Appleby's Other Story Page 4

  ‘Only in patches. This and that, you may say.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby registered an impression that he had come on ground where Mark’s instinct was for evasion. ‘For instance, a business of stolen pictures a year or two ago. I dare say it may have got into the papers. You have heard about it?’

  ‘Nothing at all. What you say is news to me entirely.’

  ‘I haven’t yet been given any particulars, but I gather none of the stolen works was recovered. Your father was judged to have taken it all rather quietly. But I’m not sure that he didn’t have some hope of reviving the scent. I used to be a good deal concerned with such matters, and I rather suspect that my being brought to Elvedon by Colonel Pride this morning had some element of plot to it. At least I was to be asked to give advice.’

  ‘And you think this has something to do with my father’s death?’

  ‘It would be rash to assert anything of the sort. But a possible link has to be kept in mind.’

  ‘I say! Didn’t you tell me that this disgusting chap Pulcinello–’

  ‘Raffaello.’

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you say he was an art-dealer? Would there be anything in that?’

  ‘I have far too little information to venture an opinion, but rather imagine I shall soon be given a good deal by Colonel Pride or his officers. And I’m going back to the house now. I take it you are going there too?’

  ‘Well, I suppose so.’ Mark Tytherton hesitated. ‘I have to, I suppose – and I set out after breakfast to go through with it. But I don’t know that I’ll be a great success.’

  ‘A success?’ Appleby found himself wondering how much this sudden diffidence was to be taken at its face value. ‘My dear sir, are you not presumably at this moment the owner of the place?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought. You see, there’s Alice – that’s my stepmother. And there’s my cousin Archie, who has always hung around. Or perhaps it’s all going to be turned into a home for stray dogs.’

  ‘Perhaps. But, whatever your relations with your father have been, the sober probability is that his sudden death has brought you a great deal of property.’

  They walked out of the wood and through the garden in a silence which served to accentuate a monotonous cooing of doves behind them. The sound was like a bored or half-hearted keening for the dead.

  ‘Were you brought up here?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘Oh, yes – all my boyhood. I was rather fond of it, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Aren’t you fond of it any longer?’

  ‘I suppose I ought to be. Perhaps I am. But I’ve wandered around, you know.’ Mark Tytherton seemed almost confused. And suddenly he stopped in his tracks. ‘I say, there’s an ambulance! Do you think somebody else has got hurt?’

  There was certainly an ambulance. It had taken the place of one of the police cars on the wide gravel expanse before the house.

  ‘I think,’ Appleby said gently, ‘that it will have come for the body. The body must be taken away, you see, for the post mortem. That’s routine. But it will be brought back before the funeral.’

  ‘I see. But look – there’s a kind of prison van as well!’ Mark Tytherton glanced at Appleby in what might have been naive dismay. ‘Who’s that going to take away?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Raffaello? Mrs Catmull the cook? Actually, I expect it’s here simply because the police piled into anything they had handy… I beg your pardon!’

  This apology was occasioned by Appleby’s having turned rather sharply round a clipped hedge and almost stumbled over a lady sitting on a garden bench in its shade. But the lady was not discomposed.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘It seems almost wrong that it should be so beautiful a morning, but I have come out to enjoy it, all the same. I think you must be Sir John Appleby? Mr Ramsden – poor Mr Tytherton’s secretary – was told about you by the military man. I didn’t catch his name.’

  ‘Colonel Pride. He’s the Chief Constable.’

  ‘Ah, yes. And Mr Ramsden told me. My name is Jane Kentwell, and I have been staying in the house over the past few days. I cannot claim to be more than an acquaintance of the Tythertons.’ There was a pause which seemed designed to lend a slight emphasis to this remark. ‘But I am much shocked by what has happened, all the same. And you’ – Miss Kentwell had turned politely to Mark – ‘are Maurice Tytherton’s son. Will you allow me to say how grieved I am, and how much I wish to sympathize?’

