The Weight of the Evidence (26 page)

‘And it’s happened quite a lot. Plenty of men have made formal marriages with German women just to get them away. And so far the Nazis haven’t come down on it. But this of Church I suspect to be an ingenious and organized affair, given a romantic, Scarlet Pimpernel top-dressing by a nicely calculating brain at the top. So far, Church has refused to divulge the truth even to his fiancée… By the way, who is Fräulein Schmauch?’

‘I’m afraid I really haven’t any idea.’ Miss Godkin looked particularly distressed as she made this appalling social confession. ‘Though I was assured by Sir David that she was a girl of good family. And clearly she is well-bred–’

‘In fact, clearly not Fräulein Schmauch. In other words the scheme – which has been using this beautiful place of yours as a sort of clearing house, if the term may be used – has a little more to it than simple knight-errantry, after all. There must be plenty of important people in Germany who might act more freely one day if their daughters, say, were out of the possible clutches of the Gestapo.’

‘Mr Appleby, this is most astounding! I had, of course, some idea that these girls were more or less in the position of refugees who wished to live quietly here for a while. But I had no idea of the adventurous and – and matrimonial circumstances in which they came to me. Though I felt, you know, that some
diplomatic
element might be involved. The Foreign Office–’

‘Quite so.’ Appleby sheered hastily off this delusory topic. ‘What is important at the moment is that we should keep quiet about the whole thing. Which is why I particularly hope that it will prove wholly unconnected with Pluckrose’s murder. And now I am afraid I must be getting back to the university.’

‘But, Mr Appleby, whatever am I to do with those three young people? They may be having a most fearful row at this moment.’

‘Miss Godkin, I am quite sure that you are very capable of dealing with
any
three young people. And probably – now that we have forced an issue – they have got it settled by this time. I rather expect that Church and Miss Cavenett will announce their engagement straight away.’

Miss Godkin, though visibly gratified by Appleby’s assertion of her competence, looked extremely perplexed. ‘But I don’t see how they can do that. If he has been married several times already–’

‘The records will be in various consulates about Germany – and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they were all unaccountably mislaid. Moreover there has probably been a whole jungle of false passports and the like through which a court would just refuse to cut its way. To which we may add the great improbability of any of the girls concerned making any claim that a real marriage occurred. On the whole I think Miss Cavenett will see that the right thing to do is to go straight ahead.’

And Appleby took his leave. Out of the corner of his eye as he went down the drive he saw Mr Church, Fräulein Schmauch, and Miss Cavenett returning from the herb garden; he saw too Miss Godkin rise from her chair and stand for a moment as one who ranges some necessary battalion of small talk about her. Perhaps her guests would stay to tea and there would be more discussion of Paul Klee and Max Ernst, of Mr Pasmore and Mr Duncan Grant. And Appleby chuckled. So much, surely, for
Zuleika Dobson
. And if now he could confine himself to the central aspect of the case, to what might be called its Pickwickian core… But before he reached the bottom of the drive Appleby was frowning thoughtfully again. He was not, after all, entirely sure that he had wholly disengaged the thing from that tiresomely magnetic German girl. What, for instance, was the wholly fantastic information that Tavender possessed? Appleby had a disturbing feeling that it might point back to St Cecilia’s. And to St Cecilia’s, somehow, he had no wish himself to return.

It is further evidence of the compelling personality of the young woman who called herself Else Schmauch that Inspector Hobhouse, as he munched sandwiches gratuitously by the university refectory, had her pretty constantly in mind. Never having met the girl, he was not in a position to meditate her charms; and it was therefore necessarily as a mere unknown force that he regarded her. But, even so, his reflections must be taken as a weighty tribute to her allure. Hobhouse put a good deal of trust in allure; it was his experience that it was generally to be found in one corner or another of any sanguinary case; and in the Pluckrose affair Fräulein Schmauch appeared to be the only person capable of providing it.

Pluckrose had been murdered; to Hobhouse this at least appeared certain. And then there had been an attempt to murder Prisk; from this conclusion one could only escape by the difficult hypothesis that Prisk had ingeniously staged the affair of the motorcar himself. And then Sir David Evans, knowing about Pluckrose and hearing about Prisk, had gone into a blue – or green – funk. Now Pluckrose, Prisk, and Sir David had, it seemed, been as three elderly moths fluttering round the ineluctable lamp that was Fräulein Schmauch – and from all this might not a tolerably clear picture be built?

