Rixon coughed. ‘In point of fact,’ he said to Appleby, ‘I believe I used the phrase “
virtually
no more harm.” But no matter.’
‘And there would have been a nice feeling about it.’ Alice paused. ‘I must have pestered Loo. It was that bad of me. And one day he simply said we were going to get married – only that we’d keep it quiet. Well, that was all right by me. But I never thought he was doing what he was. Oh, my – I was mad!’ She sighed, produced a handkerchief, and wiped away a tear. ‘I was in a tearing fury with him that I arrived here. And I think Loo’ – suddenly she burst out sobbing – ‘got me wrong!’
‘Got you wrong?’ Appleby considered this. ‘You mean your being mad wasn’t for the reason he supposed it to be?’
Alice shook her head mutely. She was incapable of reply. And Canon Rixon took it upon himself to explain. ‘That is precisely it. Alice felt that her – that Packford had done something extremely dangerous just for her sake. That was it, Alice, wasn’t it?’
Alice nodded. ‘It’s something they put you inside for,’ she sobbed. ‘I know. They did it to my Uncle Jim. And it wouldn’t matter how I lied. Not after it was found out. Because of course it’s in writing in the place we were married. They’d be certain to get him. And that’s why I was so mad with him – for being so silly just because I’d had a fancy for something. And I think he thought it was because I’d started hating him, the great silly.’
‘Yes, I see.’ What Appleby was chiefly seeing was Alice’s large appeal. Not only were all her tangible and visible surfaces golden. She quite plainly had a heart of gold as well. ‘And you’re afraid,’ he asked, ‘that his making that mistake may have – well, got him down?’
‘Just that. After all, the others were really hating him.’
‘The others?’
‘Ruth was really hating him. And the old woman too – his cook. I could see that in her at once.’
‘His cook?’ Appleby was puzzled.
‘Alice means the capable Mrs Husbands,’ Rixon interrupted. ‘She does, no doubt, supervise the culinary side of the establishment. And she might be described as of full years. I hope Alice exaggerates. It would be quite reasonable that Mrs Husbands should be, shall we say, cross. But hatred is another matter. And as for Ruth, my dear Alice, the fact is that you don’t quite understand her type. You haven’t come across it, I dare say.’
‘You meet all sorts in my trade.’ Alice was ingenuously indignant. ‘And I’d like you to know that I’ve always been mostly on the saloon and private-bar side. So I see all the superior ones too, believe me. But it’s true that Ruth has me guessing. And what poor Loo could see in a–’
‘Quite so, quite so.’ Rixon made a restraining gesture. ‘But the point, my dear, was this. Ruth was very cold and cutting. But that doesn’t mean hate – not in a woman of that type of education, and so forth. Ruth may have been feeling very much as you were. I hope Sir John will bear me out in this.’
Challenged in this way, Appleby felt that there would at least be no harm in a conventional expression of agreement. ‘And I don’t see,’ he added, turning to Alice, ‘that you can really have anything with which to reproach yourself. In your attitude, I mean, to Mr Packford just before his death.’
‘But, you see, I don’t remember!’ Alice again applied her handkerchief to her eyes. The fact that she did so with a refined gesture becoming in one on the private-bar side didn’t make her woe any less appealing. ‘I often don’t, when I’m upset. Not since the bottle.’
‘Not since the bottle?’ Appleby supposed for a moment that this must be an idiom meant to express the period since Alice’s first infancy.
‘Alice,’ Canon Rixon explained, ‘was hit on the head with a bottle.’ He spoke with the casual ease of a clergyman who prides himself on knowing the world. ‘It is, of course, one of the professional risks of the licensed trade.’
‘But it was in the snug,’ Alice added – as if this circumstance removed the affair somewhat out of the ordinary. ‘It was in the snug, and by a very well-conducted gentleman who came in regular as clockwork to listen to the nine o’clock news. He had to be put away, poor soul.’
‘And you have been liable,’ Appleby asked, ‘to bouts of forgetfulness ever since then?’
‘Only when I’ve been upset really bad.’ Alice was anxious, it seemed, not to exaggerate this aspect of her personality.
‘A purely hysterical amnesia,’ Rixon said. There appeared to be few spheres into which his technique of cheerful reassurance didn’t reach. ‘There is seldom, I understand, anything at all serious in that sort of thing.’ He paused. ‘Although it must, of course, have its inconveniences.’
