Appleby's Answer (16 page)

‘Recommend it!' Curiously enough, it was Jenkins who responded. It seemed miraculous that articulate speech could issue at all through jaws so inordinately agape. ‘Why, it's the most–'

‘Ralph means that it all depends.' Waterbird said this very loudly, thereby deftly all but drowning the yelp elicited from his comrade upon receiving a savage kick under the table. ‘Whether it's Oxford and all that, or the Army, or the Church, or whatever. I don't suppose Captain Bulkington is equally good all round. Ralph, that's right?'

‘That's right,' Ralph echoed, and comforted himself by reaching for another half muffin.

‘I can see that, of course,' Appleby said judiciously. It looked as if Waterbird intended not to play. Waterbird was not an admirer or adherent of Captain Bulkington's. Savage hostility towards his preceptor simply oozed out of him. But unlike Jenkins he possessed an adequate low cunning, and knew there were things it would be unwise to chatter about – even in return for the most gargantuan tea. But what things? Appleby, practised in situations even as odd as this one, knew that he would have to adopt a change of tactics.

‘It doesn't look to me,' he said with a sudden briskness, ‘as if many parents of prospective pupils turn up on your tutor. But when it
does
happen, I must say you put on a pretty brisk routine. Waterbird and Jenkins doing Greek; rear view of ditto as the rump of the Army Class; ditto again, mucking around with a record-player or tape-recorder and producing the Modern Side in full cry. Smart work – very.' Appleby glanced from one young man to the other. ‘Eh, Jenkins?'

‘Ask Adrian.' Jenkins contrived to gasp this through too hastily ingested muffin. ‘All a bit deep for me.'

‘Well, Adrian?' Appleby offered encouragingly.

In this crisis Adrian Waterbird showed considerable presence of mind – as well as a gratuitous viciousness signalised by another brutal kick under the table. He helped himself to an entire toasted tea-cake, thereby indicating that he at least saw no reason to abrupt the feast.

‘Sir,' he said, ‘ – are you really what you call an enquiring parent?'

‘Of course not. And you have your wits sufficiently about you to spot the fact. I'd have thought you had your wits sufficiently about you simply to clear out. The place is a fraud, isn't it? Why stay? You're not a kid.'

‘Just what are you really, please?' With wholly praiseworthy coolness, Adrian Waterbird reached for what proved to be strawberry jam. ‘Some sort of detective?'

‘That's not at all a bad guess.' Considering the situation, Appleby decided to stretch a point. ‘I come' – he added, accurately enough – ‘from Scotland Yard.'

‘Oh, I say!' Tucking his shins safely away, Ralph Jenkins produced rash speech. ‘Did that old woman come from there too?'

‘That old woman?'

‘The one we met in the pub that Sunday. Bloody inquisitive, she was. Adrian said so afterwards.'

‘Shut up, Ralph.' Adrian's vindictive toe had shot out in vain. Then he looked sullenly at Appleby. ‘You can't mix us up with whatever the Bulgar gets up to. We're just his pupils, aren't we?'

‘Almost his prisoners, I'd say. And what does he want with the two of you, anyway? Just the fees – or something else as well?'

‘He wants a bit of cover, I suppose. Kidding he's a coach, when really he's a bloody crook. And he's got us where he wants us. One day I'll damn well have
him
like that. And, my God, he'll howl.' Adrian Waterbird paused, ferociously scowling. He had resumed his full years again. This, however, did not prevent his starting in on the anchovy toast. Appleby found himself attempting imaginatively to create on his own palate the effect of this delicacy on top of tea-cake and strawberry jam.

‘Would you be so good,' Appleby said with measured severity, ‘as to tell me just what you mean by saying that Captain Bulkington has got you where he wants you? I assure you that it will be in your own interest to do so. To be unresponsive, on the other hand, may land you in an awkward situation. I say this informally. My enquiries, as a matter of fact, may be described as wholly informal, so far.' Appleby produced this, he noticed, with the emphasis of one who offers a sop to his own conscience. ‘Frankly, Mr Waterbird, it is in your urgent interest to come clean.'

‘Honest?' It was with a sudden childishness that Mr Waterbird responded with this.

‘Honest.'

‘Your wife isn't going to join us, is she? It's something that's not really for ladies, this.'

