Gay Phoenix (20 page)

But what if that mast
hadn’t
fallen on the true Charles? What if, as Judith had conjectured, Arthur had murdered his brother? It was remarkable how much – short of a position of complete nihilism – this altered the picture. (Or equally, Appleby added to himself carefully, if Charles had murdered Arthur – the straight Cain-and-Abel thing.) But this was precisely what nobody was ever going to know. Or not short of complete confession on the murderer’s part.

Appleby had been dawdling along the road. The Rover had been nearing Brockholes too rapidly for his liking, since muddle was a poor companion to take with one on such an assignment as he was visualizing. But now he stepped on the accelerator. It had become perfectly clear that his business was to discover the truth. Not merely about who lived in the house ahead of him. He couldn’t believe that would be very difficult. But about what had really happened in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And that might be very difficult indeed. In fact, his sort of thing.

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven…

Appleby, slowing before a bend, chanted the words of Ulysses in innocent hyperbole.

that which we are, we are…

He braked violently, and swerved to the side of the road. It had been a very near shave. Indeed, there had been quite a bump.

The car confronting him, which had been travelling at a shocking pace, was a Rolls-Royce. Its number plate read
CP
I. Appleby (probably like most private gentlemen) thought the number plate game a badge of vulgar ostentation. Still, it was perhaps useful to be thus instantly apprised that here was a vehicle almost certainly in the proprietorship of Mr Charles Povey (or his supplanter). There were two occupants – or there had been, since one of them, the driver, had now climbed out on the road and was advancing upon Appleby without cordiality. Neither car had escaped damage. The Rover, which might be regarded as representing a middling station in life, had reasonably held its own in this confrontation with automotive aristocracy. It showed a slightly dented front wing. But the Rolls did too.

The approaching driver, although the blame had been entirely his, was plainly preparing to adopt a stance of high indignation. Was he perhaps Povey (Charles or Arthur) himself? Appleby instantly saw that he was not. Confronting him was the bearded secretary, Bread by name but cake by nature, whose almost certainly criminal past Appleby again found himself tiresomely unable to pinpoint. But if Appleby didn’t know quite all about Bread, Bread certainly knew all about Appleby. He had been about to provoke a flaming row (since that is the routine resource of aggressive and culpable motorists) when he realized in whose company he had landed himself. His jaw dropped, and Appleby had a sharp immediate impression of obscure panic as having gripped the man.

‘Good heavens!’ Bread said with a rather weak air of astonishment. ‘Sir John Appleby, isn’t it? I remember that nice chat we had. Sorry about this. My fault, I’m sure. But there’s no real damage done. Settle up later, eh? Let the insurance fellows work it out. Just drive on.’

‘Not quite immediately, Mr Bread.’ Appleby got out of the Rover and glanced at the position of the Rolls. It was well on his own side of the road, since Bread had been dangerously cutting a corner. Even so, each car was blocking the path of the other; neither could proceed on its way even after reversing until the other shifted its position too. ‘One must act regularly in these cases,’ Appleby went on heavily. ‘There’s always the possibility of personal injury, you know. Or delayed shock. To yourself, for example, or to your passenger. The lady may be upset.’

‘Nothing of the kind. Nothing of the kind, I assure you. She said so, just as I nipped out. “I’m right as rain,” she said. “We’ll just drive on.” Have to catch a train, as a matter of fact. So I’ll be obliged, Sir John, if you’ll back clear and let me pass.’ Bread, as he said this, wasn’t quite in control of his manner or his voice; it was just as if he’d restrained himself from employing some such variant as ‘if you’ll bloody well piss off’.

Appleby took licence from this to produce the offended frown and freezing courtesy of a person of consequence in the community.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘but I really think not. I’m afraid I must ask you to do the correct thing, sir. We wait until another car comes along, and we ask the driver to notify the police. They’ll then be here in no time.’

For a moment Bread said nothing. He eyed Appleby narrowly, with a gaze both baffled and alarmed. He must have concluded that Appleby’s
ad hoc
conception of the correct thing was something he wasn’t going to be argued out of.

‘Oh, very well,’ he said. ‘As you please. But it’s extremely inconvenient.’

‘In that case I must hasten to apologize to your passenger. I take it she is Mrs Povey?’

