Appleby at Allington (20 page)

‘That’s it. Deuced well put.’ Barford was honest in his admiration for this degree of linguistic resource.

‘And I caught Digby,’ Lethbridge said, ‘yarning with that young egg-head who hangs around the place. Fellow called Travis, out of some Oxford college. Wants to lay Hope, if you ask me. Sorry, m’dear.’ Very properly, Lethbridge apologized to his wife for this crude expression – and received a blast of hilarity in exchange. ‘Talking to the kid about treasure-hunting, or some such rot. Know this Travis, Sir John?’

‘I’ve had a little conversation with him. There is something to be said for the view that he is a rather frivolous and irresponsible young man. Or that he turns into that, when he knows that he has to call it a day. Your sister Hope is plainly a different type. But they might suit each other very well. And now, if you will excuse us, I think the Chief Constable and I must seek out Mr Allington.’

‘He’s in the library,’ Barford said, ‘with your wife and that old fellow Osborne. Deuced lot of people crowding in on this affair.’

‘Well, well!’ Pride murmured, as he and Appleby walked away. ‘Straightforward chaps, and all that. But just a little…wouldn’t you say? All right among city types, no doubt. But wouldn’t go down too well in a decent regiment.’

Appleby received this grim condemnation in appropriate silence. He had no reason to doubt that it wasn’t entirely true.

The curtains had been drawn in the library. Here and there a low reading lamp had been turned on, so that the room existed only as so many pools of light fading into shadow. This made it look larger than it really was. Appleby hadn’t entered it since the occasion described by Owain Allington as a congenial
tête-à-tête
. But that had been only forty-eight hours ago. The mysterious affair at Allington Park, he told himself grimly, was going to be wound up, like a reasonably regular tragedy, in just a little over two revolutions of the sun.

There were thousands of books in imposing rows, with marble busts of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and similar appropriate persons perched above them near the ceiling. Presumably the first Mr Osborne had given orders for the bringing together of such approved authors as an English gentleman must be able to put his hand upon at need – and there they all were, from the Elizabethan translations of Philemon Holland to the sermons of Bishop Beilby Porteus. And subsequent Osbornes had added further essential works which Appleby could guess at without looking: the Badminton Library, Burton’s
Arabian Nights
, Egan’s
Boxiana
, bound volumes of
Vanity Fair
and
Cornhill
and
Punch
, romances by Edgar Wallace, bulky memoirs with titles like
Our Viceregal Life
in India
. Owain Allington had presumably taken over the lot. What his own taste in reading would be, Appleby didn’t know.

The room was precisely as it had been two nights before. Rasselas was in his familiar posture on the black rug. He might have been a pneumatic dog, Appleby thought, able partially to deflate himself when in repose. Or he had the appearance of some low but gorgeous form of marine life, organized mainly in thread-like tentacles, floating in profound unconsciousness on a midnight sea. Rasselas had certainly withdrawn from the mysterious affair – supposing, indeed, that he could ever be credited with having had any involvement in it.

‘My dear Appleby, your wife has been doing me a great kindness.’ Allington had advanced, hospitably carrying a decanter. ‘She has quieted my three excellent but excitable Italian women. They live out, you know – two at the farm and the third with the water-bailiff’s wife – and they were reluctant even to be conducted back by Enzo. This third accident has alarmed them very much. Not that there have been
three
accidents, as you and I know.’

Appleby accepted whisky. Pride did the same, and then thought better of it. The thought had no doubt come to him that he was a police officer on duty. Judith was politely drinking what looked like ginger ale. Wilfred Osborne sat quietly in a corner, with folded arms. He looked unhappy. He had been born in this house, after all, and its park and lake had been his playground as a boy. He was taking a little hard what was so rapidly becoming its murderous character.

‘I concur in your view that we are not confronting three accidents,’ Appleby said to Allington. ‘But I’m not very sure that our agreement will stretch much further. May I ask how you class Scrape’s death?’

