Stop Press (55 page)

The figures disappeared; the wind caught their voices and there was silence. Timmy and Patricia peered curiously at the still figure beside them. ‘The Collection,’ said Appleby – again softly, as if he were feeling his way. ‘Your father’s reactions; Rupert’s talk; the
curiosa
.’

The figures reappeared – a good way nearer – from the straggling shadow of a mouldering wall. Sharply foreshortened and threading their way through crumbled masonry and beneath broken arches, they were like a reconnaissance party disastrously clumped together in some near-obliterated town. The murmur of their voices rose and eddied about the tower; the voice of Miss Cavey, the first to disengage itself, chattered meaninglessly of the moon and the night.

‘New Zealand,’ said Appleby; ‘what happened in
Grand Tarantula
; the career and conversation of Adrian Kermode.’

The party below, advancing between narrowing walls, was only fitfully touched by moonlight. Faintly there came up the sound of somebody stumbling; a little fuss of concern, sympathy, assistance.

Appleby planted himself carefully against the parapet. ‘The husband’, he said with sudden confidence, ‘of our dear queen.’

They were almost directly below; motionless; caught and held in an arena of coldly pricking light. Shoon’s voice, bland and explanatory, floated up; was sharply cut by Appleby’s.

‘Proust,’ said Appleby – and it was as if the light had flooded full on him too – ‘and perhaps the anatomy of the camel.’

He was staring fixedly down; suddenly he braced himself as with the consciousness of unexpected emergency; his tongue clicked; Timmy and Patricia, following his gaze, saw the party below divided in two unequal groups. The majority were huddled together staring dutifully up at the tower. At about five yards distance, as if standing apart for the purpose of declamation, was Shoon. Close by Shoon was Winter.

Appleby swung half round. Shoon and Winter were seen to spring apart, and in the same second a report, instantly followed by another, shattered the silence. Shoon disappeared like a flash behind the shelter of a wall; Winter with the barest pause followed his example; the party scattered in panic. Timmy heard a rustle beside him; it was the arm of Appleby dropping; there was a crashing detonation by his ear; the arm swiftly rose and fell; crash after crash tore the night.

Silence, more bewildering than the uproar it succeeded, abruptly fell. Below, everyone had disappeared, making for the house under what cover they could secure. Appleby was looking at his watch. ‘Ten to nine,’ he said – and his voice came thin and flat to their numbed ears.

Patricia scarcely heard. She was staring in perplexity at that long wall, rising and falling like a switchback in some ghostly Luna Park, on which she and Timmy had crazily scrambled half an hour before…

‘Five to nine,’ said Appleby. He seemed to be methodically cleaning his revolver; with a sense of being under orders Timmy and Patricia sat quite still.

‘Almost on nine.’

Timmy stirred uneasily. ‘Had we better be getting down? It seems all quiet.’

As he spoke the tower beneath them lurched like a live thing at the cut of a whip. For a split second they were caught and shaken as by a mountainous surf. The concussion became shattering sound. It rose, unbearably flooded their senses, ebbed away. There succeeded – faint-seeming as a handful of pebbles scattered by a child – the rattle of falling masonry, the tinkle of thousands of fragments of shattered glass.

Appleby took Timmy and Patricia by the arm. Through a pall of smoke they stared at a chaos where, seconds before, the roof of Shoon Abbey had shone tranquilly in the moon.

‘Clearly’, said Appleby, ‘the moment for a tidy-up.’

‘Look here,’ said Winter, appearing in Shoon’s hall, ‘I really do object.’

‘Object?’ Appleby, as if the tidy-up before him could very well bide its time, sat down on a bench.

‘I object to being mysteriously singled out as Hamlet after all.’

‘Hamlet?’ An absent tone in Appleby’s voice suggested that his air of leisure cloaked concentrated thinking.

‘You told us that a murder had been arranged and dropped a genial hint or two that it might be Shoon who was after me. But you quite failed to mention that he employed gunmen. I reckoned that if I fairly hugged him and kept my eyes open I should be all right. And then he just gets somebody to loose off at me from a convenient eminence in the ruins. I heard that bullet whiz by. My nerve’s gone. I’m all bewildered.’ Winter, who was obviously wholly undisturbed, shook an indignant head.

‘You see
why
you’re Hamlet after all?’