  Perhaps because of his life in exotic parts, Mark appeared a shade thrown out of his stride by this business of a competent English gentlewoman doing her stuff.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said gruffly. ‘But I can’t see how you know me from Adam, I must say.’

  ‘Your photograph stands on your father’s desk – in his small writing-room, where he died.’ Miss Kentwell paused, apparently out of a well-bred impulse to mute what might easily be too dramatic a note. ‘You may like to think that it was the last thing he ever saw.’

  5

  Whether Mark Tytherton did like to think this was not clear. Perhaps he considered Miss Kentwell’s suggestion – coming, as it did, from a total stranger – an indecent invasion of family privacy. Certainly his response was no more than an inarticulate grunt, coupled with a movement as if to walk on. Miss Kentwell, however, had more to say.

  ‘I have been so interested to hear about your work in South America. It is clear that you have had to undertake substantial responsibilities from an early age.’

  ‘That’s all rubbish – the kind of thing you say about the wanderer from the fold. I’ve just been doing this and that.’

  ‘I am sure that you are taking too modest a view of yourself.’ Miss Kentwell spoke firmly, and as a woman who expects to be believed. Raffaello, Appleby recalled, had pronounced a modified eulogy upon her as a harmless creature of a tiresome sort, and at the moment at least her tiresomeness was evident. ‘But now,’ she continued, ‘there is suddenly this larger sphere of usefulness before you. You will have the happiness of bringing some of your father’s finest schemes to fruition.’

  ‘I hope I’m going to have the happiness of keeping out of quod. My father has been done in, and now the dicks have found me hiding in the wood-shed. It doesn’t look too good, does it?’

  This odd and indecorous speech did for a moment hold Miss Kentwell up. Yet almost at once she returned to the charge.

  ‘You must not distress yourself, Mr Tytherton, with morbid fancies. They are common in the first shock of bereavement. But they quickly pass, particularly if one throws oneself at once into some wide sphere of usefulness, some well conceived scheme of beneficent activity.’

  It was at this point that Appleby felt the character of Miss Kentwell to be coming clear. She was a fanatical promoter of good works, and she felt that somebody freshly in command of what must be presumed a large fortune was a prospect to be gone for at once. It was even possible that she had softened up the late Maurice Tytherton in the interest of some charitable project or other, and was now beginning to mount a campaign to ensure his son’s carrying it on. Appleby judged this something of a forlorn hope. Certainly Mark Tytherton was responding far from amiably now.

  ‘I must be getting on to the house,’ he said abruptly. ‘Only decent to see Alice. I suppose.’ This remark he had addressed to Appleby. ‘Hope you won’t be obliged to hang around Elvedon indefinitely.’ This had been for Miss Kentwell. ‘So long.’ And on this colloquial note Mark Tytherton strode away.

  ‘A most interesting young man.’ Miss Kentwell had somehow managed to take it for granted that Appleby would remain in conversation with her. ‘His manner is a little unpolished, but that is merely a matter of his colonial associations. I believed him destined to be a person of strong character and vigorous conviction.’

  ‘Possibly so. But by the way, and
talking of his colonial associations, you didn’t seem at all surprised at his having suddenly turned up here.’

  ‘It would have been scarcely civil, Sir John, to betray any reaction of that kind. One is only sorry that he didn’t arrive a few days earlier. He might have cheered and heartened his father’s last hours.’

  ‘His father didn’t exactly have last hours of that sort.’

  ‘Perfectly true. For a moment I was forgetting the extremely distressing circumstances of Mr Tytherton’s end. A death without a deathbed is a horrid thing.’ Miss Kentwell paused on this curiously Victorian sentiment. ‘Unless,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘it be death on the field of battle. That is quite another matter.’

  ‘It appears so to us. To the people dying, I suppose, these distinctions may not be all that apparent.’

  ‘That is a most interesting thought.’ It was evident that Miss Kentwell was not readily made aware of any element of levity in response to her observations. ‘I am so glad that the young man is going straight to Mrs Tytherton. As you can well imagine, she is prostrated. The presence of her step-son will be a great support to her.’

