The Open House

by Michael Innes

  ‘Thank you, Leonidas, you may go,’ Professor Snodgrass said – for all the world like an employer in a Victorian novel. ‘In fact, you may retire to bed.’

  It is probable that, upon this command, Leonidas gave a cold bow. But only probable, since nobody was ever actually to know. For, much as if the Professor’s words had been a cue-line in some old-fashioned melodrama, they had been instantly followed by a sudden deluge of darkness. The library remained, indeed, faintly lit by the dying fire. But throughout the room, as also in the corridor beyond the open door where Leonidas still stood, every light had been simultaneously extinguished. All Ledward Park was again as Appleby had first encountered it: a mere realm of Chaos and Old Night. Of Chaos in particular. For upon the inky gloom there immediately succeeded what might have been a nicely calculated crescendo of alarming, even of spine-chilling, sounds. First there was an angry shout, then pounding feet, a crash of splintering glass, a woman’s high-pitched scream, the shattering reverberation of a firearm discharged in a confined space. And then silence was entire again.

  Part Two

  THE SMALL HOURS

  7

  It could at least be said of Leonidas that, in this emergency, he had his wits about him. He had stepped swiftly across the library, and within seconds lit the candles in a three-branched candlestick.

  ‘On this side of the house, that was,’ he said. ‘The drawing-room, it might have come from. I suppose, sir’ – he had turned to Professor Snodgrass – ‘you wouldn’t have that old revolver of yours handy in this room?’

  ‘Of course not, Leonidas. But there are four of us, and we must tackle whatever mischief is afoot. William, you agree with me?’

  ‘Most certainly – and I can see that Sir John does. The question would appear to be whether we scatter, or go forward in a body. I am inclined to think that we may be bodies, if we advance together along that very awkward quadrant corridor. For I suppose that robbery with violence is what confronts us.’

  ‘That seems probable enough.’ Appleby had taken the candelabrum from Leonidas, and was walking towards the door. ‘But, if so, the robbery is likely to be over, and the robbers to be departing rather rapidly now. I propose returning to the hall. Leonidas, if I call to you from there, you are to come out and make your way to the switchboard, wherever that may be. It is probable that somebody has merely thrown out the main switch. Get it in again. Or, if fuses have been tampered with, do what you can. Professor Snodgrass, I would ask you and the vicar to remain here for the moment.’ Appleby was making no bones about taking charge in the emergency. It was his sort of thing, after all. ‘But I think I noticed a telephone in this room. If so, be so kind as to call the police at once. Tell them there has been shooting. It will get them out of bed. Right? Now I’ll take a look around.’

  He walked rapidly down the corridor. It wasn’t a place in which to loiter. But almost immediately he heard footsteps behind him – footsteps and a muted tap-tap which he knew to be produced by Professor Snodgrass’ rubber-tipped stick.

  ‘I would really rather you remained in the library,’ he said, without looking round. ‘Situations like this are quite familiar to me, you know.’

  ‘I think it probable that I have been under fire quite as often as you have.’ There was a surprising snap in Snodgrass’ voice, so that momentarily he sounded a much younger man. ‘And I have to know what has happened to Adrian.’

  ‘Very well.’ Appleby was looking fixedly ahead of him. It was still into nothing but absolute darkness. He remembered that the corridor gave not directly on the imposing colonnaded hall, but on a room of moderate size which came in between. And here it was, floating glimmeringly into view through an open door. He hadn’t paused on first passing through it, and he didn’t pause now. Only he saw from its glimpsed furnishings that it would probably be known as the music room. Facing the music, he told himself, and in half-a-dozen further strides was in the hall. The Professor was now shoulder to shoulder with him – which was remarkably good going on a stick.

  The two men stood between two of the columns that soared to the scarcely visible ornate ceiling. Merely between these, there would have been room without crowding for four or five men more. Who had once talked, Appleby asked himself, of feeling like a mouse in a cathedral? Here – holding aloft these three wax candles – one felt more like a glow-worm in a forest: an enchanted forest, in which the tree trunks were a frozen honey and the foliage hammered gold. A cold breath blew through the forest. Appleby wondered why.

