A Connoisseur's Case (2 page)

‘I expect the fellow who got Chambers to run up Scroop House for him had a hand in making the canal as well. There was often local money in these affairs. And it sounds as if he must have dropped some. Perhaps that's why the house looks a bit bleak.'

Judith shook her head.

‘They're often like that at that period. Ashlar faced with plaster, and with just a few architectural features in dressed stone. They put their money into really lavish decoration of the interior. It was all part of the social set-up. Outsiders didn't get much change from you. But you did your fellow insiders proud.' Judith paused to climb a stile. ‘And that' – she added, not very logically – ‘is why we're going to be insiders ourselves.'

‘I think that we ought at least to see the tunnel first. It will provide something to talk about over the cake and Madeira.'

‘Very well.' Judith had seized upon this false move instantly. ‘There's a pub at this end of it, so we can get a drink with our lunch. And here's the canal.' She glanced at the map again. ‘The pub's about two miles on. We follow the towpath.'

This wasn't too easy. The path was much overgrown with bramble and brier; there were places in which it had almost crumbled away; and recent rain had made it slippery underfoot.

‘Country folk,' Appleby said, ‘seem to be following townspeople in giving up the use of their legs. Here's a perfectly good straight route from somewhere to somewhere else, but it's as completely unused as the canal is.'

Judith dropped on her hands and knees in order to crawl under a small thicket of blackthorn.

‘Any sort of wayfaring is out,' she said. ‘Take going to school. Parents who could remember perfectly well, if they tried, that walking there and back was the nicest part of the day, now feel that their children are being cheated of something if the local authority doesn't send round a bus. The kids are treated as if they were chronic invalids.'

‘But we are elderly folk, you know. Our attitude to these things is nostalgic and sentimental. Children straying down the lanes, trailing their satchels and splashing through the puddles and keeping an informed eye open for birds' nests, make a very pretty picture. But probably the young people themselves now prefer the bus. And what about the ploughman? Would you have him homeward plodding his weary way still, or would you allow him his motorbike?'

‘I'd admit that he's a special case. But think of the farmers. A lot of them live in dressy villas in the suburbs of country towns, and drive to work like stockbrokers. What could be more squalid than that?'

‘I expect they live that way because urged by their wives. But it's true that, as soon as you get away from picnic routes, the countryside has a more and more unfrequented air. Look at the solitude round us now. And the next building we come to is more likely to be a roofless cottage than not. A foreigner might suppose England to be in a terrible state of depopulation. And this abandoned canal adds to the effect powerfully enough.'

‘At least it's peaceful. So I suppose we oughtn't to complain.'

Appleby shook his head.

‘Peaceful? I'm not sure it isn't faintly sinister. Do you remember Dr Watson saying something about the country being peaceful and secure, and Sherlock Holmes coming back at him with talk of the horrors that the privacy of the rural life can conceal? I expect there's something in it. I've never found that a policeman's lot in London is a particularly happy one. But it's probably worse in Little Puddleton. Hullo, here's a lock.'

Although with every appearance of neglect and decay, the lock performed its essential function still. Its dark rectangle of water, filmed with green, was several feet higher than the level of the canal on the down-falling side.

‘They built these things pretty well for eternity,' Appleby said. ‘Look at those dressed stone sides. And what a tremendous invention a lock is! One of those utterly simple things it really takes a great brain to get round to. I expect they first thought of it in China.'

‘I think I've read that Leonardo da Vinci was a dab at the things. But perhaps he only cribbed them.' Judith began to walk along one of the gates as she spoke. ‘It doesn't just invite one to a dip.'

‘Then be careful, for pity's sake. That wood's slimy and treacherous.'

‘Nonsense!' Judith said. She increased the boldness of her advance.

‘Very well. But if you must fall in, be good enough to do it on the canal side. If you tumble into the lock, it's not very clear to me how I'm to haul you out. And plunging in to the rescue wouldn't help much, either. Two bloated bodies, floating face up, is what the next wayfarer might find to entertain him.'