Suppose that this unknown girl had already an established lover; suppose him to be a man passionately jealous and homicidally inclined. Might he not have killed Pluckrose, attempted to kill Prisk – and even now be preparing a similar short way with that third amatory nuisance, Sir David Evans? And might not an awareness – or a sense – of this well account for Evans’ panic? That these men should pursue an amour until even the most unbalanced lover felt that they must be so dealt with was sensational and fantastic in the extreme. But Prisk, at least, was definitely a person of loose principles – and then had not the fellow Tavender hinted at knowledge so extravagant that it just wouldn’t be believed?

Having got so far Hobhouse stopped short – stopped short because, on his present information, he had come up against a brick wall. He had no present means whatever of providing the German lady with her necessary lover. At Nesfield University just nobody of the right sort appeared to be about. The place might hold its natural complement of quiet sensualists, effective and ineffective, practising and theoretical; but the homicidally passionate proprietor of a fatally attractive female Teuton was just not there. In the experienced judgement of Hobhouse only Marlow had a touch of any such temper. And Marlow, as far as was known, belonged to another context; his only known grudge was against Prisk alone; and that had nothing to do with a girl, Teutonic or otherwise. An attempt to take this theory further must, in fact, await the return of Appleby. Of the young man Church, about whom Appleby had given those mysterious intimations of bigamy, Hobhouse would have liked to have hopes. As far as the Pluckrose affair went Church appeared to be without an alibi for the fatal fifteen minutes round about eleven o’clock.

Eleven o’clock… Hobhouse, his brow suddenly darkening, swallowed down his last crust – for refectory sandwiches have crust all round – and rose to his feet. For before him of a sudden was the vision of the unspeakable Theodore Almeric de la Tour Lasscock, of whom there was such good reason to believe that he had witnessed a quite grotesquely bloody murder and straightaway picked up himself and his cushion and toddled off in quest of undisturbed peace of mind. Hobhouse sharpened a couple of pencils – when really hot on a trail he often snapped one off at the point – and went in search of this extreme exponent of non-cooperation.

In Lasscock’s room he found two girl students sitting on the absent scholar’s table comparing snapshots. They were waiting, they explained, for Mr Lasscock, who was known to be with the Vice-Chancellor and due presently to return. Hobhouse might have waited too; instead – and on no very clear premises, except that his impatience was great – he formed the design of confronting Lasscock with his turpitude in the presence of Sir David Evans. Having decided on this more or less dramatic procedure he proceeded to march without ceremony into the Vice-Chancellor’s room.

The sunlight was on Sir David Evans. But Lasscock, by pushing his own chair round the desk until it was side by side with Sir David’s, had ensured that the sunlight should he on him too. And whereas Sir David was under the necessity of posing in the sunlight Lasscock had only to bask. Lasscock basked and Sir David weightily talked – presumably on some aspect of the administration of historical studies in the university. Sir David talked and Lasscock sat with his hands fingertip to fingertip in front of him: an attitude which contrived to suggest some degree of judicial attention, and thus to discount what might otherwise have been a disconcerting impression of obliviousness in Lasscock’s features. For Lasscock’s eyes were closed; his mouth might have been detected as slightly open; his breathing was regular and easy. One could almost believe him asleep. But every now and then his fingers would part; hang suspended, as it were, upon Sir David’s words; and then close in affirmation, or at least in cognizance, of whatever had been said.

It was upon this scholarly and deliberative scene that Hobhouse burst. Lasscock and Sir David Evans, sitting side by side, looked at him with astonishment and mild reprobation, much as two first-class passengers of controlled behaviour but decided views might regard a person who flung himself down on an opposite seat while flourishing a green ticket. ‘Inspector Hobhouse,’ said Sir David sternly, ‘you preak in upon important pusiness, look you. Perhaps something urgent has occurred?’

