Appleby And Honeybath (22 page)

After this long speech, Appleby, very reasonably, paused to take breath. This gave Mrs Mustard, hitherto silent, an opportunity to participate in the discussion.

‘
Woe!
’ Mrs Mustard cried aloud. ‘
Woe to profane inquirers into forbidden things!
’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Appleby said. ‘A good deal of discomfort is likely to result. And I must apologize for the tedium of this preliminary exposition. But at least we are arrived at the point at which action begins.’

During these explanations, Charles Honeybath had found himself glancing from time to time at the fire now blazing on the hearth. He had been visited by a new and rather wonderful idea. That vision of depicting the proprietor of Grinton as posed before a towering array of books had been entirely fantastic. Terence wouldn’t have stood for it for a moment. But here was the library in comfortable (or perhaps uncomfortable) use again. So why not have him toasting his behind in front of this cheerful conflagration? It was the technical aspect of this that was extremely alluring. That hunting pink – and then the flickering crimson and orange and gold and mere incandescence behind it: would it be possible to bring that off? Honeybath felt impatient – anxious that Appleby would hasten his winding up of the tiresome business of the disappearing Professor Hagberg and permit more serious business to get going. Fortunately Appleby did now seem to be proposing a brisk pace.

‘So there are two perfectly definite occasions to cope with,’ Appleby was saying. ‘The first concerns what happened in this library and elsewhere yesterday afternoon, and the second what happened here in the middle of the night.

‘Let me begin with the bizarrely squatting Hagberg. Here he is, pretending to be assembling likely books for the improving of Mr Grinton’s bank balance, but actually on the hunt for Alexander Pope’s satire. Remember that he hasn’t a clue as to where it may be lurking. He has been down in the basement – where he has presumably been often enough before – and the only result has been his getting smothered in dust and cobweb. He retires to that little room for modest physical recruitment. And then, halfway through the discussion of a Welsh rabbit, and like the boy in Browning’s poem, he is stung by the splendour of a sudden thought. It is a moment of tremendous excitement. He, too, is a Classical man. And there has come to him, more or less intuitively, the probability – the near necessity – of the existence of that symmetrical door and hiding place.’ And here Appleby paused, and pointed with a muted dramatic gesture. ‘There it is, and within minutes he has spotted it and opened it. He rummages, perhaps for quite some time. And then Pope’s satire is in his hands.

‘He shuts the door – if door it’s to be called – and stands there reading the thing. It’s tremendous. As sheer malign attack, it’s tremendous. He rejoices in it, and his features betray the fact. Then, quite suddenly, he is dead. He suffers from what his compatriots call a condition – meaning a disease. He’s taking pills for it. But it strikes, and there he is: dead as a doornail, huddled on the floor. No more than a few minutes pass, and Mr Tancock enters the library.’

It was decidedly a shocked silence this time. Terence Grinton stood up, moved across the room, and actually placed himself with his back to the fire, as if a chill sense of mortality could be mitigated that way.

‘Mr Tancock’s resulting behaviour,’ Appleby went on, ‘is distinctly interesting. Simultaneously, or at least in rapid alternation, he may be said to keep his head and lose it. He doesn’t know Hagberg from Adam. The thing is totally inexplicable. But then he picks up Pope’s manuscript – which we may suppose to be on several sheets scattered on the floor – and discovers what it is almost at once. Here is something of high literary interest, and of considerable value as well.’

‘Considerable?
’ Rather surprisingly, Miss Arne found herself with a contribution to make. ‘A few months ago, fifty-seven lines of
The Revolt of Islam
in Shelley’s own hand was sold at Sotheby’s for over nine thousand pounds.’

‘Nine thousand pounds!’ This came from Terence in a kind of agonized shout. ‘For a wretched piece of scribbling: nine thousand pounds!’

‘A complete work by Pope, in his own hand and hitherto unknown,’ Miss Arne said crisply, ‘would certainly fetch much more than that.’

