Silence Observed (17 page)

The hall was quite empty. It could have done with a vigorous wash down, but apart from this it retained the dignity of the day on which it was built. Contrastingly, both the rooms leading off it gave an immediate impression of being disgraced. And the reason was obvious. Not only were the carpets and curtains in the last stages of decay. The rooms were crowded – and crowded with junk. It wouldn’t all be junk, indeed, if transported to a junk shop. But it was junk here.

Appleby concentrated on the room on his right. There was a further open door at the other side of it, through which it was possible to see part of another room beyond. This seemed to be crowded in the same way. And neither room was furnished with the slightest attempt at individual character or even specific function. There were beds and there were sideboards. There were desks which looked as if they had come from massive Victorian offices, and there were dressing-tables which looked as if they had come from penurious Victorian servants’ dormitories. The walls were covered with pictures – oils, watercolours and steel engravings side by side. There were bags of golf clubs and bundles of tennis rackets. There was a vaulting horse and a croquet box and a stuffed bear and a harmonium. And in the disposition of all these crowded objects there was only one principle to be observed. It was a principle, however, that struck Appleby as a notable one. Nothing was entirely concealed behind anything else.

In the minute which it took Appleby to absorb all this, Veere House was as soundless as the tomb. If the false Astarte were really here, it must surely be in the character of a Sleeping Beauty. In which case, Jimmy Heffer had certainly taken on the role of Prince Charming. But whether his plan for arousing the lady was at all moral – whether, indeed, they mightn’t both wake up to find themselves in jail – was a different matter. Anyway, they must now be hunted out. Appleby was about to address himself to this task when he became aware that the deathly stillness of the place had been broken. It had been broken by a light, firm tapping from – he judged – some distant part of the ground floor on which he stood.

The tapping came nearer. You didn’t have to remember
Treasure Island
and the blind pirate to be a little unnerved by it. Appleby, who had fought for his life in thieves’ kitchens almost as often as Sexton Blake, felt a momentary tingling of the scalp. And then – at the far end of the farther room at which he had been glancing – the occasion of the tapping appeared.

It was an old woman. She came from the shadow of some remoter corridor into a shaft of afternoon sunshine falling through the farthest of a series of windows which extended between Appleby and herself. As she did so, the sound of her stick – for the tapping did proceed from a stick – was muted but still irrationally alarming. She had passed from a tiled floor to a carpeted one.

It was a quick tapping – so that it suggested itself as indeed produced by a blind person rather than a lame one. But this was delusive. The old woman had eyes that could see. That she was using them was almost the first impression you had of her. She was advancing towards Appleby with her head turned steadily to her left. Her stick was in her right hand. With her left hand – its index finger extended – she was making spasmodic but purposeful movements as she advanced.

She was very old. She was in black. The black was relieved by a white collar and a white cap. And this, of course, was what made her uncanny – uncanny as she advanced through this decorous house, a house of the kind in which the successors of Sir Christopher Wren had tactfully refined upon the Dutch taste of William and Mary. The old woman was like an old woman by Rembrandt. That was it.

Of course it didn’t make sense. Mrs Kipper was not, presumably, a Kipper. Very probably she had been a Miss Smith or a Miss Jones. But perhaps she had grown into the place… Now she had passed into the shadow between two windows – and now she was in clear faint sunlight again. She was nearer. And she wasn’t – Appleby saw – a Rembrandt, after all. She was just a Frans Hals. She hadn’t – that was to say – grown out of the flesh with age. She was an ordinary acquisitive old woman.

But no – she wasn’t quite ordinary, either. She was behaving in too extraordinary a way. For he could see, now, what that left index finger was doing. It was ticking things off. It was ticking off all those rubbishing material possessions, no one among which quite concealed any other.

The pathological old miser – for that, of course, was what she was – advanced steadily towards Appleby. She looked at him, and frowned. He ought not to have been there to be counted. She stopped, and spoke sharply.

“Young man,” she said, “are you Richardson’s clerk?”

It certainly wasn’t that she was purblind. A glance from her eyes told you that she saw everything. So Appleby felt rejuvenated. Whether he was a young man was, after all, a relative matter. On the other hand, he certainly wasn’t Richardson’s clerk. So he had better say so.

