“Fireplace, two windows, a crudely painted ceiling—crude in subject as well as in execution—a canvas chair, an unlit electric torch, festoons of cobwebs, and on everything except the chair and the torch dust, layers of it. Sir Lucas was lying on the floor beneath one of the windows, quite close to the bell-push; and an old stiletto, later discovered to have been stolen from the house, had been stuck into him under the left shoulder-blade (no damning fingerprints on it, by the way; or on anything else in the vicinity). Sir Lucas was still alive, and just conscious. Wilburn bent over him to ask who was responsible. And a queer smile crossed Sir Lucas’s face, and he was just able to whisper”—here Humbleby produced and consulted a notebook—“to whisper: ‘Wrote it—on the window. Very first thing I did when I came round. Did it before I rang the bell or anything else, in case you didn’t get here in time—in time for me to tell you who——’
“His voice faded out then. But with a final effort he moved his head, glanced up at the window, nodded and smiled again. That was how he died.
“They had all heard him, and they all looked. There was bright moonlight outside, and the letters traced on the grimy pane stood out clearly.
“Otto.
“Well, it seems that then Otto started edging away, and Sir Charles made a grab at him, and they fought, and presently a wallop from Sir Charles sent Otto clean through the tell-tale window, and Sir Charles scrambled after him, and they went on fighting outside, trampling the glass to smithereens, until Wilburn and company joined in and put a stop to it. Incidentally, Wilburn says that Otto’s going through the window looked contrived to him—a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence; though of course, so many people saw the name written there that it remains perfectly good evidence in spite of having been destroyed.”
“Motive?” Fen asked.
“Good enough. Jane Welsh was wanting to marry Otto—had fallen quite dementedly in love with him, in fact—and her father didn’t approve; partly on the grounds that Otto was a German, and partly because he thought the boy wanted Jane’s prospective inheritance rather than Jane herself. To clinch it, moreover, there was the fact that Otto had been in the Luftwaffe and that Jane’s mother had been killed in 1941 in an air-raid. Jane being only eighteen years of age—and the attitude of magistrates, if appealed to, being in the circumstances at best problematical—it looked as if that was one marriage that would definitely not take place. So the killing of Sir Lucas had, from Otto’s point of view, a double advantage: it made Jane rich, and it removed the obstacle to the marriage.”
“Jane’s prospective guardian not being against it.”
“Jane’s prospective guardian being an uncle she could twist round her little finger.… But here’s the point.” Humbleby leaned forward earnestly. “Here is the point: windows nailed shut; no secret doors—emphatically none; chimney too narrow to admit a baby; and in the dust on the hall floor, only one set of footprints, made unquestionably by Sir Lucas himself.… If you’re thinking that Otto might have walked in and out on top of those prints, as that page-boy we’ve been hearing so much about recently did with King Wenceslaus, then you’re wrong. Otto’s feet are much too large, for one thing, and the prints hadn’t been disturbed, for another: so that’s out. But then, how on earth did he manage it? There’s no furniture in that hall whatever—nothing he could have used to crawl across, nothing he could have swung himself from. It’s a long, bare box, that’s all; and the distance between the door and the circular room (in which room, by the way, the dust on the floor was all messed up by the rescue-party) is miles too far for anyone to have jumped it. Nor was the weapon the sort of thing that could possibly have been fired from a bow or an air-gun or a blowpipe, or any nonsense of that sort; nor was it sharp enough or heavy enough to have penetrated as deeply as it did if it had been thrown. So ghosts apart, what is the explanation? Can you see one?”
Fen made no immediate reply. Throughout this narrative he had remained standing, draped against the mantelpiece. Now he moved, collecting Humbleby’s empty glass and his own and carrying them across to the decanter; and it was only after they were refilled that he spoke.
