Death at the President's Lodging (34 page)

“These, Mr Dean, are the facts. I repeat that everybody has at length told the truth as they knew it. But everybody acted from contradictory beliefs as to what had really happened – contrary beliefs which proceeded first from the design of the murderer and secondly from the first fatal assumption of Mr Titlow… You ask for Mr Haveland. Haveland, the murderer of your President, killed himself while resisting arrest this evening.”

“Haveland killed Umpleby,” Appleby continued, “but he was far from intending to set his signature on the deed. That he would not do such a thing Professor Empson was prepared to state with all the authority of his science. But Professor Empson, although passionately concerned at what he conceived as a dastardly plot against Haveland, was unprepared to discuss the question of Haveland’s normality in general terms: such a discussion, he plainly felt, would distract the lay mind from the one piece of scientific knowledge he felt as relevant –
Haveland was not the sort who would deliberately give himself away.
But that was not after all the basic fact. The basic fact was this: Haveland had that sort of abnormality which never loses at least its tenuous connections with reason. Take his motive. He was, as I learnt from you, Mr Dean, a likely candidate for the Presidency – and so, as I learnt from a remark of Professor Curtis’ passed on to me by Inspector Dodd, is Professor Empson. When Haveland proposed to kill Umpleby and let the blame fall on Empson (for that was the original plot) he was acting with just that combination of moral imbecility and logical sense which characterizes his type.

“He had a remarkable power of mimicry: in this room a couple of evenings ago he shocked you by a momentary imitation of Mr Deighton-Clerk – and it was deftly enough done to strike a mind interested in such things… He rang up Umpleby, then, at ten o’clock, in Empson’s voice and using the porter’s manual exchange so that the call would be remarked. Umpleby came over to Little Fellows’ – to keep an appointment with Empson, as he thought – just after half-past ten. Haveland’s plan was perfectly simple. He lurked in the orchard until the appearance of the President and again used the ruse of an assumed voice – Pownall’s this time – to lure him into the darkness. And under cover of the roar of traffic in Schools Street he shot him dead, leaving the revolver beside the body. On that revolver, as I can demonstrate, he had secured and contrived to preserve Empson’s fingerprints. Having done so much he went straight to the Dean, paying him an ordinary visit of some ten minutes. And thereafter he went straight back to his rooms. That concluded his activities. The strength of his plan was, I say, in its complete simplicity.

“Mr Titlow found the body at ten-forty and unfortunately concluded that Mr Pownall was the murderer. Thereupon he took the extraordinary course he did to ensure that Pownall should not escape. But in doing so he roused Pownall from sleep. And the latter, discovering the murder, concluded first and rightly that Haveland was the perpetrator, and secondly and incorrectly that it was Haveland who had attempted to incriminate him, Pownall. He guessed correctly, that is to say, the implications of the telephone call he had overheard, but he had no suspicion of Titlow’s interposition in the matter. Acting rapidly on the plan he thereupon formed, he had body and bones arranged in the study before ten-fifty – and just in time to be discovered by Professor Empson. And Empson, having seen Titlow hauling the body into Little Fellows’ and alarmed by his discovery of the spurious telephone call, concluded that Titlow had murdered Umpleby and was plotting to involve Haveland, and possibly himself, in ruin. He therefore evolved his plan to reincriminate Titlow – who however on bursting into the President’s study discovered the device of the faked shot in time to obliterate almost every trace of it.

“And the result of all these subtleties, gentlemen,” Appleby dryly concluded, “has been an investigation of some complexity. The double inquest will reveal the insanity which brought about Dr Umpleby’s death… Nothing more, I think, falls to be said.”

There was the longest silence that had yet been. Then Deighton-Clerk nodded to Titlow and Titlow pressed a bell. The door of the inner common-room opened.

“
Coffee is served!
”

It was late. The yellow Bentley – dispatched as a gesture of official recognition in response to a brief announcement of success – waited at the gates. Appleby, already overcoated, Dodd, still faintly bewildered, and Gott, largely appreciative, were consuming liqueur brandy from enormous rummers in the latter’s rooms. And Appleby was summing up.

“Umpleby was murdered pat upon the changing of the Orchard Ground keys – in other words under conditions which made access to him possible only to a small group of people. There were various possible explanations of that obtrusive point. One was that the conditions of access were not as they seemed: that the murderer had some hidden means of access and was utilizing the surface conditions to mislead. Another was that he had arranged things as he did for fun: that he was one of the group indicated by the conditions and was giving us a fair start that way. And yet another was that he was one member of the group wishing to
plant
the crime on another member and taking a first step by limiting the possible suspects to the group. And the theory of planted murder proved of course to be the key to the case. Everything that turned up fell in with it – only far too
much
turned up.

“First came the strong suggestions of a plant against Haveland. And soon I came to couple with that idea the name of Pownall. Pownall was concerned to
point
at Haveland: he had pointed at Haveland during a scene which subsequently turned out to have made manifest the pattern of the whole affair; and he pointed at Haveland later when putting up a story to explain his own strange conduct. It seemed reasonable to suspect that in that story Pownall was ingeniously turning the facts upside down. According to his version, Haveland had murdered Umpleby and attempted to plant the murder on him, only setting his own signature to it with the bones in a fit of craziness after his plan had been foiled. In reality (I conjectured), Pownall had murdered Umpleby and planted the crime on Haveland. When it became apparent that both the time and place of the murder had been fudged I was able to see a likely motive for both deceptions. By fudging the time Pownall was making sure of Haveland’s having no alibi; by fudging the place he was contriving a particularly striking fulfilment of the rash wish that Haveland had once expressed.

