Appleby Talking (26 page)

Mark Borlase nodded. “And so you set a trap for him?”

“Precisely. But first, let me give you briefly what my guess about Meritt was. He had been offered money – big and tempting money – to do
both
things: get the notebook and liquidate Sir Stephen. He saw his chance in Sir Stephen’s habit of taking that nocturnal stroll. Last night he simply followed him up to the Head, killed and robbed him, and dressed the body in clothes he had already concealed for the purpose, including the odd shoes. Then he dropped the body over the cliff so that it would fall just where it did, returned to the Metropole, and telephoned his confederate to begin playing her part on the eight-five this morning. The girl – her name was Jane Grove – was devoted to him. And she played up very well – to the end, I’d say.”

For a moment there was silence in Appleby’s room. Then Derry asked a question. “And your trap?”

“It depended on what is pretty well an axiom in detective investigation. A criminal who has – successfully, as he thinks – brought off an ingenious trick will try to bring off another, twice as ingenious, if you give him a chance. Still guessing – for I really had no evidence against Meritt at all – I gave him such a chance just as irresistibly as I could.

“The girl, you see, must come forward, and repeat the yarn she had told on the train. That was essential to the convincingness of the whole story. It was, of course, a yarn about encountering a man who doesn’t exist. For this
nobody
I determined to persuade Meritt to substitute a
somebody
: yourself, Mr Borlase. You had been on that train and had concealed the fact. I let Meritt have this information. I gave him the impression that I strongly suspected you. I let slip the information that you could be contacted at your club, the Junior Wessex. And as soon as Meritt had left I got a message to you there myself, explaining what I wanted and asking you to co-operate. You did so, most admirably, and I am very grateful to you.”

Mark Borlase inclined his head. “A blood-hunt isn’t much in my line, I’m bound to say. But it seemed proper that Stephen’s murderer should be brought to book.”

Derry Fisher looked perplexed. “I don’t see how Meritt–”

“It was simple enough.” Appleby broke off to take a telephone call, and then resumed his explanation. “Meritt represented himself to Mr Borlase on the telephone as my secretary, and asked him to come to my private address – which he gave as fifteen Babcock Gardens – at five forty-five. He then got in touch with the girl and arranged
his
trap.” Appleby smiled grimly. “He didn’t know it was
our
trap too.”

“He was going to incriminate Mr Borlase?”

“Just that. Remember, you would have been able to swear that you saw Mr Borlase leaving Waterloo in a taxi just behind the girl. From this would follow the inference that Mr Borlase had tracked her to her home; and that after his interview here he had decided that he must silence her.”

“But Meritt didn’t himself mean to – to kill the girl?”

“He meant to stage an attempted murder by Mr Borlase; and to that he must have nerved her on the telephone. It all had to be very nicely timed.”

Mark Borlase suddenly shivered. “He was going to arrest me, after he had himself winged the girl? He would have said the revolver was mine – that sort of thing?”

“Yes. He may even have meant to kill you, and maintain that it had happened in the course of a struggle. Then the girl would have identified you as the man with the odd shoes. And that would have been that.”

“How would he have explained being on the scene – there in Babcock Gardens, I mean – at all?”

“By declaring that I had prompted him to go and have a look at you at your club; that he had spotted you coming out and had decided to shadow you. It would have been some such story as that. He had lost his head a bit, I’d say, in pursuit of this final ingenuity. It was criminal artistry, of a sort. But it was thoroughly crazy as well.”

“And Stephen’s notebook?”

“That telephone-call was to say it has been found with Meritt’s things. Meritt thought himself absolutely safe, and he was determined to hold out for a good price.” Appleby rose. “Well – that’s the whole thing. And we shall none of us be sorry to go to bed.”

As they said goodbye, Denny Fisher hesitated. “May I ask one more question?”

“Certainly.”

“The shooting in Babcock Gardens was an afterthought of Meritt’s – and I think it was the afterthought of a fiend. But why – after you had examined the train and guessed nearly the whole truth – did you tell me that the girl was in danger?”

“She was in danger of the gallows, Mr Fisher. But at least she has escaped
that
.”

Lady Appleby glanced reproachfully at her husband as he slipped into his place on the stand in Pall Mall. “We thought you wouldn’t get here at all. The streets have been closed for ages.”

