Death at the Chase (5 page)

And he smiled with an easy charm which, on the contrary, didn’t in the least suggest embarrassment.

It was in French that the young man continued for some minutes to explain himself. Appleby missed out a little on the beginning of this; his French was very adequate, but in face of really fast bowling, so to speak, he commonly took some time to play himself in. And the young man talked with a volubility which at the same time had the precision of well-bred speech; he didn’t appear to be in any doubt that Ashmore at least would follow him easily. It was when Appleby recalled Ashmore’s claiming – during that sinister recital – to have had a French mother, indeed, that what was being said now started to be fully intelligible. The young man’s name was Jules de Voisin; he had the happiness to be a kinsman of Mr Ashmore’s; he had come to pay his respects to one whose name was so much honoured in his own family.

Appleby as he listened to this took a swift glance at Martyn Ashmore – Martyn Ashmore who like the man in Shaw’s play called himself the Celebrated Coward. His disaster would have been more bearable, he had said, had his mother
not
been French. Appleby glanced back at Jules de Voisin. Was it possible that his visit was malignly motivated, and that in his last speech there had lurked some vicious irony? Was it even possible –

Appleby abandoned speculation so as not to let his French slip again. Monsieur de Voisin had come to the tricky part of his explanation – and if he saw the hurdle to be a high one he nevertheless took it like a bird. The house having appeared for the moment untenanted, he had reflected that here after all was the dwelling of a
parent
. And having chanced to come upon a side-door hospitably ajar, he had ventured simply to enter – not indeed to commit the impertinence of freely roaming the mansion, but simply in the hope of what he had in fact achieved: ascending to some point of vantage from which he could comprehensively survey those
parterres
,
vergers
and
potagers
– not to speak of
le parc
bien boisé
– which had so delighted him as he made his approaches through his honoured kinsman’s
domaine
. And having said so much in a language eminently suited to refined compliment, young Monsieur de Voisin suddenly switched to the most colloquial English – this to admit his better sense that it really all had been the most tremendous cheek.

Mr Ashmore distinguishably felt it to have been that – and so did Appleby. The French are a people rather formally disposed, and this young man’s behaviour could scarcely be viewed as other than odd. But Ashmore didn’t greet the outrageous intrusion with anything like the ire he had allowed himself at Appleby’s much more harmless trespass a couple of hours earlier. In fact he was detectably rather at a loss. It was as if the visitor had confronted him with a problem he couldn’t yet confidently assess. Was it conceivable that the turning up of a real Frenchman was stirring in Ashmore an uneasy knowledge that certain other Frenchmen existed only inside his own head?

‘May I ask,’ Appleby said suddenly, ‘whether you are running around on a motor-bicycle?’

For an instant de Voisin seemed to hesitate, and then sufficiently accounted for this by a gesture suggesting that here had been an idiom he hadn’t at once understood. Which was fair enough, Appleby thought. The English language does play itself odd tricks.

‘But, ah – no!’ De Voisin made a further gesture conceivably indicating a politely dissimulated consciousness that his kinsman’s friend had addressed him without the formality of introduction. ‘I have my little car. But not here at the house, since I left it at the entrance to the drive. The walk through the grounds was too charming to miss.’

Appleby accepted this in silence. The young man was much overdoing, he thought, the picturesque charms of Ashmore Chase, since the decidedly run-down character of its pleasure gardens and policies in general would surely be anybody’s predominant impression of it. But Gallic politeness, no doubt, had still to be allowed for.

‘But I did observe a motor-cyclist,’ de Voisin went on. ‘He came up the drive and out of the park just as I was entering it.’ The young man paused, as if aware of himself as being surprisingly informative. He continued with precision nevertheless. ‘That was at twenty to two, just as I began my
promenade
. But I have not been here so long as that would suggest, since I made my small picnic
en route
.’

‘I see. You were mistaken, by the way, in supposing this house to be empty as well as accessible. Mr Ashmore and I must have been at lunch when you entered.’

