Appleby's Answer (5 page)

The
Diner Dupin
was appropriately mounted. In the place of honour – hard by Miss Barrace, that is to say – reposed a tatty letter-rack, decidedly an authentic period piece, in the criss-cross tapes of which was thrust an equally tatty envelope. Opposite Miss Barrace, as the presiding genius of the feast, was a ferocious (but stuffed) orang-outang (or was it gorilla?) such as the severely logical mind of the great Dupin had once inferred as the only possible efficient cause of the regrettable events in the Rue Morgue. Appleby belonged to a dining club called the Peacocks, existing to honour the shade of Thomas Love of that name; he made a mental note to endeavour to borrow for one of its occasions a creature so eminently able to recall the prince of all such beasts, Sir Oran Haut-Ton. He ventured, indeed, to put this to Miss Barrace now, with the consequence that he was instantly subjected to a stiff
viva-voce
examination not only on
Melincourt
but on
Crochet Castle
and
Gryll Grange
as well. Quite soon he was telling himself that the grotesquely named Crooks' Colloquium was a wholly pleasurable affair.

‘Going to clobber us, I suppose?' the venerable Hussey was saying.

‘Clobber you? My dear fellow, nothing is further from my mind.' Appleby was all surprise. ‘You get clobbered?'

‘Lord, yes! It's absolutely the thing from our distinguished guests. Heavies from the criminal bar. Home Office experts on entrails and heaven knows what. Unfortunate chaps who look after homicidal maniacs in jug. They get up and tell us we touch pitch and shall not pass undefiled. They must be absolutely right.'

‘It's not a line of thought that has ever come to me.'

‘Don't be mendacious, Appleby. It doesn't become your years. At our last jollification of this sort we had a fellow from your own old stamping-ground at the CID. A mild-mannered man. But he felt he must stand up and be counted. He simply appealed to us to give over. To chuck it. To purge and live clean. One day, he said, one of us might put something in somebody's head.'

‘Did he claim that it had happened already?'

‘I don't know that he did. Although forthright, he was a tactful and compassionate man. What do
you
think?'

‘I'd suppose it more likely to work the other way. Your colleagues' – Appleby glanced round the table – ‘occasionally collect a few tips from the world of real crime. But they then fantasticate them in a manner that takes them clean out of the realm of the possible. No criminal would waste time in putting himself to school amid such fairy-tales.'

‘You relieve my mind greatly.' Hussey sounded, in fact, rather disappointed. ‘My own first story was about a peculiarly ingenious murder in a Cambridge college. I knew nothing whatever about such places. I had been no more than an undergraduate in one. And undergraduates, of course, know nothing. Nothing at all.'

‘About their seniors? I can imagine that to be so. Why should they? They have other matters to attend to.'

‘Exactly. Well, I eventually returned to my own old college as a Fellow. It was a most urbane society. Or so I judged for a while. Then I observed that there were frictions here and there. Sub-acute irritations. Irritations which could not, in honesty, be so described. Unspeakable passions, my dear Appleby, and unquenchable animo-sities! I lived for months in terror lest one of these phrenetic scholars should chance upon my book, and that comprehensive holocaust should succeed.'

‘But it didn't?'

‘You are perfectly right. It didn't. And everything subsided, and we became a very clubbable crowd.'

‘Just so. And if one of your temporarily incensed colleagues
had
come upon your romance, the idea of putting such implausible nonsense into practice would never have entered his agitated but highly intelligent head.'

‘I call that a damned uncivil speech.' Hussey chuckled and raised his glass in amiable salute. ‘But let there be enough agitation, you know, and intelligence fades out. What if one of these chaps had gone right off his chump?'

‘I give you that.' Appleby raised his own glass. ‘If he were mad enough, he might start conning a whole library of thrillers. But a man who is both sane and intelligent, and who wants to kill somebody and get away with it, is likely to think his little problem out for himself. He will probably see the advantage of being as dead simple as may be.'

