Appleby Talking (12 page)

“Mrs Grimble was out. It was an hour before she came back again. She was precisely the miserable old soul I expected, and most suspiciously communicative about her movements. She had been out of the house all afternoon, she declared, visiting the municipal cemetery with her widowed brother.

“I saw that if this story was true she could have nothing to do with the disappearance of Nannie Moggs’ nest-egg. And I guessed that there
was
a widowed brother and that the story Mrs Grimble was telling he, too, would tell. It was a reasonable story, too – even if the weather was uncommonly chilly for a long afternoon among the graves.

“Suddenly the truth came to me. I fished a box of matches from my pocket. There was an experiment I could make. You can guess it, of course.”

“Guess it, my dear Appleby?” The Vicar was bewildered.

“The gas-fires. There had been a point, you remember, at which Nannie Moggs’ fire burnt brighter. In a couple of minutes I had satisfied myself that just this happened as soon as Mrs Grimble’s fire was turned
off
. It was a wretched old installation, but I’ve seen the same effect even with tolerably efficient ones.”

“Did Mrs Grimble confess?”

“Yes. I told her precisely what had happened. Lurking out of mere curiosity outside Nannie Moggs’ door, she had heard the secret confided to me, stolen the hidden money, and bolted back to her room. Then she had had sufficient cunning to realise that she must get it out of the place and fake a kind of alibi. So off she went to her brother – who was no doubt as dishonest as she. But, being a thrifty soul, she turned off her gas-fire before she left. And she did confess. My apparently supernatural knowledge of her movements was too much for her.”

“And Nannie Moggs continued vindictive? A constable was called in, and the one wretched old woman got the other sent to jail?”

Appleby shook his head. “It was my aunt who was called in. I doubt whether Mrs Grimble ever ventured on dishonesty again.”

The sea sparkled and small waves splashed drowsily on the beach. Donkeys trotted to and fro bearing the children of holiday-makers who themselves slumbered under handkerchiefs and newspapers. On the horizon lay the smoke of a Channel steamer, on a day trip to Boulogne. And at all this the vicar glanced down with contentment from the promenade. “Fastidious persons,” he said, “would call it vulgar.”

“I like a deserted beach myself,” said the Doctor.

Appleby looked up from his novel. “Do you know Thyme Bay?” he asked. “No? It’s as lonely as you could wish, Doctor.”

The Vicar removed his pipe from his mouth. “You have a story to tell us,” he said.

Appleby smiled. “Quite frankly, Vicar, I have!”

I was there (said Appleby) on special duty with the Security people at the experimental air station. It was summer, and when the tide allowed it I used to walk across the bay before breakfast.

Thyme is a tremendous stretch of sand; you may remember that in the old days they held motor races there.

But the great thing is the shells. Thyme is the one place I know of to which you can go and feel that sea-shells are still all that they were in your childhood. Both on the beach itself and among the rocks, you find them in inexhaustible variety.

On the morning of which I’m speaking, I was amusing myself so much with the shells that it was some time before I noticed the footprints.

It was a single line of prints, emerging from the sandhills, and taking rather an uncertain course towards a group of rocks, islanded in sand, near the centre of the bay. They were the prints of a fairly long-limbed man, by no means a lightweight, and more concerned to cover the ground than to admire the view. But I noticed more than that. The tracks were of a man who limped. I tried to work out what sort of limp it would be.

This had the effect, of course, of making me follow the prints. Since the man had not retraced his steps, he had presumably gone on to the rocks, and then found his way back to the coastal road somewhere farther on. So I continued to follow in his tracks.

Presently I was feeling that something was wrong, and instead of going straight up to those rocks I took a circle round them. No footprints led away from them. So I searched. And there the chap was – tall, heavy, and lying on his tummy… He was dead.

I turned him over – half-expecting what, in fact, I found. There was a bullet-hole plumb centre of his forehead. And a revolver was lying beside him.

But that wasn’t all. Suicides, you know, are fond of contriving a little décor of pathos.

