The Open House

by Michael Innes

  ‘Professor Snodgrass works in the house fairly regularly. And his people come and go. Leonidas, for example. It’s with him I’ve played tennis, as a matter of fact. He taught me.’

  ‘The Professor’s butler – or late butler – taught you to play real tennis! Didn’t you find his ability to do that a bit odd?’

  ‘Well, no. One mustn’t be snobbish.’

  ‘My dear young man, that’s about the first inconsequent thing you’ve said.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Getting tired, I suppose. I’m not used to what they call interrogation. And you have the technique, all right, in a mild way. I notice how you manoeuvre me into facing the light, for one thing.’

  For a moment Appleby made no reply to this – which was in fact a perfectly valid observation. He hadn’t, he told himself, really decided about David Anglebury. The boy seemed more honestly communicative by a long way than anybody else he had encountered at Ledward so far. But his very facility seemed worth thinking about. So did the impulse he occasionally betrayed to square up as for combat.

  ‘I suppose Leonidas may have been in service somewhere where the game is played.’ Appleby appeared to dismiss the matter. ‘Yes, that would be it.’

  ‘I’ve thought of something else, as a matter of fact.’ Anglebury hesitated. ‘I don’t know quite how to put it. You might call me snobbish again.’

  ‘But I didn’t call you snobbish! It was you yourself who used the word.’

  ‘So it was.’ Anglebury made what was only his second gesture during this interview: a passing of a hand across his eyes. ‘I think Leonidas may be what they used to call a fallen gentleman.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that one.’ Appleby regarded the young man soberly. ‘But tell me a little more about your coming to Ledward from time to time. It must have been more or less by way of invitation from Professor Snodgrass?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He’s always been very decent. Mildly friendly, you know.’

  ‘I can see him being that. I suppose, by the way, he knows – well, your family history?’

  ‘My parentage, you mean?’ There had been an upward tilt to Anglebury’s chin as he asked this. ‘I imagine so. I don’t really know. He’s never said anything about it. Of course he’s rather deep, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Deep?’ Simple-minded surprise was what Appleby appeared to register. ‘He strikes me as rather rambling and senile. But perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘Perhaps he could be both.’ Anglebury had glanced with a swift suspicion at Appleby. He might be tired, Appleby thought. But he remained unobstrusively a very sharp young man indeed.

  ‘May I ask you one further question, Mr Anglebury?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But I’m not terribly fond, by the way, of being called Mr Anglebury. I’d rather you called me David – even if you still nurse the darkest thoughts about me.’

  ‘David, then. And as for the darkest thoughts, it’s my business to nurse these about pretty well everybody, right up to the moment I sign off.’

  ‘Which is going to be quite soon?’

  ‘Quite soon.’

  ‘I begin to believe you,’ David Anglebury said.

  Appleby’s reply to this had been to nod absently, and to take a short turn down the corridor and back.

  ‘I really can’t stand any more of Laocoön,’ he said. ‘Why can’t the creatures finish their job, kids and all? Why look at this horrid frozen thing when you can read Virgil?’

  ‘Why, indeed, sir? You’re a very sophisticated policeman.’

  ‘And you, young man, are quite some way from being the best type of English public-school boy – manly but thick. However, that’s by the way. My final question is about your father. As far as I can gather, he hasn’t been seen in these parts for eight or ten years. Not since you were quite a small boy.’

  ‘Not all that small.’

  ‘Precisely. So did you meet him? Have you any impression of him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was this after your mother had told you her story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you were aware that you were meeting your father – who nevertheless was somehow not your father? It was like that?’

  ‘Just like that. You’ll think I’m cracked about English novels. But Joseph Conrad…’

  ‘I know, David. In Under Western Eyes the obscure student, Razumov, is introduced into the presence of Prince K—, who is in fact his father. But no reference to this illegitimate paternity is made. You’re saying it was like that?’

  ‘Yes, except that Razumov wasn’t a child.’

