There followed a prolonged and exhausting search for Virginia cigarettes. Clutching her sole trouvaille – twenty of an obscure and evidently obnoxious brand – Elizabeth returned, tired, cold, and irritable, to the hotel. It was just after half past four when she entered the foyer. In the public lounge on the left the tables were spread with white cloths, and a number of people were devouring an insubstantial and expensive tea. Joan Davis, descanting inexpertly upon the Shorthouse affair to Karl Wolzogen, caught sight of Elizabeth as she paused in the doorway, and signalled an invitation. Elizabeth crossed the room to join them.
‘But I mustn’t stay,’ she said. ‘Because I want some tea.’
Karl beamed; his enthusiasm was childlike and infectious. ‘But you must stay, Mrs Langley, and take tea with us. Of course you must.’ He turned to Joan. ‘Did I not say? What an Octavian to your Marschallin! Has she not the perfect figure for it?’ He surveyed Elizabeth from head to foot, with the most inoffensive frankness and admiration.
But Elizabeth, though cheered by this reference to her figure, was adamant on the subject of tea.
‘If you’ll forgive me,’ she said. ‘I’ll have it in my room. For one thing, I want to change, and for another, they take so long to serve it down here.’
Karl was crestfallen. ‘Ganz wahr,’ he admitted. ‘But I will hurry the man. You will see. I shall say to him, is it right that the friend of a man who has seen Wagner in Bayreuth should wait for her tea? And he will say: of course not! I will bring it at once!’
‘Really, you know’ said Joan kindly, ‘I don’t think the waiter would even know who Wagner was.’
‘Not know of Wagner?’ Karl was aghast. ‘But this is unbelievable . . .’ He paused for a moment, focusing this new and dreadful revelation; then he groaned resignedly. ‘Ah you English! It is as your poet Arnold has said: you are Philistines.’ He sat down abruptly, and then, seeing that Elizabeth was still standing, scrambled hastily to his feet again. ‘Consider,’ he added by way of illustration, ‘the lodgings where I stay.’
‘Karl finds his lodgings unendurable,’ Joan explained.
‘Ach, ja.’ Karl nodded sombrely. ‘They are all lace and smells and – what do you call them? – green things in great glazed pots.’
‘Aspidistras?’
‘Ja, gewiss. But it cannot be helped. It is due, you see, to the shortage of lodgings on the part of Oxford and the shortage of money on the part of me.’
‘What I really want to know,’ said Elizabeth, ‘is whether there are any more developments in the Shorthouse business?’
‘He is dead,’ said Karl with finality, ‘and that is a great blessing to us all. We will hope that the murderer is not discovered.’
‘I hardly think I should take that attitude with the police,’ remarked Joan a little faintly, ‘if I were you. . . . But really, Elizabeth, I should have thought you would have known about developments if anyone did. You seem to have been in the thick of it. I’ve heard virtually nothing, except that some people seem to think it was suicide . . .’
‘It wasn’t, though,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Unless,’ she added after a pause, ‘it was suicide arranged so as to look like murder. Such things have happened . . . But I admit it scarcely seems likely in Edwin’s case.’
‘Have you any theories?’ Joan asked. ‘After all, you’re an expert on these affairs.’
‘Theories? Well . . . I suppose I have, in a way.’ Elizabeth frowned slightly. In fact, I think I know who was responsible.’
Joan stared at her. ‘You know . . . But, my dear girl, have you told the police?’
‘N-no. Not yet. I haven’t told anybody. I haven’t got enough proof so far.’
‘You wouldn’t consider taking us into your confidence?’
Smiling, Elizabeth shook her head. ‘I’m terribly sorry . . . Perhaps later. In any case, it’s just possible I’m wrong.’
‘What a girl,’ said Joan resignedly. ‘Well, I suppose we shall have to possess our souls in patience.’ A new thought occurred to her. ‘Of course, if you really do know, Elizabeth, you ought to be forcibly silenced. You mustn’t go about sending public benefactors to the gallows.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘I never realized murder was a benefaction . . . By the way, what’s happening about the production?’ She stepped out of the way of a hastening waiter.
