The Weight of the Evidence

by Michael Innes

  ‘But,’ said Appleby, ‘Sisyphus wasn’t crushed. He just had to go on trying.’

  ‘Nefer mind, nefer mind! It is near enough. Here always is the great stone hanging over him, threatening destruction. It iss in his dreams, consider you. Always the great weight, ready to come crashing down. And always–’

  ‘Do you mean he arranged it?’ Hobhouse was bewildered and shocked to the point of positive interruption. ‘Do you mean that he arranged for this meteorite to come tumbling down and then went and sat under it?’

  ‘Always Sisyphus is in his dreams. The great stone is there in his dreams, and in his waking dreams. It pecomes a muscular fact, pressing on him. He walks with his shoulders pent. Any mass – a puilding, a pus – terrifies him. The timing haunts him. He is opsessed.’ Sir David had quite ceased to be the rugged but benevolent philosopher and had become a frank little Welshman of the bardic and excitable sort. He was, in fact, well-launched upon a piece of bad poetry. ‘He is opsessed. And then, walking over the moors one day – he finds the meteorite. A thing, look you, sent from hefen! He hurries away. But he has met his myth and he returns, again and again, compelled. The thing has grown a fetish. He comes to know efery contour of it by heart. Now in his dreams there is a real stone: here a well-known jagged edge; there a smooth knob like a pig pludgeon. And at last he acts: he tries to move the stone! He pushes, heaves, levers. The stone stirs, moves, falls pack again into its place. Now he is caught. He has pecome Sisyphus indeed. Then, one dark night–’

  ‘Then, one dark night, he goes mad.’ Appleby interrupted civilly. ‘The theory, I take it, requires that?’

  ‘To be sure.’ The Vice-Chancellor nodded, slightly resentful of this short-cut to his climax. ‘It iss a thing to remember about professors. They go mad. And Pluckrose iss compelled to raise the stone – up, up as far as it will go. Into his car, into the hoist, up and up to the tower. He will palance it on the window-sill, where it can pe seen from the court. And next day he will pe able to point and say: “Ha-ha!”’

  At this juncture Sir David threw back his beautiful mane of hair and laughed so loudly that Hobhouse jumped. The interview was becoming dream-shaped and monstrous, like something in Kafka. And the last sunbeam had disappeared, so that Hume and Hartley and Locke were growing shadowy and insubstantial.

  ‘“Ha-ha!” he will say; “see how high Sisyphus has raised his stone after all. None ever raised it higher, look you!”’ Sir David was now craning his neck up at his own ceiling, and involuntarily Appleby and Hobhouse found themselves doing the same. ‘It is perilously palanced; he will give it just one more push–’ Sir David thrust his arms outward and upward. ‘Just one more inch, when – crash!’ And Sir David’s arms fell dramatically to his sides.

  They stared at him, astonished. ‘You mean’ – Appleby had to strive for words – ‘that he had an accident while contriving some insane piece of exhibitionism; that he came tumbling down with the meteorite and was crushed; that he didn’t commit suicide after all?’

  Sir David Evans looked momentarily surprised, as if he had failed to notice the position at which he had arrived. But then he nodded emphatically. ‘Just so. It iss death by misadventure. And during a preakdown such as professors have.’ He paused and looked about the room, now filling with dusk. ‘Where are the reporters? They must be told what we have discovered, mark you. And who is the City coroner now? I must write to him. It will not do to have mistakes.’ He raised a finger – a finger which was now wholly minatory and threatening. ‘You will inquire. You will infestigate. But there will be no mistakes, look you, no mistakes!’

  ‘Damocles,’ said Appleby as they walked down the corridor.

  ‘Huh?’ Hobhouse at the moment appeared to find inarticulate sounds of most service to him.

  ‘If Sisyphus, why not Damocles? It’s true he had nothing to do with stones or meteorites. But they suspended a sword over his head by a single horse-hair and expected him to take his ease under it. I think somebody might bring Damocles into the story. The Damocles Complex.’

  Hobhouse looked cautiously behind him, rather as if he expected Sir David Evans to be following them quietly on all fours. ‘I say, what did you make of all that? I suppose his mind broods on that sort of stuff – Sisyphus Complexes and the like.’

