Death and the Chaste Apprentice (14 page)

“After all,” said Ronnie Wimsett, “we've been here for a couple of weeks or so, but Capper's been manager for months. Who knows what backs he's put up in his time?”

“The main thing is,” said Carston, pushing back his
chair and making to get up, “that we're all in the clear and can now get on with our business.”

Brad Mallory's drawl broke unnervingly into the general euphoria. “Anyone would think,” he said, “that the Saracen's Head was a one-story building.”

He was sitting slightly apart, at a table for two, which Singh had just left. There was silence for a moment after his words, but then Ronnie Wimsett broke into it confidently:

“No, no, old chap. I've thought of that. To get to the stairs in the foyer outside the Shakespeare you still have to go through the kitchens, dining room, and the bar itself. And on the other side the stairs are between the Massinger and the Webster and you'd have to go through the one and could be seen from the other. No, that doesn't wash.”

“Brad doesn't relish his position,” said Clarissa in serpentine tones, “of being one of the few actually in the
hotel
part of the Saracen at the time of the killing.”

Brad's smile in return revealed that he was hardly to be outdone in the friendly-snake department.

“Quite true if Des was killed after eight-fifteen. Yes, I could in fact have returned from the concert and gone straight upstairs and killed him. In
fact,
I went to my room, but I could just as easily have gone along to his flat. But what if he was already dead by eight-fifteen?”

Clarissa shrugged. “So what? It leaves us exactly where we were. Apart from young Peter, none of us could have gone through to the front part of the hotel.”

Bradford Mallory, no less than Clarissa, could relish a big moment. “I seem to remember,” he said, almost dreamily, “from one of my visits to your delightful play in rehearsal, a moment . . . a line—what was it? ‘What mean these sudden broils so near my doors?' Something like that!”

“ ‘Have you not other places but my house, to vent the spleen of your disordered bloods?' ” went on Gillian Soames,
as if this were something she had been itching to bring up for hours.

“I know what you're going to say,” said Clarissa Galloway with all the considerable force at her disposal. She had put her hand over the breakfast table and covered her husband's in a display of solidarity. It was a revealing gesture, which suggested that their instinct was to draw together at moments of crisis. She also revealed that this was something they had discussed overnight. Brad Mallory ignored her and went on in his dreamy fashion.

“It was, if I remember, a speech of Ralph Greatheart, at night, quieting the riotous behavior of the apprentices . . . and appearing to them in his nightshirt . . . appearing—and this is the point—
above,
on what we may call the upper stage. In fact, appearing on that part of the balcony over the center of the stage. Is that not right, Miss Fanshaw?”

“Yes,” said Susan, tight-lipped.

“And my impression is that this scene occurs—what?—about an hour into the play?”

“Something like that,” agreed Susan.

“And that with Ralph Greatheart on the balcony there is his stage wife and his daughter Alice—dear Gillian.”

“Right,” agreed Gillian.

“And did you, Miss Fanshaw, accompany them to the first floor to see that all was well?”

“No, I checked costumes and props at the bottom of the staircase as they all went up.”

“The staircase,” said Brad.

“I went up,” said Jason Thark, hurriedly, before anyone else could mention it. “It was a tricky scene, and I went and stood in the bedroom behind.”

“That's right,” said Carston, “and you—” He shut up suddenly.

“I think, you know,” said Brad, “that the police had better look into that scene and that staircase and who was there for that scene and who might have used the staircase before and after.”

“There goes your alibi for all of us,” said Gillian to Ronnie. “Somehow it always did seem too good to be true.”

T
HE RESIDENTIAL QUARTERS
of the manager of the Saracen's Head consisted of four rooms immediately above the entrance foyer and reception desk. They could be reached by a small staircase from the manager's office behind Reception or by a door from the maze of corridors and open areas on the first floor—a door that led directly into the sitting room. Des's murderer could have gained or been given access to the flat from either of these.

