Appleby at Allington

by Michael Innes

  Appleby had got out into the garden, and was at least enjoying solitude. The Allington treasure, he told himself, was so silly an idea that he had now better quit turning it over in his head. But was it? Tristram Travis and Hope Allington, for example. Perhaps they were worth thinking about a little more.

  Hope was clever and perhaps quite unscrupulous. Travis went beyond that. He was a thoroughly able young man – and from the first he had put on that curious throw-away turn. What he had managed eventually to put across was the appearance of more or less reluctantly – but still in that ineffective and silly-ass manner – abandoning a project which was still unaccomplished. With the death of Martin Allington – with the death of Martin Allington occurring just where it had occurred – it was a project which had become too ‘hot’ (as criminals were supposed to say) to be persevered with. The matter had been left like that – and with the implication that Sir John Appleby, a benevolent retired policeman, was going to forget about an abortive coup which in fact it had been a criminal act to conspire to bring about. That was a fair enough appraisal in itself. If the treasure was really there in the lake, it was no doubt incumbent upon Appleby to take some step for its lawful recovery. Travis had maintained the air of understanding something like that; at least of acknowledging that he would not now himself be allowed to get away with it. But he and Hope were not to be chivvied over what had been a mere prank in their heads. Yes, fair enough. But what if, in fact, Travis was being a little cleverer than that? What if this precious young couple had really found and made off with the treasure already?

  Appleby had an impulse to tell himself that it would still be no business of his. If it wasn’t that this unlikely yarn about a treasure had edged itself into the neighbourhood, so to speak, of two obstinately teasing fatalities, he would have no disposition to give it another thought. The private mores of the Allington family were no concern of his.

  Yet in this attitude (which would certainly have been censured by a High Court judge) he found that in fact it wasn’t at all easy to repose. He ought to have questioned Travis more closely – not that he had the slightest warrant so to do – about the actual documents which had put him in possession of the presumed facts of the case. It had been a circumstantial story: the diverted stream, the broken dam, the hazardous little voyage, the missed rendezvous. How could written evidence of such an episode have survived to the present day without being stumbled upon by somebody and consequent action being taken? It was true that Travis might well be the first trained archivist ever to have mulled over the Allington papers. But records dating from not earlier than the mid-seventeenth century are far from hard going to any reasonably educated man. Wasn’t it possible that Hope and her young man had been a little carried away by the natural optimism of youth? What Travis had come upon, wasn’t it probable that somebody else had come upon before him? And acted upon – very quietly? A title to ownership in treasure-trove was always a tricky business. In these circumstances, it would be to anybody’s interest to make no fuss. Anybody, that was to say, prepared a little to ignore the law would be likely simply to secure the stuff privately, and convert it to current coin unobtrusively and at leisure. There would then probably be no point in destroying whatever document had given the original pointer. Its subsequent discovery could do no harm; it might exist in such a context that its removal would leave an odd gap in something.

  Allingtons and Osbornes. Allingtons and Osbornes – and then an Allington again. An Osborne had collected Allington records and documents. An Osborne – Wilfred Osborne – had amiably turned them over to Owain Allington with the house. And Owain Allington – for the purpose of concocting a somewhat trivial and apparently vexatious entertainment – had given Tristram Travis the run of them. Anybody who had already irregularly possessed himself of the treasure would not seem to be likely to do that. But, if the treasure was already pocketed, what a splendid gesture of innocence!

  Suddenly Appleby came to a dead halt. Owain Allington, simply a distinguished scientist, had rather suddenly made rather a lot of money.

  But it didn’t make sense. Allington’s fortune had come to him – one had to presume – before he acquired Allington Park. And how could he have known anything about the treasure before that? Might he have been possessed, conceivably, of some secure family tradition, have consequently strained all his resources to gain possession of the place, and recouped himself almost at once by a little appropriate fishing in the lake? Only a lot of investigation could answer these questions. And investigation was something that Appleby had no title to undertake.

