The Case of the Gilded Fly (8 page)

It was then that Yseut entered the bar. She was dressed as untidily as when Nigel had first seen her that morning, and still carried her bag and her notebook. He saw that as she came in an expression of black anger appeared on Robert's face, and that he half started up from his chair; then relaxed, and sat back looking extremely uncomfortable. ‘Afraid she'll hang about his neck in public and make the whole thing obvious with a lot of dreary innuendoes,' thought Nigel, and added the mental footnote: ‘which is exactly what she will do.' Yseut met Robert's eyes with a look in which triumph and defiance were oddly mingled, flung down her things, and swaggered to the bar. None
of the three men moved to get her a drink, but she watched them closely as she ordered brandy and walked back with it.

‘Well, my children,' she said, ‘how are you all feeling after last night's carouse? Poor Donald, you look a bit green.'

‘I think it would be more appropriate for us to ask you that question,' Nigel said drily.

‘Was I very tight last night?' She laughed unconvincingly. ‘Well, one's only young once, as the dreary cliché has it. I – er – went to your room this morning, Robert dear. I was so sorry not to find you in. I'm afraid when dear Nigel saw me coming out he thought the most dreadful things. And Rachel as well. Such a pity I had to run into her: I thought I was being so discreet.' She picked up her glass with a shaky hand and swallowed half the contents at a gulp. ‘Still, I found what I went for.' She smiled silkily.

‘I'm delighted,' Robert said. ‘And as you say, what a pity I missed you.'

‘Never mind – darling.'

(The innuendoes have begun, thought Nigel gloomily.)

Robert continued: ‘Of course, I shan't see you at rehearsal today, but as I imagine there's something you'd like to talk to me about –'

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I, darling? Nothing in the world. You sound so conspiratorial – doesn't he, Nigel? As though you wanted to slip me a cheque for blackmail. If you do, I'm sure the others won't mind. But of course. I'm not accepting any cheques or doing any blackmail; it's so unwise, and it's much, much better that the truth should be known.'

‘What are you talking about, Yseut?' demanded Donald abruptly.

‘Nothing, darling. Only a joke. A private joke.'

‘I've got to go now,' Donald muttered awkwardly.

‘Oh, must you, Donald? Are you going to practise your organ? Be sure and play nicely.'

Donald rose, picked up his music, and stood looking at her for a moment. Then with a brusque movement he turned on his heel and went. Yseut smiled after him.

‘A sweet boy,' she said, ‘but just a tiny bit gauche. Let me get you both another drink.'

Nigel rose automatically.

‘What are you having? Rye and dry? Come to the bar with me, Nigel, and help me carry them back.'

On the way to the bar Yseut continued to look back over her shoulder and smiled at Robert. Arrived there, she propped herself up with her back to it and left Nigel to do the ordering.

Unfortunately, just as the barman was giving Nigel Yseut's brandy, it slipped from his fingers and spilt on the bar. He hurriedly pulled her away, but was not in time to prevent some of it running on to her blouse.

‘Blast!' she said. ‘You clumsy fool! For God's sake give me a handkerchief to wipe it off.'

Nigel gave her the handkerchief, without finding himself able to feel a shred of remorse at the incident, and ordered another brandy while she scrubbed ineffectually at the cloth. He suddenly felt extremely ill – no doubt a belated after-effect of the party – and very, very weary of Yseut and everyone who had to do with her. A fit of morose irritability seized him: I wish to God they'd all go and hang themselves, he thought.

They went back to Robert with the drinks (for which Yseut had conveniently forgotten to pay). Nigel saw her take a swift look about her, and then stiffen and flush furiously. She looked at Robert with eyes so full of hatred that tears sprang into them against her will.

‘Damn you!' she said. And literally throwing her drink on to the table she snatched up her bag and left.

There was genuine bewilderment on Robert's face.

‘Well, for heaven's sake!' he exclaimed. ‘What on earth –?'

Nigel grunted and sat down. ‘Good riddance,' he said wearily, and swallowed a double whisky neat. Not unnaturally, this made him feel more sick than ever, and he was relieved when Rachel came in and he could decently excuse himself. Obviously she wanted to talk to Robert alone, and the conversation was perfunctory until he rose to go.

