The Long Farewell (13 page)

Then take the two other ladies. Ruth Packford represents another implausible possibility. She is a wronged wife. She is – Appleby insisted to himself – a rather badly wronged wife: and what was variously engaging in Packford’s character mustn’t blind one to that. The man behaved in a weak and shabby fashion. And then, quite suddenly and ignominiously, he was exposed. In such a situation plenty of women have got to work with revolvers – and, for that matter, with knives and hatchets and packets of rat-poison – before now. So the implausibility here may be superficial and delusory, and proceed chiefly from the lady’s professed attitude and from her degree of education. Yes, particularly, perhaps, from this last. When, hard upon her husband’s death, a lady takes to lecturing you on the latest contribution to our knowledge of Thomas Horscroft to have been achieved by an American professor, one instinctively writes her off as a very high-powered emotional dynamo. But this, conceivably, is rash. It is often, after all, inhibited and highly cerebral types that surprisingly fly off the handle.

And then – Appleby said to himself – there’s Alice. Alice’s morals are no doubt to be regretted, but there is every sign that she rose to her crisis like an angel. About Ruth’s fair-mindedness and objectivity one can feel doubts. Even if she is entirely innocent of her husband’s death, there is still a sense of strain – even of something factitious – about her manner. But Alice, no one with any experience of human nature would think of twice in connection with such an affair as the present. She has plainly never hurt a fly. But then about Alice there is a fantastic and imponderable factor. She was hit on the head with that bottle.

One can’t make much of that. It’s a matter for medical experts, and almost certainly one will say one thing and another will flatly contradict him. So far, that is to say, as the theoretical possibilities go. Alice, of course, may have a history. She knows that she behaves queerly when she has an attack; and if that queerness turns out to include a disposition to major acts of violence – well, that will be too bad for her. And it isn’t, I suppose, an impossibility. One is told that it is the people with hearts of gold who find themselves living beyond their moral income and liable to catastrophic irruptions from submerged areas of their personality. Still, I’m damned if it isn’t the most implausible notion of the lot. Not that I’m inclined to write off Alice’s amnesia altogether. Even if it didn’t take her into that library with a gun – and where on earth, poor child, would she get a gun from? – it may prove to be not without its significant impact on the case.

So much for the women, Appleby said to himself – and paused to look around him. The gardens on this side of the house were in excellent order, but this only made Urchins itself more obviously in need of repair. There were spots in which things were going badly wrong with the fabric – and largely through a neglect of quite simple attention to pointing and painting. Lewis Packford had been full of a large vague enthusiasm for the little villa he had taken on Lake Garda for a season, but he didn’t seem much to have bothered about this substantial property which had come down to him from his fathers. Which brings me – Appleby thought – to Edward.

What about fratricide? It is, after all, among the things that happen from time to time. Usually it is true, among the feeble-minded or the criminal sections of the community. But it mustn’t be ruled out simply because the present affair has, with the pleasing exception of Alice, a pervasively upper-class dramatis personae. It’s more relevant to consider that Edward claims to have been in Paris when his brother died. But I don’t suppose that Cavill, in the circumstances, felt it necessary to do much in the way of testing out that alibi. So suppose that Edward really came back that evening, went straight and unobserved to his brother in the library, and there learnt that Urchins was now graced by two ladies claiming to be Mrs Packford. Can one endow Edward with the sort of temperament for which this was, so to speak, a last straw? Imagine him as deeply devoted to Urchins – there is, after all, something about his own room here that denotes a nostalgic type of mind – and as for long mountingly indignant at Lewis’ neglect of it. And then suppose him suddenly confronted with this culminating mess…

Appleby shook his head. It’s unbelievable, he told himself. Taken just like that, it’s unbelievable. It’s true there’s something about Edward, something I can’t precisely focus, that makes me feel an odd lingering doubt about him. And Edward said something that stuck in my head; he said he believed he’d be rather good at executing summary justice. But it’s still implausible. One doesn’t kill a brother because he’s improvident, or careless in little matters of estate management. And not even – except in some ancient romances – for doing something disgraceful, and dishonouring the family name. Only the suffering of some deep personal wrong would begin to make sense of Edward Packford as a suspect. I can’t say that such a wrong wasn’t suffered. But at least I haven’t the slightest evidence of its existence.

