Stop Press (44 page)

The two cars – those driven by Archie and Patricia respectively – arrived at the Abbey within five minutes of each other. The visitors were received by their host in a species of entrance hall known for learned reasons as the tribune; in the ceremony Shoon was supported by several Friends of the Venerable Bede, by the now romantically mysterious Horace Benton, and by Horace Benton’s colleague Mummery. After formal introductinos the women were conducted upstairs by Shoon and recommended to the good offices of a housekeeper; the men were put in charge of Benton and led to a cloakroom. Standards of hospitality at the Abbey were generous; it was understood that the visit was for both luncheon and dinner; settling in was therefore quite an affair. The men discarded coats, hats, scarves, gloves, sticks, umbrellas; the cleanly washed; the vain made passes with hair brushes and straightened ties; everyone then trooped back to the tribune. It was at this point that somebody noticed Sir Rupert Eliot as having emerged apparently equipped for a problematical parlour game. Pinned to his back was an irregular circle of white paper.

Mr Eliot, who in this particular might be supposed to have more acute apprehensions than others present, was the first to observe that the thing was undoubtedly a spider; Archie Eliot was the first to turn it over and discover the message. It was the message that was so allusive. There was but a single line of typescript, and it read:

Love’s Usury
, lines 10–11.

On this there was some moments’ debate. Mr Eliot rather thought that
Love’s Usury
was a play by Farquhar; Sir Archibald Eliot stoutly maintained it to be a poem by Donne. Their host, although a little haziness on a merely seventeenth-century matter could not have been counted to his discredit, appeared slightly vexed at not being able to give a convinced verdict. There was nothing for it but to send for the books.

At Shoon Abbey this was unfortunately a matter of some little difficulty, and in fact most of the time which Bussenschutt, Winter, and Appleby spent wandering through the grounds was employed by the other visitors in the rather awkward business of awaiting light on this latest enigma of the joker’s. Donne and Farquhar were available, but contriving an interview was a matter of ceremony. Shoon retired to his study, opened a safe, extracted a bunch of keys, retired to another quarter of the house for the purpose of switching off a burglar-proof device, returned to the tribune, entered a lift, and disappeared. Some ten minutes later he reappeared with a library trolley on which was a little pile of elaborately tooled leather boxes. These opened on elaborately tooled books. The company set to exploring Donne and Farquhar in their rarest and most ancient forms. It was probably at this juncture that Mr Eliot felt his first misgivings about the Shoon Collection. When scholars have occasion to make references of this kind they commonly do so in unpretentious standard editions; Mr Eliot, a scholar
manqué
, had the nicest sense of such small points of decorum, and it was doubtless this prodigal display of his host’s which began in his mind a revolution which was to have the most fateful consequences.

Meanwhile Archie had found
Love’s Usury
in Donne without any difficulty. The relevant lines read:

And at next nine

Keep midnight’s promise.

This revelation introduced a further awkwardness. Midnight’s promise had certainly been murder. And what had been promised for midnight, since it had certainly not occurred at nine o’clock on this the succeeding morning, might fairly be regarded as in store for nine o’clock at night. But all this must be presumed as having no meaning for Shoon, Benton, and anyone else who had not come from Rust. Thus hard upon their arrival at the Abbey the visitors were compelled to offer some account of the disturbances by which they had recently been surrounded. It was while these explanations were in progress that the Spider, whose pace seemed to be briskening, spoke again. And if his first action at the Abbey had been reminiscent of that literary badinage which he had come in his later years to indulge in with his friend the engineer his second action was much more in the spirit of his earlier and violent days. It was also appropriate to the new environment in which he was operating. The Spider, in fact, loosed off a bomb.

