A Connoisseur's Case Read online

  ‘His inquiries about the poor man Crabtree have brought him to the Jolly Leggers?’

  ‘Well, I think that is what he is discussing now. He is interested in somebody who was staying there last night.’

  ‘I see. I suppose that no stone must be left unturned.’

  ‘Just that.’ Judith was amused by this well-worn metaphor. ‘All sorts of things can lurk under stones.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. And some of them will be far from pretty.’

  Judith was silent. There had been something in Mrs Coulson’s voice which she found difficult to know how to respond to.

  ‘I wonder whether it has occurred to Sir John,’ Mrs Coulson said, ‘that Hollywood may be in danger too?’

  ‘Hollywood – your butler – in danger?’ This placid if slightly subterraneous lady, Judith was reflecting, could scarcely have uttered more absolutely mysterious words.

  ‘Crabtree came back to Scroop out of the past.’ Mrs Coulson had paused at the entrance to the churchyard, and her gaze was travelling slowly over its crumbling evidences of mortality. ‘You would agree that the essence of his situation lay in that?’

  ‘I suppose it did.’

  ‘He was bringing something out of the past. And therefore somebody killed him. I have been thinking about it, Lady Appleby, and that is how it seems to me.’

  ‘I can see it as a possibility. But I don’t understand how you relate to it the notion of Hollywood’s being in danger.’

  ‘He is the only other person with any direct knowledge of Scroop in Sara Coulson’s time.’

  ‘Yes, I see. But Hollywood has been available for killing for a long time. And nobody has killed him yet.’

  Mrs Coulson nodded slowly. The gesture might have been an acknowledgement that her line of thought had been not precisely rational. Or it might have been a nod directed, so to speak, to some further inward and unspoken process of her own mind. And she moved forward again towards the church porch.

  ‘As you see,’ she said, ‘there is a parvis. It is very small – yet hardly smaller than the church itself. The church at Upper Scroop is larger, but I am very fond of this one. You will see a little Saxon work at the east end.’

  They walked round the church. Mrs Coulson continued the competent talk of a squire’s lady who has done some appropriate homework in local archaeology. But she had made one very odd remark. And Judith felt a mounting conviction that she was going to make others.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ Mrs Coulson held open a roughly constructed wire door – intended, one supposed, to discourage sheep, cows and others of the brute creation from frequenting the church porch. There were the usual notices and exhortations, including an uncertainly sketched barometer or thermometer in red ink, designed to impress upon the faithful how much they yet had to subscribe if the church roof was not to fall down on them.

  ‘Of course, Bertram is responsible for the chancel,’ Mrs Coulson said, studying this. ‘The chancel is always the responsibility of the patron of a living. And Bertram doubles any sum subscribed for the upkeep of the rest of the fabric. He is very keen on everything of that sort.’

  ‘He is a strong churchman?’

  ‘I hardly think it can be called that.’ The faint irony occasionally to be distinguished in Mrs Coulson’s voice was sounding. ‘He seems to have no religious convictions. But he always goes to church. And likes to see a good turnout, as he calls it, of the village people.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ Judith realized, more vividly than before, that the woman beside her harboured rather a large impatience with her husband’s conception of his place in society.

  They entered the little church and walked round it. There wasn’t a great deal upon which to pause until they reached the north transept, which was screened off by some worm-eaten oak.

  ‘This is the tomb,’ Mrs Coulson said. ‘Don’t you like it? The Crabtree Tomb.’

  So Judith examined the Crabtree Tomb – thinking, as she did so, that this odd lady had certainly brought off another surprise. Sir William Crabtree lay supine in armour and his wife lay at his side. Beneath them, and in bas-relief, a line of Crabtree sons face a line of Crabtree daughters, all in prayer.

  ‘So the Crabtrees were people of consideration long ago.’ Judith turned to Mrs Coulson. ‘I felt Seth to be a Thomas Hardy character, but it didn’t occur to me that he might be first cousin to Tess. Here’s where a kind of fineness in him came from.’

