Appleby And Honeybath (3 page)

‘Learned Grintons,’ Appleby said. ‘It’s a staggering thought.’ Appleby seemed to be judging it useful to study the books almost shelf by shelf. ‘The
Deipnosophists
of Athenaeus, for example. Now, just what would that be? I have a notion they were a kind of learned dining club. And here’s…ah, yes – here it is. The dummy section, Charles. You must have seen it often enough. A childish amusement in eighteenth-century libraries. But whither, in this particular case?
Wohin
der
Weg
? as Faust asks Mephistopheles.’

It was almost as if Appleby was excited, and old habits were overtaking him. He had done no more, of course, than locate, and pull open, a section of shelving that wasn’t shelving at all, but merely a door deceptively veneered with the spines of non-existent books. What was revealed was a further door, apparently outward-opening, and no farther off than the thickness of the library wall. To this door there was a key, but it wasn’t turned in the lock.

‘Now, just what lies beyond that?’ Appleby was bringing a handkerchief from his pocket. ‘The library occupies the entire breadth of the wing, so it must simply be open air. A bolt hole from learning back to nature. Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet. Don’t touch the handle, Charles. Fingerprints, you know.’

Gingerly, and using the handkerchief, Appleby opened this second door upon what, according to his reckoning, ought to have been afternoon sunshine. But it wasn’t.

‘My dear Charles!’ he exclaimed. ‘Just what do you make of that?’

And at this Honeybath was inspired to a little quotation-dropping on his own account.

‘Hellish dark,’ he said, ‘and smells of cheese.’

The smell of cheese was undeniable. It was a smell, indeed, of toasted cheese, as if somebody had lately been indulging in the humble but delectable dish facetiously known as Welsh rabbit. At half past four in the afternoon it was an unexpected smell in a dignified country house, but the explanation of this might well have lain in the fact that what Appleby and Honeybath now confronted was a seeming maze of unassuming domestic offices. If Grinton ran to anyone as archaic as a bootboy or a buttons, it was conceivable that this lowly and juvenile servitor was recruiting himself with a snack in the privacy of his own obscure quarters.

That our explorers could arrive at any such speculation was due to the fact that ‘hellish dark’ was an exaggeration on Honeybath’s part. He had expected bright sunlight; what he had come upon was merely gloomy and crepuscular. There lay ahead a narrow and ill-lit corridor, with what appeared to be a considerable number of small rooms opening off it on either hand.

‘But of course!’ Honeybath said. ‘I remember now. I took a stroll round the outside of the house yesterday, and came on all this. It makes hay of poor James Gibbs’ subdued Palladian design, you know. An entire little shanty town tucked into the angle between the library wing and the main building. Quarters for garden boys and stable lads by the dozen, I suppose. A monument, my dear John, to the inexpugnable philistinism – vandalism, if you like – of the English lesser landed gentry.’

‘It does seem a shade dismal.’ Appleby wondered whether Terence Grinton would care to hear himself as coming from this precise social class.

‘And all entirely unused and deserted now. Nothing but an occasional rat stirring.’ Honeybath shook his head gloomily, but then brightened a little. ‘I wonder whether we could persuade the fellow to knock it all down?’

‘I doubt it. And one must look ahead. The accommodation may come in handy when Grinton is turned into a dump for the delinquent young. And meanwhile we must be said to have other work on hand.’

‘Yes of course. The corpse.’ Honeybath opened a door at random, and peered into a small empty room. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘these quarters can’t be
quite
deserted. There’s this smell.’

‘A clinging sort of smell. But it can’t be lingering from eighty years back, or thereabout. Try the next room, Charles.’

The next room proved to be larger, and not quite unfurnished. It contained a folding table and chair, a camp bed, several cardboard boxes, and a cooking stove fed from a small cylinder of butane gas.

‘What might be called a holiday home,’ Appleby said. ‘And simple holiday fare. Observe the plate.’

Honeybath observed the plate. It stood on the folding table, and on it lay a knife and fork and a substantial slice of toasted cheese. There was also a glass of water, and a small medicine bottle, unlabelled, and half full of pills.

