The Weight of the Evidence

by Michael Innes

  ‘Um,’ said Appleby. The skeleton in the maze had been part of that cluster of suggestions which had included too Mrs Tavender’s tea-party. And it sounded as if it might link up with the practical joking that had offended Professor Crunkhorn. But apart from this, Appleby knew nothing of it. So he said ‘Um’ as quizzically as possible and offered Tavender a sceptical smile.

  But Tavender, by vocation a badgerer of bewildered youth, was not to be drawn. ‘Don’t you think?’ he said.

  ‘I try to think.’ Appleby smiled cheerfully. ‘And what you say is extremely interesting.’

  ‘Really?’ Tavender rubbed his hands and raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘I fear I cannot agree with you. I have the strongest suspicion that my remarks have been quite without relevance to the essence of the affair. But, of course, you are in the better position to judge.’

  And Mr Tavender giggled and Pinnegar and Marlow again grew cheerful. ‘Tavender’, said Marlow, ‘believes that the skeleton in the maze is not the skeleton in the cupboard after all.’

  ‘He makes’, said Pinnegar, ‘no bones about it.’

  Tavender stopped giggling and again looked at Pinnegar sadly. And again Pinnegar sulked. It was depressing, Appleby thought. A murder in Houndsditch or Soho was altogether a more cheerful affair… But now there was a shuffling of feet and scraping of chairs in the body of the room. These learned people were going to return to their quiet fun.

  The young men, however, were reluctant to resume their seats. Marlow had produced a sheaf of papers which presumably contained his tentative views on the 1582 quarto of Mumblechance, and with this he now tapped Tavender urgently on the shoulder. ‘The meteorite,’ he said. ‘The evidences of the stone. Resolve this heavy riddle.’

  ‘Well, it is widely believed that the meteorite must have had some symbolical significance.’ And Tavender looked hopefully at Appleby, as if expecting that he might confirm this reasonable supposition.

  ‘If it had been me,’ said Pinnegar, ‘I would have used the sink.’

  ‘The sink?’ asked Marlow.

  ‘It is said that up in the tower there was, among other things, a cast-iron sink. That would have been symbolism enough. A sink of iniquity. To what was the late professor to be likened? The grease at the bottom of the sink.’ And Pinnegar laughed harshly – this time not caring whether others laughed or not. ‘And I can think of one not dissimilar object which would have been better still.’

  There was, thought Appleby, nothing in it. Pinnegar’s remarks were directed by no special animosity towards the unfortunate Pluckrose. He was a young man who cultivated this Thersytes-like attitude for private emotional reasons of his own, and these had almost certainly nothing whatever to do with the case. Or so it seemed. Again there was always the tiresome fact that one might be wrong. A clever man might cloak a precise and purposive animosity behind just such a harsh pose… And Appleby, thus professionally sniffing at a red herring, looked absently from Pinnegar to Tavender.

  Tavender was moving away. But now he stopped. ‘Does a meteorite carry about a symbolism with it?’ he asked. ‘Really, I think not. A few minds of a special sort’ – he waved a hand round the room – ‘may pump such a timing in. But what then does a meteorite universally carry? Not symbolism, but – ?’ He was looking ironically at Appleby, much as he might look at a good student whom he had found a question difficult enough to floor. ‘Not’, he repeated, ‘symbolism. But–?’

  ‘Associations,’ said Appleby.

  ‘Well, well!’ Tavender giggled and bowed and again moved away. ‘Well, well, well,’ he was saying. And his voice faded, as it had come, into the zoological background of the assembled philologists.

  The dull fire had grown duller and sleep, soft embalmer of the still midnight, had claimed the commercial gentlemen and the resident ladies. Appleby thanked Hissey for his entertainment and climbed to his room. The proper thing now was to sum up the impressions of the day and put two and two together in such a way as quite to astonish Hobhouse in the morning. Or even one and one… Appleby turned out the light and drew back the curtains and got into bed.

  He would begin with the Duke of Nesfield. Appleby stared at a ceiling across which travelled the lights of trams hauling homewards citizens from the second house of the Royal, the King’s, the Lyceum. He began with the Duke.

