‘Packford was hinting he was on to something big?’
‘Certainly. It was no doubt the occasion of his bringing us together. He liked to work up excitement, poor fellow, by dropping a word here and there.’
‘I’ve already gathered there was something of the sort in the wind.’ Appleby paused. Edward Packford, he was thinking, was taking rather a long time to appear. ‘But when you spoke of the mystery, Professor, I thought you were referring to the circumstances of Packford’s death. Would you judge them to be mysterious?’
‘He is said to have shot himself, poor fellow. But I suspect foul play, Dr Appleby. One must expect trouble, surely, if one has shady characters about the place.’
‘Shady characters?’
‘Certainly. Limbrick and Canon Rixon, you know. It is true that they have been members, more or less, of our small informal group for some time. But it is a different matter having them under one’s own roof – eh? It is very clear, to my mind, where the finger of suspicion points.’
‘You suspect one of these two – Limbrick or Rixon – of having murdered Packford?’
‘Both of them, I should say. I would not care to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.’
‘This is a very grave suggestion, Professor Prodger.’ Appleby didn’t manage to speak with much conviction. It seemed impossible not to conclude that this old person was merely raving. There had been force in Cavill’s implication that he would find a mild madness pervasive at Urchins.
‘As a matter of fact, we have had the police here. They began, very properly, to make inquiries. But they seem to have gone away again.’
‘If it’s any satisfaction to you, they’re back.’ Appleby said this firmly. ‘I’m a policeman myself.’
‘You astonish me, my dear sir.’ Prodger said this not at all like a man who is astonished. ‘I understood you to say that you were a student of bibliopegy. But no matter. Ah, here is our host.’
Appleby rose from his chair and turned to meet Edward Packford. And for a moment he experienced a species of confusion which he found it hard to account for. It was like being unexpectedly confronted with a disturbing ocular phenomenon. Edward Packford seemed to exist in some abnormal relationship with physical space, like a figure set by a primitive painter in an imperfectly organized perspective scene. But in another second the explanation of all this turned out to be quite simple. Edward was an almost exact miniature reproduction of his dead brother. He had the same features, the same chunky proportions, and the same way of carrying himself. But he was quite small. So he presented himself to Appleby’s vision as farther off than the available space permitted.
‘How do you do?’ Edward advanced and shook hands. He even had Lewis Packford’s rather clumsy movements and scattered manner. But he had quite a different eye. It was keen and briskly purposive – the eye, Appleby told himself, of a man ruled by the practical intellect. And he certainly wasn’t under the illusion that his visitor dealt in bibliopegy. ‘I am very glad you have come down,’ he said. ‘I am far from satisfied about the manner of Lewis’ death.’ He turned to Prodger. ‘Sherry in the library, Professor.’
‘Ah! There is much to be said for that. There is much to be said for a glass of sherry before lunch.’ And Prodger, with only a slight delay occasioned by his again dropping his books and glasses, toddled obediently off. Appleby wondered why Edward Packford, who could briskly dismiss a guest this way, should have continued to entertain at Urchins a number of his brother’s acquaintances who might much more properly have taken themselves off.
But an answer to this, as it happened, turned up at once. ‘You will find everybody here,’ Edward said, ‘who was staying with Lewis when he died. I persuaded them to stay on for a little, even after the police and so forth appeared to have lost interest in us. I had a notion, you see, that the interest might revive again. And I was right – for here you are.’
‘Here I am – if you will bear with me.’ As Appleby expressed himself in this amiably unofficial way he continued to size Edward up. He was a man entirely composed and sure of himself; and if his manner was somewhat sombre and reserved, that was natural enough in one who had just lost a brother in circumstances such as the present. Certainly he had every appearance of owning both the will and ability to go straight to the point; and after the maunderings of Professor Prodger this came to Appleby as something of a relief. ‘Mr Packford,’ he said, ‘may I ask you at once why you are not satisfied with what are at least the surface indications in this sad business?’
‘It wasn’t like Lewis.’ Edward waved Appleby into a chair, sat down himself, and then leant forward in an attitude that emphasised the forthright quality of his words. ‘It was damned unlike him. I can’t see him blowing his own brains out, even if things were going dead against him. And they weren’t. On the contrary, everything was coming his way.’
