Stop Press (41 page)

‘Length and depth,’ repeated Mr Eliot. ‘Length and depth, and the back slightly roached.’

The great car consumed the miles.

‘Climate’, said Winter at the back – and one gathered that he was presenting an apologia for being an archaeologist – ‘climate is all. Wedge would have me write a book; I reply that were I to go after self-expression it would be in paint. But climate forbids the development of plastic art in this country.’ He swept a theoretical eye over the landscape. ‘If only one were an Eskimo.’

‘If only the Curly Coated were a little less coarse in the bone.’

‘An Eskimo?’ Appleby spoke not at all because he wanted Winter to continue his reflections. The interjection had been required and was offered as a matter of social duty. His mind was on the problematical territory before them.

‘An Eskimo,’ repeated Winter. ‘To live perpetually enveloped in that stainless and radiant white which is the symbol of eternity. In Labrador great art must be possible – nay, must inevitably exist: an art wholly unsensuous, abstract, moulded by that one dazzling discipline of the senses to the service of transcendental truth.’ He gestured patronizingly at the fading patches of snow about them.

‘I am looking forward to the Tamworths,’ said Eliot. ‘And to the Collection, of course.’

‘As certain a supersensible art on the fringes of the polar circle as an art richly sensuous, brilliantly spectroscopic, on the fringes of the Mediterranean. All right to be an Eskimo, all right to be a Titian or’ – he hesitated – ‘Renoir. It is this half-world of mist, of muted and fugitive colour’ – and he gestured again – ‘that is the devil.’

Mr Eliot twisted round in his seat beside Patricia at the wheel. ‘I hope’, he said – and it seemed to be the mention of Renoir which momentarily diverted him from his theme – ‘that Rupert will come on with the others. I should particularly like him to see the Abbey.’

‘Climate’ – Winter was an insistent as a lecturer driving home his topic sentence – ‘is all.’ He turned to Mrs Moule. ‘Consider the unblushing fore-and-aft voluptuousness, the full-buttocked and high-bosomed
yakshi
of the most sacred Indian Buddhist art. Observe them transplanted along with the religion of Buddhism to China. Within a couple of generations acclimatization is at work, whittling at those prodigal hips, deflating those balloon-like breasts, attentuating to the rhythms of the Chinese visual scene that more than Rubensish exuberance of the flesh.’

‘The flesh?’ Mr Eliot again twisted round. ‘It must be firm. Freedom of movement is therefore essential. Plenty of ground and plenty of routing. It is there that the modern intensive methods fail.’

He paused, lit up all over. ‘I think you will all agree that there are few more interesting subjects than pigs.’

Appleby reviewed the night. The thing was engineered economically enough. Rust had two independent telephones and the joker had rung from one to the other. He asked the servant who answered for Sir Archibald Eliot and when Archie spoke begged that Mr Eliot would come at once to Mr Laslett’s house across the park; there had been a serious accident and Laslett wanted the security of a Justice of the Peace at the witnessing of a hasty will. Archie found his cousin, who set out at once, accompanied by Appleby as an obvious measure of prudence. Mr Eliot’s message of apology to his guests had been entrusted to Archie – and no sooner had they parted than Archie was hit on the head. The joker then followed Mr Eliot’s and Appleby’s tracks and rapidly faked the appearance of a struggle in the snow. He continued this to the point where they had left the drive: it was here that Kermode was to read the traces accurately and saunter off to meet Mr Eliot and Appleby returning from their fool’s errand. The joker then contrived to cut off the electricity supply where it crossed the drive, and continued to make some sort of trail to the theatre. He went some way across the park; waited for the right moment to give his single alarming cry; hurried back to the theatre; killed a pig held in readiness, extracting from the brute as much noise as possible; clothed it in trousers and slung it up in place of Dismal Desmond.

It was all so simple that it could be conjecturally reconstructed like this in a few sentences; but its simplicity had depended on time-table work the virtuosity of which roused Appleby’s professional admiration. The mechanics had been good; and so, for that matter, had been the psychology. The subtle mind which had so quickly seen how Timmy could be goaded by Henry and Eleanor had made a number of chancy but accurate calculations here too: that the evidence of the servant who answered the telephone would not get through to any responsible person in time; that under the influence of the stones-in-the-rain the party would behave as, in fact, it did; that anyone endeavouring to find out who had kept an eye on whom would meet with impressions which were hopelessly contradictory and confused… The hoax of the middle black had been as clever as it was essentially brutal; nevertheless some ground was cleared.

