Appleby and the Ospreys (20 page)

‘He was jumpy, Ringwood. That’s Bagot’s word. Osprey was apprehensive that something was coming to him.’

‘A thief after the coins, you mean?’

‘I mean nothing of the sort. I mean Trumfitt.’

‘But it was only when you were having lunch today…’

‘It was only then that Trumfitt went public, as it may be put. But he may well have been threatening Lord Osprey privately for some time. And Osprey was jumpy probably because he had a bad conscience about Trumfitt’s daughter.’

‘Miss Minnychip, now…’

‘Miss Minnychip yelped because Osprey had yelped. And she believes she had glimpsed what Osprey believed he had glimpsed. Bagot is a far sounder witness than Miss Minnychip.’

‘Perfectly true,’ Ringwood said candidly. He thought for a moment. ‘That boat,’ he said. ‘It had been out on the water, all right. We both know that.’

‘The boat, I admit, remains to be explained. And when it is, I think we’ll have arrived at the heart of the matter.’ Appleby paused, glancing with some caution at his colleague. ‘But – to be frank about it – we believe we’ve got there already, do we not?’

‘I believe so.’ Ringwood seemed encouraged to speak out. ‘Once we’ve got rid of Trumfitt, and got rid of the intruder who wasn’t there, what we are left with is what you might call a family job.’

‘Not quite that, Ringwood. There’s Lady Wimpole, for instance – and Miss Minnychip and Mrs Purvis and Rupert Quickfall. Several others, too, who can’t be described as family. Call it an inside job.’

Ringwood considered this.

‘Hadn’t we both better speak out, Sir John?’ he then asked.

‘Very well. Lord Osprey was killed by his brother-in-law, and you and I are now equally convinced of the fact.’

‘Just that. But what’s our evidence? And what do we not yet know that we ought to know, if the thing is to be brought home to the man?’

Appleby had accorded a brief nod to each of these questions.

‘We know for a start,’ he said, ‘that somebody learned in numismatics has been pilfering from the Osprey Collection, substituting nearly worthless coins for very valuable ones. This may, or may not, have been achieved actually in Lord Osprey’s presence. He turns out to have known astonishingly little about coins himself, so nothing but a little dexterity would be required to achieve the thefts. So Broadwater may, or may not, have known where the coins were kept. He may, or may not, have contrived both to know about the
trompe-l’oeil
affair and to have achieved his own means of gaining access to it. We know – that is, we can clearly see – that there was a kind of flaunting impudence about the enterprise. It could only pass undetected for so long as Lord Osprey allowed no expert other than Broadwater himself to make any sustained scrutiny of that remarkable cabinet and its contents.’

‘Miss Wimpole!’ Ringwood said. ‘It had become clear that within a couple of days Lord Osprey would have succumbed to that young woman’s determined assault on the things.’

‘You can put it that way, if you like. And remember that Lord Osprey was apparently feeling hard-up, and that the seemingly very wealthy – but also knowledgeable – Mr Rackstraw had been in correspondence with him. Broadwater may well have had wind of that. It all adds up, as they say – at least in the way of motive. But just what
happened
? At this present moment, Ringwood, we have nothing but guesswork to put before a judge and jury.’

‘We do have a corpse, Sir John. And a weapon snatched from that affair on the wall. And there’s the boat–’ Ringwood broke off abruptly. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘that damned boat is uncommonly inconvenient. For the case we’re trying to build up, that’s to say.’

‘And just there, Broadwater was, so to speak, ahead of us. He’d killed his brother-in-law – and what the devil was he to do? He remembered the evening’s fuss about an intruder who must have crossed the moat; he remembered about the little skiff in its shed; and he promptly saw in those things the means of laying a species of false trail. He slipped out of the house and across the moat by the causeway; made his way to the little boat-shed; launched the skiff and paddled it around sufficiently to get it thoroughly wet; he then berthed it and made his way back to the library. What had he achieved? A very broad hint to us that the killing of Lord Osprey had not been an inside job.’

The Detective-Inspector’s response to this was to look rather glum.

‘Sir John,’ he asked at length, ‘do you think that if we searched Broadwater’s room here at Clusters now, we might come on some of those stolen coins?’

‘No, Ringwood, I do not. Broadwater isn’t a Whitechapel thicky, you know. He’s a clever, if slightly crazy, man – a Cambridge don, and all that.’

