The Daffodil Affair Page 3

  ‘It was just then that the young fellow brought the port. “Well, ma,” ’e says, “picked a winner? And shall I bring the cigars?” “Young man,” I says, “I know my place, and ’opes that others does the same.” So ’e went away and I listens again.’ Mrs Fiddock paused. ‘But what I ’eard this time,’ she said dramatically, ‘I can scarcely bring myself to let pass these ’ere lips.’

  Mrs Thorr leant forward on her chair; the half-obliterated features of Mrs Toomer sharpened themselves in expectation; the tea towel in Mrs Rideout’s grasp suspended itself in air.

  ‘’E leaned back and lit a cigarette. And then ’e said what made my very blood run cold. “I could do with two or three of you,” ’e said, – “and that’s what I’m going to get!” And then ’e gave an ’orrid laugh, like ’e might give to a bit of fun that was all his own.’

  A moment’s profound silence greeted this appalling revelation. ‘A slaver – that’s what he is,’ said Mrs Toomer.

  ‘Or a regular Bluebeard,’ said Mrs Thorr.

  Mrs Fiddock, her imagination fired by the literary success she had achieved, leant forward. ‘Do you think,’ she asked hoarsely, ‘he drowns them in a barf?’

  Maternal solicitude is an awful power. Mrs Rideout, who had risen to her feet in agitation, took two sideways and three backward steps – and was thus able to fall upon her bed in a fit. Mrs Rideout roared; Mrs Thorr and Mrs Fiddock snivelled; Mrs Toomer gently beat her breast and uttered wheezy sighs. It is a dreadful thing to die – or even to conduct police investigations – ’mid women howling. The hardy Hudspith looked about him with some idea of throwing water or opening a window. What his eye immediately fell on was the dispassionate gaze of the Piero della Francesca – whence it travelled involuntarily to Sesame and Lilies and the historical labours of Edward Gibbon. Momentarily he felt like a man who sinks through deep waters. Then he stood up. ‘Be quiet!’ he shouted.

  Mrs Rideout stopped roaring and snivelled. Whereupon Mrs Fiddock and Mrs Thorr, as if indignant at this trespass, took breath and yelled. Mrs Toomer continued her asthmatic exhibition undeterred. Hudspith banged the table with an open palm. ‘Silence!’ he bellowed. ‘Silence in the name of the law!’

  There was instant quiet, as if the women were dispossessed of devils by the incantation. And Hudspith, learned in demonology went sternly on: ‘Anything that any of you says may be taken down and used as evidence in such proceedings as the magistrate may direct. We will now proceed to inquiries on the character and habits of the missing girl.’

  The crisis was over. Even Mrs Toomer ceased knocking her breast. Instead, she took the lid from the teapot and peered hopefully inside.

  Lucy Rideout was nineteen; so much could be gathered from her mother – who appeared to feel, however, that this represented her fair share of such information as the assembled party might provide. On her daughter’s interests and accomplishments she was vague; of her friends she knew little; among a number of photographs in a drawer she found one which, after some consultation with her friends, she was persuaded to assert was Lucy. Often, thought Hudspith, our claim upon the awareness of even close relations is surprisingly marginal and precarious. Nevertheless there was something almost pathological in this woman’s attitude to her daughter; it was almost as if the child had been an intellectual problem which Mrs Rideout had long since found it simplest to give up. He scrutinized the photograph with a professional eye. Lucy Rideout was not pretty. Nor, as far as he could discern, did she possess any of the specific types of plainness which have here and there a peculiar appeal. Why, then, Lucy? Presumably because she was half-witted and so particularly easy to spirit away. Only Hudspith thought that if this indifferent photograph revealed anything at all it was the appearance of considerable intelligence. And this by no means accorded with his brief. He turned to Mrs Rideout. “I understand,’ he said cautiously, ‘that your daughter was never very bright at her books?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout readily.

  ‘In fact, the truth is that she isn’t quite–’

  ‘Her books?’ interrupted Mrs Toomer. ‘Why, she was always at her books, poor dear.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout. ‘So she was.’

  Mrs Toomer nodded towards the bookshelf. ‘See for yourself, mister. She must have bought all them since the Rideouts was blitzed. Always reading, is Lucy. But bad at her books, as you sez.’

