Appleby File (24 page)

‘Rather more to eat?’

‘Just that. Or rather, in this case, a great deal more to eat. Our meals became quite astonishingly lavish. It was almost puzzling.’

‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, ‘Charles Pellow was thinking of throwing in his hand as a hotel-keeper, just as he had as an actor and an archaeologist? Perhaps he was doing you all, as it were, a final blow-out?’

Appleby shook his head.

‘It would have been a colourable theory,’ he said. ‘But in point of fact, it turned out to be much more a matter of funeral baked meats. At least, they might almost have been called that, although it would have been just a shade premature. For it was about a week after this that old Adrian Pellow was found drowned. His body was washed up among the rocks.’

‘An accident?’ I asked.

‘So we were at once assured. But it quickly got round our isolated little community, somehow, that Adrian had probably committed suicide. The fact that his conduct was on the dotty side naturally encouraged the idea. I accepted it myself, even before a small piece of definite evidence turned up. I had a notion that the act was a product of Adrian’s having convinced himself that the country was even more on the brink of ruin than usual. His mind had become so obsessed with that sort of imagination of disaster that it had entirely lost its grip of sober reality.’

‘One hears of that sort of thing,’ I said. ‘Of course there is always some underlying mental disturbance. The anxiety about the state of the country and so forth is a mere rationalization.’

‘No doubt.’ Appleby didn’t seem much impressed by this. ‘But as to its being suicide – well, as I’ve said, something like evidence did turn up. A note was found on the body. It was no more than a couple of lines on the top of a sheet of writing paper. Their immersion in the sea had made them almost indecipherable. But they could, in fact, just be made out.

'What Adrian Pellow had written was: “
I have taken this step at the earliest possible moment
.” What would you make of that?’

‘Some final vision of national catastrophe had come to the old chap, and he had wasted no time in getting clear of it.’

‘Actually, we were soon obliged to admit that the reference was to something altogether more rational. It emerged at the inquest that Adrian Pellow had made an extensive settlement of his property some years before. That meant, of course, that he had to survive to a certain date if his trust deed were to be valid.’

‘And it was?’

‘Indeed, yes – but only just. His death appeared to have taken place just a couple of days after that date had passed.’

I thought for a moment, and then glanced mistrustfully at Appleby.

‘It
sounds
plain sailing,’ I said. ‘Adrian Pellow stuck it out until he knew that his son Charles would benefit by the settlement becoming valid in law. And then he drowned himself with a clear conscience.’

‘You’ve forgotten something.’ Appleby was smiling happily. ‘You’ve forgotten what had been happening to our hotel meals that week.’

I stared at my friend. He appeared to be talking nonsense. But that, of course, wasn’t his habit.

‘Explain yourself,’ I said.

‘Very well. Those heavy meals gave me one or two sleepless nights. In more senses than one, they may be said a little to have upset me. Particularly in the light of one perplexing piece of medical evidence, which I’ll mention in a moment. However, in the end I did tumble to the truth. It was no more than a matter of suspicion, however, until Charles Pellow broke down under questioning.’

I was horrified.

‘Charles Pellow! The wretched man had murdered his father? What you were confronting was parricide?’

‘Nothing like that. He had found his father’s body in a rockpool. Adrian Pellow’s death was indeed a pure accident. But it had happened a fatal week too soon. The settlement was invalid. So Charles, you see, had a problem. He also had a deep freeze. All progressive hotel-keepers have.’

‘My dear Appleby!’

‘Yes, it isn’t pretty. In fact, a cold-blooded affair.’ My friend seemed unnecessarily pleased with this disagreeable joke. ‘And so I am reminded about that crucial piece of medical evidence. Spine-chilling, in a way. When first examined by the police surgeon, old Adrian Pellow’s corpse had been a good deal colder than a corpse should be. Ever!’

‘How extremely–’

‘So you see what had happened. Charles had turned everything out of that deep freeze, and deposited his father’s body in it. Then he told his staff – they were bewildered young Spaniards, for the most part – some plausible story about the mechanism having broken down.