  ‘The drawing-room,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We’ll try that first.’

  The dead man lay prone on the floor, with his head in the drawing-room and his heels in the hall. Even by candlelight his deadness didn’t seem arguable, since a bullet had emerged – not tidily – through the back of his head. His left arm was crumpled beneath him; his right was outstretched as if to reach into the room, and in its hand was grasped a heavy brass poker. It was from the cavernous darkness beyond the body that the small chill breeze was blowing.

  Appleby had set the candelabrum down on the marble floor – inconsequently aware, as he did so, of its decorous Georgian elegance. This damned house, he reflected, is full of loot. His hands busied themselves expertly with the body. He straightened up.

  ‘If he were on the operating-table at this moment,’ he said to Snodgrass, ‘there wouldn’t be a hope for him. But we must still keep our priorities right. I’ll give Leonidas that shout.’

  The shout rapidly produced footfalls, the glimmer of a match guarded behind a cupped hand, and then the bearded face of the butler in the chiaroscuro thus created. It wasn’t, Appleby told himself, the face of a frightened man; one didn’t warm to Leonidas, but there seemed to be plenty of stuffing in him. And of his employer there could be no question. Snodgrass was agitated, and no doubt in acute anxiety as to the identity of the shot man. But the possibility of further shooting didn’t alarm him.

  ‘Leonidas, go back to that telephone, and summon your local doctor at once.’

  ‘The telephone appears to be out of order, sir. Dr Absolon has just discovered so on trying to call the police. If there has been a robbery, one must suppose the line to have been cut.’

  ‘There’s been more than a robbery, as you can see,’ Appleby said grimly. ‘Is there a car here at the Park?’

  ‘My own car is in the stable-yard. I save time by coming across in it.’

  ‘Good. Then go and fetch the doctor yourself. As fast as you can possibly manage. And have a call put through to the police from his house.’

  ‘Very good, sir. And the lights?’

  ‘Yes – give a moment to that as you go. But don’t let it hold you up, if you can’t get them on instantly. And take one of these candles.’

  Leonidas hurried off. It was only when his footsteps had died away that Appleby knelt down again, and for a moment half-turned the body over.

  ‘Snodgrass,’ he asked gently, ‘is this your nephew?’

  ‘Yes.’ The Professor spoke in a low voice, which for a moment broke into a sob. ‘And in the very moment…’ He checked himself. ‘It is Adrian,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Is it quite certain that nothing can be done?’

  ‘Quite certain, I am afraid.’ Appleby lowered the body again to its first position. ‘Take a candle,’ he said, ‘and go into that bedroom near the dining-room. Bring a sheet. It will be all that is required.’

  It was just as Snodgrass was stooping to do as he was bid that the lights snapped on. The two men stared at each other, momentarily dazzled, and then both looked down at the corpse. It was, somehow, the most macabre moment yet. Appleby was glad that Adrian Snodgrass’ face was concealed again. The shot had been fired straight into it – so that the crime seemed to cry out the additional horror of a revolting brutality. Beddoes Snodgrass turned away, and now it was slowly and painfully again that he made his way across the great marble expanse of the hall. It was as if his years, and more than his years, had returned to him.

&nbs
p; ‘Somebody has been killed?’ It was Dr Absolon who asked the question. He had emerged through the music room, and had now stopped dead at the spectacle before him. ‘Snodgrass’ nephew?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Appleby suddenly remembered the somewhat odd speculations in which this country clergyman had been indulging. ‘But I could almost believe he had made the identification too confidently. There’s no need for you to look – indeed, I’d rather the body wasn’t disturbed again until the doctor and the police have seen it – but the features have suffered pretty badly.’

  ‘I see.’ Absolon (who might be momentarily shocked by the fact of death, but presumably was professionally immune from being puzzled by it) knelt down by the body, put a hand gently on its shoulder, and then stood up again and unobstrusively crossed himself. ‘Would you say,’ he asked curiously, ‘that he has been killed just as he has been killed precisely with that end in view?’