‘I think that, in a way, we’ve run ahead of ourselves, sir. We’ve started from a confrontation of these two men, round about midnight or in the small hours. Just how did that come about? We know that Lord Osprey is in his pyjamas and dressing-gown, and we take a guess that that crucial key is in his pocket. Everybody else in Clusters is presumably asleep. Why this extraordinary meeting? What is it supposed to be about?’

‘Indeed, why and what,’ Appleby said. ‘These questions are the nub of the matter. And until we can answer them, at least after some plausible fashion, we can’t act – can we? When Broadwater returns from his fishing, it would be imprudent to have him taken away in a van.’

At this point the colloquy in the Music Saloon was interrupted by Bagot, who entered carrying a tray on which stood a decanter and two glasses.

‘A glass of sherry, gentlemen,’ Bagot said solemnly.

‘It’s a little on the early side, isn’t it?’ Appleby had glanced at his watch.

‘I may remind you, Sir John, of the advanced hour for the light collation.’

‘But of course. And I am sure you always time these matters perfectly.’ Appleby poured a glass of sherry, and handed it to Ringwood. He then helped himself. ‘Just how is the house-party going to disband?’ he asked.

‘Miss Minnychip, who came over to Clusters in her car, will drive herself home. Miss Minnychip is a most independent lady. Having, as she has, only a small household may well have inclined her that way.’

At this, Ringwood, although sipping his sherry, might have been heard to utter a faint snort. It indicated, perhaps, mounting disapproval of Clusters in general, and dissent from the notion that driving a car over two or three miles of quiet country road testified to any great independence of character.

‘And Robinson, Lord Osprey’s chauffeur,’ Bagot continued with dignity, ‘will convey the rest of the party – Lady Wimpole and her daughter, Mr Quickfall, and Mr and Mrs Purvis – to the railway station in the Rolls.’ Bagot, having produced these names in their correct order, bowed, and turned to withdraw.

‘Just a moment.’ Appleby glanced at his colleague. ‘Mr Ringwood,’ he said, ‘I think we might put our current problem to Mr Bagot – who is so thoroughly knowledgeable a man.’

To this Ringwood responded merely with a slight nod – thereby indicating that he deferred only to Sir John Appleby’s seniority, and that no such irregular proposal would have come into his own head.

‘It’s like this, Mr Bagot,’ Appleby then said. ‘We have Lord Osprey, in his pyjamas and dressing-gown, in the library round about midnight or the small hours, and there meeting or encountering an unknown person who appears to have lost little time in murdering him. Since making your formal statement to the Detective-Inspector this morning, has any further notion come to you as to how this situation or confrontation may have been occasioned?’

‘In measure, yes, Sir John. It is not to be denied that
l’esprit de l’escalier
has been in operation.’ Bagot paused on this impressive (if not strikingly appropriate) display of erudition. ‘It has come to me as possibly relevant that Lord Osprey was a little given to nocturnal perambulation.’

‘Do you mean that he was a sleep-walker – that sort of thing?’

‘Not at all, Sir John.’ Bagot appeared to find this possibility mildly shocking. ‘I merely mean that his lordship, being, unhappily, of a somewhat apprehensive temperament, would occasionally get up in the night and prowl about the house. He feared, I suppose, that burglars might have gained access to us.’

‘I see. But just how do you come by this information?’

‘I have the habit, sir, of occasionally sitting up late in my pantry in order to deal with the household accounts. I have thus heard, if never actually seen, his lordship wandering around.’

‘And that happened last night?’

‘Certainly not, sir. Had anything of the sort come to my notice last night, I could hardly have failed to communicate the fact to Mr Ringwood when he questioned me this morning.’

‘I’d hope not,’ Ringwood interjected a shade morosely. ‘You told me that everybody had gone to their rooms by eleven.’

‘Quite so, Inspector. The entire household appearing to have retired by that hour, and concluding that my services would no longer be required by anyone, I went to bed myself.’

‘I see.’ Appleby was impressed by the hierarchical distinction made between these two activities. ‘Have you any further second thoughts about this whole affair?’

‘I fear not, Sir John. But should anything further come to mind, I will communicate it to you at once.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Bagot. And we must not delay you further.’

