Appleby's Other Story Page 2

  2

  One must look on the bright side, Appleby told himself as he stepped into the hall of Elvedon Court. He had been entertaining a notion – perhaps baseless, yet supported by a good deal of experience – that there had existed, as it were, wheels within the innocent wheels of Tommy Pride’s car; that the morning’s expedition had owned a basis in some desire expressed by the late Maurice Tytherton to confabulate with the country’s acknowledged authority on art robberies. The man hadn’t really reconciled himself to the loss of whatever had been filched from him; he had heard of Appleby as a friend of Pride’s; and he had taken it into his head that here was a chance of getting a fresh and better-directed hunt started. Some nonsense like that. However, Tytherton was now the late Tytherton – as his butler had with a kind of mournful satisfaction announced. Perhaps he would recover his missing pictures in heaven. It was said to be a well-ordered place; perhaps an efficient lost property bureau operated there.

  If Appleby was conscious of disapproving of this profane fancy in himself, the reason was possibly that he had suddenly become aware of being in the presence of a clergyman. He had firmly sat down in an unobtrusive corner of the hall, and let Pride go about his inquiries on his own. The statistical probability was that the proprietor of Elvedon had made away with himself. It is a good deal more common to contrive that, or even to contrive a sheer imbecile accident with a lethal weapon, than it is to get oneself murdered. Anyway, in whatever fashion Tytherton had died, Appleby felt not the slightest disposition to get involved in the matter. So down he had sat. And now here was a parson, showing some inclination to converse. Appleby stood up.

  ‘Sir John Appleby?’ the parson said.

  ‘Yes. I came over with Colonel Pride to call on Mr Tytherton – a man I’d never met.’

  ‘Ah, yes. May I introduce myself? My name is Voysey, and I am the vicar here.’

  ‘How do you do.’ As Appleby produced this civil formula (with the austerely non-interrogative inflexion which English convention decrees) he noted a look of sharp appraisal on the part of his reverend interlocutor. He was being sized up. The fact struck him as so odd that he made, as it were, a somewhat random grab at appropriate platitude. ‘This,’ Appleby ventured, ‘is a very sad business.’

  ‘For the bereaved persons – if there are genuinely any such – that is undoubtedly so. Of course it is my professional duty to adduce certain countervailing considerations. My dear Sir John, let us sit down.’

  Appleby sat down. He sat down almost abruptly. This was because of a feeling – a positively sinister feeling, familiar to him from the past – that the elderly cleric interested him. He found himself trying to think up some inoffensive formula of disengagement. For he did not propose to let his mind so much as begin to operate on whatever commonplace thing – crime or mere fatality – had befallen at Elvedon Court. Perhaps, he thought, he could firmly start a conversation on the weather. But Mr Voysey prevented him.

  ‘A sad business, no doubt. And apparently a bad one into the bargain. But that would not be my own first and spontaneous characterization of the affair.’

  ‘Indeed?’ It occurred to Appleby to wonder whether in his pulpit Mr Voysey indulged himself in this manner of address. If so, he must impress rather than enlighten the more rustic part of his congregation. ‘Then how do you view it?’

  ‘As a pretty kettle of fish, my dear sir.’ Mr Voysey appeared to enjoy his abrupt change to a colloquial note. ‘And what will happen, I ask myself, when the police take the lid off? What, let us say, will be the resulting smell? A very fish-like smell, of course. Conceivably, a variety of ancient fish-like smells. And will they fix on the right one? I am a little worried about that. I could almost wish they should not prise the lid off at all. And perhaps they won’t. It has not, of course, been my business to take much note of them, but circumspection strikes me as their chief anxiety.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand you.’ Appleby had frowned. ‘Do you mean that the police are dragging their feet?’

  ‘Something of the sort was how I felt about them when there was an odd business of stolen or missing pictures a couple of years ago. Might one call them respecters of persons? I should judge the general air of this place to slow them down a little.’

  ‘Colonel Pride will cut through anything of that sort.’

  ‘It is to be hoped so. Or perhaps you will.’

