A Night of Errors (15 page)

‘And an awkward time to get at ordinary flesh and blood. But there
is
more of that to be got at. For instance, what about the woman who came to dinner?’

‘Mrs Gollifer?’ Hyland shook his head. ‘I can’t see that she’s very likely to come in. Simply an acquaintance who came and went. And the evening begins to be abnormal, surely, only when Sir Oliver and whoever it may have been arrive home and step through that window.’

‘I think not. The evening began to get out of hand not in this study but in the drawing-room. There was a row there. Quite possibly it was an altogether independent row – or revelation.’

‘We could do with a bit of revelation ourselves.’ Hyland, his confidence in the guilt of Sebastian Dromio now shaken, glanced gloomily at the two shrouded bodies. ‘I wish they’d come and take these things away.’

‘The person who was particularly upset was the girl – Lucy Dromio. It would be interesting to know a little more about her. Do you think Sherris runs to any more old retainers besides Swindle and the late Grubb? An aged crone, long ago familiar with the nursery and schoolroom, would be a most desirable acquaintance. I don’t think one will get much from Lady Dromio – and from Miss Lucy herself still less. Of course, about a girl brought up in such a situation one can make a guess. The wonderful little Oliver turned her head – and she quite failed to screw it straight again when she grew up.’

‘Bother guesses. I never heard anything less like useful police work in my life.’ Hyland checked himself. ‘Sorry, my dear chap. Feeling a bit out of my depth, to tell the truth. So guess away. But I suggest we keep it till breakfast. I’d uncommonly relish a few hours’ sleep.’

The study door opened and a heavy-eyed constable put his head into the room. ‘Reverend Mr Greengrave,’ he said. ‘He’s just been seeing the ladies.’

Hyland groaned. ‘This is as interminable,’ he muttered, ‘as one of those beastly mystery thrillers in a cinema. No let-ups at all. Show him in.’

Mr Greengrave too was heavy-eyed, as if alternate driving and slumbering in moonlight had not quite cleared his head of either the Landorian periods or the Falernian potations of Canon Newton. He glanced from the living to the dead – both the dead – and his jaw sagged. ‘A chair,’ said Mr Greengrave.

‘A chair and a glass of water, if you please. You see, it keeps on happening.’

The constable and Hyland brought forward what was required. ‘Keeps on happening?’ said Hyland. ‘I don’t understand you.’

‘I scarcely understand myself. The night has taken upon itself a habit – well, a habit of duplication. I am not in error’ – and Mr Greengrave took a wary glance towards the fireplace – ‘in supposing that there are two bodies in this room?’

‘There are certainly two. Mr Sebastian Dromio has killed the gardener, I am sorry to say.’ Hyland, somewhat uncertain in the presence of the clergy, announced this with something of the air of a superior servant intimating disaster to the second-best dinner service. ‘He shot him while under the influence of drink.’

‘Drink?’ Mr Greengrave gulped hastily at his glass of water. ‘I have often thought that if only the bishop would encourage the practice of total abstention within the diocese–’ He stopped. ‘Would that be a man named Grubb?’

‘That’s the man. He worked here as a lad, it seems, in Sir Romeo’s time. I suppose, sir, you’d like to look at the bodies?’ Hyland spoke a little more briskly, as if passing to what he took for a routine professional procedure.

‘Thank you. It will no doubt be proper to do so presently. Let us pray.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Let us pray.’

Hyland, much confused, looked round for a suitable object by or upon which to kneel. Then he compromised by assuming the attitude generally judged proper at the more solemn moments of the burial service. Mr Greengrave prayed – and rose very much a different man. ‘This is altogether shocking,’ he said. ‘As an unresolved mystery it is not to be borne. The women of the family are altogether overwhelmed. For their sakes I hope that the truth, however distressing, may be found at once. I have myself a communication to make. Sit down.’

Obediently Appleby and Hyland sat down.

‘I saw Sir Oliver. And I saw his brother too. They were driving together in a car.’

Appleby spoke for the first time. ‘You knew, then, that Sir Oliver had a brother living?’

