Appleby File Page 6

  Appleby had betrayed some impatience during these unhelpful remarks, and had received a warning glance from Judith. Now he tried again.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that you don’t much care for the police. But you might–’ He broke off, having been interrupted by a series of bumps and shudders, followed by a splintering crash, apparently from just outside the drawing-room. He ran to the door and threw it open. Anderton Place rejoiced in a very grand marble-sheathed hall and a correspondingly imposing marble staircase. The hall was now littered with the debris of an enormous wardrobe. Minor bits and pieces – the first to detach themselves from the tumbling monster – lay here and there on the stairs. The bizarre effect was enhanced by the fact that the wardrobe had apparently contained a very large collection of Victorian and Edwardian clothing. This, too, now lay all over the place.

  ‘I was about to remark,’ Appleby said calmly when the startled ladies had joined him, ‘that two courses are possible. You might, Aunt Jessica, call in one of the big security firms. They would send you a few skilled people, in the guise of accountants or solicitors’ clerks or indigent clergy deserving a country holiday–’

  ‘Quite out of the question.’ Lady Parmiter made no bones about this. ‘I should regard anything of the sort as most objectionable.’

  ‘Alternatively, there are highly reputable bodies devoted to the pursuit of psychical research. Archbishops and Prime Ministers have been among their active members from time to time. Their attitude is totally objective and disinterested, just as is that of any other learned society. They possess great experience alike in assessing the significance of genuine paranormal phenomena and in detecting imposture. If you cared–’

  ‘I will have nothing to do with anything of the sort, John. Dear Adolphus would not have approved of it. Judith, is that not so?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Jessica, I suppose it is. But then Uncle Adolphus was never up against a peculiarly destructive poltergeist.’

  ‘There is the luncheon bell, my dear. Your uncle always liked an old-fashioned bell. I have had to instruct this new butler – whose name escapes me – to refrain from entering and announcing meals. And that reminds me. We shall not discuss these disturbing incidents before the servants. I hope the man has remembered the Andron-Blanquet. I recall it, John, as your favourite claret. Malign spirits may be at work. But at least they have made no attack upon the cellar.’

  And Lady Parmiter, a spirited woman, led the way to her dining-room.

  The meal was uneventful. Spoons and forks didn’t tie themselves into knots, or take to the air and vanish. The only mishap was a minor one, when a young parlour-maid contrived to spill an uncomfortably hot potato into Judith’s lap. Appleby found himself giving an eye to this girl. If she was a professional, it didn’t seem to be at waiting at table. And to a trained sense her relationship to the anonymous butler was detectably odd. This might be taken to count against the view that she was the standard hysterical female of canonical poltergeist literature. Appleby rose from table with a dim theory stirring in his mind.

  Then – again claiming family status – he took a prowl through Anderton Place alone. Even more than he remembered, it was a mad museum from cellars to attics. In the cellars there was plenty of that sound and modest claret; there was even more claret that was very rare indeed; there was also a bewildering amount of wine for which the late Lord Parmiter must have scoured every fifth-rate grocer’s shop in the country. The attics were full of rubbish – some of it honest-to-God rubbish, and some of it fake furniture of the most pretentious sort. And every now and then one came on something which would have satisfied the most exacting taste in the age of Louis Quatorze. The effect was a kind of security nightmare. It cried out for skilled pillage.

  And so with the rest of the house. As the crazy Lord Parmiter had disposed everything, so was everything disposed now. It would take the entire staff of the British Museum a month’s labour, one could feel, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  There were several further ‘disturbing incidents’ (as Aunt Jessica had termed them) while Appleby prowled. At one point a worthless but lethal bracket clock hurtled past Appleby’s ear and smashed into a cabinet containing some decidedly precious Dresden china. The whole affair was clearly mounting to a crisis.

