Free The Weight of the Evidence by Michael Innes Page A

‘Thank you,’ said Appleby hastily. ‘Thank you very much indeed. The meteorite shall be traced and the woman hunted for. Prisk, the Vice-Chancellor, and Miss Dearlove shall be interrogated, Murn shadowed if it should be necessary, the matter of the skeleton elucidated, and Lasscock – whoever he may be – traced. Mrs Tavender’s tea-party shall be investigated, and so will the fate of Timmy Church’s girl.’ He put down his cup. ‘I wonder if I might have more coffee? It would be nice to keep some sort of clear head.’
    Marlow, a tall man with a shock of auburn hair, went for coffee. Pinnegar stood still and looked impressed and perhaps scared. From the body of the room came a murmur of conversation mingled with mooings, gruntings, and hissings as the assembled scholars continued to challenge each other on nice philological points. The effect, Appleby thought, was to make one look for those bird- and beast-likenesses which human features can always suggest. There were the usual parrots and porkers and fish. These, after all, are the common types. But here and there was something more recherché . Prisk, for instance, had a nose flattened after a fashion curiously suggesting the platypus. The grunting and hissing was reinforced by whistling and a sort of muted bellowing as some new class of phonetic phenomena gained the attention of the company. The mingling of noises human and brute, and the zoological analogies thus evoked, gave the whole affair the quality of some vast and suspended metamorphosis, some Circean magic in which there had been a hitch halfway through… But these were unprofitable reflections. Could one say otherwise of the chatter of these two apparently light-hearted young men? Must he take them sufficiently seriously, for instance, really to inquire into the curious affair of Mrs Tavender’s tea-party?
    ‘About the telephone’ – Marlow had returned with coffee and a plate of biscuits – ‘do you think it was really meant to be Prisk ?’
    ‘By Jove, yes,’ said Pinnegar. ‘Appointment with Death. Something like that.’
    They weren’t fools. Naturally not. Everybody here was presumably something above average intelligence – it was that perhaps which gave its irritating obliqueness to the whole affair. They liked to approach things sideways. If crabs made noises, then there might be added to the hissing and grunting – Appleby checked himself. Among the constitutionally oblique a little directness might be the most effective thing. ‘Oh, quite,’ he said. ‘Somebody might propose to make a comfortable little appointment with Prisk down by those deck-chairs. And because of this telephone-business the message might somehow deliver itself to Pluckrose instead. One doesn’t see just how. But it’s a possibility, isn’t it? Like Timmy Church’s girl.’
    The young men were intrigued. They were also decently uncomfortable. ‘Perhaps’, said Pinnegar, ‘we ought not to have mentioned – ’ He was interrupted by the emergence from the pervasive zoological background of a single dominant noise. At first merely like another pertinacious experiment in phonetics, it presently disclosed itself as a giggle. An elderly man was approaching them, giggling and rubbing his hands. Pinnegar hailed him with renewed cheerfulness. ‘Tavender,’ he called, ‘here is Monsieur Dupont of the Sûreté .’ He gestured towards Appleby. ‘He has your dossier in his pocket. He is particularly interested in your skill as an epigrapher.’
    Tavender – whose wife, presumably, had held the curious tea-party – bowed, giggled, and looked at the ceiling, rather as if he expected it to yield some suitable form of words. As this didn’t happen he simply bowed and giggled again – this, apparently, with much more of good humour than embarrassment.
    ‘Epigraphy!’ said Marlow. ‘That’s the thing. Tavender or Hissey shall read the evidences of the meteorite. They can decipher inscriptions that are