Appleby and the Ospreys (16 page)

‘Possessed of considerable cunning as well?’

‘That I can’t say, but it’s likely enough. Just how has he come into your picture, Sir John?’

‘Mr Ringwood here has dropped into The Osprey Arms. And Trumfitt himself dropped in on us here at Clusters only an hour ago, accompanied by a wronged daughter called Avice. The latest wrong suffered by the lady had been at the hands of the late Lord Osprey.’

‘Indeed!’ The vicar was at once serious. ‘Tell me about it, please.’

So Appleby gave an account of the incident, more or less repeating what he had told Ringwood.

‘And it is just conceivable,’ he concluded, ‘that the fellow’s turning up on us was a bluff, and that he had the best of reasons for knowing that Lord Osprey was already dead.’

‘Tricky,’ Mr Brackley said.

‘Have you any reason to feel that, so far as Avice and the dead man are concerned, there is some substance in the story?’

‘I’ve never set eyes on this Avice Trumfitt.’ The vicar paused, as if aware that this was scarcely a communicative reply. And then he spoke again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more that I can say. A parish priest, Sir John, is obliged to listen to a good deal of gossip. But, if he isn’t to lose the confidence of his flock, he is forced to treat some of it as if it came to him in the confessional. You must excuse me, I am afraid.’

This, although falling short of the portentous, had to be final for the moment, and Appleby accompanied the vicar in silence into open air. Pausing in the portico, they had a glimpse of a man spraying with a hose the Osprey Rolls-Royce. The vicar’s bicycle, which had the appearance of having seen much service, was perched beside a huge flight of steps.

‘How are the bats?’ Appleby asked, seeking a neutral topic.

‘Distinguo
, Sir John. The clerkly bats in my belfry are, I am glad to say, still undisturbed. Not so, it would appear, with the lay bats – and they are far more numerous – at the home farm. The boys over there, it seems, have been indulging in a bat
battue
.’

‘Dear me! I’ve taken part, I’m afraid, in a pigeon
battue
. That is barbarous but at least rational, since flocks of pigeons can devastate a crop. But slaughtering bats wholesale seems utterly gratuitous.’

‘Happily it has not been wholly effective. The majority of the lay bats, in fact, would seem to have survived. But if I were one of them, I would justly feel enraged.’ This had the air of being offered as a valedictory remark, and the vicar was already astride his bicycle. He appeared, however, to think better of pushing off, and paused with the tips of both feet on the ground. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that your colleague is right about that crook being after the wretched coins, and killing poor Osprey when surprised by him, and so on. I don’t quite like the Trumfitt theory, if only because it seems likely to trail a certain amount of dirty linen behind it. But – and much more strongly – I dislike the possibility of its having been an inside job, if that’s the term. A family affair, I mean.’

‘Quite so, Mr Brackley. But, at the moment at least, the weight of the evidence is dead against anything of the sort. Osprey’s wife and son and brother-in-law, together with the entire little bunch of guests, were decidedly in the wrong place when the curtain went up on the mystery. Oddly so, in a way, and almost as if there were something stagy and contrived about it. Almost like what I believe is called a sealed-room affair – in which, of course, the room turns out not to have been sealed after all.’ For a moment Appleby paused, frowning over this. ‘I’ve an odd feeling that something may yet turn up in that quarter. But, meanwhile, whatever is the opposite of an inside job must make all the running. As for Trumfitt, I’m afraid he offers, so to speak, the worst of both worlds. He’s outside, all right, but with what you call dirty linen thick on him.’

‘Meaning that, in burying Oliver Osprey, we’d be standing at the grave-side of an elderly ravisher, were Trumfitt’s yarn to prove to have any truth in it. It’s a disagreeable thought.’ The vicar shook his head over this, and for a moment seemed lost in thought. ‘Do you know?’ he said suddenly. ‘What you want, Sir John, is a few mysterious strangers lurking in the neighbourhood. And it occurs to me that I can provide at least one of them. Do you know The Three Feathers in Great Clusters?’

