Death at the President's Lodging (2 page)

But it is a troubled quiet that much of the university enjoys in the twentieth century. Day and night the vast aggregation of London, sixty miles away, clamours for supplies; day and night it sends out products of its own. And day and night the venerable streets, up and down which so many generations of scholars and poets have sauntered in meditative calm, re-echo to the roar of modern transport. By day the city is itself a chief offender; local buses and innumerable undergraduate-driven cars jam and eddy in the narrow streets. But by night the place becomes an artery only; regularly, remorselessly, with just interval enough to allow uneasy expectation, the heavy night-travelling lorries and pantechnicons of modern commerce rumble and thunder through the town. And day and night as the ceaseless stream goes by, the grey and fretted stone, sweeping in its gentle curve from bridge to bridge, shudders and breathes, as at the stroke of a great hammer upon the earth.

St Anthony’s is fortunate amid all this. Alone among the colleges that front the worst of the hubbub, it presents on this aspect a spacious garden, the famous Orchard Ground. Behind the privacy of a twelve-foot wall, topped by lofty ornamental railings, a spreading lawn thickly set with apple trees runs back to meet the first and most massive group of college buildings: the chapel, the library and the hall. Beyond the great screen of these, in Bishop’s Court, the hum of traffic scarcely penetrates. And beyond that again the oldest part of the college, the medieval Surrey Court, with its high Early English archway and main gates giving on St Ernulphus Lane, almost touches the inviolate calm of King Alfred’s Meadows. The ancient town has its haunts for the dreamer still.

But the great garden of Orchard Ground had proved from time to time the haunt of anything but quiet activities. The St Anthony’s undergraduates had rioted in it, hunted a real fox in it, smuggled into it under cover of darkness a very sizeable sow on the verge of parturition. Orchard Ground, therefore, had long been locked up at night; junior members of the college had no access to it after ten-fifteen. The senior members, the Fellows, could use a key: for four of them who lodged in Orchard Ground a key was essential… And upon Orchard Ground, thus peculiarly insulated at night, opened the French windows of the study in which Dr Umpleby’s body had been found.

It had been a quarter past two when the great yellow Bentley swung out of New Scotland Yard; it drew up outside St Anthony’s just as four o’clock was chiming from a score of bells. Seldom, Inspector John Appleby reflected, had he been so expeditiously dispatched to investigate a case of presumed murder beyond the metropolitan area. And indeed, his arrival in the Yard’s most resplendent vehicle was sign and symbol of august forces having been at work: that morning the Dean of St Anthony’s had hastily seen the Vice-Chancellor; the Vice-Chancellor had no less hastily telephoned to the Lord Chancellor of England, High Steward of the university; the Lord Chancellor had communicated quite briskly with the Home Secretary… It was not unlikely, Appleby thought as he jumped out of the car, that local authority might feel central authority to have been pitched somewhat abruptly at its head. He was therefore relieved when, on being shown by a frightened parlourmaid into the deceased President’s dining-room, he discovered local authority incarnated in no more formidable shape than that of an old acquaintance, Inspector Dodd.

These two men offered an interesting contrast – the contrast not so much of two generations (although Appleby was by full twenty years the younger) as of two epochs of English life. Dodd, heavy, slow, simply bred, and speaking with such a dialectical purity that a philologist might have named the parish in which he was born, suggested an England fundamentally rural still – and an England in which crime, when it occurred, was clear and brutal, calling less for science and detective skill than for vigorous physical action. He had learned a routine, but he was essentially untrained and unspecialized, relying upon a pithy if uncertain native shrewdness, retaining something strong and individual in his mental, as in his linguistic, idiom. Beside him, Appleby’s personality seemed at first thin, part effaced by some long discipline of study, like a surgeon whose individuality has concentrated itself within the channels of a unique operative technique. For Appleby was the efficient product of a more “developed” age than Dodd’s; of an age in which our civilization, multiplying its elements by division, has produced, amid innumerable highly-specialized products, the highly-specialized criminal and the highly-specialized detector of crime. Nevertheless, there was something more in Appleby than the intensely taught product of a modern police college. A contemplative habit and a tentative mind, poise as well as force, reserve rather than wariness – these were the tokens perhaps of some underlying, more liberal education. It was a schooled but still free intelligence that was finally formidable in Appleby, just as it was something of tradition and of the soil that was finally formidable in Dodd.

