‘Is that,’ Halberd asked, ‘what the doctor and the local copper are saying?’
‘I don’t know about the copper. He’s an experienced sergeant, settling in to a thorough search, and not saying much meanwhile. As for the sawbones, he’s the nice old family-doctor type. Agrees, of course, that the poor devil has been stone dead for at least a couple of hours. Seems to be wondering whether he was dead first, and dragged into the hut second. Suspects something rigged, you might say. Position of the body, and so forth. Appleby, what do you say to that?’
‘I certainly felt an element of the theatrical to be present. But other things were present, too.’
‘Clues, do you mean?’
‘Clues? Oh, yes – several. Enough, in fact, to admit of only one explanation of the mystery.’
Sir John Appleby glanced from one to another of three dumbfounded faces, as if surprised that his announcement had occasioned any effect at all.
‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘there is rather a good reason why the local sergeant won’t find them – the clues, that’s to say. But, as he is going to spend some time in the hunt, I propose to while away a quarter of an hour by telling you about them. Do you agree?’
‘You’ll have your say, I think, whether we agree or not.’ Halberd had sat down heavily. ‘So go on.’
‘Thank you. But, first, I’d like to ask you something. Does it strike you as at all odd that the three of you – each, apparently, with a rather large dislike of Vivarini – should have accepted his invitation to come here in this particular week?’
‘He took a lot of trouble to arrange it,’ Gryde said. Gryde’s voice had gone from high-pitched to husky. ‘Dates, and so forth.’
‘And there was this let-bygones-be-bygones slant to it.’ Perhaps because his night tramp had been exhausting, Childrey might have been described as almost pale.
‘Just that,’ Halberd said. ‘Wouldn’t have been decent to refuse. Rum sort of coincidence, all the same – the lot of us like this.’
‘Coincidence?’ Appleby said. ‘The word is certainly worth holding on to. Vivarini, incidentally, was holding on to something. Literally so, I mean. I removed that something from his left hand, and have it in my pocket now. I don’t intend to be mysterious about it. It was the cord of the silk dressing-gown that Gryde is wearing at this moment.’
‘That’s another of your filthy lies!’ Before uttering this, Gryde had clutched grotesquely at his middle. Even as he did so, Appleby had produced the missing object and placed it quietly on the table.
‘Making a bit free with the evidence, aren’t you?’ Childrey asked. He might have spoken out of a benevolent wish to give Gryde a moment in which to recover himself.
‘Dear me! Perhaps I am.’ Appleby offered this piece of innocence with perfect gravity. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve done rather the same thing with what appears to be property – or the remains of property – of your own, my dear Childrey. If photostatic copies of papers with your firm’s letterhead are to be regarded as your property, that’s to say. You remember the little place we made to boil a kettle, down by the river, the other afternoon? I discovered that a small file of such papers had been burnt there. And no time ago at all; I could still blow a spark out of them. Might they conceivably have been awkward – even compromising – documents that Vivarini had managed to get copies of – fatally for him, as it has turned out?’
‘It’s true about that collected edition,’ Childrey said abruptly. ‘I declined to do it, simply because there wouldn’t be anything like an adequate market for it. It is untrue that I behaved improperly. And the notion of my killing Vivarini in order to recover and destroy–’
‘But there’s something more.’ Appleby had raised a hand in a civil request for silence. ‘Just to the side of the door of the lambing hut there happens to be a patch of caked mud. The first thing I found was a footprint in it. Not of a shoe, but of a bedroom-slipper – with a soft rubber sole which carries a diamond-shaped maker’s device on the instep. Yes, Halberd, you are quite right. You are wearing that slipper now.’
‘Well,’ Gryde said maliciously, ‘that’s something the sergeant
will
find.’
‘Actually, I’m afraid not.’ Appleby looked properly conscience-stricken. ‘I was rather clumsy, I’m afraid. I trod all over the thing.’
‘Can we have some explanation of all this madness – including your own totally irresponsible conduct?’ It had been after a moment of general stupefaction that Gryde had put this to Appleby.
