Death at the President's Lodging (32 page)

“There was no conspiracy,” said Appleby.

After Curtis, Barocho. And from Barocho came confirmation.

Yes, he had at length recollected where he had mislaid his gown: he had left it in Pownall’s rooms… Yes, his embarrassing questions in hall had been aimed at Titlow. It was interesting to see how people reacted – and about Titlow since the murder there had been something provoking experiment.

“But you had heard that it was believed not physically possible for Titlow to have killed the President?”

“No. I had not the particulars. But it is not that. Titlow would not plan a murder.”

And then Appleby put the grand question. “The Titlows: would they fake a text?”

And Barocho pondered and understood.

“The Titlows,” he replied at length, with a gesture that took in the whole academic world of Appleby’s question, “would not fake a text, for a text belongs to a realm of pure knowledge which they would not betray. There can be no question of expediency in that realm. But in the world of affairs, knowledge is not serene: it is often obscured – sometimes by human wickedness, often by human stupidity. In the world, truth may require for its vindication the weapons of the world – and the necessity will justify their use. The Titlows do not think of the world –
your
world perhaps,
Señor
– as very perceptive, as very pertinacious for the truth. They live themselves remote from the world – too remote today. And when the world suddenly thrusts its crisis, its decisions upon them, their response is uncertain, erratic – like that of children. But in intelligence, in pertinacious thought, they regard the world as a child. And so, although they will not fake a text to pass about among themselves, they might, to guide the world…put out a simplified edition.”

Once more the long mahogany table gleamed beneath the candles in their heavy silver candlesticks; once more the firelight flickered on dead and gone scholars round the common-room walls. Once more the ruby and gold of port and sherry, the glitter of glass, the little rainbows of fruit had been swept away untouched. Outside, the courts of St Anthony’s were still hushed in decent quiet, but from the lane beyond and from adjacent colleges came the intermittent splutter and crackle of fireworks: it was the evening of the Fifth of November… And once more Appleby was seated at the head of the table, the Fellows of the college assembled round him. And presently Appleby spoke.

“Mr Dean and gentlemen, I have to tell you that the circumstances in which your President met his death on Tuesday night are now known. Dr Umpleby was murdered by one of his colleagues.”

The formal announcement had its effect. The stillness was absolute. Only Dr Barocho, his eye circling speculatively round his companions’ faces, and Professor Curtis, whose dim absorption might have been directed to Bohemian legends or Carlovingian documents, were without a uniform strained rigidity of attention.

“In a moment,” Appleby continued, “I am going to call for a number of statements which will make the facts clear. But I believe you will find these facts less disturbing than they otherwise would be if you will allow me to make one preliminary point.

“We speak of murder as the most shocking of crimes. It is just that. Nothing stands out more clearly in my sort of experience than the surprising effects upon human behaviour which the shock of murder can have. Faced by the sudden fact of wilful killing, called upon for action and decision, a man will do what he might never think to do were he merely coolly imagining himself in the same circumstances. For murder goes along with fear, and when we are controlled by fear we are controlled by a more primitive self. In such a condition our reason may for a time become a slave – something used merely to give colour to unreasonable things. And should murder suddenly erupt in such a quiet and securely ordered society as yours, this shock may be very severe indeed: it may master a temperamental man not for minutes merely but for hours or even days – and particularly is this so if the fear is substantial and real, the product of a danger which even the rational mind must realize. And on Tuesday night, as you will learn, danger took a strange course through St Anthony’s… But though shock and danger may drive us out of ourselves for a time, sooner or later the normal asserts itself. We test our actions by normal standards – and find perhaps that we have to confess a brief madness. I cannot usefully say more and I will ask for the first statement… Mr Titlow.”

“I was convinced from the first,” began Titlow, “that Pownall had murdered Umpleby. And very soon I was to believe that, in order to escape the consequences of his guilt, he had attempted to fasten the crime upon myself. But for the horror and, as Mr Appleby has truly put it, fear arising from that second belief I would no doubt more quickly have seen the truth about the first. The truth is that I had
almost
conclusive evidence of Pownall’s guilt – but only almost. As soon as I realized this – as I did in conversation with Mr Appleby in the early hours of yesterday morning – I realized that I must narrate what I had done. When I dispatched such a narration to him this afternoon I had arrived, he would say, at judging my conduct once more by normal standards.