‘I suppose they’re really there?’ Appleby asked with an effect of mild humour. ‘We’re not just dreaming something up?’

‘They’re there, all right.’ As if to reassure himself of this, Honeybath advanced and poked the plate with a cautious finger. ‘Cold,’ he said.

‘Which at least suggests that a solitary feast wasn’t interrupted no more than five minutes ago. Can we gather anything else from this small spectacle?’

‘Well, half the feast is unconsumed. Perhaps the feaster’s eye was bigger than his belly. Or his digestion wasn’t too good.’

‘The pills might suggest that.’

‘Yes – but perhaps it was something quite different. Perhaps he was suddenly alerted or alarmed.’

‘Right enough, Charles. But what about a third possibility? Toasted cheese is rather a perfunctory and uninteresting dish. The mind of this lurking character is elsewhere. Some notion suddenly starts up in his mind so commandingly that he must follow it at once. He shoves his plate aside, hurries back to the library – and never again leaves it alive. So the cheese is important, as you can see.’

‘Important?’ It was with a touch of irritation that Honeybath repeated the word. ‘For heaven’s sake, John, don’t start talking to me in Sherlock Holmes riddles. This whole business has upset me very much. It’s quite some time since I stumbled on a dead body.’

‘Sorry – and of course it’s all thoroughly conjectural. The plate may very well have been cold from the first. But I do somehow like the idea of his jumping up halfway through his meal, whether because he was somehow alerted to your entering the library and finding the corpse, or because some exciting notion had suddenly got hold of him.

‘It may be a woman, not a man.’

‘There’s a statistical improbability there. The male sex has the stronger predilection for toasted cheese. Females eat poached eggs.’

Charles Honeybath compressed his lips. He rather envied his friend this ruthless chauvinism. But he considered it indecorous, all the same.

‘John,’ he asked, ‘I take it you believe us to be in the presence of a crime?’

‘It’s a working hypothesis. We might be more confident about it if you’d thought to take a better look at that dead man.’

‘Yes, of course. I see that.’ Honeybath paused, and it turned out to be in search of a small levity of his own. ‘I’ll try harder next time.’ He paused again, not being at all happy with this. ‘There’s one thing I did notice,’ he said. ‘It was the expression on the dead man’s face. I thought of it as malign glee. Really that. A malicious grin, as if he was pleased about something, or enjoying a nasty joke.’

‘Rictus,’ Appleby said – but with more of perplexity than conviction. ‘A big gape often remarked in what you might call sudden corpses. It used to be noticed when they’d hanged people.’

Honeybath felt that he could have done without this information. He also felt increasingly bewildered, and now expressed the fact.

‘I can’t make head or tail of it,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t say that. The head and tail are there, all right – although I admit that, even metaphorically speaking, the body is still to seek. As you are a perfectly reliable witness, my dear Charles, we have this: there in the library was a dead man; you came upon it, and at once proceeded, very properly, to tell our host; you left the library for that purpose, locking the door behind you; some person or persons, with the alternative means of ingress and egress we have discovered, almost at once took alarm and removed the body, the whereabouts of which are now unknown to us. Right?’

‘Certainly.’

‘This room seems to have been in the more or less temporary occupation of a single person. A single bed, and what you might term catering for one – and pills for one – make that point clear. It doesn’t follow that only one person was involved in the total operation – whatever the total operation may have been. Metaphorically again, it’s the total operation – the teleological aspect of the thing, so to speak – that is the missing body. The why and wherefore entirely elude us at the moment. Right again?’

‘Yes.’ Honeybath, although a little distrustful of the philosophical embellishment given to this series of propositions, could only agree. ‘Do we now hunt around further on our own, or do we call in assistance first?’

‘An immediate alarm, and sending for the police and so forth, would be the proper thing. But we can give ourselves another ten minutes or so of impropriety. Fossick around this odd set-up a little.’

‘There may be a lurking miscreant – or miscreants.’ Honeybath is not to be charged with offering this observation apprehensively. He was necessarily an imaginative man, or he wouldn’t have succeeded as a fashionable portrait painter. But although he could conjure up risks and horrors with some facility, he was by nature a courageous person. Nevertheless, he thought to ask a question.