“No,” he replied. “My name is Appleby, and I have come to call on your niece. You must forgive me for walking in. I seemed to have some difficulty with the bell at the front door.”

Mrs Kipper – as she must be presumed to be – ignored this. She had come to a halt for a moment, but now she walked on – crossing her elegant hall and entering the first of the rooms on its farther side. At the same time, she signed to Appleby to accompany her. She gave the impression of being prepared to listen to him, provided this did not distract her from the more important task of checking over her property. This still took place entirely on her left hand. No doubt there was going to be a return journey.

“I asked” – Mrs Kipper said – “because Richardson is in the house now. I heard his voice as he went upstairs. He has no business here. I have a good mind to turn him out of the place.”

“Isn’t Mr Richardson your solicitor?” Appleby asked this very much at a venture.

“Certainly not. My solicitor is Mr Wiggins of Gray’s Inn. I went up to see him only a few days ago. Richardson is a local man, who did business for my late brother-in-law, Joseph Kipper. Most mistakenly and unnecessarily, Joseph left a sum of money in trust for the education of my niece. Richardson administered it. But that is all over. The money has been spent and the trust discharged. The girl may send for him as she pleases. But he hasn’t a penny left to give her, all the same. Unless out of his own pocket.”

“Your niece Astarte?”

Mrs Kipper had now nearly reached the far end of the room. And she took time off the more serious business of her peregrination to look sharply at Appleby.

“Astarte? Stuff and nonsense! My niece’s name is plain Jane.”

“Plain Jane, I am told, is one of the loveliest girls in England.” It was again in an experimental spirit that Appleby offered this. What it produced from Mrs Kipper was a cackle of highly disagreeable laughter.

“Lovely? All the more reason why she should marry Charles Onions. They will cancel each other out, so far as looks go. Mr Onions is a revoltingly ugly man.”

“I see.” And indeed Appleby was beginning to see what might be called the archetypal simplicity of the situation at Veere House. “Your niece has no wish to marry this revoltingly ugly man. But she is penniless. And he is the match that you design for her.”

“You express it very clearly,” Mrs Kipper said. And she walked on. “The announcement,” she said presently, “would look well in
The Times
– supposing one were to waste money in that way. Miss J Kipper and Mr C Onions. The wedding photograph, too, would be a joy – supposing one were going to have such a thing.”

This time Appleby was silent. Mrs Kipper was not merely disagreeable. She was malignant. And now she had turned and begun moving back the way she had come. If this was a fairy story, Appleby told himself, Mrs Kipper sustained a couple of roles at once. She was both witch and dragon – and the hoard which the dragon guarded was this dismal accumulation of near-lumber which she had brought together on the ground floor of her house. Probably many of the upper rooms were empty – the mad old creature having concentrated everything down here, the better to keep her eye on it. That would explain the mixture of stuff from bedrooms and drawing-rooms, cloakrooms and libraries. And amid it all – he told himself – there ought to be one supremely interesting object.

“Hasn’t your niece ever been prompted to leave home?” Appleby asked. “Isn’t she anxious to earn her own living?”

“Her education – thanks to the folly of my brother-in-law – was of the extremely expensive sort that equips a young woman to do nothing. Of course, she might become a shop girl. And a shop girl she will become, if she doesn’t marry Mr Onions.”

It was at this moment that Appleby saw the Rembrandt. There was the Old Man – decayed, majestic, translucent, incredible – hanging between an insipid mezzotint and an oblong of chocolate-coated canvas once representing, it might be, a forest scene in the Flemish taste. And for a second Mrs Kipper’s eye was resting on it too. But only for a second. The Old Man and his immediate neighbours existed for her, one could see, equally and merely as objects in a compulsive ritual of enumeration.

“I mustn’t detain you,” Appleby said. It was surprising, he reflected, that this dreadful old person had been willing to suffer him in the way she had. He had better make a further move before her mood altered and she drove him from the house. “If you will be good enough to tell me where I may find Miss Kipper–”

“Upstairs,” Mrs Kipper said indifferently. “You can’t go wrong.”