“Here is my story. I returned from the common-room on Tuesday night at about half-past nine and settled down to read until it should be time to make my usual call on the President. I became interested in my book to the extent of letting two important things happen: I let my fire get low and I lost an exact sense of time. As a result of the one I felt chilly and got up to close a window on the orchard side; as a result of the other, I vaguely felt myself to have heard ten strike a minute or so before, whereas I must actually have heard half-past. I leaned out of the window for a moment to see if it was raining, wondering if I should need an umbrella to visit the President. And at that moment I became aware of the President himself just coming into the circle of light from the lobby. He was about to enter Little Fellows’ when he was stopped by somebody calling to him from the darkness of the orchard. I was just able to hear; it was Pownall’s voice, speaking urgently but at a low pitch. ‘President,’ he had called out, ‘is that you?’ And Umpleby replied, ‘Yes, I’m going in to see Empson.’ I was startled at the response: ‘Empson is here, President. He has had a fall: will you help?’ At that, Umpleby at once turned round and vanished into the darkness. I was on the point of calling out and hurrying down to assist when it occurred to me that the President and Pownall could do all that was required and that there was nothing that Empson would like less than a fuss. And so I returned to my book. But I retained an uncomfortable impression that the thing was a little odd: it was odd that Empson should have been walking in the darkness of the orchard. And after a time it struck me as disturbing that nobody had come upstairs; I was afraid that Empson was too badly hurt to be brought up to his room. And on that I decided to go and investigate.

“I stepped out to the landing – and received a distinct shock.
Empson was moving about in his room
. Nobody, I knew, had come upstairs – and yet I could not be mistaken. Empson has a polished floor with rugs and you will understand that the sound of his footsteps and stick together make a pattern with which I am perfectly familiar. For a moment I stood dumbfounded – and then I realized that Pownall must have made a mistake, calling out prematurely that the injured person he had discovered was Empson. I ran downstairs – and I think the natural thing would have been to knock at Pownall’s door. I do not know what growing sense of strangeness and alarm sent me straight into the orchard, to light upon the body of Umpleby – a revolver lying beside him.

“The shock, as Mr Appleby has charitably argued, was very great; for a moment after I had distinguished that quite conclusive wound I could only stand and tremble. Then I looked at my watch. It was ten-forty. Actually, that would seem to have been only some eight minutes after the committing of the crime. But I did not realize that: I had believed it to be just after ten when I rose to close my window and in the succeeding interval my sense of time had remained confused. Well, I had only one opinion – certain knowledge rather – from the first. Pownall, under cover of calling Umpleby to Empson’s assistance, had lured him into the orchard and done this unspeakable thing. There came back to me with tremendous force a scene at which I had been present only a few days before, a scene in which Pownall had told Umpleby that he was ‘born to be murdered’ – or some such phrase. And already I was aware of the vital fact. I was the only witness to what had occurred – either in the orchard that night or on the occasion of Pownall’s using the words I have just quoted…

“Almost without knowing what I was about, I had begun half to drag and half to carry Umpleby’s body towards Little Fellows’. And there, I suppose with some idea of confronting the criminal with his crime, I hauled it direct into Pownall’s sitting-room. The place was in darkness and I switched on the light. I crossed over to the bedroom: if Pownall was there I was going to have him out. And he was there – asleep. It was the horror of that, I think, that finally determined my actions: less than an hour after doing this thing the miscreant was asleep!

“I stood and thought for what seemed a long time – perhaps it was only sixty seconds all told. Pownall had killed Umpleby, and Pownall had got away with it. On that revolver there would, I knew, be nothing; and for evidence there were only my stories – the story of a sinister phrase spoken, the story of uncertain observations made from an upper window in the dark… And at that moment my eye turned to the body and I was aware that something immensely significant had happened. The wound was bleeding upon the carpet.
And the blood represented evidence
.”

The gathering round the long table was listening in a consternation which was turning to horror. Deighton-Clerk voiced the dawning understanding: “You resolved to
incriminate
Pownall?”

