The Long Farewell (22 page)

Again Appleby paused, and again for a moment nobody moved. But then Limbrick struck a match and lit a cigarette. ‘I can’t see,’ he said easily, ‘that you aren’t possibly making all this up. About the spuriousness, I mean, of the marginalia in the
Ecatommiti
. Let us admit that Rood was in Italy. But he may genuinely have been acting as a go-between, in relation to a genuine nobleman owning a genuine Shakespearian treasure. So far, you have been importing the notion of forgery simply on the strength of your own reading of Rood’s character.’

Appleby nodded. ‘There’s some truth in that. If I were a barrister, presenting this material in court, I should have to begin by ordering my entire material much more carefully. As it is, I’m assuming things that can only appear incontestable a little later on, when the rest of the evidence is fitted into place. You’ll find, that’s to say, that matters to which I shall presently come are not reconcilable with the assumption that the marginalia are genuine.’

At this Rushout took it upon himself to nod judiciously. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘your case at least possesses what I’d call internal coherence. And I’m prepared myself to believe the damned stuff is bogus. If only’ – he sighed – ‘because it’s too good to be true.’

‘Very well. And I’ve now come to a point at which Rood, as I conceive the matter, began to evolve a really formidable battery of alternative plans. He had found out about the embarrassing matrimonial dilemma which his client and victim had fallen into. Mr Packford here had advised his brother to take legal advice, and so Lewis Packford had told Rood the story. Rood’s instinct would be to exploit it in some way. And in one set of eventualities, he saw, a descent by the ladies upon Urchins might afford a useful element of confusion. So he communicated with them anonymously, and saw to it that they presented themselves here virtually simultaneously. He himself came down to Urchins at the same time.’

Edward Packford raised his head at this. ‘Did he? We certainly knew nothing about it.’

‘I understand that it was your brother’s invariable habit to spend an hour or two in this library before going to bed. Rood had no need to announce himself. On a summer evening, he could simply walk in by the French window. And that is what he did.’

‘Intending murder?’

‘Almost certainly not. Indeed, I’m not positively certain that he intended to confront your brother at all. It seems to me conceivable that he simply intended to slip into the house and conceal himself. The plan at this time in the forefront of his mind was probably theft. And that is where Mr Moody comes in.’

‘Huh?’ This was the first sound that Moody had uttered.

‘The position, remember, was this. Lewis Packford had possessed himself of these supposed marginalia by Shakespeare. He had informed Professor Rushout about them, and he had dropped hints to other people. Packford, of course, was a great name in this particular field of learning, and his opinion would carry much weight. When, however, the marginalia were eventually given to the world, they would almost certainly be questioned, debated and eventually exposed. That was no longer what Rood desired, or looked forward to as other than thoroughly inconvenient. But if he could possess himself of the Cintio again – steal it, in fact – he could dispose of it to that sort of collector who doesn’t object to clandestine acquisitions, and who indeed has rather a fancy for them. Mr Moody certainly falls into that category. He has a fancy for possessing remarkable things that nobody knows about. He told me so himself. Isn’t that right, Mr Moody?’

Moody considered this question sombrely for a moment. ‘Huh,’ he said.

‘Quite so. And let us notice that Mr Moody would be paying a substantial sum for the marginalia on the strength of the conviction which Lewis Packford had arrived at about it, while at the same time being unable, in the nature of the case, to call in further expert opinion by way of corroboration. Rood, then, had a lot to gain by simply walking off with the Cintio if he could lay his hands on it.’

Professor Prodger, who had for some time given the appearance of slumbering within the recesses of his venerable beard, was prompted to speech by this. ‘But that mightn’t be easy – eh? That mightn’t be easy, at all. Even if he had the advantage of knowing the precise book he was looking for. Am I right, Rixon? Limbrick, would you agree with me?’

Appleby nodded. ‘That is obviously true. And there is no doubt that Rood did in fact have an interview with Lewis Packford here in the library. And there is equally little doubt that Packford produced the Cintio. Rood’s simplest way of finding out where it was kept would be to contrive this. Unfortunately he found out something else as well. Perhaps you can guess what that was.’

‘That Lewis knew the truth, after all?’ It was Ruth Packford who asked this. She had been following Appleby with absolute concentration.

