Appleby Talking (22 page)

“I’m not surprised.” Lort was emphatic. “I don’t know what things are coming to that such antics should be considered necessary in a quiet place like this. But go on.”

“You will remember that there’s a little shelter on the verge of the Head, with a bench from which you can command the whole sweep of the bay. Borlase disappeared into that, but didn’t sit for long. Within ten minutes he was making his way back towards me – and at that I slipped out of sight and followed him discreetly back to the hotel. Perhaps I should mention having a feeling that there was something on his mind. His walk out to the Head had been direct and decisive. But on the way back he hesitated several times, as if doing a bit of wool-gathering. So I kept well in the background, and he had gone to his bedroom by the time I re-entered the hotel. I waited, as usual, until his lights were out, and then I turned in.”

“And now, you say, he has vanished?”

“Yes. I’ve got into the way of taking him along his letters in the morning. That is how I’ve discovered that he never went to bed at all.”

Lort frowned. “But you say all the lights went out in his suite? Could there have been one still burning when you went to bed yourself – one that wouldn’t be visible to you?”

“I think not.”

“And the night porter? Was he aware of Borlase’s leaving again?”

“No. But he potters around a little, although not supposed to quit the hall. I doubt if it was difficult for Borlase to let himself out unobserved.” Meritt paused. “And that, Superintendent, is the position now. What do you make of it?”

“I’m far from feeling obliged to make anything of it at all.” Lort allowed himself some tartness in this reply. “Here is a man, devoted to abstruse scientific thought, who takes a reflective stroll at one o’clock in the morning. Moonlight doesn’t help with whatever problem he’s chewing over, so for a time he sits in the dark and tries that. Presently he wanders out again, and very probably walks till morning. Eventually he emerges from his abstraction, discovers himself to be uncommonly hungry, breakfasts at the first inn he sees, returns to Sheercliff at his leisure, and finds that the conscientious Captain Meritt has persuaded the police to start a manhunt.” And Lort favoured his visitor with a bleak smile. “The truth may not be precisely that. But my guess is that I’m well within the target area.”

“I see.” Meritt had produced his watch and glanced at it. Now he put it away and turned a cold eye on the elderly and sardonic man before him. “And you think mine a very queer job?”

“I do, sir – decidedly.”

“And so it is, Superintendent. But then Borlase, as it happens, is a very queer man. Just how queer, I think I must now take the responsibility of telling you.”

“I am very willing, sir, to hear anything that makes sense of your anxieties.”

“Very well – here goes.” Meritt paused as if to collect himself. “Perhaps I can best begin by repeating what I have just said – but with a difference. The Borlases are a very queer couple of men.”

Lort stared. “You mean there is a brother – something like that?”

“I mean nothing of the sort. I mean that Sir Stephen Borlase – the man stopping at the Metropole Hotel – is much more easily understood as two people than as one.”

Lort sat back in his chair. “Jekyll and Hyde?”

“Or Hyde and Jekyll. That is undoubtedly the popular expression of the thing, and perhaps the best for laymen like you and me, Superintendent, to hang on to. Or possibly we might think of him as a sort of Hamlet – the man who couldn’t make up his mind.”

“Frankly, sir, I don’t find this easy to believe. I suppose Dr Jekyll may have been a man of some scientific attainment, but I can’t see Hamlet as an eminent research chemist.”

“Perhaps not.” Meritt took a moment to estimate the cogency of this pronouncement. “But the fact is that Borlase combines immense drive and concentration as a scientist with a highly unstable personality. Commonly his ideological convictions are very much those of any other man of his sort in our society. For the greater part of his days, that is to say, he is completely reliable. But every now and then he is subject to a fit of emotional and intellectual confusion, and from this there emerges for a short time what is virtually a different personality. It’s an awkward thing in the days of the cold war, as you can see. Let certain folk effectively contact Borlase when he has swung over to this other polarity – this other set of values – and goodness knows what they might not get out of him. And now I think you can understand why I was given my job – and why I think the present situation genuinely alarming.”

“I still feel, sir, that I’ve a good deal to learn.” Lort was clearly preparing to plod doggedly round the queer story with which he had been presented. “Am I to understand that Sir Stephen Borlase is fully aware of his own condition?”