  ‘I’m sure it doesn’t. That’s the odd thing. The sort of academic philosopher Evans is or was invariably thinks Freud and what-not a mass of nonsense. It was a sheer fantasy for the benefit of two ignorant policemen. He got quite worked up as he went along, I admit. But it began as a deliberate determination to put a false interpretation on the whole business. Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t want a scandal.’ Hobhouse shook his head sagely. ‘It’s to be hushed up as an accident. Rather the sort of thing you thought the Duke was after.’

  ‘But he wasn’t.’

  ‘Well, Evans is.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  Hobhouse’s reply was again merely an indeterminate noise. They plodded down the long corridor in a dingy twilight which thickened as they moved. A symbol, Appleby thought, of the Pluckrose affair so far. The case was growing more confused without growing more substantial. The elements of it were evasive. As the Vice-Chancellor had justly said, it was mysterious – and yet the mystery was bodiless still, scarcely quick in the mind. It required a little contemplation and less talk. But the university was like a House of Fame or Temple of Rumour in some medieval poem. A Parliament of Prattlers, with the benevolently powerful Sir David Evans as Speaker… Appleby pulled up. ‘The body – will it have gone?’

  ‘They’re waiting for dark.’

  ‘Then I think we’ll go back.’

  Students were hurrying past in mackintoshes and mufflers; electric lights, sparse, shadeless, and inimical, flicked on with an effect of impatient dismissal. The place was shutting down; sweetness and light were over for the day; the quest of knowledge was off until nine o’clock next morning. Outside the porter’s office women with pails and brooms were gathering; among them and through a faint aroma of dust and soap the porter, unbuttoned but magisterial, was moving with a time-sheet in his hand. Doors banged and the stream of students grew: spotty faces, eager faces, faces already dulled and defeated by the machine, faces full of temper and intelligence. Susan and Harry, Dick and Josephine going home to tea, to swotting over text-books, to a night at the pictures in families or together holding hands; Josephine, Dick, Harry, and Susan unaware of the awareness of the Duke of Nesfield, of the curious behaviour of their Vice-Chancellor, of Galileo’s work on the Law of Falling Bodies. Appleby and Hobhouse threaded their way through, seeking the fallen body of Pluckrose fue. So young and fair a congregation. What should they know of death? Beyond this door is the chill April evening air that fills the Wool Court. Open it.

  The evening had suddenly clouded so that now it was almost dark. The fountain trickled, invisible – a melancholy sound, a tiny pointless dissipation, a futile ebbing away. Zealous police-craft had rigged up an affair of waterproof canvas over the body, and Pluckrose was a desert traveller defeated within crawling distance of water, an arctic explorer perishing to a drip of icicles. Bringing imagination to the detection of crime. Appleby stumbled, stooped, softly exclaimed, walked on. Hobhouse followed, dubious. From the corridor behind them came a final scamper of feet, a name shouted twice, an answering faint hail. The tower soared and impended; it was impressive at dusk.

  ‘I don’t know that we can do–’ Hobhouse stopped as Appleby flashed a torch. There was the striped duck and splintered wood of the deck-chair. There was the meteorite, with effort heaved aside. And here was the body. Pluckrose crushed. Like a little old shabby rebel angel, disparted from his brightness, when the faithful host had finished hurling heaven’s hills in battle and gone home to bed.

  These persistent mythological associations… Appleby spoke soberly: ‘Could he and the meteorite really have come down together? It’s an idea, after all.’

  ‘The man was murdered.’ Hobhouse’
s voice, harsh suddenly and not to be cheated, came out of the dark. ‘No one would deliberately make such a crazy end.’

  ‘But perhaps it is true that he was mad? We want a better means of eliminating Evans’ theory.’ Appleby paused and looked down at the body. Pluckrose, a small grey man with untidy eyebrows, looked at once very dead and very surprised. A trick of the last futile messages that had hurried, collided, jammed, run out of fuel, evaporated in a chaos of crushed nerves and glands. One’s own death is surely the most surprising thing in the world – but dead men commonly look vastly indifferent. Appleby snapped off the torch. ‘The Law of Falling Bodies,’ he said.

  ‘To hell with the Law of Falling Bodies.’ For this sort of thing Hobhouse too must have a seasoned eye. But on Hobhouse too the frozen twist of those muscles had its effect.

