Appleby at Allington (4 page)

Allington had found a master-switch, and the place was now safe enough. But, for the moment, this seemed to represent the limit of his nervous resources. He was badly shaken – which wasn’t, Appleby reflected, surprising in the least. Here were the two of them, in darkness except for an unimpressive electric torch, perched at the top of a ladder with a totally unexplained and unexpected corpse.

‘A tramp,’ Allington said. ‘He must have decided to find shelter here for the night.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Appleby made a further, and necessarily imperfect, examination of the dead man. He looked about twenty-five, and he had ginger hair. He certainly bore no appearance of belonging to the higher classes of society. ‘It’s a pity that even the lights on your terrace are out. I suppose they’re the only part of the electrical equipment over there still to be tied up with all this?’

‘Oh, certainly. I had most of that part of the damned nonsense cleared up this morning.’ Allington no longer seemed particularly proud of his
son et lumière
.

‘It can’t be helped. You’d better get back to the house, and leave me here. Take your torch. Call the police. And call your own doctor, as well. He won’t thank you, but he’ll no doubt turn out promptly for the squire. When this sort of thing happens, it’s sometimes useful to have an additional observer around. And it might be useful with the insurance people.’

‘The insurance people?’

‘Certainly. You were talking about them. Whoever this chap is, and however unauthorized his entry here, anybody who depended upon him would have a bit of a case against someone.’ Appleby spoke dryly. ‘It may sound callous, but one has to have a thought to these small practical matters. And rouse your servants, and have them bring over rugs and hot-water bottles as quick as they can.’

‘But surely–’

‘The man’s dead, all right, but we’re not doctors. It’s prudent to take every practical measure. You’ll sound less of a fool at the inquest.’ Appleby checked this note of irritation, since it was something not very decent to express. ‘I’m afraid you’re a bit shaken, Allington, and I’m sorry to sound brusque. But the sooner we have the proper measures under way – well, the sooner we can relax a little.’

‘I’ll go at once.’ But Allington was still irresolute. ‘I wish Martin really had turned up this evening. I rather expected him, as I think I told you. He’d be a support.’

‘You’re going to have plenty of support tomorrow – and a church fête as well. Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can myself.’

‘My dear chap, you’re very kind. And I’m sorry that the place has produced so shocking an end to your dining with me. I feel it almost as a breach of hospitality.’

Judging this proposition to be decidedly overstrained, Appleby made no reply to it. He watched Owain Allington climb down the ladder and begin to cross the strip of park in front of the invisible house. Then he turned back to keep his vigil by the dead man. The
son et lumière
at Allington had certainly had an unfortunate close. But in about half an hour, he told himself, it would cease to be his affair. No doubt he would be required to give evidence before the coroner. But that, after all, was something he had done before.

Meanwhile, inactivity was his role. He had satisfied himself that the man in the corner was dead, and further than that he had better not go. There must be an investigation, no doubt, although there didn’t really seem to be all that to investigate. But it wasn’t for a retired Police Commissioner to start poking around. If he did so, the local people would be entirely respectful. They would feel mildly outraged, all the same.

But inactivity wasn’t natural to him. He moved over to one of the glass panels shutting him off from the night, and found that it was designed to slide back in a groove. There would be no harm in letting in a little more air. He did so, and was presently leaning out into the darkness. Being thus less immediately in the presence of death, he decided it wouldn’t be too strikingly improper to light a cigarette. For a moment the brief flare of the match blinded him. Then he realized that the summer night into which he was gazing was no longer all but impenetrably dark. For a moment he thought that the dawn was breaking, and then he saw that he was witnessing one of those odd meteorological occasions, disconcerting to nocturnally-behaving persons, in which the moon heaves itself into the sky not all that far ahead of the sun. It was a very faint moonlight that was seeping with a slow stealth into the park.