‘George Green is coming to sing Sachs. He hasn’t got Edwin’s voice, but he’s a better actor. I gather they’re hoping not to postpone the opening night. George knows his stuff, and he’s prepared to work hard . . . Incidentally, what have you done with Adam?’
‘He’s gone to Amersham to see Charles Shorthouse.’
‘How nice of him,’ said Joan dreamily. ‘I hope he gets past Beatrix. A Night-Hag riding through the air to dance with Lapland Witches . . . However’ – she roused herself from this Miltonic reverie – ‘there’s going to be a rehearsal this evening, so I hope he doesn’t stay away too long.’
‘I don’t think it occurred to him that there could possibly be one today,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Well, George Green has arrived, you see. And apparently the police have given us permission to use the theatre.’
Elizabeth became conscious that time was passing and that Karl, still courteously on his feet, was becoming a trifle restive.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the invitation, and my apologies for refusing it.’
‘My dear, I quite understand. There are times when one just doesn’t want to be sociable.’
Elizabeth smiled and left them.
At this point a discouraging admission has to be made – namely, that Elizabeth had, as a matter of fact, only the vaguest and most irrational of notions as to the identity of Edwin Shorthouse’s murderer; nor was she by any means as certain as she had made out that the answer was not, after all, suicide. She had succumbed for a moment, while talking to Joan and Karl, to a craving for effect, and she blushed, bit her lip, and cursed herself roundly as she walked away. ‘Really, how childish,’ she thought. ‘I deserve to be spanked. I’m a scatter-brained, pretentious little idiot . . .’ Her depression returned. It was true that she was inclined to be suspicious of Boris Stapleton, but she knew perfectly well that she had no serious grounds for this whatever, and to have degenerated into vain and silly chatter on the subject angered her immeasurably. ‘I deserve,’ she repeated firmly to herself, ‘to be beaten very severely indeed.’
She intereviewed the head waiter, to ensure that in the future no strangers should share her table; a garrulous fellow had bored her all through lunch, and she was determined that this should not happen again. The head waiter received her orders with that sneering deference in which head waiters excel. Elizabeth suffered a further diminution of self-confidence. She entered the hotel lift in a mood compounded equally of abasement and fury.
The double room which she occupied with Adam was situated on the second floor of the hotel, and had a private bathroom attached. Before going in, Elizabeth found a chambermaid and ordered tea. Then she slammed the door behind her, took off her coat, flung her bag on to the dressing-table, and slumped down on one of the beds. Contemplating the impersonal neatness and comfort which surrounded her, she decided that the best remedy for her present mood would be a hot bath. After a while she undressed, slipped on a white silk wrap, and went into the bathroom. She did not pause to observe that the bedroom door had reacted unfavourably to force majeure and was not properly latched. As she was bending to turn on the taps, three things happened at once.
The telephone bell began to ring.
Elizabeth half-heard, half-felt, a stealthy movement behind her, and the next instant her neck was in the clutch of hard, efficient fingers.
And there came a knocking on the bedroom door.
Elizabeth fainted. All she afterwards remembered was a kind of helpless rage at her own inability to scream or to struggle, and at the appalling moral disadvantage which her scanty clothing implied. Blackness invaded her mind an i
nstant before she crumpled up on the floor.
When she recovered consciousness, the first thing she did was to look at her watch, she had been lying there, she supposed, for five or ten minutes . . . And again there was a knocking on the bedroom door.
She got slowly and unsteadily to her feet, tenderly caressing the fading red finger-marks on her neck. She adjusted the wrap, which had partly fallen away from her body. Then she went slowly out into the empty bedroom.
She called: ‘Who – who’s there?’ and was unable to suppress the trembling of her voice.
‘Your tea, madam.’
‘I – all right. I’m coming.’
She opened the door. The chambermaid brought in her tray, set it on a table, hesitated.
‘Excuse me, madam, but – aren’t you well?’
