Appleby's Other Story (10 page)

‘But you observed something else, all the same?'

‘Precisely. The figure of a man, hurrying across the park from the direction of Elvedon itself. I withdrew into shadow before, I believe, he became aware of me. He was more likely, I judged, to be a poacher than a harmless fellow naturalist. However he was almost certain to be one of my parishioners, and a meeting might well have been embarrassing.'

‘But he turned out' – and Appleby looked hard at the Reverend Mr Voysey – ‘to be young Mark Tytherton again, after all?'

‘That is precisely what I cannot say.'

‘This time, you didn't see his face?'

‘I don't
think
I did. Certainly I was less aware of his face than of his
pace
. He was walking very rapidly, and with more than a suggestion of agitation.'

‘At what time was this?'

‘At a guess, round about half-past eleven. But I could by no means be confident to within thirty minutes or so.'

‘Mr Voysey, you are now giving me information which may be of the utmost seriousness. You must try to clarify your impressions. Here is a man walking rapidly across parkland on a moonlight night. You don't see his features, but you speak of “a suggestion of agitation”. Can you say just how that suggestion conveyed itself to you?'

‘This is most perplexing. I really don't think I can.'

‘Was he making gestures?'

‘Gestures? I think not. No – positively not.'

‘Was his haste such that he appeared to be in danger of stumbling?'

‘That may well have been so.' Mr Voysey had brightened. ‘Yes, I believe his progress might justly be so described.'

‘Did he, while within your observation, look behind him?'

‘As if he were being pursued? I think it very likely that he did. In the circumstances, that is to say.'

‘But we know nothing about his circumstances. If he was a poacher, would you have expected to notice him as carrying something?
Was
he carrying anything?'

‘Sir John, you must stop. Every question you ask merely serves to distort the very vague image of the occasion that I actually possess. Can you understand that?'

‘Most certainly I can, so let me stop building up a fancy picture for you. I shall not even ask you to estimate how close you came to this man. But one point perhaps we can get clear – and it is really a vital one. Just when did the name “Mark Tytherton”, or the thought “Mark again”, or anything of the kind, first come into your head?'

‘I don't know.' Mr Voysey had put down his apple-core on the plate before him, and was regarding Appleby soberly. ‘That, my dear sir, is the answer I must give you, however much it makes me appear a fool. Was it a thought synchronous with my actual observation of this figure? Or was it something that came to me retrospectively, when they rang me up from Elvedon this morning, and told me what had happened? I cannot return a confident answer – such as I can, for example, about my previous daylight encounter with the young man not far from the same spot. So I am a very bad witness, I fear.'

‘My dear Mr Voysey, the human memory is a very odd contraption, and you have an instinct to respect its oddity. I believe that, as a witness, you might get rather a high mark from a judge.'

‘It is a test, I confess, that I have no eagerness to face.'

‘Giving evidence in a criminal trial?' Appleby rose from the bench on which he had been sitting during this curious conversation. ‘Far be it from me to be needlessly depressing. But I fear it is extremely improbable that you will not find yourself so engaged before the year is out.'

 

 

The Hanged Man proved to be a hostelry of small pretension, although its saloon bar seemed to do a certain amount of trade of the gin-and-tonic, chicken-sandwich order with passing motorists. Appleby avoided this unpromising terrain, only to find that the public bar was at this time of day attracting no custom at all. But the fact didn't appear to make his own arrival the more welcome; it was from an unresponsive character, whose bearing hinted a sense of something demeaning in attending to so inconsiderable an order, that he succeeded in extracting a pint of bitter and a plate of bread and cheese. The suggestion that it was a fine day got no response whatever; the further and more expansive assertion that it was a very nice countryside round about here elicited no more than a melancholic sigh. So Appleby resigned himself to solitary reflection. It might be quite a useful exercise.

So far, there were two strands visible in this affair, and they were not of a sort to come together readily into a pattern. In the first of these strands he was himself, it might be said, a tenuous thread. A couple of years ago there had been some not very spectacular art theft at Elvedon; quite recently the deprived owner, Maurice Tytherton, had taken it into his head that he would like to make the acquaintance of Sir John Appleby, a celebrated authority on such matters; the said Sir John had presented himself at Elvedon (this as a consequence of a rather childish stratagem on the part of Colonel Pride) to find that Tytherton had just met a violent end – and to find, too, that an old adversary of his, the not too reputable art-dealer Egon Raffaello, had been staying there as the dead man's guest. All this might, or might not, add up; and it was certainly desirable to obtain much more specific information about the theft than stood at the beginning of the series.

What had tended to obscure this strand in the affair, and to obtrude the other, was really what might be called the moralism of Tommy Pride. Pride had a bad conscience about not having been quite frank about the occasion of his taking Appleby over to Elvedon, and this was sharpened by his perhaps obsessive sense that the place was a haunt of vice. Or at least that it was full of people who exhibited the most rotten bad form – as Tytherton had done, most strikingly, by bringing his mistress into his wife's house. But at least it seemed true that there
was
this strand to the mystery; that the house party at Elvedon – not to speak of the expatriate son, quartered in this pub, and either seen or not seen at a compromising time of night by Mr Voysey when looking for badgers – did hint a state of affairs which might generate some species of
crime passionnel
.

Brooding over this, there suddenly came into Appleby's head the totally incongruous figure of Miss Jane Kentwell, celebrated as having found the body.
Que diable allait-elle faire dans cette
galère
? She had very little appearance of being likely to find herself at home in raffish society, any more than she had of connoisseurship in the arts. Perhaps she really did make something of a profession as a seeker out of charitable gifts and bequests – but had she been admitted to Elvedon on that ticket? One had no sense of it as a place in which any philanthropic bounty was likely at all notably to flow. There was a small note of the enigmatic, Appleby told himself, about Miss Kentwell.

It was at this point in his meditation that Appleby noticed he was no longer alone in the public bar of the Hanged Man. A person of superior appearance had entered, been provided with a tankard, and modestly retreated to an unobtrusive corner. Appleby took another look at this superior person, and saw that he was none other than Catmull the butler.

 

There is no prescribed etiquette for casual rencontre between butlers and retired Commissioners of Police. The thing has to be played by ear. Appleby's manner of coping now was dictated by a lively sense of something interesting that must lurk in Catmull's having made a break from Elvedon at the present hour. The man had either served his buffet luncheon and immediately downed tools, or deputed the whole operation to some subordinate menial. Perhaps like Appleby himself he had felt a strong compulsion to withdraw and think matters out. Reflecting thus, Appleby risked an intrusive move. He picked up his own tankard and crossed over to Catmull's corner.

‘May I join you?' he asked. ‘It seems pretty quiet here today.'

Catmull nodded. The gesture indicated at once that when he stepped outside the Elvedon ring-fence it was into a position of equality with all men. Appleby approved of this, although he wasn't sure that he approved of Catmull. And if Catmull was startled by being accosted by the Chief Constable's companion he gave no sign of it.

‘It's quiet now,' he said, ‘and that's why I came here. But you wait. The reporters are on their way now, aren't they? And this is where they'll put up.'

‘I don't doubt it, Mr Catmull. And you'll have hard work keeping them out of Elvedon itself.'

‘That's a true word. Mere trippers too there'll be, once the radio and the telly and the evening papers have come out with it. No lack of drinkers in the Hanged Man tonight.' Catmull paused. ‘Queer that you and the Colonel should come asking for Mr Tytherton like that.'

‘An odd coincidence, certainly.'

‘Hadn't been at Elvedon before, I think?'

‘Never. Colonel Pride was to introduce me to your late employer. I have an idea that Mr Tytherton wanted to have a talk about the pictures he lost a couple of years ago.'

‘Ah, now that goes with what Mrs Catmull says!' Catmull was momentarily looking at Appleby through narrowed eyes. ‘Interesting, that is.'

‘And what does Mrs Catmull say? I don't quite follow you.'