‘I seem to have gathered that it was two wives that were coming his way. Wouldn’t you be inclined to admit that as a somewhat adverse circumstance, Mr Packford?’
‘It was a thoroughly queer one, anyway. And of course Lewis had been almost unbelievably foolish. But the thing isn’t utterly out of character, as taking his own life because of such a scrape would be.’
‘Were you yourself aware that he had committed bigamy?’
‘Yes and no, Sir John. That’s to say, Lewis had told me about the situation, but I hadn’t quite managed to believe it. That sounds silly. But I really had a vague feeling that he was exaggerating. He was given to exaggeration.’
‘You mean that you doubted whether he had really gone through what purported to be a legal form of marriage with this person called Alice, and thus brought himself within the reach of the law?’
‘Just that. I suspected some freakish and – no doubt – highly reprehensible joke or mummery by which this girl had been taken in after a fashion he honestly hadn’t intended her to be. Something like that. I saw the situation vaguely as a scrape. And I strongly advised him to take discreet legal advice. Whether he did or not, I don’t know. The next thing was that each of these women was tipped off about the situation.’
Appleby nodded. ‘So I’ve gathered. They received anonymous letters, and down they both came to Urchins?’
‘Just that. And then my brother was found dead, with this note beside him. It all looks like cause and effect, but I’m not happy about it.’
‘I think I can understand that.’ Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘Do I understand that you were at Urchins yourself when your brother died?’
‘I wish I had been. I might have been quite good at summary justice.’ Edward flashed this out with a sudden odd fire that set Appleby wondering. ‘But in point of fact I was in Paris on business, and had to fly back as soon as I got the news. No – there were only his housekeeper and servants, the two ladies who had arrived so disconcertingly, and this queer collection of Lewis’ precious cronies.’
‘I see.’ Appleby smiled. ‘Would I be right in guessing that you didn’t much share your brother’s interests, and that all these people aren’t your sort of crowd?’
‘Certainly you’re right. I had a great regard for the distinction Lewis had gained, and I’ve no doubt that Prodger and the rest of them are extremely learned. But I’m no antiquarian myself.’
‘Apart from his little matrimonial problem, you’re not aware that your brother had any serious worries?’
Edward frowned. ‘I begin to think he might have had a bit of a headache over money – if he was capable of turning his attention to it. I’ll know more about that when his solicitor – a fellow called Rood – comes down with the will and so forth this evening. But it’s already my guess that things aren’t in a particularly good way.’
‘Your brother wasn’t much of a business man?’
‘Far from it. The truth is, Sir John, that there was a streak of irresponsibility running right through Lewis. It emerges startlingly in this matter of his first treating himself to a secret marriage and then – as if that wasn’t enough – adding a dash of bigamy.’
‘I suppose there’s no doubt that the lady called Ruth is the legal wife, and the other the bigamous one?’
Edward shook his head. ‘No doubt at all, I’d say. Mind you, I don’t altogether blame Lewis over Alice. She’s more my idea of a wife.’
‘I haven’t met Alice yet. But I don’t think too badly of Ruth.’ Appleby smiled. ‘Not that she’d be altogether my idea of a wife either.’
‘Ruth comes out of Lewis’ own stable. She’s a lady professor, you know. I’ve no doubt it was that sort of community of interests that gave Lewis the courage to make up to her in the first place. He was always damned shy of women. Believed they weren’t at all his cup of tea. But once he’d got going with Ruth he changed his mind. He liked women after all. He even discovered that he liked them best without professorial trimmings. The quintessential female was just his line – and it had taken him all those years to discover it. So when you see Alice you’ll agree it was natural that he should be knocked sideways.’
‘Such things happen, no doubt.’ Appleby was noncommittal. Edward’s attitude to his late brother seemed decidedly indulgent – whereas, actually, Lewis Packford’s conduct appeared worse the more carefully one looked at it. The notion that he had, so to speak, graduated from Ruth to Alice wasn’t pretty. And if Ruth herself had reason to see it in that light then it was almost inconceivable that her present appearance of charity in the whole matter was not in large measure assumed. Buried somewhere in her there must be a very different emotion.
