Appleby continued to be amused. In fact he seemed genuinely to cheer up. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘you’ve brought back some very interesting information. Something I quite missed. It shows that two pairs of eyes are better than one. I’m not sure that it precisely fits in. But, of course, additional data can be all the better for that. One is compelled to some rearrangement. Do you know, I have a feeling I’ve got this whole thing wrong? A completely false picture? But I’m blessed if I can see just how.’
‘I hadn’t gathered you had a picture at all.’ Judith hesitated. ‘Incidentally, haven’t you fixed up something pretty risky?’
‘In persuading Miles Juniper to stand in for his brother? Well, yes – I suppose I have. There are circumstances in which it might become extremely awkward, however well I was backed up by the Minister, and so forth. But one takes these risks.’
‘And hands them out too, surely? If this Howard Juniper is in some sort of danger – and also in some way immensely dangerous to others – wouldn’t it be better to have an open and comprehensive search for him?’
‘It’s a thing just not easy to calculate.’ Appleby got up and paced the room. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m giving myself just twenty-four hours more. If I haven’t found Howard Juniper by this time tomorrow, I pack off his brother to Splaine again, and have the disappearance announced. Meantime, I’m just hoping – if rather against hope – that the whole thing is a mare’s nest, more or less. You remember Marchbanks?’
Judith nodded. ‘Of course I remember Marchbanks.’
‘Well, I think there may be a similar explanation here. And I’ve been having inquiries on appropriate lines made today. Some results have been negative. I’m waiting for the last batch now. There should be a telephone call from the Yard within the next half-hour.’ Appleby paused before the Christopher Wood that hung above the fireplace. He might have been studying his favourite greys in the ballet-dancer’s tights. ‘Damn all top scientists!’ he said with sudden vehemence.
Judith looked at him quickly. John didn’t often resort even to the mildest imprecation. ‘They do complicate life,’ she said. ‘But just why is this tiresome scientist so crucial? Or oughtn’t I to know?’
‘Everybody knows – although most people have no doubt forgotten again. The eminent Professor Juniper has been “featured”, as they say, in all sorts of rags. Damn all newsprint too.’ Appleby turned away from the little watercolour and faced his wife. ‘If you wanted to exterminate the inhabitants of these islands – or, for that matter, of much larger areas of the earth’s surface – this Juniper would be the chap to hire. And, as soon as he’s known to be missing, that’s what the banner headlines will point out.’
‘There oughtn’t to be such a man.’ Judith was suddenly grave. ‘He oughtn’t to have lent his abilities to such madness. He oughtn’t to have been required to.’
‘That’s pretty obvious, I’d suppose.’ Appleby was restless again. ‘It’s what his brother thinks. It’s what Clandon probably thinks. It’s what we think, and what every sane man thinks. But there it is. It’s just part of the rat race… Why doesn’t that telephone call come through?’
They went up to the drawing-room. In London, too, there had been a storm, but now the windows were open on the warm summer night. Big Ben struck the hour close by, and the heavy sound tumbled into the room like a physical thing. Judith got out some brandy, but neither of them poured any. They sat down to wait.
‘Mid-August,’ she said vaguely. ‘I suppose we’re the only people left in London.’
‘The only people left in London?’ He took up the words oddly. ‘We might be, I suppose. Any two people might be, if one or another thing happened.’
‘Oh – that!’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve always been impatient – haven’t I? – with people scared about our all going up together. I’ve felt it to be only a kind of phobia. But perhaps that’s irresponsible.’
‘Perhaps it is.’
‘Do you think there are people who would welcome it – nobody left in London? Is there that sort of pathologically destructive mind?’
‘It’s a question one sometimes hears asked.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘I suppose there may be.’
‘There was Richard Jefferies. You remember After London? He thought the city had killed him, and was killing all England as well. So he wrote a fantasy in which he killed London. It was a sort of revenge.’
‘And, of course, there’s Macaulay’s New Zealander.’ Appleby, restless still, did his best to keep up this desultory talk. ‘In the midst of a vast solitude, taking his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s. Something like that.’
