Death at the Chase (3 page)

By this time it seemed evident to Appleby that there must be somebody around the place charged with the not very easy duty of looking after Mr Martyn Ashmore. Yet nobody of the sort had appeared – and for that matter he had been building up a strong impression that the old man lived in this great place in absolute solitude. He was about to frame a question which might throw some light on this when he saw that Ashmore had moved on.

But now they were approaching an angle of the house, and Ashmore’s behaviour had become stranger still. He still held the big key in his hand – or rather he held it in both hands, cradling it as a trained Commando might cradle an automatic weapon. And some fantasy of this kind he actually went on to enact. As if this corner were a spot peculiarly vulnerable to a lethal enfilading fire, and with an agility altogether surprising in so elderly a man, he crouched, sprang and swung round the corner at the double. Appleby, caught unawares, found himself adopting a ludicrous compromise between the same manoeuvre and a more reasonable manner of circling a secluded country house on an unremarkable autumn day. He reflected impatiently that there was a great deal of Ashmore Chase; what had appeared at a first glance was that the house did nothing if not sprawl; this depressingly senile or demented war-game might go on for quite some time.

And this it did – to an extent indeed which prompted Appleby to ask a question the tone of which he a little regretted as he uttered it.

‘May I ask whether you do this kind of thing often?’

For some moments Ashmore – who had started the window-business again – offered no reply, so that Appleby feared he must have offended him. But this proved to be not so, and Ashmore’s answer when it came held almost the suggestion of polite conversation.

‘Oh, dear me, no! Not at all. Only on the anniversary.’

‘The anniversary?’

‘Of their all being killed, of course. Massacred. Today is the anniversary. I told you, didn’t I, that I remember the date?’ Suddenly Martyn Ashmore looked strangely grim. ‘I still have reason to.’

Suddenly Appleby quite definitely knew that he wanted to ask no more. Yet this, in some obscure way, was not possible. To close up when so strange a remark had been offered one would represent an indecent withdrawal of human sympathy. And he did feel a genuine if still wholly uncomprehending sympathy with this strangely driven recluse. He waited however until the ritual dash round a further wing of the house had been made.

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. Do you mean that there is one special day in the year in which you face a peculiar physical hazard?’

‘Just that. They make an attempt upon my life only on the one day. And, even so, only one single attempt. It’s a matter of their honour. Too much honour – honour and dishonour – about the whole thing.’

‘Why don’t you keep yourself securely shut away on this one dangerous day of the year? Or call in the police? It ought to be quite easy.’

‘I funked once. I gave in once. No good came of it. Did you ever read
Nostromo
by the fellow Conrad? Some sort of foreigner.’

‘I’ve read it more than once, as a matter of fact.’

‘Dr Monygham. A gentleman – English gentleman. He gave in. It broke him.’

‘It didn’t break him. He ends up as the voice of reason and morality in the book. But why did you give in?’

‘They had an electrical thing. After some hours I couldn’t take it any longer. I could show you the places – if they were at all decent.’

Appleby acknowledged a long silence. They had now got right round the house. Its front door was again ahead of them. The day seemed to have darkened – to have turned suddenly colder, as is said to happen when ghosts walk. Appleby knew that he must speak again.

‘Something very bad followed?’

‘The whole village. The men were shot. The women and children were told to go and pray for their souls in the church. Then they fired it. I was made to watch.’ The crazed country gentleman called Martyn Ashmore was silent again for a time. ‘It wouldn’t have been quite so bad, you know, if my mother hadn’t been French.’

‘But even in the years immediately after that sort of thing happened, surely, people didn’t exact vengeance from men who…who were tortured until they talked.’

‘It wasn’t believed. It was thought to be a put-up job. Don’t blame them. Collaboration often worked like that.’

‘Good God, man!’ In the stillness of the early afternoon Appleby heard his own voice almost crying out. ‘This must have been nearly thirty years ago! You can’t believe–’

Ashmore made no direct reply. He walked up to the front door, and this time put the key in the lock without hesitation. He turned it, threw open the door, and stepped back as if to let Appleby be the first to enter.

‘I hope,’ he said, ‘you’ll stay to lunch.’

