Stop Press (45 page)

‘I doubted, I say, if he was the right man. But he himself was so sure of it – he had failed, he said, at so many things and he was sure he would make a success of meditation. So I put him in. Since then my doubts have been vindicated; he has not been a success. I fear the necessary spiritual qualities have been denied to him.’ Shoon assumed a look of growing thoughtfulness which was now familiar to Appleby. ‘Sloth is the danger in such a situation –
inner
sloth.’ He made an expressive gesture. ‘I have, of course, done all I could do help the man. When he has complained about the quality of the herbs and the straw and so forth I have always gone into the matter myself. A hermit on an estate should always be regarded as the direct responsibility of the owner.’

Shoon’s guests murmured their approval of this sentiment.

‘Finally he complained that his cell was damp. Frankly it
was
damp; one could hardly have a hermit’s cell constructed in any other way. But if this miserable man was without such ghostly promptings as would enable him to rise above – nay, to glory in – coughs and cramps, what was one to do? Consider’ – and Shoon made a sign that more claret should go round – ‘consider the position of an unusuccessful hermit out of employment. The openings are very few. My responsibilities were correspondingly great.’

The guests murmured again and Benton was heard to wish that all employers were so benevolently disposed.

‘And so I let him have his way. He has moved from his cell, which was by the river, across to the ruins. Which is why the ruins, I must explain to you, are – so to speak – out of bounds. He is so touchy that I find it better that we should keep away. It is a pity: the cellarium would be particularly worth your inspection. I find it a little hard myself.’ Shoon smiled with suave brilliance at Appleby. ‘Ruins are my hobby. But so it is. And I fear the man is now a hermit in no more than name. You may still see him in the distance in devotional attitudes–’ He broke off and there was a little silence. The luncheon-table was confronted – chasteningly – with the story of a human failure.

‘Alas!’ said Shoon, ‘I fear he is only
acting
the part.’

‘That hermit’s cell,’ said Bussenschutt to his companions at a corner of the table; ‘I have a fancy to bespeak it for Benton. Never did a man look so unsociably disposed.’

Appleby, thus prompted, studied with a good deal of interest the dim-looking scholar who had once peddled arms for Shoon. Benton was certainly glum – as glum as a bankrupt company promoter or a boy who has lost his first mistress. And his glumness at a guess – such analysis is not easy with strangers – was compounded of equal portions of apprehension and anger.

‘Moreover,’ continued Bussenschutt, ‘he was most reluctant to come down to the Abbey. Shoon, I understand, wired him – as also Mummery – a most cordial invitation to inspect this important papyrus shortly after he invited me. But it was only after I telephoned him myself yesterday evening that he agreed to join us.’ Amiable and threatening, Bussenschutt peered at Winter. ‘Is not that, now, a very strange thing?’

‘Odd, no doubt.’ Winter was transparently cautious. ‘But Benton has been mixed up in certain questionable activities of our host’s. He may have been reluctant to renew doubtful communications.’

‘Ah!’ Bussenschutt was heavily deliberative. ‘I had in mind myself rather his curious relationship to Mrs Birdwire. We know how her name disturbed him. He may well have been reluctant to risk a meeting here.’

‘Like Winter.’

Appleby had spoken. From now onwards, he was promising himself, a share of the bomb-dropping was going to be his.

‘My dear Mr Appleby’ – Bussenschutt had turned towards him in cordial surprise – ‘can I have mistaken you, or did you say–?’

‘When you appeared on the terrace yesterday Winter here identified you all three at once: Shoon conjecturally and yourself and Mrs Birdwire outright. He then retreated hastily into the house. I thought the retreat odd; hitherto Winter had been all for poking about. Hadn’t you, Winter?’

‘No doubt.’

‘So I made what enquiries I could. And I found that when Timmy Eliot first mentioned Mrs Birdwire’s name Winter replied with some form of words which distinctly implied that he had never set eyes on her.’

‘Interesting,’ said Bussenschutt. ‘Interesting, indeed. Winter, am I mistaken in thinking that those are almonds at your left hand?’

Winter passed the almonds, glanced at Appleby with a look which contrived to be ironically impressed. ‘So what?’ he said.

