The Daffodil Affair (23 page)

‘No doubt,’ said Hudspith vaguely, and yawned. ‘But I think we’ll call it a day.’

The launch pushed off; the engine spluttered and roared; above the ceibas with their bunches of great purple flowers rose macaws, blue, red, and yellow, to hover against a morning sky of amethyst and gold. Nature was in one of her painfully frequent gaudy and tasteless moods. But Lucy Rideout clapped her hands and shouted. ‘Oh, look at their wings!’ she cried. ‘Oh, look at their lovely beaks!’

Out of the corner of his eye Appleby saw Hudspith shiver. The real and only Lucy Rideout had still a substantial memory of her deceased sisters; she acted them, as one might say, to the life. Wine, debonair and amiable in the stern, could have no inkling of the latest wastage in his material. But to one in the know Lucy’s impersonations were a little eerie. And were they not perhaps hazardous as well? Thus encouraged, might not Lucy’s ghosts walk; sick Lucy and young Lucy indeed revisit the glimpses of the moon – even achieve some shadowy resurrection in that now glad and eager body in the bows? But by such thoughts Lucy herself was clearly untroubled. She was single and whole; she was in on such counterplot as could be contrived; she was having a marvellous time. And now she turned to Hudspith with suddenly serious eyes. ‘Mr Hudspith,’ she said plaintively, ‘tell me about the Discourses of Epictetus.’ She wriggled a little nearer Appleby. It was all outrageous fun.

And Hudspith rubbed his jaw and frowned – but before he could offer any suitable reply Wine leant forward. ‘You can see it now,’ he said. ‘English House. Or perhaps it should be called Schlumpf’s Folly.’

Fantastic against the morning, rectangular amid the curved and coiled luxuriance of the place, soot-begrimed in the clear air, 37 Hawke Square reared itself somewhat shakily before them. A large house hastily demolished and in its old age transported across the Line can never look quite the same again – particularly when originally designed as a unit in the middle of a row. But there it stood, discernibly something out of Bloomsbury, and presumably carrying with it sufficient of the spirit of place to justify the psychic experiments of Mr Emery Wine. It might have been simpler to endeavour to take over the house where it originally stood and try out a murder or two on the spot. Perhaps Wine had mistrusted the metropolitan police. Or perhaps he had simply obeyed a collector’s instinct to have everything cosily around him. Anyway, there was the house – and so pitched that the yellow and unending river almost laved the vestigial remains of its basement storey. Here had died Colonel Morell and that unfortunate Victorian merchant, Mr Smart. The place looked, too, as if its conscience might be heavy with the doing to death of sundry general servants; their ghosts, brandishing brooms or ceaselessly hauling scuttles of coal from floor to floor, might well haunt the premises with obstinate venom.

‘I am particularly fond,’ said Wine, ‘of the simple and severe lines of the front door.’

Appleby looked at the front door – the door through which, nearly two hundred years before, Dr Samuel Johnson and his negro servant Mr Francis Barber had departed from their fruitless vigils. And of course the bodies must have been brought out that way. But where hearse and mourners had stood there were now only reeds and water and alligators. In fact the front door – it had been given a new coat of green paint, and in the centre, very shiny, was the brass head of a lion champing a ring – the front door had more of Venice than of London: one would have found the appearance of a gondola more appropriate than that of a sedan chair. Still, it was all very colourable, and there was even smoke coming from the chimneys. And Appleby looked at it steadily. Then he turned to Wine. ‘The man who did that was quite, quite mad.’ He paused. ‘Don’t you agree?’

Wine looked thoughtfully at his fingernails. ‘Well – of course I should not care to defend the sanity of old Schlumpf. I scarcely knew him. And the thing looks pretty mad. But one can never be quite sure. There may be something more to the maddest-looking project than immediately meets the eye. Don’t you think so? Hudspith, my dear fellow, don’t you agree with me?’ Wine smiled whimsically at the inarticulate reply given to this last appeal. ‘But at least one would not have it otherwise; the thing is so pleasingly odd. Of course there is a good deal that is odd about our own project – Lucy, my dear, I think you should put on your hat – and Schlumpf’s anterior oddities make perhaps too much of a good thing. That is why Beaglehole there is such a comfort. There is nothing odd about him. A solid businessman who keeps our feet on earth – or on deck as we puff up and down our interminable river.’ Wine was talking gently and apparently at random. ‘Which reminds me: the steamer is going down with Beaglehole tomorrow. So I fear you will not have much time to explore more of our oddities or of Schlumpf’s. One of you, that is to say.’

