Swan Song (8 page)

‘Just a minute,' Mudge called hurriedly. ‘This Nembutal – it's a soporific, isn't it? It'd knock you out?'

‘In that amount,' Dr Rashmole answered. ‘I'm surprised it didn't kill him. He had a very lucky escape – very lucky indeed. Well, good morning. Work to be done, work to be done.' He passed out like a wind. The door slammed shatteringly behind him.

‘Heavens,' said Elizabeth with feeling. ‘Are
all
police doctors like that?'

But Mudge was studying the third report which Dr Rashmole had brought. ‘Here's a funny thing,' he said slowly. ‘There were traces of rope on Shorthouse's socks – as if his feet had been tied. And on his shirt cuffs.' He hesitated. ‘What's to be made of that?'

‘Any marks of tying mentioned in the PM report?' Fen asked.

Mudge took up the relevant papers and scrabbled through them. ‘Yes . . . “Slight weals on wrists and ankles, possibly caused by tying”. It's uncommonly odd.'

‘Not as odd as the fact that the gin-bottle was doped,' said Fen briskly. ‘If it had been only the glass, he might
have taken it himself – as a kind of anodyne to what he intended to do. But it's inconceivable that
he
put it in the bottle.'

Adam gazed up at him, mildly. ‘Then perhaps you'll kindly tell us,' he said, ‘just how one commits an impossible murder.'

¹
The reader may like to know, at this point, that Furbelow's evidence was in fact correct in every particular.

‘
OH,
FOR A
beakerful of the cold north,' said Fen, gulping at his Burton. ‘Impossible murders, for the present, must wait their turn.'

They were sitting before a blazing and hospitable fire in the small front parlour of the ‘Bird and Baby'. Mudge had parted from them, with notable reluctance, at the door, in order to pursue his duties in less congenial circumstances; and Adam, Elizabeth, Sir Richard Freeman, and Fen were now toasting themselves to a comfortable glow. Outside, it was still attempting to snow, but with only partial success.

‘Darling, my nose is so cold,' Elizabeth complained to Adam. ‘And everything's really very tiresome. What is going to happen about the production?'

‘Oh, it'll come off – though later than we thought, I fancy. George Green can sing Sachs. I doubt if it will set the rehearsals back very much – not more than a week, anyway; if that.' Adam drank his beer; it was cold enough to make him shiver a little.

‘Professor Fen' – Elizabeth adopted her most politic charm – ‘would you be prepared to let me interview you for a newspaper?'

Fen made a feeble attempt to show disinclination. ‘Oh, I don't know . . .' he mumbled.

‘
Please
, Professor Fen. It's in a series. I'm hoping to do H.M., and Mrs Bradley, and Albert Campion, and all sorts of famous people.'

‘Well, this is a surprise,' said Fen, carefully avoiding
Adam's eye. A certain uneasiness of manner became apparent. ‘But all these people are rather more able than I am . . . Well,' for the moment, he was evidently rather subdued, ‘what exactly did you want to know?'

‘Just tell me something about your cases.'

In the absence of an appropriate introductory fanfare, Fen coughed impressively. ‘The era of my greatest successes,' he began, but was interrupted with singular brutality by Sir Richard Freeman.

‘Now,' the latter remarked firmly, ‘if we're all warmed up, let's get back to the Shorthouse affair . . . It's very childish to sulk, Gervase . . . So far the central character has been, to me at any rate, somewhat of a cipher. What was Shorthouse like, Langley?'

Adam considered. ‘In appearance – stout, not very tall; rather small eyes; self-confident; a bit of a hypochondriac, particularly about his voice; age between forty and fifty, I should say.' He paused and drank some beer. ‘As regards character – well, I must admit I didn't like him. I scarcely think anyone did. He was a trouble-maker – and his love-life wasn't exactly idyllic, I may add.'

‘There goes C. S. Lewis,' said Fen suddenly. ‘It must be Tuesday.'

‘It is Tuesday.' Sir Richard struck a match and puffed doggedly at his pipe.

‘You seem to smoke the most incombustible tobacco,' Fen commented. ‘The era of my greatest successes –'

‘In what way a trouble-maker?' Sir Richard pushed at the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe and burned his fingers. ‘Can you give us an example?'

Adam narrated in some detail the events of yesterday's rehearsal.

