The Secret Vanguard Read online

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  The Secret Vanguard

  First published in 1940

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1940-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755121120 EAN: 9780755121120

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  1: Philip Ploss Pays His Bills

  Peaceful is the first word which a house agent would have chosen in describing the home of Philip Ploss. Ancient and unpretentious, with its modern conveniences tucked unobtrusively away and even its excellent state of repair modestly dissimulated, Lark Manor nestled in the heart of the English countryside. The railway station was five minutes’ walk from the house and quite concealed; from it the fastest trains – and the fastest were so very fast that it was wonderful how very smooth they were, too – took just half an hour to reach London.

  The distance was right. In half an hour, and while hurtling towards the pleasures of his club and a matinée and dinner with a female friend, Philip Ploss could comfortably write fifteen to twenty lines of verse. These verses, which sometimes concerned the delight of travelling in a smooth train from the squalor of the city to the pleasures of a rural retreat, he would leave at his club for one or another of his acquaintance who ran a literary magazine. And two or three weeks later they would be printed and there would be a cheque which paid for the matinée and the dinner, with maybe a little over for other things. And then every three or four years all these verses would be collected in a slim volume by another acquaintance, a publisher. Philip Ploss incurred no expense whatever and there was a deferred royalty which had several times come to over five pounds. This, together with the couple of thousand or so a year which Ploss had inherited from a father in tea, helped to maintain the notable peacefulness of Lark.

  For peacefulness must continually be paid for – Fate letting it out only on simple hire, so that there is never a final instalment. Philip Ploss understood this and paid on the nail. He liked to walk through the new-mown grass; he liked to discern a great inwardness in buttercups and daisies; he liked to sit on a stile and retort upon the cattle their own ruminative technique. But even for this unassuming way of life he realized that he had to pay. He paid his doctor and his wine merchant and his stockbroker and the man who came about the drains. They in their turn did their best to preserve both Philip Ploss and his chosen environment, to keep the stile in repair and the buttercups pushing up towards the sun.

  Of such tranquillity as the world allows Philip Ploss seemed assured. It was not merely that as a well-informed, moneyed, and wary person he had a better statistical chance of avoiding trouble than most – though this it was possible to feel of him. Nor was it merely his retired way of life. Ploss straying voluptuously through fields and rural ways was a figure secure enough – free from the hazards of passion and ambition, protected at need by great financial organizations, by military skill, by willing and waiting surgeons and psychiatrists. But Ploss in his living-room at Lark held – one was obscurely but massively persuaded – even stronger cards. The place was full of books and gramophone discs and pictures, and in these – in their essence so evidently scatheless and imperishable – Ploss was soaked. Each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent persons and things, and – as in an insect filled with chlorophyll – one could not confidently say where Ploss himself left off and these in their own identity began. It was possible to feel that in a first-class crisis Ploss could simply seep away into the books and discs and pictures, hibernating in their assured immortality until a more genial season, and leaving behind nothing more vulnerable than did Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat.

  But the Cheshire cat was a magical cat, and that is perhaps a magical view. Reason tells us that we cannot seep into or shelter behind the monuments of art; that Philip Ploss was in no way specially inviolable; and that he threw up all this culture around himself simply in a vain attempt to burrow out of an increasingly terrifying universe.

  Ploss would have admitted this. He would have advanced the plea that nature had framed him a burrower; that he burrowed in obedience to the great law of kind. He observed himself, for instance, to be of the type that takes refuge in quotations; when fac
ed by any predicament it was his instinct to burrow hastily into other minds. He realized that to discern a great inwardness in buttercups and daisies was for one of his generation itself a form of taking refuge in quotations. And when emancipated schoolboys made loud discovery of this in noticing his verse for progressive reviews he felt justifiably annoyed. For an artist has a right to work with quotations if they are his medium, and daisies and buttercups which were not these flowers purely but these flowers plus a little Cowper and a little Crabbe happened to be the genuine region of Philip Ploss’ song. From nature in its minor and placid aspects, exploited as a refuge and sophisticated by obsolete literary minds, he received a genuine if tenuous inspiration. The issue of this in careful, low-keyed verse was his serious concern.

