Appleby's Other Story

by Michael Innes

  So far, there were two strands visible in this affair, and they were not of a sort to come together readily into a pattern. In the first of these strands he was himself, it might be said, a tenuous thread. A couple of years ago there had been some not very spectacular art theft at Elvedon; quite recently the deprived owner, Maurice Tytherton, had taken it into his head that he would like to make the acquaintance of Sir John Appleby, a celebrated authority on such matters; the said Sir John had presented himself at Elvedon (this as a consequence of a rather childish stratagem on the part of Colonel Pride) to find that Tytherton had just met a violent end – and to find, too, that an old adversary of his, the not too reputable art-dealer Egon Raffaello, had been staying there as the dead man’s guest. All this might, or might not, add up; and it was certainly desirable to obtain much more specific information about the theft than stood at the beginning of the series.

  What had tended to obscure this strand in the affair, and to obtrude the other, was really what might be called the moralism of Tommy Pride. Pride had a bad conscience about not having been quite frank about the occasion of his taking Appleby over to Elvedon, and this was sharpened by his perhaps obsessive sense that the place was a haunt of vice. Or at least that it was full of people who exhibited the most rotten bad form – as Tytherton had done, most strikingly, by bringing his mistress into his wife’s house. But at least it seemed true that there was this strand to the mystery; that the house party at Elvedon – not to speak of the expatriate son, quartered in this pub, and either seen or not seen at a compromising time of night by Mr Voysey when looking for badgers – did hint a state of affairs which might generate some species of crime passionnel.

  Brooding over this, there suddenly came into Appleby’s head the totally incongruous figure of Miss Jane Kentwell, celebrated as having found the body. Que diable allait-elle faire dans cette galère? She had very little appearance of being likely to find herself at home in raffish society, any more than she had of connoisseurship in the arts. Perhaps she really did make something of a profession as a seeker out of charitable gifts and bequests – but had she been admitted to Elvedon on that ticket? One had no sense of it as a place in which any philanthropic bounty was likely at all notably to flow. There was a small note of the enigmatic, Appleby told himself, about Miss Kentwell.

  It was at this point in his meditation that Appleby noticed he was no longer alone in the public bar of the Hanged Man. A person of superior appearance had entered, been provided with a tankard, and modestly retreated to an unobtrusive corner. Appleby took another look at this superior person, and saw that he was none other than Catmull the butler.

  There is no prescribed etiquette for casual rencontre between butlers and retired Commissioners of Police. The thing has to be played by ear. Appleby’s manner of coping now was dictated by a lively sense of something interesting that must lurk in Catmull’s having made a break from Elvedon at the present hour. The man had either served his buffet luncheon and immediately downed tools, or deputed the whole operation to some subordinate menial. Perhaps like Appleby himself he had felt a strong compulsion to withdraw and think matters out. Reflecting thus, Appleby risked an intrusive move. He picked up his own tankard and crossed over to Catmull’s corner.

  ‘May I join you?’ he asked. ‘It seems pretty quiet here today.’

  Catmull nodded. The gesture indicated at once that when he stepped outside the Elvedon ring-fence it was into a position of equality with all men. Appleby approved of this, although he wasn’t sure that he approved of Catmull. And if Catmull was startled by being accosted by the Chief Constable’s companion he gave no sign of it.

  ‘It’s quiet now,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I came here. But you wait. The reporters are on their way now, aren’t they? And this is where they’ll put up.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it, Mr Catmull. And you’ll have hard work keeping them out of Elvedon itself.’

  ‘That’s a true word. Mere trippers too there’ll be, once the radio and the telly and the evening papers have come out with it. No lack of drinkers in the Hanged Man tonight.’ Catmull paused. ‘Queer that you and the Colonel should come asking for Mr Tytherton like that.’

  ‘An odd coincidence, certainly.’

  ‘Hadn’t been at Elvedon before, I think?’

  ‘Never. Colonel Pride was to introduce me to your late employer. I have an idea that Mr Tytherton wanted to have a talk about the pictures he lost a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Ah, now that goes with what Mrs Catmull says!’ Catmull was momentarily looking at Appleby through narrowed eyes. ‘Interesting, that is.’

  ‘And what does Mrs Catmull say? I don’t quite follow you.’

  ‘“Why, that’s him that was in my book,” she said. When I told her your name not an hour ago, sir. “That’s him I read about,” Mrs Catmull said. But by a book she doesn’t of course mean a book. Mrs Catmull isn’t highly educated. She calls a magazine a book, sir – like most women do.’ Catmull seemed here to touch on a misogynistic note. ‘Intending, you see, that she’d read about Sir John Appleby as one going after thieved pictures, and the like.’

  ‘It was certainly an interest of mine at one time, Mr Catmull.’

