‘And what could be more classical than that?’ Appleby, not given to gesticulation, had made a gesture of impatience. ‘An almost infallible way to get yourself murdered, wouldn’t you say? Almost as infallible as having an alienated heir skulking in the ha-ha, or disguised as a hermit in the Gothic cow-house.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Pride was conceivably a little at sea before this fantasy. ‘But that’s not all.’
‘Tommy. I’ve heard those words already in the course of this affair. But I am patient. Expound.’
‘There was something else Pantin felt he ought to tell me. It seems there’s far less money behind all this than you’d think. If Mark Tytherton is to keep Elvedon he’ll have to be a deuced good manager. Thin ice, Pantin says. Damned thin ice for years. Bad buys in that picture-fancying line. Extravagant wife. Voracious top tarts. Shocking state of affairs.’
‘Did Pantin get the impression that Tytherton was acting impulsively and in a passion?’
‘Yes, he did. He says he made a note to put the brake on. Term lawyers use, it seems, when coping with the sudden whims of clients. Pantin got the notion that some specific upsetting thing had happened, and that Tytherton had lost his wool.’
‘Did he gather just what change or changes in his will Tytherton wanted to make?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘It might have been something big, or it might have been something little?’
‘I suppose so.’ Pride had led Appleby into the hall, which presented its customary appearance of mysterious depopulation. He lowered his voice to combat its resonance. ‘Come to think of it, you know, he might have been proposing to disinherit his son.’
‘Would that have been legally possible?’
‘Not perhaps all the way. Must be this and that tied up one way and another in a concern like this, eh? But at least something pretty shattering might be in his power.’
‘Yes – but my instinct is rather against it.’ Appleby had paused, frowning, before the ancestral Tytherton commemorated by Sir Thomas Lawrence. ‘For one thing, it’s a tricky thing to do – leaving an only son the proverbial farthing. It may result in enormous sums vanishing in bitter law-suits, which is a thought the wealthy hate like poison. And, for another, people just don’t, so far as my experience goes. Don’t you agree?’
‘Perfectly true.’
‘They may hound the offending child from the family hearth with dreadful imprecations. But they don’t go on to rob him of his patrimony. What about Miss Kentwell?’
‘Good God! What can she have to do with it?’
‘She appears to be some kind of charity tout. Suppose she had cozened Tytherton into believing he could get a life peerage, or some such nonsensical thing, on the strength of promising something spectacular to the Depressed Widows of the Higher Clergy–’
‘My dear John, be serious. Tytherton was a man of affairs. He would know what happens, and what doesn’t.’
‘Well, say at least that he had made some bequests of the kind. And that now, being hard up, he was thinking better of them. And suppose Miss Kentwell is in these matters a straight fanatic–’
‘War games.’ Pride had suddenly chuckled. ‘We were being made to play them before I left the army. Entertaining, of course, and calculated to sharpen the wits. You imagine some totally crazy thing, and then work out its consequences. But let’s keep Miss Kentwell till after dinner.’
‘I have a notion she may show up then.’ Appleby said this soberly, and now he turned round to pace the hall. ‘Even if not quite in the role I’ve been sketching for her. Of course it’s probably true that this proposed change in Tytherton’s will concerned some minor family matter. Or better, perhaps, domestic matter. What about that awful Mrs Graves? He’d had her, so to speak–’
‘You bet he had.’
‘I wasn’t intending the phrase in quite that sense. He was suddenly disenchanted with her, and was going to see that she didn’t get that two, or three, or five thousand pounds.’ Appleby came to a halt. ‘And there are probably other possibilities in the same area.’
‘Shocking business, this.’ Colonel Pride recurred to a familiar note. ‘A gutter paper’s holiday, eh?’
‘Oh, undoubtedly. But, talking of Mrs Graves, your Mr Pantin didn’t happen to murmur anything about family jewels?’