‘That's what I said to the old woman,' Ralph Jenkins said. Ralph Jenkins seemed to make a speciality of intermittent rash and random speech. ‘I said–'

‘Shut your bloody trap, Ralph, and leave this to me. Mrs Appleby isn't coming in to tea?'

‘Definitely not,' Appleby said. And he added unblushingly: ‘My wife has gone to pay a call on friends.'

‘I expect we've been more nervous than we need have been.' Adrian Waterbird was at his wariest. ‘Of course, we may have been a bit rough with the girl–'

‘Being our first,' Ralph Jenkins interpolated surprisingly.

‘
Shut up!
' This shameful and unnecessary admission had goaded Adrian to fury. ‘She'd simply been put up to it by the Bulgar – you see? Yelling that it had been rape. And then in he came. Frankly, I lost my nerve. And I've never properly recovered it – not enough to walk out on him. My parents, and all that. Even the police. And Ralph would be hopeless if we were really got into a corner.'

‘That's right,' Ralph said. ‘It's all really not my thing.'

Appleby refrained from asking whether the girl had been in any degree Ralph's thing. That unedifying episode, at least, need not be further enquired into. Something of the technique of Captain Bulkington had sufficiently appeared in it. And what was conceivably of greater interest was Ralph's reiterated reference to the old lady, by whom he undoubtedly meant Miss Pringle.

‘About this meeting in a pub,' Appleby said. ‘The lady wasn't a detective, however inquisitive she seemed. Her name is Priscilla Pringle, and she's a novelist. Did you simply run into her by chance?'

‘Yes, of course. We'd just slipped out for a drink in the Jolly Chairman. And there she was. Adrian, that's right, isn't it?'

‘Not exactly.' Adrian Waterbird had hesitated. He had clearly been calculating where his best course lay, and it was for further frankness that he opted now. ‘Ralph isn't very clear on these things,' he informed Appleby. ‘He gets rather at sea when there's anything he calls deep going on. Actually, we were told off to shadow the woman, and to nobble her if we got the opportunity before she cleared out. Then we were to chat her up.'

‘And that's what you managed in the pub?'

‘Just that. As you can imagine, Ralph wasn't much good–'

‘None at all,' Ralph said.

‘–but I managed to get across the required line.'

‘I see.' Appleby had unconsciously helped himself to an éclair, and now contemplated it gloomily on his plate. ‘You were to do what you could to allay Miss Pringle's suspicions about Captain Bulkington? You were to represent him as no more than a harmless eccentric – that kind of thing?'

‘Not that at all.' Suddenly Adrian Waterbird was looking at Appleby with something like Ralph Jenkins' helplessness. It was as if the limit of his intellectual capacities had been reached, and only bewilderment was before him. ‘We were to plug the Bulgar–'

‘The Bulgar?'

‘Not the word we use ourselves,' Ralph interrupted, markedly brightening. ‘But near it.'

‘Shut up, Ralph. We were to plug him as thoroughly dangerous. As a homicidal maniac, in fact, who had done in the chap he took the place over from, and who now had it in for the local big-wig, Sir Ambrose Pinkerton, in a thoroughly murderous way.'

‘Dear me! And did Miss Pringle accept all this?'

‘I rather think she did. I had a feeling we were only confirming what she'd been given a glimpse of already.'

‘I see. And would you say that Miss Pringle was alarmed?'

‘She thought she was being clever.' It was Ralph who said this, and he had momentarily even put down a cream-cake in order to do so. ‘That's something that somehow I always do know. When a person is thinking he's bloody clever. The old woman went away feeling she'd outsmarted us. I don't know what about. But she had at least bought us a couple of drinks.'

‘Mr Waterbird,' Appleby asked gravely, ‘do you concur in your friend's appreciation of the lady's state of feeling?'

‘Do I–?' Mr Waterbird glowered suspiciously at this orotund question. ‘Well, yes – that's right enough.'

‘And can you tell me just what, in all this, Captain Bulkington was up to – and perhaps still is up to? Just what was the exercise in aid of?'

‘Money, I suppose.'

‘Money?'

‘I don't believe the Bulgar thinks of anything else. He may talk murder, but it's money that's really in his head.' Having produced this succinct opinion, Adrian Waterbird made one of his ritual appeals to his companion. ‘Ralph, that's about the size of it, wouldn't you say?'