  ‘Well, here are you coming to talk to Mr Tytherton about such things today, and here is Mr Tytherton getting himself shot dead last night. If you ask me, it deserves thinking about, that does.’ Catmull paused. ‘That Mr Raffaello, now. Never been to Elvedon before in my time, he hasn’t. And he’s another one, it seems, that has to do with pictures and statues and the like. Snoops around them, too, in a way I don’t half like. Peering into places, like a guest who is anything of a gentleman shouldn’t. An eye should be kept on him, to my mind. Given his marching orders, he ought to be.’ Catmull’s tone had suddenly turned almost vicious. ‘But who’s to do that? Who does the bloody place belong to now. I’d like to know? But those in service aren’t told such things. Mrs Tytherton, she’ll go off now with you know who to France. And Mrs Catmull and me – well, a month’s wages handed us by a lawyer, it’s likely to be – and my good man pack your bag.’

  ‘I have no doubt that Mrs Catmull and yourself would readily find a suitably superior new situation.’ Appleby had listened to the butler’s sudden outburst with some curiosity. ‘But it seems possible that young Mr Tytherton, who is said to have returned to England, may propose to keep up Elvedon in the same style as his father.’

  ‘Back in England – him?’ If Catmull wasn’t genuinely startled, Appleby thought, he was an uncommonly good actor. ‘Much good he’ll do us.’ He stared morosely into what was now evidently an empty tankard. ‘In fact, damn all.’

  ‘Would you care for another pint, Mr Catmull?’

  ‘Well, sir, I don’t mind if I do.’ Catmull’s glance as he said this didn’t match with his casual tone. There was a curious hint of masked calculation in it. He is a man – Appleby told himself as he took both tankards to the bar – thoroughly pleased with his own cunning.

  But when he returned with the beer there was surely nothing but stupidity on Catmull’s face as he doggedly pursued his aggrieved note.

  ‘Of course, we have a bit put by – Mrs Catmull and me. Years in good service, we’ve seen, and careful living all the time. So there’s a small nest-egg, I don’t deny. But no possessions, sir. Scarcely a stick to set up with, if that’s what it comes to. And the price of so much as a kitchen chair something chronic today. Just what I have in my pantry at the big house, sir. Nothing else at all. Just everything there. Came to me from my father, they did. No class about them. And nothing else. Not so much as our own bed to comfort one another in.’ A long pull at his fresh pint had perhaps prompted this last affecting thought. ‘Time was, sir, when folk in the position of Mrs C and me could set up with rooms for single gentlemen. Chambers, one could call them, and charge accordingly. Prohibitive now. Absolutely prohibitive.’

 
‘I have no doubt the capital expenditure would be considerable.’ Appleby, although unable to feel any keen sympathy for the conjectured economic plight of the Catmulls, said what he could. ‘Haven’t you regularly been left in sole charge of Elvedon while Mr and Mrs Tytherton had been in London, or abroad?’

  ‘Oh, decidedly, sir. Except for Mr Ramsden as often as not, and young Mr Archie Tytherton the nephew from time to time, we take full charge, sir. Every confidence has been reposed in us.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it. When there is to be some radical change of plan for a big house, upper servants are frequently left in residence as caretakers over an indefinite period. On suitable board wages, of course. You must be aware of that. If it happens at Elvedon, it will give you time to look around.’

  ‘That’s very true, sir – very true, indeed.’ The glint of cunning had returned to Catmull’s face. His manner, moreover, was shading into what might be called the professional servile. ‘And I should be most grateful if any good word to that effect could be said, Sir John. Any influential word – from one of high standing such as yourself.’

  ‘I am most unlikely to be consulted.’

  ‘It has always been a great responsibility. The house contains so much that is valuable – quite apart from the pictures, even. But speaking of them, sir, might I ask if that Mr Raffaello – we were having a word about him a moment ago, sir – makes a business of buying such things and selling them again?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘And perhaps, Sir John, it wouldn’t always be quite above the board? A shady one, he seems to me.’

  ‘I am afraid I can say nothing whatever about that.’

  ‘Well, sir, I think I’d call that a significant reply. And in London, I imagine, there would be plenty others of the same sort?’

  ‘If you mean dealers who are not very scrupulous about the authenticity of what they sell, or careful to establish the seller’s just title, that is certainly so. But you must not suppose me to be suggesting anything of the sort about Mr Raffaello or anybody else.’

  ‘But you would have had dealings with such in your time?’

  ‘Dealings with them? I’ve seen some of them into gaol, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘And perhaps they would continue in their wickedness, sir, when they came out again? A sad thought.’

  ‘It’s certainly true of some of them.’

  ‘Their names would be in the papers – at the time, I mean, of their being convicted?’

  ‘Dear me, yes. You could look them up.’ The cunning of Catmull, Appleby was reflecting, seemed of a somewhat primitive order. He was surely a singularly unsuitable person to leave in charge of a large house filled with valuable objects. ‘But they have to be very clever indeed, I may say, not to get pretty quickly caught out. The ownership of most works of art of outstanding value is common knowledge nowadays. It’s all recorded in catalogues and so on. So it isn’t possible to buy, say, a Goya which you know to be stolen and stick it happily above your dining-room mantelpiece. All you could do would be to lock it up, and sometimes go and gloat over it in private. There are people prepared to spend big money buying themselves such a pleasure – but they are few, and singularly hard to find.’ Appleby finished his second pint – thus conscientiously consumed in the interest of detective investigation – and pushed away the tankard. ‘In fact, Mr Catmull, important works of art are about the last wares to which I could conscientiously recommend a would-be thief to turn his attention.’