  ‘I’m sure Bertram would think so.’ The irony was operative again. ‘But I suspect that the Crabtrees have been very simple folk for generations, Lady Appleby. There may be something in blue blood. I don’t know. But I doubt whether it can be put in cold storage.’

  ‘So do I. But a clever boy, a sensitive boy, bred in a cottage, may have his whole life conditioned by knowing that his name is on a tomb like this. When he has become aware of it, he may see the gentry with a different eye.’

  ‘And see their wives with a different eye, too.’

  Judith had a sudden feeling – perhaps to the credit of her own ancestry – that for the purposes of this sort of conversation it might be seemly to get out of God’s blessing and into the warm sun. Mrs Coulson, however, had sat down in a pew.

  ‘I never saw this man Crabtree,’ she said. ‘You saw him once.’

  ‘Twice. Once living and once dead.’

  ‘And both occasions were only yesterday. I try to think how he must have appeared to you. As an English villager, I suppose, with some overlay of American democratic assurance.’

  ‘Not in the least.’ Judith, seeing there was no help for it, sat down in the pew in front of Mrs Coulson, and turned round to speak to her. ‘He seemed to me to have taken no colour from his recent years. He was a villager, as you call it, with something else added. I’m not quite sure what. Talent, feeling, sensibility: that was my idea. But I have to admit that my husband felt there was some strain of disingenuous-ness or concealment in him as well.’

  ‘Something – wicked?’ Mrs Coulson hesitated. ‘A man who might make unscrupulous use of – well, of something he had stumbled on?’

  Judith knew that, for a fraction of a second, she had had hard work not to stare.

  ‘I felt nothing like that,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure that he hadn’t come back to something he was very far from telling us about.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Mrs Coulson was eager. ‘Something out of the past. And it must be stopped. That is the important thing.’

  ‘But it has been stopped, has it not?’ Judith made this point reasonably. ‘Somebody has killed Crabtree. Do you think that somebody ought to kill Hollywood as well?’

  ‘There is something mysterious about Hollywood. I discovered that today. It would not surprise me if somebody killed him. I believe somebody will. He knows too much.’

  ‘About the past? Does he know something about the present too?’

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t think I greatly mind about the present. Or do I? You see, Lady Appleby, that I am very confused. But I cannot believe that any revelation about the present can hurt anybody that – that I really love. I hope that your husband will discover everything about the present that there is to discover, and that the mystery of Crabtree’s death will be sufficiently explained as a result. I hope that we shall not have to have the whole past spread out before us.’

  ‘Mrs Coulson, this seems to me to be a very strange conversation that we are having. I just don’t know where to begin trying to make sense of it. About Hollywood, for instance. You say that you discovered something mysterious about him today. What could that have been?’

  ‘The alibi, of course. I am sure your husband didn’t believe it. I am sure he saw how surprised I was.’

  ‘If you were surprised, I have no doubt that John detected the fact. But I still don’t understand you.’

  ‘Hollywood protected me. He said that I was checking linen with him. It wasn’t true.’

  ‘I see. But you didn’t say so at the time? You accepted what you ca
ll his protection?’

  ‘I had reason to.’

  ‘And he must have known that?’

  ‘He must. He knows a great deal.’

  ‘But why should he do this?’

  ‘I have no idea, Lady Appleby. But I think he is a deep man.’

  ‘Perhaps he is. But there doesn’t seem to me to be anything particularly deep in the action of Hollywood’s that we are discussing. His protecting you resulted in your protecting him. He knew that you would be grateful for an alibi, and he wanted one himself. That may, or may not, be sinister. In the circumstances, after all, anybody would want an alibi. But there is the fact of the matter. On the terrace of Scroop House, and between the pouring of a glass of Madeira and the handing of a piece of cake, you and your husband’s butler cooked up what is undoubtedly a piece of criminal deception between you. I hadn’t a notion of it. But you’re quite right in supposing it unlikely that it eluded my husband. For anything of the sort, John has pretty well developed a sixth sense. It was rash of you – by which I mean the two of you.’

