Appleby And Honeybath (7 page)

‘And we’d better get out of the place,’ Grinton said, and moved towards the door.

But Denver didn’t budge. It was something he would be good at, Appleby thought, when still uncertain of any direction in which to move.

‘Just so,’ Denver said – much as if something prosaically sensible had just been said. ‘And it occurs to me that this library, being not otherwise required, may be the best place for me to set up in.’

‘
To set up in?
’ Grinton might have been listening to astounding words. ‘What the devil do you mean?’ That Inspector Denver had performed meritorious services in marching off those pestilent yatterers on cruel blood sports was now far from the mind of the Master of the Nether Barset Hunt. ‘If you ask me, Denver, you’d better cut off and turn in a report to the Chief Constable. Something of that kind.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not exactly the position, sir. You called in the police–’

‘The deuce I did!’ Grinton spoke with every appearance of honest indignation. That it was he who had directed his wife to ask for the meritorious Denver might have been as remote from his consciousness as was the present political situation in Kamchatka.

‘And very properly, sir, in my judgement. The situation is certainly a little obscure, but there is at least some reason to believe that there has been a theft of your property.’

‘A theft of my property!’ Grinton looked extremely startled. ‘What the deuce do you mean, Denver?’

‘A table, chair, and other effects. It is reasonable to suppose that what Sir John Appleby and Mr Honeybath came upon in there formed part of your household goods. I noticed one or two similar articles through the open door of another of those small rooms. But now these particular articles have been removed without the knowledge of their owner – to wit, yourself, sir. So burglary must be suspected. Burglary is a serious offence in itself, irrespective of the scale of the felony envisaged. Police investigation is essential.’

Honeybath, whose profession rendered him perforce a student of character, felt instructed by his prospective sitter’s reception of this not altogether plausible speech. Grinton was perceiving that it required thought. And Grinton resented this. He was not a thoughtful man. Thought was an activity which, steadily over the years, he had been addressing himself with some success to doing without. So he naturally resented any sudden call for its employment. This state of mind (if the expression was appropriate) struck Honeybath as an interesting one to pursue on the part of a portrait painter. For the first time at Grinton he felt a strong impulse to get to work. Thus he too rather resented Denver as now an obstinate presence in the place. Unlike John Appleby, he was coming to regard the whole business of the corpse and its vanishing trick as vexatious rather than interesting. It was not the less vexatious for having been hinted to him by Appleby as something that was going to occasion him a good deal of harassment at the hands of this conscientious officer.

‘Look here!’ Grinton was saying violently. ‘If you were sent for, it certainly wasn’t on account of some confounded tables and chairs. There are more than enough of the damned things about the house, and if a few have been pinched by some prowling prole I couldn’t care less.’ Terence Grinton paused on these reflections, and seemed faintly aware of them as a little lacking in relevance. ‘It’s what Mr Honeybath here saw, or thought he saw, that has brought you in on us, Denver. You know that perfectly well. So if you can just clear up that bit of twaddle, and then take yourself off, I’ll be grateful to you.’

This was undoubtedly a very rude speech, yet not without a gleam of reason. And Denver received it without any token of offence.

‘Quite so, sir. Only you see, dealing with that aspect of the situation may take a little time. A start, however, can be made at once. My officers will have arrived by now.’

‘Your officers! Who the hell are they?’

‘Two experienced and reliable men, I’m glad to say. They will act as unobtrusively as may be – only you must understand that they may have to do a good deal of ferreting around. That is unavoidable.’

‘Ferreting, you say?’ The word had the unexpected effect of appearing to bring Grinton within familiar and therefore comprehensible territory. He was perhaps recalling that his son-in-law and grandchildren were out with a ferret at that moment. ‘Well, we’ll leave you to it. And here in the library, if that’s your fancy. You’ll want to question the servants, no doubt.’

‘That may come in time, sir. But it will be best to begin with your family and guests – asking everybody in an orderly way, you know, if they have any light to throw on the situation. And taking evidence, as I’ve said, from those more evidently involved. Preferably one by one, and dictating statements which can then be read over and signed. Entirely a matter of voluntary cooperation at this stage, I need hardly say. And I’ll begin with Mr Honeybath, if he will oblige.’

