Appleby And Honeybath (20 page)

‘A couple of sunny days,’ Judith said, ‘and there will be daffodils in no time. You ought to stay for that.’

This conventional remark, designed to divert Magda from uttering inappropriate criticism of her husband, was of no effect.

‘And yet he’s pleased with himself as well,’ Magda went on. ‘And talking about getting a Mercedes. With Eton not all that far off! It’s crazy. Was Sir John at Eton?’

‘He was at rather a good grammar school – level pegging with Eton, more or less. If you want an Etonian, there’s Charles Honeybath. Much of a muchness with John, wouldn’t you say? Two comfortable old gentlemen – just a little discomposed by what you call this dead man thing.’

‘I suppose my father ought to be a comfortable old gentleman too. But he never seems quite to manage it. All that bluff cheer, and hullabaloo about hounds. It’s not quite all of him. A bit bewildered, don’t you think? Wondering how to make do in this unaccountable day and age.’

‘Yesterday was certainly not without its unaccountable element. But I have a feeling it’s going to be cleared up.’

‘I’m sure I hope so, Judith. At least I
hope
I hope so. I can’t think why, but it all strikes me as rather frightening.’

‘I don’t know why it should.’ Judith looked curiously at Magda Tancock. ‘A general malaise, perhaps, extending from your father to Demetrius and Florinda. With the exception, perhaps, of Burrow. Burrow is imperturbable. It’s a
sine qua non
with butlers, and taken for granted even in advertisements. “Wanted, an imperturbable butler”. One never sees that.’

Judith offered this nonsense by way of cheering Magda up. The young woman did have a harassed air. Perhaps her husband drank, or had a vexatious habit of pestering maidservants in corridors. Or perhaps it was just that Demetrius and Florinda were not really artistically endowed, and she knew it.

‘And there
is
Giles,’ Magda said, ‘and coming this way. I expect he has a bad conscience about refusing to join in that stupid French cricket. And he has that nasty Hillam with him. Why does my mother ask such awful people down? That awful Mustard woman, for instance. A failed actress.’

‘Is that what Mrs Mustard is?’

‘It seems so. Burrow told me. Burrow knows everything. Long ago, she was in a play called
The Spook Sonata
. Have you ever heard of it?’

‘Yes. It’s by a gloomy Swede.’

‘It sounds like a squalid vegetable. Anyway, the play has a ghost in it, as you’d expect. And it made the woman lose her nerve, so that she never went on stage again, but took to ghosts and things on her own account. Or so Burrow thinks. It’s extraordinary how much Burrow thinks. Not that it prevents him from being reasonably competent. Of course he picked up his job from his father. Nobody could pick up a job from mine.’

At this point Magda’s husband and Hillam came up with the ladies. They had, Judith thought, a conspiratorial air. Or perhaps it wasn’t quite that. Perhaps it was a kind of mutual suspicion that was between them. Probably Rosencrantz and Guildenstern distrusted one another quite a lot. So both interpretations were possible.

‘Good morning,’ Judith said, not having seen either of the men at breakfast. ‘Magda thinks that mystery is bad for the children’s French cricket. So I’ve been telling her things are clearing up.’

‘Not before time,’ Giles Tancock said. ‘Do you know, there are still policemen lurking around? All night, I suppose. And here still. Unobtrusively, and all that. But there they are, watching everybody’s every movement. If one walked down to the village to buy a packet of cigarettes, they’d be strolling idly after you.’

‘It can’t go on for long,’ Judith said – and succumbed to an impulse to venture (observantly) a little out on a limb. ‘They’ve found the body, you know.’

‘Found the body!’ Hillam repeated with unnecessary vehemence. ‘All nonsense. There isn’t a body. It was simply that the old dotard Honey…’

‘Mr Hillam,’ Judith said mildly.

‘Oh, very well. Let there be a body.’ Hillam now simply sulked. ‘I don’t give a damn.’

‘And just where, Lady Appleby, have they found the body?’ Tancock, so worried according to his wife, appeared entirely cool. ‘Hauled up into an attic?’

‘Somewhere in the churchyard, it seems. Among piles of bones.’ Judith had added this a shade inventively. ‘But quite blamelessly dead. The throat definitely not slit from ear to ear.’

‘Judith, how can you be so horrid!’ Magda exclaimed. ‘I’m sure your husband would be quite cross with you.’

