Appleby Talks Again (12 page)

“Not his lordship’s style at all.” Mrs Davis offered this.

“First a smuggled parcel and then a lady who has to be pushed into a cupboard?” Appleby rose, shaking his head. “There’s something to think about there, I agree – and I’m much obliged to you. And now I think I’ll go and see this Mr Diamond.”

The Cantelupe’s social secretary was in the library – the room, in fact, in which Butt maintained that the young person had been thrust into hiding. Although he wasn’t exactly rugged – not, Appleby told himself, a rough Diamond – he did have something more than the smooth manners and small-scale competence that one might have expected. Yet he was discernibly uneasy and puzzled. He might have been labouring under the persuasion that things had not only gone wrong, but had gone wrong in quite the wrong way. His speech however, was direct and entirely open. “I’m glad you’ve come, sir. This is the deuce of a fix.”

“It’s something that you’re aware of that.” And Appleby looked at the young man stonily. “Your behaviour has been most irresponsible. Six days ago, your employer disappeared. I believe your concern is only with his, and with his wife’s, private affairs. But you must have as good a general notion as I have of his position in scientific research in this country. Something had happened that might be of the gravest moment. Instead of bringing this home to Lady Cantelupe, or yourself taking the responsibility of informing the authorities, you set about deceiving the household with the statement that Lord Cantelupe had left suddenly for Washington. Was there a word of truth in that?”

“No – there wasn’t.” Diamond had turned pale. “I might as well tell you the facts, I suppose. There’s no point in keeping dark about something you’ll learn as soon as you contact Cantelupe’s lab.”

“That might be called self-evident.” Appleby was unsmiling.

“Oddly enough, Lady Cantelupe doesn’t know herself – yet. Nothing I mean, specific. But she’d guessed, you know, what the picture was in general terms. That’s why she’s kept quiet for a week, hoping for the best. Hoping, you might say, for the return of the prodigal.” Diamond paused, frowning. “My God,” he said, “a thing like this turns even one’s language dead common.”

“No doubt. But it’s a point, if I may say so, of a very minor interest. Will you get on with what you have to say?”

“It’s simply that there’s a girl that’s cleared off too, and from Cantelupe’s lab. A secretary who works for him. Marian something. Marian Page. It happened on Monday. That was three days before Cantelupe vanished in his turn. Or rather the lab got a telephone message on the Monday, saying that this girl Page was ill. I believe there ought to be some sort of doctor’s certificate within a week, but I should think they’re only beginning to make inquiries about her now. The reason why I have this information is very simple. I don’t know the girl, and I don’t think I’ve ever set eyes on her. But as she works for Cantelupe there, I’ve spoken to her on the telephone from time to time. I tried to get her on the Thursday afternoon, as soon as I heard about the queer way Cantelupe had walked out of this house. They said she’d been away sick since the Monday. They also said Cantelupe himself wasn’t about. And at that I rang off and did a little thinking.”

“Did you, indeed? Well, it’s what I’m doing myself.” And Appleby gave the young man a long, straight look. “Suppose these two absences, or disappearances, actually to have been connected. Suppose, to put it bluntly, that Lord Cantelupe and this Miss Page had gone off together in the reckless pursuit of an intrigue. Do you consider that you had the faintest right to treat it as a purely private matter, to be kept quiet about in the interest of avoiding scandal and so forth?”

“I’d a strong suspicion that Cantelupe had involved himself in similar indiscretions before – and without the slightest repercussions on his work, or his loyalty, or anything like that.”

“Very well, Mr Diamond. Now take the mere supposition itself – the supposition that Cantelupe’s disappearance and this girl’s absence from work
were
related. Isn’t it extremely arbitrary?”

“There’s this reason why it isn’t: Cantelupe’s relationship with the girl wasn’t a straightforward professional one. For instance, he’s got her photograph in this room – there, on the mantelpiece.”

The room was entirely lined with books, but over the fireplace there was a large mirror. Against this half-a-dozen unframed photographs were perched. Appleby walked over to them. “This middle one?” he asked – and saw in the mirror Diamond nod his head.

