Swan Song (20 page)

Fen made his way into the wings. The third act had begun. Sachs sat engrossed in his folio; David was
creeping into the room with the air of a particularly small mouse braving the slumbers of a particularly large cat. The wood-wind chattered vivaciously, but without confidence. Laying his basket on a table, David began to examine its contents, with one eye fixed apprehensively on his master. But after a time he became wholly preoccupied with cakes, ribbons, and sausages, and the sound of Sachs turning a page of the folio, underlined as it was by a downward rush of strings, threw him into something approaching a panic.

‘Yes, Master!' he quavered. ‘Here!'

Rich and sombre, the cellos enunciated the
Wahn
theme, that brilliantly contrived vein of melancholy which relieves and balances the whole great comedy . . . And on the opposite side of the stage Fen saw Judith talking to Rutherston. In another moment she had caught his eye and had slipped round the back to join him.

‘Have you found him?' she said eagerly.

Fen spoke to her with great gentleness. ‘No, I'm afraid not. Will you answer one or two questions?'

‘Y-yes, but –'

‘I wouldn't bother you if it wasn't important. How long have you and your husband been in Oxford?'

‘Oh . . . about three weeks. But please –'

‘And you husband hasn't been well during that time?'

‘No . . . It's – it's been chiefly that horrible skin disease. And he
won't
see a doctor . . .'

‘Can you give me more details of his illness?'

‘But why? Why? I don't see –'

‘As a matter of fact,' said Fen, ‘I know something about diseases, and I fancy I have an idea what's wrong with him. If you can tell me the symptoms, I'll put them before a doctor, and we can at least get some suitable medicine made up.' Fen spoke with an effort. He was at the best of times averse to lying, except for the sake of amusement, and he was vividly conscious of the cruelty of what he was-doing. But there seemed no other way. ‘Presumably,' he added, ‘your husband would have no
objection simply to taking medicine – particularly if it came from you.'

The girl nodded. ‘It's – it's very kind,' she stammered. ‘I'll tell you all I can . . . He's got a kind of laryngitis as well as the skin disease. And he's been sick a lot, and he's had diarrhoea, and he's hardly been eating at all. Oh, and he complained that his muscles were hurting and that his hands sometimes went numb . . . I – I think that's all.' She attempted a smile. ‘And quite enough, too.'

‘There are two possibilities,' Fen went on ruthlessly (afterwards he was to look back on this little episode as from his point of view the most sheerly objectionable in the whole case). ‘There are two possibilities, and one of them is food poisoning.'

‘Poisoning?' There was alarm in Judith's voice.

‘Ptomaine. You know. It isn't necessarily dangerous . . . Have you been having your meals at the place where you're staying?'

‘Yes. I've cooked them for him. The landlady lets me use the kitchen.' Judith's eyes grew wider. ‘But surely
I
can't have been responsible . . . Besides, I've been eating the same things as he had, and I'm all right.'

‘Exactly. It mayn't be the food. It mayn't even be poisoning at all . . . But has he been drinking much?'

‘No, hardly at all. Only once before that morning in the “Bird and Baby”.'

‘Then don't worry,' said Fen. Now that he had heard everything of importance he was anxious to finish with the interview.

‘But where is he now?' the girl asked.

‘As Elizabeth suggested, he's probably gone home. It's not impossible, is it, that he missed you, and imagined
you
were ahead of
him
? Maybe he was misinformed by someone . . . I think your best plan is to go to Clarendon Street and see if he's there. He doesn't appear to be in the theatre, but if he turns up I'll tell him where you are.'

Fen left her and returned to Shorthouse's dressing-room. ‘Disgusting,' he murmured to himself. ‘Disgusting
but unfortunately unavoidable.' Adam, whose vigil had already provoked a faint unease, was pleased at his return.

‘I was wondering,' Adam said, ‘just what Stapleton was doing on the roof.'

Fen sat down; he was tired and dispirited. ‘Trying to get air,' he said briefly. ‘He must have felt an attack of asphyxia coming, and gone outside in the hope of relieving it. The roof has no importance in itself.'

