The Open House (21 page)

And there was no sign of Ledward either. As if it really were the monstrous scurrying crustacean of Appleby’s earlier fantasy, it had picked itself up and vanished. But what had really happened, of course, was that mist and indeed fog, far from progressively dispersing before the cheerful sun as had at first appeared, were now in fact billowing into the park with the sudden exuberance of foam from a fire-extinguisher. Appleby hadn’t a sufficient sense of the emergency confronting him – or not, at least, in its likely detail – to be confident whether there was advantage or disadvantage in this change. At least he himself was now depending wholly on sound for the opportunity to be of any effectiveness at all. But then the same circumstance could equally impair the operations of others as well. And probably this sudden effect of what astronauts call visibility degradation would last no more than a few minutes.

There was now only one voice calling, and it still seemed to come from straight ahead of him. It was David Anglebury’s voice, and it was repeatedly calling out a name – the name of Snodgrass. Was it Basil, or was it the Professor who was thus being conjured to reveal himself?

Appleby didn’t think it made much difference.

And then – hard upon this thought – came the crisis. David’s voice was still to be heard, but had grown fainter. It was much as if he had taken a wrong cast in the children’s game known as ‘Hot and Cold’. Appleby had briefly to debate whether to give the young man a shout himself – since to call him to heel, so to speak, would be a desirable measure in face of what was afoot. On the other hand, to give such a shout was to announce himself as an intrusive presence upon whatever was going forward. So Appleby decided to accept a further measure of risk, and thus maintain himself as an unknown factor in the proceedings.

He came abruptly to a halt, and in another instant was prone in wet chill grass. The vapour had parted in front of him, to reveal a low stone wall (no more, indeed, than the vestige of a wall, now no longer with any function) which ran down a gentle slope towards the stream. It was behind the shelter of this that he was flat on his tummy now. Beyond it, he had glimpsed a dim light – whether of torch or lantern – which mysteriously suggested itself as in some way buried in the earth. And, from the same enigmatical quarter, there came a murmur of voices. They were voices speaking in a foreign tongue.

This last was a circumstance by which Appleby might be said to have been favourably impressed.

The place was an ice-house. It was this not in the loose modern sense of an environment very much colder than is comfortable, but literally and technically. Here, in fact, was one of those caverns, dug into conveniently rising ground and provided with such insulating walls as our rude forefathers could devise, in which, for the use of great houses like Ledward, ice was formerly stored throughout the year. A century might have passed since this particular ice-house had been functioning; gardeners or a gamekeeper might have used it since; its entrance was now so overgrown as to suggest a long period of absolute desuetude. It was a good hide-out. It would be a handy place in which to tuck away objects which there might be awkwardness in being found in possession of.

‘Snodgrass?’

Appleby glanced up, to find David Anglebury standing beside him in the mist. He could see that the young man was in a state of high excitement.

‘Oh – I thought you were Basil Snodgrass. I got separated from him. He and I have been…’ David broke off. ‘Listen!’

‘
David, get down!
’

‘Spanish…it’s them!’ David had sprung forward, thereby unconsciously eluding a ruthless sweep which Appleby had aimed at his legs. ‘We’ve got them…come on!’

The young man was over the wall – he had taken it like a hurdle almost from a standing start – and was charging the ice-house much as if it represented a pair of goal-posts and he had a rugger ball under his arm. Appleby, fortunately already on his feet, managed a fairly rapid vault. He gave another warning shout, but it was of no avail. Perhaps the young idiot took it for encouragement – as a kind of hunting cry. There was nothing for it but for Appleby to get up a quite improbable speed. And this – it was for no more than a few yards, all told – he did in some miraculous manner achieve. The young man with an imaginary rugger ball was brought abruptly to earth by a far from imaginary tackle. In the same instant there was the crack of a pistol from dead ahead. Appleby was aware of it as a good shot. The bullet had passed through empty air which, a split second before, was being displaced by David’s flying body.

As it happened, the grass was long, and the ground broken, so that some sort of minimal cover was not hard to find. There was still a light – it might have been designed as a little beacon – in the ice-house; and it was to this that Appleby might now have been conceived as addressing himself in unemotional tones.

