Death at the President's Lodging (18 page)

Appleby turned to the back. The chair was propelled by a single horizontal handle of the kind that can be removed by unscrewing a knob at each end. Mechanically, following the routine search for fingerprints, Appleby unscrewed. And then he glanced round the little room. It was, as Dodd had reported, full of lumber – and obviously of Titlow’s lumber chiefly. There was a harquebus. There was a meek-looking shark in a glass case. And there were one or two plaster casts, including one of a recumbent Venus – the goddess, no doubt, behind whom the revolver had been found. Appleby, not venturing to sit down on the chair, sat down on this lady’s stomach instead – and thought hard.

Umpleby alive in his study at half-past ten. Umpleby shot, elsewhere, between that hour and eleven… And suddenly there came back to Appleby another impression of the night before. The quiet of Bishop’s, protected by the great barrier of chapel, library and hall. The intermittent rumble and clatter of night traffic heard in Orchard Ground, increasing to uproar as one came nearer and nearer Schools Street. Every five minutes there must come, even in the night, a moment in which it would be safe to fire a revolver without fear of detection.

Umpleby killed here in Orchard Ground and his body trundled back to his study. Umpleby killed at one time and place and given the appearance of being killed at another time and place. At another time and place and
therefore by someone else
. Alibi…no, that wasn’t it: there had been the second shot. Stay to fire a second shot and you can’t be establishing an alibi.
Destroying someone
else’s alibi
…that was better… And then to Appleby’s picture of that grim conveyance emerging from the darkness there was added a new detail. At the feet of the dead man was a box – perhaps a sack – filled with bones.

He heaved himself up from the chilly and unyielding abdomen of Aphrodite and went slowly out of the storeroom. In the lobby he paused. On his left, Haveland’s rooms: the bones had lived there. On his right, Pownall’s – and on the carpet, blood. He turned into Orchard Ground once more and fell to pacing among the trees – this time a spectacle to none. His mind was absorbed in testing a formula – a formula which ran:

He couldn’t prove he didn’t do it there and in twenty minutes’ time – were some indication left that he was guilty. But he could prove he didn’t do it here and now.

And he added a rider:
An efficient man; he reloaded and let the revolver be found showing one shot.
And then he added a query:
Second bullet
? And finally, and inconsequently, he appended a reflection
: Nevertheless I must take that walk still – best do it now
.

Appleby had not set foot outside St Anthony’s since the big yellow Bentley had deposited him at its gates the afternoon before. And he was beginning to feel the need of a change of air. He had planned a little itinerary for himself which was to subserve both business and pleasure; the carrying out of it had been interrupted by the discovery of the revolver; he was resolved not to delay it longer now. A sandwich and a pint of beer at the Berklay bar and he would be off. He was just slipping through the archway to Surrey when he became aware of the approach of Mr Deighton-Clerk. And on Mr Deighton-Clerk’s countenance there showed, in addition to its customary benevolent severity, the clear light of St Anthony’s hospitality. Appleby’s heart sank – justifiably, as it quickly appeared.

“Ah, Mr Appleby, I have just been seeking you out. Pray come and take luncheon with me if you can spare the time; I should much like to have another talk with you. Something simple will be waiting in my rooms now.”

Appleby scarcely
had
the time – and certainly not the inclination. But he lacked the courage to say so. Perhaps long-buried habit was at work: the habit of intelligent youth to jump to the invitation of its intelligent seniors. Or perhaps the detective instinct subterraneously counselled a change of plan. Be this as it may, Appleby murmured appropriate words and followed Mr Deighton-Clerk meekly enough. He took some pleasure in the mysterious handle of the bath chair which he carried delicately with him. It would puzzle the Dean.

The luncheon was doubled fillet of sole,
bécasse Carême
and
poires flambées
– and there was a remarkable St Anthony’s hock. College cooks can produce such luncheons and undergraduates – and even dons – give them. But it was an odd gesture, Appleby thought, with which to entertain a bobby off his beat – or on it. About Deighton-Clerk there was some concealed uncertainty. His beautiful but rather precious room, his excellent but untimely woodcock, were the gestures of an uncertain man. And, once again, his conversation began uncertainly. With his colleagues, even in a difficult and untoward situation, the Dean was efficient, easy and correct. But add to the untoward situation a stranger whom he had difficulty in “placing” and he was frequently a shade out. During the meal his talk held frequent echoes of the formality and pomposity which had appeared in his first exchanges with Appleby. But now, as then, he managed finally to achieve forthrightness. He talked at length, but without more than an occasional suggestion of speech-making.