‘Who'd be married to a policeman?' Judith did now make a rather careful retreat. ‘Your imagination has been shockingly conditioned by your long frequentation of the morgue. I think I'm rather hungry. Let's push on.'

They went forward as rapidly as the state of the towpath allowed. It was a still day in early summer, and as the little valley drew in around them they seemed to be cut off from the least murmur of sound. Only once or twice there was a
plop!
that sent Judith scanning the surface of the canal for the wake of a water rat. Scroop House was now well behind them, and Appleby wondered whether his wife might, by good fortune, forget about it. He had some hopes of the tunnel.

 

And the tunnel – or at least the entrance to it – certainly held a considerable impressiveness. The canal had simply to disappear into a low hill, much as a railway line might do. But the canal had been constructed in the eighteenth century, before such operations took on a merely functional air. The mouth of the tunnel, therefore, was an orifice handsomely framed in a wall of heavily rusticated stone, and even more handsomely embellished with caryatids, herms, cornucopias and a balustrade, while the classical expertness of those responsible for its construction was further attested by a Latin inscription of considerable length and fortunate illegibility.

‘It's much more ornate than Scroop House,' Judith said.

‘Much.' Appleby was disappointed by this train of thought.

‘I expect the owner will tell us about it all.'

‘The owner? Tell us about it?'

‘The man living at Scroop House will tell us about the canal.'

‘He probably knows nothing about it – or about any other local thing. He'll be a City gent, swathed in Old School ties and bogus rurality. And if you insist on making his acquaintance, he'll turn up on you inopportunely in London and ruin one of your gayest and cleverest artistic parties.'

Luckily, perhaps, Judith hadn't listened to this thrust. She was scrambling nearer to the mouth of the tunnel.

‘But it hasn't got a towpath!' she cried. ‘And they didn't have engines, did they? However did they get the barges through?'

‘Leggers.'

‘Leggers?'

‘Just that. Men who lay on their back on the decks and did the job with their feet. A kind of walking motion on the roof of the tunnel. They must have been pretty flat out by the time they'd done three miles. That's why there's a pub at the end of the tunnel. No doubt there's one at the other end too. By the way, I suppose there's
still
a pub? It didn't shut up shop when the last leggers departed? The idea doesn't bear thinking of. I need lager badly.'

But Judith wasn't alarmed by the possibility of drought. She was now peering into the darkness of the tunnel.

‘I wonder if one can go through?' she said. ‘You see, they haven't fenced it off in any way. That means it must be safe, don't you think?'

Privately, Appleby thought that it meant just that. But he wasn't sure that he ought to encourage Judith in thoughts of navigation. Not that there wasn't a certain enticingness in the idea, since an adventure of this character would surely sink Scroop House for good.

‘I don't see any craft,' he said. ‘But perhaps you could wade. I doubt whether you'd be up to your waist in the canal as it is now. Of course, there would be bats.'

‘I'm not afraid of bats.'

‘Of course not – or not in the open air. But you must remember them as rather uncomfortable companions in a dark room. A three-mile tunnel might be worse. Statistically, I'd say it was almost certain that one of them would get tangled in your hair.'

‘Very well.' Judith turned away, admitting defeat. ‘I shan't go – ever.'

Appleby laughed as they moved off in search of the pub.

‘I'm sure you won't,' he said. ‘Nor shall I.'

 

 

Although the last of the leggers must have found rest from his topsy-turvy labours many generations ago, the hostelry in which they had recruited themselves was still a going concern. The Applebys established themselves on a bench in the open air and unwrapped their sandwiches. Appleby went inside and returned with beer.

‘Did you ask about Scroop House?' Judith said.

‘Yes, I did.' Appleby knew very well that, had he failed to do so, he would have been sent back to make good the omission. ‘But the chap seems to know nothing about it. New to the place, he said. And he's not the old sort of innkeeper. RAF type, with a handlebar moustache specially grown to tell you so. Put in by the brewery company, I suppose, and not very pleased that he hasn't been given a superior little riverside hotel on the lower Thames.'

