Stop Press (49 page)

For a moment Chown appeared irresolute. ‘I am opposed in principle’, he said, ‘to interrogation of this kind in the supposed interest of law or justice or anything of the sort. The direct preservation of life is another matter. Before saying anything whatever about my conduct of a patient’s affairs I expect the clearest proof of urgency.’ Chown, a compound of pomposity, wariness and intelligence, looked at Appleby with great severity.

‘Quite so. It is why I began by saying that a murder has been arranged.’

‘A murder by someone unknown, of you don’t know whom. Really, Mr Appleby, it is a most unconvincing position. You have
no
preference for a victim?’

‘I have one fragmentary indication. It may be a mere freak of my own mind. The evidence, such as it is, might be called etymological.’

Chown looked as if he were about to reiterate his question about drink. Instead he said, ‘My Appleby, I suppose you understand the meaning of words?’

‘Sufficiently for my purpose. And now what, if anything, are you going to tell me?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘You won’t reconsider that?’

‘I will tell you nothing for the simple reason that there is nothing to tell. The structure you have been building is not, like Winter’s, a pack of nonsense. It just happens that there is nothing in it.’

‘You have never’ – Appleby was insistent – ‘discussed Eliot even with trusted colleagues?’

‘On that I do not consider it necessary to be explicit. You must simply take my word that your theory is untenable. In fact’ – Chown deviated into unexpected humour – ‘you and I, Mr Appleby, are all square. And I shall be interested to see how you proceed.’

‘For a few more hours’, said Appleby soberly, ‘we must wait upon the event.’

They had been talking in the seclusion of a deep window recess of the large room in which Shoon’s guests were being given tea. Now they both looked out. Over the rambling fantasy of Shoon Abbey the first folds of twilight were beginning to fall.

Timmy and Patricia wandered in the Chinese Garden. Surrounding them was a prospect – as Shoon liked to put it – worthy the pencil of the great Salvator Rosa himself. Down a stony ravine, destitute of vegetation save for here and there a cactus and the blasted remains of a writhing or stunted tree, ran a shallow, turbulent stream, which broke in little crescents of foam now over a rusted and barbarically wrought shield or helmet, now over the skull or thigh-bone of a horse. A rude stone bridge had been half demolished by gunpowder – a Chinese invention in which Shoon had a peculiar interest – and near by was a clear still pool at the bottom of which could be seen the skeleton of a woman with a baby. A rack, a wheel, and other instruments of torture were disposed at intervals along the gorge, and the simulacra of numerous desiccated human bodies depended from gibbets near the top. On a rustic seat commanding a view of all this was one of Shoon’s nicely cadenced inscriptions. It explained that the scene was intended to suggest savage desolation and horror, and to evoke gloomy and surprising thoughts.

‘Quite orthodox eighteenth-century
chinoiserie’
, said Patricia. She spoke in the slightly defensive tone which she found it necessary to use at the Abbey.

‘I do think this Shoon is an awful man.’ Timmy peered down into the pool. ‘Do you know that somebody – it must be that awful Hugo – has told him that I write verse? And that he has asked me to run up a few trifles?’

‘How awful.’

Timmy looked at Patricia suspiciously. ‘Apparently he has a printing press–’

‘The Shoon Abbey Press. A great affair in the basement.’

‘No doubt. There is to be an inspection of
that
before dinner. And he likes to print off complimentary verses for any females present. The type, he says, stands ready set up; the ladies are induced to ask that the press be set in motion; one touches a lever and – lo and behold! – the trifle is before them. There are delighted exclamations.’ Timmy gave what was meant to be one of Shoon’s suave gestures. ‘Did you ever hear such rot.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said that it was charming and a very happy notion. That’s the worst of being well brought up. So then he asked me to do him his trifles. He even had the cheek to give me a sort of pattern of his own to work by. The graceful fair – that sort of thing.’

‘The graceful fair?’

‘Yes. It went like this:

The graceful fair, who deigns to shower

Her smiles on Shoonium’s mould’ring tower,

Shall read her praise in every clime

Where types can speak or poets rhyme.

One couldn’t forget it, could one?’

Patricia laughed. ‘Well, I haven’t. It’s by Horace Walpole. Adapted of course. Jasper is keen on adaptations.’

