Appleby Talks Again (21 page)

Holiday smiled grimly. “Sambrook sees this as an interruption. It’s my business to acknowledge it as a catastrophe. I opened the strongroom to get something quite different – but some instinct made me notice the loss at once. I was staggered.”

“You certainly gave the hell of a yelp, sir.” Sambrook offered this scarcely respectful comment with unabated gloom.

“But there’s no doubt of the fact.” He turned to Appleby. “It’s the very devil – and puts all three of us in a pretty sticky place.”

“All three of you?” Appleby glanced from one man to the other.

“Tim himself is out.” It was Sambrook who continued to explain. “He’s in Washington, as I’ve said. And, anyway, there would be no point in his making off with what he alone on earth knows inside out. No, sir. The trouble lies between the Director here, myself and Edward Bear.”

“You haven’t yet told me about Edward Bear.”

“Bear is our senior research worker.” Holiday now took up the tale. “He’s a very privileged young man. Nephew of the Minister. Lives with him, in fact.” There was something acrid in the Director’s voice. “And now, you must be told about the keys. We work, you know, under regulations laid down for us – and it isn’t for me to say that they’re damned nonsense. Only the four of us – Nicolson, Sambrook, Bear and myself – have keys to the strongroom. They are so constructed – and it must have been a pretty problem for the locksmiths – that access may be gained by any two of us together, but not by any one of us on his own.”

Appleby considered. “Unless you passed the keys about?”

“That goes without saying. But it’s against our rule to do so.”

“What was the position earlier tonight, Dr Holiday?”

“The tin was certainly in the strongroom when Sambrook and I locked up and went out to dinner. I got back not much more than an hour ago. Sambrook says that he let himself in about half an hour before that. About twenty minutes after my arrival we had this occasion of mine for opening the strongroom, and I saw that the tin was
not
there.”

“You’ve checked up on Bear?”

Holiday nodded emphatically. “I rang him instantly – even before contacting you. He answered at once. I didn’t tell him of what I had discovered, but simply said that I might be dropping round. He said he was working late, as he always does at home, and that I could drop in without inconveniencing him any time up to one o’clock. I’m bound to say that sounded quite normal. But he’s a cool card.” The Director paused deliberately. “So, for that matter, is Sambrook.”

Sambrook smiled, but without much appearance of gaiety. “Thank you, sir,” he said dryly.

Appleby nodded. “If you’ll just lock up,” he said, “we’ll all go round and call on this young man together. My car’s outside. You know the address?”

“Of course.” Holiday was impatient. “I’ve visited both the Minister and the young man there often enough.”

“Then, as I say, we’ll go round and settle things.”

“Settle things?” Sambrook repeated the words sharply.

“Certainly.” Appleby was mildly surprised. “It doesn’t seem a very intricate problem to me.”

There appeared to be justice in the statement that Bear was a privileged young man. He had a large book-lined room, elaborately equipped as a study. “I’ve been here ever since my uncle and I parted after dinner,” he said. “It’s our regular habit. I work on my notes here, and he gets through his papers next door. Sometimes we meet for a drink about midnight, but we don’t interrupt each other with visits. So I can’t, you see,
prove
that I didn’t go out.”

“Can’t you, Teddy? I think you can.” The Minister, so far, had been silent – a grave figure immobile before the fireplace, intently taking the situation in. “It’s true that I didn’t hear you make a sound – or true in one sense. But what about that infernal toy of yours?” He turned to Holiday. “You remember it?”

The Director shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Minister.”

“This.” The Minister stepped to Bear’s desk and flicked back the lid of a cigarette-box. The room was instantly filled with a clear, melancholy stave of music. “Teddy’s musical box. I can always just hear it, when I’m in my room next door. And at night the boy smokes like clockwork.” The Minister closed the box and the tune ceased. “A cigarette every fifteen minutes. And it was so tonight.”

Holiday frowned. “You realise, Minister, that if Bear did in fact never leave the room, then both Sambrook and myself–”

The Minister raised a hand. “I think, Holiday, that I realise a good deal. For instance, that I might be taken to be shielding my nephew. We need more information. The question is how to get it.”

Holiday nodded. “Very well. I have one suggestion which I hope will be considered reasonable. There may have been a trick. This room should be searched.”

