Appleby's Answer (18 page)

‘Of course. But this means, I suppose, that no very extensive enquiries would be practicable. By the way, when did the trouble start?'

‘Three months ago.' Sir Ambrose commanded this answer with surprising promptitude. ‘Odd thing is, the fellow's madness goes by the clock – or the calendar. Noticed it on the second occasion, and it remained true of the third. First of the month, every time!'

‘But it's the first of the month today!' Judith exclaimed.

‘So it is, Lady Appleby.' Sir Ambrose did his best to lend this admission the casual air proper in an English gentleman when contemplating crisis. ‘Uncommonly good thing that your husband has turned up to look into the matter.'

‘I'm sure John will do his best. It just occurs to me to wonder whether you ought to have the fire brigade as well.'

‘Good Lord! You can't really suppose–'

In mid-utterance, Sir Ambrose Pinkerton broke off. The muted sound of a telephone-bell had made itself heard at some middling remove in the mansion. It fell silent, and a couple of minutes later the butler glided sombrely into the drawing-room.

‘The telephone, sir,' he murmured in a confidential voice of great carrying power. ‘Detective-Inspector Graves of the County Constabulary wishes to speak to you. I explained that you were entertaining. But he says that it is an urgent matter. He says that it is very urgent, indeed.'

 

 

THE DENOUEMENT WILL NOT TAKE PLACE

 

 

Miss Priscilla Pringle had followed closely, if at a discreet remove, the course of events which she had so masterfully set in train. She had done more. For several months now she had tirelessly woven a complex web of which the denouement (if webs can be thought of as having denouements) was at last imminent!

Circumspection, she never ceased to tell herself, was the prime desideratum. There would be those who would declare her moral position to have been equivocal, and even in her own mind there was no doubt that it was delicate. The grand effect of her endeavours, it was true, was simply to be the unmasking of villainy – an achievement which must be held laudable in all right-thinking minds. Moreover, in each of the two phases of the affair she was surely bound to emerge in a sympathetic light. In the first, she was nothing other than a generous woman, shamefully abused as a consequence of having obeyed an impulse of the most benevolent, indeed charitable, order. In the second, she owned a penetrating intelligence, together with the power of taking rapid and courageous measures in a crisis. It would, no doubt, be an inevitable consequence of the whole sensational affair that her name, at present so modestly celebrated, would spring instantly into nation-wide celebrity. The film rights of
Poison at the Parsonage
would be sold for many thousands of pounds within a week. The paperback rights (not yet negotiated) would pay for far more than Miss Pringle's customary inexpensive holiday on the Italian Riviera. The novel might even be translated into Japanese. There wouldn't, of course, be much money in that. But one of Barbara Vanderpump's historical romances had been thus translated; and the resulting book had been so delicately refined a physical object that Miss Pringle (a woman of exquisite aesthetic feeling) was consumed with jealousy.

And the next book would automatically be almost as profitable. In certain carping quarters, therefore, it would be murmured that the whole sensational and scandalous business had resulted in Priscilla Pringle's doing pretty well for herself. That was why she had to be careful.

But this had not been all. It had been some time before she was completely assured of the seriousness of Captain Bulkington's intentions. Captain Bulkington's letters were hard to interpret – since he, in his rather crazy way, went in for being careful too. What if he simply got bored? What if his robustly malign attitude towards the Pinkertons (of which there seemed to be no rational explanation whatever) simply dissipated itself in fantasy, and he turned to amuse himself with other things? And there was a hazard antithetical to this. Far from cooling off, he might hot up, and simply jump the gun. For weeks Miss Pringle never opened her morning paper without being apprehensive of reading about the sudden and mysterious death of a respectable landowner in Wiltshire. For this wouldn't do at all. She had been obliged to admit (although a shade reluctantly) that it must be only an attempted murder, and not an achieved murder, that was to take place in terms of the seemingly innocent diversion whereby she had consented to provide Captain Bulkington with the basis for an amateur thriller. If Sir Ambrose was really
killed
(she saw with her accustomed intellectual clarity), the sensation, although even greater than it would otherwise be, would not be likely to redound to her credit. No: eleventh hour realisation and last minute intervention gave the formula to which she must work.