‘Probably he would – and Mr Denver as well. But I don’t think anybody can put a foot seriously wrong, any more. Over the years, I’ve developed a kind of instinct in these matters. A kind of sense of smell, you know, directed upon John and his ways.’

‘
Really, Judith!
’ Magda Tancock was yet further outraged. She appeared to feel that there had been something positively coarse in this last remark. But Judith was unabashed.

‘I’m just relieving your minds,’ she said, ‘by assuring you that it will all be sewn up in the course of the day. Giles, Mr Hillam: no need to fret. No need at all.’

This impromptu incursion into nerve-war on Judith’s part was not without result. Hallam Hillam had gone pale, and even looked as if he were not quite in control of his knees. And Tancock was by no means unshaken, although this showed itself in the main only in a sharpened glance and a compression of the lips.

‘And another thing,’ Judith added comfortingly. ‘The dead man proves to be no relation – or even, I think, friend – of anybody at Grinton. His presence here remains a little mysterious, of course, but his identity is quite clear. An American, it seems, and with an academic background. A Professor Hagberg. It’s conceivable – wouldn’t you say? – that he was here on some professional occasion. But we’ll soon know about that too.’

While this curious
conversazione
was going on in the garden, Charles Honeybath was engaged tête-à-tête
with his host. Despite the alarms of the day and night, it seemed to him discourteous entirely to ignore what must be regarded as the more agreeable side of his visit to Grinton. He found Terence in a cubbyhole called the gunroom, engaged in what was obviously rather gloomy talk with a couple of superannuated hounds.

‘I hope,’ Honeybath said, ‘we needn’t let these recent troubles drive other matters entirely out of our heads. I need hardly say that I’m very keen to get on with my job.’

‘Your job?’ As he said this, Terence glanced round the walls of the room much as if he took his visitor for an itinerant gunsmith whose services he was being solicited to retain. Then recollection came to him. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘My dear fellow, yes of course.’ Evincing by this form of words a restored sense of perfect social equality as subsisting between Honeybath and himself, Terence continued in a similarly gracious vein. ‘Any day,’ he said. ‘I can give you any day you choose.’

‘I’m afraid it must take rather more than a day.’ Having ceased to view Honeybath as a gunsmith, Terence was clearly thinking of him as a superior sort of photographer. ‘I shall want to make several sketches, for a start. And the hunting kit may be a little tricky. I could, of course, save you a bit of time by setting up a manikin, but it’s something I never greatly care for.’

‘A manikin?’ Terence seemed to sense something derogatory in being in any way associated with such a creature or object. Then he sought clearer definition. ‘Kind of scarecrow, eh?’

‘Then there’s the question of a setting.’ Honeybath judged it useless to pursue scarecrows and manikins further.

‘By jove, yes!’ Full recollection now came to Terence. ‘And you suggested the library. Extraordinary notion. Bloody bane of my life, that place has become. I ought never to have listened to him. But he was so damned persuasive. Lucky dip idea. More like needles in haystacks, if you ask me. And that son-in-law of mine. Thinks I’m blind as a bat. Peanuts – or so I supposed, and didn’t care to make a fuss. Magda wouldn’t like it – and quite likely Dolly neither. But this fellow swore it was a Tom Tiddler’s ground. And now corpses and constables all over the place. It confuses a man. Truth is, Honeychurch my dear chap, my mind hasn’t quite the absolute clarity it used to have.’ Terence glanced at his watch. ‘But do you know? Not too early for a gin and it.’

Honeybath declined this invitation (as he took it to be) and wondered whether he could venture to paint the pink-coated Terence Grinton Esquire with a wine glass of moderate size innocently in his hand. He was conscious that he had been listening to a rambling speech fragments of which, at least, were not wholly unintelligible. Perhaps he ought to hurry off and report them to Appleby. Perhaps he ought even to record that Terence had addressed him by that outlandish name of Honeychurch. Freud, after all, had shown that such slips of the tongue may be highly significant.

But Honeybath thought better of this. A coherent account of incoherence (as Freud, again, must have found) is an intellectual feat of some difficulty. And hadn’t Appleby already tumbled to the entire Grinton bag of tricks? Honeybath suspected that he had.

‘Coffee is served in the library, madam.’