‘As a matter of fact he did.’ Pride stared at Appleby in astonishment. ‘It was when he was being discreetly communicative on the theme of hard times among the Tythertons. Mrs Tytherton – Alice Tytherton – is rather given to jewellery, as I think I mentioned before. Owns a heap of them in her own right. But apparently, some time back, Tytherton infuriated her by announcing he’d sold a sizable packet of his own family ones. Pretty significant, I’d say, having to do that. You’d have to be at a loss for no more than a few thousand pounds, I’d suppose, before you adopted such an expedient. Not our world, my dear John.’
‘Definitely not. But perhaps he hadn’t sold them at all. Perhaps he’d given them to the slinky-kinky Mrs G. Or to one of Mrs G’s predecessors. Or even, as a softening up measure, to some nice little woman he had lined up for the succession.’
‘You do have an ability to touch a hard-boiled note, John. Comes of having worked in London and among the nobs, I suppose.’
‘I’m just suggesting there’s plenty of scope. For salacious conjecture, if you care to put it that way. And the jewels needn’t even have been honest Tytherton heirlooms. They may have been the rightful property of Mrs Tytherton the First.’
‘My dear chap, isn’t your fancy rather running riot?’
‘Well no, as a matter of fact. I’m on rather solid ground with this one. But perhaps that’s another story.’
‘Another story?’
‘Or say a related one. An Arabian Nights affair this, perhaps. Stories within stories. And we’ve got to sort them out.’
‘By round about dinner time, I think you said?’ Colonel Pride allowed himself to import a faint sarcasm into this question.
‘I’d hope so. But – do you know? – I think we mayn’t even have touched the central one yet. There are people lurking in this house that I haven’t yet so much as set eyes on. Two young men, for example – and a third whom I suppose to be a rather older one.’
‘Meaning – ?’
‘The Tytherton nephew, Archie. The efficient chap who runs the place, and enjoys its vistas by moonlight.’
‘Ronnie Ramsden.’
‘And Mr Carter. The wholly nebulous Mr Carter, who seems to be hinted at as Alice Tytherton’s consoler in hard times. Have you so much as a notion what he does with himself?’
‘Yes, I have. It emerged not an hour ago. He’s an eminent medical man.’
‘You mean he’s really not Mr Carter but Dr Carter?’
‘Nothing of the kind. It’s simply that he’s a surgeon. Why one doesn’t call a surgeon “Doctor” I don’t know. But it’s the English convention, is it not?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby had spoken absently. Now, with alarming suddenness, he came to a dead halt. ‘A surgeon, is he? That’s as interesting as anything I’ve heard yet.’
13
Ramsden, the young man said to run Elvedon, was not hard to find. He had a kind of office in a semi-subterranean apartment which some predecessor of the Tythertons had caused to be tricked out as a small Gothic library; it was all fretwork and escutcheons, scraps of armour, pikes, halberds, and improbable-looking wooden chairs and settles.
‘I hope you don’t find this room too silly,’ Ramsden said easily. ‘I’m rather at home in it. My very undistinguished school was in a house just like Elvedon – only four times the size – and our headmaster had a dungeon of a study much in this taste. When he had us in to correct us – which was his old-fashioned phrase – the effect of a mediaeval torture-chamber was pretty co
nvincing. However, he was a civilized character, and always offered us a glass of sherry afterwards.’
‘I think I’d have felt I deserved brandy.’ Appleby had heard of this headmaster before, and realized that Ramsden, an employee at Elvedon, was urbanely planting his social credentials on the table. ‘Were you, by any chance, at school with Mark Tytherton?’
‘Yes, indeed. Mark and I were contemporaries.’
‘Is that how you landed this job?’
‘No, it had nothing to do with it. Pure coincidence. When I arrived at Elvedon six years ago, Mark had departed for the Argentine quite some time before. It was some weeks before I tumbled to the thing, or so much as remembered him.’
‘Most interesting. Have you seen him lately?’
