Appleby File (18 page)

‘Adrian merely dotty! Damn it, Appleby, didn’t you realize what he was doing? He was
impersonating
Christopher – nothing less. That moustache, those clothes, his entire bearing: they weren’t remotely Adrian. They were Christopher
tout court
. Didn’t you remark the reaction of those who knew Christopher well? Both those Brockbank brothers were given to brutal and tasteless practical jokes, but this has been the most brutal and tasteless of the lot.’

‘They may well have been. In fact, I seem to remember hearing something of the sort about them. But if Adrian has judged it funny to get himself up like Christopher in order to attend Christopher’s memorial service that seems to me entirely his own affair. I shall be surprised, Pomfret, if you can tell me he has broken the law.’ Appleby smiled at the eminent judge. ‘Although, of course, it wouldn’t at all do for me not to believe what you say.’

‘I don’t believe it was Adrian at all. It was Christopher’s ghost.’ The Home Secretary endeavoured to offer this in a whimsical manner. it was he who had been looking patently frightened ten minutes before, and he was endeavouring to carry this off lightly now. ‘Turn up as a ghost for something like one’s own funeral is a joke good enough to gratify any purgatorial spirit, I’d suppose. What we’ve witnessed is the kind of thing those psychic chaps call a veridical phantasm of the dead.’

‘I haven’t set eyes on Christopher Brockbank for thirty years,’ Appleby said, ‘and his wandering brother Adrian I’ve never seen at all. This well-groomed person bowing himself down the aisle in that crazy fashion was
very
like Christopher?’

‘Very.’

‘Thoroughly scandalous,’ Lord Pomfret said. ‘Not to be tolerated. Appleby, you must look into it.’

‘My dear Chief Justice, I have no standing in such matters. This uniform is merely ornamental. I’m a retired man, as you know.’

‘Come, come.’ The Home Secretary laid a hand on Appleby’s arm in a manner designed as wholly humorous. ‘Do as you’re told, my boy.’

‘Do you know – perhaps I will? The ghost, or whatever, did a little distinguish me, after all. He stopped and handed me this.’ Appleby was still holding a superfluous service sheet. ‘It was almost as if he was passing me the ball.’

Much in the way of hard fact about Christopher Brockbank turned out not easy to come by. He proved to have been surprisingly wealthy. As the elder of the two brothers he had inherited a substantial fortune, and to this he had added a second fortune earned at the Bar. Uninterested in becoming a judge, he had retired comparatively early, and for the greater part of the year lived in something like seclusion in the south of France. It was understood by his acquaintance that this was in the interest of uninterrupted labour on a work of jurisprudence directed to some system of legal reform. The accident in which he had lost his life had been a large-scale air disaster in the Alpes-Maritimes. He had died intestate, and his affairs were going to take a good deal of clearing up.

It was on the strength of no more than this amount of common knowledge, together with only a modicum of private inquiry, that Appleby eventually called upon a bank manager in the City.

‘I understand from an official source,’ he began blandly, ‘that the late Mr Brockbank kept his private account in this country at your branch.’

‘That is certainly true.’ The bank manager nodded amiably. He had very clear views, Appleby conjectured, on what information was confidential and what was not. ‘He used to spare a few minutes to chat with me upon the occasion of his quite infrequent visits. A delightful man.’

‘No doubt. It has occurred to me that, in addition to keeping both a current and a deposit account with you, he may have been in the habit of lodging documents and so forth for safe keeping.’

‘Ah.’

‘I know that you maintain some sort of strongroom for such purposes, and suppose that your customers can hire strongboxes of one convenient size or another?’

‘Yes, indeed, Sir John. Should you yourself ever have occasion–’

‘Thank you. Brockbank did this?’

‘Sir John, may I say that, when inquiries of this sort are judged expedient for one reason or another, a request – and it can scarcely be more than a request – is commonly preferred by one of the Law Officers of the Crown?’ The manager paused, and found that this produced no more than a composed nod. ‘But no doubt there is little point in being sticky in the matter. Let me consult my appropriate file.’ He unlocked a drawer, and rummaged. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘it would appear that Brockbank had such a box.’