  Hudspith frowned. ‘But if she was always reading–’

  ‘That’s why she was bad at her books,’ Mrs Toomer looked curiously at Hudspith, as if doubting the perspicacity of one to whom this elementary point could be obscure. ‘Always reading, she was. It fairly drove her teachers wild.’

  ‘That was it,’ said Mrs Rideout. She nodded, vague but decided. Suddenly she became much more emphatic. ‘That and her forgetfulness. No one but me can ever know how forgetful that girl is.’

  ‘Was, more likely,’ said Mrs Fiddock gloomily.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout. ‘Sometimes she wouldn’t as much as know if she’d put her dinner inside her. Something chronic, Lucy’s memory.’

  ‘It comes of reading,’ suggested Mrs Thorr. ‘Just common reading, let alone the sort of reading your Lucy did,’ She turned to Hudspith. ‘Lord Bacon and Giboon,’ she enumerated, awed. ‘And Shakespeare and the German Gouty.’

  ‘That’s right,’ chimed in Mrs Toomer. ‘And fairy stories, too, and animals what talk. Half a week’s wages, Lucy would give, if she saw a nice big book with coloured pictures in a window.’

  And the odd thing, thought Hudspith, is that the bookshelves bear out this fantastic confusion of testimonies. He addressed himself resolutely to Lucy’s mother, ‘My information is that your daughter is weak in the head. Not what they call mentally deficient, exactly – but getting on that way. Is that right?’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Mrs Toomer before Mrs Rideout could reply. ‘Not mental–’

  ‘Mentals,’ interrupted Mrs Thorr, ‘goes to school in a car. Lucy never did that, though her father tried for it when he was alive, poor man.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout.

  ‘Not mental,’ resumed Mrs Toomer. ‘Just a bit cracked like. What you might call terrible serious-minded.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout and Mrs Fiddock and Mrs Thorr. It was their first piece of chorus work for some time.

  ‘Fair childish,’ said Mrs Fiddock, speaking as if offering the next logical step in a well-ordered theme. ‘Creepy, it was at times. Shy and innocent and ignorant like.’

  Hudspith tried something else. ‘Your daughter went out to dances – that sort of thing?’

  ‘That she did,’ said Mrs Rideout. ‘And that flighty she’d get that there was no holding her.’

  The lips of Mrs Toomer, Mrs Thorr and Mrs Fiddock parted in affirmative incantation. Hudspith plunged again. ‘What other interests had she?’

  ‘Plays,’ said Mrs Rideout.

  ‘Ah – she went to the theatre?’

  Mrs Rideout shook her head violently, apparently intimating that there were degrees of eccentricity of which even her Lucy must be acquitted. ‘She made ’em.’

  ‘Made them?’

  ‘In bed at night. Since we came here it’s fair driven me crazy. Whisper, whisper, whisper.’

  ‘What sort of plays?’

  Mrs Rideout considered. ‘Diatribes,’ she said. ‘Diatribes and sometimes another as well.’

  ‘You mean plays sometimes with two people and sometimes with three? What sort of people.’

  ‘They got very queer names.’ Mrs Rideout shifted uneasily on her chair, as if obliged to contemplate something she had long felt it more comfortable to ignore. ‘Poppet is one.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And Real Lucy and Sick Lucy is the others. Sick Lucy doesn’t seem to know much. They’re always telling her what happened before.’

  Superintendent Hudspith was not a learned man. But he had read the appropriate tex
tbooks in a number of odd fields. And now – almost as if dazzled by the great light that had come upon him – he gazed at Mrs Rideout and her friends with an unseeing eye. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll be damned!’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Toomer.

  Hudspith’s inquiries were prolonged and it was dusk as he turned east along Victoria Street. Anyone glancing at him as he passed the Army and Navy Stores would have suspected first drink and then somnambulism – for he walked as in a trance. This beat the band; it was the very mark and acme of the evil with which he had to cope. He believed himself well-read in all the quaintness and curiosity of vice; his files were a veritable museum of recherché sins; he was the familiar of devils more grotesquely caparisoned than any that ever appeared to St Anthony. But the ingenuity of this – of this vest-pocket promiscuity or compendious polygamy – he had not met the like of before… So he walked down Victoria Street growling, ready positively to bark – and conceivably up the wrong tree.

