Appleby's Answer (11 page)

Unfortunately there was a hill, and the incidents here described had been enacted on its brow. Miss Pringle had just hauled Lady Pinkerton to her feet – for it would have been inhumane to stand exulting at her overthrow – when a shrill neigh of terror made itself heard in a middle distance. This was followed by a crash, and the crash by an ominous silence.

‘He will have broken his back,' Lady Pinkerton said, and it was hard to tell whether her voice held horror or fury in the fuller measure. ‘You are no better than a murderess.' For a moment Miss Pringle thought she was going to be attacked, and she noted with apprehension that her adversary had retained possession of a nasty-looking little whip. But fortunately Lady Pinkerton's thoughts were, so to speak, in the right place, and she turned away and ran down the hill. Miss Pringle, who hadn't at all cared for the word hurled at her, but who felt a certain responsibility for the unfortunate state of affairs nevertheless, ran after her.

The car had gone over a low stone wall and lay upside-down in a turnip field. The horse, although its nervous distresses had brought it out in an ugly lather, was standing quietly at the roadside, nosing experimentally at a tussock of grass. It was, however, bleeding rather profusely at the spot where its tail had been.

Lady Pinkerton took the creature – in every sense so injured – by the bridle and began to lead him away without a word. But then she paused, and briefly addressed Miss Pringle.

‘You needn't bother about ringing up the police,' she said grimly. ‘I shall do so the moment I get home. I shall also put a call through to the Chief Constable himself. He is a fox-hunting man.'

 

Miss Priscilla Pringle to Miss Barbara Vanderpump

 

MY DEAR BARBARA,

How very kind of you to send me an advance copy of
The East in Fee
. I have often thought that Venice, chosen as a setting, would educe one of your finest historical novels – and here, I am sure, it is! I shall read it slowly, savouring every nuance of style. And then you shall have what I promise will be my candid opinion!

Meanwhile, I think it may amuse you to receive a short account of my little expedition into Wiltshire. I did get to Long Canings! Incidentally, the mystery of the odd place-name is solved. I got a hint (quite acutely, I feel) from the name of an inn in which I had a peaceful sandwich and a solitary half-pint of ale. It is called the Jolly Chairman. And, of course, one
canes
chairs – either with imported material or with cultivated bamboo. At Long Canings they used to cane high-backed chairs, which required that the stuff should be prepared in five-foot lengths. Hence the name. How interesting these things are!

It is a charming little village, with some very nice people who welcomed me, simply as a fellow Christian, at matins in the small but beautiful church. Arriving early for the service, I was spoken to most delightfully by a dear old man who might have been one of Thomas Hardy's rustics (only he was much more truly devout) and whose duty it was to ring the bell. Sir Ambrose and Lady Pinkerton live in the manor (which is unusually imposing), and I was particularly attracted by Lady Pinkerton, whose conversation is robust and full of character. I have some reason to believe her to be a notable horsewoman. Sir Ambrose is extremely quiet. Indeed, I can't say that he really said a word to me! But he read the lessons most movingly, in an exquisitely modulated voice. Dr Howard (who is the incumbent of both Long Canings and Gibber Porcorum) is a Howard. There is also a Miss Anketel, a woman of the most pungent presence, to whom I was not introduced.

And now my big surprise. I conversed with our eccentric Captain Bulkington, and rather liked him! We were quite wrong in imagining that there could be something fishy about his interest in detective stories and so on. This in fact revealed itself as a wholly harmless foible, and he is the most gentle of men – as true soldiers so often are. It amused me that he renewed his odd notion that we might collaborate in a novel. And – do you know? – I am almost inclined to indulge him. It might (as you yourself so thoughtfully said) be a kindness, since it is possible that time hangs a little heavily on his hands. (At the moment, indeed, he has only two pupils – but hand-picked, I imagine, since they are both delightful and brilliant young men.) Of course it would come to no more than an occasional letter telling him how he could contrive some imaginary crime or another. I think I shall suggest that he ‘has a go' at Sir Ambrose!! Sir Ambrose is a baronet, it seems, and baronets are always fair game, are they not?

(Of course, my dear Barbara, there is very little in all this nonsense of mine.)