Mr Eliot himself was let out. Neither under Winter’s wildly conjectured hypnotic influence nor in the much more subtle fashion supposed by Dr Chown could he be responsible for persecuting himself. Appleby said goodbye to this theory with a sigh – the same sort of sigh with which Mr Eliot himself might have dismissed a plot too exquisite for his capacities… Mr Eliot, now so placidly discoursing to Patricia on his favourite rural themes, had played no tricks on himself. Nevetheless Appleby could not feel that he was done with Mr Eliot; that the owner of Rust had ceased to puzzle him. There had been a point at which the joker had got Mr Eliot down; had driven him to speculations which had trembled on the edge of mental chaos. The joker had played a number of vexatious and spectacular tricks, but analysis showed that his single effective weapon had been his uncanny command of matter which Mr Eliot believed had never passed the boundaries of his own mind. This was what had driven Mr Eliot to the wall and almost ended his career as a writer; it was from this that he had mysteriously rallied. Mysteriously. Appleby found that the lapse of twenty-four hours had set the events of Saturday morning in a new focus, and that in this his host’s rally showed as inadequately motivated. The manifestations at Rust were not an irruption from the world of imaginative creation; not were they the result of the Spider’s inventor’s developing a secondary and purely Spidery personality. From each of these nonsensical but haunting speculations Mr Eliot had abruptly broken free – and broken free because the Renoir had been found bedded with Joseph. Mr Eliot’s explanation of his new rationality had been specious: his Spider, he implied, never behaved in quite that unrefined way; neither could he do so himself even in a fragmented psychological state.

Because Mr Eliot’s and Dr Chown’s speculations had been so extravagant in themselves it had not been immediately observable that this avenue of escape from them was, at the lowest, intellectually inadequate. And Mr Eliot, though volatile, was clearly a highly intelligent man: had he really satisfied himself with such a line of thought? It now seemed hard to believe. Yet his rally – the breakdown of the campaign against his mental balance – unquestionably dated from the recovery of the stolen picture. And from the same point dated what Appleby obscurely distinguished as a growing purposefulness in the man. This talk of good baconers – one had come to recognize it as a sign that Mr Eliot’s wits were at work.

But from the centre of the picture – or from the centre of the picture as it had hitherto been composed – Mr Eliot was now displaced. So were his children. And who else?

The more Appleby reflected on this – the more he reviewed the brief enquiries he had been able to make – the less certain did he become. Was Kermode out? Patricia’s eye had been on him disappearing across the park seconds before the shooting of the middle black. But if Kermode was the joker – and Appleby recalled the ambiguous conversation he had overheard – he had an assistant at a pinch in Gib Overall. How drunk had Overall really been? Too drunk to slip to the theatre and there to shoot, spit, and hoist the pig? Drunk enough not to realize the outrageousness of the act? It had been a good joke of its kind – and all on Timmy and Belinda: a great deal of trouble had been taken to persuade them that they had witnessed the murder of their father. It was a point that the joke was an improvisation; it had sprung from André’s joke – itself an improvisation – against Miss Cavey and her unfortunate experience in the barn. It was a point too that the joke had been a
joke
; nobody had, in fact, been murdered at midnight. Was this because an intended victim was not then readily murderable, or because the joker intended no more than to go on joking? The
temper
of the joke had been murderous. One could almost feel the middle black as a sort of totem animal, a sacrificial substitute for Mr Eliot himself – a Mr Eliot whom the joker was at once wishful and afraid to kill… Fantastic thus to introduce primitive anthropology into the problem. And the affair of the pig had been, surely, purposive rather than ritualisatic; it looked much like another attempt to disgust Mr Eliot with the mileu of his professional imaginings.

