Appleby wasn’t convinced that this was polite either. But he allowed himself to be led downstairs and into what proved to be the library. The little mystery of Mrs Husbands, he had decided, could wait. A private word with Alice mightn’t be without its usefulness.
‘Over on that table, they are.’ Alice sat down with aplomb. She knew when it was the business of a gentleman to dispense refreshment. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said suddenly. ‘Tomorrow, first thing. And they won’t find me in a hurry, either.’
Appleby poured drinks. ‘You’ve had enough?’
‘More than enough. I can’t understand what they talk about, and I don’t want to. Tonight was the worst of the lot. I’m going after breakfast, I am. And please don’t come after me.’
Appleby laughed. ‘The police, you mean? I don’t expect they’ll want to.’
‘And not the lawyers either. That Mr Rood, for instance. I don’t like him. I don’t like him at all. And I don’t want his money.’
Appleby was startled. ‘Rood’s been offering you money?’
‘Well, Loo’s money. Loo had written something extra, saying that I was to have £5,000. And I won’t take it. It makes me angry to think about it.’
‘It’s certainly not very much.’ Appleby thought he ought to be soothing and persuasive. ‘But perhaps, when you consider that his affairs haven’t been going well–’
Alice nodded vigorously. ‘That’s just it. Mr Rood has explained about the will. Edward was to have this house, and the rents from the farms and places. But it won’t be enough – not to keep a gentleman’s place the way it ought to be. And everything else goes to Ruth. But that won’t be much, either.’
‘I see.’ Alice’s processes of mind, Appleby thought, were never predictable. ‘But you know, if that’s how it is, Ruth’s share is bound to be very much more than £5,000. Besides, she earns money from her job.’
‘They pay her?’ Alice was astonished. ‘For talking all that stuff about who Thomas Horscroft was?’
‘Certainly.’
‘I call that queer – I do. But I won’t have that £5,000, all the same. I oughtn’t ever to have been more than a bit of fun – not to Loo. I must have got ideas – don’t you think – for poor Loo almost to have married me, and then to have written in about all that money. But they can’t make me take it – can they? – if they don’t even know where I am.’
‘Obviously not, Alice. But you can’t refuse the money without disappearing, you know. And I think you really want to disappear for quite a different reason. This sort of place, and these sort of people bore you stiff. Don’t they, now?’
‘Of course they do.’ There was a hint of a tear on Alice’s exquisite cheek. ‘I’d give my eyes to be back in a nice superior corner of the trade at this minute.’
‘Then back you go.’
Alice looked at Appleby round-eyed. ‘I really can?’
‘There’s nothing in the world to prevent you. If we do want you, we’ll find you, all right. You know that as well as I do. Meanwhile, if you cut out of it, my dear, you’ll be doing a very sensible thing. By the way, didn’t you try to cut out of it before? And with – um – Loo?’
‘Cut out of it with Loo?’ She looked at him in perplexity. ‘What do you mean?’
‘On that very first night? Be honest, Alice. Didn’t you try to persuade him to make a run for it with you?’
‘Of course not!’ Alice was indignant. ‘I was much too cross with him. I don’t know what I wanted – or what I did, or what I said. I just don’t remember. But of course I didn’t try to take him away. This was his own house, wasn’t it?’
‘Have you lost anything since you came to Urchins, Alice?’
‘Only my temper once or twice. And who wouldn’t do that, among such a lot? I ask you!’
‘I rather agree. But you’re sure you haven’t missed anything? Nothing in the way of personal property?’
Alice looked suddenly rather frightened. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
Appleby shook his head. ‘When somebody uses those words, my child, it’s ten to one that he or she means just the opposite. You have missed something, haven’t you?’
‘Well, yes. But nothing important. It’s just something that that cook, or one of the girls, has taken, I suppose. You can’t expect everybody to be honest all the time, can you? It just isn’t life, that isn’t.’
‘Perhaps, it’s not. But you haven’t mentioned this loss to anyone?’