‘No – in fact not since we left school. Of course I know he’s back, and has been up to the house. But I haven’t run into him. I think he’s seeing one of the local policemen now. Probably Henderson, the chap I walked round with. And it’s my turn next.’
‘Ah, yes. There have to be formal statements from everyone.’ Appleby offered this soothingly. ‘And you don’t object to a preliminary word with me?’
‘Good Lord, no. Quite the contrary, Sir John. I feel this to be an occasion. Like meeting Bernard Shaw or T S Eliot.’
‘Thank you.’ Appleby received this mild impertinence unresentfully. The general posture of affairs at Elvedon no doubt put Ramsden, like everybody else, in one degree or other on the defensive. But he remained rather an attractive young man. His looks were in his favour, including a cool and candid gaze from clear grey eyes. His manners were all right and so was his manner – which was relaxed and easy, although neither of these things in excess. ‘You and Miss Kentwell – about whom, by the way, I feel something a little odd – appear to have been last night’s special case. You were in each other’s company at the time of the killing, whereas everybody else appears to have been on his or her own.’
‘Yes, until you get down to the servants. I suppose they oughtn’t to be left out of the reckoning. For instance, the Catmulls. You know that Catmull, who is our butler, rejoices in a wife, who is our cook. They may have been in one another’s company, for all I know. And so may some of the Italian girls.’
‘Perfectly true – although I’ve no doubt that Inspector Henderson’s people are checking up below-stairs too. But may I just stick to Miss Kentwell and yourself for a moment? I suppose you were unintermittedly within each other’s observation throughout the relevant period?’
‘Which you define as – ?’
‘From the moment of your together leaving Mr Tytherton’s workroom when you had failed to find him to the moment of your together returning to it and discovering his body.’
‘Then the answer is: Most certainly. We went up to the roof, you know, but there was no question of losing each other in the dark. Indeed it wasn’t dark. There was a splendid moon.’
‘So I gather. I suppose, by the way, that your view from up there took in pretty well the whole park. Did you happen to notice anything out of the way there?’
‘You mean anybody moving around? No, I didn’t. Was there anybody?’
‘Well, yes.’ Appleby had noted the adroit question. ‘There was the vicar, looking for badgers. And there was Mark Tytherton.’
‘Indeed.’ Ramsden’s tone was instantly one of disapproving reserve. ‘I certainly saw nothing of Mark Tytherton. Nor of Voysey either.’
‘There would only be an off-chance of it.’ Appleby seemed to dismiss the point. ‘But – by the way – if you had noticed somebody unidentifiable down there, would you have been at all perturbed?’
‘Not in the least – unless the figure showed signs of prowling round the house. There’s no right of way in the park, and we lock the gates once a year to safeguard the legal position. But Mr Tytherton never, so far as I know, took exception to local people taking one or another short cut through it at any time.’
‘Ah, that brings me to something I find rather interesting. It may be called security. I’d have imagined that Tytherton would have been inclined to discourage any sort of trespass after his experience of robbery a couple of years back. That’s an affair to which a good deal of fresh thought will have to be given. You must have considered, Mr Ramsden, the possibility that a second attempted burglary lies at the bottom of last night’s tragedy?’
‘I see the attractiveness of the idea – if that’s not too awkward a way of putting it. But it’s hard to see just how it could work out.’ Ramsden frowned. ‘The Goya, for example, up there in the workroom. It’s not difficult to imagine Tytherton shot dead while defending it; shot dead as the result, say, of surprising a thief in the act.’
‘Quite so. And the thief then got in a panic and fled.’
‘But the hour is awkward, Sir John, wouldn’t you say? Not yet midnight. It would have to be the small hours before anybody in his right mind would propose simply to take a great thing like that from the wall, tuck it under his arm, and march out of Elvedon with it.’
‘Fair enough. But he might be proposing simply to open the window and lower the thing down to an accomplice.’