“Supposing,” he said, “that Otto had crossed the entrance hall on a tricycle——”
“A tricycle!” Humbleby was dumbfounded. “A——”
“A tricycle, yes,” Fen reiterated firmly. “Or supposing, again, that he had laid down a carpet, unrolling it in front of him as he entered and rolling it up again after him when he left.…”
“But the dust!” wailed Humbleby. “Have I really not made it clear to you that apart from the footprints the dust on the floor was undisturbed? Tricycles, carpets.…”
“A section of the floor at least,” Fen pointed out, “was trampled on by the rescue-party.”
“Oh, that.… Yes, but that didn’t happen until after Wilburn had examined the floor.”
“Examined it in detail?”
“Yes. At that stage they still didn’t realise anything was wrong; and when Wilburn led them in they were giggling behind him while he did a sort of parody of detective work, throwing the beam of his torch over every inch of the floor in a pretended search for bloodstains.”
“It doesn’t,” said Fen puritanically, “sound the sort of performance which would amuse me very much.”
“I dare say not. Anyway, the point about it is that Wilburn’s ready to swear that the dust was completely unmarked and undisturbed except for the footprints.… I wish he weren’t ready to swear that,” Humbleby added dolefully, “because that’s what’s holding me up. But I can’t budge him.”
“You oughtn’t to be trying to budge him, anyway.’/retorted Fen, whose mood of self-righteousness appeared to be growing on him. “It’s unethical. What about blood, now?”
“Blood? There was practically none of it. You don’t get any bleeding to speak of from that narrow type of wound.”
“Ah. Just one more question, then; and if the answer’s what I expect, I shall be able to tell you how Otto worked it.”
“If by any remote chance,” said Humbleby suspiciously, “it’s stilts that you have in mind——”
“My dear Humbleby, don’t be so puerile.”
Humbleby contained himself with an effort. “Well?” he said.
“The name on the window.” Fen spoke almost dreamily. “Was it written in capital letters?”
Whatever Humbleby had been expecting, it was clearly not this. “Yes,” he answered. “But——”
“Wait.” Fen drained his glass. “Wait while I make a telephone call.”
He went. All at once restless, Humbleby got to his feet, lit a cheroot, and began pacing the room. Presently he discovered an elastic-driven aeroplane abandoned behind an armchair, wound it up and launched it. It caught Fen a glancing blow on the temple as he reappeared in the doorway, and thence flew on into the hall, where it struck and smashed a vase. “Oh, I say, I’m sorry,” said Humbleby feebly. Fen said nothing.
But after about half a minute, when he had simmered down a bit: “Locked rooms,” he remarked sourly. “Locked rooms.… I’ll tell you what it is, Humbleby: you’ve been reading too much fiction; you’ve got locked rooms on the brain.”
Humbleby thought it politic to be meek. “Yes,” he said.
“Gideon Fell once gave a very brilliant lecture on The Locked-Room Problem, in connection with that business of the Hollow Man; but there was one category he didn’t include.”
“Well?”
Fen massaged his forehead resentfully. “He didn’t include the locked-room mystery which isn’t a locked-room mystery: like this one. So that the explanation of how Otto got into and out of that circular room is simple: he didn’t get into or out of it at all.”
Humbleby gaped. “But Sir Lucas can’t have been knifed before he entered the circular room. Sir Charles said——”
“Ah yes. Sir Charles saw him go in—or so he asserts. And——”
“Stop a bit.” Humbleby was much perturbed. “I can see wha
t you’re getting at, but there are serious objections to it.”
“Such as?”
“Well, for one thing, Sir Lucas named his murderer.”
“A murderer who struck at him from behind.… Oh, I’ve no doubt Sir Lucas acted in good faith: Otto, you see, would be the only member of the house-party whom Sir Lucas knew to have a motive. In actual fact, Sir Charles had one too—as I’ve just discovered. But Sir Lucas wasn’t aware of that; and in any case, he very particularly didn’t want Otto to marry his daughter after his death, so that the risk of doing an ex-Luftwaffe man an injustice was a risk he was prepared to take.… Next objection?”
