Death at the President's Lodging (17 page)

The mention of Chicago had been one absolute point. This was another. And Pownall took a moment to square himself to it.

“My hands were tied. Once I had – unnerved by the blood and with, I admit, the gravest folly – used that ink, I dared not risk another move. Hiding the bloodstain had been the result of some morbid streak of fear rising up in me: it rose again the next night when I continued to tamper with the carpet. And I felt at the time, I think, that I would rather be hanged than admit to it.”

The man could make a good come-back – knew what and when to concede. They were all able…what a case it was…! And suddenly Appleby found himself shocked at the quality of pure intellectual pleasure that he himself could get from this wretched business – this wretched murder where murder had no reason to be. He remembered thoughts which had come to him pacing up and down Bishop’s in the darkness that morning. The darkness, the silence, pregnant somehow with the spirit of the place, had brought him momentarily a strange bitterness – bitterness that he had come to these courts he knew as an instrument of retributive justice. And that mood had been succeeded by anger. He remembered touching the cold carved stone of an archway and feeling a permanence: something here before our time began; here while our time, as Titlow was to paint it, moved fearfully and gigantically to its close; to be here in other times than ours. He remembered a significance that the light over Surrey archway, shining steadily amid the darkness and vapour, had taken on. And he remembered how he had sworn to drive out the intrusive alien thing… And now here he was with the problem coldly before him again – a frankly enjoyable intellectual game…

And yet it was impossible altogether to suppress the element of emotion – of piety. Why was this scholar sitting here coldly telling fibs – in a matter of life and death? Had he taken a revolver and shot Umpleby in the head? After all, why should he do such an idiotic thing? A little wave of exasperation came over Appleby and he let himself go farther than he had yet done.

“Well, Mr Pownall, did your observation extend to the hour at which these interesting events took place?”

But Pownall was not to be rattled by a tone of contempt any more than he was to be shaken by disbelief. “I looked at my watch as I got out of bed. It was ten forty-two.”

“Ten forty-
two
.” Irony emphasized the precision. “But was not ten forty-two, sir, eighteen minutes before we knew that the President was shot? Just how was the living Dr Umpleby, do you think, persuaded to part with – well, even two inches of blood? There seems to be some difficulty.”

“I suppose it needn’t have been Umpleby’s blood. I suppose the plotter – whoever he was – was laying as many false clues beforehand as possible. Then he would simply have to kill Umpleby somewhere close at hand, run, and then cause the alarm to be given.”

“But we know that the President was shot in his study, where the shot would almost certainly be heard and mark the time. And then the President’s body was found there, surrounded by Mr Haveland’s bones. Does that square?”

“Yes, it does. Remember, the plotter knew that I had found out what was afoot. He had heard me call after him. And so he might abandon the plan of putting the crime on me and attempt to put it on Haveland instead.”

There was a long pause. Resolutely Appleby said nothing. And eventually Pownall added something more. “Or the murderer might abandon his plan of fathering the murder on someone else. If he were an unbalanced person, for instance, and his elaborate plan miscarried, then–”

“He might turn round on himself and leave his own signature, as it were, openly on the deed? I see.”

Appleby got up. And then a thought seemed to strike him. “By the way, if your first suggestion holds – if the murderer, knowing he had failed to frame you, decided to frame Mr Haveland, he must have counted on your unlikely folly in concealing what you ought immediately to have revealed.”

“I do not suppose my first suggestion to hold,” said Pownall.

It was a thoughtful and perplexed Appleby who walked slowly back through Orchard Ground to the President’s Lodging. He felt a disposition to react against these odd little interviews by which the case seemed to be conducting itself. He had an uneasy feeling that his own favourite technique, which was that of sitting back and watching and listening, was somehow inadequate – dangerous, indeed – in this case: something more aggressive was required. In discussion, all these people would be endlessly plausible – and they would hardly ever make a mistake.

