Appleby Talking (7 page)

“Within minutes she was dead. And as the date of her death would later be approximately determined by the state of her body, Pendragon with his Mentone alibi would be safe.

“When he did return to England he had only to drive round to Honoria’s deserted cottage and leave her with her head in the oven. He used her fingers to turn on the gas for a bit, and then turned it off again – being afraid that a great stink of gas might attract the notice of a passer-by a little too soon.

“Pendragon was invulnerable, or would have been but for the swift working of Honoria’s wits, intent on retribution.

“She swallowed the key, which would have carried us a good long way in the end. And she swallowed something else that ought to have cried
motor car
the moment we looked at it, even though it is twisted a little out of shape.

“You might find that little twist of wire on the floor, or in the glove box of any car, for it is simply the little clip often used instead of a nut to secure a terminal to its sparking-plug.

“Honoria knew there would be a post-mortem, and she sent us the only message she could. One can’t but admire her. Even when dying, it must have taken resolution to swallow those things.”

Cadover nodded. “I hope a jury will swallow them.”

“There’s a good chance that they will. The key is indeed the key to the case, for it will certainly prove to be the key of Pendragon’s garage. And it is very unlikely that he has had time to remove all traces of the elaborate set-up he had to contrive.”

“He made a solid bid for freedom.” Cadover had joined Appleby, and now both were staring out over the grey city. “Shall you be sorry if he hangs?”

Appleby considered. “I didn’t like him, but I like Honoria’s kind of game no better. So my answer must be like the abominable Jolly’s. I shall and I shan’t.”

“Anything in the news?” Appleby asked the question idly as he sat down and stretched his legs before the clubhouse fire.

“Singularly little.” The Vicar dropped his evening paper on the floor. “And certainly no sign that the world grows more honest. Numerous petty thefts and robberies – and one big one. A valuable painting – a Titian – has been stolen from Benison Court.”

“The place can very easily spare it.” Appleby spoke with a serenity altogether culpable in an Assistant Commissioner of Police. “And it will probably give its new owner far more pleasure than it gives the Scattergoods and their guests in that chilly long gallery.”

“My dear Appleby, to apply such a criterion is surely to invite the merest moral chaos. But who will the new owner be?”

“Some mad collector in America, building up a whole secret museum of stolen masterpieces. Think of the thrill of that. It would give Titian himself a tremendous kick. Whereas the long gallery at Benison would leave him cold – in every sense. But that reminds me” – Appleby had begun to fill his pipe – “did I ever tell you about the Counterpoynt affair?”

The Vicar smiled. “Go right ahead.”

“Even in his early eighties Lord Counterpoynt was an exceptionally handsome man – not merely in his features, but in his whole figure. As an undergraduate he had refused to stroke the Oxford boat, saying that it would be a waste of time; and there were several other fields in which he was regarded as being, potentially at least, the leading athlete of his generation. His interests, however, were mainly aesthetic; and he was a great patron of the arts.”

The Vicar looked perplexed. “But surely he became an extremely well-known–”

“Precisely. But back in the nineties, nobody could have guessed that young Counterpoynt would eventually revert to type – family type, I mean – and become a leading philanthropist and writer on social and moral questions.

“Among the painters he encouraged was Orlando Say, at first a great rebel and Bohemian, but eventually a Royal Academician, celebrated for his mythological subjects, and for ambitious figure compositions in classical settings. Nobody thinks much of Say now. But his canvasses have their virtues. In the age of Burne-Jones, when the nude figure commonly had the air of having been painted in indecent pinko-grey tights, Say carried on from Etty the ability to paint honest nakedness – skin that you could really believe had pores to it, glinting above water or shadowed among leaves.”

The Vicar nodded. “I am not among those, my dear Appleby, who consider the Nude to be a Pity. But if it is to be done, let it be done well.”

“An excellent sentiment, Vicar. And now to my story. One November morning some years ago, the aged Lord Counterpoynt was shown into my room at New Scotland Yard. He was in great agitation. Somebody, he said, had stolen his best Orlando Say. And he asked me to come to Counterpoynt House at once.”

“It was still standing?”