  By the way, I suppose it is – ah – Pluckrose? Well, what should make a man ask that? He thought somebody else was so certainly for it that he was reluctant to believe that it wasn’t really somebody else who had got it. And with a thing that could give such a bashing as a meteorite there might be room for deception or mistake. Here was one reason why the Duke of Nesfield might feel prompted to ask that question. Perhaps the meteorite had been for Prisk and the telephone had put things wrong. But why should a duke drift in with such a supposition? No adding one to one here.

  Somewhere down the street the lines must curve. The faintly jogging beams swept in an arc over the ceiling and down a wall. Parabolas. Ballistics… Yes, there was all that of Crunkhorn’s next. But, as Church had maintained, a mass dropped from a window was no neat commentary on the way projectiles work; only a meteorite looping in from outer space could be that. A falling star. But a thing dropped is just a thing dropped… Appleby was nearly asleep. The slanting beams, the slowly rising and then falling drone of the trams was hypnoid – which must account for a sudden and surely illusory sense of almost-illumination. He stared at the ceiling, trying to analyse an ebbing certainty that he had seen. Which was not possible. All that area of the case – talk of Galileo and the like – was just academic top dressing and nowhere near the roots of the thing. Drugs can make you feel you know, but it is illusory. And sleepiness is the same.

  Appleby sat up and clasped his knees under the bedclothes. No need to be sleepy. Move on.

  It was a pity about the tortoise; the animal had petered out with incongruous rapidity. But at least it would not appear again. There was comfort in even this fantastic elimination. Galileo, Aeschylus, Sisyphus – turn them out. Turn out Crunkhorn and Church altogether, perhaps; their talk had been odd, but did not clamour for explanation. With Sir David Evans it was different. He had been moved to offer a major effort in bamboozlement. Perhaps it was just the philosopher’s instinct. But almost certainly not. Almost certainly Sir David Evans was part of the case.

  Nothing like a little mental italics, Appleby reflected, to bolster one’s tenuous convictions. Try again. There was something factitious about the attitude of old Hissey.

  That was a stiff one. Appleby lay down again and stared at it – a little pool of dubious light in a corner of the ceiling. He shut his eyes and it was still there – a dull purple patch on the retina. It shrank as he stared at it, but refused wholly to dwindle away. And it represented something disingenuous in Hissey. Which was extraordinary. But – there it was. That about tramps: One can’t be too careful with tramps. It had been a little too good to be true…

  Appleby was asleep. He slept for eight hours, and when he woke up it was broad daylight. The ceiling was one flood of light. He stared at it, round-eyed. It stared back. He spoke to it. ‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘Well, well, well.’ He fell to making notes.

  5

  It was Ladies’ Day. Your first day, Appleby had been taught, give to an outline of the whole affair. And your second day give to a thorough rummage among the women. As likely as not your third day will see you on the morning train back to London… It was a little theoretical and there were special cases where it didn’t apply at all. But on the whole it was a sound procedure and none the worse for having been recommended by your Mr Pinnegar the night before. Cherchez la femme.

  Hissey had not appeared by the time Appleby finished breakfast. Perhaps he had picked up Paley’s Theocritus while shaving, and with that conversing had forgot all time. But one must remember that there were women in Hissey’s world as in any other. They were inobvious – a vestigial tradition of celibacy adheres to academic society �
�� but not the less potent because of that… Appleby rose and strolled out to the hall. The hotel had a little porch with wicker chairs, and on one of these an inviting patch of morning sunshine had just settled. Appleby made for it and sat down. An Englishman, as Dr Johnson said, has more frequent need to solicit than to exclude the sun. Perhaps it is so with his women too – to get back to them. At least that is the continental view. An Englishman has to dissipate much energy in pursuing women and getting them going. Whereas in happier lands, if a man is to get anything done, a policy of judicious exclusions has to be the rule, These were irrelevant reflections. And there, rising above the slate roofs of the line of villas opposite, was that ugly but extremely relevant tower. The windows in those pepper-pot turrets were surprisingly large; the meteorite would tumble through one easily enough.

