Appleby and the Ospreys (15 page)

‘Are you telling Mr Ringwood and myself,’ he asked, ‘that this pub keeper once had a job here at Clusters?’

‘Certainly, Sir John.’

‘Some time ago?’

‘Thirty years back, it would be.’

‘But within your own recollection?’

‘Certainly, sir. It was in the late Lord Osprey’s time.’ Bagot saw there might be an ambiguity in this. ‘The former Lord Osprey, Sir John. I was myself still in livery, and getting a little restless that way. The then Lady Osprey had a fancy for tall footmen, so my six feet were something of a disadvantage to me. But I did become his lordship’s butler a few years later. Nowadays, Sir John, I almost feel myself to have held the position man and boy. Man and boy, Sir John, and seeing Lord Ospreys come and go. It’s what makes the present tragedy so affecting to me.’

Appleby nodded sympathetically, and Ringwood hastened to follow suit.

‘So Trumfitt, Mr Bagot, would have been under you?’

‘Not at all, Sir John. I have, I fear, given you quite a wrong impression of his standing. He was simply one of the outside men. There were about a dozen of them at that time. We gave them a meal – although not, of course, in the servants’ hall – but they slept above the stables, and in places like that.’

‘So you had no very close contact with young Trumfitt, Mr Bagot.’ Appleby had settled down into a tone of relaxed chat. ‘Was he one of the outside men for many years? We seem to be talking about matters a long time back.’

‘For about five years, I’d say, he worked at Clusters. A strong lad, and willing enough. But with a quick temper to him, that at times had him getting on with the others none too well. In the end they ganged up on him, some of them did.’

‘Violence, was there?’

‘He found himself in the moat, Sir John – or in the deep mud that passed for the moat in places, then as now. After that, I believe he went for a soldier. But the late Lord Osprey – him that now lies dead that is – remembered what the other lads had done against him all those years back, and he put in a word for him when he came looking for that public house. Without, I’d say, any inquiry into the way Trumfitt’s character had been developing.’

‘You give us a very coherent account of the matter, Mr Bagot. We’re obliged to you.’ It might have been a much younger and rather artlessly artful Appleby who produced this. ‘Just what sort of work would young Trumfitt have been doing as a lad here? Grooming the horses – that sort of thing?’

‘By no means, Sir John.’ Bagot appeared mildly shocked. ‘The horses – hunters, of course, for the most part – were important at Clusters in those days, and it was trained men who looked after them. Young Trumfitt was simply one of the head gardener’s lads – and would be set, as likely as not, weeding between the flags in the great court, with nothing but a broken knife from the kitchens to help him. That, or skimming the duckweed from the moat. Not work that any young man would take much satisfaction in, to my mind. It may well have given a twist in his character. A further twist, you may say, to what was already there.’

‘You mean,’ Ringwood asked, ‘that Trumfitt was the kind that harbours grudges?’

‘Just that. But mark you, Mr Inspector, we never heard ill of him during these later years in that public house – not until the disgraceful scene that blew up here not an hour ago. But when I opened the door to him and his daughter I saw at once there was something amiss with him. I blame myself for letting him enter. I repeat that.’

‘Were you frightened of him?’ Ringwood asked.

‘No doubt I shared in the general perturbation.’ Bagot made this admission with dignity. ‘Sir John would not have been alarmed. And her ladyship appears, not unnaturally, to be suffering considerable absences of mind, and perhaps scarcely knew what was going on.’

‘Did you gather just what was going on – what sort of assertion this Trumfitt was making?’

‘Certainly, Inspector. I need hardly say that I heard nothing of what was said after I announced those persons and withdrew. But the man Trumfitt had already made himself tolerably clear to me – outrageously so, indeed – while still in the hall. The young woman, too.’

‘Well now, Bagot, what do you think about it? Was there anything in it? Can you provide any evidence about the imputation – either for or against it?’

But this was not the way to handle Bagot, as Appleby, silent for the moment, knew very well.

‘As to that,’ Bagot said, ‘I have nothing to say. It wouldn’t be proper – proper at all. Except,’ he added – and it was rather as if he had remembered something read in a book or newspaper – ‘in the presence of my solicitor.’

‘Good God, man! Do you imagine you’re going to be charged with anything?’ Irritation had momentarily overcome discretion with Ringwood. ‘Sir John, I’m in your hands.’

