Free The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin Page B

hyenas went back to their lairs, and soft-footed wolves began to stalk, in circles that grew ever narrower towards a point where they fell upon a struggling, screaming form and silenced it. The bickering and squabbling became transmuted by a sudden hidden alchemy into physical terror and physical agony and violent death. That afternoon Nigel left Oxford and returned to London; he came back the following evening, and heard a shot.
    When he next saw Yseut she was dead.

5. ‘Cave Ne Exeat’
    I have seen phantoms there that were as men,
    And men that were as phantoms flit and roam.
    Thomson
    â€˜Intuition,’ said Gervase Fen firmly, ‘that’s all it amounts to in the end – intuition.’
    He glared about the assembled company, as if challenging anyone to contradict him. But nobody did; it was his room, to begin with, and they were all heavy with Senior Common Room port for which he had paid, so it seemed impolite to argue. Moreover, it was exceedingly hot, and Nigel at any rate felt little inclined to do anything but relax. It was eight o’clock of the Friday evening, and only three hours ago he had completed the abominable journey down from town. He was tired. He stretched out his legs and prepared to absorb anything Fen had to say on his favourite topic.
    The room was a large one, stretching the whole width of the southernmost parallel of the second quadrangle in St Christopher’s, and facing on to the garden on one side and the quadrangle itself on the other. It was on the first floor, and was reached by a flight of steps leading up from the open passageway which led through into the garden. Austerely but comfortably furnished, the cool cream of the walls – set off by the dark green of the carpet and curtains – was decorated only by a few Chinese miniatures and by the meticulously arranged rows of books on low shelves which occupied every side of the room. On the mantelpiece were a few dilapidated plaques and busts of the greater masters of English literature, and a huge desk, its surface covered with an untidy mellay of books and papers, dominated the north wall. Fen’s wife, a plain, spectacled, sensible little woman incongruously called Dolly, sat at one corner of the fireplace, in which a few embers glowed unnecessarily, Fen himself sat at the other, while variously spaced between them were Nigel, Sir Richard Freeman, and a very old doncalled Wilkes, who had attached himself to the party for no particular reason some minutes before. On his arrival Fen had been extremely rude to him – but then he was habitually rude to everyone; it was a natural consequence, Nigel decided, of his monstrous and excessive vitality.
    â€˜Oh, and what can I do for you?’ he had inquired. But Wilkes had settled himself down and demanded whisky with every evidence of a determination to stay long and leave late.
    â€˜I’m rather sorry you’ve come, you know,’ Fen had pursued. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to be very bored with all these people.’ To whose derogation this remark was intended it was impossible to tell.
    Wilkes, however, who was rather deaf, was not in the least taken aback by these comments, and merely smiled benignly upon all and sundry and repeated his demand for whisky. Fen got it for him with painful reluctance, and contented himself henceforth with uttering in a penetrating whisper various slanders against the old man, to the acute embarrassment of everyone except Mrs Fen, who was apparently quite used to it and who said ‘Now, Gervase!’ in an objurgatory but automatic manner every few minutes.
    It was getting dark. On one side a brief prospect of Inigo Jones, on the other the great lawn flanked with trees and flowerbeds, were melting away in shadow. On the horizon, three searchlights began to form their complex trigonometrical patterns. While in the quadrangle below, a little clique of rowdy undergraduates were singing a student