The Open House

by Michael Innes

  ‘I suppose so.’ Without warning, the young man swung round, and sent first one, and then the other small solid ball he was holding viciously across the net. ‘I don’t really play this ruddy game. You have to be rather grand for it. Lord’s, or Queen’s Club.’

  ‘Or be the owner of Ledward Park.’

  ‘Well, yes. That’s obvious. And you can see the court’s in excellent order, like everything else here. Waiting for Adrian Snodgrass – and now this happens! It’s rather a rotten show, really.’

  ‘Certainly it is. But the question is, how rotten? Don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t understand that at all, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m just being crude once more. But put it this way. If Adrian was killed by a reckless thief he’d cornered, that was less rotten. If he was killed by a close relation, that was more rotten. Or am I taking an old-fashioned view?’

  ‘You’re suggesting the possibility of something monstrous.’ David Anglebury looked straight at Appleby. ‘I suppose it has been your trade.’

  ‘I suppose it has. Well, let’s go and discuss this in company of something else that’s monstrous, and that will set the tone. I mean the Laocoön in the corridor. One can at least sit down there.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ With no sign of reluctance, the young man let his racquet drop to the floor. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll only be saying again what I’ve already said to your subordinate.’

  ‘Inspector Stride isn’t my subordinate. He’s an independent concern – and, of course, the official one, for that matter. As for saying the same thing over again, it mayn’t work out that way. Our talk may take a different turn.’

  ‘I’m not going to contradict myself, if that’s what you mean.’ David Anglebury had flushed suddenly. ‘I’m hiding nothing at all. Not even about my mother.’

  ‘Thank you. Now, come along.’

  The Laocoön Group was as it had been. Neither the Trojan prince and his sons nor the serpents had made any progress. There was something unnatural about their immobility which made a returning spectator uneasy. The critic Lessing, Appleby supposed, had been getting at something like this in his celebrated book that took its title from the work.

  ‘Nemesis of a Detective,’ David Anglebury said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The ugly thing might be called that. Laocoön did a little too much deduction about the Trojan Horse – managed to see through it, you might say. And this is what came to him as a result. And to his kids too. You might regard it as a kind of cautionary tale, sir.’

  ‘So I might. Or so might any young man who found himself caught up in the toils of something he hadn’t any very clear view of the origin of.’ Appleby paused, not very pleased with this retort. Young Anglebury wasn’t the completely simple-minded boy he’d taken him to be. There had been a certain wit in the notion of Laocoön as an injudicious meddler in mysteries. But it still was quite uncertain how much he knew about himself. And to go fishing now for what he might have discovered or been told about his parentage was not, to Appleby’s mind, an agreeable occupation. He almost regretted his proposal to continue this talk. But he was in for it now. So was the boy.

  ‘Mr Anglebury, you didn’t like my speaking about the possibility of this being a family crime. But many murders are. As a matter of fact, most people (like myself) who have had to do with it are inclined to see murder as a very special sort of thing. In a way, it’s often hardly like a crime at all – even although, paradoxically, it comes right at the top of the list of crimes. A murderer is rather like a duke: a nobleman, but yet quite different from other sorts of noblemen.’ Appleby kept an eye on David Anglebury as he rapidly advanced this thesis, and was aware that it had been accorded genuine attention. He was confirmed in his view that the young man was intelligent. ‘But I was saying that a substantial proportion of murders are inside-the-family affairs. A sexual motive is distinguishable in many of them – as it is in so many imaginative works involving killings, from Greek tragedy down to the present day. But an even larger number turn on property or inheritance. The largest single group is concerned with property in the humblest way. What the old woman is believed to keep under her bed, or to have in the post-office savings bank. That sort of thing.’

  ‘How very dismal and horrible.’

  ‘It doesn’t have the glamour of Clytemnestra, I agree.’

  ‘Even Lady Macbeth doesn’t have that. She was only after what King Duncan had in the till – or the wardrobe.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’ Appleby’s mental note was now to the effect that Anglebury was really clever. ‘But all this is beating about the bush. There is every appearance of Adrian Snodgrass’ having been killed by thieves whom he had surprised at their work. And it may well turn out that way. But other possibilities have to be considered, as you very well know. It looks as if, yesterday, there weren’t too many people around who so much as certainly knew whether the man was still alive or not. Then he turns up; is alive; and gets killed. I ought to add at once that the crime may have had a political motive. Because, as it happens…’

  ‘I must say I find it hard to believe that one.’ Rather to Appleby’s surprise, Anglebury had broken in crisply with this. ‘I understand the general idea. Adrian Snodgrass had made enemies in Azuera, and some of them followed him home here and killed him. Have you read much about recent Latin-American history, sir?’

  ‘I can’t say that I have. It’s an interest of your own?’

  ‘Well, yes. I’ve read quite a number of books about it from time to time.’

  ‘I find that most interesting, Mr Anglebury.’

