Appleby Talking (2 page)

“A second wind!” The Doctor was startled. “You didn’t sail in again?”

“Certainly. It was the only thing to do. I had come quite clear-headed at last, and I knew that this fellow must absolutely be held on to like grim death. I fought so hard, and did such a lot of damage, that the police when they arrived felt they must send for an Inspector. He sorted the thing out, and a check-up on the man with the real beard eventually led to the tracking down of the man with the bogus one. That was what, in the end, I
had
seen: that if there were two men like that, they must be in a plot together. They had worked out a clever technique of distraction, particularly suitable for playing off against a boy. As soon as Bogus Beard had contrived to let me see that his
was
a disguise, he simply thrust that disguise away and did the stealing. Whereupon his confederate, Real Beard, planted himself before me in turn, and elicited the response that diverted everybody’s attention while Bogus Beard, still beardless, got away with the booty. If I hadn’t stuck it out, Real Beard would have got away in his turn, loaded with handsome apologies for my irresponsible imagination and outrageous conduct.” Appleby chuckled. “And what a bewildered little ass I’d have felt.”

George Arbuthnot was a novelist by trade – a rather sordid social comedy was his line – and he had not been broadcasting for long. But already he was popular on the air, potentially far more popular than he would ever be as a fabricator in finical prose of witty if unedifying drawing-room romances. The microphone had brought to the surface a sort of secondary personality, perhaps more effective than genuine, the chief characteristic of which was an abounding and cheerful moral earnestness. Arbuthnot’s confident voice with its buoyant nervous tone momentarily smoothed out life’s difficulties for thousands. During a precious fifteen minutes weekly his hearers could believe that all might yet be well with their particular private world.

But Arbuthnot’s own private world was a mess. He had married a beautiful and slightly crazy girl whose completely amoral nature caught his rather cynical professional interest. It had not been a sensible thing to do; craziness and amorality are not likely to go with hard-wearing domestic virtues; and certainly the wise and confident voice on the air would have condemned the alliance out of hand. Arbuthnot was paying for his rashness now.

His wife had taken a lover, a disgusting man called Rupert Slade, whose suave manners and faint contemptuous smile he had come violently to loathe. And unfortunately the situation left Arbuthnot – humiliatingly as if he were a weak-willed wronged husband in one of his own novels – baffled and indecisive. For one thing it was Slade who, being in on broadcasting, had got him this new means of adding substantially to his income. Probably Slade could do him no harm in that matter now. He was too well established as a star performer. Still, the thing added to life’s awkwardness.

And so when he came home from delivering his weekly talk Arbuthnot was often irritated and restless. He was restless tonight – more so than he could remember for some time. It was as if he were endeavouring to thrust back into the depths of his mind impulses to which it would be dangerous to give conscious attention. He tried a cigar, he tried the gramophone, he tried a book which had been listed as “Curious” in his bookseller’s catalogue. But nothing served. The book was obscene without being in the least amusing – which might be the plight, Arbuthnot gloomily reflected, in which he would eventually find himself as a novelist when the sands of his talent began to run low. As for music – well, by that he was secretly bored at any time. And the cigar for some reason kept going out.

He got up and prowled the living-room of the apartment. He stood before its handsome but unwelcoming electric radiator and thought it was like his wife. His brow darkened, and his chin went up; almost one might have thought that he had achieved one of those clear-cut decisions that he so confidently recommended over the air – and that in the novels were so seldom achieved. But the issue of this appeared not so very dramatic after all. He stubbed out the unsatisfactory cigar, switched off the cheerless radiator, moved to a door, opened it and spoke down a passage.

“Roper,” he called, “I shan’t be writing tonight, and I’m going to bed. Don’t either of you wait up, for Mrs Arbuthnot will be very late.”

George Arbuthnot flicked off the lights and left the living-room in darkness.

“A fellow called Slade,” said the Sergeant. With a sense of subdued drama he gestured in the air. “Just hit hard on the back of the head with a poker. The resourceful old blunt instrument. A very simple and fairly certain manner of killing.” The Sergeant’s voice indicated a sort of qualified professional approval. “And no fingerprints either. Here we are.”

