An Oxford Tragedy (6 page)

He turned his head away from the chair.

‘Thank you,' said Brendel. ‘You touched nothing – not the body, nor the revolver?'

Hargreaves shook his head. ‘I couldn't have,' he said with a kind of shudder.

Brendel nodded. ‘You have a telephone? Call the police at once, and a doctor.'

Under the influence of the Professor's calm efficiency, Maurice was rapidly recovering his poise.

‘It would be better,' he said, ‘to telephone from the Lodge. My line is only an extension, and anyone in the Lodge can hear what is said here.'

‘I'll go,' I said hastily. I wanted to get out of that room, and I wanted insistently to do something practical.

‘All right. Send Pine up here too,' Maurice replied.

I hurried across to the Lodge. As I did so I heard a few shouts and a belated firework exploding in the back Quad,
a grisly reminder of revels which suddenly seemed to me queerly indecent and misplaced. It is odd how, in moments of crisis, the mind works. I ought, I suppose, to have been filled with thoughts of the tragedy of this life so suddenly and horribly ended, or of the briefness and uncertainty of all human affairs. But I was not. Miserably I was conscious that I could think only of myself. Should I do the right thing? Should I behave in these strange circumstances as befitted a man of character and intelligence, or should I appear, when the inquiries were made, to have lost my head like any other second-rate man? A wretched confession, yet, if this is to be a true story, I cannot conceal it. As I entered the Lodge my doubts and uncertainties took a practical form. Ought I to telephone first to the doctor or to the police? Which was the more important? Why could not I think out clearly even a matter so simple as that? I decided for the police; after all Shirley was indubitably dead, and no doctor could help him now, but the sooner the police were on the scene the better. I got through to the station, and hurriedly and incoherently I told some unknown police officer what had occurred, and implored him to hurry. I shouted to Pine, who was outside, to wait by the gate till the police arrived, and then to take them to the Dean's room. In answer to his unspoken question I said, ‘Murder, I think,' in a voice which sounded oddly unlike my own. Then I opened the telephone directory to look up the number of one of the Oxford doctors.

At once I felt that I had been wrong. Of course it should have been the doctor first. Could not a skilful doctor tell, if he arrived in time, how long a man had been dead? Was it not of paramount importance that the time of the murder should be settled beyond possibility of mistake so that the criminal might be discovered? How many times had I not read that in works of fiction? Desperately I tried to think which of the doctors lived nearest to St Thomas's. All of
them of whom I could think lived in Holywell or St Giles's or even farther away. Almost at random I chose one, looked up his number and dialled him on the automatic exchange. After a long interval a female voice answered me. No, the doctor was out. He had dined with friends to play bridge, he might be back fairly soon. Would I … Savagely I cut off and looked up another number. This time the wait seemed an eternity. At last a reply came. ‘Do you want Mr Fleming? … No, I'm sorry, he's in London till to-morrow.' Would this never end? Miserably it crossed my mind that Maurice, had he come down, would have made no such mistake. He would have called the doctor before the police, and whatever doctor he had called would by a law of nature have been at home. But now at last my third call was answered. ‘Yes, it is Mr Kershaw speaking. Yes – yes, good Lord … Right. Yes. I'll come at once.' I put down the receiver, and stood waiting anxiously at the gate to meet Dr Kershaw and to take him to the scene of the tragedy.

It must have been about half past ten when I had run down to the Lodge; it was nearly eleven when Kershaw, a young but well-known surgeon who lived at the far end of Holywell, and I joined the little party which had gathered in the Dean's rooms. They stood talking in the outer room when we arrived; an inspector and two policemen, Brendel and Maurice Hargreaves, Pine and, to my surprise, Prendergast and Mitton. Pine, I gathered, had been to their rooms and told them. He felt, apparently, that if a murder had been committed it was the business of our Chaplain and our lawyer to be present, though what they could do was not very obvious to me. Kershaw went straight into the inner room and began to examine the body. The Inspector was obviously appalled by a situation outside his official experience; he glanced at the notes which he had made, and began to question Maurice again about the finding of the body. Meanwhile Brendel in a few brief
phrases told me what little had been learned in my absence. Poor Shirley had been shot through the head, probably from a distance of not more than two or three paces; he had apparently been sitting in the arm-chair with his back turned almost, but not quite, towards the murderer. He must, of course, have died instantaneously. Three chambers of the revolver on the table were still loaded; one had just been fired. The bullet had passed through his head, and had lodged in the wall behind the writing-table. The police, assisted by Hargreaves and Brendel himself, had made a searching examination of the rooms, but they had found no trace whatever of the murderer. At first sight, at any rate, it seemed impossible that he could have escaped, for example, by climbing out of one of the back windows. Apart from the fact that there was a sheer drop of some eighteen feet below, he could hardly have got out without leaving some marks. By daylight, no doubt, the police would go over every foot of the ground to confirm or amend this view, but for the time being it seemed almost certain that the murderer must have walked in and out by the ordinary door.