‘We were all a trifle nervous,' he concluded, ‘about what was going to happen this morning. You see, Edwin had said he was going to phone Levi and try to get Peacock replaced. Consequently . . .'

He stopped hastily.

‘Ah.' Fen slowly nodded his head, mandarin-like. ‘That's the word. “Consequently”. It appears –'

‘It appears,' said Sir Richard, interrupting him, ‘that Peacock would have a motive for murdering Shorthouse.
Did
Shorthouse telephone Levi, by the way?'

‘I don't know,' said Adam, ‘but I very much doubt it. If he had, I should have weighed in on Peacock's side, and we should have had a general explosion of artistic temperament.'

‘You chivalrous old thing,' said Elizabeth affectionately.

Fen, who had been singing to himself a hideous parody of Pogner's Address, said:

‘And this young man you noticed at the rehearsal yesterday – you think he was the one who visited Shorthouse's dressing-room last night?'

‘I presume so.'

‘You presume so,' Fen looked despondent. ‘Well, we shall soon find out, I've no doubt.'

‘He may have a motive, too.' Sir Richard gazed into the bowl of his pipe as though he expected to see a serpent there. He then shook it, irritably. ‘That is' – he gestured vaguely – ‘this girl. What you said, Langley, suggests that she's a link between Boris Who-ever-he-is and Shorthouse.'

‘
Cherchez la femme
,' said Fen tediously.

‘It's possible,' Adam answered. ‘But personally I know nothing about it. Joan Davis would be the person to ask.'

‘That's the girl who's singing Eva, isn't it?'

Adam gurgled an affirmative through his beer.
‘Darling,'
said Elizabeth reproachfully.

‘We've got two possible suspects so far, then,' said Fen. ‘Peacock and Boris Godunov, or whatever his name is. We've also got a situation in which a man is murdered with no one in the room . . . Can you hang a man at a distance?'

‘Through the skylight, perhaps,' Adam suggested. ‘It opens, doesn't it?'

‘You'd have to transfer him to the hook afterwards,' said Elizabeth practically. ‘Which is scarcely possible – from outside.'

Adam sighed and glanced at the door of the bar. It opened to admit a large, articulated human skeleton. After it came Mudge, grasping it about the waist. For the moment they were unnerved. A woman in another corner of the bar gave a little shriek.

‘And whose cupboard,' said Fen, ‘did you find that in?' He laughed heartily. When he had stopped:

‘Really, Mudge,' said Sir Richard sternly, ‘whatever your enthusiasm for the case, this is going a little far. You haven't walked through the streets of Oxford with that thing, have you?'

Mudge was abashed. ‘I came in the car, sir,' he said in subdued tones; then, brightening: ‘But look – look at its neck.'

They looked at its neck. Everyone in the bar looked at its neck. There was no doubt that something had given it a very nasty wrench indeed.

‘It would seem' – Mudge was triumphant – ‘it would seem as though there had been a rehearsal beforehand.'

With a certain amount of tumult the skeleton was pushed out of the way under one of the wooden benches. ‘And if anyone says “Alas, poor Yorick”,' Fen announced, ‘there will be a second murder.' Mudge was given beer. His manner was penitential, and he eyed the Chief Constable with such manifest unease that Fen was driven to pat him encouragingly on the back.

Some discussion followed, which was scarcely enlightening. The skeleton had been found in the property-room of the opera-house, where normally it belonged; but no one, and least of all Furbelow, had been able to account for the accident to its neck. ‘There was one point in the PM report,' said Mudge, ‘and that was that the dislocation seems to have been the result of considerable violence; almost as though someone had jumped up and
clung to him while he was hanging, so as to weigh him down.'

There was a sudden silence: then, ‘How horrible,' Elizabeth remarked in a small voice.

‘Surely there's no opera a skeleton comes into,' said Fen.

‘Oh, yes.' Adam nodded. ‘It comes in Charles Shorthouse's opera on Kaiser's
Morn to Midnight.
By the way, I suppose Charles will inherit Edwin's money.'

‘Isn't he well off?'

‘He was, but I think he spent most of his capital financing his own operas. You know, of course, that no one can possibly make a
living
by writing operas – at any rate in England,' Adam mused. ‘Edwin must have accumulated a few thousand; and as he isn't married, I imagine they'll go to Charles, and pay for the staging of the
Oresteia
.'

