Swan Song (15 page)

‘No, I don't think it's as bad as that.' Joan drew deeply on her cigarette. ‘I fancy – though he didn't say anything about it – that he believes Edwin committed suicide. But I also think he imagines I tried to
poison
Edwin, if only for the reason that the Nembutal in the gin doesn't fit in with his suicide hypothesis.'

‘The motive for this being –'

‘Altruistic concern about the production. Or' – Joan flushed a little – ‘not-so-altruistic concern about George.'

‘Who is George?'

‘George Peacock . . . Professor Fen, what ought I to do?'

‘Nothing,' said Fen decidedly.

‘But I
must
do something; I can't let them go on thinking –'

‘Let them think what they please, and console yourself by recalling the dreadful example of Mr Blenkinsop.'

‘Mr Blenkinsop?'

‘Mr Blenkinsop is my favourite tragi-comic figure in history. It came to Mr Blenkinsop' (Fen went on with a happy, faraway look in his pale blue eyes), ‘in the days when locomotives were adumbrated but not yet made, that in the pattern as commonly proposed, and whose descendents waft us incompetently about nowadays, the wheels would slip on the rails and the vehicle consequently remain motionless. He therefore devoted a great deal of time, money, and trouble to inventing a locomotive with spiked wheels which would not be liable to this disadvantage . . . With the result that you see. Mr Blenkinsop is the
locus classicus
of misplaced foresight. And it would be just as absurd if you were to try to take action about Mudge's suspicions.' Fen stubbed out his cigarette and spoke more energetically. ‘There isn't a shadow of a case against you, unless —' Fen broke off suddenly.

‘Unless what?'

‘Unless the jury brings in a charge of attempted murder or grievous bodily harm or something at the inquisition. That would be equivalent to an indictment – but of course it's wildly unlikely, and in any case the thing would never stand up for a moment in court.'

‘In other words,' said Joan, ‘I'm in a senseless panic . . . Well, well, one goes on learning things about oneself. And now, what was it
you
wanted to talk to
me
about?'

‘A general inquisition, if I may.'

‘Go ahead.'

‘Tell me about Stapleton and Judith Haynes.'

Joan's shrewd, puckish face suggested that she was perturbed. ‘What do you want to know? They're very much in love with one another. He composes. I was glancing through the vocal score of his opera after tea today.'

‘Mudge delivered it up?'

‘Yes, it was found in Edwin's rooms.'

‘Is it a good opera?'

‘Not really.' Joan grimaced. ‘But he's quite young, of course, and some composers develop late. Anyway, it's not fair to judge it when one's head's full of
Meistersinger.
As Puccini said, we're all mandoline-twangers in comparison with Wagner.
Pace
W.J. Turner.'

‘W. J. Turner,' said Fen dreamily, ‘thinks
The Flying Dutchman
is Wagner's best opera.' He made trumpeting noises, vaguely reminiscent of the overture to that work. ‘But as for
Meistersinger
– apart from
Henry IV
it's the only thing I know which convinces one of the essential nobility of
man;
as opposed to
Macbeth
and the Ninth Symphony, which are really about the gods . . .' He paused to listen to the distant strains of Pogner's Address, and then returned somewhat hurriedly to the matter in hand. ‘But as regards Judith Haynes and Edwin Shorthouse —'

‘Edwin?' In the flurry of the moment Joan spoke a little too casually. ‘I think he had hopes of Judith. But his intentions weren't honourable, to say the very least of it.'

‘What makes you say that?' Fen's eyes held a curious glitter, like those of a snake confronted by a particularly gullible and trusting rabbit.

‘Oh, I – that's just the way Edwin was.'

‘There wasn't any particular incident –'

‘To be quite frank,' Joan interrupted him, ‘I made a promise.'

‘Then you'd better break it,' said Fen, leaning back in his chair. ‘Unless of course there's something discreditable to these young people which you want to hide.'

‘No . . . no. But still –'

‘If I told you another person's life was in danger, would that make any difference?'

‘Are you serious?'

‘Perfectly.'

‘But
they
can't have anything to do with it.'

‘Probably not. But every scrap of evidence is important.'

Joan hesitated. Then: ‘Well, here goes,' she said, ‘for what it's worth . . . Edwin made some sort of attempt to rape Judith Haynes, when he was drunk. And Boris Stapleton heard about it.'