‘Yes, she is.’ Bread had hesitated over this reply; he was clearly a fellow whose second nature was prevarication. ‘But I’ll just move the Rolls back a little first.’

‘Better not, I think. The exact position of the two vehicles is important, you know.’ Bread, Appleby had decided, was in so alarmed a state that he was quite capable of reversing the Rolls rapidly into distance. ‘And I must certainly introduce myself at once. It’s the civil thing, considering that we are virtually neighbours.’

This comedy of punctilio took Appleby to the open door of the Rolls. Mrs Povey, who had been in front with Bread, hadn’t moved from her seat. It wouldn’t have been easy to do so, since the rest of the car’s interior was crammed with expensive-looking luggage. She was a striking woman, by no means very quietly dressed, and she was calming her nerves with a cigarette.

‘Mrs Povey?’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry about this. My name is Appleby, and I live in the neighbourhood. If I haven’t yet had the pleasure of making myself known to your husband it’s only because I’ve been abroad for some months. My wife is much looking forward to meeting you. Mr Bread I do know, since I met him just before going away. We had a most interesting talk. As a matter of fact, I had a curious sense of having come across him in different circumstances in the past. Without a beard, I am inclined to think. But the precise occasion eludes me.’

If Mrs Povey, formerly Miss Porter, was perturbed by this speech (as she well might have been by such unnecessarily communicative remarks) she contrived not to reveal the fact.

‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘How very nice. I do adore meeting famous people. But I am very anxious to catch my train.’

‘Is Mr Bread going to catch it too?’

This question – undeniably irregular from a strictly social point of view – did produce an effect. Mrs Povey jumpily stubbed out her cigarette in the thing that Rolls-Royces provide for the purpose.

‘Mr Bread,’ she said nervously, and with seemingly meaningless evasiveness, ‘is my husband’s secretary. But perhaps you know that.’

‘Quite so. I’m sure he is invaluable. But I hope nothing serious has happened?’

‘Serious? Of course not. I don’t see why–’

‘Your car, if I may say so,
was
travelling rather fast. And your train seems so important. There hasn’t been any sort of crisis at Brockholes? I’d be most anxious to help.’

Mrs Povey was not now standing up very well to this war of nerves – which Appleby had to acknowledge as one of his more oddly intuitive performances. It had its origin, no doubt, in a prompting to subject the lady’s husband, when he could get hold of him, to something of the same sort.

‘My mother,’ Mrs Povey said, ‘has met with a serious accident in London. I am hastening to her.’

‘But I understood you to say that nothing serious had happened?’ Appleby, who might have been the most obtuse of men, glanced behind Mrs Povey. ‘I am extremely sorry to hear such bad news, but it’s comforting you had time to pack. Perhaps, in the circumstances, we had better not wait for the police after all.’

‘No, please don’t let us do that.’ Mrs Povey’s eagerness was sudden and extreme. It came to Appleby, quite simply, that she was a woman in flight. She wasn’t hastening anywhere; she was merely bolting from Brockholes – fleeing, it might be said, the connubial dwelling. And it looked as if Bread had a similar aim in view. He was quite as anxious to make himself scarce as his employer’s wife was, and he now contributed to the conversation on a changed and conciliatory note. It was, indeed, an ingratiating note, such as Appleby could dimly remember as once familiar to him among persons holding some acquaintance with Her Majesty’s prisons.

‘That’s most considerate of you, Sir John,’ Bread said. ‘We’re really very anxious – very anxious, indeed. Such a nice lady, dear old Mrs Porter. You’ve probably met her, seeing she’s prominent in Society. And so sudden an illness! Mrs Povey is naturally in great anxiety. One of those treacherous cerebral things. We’re here today and gone tomorrow, Sir John. Like the flowers of the forest.
Eheu fugaces
, as the poet says.’

These reflections – mildly surprising if one was unacquainted with Bread (or Butter) the reading man – appeared to call for no reply. Appleby murmured some civil farewell to the distressed Mrs Povey, and turned away towards his car. Then a thought seemed to strike him.

‘Is Mr Povey at home?’ he asked. ‘He must be most anxious, too. I wonder if he’d care for a call from a new neighbour? It might serve to divert his thoughts, don’t you think?’

