Gay Phoenix (22 page)

‘It’s untrue! It’s…it’s–’ Povey now had difficulty in managing articulate speech. ‘I simply don’t remember–’

‘Rubbish.’

‘I can prove–’

‘It’s no good, Charles Povey. Because the body – Alcorne’s body – has now been found.’

‘Alcorne murdered!’ Povey’s eyes had rounded in horror, and he was suddenly panting. ‘But I have a way out! I’ve always had a way out! I told that bloody Butter so. You can’t get me for killing this man Alcorne, or whatever’s in your filthy head. I never set eyes on him.’ Povey’s voice rose to a scream. ‘Because I’m not Charles Povey. I’m Arthur Povey. I’ve been ill. I tried hard to hang on to it that I’m Arthur. I’ve witnesses to that in Adelaide. I still try hard to be Arthur, but somehow it won’t come. It was those doctors who made a lunatic of me. More and more, I don’t know I’m Arthur any longer.’ Povey collapsed again into his chair. ‘I don’t even know it now.’

Sir John Appleby, although it would have been legitimate to describe him as a case-hardened man, was more than a little shaken by this latest effort on the part of his interlocutor. Roughly speaking, he was at a loss over how to estimate the genuineness, if any, of what could be called the Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect of the affair. He had already seen – it had come to him as he harangued Judith in the small hours – that Budgery’s patient in the Adelaide hospital could be viewed as having insinuated himself into another man’s shoes (and skin, for that matter) with astonishing ingenuity. He had manoeuvred his doctors into believing they were rescuing him from a bizarre delusion and restoring him to his true identity. One might call this deep enough, and Appleby had accorded it at once a species of generous professional admiration. It had never crossed his mind, however, that Arthur Povey’s plan might have been deeper still; that he had managed, in a most notable degree, a further
tour de force
of what people nowadays liked to call contingency planning. There was an escape clause – a way out, as Povey had himself just expressed it – built into the plan from the start. The key word here – and this too Povey had used – was ‘bullied’. The doctors had bullied him into a permanent, if mysteriously intermittent, pathological acceptance of his dead brother’s identity. Morally speaking, Arthur Povey had maintained the right to be regarded as an innocent man. He might be booked for fame as a classical case history, to be cited in textbooks as exemplifying the impenetrable strangeness of a human being’s sense of his own identity. He might well have to be committed to a mental hospital. But he couldn’t be committed to jail.

It was all, of course, the most unutterable nonsense. Appleby, as a rational man, felt something like sheer irritation as he contemplated its large absurdity. But not everybody remains successfully rational, even in a law court. Take, for instance, one salient point. Arthur Povey had arrived in Adelaide minus – as his brother Charles was on record as being minus – the index finger of his left hand. Appleby imagined prosecuting counsel hammering this point home – and the jury, or at least a few obstinate members of a jury, saying to themselves
Yes, but
– and maintaining that the whole affair was too obscure and complicated to produce an adverse verdict upon.

But it wasn’t any strength in Povey’s case that was the point – at least the moral point – of the matter. Rather, it was its simple craziness. It was impossible to deny that the man was authentically deranged, and deranged in the most extraordinary way.
More and more, I don’t know I’m Arthur any longer
. In any context of law, these words of Povey’s were plain non-starters as any sort of exculpation. All along – the law would say – he had known, or at least intermittently he had known, his true identity. And nevertheless he had gone ahead being not the penniless Arthur but the affluent if embarrassed Charles – until the need for his ‘way out’ had overpoweringly come to him.

But this was only one view of that weird cry. Appleby’s whole career had been built on backing his own sense of the truth of a situation until it was controverted by plain and acknowledged fact. And he now had a strong sense that Arthur Povey, obviously so abundantly given to systematic dishonesty and falsehood, had for once said an honest thing.

‘I’m quite sane, you know,’ Arthur Povey said. He had been silent for a full minute, and now he appeared almost calm.

He had been gazing thoughtfully at his own left hand, but now he raised his eyes and looked full at Appleby. ‘I know who you are. I know you’re a police officer. I know why you’re here. I’ve always seen what suspicion might attach to me. We didn’t get on very well – my brother and myself. And it was a lonely voyage of course, with tensions building up. We might well have quarrelled – I grant you that. But I didn’t kill Arthur. He died just as I said. I escaped lightly from the accident – or seemed to. Only there was a blow that did something to my head.’