I expect the proofs of
Poison at the Parsonage
quite soon. I do seriously believe it to be the best thing I have done, and it is perhaps a little depressing to know that it will sell no better, and no worse, than any of the others. Unassisted literary merit appears to be of little avail in winning any wide public regard. But if something quite extraneous happened – if one of us two was murdered, for example – whatever we had lately published would go like hot cakes! But I certainly don't intend to be murdered, and am sure you don't either.

And now I must (as servants say at the end of their letters) ‘close'. I am all agog to get at
The East in Fee
.

 

Ever your affectionate friend,

 

PRISCILLA PRINGLE

 

PS You may recall my mentioning having been told that the last rector of Long Canings (as an independent living) had been murdered. In fact, it seems that the poor man simply fell down a well and was drowned. Malicious gossip must then have got to work, transforming this simple if sad fatality into an occasion of sinister rumour. It is happily true that the kind of thing with which I entertain my readers (innocently enough, I hope) simply does not happen in
real life
.

P P

 

 

 

A PLOT THICKENS

 

 

Sir John Appleby glanced up from his road-map.

‘Frome?' he said interrogatively. ‘And Trowbridge? I don't see why we should be working round by these places at all. They're not my idea of a quick run home.'

‘It's only a small detour.' Lady Appleby swung the Rover rapidly round a bend as she produced this soothing reply. ‘And, you see, there's the problem of lunch.'

‘The problem of lunch?' Long experience, sharpened to intuition, had brought a note of suspicion into Appleby's voice. ‘Why should lunch be a problem? These are fairly civilised parts. I'll get out the
Good Food Guide
.'

‘Spare yourself the pains. I've fixed us a free meal, as a matter of fact. With Kate Anketel.'

‘Kate Anketel?' Appleby's heart sank. ‘And who the devil, my dear Judith, is Kate Anketel?'

‘You must remember Kate. I was at school with her.'

‘You were at a great many schools, if your account of your early years hasn't been, as I sometimes suspect, pure fantasy. They kept on turning you out. It's why you discreetly declare yourself in the reference books as having been privately educated. It was while still privately educating yourself that I stumbled across you. How should I know anything about your Free Lunch Kate?'

‘You've met Kate, at least once. At the Parolles in Dorset.'

‘I've never heard of the Parolles in Dorset.'

‘Kate lives at Hinton House, near a place called Long Canings. We'll make it in half an hour. Kate trains horses.'

‘I might have known it. Another Stone in the Rain.' This was Appleby's term, drawn from his favourite poet, for a certain category of his wife's acquaintances. Judith was a sculptor, but these Stones weren't of the sort she might attack with a chisel. They were her inheritance from a childhood lived amid what Appleby considered to be a completely dotty landed gentry. ‘I will
not
be led round endless loose-boxes, or whatever they're called, hazarding totally ignorant remarks about racehorses. Racehorses are even stupider than hunters, just as hunters are even stupider than hounds. And the people who muck around with such creatures are even–'

‘Don't be so atrabilious. It's only because you're hungry – and thirsty. Kate's father built up – or laid down – the best cellar in this part of England.'

‘If your Miss Anketel is a contemporary of ours, most of the stuff will now be dead in its bottles.' Appleby pulled himself up, conscious that this was a disobliging speech. ‘However, we'll see.'

‘We'll see,' Lady Appleby said, and pushed the Rover up to seventy. Appleby, resigned, sat back and unwound. He deprecated his wife's bouts of regressive behaviour. But he had complete faith in her driving.

Nevertheless – and it was just outside Long Canings – Lady Appleby almost had an accident. Rounding a bend, at only moderate speed, she had to draw up with an abruptness that jolted her husband and herself hard into their seat-belts. The respectable bonnet of the Rover was within inches of the hindquarters of a respectable horse. The horse's owner, who was dismounted and with one of the creature's forelegs between her knees, looked up with an expression of unrestrained indignation. She was a woman of weatherbeaten but commanding appearance, whom Appleby had no difficulty in identifying as another Stone in the Rain.

‘Confound you,' this person said without ceremony. ‘Motorists ought to be forbidden to charge irresponsibly around these roads. Happened to me only a few weeks ago.'

