The Weight of the Evidence (15 page)

Hobhouse settled himself in his corner. ‘And have you’, he asked, ‘had a good day?’

It was a benevolent question, and probably the little Hobhouses heard it quite often when they got home from school. Appleby lit his pipe and considered it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘not bad. A bit miscellaneous, perhaps. I’ve been after a minor act of vandalism perpetrated against a work of art. Say five pounds or twelve days. Then I’ve collected virtually conclusive evidence against a man called Lasscock on a charge of shamming ill and dozing in the sun. Penalty? Perhaps a tactfully expressed hope for his better health on the part of Sir David Evans. But I should say that before that I was working on a little affair of bigamy. It has the making of quite a dramatic case in itself. Round Up of the Bigamy Club.’

‘Of the what?’

‘The Society for the Promotion of Bigamy. I’m not sure it oughtn’t to be the Royal Society. There is some suspicion that our friend Sir David is involved, look you. Which makes it so extremely respectable that any chance of a conviction is probably slight. Interesting, all the same. Or don’t you think?’

In the darkness of the limousine Hobhouse could be heard breathing heavily. ‘In the matter of Pluckrose–’ he began with massive irony.

‘To be sure. And tomorrow will be much better. We’ll abandon these fringes and go to the heart of the thing. The whole tempo will speed up. We’ll mess about the Wool Court and reconstruct the crime.’

‘I don’t think we could do that.’ Hobhouse was suddenly apprehensive. ‘The Chief Constable–’

Appleby chuckled. ‘I don’t mean we’ll put suspected persons through a sort of theatrical performance. Just the physics of the thing. Do you think you could supply a corpse? It would have to be quite a new corpse. And unsquashed.’

‘Certainly not!’ Hobhouse’s voice was as decided as it was scandalized.

‘Don’t you think that perhaps Nesfield Infirmary–? After all, it would only be a sort of slightly new post-mortem.’

‘It would be nothing of the sort.’ Logic came to Hobhouse’s aid. ‘A post-mortem is performed in order to discover the manner of death of the corpse in question. In what you’re suggesting the corpse wouldn’t be the corpse in question. It would be a – previous corpse. Decency is decency, Mr Appleby.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’ Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘By the way, I can tell you this. There’s going to be a great deal of sex in the Pluckrose affair. For instance, Pluckrose’s landlady practically stated to me that Pluckrose was a person of immoral habits. And that no less a person than Sir David Evans was a rival of his in his lewd loves.’

Hobhouse sat up with a jerk. ‘Now you’re talking!’ he said. ‘What I always say is this: get your hands on the sex of the matter and you’ll soon find your feet. Now, I’ll tell you a curious case–’

The car sped through the night. It was an instructive, if not an edifying, journey.

They had passed a road-house, garish with neon, loud with music; they had overtaken a little column of night-travelling lorries, headlong and stinking; they had turned through great gates dimly glimpsed – and then the moon rose as they crossed Nesfield Chase. Slyly the moon edged itself over the horizon as if its purpose were eavesdropping on the earnestly discouraging Hobhouse; then in a moment it hung clear in the sky, suddenly indifferent and remote. To the left it gleamed coldly on an expanse of water flanked by a balustrade which seemed to run endlessly into distance; to the right it created out of darkness a great irregular chequerboard of trees and clumps of trees and blotched and shafted shadows upon a carpeting of blanched and close-cropped grass. Now they were on a bridge and in the water deer were drinking; now they were running by the stream and before them, correctly framed amid plantations and contrived waters, were the ruins of Nesfield Abbey – a silhouette of broken and impending arches caught by the invisible hand of wealth and invisibly sustained in air; a treasured and embalmed decay. The car purred on, circled, stopped. There was a high stone wall and wrought-iron gates flanked by prancing monsters: portal-guarding lion-whelps, thought Appleby thinking of Tennyson. The driver discreetly tooted and there was a stir at a lodge door. ‘The park,’ said Hobhouse. He spoke in a low voice, rather as if in church. ‘It was his grandfather enclosed the chase as well.’ The car was moving again – down an avenue now.

The elm avenue ran like an arrow before them, still and dappled. Fast as the car was going, it was like walking up some endless aisle to the encountering of unknown mysteries. It is nice, thought Appleby, to be plebeian; you take nothing for granted and get all the thrill. The avenue curved, straightened again, curved once more – manoeuvring to just the angle wanted. And then there was clear moonlight and the car was in the open. It was like pulling round a point in a dinghy and finding a battleship at anchor straight ahead.