Elizabeth tried to smile. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Thanks very much.’ She felt dizzy again, and sat down quickly. A thought struck her.
‘Did you – have you seen anyone leave this room during the last few minutes?’
The chambermaid was elderly, and anxious to help.
‘Why, yes, madam – just as I was coming along the passage. A tallish lady, fair, wearing a navy-blue coat and skirt and a Fair Isle jumper. She did seem in a hurry.’
‘I – I see. Thank you.’
‘Isn’t there anything I can do for you, madam?’ said the chambermaid, and added, in an access of motherly warmth: ‘You look that shaky, truly you do.’
‘No, really, thanks.’ Elizabeth tried again to smile, and this time succeeded. ‘I just felt a little faint. I’m quite recovered now.’
When the chambermaid had gone, she was careful to see that this time the door was properly closed (it was of the kind which can be opened from the outside only with a key). It did not at the moment occur to her that the person who had attacked her might be still in the room – hidden, perhaps, in the tall and roomy wardrobe – and with more subtle resources at his or her disposal.
‘A tallish lady, fair . . .’ Evidently it had been Joan Davis. But, equally evidently, her visit might have had some perfectly innocent object. A scribbled note, discovered on the dressing-table, suggested as much. ‘Door open,’ it ran, ‘so I walked in. I forgot to say that the rehearsal’s due to start at 5, though I don’t expect many people will be on time. Will you tell Adam when he gets back?’ It was reasonable enough. Since Elizabeth had been lying quiet and unconscious in the bathroom, Joan might well have thought there was no one about. And yet . . .
Crumpling the note absent-mindedly in the palm of her left hand, Elizabeth returned to the bathroom and washed. Beneath the hum of the traffic in George Street she did not hear the brief, stealthy activity in the bedroom behind her, or the faint click of the outer door as it opened and closed again. Back in the bedroom, she dressed, did her hair and applied lipstick with a methodical deliberation half consciously directed against the horror which seemed to be creeping into her very bones. The tea-things appeared undisturbed. With a hand that shook a little, Elizabeth poured out a cup of tea and raised it to her lips.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ON THEIR WAY back, Fen and Adam stopped in High Wycombe to get the wing of the car repaired. The garage-men, as is the way of garage-men, grizzled and grumbled and shook their heads over it, and diagnosed a number of other mechanical defects hitherto unsuspected; but Fen would have none of this, and prodded them so effectively that in half an hour, which they occupied in getting some tea, they were on the road again.
‘All the same,’ said Adam, resuming an argument which had been interrupted by this interlude, ‘you can’t tell me Charles Shorthouse is as naïve as all that. He’s far from being stupid, you know.’
‘I’m aware of that. All I maintain is that he’s intelligent exclusively in his own department. As a general rule, composers aren’t the brightest of mortals, except where music’s concerned. And not always about music, either. You remember Tchaikovsky couldn’t see anything in Brahms, Wagner, or any of his contemporaries except Bizet. No, it seems to me quite credible that Charles Shorthouse should have solemnly mugged up a lot of stuff about criminology as soon as he decided to murder his brother. I admit’ – Fen was fiddling with the choke; Lily Christine jerked and spat horribly – ‘I admit that one could scarcely be taken in by that wide-eyed, innocent narrative about last night . . .’
‘You mean it wasn’t true?’
‘No. I don’t mean that. It may very well have been true. All I mean is that Shorthouse must have known that his presence in Oxford would pretty soon be discovered, and was taking the precaution of telling us all about it in advance. It’s suspicious, evidently, if people just don’t mention these things at all.’
‘But if he wanted to divert suspicion, why tell us that he was intending to kill his brother?’
‘Possibly a kind of sophisticated bluff. But I’m not at all sure, you know, that that isn’t what he did intend to do. I really wouldn’t put it past him. In fact, I believe he’d be completely ruthless where his own works were concerned, and sacrifice anything or anybody to getting them done. He’s a monomaniac – but then, most geniuses are. Look at Wagner . . . The problem, really, is not whether he intended to kill his brother but whether he actually did.’
