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A Connoisseurs Case
First published in 1962
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1962-2010
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The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN:0755120914 EAN: 9780755120918
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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About the Author
Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
1
‘And that,’ Judith Appleby said, ‘must be Scroop House.’ She took her finger from the map and pointed across the valley. ‘Get out the guide-book, John.’
Obediently, John Appleby unhitched his rucksack and rummaged in it.
‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘But I don’t expect it’s on view.’ He didn’t entirely share his wife’s fondness for perambulating the stately homes of England. One – he had long ago decided – was not all that different from another.
‘William Chambers,’ Judith said. She had expertly flicked over the pages. ‘Finished in 1786.’
‘Late,’ Appleby said disparagingly. ‘Practically Victorian.’
‘Don’t be idiotic.’ Judith had climbed a gate and was perched on it. ‘It may have heavenly chinoiseries.’
‘Most improbable.’ Appleby spoke briskly. If he had rather less than Judith’s enthusiasm, he had rather more than her grasp of relevant facts. ‘Chambers, you know, really went to China when he was a young man. His Chinese temples and furniture and so on are, in consequence, almost authentic. They have all the tasteless and gimcrack quality of the real thing with nothing of the more engaging fantasy that more ignorant designers brought to it. Think of Edwards and Darly. Garden chairs made of roots, and that kind of thing. Most attractive. But Chambers – no. Let’s get on.’ He held out his hand hopefully for the guidebook. ‘We might get across the valley before eating those sandwiches, don’t you think?’
But Judith, of course, was not to be bullied. She read on.
‘Bother!’ she said presently. ‘It doesn’t say who lives there. Stupid of it.’
‘My dear Judith, what good could it possibly do you to know who owns Scroop House? It would be out of your head again by breakfast-time tomorrow.’
‘You’re right that the place isn’t on public view.’
‘Then there you are.’
‘Exactly.’ Judith jumped down from the gate. ‘If we knew his name, we could ask for him.’
Appleby, who was fond of admitting that he was a very conventional man, stared at his wife aghast.
‘Ask for him? We can’t barge in on a total stranger.’
‘He can’t be a total stranger to Uncle Julius. Uncle Julius knows all the other nobs in the county, I suppose. We could explain I was his niece.’
Appleby’s alarm grew. This social outrage was already vivid in his imagination.
‘It just isn’t done,’ he said.
‘Then, of course, we can’t do it.’ Judith had picked up her walking stick and was moving briskly forward. She found her husband’s attitude highly entertaining. In his time John had, after all, done quite a number of things that are not commonly done. When they got inside Scroop House – as they were certainly going to do – he would cheer up and look civilly around him.
‘In the eighteenth century,’ she said, ‘it was hardly polite for a traveller to ignore a gentleman’s seat. You drove up, announced yourself, and an upper servant showed you round. If the owner was feeling sociable, he would appear and receive you.’
‘And Madeira and cake would then be served in the library.’ Appleby was resigned. ‘Let’s hope for that, too. Perhaps we can bring out our sandwiches and eat them at the same time. The upper servant will clear away the crumbs.’
‘Of course we won’t try if you don’t want to.’ Judith now said this as a matter of form. ‘I expect Uncle Julius would drive us over and introduce us tomorrow. Only his gout does seem to be rather bad, and he is very preoccupied with the atlas. He likes having us down, but he likes us going off like this for the day.’
‘Quite so.’ Appleby was aware that Colonel Julius Raven’s Atlas and Entomology of the Dry-Fly Streams of England with an Appendix on Northern Britain was to be a work of the first order of importance. Being an intermittent angler himself, he had even contributed some notes, and this had raised him greatly in the old gentleman’s regard. ‘Whether your uncle is familiarly acquainted wi
th the chap at Scroop House,’ Appleby went on, ‘will depend entirely on the quality of the chap’s water.’
‘Or earlier history as a fisherman. Uncle Julius would go any distance to talk about Indian carp. He has a story to tell about playing a sixty pound mahseer. Not that he hasn’t other interests as well. He likes hearing you talk about Scotland Yard. All those extraordinary crimes and horrors. He says you never tell him of a second-rate one – that you have a connoisseur’s attitude to your job.’