  Sesame and Lilies and the Swiss Family Robinson and the books on the bottom shelf. After London (what would that be? – wondered Hudspith, staring fixedly and vacantly at Westminster Abbey) and Cowper’s Letters and Mopsie in the Fifth… And suddenly the sheer technical difficulty of what the adversary had achieved revealed itself and forced from him a sort of reluctant admiration. Did you ever hear of the isle of Capri? It was clear now that this could not have been the whole story by a long way. But then perhaps it had been a matter of simple force in the end; despite the note in the cocoa jug, perhaps the girl had been kidnapped after all.

  Hudspith looked up at Big Ben and took no comfort from still being able to read the time on it. London slid past him: high up, the last glitter of day; round him, newsboys and sandbags, cavities and crowds; far below, the purposive hurrying of the underground and the odd pleasing smell that hangs round the stations as you pass. People glanced up at the sky; Hudspith stared through it, scanning some ultimate battleground of good and evil to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.

  Fetishists. Men who insist on knock-kneed women, on bowlegged women, on one-eyed women…and now this. Hudspith climbed flight upon flight of stairs rapidly, in a sudden cold sweat. He marched along a corridor – was hailed through an open door. ‘Hurrying?’ said a harassed voice. ‘After another of the vanishing ladies?’

  Hudspith snapped an affirmative reply and strode on. But the harassed voice stopped him. ‘Well that’s nothing. They’ve put me on a vanishing house.’

  ‘A vanishing house?’ Hudspith turned reluctantly round. ‘What the deuce do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that somebody’s pinched a house – a whole blasted house!’ The harassed voice rose to a note of extreme exasperation. ‘And a thoroughly crazy house at that.’

  4

  The best connection was by Leeds. But Appleby, because the thing had been put to him as a holiday, went by York. The wait there was over an hour, and that would be time for a stroll up to the Minster. Also, he remembered a teashop with remarkable muffins; and although muffins are largely a matter of butter, he hoped for the best. With this judicious balance of spiritual and material satisfactions in mind he left the station.

  The city walls were still there. Naturally so – but nowadays one went about in that frame of mind. The city walls were there, and in places as fresh as if they still expected culverins and demi-cannon to be brought against them hourly. Cromwell, thought Appleby vaguely as he crossed the Ouse. Extraordinarily difficult really to imagine the siege of an English town. But then how oddly things lie in the womb of time: any amount of small change from Roman legionaries’ pockets was dug up when they started making the railway station, A great massacre of Jews, thought Appleby as he passed the reticent façade of the Yorkshire Club. They had just time to kill their own wives and children and then the mob were on top of them. In England that was eight hundred years ago. He glanced down Coney Street. There was little traffic at this hour; shopkeepers, who had never read manuals on scientific salesmanship, stood at their doors, unashamedly at leisure; it was all very tranquil, very secure. Laurence Sterne, Appleby thought. And there is something in walking at random about a city, he thought, that makes one’s mind turn thus idly over and over, like Leopold Bloom’s.

  On the left, a huddle of half-heartedly ecclesiastical buildings. On the right, the unbeautiful but beneficent York City Dispensary. And in front, the Minster. The poet Shelley had called it a monstrous and tasteless relic of barbarism. But then Shelley’s was an appallingly rational and scientific mind. And perhaps they had been telling him about the Jews… Appleby climbed the steps.

  When he came out he stood for a moment blinking in the sunshine. A baker’s cart rattled past; it might have reminded him of the muffins; instead, it merely recalled Daffodil and the dubious investigation in prospect. Why, he asked himself, should you prefer a quiet cab-horse to Captain Somebody’s whopping expensive brute? Well, you hired a cab and you went to a party and you told the man to wait. Then you stole your hostess’ diamonds, deftly wrapped them in a wisp of hay and pitched them through the drawing-room window at the creature’s head. The creature at once devoured the unexpected luncheon, thus unwittingly becoming your accomplice in crime. It only remained –