“You may remember my saying yesterday evening how particularly unfortunate the President’s death was at this particular time – just before our celebrations. It was an odd and irrelevant thing to feel – or to imagine I felt – and I have been thinking it over. And it seems to me that I was really trying to invent worries that didn’t exist in order to cloak from myself the worries that did – and do – exist. I was determined to repulse the idea that our President could have been murdered by any member of his own Society; I was anxious – at the expense of logic as you no doubt felt – to see the murder traced out and away from St Anthony’s.

“I am impressed now by the extent to which – quite involuntarily – I ignored or even distorted evidence. I was inclined to see those bones, for instance, as evidence of some irrational outbreak
from
without
upon the order and sanity of our college. I contrived to ignore the reflection that the interests of a number of my colleagues made it possible that they should have bones in their possession. And – what is more remarkable – I succeeded in repressing my memory of poor Haveland’s aberration.”

There was a pause while the Dean’s servant brought in coffee. Appleby remembered the periodical pauses in Pownall’s room that morning. But while Pownall’s pauses were involuntary, Deighton-Clerk seemed to contrive his for the purpose of underlining a point. If not an outside madman, then at least an inside
madman
. That, in effect, was what the Dean was saying – and his motive, as before, was thought for the minimum of scandal… But now he was continuing.

“But what I want to say is this: that last night I failed in my duty. The urgency of my feeling that this or that event or situation in St Anthony’s could not bear any correspondence to murder made me, I am afraid, insufficiently communicative. I tried to impress upon you the fact that such disharmonies as have existed here are on another plane from murder. I would have been better leaving that – which I still of course believe – to your own common sense when you had heard a dispassionate account of what those disharmonies have been. That account I want to give you now.”

Most long-winded of the sons of St Anthony – Appleby was murmuring to himself – get on with it! Aloud he said, “It is difficult to tell what may be helpful – directly or indirectly.”

“Quite so,” responded Deighton-Clerk – much as he would reward a discreet observation by an undergraduate – “quite so. And I must tell you first – what indeed I hinted at before – that for some years now we have not been an altogether happy society. You heard the shocking remark that Haveland tells us he made to Umpleby, and you will have noticed other signs of friction. I mentioned to you a dispute I myself recently had with the President – of that I must tell you presently. But the first thing I must say is that for the disputes we have had amongst us I am unable to apportion blame. Irritations arising one cannot tell how have hardened into quarrels, enmities, accusations. There have been accusations – a thing shocking in itself – and accusations of mild criminality. But it is significant of the scale of the whole miserable business that a dispassionate mind would find it difficult, I believe, to say where the blame really lies.

“I should tell you something of Umpleby himself. He was a very able man – and in that, perhaps, lies the essence of the situation. We have no other intellect in St Anthony’s which could touch his – unless, it may be, Titlow’s. But Titlow’s is an intellect of fits and starts compared with Umpleby’s. Umpleby had all but Titlow’s ability, and far more intellectual tenacity. The great strength of Umpleby lay in his being able to cover a number of fields – of related fields, I mean, and organize useful affiliations between workers in one and another. And here in St Anthony’s he had gathered together a team. Only the team fell out.

“As I told you last night in the common-room, Haveland, Titlow, Pownall, Campbell and Ransome were all pretty closely associated – and the association was really thought out and organized by Umpleby. I was interested in the work myself, in an inactive way – or at least in those aspects of the work that touched the Mediterranean syncretisms. So I had an eye on the relations between Umpleby and the others from early on and was aware of the trouble pretty well from the beginning.”

Appleby had brought out his notebook – not without a certain diffidence over the remains of the Dean’s elegant and unpolicemanly luncheon. Deighton-Clerk, seeming to recognize the diffidence, made a permissive gesture – not unepiscopal in its rotundity – and proceeded.

