Appleby And Honeybath (4 page)

‘John, don’t be idiotic. I have no such…’

‘But it’s you, Charles, that I’m thinking of.’ Appleby pressed on – heedlessly and handsomely. ‘You have such an extraordinary yarn to tell them, you see. A vanishing corpse! They’ll be conscientiously bound to assume that you’re either off your head or having them on. Probably the latter. They have a kind of folklore about houses like this and their inhabitants. Wild carouses and crazy wagers.
A
bets
B
he can persuade
C
to plunge the telephone into a bucket of water. That kind of thing. So this vanishing corpse
is
nonsense, they’ll tell each other, and agree that their uniformed colleagues were right thickies to suppose anything else. And they’ll interrogate you on that basis. Three or four of them, all gathered round.’

‘John, I really think this kind of fun…’

‘I’m sorry.’ Appleby was perhaps genuinely abashed. ‘But I’m serious, in a way. You will find the whole routine trying, I’m afraid. But others may find it more trying still. There’s a fair-sized party at Grinton this weekend. I’ve no reason to suppose there’s much in the way of dubious goings-on. But people don’t like having their movements inquired into in an
alibi
-seeking way. Of course it mayn’t come to all that. But it very well may.’

‘Aren’t you being a bit portentous, my dear chap?’ Honeybath was rallying. ‘My own story is rather macabre but quite simple, and I shan’t in the least mind being questioned by your policemen.’

‘Good. But, by the way, don’t start offering them conjectures.’

‘Conjectures?’

‘Well, take this. Remember our brief exchange about the pose or posture of the body? Slumped or perched? That sort of thing. “If a sitter sat like that, I’d beg him to relax.” I think you said that to me. Repeat it to a competent detective officer, and he’ll be on to something at once.
Rigor mortis
. Did the appearance of the body, he’ll ask, suggest that well-known post-mortem condition to you? Did you by any chance
feel
a joint or limb? Well, it’s an important point, of course, in attempting to determine the time of death. But I imagine it was just not in your head – and you’ll do no good cudgelling it for what was never there, or starting to say things of the “I rather think” variety. Leave the other fellow to do the rather thinking.’

‘I’ll take your advice, John.’ Honeybath saw that, behind a smokescreen of badinage, Appleby was genuinely concerned over the harassment he was bound to endure. ‘Will there be an inquest, do you suppose? Can a coroner, I mean, sit on a body that isn’t there?’

‘Certainly not in such circumstances as we have here now. I’m bound to say a spot or two of blood would be useful.’

‘A spot or two of blood?’ For a moment, Honeybath was both horrified and bewildered.

‘Just that. Let’s have a good look at that chair, and at the rugs round about. Not that there aren’t plenty of ways of killing a man without shedding gore.’

Appleby carried out this investigation while Honeybath stood by. The effort was apparently unrewarding.

‘Nothing doing,’ Appleby said. ‘Although, mark you, it’s astonishing what the forensic chaps can conjure up out of what seems to be empty air.’

‘You mean, the idea that I’m of a disordered mind…’

‘No, no – I’ve told you already. They won’t assert that you’ve eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner. But remember that it has proved, after all, not to have been a sealed room that you left behind you when you turned that key in the door. Suppose it
was
only a slumbering student that you came upon, and suppose he knew about that concealed exit. He had only to wake up and take himself off.’

‘A student, did you say?’ Not surprisingly, Honeybath was distinctly at a loss.

‘Or scholar. Conceivably quite a ripe scholar. A Regius Professor from one of our ancient universities, or somebody like that. Sufficiently distinguished to lend tone to this whole affair.’

‘John, I do appeal to you…’

‘I’m not just being funny, Charles. I’m putting forward a perfectly tenable hypothesis. And it explains, doesn’t it, even the toasted cheese?’

Honeybath pulled himself together. He wasn’t dull, and he now vindicated the fact.

‘You mean,’ he asked, ‘that somebody has been pursuing a course of clandestine research in this library – and so much at leisure as to have fixed himself up sleeping quarters and culinary arrangements next door?’

‘Just that. The academic term for it is pernoctation. The chap pernoctates. Remains in residence night and day.’

‘You really believe I may have been mistaken…’

‘I don’t really believe anything of the kind.’ Appleby was a shade impatient. ‘What I do believe is that you entered this library and found a dead man. Even so, a certain amount of what I’ve just said may apply. The waking up and making-off theory isn’t mine. It’s just something that may occur to somebody else.’

