Appleby and the Ospreys (17 page)

‘My sergeant has been round every door on the ground floor of the house. There isn’t one that hasn’t got a key in it already. And always on the outside. The idea would be to make burglary more difficult that way. But I doubt whether anybody bothered to go round on such a locking-up chore every night.’

‘Bagot might know.’ Appleby paused on this familiar and not particularly useful thought. ‘Did the sergeant take out every one, and try the one we found in its place?’

‘Certainly he did.’

‘I still think the key may be important, Ringwood. Partly because of just where we found it, and partly because I feel the coins lived somewhere here on the ground floor. I was right in thinking that Clusters doesn’t run to lifts or elevators, was I not?’

‘Quite right. There used to be a couple of hoists from the old kitchens. But the whole place was modernized some time back, and all the offices, as they say, transferred to this floor. Troglodytes in short supply on the market, I suppose.’

‘That would be it, no doubt.’ Appleby betrayed no surprise at this learned flight on Ringwood’s part. ‘Where is the key now?’

‘Here in my pocket.’

‘Let me have it – would you?’

So Appleby was given the key, and dropped it into his own pocket.

‘A memento,’ Ringwood said a shade morosely, ‘of a case that didn’t run too smoothly.’

‘
Nil desperandum
, Ringwood. And – do you know? – I have an odd feeling that has once or twice come to me before. Rather long ago, I’m afraid. It’s a feeling of really knowing something that I just haven’t managed to put salt on the tail of. A something that quite infuriatingly eludes me for the moment. But it’s my guess that it will bob up again. As with the poet, you know. From hiding-places ten years deep.’

Ringwood received these remarks unfavourably.

‘I can’t see,’ he said, ‘that this nasty business has much to do with poetry.’

‘Well, no. And ten years is a bit steep. Ten days might be nearer the mark.’ Appleby frowned. ‘Ringwood,’ he asked, ‘what the devil was I doing ten days ago?’

‘Would that have been when you were lunching here, Sir John?’

‘Great heavens, man! You’re right.’

But now there came a diversion. Marcus Broadwater had appeared. He came to a halt with an air of slightly ironic diffidence.

‘Am I interrupting a conference?’ he asked.

‘If we are engaged in that way,’ Appleby said, ‘we’ll be glad to have you join us.’

‘You are very good. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of seeking you out. Some of our friends are getting impatient again. They want to know when they can leave.’

‘That’s very natural. I suppose Quickfall and the Wimpoles and Purvises will be bound for London. And I’d say, at a venture, that they will be able to catch the last evening train.’

If this reply surprised Broadwater (and it certainly surprised Ringwood) he gave no sign of the fact.

‘Excellent!’ he said. ‘I’ll give them the good news. If, of course, there
is
such a train. Surely they get scarcer and scarcer. Are you a reader of Trollope, Sir John? I’ve noticed in his novels that there always is a train, and his people keep on catching it. And they’re scarcely more than the second generation of train travellers, are they not?
Autres temps, autres moeurs
. It’s not so long ago that, visiting Clusters, I’d have had a man with me. And in our present distressing exigency, he’d have been in my room, hard at work sewing a mourning band on the sleeve of one of my jackets. And when I was an undergraduate and our last king died, we were told to go out and buy black ties, and wear them until after the funeral. All that’s a thing of the past, and vanished with the horrific slaughters of the last war. Death has become cheapened – and, as a consequence, life as well. Wouldn’t you say, Mr Ringwood?’

Ringwood scarcely concealed his disapproval of this fluent patter.

‘There’s a train from Great Clusters at eight forty-two,’ he said.

‘That should suit our friends very well – and I rather think I’ll catch it myself. I wonder whether anyone any longer simply orders himself a special train? It still wasn’t uncommon at the turn of the century – although always, I imagine, on the expensive side.’ Broadwater paused on this. ‘Or shall I stick to my plan of an evening’s fishing?’ he said. ‘All things considered, I think I will.’

‘Whether you do the one thing or the other,’ Appleby said a shade grimly, ‘I wonder whether you’d answer a question or two first. Have you ever heard of a man called Rackstraw?’

‘What an extraordinary name! Definitely not. Does he come into our present picture?’

‘He’s a wealthy American, and was here not half an hour ago. He wants to buy the Osprey Collection.’