“The name on the window. If, as Sir Lucas said, his very first action on recovering consciousness was to denounce his attacker, then he’d surely, since he was capable of entering the pavilion after being knifed, have been capable of writing the name on the outside of the window, which would be nearest, and which was just as grimy as the inside. That objection’s based, of course, on your assumption that he was struck before he ever entered the pavilion.”
“I expect he did just that—wrote the name on the outside of the window, I mean.”
“But the people who saw it were on the inside. Inside a bank, for instance, haven’t you ever noticed how the bank’s name——”
“The name Otto,” Fen interposed, “is a palindrome. That’s to say, it reads the same backwards as forwards. What’s more, the capital letters used in it are symmetrical—not like B or P or R or S, but like A or H or M. So write it on the outside of a window, and it will look exactly the same from the inside.”
“My God, yes.” Humbleby was sobered. “I never thought of that. And the fact that the name was on the outside would be fatal to Sir Charles, after his assertion that he’d seen Sir Lucas enter the pavilion unharmed, so I suppose that the ‘contriving’ Wilburn noticed in the fight was Sir Charles’s, not Otto’s: he’d realise that the name must be on the outside—Sir Lucas having said that the writing of it was the very first thing he did—and he’d see the need to destroy the window before anyone could investigate closely.… Wait, though: couldn’t Sir Lucas have entered the pavilion as Sir Charles said, and later emerged again, and——”
“One set of footprints,” Fen pointed out, “on the hall floor. Not three.”
Humbleby nodded. “I’ve been a fool about this. Locked rooms, as you said, on the brain. But what was Sir Charles’s motive—the motive Sir Lucas didn’t know about?”
“Belchester,” said Fen. “Belchester Cathedral. As you know, it was bombed during the war, and a new one’s going to be built. Well, I’ve just rung up the Dean, who’s an acquaintance of mine, to ask about the choice of architect; and he says that it was a toss-up between Sir Charles’s design and Sir Lucas’s, and that Sir Lucas’s won. The two men were notified by post, and it seems likely that Sir Charles’s notification arrived on the morning of Christmas Eve. Sir Lucas’s did too, in all probability; but Sir Lucas’s was sent to his home, and even forwarded it can’t, in the rush of Christmas postal traffic, have reached him at Rydalls before he was killed. So only Sir Charles knew; and since with Sir Lucas dead Sir Charles’s design would have been accepted.…” Fen shrugged. “Was it money, I wonder? Or was it just the blow to his professional pride? Well, well. Let’s have another drink before you telephone. In the hangman’s shed it will all come to the same thing.”
The Golden Mean
It was in the village of Çhigfold, isolated on a corner of one of the Devon moors, that Gervase Fen encountered the only man who has ever seemed to him to be definitely evil.
A word like ‘evil’ needs (he will tell you) to be used with precaution: the descent of Avernus has no milestones which mark out for the traveller—or for others watching him—the stages of his journey. And yet at the same time there is, perhaps, somewhere along it a Point of No Return. On the maps of infamy it is never shown, since for each individual its location will be different. Moreover, the setting foot across it, in the downward direction, involves a spiritual crisis so acute, and an effort of will so intolerably degrading, that it is only very rarely passed. But that young St. John Leavis had passed it, Fen never for a moment doubted. It was not the attempted parricide which produced this overwhelming conviction; that, horrible though it was, seemed to Fen merely the ratification of a treaty already concluded. Rather, it was a wholesale reversal of normal personality which you scented the instant you met the man, and which made even the dullest-witted of ordinary wholesome sinners inexplicably uneasy in his company.
Yet there was nothing you could put your finger on, saying ’This is the mark of the beast’. In all externals St. John Leavis was charming; and even if he were now and again petulant, that petulance so closely resembled the petulance of a child that it took you off-guard, compelling you to assume, against your better judgment, that there was a child’s innocence underlying it. At the time when Fen met him, at Chigfold, he was just twenty-five years old—a good-looking young man with crisp, curly fair hair and big light-blue eyes. Laziness, and selfindulgence, had thickened his neck, had fattened his cheeks and chin, blurring, like a gauze, their original fineness, but he remained unusually personable in spite of that. His tastes were literary; his conversation was witty; his manners were impeccable. And by the end of the first five minutes of their acquaintance, Fen detested him.