  ‘Preventing his uncle from positively identifying him?’

  ‘Preventing anybody from doing so with certainty.’

  ‘It’s conceivable, I suppose.’

  ‘Or at least may that be the actual consequence? May it never be certainly known who this unfortunate man is?’

  ‘I’d have thought that barely possible.’ Appleby was again fleetingly conscious of something idiosyncratic in the mental operations of the vicar of Ledward. Perhaps they really were coloured by an obsessive reading of mystery stories. The archetypal reader of such things, after all, was popularly thought of as a blameless parson with long afternoons to put in on a vicarage lawn. ‘It would be something extremely unusual – in England, at least. Particularly where there’s the presumption of a specific identity. We have every reason to suppose that here is Adrian Snodgrass – an elusive character, perhaps, but of some position in the world, and to be read about, if you care to, in Who’s Who. Of course, Who’s Who doesn’t record his dentist. But we can probably run him to earth.’

  ‘ “We’’?’

  ‘You catch me out there.’ Appleby might have been laughing if propriety hadn’t appeared to forbid. ‘I’ve passed my active days among policemen, and ended up running a certain number of them. I still talk like a policeman.’

  ‘And act like one too – and very convincingly. Do you know, I find that reassuring?’ Dr Absolon gazed candidly at Appleby across the body of the dead man. ‘Otherwise, I shouldn’t find your presence here tonight altogether unalarming. Beddoes seems only to have the vaguest notion of who you are, or where you’ve turned up from, or why. You are the mysterious stranger who has been the first to find the body.’ Absolon paused. ‘But I see, my dear sir, that you judge me flippant. What has become of Beddoes?’

  ‘Professor Snodgrass has gone to the other side of the house to find a sheet. He ought to be back by now – but I suspect he is under some strain, and has sat down for a few minutes to rest and recollect himself. I suggest that you and I take a look at this drawing-room.’ And Appleby moved forward, skirting the body. ‘We can keep an eye on one another,’ he added dryly.

  ‘Very well.’ But Dr Absolon was looking thoughtfully down at the poker in the dead man’s hand. ‘Do you know, I’d have expected that to go flying as he fell?’

  ‘Indeed? That has been your experience, in cases in which persons carrying or brandishing weapons have been dropped by a revolver-shot as they ran?’

  ‘My dear sir, now you are making fun of me.’ The vicar was not at all offended. ‘But let me make one more observation in the character of Dr Watson. I am convinced, my dear Holmes, that there have been thieves in this room.’

  If a joke had been any more appropriate to the circumstances than a laugh, this wouldn’t have been a bad one. A resourceful novelist might have declared that the drawing-room was like a place hit by a tornado. In one large sash window there were only a few jagged and evil-looking spears and sickles of glass, as if somebody had been sufficiently in a hurry to chance making an exit that way under the impulsion of a hurtling shoulder. Of the smaller objets d’art with which the place had been stacked and littered Appleby judged at a rapid glance that about a third had disappeared. And something more striking had disappeared as well. Over the mantelshelf only an expanse of faintly discoloured white enamel showed where lately there had hung a landscape by Claude Gelée, called le Lorrain. It had been, Appleby recalled, a View of the Campagna, with some banditti – no doubt supplied by one of the Courtois brothers – lurking rather unconvincingly in a corner. Now one could imagine these ruffians as having broken out of their own picture, grabbed at it frame and all, and made off with whatever they could hastily tip into a couple of sacks.

  ‘It isn’t surprising that there’s a bit of a draught,’ Absolon said. He walked over to the shattered window. ‘But this isn’t like the private wing, you know. No terrace. We’re simply perched above the basement storey. Booty and all, they had to find some means of taking a twelve-foot drop. It can’t have been a planned exit this way. They were surprised – and bolted in an unpremeditated and highly hazardous fashion. What’s the odds they got at least a gash or two from all that flying glass? There will be blood down there, if you ask me.’ Having peered briefly out into the night, the vicar turned round to look at Appleby. ‘But why did the lights go out?’