‘Dear me.’ Appleby sounded not particularly gratified by this description.
‘And it makes a change for the old man. Those sort of things don’t happen down here.’
Appleby’s glance travelled over the quiet valley.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose they do – praise the Lord.’
They walked on, and Scroop House disappeared among trees. But even at a distance it had declared itself as a tolerably imposing pile: the sort of place one feels one must have heard of at one time or another. Not that its exterior was showy; it pretended to be nothing more than a place to live in – but to live in in a pretty large if reticent way. The centre was perhaps a double cube, and another cube, one storey lower, had been bisected and placed at each end. Beyond these again were two compact wings, and the low-pitched roofs of these provided the only diagonals admitted in the entire rectangular composition. Even the portico – which one could guess to be Tuscan Doric – had the same flat lines as the main parapet above. Apart from four sparsely placed urns, the building ended off as bleakly as a biscuit tin. This was what the Applebys had glimpsed, framed between enormous beech trees and with a beech copse on its eastern flank. In front, a well timbered park sloped down to the bottom of the shallow valley.
‘Have we to get across a stream?’ Appleby asked.
Judith glanced at the map as she walked, and shook her head.
‘Only the old canal. It’s disused now, but there’s still water in it. This stretch of it runs pretty well due east and west.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense.’ Appleby was studying the contours of the land. ‘The valley’s closed to the west by those quite sizeable hills.’
‘It goes through a tunnel that’s nearly three miles long. We ought to see that too. The book calls it one of the major engineering performances of the entire English canal system. And it seems that it was all rather a flop. Partly because the railways came along in the disastrous way they did. And partly because, on the highest stretch of the canal to the east, they hadn’t been too hot on their geology. It wouldn’t hold water.’
‘Disadvantageous,’ Appleby said. ‘But we’re still quite high up here.’
‘Yes. Beyond the tunnel, it seems, the canal drops through a long series of locks to the estuary. That must have cost money too.’
‘I expect the fellow who got Chambers to run up Scroop House for him had a hand in making the canal as well. There was often local money in these affairs. And it sounds as if he must have dropped some. Perhaps that’s why the house looks a bit bleak.’
Judith shook her head.
‘They’re often like that at that period. Ashlar faced with plaster, and with just a few architectural features in dressed stone. They put their money into really lavish decoration of the interior. It was all part of the social set-up. Outsiders didn’t get much change from you. But you did your fellow insiders proud.’ Judith paused to climb a stile. ‘And that’ – she added, not very logically – ‘is why we’re going to be insiders ourselves.’
‘I think that we ought at least to see the tunnel first. It will provide something to talk about over the cake and Madeira.’
‘Very well.’ Judith had seized upon this false move instantly. ‘There’s a pub at this end of it, so we can get a drink with our lunch. And here’s the canal.’ She glanced at the map again. ‘The pub’s about two miles on. We follow the towpath.’
This wasn’t too easy. The path was much overgrown with bramble and brier; there were places in which it had almost crumbled away; and recent rain had made it slippery underfoot.
‘Country folk,’ Appleby said, ‘seem to be following townspeople in giving up the use of their legs. Here’s a perfectly good straight route from somewhere to somewhere else, but it’s as completely unused as the canal is.’
Judith dropped on her hands and knees in order to crawl under a small thicket of blackthorn.
‘Any sort of wayfaring is out,’ she said. ‘Take going to school. Parents who could remember perfectly well, if they tried, that walking there and back was the nicest part of the day, now feel that their children are being cheated of something if the local authority doesn’t send round a bus. The kids are treated as if they were chronic invalids.’
‘But we are elderly folk, you know. Our attitude to these things is nostalgic and sentimental. Children straying down the lanes, trailing their satchels and splashing through the puddles and keeping an informed eye open for birds’ nests, make a very pretty picture. But probably the young people themselves now prefer the bus. And what about the ploughman? Would you have him homeward plodding his weary way still, or would you allow him his motorbike?’
‘I’d admit that he’s a special case. But think of the farmers. A lot of them live in dressy villas in the suburbs of country towns, and drive to work like stockbrokers. What could be more squalid than that?’
