Appleby at Allington Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Appleby at Allington

  First published in 1968

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1968-2010

  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.

  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.

  ISBN: 0755120779 EAN: 9780755120772

  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.

  Part One

  Son et lumière

  1

  ‘It’s wonderful to have a little peace and quiet for a change,’ Owain Allington said. ‘And particularly when it takes the form of a congenial tête-à-tête.’

  Allington was a handsome man in his late fifties. He cultivated – one had to call it that – a slightly old-world air, and every now and then seemed to remember to produce formal courtesies of this sort. But Sir John Appleby, sitting on the other side of the magnificent fireplace in his host’s library, thought it unnecessary to utter any articulate response to this particular compliment. It struck him as being rather by way of afterthought. Allington looked tired, and perhaps he was regretting not having decided to pass this first tranquil evening in solitude. But he had invited Appleby to dinner – en garçon, since he was a bachelor and since Lady Appleby would not get back from London until next day.

  It had been an excellent dinner, for what that was worth. And Owain Allington, whom Appleby scarcely knew, had proved quite an entertaining companion. He did a little too much of the talking, perhaps, but usually remembered to drop in appropriate appeals for comment or judgement. He possessed, too, odd information on a surprising variety of people. The evening had worn away rapidly, and the hour was now late.

  ‘Of course,’ Allington was saying, ‘I still feel something of a stranger in these parts, even although I have a very tolerable reason for doing nothing of the sort. Certainly I’m still sadly vague about some of my neighbours. Yourself, for instance, my dear Sir John.’ Allington paused on this urbanely formal manner of address. ‘I would rather guess that your people have lived round about here for a good many generations?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’ Appleby spoke without impatience, although he realized that Allington had been producing a mere idle pretence of ignorance. ‘It’s not my part of the world, and I’m not that kind of person. But my wife inherited our present house from an uncle, and we came to live in it when I stopped being a policeman.’

  ‘A policeman? But yes, of course. Scotland Yard. I know all about that.’ Allington didn’t speak particularly convincingly. ‘You must have the devil of a lot of yarns about that sort of thing. Get you to spin some of them one day, I hope. You came up on what might be called the criminal side, I think? Do I express myself oddly? I do look forward to talking a little about it, at some time or other. Criminology’s been quite a thing with me. But about country life, and so on. As I was saying, more or less, I’m a new man myself – even if it’s in a manner of speaking, eh?’

  Appleby, who was finishing a second cigar – and he didn’t really care for smoking two cigars – again said nothing. Outside in the soft summer darkness, an owl hooted – a lonely sort of owl, for it had been the first sound for what seemed hours. Allington Park was pitched very much in a rural solitude.

  Allington Park. The name spoke at once of the sense in which Owain Allington was not a new man. One of his direct forbears, Rupert Allington, had held Allington Castle for King Charles. When Oliver Cromwell had first reduced and then demolished the place – which he did very thoroughly – the ruins and surrounding estate had for some reason passed out of the family. There was, indeed, enough of the castle left to constitute a very respectable picturesque feature in the landscape. It had never been quarried in, one had to suppose, except in the interest of a surreptitiously achieved hovel or pig-sty. And when the Georgian mansion in which Appleby was at present sitting had been built – it had been in the first years of the nineteenth century – a mouldering medieval pile just across one’s lake had been very much something to be preserved. Mr Osborne had preserved it.

  Mr Osborne had been a successful tallow merchant, very wealthy, and laudably anxious to make his way among the gentry. His name mus
t have helped, since it had been rather a respectable one since Queen Elizabeth’s time or thereabout. And Osbornes had been owners of Allington until quite recently. Appleby didn’t know why they had parted with the place. There were still some of them round about – living in reduced circumstances of a not very harrowing sort.

  As for Owain Allington, he had simply turned up and bought the house and estate – in the romantic manner of Warren Hastings (Judith Appleby ironically said) returning to possess himself of his ancestral Daylesford on the strength of a modest fortune picked up in India. Not that Allington had been a nabob. He was some sort of scientist by calling, and Appleby had a notion he had achieved considerable eminence. But science – or perhaps merely a pertinacious application of the scientific mind to the study of the Stock Exchange – had enriched him in what seemed rather a surprising degree. And here he was – established in his ancestral home and as a small landed proprietor. It was – Appleby reflected uncharitably – the successful Englishman’s chosen route to going soft.

