Sheiks and Adders

by Michael Innes

  Appleby glanced at the spectators. Titania was present, and this time Bottom (last glimpsed in Richard Chitfield’s library) had been restored to her. Sheik Pring was also on view, with Joan of Arc seated incongruously beside him. But now this more or less static scene was broken into by what was at least the ghost of an event. Professor McIlwraith, already arrived at this agreed rendezvous, had spotted Appleby and was advancing upon him at a lumbering run.

  ‘I’ve seen him!’ McIlwraith called out in an agitated manner. ‘He has been here. But now he has disappeared again.’

  ‘Do you mean the Emir?’ Naturally enough, Appleby disapproved of this public display of perturbation.

  ‘Yes, of course. Only ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Ten minutes ago?’ Appleby was astonished to see that the eminent philologist had glanced at his watch. ‘You thought to note the actual minute you spotted him?’

  ‘Certainly I did. I hurried straight here, you know. And there Hafrait was – strolling about as if he were at a garden party.’

  ‘Well, he was – wasn’t he?’ Appleby felt a moment of sheer exasperation. ‘Confound it, McIlwraith! I think there be six Richmonds in the field. That’s all that can be said about it.’

  ‘Just what do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean that Hafrait – unless he really is an afreet into the bargain – can’t be in two places at the same time. And I could swear I saw him ten minutes ago in quite a different corner of the grounds. How certain are you that your man really was the Emir?’

  ‘Totally certain. He spoke to me. And in rather a high-handed manner, I’m bound to say. You see, we had an appointment–’

  ‘Yes, I remember about that.’

  ‘Well, he simply waved at me – and said, “Our occasion must be a little later, my good McIlwraith”. And then he moved away. I let him go. I was too annoyed to endeavour to detain him.’

  ‘That was very natural, no doubt. The fact is that the fellow is showing off, isn’t it? He’s amusing himself with a kind of variant on Russian roulette. He’s here, together with some unfortunate double he has brought along with him, and it’s fifty-fifty which of them cops it. The thing is absolutely dotty.’

  ‘They are a peculiar people, my dear Appleby. It is my conjecture that Hafrait was offended when he heard of Chitfield’s inept plan to have other persons in Arab costume around – and the result has been even more irrational behaviour on his own part. In face of such nonsense, I hardly see we can do other than throw in our hand.’

  ‘It might be the sensible thing, I agree. But one can’t, unfortunately, contract out of a duty to endeavour to keep the Queen’s peace. In particular, Colonel Pride and his men can’t. We must put Pride wise to this new development at once.’

  Professor McIlwraith appeared properly impressed by this elevated view of the matter.

  ‘I am constrained to agree with you,’ he said. ‘And we must act simply as if we were concerned to break up a rough house in a pub.’ McIlwraith paused, perhaps in surprise at having arrived at this unassuming comparison. ‘One simply separates the parties; tells them to give over and clear off.’

  ‘Quite so. But in the present situation the Emir himself is the only party we are in a position to deal with. And I somehow don’t think much would come of our asking him to quit the field – even supposing we can find him again. He’s showing off, as I’ve said. And he won’t be disposed to take orders from anybody to leave Drool.’

  ‘Except, perhaps, from Chitfield. He no doubt regards Chitfield as a servant, just as he does me. But, on this particular occasion, Chitfield is also his host. Hafrait would not care to remain here as a formally unacceptable guest. He might turn nasty later. But at the moment, he’d go.’

  ‘Then Chitfield must be persuaded of the necessity of having a shot at just that. Unfortunately Chitfield appears to be quite as elusive as the Emir. You’ve seen no sign of him back-stage, or whatever the expression is?’

  ‘No, I have not. And I continue to feel that he has been behaving in a thoroughly vexatious manner.’

  ‘Possibly so. But he may–’ Appleby, who had been scanning the middle distance as he spoke, broke off suddenly. ‘But here is his elder daughter, apparently coming up from the archery field. And looking for somebody. It’s a disposition that seems to be catching.’ Appleby continued to watch Patty Chitfield as she approached. ‘McIlwraith – do you know? I have a notion something has happened.’

