Appleby and the Ospreys (18 page)

‘Lord Osprey, Sir John?’ Ringwood spoke rather as if supposing that Appleby was proposing to summon up the dead.

‘The
new
Lord Osprey, Ringwood. Young Adrian. Until the family lawyers do their stuff, it must be presumed that he is the owner of the things.’

‘No doubt you are right, sir. Shall I go and hunt him out?’

‘I think better not. Give a hail to that young woman up on the platform. She’s already goggling at us. Nobody should be left alone with this eminently pocketable stuff until Adrian has been brought in on it. If valuable coins turn out to be missing from it, heaven knows what a chap like our friend Quickfall might get up to asking about in open court. But he’d scarcely get round to suggesting sudden criminal collusion between the two of us.’

‘I see what you mean.’ Ringwood was already beckoning to the young policewoman. He was clearly impressed, even if slightly shocked by this swift – if no doubt routine – professional prudence. ‘What about Broadwater – if he hasn’t gone off to his fishing again? He’s a numismatist, I gather, and has actually worked on the stuff.’

‘So he has – but I don’t think we need trouble him at present, all the same. Get your girl to say, however, that we suggest Lord Osprey bring Miss Wimpole along with him. She’s a numismatist too, and shaping to be a good deal involved with this place.’

‘How would that be, Sir John?’

‘As the next Lady Osprey, Ringwood. It’s as plain as a pikestaff. Not that either of them is as yet quite aware of the fact.’ And John Appleby (who had a weakness for being pleased with his own sagacity) laughed softly. ‘It’s the only reasonably cheerful thing,’ he added, ‘that’s likely to emerge from this mess.’

So presently Adrian and Honoria appeared, and Appleby explained what he shamelessly called Mr Ringwood’s discovery.

‘Did you know of the existence of this hiding-place?’ he asked the young man.

‘I hadn’t a clue. But I did know that my father was rather given to tucking small sums of money oddly away. Five-pound notes in matchboxes. That sort of thing.’

‘Adrian,’ Honoria said, ‘has the misfortune of being the son of a pathological miser. As a consequence, he’s no doubt likely to turn into a spendthrift.’

‘Shut up, Honoria. Your sense of humour would disgrace a kindergarten.’

‘An old folk’s home, you ought to say. I’m a great deal older than you are, young man.’

‘Three years and four weeks,’ Adrian answered with surprising speed. And at this Appleby gave Ringwood a swift and almost imperceptible nod. Here, it seemed to say, was incontrovertible evidence of his late assertion.

‘The first thing to insist on the importance of,’ Appleby said to Adrian, ‘is getting this very valuable collection of coins into a place of greater security than that afforded by Clusters’ celebrated, if not fully understood,
trompe-l’oeil
affair. It was an eccentric choice, to say the least, on your father’s part. But another matter is urgent, too, and I hope Miss Wimpole will be good enough to help us with it. What is the present state of the Osprey Collection? Is everything that should be there,
there
? What is obviously a copy of the fairly recently published catalogue is lying on the top of the cabinet, or whatever it is to be called. Perhaps that may be useful.’

Honoria turned to Adrian.

‘Shall I?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course. Go ahead. Clusters is turning into a sort of
Treasure Island
. Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!’ Adrian was pretending to be Long John Silver’s parrot. ‘Eight what, Honoria?’

‘Reales
, Adrian. Spanish dollars. Sir John, here, has read about them in
Don Quixote
. I’ll find you one to play with presently. If you’d lived in Rambang in the earlier eighteenth century, you could have bought a cow for two of them.’

‘I’m glad I didn’t.’

‘Just be quiet, and let me get some sort of grip on the stuff.’ Having said this – and having said it, by implication, both to Detective-Inspector Ringwood and Sir John Appleby – Honoria Wimpole studied the Osprey Collection for some time. The catalogue, she consulted only occasionally. But she pulled out every one of the little drawers in turn, surveyed the contents with care, and every now and then picked out a single coin and scrutinized it carefully. Finally, and when she had closed the last of the drawers, she sat back in silence for several minutes, clearly putting in order what she could most usefully say.

