Appleby And Honeybath Read online

  ‘But she didn’t want to be mounted?’ This came from Hillam, who had appeared to be absorbed in Country Life again. ‘Or not by you?’

  For a moment it looked as if this outrageous equivoque was going to be greeted with a roar of laughter. But then Grinton pulled himself up.

  ‘She was at least a lady,’ he said stiffly. ‘So I don’t follow you.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Sir’, he added ominously.

  Thus to apostrophize a guest in one’s own house was pretty stiff, and Honeybath hastened to intervene – although it had to be with the first thing that came into his head.

  ‘Having things of high value around,’ he said, ‘can create a great deal of bother with one’s insurance people. I’ve often heard about that from owners of valuable pictures. They’re told they must take all sorts of devilishly expensive precautions before they can get cover. And Appleby and I noticed you had pretty effective-looking burglar alarms fitted to the library windows.’

  ‘Is that so? That must be Dolly. It’s Dolly who sees to that sort of thing.’

  Honeybath had been about to add – as a mere item of general interest – that the exercise had appeared to miss out on the dummy bookshelves in the library. But as this omission might now appear to reflect on Grinton’s wife, he held his peace. Appleby, however, pursued the subject. (So much for his resolve to refrain from fishing.)

  ‘Family papers make another problem,’ he said. ‘A man like yourself, Grinton, is liable to have quite a lot of them – perhaps stretching over centuries. Indeed, you’ve hinted something of the sort. Not of legal significance, or even of much historical importance. But precious in terms of what may be called ancestral feeling and piety. It’s hard to get a cash value set on such an archive, since no marketplace exists for it. Is there anything of that sort in the library?’

  ‘The kennel books.’ Grinton produced this with sudden decision and interest. ‘In fact the entire records of the Nether Barset since it was first recognizably a hunt. My father had a fellow working on the stuff for nearly a year, and I myself had the results bound up in decently tooled morocco. About a dozen volumes, I’d say – and no doubt still there. Not that I’ve made a recce in the bloody morgue for a good many years.’

  This sudden proclamation of Terence Grinton’s notorious and eccentric attitude to his library brought the conversation to a halt. Honeybath thought of asking, ‘All that shifting of county boundaries has pretty well done away with Barsetshire, hasn’t it?’ But as this would sound like the feeblest and most irrelevant of curiosities, he contented himself with walking over to a window and surveying the February scene. And a moment later Dolly Grinton returned to the room.

  ‘Your reliable Denver is on his way,’ she said cheerfully to her husband. ‘The copper on the telephone said Inspector Denver. Does one address him as that, or just as Mr Denver?’

  ‘Definitely as Mr Denver.’ Appleby was impressed by this care for the forms in face of what was, after all, a trying situation. ‘If I were speaking to him tête-à-tête, and didn’t know him, I’d probably just say “Inspector”. But in a general way “Mr Denver” will be right.’ Appleby offered this not very important information rather absently. He was wondering whether competence in dealing with a mob of bearded persons intent on creating nasty smells to confuse a pack of fox hounds would effectively exercise itself in face of the present conundrum. Whether the conundrum ought to be described as also having a really nasty smell was yet to appear.

  ‘I’ve told Burrow to show Mr Denver straight in here,’ Dolly Grinton said. Burrow was the Grintons’ butler. ‘Ought I to have said the library?’

  ‘No, not the library.’ Appleby, although resolved to give nobody any instructions about anything, was obliged to say this. ‘As a matter of fact, Charles and I locked it up behind us. It seemed the proper thing. Grinton, here’s the key.’

  Grinton accepted the key almost with reluctance. It symbolized, Appleby reflected, his proprietorship of something of which he strongly disapproved.

  ‘The gentleman from the police.’

  Burrow thus exercised his own judgement as to what was appropriate in this matter of nomenclature as he ushered Denver into the drawing-room. Denver, it appeared, had come out to Grinton on his own. Decidedly he wasn’t a fussy or self-important man. His concern might have been merely a routine matter involving some hitch or inadvertence over a gun licence. He did, however, produce a large notebook as an essential concomitant of whatever proceedings were in view.

