him not have disturbed the
play?’

  ‘I was merely going to stand in the shadow for a moment and glance at his canvas. He had invited me to do that earlier, when we were having some talk on the progress he could make during the performance.’

  Appleby knew this to be true and that it was one of Malloch’s strongest cards. But it was wholly without emphasis that Malloch laid it on the table.

  ‘But you did not actually go up?’

  ‘No. I was half-way up the little staircase – I suppose there are no more than a dozen steps – when I heard the shot. I stood still for a few seconds wondering what could have happened. Then I smelt gunpowder and guessed it was something serious. I turned back and got down just as a number of people were hurrying up. I understand that none of them noticed me come down the staircase. There was a good deal of confusion.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Appleby. ‘But here you were, sir, remarkably close to the actual crime; closer perhaps than anyone except Mr Bose. You cannot help us in any way; you have no information, nothing to suggest?’

  Malloch took time. ‘I have no special information or you would have had it despite our delayed interview’ – he smiled gravely at Appleby – ‘long ago. And my thinking on the subject is unlikely to have done more than parallel your own – if that. Primarily, I should conceive that the number of spaced-out acts committed by the criminal would be a great factor in his detection.’

  This sounded like confidence – but it might be bluff. ‘Yes, we must come to that presently. But my mind is on Hamlet; on the fact that Lord Auldearn died in the middle of Hamlet. I wondered if, with your knowledge of the play, you could help us there?’

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ said Malloch.

  ‘I was thinking particularly of motive. Here is an imaginative criminal–’

  ‘A gratuitous assumption, inspector. Say a fanciful criminal.’ Appleby accepted this academic correction smoothly. ‘Here then is a criminal of fanciful or fantastic mind. He kills Lord Auldearn in fanciful or fantastic circumstances; accepts a good deal of risk in order to do so. Why?’

  ‘Conceivably because the criminal, like Hamlet, thinks of himself as in pursuit of vengeance. To kill his man in the middle of the play would be – in a rough and ready and a fantastic way – to say so.’

  There was a silence. Then Appleby renewed: ‘Thinking along those lines – which I confess have occurred to me – can one get any further? Can one qualify, for instance, the sort of vengeance with which Hamlet – and thus conceivably our criminal – is concerned?’

  Malloch responded slowly but without hesitation. ‘It is a tenuous line, perhaps, but certainly one can carry further – and in more than one direction. There is, for instance, the motive of Hamlet’s vengeance: the theme of fractricide, incest, and usurpation punished. In the criminal here you might look for something equivalent to that. Or you might neglect the motive of Hamlet’s vengeance and consider its character. Predominantly, it is a procrastinated revenge. That is what has always been debated about Hamlet: why the delay?’

  This time there was a longer silence. Malloch was as steady as a rock. It was clear that he had the whole case against himself in his mind and had deliberately made the discussion of it inevitable. Had he some power in reserve? Appleby greatly feared he had: an unshakable alibi in Aberdeen. He took up another line.

  ‘Mr Malloch, the safest way to commit murder is colourlessly: a shot in a lonely place, a knife in a crowd. When a murder takes place in curious circumstances – as Lord Auldearn’s has done – there are two likely explanations. One we have touched on. The criminal, a person perhaps of unbalanced mind, wishes to actualize some fantasy, to kill startlingly or grotesquely. The other explanation of a murder accompanied by odd and striking circumstances is that there has been an attempt to involve an innocent person – a plant or frame up. The marked peculiarities of circumstance are there because they point at somebody. You follow me?’

  ‘I suspect,’ said Malloch, ‘that I precede you.’

  Colonel Sandford blinked at the grimly facetious repartee; Mason stolidly took notes; Appleby said, ‘I believe you do.’ And there was another silence.

  ‘If you are inviting my opinion,’ Malloch continued presently, ‘on the likelihoods of an attempted plot to incriminate an innocent man, I will give it. I think it unlikely.’

  This was too cool. Appleby came abruptly into the open. ‘I suggest that some unknown person – having read Anderson’s book or being possessed of other information – shot Auldearn after having concocted all this Hamlet, revenge! business in order to incriminate yourself, Professor Malloch. You think that unlikely?’

  Malloch inclined his head gravely. ‘You no doubt wish to suggest that it is a theory that should have its attractions for me. Maybe so. But as one a good deal accustomed to weigh evidence I cannot accept it.’

  ‘Will you tell us why?’

