Appleby File (7 page)

‘That would be Yuan – and I think I remember it. This must be stopped. Has the old lady called in the police?’

‘She called in the vicar, and the vicar produced an ecclesiastical exorcist, specially licensed for the job by the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s been bell, book and candle stuff all over Anderton Place. But the poltergeist hasn’t been incommoded so far.’

‘Then the good Lady Parmiter must be persuaded to try the local constabulary after all – and not just as a last resort.’ Appleby, far from amused, frowned at his untouched sherry. ‘It’s monstrous, Judith. A vast great country house, absolutely crammed with treasures waiting to be smashed to bits by some unfortunate child of disordered mind! And nothing done about it, you say, except in terms of clerical mumbo-jumbo? The old dear ought to be locked up.’

‘Don’t be so cockily rationalistic, John. Of course you’re right about the treasures. Acres and acres of the things. But acres and acres of utter junk as well. Aunt Jessica’s late husband was enormously wealthy. As a collector he was also as guileless and tasteless as they come. The result is that Anderton Place must be pretty well unique among the dwellings of men.’

‘But does your aunt
know
? What’s genuine and what’s fake, and so on?’

‘It’s impossible to tell – but she certainly likes living with the old higgledy-piggledy effect perpetrated by my uncle. Loyalty to the deceased, perhaps. Her trustees must have accurate inventories based on adequate expertises made by museum people and so forth. The insurance position would be chaotic without that. But Anderton Place itself
is
chaotic, as you’ve seen for yourself.’

‘Not so chaotic as it will be when this precious poltergeist is finished with it.’

‘That’s how it looks, I must say.’ Judith Appleby glanced at her husband with caution, and confirmed herself in the view that he had been working far too hard. There were even dark rings under his eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’re quite right. It
ought
to be stopped. Why not stop it?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Aunt Jessica has a high regard for you–’

‘Judith, are you suggesting that I take time off to run this blessed poltergeist to earth? The idea’s absurd.’

‘You said yourself she ought to call in the police. And if there’s a policeman in the family–’

‘More sherry? It’s almost dinner-time.’

‘John, dear, don’t be evasive. And think of all that stuff. Sung and T’ang and heaven knows what. And only poor old Aunt–’

‘Poor old fiddlesticks. Your precious aunt is as formidable a dowager as any of her kind in England.’

‘Don’t you feel you could handle her?’

‘Of course I could handle her.’ As he uttered this boast Appleby caught his wife’s eye and grinned. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said. And he reached out for the telephone beside him. ‘I’ll cancel things,’ he said. ‘Just for tomorrow, mind you. I can’t play truant for longer than that.’

‘The poltergeist may not last even that long with you on the job, darling.’

And with this very proper expression of confidence uttered, Judith Appleby went to see about the dinner.

It is well known that poltergeists, in common with other agents of the supernatural, frequently sulk when attracting the interest of persons sceptically inclined. Aunt Jessica’s poltergeist may have regarded the Applebys not as sceptical but merely as open-minded; certainly it lost no time in showing that it remained in business. Appleby hadn’t finished his polite inquiries about Lady Parmiter’s health – indeed the butler who had announced the visitors hadn’t left the drawing-room – when the unmistakable sound of breaking china announced the fact. From a high unglazed shelf crowded with the stuff, a medium-sized jar had tumbled to the parquet floor and exploded like a fragmentation bomb.

Appleby strode over to the resulting small disaster and picked up a couple of the larger pieces. Although scarcely an expert on Oriental ceramics, he had no difficulty in identifying what had been destroyed. The Parmiter Collection – so enormous and so eccentrically miscellaneous – was the poorer by one of those nicely manufactured pots in which one buys preserved ginger at rather superior shops.

‘Sometimes T’ang and sometimes Fortnum and Mason,’ he said rather grimly to Aunt Jessica. ‘Your visitant must certainly be described as having catholic tastes.’

‘As my dear husband himself had.’ Aunt Jessica produced this odd rejoinder with dignity. She certainly wasn’t at all an easy old lady.

‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby spoke absently. Taking the freedom of a fairly close relation, he had scrambled on a chair and was investigating the shelf from which the jar had fallen. It stood close to a high window of which the upper sash was open. Nobody had been looking that way when the thing happened. Beyond this, there was nothing to be remarked. He got down again, collected a brush and shovel from the fireplace, composedly swept up the bits and pieces, and deposited them in a waste-paper basket. Performing this more or less menial action appeared to put something further in his head. ‘How many indoor servants have you got at present?’ he asked.

‘Fewer, certainly, than some years ago.’ For a moment Lady Parmiter seemed to feel that this was as precise a computation as she could fairly be expected to arrive at. But then she tried harder. ‘Seven,’ she said, ‘or eight? Not more than that.’

‘I suppose you can just manage,’ Judith said without irony. Unlike her husband, she had been accustomed to large establishments in youth. ‘I take it they are all reliable, and have been with you for a good many years?’

‘I fear not. The minds of domestic servants, Judith, are undeniably unsettled. I sometimes judge, too, that a nomadic habit is establishing itself among them. Their faces are frequently unfamiliar to me, so I think they must come and go. My housekeeper, Mrs Thimble, would tell you about that. I don’t, of course, include Mrs Thimble in the eight. She is almost a companion to me in her humble way. Unfortunately she is absent for a few days, owing to some bereavement in her family.’

Appleby had betrayed some impatience during these unhelpful remarks, and had received a warning glance from Judith. Now he tried again.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘that you don’t much care for the police. But you might–’ He broke off, having been interrupted by a series of bumps and shudders, followed by a splintering crash, apparently from just outside the drawing-room. He ran to the door and threw it open. Anderton Place rejoiced in a very grand marble-sheathed hall and a correspondingly imposing marble staircase. The hall was now littered with the debris of an enormous wardrobe. Minor bits and pieces – the first to detach themselves from the tumbling monster – lay here and there on the stairs. The bizarre effect was enhanced by the fact that the wardrobe had apparently contained a very large collection of Victorian and Edwardian clothing. This, too, now lay all over the place.

‘I was about to remark,’ Appleby said calmly when the startled ladies had joined him, ‘that two courses are possible. You might, Aunt Jessica, call in one of the big security firms. They would send you a few skilled people, in the guise of accountants or solicitors’ clerks or indigent clergy deserving a country holiday–’

‘Quite out of the question.’ Lady Parmiter made no bones about this. ‘I should regard anything of the sort as most objectionable.’

‘Alternatively, there are highly reputable bodies devoted to the pursuit of psychical research. Archbishops and Prime Ministers have been among their active members from time to time. Their attitude is totally objective and disinterested, just as is that of any other learned society. They possess great experience alike in assessing the significance of genuine paranormal phenomena and in detecting imposture. If you cared–’

‘I will have nothing to do with anything of the sort, John. Dear Adolphus would not have approved of it. Judith, is that not so?’

‘Yes, Aunt Jessica, I suppose it is. But then Uncle Adolphus was never up against a peculiarly destructive poltergeist.’

‘There is the luncheon bell, my dear. Your uncle always liked an old-fashioned bell. I have had to instruct this new butler – whose name escapes me – to refrain from entering and announcing meals. And that reminds me. We shall not discuss these disturbing incidents before the servants. I hope the man has remembered the Andron-Blanquet. I recall it, John, as your favourite claret. Malign spirits may be at work. But at least they have made no attack upon the cellar.’

And Lady Parmiter, a spirited woman, led the way to her dining-room.

The meal was uneventful. Spoons and forks didn’t tie themselves into knots, or take to the air and vanish. The only mishap was a minor one, when a young parlour-maid contrived to spill an uncomfortably hot potato into Judith’s lap. Appleby found himself giving an eye to this girl. If she was a professional, it didn’t seem to be at waiting at table. And to a trained sense her relationship to the anonymous butler was detectably odd. This might be taken to count against the view that she was the standard hysterical female of canonical poltergeist literature. Appleby rose from table with a dim theory stirring in his mind.