‘Dead's the word.' Miss Barrace, who had been listening, interrupted briskly. ‘But, no doubt, there are people whose instinct it is to look for printed instructions. A good supply of arsenic fails to command their confidence unless the recommended dose is printed on the bottle. And Dr Hussey's Cambridge colleagues would have an inclination that way – viewing everything, as somebody said, through the spectacles of books. But I agree with Sir John. They wouldn't be likely to get much that was useful out of detective stories. They'd do better to engage in a little research in the annals of actual crime. Famous Trials, and that sort of thing.'

‘Sordid,' Hussey said disapprovingly. ‘All that stuff about pathologists coming forward and giving in evidence just what they found in the various sealed jars brought to their labs. Until it has been what Appleby calls fantasticated by you and me, Miss Barrace, violent crime is merely squalid and disgusting.'

‘Perhaps so,' Miss Barrace said. ‘But – do you know? – I once met a respectable elderly gentleman who was approaching things decidedly from the text-book angle. But not violent crime. Only blackmail. He did me the honour of consulting me on the subject.'

‘He came to you,' Appleby asked, ‘and confided to you that he was the victim of a blackmailer? I've been the recipient of such confidences myself in my time.'

‘No, no – nothing of the kind. He didn't come to me, for one thing. It was a casual encounter on a railway journey.'

‘How very odd.'

‘And it was my impression not that he was being blackmailed, but that he was proposing to set up as a blackmailer. And he had, as it were, those printed instructions I was speaking of. He was reading the thing up.'

‘Most interesting,' Hussey said. ‘A scholar, no doubt.'

‘Well, no. He said nothing about his walk in life. But I believe I should have concluded him to be an unsuccessful military man.'

‘A military man?' Appleby echoed, looking up. ‘And on a railway journey, you said?'

‘Yes, indeed.' Miss Barrace did more than masculine justice to the brandy which had now arrived before her. ‘And railway journeys are either restful or boring, as one feels disposed. I was bored, and quite welcomed this odd character.'

‘And blackmail, you said – not murder?'

‘I did say. You need not nod off, Sir John, after so trifling and foolish a banquet.'

‘I beg your pardon.' Because he had the habit of noting everything, Appleby noted the totally irrelevant fact that Miss Barrace had quoted from
Romeo and Juliet
. ‘And I assure you I am most interested. So is Hussey. Please go on.'

‘He was plainly aggrieved by the book he was reading. It was some sort of legal text-book on blackmail. We entered into conversation. He asked me if it was a subject I was interested in. I had to confess having had more than one occasion to look into it.'

‘But of course,' Hussey said cordially. ‘It occurs in at least one of your tip-top stories. I remember them well.'

‘Nothing of the kind, Master. Pray desist from idle flattery. My interest was a consequence of what impertinent reviewers are disposed to call my other character. Not that blackmail – except of the very most genteel and velvet-glove sort – much turns up in the routine work of the FO. But during the war I had to branch out a little, and look into certain aspects of espionage.'

‘You certainly had to do
that
,' Appleby said. Fabulous stories about Miss Barrace were coming back to him.

‘Far more spies are created through blackmail than by the enticement of a comfortable numbered account in a Swiss bank. But that is commonplace to you, Sir John.'

‘It is. A pretty ghastly sort of commonplace, often enough.'

‘Of course. Fear, not greed, is the mainspring of that whole futile industry. But we digress.'

‘So we do. And within ten minutes you will be calling upon me to get up and talk nonsense. So let us press on. Just why was this military character aggrieved by his text-book?'

‘It seemed to be because it was all about blackmailers being caught out. Just how the law can be exercised to cover and successfully send down even the most cunning of them. It wasn't in the least what the colonel – I am imagining him to be a colonel – was after.'

‘On the contrary,' Hussey prompted, ‘he wanted tips on how to bring the thing off?'

‘Precisely. But he wasn't an unintelligent old rascal. He was aware of the value – call it the negative value – of cautionary tales. But he wanted, so to speak, the positive know-how.'

‘Which you would have been very well able to provide.' Hussey chuckled. ‘But it wouldn't have been altogether moral to oblige him.'