‘One of us?’ said Appleby. The launch was curving inshore; presently 37 Hawke Square would tower above them like a menacing cliff.

‘Either Hudspith or yourself. I want one of you to go and contact Radbone just as quickly as you can. Have you listened to the news lately? There really isn’t much time to lose; our merger, if we can agree upon it, had better be soon.’

‘Perhaps we ought both to go?’

Wine cocked his head, as if this were a sound suggestion which had not occurred to him. ‘Perhaps so. And yet I don’t know. There is so much that I could discuss with one of you. I think we could draught a complete plan. No’ – his voice was politely final – ‘I really think not. We must save all the time we can. But which of you had better go?’

‘I don’t think it makes much difference,’ said Hudspith.

‘No,’ said Wine amiably. ‘I don’t think it does.’

Deserted and echoing, and with its ill-assembled doors and floors and wainscoting rattling and creaking in the dry wind of the pampas – it was thus that Appleby had instinctively thought of the new 37 Hawke Square. But it proved to be more than fully occupied. Miss Mood seemed, since her last appearance, to have multiplied herself by some process of fissure natural to the lower forms of life; she was to be found on every landing. And – although Mrs Nurses are rare – there were several Mrs Nurses. It had to be remembered that 37 Hawke Square was also English House, and that in material for operating in England Mr Wine was peculiarly rich. Mediums and thought-readers and prodigies wandered on every landing and popped in and out through numbered doors. Moreover it was probable that for every person thus visible there was another altogether too odd or erratic or unreliable for present view. The place was, in fact, crammed like a cheap lodging-house. And this, thought Appleby as he stood on the first-floor landing after luncheon, made the situation more than curious. Perhaps it offered unexpected scope for manoeuvre. Certainly it straitened the enemy’s plans.

‘Jacko!’

He looked up and saw Lucy beckoning from the next landing. She was conspiratorial and happy. He went up and joined her. ‘Have they given you a decent room?’

‘Not bad. In the attics. It’s funny about this house. Come up to the top.’

They climbed.

‘It’s funny about habit.’

‘About habit?’ Real Lucy’s English prose, Appleby reflected, had a touch of young Lucy still. It was at once infantile and cogent, like the more lucid performances of Miss Gertrude Stein.

‘It’s funny about a step you think is there in the dark when it isn’t – isn’t it?’

‘When you try to take a step down that isn’t there? It can give you quite a jar.’

‘Yes. Well, I get a jar when I keep on trying to go below stairs and there isn’t a below stairs. You see, the house we all lived in before the blitz–’

‘All lived in!’

‘Mum and me and the others.’

‘Of course.’

‘It was just like this, and of course below stairs and the attics were our parts. And now there is no below stairs; just three or four steps and then it ends off. I suppose it was all they managed to steal of the basement. Still, there’s all the attics. Let’s go right up.’

They climbed higher. The English material of Emery Wine flitted past, banged doors, talked, sang, somewhere played a piano. It’s funny about this house, Appleby thought. It’s funny –

‘Jack – about Mr Smart.’ They had reached the top, and Lucy leant over the balustrade. ‘This is where he fell from. It’s not really a well, is it? Not much more than a slit.’

They stood approximately on the spot from which, in the London of 1888, an unfortunate merchant had fallen to his death. A cross, thought Appleby, looking down, marks the spot. It was funny about Mr Smart. And it was, indeed, hardly a well. What one saw far below was a narrow rectangle of tiled floor.

‘Of course,’ said Lucy, ‘you’d go right to the bottom. But not quite – quite clean. There’d be bumps.’

The observation was correct; probably there would be bumps probably the body would go bumping down like a ball on a pin-table. And this, somehow, was nastier than a single plunge; and smash.

‘Of course,’ said Lucy, ‘he may try poison, like the other man – the colonel. But I don’t think so.’ She was frowning down at the tiny pattern of tiles below. He looked at her curiously. ‘But I don’t think so,’ she repeated.