‘It’s fairly clear, isn’t it?’ Allington set down the decanter, and raised his own whisky-glass as if for appraisal. ‘The poor fellow made away with himself. Two deaths, one on top of the other, were too much for him. He was an unbalanced man. Indeed – and this is something I’ve never mentioned to anybody before – I was coming to a strong suspicion that he was no longer in his right mind. You’ll hardly believe this, but he had a fantastic notion of building a complete Cistercian abbey. Only – so far as I could gather – without any Cistercians.’

‘Yes, I know about that.’

‘You know about it!’ Allington seemed really startled.

‘My wife and I were entertaining Scrape to tea within what was to prove a couple of hours of his death. He mentioned his plans.’

‘Then there you are.’ Allington spoke incisively. ‘You agree – you both agree – that he was off his head?’

‘In a limited sense, yes. It doesn’t follow that he made away with himself. May I ask whether you still hold to the view that your nephew met his death as the consequence of some sort of international conspiracy?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Allington paused, perhaps to note that Appleby was startled in his turn. ‘I have found myself obliged to re-think the whole thing.’

‘Meaning your nephew’s death and Knockdown’s?’

‘Precisely so. And Scrape’s, indeed, in the sense that I have had to get it clear that his unfortunate end has been purely peripheral. Perhaps I can put it best by saying that I have approached the problem as a scientist. I have no doubt – Pride, you will support me in this – that the police nowadays pursue what they would call scientific methods.’

‘They
are
scientific methods.’ Pride was suddenly roused to something like anger. ‘Not much my sort of thing, I’ll admit. But I have a thoroughly up-to-date crowd. Complete confidence in them.’

‘My dear man, you mustn’t mistake me. I have no doubt that your men will apply their techniques with diligence, and eventually be in a position to declare that they have arrived at an explanation. And the same holds of Appleby, whom we all so much admire. Only I doubt whether, in this particular case, they will really get quite all the way. The method is one thing. The mind behind it is another. And I may say I have had to think quite hard about the problem myself.’

‘To arrive at the true and final solution?’ It was with some natural astonishment that Appleby had received the sudden flash of arrogance in Allington’s speech. ‘Do I understand that, as a consequence of powerful cerebration, you have arrived at the truth about these obscure events?’

‘Certainly. I am saying just that.’

‘And that your view now is that the final score – or the score to date – is two accidents and a suicide?’

‘My dear Sir John’ – Allington spoke with a sudden urbane courtesy – ‘you will forgive me if I say that I do not judge it necessary to discuss the matter with you further.’

‘Very well.’ Appleby put down his glass. Judith and Osborne were already on their feet. ‘You are perfectly in order, and I do not disapprove of what you say in any way. We will leave you with the Chief Constable at once, and you can tell him what you know.’

‘I have no intention of telling Pride anything.’

There was a moment’s blank silence – in which Rasselas, most unexpectedly, emitted the faintest of contented sighs. The creature had been visited, perhaps, by a pleasing dream. Wilfred Osborne was the first to speak.

‘I say, Allington – isn’t this getting a bit off the rails? Here is your own nephew come to an unhappy end, and you saying you have got to the truth of the affair. As good as saying, for that matter, that you are the only person who
will
get to the truth of the affair. You can’t withhold your information from the police.’

‘I am not withholding information. I am withholding speculation and inference. Call them scientific speculation and inference. I am certainly not obliged to communicate these to anybody.’

‘But be reasonable, my dear Allington! What justification can you have for holding back what may be helpful? We’re not all engaged in a competition, or a battle of wits.’

‘I don’t want to offend you, Osborne. I am beholden to you in a number of ways.’ Allington was suddenly presenting the appearance of a man in real distress of mind. ‘And I know you have a high sense of duties of hospitality. Well, I will say only this. I am deeply sorry that I have implicated somebody – somebody whom I am not prepared to name – in this luckless and tragic business. I decline to be an occasion of further distress – to that person, and to others. And I therefore intend that this whole business stop here. Martin had an accident with his car. The inquisitive Knockdown meddled with something carelessly left lethal, and paid for it. The unfortunate Scrape, overwrought by these fatalities, drowned himself. This may not be what I believe. It is what I have declined to discuss. And it is as much as all the Queen’s coroners, and all her policemen too, are ever likely to arrive at.’

