The Long Farewell (4 page)

‘I suppose there’s a happy mean.’ Packford laughed again – but this time it was a short nervous laugh that seemed unlike him. ‘But these desires are all diseases, damn them. Scholarship – that’s a disease. Browning’s Grammarian died of it. And sex – that’s a disease too. Either can make an idiot of you, so that you positively stare at yourself.’

They were standing beside Appleby’s car, so that there was now a distinct awkwardness in parting upon this obscurely confessional note. For it was certainly that. Packford, who seemed to have been living for some time in a very solitary way, had been prompted to reveal some present preoccupation in a manner that he would no doubt later regret. ‘I must step on it,’ Appleby said, ‘or Judith will be in Verona hours before me.’

‘And that wouldn’t do? I see you’re the experienced married man. I’ve sometimes thought of having a shot at it. But here I am – finding Giuseppina and Gino quite enough to cope with.’

‘I suppose you may spring a surprise on us one day. It’s your habit, after all.’ Appleby shook hands, and climbed into the car. It was a rather queerly abrupt leave-taking – the more so because of the darkness into which his host immediately vanished. Appleby had a single brief impression of him, lumbering rapidly back to his summer-house, as if he had a tryst in it.

He was never to see Lewis Packford alive again.

Development at Urchins

Farewell, farewell… Why did I marry?

— Othello

It was over Lewis Packford’s open grave that Appleby first became aware of Mr Rood. One could tell at once – perhaps simply by the way he held his silk hat – that Mr Rood was an old hand at funerals. Indeed, if he hadn’t so obviously belonged to the higher professional classes it would have been reasonable to suppose that he was in charge of the lay and technical part of the proceedings.

It was only later, of course, that Appleby learnt his name; and the thing mightn’t have happened as it did but for the fact that it came on to rain hard. The heavy drops could be heard plonking on the coffin with a small hollow sound – as if the undertakers had inadvertently provided something a size too large even for Packford’s enormous bulk. There was scarcely, it seemed to Appleby, a soul present who had any substantial occasion for private grief. And this, together with the weather, imported a certain element of mere dismalness to the burial. The dead man wouldn’t have liked it. Appleby could almost hear him shouting clumsy jokes about maimed rites and churlish priests.

The service ended and the mourners dispersed. Appleby, who knew none of them, walked off alone under his umbrella. Outside the cemetery, he waited at a bus-stop. So – also under an umbrella – did the man presently to be revealed as Mr Rood. But Mr Rood didn’t appear to think that their late joint concern put Appleby and himself on speaking terms; and as he had some appearance of being the older man Appleby held his tongue. The rain increased; there wasn’t a bus; the rest of the funeral party seemed to have made a superior order of departure in private conveyances. Once Mr Rood dipped his umbrella to take a glance at the heavens, and the rain went plonk on his silk hat just as it had done on Packford’s coffin. Mr Rood made an impatient clicking noise with his tongue – perhaps because of this, or perhaps at the insufficiencies of London’s transport. Then a cruising taxi appeared, and Mr Rood with great promptitude agitated his umbrella. The taxi drew to the kerb. And at last Mr Rood spoke. ‘Would you care, sir,’ he asked politely, ‘to share my cab?’

Appleby agreed, and the two men compared destinations and climbed in. They had travelled some hundreds of yards before Mr Rood spoke. ‘A melancholy occasion,’ he said. His tone contrived to emphasize the bleakly conventional character of this utterance.

‘Yes indeed.’

There was a long silence. ‘Distressing circumstances.’ Mr Rood uttered this with a high degree of rock-like impassivity.

‘Yes.’

Mr Rood applied himself to gently shaking out his umbrella on the floor of the cab – but with a very proper punctiliousness in regard to Appleby’s legs. ‘My name is Rood,’ he said. ‘I was the dead man’s solicitor.’

‘My name is Appleby.’

‘How do you do.’ The inflection which Mr Rood gave this was far from interrogative, and he sank back gloomily in his corner of the cab. Appleby conjectured – without any marked sense of deprivation – that he had now achieved as close an intimacy with the late Lewis Packford’s solicitor as was to be permitted him. But in this he was wrong. ‘Balance of the mind disturbed,’ Rood presently said. ‘A theological rather than a legal fiction. Senseless – but little harm in it, save in cases where the deceased person had made some quite recent change in testamentary dispositions.’