  ‘And your father would have known who you were?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I know it’s a very distant thing to be talking about, or trying to recover. But can you give me any impression of how he – well, carried it off?’

  ‘Beautifully.’

  There was a silence. Perhaps this single word was ambiguous, Appleby thought. It might be used with some derogatory or ironic implication. Yet it hadn’t sounded like that. And this suddenly seemed to Appleby a circumstance stranger than anything that had turned up upon him on this not unremarkable night.

  ‘Beautifully?’ he repeated.

  ‘Just that, sir. And it had nothing to do with carrying the thing off – although I suppose he must have been conscious that there was something very much in need of carrying off. There I stood – a gentleman’s son, if we may be snobbish again, and going by the name of Anglebury. And there he was. Well, he was just very nice. If I’d been grown-up, I’d have phrased it that he showed extraordinary delicacy. He didn’t show affection, because that wouldn’t have been delicate.’

  ‘But the affection was potentially there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘David, you say you were quite small – and it’s chronologically self-evident that you were. These were remarkable things for a small boy to feel. May you not be projecting back upon the actual occasion feelings that you came to imagine about it long afterwards?’

  ‘No.’

  This second monosyllable had for a moment the effect of silencing Appleby. He glanced from David to the Laocoön Group and back again.

  ‘Stop sitting there as if you were stuffed,’ he found himself exclaiming oddly. ‘Get on your feet, and walk with me up this damned hypertrophied corridor.’ He waited until the boy did as he was told. ‘You left that encounter wishing very much that this man who was your father wasn’t your father with some mysterious difference?’

  ‘Just that.’ David Anglebury, now pacing beside Appleby, turned his head and glanced at him stonily. ‘And I think he may have had a similar feeling. But nothing more happened – not ever again. Incidentally, sir, you spoke of chronology. But you have only an approximate notion of it. I can give it to you exactly. I last saw my father – alive, that is, and not rather unmistakably dead – nine years, three months, and a week from today.’

  In a long silence the two men – or the man and the boy – reached the end of the corridor: the damned hypertrophied corridor in this damned hypertrophied house. In front of them, and in turn giving upon the enormous pillared hall, was a nondescript room which Appleby had marked as probably once an office used in connection with the business of the estate. It looked as if they must shortly present themselves once more to Inspector Stride and his men.

  ‘I implied that I was asking my last question,’ Appleby said. ‘But I have another one, after all. If things had happened differently, you would be inheriting Ledward tonight. As it is, somebody is inheriting it. The property is passing to somebody, man or woman, whom I’ll call X. And the identity of X – which must be the simplest matter in the world – is precisely what nobody has yet condescended to reveal to me. David, can you tell me who X is?’

  ‘I can tell you.’

  The door before them had opened, and the figure of a man stood framed in it.

  ‘I am X,’ the man said.

  16

  The stranger – who had thus appeared to A
ppleby’s notably astonished gaze pat like the catastrophe of the old comedy – was best to be described as well-groomed. Like the lord who annoyed young Hotspur in the aftermath of battle, he was neat and trimly dressed; and if not positively perfumed like a milliner, he did faintly exude a hint of expensive soaps and lotions as in some glossy advertisement for masculine chic. Appleby found all this untimely – perhaps for no better reason that that he himself had been up throughout the night, and was for various reasons (including a great deal of charging around and one quite stiff fight) feeling in a somewhat Hotspur-like disarray.

  ‘My name is Basil Snodgrass,’ the stranger said to Appleby. ‘And if you are the stray London detective I’ve just been told about, I’ve no doubt you have heard of me.’

  ‘I have done nothing of the kind.’ Appleby (although the description wasn’t wholly unjust) had taken no pleasure in hearing himself described as a stray London detective. ‘If I had, I should not have been asking Mr Anglebury for information the nature of which you seem to have overheard while listening on the other side of that door.’

  ‘Well, it’s my own door, after all.’ Basil Snodgrass appeared amused. ‘As for what you were asking this young man, I took that to have been just some police dodge or other. But has Beddoes really not mentioned me? I find that very odd. At least it must have been he who told his butler to ring me up with this shocking news.’