‘I expect they live that way because urged by their wives. But it’s true that, as soon as you get away from picnic routes, the countryside has a more and more unfrequented air. Look at the solitude round us now. And the next building we come to is more likely to be a roofless cottage than not. A foreigner might suppose England to be in a terrible state of depopulation. And this abandoned canal adds to the effect powerfully enough.’
‘At least it’s peaceful. So I suppose we oughtn’t to complain.’
Appleby shook his head.
‘Peaceful? I’m not sure it isn’t faintly sinister. Do you remember Dr Watson saying something about the country being peaceful and secure, and Sherlock Holmes coming back at him with talk of the horrors that the privacy of the rural life can conceal? I expect there’s something in it. I’ve never found that a policeman’s lot in London is a particularly happy one. But it’s probably worse in Little Puddleton. Hullo, here’s a lock.’
Although with every appearance of neglect and decay, the lock performed its essential function still. Its dark rectangle of water, filmed with green, was several feet higher than the level of the canal on the down-falling side.
‘They built these things pretty well for eternity,’ Appleby said. ‘Look at those dressed stone sides. And what a tremendous invention a lock is! One of those utterly simple things it really takes a great brain to get round to. I expect they first thought of it in China.’
‘I think I’ve read that Leonardo da Vinci was a dab at the things. But perhaps he only cribbed them.’ Judith began to walk along one of the gates as she spoke. ‘It doesn’t just invite one to a dip.’
‘Then be careful, for pity’s sake. That wood’s slimy and treacherous.’
‘Nonsense!’ Judith said. She increased the boldness of her advance.
‘Very well. But if you must fall in, be good enough to do it on the canal side. If you tumble into the lock, it’s not very clear to me how I’m to haul you out. And plunging in to the rescue wouldn’t help much, either. Two bloated bodies, floating face up, is what the next wayfarer might find to entertain him.’
‘Who’d be married to a policeman?’ Judith did now make a rather careful retreat. ‘Your imagination has been shockingly conditioned by your long frequentation of the morgue. I think I’m rather hungry. Let’s push on.’
They went forward as rapidly as the state of the towpath allowed. It was a still day in early summer, and as the little valley drew in around them they seemed to be cut off from the least murmur of sound. Only once or twice there was a plop! that sent Judith scanning the surface of the canal for the wake of a water rat. Scr
oop House was now well behind them, and Appleby wondered whether his wife might, by good fortune, forget about it. He had some hopes of the tunnel.
And the tunnel – or at least the entrance to it – certainly held a considerable impressiveness. The canal had simply to disappear into a low hill, much as a railway line might do. But the canal had been constructed in the eighteenth century, before such operations took on a merely functional air. The mouth of the tunnel, therefore, was an orifice handsomely framed in a wall of heavily rusticated stone, and even more handsomely embellished with caryatids, herms, cornucopias and a balustrade, while the classical expertness of those responsible for its construction was further attested by a Latin inscription of considerable length and fortunate illegibility.
‘It’s much more ornate than Scroop House,’ Judith said.
‘Much.’ Appleby was disappointed by this train of thought.
‘I expect the owner will tell us about it all.’
‘The owner? Tell us about it?’
‘The man living at Scroop House will tell us about the canal.’
‘He probably knows nothing about it – or about any other local thing. He’ll be a City gent, swathed in Old School ties and bogus rurality. And if you insist on making his acquaintance, he’ll turn up on you inopportunely in London and ruin one of your gayest and cleverest artistic parties.’
Luckily, perhaps, Judith hadn’t listened to this thrust. She was scrambling nearer to the mouth of the tunnel.
‘But it hasn’t got a towpath!’ she cried. ‘And they didn’t have engines, did they? However did they get the barges through?’
‘Leggers.’
‘Leggers?’
‘Just that. Men who lay on their back on the decks and did the job with their feet. A kind of walking motion on the roof of the tunnel. They must have been pretty flat out by the time they’d done three miles. That’s why there’s a pub at the end of the tunnel. No doubt there’s one at the other end too. By the way, I suppose there’s still a pub? It didn’t shut up shop when the last leggers departed? The idea doesn’t bear thinking of. I need lager badly.’
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