The Weight of the Evidence (4 page)

‘A curious interlude,’ said Hobhouse sententiously.

‘Interlude? We hadn’t rightly got begun. Say an irregular prologue. And the result of it is that we come back asking if it
is
Pluckrose.’

‘Of course it’s Pluckrose.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Remember I haven’t yet seen the body. And a meteorite dropped from a tower sounds as if it might be pretty obliterating. Pluckrose’s clothes on somebody else’s carcase. Such things happen.’

Hobhouse grunted. ‘Down to the supposed victim’s false teeth lying on the grass nearby.’

‘Yes, yes.’ The car slid between lamp-posts and trams – gliding effortlessly up the hill like an immaterial thing. And Appleby looked sombrely out over the grey proliferation of slate and stone. ‘But the line is fine-drawn sometimes between those tawdry fictions and actual crime… Undoubtedly Pluckrose?’

‘Undoubtedly. Much of him was – was crushed. Quite remarkably so. But there was nothing like an obliteration of the features. That’s common knowledge, so his grace is barking up a wrong tree. I’m surprised he didn’t find out from Sir David.’

‘From the Vice-Chancellor, that is? His Grace will never see you or me again. But with those he has frequently to meet he probably practises a good deal of reserve. And here we are. And what we want now is actors.’

They stood in a windy outer vestibule, curiously eyed. ‘Actors?’ said Hobhouse.

‘No drama without actors. And as yet we haven’t had any – except a sort of strayed ducal reveller. I wonder how he gets that wine – Montalcino, I should say – to carry?’ Appleby’s glance was straying round the large lobby – tiled, sweating faintly, and inhospitable – to which they had come. ‘But look; there are a couple of possible actors. Let’s begin with them.’ Two gowned figures, one elderly and the other young, were advancing up a corridor. ‘Ring up the curtain, Hobhouse. The gallery is agog.’

‘But I don’t know anything about them.’ Hobhouse looked at Appleby with an eye startled and plainly meditating the potency of Montalcino. ‘I think the regular thing would be to take you to see Sir David.’

‘Bother Sir David. Likely enough we shall have to interview the whole learned lot before we’re finished.’ And Appleby took a couple of steps across the lobby. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and fished a slip of paper from his pocket.

The two gowned persons said good afternoon politely.

‘I am Detective-Inspector Appleby of New Scotland Yard.’

The two academic gentlemen, who a moment before had been conversing together with dignity and eyeing the empty corridor with an unnecessary but impressive severity, now looked at Appleby dumbly and with at least momentary dismay. It was upsetting, no doubt.

‘And this is Inspector Hobhouse of the Borough police. As you may know, we are inquiring into the death of Professor Pluckrose.’ Appleby looked at the elder of the two men. ‘Mr Murn, I think?’

‘You are mistaken, sir.’ The elderly man looked both offended and relieved. ‘My name is Crunkhorn.’

Appleby looked at his slip of paper, and his face lit up with sudden interest. ‘Mr Crunkhorn!’ he said. ‘That’s capital. And I may suppose, perhaps, that this is – ?’

‘Church,’ said the younger man, innocently and obligingly.

‘Exactly. Now I wonder if you could both give us a few minutes? We are using a room just along this corridor.’

Mr Crunkhorn bowed, and they moved into the tank-like apartment where Hobhouse had earlier given his account of the case. Appleby politely set chairs. ‘We are lucky to have come upon you so readily,’ he said.

The young man called Church again looked scared. But Mr Crunkhorn now wore an expression of settled severity. ‘We are somewhat at a loss, Mr Appleby. I hold the chair of mathematics and Mr Church is my colleague in that department. We have no special knowledge of Pluckrose. In fact, we were very seldom associated with him.’

‘Just so.’ Appleby nodded agreeably. ‘Inspector Hobhouse and I have been seeing the Vice-Chancellor.’

Hobhouse gave an inarticulate mutter and stared stonily at the golden-tasselled cap of the Duke of Nesfield where it still perched incongruously on its bust. Plainly, this sort of thing was far from having his approval.

‘Sir David is greatly upset – much grieved. He regarded Professor Pluckrose as a close personal friend.’

‘Indeed,’ said Crunkhorn – a shade grimly.

‘And he advised us to come straight to you for what he called an objective and dispassionate view.’

‘Ah,’ said Crunkhorn.

‘Nobody, he thought, would be better able to provide such a thing. And he made one or two remarks on the value of a mathematical training which interested me very much. I fear I was a classical man myself.’

