Death at the President's Lodging (10 page)

His companions, Appleby noticed, were quite evidently aware that something had at length been said relevant to the President’s death. Addressing Campbell, therefore, he came more directly to his point. “What is St Anthony’s like for climbing in, out, or about?” he asked.

Campbell laughed rather shortly. “I’m a mountaineer at times, as you know. But I assure you I’m not a housebreaker – or a steeplejack, and I don’t see that I’m qualified to give an opinion. Anyone could get on to the roofs through some trap door or other and scamper round; but I should say, for what it is worth, that that would be about all. I should imagine that climbing up or down, in or out, is almost impossible.”

“Even to a skilled climber?”

Campbell answered steadily.

“Even to a skilled climber.”

Appleby sat in his bedroom and took stock – first, and by long habit, of his immediate surroundings; then of his mind. The room did not occupy him long. It was about eight feet square, eight feet high and for window it had a bewildering maze of traceried glass sweeping in a Gothic curve from the floor in one corner to the ceiling in another. St Anthony’s, willing to cram into its venerable fabric an extra dozen of undergraduates, had carried out some curious internal alterations in the venerable fabric’s structure. The room bore traces of its regular occupant in the shape of an empty jar labelled
Rowing
Ointment
, a religious text decorated with an exuberant floral border, a half-tone representation of Miss Mae West, and ten uniform photographs in uniform frames of exceedingly uniform young men – the other ten, doubtless, of some school eleven of the recent past. Why the owner of these
keimelia
was not in residence among them had not been explained: perhaps he had had some difference of opinion with authority; perhaps (Appleby speculated) he was having measles or mumps.

Appleby turned to his thoughts. He was feeling, on the whole, more confident than when he had parted from Dodd. Going over Dodd’s facts had given him certain physical contours of the situation – contours that must be regarded as significant by reason of the definition with which they appeared to point, limit, exclude. But around them Appleby had felt a complete darkness; they were no more than a sort of braille recording of the facts. But later in the evening he had begun to see light, or the possibility of light – light flickering and uncertain, no doubt, as the dying fires in the common-room must be at this moment. From the stage and
décor
– that so elaborately constructed stage, that gruesome
décor
– Appleby had arrived at some view of the
dramatis personae
; at some glimpse, perhaps, of the protagonists…

A certain amount of Appleby’s work lay among persons of considerable cunning. Occasionally he had the stimulus of crossing swords with a good or excellent natural intelligence. But for the most part he dealt with sub-average intelligence, or with normal intelligence circumscribed and handicapped by deficient training and knowledge. And here was what might be intellectually the case of his life. Here was a society of men much above the average in intelligence, the product of a variety of severe mental trainings, formidably armed with knowledge. The secret was hidden amongst them and intelligence and athletic thinking would be needed to reveal it.

Of one thing that evening he had begun to feel convinced. His earlier cautious refusal to take as conclusive those physical facts that cried “
Submarine!
” to Dodd might almost certainly be abandoned. The extraordinary fact of the freshly fitted locks and freshly issued keys had been almost conclusive of that in itself. Directly or indirectly, the murder had been brought about by one or more of the persons with keys. The only alternative – that a malefactor had climbed out of the locked orchard – was sufficiently unlikely to be put last in any line of investigation. The keys held the key. They gave a formula:

Deighton-Clerk, Empson, Gott, Haveland, Lambrick, Pownall, Titlow, the college porter, a hypothetical X (possessor of the missing tenth key); one, or some, or all of these murdered Umpleby – or so disposed of a key as to be able to throw light on the murder.

Appleby looked mentally at this and saw that he had missed something. He brought out pencil and paper and wrote an elaborated formula down:

Slotwiner; Deighton-Clerk, Empson, Gott, Haveland, Lambrick, Pownall, Titlow, the college porter, a hypothetical X (possessor of the tenth key); one, or some, or all of these murdered Umpleby, or one of the ninth last so disposed of a key as to be in a position to throw light on the murder. So far, none can be excluded, but if Slotwiner and Titlow are telling the truth they corroborate each other’s alibis… Dodd is having certain further alibi statements checked.