“In a general way – yes. But he plays it down. When normal, he declines to admit that these periods of disturbance go, so to speak, at all deep. He won’t treat himself as potentially a cot case. Nothing in the way of regular visits by the appropriate sort of medical man would be tolerated by him. So he has been persuaded that he is in the first flight of VIPs – as indeed he pretty well is – and provided with–”

“ – The new style of guardian angel represented by yourself.” Lort, having given his cautious antagonism this further airing, reached for a scribbling-pad as if to indicate that the matter had entered a new phase. “Have you been given to understand that there does now exist against Borlase a specific threat? Are there, in fact, supposed to be persons aware of his condition and actively planning to exploit it?”

“It is thought very likely that there are – particularly a fellow called Krauss.”

“I see. And you have been told what signs to look for in Borlase himself?”

“He is said to go moody, restless, distraught – that sort of thing.”

Lort nodded. “What about the last few days? Has he appeared all right?”

“The devil of it is, Superintendent, that he has always appeared a bit of a queer fish to me. I can’t claim to have noticed any change in the last few days.”

“Then, Captain Meritt, it remains my guess that this is a false alarm. When did you leave the Metropole – half a hour ago? Likely enough, Borlase has returned in the interval. I’ll call the place up and find out.”

Two telephones stood on Lort’s desk – and now, as he was in the act of reaching for one, the second emitted a low but urgent purr. The Superintendent picked it up. “Yes… Yes… Dead, you say?…
Where
?” Lort’s glance, as he listened, fleetingly sought Meritt’s face. “The
tide
? If that was so, you did perfectly right… Unidentified? I hope he remains so… I said, I hope he remains so… Never mind why… Yes, of course – within ten minutes… Thank you.”

When Lort had snapped down the receiver, there was a moment’s silence. Meritt had gone pale, and when he spoke it was with an odd striving for a casual note. “Not, I suppose, anything to do with – ?”

“Probably not.” Lort was on his feet. “Still, you might care to come along, sir – just in case.”

“In case – ?”

“In case it
is
the body of Sir Stephen Borlase that has just been found below Merlin Head.”

“Accident?”

The Superintendent reached for his cap. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

The sky was almost cloudless, the air filled with a mild warmth, the sea sparkling within its far-flung semicircle of gleaming cliffs. On the front and in the broad, tree-lined streets, visitors – at this early season mainly recruited from the superior classes of society – made their way to and from the baths, the Winter Gardens, the circulating libraries, or exercised well-bred dogs with due regard to the cleanliness and decorum which is so marked a feature of the Sheercliff scene. As he drove the agitated Captain Meritt through this pleasing pageant, Superintendent Lort discernibly let his spirits rise. But the effect of this was only to give a more sardonic turn to his speech. An accident, he pointed out, whether in the sea or on the cliffs, was an undesirable thing. The City Council deprecated accidents. Accidents were dissuasive; potential visitors read about them and decided to go elsewhere. But a crime was another matter. Many pious and law-abiding Sheercliff citizens would ask for nothing better than a really sensational crime. The present season, it was true, was somewhat early. Even a murder extensively featured in the national Press would have little effect upon Metropole or Grand or Majestic folk. But the August crowds – the true annual bearers of prosperity to the town – were another matter. A course of events culminating in the Central Criminal Court in about the third week of July, Superintendent Lort opined, might take threepence off the rates.

Captain Meritt showed no appreciation of this unexpected vein of pleasantry in his professional colleague. He sat silent during the drive. He remained silent in the small police-station which they entered at the end of it. Here a melancholy sergeant led them out to a shed at the back for the purpose, as he expressed it, of viewing the remains. This, however, was for some minutes delayed. With a due sense of climax, the sergeant chose to pause in the intervening yard and favour his superior with a fuller account of the case.