‘Not at all, my dear chap. It’s entirely your case.’ Appleby thus hastened to obviate the threat of any unseemly friction between the two representatives of the law. ‘And we must agree that Mr Bagot has been most helpful – as he can always be relied on to be. But now we’re holding him up from his very responsible work. So we must simply thank him, and withdraw.’

‘Sorry about that,’ Ringwood said gruffly, as the two men walked down the corridor.

‘Nonsense!’ Appleby said, laughing. ‘But in grand houses always butter up the servants. It was one of the things they said to me in my first probationary week in the CID.’

‘I don’t know that buttering up Bagot has taken us very far. Just where are we going now?’

‘It looks like the Music Saloon, Ringwood, and your little posse of assistants with their gadgetry. They include one rather good-looking girl.’

‘Do they, indeed, sir?’ Ringwood asked this dryly, and clearly as one indisposed to frivolity. ‘What I meant was about our progress in this affair. Would you say that Bagot has given us any sort of useful nudge along the way?’

‘It depends on what you mean by the way, I suppose. If it’s that underwater labyrinth that you and I encountered this morning, the answer is “Yes”. We heard, for the first time, of somebody who had ample occasion to know his way about the moat.’

‘Trumfitt?’

‘Trumfitt long ago. The lad who, among other chores, pottered around in that little boat – or in a previous little boat – chasing up the duckweed. He’s the first person we’ve heard of who, last night, could have got from any
A
to any
B
on that stinking anachronism without wasting time about it.’

‘True enough, Sir John. But I don’t know that it very clearly points to our precious pub keeper as a murderer. If you’ve slit a man’s throat in the small hours, you don’t come bellowing for his blood a few hours later.’ Ringwood paused on this. ‘Unless,’ he at once soberly added, ‘as a kind of bluff or blind. A bit primitive, that.’

‘The possibility has occurred to me. And our friend Trumfitt doesn’t strike me as a particularly sophisticated man.’

‘Which wouldn’t preclude his going hopping mad out of an outrage offered to his daughter. So Trumfitt’s a suspect all right.’

‘Certainly he is. He’s that – but no more than that.’

‘At least nothing to do with those bloody coins, Sir John.’

‘Nothing whatever. But it’s the coins that may be bloody – or blood-straked – all the same.’

‘But Trumfitt remains, to say the least, something of an outsider in the race?’

‘Definitely that. But in our sort of race, Ringwood, we have to keep an eye on the outsider right up to the winning post.’

‘And that’s a true word, Sir John.’ Ringwood nodded sagely. ‘The field is still open. Not a doubt about that.’

In the hall they ran into Mr Brackley. He offered both men a passing nod, but then came to a halt, as if feeling he must explain himself.

‘I can’t say “good afternoon”,’ he said, ‘since no time ago I said “good morning” to each of you. When I got home there was a telephone call from our bereaved young man, asking me to come back and have a word with him. No doubt I ought to have thought of it in the first place, when I cycled over to see his mother.’

‘I’d suppose it to have been his business to be present at that meeting,’ Appleby said. ‘Adrian will have to learn to consider the forms, will he not, now that he’s the head of the family. And, without doubt, he is your leading parishioner.’ This was an echo of a little joke Judith Appleby had made, but her husband had failed to remember the fact.

‘I don’t know I’d call him that myself, Sir John, unless in a moment of uncommon formality. For what is a parishioner? In essence what is he – or she? I’d say it’s somebody who, at least occasionally, turns up in church. And I doubt whether Adrian Osprey has done that since – well, since they carried him to the font and he became Adrian.’

‘He scarcely had a say in that, sir.’ Rather surprisingly, Detective-Inspector Ringwood came out with this. ‘It’s not everybody who believes in infant baptism. John Baptist himself didn’t make a kids’ business of it, if the Gospels are to be believed.’

This unexpected emergence of the Voice of Dissent at once delighted the vicar of Little Clusters.

‘My dear sir,’ he said, ‘we must talk about that. Just give me your address, and I’ll call and have a chat. Yes, indeed!’ And he turned to Appleby. ‘First things first, Sir John – isn’t that right?’

Thus abruptly confronted with the urgency of theological discussion, Appleby was momentarily put to a stand.

