Stop Press (56 page)

Mr Eliot was again on his feet. ‘John…stop. I–’

‘But Shoon’ – Appleby went grimly on – ‘was hoist with his own petard – literally that. There is a poetic justice in his end which might come straight from fiction.’ Appleby’s eye darted to Kermode, to Bussenschutt. ‘Jasper Shoon will never plot again.’

‘
Never again!
’

The party jumped. Appleby, if dramatic, had been quiet; now Mr Eliot’s voice rang through the room.

‘Never again will I put pen to paper as a writer! This is the end.’

‘You fool’ – it was Rupert Eliot who had turned on his cousin – ‘you soft fool’ – Rupert’s voice rose in a snarl – ‘will you give over thousands of pounds a year just because–’

Like another explosion Appleby’s hand rang on a table beside him. ‘Sir Rupert, have you not again and again wished the stories at an end? Have you not? And
now
you would have them go on – and get your money from them?
Why?
’

The figures in the tribune might have been turned to stone. Only Rupert moved – lurched back into his chair.

‘Why, Sir Rupert – except that Shoon is dead?
But Shoon is not dead
.’

Rupert’s head jerked back; his jaw fell oddly open.

‘You were given a hint to take the
Begonia
to New Zealand on the ninth of next month. I advise an earlier boat. Shoon is alive. I have locked him in a cupboard.’ Appleby suddenly chuckled. ‘Alas, it’s the only lock I shall ever turn on him.’

‘You can get him’ – Winter’s voice cut quickly in on the bewilderment – ‘for inciting somebody to shoot at me out there by the tower.’

‘My dear man, that was Sir Rupert shooting at Shoon. And doesn’t Shoon know it!’ He turned back to Rupert. ‘On every account’, he said dryly, ‘an earlier boat seems best.’

Dr Bussenchutt set down his glass. ‘The Smith Woodhouse late-bottled,’ he said. ‘A wine invariably brilliant on the table.’

‘I deprecate’, said Mummery, ‘aroma in ports.’

‘We are to have the Fonseca’, said Winter, ‘on Founder’s Day. Nearly six months to wait.’

The murmur of talk filled the common-room. Appleby’s eye, wandering from his companions at the supernumerary table, communed with the critical gaze of Dr Groper over the fireplace, passed on to distinguish in the shadows variously apocryphal portraits of William of Chalfont, Richard à Lys, Sir Humphrey Bohun. On a lectern at the far end of the room, set out for the inspection and comment of the learned, were the first proofs of Dr Bussenschutt’s critical edition of the Codex. From outside floated in the chatter of undergraduates arguing a choice of cinemas. Beyond them Oxford, river-rounded, branchy between towers, circled beneath the soft summer night, its progress marked by the chime of discreetly emotive bells.

‘Young Eliot’, pronounced Bussenschutt, ‘is said to be doing well. In general I do not approve of undergraduates entertaining thoughts of matrimony while their Schools are immediately before them. But in this instance there would appear to be no deleterious result. I hope that he will go to the Treasury.’ Bussenschutt looked speculatively at Appleby, cautiously across to Benton who was sitting, gloomy and wishful, at the solitude of the little table. ‘That was a curious affair. And the most curious part of it, Mr Appleby, was undoubtedly your own performance at the end.’

Mummery made a short gurgling noise. ‘It was a rigmarole of nonsense.’

‘Ah, yes, my dear Mummery. But Appleby got the pace just right. It would not have withstood inspection for ten minutes; he drove through with it in just over five.’

‘It was nicely done,’ murmured Winter. ‘Even to your looking deadly pale over the supposed death of poor Shoon. However did you manage that?’

‘One nips into a privy’, said Appleby placidly, ‘and tickles the back of one’s throat till one’s horridly sick.’

‘My dear Master’ – Mummery rumbled mysteriously – ‘here is a lesson in laborious thoroughness even for you… But was it not all rather unnecessary?’

Appleby nodded. ‘Perhaps so. But I was on holiday, after all. And I rather wanted to see Rupert Eliot actually crack. Then there was Mr Eliot. One ought not, I suppose, to teach one’s future brother-in-law’s father little lessons. Still, I thought that a few minutes’ believing that he had inadvertently slaughtered Shoon might do him good. To loose off a couple of bombs while visiting a neighbour’ – Appleby shook his head solemnly – ‘is really a shockingly irresponsible thing to do. As I once said, he
is
younger than Timmy. When you come to think of it, the heart of the mystery lay in that evident fact.’