Edward Packford was looking at his watch – with a gesture which precisely reminded Appleby of his brother’s doing the same thing in his summer-house on Garth. ‘Look here,’ Edward said, ‘we’ve time for a drink before lunch. But not, I’d suggest, with that crowd. I’m beginning to feel I’ve seen enough of them, and you can open your own innings over the cutlets. Come along to my small room.’
They entered the house and went down a long corridor with a vaulted ceiling. It appeared that parts of the interior had been transformed to suit the Gothic taste too. ‘I had this as a boy,’ Edward said as he threw open a door, ‘and Lewis always insisted that I should hang on to it. Not that I used it much when I was down here. For Lewis and I, you know, although our interests weren’t much in common, suffered each other’s company tolerably well.’ Edward was silent for a moment, and Appleby was aware that he had heard – perhaps, that he had been intended to hear – a careful understatement. And then at once his host walked over to a table and poured drinks, while Appleby glanced around the room. It was still essentially a schoolboy’s, with shabby books piled on the shelves, and colour prints and House photographs on the walls, and on the chimney-piece a mangy stuffed badger in a cracked glass case.
Edward pointed familiarly to a chair. ‘I know you’re not here to answer questions,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you’ll just tell me whether, in your opinion, there can really be anything in my feeling that we’re far from having got at the truth about Lewis’ death?’
‘There would have been no point in my coming down, Mr Packford, if I’d judged the matter closed.’
Edward nodded, and gave what sounded like a satisfied grunt. ‘But there was that damned postcard. Of course you’ll have heard about it. Is there any getting round it?’
‘I don’t want precisely to get round it. But I do want to give it a good deal of thought. You judged it to be certainly in your brother’s handwriting?’
‘Decidedly I did. But I’m no expert.’
‘Experts have agreed with you, it appears. Not that their opinion absolutely settles such a point. Tip-top forgers aren’t all that easily detected within the compass of a few scrawled words.’
‘So I’d suppose, Sir John. But the presence of such a person in the affair is rather an extravagant idea to start with. And then there’s the astonishing fact that Mrs Husbands, the housekeeper, actually observed the ink not yet dry on the card.’
‘Mrs Husbands might be imagining that. She satisfied my chap Cavill as reliable, I admit. But she is reporting on something which she thought she saw at a moment of terrific shock. And I assure you that people who appear entirely well-balanced may swear to the queerest things in such circumstances. Or again, this Mrs Husbands may be lying.’ Appleby paused. ‘But take the first possibility, and suppose that she was simply mistaken about the ink. And suppose at the same time that the writing is genuinely your brother’s. Is it particularly impressive evidence – evidence that is anything like conclusive?’
‘I don’t think it is – not in the circumstances. My brother, bless him, was always peddling Shakespeare. He was quite capable of sending off a postcard like that in half-a-dozen different situations – say to an unsatisfactory tradesman with whom he didn’t mean to deal again.
Farewell, a long farewell.
’ Edward’s voice had dropped, as if he were carefully controlling it. ‘I can just hear Lewis roaring with laughter at what he would consider an extremely good joke.’ He raised his glass and gazed into it sombrely. ‘But if Mrs Husbands is neither lying nor mistaken? Then we must accept it that Lewis–?’ Edward left his question unfinished.
‘I’m not at all sure that we must. But it’s not, if you will forgive me, a conjecture I want to take much farther at the moment. For a start, Mr Packford, I want to see the library – and Mrs Husbands.’
‘Prodger and his crew are in the library now. Perhaps after lunch–’
But Appleby shook his head. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll defer the business of meeting the rest of your house-party. Get them into lunch, then get me into the library. And then – yes, get this Mrs Husbands to bring me something there on a tray.’
‘But, dash it all, you haven’t come, my dear sir, to tinker with the clocks or tune the piano!’ Edward Packford’s sense of hospitable fitness was clearly disturbed.
‘I probably haven’t come to do anything so agreeable.’ Appleby had stood up, suddenly grim. ‘When I enter a house in the way of my profession, it would often be tolerably accurate to describe me as the man who has come about the drains.’
Edward Packford too had got to his feet. ‘Unsavoury excavations?’ he asked. ‘Well, that’s fair warning. And I can only say that I hope you will go through with them.’