She explained. ‘Poor Judith,' she said. ‘“Clothing disarranged”, as the Sunday papers put it. I don't think I've ever seen quite such misery and hatred in a human face – she's instinctively virginal, that child . . . Well, attacks like that haven't much chance of succeeding at the best of times, but of course I interfered.'

‘What did you do?' Fen asked, interested.

‘I got him by his coat collar and the seat of his pants,' said Joan with nostalgic pleasure. ‘There must be something particularly disconcerting about that, because it seems to paralyse people . . . Then I tripped him, and he toppled down and banged his head.'

These amazonian tactics evidently pleased Fen. ‘Most satisfactory.' he agreed. ‘But how did Stapleton get to know of it?'

‘Judith must have told him. He came to me the day afterwards, looking rather queer, and thanked me. But . . . well, there's no doubt he felt pretty strongly about it.' She paused, and as Fen said nothing: ‘I suppose that adds to your list of motives?'

‘Not appreciably,' said Fen. He was now frankly sprawling, his long legs stretched out towards the fire, his gold cigarette-case, temporarily forgotten, held in his right hand. ‘It's only confirmation of what I already suspected. Now about your own movements last night . . .'

‘Just as a matter of routine.'

‘Exactly what I was going to say,' Fen remarked benevolently. He gave her a cigarette and put the case away again. ‘Any alibi?'

‘None whatever. Immediately after our meeting at the Randolph I walked back to the “Mace and Sceptre” and went to bed. That would be fairly soon after nine.'

‘And thereafter you might at any time have crept out, disguised as an atom physicist and unobserved by anyone.'

‘Yes. There are plenty of back exits from the hotel . . . As a matter of fact, though, I didn't.'

‘No.' Fen spoke a little absent-mindedly. He produced a lighter and lit Joan's cigarette for her. ‘Can you tell me what you've been doing since lunch today?'

‘Yes, of course – but why?'

‘There are reasons,' Fen assured her amicably. He reflected, as he spoke, that unfortunately no kind of trap was possible in inquiring about the attacks on Elizabeth. ‘And quite good ones at that.'

‘You make me nervous,' said Joan. ‘Now I shall probably leave something out, or get my times mixed, and you'll have me carried off to gaol on suspicion of something.'

The warmth of the electric fire was making Fen sleepy. He roused himself and grinned at her. ‘Think hard,' he said unconsolingly.

‘Well . . . after a late lunch I went to the residents' lounge and wrote letters. There must be plenty of people who can guarantee I really was there. About four Karl turned up – I'd invited him to tea. He'd just spent a very hectic hour, poor dear, communicating with people about this rehearsal. We went to the public lounge. Then the Inspector arrived. We gave him a cup of tea, and he asked us questions.'

‘Did you see or talk to anyone connected with the opera while you were having tea – apart from Wolzogen, that is?'

‘No, I don't think – oh, yes, of course, Elizabeth. But only for a few minutes. That was after the Inspector had left.'

‘What did you talk to her about?'

Joan frowned. ‘Nothing special, I fancy. Just vague chatter.' A thought occurred to her. ‘But haven't you spoken to Elizabeth? It seems she has some fairly definite idea about who did what to Edwin.'

‘She
had
such an idea,' said Fen with great firmness. He still misdoubted this as a motive for the attacks on Elizabeth, but it might as well be quashed at the earliest possible opportunity. ‘Since then it's been proved to be quite false.'

‘I see . . . Shall I go on?'

‘Please.'

‘Karl left shortly after Elizabeth. I think he went upstairs to see George. I finished my tea, and then it occurred to me that we'd neither of us told Elizabeth what
time
the rehearsal was supposed to be. I thought I'd look in and remedy that, as she was up in her room . . . At least, that's where I imagined she was. Actually I found the door off the latch and no one there.'

The door off the latch
. . . That suggested culpable carelessness on the part of Elizabeth's attacker, Fen thought: unless of course Joan had been that attacker, and was now lying to conceal the fact. He glanced covertly at her, and it came to him with something of a shock that potentially at least she might well be without scruples. Beneath her pervasive charm there was a certain hardness – though that in itself militated against her having been concerned in the attacks on Elizabeth, which appeared to have been inadequately conceived and carried out in a state of something like panic.

‘I was all the more surprised,' she was saying, ‘because as I knocked I thought I heard some kind of movement inside the room. But I suppose it must have been next door.'