‘My wife and I have dined there once or twice. Quite unusually good food, but uncommonly expensive. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s run by a man called Fothergill, a bit of a scholar turned restaurateur. I knew him at Balliol long ago, and have a word with him every now and then. In the street, that’s to say. If I were seen going into the place my bank manager would have a fit. But I ran into Fothergill a couple of days ago, and he told me about an American – as he apparently is – of the name of Rackstraw. An etymologist would maintain that he must be a stingy fellow, but in fact he seems to be both opulent and regardless. He turned up at The Three Feathers in a Cadillac, booked himself a little suite of rooms, and appears to have done nothing much since. A waiter who takes him in drinks occasionally says he spends a good deal of time poring over a stamp album.’

‘A stamp album!’

‘Yes, a stamp album – which does now suddenly strike me as what you might call a near miss. What do you think?’

‘Stamps are on a distinctly lower intellectual plane than coins. One associates them with King George V – a blameless monarch, but not exactly a master mind. But there’s certainly a whiff of mystery about your Rackstraw, vicar. I’ll have it looked into.’ Appleby spoke with rather more conviction than he in fact felt. To be thus handed a mysterious stranger on, as it were, a plate, might have made him positively suspicious of an informant less transparently honest than Mr Brackley. ‘And if any further problematical persons come within your purview,’ he added, ‘do let me know – or let Ringwood know – at once.’

‘And, meanwhile, I’ll take myself off.’ As he said this, Mr Brackley put a foot on a pedal, maintained the balance of his machine by a deft waggle of the front wheel, and departed down the causeway. But an odd moment succeeded. A large and fast-moving car appeared, making for Clusters. Mr Brackley, momentarily glancing backwards, accorded Appleby what appeared to be intended as an informative sort of wave. In doing this, he swerved slightly, and this alarmed the driver of the Cadillac (as it proved to be). So the car swerved too, and for a moment it seemed possible that each was going to land in the moat. But this misadventure was avoided by both parties, and the vicar of Little Clusters disappeared behind a light cloud of dust.

‘May I ask whether I have the honour of speaking to Lord Osprey?’

The man driving the Cadillac spoke with what Victorian novelists are fond of calling a ‘twang’, and so was undoubtedly as American as was his car. Here, in fact, was Mr Rackstraw. It took Appleby a moment to digest the oddity of this.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he then said. ‘My name is Appleby.’

‘He wouldn’t have been the cycler?’

‘No. That was the local vicar. A Mr Brackley.’

‘The Reverend Brackley.’ Mr Rackstraw, who appeared to have a tidy mind, might have dropped this information into an appropriate pigeonhole. ‘I’m visiting with Lord Osprey,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t made a date with him. Would he be at home, Mr Appleby?’

‘Sir John Appleby.’ This was a very English politeness, being designed to save Mr Rackstraw from any mild solecism in company later. ‘Which Lord Osprey are you meaning to call on?’

‘Which? There’s can’t be two Lord Ospreys, can there?’ Mr Rackstraw looked at Appleby with some suspicion. ‘Or can there? I’m not all that acquainted with such matters, Sir John.’ Mr Rackstraw, aware that he had got this form of address exactly right, eyed Clusters with a confident gaze. ‘But there might be a dozen of them,’ he said, ‘and they’d still have quite a home.’

‘I’m sorry – and I have to explain. Of course there is only one Lord Osprey at a time. But a Lord Osprey has just died, and his son – a young man called Adrian Osprey, who is actually in Clusters now – immediately succeeds to the title.’

‘I see – and I’d better quit, I guess. The young man won’t be feeling like doing business.’

‘I think you are quite right there, sir. As a matter of fact, we have every reason to believe that his father has been murdered.’

‘Murdered!’

‘Just that. And perhaps I ought to say that I have myself some connection with the police who are investigating.’

‘The young man will inherit everything?’ Mr Rackstraw, although he had been given astounding news, clearly had a point and was resolved to stick to it.

‘“Everything” is rather a comprehensive expression, is it not? I’m afraid I can’t tell you.’

‘It’s the coins. The Osprey Collection. I’d corresponded with the lord, and intended to make an offer for it. But not, of course, sight unseen.’

‘Of course not.’ Appleby, although aware of having tumbled into a situation of extreme oddity, managed to remain matter of fact. ‘I take it, sir, that you are yourself a determined collector of such things?’

Mr Rackstraw, who had got out of his car, was surveying the moat with disfavour.