  ‘If I might just make a note or two,’ he said, ‘on the household. Quite a large household, I expect, so it will be convenient.’

  ‘You mean who’s at Grinton now?’ The proprietor of Grinton seemed to feel that this put the matter more plainly. ‘My wife and myself, as you can see. My daughter, Magda, and her husband and two kids. They’re all out after rabbits.’

  ‘Rabbits,’ Denver said, with a disconcerting appearance of actually having written down this word. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Half a dozen guests. Or is it eight? My wife will know. I suppose she also knows something about the gentleman in the corner there. Name of Hillam, I believe.’ Grinton contrived this outrage without any effect of insolence. ‘And this is Mr Charles Honeybath, who says he…who found the body. Mr Honeybath is a painter.’

  ‘Artist, or interior decorator?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Denver. Mr Honeybath is a most distinguished artist. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Distinguished,’ Denver said – without any appearance of displeasure. ‘A friend of long-standing, I take it?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind.’ Grinton perhaps felt that this was a slightly unbecoming expression. ‘But an old friend of Sir John and Lady Appleby. This is Sir John. Lady Appleby has gone for a walk.’

  ‘Sir John and Lady Appleby,’ Denver repeated as he wrote – and in an inexpressive fashion that pleased Appleby very much. ‘And who else? I needn’t have the servants, just at the moment, Mr Grinton.’

  Grinton gave the required names, accompanying several of them with more or less gratuitous comments. Denver wrote them all down, and then closed his notebook. He did this with an air of feeling that to keep it open would be discourteous during the next phase of the enquiry.

  ‘Mr Honeybath,’ he said. ‘You appear to have had a most upsetting experience. Nobody expects to come on a body when he goes to find a book in a library.’

  ‘I didn’t go to find a book.’ Honeybath judged that this misconception must be removed at once. ‘I just went to look at the place. I hadn’t been in it before.’

  ‘Ah! Quite natural, of course. And you mustn’t let my questions worry you.’

  ‘I have no such disposition, Mr Denver.’ Honeybath said this a trifle disingenuously. Worry was of course the precise word for the whole thing. ‘So go ahead.’

  Denver went ahead, and the story – the unlikely story – unfolded. Denver took it in his stride, and didn’t again apply himself to the notebook. ‘And now I’d better have a look,’ he said when it was concluded. ‘At the library, I mean. With your permission, sir.’

  Grinton grunted acquiescence in so decidedly ungracious a manner that any common policeman might have become suspicious at once. But the gracelessness – it was to be presumed – was a matter of habit and not of guilt on Grinton’s part.

  ‘Anybody in there now?’ Denver asked.

  ‘We locked it up,’ Appleby said, and immediately felt that he ought to have left this reply to Honeybath. Appleby’s line was absolute invisibility until he was, so to speak, unmasked. It had sounded as if Inspector Denver had no recollection of Scotland Yard as once having harboured a Sir John Appleby. It wasn’t likely. But it was a nice thought.

  ‘Then we’ll go along.’ Denver took the initiative in moving towards the door of the drawing-room – thereby offering a delicate indication that he was in control of the proceedings. ‘But not too many of us, since we don’t want a great deal of moving about in the place. It’s possible th
at I may have to bring in men to look for fingerprints, and that sort of thing. Mr Honeybath, of course, as well as yourself, Mr Grinton. And perhaps you’ll be good enough to come with us as well, Sir James.’

  ‘John,’ Appleby said.

  ‘I beg your pardon. Sir John.’ Denver was at his most wooden. ‘And, of course, we must have a look at this place in which it seems that somebody has been putting up for the night. It’s an odd one, that. If I were sceptical before improbabilities – which isn’t, you know, a detective officer’s business: far from it – I think I’d be sceptical there. After you, sir.’

  Grinton produced another grunt, and the four men left the room.

