Death at the Chase (12 page)

‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard of it, sir.’ Bobby was rather startled by this sudden vision of a deceased kinsman in so apocalyptic a role.

‘The dictionary he undertook after his
New Millennium
. That, you know, was his encyclopaedia. Your father fell over the wall of my park.’ Martyn Ashmore appeared unaware that here was a transition of some abruptness. ‘I was very glad to meet him. Turned out an authority on portraiture. Jarvis, Haydon – fellows of that sort.’

Bobby contrived to produce some suitable reply to this. He was accustomed to thinking of his father as a notable polymath. And what his father didn’t know about, his mother did. Perhaps this was why Bobby had taken to fiction, which is a field of knowledge only in a somewhat special sense. Meantime, he had an opportunity to glance round this strange old man’s habitat. Its first suggestion was extremely comfortless. The hall, although not large, had a flagged floor, a raftered ceiling, a random display of rusty weapons on its walls, and a certain amount of useless-looking Tudor furniture standing around. There was a disproportionately large fireplace, and in this there dully shone, like a glow-worm in the mouth of some forbidding cavern, the single bar of a small and extremely primitive electric fire. The whole set-up, moreover, had a mouldy smell.

It wasn’t altogether apparent, however, that the Ashmores had to suffer, as head of the family, a savage old person lost to all the decencies or even creature comforts of life. Mr Ashmore’s black trousers had here and there a greenish hue, but there was a suggestion that they had been donned, together with an appropriate change of linen, at some prescribed evening hour. His faded velvet smoking-jacket seemed really to belong to an age in which gentlemen veritably put on a special garment of the sort before lighting a cigar. Perhaps what Bobby could glimpse through a half-open door was in fact a smoking room, and at least it had a bright log fire burning in a sizeable grate. Through another door, it was true, there was visible a once dignified apartment which seemed to have been roughly adapted to the uses of a kitchen, and there was everywhere a little more dust than seemed compatible with the existence of any indoor servants whatever. It was towards the first of these doors that Mr Ashmore now made a move. He seemed to be proposing, if not some form of material refreshment, at least the enjoyment of the young men’s conversation for a few minutes longer.

‘I think we’d better not stay, Uncle Martyn,’ Giles said. Giles’ manner had become nervous again. It was as if, knowing he had pulled off a wonderful
coup
with this all-important relative, he was feeling that it would be wise to go while the going was good. Perhaps he was afraid that Bobby would somehow put his foot in it. ‘Bobby has a friend we have to pick up,’ he went on, ‘and then I have to be dropped at home and they go on to Dream.’

‘Then I must not detain you.’ Martyn Ashmore, it struck Bobby, was speaking to them rather as a grown-up speaks to well-bred children – as if to contemporaries, but with a faint playfulness at the same time. And his nephew Giles he definitely found amusing. This emerged in the next words he spoke. ‘I must simply retire to the enjoyment, my dear lad, of your very original present. You have really surprised me, I am bound to say. Shall I ever surprise you? It seems too much for an old man to hope for. To impose the unexpected upon one’s intimates – even upon one’s mere relations – holds a peculiar pleasure. Don’t you agree?’

‘Well, yes – I do.’ Giles produced this rather uncertainly. But suddenly he reiterated it. ‘Yes. I do.’

‘There was a fellow who wrote plays’ – Martyn Ashmore had turned to Bobby – ‘and, as it happens, I was mentioning him to your father the other day. He said something to the effect that the tables of consanguinity are founded upon a basis of natural revulsion. It may be I don’t get the words right, but the idea is clear. I have always subscribed to it, so far as my own consanguinity is concerned. I detest all other Ashmores – and it has worried me that, as a matter of mere decorum, I may have to part my possessions among them. Upon the occasion of my death, that is. And my death might now take place, you know, in little more than thirty years time. Or so statistics and the habits of heredity suggest to me. But what was I saying? Ah, yes. I detest all Ashmores, and it is therefore reasonable to infer that all Ashmores detest me. Suddenly an Ashmore appears, bearing gifts. Have I any reason to distrust him? We sport no Grecian ancestry, so far as I know. Giles, you follow me?’

