The Weight of the Evidence (31 page)

This gets a great deal out of the way, at least to my own satisfaction. I hope to get corroboration by staging a general show-down this evening.

And now it is all plain sailing:

The Munchausen inscriptions are at Cambridge.

The bust was new – and it turned green.

And:

The meteorite was on record as only recently arrived on earth.

And:

The noise of a steam hammer; the Strength of Materials

The forge room is little used

The prime association of meteorite is
from above

The extension ladder

The hoist will go up to the top storey

The hoist can be operated from the dark-room

The weight of the evidence.

John Appleby put his notes in his pocket; he brought out a letter and laid it on the table in front of him. Crunkhorn came into the room followed by Hobhouse and Marlow, and at short intervals the others arrived. Appleby looked at nobody and said nothing, seemingly lost in some sombre reverie of his own. Hobhouse, counting the people as they came in, eventually leant forward and whispered to him. And then Appleby spoke.

‘I have here a letter addressed to the Chancellor of the University by Professor Hissey. I have spoken to the Duke on the telephone and he has given me permission to read it to you.’

And Appleby picked up the letter from the table, opened it, and read – slowly and in a clear, unemphatic voice.

The University of Nesfield

MY LORD DUKE,

I am informed by Mr Appleby of the metropolitan police that the lamentable events which have lately taken place within the university have been to you a matter of personal concern. It is for this reason – and because your Vice-Chancellor, by an irresponsible frolic unhappily implicated in the affair, may wish for the moment to stand aside – that I venture to address this letter to Your Grace. I shall be as little tedious as may be. Of what I have to say the greater part must necessarily be explanatory. Nevertheless the essence of my purpose is apologetic. I am sorry that I punched Pluckrose on the jaw. The fact that he thereupon fell under the steam hammer; that in falling back I pressed against the valve-lever; and that as a necessary consequence Pluckrose was instantly killed: these are points upon which remorse would be inappropriate, as they were concomitants fortuitous and undesigned. But I am sorry that I punched the man on the jaw.

I am sorry that I involved Prisk in the risk of a serious motor accident. Legally and morally, this act was attempted murder. I would not have done it had I not had a great deal of work on hand. Night after night I sat up trying to get through with this, but I was early aware that Appleby was progressing too rapidly for me. It became clear that something must be done. Otherwise
Annotatiunculae Criticae
would never be completed, for I believe that there are few opportunities for scholarly disquisition afforded to occupants of a condemned cell. The particular clouding of the issue which I attempted was possibly but indifferently conceived – but I was tempted into feeling that if it could be made apparent that Prisk had always been the predestined victim I should be in a considerably stronger position. It was an uncomfortable night, with its long lurking round Nesfield Court.

And now I must be something more systematic. But first let me repeat that this letter is motivated by ethical concern. I am anxious – I have from the first been anxious – that all the facts of the matter should be known and that justice should ultimately take its course. I have no wish to avoid the consequences of the unhappy deeds which have been forced upon me. This being so, you may ask – with a recourse to that Latinity which is but one evidence of Your Grace’s distinguished abilities:

Quid est, Catulle? quid moraris emori?

And the answer is, of course, that I have not wanted to hurry up and die; I have had, I reiterate, too much work on hand. It would be no exaggeration to say that, from the first moment of my realizing that Pluckrose was dead, I have been entirely engaged in arranging what might be described as a series of delaying actions. At first my expectations were modest; I sought for no more than a few days in which I could order my papers and prepare one or two learned trifles – significant only to myself – for the press. Later I saw that I might take somewhat larger scope, and at least get out my projected book. But that this was not to be and that the twitch of the tether – or should I say halter? – was imminent I realized upon learning from Inspector Hobhouse, an amiable if unwary officer, that the perspicacious Appleby had penetrated to what may be called the Pickwickian or Stumpsian aspect of the case.