So much he had learned that afternoon in the President’s Lodging – and so much his subsequent impressions had come to confirm. But what else had he learned later? What had he learned from his interview with the Dean? First, certain facts about the Dean himself. He had been anxious to have it found that the murder was an
outside
murder – that was natural enough. And he had advanced an argument which was simply in effect, “Such things do not happen among us. And the quality of our knowledge that they do not so happen is really safer evidence than arbitrary physical indications to the contrary.” Appleby had given the argument fair weight, but he was abandoning it now – and the Dean, he suspected, was doing the same… What else had transpired? The Dean was apprehensive that routine investigation would bring to light matters of petty scandal within the college. And he had recently had some sort of quarrel with Umpleby himself. That was about all. As to more general impressions, they were difficult to form as yet. The man was upset – even thrown off his balance. He would not have given way slightly to a latent pomposity, would not have made pointless reference to the celebrations in which St Anthony’s was soon to indulge, had that not been so. But that he was insincere, that he was concealing any material information – of anything of this sort there was no evidence.

Appleby next passed to a review of the events in hall or rather to the one significant event: the odd behaviour of Barocho. The Spaniard had possibly only the vaguest ideas on the circumstances of Umpleby’s death, and was aiming something at random and for reasons of his own – at Titlow, had it been, or at Haveland? Or had there been no specific application; merely something tossed into the air for the purpose of watching the general reaction? Not much useful thinking, probably, could be done on the incident at present.

But on coming to the events in the common-room Appleby faced a complexity which made him feel suddenly cramped. He sprang up and passed into the absent undergraduate’s sitting-room – a big, rather dingy apartment, its walls entirely panelled in wood that had been overlaid with chocolate-coloured paint. Turning on the reading lamp, Appleby began to pace softly up and down.

The outstanding fact was Haveland’s admission – that oddly public admission – of the proprietorship of the bones. He ought to have admitted this earlier to Dodd. That the bones would be traced to him he must have known as fairly certain: why then had he delayed owning to them? Obviously, in order to do so under the particular circumstances possible in the common-room, with all his colleagues around him. He had wanted to show himself publicly as aware of the existence of a case against himself. He had appealed to Empson to reveal a most damaging story that he believed only Empson knew – the story of a quarrel with Umpleby which had led to his expressing a malevolent wish now almost literally fulfilled: “I said I would like to see him immured in one of his own grisly sepulchres.”

It was a terrific admission to have to make, and Haveland must have been aware that Appleby would soon be in possession of information which would make it doubly – and more than doubly – terrific. Haveland had once experienced a fit of serious unbalance – and the circumstances had apparently suggested some morbid attraction to symbols of physical dissolution.

What had happened, then, was this. Confronted by these disquieting facts, Haveland had come forward and said, “You are at liberty to believe that in a fit of aberration last night I killed the President and made good my wish as to his lying amid a litter of bones. Or you can suspect that somebody aware of all this has put a plant on me.”

Somebody aware of all this
… “Empson knew I had a collection of bones in college: I wonder if anyone else knew…?” Empson, you know what I mean, and I don’t think anyone else knows of it…” “That is correct, Empson, is it not…?” Haveland had, in fact, as good as pointed to Empson. And what had Empson done? Perhaps the most striking fact, Appleby reflected, was that Empson, aware enough of the insinuation,
had not pointed back
. Empson had, after a manner, pointed
sideways
. “Ask Titlow…” There was nothing in the words, but there had been no mistaking the existence of some significance behind them. There had indeed been an electrical atmosphere round that table, and now Appleby was feeling his way to recreating it – conjuring it up imaginatively in order to test and explore it anew.

The facts pointing at Haveland. Haveland pointing at Empson. Empson (like Barocho?) pointing at Titlow. And Titlow himself? “I can imagine their being put there to incriminate you, Haveland. Pownall, does that not seem possible to you?” Had there been anything in that? Appleby thought there had – but amid all these charged utterances was he now reading a charge into something uncharged, casual merely? Anyway, Pownall in his turn had certainly pointed. It was he who had, at length, pointed back at Haveland: “I can imagine an explanation which is at once simpler and odder…” “Haveland, what madman’s trick are you suggesting?” Appleby knew how, on the level of intellectual dispute, these men would toss a ball around in just that way, each trying to embarrass the other. It was the habit in any mentally athletic society, no doubt; and no doubt the same process would have its pleasures on the level of scandal and gossip. But when it was a case of murder that was in question…?