‘But why ever should anybody be researching here in such a crazily covert fashion?’

‘Because of the peculiar disposition of our host. Judith has told me quite a lot about your prospective sitter. Terence Grinton actively dislikes his library, associating it with what he regards as loopy egghead Grintons who have turned up from time to time. It’s not an altogether uncommon thing. There have been Coleridges, for instance, who took a thoroughly dark view of Sam as the family’s black sheep. And would even have liked to shoo enquiring scholars from the door. Can’t you imagine our Terence roaring at such people?’

‘Yes, I can.’ Honeybath now acknowledged this with candour. ‘But if the man
was
dead, he can’t have come to life again and simply walked out of the place. He must have been smuggled out.’

‘Quite so. And I don’t suggest that we have really got all that far. Merely penetrated to one conceivable tip of a mystery. However, let’s be off. Just lock the door beyond those fake books, Charles, remembering again not to touch the handle. And we’ll lock the main door behind us, just as you did before.’

A couple of minutes later, the two men walked in sober silence away from the library.

It was Honeybath, Appleby insisted, who must tell Terence Grinton what had happened. He had made an abortive attempt to do so already, and it was in his court that the ball still bounced. To be led by the hand, so to speak, into his host’s presence, and there to stand silent while his disturbing discovery was recounted by a third person, would be altogether undignified. That Appleby happened to be a retired policeman, and so more habituated to talking about corpses, was neither here nor there.

Appleby didn’t precisely articulate these remarks, but he conveyed the sense of them, all the same. So thus it had to be. Honeybath felt the occasion to be awkward, but didn’t really take much account of the fact. The one thing not doubtful about the whole affair was its gravity. Embarrassments, therefore, didn’t much matter.

They found that Grinton and his wife were now alone in the drawing-room, except for the presence of a guest called Hillam. Hillam, a middle-aged man of no considerable presence whether physical or otherwise, was understood to be a Curator of something somewhere, and a recent acquisition to Dolly Grinton’s circle of acquaintance. Nobody had been paying much attention to him, and nobody paid any attention to him now.

‘Grinton,’ Honeybath said firmly, ‘I am afraid I have something most unpleasant to tell you about. Less than an hour ago, I went into your library.

‘The devil you did!’ Grinton said. He didn’t say this rudely, but he did say it violently, and his achieving this combination of effects was disconcerting. Mrs Grinton was cheerfully amused – which was frequently her line.

‘I hope it wasn’t intrusive,’ Honeybath said, thus momentarily shying away from his proper business. ‘As a matter of fact, I had the thought that it might provide not a bad setting for our portrait.’

‘God bless my soul!’ Grinton was receiving this information as a joke – a joke perhaps in rather poor taste, but which it was incumbent on a host to take in good part. ‘The portrait? My dear chap!’

‘I found a dead man there.’

‘You found a
dead
man!’ Grinton allowed himself to be checked for a second before this surprising information – just as he might have been on recollecting that beyond rather a high hedge lay a distinctly wide and deep ditch. ‘The library is crammed with dead men. Acres of them on every wall. Dead as doornails, but all still thinking themselves entitled to be taken down and listened to. Go on.’

Honeybath found some difficulty in going on. Here was something he had to paint, and hadn’t yet taken the measure of: a rip-roaring roast-beef-and-ale kind of philistine who yet possessed certain odd qualities of mind.

‘He was simply sitting in a chair in the middle of the room,’ Honeybath managed to articulate. ‘He was somebody I’d certainly never seen before.’

‘Whether alive or dead – eh?’ Almost predictably, Grinton judged this question deserving of brief but loud mirth. ‘Appleby, were you in on this artistic reconnaissance?’

‘No, I was not. But I’ve been in the library with Honeybath again since.’

‘And viewed the body?’

‘No. The body has now disappeared.’

‘Disappeared!’
It was as if here at last was something about which a just indignation must be expressed. ‘A dead body has
disappeared
from my library? It’s monstrous! I’ll send for the police. Dolly, get on the telephone and tell them we’ve all gone mad. Insist on speaking to a man called Denver. A capable chap. Dealt very well with those demonstrators who tried to bugger up the meet at Starveacre Cross. Beg pardon, my dear.’ This apology for improper language was addressed to his wife. ‘Disappeared, my arse!’ he then added as an afterthought.