It was with a sense that time had been behaving in some obscurely curious fashion that night that he now glanced at the illuminated dial of his watch. There would certainly be little of the night left by the time he got to bed. Meanwhile, there was this mild lunar manifestation. It would be soothing, even perhaps poetic in suggestion to anyone less gruesomely circumstanced than he himself happened to be. Even so, he watched with satisfaction great trees beginning to define themselves – beginning even, or so he fancied, to cast a ghost of shadow on the grass. He remembered the story about King Charles’ treasure being buried under one of them. He was very far from believing in it, and it was his impression that Owain Allington was very far from believing in it too. But there had apparently been people taking it seriously – even to the point of doing a little quiet trespassing and prospecting at an hour very much like this. It suddenly occurred to Appleby that the dead man might have been one of them.

He turned back irresolutely towards the body, almost as if prompted to seek verification of this suspicion in some way. But that was nonsense, like a notion out of a boys’ adventure story – in which the dead man would prove to have an ancient map in his pocket, with the hiding-place marked with a cross in rusty red.

Appleby returned to the window. He could now see the glimmer of the lake, and even the white line of the long drive that skirted it. Low on a near horizon, a beam of light appeared, circled, vanished. That was a car or lorry on the high road. Presently the arrival of the county constabulary would be signalised in that way. And he himself would drive home in the first dawn – drive home without having interfered.

Of course, one can’t help one’s thoughts. Appleby found himself at least thinking about the dead man. How long had he been dead? He remembered the first feel of the body under his hand. He and Allington – he had told Allington – were not doctors. But there are some things one develops an instinct for if one has become Police Commissioner by the long, hard road of half a lifetime of criminal investigation.

No time at all, Appleby had to tell himself. The fellow had been dead no time at all.

‘It sounds very odd to me,’ Judith Appleby said.

‘It was no business of mine,’ her husband replied. ‘I must get that bird out.’ A thrush had got under the net guarding the raspberries, and for a couple of minutes he devoted himself to ejecting it. ‘I’m not a policeman,’ he then said. ‘Or not any longer.’

‘John, dear, whenever you meet anybody you judge to be a socially pretentious person, the first thing you announce is that you
are
a policeman. It’s like some City gent in a Victorian novel, bellowing that he’s a plain British merchant.’

‘All right, all right. But stick to the point. This rum death at Allington is
not
my concern. And there’s another of those confounded birds. These nets are no good. They’re a notion out of Noah’s Ark. This winter we’ll have Hoobin and his boy build cages. We’ll put all the soft fruit inside cages. It’s the only way. I’ve been thinking about it for some time.’

‘Cages, by all means.’ Judith clapped her hands expertly behind the second thrush. She had come home by the mid-morning train, and they were making a round of the garden. ‘And perhaps you should keep bees. There’s said to be a lot of intellectual interest in them. You could embody your observations and researches in what used to be called a monograph.’ She lowered the net into place again. ‘Of course, I can see that this affair is very old-hat.’

‘What do you mean – old-hat?’

‘
Death at Allington Park
. It sounds like the most antique sort of detective story. But, in fact, it’s something that has happened to one of our neighbours. And it’s unexplained.’

‘It doesn’t seem to be a neighbour who got himself killed. The body conveyed nothing to Owain Allington. As for its being unexplained – it’s early days to say that. No doubt the police and the medical people will work it out.’

‘I suppose, John, you’ll have to answer questions yourself?’

‘No doubt.’

‘Do you know, I doubt whether you’re going to strike your local colleagues as a man of much observation. How large is this gazebo-thing the show was run from?’

‘Surprisingly large to be perched up on stilts like that. Perhaps twelve feet square – if my observation
is
any good, that is.’ Appleby looked dubiously at Judith. What she was going to say wasn’t exactly obscure to him.

‘And you were shut up in it for quite some time, fooling around with that
lumière
, and quite unconscious that you were cheek by jowl with a corpse?’

‘There was only a very low light. And no question of being cheek by jowl with the thing. It was crumpled in a corner, and more or less under a bench.’

‘That’s one of the things which don’t make sense. The electrocuting was of the instantaneous sort, and not the nasty hang-on-until-charred business?’

‘It was nasty enough. But you’re quite right.’

‘Otherwise, there would have been a kind of cook-house smell.’ Judith made this revolting point dispassionately. ‘So I don’t see how–’

‘No more do I. It was curious that the chap tumbled himself so unobtrusively into a corner.’