‘Certainly not!’ Alice was again indignant. ‘That wouldn’t be refined. Not when you’re a guest in a gentleman’s private residence. It would be different in a hotel. But I never like hearing of that sort of thing – complaints of pilfering, I mean. There’s nothing gives licensed premises a worse name. And it would be dead common to complain about such a thing, when you’re in a country seat.’
Appleby chuckled. ‘I’d have missed some rather interesting inquiries in my time, Alice, if that particular rule of good society had been observed. But let’s not bother more about it now. You get off to bed – and pack as soon as you get up in the morning. Now I must go and see Edward.’
‘You’ll find him in that funny little room of his, I think. But I can really go in the morning? I shan’t be wanted for more of the – mystery?’
Appleby shook his head – seriously, this time. ‘The morning is still quite a long time off,’ he said. ‘And I’m beginning to hope the mystery won’t last far into it.’
2
Edward Packford looked up as Appleby entered the little room. For a moment he didn’t appear to recognize his visitor. And for a moment, too, Appleby had once more the odd sensation of seeing a Lewis Packford who had, as it were, shrunk in the wash. Indeed, this time the effect was even more striking, for there was something shrivelled or diminished about Edward; he seemed not quite the man who had greeted Appleby that morning.
‘I’m afraid,’ Appleby said, ‘that your solicitor’s news hasn’t been too good?’
‘My solicitor?’ Edward frowned – abstractedly, as if his mind were still rather far away. ‘Rood isn’t my solicitor. And it’s a pity he was Lewis’.’
‘He mismanaged things? I understand his claim to be that he was very little consulted over money matters.’
‘It may have been so, Sir John. I don’t know much about it.’ Edward Packford had drawn forward a chair with automatic punctiliousness. But he appeared indisposed to talk freely.
‘Would you say that your brother had confidence in him?’
There was a marked silence. Edward for some reason seemed to find this question hard to answer. ‘Did Lewis have confidence in him?’ he repeated. ‘I believe that, in some ways, he had. But he used to laugh at him – not as a lawyer, but as a would-be scholar. And he used to put on a turn.’
‘A turn?’ Appleby was puzzled.
‘Lewis was rather good at mimicry. He used to put on a turn – imitating this fellow Rood rolling his umbrella. I expect Rood resented it.’
Appleby looked at Edward curiously. ‘What makes you think that?’
Edward frowned again, as if the question irked or puzzled him. ‘He expresses himself in a kind of gloating way. No – that’s not quite right. He makes remarks that in themselves express ordinary decent feelings. But he takes care that they sound quite forbiddingly unconcerned and conventional.’
Appleby nodded. ‘I noticed that in him almost at once. But it may be no more than a mannerism. And I’d say that Rood has ability.’
‘No doubt.’ Edward appeared uninterested.
‘But you’re more concerned with the fellow’s news than with the fellow himself? And money’s going to be tight?’
‘Certainly it is. There’s a widow to provide for. To say nothing of a mistress.’ Edward produced rather a grim smile. ‘The jointure for a mistress is apparently £5,000.’
‘You’d quarrel with that?’
‘Of course not.’ Edward spoke sharply. ‘If Lewis found the girl worth going to
bed with, she must have whatever sum he named.’
‘Even if she’s not worth it?’
Quite unexpectedly, Edward Packford smiled. ‘But she is worth it. You know that as well as I do. If I were quite a different man from what I happen to be, I’d be prepared to write a big cheque for the privilege of having slept with Alice. Or so I suppose. But of course that’s all damned nonsense. The point is that the girl’s a good sort of girl anyway. Let her take her £5,000 and depart. I’m sure we bore her most horribly.’
Appleby laughed. ‘As it happens, I know that to be only too true. But she won’t take the money. She thinks it ought to go either to Ruth – for having beaten her, I suppose, to the altar – or to you, my dear sir, in order to enable you to maintain what she calls a country seat.’
‘Well, that’s very handsome of her, and bears out what I said. But I don’t know that £5,000 will go far in the way of patching up Urchins. Not, Sir John, that matters of that sort are at all your business.’
‘I assure you that I can’t help taking an interest in them.’ Appleby said this rather drily. ‘And I suppose that the real mischief is your brother’s having contracted a valid marriage as well as a bogus one. How do you feel about Ruth?’