‘In a dim way, yes – though I must say our amiable host’s precautions seem overdone. And in the lord’s name what was that appalling explosion? Has he been eliminating someone else? And where is he now? The man’s a menace and ought to be nobbled.’

Appleby got briskly to his feet. ‘It will do. If the tempo goes right it will do… All questions will be fully and systematically answered in about fifteen minutes. Or
nearly
all.’ He grinned at Winter’s bewilderment. ‘I’m going to find Shoon. Go into the tribune – Patricia, Timmy, go with him too – and keep everyone together. There may be some danger of fire after such a big bang, but no doubt Shoon’s staff will control it. Yes, we’ll have it all out now. But wait a minute. Yes – I’ll come with you.’

‘You seem’, said Winter resentfully, ‘extraordinarily cheerful.’

‘My dear man, cheerfulness is most important in an affair like this.’

In the tribune cheerfulness was conspicuously lacking. The party was suffering – not unnaturally – from shock. Miss Cavey was lying on a sofa moaning. Mr Eliot, very pale and very still, was standing beside Belinda. The air was heavy with helpless bewilderment. The only person usefully employed was Chown. He was applying improvised bandages to Rupert Eliot – a Rupert Eliot who was singed, bloody and terrified. Of Shoon there was no sign.

Appleby, reaching the doorway and taking one glance round all this, called out: ‘Mr Eliot, are you all right?’ Winter noted that anxiety had come into his voice; the whole room turned round at the ring of it.

‘Thank you, John,’ – Mr Eliot’s reply was faint but calm – ‘I am quite all right.’

‘Good. Nobody need worry.’ Appleby was suddenly confident. ‘All stop here. I’m going to find Mr Shoon.’ Unemotionally, and with the eyes of the whole party upon him, he took his revolver from his pocket. There was a little gasp of surprise. He poised the weapon in his hand. ‘We are all going to have a little talk with our host.’

Brisk and assured, Appleby nodded at the company and was gone.

Minutes dragged by. There had been attempted murder by the west tower. The wind blew coldly through windows which had been shattered by a terrific and unaccountable explosion. Somewhere about the Abbey a detective from Scotland Yard was hunting the Abbey’s owner with a revolver. Against all this the party, worn down by days of discomforts great and small, made no attempt to stand up. Numb and dumb, they waited for what would happen next. Miss Cavey continued to moan. Chown, with a grunt of satisfaction, heaved Rupert into an enveloping easy chair. Once Mr Eliot made to speak, checked himself, put his head between his hands and sighed. Of the whole gathering only Adrian Kermode preserved an appearance of active – and puzzled – intelligence.

Minutes dragged by. A clock struck the quarter after nine. The chimes died away and above them rose the sound of footsteps – one man’s footsteps – in the corridor outside.

The door opened and Appleby came in.

Patricia almost cried out. Her brother was pale – very pale, very controlled. He looked about him without speaking, closed the door, moved rather slowly to the centre of the room.

‘There has been’ – he hesitated – ‘considerable material damage.’

The opening was obscurely ominous; the party stirred uneasily and once more Mr Eliot seemed to make a vain attempt to speak.

‘As you will have gathered from the fact of Sir Rupert’s being wounded, the explosion took place in the Collection. Among the letters. I should imagine that most of them are destroyed.’ Appleby braced himself. ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ – and his voice was at once formal and oddly abrupt – ‘Mr Shoon is dead.’

Upon the instant’s silence – sharply, briefly – Mr Eliot cried out; the sound released a murmur of horror, of bewilderment… Appleby raised his hand.

‘Mr Shoon has been accidentally killed. And yet – not wholly accidentally. He has perished in an attempt to murder Mr Eliot.’

‘But, John–’ Mr Eliot had stood up, desperate and incredulous.

‘Let me speak.’ Appleby, securing silence, was evidently casting round in his mind how best to proceed. ‘You must understand that our host was a very desperate and determined man. Mr Winter here can witness to that. For an attempt – as some of you have realized – was made to murder him too: the shot in the darkness while you were inspecting the tower. Today’ – Appleby’s eye went to Bussenschutt – ‘Shoon was given reason to believe that Winter might have obtained certain information about questionable early activities of his own. I need not specify how. It is enough to say that the information was in the possession of a lady whom Shoon believed to be discreet, and that when he had reason to think that it had passed to Winter – he acted. That gives you the measure of the man… And Mr Eliot had information about Shoon more dangerous still,’

‘But, John, it isn’t so.’ Mr Eliot’s voice came dully from across the room.