‘Yes, that's it.' Thus offering his accustomed corroboration, Ralph Jenkins seemed about to return to his cream-cake. Before doing so, however, he unexpectedly contributed a thought of his own. ‘Of course he might combine business and pleasure, I suppose, from time to time.'

‘The possibility ought certainly to be borne in mind.' Appleby glanced at his watch, and asked for his bill. The little tea-party proved, not unnaturally, to have been a most expensive affair. Nor, in requital of the massive carbohydrates, fats, and sugars spread before them had his guests let more than a few crumbs of information fall from the board. Such as they were, however, Appleby was grateful for them. He accordingly took leave of Messrs Waterbird and Jenkins on a restored note of avuncular benevolence. It was only when he had done so that he recalled having rashly announced himself as an emissary of Scotland Yard. Would they hand on this information to their hated tyrant, and thus explode the myth of Arthur Appleby for ever? Appleby judged it a fairly safe bet that they would not.

Judith was perched on a stile, sucking a straw, and with an air of contentment perhaps attributable to the continued warmth of the early evening sun.

‘Were the young men communicative?' she asked.

‘Moderately. Jenkins is too witless to be particularly helpful, but Waterbird wasn't entirely useless. Neither of them has a very clear or extensive view of the affair.'

‘The affair?'

‘There's an affair, all right. And Bulkington, incidentally, really has turned that worthy couple into a pair of helots. He has engineered a hold over them – by contriving they should behave not too prettily to some local trollop. Not edifying, but I have a notion it may rather establish Bulkington's pattern.'

‘You mean that he gets people into compromising, or at least humiliating and embarrassing, situations, and then presents a bill?'

‘Excellent. You express my thought very well.'

‘Thank you. And now we had better be getting on to the next thing.' Judith jumped down from the stile. ‘Mustn't be late for it.'

‘Your blessed Bundlethorpes? That's tomorrow, not today.'

‘Not Bundlethorpes. Pinkertons – at the big house.'

‘Pinkertons? What on earth do you mean?'

‘I ran into them on my walk. Kate had rung them up–'

‘Kate? Who in the world is Kate?'

‘Don't be so stupid. Kate Anketel. She'd rung them up about something, and told them who you are. They were all agog. They want your professional opinion about some disturbing goings-on at the manor. So we're going to drinks.'

‘Damn their impertinence. They can confer with the local constable. I'm not in the least disposed–'

‘My dear John, the Pinkertons are the hitherto unexplored factor in your mystery. Bulkington has a thing about them, hasn't he? So it's essential you should case their joint too. I consider it extremely clever of me to have made the contact.'

‘So do I.' Appleby said this with an air of magnanimous frankness. ‘All the same, I flatly decline to go and drink with a woman to whom you were so monstrously uncivil on the public highway.'

‘She was monstrously uncivil to us.'

‘So she was.' Appleby held open the door of the car. ‘But that's rather far from mending the matter.'

‘You'll find that over the unfortunate episode a ready veil will be drawn. The effortless civility of well-bred persons will prevail.'

‘I don't doubt it. All the same–' Appleby broke off, grinning broadly. ‘Good on you, my dear,' he said. ‘Let's get moving.'

 

 

The manor house at Long Canings did not suggest itself as based on any very simple rural economy. Sir Ambrose and Lady Pinkerton, together with their predecessors (whether Pinkertons or not) over a good many generations, must alike have been in the enjoyment of other and larger sources of revenue than would be constituted by half-a-dozen or a dozen farms. Without the house and within there was much mellow opulence on view. Even the portal-warding griffons on either side of the drive had a sleek and well-groomed air, as if they had lately paid a visit to a superior class of poodle-parlour. The lawns were shaved, the shrubs were clipped, the statuary deployed here and there looked at once respectably antique and rigorously tubbed: one could almost imagine the mythological ladies (who were already conveniently disrobed) as under contract to descend from their pedestals at some appointed daily hour for the purpose of performing the most far-reaching ablutions. The butler who answered the door-bell presented (unlike so many butlers) a similarly cleanly look – partly, perhaps, because he was attired not in ignobly ambiguous garments parsimoniously appropriate to either dawn or dusk, but in impeccable if sombre morning dress such as might have graced a funeral or a memorial service in the highest rank of society.