The Assistant Commissioner laughed. “My dear, it’s one of those occasions on which I find it useful to be known to the police.” He looked at his watch. “And we still have a good deal of time on hand. Was the breakfast up to scratch?”

“Sir John – that breakfast was out of this world!” It was Mrs Harbot who replied – dropping, in order to do so, the binoculars with which she had been studying whatever of British institutions came within their field. “I think your London clubs are wonderful. But what I don’t figure out, Sir John, is why you’re here with us in these seats. I’d guess that a man high up with the police would be down there on a horse, with a uniform and a sword. Like the one going past now. Isn’t he beautiful? Would he be an Inspector?”

Appleby looked – and paused civilly, as if the question required some little skill to answer. “He’s a major, as a matter of fact, in the Brigade of Guards. The police, you know, require a bit of a helping hand on occasions of this sort.”

Mrs Harbot again surveyed the scene. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Sir John, if something marvellously unexpected happened?”

This, clearly, was a largeness of expectation with which Appleby found it hard to sympathise. “I’ll be quite content with what’s on the programme. I’ve had my share of the unexpected, as a matter of fact, during the small hours of this morning.”

Lady Appleby looked up quickly. “Is that why you didn’t come home?”

“Yes. A little encounter with the Lion and the Unicorn.”

Mrs Harbot’s eyes rounded. “The Lion and the Unicorn? Were they heralds or pursuivants – something like that?”

“Dear me, no. They were just a Lion and a Unicorn.”

“But doing something unexpected?”

Appleby looked doubtful. “That’s rather hard to answer. In a sense, their behaviour was quite conventional. They were fighting for the Crown.”

Mrs Harbot was horrified. “Not the crown that–”

“Dear me, no. The traditional crown of the ancient kingdom of Ruritania.”

Lady Appleby eyed her husband with frank scepticism. “Ruritania, John?”

“I’m calling it that.” And Appleby turned gravely to Mrs Harbot. “Even so, you must treat this as a most confidential communication. It is true that Ruritania – the country I am calling Ruritania – disappeared as an independent monarchy round about 1918. That is how its crown jewels came to be alienated. But if the facts that I am about to tell you became generally known, I assure you that the Chancelleries of Europe would be rocked to their foundations.”

Mrs Harbot smiled brilliantly. “If this isn’t just like Sherlock Holmes!”

“I hope you will continue to think so. But let me proceed.

“The offices and showrooms of the Jewellers’ Company,” Appleby began, “are just round the corner. You can see them from the card-room of this club. It was from there, indeed, that Colonel Busteed – one of our oldest members – saw the thing being installed late yesterday evening. It seemed a belated effort in the way of decoration, but it was all done with great speed and efficiency. A lorry with a tall extension-ladder drove up just after office hours, and within fifteen minutes an elaborate affair had been erected at the level of the mansard roof: an enormous coat of arms, flanked by two handsome beasts, pretty well as large as life and done very much in the round. Busteed concluded that the Jewellers had felt something more than the general scheme of decoration in the street was required, and that they had arranged for this imposing display pretty well at the eleventh hour. He thought no more about it – or no more about it just then. But he did happen to mention it to me as I was leaving the club. It was pretty well dusk by that time, but I caught a glimpse of the contraption myself as I turned the corner.

“As it happened, I had to pay a call at the Home Office, and coming out I ran into Lord Anchor. He is a distinguished elderly man, and among other things a former Master of the Jeweller’s Company. By way of making conversation, I said something about this last-moment embellishing of their building. To my surprise, he said he had never heard of it. Indeed, the old boy took quite a high line.”

“A high line?” Mrs Harbot was puzzled.

“He said that the greatest propriety had to be observed in using the royal coat of arms, or anything like it; and that if he had been consulted he would have vetoed the proposal at once. Well, I concluded that the other Jewellers had by-passed old Anchor in the matter, and that I had properly put my foot in it. So I endeavoured to escape. I didn’t get away, however, until I had heard a good deal more in the way of criticism of the Jewellers’ recent policies. For instance, there was this business of the Ruritanian regalia.”

Mrs Harbot sighed delightedly. “The crown jewels?”