To left and right Nesfield Court sprawled into distance – or would have sprawled had it not been laboriously braced against aesthetic appraisal by the massive perpendiculars of Corinthian columns rising to a succession of pediments, or marshalled by platoons and companies into symmetrically disposed porticoes and colonnades. Beneath all this was an ordered multitude of flights of steps, advancing and retiring upon each other like a frozen ballet; and beneath this again was a system of terraces at once cold and lavish, mathematically embellished with classical statuary: hounds and boars, nymphs and satyrs, Laocoon and Hercules and Niobe all tears. Appleby looked at it all as the car slowed down. There was a lot of it and it had been there for quite a long time. Moreover it would last. Even when England had turned into the Duke’s dog-kennel paradise it would stand. Even when given over to the occupancy of tired workers or imbecile children it would continue to make its own assertions and not theirs. At the moment it made Pluckrose seem very small; before this vast façade of stone that shabby little figure shrivelled further, took on the dimensions of some inky-spinning spider crushed between the pages of an academic text-book. How curious, then, the power of the moral conscience. How curious that the judges of this class-ridden and materialistic modern England would license the pulling of Nesfield Court stone from stone if it were demonstrable that the riddle of this obscure scholar’s death could only be solved that way!

The car had stopped before a bifurcation of the drive. Appleby saw the driver’s questioning face, and smiled. ‘Hobhouse,’ he said, ‘how do you think we get in?’

‘Get in?’ Hobhouse was looking dubiously up at the moonlit vistas of pale stone. ‘Drive up to the front door, of course. Get on.’

They drove on past long flights of empty and unwelcoming steps. It was rather as if they were sculling round the battleship and looking for an accommodation ladder. Suddenly the bonnet of the car nosed up into air; a flight of steps had parted before them and they were mounting a steep stone ramp. Darkness gathered round them and then once more they were on a level and had come to a stop. Great pillars soared all around with here and there a shaft of moonlight striking uncertainly through. It was like being lost in a forest of immemorial elms. They sat and peered rather helplessly into the thicker darkness. ‘Well,’ said Appleby, ‘I think there can be no doubt that this is the front door. What about ringing the bell? Or do you think one just gives a knock?’

Hobhouse showed no disposition to get out. ‘Perhaps–’

‘I expect you’re right. They probably open this one only for the Royal Family. We’d better search elsewhere.’

The car moved forward; the bonnet sharply dipped; presently the unending steps and terraces and balustrades were gliding past them once more. They turned a corner. ‘Do you know,’ said Appleby, ‘I believe that was just the side of the house. There’s far more of it this way on.’

‘If this were a taxi we’d have had a bob’s worth round the place already.’ Hobhouse was becoming restive. ‘And as yet I haven’t seen a single light. The place might be uninhabited.’

‘Probably nine-tenths of it are. I think I see an archway a bit along. Let’s turn in.’

The archway proved to have something like the dimensions of a tunnel; they drove through and now the building rose on all sides of them. Still there was no gleam of light; great walls, blank or with shuttered windows, rose intermittently before them; they crawled uncertainly through further tunnels and drove slowly round court after deserted court.

‘It’s like a dream,’ said Hobhouse flatly, and then: ‘Lights!’ he added dramatically – much as a castaway might announce a sail.

The buildings were lower and more irregular now, and straight ahead a cluster of lights had revealed itself. The car crawled to a standstill; a shaft of light shot across the darkness nearby as a door was opened and shut; another door, wide open, showed a vista of empty, stone-flagged corridor.

‘Offices,’ said Appleby. ‘Laundries and harness-rooms and lord knows what. Rather a come-down after such a regal approach. But human contact is something. Out we get. And don’t forget to be properly respectful to the head groom.’

Hobhouse shook his head. ‘Drive on,’ he said firmly.

‘But don’t you think–?’

‘Mr Appleby, we have the dignity of the constabulary to observe. It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.’

Appleby sighed and the car drove on. ‘Hobhouse,’ he asked suddenly, ‘whom are you going to ask for, anyway?’

‘Ask for?’ Hobhouse appeared not to have considered this point.

‘Supposing that in the next half-hour we find what looks like the policemen’s entrance, whom are you going to ask for – the Duke?’

‘It’s really rather difficult to say. If it were the Lord Mayor of Nesfield, now, I’d certainly ask for the Lord Mayor.’

‘And if it were a baronet somewhere about the country?’