“Yes – and one of the last surviving town houses of that tremendous sort. A Say was small beer in such a place, and I wondered why the old boy was so upset. I presently found out.

“Counterpoynt took me to the smoking-room – an apartment, it appeared, designed exclusively for male habitation, as the Edwardian habit was. Among a good many paintings there was one empty space, and the proportions of this suggested at once that the stolen picture had been a single full-length figure-composition. And this was confirmed when Counterpoynt showed me a photograph of it. It was called
The Flight of Patroclus
, and represented the young Grecian warrior, stark naked, hurtling through the picture-space from left to right. Hector presumably was after him, but Hector wasn’t in the picture. And now I come to the crux of the matter. The nude youth was quite clearly the young Counterpoynt. This was why the painting had been kept in the smoking-room. It was an utterly blameless and rather lovely thing. But ladies – at least in Victorian or Edwardian times – might conceivably have been embarrassed if called upon to admire their host represented in just that way. And here too, apparently, was the reason why his lordship was so upset. He didn’t fancy the notion of his own unclothed image – even if from sixty years back – being carried off to some thieves’ kitchen.”

The Vicar considered. “But was nothing else stolen?”

“An admirable question. Counterpoynt House had been successfully broken into – and nothing but this curious Orlando Say had vanished. And this very smoking-room held a small Rembrandt landscape and a particularly fine Cuyp. It didn’t make sense. Or rather it did. Malice rather than any mercenary motive must have been responsible. The thing was a prank – an ill-natured practical joke.”

“But with so old a man–”

“Exactly. Sixty years earlier one could have supposed that some young rips had hit upon a means of discomfiting another young rip. But who could now want to badger this eminent old person? Conceivably another old person, not risen to any eminence, and enjoying a crazy senile revenge. But the actual robbery was an able-bodied piece of work. If a malignant contemporary of Counterpoynt’s had conceived the stroke, he had employed someone else on the job. And that, somehow, seemed unlikely.

“Well, I understood Counterpoynt’s being upset – but not his being quite so upset as he was. There wasn’t much to do except put some routine measures in operation and promise that the Yard would do its best. A thorough examination of the scene of the robbery yielded nothing, nor did a close watch in certain likely quarters produce any hint of the stolen picture’s going on an illicit market. But about a fortnight later there was a very odd development indeed.

“Only one public gallery in the country has any considerable collection of Orlando Says, and that is the Municipal Museum at Nesfield. One of my first moves had been to get in touch with the Director there, since it had occurred to me that he might have made some study of Say, and so possess a chance piece of information that might throw light on the mysterious theft from Counterpoynt House. That particular cast had drawn blank, but now I had a telephone call from him. An oil painting of Say’s had been stolen from his gallery in the course of the previous night, and he would be much obliged if I could come down.

“So down I went, wondering whether Say was presently to be universally acclaimed as a transcendent genius, and whether an enterprising criminal had received some species of precognitive intelligence of this shift in artistic taste.

“But as soon as I entered the gallery, I saw that this fantastic explanation, at least, was ruled out. The place was stuffed with Says. There were Homeric heroes on every wall – for all I knew, half the English peerage had posed for them – and there was an equal muster of nymphs and goddesses, knee-deep in water or gleaming engagingly from behind an exiguous screen of leaves. And it was a nymph that had disappeared. The missing picture was called
The Metamorphosis of
Daphne
. The Director showed me a photograph. There she was, beautifully naked, and hurtling across the picture-space from left to right. Apollo wasn’t in the painting – but presumably he wasn’t far out of it, since one of the nymph’s arms was already sprouting into a very pretty little laurel-bough.”

The Vicar chuckled. “As the poet Marvell puts it:

Apollo hunted Daphne so,

Only that she might laurel grow.”

“Quite so. Well, light was dawning on me, and I asked if anything was known about the model who had posed for Orlando Say in this picture. The answer was just right. There was an obscure story that it had been a well-known society beauty of the time – now still alive, but as an extremely old and august lady.

“So there you are.
Apollo Pursuing Daphne
had been a very daring prank indeed. Lord Counterpoynt had wisely had it chopped in two – and the half which had represented him as the pursuing Apollo he had retained as a representation of the fleeing Patroclus. The other half had gone to the lady, who had at some time most rashly parted with it.

