Appleby Talks Again

by Michael Innes

  “So now we know.” Holiday turned to confront Bear and Sambrook. “We know that we have two young criminals in this room.”

  “On the contrary.” Appleby, seeming to take an aimless stroll, planted himself before the door. “We know that we have one elderly one.” He turned to the Minister. “The missing valve, I am sorry – or glad – to say, is in the Director’s pocket. He put it there the instant he entered the strongroom, and just before giving the yelp that brought Sambrook in after him. It’s there still, because he’s had no opportunity to part with it since.”

  For a moment the Minister appeared incredulous. Then he took a glance at Holiday and saw that it was the truth. “But this ribbon?”

  “Too clumsy for words. Bear, if guilty, could have erased the tune from it in seconds simply by pressing a switch. Holiday had it prepared, and planted it where I found it. He was good enough to tell me that he frequently called in here.” Appleby paused. “First to create Bear’s musical alibi and then make sure that it should appear to break down was a clever idea in a general way. But the execution has been merely childish.”

  “But can you be sure–?”

  “I know it was Holiday who hid the thing where I found it, simply because he guided me to the hiding-place. That’s why I was so quick. You know hypersensitive people who, as a parlour game, can find any object hidden in a room from the tiny, involuntary and unconscious hints that the hiders betray? It’s the same, I assure you, with a trained detective. Holiday thought he was sitting there immobile and poker-faced, letting me find what he had planted in my own good time. But I can tell you that within ten minutes he was virtually shouting at me: ‘Look there!’ So I looked.”

  Appleby didn’t move from the door. “Minister, will you be good enough to take up the telephone and call the Yard?”

  TOM, DICK AND HARRY

  “Old Josiah Hopcutt”, Appleby said, “was a prosperous manufacturer. And he continued prosperous when he had ceased to manufacture anything except large-scale tedium for the people looking after him. He lived on into old age, that is to say, in a semi-embalmed condition in an enormous villa in Harrogate.”

  “Was he Hopcutt’s Hosiery?” I asked.

  “He was. His whole career might be described as a sort of mission. He persuaded the women of England that they had legs, and a moral duty to display them. Not that Hopcutt wasn’t rather a stuffy old boy himself. Very strict views on propriety, and so forth. And his only known exercise of the sense of humour – if it can be called that – was in the names he gave his three sons. He had them christened Tom, Dick and Harry.”

  “They were triplets?”

  “Not a bit of it. He just seemed to know that his excellent wife was going to bear him three sons, and went ahead on that basis. There were no daughters, by the way. Mrs Hopcutt died giving birth to Harry, and that finished the family. And the boys, I think, grew up not caring for their father very much.”

  Appleby paused for a moment, and I asked one of those questions with which I like to help him along. “And the hosiery business? Did Tom, Dick and Harry take to that?”

  “Decidedly not. Getting the glamour into wool and lisle and silk and nylon didn’t appeal to any of them. If Tom had any interest in legs, it wasn’t in calculating what could be done for them at fourteen-and-eleven the pair. He married a chorus-girl, was divorced, and then took himself off to Canada.”

  “In disgrace with his father?”

  “I think in no more than mild disgrace. The old chap, although strict, was not fanatical. Tom was really called away by a lust for adventure, and in one way and another he contrived to lead an uncommonly dangerous life. He made one trip home, and it revealed him as having turned into a handsome, bearded, frontier-forwarding type. Then off he went again.”

  “And Dick?”

  “Dick too was enterprising in his way – although his history is a sad one. He lost his sight in a Commando raid. That was rather bad, because he’d wanted to be a painter. However, he hitched on to a group of scientists engaged in acoustic research, and developed to a preternatural degree of sensitiveness what was already a fine ear. Moreover he was intelligent, so he quickly got hold of what this branch of science was about, and be had the satisfaction of knowing that he might make important contributions to it. He lived in almost complete retirement, dedicated to this work.”