  The appearance of the library had changed a little. This was because the direct late afternoon sunlight was now only slanting through the three tall south windows, and creating shadows where there had been none before. There was also a fine dust dancing and eddying in its beams, as if stirred into motion by the mere opening of the door. It would be quite something, Honeybath told himself, to snare just that on a canvas. The floor was interesting, too. He noticed for the first time that the marble, where not concealed in a rather stupid way by the multicoloured rugs, was of a cold silver-grey heavily streaked with trailing strands of dark green. The effect, particularly in certain bays created by the additional book stacks jutting out into the room, was cavernous and almost subaquatic. The superannuations of sunk realms… He wondered where the quotation came from.

  ‘Is that the chair?’ Denver asked.

  It had been Appleby’s first question too. Honeybath looked at the chair, and for the first time saw the question’s prompting occasion.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘You didn’t by any chance move it, Mr Honeybath?’

  ‘Most certainly not.’

  ‘It’s a little oddly placed, isn’t it? Planted there, and directly facing the door. Not really related to what you might call the general lie of the room. Everything else is related, somehow, to whatever’s round about it. To rather a formal and unused effect, in a way.

  ‘The place is unused.’ Its owner said this with a certain morose satisfaction. ‘We’re not bookish at Grinton. I sometimes call the library the great family white elephant.’ Grinton, who hadn’t roared with laughter for some time, roared with laughter now. Then he checked himself. ‘Beg pardon,’ he said. ‘Dead man and all that.’

  ‘But there isn’t a dead man.’ Denver betrayed mild exasperation as he said this. ‘But of course there was one,’ he added hastily. ‘In that chair. Just what do you make of it, sir?’

  This appeal, being addressed abruptly to Appleby, was disconcerting. But there was no point in affecting to be obtuse.

  ‘When Mr Honeybath first spoke to me about it,’ Appleby said, ‘he made a remark about a sitter posed for a portrait. It was merely something running in his head, since it’s to paint a portrait that he’s at Grinton now. But it suggested something to me: a body set in that chair and pointing just that way. It suggested a deliberate extravagance – a flamboyance, say, or a very grisly joke. Somebody was to come into this library and receive a nasty shock. It’s a tenuous notion. But it came to me.’

  ‘It might come to anybody,’ Denver said – perhaps not wholly felicitously. ‘But it’s worth thinking about. Mr Grinton, who would be likely to come into this room and have that happen to him?’

  ‘Her,’ Grinton said. ‘Almost certainly, her. One of the maids comes in once a week – on what day I don’t know, although my wife probably does. Flicks around with one of those feather things.’

  ‘I see.’ Denver was silent for a moment, perhaps perpending the absurdity of such a pitiful onslaught on thousands of books. ‘But occasion might be found to get somebody else to come in? An interested party – to put it that way – might have thought to contrive that you yourself should come in and be surprised by the thing?’

  ‘Most unlikely.’ Grinton gave this reply with a robust confidence. ‘And this is all rubbish, anyway. What’s the use of talking about a dead body when there isn’t one?’

  Denver made no reply to such confused logic. Much as Appleby had done before him, he was studying the chair with minute attention. He then applied the same technique to the library at large, so that his companions might have begun to feel that they were all going to be there till dinner time. But quite soon he gave it up.

  ‘There’s absolutely nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s all as normal and innocent as may be. Of course we can bring people in, you know, whose line is to produce marvels. They’ll analyse the dust – of which there’s enough, I must say – and they’ll analyse the lord knows what. They’ll tell you how many different people, if any, have been in this room over the past week. Tell you their sex, for that matter, and perhaps the colour of their hair. But it takes time. And I won’t say what I think it leads to.’

  Appleby liked this, perhaps as himself having similar phases of bafflement stacked up pretty abundantly in his past. And the momentary sense of fellow-feeling prompted him to break that resolve to keep almost entirely mum.

  ‘At least,’ he said, ‘we can now go next door. Architecturally speaking, it’s to move from the sublime to the ridiculous. There’s a little warren of small domestic offices – grotesquely opening, as I’ve told you, from behind an imposing stack of bogus seventeenth-century theology, if I remember aright. But at least there’s something on view. Even toasted cheese is better than nothing.’