‘Certainly that he knew a great deal of the truth. Your husband, that is to say, had detected the fact of forgery. He had done so, it may be, only within the preceding few hours; and without doubt he had, so far, communicated his discovery to no one. There seems a high probability that Rood had underestimated his victim’s intelligence right from the start. Packford had indeed been bowled over by the magnitude of the supposed find, so that for a time his critical faculties were in abeyance. But from the first I believe that doubts and suspicions were gnawing at his mind – even without his being at all consciously aware of it. The drift of our conversation at Garda seems to me highly significant now. He talked about the technique of literary forgery – old paper, a chemically correct ink and so forth – and also about its psychology: forgery sometimes starting as a joke, gratifying an impulse to laugh up one’s sleeve, being particularly attractive to those who have reason to suppose themselves patronized or looked down upon. Very obscurely, in fact, his mind was groping after the basis of the whole deception which was being launched against him at that very moment. And now some more minute study of his find flashed on him the truth that it was spurious.’

‘And you think,’ Ruth asked, ‘that he taxed Rood there and then?’

‘No, I don’t. I think his first supposition was that both he and Rood had been equally the victims of an imposture. But you see the crisis with which Rood suddenly found himself confronted. Once Packford had communicated his revised opinion to Professor Rushout, or anybody of the sort, the Cintio would become virtually valueless. So there was no point in stealing it. And, whether he stole it or not, Lewis Packford would certainly conduct an investigation as a consequence of which he himself could scarcely escape exposure. Nor would he then be able to plead that he had been devising a harmless and even salutary hoax. For the cold fact would be that he had fabricated a false document, invented a false provenance for it, and sold it for a large sum of money. Things were turning very awkward for him. It was incumbent upon him, therefore, to bring one of his reserve plans into operation. Fortunately he had – or believed himself to have – a Napoleonic genius in that direction.’

‘And so,’ Edward Packford asked, ‘we come to murder?’

‘And so we come to murder – and to a little more forgery. It is obvious that, if your brother died there and then, with the fact of his final discovery of the spuriousness of the marginalia undisclosed, Rood could still do very well. He could walk off with the Cintio, just as he had already proposed. Later, Professor Rushout would certainly make public the fact that Packford had believed himself to be in possession of important Shakespeare marginalia; there would be a vain hunt for the missing volume; and Rood would have something pleasingly notorious to peddle to Mr Moody on the quiet.’

‘Huh.’

‘And already the way was paved for this alternative operation. Acute domestic embarrassment had been, so to speak, dumped on the doorstep of Urchins that very afternoon. If Lewis Packford was given the appearance of committing suicide there and then, there would be a ready-made motive. So Rood shot him, and scrawled that note. He had, of course, put in a lot of time perfecting his command of Packford’s handwriting. I think it likely that he was ingenious enough to use a particularly slow-drying ink – in the hope that the first person brought to the spot by the shot would notice this apparently incontestable piece of additional evidence.’

There was a scrape of a match as Limbrick lit another cigarette. ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is the point at which your whole case, Sir John, turns to sheer nonsense. You say that Rood committed murder and ingeniously disguised it as suicide. But everybody knows that he was later virtually the only person to declare that it
was
murder. Do you maintain that he was simply putting up a crazy double bluff?’

Appleby shook his head. ‘Not quite that. The Napoleonic change of plan had a fatal attraction for Rood simply, one may say, for its own sake. It cropped up in his conversation in a way that clearly indicated an obsession. But there was, at the same time, a rational basis for this very hazardous second – or third – thought, when he embarked upon it. And this again concerns our American friend, Mr Moody, who has so kindly come along this morning.’

Limbrick blew out a cloud of cigarette-smoke. ‘Huh,’ he said impudently.

‘Huh?’ Moody eyed Limbrick aggressively. Then, perhaps warned by some interior spasm, he reached for his pills again. ‘Huh,’ he said.

