Appleby's Answer (23 page)

‘Interesting, eh?' the Captain was saying. ‘Two ways of taking it, of course. Either, my dear, you were selling murder and are of interest to the police as a consequence, or you had some crackpot notion in your head that would make you the laughing stock of England. So – as I said – £5,000.'

 

 

The situation was one which a lower-class criminal (uncommon in Miss Pringle's fictions) might have pronounced a fair cop. Miss Pringle was amazed that the extreme vulnerability of her grand design had not been evident to her from the first. The least disastrous issue of it now appeared to be that she would presently figure in the public prints as a harmless crackpot. ‘Crackpot' had been Captain Bulkington's word, and it was rankling. It was doing this because, through all her confusion and dismay, Miss Pringle quite clearly perceived that it was the Captain who was
really
mad. Cunning, yes – but also deeply mad as well. Sooner or later, they would have to lock him up. And they wouldn't have to lock
her
up – or not, at least, in any institution for the mentally deranged. To think of Captain Bulkington ending his days in such a place (perhaps years after having had £5,000 out of her) was really rather sad. Was it not – come to think of it – unbearable? At this point Miss Pringle recalled that she had an emergency plan.

‘Very well,' Miss Pringle said composedly. ‘We must talk. But not in this room. It has been bugged once, and may be bugged again.' She paused on this, pleased that, even in crisis, the technical terminology of her craft did not desert her. ‘And not in this house, either. We'll settle things up, if you please, in the open air.'

‘After 1 a.m.?' Captain Bulkington said dubiously. ‘Mild weather, of course. Still, perhaps a bit chilly for a lady – eh?' He paused on this really rather touching solicitude. ‘And particularly for a lady of uncertain years.' Achieving this gratuitous piece of malice at the expense of his intended victim of hideous blackmail, Captain Bulkington laughed loudly. He laughed again – and this time his laugh turned into the maniacal cackle. Miss Pringle, if intimidated, was encouraged as well.

They went into the hall of ‘Kandahar', and Captain Bulkington opened the front door. The hall was an ill-lit and gloomy place, and Miss Pringle might well have missed the fact that the Captain had unobtrusively possessed himself of a stout walking-stick. She marked this, however, and immediately rather wished she had something of the sort herself. But within reach there was nothing more suitable for assisting a pedestrian than a medium-sized ebony elephant – trumpeting with upraised trunk – which stood on a table near the door. Captain Bulkington was now for a moment preoccupied with reaching for a deer-stalker hat from a peg. Miss Pringle grabbed the elephant – conveniently by his trunk – and thrust it beneath what was fortunately a voluminous coat. It was a stage in the emergency plan.

Night, silence, and the untended gardens of ‘Kandahar' received the late collaborators in a labour of detective literature.

‘It is useless,' Miss Pringle said firmly, ‘to be unrealistic. For
either
of us to be unrealistic. Compromise must be achieved.'

‘Compromise fiddlesticks!' Captain Bulkington barked into the darkness. Argument had been going on for some minutes, during which the two contracting parties had rounded the house and entered what Miss Pringle uncertainly sensed as an abandoned kitchen garden. A moon of sorts had appeared – punctually, she supposed – on the eastern horizon, and she could now sufficiently distinguish the Captain's form beside her to bash him tolerably accurately on the head. But just where was the well? On the last occasion of her leaving ‘Kandahar' (and before making her way to the Jolly Chairman and the unexpected society of Messrs Waterbird and Jenkins) she had taken care to make a rapid survey of Captain Bulkington's policies. She could not confidently feel, however, that in the near-darkness her bearings were going to be at all easy to find.

And, meanwhile, she played for time. She talked in a prolix and confusing way about her finances. She protested her inability to find anything like £5,000 – but she was careful to do this on a note of progressively weakening resolve. As a result, she hoped, Captain Bulkington was feeling he could afford to humour her – as he had done, it might be said, in agreeing to these negotiations taking place thus eccentrically
en plein air
.

But – once more –
where was the well?
It was essential to her emergency plan that she should be able to tumble the corpse into it. If a man falls down a very deep well there is nothing more likely than that he should knock his brains out in the process. Miss Pringle's professional studies had made her quite clear on this point. Whereas if the same man is found merely sprawled in his kitchen garden –

At this point Miss Pringle's meditations were interrupted by a scream. She had – she realised, much to her surprise – uttered it herself. And she had done this because she had seen a ghost.

At least she had seen a white and hovering presence of uncertain dimensions not much more than a dozen yards away. It might have been a sheeted dwarf. It might have been an ectoplasmic apparition in a state of semi-deliquescence. In fact, it was the ‘Kandahar' goat. And – quite suddenly – it was no longer hovering. It was hurling itself in Miss Pringle's direction with almost incredible velocity.

Well was it for Miss Pringle in that moment that she was under the protection of a military man. The goat had ingeniously swerved in its charge, very much as if indelicately proposing that its impact upon Miss Pringle should be of posterior effect. But Captain Bulkington (who had produced a roar of manly rage) took two steps forward and lashed out at the creature with his stick. And at this the creature gave a yelp of agony (it was almost a human sound, and Miss Pringle, for some reason, didn't like it at all) before turning and vanishing into the night.

