Appleby and the Ospreys

by Michael Innes

  ‘Yes,’ Appleby said. ‘I suppose one does. Is Adrian fond of field sports: hunting and shooting and so on?’

  ‘He certainly hunts. But hunting is something anybody can do anywhere – if he has the money, that is. And if, when I go away, he simply lets Clusters to an American millionaire, or somebody of that sort, he could no doubt reserve the fishing and shooting rights. I think that’s the phrase.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Adrian about your plan to move out, Lady Osprey?’

  ‘No, not yet. I thought I’d leave it until after poor Oliver’s funeral.’

  ‘Which is when people will begin to address your son as Lord Osprey. There is much to be said for sticking to the proprieties in all these matters.’

  Appleby was unsure whether he had offered this observation with any inflexion of irony. Certainly Lady Osprey’s mind appeared to be behaving oddly – if not positively improperly – in the context of the immediate state of affairs at Clusters. Fleetingly, Appleby wondered whether she was in a condition of such deep shock that she scarcely knew what she was talking about. But there was no real indication of anything of the kind. She disliked the place; an event had now happened which presumably caused her to dislike it even more; she was in a position to leave, and that was what she was going to do.

  Or this – Appleby told himself – was the appearance of the matter. But about his whole encounter with Lady Osprey was there not more than a hint of oddity – almost of implausibility? Had he really been begged to come to Clusters only to find himself asked for advice about furniture removers – a subject which until now the lady hadn’t with any tenacity pursued? And there was surely something grotesque in her almost totally ignoring the element of mystery surrounding her husband’s horrible death. Quite suddenly, Appleby found himself wondering whether this seemingly artless person was in fact playing rather a deep game; presenting, for some end of her own, a kind of additional or subsidiary puzzle to a man who had been rising to puzzles through a long professional career. There was at least something disturbing in the notion that there existed, so to speak, more than one angler in the Broadwater family.

  ‘I do hope you will stay to lunch with us,’ Lady Osprey said. ‘You could have a chat with Adrian. And everybody seems to be staying at least till the afternoon. The policeman, I am told, was anxious they should do that in order that he could take statements from them.’

  ‘Thank you: I shall be delighted,’ Appleby replied – not, perhaps, without a certain sense of having taken the hook in his gullet. ‘And now I ought to have a word with that policeman, simply in a friendly way. I haven’t met him, but when he gave me your message on the telephone he sounded a sensible man.’

  ‘But with an odd name. Ringworm, or something of the sort. And I’m afraid Adrian was rather rude to him. So be as nice to Mr Ringworm as you can.’

  Appleby failed to take this injunction kindly, but refrained from revealing the fact. Lady Osprey rang a bell, and Bagot answered it so promptly that it was difficult to believe he hadn’t been listening at the door. Had he in fact been committing this improbable impropriety, Appleby reflected, he would have learnt little that he didn’t already know.

  5

  Detective-Inspector Ringwood had established himself – by this time with a considerable entourage – in the Music Saloon.

  The Music Saloon was much the largest and grandest room in Clusters. Except when the Ospreys gave a ball (which was about once in a generation) hardly anybody ever entered it except persons armed with ladders and mops and vacuum cleaners. The lofty ceiling dripped enormous chandeliers; vistas of equally enormous mirrors suggested Versailles; at regular intervals between these rose Corinthian columns which, being unfortunately too plump even for their considerable height, were evocative less of Greece than of Pharaonic Egypt. There was a chimneypiece so elaborately (if inappropriately) besculptured with mermaids and tritons that it invariably formed the frontispiece of every book about chimneypieces to be published. There was also, in a rather deep recess between two of the wodgy columns, the celebrated trompe-l’oeil door. Visitors were indeed sometimes admitted to the Saloon to take a peep at this. The door had a harp perched against it, but the point a conducting Lord Osprey had to make was, of course, that the harp wasn’t a real harp nor the door a real door; what one was looking at was nothing but paint skilfully applied to canvas. The late peer had been fond of explaining that the dodge had been copied at the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth, although there were books absurdly asserting that the borrowing had been the other way round.

