Swan Song (11 page)

‘You must know he's dead.'

‘So he is,' said the Master, brightening. ‘I had a
telegram about it this morning. Well, well. When is the funeral? I don't expect I shall get to it, though.'

‘It's thought that he was murdered.'

The Master frowned. ‘Murdered? What an extraordinary coincidence.'

‘Whatever do you mean, coincidence?'

‘I'll tell you something' – the Master leaned forward confidingly – ‘provided you don't let it go any further.'

‘Well?' Fen asked. He appeared stupefied by so much cold-bloodedness.

‘I had seriously considered killing Edwin myself.'

Adam gazed at him, aghast. ‘You can't mean that?'

‘Of course,' the Master admitted, ‘I had to consider the pros and cons.' Here Fen muttered something unintelligible, and hastily lit a cigarette. ‘The question really was whether Edwin's
voice
or Edwin's
money
was going to be more useful to me in producing the
Oresteia.
I won't say it wasn't a difficult decision to have to make. Edwin was a very fine singer – very fine. It seemed, in a way, a great pity to have to sacrifice him. But' – the Master waved his hand in a simple gesture of resignation – ‘first things must come first. And the dilemma, after all, was entirely of his own making. If he had voluntarily offered to finance the
Oresteia,
of course it would not have arisen.'

‘You felt' – Adam spoke very cautiously – ‘no kind of scruples?'

‘Well, of course,' said the Master handsomely, ‘one's always a little upset when an emergency of that kind arises. And I confess that when it came to the point I hadn't the heart to go on with it. I postponed the matter – out of sheer moral cowardice, I'm sorry to say. I can hardly forgive myself now. Still, all has turned out for the best. There's a Providence watching over us, as I've always maintained.' And he gazed up at the ceiling, as though expecting actually to see this benignant spirit at its tutelary task.

‘And what exactly,' Fen inquired in a strained, unnatural voice, ‘was your plan?'

‘I went into the matter with some care,' said the Master. He nodded at a row of detective novels and criminological works reposing on a shelf. ‘One oughtn't to go about these things in an amateurish way – otherwise the police are liable to find out what has happened. It seems, for example, that one's fingers leave a
distinctive mark
on certain textures and surfaces – a most interesting point . . . However, I won't weary you with an account of my preliminary studies. The first action I took was to write a note to Edwin asking him to meet me at the theatre last night. I thought,' the Master explained, ‘that that would constitute a rather less public
mise en scène
than his hotel.'

‘But surely he must have considered such an arrangement rather odd?'

‘Oh, dear.' The Master was taken aback. ‘I hadn't thought of that. Perhaps he did. It's conceivable, of course, that he never turned up there at all. Certainly he sent no reply to my note.'

‘You didn't see him, then?'

‘No. As I told you, my resolution gave out. Beatrix and I left here at nine o'clock in the Vauxhall – it's a big, purring thing,' the Master informed them aggrievedly, ‘not at all like that nice little car you've got. And we arrived in Oxford at half past ten, I suppose. It was then that my resolution failed me. We went to the “Mace and Sceptre” with a friend of mine, and drank coffee. Then at about midnight we left and drove back here again.'

‘Were you and Miss Thorn together all the time?'

‘I suppose so,' said the Master vaguely, ‘I'm not sure that I can remember, really . . . I've an idea that Beatrix and I lost one another at one stage in the evening; and to be candid' – he lowered his voice to an apprehensive whisper and glanced furtively at the door – ‘I wasn't altogether sorry. Still, that's another story.'

Fen sighed, and fidgeted with his feet. ‘What is your friend's name?'

‘Wilkes,' said the Master. ‘A very charming fellow. You should look him up if you're ever in Oxford.'

‘
Wilkes
,' said Fen with deep disgust. He expelled breath in a serpentine hiss. ‘I know him.'

‘Splendid, splendid.'

‘And how' – Fen hesitated, in great embarrassment – ‘how did you actually intend to – ah – to deal with your brother?'

‘A knife,' said the Master dramatically. ‘I had provided myself with a knife. And I was proposing to jiggle it about in the wound,' he added, ‘so that no one could tell what size blade had been used.'