Without a glance, she tapped her way on into the next room.

A murmur of voices guided Appleby when he reached the first-floor landing. Standing on no ceremony, he opened a door and walked through it.

He was in the presence – he saw at once – of a council of war. Three people sat round a table. At the head of it was an elderly man of legal appearance. He must be Mr Richardson. On his left sat Jimmy Heffer. On his right sat the girl to whom an ironic fate had given the beauty of a goddess and the name of Jane Kipper. Appleby had a second in which to contemplate her with a certain amount of awe before he was addressed by Heffer. The young man had sprung to his feet.

“How dare you follow me here!” he said. “How dare you break into this house!”

“Sit down,” Appleby said coldly. “And don’t waste time talking nonsense.” He turned to the young woman. “My name is Appleby. It has probably cropped up in Mr Heffer’s conversation. I see that you have at least had the good sense to call in legal advice. I understand this gentleman to be your solicitor, Mr Richardson?”

“Yes.” The Botticelli mask was turned gravely on Appleby. “I sent for him as soon as Jimmy rang up. Jimmy thought I had killed somebody.”

“I really don’t think that we can have this.” Richardson had stood up and was looking at Appleby with severity. “Your appearance in this way, Sir John, is entirely irregular.”

“No doubt it is, sir. All the better, perhaps, for your clients.”

“Mr Heffer is in no sense my client. Until I entered this room half an hour ago I had never set eyes on him. It is Miss Kipper whose interests I represent. I have stood in a professional relationship to her for many years.”

“So I understand. But it appears that she and Mr Heffer have got rather mixed up. They have involved themselves in what might be given the appearance of a criminal conspiracy. I don’t doubt that you have learnt that much by this time.”

Richardson was silent for a moment. He appeared to be weighing with some care the precise form of words which Appleby had used. Then he relaxed slightly.

“Shall we all sit down?” he said. “We can take it that we know what Sir John is referring to. But I must say at once” – and he turned again to Appleby – “that I can continue this informal discussion only if it is agreed that my client was in no way involved in the death of Sir Gabriel Gulliver. Mr Heffer, it appears, lost his head – conceivably not without your assistance, Sir John – and was disposed to admit what can only be called a morbid and absurd suspicion.”

“Mr Heffer, sir, has built up romantic notions of your client, and he has perhaps been inclined to impute to her a degree of ruthlessness which, it is to be hoped, is entirely foreign to her. Although ruthlessness of a sort she certainly has. I don’t think that she shot Gulliver this morning. But I’d be glad to hear of a little more positive evidence in the matter than I possess at present.”

Richardson nodded.

“As it happens, it exists. Miss Kipper leads a lonely life in this house. She might have difficulty in bringing proof of her whereabouts at one time or another. But, this morning, there were a couple of workmen about the place. Fortunately, she several times conversed with them.”

“I accept that.” Appleby turned to Heffer. “The nightmare is over, isn’t it?” he asked. “You no longer have to think of fighting for your life – and this lady’s?”

“Yes. Of course, I knew Jane couldn’t have done it, really. But, after the affair last night–”

“No doubt.” Appleby interrupted rather brusquely. “And now, we can sort things out a little – factually, if not morally. For I am bound to say, Heffer, that in point of professional trust you have let yourself down badly. Of course, it may be maintained” – and Appleby glanced grimly at the extravagant beauty of Miss Kipper – “that the woman tempted you.”

“I can’t admit anything of that sort.” Richardson struck in sharply. “I cannot admit that Miss Kipper either did, or intended to do, or procure, anything of a criminal nature. There are problems of inheritance in her family – including problems of the rights of ownership in various effects in this house – which have never been satisfactorily resolved. One obstacle has been the disposition of her aunt, Mrs Kipper, whom you may have met. It has been my own policy to see what time would do. Mrs Kipper has for long been very eccentric. I happen to know that she visits her own solicitor monthly for the purpose of altering her will. And so forth. It has been in my mind that a long history of such capricious conduct might very usefully be allowed to build itself up – usefully from the point of view of my client, Miss Kipper, should litigation eventually be necessary.”