‘Ah,’ said Bussenschutt.

‘But the real point of my performance was this. Eliot had come to know that it was Rupert who was persecuting him. And he knew
how
Rupert was managing it. But he had no notion
why
Rupert was behaving in such a deplorable way. I thought it would be useful to get that out quite clearly – the anatomy of the camel, you know.’

Bussenschutt passed the decanter. ‘The anatomy’, he said with a great appearance of comprehension, ‘of the camel.’

‘I felt that if I could only suggest to Rupert that the thing was being huddled up in a foggy way without his being suspected he might be tricked into betraying himself. The great difficulty was glossing over the real crime Rupert had attempted to commit: I mean his nipping out of the Collection to the roof, down the bogus-broken wall, and taking a shot at Shoon. The fact that the shot whizzed past Winter, and the further fact that Shoon really had some faint motive for setting a confederate to eliminate Winter, made it just possible to give the thing the necessary twist. My story was, of course, a rigmarole. Eliot did serve in the Near East, and was invalided home after an illness which slightly impaired his memory. But he and Shoon certainly never had the sort of encounter I suggested. Shoon would clearly not have taken Belinda Eliot into the Abbey if there had been anything. of the sort.’

‘You know’ – Bussenschutt was almost bashful – ‘I thought of that at the time.’

Appleby smiled. ‘I was afraid somebody would chip in and explode the whole thing – on any one of a score of counts. I was particularly afraid of Kermode. For of course Kermode
knew
. About the clairvoyance, I mean. He as good as explained it to me quite early on. He had a start, I suppose; he understands the writing of that sort of stuff. And – in a way – he motivated the whole plot’

There was a meditative pause. ‘Quite so,’ said Bussenschutt. ‘Um, most clearly so.’ An irresolute silence settled on the supernumerary table. Appleby stared demurely at his glass. Mummery emitted that noise, as of an emptying bath, which was understood by his colleagues to indicate curiosity and impatience.

‘The fact is’, said Bussenschutt cautiously, ‘that we have to confess ourselves as still far from clear on – ah – the details of the affair. It would be a kindness – it would gratify what must be now a tolerably harmless curiosity – if you were to offer us, my dear Mr Appleby, an – ah – expository résumé of what must no doubt be called the Eliot Case.’

‘Beginning’, added Winter more frankly, ‘at the beginning and explaining just what it was all about.’

‘By all means.’ Appleby nodded, looked at Bussenschutt, paused. ‘But what’, he asked learnedly and with faint malice, ‘do we imply by the beginning?’

Bussenschutt chuckled with great geniality. ‘We imply the end.’

‘Exactly. No beginning could be made on the mystery until one had a notion of what the mysterious incidents were designed to achieve. If not directed to an end they were meaningless, the work – as was not inconceivable – of a lunatic. I dismissed the lunatic and proceeded to distinguish’ – unconsciously Appleby’s idiom was taking on an academic tinge – ‘between possible ends. In the human psyche two conflicting principles govern: the pleasure principle and the reality principle.’

‘Such a constatation’, interrupted Bussenschutt, ‘may be empirically useful. Nevertheless, I would not care–’ He checked himself. ‘But this is a topic for another occasion.’

‘If the pleasure principle were at work the unknown might be attempting to achieve certain immediate gratifications: revenge upon an enemy, a sense of power, the spectacle of humiliation, bewilderment, terror in others. But if the reality principle were at work we should be confronted with something fundamentally different. The incidents would represent a rational and practical plan to cope with an actual environment; the aim would be not immediate pleasure but survival and adaptation.

‘My own conclusions on this matter became definite with the affair of the middle black. The reality principle was at work.’