  “Which leaves us,” I said, “with Harry.”

  “You’re quite right.” Appleby gave what I sometimes feel is a rather unnecessary smile. “So it does.

  “Harry was some sort of unsuccessful broker, and his way of life was, for the most part, as prosaic as his father’s had been. Nevertheless he had a streak of his brothers’ enterprise and adventurousness, and it came out in a hobby to which he was passionately given. Harry was a speleologist.”

  “Caves?”

  “Caves and underground rivers and so on. It’s quite a widespread activity nowadays, and Harry belonged to several clubs and societies concerned with that sort of exploration. But he was also a bit of a lone wolf, and would go off from time to time and do a bit on his own. One would be inclined to say that nothing more dangerous could be conceived.

  “I haven’t mentioned that Harry was unmarried. He lived by himself, looked after only by an elderly housekeeper, and he was quite free to develop this subterranean obsession as he pleased. Eventually it got so that he was off on it every other weekend. Well, he was just packing up for one of these occasions when the housekeeper brought him a telegram. He opened it and gave an exclamation of annoyance. ‘The Savage,’ he said. ‘Arrived at Southampton. What a confounded nuisance!’

  “The housekeeper, who hadn’t been with Harry very long, didn’t make much of this. ‘My brother Tom,’ he said, ‘back in this country and proposing to visit me. He must look after himself for a few days elsewhere. When he calls, say I may possibly be back on Monday.’ And Harry finished packing and went off, having scribbled down an address in Yorkshire that would find him.”

  “Did he always leave an address?” I asked.

  “Apparently he did – although sometimes he would wander on and become untraceable. There was certainly nothing out-of-the-way in his going off as he had done. And what he had said prepared his housekeeper for the bearded figure that turned up only a few hours later. The woman explained that her employer had gone off after receiving the telegram, and that he would probably be back in three or four days. The Savage didn’t seem too pleased, but he cleared out at once, simply saying that he would call his brother up on the telephone.”

  Appleby paused as if to consider how to tell the rest of his story. “Well, Harry turned up in Yorkshire, and spent a couple of days with a group of enthusiasts who were old acquaintances of his. Then he moved on, with only a vague reference to his perhaps having a look at the Grendale Cleft.”

  “What was that?”

  “Some means of getting down to a system of underground caves in Cumberland. After that, as you may perhaps guess, Harry Hopcutt simply vanished. Eventually the police were called in.”

  “Yourself?”

  Appleby shook his head. “A young fellow called Howley. It seems that for quite a time Harry’s housekeeper took no alarm, since she was accustomed to these disappearances and silences. It was the Savage who eventually kicked up a fuss. He had rung up several times with inquiries. Eventually, and when nearly three weeks had elapsed, he presented himself at Scotland Yard and demanded action. Nobody could say he was making an unnecessary fuss. A hunt for Harry was instituted all over the country. What was eventually found was some clothes, a rucksack, and a frayed rope.”

  “At that Grendale Cleft?”

  “No – but at a similar spot, much more remote and dangerous, called the Gimlet. The discovery meant that Harry had vanished for ever. Alph the sacred river itself was not less likely to give up its dead than were the waters beneath that ghastly shaft.

  “What followed was commonplace enough. Family solicitors took charge, and the Bear
ded Savage moved into Harry’s flat in order to straighten things up. It was there that this young Detective-Sergeant of ours, Brian Howley, made a final call on him. The Savage had offered a reward for any information leading to the discovery of his brother, and it was simply Howley’s duty to explain that the police had done the whole job and there was nobody to make a claim. This took him five minutes – and would have taken him only four, had there not been a very brief interruption while the Savage took a telephone call. ‘Yes,’ he had said into the instrument, ‘Tom Hopcutt speaking.’ He had repeated this, waited, and then put down the receiver. ‘Odd,’ he had said casually to Howley in his Canadian accent. ‘A long-distance call. But the fellow rang off.’”