‘Ought you really to do that?’ Unexpectedly, the little man called Hillam intervened with this, laying down a copy of
Country Life
at which he had been glancing as he did so. ‘Hadn’t we better let Mr Honeybath sleep it off first?’

This extremely offensive remark brought Mrs Grinton into action.

‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘is the best person to decide about that. John, ought we to get the police at once?’

‘Certainly.’

‘There really can’t be – well, some sort of mistake?’

‘No.’

‘It does sound peculiar.’

‘It
is
peculiar, Dolly. And so are certain other circumstances for which I can vouch.’

‘Perhaps we ought to have another look in the library ourselves, John?’

‘The police ought to be the first people to go in there now. And somewhere else, as well. There really is a mystery to clear up, and a dead man really does figure in it. Just conceivably, no major crime is involved. I can’t yet say whether that’s my own conjecture.’

‘Denver, is it?’ Mrs Grinton said, and rose and left the room.

Among the four men, left to themselves, there was a brief silence which was broken by Hillam.

‘I hope you didn’t mind my little joke,’ Hillam said.

Honeybath, feeling that this form of words need not be construed as an apology, said nothing. Grinton looked uncomfortable – indeed, oddly ill at ease. Conceivably he was thinking that Hillam must be all right, since Dolly had brought him along, but that he wasn’t quite one’s own sort, all the same. Honeybath, on the other hand, was at least out of the right stable, although daubing paint on to canvas was an odd manner of life. About Appleby he wasn’t at all sure. He had married one of those Ravens, who had been a crazy crowd for ages, and before that people had probably never heard of him. He had drive – Grinton had great respect for drive provided it didn’t take a man too close to the heels of the pack – and had been very high up in whatever he had been high up in. This was the sum total of Terence Grinton’s knowledge about Appleby. He was a man of limited curiosities.

Honeybath was trying to remember something about the opprobrious Hillam. He had never met him before, and his name was unfamiliar. Hallam Hillam – an infelicitous combination, because awkward on the tongue. Might he be some kind of art boffin? The Courtauld? The Tate? The V and A? More probably some minor provincial place.

Appleby was telling himself not to start asking questions. He had no personal interest in any of the people at Grinton. He was here at all only because Judith had a notion that one ought ‘occasionally to move among’ one’s quite remote connections. No doubt he had taken on the doctrine when, long ago, he had taken on the wife – and he had to admit that it had yielded interest and amusement from time to time. But a large social circle was something which neither his earliest years nor his later intellectual habit had taught him to rejoice in. Familiarity with a wide diversity of human types no doubt broadened the mind, but his professional career had provided him with quite enough of that. Pottering around the old home – really Judith’s old home – and listening to his clever children’s odd modish persuasions and reading this and that in order to mitigate his immense ignorance in various fields of knowledge: these were the proper employments for an ageing man. Certainly not going fishing and inquiring over casually encountered petty mystifications.

‘Grinton,’ he suddenly heard himself asking, ‘does your library contain much, or anything, of major interest or high value?’

‘My dear chap!’

Terence Grinton seemed so astonished by this weird question – behaviour, indeed – on the part of his guest that he forgot either to roar with laughter or to bristle with indignation.

‘Ask me another,’ he said. ‘People have turned up from time to time wanting to poke about in it for one crackpot reason or another. It’s because of something running in my family, you know. Like drink or lunacy or chasing ceaselessly after wenches. Respectable in its own way, no doubt, among people of the appropriate sort. Not that such cattle don’t turn out pretty shady if you take a hard look at them. Beaks and dons and poets and every kind of scribbler. Communists to a man.’ Grinton made a brief pause in this extraordinary speech. ‘And they’re not even always after the bloody books. Heads full of letters and diaries and heaven knows what scribblings that they imagine the place must be stuffing with. Damned impertinence. Only a few months ago there was an unnatural woman – heaven knows from where – who said she was writing a book about Ambrose Grinton, a dissolute chap who went messing around back in the Middle Ages among artists and their doxies – beg pardon, Honeybath – and collected rubbish from their waste paper baskets. I wasn’t unfriendly. I even asked her if she ever rode to hounds, and offered to mount her for a good run or two.’