An elderly clergyman, early abroad in the interest of bird-watching, had been the first to peer over Merlin Head and see the body. It lay sprawled on an isolated outcrop of rock at the base of the cliff, and only by an unlikely chance had it not fallen directly into the sea. Had this happened, it would probably have disappeared – at least as an identifiable individual – for good. For the currents played strange tricks on this coast, and it was only after some weeks that the sea commonly rendered up its dead. On this the sergeant was disposed to be expansive. “Nibbled, sir – that’s how they often are. Some quite small fish, it seems, are uncommonly gross feeders. But come along.”

On this macabre note, the three men entered the shed. The body lay on a long table, covered with a sheet. The sergeant stepped forward and drew this back, so that the face was revealed.

“It’s your man, all right.” Lort’s voice was decently subdued.

“It’s my man.” Meritt, very pale, glanced at the sergeant. “Any certainty how it happened?”

“The back of the head’s stove in. He might have been hit, and then thrown over the cliff. Or he might just have jumped and the damage been done by the rocks. The surgeon thinks they’ll be able to tell just which, once they’ve gone into the body more particular.”

“I see.” Meritt moved closer to the body, gave a startled exclamation, and drew the sheet down farther. “It’s Sir Stephen Borlase, all right. But those aren’t his clothes. At least, I never saw him in them.”

Lort frowned. “He wasn’t dressed like this when you followed him last night?”

“He wasn’t in anything like this dark stuff at all. He was in country kit – a light tweed with rather a bold pattern.”

“Odd.” Lort turned to the sergeant. “Anything on those clothes – a tailor’s label with the owner’s name, for instance?”

“Nothing of the sort, sir. I’d say they were ordinary, good-class, off-the-peg garments. But there’s something queer about the shoes.”

“They don’t fit?” Lort pounced on this.

“It’s not that. It’s
this
.” The sergeant, his sense of drama reasserting itself, whipped away the sheet altogether. “Did you ever see a corpse in one black shoe and one brown?”

“Suicide.” Lort had driven halfway back through Sheercliff before he spoke. “Suicide planned so that it could never be proved. Borlase was simply going to disappear. When you followed him last night – or rather early this morning – he was spying out the land. Or it might be better to say the cliff and the sea.”

“Look before you leap?” Meritt was moodily stuffing a pipe.

“Just that. And perhaps he didn’t like what he saw. You told me that he walked up there briskly enough, but that his return to the Metropole was a bit irresolute. But he went through with the thing. Knowing that he had to give you the slip this time, he changed into those anonymous clothes in the dark – which is how he managed to land himself with different-coloured shoes.”

“That may be true.” Meritt was suddenly interested. “And the shoes were, in fact, to give him away! It might be one of those queer tricks of the mind – and particularly of a mind like Borlase’s. Part of him didn’t want anonymity and extinction. So he made this unconsciously motivated mistake and betrayal. An instance of what Freud calls the psychopathology of everyday life.”

“No doubt.” Superintendent Lort did not appear to feel that his picture of the case was much strengthened by this speculation. “Well, Borlase slipped out again later, and simply pitched himself over Merlin Head. He reckoned to go straight into the sea, and to be drawn out by the current. Later, we might or might not have got back an unrecognisable body in unidentifiable clothes. Of course, further investigation may prove me wrong. But I’d say it’s a fair working supposition. Do you agree?”

Without interrupting the business of lighting his pipe, Captain Meritt shook his head. “I don’t see it. Borlase was an odd chap, or I wouldn’t have been given my job. He might, I suppose, feel driven to take his own life. And he might feel the act as disgraceful – as something to disguise. But why not disguise it as an accident? He had plenty of brains to work out something convincing in that way. Why should he try to make his death look like an unaccountable disappearance?”

“Might it be because he disliked you, sir?”

“What’s that?” Meritt was startled.

“I mean, of course, disliked the way you’d been set on him. He resented having a gaoler disguised as a bodyguard – and quite right too, if you ask me.” Lort delivered himself of this sentiment with vigour. “So he resolved to leave you in as awkward a situation as he could. Had he seemed just to clean vanish, you’d have been left looking decidedly a fool.”

“I see.” Meritt digested this view of the matter in silence for some seconds. And when at length he pronounced upon it, it was with unexpected urbanity. “Well, Borlase is dead, poor devil – and it’s a bad mark to me either way. I’ll be quite content myself if your interpretation is accepted by the coroner.”