Appleby brought out a pipe and filled it. He would allow himself any inspiration it might bring, before he returned to the house and made some further contacts. He must see his host again, and put himself in the way of accepting an invitation for the night. Because now he wanted that. He wanted to be about when his old acquaintance Mr Rood appeared bearing Lewis Packford’s will. And he also wanted to be about later – perhaps much later – than that. And here – he said to himself, with his pipe going well – I come to the real nub to the matter. All this business of wives, and of everything in the way of disturbed personal relations which may flow from them, is a monstrous red herring. It’s just like Lewis Packford to have made his farewells to this life with a large bad distracting joke in the worst of taste. One is sorry for Ruth and Alice. They have been extremely badly treated; their position is humiliating and absurd; and of course, according to their degree of affection for the dead man, it is sad, tragic, or what you will.
But they have nothing to do with the case.

Appleby sat down on a garden bench – almost as if to give himself an opportunity of staring stoutly at this bold proposition. The entire mystery, if mystery there was, lay, so to speak, on the other frontier of Lewis Packford’s life. The suspicions of Professor Prodger were crack-brained. The suspicions of Mr Rood had appeared, on first impact, to be hardly less extravagant. Men just don’t get killed – very seldom, even, kill themselves – in a context of learned discoveries about Shakespeare’s Italian travels. Whereas, of course, wives – whether singly or in plurality – are quite another matter. In one way or another, wives have been mixed up with crimes of violence since the beginning of time.

Notwithstanding which – Appleby told himself obstinately as he puffed at his pipe – the true scent in this business began with Lewis Packford spouting out of
Romeo and Juliet
, and being cagey about Verona, and expatiating on the history of literary forgery. It continued through Rood’s persuasion that his death was connected with the theft of the physical vehicle of some important discovery in the Shakespearian field. And it culminated – for the moment – in something rather odd that Appleby believed himself to have noticed about Packford’s library. There was a possibility, indeed, that one or another or all of the ladies who at present adorned Urchins had some functional role in the mystery. But the mystery was a mystery stemming from the impoverished nobleman of Verona. Appleby wasn’t convinced that the impoverished nobleman existed. But he was important, were he fact or fiction.

Appleby got to his feet again and moved on. All this was excellent. It represented the detective intelligence taking a strong and confident line. Unfortunately it was no more than a sort of hunch, and it might be blown to the four winds tomorrow. And decidedly there were some awkwardly missing bits. The poet Meredith had observed, very truly, that in tragic life, God wot, no villain need be. But it wasn’t a proposition that held in the present case. If Cavill wasn’t right, after all, if the whole affair wasn’t what Packford himself had liked to call cobweb, then a villain must be laid on. So far, there hadn’t been a glimpse of him. If Rood had anyone in his head, he had bolted from that taxi before giving a name to him. Professor Prodger would scarcely make a convincing villain even in a
milieu
of low comedy in the Anglo-Irish theatre. Canon Rixon, it was true, was ugly enough to play First Murderer in
The Babes in the Wood
– but it was hard to believe that he would not be better accommodated with the part of the Good Fairy.

At this point in his reflection Appleby turned the corner of a tall cypress hedge and came upon a scene of subdued drama.

‘How dare you make such a suggestion to me!’

It was very much as if to the missing villain of the piece that Ruth Packford was thus delivering herself. She had, apparently, just sprung to her feet from a chair set beside a low rustic table. On the other side of this, and making no effort to rise to his feet in turn, was a middle-aged man whom Appleby – most unprofessionally – took a strong dislike to on sight. He was very well preserved, and very well dressed, and he now wore an expression of contemptuous surprise. If Ruth’s words had been ‘Unhand me, sir!’ they would have been emotionally correct but factually unwarranted. For the man’s hands were occupied already. One of them held a fountain-pen, and the other an object which it took Appleby only a further second to identify as a cheque-book.