“Precisely. The Jewellers were displaying them in a window, behind a steel grill, and Lord Anchor believed that this was likely to cause some resentment in
émigré
Ruritanian circles in this country. There was no doubt about the Company’s legal right to the jewels – the intrinsic value of which, indeed, was not very considerable. They had been handed over with the authority of the former royal family and its ministers as part-security for a loan that went west in the abortive counter-revolution of 1925. But there had been some sore feelings – even litigation – and Anchor felt that to make the ancient crown and so forth part of a topical display had been an error in tact. He pointed out that the beautiful young Grand Duchess Paulina, the claimant to the Ruritanian throne, was in London at this moment.”

“Isn’t that just too romantic?” Mrs Harbot was enthralled.

Appleby shook his head. “I assure you that I haven’t come to the romantic part yet. Anchor held forth for some time in this vein, and my impression was that the old chap was talking sense. I left him in a state of considerable indignation. But it was nothing to the state in which I found Colonel Busteed when, later in the evening, I came back to the club. It appeared that the Lion and the Unicorn were automata.”

“Automata?” It was Lady Appleby who was startled this time. “You mean they moved – were worked by machinery?”

“So Busteed had convinced himself. There are such things round about London at the moment, you know – and quite amusing some of them are. But the application of the principle to these particular heraldic symbols had apparently struck Busteed as grossly unsuitable. I wasn’t myself all that shocked; it seemed to me that the Lion and the Unicorn could bob or beck at each other harmlessly enough. I was surprised, however, when Busteed told me what the Lion did. It scratched.”

Mrs Harbot stared. “Scratched the Unicorn?”

“Not even that. The Lion scratched
itself
. Busteed had only glimpsed the phenomenon in the dusk on his way to dinner, but he was quite sure of it. I confess that I was a good deal puzzled. Busteed, although our great authority here on both port and Madeira, is a most abstemious man, and I found it hard to imagine that he had been other than quite sober.

“As it happened, I hadn’t much leisure to consider the matter, for I was simply eating a hasty late meal before going back for some hours’ work at the Yard. It was after midnight before the problem came into my head again – but when it did come, it came to stick. Lord Anchor’s ignorance and Colonel Busteed’s impression were both mildly surprising; taken together, they constituted something really odd. I ended by setting the telephone going and eventually tracked down the Jewellers’ secretary in his bed. My story was news to him. He had never heard of a proposal to put up any decoration of the sort I described. He suggested contacting his night-watchman at once.

“I had already tried ringing the Jewellers’ premises, and there had been no reply. It seemed clear that there was trouble, so I called out a car and came round with a couple of constables straight away. The street-lighting illuminated the lower part of the building clearly enough, but above the cornice it faded into darkness, so that there was no more than a vague blob to suggest what we were looking for. The car, however, had a powerful spotlight, and we had this focused in a matter of seconds. The coat of arms was there. But both the Lion and the Unicorn had gone.”

“Gone?” Mrs Harbot was perplexed. “I don’t see how automata could
go
.”

Appleby chuckled. “Augustly employed automata don’t scratch themselves either. But humans may be tempted to do so – particularly if constrained to maintain uncomfortable postures in unusual habiliments. I had no doubt that we were in the presence of an ingenious plot to gain access to the Jewellers’ building by the one vulnerable route – the windows in the mansard roof.

“There was an awkward pause while we waited for keys. When the secretary arrived with them he brought Lord Anchor as well – in high feather, it seemed to me, that the Company had run into a spot of trouble. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that it was the Ruritanian regalia that was the occasion of it. We hadn’t got far in our search of the building when we knew that he was right.

“From somewhere in the bowels of the place there came a muffled thumping and hollaring. I needn’t say that this was from the night-watchman, who had met the invasion of his territory with singularly little efficiency and been ignominiously locked up. But another sound was more commanding – and for some seconds thoroughly perplexing as well. I had a queer impression that it was something I had heard often enough – and yet never, so to speak, in this workaday world. The truth appeared when we burst into the main showroom of the place. A wide space had been cleared in the middle, the Ruritanian crown stood isolated on a table at the side, and before it the Lion and the Unicorn were at a ding-dong duel with sabres. It was first-class cinema stuff.”