The Secret Vanguard Read online

  Hetherton, mildly surprised, did not fail to notice that his friend was surprised, too. In talk of this sort it was easy to guess, he did not commonly encourage himself. ‘And you say’ – Hetherton had some skill in prompting – ‘that the force of the situation lay in nothing appearing to be wrong?’

  ‘Largely in that. Listen. I motored down on Saturday afternoon. He lived much as one might suppose – a small manor house at Lark, on the slope of the Chilterns. A peaceful place. He was comfortably off but not wealthy, and he had cultivated his garden. Literally and in Marvell’s sense: as if his highest lot to plant the bergamot. And in Voltaire’s sense, too. Discreet cultivation all round. I went into a living-room first to see the doctor and the police down there. It’s interesting. I don’t know if you know his poetry, but it struck me that he must have confined himself within its narrow compass with all the intelligent deliberation of the authentic minor artist. For there was plenty of major art about, and one had the sense that he was on terms with it. There was a refectory table with a local detective-sergeant making notes at one end – and at the other was a Purgatorio open at the thirtieth canto, with Vernon’s commentary beside it. A gramophone – one of those great horned things – was in a corner. He had been playing Opus 131.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hetherton.

  ‘You will feel nothing out of the way in that sort of life – but it’s an unusual setting for violence. There is something moving and mysterious – if you’ll believe me – about a half-smoked cigarette lying beside a murdered tart. When its place is taken by the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio–’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘I lingered in that room. It tempted to rather futile guessing. Reading Dante and writing a sort of higher dairymaid poetry…one seemed to see the man as one who knew the nature of strength – and who never risked the disillusion of finding himself without it. I prowled the room and tried to build him up further. It was possible to fancy a faintly silly streak – or more strictly perhaps the affectation of it. In an extreme I could imagine a dilettante giggle deliberately assumed – defensive mechanisms of that sort. Certainly not a rash or even a resolute man. One would guess that if he kept a diary–’

  ‘Did he keep a diary?’

  Appleby looked at Hetherton’s seriously inquiring face and smiled. ‘You should be an assistant-commissioner; it’s their business to stop gabble in just that way. And the question is pertinent. Unfortunately the answer is unknown. Ploss may have kept a diary and it may – as you shall hear – have been destroyed… But I see that you are all impatience to be conducted to the corpse.’

  Rather as if he took this proposal literally, Hetherton sat abruptly back. The little restaurant had emptied and in place of a babel of talk and the clatter of knives and forks there was only the rumble of traffic outside. ‘Really, my dear Appleby, you have drawn me into very unfamiliar territory – very unfamiliar territory indeed. But I shall certainly not boggle at the body. Indeed, I am inclined to charge you with deftly withholding it in order to whet my interest.’ Hetherton shook his head with a mock solemnity which was intended to make it quite clear that the accusation was facetious. And then his solemnity became genuine. ‘Dear me! I hardly know that I ought to speak of this unfortunate man in such a way.’

  ‘Then let me be thoroughly serious. I mentioned a tower. Actually it proved to be a gazebo at the top of the garden – a large affair, with a sort of sun-room from which there is a magnificent view. Ploss seems to have spent a good deal of his time there. Books were littered about – eighteenth-century memoirs mostly, with slips of paper stuck in them as if he was up to a job of work. I expected Ploss’ brains to be littered about, too. But the thing had been neatly done. I looked at him and it didn’t occur to me that he was dead.’

  Appleby paused. He had embarked on an account of the Ploss affair almost idly, but an odd urgency had been growing on him as he talked. He wanted to recreate at least some shadow of the thing; to share it in some degree with this vague, intelligent scholar who would presently disappear within the recesses of Barry’s portico. It was not often that a case so got on his mind as to need purging in this way.