‘You won't forget my message to Helen?' he said.

‘Message?' answered Robert vaguely. ‘Oh, yes, of course. No, I won't forget.'

‘Good-bye, then.'

Rachel gave him a ghost of a smile.

‘Arrivederci,' said Robert.

‘Arrivederci,' he echoed; and went.

A hypocritical farewell, he said savagely to himself, as he pushed through the swing-doors into the street and made for St Christopher's: I should be delighted if I never saw any of them again. Let them all squabble their beastly heads off. Let them shoot each other with stolen revolvers, and I'm damned if I shall care. But they won't have the guts even to do that. It's all superficial and conventional and merely stupid. They wouldn't have the guts.

But he was wrong. For now on the borders of the mind the jackals and hyenas went back to their lairs, and soft-footed wolves began to stalk, in circles that grew ever narrower towards a point where they fell upon a struggling, screaming form and silenced it. The bickering and squabbling became transmuted by a sudden hidden alchemy into physical terror and physical agony and violent death. That afternoon Nigel left Oxford and returned to London; he came back the following evening, and heard a shot.

When he next saw Yseut she was dead.

I have seen phantoms there that were as men,

And men that were as phantoms flit and roam.

Thomson

‘Intuition,' said Gervase Fen firmly, ‘that's all it amounts to in the end – intuition.'

He glared about the assembled company, as if challenging anyone to contradict him. But nobody did; it was his room, to begin with, and they were all heavy with Senior Common Room port for which he had paid, so it seemed impolite to argue. Moreover, it was exceedingly hot, and Nigel at any rate felt little inclined to do anything but relax. It was eight o'clock of the Friday evening, and only three hours ago he had completed the abominable journey down from town. He was tired. He stretched out his legs and prepared to absorb anything Fen had to say on his favourite topic.

The room was a large one, stretching the whole width of the southernmost parallel of the second quadrangle in St Christopher's, and facing on to the garden on one side and the quadrangle itself on the other. It was on the first floor, and was reached by a flight of steps leading up from the open passageway which led through into the garden. Austerely but comfortably furnished, the cool cream of the walls – set off by the dark green of the carpet and curtains – was decorated only by a few Chinese miniatures and by the meticulously arranged rows of books on low shelves which occupied every side of the room. On the mantelpiece were a few dilapidated plaques and busts of the greater masters of English literature, and a huge desk, its surface covered with an untidy mellay of books and papers, dominated the north wall. Fen's wife, a plain, spectacled, sensible little woman incongruously called Dolly, sat at one corner of the fireplace, in which a few embers glowed unnecessarily, Fen himself sat at the other, while variously spaced between them were Nigel, Sir Richard Freeman, and a very old don
called Wilkes, who had attached himself to the party for no particular reason some minutes before. On his arrival Fen had been extremely rude to him – but then he was habitually rude to everyone; it was a natural consequence, Nigel decided, of his monstrous and excessive vitality.

‘Oh, and what can I do for you?' he had inquired. But Wilkes had settled himself down and demanded whisky with every evidence of a determination to stay long and leave late.

‘I'm rather sorry you've come, you know,' Fen had pursued. ‘I'm afraid you're going to be very bored with all these people.' To whose derogation this remark was intended it was impossible to tell.

Wilkes, however, who was rather deaf, was not in the least taken aback by these comments, and merely smiled benignly upon all and sundry and repeated his demand for whisky. Fen got it for him with painful reluctance, and contented himself henceforth with uttering in a penetrating whisper various slanders against the old man, to the acute embarrassment of everyone except Mrs Fen, who was apparently quite used to it and who said ‘Now, Gervase!' in an objurgatory but automatic manner every few minutes.

It was getting dark. On one side a brief prospect of Inigo Jones, on the other the great lawn flanked with trees and flowerbeds, were melting away in shadow. On the horizon, three searchlights began to form their complex trigonometrical patterns. While in the quadrangle below, a little clique of rowdy undergraduates were singing a student song to words not usually supplied in the printed versions.