“Searched!” Young Edward Bear was suddenly angry. “Do you realise, sir, that you’re in the house of a Minister of the–”

But again the Minister raised a hand. “You are quite right, Holiday,” he said calmly. “Appleby, if we all stay here and give you plenty of time, could you search the room yourself?”

Appleby smiled. “I’d like to,” he said.

It was less than half an hour later that the little musical stave was heard in the room again. This time, it came not from the musical box but from a tape-recorder on a table near Bear’s desk. There was a deathly silence among the four men for seconds after the tune had tinkled to its close. They all knew that in fifteen minutes the same sound would be heard. Appleby had found the long spool of metal ribbon on which it was recorded stowed away in a small cardboard container behind a row of books.

“So now we know.” Holiday turned to confront Bear and Sambrook. “We know that we have two young criminals in this room.”

“On the contrary.” Appleby, seeming to take an aimless stroll, planted himself before the door. “We know that we have one elderly one.” He turned to the Minister. “The missing valve, I am sorry – or glad – to say, is in the Director’s pocket. He put it there the instant he entered the strongroom, and just before giving the yelp that brought Sambrook in after him. It’s there still, because he’s had no opportunity to part with it since.”

For a moment the Minister appeared incredulous. Then he took a glance at Holiday and saw that it was the truth. “But this ribbon?”

“Too clumsy for words. Bear, if guilty, could have erased the tune from it in seconds simply by pressing a switch. Holiday had it prepared, and planted it where I found it. He was good enough to tell me that he frequently called in here.” Appleby paused. “First to create Bear’s musical alibi and then make sure that it should appear to break down was a clever idea in a general way. But the execution has been merely childish.”

“But can you be sure–?”

“I know it was Holiday who hid the thing where I found it, simply because he guided me to the hiding-place. That’s why I was so quick. You know hypersensitive people who, as a parlour game, can find any object hidden in a room from the tiny, involuntary and unconscious hints that the hiders betray? It’s the same, I assure you, with a trained detective. Holiday thought he was sitting there immobile and poker-faced, letting me find what he had planted in my own good time. But I can tell you that within ten minutes he was virtually shouting at me:
‘Look there
!’ So I looked.”

Appleby didn’t move from the door. “Minister, will you be good enough to take up the telephone and call the Yard?”

“Old Josiah Hopcutt”, Appleby said, “was a prosperous manufacturer. And he continued prosperous when he had ceased to manufacture anything except large-scale tedium for the people looking after him. He lived on into old age, that is to say, in a semi-embalmed condition in an enormous villa in Harrogate.”

“Was he Hopcutt’s Hosiery?” I asked.

“He was. His whole career might be described as a sort of mission. He persuaded the women of England that they had legs, and a moral duty to display them. Not that Hopcutt wasn’t rather a stuffy old boy himself. Very strict views on propriety, and so forth. And his only known exercise of the sense of humour – if it can be called that – was in the names he gave his three sons. He had them christened Tom, Dick and Harry.”

“They were triplets?”

“Not a bit of it. He just seemed to know that his excellent wife was going to bear him three sons, and went ahead on that basis. There were no daughters, by the way. Mrs Hopcutt died giving birth to Harry, and that finished the family. And the boys, I think, grew up not caring for their father very much.”

Appleby paused for a moment, and I asked one of those questions with which I like to help him along. “And the hosiery business? Did Tom, Dick and Harry take to that?”

“Decidedly not. Getting the glamour into wool and lisle and silk and nylon didn’t appeal to any of them. If Tom had any interest in legs, it wasn’t in calculating what could be done for them at fourteen-and-eleven the pair. He married a chorus-girl, was divorced, and then took himself off to Canada.”

“In disgrace with his father?”

“I think in no more than mild disgrace. The old chap, although strict, was not fanatical. Tom was really called away by a lust for adventure, and in one way and another he contrived to lead an uncommonly dangerous life. He made one trip home, and it revealed him as having turned into a handsome, bearded, frontier-forwarding type. Then off he went again.”

“And Dick?”

