Love Lies Bleeding

5

Bloody-Man’s-Finger

‘You arrived opportunely,’ said the headmaster, and Fen, sprawled in one of the leather-covered armchairs, nodded sombrely. ‘I’ve no doubt Stagge will welcome your help; certainly I shall. Things are going to be very difficult. Of course, everything possible must be done, but I can’t help wishing this hadn’t happened on the evening before speech day. It’s callous, no doubt—’

‘No, no,’ Fen interrupted. ‘Your principal responsibility is to the school…I suppose it’s too late to cancel anything?’

‘Far too late. The programme will have to go through as arranged. I only hope we can hush things up until at least tomorrow evening. But I foresee the most appalling complications. Publicity of that sort…’ The headmaster gestured expressively and fell silent.

Beyond the oblongs of light from the study windows there was a darkness so thick as to seem almost palpable; yet the flowers – the roses and verbena – seemed to welcome its embrace, for their scent was sharper and more vivid than it had been during the daytime. A moth fluttered round the lamp on the desk, its wings beating a rapid, intermittent tattoo against the buff-coloured parchment of the shade. Pools of shadow lay in the corners, but the light splashed glittering on to the brass andirons which stood sentinel to the unlit fire, and on to the cut glass tumbler which Fen was pensively rotating between his long, sensitive fingers.

‘You sent your secretary home?’ he said.

‘Yes. After I’d telephoned the police. There was no point in his staying.’

‘Good. Then let’s get down to essentials. Apart from the repercussions on the school, are you personally distressed by the deaths of these two men?’

The headmaster rose abruptly, and began pacing round the room. His thin hair was dishevelled, and his eyes looked unnaturally hollow with fatigue. One hand was thrust into his pocket, and the other held a cigarette which was burning away unregarded and scattering its ash in little compact clots on to the heavy blue carpet.

‘To be candid, no,’ he answered after an interval. ‘I never liked either of them very much. But that fact is irrelevant, I trust.’

He halted before an old mirror in a delicate gilt frame and made a half-hearted attempt to straighten his hair. Fen continued to contemplate the dioramic reflections on his glass.

‘Tell me about them,’ he said. ‘Character, history, personal ties – that sort of thing.’

‘As far as I can.’ The headmaster resumed his pacing. ‘Love, I think, was the more interesting character of the two. He teaches – taught, I suppose I must say – classics and history. Competent, methodical – a satisfactory man in most ways.’

‘Did the boys like him?’

‘They respected him, I think, but he wasn’t the sort of person who invites affection. He was a puritan, not altogether lacking in shrewdness. Duty was his lodestar. It would be wrong to say that he disapproved of pleasure, but he was inclined to regard it as a necessary medicine, to be taken at specified times, in specified doses. And for all his competence’ – the headmaster abandoned this hazy diagnosis to be more specific – ‘he was never a successful housemaster.’

‘I didn’t realize,’ said Fen, ‘that he was a housemaster.’

‘Not here. At Merfield. When he left Cambridge he came here as an assistant master. Then he went on to Merfield and got a house. And then, when he reached the age limit for house masters, he came back here as an assistant master. That was during the war, when we badly needed staff.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Sixty-two, I think.’

‘Surely most schoolmasters retire at sixty.’

‘Yes. But Love wasn’t the sort of man to retire as long as he kept his faculties and could do his job. The Loves of this world don’t retire; they die on their feet.’ The headmaster took a silver clock from the broad, carved mantel, emptied a key out of a vase, and began winding it. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he went on, ‘Love has been rather a problem to me. Since the war ended, the governors have been clamouring for a staff age limit of sixty, and by rights I ought to have got rid of him. But I persuaded the board to make an exception in his case.’

‘Why?’

‘I had a certain admiration for him,’ the headmaster explained as he restored key and clock to their places. ‘He always seemed to me to be rather like the Albert Memorial – intrinsically graceless, but so uncompromising as to compel respect. And, of course, the soul of probity, even in the smallest and most trivial things; the sort of man who’d return a stamp to the post office if it hadn’t been cancelled. That may have been why he was a failure as a housemaster. Ruling a house too rigidly and meticulously is always a mistake.’