‘Mr Eliot had this information –
but without knowing it
.’

There was baffled silence.

‘But he might be on the verge of knowing it
every moment that he was working on his new book
. That is the secret of the whole mysterious – now of the whole tragic – affair. Shoon could not afford to let
A Death in the Desert
go on,’

Kermode shifted sharply in his seat. ‘But the clairvoyance – the knowledge of things Eliot had thought of for–’

‘Stop.’ Once more Appleby raised his hand. ‘Let me get right through. It is complicated; it had better be got clear once and for all. Part of it can only be conjecture. And for that reason the affair had best be – to put it bluntly – hushed up. I am not here as a policeman. There is no case against anybody except a dead man. That Shoon died a violent death at the hands of one of his own detestable inventions is all that the world need know.’

Rupert Eliot, who had been shivering slightly in his chair, looked up sharply. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘No need for a washing of this god-awful dirty linen.’

‘Sir Rupert, I think, takes the right line. And you must remember that he has been harried today by Shoon too. But that was a blind… Now let me go on.’ Appleby’s eye went round the room; his voice drove forward; he had achieved an almost hypnotic control of the company. ‘Part of the story, I say, can be only conjecture unless Mr Eliot should come to remember. For the odd point is there: he is powerless to assist us.

‘Here then is a conjectural reconstruction. I learnt from Miss Eliot that her father spent the latter part of his army career in the Military Intelligence in the Near East… Mr Eliot, that is correct?’

Mr Eliot nodded a bewildered and anxious head. ‘That is certainly so.’

‘There – in the East – Mr Eliot came upon one doesn’t know what villainy of Shoon’s. One can only guess that a murder in the desert was involved. No sooner had he done that than he fell ill. I think – for reasons to which I am just coming – that he must have fallen ill actually on Shoon’s hands. When he recovered it was – to Shoon’s immense relief– with a memory entirely blank as to the whole affair. Again, Mr Eliot, you agree?’

‘I certainly fell ill. And my memory was affected. I remember nothing of Shoon. But–’

‘Exactly! Shoon was tolerably safe. Judge then of his consternation when – years later – he learns from Belinda that her father is engaged in writing a novel called
A Death in the Desert
. Why has he chosen such a theme? Must it not be because buried memories of that real affair of violence are rising up in his mind? Or, if the thing be fortuitous, what buried memories may the mere working on such a theme not revive?’

A spell might have been over the tribune. Peter Holme, leaning forward on a stool by the fire, was staring at Appleby in mere fascination; Miss Cavey’s moans had become intermittent gulps; Rupert Eliot was trembling again in his chair; Archie was staring before him just as he had stared at the inscription on the architrave at Rust two nights before.

‘And so Shoon set about driving Eliot from his book – from all his books. As Winter discovered, everything at Rust could be done from the outside. And the clairvoyance – that was the simplest thing of all. We thought of a number of explanations: hypnotism, for example. But we didn’t think of another abnormal state of mind which might account for the facts: delirium. And it is because of this that we must suppose Shoon to have had access to Mr Eliot during the illness which resulted in his loss of memory. Mr Eliot had not begun to write the Spider stories then – but fragments of the fantasies were already in his mind. And to score the effects that were scored at Rust fragments were all that Shoon required. He got them from the lips of a delirious man.’

Appleby paused to take breath, and as he paused Bussenschutt intervened. ‘I must really–’

‘But’ – Appleby was off again – ‘the attempt to end the Spider stories was a failure. And so Shoon proceeded to more desperate measures. He got us here. He harried Sir Rupert in order – one supposes – to diffuse our anxieties. And then–’

Appleby stopped as if with a full sense of drama. ‘And then the plot miscarried. Sir Rupert – threatened by the various messages about what might happen at nine – had taken refuge in the Collection. Shoon set up one of the infernal machines in which he trades. It was to explode on Mr Eliot
when Mr Eliot went to bring Sir Rupert down again
. Probably we should have imagined that the wrong man had been killed, and the motive of the whole affair would have been successfully obscured. Or that was the idea. Shoon, you may remember, was a great reader’ – Appleby swung round on Mr Eliot, and Winter had a momentary impression of him as playing some elaborate instrument – ‘of ingenious romances of crime.’