A Connoisseur's Case Read online

  Appleby stopped in his tracks once more. But this time, he surveyed not the house but the young man who was conducting him to it.

  ‘Mr Binns,’ he said, ‘I must confess that your manners are not agreeable to me. At the same time, you are talking tolerable sense. Undesigned homicide in the course of a too carelessly perpetrated robbery with violence is, statistically, far the most probable explanation of Crabtree’s death. Your sister’s notion, on the other hand, is an odd and quirky one.’

  ‘There!’ Peter said, turning to Daphne. ‘Sucks to you!’

  Appleby ignored this puerility.

  ‘But I ought to add that it is what your sister says that interests me, all the same.’

  After this the party had walked for some minutes in silence. Scroop House was now directly in front of them. On their right it was almost impinged on by a beech copse. On their left there appeared to be a walled garden. But straight in front the park ran directly up to a low balustraded terrace before the house. The facade, as the Applebys had previously seen from a distance, was plain to the point of bleakness. But the proportions were good, and the total effect was impressive as well as pleasing. Old Mrs Coulson, who had, it seemed, gone in so uncompromisingly only for the best people and the best things, had possessed an admirable backdrop to her activities in Scroop House. Mr Arthur Balfour himself, in point of severe good taste, must often have compared the place favourably with a good many of the grand houses among which, with his fellow Cabinet Ministers, he was accustomed to revolve at weekends.

  Judith was delighted. It was clear that Seth Crabtree – although she had been so disposed to make a pet of him – was banished for a time from her head, now that this not readily accessible masterpiece by William Chambers was actually before her.

  A figure had appeared on the terrace: the figure of a woman holding a small watering can, with which she was tending a line of plants disposed along the balustrade. Here, plainly, was the lady of the house. And Appleby, although not much given to a sentimental regard for places of this kind, acknowledged something pleasing and obscurely moving in this modest domestic spectacle. Just so had the womenfolk of Scroop House been pottering around since Chambers rolled up his drawings, dismissed his workmen, and handed the place over to the first Coulson in 1786.

  They had all come to a halt again – and Appleby realized that, this time, it was Daphne Binns who had brought this about.

  ‘It’s Mrs Coulson,’ Daphne said. Her voice had altered. ‘She’s nice. In fact, you’ll find her no end of a pleasant change. Peter, march!’ And Daphne gave her brother a sharp nudge in the ribs. Then she looked straight at the Applebys. ‘Exeunt the bloody Binnses,’ she said. ‘Signed, Daphne Binns.’

  8

  ‘Would you call them enfants terribles?’ Judith asked, as they watched the young Binnses make off towards a corner of the house.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘But I do know I’m sorry I said something pompous to the boy about his manners. I’m not a damned adjutant or house master or moral tutor.’

  ‘You’re a Commissioner of Police, John, and getting dangerously accustomed to deference. But you were quite right, all the same. He was unspeakable. And his sister wasn’t much better.’

  ‘I don’t know that I agree. The boy is certainly one of nature’s Binnses, and Harrer an’ Trinity College haven’t much changed him.’

  ‘Whatever are you talking about?’

  ‘A poem of Kipling’s. Don’t forget your plain policeman’s simple tastes. But what I’m saying is that the girl is a cut above the boy. I liked her.’

  ‘Yes, she’s not bad looking, I agree.’

  ‘Idiot. Or – as Peter would say – shut up. There’s more to Daphne than to her brother. And she’s more dangerous.’

  ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male. Your friend Kipling again. But go on.’

  ‘Peter is up against something rather small, and Daphne is up against something pretty big. Of course, small things, just as much as big ones, lead to rash acts from time to time. I wonder when their mother died.’

  ‘You know she’s dead?’

  ‘Well, she vanished and didn’t turn up again. And it’s only the dead who don’t, sooner or later, turn up. Anyway, Mrs Binns’ virtual non-existence seems to be the explanation of the children’s coming here from time to time. They’ve found a mother – don’t you think? – in the lady of the watering can. Your uncle says she has a roving eye. But I suspect she had a maternal instinct as well. And she’s coming down those steps to meet us now.’