  ‘Marginally, perhaps.’ Slight gloom appeared to be possessing Denver.

  ‘Incidentally, I suppose the state of those doors and keys is important.’ Appleby produced this conjecture with splendid vagueness. ‘But Mr Honeybath will be clearer-headed about that than I am.’

  This was a bit steep – or at least Honeybath thought so. But he did his best.

  ‘Sir John and I,’ he said, ‘found a door behind the false one unlocked but with a key in it. A further door, giving on a yard outside, was unlocked and without a key. That’s perhaps a little surprising. And those offices must be connected in some further way, I imagine, with the main building. We didn’t investigate that. I think it was unnecessary because, before going to look for Mr Grinton, we locked both these entrances to the library itself. But one sees that the body may have been removed – when it was removed during my very brief absence – in one of two ways: either into the yard and then whisked away in a conveyance, or back into the house itself through the far end of these offices. The latter course would surely have been extremely hazardous, and is therefore much the less probable.’

  As brief exposition, Appleby thought rather well of this. He thought rather less well of himself, since he ought to have checked up on that presumed further entrance from the offices to the main building. The point was not perhaps other than a merely academic one, since Honeybath was undoubtedly right about the vast unlikelihood of the body’s having simply been smuggled into another part of the house. Still, he wasn’t what he once had been, Appleby thought. So he became a shade gloomy too.

  They passed through the bogus door, unlocked the proper door beyond it, and passed through that. Denver made a pause in the corridor thus revealed.

  ‘The squatter,’ he said. ‘Have I got this clear? We’re going to come on evidence of a person or persons actually living in a clandestine way on the premises? It’s a new one to me, I must say.’

  ‘Nevertheless, that’s it.’ Appleby threw open a door. ‘Here’s the first room – totally empty, as you see. And here’s what you may call the lodging house.’ He threw open the door of the second room.

  But the second room was now totally empty too.

  4

  Naturally enough, Appleby wasn’t pleased. Probably Honeybath wasn’t pleased either, but with Honeybath nothing in the nature of professional prestige was involved. Appleby felt that he had put something almost approaching theatricality into ushering his provincial colleague into the presence of a camp bed, a cooking stove and whatever, and that there was something awkwa
rd in the fact that the designed effect had decidedly not come off.

  But if anybody actually showed embarrassment it was Detective Inspector Denver. Whether Denver really knew who Appleby was, or was as unknowing as he appeared to be, he was in the presence of two guests at Grinton who were both obviously of some standing in the world, and who had somehow involved themselves in what – at least at a first glance – looked like an episode of obscure farce.

  Three of the four men, then, were uncomfortably silent for several moments. Not so Terence Grinton. If anything had its funny side, it was in Grinton’s nature to seize upon it with acclaim. So Grinton now produced that roar. Here was the funniest thing that had happened for a long time. One mare’s nest, he was apparently feeling, had riotously succeeded upon another.

  It may be presumed that Denver, being a clear-headed man, was at once able to distinguish between one episode and the other. Honeybath and Appleby had entered this room together, and what they had found in it they had reported upon without any divergence of statement between them. It was true that one did occasionally come upon two – or even more – perfectly respectable witnesses swearing to an identical experience that in the issue had proved radically without status as objective fact. Of this there usually turned out to be now one explanation and now another. Human minds were uncommonly rum, and could run even to what psychologists called collective hallucination. Denver had more than once stood by and witnessed even judges of the High Court baffled by such situations. Denver, however, as a reasonable man, could come to only one conclusion here. Barring something in the nature of an irresponsible prank or scandalous wager – in which he didn’t for a moment believe – these two gentlemen had seen exactly what they said they saw. And this meant that in the space of what could be reckoned as well under an hour a person or persons unknown had entered this room and done a thorough clear up. This had been at least at appreciable risk of detection, since the yard – and presumably a vehicle in the yard – might well have been observed: this even taking account of the considerable seclusion of the entire area. Either, therefore, there had been something deadly serious about the exploit, or it exemplified the same sort of freakish behaviour as had been at work in the deliberate perching (as it could be read to be) of that body in the adjacent library.