Appleby's Other Story (11 page)

‘Yes, he does.'

‘And perhaps, Sir John, it wouldn't always be quite above the board? A shady one, he seems to me.'

‘I am afraid I can say nothing whatever about that.'

‘Well, sir, I think I'd call that a significant reply. And in London, I imagine, there would be plenty others of the same sort?'

‘If you mean dealers who are not very scrupulous about the authenticity of what they sell, or careful to establish the seller's just title, that is certainly so. But you must not suppose me to be suggesting anything of the sort about Mr Raffaello or anybody else.'

‘But you would have had dealings with such in your time?'

‘Dealings with them? I've seen some of them into gaol, if that's what you mean.'

‘And perhaps they would continue in their wickedness, sir, when they came out again? A sad thought.'

‘It's certainly true of some of them.'

‘Their names would be in the papers – at the time, I mean, of their being convicted?'

‘Dear me, yes. You could look them up.' The cunning of Catmull, Appleby was reflecting, seemed of a somewhat primitive order. He was surely a singularly unsuitable person to leave in charge of a large house filled with valuable objects. ‘But they have to be very clever indeed, I may say, not to get pretty quickly caught out. The ownership of most works of art of outstanding value is common knowledge nowadays. It's all recorded in catalogues and so on. So it isn't possible to buy, say, a Goya which you know to be stolen and stick it happily above your dining-room mantelpiece. All you could do would be to lock it up, and sometimes go and gloat over it in private. There are people prepared to spend big money buying themselves such a pleasure – but they are few, and singularly hard to find.' Appleby finished his second pint – thus conscientiously consumed in the interest of detective investigation – and pushed away the tankard. ‘In fact, Mr Catmull, important works of art are about the last wares to which I could conscientiously recommend a would-be thief to turn his attention.'

‘Most interesting, sir. May I ask what, in fact, you would positively recommend?'

‘My dear Mr Catmull, that would be telling.'

 

 

Catmull didn't press his hopeful inquiry; instead, he consulted his watch, got to his feet, offered Appleby a modified form of professional bow, and withdrew with dignity from the Hanged Man. The cares of Elvedon were gathering once more around him.

Appleby recalled that he had undertaken to contact Mark Tytherton. It looked as if, immediately after their last meeting in the presence of the unspeakable Raffaello and the enigmatically philanthropical Miss Kentwell, the young man had made his way into the further presence of his stepmother – and perhaps, briefly, into that of his dead father before the ambulance had received him. Alice Tytherton's manner had not suggested that this occasion of mutual condolence – which in conditions of any sort of decency ought to have been a moving one – had brought her any comfort or consolation whatever. The widow hadn't, in fact, so much as pretended to grief. As for Mark, he had been upon the occasion of his encounters with Appleby, Raffaello, and Miss Kentwell at least in a discernible state of shock. It might of course be shock over something done and not merely over something heard or suffered. That was an open question. That it should remain an open question, at least for the time, appeared to have been Mr Voysey's anxiety – an anxiety which had partly explained itself from the vicar's confusion, psychologically persuasive enough, as to just what had come into his head when. Voysey – when, as it were, going by the book – didn't care for Mark Tytherton at all. Mark was a young man of irregular life, at odds with his family, and not at all disposed to exhibit those professions and attitudes upon which it is comforting to be able to rely in a Christian and a gentleman. But an unregenerate Voysey – conceivably a wise and humane Voysey – would acknowledge at a pinch a soft spot for the wandering heir. Appleby wasn't confident that he didn't harbour such a soft spot himself. But soft spots, while becoming in a clergyman, are wholly undesirable in a policeman. Appleby's business was to find Mark again – and perhaps to twist his tail a little before introducing him into the society of the Chief Constable and Inspector Henderson.

One must suppose Mark to have found Elvedon unwelcoming. It was improbable that he didn't now own the place. Outcast heirs commonly discover themselves to be heirs after all. But he seemed not to have announced himself as at all settling in. If he hadn't departed altogether, which was something that common prudence would surely counterindicate, he had presumably returned to this wretched pub. There was a probability that he was somewhere lurking in it now. Appleby resolved to investigate. He got to his feet and walked over to the bar. A detached observer might have remarked in him a somewhat ominous gathering of authority as he moved. The taciturn and discontented publican, who was disdainfully puddling glasses in an invisible sink of what was doubtless dirty water, glanced at him with a new wariness as he approached.

