The Long Farewell (21 page)

Appleby moved carefully around the room. The dead solicitor didn’t appear to have done much unpacking. What was chiefly in evidence was a small pile of legal documents on a desk before a curtained window. Appleby looked at them closely. They were typewritten, but freely annotated in pencil. They seemed entirely concerned with Packford family affairs.

And then Appleby’s glance travelled to the other end of the desk. A pencil lay on it; and beside the pencil was an irregular sheet of paper, such as might have been torn roughly out of a notebook. And on the paper was a pencilled scrawl. It read:

Farewell, a long farewell!

There was a knock at the door. Appleby turned away from the desk – he had spent a couple of further minutes there – and opened it to admit Mrs Husbands. The housekeeper too had presumably been in bed, but now she was dressed again, although hastily. She had daubed her face with powder – seemingly regardless of the fact that what it notably lacked was colour. Mrs Husbands, indeed, looked like a ghost; it was as if she had been abruptly translated from the Edwardian to a Stygian world. She was the second person, Appleby reflected, whom he had seen strangely transformed at Urchins that night.

‘Please come in.’ Appleby spoke gravely and with courtesy. ‘I believe you can be of great assistance to me.’

He stood aside. Mrs Husbands hesitated. Her glance was going – half fearfully, half curiously – past him to the grim huddle of mortality on the floor. ‘Must it be – here?’ she asked.

‘I am sorry to distress you. But I think it will be best.’ Appleby closed the door behind the housekeeper. ‘Let me be quite frank, Mrs Husbands. I am anxious that you should answer one or two questions at once – and before there has been any possibility of confusion.’

‘Confusion, Sir John?’

‘I think it possible that, were you now to engage in private consultation with another member of this household, a certain undesirable confusion might result.’

He could hear Mrs Husbands catch her breath. ‘I do understand you,’ she said. ‘And I don’t consider it proper to say anything without consulting Mr Packford, who is now my employer.’

‘I certainly can’t oblige you to talk.’ Appleby had walked across the room, so that the dead body now lay sprawled between Mrs Husbands and himself. ‘I am myself here as Mr Packford’s guest. But I am also here officially, and at the invitation of the Chief Constable of this county. I cannot possibly venture to put any improper pressure upon you, even if I were anxious to do so. You may, if you wish, defer all discussion of what has happened in this house tonight, and all further discussion of what happened in it a few nights ago, until you have taken legal advice.’

‘Then I shall certainly do so.’

‘But I should like you to consider. I should like you to consider that, when one is faced with
this’
– and Appleby made an almost imperceptible gesture towards Rood’s body – ‘only the truth, and the immediate truth, is remotely adequate.’

‘I don’t know the truth. Anything I say may only lead fatally away from it.’

‘That is very unlikely, Mrs Husbands. And you must consider that, where there have been two violent deaths, as in this house, the position becomes unpredictable and dangerous until the full truth is known. Concealment means danger – perhaps for yourself, perhaps for others.’

‘Are you trying to frighten me, Sir John?’

‘Conceivably I’m giving you a rational warning. And I can assure you that it is only a small number of questions which I should like you to answer. Will you come and look at something on this desk?’ Appleby waited until she had crossed the room. ‘It’s rather like your experience of the other night, is it not?’

Mrs Husbands looked at the torn sheet of paper with its pencilled scrawl. ‘You mean this?’

‘Yes, I do. Have you seen it before?’

‘But of course. It’s the same message. Mr Rood has written the same words that Mr Packford did.’

‘So it would appear. And I can’t help feeling it was a little uninventive.’

Mrs Husbands frowned. ‘Uninventive? I don’t understand you.’

‘He might have borrowed the first line of the same speech and written
So farewell to the little good you bear me.
Or, later on, I seem to recall a bit about swimming beyond one’s depth. Would that, I wonder, have been appropriate?’ Appleby paused, and then lightly touched the fragment of paper. ‘But I think,’ he said, ‘that you may be said to have seen this before – in another sense?’

Mrs Husbands was silent.

‘In fact, you have seen this actual piece of paper – either as it is now, or in its place in a notebook?’

‘Yes, I have.’ Suddenly in Mrs Husband’s voice there was weariness and despair. ‘Now, what more do you want of me?’

But Appleby shook his head. ‘Nothing at all,’ he said. ‘My investigation is concluded.’

