The Bloody Wood

by Michael Innes

  ‘Certainly not. They must be their own judges of what is necessary. I have no standing in the matter whatever.’

  ‘They don’t look to me likely to make much headway. I’d say they were a bit overborne by their company.’

  ‘If they are, it’s no credit to us. Still, there’s some sense in what you say, Edward. We need someone who won’t even be conscious that he’s standing up to the gentry. That’s why I’ve stretched a point.’

  ‘Excellent, my dear John. You mean you’ll take hold of this thing yourself?’

  ‘Definitely not. I’m in precisely the position that you are – or Friary there. But I’ve advised them to get through to their station and get the fellow in charge to contact the Chief Constable.’

  ‘I see.’ Edward Pendleton was dubious. ‘Isn’t that to make rather a thing of it?’

  ‘It may possibly turn out to be a thing – without any making on our part.’

  ‘I’m sure you know best, my dear chap. Charne’s in the county, I imagine, and not the borough?’

  ‘Certainly it is.’

  ‘You know this Chief Constable? He’s–?’ Pendleton paused significantly.

  ‘He’s a Colonel Morrison.’ Appleby was conscious of a need for patience. ‘And not late-risen from the people, or anything disagreeable of that sort.’

  ‘My dear John, if there’s anything I can’t be charged with, it’s being a snob. But there are times when one doesn’t want too many jumped-up fellows running around.’

  Appleby found no reply to this – or no reply of any particular relevance.

  ‘I began on the beat myself, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, yes – but of course that was rather different.’ Edward Pendleton evinced mild disquiet; he clearly felt that Appleby had said something that wasn’t very good form. ‘Well, I must go and comfort Irene a little. Naturally, she’s very upset indeed.’

  Pendleton moved away abruptly. It was what Appleby had designed that he should do. He himself was only a spectator, as he had said. But at least he wanted to see clearly. He would sit down in a corner – there was nothing else to be done – and piece together what he knew so far. It wasn’t much.

  Hard upon the death of his wife, Charles Martineau had gone into his office and killed himself. So much Bobby Angrave had conveyed to Appleby at once, but thereafter the general shock and confusion still predominant in the household had much impeded the flow of further information. Had Appleby felt himself to be in charge, he could no doubt have assembled in ten minutes such preliminary facts as there were. But standing on the touch line as he did (if the figure wasn’t too weird a one to entertain), he had to await what the general disorganization cast up to him. The first odd circumstance, perhaps, consisted in what was reported about the conduct of Friary. It was Friary who had heard the shot – or rather who had alone heard it for what it was, and with distinct attention. Other people thought that perhaps they had heard it, or that at least they had heard something like it. They explained how this had occasioned no alarm. The popping of fire-arms was not encouraged round Charne, but even outside the shooting season there was a certain amount of it. Grace Martineau’s notion of wild nature was such, one gathered, that Charles’ keepers had discreetly to thin out sundry predators if its appearance was to be preserved.

  Friary had heard the sound for what it was: a pistol-shot within the house. And Friary – now so composedly offering unwanted whisky to all and sundry – had apparently panicked. Instead, that is to say, of going straight into his master’s office he had rushed around the house shouting for help. Edward Pendleton had already murmured that there was nothing surprising in this; the fellow had never been in the army; servants are unaccountable at all times. Appleby, on the other hand, felt that if he himself were minded to be curious he would probably start being curious at this point. He had gathered something of Friary’s private interests; there was nothing very out of the way about them; but Appleby had often had occasion to remark that professional amorists are a bit soft. Friary by no means struck him, however, as nervously flabby. If the man behaved oddly, it would be because he was under considerable pressure of one sort or another.

  But now, at least, everybody had some excuse for being in a state of shock. In a sort of delayed reaction, the double fatality was coming home to them. A thousand deaths are not ten times as appalling as a hundred – not by a long way. If there were a machine to measure such things, it might show, correspondingly, that two deaths fall at least some way short of being twice as appalling as one. There can be circumstances in which duality suggests positive comfort – as when a childless and devoted married couple die simultaneously in a road accident. Some sense of this sort might even have been conjectured as likely to obtain in the present case. But Charles Martineau hadn’t died beside his wife; he had died after being agonizingly parted from her. Nor – and this added to the sense of horror which was beginning rather mysteriously to pervade the matter – had he died the same sort of death. Charles had died, one might say, by fire. His wife had died by water.

  14

  It had required a little time for Appleby to arrive even at this quite simple fact. He had taken it for granted – the moment Bobby Angrave spoke, he had taken it for granted – that Grace Martineau had died, if not in her bed, then at least on the way to it. And when the truth – the first bare fact of it – had come to him, it was of Bobby Angrave that he found himself thinking: Bobby standing by one of the great stone basins in the obliterated formal garden, and proposing to fill it to the brim as a surprise for his uncle. But the basins, of course, were still dry. It wasn’t in one of these that Grace had been found drowned. It was in that deep pool in Charne Wood through which Judith Appleby had once proposed to urge her pony.