In the series of letters to the Captain in which she had sketched the plot of
The Three
Warnings
(or was it
Fretful Elements
, a phrase she had found in
King Lear
?) she had been extremely careful to write precisely as she had promised Captain Bulkington to do: strictly without a hint of anything other than a literary
bagatelle
as being afoot. And he had replied in the same manner. But three times on the telephone he had spoken to different effect, and been most reassuringly maniacal. Sir Ambrose had really and truly received his three warnings – as of death by earth, air, and water – on the first day of three successive months. Ahead of him now was the real thing. Bang on the due date, and through the instrumentality of certain ingenious measures which the professional skill of Miss Pringle had been able to suggest, he and his pretentious mansion (and, if possible, wife as well) would go up in flames. Captain Bulkington's chuckle just before putting down the receiver upon the occasion of his transmitting this news attained to a pitch of the higher insanity such as momentarily chilled even Miss Pringle's blood.

But that which freezes the blood may be said, in a similar figure of speech, to produce an icy calm. Miss Pringle's was an icy calm. She let the very day come. She let its hour of luncheon pass. And then (having first assured herself that her car was in good running order) she picked up her telephone, dialled 999, and unburdened herself of the staggering realisation that had come to her.

Despite thus playing it so cool, however, Miss Pringle was unable to prevent herself from arriving in the vicinity of Long Canings considerably in advance of the time appointed for her rendezvous with the forces of the law. She recalled her collision with Lady Pinkerton's horse and her flat tyre outside the rectory at Gibber Porcorum. It seemed a district in which automobilism was exposed to peculiar hazard, and she must give herself time in hand as an insurance against anything of the kind now. But all went uneventfully, with the consequence that she had an hour to spare.

Dusk was deepening into darkness, and she wondered whether she should simply draw up in a lay-by and compose her mind in solitude. But this seemed a cheerless plan, and she had to acknowledge to herself that she felt the need a little to tune herself up. Suddenly she remembered the Jolly Chairman. There was something heartening about its mere name. And the hour was a perfectly proper one for a lady to indulge in a small brandy and soda. Deciding on this, Miss Pringle pulled up at the inn.

Seeking on this occasion only refreshment and not the pleasures of conversation with local inhabitants, she opted for the saloon bar. It would quite probably be empty, she thought – and pushed the door boldly and regardlessly open. But not only was there company; there was crisis as well. The small square space – not much larger than a commodious horse-box – contained a lady and two gentlemen. The gentlemen were already known to Miss Pringle as
habitués
of the hostelry, since they were in fact none other than Captain Bulkington's pupils. The lady was Miss Pringle's old friend (and
consoeur
, as Captain Bulkington would facetiously have said), Barbara Vanderpump.

Had Miss Pringle been capable of feeling anything other than a just indignation, she might have succumbed to alarm and dismay before so unexpected a confrontation. Her first impulse, indeed, was to curse her own folly in thus exposing herself in a place of common resort. But her mission to Long Canings was not going to be a secret, after all; and if there was something sinister in the confabulation upon which she had stumbled, it was as well that she had become apprised of it betimes.

And now – even before acknowledging the existence of her friend and the young men from ‘Kandahar' – Miss Pringle achieved a rapid preliminary analysis of the situation. She saw that in all probability it wasn't sinister at all. The presence of Messrs Waterbird and Jenkins required no explaining, since the Jolly Chairman represented their refuge from the horrors of their condition as often as they had the price of a pint of bitter in their pockets. And the presence of Barbara Vanderpump could be explained easily enough. It was only necessary to remember (what Miss Pringle had long been conscious of) the appalling vulgarity and triviality of her friend's mind. Inane curiosity and mere idleness were amply sufficient to account for this silly woman's appearance in Long Canings.

