Appleby And Honeybath (6 page)

As brief exposition, Appleby thought rather well of this. He thought rather less well of himself, since he ought to have checked up on that presumed further entrance from the offices to the main building. The point was not perhaps other than a merely academic one, since Honeybath was undoubtedly right about the vast unlikelihood of the body’s having simply been smuggled into another part of the house. Still, he wasn’t what he once had been, Appleby thought. So he became a shade gloomy too.

They passed through the bogus door, unlocked the proper door beyond it, and passed through that. Denver made a pause in the corridor thus revealed.

‘The squatter,’ he said. ‘Have I got this clear? We’re going to come on evidence of a person or persons actually living in a clandestine way on the premises? It’s a new one to me, I must say.’

‘Nevertheless, that’s it.’ Appleby threw open a door. ‘Here’s the first room – totally empty, as you see. And here’s what you may call the lodging house.’ He threw open the door of the second room.

But the second room was now totally empty too.

Naturally enough, Appleby wasn’t pleased. Probably Honeybath wasn’t pleased either, but with Honeybath nothing in the nature of professional prestige was involved. Appleby felt that he had put something almost approaching theatricality into ushering his provincial colleague into the presence of a camp bed, a cooking stove and whatever, and that there was something awkward in the fact that the designed effect had decidedly not come off.

But if anybody actually showed embarrassment it was Detective Inspector Denver. Whether Denver really knew who Appleby was, or was as unknowing as he appeared to be, he was in the presence of two guests at Grinton who were both obviously of some standing in the world, and who had somehow involved themselves in what – at least at a first glance – looked like an episode of obscure farce.

Three of the four men, then, were uncomfortably silent for several moments. Not so Terence Grinton. If anything had its funny side, it was in Grinton’s nature to seize upon it with acclaim. So Grinton now produced that roar. Here was the funniest thing that had happened for a long time. One mare’s nest, he was apparently feeling, had riotously succeeded upon another.

It may be presumed that Denver, being a clear-headed man, was at once able to distinguish between one episode and the other. Honeybath and Appleby had entered this room together, and what they had found in it they had reported upon without any divergence of statement between them. It was true that one did occasionally come upon two – or even more – perfectly respectable witnesses swearing to an identical experience that in the issue had proved radically without status as objective fact. Of this there usually turned out to be now one explanation and now another. Human minds were uncommonly rum, and could run even to what psychologists called collective hallucination. Denver had more than once stood by and witnessed even judges of the High Court baffled by such situations. Denver, however, as a reasonable man, could come to only one conclusion here. Barring something in the nature of an irresponsible prank or scandalous wager – in which he didn’t for a moment believe – these two gentlemen had seen exactly what they said they saw. And this meant that in the space of what could be reckoned as well under an hour a person or persons unknown had entered this room and done a thorough clear up. This had been at least at appreciable risk of detection, since the yard – and presumably a vehicle in the yard – might well have been observed: this even taking account of the considerable seclusion of the entire area. Either, therefore, there had been something deadly serious about the exploit, or it exemplified the same sort of freakish behaviour as had been at work in the deliberate perching (as it could be read to be) of that body in the adjacent library.

But had there
been
a body? Denver was bound to have been asking himself this. Honeybath’s story had a quite different standing from the joint story of Honeybath and Appleby. Honeybath was an artist, and therefore more or less by definition a fanciful and unreliable person. It was of course improbable that he went in for hallucinations in a big way. But he might well have come upon a man deeply asleep, and have jumped to the conclusion – this on the score of some mild temperamental quirk of his own – that it was a dead man he was looking at. And almost immediately upon his quitting the library the man might have woken up, and taken through the bogus door the shortest route to a reviving toddle in open air.

Hither and thither dividing the swift mind, therefore, Inspector Denver must be thus thought of as he glanced round the unrewarding vacancy before him.

‘There isn’t much to go on,’ he then said.

