‘I don’t need an apology. But I could do with an explanation.’
‘Ah, that – yes, indeed. But the apology must come first. For dragging you into the little joke. It started up in my mind like a creation, you know, just as I was walking out of that church. There on the service sheet were my fingerprints, and there were you, who if handed the thing could be trusted to do as I have no doubt you have done. A sublimely simple way of vindicating myself as still in the land of the living.’
‘I am delighted you are with us still.’ Appleby said this on a note of distinguishable irony. ‘And I accept your apology at once. And now, may the explanation of the little joke follow?’
‘The explanation is that it has been designed as rather more than a little joke. My idea has been, in fact, to make a real impact upon the complacency of some who are satisfied with the absurd inadequacy of many of our laws. That old fool Pomfret, for example. I have for long been a legal reformer, after all.’
‘I see.’ Appleby really did see. ‘This exploit has been in the interest of highlighting the fact, or contention, that the law is hazardously lax in point of verifying adequately the identity of deceased persons – that sort of thing?’
‘Precisely that sort of thing. I shall have established – strikingly because by means of an ingenious prank – that in France and England alike–’
‘Quite so, Mr Brockbank. We need not linger on the worth of your intentions. But surely you have reflected of late on the extent to which you are likely to be in trouble, under French legal jurisdiction, if not under English? The deception you carried out upon the occasion of that disaster–’
‘My dear Appleby, what can you be thinking of? That was my brother Adrian, was it not? This all begins from his proposing to bring off a better joke against
me
than I ever brought off against
him
. It is on the record, I suppose, that we have both rather gone in for that sort of thing. He was going to confront me with the pleasant position of being legally dead. Well, I capped his joke by, you may say, concurring. I attended – I hope in a suitably devout manner – my own memorial service. So the laugh is going to be on him.’
‘Mr Brockbank, I have seldom come across so impudent an imposture!’ Appleby suddenly found himself as outraged as the Lord Chief Justice had been. ‘Whether your brother has, or has not, been remotely involved in this freakish and indecent affair I do not know. But I
do
know that, six weeks ago in France, you presented yourself as that brother upon an occasion at which such clowning would have been wholly inconceivable’ – Appleby paused, and then took a calculated plunge – ‘to anybody bearing the character of a gentleman.’
‘I withdraw my apology.’ Christopher Brockbank had gone extremely pale. ‘As for what you allege: prove it. Or get somebody with a legitimate concern in my affairs to prove it.
You
have none.’
‘Then I scarcely see why you should be calling on me – except to discover how far I have penetrated to the truth of this nonsense. I am prepared to believe that you had some ghost of serious intention in the way of exposing the weakness of certain legal processes. I accept that notions of what is permissibly funny may differ as between one generation, or one coterie, and another. But your present pack of lies about the conduct of your own brother – lies which I must now suppose you to be intending to make public – is a little too steep for me. Just what are you going to say to your brother when you meet?’
‘I don’t quite know.’ Christopher Brockbank had decided to digest the strong words which had been offered to him. ‘But I must certainly decide, since I am on the point of running down to see him now.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Appleby stared incredulously at his visitor.
‘I said I’m off to see Adrian. I must persuade him I’m not as dead as he has tried to represent me. In a way, he doesn’t know that he has not, so to speak, liquidated me quite successfully. Here is more than six weeks gone by since his little turn over my supposed body, and I haven’t – so far as he knows – given a chirp. That must be puzzling him, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Possibly so. Do I understand that your only public appearance has been at that deplorably mistaken memorial service?’
‘Yes, it has. You may simply take it that it has amused me to lie low.’
‘You appear to me to be in love with your own mortality. Now more than ever seems it rich to die: that sort of thing. What if there’s a general feeling, Mr Brockbank, that your decease was a welcome event? You might have quite a task in persuading a malicious world that you
are
alive; that you are you, in fact, and not some species of Tichborne Claimant.’
‘Ah, that’s where those fingerprints come in. It’s hardly a piece of evidence a conscientious policeman could suppress, eh?’