These astonishing words were uttered in a loud voice by Burrow at the end of luncheon. It may be said that two distinct astonishments inhered in them. Who ever heard of such an announcement being made in a private house at the end of a meal? And who could have dreamed of Terence Grinton’s
bête noire
or White Elephant being designated for such a use?

Dolly Grinton, who had been presiding at the head of her table with her usual bright manners or mannerisms, could only suppose that Burrow had taken leave of his senses, and fear that Terence would instantly do that too. But it is essential – above all things it is essential – not to let one’s husband’s butler down. To reprove, or even ignore, Burrow was inconceivable. So Dolly gathered the glances of her family and guests, and charmingly exclaimed, ‘Shall we all go through?’

They all went through: Mr and Mrs Grinton, Sir John and Lady Appleby, Mr and Mrs Tancock, Master Tancock and Miss Tancock, Miss Arne, Mrs Mustard, Mr Honeybath, Mr Hillam – and the summoning Burrow as well. They crossed the hall, walked down the long corridor, and entered the library – some achieving or affecting unconcerned chat, others silent and wondering.

And now there was something further to wonder at. Not the waiting presence of Inspector Denver (everybody might dimly have expected that), but the staggering fact that in the enormous and heraldically embellished fireplace a very sizeable fire was burning. It was a thing perfectly rational in itself; the library was by nature a chilly place, and the day remained rather chilly too; a little more warmth than small cups of coffee could generate was a thoughtful and agreeable measure. But decades, generations, conceivably even centuries had elapsed since anything of the kind was on view. So for some moments nobody had eyes for anything else.

But now another and almost equally remarkable circumstance was to be observed. The dummy door – the dummy door through which Honeybath and Appleby had passed less than twenty-four hours before – was open, uncertainly revealing the incongruously menial regions beyond. But so, too, was another dummy door, sited with a precise and wholly eighteenth-century symmetry in relation to the first. Yet the doors were not replicas the one of the other. What might be termed the Honeybath/Appleby door was masked – it will be recalled – by the mere spines of non-existent books. The new door (although inaccurately to be so designated, since indubitably coeval with its fellow) consisted of real bookshelves supporting real books. Its construction – although by no means without precedent in similar august chambers elsewhere – evidenced considerable engineering skill on the part of the Jacobitical James Gibbs. What manner of contraption fabricated in the nineteen-eighties, it might well have been asked, is likely to be found in working order more than two hundred years on? But then James Gibbs was an ornament of his time; numerous learned monographs have been devoted to him; his working drawings are treasured in sundry public repositories devoted to the history of architecture.

Behind this notable aperture, however, lay only a small spectacle partaking of the nature of anticlimax. Everything on view lay within the depth of the circumambient wall; a few shelves, a few shallow drawers, an untidy jumble of small portfolios. Who would have thought (except, of course, the reader) that here stood revealed the very
locus arcanus
of the Grinton mystery?

‘Everybody will be glad to know,’ Appleby said blandly as he put down his coffee cup, ‘that Mr Denver, of the County Constabulary, acting with remarkable celerity, has now cleared up the difficulties arising at Grinton yesterday. Rather than embark upon explanations himself, however, he has asked me to say a word or two about the circumstances. This is because he is by no means certain that the police have any standing in the affair, and is reluctant to speak in any fashion that might seem to prejudice the official situation. May I ask, for a start, if anybody has anything to say about that?’

Nobody had – and it would not have been easy, indeed, to know how to tackle this essay in confident mystification.

‘Mr Grinton’s family,’ Appleby went on, ‘is fully represented here – as it ought to be when we are considering what is essentially a family concern. As for the venue, it has occurred to Mr Grinton and myself that this beautiful library is the right place, since matters must arise in which a view of its precise layout will be advantageous to a ready comprehension of one or two matters I must mention.’

Appleby paused on this, as if to hint that there was no particular need for haste in achieving the small elucidation before him. For a moment it seemed that Terence Grinton was prompted to speech – probably to deny that anything had occurred to him at all. He looked searchingly around the room instead, perhaps in the hope of discovering that Burrow had thought to back up the coffee with a supply of brandy. Burrow, however, was merely circling the company with a salver from which more coffee, cream and sugar were on offer. Having accomplished this, he took up an unobtrusive station at the rear of the assembly, after the fashion in which functionaries of his order resign themselves to sitting out (or standing out) the eloquence traditionally following upon a banquet.