‘Messy,’ he said. ‘Not sanitary. But you’re dead right about me. I collect in one field and another. But not without mastering the ground, Sir John. This Osprey Collection, now. I’ve had their catalogue, and I’ve been working on it in my apartment hotel in Great Clusters. A good class of book, and well illustrated. So I’d know at once if Lord Osprey – if
young
Lord Osprey, as it now is – were to be holding anything back. Yes,
sir
.’

This – Appleby thought – explained that waiter’s impression of a stamp collection. But there seemed to be rather more about Mr Rackstraw that required explanation. Almost, he seemed a little too good to be true.

‘This,’ he asked suddenly and sharply, ‘is the first time you’ve been out here?’

‘At Clusters? It sure is. I do my homework thoroughly, as you might say.’ Mr Rackstraw was clearly proud of his command of this expression.

‘That car – did you bring it from America with you?’

‘No, sir. They hired it me in London. One gets used to a thing. Lord Osprey, now – he would have been used to a Rolls?’

‘I believe he was.’

‘Thoroughbred little affairs. A look of class all over them.’ Mr Rackstraw said this handsomely. ‘But rather a lot of them around. In London you see queues of them.’

For Mr Rackstraw, Appleby reflected, ‘London’ probably meant the environs of the Connaught Hotel. But now the visitor had shaken hands and was climbing back into his hired car.

‘Do I have to reverse?’ he asked.

‘By no means.’ Appleby almost felt he had to vindicate the consequence of Clusters before this transatlantic visitor. ‘Drive straight on. There’s a courtyard in which you can turn easily enough.’

Following the Cadillac on foot, Appleby made several pauses to stare thoughtfully out over the moat. He recalled Ringwood as saying something to the effect that his men might have to end up by dredging it. The idea seemed an absurdity, and Ringwood had, of course, offered it as just that. The Osprey affair didn’t run – as so many police hunts seemed to run nowadays – to a missing person and possibly a corpse. Nobody was missing – but what was missing was a collection of coins. No sooner had Appleby remembered this obvious fact than he found himself to have conjured up a distinctly odd visual image. It was of the late Lord Osprey suddenly at bay in his library, with the Osprey Collection in some obscure fashion under his hand, and an armed thief in front of him. With a speed and dexterity not in the least within Appleby’s recollection or knowledge of Osprey as possessing, the collection’s proprietor had wrenched open that French window and hurled his treasure into the darkness outside. It went down with a dull splash into the moat, and was thus safe from the unknown predator. Unknown, that was to say, to Appleby; he had to confess that he hadn’t a clue as to whom it might have been; nobody knew except Lord Osprey himself; and Lord Osprey was very swiftly dead and silenced.

Appleby broke off from this bizarre fantasy to give a perfunctory wave to Mr Rackstraw, who had now succeeded in turning his car, and was presumably on his way back to what he had called his apartment hotel. But the renewed sight of Rackstraw put another idea in Appleby’s head – not, this time, of a cinematic sort, but simply as a concept already formed in the mind. The Osprey Collection was proving uncommonly elusive – so did it any longer exist as entitled to be
called
the Osprey Collection in the full sense? Osprey, if the little man Purvis was to be believed, had been hard up and looking round for money on a substantial scale. Rackstraw had perhaps got wind of the fact. Had he not, indeed, claimed to have been in correspondence with Lord Osprey? Conceivably another would-be purchaser had got ahead of him, and a deal had been done. All this made a perfectly coherent theory. The bird, so to speak, had already flown. With the Osprey Collection the sudden and violent death of Lord Osprey had nothing to do. In thinking up that notion of the collection’s being beneath the muddy waters of the moat, Appleby had simply been barking up the wrong tree. The Case of the Barking Dog. The Osprey affair – at least up to the present moment – deserved, perhaps, to be called just that.

To a slightly operatic effect, as if to deliver himself of a resounding solo, Detective-Inspector Ringwood was standing in the middle of the marble-clad hall.

‘Who might that have been?’ he asked with unaccustomed brusquerie. The afternoon was advancing, and little progress being made. Although not an edgy man, Ringwood was almost irritable.

‘An enormously affluent American called Rackstraw. He wanted to buy those blasted coins. I explained to him that a deal wasn’t really practicable at the moment, and that a new Lord Osprey must be given time to play himself in.’

‘You might have invited him to come in and look for the blessed things.’ Ringwood was now gloomy. ‘We need all the help we can get. Incidentally, that key’s no good.’

‘The key to the mystery, we were calling it. Just how has it failed us?’