  And yet – by an odd irony – Allington had been more or less begging him to turn investigator. What he was to investigate, indeed, was something totally different; was a supposedly sinister element in Martin Allington’s death. And yet – come to think of it – not totally different. There was a tiny link between Martin’s death and the treasure. Martin had been drowned at the very spot where the treasure was alleged to lie, or to have lain. The link was totally without meaning on any hypothesis that Appleby could frame. The merest coincidence alone could be involved. Only Appleby, as it happened, had trained himself through a long professional career to distrust coincidence as soon as he became aware of it.

  And, of course, there had been another coincidence. Allington Park and its surrounding countryside were quite as peaceful places as even Colonel Pride liked to think. Mysterious events might be described as pretty well unknown. But in the same twenty-four hours – quite conceivably, in the very hour – that Martin Allington had met what must at least be called a rather inexplicable accident another man had died in a tolerably strange fashion. And that other man, the bizarrely named Knockdown, turned out to have a criminal record, and one involving violence. This had to be called a coincidence too.

  ‘My dear John, wouldn’t you say that our hour is almost come?’ It was Wilfred Osborne who had appeared at Appleby’s side. ‘And Judith, who has been mysteriously invisible for some time, is now talking to our friend Barford. I should say they have now reached about the seventeenth green. Might we not rescue her?’

  ‘I think we well might.’

  ‘And make our farewells. To some extent one ought to fall in with a fellow’s whims, no doubt, when his nephew and heir has just been dragged out of a lake. But there are limits to my mind, and they exclude the necessity of lingering to partake of a cold collation.’

  ‘Sandwiches, I believe.’

  ‘Exactly. And I don’t want them. Too much like something or other in Hamlet.’ Osborne paused in an effort of recollection. ‘Wonderful play that. But I’m not at all clear what has put it in my head.’

  ‘Funeral baked meats, I think.’ Appleby moved off on the expedition which was to rescue Judith. ‘By the way, Wilfred, can you tell me just how Owain Allington made his money? It isn’t something that pure scientists often very notably do.’

  ‘He wasn’t pure. Or he didn’t stay pure. He went into industry.’

  ‘You mean he gave up physics altogether?’

  ‘Oh, no – nothing like that. Of course I don’t in the least understand such things. But I gather that he went into the industrial applications of his own advanced research at a very high level. They’d pay him the moon for that, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Something near the moon, perhaps.’ Appleby sounded unconvinced. ‘But would that really enable him to buy Allington Park?’

  ‘I suppose so. I’ll tell you just what he paid, if you like.’ Osborne did so. ‘A tidy sum, from my point of view, even after the various debts and encumbrances were discharged. But Allington could have earned it, I suppose, if he had something really top-of-the-market to peddle.’

  ‘He could have earned it, conceivably – although it doesn’t seem to me likely.’ Appleby came suddenly to a halt. ‘But he couldn’t have kept it! I wonder why that didn’t occur to me before?’

  ‘But he didn’t keep it.’ Osborne chuckled innocently. ‘He paid most of it over to me. And I liv
e on what was left after I’d settled up the damned bills.’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’ Appleby had forgotten Judith, now doubtless listening to George Barford getting down a conclusive putt at the eighteenth. He was excited and perplexed. ‘Wilfred, do you pay surtax still?’

  ‘Lord, no! Never did – not even when it began at about twopence. When I was keeping the estate going, John, I was lucky if I ended the year with a couple of thousand and my own potatoes. But I don’t see–’

  ‘Allington could get some way on borrowed money, no doubt. But if he was running along as a professor, or whatever he was, on nothing much, and suddenly earned even quite enormous sums, I’d be very surprised to hear he was in a position to buy this estate as a result. Taxation would simply rule it out. That sort of thing can’t happen in what Pride calls our socialist society. Only a legacy or inheritance would do it–’

  ‘What about a Nobel Prize – something like that?’