  ‘I took him for a relation, a lawyer – lord knows what. For he had been shot as he sat. He had been shot directly in the middle of the forehead and a lock of his hair – long, untidy hair – had fallen by some strange chance directly over the wound. That made it uncanny enough. But there was more. I have seen plenty of bodies to which death has come instantaneously, but never one in which there has been visible neither awareness nor effect of death. It was so, however, with Ploss. He wasn’t shot from hiding; the character of the little sun-room makes that impossible. For some fraction of a second at least he must have seen a weapon pointed fatally at his head. But whatever muscular action it was that produced, death had cancelled out. His hands were folded lightly in his lap. His expression perhaps was slightly puzzled – but this, I think, may have been habitual. And then there was his eye…’

  Hetherton shifted on his chair. ‘Do these’ – he hesitated – ‘curious circumstances help you towards – towards a reconstruction of the crime?’

  ‘No.’ Appleby was emphatic. ‘Nothing of that sort. Friend or enemy, stranger or acquaintance: any of these may have stood up before Ploss and fired that revolver. The odd fact of his apparent unawareness tells me nothing in a detective way. It is simply a fortuitous thing that enforces the strangeness of the whole impression. For there he sat with the paraphernalia of his tranquil and secure existence about him, and below lay a countryside utterly at peace in the evening sun. Only up there and with the Chilterns behind us there was a first breath of cold night wind. It blew in like a commentary or a question, and it stirred his hair.’

  There was silence. Hetherton looked thoughtfully at Appleby. ‘And there was something,’ he said presently, ‘about his eye?’

  ‘At a second glance it was, of course, a dead man’s eye. And curiously unfocused. At one moment it would seem as if he were looking at somebody or something across the little glassed-in platform. And the next I would get a very different impression.’ Appleby hesitated. ‘I would see him as looking in that agonal second not at anything on the gazebo, and not at the prospect immediately before it. I would see him’ – Appleby stretched out his hand for the bill – ‘as looking not at that English vista at all; as looking straight over our heads here as we sit and seeing something very far away.’

  Appleby stood up. ‘To which there is only one thing to add. “And this was strange, because it was the middle of the night.” Ploss was shot round midnight on Friday, so these fanciful feelings about his glance are scarcely relevant.’

  Hetherton took a deep breath, rose, produced a florin. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I am quite gripped by the mystery. I wish I could help.’ And, as if at the extravagance of the thought, he smiled his scholar’s smile.

  3: It Had Something to Do with a Poem

  The little Greek restaurant in Coptic Street had opened a miniature fruit-counter in one of its windows; some way beyond a gentlewoman’s tea-shop had changed curtains and perhaps hands. Our private landmarks alter in a companionable way, thought Appleby, reminding us that we are slipping along ourselves. Only the city in its vastness is unchanging – its growth or decay no affair of ours, like the things that happen in geological time. Or is it not so? Across the street a young soldier in private’s uniform was carefully reading what appeared to be an Italian missal in the window of an antiquarian bookshop. Round the corner a group of American tourists stood before the Thackeray Hotel – and people glanced at them in passing, like ornithologists taking note of a diminishing species. Of course restaurants took to trying to market fruit and gentlewomen sold each other the goodwill of tea-shops. Πáντa ρει – things amble along. But might things not at any time begin to move very fast indeed, as fast as the traffic in Great Russell Street, which seemed likely to be fatal to old H
etherton one day…? Appleby took his friend’s arm and steered him across to the gateway of the Museum.

  The air was filled with mild sunshine; a nondescript sprinkling of people – learned, eccentric, dull – ate belated sandwiches on the steps; above them the pigeons manoeuvred from their bases in the colonnades. And Hetherton, pausing between great pillars as a man pauses at a suburban gate, said wistfully: ‘Won’t you come in?’

  Appleby went in. A grey light, cold and pure; sound at once muted and faintly echoing; sightseers moving about with slightly puzzled faces – puzzled chiefly by the obscure sense that it was here and not in any imagined palace of romance that the burden of selfish solicitude might lift. The place was massively timeless; it seemed firmly stayed upon the very pillars of eternity.