Appleby wasn’t so sure. His own first conjecture offered at least a small niche or crevice in the blank wall the Grinton affair presented as a whole. One hears of industrial espionage – and often of a highly ingenious and even
outré
sort. So why not learned or academic espionage? The Grinton library was an absolutely unknown quantity. A lot of it would be rubbish or near-rubbish, of no more value than the sham volumes of outmoded theology on the concealed door. As much again, or more, must consist of books which time and comparative rarity had made worth, in the aggregate, a good deal of money. But nothing of this kind was likely to be so important, or so impossible of access elsewhere, as to produce the extraordinary state of affairs which Appleby believed himself to have stumbled on. Only highly significant manuscript material would fill the bill. But, if found, why not simply make off with it? Perhaps there was a moral, conceivably also a legal, distinction between filching something and simply studying or copying it even in a clandestine and trespassing way on the spot.
But perhaps it had to be searched for
. Nothing was more likely than that, catalogue-wise, the Grinton library and its cellarage were a chaos.

All this made sense in a way. But it didn’t quite make sense of a dead body. That seemed to belong with another order of activity. And in all this there was a good deal of food for thought.

Was there anyone at Grinton who was likely really to know about the library? Terence Grinton himself was an obvious write-off from the start. He knew about the kennel books, and he believed that a certain forbear called Ambrose Grinton, who was most unlikely to have flourished more than two or three centuries ago, belonged ‘back in the Middle Ages’. Dolly Grinton was clearly a more sophisticated person, with some education and a good deal of intelligence. But Dolly’s taste in literature and the arts in general had already made itself known to Appleby as of a modish sort, and it was likely that she owned only a sketchy knowledge of the history of the family into which she had married. She was also rather Frenchified, and liked talking about Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute,
la nouvelle vague
, and topics of that kind: no doubt noteworthy in themselves but having little to do with English squirarchal life. Appleby had noticed, however, that Judith, who kept up a little with that sort of passing show, had been getting on very well with Dolly. If anything that could be classified as mere family gossip looked like being relevant to the present mystery it could possibly be coaxed into light by this route.

Was there anyone else? The Grintons’ daughter and son-in-law, Magda and Giles Tancock, together with their two children and a nurse, were staying at Grinton for a week. Terence Grinton had early described Tancock to Appleby as a ‘glorified auctioneer’, but had not been specific as to just where the glorification lay. Perhaps he shouted up the bids for fat cattle, or perhaps he was the kind of young pin-money aesthete who gets sucked into the proliferating departments of the great London auctioneering concerns. The latter was the more probable conjecture to the extent that Magda was what Americans call a college girl. She had got herself to Oxford – Appleby had been told – about a dozen years ago, and had there studied he didn’t know what. This murky past (as it must appear to her father) suggested strength of character, or even a masterful self-will, in a Grinton, and perhaps she knew more about the Grintons than Terence Grinton did. The frequent vagueness of the armigerous classes about their own ancestry had often struck Appleby (whose own origins were distinctly modest) as among the curiosities of the English social scene.

At the moment Appleby pursued this line of thought no further. Instead, he fell to wondering how the capable but evidently perplexed Inspector Denver was now going to handle the thing. However little there was ‘to go on’, the chap couldn’t very well wash his hands of it – writing in that notebook something like, ‘No further action required’. On the other hand he would be chary of mounting at Grinton the kind of performance which would lead to newspapers enthusiastically announcing that the police ‘suspected foul play’, or even that they were ‘treating the matter as a case of murder’. That way lay a quite horrific jamboree: a mobile control centre; police dogs with handlers; frogmen from the underwater search unit hunting hopefully for ponds to plunge into; files of perspiring officers apparently grazing on the lawns like transmogrified sheep, but really scrabbling after non-existent spent bullets or abandoned cigarette ends. No sensible policeman wants that sort of circus if it can possibly be avoided.