  ‘My position in the country, and all that, couldn’t be called equivocal, I suppose.’ Allington spoke as a man amused, and almost as if divining something of Appleby’s thought. ‘A walk round the tombs in the parish church will settle that. The Osbornes, you know, had to build themselves a brand new and extremely Gothic-looking vault for the repose of their bones. In the church itself we take up a lot more room than the congregation does. Crusaders, and all the rest of it. Still, I’ve shoved in, and am a newcomer among all sorts of folk whose great-grandfathers walked at a plough-tail. There’s mild entertainment in it.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Appleby reflected fleetingly on the weird class-consciousness of his countrymen. ‘But I suppose there are duties as well as diversions. The estate must take a certain amount of time, surely. And I gather you’re a magistrate, and do a good deal of entertaining, and so forth. Don’t you regret the time it takes from your real work? You’re a younger man than I am, Allington, by a good way.’ Appleby was conscious of slight challenge in his own tone. He hadn’t really decided whether he cared for his host or not.

  ‘I’ve retreated into a backwater, you mean? It may be so – and I confess, my dear fellow, that I do sometimes find myself a little casting about for something to use my brains on.’ Allington spoke lightly, and with an effect of increasing amusement. ‘But I assure you that even a country gentleman can follow scientific pursuits. And I get a great deal of fun out of quite small projects. Perhaps that’s shameful to confess. But there it is. Do you know? It even quite entertained me to take an active part in rigging up all that rot.’

  ‘The son et lumière?’

  ‘Yes, but praise the Lord it’s over, all the same. I’ll never allow it again, my dear Appleby. Everybody was upset by it, one way or another. Even Rasselas – and he’s of a reposeful nature.’

  Rasselas was a golden Labrador, and he now lay before the small summer fire on a black bearskin rug. He was a well-groomed dog; spun-gold might actually have been his outer integument; one had to suppose that his retrieving days were over, and that he now enjoyed retirement on somewhat the same terms of modest opulence as did his master. And his posture certainly suggested the largest capacity for repose. Contented immobility seemed very much his line. It was hard to believe that Rasselas had really been much disturbed by the entertainment which had lately been going on at Allington.

  ‘For how long did your show run?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘Three weeks. It’s the shortest time it’s economic to set it up for – or at least that’s what they put across on me. True enough, probably, since it’s a surprisingly elaborate affair. One isn’t, of course, bothered with actors and actresses. All that – and a lot of music and battles and bombardments and historical noises in general – comes down canned. It has all been pre-recorded on magnetic tapes, and you make your money simply by playing the blessed things over every night.’

  ‘It’s the lighting that’s rather a business?’

  ‘Lord, yes. Wires and cables all over the place. But interesting, really. It’s into the spectacle that most of the ingenuity goes – and the spectacle simply is the lighting. So they’ve developed no end of tricks. All controlled from one point, too. I’ll show you.’

  ‘You got good audiences?’

  ‘Capacity audiences, except on the two nights that it rained. Chars-à-banc full of tourists – what they call coaches nowadays. And mostly all fixed up in New York and Chicago. That side of the affair – would you believe it? – took over eighteen months to mount. There are all sorts of vexations you mightn’t think about. Insurance, for instance. Wherever all those damned people chose to wander, it seemed I was responsible for any harm that might come to them. Driving their cars into the lake, for instance, or encouraging chunks of the castle to fall on their heads. It cost the moon.’

  ‘I hope it made a profit, all the same?’

  ‘A profit?’ There was momentary suspicion in Allington’s quick glance. ‘Quite a good one, I think. But I didn’t do it for the mun. It goes to District Nurses, and Preservation Trusts, and homes for superannuated huntsmen: that sort of thing. I did it because it seemed expected of me. Not a good motive, I expect you’ll say. New-man stuff again.’

