Ampersand Papers (11 page)

‘In a sense, yes. And my sister agrees with me. That is so, Geraldine, is it not?’

Geraldine gave her nod.

‘It is my sense that Sutch was an unprincipled person, and that he had involved himself in intrigue.’

‘In intrigue?’ Appleby looked properly puzzled and distressed. ‘The term is commonly taken to suggest something in the nature of a conspiracy between two or more persons. Are you saying that you believe that to be the state of the case?’

‘Decidedly.’

‘Then with whom was Dr Sutch conspiring? It can hardly, I take it, have been with a member of your family or household.’

‘Of course not – and I fear I can give no helpful answer to your question. But one thing it is necessary to say. Whatever was going on did tend to exercise an exacerbating or irritant effect upon certain members of the family. They were set a little at odds, shall we say. And this, Sir John, is the occasion of my appealing to you. If the mystery is not resolved in a clear-headed way, baseless suspicions may be aroused.’

‘That would be most unfortunate, of course.’ Appleby had a sense that things were turning uncommonly odd at this interview. ‘But
is
there necessarily any mystery? You have just been saying that Dr Sutch was careless, and unhappily with fatal consequences.’

‘I am not quite satisfied as to that.’ For the first time, Grace Digitt hesitated. ‘There is, you see, this background to the affair in those extremely valuable papers. I have been making inquiries about them.’

‘Ah, yes – the papers. Mr Craig has some sort of note about that. But perhaps you can give me a fuller view of that aspect of the affair. If, indeed, it can conceivably have anything to do with Dr Sutch’s death. The police, you know, and for that matter I myself, are concerned solely with that.’

‘No doubt. I have to confess that I was not well-informed about the papers once possibly in the possession of Adrian Digitt. It is not my sort of thing. I was slow to appreciate the point that this merely literary material might be very valuable indeed.’

‘And so well worth intriguing about.’ It was Geraldine who unexpectedly offered this contribution to the debate.

‘Exactly so. My sister makes the vital point, Sir John. Skillet at one time talked about them in such a vein, although he has not latterly done so. I was inclined to discount his remarks.’

‘Archie, you see,’ Geraldine said as if by way of explanatory aside, ‘talks a good deal.’

‘It may be said,’ Grace went on, ‘that we were in a weak situation. We had no certainty that these papers existed at all, whether at Treskinnick or anywhere else. Sutch, if he came upon them, would have been in a position to misappropriate the lot. But to dispose of them he would presumably have required accomplices of some sort. It is in this context that I speak of the possibility of intrigue.’

‘I see.’ Appleby paused, aware that Grace Digitt was no fool – and aware, too, that here was a point at which caution was required. ‘But suppose we make a contrary supposition. Suppose Dr Sutch to have been an honest man…’

‘As it is incumbent upon us to do, so long as we lack evidence to disprove it.’ Predictably (Appleby told himself) Geraldine had pounced at last.

‘Quite so, Lady Geraldine. So let me continue. Imagine Dr Sutch to have found the papers, and to have taken them straight to Lord Ampersand. Might there then have been any dispute as to their ownership?’

‘Indeed there might.’ Grace spoke without hesitation. ‘I have discussed the issue on the telephone with our family solicitor, Sir John. It is his opinion that the papers, regarded as physical objects merely, might be adjudged to be the property of my father. But since they have never been published, the copyright in them continues in being indefinitely, and may at this moment be the legal property of some legitimate descendant of Adrian Digitt’s, supposing such a person to exist. So your question is answered, Sir John. There might well be dispute about the matter. It would, of course, be a disgraceful thing.’

Appleby didn’t quite see that it need be a disgraceful thing. But he did see that a point of substance had emerged about those hypothetical Ampersand Papers.

‘Lady Grace,’ he asked, ‘do you yourself possess any information as to whether or not a descendant of Adrian Digitt’s is alive today?’

‘I have discussed the question with a cousin, Charles Digitt. As it happens, he is staying at the castle now. But I first raised the problem with him a considerable time ago, when this fuss about Adrian Digitt arose. He appeared at that time disinclined to treat it seriously, and had nothing to say about it. Indeed, I cannot say that he was wholly civil to me. But now, and no doubt as a consequence of this shocking affair, he has been more communicative. We have a distant relation, an elderly woman named Deborah Digitt, who lives at Budleigh Salterton. Charles believes her to be Adrian Digitt’s great-granddaughter, and his only living descendant. So the copyright of which we have been speaking may well be her property.’