‘John, are you armed?’

‘Armed?’

‘Carrying a gun, or something of the sort.’

‘Good lord!’ Appleby refrained from laughter. ‘Guns and sealed rooms go together, my dear chap. Their natural home is in your story books. And now we’ll take a look at the other rooms in this abandoned Grinton slum.’

They looked at half a dozen rooms. The disagreeable accretions to the library’s north front proved to be, after all, not strikingly extensive. Here and there were a few sticks of abandoned furniture, but apart from these the rooms harboured nothing except dust and cobweb.

‘Not even a bat, owl, or temple-haunting martlet,’ Appleby said. ‘Let’s find our way into the open air. The approach to these
aedes liberae
may be instructive.’

‘You’re being devilish learned,’ Honeybath said – peevishly but not unreasonably.

‘It happens with detectives, in a sporadic way. Your pal Sherlock Holmes, for instance. On one page his knowledge of literature is pronounced to be nil. On another you find him quoting Goethe or Flaubert in the original.’

‘Bother Sherlock Holmes! And he’s
not
my pal. It’s years since…’ Honeybath fell silent, aware of something childish in his attitude. And he realized that his friend (like some further Holmeses, come to think of it) was given to talking nonsense while he thought hard. ‘Here’s the outside door, John. And it’s not locked. There’s not even a key.’

They emerged into a space having the character of a small stable yard. It had a forlorn air, and it was clear that nothing much happened in it. An abandoned piece of agricultural machinery stood in a corner, and in another was what appeared to be a snowplough. There was an empty shed which might have housed a car or small van.

‘There’s a kind of cart track straight ahead,’ Appleby said.

‘Yes, I noticed it yesterday. I think it joins a secondary drive: not the grand one through the park, but a humble one leading by a short route to the village and the church. The equivalent of the suburban tradesmen’s entrance, one may say.’

‘No doubt. But, Charles, here’s the important thing. Some fairly recent Grinton has had the grace to be ashamed of this mess, and has managed that enormous hedge. Positively Italian, isn’t it? And in very good trim.’

‘Your important point being that it entirely screens all this from the main building?’

‘Just that – or almost that. If one walked straight across this yard one might be overseen from the top windows. But not if one skirted it on the house side. I believe it would even be possible to bring in a car or van. Risky, of course. But it could be done.’

‘Particularly at night.’

‘Particularly at night.’ Appleby nodded gravely, as if in tribute to this sagacious remark. ‘And, of course, if there was no moon.’

‘But people like the Grintons go in for dogs in a big way. Indeed, I believe Grinton receives superannuated fox hounds within his domestic circle. I’ve already been sniffed at by several such creatures. And the dogs might bark.’

‘Or not bark, Charles. That is the really significant thing. The sedge is withered from the lake, and no dogs woof.’

With this peculiarly extravagant perversion of Keats and Conan Doyle, Appleby led the way back to the library.

But then – rather to Honeybath’s surprise – he lingered there. It might almost have been said that the retired Commissioner lingered there wistfully. And, as if aware of betraying this oddity of feeling, he explained himself.

‘It’s the police, all right,’ he said. ‘A simple dead body can be coped with, at least in the first instance, by the family doctor. He arrives with his little black bag, pronounces life to be extinct, and then conceivably has to wonder whether establishing the cause of death requires a p-m. An autopsy, as the jargon has it nowadays. But, Charles, a
missing
dead body is quite another matter. You report it to your local police station; uniformed men turn up in a miraculous ten minutes; as soon as they’re satisfied that the affair isn’t nonsense they get on the blower; and the plain clothes chaps from their detective branch are likely to be with you ten minutes after that again. And all this in the sleepiest part of the country you care to choose. The Fire Brigade just isn’t in it. The speed of the operation can be very disconcerting.’

‘I suppose that must be so.’ Honeybath looked doubtfully at his friend.

‘I myself shall be in danger of becoming irritated. They won’t let me in, you know. Not into this library again. It would be dead against all policemanly etiquette. Not like all those fairy tales you have in your head, with the thick-headed Inspector hurrying forward and crying out “Thank God you’re here, sir”.’