‘Good – but first tell me this.’ Appleby put down his cup. ‘That Miss Kentwell, there at the other end of the room. Have you discovered her profession?’
‘Charity organizer.’
‘Ah, yes – but anything else?’
‘The only other thing I know about her – apart from her own account of her movements last night, and so on – is that the servants here don’t like her a bit.’
‘Catmull?’
‘Both Catmull and his wife.’
‘I see. I haven’t yet met Mrs Catmull. I think I must seek her out.’
‘That won’t be difficult, sir. She’s in the butler’s pantry more often than not.’
‘Her husband’s pantry? But isn’t she the cook?’
‘I believe so. Perhaps she’s scared. But about Miss Kentwell – some of the servant-maids don’t care for her either. Foreigners, of course, they are; and perhaps one needn’t much attend to them. But they say she spies on them.’
‘On the maids themselves – those Italian girls?’
‘Yes, sir – and in a general way as well. The young women sleep at the top of the house, and three nights ago one of them came down to the kitchens in the small hours. Catmull hadn’t allowed her something she rather fancied at supper in the servants’ hall, and she was determined to get the better of him and nobble some. A kind of jam tart, I gather it was.’
‘Good for her. Well?’
‘She saw Miss Kentwell creeping round the house. She–’
‘Bedroom doors – that sort of thing?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Henderson stared. ‘Or so this young person says. She may have a nasty mind.’
‘Nothing of the kind.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Henderson was like a rock. ‘Whatever the lady may have been up to, I have a strong impression that this girl was drawing on her imagination, at least to some extent.’
‘It’s immaterial, Henderson. There can’t be any doubt about what the woman has been up to. Her role as a charity organizer or whatever is entirely spurious. And her real role, incidentally, makes it pretty certain that she didn’t – that she and Ramsden between them didn’t – kill Tytherton. Tytherton was her employer. He introduced her to Elvedon, in an entirely bogus character, to spy on his wife. He was meditating a divorce, and Miss Kentwell is nothing other than a private inquiry agent. And from some damned expensive firm, I don’t doubt.’
‘I see, sir.’ Henderson said this a shade woodenly. ‘And it would be Carter who is in question?’
‘Yes, Carter – the fellow she’s innocently chatting up now. Her assignment is over, after all.’ Appleby paused. ‘Not that Alice Tytherton mayn’t have been admitting other lovers. So Miss Kentwell may have enjoyed what might be called a roving commission.’
‘It seems to me, sir, that the Chief Constable is pretty well right about this lot.’ Henderson grimly surveyed the tea party at large. ‘Live like cats, it seems. But it may all be a bit aside from our concern.’ Henderson hesitated. ‘You see, Sir John, it’s rather my instinct to cling to the pictures as the mainspring of the affair. If Miss Kentwell had been prowling Elvedon suspiciously, so has Raffaello–’
‘That’s absolutely true.’ Appleby’s admission was immediate. ‘And it’s certainly not something to lose sight of.’
‘Well, we do know where his interests lie. He may have made brief passes at Mrs Graves–’
‘Not significant, I agree. She’s a loose woman, and asks for it.’
‘Just so, sir. And if Raffaello is near the centre of the thing, then the pictures are.’ Henderson hesitated. ‘And you see, sir, in my own mind, I keep on coming back to the one in the dead man’s room.’
‘Ah, the Goya. A splendid portrait.’
‘I’d be right, I take it, to suppose it very valuable?’
‘Certainly. At a guess, I’d say it’s the most valuable thing in the house.’
‘Then Tytherton’s being killed right in front of it looks to me like being significant.’
‘But it’s there on the wall still, quite undisturbed.’
‘Yes, Sir John – it’s safe and sound, all right. But I have this thought about something unexpected having perhaps disturbed somebody’s programme. I know it sounds a trifle vague, that.’
‘Not at all. And I’d be inclined to call something of the sort inherently probable. We’re dealing with more than one story, as I think I’ve said. So why shouldn’t one of them, so to speak, blunder in on another?’