“I allowed this more or less simple case against Pownall a long run. But it didn’t seem good enough. For one thing the revolver had significantly given itself the trouble to turn up and I had been prepared to find it faked in some way to represent another link in the chain against Haveland. On the contrary it had Pownall’s prints; if Pownall had shot Umpleby with it he seemed to have been almost unbelievably careless. Again, I had a very distinct impression about the interview I had had with Pownall – the impression that his story had been a complicated mixture of truth and falsehood. This complication, and much else that I felt as having a place in the case, my theory so far failed to cover.

“I was, for instance, convinced that in some way or another both Titlow and Empson came in. With both these I had had what I felt were significant interviews. Titlow, an erratic person it appeared at all times, was strung up
to believe some specific person guilty
. He had it all curiously involved with a philosophy of history – was obviously in a state of unwonted intellectual confusion – but it came down to this: if there was anything incredible about the idea of X having murdered Umpleby then he, Titlow, had some duty before him… And then he gave me the strange reference to Kant: I was to turn upside down the contention that the duty of truthfulness overrides the duty to protect society from murder.

“There was something here which any theory of the crime must elucidate and incorporate. And that consideration held also of the results of my interview with Empson. Empson too had an X in his mind; was shocked that, contrary to the expectations of science and experience, X should have murdered Umpleby – that, at least, was what I read into his attitude. And his X was, of course, not Haveland; there was something like passion in his assertion of Haveland’s innocence. And there were two other points. When the possibility came up that the shot heard from the study might have been faked he was anxious to know if any trace of a contrivance for effecting such a fake had been discovered: he was inquiring, in fact, for what would be evidence against Titlow. The last point was his hesitation over the telephone call. That was enigmatical until the revolver was revealed as bearing Empson’s prints as well as Pownall’s. That revelation brought, of course, the suggestion of a plant against Empson and a faked telephone call fell into place as another attempted piece of evidence against him. Why had Empson
almost
denied making that call, when he knew the porter would seem to expose such a denial? And the answer came: because he knew such a call had been planted on him and he had been on the verge of taking the line of saying so… At the same time I saw how Empson’s fingerprints at least might have been got on the revolver. I remembered that the revolver had tried to tell me something, so to speak, the moment I saw it. It was a slight little weapon with a slim curved ivory handle – uncommonly like the handle of Empson’s stick. I could imagine it tied to some actual stick and thrust into Empson’s hand for a moment in one of those dark lobbies before being withdrawn with an apology for the mistake. The result, almost certainly, would be the slightest and most imperfect of prints – more imperfect even than the prints cautiously got by Titlow from the sleeping Pownall. But very poor prints – the impress of quite a dry finger on an indifferent surface – can be made susceptible of identification nowadays. Here we had an instance of a technical advance in criminology being exploited not once but
twice
in the same case. Which is as good as a word of warning, perhaps, in the field of ‘scientific’ detection.

“Then came the twisted wire found by Kellett thrust down a drain. You might have guessed that, Dodd. It was the crumpled cousin to the wire contraption you had seen me make to protect possible fingerprints on the revolver! Enclosed in a little cage like that, the revolver could be handled and fired readily enough without obliterating or marring previous prints.

“By that time there was a most embarrassing wealth of clues of the possibly or probably planted sort. Against Haveland: the bones. Against Empson: fingerprints and a faked telephone call. Against Pownall (accepting some truth in his story): the bloodstains, the diary pages and – again – fingerprints. Against Titlow alone of the Little Fellows’ group there seemed to be nothing planted. So I tried him out for a bit as sole villain. I toyed with the idea of his trying to incriminate all three of his Little Fellows’ colleagues. Then, taking it another way, I tried to see him concerned to establish his own alibi. I brought in Edwards’ suggestion of the fireworks and my own observations of the candle-grease on the bookcase there. But I didn’t much like it and presently – I suppose for the sake of schematic completeness – I began to explore the possibility of the candle-grease being the sole remaining evidence of a plant against Titlow. I got as far, in fact, as seeing the possibilities of the planted faked shot as an instrument for incriminating him. But there I knew I was on very speculative ground.

“What I had got was the four Little Fellows’ men involved in some queer chain of events. I began to search for a
direction
to it. A minute ago I said that, quite early on, Pownall had pointed at Haveland. That was in the common-room on my first night. But more had happened on that occasion. It would not be too much to say that the air had been heavy with insinuation. And an analysis of what had been said or hinted produced this: Pownall had pointed at Haveland, Haveland had pointed at Empson, Empson had pointed at Titlow, and Titlow had pointed at Pownall. Nothing could well be more schematic than that: it gave what was certainly a chain, and it gave a direction in which the chain went. Could I find any start to it all? Was there any correspondence between the way the pointing went and anything known or suspected as to the direction of the planted clues? I could get at only one correspondence: Haveland’s insinuations were against Empson – and I had some reason to regard Haveland both as the likely imitator of Empson’s voice (he had a talent for it) and as the person who had planted Empson’s prints on the revolver (he had been concerned to know if the revolver had been found).

“So I made another tentative start there.
Haveland killed Umpleby and attempted to lay the blame on Empson
. That turned out to be correct. But I went on from it to another guess which turned out to be wrong.
Titlow had suspected Haveland’s guilt and had arranged the bones as a means of bringing the crime home to him
– and he was now very properly worried over the morality of such a procedure and was anxious as to the certainty of his belief. But presently I had to discard that – for Titlow’s insinuations had been directed against not
Haveland
but
Pownall
…

“But what I was not immediately prepared to abandon – having got so far – was Haveland’s guilt. For, paradoxically enough, the notion of somebody’s faking a case against Haveland now removed the chief obstacle to seeing Haveland as really guilty. A case faked against Haveland was really protecting him – because it was
unconvincingly
faked: Haveland, as Empson knew, was not the man to sign his deed in the way suggested.