Appleby And Honeybath (2 page)

It wasn’t, of course, kept under lock and key. There just seemed to be an unspoken understanding that it wasn’t among the ground floor rooms, fairly numerous in such a house, through which guests might wander at will. Quite commonly there is such a room, called a study, an office, a book room or whatever, reserved for the private use of the owner. But as Grinton himself never entered his library, this convention clearly didn’t apply. Honeybath told himself that the apartment, obviously of considerable size, was demonstrably what house agents call a ‘reception’ room, and that he could scarcely be charged with violating his host’s hospitality if he went in and glanced round it.

His first impression was that somebody else had been taken with the same idea, and had signalled his approval of the library and its appointments by sitting down comfortably in an armchair in the middle of it. And Honeybath, perhaps because already possessed by a slight consciousness of intruding where he had no business, was momentarily confused to the extent of exclaiming, ‘Oh, I beg your pardon!’ much as if he had walked into a wrong bedroom and the spectacle of a lady brushing her teeth. But the figure was that of a middle-aged man – who might have been expected to say, ‘Not at all’, or ‘Good afternoon’, or ‘Mr Honeybath, is it not?’, or simply just, ‘Hallo’. But from the figure there came no sound, nor did it look up or stir in its seat. Honeybath concluded that here was a fellow guest – for guests came and went – who had sought out this secluded situation for a quiet after-luncheon nap, or even for the purpose of meditation and private devotion. Thus indicting himself of idle and unseasonable behaviour, the eminent painter (whose unflawed courtesy was an unobtrusive part of his make-up) was about to withdraw as quietly as might be when he realized that something was wrong. He walked up to the seated figure, touched a hand, with his own hand made a small gesture before open and unblinking eyes, and saw that he was almost certainly in the presence of a dead man. This was a shock. There was a greater shock when he took in the expression frozen, as it were, upon the dead man’s face. It could be described only as exhibiting malign glee.

So here is the finding of our corpse.

Satisfied that the man was indeed dead, Honeybath decided that it wasn’t his business to interfere with the body or investigate further. He must simply hasten to apprise his host of his perturbing discovery. So he turned away to leave the library. At the door, however, he paused for a moment. There was a key in the lock on its inner side. This, on a sudden impulse, he removed to the outside, and he then locked the door behind him. He put the key in his pocket and went on his way.

Finding Grinton ought to have been easy. It was tea-time, and he was likely, together at least with some of his household and guests, to be gathered in the drawing-room in respectful attendance upon Dolly Grinton’s Georgian silver. This very circumstance, however, made the thing awkward. To announce baldly, ‘There’s a dead man in the library’, would be a little lacking in skilled social comportment in a company possibly including several delicately nurtured gentlewomen. Honeybath saw that he must go quietly up to Grinton himself and murmur, ‘My dear Grinton, may I have a word with you?’ This in itself might occasion slight surprise, but of course his host would at once get to his feet and leave the room with him.

The plan, however, failed to work. Even as Honeybath opened the door, Grinton appeared to have come just to the end of telling some vastly entertaining story – or at least this was the inference to be drawn from the fact that the man himself was laughing loudly, and that several people imperfectly glimpsed were politely acknowledging that general mirth was required. Honeybath, thus finding himself in something like the position of the messenger Mercadè‚ in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, bearing woeful tidings into a joyous assembly, momentarily lost his nerve and retired again, with the result that he bumped into Sir John Appleby, who was arriving rather late for tea.

‘John!’ Honeybath said. ‘There’s a dead man in the library.’

‘Are you sure?’ There was nothing startled in Appleby’s voice. ‘Sleepy places, libraries, at times. And since this one is a kind of sleeping library itself…’

‘It isn’t a joke.’ Honeybath, already agitated, was now annoyed as well. ‘A dead man, I tell you.’

‘Who is it?’

‘I’ve no idea. Just a middle-aged man. I never saw him before. We must let Grinton know at once. We’d better both go in.’ Honeybath had seized the chance of useful reinforcement. He perhaps dimly felt that to have a retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police at one’s elbow is a welcome state of affairs when something slightly unnerving is on hand. ‘That’s the only proper thing.’