‘Yes.’
The clock ticked. ‘As I say,’ Appleby said, ‘there’s a hope that the whole thing’s a baseless scare.’
‘And just what is the position, if it isn’t? I mean, is Professor Juniper potentially so lethal just because of what he keeps under his hat, or has he–’
‘Possibly both.’ Appleby didn’t wait for Judith to finish. ‘There’s certainly what he knows, just as there’s what the top flight nuclear people know. And there may be what he has – more or less literally in his pocket. A culture – or whatever they call it – of almost inconceivable virulence. Clandon says he can’t be sure. He hopes and thinks not. But he can’t be sure.’
‘And there’s been no trace of him – not even a trail picked up for a bit and then lost?’
‘Absolutely not. He walked out – without a word, it seems, and without so much as a briefcase. The earth might have swallowed him.’
‘Or the waters.’
‘Quite so. And the waters wouldn’t be too bad. Sooner or later, they’d render up something, and we’d know where we were.’
Judith was silent for a moment. She had the resource of darning socks. ‘There must be lots of ways,’ she said presently, ‘in which a clever man can commit suicide without leaving a trace of himself.’
‘Lord, yes. But why should Juniper do that? In his circumstances, it would be a most devilish trick. What motive would he have?’
‘That’s easy, surely. Suppose it has all got him down far more than anybody suspected. Suppose he has suffered indescribably in his conscience simply because of working in that field. He can’t face it, and he takes his own life. But he does it in a way that gets him a little of his own back on authority and government and so on. He’s not prompted to go so far as scattering his microbes or whatever they are. But he does fix things so that a good many of you don’t sleep too well.’
Appleby shook his head. ‘Yes – but he doesn’t seem to have been quite that sort of person. Nervous and erratic, perhaps – but not even incipiently malignant. I’ve had all this out with medical chaps thoroughly reliable in their field. They incline to the view – naturally they won’t be dogmatic – that a theory like yours posits a personality change that doesn’t come on a man suddenly and without his associates being aware that something’s going wrong. And there’s not the slightest record that Howard Juniper has had what could reasonably be called a psychiatric history.’
‘But isn’t it something that a man can have on the quiet? Not everybody revels in broadcasting their experiences on a psycho-analyst’s couch. Although certainly some do.’
‘Yes – it has to be admitted as a possibility. But it’s not a substantial one during recent years. Farther back, it’s a different matter… Ah, there’s the doorbell. Cudworth must have decided to come round. Too complicated for the telephone. I’m not sure that isn’t hopeful.’
Superintendent Cudworth was a large man, and he seemed to occupy a disproportionate space in the cubbyhole that served Appleby as a study in the small Westminster house. He was in uniform and his silver-braided cap lay on the desk; he himself stood by the window turning over a sheaf of notes. From the deliberation with which he continued to do this for a moment, Appleby knew that he was excited. ‘Out with it, Cudworth,’ he said.
‘You got on a
winner, sir. Birds it is. Or at least it looks uncommonly like it. Bit of a relief, you might say, if it really turns out that way.’
‘Oh, quite.’ Appleby was perfectly capable of matching Cudworth’s power of understatement. ‘Just how has it worked out?’
‘Well, sir, it didn’t seem to me to be too promising, as you know. I remembered your fellow who was found trout fishing, all right. Well, they say that’s the contemplative man’s recreation. You don’t normally go off to it in a crowd. And it seemed to me that the same would apply a fortiori to birdwatching. A thoroughly solitary employment. One tucks oneself away in some out-of-the-way country pub, and one’s only companion is one’s binoculars. And I’m sure, in fact, that most birdwatching is done that way. On the other hand, there does turn out to be a certain amount of organization.’
Appleby nodded. ‘I knew there was. My wife subscribes to an affair somewhere on the Severn.’
‘The Wildfowl Trust, that would be. An important concern in the field of ornithological science. And there are one or two others. They even have hostels for members, and so on. A fellow at Burlington House briefed me about the whole thing in no time, and we’ve had the local police making inquiries. They all drew blank. But that, I’m glad to say, was only Phase One.’