  ‘I told my father you were here, and he asked me to find you.’ Miss Chitfield had addressed Appleby briskly, and with only a glance at his companion. ‘We’ve found a doctor, but we need a policeman too.’

  ‘Then it isn’t me you want, but–’ Appleby checked himself. It was still no business of his to disclose to all and sundry the presence of Colonel Pride. ‘I noticed a constable with a Panda car at the main gate,’ he emended. ‘Guiding the traffic, I suppose. If something has happened requiring the police, he’s the proper man to get hold of.’

  ‘In that case we’ll have to have you improperly, Sir John. This is something quite urgent. Please come to the archery ground at once.’

  ‘Very well.’ Appleby was in fact without any serious intention of taking a stand on the proprieties. ‘Has there been an accident there?’

  ‘It would be better to call it an incident. Somebody has been shot.’

  ‘I see. Might he be described as a wandering Arab, Miss Chitfield?’

  ‘Certainly he might.’ Patty gave Appleby a queer glance. ‘At least it isn’t Tibby Fancroft.’

  ‘Quite so. And I think that perhaps Professor McIlwraith – you know Professor McIlwraith? – had better come along too.’

  ‘Of course I know him.’ Patty favoured the philologist with a quick nod. ‘Now, for goodness sake, get moving.’

  The three were in fact already moving, so Patty’s brusque injunction suggested that she was considerably upset. Appleby, although reflecting that, if there was a doctor already on the scene, the next urgent requirement must be an ambulance rather than a policeman, was quite willing to hurry. And here no crush impeded them; it looked as if the actual archery competitions had been wound up and everybody had gone off elsewhere. In fact there was only a single small group of people to be seen. They were congregated beside one of the targets on the nearer side of the range. And in the middle of them, huddled on the ground, was a figure swathed in white. It reminded Appleby grimly of that joke about a laundry basket.

  There was a uniformed policeman – so somebody else must have remembered about the Panda car. There was a man who could be spotted as the doctor, although he was got up to look like Robinson Crusoe. Mark Chitfield and Tibby Fancroft were standing side by side – the latter still in the sports shirt and trousers to which he had stripped outside Richard Chitfield’s library. And there was Chitfield himself, who swung round at the approach of the new arrivals.

  ‘Here is Sir John Appleby,’ Patty said rather baldly. She had glanced at her father and appeared to dislike what she saw. This was not altogether unreasonable. For a master of high finance – or whatever he was – Mr Chitfield was for the moment cutting an unimpressive figure. To declare that he was panic-stricken would have been to observe a decent moderation in speech.

  ‘He’s dead!’ Chitfield said hoarsely. ‘Hafrait’s dead. If it gets known – that he died here – the whole thing will crash.’ He glared at Appleby, who received this mildly surprising and not very decent view of the matter impassively. Mark Chitfield, although very pale, failed to resist raising his eyes to heaven as if to acknowledge a consciousness that for the whole Chitfield family the prison gates were about to gape open at last. Tibby seemed entirely bewildered. And Appleby noticed for the first time that he was a tall youth – almost as tall as the Emir Hafrait. It looked as if, had he not shed that Arab garb, he might have been decidedly at risk.

&
nbsp; ‘Dead!’ Chitfield reiterated, and swung round towards the doctor. ‘He is dead? You’re sure of it?’

  ‘He is most certainly dead.’ The doctor, who had been obliged to set down on the grass a palm-leaf umbrella and an ancient fowling-piece, stooped and retrieved these absurd objects composedly. He was a local man, and as he did so he recognized Appleby, who was still carrying around his equally absurd long-bow. ‘Good afternoon, Sir John,’ he said. ‘Rather your sort of thing, I imagine. Or a very peculiar accident, to say the least. Take a look.’

  Thus bidden, and under the respectful gaze of the constable, Appleby stepped forward and obeyed this injunction. The body was lying on its side. It was so lying because it could not have been very decently disposed in any other fashion. The arrow – for it had been a bow-and-arrow affair – had entered from behind. A third of it, the feathered third, protruded between the shoulder blades. Another third, the barbed third, similarly protruded from the chest. The final third was inside the dead man. There was little doubt that surgery would be required to remove it.