  ‘Leonidas rang you up?’

  ‘Leonidas? That may have been his name, although it sounds a deuced odd one. Not that I couldn’t cap it. I once had a handyman called Pneumaticos.’ Basil Snodgrass offered this useless information with an air of wishing to modify a certain acerbity which had so far marked his tone. ‘It wouldn’t be easy to beat that, eh? But, as I was saying, this fellow got me out of bed in the small hours, and told me about Adrian’s death. He wasn’t at all civil about it. He seemed to feel that butlers in decent houses are not required to make such communications.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Leonidas is understood to have left Professor Snodgrass’ employment on much that score.’

  ‘A good riddance, no doubt. And we could do with a rather more general exodus from Ledward, if you ask me. Clumping coppers all over the place.’

  ‘I am afraid, Mr Snodgrass, that as things stand at the moment there would be little point in attempting to order the police off the premises. But as soon as the obscurity surrounding the late Mr Snodgrass’ death is cleared up – and I expect it to be quite soon – they will certainly depart gladly enough. Certainly I shall.’

  ‘My dear sir, I have no wish to be inhospitable.’ Basil Snodgrass was again conciliatory. ‘Not even to this young man, who is totally unknown to me.’

  ‘My name is David Anglebury.’ David was looking angry. ‘And this is Sir John Appleby, and I think it may be rather lucky that he has turned up.’

  ‘Anglebury? Ah, yes. Well, we are now known to each other, all three.’

  ‘Am I correct,’ Appleby asked, ‘in supposing you to be a brother of Adrian Snodgrass?’

  ‘A half-brother. There are now no surviving children or descendants of our father’s first marriage, and I am the only child of his second. So there is nothing at all complicated about me.’ Basil Snodgrass suddenly produced what could not in fairness have been called other than a charming smile; some mechanism of social appraisal, it was to be presumed, had prompted him to modify his attitude to Appleby. ‘And I’m sorry to have announced myself as I did. Considering the situation in this house, it was in rather indifferent taste, no doubt. I’m afraid I have something of a theatrical streak about me. Perhaps I oughtn’t even to have hurried over, really. But I thought I might give poor old Beddoes a bit of support. Not that we’ve ever been in the least intimate. There’s something there, indeed, that may puzzle you: my giving the effect of having so much dropped out of the blue.’

  ‘Or the black,’ Appleby said. ‘It’s still quite some time till dawn.’

  ‘Quite so. I live, I ought to say, about fifty miles off – but my contacts with the Ledward Snodgrasses have been tenuous, all the same. No malice; it has just happened like that. Ages ago, my father made a totally new life for himself with his new marriage, and the families have continued that way.’

  ‘It’s not uncommon, where there have been two marriages.’

  ‘Quite so. And, of course, I’ve been abroad a great deal. I’m just back from Brazil, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Brazil? Then I take it you are another of the Snodgrasses with South American connections?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s a family thing, you might say. Even old Beddoes, who has nothing either political or commercial about him. He has published text-books about some of the beastly wars over there.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much you will have learnt from the police, Mr Snodgrass. Did they tell you that we appear to have had South American callers at Ledward tonight?’

  ‘Yes, they did – and I’m bound to say I think it a thoroughly unlikely story. This business of a Poussin…’

  ‘A Claude.’

  ‘Ah, yes. It has never much occurred to me to find out about the Ledward treasures. There has been no particular reason, after all, to suppose that I would outlive Adrian. But, as I say, this picture-stealing affair just doesn’t square with notions of political assassination, or whatever it’s supposed to have been. You might be caught stealing a picture, and shoot the man who jumped at you. But you wouldn’t kill a man because you disliked his politics, or because he knew inconveniently much about yours, and then walk off with his Claude as a kind of luck-penny.’

  ‘That is true. It seems almost necessary to believe that your half-brother’s return to Ledward precipitated several operations not very intimately connected with one another.’