  Ahead, past insignificant doors and a primitive cloakroom, lay the great domed library that was the cerebral cortex of England. All around and on many levels stretched the long galleries with their millennial spoils: Brahma and Minerva, Mumbo Jumbo and Kwannon, Bes and Set and all the brutish gods of Nile looking down upon a trickle of idle Londoners in the year of Christ nineteen hundred and thirty-nine. And the bronze and the granite and the quartz, the black basalt and the green slate seemed like bucklers against death, buttresses to an invisible permanence. Get old Hetherton safely from under the snouts of the buses and taxis, inject him into this all-sheltering womb and he was utterly secure until he chose to venture out again. Nothing could happen here… Appleby blinked. It was a delusion – a trick of the spirit of the place such as a brain sparely dieted on milk and baked beans might surely resist. For let a shot be fired in the Balkans or a bomb be dropped on Warsaw, and this adamantine haven would untenant itself, the vases vanishing into wood-wool and the colossi departing amid much heave and shove for hiding places unrevealed. The red granite lion from the temple of Soleb looked permanent enough, had looked so for well over three thousand years. But plenty of monuments not dissimilar were now one with the hot dust of Spain.

  ‘Who would want to shoot a quiet fellow like that?’

  Appleby blinked again. Hetherton had paused by the door of his own room as he uttered the question; very evidently it had been repeating itself persistently in his mind.

  ‘Who would want to shoot Ploss? Lord knows. But bullets do sometimes find quiet fellows. And then one has to discover in what direction they have been not so quiet. Or perhaps quietly nasty – to a woman, a dependant, someone with a secret. But I can’t fit anything of that sort to Ploss.’

  They entered Hetherton’s room and its owner began to clear papers and photographs from a chair. But Appleby prowled restlessly about – presently to halt before a little statuette on a shelf. It was a faience figure from Cnossos, a female form headless and full-breasted, brandishing what appeared to be a snake. ‘Sex,’ said Appleby. ‘Begin there. Ploss was unmarried and he had a sexual life which was trivial and regular. He was of the sort to have seen it as such and to be chary of anything else. And anyone – well – in on that with him had to have the same rational views. Just no room for out-of-hand passions there.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ Hetherton, speaking diffidently, transferred his gaze from the Cnossos figurine to a somewhat faded photogravure of the Hera of Samos. It was a favourite of his and he had possessed it from boyhood; it was an ideal round which a good many of his convictions had crystallized. ‘I suppose not. But I should imagine that, even so, it is a field in which one never can tell.’ He stopped as if struck by a sudden thought. ‘You’ve already made all that a subject of investigation in this case?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Such things make part of our day’s work.’ Appleby smiled wryly. ‘And with the habit and technique of just suspecting all round I can assure you we make pretty good going. But we get nowhere with Ploss along these lines. So, of course, we turn to the notion of blackmail. The fact that the place was searched makes that a reasonably promising approach.’

  ‘Searched?’

  ‘Yes. I said, remember, that one couldn’t be sure he didn’t keep a diary. That is because his house was searched and anything of the sort may have been removed or destroyed. You can guess that something like that is a common feature of cases in which blackmail figures: the blackmailer is silenced and a hunt made at the same time for incriminating documents and the like.’

  ‘It must be very difficult, surely, to ransack a whole house?’

  ‘Ransack isn’t quite the word; it suggests disturbance, and there was nothing of that. Nor was the whole house involved. There had simply been a skilled search – skilled, mark you – of those places in which a man would be likely to leave papers. Not to hide papers, but just to leave them. And it was all simple enough. Ploss had a habit of sitting late sometimes on the gazebo, and then his housekeeper – the only other person sleeping in the place – would go to bed without locking up. To dispose of Ploss and then go indoors and hunt around was not difficult. But it was all very efficiently done.’ Appleby, again pausing before the Cnossos statuette, stared at it as a man might stare at a blank wall. ‘What I should be tempted to call a sheer waste of first-class technique.’