“I would put the beginnings of a certain awkwardness about five years ago, after Campbell got his Fellowship. He was a very young man then – I suppose about twenty-three. And that would make him only two or three years younger than our other young man, Rowland Ransome, the research Fellow. Ransome had been working for some time, practically under Umpleby’s direction, when Campbell came to St Anthony’s and the two young men became close friends. Ransome is a clever creature but – well – intermittent: one thing he will do well and indeed brilliantly, and the next carelessly and ill. He is a careless, happy-go-lucky and often obstinate person, with very little thought for his own reputation or success. And presently Campbell got it into his head, rightly or wrongly, that Umpleby was exploiting Ransome. Ransome, he thought, was content to work under Umpleby’s direction to an extent not proper to his status, and Umpleby was profiting by Ransome’s results as a man should not profit from the results of his pupil. And he convinced Ransome himself that this was so.

“As I said, it is a matter very difficult to judge. Umpleby was printing steadily – and printing without more than occasional reference to Ransome. But you have to remember that Umpleby was organizing and coordinating the work of a number of people with those people’s consent – and a good deal to their advantage. I record here the opinion, Mr Appleby, that Umpleby never appropriated other people’s intellectual property for any good it would do himself in the learned world.”

This was a dark saying and Appleby, remembering his own incredulity over Haveland’s insinuation of plagiarism, challenged it at once.

“‘For any good it would do himself’ – will you explain that qualification, please?”

“You will find, Mr Appleby, that it explains itself presently. To put it briefly, Umpleby came to relish annoying people. And if he himself worked out, say,
Solution x
, he was capable of working still harder to persuade, say, Colleague A that
Solution x
was Colleague A’s achievement – simply for the amusement of annoying Colleague A by appearing to steal
Solution x
from him later on.”

“I see,” said Appleby. (And what, he was wondering, would Dodd make of
this
?)

“I can now take up my thread again,” continued the Dean, “without further emphasis on the fact that Umpleby was not an easy or amiable man. When he heard that Ransome, who had been his pupil since he came up, and whom he regarded as his pupil still, was complaining (behind his back, as he said) in the way I have mentioned he was furious. The situation was exceedingly awkward until Ransome went abroad four years ago. He was away for two years and when he came back the trouble flared up again. There were scenes – incidents, perhaps, is a better word – and finally Umpleby acted in what was generally thought a very high-handed manner. He had in his possession certain valuable documents which had always been understood to be preponderantly Ransome’s. When I say valuable documents you will understand, of course, that I mean valuable in a learned sense: they constituted, in fact, an almost completely worked out key to certain inscriptions which promised to be of the greatest importance – I need not particularize. Umpleby simply hung on to them. When Ransome, he said, was out of the country again he might have them: Ransome’s presence here was offensive to him and that was his only means of getting him away. Well, Ransome went, and has been away ever since. And over this arose my own quarrel with Umpleby – the quarrel to which I referred yesterday evening.”

Deighton-Clerk was absorbed in his narrative now: the self-consciousness, the orotundity were gone in the intellectual effort to attain the completest clarity. Appleby was listening intently.

“A few months ago I had a letter from Ransome saying that the documents had not come back to him. And he added some hint that set me making certain inquiries. And presently I found to my great uneasiness that Umpleby was proposing to print matter bearing on the decipherment of the inscriptions in question in a learned journal. I was told this in the greatest confidence by the editor, Sir Theodore Peek, and I at once approached Umpleby privately. I could get no satisfaction from him. And then I considered it my duty to bring the matter up formally at a college meeting. It was not strictly in order to do so, but I did it. And it caused high words. Superficially, it was not a very serious affair – merely an unfortunate dispute between colleagues over a learned matter. But underneath there lay this ugly hint of plagiarism – or theft. Remember, please, that it is not a simple business. I have not the least doubt that Umpleby was capable of work on those inscriptions of a superior order to Ransome’s, and beyond the fact that Umpleby was acting high-handedly and unjustly in retaining another man’s property – or part property – the whole matter is perplexed.”