Appleby and the Ospreys (12 page)

‘Quite so. And, of course, the key may be to something not here at Clusters, at all. But I doubt that. I think it probably fits a lock here on the ground floor of Clusters.’

‘The ground floor, sir? How do you make that out?’

‘Another guess, I’m afraid. I’m supposing that the key gives access to that collection.’

‘Collection, Sir John?’

‘The Osprey Collection of coins, Ringwood. We know that Lord Osprey was idiosyncratically cagey on the numismatic front. And we know that he produced his hoard for his brother-in-law, Marcus Broadwater, on a trolley. Broadwater, you know, is a professional numismatist, who advised him – cataloguing the things, and so forth.’

‘He must have been off his rocker – Lord Osprey must. A trolley, you say!’

‘Quite so. But the point is that, since Clusters doesn’t seem to run to any lifts or hoists, the coins were kept in concealment here on the ground floor. And it’s possible that this key may lead to them.’

‘So you think, sir, that the collection of coins is near the heart of the matter?’

‘It’s no more than a conjecture at this stage, Ringwood. I’ve come across one or two elements that don’t seem to fit into any such notion. But here is this mysterious key, which
does
fit. And it must, literally, fit some lock or other. We’ve got to find it.’

‘The point is one you need scarcely reiterate, Sir John.’ It was clear that these two policemen – active and retired – were not getting on very well together. ‘The sergeant here can begin going round with the key at once. Only we’d better have a photograph of the thing here on the shelf before disturbing it. And let the finger-print people see it’s quite without a surface they could work on.’

‘Quite right,’ Appleby said. ‘Never miss out on the routine. Hard-won experience has created it.’

Ringwood received this with a moment’s silence – possibly as detecting a hint of mockery in it. And then, suddenly, he smiled.

‘Do you recall, sir,’ he asked, ‘saying a true word about this not a long time back? A kind of metaphor, I think they’d call it.’

‘And now, Ringwood, you’re producing a kind of riddle. What did I say?’

‘You said, Sir John, that the key to the mystery lay in this confounded library.’

Bagot – perhaps after some token consultation with the bereaved Lady Osprey – had decided that luncheon should be a buffet affair. It was probably his view that, whatever the police might think, the house-party at Clusters had lasted long enough, and that a hint of imminent dispersal was in order. Such a hint might be given if the guests were required to remain on their feet as they munched, unless they were willing to perch on chairs ranged round the circumference of the room as at a ball. As this latter disposition would have been absurd, everybody remained perpendicular, including Lady Osprey herself in a slightly bewildered way – until, indeed, her son, furiously scowling, dragged forward one of the ranked chairs and made her sit on it.

Sir John Appleby, gnawing the while at a smoked salmon sandwich of the more obstinately stringy sort, didn’t fail to remark this filial attention on Adrian Osprey’s part, and he had a sense of it as obscurely significant. The young man’s temperament appeared to be such that he might have been a little more than a shade rough with a girl, but he didn’t somehow seem likely to have behind him the role of a patricide.

But Appleby faced another and less speculative consideration. Given that Lord Osprey’s murder had been committed by the mysterious and alarming intruder at the French window of the library not many hours before the fatality, nobody now in the enjoyment of Bagot’s buffet could qualify as the perpetrator. For when the intruder had briefly revealed himself to Lord Osprey and Miss Minnychip, the entire company had been congregated on the wrong side of the window, having gathered in the library for the purpose of imbibing what Adrian clearly regarded as the strikingly unsatisfactory family sherry.

And now the company was complete once more, since Marcus Broadwater had turned up from his river. Entering a little late, he had addressed a word or two to his sister – of too casual a sort, Appleby felt, to be quite appropriate to the occasion. And now he had turned to Appleby himself.

‘Uncommonly annoying,’ he said. ‘Everything upset as a result of last night’s revolting butchery. They even forgot to put a bite to eat in my basket. But, as it happened, the trout haven’t been rising, anyway. Too much bright sunlight, I expect. Probably I’ll go back and flog the water for an hour or two in the late afternoon. Perhaps I’ll try a Poly May Dun. Any progress here?’

