“Hammer,” he said. “That’s what we need.”
“Are you going to smash it entirely?”
“No, no, lever the, you know, the nailheads, with the claw. Lever them up. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
There was a hammer in the drawer. Horley blew out his cheeks and set to with the claw and, after great effort, managed to lever one of the nails halfway out. Grinstead watched him closely.
“See! Just persistence. That’s all you need,” Horley said.
“Of course.”
“Do it all now.”
“You’re nearly there.”
“Absolutely.”
He continued bashing, levering, pulling, and finally managed to twist the metal tapes aside and over the edge of the top. He stood up, panting. His breath was wheezing in his throat.
“Grinstead, would you mind finishing it off?” he said. “I’m not sure I…”
Grinstead took the hammer and pulled out the rest of the nails. It only took a minute. He lifted the top off the box and set it aside, and then reached down into the mass of crumpled paper and curls of wood shavings in which the bronze was packed.
“Here it is,” he said.
He lifted it out and unwrapped the final layer of tissue paper before setting the monkey on the table next to the picture. It was just as repulsive as he remembered. He turned to Horley, who was gazing at it with an expression of horror.
“Horley? Surely you knew what it looked—”
“No, it’s not…” Horley swayed, clutching at the table. The picture rocked on its easel. “Grinstead, I’m not feeling very well—oh God….”
He stumbled toward the bedroom and flung open the door just in time to vomit into the washbasin inside it. His breathing was louder, high-pitched, and more labored. It sounded like a very bad attack of asthma.
Grinstead stood up and looked at his watch. It was getting on for one o’clock.
“Horley? You all right?”
Horley’s breath was rattling. “Can’t breathe,” he managed to say.
“Let me phone for an ambulance. You don’t sound at all good.”
“No—can’t phone out from here after midnight—the porter’s off duty….Oh God—”
He was sick again.
“Go to the lodge,” he mumbled. “Phone there somewhere—Grinstead, I’m frightened….”
“I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Grinstead pressed the switch on the landing. The light went out before he reached the foot of the staircase. He stood inside the doorway and lit a cigarette. The rain had stopped falling, but the moisture in the air was gathering into a dense fog into which the buildings seemed to be dissolving; beyond the dark chapel roof, the air was saturated with a soft orange glow from the street outside. A distant mechanism began to whir quietly, and the chapel bell struck once.
Grinstead smoked the rest of the cigarette and went back upstairs. He held his breath and looked into the bedroom. Horley was dead. He pulled the door shut and turned back.
He cast about for something to carry the picture in, and saw Horley’s briefcase, crammed with books and papers, lying on its side under the desk. Grinstead tipped everything out on the floor and found that, with a little persuasion, the picture just fit; it would have been a pity to cut it out of the frame, which was pretty, and suited it very well.
Then he took a pencil from the desk and moved the bunch of keys around until he saw the one Horley had used to open the garden door when he let them in to the college earlier on. Using a handkerchief to keep his fingerprints off the rest of the bunch, he detached the garden key and put it in his pocket.
He looked around. There was nothing to suggest foul play, because after all there hadn’t been any foul play. Two men had come here to have a drink and look at the bronze sculpture that had obviously been in the box (Grinstead picked up a shaving of wood and dropped it on the monkey’s lap), the guest had left, the other had been overcome with some kind of food poisoning, and, unable to phone for help, died in his bedroom.
He left very quietly, carrying the briefcase. There was no need to take the monkey: it would follow in its own time. He found his way through the quad, into the garden and out of the door. He locked it again after him, and set off for his hotel through the freezing fog.
As he turned into the High Street, a taxi came along, too fast, and hit him. In his dark overcoat, he was practically invisible, and he should have stopped to make sure the road was clear, but the taxi driver should have been going more slowly, with visibility so limited. The court found later that they were both to blame. The briefcase flew out of Grinstead’s hand and landed on the pavement a moment after his head hit the road. He died at once.
—
“Anaphylactic shock,” said the bursar to the chaplain as they stood in Horley’s rooms some days later.
“What’s that?”
“When you eat something you’re allergic to. Nuts, quite often. That’s what did him in, apparently.”
“Didn’t we have that rather nice nut pudding of Chef’s that night?”
“Don’t know. I wasn’t dining that night. I wonder if…Well, it’s too late to make any difference now.”
“But wouldn’t he have known, if he was allergic to nuts?”
“Sometimes not. You find out when the thing kicks in, which it might do at once or it might take a couple of hours, and then you’ve only got a few minutes.”
“Poor man,” said the chaplain. “I expect his guest would have gone by that time.”
The bursar cast a sideways glance at his colleague, who was gazing sorrowfully at the bronze monkey. “That’s what we must suppose,” he said.
“And what about his possessions? He’s got an awful lot of pictures and things.”
“We’ll have to make an inventory. He seems to have had no family except an unmarried sister, and I have no idea if he left a will. There’s a lot of work involved.”
“And what are you carrying, Charles? What’s in that parcel? Something of his?”
“Well,” said the Bursar. “It’s rather odd. On the same night, it seems that a chap was knocked down in the High—You remember how foggy it was?”
“Yes, I do. Beastly.”
“That chap was Horley’s guest. Had been Horley’s guest, I suppose one should say. Killed at once.”
“No! Both died on the same night?”
“And he seems to have been carrying Horley’s briefcase, containing this painting.” He took the picture out of the brown-paper parcel and set it on the little easel, next to the monkey. “So what d’you make of that, Eric?”
The chaplain’s old pale blue eyes were wide. “Extraordinary! D’you think Horley had just given him the painting? Or perhaps sold it to him? What a tragic business!”
“If he’d sold it, there’d be a receipt or something of the sort, but we haven’t found one. Since there’s no evidence it belonged to the other chap, we have to assume it was Horley’s. We’ll count it all up in the inventory.”
“What a very pretty girl. D’you know who she is?”
“No idea,” said the bursar, “but she looks mighty pleased with herself.”
A Note from Philip Pullman
I started telling stories as soon as I knew what stories were. I was fascinated by them—that something could happen and be connected to another thing, and that someone could put the two things together and show how the first thing caused the second thing, which then caused a third thing. I loved it. I love it still.
I grew up at a time when TV wasn’t as important as it is now. In fact, part of my childhood was spent in Australia when that country still didn’t even have TV, so a lot of my early experiences with stories came from the radio, which is a wonderful medium. I remember listening to gangster serials, and cowboy serials, and best of alclass="underline" “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound! Look, up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s SUPERMAN!”