The Weight of the Evidence (20 page)

‘Distinctly not.’ Crunkhorn was decided. ‘I don’t believe that Pluckrose himself had any interests of that sort. He was a man curious in numerous fields of knowledge, but anything he was interested in we invariably heard about. He was an inveterate talker and controversialist.’

‘Might the meteorite have some merely monetary value – contain precious metals which would make it worth stealing?’

‘Almost certainly not. Gold, platinum, or silver have never been found in such things except in minute quantities. Moreover this meteorite – at which I took occasion to glance yesterday evening – appears to be of the common stony sort; it is unlikely to have a high metallic content; it would be a good deal heavier if it had. But the physicists will be able to tell you more than I can; as you know, they have charge of it now.’

Appleby nodded. Hobhouse, who had been staring glumly at the fountain, turned to ask a question. ‘It wouldn’t be valuable or important just because of its size?’

‘Dear me, no!’ Crunkhorn was amused. ‘There is a meteorite in Mexico which is estimated to weigh over fifty tons.’

Hobhouse sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t drop
that
on a man.’

‘I suppose not. But if one did–’ Crunkhorn paused and frowned. ‘It occurs to me that there is just one thing that would make a commonplace meteoric stone of immense interest: the presence in it of organized matter.’

Appleby looked up. ‘Life?’

‘Precisely. Needless to say, plenty of them have been cut up and examined for anything that might suggest the existence of organic matter beyond this planet. But nothing of the sort has ever been found.’

‘I see.’ Appleby’s voice was suddenly oddly detached and absent. For suddenly he found himself groping with his obscurest intimations of the case; with nothing less than the truth as it was already striving to constitute itself deep in his mind. Once before he had known this sensation in the Pluckrose affair – when Tavender’s gnomic utterance on the ‘associations’ of meteorites had recurred to him as he lay in bed summing up the evidence two nights before. Now he glanced from Crunkhorn to Hobhouse. ‘How did we know it was a meteorite?’ he asked.

Hobhouse looked momentarily blank. ‘How? Well, before you came we had the professor of physics, and a lecturer in geology, and a man from the city museum–’

‘But of course it’s a meteorite.’ Crunkhorn joined in impatiently. ‘One has only to look at it–’

‘You
have only to look at it.’

‘Traces of the characteristic crust–’

‘No doubt, no doubt.’ Appleby was pacing restlessly up and down. He turned to Hobhouse. ‘But to
you
, and to
me
– it’s just a big stone…’ He halted, almost comically rueful. ‘I’m not sure I know what I’m talking about,’ he said.

Crunkhorn raised his eyebrows. Hobhouse gave a grunt which sounded distinctly disapproving, and turned as if to leave the Wool Court. Then he stopped. ‘Somebody coming,’ he said.

They all looked at the door by which they had emerged from the building. It had gently opened. For a moment nothing further happened. Then something large, floral, and shapeless appeared. It was a cushion. And after it placidly toddled a stout and comfortable elderly man.

‘Lasscock,’ Appleby said.

Pluckrose’s chair was represented only by slivers which had been too small for policemen to bother picking up. The second chair that had stood beneath the tower someone had removed to the side of the court. And towards this second chair Lasscock, leisurely and unheeding, ambled now. He dumped his cushion in it, picked it up, and moved placidly towards the three watchers. To the regular hum and clatter of the engineering shops had now been added the intermittent scream of some species of grinding machine and the dull thud and reverberation of what might have been a steam hammer. Perhaps because this made audible speech too strenuous an affair – perhaps because he saw no occasion for utterance – Lasscock said nothing. He merely bowed politely, set down his chair directly under the tower, patted the cushion into place, produced from his pocket a copy of
The Times
, and settled himself comfortably in the sun. The engineering shops pulsed and banged; it was just ten o’clock and a bell rang loudly; through the high windows of the long corridor flanking the court on this side came a clatter and shouting of students hurrying from lecture to lecture. It was all uncommonly like Miss Dearlove’s orchard. And Lasscock closed his eyes. Then, as if mindful always of life’s minor courtesies, he opened them again; gave a second – and as it were valedictory – bow; closed them once more; and settled the open newspaper peacefully over his face. Lasscock had all the appearance of being asleep.