  Hetherton had sat down at an untidy desk and printed ‘PHILIP PLOSS’ in capital letters on a scribbling pad. He was now looking at this with a disconcerted expression. ‘The search you describe,’ he said, ‘–I think I see the point. If Ploss held a valuable or incriminating document he would be likely to keep it in some place of concealment or security. Or at least another person could not be sure that he would not do so. But his search would seem to have been directed towards something which Ploss saw no reason to stow away.’

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘Put it this way: the search was made because Ploss possessed – or because there was a chance that he possessed – some paper or record or object the value or significance of which was unknown to him.’

  Appleby nodded – with a faint smile that made Hetherton suddenly chuckle. ‘My dear Appleby, you must not laugh at my first steps in criminal investigation. We must all walk before we can run.’ He chuckled a second time. ‘There – it sounds as if I wanted to run, does it not? And perhaps I do. You have suddenly made me feel that this is a dull old place.’ Again he stared in obscure disquiet at his scribbling pad. ‘I feel that I want to know the truth about this Ploss. Not for the sake of hunting down a criminal – I fear I would shrink from that – but just for the sake of knowing.’ And Hetherton, thus unconsciously enunciating the central faith of the dull old place, began to print ‘PHILIP PLOSS’ once more. ‘Tell me how the professionals set about the task.’

  ‘Laboriously and without inspiration. We inquire into the man’s way of life, and particularly into any changes which it may recently have undergone. But on Ploss we get almost nothing that way. Recently he had been coming rather more frequently up to town. And staying longer. And his housekeeper seems to feel that he was using his books in rather a different fashion. Instead of taking down a book and reading it through he would be going from book to book – or have several open before him at the same time. You will remember the eighteenth-century memoirs I noticed in the gazebo. It seems reasonable to conclude–’

  With an effect of great unexpectedness Hetherton tapped his desk with a forefinger. From a person of his habits the interruption was positively brusque. Appleby stopped and stared.

  ‘My dear fellow, you must forgive me.’ Hetherton was most apologetic. ‘Something had just come into my head. Bishop Sweetapple.’

  ‘Bishop Sweetapple?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Notice how I have been printing Ploss’ name on this pad. These small capital letters: what would you say they suggest?’

  Appleby glanced at the pad. ‘The signature to a letter,’ he said without hesitation, ‘as printed in a newspaper or possibly a book.’

  ‘Exactly. In fact I have been groping unconsciously after something recently seen. And that was it. A letter from Ploss
– probably in the Literary Supplement – asking for documents and so on concerning Bishop Sweetapple. Ploss was writing a book.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘I’m afraid his lordship is unknown to me.’

  ‘Sweetapple was an undistinguished Erastian divine with literary tastes, a friend of Chesterfield’s and a contributor to the World – that sort of thing. I fear I know very little about him. No doubt a biography is wanted.’ Hetherton paused. ‘By workers in that field,’ he qualified cautiously.

  ‘No doubt. But it seems hardly likely that Ploss was shot because hot on the traces of Sweetapple.’

  Hetherton looked quite dashed. ‘I cannot but agree with you. Only–’ He frowned. ‘I have a notion that there is something else in my head.’ He glanced again at the scribbling pad. ‘That I recently noticed Ploss’ name in some other connection. Quite recently… Do you know, I think it was something about a poem?’

  ‘A poem?’

  Hetherton sighed. ‘How irrelevant this is!’ He tore off the sheet of scribbling paper and crumpled it up. ‘Yes,’ he said – and he spoke at once dismissively and with conviction – ‘it was something to do with a poem.’

  4: Sheila Grant Listens to Poetry

  The train stopped – as it sometimes did – on the middle of the Forth Bridge. It was then that the uncommunicative man spoke grudgingly from his corner. ‘Poetry?’ he said.