It was in this second that the thing happened. Suddenly between the two men the worn brick on which they stood quivered and seemed to explode. There was a crash and an effect of flying splinters. There was a brief dust. A large flat stone – a roofing stone – lay in fragments at their feet.

Appleby looked up. He saw a mouldering and crenellated parapet. Behind it there must lie a flat leaded space. Beyond that rose the swell of the ancient roof from which this deadly projectile must have come. He was instantly and enormously angry. Martyn Ashmore had been within inches of his end. So for that matter had been a retired and inoffensive Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. He grabbed Ashmore and dragged him within the shelter of the doorway.

‘Have you servants?’ he demanded. ‘Have you a telephone?’

‘A telephone? Yes, of course. But they’ve disconnected it. The post-office people. They were demanding some extortionate rent.’

Appleby scarcely heard this. He was listening to something else – the sound of flying feet on what must be an uncarpeted staircase. He dashed into a gloomy hall. A door banged. He turned towards the noise, but its direction eluded him. Then from somewhere beyond the back of the house came the roar of a motor-cycle engine. It rose and then rapidly faded into distance.

‘Another failure,’ Ashmore said. ‘Three hundred and sixty-five days to go.’ He laughed harshly, but his voice was steady. ‘And now about luncheon. Would claret or burgundy be your choice?’

It was not much Appleby’s habit, in any crisis, to lose a tolerably sharp consciousness of his surroundings. But he was forced afterwards to admit that it was in an almost dreamlike state that he had traversed shabby and almost empty rooms, had watched his host light a candle, had descended behind him into just such a cellar as he had fatuously imagined he might be incarcerated in by a maniac. It wasn’t an empty cellar. He opened his eyes wide, indeed, at what he saw.

‘What about this?’ Ashmore was asking, and held up a bottle.

‘That’s brandy,’ Appleby said. Even in this extraordinary situation he was able to reflect that it was a long time since he had set eyes on just such a bottle – its neck bulbous with wax, its label hand-written in France long ago.

‘Yes, of course.’ Ashmore put the brandy back in its rack. ‘We want a half-bottle, wouldn’t you say?’ His impulse of hospitality seemed to be moderating itself. ‘One doesn’t care to turn too sleepy of an afternoon, eh? And here they are. Lafite.’ His unnerving laugh echoed queerly beneath the vaulting of the chilly place. ‘You must try my Lafite. Just a glass.’

The wine was superb, but only the most evil-hearted of grocers could have purveyed the cheese. Appleby ate it heartily all the same – mostly with the end of a knife, since the bread available at Ashmore Chase was on the elderly side. He found that the morning’s adventure had given him an appetite, and this he took to be a sign that there remained to him at least some vestige of the spirit of youth. In a sense however it was an adventure wasted on him; he had spent too much of his life walking in and out of affairs of this sort; the thing would have come at least with a greater effect of impact to another man: a quietly wayfaring scholar, say, or the simplest of citizens on a country jaunt. On the other hand he was himself at least in a strong position to get on with the matter, since he need waste no time in perturbation or amazement.

And certainly he couldn’t simply let it lie. It had undeniably become his affair, since one can’t see either oneself or another within inches of being murdered and at once merely close the file. Moreover there seemed something helpless and unprotected in Martyn Ashmore’s situation which had the effect of placing additional responsibility upon even the most fortuitously contacted represent-ative of society and the law. That this went with something courageous in the man – that although a rum old creature with some unknown horror behind him he was yet evidently indisposed to flap – seemed no more than a fact constituting an additional claim.

And the first point was clear. Something extremely definite had
happened
. At one moment, that was to say, Appleby had been supposing himself in the presence of a harmless eccentric – or lunatic, to use a harsher word. In the next moment an event had
happened
which had at least served to set the old gentleman’s outlandish behaviour in some rational consonance with outer reality. The stone that had come crashing down in that transforming instant might fairly be called a sizeable chunk of just that: outer reality in its most lethal form.

