A Night of Errors

by Michael Innes

  It was true. As the taunting presence beyond the hedge fell silent it was possible to hear Sebastian’s voice receding into distance. He was calling upon an imaginary corps of Dromio cadets to drive the threatening Jacquerie off the estate. His sixth shot, however, he appeared to be saving up still.

  ‘All right, men – forward you go.’ And Hyland advanced upon the system of hedges before him, waving his cane. The effect, Appleby thought, was rather like a travesty of some battle-piece by Lady Butler.

  ‘Yah, muckers!’ The jeering voice rose again. ‘Come on, the whole blurry gang. I’ll make bleeding ’ermits of the lot of yer.’

  Undeterred by this mysterious threat, the local constabulary advanced. With cat-like tread, Appleby murmured to himself – and indeed it was a Gilbertian moment. There were angry exclamations, mutters of bafflement. ‘Can’t make it out, sir,’ somebody called. ‘Seems like a little garden with this hedge all round.’

  ‘Come into the garden, you bleeding Mauds!’ The decanter was erected again and circled – rather like Excalibur waving above the surface of the lake. It disappeared and the voice broke into uproarious song. ‘For I’m the king of the carsle,’ it sang, ‘And you’re–’ The traditional words appeared altogether inadequate to the feelings of the singer; he extemporized after a fashion that made Hyland breathe hard as he listened.

  There was a sudden shout of triumph. ‘Here you are, sir, I’ve found a gap.’

  The constabulary converged upon this rally-cry and were presently piling through a narrow opening in the hedge. Appleby followed. He was in time to hear shouts of bewilderment and alarm. ‘Can’t make it out, sir.’ ‘Seems to be hedge wherever you turn, like.’ ‘No sight of him, sir.’ ‘Them little paths all over the place.’

  ‘Hyland,’ called Appleby, ‘do you know where we are?’

  ‘Yes, I do. We’re in a damned maze.’

  ‘Yah – muts! Will yer walk into my parlour, you blurry blue-bottles? I’ll fix yer! I’m a-coming at yer!’ With very considerable dramatic effect, the voice sank to a gloating stage whisper. ‘I’m a-coming at you bleeders with a blurry rusty knife. Where will it get yer, mate? Arsk Haristotle. That’s what I advise you. Arsk Haristotle and the ’ermits.’

  Appleby lit a cigarette. All around him constables blundered and swore. It seemed that only two or three of them had torches, and into the narrow cañons of the maze the moonlight cast no gleam. ‘Hyland,’ Appleby called again, ‘you know how these places are commonly made? As soon as you get to the centre there’s a direct path straight out. Why doesn’t the fellow simply make off?’

  But the fellow showed no intention of that; he was plainly enjoying himself enormously. ‘Nah then,’ he cried, ‘I’m a-coming arfter the first of you. Let’s ’ope it’s your boss, mates. No more wife and kids for ’im. Listen, will yer?’

  Everybody listened. The sound with which they were regaled was definitely displeasing, being nothing less than the whetting of some iron implement upon stone. From somewhere outside the maze the constable who had been winged by Sebastian Dromio swore softly as a comrade administered first-aid. Then there was absolute silence – a silence through which there could presently be heard a soft rustling as of somebody creeping on his belly over fallen leaves. Appleby could hear a young constable near him breathing with unnatural haste. Here and there torches flickered. But the forces of the law had precipitated themselves so gallantly into the intricacies of the maze that all were now isolated and no one man able to help another.

  For seconds the silence was absolute. Then there was a spine-chilling scream, a dull thud, an ebbing succession of dull, deep sobs. Appleby could hear men gasp around him; Hyland, the commander who had led his forces into a fatal trap, was grinding his teeth beyond a barrier of hedge. The sobs grew fainter. Then imperceptibly they grew again in volume and altered in tone; presently they made a distinguishable laughter which welled to a wild mocking delight. ‘That tickled yer!’ called the voice. ‘That sent yer running home to yer mothers.’

  Appleby chuckled. ‘Him all the time – and just treating us to a little play. Hyland, do you think it any good trying to track this rustic Minotaur through his labyrinth?’

  ‘I can’t say that I do.’

  ‘Quite so – and moreover we are wasting our time. The fellow can be no more than a grotesque flourish somewhere on the outer margin of the case.’

  ‘’Ere – ’oo are you calling names?’ The gloating voice was abruptly injured.

  ‘Come along men.’ Appleby’s words carried clearly across the maze. ‘Find your way out and make your way back to the house. There’s nothing of any interest to us here.’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’ From somewhere in the darkness a constable of nimbler wit than his fellows took up Appleby’s words. ‘Nothing here, I reckon, but a kid from the village having a game with us.’

  ‘I tell yer I’ve got an ’orrible knife! I tell yer I’m going to spoil all yer ’igh ’opes of romance! D’yer ’ear, you blurry bluebottles?’ Anxiety to reinstate himself dominated the unseen lurker’s tones.