‘I think,' Appleby said, ‘that you have a few rooms here? There is a gentleman staying with you now?'

‘Yes, there is.'

‘You know who he happens to be?'

‘I don't know much about the folk in these parts. I haven't been here long.'

‘Why should you suppose him to belong to these parts? I suppose he just drove up, didn't he, like anyone else motoring around?'

‘He drove up, all right – in a taxi from the junction. He's no business of mine.'

‘But you know now who he is?'

‘Well, one of my regulars has said something. I didn't much attend to it.' Momentarily, the publican showed signs of fight. ‘And who are you, anyway?'

‘I am Sir John Appleby.'

‘Never heard of you.'

‘There is no reason why you should have. I advise you to answer my questions, all the same. You have heard what has happened at Elvedon Court?'

‘Everybody has heard that. The police are there. I don't want any trouble.'

‘There is no reason to suppose you are going to meet any.' Appleby wondered what inconsiderable irregularities in the conduct of the Hanged Man were the occasion of this defensive attitude. ‘Where is this gentleman now?'

‘I don't know. In his room, perhaps.'

‘Be so good as to tell him I want to speak to him.'

‘There's a woman with him.'

‘That is quite irrelevant.' Appleby dissimulated his surprise at this blurted out information. ‘You mean that he arrived with a woman?'

‘Nothing of the kind. She came asking for him – just before you came in. One of the nobs from the big house, I'd say. Dressed up to the nines. I sent her up. Number Two. There's only Number One and Number Two here. No class, this place. Not much trade, either.'

‘Thank you. You needn't trouble yourself further. It doesn't sound as if Number Two will be hard to find. I hope you're washing those glasses in running water.'

And Appleby left the public bar. This mild police bullying, he reflected, came back to him quite naturally from long, long ago.

 

The little staircase was dirty. There was a shabby landing and a small corridor. There were voices, raised voices, from behind the second door he came to. He had never found keyholes attractive. They were even less attractive than bullying. He knocked briskly at the door and walked in.

‘Who the hell are you?' Young Mark Tytherton, standing in the middle of the small ugly room, had swung round furiously. He had a trick of reacting to stimuli in an over-violent way.

‘You know who I am. Appleby. Introduce me, please.'

‘This is Mrs Graves. Please take her away and bury her.'

To a witticism so logically bizarre as this it is not easy to frame a reply, and for a moment Appleby found himself looking speechlessly at the lady – almost, indeed, like an undertaker making a rapid calculation of the dimensions of a corpse. Not that there was anything corpse-like about Mrs Graves; she seemed as alive as an electric eel, and no more comfortable for the purpose of making passes at. But tastes of course differ, and those of an elderly policeman are not of an exotic sort. It was possible that this snaky slinky person was precisely Mark Tytherton's style – as she was reputed to have been that of his late father. Perhaps – extremely unedifying as the thought was – the occasion of this prodigal son's home-coming had been a rumour of the attractiveness of his father's mistress. She couldn't be thought of as a fatted calf, indeed; rather she would pass very well as a serpent of old Nile. And perhaps the not very gallant injunction that Appleby had just received was a consequence of no more than a lovers' quarrel. Not that they looked like lovers – even lovers who had fallen out. They had been confronting each other, absurdly, from either side of an iron bedstead which showed no sign of having had to resign itself to illicit amorous purposes. And they presented as convincing an appearance of mortal enemies as Appleby could remember ever having seen together in a room.

‘I don't in the least want to take either of you away,' Appleby said. ‘Nor even to interrupt a private social occasion. What I have to tell you is that the police resume their investigation at Elvedon at two o'clock, and would be obliged if you could be available to them then.'