The explosion, though not of shattering violence, was sufficiently alarming. A number of people retreated hastily from the quarter in which they conceived the danger to lie; Timmy Eliot was the first to make a move in the contrary direction. He ran towards the cloakroom – where a glass door could be observed as having been shattered by the concussion – and disappeared within. A shout as of discovery brought others on the scene. In point of sudden shock the effect which the joker had contrived was not altogether incomparable with the affair of the middle black. Rupert had travelled to the Abbey in a vast yellowish overcoat and a bowler hat. These he had hung in a row with other peoples’ s wraps – and it was these alone which had been demolished. The bomb – which must have been a miniature affair – had presumably been slipped into a pocket of the coat; in the result this outermost shell of Sir Rupert was ripped to ribbons – and of the bowler hat the brim and crown were discovered in opposite corners of the room. It was a nicely calculated demonstration. Steering with a hair’s-breadth of mere futility, it contrived to convey the most macabre suggestion of a threatening violent dissolution. And the threat implicit in the explosion was explicitly restated on a second paper spider which turned up in the course of a rummage among the debris. This read:

It’s coming to you, Rupert.

THE SPIDER KNOWS ALL.

Appleby, somewhat bewilderingly transported from those intimations of the higher destructiveness so suavely explained away by Shoon in his boardroom to this petty but efficient petarding among the hats and coats, repeated to himself that it would all link up. Perhaps at some level of his mind not readily available to consciousness it had all linked up already. Or perhaps he was merely enunciating to himself some article of faith. But not only, he told himself, would it all link up; it would also all turn on one cardinal fact. To these scattered events there was a centre: Mr Eliot had really found the joker in possession of an odd insight into his own mind. Amid much mystification this was the mystery. Motive and mechanism, the why and the how, met here. It was this that gave its intellectual interest to a rambling and irregular weekend affair. It was this, too, that Appleby contrived to keep in focus during a curious conversation with Rupert Eliot which followed upon the cloakroom explosion.

The conversation was initiated by Rupert. He led Appleby aside and enquired, ‘How’s two and two? Have you plumped for four yet, or are you still keeping an open mind on the possibility of three or five?’

‘I wish I saw it as simply as that. Perhaps you know more about it than I do.’

They were parading down a long Gothic corridor rather reminiscent of a station hotel. It was gloomy. But even in the gloom Appleby could see Rupert assume his least engaging smile. ‘Know about it? I know it ought to be stopped.’

‘Before nine tonight?’

Rupert snorted. ‘I’m not scared. I’ve been threatened in my time by more formidable men than Archie. But his foolery ought to be stopped. In other people’s houses. It’s intolerable.’

‘You think that two and two make Sir Archibald?’

‘I know’ – Rupert combined a further snort with a backward jerk of the head towards the cloakroom – ‘that
that
was Archie. Who else would mix up a nasty little infernal machine and rubbish out of Donne, or whoever it is? And Archie won’t murder anyone – unless it be Shoon. I needn’t shake in my shoes. It’s just malicious japing. But it should be dropped on all the same. Damned intolerable foolery.’

‘Sir Archibald might murder Shoon?’

‘Not really. One gets the trick of talking like a story-book with all this about one. But Archie had a vicious quarrel with Shoon at the end of that west tower business. Over the bill, no doubt.’

‘I see.’ Halfway down the corridor they had reached the grateful warmth of an enormous log fire and paused before it. ‘By the way, Sir Rupert, your own mathematics are pretty cautious. I gather that your two and two give you Sir Archibald only in this particular joke. Perhaps he just sticks his malicious oar in at this point?’

‘Perhaps so. There’s the fact that the previous jokes were directed against Richard. This one is directed against me. The jokes against Richard failed in their object and I shouldn’t be surprised if we’ve heard the last of them. This joke of Archie’s has a different object. Or more probably no object at all.’

Appleby spread out his hands to the blaze. ‘I am interested’, he said carefully, ‘that you think the jokes were after something and have been a failure. Will you tell me of just what you are thinking?’

‘My good sir’ – Rupert was impatient – ‘it’s as obvious to you as it is to me. Richard was to be thrown off his rocker. Or alternatively he was to be manoeuvred int the resolution to drop scribbling those rubbishing books – as one heartily wishes he would. And the thing has been a failure simply because he is a stronger and more obstinate man than one would guess.’

‘I have thought of that, I admit. Such seems to have been the
object
. But what was the
motive
?’ Appleby glanced up from the fire and rapidly answered his own question. ‘It was either business or pleasure.’