‘You didn't look in the bathroom?'

‘No-no. The door was partly open, but there wasn't any sound, so I didn't bother to investigate . . . Professor Fen, what is all this about? Does it concern Elizabeth?'

‘Yes,' said Fen. ‘It does. There were two attempts to kill her this afternoon, both about the time you went up to her room. Anonymous attempts, I should add. That's why your evidence may be important.'

‘To
kill
her? But why? Why?' Joan had been startled out of her habitual equanimity.

Fen shrugged. ‘We don't know. But go on. After you'd left the note –'

‘The note?' Joan spoke confusedly. ‘Oh, yes, of course. I just put on a coat and hat and came round here. That's all.'

‘Now, try and remember, please.' Fen leaned forward. ‘When you went up to that room, did you see anyone in front of you going in the same direction?'

Joan considered. ‘No,' she answered at last. ‘I'm pretty certain I didn't.'

Fen suppressed a sigh of disappointment, and fell to recalling the exact topography of the hotel corridor. There was a right-angle bend, he remembered, immediately before one arrived at room 72, so that in approaching from the stairs and lifts one would have to be right up to the door in order to see anyone enter it. Beyond the bend there were a few more bedrooms (among them that of Peacock); then lavatories and bathrooms; and at last the corridor resolved itself into a cul-de-sac, with nothing at the end but a wall, a frosted-glass window, and a radiator. Yet if Joan were telling the truth, the attacker must have come from the direction opposite to that of the stairs and the lifts. He might have been lurking previously in a bathroom or a lavatory – only there was no plausible reason why he should. And on the other hand, he might have come from Peacock's room . . .

Fen shook his head. The affair was exasperatingly elusive – the more so as Elizabeth's assailant had been sufficiently insouciant to give himself away ten times
over. Nor, now he came to think of it, had this interview been very much help; its sole justification, in fact, lay in the dispiriting news that Mudge was developing theories of his own.

Fen got energetically to his feet, becoming once more aware of the distant music; aware, too, that Joan was regarding him curiously.

‘Class dismissed?' she asked.

‘With full marks,' he said. ‘Now I must find someone else to pester. Are you staying here?'

‘No. I'll come down, I think, and see what progress they're making.' Fen opened the door for her. ‘Oh, damn,' she said. ‘I haven't turned the fire off.'

Fen went back and turned it off for her.

‘It stinks,' he said gravely, ‘and I am ready to depart.'

‘
ONE OF MY
happiest memories,' said Joan as they descended the stairs, ‘is playing Salome in Strauss's opera with Edwin in the unlikely role of John the Baptist. It was some time ago, when I really had a figure' (‘You have still,' Fen put in gallantly), ‘and I remember it partly because I realized even then that I was the first Salome to give the males in the audience a really good run for their money during the Dance of the Seven Veils. It was at the Paris opera, and I ended up in a condition of nudity which would have made the Windmill girls blush . . . However, that wasn't what I was going to say. There stood Edwin, sternly resisting my charms, pudgy, half-naked, and with a corpulence barely credible in a man who'd lived so long on locusts and wild honey. And do you know' – Joan stopped abruptly in front of the door which led into the auditorium – ‘do you know, I found him
revolting. “Let thy white body be touched by me”
,' she quoted. ‘And really, if I'd
had
to touch him, I think I should have screamed . . .'

‘All this,' Fen suggested, ‘being relevant to the attempted rape of Judith Haynes.'

‘Yes. God knows
I'm
hard boiled enough, and that was on the stage. What
she
must have felt –'

They actually found Judith Haynes sitting with Elizabeth, and went to join them. The rehearsal, it was evident, was going with a swing. Adam – who up to now had been playing the entire scene with his gaze fixed unwaveringly on his wife, to the great astonishment and
dismay of Rutherston – was singing Walther's trial-song. The first oboe had not even yet appeared, and Peacock, from the rostrum, periodically supplied his part by a hollow sepulchral chanting which greatly disconcerted everyone. None the less, there was an atmosphere of good-humour about the proceedings now that things were fairly under way – and moreover, a greater air of plausibility than in any of the rehearsals so far. People were acting as well as singing; moves went smoothly; the scenery had crystallized into dim but still unmistakable simulacra of its ultimate forms. Joan realized that a weight had lifted from the production by the death of Edwin Shorthouse, and because she was a loyal member of her profession the realization made her happy.