Appleby Talking (16 page)

And Appleby talked. Being thorough, he made such anatomical observations as his ignorance allowed. Once he glanced round at the corpse, and out of the corner of his eye glimpsed Holroyd beyond the glass-panelled door, his hand already going up to flick at the switch. A moment later the theatre was in darkness, and seconds after that Appleby felt a sharp tap beneath the shoulder-blade. He pitched to the floor, pressing his stop-watch as he did so. Various heaving sounds followed as Holroyd got the portly Albert off the table; then Appleby felt himself seized in surprisingly strong arms and hoisted up in Albert’s place. Next came a shuffle and a scrape as Holroyd, panting heavily now, dragged the inert Albert from the theatre. Appleby waited for a couple of seconds, threw back the tarpaulin and lowered himself to the floor. Then he groped his way through the door, flicked on the light and looked at his watch. “And the audience,” he said, “is now sitting back and waiting – until presently somebody points out that the cadaver is the wrong size. Thank you very much. The reconstruction has been more instructive than I hoped.” He turned to Holroyd. “I am still inclined to think that it has the appearance of being the work of two men. And yet you managed it pretty well on schedule when single-handed. Never a fumble and just the right lift. You might almost have been practising it.”

Holroyd frowned. “Yachting,” he said briefly, “–and particularly at night. It makes one handy.”

And Albert looked with sudden suspicion at Nessfield’s professor of Human Physiology. “Yachting?” he asked. “Now, would that have put you in the way of acquaintance with many seafaring men?”

Of James Cass, that luckless waif who would be a seafarer no longer, Appleby learned little more that afternoon. The cargo-vessel from which he had disembarked was already at sea again, and a couple of days must elapse before any line could be tapped there. But one elderly seaman who had recently made several voyages with him a little research did produce, and from this witness two facts emerged. There was nothing out of the way about Cass – except that he was a man distinctly on the simple side. Cass had been suggestible, Appleby gathered; so much so as to have been slightly a butt among his fellows. And Appleby asked a question: had the dead man appeared to have any regular engagement or preoccupation when he came into port? The answer to this was definitive. Within a couple of hours, Appleby felt, the file dealing with this queer mystery of the anatomy theatre would be virtually closed for good.

Another fifteen minutes found him mounting the staircase of one of Nessfield’s most superior blocks of professional chambers. But the building, if imposing, was gloomy as well, and when Appleby was overtaken and jostled by a hurrying form it was a second before he recognised that he was again in the presence of Dr Holroyd.

“Just a moment,” Appleby laid a hand on the other’s arm. “May I ask if this coincidence extends to our both aiming at the third floor?”

Holroyd was startled, but made no reply. They mounted the final flight side by side and in silence. Appleby rang a bell before a door with a handsome brass plate. After a perceptible delay the door was opened by a decidedly flurried nurse, who showed the two men into a sombre waiting-room. “I don’t think,” she said, “that you have an appointment? And as an emergency has just arisen I am afraid there is no chance of seeing Dr–”

She stopped at an exclamation from Appleby. Hunched in a corner of the waiting-room was a figure whose face was almost entirely swathed in a voluminous silk muffler. But there was no mistaking that flowing silver hair. “Sir David!” exclaimed Appleby. “This is really a most remarkable rendezvous.”

Sir David Evans groaned. “My chaw,” he said. “It is one pig ache, look you.”

Holroyd laughed nervously. “Shakespeare was demonstrably right. There was never yet philosopher could bear the toothache patiently – nor Vice-Chancellor either.”

But Appleby paid no attention; he was listening keenly to something else. From beyond a door on the right came sound of hurried, heavy movement. Appleby strode across the room and turned the handle. He flung back the door and found himself looking into the dentist’s surgery. “Dr Wesselmann?” he said.

The answer was an angry shout from a bullet-headed man in a white coat. “How dare you intrude in this way!” he cried. “My colleague and myself are confronted with a serious emergency. Be so good as to withdraw at once.”

Appleby stood his ground and surveyed the room; Holroyd stepped close behind him. The dentist’s chair was empty, but on a surgical couch nearby lay a patient covered with a light rug. Over this figure another white-coated man was bending, and appeared to be holding an oxygen-mask over its face.