Timmy looked about the Chinese Garden with all the gloom it could be expected to evoke. ‘How learned you are, Patricia. Winter would say your proper place was in the poetry of Lord Tennyson. You know, I’m coming to think Winter is a bit of an ass. Do you think I must do the trifles? With more murder and sudden death promised it seems a wanton fiddling.’

‘I think you better had; it will be only civil… But come and see the ruins. It will be dark in half an hour.’

They climbed out of the miniature ravine in which the Chinese Garden was set. Presently the ruins were before them. ‘Hold on’, said Patricia. ‘There’s the Hermit.’

The Hermit, in a coarse grey gown and with a little book in his hands, was pacing meditatively up and down before a long line of Norman arches on the near side of the ruins – no doubt the cellarium. At each end of his walk he paused for some moments in a devotional attitude. The effect was curiously like that of sentry-go.

‘He does look rather trade-fallen, doesn’t he?’ said Timmy; for the Hermit, though correct in his behaviour, was decidedly more pursy and alcoholic than an anchorite may respectably be. ‘Let’s go and talk to him.’

‘Well,’ said Patricia, ‘it is what Jasper calls out of bounds.’

‘Oh, rot.’ That there is such a thing as discreet observance of the behests of an employer was not a notion which would lodge readily in Timmy’s mind. ‘You needn’t’, he lucklessly added, ‘be scared.’

Patricia, once more darkly reflecting on the Eliots in their character as Barbary apes, tilted her chin and strode forward. When they were a little more than halfway the Hermit caught sight of them. He knelt in prayer.

‘What absolute–’ Timmy’s exclamation was cut short by the unexpected sight of his father. Mr Eliot – or rather Mr Eliot’s head – had appeared with infinite caution from behind a fragment of masonry at the Hermit’s rear; he made a rapid survey of the ground before him, bolted sharply for another place of concealment farther on, and was immediately lost in the advancing shades of evening.

Timmy and Patricia, who had been unwittingly useful in focusing the Hermit’s attention, looked at each other rather blankly. ‘What an extraordinary thing,’ said Timmy. ‘Though daddy does amuse himself at times with playing boy scouts. As I gather Chown thinks, he is a child at heart. What is this ruins business anyway?’

‘The cellarium? Belinda and I have always supposed it to be a laboratory in a quiet way. Trying out explosive formulas they’ve bribed or stolen from other people – that sort of thing.’

‘I say, you do take your proximity to this scandalous racket coolly.’

‘I keep away and get on with my own stuff. It’s you who are all for proximity at the moment.’

‘Quite true. And come on.’ Timmy grabbed Patricia’s arm and advanced farther. The Hermit abandoned prayer and began to thump himself with an ugly-looking flint and to bang his head on the ground. Timmy paused doubtfully. ‘Patricia, don’t you think he’s really and sincerely mortifying himself and all that? It
would
rather be gatecrashing if he were.’

‘I’m quite sure he’s not. It’s just Jasper’s little joke. You needn’t be scared.’

They went on. When they were within fifteen yards the Hermit abrupted his penitential proceedings and turned towards them. ‘Bundle off!’ he shouted.

They stopped.

‘D’you hear?’ bawled the Hermit. ‘Bundle off, you young bastards, if you don’t want a kick on the ruddy rump.’ He advanced brandishing his chunk of flint menacingly.

‘What an awful man,’ said Timmy. He looked, Patricia thought, not much less belligerent than the Hermit himself. It seemed likely that once more the cloistral calm of Shoon Abbey would be most shockingly disturbed.

But at this moment there came a diversion. Jasper Shoon himself emerged from the cellarium. ‘My dear young friends’, he said advancing and taking each firmly by an arm, ‘the evening air here is not altogether wholesome.’ He led them back to the house. On the terrace they paused and from this discreet distance surveyed the interesting ruins anew; in the half-light they were beginnnig to look convincingly venerable.

‘I cannot tell you’, said Shoon, ‘what the past means to me.’ He paused meditatively. ‘You know, nothing would please me better than the present
becoming
the past rather more quickly than it commonly does.’

Appleby, wandering the Abbey in quest of Shoon’s Zoffanys, was halted by the melodiously upraised voice of Peter Holme. ‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ Holme was saying. ‘Really better not. It’s the sort of thing that sounds all right in the book, or pleases an audience well enough in good stout melodrama. But in real life, no. Much more embarrassment than satisfaction, I’m sure. Or at least wait until you get back to Rust. Surely a horse-whipping should be a strictly domestic affair.’

