Death at the Chase (4 page)

‘Of course,’ Martyn Ashmore was saying, ‘Jarvis painted my grandfather when he was still an Eton boy. You can see that. My grandfather was born in 1720. He was known among his familiars, even to the end of his long life, as “Bubbles” Ashmore. It was the year, you know, of the South Sea Bubble.’

‘I suppose your grandfather married rather late in life too?’ Appleby followed up this harmless question with one which he felt even as he uttered it, to be impertinent. ‘And perhaps you may carry on the tradition?’

‘It’s a question which others are asking themselves.’ Ashmore, who seemed unoffended, produced a malicious chuckle as he said this. ‘But I think you mentioned the roof? There is a point of access to it above the front door. But I am afraid that it affords no very great extension of view.’

Appleby found himself walking on – and presently descending some stairs and ascending others – in a meditative silence. About the Ashmores he was obliged, he supposed, to believe what he had been told. Perhaps Martyn Ashmore was a little embroidering or overstating the facts; perhaps he had even skipped a generation in his leapfrogging progress back to the age of Queen Anne; but notable longevity and a propensity to take up the task of procreation only at an advanced age no doubt ran in his family authentically enough. What was perplexing was the manner in which, while airing these matters, he seemed entirely to have dismissed both the dreadful personal history at which he had hinted and the sufficiently startling event of an hour ago – which he had declared to be only one in a series of such events with which that history continued to implicate him annually.

Perhaps he had an iron nerve, so that what occasioned him a very natural anxiety in the immediate prospect he was at once able to banish from his mind as soon as he was assured of his next twelve months’ immunity. Or perhaps he simply suffered from some disorder of the memory, so that his mental life was subject to pathological discontinuities. If, after all, he had suffered what he had so briefly claimed to have suffered, and seen what he had equally briefly claimed to have seen, then he surely had some title to be a little off his head. And if furthermore – beyond all sober belief as it seemed – he was in fact the recurrent object of a species of diabolically cat-and-mouse revenge, then equally surely he could claim credit for not being vastly madder still.

But now they had climbed a final flight of wooden steps – it was little more than a ladder with a handrail – and passed through a low door. They were in open air, with a flat leaded area beneath their feet, the long spine of a steeply pitched stone roof behind them, and in front a low parapet constituted by battlements of a conventional sort. They were not particularly high up, since the house nowhere rose above two main storeys and a range of attic rooms. Appleby walked to the battlements and looked over. What lay immediately below was undoubtedly the front door. Ashmore had at least brought him straight to the spot from which the attack had been launched. And this seemed good enough warrant for recurring to it.

‘These periodic attempts to murder you,’ Appleby said boldly. ‘Do you regard them as strictly your own affair, or have you been accustomed to report them to the police?’

‘Oh, that!’ Ashmore’s tone, if not exactly dismissive, was that of a man to whom a topic of no great moment has been proposed. ‘I don’t make a fuss.’

‘You must forgive me for appearing merely curious. I realize the thing is no business of mine.’

‘Not at all.’ Ashmore turned to Appleby decisively. ‘Here you are, my dear sir, consenting to be my guest – and after some initial misunderstanding which I regret. And as a result, somebody nearly brains you. I say just enough – or so I suppose – to explain the matter, and pass to less disagreeable topics. But you are certainly entitled to a further word, if you feel that way. What’s that about the police? You told me you were a policeman yourself. Indeed, I’ve heard of you, as I said. Am I to understand that you are acting–’

‘Nothing of the kind, Mr Ashmore. I have no standing in your affair whatever. Perhaps I’m talking entirely out of turn. What happened before lunch stemmed, you say, from some very painful incident in the past. I do confess to wondering whether that fact has prompted you to keep quite mum about these attempts, or whether the local police know about them.’

‘I don’t see the local police doing much about them. Outside their range, if you ask me.’

‘I must disagree with you.’ Appleby spoke more forcibly than he had yet ventured to do. ‘If it is really true that your life is in some danger on only one day of the year, it is evident that the police could ensure your absolute safety upon it with very little inconvenience to either themselves or you.’

