‘A reasonable misapprehension.’ Appleby was impressed. ‘And has Charles Povey only one ear too?’
‘All that Mr Povey lacks is the index finger of his left hand. But he may be extremely sensitive about that.’
‘I see.’ Appleby sounded unconvinced. ‘Another matter of congenital malformation?’
‘Nothing of the kind. Merely an accident when he was a young man. But there was an ugly rumour about it at the time – and, of course, that might induce morbid feelings in him later. It was said that the finger had been chopped off by his brother Arthur.’
‘It sounds a most revolting accident.’
‘No, not an accident. An entirely deliberate action. And in a wood-shed, they say, which makes it appear particularly squalid.’
There was a moment’s silence. Appleby appeared not much concerned with the logic of Mrs Birch-Blackie’s last remark. Rather, he might have been gazing into hiding places many years deep.
‘Arthur?’ he said. ‘A younger brother – and haven’t I heard he lost his life at sea?’
‘You probably have. It was in the papers at the time. Charles and Arthur were on a yacht together. And something fell on Arthur and brained him.’
‘And Charles suffered various privations thereafter?’
‘Apparently. Yes – there was a bit about that too.’
‘A harrowing incident, no doubt. It might itself affect Charles Povey’s temperament, don’t you think? Turn him into a bit of a recluse, and so forth.’
‘No occasion for treating yourself to a ten-foot fence,’ Colonel Birch-Blackie said. ‘But one sympathizes, of course. Bad show, losing a brother. Even if he did once take a chopper to you.’
‘Perfectly true.’ Appleby concurred with these sage observations as if from a certain absence of mind. Indeed, his interest in Mr Charles Povey of Brockholes Abbey seemed to have evaporated. ‘Coffee in the library, I think,’ he said. ‘I rather want your advice, Birch-Blackie, on a bit of drainage we’re thinking of in the field beyond the spinney.’
‘My dear fellow, I’ll be delighted.’
‘Good. I’ll be most grateful.’ Appleby got to his feet. ‘We feel it’s quite important,’ he said. ‘We’re thinking about it a lot.’
The subject thus proposed for conference proved to open up a somewhat wider field of discussion than Appleby had perhaps reckoned. Colonel Birch-Blackie had heard favourable reports of a new type of land drain, approximately twice the normal length, particularly designed for use where there was likely to be trouble from moles. And Dr Dunton proved to have relevant facts fresh in mind, since he had been conducting a spirited dispute with higher ecclesiastical authorities on the troublesome frequency with which floodwater made its way into his glebe. It was a further hour, therefore, before the guests took their departure. Appleby saw the Birch-Blackies punctiliously into their car. He walked with the Vicar (who wheeled his bicycle) to the bottom of the Long Dream drive. Then he returned to the house at a very brisk pace indeed. He was glancing at his watch as he crossed the hall – so that Judith, who was helping Mrs Colpoys to clear up, glanced at him curiously, but said nothing. He went into the butler’s pantry, which nowadays accommodated not a manservant but a deep-freeze and a telephone. It was the telephone to which he turned.
‘Please get me,’ he said briskly to the operator, ‘the General Infirmary in Adelaide, South Australia.’
12
Until rather late that night Appleby continued to speculate sometimes through the medium of remarks thrown out to Judith, sometimes broodingly inside his own head.
‘Buzfuz,’ he said. ‘That’s what this Antipodean sawbones insisted on calling the brothers. Medical etiquette and so forth. Protecting a patient’s privacy and confidence. Fair enough, I suppose. But if he’d been prepared to call a Povey a Povey I’d have known where we are long ago. Or approximately where we are. For it’s an uncommon puzzle still.’
‘Did he mind being routed out?’
‘The good Professor Budgery? He wasn’t too cordial at first. It was at an unconscionable hour, I suppose. The huntsmen up in America, and chaps already past their first sleep in Persia. But he was perfectly forthcoming when I’d explained a bit. His Colin and Adam Buzfuz were Charles and Arthur Povey. And the craft he called the Jabberwock was really the Gay Phoenix. Equally silly names for a boat, if you ask me.’
