Ampersand Papers (12 page)

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Authors: Michael Innes

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‘Man’s at least a gentleman,’ Lord Ampersand said, turning to his son, and speaking precisely as if he’d forgotten that Appleby was in the room. ‘Know where you are with him, eh? Better let him go ahead.’

But at this candid moment there was an interruption, the door of the library opening and a young man coming into the room. He paused, but not as if having been unaware of whom he was going to find there. Then, as it seemed not to occur to either Lord Ampersand or his son to say anything, he addressed himself to Appleby.

‘May I introduce myself?’ he asked. ‘My name is Charles Digitt.’

‘And he is going to be my heir,’ Lord Skillet said. ‘When my poor father passes on, Charles will undoubtedly be my heir. Presumptive, of course. Entirely so until they’ve ordered my coffin. I imagine Grace and Geraldine will do that. So it’s sure to be on the cheap.’

These unseemly remarks didn’t discompose young Charles Digitt, who shook hands with Appleby, sat down, and devoted himself to taking stock of the situation.

‘Are they all coming out?’ he asked presently.

‘Are all what coming out, Charles?’ It was Lord Ampersand who was perplexed.

‘The cats from their bags, Uncle. And scattering in every direction. Some of them getting into cupboards, perhaps, and rattling the family skeletons.’

This, although homelier matter, seemed to be as baffling to Lord Ampersand as the fabled death of Aeschylus had been. Appleby wondered whether it was in some way directed against Lord Skillet. He had detected a glance passing between the two cousins which somehow spoke of a covert war of nerves as existing between them. In an ordinary way first cousins don’t much trouble themselves with sibling jealousies. But here there was the special circumstance that the first of them was at one remove and the second of them at two removes from the same marquisate. Appleby, whose more common contacts were with professional persons and a modest gentry, felt unsure of his ground here. He had seen enough in his time of dirty work in the higher reaches of society to form the view that the only fairly constant attribute of the aristocracy consisted in their being rather odd, and in particular in their secretly setting store by distinctions which overtly they made light of. Perhaps this crowd was like that.

But at the moment he’d had a stroke of luck. With the exception of that Miss Deborah Digitt whose existence and possible connection with the hypothetical Ampersand Papers had been revealed by Lady Grace, he’d now had the whole lot on parade. And here at the moment were three male Digitts in a room with him. It wasn’t a bad opportunity for beginning to sort things out.

‘I don’t know about cats in bags,’ he said easily, ‘but I am, I confess, curious about cupboards. As containing, you know, not skeletons but papers. I have gathered from Lady Grace that Dr Sutch, who has died in so startling and indeed perplexing a fashion, had been employed by you, Lord Ampersand, to search for documents which might prove to be of great interest and equally great financial value. Anybody not assured that Dr Sutch’s death was purely accidental would be bound to centre his inquiries on those activities. For example, on the probable legal ownership of anything of the kind that turned up.’

‘It isn’t plausible,’ Charles Digitt said, ‘that a man should be murdered – and it seems to be murder that you are talking about, Sir John – over scraps of Shelley and Byron.’

‘Not even if they had, potentially, a high sale-room value?’

‘Not even then, I’d say – for what my opinion is worth.’ Charles now seemed to be speaking quite seriously. ‘Literary remains – if that’s the term – are not things that people get murdered about. Or not outside harmless fiction.’

‘I’m bound to say I agree with my cousin.’ Lord Skillet stretched himself lazily. ‘Jewels, yes – or bullion, or even what people stow away in the vaults of a bank. But, somehow, poems and diaries and so forth, not. Murder goes along with glamour. Something of that kind.’

There was a pause which lasted long enough for Appleby to digest the fact that beneath a tiresome frivolity these first cousins were both intelligent men. But he was aware of something else as well. It was as if there were a game of skill in progress and one of the contestants – whether judiciously or not – had exposed an important card upon the table. At least Archie (which he recalled as Lord Skillet’s name) and Charles had taken another hard look at one another. And what about Lord Ampersand? During these latter exchanges he would have had to be described as fallen into an abstraction. Perhaps he was merely thinking about his dogs, or about the perplexing fact that nowadays he never seemed to have quite enough money to pay his bills. Or was it about something more germane to the current situation at Treskinnick Castle? Quite unexpectedly, Lord Ampersand now answered this unspoken question in Appleby’s mind.