‘Phase Two,’ Appleby said.
‘Phase Two, sir, has been concerned not with public bodies but with private individuals. And it has been a bigger job. Particularly, of course, since it was necessary to take in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. There are a good many owners of large estates who maintain sanctuaries, reserves, and what have you – and who are perfectly willing to admit, and even entertain, well-accredited students of the thing. All as you might imagine.’
‘Quite,’ Appleby said.
‘Professor Juniper, if he really had this interest in birds, would know about all that pretty well. I mean that a fellow with a highly trained mind, and so forth, would naturally get a grip of the entire set-up. And he’d have the entrée, as they say. Get in, I mean, wherever he wanted to.’
‘Obviously,’ Appleby said.
‘Well, no – that’s just the point. There are one or two landowners with the relevant interests who don’t welcome anybody. Keep Out. This Means You. That sort.’
‘In which case, no doubt, the enthusiast lurks on the fringes and observes what he can?’
‘Just that. And the most notorious of them is the Earl of Ailsworth. Would you have heard of him?’
Appleby shook his head. ‘I can’t say I have.’
‘No more you would have. A backwoodsman, as they say. Not much on view over there’ – and at this Superintendent Cudworth jerked a thumb in what was presumably meant to be the direction of the House of Lords – ‘but well known if you happen to be interested in birds. Particularly on account of the Tibetan Donkey Duck.’
‘The Tibetan Donkey Duck? There can’t be such a creature. The name’s absurd.’
‘Well, sir, the point is there nearly wasn’t such a creature. The species had almost died out. But Lord Ailsworth led an expedition in search of them, and actually found a couple–’
‘In Tibet?’
‘Certainly in Tibet. And he brought them home and has managed to breed from them. But he keeps them, it seems, very much to himself.’
Appleby smiled. ‘One can understand a somewhat proprietary attitude in the circumstances. And now, let us have it, Cudworth. You’ve established a link between this Lord Ailsworth, and the missing man?’
‘Well, sir – yes and no. Ailsworth is a small market town, and I got on to the police there straight away. They were uncooperative, I’m sorry to say. Scared of bothering the local bigwig.’
‘Common enough.’
‘There’s no doubt of that. So I wasted no time on them, but contacted their Chief Constable. Name of Colonel Pickering. Well, that seemed all right. Probably accustomed to drinking his lordship’s port, and all the rest of it. And he sounded a very nice fellow. Told me he’d do what he could, but that I’d landed him with a stiff assignment. Lord Ailsworth’s quite mad, he said. Can think of nothing but the Donkey Ducks.’ Cudworth broke off. ‘Did you say the name troubled you? A matter of markings on the breast, it seems. Like the head of a donkey.’
‘Bother the bird and its idiotic name. What came of all this?’
‘A thoroughly negative report, as far as Colonel Pickering was concerned. He had managed to see Lord Ailsworth, but came away with nothing but a flea in his ear. Lord Ailsworth had never heard of anybody called Juniper. And anybody who came disturbing his birds would be shot. Just that.’
‘Forthright.’
‘Forthright, as you say. But I had a feeling that this Ailsworth line should be followed up. Lord Ailsworth and his Donkey Ducks suggest a sort of challenge, wouldn’t you say? And I remembered Professor Juniper’s reputation for queer exploits as a young man. There was food for thought in it.’
‘There certainly was.’ Appleby, for the first time, nodded in brisk approval. ‘Next?’
‘I thought of precisely the situation you mentioned, sir. The baffled enthusiast lurking in the nearest pub. And I sent a sergeant down by car straight away. There are a couple of hotels in Ailsworth itself, where he drew quite blank. But in an isolated hamlet called Nether Ailsworth, on the edge of Lord Ailsworth’s park, it was another matter. The people in the pub recognized a photograph of Professor Juniper at once. He’d stayed there for a couple of nights about six weeks ago. I’ve checked on the dates since. Juniper ought to have been in Edinburgh. He’d given it out that he was making a dash there to contact a biologist over on a short visit from Denmark. Of course it was nobody’s business to corroborate such an announcement by the boss of the Research Station.’
