‘Or even seven.’ Appleby contributed to this Dutch auction with entire gravity. ‘And I’m most interested – most interested and edified, if I may venture to say so – to hear of your increasingly serious and elevated cast of mind. Would you ascribe the change to any particular circumstance in your life?’
‘No, I hardly think so.’ Appleby was conscious of receiving another sharp glance. ‘Simply a matter of years bringing the philosophic habit along. It’s mentioned by Wordsworth – always my favourite poet. I’m very fond of nature, and so forth.’
‘Ah, yes. I was thinking, I suppose, of your brother’s death in such tragic circumstances. Such an experience might well have a profound effect on a man. I forget your brother’s name?’
‘Arthur.’ Mr Povey gave this information with perhaps a shade of unnecessary emphasis. He paused, and then added, firmly and quietly: ‘I’m absolutely clear as to that.’
These were surprising words. Pondered, they even became bewildering. If the man who had uttered them was indeed Charles Povey, they were of course literally true. But their truth was of an order which no sane man could feel prompted to enunciate. Nobody can be other than clear about a brother’s Christian name, whether that brother be dead or alive. If, on the other hand, the man now present in this library was Arthur Povey, he had backed up his lie in a singularly inept fashion.
Confronted with these facts, Appleby felt what he acknowledged to be a rather childish relief. It wasn’t a mare’s nest, and in pushing around Brockholes in a suspicious way he at least couldn’t be charged with making a simple ass of himself. A few minutes ago, the only irreducible fact had been that the financial affairs connected with the name of Charles Povey were in a singularly bad way; that a surprising number of persons had absented themselves abruptly from Brockholes as a consequence; and that one of these, Povey’s wife, had produced what was at the very least a surprising slip of the tongue. It was now certain that there existed an authentic mystery beyond all this; and that the mystery ultimately turned on a problem of identity precisely as he had supposed it must. That this clarification of the affair had been brought about by six words deliberately uttered by a man to all appearances fully in control of himself was a fact that required pondering. Meanwhile, however, something had to be said.
‘Arthur, of course,’ Appleby murmured blandly. ‘My wife, by the way, remembers both of you. She was a Raven, you know.’
‘Yes, of course. I look forward to meeting her when all this is over, Sir John. A notable family in these parts.’
‘Quite so. You no doubt recall something of Judith’s uncles, Everard and Luke. What was notable about them was a vein of very considerable eccentricity, after all.’
‘Yes. That’s to say, I may have heard so.’ Povey paused. ‘By Jove, yes! Wasn’t there a famous business of lighting a beacon fire on the church tower at Dream?’
‘There was, indeed. But that was long before my time. You must have been no more than a boy.’
‘Perfectly true.’ Mr Povey had the air of a man prepared, even in a crisis of his affairs, to indulge a casual visitor in garrulous reminiscences.
‘But that’s all water under the bridge, wouldn’t you say? I think we must have a few common acquaintances of much more recent date.’
‘Possibly so.’ Just perceptibly, Mr Povey tautened himself on his chair.
‘Professor Budgery, for example.’
‘Budgery?’
‘The doctor who attended you in Australia after your terrible experience.’
‘Yes, indeed. Efficient chap. I was most grateful to him.’
‘He once told me the whole story. The whole astonishing story.’
‘Did he, now? Stretching things a bit, wasn’t he, if he did that?’
‘He was very discreet. It has naturally – you’ll forgive me – made me very interested in my new neighbour.’
‘Kind of you, Sir John.’ This came from Mr Povey with an irony that was impressively subdued. ‘Do you know, I’d much like to meet Budgery again myself – and have him tell me the story?’ Suddenly and unaccountably, Povey appeared genuinely agitated. ‘You see, my own memories of it all are quite oddly confused. There was more to it, you must understand, than the shock of Charles’ death. Arthur’s death, I mean.’ Povey broke off. ‘Ah! You see how muddled I can get. But – since you’ve been told the whole medical history of the affair – you must have some idea why.’ Povey’s was now again a completely relaxed smile. ‘There was more to it than just that dreadful accident – with a certain amount of subsequent privation and so forth thrown in. The fact is, I got a bit of a bang on the head myself. The consequences were rather astonishing for a time, as you justly observe.’
