Death at the Chase (2 page)

It was clear that neither law nor courtesy required Appleby (who surely couldn’t be taken for a Frenchman) to pay any heed to this extraordinary command. He had only to inquire whether this unreasonable person would prefer him to retreat as he had come or to terminate his trespass by some other route. It was no doubt a mixture of curiosity and compassion which prompted him to do as he had been told. He was to reflect afterwards that the mixture was an unholy one, and that he had no business to complain that trouble followed.

The house lay in a hollow, and this was no doubt the reason why Appleby hadn’t spotted it earlier. It was ancient – as ancient as Dream and a good deal larger. Architecturally it would have to be called a mess, for from some nucleus which had long since been swallowed up and vanished it wandered indecisively here and there in half-timber work, red brick, and stone – and this now on one scale of pretension and now on quite another, no doubt according to the several whims and material circumstances of numerous generations of its owners. All appeared to have been very fond of chimneys; clusters of these, some weathered smooth and others still distinguishably carved with Tudor elaboration, sprouted from a grey stone roof which had turned sinuous and undulant with the years. The effect was rather that of some improbable monster in a medieval Bestiary, horripilant like the porpentine against its foes. Although the autumn day was chilly, and although the mansion scarcely had the appearance of one in which an unobtrusive central heating had been laid on, Appleby observed that from one of these numerous stacks did there come the faintest trail of smoke.

The place might have been untenanted. He began to wonder indeed if it
was
untenanted; if he was being led – or rather driven or shepherded – into some fiendish trap prepared for casual passers-by by a maniac. Perhaps when they reached the shelter of the building the old gentleman – already so unnervingly padding along behind him – would expertly cosh him on the head with the blackthorn and then manacle him for life amid a congeries of random victims in anabandoned wine-cellar. This morbid persuasion became momentarily so strong in Appleby that he halted, turned round, and casually felt in a pocket for his pipe and tobacco-pouch. At the same time he looked the old gentleman steadily in the eye – a proceeding, as everybody knows, highly correct when maniacs are in question.

‘Chilly,’ Appleby said. ‘But these gleams of sunshine are pleasant, all the same.’

The old gentleman appeared nonplussed. He even neglected to brandish his stick. Appleby took the opportunity to have a better look at him. He wondered why, if his dwelling had suggested some fabulous creature, he himself so strongly suggested a tortoise. He was thin, angular, and capable of at least a certain range of rapid nervous movements, so the image ought not to have fitted at all. Then Appleby remembered that tortoises are reputed to live for a very long time – the really big kinds for several centuries. And this is what the old gentleman gave the impression of doing. He looked by no means what could be called exceptionally old, but he did look as if he were engaged on the job of living almost indefinitely. It was a pervasive desiccation perhaps that rendered this impression; one felt that nothing could happen to his physical frame except – at some utterly remote future time – a slow crumbling and turning to dust. In a humbler walk of life he would be destined eventually to a booth in a fair, surrounded by impressive-looking documentary evidences of his extreme longevity, and offering to shake hands at sixpence a time.

This would have been an uncomfortable fancy in itself. But what made Appleby feel obscurely uneasy was his impression that the life thus suggesting itself as abnormally hardwearing and tenacious seemed also a life abnormally burdened after some nervous fashion. Here in fact was Pilgrim grown old with his bundle still on his back. It might be full of remorse and guilt and morbid scruple, as was the case with Bunyan’s character. Or it might be full of the standard horrors of a modern psychiatric clinic: senseless obsessions, phobias, chasms of depression, self-hatred, despair.

The old gentleman had made no reply to Appleby’s inane remark about the sunshine. He had simply stood in silence, watching him stuff his pipe. Something had changed in his manner, all the same. And this was signalized by the words – wholly surprising words – with which he greeted Appleby’s first puff.

‘What’s that stuff you’re smoking?’

‘John Cotton 1 and 2.’

‘I thought so.’ The old gentleman hesitated. A new species of agitation appeared to have possessed him. ‘I think I’ve got a pipe in the house,’ he said.

