Swan Song

by Crispin, Edmund

  After a moment’s hesitation, Judith turned to the paragraphs on ‘Methods of Administration’. The man who had followed her down Parks Road, and who had spent some seconds in examining the library register before entering the room, pushed by at the back of her chair to take down a volume from the shelves behind her. But she did not look up.

  Boris Stapleton lay on his back, naked on a laboratory table. From a long gash in his abdomen a young doctor, wearing rubber gloves, was carefully removing the stomach and intestines. There was a strong smell of ether in the room, but it was insufficient to offset the effects of opening the body.

  ‘Lord,’ said the young doctor, ‘how these cadavers stink.’

  An older man, who was working at a bench nearby, frowned momentarily.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he remarked, ‘remember that the poor devil was as alive as you are twenty-four hours ago.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the young doctor. ‘A good deal can happen in twenty-four hours.’ He made the last cut. ‘Here we are. The Marsh test, or the Reinsch?’

  At about five o’clock, the hotel porter brought Adam a note which a small and grubby boy had just delivered.

  ‘Meet me as soon as you are able,’ it ran, ‘in Judith’s room. First floor, second on the right. This is urgent.’ It was signed ‘G.F.’ Adam did not pause to reflect that he had never yet seen a sample of Fen’s handwriting. He hesitated, and then went upstairs to the bedroom. Elizabeth opened the door to him. He saw that she had been crying.

  ‘I’ve just come to tell you,’ he said awkwardly, ‘that I’ve got to go and meet Fen at Judith’s digs. Afterwards I shall go straight to the theatre.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You’ll be at the show, of course?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If you are, come to my dressing-room afterwards . . . Elizabeth, I’m sorry.’

  She said nothing. Presently he turned and left the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  GERVASE FEN ATE a large tea, lit a pipe, and retired to his study, intimating severely that no one was to disturb him. He had decided that he must make one last attempt to get to grips with the case. His failure to make anything of it thus far constituted a disagreeable mental irritant and made concentration on other matters difficult or even impossible. For his own sake, therefore, the business must be cleared up.

  He settled down in an armchair by the fire and devoted his mind to a steady review of the material evidence. It proved unenlightening. He turned to opportunity: Joan Davis, Karl Wolzogen, Charles Shorthouse, Beatrix, Boris Stapleton, Judith, even Adam or Elizabeth – all had been alone at the time when Edwin Shorthouse met his death, and any one of them, presumably, could have been responsible for it. Yet for Stapleton’s murder, only Judith, to all seeming, had had the opportunity, and he persisted in regarding her as innocent. The attack on Elizabeth could have been made by anyone except Adam, Charles Shorthouse, and Beatrix Thorn . . . But why had she been attacked at all?

  Fen had a remarkable memory for detail. He began to re-enact, in imagination, every conversation and interview he had had since the case began. The process was long and troublesome, but at the end of it he had the truth.

  It depended on three casual remarks: one made by Elizabeth in the ‘Bird and Baby’ on the morning after the murder, another made by Adam on the same occasion, and another made by Judith at the theatre. The last two, linked together and combined with a part of Elizabeth’s information about the quarrel between Adam and Edwin Shorthouse, cleared up the problem of Stapleton’s death. The first suggested a reason for the attack on Elizabeth and also a means by which Shorthouse might have met his end. Fen considered the topography of Shorthouse’s dressing-room, and of its surroundings, and saw that these fitted well enough. There was one small fact, however, which refused to be assimilated, and on this he meditated for a considerable time. At last he smiled.

  ‘Camouflage,’ he said aloud. ‘And confirmation, if one needed any. Now let me see . . .’

  He spent some minutes browsing in medical books taken from his loaded and untidy shelves, and a rather longer period playing games with a cardboard box, some string, and other more or less symbolical objects. In the end he had no doubts. The method of each murder indicated the murderer beyond question.

  The clock on the mantelpiece stood at a quarter to six. There was just time to communicate his results to Mudge before going on to the opera. He telephoned the police station.

  ‘I’ve got the answer,’ he said as soon as the Inspector was on the line. ‘But it takes rather a lot of explaining, so I’d better come and see you. Is that all right?’

  ‘If you do know, sir, I shall be eternally grateful.’