  That a man should, by his own hand, follow his wife to the grave is a solemn and dreadful thing. But if it is to be condemned it must be either on religious grounds or in terms of some humanist persuasion that we best show our devotion to the dead by continuing in a state in which we can remember and honour them.

  Appleby, turning this over in his mind as he sat alone for a little in a corner of the music room, had a sense that he wasn’t quite wasting his time. What these thoughts had brought him was a suspicion that a little professional activity might be incumbent upon him after all. But, if it were, it wouldn’t be at all a matter of his duty as a policeman. He had, of course, a duty to keep the Queen’s peace and protect the Queen’s lieges. The Queen, after all, might be said to have done very well by him, so that he had a particular obligation to do as well as he could by her. Yet these very proper considerations, he knew, were very far from likely to set him breathing down the necks of Colonel Morrison and his men. What he was seeing now, however, was that he conceivably had a duty to the Martineaus. Their death mustn’t be got wrong. In all probability there was no hazard of its being so. It all seemed simple – and sad – enough. But the simplicity was, in one aspect, so painful a simplicity that it ought to be tested before being accepted. It ought to be tested hard.

  Appleby’s first test was by way of Judith, and took place shortly after they had gone finally to their room.

  ‘Grace is as well where she is,’ he said. ‘And perhaps that goes for Charles, too. Looking at the thing now, one sees the utter nonsense of Charles married to Mrs Gillingham, or Charles married to Martine.’

  ‘Oh, quite. It doesn’t mean that Charles ought to have blown his brains out – if it was his brains.’

  ‘Certainly it was his brains – and very out. That sort of action has a shocking aspect of sheer physical mess.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Judith had been sufficiently involved in certain episodes in her husband’s career to take this in her stride. ‘I’m going to begin Emma tonight. I brought up a copy from downstairs.’

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘Grace had got to the place where Emma doesn’t rep
ent her condescension in going to the Coles.’

  ‘I see.’ It must often have been in an extremity of pain that Grace Martineau had followed for the last time the fortunes of Miss Woodhouse and Mr Knightley. The small private commemorative act now proposed by Judith would have pleased her. ‘Are you left puzzled by anything in this affair?’

  ‘Yes.’ Judith gave this reply at once.

  ‘Just how is it mysterious?’

  ‘It’s mysterious – if ever so slightly – in your simple Scotland Yard way. Weren’t we making a stupid joke about The Mysterious Affair at Charne, or something of the sort? I’ve sometimes thought it fatuous to get excited about this particular death or that as being mysterious, when every death there ever was is a mystery there are absolutely no clues to.’

  ‘Yes,’ Appleby said patiently. When Judith offered remarks of this kind of philosophic generality it usually meant that she was getting something quite different clear in her head.

  ‘Charles acted out of character. The puzzle lies there. What are the reasons why people commit suicide? You must have them all indexed in your head.’

  ‘Not all, I imagine – but a good many of them. Some people do it rationally – almost, you might say, on a hedonistic calculus – when they realize that their bodies have finally betrayed them, and that there is nothing left for them except pain on this side of the grave. For instance, if Grace had drowned herself deliberately, instead of by accident–’

  ‘Yes, of course. What about the other reasons for suicide?’

  ‘It can be done by way of punishing people by whom one believes oneself to have been slighted. “They’ll be sorry now.” That’s quite common.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Melancholia – the real, black thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘To cheat an insurance company, to avoid imprisonment or disgrace intolerable to one’s pride, to rate half a column in one’s local paper or two or three lines in a national one–’ Appleby broke off. ‘And, of course, by way of self-punishment and expiation.’

  ‘Would that be it?’

  ‘It seems the only way of getting round your feeling that Charles acted out of character. Of course, the facts are still obscure. But there was Grace, wandering alone in Charne Wood–’

  ‘Tottering alone. Wouldn’t that be more accurate?’

  ‘Yes, it would. And Charles may have felt that he had been unpardonably careless. He may have shot himself in some access of remorse.’

  ‘Do you think they’d been making another of their little trips to the belvedere? The other evening, Grace said–’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’ Appleby nodded. ‘She said something about their sometimes coming away together and sometimes separately – just to show they could still be independent of one another. I scarcely thought her serious.’

  ‘They may have been in the belvedere, and she may have challenged him, in some way, with that rather high-spirited air she had. He may have given in, against his better judgement, and left her there. Then she set out on her small, independent return – and it was the end of her. Charles would blame himself bitterly.’

  ‘Certainly he would.’ Appleby thought for a moment. ‘But not to the extent of shooting himself. It still doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Very well.’ Judith was now sitting in front of her dressing-table, apparently intent upon dispassionate scrutiny of what its looking-glass revealed. ‘In that case, we have to go deeper. He must have wished her dead, you know.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little crudely put?’

  ‘We’re confronting something crude. Crude or cruel. It’s the same word, I believe.’