  ‘My dear Dr Absolon, that is a question to which I don’t doubt that you can supply me with more answers than one.’

  ‘One needs an answer that fits into the simplicity of the thing.’

  ‘Its simplicity? Are you sure you don’t mean its nonsensicalness?’

  ‘Essentially its simplicity, surely. On this night of the year alone, the Snodgrasses keep, as it were, open house. Anybody can walk in – and be sure of finding nobody around. By “anybody” we have to mean, of course, anybody who knows just how our friend the Professor’s annual ritual has evolved. Well, in they come, having a mind to the Claude I see you mourning, and to much else. Unfortunately, what nobody except Beddoes himself believes will ever really happen has happened. Adrian Snodgrass has turned up; he has sat down to the waiting meal; his uncle’s faithful old servitor (I refer to that patent rascal, Leonidas, my dear Appleby) presents himself, opens a bottle of champagne, and makes his way – full of glad tidings – to the library. The thieves, meanwhile, have arrived. Adrian hears something suspicious; something so suspicious that he picks up a poker and goes to investigate. He appears at the door of this room. The criminals panic; one of them shoots at him point-blank, and they make a disorderly retreat through the window. Appleby, don’t you see it that way?’

  ‘I fear I lack your amateur élan, sir. I shouldn’t dream of asserting that I see it at all.’ Appleby offered this reply absently, since he was prowling restlessly and enquiringly around the room. ‘However, it may well be that you have arrived at some part of the truth. You were asking yourself, by the way, why the lights went out.’

  ‘They went out as they did – with a shattering simultaneity – simply because they could so go out. It has been Beddoes’ whim so to order matters that he can turn on every light in the house at the flick of a single switch. So they can similarly be turned off, and therefore…’

  ‘My dear Vicar, there is nothing singular about that. Almost every lighting system is arranged in that fashion.’

  ‘Is that so? I am bound to admit I have never enquired. But my main point remains unaffected. There can be safety in sudden darkness where lawless behaviour is in question. The criminals had one of their number at the strategic point, wherever it may be. And he switched off the lights the moment he was aware that Adrian Snodgrass was alerted, and that danger was therefore imminent.’

  ‘There is much to be said for your reading of the matter.’ Appleby had come to a halt, and was now looking at Dr Absolon with attention. ‘But I wonder whether it can be made to accommodate something else?’

  ‘There is something else?’

  ‘Well, for me there is. You see, it was I alone who saw her. The woman in white. But I think you too hear
d her scream.’

  8

  But now there was a new sound to be heard: one less definite than a scream, but somehow equally unnerving. Professor Snodgrass’ uncertain footsteps, and the dull tap of Professor Snodgrass’ stick on marble were elements in it. But so was a species of sobbing respiration, and what sounded like a muttering or babbling of broken sentences. And then Snodgrass was in the drawing-room. He had turned deathly pale – a state which might be accounted for by the fact that he had again had to skirt his cherished nephew’s dead body. But he had also been reduced – momentarily, at least – to a condition of painful incoherence. He looked about him, stammering and feebly gesticulating. It was an awkward and painful confrontation.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Appleby said, ‘that a good deal has gone.’ He had concluded that it was the ravaged state of this richly furnished and adorned apartment that had dealt the guardian of Ledward Park a culminating blow.

  ‘Gone! He’s gone?’ Snodgrass had plainly misunderstood. ‘But I must see him! Call him – call him at once. Find…’ He broke off with a bewilderment of his head, as if he had suddenly been unable to find a word, or a name.

  ‘Leonidas?’ Absolon said.

  ‘Yes, yes. I must speak to him. What have you done with him?’

  ‘I gave him an order,’ Appleby said. ‘This is a situation, I’m afraid, in which we can’t stand upon ceremony. The telephone line has been cut. I’ve sent your man in his car for a doctor – and the police.’

  ‘The doctor will be able to do nothing for your nephew,’ Absolon said gently. ‘But the police may catch…’