  It was perhaps because this serious concern was habitually with an area of sensation narrowly confined that Philip Ploss liked a vista with which to relax. To indulge himself in this he had constructed at the highest point of his garden the sort of skeletal wooden tower which is known as a gazebo. It was more elaborate than most. The final platform had been roofed and in part glassed in; and here Ploss kept a few books, a few discs, and a gramophone which was twin to the one in the house. The place offered retirement beyond retirement, a retreat within a retreat – and at the same time it offered a whole countryside spread out for inspection like a map. To the northwest, it is true, the prospect was closed by the final swell of the Chilterns. But in the opposite quarter, and where the view took in the vale of St Albans and a shimmer of lower Thames valley beyond, there was a sense of almost continental vista. Here, too, and by a trick of the ground, there was a strikingly sharp transition from the local to the remote. The landscape, as if it were the work of a discreet and skilful painter, showed no middle distance. Immediately below lay the familiar territory of the poet: Lark and its garden, a lane, a spinney, a big field and two little ones, livestock as individually familiar as the vicar or the doctor and in receipt of considerably more of Philip Ploss’ regard. Beyond this – and articulated with it as abruptly as in a composite photograph – appeared to lie the shadowy field full of folk that is England. In point of topographical fact the area surveyed was not after all perhaps remarkably extensive; yet it had a composition, an atmosphere, a various suggestiveness which made it appear to be so. Philip Ploss liked to contemplate it under its various accidents of light and shade. A spare middle-aged figure, with friendly, slightly puzzled eyes under long, pleasantly untidy hair, he would sit for hours on his gazebo in vague contemplation of the horizons it offered.

  He was a man of authentic imagination and he must have seen in this soft country – or just over the edge of it – symbols and enigmas as well as familiar cattle and favourite walks. Around him was an agriculture which, for all its appearance of tidy prosperity, was a lingering and vestigial thing. Far to the south, invisible on the fields of Eton, a ruling class was getting its eye in to play for another century of power: enigmatical, surely, if its luck would hold or not. Just beyond, and from the battlements of Windsor, the ghosts of Harrys and Edwards watched the process with anxious eyes. Turn the head eastward into the breeze that was blowing from Heligoland and Sylt and one was looking at London, a London which declared itself at night in a great smear of light across the sky. And London, which reached by train was a comprehensible place of theatres and concert halls and clubs, revealed itself from this distance as an enigma, too. Immensely strong, immensely vulnerable, at once complex and unplanned, its gigantic sprawl was like the agony of a creature that strives to cast out its own evil and realize some distant hope. Perhaps it was succeeding, Philip Ploss used to reflect – and then some smothered uneasiness in himself would make him look away. He would look further – his inward eye overleaping London to skirt the North Downs and hover over those Kentish creeks and inlets where England was fought for in desperate little battles long ago. Nearby was Dover: Philip Ploss’ mind would burrow into King Lear…and then he might reflect that a line drawn from where he sat to Shakespeare’s Cliff and thence prolonged a further twenty-two miles would very likely touch Calais…

  And beyond this – to the vaster enigma of continental Europe – the eye of Philip Ploss would not travel. He would break off and look up at the great three-dimensional highway of the sky. Then – very likely – he would descend from the gazebo and go indoors and take his chequebook and pay as many bills as he could find. And after that he would walk through the spinney and note how black the brambles were, or he would visit one of the little fields where there was a particularly expressive bullock. The confused and subterraneous logic of all this was perhaps a shade ignoble – but after all a prudent man has the right to purchase what tranquillity he may. Had Philip Ploss’ money from tea, and from his acquaintance with the editors and publishers, been able to exercise a remoter control than it did – could it have commanded in chancelleries and cabinet rooms and the offices of great trusts and concessions – it is certain that this narrative would never have come into being. It would be possible to read instead many more slim volumes of Ploss.

  2: He Pays His Last Bill

  ‘Ploss,’ said John Appleby deliberately. ‘Philip Ploss, the Cow-and-Gate poet. Who would want, now, to shoot a quiet fellow like that?’

