The Bloody Wood (20 page)

‘And then the fingerprints,’ Colonel Morrison said.

‘Ah, yes – the fingerprints.’ Appleby nodded. ‘The machine, when discovered, showed Martineau’s fingerprints, and no others. But I still confess to a little doubt.’ Appleby said this very mildly. ‘This, if it happened, was a kind of sacred thing. I’m willing to agree with Mr Angrave that it is most distressing that we should have to discuss it, Yet discuss it we must. I have to ask myself whether Charles Martineau would, in fact, think to obtain this record covertly. Knowing him, and knowing his relations with his wife, I feel it to be a large question. Then again – although it’s quite another thing – I have to confess to a further doubt. I’m a little worried, if the truth be told, about that blown fuse. You see, the machine is in no way defective. That the fuse should simply have gone is, of course, technically possible. But it’s such an unlikely thing to happen, you know, that one is bound to pause on it. And I’d emphasize this. In fact, quite frankly, I find it the most intractable element in the whole affair.’

Dr Fell, who had sat silent and brooding hitherto, suddenly stirred in his chair. He looked round the music room, and his glance rested on Diana Page.

‘About Angrave’s suggestion,’ he said, ‘it happens that I have something to say. I think Miss Page knows what I mean, and will support my doubtless suspect testimony.’ Fell frowned, as if regretting this gratuitous irony. ‘About a week ago–’

Fell broke off. He did so because Diana had burst into tears. It was a moment before he could resume.

‘Miss Page and I were talking with Charles Martineau in a desultory way. He was teasing Miss Page a little – I think it may be put like that – about some sort of popular music. Is that not right?’

Diana nodded dumbly. She had controlled her sobbing.

‘Then we spoke of the recording of music – and also of poetry. I think I mentioned having heard the voice of Tennyson on an old gramophone record. Miss Page–’

‘Let me tell.’ Diana looked up and took a deep breath. Her tear-stained face held its not unfamiliar expression of mingled defiance and misery. ‘I’m so damned stupid! Of course I didn’t mean to hurt him. But I said we could now all have such records – in families, and that sort of thing. So that we’d be able–’ Diana failed to continue. She was weeping again.

Judith Appleby crossed the room, and sat down beside her.

‘Diana,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t really stupid, at all. And now Dr Fell can go on.’

‘There’s little more to tell. It’s true that, as a result of the turn our talk had taken, this idea seemed to be before us: that Charles Martineau – or merely one in his situation, say – might have that sort of record, just as he might have a portrait, or photographs in an album. The significant point is Martineau’s reaction. For some reason he was horrified. He made it clear that the idea was repugnant to him. I don’t suppose that Miss Page and I are doing more than recording an odd coincidence. But there it is.’

‘I don’t think it is at all surprising.’ Martine Rivière had turned pale, but she made this interruption unemotionally. ‘Had my uncle casually possessed such a thing, he might have prized it. But I can see him recoiling from the notion of deliberately securing such a memorial…at a late hour.’

‘I agree,’ Bobby Angrave said. ‘My explanation was a bad one.’ He hesitated. ‘But I have a queer feeling that Uncle Charles’ conversation with Dr Fell and Diana about recording may have…well, put ideas in his head. Is there any sense in that? I suppose not.’

‘On the contrary, it may well be true.’ Appleby was looking across the room at his friend Christopher Sly. ‘And it mayn’t be easy to tell just where the process stopped. For the moment, however, let me come back to Friary.’

‘And to his lies?’ Bobby asked.

‘Yes – but we must consider whether they were lies. The first relates to this tape-recorder. According to Friary, Charles Martineau said he had taken it away to be repaired. This was not so. But why should Friary make up such a story? Well, one can imagine motives – such as his having himself taken the machine for some evil design of his own. Had he done that, however, he would scarcely have told so readily detectable a lie. I had only to check on his story, and it would be exposed. It seems more likely that the lie – or prevarication – was Martineau’s own, and Friary’s statement quite truthful. Martineau proposed to use the machine in a way that he didn’t care that Friary should know of – and therefore said something other than the truth about it, Remember, on the other hand, that he wasn’t being consistently secretive. Macaulay and Neil saw him with the thing quite openly. And now take Friary’s other seemingly motiveless lie. It too was vulnerable to exposure – if, once more, it was a lie, or if he knew that it was.’