  ‘No doubt – although I can’t see that they can be very well known to each other. Would you describe the Tythertons, incidentally, as a devoted couple?’

  ‘Ah.’ Miss Kentwell made this noise in a considering way, and was plainly playing for time. It must be her instinct to treat as scandalous any suggestion that couples – at least among the respectable classes – are ever other than devoted. On the other hand, and in this instance, it looked as if there was something to a contrary effect that she wanted to say. And she managed to say it now. ‘One could not maintain, Sir John, that poor Mr Tytherton’s second marriage quite filled all his horizons.’ Miss Kentwell paused on this expansive if not very lucid image. ‘Upon signs of that, indeed, one might come in the composition of our present small house party.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘And of the second marriage there are, of course, no children.’ Miss Kentwell had gone discreetly off on another tack. ‘So it seemed rather a question of Mr Tytherton’s finding new fields of interest, of worthwhile interest. Signs were not wanting that he was about to do so.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby felt prompted to add: ‘You think you had pretty well nobbled him for something?’ Instead, he said: ‘I gather he had been something of a collector or connoisseur of pictures, and so on. Perhaps he was proposing to start in again on that? Perhaps that’s why Mr Raffaello is here?’

  ‘Mr Tytherton was too large a man to rest content with a sterile dilettantism.’ Miss Kentwell paused on this elevated persuasion. ‘Besides, Sir John, as you know, in that field public recognition takes some time to mature. To give this to one gallery and that to another is not enough. A whole collection is required, and the nation itself has to be the recipient. All that takes time.’

  ‘I suppose it does.’ Appleby was conscious of perceptible effort as required for dissimulating a growing astonishment before this lady. ‘Would you describe the dead man as having been a person of the first ability?’

  ‘Not, I think, quite that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been likely, for example, to have got to the Lords on a life peerage by way of public service on boards and commissions and so on? Philanthropy would have to be his line? What one might call instant philanthropy, if possible?’

  ‘I am afraid we are coming to speak in very crude terms, Sir John. Of course Mr Tytherton would have accepted proper public recognition of anything he did. But his deeper motive–’

  ‘Quite so. We need waste no time upon so obvious a thought. However – and to be crude again for just a moment – are you sure that there was quite all that money available?’

  ‘No, I am not.’ Miss Kentwell was surprisingly emphatic. ‘I am bound to confess that my inquiries in that direction have yielded some rather disappointing, even disconcerting, results. However, we must not talk in this fashion with poor Mr Tytherton not yet even in his grave. I am told that the coroner’s inquest is likely to be held on Thursday. It is most inconvenient, since it will clash with an important meeting – that of the committee of the Society for the Relief of Depressed Widows of the Higher Clergy. There is a need there that is too little recognized. So I am most anxious to attend.’

  ‘Then I hope you will be able to do so. Have you been positively notified that you will be required to give evidence at the inquest?’

  ‘But of course, Sir John!’ Miss Kentwell sounded surprised and even offended. ‘Was I not the first person to set eye upon the body?’

  ‘Dear me! I am sorry to hear that. It must have been a most distressing experience.’ The facts of the case, Appleby thought, were coming to him all out of order and in an almost luxuriously amateur way. He would have been perfectly happy pottering round Elvedon all day, simply picking up here and there pleasing pieces of information like this. Being closeted with one of Pride’s senior men and presented with a well-ordered narrative wouldn’t be half the fun.

  ‘Thank you, yes – it was most distressing. It is probably best that dead bodies should be found by servants. They are less sensitive, and therefore less easily upset.’

  ‘Dead bodies are very frequently found by butlers,’ Appleby said gravely. ‘That is perhaps the best arrangement. Butlers are phlegmatic. They preserve an impassive demeanour in midst of the most trying circumstances. However, it was not as bad as it might have been. For I can perceive, Miss Kentwell, that you are a strong-minded woman. I believe you may even be possessed of what is called an iron nerve.’

