A Night of Errors Page 7

  Appleby laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Hullo!’ he said, ‘can I be of any help to you?’

  The man stirred and sat up, making Appleby immediately feel officious. Still, he could hardly have passed by what might have been a corpse or a case of serious illness.

  ‘Help?’ said the man, blinking sleepily at Appleby in the moonlight. ‘Dear me, no. But I am obliged to you for your kindness.’

  Appleby realized with some embarrassment that he was talking to a clergyman. ‘It is a mild night,’ he said, ‘and pleasant enough for a nap in the open air.’

  ‘Quite so – precisely so.’ The clergyman appeared to consider whether this was an adequately civil end to the encounter. ‘But it is not a thing I commonly do. Indeed in my parish – I must explain that I am the incumbent of a neighbouring parish – the habit of sitting in parked cars at night gives me not a little anxiety. People come out from the towns and misconduct themselves, and the example is a bad one for our own young folk.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Appleby. The gentleman thus discharging himself of professional anxieties, he saw, was still half asleep. Appleby wondered if he had been drinking.

  ‘The truth is that I have been dining with a friend – with a colleague, that is to say–’

  ‘That sort of thing can be very soporific, I am sure.’ Appleby nodded sympathetically and prepared to beat a tactful retreat.

  ‘Well, yes; Canon Newton’s conversation is so polished that it is a little like an elderly lullaby – though I should hate him to hear I had said so. The real truth is that I have a very poor head for wine. So much so, indeed, that I have sometimes contemplated a total abstention. But then one is reckoned a dull dog – and even a clergyman does not care for that. The bishop would laugh at it.’

  This in a bishop, Appleby thought, was somewhat unepiscopal conduct. ‘It is a difficult situation, no doubt,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘So I set off for home early. I was singing.’

  ‘It’s like that at night. I have just been doing a bit of reciting myself.’

  ‘Now, that is very interesting.’ The clergyman was still sleepy. And sleepiness made him not morose but friendly – which Appleby judged a pleasant trait. ‘My name, I should say, is Greengrave.’

  ‘Mine is Appleby.’

  ‘Good gracious! Are you the young man who has married Judith Raven? I am delighted to meet you.’ And Mr Greengrave shook hands – rather with the air, Appleby thought, of a cricketer bringing off a difficult catch. ‘Well, as I say, I was singing; and then I fell to meditating a matter of some perplexity; and then’ – Mr Greengrave hesitated – ‘I had rather a curious experience. It sobered me, so to speak, and I went along cautiously. And then I grew so sleepy that I judged it safer–’

  ‘Very wise,’ said Appleby; ‘very wise, indeed.’

  ‘But I must not weary you with my affairs. I hope we may meet again.’ And Mr Greengrave made as if to proceed on his way.

  Appleby stepped back. ‘By the way,’ he asked, ‘can you tell me if I am right for Sherris Hall?’

  ‘Sherris Hall?’ There was something startled in the clergyman’s voice.

  ‘Yes. I am making my way there in rather a hurry. I suppose it is an odd inquiry at this late hour.’

  ‘Has – has anything happened there, may I ask?’

  ‘Something rather serious, I am afraid.’ Appleby was less cautious than he would have been before he became a private citizen. ‘Inspector Hyland of Sherris Magna rang me up–’

  ‘The police!’ Mr Greengrave’s face took on a paler shade in the moonlight.

  Appleby looked curiously at the agitated man before him. His indiscretion was deliberate now. ‘Yes, the police. I was a policeman myself, you know, once. Something bad has occurred, it seems. And Hyland thinks it has started up from some hiding-place no end of years back.’

  ‘Good heavens! Only this evening–’ Mr Greengrave checked himself and looked cautious. ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘that I have suffered from something in the nature of an hallucination, and I am still somewhat confused. I had better be off to bed. As for Sherris Hall, take the first to the left and you can’t go wrong. Good night.’

  And Mr Greengrave departed amid a grinding of gears. Appleby watched him go, and noted that the course he steered was very tolerably straight. It did not look as if the hallucination and confusion of which he spoke had any very substantial origin in alcohol.

