Appleby and the Ospreys (13 page)

This was all very unsatisfactory and vague, and it would perhaps be best to keep the Osprey Collection and its riddle at, as it were, the centre of the composition. Appleby had almost arrived at this conclusion when the preserved decorum of Bagot’s buffet was broken in upon by a sudden and totally unexpected occasion of scandal and confusion.

The disturbance began with a clamour emanating from the main Entrance Hall of Clusters which has already been described, and the effect was of that lofty and marble sheathed oval as abruptly given over to disgrace and spoliation at the hands of an insurgent mob. Just so might some great cathedral have resounded to the destructive frenzy of a wandering barbarian horde. One might have imagined the non-existent statues in their vacant niches as looking on helpless and aghast at mounting chaos. Much of this was acoustic delusion, but what immediately succeeded upon it was even more alarming. The bivalvular doors of the apartment in which the assembled gentlefolk were recruiting themselves burst open, and, almost filling the wide space thus created, there appeared an enormous man, red-faced, glaring, and bellowing furiously. For a moment he stood motionless, confronting the company. Then he turned half round, seized a young woman who had been cowering behind him, and propelled her in front of him into the room.

‘Where is he?’ the enormous man shouted. ‘Show me the ruddy bastard! I’ll learn him, I will. I’ll leave him so that he won’t want to do it again – or be able to, if I get my hands on him you know where. Bloody aristocratic ripper!’

From behind this volcanically eruptive person there appeared the pale face of Bagot. Bagot was clearly frightened out of his wits – but even so, his duty to uphold the covenances momentarily sustained him.

‘Mr Trumfitt and Miss Trumfitt, my lady,’ he announced, and thereupon bolted from view.

Mr Trumfitt pausing to take breath, there was a moment’s stupefied silence – into which, however, snivelling noises were interjected by his daughter. So here – Appleby thought – were the outraged publican from a local village and his ravished daughter. Obscurely, he drew a certain encouragement from this. For some little time the situation had been unpromisingly static. Here at least was development. It was, of course, awkward for Adrian. But you can’t be a bit rough with village girls and expect always to get away with it.

‘Where’s his lordship?’ Trumfitt yelled. ‘Where’s that bloody Lord Osprey? I’ll put my hands on him, I will. You’ll all see if I won’t.’ He glared round the company. ‘Crawled into the woodwork, has he? I’ll have him out of it.’

There was another moment’s silence, and then Adrian stepped forward.

‘I am Lord Osprey,’ he said. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘You bloody little brat, get back to school!’ Trumfitt shouted. And he turned to his daughter. ‘Avice,’ he said, ‘tell them all it wasn’t the young one.’

‘No more it weren’t,’ Avice said. ‘And he’s not a lord yet, he isn’t.’ And with a certain dramatic sense, Avice turned to the company at large. ‘It were the old un,’ she said. ‘And where is he? My dad has promised to hold him down while I get my nails in him.’

At this point several of the guests had sufficiently recovered from their surprise – and fright – to utter disapproving noises. But the first to speak was Rupert Quickfall.

‘This is most unseemly,’ he said. ‘Why have these persons been admitted to the house – let alone allowed to pass half a dozen policemen?’

‘But I think that some explanation should be given us.’ Lady Wimpole, although obviously much confused in mind, spoke with surprising emphasis. ‘Certainly those horrible people ought to be taken away. But what does the young woman mean by saying that Adrian isn’t yet a peer? And what does this disgusting man mean by demanding to see Adrian’s father?’ Alarm now sounded in Lady Wimpole’s voice. ‘Poor Oliver
is
dead, isn’t he?’

‘Really, Mama, this is too absurd.’ It was Honoria who now spoke. ‘Of course Lord Osprey is dead – only this man, who seems to have some grudge against him, hasn’t heard of the fact.’

‘Dead!’ shouted Trumfitt on a note of outraged incredulity. ‘Of course he isn’t dead – not yet, he isn’t. It’s a trick. Smuggling him out of the country to escape appearing in the dock. That’s what they’re up to. I’ll have the law on the lot of them.’

‘The law is sometimes an ass,’ Appleby said. ‘But not quite to that extent, perhaps. Quickfall, have you anything to say about all this?’

‘My dear Appleby, if a touch of the facetious weren’t out of place before a mess-up of the present sort, I’d be inclined to say that I reserve my defence. Clearly I got things a little the wrong way round on the telephone. The generations got themselves slightly mixed up. For the moment, I’ll rest on that.’