‘His executors haven’t yet got round to inquiring about it?’

‘Seemingly not.’

‘I’d like you to open it and let me examine the contents.’

‘My dear Sir John!’ The manager was genuinely scandalized. ‘You can scarcely believe–’

‘But only in the most superficial way. I have an officer waiting in your outer office who would simply turn over these documents unopened, and apply a very simple test to the envelopes or whatever the outer coverings may prove to be. He will not take, and I shall not take, the slightest interest in what is said.’

For a moment the manager’s hand hovered over his telephone. An appeal to higher authority – perhaps to the awful authority of the General Manager himself – was plainly in his mind. Then he took a deep breath.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I suppose an adequate discretion will be observed?’

‘Oh, most decidedly,’ Appleby said.

‘So that, for a start, is
that
,’ Appleby murmured to the Lord Chief Justice an hour later.

‘But surely, my dear Appleby, he would scarcely recognize you at a glance? The years have been passing over us, after all.’

‘That is all too true. But the point isn’t material. There I was, dressed up for that formal occasion in the uniform of a high-ranking officer of the Metropolitan Police. He felt he could trust me to tumble to the thing.’

‘And you are quite sure?
Absolutely
sure? The fingerprints on that service sheet were identical–’

‘Beyond a shadow of doubt. Christopher Brockbank always deposited or withdrew documents from that strongbox in the presence of an official of the bank who was in a position to identify him beyond question. The man who attended Christopher Brockbank’s memorial service was Christopher Brockbank himself.’

‘And he wanted the fact to be known?’

‘He wanted the fact to be known.’

‘It makes no sense.’

‘What it makes is very good
nonsense
. And there is one kind of nonsense that Brockbank is on record as having a fondness for: the kind of nonsense one calls a practical joke. And I expect he had money on it.’

‘Money!’ Lord Pomfret was outraged.

‘Say a wager with one of his own kidney.’

‘We have been most notoriously abused.’ Something formidable had come into Pomfret’s voice. One could almost imagine that high above his head in the chill London air the scales were trembling in the hand of the blindfolded figure of Justice which crowns the Central Criminal Court.

‘I wouldn’t deny it for a moment. But I come back to a point I’ve more or less made before. You can’t send a man down, Chief Justice, for attending his own memorial service. It just isn’t a crime.’

‘But there must be something very like a crime in the hinterland of this impertinent buffoonery.’ Lord Pomfret had flushed darkly. ‘Steps have been taken to certify as dead a man who isn’t dead at all.’

‘In a foreign country, and in the context of some hideous and, no doubt, vastly confused air crash. Possibly without any actual knowledge of the thing on Brockbank’s own part. Possibly as a consequence of innocent error – error on top of which he has merely piled an audacious joke. And a singularly tasteless joke, perhaps. But not one with gaol at the end of it.’

‘We can get him. We can get him for
something
.’

‘I don’t know what to make of that from a legal point of view.’ The retired Commissioner of Police made no bones about glancing at the Lord Chief Justice of England in frank amusement. ‘And there will be a good deal of laughter in court, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You’re damn well right.’ Not altogether unexpectedly, Lord Pomfret was suddenly laughing himself. ‘But what the devil is he going to do now? Just how is he proposing to come alive again?’

‘With great respect, m’lud, I suggest your lordship is in some confusion.’ Appleby, watching his august interlocutor dive for a whisky decanter and a syphon, was laughing too. ‘Christopher Brockbank
is
alive. He’s in a position, so to speak, in which no further action is necessary.’

‘Nor from us either? We leave him to it?’

‘Just that I wouldn’t say.’ Appleby was grave again. ‘I confess to being a little uneasy still about the whole affair.’

‘The deuce you do!’ Now on his feet, the Lord Chief Justice held the decanter poised in air. ‘So what? Say when.’

‘Only a finger,’ Appleby said. ‘And I’ll continue to look into the thing.’

‘With discretion, my dear fellow.’ Pomfret was suddenly almost like the bank manager.

‘Oh, most decidedly,’ Appleby said.

