‘Poor fellow.’ Fen shook his head in commiseration. ‘Well, a pair of bantam’s eggs aren’t likely to buy him much consolation.’ Receiving the key, he retired upstairs and dozed fitfully on his bed until half past eleven.
A quarter of an hour later he left the inn. The moon, almost at its full, bloomed amid a million stars. The eternal silences of those infinite spaces, Pascal’s hypothetized agnostic had remarked, terrify me; which meant, presumably, that they did not terrify Pascal. And where the inter-stellar immensities were concerned, Fen reflected, Christians certainly had the best of it. Mathematicians might adumbrate their billions and their myriads, libertins might tremble in contemplation of them; the Christian, secure in a cosmology which dismissed them as irrelevance, was at liberty to regard the multitudes of remote suns as having been designed with no graver purpose than to solace his eye on such nocturnal rambles as this; at liberty to think of them as seraphic peep-holes in the floor of heaven, or (more vividly) as patines of bright gold. . . . ‘Now lies the earth all Danaë to the stars,’ Fen murmured inwardly – and thereupon abandoned theopathy and fell to considering the derivations of poetry. Patines of bright gold. But the bright gold, with Danaë. Danaë to the stars. Professionally meditating the possible genesis of Tennyson’s line, he stalked silently through the kitchen garden and the orchard and out on to the slope behind the inn.
The three birch trees might have been steeped in rime; and as Fen came in sight of the woods, he saw that they, too, lay in a tarn of silver light. A white owl flew low across the moon, its silhouette knife-clear, a field-mouse clutched in its beak; a few yards nearer the woods, and he heard the inebriate singing of nightingales. A forest of Nightingales; it was not improbable that within it lurked, in the person of the lunatic, a Circe’s son – his intentions less subtle than those of Comus, but basically, no doubt, the same. Moreover, there breathed somewhere beneath this moon the murderer of Mrs Lambert, so that, as regarded nightingales, Eliot’s ‘stiff dishonoured shroud’ was probably more apposite than Williams’ oblique and lovely vision. . . . In the golf-course shelter Bussy, his mind impervious to nocturnal magic, would be brooding on strychnine – and at this dismal reflection Fen momentarily halted. Cat-like, he cherished the hours of darkness; it was his view that they belonged, inviolately, to Faëry and to high adventure; and although it was to be presumed that adventure of some sort awaited him, he suspected that it would prove to be laborious and squalid rather than swift and ennobling. It was with reluctance that, resisting the lure of renegation, he entered the wood.
No encounter, priapine, homicidal or other, enlivened his passage across it. At the far side he climbed a stile and was on the golf-course, amid a thicket of gorse whose butter-gold flowers were blanched now and obscurely sinister. The fairway of the third lay before him, and he walked down to the green. The fourth, he recalled, was a short hole which involved driving across a bramble-filled dip with steep sides. Into this he scrambled, and out again at the other side. The green, and the hut, lay before him. And there might – he halted, apprehensive – be someone moving hurriedly and silently away from it: in this deceptive light, though, it was difficult to be sure. . . . Walking more swiftly, he came to the hut and stood at the entrance; inside, a fragmentary orange glow, itself visible, yet had no power to illumine the pitch blackness.
‘Bussy!’ Fen whispered.
And now there was movement – movement and a prolonged, toneless, hollow suspiration. Fen snatched a torch from his pocket and switched it on. The light fell on glazed eyes, on the glittering haft of a knife which projected from Bussy’s mangled throat. His mouth moved, attempting speech; there came again that vacant, useless exhalation of breath; blood choked him; finger-nails scrabbled convulsively on wood.
After that, silence.
CHAPTER 11
AT five o’clock on the following afternoon – which was the Tuesday – Superintendent Wolfe of the Sanford Morvel police and Detective-Inspector Humbleby of the Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, called on Fen at ‘The Fish Inn’.
