The Weight of the Evidence Read Free Page B

fountain. The fountain plays?’
    ‘Commonly it trickles away. But it’s on the main and can make quite a display. And, oddly enough, it was full strength when the body was discovered, and drenching the whole place. Nobody knows who turned it on.’
    ‘I see.’ Appleby studied the plan again. ‘Now take the corridor. Nothing remarkable about that. Windows looking on the Court–’
    ‘I wouldn’t say looking. They begin about seven feet up and are full of what is probably called stained glass.’ Hobhouse too, it seemed, was not without his aesthetic reactions.
    ‘Windows, in fact, that make this corner of the court pretty secluded. Anything else about the corridor? Double doors giving on the court.’ Appleby’s finger moved up the paper. ‘What’s this blob?’
    ‘It’s not a blob; it’s a telephone. In a little locked box on the wall.’
    ‘How very odd.’
    ‘Economy. Pluckrose had to share it with the man next door. Caused trouble, it appears.’
    ‘But presumably not murder. Pluckrose had this room at the end?’
    ‘Yes. And then comes Prisk, the professor of Romance languages. And then Pluckrose’s private laboratory.’
    Appleby frowned. ‘Aren’t these people oddly mixed up?’
    ‘Uncommonly, I should say. But, you see, the university has grown pretty rapidly’ – Hobhouse was not without civic pride in this announcement – ‘and at the same time people have refused to budge from their familiar quarters. It seems that in little matters like that there’s nobody who can order professors and suchlike about. So here’s Pluckrose, and then Prisk, and then Pluckrose’s lab and then the photographic room and then–’
    ‘Wait a minute.’ Appleby had again put a finger on the plan. ‘Whatever is this affair in the corner?’
    ‘Of the lab?’ Hobhouse puffed at his pipe, much pleased. ‘You’d never guess. It’s a maze.’
    ‘Ah, for the photography.’
    Hobhouse’s face fell. ‘Yes. The dark-room is next door, and the only entrance to it is through this little pitch-black maze. It prevents the accidental ingress’ – Hobhouse paused as if to admire this phrase – ‘of light.’
    ‘And the dark-room takes up part of the breadth of the building here, and in the other part is the hoist. But the main doors of the hoist open on what is the next room again, a big one in the angle of the building. In fact, the lowest of the store-rooms. And now turn the corner and we come to a man called Marlow.’
    ‘Yes. But don’t turn the corner before you notice that that lowest store-room had only one pair of doors: on the far side and giving on a road – a public road, that is, but with nothing but university buildings opposite. Here’s the refectory and here’s the Great Hall.’
    ‘I see. Now Marlow: I think you said he was senior lecturer in English? Good. And next to him?’
    ‘An aged and bearded person called Murn. Some sort of assistant to Pluckrose. And after that come more labs.’
    ‘At which we call a halt. But we remember that above the store-room is another store-room, and above that two further store-rooms again. And the two uppermost store-rooms are a bit bigger than those below. In fact there’s a jutting-out or overhanging affair supported on corbels. And at each corner is a further overhang: a little windowed pepper-box affair of a turret. On this final architectural quiddity the whole crime turns.’
    ‘Just that.’ Hobhouse picked up a match and held it suspended above the table. ‘It meant that Pluckrose, sitting in his deck-chair some feet from the wall of the Wool Court, was directly beneath one of the pepper-box windows.’ He let the match fall. ‘So that once you’d got the meteorite up on the window-sill the thing was a mathematical certainty.’
    Appleby sighed. ‘It’s nice that there should be a bit of certainty somewhere. And now I think we’d better go and actually inspect. After that – luncheon.’
    ‘I hope that you gentlemen will lunch with