The Open House (15 page)

‘No doubt, Inspector.’ Appleby thought it unnecessary to appear amused. ‘And now that you have refreshed us with wit, we may perhaps proceed to a sober consideration of the matter. I would value your opinion on the Campagna with Banditti.’

‘On the what?’

‘The painting by Claude, which was over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room. Were they looking for a safe behind that? I hardly think so. It hasn’t been displaced; it has been removed. Have you any notion of its approximate value?’

‘Enormous, no doubt, on a legitimate market. I’m told there’s ceasing to be any sense in such things. Pretty high, even on a black market. And if it’s heavily insured, and the insurers were willing to play, worth a great deal simply on a ransom basis.’

‘Exactly. I see you have a very good sense of such things. The Claude would be far more valuable than anything likely to be stored in this safe.’

‘Family jewellery?’

‘I doubt it. Not if Ledward’s affairs are administered in any sensible fashion. Really valuable jewellery, if there is no present use for it, is nearly always stored in banks or strong rooms, where insurance costs very much less than in a vulnerable safe like this.’

‘Bank-notes of high denomination?’

‘Perhaps. But, again, nobody is going to tuck away really large sums in that way for years on end. Think of inflation. Real value would be dropping year by year. Does it occur to you, Inspector, that this safe may have contained objects of interest rather than objects of value?’

‘I don’t know that I quite follow you, sir.’

‘Well, say a family tree. Or a birth certificate, or marriage lines, or a diary. There are all sorts of possibilities.’

‘I have found that to be commonly the case, sir, when one is completely at sea before a mystery.’

‘Perfectly true, and the thought is a sobering one. But I must not further detain you. Unless, Inspector, I can help you in any way.’

‘Well, there is one matter, Sir John. Professor Snodgrass doesn’t seem able to give much of a description of the men he came upon in the downstairs bedroom – if that
is
where he came upon them – and the lady, Mrs Anglebury, has been given something by Dr Plumridge that has fairly knocked her out. But what about yourself, Sir John? You’re the trained man, if I may put it that way, who had a sight of them.’

‘Perfectly true. But I can only speak for one of them. Although, mark you, I glimpsed him in about a thousand different aspects in those damned mirrors. Shall I tell you how he struck me, Inspector?’ And Appleby looked solemnly at Stride. ‘As a sinister foreigner. Just that.’

‘I see.’ Stride looked doubtful. ‘Might I ask why sinister?’

‘He was dark, my dear fellow. What is called swarthy. And with a villainous-looking drooping moustache.’

‘That’s something to go on.’ Stride had taken this frivolity very well. ‘And you could identify him?’

‘Parade him, Inspector, and I’ll promise to walk straight up to him.’

‘Which is a great deal more. Would you say, sir, that, having cracked this safe, they’d brought off their trick, and had nothing more to do than to beat it?’

‘It’s a grim conclusion. But I confess to seeing it very much like that. Is Mrs Gathercoal all right? I rather took to her.’

‘She has come to no harm at all. But she might be a deep one, if you ask me.’

‘Indeed? It’s an interesting point of view. The confederate who is knocked out and tied up? I’ve come across it, I confess. And there’s a good deal more that one has a sense of having come across. The vicar, by the way, seemed to have the same feeling at one point. He kept on advancing ingenious theories out of a wide reading in detective stories. But now I think he’s sobered up.’

‘Ah, drink!’ Detective Inspector Stride revealed himself as being of somewhat literal mind. ‘That’s something one always has to think about. There seems to have been a lot of port drunk in that library.’

‘Indeed, yes. I myself was plied with it.’

‘And that champagne.’ Stride had tactfully ignored Appleby’s comment. ‘Apart from a glass or thereabout that got spilt, the dead man seems to have drunk a bottle of it. And after some sherry to begin with.’

‘Madeira.’

‘And, what’s more, he seems to have intended to go on to a second bottle.’

‘In the company of his uncle, perhaps. But I agree that in his last moments Adrian may not have been too clear in his head. He seems to have been resolved to make his homecoming a convivial occasion. He took a glass of the madeira with his uncle’s butler. By the way, I suppose that fellow has returned to Ledward?’