‘Why, certainly. You all had a bit of a motive for killing Vivarini – or at least you can severally think up motives with which to confront one another. And in the case of each of you we now have a clue – a real, damning, mystery-story clue. There is a fairly simple explanation, is there not? One of you killed Vivarini, and deliberately planted two clues leading to the other two of you severally. If just one of these clues was noticed, there would be one suspect; if two, there would be an indication that two of you had been in collusion. But in addition to planting those two clues
deliberately
, the murderer also dropped one, pointing to himself,
inadvertently
. Would you agree’ – and Appleby glanced from one to another of his companions – ‘that we now have an explanation of the observed facts?’
‘A singularly rubbishing one,’ Childrey said robustly.
‘Very well, let me try again.’ Appleby paused – and when he resumed speaking it was almost as if a current of icy air had begun to blow through the cottage. ‘There
was
collusion, and between all three of you. And so incompetent have you been in your evil courses that you have all three made first class errors. Childrey failed completely to destroy the papers he had managed to recover, and Gryde and Halberd both left physical traces of their presence in the lambing hut. Will that do?’
‘My dear Appleby, I fear you have a poor opinion of us.’ Sweat was pouring down Gryde’s face, but he managed to utter this with an air of mild mockery. ‘Should we be
quite
so inept? And there’s something you just haven’t accounted for: your own damnably odd conduct.’
‘Do you know, I’d call that right in the target area? Although I’d say it was not so much a matter of my conduct as of my mere presence.’ With an air of conscious relaxation, Appleby began to fill his pipe. ‘We were talking about coincidence. Well, the really implausible coincidence was my being here at all. Don’t you see? I was
meant
to be here. Vivarini wanted me here – and that although he and I were no more than casual acquaintances. That was the first thing in my head when I found him dead. And it led me straight to the truth.’
‘The truth!’ There was a dark flush on Halberd’s face. ‘You mean to say you know the
truth
, and you’ve been entertaining us to a lot of damned rubbish notwithstanding?’
‘I certainly know the truth.’
‘May we be favoured’ – Gryde hissed this – ‘with some notion of when you arrived at it?’
‘Oh, almost at once. Before I came in to tell you that Vivarini had been shot. First I
thought
for a few minutes, you know. It’s always the advisable thing to do. And then I went to have a look at the gas cylinders. That settled it.’
‘Vivarini,’ Appleby said, ‘didn’t like any of you. You’d refused to publish him as a classic, you’d reviewed him waspishly, you’d been in a mess-up with him about a girl. But what he really resented was being treated as outmoded. His so-called Comedy of Discomfiture you all regarded as old hat. Well, he decided to treat you to a whiff of that Comedy all on your own.’ Appleby paused. ‘After all,’ he said – blandly and with apparent inconsequence – ‘I was his guest, you know. I owed him something. It would have been a shame to knock that comedy too rapidly on the head.’
‘The man was a devil,’ Gryde said. ‘And you’re a devil too.’
‘No, no – Vivarini wasn’t really an evil man. He had me down so that there would be a sporting chance of giving you all no more than a bad half-hour.’
‘Three hours.’ Childrey had glanced at his watch.
‘Very well. And I’ve no doubt that he’d taken other measures. A letter on its way to Australia, by surface mail, perhaps, and then due to come back the same way. At the worst you’d have had no more than a few months in quod.’
‘Go on,’ Halberd said grimly.
‘There’s very little to tell! He spread a few useful lies: that one of you had egged him on to arrange this fishing-party; that he was nurturing something between thoughts and intentions of suicide (although that was
not
a lie); that he had evidence of some discreditable sharp practice on Childrey’s part. Then, similarly, he prepared his few useful clues: making that footprint, filching the cord from Gryde’s dressing-gown, making his little imperfectly burnt heap of old business letters. After that, he had just one more thing to prepare.’
‘You mean to tell us,’ Halberd said, ‘that he killed himself just for the fun of playing us a rotten trick?’
‘Certainly. It was to be his last masterpiece in the Comedy of–’
‘Yes, yes. But surely–’
‘My dear Halberd, didn’t you notice he was a sick man? It’s my guess that he was very sick indeed – with no more than months, or perhaps weeks, before him.’
‘My God – the poor devil! Ending his days with a revolting piece of malice.’ Halberd frowned. ‘What was that you said about gas cylinders?’