Mrs Povey and Mr Bread observably exchanged a swift and apprehensive glance. Conceivably it wasn’t obscure to either of them that this pestilent former Police Commissioner would now make his way to Brockholes whether they liked it or not.

‘But of course!’ Mrs Povey said with random and misplaced effusiveness. She had undeniably become a thoroughly frightened woman, so that Appleby found himself wondering what on earth could really have happened. ‘Do call, Sir John. Arthur will be quite delighted.’

This staggering instance of what the learned term the psycho-pathology of everyday life didn’t cause a flicker on Appleby’s now almost vacuously polite face, and the perturbed lady herself appeared quite unconscious of what she had inadvertently revealed. (Or
was
it inadvertent? The inner Appleby, long habituated to thinking twice about anything he heard within a context of suspected crime, asked himself this automatically. Wheels within wheels, perhaps? One simply never knew.) Appleby’s glance had gone instantly to Bread, and he had to tell himself that Bread was by no means inconsiderable. Bread’s expression hadn’t flickered either, although he couldn’t have failed to register what on any simple calculation had been a potentially disastrous slip.

‘Then I’ll certainly drop in.’ Appleby smiled benignly, produced the sort of bow that the cerebrally stricken Mrs Porter (being habituated to the most refined social circles) would have approved at once, and returned to his own car.

It all remained, he reflected, as speculative as you please. But there was much to be said for the view that this precious couple were throwing the poor devil to the wolves. And he still wasn’t sure that it was a wolf he himself wanted to be.

As if in the kind of dream that goes in for reduplicated disasters, the late near-accident all but repeated itself only a few hundred yards ahead. This time, what hurtled round a bend and saved itself only with a swerve and a scream of brakes was that sort of minibus or shooting-wagon in which members of the larger landed gentry are accustomed to truck around small
corvées
of men and youths impounded to beat up pheasants for the purposes of ritual slaughter. But the vehicle was not being thus used now. Its large roofrack was crammed with suitcases and bundles, and with the exception of the driver the occupants were all females.

The driver, reduced to backing and then edging cautiously past, took a look at Appleby. Appleby took a look at the driver. As in the case of Bread some months before, a factor of recognition came instantaneously into play. This time, however, Appleby could put a name to the man as certainly as the man could put a name to Appleby. Nor was this all. The females, because accommodated facing inwards on benches running the length of the wagon, were not clearly distinguishable. Even so – if but for a brief moment – Appleby was aware of what might be termed old familiar faces: several of them. He had last viewed them, years before, as they stood in the dock at the Central Criminal Court before taking up a spell of residence in Holloway Jail.

They were gone – and clearly with all their worldly possessions swaying on the roof above them. It was evidence of a most precipitate and dramatic exodus from the Poveys’ ancestral home.

But there was no difficulty in finding the proprietor of the mansion. He was standing before his front door, gazing bemusedly up and down the broad terrace upon which it gave, and apparently in the very act of realizing that he was the sole remaining inhabitant.

The rats had abandoned the sinking ship. Another flat and faded metaphor, Appleby told himself. Would it be apter to say that the little rats had abandoned the big rat? Big or little, there was nothing particularly ratlike about Mr Povey. He looked exhausted, harassed, even a thoroughly sick man. But he would have passed anywhere as a well-bred Englishman still in vigorous middle age; when not, as now, in some state of shock, he probably commanded that air of unobtrusive self-assurance and untroubled authority which marks the man of property. If indeed an impostor, he started off with certain natural advantages as a consequence of this. In fact, Appleby thought, when normally poised he might be quite a tough nut to crack. Which was all the more reason for sailing in at once. With this final mix-up of banal images, Appleby strode up a short flight of steps.

‘Mr Povey?’ he said. ‘I must introduce myself. My name is Appleby.’

‘Yes, of course, Sir John. I’ve heard of you as one of my new neighbours – and professionally as well, I need hardly say.’ Mr Povey, although his awareness appeared to have focused itself with difficulty upon this sudden irruption of a fresh hazard in his environment, and although his quick smile was tight and carefully controlled, took a step forward and shook hands in proper form. ‘Delighted to meet you. How do you do?’