‘One has one's professional obligations.' Alarmingly, Miss Barrace responded to Hussey's chuckle with a deep and rumbling laugh. ‘I could hardly offer him even the small change of the subject.'

‘Was he mad?' Appleby asked.

‘It must be evident that an element of eccentricity entered into his attitude.' Miss Barrace paused upon this eminently diplomatic reply. ‘Waiter, more brandy.'

‘And then?'

‘He suggested that we might have further chats. It seemed not feasible, alas, that they should take place. So that is the end of my story. But I confess that I was left feeling curious about him.'

‘A wholesome attitude,' Appleby said. ‘Did you, by any chance, exchange names?'

‘Certainly not. He did, in fact, offer me his card. I tore it up on the platform without looking at it. It was either that, or taking an absurd story to the police.'

‘So it was.' Appleby was so impressed by this latest piece of information that quite a pause succeeded. ‘By the way,' he said, ‘I am interested in some of the members of your club. Those two women at the far end of the table, for instance – the one in salmon-pink and the other in magenta. Who are they?'

‘I'm afraid I don't know their names. They are recent accessions to our number, and I fear I am not quite keeping up. I think the salmon-pink one writes stories about archdeacons and prebendaries and precentors. Why should those in particular–?'

‘They were introduced to me – or introduced themselves – in a confused sort of way. The magenta one was anxious that the salmon-pink one should tell me some interesting anecdote.' Appleby just perceptibly hesitated. ‘There was to be a railway journey in it, and a retired soldier. But the salmon-pink one rather shut the other one up.'

‘Then you were no doubt preserved from some entirely boring communication. During the informal aftermath of this' – Miss Barrace was grim – ‘quite a number of people will want to tell you things. And now, Sir John, are you ready?'

‘I believe I'd claim readiness as one of my few remaining virtues.'

‘Good,' Miss Barrace said. And she tapped on the table and stood up.

 

 

IN DARKEST WILTS

 

 

Miss Priscilla Pringle to Miss Barbara Vanderpump

 

MY DEAR BARBARA,

 

No, I think I shall not be in town again for some time, but of course we must certainly lunch together when I do come up! I have finished
Poison at the Parsonage
, I am thankful to announce, if only after one or two bad moments. Needless to say, there was no trouble with the ecclesiastical part, because I know that territory thoroughly. But the whole episode of the unprincipled farmer who thought he was shooting a fox (although it was really the red-haired Lady Curricle, who had ‘taken a toss', you will remember, over a hedge) was, I fear, a mistake. I have never myself ridden to hounds (although my Uncle Arthur was an enthusiast and celebrated as a most intrepid ‘thruster' in his time), and found considerable difficulty in catching the feel of a fast run with the sagacious animals! But now I think it will at least pass. I found just a little help, I will confess to you, in Siegfried Sassoon's
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
.

Speaking of parsonages, do you recall my odd encounter with Captain Bulkington, about which you were so anxious that I should tell that important policeman, Appleby? Well, I recently met somebody from his, Bulkington's, part of the country (which is near Chippenham) and she told me that the proper name of ‘Kandahar', the Captain's house, is simply The Old Rectory, Long Canings. The Parish of Long Canings was combined a good many years ago with the neighbouring parish of Gibber Porcorum. At that time the Captain must have bought the house from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and given it its present fancy name, which no doubt commemorates some family association of his own. And talking, by the way, of names, it appears that Long Canings is so called after an interesting rural pursuit, long practised there. I must find out more about this.

But I want to find out more about something else. The Old Rectory is not really old at all – and indeed parsons' houses thus denominated seldom are. In the mid-nineteenth century, when (as you will know) the beneficed clergy were still persons of position, and owning a stake in the country, it was the frequent habit to build vicarages and the like which often overshadowed, in point of respectability and consequence, the local public house (dear me, I mean of course to write manor house!) itself. Our quaint Captain's residence is said to be like this: an imposing Victorian pile in the Gothic taste. It was thus no doubt suitable for the reception of the extensive tutorial establishment he designed.