  ‘It would go quite a way.’ Appleby was rather surprised by this informed suggestion. ‘But I’m pretty sure he has never won anything of the sort. A legacy or inheritance is the only answer – or some really large sum quite irregularly acquired.’

  ‘Some sort of fiddle, as they say?’ Wilfred Osborne was alarmed. ‘That doesn’t mean the Treasury or something could try to get it back from me?’

  ‘It’s highly improbable.’ Appleby found that he had to laugh at this idea. And then a thought struck him. ‘Wilfred, do you mind answering another question? When Allington did buy the place, can you remember if the entire purchase price was paid over before he actually gained possession?’

  ‘Good Lord, yes! My legal chaps saw to that. Excellent people. Been going to them for generations. Thoroughly reliable. Not like all those London sharks. Of course I was in their hands, and I couldn’t tell you just how Allington raised what was required. But every penny had been paid before he ever entered the place except to inspect it, or as a guest.’

  ‘We’d better move on, or Judith will be handed over to Lethbridge.’

  ‘We mustn’t allow that.’ Osborne chuckled with gentle malice. ‘I’ve just had him. He’s the biggest bore of the lot. And his wife makes the most appalling noises. Laughter, apparently. But I’d keep her in the stables, if she belonged to me.’

  ‘That’s a most uncharitable remark.’

  ‘So it is, John.’ Osborne seemed genuinely abashed. ‘Do you know? I believe there’s something about this place now that leads to that sort of thing. Let’s get out.’

  4

  Somebody had hauled down the flag which Owain Allington – perhaps through a mild delusion of grandeur – was accustomed to fly when he was in residence at Allington Park. Appleby wondered whether it would be hoisted again next day at half-mast.

  ‘It’s all very curious,’ Judith said, as she came up. ‘They none of them seem to have cared for Martin Allington at all. And yet–’

  ‘But his uncle cared for him,’ Wilfred Osborne interrupted. ‘He was going to hand him the poor old place on a plate.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you’d liked the idea, at all, Wilfred.’ It was Appleby who said this, and he glanced curiously at the poor old place’s former owner.

  ‘You wouldn’t expect me to be enthusiastic, my dear John, one way or the other. Certainly I haven’t been feeling about it melodramatically. Nothing of that sort.’

  ‘Melodramatically?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Well, you know, hoping that each successive heir would drop dead, or anything of that sort.’ Osborne produced this strange remark in his most ingenuous manner. ‘But, as I was saying, Owain Allington seemed to be able to take his nephew. Doted on him, in fact.’

  ‘I suppose so. At least it’s the appearance of the thing.’ Judith was looking perplexed. ‘And yet I feel unconvinced about it. Mr Allington is upset. In fact, he’s in a very emotional state. But I can’t quite persuade myself that the emotion is grief.’

  They were walking towards their car, and Appleby received this in silence. Judith, he knew, wasn’t by way of talking idly in face of affairs like the present.

  ‘And the others,’ Judith went on, ‘are about as concerned as if Martin had been a poorly trained dog. Yet the household appears to think it would be indecorous to sit down to an ordinary square meal.’

  ‘So Enzo,’ Appleby said, ‘is furiously cutting scores of sandwiches.’

  ‘Well, not actually Enzo. He’s superintending. There are plenty more servants, as you might guess, tucked away behind the scenes. Mostly Italian, too. But they all live out.’

  ‘Judith,’ Appleby said to Osborne, ‘is tireless in her investigations into how other households run. I can’t think why. It’s a topic on which she has nothing to learn.’

  ‘The slightest acquaintance with Dream tells one that,’ Osborne said. ‘So it must be a pure and disinterested desire for knowledge. But, Judith, how have you been coming by it?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been talking to Enzo in the butler’s pantry. He’s on his promotion there since Mr Allington sacked his English butler. He enjoyed talking.’

  ‘Enzo did?’ Appleby asked. ‘He seemed to me rather taciturn.’

  ‘The poor lad has hardly any English. He welcomed a little Italian conversation. I don’t think he would get much of it, somehow, from the Lethbridges and the Barfords.’

