When I returned to my room I found the whole staircase flooded with light. Lloyd Comstock and Stuart Somerville were nowhere to be seen but Michael was lying on my sofa, smoking a cigarette.
“Gosh, you look pale,” he said. “Have you seen a ghost?”
“I’m not at all sure that I haven’t,” I replied as lightly as I could. “Where are the others?”
“Dunno. When you went down after the fuses they disappeared. Own rooms, I suppose. I stayed here as I wanted to speak to you.”
There was a note of seriousness in Michael’s voice which I was quick to catch. “Shoot,” I murmured abstractedly.
“I had a letter today from my uncle,” he said wistfully. “The one that runs a prep school in Clifton. He’s offered me a job there next term. I’m afraid I’ll have to accept it.”
The mania for leaving Cambridge prematurely seemed to be assuming epidemic proportions on “A” staircase.
“But, my dear fellow,” I cried impatiently. “You can’t possibly give up your chance of getting a degree here. You must finish your third year.”
“Can’t be done. My pater is dreadfully hard up. The Lenox Scholarship was my only hope and, of course, Baumann will carry that off, damn him.”
“How much is the thing worth?”
“Eighty pounds a year. It must sound absurd to you, but to me its the difference between, well—”
I did some rapid calculations. “Why, that’s nothing,” I said. “I’m not a ruddy millionaire in spite of Somerville’s cracks, but I spend that much on ‘Gin and Its’ every term. Let me lend it to you. You can call it America’s contribution toward the depreciated pound sterling.”
Michael sat up with a start.
“Good Lord, no,” he answered. “I couldn’t borrow from you or anyone else. I must carve my own way out. Thanks all the same. It was ripping of you to suggest it.”
“Darn your British pride, and darn you, Michael Grayling. Now get this straight. You’re not going to accept that pokey little job in your uncle’s pokey little prep school. You’re not going to leave Cambridge. You’re going to win the Lenox Scholarship and you’re going to get a first in the Tripos. And right now you are going to promise me that you won’t make any decision until after the exam results come out. I have a hunch that one of your chief competitors is going to be—er—eliminated.”
“Eliminated?” Michael’s voice was pathetically eager. Inwardly I damned Baumann and his arrogant brilliance. This stupid little bit of money meant so much to Michael. It was nothing to the South African except another bauble to satisfy his vanity which was already over-inflated.
And then, Baumann had lied to me that morning. There was no John Bowman at Cambridge at all. He had lied about the Profile. She had been in his rooms before lunch. She had, so I believed, been in his rooms again that night. He must know more about her than he was prepared to admit. He could have saved me from so much mental anguish by telling me the truth, and he could save Michael from disappointment and indecision if he would be more specific about his leaving Cambridge. Why should I not march into his rooms and demand an answer to both questions. And if he refused, then I would give him back his rotten envelope and tell him to go to an even more torrid place than Africa. I was in a fighting mood.
I went over to my bookshelf. The package was still reposing in the second volume of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I shoved it angrily in my pocket.
“Wait here a minute, Michael. I’m going in to speak to Baumann.” My voice must have sounded strangely purposeful because Michael sat up and stared at me in open-mouthed amazement.
Without another word I strode out, crossed the passage and banged noisily on Baumann’s sported oak. There was no sound from his room but a crack of light showed under the door.
“I’ll get in if it’s the last thing I do,” I muttered, still haunted by that fleeting glimpse of the Profile.
I opened the passage window and climbed onto the still dripping roof. Once outside, I walked along the narrow parapet that separated my window from Baumann’s. So far it was easy, but as I looked through into my neighbour’s lighted room, I almost lost my balance and toppled over backwards into the court four stories below. I had to look twice before I could believe that this was not all some hideous nightmare. I grasped at the window sash to steady myself.
Baumann was stretched face downward on the floor near the writing-table with his head lying in a large pool of blood. Near his right hand I caught the dull gleam of blued steel….
My first instinct was to go back to my own room. It was only the memory of the Profile on the staircase that made me go on. I loved her. If I had ever doubted it before I knew it now as I stood balancing myself outside Baumann’s window. I was going to do what I could to help her. For, however innocent her presence may have been—if she had been in Baumann’s room that night, she would need my help.