‘So you will see,’ Appleby resumed, ‘how things stood. Mr Tancock had no notion that Hagberg was in the library with his father-in-law’s connivance. He supposed him to be a simple thief’ but one whose sudden death could decidedly be put to account. In short, Mr Tancock pocketed the manuscript. It was not for nothing, we may say, that he had married into the family of Autolycus Grinton. So now he was in high spirits, and prompted to do a singularly freakish thing. He emptied the dead man’s pockets, perched the body on a chair, and left the library as he had entered it; by the door, that is to say, by which we have ourselves come in. He may thereby narrowly have escaped encountering Mr Honeybath, who himself entered the room a few minutes later.

‘It will be convenient to continue following Mr Tancock for the moment. Retreating, perhaps to his own room, he examines the personal belongings of the dead man he has brought away with him. He thus discovers the dead man’s name, and at once his position is transformed. He knows that a Professor Hagberg is an authority on Pope, and that if his identity is discovered much inquiry must follow. So it is essential to remove the body. He returns to the library – this time unobtrusively by the bogus door from the rear of the building – carts the body out to his car, and makes off with it to what he conceives of as a brilliant temporary hiding place. It is now that Mr Honeybath returns to the library, accompanied by myself. To Mr Honeybath’s considerable confusion, there is no dead body to be found.

‘We search the library, discover the bogus door, discover the little room with its unaccountable temporary furnishings, return to the library, lock it up, and withdraw. Mr Tancock meanwhile returns from the churchyard, proposing to re-enter the house through the deserted domestic offices. He chances to glance into the little room, and realizes the purpose to which it has been put. But he still, you must remember, believes that nobody knows anything about the whole affair except himself. So these further traces of mysterious activity must be removed too. He bundles the camp bed and everything else into his car, returns to the church with them, dumps them in the vestry, and drives back to Grinton. We are not yet quite finished with Mr Tancock, since there is something he has been careless about. We are finished, however, with the events of the afternoon. The events of the night are to follow.’

‘But quite a lot more happened yesterday afternoon.’ Dolly Grinton broke in with this rather as if accused of having provided insufficient entertainment for her guests. ‘We all heard about Mr Honeybath finding a body, and Terence told me to send for Mr Denver, and statements were taken, and goodness knows what.’

‘Perfectly true,’ Appleby said. ‘But the next active moves came from Mr Hillam and Mrs Mustard when the rest of us had all gone to bed. Not that “the rest of us” includes Mr Denver and his men. They were lurking in this library and very much awake.

‘So consider Mr Hillam and Mrs Mustard a little more closely. They know nothing about Pope. But they are competing, as it were, for the Claudes, each ignorant of the designs of the other. But it isn’t a competition on equal terms. Mr Hillam has only a vague notion that the booty is probably somewhere here in the library. Come to think of it, his is rather a forlorn hope. He is here merely for a long weekend, and what can he really do about it? The Claude he has detected hanging in the drawing-room makes his position only the more tantalizing. One almost sympathizes with Mr Hillam and his ill-concealed irritation and bafflement. However, he is a predatory person, betraying the hospitality extended to him. And that goes for Mrs Mustard too.’

‘I declare Sir John Appleby,’ Mrs Mustard said firmly, ‘to be diabolically possessed. His is one of the most striking cases with which I have met.’

‘Mrs Mustard holds a big advantage over Mr Hillam. She knows about that capacious secret cupboard, into which anything awkward or inconvenient or even confidential is likely to have been stuffed from time to time. Mrs Mustard is simply waiting for a good opportunity to explore it.

‘But now circumstances have suddenly altered: the mysterious body, policemen all over the place. Mrs Mustard decides she must act. So does Mr Hillam. And so – to come back to him – does Mr Tancock. It has been Mr Tancock’s habit to pursue his researches in the library with the help of a batch of antiquarian bookseller’s catalogues. But one of these he finds to be missing. He decides he must have left it in the basement (where, in fact, I myself came on it earlier in the day) and that the situation is a dodgy one. The catalogue may well be found and occasion undesirable speculation. He may even imagine his own fingerprints as on it: that sort of thing. Fingerprints are much in the minds of the laity when criminal matters are in question. And now it becomes known – or, rather, believed – that the police have vacated the library. So Mr Tancock comes downstairs in the small hours and descends into that basement.