‘Leonidas? He came back, all right. He and the Professor have been having a word together in the hall, sitting on one of those marble benches. Chilly things. Bad for the backside, if you ask me. None too pleased with each other either, by the look of them.’

‘The Professor and Leonidas? I’d be on the Professor’s side, I think. There’s a covert insolence about that fellow I don’t at all like. If he were my employee, I doubt whether he’d long survive unfired. But that’s neither here nor there. And Professor Snodgrass, incidentally, is the person I now rather want to talk to again. If you approve, that is, Inspector. This is your case.’

‘You’re very welcome, I’m sure.’ Stride was showing signs of sinking into gloom. ‘There’s no sense to be got out of that old gentleman at present. None at all. Of course, we must remember he has had a great shock.’

‘So he has. Only – do you know ? – I’m not as confident as I’d like to be about just what that great shock was.’

‘I’d like to be confident of anything at all,’ Stride said with sudden savagery, ‘in this damned case.’

But confidence was a quality which appeared to have returned to Professor Snodgrass. He was still perched, indeed, on one of those marble benches which Stride had aspersed as fundamentally unsound. But it was with an air of relaxation that made itself felt at once. Both the horror of his nephew’s death and the nasty jar of his sudden glimpse of a gang of murderers seemed to have faded on him; he was watching a good deal of coming and going on the part of the constabulary with a vague but composed interest; he might have been studying the logistics of a homicide operation from the detached but informed standpoint of the military historian he was.

Appleby wondered, somewhat inconsequently, whether Ledward had ever seen anything of this sort before. Had gentlemen with swords at their sides, or ornate in satin, or buckskin-breeched from hunting, ever fallen in their cups to some lethal quarrel amid all this tomb-like splendour and massive decorum? A film director could mount a splendid armed brawl as eddying round these ranked columns. The poised and planted feet would ring on marble, and the smooth alabaster be grooved and gashed by the flailing blades. At the moment, however, the only camera on the scene had just been carried into the drawing-room by an officer in plain clothes; he would take numerous photographs of the corpse; on some future day, perhaps, a judge would examine these, and decide that the more distressing of them need not be placed in the hands of the jury.

‘I hear they have broken up the octagon room,’ Professor Snodgrass said, a little unexpectedly. ‘It has never seemed to me other than in poor taste. But to take a hammer to it has been exceedingly high-handed, to my mind.’

‘It wasn’t exactly a matter of a hammer.’ The chronic mild battiness of Beddoes Snodgrass, Appleby reflected, might well cause Detective Inspector Stride to despair of him as a reliable witness. But of course the old gentleman was perfectly capable of responding to reason with reason – or intermittently so, at least. ‘And I’m afraid I was partly responsible myself. I was trying to catch somebody, you know. One of those South Americans.’

This piece of shock tactics was not without its effect. The Professor gave Appleby a glance the sharpness of which didn’t wholly cohere with his general air of being perched at some remove above the general level of events.

‘South Americans, my dear Sir Edward?’

‘John.’

‘Ah, yes – Sir John. It takes time to place a new neighbour. You think that is the explanation of my poor nephew’s being shot? It hadn’t occurred to me. But nothing is more likely. A mission of vengeance on the part of Gozman Spinto’s crowd. Adrian smashed Gozman Spinto, you know. It was a great step towards constitutional government.’

‘I understand it was your ancestor the Liberator who smashed Gozman Spinto. Decapitated him, in fact. And that it wasn’t a great step to anything except the Liberator’s making a packet.’

‘Really? Well, the details are unimportant, are they not. Emissaries of one scoundrelly Azuera
Junta
or another. Do you think they may still be lurking in Ledward? If so, I am inclined to suggest that the military be called to the assistance of the police. The villains may be in possession of automatic weapons. They are said to be coming increasingly into use.’

‘I hardly think, Professor, that soldiers are required.’

‘Well, mention it to me, if you change your mind. There is no doubt a militia regiment quite near at hand. The Lord Lieutenant of the County would know. He is an old friend of mine, and I could call upon him at any time.’

‘Thank you. I’ll bear it in mind. I wonder whether you can tell me…’

‘I have asked Leonidas to serve coffee. The hour appears to be somewhat advanced. But it didn’t seem to me that we had quite got to the stage of early morning tea. Besides, that is best partaken of in bed.’