The two men were likely enough to clash; with a little goodwill they were equally likely to combine. And now Dodd, for all his fifteen stone and an uncommon tiredness (he had been working on the case since early morning), sprang up with decent cordiality to welcome his colleague. “The detective arrives,” he said with a deep chuckle when greetings had been exchanged, “and the village policeman hands over the body with all the misunderstood clues to date.” As he spoke, Dodd turned towards the table, on which a pile of papers evinced his industry during the day. They were flanked on the one hand by a hastily-made but sufficiently clear ground-plan of the college and on the other by the remains of bread and cheese, and beer in stout academic pewter – refreshments which it had occurred to Dr Umpleby’s servants, round about three o’clock, that the inspector might stand a little in need of. “The St Anthony’s beer,” Dodd said, “is a good feature of the case. The village policeman is baffled, but he gets his pint.”

Appleby smiled. “The village policeman has notably mastered his facts,” he replied, “at least if he’s the same policeman I knew a couple of years ago. The Yard still talks about your check-up on those motor-thieves…you remember?”

Dodd’s acknowledgment of the compliment in the reminiscence took the form of wasting no time now. Drawing up a chair for Appleby he placed the pile of papers between them. “I’ve been going a bit fast today,” he said abruptly, “and what I’ve got here is limited by going fast. It’s short all round but it gives us bearings. There has been ground enough to cover, and first on the spot must get quickly over all, you’ll agree. I’ve taken dozens of statements in a hasty way. Any one of them might have put me direct on somebody making out of the country. But none of them has. It’s a mystery right enough, Appleby. In other words, it looks like one of your cases, not mine.”

Dodd’s handsome speech was sincere but not wholly disinterested. Fortified by the St Anthony’s ale, he had been spending the last hour thinking, and the more he had thought the less he had liked the results. His mind, indeed, had begun to stray, shying from this case on which he could see no beginning to another case of which he hoped soon to see the end. For some time he had been working on an extensive series of burglaries in the suburbs and this baffling matter of Dr Umpleby, obviously urgent, had come to interrupt his personal control of a round-up from which he saw himself as likely to gain a good deal of credit. He put his position to Appleby now and it was agreed that the latter should, for the time being, take over the St Anthony’s mystery as completely as possible. As soon as they had come to an understanding on this, Dodd placed the plan of the college in front of Appleby and proceeded to outline the facts as he knew them.

“Dr Umpleby was shot dead at eleven o’clock last night. That’s the first of several things that make his death something like the storybooks. You know the murdered squire’s house in the middle of the snowstorm? And all the fancy changes rung on that – liners on the ocean, submarines, balloons in the air, locked rooms with never a chimney? St Anthony’s or any other college, you see, is something like that from half-past nine every night. Here’s your submarine.” As he spoke, Dodd took up the ground-plan and ran a large finger aggressively round the perimeter of the St Anthony’s buildings. “But in this college,” he went on, “there’s more to it than that.” This time his finger ran round a lesser circuit. “In this college there’s submarine
within
submarine. At half-past nine they shut off the college as a whole from the world. And then later, at ten-fifteen, they shut off one bit of the college from the rest. That is almost a pure storybook situation now, isn’t it? Nobody gets in or out of the college after half-past nine that the porter doesn’t know of –
with certain exceptions
. Nobody got in or out from half-past nine last night to this present moment that we don’t know of –
with the
same possible exceptions
. And after ten-fifteen, nobody can go to and fro between the main body of the college (submarine) and this additionally shut-off Orchard Ground (submarine within submarine) with, again,
the same possible exceptions
. Only” – and here Inspector Dodd suddenly spoke with a vigorous irritation – “none of the exceptions appears to be a homicidal lunatic! And therefore the lunatic who did
that
” – and here Dodd jerked his thumb in the direction of the next room – “ought still to be on the premises.
I
haven’t found him, Appleby. Every man alive in this college is saner and more blameless than the rest.”