‘Did Budgery tell you anything new?’
‘No, not really. But then I had a go – another confoundedly expensive telephone call – at the Chief Justice of the place.’
‘Delusions of grandeur, I call that. And surely there wasn’t a law case about the affair?’
‘No, no – it was just that this old chap was at that dinner I told you about. It came back to me that he’d hinted a wholesome scepticism in the face of the whole yarn – the whole medical history, or whatever it’s to be called. As we drove down to Adelaide together he even murmured to me something to the effect that he suspected a bit of monkey business about the affair. Well, so did I, in a dim enough way. So I wanted to check whether he’d had in mind what had vaguely hovered in my own thick skull. He had.’
‘Which was what?’
‘Well, now, that’s hard to say.’
‘Don’t be idiotic, John. If you suspected something, and this old judge person suspected the same thing, you must know what it was, or is, that you both suspected, or suspect.’
‘Most precisely expressed. But just what do you think the horrid thought is?’
‘What happened on the Gay Phoenix wasn’t an accident.’
‘Just what do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that Arthur Povey, the younger brother, didn’t die as a result of something falling on him.’
‘Ah! Looked at strictly, you know, that’s a somewhat ambiguous constatation.’
‘Don’t be pedantic.’
‘All right. Let’s take the thing quite simply. The story begins, in the solitude of the Pacific Ocean, on straight Cain-and-Abel lines. An elder brother kills a younger. It’s perfectly conceivable. Fratricide happens to be not all that common in the modern world, but it does sometimes happen. And here we have a history of something like bad blood between the brothers – although the evidence for it lies only in that woodshed a long time ago.’
‘And the story may merely have been malicious gossip. That’s never in short supply in these parts.’
‘Too true. But if there really was a smouldering antagonism between Charles and Arthur Povey it’s reasonable to maintain that weeks at sea with only one another’s company might well produce a flare-up. But it’s all completely speculative, is it not? So now consider another thing. There were these two men alone together in an inviolable privacy – and on a yacht which probably bore, and would retain, the signs of having taken a terrific pounding from storms in which any disaster might occur. It’s hard to imagine more ideal conditions for the undetectable murder. If Charles Povey killed Arthur Povey in that way he had, and has, absolutely nothing to worry about.’
‘Except a trifle on his conscience.’
‘Quite so. His crime might well drive him insane, or the next thing to it. It might induce all sorts of bizarre behaviour. It might render him a very dangerous man indeed, prone to further violent acts without rational motivation of any sort. All that’s obvious. But my point is this: at the level of cold reason this murderer has no worries at all – so it’s no use trying to explain any conduct subsequently observed in him as logically adopted under some compulsion arising from his deed. I’ll give you an example. If one were writing a yarn about the thing one might call it The Case of the Elusive Tycoon. It seems that Charles Povey has played something like that role for quite a long time – but now he has grotesquely stepped it up. The fellow calling himself Bread – about whom a certain amount of thinking may usefully be done – plugged t
he idea, you remember, when I had my odd encounter with him. For blameless and indeed edifying reasons, Mr Charles Povey of Brockholes Abbey is more and more withdrawing from the observation of the world. We have to ask ourselves why. It’s not because he’s a murderer – for the simple reason that, as we agree, he’s utterly safe on that front already.
‘It’s because his business interests are in a very bad way – and even perhaps in danger of being exposed as largely fraudulent. He’s in danger of being bankrupted and even exposed as a crook, so he’s lying low.’
There was a silence during which Appleby stuffed a pipe and lit it. Judith, who had been messing about with some clay on a board in front of her, continued this activity with increased concentration. An observer might have concluded that they had tacitly agreed to drop the Brockholes mystery as boring. But then suddenly Appleby spoke again.