  Back in the drawing-room, Appleby found that Judith had been trying to persuade her aunt to take drastic emergency action. She ought to send her entire staff away on board-wages, shut up the house, and leave merely a thoroughly reliable caretaker in charge. Appleby didn’t think much of this plan. Nor – more conclusively – did Lady Parmiter. If the poltergeist really was a poltergeist (and on this she, too, professed an open mind) the result might merely be major disaster. More poltergeists might simply move in, and the last state of Anderton be worse than its first. Appleby agreed, or professed to agree. He had an alternative suggestion. The most experienced packers in London should be hastily brought in. Working under Lady Parmiter’s direction, they could crate up everything of the first value for immediate removal to impregnable strongrooms in the metropolis. Poltergeists were invariably confined to one stamping-ground. They wouldn’t be able to follow.

  Lady Parmiter turned this down too – but with a shift of ground. Such a proceeding would be abhorrent to the shade of dear Adolphus, and was therefore not to be entertained for a moment. It seemed an impasse. Appleby produced what seemed to be a final throw.

  ‘But doesn’t Anderton run to something like a strongroom of its own?’ he asked. ‘I seem to remember Judith’s uncle speaking of something of the kind, and being rather proud of it.’

  ‘We simply call it the safe, John, but it is in fact a large room and entirely burglar-proof. I always lock my dear mother’s Queen Anne silver away in it when I have occasion to leave Anderton.’

  ‘That’s very prudent of you.’ Appleby was wondering whether he could possibly bring this perverse old person to see reason. At least he mustn’t give up without a further attempt. ‘May I see it?’ he asked. ‘Your husband was extremely wise to have such a thing constructed. No great house should be without one.’

  The request, thus framed, was well received. The Anderton strong-room looked tremendously impressive – and had looked just that for at least fifty years. Indeed, it might have been some triumph of metallurgical skill triumphantly displayed at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851. If Appleby was amused at this outmoded affair he managed not to betray the fact.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘–couldn’t we simply put everything that is really valuable in here? I’m sure Lord Parmiter would have approved. We have on our hands just the sort of situation he must have been envisaging when he ordered so spacious an affair. If what we’re up against is simple human vandalism or madness, then we defeat it in this simple way. If it’s something supernatural, we’re at least no worse off than we are at present. Of course you’re the only person who knows what’s what; who can quickly pick out the really precious things from those which are to be classed as primarily of sentimental value. I honestly feel you should do this, Aunt Jessica. It’s your duty as the guardian of all the marvellous things Lord Parmiter gathered together. And it can all be done this afternoon. You show us what, and the whole household can help with the stowing.’

  Perhaps surprisingly, Lady Parmiter agreed to this plan at once. The undisturbed disposition of things at Anderton was very dear to her as one of the pieties of widowhood. She was a good Victorian, after all, and the impulse was the same as that which had prompted a more famous Widow to preserve intact the arrangements on her deceased Prince Consort’s writing table. On the other hand she had a shrewd sense of what things were worth, and no reason to believe that dear Adolphus would have smiled on the indiscriminate massacre of his wildly heterogeneous treasures.

  The task was accomplished by a late dinner-time, the bewildered servants being directed (in the absence of the bereaved Mrs Thimble) by
the butler without a name. Anderton didn’t look all that denuded when the job was finished. All the same, objects worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds had been segregated and placed under lock and key. The poltergeist was thwarted – or so it was to be hoped.

  The Applebys drove back to London in the dark – but not before Appleby himself had contrived a short private conversation with Lady Parmiter.

  ‘Lucky your aunt turned out to know the stuff fairly well,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I doubt whether much that’s really first-rate now remains outside that strongroom.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘You’d agree, Judith, that Aunt Jessica has been persuaded to do the rational thing?’

  ‘Clearly she has – unless it really is a supernatural agency that’s at work.’

  ‘You’d also agree that what she has done is the obvious thing in the circumstances?’

  ‘Well, yes. But I don’t see–’

  ‘The predictable thing?’ It was almost in anxiety that Appleby appeared to wait for his wife’s acquiescence this time.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Then I think all’s well. Yes, I’m pretty sure of it. By the way, just give a glance at the spare bedroom tomorrow. Your aunt’s coming to stay with us.’

