The Open House (16 page)

‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby felt a strong prompting to seize Beddoes Snodgrass and shake him vigorously. ‘May I ask whether the police know about Leonidas’ departure?’

‘I doubt whether he mentioned it to them, my dear Appleby. Nor have I. After all, it can’t really concern them. And they appear to have such a lot on their hands as it is, poor fellows. Do you know’ – and Professor Snodgrass suddenly brightened – ‘I think I’ll go and make that coffee myself?’

FIRST LIGHT

This was a house – Appleby told himself as he watched the Professor totter away on his stick – in which reliable information remained in uncommonly short supply. On the other hand the place was willing to do one any amount of solitude, and it was in solitude that such scant information as he had managed to acquire might best be sifted and reflected upon. No doubt if he returned to the society of Inspector Stride he might pick up a little more hard fact than he was yet possessed of, and certain areas of the mystery might emerge from the soft focus in which they were at present obstinately clothed for him. But for half an hour or so that could wait. He would simply lose himself in Ledward and brood.

There was one direction in which he had not yet gone. This was along the fourth of the quadrant corridors and into whatever it conducted to. Presumably this would be a wing of the same general dimensions as the other three. One might make a bet with oneself as to what it housed. For instance, it might be devoted to a museum of South American antiquities, and even contain pictures and records of value in trying to get a notion of the character of the Snodgrasses’ involvement in the continent. Or it might be divided in two, like the wing shared by the hothouse and the chapel, and offer the alternative diversions of a billiard-room and a swimming bath. Appleby decided to take his ruminative stroll in that direction.

Had he really got anything out of Professor Snodgrass on the strength of the nonsense he had talked to him? He certainly hadn’t elicited anything dramatic. Neither a howl of rage nor an expression of unbounded joy had greeted his confident assertion that Adrian had left an infant heir behind him. Again, the Professor had not been drawn into any communication as to whom
he
understood or supposed that Ledward would now pass. His avoidance of this had something wary or nervous about it. And there was another odd thing: he had shown no impulse to be communicative about his own glimpse of the marauders.

After all, at least one of the men
had
been a sinister-looking foreigner. Appleby had described him to Stride accurately enough. And when he had spoken of them to the Professor as ‘those South Americans’ the old gentleman had accepted this and elaborated upon it within a matter of seconds. But this had taken the form of a piece of extravagant chronological confusion. And it had
not
prompted him to add, in corroboration of the general idea of some exotic vendetta, that his own glimpse had undoubtedly been of Latin-American persons. Yet the effect of that glimpse had, for a time, been shattering – or, if not shattering, bewildering. And Snodgrass had now shut down on it.

One must concede the possibility, Appleby reflected, of two distinct crimes. It was untidy; it wouldn’t please Dr Absolon in his character as a connoisseur of detective fiction; but one had to come back to it, all the same. Two synchronous crimes – but not grossly coincidental, since each had keyed to the same brief span of time for logical reasons. The intruders whom he himself had glimpsed (who might or might not, have been those whom the Professor and Mrs Anglebury had severally glimpsed) were indeed exotic. They had pursued Adrian Snodgrass, it might be, across the South Atlantic Ocean. But their purpose, conceivably, had not been vendetta or vengeance, but something quite different. And there were a number of possibilities here, although the most obvious of them connected itself with the rifled safe. These foreigners (former associates of Adrian’s, or whatever they may have been) knew enough about the safe to hunt for it.
And they had wanted to get to it first
. They had wanted to abstract or destroy vital papers, say, before Adrian himself recovered and in some way exploited them. And it looked as if they had succeeded, more or less.

The other intruders had been English – since it had been ‘lower-class urban voices’ that Dr Absolon had heard. These people had come on this particular night simply because it was the night in the year upon which Ledward and its treasures were uniquely vulnerable. They, too, had been successful, since they had departed with the Claude and much else. And everything pointed to them as the killers of Adrian Snodgrass. That sort of killing is the product of a loss of nerve. As cool and efficient criminals they seemed inferior to the other lot.