‘Well, yes.’ Appleby wasn’t in a hurry. ‘But if there’s really a total stranger suddenly dead on the premises this Terence Grinton will create uproar at once. Tally-ho and from a view to a death will be nothing to it. I think you and I had better have a quiet look first. If you can nerve yourself to it, Charles.’

‘Certainly I can.’ Honeybath wasn’t pleased at this needless challenge. It hinted a levity inappropriate to the occasion. But then John, he recalled, was one much traded in corpses. He had been dealing with them unceasingly throughout the earlier part of his professional career. In the light of this, a certain tinge of the hard-boiled in his attitude was fair enough. ‘Come along then,’ Honeybath said. ‘And don’t imagine I’ve gone clean off my head.’

‘Certainly not.’ Appleby was entirely placid. ‘That’s a most unlikely contingency. Even more unlikely than the appearance of a dead body in the library at Grinton.’

They made their way in silence to the library. It was quite a step. If the squirearchal Grintons had from time to time turned up men of literary or artistic inclination, so had they also produced every now and then men with an alert eye to every opportunity of augmenting the family fortune. And these money-making Grintons had commonly commemorated their success by additions – always in a contemporary taste – to the fabric of their dwelling. Grinton sprawled and proliferated in half a dozen architectural styles in a manner almost totally obscuring its original character as no more than a substantial manor house. The final result, you could feel, was much what might be achieved by a child possessed of an inordinately wide variety of ‘building sets’ of the sophisticated modern sort. The reckless
mélange
might conceivably have produced a not unpleasing effect of fantasy. But this hadn’t happened. The place was a bit of a monstrosity. Respectable guidebooks to the county said as much in decently temperate language.

The library occupied the greater part of the ground floor of a wing of moderate size and sober elegance designed by James Gibbs, an excellent architect although a suspected Jacobite, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Its south front remained much as Gibbs had left it, but that to the north was in part obscured by a confused huddle of domestic offices, now disused and virtually derelict, added by a Victorian Grinton with a mania for maintaining something like a small army of servants whose preservation from a scandalous idleness had required the exercise of much ingenuity on the part of the housekeeper, butler and similar important persons.

The door of the library stood at the end of, and faced down, a broad corridor. This approach Appleby and Honeybath traversed in a slightly constrained silence. The constraint was undoubtedly Appleby’s creation. Much experience had fostered in him a sceptical stance before one or another extravagant persuasion on the part of agitated citizens. There was going to be a moment or two of mild embarrassment as the man in the library of Grinton Hall woke up.

Honeybath halted before the door, and brought the key from his pocket. At this Appleby was prompted to speech.

‘Good Lord, Charles! Did you lock the place up behind you?’

‘Well, yes – I thought it just as well.’ Honeybath offered this confession rather awkwardly. ‘There are several children in the house, you know, and no end of women. I felt that if one of them had obeyed the same impulse as myself – an impulse of rather pointless curiosity, I fear – they might have…’

‘Quite so. Received a terrible shock. Now go ahead.’

So Honeybath unlocked the door, and the two men entered the room. The armchair was where it had been. But its occupant had vanished.

‘It’s not there!’ This came from Honeybath as a spontaneous cry of dismay. He might have been feeling that here was a large misfortune in itself, much as if the dead man had been a valuable clock or painting.

‘Well, no.’ Appleby looked about him at leisure. ‘There seems to be nothing spectacular on view for the present.’ He glanced at Honeybath almost with suspicion – but it was impossible to believe that so right-thinking a man had involved himself in some tasteless practical joke. ‘Is that the chair?’

‘Definitely.’

‘He was slumped in it?’

‘Not quite that.’ Honeybath was relieved at being presented with these matter-of-fact questions. ‘Just sitting. Or better, perhaps, perched.’ Here was a field in which he was, after all, an authority. ‘If a sitter sat like that, I’d beg him to relax.’ Honeybath studied the room more carefully than before. ‘It’s like one of your sealed room mysteries.’

‘One of my what?’

‘Well, in thrillers, then.’ Honeybath felt that he had embarked on rather a foolish line of talk. ‘A crime or something taking place behind locked doors, so that the perpetrator couldn’t seemingly have got out. Only here it’s the corpse.’