  ‘Then prepare,’ said Fen sternly, ‘to be eternally grateful . . . By the way, it wasn’t Judith Stapleton who murdered her husband.’

  ‘No?’ Mudge sounded disappointed. ‘Well, I’ll judge of that when I hear what you have to say . . . I’ve had a man tailing her, you know.’

  ‘How melodramatic.’

  ‘It seems the last thing she did was to register under a false name at the Radcliffe Science Library.’

  ‘Did she, now?’ said Fen. ‘Most reprehensible, I’m sure. I’ll be with you shortly.’

  He rang off and went up to his bedroom, where he devoted five flurried minutes to changing. Then he put on an overcoat and his extraordinary hat and went out to the garage. He was almost at the door of it when a horrifying thought suddenly occurred to him.

  ‘Oh, my dear paws!’ he exclaimed, and fled back to the telephone.

  ‘Put me through,’ he said, when at last the ‘Mace and Sceptre’ announced itself, ‘to room 72.’ He fretted and fidgeted until at last Elizabeth answered.

  ‘Elizabeth?’ he said. ‘This is Fen. Is Adam with you?’

  ‘No.’ Elizabeth was surprised. ‘I thought he was with you.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t,’ said Fen grimly. ‘Do you know where he was supposed to be meeting me?’

  ‘At Judith’s digs. But why –’

  Fen, however, had no time to answer questions. He threw the telephone back on to the desk, fell over the cat, recovered himself, pounded into the hall, snatched an automatic pistol from a table drawer, and once again made for the garage.

  ‘Now, Lily Christine,’ he muttered, ‘you can do something for your living.’

  In this, unfortunately, he proved to be over-optimistic. Nothing he could contrive would start the car. He tampered with the levers, and wound the handle, until he was exhausted. Finally, in an access of vengeful fury, he hurled an empty petrol-can at the chromium nude on the radiator-cap, seized his wife’s bicycle, and wobbled frantically away on it.

  Owing to a series of minor vexations and delays, it was twenty-five minutes past five before Adam arrived at the house in Clarendon Street, and he reflected, as he paused to look up at its windows, that he must be at the opera-house, in order to change and put on his make-up, by six o’clock at the latest. The house, which was Victorian in a mellow, Betjemanian fashion, stood back a little from the road. To reach the front door, whose brass handle shone brightly in a setting of flaky, ulcerated brown paint, one climbed three shallow steps of crumbling brick, passed through a small iron gate which stood permanently open, and walked up an asphalt path through a rather ravaged and desolate little garden. Adam, who had never accustomed himself to marching unheralded into lodging-houses, knocked and rang politely. But although he repeated this process a minute later, there was no sound or movement from inside; apparently the house was untenanted.

  It was likely, Adam thought, that Fen had grown tired of waiting, and left. All the same, he had better investigate. ‘First floor, second on the right . . .’ He opened the front door, went up the narrow stairs with their hard, thin carpet, and knocked at the appropriate door. Again there was no reply. With some hesitation, he opened the door and peered into the room. Though sparsely and cheaply furnished it was yet unexpectedly large. Clothes lay about it in
confusion. On the end of the bed was a half-packed suitcase. A variety of rubbish had overflowed the waste-paper basket on to the floor around it. The windows, which were closed, had scanty yellow curtains. There was a gas-fire . . . Adam stepped into the room, and at this, as the result of a hard and well-aimed blow on the back of the head, all perception of his surroundings abruptly ceased.

  After a time, a thin trickle of gas began to escape from the gas-fire, and the bedroom door was quietly closed, and locked on the outside.

  Beatrix Thorn, the Master, Sir Richard Freeman, and Mr Levi all arrived at the opera-house at about ten minutes past six. The last two, though unacquainted, came together in the bar.

  ‘I tell you, this Peacock ’e’s good,’ said Mr Levi. ‘’E ’ave them bums in the orchestra genau where ’e want ’em. We’ll see something tonight, I’m warning you.’

  Near them, a group of Young Intellectuals were discussing Wagner.

  ‘Of course, the effect of the Teutonic gods and heroes of the Ring on the German mentality has been deplorable.’

  ‘Exactly what I always maintain. In the last analysis, Wagner is responsible for Belsen.’