  ‘Not at all. What did Crunkhorn tell us about Galileo’s experiment? That the one-pound shot and the ten-pound shot arrived at the foot of the leaning tower virtually at the same time. In a vacuum they would each have touched the ground actually at the same moment. But then they were bodies each with the same high specific gravity. If he had chucked over a ten-pound shot and, say, a one-pound open book the result would have been different. So what about a meteorite and a human body falling a considerable distance through air? Wouldn’t the meteorite be bound to arrive first?’

  ‘Not if the human body was clinging to it.’

  ‘I suppose that’s so. It’s only the resistance of the air which gives different velocities to different objects falling. But could he cling? Not, certainly, through a very long drop. If one jumped out of an aeroplane clutching a bomb one would part company with it soon and arrive on the ground some seconds later. Or so I should guess.’

  Hobhouse looked up at the dark empty sky. ‘It’s not a thing very easily verified by the police. Nor Pluckrose and the meteorite either.’

  ‘But we can hunt up the university’s physicists and see what they say. And we may still find evidence that he was certainly sitting here in the chair when the thing fell. Although the court is secluded–’

  Like a trick on the stage, light flooded them. Shafts of light, bars of darkness, lay on the grass, bridged the fountain, broke into confused chequering over the body with its sheltering tent. They turned round. Across the court half a dozen tall windows had sprung to a garish brightness and through their upper halves could be seen a system of shafts and wheels and belts which now with a faint throb began to turn. So something happened of an evening after all. The throbbing grew louder, and across the lower windows, of a semi-opaque sea-green glass, indeterminate shadows moved.

  ‘Engineering,’ said Hobhouse. ‘They work only in the afternoon and again at night. I suppose a good many of the students are in jobs. Anyway, that side would be deserted in the morning. And even if there were people about they couldn’t see out of the windows at ground level.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Appleby was staring absently at the turning wheels. ‘Isn’t it odd that the university should be so insistent that there should never be a view from its windows? The eye is turned inward.’

  ‘Umph.’ Hobhouse was unimpressed by symbolism. ‘It’s time they collected the body. P-M at ten in the morning and funeral at two.’

  ‘Relations?’

  ‘One distant cousin, so far. There’s a will at the bank and a solicitor hard at work writing letters to anyone who could possibly be concerned. Nice easy wicket, the Law.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘He lodged with a Miss Dearlove. I haven’t seen her yet. What a mess these deaths and homicides are. Far more running about than with burglary or forgery.’

  ‘Yes.’ Appleby looked at the body and agreed with this professional view. ‘Distinctly a mess.’

  ‘But embezzlement can be very bad. And I always say carnal knowledge is worst.’

  ‘I rather agree with you.’

  Hobhouse lowered his voice. ‘Did you ever have a case of a man keeping–’

  ‘What I want to know’ – Appleby’s voice was suddenly incisive in the darkness – ‘what I want to know is this. Does anybody round about here keep pets?’

  4

  Outside the university trams charged down the hill. This lot took people to the first house at the Royal, the King’s, the Lyceum. The next lot would take cinemagoers: the Majestic, the Super, the Palace. Then there would be a lot taking people to the second house at the Royal, the King’s, the Lyceum. The trams charged past in a clang of bells, their swaying motion more marked now that they were stubby pencils of light; it was funny that nobody was ever sick on charging and bucketing trams that pencilled and swayed away into distance and became like bits broken off the Neons further on. Further on was lower down too, so you could see from here the city spread in a sort of drab sparkle in the darkness, and you could see a pool of darkness which was a park, and you could see the station and hard bright lights in the shunting-yards beyond the station.

  It is odd – thought Appleby, saying good night to Hobhouse – that the mind when tired churns out such flawless modern prose. It is more than odd, he thought as he climbed the stairs of the private hotel; it is more than odd, it is suspicious. He poured chilly water at a Victorian ewer and basin and tried to go on beginning a Hemingway story where he had left off at the shunting-yards. But the plunge of his hands in the cold water woke him and Hemingway became irrelevant and he thought of Aeschylus. Aeschylus might be relevant. He thought of what he had stumbled against in the dusk of the Wool Court. Sisyphus was poppycock. But there might be something in Aeschylus. There might be something in Aeschylus if these people’s minds really worked in that sort of way – but he was inclined to doubt this.

