Death at the President's Lodging (20 page)

“And
therefore
not suitable for one of Gott’s lucubrations,” said Horace with heavy irony. “What, I ask, is the university coming to? We shall be hearing of Deighton-Clerk doing advertisement copy-writing on the quiet next.”

“Did you say
lucubrations
?” asked David, bethinking himself of a belated pedantry. “Wrong word. Means something done in the night.”

“Like Umpleby,” said Horace. “He was done-in-nin the night all right.
And
I’m not convinced
he
wasn’t really one of Gott’s lucubrations.”

But David, ignoring this witticism, had produced a map. “Gentlemen,” he said, “let us confer.” They all stared rather vaguely at the map.

“It is a matter,” said Horace, “of penetrating to the mind of the quarry. Did you ever read
The
Thirty-Nine Steps
, Mike? An altogether healthier type of fiction than the morbid perpetrations of Uncle Gott. Well, there was a man there who wanted to pass as a Scottish road-mender. And he did it by thinking himself into the part. He gave his whole mind to
being
a road-mender. And as a result he survived the keenest scrutiny of the emissaries of the Black Stone – and all that. Now, all we have to do is to identify ourselves with the criminal; we can then put our finger down quite confidently on David’s map and say:
There he is!
”

“It depends on the size of the map,” said Mike. “I think he’s in London.”

“Too far.”

“No, not really. And a capital place to hide – to lie concealed, as they say. At his club, quite likely. Terribly close London clubs are about their members if you go to inquire. Very nice point Gott makes of that in
Poison at the Zoo
–”

David and Horace gave a concerted groan.

“Anyway,” said David, “do dons
have
clubs? I don’t believe they do – except the very old ones who belong to a special place down by the Duke of York’s Steps… But town’s no good: we bank on a radius of about twenty miles. Let’s see what that takes in.”

He busied himself with a pencil and presently announced: “Just misses St Neots, takes in Biggleswade, goes through Hatfield, misses Amersham, goes through Princes Risborough, misses Kingswood by a few miles and Bicester by a good deal more, just misses Towcester, takes in Olney and a bit beyond–”

“Got it!” cried Mike suddenly, “and we’re all wrong!”

“Olney and a bit beyond,” David reiterated severely, “misses Rushden – and so round to just short of St Neots again. And
now
what is it, Mike?”

“It is,” replied Mike in bubbling excitement, “that we’re miles out. Olney, you see, made me think of Kelmscott at once–”

“And why should Olney make you think of Kelmscott, you moron?”

“Because of the English poets, you ignoramus. And now listen. When I was, as the uninstructed say, a fresher, I made a pilgrimage one vacation to this Kelmscott – a
literary
pilgrimage. And making my way from Kelmscott to Burford I came to a hamlet of which the name escapes me. And outside the hamlet was a manor house or some such – much retired in its own grounds. And just as I was passing, out he came.”

“Out
who
came?”

“Our quarry – as Horace so picturesquely puts it. And even in those days, when I come to think of it, he nursed a criminal conscience. Because he started perceptibly on seeing me, as they say, and appeared, again as they say, to wish to avoid observation. In fact, he seeped out and was gone before I could really distinguish his features. But I recognized him absolutely and instantly by a trick he has – walking with his fists to his shoulders like physical jerks.”

“Is this thing
true
?” demanded Horace.

“Split true. Old David’s prosing away brought it back to me. Of course it’s
miles
away. But if my frail old car can get us there – let’s go quick.”

David nodded his agreement. Horace, who had been lying in his favourite position on the Three Doves carpet, puffing smoke at a sleeping cat, scrambled up, and all three bundled out into the yard. Mike’s frail old car – a thoroughly robust and recent De Dion which had cost a doting aunt a small fortune – was purring in a moment. And presently they were careering exhilaratingly through the tingling winter air in the direction of Farringdon. That there was any sense whatever in their operations none of them believed: they were simply diverting themselves after the complicatedly ironic fashion of their order – the order of more mental undergraduates. To lunch at the Three Doves, to spin through the country drinking the wind of their own speed like Shelley’s spirits, to sing and chant and chatter, and in the intervals play this elaborate make-believe; these were excellent things. And so they ran through Wantage.

Suddenly Mike threw out his clutch and jammed on his brakes with a reckless abruptness that made Horace shut his eyes in the expectation of catastrophe. But the De Dion merely glided smoothly and instantly to a standstill. Over the way was an unbeautiful brick building announcing itself as a Steam Laundry.

“Here,” Mike explained, “we make a purchase.” And he climbed out. “You may come too, if you like,” he added politely

And so the three crossed the road and entered a damp and forbidding office, presided over by a severe – and already surprised and misdoubting – lady of uncertain years. Mike had already removed his hat. Now he bowed – the same bow he was accustomed to give nightly in his character as bible-clerk to the St Anthony’s high-table.

“I wonder, madam, if your establishment uses – I believe they are called skips?”

“Skips? Yes, of course.”

“Of course you use them?”

“Of course they are called skips.
And
of course we use them.”

“Will you sell one?”

“Sell one, sir! This is a laundry, not a basket-maker’s. We haven’t any spare skips.”

“My dear madam, are you sure? It is really quite urgent. May I explain? My grand-aunt – you may know her: Mrs Umpleby of St Anthony’s Lodge – is sailing for India tomorrow, and she has always been accustomed to pack blankets and eiderdowns and things of that sort in a skip. And she has just discovered that her own skip has been damaged by mice, so she asked me–”

“Mice!” interjected the misdoubting lady incredulously.