And now Miss Pringle and Captain Bulkington resumed their deliberations and their stroll. Not that it was exactly a stroll. For the Captain's pace was quickening, and there was something obscurely purposive about the course he steered. Miss Pringle had a sense of it as a circular or spiral course, narrowing towards a point. Had she been in a condition of mind apt for recalling the English poets, she might have felt herself in the condition of a pern in a gyre.

And Captain Bulkington was only half-attending to her. She was sure he was determined to have his £5,000. But now there was something else on his mind. He was muttering to himself as he moved. Once or twice he stopped, and produced his weird and gloating cackle of laughter. Then he would press on again, warily but urgently, towards an unseen goal.

Then, suddenly, the well was in front of them.

So was the goat. It seemed to have established itself as what might be called (again in a poetic context) the Guardian of the Well. Captain Bulkington appeared particularly to resent this. He hurled at the goat certain words quite unfit to be heard by ladies. The goat (although itself probably a gentleman) seemed to find them equally distasteful, for it drew away until no more than a white blur again.

Miss Pringle saw that her moment had come. Captain Bulkington still didn't trust the goat; he had half turned and was confronting its dim form with upraised stick. It was now or never, Miss Pringle told herself, for bringing another animal on the scene. She unbuttoned her coat with her left hand, and thus gained egress for the elephant which was clutched by the trunk in her right. Taking a stealthy step backwards the better to calculate her aim, she raised the elephant high in air.

It wasn't – alas! – any good. It was no good at all. In the golden world of Miss Pringle's fiction the thing would have been accomplished in a moment. But this was the brazen world of fact. In it – Miss Pringle blindingly and despairingly discovered – she hadn't a scrap of criminal ruthlessness to her name. She could no more bash the unspeakable Bulkington on the head than she could similarly have bashed her dear father the Archdeacon. It was simply not on.

Miss Pringle cried her horror aloud, so that Captain Bulkington turned back and stared at her. The heavy black object she held in her hand was now shameful and intolerable to her, so that she violently cast it away. In this the strength of frenzy must have come to her – for the elephant, although merely lobbed as a schoolgirl might lob a cricket-ball, soared in a bold parabola, was for a moment lost against the darkness of the sky, and then fell (as if most infallibly aimed) plumb into the centre of the well. And it must even have found a gap in the miserable piece of wire-netting covering the thing. It had vanished without a trace.

‘What was that?' It was now the turn of Captain Bulkington to cry out with extreme violence, much as if some shrine had been profaned. The well, after all (although Miss Pringle was unaware of the fact), was sacred to him as the scene or instrument of what he may reasonably have regarded as the height of his professional achievement: the hounding to his death of the miserable Dr Pusey many years before. Captain Bulkington ran forward with a further shout of senseless rage, leant over the low, crumbling wall, and peered into the blackness below.

It was the goat's moment. Still doubtless smarting from the thwacking it had received, the creature put down its head and charged. There was a crumbling of masonry, a splintering of rotten wood, a single ghastly shriek, and Captain A G de P Bulkington (of ‘Kandahar' and the Imperial Forces Club) had gone ruining after his ebony elephant to the depths below. As for the goat, it gave Miss Pringle a single contemptuous look, and withdrew quietly from the scene. It had shown her, one might say, how such a job ought to be done.

 

And thus, ten minutes later, Appleby found the lady. She was weeping, she was wildly distraught, but she did manage to tell the tale of the last agony of Captain Bulkington. Appleby found himself not doubting it for a moment – if only because no self-respecting novelist (such as Miss Pringle was) would venture to invent such a catastrophe. His pocket-torch, indeed, did reveal the tracks of the Captain's four-footed executioner. But it would have taken a searchlight to penetrate to the bottom of the well, and it was obvious that there was nothing whatever to be done. It would be a job for the local fire brigade to restore the mortal remains of Bulkington to upper air.

‘What shall I do?' Miss Pringle wailed. ‘Oh, whatever shall I do?'

It wasn't an easy question to deal with. Appleby, after all, was a policeman. Yet it was hard, somehow, to regard the stricken authoress of
Vengence at the Vicarage
and other romances except in a sympathetic light. So Appleby countered with a question of his own.

‘Miss Pringle, does anybody know you came on here from the Pinkertons?'

‘Oh, no – no, Sir John. Nobody at all! The housekeeper sleeps in the village. And those horrible young men have both run away.'

‘And your car's in the drive?'

‘Yes, indeed. It is just short of the front door.'

Appleby's answer had come to him.

‘Get into it quick,' he said, ‘and go home.'

 

 

 

John Appleby first appears in
Death at the President's Lodging
, by which time he has risen to the rank of Inspector in the police force. A cerebral detective, with ready wit, charm and good manners, he rose from humble origins to being educated at ‘St Anthony's College', Oxford, prior to joining the police as an ordinary constable.

Having decided to take early retirement just after World War II, he nonetheless continued his police career at a later stage and is subsequently appointed an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, where his crime solving talents are put to good use, despite the lofty administrative position. Final retirement from the police force (as Commissioner and Sir John Appleby) does not, however, diminish Appleby's taste for solving crime and he continues to be active,
Appleby and the Ospreys
marking his final appearance in the late 1980's.

In
Appleby's End
he meets Judith Raven, whom he marries and who has an involvement in many subsequent cases, as does their son Bobby and other members of his family.

 

 

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels