Appleby at Allington (5 page)

Appleby made a suitable reply to this humorous sally. He had done a great deal of living on terms of mild acquaintanceship with people who appeared to have known his wife intimately from her cradle. He rather liked Wilfred Osborne. His conversation could scarcely be called intellectually stimulating, but it was inoffensive even when slightly absurd. And his manners were of the kind that can’t go wrong; he had the flawless confidence and the polite diffidence of a man who has never had to give his position in the world a thought. It was a position which had, indeed, taken quite a tumble. Like Dogberry, Osborne must have had losses, since he had once lived in a large way and now lived in a small one. But there was not the slightest sign that this change in material circumstances had made any mark upon him. He was today what from his birth he had been. The great-grandson of the tallow King of Victoria’s middle time seemed to embody the aristocratic idea much more securely than did the descendant of the Cavaliers and Crusaders who had supplanted him at Allington Park.

‘Hoobin is worried about the moles,’ Osborne said. ‘And quite right, too. Your upper spinney’s alive with them, and it stands to reason they have to get down to the stream. And you can see what that means, Judith. It means your croquet lawn. One day you’ll ask all your friends to a tournament – all those dead-keen old ladies and gentlemen, my dear – and they’ll all spend a wakeful night planning the what-d’you-call-it – the strategy of their game. But that same night the moles will have been at work. So when the company arrives, brandishing its mallets–’

‘It sounds a catastrophe,’ Appleby said. ‘So what should we do?’

‘You’ll find that Hoobin wants to bring in the mole-catcher. But that’s because he has a family interest. It’s Hannah Hoobin’s boy who is our local mole-catcher now.’

‘Hannah
Hoobin’s boy?’ Appleby was now accustomed to this sort of conversation. ‘Is that the old fellow with the grey beard?’

‘That’s Hannah Hoobin’s boy. But have nothing to do with him, Appleby. Shoot the creatures. It’s the only way.’

‘Shoot them!’ Appleby was dismayed. ‘I shoot squirrels, and I shoot pigeons, and I rather think that soon I shall have to be shooting rabbits. But I’m blest if I’m going to start on the moles. Besides, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a live mole in my life. They’re of a reclusive habit, I’d say.’

‘My dear Appleby, you don’t need to
see
them.’ Osborne was harmlessly amused by this innocence. ‘You get a stepladder, set it up over each mole-hill in turn, and fire straight down into it. Of course the timing’s important. Moles, you know, go by the clock. Twelve noon used to be the time. But that was in the old days. Summer time may make it a bit chancy. In which case, I’d try moth-balls. Moles don’t care for moth-balls at all.’

‘I think, perhaps, we should go in and begin lunch,’ Judith said. She felt that John might support all this rural lore better over his cold salmon and hock. ‘And we don’t want to miss the opening of the fête. That’s always fun.’

‘Judith and I missed the
son et lumière
,’ Appleby said over the coffee. ‘But Allington gave me an account of it last night. He appears to have enjoyed it, really – although he was putting on a bit of a turn about how upsetting it had been.’

‘And now,’ Judith said, ‘there really
has
been an upset. Have you heard, Wilfred? Mr Allington took John to look at the lighting equipment last night, and they found a dead man. He had received a lethal electric shock.’

‘Good Lord!’ Osborne had put down his cup. He looked very startled. ‘Somebody who had strayed in?’

‘He was still unidentified when I came away,’ Appleby said. ‘It does look as if it may have been a matter of rash curiosity. And Allington has a curious story about one consequence of this show he has been putting on. There was something about treasure in it – and people have actually been found wandering about the park in the night, treasure-hunting. It sounded a bit unlikely to me, and I couldn’t be certain that Allington himself was being quite serious about it.’

‘There was always a legend about treasure.’ Osborne spoke thoughtfully. ‘I remember it quite firing my imagination as a boy. In fact, my brother and I went digging for it. I haven’t thought about it for years, but no doubt the story still lives on. It’s rather a pleasant memory, so far as I’m concerned. I’d hate to think of it leading to anybody’s death.’

‘No need to, at the moment.’ Appleby gave a brief account of his experience of the previous night. ‘I can’t see how any notion of hunting for treasure would take a chap up among all that electrical stuff.’ Appleby paused, suddenly frowning. ‘Osborne, you attended this affair?’

‘I went along on the first night. As Judith knows, I’m careful not to seem standoffish about anything at Allington. And this was a good idea, without a doubt. Jolly well done, I thought, and pots of money for charity.’

‘Did the part about the treasure suggest one likely spot for it more than another?’

‘I don’t very clearly remember. To tell you the honest truth, Appleby, I got a bit sleepy at times. History, and all that, tends to have that effect on me, I’m afraid. Not that it wasn’t tiptop, as I said. There was what you might call a will-o’-the-wisp effect when they told about the treasure. You know what I mean: lights darting here and there, and always deeper into the park. Come to think of it, they always seemed to end up in the same spot. As if that was the goal, you know. But it was very confusing. That was the idea, I suppose. The place wouldn’t have been easy to identify afterwards.’ Osborne shook his head. ‘I see what you’re getting at, of course. But it would only be a wholly uneducated person – indeed, a half-wit, wouldn’t you say? – who could take anything of the sort as other than make-believe. No sensible person could suppose that an
actual
likely hiding-place was being – what’s it called? – spot-lit.’

‘That seems fair enough.’ Appleby saw that Judith was looking at her watch; she seemed genuinely determined to be at Allington in time for the start of the afternoon’s proceedings. ‘But suppose it
was
rational to believe that the will-o’-the-wisp was a reliable guide. There might then be sense in turning it on again, in order to take accurate observations at leisure. Allington actually invited me to get going on it myself. I don’t at all know how it would have been done, since all I ever did last night was to flick a switch or two at random. But one imagines there must have been some sort of script or score or notation. The whole affair – the
lumière
part, I mean – must have been programmed to go through certain sequences at command. You’d do this or that, and the treasure-hunt sequence would result – duly synchronized, of course, with the relevant chunks of
son
. It is just conceivable – and I may say, Osborne, that it’s Judith who has set me taking such a fantastic view of the affair – it is just conceivable that the chap who came to that nasty end thought that, there under his hand, he had some clue to finding the treasure.’ Appleby paused. ‘I don’t think it likely. But it’s a line. It’s
one
line – for a start.’

‘I’ll get out the car,’ Judith said and slipped quietly from the room.

‘Osborne,’ Appleby asked thoughtfully, ‘I think you did know Judith from her earliest years?’

‘Certainly. I can remember her in bonnets and long clothes. Queer things they dressed infants in in those days.’

‘Would you say that, from the first, she was peculiarly adept at getting her own way?’

‘That puts it a little strongly, perhaps.’ Wilfred Osborne wasn’t at all at a loss before this question. ‘But she had marked strength of character from the first. Most important in the – what would you call it? – battle of life. I often reflected that the fellow who married her would bless himself. Splendid housewife, too – eh? Capital lunch.’

It appeared that the annual fête at Allington Park was not quite so modest and local an affair as Owain Allington had intimated. People came from both the Dreams (Stony Dream and the Applebys’ own Long Dream), from Linger, and even from Boxer’s Bottom. None of them had any direct interest in the objects of this particular charitable effort. In the village hall of Allington all the doors had come off their hinges and half the windows had fallen out of their frames – but who at Linger cared about that? In inclement weather rainwater dripped down the neck of the Reverend Mr Scrape as he murmured from his pulpit to Owain Allington, Owain Allington’s farm-manager, Owain Allington’s farm-manager’s wife, old Scurl (who rang the bell), and the assembled young of Allington village, penned mute in the chancel, and facetiously referred to as the choir. Yet this would hardly have struck anybody in Boxer’s Bottom as anything out of the way. The grand project for a changing-room and lavatory on the new playing-field (gift of Owain Allington Esquire), if bruited in any of these other rural centres, would doubtless have been commented upon as a mere delusion of grandeur.

Nevertheless, people poured into Allington Park. The men came to shoot clay pigeons under the superintendence of Owain Allington’s keeper, and also in the hope that one or another of their children would win not a lollipop or a comic but a bottle of whisky or gin from the threepenny lottery. The children came to ride the ponies of their more fortunately circumstanced contemporaries, to scream, to run, to collide with each other and with the adults, and occasionally to fall into the lake. The women came to gossip – and in the perennial hope that the gentry, whether in miserable ignorance or to curry favour, would be selling their fruitcakes and chutney and jam well below market prices. These may be declared the main motivating forces at play within this wholesome English festival.

It was a beautiful afternoon, and the sunlight glittered on the lake as Appleby swung the car into the long drive that led straight up to the north front of the house. The castle was visible across the water and slightly to the west; what wasn’t visible was the scaffolding erected for the
son et lumière
. Sure enough, it had vanished, and in its place was a marquee and some smaller tents. A faint waft of music came across the lake. Owain Allington’s flag was flying from his housetop.

‘Quick work,’ Appleby said. And then, suddenly, he exclaimed. ‘Do you know? I think they’ve taken away the gazebo-affair too.’

‘It would have been rather a skeleton at the feast, eh?’ Osborne suggested. ‘At a junketing like this you don’t want a standing reminder – quite literally standing, one may say – of a rather gruesome happening the day before.’

‘True enough. But I’m surprised at the police. When you have an unexplained fatality in a temporary structure like that, you don’t generally whisk it out of existence twelve hours later.’

‘Owain would have insisted on it.’ Osborne spoke innocently if a shade dryly. ‘It’s wonderful what can be insisted on by a grandee – wouldn’t you say?’

‘Particularly in the green heart of England,’ Judith amplified. She had marked her husband’s disapproval, and regarded it as highly promising. ‘Perhaps, John, you’ll be able to have a little chat about it with Colonel Pride.’

‘The Chief Constable? Certainly not. He feels I have to be kept in my place – which is absurd. If he’s at this nonsense, of course we’ll have some civil talk. But I don’t care for him.’

‘My dear Appleby, you mustn’t be put out by Tommy Pride’s manner.’ Wilfred Osborne spoke as a man of peace. ‘He’s not a bad chap. Had quite a decent war, and all that. Perhaps he hasn’t much between the ears, as the young people say. And, naturally, he knows nothing about criminals, and all that sort of thing.’ Osborne paused in mild perplexity before Judith’s sudden yelp of laughter. ‘Only saying, my dear, that poor old Tommy may feel a bit defensive – with a top pro. like John moving into these parts. Appleby, may I call you John? Seems not too out of turn.’

‘Yes, of course. And I’ve no doubt you’re right, Wilfred, about Pride. But he’s one reason why I wouldn’t dream of starting to poke into that affair last night.’

‘Why do the lake and drive run beside each other on this hard straight line?’ Judith had judged a diversion useful. ‘Didn’t Humphrey Repton or somebody lay out the grounds?’

‘He improved them, my dear. That was the word.’ Osborne was delighted. ‘It comes into
An Inquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening
. And it was only for my great-grandfather, you know, that he did the job. Chronologically, that’s rather remarkable. Osbornes marry late, you see, if they marry at all. My great-grandfather was what they called a Russia merchant. I don’t know why Russia. It was where tallow in a big way seemed to come from. Perhaps it was made out of bears. What was I saying?’

‘Repton.’

‘Yes, of course. He was a gentleman, you know, who lost his fortune and turned professional gardener to the nobility, gentry, and newer propertied classes. That would be how to put it – eh, John? And it impressed my great-grandfather very much. He had Repton in a big way. In those days you
wound
your waters – that was the word for them – but just here it was necessary to have this long straight bank. It’s really the bed of a shallow quarry, from which they got the stone for the later parts of the castle. However, the resourceful Repton said it was an interesting return to the Dutch Taste. I believe he threw in a tulip-bed a quarter of a mile long. Of course, this isn’t the main approach. Do you know Ashdown House in Berkshire? Most intriguing Dutch place in the country.’

The car continued to move up the drive – slowly, because it was now one of a line of cars. Osborne continued to talk in a casually informative way about Allington. Appleby wondered how strong his feelings about the house really were. He also wondered whether, apart from having been a soldier, this amiable elderly man had ever engaged in any settled occupation whatever. Presumably he had run Allington when he owned it. But what had he done since then? Perhaps just lived on what he had salved from what must have been, presumably, a sadly encumbered estate. Judith would know.