Death at the President's Lodging (3 page)

“Dinner was over by about eight o’clock – as far as the proceedings in hall were concerned. But all the people at the high-table – the President, Dean and Fellows, that is – went across in a body as usual to their common-rooms. They sat in the smaller common-room for about half an hour, having a little extra, I gather, in the way of port and dessert. Then at about half-past eight they made another move – still in a body – to the larger common-room next door. They had coffee and cigarettes there – all according to the day’s routine still – and talked till about nine o’clock. Dr Umpleby was the first to leave: he went off through a door that gives directly into his own house. And if we’re to believe what we’re told, that was the last time any of his colleagues saw him alive.

“Well, the common-room began to break up after that, and by half-past nine everybody was gone. Lambrick, Campbell, Chalmers-Paton are married men and by half-past nine they were off to their homes. The others all went to their rooms about the college. All, that is, with the exception of Gott, who is Junior Proctor and went out patrolling the streets.

“At nine-thirty the locking up began. The porter locked the main gates. That is the moment, you may say, at which the submarine submerged: from that moment to this nobody can have got in or out of St Anthony’s without observation –
unless he had a key
.”

Appleby shook his head in mild protest. “I incline to distrust those keys from the start,” he said, “and I distrust your submarine. A great rambling building like this may have half a dozen irregular entrances – or exits.”

But Dodd’s reply was confident. “The submarine may sound as if I’ve been reading novels, but I believe it’s near the mark. It’s something we have to know in a quiet way – and we could surprise some colleges by pointing out a good many smart dodges. But I’ve overhauled St Anthony’s today, and it’s
watertight
.”

Appleby nodded his provisional acceptance of the point. “Well,” he said, “the President is in his Lodging, the dons are in their rooms, the undergraduates are in theirs, and the great world is effectively locked out. What next?”

“More locking out – or in,” Dodd promptly replied. “The President’s butler locked three doors. He locked the front door of the Lodging giving on Bishop’s Court, he locked the back door giving on St Ernulphus Lane, and he locked the door between the Lodging and the common-rooms – the one, that is, the President had used a little before. That was about ten o’clock. At ten-fifteen came the final locking-up. The porter locked the gates to Orchard Ground…”

Dodd had so far been delivering himself of this scheme of things without book. Now he paused and handed Appleby a sheaf of notes. “I’d go over that again, if I were you,” he said; “it takes a little getting clear.”

Appleby went slowly over the notes and observed, with something of the admiration that was intended, that Dodd had apparently let no discrepancy creep into his oral account. He looked up when he had digested the names and times, and Dodd went on to the crisis of his narrative.

“When Dr Umpleby left the common-room he went straight to his study. At half-past ten his butler, Slotwiner, took in some sort of drink – it was the regular routine apparently – and then retired to his pantry off the hall. Slotwiner more or less had his eye on the hall during the next half-hour and nobody, he says, entered the study that way, and nobody came out. In other words, there was only one way into – or out of – the study during that period – by way of the French windows that give on Orchard Ground.”

“The so-securely locked Orchard Ground,” murmured Appleby.

Dodd took up the implications of the other’s tone perceptively enough. “Exactly. I suppose our first clue is just that – that we have to deal, from the outset, with so obviously artificial a situation. But here meantime is this butler, Slotwiner, in his pantry. The pantry is a mere nook of a place and normally he would have gone downstairs to where he has a room of his own beside the kitchens. But apparently on this night of the week, Mr Titlow – that’s the senior Fellow – has been in the habit of calling on the President for a short talk on college business. He comes regularly just on eleven – pretty late, it seems to me, for a call, but the idea was that each could get in a couple of hours’ work after the usual common-room convivialities were over. I believe, you know, that these folk do quite an amount of work in their own way. Well, Slotwiner waited upstairs to let Titlow in. He had to unlock the front door – this one opening on Bishop’s Court – because, as you remember, he had locked it along with the other two doors at ten o’clock, following the rule in Umpleby’s household. Titlow turned up as usual on the stroke of eleven and he and Slotwiner were just exchanging a word in the hall when they heard the shot.”