Retired Police Commissioners don’t go fossicking in France, and through the courtesy of his successor Appleby received reports in due season. Hard upon the air crash, it transpired, an elderly and distressed English gentleman had appeared upon the scene of the disaster in a chauffeur-driven car. Presenting himself to the
chef de gendarmerie
who was in control of the rescue operations, he had explained that he was Adrian Brockbank, and that he had motored straight from Nice upon hearing of the accident, since he had only too much reason to suppose that his elder brother, Mr Christopher Brockbank QC, had been on board the ill-fated plane. Could he be given any information about this, either way? It was explained to Mr Adrian Brockbank that much confusion inevitably prevailed; that, as often happened on such sad occasions, there was no certainty that an entirely reliable list of passengers’ names existed; and that certain necessarily painful and distressing attempts at identification were even then going on. Would Mr Adrian Brockbank care…?

The inquirer steeled himself, and cared. Eventually he had been almost irrationally reluctant to admit the sad truth. A ring on the charred finger of one of the grim exhibits he had, indeed, formally to depose as being his brother’s ring. But it seemed so tiny a piece of evidence! Might there not be more? A relevant article of baggage, perhaps, that had in part escaped the heat of the conflagration?

Not – it was explained to Mr Adrian Brockbank – at the moment. But something of the kind might yet turn up. As so often, debris was probably scattered over a very wide area. There was to be a systematic search at first light. With this information, Mr Adrian Brockbank and his chauffeur had departed to a nearby hotel for the night. And in the morning the sombre expectation had been fulfilled. Christopher Brockbank’s briefcase had been discovered, along with other detritus, in a field nearly a quarter of a mile away; and it contained a number of recent personal papers and his passport. Whereupon Adrian, formally identifying himself through the production of his own passport and the testimony of his chauffeur, satisfied the requirements of French law by making a deposition before a magistrate. After that again, he made decent arrangements for the disposal of anything that could be called his brother’s remains. And then he departed as he had come.

Such had been the highly unsatisfactory death of Christopher Brockbank.

All this, Appleby told himself, didn’t remain exactly obscure once you took a straight look at it. Just as it wasn’t Adrian who had turned up at the memorial service, so it hadn’t been Adrian who had turned up at the grisly aftermath of that aerial holocaust. It had been Christopher on both occasions – and it was impossible to say that throughout the whole affair there had been any positive role played by Adrian at all. This was bizarre – but there was something that was mildly alarming as well. Christopher had
waited
. Equipped with a passport in the name of his brother, equipped no doubt with a duplicate passport in his own name, equipped with the briefcase which he would eventually toss into an appropriate field – equipped with all this, Christopher had waited for a sufficiently substantial disaster within, say, a couple of hours’ hard motoring-distance of his French residence. He had certainly had to wait for months – and more probably for years. A thoroughly macabre pertinacity had marked the attaining of his practical joke.

And hadn’t the joker overreached himself? Could any place in society remain for a man who, with merely frivolous intent, had deliberately identified an unknown dead body as his own? It seemed not surprising that Christopher hadn’t been heard of again since he had walked down that aisle, graciously bowing to a bewildered congregation. Perhaps he had very justifiably lost his nerve.

But, even if Adrian didn’t come into the story at all, where
was
Adrian? He was almost certainly Christopher’s heir, and yet even Christopher’s English solicitors appeared to know nothing about him. Perhaps they were just being more successfully cagey than that bank manager. Certainly they had, for the moment, nothing to say – except that Mr Adrian Brockbank spent most of his time sailing the seven seas.

Appleby was coming to feel, not very rationally, that time was important. He had told Lord Pomfret that he was uneasy – which had been injudicious, since he couldn’t quite have explained why. Pomfret, however, had refrained from catechising him. And now he had the same feeling still. No Brockbank had died. But two Brockbanks might be described as lying low. There was about this the effect of an ominous lull.

And then Christopher Brockbank turned up.

He turned up on Appleby’s urban doorstep and was shown in – looking precisely the man who had put on the turn in St Boniface’s.

‘My dear Appleby,’ he said, ‘I have ventured to call for the purpose of offering you an apology.’ Brockbank’s address was easy and familiar; he might have been talking to a man he ran into every second week in one club or another.