‘You believed yourself to be Arthur?’
‘Just that.’ Povey made another pause. He had a good sense of timing. ‘However, those Australian leeches – Budgery and his crowd – successfully bullied me out of it.’
‘Brutally put, you were a bit mad?’
‘Exactly so.’ Povey, although he had raised his eyebrows, amicably concurred. ‘And periods of confusion still turn up on me from time to time.’
‘In which you again believe yourself to be Arthur?’
‘Not very precisely that.’ For the first time, Mr Povey had hesitated. ‘But a great deal of amnesia, and that sort of thing.’
‘Dear me! Most inconvenient.’
‘Convenient, Sir John?’ This time, Povey’s eyebrows had really shot up.
‘Inconvenient was the word I used.’
‘Yes, of course. Damnably inconvenient, from time to time. This fellow Alcorne, for example, that they’re making such a devil of a fuss about. There’s a lot I don’t clearly remember about him.’
‘Ah, Alcorne.’ Appleby had the wit to load with significance his repetition of this name. It was in fact entirely new to him.
‘Yes, Alcorne. I had a lot to do with him a number of years ago. Naturally I remember that.’ Povey laughed easily. ‘We were partners, you know, and in a very big way. We were partners in several very large enterprises indeed. The enterprises they’re now all going crazy about.’
‘They?’ Appleby said.
‘All those chaps who are talking about fraud and conspiracy and God knows what. The chaps who are determined to bring me down.’
‘They have brought you down, haven’t they?’
‘Yes, they have.’ Mr Povey appeared to face it. ‘Red ruin, without a doubt.’
‘To the extent that your own wife, and that secretary of yours, and your whole staff for that matter, have pocketed what they can and bolted?’
‘It looks like just that. But it’s Jasper Alcorne I’m worried about – and particularly this business of not being able to remember things quite clearly. It might look bad.’
‘Yes, Mr Povey, I agree. It might look very bad.’ Appleby was feeling his way into this mysteriously sensitive area. ‘The Alcorne affair was pretty bad at the time, wasn’t it?’
‘So I’ve gathered. I mean, yes – I do remember that. There we were, the two of us, as closely associated as could be. And he bolted, you know, just like that damned woman this morning, and with no end of securities and everything else. It turned out he’d been as crooked as they come. And I’d known nothing about it! We had the hell of a time putting a bold face on it. We had to sail pretty close to the wind ourselves, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘We?’
‘Oh, myself and various close associates at that time. Assets had vanished in a big way. That kind of thing. Alcorne has never been seen since, and the scandal was forgotten about, more or less. But now, because of my present difficulties, those brutes in the City are all on to it again, digging away like mad. God knows what they may turn up.’
‘I can tell you, Mr Povey.’ Appleby suddenly sensed that the moment
of truth was now very close indeed. He also felt that it might be hurried along by one or two thumping lies.
‘I suppose you realize that this isn’t – to be quite honest – any sort of social call?’
There was a moment’s silence in the library of Brockholes. It seemed a very long moment. Appleby had time to wonder whether Povey had realized this pretty obvious fact or not. He felt no certainty in the matter. It depended on the truth about Povey’s present mental state, and this was something entirely enigmatical. The man was deploying a good deal of cunning: there could be no doubt about that. Sometimes he seemed so baselessly confident of the sufficiency and success of all this guile that he must be judged as mad as a hatter. At other times he seemed entirely sane. Appleby told himself that one could be certain of only a single fact. The man with whom he was closeted was Arthur Povey. And Arthur Povey was very hazy about Jasper Alcorne for the simple reason that he had never got a grip on what appeared to have been a crucial episode in Charles Povey’s career. Hence all this stuff about amnesia. It was as simple as that. And now Appleby went ahead.
