A Night of Errors (28 page)

‘Morris,’ said Appleby seriously, ‘you’ve seen your way far into this affair. Please remember that I think you did uncommonly well. Good night.’

‘A safety-razor?’ said Mr Greengrave. ‘Dear me, yes. If you will–’

Hyland appeared behind his host. He had changed his uniform and seemed to sparkle all over. ‘Hullo, Appleby,’ he called jovially, ‘how are you? Our excellent friend the dentist–’

‘What Appleby wants is a barber, my dear Inspector. And at least I can provide the implements, though not the man. Come upstairs. Perhaps you would care for a bath? There is ample hot water, I am glad to say – which is not always the way with us in summer. Hyland and I were about to sit down, but a bachelor meal can very well wait.’ Mr Greengrave was full of cheerful bustle. ‘Nothing but cold duck and a salad.’ He hesitated. ‘A Khaki Campbell, if the truth must be told. I hope it will not be felt to lend too macabre a touch to our meal. There are new blades in this little box. And this towel, I am thankful to find, is large, dry and warm. The fact is, I have an excellent housekeeper. Unfortunately I have discovered that she holds
séances
in her sitting-room. For a clergyman, it makes rather a delicate situation. I had meant to consult my friend Canon Newton on the matter last night, but it went quite out of my mind.’

When Appleby came downstairs the two men were drinking sherry in the vicar’s dining-room. Hyland set down his glass. ‘Very odd,’ he said, ‘that guess of yours about fire down below. For as a matter of fact–’

‘No, no – this will not do at all.’ Mr Greengrave urbanely interposed. ‘The Dromio affair has been very shocking – very shocking indeed. It is no good concomitant of appetite. Pray, therefore, let us converse of indifferent matters as we dine. And afterwards we may talk it out. I would have you notice the little centrepiece with the roses. Connoisseurship in such matters far be it from me to claim. But I am told that it is by Claus of Innsbruck. The sea-horse is judged rather better than the Neptune.’

And thus, as if he were veritably the golden-tongued Canon Newton himself, did Mr Greengrave conduct matters to the end of the meal. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘let us draw our chairs to the window, for the evening is again mild. The Inspector, I believe’ – and he glanced with a faint irony from Hyland to Appleby – ‘has a good deal to tell.’

‘Far from it.’ Hyland stuffed his pipe. ‘There is really not a great deal to say. For, after all, we were pretty far on the road to a solution of the matter before Appleby left us. But the queer way Sir Oliver died in the end – well, it deserves rather more narrative skill than I can bring to it.

‘We owe a great deal to Appleby.’ Hyland, as he made this announcement to Mr Greengrave, nodded his head emphatically, rather as if to give a courtesy statement all the weight that could be contrived. ‘In point of psychology, you know – the dead man’s psychological type.’

Mr Greengrave passed a decanter of port. ‘You interest me,’ he said.

‘This business of plunging down from a height into a final sea of fire. He was compelled to do that. And Appleby foretold it. Now, that is a remarkable achievement – a very remarkable achievement indeed.’ He paused. ‘Of course, a great deal of that sort of thing is common knowledge nowadays.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Greengrave.

‘When Sir Oliver went mad certain of his dominant character-traits became massively emphasized. One of these was ambition.’

‘Um,’ said Mr Greengrave.

Appleby poured himself port.

‘The crime was ambitious – very ambitious.’ Hyland shook his head. ‘I was to be taken in.’

Appleby set down the decanter and looked at his colleague with a good deal of pleasure. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is very true.’

‘In the cleverness it attempted it was a sort of megalomaniac crime, revealing Sir Oliver’s desire to out-top his fellows. It revealed what you might call a wild criminal ambition. In other words he was a prey to those criminal types of ambition which cannot normally be admitted to consciousness. And what goes along with such repressed ambitions?’ Hyland paused dramatically. ‘An obsession with, and dread of, heights. That dictated the nature of his final exhibitionistic act. That was why he made for the quarry.’

‘The quarry?’ said Appleby. ‘Do you know, I thought it would be some sort of industrial plant – a blast-furnace, or something of that sort, not easy to come by in this part of the country. But a quarry was a simple solution enough.’

‘We don’t yet know how many places he contrived to fire. But he appears to have moved in a circle, and this quarry where he was finally run to earth shortly after midday is not a dozen miles from here. It has been disused for a great many years – something like a great concave cliff of sheer stone, pointing due south. At this time of year it was a vast oven, with the base of it a jungle of parched bracken. He fired that.