'That was why we had those tremendous meals. The ordinary refrigerator wouldn’t hold all that food, and it would have looked decidedly odd if Charles had suddenly consigned it all to the incinerator or the pigs. So it had to be eaten. And hotel guests are never very reluctant to turn pigs themselves. Little else to do, you know. So – as I said – funeral baked meats.’

‘But surely Adrian Pellow would have been missed?’

‘Remember that he did for himself in that self-contained flat. And remember that Charles Pellow was a professional actor. He simply impersonated his father – briefly but effectively, every now and then. Adrian’s extraordinary habits and mannerisms made it easy.’

I was rather dazed by this time, ‘And then?’ I asked.

‘When the right date came round, Charles got out the body and – so to speak – drowned it again. Full fathom five thy father lies. When found, the quite late Adrian Pellow presented every appearance of an almost freshly drowned man. Restaurants, after all, play very much the same trick with trout.’

‘My dear Appleby, trout can’t drown.’ I was rather irritated by Appleby. Policemen ought not to be flippant, to my mind. ‘But what about that note? The one about the earliest possible moment, or whatever the phrase was.’

‘Adrian Pellow used to put in a lot of time writing indignant letters about this and that to the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury and I don’t know whom else. He just had enough sense not to waste stamps posting them.

'Charles did a rummage through the pile, and came on this particular fragment. It seemed to fit neatly into the picture, so he planted it on the body.’

‘Wasn’t that a piece of rather muddled thinking? A man about to drown himself would
leave
a farewell note behind him – not take it to sea with him. Anyway, it merely emphasized–’

‘I quite agree with you. But Charles Pellow was actually committing one crime, remember, and I expect he was irrationally afraid of being suspected of committing another. That fragment of his father’s writing made the death seem explicitly a suicide.

'And of course it supported the appearance of its not having taken place too early.’

‘But the wily Charles,’ I said, ‘was caught out in the end.’

‘He was, indeed. As your banker will tell you, my dear fellow, it’s dangerous to rely on frozen assets in a crisis.’

‘Cab, sir?’

Appleby and his wife turned round in surprise. One does not expect, emerging from a small
albergo
on the Simplon Pass, to be greeted – and in theatrical Cockney – with just that.

But it was undoubtedly a London taxicab. Two young men had just been settling themselves down in it. But now they had jumped to the ground, and were grinning cheerfully and hospitably at the Applebys. They were – it seemed they couldn’t be other than – English undergraduates. Nobody else tours the Continent in that sort of conveyance. The cab, Appleby noticed, had its name – The Coy Mistress – painted on the bonnet.

‘Let us take you as far as the hospice, sir,’ said the first young man. ‘There’s another hundred metres after that. So you can still say you’ve walked across the Alps.’

The young men, in fact, were in such high spirits that it seemed a pity to turn one’s back on them. Which was why the Applebys drove up to the Simplon Hospice in a London cab.

The following day The Coy Mistress turned up triumphantly in the streets of Lausanne. Appleby hailed it – rather regretting that he didn’t have a well-rolled umbrella with which to make this metropolitan gesture – and invited its owners to lunch. It was an entirely agreeable occasion. One of the young men, whose name was Ronald McKechnie, recited Byron. You could sense that he adored that supreme poet of adolescence, but he managed a great air of finding the heady verses absurd. The other youth, Peter Lawson, had been told that the site of Edward Gibbon’s villa was now occupied by a post office, and in this prosaic circumstance saw a striking instance of the degeneracy of the times. Appleby felt very old, but found all this entertaining, nevertheless. And then the young men returned to the endlessly satisfactory topic of The Coy Mistress.

‘You see,’ McKechnie said instructively to Appleby, ‘a taxi like that is a tremendously good buy. I don’t know if you know anything about the London police?’

Appleby, whose job was running the London police, replied soberly that they were a body of men about whom he learnt a little more from time to time.

‘Well, they’re terribly good – or perhaps it’s the GLC, for I’m not sure – about seeing that taxis and so on are kept in sound mechanical order. So you can’t buy an old taxi that hasn’t been inspected and passed in that way some time within the preceding twelve months. But what makes it
really
good value is if you know about Stubbs.’

‘And everybody doesn’t,’ Lawson added quickly. ‘In fact, sir, you mustn’t tell.’