‘You must ask the police,’ Appleby said, and then abandoned so patently disingenuous a response. ‘Ringwood has sent one or two things for forensic investigation, but I don’t myself expect the results to be much of a surprise. Your brother-in-law was killed with a weapon snatched from one of those trophies on the library wall. That doesn’t, to my own mind, suggest much in the way of premeditation. And we find that somebody has had out a little boat from the shed on the other side of the moat. That seems to tie in with the fellow fleetingly seen last night through the French window in the library. I don’t know that there’s anything more concrete than that.’

‘Such as your information is, Sir John, it is good of you to give me word of it. And I am afraid I spoke to you rather foolishly this morning. Perhaps I was taken a little by surprise, my mind being already on the fish. I mean about being a good suspect, and so on.’

‘I don’t know that I took you very seriously, Mr Broadwater. By the way, does the name Minnychip count for much in the numismatic world?’

‘Meaning our friend’s late father?’ Broadwater laughed good-naturedly. ‘He was an Anglo-Indian of some sort, who interested himself in coinage from that point of vantage. I know that he contributed a number of well-informed articles to scholarly journals. And according to his daughter – as you have no doubt heard from the lady – he formed his own collection of coins from the Orient.’

‘Would it be as important as the Osprey Collection?’

‘Good Lord, no!’ Broadwater was amused.

‘Do you think Miss Minnychip herself knows much about coins in any sort of learned way? Or continues her father’s interest by dealing in them – anything of that sort? Or ever betrays what might be regarded as an obsession with the subject?’

Broadwater accorded this string of questions a moment’s thought.

‘I’d scarcely suppose anything of the kind,’ he then said. ‘And she has never, by the way, invited me to take a look at what she has. That is perhaps a shade odd. And yet, why should she? Have you, incidentally, talked at all to Honoria Wimpole?’

‘Not so far. But I take her to be the young woman standing by the fireplace.’

‘Quite right. Now she is a numismatist. Another ten years, and she will be one of the leading authorities in our field. Curious, in a way. Her mother – talking to Quickfall, over there – is an uncommonly silly woman. Even as women go.’

Appleby made no comment on Broadwater’s final remark here. But after another moment he asked a further question.

‘Will Miss Wimpole have seen the Osprey Collection?’

‘I don’t know. But I imagine not. She may have come to Clusters in the hope of doing so.’

‘The police still don’t know where the Osprey Collection is kept. And you told me earlier this morning that you don’t know either. That struck me as most extraordinary, and it still does. Ringwood was equally surprised when I passed on your information. And rather perturbed, really. Because it does seem not altogether unlikely that there is some link between your brother-in-law’s death and this uncommonly elusive collection. It’s almost as if – and you must forgive me for putting the point in this way – with that death, you are the only person who knows positively that the coins exist.’

‘That, Sir John – and now
you
must forgive
me
– is total nonsense. Over the years, a number of scholars of undeniable integrity have enjoyed the privilege of examining the Osprey Collection.’

‘I don’t doubt that for a moment, Mr Broadwater. And I must emend the point I was trying to make. You are now the only person who can possibly tell whether the Osprey Collection still exists in its integrity.’

‘Only a couple of years ago my brother-in-law and I compiled and printed for private circulation a catalogue of the Osprey Collection. When the coins are found – as I hope they soon will be – the continued integrity of the collection can be checked against it.’

‘The degree of collaboration between you which that entails seems to make all the odder the fact that you don’t know the collection’s whereabouts. It
will
have to be found, you know – if only for the probate people. Of course, there’s that key.’

‘Key?’ Broadwater repeated sharply. His tone perhaps indicated a growing knowledge that this was scarcely a friendly interrogation.

‘Ringwood and I found a key, rather oddly sited, in the library only an hour ago. I have taken it into my head that it may be the key to whatever secure place Lord Osprey kept his coins in. A small room or a cupboard: that sort of thing. Ringwood has a man going round with the key now – and instructions to try it wherever he sees a keyhole.’

‘An unoccupied keyhole, I presume.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose the fellow will take much for granted. But – for a start, at least – he’ll stick to the ground floor, because of Osprey’s habit of parading his coins on a trolley. You must recall telling me about that this morning. By the way, did anybody else ever see him so oddly engaged?’

‘I’ve no idea. But it would be reasonable to suppose that Bagot did. Bagot sees everything.’

‘Even where the trolley and the collection came from?’

‘I wouldn’t go so far as to assert that, Sir John. Poor Oliver had a certain cunning to him. He was always something of an eccentric, you know. And that sort of thing was growing on him with the years. You must have noticed it yourself?’