  When he went into the dining-room he found himself unexpectedly confronted at table with Professor Hissey. And Hissey recognized him. ‘Appleby?’ he said in amiable surprise. ‘What brings you here? And what has happened to Williams and Merryweather and Grant? And do you ever hear from Harrison? I had a letter about a year ago. The natives, he says, are becoming interested – really interested – in Catullus. I can well believe it. Merryweather, I am sure, is a very capable lecturer. Harrison, that is to say.’ And Professor Hissey ate some soup.

  It was rather difficult. Appleby decided to begin with Grant. ‘Grant–’ he said.

  ‘Williams, my dear fellow’ – Hissey leant across the table confidentially – ‘do you remember Appleby? I have been told a most extraordinary thing. He became a policeman.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Appleby. ‘I became a policeman.’ It was really very difficult indeed.

  ‘And do you like it?’ Mr Hissey betrayed no consciousness of there having been any hitch in the conversation. ‘I don’t think I ever had a competent pupil become a policeman before. But some of the very incompetent ones have.’ He ate more soup. ‘In Africa, that is. They go about on motor bicycles. No doubt quite a different thing. We have no wine at table here. But if you care to join me in my room afterwards I can offer you a glass of port, my dear – Appleby.’ And Mr Hissey first smiled at his former pupil in innocent triumph and then looked slowly round the dining-room, rather as if he found it faintly but pervasively unfamiliar. Appleby remembered that Hissey had always been a slightly absent-minded man.

  ‘I should like a glass of port very much. I think I should say that I have come to Nesfield to inquire into the business of Professor Pluckrose.’

  Hissey looked perplexed. ‘Pluckrose?’ he said. ‘I don’t think Piuckrose has a business.’

  ‘I mean–’

  ‘Some of them have businesses. Rather surprising in scholars, don’t you think? Crunkhorn is said to own and manage a garage. It perplexes me, I confess. But you’re too late with Pluckrose, anyway. I’ve just remembered. He’s dead.’

  ‘That’s just it, sir. Pluckrose has died in a mysterious way and I’ve been sent down to inquire into the circumstances.’

  ‘I see. You said, you know, into the business.’ Hissey was mildly reproachful. ‘One can’t be too careful w
ith tramps.’

  ‘Tramps?’ Appleby looked rather blankly at his former preceptor.

  ‘They may appear innocent and even deserving. But as likely as not they are concerned to rob you – and prepared to offer violence if you resist.’ And Hissey shook his head, very worldly wise. ‘Of course I should never refuse a tramp a shilling or two if he asked for it. It is quite clear from the accounts that they give of themselves that they have a very hard time. It would be uncharitable to refuse. But when I walk in the country I always carry a big stick.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby watched the fish go. ‘And you think that Pluckrose–’

  ‘Pluckrose?’ Hissey spoke as if some quite new term had been introduced into the discussion. ‘Killed by tramps, poor chap. I suppose the police will send up to investigate. Do you always see the Hellenic Review?’

  At the Royal, the King’s, the Lyceum the first houses would be in full swing. Life, in fact, is extremely various. Perhaps the best technique for tackling its problems is a thoroughgoing inconsequence. ‘Not always,’ Appleby said. ‘Do many people at the university keep pets?’

  ‘No,’ said Hissey. He appeared wholly unsurprised. ‘I don’t think many people do.’ He considered. ‘The head porter keeps a tortoise.’

  ‘You disappoint me,’ said Appleby. ‘Keenly.’

  ‘I am extremely sorry.’ Hissey looked benevolently across the table at this extravagant animal-lover. ‘But I am really afraid that nobody else keeps–’

  ‘You mistake me. I mean I am disappointed that the porter should keep a tortoise. I thought it might have something to do with Pluckrose – and Aeschylus.’

  Professor Hissey laid down his knife and fork. ‘My dear Merryweather – Appleby, I mean – there are no eagles round about Nesfield. Nor was Pluckrose bald.’

  Appleby chuckled to himself. Lead the old boy to his own ground and his mind became instantly cogent. ‘I didn’t mean quite that. I don’t suppose that Pluckrose was killed as Aeschylus was by having an eagle drop a tortoise on his bald head in mistake for a stone. I was thinking of something rather symbolical.’