Jules de Voisin received this communication only with a bow. It was, Appleby reflected, a perfectly justifiable snub. If Martyn Ashmore was indisposed to indicate overt displeasure at his French kinsman’s behaviour it certainly wasn’t for a casual guest to do so. Nevertheless Appleby was suddenly determined to have nothing whatever swept, so to speak, under the mat.

‘I congratulate you,’ he said, ‘on being so certain of just when you saw the motor-cycle. It may be a point of importance. There can be little doubt that its rider must be regarded as a dangerous criminal. In fact he attempted to murder Mr Ashmore not much more than an hour ago from this very spot.’

Naturally enough, de Voisin received this with a shocked exclamation. He then turned to Martyn Ashmore and appeared to indicate by a raised eyebrow his continuing sense of the irregular character of this conversation.

‘Sir John Appleby,’ Ashmore said. ‘Another new acquaintance, my dear – um – Jules. But a neighbour, more or less. Sir John has held a very distinguished position. You may think of him as having been
Préfet de Police
in London. Appleby, my kinsman, Jules de Voisin.’

Appleby was more impressed by this performance than de Voisin appeared to be. It indicated considerable reserves of clarity in his eccentric host. It even seemed to sanction Appleby’s taking to himself a certain professional standing in relation to the homicidal incident he had just referred to. But if de Voisin was surprised he failed to show it. Having, with a relapse into his native tongue, announced that he was enchanted to make Appleby’s acquaintance, he surveyed the small platform on which all three men stood with the decently enhanced interest proper to its having been revealed as the scene of recent outrage. With an equally becoming gravity he felicitated his kinsman on his fortunate escape from danger. He then again fell silent. It was a silence which conveyed that he was by no means dismissing without further concern the startling information he had been offered. Its implication seemed rather to be that further discussion of it ought to be a family affair, and not to take place in the presence of Sir John Appleby –
Préfet de Police
, or not.

It was again, Appleby judged, fair enough. It wasn’t clear to him, all the same, that he ought now simply to take his leave – not even if it was to carry the whole story at once to Colonel Pride. For it was not credible, after all, that there wasn’t something to be discovered about this young Frenchman in some way relevant to the plain crime that had been attempted. That he should have turned up by sheer coincidence on a kinsman he had never before set eyes on precisely on the day which had seen that kinsman’s attempted murder was too improbable for any ready belief; it would have been so even if Ashmore had not himself provided that attempt with an obscure but lurid French background. Appleby decided at least to make one more exploratory move.

‘You ought to know something of the circumstances,’ he said to de Voisin. ‘They represent an odd mingling of premeditation and improvisation. Or that’s the appearance of the thing. The fellow ensconced himself here, and lay in wait until Mr Ashmore (as it happened, in my company) came up to his front door – which is directly beneath, as you can see. A shot would have settled the matter. But he employed something just a little less accurate. He yanked a stone–’

‘Yanked?’

‘He wrenched a stone from the roof, and dropped or lobbed it over this parapet.’ Appleby paused. ‘Would you care to see where it came from?”

De Voisin was again – in effect –
enchanté
; he evinced, in other words, a purely conventional interest. Or this was how he appeared. But then de Voisin – Appleby inclined to conclude – was rather a deep young man. Perhaps he was at once deep and out of his depth. Or perhaps – but this was highly speculative – he was playing it all a little more cool than was perfectly
convenable
simply because what he had stumbled upon was in some way wholly staggering.

‘You can see where one stone is missing,’ Appleby said. ‘If you consider that a full half of it was tucked away beneath the row immediately above, you’ll see that it can’t have been very easy to prise out – and that it was big enough to brain an elephant… Take a closer look, Monsieur de Voisin.’

Rather as one courteously acquiescent before some importunate invitation to view an uninteresting knick-knack, heirloom, or indeed mere snapshot, de Voisin did as he was required. Perhaps he was a little short-sighted, for a fraction of a second seemed to pass before he became aware of the enigmatically scratched surface of the freshly exposed stone. When he did so he gave a startled exclamation. But when he turned to Appleby it was with an expression at once of anger and of contempt. And it was very deliberately that he spoke in his own tongue.

‘
Je ne le crois pas, Monsieur. C’est un galimatias, une pure bêtise
.’