‘You mean you didn’t kill
Charles
? I believe that.’

‘Charles?’ It was like a man in pain that Arthur Povey uneasily moved his head. ‘I don’t understand you. Who do you think I am? What the devil do you mean?’ Arthur Povey was silent again for a moment. ‘You must be crazy,’ he said.

Sir John Appleby, retired Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was aware of a sudden incongruous image floating somewhere inside his own head. It was of one of the delights of his childhood: a little wooden chalet out of which there bobbed, as the barometer rose or fell, now a little man and now a little woman. The notion of barometric pressure not having been within his intellectual grasp, it had been a mysterious phenomenon. Sometimes the little man and the little woman seemed to come and go with bewildering rapidity – a subjective impression, no doubt, occasioned by his being a good deal occupied in his nursery with a diversity of absorbing pursuits. And now the little man and the little woman were with him again.

What Arthur Povey had just produced – he told himself rather desperately – was simply his most superb turn yet. And it was far, far too good to be true. Only it
was
true. Appleby was in the veritable presence of Jekyll and Hyde. Only that didn’t quite square with the facts of the case, since of these two famous fictional characters one had been a goody and the other a baddy. Whereas Charles and Arthur Povey could only be described as persons between whose moral worth, or lack of it, it would now be useless to attempt to discriminate. Appleby had solved their mystery, at least in a general way. What remained to tempt curiosity was a psychologist’s affair – that, rather than a former policeman’s. Arthur Povey had – but to a degree that remained obscure – been hoist with his own petard. Not, clearly, in a settled way, but rather with an intermittency which must make his life perpetually alarming.

And it was no business of
his
. This time, Appleby asserted this to himself seriously and after a moment’s deliberate thought. It would be socially irresponsible, having discovered what he had discovered, not to pick up the telephone and call the police. But he had spent a long lifetime being socially responsible. Now, he rose to his feet, and called it a day.

‘Mr Povey,’ he said, ‘you tell me you have been ill. You are still ill now, if my judgement isn’t at fault. I’m going to see my family doctor. I shall ask him to call on you at once. I advise you to see him and confide in him. Meanwhile, forget that story about Alcorne having met a bad end. I know nothing about him. Goodbye.’

Appleby walked from the library and through the chilly hall; then, without pausing, he left Brockholes Abbey with no mind ever to return there. Rounding the house to regain the drive, however, he passed a line of garages. One remaining car was visible, and it was an uncommonly powerful one. He glanced at it briefly, grimly, and then drove away.

For some time Arthur Povey sat on in his deserted mansion, staring at a huge and empty fireplace. His head was troubling him. But, curiously enough, a headache usually signalled the lifting of those tiresome – and dreadfully dangerous – confusions into which he now so often fell. He’d been having an increasingly hard time.
Both of him
had been having that.

He got up and mixed himself a drink. There was a cheerful side to the thing. He’d got rid of the horrible Pops, and of the treacherous Butter, and of all those low crooks battening on him as bogus domestic servants. And he’d foxed that policeman. He didn’t quite remember
how
he’d foxed him, but he certainly had. Or had he? It didn’t much matter. The infernal busybody was gone too.

He left the library and prowled through the big deserted house. He’d hated it as a boy, and he hated it now. And they’d wanted damn well to imprison him in the place! He was free at last.

Arthur Povey went up to his bedroom. He paused several times on the stairs to chuckle to himself. Only be clever enough, and you always get through. In the bedroom he pulled open drawers and packed a single suitcase. Just at the moment, it would be as well to travel light. Arthur – Charles, that was to say – despite his wealth had been quite good at that. Povey shoved aside a wardrobe, opened a safe concealed in the wall, and stuffed another suitcase with ten-pound notes. He stuffed it very full indeed, whistling to himself softly as he worked. There would be some sort of manhunt, he supposed, but he wasn’t afraid of that. He knew the sea (poor old Charles had never really known the sea) and that was an important point in favour of one who proposed to lead an elusive life. A
new
sort of elusive life – not one cooped up in a bloody morgue. He paused in his final preparations, and whistled a little more robustly. It had just dawned on him – for now his head was entirely clear – that for the rest of his days he wasn’t going to be a Povey at all.

It was an immense release. He grabbed both suitcases, hurried out of the house, and drove triumphantly away in his big car.

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.