It hadn’t come down by accident. It hadn’t come down as a mere alarming joke. The person who dropped it had aimed it – and had surely been curiously indifferent as to which of the two figures below got killed. Or had the assailant so concentrated on Ashmore that he (or she) simply failed to notice Appleby standing within a few feet of him? It didn’t seem possible. What was perhaps worth remarking was the fact that probability had remained a little against anybody getting killed at all. It had been a murderous attack conducted, so to speak, on the principles of Russian roulette. If Ashmore himself was to be believed – which there was no very compelling evidence to persuade one to do – something of this sort happened to him precisely once a year, and obscurely as the consequence of a bygone horror so hideously hinted that Appleby’s scepticism had faltered before it. Yet even if one granted that Ashmore had experienced some unspeakable outrage, direr still in its consequences, in occupied France, it didn’t necessarily follow that either the hurtled stone or (if they really had happened) any of its annual equivalents were in the causal relationship with those distant events that Ashmore supposed them to be.

Appleby finished his cheese. It was definitely mouldy. He finished his claret. It was faintly musty, as the most perfect clarets are. He didn’t delude himself that the facts he had just been reviewing made the faintest sense in his head. But he still felt that action was required of him. Even if – fantastically – it was true that Ashmore’s life would not again be in danger until a year had elapsed it didn’t mean that a resolute attempt ought not to be made to catch here and now the person who had ridden away on a motor-cycle.

Appleby felt he had already been remiss about this. But the trouble lay in Ashmore’s attitude to his guest, which was bewilderingly fluctuating and inconsequent. At present he was pleasing himself – living in this pathologically miserly and reclusive manner as he did – in dredging up as from some former existence the attitudes of an urbane and practised host, entertaining a neighbouring gentleman amid all the amenities of a well-appointed establishment. The wartime episode, the mysterious annual persecution, its latest exemplification at the very door of Ashmore Chase an hour ago: these topics had somehow become taboo during the frugal repast. It wasn’t at all clear to Appleby how Ashmore would receive a proposal to turn to and prosecute a little detective investigation on the spot. Nevertheless the proposal must be made.

‘I’ve very much enjoyed my lunch,’ Appleby said. ‘And now – do you know? – I’d rather like to climb up and have a look at your roof. And perhaps at the back of the house as well.’

‘My dear sir, I shall be delighted. These would not be my own first choice, and perhaps you will permit me to show you a little more of the house. It is an unassuming place, but at least I can act the cicerone with affection. But you must check me, if I too much indulge in family history.’

‘I don’t think I shall do that.’ Following his host’s example, Appleby rose from table – a plain scrubbed table, for they had eaten in a kitchen. ‘Your family history would interest me very much.’

‘My poor father, Ayden Ashmore,’ Ashmore said, and paused.

They were traversing, at the top of one wing of the house, a long gallery – a gallery indeed not all that long, yet answering respectably to one’s idea of this characteristic apartment in a Jacobean mansion. The portrait was that of a young man in his mid-twenties, and Appleby was less immediately struck by his features than by his attire.

‘In fancy dress?’ he ventured.

‘Nothing of the kind.’ Martyn Ashmore stared. ‘The portrait is by Haydon – Benjamin Robert Haydon.’

‘Haydon?’ It was Appleby’s turn to stare. ‘But Haydon painted Wordsworth! He even painted Keats, who died–’

‘Oh, no doubt. But he also painted gentlemen as well.’ Ashmore, as he achieved this magnificent piece of cross-purposes, shook his head sadly before the young man in his late-Georgian finery. ‘My poor father’s life was a tragedy.’

‘I am very sorry to hear it.’ Appleby, with improbable sums in his head, looked speculatively at his host. ‘At least he can scarcely have died young.’

‘He died in a hunting accident. It was in his ninety-ninth year, when he was already preparing for his small family celebration. It cut me up very much. I was a lad of eight at the time.’ Ashmore moved on. ‘Perhaps it
is
a shade surprising. But it just so happens that, in my family, there is a tradition of marrying a little late. May I invite your attention to this by Charles Jarvis? It is of my grandfather Silas.’

‘And Jarvis painted another of the English poets, Alexander Pope.’ Appleby recalled his reflections on the life rhythm of the tortoise. He had scarcely been wrong about its relevance to his new acquaintance.