At the margin of the inn’s most substantial lawn there stood a large iron roller, about the size of those which are employed in flattening cricket pitches. Its handle was propped, at an angle of some forty-five degrees, against the trunk of a beech tree, and Fen had discovered that, with the addition of cushions to ward off the metallic chill, it could be made into a tolerably comfortable easy-chair. Here he reclined in hieratic state, somnolently fretting. The sun, dropping inexorably towards the west, had left him in shadow – and he eyed it as balefully as if the cosmic mechanism had been contrived solely with a view to inconveniencing him. It would have been reasonable to expect – he reflected – that an election campaign would consume all one’s available energies, that it would offer one a little of the fabled toil and excitement of ideological conflict. It was in this faith, certainly, that he had embarked on his four-days-old political career. By now, however, reasonable expectation was in full retreat, a victim of uncompromising fact. Anything less exciting than the Sanford by-election could scarcely be envisaged – and the blame for this lay not with the candidates or with their agents, but with the Sanford electors. To woo them politically was like attempting to discuss the binomial theorem with a broom; they were simply not susceptible to advances of that particular kind. Like fairy gold, or like those satanic houris which tempted the hermits of the Thebaid, they vanished at a touch, and were no more seen. In remarking that ‘a good many’ of them were politically apathetic, Captain Watkyn had grossly understated the position – as, indeed, he had himself come to discover. For in exchanging guarded courtesies with his Labour and Conservative opposite numbers, he had learned that their candidates were hamstrung in exactly the same way as was Fen, that their meetings were scarcely better attended than Fen’s had been on the previous Sunday, and that since meetings and canvassing were so patently barren of results, they proposed to indulge in these activities only at the minimum level required by professional decency. . . . Canvassing; Fen frowned. That morning he had canvassed in Peek, and a more conspicuous waste of energy it was impossible to imagine. Admittedly Peek was not characterized, as was Sanford Morvel, by spiritual vacuity; but it was notorious as a flourishing Black Market centre, and its surreptitious hawking of whisky and illegally slaughtered pork seemed to engross it to the exclusion of all other interests. Confronted by one whose mission was unconnected with illicit purchase or sale, Peek’s only discernible reaction was a kind of embarrassed surprise – just such an emotion, Fen thought, as might be displayed by a genteel young woman who has accidentally overheard an improper anecdote.
He shifted to a more comfortable position and rearranged his cushions. The thwarting nature of his business in Sanford Angelorum would be just tolerable, he felt, if it did not so effectually interfere with matters of more liberal interest, such as the study of various people he had met, and of the problems involved in the killing of Bussy and Mrs Lambert. Aggravatingly, he found himself in the position of a man who, weighing the merits of one entertainment against those of another, has chosen not only wrongly but also quite irrevocably. And it was little consolation to reflect that the civic indifference of the local populace would leave him a good deal of leisure to meddle in extraneous matters; sooner or later, at some crux, he would be dragged away to a street corner and obliged to descant on the various moral and economic backbones of this multitudinously vertebrate constituency. . . .
Looking up, he perceived the approach of Wolfe and of Humbleby. With Wolfe he had talked, over Bussy’s stiffening body, on the previous night; and at Humbleby’s identity it was easy enough to guess. By this time the nature of Bussy’s business in the neighbourhood must certainly have been revealed, and it was reasonable to envisage a certain tension between the Chief Constable of the county and the Assistant Commissioner of New Scotland Yard. But such tension – if it existed – was not echoed in the relations of Humbleby and Wolfe, which were clearly quite amicable. Humbleby – a neat, eld
erly, mild-looking man with a round red face and a grey Homburg hat tilted forward over his eyes – was introduced to Fen and expressed a courteous gratification; he peered about him, seeking chairs, and on seeing none squatted on the grass beside the roller. Wolfe imitated him. The tableau thus contrived was faintly absurd, Fen thought, suggesting as it did a lotus-eating Oriental monarch receiving in audience the emissaries of an American oil company.
‘Well, well.’ Humbleby glanced up at Fen in civil appraisal. ‘I’m very glad to find that you’re not busy, very glad indeed. We’ve come – as of course you realize – to talk about poor Bussy’s death.’
‘A damnable business,’ said Wolfe moodily. ‘You’d think a rural district like this would be peaceful enough, wouldn’t you? But it’s not two months since I was transferred to this Division, and already I’ve had to contend with a case of blackmail, a case of embezzlement, an escaped lunatic, a thoroughly nasty road accident, and two murders, let alone petty larceny, Black Market, and casual drunks. . . . It might be Chicago.’