‘Which I suppose Packford hadn’t done.’

Since this hadn’t been in the least a fishing remark, Appleby wasn’t convinced that it deserved to be met with the massive effect of silence which Rood now achieved. However, having thus sufficiently vindicated his professional discretion, the solicitor did proceed in a more conversable vein. ‘Not that I regard with any disfavour the spectacle of people of property making changes in their wills from time to time. From the solicitor’s point of view, it is grist to the mill, after all. And there is much to be said for having the courage to change one’s mind. Napoleon, you will recall, was celebrated for his ability decisively to alter his plans at short notice.’

‘So I’ve heard.’ Appleby wondered whether the correct and dim Mr Rood cherished a fantasy life in which he directed vast armies across the surface of Europe. ‘And I imagine, by the way, that Lewis Packford was the sort of man who would, on occasion, do odd and impulsive things. And suicide is no doubt commonly a matter of sudden impulse.’

‘It may be so. But I was a good deal surprised.’

‘By Packford’s taking that course?’

‘Precisely. And I am a good deal surprised still.’ Mr Rood contrived to lend to this statement the suggestion that it was itself surprising. The implication seemed to be that he wasn’t often surprised, since his sagacity commonly penetrated with perfect accuracy into the future. ‘I am assured by Packford’s physician that our friend had no rational occasion to fear for his health. And, knowing him as I did, I cannot believe that he had any irrational prompting that way, either. No morbid fears about his interior economy, or anything of that sort.’

Appleby nodded. ‘I should be inclined to agree with you. As it happens, I paid him a visit in Italy not long ago. He appeared to be in excellent health, and enjoying life. But it’s my experience that, unless one is really intimate with a man, one may be entirely deceived about – well, his emotional constitution and underlying nervous condition. But perhaps you
were
an intimate?’

Rood, who during this speech had changed his position in the cab and was now eyeing Appleby attentively, shook his head slightly. ‘Dear me, no. Nothing of the sort. Our association, it is true, extended beyond my professional services to him. I have, as it happens, a modest interest in certain of the subjects upon which he was so distinguished an authority. We even collaborated two or three times in papers on bibliographical and palaeographical topics. But I cannot claim much acquaintance with poor Packford’s personal life. I speak from a very general impression. Still, it surprises me, I repeat, that he should take a revolver and blow his brains out.’

‘You mean, Mr Rood, that the circumstance appears to you to deserve a good deal of investigation?’

Rather unexpectedly – but in a fashion that was entirely grim – Rood smiled. ‘It will be proper for me to say,’ he said with august formality, ‘that I should not now be opening the subject at all, had not your being good enough to mention your name put me, Sir John, in full possession of your identity.’

‘Ah.’ Appleby was slightly disconcerted. ‘But I have no official slant on this, you know. Although Packford has for some reason been buried in London, I understand he died in the country. It’s very unlikely to be brought to me.’

‘Quite so, quite so.’ Rood spoke as one man who has adequate subordinates does to another. ‘I had no thought of anything of the sort. And you will not think, Sir John, that one with a good deal of experience, however humdrum, as a family solicitor is at all likely to judge a respectable client’s sudden suicide as a propitious occasion for detective investigation. Far from it. Ten to one, it is highly desirable that any such incident, however mysterious, should pass unexplored into oblivion.’

‘I’m afraid that, professionally, it would be a little hard for me to agree to that.’ Appleby smiled. ‘But I see what you mean.’

‘If the dead man were being blackmailed – well, he can be blackmailed no longer, and the last thing that his shade could desire would be a scandal. And to other common probabilities, similar considerations apply. But with poor Packford, I am in some little difficulty.’

‘Difficulty?’ Appleby asked.

‘I cannot feel very confident that he did take his own life.’ Rood delivered himself of this opinion entirely without emphasis or excitement. ‘In fact, I should suppose it highly probable that he was murdered.’