‘That was it,’ Appleby said. ‘The last boss-shot in a pathetically incompetent affair. Ingenious in places, yes. But well-conceived, no. And it won’t be any good now having a go at hunting us down. The police will be trotting up at any minute, and we could dodge you, off our own bats, for an hour. Nor am I the only man who now knows the facts of the case. I took the precaution of making a progress report to somebody – I won’t name him – from which the whole set-up can certainly be worked out. So – as I said – that was it. Finish.’

Silence greeted this speech. The only sound was a faint rustle in the grass, and in trees which seconds ago had been invisible, but which now showed as dark, crag-like islands from which a milky sea-spray was falling away. The vapours were departing. The entrance to the ice-house revealed itself as a mouldering wooden door on broken hinges. It was rather a pitiful refuge.

Suddenly there was a second shot – so that Appleby threw an arm round David’s shoulders and forced him farther to the ground. Then, almost immediately, there was a third. Immediately, and from somewhere still in mist on the right, a small hubbub arose. It might have been the police, emerging, in a belated but spectacular fashion, and with much banging of doors and stamping of feet, from some unsuspected hiding-place near by. Appleby didn’t turn his head. Herons behave like that when getting under way. Here were simply two or three more, justly alarmed, hastily quitting some invisible plantation and proposing to join their fellows in the water.

It was for something else that Appleby was listening: for so much as a single cry or moan from the direction of the ice-house. Nothing. Nothing came from the place except a small drift of vapour darker than the pearl-grey mist now everywhere in retreat from the park; except this, and a faint acrid smell.

Appleby stood up.

‘A very old-fashioned weapon,’ he said. ‘Could it even be a double action Colt?’ He paused, and looked appraisingly at the boy now scrambling to his feet beside him. ‘I’m afraid it might be a good idea if we went in there together. The spectacle mayn’t be very agreeable, but that would be the best course from the point of view of giving evidence later on. Do you mind, Snodgrass?’

‘No – although I think I know what we’re going to find.’ Although very pale, the young man took a brisk pace forward. Then he paused.
‘Snodgrass?
’ he repeated.

‘The truth is as you can’t but have imagined it at times. Snodgrass has never been other than your true name. And – since very early this morning – Ledward has belonged to you.’

‘An excellent woman, Mrs Gathercoal,’ Dr Absolon said, a few hours later. He was walking with Appleby across the park, preparatory to offering him the hospitality of Ledward Vicarage. It was from this undisturbed abode, it had been agreed, that the rescue of Appleby’s car might be effected with a minimum of publicity. ‘To organize coffee and bacon-and-eggs after a night like that was a considerable feat. Not to speak of the capital potted char. A most interesting old-world dish.’ Absolon paused. ‘But it is hardly surprising that young David had little appetite. It must all be a terrific shock to him. Particularly as it culminated in finding the bodies of poor Beddoes and the scoundrel Basil.’

‘Each was as great a scoundrel as the other, Vicar.’

‘But surely Beddoes was a mere accomplice, and more than a little mad?’

‘To my mind, nothing of the kind. When I tumbled in on the middle of their plot last night, the Professor may be said to have put on a very distinguished turn indeed. He was as good an actor, in a way, as the fellow one is inclined to call Basil-Leonidas. And Basil had, at least as a young man, actual experience as an actor.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Well, as an amateur and when at Oxford. See
Who’s Who
. But when he returned to the scene of action so hard upon removing Leonidas’ beard, it ought to have occurred to him not to stink of soap and what they call after-shave lotion.’

‘It was really so odd a circumstance that alerted you?’

‘Well, say that I was at once aware of it – having a good sense of smell.’ Appleby smiled. ‘But really, the instant he entered the corridor, I remember simply staring in astonishment at the effrontery of the proposed deception. They were very rash, to put it mildly, to go ahead with their plan once they knew the identity of the stranger out of the night.’

‘Yourself, you mean?’

‘Precisely. My wits may be growing dim, but I’m a professional, after all. You see, as the thing was plotted, it would be only yourself – called in to substantiate the story of lurking and implausibly chattering thieves – who would be likely to see the briskly materializing Basil hard upon the departure of the offended Leonidas. It was all entirely foolish, nevertheless. Particularly as almost the same complicated preparations must have been made last year – and would have been next year, one has to suppose, if Adrian hadn’t turned up last night.’