Fen rose hastily. ‘Well, we must be off,' he said.

The Master was mildly perplexed. ‘You wouldn't like to hear some of the
Oresteia
?'

‘I'm afraid we haven't the time.'

‘Well then, you must let me know when the Metropolitan proposes to put it on.'

‘No, no, Shorthouse,' said Adam. ‘Professor Fen has nothing to do with the Metropolitan.'

The Master shook his head sadly. ‘Stupid of me,' he said. ‘There are times when I almost wonder if I'm not getting a little absent-minded.'

He opened the door for them. In the corridor outside a maid flitted by, silently weeping.

‘There,' said the Master. ‘You see? I suppose I ought to talk to Gabriel about it. The trouble is, though, that as one gets older one forgets about these things, except in broad outline . . . Well, good afternoon to you. You'll let me have the American agreement sometime, won't you? You needn't be afraid my terms will be at all harsh . . . ?'

And the Master retired triumphantly into his room.

ELIZABETH HAD SEEN
Fen and Adam off from the main gate of St Christopher's; and as the tumult of Lily Christine III died away in Broad Street, she began almost to wish that she had gone with them. Oxford in vacation-time has a certain hollowness – imparts a sense almost of anticlimax. The occasional don or scout or undergraduate to be seen wandering about the quadrangles serves only to emphasize the echoing vacancy about him. Minatory pronouncements, in thick black type, warn the public that it is no longer permissible to enter the college gardens; porters, slumbering in over-heated lodges, are so rarely disturbed that any intrusion on their quiet rouses them to positive offensiveness; sung services, in the various chapels, degenerate with startling abruptness from a plethora to a definite scarcity, and the clergy are to be found droning away to exiguous congregations of surreptitiously yawning
dévots;
while on normally crowded noticeboards a few belated placards, their edges curling with neglect, flap dismally in the breeze, and one may see an occasional roped trunk, overlooked by the railway, accumulating dust amid a clutter of red-painted fire-buckets and sandbags.

Cumulatively, these things are depressing, and Elizabeth was a little downcast as she stood gazing up St Giles' after her departing husband. She might, she thought, go back to the ‘Mace and Sceptre', there to spend the afternoon reading; she might rummage for books in Blackwell's; she might go to the cinema . . . But in her
present restless mood none of these things held much immediate attraction. She decided at last to re-visit Somerville, her old college, and accordingly set off along the Woodstock Road.

The expedition, however, proved barren. A porteress, new since Elizabeth's time, and accommodated in more civilized if also more austere fashion than her confrères at the men's colleges, informed her that all the women dons she had known were at present out of Oxford – berugged and befurred, Elizabeth supposed, in the sunlight of a Swiss hotel terrace, or sequestered in a quiet corner of the
Bibliothèque Nationale,
annotating with minute and unflagging industry the scribal errors of some medieval manuscript . . . Elizabeth turned away, disappointed. She had made up her mind, without any particular confidence, that what she needed was company and conversation – even the company and conversation of female dons. She found a telephone-box, and telephoned fruitlessly to acquaintances until her supply of pence was exhausted; considered renewing it at a nearby shop, and almost immediately lost heart; wandered morosely towards the Taylorian, half intending to look up a recent German volume on fingerprints; and eventually – as she had all along rather expected – went to a cinema.

The two films she saw did little to dissipate the cloud of depression which was gathering round her. The first was one of those documentaries, so dear to the critics of the Sunday press, about the Earth and those .who lead their simple lives in constant contact with it. A sententious voice uttered a sententious and at times appalling commentary (‘The life is the wheat, the red wheat, the white wheat; the wheat is the life', etc. etc.). There was a seemingly interminable sequence depicting a primitive childbirth. And the end of it all was an obscenely hygienic apocalyptic vision – the more progressive characters staring wet-eyed but optimistic into the Future – of almost everyone being inoculated against
something or other; with, Elizabeth presumed (though the film made no mention of this), the usual crop of post-inoculation horrors so amiably set forth in the handbooks.