And Nessfield’s lecturer in Prosthetics seemed to find further explanations necessary. “A patient,” he said rapidly, “with an unsuspected idiosyncrasy to intravenous barbiturates. Oxygen has to be administered, and the position is critical. So be so good–”

Appleby leaped forward and sent the white-coated holder of the oxygen-mask spinning; he flung back the rug. There could be no doubt that what was revealed was James Cass’ body. And since lying on Professor Finlay’s dissecting-table it had sustained a great gash in the throat. It had never been very pleasant to look at. It was ghastly enough now.

Wesselmann’s hand darted to his pocket; Holroyd leaped on him with his yachtsman’s litheness, and the alien dentist went down heavily on the floor. The second man showed no fight as he was handcuffed. Appleby looked curiously at Holroyd. “So you saw,” he asked, “how the land lay?”

“In my purely amateur fashion I suppose I did. And I think I finished on schedule once again.”

Appleby laughed. “Your intervention saved me from something decidedly nasty at the hands of Nessfield’s authority on false teeth. By the way, would you look round for the teeth in question? And then we can have in Sir David – seeing he is so conveniently in attendance – and say an explanatory word.”

“I got the hang of it,” said Appleby, “when we did a very rough-and-ready reconstruction of the crime. For when, while playing Finlay’s part, I glanced round at the cadaver, I found myself catching a glimpse of Dr Holroyd here when he was obligingly playing First Murderer and turning off the lights. There was a glass panel in the door, and through this he was perfectly visible. I saw at once why Finlay had been killed. It was merely because he had seen,
and recognised
, somebody who was about to plunge the theatre in darkness for some nefarious, but not necessarily murderous, end. What did this person want? There could be only one answer: the body of James Cass. Already he had tried to get it in the night, but the housebreaking involved had proved too difficult.”

The benevolent features of Sir David Evans were shadowed by perplexity. “But why, Mr Appleby, should this man want such a pody?”

“I shall come to that in a moment. But first keep simply to this: that the body had to be stolen even at great hazard; that when glimpsed and recognised by Finlay the potential thief was sufficiently ruthless to silence him with a dagger secreted for such an emergency – and was also sufficiently quick-witted to exploit this extemporaneous murder to his own advantage. If he had simply bolted with Cass’ body and left that of Finlay the hunt would, of course, have been up the moment somebody turned the lights on. By rapidly substituting one body for the other – Finlay’s for that of Cass – on the dissecting-table, he contrived the appearance first of some more or less natural momentary absence of Finlay from the theatre, and secondly the suggestion of some possible joke which kept the audience wary and quiet for some seconds longer. All this gave additional time for his getaway. And – yet again – the sheerly grotesque consequence of the substitution had great potential value as a disguise. By suggesting some maniacal act of private vengeance it masked the purely practical – and the professionally criminal – nature of the crime.

“And now, what did we know of Cass? We knew that he was a seaman; that he travelled more or less regularly between England and America; that he was knocked down and presently died shortly after landing; and that he was a simple-minded fellow, easily open to persuasion. And we also knew this: that he had a set of rather incongruously magnificent false teeth; that in the anatomy theatre these first protruded themselves and then by some muscular spasm appeared to lodge themselves in the throat, the jaw closing like a vice. And we also knew that, hard upon this, a certain Dr Wesselmann, an alien comparatively little known in Nessfield and actually a specialist in false teeth, hurried from the theatre accompanied by a companion. When I also learned from a seaman who had sailed with Cass that he was often concerned about his teeth and would hurry off to a dentist as soon as he reached shore, I saw that the case was virtually complete.”

“And would be wholly so when you recovered Cass’ body and got hold of these.” Holroyd came forward as he spoke, carrying two dental plates on an enamel tray. “Sir David, what would you say about Cass’ teeth?”

Nessfield’s Vice-Chancellor had removed the muffler from about his jaw; the excitement of the hunt had for the moment banished the pain which had driven him to Wesselmann’s rooms. He inspected the dentures carefully – and then spoke the inevitable word. “They are pig,” he said decisively.