And so much, Appleby thought, by way of a preliminary guess or two. It was a picture of the affair which at least organized some of the main chunks of evidence into the semblance of a coherent pattern. Still, as a nearly-completed jigsaw in which all the remaining pieces showed promise of using themselves up it wasn’t possible to think very highly of it.

Confronting this gloomy conclusion, Appleby came to a halt and looked about him. This quadrant corridor wasn’t identical with the others. It was, so to speak, a de luxe model, with an impressive additional feature thrown in. On its outer curve, which was on his left as he walked, it opened out into a semi-circular apse-like recess which looked large enough to accommodate a small orchestra. What it did accommodate was an indifferent marble reproduction of the Laocoön Group. The unfortunate father and his sons, writhing in the coils of Athena’s avenging serpents, had been combined with a placid little fountain which (like everything else at Ledward that night) had been paraded for the returning heir. There was a marble bench in front of the exhibition, as if to invite the passer-by to a leisured gloat before this revolting masterpiece of the Pergamene school. Appleby sat down and regarded it glumly. One had to admit that here was a spectacle of violence which
had
been tidied up. Polydorus, Athenodorus, and Agesander (if those were really the sculptors’ names) had reduced those straining bodies and contorted limbs to a tolerably lucid spectacle artistically regarded. They hadn’t, so to speak, left anything out of their particular jigsaw. Appleby got up and moved on. He must try to emulate just that.

He continued down the corridor. It happened to be one of those patches of Ledward that was poorly lit, and when Appleby opened a door at its end and stepped into brilliant illumination he was for some moments at a loss to interpret what confronted him. He seemed to be in a small structure like a wooden horse-box, and looking out through an unglazed aperture at a lofty and enormous hall which might conceivably be a riding-school. Along the whole of one wall there was a low wooden structure, like a projecting corridor, with netted openings here and there, and a sloping wooden roof. High overhead there were windows and a skylight, but the present shadowless lighting came from a very modern-looking electrical installation just below the rafters. By way of making a little more of this, Appleby took a couple of steps forward. As he did so there was the sound of something like a sharp report from somewhere in front of him, instantly followed by an ugly crack against the woodwork behind. He was just reflecting that the night’s show-down had really begun (and had in fact dropped swiftly to the floor) when a triumphant voice sounded from somewhere at the other end of the hall.

‘Got the dedans!’

‘And you nearly got me.’ Appleby had risen rather sheepishly to his feet. ‘And you’re serving from the hazard side. Come over here, and see if you can get the grille.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I’d no idea anybody would come along here.’ David Anglebury had jumped over the sagging net which gives its delusively slapdash suggestion to a real-tennis court, still carrying a couple of balls and the oddly lopsided racquet with which the ancient game is played. ‘I was just mucking around,’ he said. ‘I didn’t feel like going to sleep in this damned house. And, of course, I can’t leave until my mother can.’

‘Dr Plumridge has settled her down for a bit?’

‘Yes – but the police want to ask her all sorts of things. Only as part of the drill, I think.’

‘I’m not sure that I quite know what you mean by that, Mr Anglebury.’

‘Well, they know about her, you see.’

‘In just what way? Has she a habit of going round confessing to other people’s crimes? Forgive me if that sounds rather crude. It’s a species of morbid behaviour, as a matter of fact, known to every experienced police officer. The trouble is, you’ll understand, that one never can tell.’

‘I suppose so.’ Without warning, the young man swung round, and sent first one, and then the other small solid ball he was holding viciously across the net. ‘I don’t really play this ruddy game. You have to be rather grand for it. Lord’s, or Queen’s Club.’

‘Or be the owner of Ledward Park.’

‘Well, yes. That’s obvious. And you can see the court’s in excellent order, like everything else here. Waiting for Adrian Snodgrass – and now this happens! It’s rather a rotten show, really.’

‘Certainly it is. But the question is,
how
rotten? Don’t you think?’

‘I don’t understand that at all, sir.’

