‘The letter?’ Brian Button repeated. ‘The one he was dictating – ‘No, no, B B. Have some sense, my dear boy. The one your friend Bruno came on him writing, and that he took over to the post office himself. Stamped, of course, as second-class mail.’
‘I don’t understand you, sir.’ B B had sat down on a garden seat; he was almost as pale as when he had arrived at Dream in the first instance.
‘And I’m blessed if I do either.’ Bobby Appleby chucked his tennis racket on the grass at his feet. ‘Explain – for goodness sake.’
‘Come, come – where’s all that absolutely top-detective stuff?’ Appleby was in irritatingly good humour. ‘And, Bobby, you had an instinct it was all a matter of Durham’s calling it a day: don’t you remember your prattle about the fire of life, and euthanasia, and whatever? As for the letter, it stared us in the face. The Master didn’t want it to go out of his lodging through the college messenger service, so he took it to the post himself.’
‘He was anxious,’ B B demanded, ‘to conceal whom he was writing to?’
‘Not exactly that.
The letter was to somebody in college
. And he didn’t want to risk its being delivered, after his death, more or less straight away by hand. Despatched by second-class mail, it would be delivered this morning. And it was. To the Vice-Master.’
‘And just what was this in aid of?’ It was clear from his tone that Brian Button already dimly knew.
‘It was in aid, my dear lad, of what his seemingly interrupted communication to the Cannongate trustees on that tape-recorder was also in aid of. Something quite extravagantly malevolent. For let’s face it, B B. You’d annoyed him. You’d annoyed him quite a lot. And he was maliciously resolved to make his departure from this life the occasion of your experiencing
un
mauvais quart d’heure
. Or rather more.’
‘He thought it was really me who had done that monkeying with the photocopies?’
‘No B B. He couldn’t have thought that. For the Master had done that copying turn himself. Incidentally, the photocopying machine has been in use this morning. By the police. And they’ve sent me out this.’ Appleby handed a paper to B B. ‘From the Master to the Vice-Master. Robert Durham’s testament, poor chap.’
My Dear Adrian,
First, let me say how much I hope that the Fellows will elect you into the Mastership. If it should come about that I am permitted to look down upon the college from on high, or obliged to peer up at it from below, this will be the spectacle I shall most wish to view. Bless you, my dear man.
Secondly, pray have the police release that wretched Button. (Is not this appropriately reminiscent of some of the last words of Shakespeare’s Lear?) If he be not in custody as you read this, it is because they have been so stupid and negligent as to neglect the tape-recorder on my desk. But surely not even Dogberry and Verges could be so dull.
Button needs a lesson in (as we used to say) pulling his socks up. He is also (what, most illogically, I cannot quite forgive him) the immediate occasion of the step I am about to take. The Cannongate Papers contain some fascinating things, and the censurable carelessness of this young man prompted me to help myself in a clandestine fashion to certain material useful to – shall I say – a historian of the intimate
mores
of the more elevated classes of society at least not very long ago. Unfortunately the beastly Button is very acute; he detected the theft, and came to tell me about it with a mingling of trepidation, uneasiness, complacency and self-congratulation which has extremely offended me.
I need not speak of my present state of health. What has told me that the time has come is really, and precisely, this Button business.
He
hasn’t found me out but
I
have found
myself
out. And in an action of the weirdest eccentricity! As that equally tiresome Bruno Bone would tell you, the poet Pope speaks of Heads of Houses who beastly Skelton quote. But who ever heard of a Head of a House given to petty nocturnal pilferings?
Ave, Hadriane, moriturus te salutat.
ROBERT DURHAM
Master
In the fashionable church of St Boniface in the Fields (mysteriously so named, since it was in the heart of London) a large and distinguished congregation was assembled to give thanks for the life of the late Christopher Brockbank, QC. The two newspaper reporters at the door, discreetly clad in unjournalistic black, had been busy receiving and recording all sorts of weighty names. It was the sort of occasion upon which sundry persons explain themselves as ‘representing’ sundry other persons even more august than themselves; or sundry institutions, corporations, charities and learned bodies with which the deceased important individual has been associated.