And here was a small problem for Appleby – of an ethical order, if that wasn’t too elevated a term. When – in the words of the song – constabulary duty’s to be done, what is the proper comportment on the part of an unconfessed constable? Appleby had sketched that provisional theory of espionage to Honeybath. Ought he at once to favour Denver with it as well? Denver hadn’t asked for anything of the kind. He had scarcely had an opportunity to do so. If he had really failed to tumble to Appleby’s identity, there was no particular reason for his asking questions in any case. If he
had
done so, and was making a species of solemn game out of pretending the penny hadn’t dropped, perhaps he ought to be let play the thing his own way. For the time being, at least, Appleby resolved to continue lying low.

‘I think we might return to the house,’ Denver said. ‘Then I’d better take formal statements from those who have been more immediately involved.’ He paused on this. ‘And see if anybody has any ideas about the thing. About just what has happened. We know that
something
has happened. And we don’t know much more than that.’

‘Not even whether the affair’s one for the police,’ Terence Grinton said rather surprisingly. ‘If there was a dead body around, you know, it would be another matter. But devil there is – unless it has been stuffed up a chimney.’

‘A chimney!’ Honeybath exclaimed – startled by this approximation to a previous conjecture of his own.

‘Or taken out and fed to the pigs.’ It was with a sudden and not uncharacteristic violence that Grinton loudly added this senseless conjecture. ‘What else, in heaven’s name?’

‘Well, sir, burglary, in a manner of speaking.’ Denver spoke in a deadpan respectful voice. ‘It’s my understanding that a bed, and a table, and a cooking stove–’

‘It’s an interesting point.’ Appleby interrupted with what he judged to be a layman’s innocent remark. ‘Does a man commit burglary by removing or proposing to remove from another man’s house what he has previously planted there himself? I can imagine a whole line of magistrates urgently consulting their clerk over an issue like that.’

‘We can imagine a lot of things,’ Denver said. ‘It’s a good deal easier than digging out facts.’

This was undeniable, and produced a general silence. It prompted Appleby to a further observation.

‘Or relevant facts,’ he said. ‘I rather suppose that to be the hardest task of detective officers.’

‘As you say, sir.’ Denver was again at his most wooden as he offered this concurrence. And he then led the way out of the bleakly empty room.

It was now five p.m. on the seventh of February, and an almanac would have provided the information that the sun was due to set in four minutes. The library at Grinton Hall seemed to be aware of something of the sort; it was turning dusky in the corners, and almost dark in those contracted spaces in which towering rows of books, monumental rather than edifying or learned in suggestion, squared up one to another in a series of bays along the north wall. Here and there in the meagre gap between these and the ceiling’s gilded and convoluted cornice perched yellowed and dusty busts: Homer, Julius Caesar, obscure classical gods and goddesses. It all suddenly struck Honeybath, as the four men paused again in the middle of the room, as rather effectively sinister. He thought of those illustrations which Hablot Browne – ‘Phiz’ to the world – could cook up for the gloomier moments in novels like
Little Dorrit
and
Bleak House
. Accusing fingers, painted or in plasterwork or marble, pointing down at sprawled and lifeless figures on shadowy floors. Generically, that kind of thing. Honeybath thought again of his projected portrait in such a grotesquely incongruous setting as that.

But this was frivolous, and he ought to be attending to what Inspector Denver was now judging it proper to say.

‘Would this room be much used, sir, by your household and guests?’ Denver was asking the proprietor of Grinton.

‘Used?’
What might be called Terence Grinton’s King Charles’ head (to continue with Dickens) was instantly touched off by the question. ‘Who would want to use a bloody morgue? And a morgue it has just been, according to one cock-and-bull yarn we’ve been listening to.’

This, as uttered in Honeybath’s presence, was scarcely urbane. But Denver gave no sign of disapproval – which wouldn’t, indeed, have been his place. He did, however, appear interested. To Appleby, whose resolve to be unobtrusive didn’t prevent his being other than a keen observer of whatever was going on, it had already seemed that Denver was distinctly interested in the violent Terence. He had been shooting keen sidelong glances at him from time to time.