Swan Song

by Crispin, Edmund

  ‘Yes, possibly.’ Fen was grave again. ‘But at the same time, I agree with the girl that he’d almost certainly have told her if he intended to do that.’

  ‘Well, you don’t think he’s been kidnapped, do you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know at all . . . It’s simply that I don’t like the sound of this “illness”, particularly as there seems to be someone running around with a whole pharmacopoeia of poisons in his pocket . . . Come and help me look on the roof.’

  ‘Have you got a torch? It must be quite dark now, and one doesn’t want to topple over the edge.’

  Fen felt in the pocket of his raincoat, and after bringing to light successively a grubby handkerchief, a half-empty packet of cigarettes, a copy of the Imitation of Christ, and a small woolly bear named Thomas Shadwell, found his torch.

  Outside it was bitterly cold; Adam shivered and turned up the collar of his coat. No stars were visible, and the moon had not yet risen, but beneath a street lamp they could see the front of the Playhouse in Beaumont Street, and farther to the left the light from the foyer of the Randolph Hotel winked rapidly and was again still as someone pushed in through the revolving doors. The footsteps of a single wayfarer passing along St John Street were preternaturally clear and sharp. Adam, who disliked heights, felt a mild but decided nausea; the discovery which they shortly made, however, was sufficient to drive other considerations from his mind.

  Boris Stapleton lay prone, about half-way between the skylight which penetrated the ceiling of Edwin Shorthouse’s dressing-room and the little hut (its door now creaking lugubriously in the wind) which housed the machinery of the lift. Adam hardly needed to be told that he was dead, though there were no marks of violence on the body, except for the bruises occasioned by its fall. Traces of vomit were nearby. The good-looking young face, when they turned it over, betrayed nothing but a faint astonishment.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AS WELL AS possible, they lowered Stapleton’s body down the ladder and carried it to Shorthouse’s dressing-room, which had remained unoccupied since his death. It was a peculiarly exhausting task, which left them panting and unsteady. Fortunately they met no one.

  ‘Well,’ Adam gulped as he straightened himself, ‘what do we do now?’

  ‘Telephone Mudge, will you, and tell him what’s happened.’ Fen was smoothing back his unruly hair. ‘But don’t breathe a word to anyone else – particularly Judith.’

  ‘Surely she ought to be –’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Fen grimly, ‘that when she gets the news she’ll break down. And there are some things I must ask her before that happens.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Arsenic, I fancy.’

  Adam went to the telephone. Downstairs, the orchestra was tuning up for the third act; the oboe A droned out, encircled by bare fifths; the flutes were indulging in bravura displays; the tuba honked despondently. Fen bent down again to examine Stapleton’s body. Despite the temperature of the roof, there was still a little warmth in it; but the man was thin, wasted, almost skeletal. The skin disease on his cheeks, throat, and chin resembled eczema. There was a strange, very faint odour resembling that of garlic. Repressing a slight shudder of disgust, Fen opened the mouth and felt for the tongue; it was much furred. The eyelids were red and puffy. Fen examined the finger-nails, noticed that there was a white band running across them, and turned his attention to the hair, and afterwards to the palms of the hands, which were hard and horny. Then he went to the wash-basin, and was soaping himself industriously when Adam returned.

  ‘Mudge,’ said Adam gloomily, ‘was very much upset. I suppose he’s beginning to realize that what with this and the attack on Elizabeth his suicide theory’s suffering a lot of shocks . . . Anyway, he’s coming here immediately. Have you discovered anything?’

  Fen was drying his hands with a handkerchief; there appeared to be no towel in the room. ‘I was right about the arsenic. And it’s chronic – it must have been going on for some weeks.’

  Adam kept his eyes averted from the face of the corpse; Fen had left the mouth open, and it gaped disagreeably. ‘No wonder,’ said Adam with an effort, ‘that he was ill. I suppose if he’d only had the sense to see a doctor –’

  ‘Exactly. He needn’t have died.’ Fen, about to return the damp handkerchief to his pocket, thought better of it, and put it instead on the dressing-table. ‘That skin disease is a normal symptom of arsenical poisoning. But the fact that he’d suffered from eczema on some previous occasion made him unsuspicious.’