‘Certainly not. But Lady Dromio has just told me her story, and now I know it must have been a brother. At the time, and for reasons which our earlier encounter tonight has made known to you, I supposed my eyes to be playing tricks on me. In a sense it is something of a relief to know that what I saw was – um – veridical. The two men were uncommonly like each other – a most striking family resemblance. But then I suppose they were what are called uniovular twins – or triplets, I should say.’ Mr Greengrave paused on this, a little proud of his command of a scientific vocabulary. ‘Clearly they were driving home to Sherris together. And clearly it was with this brother that Sebastian – the wretched Sebastian as I fear we must say – saw Sir Oliver earlier in the day.’

‘That
what
?’ Hyland almost jumped from his chair.

‘It is a circumstance which Lady Dromio has not been able to bring herself to communicate to you. You must forgive her. It is not unnatural – nor, I venture to think, altogether improper – that it is to her spiritual adviser that a woman will choose to reveal a matter of this sort.’ Mr Greengrave, who until this night had never with Lady Dromio achieved very much in the way of spiritual admonition, spoke not without a modest triumph. ‘Sebastian knew that Oliver was back in England. He caught a glimpse of him lunching with a stranger in London today – or rather I should say yesterday. He did not actually see the stranger’s features, but there is a strong inference, surely, that it was one of the missing brothers. Sebastian appears obscurely to have felt that his nephew’s return was likely to occasion some crisis in the family’s affairs, and so he hurried down here at once.’

‘And what did he do when he got here?’ Hyland was once more alert. ‘That’s the question, if you ask me.’

Mr Greengrave shook his head. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘I for my part ask no questions. Rather, I have further information to give. Or, better, I have a speculation.’ He frowned. ‘Or, better still, I have an intuition strongly supported by subsequent reflection. It may be that I ought to have taxed Lady Dromio with the matter at once. At the moment of bereavement, however, such things are difficult. I have half a mind to ask Canon Newton to come over. He has great confidence and address. He faces the most distressing pastoral tasks with what I can only term aplomb. Only I have a notion that, at the moment, he will be – um – particularly fast asleep.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Appleby, ‘it will not be too distressing to you to confide this intuition to
us
?’

‘I believe I am bound to do so. Although in all probability my discovery is unconnected with Sir Oliver’s death.’

‘To say nothing of Grubb’s. We mustn’t forget him.’

Somewhat unexpectedly, Mr Greengrave robustly laughed. ‘To Grubb himself,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t at all matter if we do. He will be adequately borne in mind elsewhere. But about my discovery let there be no beating about the bush. I believe Lucy Dromio to be the daughter of a lady who, I am told, came to dinner here yesterday evening. Her name is Mrs Gollifer.’

‘I see.’ Appleby looked thoughtfully at the dying and still sinister embers in the great fireplace. ‘And does your intuition extend to the girl’s father?’

‘Dear me, no. On that I have no information whatever.’

Hyland stirred impatiently. ‘But have you any information at all? Or is it just a feeling inside?’

‘I can only describe it as a sharp visual perception. I was driving home earlier tonight, and Miss Dromio was much in my mind. Suddenly her image rose vividly before me – and at the same time that of Mrs Gollifer, whom I had never connected with her in any way. I realized at once that they are mother and daughter. And the realization is the more curious in that they are not really at all
like
each other. I doubt whether an excellent photograph of each would remotely hint anything of the sort.’

‘Very interesting – very interesting, indeed.’ Hyland glanced over at Appleby with an expression suggesting profound gloom. ‘But as evidence–’

‘It’s not offered as evidence.’ Appleby had sat forward and was looking at Mr Greengrave attentively. ‘Was this before you saw Sir Oliver and the stranger we suppose to be his brother?’

Mr Greengrave nodded. ‘It was some little time before. As a matter of fact I took those two men to be something in the nature of a hallucination, and the experience tended somewhat to shake my confidence in this earlier visual experience. But I have no doubt of it now. Very strange as it must seem, Mrs Gollifer is the mother of Lucy Dromio.’

Hyland shook his head. ‘Really, sir, your conviction seems to me most unreasonable. For instance, why mother? Might she not be the girl’s aunt?’

‘I quite understand your misgivings.’ Mr Greengrave was unperturbed. ‘But I believe it will turn out as I say.’

‘And what is known of this Mrs Gollifer?’ Appleby addressed the two men equally. ‘Is her husband alive? Has she children? Is she an intimate friend here?’

‘Her husband died many years ago.’ It was Hyland who replied. ‘He was one of the largest landowners in these parts. There is one son, a Mr Geoffrey Gollifer, who inherited the estates. Mrs Gollifer now lives on one of the smaller of the family properties not many miles away. Whether she has been much in the way of visiting here I don’t at all know.’

