Death at the President's Lodging Read Online Free PDF Page A

he had delayed the climax of his narration. “The keys were all changed yesterday morning!”
    Appleby whistled. Dodd when he had heard the same news had sworn. It was the final and overwhelming touch of that topsy-turvy precision that seemed to mark the St Anthony’s case.
    Briefly Dodd explained. No one had taken much care of his key. A key is not at all the same thing to a scholar that it is to a banker, a doctor or a business man. The possessions of the learned classes are locked up for the most part in their heads and to a don a key is more often than not something that he discovers himself to have lost when he wants to open a suitcase. And those Fellows of St Anthony’s who possessed keys to the gates which had suddenly become so tragically important had for long been careless enough with them without anybody worrying. But recently there had been a scandal. An undergraduate had got into serious trouble during an illicit nocturnal expedition, and the mystery of how he had made his way in and out of St Anthony’s had not been satisfactorily cleared up. The President had decided that a key had been copied. He had ordered fresh locks and keys for the three vital gates – and the locks had been fitted, and the keys distributed to the people concerned, only the morning before he met his death.
    It was Dodd’s view that this circumstance, though extraordinary in itself, introduced a welcome simplification into the case. It seemed likely to save an enormous amount of laborious and difficult inquiry – for nothing, as he had found in the interviews he had already conducted that morning, could well be more difficult, delicate and tedious than pursuing a number of academic persons with minute questions as to their material possessions. Moreover, the circle of possible suspects seemed at once to be narrowed in the most definite way. If Dodd at that moment had been called upon to write a formal report on the progress of the investigation he would have risked a categorical assertion. Dr Umpleby could have been murdered only by one of a small group of persons definitely known.
    And Appleby, as he reviewed the situation while pacing restlessly but observantly round the fantastic death-chamber, had also reached one definite conclusion. Mystery stories were popular in universities – and even among the police. Dodd, who still kept so much of an English countryside that read Bunyan and the Bible, and who was, besides, a monument of efficient but unimaginative police routine, was a case in point. His native shrewdness had at once led him to note the artificiality of the present circumstances. But (and such, Appleby reflected, is the extraordinary power of the Word) he was half-prepared to accept the artificial, the strikingly fictive , as normal. And he seemed in danger, as a consequence, of missing that most important Why in the case: Why had Umpleby met his death in a storybook manner? For that his death had been set in an elaborately contrived frame seemed now clear: the circumstance of the changing of the locks made this evident almost to the point of demonstration. Umpleby had died amid circumstances of elaborate ingenuity. He had died in a literary context; indeed, he had in a manner of speaking died amid a confusion of literary contexts. For in the network of physical circumscriptions implicitly pointing (as Appleby had put it to himself) to so-and - so there was contrivance in a literary tradition deriving from all the progeny of Sherlock Holmes, while in the fantasy of the bones there was something of the incongruous tradition of the “shocker.” Somewhere in the case, it seemed, there was a mind thinking in terms both of inference and of the macabre… A mind, one might say, thinking in terms of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, come to think of it, was a present intellectual fashion, and St Anthony’s was an intellectual place…
    An intellectual place. That was, of course, a vital fact to remember when proceeding a step further