Appleby was to reflect afterwards that he had been too hastily and baselessly sceptical about the surprising notion which had thus erupted in the mind of Mr Rood. The solicitor had undoubtedly a vein of conceit which might lead him to evolve and push pet theories. But he didn’t appear hare-brained. And Appleby at this stage knew very little about the actual circumstances of Packford’s death and presumed suicide; he had no facts with which instantly to controvert his casually acquired companion of the taxi-cab. But he knew from long experience that almost every suicide, however transparent, starts talk of foul play somewhere; and that it is not always in the temperamentally obvious individuals that such fantasies of homicide are found to have originated. The present probability, he instantly judged, was simply that Packford’s unexpected death had touched off some quirk in Rood’s mind, and set him imagining things.

But all this didn’t mean that the suggestion could be politely ignored. Rood couldn’t have been Packford’s solicitor if he were not a responsible lawyer of good standing; nursing this suspicion, he had tumbled quite by accident into the company of Appleby, who was an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It didn’t follow that it was at all incumbent upon Appleby to get out a magnifying glass and begin hunting for bloodstains and footprints. Indeed, he wasn’t entitled to. But he must attend to whatever information he was about to receive, and take appropriate action should it be necessary. ‘I am greatly concerned,’ he said, ‘that you should have arrived at such a suspicion. But you have no doubt communicated it to the police-force concerned?’

‘I certainly communicated one opinion I had formed to the officer who investigated the matter. Unfortunately, it has been virtually ignored. The police – and, I understand, the coroner – are entirely easy in their minds. The inquest has been adjourned. But I have no doubt that it will conclude in mere formality. Well, perhaps it is better so.’ Mr Rood delivered himself of this final judgement with gloomy dignity.

‘It is certainly nothing of the kind, if there is the slightest ground for any doubt in the matter.’ Appleby spoke with some severity. ‘Are you in a position to point to any motive which may have prompted to Packford’s murder?’

‘Robbery, Sir John.’

Appleby shook his head. ‘I’m at some disadvantage, you know, because I am simply without the facts of the case. But in this country there are singularly few murders which are conceived of as deliberately incident to a robbery. Thieves and burglars commonly kill only when surprised, and then the circumstances are likely to leave no doubt about the matter.’

‘It may well be that I am entirely mistaken.’ Judging his umbrella now tolerably dry, Rood had begun to roll it with meticulous care. ‘But the robbery of Packford, if it took place, was of a singular kind. I think you said you visited him in Italy?’

The taxi-cab bumped to a stop. It was in a traffic jam. Appleby glanced curiously at his companion. Rood had finished fiddling with his umbrella and was sitting with it upright between his knees. If he was a crank, his appearance was far from suggesting the fact. Looked at in a sufficiently wide context, he would no doubt appear dim. Viewed simply in the light of his profession, he suggested a dry narrow rigour which would make him entirely adequate at his job. ‘Yes,’ Appleby said, ‘I did call on Packford in Italy during the summer. It was no more than a surprise visit. I had dinner with him, and then drove on to Verona.’

‘I think that would have been on the 8th of July?’

The jerk with which Appleby sat up wasn’t altogether a matter of the sudden renewed forward movement of the taxi. ‘That was certainly the date,’ he said. ‘But I’d hardly have thought that it was an occasion to go down in history.’

‘Ah.’ There was a new tone in Rood’s voice. It could easily be identified as satisfaction. ‘There would be nothing remarkable in my knowing, without your having told me, about your call on Packford at Garda. But it’s queer that I should know the date – eh?’ He gave a conceited chuckle.

‘There’s nothing actually strange about it, I suppose. But it is mildy surprising. It’s something that Packford might have mentioned to you, or to anyone, on his return to England. But one would hardly expect him to mention the precise date of so unimportant an event, or that it should then stick in your head. I had to make an effort myself to check that you’d got it right.’

‘Quite so.’ Rood was now really gratified. ‘As a matter of fact, I learnt about it at the time. Packford and I were in correspondence during the summer – legal correspondence, you will understand, but with the usual more personal postscripts and so on which it is customary and courteous to add in such circumstances. He mentioned your call. He said that it came within an ace of being a celebration.’ Rood paused. ‘Does that strike you as entirely enigmatical?’

‘I’m not sure that’s a question to answer out of hand.’ Appleby made this reply almost automatically. Where his official activities were in question it was a second nature to him to ask far more questions than he answered.