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

question when the possible preferment of a mere scholar was canvassed? At this moment the Dean’s eye, voyaging still among his rafters, rested on Aquarius , “the man who bears the watering-pot,” as the rhyme has it. And by processes connected perhaps with the association cold - douche , the full mischief of the business was brought home to him more vividly than it had been yet. To be mixed up in a scandal under these outrageous circumstances of modern nationwide publicity! Hardly helpful, he thought grimly; hardly helpful whatever solution of the business the police achieved. That there would be no sensational domestic revelation – it was for that that he must hope and pray. And it was of that that he had, in the course of the day, almost succeeded in convincing himself. ( Pisces , as if they had ventured some contradiction, came in for a stern glance here.) In the long run it would not be left in any doubt that the crime (crime in St Anthony’s!) was an outside affair – the purposeless stroke, perhaps, of a madman.
    But here Libra , the scales, asserted themselves. There was matter to be balanced against that hope. Let this detective be anything but a model of discretion, let him have a taste for amusing the public, and there might be an uncomfortable enough period of startling, if improbable and unprovable, theories blowing about. The unlucky topographical circumstances of the deed, the Dean had realized from the first, set suspicion flowing where it should be fantastic that suspicion should flow… He frowned as he thought of his colleagues under suspicion of murder. How would they stand badgering by policemen, coroners, lawyers? How, for that matter, would he stand it himself? Praise Providence, he and his colleagues were all demonstrably sane.
    Those bones! They were mad. Last night, when he had viewed them, he had been annoyed by them. He had at first been more annoyed by the bones (he recollected with some discomfort) than distressed about the tragedy. He had been annoyed because he had been bewildered (Mr Deighton-Clerk disliked being bewildered – or even slightly puzzled). But later he had felt – somewhat incoherently – a possible blessedness in them: their very irrationality removed the crime somehow from the sinister and calculated to the fantastic. They were a sort of bulwark between the life of the college, in all its measure and reason, and the whole horrid business.
    And then – and it was as if Leo, Taurus and Aries had roared, bellowed, butted all in a moment – Mr Deighton-Clerk realized what a feeble piece of thinking this was. The first thing that this detective would suspect about the bones was that they were some sort of blind or bluff. How obvious; how very, very obvious! Indeed, were the man literate, his mind might run to some notion of the touch of fantasy, the vivid dash of irrationality, that it might please an intellectual and cultivated mind to mingle with a laboriously calculated crime… A mixture, thought Mr Deighton-Clerk, somewhat in the manner of Poe.
    Decidedly, he did not like the bones after all. And suddenly he realized that, subconsciously, they had profoundly disturbed him from the first. Sinister, grisly objects – surely they were striving to connect themselves with…something forgotten, suppressed, unconsidered on the borders of his consciousness…? He was nervous. The dock (he heard his own inner voice absurdly exclaim) is yawning open for us all…
    Mr Deighton-Clerk pulled himself up. He was decidedly tired. More than tired, he was unsettled. Indeed it was a terrible, a shocking business. Murder – the human soul hurled all unprepared to Judgment – was equally awful in college or cottage. He had seldom seen eye to eye with Umpleby – but how meaningless their disagreements had been! How absurd this or that estrangement between them in face of abrupt and total severance – the quick and the dead! The Dean looked at his watch. Just half an hour to hall,