‘Well, sir, grant me that, and I’ll ask you about something else. We got it clear, you remember, that if Ramsden and Miss Kentwell hadn’t happened to go back to the workroom, nothing out of the way might have been discovered until this morning. Even after Tytherton was shot – always provided the shot hadn’t been heard – there would have been a useful space of time in which to make a clean getaway with the picture. Not only off the premises, but a good deal further.’
‘Anything up to twelve hours.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘Useful – but not all that useful.’
‘May I ask, sir, just what sort of conditions you’d relish, if you had a mind to steal a picture like this Goya yourself?’
‘I can tell you at once.’ Appleby was amused by so hypothetical a question. ‘I’d like something between a week and a fortnight to elapse before the theft came to light at all. It would give me a chance of selling the thing – in a quiet way, of course – more or less on an open and legitimate market.’
‘To an unwary but bona fide purchaser?’
‘Just so. Once the theft was news, it wouldn’t be so easy – not by a very long way. But all this is a trifle irrelevant, isn’t it? In the circumstances we confront in relation to Tytherton’s Goya, it’s hard to work out how anybody could be planning anything of the kind. For how could it be done?’
There was a pause. Appleby had been looking a shade absently at Henderson as he spoke. Equally absently, his eye now roved over the assembled company, just comfortably out of earshot.
‘They’re a mixed lot, aren’t they?’ Henderson said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Appleby had turned back with a start. ‘Sorry! I was remembering something – and from rather a long time ago. Yes, thoroughly mixed. One of them, by the way, definitely knows about pictures and so on. The distinguished sawbones, Carter. The others, I’d suppose, don’t much go in for that kind of thing.’
‘The one I’m worried about, sir, is young Mr Tytherton. The heir, that is: Mr Mark Tytherton. His story – and I’ve had a story from him – doesn’t seem to hitch on to the picture business. It takes us back to all this damned whoring.’
Henderson had been suddenly vehement – but apparently more out of intellectual irritation than moral repugnance.
‘You take Mark Tytherton to be given to that sort of thing?’ Appleby asked.
‘Not at all. Of course we don’t know anything about his way of life. But at least nothing he’s said suggests any concern to get into bed with anybody. It seems rather that the whole spectacle – even from thousands of miles away – had been getting him down. And particularly what he calls the ultimate insult in the matter of his mother’s jewels. He is a bit cracked about that.’
‘Yes. But what’s now his full story?’
‘It’s extremely simple. He walked over to Elvedon at about ten o’clock last night, saw a light in his father’s workroom, and came straight into the house. It hadn’t yet been locked up. He went upstairs and presented himself. He says he thinks his father wanted to receive him decently, but was very upset.’
‘About Mark’s unexpected arrival?’
‘Not that at all. He’s quite positive. It was as if his father had just received, and hadn’t recovered from, some considerable shock. His father was in what he called a bate, meaning a rage. So–’
‘Did they have a drink together, all the same?’
‘Yes, they did. But then the meeting went badly wrong. Mark says it was as if his father’s bate was catching. He – Mark, that is – started in on this jewels business, said he wouldn’t stand for their being handed round a brothel–’
‘Strong words, Henderson.’
‘Yes, sir. He demanded that they be given up to him, and his father said it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be done. It was all quite horrible, Mark says, and over in ten minutes. He stormed out of the house, still without seeing anyone, wandered about the park for a long time, and then went back to his pub. That’s his whole story.’
‘Well, well. It’s at least clear, is it not, to what it directs us?’
‘Sir?’
‘To the only chief performer in this sordid tragi-comedy that I haven’t been able to introduce myself to. Is that him over there – the pasty-faced youth?’
‘That is the dead man’s nephew, sir. Mr Archie Tytherton.’
‘He looks unhealthy.’
‘I doubt whether it’s to be called a natural pallor. He was extremely nervous when I first saw him and he told me that story about a nightmare.’