“The shot coming, no doubt,” said Appleby, “from the study where Umpleby was supposed to be sitting
solus
?”

“Exactly so. And he was
solus
– or rather his corpse was – when Titlow and Slotwiner rushed into the room. Umpleby was shot; there was – if we are to believe these two – no weapon; but the French windows giving on Orchard Ground were ajar. Well, Titlow and Slotwiner (or one of them – I don’t know which) tumbled to the situation surprisingly quickly. They saw it was murder and they saw the significance of Orchard Ground. If the murderer had escaped that way he was there still, unless – what didn’t occur to them – he had the key to those gates.”

The inspector picked up a pencil this time and ran it over the plan. Very laboriously, once more, he made his cardinal point. “You’ll see how certain that is,” he said, “when you get out there. On these three sides Orchard Ground is bounded either by an exceedingly high wall or by an arrangement of combined wall and railings that is higher still. The fourth side has the President’s Lodging here at one end and the college chapel at the other, with the hall and library in between. These make a line of buildings that separated Orchard Ground from Bishop’s Court, and there are just two passages through: one between chapel and library and the other between hall and President’s Lodging. The only other exit from Orchard Ground is by a little wicket gate opening on Schools Street. And all three exits were, of course, locked. Escape from Orchard Ground without the key was impossible.

“So you see Titlow and Slotwiner decided they’d got the murderer safe. They didn’t think he could get out because they didn’t think he could have the key to those three gates. And they didn’t think he could have a key because it didn’t occur to them to think of a Fellow of the college.

“I suspect Slotwiner of taking the initiative. He’s an old soldier and would be up to an emergency, whereas Titlow seems a dreamy soul enough. But Titlow’s got guts. The look of that room was pretty surprising, but he stuck there guarding the window while Slotwiner ran to the telephone in the hall and got the porters across, called a doctor and got on to us. I was at the station late working at reports of my own case and I got enough from Slotwiner to be along with every man I could muster in ten minutes. Slotwiner and Titlow were in the study still with a porter to help them keep guard. We went through everything on the orchard side of those gates as if we were looking for a black cat. We worked on a cordon basis from one end to the other, ransacked the chapel and the little block of Fellows’ buildings opposite and climbed every tree. Apart from three of the four Fellows (Titlow is the fourth) who live in Orchard Ground and were there undisturbed in their rooms, we found no one. We searched again by daylight, of course, and the gates are guarded still.”

Dodd paused for a moment and Appleby asked a question: “There is no trace of any sort of robbery?”

“None at all. Money, watch and so on still on the corpse. There is one point, though, that might conceivably be relevant.” Dodd picked up a small object wrapped in tissue paper and tossed it down in front of his colleague. “Umpleby’s pocket-diary – and found in his pocket all right. Plenty of entries for you to study – until you come just up to date. The leaf for the last two days, and the leaf for today and tomorrow, have been torn out… And now come along.”

The two men left the dead President’s dining-room and crossed the hall to where, at the end of a narrow corridor, a stalwart constable stood guard over the study door. He stood aside with a salute and a frank provincial stare at Appleby, while Dodd, taking a key from his pocket, unlocked the door and pushed it open with something of a restrained dramatic gesture.

The study was a long, well-proportioned room, with a deep open fireplace opposite the single door and with windows at each end: to the left (and barred like all the ground floor outer windows of the college), a row of small windows giving on St Ernulphus Lane; to the right, rather narrow French windows, now heavily curtained, but giving, as Appleby knew, upon Orchard Ground. The sombrely-furnished, book-lined apartment was lit partly by the dull light of the November evening and partly by a single electric standard lamp. Half-way between the French windows and the fireplace, sprawled upon its back, lay the body of a man – tall, spare, dinner jacketed. So much, and so much only, was visible, for round the head there was swathed, as if in gross burlesque of the common offices of death, the dull black stuff of an academic gown.

