‘Anyway, the corpse was called Umpleby. A good North Country name.’
Hobhouse rose massively to a repartee. ‘There’s a fair number of us managing things down there.’
‘To be sure. Well, I sat with the local inspector just as I’m sitting with you now. And he explained the affair just as you’ve been doing. Not so lucidly perhaps, but competently enough.’
‘Umph,’ said Hobhouse. His voice held an appreciable change of tone.
‘We sat and studied a plan just like this one.’ Appleby tapped a sheet of paper before him. ‘But there was one difference that I remember. Beer.’
‘Beer?’
‘They sent us in beer.’ Appleby’s eye traversed the empty table. ‘Two uncommonly handsome tankards.’
‘Is that so?’ Hobhouse was impressed but cautious. ‘You wouldn’t say that a thing like that was lowering to the dignity of the force?’
‘Not the way it was done. With the compliments of the College – that sort of thing. Do you know, I remember that beer better than I remember the crime. It was a confused affair.’
‘Umph.’ Hobhouse too scanned the long bleak table, momentarily depressed. ‘When we go out to lunch,’ he said, ‘I think I can find you–’
‘Capital. But first perhaps we’d better go over the ground again. I’m rather slow, as you’ve seen.’
‘Not a bit.’ Hobhouse was almost genial. ‘But if you ran over the facts as you’ve had them so far–’
‘Pluckrose was a biochemist of some eminence. Nobody on the scientific side here is in quite the same street. There may be something in that.’ Appleby felt in his pocket. ‘Why not light your pipe?’
‘I suppose they wouldn’t object?’ Hobhouse looked doubtfully round the room. ‘It’s not what you’d call a very homey spot, is it?’
Appleby too looked about him – thoughtfully, as if here might be an unexpected key to the riddle which lay in front. The place was some species of boardroom; presumably the professors of the university, as also the council of local notabilities by whom they were controlled, held their deliberations here. Large and square and high and gloomy, with walls of oily brown paint relieved by inconsequent outcrops of bare stone, it would have, if disfurnished, much the appearance of a sanitarily conceived receptacle for polar bears or hippopotami in a nineteenth-century zoological park. Gothic windows, anxious to present a symmetrical effect when viewed from without, had disposed themselves into a bewildering chaos when viewed, as now, from within; rafters, obedient to the necessities of some warren of rooms and corridors superimposed, edged themselves into positions suggestive of an obscure system of antipathies and affinities above; there was a fireplace so large that it held a massive bookcase stuffed with fading university calendars and superannuated reports. Above this last hung a sizeable canvas by Burne-Jones: an affair of enigmatic and epicene figures wandering amid a complicated system of trellises and vines. The rest of the wall space was covered up to a height of some twelve feet with a jumble of mutton-chopped or bewhiskered worthies in photogravure and daguerreotype and oil; similar worthies, more substantially commemorated in gleaming white marble, were dotted round the room on pedestals, while here and there a nymph or goddess, fashioned in the same forbidding medium, cowered and postured in futile pudicity and alarm. The whole evinced that curious unawareness of even the elements of aesthetic decorum to which the learned seem peculiarly prone. The room was itself a sort of murder; was a clumsy bashing of the simple rules of seemliness; was a brutal bludgeoning of the innocent and unoffending eye. Enormously criminal – thought Appleby extravagantly – must be the people who tolerated such a horror. Murder – yes. But murder considered as one of the fine arts? Surely not. But yet – Appleby frowned. But yet to kill a man seemingly out of interplanetary space – He struck a match, puffed, and turned to Hobhouse once more.
‘A scientist of eminence. You know, they very seldom go in for the sort of thing that leads to a sticky end. Jealousies sometimes – but not very often. Personal irritabilities and squabbles often enough. But such things with them are commonly peripheral.’
‘Ah,’ said Hobhouse.
‘I mean that they exist only on the fringes of the mind, on those borders of the whole psychical field where there isn’t enough energy or attention or whatever it be to produce any very drastic consequences. It’s with other types – artists, for instance – that you sometimes get odd shifts of energy to those fringes. Then you may find mere irritations and obscure antagonisms suddenly issuing in violence, vendetta, a settled and effective hate. But not on the whole with scientists. And another thing. Commonly they are either moral – sexually, I mean – or immoral in a methodical, businesslike, and undangerous way.’