What had he really learnt? Or what, rather, had he really learnt that he was not
meant
to learn? His one success, so far, had been in this last encounter with Pownall: he had at least forced Pownall from one position to another – convicted him of very injudicious conduct. But that success had been the result of orthodox police methods: a little successful prying through a window, a little successful bullying. Had he made a mistake in trying to follow these people over their own discursive ground? And these palavers took time; the morning had slipped away without appreciable gain. He would not have another of these face-to-face interviews until he had done a little preliminary backstairs work. And the need for one piece of concrete investigation was pressing upon him vividly – had been pressing upon him when he told Dodd that he was presently going to take a walk. He had to solve a puzzle that seemed at once irrelevant to the case and at the same time too near the case to be really irrelevant… And meantime he turned into the President’s Lodging to persuade Dodd, if Dodd himself was impatient to be gone, to provide another officer sufficiently senior to go on with the business of taking formal statements. He was not yet prepared to give time to that himself.

He was still somewhat gloomy as he crossed the President’s hall. Quick results were not to be looked for, to be sure, in a case so complicated as the present. Nevertheless, certain things should now have emerged or be beginning to emerge that had not in fact done so. Certain threads of motive there should be by now – and, actually, what was there? Umpleby had been disliked by Haveland and others, and there was a dubious story of his having made free with other people’s intellectual property. Very insufficient, so far. What else might have emerged? The weapon…?

Appleby turned into the dining-room. At one end of the table the sad sergeant was gathering together a bundle of papers. At the other end sat Dodd, apparently in meditation. And on the polished mahogany between them lay a tiny gleaming revolver – a delicate thing with a slender barrel of chilly blue steel, a slender curved ivory butt. Barely a serious weapon – but at three or four yards just serious enough.

Appleby was analysing his surprise at this appearance when Dodd awoke from his meditations and beamed. “The coppers,” he said, “have managed a little more of the rough work for you” – he waved his hand at the pistol – “and will now withdraw.” And he began gathering his own papers together.

“Without divulging the hiding place of this interesting object?”

“To be sure – I was forgetting. We found it among the Wenuses and other fabulous animals.” Inspector Dodd had his own power of literary allusion.

“Quite so,” said Appleby; “among the Wenuses. What could be more obvious?” And even the sad sergeant joined discreetly in the mirth. Then Dodd explained.

“Babbitt found it in the storeroom of Little Fellows’. You know how a passage runs back on the ground floor to the little staircase that goes down to the servants’ basement pantry and so on? Back there on the ground floor itself, just over the pantry, there is a little storeroom or big cupboard full of all manner of junk. Babbitt” – Dodd continued with a momentary return to the meditative manner – “was routing about there before you were facing that breakfast of yours… Well, there is all manner of stuff, apparently, including a good many of Titlow’s cast-off oddities. Quite a museum of a place: there’s statues and mummy-cases and bits of an old bathroom floor – or so Babbitt says, but your learning will doubtless recognize a Roman pavement or such-like. And the door is more or less blocked by an old bath chair that Empson used to use (it seems) when he was lamer than he is. And behind that are these heathen females, and the revolver had been chucked behind them again. Not a bad hiding place, really.”

“It no doubt had its points,” Appleby agreed rather dryly. He was staring thoughtfully at the little weapon. And for some moments he continued to stare.

“You seem to be waiting for it to jump up and out with the whole story,” said Dodd.

“I have a feeling that it has already told me something just as it lies. But I can’t fix it.
Abondance de richesse
again. A few minutes ago I was feeling that perhaps I had learnt nothing after all. And now in a minute I learn far too much.”

“The approved cryptic manner,” said Dodd with a chuckle.

Appleby almost blushed – and certainly became brisk. “Got a railway timetable, Dodd? Good. Sergeant, have you had a jaunt to town recently? Go over, will you, and get my suitcase from Six-two.”

“The Yard in action,” continued Dodd in the same humorous vein. “And now, in my own humble way, I’m off after my burglars. Kellett will be here presently to continue taking statements and so forth as you want them. I think you said you were going to take a nice walk. Don’t let them bludgeon you again in our rural solitudes. And if your learned friends aren’t claiming you, will you meet Mrs D over supper?”

Appleby accepted cordially: it would be a failure in propriety, he felt, to appear at the St Anthony’s board again. The arrangement was just completed when the sergeant returned with the suitcase, and Appleby fell rapidly to work before a lingering and attentive Dodd.

“You don’t think he’ll have left fingerprints, do you?” the latter asked incredulously.

“You never can tell.” Appleby’s fingers were busy twisting up a stout length of wire.