‘Ah, yes – the giant billiard balls.’
‘And it seems to me that his terror has been growing ever since.’
‘He’s another who’s in a fix, of course.’ From across the big library, Appleby regarded Archie Tytherton attentively. He was standing by himself, automatically gulping tea. ‘He, too, had his row with Maurice Tytherton yesterday evening. This seems an uncommonly quarrelsome house, wouldn’t you say, Henderson?’ Appleby didn’t pause for a reply. ‘Only, this young man’s row was before Tytherton rang up his solicitor, whereas Mark’s was after it. By the way, wasn’t Archie’s row with his uncle witnessed by somebody?’
‘That was Catmull. Catmull claims – but I can’t say that I regard him as very reliable – that he overheard Maurice Tytherton, in a great fury, say something to his nephew about having caught him with his pants down.’
‘An ambiguous expression, it seems to me.’
‘Yes, sir. It is a common figure of speech for mere unpreparedness, I believe. But in this instance it might have had a rather–’
‘Quite so. I really must attempt conversation with Archie Tytherton.’
17
Appleby made the attempt forthwith. But he had no sooner moved out of his corner of the library than he became aware that the late Maurice Tytherton’s nephew must have been keeping an apprehensive eye on him. The young man was now making for the door. Appleby felt a certain sympathy for him. Archie had twice been carpeted by Inspector Henderson, and it wasn’t perhaps unreasonable in him to feel that this was enough. Moreover that he was in a fine state of panic was attested by the precipitate clumsiness of his present retreat. He had put down his cup and saucer with an unseemly clatter, and had then stood so little upon the order of his going that he had bumped into Mrs Graves quite violently from behind. Mrs Graves had turned and glared at him; they had glared at each other, indeed, with a curious and disagreeable intensity of regard; and then the unappealing Archie, with one further panic-stricken glance at Appleby, had bolted from the room.
Appleby followed, more decorously but with almost the same speed. At least he was out of the library in time to see that Archie, swayed perhaps by the cunning of a hunted creature, had turned not towards the other principal apartments of the mansion but down a short passage leading to its domestic offices. What was now going forward was, frankly if absurdly, a pursuit. When Archie vanished through a green-baize door of the free-swinging sort which prescriptively segregates from their betters the menial hordes of a house like Elvedon Appleby was so close behind him that the rebound of the contraption almost caught him on the nose. This was not a major check; nevertheless when he had coped with it and plunged into a further passage it was to find that Archie had vanished. He could certainly not have reached its other end, so he must have dashed through one near-by door or another. Appleby chose the one closest to him, threw it open without ceremony, and entered the room thus revealed.
What he first became aware of was a culinary object which he had no difficulty in identifying as a rolling pin. He next observed that a certain amount of flour and even pastry still adhered to its surface. Finally, he realized that this normally harmless implement was being employed as a weapon, and seemed about to come down on his head.
Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. Appleby must, he supposed, have contrived some such injunction as this, although phrased more prosaically. For the lady with the rolling pin (who could only be Mrs Catmull, thus emblematically armed, like a saint carrying the appropriate instrument of her martyrdom) set it down, albeit reluctantly, on a table chiefly furnished with cloths, brushes, and silver-polishes. Appleby was constrained to realize that he had unwittingly blundered into what was a sanctum indeed. Here was the pantry of Mr Catmull himself.
‘What you doing here?’ Mrs Catmull demanded. Her tone suggested much more of truculence than of the reasonable deference prescriptively required of her when suddenly confronted by somebody of superior social station. ‘You’ve no business here, you haven’t – nor has anyone except this new Mr Tytherton himself. And the good manners to keep away, he’s had, he has.’
‘I’m sure that’s most commendable.’ Appleby recalled Catmull’s derogatory attitude towards his wife’s degree of educational accomplishment. ‘And I’m very sorry to intrude upon you in this way. I thought I was going to find Mr Archie Tytherton.’