Sir Richard Freeman coughed disapprovingly as Fen became launched on his logomachy; he had heard it all before. But Fen was oblivious to such mild innuendoes, and proceeded with irrepressible verve to enlarge on his ideas.

‘As I always tell you, Dick,' he was saying, ‘detection and literary criticism really come to the same thing: intuition – that miserable and degraded counter of our modern pseudo-philosophies. … However,' he went on, dismissing the intrusive digression with obvious reluctance, ‘that is not the point. The point is that, to put it simply, the relation between one clue and another – I should say the nature of the relation between one
clue and another – occurs to your detective in exactly the same way – whether it be accelerated logic or some entirely extra-rational faculty – as the nature of the relation between, say, Ben Jonson and Dryden, occurs to the literary critic.'

He paused rather dubiously, scenting perhaps an inherent weakness in the instance, but trod hot-foot over it and returned to the safer regions of abstract peroration.

‘Then once the idea has occurred to you, you can work on substantiating it from the text – or from the remainder of the clues. You get led astray occasionally, of course, but there's always logic to confirm or refute you. It follows,' he said, grinning cheerfully and shuffling his feet about, ‘that although detectives aren't necessarily good literary critics' (and he waved happily at Sir Richard) ‘good literary critics, if they bother to acquire the elementary technical equipment required in police work' (here Sir Richard groaned) ‘are always good detectives. I'm a very good detective myself,' he concluded modestly. ‘In fact I'm the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction.'

The company considered this claim for a moment in silence. But any comment they might have wished to make on it was cut short by the sudden ringing of one of the telephones on Fen's desk. He bounded to his feet like a jack-in-the-box and strode exuberantly across to it. The rest sat with that half embarrassment which comes from being compelled to listen to a private telephone conversation. Wilkes began singing the opening theme of Strauss's
Heldenleben
, which took him through three and a half octaves and resulted in the most extraordinary series of sounds. A ghostly echo, of a wireless or gramophone, carried on with it from somewhere outside, and it occurred to Nigel that Wilkes was not very deaf if he could hear that. Through the din Fen's voice was heard apostrophizing the instrument:

‘Who? … Yes, certainly. Send him over straight away.' He put down the receiver and returned rubbing his hands excitedly. ‘That was the lodge,' he announced. ‘Robert Warner the playwright is coming up to see me. It will be nice to have the opportunity of hearing just what he feels like when he's writing, and how he sets about it.'

A general groan of dismay went up; Fen's habit of
cross-examining reluctant people about their jobs was not one of his more agreeable characteristics.

‘We literary critics must get down to fundamentals, you know,' he added. Then his eye fell on Wilkes, and he said wistfully: ‘Would you like to go now, Wilkes? I'm afraid you'll find it a bit beyond you.'

‘No, I would not like to go,' replied the aged Wilkes with sudden asperity. ‘I have only just arrived. For heaven's sake sit down, man,' he squeaked, ‘and stop fidgeting about.'

This so abashed Fen that he sat down and openly sulked until, a few moments later, Robert Warner came in.

He greeted Nigel pleasantly and was introduced to the others, preserving a remarkable
sang-froid
while Fen bustled about finding him a chair and a drink and offering him a box of cigarettes, half of which he dropped all over the floor. When they had finished helping him pick them up they were all very breathless and red in the face, and sat in silence for a moment. This was unexpectedly broken by Wilkes saying in a determined voice:

‘I am now going to tell you a ghost story.'

‘No, no!' cried Fen, starting up in alarm. ‘That's really not necessary, Wilkes. We can, I hope, succeed in keeping the conversation going without that.'

‘I think it will be of interest,' Wilkes went on inexorably, ‘not only because it concerns this college, but because it happens to be true. Furthermore, unlike the majority of true ghost stories, it is interesting and even a little thrilling. But of course if it will bore you –' He stared blandly about the gathering.

‘Certainly it won't bore us,' said Sir Richard, attracting to himself a baleful glance from Fen. ‘Personally, I need a little relaxation.' He yawned. ‘I feel sleepy.'