  ‘I have nothing whatever to do with the matter.’ Appleby was looking at Mr Voysey in astonishment. ‘I suppose you may have heard of me, and be imagining I am still on an active list. I am not. And, even if I were, such an affair as this wouldn’t remotely come my way. My presence here is totally fortuitous.’

  ‘Your reputation is known to me, I confess. But perhaps, Sir John, I am under a misapprehension as to why Colonel Pride and yourself have arrived together, hard upon this grim news.’

  ‘I think you are. When we arrived at Elvedon just now, neither Pride nor I had a notion of Tytherton’s being dead. Haven’t I made that clear to you already, Mr Voysey? Quite literally, we came to pay a call.’

  ‘I see, I see. But at least Pride is now the responsible man. And if he does interest you in the mystery, after all–’

  ‘The mystery?’

  ‘I think it will certainly turn out to be that, Sir John. If he does interest you in it, I shall be relieved. I don’t know that I greatly care for these people.’ Voysey made a gesture as if to embrace Elvedon Court at large. ‘But they are in my care, are they not? In a pastoral sense, that is.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘And I would not like to see some miscarriage of justice befall.’

  ‘You have positive reason to fear something of the kind?’

  ‘It is like this, Sir John.’ Voysey paused, as if to collect himself. If there was something mildly eccentric about him, he seemed nevertheless entirely serious. ‘They are a curious crowd. Some of their relations would have to be described, I fear, as not wholly edifying.’

  ‘The household here at Elvedon?’

  ‘That – and some of their acquaintance. My fear is that the local police will simply seize upon whatever happens to be the first thing to turn up, and perhaps pursue it to the exclusion of so much as noticing others.’

  ‘I think they can be relied upon to take a pretty comprehensive view. Police are famous, Mr Voysey, for leaving no avenues unexplored.’

  ‘It may be so. But take, for instance, Mark.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Mark Tytherton, the dead man’s son, and his heir.’

  ‘Who lives in Argentina, and never visits England?’

  ‘Quite so. I perceive you have already been making inquiries.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind, sir.’ Appleby was annoyed. ‘Pride has merely given me some account of the family as we drove over.’

  ‘Ah, to be sure. But my point is the possibly prejudicial character of the coincidence of Maurice Tytherton’s death with his son turning up at long last. For he has turned up. And that’s not all. But perhaps, Sir John, you judge me importunate – that I am unwarrantably obtruding these matters upon you?’

  ‘It would be uncommonly hard to say that you were not. But, having got so far, we’d better go on. Just where has Mark Tytherton turned up, and what do you mean by speaking of his return as “not all”?’

  ‘I mean the clandestine character of the thing. A couple of days ago I simply came upon him in the park. My identification of him was most positive, but he was aware of me only as a passer-by. I have since made discreet inquiries, and know that he has not shown up at the house.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby paused, and looked hard at the vicar. ‘Well, that is information which you must give to the officers in charge of the present inquiry.’

  ‘I am afraid you are right.’ Voysey paused in his turn. ‘If I didn’t know it w
as my duty to tell them, it is improbable I should be telling you. And I hope I have made my general position clear.’

  ‘What I think you are telling me is this: the situation here at Elvedon is such that any one of quite a variety of causes may lie behind its owner’s violent death, and that they should all be investigated before any conclusion is arrived at. In particular, we shouldn’t be too impressed by what sounds a very odd piece of behaviour on the part of his son. Would you describe yourself, sir, as having a liking for Mark Tytherton?’

  ‘As you already know, neither I nor anyone else here has an opportunity of forming an opinion of him over rather a long period of time. But, for what it is worth, I am afraid the answer is no.’

  ‘I see. Is there, in fact, anybody here for whom you feel your sympathies enlisted?’

  ‘Let me first give you, Sir John, what you may regard as the proper parsonical reply. I hope to feel a fully human sympathy for all with whom I am brought in contact. Apart from that…well, let me put it another way. At Elvedon I have no axe to grind. But I am very glad that you have asked me a question. It augurs well.’