‘Always before this he had been off in the car he had, and so rapidly that there was no catching him. But this time he was caught – caught, I mean, by his own infernal imagination.

‘I wasn’t there – but I think I can pretty well see the scene. Here was his latest achievement in incendiarism – in pyromania – and above it towered this sheer face of stone. He skirted the quarry and climbed to the top, so that he was looking down at this sea of fire of his own contriving. Fire down below.’

Hyland paused to gulp port in a fashion that Canon Newton could not but have condemned. ‘And presently there was quite a crowd down below too. For the blaze was a tremendous one, and by this time the whole countryside knew what was menacing them. He stood up there and danced, it seems, like a maniac, with the smoke beginning to rise round about him like an enveloping curtain. There was some difficulty in getting up after him – or it may have been that folk were simply a bit scared. But it was known that he was Sir Oliver Dromio, stark raving mad and with more than one murder on his hands, and some fellow who had a gun took a shot at him. Very irregular, of course, but I should be sorry to run him in, all the same. And that sent him madder than before. He danced and he sang, and he laughed that laugh we all of us heard. The fire was terrific by this time; often he was invisible behind the smoke of it and he could have got away again easily enough. But he didn’t – and then it was all over in a flash. His last peal of laughter broke off in the middle, and a moment later his body was seen hurtling down the face of the cliff and into the fire. They fought the blaze for over two hours before they could get near him. He wasn’t much more than bones – and most of them were broken. That was the end of Sir Oliver Dromio.’

‘Really
Sir Oliver Dromio?’ Mr Greengrave as he asked this question looked very acute.

‘But of course!’ Hyland was triumphant. ‘The moment that the body could he hauled out we had that dentist on the spot. And he made no bones about it. The teeth were those of the man whom he had attended as Sir Oliver Dromio over a long period of years.’ Hyland turned to Appleby. ‘I hope you will admit the conclusive nature of such evidence?’

‘Certainly. The body is undoubtedly Sir Oliver Dromio’s. And now it only remains for you to sum up the whole story and show us how your explanation covers all the known facts. I think there was a time when you felt there were rather a lot of facts – far more than was comfortable, indeed.’

‘That’s true enough. But it’s wonderful how they all fit in. So let me begin at the beginning and run through the whole affair as it has now discovered itself. A very nice port, if I may say so, sir.’ And Hyland reached for the decanter.

‘The first fact is the controlling one. Sir Oliver Dromio was in a pretty tight place financially, and he had been making a desperate bid to extricate himself by marrying an American heiress. I think we must suppose that he had failed to bring this off.’

Appleby set down his glass. ‘Isn’t it a wee bit early for suppositions?’ he asked. ‘The point, you know, is uncommonly important. For if he did have the heiress in the bag–’

‘Quite so. The financial motive would vanish. But there is another which might be equally powerful. The man was a blackguard. He had been blackmailing Mrs Gollifer – and just how badly he treated his foster-sister Lucy we don’t know. Nothing is more likely than that such a bad hat was facing one or another major disaster. And it occurs to me that some thing of the sort may have got itself bound up with the matter of the American heiress. Suppose she had trustees or other advisors who succeeded in demanding an enquiry into Sir Oliver’s financial position. And suppose that Sir Oliver, whether in conspiracy with Sebastian or otherwise, had been getting large sums of money in an improper way out of the firm. That would give us what we need – an absolute fix straight ahead of him.

‘At this juncture he learnt about the existence of his brothers – and of course here would be the threat of further financial investigation. So he brings one of them over to England and then secretly down to Sherris, with his plan probably already forming in his mind. He will get out of his difficulties simply by vanishing – to the solace, no doubt, of some small reserve of capital which he has hidden away. But he will leave his own body behind him!

‘So down these two come, and Swindle is instructed to make possible an unobtrusive entrance. Sir Oliver sees that his brother will pass very well for himself – at least for a time and in the first shock of a sensational discovery. So he kills him and changes clothes – and the effect, he sees, is excellent. And then to his horror he spots something he hadn’t thought of. This long-lost brother of his, having been some sort of manual worker, has hands which nobody could mistake for those of Sir Oliver Dromio. He must find some resource, however desperate – so he lights the fire and thrust the dead man’s arms into the flames. But now there is another difficulty. Discovery must not be left too late or identification may be impossible. So he waits for what he judges to be the right moment, and then attracts the attention of the household by hurling the tantalus with a crash across the room. And at that he makes his escape.