“Asked me to see what I could do. I understand the usual price is about five pounds–”

Mike produced his pocket-book, and the misdoubting lady, now no longer misdoubting, produced the skip. It was an enormous wickerwork thing, secured by a formidable iron bar, two staples and a padlock. Mike gravely superintended the hoisting of it into the back of the car, paid the surprised lady, assured her of his grand-aunt’s gratitude, distributed substantial tips and waved his friends aboard. The De Dion purred on.

Mike, Horace thought, was probably Aristotle’s Magnificent Man. His fun was on a lordly scale… But the expenditure on the skip had rather shocked him. “What’s it for?” he asked.

“One cage for Bajazeth,” Mike replied – and continued cryptically: “one city of Rome, one cloth of the sun and moon, one dragon for
Faustus
…” The day before he had been deep in the study of Elizabethan stage properties. And presently he was declaiming:

And there, in mire and puddle, have I stood

This ten days’ space; and, lest that I should sleep,

One plays continually upon a drum;

They give me bread and water, being a king…

Tell Isabel the queen, I look’d not thus,

When for her sake I ran at tilt in France…

And Horace, behind, was thumping the skip and answering:

I am Ulysses Laertiades,

The fear of all the world for policies,

For which my facts as high as heaven resound.

I dwell in Ithaca, earth’s most renown’d

All over-shadow’d with the shake-leaf hill,

Tree-famed Neritus…

And then David started on Pindar, and remembering a lot grew more and more excited in the effort to remember more. And the De Dion sang through the air like a thing of victory, and the other two listened much as when the world was young. And so they came to Lechlade and stopped in the square to consider. Presently they were nosing up narrow lanes and for a long time were completely and oddly silent.

“There has come upon us,” said David, “a nasty sense of the possible reality of our quiet fun.”

And it was true. After all, it was
true
that Mike had once seen him near here…

“This,” announced Mike presently, “is my hamlet – and there is the house.”

The hamlet was small and unremarkable. The house was large, gloomy and repellent – a raw red brick affair not unreminiscent of the steam-laundry, and an offence in this country of mellow stone. But it was decently hidden away behind a large well-timbered garden and high brick walls. There was a lodge with high iron gates and a postman’s bicycle leaning against an open wing.

“I think,” said David, “we will put a question or two in the village.” Mike backed the car out of sight of the lodge and they all got out. It seemed an ill-populated hamlet. No one was visible except two very aged men, sitting against the side of a house and sunning themselves in the bleak and diminishing November sun. These worthies David approached.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “We are rather lost: can you tell us the name of this village?”

One of the very aged men nodded vigorously.

“Oi, oi,” he muttered, “powerful great pigs. True it is, there was never such come I was a lad. True it is.”

Conjecturing that this was part of an interrupted conversation rather than directed to his own question, David tried again – loudly.

“What place is this, please?”

Both aged men looked at him kindly and comprehendingly. The second appeared to be on the verge of revelation. But when he spoke it was himself to take up some anterior theme.

“And do ’ee tell oi so!” said the second aged man. “And do ’ee tell oi so!”

Horace was giggling. Mike was making unintelligible signs. And then the first old man suddenly made contact with the new factor in his environment.

“This be Lunnontawn,” he said.

“London town!” repeated David and Mike blankly together.

“Noa! Not Lunnontawn;
Lunnontawn
.”

“And what,” asked Mike, taking up the running and slightly changing the subject, “and what is that house there?” And he pointed to the aggressively red, steam-laundry-like building amid the trees.

“That be White House,” said the second old man, darkly and unexpectedly – and spat.

“White House: who lives there?”

The two aged men looked at each other apprehensively. And then, mysteriously moved by a common impulse, they both struggled to their feet. They were old, old men – gone at the knees and with hands like claws. And they tottered away. The first disappeared at once into the house against which they had been sitting. The second made for a decrepit cottage next door. But on the threshold he paused and shuffled himself painfully round.

“A terrible haunt of wickedness that do be,” he said. He spat, and disappeared.

Mike was shaking his head sadly at Horace. “I heard the old, old men say, All that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters… Chaps, let us drift away.” And the three moved back, rather uncertainly, towards the big house.

“We will go straight in,” said Horace, “and inquire.”

“Horace,” said Mike, “scents
une maison mal famée
.”

“Come on,” said David, “he was lurking here once and may be lurking here again.” The gate was still open and the postman’s bicycle still leaning against it. No one noticed them as they went in, but they caught a glimpse, over a low hedge, of the postman gossiping with someone at the back door of the lodge. “Straight on,” said David. The drive wound among shrubberies. Presently they rounded a bend and saw the White House – saw, that is to say, in addition to the large and garish red structure which was alone visible from the road a long, low and rather dubiously white residence on to which it had been built. It was a depressing place; house and grounds alike seemed decently but lovelessly and unenthusiastically kept. From somewhere behind the shrubbery came a murmur of voices. The three stopped to listen.

And then an odd thing happened. Round the final curve of the drive in front of them there swung the figure of a man, coming from the house. But no sooner had he seen the three intruders bearing down on him than he plunged into the bushes – from the crashing noise that resulted, apparently the thick of the bushes and disappeared.

“Was it him?” cried David. It had all been tremendously sudden.

“Of course it was him,” shouted Mike, and started blindly forward. He didn’t really know, but he did want excitement. All three went galloping up the drive, Horace making blood-curdling noises by way of ironic reference to the sport of fox-hunting. The fugitive, by plunging through a few yards of laurel, had gained a narrow winding path and disappeared. But he could be heard still retreating rapidly, in a direction roughly parallel to the drive, and towards the house. The pursuers followed in single file.