  ‘I agree that of late there must have been times when Charles could have felt that Grace’s life was intolerable to her, and that it would be very merciful if she might die. But he can scarcely have believed, say, that he left her to make her own way back from the belvedere as the result of some subliminal prompting to put her life in hazard. That she should turn faint – or whatever actually happened – just at the moment and in the posture that would take her into that pool was a chance that no unconscious mind would gamble on.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the point – or not the whole point. In times of great emotional stress our minds are said – aren’t they? – to function in pretty primitive ways. Unconsciously perhaps, we believe, for instance, in the independent reality of our thoughts; in their power to go out from us and do things. That’s why we go into mourning. We imagine–’

  ‘But we don’t go into mourning.’ Appleby felt that he really had to object to this one. ‘Not any longer.’

  ‘Well, it’s most unhealthy not to. We mourn, in one way or another, to punish ourselves for the lethal thing our own thoughts have achieved.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Or rather, I don’t know, because I suspect it’s really most awful rot. You’re saying that poor Charles nourished an unacknowledged death-wish against his wife, even if it was on what may be called respectable compassionate grounds. So when she did die, and die by misadventure, he succumbed to a bit of primitive magic, acknowledged to himself he’d killed her, and then took his own life in order to even things up. It may be so – but why not imagine something simpler? All we’re looking for is some sudden additional stress or strain that would quite knock Charles off balance for a while. His wife is dying. Then, suddenly, along comes something else.’

  ‘You mean a worry about Bobby Angrave, or something?’

  ‘No, not that. For the moment, I put anything of that sort aside. It must be a something else that has to do with Grace directly. Why shouldn’t it be the crazy marriage business? Suppose it was only tonight that Grace broached that. And suppose that, as a result of it, Charles and Grace quarrelled.’

  ‘They couldn’t quarrel.’ Judith was shaking her head vigorously. ‘Not at that stage in Grace’s illness. It’s inconceivable.’

  ‘In a sense, it takes only one to make a quarrel. And the stage of Grace’s illness, with her at least, might predispose to some nervous explosion. Charles would almost certainly be horrified and revolted by her strange fancy. He might betray his feeling. And a quarrel – call it a lovers’ quarrel – might result. Charles would walk away, if only to cool off. And never see his wife again. Their last words would have been spoken in anger – and only because of a plan of hers which she believed to be for his good. When this came home to Charles, hard upon the news of Grace’s death, he really might, I believe, have made away with himself.’

  This last suggestion of Appleby’s produced silence for a time. Judith had got into bed, and now she picked up Jane Austen’s Emma. But she could hardly have been reminded that the novel’s heroine was the younger of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, before she spoke again.

  ‘John, isn’t there another possibility?’

  ‘There are probably dozens.’

  ‘Mayn’t Charles have taken his own life because Grace took her own life?’

  Appleby, who was placing a pair of shoes where he hoped they would catch the eye of a doubtless distracted housemaid in the morning, turned round and stared at his wife.

  ‘Grace! You think it was no accident?’

  ‘Why should it be? People don’t much fall into deep pools they are perfectly familiar with – not even when mortally ill. But the pool might have had its attractions for Grace. Didn’t she say something to us about deep, deep sleep? Well, it’s a deep, deep pool.’

  ‘People sometimes throw themselves off a bridge, or into the ocean. But they don’t just lie down–’

  ‘Yes, they do. Shelley did. He just lay down in quite a shallow pool, and stayed put.’

  ‘He didn’t drown.’

  ‘There was somebody there to pull him out. But, seriously, a woman might be drawn to take her own life in just that way. Indeed, I can think of
one very distinguished woman who did.’

  ‘And Grace did – and Charles knew?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Judith picked up Emma again. ‘It’s just one more way it may have happened.’

  15

  In the pagoda room – named from an ancient and gorgeous wallpaper and used only for the consumption of breakfast – Mrs Gillingham was sipping a frugal cup of coffee and studying a road-map. She looked up as Judith entered and a shaft of early sunshine caught her perfectly ordered hair.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘I hope that the sideboard carries what you require. Friary is usually in attendance, but today he has neither appeared nor sent a substitute. Perhaps he is still upset. He will certainly be glad to see us go.’ For a moment Mrs Gillingham’s glance went back to her map. ‘One has almost to regard him as the head of the household.’

  ‘You are leaving at once?’ Judith asked.

  ‘It seems the proper thing to do. As it happens, I am on a round of visits.’ It was without self-consciousness that Mrs Gillingham made this rather old-world pronouncement. ‘There is a slight awkwardness. However, I have sent a telegram, and everything is arranged.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’ It occurred to Judith that Mrs Gillingham, so restful in restful times, showed up as a shade chilly against Charne’s new background.

  ‘One’s farewells are a little tricky. I shall say goodbye, of course, to both Bobby and Martine – but perhaps to Martine first. Writing afterwards is a different matter.’

  ‘You mean a Collins?’ Judith found the social problem thus propounded decidedly odd.

  ‘Exactly. To whom shall the bread-and-butter letter go? One must, after all, continue to observe the forms. Fail in that, and chaos is come again.’ Mrs Gillingham, although she spoke with a faint irony, seemed to mean what she said.