These were ragged reflections; Appleby turned back to possible eliminations. Archie Eliot. The first picture which had sprung to Appleby’s peculiarly schooled mind had been of Archie strolling quietly from one telephone to intercept a servant answering at another. Simple enough. How badly then had Archie been wounded? Could the wound have been self-inflicted? What had happened to him when he had been left in charge of Chown? Could he have got away in time for the cry, for the final business with the pig? This remained to discover, and it meant – what Appleby had not so far contrived – another conference with Chown.

And nobody else could be called definitely out. During the vital half-hour round midnight a surprising number of people had slipped from observation; there had been a sort of smoke-screen of stormy stones. Never a case, thought Appleby, needing so much patient digging around on the spot; never a case in which there was so little chance of anything of the sort. Back at Rust the majority of Mr Eliot’s party was preparing to disperse on the morrow; and here meantime were others punctiliously fulfilling an engagement to visit Shoon Abbey. From every concrete evidence of the mystery he was now being hurtled rapidly away.

Nevertheless to Shoon Abbey certain dubious filaments stretched out. The first act of the joker had been to burgle Mrs Birdwire and news of this burglary had upset a certain Horace Benton, once disreputably employed by Jasper Shoon himself. At the Abbey was Benton’s colleague Bussenschutt, who had been prompted by these events to an ingenious cultivation of the burgled lady. Here in the car was Gerald Winter, who had communicated Timmy’s story of the burglary to the others, and who had become so laudably anxious to investigate the troublesome incidents at the home of his pupil Timmy Eliot. The connexion between these facts was obscure, but could scarcely be illusory.

They were off to the Abbey now in fulfilment of a visit which had been in the air for some days. Appleby wondered how the project had originated. Belinda worked at the Abbey, but until yesterday its owner and Mr Eliot had been only slightly acquainted. Yesterday Shoon had appeared, flanked by Bussenschutt and Mrs Birdwire, and had presented something between an invitation and a summons to the Rust party at large. By what had this been prompted? There was, it seemed, a considerable party at the Abbey already: nothing less than a gathering of that dubious organization to which Shoon, with unamiable but sufficient irony, had given the title of Friends of the Venerable Bede. With these were now to be mingled the servants of the Spider. Who had engineered this fusion? And for what purpose? For Appleby found himself convinced that the plot was still thickening and that this expansive expedition was not mere drift. The mystery which lay behind lay in front as well.

Mrs Moule had come to a different conclusion. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I am looking forward to seeing the Abbey too. But I would be just a
shade
happier if these horrid jokes had been cleared up first. We do a little seem to be running away. And they have been so confusing as well as horrid that they tend to go round and round in one’s head.’

‘A mighty maze,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘but not without a plan… Has anyone got a match?’

Appleby, supplying matches, wondered what way the wind was wont to be blowing when his host turned from pigs to Pope.

‘And after all,’ said Winter, ‘nearly everybody is coming across. I shouldn’t be surprised if we make considerable headway at the Abbey.’

‘I agree.’ Mr Eliot, without turning round, spoke with brisk decision. ‘And curiously enough Rupert – who has, you know, great knowledge of the world – made exactly the same remark before we set out. John, what do you think?’

‘It doesn’t seem at all unlikely that we are carrying our domestic incubus with us.’

Mrs Moule, impressed by this mysterious unanimity, peered rather anxiously ahead. ‘You really think so? I’m sure Mr Shoon’s home is a most dangerous place for jokers. All those guns and explosives and things. Belinda’ – Belinda and Timmy were on the little seats in front of her – ‘does he keep his sinister wares on the premises?’

Belinda laughed. ‘I’ve never seen any. But it’s a big place and there are mysterious doings sometimes in the ruins. I think they do a little quiet research.’

‘It seems to me in
rather
bad taste’, said Mrs Moule, ‘to construct what is almost a
religious
setting for that sort of thing… Of course I don’t mean anything that Sir Archibald had to do with.’

‘Sir Archibald?’ Appleby stiffened abruptly against luxurious upholstery.

‘It’s the only thing’, explained Timmy – he had scarcely spoken since they set out – ‘that Archie has done since his bridge. Shoon knew Archie long before Belinda went to the Abbey. And he called him in over the west tower. Ruined towers, it seems, are uncommonly tricky. You have to get permission from county authorities before you put up that sort of thing. Shoon got Archie to make quite an engineering job of it. They were quite thick, one gathers, for a while.’