There was an inarticulate murmur in reply; Appleby turned into the tribune and found that the person being thus oddly exhorted by Holme was Sir Rupert Eliot. And Rupert was indeed brandishing a whip in a most ferocious manner.

‘Appleby’ – Holme was lounging gracefully on a sofa – ‘do add your entreaties to mine. Eliot here has been handed the black spot again – how much I have always wanted to play in
Treasure Island!
– and seems determined to beat up his cousin as a result. I am doing my utmost’ – Holme stretched himself lazily – ‘my very utmost to prevent it. For one thing, our nerves are all too frayed. I just don’t want to hear Archie Eliot yelp. Another time, conceivably yes; before dinner and after that dreary Collection, no. Intervene, I beg.’

‘The black spot?’ Appleby turned to Rupert. ‘Another warning?’

‘Another piece of damned foolery.’ With the point of his whip Rupert pointed at a fragment of crumpled newspaper on a table. ‘Shied at me as I was walking down the corridor. I tell you, a good hiding is what the little swine wants. I admit that the proper place of execution would be a public lavatory. But Shoon’s beastly Abbey comes to much the same thing.’

Holme smoothed out the missile; it proved to be a fragment torn from a Sunday paper and was about six inches square. ‘After that young bomb’, he said, ‘it seems distinctly an anticlimax. Even supposing it is Sir Archibald, do you really think you must reply with a whip? What about a drawing-pin on his chair at dinner? Or a particularly tempting sweet filled with ink?’

Rupert snorted. ‘Give it to Appleby,’ he said. ‘Let him use his blasted snooping eyes.’

Without resentment Appleby used his eyes. The fragment had been torn roughly from a page of advertisements. ‘Bargains at a Regent Street shop,’ he said; ‘there seems nothing particularly insulting – nor yet sinister – in that.’ He turned over. ‘Sailings for New Zealand. Hardly significant either… I see.’ He passed the paper back to Holme. ‘The joker was simply after a figure. The
Begonia
sails on the ninth of December. And found the figure nine, therefore, a lightly sketched spider. Reticent indeed.’ He smiled cheerfully at Rupert. ‘As I murmured before,
Annihilation at Nine
. Or
The Clock Strikes
– with emphasis on the final word.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Sir Rupert, have you made a will? You have just under three hours to live.’

Holme was staring at Appleby in mild astonishment. Rupert’s indignation was such that it took him a moment to command the power of speech. ‘If you showed the least sign of making yourself useful’, he said, ‘we might for a day or two tolerate you about. But your sense of humour quite fails to please.’ He snorted again. ‘Do you really think I’m scared?’

‘I think you’re moving that way.’

‘Pah! I tell you I’ve sampled most of the more dangerous sorts of humanity, and Archie’s kind isn’t among them.’

‘Your confidence that your persecutor is Sir Archibald is really uncommonly interesting – chiefly because it is almost completely without a rational basis. Has it occurred to you, I wonder, that it is closely related to your cousin Richard’s conviction some time ago that he was the victim of a sort of kink in the universe? He clung to that notion because he was a bit scared. And now here are you clinging to the notion that it is Archie who is after you.’ Appleby was speaking forcibly and brusquely. ‘While all the time a much likelier person is Shoon.’

Peter Holme whistled: the sound mingled with the clatter of Rupert’s whip as it fell to the floor. He stooped to retrieve it; straightened up again with a face drained of colour. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘A murder has been arranged.’ Appleby made the statement less soberly than formerly to Chown. ‘That is my refrain for the rest of this evening. And I assure you that I am really beginning to see that the victim may very well be yourself.’

Rupert’s confidence was plainly wavering. ‘You’ve taken leave of your senses,’ he said shortly.

‘And as a likely murderer I would pick first on our present host. You know the sort of life he led before he came out on top of his racket and set up as a professional eighteenth-century racket? You know that he as good as professes a set philosophy of destruction? A dangerous man, Sir Rupert – so beware!’

Peter Holme, still sprawled on his sofa, was plainly undecided as to whether Appleby’s flamboyance or its effect on Rupert was the oddest part of all this. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘if the plot doesn’t thicken.’

‘Are you talking plots here too?’ Belinda had come into the room. She looked curiously from Rupert to Appleby. ‘John, I think daddy really has taken leave of his senses at last. Guess what he’s been doing.’