‘Tell you an odd thing,’ he said to the library at large. ‘About that fellow Sutch, you know. Turned uncommonly curious about matters he wasn’t being invited to stick his nose into. Did you ever hear’ – Lord Ampersand had turned to Appleby – ‘of the art of war in the Middle Ages?’

‘It was quite advanced, no doubt.’

‘No, no. It’s a book. By a chap called Oboy, or something of the kind.’

‘Oman,’ Lord Skillet said indulgently. ‘But just what are you talking about?’

‘Rummaged for it in this very room. And talked about Oliver Cromwell. No connection with Shelley and that lot, at all. I looked them up, you know. And about Treskinnick being reduced. It was damned rum.’

‘I suppose,’ Archie said, ‘that he was going to take advantage of his stay here to write a history of the wretched pile for some antiquarian journal. With profuse acknowledgements to the Most Hon. the Marquess of Ampersand. A spot of kudos. That sort of thing. And some chaps
did
reduce the castle. But, this time, it was the castle, you might say, that reduced Sutch. Such is life, as it were.’

Appleby listened without impatience to this return to frivolity. Let these people exhibit themselves to the full. Even egg them on.

‘All sorts of legends,’ he offered, ‘do attach themselves to a historic place like this. No doubt a siege of Treskinnick is a historical fact, although I know nothing about it. But there must be all sorts of stories of dubious authenticity as well. Sutch may have thought of treating of them too. In lighter vein, one might say.’

‘If so, they didn’t exactly buoy him up.’ Lord Skillet seemed to find this reflection funny. ‘But it’s all none too relevant, Sir John, to what you appear determined to take in hand.’

‘Perfectly true – but it’s interesting, all the same. Is there any member of your family who goes in for the annals of the Digitts?’

‘Our cousin Deborah.’ Charles came out with this decisively, but after a second’s pause. ‘She lives at Budleigh Salterton, and knows a great deal of family history.’

‘Decent woman,’ Lord Ampersand said. ‘Send her game from time to time. The right thing. Didn’t know you saw much of her, Charles.’

‘Oh, yes – quite a lot, just recently. Deborah is a delightful woman – lively and cultivated. She owns a great many family papers, too, and could write us up if she wanted to. She’s the great-granddaughter of Adrian Digitt, you know. And it’s Adrian, in a sense, that we’re having all this fuss about.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Appleby continued mildly interested, ‘Would Dr Sutch’s researches have taken him at all into Miss Deborah Digitt’s company, would you say?’

‘I’ve no idea – no idea, at all. I had very little conversation with poor Sutch. Archie may know. Archie?’

‘I’ve no idea either.’ Archie again faintly suggested the poker player. ‘We’ve all wondered from time to time, of course, whether those supposed papers of Adrian Digitt’s mayn’t be in the old girl’s possession, after all. Surely you must have sounded her about that, Charles? If you’ve really been getting thick with her, that’s to say.’

‘She’s rather close, as a matter of fact, Archie. And your father would be the proper person to inquire.’

It was at this juncture that a violent altercation broke out between certain of Lord Ampersand’s dogs in the courtyard outside the library windows, and the conference was thrown into confusion as a result. Appleby took the opportunity to withdraw. He had been given a good deal to think about. Had an officer higher in the hierarchy of the police (only there wasn’t one) demanded a statement from him at that moment he would have had to record the impression – perhaps the key impression – that a good deal had been going on among the Digitts both before and after the decease of the unfortunate Dr Ambrose Sutch.

12

 

Lady Ampersand was the last person to run to earth. Appleby didn’t want to leave Treskinnick Castle without making the acquaintance of its chatelaine. Lady Ampersand, after all, wasn’t a Digitt. She might be quite agreeable.

Ludlow, appealed to as he passed through the hall, was confident that there would be no more difficulty in locating her ladyship. It was her jigsaw hour, he explained. This was her invariable pursuit between tea and dressing for dinner, and she invariably prosecuted it in the grey drawing-room. Ludlow made no scruple about immediately conducting Appleby to this apartment. He opened the two leaves of an imposing door, said ‘Sir John Appleby’ in a loud voice which would have been appropriate to carry over the din of a large party, and withdrew.