‘I
don’t
quite follow you, Uncle.’ Giles’ uneasiness was increasing. ‘I’m sure I never heard anything about Greek marriages in our family. Only some French ones, and I don’t–’

‘
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
. I see that Bobby understands me. He is clearly a ripe scholar. But now I see that you must really go. Mr Appleby, please give my best wishes to your father. But for the fact that I rarely venture abroad, I would call on him, and hope to be presented to your mother.’ Martyn Ashmore, as he moved through these ritual remarks, moved also towards his front door. It swung open under his hand. ‘And so, goodnight,’ he said. ‘And, Giles, I shall be thinking about you, and about what we have talked over earlier. Who knows what will come of it? You may – yes, after all – you may be surprised.’

Finn was standing on the terrace. He had got tired of waiting in the car, and had been taking a prowl round the house, the sickle moon was now high in the sky. But light cloud was drifting across it, and the broken façade of the ancient building gleamed and darkened alternately like a stage-set defectively lit.

‘I took a peep,’ Finn called out as they came up. His voice sounded much too loud in the still night. ‘But I didn’t see any sign of you. Didn’t the old fellow crack one of those bottles of champagne?’

‘What do you mean – you took a peep?’ Giles demanded. ‘Have you been peering through a keyhole?’

‘That lighted window, you idiot.’ Finn pointed along the terrace. ‘There’s a curtain not quite drawn, and it seems to be the old gentleman’s sitting-room. But he must have been palavering with you somewhere else.’

‘We didn’t go beyond the hall,’ Bobby said. ‘And now I think it’s time we cleared out. Let’s get back to the car.’

‘I wonder whether he
has
opened a bottle of that wine?’ Giles asked. Uncertainty again seemed to have overtaken him. ‘He has an odd way of talking sometimes. Courtly and old-world, I suppose. And he said something about enjoying what I’d brought along. Let’s have a look.’

‘For pity’s sake!’ Bobby said. He was suddenly feeling impatient over this whole affair. But Giles had already moved the short distance down the terrace, and Finn was skipping gleefully after him. Bobby hesitated, and then followed.

‘He isn’t!’ Giles whispered, and drew back from a quick glance he had taken through the half-drawn curtains. Bobby said nothing, but made a similar brief inspection. It was the room with the fire which had been visible from the hall, and Martyn Ashmore was sitting in an easy-chair at one side of the fireplace. Bobby saw him put out a hand to a small table and pick up a book. There was certainly no bottle or glass in evidence.

‘He was merely saying something polite,’ Finn said. ‘Probably he doesn’t drink at all, and will send your blessed
cadeau
to a church sale.’ Finn’s voice was again recklessly loud. ‘It’s not quite the Christmas season yet,’ he added. ‘But what about striking up with a carol?’

‘Be quiet, you fool,’ Bobby said. ‘And if you both want to come away in my car, come now. This prowling and spying–’

But Bobby’s sentence – plainly to be framed in a key of moral reprobation – never got itself finished. It was interrupted by an angry voice from the near-darkness below the terrace.

‘Stay where you are!’ the voice shouted roughly. ‘If you run, I’ll fire!’

‘Run!’ Bobby hissed. He was clear he wasn’t going to take an order like that. ‘Into the park. Draw him away from the car.’

‘It’s Ibell!’ Already fleeing down the terrace, Giles produced this in a panicky gasp. ‘He’s quite–’

But Giles’ sentence didn’t get itself finished either. There was a loud report, accompanied by the unbelievable sound of a patter of lead on the wall of the house close behind them. The ferocious Ibell – if it was indeed he – not being in a position to fire a shot across their bow, had fired one manically close to their stern.

‘Scatter!’ Bobby shouted. And he ran to the edge of the terrace and jumped. At once a dramatic darkness engulfed him, so that for an alarming moment he wondered whether his blind leap had taken him to the bottom of a well. Then he realized that it had merely been synchronous with the moon’s making a dive into deeper cloud than hitherto. With a madman around, this was all to the good.