In a few moments more Mudge arrived with a police doctor. Luckily the latter was not Dr Rashmole, whose necrophilious exuberance Fen felt would have been unendurable in the present circumstances. He examined the body, and provisionally confirmed Fen's diagnosis. Fen gave Mudge a digest of the information he had received from Judith; its effect did not appear to be enlivening.

‘Well, sir,' said Mudge blankly, ‘there seems to be only one answer to
this
problem.'

‘Impossible,' Fen replied waspishly. ‘The girl was utterly devoted to him. She'd no more have killed him than I would.'

‘There are people who can act, sir,' said Mudge platitudinously. ‘And it wouldn't be the first time a love-affair's gone sour and ended in murder.'

‘Would she have admitted to preparing his meals if she'd been poisoning him?'

‘Of course she would.' Mudge, too, was becoming a trifle annoyed. ‘The landlady knew all about it, and it would have been insane to deny the fact.'

‘Perhaps,' Adam suggested with singular lack of penetration, ‘some third person put the poison in the sugar, or in some other ingredient.'

He looked at them hopefully, but neither Fen nor the Inspector made any effort to point out that if this were the truth Judith too would probably be dead. The two men were, in fact, becoming unnecessarily heated. In Fen this was probably due to a reaction from his conversation with Judith; in the Inspector, to a growing belief that Fen
was wilfully and unnecessarily complicating every aspect of the case he could lay hands on.

‘It's by no means impossible, you know,' said Fen, ‘that Stapleton was regularly getting something to eat or drink from an outsider.'

‘Not impossible, no,' said Mudge obstinately. ‘But wouldn't his wife have known about it, if they were as intimate as you maintain?'

‘I don't care,' Fen snapped. ‘I decline absolutely to believe that she had anything to do with it. Haven't you got eyes in your head? Can't you see the child was in love with him?'

‘And can't
you
see,' said the Inspector, ‘that what you're trying to do is to fabricate another impossible murder?'

They stared at one another with open antagonism. And it was at that moment that the door opened and Judith herself entered the room.

‘Professor Fen,' she said, ‘I heard you'd come up here, and I wondered if –'

Then she saw the body which lay huddled on the floor.

The words died on her lips. She stood absolutely still. Her cheeks still glowed from the exertion of running up the stairs, but there was an area of dead whiteness about her nose and mouth. She made no attempt to approach the body. After a moment she began to sob – a slow, mechanical dry-eyed, almost soundless sobbing. For a time the four men stood helpless. Then the doctor tried to touch her, and she pushed him away with the gesture of a petulant child. The sobbing grew slower and at last ceased.

‘You won't cut him up,' she whispered. And then her voice rose suddenly to a scream, a horrifying, ridiculous wail like that of a terrified cat:
‘God help you if you touch him! God help you!'

Adam took off his overcoat and laid it over the gaping, witless face. He was aware that the distant music had stopped – aware, too, that it had stopped because he was not there to make his entry. He heard the call-boy
chanting his name on the floor below, but he made no move.

After the rehearsal Fen walked back towards the ‘Mace and Sceptre' with Adam, Joan and Elizabeth. Joan broke the long silence by saying:

‘I wonder if they took my advice – to avoid having children at first . . . If they didn't, it may be a consolation to Judith to –'

It was Fen's turn to lose his temper. ‘A consolation,' he repeated savagely. ‘Yes, perhaps it may. But you still seem to forget that murder's been done, and that someone will sooner or later hang for it.'

‘You don't think that Judith –'

‘She didn't kill her husband. Of course not. But there was the murder of Shorthouse as well. Let's keep our chatter about “consolation” for the time when everything's cleared up.'

Elizabeth said gently: ‘You haven't a clue, Professor Fen?'

‘None,' said Fen more soberly. ‘Not the vestige of an idea . . . You'd better cut me out of your series, Elizabeth.'

They went on in silence to the hotel. Before they parted Fen said to Joan:

‘I'm sorry I was so detestably rude.'