  ‘I don’t see how he can have been,’ objected a dark-haired girl, ‘considering he died several years before Hiltler was born.’

  ‘Don’t be deliberately obtuse, Anthea . . . Die Meistersinger is infected too, though in a more insidious and subtle way.’

  ‘Yes. Cecil Gray says, you remember, that it’s a great hymn to Germany’s achievements in art and war.’

  ‘There’s only one mention of war in it,’ said the dark-haired girl, ‘and that’s where Sachs says at the end that if Germany’s ever defeated her art won’t recover from it.’

  They gazed at her with great dislike.

  ‘Surely, Anthea, you’re not maintaining that you know more about Wagner than Cecil Gray does?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the dark-haired girl simply, ‘I am. But of course if you interpret Sachs’ remark as a great hymn to German achievements in war, you’re capable of believing anything.’

  ‘And then there are the plagiarisms. There’s that tune in the first scene of the last act which he cribbed from Nicolai’s Merry Wives.’

  ‘He didn’t crib it from anything,’ said the dark-haired girl. ‘It’s a variation on part of the Prize song.’

  ‘. . . Moreover, it’s obvious that a man of Wagner’s moral character couldn’t have produced great art. He was unscrupulous about money, he had affairs with the wives of his benefactors . . .’

  ‘I don’t see,’ said the dark-haired girl, ‘what moral character has to do with being able to produce great art. Villon was a thief, Bacon fawned for office, Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo were perverts, Gluck died of drink, Wordsworth was vain . . .’

  ‘Oh, Anthea, don’t be such a bore.’

  Beatrix Thorn and the Master were still arguing about cars.

  ‘And then the vibration . . . The structure of your ear . . .’

  ‘I know nothing about the structure of my ear, Beatrix, and I don’t wish to learn.’

  ‘These undergraduates,’ said Mr Levi cheerfully, ‘they’re a set of silly punks, nicht wahr?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FEN ARRIVED AT the house in Clarendon Street at about ten minutes past six, and was dismayed to find all the doors locked. He returned to the gate and gazed fretfully up and down the almost deserted road. A seedy-looking little man, who for some moments had been contemplating him with interest from the pavement, said:

  ‘What’s up, mate? Lorst yer key?’

  ‘I can’t get in,’ said Fen dismally. ‘I can’t get in.’

  ‘’Eave a ’alf-brick through the winder,’ the seedy little man suggested.

  ‘I haven’t got a half-brick.’

  ‘No,’ said the seedy little man with a farouche wink, ‘but I ’ave.’ He produced one from the pocket of his overcoat.

  Fen seized it from him and was about to precipitate it through a front window when the little man, dismayed at such an intemperate and amateurish scheme, caught his arm.

  ‘Not ’ere,’ he said. ‘Rahnd the back.’

  They went round to the back and made an entrance through the kitchen window. Fen led the way up the stairs.

  ‘Doesn’t look to me,’ said the little man disapprovingly, ‘as if there’s anything worth pinchin’ ’ere. What we want is socialism, so as everyone ’ll ’ave somethink worth pinchin’ . . . Phew, what a stink o’ gas.’

  In this he did not exaggerate. Fen rattled unavailingly at the door behind which Adam lay. Then took several steps back and hurled himself violently and uselessly against it. The little man watched these injudicious goings-on with great contempt.

  ‘All you’ll do,’ he announced, ‘is break yer collar-bone.’

  ‘I believe I have broken it,’ Fen complained.

  ‘’Ere,’ said the little man. ‘Let me get at it.’ He took a bunch of skeleton keys from inside his coat.

  ‘You ought to be in prison,’ said Fen amiably.

  ‘Bloody good thing for you I ain’t . . . Ah. That’s done it. Silly little lock, if you ask me. A child could pick it.’

  They got Adam out of the room and into the open air. He had recovered from the blow on his head, and had not yet succumbed to the gas, the flow of which, owing to some defect in the fire, was very weak. But he felt decidedly ill. They held his head while he vomited.

  ‘Tryin’ ter take yer own life,’ said the little man reproachfully. ‘Ungodly, that’s what it is.

  ‘Think of the nice birds,’ he added encouragingly, ‘and the nice trees, and the nice bloody atom bombs, and all the things what make life worth living.’ Having made this suggestion, he departed.