Unavoidably, Mr Honeybath obliged – and thus found himself alone with Denver in no time at all.

‘A difficult man,’ Denver said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Mr Grinton. A tetchy chap.’

Honeybath found he didn’t at all know how to respond to this familiar note. It was scarcely proper to concur enthusiastically in such a verdict upon one’s host. On the other hand, ‘tetchy’ was an expressive English word of which he approved, and there could be no doubt whatever as to its applicability.

‘True enough,’ he said. ‘And something I have to take an interest in. I’m here to paint his portrait.’

‘Quite so, sir.’ Denver opened his notebook and brought out his pen, as if formal proceedings were now to begin. ‘Mr Charles Honeybath,’ he said – and appeared to write down the name. ‘RA, I think it would be?’

‘Yes.’ Honeybath, whose boyhood had been lived amid dreams of artistic glory, took no particular pride in the indubitable distinction of being a Royal Academician.

‘Interesting. They say, you know, that the Grintons are uncommonly hard up. Vanity, would you say?’

It took Honeybath a moment to catch on to the sense of this. It was simply that Terence Grinton’s financial situation was such as to render a portrait an injudicious luxury, and that vanity was perhaps the explanation. Honeybath was quite clear that it would be wholly improper to volunteer the information that the portrait was to be paid for by subscription – a fact which couldn’t possibly be of any relevance to the messsy business of the vanishing corpse.

‘I don’t think I’d call Mr Grinton vain,’ he said briefly. But he did wonder whether it might be true that the family was short of money. Terence couldn’t conceivably be
earning
money; the company didn’t exist that would pay him a fee to sit on its board. And there was no positive reason to suppose that behind him there any longer stood substantial inherited wealth. He probably blundered along as a landowner, and that was it. But here again was something irrelevant to that corpse.

‘And now to get down to it,’ Denver said comfortably. ‘It seems to me, sir, that we are on rather surer ground through that dummy door than we are here in the library. It’s not that I don’t judge your evidence to be reliable in every way. But you were on your own when you came upon this seemingly dead man. And you came away fairly quickly. I can imagine you in a witness box, Mr Honeybath, being cross-examined by counsel defending some villain or other. He might get some way in persuading a jury that there wasn’t all that evidence that the dead man wasn’t presently able to get up and walk. But it’s different when we get through that fake door. Sir John Appleby is with you when you are on the other side of it. Of course it’s quite irrelevant that Sir John has been the Metropolitan Commissioner.’ Denver said this positively airily. ‘It’s simply that two are better than one when a witness box is in prospect. I hope, sir, you follow me.’

‘Of course I follow you.’ Honeybath wondered whether ‘testy’ could fairly be applied to his manner of saying this.

‘Well, sir, your statement needn’t take us five minutes. I’ve a very fair notion of its content already. But I do wonder whether you have formed any impression about the whole thing.’

‘I have been thinking about it, of course.’ Honeybath recalled Appleby’s advice to refrain from conjectures. ‘But not, I’m afraid, to any effect worth recording. I’m entirely in the dark. Probably a good deal more than you are.’

‘Well, sir, I don’t mind admitting that, for a start, I’d like a little more light on that dead body. You are convinced that it
was
a dead body, and would maintain that in court. Right?’

‘Certainly.’ Honeybath hesitated. ‘But you might call that my rational conviction. It has been dawning on me that, in a position like mine, it isn’t easy to be wholeheartedly rational. Really, I begin to harbour doubts. Coma, now. One hears a lot about coma nowadays. How close to actual death can its appearances be?’

‘Deep waters, Mr Honeybath. It used to be assumed that death invariably happens in a breath. One moment alive; the next, not. Nowadays there’s a different view. And whether this man was really dead is something – to be frank with you – that I have to keep an open mind about. But of one thing I’m confident. If he was merely in deep coma when you came on him, he could nevertheless be in no condition simply to stand up and walk out of the room a few minutes later. Alive or dead, he was carried out. Somebody lugged the guts into the neighbour room.’

This literary flight on the part of Inspector Denver quite startled Honeybath. But he saw that a real analysis was going forward.

‘There’s another question,’ Denver said. ‘Agree that you were correct in deciding the man was dead. Did any suggestion of the cause of death occur to you then and there?’