‘So let me be quite straight, Mr Povey. I’m a retired man now, but you know what my job has been. The unsolved mystery about your partner Alcorne lay on my desk for months. We had our own ideas about what might have happened to him – and I much doubt whether you can have forgotten’ – Appleby put a vicious sarcasm into the uttering of this word – ‘the pretty nasty time we gave you. But we lacked proof. Well, all that has changed now. And – since it was all under my hand at the time – I’ve been asked to return and clear it up for good. That’s why I’m at Brockholes this morning, Mr Povey. And for no other reason at all.’ As he produced this tissue of outrageous falsehoods Appleby leant forward threateningly and remembered to offer a ferocious scowl. No star of Scotland Yard in some television fantasy of criminal investigation could have been more magnificently intimidating. ‘So now we’ll have the truth, Charles Povey. And nothing but.’ Perhaps for the first time in his life, Appleby had risen to a hideous snarl.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Suddenly Povey sprang to his feet, trembling and as white as a sheet. He was a man horribly transformed.
‘But indeed you do. How could this man Alcorne simply vanish – so utterly as to elude the search of every police force in the five continents? The very idea is nonsensical. And where did all those assets go? They went into your own pocket, Charles Povey. Because you were desperately in need of them. And I think it’s true, isn’t it’ – Appleby’s voice had dropped suddenly into a kind of spine-chilling caress – ‘that the Poveys always had a violent streak in them? Your brother Arthur for one. And certainly yourself.’
‘It’s untrue! It’s…it’s–’ Povey now had difficulty in managing articulate speech. ‘I simply don’t remember–’
‘Rubbish.’
‘I can prove–’
‘It’s no good, Charles Povey. Because the body – Alcorne’s body – has now been found.’
‘Alcorne murdered!’ Povey’s eyes had rounded in horror, and he was suddenly panting. ‘But I have a way out! I’ve always had a way out! I told that bloody Butter so. You can’t get me for killing this man Alcorne, or whatever’s in your filthy head. I never set eyes on him.’ Povey’s voice rose to a scream. ‘Because I’m not Charles Povey. I’m Arthur Povey. I’ve been ill. I tried hard to hang on to it that I’m Arthur. I’ve witnesses to that in Adelaide. I still try hard to be Arthur, but somehow it won’t come. It was those doctors who made a lunatic of me. More and more, I don’t know I’m Arthur any longer.’ Povey collapsed again into his chair. ‘I don’t even know it now.’
15
Sir John Appleby, although it would have been legitimate to describe him as a case-hardened man, was more than a little shaken by this latest effort on the part of his interlocutor. Roughly speaking, he was at a loss over how to estimate the genuineness, if any, of what could be called the Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect of the affair. He had already seen – it had come to him as he harangued Judith in the small hours – that Budgery’s patient in the Adelaide hospital could be viewed as having insinuated himself into another man’s shoes (and skin, for that matter) with astonishing ingenuity. He had manoeuvred his doctors into believing they were rescuing him from a bizarre delusion and restoring him to his true identity. One might call this deep enough, and Appleby had accorded it at once a species of generous professional admiration. It had never crossed his mind, however, that Arthur Povey’s plan might have been deeper still; that he had managed, in a most notable degree, a further tour de force of what people nowadays liked to call contingency planning. There was an escape clause – a way out, as Povey had himself just expressed it – built into the plan from the start. The key word here – and this too Povey had used – was ‘bullied’. The doctors had bullied him into a permanent, if mysteriously intermittent, pathological acceptance of his dead brother’s identity. Morally speaking, Arthur Povey had maintained the right to be regarded as an innocent man. He might be booked for fame as a classical case history, to be cited in textbooks as exemplifying the impenetrable strangeness of a human being’s sense of his own identity. He might well have to be committed to a mental hospital. But he couldn’t be committed to jail.