Kershaw's examination did not take long, for the case was only too clear. He could only confirm what we already knew. Suicide, of course, was out of the question. ‘If a man shoots himself,' Brendel explained in my ear, ‘there is always some charring, because he has to hold the revolver so near to himself. Besides, of course, he couldn't have put the revolver back on the table. He seems to have been shot from a distance of two or three yards; the tiny little hole is where the bullet went in – the other much larger is where it came out. It's just a trifle ragged because of the resistance to its passage inside the head – bone and so forth.'

‘How long has he been dead?' asked the Inspector.

‘About an hour, perhaps more, perhaps less,' said Kershaw. ‘I can't tell more nearly than that.'

I saw Brendel make a rapid entry in a little note-book which he had drawn from his pocket.

‘That would make it about ten o'clock?' he said.

Kershaw nodded. ‘But don't tie me down to any pronouncement of that sort,' he said. ‘I think he's been dead about an hour, but that's only a guess, after all.'

Again my mind refused to live up to the situation. I was thinking now only of absurd little details. Ought I to offer a drink to the policemen before they went? Would it be indecent to smoke in that outer room next door to the murdered body? Wherever was Maurice to sleep? The scouts all went out of college to their homes about nine o'clock, and there would be no one to make up a bed for him. But he couldn't sleep, surely, in his bedroom with the corpse lying next door. Should I offer him a shake-down in my own spare room? Ought I to explain to the Inspector who Brendel was and his reputation as an investigator of crime? Or would that be a tactless exposure of something which ought to be kept secret? Round and round in my head went all those stupid questions; more and more I felt certain that whatever I did would certainly be wrong. I felt an almost insane desire to say or do something which would stamp me as a practical man, able to deal with any crisis.

But while I hesitated how to begin, decisions were already being taken.

‘We can't do anything more here to-night,' said the Inspector. ‘The rooms must be locked up, and I think that the night porter had better keep an eye on them, too. I'll be round first thing in the morning. Have you got a key of the outer room, Sir?'

‘I think,' said Maurice, ‘that my key's probably in his pocket.' He indicated Shirley's body with a movement of his head.

Rather gingerly, I thought, the Inspector crossed the
room and fumbled in the dead man's pocket. He pulled out a key and showed it to Maurice.

‘Is that the one?'

‘Yes, that's it. Now we had better lock up. But first I'll get a few things for the night from my bedroom.' He seemed now to have recovered his usual habit of command. As he collected pyjamas and shaving tackle from the room within he decided all the questions which had been agitating my mind. ‘Francis, you must give me a shake-down in your room for the night. Inspector, you and your men must come down and have something to drink before you leave – and you, too, Kershaw – we all need something pretty stiff after this. The Common Room will still be open, and there are drinks there. Brendel, we shall want your help over this matter. If this isn't a real murder then nothing is.' I felt that the direction of affairs had been assumed by stronger hands than mine.

It was just then that Prendergast spoke, and presented us without warning with a new problem.

‘Who,' he said quite suddenly and very quietly, ‘who is going to tell Ruth?'