‘No, it is not.’ Appleby was becoming impatient of this senseless conversation. ‘If your brother Adrian really played that trick at the scene of the disaster – which I do not believe for a moment – he will be gratified to learn that you have taken the consequences of his joke so seriously as pretty well to register your continued existence with the police.’
‘But I shan’t tell him what I did with that service sheet.’
Christopher Brockbank gave a cunning chuckle. ‘Not till I’m sure he hasn’t got some further joke up his sleeve.’
He got to his feet. ‘And now I must be off to my brotherly occasion.’
‘Far be it from me to detain you. But may I ask, Mr Brockbank, where your brother is to be found?’
‘Ah, that will doubtless be becoming public property quite soon. Adrian is a minor celebrity in his way. But, just at the moment, I think I’ll keep him to myself.’
The prediction proved accurate. The very next morning’s papers carried the news that Adrian Brockbank’s yacht had been sighted at anchor off Budleigh Salterton in Devon. It seemed probable that he had arrived unobtrusively in home waters several days earlier.
Appleby endeavoured to absorb this as information of only moderate interest. Christopher Brockbank had had his joke, and it had involved a breach of the law in France if not in England. He had now gone off to join his nautical brother Adrian, and crow over the manner in which he had taken Adrian’s identity upon himself at the inception of the imposture in the Alpes-Maritimes. Something like that must really be what was in Christopher’s mind. And it was all very far from being Appleby’s business; he ought to be indifferent as to whether those two professional jokers (as they appeared to have been) decided to laugh over the thing together or to quarrel about it. Let them fight it out.
But this line of thought didn’t work. Several times in the course of the morning there came back into Appleby’s head one particular statement which Christopher had made. It was a statement which just
might
be fraught with a consequence not pretty to think of. At noon Appleby got out his car and drove west.
Budleigh Salterton proved not to run to a harbour. A few unimpressive craft were drawn up on a pebbly beach; far away on the horizon tankers and freighters ploughed up and down the English Channel; the sea was otherwise empty except for a single yacht riding at anchor rather far out. Binoculars didn’t help to make anything of this. Where one might have been expected to read the vessel’s name a tarpaulin or small sail had been spread as if to dry. Appleby appealed to a bystander.
‘Do you happen to know,’ he asked, ‘whose yacht that is?’
‘I haven’t any idea.’ The man addressed, although he appeared to be a resident of the place, was plainly without nautical interests. ‘It has been here for some days – except that it went out at dusk yesterday evening, and I happened to see it return at dawn this morning. But I did hear somebody say there was a rumour that the fellow was one of those lone yachtsman types.’
‘Do you know where I can hire a rowing boat?’
‘Just down by that groyne, I believe.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘May I come on board?’ Appleby called out. Adrian Brockbank was very like his brother – even down to the neat grey moustache.
‘Not if you’re another of those infernal journalists.’
‘I’m not. I’m an infernal policeman. A retired one.’
‘You can come up, if you like.’ And Adrian tossed down a small accommodation ladder. He had appeared only momentarily startled.
‘Thank you.’ Appleby climbed, and settled himself without ceremony on the gunwale. ‘Have you had any other visitors just lately, Mr Brockbank?’
‘I see you know my name. Only a journalist, as I say. That was yesterday evening. But I persuaded him to clear out again.’
‘What about your brother?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Adrian stared.
‘Your brother Christopher.’
‘Good God, Mr–’
‘Appleby. Sir John Appleby. Yes?’
‘My brother Christopher was killed six weeks ago in an air crash. Your question is either ignorant or outrageous.’
‘That remains to be proved, sir. And I gather you have been on some extended cruise or other. Just how did you hear this sad news?’
‘
Hear
it? Heaven and earth, man! It was actually I who identified Christopher’s body. I’d sailed into Nice, and tried to contact him by telephone. They said he was believed to have joined a plane for Paris, and gave some particulars. Then suddenly there was the news of this–’
‘So you identified the body, made certain decent arrangements about it, and then went to sea again. Is that right?’