  If this brisk speech surprised Judith as she uttered it, there was no appearance of its correspondingly surprising Mrs Coulson. When the mistress of Scroop House spoke, it was with undiminished composure.

  ‘It was a shock,’ she said. ‘I mean, my saying nothing. I mean, my not denying Hollywood’s story on the instant. But I was silent. Or did I give an actual assent? Perhaps I did. Anyway, my conduct showed me where I had got to. It will scarcely surprise you that I had to go and lie down. And, you see, I was in great fear. Perhaps I am still, although reassurance has been given me. I don’t know.’

  Judith thought for a moment.

  ‘You felt so – so unwell,’ she said, ‘that you went to see your doctor? Dr West is your doctor?’

  ‘Dr West is my doctor.’ Mrs Coulson raised her chin. She looked straight up the nave of the little church as if confronting whatever the vista thus revealed suggested. ‘And he is my lover too.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ Judith had spoken quickly – for she felt that the effect of a shocked silence must definitely not succeed upon what she had just heard. But at least she was puzzled. Mrs Coulson was not terribly bright. But she was a generous sort of woman and nobody could despise her. ‘But what I don’t see is why you haven’t gone away with him.’

  Mrs Coulson hesitated.

  ‘It has been very recent. A matter of weeks.’

  ‘I still don’t see why you haven’t gone away with him.’

  ‘It is not possible. It is a matter of his profession. I am Brian’s patient at this moment. It would ruin him.’

  ‘Yes, that makes sense, of course. But doesn’t that mean – well, a hopeless mess?’

  ‘It does.’ This time Mrs Coulson spoke so very composedly that Judith realized she might at any moment abruptly break down. ‘Even without – this.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘The old man coming into the boathouse.’

  ‘Mrs Coulson!’ Despite her previous speculations, Judith was horrified now. ‘Crabtree?’

  ‘Yes. And I simply fled. Through the park. Leaving Brian. It was shameful. I mean the flight. And Brian says he simply hurried away too. But I cannot be quite certain. He is a very passionate man.’ Mrs Coulson paused, so that Judith had a grotesque sense that this was something that the unfortunate woman before her would have liked to be more sure of. ‘And he was in the power of this horrible intruder.’

  ‘But that is nonsense, surely. You might suppose so, in a mood of panic. But Dr West must be a man of the world, who can quickly assess the limits of such a disaster. He would see that, even if this intruder were unscrupulous and malign, any story he could tell would be a mere unsupported slander.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Mrs Coulson spoke dully now. ‘But it is very terrible. And – and disenchanting.’

  Judith was silent for a moment, wondering whether there was anything she might venture to say. ‘Mrs Coulson, you won’t be offended if I tell you how I see this? I see it as some sort of muddle. I think that, if Crabtree hadn’t turned up and got killed, it would presently have – well, cleared itself up. Been seen, I mean, as some sort of mistake – as just no go. Not without a great deal of pain, which perhaps you’d have had to share with your husband. I can’t say. But something one leaves behind, even if one doesn’t forget about. Am I being very impertinent?’

  ‘You are being kind. And truthful. What you say, I know.’ Mrs Coulson got this out with a queer dignity. When she spoke again, it was with a slight effect of changing the subject. ‘Sometimes I think there is a curse on Scroop House. Or at least on its women. Mrs Binns – and now me.’

  ‘I understand what you mean.’ Judith remembered her Uncle Julius’ flat statement that Mrs Binns had been an immoral woman; she remembered how – to his subsequent regret – he had hinted that the younger Mrs Coulson had at least the makings of one. And there could be no doubt – she decided – that something of the miserable tragicomedy just recounted had come under his observation during some ramble on the previous afternoon.

  ‘Mrs Binns,’ she asked, ‘was rather an unsatisfactory person?’

  ‘It is not for me to sit in judgement on her, Lady Appleby. And I never quite understood the matter. When she went away, it was because of some scandal which Bertram must have known of. But he never explained it to me. Whatever it was, Bertram must have judged it a very terrible thing to have happened at Scroop. Because it was certainly the occasion of his asking Mr Binns to leave.’