‘An inside job – is that the phrase? But you know, Sir John, that a rough check has failed to show anything else missing. I went round with this Inspector or Superintendent who’s going to see me again. A nice chap.’
‘Henderson. Well, I’ll tell you one thing he’ll have before him by now – the police records of that first robbery. And he’ll want your recollections of it.’
‘He’s welcome to them, Sir John. And I very much hope you’re both on the right track.’
‘Thank you.’ For a moment Appleby had taken this as being merely a conventional expression. Now he looked sharply at Ramsden. ‘Am I to attach some meaning to that?’
‘I think you can guess what’s in my mind.’ Ramsden had stood up, and was leaning over the back of a chair which would have served as a very adequate throne for King Lear in an aggressively antiquarian production of his tragedy. ‘Robbery ending in murder is a pretty lurid affair. It’s horrifying, or catastrophic, or sad, or whatever. But it’s not dead squalid and scandalous.’
Ronnie Ramsden, Appleby reflected, appeared to own the same distastes as Colonel Pride. Robbery with violence was one thing; adultery and miscellaneous fornication with violence was quite another. But it would be as well to check that this really was what ran in the young man’s head.
‘Do I understand you to mean, Mr Ramsden, that other readings of Mr Tytherton’s death are likely to require the sifting of a great deal that is unsavoury and immoral?’
‘Well – that, more or less. I don’t know about immoral. I don’t think I’m particularly a puritan about a bit of bed-hopping, and all that. But it does get fearfully boring – a gang of people, some of them not even all that young, loosing their unbeautiful natures at each other and scrapping away over that sort of thing.’
‘You’d rather they filched each other’s Goyas, revolver in hand?’
‘I’d call that an extravagant way to put it. But I suppose it’s more or less what I mean.’
‘It’s an interesting ethical point of view.’ Appleby spoke dryly. ‘But a picture-theft can be scandalous too, wouldn’t you say? For instance, when it isn’t one.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ The young man had sat down again – behind a desk of decidedly orderly character. He had suddenly taken on the air of one who had just so much time for Appleby, and no more. ‘Will you explain yourself?’
‘Certainly. I haven’t yet got the facts, so this is only conjecture. What I have got is the impression that the whole affair went in rather a minor key, was distinctly soft-pedalled – or any other metaphor you choose.’
‘Just what affair, Sir John?’
‘The supposed robbery two years back.’
‘The sup
posed robbery?’
‘That’s where I just conjecture. By the way, I think I am correct in supposing that you manage the Elvedon estate, and a good many related matters?’
‘I do.’
‘Then it couldn’t possibly be news to you that Maurice Tytherton’s financial affairs have been more or less seriously embarrassed for some time?’
‘It couldn’t possibly be something I would discuss with you, Sir John.’ Ramsden’s reply had been swift and tart. ‘You would have to apply to Mr Tytherton’s solicitor.’
‘The Chief Constable has already done so, and I think we have enough to go on. Are the pictures and so on here in Elvedon insured?’
‘Yes, they are – although it costs the moon.’
‘Those that disappeared a couple of years ago were insured?’
‘They were, although not adequately.’ Ramsden sat back squarely in his chair, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him. Although young, he looked formidable. ‘Sir John, you are advancing a very grave allegation – and through the singularly odd medium of an informal conversation with myself. You are saying, in effect, that the late Mr Tytherton, some two years ago, stole certain of his own pictures, collected insurance money on them, and then presumably quietly sold them on some illicit market. Moreover, you are suggesting that something of the same kind has in some mysterious fashion resulted in Mr Tytherton’s death now. Am I right?’
‘Yes, you are – provided you bear in mind that it is my common method in affairs of this kind to advance and review every conceivable hypothesis. I am perfectly willing to take up the sort of conjectures which you yourself appear more inclined to entertain. Some of them would be little more to Mr Tytherton’s credit than is the theory I have just sketched. They will, of course, take longer to run over – and for an obvious reason.’
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