I climbed in through the window. One glance at the body was sufficient to tell that Baumann was dead. He had been shot just above the mouth and the bullet had caused hideous wreckage in his upper jaw. A revolver was lying on the floor close to his hand and half covered also in the blood. The desk chair had fallen over.
On the desk I saw to my amazement that, in addition to an open volume of the Idylls of Theocritus and a Greek Lexicon, there was a small tin of the liquid metal polish called Brasso, a cleaning rag and a piece of chamois leather. For a moment I stared uncomprehendingly and then light began to dawn. Every appearance pointed to the fact that Baumann had been cleaning his revolver at the desk when it accidentally went off and shot him in the face. The positions of the body, gun and fallen chair would have forced this conclusion on anyone who had entered the room through the door.
Now, even at the risk of alienating my reader’s sympathy, I am going to declare frankly that I never was taken in by all these careful arrangements. As soon as I saw Baumann’s dead body through the window, some sixth sense told me that he had been murdered. As soon as I saw the tin of Brasso and the dirty rags I thought to myself, “How clever of somebody. This is a good job. I must keep up the farce.” In short, I shamelessly decided to compound what I believed to be a felony. I do not attempt to excuse myself. I can only repeat that I had seen the features of the girl I loved on the staircase that night and I knew that nothing I could do would bring Baumann back to life. If she did kill Baumann, she probably had good reason and I was not going to betray her until I had heard what she had to say for herself.
All these thoughts flashed through my head in a very few seconds. Then I suddenly saw, staring me in the face, the most damning piece of evidence in the world—evidence sufficient to prove that what looked like an accidental death was premeditated murder, evidence conclusive enough to send a man to the gallows.
Now the carpet in Baumann’s room was light red with a motif of large indeterminate flowers in dark crimson. These were arranged in symmetrical design at regular intervals and there were, of course, spaces in which there was no pattern at all. In one of these spaces, about eighteen inches from Baumann’s feet, I noticed that there was a crimson circle which looked, at first glance, like a floating peony or chrysanthemum which had come adrift from its mooring in the carpet’s design. I went over and touched it with my hand. It was sticky and my fingers were red. Blood! If Baumann’s “accident” had occurred while he was seated at his desk, how could there reasonably be an isolated patch of blood several feet away?
As I stood there trying to puzzle this out, someone banged on the sported oak. Michael’s voice cried out:
“Anything up, Hilary?”
“Yes, there’s been an accident.”
“Let me in for God’s sake.” His voice sounded tense.
I paused with my hand on the door knob. No. Not even Michael must know my secret. But I must act fast. Now, if ever, was the time for a clear head and rapid thinking.
“Better not,” I said as calmly as I could. “Go down to Warren’s room and tell him to come up here. It’s pretty serious.”
As I heard Michael’s footsteps retreating, I turned back into the room. Quick, quick, I thought. I must get some alcohol—something to remove that tell-tale second stain. I ran into Baumann’s bedroom and the first thing that caught my eye was a queer-shaped bottle of what looked like perfume. Veldbloemen, I read on the label, “a distillation of the odoriferous plants that are peculiar to the South African Veld.” If I felt any surprise at finding perfume in the bedroom of an athletic Boer farmer, its South African origin explained it. The smells of home are the comfort and the despair of the homesick.
I drenched my handkerchief in the perfume and, as I did so, I felt a dull, sickening sensation in the pit of my stomach. This was the scent which I had smelled when the Profile pulled out her handkerchief that morning. This was the odour which had assailed my nostrils on the staircase. The chain of circumstantial evidence seemed satanically conclusive.
As I rubbed the sinister patch on the carpet with my sodden handkerchief. I could hear the distant sounds of Dr. Warren’s piano. Suddenly they stopped. Michael had evidently reached the tutor’s rooms. I redoubled my efforts on the stain. The room smelt like a greenhouse. Throwing all the windows wide open, I heard footsteps on the stairs. I stuffed into my pocket the dirty blood-stained handkerchief. There was a soft tap on the still sported oak….
Dr. Reginald Warren, Tutor of All Saints, was not at all the type of man one would expect to play Chopin during a storm. In fact, no one would expect him to play Chopin at all. He tinkled Bach and Mozart occasionally, but first and last he was a scientist—and a rather lugubrious scientist at that. His nickname, the Merry Monocle, was ironical as far as the adjective was concerned, but exact as to the substantive. He had been a colonel in the British Army during the war and had won the V. C. for gallantry on the field. He had never been known to show emotion of any kind whatsoever. If he had passions he kept them to himself or exorcised them with his music.