  They both lit cigarettes. ‘What makes it so unpleasant,’ said Adam bitterly, ‘is that whoever was poisoning him must have been aware that he’d rather die than stay out of the production, and have traded on it . . . And now Judith is a widow, after two days of marriage, and – oh, it’s damnable.’ After a pause he went on: ‘And I can’t see the motive for it, unless he knew something about Edwin’s death . . . Could it be suicide?’

  ‘Unheard-of,’ said Fen without hesitation. ‘If he’d wanted to commit suicide he’d have given himself one good dose, not a series. And anyway, why should he commit suicide? He’d just got married. To all appearance he was exceedingly happy.’

  Adam nodded sombrely. ‘How can arsenic be got?’ he inquired. ‘That is, without openly buying it?’

  ‘In all sorts of ways. It can be extracted from fly-papers, and weed killers and rat poisons, and sheep dip and God knows what else . . . However,’ Fen added, ‘I’d better go and see Judith. It looks at present as if she’ll be our sole witness. Will you wait here until I get back? Repel all boarders – except, of course, the police.’

  On his way down the stairs he came upon Furbelow, and was reminded by the encounter of a problem which for some days he had been intending to clear up.

  ‘Furbelow,’ he said, ‘did you have instructions from Mr Shorthouse not to disturb him when he was in his dressing-room?’

  The question evidently stirred latent fires of resentment. Furbelow even forgot himself so far as to spit, though in rather a dry-mouthed ineffectual fashion.

  ‘Ah, that he did,’ he burst out. ‘Some o’ these theatre folk, they fancy they’re God Almighty ‘Isself. The first night ’e was ’ere I went into ’is dressing-room quite ’armless-like, to look if I might ’ave dropped something, an’ what does ’is ’ighness do but tell me ’e’ll wring my neck if I ever as much as put me nose inside again. Called me a thief, ’e did.’ Ecstatic with rage, Furbelow hissed at Fen, like a goose. ‘I wouldn’t ‘a’ gorn in there again, not if the devil ’ad bin after me with ’is flesh-’ooks.’

  Being unable to conceive any reliable method of putting a stop to this homiletics, Fen pursued his way, leaving Furbelow yelping indignantly behind him. It was unlikely, he thought, that the personnel of the opera were unaware of this incident; Furbelow was not the man to return contumely with silence. And that suggested that Edwin Shorthouse had been responsible for at least one circumstance which might have facilitated his own death.

  Fen made his way into the wings. The third act had begun. Sachs sat engrossed in his folio; David was creeping into the room with the air of a particularly small mouse braving the slumbers of a particularly large cat. The wood-wind chattered vivaciously, but without confidence. Laying his basket on a table, David began to examine its contents, with one eye fixed apprehensively on his master. But after a time he became wholly preoccupied with cakes, ribbons, and sausages, and the sound of Sachs turning a page of the folio, underlined as it was by a downward rush of strings, threw him into something approaching a panic.

  ‘Yes, Master!’ he quavered. ‘Here!’

  Rich and sombre, the cellos enunciated the Wahn theme, that brilliantly contrived vein of melancholy which relieves and balances the whole great comedy . . . And on the opposite side of the stage Fen saw Judith talking to Rutherston. In another moment she had caught his eye and had slipped round the back to join him.

  ‘Have you found him?’ she said eagerly.


  Fen spoke to her with great gentleness. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Will you answer one or two questions?’

  ‘Y-yes, but –’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important. How long have you and your husband been in Oxford?’

  ‘Oh . . . about three weeks. But please –’

  ‘And you husband hasn’t been well during that time?’

  ‘No . . . It’s – it’s been chiefly that horrible skin disease. And he won’t see a doctor . . .’

  ‘Can you give me more details of his illness?’

  ‘But why? Why? I don’t see –’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Fen, ‘I know something about diseases, and I fancy I have an idea what’s wrong with him. If you can tell me the symptoms, I’ll put them before a doctor, and we can at least get some suitable medicine made up.’ Fen spoke with an effort. He was at the best of times averse to lying, except for the sake of amusement, and he was vividly conscious of the cruelty of what he was-doing. But there seemed no other way. ‘Presumably,’ he added, ‘your husband would have no objection simply to taking medicine – particularly if it came from you.’