‘How excessively odd! The coins do keep on turning up on us, do they not?’

‘They do, indeed. And I have at least your word for it, Mr Broadwater, that they do exist. But you and I have talked about their excessive elusiveness only a short time ago. I’d much like to see them, I have to admit. By the way, can you tell me anything about this?’ Appleby’s hand had gone to a pocket, and now it was extended to Broadwater with the mysterious key on its palm.

‘It’s a key,’ Broadwater said calmly. ‘What of it?’

‘What, indeed?’

‘Just where does it come from, Sir John?’

‘From nowhere, seemingly. It’s not like the key of a drawer or strong-box, but rather of an honest-to-God door. Wouldn’t you say? And rather distinguished in its way. But it could be duplicated by a locksmith, I suppose, readily enough. So far as the business part goes, that is.’

‘May I ask how you came by it, Sir John?’

‘We found it in the library,’ Appleby said – and now he was speaking rather casually. ‘I have a notion that the Osprey Collection may lie, so to speak, on the other side of it. But I believe I’ve failed to convince Mr Ringwood here, so let me pass to something else. It’s about that fellow Trumfitt. I gather you spend a good deal of time at Clusters, so perhaps you know something about him. Has he, would you say, a bit of a reputation for violence?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Broadwater now sounded slightly impatient. ‘I suppose he gave something of that impression when he favoured us with that visit a little time ago. I’ve seen him, when I took a walk near his pub, hard at work drowning some kittens. But that’s a common enough rural pursuit. As for the yarn about his daughter, I suspect he was trumping up a good deal out of very little.’

‘But out of something, nevertheless?’

‘My dear Sir John, I am not prepared to discuss my late brother-in-law’s character. It would be a most unseemly thing.’

‘Even if it were to help to elucidate his murder?’

‘Even then. It is something that close relatives ought never to be catechized about.’

And having delivered himself of this high-minded remark, Broadwater gave a curt nod and walked away. It was with evident displeasure that Detective-Inspector Ringwood watched him go.

‘I can’t make that fellow out at all, Sir John,’ he said. ‘Accosts you, one might say, with a mass of fluent jabber – and when that dries up, he just walks out on you. A regular play-acting type.’

‘Perfectly true, Ringwood. I had it all from him when on my way here this morning. An actor in search of a role, you might say. And perhaps that is a role in itself.’

Ringwood received this cryptic remark in silence, as if its logic required thought.

‘Histrionic,’ he then said. ‘That’s the word for him. But it applies equally, if you ask me, to some of the rest of them. There’s that high-up lawyer, for example.’

‘Quickfall? I suppose that’s true. But Quickfall is rather different. He has a real stage, and makes his living on it. Actors and barristers flock together. There’s a London club that’s pretty well full of them.’

‘There’s the bench and there’s the bar, sir. But for a bit of real drama, you have to add the dock. And it’s the dock we have to be thinking of.’

‘You are right there, Ringwood. And if we’re to get somebody into it – figuratively speaking – before this day is out, we must keep moving.’

‘Are you really thinking, Sir John, that we can get this whole messy mystery tied up before nightfall?’

‘Round about then, I’d rather hope. And we can begin by going back to your incident room. I think that’s what you call it nowadays.’

‘You’d be meaning the Music Saloon?’

‘Just that. I’ve a notion it’s the other place in which some key to this affair may lie.’

There was a constable on duty outside the Music Saloon, but the interior was untenanted except for a single policewoman brooding over a telephone on the platform. She was the same young person on whose good looks Appleby had commented to Ringwood earlier in the day. Ringwood, he felt, had disapproved, so perhaps some convention obtained in the matter. When Appleby had first found himself in the Metropolitan Police it had still been virtually a one-gender affair.

‘What made you decide to pitch your tent here?’ he asked Ringwood, glancing round the enormous chamber. ‘It’s impressive in its way, I suppose, and dates from a period in which conspicuous expenditure was still largely the perquisite of an aristocracy.’

‘No doubt. And I chose it as the place seemingly least likely to inconvenience the household. It’s clear that in the normal course of things nobody ever comes near it.’

‘But even a single person needn’t feel exactly lonesome – not with all this proliferation of out-size looking-glasses. Dozens of you visible to yourself wherever you stand. Multiplying monotony in a wilderness of mirrors.’ Appleby paused on this ingenious misquotation, which was, however, lost on his companion. ‘I wonder how long it is? Promenade round it two or three times, and you’ll have managed a healthy before-dinner walk.’