  ‘Odd!’ Appleby murmured, and walked back to the Bentley.

  But this was not his only untoward encounter on the way to inquire into the death of Sir Oliver Dromio. And inebriety of one degree or another seemed to be the rule round about Sherris that night.

  He found the drive and turned into it. Within fifty yards it forked. Taken by surprise, Appleby swung right and was presently convinced that his guess had been a bad one. This was a mere track. It wound through a shrubbery and petered out. And as he brought the car to a halt and prepared to back he saw that his headlights were focused upon a sleeping man. He lay sprawled on a bench before a ramshackle shed. And on the ground, partly obscured by his dangling legs, lay an object that gleamed and sparkled like a gigantic firefly. A tramp, Appleby thought, and slipped into reverse. But what, after all, was that object that lay at his feet, throwing back every colour in the spectrum? Had Sir Oliver Dromio been killed by a burglar, and were these the Dromio family jewels? It is astonishing how many burglars, when about to make off with a highly successful haul, get themselves hopelessly drunk on a purloined bottle of whisky. Liquor disposed freely about the house, indeed, is as effective a precaution as all but the most expensive sort of safe. And Appleby stopped the car. As he did so the man woke up and stared dead into the headlights in a sort of stupid terror.

  The stupidity, it could be discerned, was natural to that coarse face. And the terror, surely, had not come upon it on the instant. Terror, Appleby intuitively felt, had been upon the man when he fell into his drunken slumber, and the same terror was with him now as he awoke to that blinding glare.

  It was clear, at any rate, that constabulary work was to be done. And Appleby leapt from the Bentley. But as he did so the man – who looked more like a farm-labourer than a tramp – found possession of his wits and limbs. He staggered to his feet, grabbed the strangely prismatic object from the ground, and with surprising speed rounded the shed and vanished into the shrubbery. Appleby followed, stopped, listened. Not a sound was to be heard. Among these thick shadows the fellow was creeping away or lying concealed with the cunning of a redskin. To play hide-and-seek with him would be useless. Lady Dromio’s tiaras and necklaces – if indeed it had been these – were gone for the moment. But with the police of the countryside roused by murder the fellow had little chance of escape. Appleby returned to his car, backed to the drive, and drove ahead. He rounded a final curve and the house lay before him, its leads gleaming in the moon and yellow lights pouring from a dozen windows.

  And above it two straight pillars rose into the sky. Perhaps Sir Oliver Dromio was indeed reduced to cinders. But Appleby, recalling the charred hovel and carrion stench that had marked the end of Gaffer Odgers, again doubted if anything so dramatic had occurred.

  And, of course, he was right. A stench of sorts there was, but it was incongruously suggestive of no more than half a dozen sausages incautiously left on a gas-ring. Through an open french window came the warm breath of this strangely Mediterranean night. Inspector Hyland sat at a table, stiff in silver buttons and black braid; he had clearly judged the violent death of a baronet to call for an appearance en grande tenue. White gloves and a silver-headed cane lay beside him. A constable was walking up and down on the terrace outside, apparently to guard his chief from sudden nocturnal assault. Another stood by the door, his attitude suggesting an intention to collect tickets from those desiring admittance to the spectacle within.

  The body lay before the fireplace on a grotesquely deflated polar bear. The bear’s mouth gaped open as if the last gasp of air had be
en forced out of it by the fall. The mouth of what had been Sir Oliver Dromio gaped open, too. And the back of the head was all bashed in.

  Would you care to come and look at something … Appleby glanced from the body in its sprawled indignity to Inspector Hyland, neat and dapper at his table, naively rejoicing in being still alive. ‘I should be inclined,’ he said mildly, ‘to send for a sheet.’

  Hyland shook his head disapprovingly. ‘We must wait for the photographers and people from the borough, my dear chap. Nothing must be touched till then.’

  ‘I see. I just don’t like the flies crawling over the tongue. Or that fat one perched on the left iris.’