On a flat ledge of the rock a score or so of shells – the long, whorled kind – had been ranged in straight lines, like toy soldiers drawn up for battle. Beside them lay an open fountain-pen, and a scrap of paper that looked as if it had been torn from the top edge of a notebook. There was just a sentence: “
As a child, I played with these for hours
.”

Of course I did the routine things at once. The dead man was a stranger to me.

He carried loose change, a few keys on a ring, a handkerchief, a gold cigarette-case, and a box of matches – absolutely nothing else. But his clothes were good, and I found his name sewn inside a pocket of the jacket. A G Thorman, Esqre. It seemed familiar.

I made one other discovery. The right ankle was badly swollen. I had been right about that limp.

Thorman was in late middle-age, and it turned out that I was remembering his name from the great days of aviation – the era of the first long-distance flights. He had made some of the most famous of these with Sir Charles Tumbril, and he had been staying with Tumbril at the time of his death.

But he had belonged to the district, too, having been born and brought up in a rectory just beyond Thyme Point. So it seemed likely enough that he had chosen to cut short his life in some haunt holding poignant memories of his childhood.

I took Tumbril the news of his guest’s death myself. It was still quite early, and he came out from his wife’s breakfast-table to hear it. I had a glimpse of both the Tumbrils from the hall, and there was Thorman’s place, empty, between them.

Tumbril showed me into his study and closed the door with a jerk of his shoulder. He was a powerful, lumbering, clumsy man.

He stood in front of an empty fireplace, with his hands deep in his trouser pockets. I told him my news, and he didn’t say a word. “It comes completely as a surprise to you, Sir Charles?”

He looked at me as if this was an impertinence. “It’s not for us to conjecture,” he said. “What has prompted Thorman to suicide can be neither your business nor mine.”

“That doesn’t quite cover the matter, Sir Charles. Our circumstances are rather exceptional here. You are in control of this experimental station, and I am responsible to the Ministry on the security side. You have three planes here on the secret list, including the P.2204 itself. Any untoward incident simply must be sifted to the bottom.”

Tumbril took it very well, and said something about liking a man who kept his teeth in his job. I repeated my first question.

“A surprise?” Tumbril considered. “I can’t see why it shouldn’t be a surprise.”

“But yet it isn’t?”

“No, Appleby – it is not. Since Thorman came down to us a few days ago there has been something in the air. We were very old friends, and I couldn’t help feeling something wrong.”

“Thorman didn’t give any hint of what it might be?”

“None at all. He was always a reticent fellow.”

“He might have had some sort of secret life?”

“I hope he had nothing as shoddy as that sounds, Appleby. And I don’t think you’d find any of the very obvious things: money gone wrong, a jam between two women, or anything of that sort. But serious disease is a possibility. He looked healthy enough, but you never know.”

“Were there any relations?”

“A brother. I suppose I ought to contact him now.” Tumbril crossed the room to the old upright telephone he kept on his desk. Then he said: “I’ll do that later.”

I thought this might be a hint for me to clear out. But I asked one more question. “You had confidence, Sir Charles, in Thorman’s probity?”

He looked at me with a startled face. “Probity?” he repeated. “Are you suggesting, Appleby, that Thorman may have been a spy – something of that sort?”

“Yes, Sir Charles. That is what I have in mind.”

He looked at me in silence for almost half a minute, and his voice when he spoke was uncomfortably cold. “I must repeat that Arthur Thorman was one of my oldest friends. Your suggestion is ridiculous. It is also personally offensive to me. Good morning.”

So that was that, and I left the room well and truly snubbed.

All the same, I didn’t precisely banish the puzzle of Arthur Thorman from my mind.

And there
was
a puzzle; it was a perfectly plain puzzle, which appears clearly in the facts as I’ve already given them.

Tumbril must have felt he’d been a bit stiff with me, and that I’d shown the correct reactions.

At least that, I suppose, is why I received a telephone call from Lady Tumbril later in the morning, inviting me in to tea. I went along at the time named.

Thorman’s brother had arrived. He must have been much older than the dead man; his only interest in life was the Great Pyramid of Cheops; and he gave no indication of finding a suicide in the family anything very out of the way.