Hobhouse looked up. ‘You don’t’, he said somewhat unexpectedly, ‘paint a very attractive portrait.’ His eye went gloomily round the worthies on the walls. ‘And, by the way, is this what you call running over the facts?’
Appleby grinned, unoffended. ‘It’s what I call running round them. Winding into the subject, you might say.’
‘I see.’ And Hobhouse’s gaze transferred itself fleetingly to a hideous and Gothicized clock – uselessly, for the clock was of the kind which has exchanged time for eternity long ago. ‘A kind of lager is the best beer we brew down here.’
‘Very well. You tell me that Pluckrose, eminent scientist, was killed by a meteorite – a giant meteorite. It fell plop on him yesterday morning as he was sitting on a deck-chair in the little quadrangle called the Wool Court. There was no pretence that the fatality was actually an astral affair. A mass which had in fact fallen through the entire stratosphere–’
‘Ah,’ said Hobhouse.
‘–which had in fact fallen right through the air from outer space would, of course, be fairly hot, and would pretty well bury itself where it fell. Neither of these phenomena was observed. We must conclude, then, that someone took this massive and unlikely object and deliberately pitched it down on top of the victim. Why?’
‘Why indeed, Mr Appleby. Why indeed.’
‘I don’t mean what was the motive for the total crime. I mean simply, what was the motive for proceeding in just this way? It cut out – or, speaking theoretically, all but cut out – the best security which a murderer can achieve: the appearance of natural death. Pitch a coping-stone at a man – or a piece of lead roofing or a shower of tiles – and it may remain possible so to fix things that the appearance of accident results. But this does not apply to a meteorite, because meteorites are not part of the customary furniture of roofs.’ Appleby paused. ‘You must forgive the obviousness of all this. We’re considering the facts. And what, when one comes to think of it, constitutes a thing a fact? Its obviousness, I should say. Do you agree?’
Hobhouse, very properly ignoring this invitation to metaphysical discussion, shook his head. ‘You might be hoisting a meteorite to a museum or store-room or such like on an upper storey. And it might fall and kill somebody. And then you might be so scared–’
‘Quite so. In theory the possibility of simple misadventure remains. But, in practice, wouldn’t you say it could be ignored?’
‘I don’t know as to that.’ Infinite caution was plainly Hobhouse’s line. ‘After all, there
is
a sort of store-room just in the appropriate place. You can’t quite ignore that.’ And he laid the stem of his pipe on the plan before them.
‘True enough. And in a tower which actually overshadows the spot where Pluckrose was sitting. But there is no provision for hauling up heavy objects from the Wool Court. What is provided is a sort of lift or hoist inside the building itself. One could hardly rig up a heavy affair of beams and pulleys on an outside wall without being spotted. Nor, when the lift was available, would it be sensible.’
‘Unless the meteorite was too heavy for the lift.’
‘To be sure. Suppose, then, that somebody about the university had a meteorite he wanted to store, and that he decided on this place in the tower. The lift is too small, or otherwise unsuitable. Wouldn’t he then find some more convenient place altogether? Or, if he decided to persevere, is it believable that he would attempt the whole laborious business himself, rather than call in porters and so forth, who would make comparatively light of the job?’
‘But suppose, Mr Appleby, that some sort of secrecy was intended? A point about this out-of-the-way store-room in the tower is that it seems hardly ever visited. Suppose the meteorite was to be some sort of scientific surprise, so that the fellow who found it wanted to keep it quiet for a time–’
‘Then, I agree, this particular store-room wouldn’t be a bad place. But only if the thing could be got unobtrusively up in the lift. To rig up some sort of derrick at a window in broad daylight–’
‘The Wool Court is fairly secluded.’ Hobhouse was obstinate. ‘And the fellow mightn’t mind being seen just by some stray colleague. He’d reckon on simply tipping him the wink not to talk about his innocent little surprise.’
‘Very well. But it’s all slightly improbable?’
‘Yes.’
‘And we are then to suppose that this same fellow panics when the accident occurs, and keeps quiet for more than twenty-four hours thereafter?’
‘Yes.’
‘That in itself being another improbability?’
‘Yes.’
‘And to postulate the coincidence of two minor improbabilities is to establish a major improbability?’