‘To begin with,’ she then began, ‘I ought perhaps to explain that the collection is basically what used to be thought of as a gentleman’s cabinet, a polite accessory to a polite education. No particular emphasis; just a general assembly of coins, slanted on the whole to the classical field – which is, of course, quite enormous in itself. It’s that sort of collection on a pretty grand scale. There is, however, the beginning of a sensible concentration on one important field or another – and in that we can perhaps see the influence of Adrian’s Uncle Marcus. I could have told you all this without ever entering this room. And what I have now discovered, any qualified person could have discovered simply by looking at the collection with adequate care.’

Saying this, Honoria pulled out one of the drawers, and pointed to a small coin near the middle of it.

‘Mr Ringwood,’ she then said, ‘will you just take a straight glance at this one, and tell us whose head is on it?’

Not without a shade of reluctance, Ringwood obeyed this behest.

‘It’s Edward VII,’ he then said. ‘And the coin must be something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It’s a half sovereign.’

‘Exactly. And, according to the catalogue, it ought to be a gold coin of rather more antiquity: a stater of Demetrius Poliorcetes, King of Macedon, round about 250 BC.’

Ringwood being rendered momentarily speechless before this mystery, it fell to Appleby to say something.

‘In other words, Miss Wimpole, the Osprey Collection has been – well, milked?’

‘Just that – although nowhere else, so far as I’ve yet discovered, with quite that degree of impudence. It’s a matter of a good many rare, and therefore very valuable, coins being removed, and there being set in their place other old coins of no particular rarity or value. An ignoramus simply wouldn’t notice.’ Having said this, Honoria Wimpole sat back abruptly, and when she spoke again, it was on quite a different note. ‘So, in God’s name,’ she said, ‘whatever do we do?’

‘Ask Bagot. Bagot knows everything.’

This attempt, on Adrian’s part, to import a certain lightness of air into the sudden crisis signally failed. Appleby, indeed, may scarcely have heard it. He was reflecting that he had himself called Lord Osprey an ignoramus – but that had been to Judith ten days before.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘it might have been quite some time before Lord Osprey tumbled to the thing?’

And at this Honoria, although not normally at all a hesitant person, did hesitate.

‘I suppose that is undeniably true,’ she then said.

After this, there was a long silence. The young policewoman, back on her dais, had become ostentatiously absorbed in some clerkly activity. The counsels of princes, she may have felt, are not prudently to be overheard.

‘It’s beginning to come clear,’ Ringwood eventually said, and looked doubtfully at Appleby.

But Appleby remained silent. He had suddenly seen himself as knowing something probably not known to anybody else, except conceivably to Lord Osprey’s murderer. It was as if a voice had spoken from the dead. It was as if such a voice had spoken very briefly; had uttered, indeed, but a single word – a single word, however, of portentous effect.

Appleby’s first impulse was to communicate his discovery – if discovery it was – to his companions there and then. He felt that he had almost a duty to do so. For if he himself happened to be murdered by a bullet from afar here and now, or even to suffer some lethal seizure as he sat, neither Ringwood nor anybody else was by any means certain to arrive at knowledge perhaps crucial to the elucidation of the Clusters mystery.

But
was
it knowledge? Or was it, on the contrary, a mere ingenious fantasy, prompted by the odd chime of a word? Appleby decided, for the time being at least, to hold his hand – or his tongue. It wasn’t merely early days with the Osprey enigma; almost, it was early hours. A good deal had happened – or, rather, had been talked about – and it wasn’t yet quite tea-time for the Ospreys and their guests. So the present talk might reasonably be carried a little further. Something might emerge from it. But caution was required. What to Ringwood was ‘beginning to come clear’ had best be kept under wraps for the moment.

‘I rather gather,’ he said to Honoria, ‘that you were hoping that Lord Osprey might himself show you this collection either today or tomorrow. Had that happened, you could hardly have failed to make then the discovery you have made now. Is that right?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Had that happened – had you, for example, noticed that half sovereign masquerading as something uttered by Demetrius Poliorcetes – would you have drawn Lord Osprey’s attention to it?’

‘Isn’t that what is called a hypothetical question, Sir John?’

‘No doubt it is, but I see no reason why you shouldn’t answer it.’