Epilogue in the Working Library of a Scholar

Oh, most lame and impotent conclusion!

— Othello

‘Come in.’

Appleby spoke the words not by way of summons but as the beginning of an explanation. It was after breakfast, and everybody was in the library. Even Rushout and Moody were present – their arrival at Urchins having been hastened by a telephone call.

‘Come in
. Almost as soon as I heard the words, of course, I ought to have begun wondering what Lewis Packford was up to. For consider. His summer-house presented simply a blank wall on the side by which I approached it. So he couldn’t possibly have spotted me – and indeed when I walked in he was clearly completely surprised. He assured me moreover that he was quite out of contact with either English men or English women. No doubt one might argue that, hearing a knock on a door, a man will instinctively call out in his own language. But that simply wouldn’t be true in the particular circumstances of the case. Packford had fluent Italian, and he had been settled there at Garda for a good part of the summer. So you may put it this way. What would the reasonable inference have been if Packford had called out
Herein
?’

There was a moment’s silence in the library, and then Edward Packford spoke a shade impatiently. ‘One could be pretty sure that he was expecting a German, of course.’

‘Precisely. His calling out in English was, admittedly, not so completely definitive as that. But at least it suggests a strong probability that your brother was expecting a visit from an Englishman.’

‘Or from an American.’ Limbrick, who had taken up a position from which he could glower offensively at Moody, made this suggestion with animus.

‘Quite so. And Packford was certainly expecting somebody. Once or twice he looked at his watch in a way that wasn’t wholly civil; and when I left him he was hurrying back to that summer-house like a man with an appointment. Thinking it over afterwards, I came to the conclusion that he had agreed to meet somebody quietly there either before one evening hour or after another one. That happened to make it possible for him to give me dinner at tolerable leisure – and to produce quite a lot of talk which later events have shown to be highly significant in itself. But even while talking he was distrait at times. So I didn’t find it difficult to accept Rood’s later suggestion that I had chanced to pay my call on Packford on the very evening that something extremely important was happening.’ Appleby paused. ‘In fact Rood’s suggestion fitted in with my own sense of the whole incident. What was later to puzzle me a good deal was why Rood made it.’

‘Puzzling conduct,’ Ruth Packford said, ‘appears to have been Mr Rood’s forte. That, and howling bad taste. Whether he was a rascal or not, I don’t know – and I don’t greatly care. But to make his death a kind of grotesque echo of Lewis’ was disgusting.’

Alice nodded approvingly. ‘I quite agree with that, I must say. Leaving the same message – about the long farewell, I mean – was in bad taste. It wasn’t a thing a gentleman would do.’

‘I suppose,’ Edward Packford asked, ‘that the handwriting will prove to be authentically Rood’s?’

‘I’m quite sure it will.’ Appleby spoke with authority. ‘He had been annotating some legal documents, so I’ve been able to make a comparison. Rood wrote the scrawl we found last night.’

‘Echoing what my brother wrote?’

Appleby shook his head. ‘Your brother never wrote anything of the sort. Both these messages were written by Rood.’

There was a baffled silence. And it was Ruth’s mind which first got to work effectively on Appleby’s announcement. ‘In other words,’ she said, ‘Lewis was never by way of saying farewell to anybody or anything?’

‘Precisely. I had to consider, of course, the possibility that he had been killed immediately after writing something merely designed to announce that he was solving his difficult matrimonial situation – if that’s the right word for it – by packing up and clearing out. The suitcase which turned up in his car seemed for a time to support that interpretation. But the suitcase was Alice’s work. I am inclined to think that, during the period of total loss of memory which she has described, she visited Packford in this room and suggested flight. Then, still in the same dissociated state, she packed a suitcase for him and hid it in his car, together with the little travelling-case of her own. I’ve already explained this hypothesis to Alice, and she doesn’t disagree with it. All this, of course, wasn’t a confusion upon which Rood could have been reckoning at all. But it was otherwise with the simple arrival of the two ladies at Urchins and the crisis which that produced. Rood certainly engineered that. It was an essential part of his plan. Or rather it was an essential part of one of his plans. For he had a great belief in keeping things flexible. It was a trait which emerged in my first conversation with him. You might call it his Napoleon complex. That in turn was a reflex of his vanity. And these elements are at the heart of the case.’