‘It was clear’ – Appleby continued to address Bussenschutt – ‘that Mrs Birdwire represented a dark page indeed in Winter’s past. He couldn’t face her. And since we arrived at the Abbey he has been quite pathetically keeping his eye on the middle distance, ready to bolt again should the woman pay Shoon a visit. One feels that intrigue is not his element.’ Appleby shook a solemn head.

Winter showed no signs of restiveness under this banter. He drained his glass, nodded resignedly, glanced quickly about the table and said simply: ‘I robbed her.’

‘
You
robbed her?’ Bussenschutt had sat back in his chair in abrupt indignation. ‘You mean to say that the burglary which you so brazenly recounted to us the other night–’

‘My dear Master!’ Winter looked startled. ‘You mistake me. In the burglary the good lady was not robbed at all; everything was grotesquely returned to her. I am confessing to a
real
robbery. What I stole is in my room at college at this moment. And it was a robbery with
violence
.’

Bussenschutt glanced across the table. ‘I am so sorry for Mummery,’ he said. ‘How much he would like to be in on all this.’

Winter shook his head. ‘I will confess. With Appleby baying on the trail like this it is my only chance. But not in undertones over the remains of Dover sole. You must restrain your impatience.’

With unruffled composure Winter continued his meal.

They retreated, not very sociably, to Bussenschutt’s bedroom. Bussenschutt indeed, whose humour it was to regard Winter as a captive, conducted this retreat with such circumstance that at the break up of the luncheon table even an idle eye might have spotted that something was afoot. But the majority of Shoon’s guests were being invited to conduct themselves informally round Shoon’s pictures; it was unlikely that anyone would be missed until the grand assembly for the purpose of inspecting the Collection later in the afternoon.

‘In Aleppo once – ’ said Winter, and paused to light his pipe.

Appleby, whom forty-eight hours at Rust Hall had made abnormally sensitive to literary allusions, looked at Winter suspicously. ‘You are sure,’ he asked, ‘that you are not muddling yourself up with Othello? He made a strikingly similar remark.’

‘In Aleppo once,’ reiterated Winter unheeding, ‘it happened that I ran into this appalling lady. Why I was there I have forgotten, and why she was there I never knew.’

‘The inhabitants of that once flourishing city’, interpolated Bussenschutt, ‘are famous throughout the East for the elegance of their manners. And this, I conceive, might be an attraction – but for which of you I will not venture to say.’

‘We met while making the inspection of the aqueduct, the prime antiquity of the district. Mrs Birdwire–’

‘Stay!’ said Bussenschutt. ‘There are some vivid chapters on Aleppo in
Circumcised Dogs
. But I recall nothing of an encounter with Mr Winter.’

‘Mr Winter never revealed his name; it was an irrelevance which the lady’s expansive nature crowded off the stage from the first. But our friendship matured with remarkable rapidity. By the time we had finished examining the aqueduct I was being favoured with the sort of racy reminiscences in which you, my dear Master, have been so interestingly soaking yourself during the last few days. We then got into a carriage – a ramshackle but rubber-tyred carriage with which she had contrived to provide herself – and were driven to her house. She had been in Aleppo some months and – what is vital to my story – had come there direct from Greece; I think she was proposing to write a book about Greece in Aleppo, and then a book about Aleppo when she had moved somewhere else. Meanwhile she had made herself uncommonly comfortable; there is any number of stately houses and she had nosed out one which was in excellent repair. I remember walking about the pistachio plantation which surrounded the place and reflecting how surprisingly secluded it was. Without knowing it, I was taking my first step towards crime.’

‘The circumstances’, said Bussenschutt, ‘were favourable and your true nature unfolded.’

‘No doubt. But so did Mrs Birdwire’s. Why she should have made such a confidant of a casual acquaintance I don’t know. There was a further dish of miscellaneous reminiscence – this time of the less publishable sort – and then as our precipitate friendship grew the conversation became more intimate. Drains.’

‘To be sure – drains.’ Bussenschutt sighed as one who has himself suffered all that another can recount.

‘Mrs Birdwire has many interests, but her master-interest is drains. On this subject her travels have enabled her to make a great number of curious observations. For myself it has no appeal. Doubtless owing wholly to some accident of my nursery environment which Chown would wholly deplore, my attitude to the science of sewerage is entirely negative. Mrs Birdwire on this hobbyhorse bored me, and as I listened I began to wish myself where I was planning to be on the morrow: over that waste of limestone hills by which we were surrounded and on my way to Iskanderoon.… But, as you yourself, Master, recently remarked, how oddly one thing leads to another!’