‘A man whom there were none to praise and very few to love,’ Fen remarked sadly. ‘But he is in his grave, and, oh, the difference to me…What about his private life? Was he married?’

‘Yes. His wife’s a wispy, mousy little woman; all the character rubbed out of her, I suspect, by years of ministering to him.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I can’t think of anything. The man you really ought to talk to is Etherege. He knows all there is to know about everyone.’

Fen emptied his glass with a single gulp and set it on the floor beside his chair. The blue curtains stirred, almost imperceptibly, in a breeze too inconsiderable to alleviate the dry, prickly heat. The moth, momentarily quiescent, was clinging to the inside of the lampshade, its outline blurred and exaggerated by the opaque parchment. The remote but persistent baying of a dog suggested that Mr Merrythought was communing with some inward grief. It was the only sound. The building might have been draped and muffled in a pall.

And palls, Fen thought, were not inappropriate in the circumstances. He found a battered cigarette loose in his pocket and, after ascertaining that it did not belong to one of those evil and recondite brands to which the shortage occasionally condemned him, lit it.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll take your advice and talk to Etherege, whoever he may be. And now, what about Somers?’

The headmaster, with that protective deliberation of movement which heat compels, lowered himself into a chair, rubbed his sleeve across his forehead, and yawned.

‘Lord,’ he said, ‘how tired I am…Somers. Yes. Quite a young man. Educated at Merfield, where he was head boy in Love’s house. Love thought the world of him. I should have told you that favouritism was one of Love’s few vices. The way he coddled Somers at Merfield aroused a good deal of resentment.’

He yawned again, and apologized. ‘Somers taught English,’ he went on. ‘Clever, and a shade conceited. Not popular. He came here a year ago, from the army.’

‘Married?’

‘No. He has – had – has – rooms in a rather nice Palladian house in Castrevenford town; it’s supposed to have been designed by Nicholas Revett. I don’t blame him for preferring to live away from the school,’ the headmaster added rather inconsequently. ‘I always used to if possible…However.’

‘Any relatives? Any close friends?’

‘Neither. Parents dead, no brothers or sisters. And as to friends – no, I don’t believe he was intimate with anyone here. Once again, Etherege would be the man to ask. Anything else?’

‘No, thanks.’ Fen blew a smoke ring and watched it expand, opalescent, against the lamp. ‘Not until I’ve seen the bodies, anyway.’ He brooded for a while. ‘I hope,’ he said at last, ‘that the superintendent isn’t going to raise difficulties about allowing me in on this.’

‘I shouldn’t imagine so.’ The headmaster looked up at the clock and saw that the time was twenty-five minutes past eleven. ‘In any case, we shall soon know.’

The superintendent arrived five minutes later. He wore uniform; and an intensification of the habitual expression of alarm on his features suggested that he was oppressed by the magnitude of the disaster. Fen suspected that, like Buridan’s ass, he could not decide what to tackle first. With him were a doctor – an undersized man with bloodshot eyes, neatly bearded and unexpectedly rancorous in utterance – a sergeant, carrying a worn black Gladstone bag, and a constable. Outside, an ambulance was parked, and its white-coated attendants were wandering about spectrally illuminated by its sidelights, until their services should be required.

The social formalities were hurriedly consummated, and Stagge addressed himself to Fen.

‘Murder’s a bit outside my usual province,’ he admitted. ‘If it is murder, that is. So if you’d like to lend a hand, sir, your experience would be most valuable.’ He smiled engagingly, and the admixture of mirth which this gave to his normal mien produced a singularly bizarre and ghastly effect.

Fen murmured his gratification in suitable terms.

‘Splendid,’ said the headmaster, heroically stifling a yawn.