Appleby took a deep breath. ‘It’s a trail,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir – or something getting on that way. I must say that the first thing I thought of was the possibility of confusion with Professor Juniper’s brother. He might be keen on birds too. But the sergeant had covered the whole business. There had been no concealment. Howard Juniper’s name, in Howard Juniper’s writing, was there in the pub register. And even the Research Station as his address.’
‘But after that – nothing?’
‘Nothing. If our man has been back to Ailsworth, it hasn’t been to that pub.’
5
Appleby drove himself down to Ailsworth very early in the morning. Short of a Cabinet Minister, he was the only appropriate person for the job. For if Howard Juniper was really going to be run to earth while happily trespassing on the Earl of Ailsworth’s bird sanctuary, he would decidedly have to be put on the carpet. The metaphors were a bit mixed, Appleby thought, but they did cover the facts of the situation. Juniper was a very big man, and it wouldn’t do to preach to him or adopt a high moral tone. What such a man would be most likely to take in good part would be words spoken more in anger than in sorrow. And Appleby didn’t think he would find it difficult to be very genuinely angry. He would indeed be far less angry than relieved. But he needn’t show that.
Of course he could only take Howard Juniper that way if the chap was reasonably sane. If Juniper’s bolt had been the consequence of a bad breakdown, Appleby’s responsibility would obviously be confined to calling in the doctors. But supposing – what was much more probable – that Juniper wasn’t very definitely one thing or the other? What might become important then, surely, would be some ability to enter into his point of view.
Appleby wished he knew more about birds. If it had been proper to bring Judith – and why hadn’t he, since it had certainly not been particularly proper to send her to Splaine Croft? – she would have handled that side of the situation adequately. As a boy he had collected birds’ eggs – which was now just one more of the things you couldn’t legally do. Who would be a policeman – he asked himself irrelevantly, as he ran along the Suffolk coast – in an age in which small boys must be brought before magistrates and lectured on the wickedness of rifling hedgerows?
>
This birdwatching business clearly happened at a number of levels. At the lowest, the small boys, warned off their bird-nesting, made lists of birds seen, accompanied by appropriate smudgy drawings. That was rather like collecting the numbers of railway engines – although it was fair to admit that, humanly, it was rather more promising. Then there were all sorts of serious adults, with schoolmasters – one would say at a guess – heading the list. Miles Juniper, in fact, rather than Howard. But, beyond that, there were no doubt people of highly intellectual habit who found in crawling about with binoculars some sort of release from obsessional labour in the field of science. Howard Juniper came in there.
But why birds? What did the little blighters do that was so compelling? Appleby, although he had in fact some claim to be a countryman, asked himself this question in a conscientiously townee way. Clearly the answer was that birds have a life of their own which, although over large areas irrational and perplexing, isn’t quite so irrational and perplexing as the life that human beings have been contriving for themselves of late. Work hard on birds, and you may here and there make some sense of them. This scarcely holds of homo sapiens.
The road swung west to skirt an estuary. He stopped the car and studied his map. Yes, there it was – on the other side of this broad empty stretch of water. Marshland, and then water meadow with pollarded trees marking the lines of ditches. Beyond that, on slightly higher ground, some areas of timber. Just visible behind the largest of these, a pediment and a cluster of chimneys. Ailsworth Court.
He must go some miles west still to the first bridge across the estuary. On this side he skirted lazily lapping water which was a lovely summer blue. But on the other side were great stretches of reed which it would be hard to push a boat through. Straight opposite where he had stopped the car, he could see a high wire fence running down to the water and some way into it. Getting out his binoculars – which might be useful for spotting more than birds – and scanning the farther shore to the west of this, he could distinguish, more than a couple of miles away, the last hundred yards of a similar fence. They were fences of the formidable sort that incline outwards at the top at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was evident that Lord Ailsworth took the protecting of his birds very seriously.
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