‘I don’t think anybody ought to rest.’ This came from a lady whom Appleby identified provisionally as the shadowy Mrs Purvis, wife of one of the Purvises of Purvis, Purvis and Purvis. ‘We are in a perfectly shocking situation,’ Mrs Purvis went on. ‘No sooner is Lord Osprey brutally murdered than we are publicly confronted with some disgusting aspersion upon him. We ought all to bestir ourselves, and begin by supporting Lady Osprey and her son in any way we can.’

‘Quite right!’ Miss Minnychip spoke in her turn. ‘Poor Oliver is dead, and – so far as the law goes – he can, I suppose, be slandered with impunity. But of slander we can at least express our detestation. Many have fallen by the edge of the sword: but not so many as have fallen by the tongue.’

‘Thank you, my dear.’ Lady Osprey, in order to utter these very proper words, appeared to have to contend with a certain absence of mind. She was still sitting on the chair Adrian had provided for her, and she had perhaps been reflecting, Appleby thought, on the disposition of articles of furniture in the dower house. For one whose husband had been murdered and then within twenty-four hours apparently aspersed as a ravisher Lady Osprey seemed to own just the right temperament.

‘What about having in those policemen?’ Mr Purvis asked abruptly. ‘Sir John, wouldn’t they be just right for dealing with our unwelcome visitors?’

‘I think I’d rather have Mr Trumfitt and his daughter leave quietly and of their own free will,’ Appleby said. ‘Mr Broadwater, what do you think about that?’

‘I rather agree, Sir John.’ Marcus Broadwater had been the only one of the company not to speak so far. ‘It’s my opinion that they are conceivably not being wholly candid with us. But if they are willing to go, let them go. For one thing – but I defer to Quickfall here – once an intruder has gained entry to a private property, the law about getting him out again is surprisingly tricky. He has to be guilty of threatening behaviour, or something of that sort, before the police can bundle him out of the door and into a van.’

‘But we’ve all heard Mr Trumfitt going for threatening behaviour in a big way. Emasculation, and nothing short of it, was what he appears to have been envisaging.’

‘But that threat, Sir John, was directed against a man who is in fact dead: the late Lord Osprey. The present Lord Osprey was merely enjoined to go back to school. That was what the law is, no doubt, prepared to call vulgar abuse. But I doubt whether it can be construed as a threat.’

These learned exchanges were interrupted by Mr Trumfitt himself. He had been surprisingly silent for more than five minutes. Now he began roaring again. His daughter, as if taking a cue from this, resumed her snivelling. Appleby failed to discern in her any suggestion of a maidenhood but lately wronged. He had to remind himself of Quickfall’s undeniably valid assertion that a drab is as entitled as a duchess to resist the violent embraces of a male.

And then, if only briefly, Adrian Osprey took charge of the situation, directly confronting the enraged publican.

‘Mr Trumfitt,’ he said, ‘my father is dead. There is every reason to believe that he has been murdered. And you are creating a disgraceful scene. Please go away, and take your daughter with you.’

This firm speech was surprisingly effective. Mr Trumfitt grabbed the blubbering Avice and dragged her to the door. But there he turned, and gave a final shout at the company.

‘I’ll be even with the whole pack of you!’ he roared. After which – and presumably unaware that he had thus closely paraphrased a celebrated line in Shakespeare – he bundled both Avice and himself out of the room.

It speaks well for the resilience of the upper reaches of English society that after this vulgar irruption upon Bagot’s buffet the company picked itself up at once and assumed every appearance of undisturbed polite life. Bagot himself assisted this recovery by bringing in coffee and gravely handing it round with the assistance of a parlour maid. And Appleby assisted too – at least to the extent of deftly grabbing a sugar basin and crossing the room in order to offer it to Honoria Wimpole, introducing himself as he did so. Honoria was amused.

‘I know about you,’ she said, ‘and believe you want to pump me. Pump away.’

‘I want to know about coins, really, Miss Wimpole. Apart from Mr Broadwater – with whom I have already had a good deal of talk – you are the only numismatist here.’

‘Not really. There’s Miss Minnychip, Sir John.’

‘She is a guardian of such things, but I don’t think she knows – or claims to know – a great deal about them. She simply treasures a collection made by her father. I mustn’t tell you where she keeps it – although I can say that its whereabouts reflect a keen sense of its worth. Is the Minnychip Collection, as it may be called, really of the first importance?’