‘If you want him, sir, you can have him, so far as I’m concerned. But he wouldn’t be welcome in this pantry of my husband’s, he wouldn’t. Nothing but a paratroop, that young Mr Archie is, nor ever was anything else.’
‘A hanger-on, Mrs Catmull?’ It was only for a moment that Appleby had been baffled by the apparent ascription of the career of arms to Archie. ‘Living on his uncle, would you say?’
‘His late uncle. This new Mr Tytherton, he’ll give him the right-about, I shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘I see. Well, my conversation with Mr Catmull earlier today suggested, I’m afraid, that he was a little apprehensive of receiving the right-about himself. He resents the possibility – very naturally, I should say, considering how snugly he’s accommodated here.’
As he thus enlarged the scope of his conversation with the lady, Appleby glanced round the pantry. In this adytum, he recalled, Catmull had asserted that all his worldly possessions had their sanctuary. It was a fairly big room, and with a certain amount of furniture, largely in abraded leather, of the sort that upper servants do over a period of years collect from indulgent employers. But perhaps its most prominent object was one which would have startled and not much pleased the Reverend Mr Voysey: a stuffed badger to which some rustic taxidermist had ingeniously imparted a quite needless air of extreme ferocity. For the rest, it might have been conjectured that Catmull shared with his late master a decided taste for the graphic arts. In a position of honour over the large safe in which the butler presumably kept the Tytherton silver hung an enormously blown up photograph, in dingy sepias, of some departed Catmull ancestor. Standing on one foot only, with just the toe of the other elegantly touching the ground, and supporting an elbow on a kind of up-turned drainpipe topped by a fern, he was in fact the Catmull equivalent – Appleby reflected – of that Tytherton whom Sir Thomas Lawrence had depicted gesturing at a ledger. But apart from this exhibition of family piety, Catmull’s taste appeared to incline towards pugilism and the turf, since the dozen or so other pictures, displayed in heavy and hideous frames of some ebony-like substance, were prints of improbably elongated racehorses and all too persuasively gory prize-fights being fought out for the delectation of assembled groups of gentlemen upon grassy swards and amid surroundings of rural calm. Appleby turned away from these evidences of connoisseurship in t
he interest of furthering his acquaintance with their proprietor’s spouse. Archie Tytherton had eluded him for the moment, but it ought not to be difficult to run him to earth later.
‘Your husband,’ he said with mild geniality, ‘tells me that you’ve read about me in a book.’
‘Ah, then you’re him I thought you might be – Sir John Appleby.’ If Mrs Catmull was impressed to a gratifying degree it was also true that a certain air of suspicion which emanated from her seemed not wholly abated. ‘It’s not proper,’ she went on, ‘what’s been happening at Elvedon. Not proper at all. Shooting poor Mr Tytherton like that – a perfect gentleman in every way, sir–’
‘You had a high regard for your employer?’
‘Well, now – not that he wasn’t a shocking old goat, begging your pardon. But very correct as a gentleman in every way, and this shooting of him like a dog is a very bad thing. But that’s not all.’
‘Ah – these, Mrs Catmull, are familiar words. But to just what do you refer?’
‘The foreigners, sir. Not respectable company any way on. Peering and spying, like I’ve no doubt you’ve heard. The one called Raffaello. Caught him in this very pantry, we did – which is why I now give a hand to Catmull keeping an eye on it.’
‘And with a rolling pin. Well, well. But what do you suppose Mr Raffaello to have been after here?’
‘The spoons, I’d say, or anything he could lay his hands on. Taken into custody, he should be, and remanded and all that, and put away proper.’
‘I’m not altogether unsympathetically disposed to that point of view. But did you say “foreigners”? You surely don’t regard Mr Mark Tytherton as a foreigner simply because he has lived for a long period overseas?’
‘Certainly not. An empire-builder in the Queen’s dominions, Mr Mark has been – and had a very civil word with me not an hour ago.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ Appleby refrained from a discussion of the political status of Argentina. ‘So who–’
Appleby's Other Story Page 13