‘I’m afraid it didn’t. I can’t recall holding any internal debate on the matter.’ Honeybath was aware of this as rather a pedantic form of words. ‘But you see what that means,’ he suddenly added. ‘I must have been taking it for granted that the chap had just died in a perfectly natural manner. As Appleby has pointed out to me, most people do. And at times very suddenly, if I’m not mistaken. A totally unheralded cerebral disaster. One has been harbouring a treacherous aneurysm – I believe that’s the word – inside one’s head, and quite suddenly it goes bust.’

‘But you didn’t, at the time, actually find yourself thinking along those lines?’

‘Assuredly not. I was simply extremely shocked.’

‘Quite so, Mr Honeybath. Nothing could be more natural. Of course if you had happened to think of something entirely different – some form of violent death, I mean – you would probably have spared a moment or two to investigate before going for help.’

‘No doubt. And if there had been any substantial and overt sign of violence I’d surely have been aware of it. If the man was murdered, in other words, it wasn’t in any strikingly gory fashion.’

‘Exactly. No blood here, and none next door – where you and Sir John had those two odd experiences.’

‘Two
experiences?’

‘Oh, decidedly. Signs of an unobtrusive squatter in a country house like Grinton were uncommonly curious in themselves. And then finding that the signs had vanished was more curious still.’

‘A vagrant,’ Honeybath said hopefully. ‘A kind of new style tramp. Or an enterprising hippie, perhaps with a little van. He has been quite snug here. But something sinister happens, and he takes alarm and bolts.’

‘Dear me!’ Denver was staring at Honeybath in what might have been charitably regarded as admiring astonishment. ‘I’d almost suppose you to be a scientist, sir, rather than an artist. I believe fertility in the field of hypothesis to be the hallmark of your top scientific man.’ Having allowed himself this frivolity, Denver again took up his pen. ‘Just a brief recital of facts,’ he said. ‘That you can put your signature to. Not a deposition, you understand, in any legal sense. Just to help us along.’

Honeybath helped along, and then withdrew from the library. His own duty in the matter he could now consider to have been discharged, and it was unlikely that anyone would bother him again. Nevertheless he continued to feel something vexatious about the whole affair. He had come to Grinton to cope with a mystery, since that is what painting the portrait of another human being involves. Or painting a kitchen chair or an old pair of boots, for that matter. You have to love the things, and achieve an obscure act of possession, and the result is that you have brought a minute speck of light into the vast darkness in which we move and have our being. Honeybath had preserved this sober faith in his craft through several decades of painting Terence Grintons and Dolly Grintons and all their company. So it was tiresome that when just about to start on a serious job there should bob up this distracting issue of a mobile corpse.

He had left Denver sitting in the library, absorbed in pen-and-ink labours like some conscientious fellow in what they called middle management. Honeybath felt that the man ought to be on the telephone arranging a sort of cordon of roadblocks round Grinton, or out and about in the shrubberies hunting for clues with a magnifying glass. But perhaps his subordinates were now doing that sort of thing. Perhaps Denver was like a spider, alert at the centre of a finely fabricated web of intelligence. He didn’t quite give that impression. But no doubt he was competent enough.

The broad corridor from the library led to the main hall of the house. This had at some time or other been carved out of several rooms, so that both in its shape and in its proportions it was a little odd. But it was spacious and also lofty, since a couple of upstairs bedrooms had disappeared into it as well. It testified to the consequence of the Grintons; its walls were adorned with trophies of the chase; it had been furnished in a half-hearted way as a place to sit about in.

Nobody was sitting in it now. But at one end, and beside the door leading to a vestibule, there stood a uniformed policeman. Although he rendered no impression of being aggressively immobile, and although the epithet ‘rigid’ could scarcely be applied to him, he was yet so motionless, so little suggestive of having lately done anything or of being about to do something, that he somehow seemed less a policeman than what is called a police presence. Within a fairly short span of time the entire Grinton family and their guests were almost sure to pass through this hall. Honeybath therefore concluded that the role of this constable (who was ‘stolid’ as all such persons are in fiction) was simply to impress the household at large with the reserve, the lurking, powers of the law.