“I now knew that I had only to wait. And – sure enough – there was presently an attempt to blackmail poor old Counterpoynt. The thefts had been the work of a fellow who had got the whole story from some stray letter of Say’s. He was pretty sure that Lord Counterpoynt would pay a lot rather than have such a ludicrous scandal dragged up in his and the lady’s respectable old age. When we pounced on this enterprising scoundrel in the end we found that he had even gone to the trouble of having the two halves of the picture put together again. The background showed it to be incontrovertibly one composition. And it was really rather a pretty thing.”

The Vicar had been listening with grave attention. “And may I ask,” he said cautiously, “where this – um – improper picture hangs now?”

“Of course you may.” And Appleby smiled. “But if I were to give an answer – well, that would be telling.”

“It was the convenient sort of case,” Appleby said, “in which the bullet stops the clock.”

The QC looked sceptical. “That’s something that
ought
to happen from time to time, I’ve no doubt. But in twenty years on the criminal side I’ve never actually come across it.”

The Vicar was mildly considering. “I
believe
,” he ventured presently, “that it has been used in a detective story. In fact, I’m almost sure of it.”

Appleby chuckled. “I suspect that your reading in the genre is limited. Yarns in which the clock stops the bullet and the bullet retaliates by stopping the clock are as thick in the libraries as autumnal leaves are supposed to be in Vallombrosa. But there was another interesting feature in this case. The evidence of one witness – a crucial witness – was complicated by the fact that he had seen only the
reversed image
of the clock.”

“You mean in a mirror?” The QC groaned. “It’s really too much, my dear fellow. All yarns in which the bullet stops the clock in Chapter One regularly introduce a mirror to our notice round about Chapter Five or Six. And you yourself are being wildly improvident. You should sit on your mirror” – and the QC stretched out his arm for the decanter – “until the port has gone round a second time.”

“I can imagine nothing more gingerly and uncomfortable. I insist on setting my mirror squarely on the table. And, for that matter, my clock too. It is important that you take a good look at it.” Appleby, somewhat to the Vicar’s bewilderment, pointed firmly to a dish of walnuts. “Notice that it is a thoroughly modern clock. You might almost call it a modish clock. And certainly a reticent clock. It bears no figures, but only a plain dot at each hour.”

The QC nodded. “I’ve seen that sort of clock. Uncommonly silly notion, if you ask me. But then” – he smiled happily – “it’s clear that you are determined to tell us an uncommonly silly story. It’s an art that I can’t myself study too carefully. So pray proceed.”

Appleby nodded. “Very well. Sir Hannibal Green was a prosperous bachelor living in a flat just off Piccadilly, where he was ministered to by a manservant of the name of Snake.”

“I don’t believe a word of it.” The QC was uncompromising. “Outside Restoration Comedy, such a name simply doesn’t exist.”

Appleby grinned. “Well, I’m
calling
the man Snake. And Snake alone lived with Sir Hannibal in the flat, getting along with the aid of persons who came in to oblige by the day. Sir Hannibal wasn’t distinguished for anything very much, with the exception of a very fine collection of miniatures. Some of these hung on the walls of his study; others were disposed in showcases; and the majority – I suppose so that the general effect should not be too overwhelming – lived in a big Flemish cabinet which had been steel-lined and fire-proofed for the purpose.

“As you may have guessed, my story concerns an attempt to steal these treasures. It was a successful attempt and a ruthless one – involving nothing less than Sir Hannibal’s murder. And it occurred on the day that Sir Hannibal, together with Snake, returned from his annual visit to Italy.”

“Italy?” The Vicar cracked a nut with the air of bringing off an epigram. “Then Hannibal must have crossed the Alps.”

“Certainly he did.” Appleby smiled tolerantly. “He did so by rail and through the Mont Cenis – which got him and his manservant back to Victoria round about seven p.m. They drove straight home in a taxi. Sir Hannibal, after satisfying himself that his collection was safe and sound, went to his bedroom to change. And Snake employed himself in preparing a light supper. So much is certain.