It was irrational, of course—quite irrational and unfair: in discussing the matter(which he is oddly reluctant to do), Fen confines himself to a simple statement of the fact, making no attempt to justify it. Spiritual issues are irrelevant, in any case, he says, so long as a story is all you want: the act of violence was unquestionably an act of self-interest, and you are quite at liberty to rest content with that—which is a perfectly adequate explanation in itself—and to refuse to delve deeper. The fact remains, however, that to an actual participant the overtones were infinitely more impressive than the note which produced them; and it appears that the only person who was altogether deaf to those overtones, until the terror at last unstopped his ears, was St. John’s victim, his father.
This—in Fen’s opinion—was to be expected. The mere temperamental contrast between father and son was a formidable barrier to mutual understanding in itself, even if you left aside the natural blindness which goes with kinship and overfamiliarity. For George Seymour Leavis differed from St. John in every important particular. At forty-seven he was boisterous, ‘sporty’, an open-air man; red in the face, active, a faddist in his diet, an unconquerably simple mind. He had made money, a good deal of it, out of steel. St. John, on the contrary, had never made any money out of anything, and avowedly had no intention of trying. And of this attitude, his father, as a self-made man, very definitely disapproved, with the result that St. John’s allowance was exiguous, and he was forced, if he wanted a change from the great sooty Victorian-Gothic house in the midlands, to take his holidays—as on the present occasion—in company with Leavis senior. In this circumstance lay the more superficial explanation of the attempt to kill: Mrs. Leavis had died years before, and St. John was his father’s sole heir.
The inn at Chigfold had three guest-rooms; and during that last week of April 1949 they were all occupied, two of them by the Leavises and the third by Fen, who was filling in time before returning to Oxford for the Trinity term. St. John drank, and read, and complained inoffensively of boredom; his father, and Fen, walked—together, for the most part, in the companionable silence which both of them liked better, while exercising, than conversation. Thus uneventfully the first part of the holiday went by. But there came a day when Fen found himself obliged to go walking alone: Leavis père had taken the bus into Tawton, twelve miles away across the moor, in order to attend a Rotary luncheon, and since he had decided to return to Chigfold on foot, would not be in until nightfall. St. John was no walker, even if Fen had had the slightest wish for his company, and in any case was proposing to drive into Barnstaple for the afternoon and evening, and see a film. After an early
tea, therefore, Fen put on a mackintosh, recovered his stick from the teeth of the over-exuberant wolf-hound which was supposed to protect the inn against burglars, and thus equipped, set out on his own. Outside the inn, he hesitated. The road running through the little stonebuilt village beckoned impartially in either direction. But it was on Barnstaple that he turned his back, towards Nag’s Tor and Tawton that he went. Leavis senior had hitherto shown a marked preference for the Barnstaple direction; and this fact, by provoking in Fen a natural reaction as soon as he was left to his own devices, was destined to save Leavis senior’s life.
From Chigfold to Nag’s Tor is a matter of some seven miles across deserted, wind-swept moorland. There is a road, of course—a white road which dips and rises, following the contours of the land like a stretched tape; but except in summer, pedestrians are as rare on it as vehicles, and Fen reached his goal, towards twilight, without having encountered a single living soul. He paused, staring up at the prominence—turf-and heather-covered, with outcrops of flaky-looking rock—in whose shape, viewed from the proper angle by a strenuously imaginative man, something dimly equine was said to be discernible. Then he began to climb. It was a longer and steeper ascent than it had seemed from the road; and the rocky gullies, when you actually came to them, were revealed as tolerably deep and dangerous. Fen reached the summit safely, however. And it was not until he was descending again—by the slopes away from the road—that he happened on the elder Leavis’s body.
Beware of the Trains Page 14