A smoothly accelerating lift whirled them upwards. The door of the Arbuthnot apartment, by which a constable stood guard, was handsome and enamelled in a delicate cream. The sort of place, Detective-Inspector John Appleby reflected, which ate money and bred nervy folk… They entered the living-room, and he glanced curiously about him. “Arbuthnot the novelist?” he asked.

The room gave at a first appearance the impression of gracious and civilised standards. The walls were lined with books – for the most part either new or very old – in French and English. A large late Matisse displayed its salmon pinks and acid greens on the wall opposite the window. But the whole place had been efficiently decorated and furnished in terms of some delicately-considered scheme, and nothing was visible that did not almost ostentatiously blend with the whole.

“A sterile room, Sergeant, for sterile people living by the laws of cocktail-bars and arty magazines. Have you any kids? Imagine them let loose in a place like this.” Appleby took off his hat. “And who,” he asked unprofessionally, “cares which of them killed whom? Still, no doubt we’d better find out.”

Slade’s body still lay prone on the carpet, covered with a sheet. Appleby twitched this away and looked down on the sprawled figure in evening-clothes which was revealed to him. It was just possible to distinguish that on the back of the dead man’s head there had been a bald patch which would have made a very fair target even in virtual darkness. And the blow had been terrific. Blood, brains, and shivered glass lay around. There was a faint smell of whisky. It looked as if the assailant had struck while Slade was standing beside a small table having a drink. Decanters and siphon were still disposed where they had been set the night before.

“Nasty,” said the Sergeant. “Doesn’t have the appearance of something that happened in the heat of a quarrel. Nothing face to face about it. Matter of stepping up softly from behind while the poor devil was believing himself hospitably entertained. Unmanly, I call it.”

“Unmanly?” Appleby frowned. “That blow looks like the work of a blacksmith. But perhaps…”

The Sergeant nodded. “Just so, sir. It seems there are skulls and skulls. And this one was of the egg-shell kind. So it seems to be quite possible that the lady–”

“I see.” And Appleby once more drew the sheet over Slade’s body. “The lady first.”

And Mrs Arbuthnot was brought in. A striking woman with haunted eyes, she strode forward in uncontrollable nervous agitation. “My diamonds!” she exclaimed. “They have been stolen from the wall-safe in my dressing-room. Often I forget to lock it, and now they have simply disappeared.”

Appleby’s glance moved from Mrs Arbuthnot to the sheeted figure on the floor. “Loss upon loss,” he said dryly.

Mrs Arbuthnot flushed. “But you don’t understand! The disappearance of the diamonds explains this horrible thing.”

“I see. In fact, you suppose them to have been stolen by the man who killed your – who killed Mr Slade?”

“But of course! So it is idiotic to think that the murderer could have been George – my husband, that is.”

Appleby received this in silence for a moment. “But husbands,” he said presently, “do sometimes kill – well, lovers?”

Mrs Arbuthnot looked him straight in the eyes, and he saw that she was a woman oversexed to the point of nymphomania. “No doubt they do,” she answered steadily. “But they don’t steal their wives’ diamonds.”

Behind Appleby the Sergeant sighed heavily, as one who has heard these childish urgings before. “That,” he said with irony, “settles the matter, no doubt.”

But Appleby himself was looking at Mrs Arbuthnot with a good deal of curiosity. “Perhaps,” he asked mildly, “you will give me your own account of what happened last night?”

With a movement at once sinuous and weary, Mrs Arbuthnot sank into a chair. “Very well – although your colleagues have heard it all already. Rupert – Mr Slade, that is – brought me home. It was late and both my husband and our two servants – a man and wife named Roper – had gone to bed. I asked Rupert in. I thought it quite likely, you see, that my husband would still be up, for often he writes into the small hours of the morning.”

Appleby nodded. “Quite so,” he murmured. “But it just happened that on this occasion you had to continue entertaining Mr Slade alone.”

“I gave him a drink. We decided we were hungry, and I went to the kitchen to cut sandwiches. It was while I was away–” Suddenly Mrs Arbuthnot’s voice choked on a sob. “It was while I was away that this horrible thing happened.”

“I see. And while you were in the kitchen making those sandwiches just what, if anything, did you hear?”