‘The mare may have gone lame.' Judith Appleby had climbed briskly from the car. ‘But that's no reason why you shouldn't have got it on to the verge.'

‘I shall complain to the police.'

‘You'd do better to complain to your RDC.' Judith stirred the surface of the road with a toe. ‘They call the stuff loose chippings. Disgusting flint. Disgraceful where there are horses around.'

‘You're absolutely right. But our RDC are a pack of red-hot socialists. Waste of time to address them. If you ask me, some of them are at the bottom of the deuced odd things that have been happening round here lately.'

‘Deuced odd things?' Appleby asked automatically. Deuced odd things, after all, were his line.

‘A great deal of annoyance and impertinence offered to my husband.' As Lady Pinkerton said this, she suddenly struck Judith as being in a state of barely concealed nervous agitation. Conceivably the near-collision had really upset her quite a lot.

‘Perhaps,' Judith said politely, ‘we could take a message for you. You might care to send for a groom? We're lunching at a place called Hinton House.'

‘Thank you, I can manage very well.' The weatherbeaten woman now comprehended both Applebys in her stare. ‘Haven't we' – she demanded on a note less social than threatening – ‘
met
somewhere?'

‘Perhaps at the Parolles in Dorset,' Appleby suggested.

‘Very possibly.' It was immediately apparent that this foolish joke, designed as intelligible only to Judith and prompted by hunger and impatience alike, had quite misfired. Momentarily, the weatherbeaten woman was almost civil. ‘My husband and I have visited there, and so, I believe, has Miss Anketel. You had better drive on to Hinton now, or you will be late for lunch. Be so good as to go past well on the other side of the road.' The weatherbeaten woman was resuming normal form. ‘Kate Anketel,' she said, ‘has some uncommonly odd friends.'

‘Indeed?' Judith had raised her eyebrows in a manner suggesting to her husband the urgent desirability of getting these two ladies out of earshot of each other.

‘For example, the woman staying with her now. She had an absurd name.
My
name is Pinkerton.'

‘Our name is Appleby.' (Lady Pinkerton – for it was of course she – and Lady Appleby eyed one another without cordiality.) ‘And what is the absurd name?'

‘Vanderpump. Was ever anything so grotesque?'

‘Barbara Vanderpump?'

‘How in heaven should I know? Kate introduced the woman to me. But I don't keep useless information in my head.'

‘I think it must be Barbara. I was at school with her – and with Kate Anketel too.'

‘Indeed? Then you are going to have a reunion, no doubt. I am inclined to think that the Vanderpump woman is presuming upon just such a slight and distant acquaintance with Miss Anketel for some impertinent purpose of her own. It happens.'

‘Really?' Judith said. (Appleby, opening the door of the car, endeavoured – but in vain – to motion his wife within.)

‘She noses around. She tries to engage our village people in gossip. Some time ago, we had another woman of the same sort – who even had the insolence to come to church. But this woman, Miss Vanderpump, has the appearance of positively trying to
unearth
something.'

‘I think I have heard that she writes novels, and perhaps that explains the matter. Historical novels, I believe. So if she comes nosing around – as you express it – after
you
, you must be charitable, and bear with her.' And now Lady Appleby did climb into her car and switch on the engine. ‘Since she has, you see, a professional interest in quaint survivals.' She let in the clutch. ‘And in outmoded manners,' she added – and steered the Rover carefully past Lady Pinkerton's patient quadruped.

‘That was very rude of you,' Appleby said. He appeared to derive a good deal of amusement from the circumstance for the remainder of their drive.

 

He was not particularly surprised to find that he did, after all, remember Miss Anketel (and that she, indeed, even called up in him a dim recollection of the Dorset Parolles). The lesson of the great Vidocq, who transformed the efficiency of the Paris Sûreté by the simple means of insisting that his detectives should never forget a face, had not been lost upon the Scotland Yard where Appleby had been trained. So of course he recalled Judith's school friend as soon as he set eyes on her. (He even, he imagined, recalled her smell, which was of what he supposed to be called a saddle-room.) It was a surprise, however, to find that he also recognised that other school friend of Judith's, Miss Anketel's house-guest, Barbara Vanderpump.