‘“Why, that's him that was in my book,” she said. When I told her your name not an hour ago, sir. “That's him I read about,” Mrs Catmull said. But by a book she doesn't of course
mean
a book. Mrs Catmull isn't highly educated. She calls a magazine a book, sir – like most women do.' Catmull seemed here to touch on a misogynistic note. ‘Intending, you see, that she'd read about Sir John Appleby as one going after thieved pictures, and the like.'

‘It was certainly an interest of mine at one time, Mr Catmull.'

‘Well, here are you coming to talk to Mr Tytherton about such things today, and here is Mr Tytherton getting himself shot dead last night. If you ask me, it deserves thinking about, that does.' Catmull paused. ‘That Mr Raffaello, now. Never been to Elvedon before in my time, he hasn't. And he's another one, it seems, that has to do with pictures and statues and the like. Snoops around them, too, in a way I don't half like. Peering into places, like a guest who is anything of a gentleman shouldn't. An eye should be kept on him, to my mind. Given his marching orders, he ought to be.' Catmull's tone had suddenly turned almost vicious. ‘But who's to do that? Who does the bloody place belong to now. I'd like to know? But those in service aren't told such things. Mrs Tytherton, she'll go off now with you know who to France. And Mrs Catmull and me – well, a month's wages handed us by a lawyer, it's likely to be – and my good man pack your bag.'

‘I have no doubt that Mrs Catmull and yourself would readily find a suitably superior new situation.' Appleby had listened to the butler's sudden outburst with some curiosity. ‘But it seems possible that young Mr Tytherton, who is said to have returned to England, may propose to keep up Elvedon in the same style as his father.'

‘Back in England – him?' If Catmull wasn't genuinely startled, Appleby thought, he was an uncommonly good actor. ‘Much good he'll do us.' He stared morosely into what was now evidently an empty tankard. ‘In fact, damn all.'

‘Would you care for another pint, Mr Catmull?'

‘Well, sir, I don't mind if I do.' Catmull's glance as he said this didn't match with his casual tone. There was a curious hint of masked calculation in it. He is a man – Appleby told himself as he took both tankards to the bar – thoroughly pleased with his own cunning.

 

But when he returned with the beer there was surely nothing but stupidity on Catmull's face as he doggedly pursued his aggrieved note.

‘Of course, we have a bit put by – Mrs Catmull and me. Years in good service, we've seen, and careful living all the time. So there's a small nest-egg, I don't deny. But no possessions, sir. Scarcely a stick to set up with, if that's what it comes to. And the price of so much as a kitchen chair something chronic today. Just what I have in my pantry at the big house, sir. Nothing else at all. Just everything there. Came to me from my father, they did. No class about them. And nothing else. Not so much as our own bed to comfort one another in.' A long pull at his fresh pint had perhaps prompted this last affecting thought. ‘Time was, sir, when folk in the position of Mrs C and me could set up with rooms for single gentlemen. Chambers, one could call them, and charge accordingly. Prohibitive now. Absolutely prohibitive.'

‘I have no doubt the capital expenditure would be considerable.' Appleby, although unable to feel any keen sympathy for the conjectured economic plight of the Catmulls, said what he could. ‘Haven't you regularly been left in sole charge of Elvedon while Mr and Mrs Tytherton had been in London, or abroad?'

‘Oh, decidedly, sir. Except for Mr Ramsden as often as not, and young Mr Archie Tytherton the nephew from time to time, we take full charge, sir. Every confidence has been reposed in us.'

‘I'm very glad to hear it. When there is to be some radical change of plan for a big house, upper servants are frequently left in residence as caretakers over an indefinite period. On suitable board wages, of course. You must be aware of that. If it happens at Elvedon, it will give you time to look around.'

‘That's very true, sir – very true, indeed.' The glint of cunning had returned to Catmull's face. His manner, moreover, was shading into what might be called the professional servile. ‘And I should be most grateful if any good word to that effect could be said, Sir John. Any influential word – from one of high standing such as yourself.'

‘I am most unlikely to be consulted.'

‘It has always been a great responsibility. The house contains so much that is valuable – quite apart from the pictures, even. But speaking of them, sir, might I ask if that Mr Raffaello – we were having a word about him a moment ago, sir – makes a business of buying such things and selling them again?'