  There was no doubt that Colonel Raven’s description of Bertram Coulson’s wife, although it had been couched in somewhat Edwardian terms, fitted the lady very well. She was a devilish fine woman in a mature way. But if there was indeed a smothered fire in her, or at least a suggestion that she had difficulty in finding the life laid down for her adequate to her sense of what life should provide, this was less immediately striking than an entirely pleasing quickness of response and warmth of interest. She had still been carrying her watering can when she came down to greet her visitors. Now, back on the terrace, she walked them about for a few minutes, talking about her plants, before settling them in a sunny corner. This last action she performed competently, but with a certain vagueness as to the disposition of chairs and cushions which struck Appleby as a revealing characteristic at once. He doubted whether Mrs Coulson was much of a housewife, or managed any very effective contact with the inanimate world around her. She was a kind of magna mater whose true sphere was a teeming nursery with all its proper appendages of ponies, puppies, kittens and canaries. Lacking these, she might conceivably get wrong what it was she did lack. And a mistake of that sort might take her into difficult waters.

  ‘My husband has had to go over to the farm,’ she said, ‘but he will be back quite soon. It is something to do with the milking parlour.’

  ‘Why does one have milking parlours?’ Judith, whom Appleby judged liable to start conversations on too brittle a metropolitan note, looked interrogatively at Mrs Coulson. Stable boys make those odd noises when grooming horses, but do milkmaids converse with cows?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have never thought about it. We must ask Bertram. He is very proud of knowing everything about English country ways.’ Mrs Coulson paused, as if seeking some way of carrying on the topic. ‘In my own country we have a saying – or it may be a song, for I don’t quite remember – about singing to the cattle. But that is not, perhaps, quite the same thing. The point about the milking parlour, I think, is that it has to meet certain standards before Bertram is allowed to market the milk in a certain way. Bertram has letters about it from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Not that we market fish.’ Mrs Coulson paused again. ‘Does Colonel Raven market fish?’

  Judith laughed. Having received a frown from her husband, she was obediently dropping her conversational pitch.

  ‘I don’t think so – although fish are almost the only thing he talks about. Do Mr Coulson and he have angling as a topic in common?’

  ‘Oh, certainly they do. Bertram has all the topics he feels he ought to have. He does everything. Did you know, Lady Appleby, that there is something called the Country Gentlemen’s Association?’

  ‘I don’t think I did. But there ought to be, so I suppose there is.’ Judith was conscious of receiving another frown from Appleby as a reward for this idiocy. ‘And Mr Coulson belongs?’

  ‘I believe he is on some sort of council or committee. My husband, you see, was a little diffident about coming to live at Scroop. Having nerved himself to it, he does nothing half-heartedly.’

  ‘That’s very sensible,’ Appleby said. He was coming to feel that Mrs Coulson, as one might say, decidedly knew what was in her flower pots. And a critical spirit lurked in her. For that matter, something less readily distinguishable lurked in her as well. In fact, it suddenly came to Appleby that he was enjoying the Crabtree affair very much. There was no dead wood in it. T
here were no supers – no mere walking-on parts. Everybody was at least worth observation. ‘So I take it,’ he went on, ‘that Mr Coulson is very much a practical farmer?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. He is very much against what he calls surtax farming. And weekend squires.’

  ‘I suppose his former tenant, Mr Binns, was something of a weekend squire?’

  ‘My husband did eventually rather fall out with Mr Binns.’ Suddenly, Mrs Coulson was speaking with caution. ‘But I don’t think that, to this day, he really knows why he did so. Something bad, you see, happened in the Binnses’ home.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘And Bertram hated it. Bertram hated that happening in a home where – where there were children.’ Mrs Coulson had again changed her manner, as if resolved upon frankness. ‘You see?’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘And he would have liked Scroop to have a direct heir. That – although he scarcely knows it – is why he agrees to having the young Binnses here from time to time.’