  ‘Chitfield, you are a fool!’ It was Professor McIlwraith who produced this unseemly exclamation. He had advanced, knelt down, and peered closely and without ceremony at the dead man’s face. ‘They haven’t killed the Emir, but some fellow unfortunate enough to look like him. Not a spurious Arab, like your absurd Pring, but a member of his own entourage, given the nasty job of taking the risk.’

  ‘Of sharing the risk,’ Appleby said. ‘You have to give your tiresome Emir that. Russian roulette again. He has a taste, in fact, for a decidedly drastic form of gambling. McIlwraith, what is your opinion of all this?’

  ‘That it mayn’t take them long to discover their mistake. If Hafrait is indeed strolling round this wretched fête with a full knowledge of the risk he runs – and it’s entirely in the man’s character, I’m bound to say – then a single close-up glimpse of him, upright on his two feet, will tell these assassins just how they’ve been fooled. And when that happens they will presumably go to work again.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’ Appleby turned to Richard Chitfield. ‘I know nothing about the merits of this Hafrait as a business associate,’ he said dryly. ‘But he is quite plainly a most undesirable guest. I advise you to get rid of him.’

  ‘But not in too summary a fashion,’ Mark Chitfield said with unsuitable cheerfulness. And he glanced down at the dead man. ‘That’s been tried already.’

  14

  ‘One possibility occurs to me,’ Professor McIlwraith said. This odd scholar, Appleby reflected, seemed curiously unperturbed by the horrific spectacle almost at his feet. His academic career had perhaps not been of a uniformly sheltered kind; spells of duty even as a scholar in Tehran and similar places might well have inured him to running up against violent situations at one time or another. ‘Although, as I have already mentioned, the Emir thought fit to treat me in a somewhat cavalier fashion earlier this afternoon, there are undoubtedly certain matters of a quasi-political sort upon which he is designing to consult me. And now – having, so to speak, done the honours of the fête and thereby played his foolish roulette – he may simply have returned to the house and be expecting me to be at his disposal in the library. I suggest that we investigate that possibility.’

  ‘If he has done anything of the sort,’ Appleby said, ‘it strikes me that he may have placed himself in quite as unguarded a situation as when he was wandering around the grounds. When Mr Fancroft led me to your library, Mr Chitfield – and incidentally to a glimpse of a singularly bizarre meeting – it struck me that the house and its contents were notably vulnerable to petty, or not so petty, theft. There seemed to be nobody about at all. Except, indeed, that your meeting itself was guarded by a man with a revolver. He directed it, until checked by you, upon Mr Fancroft and myself. Is he to be described as a personal guard of your own?’

  ‘Yes, he is. But that doesn’t signify.’

  ‘It certainly seems to signify, sir, a certain disregard of the law. The circumstances in which such a person is entitled to carry fire-arms are very rare indeed. But we needn’t, at the moment, pause over that. This officer’ – and Appleby nodded towards the constable – ‘will see to it that the Chief Constable is contacted and the proper procedures in relation to this dead man put into effect. I think the younger people may usefully assist in finding him. He is, as you may already know, the other Robin Hood. You and I, Professor, will go with Mr Chitfield to the library, where we may perhaps find this tiresome potentate as you suggest.’

  In this simple way, without authority and as by what may be termed mere habit, did Sir John Appleby, lately the devoted pruner of his wife’s roses, take charge of the mysterious affair at Drool Court.

  And there, in the library, was indeed the Emir Hafrait, seated at the long table as Appleby had first glimpsed him. There was no sign of the man with the gun.

  ‘Ah,’ the Emir said. ‘Here is our Professor at last, Mr Chitfield. Your other companion is unknown to me. However, you all have my permission to sit down.’

  Appleby was the first to comply with this startling assumption of regality. He was also the first to speak.

  ‘I regret to have to inform Your Excellency that a person garbed as you are garbed, and bearing a strong resemblance to yourself, has been brutally murdered in the grounds of this house.’