‘I scarcely knew your brother-in-law, Mr Broadwater. But I certainly never thought of him as cunning, or even eccentric.’

‘In fact, Sir John, you only thought of him as slightly pompous and slightly boring. Well, the poor old chap was those things as well. But
de mortuis nil nisi bonum
. May I get you a glass of wine?’

Appleby accepted the wine. It turned out to be burgundy – the same, presumably, that Bagot in his pantry had set to breathe earlier that morning. Appleby retired with his glass to a corner of the room, and there, undisturbed for a few minutes, achieved a synoptic view of the whole company. It depressed him, and he wondered why. Was it perhaps because he suddenly sensed all these people as starkly irrelevant to the problem on hand? Was the Osprey Collection itself a kind of mute irrelevance? It had first surfaced as a fragment of quite idle talk between Judith and himself on their way home from Clusters a few days previously. He had himself mentioned it to Ringwood in the course of his telephone conversation that morning, saying that its existence perhaps enhanced the possibility that attempted theft or burglary might be a factor in the mystery. Almost immediately after that it had figured prominently in the course of his bizarre encounter with Marcus Broadwater when he was obeying Lady Osprey’s summons to Clusters. Immediately after that again there had been his meeting with the local clergyman, Mr Bradley; and with Bradley he had himself at once raised the topic of the coins. It might almost be said that they had now become an obsession with him: since the moment of his arrival at Clusters they had never for long been out of his head.

But was the Osprey Collection a mere will-o’-the-wisp – not as simply being without substantial existence (although, indeed, he was still without solid proof that it
did
exist) but as bearing the character of a small, delusive flame the sole effect of which was to lead one hopelessly astray? Had the murder of Lord Osprey (for that he had been murdered was – except indeed for Bagot with his absurd notion of an accident – the one solid fact in the affair so far) been the consequence of some situation with which the unfortunate man’s hoard of ancient coins had no connection?

Appleby paused on this, as his training had taught him to do. When in doubt or at a stand, step back and attempt a little radical rethinking, a totally fresh approach. Above all, when you have a murdered man on your hands,
find out about him
.

So what did he know about Lord Osprey? What sort of picture of the owner of Clusters had he brought to Clusters with him, and in what particulars had he added to it since? The answers to these questions proved, on scrutiny, to be thoroughly unsatisfactory. On some fairly recent occasion television had given him a glimpse of Lord Osprey making a speech in the House of Lords, and had even afforded him a brief snippet of it. On the strength of this he had concluded that nature had not intended the man to be a legislator, and he had even described him to Judith as a political ignoramus. This had been hasty and intolerant, and it was possible to see another side to the picture. Osprey was a hereditary peer, not one of those citizens who have become ‘life’ peers as the result of a long frequentation of public affairs. And a majority of hereditary peers seldom or never go near the House of Lords, believing it to be an obsolete or at least tiresome institution. A few may attend and speak there out of vanity – but not many, since the majority have ample means of satisfying vanity in other directions. Those who do attend and take part in the work of the House are, on the whole, to be described as conscientious if sometimes not particularly talented persons. Osprey had probably belonged with these. What could be said with some certainty was that he had not been a highly intelligent man: to pursue, as he appeared to have done, a hobby of which he had gained very little command was surely definitive on the point.

But what about him in his social relations, and as a family man? Here, Appleby realized that he knew almost nothing. There had been that luncheon party, with its talk of bats in the belfry. He had carried away from it an impression of the Ospreys as not much interested in their guests, nor in one another, either. Osprey had been a little inclined to brow-beat his wife, but this didn’t seem to have bothered her. There was no sort of tension between them, and perhaps there never had been. It was possible to wonder how they had ever come to get married, particularly as they seemed to stem from somewhat disparate backgrounds. This morning, what might be called the blankness of Lady Osprey’s response to her sudden and shocking widowhood suggested that the relationship between husband and wife wasn’t and never had been other than on the shallow side. Nor did Adrian, their only child, seem to set much store on family ties. He was perhaps a little more attached to his mother than to his father, but he hadn’t struck Appleby as a young man who had grown up much nourished by the domestic affections. The entire picture was rather dull, with no strong accent anywhere to be discerned in it. Perhaps there was somewhere such an accent, but of a kind kept by general consent distinctly under drapes.