‘Well I’m blessed!’ Hobhouse, not previously familiar with the habits of Nesfield’s learned version of the Fat Boy, stared in astonishment. Then his gaze travelled storey by storey up the tower. ‘Of all the spots to choose for a quiet nap.’ His voice was positively anxious – much as if he expected a second celestial visitation to come thundering down from one of the windows above. ‘And it’s not very decent, either.’

Hobhouse had perforce to speak loudly if his indignation were to be communicated at all. And Lasscock, deceptively somnolent, apparently heard. For his voice came mildly from behind the broad expanses of
The Times
. ‘My dear sir,’ it said; ‘come, come. Don’t doubt you’re a sensitive feller and all that. But no good runnin’ after morbid associations. Pluckrose’s death very distressin’ thing. Dangerous to let it lie on the mind. What the doctors nowadays call traumatic. Don’t intend to act as if it were any concern of mine. And certenly not goin’ to be driven to fresh woods and pastures new.’

‘Humph.’ Hobhouse looked at Lasscock – or rather at the empty villas and mansions of
The
Times
back page – with strong disapproval. ‘And do you always sleep here?’

‘Sleep?’ Lasscock’s voice sounded mildly surprised. ‘Commonly come here to think things out – when I happen to have a little leisure.’ With Lasscock
leisure
rhymed still with
seizure
– which somehow gave the word a particularly leisurable feel. ‘Not that I intend to think out Pluckrose. Business of that Lunnon feller – and yourself, from the sound of you.’

‘It certainly is.’ Hobhouse was extremely indignant. ‘And may I ask–’

‘Mornin’.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Mornin’ to you.’

And
The Times
crackled faintly, as to a long indrawn breath.

They climbed the rather narrow staircase which, apart from the hoist, was the only means of communication between the store-rooms of the tower. Hobhouse breathed heavily, but not altogether from the effort involved. ‘Disgraceful!’ he muttered. ‘Levity, I call it. A historian, did you say? If only he were a material witness and we could get him in the box we’d see that he got history.’ Hobhouse put something like venom into this obscure threat. ‘“Mornin’,” indeed!’

Appleby laughed. ‘But he is a material witness. He was there, you know, all the time.’

Hobhouse came to an abrupt halt. ‘You don’t say so!’

‘But I do. I’ll give ten to one that he toddled into the university as usual – and afterwards bolted back to Miss Dearlove’s and had his half-term chill prematurely, just trusting that no one would remember seeing him about. The thing happened under his nose. Or rather, in front of his
Times
. The distinction is important, I’m afraid.’

‘You mean–’

‘I mean that he woke up in his accustomed deck-chair and there was Pluckrose pashed and pounded beside him. A nasty shock. Disturbin’. You might even say odjus. But he isn’t going to let it lie on his mind.’

‘Well!’ Hobhouse almost exploded with anger. ‘It’s utterly scandalous. He’s made himself an accessory after–’

‘I suppose he has. His attitude is certainly one of extreme quietism. But apart from his determination not to be bothered with the business he told me what must be more or less the truth. I can remember his words. “Somebody dropped a horrid great rock on him from the tower. And I don’t know anything more about it.” If Lasscock was asleep that will be really all he knows. He has simply suppressed the fact that he was present, that he saw that Pluckrose was undoubtedly and horridly dead, and that he made himself scarce. Avoiding anything traumatic, you know.’

Hobhouse had turned round. ‘It’s a criminal offence,’ he said. ‘Come along. We’ll nip down to town and get a warrant and have him detained.’

‘My dear man, you’ve been trying – very rightly – to drag me up these stairs for a couple of days. Don’t let us have any more Dukes in the case, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Dukes?’ Hobhouse paused, bewildered.

‘First the noble Duke of Nesfield and now the noble Duke of York. Marching us up to the top of the tower and marching–’

Hobhouse had turned round once more – resignedly.

‘Ahr,’ he said. ‘Fond of a bit of literature, aren’t you?’

‘Literature?’ Appleby, climbing again, slapped his thigh. ‘That reminds me that I’d quite forgotten
Zuleika Dobson
. But I don’t know that she’s going to he so important, after all.
Pickwick
Papers
is much more in the picture.’

‘
Pickwick
?’ Hobhouse was suddenly curious. ‘I know that book like the back of my hand, Mr Appleby.’

‘Then you must remember the famous occasion’ – and Appleby dropped his voice to a facetious whisper. ‘You see?’ he concluded presently.