  The girl nodded. ‘It’s – it’s very kind,’ she stammered. ‘I’ll tell you all I can . . . He’s got a kind of laryngitis as well as the skin disease. And he’s been sick a lot, and he’s had diarrhoea, and he’s hardly been eating at all. Oh, and he complained that his muscles were hurting and that his hands sometimes went numb . . . I – I think that’s all.’ She attempted a smile. ‘And quite enough, too.’

  ‘There are two possibilities,’ Fen went on ruthlessly (afterwards he was to look back on this little episode as from his point of view the most sheerly objectionable in the whole case). ‘There are two possibilities, and one of them is food poisoning.’

  ‘Poisoning?’ There was alarm in Judith’s voice.

  ‘Ptomaine. You know. It isn’t necessarily dangerous . . . Have you been having your meals at the place where you’re staying?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve cooked them for him. The landlady lets me use the kitchen.’ Judith’s eyes grew wider. ‘But surely I can’t have been responsible . . . Besides, I’ve been eating the same things as he had, and I’m all right.’

  ‘Exactly. It mayn’t be the food. It mayn’t even be poisoning at all . . . But has he been drinking much?’

  ‘No, hardly at all. Only once before that morning in the “Bird and Baby”.’

  ‘Then don’t worry,’ said Fen. Now that he had heard everything of importance he was anxious to finish with the interview.

  ‘But where is he now?’ the girl asked.

  ‘As Elizabeth suggested, he’s probably gone home. It’s not impossible, is it, that he missed you, and imagined you were ahead of him? Maybe he was misinformed by someone . . . I think your best plan is to go to Clarendon Street and see if he’s there. He doesn’t appear to be in the theatre, but if he turns up I’ll tell him where you are.’

  Fen left her and returned to Shorthouse’s dressing-room. ‘Disgusting,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Disgusting but unfortunately unavoidable.’ Adam, whose vigil had already provoked a faint unease, was pleased at his return.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Adam said, ‘just what Stapleton was doing on the roof.’

  Fen sat down; he was tired and dispirited. ‘Trying to get air,’ he said briefly. ‘He must have felt an attack of asphyxia coming, and gone outside in the hope of relieving it. The roof has no importance in itself.’

  In a few moments more Mudge arrived with a police doctor. Luckily the latter was not Dr Rashmole, whose necrophilious exuberance Fen felt would have been unendurable in the present circumstances. He examined the body, and provisionally confirmed Fen’s diagnosis. Fen gave Mudge a digest of the information he had received from Judith; its effect did not appear to be enlivening.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Mudge blankly, ‘there seems to be only one answer to this problem.’

  ‘Impossible,’ Fen replied waspishly. ‘The girl was utterly devoted to him. She’d no more have killed him than I would.’

  ‘There are people who can act, sir,’ said Mudge platitudinously. ‘And it wouldn’t be the first time a love-affair’s gone sour and ended in murder.’

  ‘Would she have admitted to preparing his meals if she’d been poisoning him?’

  ‘Of course she would.’ Mudge, too, was becoming a trifle annoyed. ‘The landlady knew all about it, and it would have been insane to deny the fact.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Adam suggested with singular lack of penetration, ‘some third person put the poison in the sugar, or in some other ingredient.’

  He looked at them hopefully, but neither Fen nor the Inspector made any effort to point out that if this were the truth Judith too would probably be dead. The two men were, in fact, becoming unnecessarily heated. In Fen this was probably due to a reaction from his conversation with Judith; in the Inspector, to a growing belief that Fen was wilfully and unnecessarily complicating every aspect of the case he could lay hands on.

  ‘It’s by no means impossible, you know,’ said Fen, ‘that Stapleton was regularly getting something to eat or drink from an outsider.’

  ‘Not impossible, no,’ said Mudge obstinately. ‘But wouldn’t his wife have known about it, if they were as intimate as you maintain?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Fen snapped. ‘I decline absolutely to believe that she had anything to do with it. Haven’t you got eyes in your head? Can’t you see the child was in love with him?’

  ‘And can’t you see,’ said the Inspector, ‘that what you’re trying to do is to fabricate another impossible murder?’