‘His plan, however, is by no means completed, for he realizes that there may still be risk of correct identification. So he collects petrol, waits his opportunity, and presently contrives to send the study – and indeed the whole house – up in flames. Now, what, we may ask ourselves, is the position at this point?

‘It is really, when you come to think of it, a very pretty one. Sir Oliver Dromio is believed to have been murdered in his own study and subsequently to have been burnt to ashes. Investigation will quickly reveal him as having travelled here with an unknown man, and further investigation will almost certainly uncover the fact that this unknown man was his brother. Such a brother, newly apprised of the breeding and position of which he had been cheated, might well be a resentful and dangerous man, and there will be a strong case for supposing him the murderer. Even the fire will count here, for fire first deprived that brother of his just position, and with fire it might well have pleased him to crown his own deed. The hunt, then, will be for this brother as the murderer of Sir Oliver Dromio. But he will never be found. Because, of course, he is already dead, and it is his body that we have taken for Sir Oliver’s. For Sir Oliver nobody is going to hunt, since we believe that we have nothing to do but make arrangements for his funeral.’

Hyland paused for a moment, a frown of concentration on his face. Mr Greengrave leant forward. ‘Sir Oliver, then, in planning this diabolically clever crime, failed to think of the dentist?’

‘Of course he did.’ Hyland was slightly impatient. ‘But now other events are transacting themselves in such a way as enormously to increase the apparent complexity of our problem. Mrs Gollifer has confessed that she is Lucy Dromio’s mother, and that she has been blackmailed by Sir Oliver. And Geoffrey Gollifer almost simultaneously discovers this and hurries to Sherris. Exactly what he witnesses we cannot, until we find him, tell. But he accepts what everybody is designed to accept – namely, that Sir Oliver Dromio has been murdered, and he knows that his mother, and perhaps Lucy whom he loves, had the strongest motives for some crime of passion against the supposed dead man. Hence the most disconcerting feature of the whole affair – Geoffrey Gollifer’s attempt to shield them by taking the crime upon himself. Perhaps he meant to kill Sir Oliver; and feels that true justice requires him to accept responsibility for the actual killing. When he hears that it is
not
Sir Oliver who has been killed he simply loses his nerve and makes a bolt for it… And now we come to the queerest fact of all. Sir Oliver heard too.’

Mr Greengrave again leant forward. ‘
Sir Oliver
heard?’ he asked.

‘Well, I can’t be quite sure. The certain fact is this – that Sir Oliver, hitherto contriving a brilliant if crazy crime of calculation, suddenly goes off his head. One gathers it is just what his father did. Of course, it may have been the mere uncontrollable excitement of the affair. But I fancy that he was still lurking near, and that he quickly learnt what had become common knowledge in the household – namely, our discovery that the body was
not
Sir Oliver’s, and that some deception had been attempted. In fact, Sir Oliver’s plan had failed, failure drove him crazy, he made his sensational appearance at the crisis of the fire, tore about the country firing things at random, and eventually made a spectacular end of it all in that quarry.’

There was a short silence. Mr Greengrave turned to Appleby. ‘And what,’ he asked, ‘do you think of that?’

‘It is very good – very good, indeed. Only it does leave one or two things out.’

Hyland made an impatient gesture. ‘Of course it leaves things out. Grubb, for instance. But we know approximately where he came in, and precisely what prompted Sebastian Dromio to kill him.’

Appleby shook his head. ‘I’m thinking of other things your narrative leaves out. Smaller things.’

‘Oh, certainly – to be sure.’ Hyland was relieved. ‘A good many details remain to be filled in.’

Again Appleby shook his head. It might almost have been supposed that he was embarrassed. ‘That’s not quite it,’ he said. ‘It’s rather that your whole reconstruction needs dismantling and fresh disposition on a different basis. Some quite big things must be brought in – like the tramp. And some quite little ones – like Sir Oliver Dromio’s vanity – what I have called his fastidiousness in the matter of ties… Still, you have got the case to one very definite point.’ Appleby paused. ‘But it’s the point to which the criminal designed that you should get it.’