‘Yet, basically, their plan was fairly simple.’

‘Perfectly true. In the interest of Basil, who would succeed to the property and then do a quiet share-out with Beddoes, Adrian was to be killed as soon as he turned up, and the blame laid on non-existent burglars. But they elaborated far too much – simply, I suppose, in a spirit of malign and rejoicing ingenuity. The interrupted supper and the clutched poker. All those sound-effects – a little lacking, incidentally, in lucid sequence – which were a mere matter of time-clocks and magnetic tape.

‘Not that it wasn’t all marvellously dextrous. Basil must have done an uncommon amount of brisk skipping around before he presented himself to Beddoes and myself. “Mr Snodgrass is in residence”, forsooth! His manoeuvres had included, remember, the actual intercepting and shooting of Adrian when still out of earshot. What Beddoes would call terrain and tactics, no doubt.’

‘Ah, that admirable book.’

‘But there was one staring indication of the bogus character of the off-stage noises. Out on the terrace, Basil tried out one sequence – simply to test it, I imagine – in what happened to be my hearing during my first unsuspected presence in the library. It was the one of the thieves chattering or whispering, dropping something metallic, and then making off at the double. You got the benefit of it as you came through the park. But I’d heard the rehearsal. The identical sequence twice over! There could be only one explanation of that.’

‘God bless my soul!’

‘But they were both capable of quick thinking. When they got at the truth about David…’

‘I don’t understand that at all.’

‘I’ll explain in a moment. But, when they did, and saw that
he
must appear to be killed by intruders as well, they did a really brilliant improvisation. Voices again – but real voices this time. In fact their own voices, talking Spanish. They had to reckon, having set their trap, that they might fail to kill the boy, or somehow be surprised, and have to bolt. There would then have been David’s own testimony that it had been our Latin-American friends who had been for some mysterious reason gunning for him.’

‘But there really
have
been…’

‘Oh, indeed yes. And the reason I wasn’t very briskly backed up by the police in the crisis was that they had got word of them and were after them. Our friends from Azuera had crashed the car they were escaping in, and had scattered. So it required quite a force to bring them in. It was effected pretty quickly, all the same. And it is pretty quickly, too, that these South American gentry have tumbled out their story. It has been the wisest thing they could do.’ Appleby halted for a moment. The herons were still in the water, and their heads were still behaving like automata. ‘They
had
arrived to do a little burglary…’

‘Which was a most absurd coincidence.’

‘Not really. They had to beat Adrian to it, so to speak, and they just brought it off. Of course they proved to have been under a comical misconception, so that in the end they simply dropped everything, and ran.
Literally
dropped everything. And that, I have to confess, was something I didn’t reckon on. And my stupidity nearly cost young David his life.’

‘My dear Appleby, I am quite bewildered. You speak in riddles.’

‘Nothing of the kind, Vicar. I am explaining this rather odd affair to you at breakneck speed, and with a lucidity born of years of practice.’ Appleby looked half-seriously at Dr Absolon. ‘Ask me any question whatever, and I’ll carry on logically from that point.’

It was some moments before Dr Absolon availed himself of this invitation. He too had halted, and was studying the creatures hunched in the shallows of the Ledward.

‘God has not died for the white heron,’ he said. ‘God has not appeared to the birds.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m sorry. Only a modern poet’s way of raising an interesting theological point. But here’s your question. What did those foreigners want from a safe, and how did they know it was there?’

‘Two questions, Vicar, but both quite simple ones. Long ago, Adrian Snodgrass let it be known that he had somewhere tucked away documents the production of which would at any time be fatal to some political group or other in Azuera. And at this point we have to rely a little upon what those people’s emissaries (as I suppose they should be called) told Stride after he’d hauled them in this morning. It seems that Adrian, quite recently and just before setting out for England, hit the bottle in what proved to be politically unreliable company. He was coming back to Ledward, he announced in his cups, to get some papers out of a safe hidden behind the portrait of a lady in his bedroom – and the consequences were to be of a highly dramatic order. That’s why, as I said a couple of minutes ago, our recent visitors had to beat Adrian to it. It was their job to find the safe, blow it, check the documents, and then either carry them off or destroy them.’