‘About hearing his employers?’ the Chief Constable asked.

‘Exactly. Friary maintains that he heard the Martineaus talking together in the belvedere on the evening of the day before yesterday. Yesterday, the day of their deaths, he did
not
hear them at the same hour – the hour of his regular return from the village. But he
did
hear them, he says, much earlier – when he went up to the belvedere at five o’clock with the idea of seeing that everything was in order. According to Mr and Mrs Pendleton, however, this was impossible. They were themselves talking to Grace Martineau at that hour in quite another part of the grounds. Unless, once more, Friary is making up a story for reasons we haven’t got at – and I really rule that out – there is only one explanation. It lies in this.’ Appleby tapped the tape-recorder in front of him. ‘What Friary heard yesterday afternoon was a recorded conversation. Charles Martineau may have been in the belvedere; Grace Martineau cannot have been. So what are we to make of that?’ Appleby paused. ‘I can think of only one reasonable explanation. Friary went to the belvedere on this occasion more or less by chance. His presence cannot have been reckoned on. So the performance, if we may call it that’ – Appleby tapped the machine again – ‘was not designed for his benefit. It can scarcely have been for anyone’s benefit. In fact it was a rehearsal – and being carried out in what was thought of as privacy.’

‘A rehearsal?’ Colonel Morrison had produced his silk handkerchief; he was plainly bewildered. ‘A rehearsal for what? There’s no record of this phoney conversation’s ever being heard again.’

‘You have to remember the blown fuse,’ Appleby said.

In the baffled pause that followed, it was to be seen that Bobby Angrave had risen to his feet.

‘I have protested about this,’ he said, ‘and I protest again now. I have no power to stop you from going on to whatever wretched conclusion you please. But I think I can forbid its happening in this house. You are hounding somebody you can’t bring to justice – and you shan’t do it here. Martine, you agree?’

‘I don’t think I do, I thought I did, but now I don’t. I’m sorry, Bobby. But I think it must go on.’

‘It will go on, anyway.’ Bobby flung himself back in his chair. ‘But why not in their beastly police station, or coroner’s court? However, have it your own way.’

‘Then I shall continue.’ Appleby looked at the young man seriously. ‘But I agree that we have arrived at a point at which it is possible to sympathize with the feeling you express. And now’ – and Appleby looked round the company – ‘what is the first question we have to ask?’

For a moment it appeared that Appleby’s own question was to be taken as rhetorical, and nobody spoke. When he remained silent, however, Pendleton provided a reply.

‘The first question we have to ask is clear enough. I don’t like it – but there it is in front of us. Just why should Charles have made such a recording, and just why should he have rehearsed it, as you term it, in the way he did?’

‘Thank you.’ Appleby nodded sombrely. ‘Ask oneself that, and there is only one reply. Charles Martineau killed his wife.’

It was into a stricken silence that Appleby next spoke.

‘Listen, please,’ he said – and set going the tape-recorder. It was three or four minutes before he switched it off. ‘A very ordinary conversation, wouldn’t you say? It even has a little of what Charles and Grace confessed to us: that they liked a mild gossip about their guests. But what are we to suppose? We are to suppose that Charles certainly recorded it because he knew his wife would die soon. But it was with a very different purpose from the simple commemorative one which Mr Angrave was suggesting to us. Briefly, he was no longer able to bear the spectacle of her suffering, and he decided that he must kill her. A mercy killing is what the newspapers call it.

‘But he didn’t intend that this miserable thing should ever be known. He determined that Grace should meet the appearance of accidental death – death by drowning – and that he himself, for greater security, should own an alibi. So he recorded this talk – in the belvedere, no doubt. Yesterday afternoon – overheard by Friary, as it happened – he tested it out there. And then he was ready.

‘Yesterday evening he and Grace made their little expedition together. On the way to the belvedere he drowned her in the pond. It was just like that.’ Appleby was silent for a moment, ‘And what then? His plan depended on the celebrated punctuality of Friary. He went on to the belvedere, and waited for Friary to pass. As soon as Friary approached, Martineau was going to switch on the tape-recorder. Then, when he was sure that Friary had heard it, he was going to switch it off,
and at once join Friary
. He was going to see to it that Friary didn’t take a path past the pond,
and he was going to remain within sight of one person or another until his wife’s body had been found
. But, as it happened, his plan didn’t work.’