‘Might not the papers be her property too – and actually in her possession? She would appear to be the natural person to have inherited them. Has inquiry been made of this Miss Digitt?’

‘It shall be made, of course.’ Grace said this grimly. ‘We haven’t got round to it yet.’

‘I see.’ Appleby paused for moment. ‘Allow me, Lady Grace, to put what is admittedly an extremely bizarre suggestion to you. Suppose that the papers were here at Treskinnick, and that the copyright was Miss Deborah Digitt’s. Might she not feel that the tidy thing, as it were, would be that the papers themselves should be in her possession too? After all, she might well believe that she had a moral, and even legal, right to them. Might she not have decided to simplify matters, as it were, by entering into what you call an intrigue with Dr Sutch?’

There was a moment’s silence, during which Appleby had the satisfaction of seeing that he had produced an absurdity (as it must surely be) that the competent Grace Digitt hadn’t thought of. Oddly enough, it looked as if Geraldine had. For this time she had given a nod of a peculiar character, rather as if acknowledging that here was a glimpse of the obvious.

‘We have no reason to suppose,’ Grace said a little coldly, ‘that Miss Digitt, although living, indeed, in an obscure situation, is other than a person of unblemished character.’

‘Nor have we of Dr Sutch, Lady Grace, although his was no doubt an obscure situation too. I only wished to bring home to your sister and yourself the curious manner in which suspicions may ramify, when once embarked upon. I wonder whether it will be possible for me to have some conversation with your father?’

‘I see him coming through the main gate now.’ Grace was standing by a window. ‘And Skillet with him.’

‘And the dogs,’ Geraldine said.

‘Sir John is unlikely to wish to converse with
them
, Geraldine,’ Grace said severely.

‘I suppose not, Grace. At least we haven’t given the dogs a bad name.’

This unexpected witticism was not well received by the elder daughter of the Ampersands. Grace walked to the door.

‘My sister and I will now withdraw, Sir John,’ she said with a touch of
hauteur
, ‘and I shall ask my father and brother to join you.’

So Appleby was left for some minutes to his own devices. At least he no longer felt himself to be in any false position. Here was a mystery of sorts, and he had made his life among such things. He was quite prepared to assume the full mantle of the law, and sort these Digitts out. It was true that he hadn’t developed (as he had occasionally done in the past) a rather instant insight into the state of the case. If Dr Sutch had been murdered, it was difficult to see just how. It was still more difficult to see in all this stuff about Adrian Digitt’s remains anything that could have quite the weight to precipitate a crime of such a sort. The unfortunate Dr Sutch, indeed, had been precipitated, but there was still very little reason to suppose that he hadn’t, so to speak, precipitated himself. At least there had been nobody to give him a lethal shove.

Or had there been? Why not? Why
not
? Just suppose that…

But no. It was impossible. Thinking back hard, Appleby told himself that what had glimmered in his mind just wouldn’t work. The clock was against it. And, in any case, it was utterly improbable that, in such a situation, anybody would pause…

The door opened. Lord Ampersand and his son, Lord Skillet, entered the room.

It must have been the helicopter,’ Lord Ampersand said.

‘The helicopter?’ Appleby repeated, at a loss before this abrupt announcement.

‘Yes, the helicopter. It must have been that. I’ve been turning over one thing and another. And that’s it.’

‘You will observe, Sir John,’ Lord Skillet said, ‘that my father has been addressing his mind to our problem.’

‘Properly so,’ Appleby returned dryly, and made a mental note that the heir of the Ampersands was one given to irony and perhaps malice. ‘But just what helicopter, Lord Ampersand?’

‘Well, you know, they’re around a great deal. The naval station has the things. Police borrowed one, as a matter of fact, to land a fellow up there on the North Tower.’

‘Did they, indeed?’ It surprised Appleby that Inspector Craig had not reported this obvious manoeuvre.

‘Confounded nuisance they can be, my dear sir.’ Lord Ampersand appeared to remain a little vague as to Appleby’s identity. ‘Make the devil of a racket at times. But what I remembered, you see, was a kinsman of mine who was a fighter pilot during the war. Resourceful chap. Discovered how to cope with those buzz-things. He’d come up behind them, and just touch a fin, or whatever it was to be called, with his wing-tip. And down it would go into the English Channel.’