Appleby picked up the photograph, looked at it for a moment, and then turned and walked back with it to the middle of the room. He laid it on a table. “A good-looking girl,” he said impassively – and suddenly added: “Where’s the cupboard?”

“The cupboard?” For a moment Diamond was bewildered. Then he walked to a section of the bookshelves and gave a tug. “I suppose you mean this. It’s one of those concealed affairs behind dummy books. Doesn’t spoil the symmetry of the room. But I can’t think–”

“Never mind.” Appleby stepped inside the small square space and spent a couple of minutes making a careful inspection. “Miss Page,” he asked when he emerged, “never came and worked here? This library has a lot of office stuff: filing-cabinets, tape-recorder, those desk telephones, that typewriter. Yet you say Cantelupe never did any of his real work in the place?”

“Never.” Diamond had looked startled. “And if the girl ever turned up here, it was without my knowing it.”

“And you say you never set eyes on her?”

“Never.”

“Then how do you know that this is her photograph?”

Diamond laughed a shade contemptuously. “I know because she’s written on the back of the thing.”

Appleby turned the photograph over. Pencilled in a neat script were the words:
Lord Cantelupe from Marian P
. Appleby looked at them thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “it’s perfectly decorous.”

Diamond laughed again – this time more easily. “It’s certainly discreet. But, even so, it’s a bit out of the way. Secretaries don’t commonly give a nice photograph of themselves to the boss.”

“Does Lady Cantelupe know Miss Page, would you say?”

“I haven’t the slightest reason to suppose so. Incidentally, she makes a point of never coming in here – which may explain Cantelupe’s sticking up the girl’s photograph in this casual way.”

“Then it won’t perhaps be tactful to give Lady Cantelupe a receipt for it.” And Appleby picked up the photograph of Marian Page. “But you can be a witness that I’m making off with it. And now I must go and make some inquiries elsewhere.”

Diamond seemed surprised that their interview was over. “Well,” he said – and his voice was ever so slightly jaunty – “I hope you’ve learned something here for a start.”

“As a matter of fact I have. Quite a lot. Good morning.”

Late that evening, as the two men dined together, the Minister listened moodily to Appleby’s account of his investigations during the day. “And the girl – this Marian Page?” he asked.

“She has certainly disappeared. The lab got a telephone message on the Monday, saying that she was unwell and would be away some days. And her landlady got a similar message that afternoon, saying that Miss Page had heard that her mother was dangerously ill, and had gone at once to join her in the country. I’ve checked that the message was false. Miss Page’s mother is quite well.”

“People seem to have been a bit casual about the girl. Do you think it sounds like her running away with Cantelupe? I don’t.”

Appleby shook his head. “I don’t believe it for a moment. And I don’t believe that he shoved her, or any girl, into a cupboard. It’s not the way that a man like Cantelupe makes an ass of himself. And what is suggested to me by the manner in which he left his house is something quite different.”

“Different?” The Minister waited for a moment. And when Appleby said nothing he added: “But there was that photograph.”

“There was indeed. It told me quite a lot. For one thing, I recognised it. I’d seen the girl – and with Cantelupe.”

“Good lord!”

“It was about a month ago. I didn’t recognise Cantelupe at the time, but I’ve checked up on my memory since. It was in a rather smart restaurant to which I’d taken my wife. Cantelupe was giving the girl dinner.”

“I see. And what was she like?”

Appleby drained his tankard. “She was all right.”

“You mean–?”

“It was a clear case, on its own high level, of the boss having infatuated himself with a girl about the place. She was handling it as well as she could. I expect she liked her job rather more than she liked him. A capable girl of strong character, I’d say.”

The Minister considered. “That would explain the photograph, and its decidedly temperate inscription.”

“Ah – the inscription. That introduces something else. In fact, the villain.”

“The villain, my dear Appleby?”

“Just that. In tragic life, God wot, no villain need be. But this isn’t tragic life, Minister – or if it is, it’s criminal investigation as well. That photograph, you know, was leaning against a mirror. When I took it up, I saw the reflection of the back. It was blank. But Diamond realised he had made a slip in claiming to be able to identify the thing, and when I was examining the cupboard, he supplied that neat pencilled script himself.”

“Well, well!” The Minister had to make some effort to take this in his stride. “Would you say, then, that there was some intrigue between Diamond and the girl?”