In the silence which for a moment followed this the rising wind continued to murmur and whisper in the interstices of the roof. According to one’s mood, one might have concluded the effect to be either maleficent or benign; a sinister stirring of those natural forces by which the pyramids themselves will one day be worn away, or a comfortable cradle song crooned by earth over a structure which, although venerable to a human eye, must nestle in a mere infancy to the eye of time.

But if Appleby had been disposed to poetical reflection of this sort – which he was not – he would certainly have been recalled from it by the curious behaviour of his host. If de Voisin was oddly angered by what he had seen, his English relative was yet more angered by what he had heard – by the scornful exclamation, that is to say, which the young Frenchman had produced upon becoming aware of the scrawled Cross of Lorraine. But Martyn Ashmore was not merely indignant; he was agitated as well. He had become in fact very much the Ashmore into whose arms Appleby had more or less tumbled over the stile. It was almost as if something which was essentially a protective fantasy were under attack.

And now, for the first time, Ashmore spoke in French. He spoke so vehemently, and was so instantly answered by his young visitor in a similar key – for seconds indeed to an effect of shouting one another down – that Appleby’s ear was again momentarily baffled. Then this indecorous episode ended as abruptly as it had begun. Ashmore had pulled himself up – and although his limbs were trembling his voice had come wholly under control. He turned to Appleby.

‘My dear Sir John, you will realize that it is a long time since I have received a visit from one of my French connections. It is a red-letter day, and I find myself becoming positively excited! I take it very kindly that Jules should have made his way to the Chase. I rather fear his visit may be only a short one. And he and I, as you may imagine, will have plenty of family matters to talk about.’

‘That will be most agreeable, I don’t doubt.’ Appleby glanced curiously at de Voisin, hoping for some indication of how he felt about this belated welcome. But de Voisin merely returned the glance with faint irony. He had entirely picked up the abruptness with which Appleby had been dismissed.

It was a dismissal to take gracefully. Appleby murmured further words about his excellent lunch, shook hands solemnly with both men, and begged to be so far indulged as to see himself out of the house. Mr Ashmore and Monsieur de Voisin, he added, would no doubt wish to spend a little more time admiring the view.

In five minutes he was walking thoughtfully down a weed-covered drive. Tentatively, he tried telling himself that what lay behind him was no affair of his. But he found it wouldn’t do. Simply as a matter of public duty it wouldn’t do. He would run over that evening, he decided, and have a word with the Chief Constable.

Benevolent Intentions at Long Dream Manor

‘Do you mean,’ Judith Appleby asked, ‘that you went on till you were stopped?’

‘Precisely that. I observed your canons in such matters to the letter.’ Appleby accepted a second cup of tea, shook his head austerely at a seducing plate of chocolate Bath Olivers, and then nodded it in gloomy substantiation of what he had just said. ‘And no good came of it. No good ever does.’

‘It doesn’t strike me that way at all.’ Judith, whose weight remained constant regardless of dietary indulgence, picked up one of the biscuits. ‘You arrived home with a mystery – or at least with the tip or the ghost of a mystery – and you’ve been battening on it ever since. All that business, for example, of rushing over to alarm poor Tommy Pride. You enjoy it enormously. Just like old times. Much better fun than stacking wood. By the way, we’ll be out of dry wood and living in a smoky house before Christmas if you don’t–’

‘Very well.’ Appleby gave a decisive nod. ‘I’ll tell Hoobin.’

‘Yes, do tell Hoobin, John. And don’t forget his bottle of whisky. It will be for his eightieth birthday.’

‘Of course not.’ Appleby gave a resigned sigh. ‘Your hale and hearty husband will go through this Caliban act, stacking wood. And the octogenarian Hoobin, a dignified Prospero, will tipple whisky in the potting shed. What were we talking about?’

‘
The Great Maquis Mystery
. Or perhaps
Peril at Ashmore Chase.
And about scaring Tommy Pride.’

‘I’m not in the least averse to scaring Tommy Pride. I wasn’t at school with him. I didn’t dance with him at hunt balls, as you–’