  The Music Saloon was also provided with a large platform for an orchestra, and it was on this that Ringwood – who, Appleby judged, must have a whimsical streak in him – had located the small assemblage of officers, male and female, which now, it is claimed, constitute a Murder Squad in all properly developed English constabularies. These weren’t at all trompe-l’oeil: there they solidly were, complete with wireless telephones, electric typewriters, cameras, and the computers that have become so indispensable in the fight against crime.

  Appleby took this in respectfully enough, but as he shook hands with the Detective-Inspector he murmured something about finding somewhere for a quiet talk.

  ‘We’ll go to the library, Sir John,’ Ringwood said. ‘You’ll want to view the body.’

  Appleby, in fact, didn’t want to view the body. He had viewed plenty of bodies in his time, and had no inclination to add that of the late Lord Osprey to the list.

  ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘If the thing came to a murder trial, and it became known that I’d had a sniff at the corpse, I might find myself under subpoena as a witness for the defence, or something of that kind. It wouldn’t do, Mr Ringwood. It wouldn’t do at all.’

  ‘I’ll just ring through to the men in the library, sir.’ Ringwood was by now fully aware of his distinguished colleague’s instinct for evasive action. ‘If the photographers have finished their job, the corpse may already have been taken away to our mortuary. You wouldn’t mind having a look at the room itself?’

  ‘Not in the least. As it happens, I was in it a few days ago, drinking sherry. But I didn’t take much account of it. The only thing I remember is a strong impression that the Ospreys as a family have seldom been very bookishly inclined. So telephone away.’

  And Ringwood telephoned – not without betraying some satisfaction in the up-to-date contraption enabling him to do so. Then he turned back to Appleby.

  ‘As I thought,’ he said. ‘Taken away ten minutes ago. The corpus delicti, as they say. I suppose it may have to be brought back later, to some sort of family vault or mausoleum. You’d expect an outfit like Clusters to run to something of that kind.’

  ‘No doubt that’s so.’ Appleby rather approved of Ringwood’s thus reaching for a more familiar note. ‘It’s only the rude forefathers of the hamlet who are likely to be buried in Mr Brackley’s churchyard. Not that the little church doesn’t run to a few storied urns – and even animated busts. But not, I think, to capacious tombs. No doubt Clusters has, as you suggest, its own provision of that sort of thing on or near the premises. Bagot will know. And I have a feeling that Bagot knows a good deal.’

  So the men made their way to the library, amiably conversing as they covered the considerable distance this entailed. They found a couple of constables still on guard there. They looked at some coagulated blood on a rug. They looked round the large apartment as a whole. Appleby did his best to bring a fresh eye to the job, but was for the moment only confirmed in his impression that through a good many generations the pleasures of scholarship had eluded the Ospreys. And Ringwood, for his part, seemed positively depressed by the place.

  ‘What you might call uncommunicative, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘A necessary adjunct of what they term a stately home. But not really loved by anybody.’

  ‘The window at the end there has a curious view. A narr
ow terrace and then what they call the moat. Slightly Venetian in effect, you might say. It might be some magnifico’s water-gate.’ Appleby paused on this remark, frowning as if displeased at its inconsequence. ‘Is there any notion yet of approximately when the wretched man was killed?’

  ‘The doctor’s first impression is very late last night – even, perhaps, in the small hours. He says the top forensic man who’s now on his way to us may come out with something more confident and definite. But he added that the fellow is paid to do just that.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby was non-committal before this slightly unseemly scepticism. ‘What about the weapon?’

  ‘Probably quite a sizeable affair, he says. Not all that sharp, but distinctly up to its job. My men have carried out a pretty thorough search already, and have found nothing. The killer must have carried it away with him. Perhaps he chucked it in the moat. I don’t envy the fellows who’ll have to hunt there. About as mucky a job as you could imagine.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby glanced round the room. ‘What about the space behind all those rows of books?’

