‘You wouldn’t have said, sir, that he was of an enthusiastic temperament?’
‘Indeed I should. He was decidedly that.’
‘And sanguine? Constitutionally convinced that things would always turn out all right?’
Appleby nodded. ‘That too. I see you have formed a very good impression of him, Cavill.’
‘Then I don’t think it’s all quite so much out of the way as we might suppose. There’s a type of middle-aged man, you know, who’s just the kind of late starter we were talking about. He’s been firmly convinced all his days that he’s a born bachelor. It’s something he’s likely to be uneasy about, and you often find it going along with a rather secretive disposition.’
‘Packford had that – in a way. But it mostly connected itself with his work. As a man, he usually gave an impression of candour. He wouldn’t conceal his delights and triumphs.’
‘No doubt, sir. But I think our picture of him is building up very nicely.’ Cavill was now entirely happy. Psychological types were his great stand-by and he loved expounding them. A few minutes before, he had ignored an invitation to sit down. But now he tumbled into a chair and wagged a cheerfully egalitarian finger at the Assistant Commissioner. ‘One day this type of chap discovers that his doubts and distrusts of himself – in the matter of sex, that’s to say – are all moonshine, and that he’s been treating himself as an outsider for no good reason at all. It’s a discovery that will be very likely to throw him a bit off his balance. He decides that there’s nothing in the world to compete with the very simplest tumbling in the hay.’
Appleby smiled. ‘Your image doesn’t express the matter with much delicacy. But I follow you.’
‘And there’s almost no folly that such a man, more or less in the first flush of his discovery, won’t unhesitatingly commit. He’ll take a couple of girls in his stride.’
‘I admit that. And I’ll even agree that the man might conceivably be Lewis Packford. But surely, my dear fellow, he needn’t
marry
them both.’
‘He might possibly think it more correct – fairer all round.’ Cavill had offered this with every appearance of a serious contribution to the discussion. And Appleby himself saw that, fantastic as it might seem, Packford’s mind could really have worked that way. ‘And the ladies were unaware of each other’s existence?’ he asked.
‘Certainly they were – just as the rest of Packford’s acquaintance was unaware of the existence of either of them. I have a feeling that the whole crazy and dangerous proceeding was very much to the man’s taste. It answered to his love of secrecy, and he probably enjoyed laughing up his sleeve about it.’
‘Laughing up his sleeve?’ It was a phrase, Appleby recalled, that had somehow turned up during his own last conversation with Packford. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t a secret that he could have any rational hope of keeping indefinitely. Bluntly put, our eminent scholar was heading for gaol.’
‘Of course he was. And as for the ladies, sir, they had in fact just found out. And they had turned up to have the matter out with Packford. That was the precipitating occasion of his suicide.’
Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘It takes some believing, you know. It was only an hour ago that I was talking to Packford’s solicitor, a fellow called Rood–’
‘Ah, Rood,’ Cavill spoke tartly. ‘I know
him
.’
‘Well, Rood said nothing of all this. I can’t believe he knows anything about it. And yet he strikes me as a thoroughly acute man.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘And I still find it uncommonly difficult to think of Packford in this sort of context at all. He was a scholar, Cavill. When I saw him in Italy I’m quite sure that he was utterly absorbed in some plan for discovering whether Shakespeare had ever been there – or at least a project of that kind. There was certainly something else just tugging at his mind. But it’s a bit stiff to believe it was a superfluity of wives.’
‘I’ve no doubt, sir, that he was able to leave that behind him in England – at least to some extent. It may even have been his motive for spending the summer in Italy – rather unobtrusively, as I gather it was. His rapturous experiences were over, and he was only anxious that neither of the ladies should come up with him.’
Appleby shrugged his shoulders. ‘I can only say, Cavill, that I’ve seen some queer things in my time. But this is about the queerest.’
‘Well, now, that was my feeling about Urchins.’
‘Urchins?’
‘Packford’s house in the country. I suppose it belongs to his brother now.’
‘Packford had a brother?’
‘A younger brother called Edward. A bit of an eccentric, too, it seems to me. Insisting, for instance, that all those professors and so forth should stop on. Scarcely decent, after such a death. Particularly with the two wives having turned up. Craziest place in England at the moment, I say. But you can take it from me, sir, that there hasn’t been a murder.’