  They stared at one another with open antagonism. And it was at that moment that the door opened and Judith herself entered the room.

  ‘Professor Fen,’ she said, ‘I heard you’d come up here, and I wondered if –’

  Then she saw the body which lay huddled on the floor.

  The words died on her lips. She stood absolutely still. Her cheeks still glowed from the exertion of running up the stairs, but there was an area of dead whiteness about her nose and mouth. She made no attempt to approach the body. After a moment she began to sob – a slow, mechanical dry-eyed, almost soundless sobbing. For a time the four men stood helpless. Then the doctor tried to touch her, and she pushed him away with the gesture of a petulant child. The sobbing grew slower and at last ceased.

  ‘You won’t cut him up,’ she whispered. And then her voice rose suddenly to a scream, a horrifying, ridiculous wail like that of a terrified cat: ‘God help you if you touch him! God help you!’

  Adam took off his overcoat and laid it over the gaping, witless face. He was aware that the distant music had stopped – aware, too, that it had stopped because he was not there to make his entry. He heard the call-boy chanting his name on the floor below, but he made no move.

  After the rehearsal Fen walked back towards the ‘Mace and Sceptre’ with Adam, Joan and Elizabeth. Joan broke the long silence by saying:

  ‘I wonder if they took my advice – to avoid having children at first . . . If they didn’t, it may be a consolation to Judith to –’

  It was Fen’s turn to lose his temper. ‘A consolation,’ he repeated savagely. ‘Yes, perhaps it may. But you still seem to forget that murder’s been done, and that someone will sooner or later hang for it.’

  ‘You don’t think that Judith –’

  ‘She didn’t kill her husband. Of course not. But there was the murder of Shorthouse as well. Let’s keep our chatter about “consolation” for the time when everything’s cleared up.’

  Elizabeth said gently: ‘You haven’t a clue, Professor Fen?’

  ‘None,’ said Fen more soberly. ‘Not the vestige of an idea . . . You’d better cut me out of your series, Elizabeth.’

  They went on in silence to the hotel. Before they parted Fen said to Joan:

  ‘I’m sorry I was so detestably rude.’

  She looked steadily at him. ‘“Unnoticeably”,’ she s
aid, and smiled. ‘We’re all on edge, and I agree that sentimental chatter isn’t any help . . . You’ll be at the performance tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course. Good luck, if I don’t see you before then.’

  ‘Come backstage afterwards.’

  ‘I’d like to . . . Again, my apologies.’

  ‘Forgiveness isn’t in order,’ said Joan. ‘So I’ll risk quoting Shakespeare to a Professor of English Literature . . . “Let us not burden our remembrance with a heaviness that’s gone”.’ She smiled again, and went with Adam and Elizabeth into the hotel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BEFORE THE CULMINATION of the case there was respite of a little less than twenty-four hours. The second scene of act three was rehearsed on the Monday morning, a week after Shorthouse’s death. Substitutes were quickly found for Judith, who had withdrawn from the production and yet refused to go back to her parents, and for Stapleton. Rutherston gave a final impassioned address in which he begged the chorus to try and look like sixteenth-century Nurembergers instead of like an elementary eurhythmics class. The autopsy on Stapleton, which it had been impossible to waive, was not expected to produce definite results until the Tuesday morning. There was to be no work on the Monday afternoon until the curtain went up at six-thirty on the first performance.

  Adam and Elizabeth spent the afternoon at the hotel. The events of the last few days had somehow contrived to cast a shadow over their relationship. A self-consciousness, almost a coldness, had grown up between them, the more difficult to dispel as the reasons for it were either too obscure or, it seemed, too inadequate to be dealt with directly. Neither was happy; their old careless intimacy had gone. In both, the faculty of criticism had been sharpened to include trivial and even imaginary offences. Elizabeth felt that Adam was becoming too tyrannical and overbearing, and began to regret (though with a sense of treachery) the days of her independence. Adam felt that Elizabeth was becoming touchy, irascible, and over-sensitive. Both saw in this development the notorious disillusionment which is said to follow the first romantic months of marriage, both half-resigned themselves to it, and both, as a consequence, confirmed and strengthened it.