Appleby and the Ospreys (9 page)

‘What might be called rather a daunting pile – wouldn’t you say, Sir John?’

‘Certainly a very considerable woodpile in which to be hunting for a nigger, Mr Ringwood. But – do you know? – I notched up one of my earliest small successes in rather the same sort of place. Or, rather, the same
size
of place. It belonged not to a baron but a duke.’

‘Scamnum Court. I read about it in the papers as a kid, sir, and I’m not sure it wasn’t what first prompted me to become a copper.’

‘Do you regret that?’

‘I think, now, that I’d rather have run away to sea. That was my earlier idea. It would have been better fun.’

‘Yes, indeed. Better the Atlantic or Pacific to gaze out over than this muddy ditch.’ For a moment Appleby and Ringwood looked at one another comprehendingly, as disillusioned public servants are apt to do. ‘But
à propos
of that,’ Appleby went on, ‘what about the little boat-shed? Did they find it?’

‘Certainly they did. It’s round a corner, and just out of sight of us here. Full of snoozing bats. But there’s a little dinghy, all right, together with a pair of sculls. And they’ve all been in the water no time ago.’

‘The plot thickens, Ringwood. Or dampens, perhaps one should say. Would you conclude that our last night’s intruder knew his way around?’

‘It would certainly seem so.’

‘You’ve got a man staying put there now? Shed and dinghy and sculls must all be examined minutely, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Of course, Sir John. There’s an officer on guard until relieved.’

‘Good. But the key to the mystery lies essentially in that confounded library. How minutely that has to be searched, I’m sure you know.’

‘Certainly I do.’ For a moment Ringwood permitted himself to sound faintly reproachful. ‘They’re working on it at this moment.’

‘Every book, Ringwood.’

‘And dusted for finger-prints, Sir John?’ A tinge of irony accompanied this question.

‘I wouldn’t quite say that. But it’s true, of course, of every weapon, likely or unlikely, in those damned trophies. Is there any sort of lavatory close to the library?’

‘There’s a little place of the sort just next door. Provided, I suppose, for anybody who’d been after a particularly dusty book.’

‘H and C?’

‘H and C?’ Ringwood had to repeat this phrase before he understood it. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been told.’

‘Perhaps you ought to have been. A murderer, you know, frequently seeks immediately to cleanse his weapon of blood. If he does so under cold water, he probably succeeds. But if hot water is available, and he uses that, the result is likely to be less satisfactory. Odd, but it’s so.’

‘I’ll remember the point.’ Ringwood managed to look suitably edified. ‘What about yourself, sir? Have you made any progress?’

‘I’m not at all confident that I have, although I’ve talked to several people. Two of them may be said to have accosted me. Bagot was the first of them. Apparently for the sake of spreading a decent decorum over his employer’s end, he had concocted a theory of accidental death. Complete nonsense, and rather surprising from a reasonably intelligent man. And he didn’t conceal the fact that he behaved with rather more caution than courage when Lord Osprey told him to go after the intruder last night. He ought to have gone straight out through the French window, don’t you think? Instead of which, he hunted out the chauffeur, and together they viewed the scene from a respectful distance. And that reminds me. What do we know about the latch or catch or bolt on that window?’

‘I’ve looked into it, Sir John. There are two bolts, and normally they are kept pushed home so as to secure the window. But they are quite surprisingly flimsy affairs, and it rather looks as if a good shove had recently been given from outside and they’d tumbled out of place, so that one wing of the window might have been swung open.’ Ringwood paused for a moment on this. ‘It’s rather a crucial point, I’d say.’

‘It may certainly be that. In fact, it affects our investigation a good deal.’

‘Undoubtedly, Sir John.’

‘It at least bears an appearance of fitting in with a general picture of the affair.’ Appleby, who possessed the trick of getting much caution into a few words, was silent for a moment. ‘The other fellow who came at me,’ he then said, ‘was the guest called Purvis. He’s an accountant by trade, but he doesn’t act professionally or officially for the Ospreys. He contrived to hint that Lord Osprey may have been hard-up after a fashion. I rather felt, Ringwood, that the fellow only wanted to stare at me. And I’m blessed if he didn’t then tell me that our talk seemed to be getting nowhere.’

‘What about you and me, Sir John? Are we getting anywhere?’