  ‘Those, of course. I’ll have every volume shoved hard back to the panel behind it.’

  ‘That for a start.’ Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘It might be better to have them out, shelf by shelf. If you have the man-power, that’s to say.’

  ‘Of course I have the man-power, and I’ll do as you suggest.’ If Ringwood was offended by this virtual instruction, he didn’t show it.

  ‘You know, it’s odd what one sometimes doesn’t see. Did you ever read a yarn by Edgar Allan Poe called The Purloined Letter?’

  ‘I can’t say I have, Sir John.’

  ‘It turns on the notion that when one is hunting for what one believes to have been concealed one tends to stare straight through what has not been concealed. The letter is there under the searchers’ noses, stuck – if I remember correctly – “in a trumpery filigree card-rack”.’

  ‘You couldn’t very well stick a sizeable dagger or the like in a card-rack.’

  ‘What about those trophies, Mr Ringwood?’

  ‘Trophies, Sir John?’ If the word conveyed anything to the Detective-Inspector, it was perhaps to be applied to cups or mugs or jugs handed out at the close of an athletic occasion.

  ‘The name is given, I think, to the sort of large-scale decorative arrangement of weapons and armour you see there on either side of the chimneypiece. Spears from the Zulu wars, the helmets of Roman legionaries dug out of the clay, dandified stilettos from the seicento, muskets once discharged against the armies of Napoleon, bayonets and hand-grenades from Flanders: the lot. And all radiating in a symmetrical design from a hub purporting to be nothing less than the shield of a Greek hoplite or a Japanese samurai. The idea is that your ancestors have been a martial crowd ever since they tumbled out of Noah’s ark. And disposed as they are here in a library, the weapons assert that an aristocrat has better things to do than learn his ABC.’

  It is to the credit of Detective-Inspector Ringwood that he listened to this unusual flood of eloquence on Sir John Appleby’s part with attention and respect.

  ‘So you think,’ he asked, ‘that our murderer simply snatched one of those museum pieces from the wall, went to work with it, and then simply put it back in place again?’

  ‘It’s just a possibility, Mr Ringwood.’

  ‘And if we take down the whole lot we’ll fine freshly congealed blood on one weapon or another?’

  ‘That would possibly be so. The blood group would then be determined: all that. And what else would follow?’

  ‘Quite a lot.’ Ringwood spoke slowly, like a man finding his way on unfamiliar ground. ‘The murder of Lord Osprey becomes unpremeditated, and a matter of imaginative resource and quick thinking as well. There’s also a kind of gambling element in it or – or something almost taunting, crying “Catch me if you can”.’

  ‘Just that.’ John Appleby knew how to be briskly approving. ‘It couldn’t be better put, Ringwood. And if we’re right, if we find Osprey’s blood on a blade, we have something like a psychological sketch of the man – the man or woman – who wielded it.’

  6

  Ringwood now took himself off to what he thought of as his headquarters in the Music Saloon, and as he did so he also withdrew the two guardian constables to the corridor outside the library. By this manoeuvre he contrived to leave Lady Osprey’s visitor (who just happened to be a policeman too, although on the retired list) alone in the room in which, only a few hours earlier, Lord Osprey had been killed. This was quite a stroke on the Detective-Inspector’s part towards implicating Sir John Appleby in the investigation of what was in itself an invitingly mysterious affair.

  It wasn’t, Appleby felt, an investigation that had made a great deal of headway so far. He had himself hit upon where the weapon might be found, but this was no more than a conjecture which had yet to be verified. And even if it was so verified, the motive prompting its use was still totally obscure. Who had murdered Lord Osprey, and why?

