Appleby And Honeybath (8 page)

The Applebys now appeared – Judith presumably having lately returned in the dusk from a long tramp on the downs. For a moment they didn’t notice Honeybath. Appleby strolled up to the constable just as if he were quite real but also entirely harmless. The constable appreciated this, producing brisk and amiable replies to whatever Appleby was saying to him. Judith began to circle the hall, pausing here and there before masks and brushes as if some interesting individuality attached to one vulpine relic or another. Then she saw Honeybath and came over to him.

‘Charles,’ she said, ‘John has just spun me the most extraordinary yarn about high jinks at Grinton. I suppose it’s not one of his tiresome jokes?’

‘Definitely not. I’ve no doubt he has told you exactly what has happened – or the very little that we
know
to have happened, perhaps I’d better say.’

‘You didn’t do it, Charles?’

‘Judith!’

‘I expect it’s what everybody’s going to be asked – if not just in so many words. John says one reading of the thing is murder of someone unknown by someone unknown. One must hope it turns out to be an inside job.’

‘I sometimes can’t decide whether you or John is the sillier.’ Honeybath had known Judith from childhood.

‘There would be more excitement in an inside job. Haven’t you even been
suspected
?’

‘Well, I’ve just come from an interview with the top policeman on the scene. Whether he suspects me or not, I haven’t the faintest idea. But it’s his business to suspect everybody, no doubt. Although of precisely what isn’t yet at all clear.’

‘John says he’s next after you for interview. Here he is.’

Appleby, having finished his conversation with the constable, had now joined them.

‘Yes, it’s me next,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And do you know? I don’t believe this excellent Denver has a clue to my murky past.’

‘Ah!’ It was plain that Honeybath relished this. And he was even constrained to an uncustomary colloquial note. ‘John,’ he said, ‘don’t make me laugh.’

‘I hope I guessed right,’ Denver said to Appleby. ‘About not wanting your official position brought forward, that is.’

‘My former official position, Mr Denver. But you were certainly right. I know very little about most of the people now at Grinton, and some of them might quite well take it into their heads that I was ready to meddle in this thing. Nothing could be further from the truth.’

‘Quite so, Sir John.’

‘And for that matter, you know, retired or not retired is all one. If the present Metropolitan Commissioner – a very nice fellow, by the way – was in this house now, he would have no special standing in the matter whatever.’

‘Very true, indeed, sir, speaking by the book.’

‘Well, let me make that statement for you. At four thirty-five this afternoon I was about to enter the drawing-room at Grinton Hall. I met my fellow guest, Mr Charles Honeybath, coming out. Mr Honeybath said, “John! There’s a dead man in the library.” I said–’

Appleby was speaking at brisk dictation speed, so Denver had to grab his pen and make do. For two or three minutes he scribbled hard.

‘Read it back to me,’ Appleby then said, ‘and I’ll sign and you can get on to your next chap. Grinton himself, I suppose.’

‘Yes – Grinton.’ Denver didn’t seem enchanted with the professional brevity of this performance; in fact, he looked very like a man who wants to say, ‘But please don’t go away’. What he did say was, ‘Mr Honeybath tells me he’s painting his portrait. He’s rather a tetchy fellow.’

‘Mr Honeybath?’

‘No, sir. Mr Grinton.’ Denver was unruffled. ‘Would you have known him for long?’

‘For a good many years, in a very slight way. Through some female line or other, he’s related remotely to my wife. On two or three occasions we’ve lunched at Grinton. But this is our first regular visit.’

‘Have you noticed, Sir John, anything odd about Mr Grinton’s attitude to this room?’

‘My dear Denver, I’ve had very little time to become aware of anything of the sort. But, I suppose, in a way – yes. It’s no more than goes with a certain general eccentricity of character. Plenty of people, you know, don’t care much for book-learning. It just doesn’t enter their lives. But that perfectly common trait Grinton seems to carry a step further. He positively dislikes books, and so owns a frank antipathy to his own library.’

‘More than that, Sir John. He keeps people out of it. There’s something almost nervous about the thing. And progressively so.’

‘I’ve had no opportunity to remark that, Inspector. And I don’t see how you can have had such an opportunity either. To observe, I mean, any change of attitude or emphasis on Mr Grinton’s part.’

‘Well, not myself, sir. Certainly not. But I’ve had a word with the butler.’