But it was not at this sight that Appleby started a little as he entered the room. If Dodd had spoken of a lunatic he now saw why. From the dull dark-oak panels over the fireplace, roughly scrawled in chalk, a couple of grinning death’s heads stared out upon the room. Just beside the President’s grotesquely muffled head lay a human skull. And over the surrounding area of the floor were scattered little piles of human bones.

For a long moment Appleby paused on the spectacle; then he moved over to the French windows and pulled back the curtain. Dusk was falling and the trim college orchard seemed to hold all the mystery of a forest. Only close to him on the right, breaking the illusion, was the grey line of hall and library, stone upon buttressed stone, fading, far above, into the darkness of stained-glass windows. Directly in front, in uncertain silhouette against a lustreless Eastern sky, loomed the boldly arabesqued gables of the Caroline chapel. An exhalation neither wholly mist nor wholly fog was beginning to glide over the immemorial turf, to curl round the trees, to dissolve in insubstantial pageantry the fading lines of archway and wall. And echoing over the college and the city, muted as if in requiem for what lay within, was the age-old melody of vesper bells.

For some minutes Appleby continued to stare out upon the fast thickening shadows. Then, without turning round and almost as if in soliloquy, he began to feel for his own grip on the case.

“At ten-fifteen this court, Orchard Ground, was locked up. After that, anyone who was in it could get out, or who was out could get in, in one of two ways. The one way was by means of the key possessed by certain of the Fellows: with that one could pass either between the orchard and the rest of the college by one of the two gates giving on Bishop’s Court; or between the orchard and the outer world by means of the little gate that gives on Schools Street. The other way was through these French windows, through this study and out by one of the doors in the President’s hall – the front door giving on Bishop’s Court, the common-room door giving indirectly on the same quarter, or the back door giving on St Ernulphus Lane and, again, the outer world.

“At ten-thirty Umpleby, according to the butler, was alive. From then until eleven o’clock, according to the butler, no one passed from the study through the hall to Bishop’s Court or St Ernulphus Lane – or conversely.

“At eleven o’clock, according to the butler and Titlow, there was a shot from the study. They went in at once and found Umpleby dead. They then claim to have had the route through the study under continuous observation until they handed over to you. And you had it under observation until you had searched study, Orchard Ground and all the buildings in Orchard Ground thoroughly.

“Accepting these appearances we have a fairly clear situation. If Umpleby was shot when we think he was and where we think he was and other than by himself, then his assailant was
either
one of the three people discovered by you during your search or a fourth person having a key. That fourth person, again, might be
either
another of the persons legitimately possessed of keys or an unknown person in wrongful possession of one. It follows that there are two preliminary issues: first, the movements of the persons legitimately possessed of keys and, as an extension of that, the relations of such persons to Umpleby; secondly, the provenance of the existing keys – the history of each, with the likelihood of its having been abstracted and copied in the recent past.”

Appleby, as he worked out this concise and knotty résumé of the facts, spoke with a shade of reluctance. He was less ready than Dodd for anything savouring of a conventional mystery, and he was inclined to distrust inference from the oddly precise conditions under which Umpleby had apparently been murdered. As Dodd had shrewdly remarked, the affair was obtrusively artificial, as if the criminal had gone out of his way to sign himself both ingenious and grotesque, calculating and whimsical. Within an hour of his arrival at St Anthony’s, Appleby was finding a particular line of action imposed upon him – a line demanding minute and probably laborious investigation into the conduct and dispositions of a small, clearly-marked group of people. He saw that he was confronted, actually, with two propositions. The first was simple: “The circumstances are such that I must concentrate on so-and-so.” The second was less simple: “The circumstances
have been so contrived
as to suggest
that I must concentrate on so-and-so.” In pursuing the first proposition he must, at least, not lose sight of the second.