  Appleby paused. “Howley thought nothing of it. But, within a matter of hours, the Bearded Savage was in gaol.”

  I was startled. “He had killed Harry?”

  “My dear fellow, he was Harry. Surely that’s clear enough?”

  “You can’t do much in a false beard,” Appleby explained, “except briefly and as tour de force. Well, it was like that Harry presented himself to his own housekeeper, after having sent himself the telegram. Then he went off to Yorkshire, showing among his friends in his proper identity. After that he went into seclusion and grew the real beard – making those occasional telephone inquiries of the housekeeper, and faking matters at the Gimlet, meanwhile. Once the beard was established, he was ready to make his permanent appearance in Tom’s shoes.”

  “But why? What was this in aid of?”

  “He had discovered that Tom had died in Canada – but in circumstances so obscure that nothing would ever be heard of it. And by himself becoming Tom, he bypassed Dick as his father’s heir. Or he would have done, if he hadn’t been found out.”

  “And how, my dear Appleby, was he found out?”

  “Dick’s ear. Harry was reckoning on Dick’s blindness – but he hadn’t thought about that. It was Dick on the telephone, and Dick knew Harry had answered it, despite his attempted Canadian accent. Of course the moment we started investigating, the bogus Savage was done for.”

  THE LOMBARD BOOKS

  “Some of the objects are a little problematical, I admit.” Sir John Appleby let his eye travel over what he called his museum.

  “For instance, that perfectly innocent-looking copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. What do you make of it?”

  I peered at the volume cautiously. “Nothing whatever. But I remember a famous sentence in it. ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.’ So I hope its associations are not of a kind that Miss Austen would have deprecated.” I picked up the book. “It looks harmless enough.”

  Appleby grinned. “As a matter of fact, it’s an infernal machine.”

  “Bless my soul!” I made to drop the thing hastily. Then, thinking better of this, I laid it carefully back in its place. “The villain who contrived it must have had a most perverted sense of humour.”

  Appleby shook his head. “I don’t think there was much humour involved. And I may say there were more than a dozen of these infernal machines. This just happens to be the one I begged for my little collection. Have another look at it.”

  I took it up again cautiously.

  “It’s quite harmless now?”

  “Well – that depends.”

  “The weight seems to be about what one would expect.” I opened the cover and stared in some perplexity at a first printed page. “But, my dear Appleby, this is Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.” And I flicked over the pages. “In fact, it’s a perfectly normal book.”

  Appleby was clearly delighted. “You would undoubtedly have said the same of the Tom Jones, the Tristram Shandy, the Pickwick Papers, and all the others. But they were, I assure you, infernal machines. Very infernal machines. But let me explain.

  “You will no doubt recall the name of Lord Lombard? When the English language still kept its genius for understatement he would have been called a captain of industry. In point of fact he was pretty well its field-marshal. Moreover – to keep the figure for a moment – he had once carried his future baton in what was decidedly a private’s knapsack. Lombard was a self-made man.”

  “There isn’t, is there,” I said, “much understatement in that traditional expression? Hyperbole could scarcely go further.”

  “No doubt.” I felt Appleby was not disposed to do justice to the neatness of the point I had made. “But the old boy had really gone one better. He had contrived several self-made Lombards.

  “The industrial empire he had built up was immense. It branched out into all sorts of widely differing activities – and he was said to keep almost every one of them under his own direct control. Then he was a philanthropist in the big, old-fashioned way, and had strong feelings about educating the masses. He founded technical schools and colleges dealing with pretty well everything under the sun. He collected paintings, and I believe he had a very genuine if rather naïve delight in them. And he collected books.”

  “Did he,” I asked, “collect Jane Austen?”

  “Ah” – and Appleby smiled – “that brings me to the story.”