‘Why not?’

‘Because the – the case of Colonel Morell is less certain. I think he’ll try to – to reproduce the more striking one.’

Striking, thought Appleby, was the word. He glanced round the landing. There appeared to be nobody about. ‘You’re probably right.’

‘Though of course he might just do something quite different. The – the–’ She paused, at a loss for the right abstract words.

‘The conditions of the problem would still hold.’

‘Yes. But somehow I think it will be the staircase. So think what he has to do. And suppose it’s Hudspith.’

‘Suppose it’s Hudspith,’ said Appleby gravely.

‘Well, Hudspith has to go off with Beaglehole on the steamer as if for a long journey. That means no more Beaglehole for weeks. And that’s important – if we can work it.’

Appleby was looking at her with narrowed eyes. He had colleagues as competent and economically-minded as this. But not many of them.

‘And then Hudspith has to be brought back – or persuaded to come back. And nobody here must know. And he must be pitched down here and killed, and still none of all these queer people must know, and then there must be a lot of waiting while you think he is just sailing down the river. It was ages before Dr Spettigue–’

‘But that was because Dr Spettigue didn’t move into his new consulting-rooms for quite a time.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s not quite right, Jacko. I mean, we don’t know the ghost would have appeared any quicker even if Dr Spettigue had moved in at once. Perhaps ghosts take some time to pull themselves together. Particularly after–’ And her glance went down the long drop to the hall below.

‘You’re quite right. Wine must be prepared to wait weeks or even months for results from this particular experiment. And, mind you, it’s no more than a sideline with him; a little weak hankering after pure science in a predominantly practical man. Interesting chap, Wine.’

Lucy shook her head impatiently. ‘Don’t be cool and detached, Jacko. It’s just showing off. And – and beside the point.’

Appleby looked at his late patient and victim with respect. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘The point is this. Hudspith is pitched down there and killed and nobody must know. That means getting rid of the body quick. What will they do? Feed it to the alligators, if you ask me. And what about Beaglehole? He must make himself scarce and keep himself scarce. If you saw, him or heard he was about it would be all up with the experiment. The whole thing turns on your not suspecting anything. If you suspected that Hudspith was dead, then you might begin to
expect
a ghost. And the experiment has to be so that there isn’t what that big book calls specific expectation.’

‘You’ve got it all up, Lucy. Have you anything to suggest?’

‘Well it’s pretty clear what
might
be done, isn’t it? The question is, can it be worked? We’ll try.’ She sighed and grinned at him, pale and excited. ‘You know, it’s a good thing the young ’un and the prig are out of this. They’d be scared stiff.’

‘And you, Lucy?’

She stretched herself luxuriously and perilously against the balustrade. ‘Me, Jacko? Well, I don’t think I’ll ever bother to go to the pictures again.’

It was dusk among the chimney pots. Half-close the eyes and it was possible to imagine a whole forest of them; possible to conjure up a whole London below. And perhaps one day London – perhaps one day all the great cities would be like this: some single surviving battered building perched above swamps and grasses which stretched everywhere to the horizon.
After London
…it had been one of the books of one of the Lucys – the story of a sparse feudal culture scattered over home counties from which the industrial heart had vanished in some unnamed catastrophe… Appleby peered out over the darkening pampa. There too, on those last and inaccessible reaches of the monstrous river, were spears and bows and arrows; were the remnants of some primitive and tribal organization. Perhaps the savages would have the laugh on the more complicated and showy structures in the end. Perhaps –

A smut falling on Appleby’s nose interrupted this reverie. Down in the bowels of 37 Hawke Square they were burning real coal. Soot and coaldust were no doubt the appropriate incense of the place and peculiarly necessary while the right psychical atmosphere was being worked up. There was something very close to ritual sacrifice in the fantastic experiment being prepared by Wine. Indeed, a psychologist would say that his conduct was purely atavistic – a mere throwback to primitive magic – and that the ingenious notion of an unusually drastic experiment in psychical research was the merest rationalization. But whatever it was – thought Appleby, sitting on the laboriously transplanted leads of 37 Hawke Square – whatever it was, it
was
– and in a very pretty state of forwardness. And there was only one thing to do.