She looked steadily at him. ‘“Unnoticeably”,' she said, and smiled. ‘We're all on edge, and I agree that sentimental chatter isn't any help . . . You'll be at the performance tomorrow?'

‘Of course. Good luck, if I don't see you before then.'

‘Come backstage afterwards.'

‘I'd like to . . . Again, my apologies.'

‘Forgiveness isn't in order,' said Joan. ‘So I'll risk quoting Shakespeare to a Professor of English Literature . . .
“Let us not burden our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone”
.' She smiled again, and went with Adam and Elizabeth into the hotel.

BEFORE THE CULMINATION
of the case there was respite of a little less than twenty-four hours. The second scene of act three was rehearsed on the Monday morning, a week after Shorthouse's death. Substitutes were quickly found for Judith, who had withdrawn from the production and yet refused to go back to her parents, and for Stapleton. Rutherston gave a final impassioned address in which he begged the chorus to try and look like sixteenth-century Nurembergers instead of like an elementary eurhythmics class. The autopsy on Stapleton, which it had been impossible to waive, was not expected to produce definite results until the Tuesday morning. There was to be no work on the Monday afternoon until the curtain went up at six-thirty on the first performance.

Adam and Elizabeth spent the afternoon at the hotel. The events of the last few days had somehow contrived to cast a shadow over their relationship. A self-consciousness, almost a coldness, had grown up between them, the more difficult to dispel as the reasons for it were either too obscure or, it seemed, too inadequate to be dealt with directly. Neither was happy; their old careless intimacy had gone. In both, the faculty of criticism had been sharpened to include trivial and even imaginary offences. Elizabeth felt that Adam was becoming too tyrannical and overbearing, and began to regret (though with a sense of treachery) the days of her independence. Adam felt that Elizabeth was becoming touchy, irascible, and
over-sensitive. Both saw in this development the notorious disillusionment which is said to follow the first romantic months of marriage, both half-resigned themselves to it, and both, as a consequence, confirmed and strengthened it.

Its causes were various. The impact of violent death had left them nervous, though they scarcely recognized the fact. Mere physical apprehension was only a part of it; there was also a suppressed atavism, a superstitious horror, still potent from the remote origins of the race, of the inexplicable. It was unconscious, but it was there. In Adam's case it was complicated partly by the strain of the final rehearsals (the death of Shorthouse having resulted in an abnormally high pressure of work for everyone) and partly by a temporary, irrational reaction against the disorderliness which has characterized the theatrical profession at all times and everywhere; in Elizabeth's by the constant surveillance on which Adam insisted. She was one of those who have an urgent, innate need of occasional solitude – and the war has shown, if proof be needed, that such people, when forced to be continually gregarious, become fretful and in extreme cases even insane.

They did not speak of these matters, being indeed only half conscious of them. Nor was their criticism of each other explicit; at most it was a matter of hints. But they were aware of the estrangement, and, by seeking for explanations of it more or less complimentary to themselves, accentuated it. The progess of their
malaise
had not of course reached as yet a point which could be described as crucial; it was reversible as and when they chose. Unluckily, neither of them was inclined to make the first move.

During the afternoon Adam slept, and was troubled with nightmares. When he awoke, dry-mouthed and with a feeling of nausea, there was only one of them that he could remember. He had seemed to be driving along a country road, and had come in sight of a large, grey,
low-built, part-medieval building. Though he had never seen it before, he knew instinctively that its name was Oldacre Priory. He entered one of its rooms, which was sparsely furnished and hung with tattered banners. The place seemed to be a museum. There was no life in it, but he was later to find that there were creatures which moved. He opened a door which gave on to a courtyard. For a moment it seemed quiet, and then the building began to vibrate with a heavy tramping, and a file of armoured knights came into view. He was aware that there were no men inside the armour, either alive or dead. Nor were the things robots. They were mere accumulations of matter, moved purposively by some force outside themselves. They did not see him, but there was something about them which made him withdraw, very quickly and quietly, into the room of the banners, close the door, and lean for a moment against it to catch his breath. Then he started to run.