  “Old Lombard collected books just as one more rich man’s hobby, no doubt. But there was nothing he was more proud of than the fact that as a young man he had been a great reader. He had read the English classics as part of some early scheme of self-improvement. And although his later career had left him little time to follow this up, he was proud of what he remembered. His talk was often, in a very simple way, literary talk. And when he went about starting his evening schools and opening his free libraries and so forth, he would bring in these old memories with genuine enthusiasm and great effect.

  “In his old age – for he had come to that – he lived with an unmarried sister, who was a clever woman a good deal younger than himself, and with a middle-aged nephew, Amos Lombard.

  “Amos held various subordinate responsibilities in some of his uncle’s concerns, and it was natural to suppose that eventually he would come into full control. But old Lombard showed no disposition to get out of the saddle, and when he did give Amos a new job from time to time, it was generally just on the philanthropic and educational side.

  “The venerable gentleman was full of drive still, and when he took time off from the detailed direction of a large whack of England’s heavy industry, it was to make speeches to apprentices on self-help, and how to gain a liberal education after working hours, and the profit and pleasure of reading George Eliot and Dickens and the rest – all backed up with plenty of those well-remembered quotations. He looked as if he was going on for ever. And then – rather rapidly – he began to crack up. It was decidedly queer.”

  I didn’t make much of this. “Queer?” I asked Appleby. “If Lombard was an old man at the end of a tremendously hardworking life, wasn’t it natural enough?”

  “That was what I said myself when his sister first came to me. It wasn’t, by the way, an official visit. Miss Lombard had formed some connection with my wife’s family, and they sent her along. I listened to her at first with no more than politeness, I must confess. But in the end I was convinced that there was something in her story. Her brother’s mind and memory, she said, were still perfectly sound and clear. But he had unaccountably begun to lose all confidence in himself.”

  I considered this. “In his power to conduct all his industrial enterprises? That sort of thing?”

  “It was more or less pervasive. From a thoroughly efficient and rather harshly dominating personality, Lombard was turning into a weak and indecisive old man who appeared to harbour some shameful secret. And Miss Lombard was convinced that his nephew Amos was responsible.”

  “What a sinister notion! Did Amos appear to be a villain?”

  “Well, yes – I’d say he did. He struck me as having the family brains, a great deal of ambition, and a growing determination to get his uncle shelved and to take charge himself.

  “They lived in the same house, and I inquired into the extent of their ass
ociation. They met, it seemed, for business in the morning, with secretaries and so on present, and with Amos for the most part simply receiving instructions about this and that. In the evening they dined en famille with Miss Lombard, and then the two men would spend an hour together in a sociable way in the old man’s library. Old Lombard still liked his little literary chat.”

  “Was it possible that, during this regular period at which they were alone together, Amos had hit upon some technique for getting his uncle down? This was Miss Lombard’s suggestion. It seemed fantastic, but I felt it must be investigated.

  “I set about inquiring after any new activities to which Amos might have been giving himself lately. And I found a very curious one: certain of the higher branches of printing.”

  I looked at Appleby in astonishment. “He took to it himself?”

  “No. He simply got what he wanted through one of those technical colleges. You know how, when a few pages are missing from a rare and valuable book, they are sometimes supplied in facsimile? Under cover of that fact, Amos faked a number of his uncle’s favourite books – for example, this edition of Mansfield Park.”

  “Faked them! You mean–?”

  “Yes. He ingeniously falsified the stories in one or another prominent particular, upon which any sane man would feel he could trust his memory with confidence. If, for instance, you read this Mansfield Park you would find that Fanny marries Henry Crawford.”

  “Good lord!”

  “Precisely. Amos, you see, would get his uncle involved in argument, work round to one of these fakes, and then confound him on the evidence of his own eyes. Old Lombard was on the verge of being persuaded that his mind must be going, and that it was indeed high time he should retire.”

  Appleby paused. “I shall always remember his relief and astonishment when I gave him an authentic copy of Jane Austen’s novel.”

  THE MOUSE-TRAP