“I never heard of dusting for fingerprints with a sort of rabbit-trap before.” Dodd was amused and impressed and happy in the contemplation of these mysterious proceedings.

“Good Lord, Dodd; how out of date your shockers must be! You don’t think I’m going to tackle what may be a hundred-to-one chance myself, do you? It’s a job for the best chemists and photographers we have. And they will want the bullet too, by the way, when it’s available.” The little wire cage was finished as he spoke; the revolver, delicately lifted, fitted miraculously into it; the whole, together with the notorious tenth key, fitted into a small steel box. The box was locked and handed to the sergeant; its key pocketed. “There you are, Sergeant, and there’s the timetable. The first train to town and then a taxi to the Yard. Mr Mansell in the east block. Time is an element in these diversions – so off with you. And you’d better stay the night: you might be useful to bring back reports. So have a good time.”

The sad sergeant went off transformed. And Dodd went off too. He carried away with him for meditation a new image of Appleby – an image, momentarily caught, of a startled and startling eye.

Undergraduates were strolling through Bishop’s – more of them than usual, perhaps, and more slowly than the bite in the air might seem to warrant. Some lingered to converse with friends at windows – and the windows of the court were remarkably peopled too. But Appleby, pacing in the filtered winter sunshine where he had before paced in darkness, was oblivious of his character as a spectacle. The excitement detected by Dodd was on him still.

To Dodd he had complained earlier of too much light – but it had been light, or a multiplicity of lights, playing brokenly and confusedly on a blank wall. Now the light had suddenly concentrated itself and revealed an opening, an uncertain avenue down which it might be possible to press. He was beginning that exploration now. And as he went cautiously forward the avenue narrowed and defined itself; the light grew…

He knew now something that he ought to have known the moment he first entered the President’s study. The shot heard by Titlow and Slotwiner could not have been the shot that killed Umpleby. Barocho’s gown was next to absolute proof of this. Appleby had found it – carefully replaced as it had first been discovered – swathed round the dead man’s head. And for this the murderer had surely had no time. Between the report from the study and the entry of Titlow and Slotwiner scarcely a quarter of a minute could have elapsed. To scatter the bones, to scrawl however hastily on the wall and then to escape into the orchard would take every available second. The murderer would have had no time to wrap a gown round his victim’s head – and he would have had no motive to do so either.

And all this, which should have come home to Appleby at once – which must, indeed, have been lurking deep in his mind from the first – it had needed a chance piece of information from Dodd to bring to consciousness. And it had come to consciousness in the form of a vivid picture. For as he had stood in Umpleby’s dining-room his inner vision had recreated for itself all the impenetrable darkness of a moonless November night – darkness such as he had himself experienced a dozen hours before. And through the darkness had lumbered a dubious shape, creaking and jolting – a shape indefinable until, stopping by the dim light from a pair of French windows, it revealed itself as a bath chair in which was huddled a human body, its head swathed in black…

And as the picture came now once more with renewed conviction to Appleby’s mind he turned round and hurried into Orchard Ground. A minute later he had found the storeroom of which Dodd had spoken. The bath chair was there. Would it be possible to say that it had recently been used – that it had recently been outside? He fell to an absorbed examination. It was, even as it had presented itself to his imagination, an old and creaking wickerwork thing – a hair-raising vehicle for the purpose to which he suspected it of having been put. But it was in sound enough order. He studied the hubs. There was no trace of oil – slight evidence, perhaps, that if the chair had been used it had been used in an emergency, without previous plan. And nowhere was there any blood. That, of course, would give the motive for the swathed head: nowhere must there be blood except in the President’s study… And next, Appleby turned his attention to the tyres. They were old and worn, the rubber hard and perished, with a surface to which little would adhere. But here and there were minute cracks and fissures which offered hope. In these, in one or two places, were traces of gravel – but all bone dry. Supposing this gravel to have been picked up a couple of nights before, could it be as dry as this? Appleby thought it could – and searched on for better evidence. And when he had almost finished minutely scanning the perimeter of the second wheel he found it. Between tyre and rim, caught up as the chair had scraped against the border of some lawn, was a single blade of grass. And that clear green, which clings even in mid-winter to an immemorial turf, was on it still. Recently – very recently – the bath chair had been used.