  Old Mr Hetherton put down his glass of milk and looked warily round the Express Dairy. He and Appleby met once a fortnight to talk archaeology. They talked, that is to say, old Mr Hetherton’s subject; Hetherton looked after some species of antiquities in the British Museum. And now Appleby had switched unwontedly to his own field, for Appleby worked at Scotland Yard. Hetherton, who had an abstract mind and thought of his friend vaguely as a criminologist, was surprised at this abrupt laying, as it were, of a concrete corpse on the narrow marble table between them. He looked cautiously about him – here was a topic which would not edify any young persons near – and then took up the first point to suggest itself. ‘A Cow-and-Gate poet?’ he asked.

  ‘His verse was simple, wholesome stuff – a sort of food for babes. And exclusively rural in inspiration.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Hetherton had never made proprietary baby foods a subject of study, and he conveyed by this tone awareness of a joke, scrupulous admission that it had failed to reach him, and courteous acknowledgement of the attempt to amuse. ‘Shot dead?’ he further inquired.

  ‘Quite dead. And instantaneously so. You would scarcely have suspected that anything was wrong. I find myself rather haunted by that.’

  Hetherton reached for the menu, as if additional baked beans on toast might have a sedative effect. ‘You exclude,’ he said, ‘the possibility of this unfortunate man’s having taken his own life?’

  ‘I didn’t to begin with.’ Appleby crumbled a roll. ‘It was my first – and flippant – suggestion. That sounds bad. But it is a fact that a forthright violent death sends up my spirits. And homicide makes them soar.’

  Hetherton looked troubled. ‘I can conceive a certain excitement–’

  ‘It’s not exactly that. You would be surprised to know how much of my time is given up to suspecting people in the most indefinite way. Not suspecting people of this or that, but simply suspecting. Sometimes I feel it is the most debasing activity possible to man. Any specific suspicion can come as an enormous relief. You see?’

  ‘I really believe I do.’ Hetherton smiled with pleasure. ‘It is a response of considerable interest from the point of view of ethical theory, is it not?’

  ‘No doubt. But the simple fact is this: when my sergeant told me that Philip Ploss had been murdered I fell into a gamesome mood and insisted that it would prove to be suicide after all. There was no weapon – but then the thing had happened on some sort of tower, presumably in the open air. So I said it was done with a balloon.’

  ‘With a balloon?’ Hetherton’s bewilderment made him lay down his knife and fork with extra care.

  ‘A small, very buoyant, helium-filled balloon. You wait for a da
rk night and a stiff breeze blowing out to sea. Then you go into the open air and shoot yourself – having attached the balloon to the revolver first. The revolver vanishes and no verdict of suicide is possible.’

  ‘Really, I can hardly imagine–’

  Appleby smiled. ‘No more can anyone else. This is just what I made up for the sergeant as we motored down: the local police, you’ll realize, having sent for us pretty quick. I embroidered on the idea readily enough. Our only chance, I said, lay in revolver and balloon being one day cut out of the tummy of a shark. The balloon might prove to have been made in Japan. Investigations would be instituted in Tokyo. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I see.’ Hetherton nodded slowly. It could not be maintained, the nod seemed to say, that the humour Appleby was describing wore or carried well.

  ‘Call it professional callousness. Ploss meant little to me. I had never been moved or even pleased by his verse. Of his life I knew nothing at all. From his death I hoped to get a certain intellectual stimulus. I hoped, that is to say, that there would be a decent element of puzzle to it.’

  Hetherton’s lips moved, presumably to reiterate that he saw. Then he appeared to feel that such a bold claim might be unjustified: insight into the mind of a young man who motored about the country hoping for mysterious deaths ought not to be lightly claimed. ‘You interest me,’ he said carefully.

  ‘And the element of puzzle proved to be there. An obstinate puzzle, too. I’m carrying it about with me now and I’ve put it to you. Who would want to shoot a quiet fellow like that? And yet this element – the intellectual element, you may term it – is not the thing’s main fascination. What I called its haunting quality comes from something else – comes from its power to impose itself as drama.’ Appleby paused and Hetherton saw his eyes light up. ‘Yes; the honest truth is in that. It was like going into a theatre and seeing a curtain – an object insignificant in itself – faintly stir in the dim light. It stirs because the ropes have taken a preliminary strain and it is about to rise. And one knows that on the other side is a great hinterland of drama. That is it. The death of Philip Ploss was like the stirring of such a curtain.’