‘Then may we go and find it?’ Appleby turned to walk on, but then paused until the old gentleman had come abreast of him. It was like dropping in on
Treasure Island
and coaxing Ben Gunn with an offer of Parmesan cheese. He wondered whether his host – as it suddenly seemed reasonable to term this curious old creature – was quite fantastically impoverished. The house they were now approaching certainly suggested it. So did the wild garden they had entered through a gate from the small park with its ill-repaired wall. Appleby took a cautious sideways glance at his companion. He wore a knickerbocker suit of antique cut. It was piped and patched at appropriate points with stout leather, and the cloth seemed of a quality that would last forever anyway. The outfit might well have been tailored for the old gentleman’s father round about the time of the Boer War. It carried a strong suggestion of the earliest days of cycling. Anything much in the way of shape had long since departed from it. But it was quite clean.

‘My name is Ashmore,’ the old gentleman said abruptly. He had come to a halt – and this time it was he who appeared to look Appleby steadily in the eye. If there was something wild in his gaze, there was something uncommonly penetrating as well. ‘You’ve heard of me,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite–’ Appleby broke off. It was, he supposed, as a local magnate that the man called Ashmore presumed he must be known to his visitor. But the name rang only some faint and elusive bell. Unlike Judith, Appleby hadn’t the knack of regarding anybody within fifteen miles as a close neighbour. If Judith had talked about this ancient Mr Ashmore as among the attractions of the neighbourhood her husband had been most culpably not listening to her. Nevertheless it was awkward to have to deny something that Ashmore had so dogmatically assumed, and Appleby was for a moment at a loss. Ashmore himself resumed the conversation.

‘Don’t think I’m a fool,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I’m an old fool, or a bloody fool, or even just a born one. Didn’t you say your name was Appleby, and talk about the police? I’ve placed you, you know. It’s taken me a minute or two – but that doesn’t mean my wits are wholly decayed. Mind you, they
may
be, but this isn’t evidence of it. You’ve been an important man – Sir John, isn’t it – but not
all
that important. So it takes a little thought to sort you out. And of course you’ve heard of me. Nobody in your position could have failed to.’ Ashmore paused. ‘Did you use to see those plays by that fellow Bernard Shaw?’

‘Decidedly I did.’

‘There’s a man in one of them who goes around handing out his card.
Mr X, the
Celebrated Coward
. Just like that. Well, I’m Martyn Ashmore, the celebrated ditto.’ Ashmore laughed harshly. ‘So now we are introduced. Can I have a fill of your tobacco, all the same?’

Judith – Appleby reflected – would have landed him in precisely this absurd situation. It was again the principle of going on till you are stopped. He recalled the occasion, for example, upon which she had insisted upon their ‘exploring’ – which meant simply breaking into – a house seemingly even more derelict and untenanted than this which confronted him now. There had been a moat round it, and owls had been appropriately hooting. It seemed incredible that any other human being had approached it for years. So they had climbed in through what had once been a window. They had hazardously ascended and descended tottering staircases. They had doubtfully distinguished on mouldering walls what had once been linenfold panelling. It had been great fun. And then the man had come. He was some sort of caretaker – an abandoned family retainer (they had afterwards decided) told to prowl the place in order to repel such vulgar persons as might commit nuisances in corners or scratch initials or even more objectionable
graffiti
upon disgraced chimneypieces. They had heard his footfalls from afar. Footfalls plus an unnerving
tap
. For he was an ancient creature who got around only with the aid of a stick.

Plop, plop, and a
tap
. Plop, plop, and a
tap
. Admittedly it had been unnerving. Judith had persuaded him to hide in a cupboard.

Much later, and in an unwary moment, Appleby had told this story to the children. It must have been after dinner and when the Applebys – as tended to be their habit – were lingering amid Beaujolais and guttering candles before turning to the washing-up. And now the story, if inexpugnably hilarious, had turned faintly tedious. The man, like some homing device of ghastly sophistication in modern warfare, had walked and tapped his way straight to the cupboard. He had thrown open the door – and there Sir John and Lady Appleby had been, like the woman (according to Bobby Appleby, who was of a literary turn) in a play of Strindberg’s, who lived in a cupboard because she believed herself to be a parrot. And Appleby had emerged, fumbling for the famous visiting card in one pocket while noisily jingling a kind of Danegeld of halfcrowns in the other. The man (according to Bobby) had behaved in an impeccably Jeeves-like manner. Recognizing (despite the halfcrowns, which had been a false note attributable to Appleby’s unassuming origins) the presence of the upper classes, he had bowed the Applebys deferentially off the premises.