‘He’s a little man in Camberwell. For some reason he’s not allowed to buy as many of them as he wants – or not direct from the taxi people. So he’s open to buying a few back every year from people like us who have been round the Continent in them. Stubbs has promised to take The Coy Mistress off our hands as soon as we’re done with it, and he’s giving us £25 more than we paid for the thing in the first place. So you see how one should keep it quiet, and only tell one’s friends.’

Appleby nodded – by way of honourable assurance that he would not hasten himself to Camberwell on his return home.

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘But what does this excellent Stubbs do with the cabs when he’s got them?’

Lawson chuckled happily.

‘He exports them to Ubangi-Shari. At least I think it’s Ubangi-Shari, but it may be Chad. Not, you might say, as going concerns. The engines are taken out, and they’re converted into carriages for the higher nobility. Drawn by dromedaries.’

McKechnie looked at his watch.

‘I say! Peter and I must be going. We’re shoving The Coy Mistress into a garage for the afternoon. To a fellow who knows just how to tune up that sort of engine. We’ll be going across France like the wind.’

‘Or like dromedaries,’ Appleby said. ‘By the way, was it Stubbs who told you about this tuner up of London taxicabs in Lausanne?’

‘Yes – that was Stubbs. He’s a tremendously smart chap.’

‘He sounds just that to me,’ Appleby said.

The Applebys flew home.

‘You really do quite fatally attract crime,’ Judith remarked. ‘We go off for a rather quiet sort of holiday, and a chance encounter runs you straight into a spot of smuggling… You say it is smuggling?’

‘Oh, yes – it’s certainly smuggling. How tiresome that I’m pretty well obliged to do something about it. A policeman’s lot is not–’

‘Yes, I know. But at least I hope, John, that the young men won’t get into trouble. They’re bound to feel awful asses, poor dears.’

‘The young seldom feel asses for long.’

‘And they’ll be down by £25 – the money they were going to get from the benevolent Stubbs. What would Stubbs’ line be, do you think? Watches?’

‘Almost certainly, as the racket starts in Switzerland. And the whole picture may be called excessively clear. A set-up like The Coy Mistress represents about the last word in obtrusive innocence. Young men like that would never have either the means or the inclination to smuggle anything more than a fountain pen or a bottle of brandy. Customs people are going to treat them very cursorily.’

‘But the man who they thought was simply going to tune up their engine has really stuffed the upholstery and so on with thousands of watches for the benefit of this improbable Stubbs when The Coy Mistress is made over to him?’

‘That is indeed the picture – and “clear” is barely the word for it. “Pellucid” would be my own choice.’

‘Yes, John, I suppose it’s extremely simple. But don’t forget to tell me how it ends, all the same.’

‘Pellucid but untrue.’ Appleby had just got home from Scotland Yard one evening a week later. ‘It was all too artless to be authentic, don’t you think? Anyway, our young friends are now in gaol, along with several other people.’

Judith looked at her husband in dismay.

‘Ronald McKechnie and Peter Lawson? Our undergraduates?’

‘To begin with, they’re not undergraduates, and never have been. We were dim-witted to be taken in. Consider the business of their giving us that lift up the Simplon. It wasn’t, somehow, quite in character. If we’d met first and had a bit of talk, then the sort of young men they appeared to be might have made the offer. But that sudden “Cab, sir?” business didn’t ring true.’

‘That sounds like wisdom after the event. And I don’t see how–’

‘Nor were you right in speaking of our
chance
encounter with them. It was planned. In fact, they planned both encounters – the one on the Pass, and the one in Lausanne. If I hadn’t asked them to lunch, they’d have run into us again and asked us to coffee. And then out they’d have come with all that stuff about Stubbs.’ Appleby smiled. ‘Stuff even a policeman couldn’t fail to get suspicious about.’

‘I still don’t see what they hoped to gain by it all.’

‘A magnificent diversion. They knew I’d have The Coy Mistress traced, and that when they landed it from the car ferry the whole resources of the customs-house would be turned on to ransacking it. That would mean only a very light and routine check on other vehicles on the same ferry.’

‘And it was on one of those other vehicles that the big load of uncustomed watches was really being smuggled?’