‘The point was this,’ Appleby went on. ‘The Cintio had appeared obscurely, and it had been changing hands obscurely. If it had left in its wake, so to speak, nothing more serious than a suicide, Mr Moody or some similar purchaser might have risked coming out into the open with it, after all. Once it was heard about, it would almost certainly be examined by experts, and the danger of its being proved a fake would be very real – so that once more Rood might be booked for trouble. Murder is a different matter. Once any strong suspicion that Packford had been murdered got abroad – once it was known that the police were seriously pursuing the possibility, and so forth – then it would become a very dubious and dangerous possession indeed, and its new owner would almost certainly keep quiet about it. Hence Rood’s new attitude. He lay in wait for me – I can now see – after Packford’s funeral, and began airing a theory of murder and robbery. Indeed he had already begun on that line with my colleague Cavill – expressing his conviction, for instance, that the message on the postcard was a forgery. Later he was to assure me that it was a
brilliant
forgery – which is a pretty enough instance of the operation of his very large conceit. And of course it was Rood who got yesterday’s evening papers to turn Packford’s death into a sensation and reveal that I had come down to investigate. Perhaps he knew, by the time he did this, that Mr Moody had actually arrived in England. And here, incidentally, we come to a yet more compelling reason for Rood’s turning Packford’s death into murder. There’s just nothing that Mr Moody likes better than that sort of thing. He has a remarkable collection of more or less blood-streaked relics. Isn’t that so, Mr Moody?’

‘Huh?’ Moody considered for a moment, and then appeared to resolve on speech. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘And the collection is growing all the time?’

‘Sure. I can get those things when I want them. I can get most anything when I want it.’

‘Exactly. That, if I may say so, is a most succinct statement of your position. And when you read in the English papers last night a lot of stuff about Lewis Packford’s having been murdered, you wanted his Cintio even more than you’d wanted it before?’

‘Sure. That’s only sense, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it is.’ Appleby nodded with conviction. ‘In addition to all those scribblings by Shakespeare, the book would have this further associational interest. I believe that’s the term. And now we’re almost finished with Rood. But not quite.’

Canon Rixon shook his head. ‘And, meantime, the wretched man is finished with us. I am bound to say I think it’s to his credit. The Archbishop would no doubt disagree with me. And of course theological considerations must not be ignored. Still, Rood has, so to speak, taken himself off before a great deal of horrible degradation in courts of law. I admire his courage.’

Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘I at least admire his cleverness – and the less reluctantly, perhaps because it was, in a last analysis, of such a crack-brained sort. One can’t, in my line of territory, afford to admire anything at all in a really tiptop and thoroughly capable criminal. But those on the lunatic fringe one can extend a little charity to, even when their cleverness has drawn them into horrible crime. But that’s by the way. I now come to the second stage of my investigation.’

‘You certainly seem disposed to give us good measure.’ Edward Packford had risen to his feet and strolled to the window. Now he was surveying the whole company with a speculative eye. ‘There’s more to come? Something more lies behind Rood’s taking the course he did?’

‘What lies behind it,’ Limbrick said, ‘is presumably the good Sir John’s chasing him up – chasing him up with what I myself would still describe as a wonderfully convincing fantasy. Perhaps Rood judged it so convincing that he didn’t see much hope in the mere fact of its being a high-class policeman’s fairy-tale. And that would be too bad.’

Alice, who had continued mute during the further intricacies of Appleby’s exposition, was suddenly prompted to make a purely human remark. ‘All this would be a little
less
bad,’ she said to Limbrick, ‘if you kept your bloody mouth shut.’

‘I thoroughly agree,’ Prodger sat up so suddenly that a couple of startled moths flew out of his beard. ‘Limbrick, having been humilatingly exposed in reprehensible courses not many hours ago, ought in mere decency to be silent.’ He turned to Alice. ‘Nor, my dear young woman, need you blush at so legitimate a use of the resources of the vulgar tongue. Sir John, proceed.’

‘Thank you. Well, the final stage of the affair turns on the fact that Rood liked, as he expressed it to me, to be ready for all eventualities. Even, apparently, for tolerably unlikely ones. He may have got wind of the fact that Mr Moody – whose reputation and habits I discovered to be well known to him – was in this country. But when Rood returned to Urchins yesterday with Packford’s will and so forth, he can surely have seen only a remote chance of Moody’s actually being here or in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless Rood was prepared for that, as for other things. He brought two suitcases with him.’