Hobhouse produced the first of his pencils and pointed it. He pointed it at the countenance of Lasscock which, rosy against the Vice-Chancellor’s rows of sunlit calf and morocco, showed like a peach lazily ripening against an ancient wall. ‘I have important business too, sir. I have come to tax Mr Lasscock–’

‘Bless me! Feller has changed his job.’ Lasscock shook his head in mild astonishment. ‘Policeman, when I last saw him. Goin’ round with the Lunnon man. And now he’s hopped into the Inland Revenue. Like some of the Lepidoptera, my dear Evans. A pest as a caterpillar and then a pest as a butterfly later on.’ Lasscock opened his eyes quite wide upon Hobhouse. ‘But it’s no good, sir; no dashed good at all. Nothin’ to be taxed on. Brother sold the last acre years ago. Not a penny left in the Funds. Supportin’ myself like a little school teacher. Sweat of my brow.’ And Lasscock produced a beautiful canary-coloured handkerchief and gave his forehead a sort of symbolical dab.

‘I have come’, said Hobhouse, breathing hard, ‘to
charge
Mr Lasscock–’

Sir David rose to his feet. ‘Inspector Hobhouse, do I understand that you hold a warrant to arrest–’

‘No, sir; nothing of the kind.’ Hobhouse, thus unhappily taken up, floundered momentarily and the accusing pencil wavered. ‘I have come to – to represent to Mr Lasscock the seriousness of his having withheld important information from the police. He claims not to have been at the university on Monday. And now, acting on information received’ – Hobhouse boldly advanced this useful if mendacious formula – ‘we have reason to believe that statement to be inaccurate; deliberately misleading, I am afraid it is necessary to say. In fact I am inclined to suspect that Mr Lasscock saw the whole thing.’

‘Saw the whole thing!’ Sir David sat down again – quite abruptly.

‘Mr Lasscock was sitting in the Wool Court when the meteorite came down and killed Pluckrose. Mr Lasscock, I say, was there as he commonly is at that hour, sitting in a deck-chair. And, for all I know, he may have been staring straight up at the tower.’ Hobhouse paused. ‘The statement that he was elsewhere is a very serious matter indeed.’

‘Statement?’ said Lasscock. ‘What djew mean by statement, officer? Lunnon man got it in his notebooks, signed and properly witnessed?’

Hobhouse struggled with his extreme indignation. ‘You distinctly stated to Detective-Inspector Appleby of Scotland Yard–’

Lasscock shook his head indulgently and turned to the Vice-Chancellor. ‘Feller isn’t talkin’ about a statement at all. Talkin’ about a private conversation with this Appleby t’other mornin’. Gentlemanlike chap but seems to get things confused. Drowsy mornin’ in Miss Dearlove’s orchard – excusable perhaps. But inclined to take a severe view of this Hobhouse, ’pon my soul.’

‘Do you mean’ – Hobhouse rapped his pencil on Sir David Evans’s desk, and the point promptly snapped – ‘Do you mean flatly to deny that you said–’

Momentarily disengaging his fingertips from their contact each with each, Lasscock pointed to a desk calendar. ‘Notice the date?’ he asked. ‘Monday quite a long time back now, ain’t it? What’s the Chief Constable goin’ to say when he larns that you haven’t yet taken formal statements from people you believe to be concarned? ’Course I was sittin’ in the court. And down the thing fell.’

‘Very well!’ Hobhouse contrived to control himself sufficiently to fish his second pencil unbroken from his pocket. ‘And now will you have the goodness to tell me–’

‘Stop!’ Sir David Evans, who had been listening to all this in evident perturbation, jumped up, strode across the room, and flung up a window. ‘My dear Lasscock,’ he said as he turned round again, ‘you must haf a care. It iss not to be porne, look you, that we should be intimidated in this way. You must carefully consider eferything you should say. We had petter haf advice, we had petter haf your solicitors, pefore anything more iss said.’

‘Attorneys?’ Lasscock very definitely shook his head. ‘A pack of six-and-eightpenny rascals and odjus jargonmongers. I think I can look after myself – obleeged to you, all the same. And it was like this. Of course I was sittin’ in the court; reclinin’, you might say–’

The Vice-Chancellor fiddled at random with papers on his desk. ‘Lasscock,’ he said, ‘I peg you to stop and reflect.’ He turned to Hobhouse. ‘I consider it my duty to protect Mr Lasscock’s interests in efery way. He iss a most valued and respected colleague of mine, look you. I will not see a friend – a close personal friend – do anything rash, I say. There must pe no more of this now, inspector. If you wish–’

‘My dear Evans, you are too dam’ solicitous.’ Lasscock was now looking at Sir David with a good deal of covert curiosity. ‘But the officer may as well have the story now as later. There I was, reclinin’ in the court and workin’ one or two things out. It may well be I was lookin’ up at the tower–’