So Bagot went away – or, as he would have expressed it, withdrew. And Appleby turned to Ringwood.

‘We inch forward, wouldn’t you say?’ he asked. ‘We’ve already had Osprey alarmed by his own shadow – almost literally that – in the library yesterday evening; now we learn that alarm came to him naturally, and that he sometimes prowled Clusters in the small hours as a consequence. It’s reasonable to think of him as so employed last night, and as visiting the library in that frame of mind. In something not far short of funk, that is.’

‘So we’ve just got to get Broadwater there, too, at that identical unlikely hour, and what you called a confrontation, Sir John, is in the bag.’ Ringwood’s tone was sceptical, but his features began to express something else even as he spoke. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘I believe we’re on to it.’

‘I think we are. The cardinal point about Broadwater – apparently so absorbed in his fishing – is that he knows he’s in a desperate situation. He’s been pillaging the Osprey Collection, and trusting wholly to the fact that Osprey is so cagey about it, so near to being a pathological miser, that nobody qualified to detect his depredations is likely to appear. But now suddenly on the scene is this girl Honoria Wimpole, who is a real pro, and shows every sign of getting round the old boy. Moreover, Osprey is – or believes himself to be – hard up, and our American friend Rackstraw is perhaps not the only acquisitive American willing to deal out the dollars and make off with the booty. And there’s one other thing.’

‘So there is,’ Ringwood said. ‘Broadwater doesn’t even know where the collection is kept. When he had dealings with it Lord Osprey simply trundled it in in that cabinet – or trolley, as Broadwater disparagingly calls it. So, even if his spoils are still at his command, he has no power to restore them unobtrusively to their proper place.’

‘At which point, Ringwood, we come to a flaw in the logic – but Broadwater’s logic, not ours. For here we have him, not many hours ago, in the library – desperately hunting for the collection’s hiding-place, although he could do nothing much about it, if he found it. I don’t myself judge that to be an impossible mental state. But perhaps it is in his power to make good the most glaring depredations, with some chance of explaining away the minor ones later on.’

‘Does it occur to you, Sir John, that, if only he can locate the things, he can stage a burglary of the whole lot?’

‘You are absolutely right. And yesterday evening’s supposed prowler may have put it into his head to stage such a thing without loss of time. Anyway, here we have Lord Osprey and his brother-in-law, confronting one another in the library. And I rather think that Lord Osprey is armed. You don’t have what Bagot calls an apprehensive man prowling a property like this in the middle of the night without a weapon in his hand. A revolver, one imagines.’

‘One imagines just that.’

‘And next there is a kind of moment of truth. Broadwater loses his cool, and blusters. He says that the situation is intolerable, and that the secret of the collection’s hiding place must be confided to him. Hasn’t there actually been a thief scouting round that very evening? That sort of thing. There are a few increasingly angry exchanges, and then – for let us be thoroughly dramatic, Ringwood – the scales fall from Lord Osprey’s eyes. He realizes that his brother-in-law is a crook; is himself proposing to thieve the whole collection and put the blame on a burglar. Something like that.’

‘Just what happens then, Sir John?’

‘I don’t really know – and you don’t, either.’ Appleby had calmed down. ‘We don’t know, that’s to say, the stages by which the calamitous situation developed. But here are two frightened men. Osprey’s fright turns to panic. He remembers that the key to that
trompe-l’oeil
door is in his pocket, and he takes it out and hurls it into the saving darkness at the other end of the library. Broadwater perhaps makes nothing of this gesture, or he may misinterpret it as initiating some sort of attack. He himself produces some threatening gesture, and Lord Osprey points that revolver at him. Broadwater panics in his turn, snatches that weapon from the trophy, and within seconds his brother-in-law is a dead man.’

‘And then?’

‘I won’t say that sanity returns to Broadwater, but I will say that cunning takes control. He cleanses the weapon and returns it to the trophy. He remembers the false alarm, as it had been declared to be, earlier in the evening. He steals out of the house, taking Osprey’s revolver with him. Out on the causeway, he chucks the revolver into the moat, and hurries to the little boat-shed. He launches the skiff, paddles it around for a few minutes to get it thoroughly wet, and then gets it back in the shed again, and himself returns to the house. And this false and watery trail having been laid, I suppose he goes to bed – or, as Bagot puts it, retires.’