  ‘I’m very sorry not to have seen it.’ Appleby, who deprecated nocturnal entertainments in the open air, remembered that he had let most of the evening pass without producing this civility. ‘There must have been no end of historical associations to draw upon.’

  ‘The whole bag of tricks.’ Allington produced this humorously but with evident satisfaction. ‘Queen Elizabeth slept here, for instance. I went into that rather carefully – and in fact the old girl did. And as for this modern house – well, it seems Winston Churchill once came to lunch in it. Some young Osborne was a pal of his.’

  ‘So the house came in as well as the castle?’

  ‘Now one and now the other – although it was naturally the castle most of the time. They were never both lit up at once. We had the church tower, too, and the twelfth-century dovecot, and this and that in the nearer parts of the park. It wasn’t bad value for ten bob. Only I wish I’d had the wit to cut out the stuff about the treasure. It brought us some damned impertinence straight away, and will probably bring more.’ Allington paused. ‘Can you,’ he asked unexpectedly, ‘hear anything now?’

  Appleby could certainly hear nothing. Even Rasselas seemed to have the art of slumbering without the slightest suggestion of a wheeze. Outside, the late summer night was extraordinarily still. The countryside was enfolded, one might have said, in a kind of soupy silence.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Appleby said. ‘What am I expected to hear?’

  ‘Lord knows. Hoarse whispers, curses, heavy breathing, the thud of sods, the clink of mattocks and spades.’ Allington laughed as he offered this comical catalogue. ‘It’s true enough. You see, I had the script written by a young chap from Oxford, and he was quite sure that buried treasure would go down fearfully well. So there was a passage that was a kind of treasure hunt, with a spot-light prowling here and there in the park, probing into likely places. Coming to rest beneath a mighty oak, for instance, and voices whispering “Is it here, perhaps, that King Charles’ treasure lies?” Pretty silly, that one – for who’d try to bury anything sizeable bang under a great tree? Still, the idea seemed harmless, and the audience enjoyed it. But – believe it or not – we’ve already had people prowling in the small hours with fuddled notions of real treasure-trove. If it goes on, Appleby, I’ll set Rasselas to bite great collops out of them.’

  ‘An excellent plan.’ Appleby stooped down and stroked Rasselas’ ear. Rasselas failed to respond by so much as a twitch. It appeared very doubtful whether he would be much of a performer in the collop-biting line.

  ‘Of course, the local folk wouldn’t behave like that. They’re my own people, in a sense.’ It was quite unaffectedly that Allington produced this feudal reflection. ‘Townees from the audience – and I rather suspect some of t
he technical chaps who set up the show. But at least they clear out tomorrow. I’ve insisted that the whole affair be dismantled and out of the park by noon. That’s because of the fête, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know about the fête.’

  ‘You’ll think I make a circus of the place every day of the year. But tomorrow’s the prescriptive date for our church fête, and I felt they might as well come along and get it over. It’s a very modest affair. House and gardens open, a few stalls with old women selling jam, and the vicar running some sort of gambling hell in a tent. My job is to walk around in a grey bowler hat. Have you a grey bowler, Appleby? If so, do come across, and we’ll walk around together.’

  ‘I’m afraid I only have a grey topper, which wouldn’t be at all the same thing. And I might alarm your vicar, if he knew I was a policeman. But about that treasure, Allington. Do you really suppose there may be anything of the kind buried within or near the castle?’

  ‘Ah!’ For a moment Allington hesitated. He was looking at Rasselas attentively, rather as if expecting the creature to raise its head from the rug and offer an opinion. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. It’s a story told about a good many Cavalier strongholds. And, of course, plenty of people did bury their plate, and so on – if they hadn’t melted it down in their unfortunate monarch’s cause already. But it seems to stand to reason that what got buried was pretty soon dug up again. I certainly haven’t sufficient faith in the story to start hunting round myself.’

  2

  Appleby felt the topic of buried treasure to have exhausted itself. And the hour was growing very late. He had already made one move to depart, and been restrained by his host. He made a mental note to remember in future that Owain Allington was the type that expects conversation into the small hours.