  ‘Certainly. My first reason is that it is nonsense. There is nobody – knowing Anderson’s forthcoming folly or not – who would wish to incriminate me in a murder charge. That is a thing which a man may be presumed to know. Secondly – and this will impress you more – the suggestion will not stand logical examination. In contriving the messages and shooting Auldearn as he did the criminal incurred grave risks. Before he did so he would, we may be sure, want to be reasonably certain of his object – that of incriminating me. Could he be reasonably certain of a situation in which he would be safe and I would be compromised? I think not. And – more conclusively by a long way – his method of incriminating me as you suggest it would be the very way – almost certainly – to let me out. The messages – which are, after all, only a feeble pointer in my direction – would actually be, in all human probability, fatal to the plan. It is inconceivable that he should be so minutely familiar with my movements, minute by minute and hour by hour, as to be certain that for one or more of these messages I had not a solid alibi. And on a single solid alibi the whole risky and laborious plot would break at once. Your kindly suggestion won’t hold.’

  ‘I am inclined to agree,’ said Appleby. Inwardly, he was contemplating a wall without beer-bottles – and the remote and stony streets of Aberdeen. Neatly enough Malloch had come round to what would be Appleby’s breaking-point as well – alibis on the early messages.

  ‘And the fact’, said Malloch quietly, ‘that I am possibly uncovered for any of the relevant times is a remarkable circumstance on which your supposed criminal could not conceivably reckon.’

  For an instant the words rang meaninglessly in Appleby’s ears; then he realized their bearing. ‘Ah yes,’ he said equally quietly, ‘we must come to that now. You will understand that questions intended to establish alibis are of a routine nature and put to everyone.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Malloch.

  ‘That the information with which you are volunteering to help us you may if you wish withhold, or defer until you have taken legal advice.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Malloch.

  ‘And that anything you say will be taken down and may be presented in evidence against you or otherwise.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Malloch.

  ‘And now, if you will be so good, we will work backwards. The attack upon Dr Bunney between nine-thirty and ten o’clock this morning. Nobody has mentioned you as in their company, so I presume–’

  ‘Immediately after breakfast I went to the library and stayed there, alone.’

  ‘Thank you. Did you meet anyone going or coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The murder of Mr Bose between one-forty and two this morning.’

  ‘Shortly after the search in the hall I went to my room and stayed there.’

  ‘Thank you. Most people, of course, did just that. And the time of Lord Auldearn’s murder we have discussed. So now we come to the messages. I understand that you came from Aberdeen–’

 
Malloch calmly took out his watch and looked at it. ‘I would not wish’, he said, ‘not to change. Perhaps it will shorten matters if I explain that I was in London for over a week before I came down to Scamnum.’

  Appleby looked at him very gravely. ‘There is a general impression–’

  ‘Quite so. It is a matter of social prevarication. I was pressed to come earlier but, although I looked forward to the play itself, I rather fought shy of long preliminaries. So I pleaded pressure of work in Aberdeen and arranged to come south on the Friday, arriving here after dinner. That was the course of things I actually expected. But I found myself able to get away a week earlier and took the opportunity to go to London and put in the time at the Museum. I then came here on the Friday evening as arranged. And I judged it not necessary to explain my previous movements.’

  ‘In fact you gave it out that you had come straight from Aberdeen?’

  ‘By implication – possibly so.’ Malloch was unperturbed.

  ‘There were five messages that we know of. Working backwards again, there was the message on the radio-gramophone early on Sunday morning. I do not suppose that you, more than anybody else sleeping in the house that night, have an alibi for the effecting of that?’

  ‘I am sure I have not.’

  ‘Nor for the message that came through Dr Bunney’s apparatus at breakfast on Saturday? I think you had the apparatus explained to you shortly after your arrival on Friday night?’

  ‘Yes. No alibi.’

  ‘Nor – again like everybody else – for the letter posted in the West End to Mr Gylby on Friday?’

  ‘No alibi. And anybody could arrange for such a thing.’

  ‘Quite so. And now, can you detail your movements on Friday – everything before your arrival here?’

  ‘I was at the Museum at ten and worked, under the frequent observation of people who know me, till half past twelve. Then I took a cab to the Athenaeum and kept a luncheon appointment with the Provost of Cudworth – an erratic scholar but a credible witness. He had only an hour; we parted at a quarter to two and then the fine afternoon tempted me to walk in St James’ and the Green Park. I took a cab back to the Museum a little after three.’