When first I started this chronicle I said that I would tell a plain tale in a straightforward way, nor, in my simplicity, did it occur to me that that would be any very difficult task. And yet what could be harder? For here I have already written four chapters, and still the most important characters have not appeared. What should I say to a pupil who wrote me an essay and never really began to grapple with the subject till his essay was a third done? How easily I should point out the importance of striking at once to the heart of a problem, of fixing the interest of the reader on the main topic, of concentrating upon the essential figures. How easy is criticism, how woefully difficult is construction! How now, at long last, I begin to respect the artist, be his creation never so humble! It is a humiliating confession for me, who all my life have watched and encouraged and criticized, and always with the secret thought that I could easily outshine the writers and the doers if only I cared to make the effort. And now I begin to see that it is not just fastidiousness, not even just idleness which has restrained me, but a lack, a miserable lack, of creative energy and artistic power. Humiliation indeed! I, who in my superior wisdom have lightly criticized so many youthful essays and reviewed so many books, cannot now set a plain tale on paper without hesitations and omissions and turnings back to events that should have been narrated three chapters since. I cannot now start this chronicle again; such as it is it must stand. But at least I must postpone no longer an account of the Verekers – of the President of St Thomas's and his two daughters. For how otherwise could I face old members of the college? They might read a few chapters of this book out of loyalty to their old college, or even out of curiosity, but would they not then throw it impatiently aside?
‘Nothing about the Verekers,' they would say, ‘but then it's
not
St Thomas's'.' So the effort must be made, however unfitted the author to the task. And first for the bald facts.

Henry Vereker had been elected President of St Thomas's nineteen years before – to be exact, in the glorious warm summer of 1911, and since then he had ruled over us – a courtly, white-haired, gentle, rather frail man, who lived still, as it seemed to most of us, in the more leisured atmosphere of Edwardian, or even of late Victorian times. His wife had been at once a stronger and a finer type. As I remember her, indeed, she had been a remarkable woman, not very artistic, not very clever, and yet, by virtue of character and a deep instinctive sympathy for others, a kind of natural leader; devoted to her family, and adored by them. Other women had a deep respect and liking for her, and, since it was her habit to speak ill of no one, everyone had nothing but good to speak of her. As wife of the Head of one of Oxford's greatest colleges she was happily and fortunately placed, but in 1913, very suddenly, she died, and from that grief the President never quite recovered. He fulfilled his duties, and fulfilled them admirably – no Head of a House was better liked or more generally respected – but his heart was buried in the past. There were two daughters, Ruth who was fourteen when her mother died, and Mary who was four years younger; each of them in turn had filled her mother's place in the President's Lodgings, and each had filled it to admiration.

Ruth and Mary. How can I describe them? I guess well enough how some of the great artists might have painted them; I can imagine how some of my favourite poets might have pictured their charm; most clearly of all I can see them illuminating the pages of George Meredith. But I am an old bachelor of sixty. If anything here is lacking to them of youthful charms and womanly allure, blame me, not them.
It is the fashion among men of my generation when they wish to bestow the highest praise on a young woman to say, ‘Thank God, she isn't one of those modern, cocktail-drinking, cigarette-smoking, jazzing modern creatures.' It would be true to say that of Ruth and Mary, and yet it would be only a fraction of the truth. For they were both children of their own post-war generation, though they escaped, as it seemed naturally, its less attractive traits … The secret, as I believe, of their charm was an intense enjoyment of life, and a love and comprehensive sympathy for the lives of others. If you had tea with Ruth you knew that she would rejoice with you in your minor triumphs, and sympathize with understanding in your petty disappointments; if you took Mary to the theatre you knew before you started that she as well as you would enjoy every moment of the evening. Like Lady Everingham in
Coningsby
, they possessed the two fine qualities which make the art of conversation. They could originate, and they could sympathize, for they possessed at the same time ‘the habit of communicating and the habit of listening.' They had inherited their character and their sympathy from their mother, their charm of manner and their good looks from their father. They seemed, too, to exercise their sway over callow undergraduates and middle-aged dons with equal facility. How often in their drawing-room had I seen a crusty professor thaw and become youthful and enthusiastic, or a shy and tongue-tied undergraduate cast aside his stiff and clumsy mannerisms to grow gay, and natural and happy. It used to be a saying in the years after the war that every undergraduate at St Thomas's was in love with one of the Verekers, and every don with both. It pleased me, as a confirmed bachelor, to suppose that my affection for them was of a semi-paternal kind. Perhaps it was – I cannot be quite sure. But I am certain that of all the young ladies whom I have met none could hold a candle to Ruth and Mary
Vereker. I know I am a sentimentalist, but where they are concerned, who could be otherwise? They had, of course, been brought up in college and I think they loved St Thomas's and all that belonged to it almost as much as St Thomas's loved them.