It was all, of course, the most unutterable nonsense. Appleby, as a rational man, felt something like sheer irritation as he contemplated its large absurdity. But not everybody remains successfully rational, even in a law court. Take, for instance, one salient point. Arthur Povey had arrived in Adelaide minus – as his brother Charles was on record as being minus – the index finger of his left hand. Appleby imagined prosecuting counsel hammering this point home – and the jury, or at least a few obstinate members of a jury, saying to themselves Yes, but – and maintaining that the whole affair was too obscure and complicated to produce an adverse verdict upon.
But it wasn’t any strength in Povey’s case that was the point – at least the moral point – of the matter. Rather, it was its simple craziness. It was impossible to deny that the man was authentically deranged, and deranged in the most extraordinary way. More and more, I don’t know I’m Arthur any longer. In any context of law, these words of Povey’s were plain non-starters as any sort of exculpation. All along – the law would say – he had known, or at least intermittently he had known, his true identity. And nevertheless he had gone ahead being not the penniless Arthur but the affluent if embarrassed Charles – until the need for his ‘way out’ had overpoweringly come to him.
But this was only one view of that weird cry. Appleby’s whole career had been built on backing his own sense of the truth of a situation until it was controverted by plain and acknowledged fact. And he now had a strong sense that Arthur Povey, obviously so abundantly given to systematic dishonesty and falsehood, had for once said an honest thing.
‘I’m quite sane, you know,’ Arthur Povey said. He had been silent for a full minute, and now he appeared almost calm.
He had been gazing thoughtfully at his own left hand, but now he raised his eyes and looked full at Appleby. ‘I know who you are. I know you’re a police officer. I know why you’re here. I’ve always seen what suspicion might attach to me. We didn’t get on very well – my brother and myself. And it was a lonely voyage of course, with tensions building up. We might well have quarrelled – I grant you that. But I didn’t kill Arthur. He died just as I said. I escaped lightly from the accident – or seemed to. Only there was a blow that did something to my head.’
‘You mean you didn’t kill Charles? I believe that.’
‘Charles?’ It was like a man in pain that Arthur Povey uneasily moved his head. ‘I don’t understand you. Who do you think I am? What the devil do you mean?’ Arthur Povey was silent again for a moment. ‘You must be crazy,’ he said.
Sir John Appleby, retired Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was aware of a sudden incongruous image floating somewhere
inside his own head. It was of one of the delights of his childhood: a little wooden chalet out of which there bobbed, as the barometer rose or fell, now a little man and now a little woman. The notion of barometric pressure not having been within his intellectual grasp, it had been a mysterious phenomenon. Sometimes the little man and the little woman seemed to come and go with bewildering rapidity – a subjective impression, no doubt, occasioned by his being a good deal occupied in his nursery with a diversity of absorbing pursuits. And now the little man and the little woman were with him again.
What Arthur Povey had just produced – he told himself rather desperately – was simply his most superb turn yet. And it was far, far too good to be true. Only it was true. Appleby was in the veritable presence of Jekyll and Hyde. Only that didn’t quite square with the facts of the case, since of these two famous fictional characters one had been a goody and the other a baddy. Whereas Charles and Arthur Povey could only be described as persons between whose moral worth, or lack of it, it would now be useless to attempt to discriminate. Appleby had solved their mystery, at least in a general way. What remained to tempt curiosity was a psychologist’s affair – that, rather than a former policeman’s. Arthur Povey had – but to a degree that remained obscure – been hoist with his own petard. Not, clearly, in a settled way, but rather with an intermittency which must make his life perpetually alarming.
And it was no business of his. This time, Appleby asserted this to himself seriously and after a moment’s deliberate thought. It would be socially irresponsible, having discovered what he had discovered, not to pick up the telephone and call the police. But he had spent a long lifetime being socially responsible. Now, he rose to his feet, and called it a day.
Gay Phoenix Page 17