  Appleby shook his head at this unpolicemanlike fantasy, and found that he had wandered into that narrow and winding street which has the most interesting shops. This bookshop, for instance: A Good Warm Watch Coat – that was Laurence Sterne again; Francis Drake’s Eboracum of 1736 – one would have to be fairly prosperous to buy that. And that antique shop – he crossed the road. Such places were not quite what they were in the great days of those wandering scholars, the fabulous horn-rimmed Americans of the twenties. Perhaps they will be back again in the fifties, Appleby thought; and paused to glance in. Warming pans, coffin stools, china dogs. He walked on, passing a second shop of the same sort: china dogs, warming pans, coffin stools. The pomps of death: dissolution had once been a comfortably solid affair. Now it was papier mâché coffins and zip-fastening shrouds. He knew a psychiatrist who, in the early months of war, had been required to treat nervous children in a hall stacked with these conveniences… Another shop – and this time Appleby stared. The same sort of wares were exposed for sale. But suspended in the centre of them was something different. It was an ancient broom – the kind that is no more than a bundle of twigs or faggots bound to a handle.

  Undoubtedly it was a witch’s broom. And this sudden coming upon such an object in a shop window was like the beginning of a deftly told tale of the supernatural. Appleby, whose mind was perhaps no less rational than Shelley’s, frowned disapprovingly. And as he frowned he became aware of somebody looking at him.

  It was a shrunken and dusty man; he stood at the shop door so vacantly and patiently that he might have been something put out to purify in the sun. But he was looking at Appleby with a slowly gathering alertness, rather suggestive of a rusty machine beginning to turn. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said – and added mildly: ‘Are you a tourist?’

  The word has taken to itself a sinister quality: if you are a tourist you may well be suspected of carrying a fountain pen filled with tear gas or a short-wave receiver concealed in your hat. And the vast annoyance of Daffodil and Bodfish and Lady Caroline lay heavily on Appleby’s mind. ‘No,’ he said severely; ‘I’m a policeman.’ He looked gloomily at the broomstick. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘did you come by that?’

  The idle question had quite unexpected results. ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ cried the dusty man in despair. ‘I knew there must be something wrong!’ He took a shuffling step backwards. ‘I suppose you had better come in and see the cauldron too.’

  Appleby opened his mouth to say that neither broom nor cauldron was any interest of his. But even as he did so professional instinct asserted itself. Never let any little odd thing go by. ‘Certainly I must see the cauldron,’ he said sternly. ‘And anything else concerned.’

  The dusty man ran an agitated hand through his hair, rem
oved what appeared to be a cobweb from his right ear, and uttered a gulping sound suggestive of mingled submission and distraction. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘one has to be on the lookout for anything that will attract the eye – of a genuine sort, of course. And there was no doubt of the provenance of the articles in this case.’

  ‘No doubt of the what?’

  ‘The genuineness of their history, sir, as proved by the different hands they had been through. I know the family well enough. But I should have been more careful, all the same. The whole thing was queer, I freely acknowledge. Why, even the horse was queer.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The horse, sir. Very queer indeed was the way that horse behaved.’

  Appleby took a deep breath. ‘It is about that,’ he said, ‘that we are going to talk.’

  The first few yards of assembled antiques were reasonably well groomed; behind that everything was most woefully weighted with gathered dust. The stock-in-trade was miscellaneous, congested and arranged with a fantasy which must have been of the genuine unconscious kind. An Indian idol sat up in a four-poster bed, stretching out a multiplicity of hands as if demanding early morning tea; a row of stags’ heads had Georgian coffee pots and spoon warmers depending from the antlers; through the half-open door of a grandfather clock peered the articulated skeleton of an ape or baboon. Your first surrealists, thought Appleby, are necessarily those who purvey curios in a restricted space. And you can achieve similar effects by dropping a bomb on a well-ordered museum. Perhaps some psychic and infantile bomb is responsible for the pictures of Miro and Dali. Perhaps – He remembered that he had come in here to listen to a confession. ‘Things look rather quiet,’ he said in an accusing voice.

  ‘They are quiet,’ said the dusty man. ‘Really very quiet indeed,’ he added with anxious candour.

  ‘Still, you have sold a couple of china dogs.’ On a very dusty table Appleby had noticed two oval islands such as the posteriors of these creatures would cover.