This time, the silence in the library prolonged itself. Not even Rasselas relieved it with another faint woof. And then – faintly at first but in rapidly mounting crescendo – pandemonium appeared to break out in Allington Park. It had nothing to do with the bizarre attitude and utterance of the owner of the mansion. It appeared to break out first on a bedroom floor, and then to come tumbling rapidly down the main staircase.

A moment later, the library seemed suddenly filled with Lethbridges and Barfords. But in fact it was only the parents who had come tumbling in.

‘The kids!’ Ivon Lethbridge shouted. ‘All four of them. They’ve vanished. They’ve been carried off. Without so much as climbing into their beds!’

‘Murder!’ The sudden scream came from Faith Barford. ‘Murder, murder,
murder!
’

For some moments the distressing character of this scene was enhanced by Hope Allington, who had come briskly into the drawing-room and at once addressed herself to smacking her sister’s face. Although a time-sanctioned treatment for hysterical behaviour, it lacked amenity as a family spectacle. But at least it had some effect. Faith Barford stopped screaming and subsided into quiet sobs.

She was not altogether to be blamed, Appleby thought. The atmosphere at Allington Park was now such that any untoward event was likely to be accorded a sinister interpretation. In any well-regulated English mind three unaccountable deaths add up to the probable presence of a maniac about the place. Within such a context the sudden disappearance of four children might well disturb anyone.

‘Miss Allington,’ Appleby asked, ‘where is Mr Travis now?’

‘Back in Oxford.’ Hope snapped this out frankly enough. ‘We decided that it was no go. Either way – whether it’s still there or not – there’s nothing in it for us.’

‘My dear Hope,’ Owain Allington said, ‘whatever are you talking about? This is no time to speak in riddles.’

‘Isn’t that just what you’ve been doing yourself?’ Appleby said. ‘And I don’t think there’s much of a riddle in what Miss Allington tells us, anyway. But we’d better get back to the children. I think, Miss Allington, that Mr Travis had some talk with them?’

‘Oh, yes. He told them the story of the siege. Good Cavalier and Roundhead stuff. They loved it. Tristram said afterwards that he thought he could make historians of Eugene and Digby.’

‘Historians!’ The natural agitation of Ivon Lethbridge modulated into indignation before this. ‘Cavaliers and Roundheads? Damned nonsense! History is all bunk, as Winston Churchill said.’

‘I think that Mr Lethbridge is perhaps confusing his authorities,’ Appleby suggested mildly. ‘But again we must stick to the point. The children had better be found at once. But there is probably very little mystery about them. Miss Allington, may I take it that Mr Travis amused himself by telling them the wonderful story of the treasure as well?’

‘It’s quite likely – and why shouldn’t he?’

‘Why indeed? But here are two high-spirited boys bored stiff by top-spin’ – Appleby had to hold up a hand to check the just indignation of the Lethbridge parents before this appalling remark – ‘and along with them two admiring girl-cousins. I have very little doubt that they’re having a wonderful time in the castle at this moment. If not there, then somewhere else around the place. I suggest that some of us go and see.’

‘It’s pitch dark by now,’ Judith said. ‘And there will be no moon for hours.’

‘We’ll want as many electric torches as can be found.’ Appleby said. ‘We’ll also want a certain discretion. There’s no need to alarm them with the effect of a hue and cry.’ He turned to Allington. ‘And do you think we might venture to disturb Rasselas? He might be quite a help.’

‘You’re right about not alarming them,’ Wilfred Osborne murmured to Appleby as the expedition set out. ‘If I had children as young as these at Allington, I’d put the castle out of bounds.’

‘The ruins are dangerous?’

‘I think they must be called that. There are one or two places with an ugly drop to the moat. And one or two others where masonry might come tumbling during a scramble.’

‘I see. It’s something the clever Mr Travis might have thought of before putting ideas in the children’s heads. Judith was wrong about its being pitch dark. It’s a perfectly clear sky, and starlight counts for something, when one’s eyes get used to it. Still, the children are almost sure to have torches themselves, and that should help. Just catch a glimpse of one of them, and we can begin making friendly and unalarming noises.’

‘John, is that you?’ Judith’s voice came out of the darkness, and in a moment she had joined them. ‘Aren’t we rather a crowd?’