  ‘We walked up from the canal with them,’ Judith said. ‘We found them – most interesting.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Mrs Coulson gave Judith a glance which wasn’t exactly uncomprehending. ‘And I like having them simply because they lost their mother when so young. I have thought I might be more to them than I have turned out to be.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure.’ What Appleby thought of as her social manner had suddenly dropped from Judith. She spoke gently and seriously. ‘You are rather important to Daphne Binns.’

  ‘You think so?’ Mrs Coulson had flushed faintly. ‘There are things one learns too late.’

  Silence followed this – as it will when casual acquaintances have gone a step too deep. Mrs Coulson looked out over the terrace, as if hoping that her husband might now turn up. But the park was empty. And its emptiness seemed to drive Mrs Coulson to further confidence.

  ‘And there is the fact,’ she said, ‘that this house is haunted.’ She smiled at what must have been Judith’s look of alarm. ‘Perhaps you are thinking of poor Mrs Binns, who disappeared so oddly. But it’s nothing like that. I don’t speak literally, Lady Appleby. Scroop is haunted only for my husband. And by the last Mrs Coulson.’

  ‘The Grand Collector?’

  ‘They called her that.’ There was a trace of impatience in the present Mrs Coulson’s voice. ‘I suppose she was a remarkable woman. Scroop House appears in the books of that period – in the biographies and memoirs of famous people.’

  Appleby, who had been listening in silence, himself for some reason felt impatient at this point.

  ‘Perhaps it does,’ he said, ‘–here and there. But I suspect that local legend exaggerates that aspect of the place, if I may say so. And I hope your husband doesn’t put in a lot of time sighing over past glories that are mainly in his own head.’

  Whether this forthright and not entirely civil speech was calculated or not, it had a decided effect upon Mrs Coulson.

  ‘But he does!’ she said. ‘And yet he is quite as able a man as Alfred Binns. He would have gone farther, by a long way. I mean, at the sort of thing men like to do. Nobody knew more about packing meat. He was all set to put Australia right away ahead. But he had to have this. And it hasn’t worked – or not really. I don’t know why. But I sometimes think he doesn’t, for some reason, feel entitled to be at Scroop at all.’

  ‘How very odd!’ Judith said – rather at random, and by way of breaking another silence.

  ‘I sometimes think it makes people odd. Certainly it did no good to Alfred Binns. And old Mrs Coulson is said to have turned very queer in the end. Of course she had reached a great age. She turned secretive, I understand. But here comes Bertram.’

  Appleby eyed with considerable curiosity the figure now hurrying down the terrace towards them. But, although the figure was indeed making very good speed, ‘hurrying’ was not the precisely appropriate word. ‘Loping’ might be better. Bertram Coulson was tall and lean, with a slight stoop. His possession of these features was enhanced by his being dressed in a Norfolk jacket which only just stopped short of a length suggesting a hunting coat, knickerbockers which hovered between being breeches and the species of garment vulgarly known in Appleby’s youth as ‘plus-fours’, and leggings with the dull polish that comes from the careful scouring and burnishing away of many impositions of mud and loam. And Bertram Coulson carried a shooting stick. It was not, perhaps, an object with which many gentlemen equip themselves for the purpose of strolling to and from a home farm. But it did contribute to the general effect. So did the lope. It seemed to suggest somebody who is never more at home than when striding across ploughland on some urgent bucolic occasion.

  Not – Appleby at once added to himself in justice – that there was anything that could be called absurd about Bertram Coulson. He was a good-looking man, and the clothes that did somehow catch the eye were good-looking clothes too; his tweed had plainly reached him from the Hebrides by way of Savile Row. There wasn’t about him – as there had been about Mr David Channing-Kennedy of the Jolly Leggers any suggestion of the spurious. He was man who had taken on a role, and who remained a little conscious of the fact.