Then – again claiming family status – he took a prowl through Anderton Place alone. Even more than he remembered, it was a mad museum from cellars to attics. In the cellars there was plenty of that sound and modest claret; there was even more claret that was very rare indeed; there was also a bewildering amount of wine for which the late Lord Parmiter must have scoured every fifth-rate grocer’s shop in the country. The attics were full of rubbish – some of it honest-to-God rubbish, and some of it fake furniture of the most pretentious sort. And every now and then one came on something which would have satisfied the most exacting taste in the age of Louis Quatorze. The effect was a kind of security nightmare. It cried out for skilled pillage.

And so with the rest of the house. As the crazy Lord Parmiter had disposed everything, so was everything disposed now. It would take the entire staff of the British Museum a month’s labour, one could feel, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

There were several further ‘disturbing incidents’ (as Aunt Jessica had termed them) while Appleby prowled. At one point a worthless but lethal bracket clock hurtled past Appleby’s ear and smashed into a cabinet containing some decidedly precious Dresden china. The whole affair was clearly mounting to a crisis.

Back in the drawing-room, Appleby found that Judith had been trying to persuade her aunt to take drastic emergency action. She ought to send her entire staff away on board-wages, shut up the house, and leave merely a thoroughly reliable caretaker in charge. Appleby didn’t think much of this plan. Nor – more conclusively – did Lady Parmiter. If the poltergeist really was a poltergeist (and on this she, too, professed an open mind) the result might merely be major disaster. More poltergeists might simply move in, and the last state of Anderton be worse than its first. Appleby agreed, or professed to agree. He had an alternative suggestion. The most experienced packers in London should be hastily brought in. Working under Lady Parmiter’s direction, they could crate up everything of the first value for immediate removal to impregnable strongrooms in the metropolis. Poltergeists were invariably confined to one stamping-ground. They wouldn’t be able to follow.

Lady Parmiter turned this down too – but with a shift of ground. Such a proceeding would be abhorrent to the shade of dear Adolphus, and was therefore not to be entertained for a moment. It seemed an impasse. Appleby produced what seemed to be a final throw.

‘But doesn’t Anderton run to something like a strongroom of its own?’ he asked. ‘I seem to remember Judith’s uncle speaking of something of the kind, and being rather proud of it.’

‘We simply call it the safe, John, but it is in fact a large room and entirely burglar-proof. I always lock my dear mother’s Queen Anne silver away in it when I have occasion to leave Anderton.’

‘That’s very prudent of you.’ Appleby was wondering whether he could possibly bring this perverse old person to see reason. At least he mustn’t give up without a further attempt. ‘May I see it?’ he asked. ‘Your husband was extremely wise to have such a thing constructed. No great house should be without one.’

The request, thus framed, was well received. The Anderton strong-room looked tremendously impressive – and had looked just that for at least fifty years. Indeed, it might have been some triumph of metallurgical skill triumphantly displayed at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851. If Appleby was amused at this outmoded affair he managed not to betray the fact.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘–couldn’t we simply put everything that is really valuable in here? I’m sure Lord Parmiter would have approved. We have on our hands just the sort of situation he must have been envisaging when he ordered so spacious an affair. If what we’re up against is simple human vandalism or madness, then we defeat it in this simple way. If it’s something supernatural, we’re at least no worse off than we are at present. Of course you’re the only person who knows what’s what; who can quickly pick out the really precious things from those which are to be classed as primarily of sentimental value. I honestly feel you should do this, Aunt Jessica. It’s your duty as the guardian of all the marvellous things Lord Parmiter gathered together. And it can all be done this afternoon. You show us what, and the whole household can help with the stowing.’

Perhaps surprisingly, Lady Parmiter agreed to this plan at once. The undisturbed disposition of things at Anderton was very dear to her as one of the pieties of widowhood. She was a good Victorian, after all, and the impulse was the same as that which had prompted a more famous Widow to preserve intact the arrangements on her deceased Prince Consort’s writing table. On the other hand she had a shrewd sense of what things were worth, and no reason to believe that dear Adolphus would have smiled on the indiscriminate massacre of his wildly heterogeneous treasures.

The task was accomplished by a late dinner-time, the bewildered servants being directed (in the absence of the bereaved Mrs Thimble) by the butler without a name. Anderton didn’t look all that denuded when the job was finished. All the same, objects worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds had been segregated and placed under lock and key. The poltergeist was thwarted – or so it was to be hoped.