‘Indeed.’ Crunkhorn spoke more mildly. ‘Our professor of classics is Hissey.’

‘Really?’ Appleby was interested. ‘I used to attend his lectures when he was a don at St Anthony’s.’

‘Dear me.’ Crunkhorn, though staring a little blankly at this odd policeman, relaxed appreciably in his chair. ‘A sound scholar, I have been told. But somewhat out of his element here. These universities, you know, require for the most part technical men. Applied scientists – that sort of timing.’

Silly old snob, thought Appleby. ‘These’ universities won’t have a soul of their own until they put the Duke’s Dicks and Harrys into their teaching jobs. Aloud he said: ‘And now I wonder if you can help us? Professor Pluckrose appears to have been murdered, I am very sorry to say. Is there any general picture into which such a thing would conceivably fit?’ He paused. ‘Of course we quite realize that you may not think there is anything profitable to record.’

Hobhouse stirred slightly, as if reluctantly acknowledging the mature technique concealed in this last remark. Nothing like suggesting to a witness that he may be without anything interesting to say.

And Professor Crunkhorn said something. It had at least the virtue of being totally unexpected. ‘Galileo,’ he said. ‘I associate the affair with Galileo.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Galileo.’

Appleby looked very blank. ‘Do I understand you to refer to – to the sixteenth-century astronomer?’

Professor Crunkhorn turned to his junior colleague. ‘Church,’ he asked, ‘do you remember when he was born?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘Or when he died?’

‘I can’t say I do.’

‘Ah.’ Crunkhorn shook his head with facetious sadness over this piece of academic nescience. ‘But stay! The dates have just come into my head.’ He smiled amiably at his discomfited assistant. ‘1564 to 1642. We shall therefore do well to refer to him as a
seventeenth
-century astronomer.’

Hobhouse breathed heavily, clearly indicating his conviction that this travesty of correct police procedure could lead only to buffoonery. Appleby, however, looked admiringly at Crunkhorn, as if delighted to meet so forthright and cogent a mind. ‘I certainly agree that we should assign Galileo to the seventeenth century. And it is most interesting that he should be implicated in Professor Pluckrose’s death. Perhaps you could expand the matter a little?’

‘Church sees what is in my mind. He will explain better than I can.’ And Crunkhorn again beamed amiably at his colleague. It was plain that one of this young man’s functions was to be taken round and baited, like a sort of learned bear.

‘Meteorites,’ said Church uncertainly and gloomily. ‘They say the old person was killed with a meteorite.’ He paused for a moment, as if there was something enticing in the thought of this short way with old persons. ‘I suppose that might link up with astronomy after some fashion.’ He scowled at Appleby – an able youth, acutely conscious of being manoeuvred into saying something thoroughly feeble.

‘To be sure,’ said Crunkhorn. ‘Your analysis, my dear Church, carries us some way – some
little
way. But it is a particular experiment of Galileo’s which I have in mind. You know something, Church, of the architectural curiosities of Pisa?’

‘There’s a leaning tower.’

‘Splendid! There is indeed a leaning tower, and from it Galileo conducted one of his most famous experiments. Unfortunately it was an experiment tinged with that frivolity to which he was prone. He had, as you know, become a professor of mathematics at an early age, and this appears to have unsettled him.’

Mr Church, who was himself presumably committed to the business of becoming a professor of mathematics sooner or later, scowled more darkly than ever. Appleby was beginning to be interested in him.

‘This experiment of Galileo’s to which I refer was directed towards the establishment of the Law of Falling Bodies, according to which all bodies fall at the same rate in a vacuum and at the end of a given time have a velocity proportional to the time in which they have been falling, and have traversed a distance proportional to the square of that time.’ Crunkhorn looked expectantly at Hobhouse, as if soliciting that officer’s learned acquiescence. ‘Now Aristotle had maintained otherwise, and Galileo’s colleagues swore by Aristotle.’

‘The longest tyranny that ever swayed,’ said Church. This was apparently a quotation, and the young man brightened momentarily at the consciousness of having behaved in a suitably donnish way.

‘No doubt. And Galileo determined to demonstrate in a particularly dramatic manner the truth of his own view on the matter. As it happened, his colleagues were in the habit of walking past the base of the leaning tower in a daily academic procession. Galileo climbed the tower, taking with him what we may call a one-pound shot and a ten-pound shot. And these he dropped at what he considered the appropriate moment. Such of his colleagues as were not distracted by a narrow escape from death were forced to confess that the shots had landed virtually simultaneously. Or rather they confessed that so it appeared to them. As Aristotle could not be wrong, it was evident that their eyes must have deceived them.’