‘The
Oresteia
?'

‘It's a big tetralogy he's just finishing: Cadogan's done the libretto. Apparently it pretty well needs a new theatre built to do it in – a second Bayreuth, as it were.'

‘Then Charles Shorthouse is a suspect,' said Fen with a certain satisfaction. ‘There goes C. S. Lewis again.'

‘Except that he lives at Amersham,' Sir Richard interposed.

‘There is transport. Obviously we shall have to find out what he was doing last night. He may bave an alibi.'

By now the little bar was beginning to empty again, as people drifted out for lunch. The opening of the door admitted blasts of cold wind, and they could just glimpse the grey stone front of St John's standing against a sky of more luminous grey, and tall, bare trees, spattered with little wisps of white, and one of the robot-like lamp-posts which are lined along the centre of St Giles'. It was growing so dark as to seem like evening. In the halls of Colleges, tasteless soups or sinister, bloated sausages, reminiscent of financiers in a socialist cartoon, were being set on tables. Fen's thoughts were turning to food.

‘My thoughts,' he told them, ‘are turning to food.'

‘And my feet,' said Elizabeth firmly, ‘are turning to ice . . . Adam darling, I supose you realize you're keeping
all
the fire off me?'

Two newcomers entered the bar. Adam, caught midway in a complex movement which drew wails of annoyance from Fen, greeted them in a harassed and absent manner. They drew near, diffidently.

‘Come and share the fire,' said Sir Richard agreeably.

The young man smiled in tacit apology for disturbing them. He was handsome in a dark, foreign fashion, and wiry, with alert, imaginative eys, but his face was disfigured by some sort of skin disease, and he looked far from well. With him was Judith Haynes. Though she was very young, her manner was aloof and mistrustful, with a veneer of sophistication which gave evidence of careful cultivation. Beneath a heavy brown coat she wore slacks and a jersey which emphasized the slenderness, almost the fragility, of her figure. A few flecks of half-melted snow glittered in her fair hair. She stood a little behind the young man, watching him with a trace of anxiety in her eyes. It was not difficult to see that she was very much in love with him.

‘Let me introduce you,' said Adam, suddenly mindful of his responsibilities. ‘Mr—?'

‘Stapleton,' said the young man. ‘Boris Stapleton. And this is Judith Haynes.'

‘My wife,' Adam responded. ‘Professor Fen, Sir Richard Freeman, Inspector Mudge.' It was as though he were reeling off a list of malefactors.

A conventional murmur of gratification went up. Hierophantically, Fen rearranged the circle round the fire and ordered a new round of drinks. A momentary blankness fell upon all their minds. It was clear, too, that the potential relevance of Stapleton to the matter in hand had not revealed itself to Mudge. He was finishing his beer in surreptitious haste, plainly considering that the time for his departure had arrived. Adam observed this.

‘Miss Haynes and Mr Stapleton' – his tones were significantly informative – ‘are both in
Die Meistersinger
.'

Mudge became instantly less fretful. He opened his mouth to speak, but Stapleton unwittingly forestalled him.

‘What's going to happen, sir?' he asked of Adam. ‘Will the first night be postponed?'

‘I imagine so.' Adam nodded. ‘But I haven't seen Peacock this morning. I heard from Joan, though, that Levi has been telephoned, and is in a condition approaching apoplexy.'

‘It's extraordinary.' Stapleton's utterance seemed less conventional than genuinely perplexed. ‘The more so as I myself saw Mr Shorthouse quite late last night.'

The name of Shorthouse roused Mudge into activity. He joined the conversation, cautiously, like a toreador confronted by a particularly incalculable bull.

‘I gather, Mr Stapleton,' he said, ‘that you were the last person to see Mr Shorthouse alive?'

Stapleton hesitated, fractionally. ‘Was I? I've heard no details, I'm afraid. Certainly I was with him last evening.'

‘Really, now? May I ask
why
you visited him, sir?'

‘It was about my opera. He'd agreed to look at the score. I went to ask him what he thought of it.'

‘Surely rather a late hour, sir, for a discussion of that kind?'

‘It was his suggestion,' Stapleton said helplessly. ‘I was scarcely in a position to object.'