  A tram stopped at the corner and disgorged a first clump of students: young men and women hatless and hatted, with attaché cases, hockey-sticks, bundles of books in straps. More came off a tram coming the other way, and the road was suddenly filled with students. They advanced in every possible combination. A man and a girl, two girls, three girls and a man, two men, a man alone, a girl and three men. Appleby, remembering that it was Ladies’ Day, conscientiously studied the girls. One could see that they ranged from the extremely inhibited to the mildly nymphomaniac. It takes all sorts to make a world – certainly to keep a world going… And now from a later tram there had descended a venerable old man with a white beard and a purple muffler. Behind him came another group of girls. He slackened his pace and they were past him, disregarding. It pleased him to walk along behind; it pleased him to review at leisure a rapidly moving bunch of silk and lisle clad legs. A most mild and scholarly old person; probably one of the professors. Why did he walk through the streets in a purple muffler? Born in the purple. Perhaps the muffler percolated through from a repressed emperor-fantasy; perhaps one day he would go mad (things to remember about professors: they haf preakdowns) and shave and announce that he was Napoleon. Appleby shook his head and fished out a notebook. A girl. That was rather more to the point. What happened to Timmy Church’s girl? No, she didn’t really sound all that relevant. It would be disgusting to go nosing off after Timmy Church’s girl simply on the strength of a random remark of young Pinnegar’s. A landlady. Much better. A sinister gentlewoman called Dearlove. Appleby fetched his hat.

  It was a mild April day. The sun was up and had turned from red to gold as if it meant to stay; it splashed the long, glass-roofed sheds of the railway station, ran along the canal, caught in a noose of light the grimy spire of Nesfield Cathedral, delicately explored the opulent curves of the municipal gasometers. Down the hill a mist was lifting; the city unveiled itself; it was possible to feel that the whole man-made mess was gratefully breathing in the spring. Appleby climbed on the top of a bus. He paid twopence and was trundled across a sort of compromise between a common and a public park. There were dark grey tennis-courts, and a tentative golf-course. There were conveniences for ladies and for gentlemen built of glazed yellow brick. There was a cast-iron bandstand. Dotted about were cast-iron seats made to look as if they had been put together out of roughly trimmed timber. And the whole was islanded amid long, lurching rows of stepped-up houses, for here the crowded suburbs were built on a switchback principle across the system of narrow valleys running down to the town. Appleby had a pennyworth of reflection on this compost of the banal and the bizarre; took out a further pennyworth in occasional glimpses of distant dales; and then climbed down as the bus reached its terminus. Around him now was the dismal confusion of a cheap housing estate in the early stages of its development. He walked through this for ten minutes and was in open country. Crime, Sherlock Holmes had believed, was much more horrific in rural areas than in the town. But those cows, faintly steamy still beyond a hedge, were a picture of arcadian innocence. Were there cows in Arcady, or only goats and sheep? Appleby turned through massive but dilapidated gates and walked up an elm avenue. Miss Dearlove owned what ambition might style a manor house.

  And Miss Dearlove owned cats. Numbers of these were following Appleby silently. Every now and then as he advanced up the avenue there would be a slither just behind him and the feline force would grow. It was as if some outflanking movement were being directed with much tactical skill from the mansion ahead. A blackbird fluted briefly. Appleby rounded a bend, and now there were cats in front – a line of them advancing in open order down the drive. Again the blackbird fluted. And the cats in front, parting in a swift right and left incline, faded into the undergrowth. But there at last was the house straight ahead: large, grey, and square. If the cats were proposing to close in and attack they were leaving it till very late. It was possible to see where patches of paint had peeled from the front door. Everything was in considerable disrepair. A quiet, peaceful spot nevertheless, and one doubtless grateful to a jaded professor after the hurly-burly of Nesfield.

  But now from in front there came a murmur of mingling sounds. Narcoleptic doves maintained a futile drowsy cooing and the chirpings and twitterings of a multitude of lesser fowl, like desperate nursemaids crooning over a vast and lively dormitory of imbecile children. There was a splash of water as from a little cascade. Beyond the house a bull began to bellow. And suddenly, as if all this were an overture merely, there rang out from somewhere ahead first one and then another spine-chilling scream. Appleby stopped in his tracks. The scream rang out a third time, rose to a yell, died away to an indescribable gurgle. Appleby grinned. Even well-trained guerilla cats have their noisy moments. He advanced again, and now there was the sound of a heavy-oil engine, uncertainly pulsing in an outbuilding to the right.