Hobhouse took his pipe from his mouth and smiled. ‘Wasn’t there one of the ancients, Mr Appleby, that always used questions to put one down?’
‘Socrates. And the method must often have been extremely tiresome. But I say that, on the present showing, simple accident is no more than a faint theoretical possibility.’
‘In other words: murder. Someone got this meteorite up to the store-room at the top of the tower, waited until Pluckrose was in position below, and then tipped it out of the window.’
Appleby nodded. ‘Say it looks like murder. And now comes something odd. Actually there are – I think you said four?’
‘Four.’
‘There are four of these store-rooms, one on top of another. And, although not much used, the clerk of works and the head porter check through them once a year. They last did this, as it happens, about three weeks ago. And there was no meteorite. Nothing odd in that. But what is a trifle queer is that there was quite a number of things which would have served equally well. For instance, in the uppermost room but one there was a small steel safe and two deed boxes and a stone cannon-ball and a cast-iron sink. And a dozen miniature reinforced-concrete pillars used by people who study something called the Strength of Materials.’
Hobhouse puffed tobacco smoke approvingly. ‘Very nice, Mr Appleby. A good memory is the most important thing a detective officer can have, if you ask me.’
‘Umph,’ said Appleby.
‘Well, it may be different in London, I don’t know. But you’ve got to the queer part now, all right. There was no need to haul up this meteorite affair at all. Any of those things lying around would have served. The meteorite was a mere wanton freak, like. You agree, sir?’ Hobhouse’s glance was swift and shrewd.
‘Dear me, no. That’s to be in altogether too much of a hurry – lager or no lager.’ Appleby frowned absently at a clout-clutching, sharp-nosed Aphrodite across the room. ‘Perhaps there was little premeditation and the fellow didn’t go up and make an inspection first. He just bundled himself and the meteorite into the hoist, knowing nothing of the safe and the sink and what-not. Or, again, we may be going astray through thinking of quite the wrong type of person.
You
agree?’
Hobhouse shook a tolerant head. ‘Now, now, there’s no call to go trying to catch each other out. I don’t follow you, I freely admit.’
‘The meteorite didn’t come straight from space. We know that because it was cold and because it shows faint traces of vegetable growth – a lichen or something of the sort. Now, the sort of person we tend to have in mind as the criminal – a scholar or scientist – would at once understand the conclusiveness of evidence of this sort. So, with a little reflection, would ordinary educated people like ourselves. But an uneducated man? Might he not believe that by possessing himself of, and using, this meteorite he was cunningly contriving an almost conclusive appearance of simple misadventure? Might he not, in fact, believe that he was constructing the most irrefrangible of alibis? For no man can be accused of loitering suspiciously in the neighbourhood of Mars or Saturn.’
Hobhouse chuckled. ‘Nor of Venus, for that matter – in just that sense.’ He put down his pipe. ‘You’ve hit on a very important notion there,’ he added soberly.
‘Possibly – or possibly there may be nothing in it. And now consider the topographical layout of the affair.’ Appleby looked at the plan. ‘What’s this thing in the middle of the Wool Court – an aspidistra?’
‘A coconut palm,’ said Hobhouse solemnly.
‘Rubbish.’
‘Actually it’s a fountain. To me, it gives a distinctly watery effect. But I dare say leafy might be applied to it too.’ Hobhouse, now on very good terms with the officer from London, chuckled comfortably. ‘And these things in the angle of the wall are deck-chairs.’
‘Indisputably. What we have, then, is a corner of the ground floor of the main building. It’s like a fat L turned the wrong way round. On the inner side of this is a thin L which represents a corridor. And inside that, again, is the Wool Court and its fountain. The fountain plays?’
‘Commonly it trickles away. But it’s on the main and can make quite a display. And, oddly enough, it was full strength when the body was discovered, and drenching the whole place. Nobody knows who turned it on.’
‘I see.’ Appleby studied the plan again. ‘Now take the corridor. Nothing remarkable about that. Windows looking on the Court–’
‘I wouldn’t say looking. They begin about seven feet up and are full of what is probably called stained glass.’ Hobhouse too, it seemed, was not without his aesthetic reactions.
‘Windows, in fact, that make this corner of the court pretty secluded. Anything else about the corridor? Double doors giving on the court.’ Appleby’s finger moved up the paper. ‘What’s this blob?’