  The only answer afforded to either of these questions to date had been in the form of an eccentric and almost burlesque confession by the dead man’s brother-in-law. Appleby found himself disliking Marcus Broadwater, but this dislike arose merely from his feeling that murder was never something to be funny about. Nor had Broadwater, in fact, offered a confession in any exact sense. He had merely obtruded himself as being a promising suspect in the affair, and had hauled in the elusive Osprey Collection of coins by way of motivating his supposed crime. There was surely a streak of sheer nonsense in this. Broadwater had professed himself ignorant of where the collection was kept; and if Lord Osprey was alone in possession of this secret, cutting his throat was by no means a good way of getting at it.

  Broadwater was not to be eliminated, all the same. He might have advanced a wholly implausible motive for killing his brother-in-law by way of getting himself dismissed as a harmless eccentric when in fact he was nothing of the sort and had killed Osprey for some totally different reason.

  Appleby paced moodily round the library. Why, near midnight or in the small hours, had Osprey been here at all? It could hardly have been to edify himself by reading eighteenth-century sermons or to shed his cares by chuckling over back numbers of Punch. Had he a known habit of nocturnal prowling through this vast travesty of a dwelling place? Was it conceivable that he occasionally kept disreputable trysts in this unfrequented apartment?

  Appleby paused at the window through which – as he had idly remarked to Ringwood – there was an almost Venetian effect. It was a French window, beyond which was a small patch of paving, surrounded on its other sides by the area of stagnant water they called the moat. So it was just possible to imagine moonlight, and a courtesan stepping swiftly from a gondola into the arms of an expectant grandee waiting within the shadow of his palazzo. Something of this silly fancy – Appleby recalled with discomfort – he had actually offered to Ringwood. Into any such picture Lord Osprey didn’t seem to fit at all well, anyway.

  And now this unprofitable reverie on Appleby’s part was interrupted by the sound of a considerable altercation in the corridor outside the library.

  ‘I tell you I’m the owner of this whole bloody dump, and I’ll go where I like in it!’

  The door had been flung open, and now a young man burst into the library. He was followed by a red-faced constable who gave every appearance of having been thumped violently in the chest, and of being minded to do something thoroughly effective in reply.

  Appleby strode rapidly across the room.

  ‘All right, officer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Mr Osprey and I can usefully have a quiet talk. But one of you get back to that Music Saloon and report the fact to the Detective-Inspector.’

  This, of course, marked a further stage in Sir John Appleby’s admitting involvement in the Osprey affair. The const
able, relieved rather than perplexed, took himself off as instructed, and Appleby turned to Adrian Osprey.

  ‘Are you, perhaps, looking for me?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly I am. And it’s to ask you what the devil you are doing here. And to tell you to clear out.’

  ‘I am here on the invitation of your mother, sir. But I must add that, having once had some part in criminal investigation myself, I have felt bound to give Detective-Inspector Ringwood any assistance and advice that I can.’

  It was thus that Appleby (who had only been up to his ankles so far) definitely crossed his Rubicon into the Clusters mystery. But who was his adversary; who, so to speak, his Pompey? Could it conceivably be the young man who had thus rudely burst in on him, and who was the heir to the whole place?

  But Adrian Osprey now changed his note abruptly. He wasn’t exactly polite. Politeness was perhaps something he simply didn’t go in for. At a pinch he could manage civility, and it was this that he turned on.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I withdraw. About, I mean, ordering you to withdraw. I’ve heard, Sir John, that you’ve been a dab hand at this sort of thing in your time. So stay on. Stay the night, if you’ve a mind to it. I’ll tell Bagot, or the housekeeper or somebody, to find you a room. We could put up the whole of Scotland Yard in this warren of a place without noticing it. Except, perhaps, by the smell. Sorry. Remarks of that sort are rather my thing.’

  ‘It is a disadvantageous proclivity, sir, so far as any sort of career is concerned. You would do well to go after wit of a less offensive sort.’ Appleby said this with the instant authority of a very senior man. ‘As for staying the night, I am, of course, grateful for your offer of hospitality. But I am unlikely to have to avail myself of it. What is mysterious about your father’s death is likely to be resolved quite soon. Contrary, no doubt, to popular belief, it is so with the majority of crimes.’