But Hobhouse shook his head. ‘I don’t see that it makes sense,’ he said. ‘And, what’s more, I’ll tell you this. I sometimes think you’re a bit off it.’ He climbed in silence and then paused again with a slow grin. ‘It’s Lunnon,’ he said. ‘That’s it. Lunnon feller.’ He laughed immoderately.

‘Thirty-nine,’ said Appleby.

‘Eh?’

‘Thirty-nine steps.’

‘Ahr. Literature again.’

‘Or say twenty feet. So the storey we’re concerned with must really be a very pretty height. Higher than it looks, somehow, from down below.’ Appleby looked round him. ‘But we’ll begin our inspection here.’

They had climbed from the ground floor of the tower to the first storey. Here the windows were still flush with the walls and the place was no more than a big, squarish box, bleakly white-washed and containing a scattering of miscellaneous lumber: piles of pails and mops, two parts of an extension ladder, several enormous blackboards, and a stack of framed, life-size photographs – presumably of university graduates whose insufficient distinction had earned them this oblivion.

‘It looks bigger than the room below,’ Appleby said.

‘So it is. It occupies the whole area of the tower. But, down below, part of that area is taken in for the dark-room; and the hoist is recessed off too. Here, as you see, the hoist is just part of the floor. And plenty big enough for that meteorite.’

‘It would take two of them.’ Appleby walked over to the hoist and cautiously stood on it. Flush as it now was with the floor, it looked like no more than a sort of trapdoor – except that the corners of it ran on metal pillars which stood parallel with the sides of the tower until they disappeared through a hole in the roof. ‘Rather like the sort of thing they have in railway stations, except that it isn’t railed off at all. If the hoist were down at the bottom and you were up at the top you’d have to mind your step.’

Hobhouse nodded. ‘Illegal probably. And there has been some sort of protection which I suspect the porters have knocked away. Easier to manipulate things. And, of course, at this level the thing is hardly used at all – just when they want to stow away a bit of sizeable junk.’

‘But it’s quite a complicated, electrically-controlled, affair. You’d think it hardly worth keeping in order.’

‘It’s used quite a lot between ground floor and basement. You see, as well as opening on the ground-floor store-room it opens on the dark-room too. And from there they use it to send things down to a basement room to be washed.’

‘I see.’ Appleby looked up through the square hole in the roof above him. ‘And the hoist goes right to the top?’

‘Right to the low top storey under the roof. The works are in the pitch of the rafters. But the windows in the top storey are quite tiny. So the one immediately above this is the business storey as far as we’re concerned.’

‘Then up we go. And why shouldn’t we go up on the hoist? Just like a god at the end of a play.’

Hobhouse looked puzzled, doubtless because plays of this sort were outside his experience. ‘Well, I could send you up, or you me. But if we both stood on the hoist I don’t think we could reach the switch.’

Appleby moved to the middle of the little platform. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘so long.’ He saw Hobhouse hesitate and then cautiously turn the switch. The hoist quivered beneath him and rose quite smoothly. It was an odd sensation. For a moment he was poised midway between the two storeys, and then the hoist came to rest as part of the flooring of the upper one. Appleby looked about him. The first impression was obvious. The place contained lethal objects galore. Here, close by the hoist, was the cast-iron sink. And there, by the wall, were the safe and the deed boxes, and on the other side were the squat ferro-concrete pillars which the engineers, learned in the Strength of Materials, used for bashing things. The cannon-ball was not immediately visible, but no doubt it was concealed somewhere amid the general litter of the room. And Appleby turned to Hobhouse as he came puffing up the stairs. ‘Plenty of stuff left. What about a little experiment on your friend Lasscock down below?’

‘Do you really think – ?’ Hobhouse looked sorely tempted, but presently shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do, Mr Appleby; it wouldn’t do. He could bring an action. Of course if we were making notes over there by the window we might drop a pencil on him, just by mistake.’

‘But he may have a weak heart, and the shock might be too much for him.’ Appleby crossed the room. ‘This is the window overlooking the court? It juts out, all right; these turrets are quite sizeable. And so are the windows themselves. And they open easily. And the sill is no more than nine inches from the floor.’ Appleby was now peering out and down. ‘Would it be possible to mistake one man for another down there? I suppose it would, particularly if one were a bit worked up. But Lasscock is pretty unmistakable. There he is.
Times
and all.’