‘What you tell us is extremely interesting.’ Appleby spoke quite without irony. ‘And the tower here is not unlike a leaning tower: that is to say, it has overhanging turrets which would make it quite a good place for such experiments. But I think that when you say you associate the affair of Professor Pluckrose’s death with Galileo you must have something further in mind?’

‘I have. In the university of late there has been a peculiar spirit of levity abroad.’

Church suddenly grinned. ‘But with Galileo it seems to have been rather a matter of gravity. And with Pluckrose too.’

Crunkhorn frowned; this joke clearly failed to conform to the best academic canons. ‘A spirit of levity among the younger members of our teaching body. “Ragging” is, I believe, the word. The sort of thing one associates with undergraduates in spurious novels of university life. We have been perturbed by it. And inclined to wonder who is the moving spirit.’ Mr Crunkhorn looked with frank speculation at Mr Church.

‘Jokes?’ asked Hobhouse. ‘You don’t suggest that Pluckrose had an enormous meteorite thrown at him by way of a practical joke?’

‘I for one’, said Church, ‘fail to remember such a thing even in a spurious novel. But I agree that there have been practical jokes and that there is probably a moving spirit. Which gets us back to Galileo, doesn’t it?
Eppur si muove
.’ And Church laughed immoderately. After all, a young man quite well able to look after himself.

Crunkhorn frowned. ‘I certainly don’t suggest that Pluckrose was deliberately killed for fun. Such a suggestion would be rational only if there were ground for supposing the presence of a criminal lunatic about the university. But the thing may well have been a violent and dangerous jest gone wrong – just what Galileo’s demonstration would have been had an accident occurred.’ Crunkhorn hesitated. ‘I really do not know if I ought to take this train of thought further. But perhaps it had better be mentioned that Pluckrose had a good deal of mathematics. He was a biochemist and interested in genetics, which requires a certain amount of mathematics nowadays. He had enough mathematics to ride various hobbies. And one of these was ballistics. He held rather cranky views on that.’

Hobhouse was looking glumly at the ceiling. Appleby came tactfully to his aid. ‘Ballistics?’ he said. ‘You mean – ?’

‘The science of projectiles. The Navy applies its laws whenever it fires a gun.’

‘Rules’, said Church, ‘worked out by Newton and others when the bosses told them that the targets must jolly well be hit. Which is the sort of supply-and-demand affair they call science.’

And Professor Crunkhorn and his assistant eyed each other with a sudden serious animosity. At the moment, thought Appleby, one of the radical issues between the old and the young. Is science the disinterested pursuit of knowledge which the world may apply if it will? Or is it an activity always dependent upon economic and political demands? Odd how this messy mystery is bringing all that sort of stuff in.

‘And a meteorite falling from a tower,’ asked Hobhouse practically; ‘would that be ballistics?’

‘In a sense, yes.’ Crunkhorn frowned and spoke carefully. ‘Suppose Pluckrose to have what was, for some, an irritating way of airing this hobby of his. He is always talking about shells and bombs in a bland, theoretical way. He sees these abominations obstinately in terms of science and not at all in terms of morals or of the imagination. Until somebody says to himself: “I’ll show him what it
feels
like to have a projectile drop by one’s nose.” I think, gentlemen, that the explanation of the fatality might lie there.’

There was silence. One may be a bit pompous and yet by no means a fool. And Appleby looked at Church. The young man had gone slightly pale. The silence prolonged itself.

‘It would be a tragedy,’ pursued Crunkhorn presently. ‘And the law, I think, would call it manslaughter of the gravest sort. For myself, I should regard with great charity a folly so dreadfully visited. Nor do I say positively that this is even the most likely manner of Pluckrose’s death. It is merely a possibility, and one which, if the mystery continues, would certainly be discovered and canvassed. So I mention it now. Perhaps Church will tell us what he thinks of it.’

Appleby looked thoughtfully from one to the other of these men. Was Crunkhorn obliquely accusing his junior colleague? Or was he, despite an obvious everyday friction between the two, concerned to tide one whom he believed innocent over the first shock of a suspicion he judged inevitable? Church was scared. Was he scared merely as any young and inwardly uncertain man might be with such sinister and unfamiliar matter hovering round him? For a moment nobody said anything and one could hear the silence of the motionless clock.