Titlow continued unheeding. “I referred Mr Appleby to a contention of Kant’s. Kant maintained that in no conceivable circumstance could it be justifiable to lie – not even to mislead an intending murderer as to the whereabouts of his victim. Standing there over Umpleby’s body I seemed to see quite a different imperative. If the cunning of a murderer could only be defeated by a lie, then a lie must be told – or acted. I saw a moral dilemma–”

For a moment the Dean’s voice rang out in passionate refutation: in the pause that followed the sporadic explosions outside reverberated as from a battle-field. And coldly Titlow continued. “Deighton-Clerk is right. And Mr Appleby too is right: a brief madness, no doubt, was upon me. I saw myself in an utterly strange situation and called on for an instant decision. And what dominated me was this: were I not to act, the thing was over – in the next room was a murderer who could never be touched. But were I to act – act on the plan the blood-stained carpet had suggested to me – then nothing final and irrevocable would have been done. If a shadow of doubt should later come to me, if reflection should dictate it, I could cancel the effect or action by a single word. I did not think I should be afraid to do so – nor have I. But that is unimportant. I acted. I tore a couple of pages from Umpleby’s diary and left them, burnt but for a fragment of his writing, in an ashtray. I dragged the body out into the orchard again – that was obviously necessary. And then I returned with the revolver.”

Titlow paused. And in the pause there was a touch of the histrionic, as if a flash of his ungoverned imaginative sense had come to ease for a moment the situation in which he found himself. “I had remembered a vital fact. During the alarm of fire we had some years ago, Pownall had revealed himself as an exceptionally heavy sleeper. That gave my plan, I thought, a substantial chance. I returned with the revolver, held by the barrel in my handkerchief, and went into the bedroom. Pownall was fast asleep, his arms outside the coverlet. I took his right wrist with infinite caution and lightly pressed the pistol-butt to his thumb. He stirred in his sleep but I had slipped from the room, as I thought, without his being roused. I tossed the revolver into the storeroom, where it would certainly be found, and then retreated upstairs to my own rooms. But that is only half my story. And if I needed confirmation of Pownall’s guilt the other half brought it – and with a shock. For Pownall turned the tables on me.”

There was a stir round the common-room – a furtive shifting of limbs, here and there a cough. Dr Barocho was providently rolling himself a stock of cigarettes. Lambrick thought to lower the tension by turning with unconvincing heartiness to throw a log on the fire. Curtis was looking with vague interest at Appleby, as if trying to place an uncertain acquaintance. Titlow continued.

“I determined that I had better do what I had always done – go over, I mean, at eleven o’clock to visit Umpleby. When he was found to have disappeared from his study I could give something like an alarm – and perhaps manage to direct the search to Pownall’s rooms… So I presented myself on the stroke of the hour at Umpleby’s front door. I had hardly spoken to the butler when we heard the shot from the study. We both rushed in. I could do nothing else, but I knew at once that some devilry was afoot.”

“That some devilry was afoot!” It was the Dean speaking, a fascinated eye on his colleague.

“And there the body lay, in the litter of bones. I knew at once that I must have awakened Pownall and that he had contrived some plot. On the face of it it was a plot against Haveland – a plant. But I was wary enough to send Slotwiner to the telephone and hunt feverishly around. There was of course a smell of gun-powder in the room, but there was a smell too of something else – a badly snuffed candle. And then I saw: Pownall had contrived a plot against
me
… It was fiendishly clever, and if I had not penetrated to the farther end of the room it would have caught me. He had arranged a simple demonstration that I had both killed Umpleby and attempted to incriminate someone else and secure an unshakable alibi for myself. He had reasoned like this. If a shot heard by Slotwiner and myself had killed Umpleby neither Slotwiner nor I could have killed him. From that it followed that if such a shot were heard and then proved to be a
fake
it must have been faked to provide an alibi for Slotwiner or myself. If in the faking of that shot there were used something that could be identified with me then the case against me would be clear – or clear enough to give me a very bad time. And that was what he contrived. On the top of a revolving bookcase in a bay at the farther end of the study, concealed behind a few books, he had arranged just such an apparatus as I might have used to engineer that shot. It was an arrangement of a candle-stub and a burnt-out squib – just such a one as they are letting off around us now and just such a one as I was known to have impounded from an unruly undergraduate a year ago tonight. With a little practice such an arrangement could have been quite accurately timed by a person wanting to suggest an alibi in that way. And if I had not discovered it you see what would have been said: that I had not had the opportunity on which I had counted for removing the traces of my plot. As it was, I had time to thrust squib and candle into my pocket and the books back on their shelf before Slotwiner returned. My escape had been a very narrow one.”