“Exactly so. And now, look.” Holroyd gave a deft twist to a molar; the denture which he was holding fell apart; in the hollow of each gleaming tooth there could be discerned a minute oil-silk package.

“What they contain,” said Appleby, “is probably papers covered with a microscopic writing. I had thought perhaps of uncut diamonds. But now I am pretty sure that what we have run to earth is espionage. What one might call the Unwitting Intermediary represents one of the first principles of that perpetually fantastic game at its higher levels. Have a messenger who has no notion that he
is
a messenger, and you at once supply yourself with the sort of insulating device between cell and cell that gives spies a comforting feeling of security. Cass has been such a device. And it was one perfectly easy to operate. He had merely to be persuaded that his false teeth were always likely to give him trouble, and that he must regularly consult (at an obligingly low fee) this dentist at one end and that dentist at the other – and the thing was practically foolproof. Only Wesselmann and his friends failed to reckon on sudden death, and much less on Cass’ signing away his body – dentures and all – to an anatomy school.” Appleby paused. “And now, gentlemen, that concludes the affair. So what shall we call it?”

Holroyd smiled. “Call it the Cass Case. You couldn’t get anything more compendious than that.”

But Sir David Evans shook his beautiful silver locks. “No!” he said authoritatively. “It shall be called
Lesson in Anatomy
. The investigation has been most interesting, Mr Appleby. And now let us go. For the photographers, look you, are waiting.”

“It all began,” Appleby said, “with a Professor writing a learned article called
Shakespeare’s Stage Blood
. He wasn’t starting a theory that the Bard came of a long line of actors. He was simply showing from a study of the old texts that the Elizabethan theatre was a thoroughly gory place.”

The Vicar nodded. “Carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,” he quoted cheerfully. “Accidental judgements, casual slaughters, death put on by cunning and forced cause–”

“Quite so. But the relevant point was this: when
X
drew his dagger or rapier on the stage of the Globe and appeared to stab
Y
, what in fact he did stab was a concealed bladder, full of some sort of red paint. The stuff spurted out all over the place, and gave an engaging impression of a neatly severed artery.”

“Messy. One hopes it came out in the wash.”

“No doubt it did. But the immediate effect was terrific. All concerned simply wallowed in this bogus blood, and the audience got no end of a thrill. Now, no sooner had the Professor published his discovery than it greatly took the fancy of a chap called Cherry, who was the moving spirit of a group of amateur players at Nessfield. Most of his company belonged to the staff of the University there, and this blood-bath business apparently gave very general pleasure to all. It was felt that something should be done to put this discovery about Shakespeare’s stage into practice. So Cherry decided that the next play should be
Julius Caesar
.”

The Vicar chuckled. “‘Stoop, Romans, stoop, and let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood.’”

“Precisely. ‘Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.’ Contemplating that scene, Cherry, you may say, simply saw red. As it happened, I was visiting a friend of some consequence in those parts, and he took me along to the performance. For some reason that I didn’t gather, it was quite an occasion, and we sat among a whole gaggle of the local nobs, all doing Cherry and his friends proud.

“They played uncommonly well. The scene in the Senate House built up some first-rate suspense, and when at length the conspirators had edged round Caesar and isolated him beside Pompey’s statue, the audience was as keyed up as ever I’ve seen it at a professional production. Then Casca gave his signal, and that dignified group of noble Romans closed in like a rugger scrum, and had a high old time stabbing and hacking for all they were worth. You wouldn’t have believed, Vicar, that most of them were Doctors of Philosophy and Readers in Ancient Hebrew and such like. And the gore! It exceeded all expectations. Every one of the conspirators – Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Decius, Cinna, and the rest–”

“Ligarius, Trebonius, and Metellus.” The Vicar rubbed his hands in mild self-congratulation. “Once learnt, one doesn’t forget these things.”

“They were all dripping some beastly stuff supplied, I imagine, by the Department of Chemistry. And the rest of the scene went with a swing – Mark Antony’s ‘Cry Havoc’ speech and all. It was only when Antony and the servant of Octavius started to bear away the body that things went wrong. You see, it
was
a body. Caesar had been stabbed through the heart.”