And now let me tell you about Pluckrose. He was an interfering fellow, if ever there was one – and in a peculiarly laborious way. He would get up enough of another man’s subject to enable him to take more or less effective ground in his badgering activities. He did this with my own subject, which – perhaps it is necessary to mention – is that branch of classical archaeology known as epigraphy, or the science of deciphering inscriptions cut in stone. Of recent years we have had to deal with one or two odd cases of fraud or forgery in this department of knowledge; and, hearing of this, Pluckrose took an extraordinary notion into his head. He declared – no less – that the inscriptions on the celebrated Tartary obelisks recovered by my honoured teacher and close friend Professor Munchausen of Riga were an out-and-out fake! This nonsense was tiresome enough, but there was worse to follow. Pluckrose, in addition to being a busybody, was a chemist. And he declared his intention of undertaking a chemical experiment which should prove the truth of his assertion.

Although extremely annoyed by this grotesque and offensive talk, I was not actually alarmed until the startling incident at Mrs Tavender’s party. It was here that Pluckrose explained to me the nature of the test he proposed. More or less freshly cut stone, he declared, could be made to respond to chemical action in a manner altogether different from stone the surfaces of which had been exposed to the air for many centuries. It was his intention to go up to Cambridge and empty a vial of fluid on the inscriptions. If these had indeed – as he asserted – been cut within the last two or three years the surfaces thus recently exposed would react by turning green. And to make good this assertion Pluckrose perpetrated his astounding and offensive attack upon Sir David Evans’ recently chiselled bust. It will certainly occur to you – as it certainly occurred to Appleby – that this was very imperfect evidence of Pluckrose’s being able, or disposed, to carry out his threat. A colourless liquid which will act as a green dye when exposed to air is likely enough, but a similar fluid which will distinguish between old and fresh-cut stone is altogether less probable. Had this struck me at the time, how different might the issue of the whole affair have been.
Sed haec prius
fuere
.

I expostulated with Pluckrose more than once, endeavouring to urge the disrepute into which his futile and disgusting experiment would bring both Nesfield and academic people in general. I expostulated with him on that fatal Monday morning in the Wool Court, having previously made an appointment for the purpose. This was at ten thirty, and the place was suitable as being commonly quiet and secluded – with only Lasscock, perhaps, asleep under the tower. But on this morning the Wool Court was somewhat uncomfortable; the fountain had been turned full on and – owing to the direction of the wind – only Lasscock’s corner was entirely dry. I had, of course, no idea of what this matter of the fountain meant – or that at that very moment Evans was pursuing the disguised Pinnegar to the topmost storey of the tower. I drew Pluckrose into the forge room, a little-used place in which the engineers have their drop hammer and one or two other pieces of heavy apparatus. He was very offensive. It was there that I punched him on the jaw.

The hammer had pulverized the man; it was extremely awkward. In a sense the thing was pure accident, for I had certainly not the remotest conscious intention of killing him. But I had knocked him under this terrible machine and by an inadvertent movement I had released the mechanism. What Freud has called the psycho-pathology of errors was plainly involved; that obscure mechanism of the mind which makes the unconsciously suicidal man cut his chin while shaving!

Here then was Pluckrose dead – a prosecuting barrister would doubtless say neatly and ingeniously despatched – and through the instrumentality (shall we put it?) of one with whom he could very probably be proved to have been involved in a dispute. I do not think that I have ever been in a more awkward situation – in ‘so tight a place’, to use the popular expression.

For the very tolerable ingenuity of the dispositions that I proceeded to make I am disposed to claim little applause. I acted as a man in a dream, and yet with the most efficient calculation and despatch. It seems likely that the same powerful and hidden forces which I must admit as having been a factor in Pluckrose’s death were continuing to operate – and with a similar automatism.

The leading principle was obvious. It was half past ten and Pluckrose had just been killed. I must give to the fatality the appearance of having taken place at some other hour – an hour at which, demonstrably, I could not be involved. I have gathered from Appleby that this is called constructing an
alibi
; the Latin is indifferent but the meaning clear.