‘We shall have to find that man at the “Mace and Sceptre” and check up on his movements.’
‘Yes. Wilkes. We may as well do that as soon as we get in. You’re staying there yourself, aren’t you?’
Adam nodded, his hand straying towards the brake as they approached a dangerous cross-roads.
‘I’m interested,’ Fen resumed after a moment’s rare attention to the other traffic on the road, ‘to hear that Charles Shorthouse and the Thorn woman got separated at some stage. Don’t you think she’s capable of committing murder to further his interests?’
Adam considered. ‘Would she have the strength to string up a lump of suet like Edwin Shorthouse?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fen uneasily, ‘but it isn’t a possibility one can rule out. And then I can’t see how the thing was done . . . I thought I had an idea, but it becomes less and less plausible the more I think about it.’ He seemed depressed. ‘Anyway, we now know why Edwin Shorthouse was in his dressing-room at that time of night.’
‘Do we?’ said Adam thoughtfully. ‘I was wondering if there wasn’t a simpler explanation.’
‘Oh?’
‘Something of the same sort happened before – about two years ago, when we were doing Falstaff at Cambridge. Edwin had rooms with a landlady who disapproved of drink, and he was obliged to keep his supplies at the theatre. History may be repeating itself.’
‘We’ll inquire,’ said Fen. ‘And we may as well do it on the way back. Where was he staying?’
‘In Holywell. I can’t remember the number, but I think I can recognize the place when we get there.’
‘I should have thought a man in his position could have afforded to stay at a hotel.’
‘He could afford it all right, but he was too mean.’
‘What a symposium of deadly sins the poor fellow seems to have been . . . Afterwards,’ said Fen, ‘I must see Peacock. And I should like to have a talk with Joan Davis about Stapleton and that girl. Women have an instinct for the truth in such cases.’
They crossed Magdalen Bridge at a quarter past five, and drove to Holywell. Adam’s theory about Edwin Shorthouse’s landlady proved to be correct. She was a large, doleful, indistinct woman with a streak of cheerless religiosity, a tendency to misquote the Bible and an ample, if rather generalized, store of information on the destination of the soul after death. They understood that she had had no very high opinion of her late lodger and was in no doubt as to his present whereabouts. Strong drink, she added in response to persistent queries, had never been allowed to enter her house, being in her opinion contrary to godliness and the Christian religion. Unfortunately this assertion moved Fen to initiate a long and unprofitable argument about the marriage at Cana, and it was
some minutes before they were able to get away.
‘But you were quite right,’ said Fen as they drove up Broad Street. ‘And that, thank God, is one problem out of the way.’
‘How are you going to find this man Wilkes?’
‘Search the bars,’ said Fen without hesitation.
‘You know him well?’
‘Only too well. He’s a deaf and very aged colleague of mine at St Christopher’s. And he’s dishonest,’ said Fen aggrievedly. ‘He steals my whisky.’
They reached the ‘Mace and Sceptre’, and, pursued by a savage explosion from Lily Christine (‘There it goes again,’ said Fen complacently) pushed their way through the revolving doors and into the public lounge, where they were fortunate enough to find Wilkes waiting expectantly for opening time. Fen introduced him to Adam.
‘Now, listen, Wilkes,’ he went on without more preliminary, ‘we want to know about Charles Shorthouse. The composer. It seems you were with him last night.’
‘What’s it got to do with you who I was with?’ said Wilkes testily. ‘Heh. Interfering busybody –’
‘A man has been murdered –’
‘Pity it wasn’t you.’
‘A man has been murdered, and I’m trying to find out who was responsible . . . As you see,’ Fen explained to Adam, ‘Wilkes is very old, and I fancy his mind is going . . . Well, Wilkes, were you with Charles Shorthouse or weren’t you?’
‘Can’t hear a word you’re saying.’
‘Were you with Charles Shorthouse last night?’
‘Yes.’ The aged Wilkes spoke more soberly, though there was still a malignant gleam in his alligator eye. ‘And with his succubus.’
‘His succubus?’ Fen was startled.
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