‘Of course, I defer to you,’ he then said. ‘And I mustn’t say that Lord Osprey’s death is of the same importance as the problem of paedo-baptism. But it’s important, all the same, and moreover getting to the bottom of it is urgent. I’m sure you agree. And presumably it was what was in Adrian Osprey’s mind when he asked you to come back to Clusters?’

‘He certainly wants the mystery resolved. But his mother had been worrying over some practical matters, and he felt I might be a help with them. Whether, for instance, when a man has been murdered, the body can be buried before there’s been an inquest. And about the reading of a will, and the like. Mr Ringwood, here, has a better sense of my proper territory. Adrian seemed to feel that such matters must come before me every week. I said what I could, and told him to send at once for the family solicitor. No doubt, that means some large firm in London. But they’ll certainly have somebody here before the day is out.’

‘Adrian didn’t – but I don’t know whether I ought to ask you this – he didn’t strike you as anxious in any way to get something off his chest?’

‘He said – and I think, Sir John, I can answer you readily enough – he said something about having been a bloody poor sort of son. It was, I think, no more than a general sense of inadequacy that was in question, and the worry must be accounted to his credit. It is true that he appears to be not an altogether easy youth. Or exactly a model son. But which of us, for that matter, has been that?’

‘You have a true word there,’ Ringwood said. It was to be presumed that Ringwood was a family man.

‘This morning,’ Appleby continued, ‘you and I, Mr Brackley, exchanged a word or two about the Osprey Collection.’

‘Ah, yes – the coins! I recall that.’

‘Had Adrian anything to say about them; for instance, did he express any worry about their apparent elusiveness?’

‘He made no mention of them, at all.’

‘Or did he seem concerned about the financial consequences of his father’s death?’

‘Nothing of the kind seemed to be in his head.’

‘I ask for several reasons. What is called, I think, capital transfer tax is now often a great worry to seemingly wealthy people. If an unexpected death occurs, severe headaches may result for the heirs. And I have a slight sense that Lord Osprey’s affairs were not quite as he’d have wished them to be. From that fellow Purvis, indeed, he was fishing for the means to a little quick money. That’s not of any great significance, I suppose. But there are other things it might be useful to know. The Osprey estate itself – meaning the landed estate – appears to be not all that considerable, and although there are a good many valuable things in this great barrack of a place, they mightn’t add up to all that. So in what did Osprey’s main wealth consist? Or, conceivably, does it not really exist? And that brings me back to those blessed coins. Are they possibly of sufficient value to be really important – even crucial – for the total financial set-up?’

‘My dear Sir John!’ The vicar seemed amused that this question should be put to him. ‘It’s hardly necessary to say that I am no authority on such things. But, at a guess, I’d regard it as very improbable that the coins rate anything like as highly as that. That they’d be a huge haul for a thief is no doubt true. But that they represent life or death for the Ospreys as a clan strikes me as totally untenable.’

‘No doubt that puts them accurately in their place, metaphorically speaking. Just what or where their place is literally is one of our minor puzzles at the moment.’

‘I wouldn’t call it a minor puzzle at all,’ Ringwood interposed. ‘That Lord Osprey was killed by a crook who was after the things – and who may, or may not, have got away with them – is the best hypothesis we can work from at the moment. Or so it seems to me. I’m not so sure about Sir John here.’ Ringwood was steadily gaining in confidence
vis-à-vis
the almost legendary John Appleby. ‘He’s made me rather interested in a fellow called Trumfitt, who wouldn’t be much on the spot where antique coins are concerned.’

‘Certainly not, if it’s the Trumfitt I know.’ Mr Brackley was amused. ‘It’s the rip-roaring giant at the pub?’

‘That’s the man,’ Appleby said. ‘Not, one imagines, exactly spot-on in the world of numismatics. Just what do you know about him?’

‘That he has a picturesque local history as a man of violence. Much of it may be purely legendary, and promoted by himself as attractive to his clientele. But he has in fact been in trouble once or twice with the beaks, and keeps good order in his pub as a result. He can’t find that difficult, being what one may call one of nature’s chuckers-out. Rather lost, I’d say, in our fairly orderly community. He’d make a very good career as a bouncer at some Soho dive.’ Mr Brackley was clearly proud of his command of a demotic English idiom here. ‘In the army at one time, I’ve been told, but came out in a hurry. Himself bounced, it may have been.’