There was a tarpaulin which must have been used to shroud some mechanism of the engineers; and in this I bundled the body. I carried it across the Wool Court – no mean feat – and set it in a deck-chair directly under the turret and hard by Lasscock. A newspaper which I had in my pocket I placed over the crushed torso, so that glimpsed only for a moment Pluckrose would not appear too obviously dead to a sleepy man. For I knew that Lasscock would be awakened by the eleven o’clock bell and all my plan turned on that. I took back the tarpaulin. There was a mess in the forge room. I had to risk that for a time.

I went round the building and up the tower. This must have been only minutes after Pinnegar came down; and during everything that followed Evans was resting, or lying exhausted, in the top storey. By how much would the terrors of the affair have been increased had I known of this extraordinary circumstance!

There was an extension ladder in the store-room immediately above ground level; I took the two parts of it up separately and assembled it; it stretched from the window-sill to the hoist.

I got hold of the iron sink – and then I saw the meteorite.

It was plainly that. But only something like clairvoyance can explain all that I immediately knew about it. For I knew at once that Pluckrose himself had hidden it here, and in furtherance of a plan of the most extreme ingenuity and malice. Mr Pickwick, when at Cobham, discovered an inscription which he rashly declared to be of extreme antiquity – but a little analysis showed that it read BILL STUMPS HIS MARK. Pluckrose had possessed himself of a meteorite well-authenticated as having only recently arrived on earth. He proposed to remove all but the inobvious traces of the thing’s being indeed a meteoric stone; to do this and then to fake an inscription which I might later be induced to accept as genuine ancient work. And then Pluckrose would spring his mine: the Greeks or Romans or whoever it might be had, then, contrived to carve an inscription on a body thousands of millions of miles away in interstellar space!

So you can see why I took the meteorite and not the sink; you can see, perhaps, two reasons. ‘’Tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard’ – and I was certainly in a position to do that. But it also occurred to me how inevitably a meteorite sets one thinking in terms of impact from above; and this I had to enforce by any subtle power of suggestion I could command. So I got hold of the meteorite –
rudis indigestaque moles
– and heaved and levered it on the ladder. It was a terrific weight, and yet not, I suppose, capable of doing at all the damage that the drop hammer had done. In fact the weight of the meteorite might have been awkward evidence. And I suppose Cruckhorn to have had something of the sort in mind when, according to Appleby, he said something about a fifty-ton meteorite.

And now mark the situation. One end of the ladder lay on the window-sill and the meteorite lay on the ladder. The other end of the ladder lay on, and was tethered to, the hoist – the hoist raised some eighteen inches above floor level.
And the hoist could be controlled from the dark-room
.

You will see that there is little more explaining to do. I hurried to the dark-room, taking care that Atkinson should note the time: ten fifty. And that, just on the ringing of the eleven o’clock bell, I set the hoist a few feet
up
, and so tipped the meteorite out and down. It was a curiously godlike sensation:
eripuit caelo fulmen
. But there followed a period of some strain. I had to wait in the dark-room until the news was brought to us. I had to trust that, in the general consternation, no one would think to go up to the tower until I could slip up myself and dismantle the ladder. I had to trust, too, that I should then be able to get round to a still-deserted forge room and clean up the hammer. The fact that Lasscock simply made off without giving any alarm considerably increased at least the second of these risks – and the stress of the situation generally. And later, of course, it appeared for a time as if his continued silence might upset my ‘
alibi
’ altogether. All these matters, however, fell out well enough in the end.

But I had reckoned without Appleby – and it is curious that I should have had a tendency to confuse him with Merryweather and Grant, persons, it must be recorded, of but mediocre mind. It is pleasant to reflect that the concentration and efficiency with which he has brought his natural talent to bear upon the case may be due in some measure at least to his pursuance as an undergraduate of the grand old fortifying classical curriculum. I did not see a great deal of him in those days, but I recall that he brought me essays from time to time, and it is possible that I did a little to assist him in the business of straight thinking.