‘You can well understand, Stagge, how distressed I am. Personal feelings apart, this tragedy comes at a very unlucky time for the school. It will be impossible, of course, to keep these deaths a secret, but none the less—’

‘You would wish me to act as unobtrusively as possible.’ Stagge raised his forefinger, apparently in order to focus their attention upon his perspicacity and tact. ‘I appreciate your position, Dr Stanford, and I’ll do my best. If we’re lucky, the newspapers may not get hold of it till after speech day. But I’m afraid, on the other hand, that there are bound to be rumours…’

‘Unavoidable,’ the headmaster agreed. ‘It’s just got to be faced. Fortunately we have many more applications for entry to the school than we can possibly deal with. There’ll be a falling-off when the news is published, and some foolish people will take their sons away, but I’ve no doubt it will still be possible to keep the numbers up to the maximum.’ He became abruptly aware that the occasion was not particularly well suited to a recital of his own problems, and stopped short.

‘Let’s get at the bodies, then,’ said the doctor vampirically, ‘or we shall be up all night.’

Stagge nodded, rousing himself. He glanced nervously at Fen. ‘I thought, sir, that we might go and look at Mr Somers first, then go on to Mr Love’s house.’

‘Good,’ said Fen. ‘Let’s make a move, then.’ His words broke the temporary paralysis and, after a little shuffling for precedence, they all trooped out into the darkness.

The headmaster led the way with a torch which he had taken from a drawer of his desk, and during the three minutes’ walk to Hubbard’s Building no word was spoken. The breeze brushed weakly against their faces, tantalizing them with the prospect of a coolness which never came. A layer of cloud obscured all but a handful of stars. Leaving the turf, their shoes rattled with startling vehemence on the asphalt, and they all breathed laboriously, as though the heavy, tepid air were deficient in oxygen. Presently the ivy-covered bulk of the teaching block loomed above them, and they passed inside.

Dim, infrequent lights were burning. They crossed a bare, stone-paved entrance hall and climbed a broad flight of wooden stairs whose treads were hollowed by generations of hard use. The window panes, made mirrors by the blackness beyond them and the illumination within, reflected their silent procession, and their footsteps awoke harsh echoes. The building seemed tranced into stillness as by a magician’s wand. They entered a long corridor, bare, shadowy and deserted. The numbered doors on either side bore the marks of merciless kicking on their lower panels, and near one of them lay a forlorn single sheet of exercise paper, heavily scored over in red ink, and with the dun imprint of a footmark on one corner. At the end of the corridor they came to a door which was more solid and opulent than those of the classrooms. A line of yellow light shone under it. The headmaster pushed it open and they entered the masters’ common room.

It was a large, tall room, symmetrically rectangular. A well-filled green baize noticeboard was fixed to the wall near the single door. Several tiers of small lockers, painted black and bearing their owners’ names on small strips of pasteboard thrust into brass slots, were at the far end. They saw half-empty mahogany bookcases, a worn, mud-coloured, ash-impregnated carpet, a long line of hooks with one or two gowns that had turned green with extreme age. A large table occupied the centre, littered with inkpots, cross-nibbed pens, ashtrays, and bulky envelopes. Smaller tables flanked it. There were three chairs that were comfortable and a large number that were not. The hessian curtains were undrawn and the windows wide open. And on the floor looking up at the small flies which crawled on the ceiling, lay the body of Michael Somers.

Yet their first and strongest impression was not of that, but of the heat. It beat against them in a scorching wave, and they saw that it came from a large electric fire standing about halfway down the room. Wells, the porter, stumbled hurriedly to his feet, the sweat running down his face like rain. He mumbled something, but for the moment no one paid any attention to him. After the first overwhelming shock of the heat, they had eyes for nothing but the body.

It was lying supine by a small table, with an overturned chair beside it. Clearly Somers had fallen back against the table and slid down it, for his head was propped against one of the legs, and his arms were outflung as if he had tried to save himself. Blood had streamed down the left side of his face on to the carpet, and where his left eye had been there was a riven, pulp-encrusted hole at which a bluebottle was feeding.

They looked, and, sickened, turned away again. The headmaster said rather shakily: ‘Why in God’s name have you got that fire on, Wells?’

‘It was like that, sir,’ Wells stammered, ‘when I found him. And you told me not to touch anything.’