‘Then comes Mrs Mustard. She brings with her in a bag some of the standard paraphernalia of spiritualistic séances: they will serve for obfuscation should she be detected. The lurking police are invisible. So, as she moves about, is she for appreciable periods to the police. She finds that massively disguised cupboard, opens it, rummages, quickly comes on the small portfolio containing the Claudes, stuffs it in her bag, and closes the door. It is in that very moment, I imagine, that in comes Mr Hillam. Mr Hillam is, you know, rather an ineffective person. He starts a useless and dangerous row with the lady. And at this point Mr Tancock – if one may so express it – surfaces.

‘One can, incidentally, a little enter into Mr Tancock’s state of mind. He hasn’t found the catalogue, so that remains a minor worry. A far bigger one is the fact that his plan to remove all trace of Professor Hagberg’s presence has miscarried, and that he has, quite crazily, landed himself with a very awkward situation at the church. On the other hand he has the unexpected windfall of the satire and no notion that it is in anybody else’s mind. A big reward for his efforts is, therefore, still possible. But he will need all his wits if he is to extricate himself from the fix in which he finds himself.

‘So there is last night’s total situation – apart from Mr Grinton’s turning up and firing a revolver, and so forth. There really isn’t much mystery left.’

Perhaps unexpectedly, it was Magda Tancock who first collected herself in face of this doubtless-elucidated but nevertheless, uncomfortable situation.

‘At least Giles has that satire,’ she said, ‘although he has behaved a little oddly about it. That’s just, as Sir John has said, a family affair, and to be put right accordingly. I’ve been worried about all this, and now I know why.’ Magda turned quickly to her children. ‘My darlings,’ she said, ‘are you having such a nice, nice game?’

Florinda failed to respond to this maternal solicitude. Demetrius put out his tongue. But since he was a polite child, it was at his sister and not his mother.

‘But what about the Claudes?’ It was Hillam who demanded this, and he was glaring vindictively at Mrs Mustard. ‘Of course I haven’t been involved at all. I’ve explained that. But this damned woman must be made to hand them over. And then she must be put in jail.’

‘I’m afraid that must be rather doubtful,’ Appleby said, ‘and I think Mr Denver will agree with me. I don’t believe the pictures are any longer in the lady’s possession. And – what’s more important – I much doubt whether they could legally be proved ever to have been so. I’ve offered, you know, only what can be called a conjecture. Suppose it to be true. What will the lady have done? Hurried to the local post office, I’d say, and despatched them to an unknown destination. Suppose that they turn up later – on an American market, perhaps, in six months’ time. How is Mr Grinton going to prove that they were ever in his ownership, or to be identified with the Claudes mentioned in that gossipy
Reliquiae
Grintonianae
? It would be a cock-eyed case from the start. In fact, it’s most unlikely that Mrs Mustard will be required to pursue her transcendental meditations in prison, although she certainly deserves to do so.’

‘And what about the satire?’ Giles Tancock suddenly spoke up boldly. ‘What proof is there that it in any sense passed into the possession of Jonathan Grinton, or that it was written in this house or remained in this house? Jonathan Grinton’s Journal? There’s no proof that anything of the sort ever existed. There’s nothing but that so-called transcript, made by my father-in-law’s creature, Burrow.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Burrow said, ‘I respectfully beg you to take note of what has just been said. I have the penalties attached to slanderous utterance in mind.’

‘And it won’t wash, Mr Tancock.’ Inspector Denver, hitherto silent, had risen and advanced to the centre of the room. ‘There will be no doubt, you know, about that body having been in your car. Our forensic people are seeing to that. Legally, mind you, your dealings with the dead Hagberg may be on the tricky side. I can imagine counsel representing that, not wishing to cause distress in a weekend party, you quietly removed the body
pro tem
to holy ground. Nonsense of that sort. But, taking one thing with another, your prospects aren’t good. Unless you act quietly in a family way.’

‘And hand over that Pope thing!’ Terence Grinton said – or, rather, produced as a shout. ‘I’m told I’ve lost those daubs by Claude Whatshisname, and an enormous sum of money as a result. But I’ll bloody well have the poem. Nine thousand pounds! Hand it over, blast you!’

And Giles Tancock gave in. Reluctantly, he put a hand in an inner pocket. Reluctantly, he produced a sheaf of yellowed papers and handed them to his father-in-law.

‘Then there you are,’ he said. ‘And much good may they do you.’