‘I don’t know that we are. What would you say to taking a little time off? A rather more abundant breath of fresh air than we get just standing here and mooning? Exercise, Ringwood! We’ll find that boat-house and take out the dinghy. That’s what we’ll do. Come along.’

If Detective-Inspector Ringwood found this sudden aquatic enthusiasm on Sir John Appleby’s part bewildering and even a shade unbecoming, he managed to keep the fact to himself – with the result that the two men found themselves within a few minutes entering the little moat-side shed which had hitherto existed, so to speak, only on the outer margin of the story. It was dilapidated but not damp, shadowy but not dark, and it was true that numerous bats were depending in a comfortable snooze from its small rafters. Rather less comfortable was a constable sitting on an upturned bucket.

‘It’s been in the water, all right,’ Appleby said, looking at the dinghy. ‘You and I and the officer had better agree on the fact here and now – just in case, on some future occasion, a barrister has to elicit more evidence on the point than is provided by the man or men you’ve already sent here. You agree?’

‘The boat has certainly been afloat quite recently. And you can even feel some moisture still on the sculls.’ Ringwood spoke with the relief of a man suddenly discovering in a companion something other than insanity or simple whimsy. ‘And we push it out and embark, do we?’

‘Just that. There’s even a little rudder. I’ll take that and you take the sculls – and it’s hard to starboard for a start until we have sight of that little terrace and the French window. And you can see from here that the so-called moat just isn’t, nor ever has been, a moat in the simple sense of the term. Clusters, as everybody knows, is simply planted on an island in the middle of a big pool.’

‘And a muddy sort of pool at that. In places it’s all silted up. If you or I, Sir John, lived surrounded by such a thing, we’d have the sanitary people after us in no time.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ By this time the dinghy was on the water and moving. ‘But – dash it all! – it’s suddenly quite deep, isn’t it? The bottom must be a matter of mini-ravines and mini-mountains. How very odd! Heave ho, Ringwood, heave ho!’

This wholly inapposite nautical injunction was perhaps to be forgiven Sir John Appleby since – and for the first time that day – he was in a state of considerable excitement.

‘There’s the terrace,’ he said, ‘and there’s the window. We’ll make straight for them now.’ As he spoke, he gave a pull on the rudder – and, almost at once, the dinghy came to a stop, with its bow up and its stern almost in the water. ‘Back paddle, Ringwood,’ he said. ‘We’ve run into one of the mini-mountains.’

Ringwood did as he was told, to an effect of immediate disengagement. He peered over the side.

‘Your mountain can be nothing but a mud bank, sir,’ he said. ‘And we’ve stirred up quite a dollop of it.’

‘So we have. But row ahead. We’ll try a bit further on.’

Ringwood complied, but almost immediately it was with the same result.

‘It’s like a submerged maze,’ he said irritably. ‘And there are people watching us from the windows. I can see some of my own men. They must think us crazy.’

‘Which is very much what we are not, my dear fellow.’ Appleby’s excitement still showed in his speech. ‘And to speak of a maze is a little to exaggerate, you know. There’s nothing man-made involved, I’d say. But to paddle even this small craft around, you need an exact knowledge of the terrain – not that terrain is exactly the word.’

‘What you need, it seems to me, is to be a bloody submarine.’ Ringwood was breathing heavily – and not entirely from the exertion of tugging at his oars. ‘And don’t imagine I’ve no notion of what we are about.’

‘I’m never likely to imagine anything of the sort.’ Appleby was enjoying this loosening up of his relations with the Detective-Inspector. ‘So just what have we proved, so far?’

‘That nobody can get into this little tub and simply row straight over to that French window.’

‘Quite so. And what have we still to find out?’

‘Whether it can be done at all – fairly rapidly if one’s familiar with the lie of the land.’

‘Or of the moat. Quite so. Could an oarsman who is familiar with what we may call the maze manage it – or would he know he couldn’t? It must be possible for this dinghy to potter fairly freely here and there on the moat. There’d be no point in its being here at all if that weren’t so. But just round about that little terrace and French window there may be what might be called a no-go area. Swimming, or at least wading through patches of fairly deep water, would be required. Of course we don’t know whether or not that intruder was dripping wet. Or muddy up to, say, the waist.’