Bussenschutt frowned rather as if he had been set a puzzle. ‘The essential fact about drains is that we dig them. The link is in that.’ His frown changed to a complacent smile at his own perspicacity.

‘You are very right. Mrs Birdwire, though abundantly learned in every system of sewage-disposal primitive and refined, holds inflexible views on the subject as it may affect herself. Briefly, she believes in the septic tank. The Aleppo house had been equipped in this way: we made an inspection. In Greece a similar convenience had been arranged. And while the tank was being dug in something else – she perfectly casually told me – was dug up. We viewed this too – on my petition. It was’ – a childlike gravity, Appleby noted with interest, had descended on Gerald Winter – ‘a small antique marble.’

Bussenschutt looked mildly interested. ‘Graeco-Roman, no doubt,’ he said.

‘Not at all.’

‘Hellenic?’

‘A small
archaic
marble. And the patina – lord knows where the thing had lain – was more perfect than you have ever seen. Mrs Birdwire liked it; she thought it had a nice smile.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Bussenschutt. ‘Oh, dear, dear.’

‘It had popped up unexpectedly in the course of laying her beastly little drain, and she regarded it as one might regard a lucky sixpence. People bore holes in lucky sixpences. Mrs Birdwire proposed to bore a hole in her marble.’

‘This is bad,’ said Bussenschutt; ‘very bad indeed. I once saw a Venus of Milo with a clock let into the stomach. But that was only a copy, after all… For what purpose – ?’

‘A fishpond. She was planning a little fishpond here at home and she thought that with a good clean-up–’

Bussenschutt, completely at one with his colleague, softly groaned.

‘…and a sort of spout put through for a fountain–’

‘Enough, Winter! Mr Appleby and I appreciate the situation. You took the marble into your own keeping.’

‘Delicately expressed, Master. I stole it. I laid hands on the woman and stole it. Everything conspired to prompt and assist me. She proposed tea and summoned servants. Nobody came. I don’t doubt that she had taken half Aleppo into her service as soon as she arrived, but – what I couldn’t feel to be other than a dispensation – not a soul was about to answer her bawls. We made tea ourselves and she explained that it was no doubt the wireless. In those days at least five governments were bombarding that part of the world with the most beguiling programmes money could contrive, and the people of Aleppo are far too courteous to reject such princely free entertainment. So we drank tea and then – for everything, I say, conspired with or against me – nothing would satisfy her but that I should inspect her cellars. I won’t swear that in the interest of that marble I wouldn’t have consigned the woman to the dankest dungeon. As it happened, nothing of the sort was necessary. Her friend Lady Pike was arriving next day; Lady Pike dislikes heat; Mrs Birdwire had therefore rigged up a very comfortable sitting-room in the heart of the cellarage. I paused only to see that there was a stout door with a bolt on the outside. Then I gave the lady a push.’

‘A push?’ asked Appleby mildly.

‘A push. It is quite remarkable how strong one’s gentleman-like prejudices are. I tried to manoeuvre her so that I could simply cut and run, but in the end an unchivalrous push was needed. There is little more to relate. I bagged the marble, went to my hotel and packed, and was on my way to Alexandretta within an hour. There I caught a coasting steamer; I was in Split within three days and in Zagreb the night after. The marble and its unknown purloiner had vanished into Europe.’

‘And only now’, said Bussenschutt, ‘is the criminal unmasked. Unlike Mr Appleby, I have never mingled with the criminal classes before – unless our present host be judged on the fringes of that category – and I confess to finding a good deal of interest in the whole affair. How, Winter, did you feel afterwards? Was the sight of a policeman in the street not without its alarms? Were there moral compunctions? Did the incident come between you and the aesthetic contemplation of the object of which you had possessed yourself? If the like circumstances arose, would you do it again?’

Winter laughed – a trifle shortly. ‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘I admit it.’ He turned towards the window by which Appleby had been standing. ‘You must understand–’

But Appleby was by the window no longer; he had drifted silently to the door. Even as Winter spoke his hand went to the knob, the door swung briskly open, and Sir Archibald Eliot tumbled into the room.