‘Quite so.’ Appleby didn’t give much more than civil attention to this. He was looking curiously at the young woman. ‘And what happens?’ he asked. ‘How do you behave when you have these temporary failures of memory?’
‘I can’t tell, can I?’ Alice made this point with a great appearance of reason.
‘Well, no.’ Appleby smiled as encouragingly as he could, for it struck him that the girl was now rather frightened. ‘But I suppose you are given tolerably reliable information about it from time to time?’
‘People don’t say much. It’s kind of awkward, you see.’
‘Yes, I do see that.’ Appleby was patient. ‘And you certainly needn’t talk about this at all, if you don’t want to.’
Alice took a deep breath. She was helpless before this magnanimity. ‘But they do say,’ she said, ‘that I can behave real queer.’
‘And it was like that the other evening? There’s a big gap in what you can remember anything about?’
‘Yes. From the sweet.’
‘From the sweet?’ Appleby was puzzled.
Alice blushed. ‘What we had at the end. The dessert.’
Rixon chuckled. ‘Which the profane vulgar,’ he said, ‘do denominate pudding.’ He patted Alice’s hand again. It was something, Appleby reflected, that could quite rapidly build up into a habit.
‘Because after that,’ Alice went on, ‘I can remember nothing at all. Not until I woke up next morning.’ She looked at Appleby with large woebegone eyes. ‘Not,’ she amplified, ‘until they woke me up in my own bed with a cup of tea next morning.’
And at this Alice went indoors. Appleby thoughtfully watched her departure. ‘I suppose,’ he asked Rixon, ‘that the poor girl was summoned after the discovery of Packford’s death? It wasn’t left until that cup of tea?’
‘She was certainly summoned. We all were. But I can well believe she was in some state she didn’t afterwards remember. There was something somnambulistic about her, without question. She registered what, superficially, one would have called normal shock. And yet there was something odd about it.’ Rixon hesitated. ‘You don’t think, my dear sir, that she could conceivably have been in any way responsible for–’
‘One can’t, in a business of this sort, afford to rule anything out. And a girl who, on the night of a somewhat mysterious fatality, may have been wandering about in what is called, I believe, a dissociated state certainly mustn’t be ignored. Not that I’m so interested in Alice as I am in you.’
‘In me?’ Canon Rixon was undoubtedly startled by this sudden assault. He had picked up the Snakes and Ladders, and now the dice and counters could be heard to rattle sharply in their box.
‘Or in anybody whose connection with the dead man was more on his professional and learned than on his personal and – shall we say? – amorous side. You see, Dr Rixon, the spectacle of a man of Lewis Packford’s standing and intelligence being pursued by two enraged wives is so exceedingly surprising that it tends to shove itself into the very centre of the picture. And that may be unjustifiable. It’s true that he must have found marriage an extremely interesting experience–’
Rixon nodded. ‘The evidence,’ he said urbanely, ‘points that way.’
‘But I doubt whether it was really so absorbing as his work.’
‘I rather agree.’
‘Well then, consider that scrawled message found on his desk. Accept the straightforward view that Lewis Packford wrote it and then blew his brains out. And accept, too, the supposition that he used that particular quotation not entirely at random. What would be your comment on it?’
‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness.’ Canon Rixon repeated the words weightily, rather as if they were a text at the start of a sermon. ‘Packford’s greatness, in Packford’s eyes, could mean only his reputation as a scholar – as a person of the most undoubted eminence in his field of literary research. If he felt that he was saying farewell to that, it would be because he had reason to suppose that this reputation was about to suffer some irreparable blow.’
‘And just how might that come about?’
‘He might have made even more of an ass of himself than we all sometimes do.’ Rixon plainly offered this as rather a felicitous formulation. ‘Somebody might be in a position to show that one of Packford’s major discoveries was moonshine – and in circumstances which would exhibit him as having possessed an embarrassing streak of ignorance, or as having been ludicrously credulous or culpably careless. Nothing of this sounds to me particularly likely, but it is more likely than the other obvious possibility.’
‘Which is?’
Rixon hesitated. ‘He might not have been frank about his indebtedness to another man’s work. That, of course, when sufficiently heinous, means sudden death to a scholar’s reputation. Or – yet again – he might have invented evidence to support one or another of his triumphant discoveries. If an exposure of anything of that sort were imminent, then certainly his greatness would be something it was time to say goodbye to.’
Appleby considered this. ‘And it is your own opinion, Dr Rixon, that something of the sort was actually blowing up?’