Legal luminaries predominated. An acute observer (and there was at least one such present) might have remarked that a number of these did not settle in their pews, kneel, and bury their noses devoutly in their cupped hands without an exchange of glances in which a hint of whimsical humour fleetingly flickered.
All
this for Chris Brockbank!
they appeared to be telling each other.
Just what would he have made of it?
Sir John Appleby (our acute observer) was representing his successor as Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. For Brockbank long ago, and before he had transformed himself from a leading silk into a vigorous and somewhat eccentric legal reformer, had owned his connections with Scotland Yard, and this fact had to be duly acknowledged today. Appleby possessed only a vague memory of the man, so that a certain artificiality perhaps attended his presence at the service. It hadn’t seemed decent, however, to decline a request which was unlikely to occupy him for much more than twenty minutes – or thirty-five if one counted the time spent in scrambling into uniform and out again.
It would have been hard to tell that it wasn’t something quite different – even a wedding – that was about to transact itself. Gravity now and then there had to be, but on the whole a cheerful demeanour is held not improper on such occasions. The good fight has been fought, and nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail or knock the breast. Six weeks had passed, moreover, since Christopher Brockbank’s death, and anybody much stunned by grief had thus had a substantial period in which to recover. Whether there had been many such appeared doubtful. Brockbank had been unmarried, and now the front pew reserved for relations was occupied only by two elderly women, habited in old-fashioned and no doubt frequently exhibited mourning, whom somebody had identified for Appleby in a whisper as cousins of the dead man. If anything, they appeared rather to be enjoying their role. It was to be conjectured that they owned some quite obscure, although genteel, situation in society. Nobody had ever heard of any Brockbanks until Christopher QC had come along. In some corner of the globe, Appleby vaguely understood, there was a brother, Adrian Brockbank, who had also distinguished himself – it seemed as a lone yachtsman. But the wandering Adrian had not, it seemed, hoisted himself into a jet for the occasion.
The congregation had got to its feet, and was listening to the singing of a psalm. It was well worth listening to, since the words were striking in themselves and the choir of St Boniface’s is justly celebrated. The congregation was, of course, in the expectation of playing a somewhat passive part. At such services it is understood that there is to be comparatively little scope for what, in another context, would be called audience participation.
Appleby looked about him. It was impressive that the Lord Chief Justice had turned up, and that he was flanked by two Ministers of the Crown. There were also two or three socially prominent dowagers, who were perhaps recalling passages with Christopher when he had been young as well as gay: these glanced from time to time in benevolent amusement at the two old creatures in the front pew. Among the clergy, and wearing a very plain but very golden pectoral cross, was a bishop who would presently ascend the pulpit and deliver a brief address. In the nave two elderly clubmen (as they ought probably to be called) of subdued raffish appearance were putting their heads together in muttered colloquy. These must liaise with yet another aspect of the dead man’s dead life. They were presumably laying a wager with one another on just how many minutes the address would occupy.
The service proceeded with unflawed decorum. An anthem was sung. The bishop, ceremoniously conducted to his elevated perch, began his address. He lost no time in launching upon a character-analysis of the late Queen’s Counsel; it would have been possible to imagine an hour-glass of the diminutive sort used for nicely timing the boiling of eggs as being perched on the pulpit’s edge beside him. The analysis, although touching lightly once or twice upon endearing foible, was highly favourable in the main. The dead man, disposed in his private life to charity, humility, gentleness, and the study of English madrigals, had in his professional character been dedicated, stern, courageous, and passionately devoted to upholding, clarifying, reforming his country’s laws.