‘I’d ask for the baronet.’

‘And if it were an earl?’ The courts now were growing loftier again, and the lighted windows were large and showed blinds of uniform cream. ‘Or, say, a marquis?’

Hobhouse shook his head, much disturbed. ‘They have all sorts of folk around them. What would you say to asking for His Grace’s secretary?’

‘I think you ought to ask for the major-domo.’

‘It sounds kind of queer to me, Mr Appleby.’

Appleby chuckled. ‘It is. Of course you might try the steward.’

‘Would the steward be a gentleman?’ Hobhouse had sunk his voice confidentially.

‘Not in the sense you mean.’

‘Then it wouldn’t do. Particularly with the Chief Constable’s car.’ Hobhouse pondered. ‘What about not asking for anyone? What about just saying, ‘I am Inspector Hobhouse of the Borough Police’? And then just expecting something to happen?’

‘That will be capital.’ A paralysing place, Appleby was thinking – when the car jerked to a stop. They had come suddenly upon a sort of junior version of the portals at which they had made their first assault – another ramp running up under a small portico. Only here there were lights in the roof and panels of light from windows flanking a closed door.

They got out and explored. ‘There isn’t a bell,’ said Hobhouse, suddenly dejected.

‘A bell? Of course not. This little place scarcely counts as an entrance. It’s just a convenient place to put out the cat. Try a knock.’

Hobhouse knocked, and presently knocked again; there was no result. ‘It looks like another blank,’ he said.

‘Nonsense. Look at the lights.’ It was Appleby who was impatient now. ‘Try the door. If it’s open we’ll simply walk in.’

‘Walk in!’ Hobhouse was scandalized.

‘We’ll come upon a porter or footman in no time. In you go.’

Doubtfully Hobhouse pushed open the door and they entered a vestibule which was all pale green enamel and Chinese Chippendale. In front were curtained glass doors with light streaming through. Hobhouse looked about him and seemed to gather resolution from the costliness and strangeness of the place. He advanced upon the glass doors, opened one wing, and marched through without a pause. Then suddenly he gave a bound backwards, cannoned violently into Appleby, and slammed the door to.

‘Hobhouse, what on earth–’

‘Somebody took a shot at me.’ Hobhouse’s hand had dived into his overcoat pocket; his glance was warily on the door.

‘Took a shot at you? Nonsense. There wasn’t a sound.’

‘I felt it go past my ear. A graze.’

‘My dear man–’ Appleby stopped and stared. From Hobhouse’s left ear there was a trickle of blood.

And then the door opened again and the tall figure of the Duke of Nesfield was before them, politely curious. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘that you are not hurt? Perhaps it was a stupid place to set the thing up. But then nobody ever comes in this way.’ He came forward and shook hands, a man very far from proposing to show surprise at the identity of his unexpected guests. ‘My friends and I took a fancy to darts some months ago, and tonight we are having a little reunion. You play?’ He stood aside and they entered what proved to be a billiard room. ‘More coffee, Thomas.’ He glanced at Hobhouse. ‘And a bottle of iodine.’

Appleby looked about him. Yes, there was the darts board, set up on a wall close by the door. And standing beside it, as one who studies the strategy of the later stages of the game, was young Marlow. And over by the billiard table, surveying the newcomers with frank distaste, was that acid and severe Romance philologer, Professor Prisk.

‘Marlow’, said the Duke, ‘is streets ahead of us. He has the advantage of playing regularly in a Nesfield pub. A thing, unfortunately, I can’t do; it would be an affectation. And a thing the professor can’t do either; it would be an impropriety.’

‘Indecorous would be a better word.’ Prisk took careful aim. ‘And I think eccentric would be better still. Perhaps I may take it up. Pluckrose was our eccentric professor, as Mr Appleby here has found out. And now another is needed in his room.’

‘Talking of Pluckrose’s room–’ began Marlow.

‘Whisky?’ The Duke had strode over to a great silver tray on which stood an array of decanters and now spoke rather abruptly to the company at large. Prisk and Marlow, it seemed to Appleby, represented once again the Duke’s fondness for little parties with some ulterior object. And this, surely, could only have to do with the Pluckrose mystery. Nevertheless the Duke was not at all disposed to let Pluckrose’s name turn up at random. For the moment at least he had imposed upon Hobhouse and Appleby the part of casual visitors, and now he had shut up Marlow with businesslike directness. ‘Whisky?’ he repeated. ‘Although darts ought really to go with beer.’