  ‘To stay with us!’

  ‘Oh, not for long. Just for two or three days. She’s telling that butler tonight that she’s coming to us in the morning.’

  ‘How very odd! But at least we can get a good night’s sleep first.’

  ‘Very true. Just one telephone call, and I’ll be ready for it.’

  ‘A telephone call?’

  ‘To the Thames Valley Constabulary, my dear. Anderton is on their territory – so I must liaise with them, as people now say.’ And Appleby laughed softly as he swung the steering wheel. ‘I set the trap. They spring it.’

  ‘All caught,’ Appleby announced a couple of mornings later. ‘Butler, phoney parlour-maid

  ‘I recall remarking,’ Lady Parmiter said, ‘that servants tend to be rather unreliable nowadays.’

  ‘Quite so – and in fact two more were in the pay of the gang. All small fry, of course, the butler included. Fortunately their bosses decided to be in at the kill. Our Thames Valley friends nicked the lot while they were happily treating your strongroom, Aunt Jessica, like a hunk of old cheese.’

  ‘We had really done quite a lot of their work for them?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Just that. They count as top-ranking villains, but happen not to be all that clued up on the fine-art front. They could only have made a purely random haul by themselves. Hence the poltergeist, who made us work like mad doing all the sifting for them.’

  ‘But John, what about the tumbling jar? That did look like the real thing.’

  ‘Not to me. A little bladder on the end of a long tube passing through the window. Squeeze a bulb at the other end, and the trick’s accomplished. You just pull the thing out through the window again, and there you are. Literally a trick. Every kid’s conjuring-set includes a miniature version of the same thing.’

  ‘I must go upstairs and pack at once.’ Aunt Jessica announced this firmly. ‘It would be the wish of dear Adolphus that the status quo ante at Anderton be restored forthwith. And Mrs Thimble must find me a new butler. His first task, my dear John, will be to pack up every bottle of Andron-Blanquet I still possess. And I needn’t tell you where it will be despatched to.’

  The Fishermen

  In Scotland trout-fishing, almost as much as deer-stalking and grouse-shooting, is an amusement for wealthy men. Appleby was not particularly wealthy. From a modest station he had risen to be London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police – a mouthful which his children, accurately enough, had turned into better and briefer English as Top Cop.

  Top Cop’s job turning out, predictably, to be more purely administrative than was at all enlivening, Appleby had retired from it earlier than need be, and now lived as an unassuming country gentleman on a small estate in the south of England, which was the property of his wife. This, very happily, had proved not incompatible with getting into odd situations from time to time. Sir John Appleby liked odd situations. As a country gentleman he also, of course, liked fishing.

  So he had accepted Vivarini’s invitation to bring a rod to Dunwinnie, although he didn’t really know the celebrated playwright particularly well. Now here he was, cheek by jowl with four other piscatory enthusiasts in what had once been a crofter’s cottage. Crofters, and all such humbly independent tillers of the soil, had almost vanished from this part of the Scottish Highlands. Whether in small patches or in large, the region had been turned into holiday terrain for those rich men.

  Appleby didn’t brood on this. At least the hunting boxes and shooting lodges were (like everything else) thin on the ground. From the cottage one saw only the river – a brawling flood interspersed with still-seeming pools, brown from the peat and with trout enough – with an abandoned lambing hut on its farther bank and then the moorland that stretched away to the remote line of the Grampians. Dr Johnson, Appleby remembered, had once surveyed this scene and disliked it. A wide extent of hopeless sterility, he had written down. Quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation. That had been the heather.

  There was a brushing sound in the heather now. Appleby looked up from his task of gutting fish for supper, and saw that his host was returning. Vivarini had been the last to leave the water. He seemed to be a keen angler. In his stained waders, Balmoral bonnet festooned with dry-flies, and with his respectably battered old creel, he certainly looked the part. But perhaps the playwright had enough of the actor in him for that. Snobbery and expensive rural diversions are inextricably tied up together in Britain, and in pursuit of some elusive social status men will go fox-hunting who in their hearts are terrified at the sight of a horse. Perhaps Vivarini with his costly stretch of trout-stream was a little like that.