‘I have an impression that she is a very old friend of Lady Dromio’s.’ Mr Greengrave had risen, crossed the room, and was standing composedly over the shrouded bodies by the fireplace. ‘That she comes here often I do not know. Rather less often, I imagine, than the degree of intimacy existing between the two women would suggest.’

‘And her moral character?’

Mr Greengrave smiled. ‘Really, Mr Appleby, she is rather too old to
have
a moral character – at least in the sense which you probably imply. She is not, of course, one of my parishioners, and I am only slightly acquainted with her. I would hazard that she is a woman of high principle.’

Hyland, his hands deep in his pockets, sighed with a resigned impatience. ‘Does that not suggest its being unlikely that she should have to farm out an illegitimate daughter on Lady Dromio?’

Mr Greengrave took a turn about the room. ‘Assume,’ he said, ‘that my intuition in this matter is correct – although I grant that you do very right to question it. The illegitimacy of the child by no means necessarily follows. To begin with, I have the impression that Lucy Dromio is by some years older than Geoffrey Gollifer. Thus if the late Mr Gollifer were not her father – and it is hard to imagine that he can have been so – it is yet possible that she is legitimate. She may be the legitimate daughter of Mrs Gollifer and some man unknown to us.’

Appleby too had risen and was looking out of the window. Hyland’s bodyguard – whether with licence or not – had departed, and the terrace was empty under a fitful moonlight. He turned round. ‘You say that the late Mr Gollifer was a landowner? He would be the old-fashioned territorial magnate with his wealth pretty well entirely locked up that way?’

‘Just that, I imagine.’ Hyland yawned. ‘Though I don’t see–’

‘Then we have a very queer situation indeed. Mr Greengrave’s suggestion is virtually this: that Mrs Gollifer’s marriage – her known marriage – may have been bigamous. It is this Geoffrey Gollifer who is illegitimate. And he is at present in the enjoyment of estates which are likely enough entailed upon his father’s legitimate heirs male. The situation has the makings of a melodrama of the most orthodox sort.’

‘And is obviously quite intimately connected with the deaths of Sir Oliver Dromio and the man Grubb.’ Hyland was reduced to irony. ‘Mr Greengrave has been privileged to see a vision in the midst of great darkness, and at once our problem becomes crystal clear.’

‘If true, it certainly makes our problem more complicated. But that is all to the good. With police work, it is only in the very simplest cases that failure can be excused. The unknown body in the river, the robbery in the dark lane–’

‘Yes, to be sure.’ Hyland made an impatient gesture. ‘The queerer a case, the more there should be to get hold of. But here we are heading for having a lot too much. Mr Greengrave has formed rather an irrational conviction and you, my dear Appleby, have built upon it one of a number of possible flights of fancy. But even if what you say is true all along the line it appears to me to give us not a single and more complicated case but two cases with no more than an accidental connexion. Think of that brother – or of those brothers – brought back from America. Half an hour ago you were for having them right in the forefront of the investigation. But what earthly connexions can they have with the hypothetical bigamy of Mrs Gollifer?’

‘One possibility is surely not at all difficult to grasp.’ Appleby took another turn about the room. ‘It attracts me too – just because I am reluctant to have those brothers back from the shades at all.’

Hyland shook his head. ‘They’re back all right. Mr Greengrave here saw two Dromios driving in a car, not one.’

‘But I don’t think you have any confidence in the other thing he saw?’

‘Well, no – I haven’t. But that wasn’t really seeing, was it?’

‘Here was Mr Greengrave driving through the dusk. His mind was active but his senses somewhat distracted. I am myself inclined to give more weight to his sudden inward perception about Mrs Gollifer and Lucy Dromio than I am to the two men of similar appearance whom he actually believed himself to see. He was sitting behind a windscreen – and so, too, presumably, was whatever he saw. You yourself must often have observed that a mere defect in a sheet of glass will momentarily produce the appearance of two identical objects where there is, in fact, but one.’

Hyland threw back his head in despair. ‘Really, my dear fellow, this exceeds all bounds. First you build up a most ingenious story on the basis of there having been two, and perhaps three, Dromio brothers in this room. And now you talk of a defect in a sheet of glass. Be serious, for heaven’s sake.’