Superintendent Dundy had sent Nettles off to talk to the kitchen and the cleaning staff. Nettles was an excellent chap, but he did tend to chat, to comment, to make his presence felt. Dundy liked to sniff out a place in silence—walk around, get the feel, sense a personality. Then he would look around and think of what was missing, what was out of place. So he said to Charlie, down in Reception: “Let's go up and quietly get the lie of the land, shall we?” Charlie nodded, and together they ascended the stairs and went to work.

The manager's living quarters—or dying quarters, as
they had so soon become for Des Capper—had been inhabited for twenty years by “dear old Arthur,” as Gillian Soames and others always called him, and his impress was still on them. His had been the choice of furniture, his the choice of the pictures on the walls. It was mainly in the extras and inessentials that Des and Win had made their tenure felt. Or that Des had made his tenure felt.

The photo of the hotel in Dubbo, squarely in the center of the sideboard, had Des standing by the wrought-iron pillar of a wonderful nineteenth-century structure, looking loathsomely proprietorial. Win was not to be seen. Perhaps she was behind the camera, but as it seemed a highly professional photograph—you could feel the flies, smell the sheep-dip—this was unlikely. Probably she had been behind the bar as usual. The books all seemed to be Des's, too:
The Homemaker's Medical Enquire Within, The Secrets of the Tarot,
Desmond Morris,
Reader's Digest
evaporated books, L. Ron Hubbard, and Arthur Hailey. Even the
Jane Fonda Exercise Book
belonged, Dundy guessed, more to Des than to Win. There were newish paperbacks of several biographies of the Mountbattens, presumably purchased to give corroborative detail to Des's recent incautious claims, which Dundy had heard about from Frank. There was also
Heat and Dust
and a popular book on Indian religions.

Des's research for the festival took in heavier tomes. From the Ketterick Public Library he had borrowed a thick book on Donizetti by William Ashbrook and a volume on Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy. The latter had been much renewed, with dates handwritten in. The former was a new borrowing, with a return date ten days hence. They both sat on a small table by the biggest armchair. Charlie took them up and skimmed through the sections on
Adelaide
and
The Chaste Apprentice.

Iain Dundy was over by the sideboard, getting whiffs of Des's personality. There was a pile of old records there—
Mantovani, James Last and the Beachboys—but the record player did not look as if it had been touched since they had moved in. The
Mirror
and the
Sun
of the day before were beside one of the easy chairs, and some old
Penthouses
were stacked under a coffee table. The racing pages of the newspapers were marked for possible bets. In one of the papers something was cut out; it seemed to be the regular medical column. Iain Dundy raised his eyebrows and went on.

Win's influence seemed mainly to consist of dainty linen and lace mats on the dressing tables, sideboards, and occasional tables, such as the one on which the knife had lain. Probably also hers were the antimacassars on the backs of easy chairs and sofa. Leaning against the sofa, Dundy found that the covering was slightly damp. The furniture in the room was all solid, capacious and worn, and had no doubt served “dear old Arthur” for years, until it had now gained this light accretion of alien personality from the new managers. No doubt it was like this when a stately home was taken over by new stately owners.

The body had by now been taken away, though chalk marks and tapes marked where it had been, and Iain Dundy could remember it very well. The sitting room in the manager's flat was a large one, with the main bedroom leading off at one end, kitchen and second bedroom leading off from the other. The sofa and the easy chairs were clustered around a fireplace, with a small dining table and two chairs positioned by the window that overlooked Ketterick High Street. This left a goodly space at one end, where the stairs down to the ground floor and the door out to the corridor were. It was in this open space that Des's body had been found. It had pitched forward, its head towards the door into the corridor, its back decorated by a knife between the shoulder blades. The table on which had rested the knife had been in that open space too,
just behind the sofa. One could still see the imprint left by the handle of the knife on the embroidered table mat it had rested on. Anyone, on an impulse born of overwhelming nausea or provocation, could have taken it up and stabbed the loathly Des with it on the spur of the moment.