Bobby Appleby was not only of a literary turn. He had lately become a novelist. He was entitled to his fantasies. But
had
it been a fantasy? Appleby could no longer precisely remember. The cupboard indeed he could vividly recall. It had exuded what he vaguely conjectured to be the smell of the droppings of untold generations of bats. But had there really been that moment in which he had simultaneously obtruded an oblong of pasteboard (
Sir John Appleby, New Scotland Yard
) and a couple of halfcrowns? Appleby no longer knew. But he had been left with a distaste of what might be called false situations. Perhaps he was heading for one now.

The garden through which Mr Ashmore had conducted him abounded chiefly in hemlock and thistle – these (as once at Byron’s Newstead) having choked up the rose that once bloomed on the spray. Here and there headless statues presided over exhausted fountains and departed shrubberies. There was a croquet-lawn abundant in fungi and mushrooms. Appleby rather suspected that Mr Ashmore relied upon these as upon a home farm; that the fatally inviting stile had tumbled him into the society not merely of a pathological recluse but of a pathological miser as well. The mere possession of a tobacco-pouch had transformed his status with the proprietor of this impressive if mouldering mansion. Extravagantly prosperous gentlemen in the City of London would part with large sums for the possession of so authentically feudal a set-up as lay before him. But Mr Ashmore was prepared to admit to it anybody who would provide him with a free smoke.

‘I like your house very much,’ Appleby said. ‘I must have missed it on my map. What is it called?’

‘Ashmore Chase, of course.’ Mr Ashmore had turned to stare at him. ‘What do you think? They’re all around me, my damned brothers and cousins in their bogus Lutyens homes-and-gardens manor houses. Opening their interesting grounds for the benefit of District Nurses and God knows what. But I’m the head of the family, after all. You may say that the Sixteenth Century means nothing nowadays. Fair enough. But land does. I’ve been out in your bloody modern world, and I’ve crashed in it. The Celebrated Coward and all that. But the estate’s mine too. And that’s a different matter – eh? I know my rent-roll, and I know their rotten stock-jobbing bubble-and-squeak standing. No wonder they hate me. Well, I hate them too.’

Appleby said nothing. These family amenities didn’t strike him as a very proper matter of communication to a stranger. But he was surprised that he hadn’t heard, either from Judith or one of his new neighbours, of a network of Ashmores in the county; he promised himself to gain more accurate information about them than was likely to come from the eccentric old person he was now listening to. But he also wanted to know about the old person’s harping on the theme of the Celebrated Coward. Just for the moment, he couldn’t place this at all. He had been challenged to respond to the name of Ashmore in a way that in fact he couldn’t do. When the old man had said ‘You’ve heard of me’ some faint bell had indeed rung in his head. But it hadn’t, so to speak, rung up any curtain. Mr Ashmore owned some perished history which the world had cast into a deeper oblivion than he knew. Because curiosity had been so large a part of his professional life, Appleby had an instinct to get at this. But the time for it hadn’t quite come. Perhaps it would come when the old fellow found that pipe.

But now it didn’t look as if this was going to happen in a hurry. Mr Ashmore – Martyn Ashmore, as he had declared himself to be – appeared curiously reluctant to go indoors. They had reached a terrace which, although much overgrown, could be distinguished as attractively paved in ancient brick. This ran the length of the house on the front now exposed to them, and from it a few farther steps led up to a front door in equally ancient oak.

The door was shut. Apparently it was locked as well, for Ashmore as he walked up to it had produced from a pocket an impressively large key. Instead of applying this to the keyhole, however, he somewhat surprisingly applied his ear to it instead. Then, with a gesture to Appleby to follow him in silence, he moved softly down the terrace, pausing every now and then to peer cautiously through a window. But the windows were in so begrimed a state that this inspection could have had little practical utility, and Appleby was unable to resist an uncomfortable impression that what he was witnessing was a compulsive ritual devoid of rational significance. Presently they came to a second and smaller door of what appeared to be comparatively recent date, sheltered beneath a frankly unauthentic Gothic portico. This door – Appleby was further instructed to remark – was ajar and swaying gently to and fro in a light chilly breeze which was now rising. Ashmore paid no attention to it. He walked on to the next window, stopped, and anxiously examined its fastenings.