‘I think you said earlier that I could manage that off my own bat. I refuse to disarrange my life over the matter. But I may as well tell you that the police
do
know about it. At least their Chief Constable does.’

‘Colonel Pride?’

‘That’s right – young Tommy Pride. I’ve mentioned it to him more than once when meeting him in a casual way. At drinks somewhere or other – that sort of thing. I don’t, as a matter of fact, go around very much nowadays. I might almost be called a bit of a recluse, you know. But there are three or four neighbours on whom I have a kind of duty to drop in just occasionally. Trouble is, I’m so liable to meet some of my damned relations. Cursed number of Ashmores round these parts.’

This, Appleby recalled, was a note which his host had already sounded. At the moment it seemed a red herring, and he had better stick to the Chief Constable.

‘And what action,’ he asked, ‘did Colonel Pride think it best to take?’

‘Oh, he didn’t take any action! I wasn’t urging anything on him, you know. It seemed to me proper he should be put in the picture, eh? But I wasn’t crying out. Thought I’d made that point with you.’

‘You made it, all right.’ Standing on what must have been the precise spot from which that deadly stone had been dropped or flung, Appleby scrutinized the owner of Ashmore Chase anew. Then he thought of the Chief Constable. Colonel Pride had in recent months become quite well known to him, and although there mightbe aspects of police work in which this gallant soldier was distinguishably an amateur Appleby made no question of his being a thoroughly conscientious person. If he had taken no action as a result of Martyn Ashmore’s story it could only be because Ashmore had so told his story as to give the strongest impression of being gently mad. Pride of course had not enjoyed the additional stimulus to action of seeing a sizeable chunk of stone suddenly fragment itself in the vicinity of his feet. Appleby promised himself to relay his own persuasive experience to Pride as rapidly as might be. Pride was not perhaps to be described as an Appleby enthusiast, but he had accepted amiably enough the rather tiresome bobbing up in his neighbourhood of a superannuated top policeman from London. He would certainly not be disposed to assert that Appleby had been imagining things.

Quite possibly, with the ordinary resources of a detective branch, this deplorable affair could be got to the bottom of almost at once. Failing that, it should be easy to ensure that a year today (whether with Ashmore’s knowledge or not) a disagreeable reception should be awaiting anybody making a felonious approach to Ashmore Chase. Appleby found himself looking forward to this with satisfaction. It was odd how angry he still felt. Often enough in the past, desperation of one sort or another had prompted various people to deliberate attempts on his life. He couldn’t recall ever having been furious about it. There must be something particularly exacerbating in being nearly killed as the mere consequence of a casual encounter during a blameless country walk.

Meanwhile, he wondered whether an old professional instinct could be aroused in Ashmore as well as in himself. If what Ashmore had recounted was true, tragedy had come to him only as a result of his being in some situation which an active and adventurous man could alone find himself in; the background of his story appeared to be the
Résistance
in occupied France. It should be possible to coax him into a mood in which his reaction to danger and violence would be other than his present mask (if it was that) of contemptuous disregard.

‘Why a stone from your own roof?’ Appleby demanded suddenly. He turned and pointed. ‘I know about that sort of construction, and I’m sure you do too. It’s immemorial, and it’s made to last. One might be able to wrench one of these heavy slabs free, but one couldn’t reckon on it. Why didn’t he bring something handier up with him? Did he want to suggest an accident?’

‘Perhaps
you
want to suggest an accident.’ Suddenly Ashmore’s attention did really seem engaged, and he pointed in his turn. ‘It could have been an accident – if the stone had simply become detached from somewhere up there near the ridge of the roof. By the time it reached this flat platform its momentum might be such as to bounce it over the parapet. That’s it, isn’t it – and all the rest just an old fellow imagining things?’

‘To be frank, I rather wish that it was – since your story, you know, is an uncommonly uncomfortable one.’ Appleby smiled disarmingly. ‘Unfortunately it just isn’t so. A sharp-edged stone crashing down on this lead might conceivably bounce, but it would leave a substantial gash or scar in doing so. I wouldn’t believe it to have been an accident even if I hadn’t heard that motor-cycle. Besides, you know, the stone
didn’t
come from high up. It came from
there
.’ Appleby’s finger went out straight in front of him. ‘Right by the fellow’s hand.’