  The house was late Georgian and dug into the ground – a costly arrangement seemingly devised for the sole purpose of keeping servants in a symbolical subjection. Appleby climbed a flight of steps and was looking down into a basement with windows heavily barred; from this troglodytic depth rose a clatter of cutlery recklessly handled in bulk. He tugged at a bell-pull, and the result, startling in itself, was enhanced by the instant baying of a hound in some remote and echoing corner of the building; these effects almost drowned a less commanding but curiously displeasing snuffling and slobbering audible on the other side of the door. The door opened upon an elderly maidservant; the maidservant sniffed; there was an answering slobber and snuffle from two shambling black spaniels at her feet. Appleby was led into a shadowy hall, lit from high above through a skylight of purple glass. A grandfather clock of the kind equipped with what are called Westminster chimes began to tackle the announcement that it was a quarter to eleven. The spaniels, horridly wheezing and whiffling, crawled about annoying cats. A vacuum- cleaner roared in a nearby corridor; it was as noisy, Appleby rather desperately thought, as the kind that used to arrive once a year in a van and accomplish the spring cleaning in a single agonizing day… The maidservant took a deep breath and announced at the top of her voice that Miss Dearlove would be down soon. Appleby sat down and put his head between his hands. He could still hear the doves and the bull and the engine. And he was not sure that now he couldn’t hear somebody killing a pig. But perhaps this was merely a hallucinatory carry-over from the philological proceedings of the evening before.

  Poor old Pluckrose. That shabby and fallen archangel had certainly known what the pains of Pandemonium are… Appleby looked up and became aware with some alarm that a large chunk of skylight had detached itself and was floating down at him in a leisured but purposeful way. Ballistics, he thought – and realized that it was merely a large and purple-clad lady descending a gloomy staircase. Miss Dearlove advanced, carrying his card. ‘Commander Appleby?’ she said – and her voice was at once deep and tuned to a professionally cheerful chirp. ‘A relation of the dear Admiral, no doubt? I think it may be possible to receive you. I hope it may.’ And in the gloom Miss Dearlove graciously smiled.

  ‘Inspector Appleby,’ said Appleby.

  Miss Dearlove looked at the card again. ‘Though
now I come to think of it–’ She looked at Appleby in severe appraisal. ‘I fear that just at present–’

  ‘My business concerns the late Professor Pluckrose.’

  ‘Ah.’ Miss Dearlove dived at her skirts and produced a contrivance which Appleby suspected might be called a reticule. ‘My housekeeper informs me–’ She brought out a notebook and opened it. ‘Thirty-eight pounds, eleven shillings, and fourpence.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Thirty-eight pounds, eleven shillings.’ Miss Dearlove paused. ‘And fourpence,’ she added briskly.

  ‘You mean that Professor Pluckrose owed you – ?’

  ‘The professor owed the establishment that sum. These are matters in which he was a little absent at times.’

  ‘I see.’

  The clock had begun again, and now there was a cuckoo clock operating too. In a corner the spaniels had fallen into a senile quarrel, and this disorderly behaviour was spreading to a number of cats. The doves, the vacuum-cleaner, the bull, the engine, and the cascade were tireless; the hound was intermittent but effective; the clatter of the cutlery it was possible to feel was a little dying down.

  ‘Poor Sir Archibald’, said Miss Dearlove, ‘was a little the same. He was, of course, a very old man – a contemporary of my father’s, the late Sir Horace Dearlove.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Appleby respectfully.

  ‘KCMG.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘My father, the late Sir Horace Dearlove, KCMG. But it was not so with the dear General. In these little matters, as in others of greater moment, he was the most punctilious of men.’ Miss Dearlove’s eye returned to her notebook. ‘Thirty-eight pounds, eleven shillings, and fourpence.’

  ‘Quite so. It is a charge which the executors will no doubt settle. I must explain that I am from the police. I understand that Mr Pluckrose had been, ah–’