‘That won’t do either,’ he said. ‘Up to a point, the remote control mythos can no doubt be useful to a shady operator. But when there’s real pressure on him – when his financial probity and viability are being radically questioned, and so on – it can’t be in his interest to carry the turn to a bizarre extreme. It leads to private enquiry agents hiding themselves in hides, and heaven knows what. No! The man must have some other reason to fear the common traffic of life – whether on the business front, or the social front, or both. So he’s taking all the subsidiary risks that attend making himself appear very eccentric indeed. Or somebody is compelling him to play it that way. Bread, perhaps. Or this new Mrs Povey. Or – again – both.’
‘There’s all this business of bastards and so on.’
‘Poppycock! It has no doubt been disconcerting to find the district still a petty hornets’ nest in that way.’ Appleby had let his pipe go out. He put it down on the table beside him. ‘Of course,’ he said slowly, ‘he may find that he has some quite different, and vastly larger, danger to fear from the persistence of rustic memories. Returning to Brockholes may have been a disastrous miscalculation. He has exposed himself to hazard on two fronts instead of one.’ Appleby paused. ‘And why the devil should he get married?’ he added.
‘Why ever should he not?’ Judith Appleby was mildly amused. ‘Men do. They fall suddenly in love. And if they’re virtuous, or the lady is, marriage follows – and often with all convenient speed.’
‘I have a sense of it as out of character in this particular case, all the same. He’s got along quite happily without marriage through the better part of a lifetime. Why muck in now?’
‘Nothing in the world is more common than the marriage of hardened bachelors in middle age. You’re a case in point, darling.’
‘Damn it, woman, I was twenty-nine!’ Appleby, comically outraged, had sat bolt upright. ‘This is a perfectly idiotic conversation,’ he said severely.
‘It’s nothing of the sort. You’re moving in on something. Remorselessly – like one of those bloodhounds in old-fashioned thrillers. I recognize the signs.’
‘The whole affair is no business of mine.’
‘And I’ve heard that quite recently.’ To an effect of muted drama, Judith thrust a scalpel into the heart of the little maquette on which she had been working. ‘So what happens now?’ she asked.
‘What happens,’ Appleby said, ‘is that we go to bed. And I’ll drop in on Brockholes again tomorrow. Undeniably, it’s an interesting place.’
But something happened before that. It was in the small hours that Appleby, totally against his habit, found himself suddenly wide awake. He sat up in bed, and then – equally unwontedly – called out urgently to his wife.
‘Judith, wake up!’
‘John, what on earth is it? Burglars – a fire?’ Judith had flicked on a light and was sitting up too.
‘Nothing of the kind. But listen. You remember my saying that something you said was an ambiguous constatation?’
‘For pity’s sake! I don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell me at breakfast. Go to sleep.’
‘Wait a minute. You really must listen. I really don’t think I quite knew what I meant. But I do now. You had said that perhaps Arthur Povey didn’t die as a result of something falling on him. What you meant was that his brother Charles murdered him. Isn’t that right? But your words could have meant something else. Arthur Povey didn’t die as a result of something falling on him. It was Charles Povey who died that way.’
‘John, you’ve been dreaming. You’ve been having a nightmare. You probably drank too much before coming to bed.’
‘Nothing of the sort. It’s simply that the truth of this affair has jumped at me. All that business about the storm-tossed Povey in hospital, for a start. It didn’t ring true. The Chief Justice thought it didn’t. I thought it didn’t.’
‘You’ve gone off your head, John dear. Do you really think that Budgery, a perfectly responsible professor of medicine, was spinning you and his other guests a pack of lies?’
‘Of course not. He was simply taken in. He and his assistants in that hospital were simply taken in – and by an uncommonly cunning rascal. It was the younger Povey, Arthur, who survived in the Gay Phoenix – only he claimed to be his wealthy elder brother, Charles. But I’m wrong. He did better than that. He allowed himself, but most reluctantly, to be persuaded he was Charles. He had those doctors sweating blood to cure him of the weird psychological aberration – as they conceived it to be – that he wasn’t himself but his brother.’ Appleby was suddenly as excited as a boy. ‘No imposture can have had a more brilliant flying start in all recorded history!’