  ‘Nasty, of course.’ Hyland rubbed his nose, uncertain how to receive these unexpectedly unprofessional remarks. ‘Very distressing for the family. They are prostrated, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally… I suppose he is dead?’

  ‘He’s dead, all right.’

  ‘And he has been touched?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. He had to be dragged out of the fire, you know. Couldn’t let him roast until we got up a battery of cameras.’

  ‘No, one couldn’t do that.’ Appleby during these flat responses was looking carefully round the room. It was insufferably hot. ‘Who did drag him out?’

  ‘The butler, Swindle. A disagreeable old man, who’s been with the Dromios for ages.’

  ‘Is the butler prostrated?’

  ‘Dear me, yes.’ Hyland was confident. ‘Terrible experience for the poor old chap. Fairly slavering.’

  ‘Nothing known to have been stolen, I suppose? Jewels, bonds, anything like that?’

  ‘Nothing like that – nothing like that, at all.’ Hyland shook his head. ‘That’s to say, of course, so far as I know at present. But I think we’ll find this is quite a different sort of affair.’ He lowered his voice. ‘What you might call a domestic tragedy. They were expecting Sir Oliver back, you know, and were all very edgy one way or another, it seems. And then he came back. And immediately this happened. So it doesn’t look like being the work of a cornered thief, or anything commonplace of that sort.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby looked at the gaping jowls of man and brute on the floor. ‘The result of a family reunion, you might say?’

  ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it.’ Hyland found irony disturbing.

  ‘No wonder they are all deflated.’ Appleby was glancing again at the bear. ‘Or did you say prostrated? It’s more or less the same thing.’ Abruptly he changed his tone. ‘But how on earth did the arms get like that? There’s something queer there.’

  Hyland nodded. ‘That’s what they meant by saying he had been burnt to a cinder. Stupid exaggeration, of course. But the forearms and hands are just like that, as you see. I’d say it rather helps us to envisage the actual assault.’

  Appleby knelt by the body. The hands and forearms had indeed been consumed almost to the bone. The jacket, of dark blue cloth, was scorched over its upper part, and on the shoulders in places charred away. Appleby shook his head. ‘Helps us? I don’t know that I see it.’

  ‘You notice how high this big fireplace is, with a mantelpiece nearly seven feet up? He must have been standing facing it, I think, when he was taken by surprise from behind. He would throw up his arms as he fell, trying to catch at the mantelpiece and save himself. But his grasp would fall short of it and he would go straight into the fireplace just as he was found.’ And Hyland looked at Appleby with a poker face. ‘That all right?’

  ‘It’s nonsense from beginning to end. If a man got a blow like that his arms couldn’t conceivably go out and above his head to save himself from a fall. He would simply crumple where he stood. And your reading of the affair implies that he was standing in front of a roaring fire before the attack was made. But who would think of lighting a fire on a night like this?’

  ‘A man sometimes feels chilly when he’s been travelling, even when the temperature is warm enough. Or he may have been proposing to burn papers.’

  ‘Or to roast chestnuts, or make hot-buttered toast? And Appleby shook his head. ‘I’m terribly rusty, of course. But not so rusty as all that.’

  And Hyland chuckled, much pleased. ‘Exactly so! The fire was lit after the murder, not before it. And it wasn’t lit for any of the common purposes for which one lights a fire. It was lit as a symbol.’

  ‘A symbol?’ Appleby frowned. ‘Arson when committed by insane people is generally considered as some sort of symbolic act. But I can’t see that anything of the sort fits here.’

  ‘No more it does. You see, we’ve come on something that goes back forty years. When Sir Oliver here was an infant there was a big fire at Sherris. His two brothers – he was one of triplets – were burnt to death in it. And there was something fishy about the whole business. We’ve got a record at the station.’

  ‘So you told me on the telephone.’ Appleby was now prowling round the study. ‘You also said that this was a grim crime of retribution. But what sense is there in that? The infant Oliver can scarcely have planned to burn up his brothers himself. So why should somebody part-burn him now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Hyland was honest. ‘But that old fire is a sort of starting-point of recent Dromio family history. And now there is this senseless fire on a hot summer night. I just have a hunch the two things link up.’

