Death at the President's Lodging by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

looked at his watch. “I’m due for the Dean,” he said, “and you for your supper and a rest. They’ll want to take the body now, I expect.”
    Dodd nodded. “The body goes out to the mortuary,” he agreed; “the room’s locked up and sealed and you take the key. And it’s for you to say when we bring a sack for these blasted bones.”
    Appleby chuckled. “I see it’s the ossuary that really disturbs you. I think it may help a lot.” He picked up a fibula as he spoke and wagged it with professionally excusable callousness at Dodd. And with an association of thought which would have been clear to that efficient officer only if he had been a reader of Sir Thomas Browne he murmured: “What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women…”
    The fibula dropped with a little dry rattle on its pile as Appleby broke off to add: “Nor is the other question, I hope, unanswerable.”
    “ Other question?”
    Appleby had turned to the door. “Who, my dear Dodd, were the proprietaries of these bones? We must consult the Provincial Guardians.”

3
     
    The Reverend the Honourable Tracy Deighton-Clerk, Dean of St Anthony’s, contrived, though still in middle age, to suggest the great Victorians. His features were at once wholly strong and wholly benevolent, evoking, even to a hint of side-whisker, the formidable canvases of G F Watts. His manner was a degree on the heavy side of courtesy and not at times without that temerarious combination of aloofness and charm which used to be attempted, some two generations ago, by those who had once glimpsed Matthew Arnold. He had a fancy for himself in the role of ultimus Romanorum ; the last representative of a clerical and leisured university, of an academic society that was not cultured merely but also Polite.
    The psychologically-minded Slotwiner (who was said to model himself not a little on Mr Deighton-Clerk’s manner) might have remarked that in the Dean’s persona the episcopal idea had of late been rapidly developing. Indeed, the episcopal idea was hovering round him now, a comforting penumbra to the disturbing situation which confronted him as he stood, in elegant clerical evening dress, before the fireplace of his study.
    It was a room in marked contrast with the sombre and somewhat oppressive solidity of the dead President’s apartment. Round a delicate Aubusson carpet, on which undergraduates instinctively trod as diffidently as if they had been schoolboys still, low white book-shelves enclosed the creamy vellum of the Schoolmen and the Fathers. The panelling was cream, its delicate Caroline carving touched with gold. The ceiling was cross-raftered in oak and from the interstices there gleamed, oddly but harmoniously in blue and silver, the twelve signs of the zodiac. Over the fireplace brooded in austere beauty one of Piero della Francesca’s mathematically-minded madonnas, the blue of her gown the same as that amid the rafters above. The whole made a pleasant frame – and the rest of the furnishing was ingeniously unnoticeable. Mr Deighton-Clerk and the Virgin between them dominated the room.
    But at the moment the Dean was feeling in a scarcely dominant mood. He was doubting his own wisdom – a process he disliked and avoided. But he could not but doubt the wisdom of the action he had taken that morning. To insist on bringing down a detective-officer – no doubt a notorious detective-officer – from Scotland Yard because of this appalling affair! This was surely to court the widest publicity – to say the least?
    Mr Deighton-Clerk’s gaze went slowly up to the ceiling, as if seeking comfort in his own private astrological heaven. Comfort came to him in some measure as his eye moved from Cancer to the taut form of Sagittarius . He had taken energetic action. And was it not (but here the thought floated only in the remoter regions of the Dean’s brain) – was it not the capacity for energetic action that was called in