‘I scarcely think one can say that of it. But it has its strengths, I believe. Slender coins from Assyria and thick ones from Latium. Tablets of Bactriana. Bull, star, globe, crescent, and so on. All attractively named for amateurs. Who could resist
zianies
? They’re things minted by the Moors in a gold alloy.’

‘And every one of them worth ten
reales
.’

‘Sir John, I’ve been showing off, and now you’re making fun of me. You must be something of a numismatist yourself.’

‘Far from it. I’ve simply read
Don Quixote
. But, for the moment, let’s forget about Miss Minnychip. Of course it’s the Osprey Collection that’s in every way important now. Have you had a sight of it?’

‘No, I have not, Sir John. Nor many other people either, so far as I can make out. But there’s been a catalogue.’

‘I know about that. Are you here because you hoped to be given sight of it?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you haven’t been?’

‘No.’

‘But you were still hoping, right up to this nasty affair?’

‘Certainly I was. I came here with my mother because Lord Osprey had more or less promised to show me his collection.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘No. I’ve already said that, haven’t I? Today or tomorrow, it would have happened, I think. We were getting on rather well together, Lord Osprey and I.’

‘Did he tell you where the Osprey Collection was kept?’

‘Kept, Sir John?’

‘He made a secret of it, it seems. He didn’t divulge it to you?’

‘Definitely not. I imagine it must be in some sort of strong room. It is extremely valuable. Its nature makes it that. It’s not like, say, a great Mantegna or Turner, the direct market value of which, to a thief, is nil. Coins can be sent all over the place, and simply sold piecemeal. Ideal booty, in fact.’

‘Worth committing murder for?’

‘Most definitely. And that’s what has happened, I suppose.’

‘I don’t know that we can yet be quite sure of that, Miss Wimpole. And may I now venture on more delicate ground?’

‘Yes, you may. And I know what’s in your head, Sir John. The reach of the late Lord Osprey’s amorous proclivities.’

‘Well, yes.’ This was going a little fast for Sir John Appleby, an elderly and therefore misdoubting spectator of a much younger generation. ‘The territory we seemed to be hearing about from that Mr Trumfitt.’

‘Quite so. And you want to know whether I tried softening up Lord Osprey through an exhibition of female charm.’

‘Stuff and nonsense, Miss Wimpole. You wouldn’t need to put on any turn in order to be attractive to this wretched dead man. My question is simply whether you judged him to be on the inflammable side?’

‘As in this story about Miss Trumfitt? Very probably, I’d say. But he was also prepared to doat, which isn’t quite the same thing.’

‘I’m not sure that I follow you, Miss Wimpole.’

‘By doating I mean a kind of flirting to no practical intent in what he perfectly well knew to be a no-go area. It’s tiresome to have to admit to such a thing as going on in one’s own frosty cabbage patch. But I did let him doat, and thereby got a little nearer to the Osprey Collection.’ Honoria Wimpole paused on this. ‘He wasn’t, by the way, altogether a stupid man. And that cut down my feeling of false pretences. I mean that he knew perfectly well that, even if he poured his every treasure on my head – owls from Athens, winged horses from Corinth, turtles from Aegina – it wouldn’t bring us an inch nearer together. He doated, all right. But there was always a groat’s worth of wit in his pate.’

‘Can you cite an instance of that?’

‘His putting up with Marcus Broadwater. Broadwater seems to me to have been a thoroughly tiresome brother-in-law. But at some point or other Lord Osprey had the wit to spot him as a godsend.’

‘Explain.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll find it rather fanciful. I seem to see Lord Osprey as one of nature’s misers – and in a quite pathological way. Discovering in himself an impulse to conceal small bags of money in secure hiding-places all over this enormous house. That sort of thing.’

‘It’s an ingenious thought, Miss Wimpole. Go on.’

‘But he had sense enough to fear that, if he carried that to an extreme, his family would be worried, and doctors called in, and in no time he’d find himself put under trustees or even carted away as a lunatic. And then he found the expedient of hiding not current coins but ancient ones. And having realized that this would be judged a perfectly respectable activity, and that he had a brother-in-law in a position to advise him and at the same time to cover his own almost complete ignorance of numismatics, he started up what we now call the Osprey Collection. What do you think, Sir John?’