  ‘Lady Appleby? How do you do.’ Bertram Coulson advanced to shake hands, became aware that the result of this gesture was to offer Judith the shooting stick, rectified the error hastily, and then turned to Appleby. ‘Sir John, how do you do. I must apologize to Lady Appleby for not being on the spot. Good of Raven to persuade you to come over. He’s a very good neighbour of mine. We hit it off pretty well on one local matter and another. Both believe in keeping an eye on things. Many of them are a neglectful lot about here, I’m sorry to say. Up and down to London by train, spend the weekends with their noses in financial journals, and scarcely know their own people by sight. Sad state of affairs. But how is your uncle, Lady Appleby? I gathered he’d had another touch of gout. Stood thigh-deep in too many rivers in his time, I suppose. But worth it, after all. No peace like the peace you get flogging a decent stretch of water.’

  Various civilities succeeded upon this speech. Mrs Coulson’s contributions to these were adequate but not prominent. In her husband’s presence she seemed inclined to withdraw into the position of a spectator. And Appleby thought that her attitude to Coulson was tinged with an ironical quality that one would scarcely have predicted from the general warmth and simplicity of her personality.

  ‘The reason I’m late,’ Coulson went on, ‘is simply that, as Edith may have told you, I’m a bit of a practical farmer nowadays. I went over to see about flooring the milking parlour of my own little concern. And it occurred to me’ – Coulson turned to his wife – ‘that it might be a good time to concrete the farther yard. There are times of the year when Bridges has to bring in his cows from the twelve-acre through a couple of feet of mud. And mud’ – this time Coulson turned to Judith – ‘is bad for muck, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Oh, yes – indeed.’ Judith was all grave assent. ‘Concrete a yard, and you begin to get some of the cost back in muck in no time. I’m so glad you’re sound on manure.’

  Coulson was delighted. But Mrs Coulson – Appleby noted – was regarding Judith with a sceptical eye.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Mrs Coulson said, ‘that Bertram was so enthusiastic about the manure, or would have entertained visitors with it so speedily, when he was an overlander.’

  ‘An overlander?’ Appleby said.

  The overlander, in the end.’ Mrs Coulson spoke with a touch of affectionate pride. ‘Whenever they ate a steak in Melbourne or Adelaide – and they begin, you know, eating them at breakfast and go on all day – Bertram had brought it to them on the hoof. And he was in at the death, too.’

  Coulson laughed.

  ‘By the death,’ he said, ‘Edith means the big freeze. We stopped herding them down that murderous thousand miles, and started slaughtering and freezing them on the spot. Technical advances made it the logical thing. But it took – well, it took a
ll the romance away.’

  Judith nodded sagely – so that Appleby had a gloomy vision of her making a pet of this Bertram Coulson rather in the way she had been disposed to do with the late Seth Crabtree. He hoped that another prompt fatality wouldn’t ensue.

  ‘But there’s still some romance,’ Judith asked, ‘in concreting that yard, and thinking about the twelve-acre, and – well, in living where Coulsons have lived for a long time?’

  Appleby wondered whether Mrs Coulson’s toes were curling as his were at this outrageous appeal to sentiment. Not that Judith wasn’t doing her bit. They weren’t, after all, honest payers of a morning call. They were snoopers, as young Mr Peter Binns had roundly suggested. And Judith was simply prodding Bertram Coulson to see how he would respond.

  He didn’t, in fact, respond with any very direct reply: rather, he gave the impression of something like a nervous shying away from the theme of Coulson succeeding Coulson.

  ‘I certainly arranged about the yard to my satisfaction, Lady Appleby. But then I was held up by something else. A fellow called Hilliard, our local police inspector, rang me up.’ Coulson turned to Appleby and gave him a straight glance – the kind of straight glance, Appleby thought, that is planned that way a second before it happens. ‘It was about this poor fellow Crabtree.’

  ‘The man who had the fatal accident yesterday?’ It was Mrs Coulson who asked this.

  ‘Yes, my dear – at the lock. Hilliard is coming up to make some inquiries. As you know, I ran into the old man yesterday. It must have been only a few hours before he died.’

  ‘And it was my wife and I who found the body,’ Appleby said. It wasn’t clear to him whether Bertram Coulson already knew this. ‘Has Hilliard in fact told you that Crabtree’s death was accidental?’