‘Feel about her?’ Edward, who had been prowling restlessly round his small room, turned round impatiently. ‘Am I called on to have any feeling about the woman – whether the one way or the other?’ He stared queerly at Appleby – queerly, since his gaze seemed to be directed upon something quite different and quite absorbing which he was viewing through Appleby as through a window. ‘She’s all right, I suppose – although I think we agreed she wasn’t precisely the dream-woman for either of us.’ Edward laughed – and his laughter, more than his speech, brought it home to Appleby that he was in some quite abnormal state. It seemed certain that the new owner of Urchins did tremendously care about the place, and that Rood’s disclosure of the full precariousness of the position had shocked him profoundly. This, at least, was the best way of accounting for his condition.
‘I’m not sure myself,’ Appleby said, ‘whether Ruth improves more on acquaintance or just impresses more on acquaintance. It’s not by any means the same thing.’
‘It would be idle to maintain that I greatly care to find out. She was good enough for Lewis – although it’s true the fact might be more impressive if he hadn’t almost immediately made a fool of himself with this other girl. And so, I suppose, she’s good enough for me – as my brother’s widow. It isn’t, one supposes, a very close relationship.’
‘You’d say that, after this clandestine and rather tenuous marriage, she’s fully entitled to her share of his property?’
‘Of course she is. She’s entitled to anything she has a reasonable expectation of. Let her take it, and depart in charity.’
There was another silence. Appleby devoted it to wondering just what it was in Edward that now so acutely puzzled him. Was there some whole aspect of the man which, earlier that day, had escaped him? Or since then had something transforming occurred which Appleby himself hadn’t tumbled to or got into focus? Certainly he found himself strangely in the dark with Edward now. And into his head there floated – utterly incongruously, as it seemed – the image of Alice on a lamentable occasion; the image of Alice being suddenly hit on the head with a bottle by that perfectly respectable person who had the habit of dropping in to listen to the nine o’clock news. It was just such an impression that Edward, somehow, now gave. He might have been hit over the head with a bottle no more than ten minutes ago. The ten minutes was important in the picture. For it wasn’t from something revealed to him some hours ago that the man was suffering now. Almost immediately before he himself had entered this room – Appleby found himself grotesquely convinced – Edward Packford had been hit on the head with a bottle. And his assailant, it was possible to feel, had borne an appearance as respectable as Alice’s had done.
But all this didn’t seem particularly helpful, and Appleby decided to move on to other matters. ‘I came in,’ he said, ‘to give you several pieces of news. And the first of them takes us back to Rood. So far as I’m concerned, he was the first man to advance a number of notions which decidedly deserve chewing over still. And one of them we may regard as now verified. Your brother did acquire in Italy – whether in Verona or elsewhere – a literary document of the greatest importance. Unless he was all wrong – your brother, I mean, not Rood – he had got hold of an Italian book quite copiously and very significantly annotated by Shakespeare. But perhaps this isn’t news to you, after all?’
‘It’s news, all right.’ Edward spoke slowly, and for the first time in their interview there was something in his voice that carried simple and unenigmatic conviction. ‘Of course, Lewis seems to have been dropping hints to that learned crew of his about something pretty remarkable. But it might quite well have been remarkable only to scholars. Whereas, unless my sense of these things is badly astray, what you are telling me is big news in a purely practical and mundane sense.’
‘Precisely. Your brother had possessed himself of something worth a very large sum of money.’
Edward, still prowling around his room, turned and looked at Appleby steadily. ‘And then he was killed.’
‘So you say. So Rood said. So some others appear to think. So part of the apparent evidence makes it very difficult to believe.’ Appleby paused on this succinct statement. ‘And to all this we must add that nobody appears to know where that immensely valuable book is now. But we do appear to know whose legal property it is, if and when it turns up.’
‘Certainly we do. It’s Ruth’s.’ Edward could not have made this statement in a tone that was more matter of fact. ‘By the way, may I ask you how you have come by this fresh knowledge?’
‘From a fellow called Charles Rushout.’