‘Are we to understand, then,’ Canon Rixon asked, ‘that this unfortunate solicitor was throughout prosecuting some criminal design? This is shocking indeed.’

‘You are to understand, for a start, that he planned an elaborate, foolish and conceited hoax.’

‘A hoax?’ Edward Packford’s voice was sharp, and he had swung round on Appleby. ‘Just what do you mean by that?’

‘You will understand what I mean presently. And it is better, I think, to speak of a hoax than of a fraud – at least in the first instance. But let me go back to Garda. I left your brother, so to speak, expecting an English visitor – and concealing the fact of that expectation from a casual caller in the person of myself. Well, yesterday I discovered – and in rather an odd way – that that English visitor had almost certainly been Rood himself. You will agree, I think, that your brother had rather a simple sense of humour, and was moreover fond of repeating his little jokes?’

Edward nodded. ‘Perfectly true.’

‘When I called on him, he happened to remark upon the decoration of his summer-house. There were wall paintings of a somewhat insipid erotic cast. He referred to them as amorous shrimps, and added that there was no vice in them. When I happened, in this connection, to repeat the phrase “amorous shrimps” to Rood, Rood at once, in speaking of your brother, used the phrase “no vice in him” to me. The associative link was unmistakable. Rood too had heard that joke from your brother in the summer-house. But Rood had implicitly denied ever having visited your brother at Garda. He had simply corresponded with him, and arranged for the transfer of £1,000 – the sum required, according to Rood’s story, to buy some valuable book or document from an impoverished nobleman of Verona. It became clear to me that this impoverished nobleman was moonshine. Rood had invented him; and had persuaded your brother that he, Rood, was acting as an intermediary in delicate negotiations.’

There was silence again – oddly broken by a burst of rather harsh laughter from Rushout. ‘Is this leading up to the proposition that the supposed annotations by Shakespeare in that
Ecatommiti
are a fake – a forgery?’

‘Certainly it is. Rood was a bit of a scholar and a bit of a palaeographer. And Lewis Packford – Mr Packford here has told me – used to rather laugh at Rood’s pretensions, and indeed to make fun of him generally. With a man of Rood’s temperament, that was a dangerous thing to do. And Rood furthermore possessed a dangerous accomplishment: he had made himself into a brilliant forger. Not, of course, of his clients’ signatures on cheques, or anything of that sort; but simply in the field of literary and antiquarian investigation. The history of scholarship is oddly full of that sort of thing; and there are all degrees of the impulse. The learned joke about Bogdown, if I may venture to say so, is a sort of first-cousin to it.’

Canon Rixon raised a mildly protesting hand at this. ‘My dear Sir John, I consider that remark to be contentious. But proceed.’

‘Rood, then, determined on a shattering hoax at Packford’s expense. On the one hand, he counted on his own quite exceptional skill; and on the other, on what may be called a sanguine streak in his proposed victim. He told me that he regarded Packford as credulous. Even so, his proposed deception was a great gamble. But then he admired gambles. He told me that too. And he particularly admired the gambler who will double his stake at a crisis. The relevance of that will appear later.’

Appleby paused to look round his auditory. With the exception of Alice, who had clearly given up trying to grasp what it was all about, they were as attentive as any actor or lecturer could wish. Moody, who had perhaps been hurried over his breakfast, was covertly swallowing one of Dr Cahoon’s pills. But nobody else moved.

‘The hoax might have worked. As we all now know, Packford went so far as to write a letter to Professor Rushout, stating his conviction that he had found an incomparably important body of marginalia by Shakespeare. And he dropped various hints about it to other people now in this library. The time had come for Rood to disclose the truth, and set the whole learned world laughing at Lewis Packford’s gullibility. Unfortunately Rood had, at quite an early stage, allowed himself one of those swift changes of plan he was so proud of. He had admitted a simple profit motive into his enterprise, and collected from his victim a large sum of money – ostensibly to hand over to the impoverished Veronese nobleman. This, when you come to think of it, was really a hopeless and pitiable muddle at the start. For it would only be for so long as the authenticity of the marginalia went virtually unquestioned that there would be no danger of investigations which would ultimately expose the whole Veronese story as a fraud. Rood could, of course, have handed back the £1,000 at the moment of exploding his hoax. But clearly he didn’t want to. So he thought again, and changed his strategy once more.’