  ‘In fact, Mrs Coulson, poor Mr Binns lost his house because he had lost his wife?’

  ‘It sounds very absurd. But then, as you have seen, my husband is a little absurd about Scroop. He would like it all to be as in the former Mrs Coulson’s time. He keeps everything about the place, you know, precisely as it was then – and, no doubt, he would like me to be a Sara Coulson myself. So anything like a bad kind of life there was something he couldn’t bear the thought of. And the result was that out the Binnses went and in we came. I had no say in the matter. Only I did insist that the Binns children should come to us whenever they wanted to.’

  ‘Do you know whether Mrs Binns is still alive?’

  ‘I am almost sure that she is dead. But, you see, nobody ever mentions her.’

  ‘Not even her children in the most casual way?’

  ‘Not even her children. All I have heard is hints dropped among the local people. And, even there, of course, I have never encouraged gossip. What I seem to have gathered is that Mrs Binns had many affairs – but had one particularly disgraceful one of quite long standing. Her husband discovered about it and she vanished. Perhaps she joined the – the guilty party.’

  ‘I see.’ The subject didn’t seem to Judith one which, in the circumstances, could decently be carried further.

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Coulson said, ‘Hollywood must know.’

  ‘Hollywood?’ Judith was startled – partly, perhaps, because she was aware of Tarbox’s description of his confrère at Scroop.

  ‘As I said, Hollywood is like Crabtree. And he has been in a position to know everything. I keep wondering – haven’t I said this? – if perhaps he knows something so dangerous that he is in danger himself.’

  14

  Mrs Coulson, it seemed, had a car in the village, and the two women parted at the gate of the churchyard. Judith walked back to the inn. Of what she had learnt in this strange interview, some part was not entirely new – or at least not entirely unsuspected. Of the assignation in the boathouse, and of Crabtree’s coming upon it, John had already built up a conjectural picture. Perhaps, too, John had guessed at Dr West as the man involved. And – with equal accuracy, no doubt – John had provided Uncle Julius with his place in the margin of the episode.

  That Uncle Julius had himself stepped out of that margin to take an indignant and fatal swipe at Crabtree was plainly absurd. If it was this unfortunate discovery in the boathouse that had led to the old man’s death, then it could only be West hi
mself who was the murderer. And West would have a real motive. Mrs Coulson was his patient. If the fact of the liaison got abroad, the result would not be scandal merely but professional ruin as well.

  In theory, of course, the murder might have been committed by Mrs Coulson upon the identical motive. The detected lovers appeared to have fled severally and in confusion; neither could be certain of the other’s subsequent conduct; each could only reassure the other with protestations of innocence. At least, it must be called a very miserable state of affairs.

  Mrs Coulson had said a number of unaccountable things – so many, that Judith felt she ought to count them over in her head now, as an insurance against omitting something important when she presently made a report to John. But when she did run over the conversation in this way, the result was curiously unsatisfactory. She seemed to have taken account of everything, yet there was something she hadn’t got round to. Some one thing that Mrs Coulson had said was incompatible with some other thing that Judith positively knew. That was it. Perhaps the point was important, and perhaps it was not. But to grope vainly for it was infuriating. And, in the circumstances, there was only one safe course to adopt. She must try to give John not a synopsis but a verbatim account of the interview. Which meant doing the job at once, while Mrs Coulson’s words were fresh in her memory.

  But John was not to be found. Nor, for that matter, was Alfred Binns. The little lounge of the Jolly Leggers was deserted. Judith went out again and strolled to the canal. There was nobody in sight on the towpath. John, she decided, must have made some foray of his own into Nether Scroop, and she had missed him. Her best plan was now to wait for him where she was.

  She walked towards the tunnel, feeling that its entrance was worth taking another look at. She studied the stonework. She peered inside – but the sun was now in the west and gave no help in distinguishing more than a couple of yards of the interior. She was just about to turn away, when a voice spoke seemingly from the depths of the earth.

  ‘Oh, good. Just take a look round – will you? – for Channing-Kennedy.’