Hamlet Revenge! by Michael Innes

Author:Michael Innes [Innes, Michael]
Format: epub
Tags: murder, lord chancellor, crime, innes, appleby, hamlet
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2010-01-12T23:20:25+00:00

8

Resolved but apprehensive, Noel paused for respite at the first turning of the stair. He flung up a window and surveyed the world. It was undeniably the familiar world – the world on which, rising early to canter on Horton Down, he had flung up his own bedroom window just twenty-four hours before. In the farther park two textures of moving grey were sorting themselves out: mist drifting, eddying, dispersing; sheep beginning to move in the dewy feed. Already the day declared its season; already the scent of the syringas, heavy as orange blossom, was blowing up from the gardens. The hubbub dawn chorus had thinned to distinguishable notes: willow-warblers monotonously tumbling downstairs, chaffinches as unvaryingly revving-up, and suspense provided only by the wrens, who pleased themselves as to whether or not they should add answer to question. And dominating and insistent, as if he were aware that a fortnight, a week now might command him to silence, the cuckoo called from the oak woods. To Noel, who associated birds – a few moorland varieties apart – with clerkly nature lovers and girl-guides, these effects came confusedly. But as mere massive sensation their familiarity disturbed him and he looked round almost anxiously for sign of change.

It was there. It was there in a curl of smoke rising – a full hour early – in the middle distance: Mrs Manley at the south lodge, aware that the skies had fallen and determined to face the unknown with the day’s routine well forward. It was there – more obviously – in patrolling policemen. It was there in a little group of people toiling hastily up the brow of Horton Hill: a gesticulating person in front and behind a knot of persons with impedimenta – cameras, this time, of the cinematographic and telescopic sort. And it was there – had Noel known it – in the couple of cars that flashed over the visible rise of the Horton road: the press making hell-for-leather for Scamnum Court. And it was there – again if he had known it – in the farthest puff of white on the horizon. For that was the express hurtling the London dailies south and west, all with the Scamnum story in two inches of smeared red – or all save the Despatch-Record, whose news editor, having pushed his stop-press button with some extra minutes to spare before going to bed, had built in a flaming streamer that became Fleet Street talk for days.

Noel leant out further inches, automatically estimated the possibility of spitting on a policeman’s helmet below, and then turned his eyes sharp right along the east façade. In the remote distance he could just discern a fugitive line of blue. ‘The sea’, he chanted, ‘lay laughing at a distance…’ He waved to the astonished constable below. ‘And in the meadows and the lower grounds was all the sweetness of a common dawn.’ And having keyed himself up in this fashion Noel slammed down the window, bounded up the remaining stairs and knocked briskly at Diana Sandys’ door.

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