Edward shook his head. ‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘He’s a Professor of Literature in some northern university or other. He edits a journal called The Elizabethan and Jacobean Quarterly. And I found him at your local hotel this evening, all agog to present himself to you and tell you of the immense treasure which Urchins at present so unsuspectingly enshrines.’
‘How does he come to know about it?’
‘Your brother wrote and told him. Later, your brother was going to send him a paper for his journal, announcing and describing his discovery. But that’s not quite all. Rushout’s first action on hearing the news was to pass it on quietly to an American collector called Moody. And Moody’s now at your local hotel, too.’
This time, Edward did really appear to be staggered. But he still spoke quietly. ‘What sort of a collector? A college librarian – that sort of fellow?’
‘Not at all that sort of fellow. Shrewd, ignorant, vastly rich, and in the grip of some advanced acquisitive mania.’
‘Does he keep on swallowing pills for the benefit of his duodenum?’
‘Well, yes – he does.’ Appleby was surprised. ‘You know him?’
‘Dear me, no. But I’ve heard Lewis talk about him. I’d forgotten his name. But that’s right – Moody.’
Appleby laughed. ‘He’s the fellow, in fact, that Prodger consistently refers to as Sankey, and baits Limbrick with.’
‘No doubt. And I’ve heard Lewis tell some queer yarns about him. You think Moody is proposing to come along and make an offer for this book if it can be found? Ruth must be told at once. It’s her affair, and it’s obviously of the greatest importance. What’s this book called?’
‘It’s the Ecatommiti of Cintio – or perhaps part of the Ecatommiti, I’m not quite sure. It isn’t a thing I’ve ever set eyes on. But Ruth herself will know about it, since it’s her line of country too. And Rushout, of course, will be able to describe it accurately.’
‘Good.’ Edward had become brisk and incisive. ‘We must have a thorough hunt for it tomorrow. It may, of course, have been stolen. In fact, we can’t blink the high probability that it has been. On the other hand,
it may conceivably just be lying about. Lewis, as you perhaps know, could be almost incredibly careless about such things. Do you think it had dawned on him, by the way, that this Ecatommiti was not only his final passport to fame but also potentially his absolute financial salvation?’
Appleby shook his head. ‘I can’t possibly tell. But my guess is that he hadn’t focused that second aspect of the thing at all.’
‘Well, that makes it the more probable that he simply did leave it lying about. He may conceivably have left it lying about so carelessly that the thief – if there was a thief – was baffled after all. Do you think that’s possible?’
‘Yes, I do. And I have a notion somebody else does, as well.’
3
It was eleven o’clock when Appleby knocked at the door through which he had earlier seen Mrs Husbands so oddly emerge. The whole household seemed to have gone to bed, so he wasn’t surprised when he got a reply from within. He opened the door and entered. The occupant was Mr Rood.
The solicitor was standing in front of a suitcase, fishing out a pair of pyjamas. He turned and looked at Appleby with sombre distaste. ‘Ah, Sir John,’ he said. ‘I am very glad to see you. For a word in private, that is to say. For I must confess that I am still very much dissatisfied. However, it is something that the matter is now in your hands. I hope you have come to agree that the police didn’t, in the first instance, get to the bottom of the matter.’
‘Yes, I have.’ Appleby sat down. ‘And I must tell you at once that certain of your suspicions, at least, have been substantiated. Packford did undoubtedly procure in Italy something not only of the greatest scholarly interest but of a very large monetary value as well.’ Appleby gave a brief account of the Cintio. ‘So that’s what the thousand pounds went for, we must presume. And it was a wonderful bargain, you’ll agree.’
‘Most interesting,’ Rood said. ‘And I fear that our late friend’s secretive disposition was fatal to him. Had he divulged the nature of his find to myself or any other competent person, it would have been represented to him that such a treasure should be kept in the strong-room of his bank. As it was, he was shot and robbed. It is all most distressing.’ Rood unfolded the pyjamas and laid them neatly on the bed. ‘But there is the faked suicide, Sir John. That was a false step, surely, on the murderer’s part. It gives us a vital piece of information – one which enormously narrows the field. I regret that I cannot offer you a cigarette. I never smoke.’
The Long Farewell Page 14