‘Difficult,’ said Humbleby perfunctorily; he did not seem much impressed by this catalogue of flagitious acts. ‘Difficult, no doubt. . . . However, we’d better get down to our business.’
‘Which is’ – Wolfe plucked a daisy and stared absently at it – ‘to ask you, Professor Fen, what you were doing on the golf-course at midnight last night. I ought to have had that explained at the time, but in the commotion it was forgotten. . . . You might,’ he prompted considerately, ‘have been taking a walk.’
‘But I wasn’t.’ Feeling his recumbent attitude to be in some way discourteous, Fen straightened up. ‘I went there, by previous arrangement, to meet Bussy.’
‘Indeed.’ Humbleby’s habitual mildness of utterance stiffened on the word. ‘Perhaps you would explain – –’
‘The way of it was this,’ said Fen. And he recounted the substance of his two interviews with Bussy – though for reasons of his own he omitted any reference to that oddity in the circumstances of Mrs Lambert’s murder which both he and Bussy had observed. ‘So I arrived at the rendezvous punctually,’ he concluded. ‘And there is the possibility that I saw the murderer escape – unless, that is, I was deluded by shadows.’
‘I think it’s very likely that you did see the murderer escape.’ Humbleby nodded. ‘The police surgeon had confirmed a point which was already obvious enough – namely, that Bussy cannot have lived for more than a couple of minutes after that knife was driven into his neck. If only you’d been five minutes earlier. . . .’ Then he gestured impatiently. ‘Still, it doesn’t do to think of such things. In that variety of “if” there is no virtue.’
For a moment they were all silent, considering the implications of Fen’s recital. Smoke curled lazily from one of the inn’s chimneys. Upon that slope where, twenty-four hours before, Fen had last spoken to Bussy, a sheep appeared, the vanguard of others which soon dotted the turf like fragments of dingy cotton-wool. And presently Humbleby said:
‘Of course there’s a motive there. Granted that Bussy had obtained, or was on the point of obtaining, evidence that would hang Mrs Lambert’s murderer, then that murderer’s only possible chance of safety would lie in killing him.’
‘A sound hypothesis,’ said Wolfe. ‘The only trouble with it is that as far as I can see we don’t need a motive.’
‘Not need a motive?’ Fen was startled.
‘The indications,’ Wolfe explained, ‘are that it was Elphinstone who knifed Bussy.’
‘Elphinstone?’
‘The lunatic. He was apparently camping in the hut for the night. It’s the first real trace of him that we’ve found.’
‘But I didn’t gather he was homicidal.’
‘The actions of lunatics,’ said Humbleby a little testily, ‘are not predictable – and the forms of lunacy are not adequately understood. The doctors say, of course, that they can tell whether any given lunatic is liable to kill or not, but the plain fact is that they can do nothing of the sort. Moreover, Elphinstone’s – as I learned from Dr Boysenberry this morning – is a complex and unclassified case; the second adjective meaning, I take it, that no one has the faintest notion what caused his madness, what will cure it, or what his reactions to any particular set of circumstances are likely to be. So I see nothing inherently improbable in the supposition that he killed Bussy.’
‘But with a powerful rational motive existing,’ Fen pointed out, ‘that supposition ought to be exhaustively tested.’
‘I agree entirely. And we might do well to discuss the point immediately.’ Humbleby paused, considering how best to approach it. ‘There’s the possibility, of course, that Mrs Lambert’s murderer came upon Bussy quite accidentally. But at such a time and place that’s very unlikely, and for all practical purposes we can dismiss it. Then there’s the possibility that Mrs Lambert’s murderer – –’
‘Whom we might,’ Wolfe suggested, ‘call X.’
‘X, if trite, will be much more convenient,’ Humbleby assented briskly. ‘Where was I, now? Ah, yes. There’s the possibility that X followed Bussy to the hut. And that I find quite incredible. Bussy must have been very much on the alert for that sort of thing, and it’s only possible to tail a man undetectably so long as he has no suspicion that you’re there. If Bussy had been followed, he would have known it. And if he had known it, he would certainly not have been taken unawares – the more so since he was carrying a gun.’