  Very rightly, Appleby felt mean at harbouring this thought, particularly as Vivarini looked so far from well. Even in the twilight now falling like an elfin gossamer over these haunted lands, one could distinguish that about the man. Perhaps it was simply that he was under some sort of nervous strain. Appleby knew nothing about his London way of life, but there could well be things he wanted to get away from. A set-up like this at Dunwinnie – a small all-male society gathered for a secluded holiday on a bachelor basis – might well have been planned as wholesome relief by a man rather too much involved in something altogether different.

  ‘Cloud coming up,’ Vivarini said, ‘and that breeze from the west stiffening. Makes casting tricky. I decided to stay with Black Gnat, by the way.’ He indicated the fly still on the end of his line. ‘A mistake, probably. Not sultry enough, eh?’

  Clifford Childrey, ensconced with a three-day-old copy of the Scotsman on a bench beside the cottage door, glanced up – not at Vivarini but at Appleby – and then resumed his reading. He was Vivarini’s publisher. A large and ruddy outdoor man, he had no need whatever to look a part.

  ‘You deserve a drink, Vivarini,’ Appleby said.

  ‘Not so much as you do, sweating away as cook. I’ll see to it. Sherry, I suppose? And you, Cliff?’

  ‘Sherry.’ Childrey momentarily lowered his newspaper. ‘Don’t know about the other two. They’ve gone downstream to bathe.’

  ‘Right. I do like this American make.’ Vivarini had leant his rod against the cottage’s low thatched roof. ‘No more than five ounces to the six feet. Flog the water all day with it.’

  ‘Umph.’ This response came from behind the Scotsman, which had been raised again. But it was tossed to the ground when Vivarini had entered the cottage. ‘No need to be supercilious,’ Childrey said.

  ‘I’ve been nothing of the kind.’ Appleby was amused at the charge. ‘And if “umph” isn’t super
cilious, I don’t know what is.’

  ‘Well, well – Freddie Vivarini and I have been chums for a long time.’ Childrey chuckled comfortably. ‘A damned queer lot writers are, Appleby. I’ve spent my life trying to do business with them. Novelists are the worst, of course, but dramatists run them close. Always getting things up and trying out roles. What they call personas, I suppose. Thingamies, really. Chimeras.’

  ‘You mean chameleons.’

  ‘That’s right. No reliable personal identity. Shelley said something about it. Right up his own street.’

  ‘Keats. You think our host is playing at being a sportsman?’

  ‘Oh, at that and lots of other things. What he’s run on all his life has been folding up on him. Unsuccessful literary man.’

  ‘Unsuccessful?’

  ‘Of course he’s made a fortune. But that’s what he’s taken to calling himself. You’re meant to regard it ironically. Uneasy joke, all the same.’ Childrey checked himself and got to his feet, perhaps aware of talking too casually about his host. ‘I’ll start that grill for you,’ he said. ‘I see you’ll need it soon.’

  As if in one of Vivarini’s own neat plays, Childrey’s exit-line brought the subject of his late remarks promptly on-stage again. Vivarini was bearing glasses and a bottle which, even in the gloaming, could be seen as lightly frosted. The cottage was not wholly comfortless. Warmth was laid on for chilly evenings, and there was hot water and a refrigerator and a compendious affair for cooking any way you liked, all served by a few cylinders of butane trundled across the moor on a vehicle like a young tank. Not that their actual culinary regime wasn’t simple enough. Elderly Englishmen of the sort gathered at Dunwinnie rather enjoy pretending to be public-schoolboys still, toasting crumpets or bloaters before a study fire. Of course there are limits, and when it is a matter of a glass of dry sherry or opening a bottle of hock, they don’t expect the stuff to reach their palate other than at the temperature it should. Nor do they care to couch in straw. Appleby was just reflecting that the cottage’s bunks had certainly come from an expensive shop, when he became aware that his host, uncorked bottle in hand, was laughing cheerfully.