  Appleby walked over to the fireplace and peered into a coalscuttle. It would be interesting to know of anything emanating from the prostrated family by which this hunch of his colleague’s had been activated… He turned to Hyland. ‘By the way,’ he asked, ‘who rang you up?’

  ‘Fellow called Sebastian Dromio. He’s an uncle of the dead man, and came down to Sherris, it seems only this evening. Pelting funk he was in too.’

  ‘I see. Did he say anything to suggest–’ Appleby checked himself. If he was going to have a clear run in this matter – and it was beginning to interest him – he must not put Hyland out of humour. He turned to the door. ‘Here they are,’ he said. ‘Cameras, insufflators and all. And behind them your police surgeon with his little black bag. I think I’ll go out and take a turn on the terrace. It’s a lovely night, after all.’

  It was a lovely night. The constable on the terrace was enjoying it. But here was one of the two approaches to the room in which Sir Oliver Dromio had been killed. The place might with possible advantage have been examined rather closely before this heavy-footed young man was set tramping up and down on it. And Appleby brought out a torch and went exploring. After a fairly intensive search he went right round the house. It seemed a long time since he had treated other people’s property in that way. But a notion of the layout of the place and its offices might be useful later on.

  When he returned to the study the photographers and finger-print men had finished their work and the police surgeon was approaching the body. He was a young man who looked as if he would be most at home on a football field, but his manner was that of one who was equally familiar with occasions like the present.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, looking down at the sprawled form on the bearskin rug. ‘I sat next to him at dinner only a few months ago. Pleasant fellow enough, he seemed to be. And now his clothes’ – and the police-surgeon produced a large pair of scissors – ‘have come off him in the normal way for the last time. Rather a well-cut suit to treat so cavalierly. But it causes the least disturbance before having a good dekko at him. No signs of bonds on the trouser legs. But he might have been tied up, you know, for some time before he was for it. We’ll have a look at the shins.’

  ‘I doubt there being anything like that.’ Hyland was tapping his fingers nervously on the desk, and Appleby suspected that his confidence was waning as the night wore on. ‘He was heard in this room, talking in a normal way, not so very long before they found him dead.’

  ‘That so?’ The police surgeon was cutting the clothes from the body. The effect, as the white lower limbs and torso began to show, was rather that of some dark-skinned animal under the hands
of a taxidermist. And the flattened polar bear grotesquely enhanced this impression. But the surgeon’s mind had taken another turn. ‘Marsyas,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t he flayed? And a fair number of saints and martyrs too, I should imagine. Not that our late friend was anything of a saint, if report speaks true. And I doubt if he had the stuff of the martyrs in him. Take a pinch at the buttocks here and you’ll see he was a flabby sort of cove.’ The surgeon ignored the expression of disapproval with which Hyland received this. ‘Type of the athlete taken to living soft, I’d say. And what is nastier than that? No very obvious marks of violence on the body. But of course it would still be rash to say that it was positively the knock on the head that killed him.’

  Appleby stepped forward. ‘Not a saint?’ he said casually. ‘Then I gather he had a bit of a reputation in the county?’

  ‘Lord, yes! Vain, self-conscious chap. Attractive to women, it seems, and none too scrupulous as to how he exploited the fact. Been between a good many sheets where he had no business, if you ask me.’

  Hyland frowned and jerked his head meaningfully in the direction of his subordinate at the door. But the young surgeon laughed bluffly – a nervous young man concerned to vindicate the possession of a good smoking-room manner. ‘Not,’ he continued, ‘that there’s much in all that, is there?’

  ‘Much?’ said Appleby. ‘Dear me, no. Nothing at all.’

  ‘So there must have been something else that really offended people in Dromio. Well-nourished, isn’t he? Tummy full of comfortable dinner, and kidneys no doubt just beginning to think of dealing with half a bottle of claret. In the midst of life we are in the county morgue.’

  ‘He offended people?’ asked Appleby.

  ‘Quite a heap. Do you know, they wouldn’t have him in the Plantagenet? My uncle’s a member and he told me so.’