  The fact that Adam’s absence from the opera-house was not discovered until the overture was actually under way was not in itself surprising, for it was generally assumed, in so far as anyone thought about it at all, that he had arrived unnoticed and gone straight to his dressing-room. In the end it was Joan who was responsible for the news. Rousing herself from an agreeable day-dream at the call-boy’s cry of ‘Act one beginners, please,’ she looked into Adam’s dressing-room on her way downstairs, found it empty, thought for a moment that he had preceded her to the stage, and then saw his act one costume draped tidily over the back of a chair. This spectacle sent her running frantically downstairs to Karl Wolzogen.

  ‘Karl!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where’s Adam?’

  He failed at first to appreciate the situation. ‘How do I know where he is?’ he said testily.

  ‘You don’t understand . . . He’s not in the theatre.’

  ‘What?’ Karl was incredulous, alarmed.

  ‘He’s just not here.’

  Karl stared at her blankly for a moment. ‘Lieber Gott,’ he whispered. ‘What are we to do?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Adam obstinately. ‘I must go and sing.’

  Fen attempted to dissuade him. ‘After what you’ve been through,’ he said, ‘you’re quite incapable of standing up and bawling your way through a five-hour opera.’

  ‘I must try, that’s all.’

  ‘I suppose if you insist . . . By the way, you didn’t see the person who hit you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought not,’ said Fen, undismayed. ‘But it was just as well to ask.’ He perceived that across the road there was the shop of a dispensing chemist, and that it was still open. ‘Come over here,’ he said, taking Adam by the arm, ‘and I’ll get you some dope to help you keep going.’

  The only occupant of the shop, which was small and overcrowded, was the chemist himself, a bald, paunchy, apprehensive middle-aged man.

  ‘Make this up,’ said Fen, and uttered technicalities. His knowledge of science, though inaccurate, was varied and occasionally useful.

  ‘Have you a doctor’s prescription, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid it can’t be done.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it can,’ sai
d Fen, producing his automatic pistol. ‘And if you don’t get on with it at once, I shall shoot you, rather horribly, in the lungs.’

  The chemist went very pale and put up his hands.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to do that,’ said Fen, peeved. ‘You can’t make up a prescription standing in that attitude.’

  He watched the chemist, issuing periodic instructions, as the man went to work. The result was a colourless liquid in a small glass, which Fen handed to Adam. Adam, who had hitherto been too bemused to question these extraordinary proceedings, now lost confidence.

  ‘Is this stuff all right?’ he demanded.

  ‘Perfectly. And for heaven’s sake hurry up. It’s nearly half past six now.’

  Adam mustered his resolution and swallowed the draught. It made him feel better almost at once.

  ‘I hope to God,’ he said, ‘that they discovered fairly early that I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Take my wife’s bicycle,’ Fen suggested. He put the pistol back in his pocket and went outside to watch Adam pedal away.

  After a moment the chemist came to the door of his shop. He did not at first observe that Fen was still in the immediate neighbourhood.

  ‘Help, help,’ he said to a surprised passer-by. ‘Help.’

  Fen was annoyed. ‘Be quiet,’ he told the chemist sternly. ‘And don’t be such a silly little man.’ The chemist moaned with fear and rushed back into his shop. Greatly pleased at his previously unsuspected power of provoking terror in the breast of a fellow-being, Fen strode away.

  Adam was horrified, when he arrived at the opera-house, to hear the music of the overture. It was about two-thirds of the way through, which meant, he calculated, that he had three minutes at the most to get changed and on to the stage. A concourse of incoherently agitated people met him. He forced his way past them and ran up the stairs, pulling off his coat. A belated lady of the chorus was startled to see him rushing towards her in the act of unbuttoning his trousers, and pressed herself against the wall, emitting faint, defensive screams, until he had gone by. There was no time for make-up – and of course the clothes were displaying that malevolent unmanageability with which they always reward anyone who is in a hurry to don or doff them. But somehow he got ready, and raced downstairs again, and was at his place as the penultimate chord of the overture sounded from beyond the curtain. He waved incautiously at Joan, and on this bravura gesture – which struck most of the audience as a singularly unhappy innovation – the curtain went up.