Appleby felt that he had run over the salient facts. Now he turned to contemplate those less obtrusive. And the less obtrusive facts, he well knew, were often finally the vital facts: the neglect of some minute observation, the leaving of a single fugitive query unattended to, was often the ruining of an elaborate and laborious detective procedure.

The candle-grease. Slotwiner and the candles. The
Deipnosophists
upside down. The safe. Barocho’s gown. The Dean, hitherto so reticent about college scandal, describing Haveland’s old attack. Curtis so casually, so vaguely making sure that Appleby should know that Gott was Pentreith… And finally there was Campbell, the man who had gone high; more significantly, the man who had scaled St Baldred’s tower. He was married and lived out of college. He had no key. But he was an ethnologist and so connected with the Umpleby group. And although Appleby did not believe in the probability of Campbell scaling the heights of St Anthony’s as it were alpenstock in hand, probability was not enough. Troublesome red herring as he might be, he must be kept in mind.

Appleby’s thoughts swam up from these speculations to a consciousness of his surroundings. He had been staring unseeingly at a rather scanty shelf of books:
Stubb’s Select Charters, Poems of To-day, The Forsyte Saga, Trent’s Last Case…

He turned round and swung impatiently across the room. A kettle, a commoner’s gown, a football “cap” – its tinsel already tarnished by those vapours that were even now floating round the courts. Kneeling on a window-seat he threw open a window and looked out. It was black, damp, cold. But it was cold too inside, and Appleby was not at all sleepy. Obeying an impulse, he switched off the light, groped his way out to the landing and then softly made his way downstairs. There was a light under one door, and a murmur of voices. Excited undergraduates sitting up over the case, no doubt, and fortifying themselves lawfully within college with some of those pleasant potations denied to the unhappily prowling Gott. But by this time Gott would be comfortably in his bed in Surrey: as Appleby reached the open air there came to him, muffled and solemn, one deep note from a distant bell, followed by fainter chimes from other quarters. One o’clock.

The Dean’s staircase, where Appleby had his rooms, was in the corner of Bishop’s diagonal to the common-rooms. On the left, over the archway to Surrey, a lamp still burned. But it had been turned low and its light hardly reached across the gravel path to the edge of the lawn which Appleby knew stretched in front of him. The night was starless and obscure. Almost nothing could be seen except an uncertain line separating two contrasting textures of darkness – textures which would reveal themselves at dawn as stone and sky. And yet Appleby had never felt the place more keenly than under this spell of silence and night. He began to pace up and down the near side of the court, cleaving a path through the darkness, absorbed.

Two o’clock found Appleby still pacing. But the echo of the bells once more made him pause, and in the pause there came to him the second impulse of that night. Behind the screen of buildings in front of him lay Orchard Ground, and in his pocket reposed a key. It was now the only key, with the exception of the problematical tenth, not in the possession of his colleagues. The keys had been collected from their owners that morning (a bold exercise of authority by Dodd); a constable armed with one had stood guard all day; and a relief, similarly armed, was now sitting in the porter’s lodge. Empson, Haveland, Pownall and Titlow, once they had been let into Orchard Ground for the night, were thus virtually prisoners of the police until the morning. As things stood at the moment – and they could hardly so stand for long – no one could get in or out of Orchard Ground without applying to the constable on duty – or to Appleby. The latter’s impulse to use his key now was quite irrational, for in the almost impenetrable darkness nothing certainly could be done. But impulses of the sort he did not think it necessary invariably to resist, and he moved cautiously off to the nearer of the two gates – that between chapel and library. Then suddenly changing his mind, he struck across the lawn, skirting the library and chapel, to reach the western gate instead – that between hall and the President’s Lodging. This was, of course, the gate he had seen when moving to the common-room after dinner, and the gate through which the constable would have admitted the four Orchard Ground men to their rooms.