Lady Tumbril coped with the situation very well, but it wasn’t a cheerful tea. Tumbril himself didn’t appear – his wife explained that he was working – and we ate our crumpets in some abstraction, while the elder Thorman explained that something in the proportions of his pyramid made it certain that London would be destroyed by an earthquake in 1958.

It was only at the end of the meal that this tedious old person appeared to make any contact with the lesser catastrophe of that morning. And what he was mainly prompted to, it seemed, was a concern over his brother’s clothes and baggage, as these must still repose in a bedroom upstairs.

The tea-party ended with the old man’s going up to inspect and pack his brother’s things, and with myself accompanying him to lend a hand.

I suppose I should be ashamed of the next incident in the story. Waste-paper baskets and fireplaces have a strong professional fascination for me. I searched those in Arthur Thorman’s room. It was not quite at random. I had come to have a good idea of what I might find there. Ten minutes later I was once more in Sir Charles Tumbril’s study.

“Will you please look at this, sir?”

He was again standing before the fireplace with his hands in his pockets, and he gave that sombre glance at what I was holding out to him. “Put it on the desk,” he said.

“Sir Charles – is there any point in this concealment? I saw how it was with your arm when you stopped yourself from telephoning this morning.”

“I’ve certainly had an accident. But I’m not aware that I need exhibit it to you, Appleby.”

“Nor to your doctor?”

He looked at me in silence. “What do you want?” he asked.

“I should like to know, sir, whether Thorman was writing a book – a book of memoirs, or anything of that sort?”

Tumbril glanced towards the piece of charred paper I had laid on his desk. “Yes,” he said, “I believe he was.”

“You must know what I’ve got here, sir. I had to find it.” I was looking at him steadily.

“You see, the thing didn’t make sense as it stood. That last message of Thorman’s could be the product only of complete spontaneity – a final spur-of-the-moment touch to his suicide."

“But, although it had the appearance of having been written on the spot, there wasn’t another scrap of paper on him. That it should just happen that he had that one fragment from a notebook–”

“I see. And what, in fact, have you got there?”

“The bottom of another leaf of the same paper, Sir Charles. And on it, also in Thorman’s writing, just two words:
paper gliders
.”

“I must tell you the truth.” Tumbril had sat down. “I must tell you the truth, Appleby.

“It so happens that I am a very light sleeper. That fact brought me down here at two o’clock this morning, to find Thorman with the safe open, and the P.2204 file in front of him on this desk. He brought out a revolver and fired at me.

“The bullet went through my arm. I don’t doubt now that he meant to kill. And then he grabbed the file and bolted out through the French window. He must have opened it in case of just such a need to cut and run."

“He jumped from the terrace and I heard a yelp of pain. He tried to run on, but could only limp, and I knew that he had sprained an ankle. The result, of course, was that I caught up with him in no time."

“He still had the revolver; we struggled for it; it went off again – and there was Thorman, dead. I carried the body back to the house."

“I went up to his room with the idea of searching it for anything else he might have stolen, and there I saw the manuscript of this book he had begun. My eye fell on the last words he had written. I saw them as pathetic. And suddenly I saw how that pathos might be exploited to shield poor Arthur’s name."

“My wife and I between us had the whole plan worked out within half an hour. Shortly before dawn we got out her helicopter from the private hangar – we fly in and out here, you know, at all sorts of hours – and hoisted in the body."

“Thorman and I were of the same weight and build; I put on his shoes, which I found fitted well enough; and then I set out for the shore. The tide was just right, and I walked out to those rocks – limping, of course, for I remembered Thorman’s ankle. My wife followed in the machine, and lowered the body to me on the winch."

“I restored the shoes and made the various dispositions which you found – and which you were meant to find, Appleby, for I had noticed your regular morning walk."

“Then I went up the rope and we flew home. We thought that we had achieved our aim: to make it appear irrefutable that poor Arthur Thorman had committed suicide – and in circumstances which, although mysterious, were wholly unconnected with any suspicion of treason.”