  ‘I’d suppose not,’ Appleby said dryly. ‘Did you gather where he comes from?’

  ‘A place called Pescocalascio on the edge of the Abruzzi. It’s rather an awful place. Enzo was quite touched when he discovered I knew it fairly well.’

  ‘He would be. And I suppose you fixed up with him to come and sit for you?’

  ‘Oh, yes – of course. He has promised to come over on his first afternoon off, if I want him.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby, with his hand on the door of the car, stared at Judith. ‘Had he anything interesting to say?’

  ‘Moderately, I always like listening to Italians. But I won’t bore you with it now.’

  Appleby said no more, and they climbed into the car. Judith’s last remark had been straight family code. She had something to say that she didn’t want even Wilfred Osborne to hear.

  This time, Appleby took the wheel, and Osborne sat beside him. On their left, the lake looked particularly harmless in the evening light.

  ‘Do you notice,’ Osborne said, ‘that this drive looks longer when viewed from this end?’ He spoke as if casting about for some neutral topic. ‘In Repton’s time, people liked what they called consequence. It meant, among other things, trying to make all your possessions look a little larger than they really were. It’s not actually all that distance from here to the gate. Shouting distance, you might say.’

  ‘A little more than that,’ Judith said from the back.

  ‘Perhaps so. But it looks farther, because of a trick of perspective. As your eye follows the line of the drive, it follows the line of the lake as well. And as the lake is narrower up there than down here, you get an effect of increased distance. It gave Repton the notion of playing a trick with the drive itself, as well. It’s a full yard narrower at the other end.’

  ‘Very clever,’ Appleby said. ‘But one result, I suppose, is the rather tight turn-in by the gate. And it’s curious to think what that means. If Repton had been less clever, Martin Allington might be less dead.’

  ‘I wish all roads didn’t lead to Martin Allington,’ Judith said.

  ‘So do I.’ Appleby sounded almost irritated. ‘I’ve had enough of that young man’s death as a mystery. And I have a very odd feeling that it’s not a mystery and that I know it’s not a mystery.’

  ‘How very odd!’ Osborne said. ‘And I’m not sure what you mean. What seems mysterious is the young man’s having miscalculated quite as badly as he must have done up there in order to land himself in the water. They talk about his driving when tight. But he’d made a long trip safely enough. The thing happened in the last few hundred yards.’

  ‘Exactly s
o. And I have an infuriating notion that at the back of my head I know why. And it’s a why that would cut out Owain Allington’s talk about murder, and Lord knows what. It has something to do with–’ Appleby broke off. ‘They’re having a field-day,’ he said.

  Two police cars were parked at the foot of the drive. They had disgorged half a dozen officers in uniform or plain clothes, and a good deal of paraphernalia as well. Out in the road there was a third car, and beside it a couple of men with cameras appeared to be waiting impatiently.

  ‘The press,’ Appleby said. ‘But they have to hold off until our friend Pride’s men have finished their own photographic job. And measuring, of course. That’s a good deal more important, and it’s what they’re up to now. Distances and directions are something. But after all that traffic, the state of the ground’s going to tell them nothing at all.’

  ‘That long white gate’s still off its hinges,’ Osborne said, ‘and lying back there where people chucked it. They’re using it as a kind of hat-stand.’

  This was true. The evening was still warm, and discarded hats, helmets and jackets had been slung on the gate. They were now being investigated by Rasselas. He seemed to disapprove of them.

  ‘Nice dog, that,’ Osborne said. ‘Well-bred creature. Notice the short, wide skull. Well-trained too. Must ask Allington where he got hold of him.’

  The Applebys paid civil attention to these commendations. But Appleby, at least, was more interested in the professional work going forward. Perhaps it was because of this that he made a somewhat absent-minded turn into the road.

  ‘Right, John, you idiot – not left,’ Judith called from the back. But she was too late, and the car was already crossing the bridge over the stream by which the lake was fed.