Lady Ampersand had for a moment the appearance of greeting her caller with a dramatic gesture ambiguously poised between welcome and arrest. But this was merely because she happened to be holding up in air a small and convoluted fragment of plywood, the better to meditate its place in the puzzle on the table in front of her.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘How do you do?’ Although perhaps reluctant to break off from her absorbing task, she was much too well-bred to be other than graciously welcoming. ‘I am so pleased that my daughter Grace thought of you, Sergeant. But when the idea was brought forward I also rang up my sister Agatha, who is a tower of strength when anything disagreeable happens. She was quite clear that you were the person to send for.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not a sergeant,’ Appleby said. ‘I have retired, you see, and am no longer a policeman at all.’

‘I don’t think it makes any difference. In fact I am sure my husband will be delighted to employ you. And I will see to it that he makes a satisfactory arrangement on the financial side. He is sometimes a little absent-minded in such matters. I think it is going to be the giraffe.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘In the top right-hand corner. The puzzle, you see, is called “Noah’s Ark”. It arrived from Harrods only this morning.’

‘How very interesting.’ Appleby advanced to the table. ‘Yes, almost certainly the giraffe.’ Lady Verinder in
The Moonstone
, he was thinking, was surely the last woman in England to propose the private hire of a detective officer from Scotland Yard. ‘Giraffes are creatures readily identifiable by their necks, are they not? But I have always thought their little stumpy horns very characteristic too.’

‘So they are.’ Lady Ampersand appeared now to have become aware that her visitor was not from the order of society which she had supposed. Her error, however, failed to disturb her. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am so pleased. My husband, you must understand, would be upset if it were discovered that one of us had done something dreadful to that unfortunate man. Not that he wasn’t rather tiresome at times. When he wasn’t calling Rollo “my lord” he was calling him “your grace”. I even distinctly heard him on one occasion say, “May it please your grace”. It irritated my husband very much to be mixed up with a duke. Rather a long time ago, it seems, there was an Ampersand who declined a dukedom in exchange for his wife. I have never got to know a great deal about the Digitts. But they appear to have been very odd people at times. Dear me! Here is what must be the trunk of the elephant. Don’t you think, Mr…?’

‘Sir John Appleby. And undoubtedly the trunk. I am sorry to hear that Dr Sutch was so socially insufficient. I wonder whether we might discuss some other aspects of his time at Treskinnick?’

‘But certainly, Sir John.’ Lady Ampersand took this transition in her stride.

‘Can you tell me, for instance, how Lord Ampersand came to get hold of him?’

‘He was found somewhere by our son, Archie. It was scarcely a recommendation, to my mind. It would have been better to consult my sister Agatha. Archie, of course, is extremely clever, and my husband relies on him a good deal. But not all of his acquaintance are agreeable, or even presentable.’

‘I have no doubt that Lord Skillet possesses catholic tastes, Lady Ampersand. He interested himself, for instance, in this matter of Adrian Digitt’s papers?’

‘Oh, very much. It was a matter of his feeling there was money in them.’

‘Yes, of course. It is only natural. Would his cousin, Mr Charles Digitt, have had the same sort of interest in them?’

‘I suppose so. In fact, that is only natural too. Charles will inherit the title, you know, and presumably anything else that there is to inherit. And as the family affairs are somewhat embarrassed, he must be expected to have an eye to anything that might raise the wind.’ Lady Ampersand appeared pleased with this free-and-easy expression. ‘I am almost sure that here we have the lion’s mane. The best puzzles come from Harrods. They have a very special man who knows about them.’

‘Reliable tradesmen are a great blessing, are they not? By the way, do you yourself believe that these papers really exist?’

‘Certainly I do. In fact, it is my belief that Archie came on them – or on some of them – a long time ago. And I don’t think he wanted Dr Sutch about the place one little bit.’

‘But didn’t you say it was he who found Dr Sutch for the job?’

‘Oh, certainly. But it was only because we insisted that a person of that sort should be brought in. He may have thought that Sutch would be less troublesome than anybody else, don’t you think? Particularly if he himself had been selling some of those papers in a quiet way already.’

‘Dear me, Lady Ampersand! Would your son have been doing that?’

‘As a small boy, Sir John, Archie was much given to going to my purse – just as, later, he was given to going to his father’s brandy and cigars. As my sister Agatha once said to me, Archie is one of nature’s pilferers.’ Lady Ampersand paused to fit in the lion’s mane. ‘It is a weakness, no doubt. But only a small one. I used to feel it distracted his mind from other less trivial failings.’

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