‘Oh, that! I see.’ Appleby didn’t sound interested. ‘I can’t remember running across anything of the sort. But I may have. As you know, my bloodhound days are rather far behind me. But here your locked door has happened, without a doubt. Or without, at least, an immediate doubt. Your corpse has vanished through the roof, or something like that. Post-mortem levitation. Or an Assumption…’

‘Quite so.’ Honeybath hastened to save his friend from perpetrating a profane comparison. ‘There’s that fireplace,’ he added with recovered confidence.

‘So there is.’

‘It might be described as of baronial magnificence, wouldn’t you say? Out of proportion even to this large room.’

This was true. The fireplace was a huge marble affair, massively decorated with statuary and armorial bearings. Appleby obligingly inspected it with care.

‘You think,’ he asked seriously, ‘the corpse may have scrambled up the chimney – like some sweep’s unfortunate juvenile assistant in Victoria’s darkest England?’

‘Not exactly that.’ Honeybath felt uncomfortable in the face of this unseasonable pleasantry. ‘But it might have been hauled up, if the flue’s a straight one. Or someone may have had a rope ladder. A
silk
rope ladder. I’ve read that such a thing can be conveyed undetected if tightly wound round a fellow’s body. Under his jacket, you know.’

‘Well, it might certainly be a handy thing in your sealed room situation, Charles. But are you sure it is your situation?’

‘There’s only one door, and I locked it behind me.’

‘There are three windows – and very big ones, if the point’s relevant. Let’s look at them.’

They looked at the windows.

‘Not the original fenestration,’ Honeybath said with knowledge. ‘Altered in the age of plate glass. But what are those little boxes?’

‘It’s the age of burglar alarms, too.’ Appleby made a rapid inspection. ‘All three windows firmly secured from the inside. For the moment, your SRS prospers.’

‘My what, John?’

‘Sealed room situation. But wait a minute! Here’s a staircase – an odd little spiral one – descending to some depth below. You don’t see it at first, since it’s hidden in this furthest bay. I’m going down.’ Appleby had scarcely ceased speaking before – with remarkable agility in an elderly man – he had simply vanished beneath the floor. For a couple of minutes Honeybath heard him moving about. Then, decidedly in a dusty state, he reappeared again. ‘Only a very large basement,’ he said. ‘No door, just some massively barred semi-basement windows. And the whole area absolutely crammed with junk. But literary and learned junk. More books, stacked up in enormous piles, higgledy-piggledy. Old trunks bulging with papers in bundles and papers in tatters. A kind of librarian’s nightmare.’

‘How very odd.’

‘It’s just a matter of most Grintons having been of the true Terence breed. But return to the body, Charles – in recollection, that is. Would you say you examined it at all thoroughly?’

‘I can’t say that I did. But I do feel I made sure the man was dead. And something about it does now come into my head – just because of your own present appearance, as a matter of fact. There was something dusty about him – and a cobweb in his hair. Do you know? I’m beginning almost to see him again.’ Honeybath frowned. ‘Something about his clothes – no, not just the dust. And about his shoes. But, no – it’s gone again.’

‘It may come back.’

‘I suppose I ought to have been more observant. You see, being quite sure the man was dead, I decided to get Grinton at once.’

‘Quite right, but you realize where we are now. When you left the library, the probability was that you were leaving behind you a death from natural causes. Most people die that way, after all.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘That the chap was unknown to you was perplexing, but there could be several explanations of that. When bodies immediately disappear, however, the probability shifts. Why whisk away into concealment the victim of a simple heart attack? No answer, Charles. Or none that I can see off-hand. So miching mallecho seems to be at work.’

Appleby was now prowling the room rather in the manner of one of the larger cats waiting to be fed in a zoo. It was a room deserving to be called handsome in every way. From the marble floor, for the most part obscured beneath dim and doubtless valuable rugs thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa or similar localities, up to a deeply coffered ceiling to which gilding had at some period been liberally applied, every inch of wall space was occupied by tier upon tier of books in a state of centennial slumber. More books – thousands rather than hundreds of them – were ranged in deep bays or alcoves projecting from the long north wall of the room. The total effect was oppressive, and this was enhanced by the presence of a powerful
smell
. Even well-kept books, provided they are numerous and old enough, generate this phenomenon. Confronted by all this, Honeybath, although much distracted by the untoward situation into which he had been precipitated, spared a thought for his wonderful vision of Terence Grinton here in his hunting kit. Sitting at ease, perhaps, in that fatal chair…