‘That’s not this fellow Rood’s opinion. He has a story about Packford having acquired something important from an impoverished nobleman of Ver–’
‘Yes, sir, I know all about that.’ Cavill’s interruption was at once highly improper and an indication that he was now viewing Appleby from a mood of sunny tolerance. ‘I think, perhaps, you ought to look at page two.’
Appleby picked up the file again and looked at page two. There was rather a long silence. Page two recorded that Lewis Packford had left a written paper which had been found beside his body. It had been scrawled on a postcard, and read simply:
Farewell, a long farewell!
Appleby stared at this. ‘You know that it’s a quotation?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir. I looked it up.’
‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness
. It’s rather a magniloquent last message to be left even by quite a well-known scholar, isn’t it? But he was always quoting Shakespeare, and in a hit-or-miss way.’ Appleby looked up at Cavill, frowning. ‘It’s his writing? I’d have said it was – so far as my memory goes.’
Cavill nodded. ‘It’s his writing, all right. We’ve had two experts on it. Only your friend Rood, sir, declares it to be a forgery. Quite nasty about it, he was. Dignity injured. A touchy type. Claims to be a bit of an expert himself.’
‘And when you disregarded him, he tackled me. But he didn’t tell me about all this.’ Appleby pointed to the file again. ‘You say the scrawl reproduced here was lying beside the body?’
‘Just that.’
‘Do you see any significance in the fact that it was written on a postcard?’
‘Well, sir, it’s certainly a point worth pausing over. But I simply take it that a postcard was the first thing that came handy on his desk.’
‘There was other stationery there too?’
‘Certainly there was. Packford shot himself in his library, just like one of those baronets in a novel. And this postcard, and his fountain-pen, were lying on the desk.’
Appleby got up, walked to a window, and stared out at the London dusk.
‘Farewell, a long farewell
,’ he murmured.
‘Farewell, a long farewell
,
to all my greatness
.’ He turned and looked sharply at Cavill. ‘Has it occurred to you that what Packford wrote on that postcard was no more than a flowery way of saying
any
sort of goodbye? He was always – as I say – spouting Shakespeare. He may well have had the trick of regularly scribbling him too. Has it occurred to you that what we have here is something he might conceivably scrawl on some perfectly trivial and entirely innocent occasion?’
‘As far as an intention to commit suicide goes, the words are certainly not very explicit.’ Cavill’s body had stiffened in his chair as he gave this evasive answer, and Appleby realized that he was angry again. ‘They might, of course, be about something quite different. By jove, sir, what a subtle thought.’
‘Sorry,’ Appleby said. ‘Idiotic of me.’
‘Well, sir, I’m bound to say I did consider the point you raise. Old fragments of writing have been used in misleading contexts before now. I remember’ – Cavill smiled faintly – ‘your mentioning it in a lecture.’
‘Well, then – how do you meet the point?’
‘By believing the testimony of Packford’s housekeeper, who seems a perfectly respectable and reliable woman. It was she who heard the shot, and who ran to the library. Packford was slumped over his desk, and the postcard was on his writing-pad. The woman took a good straight look at it. And the ink was wet.’
Appleby took a long breath. ‘I don’t know much about your literature of baronets in libraries,’ he said. ‘But my guess is that you might search in vain for just that.’
But Cavill was unimpressed by this sally. ‘The point is this, sir,’ he said a shade didactically. ‘We have a confluence of improbabilities. That this scrawl of Packford’s is
not
Packford’s is an improbability, since we have the opinion of two of our own experts to set over against the opinion of Rood, who is a mere crank. That the scrawl does
not
refer to his intention of taking his own life is a second improbability, much more likely to turn up in fiction than in fact. And that the respectable woman I have mentioned should be either mistaken or telling a blank lie is a third improbability. All this adds up, surely, to a very big improbability indeed.’
‘But Packford’s bigamy is as big an improbability as any, my dear Cavill. And yet it is admittedly gospel. So we are reminded that highly improbable things do sometimes occur.’