The second film concerned spies, and might perhaps have been considered as one of the lesser tolls levied on a peaceable and inoffensive world by Hitler's paranoia. It was one of those films in which, at the beginning, there is great uncertainty as to who is on what side, and in which, at the end, the problem has not been properly elucidated. Besides, this example was particularly odious in resorting to a gas whose sole and invariable potency lay in causing people to rise from their beds at dead of night and precipitate themselves, uttering loud and melancholy cries, over adjacent cliffs . . . Elizabeth left the cinema in a condition of black accidie, pausing only to inform an elderly gentleman who was on the point of buying a ticket that if he expected to be entertained by what he saw he had better think again. What action he took as a result of this advice, apart from raising his hat and mumbling unintelligibly, Elizabeth did not wait to observe.

There followed a prolonged and exhausting search for Virginia cigarettes. Clutching her sole
trouvaille
– twenty of an obscure and evidently obnoxious brand – Elizabeth returned, tired, cold, and irritable, to the hotel. It was just after half past four when she entered the foyer. In the public lounge on the left the tables were spread with white cloths, and a number of people were devouring an insubstantial and expensive tea. Joan Davis, descanting inexpertly upon the Shorthouse affair to Karl Wolzogen, caught sight of Elizabeth as she paused in the doorway, and signalled an invitation. Elizabeth crossed the room to join them.

‘But I mustn't stay,' she said. ‘Because I want some tea.'

Karl beamed; his enthusiasm was childlike and infectious. ‘But you must stay, Mrs Langley, and take tea with us. Of course you must.' He turned to Joan. ‘Did I not
say? What an Octavian to your Marschallin! Has she not the perfect figure for it?' He surveyed Elizabeth from head to foot, with the most inoffensive frankness and admiration.

But Elizabeth, though cheered by this reference to her figure, was adamant on the subject of tea.

‘If you'll forgive me,' she said. ‘I'll have it in my room. For one thing, I want to change, and for another, they take so long to serve it down here.'

Karl was crestfallen. ‘
Ganz wahr
,' he admitted. ‘But I will hurry the man. You will see. I shall say to him, is it right that the friend of a man who has seen Wagner in Bayreuth should wait for her tea? And he will say: of course not! I will bring it at once!'

‘Really, you know' said Joan kindly, ‘I don't think the waiter would even know who Wagner was.'

‘Not know of Wagner?' Karl was aghast. ‘But this is unbelievable . . .' He paused for a moment, focusing this new and dreadful revelation; then he groaned resignedly. ‘Ah you English! It is as your poet Arnold has said: you are Philistines.' He sat down abruptly, and then, seeing that Elizabeth was still standing, scrambled hastily to his feet again. ‘Consider,' he added by way of illustration, ‘the lodgings where I stay.'

‘Karl finds his lodgings unendurable,' Joan explained.

‘Ach, ja.'
Karl nodded sombrely. ‘They are all lace and smells and – what do you call them? – green things in great glazed pots.'

‘Aspidistras?'

‘Ja, gewiss.
But it cannot be helped. It is due, you see, to the shortage of lodgings on the part of Oxford and the shortage of money on the part of me.'

‘What I really want to know,' said Elizabeth, ‘is whether there are any more developments in the Shorthouse business?'

‘He is dead,' said Karl with finality, ‘and that is a great blessing to us all. We will hope that the murderer is not discovered.'

‘I hardly think I should take that attitude with the police,' remarked Joan a little faintly, ‘if I were you. . . . But really, Elizabeth, I should have thought you would have known about developments if anyone did. You seem to have been in the thick of it. I've heard virtually nothing, except that some people seem to think it was suicide . . .'

‘It wasn't, though,' said Elizabeth. ‘Unless,' she added after a pause, ‘it was suicide arranged so as to look like murder. Such things have happened . . . But I admit it scarcely seems likely in Edwin's case.'

‘Have you any theories?' Joan asked. ‘After all, you're an expert on these affairs.'

‘Theories? Well . . . I suppose I have, in a way.' Elizabeth frowned slightly. In fact, I think I know who was responsible.'

Joan stared at her. ‘You
know
. . . But, my dear girl, have you told the police?'

‘N-no. Not yet. I haven't told anybody. I haven't got enough proof so far.'