And his face was quite dispassionate as he stood on the threshold. I saw a look of horror and fear on Michael’s countenance.
“Thank you, Mr. Grayling,” said Dr. Warren as he adjusted his monocle in his left eye. “I must ask you to return to your room and say nothing. Mr. Fenton, will you please stay here with me?”
He shut the door on Michael. His hands touched the body in various places and then spread in a gesture of finality.
“Mr. Fenton,” he said, in the same formal tones I had heard him use in discussing the requirements for Littlego, “he is dead, as you have probably observed. I should say offhand only about twenty minutes, half an hour at the most.” He looked at his watch. “It is now ten-fifteen. Did you hear a shot just before ten o’clock?”
“Well, sir,” I explained, “there was the storm then and the thunder. Four of us were in my room next door. We heard nothing that we recognized as a shot.” I went on to explain about the fuses and my visit to the porter’s lodge.
“A curious coincidence,” he murmured. “But I suppose it was the sudden darkness that startled Baumann as he was cleaning his revolver. Do you know, by the way, if it belongs to him?”
“I don’t know for certain, sir. It was rumoured that Baumann had a gun. The bedmaker has complained.”
“It should have been reported immediately,” said the tutor severely. “The possession of firearms is strictly forbidden by University regulations.” He picked up the tin of Brasso and sniffed at it.
“There is a strange smell here,” he remarked. Remembering the handkerchief in my pocket, I instinctively moved away from him.
After a few more questions he said, “Fenton, go to the porter’s lodge and call the police station. Ask for Inspector Horrocks. He served with me during the war. A splendid fellow and a personal friend of mine.”
“Inspector Horrocks? I know him,” I said with relief. “I report to him under the Aliens’ Act every time I go down to Cambridge. He’s been very decent to me.”
“So much the better,” he replied drily. “Come back here when you’ve finished. Horrocks will want to question you, I expect.”
Much as I hated to leave Dr. Warren alone with the telltale stain, I departed to do as I was told. After some difficulty I managed to get hold of my old friend Horrocks. My call was transferred from the police station to the asylum, where I just missed getting him. Finally I located him at his home. He promised to come at once and to make arrangements for a police surgeon to follow him.
Inspector Horrocks had always been most affable on the not infrequent occasions when I went through the farcical performance of “registering” as a potentially undesirable alien. Many a beer had we consumed together over a discussion of international problems. But his voice over the telephone sounded so stern and official that I could not believe it was my erstwhile jovial companion.
I reflected that I must dispose of the handkerchief before he arrived on the scene. My hand furtively sought my coat pocket and, as it did so, it came into contact with the letter Bauman had given me that morning.
This set me thinking. Having done all I could to prevent the avenging of the South African’s death, I felt that the least I could do was to comply with the last request he had made me. Perhaps I was rattled, perhaps I was over-conscientious, but in the excitement of the moment I did something that I was to regret many times later. I pulled the letter from my pocket, tore open the outer envelope and placed the enclosure in the letter box near the lodge. I did not look at the address, but as the envelope fell down the slot, I caught the letters B-R-I-D-G-E-S. Then I saw the porter look inquiringly towards me. I moved quickly away, but not before I had noticed that the outer envelope, which I still held in my hand, was blood-stained from its proximity to my handkerchief.
Here was another piece of evidence to destroy. Well, there is a classical place to dispose of useless paper; and if paper, why not a handkerchief also?
Nodding goodnight to the porter, I strolled casually towards the one corner of the college where one can go without question at any hour of the day or night. There I tore the envelope and the handkerchief into small pieces and safely dispatched them on their long journey down the Cambridge sewer pipes.
I breathed a sigh of relief and lit a cigarette in a vain attempt to hide the fact that I still smelled like a lady’s boudoir. Then I washed my hands and returned slowly and thoughtfully to the room where Baumann’s body lay.
It was not until I saw him still lying there, under the cool scrutiny of Dr. Warren, that I reflected that Michael Grayling’s problems were undoubtedly solved, and that Stuart Somerville would now get his much-coveted cricket blue. It was indeed an ill wind that had blown that night, but it could not fail to bring some good to my friends on “A” staircase.