There could be no doubt of it. A slab had successfully been wrenched from the roof, and the underlying stone thus uncovered was lighter in colour than those surrounding it, so that what had happened was visible at once. Appleby walked up to the place. He had to inspect it only for a moment before suddenly stiffening. Then he turned to his companion. ‘I think you may feel you know,’ he said, ‘just how to interpret
that
?’

That
was a very simple design which had been boldly scratched on the exposed surface with a sharp instrument.

For a moment both men looked at this in silence. Appleby recorded to himself an impression that Martyn Ashmore’s breathing was for the moment not perfectly regular. But when the old man spoke it was detachedly and with a faint irony.

‘Perhaps it isn’t as recent as it looks? A mason’s mark, would you say? They were still very fond of them in the sixteenth century.’

‘No doubt.’ Appleby’s tone indicated that he took no pleasure in this trifling. ‘But if that is a medieval stonemason’s mark, Mr Ashmore, what he chose to sign himself with was the Cross of Lorraine. It was to have other associations in a later age.’

‘Capital plan!’ Lord Ampersand was constitutionally averse to small cash disbursements. ‘And no heel-taps, Archie. We’ll go and tell your mother.’

The breeze which had begun to blow earlier was still rising, and it made the present perch of Appleby and his host a chilly one. It was beginning to whistle in the battlements – and also to sigh subtly or whisper in the innumerable small crevices of the ancient roof. Appleby’s last words had been followed by a silence in which he had believed himself to be listening only to these murmurings of external nature. But now he suddenly raised his head and listened in another fashion.

‘Can there be anybody else up here?’ he asked. ‘Somebody who for some reason came up before us? I haven’t gathered whether you have many servants about the place.’

‘Servants?’ Ashmore produced a contemptuous exclamation. ‘I do without them entirely, praise the Lord! Do you know the kind of wages they ask for nowadays? Totally impossible!’

‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby was still listening. At the same time he was reflecting that, as the owner of what was clearly a substantial estate in this particular part of England, Martyn Ashmore, regardless of other sources of wealth, could not be other than an extremely prosperous man. Indeed he had himself hinted as much. Of a thoroughly irrational element in his parsimony there could be no doubt whatever.

‘But I think you’re right,’ Ashmore said. He had cocked his head on one side in an attitude of listening. But if this somehow enhanced the effect of an unnatural agelessness in his features – rather as if a death-mask had been canted over on its stand – it also suggested an almost unimpaired capacity for alert attention to his surroundings when he was minded that way. His senses, Appleby thought, had remained with him more certainly than his wits. And now he turned to Appleby and nodded. ‘Not a doubt of it.’

Appleby surveyed their situation. Even the principal façade of the house was without regularity, and one consequence of this was apparent at their present level. On their left hand as they faced outwards towards the park the battlemented effect abruptly left off, so that the roof structure terminated merely in impassable eaves and a gutter. But on their right a cheerfully incongruous Gothicizing had been carried out, with the result that there were more battlements, and a narrow leaded walk behind them. Along this one could move in very reasonable safety. The route would take one round a corner of the roof. And it was from this direction that something like the sound of footfalls had come.

‘Nobody can have slipped up behind us,’ Appleby said. ‘If there’s anybody there, he’s been up here for some time. If you don’t mind, we’ll go and have a look.’

But this proposal proved unnecessary. Even as Appleby spoke, the figure of a man appeared round the angle of the roof, hesitated for a moment before what he saw, and then advanced upon them with what was almost an air of leisure. He was quite a young man, in clothes so expressive of English casual elegance that one instantly conjectured him to be a foreigner. And confirmation of this appeared in the first words he spoke.

‘
Mille pardons!
’ the young man said – and as he spoke his glance travelled between Appleby and Ashmore, as if he were rapidly sorting them out. It was to Ashmore that he now made an expressive gesture. ‘
Je suis très, très confus
,’ he said.