  ‘Do you?’ Appleby received one of the young man’s straight looks. ‘What I was going to say is this. Politics can be pretty tough in a good many countries over there. But I don’t think the contestants pursue each other from continent to continent with revolvers. That’s the principle of the vendetta, isn’t it? I don’t think it has much established itself in those places. Perhaps I’m speaking on much too little real information – and, of course, I have no first-hand knowledge of South Americans and their ways whatever. But I just have a feel of this idea as wrong. As astray, I mean. I find myself not believing in it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I don’t agree with you. But, you know, the murder may have been unpremeditated. Indeed, it has very much the appearance of that. Former associates of the dead man may have come here to confer with him – or say to bargain with him – and then something may have gone wrong, so that some fatal fracas followed. Or the meeting may have been interrupted by something having nothing to do with it.’

  ‘By thieves operating on their own, for instance. Or by relations lured on by the thought of what Adrian Snodgrass had in the post-office savings bank. Or hidden under his bed – but that, it seems, turned out just to be my mother.’

  ‘We needn’t take that up just at the moment.’ Appleby hardly knew what to make of the remark just offered to him. It was a heartless joke, and not engaging. But perhaps it was some sort of desperation that had prompted it. ‘What I’m really in search of – and being rather obstinately denied – is authentic family history.’

  ‘Snodgrass family history, I suppose you mean. But I don’t see how you can imagine I’m going to help you to it.’

  ‘Perhaps your mother can help. Hasn’t she been a family friend for a long time?’

  ‘You know very well there’s no sense in that, and that my mother’s mind is very badly deranged. She might say anything under the sun. But her doctors would have to tell you that you couldn’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘That may be an exaggeration, I think. What your mother had to say might be informative, if only in a fragmentary fashion.’

  ‘I don’t want her bothered, sir!’ This came from the young man like a cry. ‘It might have the most ghastly effect on her.’

  ‘I understand your feeling, Mr Anglebury. Unfortunately your mother turned up here tonight in very odd circumstances – and yourself aft
er her, for that matter. The police have an inescapable duty at least to seek to question her. I really don’t see how they can be headed off – unless the necessary information can be obtained elsewhere. I think myself that the mystery – and it is a mystery, goodness knows – may be connected with events long before your time. Or just before your time.’ Appleby paused. ‘But I don’t think I ought to go on with this. I have nothing to do with the local police; I’m at Ledward by sheer accident; and it’s open to you to conclude that I’m actuated by nothing except vulgar and morbid curiosity.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘I think I’d like to tell you what I can,’ David Anglebury said.

  15

  Lacocoön was doing quite well; he had one of the serpents firmly by the neck. But his sons, although well-grown lads, were not being much help; they seemed chiefly concerned to achieve a despairing gesture. The little fountain dribbled and prattled inconsequently at their feet. Appleby found the effect irritating, and was rather inclined to lead David Anglebury elsewhere. But the tennis-court had been comfortless, and to retreat in the other direction would be to return to the vicinity of Stride and his assistants. It would be best to stay put, and listen to the young man while – so to speak – the listening was good.

  ‘I sometimes think that my mother must have brought herself up on bad Victorian novels.’ Anglebury seemed unconscious that this was an odd introduction to what he might have to say. ‘Did you ever read Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby was surprised. ‘But that’s not a bad Victorian novel. It’s a very good one.’

  ‘I know it is. But, you see, I’ve been reading English at Cambridge, and I found out something odd about it.’

  ‘About Cambridge?’

  ‘About Thomas Hardy’s novel. The way one reads it now, the heroine just gets seduced by the villain, Alec d’Urberville. He takes her home from a rustics’ dance one night, and his ardour is a bit too much for her, and he simply manages to have her in a wood. He’s a nasty chap, but the thing is natural enough in itself.’

  ‘I suppose that is so.’ Appleby saw no reason to hurry young Anglebury. This preamble was a kind of staving off of embarrassing matter to come.

  ‘But what I discovered was this. When Hardy wanted to start by printing the novel as a serial in a magazine, he wasn’t allowed to arrange Tess’ seduction like that, because it wouldn’t have been respectable, or at all a proper start for a heroine’s career. So he had to take out the bit in the wood – it’s called a chase, actually – and put in something extremely silly about Tess’ having been hoodwinked by a bogus marriage-ceremony. And apparently there were lots of bad novels full of rubbish of that kind, and Hardy was just taking over a standard melodramatic device.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby paused. ‘And you think,’ he said gently, ‘that your mother had been a reader of them? They’d have been rather out of date, you know, even when she was a girl.’

  ‘I expect I’m talking rot, really.’ Anglebury, who was sitting stiffly upright on his bench, had flushed swiftly; and the effect of this was curiously enhanced by the bleakly white marble of the Laocoön Group and their niche. ‘But well, sir, you understand what I’m saying, more or less.’

  ‘What you know came to you from your mother?’

  ‘Yes – and when most of her mind was quite sensible. When it was only in bits and pieces that she had taken to imagining things. She was imagining that she had been tricked into going through a false marriage ceremony. I suppose it’s conceivable that a servant-girl might be deceived in that way. But it couldn’t happen to a lady. To an educated woman, I mean.’

  ‘It does seem improbable.’

  ‘But the…the thing happened, all right. The seduction or whatever it’s to be called. And I’m afraid I’ve got rather a staggerer for you now, sir. It was Adrian Snodgrass. I’m his illegitimate son.’