He wiped the sweat from his face with a limp and soaking handkerchief. Even the bald crown of his head was a hectic, fever-stricken crimson, and his thin, stooping body seemed on the point of collapse. He felt for a back of a chair, his damp palm slipped on the polished wood, and he staggered momentarily.

Fen loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. He stood at a window and watched while the sergeant, under Stagge’s direction, photographed the body and its surroundings. Then the doctor began his examination. Stagge, meanwhile, had approached the electric fire and was regarding it dubiously. After a moment’s consideration he went to the wall switch to which it was attached and flicked it off with a pencil. The bars of the fire faded from scarlet through orange to ochre, and then became black. Stagge turned to Fen.

‘An extraordinary thing, sir,’ he said, ‘using a fire on a broiling evening like this.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve heard that such methods have been used to warm a corpse, and so create uncertainty about the time of death.’

Fen was fanning himself with his pocketbook, an activity which, he found, generated far more warmth than it dispelled; he desisted abruptly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But in this instance the fire’s several feet away from the body. And since it’s portable, I’m afraid that theory will have to be ruled out.’ Preoccupied, he moved to the small table against which Somers’ body was lying.

‘It looks to me,’ Stagge observed with a diffidence unsuited to so self-evident a proposition, ‘as if this was where he was working.’

They gazed at the table in silence. A blotting pad lay on it, its white surface covered with mirror images of black ink writing. They could make out the words ‘satisfactory’, ‘very fair’, ‘a marked improvement since the beginning of term’, and innumerable repetitions of the initials ‘M.S.’. A pile of small, printed report forms was on the blotter, and scattered around it were several envelopes similar to those on the central table. Each one bore the name of a form, with a list of initials of masters below it, and contained further report forms. For the rest, there was an ashtray with one or two cigarette stubs, a large circular well of blue-black ink, a mark-book, an open bottle of black ink, a long, broad strip of black cloth with the ends knotted together, and a pen.

Stagge turned to the headmaster. ‘These are mid-term reports, I take it?’

‘Yes, superintendent.’ The headmaster had followed Fen’s example in loosening his tie; he looked raffish yet weary. ‘Form masters and visiting masters were due to have finished them by five this afternoon; then they were to have gone to housemasters, and finally to me.’

‘Mr Somers was behind schedule, then?’

‘Yes. I was aware of the fact.’ The headmaster pointed to the strip of cloth on the table. ‘That, of course, is a sling. Somers sprained his wrist a few days ago, just before the reports were put out, and wasn’t able to do any writing until it got better. However, he told me yesterday afternoon that he would have them done by the morning of speech day, and that was early enough.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I always arrange for the terminus ad quem to be a little earlier than is strictly necessary, since even schoolmasters are fallible.’

‘Couldn’t one of the other masters have acted as his amanuensis?’ Fen asked.

The headmaster spoke rather uncertainly. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But probably he didn’t want to burden anyone else with the job. This is a very busy stage of the term, and even filling in “satisfactory” two hundred times takes longer than you’d imagine. What’s more, Somers was a form master, and had to deal with all the various headings for his form, in addition.’

‘Ah.’ Fen was pensive. ‘When the reports are finished, do the housemasters collect them?’

‘No. Wells does that. He divides them up into houses and passes them on to the appropriate men.’

Fen looked at Wells. ‘Apparently,’ he remarked, ‘you’ve taken some of them away already. There don’t seem to be many here.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Wells. ‘All the ones Mr Somers had finished, or hadn’t anything to do with, are in my office. But I haven’t taken any since Mr Somers come in here this evening.’

There was a momentary silence, and the sergeant, snatching zealously at his opportunity, said: ‘Fingerprints, superintendent?’

Stagge gestured haplessly. ‘Leave that for the moment,’ he said. ‘There are bound to be prints of everyone on the staff all over this room.’ He tapped on the table. ‘I take it, then, that Mr Somers was working here when someone interrupted him. He got up, knocked over the chair, faced away from the table and towards the door, and was shot…’ He paused, gloomily considering this hollow and unenlightening reconstruction, then observed that the doctor had finished his first brief examination of the body. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

The doctor dusted his knees and wiped his eyes. ‘Exactly what you’d expect,’ he said. ‘He was shot at a distance of something like six feet with – I think – a .38.’