Did the position of the body tell one anything? Could Des have been starting towards the door when he was stabbed from behind? Possibly. Equally, he could have been standing in thought, facing in that direction, and propelled sprawling forward by the force of the blow from behind. There was nothing particular to look at on that wall apart from the door and a reproduction of Morris's
Queen Guinevere
beside it. But a man in thought does not need anything to look at, and Des, Dundy suspected, was a man with a variety of projects demanding thought.

Did he, Dundy wondered, keep all these projects in his head, or did he keep some written record, however vestigial?

Dundy and Charlie spent over an hour circling the flat warily, like two animals careful not to invade the other's territory. Then Nettles came up after a not very rewarding session with the domestic staff, and inevitably they all settled down to an interim comparing of notes. Dundy came out at once with the question of Des's projects and his thirst for scraps of knowledge.

“I don't think there can be any doubt,” he said, “that he was a man who loved information. First of all, just information. Have you met people like that? Do they still exist in your generation? They'll bring it out anywhere, anytime: the age of the pyramids, the average number of eggs a chicken lays a year, the estimated population of China in the year 3000. Totally out of the blue they'll come out with it—some real conversation stopper. And like as not they'll just think they've floored you and congratulate themselves on their cleverness.”

“I know that sort of bloke,” agreed Nettles. “The sort who makes you slope off to the saloon bar if you hear his voice coming from the public. But in his case it shades off into something much more nasty, doesn't it?”

“Apparently. But I think it starts off as this sort of desire to accumulate out-of-the-way information. The sort of fact you got in the old Ripley “Believe It or Not” column or as a little paragraph in the
Reader's Digest.
That sort of interest is rather boring but totally innocent. When it spreads itself out and becomes a desire to collect information about living people, that's when it becomes dangerous. And so far as we can see, Des's magpie instincts about information also embraced people—the guests at the hotel and very probably the staff at the hotel as well.”

“What I'm trying to get a handle on,” said Charlie, “is the point of it all. I mean, with some people it can be just accumulation for the sake of accumulation. I wouldn't think it was that way with Des Capper, would you?”

“No,” said Dundy emphatically.

“Then was it for pure, straightforward blackmail? Was it for chuckling over and poking ribs—as in Frank's story about the man who'd brought his bird here? Or was it something more subtle than either?”

“Yes, that is the question, isn't it? I suppose the murder gives us the answer to that, if we're on the right track.” Iain Dundy paused and scratched his ear. “But perhaps it's not completely clear-cut, not as neat as you put it. You say: Did he accumulate grubby bits of information just for the sake of it, did he chuckle over it, or did he use it for blackmail? Perhaps the answer is: All three. It's not necessarily either/or. If the information was not usable, he just enjoyed having it. If it was usable, he had to decide what use to make of it.”

“And there was one other possible use for it,” said Charlie thoughtfully.

“What's that?”

“Revenge.”

Dundy nodded.

“There is also this question of how he got appointed here,” said Nettles. “It's something the staff keep bringing up. He wasn't just awful; he was the wrong type.”

“We'll have to start looking at that,” agreed Dundy. “If he was as unsuitable as Frank and everyone else imply, then the question of blackmail must surely arise there.”

“And if it arises there, then the chances are that it has arisen again now,” said Nettles.

“Yes, though let's remember one thing: That would be blackmail for personal advancement. It could be done very subtly. Just a whisper and a nod. It could be done so indirectly as hardly to be blackmail at all.”

“Though not by this Capper character, surely, sir, if what we've heard of him is to be believed?” objected Charlie. “Hardly a subtle character, by all accounts.”

“Probably you're right. But still, it is one further step to blackmail for money. A further and a very dangerous one. But if he was blackmailing one of the festival guests here, what else could it be but blackmail for money?”