  ‘I must really insist–’

  ‘And I shall always do my best to answer any others. But now’ – and the vicar gave Appleby a faintly ironic glance – ‘I must be off about my true business of visiting the good poor. My vicarage, by the way, is no more than a couple of hundred yards off, beyond our late friend’s kitchen gardens. Good morning to you.’

  Appleby endeavoured to relax again. It was true, he reflected, that he had asked a question. In fact he had asked several questions. But there was no need to regard himself as having thus got on a slippery slope. The Reverend Mr Voysey, so oddly and insistently communicative, had taken him unawares and given his professional curiosity a nudge. There was no denying that. But it ought not to be really difficult to coax it to sleep again.

  He got up and strolled round the hall, which rose to a domed roof with a lantern at a great height above. The floor was laid with black and white marble, and between engaged columns on the walls hung uninteresting portraits of prosperous persons by Herkomer and other fashionable painters of the later nineteenth century. These presumably represented the Tythertons making, as it were, an immediate and frank avowal of the period of their own rise to consequence. Nobody would want to walk off with square yards of that sort of canvas, so presumably the deceased Maurice Tytherton’s major treasures (or what remained of them after the more or less recent robbery) were hung somewhere else in the house. There must certainly be plenty of room for them.

  There wasn’t a soul in evidence – except that Appleby could see that a police constable had now been stationed outside the front door. There wasn’t even a murmur of talk. Silence is of course appropriate to a household in mourning, but from somewhere one might expect to hear at least voices briefly engaged, or an opening or shutting door. Nothing of the kind. Yet there must surely be a substantial number of people around. Servants, for example. The personage who had admitted Pride and himself to the mansion wasn’t the sort who consents, even in the nineteen-seventies, to getting along without a sizeable squad of underlings. But there wasn’t so much as the scurry of an apron. Whatever was going on, was going on at a remove from these central splendours amid which Appleby had islanded himself.

  It was true that the household itself, as Pride had sketched it, wasn’t a large one. There was the second Mrs Tytherton, now a widow, with whom Mr Voysey had presumably been closeted. There was perhaps a nephew – who was said to come and go. There was a secretary. Apart from the possibility of house guests – always to be reckoned with in a place running on this scale – that was it. Except, of course, for the enigmatically non-resident Mark.

  Appleby paused, frowning, in front of a Lawrence. It represented a whiskered gentleman in broadcloth, who was pointing a quill pen at an open ledger in a manner reminiscent of a Field Marshal pointing with his baton at a map. Lawrence hadn’t thought much of this commission, and had made a flashy job of it. The sitter was perhaps the original, the first mentionable, Tytherton. Appleby moved on. Perhaps Mark Tytherton, more or less lurking in a shrubbery, was to be, correspondingly, the last of the line.

  A very odd yarn – that of Voysey’s. The long-lost, bad-hat heir returns in secret to the neighbourhood of his ancestral home, and a horrid murder succeeds. When you were handed a melodramatic set-up like that, Appleby told himself, it was invariably rubbish. One could say of it, as in the curtain-line of Ibsen’s play, that people don’t do such things.

  Not that they don’t do other things which are a great deal odder. He had seen much that was bizarre in his time. But he hadn’t seen much that was bizarre lately… Quite conceivably, the sudden end of Maurice Tytherton might be at least not a simple affair. That had really been the burden of the Reverend Mr Voysey’s discourse: that odd and intricate relationships were the order of the day at Elvedon Court, and that Tytherton’s decease might well beckon an inquiring mind into them.

  With a movement almost too abrupt to be either aesthetically decorous or physically safe when walking this marble sea, Appleby turned away from Sir Thomas Lawrence’s negligent and condescending daub, and sought the open air. It had been a mistake to enter this confounded house with Tommy Pride; his presence was otiose, anomalous, and out of time. He was a comfortably retired man. He would withdraw to Elvedon’s nearer policies, and be comfortably retired there. Tommy Pride could come and bellow for him – or set his cops hunting him – when it was time to go away.