‘Six feet,’ Stagge muttered. He paced out the distance to where the murderer had presumably stood, and having arrived there, looked about him rather vaguely in search of inspiration: but apparently none was forthcoming, for he made no further remark.

‘He must have a thick skull,’ the doctor went on, nodding towards the body, ‘because the bullet’s lodged in his brain…Death was instantaneous, of course.’

‘Time of death?’ Stagge asked.

‘Anything between half an hour ago and an hour and a half.’

Stagge consulted his watch. ‘And it’s twenty minutes to midnight now. Between ten and eleven, in fact. Anything else?’

‘Nothing,’ said the doctor uncompromisingly. ‘Can he be taken out to the ambulance?’

Stagge shook his head. ‘Not for a moment. I must go through his pockets and the sergeant must take his fingerprints. After that you can have him.’

He bent down and removed the contents of Somers’ pockets, laying them on the central table. At first glance there seemed nothing unusual about them: keys, money, a wallet – containing banknotes, an identity card and a driving licence – a pencil, a handkerchief, a half-filled tortoiseshell cigarette case and a utility petrol lighter…

‘But what on earth is he doing with that?’ Fen enquired.

‘That’ was a large sheet of spotless white blotting paper folded into eight, which had been in Somers’ breast pocket. Stagge turned it over carefully in his hands.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t see anything specially odd about a man carrying blotting paper. I dare say…’

But Fen had taken the sheet away from him and was comparing it with the pad on the table. ‘Same kind,’ he observed, ‘same colour, same size.’ He glanced round the room. ‘And there are several identical pads, all with clean blotting paper.’ Turning to Wells, he said: ‘Are you responsible for renewing the blotting paper in these pads?’

‘Yes, sir. I do it on the first day of every month, regular.’

‘Wells is a stickler for routine,’ the headmaster put in.

‘And this,’ said Fen thoughtfully, ‘is June first.’

Wells nodded eagerly; with the switching off of the electric fire something of his animation had returned. ‘I changed the blotting paper earlier this evening, sir.’

‘I dare say,’ the headmaster remarked rather deprecatorily, ‘that Somers wanted some and just pinched it. People do that sort of thing, you know.’

But Fen seemed dissatisfied with this explanation. To Wells he said: ‘Where do you keep the fresh blotting paper?’

‘In a cupboard in my office, sir.’

‘And where does it come from in the first place?’

‘Well, sir, from the school stationery shop.’

‘And is the same sort of blotting paper sold to the boys and the masters when they happen to want it?’

‘Yes, sir, I believe so.’

‘When you replace it, do you put a specific amount in each pad?’

‘Yes, sir. Three large sheets, folded double.’

‘Good,’ said Fen. ‘Have a look at all the pads in this room, then – including the one Somers was using – and see if there’s a sheet missing from any of them.’

Glad of occupation, Wells began to bustle about.

Stagge said, ‘I don’t quite see what you’re getting at, Professor Fen.’

‘Was ist, ist vernünftig,’ said Fen cheerfully. ‘All facts are valuable, superintendent.’

Stagge’s self-confidence visibly waned at this evasive response, and he was silent, watching the sergeant at his disagreeable task. He had cleaned Somers’ fingers with benzoline and pressed them on to an inked metal plate; now he was transferring the prints to a sheet of white paper. Finishing the job, he straightened up, red with effort, and said, ‘What about his wristwatch, sir? You’ll be wanting that?’

Stagge grunted. ‘I’m glad you reminded me,’ he said, and bent down to unstrap it. The headmaster, watching this operation, broke in with, ‘He’s wearing it the wrong way round.’

Fen looked at him with interest. ‘The wrong way round?’

‘He always wore it on the inside of his wrist, as I believe the Americans do. It isn’t like that now.’

Stagge had the watch at his ear, holding it delicately by the edge of the strap. ‘Anyway, it isn’t going,’ he said, and examined it. ‘The hands are at five to nine.’

‘Is it broken?’ Fen asked.

‘Not that I can see.’