‘And that,’ said Fen from the empyrean, ‘leaves us with no other alternative than to suppose that X knew in advance that Bussy was coming to the hut, and waited for him there.’
‘As you say. And this is where you can help us. Could our X, or for that matter anyone else, have known of the rendezvous?’
‘No, he could not.’ Fen spoke very definitely. ‘In the first place, Bussy wouldn’t have told anyone – he was emphatic about that. In the second place, I didn’t tell anyone. And in the third place, the conversation during which we fixed the hour and the locale, though it could have been overlooked – from the guest-rooms in the inn, for example – couldn’t conceivably have been overheard. I made sure of that at the time. We were speaking in low tones, and there wasn’t any possible hiding-place within earshot.’
‘All of which,’ said Wolfe, ‘would seem to settle it that X did not murder Bussy. And, incidentally, it’s perhaps worth adding that even if Bussy did inform some third person of the rendezvous, that very fact would have made him approach the hut with caution, a thing he evidently didn’t do. . . . We have to exclude Y, then.’
‘Unless’ – Humbleby was faintly jocose – ‘we choose to identify X with Professor Fen. . . . However, if that identification were correct, it would hardly be in Professor Fen’s interest to insist that no one but Bussy and himself could have known of the appointment.’ And Humbleby, with what he evidently imagined to be great good humour, leered.
‘I didn’t kill the man,’ said Fen rather coldly. ‘But I should like to know why you’ve concluded that the lunatic did.’
‘Well, it’s like this.’ Humbleby ceased leering abruptly, and frowned instead. ‘There is, in the first place, the small camp-fire which was still smouldering just inside the hut. You saw it, I think?’
‘Yes. From the amount of ash surrounding it, I calculated it hadn’t been alight for much more than an hour.’
‘That,’ said Humbleby cautiously, ‘is as it may be. . . . But the point I’m coming to is this: embedded in the heart of the fire was a pair of rimless pince-nez which Dr Boysenberry has identified as those which were stolen from his office – and stolen, beyond all question, by the lunatic – at the time of the escape. In the absence of contradictory evidence, it’s therefore reasonable to deduce that it was the lunatic who made the fire.’
‘Quite so,’ said Fen. ‘But he might easily have abandoned his camp, and gone elsewhere, some time before the murder took place.’
‘Yes. But over against that we must set the fact that he almost certain
ly stole the knife with which the murder was committed. You may still argue, of course, that he left it lying about and that someone else then picked it up and used it on Bussy, but that, I think, would be rather far-fetched.’
‘Certainly it would,’ Fen agreed. ‘But tell me about the knife.’
‘It was pinched yesterday evening,’ said Wolfe, ‘from the Louse of a man called Judd, who writes detective stories. It’s a Pathan knife, incidentally – not that that matters. Anyway, Judd and his housekeeper were out all evening, and someone – presumably the lunatic – broke in through a window, pinched the knife and a tin of American ham – –’
‘Which, by the way, was found empty near Bussy’s body,’ Humbleby interrupted.
‘– and left behind him,’ said Wolfe in conclusion, ‘a signature.’
Fen was interested. ‘A signature? Do you mean his name?’
‘No, not that. It was some words scrawled in red paint on the kitchen wall: Down with Taft.’
‘Down with what?’
‘With Taft,’ said Wolfe, chuckling. ‘Taft, you see, was a candidate for the American Presidency in 1912.’
‘I still,’ said Fen, ‘entirely fail to understand – –’
‘Well, well, I’m not surprised.’ Here Wolfe laughed very heartily, thereby provoking Humbleby to gaze at him with overt displeasure. ‘And I certainly wouldn’t have understood it, but for the fact that Boysenberry supplied the police with a certain amount of information about Elphinstone at the time he got away from the asylum. Apparently Elphinstone is periodically convinced that he’s Woodrow Wilson.’
‘Ah.’ Fen was at once enlightened. ‘And Taft was one of Wilson’s opponents in the 1912 election. So at the time when Elphinstone broke into Judd’s house he was presumably, in the character of Wilson, rehearsing the fevers of 1912.’
‘So one supposes,’ said Humbleby, nodding. ‘And that, in summary, is the case against Elphinstone. Not absolutely conclusive – but then, it’s very rare to find a case that is.’
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