‘You know very well why I don’t much care for it. It introduces the question of whether Lord Osprey himself hadn’t been doing what you call the milking. If he had been selling off one or two very valuable coins in a quiet way, and artlessly dropping mediocre substitutes in their place, I might well have hesitated to pounce on the thing. It wouldn’t have been exactly tactful. And as what I’d detected could only be called a childish or muddle-headed foible, with nothing of real deceit about it, my speaking up could quite fairly be considered as impertinent as well.’

‘But, Miss Wimpole, consider the context in which we now have to consider all this. Lord Osprey has been murdered, and we have to do our best to decide whether or not the Osprey Collection has been some sort of motivating factor. That the coins have nothing to do with the case is a tenable view. The fellow who burst in on us so angrily at lunch-time will no doubt come into your head there. But he may well be totally irrelevant to our real concern, and both Mr Ringwood and I incline to the view that the coins are indeed central to the case. You have now inspected them at leisure, and have yourself raised the possibility that Lord Osprey had himself been quietly parting with some of the most valuable things and replacing them with coins of altogether inferior worth. Obviously it is a possibility. But are you inclined to view that state of the case as probable? That’s what I’d like to get at.’

‘Definitely not.’ Honoria gave this reply without hesitation. ‘And for two reasons. The first is simply that half sovereign. Substituting that for a coin of the third century BC was a freakish act that doesn’t at all fit in with my conception of Lord Osprey’s character. But my second reason is much more substantial. Lord Osprey definitely led me to feel that I was going to be shown his collection either today or tomorrow. And he knew perfectly well that my interest in it would be informed and professional.’

‘So you are driven to suppose that he was unaware of what had happened to his collection. If it had been happening slowly over a considerable period of time, could his ignorance – call it his numismatic innocence – have been such that he might not notice something amiss?’

‘I think so. The substitutions, so far as I have spotted them during this brief rummage, are not startling at a mere glance. Where a coin of considerable antiquity has been abstracted, it is generally a coin of some antiquity – but of very little value today – that has been put in its place.’

‘That half sovereign,’ Ringwood interrupted. ‘You can’t say that of it?’

‘No, indeed. It’s almost like a joke. Or not so much a joke as a dare. A hostage given to fortune.’

‘A what?’ Adrian asked.

‘Or somebody saying “Catch who catch can”. I find it distinctly odd.’

‘It’s
all
distinctly odd,’ Adrian complained. ‘I can’t get to the bottom of it, at all. I knew there were a lot of old coins my father was interested in, but not anything about all this hiding them away. It’s the sort of thing misers do, all right. At Harrow they made me read a book about one. Silas somebody. It’s by a woman.’

‘Women do sometimes write books, Adrian.’

It seemed to Appleby that there was more of affection than mockery in this remark. But that was by the way. More important was his sense that the Osprey mystery was now moving. And Ringwood, he knew, had the same feeling. But Ringwood still saw a difficulty that Appleby didn’t.

Because of that chime of a single word.

But Appleby had schooled himself to distrust hunches and flashes of inspiration. Often enough they had proved to be false lights leading either nowhere or into embarrassing situations which it had required a good deal of skill to get out of. Perhaps it might be so now. He was on the verge, as it were, of standing the entire Osprey affair on its head, and this on the strength of an odd association of ideas which would distinctly cut no ice in a court of law. He could almost hear the accents in which some criminal barrister like the fellow Quickfall might hold it up to ridicule before a judge and jury.

Before sharing his hazardous new perception even with Ringwood, it would be wise to find some sort of concrete evidence – or, failing that, at least some concurring opinion. And here Appleby thought of Bagot. It seemed to be a general opinion at Clusters that Bagot should be consulted about this, or would know all about that. So Appleby decided to have another go at Bagot, and that on this occasion it should be a téte-à-téte affair, without the support of Ringwood. Bagot and Ringwood hadn’t got along together too well.

This proved easy. Hard upon the conference with Honoria Wimpole the Detective-Inspector had been called away to the telephone to give some complicated instructions about matters unrelated to the Osprey enquiry. And it was a little after five o’clock; a tea-drinking in the drawing-room was drawing to a close; but this was without the attendance of Bagot, for whose superintendence it was too trivial an occasion. Bagot, in fact, was having tea served to him in his pantry by a nervous junior parlour maid, and Appleby found him there. Bagot was good enough to intimate to his underling that a cup should be provided for Sir John.