‘Quite so. Either the joker would merely be
pleased
to see the end of the Spider, or he would think to
gain
by it. It’s nice’ – Rupert grinned wolfishly – ‘to be able to keep up with the thought of the police. But I don’t know that it’s a very helpful line. We should all be
pleased
to see the end of the Spider. But I don’t know that any of us would
gain
. I, for one, should
lose
.’

‘Indeed?’ Appleby was boldly interrogative.

‘A delicate matter, my dear Mr Appleby. I have no doubt that it has been explained to you by Archie and others that my circumstances are necessitous. In fact I am maintained by the generosity of my cousin Richard. And what he allows me is two per cent of his royalties. I have his word that I shall always have that – and Richard is monotonously honourable. But I wouldn’t swear that he hasn’t repented of his promise since. For me, the passing of the Spider means the passing of a certain income. I hand you all this, of course’ – Rupert chuckled delightedly – ‘as a defence of myself against the suspicions which I don’t doubt you have been harbouring.’

‘I’m glad to be handed anything. May I ask if Sir Archibald is in a position similar to yours?’

‘He is not. He just extracts what he can from Richard from time to time. And of course he just hates the Spider – that engineer, you know, got right under his skin. I really think he’s your best suspect for the tricks – for the whole sorry series of them, after all. For instance, if there weren’t the odd fact that he had been drugged, how clearly he would stand out as the one person who could have monkeyed with that picture. When you come to think of it, he may have drugged himself.’

‘As it happens, he was seen to do so.’

Rupert jumped. ‘Then–’

Appleby shook his head. ‘It doesn’t greatly help. But drugs reminds me of something. Can you think of anyone concerned, other than Chown, who has a medical training?’

‘A
medical
training – do you mean chemicals? Dabbling in explosives?’

‘Not at all. I mean actually qualified to practise medicine.’

‘The police draw ahead at last. You baffle me. But the answer, I believe, is the little bounder André. He was a doctor until he found there was more money in the Spider.’

‘What a lot of people have done that: engineers, doctors, men of the world–’

Rupert frowned. ‘Young man, I have been as helpful as I could and need not be repaid by impertinence.’

Appleby apologized cheerfully. ‘And I believe,’ he said, ‘there is one other piece of information which would help. I understand your cousin’s habit is to write two novels simultaneously. Was there a companion manuscript to
Murder at Midnight
, do you happen to know?’

‘There was. Indeed, there is – locked up in a safe.
Murder at Midnight
has been abandoned, but the other, I suppose, will go on when all this blows over.’

‘Do you know the theme – or title?’

‘The theme, no; the title, yes.
A Death in the Desert
.’

Appleby shook his head. ‘Literary but unilluminating. If it were called, now
, Annihilation at Nine.
Or even
The Corpse in the Cloakroom.’

‘I tell you, there’s no mystery about the cloakroom business. I’m convinced it’s Archie’s joke.’

‘I believe you,’ said Appleby.

The majority of the Friends of the Friends of the Venerable Bede had departed – presumably after having been addressed by Dr Bussenschutt the evening before. Those who remained seemed disposed to extreme reticence. At luncheon the party from Rust were slightly the more numerous, and it was to them that Shoon directed most of his conversation.

‘I must warn you’, said Shoon, ‘about the Hermit.’ He glanced round gravely and his eye fell particularly on Miss Cavey, as if commerce with anchorites might be supposed peculiarly attractive to her. ‘The poor fellow has been of uncertain temper for years now. When I installed him I doubted if he had a vocation for the contemplative life. And I may fairly claim some experience of hermits.’

There was a moment’s attentive silence. Appleby looked from his host to Rupert Eliot. But he saw neither. What he saw was himself in a school library twenty years before, with his pen in his mouth and both hands turning the pages of an enormous book… Sherlock Holmes had declined to burden his memory with elementary astronomy. Appleby, contemplating the first ray of positive light which had broken in upon the affair of the Spider, thanked his stars for a memory which refused to shed the traditional lumber of a liberal education.