  The constable beneath the portico jerked to attention, and saluted Appleby with a rigidity that could not have been exceeded had the visitor been the Monarch and her Consort rolled into one. Word, in fact, had got round. The Chief Constable himself had arrived – and with him he had brought John Appleby.

  Perhaps, Appleby thought, there was a maze or a grotto or an abandoned ice-house – some nook where (like Mark Tytherton of Argentina) he could lurk. If he got himself mixed up in the death of this wealthy and obscure merchant banker, his grandchildren would echo their parents’ affectionate laughter. He was as much on the shelf as that.

  He walked down the stately steps, consciously resisting the undignified scamper of a fugitive. The July day was gorgeous, but now uncommonly hot. He walked across a gravel sweep, through an archway in a high wall, and into a formal garden beyond which lay an expanse of woodland apparently traversed by winding paths. It would be pleasantly cool in there, he thought, and made his way to it. Within minutes Elvedon had vanished, hidden behind stately beech trees and agreeably random hazel thickets. So that was that. He would drop Maurice and Mark Tytherton, and think of something else.

  He rounded a bend and found himself in a small glade. In the middle of it, on a fallen trunk, a man was sitting, seemingly lost in profound reflection. For a moment Appleby thought that this might be the mysterious Mark. Then he saw it couldn’t be – simply because it was somebody he knew very well.

  ‘Good morning,’ Appleby said dryly.

  3

  It would be theatrical to declare that, very suddenly, the die was cast. But Appleby certainly felt himself, as he eyed the man called Egon Raffaello, moving perceptibly nearer to the life and death of Maurice Tytherton. The uninteresting story of some theft or burglary which had resulted in the loss of a number of not-all-that important pictures: this had instantly turned, as it were, three-dimensional. A curtain with some conventional scene depicted on it – a stately home appropriately surrounded by gardens and park – had unexpectedly lifted. And what stood revealed was a solid set, handsomely stage-carpentered, which (to hold the metaphor) was irresistibly beckoning Sir John Appleby to step across the footlights and take up a familiar role.

  ‘Oh, good morning,’ Raffaello said. He had jumped to his feet and was still uncertainly poised on them – much as if not wholly without the thought of taking to his heels. But his voice was steady enough. ‘How curious, m
y dear Commander, that we should meet at Elvedon. But I am forgetting. Not Commander. Sir John. I think, in fact, you run the whole show? I congratulate you.’

  ‘Thank you. But I have retired. It’s some time – is it not? – since we effectively met. Perhaps you will allow me to say that I have continued to follow your career as well as a secluded countryman can. A compulsive interest attaches to a charmed life, don’t you think?’ With the effect of one owning a good deal of leisure, Appleby sat down on the tree trunk from which Raffaello had started. ‘Do you know that after the Nessfield affair I thought they had you? But not a bit of it. Here you are, never having had to listen to a judge’s hard opinion of you in your life. So I congratulate you.’

  ‘You can’t be said to be turning civil, Appleby. I fear a morose and acrid dotage is ahead of you. What you have just been saying, by the way, if heard by witnesses, would probably be actionable. And I should be in quite a strong position to sue. No doubt I am regarded as what is called a keen business man. But no art dealer could stay in business without being that. The fact is, I am enormously respectable.’

  ‘You are most assuredly nothing of the kind. In fact, no adequately informed person would much want to have dealings with you – except, perhaps, for purposes of an irregular sort. So I find your presence at Elvedon interesting. I take it you are staying in the house?’

  ‘Has some local policeman decided to send you round asking questions? But yes – I have been staying with Maurice Tytherton.’

  ‘And his death has disconcerted you?’

  ‘Obviously. We are all – the small house party here – very much upset. When a sudden death occurs, it seems natural to express proper condolences, and then pack up and go. But the police have asked us all to stay till tomorrow. And some of us may have to return for the inquest. Rather a bore, that. But my anxiety to assist the law is, of course, almost celebrated. I’m even perfectly willing to assist you – who may be described as the law in carpet slippers.’