‘My dearest Barbara,' Miss Pringle said, ‘this is indeed a surprise! And good evening to you, my dear lads.' Having achieved this cheerful and familiar greeting to the gentlemen (who had executed their uncertain, nicely-brought-up shamble to their feet), she turned to the pub-keeper, who was making a brief foray from the public bar. ‘A
large
brandy and soda, if you please,' she said briskly, and sat down. ‘Mr Jenkins,' she continued, ‘you don't look well.'

‘Not well?' The familiar bemused gape appeared on Ralph Jenkins' features. ‘That's a funny thing – because I don't
feel
well, either.' Ralph sighed hopelessly, as if dimly aware of some unfathomable error in logic, and peered into the depths of his glass.

‘Ralph ate too big a tea,' Adrian Waterbird said contemptuously. ‘And he has a rotten stomach. No good at all.'

‘We were stood it by the man from Scotland Yard,' Ralph bestirred himself to say in an explanatory tone. ‘Very decent of him, really. Although, mind you, I think he was fishing for something. About the Bulgar, probably. Do you know, he'd come to “Kandahar” pretending he had a son he wanted to send there? Dashed queer, I thought that.'

Miss Pringle also judged this intelligence dashed queer. It was the local constabulary that she had alerted to the perilous state of affairs at Long Canings, and even if they had for some reason immediately contacted the metropolitan police there couldn't possibly have been time for a man to come down from Scotland Yard, nose around ‘Kandahar', and give those two overgrown little brutes tea.

‘He had his wife with him, too,' Ralph amplified. ‘And the Bulgar said their name was–'

‘Shut up, Ralph. You're talking too much.' Adrian's glass was empty, and he now looked hopefully at Miss Pringle – no doubt recalling former benefits received. Miss Pringle, however, had turned to deal with Miss Vanderpump.

‘I hope, Barbara,' she said, ‘that you find everything in these parts much as described in my letter. It is gratifying that you should think to check up on it.'

‘My dear Priscilla, I fear I have not given that quaint plan of yours a thought. And my meeting with Captain Bulkington's pupils this evening is purely fortuitous. The fact is – although I doubt whether I have ever mentioned it to you – that I have a very old friend, Kate Anketel, who lives not far from here. I had promised her a visit for a long time, and at last I have been able to manage it. Hinton House is quite charming, and dear Kate – we were at school together – moves in the best county society.'

‘Very gratifying,' Miss Pringle said. She felt momentarily baffled in the face of this unexpected
aplomb
on Miss Vanderpump's part. ‘Then, no doubt, you have met the Pinkertons as well. And Dr Howard–'

‘Who is a Howard,' Miss Vanderpump said with oafish irony.

‘–and Captain Bulkington himself.'

‘I hardly think that
he
qualifies as moving in the best circles here.' Miss Vanderpump spoke with
hauteur
.
‘That
, my dear Priscilla, must be said, however much it is known that you have been inclined to form an attachment to him.'

Miss Pringle had no opportunity to reply to this disagreeable raillery, since the colloquy of the two ladies was abruptly interrupted by a sudden and unseemly brawl between the two young men. For some reason probably not unconnected with the amount of beer he had imbibed, the normally submissive Ralph Jenkins had turned truculent and stupidly blustering. He had resented, it seemed, Adrian Waterbird's assertion that he talked too much. But just on what the dispute turned was not at first clear.

‘Why shouldn't I tell her?' Ralph demanded. ‘We told her some damned queer things in this pub last time, didn't we? And that Scotland Yard man – didn't you tell him about the rotten trick the Bulgar played on us with that slut Sally?'

‘What we say and what we don't say, you great moron, you'll bloody well leave to me.' Adrian's voice was coldly furious. He was so angry, indeed, that he appeared unaware that Miss Pringle and Miss Vanderpump were not absorbed in their own affairs. ‘Telling that chap we were made to tell a pack of lies is one thing. Blabbing about burglary is quite another.' Adrian dropped to a fierce whisper. ‘Pinkerton's a beak. He'd have us inside like a shot if he knew we'd been made to steal his rotten clothes. Bad-school, probably, which is a bloody sight worse than quod. They'd have
you
snivelling and yelping in no time, soppy Jenkins.'