‘It is right. But I’m damned if I know what entitles you–’
‘And then, only a few days ago, there was your brother’s memorial service at St Boniface’s in London. Do you say that you attended it?’
‘Certainly I attended it. But as I’d only just berthed here, and had to get hold of the right clothes, I was a bit late for the occasion.’
‘I see. Then you came straight back here?’
‘Obviously I did. I don’t like fuss. I’ve been lying low.’
‘That’s something that appears to run in the family. And so, very decidedly, does something else.’
‘May I ask what that is?’ Adrian was now eyeing Appleby narrowly.
‘A rash fondness for ingenious but really quite vulnerable lies. Mr Brockbank, your brother Christopher, having somehow got wind of your arrival here at Budleigh, came down yesterday evening and – I don’t doubt – rowed out to see you just as I have done. It was something quite out of the blue. I don’t know where you’ve come from, but you certainly haven’t been receiving English news on the way. And here, suddenly, was your brother, chock-f of the craziest and most discreditable of his practical jokes. He’d resolved to attend his own memorial service, partly for the sheer hell of it, and partly to dramatize what he considered some loophole in the law. He’d plotted the thing ingeniously enough, and it had involved his impersonating you at the scene of an air-crash. He told you all this in exuberant detail.
You
had been made to appear the joker – this was the best part of
his
joke – and as a result of it he was officially dead until he chose to come alive again.’ Appleby paused. ‘Mr Brockbank,’ he went on quietly, ‘you decided that he never
would
so choose.’
‘This is the most outrageous–’
‘Please don’t interrupt. What you said to yourself was this: if Christopher wanted to be dead, let him damned well
be
dead – and let his large fortune pass to his next of kin, yourself. It was all so simple, was it not? Lie One:
you
had sworn to what was in fact the
true
identity of the dead man. Lie Two:
you
had been just in time for the memorial service. Your story would be simple and plausible. The true story, supposing anybody should tumble to it, would be too fantastic for credence. Have I succeeded in stating the matter with some succinctness?’
‘You have a kind of professional glibness, Sir John.’ Adrian said this perfectly coolly. ‘I suppose that for most of your days you’ve been ingeniously fudging up yarns like this. But it won’t wash, you know. It won’t wash, at all. You are reckoning that, at every step, it will be possible to collect one or another scrap of circumstantial evidence against me, and that these will just add up. But they won’t – not to anything like the total that would persuade a jury of such nonsense. My poor brother met an accidental death in France, and I identified his body, and that’s that.’
‘On the contrary, your brother was murdered by you on this yacht yesterday evening; doubtless sewn up in canvas with as much in the way of miscellaneous metal objects as you could find on board; and sent over the side – far out at sea – last night.’
‘Far out at sea?’ It was ironically that Adrian repeated the words. ‘Awkward, that. A body is rather a useful exhibit, is it not, when a thin case has to be proved?’
‘Mr Brockbank, you entirely mistake the matter. There is absolute proof that your brother Christopher, alive and well, attended his own memorial service. It is a proof which, I know, he proposed to withhold from you for a time – which was perhaps a pity. But the evidence, which I need not particularize, is in my possession.’
‘Dear me!’ Adrian made a casual gesture which somehow didn’t match with a suddenly alert look and a tautened frame. ‘And is it in the possession of anybody else?’
‘Yes, of several people. Otherwise, I’m bound to say I shouldn’t be thus alone with you, Mr Brockbank, in a secluded situation. But it hadn’t, I repeat, been evidence in
your
possession. For it wasn’t in your brother’s mind to mention its existence to you just at present. He was keeping it up
his
sleeve in case you proved to have something further up
your
sleeve. Rather a muzzy notion, perhaps, but understandable when Brockbank is sparring with Brockbank. It is evidence, incidentally, which was entirely and ingeniously devised by your brother himself.’ Appleby paused. ‘I may just say that finger-prints come into it. Irrefutable things.’
There was a long silence, and then Adrian Brockbank, who had also been perched on a gunwale, stood up.
‘If I may just slip below for a moment,’ he said, ‘I think I can turn up something which will put a term to this whole absurd affair.’