‘The dickens you have!’ Appleby was impressed by this.

‘I got hold of him by saying I’d need him to hunt up people I wanted to talk to. It wouldn’t have been colourable, of course, to have more than five minutes’ chat with him. But I told him he mustn’t be surprised if one of my men turned up in this library with a little vacuum cleaner. It would be to collect specimens of dust for scientific purposes. There was a surprising amount of dust, I said. That touched his professional pride. Nowadays – as you must have noticed in your walk of life, Sir John – a butler is often the only upper servant even in rather grand places like this one. He doubles up as housekeeper as well, and is in charge of the entire bag of tricks, you may say. Well, the man explained to me that Mr Grinton can hardly have anybody enter this library – and he says this seems to have been particularly true of late.’ Denver glanced quickly at Appleby; he probably felt that he had got his man. ‘It takes some accounting for, if you ask me.’

‘Are you suggesting, Inspector, that this room harbours a dark secret, which an intruder might stumble upon? A mad relation, perhaps, dressed chiefly in rags and cobwebs?’

‘Not quite that, Sir John.’ Denver was again unruffled in the face of this mockery. ‘But, well – something.’

‘Then why doesn’t Grinton simply keep the room locked up?’

‘That would perhaps be a little too obtrusive to be prudent.’

‘If he said his library happens to contain items of great value, turning a key on it might seem quite natural. But I don’t say you’re not on to something, Denver. Well within a target area. We have to keep thinking about this room.’ Appleby was aware that he had employed a possibly disastrous pronoun. ‘Whenever you think about that dead body, think about this room as well. And now I’d better make way for your next suspect.’

‘There’s one thing Grinton can’t be suspected of.’ Denver gave no sign he felt this interview to be over. ‘Shunting the body – always supposing it
was
a body, of which I’m not quite convinced – through that dummy door. He was in the drawing-room as that was happening.’

‘So it would seem. But that sort of alibi, you know, can turn out to be unexpectedly tricky.’ Appleby was now the man of experience, uttering cautionary words. ‘Have an incident re-enacted as closely as may be, keep a stopwatch in your hand, and surprising results sometimes appear.’

‘Of course that’s so. And it would be absurd to speak of Mr Grinton as a suspect, anyway.’ Denver somehow didn’t say this very convincingly. ‘Far too many unknown quantities still. For the sheer devil of the thing, give me what they call a house party every time.’

‘Well, yes. But it isn’t a
big
house party, you know. And it’s not really a very big house either. Think if this was happening at Blenheim or Knole or Castle Howard.’

‘Or Scamnum Court,’ Denver said – thus showing a surprising acquaintance with Appleby’s early career. ‘But you know, sir, there is one promising factor in this affair. It’s rum. It’s uncommonly rum – and that’s something. Because, you know, it’s when one has an absolutely colourless crime–’

‘There’s been a crime?’ Appleby interrupted. ‘Apart from that absurd talk you put up about burglared furniture?’

‘I think there’s been a crime.’ Denver said this with a very proper gravity. ‘But what I was suggesting is this: it’s the colourless crime that can be the devil to get any grip on. As soon as the quirky comes in, there’s likely to be something to get hold of.’

‘That’s very true.’ Appleby contrived to receive with admiring surprise this commonplace of criminological lore. ‘So concentrate on the very odd business of a dead man being spirited away. Tabulate all rational motives for such an act that you can think of, and then weigh each in turn.’

‘But are there
any
rational motives? Can you come up with one for a start, Sir John?’ Denver seemed to feel that this had been venturesome. ‘For I don’t know that I can,’ he added.

‘Well now, what about it’s being a matter of taste?’

‘Taste, Sir John?’

‘There’s a certain suggestion that a dead body had been perched or posed in that chair to create a macabre effect upon discovery. The perpetrator may have decided, upon reflection, that it was a somewhat unbecoming joke. Not on, as they say. So he picked up the corpse again and moved elsewhere.’

Inspector Denver – as well he might – didn’t at once know how to take this.

‘Would you really think–’ he began.

‘I’m not being entirely frivolous. In cases of murder – and we keep an open mind about this being one – the murderer often turns curiously confused. He may go in for compunctions before the deed, but something like mere bewilderment after it. The classical instance is Shakespeare’s Macbeth.’