‘Mud to that extent, Sir John, would probably show up on the terrace, where there’s no sign of anything of the kind. And if the fellow performed his manoeuvre a second time, and then actually broke into the library and killed Lord Osprey, his leaving plenty of mud around would be a dead certainty.’

‘Absolutely true. So we must go on searching – rather like the fellows who went seeking the North-West Passage. Frobisher and that crowd, I mean.’

Ringwood, already tugging again at his oars, offered no pretence of being amused by this comparison.

‘We’ll go up to the causeway,’ he said. ‘No getting beyond that, of course, although there may be a conduit or two running through it. But if we want mud, there we have it. Silted up against the stonework, and several feet deep. We turn just short of that, keep on nosing towards the house, may or may not be baffled any number of times, and may or may not find there is a way through.’

‘Just that,’ Appleby said.

And there was. In the end, and after many false casts, Appleby had only to put out a hand and steady the dinghy against the terrace.

‘Odd,’ he said, ‘that they never thought to have at least a low balustrade. But here we are, and I suppose we can get back again. But what if anything, Ringwood, does our trip tell us?’

‘That somebody got into this dinghy last night, and then – whether just once or again later – made his way here and back.’

‘And rapidly, Ringwood. Without anything like our sort of trial and error. Knowing the route well.’

‘How do you make that out, Sir John?’

‘Bagot mayn’t have been in a great hurry to collect that chauffeur and make his way along the causeway to a commanding view of this whole area. He was probably scared, and as dilatory as he could reasonably be. But if the two men saw nothing out of the way, the intruder making off again in this dinghy must have regained the boat-house pretty quickly. So who can he have been? Or, to put the question more cautiously, to what category of persons can he – or she, for that matter – have belonged?’

‘Surely, Sir John, it could hardly have been a female? The whole picture suggests what may be called a masculine crime.’

‘I rather agree. But the only testimony on the point is Miss Minnychip’s. And she has spoken to me – and I suppose to you – of no more than a mere impression that it was a man. And an impression gained in the dusk and from a mere glimpse. But let us assume, at least for the moment, that it was a man who rowed over here and approached the French window. Have we, so far, the slightest clue to his identity? Or, failing that, what may be called a mere instinctive suspicion?’

‘What about that fellow who has insisted on clearing off and going fishing? Lady Osprey’s brother, Marcus Broadwater?’

‘Absolutely out, Ringwood. And as one of a whole category of persons. Everyone, you may say, on view so far! Bagot asserts that the whole family, together with the little clump of weekend guests, were in the library drinking his sherry when the thing happened. Bagot, of course may be mistaken. Or he may be lying outright. But check up on the point, and it’s my guess the whole lot will subscribe to the fact.’

‘They do, Sir John. I’ve made sure of it.’ The Detective-Inspector said this almost as if he were ashamed of his own promptitude and thoroughness. ‘So suggesting Broadwater is mere muddle.’

‘It’s the impulse we all have, in our line of business, to see any affair of this sort as what may be called a closed-shop case. We have to face it. But the person operating from this wretched cockle-shell is, so to speak, out there in the void. At least in this part of the inquiry, Ringwood, we’re after a Great Unknown.’ Appleby paused on this melodramatic exclamation. ‘Of course it might be the vicar,’ he said.

‘The vicar, Sir John?’ Reasonably enough, Ringwood was merely bewildered by this.

‘Mr Brackley. He may have got rather seriously at odds with Lord Osprey over the bats.’

‘I think, Sir John’ – and Ringwood managed to produce a dutiful smile – ‘we’d better, perhaps, paddle back to the shed.’

Having returned to
terra firma
after this odd watery excursion, the two men walked in silence along the causeway to the house. Ringwood then went back to the Music Saloon. Appleby lingered in the main Entrance Hall. This, being in what has to be called the modern part of Clusters, was a large and lofty oval sheathed in white marble from top to bottom and paved in white marble too. You could have put a dozen fair-ground giants in it and it would still have had a dispeopled look – the impression of emptiness arising partly from a circumference rich in out-size and vacant marble niches which seemed to be waiting to house answeringly colossal statues which had failed to arrive from Greece or Italy. Perhaps, Appleby thought, they had been lost in the post. Traversing this expanse – and for the moment thus fancifully disposed – he told himself he knew what it must be like to be a small spider making its way along the bottom of a bath.