‘That’s quite true, sir,’ Cavill – perhaps because he felt that he had really established his case – was now entirely patient. ‘And you’d find Urchins – if you went down there – pretty hard to believe in at the moment. But there it is. It’s a fact. And I’m not arguing that wildly improbable interpretations of evidence are not occasionally vindicated. But I am saying that this Packford business holds no further surprises. What they do about the dead man’s two wives and so forth is no business of ours – unless it becomes a question of whether the more recent of them knew what she was about. But that isn’t going to interest you or me.’
‘I agree with you there.’ Appleby had turned back to the window. ‘What was that you said about a collection of professors and such like?’
‘There was a sort of house-party, sir. People interested in Packford’s scholarly discoveries and so forth all gathered there by his invitation. That was the set-up when the thing happened. And Edward Packford has persuaded them to stay on for a little. The whole circus is there now.’
‘How very queer.’ Appleby had turned round again. ‘Cavill – you are sure the affair is closed? I mean – well, a fellow couldn’t go down and have another look?’
Cavill stood up and laughed. He laughed at the Assistant Commissioner with a pure affection that went to Appleby’s heart. It was one of those moments which, in a rather brittle, rather edgy organization, are worth living for. Then he picked up the file and placed it neatly in the centre of Appleby’s desk.
‘Good hunting, sir,’ Cavill said. And he went out of the room still laughing.
Neither Edward Packford nor the local police, when contacted by telephone, took any exception to the idea of further investigation. So Appleby went down by train next day – an antique mode of conveyance across England’s smaller distances for which he had a weakness that frequently cost him quite a lot of time. He changed trains at Sherborne and again at Little Urchins. When he got out at Deep Urchins a car was waiting for him. It seemed much as if he were paying the surviving Packfords a purely social visit.
The car was old and lethargic; the woman driving it appeared young and extremely brisk. She could hardly be the respectable housekeeper who figured among Cavill’s witnesses, so Appleby put her down as a secretary. She wasted no words, and they drove out of the little station yard in what looked like the beginnings of an oppressive silence. Although the young woman was, so to speak, at the receiving end of the encounter, and thus to be regarded as in possession of the initiative, Appleby thought that she was perhaps waiting until spoken to. Some secretaries were like that. Some were not.
‘A queer name,’ Appleby hazarded. ‘Deep Urchins, I mean.’
‘Poor Seth,’ the young woman said decisively.
‘I beg your pardon?’
The young woman took her eye from the road for a moment – she appeared to be unfamiliar with the car, which felt as if it might be a little unreliable in point of steering mechanism – and looked at Appleby in sharp appraisal. ‘I suppose you know,’ she said, ‘that Deep Urchins is Thomas Horscroft’s Nether Ladds?’
‘No. I’m afraid I don’t. But the circumstance is, of course, extremely interesting.’ Appleby was doing his best. ‘And I think you said something about Seth?’
‘Poor Seth Cowmeadow, who drowned himself in the pond at Nether Ladds, after letting himself get drunk at the “Welcome Home” and so failing to prevent the boar from eating his grandchild in its cradle.’
‘The boar’s grandchild?’
‘Seth Cowmeadow’s grandchild. But I see you haven’t read the book.’ The young woman took another – and this time frankly disapproving – glance at Appleby.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’
‘Professor Quelch of Princeton has just published an absorbingly interesting study of Horscroft’s public-houses. Of their names, that is to say. They prove to be deeply meaningful. The “Welcome Home,” for example. The name harbours a profound irony.’
‘I’m sure it does,’ Appleby said. The young woman, he now supposed, must be one of the learned members of the late Lewis Packford’s still lingering house-party. Her interest appeared to lie not quite in the dead man’s period. But perhaps she ran Shakespeare as a second string.
The car was now running through a hamlet which a signpost announced as Urchin Pydell. The young woman took a hand from the wheel and pointed at a displeasing hovel beyond a ditch. ‘The Hangman’s Cottage,’ she said. ‘You remember how–’
‘It ought to be condemned,’ Appleby said firmly. ‘A demolition order, or whatever it’s called, from the local authority. Either that, or a shilling charged to literary pilgrims at the door.’ He paused. ‘And we can’t be far from Gaffer’s Grave.’