Having offered this idle remark, Appleby embarked on a perambulation that might have been suggested by it. And when he had been twice round the room, scanning the walls as he moved, he came to a halt.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, indeed. Parallax, Ringwood. Have you ever reflected on parallax?’

‘Parallax?’ Ringwood was displeased – and justifiably so. It is undeniable that John Appleby, when excited, is a little given to teasing remarks. ‘It sounds like something you get from the chemist.’

‘It’s the apparent movement of one object in relation to another when the eye is moved. Think of looking out through the window of a railway-train as it hurtles along – hurtles your eye along. Everything seems to be scampering past everything else, with only the horizon in something near repose. That’s parallax. And it’s the great enemy of illusionism in art – or in life, for that matter. Shift your stance only a little, and you know at once whether what’s in front of you exists in three dimensions or only in two: whether it’s an actual landscape, say, or simply a painting of one. What’s in front of our noses now?’

‘A half-open door, with a little lobby beyond it. And in the wall beyond that there’s a second door, which is closed.’

‘Move on a pace, Ringwood. Parallax is operating, remember. So the farther door ought to have begun to edge out of view, ought it not? Well, has it?’

‘Of course it hasn’t.’ Ringwood, although now far from at sea, accepted good-humouredly this note of catechism. ‘It hasn’t because the whole thing is a silly fake. It’s the blessed
trompe-l’oeil
, as they call it. There’s really hardly any lobby at all, and the farther door, together with the harp perched in front of it, is much nearer than it appears to be, and no more than paint on canvas.’

‘I agree that there’s hardly any real lobby there. But the second door is a real door, although the harp, indeed, is no more than pigment, skilfully applied. In fact, Ringwood, the Clusters
trompe-l’oeil
is a
trompe-l’oeil
trompe-l’oeil
.’

‘Or a
trompe-l’oeil
with knobs on.’ Ringwood was rather pleased with this. ‘And are you suggesting, Sir John…?’

‘Of course I am. The door supposed to be no more than canvas has a keyhole, hasn’t it?’ For the second time in half an hour Appleby’s hand went to a pocket. ‘So here’s our blessed key again,’ he said. ‘Try it, Ringwood.’

And Inspector-Detective Ringwood put the solid key in the keyhole of an equally solid door. He turned a solid door-knob, and the door swung open.

‘The bloody coins!’ he said.

Senior officers of police, when on duty, commonly refrain from improper language. But on this occasion, Appleby felt, Ringwood was decidedly to be excused.

‘Almost certainly so,’ he said. ‘And there’s what that chap Broadwater told me was like a trolley in a restaurant. That scarcely does the affair justice, would you say? Trundle it out, Ringwood. It doesn’t look as if it trundled, but I’ll be surprised if it fails to.’

Ringwood did as he was told – and without great effort, although the entire Osprey Collection was under his hand.

‘Moves like a high-class kid’s pram,’ he said. ‘And all those shallow drawers! I’ll bet they move like a dream. If Louis Quatorze or somebody of that sort had ordered a filing cabinet, this is what would have been respectfully delivered to him. Worth a mint of money in itself, I’d say. You can imagine it in one of those grand auctioneer’s catalogues.’

‘Quite so. Beautifully sprung, and with its wheels concealed behind exquisite joinery. A veritable Cadillac of a filing cabinet. Mr Rackstraw himself would be impressed by it.’ Appleby’s enthusiasm was perhaps tinged with irony. ‘One positively hesitates to explore further. But pull out one of those drawers, Ringwood.’

Ringwood did so.

‘The coins, all right,’ he said. ‘Not all that impressive, this lot. Rather like old halfpennies and farthings. But each of them snug in a little velvet berth.’

‘Try another one.’

The second drawer opened to reveal a blaze of gold. And for a few moments Appleby and Ringwood gazed at one another, much as a couple of conquistadores might have done if suddenly confronted with some treasure of the Incas.

‘We can’t keep this to ourselves,’ Appleby said abruptly. ‘Under present circumstances, the whole caboodle ought to be lodged in the strong-room of a bank. And the first thing to do is to call in Lord Osprey.’