“Dick too was enterprising in his way – although his history is a sad one. He lost his sight in a Commando raid. That was rather bad, because he’d wanted to be a painter. However, he hitched on to a group of scientists engaged in acoustic research, and developed to a preternatural degree of sensitiveness what was already a fine ear. Moreover he was intelligent, so he quickly got hold of what this branch of science was about, and be had the satisfaction of knowing that he might make important contributions to it. He lived in almost complete retirement, dedicated to this work.”

“Which leaves us,” I said, “with Harry.”

“You’re quite right.” Appleby gave what I sometimes feel is a rather unnecessary smile. “So it does.

“Harry was some sort of unsuccessful broker, and his way of life was, for the most part, as prosaic as his father’s had been. Nevertheless he had a streak of his brothers’ enterprise and adventurousness, and it came out in a hobby to which he was passionately given. Harry was a speleologist.”

“Caves?”

“Caves and underground rivers and so on. It’s quite a widespread activity nowadays, and Harry belonged to several clubs and societies concerned with that sort of exploration. But he was also a bit of a lone wolf, and would go off from time to time and do a bit on his own. One would be inclined to say that nothing more dangerous could be conceived.

“I haven’t mentioned that Harry was unmarried. He lived by himself, looked after only by an elderly housekeeper, and he was quite free to develop this subterranean obsession as he pleased. Eventually it got so that he was off on it every other weekend. Well, he was just packing up for one of these occasions when the housekeeper brought him a telegram. He opened it and gave an exclamation of annoyance. ‘The Savage,’ he said. ‘Arrived at Southampton. What a confounded nuisance!’

“The housekeeper, who hadn’t been with Harry very long, didn’t make much of this. ‘My brother Tom,’ he said, ‘back in this country and proposing to visit me. He must look after himself for a few days elsewhere. When he calls, say I may possibly be back on Monday.’ And Harry finished packing and went off, having scribbled down an address in Yorkshire that would find him.”

“Did he always leave an address?” I asked.

“Apparently he did – although sometimes he would wander on and become untraceable. There was certainly nothing out-of-the-way in his going off as he had done. And what he had said prepared his housekeeper for the bearded figure that turned up only a few hours later. The woman explained that her employer had gone off after receiving the telegram, and that he would probably be back in three or four days. The Savage didn’t seem too pleased, but he cleared out at once, simply saying that he would call his brother up on the telephone.”

Appleby paused as if to consider how to tell the rest of his story. “Well, Harry turned up in Yorkshire, and spent a couple of days with a group of enthusiasts who were old acquaintances of his. Then he moved on, with only a vague reference to his perhaps having a look at the Grendale Cleft.”

“What was that?”

“Some means of getting down to a system of underground caves in Cumberland. After that, as you may perhaps guess, Harry Hopcutt simply vanished. Eventually the police were called in.”

“Yourself?”

Appleby shook his head. “A young fellow called Howley. It seems that for quite a time Harry’s housekeeper took no alarm, since she was accustomed to these disappearances and silences. It was the Savage who eventually kicked up a fuss. He had rung up several times with inquiries. Eventually, and when nearly three weeks had elapsed, he presented himself at Scotland Yard and demanded action. Nobody could say he was making an unnecessary fuss. A hunt for Harry was instituted all over the country. What was eventually found was some clothes, a rucksack, and a frayed rope.”

“At that Grendale Cleft?”

“No – but at a similar spot, much more remote and dangerous, called the Gimlet. The discovery meant that Harry had vanished for ever. Alph the sacred river itself was not less likely to give up its dead than were the waters beneath that ghastly shaft.

“What followed was commonplace enough. Family solicitors took charge, and the Bearded Savage moved into Harry’s flat in order to straighten things up. It was there that this young Detective-Sergeant of ours, Brian Howley, made a final call on him. The Savage had offered a reward for any information leading to the discovery of his brother, and it was simply Howley’s duty to explain that the police had done the whole job and there was nobody to make a claim. This took him five minutes – and would have taken him only four, had there not been a very brief interruption while the Savage took a telephone call. ‘Yes,’ he had said into the instrument, ‘Tom Hopcutt speaking.’ He had repeated this, waited, and then put down the receiver. ‘Odd,’ he had said casually to Howley in his Canadian accent. ‘A long-distance call. But the fellow rang off.’”