‘Lord Ampersand, are you suggesting that this is how Dr Sutch met his end?’

‘That’s right. Bit of a lark, I suppose. High-spirited fellows. Of course, the chap mayn’t have noticed Sutch crawling around. Unfortunate, eh?’

‘Decidedly so.’

‘Or the catastrophe,’ Lord Skillet said, ‘may have been wholly inadvertent. The helicopter simply flew too near to that staircase, and the mere turbulence from the rotors brought it down. As my father says, that’s it. So we needn’t trouble ourselves further.’

‘I fear we shall have to trouble ourselves quite a lot further, Lord Skillet.’ Appleby accompanied this expression of opinion with a stony glance at Archie before turning back to his father. ‘Are you saying, Lord Ampersand, that there
was
a helicopter?’

‘It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Otherwise it couldn’t have happened that way.’ Lord Ampersand paused on this triumph of logic. ‘But I quite accept what my son has to say. Pure accident, and so on.’

‘Lord Ampersand, it appears from the police report that you yourself actually
saw
the staircase collapse…’

‘Perfectly true. It was quite worrying, my dear Sir Robert.’

‘John. Do you now assert that you also saw a helicopter – and heard it as well?’

‘Well now, I can’t say that.’ Lord Ampersand had the air of a patient man meeting some merely captious criticism. ‘As I say, the things are around a great deal. It’s so usual that one ceases to notice them. But the staircase giving way like that wasn’t usual at all. In fact, I never saw it happen before. So of course I was aware of that.’

‘As always,’ Lord Skillet said, ‘my father is the soul of lucidity. I look forward to his explaining the affair to our local naval commander.’

‘That, I judge, is unlikely to happen.’ Appleby wondered whether Lord Skillet was quite as frivolous as he appeared determined to represent himself. ‘We must put your father’s theory out of our heads, for the simple reason that I myself know quite positively that there was no aircraft of any kind around. I was down there at the foot of the cliff, you see, when the staircase fell, and Dr Sutch with it.’ Appleby paused on this long enough to see that he had disconcerted his auditory. It was odd that this piece of information seemed to come as a surprise to these people. Or was that the position? There was nothing astonishing in the fact that Lord Ampersand was a good deal less on the ball than his daughters. But what about his son? Appleby found himself wondering whether Lord Skillet was a man who – habitually and, as it were, by routine – faked his reactions to whatever turned up.

‘How disagreeable for you,’ Lord Skillet said. ‘Sutch was rather an old tortoise in a way. And the helicopter, like Aeschylus’ eagle, might have dropped him plumb on your head.’

It is unlikely that this somewhat strained piece of classical lore meant much to Lord Ampersand. But Lord Ampersand nodded appreciatively, all the same. He probably held his heir in high regard, at least intellectually considered. Appleby found himself, feeling differently. Something indefinable in Lord Skillet’s bearing, even more than his last slightly crazy remark, made him wonder whether this scion of aristocracy was wholly sane.

‘There was also a man called Cave,’ he said. ‘Cave was the man who came up to the castle with the news that Sutch was dead. But Cave had been in a cave, and mightn’t be able to swear that there had been no helicopter. But it is probable that a jury would take my word for it.’

‘A jury?’ Lord Skillet was all innocent surprise. ‘The Coroner’s, do you mean?’

‘For a start, yes. But another jury may enter the picture later, Lord Skillet. Possibly at the Central Criminal Court. For as the newspapers like to have it, the police are not ruling out the possibility of foul play.’

‘Foul play!’ Lord Ampersand exclaimed, as if the thought had never occurred to him. ‘Do you mean, my dear sir, that somebody may have plotted to
kill
this Sutch fellow? Who on earth would do that?’

‘At the moment, I haven’t the slightest idea. Perhaps nobody. “Foul play” is a term one can apply rather widely, I suppose.’

‘Perhaps,’ Lord Skillet asked politely, ‘you are turning over in your head my father and myself as likely foul players?’

‘Certainly not. I turn nothing over in my head until I have an adequate assemblage of facts there. And that means that there are certain questions I’d like to ask. It will be perfectly proper for you to take exception to my doing so. As you know, I am merely assisting your Chief Constable in an informal way.’