  ‘I see.’ Although without feigning surprise, Appleby gave no indication that this was not altogether a novel idea to him. ‘Would you say that many people know?’

  ‘Oh, yes – I think so. At least some must. I’m said to be rather like him, as a matter of fact.’

  Appleby had got up abruptly and moved over to the fountain. He might have been searching for a tap which should enable him to turn the confounded thing off. He had, in fact, found young David’s last remark curiously touching. A boy has to take some sort of pride in his parentage, and here had been an oblique way of expressing it. There had been a staunchness, a kind of standing up to be counted, in it, as well. And now the lad’s father had met a violent death and his mother had been crazily claiming to have inflicted it. Appleby found himself liking the Ledward affair less and less. But it would at least be a shade less uncomfortable as past history, and that was what he had to make it. He had something like three hours, he reckoned, until that notional breakfast-time.

  ‘So the story is this,’ he said. ‘Your father got your mother with child, and then deserted her. And you are the child. You may well regard it as unforgivable. There have been sons who have grown up to exact vengeance in such circumstances.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ For a moment Anglebury’s taut body sagged, so that he suddenly looked very tired. ‘But if I’d killed my father, I think I’d have told you by now.’

  ‘That is the probability, I agree.’ Appleby was unemotional. ‘But not, of course, a certainty. I suppose, by the way, that what your father did – or what you believe him to have done – does horrify you?’

  ‘Yes – but not as much as somebody having killed him does. I try to be objective. As a matter of fact, I once got so desperate that I had a talk with the family doctor about it…’

  ‘You mean Dr Plumridge?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve known him for a long time.’

  ‘I see. Go on.’

  ‘He helped me to see that I must try to hold the balance even. My mother may have been very unstable from the first, and that may be why my father funked honourable marriage.’

  ‘Yes. But she wasn’t too unstable to get married to someone else quickly enough to avoid open scandal. Or have I got it wrong?’

  ‘You’ve got it quite right. Charles Anglebury was some sort of lawyer. He had fallen deeply in love with my mother some years before. Or so my mother has told me at times when she was sane enough.’

  ‘And he knew.’

  ‘Oh, yes – I’m sure he did. The whole thing. He was some sort of minor saint, I think.’

  ‘You liked him, and as a boy took it for granted that he was your father?’

  ‘I remember nothing about him. I was very small when he died.’

  ‘And were you very small when your mother began confiding this unhappy story to you?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by small. I suppose I was about eight.’

  This information again brought Appleby to something of a halt. But he was committed now to extracting from the boy everything he was willing to tell.

  ‘About that faked marriage service,’ he said. ‘It turns up, as a matter of fact, in plenty of plays and romances long before the Victorian age. Do you think your mother told this particular part of her story to others as well as yourself?’

  ‘I know she did.’ David Anglebury shrugged his shoulders awkwardly, so that one could see he wasn’t given to such gestures. ‘It was one of the first things to show the doctors and people she was a little mad. You don’t think they should have believed her, do you?’

  ‘I am quite sure they oughtn’t to have disbelieved her without investigation. Did she tell the story in any circumstantial detail, so that some sort of check-up could have been made?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Certainly not to me.’

  ‘Did she come here, and did you follow her here, a year ago tonight?’

  ‘Yes – but nobody else knew. She had just wandered into the house, when I arrived and got her away. I didn’t tell Dr Plumridge or anybody. I knew perfectly well, you see, that it wa
s all entirely harmless. Even although she talked rather as she talked this time. The wronged woman business. I’ve got in the way of not creating about all this. What would be the good? It doesn’t seem as if they can do anything. And it would be a bit heart-breaking, really, if I didn’t manage to take it more or less in my stride. It’s lucky we have money – not a great deal, but enough. We have a very capable woman at home. She was a nurse.’

  ‘That’s something. But the future must take some planning for. I suppose you haven’t come down from Cambridge yet?’

  ‘Oh, no. I go back for my second year next week.’ The young man hesitated. ‘If this affair doesn’t go on being too awkward, that is.’

  ‘It won’t.’

  ‘You are sure of that, sir?’ Anglebury sounded surprised and relieved.

  ‘Yes. A case of this sort – one has to call it a case – always gets itself cleared up quickly.’ Appleby paused on this; he was now facing the seated boy squarely. ‘Where there is abundance of mystery and confusion in every direction, the truth seldom remains hidden for long. It’s a matter of having plenty of angles to go at it from. Only the utterly simple crimes – the simplex crimes, you might say – have the trick of remaining baffling.’

  ‘Well, that’s rather good news.’ Anglebury, although puzzled, appeared genuinely cheered up. ‘Is there anything else I can possibly be useful about, sir?’

  ‘There are several matters I’d like more information on, as a matter of fact. This house, for example. You give me the impression of knowing it pretty well. Do you come here quite a lot?’

  ‘Not really that.’ A slight return of wariness was observable in Anglebury’s manner.

  ‘You know your way to that tennis court, for instance, and find it quite natural to knock a ball about there. But Ledward must surely be shut up for most of the time – although of course there has been this bizarre yearly occasion.’