‘I see. And now we can go to sleep.’
‘Judith, don’t be maddening. Can’t you see how it all fits? What we’re looking for is a rational explanation of this man’s returning unwarily to Brockholes – and equally of his going so madly reclusive there. He came because he had very little notion of his brother Charles’ final reputation as an amorist and general bad hat. And he’s gone to earth and put up this story of retiring from the world and its sordid concerns simply because he has found that on no other terms can the imposture or impersonation or whatever it’s to be called be sustained. I shouldn’t be surprised if that ex-crook Bread knows the truth about him, and has him under his thumb as a result. And his bride the former Miss Porter too, for that matter.’
‘And John Appleby. Well, well!’
‘Yes – and John Appleby. But I’m blessed if I know what the retired copper is going to do about it.’
‘I thought you were going over to Brockholes first thing in the morning.’
‘I have my doubts about it now. What does it matter who calls himself Charles Povey? Whoever he is, he looks like being booked for a packet of trouble without my shoving in.’
‘It’s no good, John. Of course you’ll have to go. It wouldn’t be you if you didn’t. Just sleep on that.’
‘I suppose you’re right. I know you’re right. Sorry to have disturbed you. Good night again.’
‘Good morning,’ Judith said. And she turned over and went to sleep.
13
It might be better – Appleby told himself as he drove off next morning – to take this whole dubious business to the police. However fantastic the story seemed, the local constabulary would certainly listen to him with quite oppressive respect. Or he could take it straight to the Chief Constable, who was an old friend, with a stiff off-the-record injunction that he himself was not to be further involved in any way. That would be what might be called the dignified thing to do. It wasn’t in the least dignified to do any more private poking round himself; if he did, he might very soon find himself feeling rather like Judith’s birdwatching acquaintance in his hide. And if his own birdwatching resulted in his turning up, so to speak, a mare’s nest he would feel a thorough fool if a word of it got around. Moreover, he remembered gloomily, he had never, when a policeman himself, much managed to like busybody citizens wh
o presented themselves with implausible stories of dirty work at the crossroads. This had been very wrong of him – for hadn’t it been part of his job constantly to urge upon the public their bounden duty to call a copper the moment they smelt a rat or even a mouse?
Appleby found himself scowling over the bonnet of his antique Rover as he drove. This welter of bad metaphors – rats at the cross-roads – seemed to mirror a most discreditable confusion of mind. He was even in a kind of philosophical muddle. Supposing it to be true that this fellow call himself Charles Povey was really Arthur Povey, just what did the fact signify to a reasonable man? Charles had got himself blipped on the head by a mast, and Arthur had nipped in and taken, as it were, the vacant family niche. There seemed every indication that, morally speaking, the brothers had been much of a muchness – each, you might say, a shade more than average-worthless human beings. So what? Arthur, on the whole, sounded a slightly less unappealing character than his brother. He had at least – granting the truth of the story – embarked on a project of impressively breathtaking audacity. So what were people for? It came down to that. Bobby Appleby – youngest of the Applebys and a most advanced novelist – would at this point offer, if applied to, remarks on a senseless universe; would back up the enterprising Arthur on existentialist principles – adding, as he went along, sage reflections on all property as theft. Bobby, on the other hand, would unobtrusively drop from the circle of his acquaintance anybody who had formed the habit of acquiring his reading matter from the bookshops in a slightly irregular way. There were areas in which one had to keep theory and practice distinct. But what would Bobby do if he happened to detect a total stranger helping himself to novels or biographies or treatises on pastoral theology from the shelves of Messrs Hatchards or Sir Basil Blackwell? Would he call a copper at once? Appleby found he hadn’t a clue. It was depressing that the minds of the young should be so opaque to one.
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