Appleby shook his head impatiently. “No. Consider the sequence of events. Cantelupe, who is impressionable in ways that his wife has learned to discount, starts up this middle-aged man’s passion for Miss Page. He turns worried and nervous – which is a normal reaction to such a situation. On Monday Miss Page vanishes, to the accompaniment of those bogus telephone messages. On Tuesday morning Cantelupe goes out and makes a mysterious purchase. That afternoon there is the even more mysterious incident reported by Butt. Cantelupe’s worry then turns to desperation, and on Thursday he disappears too. And you remember
how
he disappears?”

The Minister nodded. “He walks out of his house, and straight past his own waiting car and chauffeur.”

“Precisely. It’s not how a man in Cantelupe’s position goes off for a lark – or even upon some serious resolution to make a complete break with his whole past life. It bears quite another character – and one, I suppose, that is sufficiently obvious.”

“Nervous breakdown?”

“Just that. Or what they call, technically, hysterical fugue. Complete loss of memory, and disappearance into the blue.”

The Minister considered for a moment. “When a chap goes right round the bend in that way, isn’t he pretty quickly picked up?”

“Not always. Sometimes he behaves with a sort of unconscious cunning that defeats even an active hunt for days or weeks. Thanks to Lady Cantelupe’s delay – and the obscure and sinister role of Diamond – there’s been no hunt for Cantelupe until today.”

“Oughtn’t this Diamond fellow to be locked up – or at least be made to give some account of himself?” The Minister had a recurrence of his mildly sardonic manner. “It’s generally regarded as the right line with villains.”

But Appleby shook his head. “If I’m right in the way I see this case,” he said gravely, “then the last thing we want do is to alarm Charles Diamond.”

Every newspaper next morning carried the story of Lord Cantelupe’s disappearance. He was described as having been missing for several days. Scotland Yard believed that he was suffering from loss of memory. Importance was attached to reports that a man answering to his description had been seen in Cambridge, behaving in a dazed manner that had attracted attention. Lord Cantelupe was a Cambridge graduate, and it was thought that he might have returned to familiar ground. The police were conducting an intensive search both in the city and the surrounding countryside.

It was in tones of considerable impatience that the Minister spoke to Appleby on the telephone shortly after breakfast. For one thing, there had been some delay in getting him through.

“Look here, Appleby, did that news have to break like that? And how did the papers get on to it?”

“I put it out myself. You don’t disapprove?” Over the wire, Appleby’s voice sounded flat and tired.

“My dear fellow, you’re a pretty sound judge. And it’s good that we’ve got that line on Cambridge. But need
that
have gone out? There may be less virtuously disposed people than ourselves after him, remember.”

“There certainly may. But I don’t think there’s any extra danger in what we’ve done.” Appleby’s voice paused. “I think, Minister, you’d better come round and see me.”

“
I
come round and see
you
?” The Minister was startled. “At New Scotland Yard?”

“No, no. I’m in Cantelupe’s library. They got you through to me here. I think you’ll be – well, interested.”

“I’ll take your word for that. Give me ten minutes.” And the Minister slapped down the receiver.

There were two uniformed inspectors in the book-lined room. The Minister gave them a nod and then turned at once to Appleby. “Well, here I am. What about that fellow Diamond? I’m still uneasy at his being loose. Where is he?”

“Not in this house – where I think he’s ceased taking his duties very seriously. I rather hope that he’s in Cambridge by this time.”

The Minister stared. “You mean that’s all rot?”

“Certainly. No more than an attempt at a little diversionary action. We still haven’t a notion about Cantelupe’s whereabouts. All we’ve got is his overcoat.”

“And how on earth–”

“On Thursday evening he dined by himself in the very restaurant in which my wife and I saw him entertaining Miss Page. The head waiter thought he looked queer. And when he left he forgot his coat. And in the pocket there was
that
.” Appleby picked up from a table beside him a small cigar-box. “Inside which there was this.” He opened the box. It contained a broad, flat spool of metal ribbon. “The sequence is clear. Cantelupe received this by post on Tuesday morning. He didn’t, here at home, have the machine to play it back on–”