“Why necessarily look for a lunatic?” Appleby asked.

“I don’t,” responded Dodd soberly. “That hanky-panky through there rattled me for a moment,” and again he motioned towards the next room. “You’ll see what I mean presently,” he continued a little grimly, “but the point I have to make now is about these exceptions. The exceptions, as you may guess, are certain of the Fellows of the college – not by any means all of them. They have keys – double-purpose keys. They can enter or leave the college with them through this little door on Schools Street. And you see where – if they’re coming in – that lands them. It lands them straight in the submarine within a submarine, Orchard Ground. They can then use the same key to get them out of Orchard Ground into the rest of the college. And when I give you the facts of the case in a minute you’ll see that the murderer of Dr Umpleby appears to have had one of those keys. Which is no doubt,” the inspector added dryly, “why
you
have been sent for in such a hurry.”

“I see the suggested situation, anyway,” Appleby replied, after a brief scrutiny of the ground-plan. “Whereas in a normal college a nocturnal murder would probably be physically within the power of anyone within the college,
this
college is so arranged that
this
murder could apparently be carried out only by quite a few people – people who had, or who could get hold of, a key to this Orchard Ground. For the keys – you are maintaining, are you not? – gave the particular sort of access to Dr Umpleby that the circumstances seem to require.”

Dodd nodded. “You’ve got it,” he said, “and you can understand the perturbation of St Anthony’s.”

“There is the obvious fact that keys are treacherous things. They’re easier to steal usually than a cheque-book – and far easier to copy than a signature.”

Dodd shook his head. “Yes, but you’ll see presently that there’s more to it than that. The topography of the business really is uncommonly odd.”

Both men looked at the plan in silence for a moment. “Well,” said Appleby at length, “here is our stage setting. Now let us have the characters and events.”

“I’ll begin with characters,” Dodd said, “indeed I’ll begin where I had to begin this morning; with a list of names.” As he spoke, the inspector rummaged among his papers as if looking for a memorandum. Then, apparently thinking better of it, he squared his shoulders, wrinkled his brow in concentration and continued with his eyes fixed upon his own large boots.

“Here are the Fellows who were dining in college last night. In addition to the President there was the Dean; he’s called the Reverend the Honourable Tracy Deighton-Clerk.” (There was an indefinable salt in the inspector’s mode of conveying this information.) “And there were Mr Lambrick, Professor Empson, Mr Haveland, Mr Titlow, Dr Pownall, Dr Gott, Mr Campbell, Professor Curtis, Mr Chalmers-Paton and Dr Barocho.”

Appleby nodded. “Deighton-Clerk,” he repeated, “Lambrick, Empson, Haveland, Titlow, Pownall, Gott, Campbell, Curtis, Chalmers-Paton – and a foreigner who just beats me. Go on.”

“Barocho,” said Dodd. “And only one Fellow, as it happens, was absent. He’s called Ransome and at the moment he’s said to be digging up some learned stuff in central Asia.” Dodd’s tone again conveyed some hint of the feeling that Dr Umpleby’s death had landed him among queer fish. “Not that I’ve any proof,” he continued suspiciously, “of where this Ransome is. That’s just what they all say.”

Appleby smiled. “The submarine seems well officered,” he said. “If you’re going on to extract a list of a couple of hundred or so undergraduates from those boots of yours I think I’d certainly prefer the baronet’s country house. Or the balloon in the stratosphere – that generally holds about two.” But his eyes as he spoke were on the plan in front of him and in a moment he added: “But the point seems to be that the undergraduates don’t come in?”

“I don’t think they do,” replied Dodd; “at least it’s
likely
they don’t, just as it’s likely the college servants and so on don’t – and, as you’ve gathered, for simple topographical reasons. So the list I’ve given you may be important. And now, after the scene and the persons, I suppose, events and times. Here is the time-scheme of the thing as far as I’ve got it into my head.