‘Certainly it is. But what I want to ask you about is connected with South America, and Adrian’s long sojourns there. Do you think his wife came back to England with him on this occasion?’

‘Adrian’s
wife
? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘But didn’t you tell me that he had a wife? And a little boy?’

‘Nothing of the kind.’ Professor Snodgrass had suddenly produced what Appleby characterized to himself as a glare of cold sanity. ‘You must have taken leave of your senses.’

‘Not quite that, I hope. But no doubt I misunderstood you, or am confusing your family with another family having connections out there.’ Appleby offered this absurdity without a blush. It was only fair, after all, to send an occasional imbecile vagueness back over the net, so to speak, and into the Professor’s court. ‘So there’s no direct heir to Ledward? How very sad! That such a splendid place should in a fashion be going begging.’ Appleby shook his head in a sombre fashion – and then seemed to cheer up, as if another thought had struck him. ‘But, of course, Adrian
may
have married, and without troubling to let you know about it. Any time in these past ten years, or thereabout. Indeed, nothing is more probable. He was just the age at which his type often decides to settle down. Adventure and women and so forth behind him, and a stable and domestic life in front. Such marriages are often singularly happy and successful. With your experience of the world, Professor, you must have noticed that. And it’s particularly true in cases in which there’s more than a mere competence in the way of family fortune. Yes, Adrian, come to think of it, had almost certainly married. And he’d come back to fix up his future manner of life here. He’d be looking forward to the boy’s growing up in the old home. The first pony. The first gun. Off to Eton for his first half. All that. It can still happen, of course, so far as the little chap is concerned. I wonder whether he takes after both the Snodgrasses and the Beddoeses.’

Appleby paused with some satisfaction on this rapidly constructed fantasy.
We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven
, he was telling himself.
Still, we can give a
kick or two now and then
. And thus vaingloriously congratulating himself, he had another rapid go.

‘I expect,’ he said, ‘you know Charles Pumpernickle? He’s our ambassador in Patagonia at the moment. And of course it was he who told me, not you. Stupid of me to make that muddle. Told me, I mean, about Adrian Snodgrass’ marriage. And about the boy. A dear little fellow, he says.’

It would not have been possible to maintain that Professor Beddoes Snodgrass displayed any marked gratification at thus being suddenly dowered with a great-nephew – even one vouched for as a dear little fellow. On the other hand (and Appleby was watching him closely) he gave no sign of mortification or rage. Perhaps he was sufficiently in possession of his wits to know very well that he had been listening to an outrageous fabrication. Or perhaps his regard and affection had been wholly for Adrian as an individual, so that, with Adrian dead, he wasn’t much affected by Appleby’s story, even if he believed it. Or perhaps, yet again, his mental life was in fact so discontinuous that Stride was justified in feeling that nothing was to be done with him. Appleby, however, had one last shot.

‘I am sure,’ he said (not very decently, but policemen cannot always be over-nice), ‘that this will be a great consolation to you. The fact, I mean, that Adrian has left a son. But will it come as a disappointment to somebody else?’

‘Somebody else?’

‘There must be somebody who would be due to inherit Ledward now, if Adrian had
not
in fact married and produced an heir. Who is he?’

‘He?’

‘You mean it’s a woman?’

‘Leonidas – I wonder what can have become of him.’ Whether through guile or not, Professor Snodgrass had gone completely vague again. ‘Why hasn’t he brought that coffee? But – dear me! – now I remember. I have dismissed him.’

‘Dismissed Leonidas? Given him notice?’

‘Or did he dismiss me?’ The Professor paused, and appeared to see no light on this problem. ‘He certainly remarked that these were not respectable goings-on. It was hard to controvert him. Unfortunately, what he had to say was couched in a tone of some insolence. So he has departed. That’s why there’s no coffee. I do, my dear fellow, apologize about it.’

‘Never mind about the coffee. You say your butler has
departed
?’

‘Certainly. Returned in his car to the Old Dower House, packed his bags – and by this time will have cleared out for good. You may make your mind entirely easy, Appleby. You won’t see that rather objectionable man again. He has been a disappointment to me, I’m bound to say. One has a right to expect more of a person with a name like that. Weren’t we having a chat, by the way, about Thermopylae? We must resume it, one day.’