It was now that something slightly untoward occurred. A late arrival entered the church. An elderly man with a finely trimmed grey moustache, he was dressed with the exactest propriety for the occasion; that he was accustomed to such appearances was evident in the mere manner in which he contrived to carry a black silk hat, an umbrella, and a pair of grey kid gloves dexterously in his left hand while receiving from the hovering verger the printed service sheet. Not many of those present thought it becoming to turn their heads to see what was happening. But nobody, in fact, was cheated of a sight of the newcomer for long. He might have been expected (however accustomed to some position of prominence) to slip modestly into a pew near the west door. But this he did not do. He walked with quiet deliberation up the central aisle – very much (Appleby thought) as if he were an integral and expected part of the ritual which he was in fact indecorously troubling. He walked right up to the front pew, and sat down beside Christopher Brockbank’s female relatives.
There could be only one explanation. Here was the missing Adrian, brother of the dead man – to whom, indeed, Appleby’s recollection sufficed to recognize that he bore a strong family likeness. Perhaps the plane from Singapore or the Bahamas or wherever had been delayed; perhaps fog had caused it to be diverted from Heathrow to a more distant airport; thus rendered unavoidably tardy in his appearance, this much-travelled Brockbank had decided that he must afford a general indication of his presence, and move to the support of the ladies of the family, even at the cost of rendering an effect of considerable disturbance. It must have been – Appleby thought sympathetically – a difficult decision to make.
The address went on. The new arrival listened with close attention to what must now be the tail-end of it. And everybody else ought to have been doing the same thing.
But this was not so. The Lord Chief Justice had hastily removed one pair of spectacles, donned another, and directed upon the fraternal appearance in the front pew the kind of gaze which for many years he had been accustomed to bring to bear upon occupants of the dock at the Central Criminal Court. One of the Cabinet Ministers was looking frightened – which is something no Cabinet Minister should ever do. Two of the dowagers were talking to one another in agitated and semi-audible whispers. A third appeared to be on the verge of hysterics. As for the bishop, he was so upset that he let the typescript of his carefully prepared allocution flutter to the floor below, with the result that he was promptly reduced to a peroration in terms of embarrassed improvisation.
But before even this was concluded, the brother – whether veritable or supposititious – of the late Christopher Brockbank behaved very strangely. He stood up, moved into the aisle, and bowed. He bowed, not towards the altar (which would have been very proper in itself), but at the bishop in his pulpit (and this wasn’t proper at all). He then turned, and retreated as he had come. Only, whereas on arriving he had kept his eyes decently directed upon the floor, on departing he bowed to right and left as he walked – much like a monarch withdrawing from an audience-chamber through a double file of respectful courtiers. He paused only once, and that was beside the uniformed Appleby, upon whom he directed a keen but momentary glance, before politely handing him his service sheet. Then he resumed his stately progress down the aisle until he reached the church door and vanished.
Somebody would possibly have followed a man so patently deranged, and therefore conceivably a danger to himself or others, had not the Rector of St Boniface’s thought it expedient to come to the rescue of the flustered bishop by promptly embarking upon the prayers which, together with a hymn, were to conclude the service. These prayers (which are full of tremendous things) it would have been indecent to disturb. But a hymn is only a hymn, and it was quite plain that numerous members of the congregation were giving utterance not to the somewhat jejune sentiments this one proposed to them, but to various expressions, delivered more or less
sotto voce
, of indignation and stupefaction. The Lord Chief Justice, moreover, was gesturing. He was gesturing at Appleby in a positively threatening way which Appleby perfectly understood. If Appleby bolted from this untoward and unseemly incident instead of reacting to it in some policemanlike fashion he would pretty well be treated as in contempt of court. This was why he found himself standing on the pavement outside St Boniface’s a couple of minutes later.
‘Get into this thing,’ the Lord Chief Justice said imperiously, and pointed at his Rolls Royce. ‘You, too,’ he said to the Home Secretary (who was one of the two Ministers who had been giving thanks for the life of the deceased Brockbank). ‘We can’t let such an outrage pass.’
‘An outrage?’ Appleby queried, as he resignedly sat down in the car. ‘Wasn’t it merely that Christopher Brockbank’s brother is mildly dotty – nothing more?’