Diana Page was weeping again, but this time nobody attended to her. Mrs Gillingham’s sense of the importance of the forms didn’t prevent her from looking like a woman who knows that she is in the presence of guilt and misery. Bobby Angrave and Martine Rivière had scarcely taken their eyes off each other since Appleby began his recital. But now Bobby looked across the room.

‘What do you mean,’ he asked, ‘by saying that the plan didn’t work?’

‘Remember the extraordinary mischance of the fuse. The tape-recorder failed to function, and Friary, as a consequence, walked past a belvedere from which there came nothing but silence. We may imagine that by this time Charles Martineau knew that he had behaved like a madman, and we may take a guess that he simply wandered about. When young Neil came with the news of Mrs Martineau’s death, some instinct of self-preservation made him – for a few futile minutes – play a part. He went into his office and summoned Dr Fell. Then he took out that revolver and killed himself. Perhaps he had meant to do that all along.’

There was a deep silence. Diana, becoming aware of the sound of her own sobs, was frightened into silence too.

‘All that,’ Appleby said, ‘is what we are asked to suppose.’

‘You mean it isn’t the truth?’ Martine demanded.

‘Of course not. Charles could not conceivably have thrust his wife into a pond and drowned her. Such a notion is nothing but a morbid fantasy. Yet a good deal has been built upon it.’

‘You mean that nothing of all this was ever so much as in my uncle’s head?’

‘Virtually that, Martine, I am glad to say. And yet it began with your uncle – and not wholly without a touch of the fantastic. It began too, with this machine. Indeed, I am now going to play you another tape.’ Appleby busied himself with the tape-recorder. ‘This one didn’t have to be home-made. It can be obtained from some educational supplier or other. It’s wonderful what children are taught nowadays. This tape, by the way, wasn’t in the belvedere. It was found by some of Colonel Morrison’s men in a place where I told them to hunt for it. It was in its cardboard box, which has proved useful for fingerprints. It would never have occurred to me to hunt for it, incidentally, but for a fellow called Christopher Sly.’

‘Christopher Sly?’ Martine repeated.

‘A tinker. I’ll explain in a moment. Now listen, please.’

The tape-recorder once more gave its little preliminary hum. And then, with an effect which might have startled the ears even of Holman Hunt’s shadows on the walls, the music room at Charne was overflowing with the song of a nightingale.

‘Wilt thou have music? hark! Apollo plays,

And twenty caged nightingales do sing.’

Appleby had switched off before offering his hearers this quotation. The people in the music room were silent for a time – just as they might have been had they been gathered in the loggia at dusk, and the same strains been filling the air.

‘That’s what they say to poor Sly in the play,’ Appleby said. ‘And I knew, quite early on, that Sly had something to say to
me
. He sent me, as it were, a tiny signal. The signal was “nightingale”. No more than that. In a sense, it was in fact to prove to be a caged nightingale.’ Appleby’s hand was on the tape-recorder still. He shook his head, as if not well satisfied with himself. ‘This momentary signal ought to have linked itself – or
I
ought to have linked it – with another which I’d received already. You remember our talk about nightingales and poetry? I knew there was
something
just catching at my mind at that time. But I didn’t get it.’

‘I don’t think we know what you’re talking about,’ Bobby Angrave said.

‘I rather believe that somebody knows. Essentially, I’m talking about the possession of a good ear – or just an educated ear – and a precise auditory memory. I happen to have these. If Martine went to the piano now, and played to us a piece I’d heard her play yesterday, her two performances would both be available to me for critical comparison – supposing I were a critic, which I’m not.’

‘This is utter rot, to my mind.’ Bobby said this with cold contempt. ‘But I suppose you must go on – and on and on.’

‘I shall certainly go on, and I ask everybody to be patient. I am not the only person here with the kind of memory I speak of. Diana has it – and so has somebody else. Only Diana’s memory is a little weak elsewhere. It’s not very good at literary history.’