Bussenschutt stirred in his chair. ‘But from what I have heard of that incident–’

‘Quite so. It was heavy with malice – with a sheer lust to shock and terrify. But it stopped short of the last act of malice, of revenge, of the assertion of power: murder. It was murderous without a murder. The Eliot children were led for some agonizing moments to think that their father had been killed. The pleasure principle was there. Perhaps strongly there. For notice that the incident came after the breakdown of the unknown’s first plan; came after Eliot’s mysterious rally – when the unknown must have realized that this new demonstration could be of very little
use
. Substantially it was a malicious fling by the pleasure principle, while the reality principle evolved something else. In the fate of the pig there was a sort of substitutive gratification of the will to murder – as if the pleasure principle were eager for murder if it could go its own way. But there was no murder; the reality principle was still in final control. There was no murder because murder was
practically
useless. And the joker – as I assured you, Winter – was a
practical
joker. He was after an actual end – after some definite end in the real world – which Eliot’s murder would not serve. And here Kermode was the key.

‘The career of Kermode – that was the first clue. If Eliot died Kermode was to carry on. So one sees something which Eliot’s death would not serve: the disappearance of the Spider. Only if Eliot himself, while still living, said “No more of these books shall appear,” would the career of the Spider cease… Not Eliot’s death, then – though the unknown might
like
that – but the death of the Spider: that was conceivably the end. And behind the elaborate effort which was being made I felt justified in looking for an
urgen
t motive. And – again – a
practical
motive; not an impulse of intellectual snobbery, the desire to get out of a theatrical contract, or anything of the sort.’

‘Surely,’ said Bussenschutt, ‘Kermode himself–’

Appleby nodded. ‘I had to keep Kermode in mind. His was a special case. He described himself as waiting on the touch-line; he was eager to take over; and I had overheard him lament the fact that Eliot had rallied from the first onslaught. Kermode wanted
Eliot’s
Spider to die, and for a motive which might be reckoned urgent and practical. I completely eliminated him only when the affair entered on its second phase; when the unknown began to operate in a direction which could not benefit Kermode at all.

‘But meantime I had this general problem: what urgent and practical motive could there be for killing the Spider, for stopping Wedge’s presses for good and all? The answer was not hard to seek, Those presses were proposing to publish something which the unknown could not afford to see published.’

Appleby paused, aware of a great silence about him, and with a disconcerting feeling that the whole common-room must be listening. But the big table, the middle-sized table and the little table were all deserted; his companions’ colleagues had dispersed.

Winter was leaning forward ‘The mainspring of the whole plot was fear of something which seemed about to crop up in a book? That is a variation on the motive you imputed to Shoon in your fantasy.’

‘Quite so. But Shoon in my fantasy was going to escape from his predicament simply by murdering Eliot. To the unknown, on the contrary, such a cause was useless; the affair of the middle black – the whole elaborate campaign indeed – showed that. From this there was a clear conclusion. The thing which must not be published already existed. Once more, Kermnode was the key. For we know that not only was he to carry on with Spider stories of his own; he was to complete and publish Eliot’s unfinished manuscripts. And one such manuscript was known to exist: the novel,
A Death in the Desert
. Eliot had been writing this at the same time as
Murder at Midnight
, but of these two it was only
Murder at Midnight
that the unknown ventured to bring into prominence by monkeying with. Eliot destroyed
Murder at Midnight
when first disturbed by what was happening. But
A Death in the Desert
, with some basic idea in which he was particularly pleased, he preserved and was resolved – after that mysterious rally to which I shall come – to go on with. Moreover, it was securely in a safe; if Eliot died the thing would go straight to Kermode to complete. Indeed Kermode, who assisted in miscellaneous ways in the Spider concern, may very well have had the gist of it communicated to him by Eliot or Wedge.

‘So you see the point at which we have arrived. Wedge’s presses are waiting – with all that hunger which so amuses Winter – for this new book. But this new book must not appear. Elaborate efforts are therefore made to disgust Eliot with his work, to play upon his nerves so that – in effect – he will cry: “
Stop Press
”. Neither by Kermode nor by himself will any more Spider stuff be printed. To get him to that point was the object, and the unknown’s efforts were, I say, elaborate. They were also subtle. But, being subtle, they were double-edged. The plot failed when it seemed on the very point of success. Eliot went to bed a defeated man, knowing – as he told us – what he must do: and by that he meant, surely, the consigning of the Spider to oblivion. The next morning he had rallied and was proposing to go straight ahead. It was now the unknown who was defeated: he could almost hear, if he was an imaginative man, Wedge’s presses beginning to turn. But, very clearly, he had a second string to his bow.’