‘There are three stored at the back of the cottage. Two contain butane, all right, but the third contains hydrogen. And all he needed apart from that was a fair-sized child’s balloon – just not too big to go up that chimney. Plenty of lift in it to float away a very small gun. With this west wind, it must be over the North Sea by now. So you see why he had to die with his head in the fireplace – and why the doctor is puzzling over the odd position of the body.’
‘The sergeant of police,’ Gryde said, ‘isn’t puzzling over that footprint. Because you trampled it out of existence.’
There was a long silence while three exhausted fishermen stared at a retired Metropolitan Commissioner.
‘It will be thought,’ Appleby said, ‘that Vivarini was shot by some professional criminal who had an eye on our wallets, and who knew he had major charges to face if he was apprehended. Something like that. The police don’t always end up with an arrest, but they never fail to have a theory of the crime.’
‘Is it going to be safe?’ Gryde asked.
‘Fairly safe, I’d suppose.’ For the first time since his arrival at Dunwinnie, there was a hint of contempt in Appleby’s voice. ‘But safe or not, I judge it decent that this particular comedy of Frederick Vivarini’s shall never be played before a larger audience than it has enjoyed tonight.’
Lord Pendragon was a British civil servant of the old school. A King’s Scholar at Eton, an Open Scholar of Christ Church and for a leisured two years a Fellow of New College, he had entered the Treasury and risen as far as they rise – taking with him much literary cultivation, artistic connoisseurship, musical taste and the like, in the acquirement of which he had conceivably been assisted by his substantial private fortune. As a young man Pendragon had worked for Cabinet Ministers out of his own stable. He used to exchange with them, when they lost their jobs, suitable memorial trifles: perhaps a book bound for Jean Grolier against one bound by Samuel Mearne. Later, he worked with the same perfect discretion and good humour for New Men (as they were called at his club) whose private interests, although perfectly reputable, were of a somewhat different order. And now here he was, retired and silver-haired, perhaps the most eminent guest at this small gathering at the Lyle Gallery, distinguished from his fellows only by a slight excess of that air of perfect diffidence which marks the English gentleman.
The Lyle is, of course, one of the major picture galleries of the world, and this was why Lady Finch had chosen it to receive her Conversation Piece. The gift was in memory of her late husband, Sir Gabriel Finch, the eminent financier. Sir Gabriel had clearly been the life and soul of the convivial occasion depicted. The ladies had withdrawn; the male guests were clustered round their host at the foot of his dining-table; and the brilliant talk to which they were listening was agreeably symbolized or concretized in the crystal and gold which the Finches abundantly commanded for the service of dessert. Word had gone round the small gathering at the Lyle that what was particularly to be admired was the
trompe-l’oeil
effect with which the artist had rendered the cherry stones and walnut shells on the silver-gilt plates. Some of the more self-assured of Lady Finch’s friends were affecting to make this aesthetic discovery for themselves.
Of course there were levels of appreciation, each with its own vocabulary. The Director of the Lyle murmured to Judith Appleby that nobody would have expected the poor devil to turn himself into a
quadraturista
. The poor devil was the painter, Gwilym Lloyd. Lloyd – whom the uncharitable wit of the studios had nicknamed Mungo long before his death – had as a young man been regarded as the most promising painter of his generation. Then he had married, surrounded himself with a numerous progeny, and settled down as a ruthless manufacturer of boardroom portraits. Mungo Lloyd ended up as an RA – he, like Lord Pendragon had risen as far as they rise – and it was possible that the Conversation Piece had been the turning-point in his career. So the picture had, for the informed, a certain sombre historical interest. Moreover, extremely few people had ever seen it before. It had hung in some private sanctum of the late Sir Gabriel’s, accessible only to the regard of the particular cronies of its proprietor – who had presumably included the four persons here represented with him over their port and cigars. It was perhaps this fact that had brought the Applebys to have a look at the thing now.
‘Do you find it amusing?’ Lady Finch asked. Lady Finch, whether correctly or not, had taken on the role of hostess on this artistic occasion, and was having a word with everybody in turn.
‘No, not exactly that.’ Appleby judged the question odd. Apart from a formal introduction, Lady Finch was unknown to him, and he now glanced at her with attention. A harmless vacuous woman, she seemed to be. ‘But extremely interesting. It captures a great deal of a certain style of living. You have very generously given the gallery what must become a notable period piece.’