He had fallen soft – into a drift of beech-leaves, with leaf-mould underneath. He put up a hand and removed a dry twig from his hair. He could still faintly hear running footsteps. Suddenly he heard, too, the baying of a hound. But no – he didn’t. It wasn’t a hound. It was Finn. And his heart warmed to Finn, whose involvement in this night’s proceedings was not, like Giles Ashmore’s, mercenary, but entirely joyous and freakish. And now the hound abruptly – so to speak – took to the air. It too-whitted and too-whooed. Finn, like the boy so movingly recalled by Wordsworth, was blowing mimic hootings to the owls. But the keeper – if it was the keeper – appeared not assuaged by this gamesome metamorphosis. There was a further angry shout, and the shot-gun went off again. If the chap was really firing into darkness – if he was letting off his bleeding weapon other than straight into air – he deserved to be locked up. Even if he believed himself to have stumbled upon a trio of burglars on his employer’s terrace, he was far from entitled to try and maim somebody.

The racket didn’t appear to have brought Martyn Ashmore out of the house. Perhaps he was accustomed to Ibell’s behaving in this way during his nocturnal perambulations. Perhaps he was just absorbed in his book. But that was unimportant. The main point seemed to be that, like Bobby himself, Giles and Finn had, for the present, got clean away. Particularly if the moon continued covered, there was really very little that Ibell could do in the way of running to earth any one of three young men in prudent hiding in a large park. Unless, of course, Finn started fooling again. Or unless Ibell, if so minded, could summon a
real
Hound of the Baskervilles to his aid. Only Bobby’s car was a difficulty. If Ibell was aware of its presence, as he well might be, he had only to lurk near it to make a fair cop later on. Fortunately the car was in deep darkness a hundred yards down the drive. Bobby decided to wait for ten minutes or so, and then make his way cautiously in its direction. Perhaps they would find themselves making a rendezvous there, all three, and manage a successful get-away.

If that was at all the proper thing to do. Bobby Appleby, whose intellectual interests and literary pursuits didn’t much alter the fact that he was a very correct young man, found himself not at all sure about this. The whole evening’s adventure had been a plot of sorts directed against Martyn Ashmore – and looked at other than in irresponsible high spirits it had been a plot of rather an unworthy kind. And the further business of peering through that window – which was what the keeper had virtually caught them at – was something that, as between gentlemen, ought simply not to have been on.

This upsurge of what Bobby himself would scoffingly have called
sahib
-stuff upset Bobby a good deal. Perhaps the only correct course was to walk up to the house again – risking a few pellets in one’s backside – and ring that damned bell and apologize and explain. They ought all three to do that. But if the other two weren’t now contactable, and this was Bobby’s own honest conviction, then Bobby ought to do it off his own bat.

Bobby didn’t. What he reckoned as ten minutes went by, and he had made no move to do anything of the kind. And the reason, he found, was a very odd one. It had something to do with old Mr Martyn Ashmore himself. There had been something equivocal – a good literary word – in Ashmore’s attitude during the brief epilogue – so to speak – to his encounter with his nephew which Bobby had been called in to witness. To put it vulgarly, the proprietor of Ashmore Chase had in some obscure fashion been laughing up his sleeve. In language yet more demotic, he had been pleasing himself with the knowledge that his designing nephew Giles would presently be laughing on the other side of his face.

At this point Bobby Appleby found himself feeling in a pocket for his pipe. He checked himself as he did so – the flare of a match would be just one more folly – and probably without reflecting on the truth of Finn’s assertion that he was his father’s son. But at least his father had confessed to him that a good part of his policeman’s career had been built on hunches, and that hunches were always the better of being controlled by a meditative smoke. This present drift of an odd persuasion through his own mind was eminently a hunch. He could give himself no rational account of it. There was, for instance, only further perplexity in his awareness that it was bound up with something sensed in the hinterland of Finn’s more recent posture in the affair. For what was Finn but a silly ass? Nothing at all, Bobby told himself. He almost spoke the words aloud.

He suddenly found that he was looking at the smooth shaft of a beech – the tree, presumably, amid the fallen leaves of which he had tumbled. In other words, the moon was in business again. He listened intently, and all he heard was the hooting of an owl. He had no difficulty in distinguishing between a real owl and a mimic one. (Real owls, if Wordsworth was to be believed, did have – which shows that an anti-novelist is cleverer than an owl.) Some sort of proper nocturnal order was establishing itself again in the purlieus of Ashmore Chase. It seemed a hint that the best that three young idiots could do was to clear out.

Bobby heaved himself out of shadow – absurdly enough, it took quite a nerve – and walked in the direction of the drive.