‘Decidedly not!’ Rixon spoke warmly. ‘Quite the contrary. We all had the impression that poor Packford was in a mood of very considerable confidence, that he believed himself to have made a most important new discovery, and that he was on the brink of letting us in on the secret. Sometimes it amused him to let the new cat out of the bag at a simple jump. But more commonly it emerged by inches. There was undoubtedly something of the showman in Packford, and he liked to work up curiosity. It was a trait in him that irritated scholars of the severer and bleaker sort.’
‘But he hadn’t in fact revealed anything specific? His hints were still vague?’
Rixon took time to consider this question. ‘I can’t speak for Limbrick,’ he said. ‘Have you met Limbrick yet?’
‘No, I haven’t. But he’s the next person I must get hold of. I understand that, among other things, he is an important collector? Professor Prodger seems to take a poor view of him.’
‘Prodger has become very eccentric, as you must have observed. Limbrick is a wealthy man, who certainly collects manuscripts and rare books and so forth. But he is also something of a scholar in his own right, or he would not be one of our small society.’
‘The Bogdown Society?’
Rixon laughed. ‘Ah, so you have heard of that? It is only an occasional joke, you know – a mere bagatelle, as they used to say. We are held together, I hope, by more solid interests as well. But what I was saying, Sir John, is this: that Packford may have told Limbrick rather more than the rest of us. That, indeed, is my impression. No doubt you will investigate it.’
‘No doubt I shall.’ Appleby suddenly looked full at Rixon. ‘Did you know that Packford had a vivid interest in the subject of literary forgery?’
‘I have heard him talk about it.’ Rixon was startled. ‘Perhaps he may have projected one of his attractive lighter monographs on the subject.’
‘When I called on him in Italy, not very long ago, he made a joke about it. He suggested that he and I should set up as forgers together.’
Rixon laughed – perhaps a shade uneasily. ‘That is quite like Packford, is it not? His sense of humour was often freakish, but never subtle.’
‘I agree. But in detection, you know – which was my trade until I was nobbled by rather dull administration – one learns always to attend to a man’s jokes.’
‘Ah!’ Rixon nodded competently. ‘The Freudian theory of wit, eh? Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.’
‘Perhaps you can call it that. It’s perhaps true that a joke often represents the bringing out for an airing of something slightly disreputable or risky. The joke-element is a sort of disguise.’
Canon Rixon weighed this for a moment, and then seemed to decide that it called for a distinct change of tone. ‘I don’t like anything of this,’ he said. ‘It is trafficking in suspicions in a fashion that is extremely repugnant to me. And I don’t believe that Lewis Packford had the slightest inclination to perpetrate literary forgeries. I blame myself for having entered into the subject.’
‘You would be quite wrong if you refused to do so.’ Appleby had now stood up, and he spoke energetically. ‘It seems to me that Packford’s death still preserves a grave element of unresolved doubt. You would act very improperly if you were not as fully communicative as it is possible to be.’
‘That is perfectly true.’ Rixon, too, rose. ‘But I don’t believe that poor Packford had a hankering after forgery, all the same.’
Appleby shook his head a shade impatiently. ‘My dear sir, I am not myself asserting anything of the sort. It may have been something quite different that prompted him to discuss the subject with me. I see at least two further possibilities.’ Appleby paused. ‘And one of them strikes me as really interesting.’
The trouble about this nebulous affair – Appleby told himself as he took a turn round the garden – consists in its being so full of implausible possibilities. Make the one assumption that Mrs Husbands is for some reason unreliable about the ink on that postcard, and all sorts of queer notions are in order.
Take, for instance, Mrs Husbands herself. It’s perfectly clear that she had strong feelings about her employer. One can’t, indeed, speak confidently of an emotional relationship between them. That may have existed; but, even if it did, it can’t at present be identified. On the other hand, the intensity of feeling may have been all on the lady’s side, and Lewis Packford scarcely aware of it. Mrs Husbands is the younger by a good many years, but she may nevertheless have built up for herself a maternal rather than an amorous role. It’s clear that she was instantly prompted to an overwhelming jealousy of the two young women who had so strangely turned up with intimate claims upon Packford. That fits in reasonably enough with either interpretation of the nature of her feelings. But when you come to the hypothesis of murder – of a full-blown
crime passionnel
– it’s quite a different matter. Women don’t possess themselves of army revolvers and shoot their dream sons. But they do occasionally behave in that way with their dream lovers.