  ‘Most interesting, sir. May I ask what, in fact, you would positively recommend?’

  ‘My dear Mr Catmull, that would be telling.’

  11

  Catmull didn’t press his hopeful inquiry; instead, he consulted his watch, got to his feet, offered Appleby a modified form of professional bow, and withdrew with dignity from the Hanged Man. The cares of Elvedon were gathering once more around him.

  Appleby recalled that he had undertaken to contact Mark Tytherton. It looked as if, immediately after their last meeting in the presence of the unspeakable Raffaello and the enigmatically philanthropical Miss Kentwell, the young man had made his way into the further presence of his stepmother – and perhaps, briefly, into that of his dead father before the ambulance had received him. Alice Tytherton’s manner had not suggested that this occasion of mutual condolence – which in conditions of any sort of decency ought to have been a moving one – had brought her any comfort or consolation whatever. The widow hadn’t, in fact, so much as pretended to grief. As for Mark, he had been upon the occasion of his encounters with Appleby, Raffaello, and Miss Kentwell at least in a discernible state of shock. It might of course be shock over something done and not merely over something heard or suffered. That was an open question. That it should remain an open question, at least for the time, appeared to have been Mr Voysey’s anxiety – an anxiety which had partly explained itself from the vicar’s confusion, psychologically persuasive enough, as to just what had come into his head when. Voysey – when, as it were, going by the book – didn’t care for Mark Tytherton at all. Mark was a young man of irregular life, at odds with his family, and not at all disposed to exhibit those professions and attitudes upon which it is comforting to be able to rely in a Christian and a gentleman. But an unregenerate Voysey – conceivably a wise and humane Voysey – would acknowledge at a pinch a soft spot for the wandering heir. Appleby wasn’t confident that he didn’t harbour such a soft spot himself. But soft spots, while becoming in a clergyman, are wholly undesirable in a policeman. Appleby’s business was to find Mark again – and perhaps to twist his tail a little before introducing him into the society of the Chief Constable and Inspector Henderson.

  One must suppose Mark to have found Elvedon unwelcoming. It was improbable that he didn’t now own the place. Outcast heirs commonly discover themselves to be heirs after all. But he seemed not to have announced himself as at all settling in. If he hadn’t departed altogether, which was something that common prudence would surely counterindicate, he had presumably returned to this wretched pub. There was a probability that he was somewhere lurking in it now. Appleby resolved to investigate. He got to his feet and walked over to the bar. A detached observer might have remarked in him a somewhat ominous gathering of authority as he moved. The taciturn and discontented publican, who was disdainfully puddling glasses in an invisible sink of what was doubtless dirty water, glanced at him with a new wariness as he approached.

  ‘I think,’ Appleby said, ‘that you have a few rooms here? There is a gentleman staying with you now?’

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  ‘You know who he happens to be?’

  ‘I don’t know much about the folk in these parts. I haven’t been here long.’

  ‘Why should you suppose him to belong to these parts? I suppose he just drove up, didn’t he, like anyone else motoring around?’

  ‘He drove up, all right – in a taxi from the junction. He’s no business of mine.’

  ‘But you know now who he is?’

  ‘Well, one of my regulars has said something. I didn’t much attend to it.’ Momentarily, the publican showed signs of fight. ‘And who are you, anyway?’

  ‘I am Sir John Appleby.’

  ‘Never heard of you.’

  ‘There is no reason why you should have. I advise you to answer my questions, all the same. You have heard what has happened at Elvedon Court?’

  ‘Everybody has heard that. The police are there. I don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘There is no reason to suppose you are going to meet any.’ Appleby wondered what inconsiderable irregularities in the conduct of the Hanged Man were the occasion of this defensive attitude. ‘Where is this gentleman now?’

  ‘I don’t know. In his room, perhaps.’

  ‘Be so good as to tell him I want to speak to him.’

  �
��There’s a woman with him.’

  ‘That is quite irrelevant.’ Appleby dissimulated his surprise at this blurted out information. ‘You mean that he arrived with a woman?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. She came asking for him – just before you came in. One of the nobs from the big house, I’d say. Dressed up to the nines. I sent her up. Number Two. There’s only Number One and Number Two here. No class, this place. Not much trade, either.’

  ‘Thank you. You needn’t trouble yourself further. It doesn’t sound as if Number Two will be hard to find. I hope you’re washing those glasses in running water.’

  And Appleby left the public bar. This mild police bullying, he reflected, came back to him quite naturally from long, long ago.

  The little staircase was dirty. There was a shabby landing and a small corridor. There were voices, raised voices, from behind the second door he came to. He had never found keyholes attractive. They were even less attractive than bullying. He knocked briskly at the door and walked in.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Young Mark Tytherton, standing in the middle of the small ugly room, had swung round furiously. He had a trick of reacting to stimuli in an over-violent way.