‘I could have told you that without going inside.'

‘Could you, indeed?' Appleby thought for a moment and then turned to glance at the door of the pub. There, as the law required, was a legend informing the world that David Channing-Kennedy was licensed to sell spirits, wines and tobacco. ‘You're quite right, of course. Truly rural innkeepers don't run to double-barrelled names any more than to that sort of whisker. I always said you ought to be a detective.'

‘Elementary, my dear–' Judith broke off and lowered her voice. ‘Look,' she said. ‘Here's somebody much more hopeful.'

This was certainly true. An old man had emerged from the door of the public bar, and was looking around him as if in search of a bench on which to sit. In one hand he was carrying something with care. His clothes, which were threadbare but decent, were not particularly rural. Indeed, there was something faintly foreign about them. But it was otherwise with his features. Browned and wizened, these were English and of the folk. But they had a certain fineness, too, and they had not lost sensitiveness in what now appeared to be almost extreme old age.

‘Good morning, sir. Good morning, madam.' The old man had touched a rather battered hat as he spoke. His speech, like his clothes, was distinguishably tinged with strangeness. And now, with his freehand, he made a slight gesture towards a bench a little way from that on which the Applebys sat. He was asking permission to sit down. But this was courtesy and not servility. It gave him, somehow, the air of stepping out of a past age – an age of gentle and simple, master and man.

‘Good morning,' Appleby said. ‘There's some real warmth in this sun.'

‘But you won't have found it too hot for walking. The season's yet a kindly one for that, sir.' The old man sat down, and set his burden carefully beside him. It revealed itself as a beautifully fashioned model of a canal barge – but battered and dusty, as if it had ceased to give anybody pleasure long ago. Judith got up and walked over to it. She had known at once that this was something that would give pleasure now.

‘What a lovely thing!' she said. ‘A barge seems rather common-place, when just glanced at. But your model isn't like that. Is it very old?'

‘Not older than myself, madam. For it was as a lad that I made it. Not overmuch skill had then come to me. And yet I like it well enough, and thank you for taking notice of it.'

‘And you've always had it?' Appleby asked. He had risen and strolled over too.

‘Nay – that I haven't. It was for the innkeeper's lass that I fashioned it, and with love-liking enough in the making. But was she Bess or was she Kate? That, now, I disremember – although I well remember the working of the wood. It's the craft that is long in this life, surely, and not how a boy's fancy is moved for a girl.' The old man was now dusting his barge with a clean but frayed and ancient handkerchief. ‘But the lass was careless of it, and set it straightway on tin chimney-piece in the public bar. So by that I knew she was not for me.'

‘But you didn't take back your love token?' Judith asked. Appleby could see that his wife was much impressed by this Thomas Hardy-like rural character. ‘You let it be?'

‘Yes, madam, I let it be. And there it rested, it seems, come many a year, while I myself was wandering. Yet some must have handled it – and let it fall too, which can't, in a public, be thought of as surprising. The rudder is broken, as you can see, and I'd best fashion a new one.'

‘Yes, I can see that. But have you the right sort of wood?'

‘There's always something in a man's pocket, madam, if his fancy is for work of that kind.' And at once the old man substantiated this claim by producing both a piece of wood and a pocket knife of the many-bladed variety. ‘Cedar, madam, will answer very well. And, by your leave, I'll begin straightway. For there's always hurt in the sight of a broken thing.'

‘But you haven't thought of mending it before now?' Appleby asked.

For a moment the old man seemed to hesitate, so that Appleby wondered whether he had been too curious. Then he spoke frankly enough.

‘It was but yesterday, sir, that I returned to these parts – my native parts, as you'll have gathered — on account of having a fancy to lay my bones here. Fifteen years I've been from home, working as a carpenter in the city of Spokane – which one of your knowledge won't fail to know is in the state of Washington, and as far across America as a man may travel.'