  ‘Ah, indeed. But he will have his reward.’

  ‘That is as it may be.’ Appleby felt no temptation to enter into a theological discussion. ‘But a stringent investigation alike of his presence here and of his death must be instituted at once. I must ask without more ado what you have to say about it – and about much else, I am inclined to believe.’

  ‘May I inquire, sir, what right you have to address me in this peremptory fashion?’ It was evident that the Emir Hafrait commanded excellent English.

  ‘Certainly you may. I hold the Queen’s warrant – and, as it happens, her commission as well. It is my duty to do what I can to preserve Her Majesty’s peace.’

  ‘You are, in fact, a magistrate?’

  ‘Certainly I am a magistrate. And I am closely in touch with the Chief Constable of this district – who will, I hope, be joining us shortly. Meanwhile, it will greatly oblige me if Your Excellency will answer a few questions.’

  ‘Very well.’ The Emir inclined his head with dignity, and apparently by way of acknowledging this more accommodating manner of address.

  ‘Basic to the situation I take it is the fact of your position being such that, wherever you go, there is always present some threat of a political nature to the safety of your person.’

  ‘That is so. Professor McIlwraith could tell you about that.’

  ‘Certainly I could.’ McIlwraith now spoke for the first time. ‘And about the difficulty over dress.’

  ‘I think I have some understanding of that.’ Appleby glanced at the Emir. ‘I take it you are among those of your race or nation who will in no circumstances don western clothes?’

  ‘That is so. And I take strong exception, moreover, to Europeans donning the garments of my own countrymen. The spectacle of it has displeased me this afternoon.’

  ‘No doubt,’ McIlwraith said, ‘Mr Chitfield arranged that there should be such persons with a purpose more sober than that of mere frolic.’

  ‘Of course he did.’ Appleby spoke with a touch of impatience. ‘In fact he organized, in an amateur fashion and on a considerable scale, a state of affairs holding some affinity with the Emir’s apparent habit of taking a kind of decoy around with him.’

  ‘Just that,’ Chitfield said. ‘If there was to be an unobtrusive conference with the Emir, my fancy-dress party seemed just the thing to cover it. I made sure that there would be quite a number of sheiks around.’

  ‘I would have discountenanced the idea had it been made clear to me.’ The Emir spoke severely. ‘I regard these m
asquerading people as an impertinence.’

  ‘I don’t quite see that,’ Appleby said – feeling it rather hard that Mr Pring and his fellows should be thus aspersed. ‘But, Mr Chitfield, you were certainly bringing innocent and unknowing people into hazard. The law might take a serious view of it. But that, for the moment, is by the by. The Emir is in considerable danger still. That’s the situation to take account of at present.’

  ‘Nevertheless I must say something further about the masquerade.’ The Emir, as he made this announcement, was regarding his host with unconcealed disfavour. ‘I was never before required to sit down beside circus clowns and Teddy bears. There was even, if I recollect aright, a Mickey Mouse.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that was rather a mistake.’ Chitfield said this in a tone of weak apology. ‘It was simply that, at so early a stage in our negotiation, some of the fellows took the opportunity of not showing their hand.’

  ‘Their faces, you mean,’ the Emir said grimly. ‘Although I thought it due to you as my host not to show my displeasure openly, I judged it an altogether unsuitable levity. I have, however, so far restrained my displeasure as to take a stroll through the absurd charade in progress here. I now propose to return to London.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Appleby asked, ‘taking the corpse of your unfortunate henchman with you?’

  ‘Ah, that.’ The Emir smiled faintly. ‘Of course I much regret the man’s death. But it is the custom in my family to have several such persons at one’s disposal.’

  ‘I fear, Your Excellency, that in this country it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance. Indeed, only diplomatic immunity may stand between you and considerable inconvenience. However, let us consider your return to London – which I myself regard as wholly desirable. How is it best to be accomplished without risk of some further fatality? The question can’t be answered without rather more information than we have obtained so far. When, for example, was your meeting or conference or whatever it may have been called arranged to take place at Drool Court? Certain dispositions made by Mr Chitfield here suggest that it must have been some time ago.’