  ‘Really, Sir John, I would hardly claim–’

  ‘Think if it had been, say, the depressed widow of a higher clergyman who discovered Mr Tytherton’s corpse. The poor soul would have had hysterics on the spot.’ Appleby pulled himself up. Being an amateur was going to his head, as these irresponsible and scandalous witticisms showed. And he mustn’t let a rash frivolity offend Miss Kentwell. ‘And were you by yourself,’ he asked, ‘when you made the discovery?’

  ‘Not exactly. I was with Mr Ramsden. But, naturally, he had opened the door for me, and allowed me to pass in first.’

  ‘In fact, you were ushered in on the corpse?’

  ‘That is an odd way of expressing it, Sir John. But perfectly accurate.’

  ‘Then, I take it–’ Appleby broke off, his eye having been caught by a small stir of activity in front of the house. The ambulance was driving up to the foot of the steps leading to the front door. It was doing this at a crawl, as if the driver was conscious of being involved in what was in fact the first stage of a funeral. Several people had emerged from the house, and were standing awkwardly in a line, as if for some muted formal occasion. Appleby recognized only Pride, Mark Tytherton, and Catmull the butler – a circumstance persuading him that, if he was really going to be involved in the affair, the time had come to stop wandering round its periphery. And now the body had appeared, swathed and on a stretcher. There was a pause for some sort of consultation about getting it down to ground level.

  Appleby had sat down beside Miss Kentwell, and he now felt something uncomfortable about this species of spectatorship from a middle distance. Maurice Tytherton was leaving home. Appleby, after a fashion, was his guest. It would be only decent to participate in this leave-taking.

  ‘I think I’ll walk over,’ he said.

  ‘Then let me not detain you, Sir John. I shall remain here – but with the serious thoughts such an occasion suggests.’ And Miss Kentwell offered Appleby a composed bow.

  The stretcher and its burden were already being got into the ambulance when he reached the near side of the gravel sweep. So he simply stood and watched the doors being closed on it. He rather supposed he had no wish himself to view the body, although no doubt it would be available for the purpose in some proper place. And there would be plenty of photographs – the grim s
ort of photographs that are never seen except by policemen and lawyers and the unfortunate members of juries. Perhaps among the group of people who had come indecisively down the steps and were now standing pointlessly at the foot of them there was somebody who was going to study the faces of a jury from the dock. Perhaps it was all as good as determined already; just what had happened was by now known to every policeman in the house; tomorrow’s newspapers would inform a not very curious world that this or that individual at Elvedon was ‘assisting the police in their inquiries’.

  The very phrase, Appleby told himself, had been invented since his time – which was why he didn’t like it. And now he watched the ambulance drive away, and the knot of mourners or spectators or whatever they were to be called begin to climb the steps again. He noticed the absurd circumstance that Catmull was carrying a neatly folded travelling-rug. It had been part of the regular ritual of seeing his employer off the premises, no doubt, and he had automatically gone through with it on the present occasion.

  Only Tommy Pride was left – and Tommy was signalling to him urgently, was striding across the gravel, had taken him by the arm.

  ‘My dear John, I was afraid you had found means to quit the place. Walk in the grounds. eh? Delightful morning for it. But now, for the Lord’s sake, come in and have a word about this damnable business. Of course I haven’t positively promised Henderson–’

  ‘Who is Henderson?’

  ‘My senior man on this criminal side of things. Thoroughly agreeable, unassuming fellow. As I say, I wouldn’t in the least put you in a false position. We came across in a purely social way–’

  ‘Did we? Wasn’t there – honestly, Tommy – some notion that I might talk to Tytherton about his stolen pictures?’

  ‘Well, yes – as a matter of fact I suppose there was. But that’s all blown sky-high now. Poor fellow’s gone where pilfered Poussins are not, eh? Well, as I was saying, I don’t remotely want to – ’