‘This fellow follows me around, talking like a coppers' manual.' Mark Tytherton offered this observation to Mrs Graves in what was momentarily almost a conciliatory tone. ‘It's your turn now, woman. Talk to him. Chat him up. I'm going down to get a drink. I'll need it, if I'm to be put through some third degree.'

‘If you choose, Mr Tytherton, you need say nothing at all to anyone until you have taken legal advice. And that, madam, applies to you as well. But if I might myself have a word with both of you now, the later stage of the affair might be simplified.'

‘And what the hell do you mean by that?' Mark Tytherton demanded.

‘Only what I say. And I assure you that I am a totally disinterested observer of this affair. It is a complicated affair. Also an onion of an affair, one might say, requiring a good deal of stripping.'

‘No need to be coarse,' Mrs Graves said haughtily. ‘And I don't understand your position at all. It seems quite irregular.'

‘So it is, madam. I may be called a Baker Street Irregular. As for my coarseness, there is perhaps rather a lot of it around. It's my idea that a certain amount of it can conceivably be got out of the way in not too public a fashion. But I warn you that I may be wrong.'

‘There may be something in that!' Mark Tytherton came out with this vehemently. ‘It's the absolute damned indecency of these salt bitches that really gets me down. It dragged
him
down.'

‘Mr Tytherton, I have already listened to a certain amount of your intemperate speech. If you want my help–'

‘A snooping copper's
help
?'

‘Yes – my help. If you want it, you'll employ the language of a gentleman.'

‘Creeping Christ! The man's out of Noah's Ark.'

‘Then moderate your tongue, or back into the Ark I go. Leaving you, incidentally, in not too agreeable a position. What were you doing, prowling around Elvedon not far short of midnight last night?'

‘What was I doing last night, out in the pale moonlight?' Mark produced this snatch of music-hall melody defiantly enough, but he had gone pale nevertheless. So, for that matter, had Mrs Graves. Perhaps, Appleby thought, these two, despite their present enmity, had been playing Romeo and Juliet under the same resplendent moon which had enabled Miss Kentwell and the attendant Ramsden to survey the countryside from the leads of Elvedon. Or perhaps they had been quite otherwise employed. They were certainly exchanging a glance quite as much of complicity as enmity now. ‘What was I doing?' Mark repeated. ‘Nothing that I see any reason to tell you about.'

‘That is a perfectly legitimate reply. But it means that you
were
on the prowl?'

‘Who wouldn't be on a fine night, if the alternative was skulking in this bloody pub?'

‘I take the point. But the skulking was your own idea, after all. If you had driven straight to Elvedon, I don't know just how lovingly or civilly you would have been received. But I have no reason to suppose you'd have been turned away from the place.'

‘Do you suppose I'd have wanted to spend a night under the same roof as those two–' With an enormous effort, Mark checked himself. ‘With those two gentlewomen?'

‘He's a straight nut-case,' Mrs Graves offered unexpectedly. ‘He has a thing about his mother.'

 

Appleby glanced at this disagreeable and far from nicely bred woman with a certain respect. She had at least said something that she believed to be true; something that was conceivably a firm stepping-stone in a thoroughly boggy affair. What Mark had earlier represented in himself as a loss of nerve and lack of guts – the reason, he had maintained, of his not going straight to Elvedon upon his arrival in England – had quite possibly its real occasion in what Mrs Graves vulgarly called a thing about his mother. Appleby had heard nothing about the first Mrs Tytherton; about how far back, so to speak, she lay either in her husband's life or her son's. She might be dead, or she might be alive and divorced. She might have been a faithless wife to Tytherton. Or Tytherton might have been a faithless husband to her, as he appeared to have been to his second wife, Alice Tytherton. There was plenty of room for conjecture. There was also a need for simple information, if anything was to be made of this new dimension of the affair. Mark Tytherton himself could supply much of it, and Appleby wasn't sure that, only a few minutes before, the young man hadn't betrayed a certain willingness to parley. The presence of Mrs Graves, however, was unlikely to facilitate the process. And Mrs Graves, although no doubt harbouring mysteries of her own, would keep. It would be a good idea to get rid of her. Having determined on this, Appleby made a sudden move over to the window, and glanced out.