  ‘Several?’

  ‘Well, say a couple that embodied some criminal intention’ – Appleby glanced at David Anglebury – ‘and one other that might best be described as idle and inconsequent. Or at least eccentric and a little mad.’

  ‘I can’t say I have quite got my bearings on all this.’ As he spoke, Basil Snodgrass strolled forward into the corridor. He was a spare and loose-limbed man, who moved with an easy negligence which, even in the middle of this strange conversation, seemed wholly unaffected. ‘There are a good many odd people around. A respectable female domestic, for instance, who seems to belong to Beddoes’ stable, and who is said to have been rather roughly handled. Do you know whom I mean? She has some absurd name. Mrs Scrabblecoke, or something of that sort.’

  ‘Mrs Gathercoal.’

  ‘Ah, yes. And then there is the local doctor. It was natural to send for him. But there is the local parson as well. There can’t have been much occasion for his offices – not with Adrian so absolutely and instantly killed.’

  ‘The Professor had invited Dr Absolon to join him earlier. The idea was that he should be present to welcome your half-brother should he turn up.’

  ‘Which he did – but to a welcome of a very different sort. And why ever should Adrian be expected – suddenly and in the middle of the night?’

  ‘That might almost be called a long story.’ There was a hint of impatience in Appleby’s voice. ‘Professor Snodgrass and Adrian Snodgrass had a kind of compact. May I say that there are one or two more important matters to get clear?’

  ‘I’m very sure there are.’

  ‘Then may I ask you one rather vital question?’

  ‘Certainly you may.’ For a moment Basil Snodgrass had looked startled. ‘Fire ahead.’

  ‘Good. Can you tell me, please, whether your half-brother was left-handed?’

  A brief silence was produced by this totally unexpected question. It was as if Basil Snodgrass felt some obscure necessity to take its measure. But when he did reply it was emphatically enough.

  ‘My dear sir, I haven’t the slightest idea. Curious as it may seem, we scarcely knew each other.’

  ‘But I can tell you!’ David Anglebury, who had been silent again during th
ese exchanges, broke in almost eagerly. ‘You will think it strange that I can, since it’s such a long time since I met my…since I met Mr Snodgrass. But I told you how nice he was. He played with me for a bit: cricket, and a few minutes’ knock-up at tennis. I remember it all pretty vividly, as it happens.’

  ‘That is most interesting.’ Appleby gave the young man a quick smile. ‘Well?’

  ‘He was definitely left-handed. I am quite sure of it.’

  ‘Oddly enough, I am quite sure of it too.’

  17

  There could be no doubt – Appleby was telling himself half an hour later – about the authenticity of Basil Snodgrass. He was even lurking among those minor Snodgrasses in Who’s Who, over whose names Appleby could now see that he had let his eye too rapidly pass. Basil’s, indeed, even more than Adrian’s, might be called a fade-out career. At Oxford he had been President both of the Union and the OUDS, and shortly thereafter appeared to have been gaining some fame for himself as a racing motorist. But this versatility had clearly turned into a somewhat feckless trying out one thing after another, so that so far as public record went he had simply died away.

  Appleby had returned to the library to conduct this small investigation, and it occurred to him to take another look at the handsome engraving over the fireplace of the Seat of Augustus Snodgrass Esquire. He could now see that it represented all four wings of the mansion as already in being, and that he could quite well trace out, if he wanted to, the course of his own nocturnal scamperings around the place. He was just reflecting that it made an admirable theatre for highly theatrical goings-on when the door opened and Dr Plumridge entered.

  ‘I’m thinking of calling it a day,’ Plumridge said, ‘ – or rather a night. The police surgeon has arrived, and I propose leaving him to it. But I thought I’d seek you out and say goodbye.’

  ‘That’s very nice of you.’ Appleby wondered whether Plumridge’s civil impulse in fact meant that he had something to communicate. ‘Would you say that the police surgeon has caught up with your own observations?’