‘Perhaps I’m just being crude once more. But put it this way. If Adrian was killed by a reckless thief he’d cornered, that was less rotten. If he was killed by a close relation, that was more rotten. Or am I taking an old-fashioned view?’

‘You’re suggesting the possibility of something monstrous.’ David Anglebury looked straight at Appleby. ‘I suppose it has been your trade.’

‘I suppose it has. Well, let’s go and discuss this in company of something else that’s monstrous, and that will set the tone. I mean the Laocoön in the corridor. One can at least sit down there.’

‘Very well, sir.’ With no sign of reluctance, the young man let his racquet drop to the floor. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll only be saying again what I’ve already said to your subordinate.’

‘Inspector Stride isn’t my subordinate. He’s an independent concern – and, of course, the official one, for that matter. As for saying the same thing over again, it mayn’t work out that way. Our talk may take a different turn.’

‘I’m not going to contradict myself, if that’s what you mean.’ David Anglebury had flushed suddenly. ‘I’m hiding nothing at all. Not even about my mother.’

‘Thank you. Now, come along.’

The Laocoön Group was as it had been. Neither the Trojan prince and his sons nor the serpents had made any progress. There was something unnatural about their immobility which made a returning spectator uneasy. The critic Lessing, Appleby supposed, had been getting at something like this in his celebrated book that took its title from the work.

‘Nemesis of a Detective,’ David Anglebury said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The ugly thing might be called that. Laocoön did a little too much deduction about the Trojan Horse – managed to see through it, you might say. And this is what came to him as a result. And to his kids too. You might regard it as a kind of cautionary tale, sir.’

‘So I might. Or so might any young man who found himself caught up in the toils of something he hadn’t any very clear view of the origin of.’ Appleby paused, not very pleased with this retort. Young Anglebury wasn’t the completely simple-minded boy he’d taken him to be. There had been a certain wit in the notion of Laocoön as an injudicious meddler in mysteries. But it still was quite uncertain how much he knew about himself. And to go fishing now for what he might have discovered or been told about his parentage was not, to Appleby’s mind, an agreeable occupation. He almost regretted his proposal to continue this talk. But he was in for it now. So was the boy.

‘Mr Anglebury, you didn’t like my speaking about the possibility of this being a family crime. But many murders are. As a matter of fact, most people (like myself) who have had to do with it are inclined to see murder as a very special sort of thing. In a way, it’s often hardly like a crime at all – even although, paradoxically, it comes right at the top of the list of crimes. A murderer is rather like a duke: a nobleman, but yet quite different from other sorts of noblemen.’ Appleby kept an eye on David Anglebury as he rapidly advanced this thesis, and was aware that it had been accorded genuine attention. He was confirmed in his view that the young man was intelligent. ‘But I was saying that a substantial proportion of murders are inside-the-family affairs. A sexual motive is distinguishable in many of them – as it is in so many imaginative works involving killings, from Greek tragedy down to the present day. But an even larger number turn on property or inheritance. The largest single group is concerned with property in the humblest way. What the old woman is believed to keep under her bed, or to have in the post-office savings bank. That sort of thing.’

‘How very dismal and horrible.’

‘It doesn’t have the glamour of Clytemnestra, I agree.’

‘Even Lady Macbeth doesn’t have that. She was only after what King Duncan had in the till – or the wardrobe.’

‘I suppose that’s true.’ Appleby’s mental note was now to the effect that Anglebury was really clever. ‘But all this is beating about the bush. There is every appearance of Adrian Snodgrass’ having been killed by thieves whom he had surprised at their work. And it may well turn out that way. But other possibilities have to be considered, as you very well know. It looks as if, yesterday, there weren’t too many people around who so much as certainly knew whether the man was still alive or not. Then he turns up;
is
alive; and gets killed. I ought to add at once that the crime may have had a political motive. Because, as it happens…’

‘I must say I find it hard to believe that one.’ Rather to Appleby’s surprise, Anglebury had broken in crisply with this. ‘I understand the general idea. Adrian Snodgrass had made enemies in Azuera, and some of them followed him home here and killed him. Have you read much about recent Latin-American history, sir?’