‘It was Owain Allington who went up the ladder first?’

‘Yes.’

‘Into the dark?’

‘Yes.’ Appleby smiled at his wife. ‘We’re quite getting somewhere, are we not?’

‘The first thing Allington did was to shove the corpse out of the way. Then he switched on this low light as Sir John Appleby – a dignified figure who is not to be hurried – lumbered majestically up the ladder.’

‘Laughter in court,’ Appleby said. ‘The witness appeared discomfited.’

‘But it still doesn’t make sense. For why should he do anything of the sort?’

‘Why, indeed?’ Appleby looked worried – but this was because he had failed to count accurately the peaches on the old brick wall which they were now facing. ‘Perhaps I haven’t made it clear that my lack of observation continued to the end. I’d have left the blessed gazebo as ignorant of the corpse as I’d entered it, if Allington himself hadn’t absolutely invited me to find it.’

‘You mean that he said, “Look, Appleby, there’s a dead body”?’

‘Not precisely that. He said, “What’s that bundle of stuff in the corner?” And I went over and found what I found. If he knew the body was there – and it’s a perfectly fantastic notion, anyway – and wanted me to find it, he might as well have let me find it at the start, and not made a dive for it when he first entered the place, in order to shove it out of sight for a time. Isn’t that obvious?’

‘Not in the least. He may have felt that an extra ten or fifteen minutes would make it more certain that the chap really was dead.’

‘You have the most macabre imagination of any woman I have ever known. Here is some wretched accident with a live electric cable, and you start fumbling round to find something suspicious in the behaviour of a highly respectable landed proprietor.’

‘You oughtn’t to expect
me
to do any more than fumble. I’m just an amateur. But you’re a professional, and ought to be able to get straight at the truth.’ Judith produced this argument with a great air of lucidity. ‘It would be dreadful if poor Mr Allington
did
come under any sort of suspicion. So I think you owe it to–’

‘Considering that you’ve just been cooking up a sheer rigmarole against the fellow–’ Words failed Appleby. ‘I think I’ll spray this one,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of the leaves. I’ll do it this afternoon.’

‘But, John, we’ll be at the fête.’

‘Fête! What fête?’ Appleby looked at his wife in alarm. ‘I detest fêtes.’

‘The fête at Allington, of course.’ Judith seemed entirely surprised.

‘There can’t be a fête at Allington. A death yesterday, and a fête worse than death today: it just wouldn’t do.’ Appleby paused, but this fatigued joke raised no mirth in Judith. ‘They’re bound to put it off.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Judith shook her head decisively. ‘Not just for an unfortunate accident.’

‘You’ve just been maintaining–’

‘It will give you another chance to look around.’

‘I don’t want another chance to look around. I refuse to go to Allington’s wretched fête. The vicar over there runs a gambling hell. It’s something that, in my position, I ought not to countenance.’

‘I really think you must, John. It wouldn’t be civil to Wilfred Osborne not to.’

‘Wilfred Osborne? What the dickens has he got to do with it?’

‘He makes a point of always going to the affair at the Park. As the former owner, he feels it would be ungracious to stay away.’

‘Very proper, no doubt. But I don’t see what it has to do with us.’

‘John, it’s why I came back by the early train. I’ve asked Wilfred to lunch, and said we’ll all go across together.’ Judith glanced across the garden. ‘And here he is.’

Osborne, spare and oddly elegant in ancient tweeds, gave them a wave – genial, but at the same time indicating that Sir John and Lady Appleby must wait their turn. Osborne was conversing with their gardener, the aged Hoobin. The exchange began with formal courtesies, modulated into lively and contentious debate, and closed upon what appeared to be a note of harmonious despondency. Hoobin shook his head gloomily at Mr Osborne, and Mr Osborne shook his head gloomily at Hoobin. The fatality that lies in wait for all horticultural endeavour was common ground between them.

‘Judith, my dear, you look extremely well.’ Osborne kissed his hostess and shook hands with Appleby. ‘How are you, Appleby? Not too bored, eh? Very little scope for the fingerprints, and all that, in Long Dream, I should say.’