Mrs Arbuthnot hesitated, and Appleby had a fleeting impression of fear and intense calculation. “I did hear voices,” she said. “Rupert’s and – and that of another man: a totally strange voice. Do you understand? A
strange
voice. It was only a few words, short and sharp. And when I came back into this room Rupert was lying on the floor and I saw that he must be dead. I roused my husband. No doubt I ought to have thought of robbery at once. But the shock was too great for coherent thinking, and it was only much later that I found my diamonds had been stolen.” Mrs Arbuthnot paused. “I blame myself terribly. You see, I had left the main door of the flat on the latch behind us. The thief had only to step in.”

“No doubt.” Appleby looked searchingly at Mrs Arbuthnot. “He was rather lucky to be on the spot, was he not? And you think that he stole your diamonds and then brained Mr Slade just by way of finishing off the evening strongly?”

“I think the thief must have stolen the diamonds and then ventured to explore this room, hoping to find something else that was valuable – perhaps he had heard of the Matisse. When he found Rupert barring his way he killed him and made his escape.”

And this was the story to which Mrs Arbuthnot stuck. It was not, Appleby reflected, without some faint colour of possibility. But one major difficulty was evident. Slade had been struck from behind – to all appearance an unsuspecting man. And he was in no sense cutting off the supposed thief’s retreat; the whole geography of the apartment negatived this. To say, therefore, that Slade was barring his way to safety was manifestly unsound.

Was Mrs Arbuthnot, then, shielding her husband with this tale of stolen diamonds? Had the two of them concocted the tale together? Suppose Arbuthnot had killed his wife’s lover. Was it not very likely that, faced by this frightful fact, husband and wife had got together to present the most convincing lie that occurred to them?

Arbuthnot himself was brought in. He was a man, it struck Appleby, who either as witness or accused would make a poor impression on a jury. He was obviously clever and almost as obviously insincere – a man wavering, perhaps, between incompatible attitudes to life, indecisive and therefore unreliable and possibly dangerous. And now he was in an awkward situation enough, for his wife’s lover had been found murdered beneath his roof. Nevertheless, at first he faced things confidently.

“I went to bed early and read,” he said. “I never really go to sleep until my wife gets home.”

“And of late that has frequently been in the small hours?”

The man flushed, hesitated, and then ignored the question. “But I did eventually doze off, and all I can say is that I heard three distinct voices. Not what they said, but just the sound of them.”

“That’s it!” Mrs Arbuthnot broke in anxiously. “My voice, Rupert’s voice, and then the voice of the thief and murderer. He must have tried to bluff when he blundered in on Rupert.”

Appleby ignored this. “You mean,” he asked Arbuthnot, “that you heard three voices engaged in conversation?”

“I couldn’t say that. And I can’t be sure that the third voice said very much. But the other two were Slade’s and my wife’s, all right. So I suppose her explanation fits well enough.”

“Do you, indeed?” Appleby spoke dryly. “By the way, was this third voice a cultivated voice?”

Arbuthnot hesitated. “Well, yes; I’m pretty sure it was. I sleepily felt something rather disconcerting about it, as a matter of fact.”

“A gentleman cracksman. And one, incidentally, who turned with some facility and abruptness to murder.” Appleby paused. “Mr Arbuthnot,” he continued abruptly, “you must be very aware of one likely hypothesis in this case. Are you prepared to swear – in a criminal court, if need be – that last night you didn’t get out of bed, enter this room while your wife was making sandwiches in the kitchen, and here – well, encounter the dead man?”

Arbuthnot had gone pale. “I did not,” he said.

“And you are sure that this story of a third voice, and of stolen diamonds, has not been concocted between your wife and yourself?”

“I am certain that it has not.”

Appleby turned to the Sergeant. “There are two servants – the Ropers. Are they in a position to corroborate this story in any way?”

The Sergeant fumbled with a notebook. And Arbuthnot gloomily cut in. “Not a chance of it, I’m afraid. I told them to go to bed. And they sleep like logs. It’s been a regular joke between my wife and myself.”

Mrs Arbuthnot nodded. “They wouldn’t hear a thing,” she declared confidently.

Appleby moved to the bell. “We’ll have them in,” he said. “And the whole
dramatis
personae
will then be present for the conclusion of the play.”