‘Macbeth’s bewilderment wouldn’t have caused him to move Duncan’s body out of the chamber where he’d murdered him.’ Denver, a reasonably literate man, remembered the play pretty clearly. ‘Lady Macbeth might have done it – if she’d seen any sense in so doing.’

‘Excellent! You see how indulging in quite fanciful ideas can open up useful trains of thought.’

‘You mean, sir, that Mrs Grinton, as well as Grinton himself, may have been in on the act?’

Appleby, not commonly unready in reply, was held up for a moment by this. He wondered whether Dolly Grinton could possibly support the character of a fiend-like queen. More clearly, he saw that the otherwise thoroughly competent Inspector was in some danger of developing an awkward
idée fixe
about Terence Grinton. Terence had undoubtedly been uncivil to the chap. But Terence would be uncivil to anybody, and with a kind of saving geniality more often than not. Appleby wondered whether he ought to try to put in a good word for Terence. But then he remembered that he had been asked a question and had better answer it.

‘It certainly hasn’t occurred to me, Denver, to start suspecting my host and hostess of some dark crime. I meant merely that there may be two or more villains in the piece. Two people, for that matter, can lug a body around more easily than one.’ Appleby hesitated for a moment. ‘But just go back to that rather odd thing you said about Grinton. Surely you’ve already admitted that as a prime suspect he just doesn’t stand up. When this supposed body-shunting business was going on, he was at the other end of the house.’

‘Yes, Sir John, we’ve just taken account of that – and it was you yourself who had a cautionary word about alibis. It’s no more than that I feel Mr Grinton is somehow keeping something or other in the bag. And it might be quite natural that his wife should know about it.’

‘I wouldn’t dispute the general proposition that husbands and wives have a tendency to share secrets. If you are a married man yourself, you know that very well.’

‘Yes, indeed, sir. And would you be inclined to say that of those two it’s the lady who is the brighter by some way?’

‘Perhaps so.’ Appleby wasn’t quite comfortable before this turn in the discussion of the persons whose hospitality he was enjoying. But the feeling was one it would be quite wrong to give weight to. ‘Estimating intelligence is a tricky thing, Inspector, as you know very well. Mrs Grinton is certainly clever, but I’m not at all clear that Mr Grinton is stupid.’

‘Cunning, perhaps?’

This looked like the
idée fixe
again, and Appleby paused before coping with it.

‘When intelligence and lack of information go together,’ he said, ‘an effect of cunning is sometimes the result. And I would say of Grinton – without in the least wanting to disparage the man – that he is quite surprisingly ignorant about a great deal.’

‘And the sort that, if he
can
get something wrong,
will
get it wrong?’

‘An extreme view, perhaps – and I don’t really know him anything like well enough to say. But I certainly wouldn’t – well – trust him with the conduct of my affairs. And now, Inspector, you’d better have your own little chat with him.’

Charles Honeybath, meanwhile, had wandered back to the drawing-room. It was the violet hour, when – as the poet says – the eyes and back turn upward from the desk. Honeybath had no desk, and at the moment not even an easel. He was finding the violet hour unsatisfactory – as it can often be in an English country house in what is still late winter rather than early spring. Women talk about gardening, but without conviction; men grumble because they are no longer allowed to shoot things – unless, indeed, there are duck around; children, bundled out of school on the pretext of a ‘half-term’ exeat, are troublesome presences. It may be more than an hour before a bell rings by way of telling you to get out of one set of clothes and into another: a ritual pleasing to the female sex but rather boring to the male. And quite often you are lucky if you so much as get a drink in advance of the announcement that dinner is served.

Honeybath had missed his tea, and although nothing of the sort was still likely to be going on, there might yet be a stray uncleared sandwich to nibble. It turned out there was a little more: a teapot on a stand, and a tiny blue flame under a kettle. Nor was the drawing-room entirely untenanted. Two other guests were in possession: the man called Hallam Hillam, and Grinton’s son-in-law, Giles Tancock. They seemed to have been conferring together as Honeybath entered the room. The afternoon’s sensational event must by now be known throughout the household, and no doubt there was much to be conjectured about it. Honeybath himself had in a sense been the hero of the occasion, so perhaps these two men would question him about it. He didn’t want this. He didn’t feel he knew either at all well, and he had an uncertain sense of their owning some common world only in a tenuous relationship with his own. It seemed necessary to make an attempt at conversation.