This was mildly perplexing, and for a moment Appleby could think of no better explanation than that the well-dressed person had been advancing the most grossly improper of proposals. In which case, no doubt, it was Appleby’s business, in the absence of the actual
jeune premier
of the piece, to step forward and incontinently knock him down. Ruth however didn’t seem to judge this a necessary move. For she at once put on a bright but icy social manner. ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘may I introduce Mr Limbrick? Sir John Appleby.’

‘How do you do.’ Limbrick now rose gracefully and shook hands. ‘Mrs Packford and I have been considering some business matters. But they can be deferred. Indeed, perhaps they had better be deferred.’ He smiled charmingly. ‘Another time, dear lady.’

Ruth could be seen positively to quiver with indignation under this mode of address. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But there will certainly be no occasion to raise the matter again, so far as I am concerned. I have no reason to doubt that my husband had some reasonable occasion to value your society. But I confess it is not apparent to me.’ Ruth’s icy manner carried her thus far very successfully. But then it turned to a flash of anger. ‘Nor, sir, am I accustomed to the society of hucksters. Good afternoon!’ And she swung round and marched off.

Limbrick looked at Appleby, slightly shrugged his shoulders, and sat down again. ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘I only wanted the books.’

Appleby sat down too. He continued to have small fancy for his new acquaintance. But it was his business to continue his inquiries in as amiable a fashion as might be. ‘You were proposing,’ he asked, ‘to buy Lewis Packford’s books?’

‘Just that.’ Entirely without embarrassment, Limbrick put the cheque-book away in his pocket.

‘The whole lot? It’s a very large library, surely – and is it certain to be Mrs Packford’s?’

‘Oh, yes – if she is Mrs Packford. And I explained that my offer was conditional upon that. Perhaps I made a mistake there. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely tactful. But I don’t think I’m likely to be wrong about the legal position. The books are without doubt our late friend’s private property. And as the house and estate probably have to go to the brother, it’s all the more certain that the rest will go to his wife. Except, of course, what he may have taken it into his head to leave to the little tart from the pub. And that would hardly be sixteenth-century books.’

‘I suppose not.’ Appleby, who didn’t much care for this manner of speaking of Alice, looked at Limbrick stonily. ‘But there does seem something rather precipitate in your proposal, all the same. Packford is barely buried. The contents of his will have not yet been communicated to the persons interested. And a library of that sort can’t, surely, be bought and sold by the yard? How on earth could you know, even approximately, what would be a fair offer for it?’

Limbrick laughed carelessly. ‘I was prepared to go pretty high.’

‘I see. And the idea was a binding deal here and now?’

‘Just that, Sir John.’ Limbrick’s tone was faintly mocking. ‘One gets nowhere as a collector nowadays if one doesn’t act with speed. Too many Americans in the market. Confound them for a set of purse-proud devils!’

Appleby didn’t, for a moment, find anything to reply to this. A man prepared to go pretty high in the matter of buying a large library the value of which could only be approximately known to him, and setting about the business by literally thrusting a cheque-book beneath the nose of a woman not a week widowed, seemed to have little title to asperse purse-proud devils, whether on one side of the Atlantic or the other.

And Limbrick was – even in Appleby’s fairly extensive experience of men and manners – something new. Wealthy and fanatical collectors, actuated by mere acquisitiveness, are frequently found with a mania for jewels, and sometimes with a mania for pictures. But Appleby had never before met any who went after books and manuscripts in quite what appeared to be Limbrick’s spirit. He had indeed heard of their existence, and in the present state of affairs at Urchins he found the actual appearance of such a person a circumstance to ponder on. He also reflected that Professor Prodger was perhaps after all not without discrimination – even although he seemed inclined to confound under one judgement the surely harmless Canon Rixon and this far from agreeable customer. ‘You would like Packford’s whole collection?’ he asked civilly. ‘It isn’t just a matter of certain very important and interesting items, such as you could go after if the executors held a sale?’

For the first time, Limbrick favoured Appleby with a glance which might have been called closely considering. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that you may imagine that I’ve been trying to put over a fast one. That sort of thing is, I suppose, your job. But don’t waste your time. Even if that girl had signed on the dotted line, here and now on this table, there would have had to be a valuation for probate, and so on. I couldn’t really have got away with anything.’ Limbrick smiled insolently. ‘Or not, at least, with very much.’