  ‘Been to too many picture shows, I reckon,’ said another constable. ‘Here’s the exit, boys. Make for my voice.’

  ‘’Ere, wait a bit – you can’t do this to me!’ From the recesses of the maze there came a sound of hurrying feet and laboured breathing. ‘Yer can’t leave me all alone ’ere in the dark, lads; not arfter wot I seen tonight. ’Tain’t Christian – you arsk parson. Nor ’tain’t the law neither. Ain’t yer policemen?’

  The body of men thus invoked had by this time extricated itself from the maze. ‘That’s right,’ called Hyland briskly. ‘Straight up to the terrace.’

  ‘Don’t I ’elp pay yer bleeding wages? I demands protection – that’s wot I do.’ The voice modulated from indignation to pathos. ‘Don’t even a mucking gardener ’ave ’is rights? ’Ere I am.’

  Appleby turned round in time to see a lurching figure break from the cover of the maze and advance unsteadily but rapidly towards the retreating constabulary. In one hand he swung a crystal decanter, quite empty. Here was undoubtedly the fellow whom he had encountered earlier that night, a queer terror in his eyes. Appleby halted. ‘Are you Grubb the gardener?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s me, sir.’ Grubb raised his free hand and gave a deferential tug at a forelock.

  ‘I thought so. Well, good night to you.’

  ‘Good night to me? Me – wot’s seen such ’orrors as you wouldn’t believe?’ Grubb was very drunk; he had just passed from extreme belligerence to some ecstasy of fraternal feeling; it was plain that this cavalier treatment hurt him very much. ‘Don’t be ’ard of ’eart, sir. Take me along of you, and ’ear what I ’as to say.’

  ‘If you want to tell us something you may come up to the house. But hurry along. We have very little time to waste.’

  At this Grubb took a constable’s arm and moved amiably forward. The hunt had come to the tamest of ends. Up a long flagged path between beech-hedges the forces of Hyland advanced, majestic and measured, conscious of duty laudibly discharged. The moon, as if to dignify the scene yet further, emerged from its clouds; the lawn was silvered; the bold arabesques of the hippogriffs cast their shadows across it like a gaping and carious mouth. And into this the party marched.

  ‘Halt!’

  The word rang out so commandingly that, as if on a parade ground, everybody stood stock still. Some peered into the shadows. Others, with a nicer ear, apprehensively eyed the moon. Appleby, sceptical of any supernatural intervention on the captured Grubb’s behalf, scanned the hippogriffs. And, sure enough, on one of them the diminished figure of a man perilously swayed. In one hand he held a revolver. For a badly intoxicated man Sebastian Dromio had achieved a remarkable climb.

  ‘Back to your hovels!’ Sebastian’s weapon circled in air. ‘Not to be intimidated by a mob of beashtly peasants, believe me.’

  ‘Whose yer calling a pheasant?’ Grubb was again abruptly truculent. Swaying slightly on his fee
t, and slowly swinging the decanter – of which nobody had thought to relieve him – he stared vacantly upwards. ‘Who are yer, anyway?’ he called.

  ‘I am Shir Shebastian Dromio.’ The answer came slurred but promptly from the hippogriff. ‘I am defending my property – deuced great property just come to me from my desheasted nephew. Not going to stand for any nonsense from peasants. Got a gun. Shoot at shight. Shoot one of you now. Picking my man.’ And Sebastian poised his weapon with an unsteady but dangerous hand.

  ‘Property!’ Grubb raised his voice scornfully. ‘A bleeding Jack on the Bean-stalk – that’s what yer are.’

  ‘I tell you I am Shir–’

  ‘You nothing but a blurry nigger up a gum-tree.’ Grubb brandished his decanter and favoured the heavens with an unfocused stare. ‘Send the police arfter yer, that’s what I’ll do. Friends of mine, they are. And what yer doing to that mucking ’orse anyway?’ And Grubb pointed a wavering finger at the hippogriff. Suddenly his body stiffened and his voice changed; his eye had at last fixed itself on the relevant object overhead. ‘Gawd – if it ain’t Mr Dromio! I knows yer’ – the voice was shrill – ‘I knows yer ’orrible family crime! I seen–’

  Sebastian Dromio’s arm stiffened and his weapon spurted fire; a moment later his figure had swayed, spun, toppled from its crazy perch. What followed was a loud splash. The curve of Sebastian’s fall had taken him into the lily pond.

  ‘Well, I’m blessed.’ Hyland found his voice. ‘A couple of you men haul Mr Dromio out. As likely as not he’s very little the worse.’

  And so it proved. They hauled him from the pond, green with duckweed and shivering. Hyland looked at him distastefully. ‘It might be worse,’ he said. ‘He might have done something pretty nasty with that gun.’

  ‘He has, sir.’ It was a constable who spoke soberly from a little distance away. ‘Grubb is quite dead. That bullet got him through the heart.’

  9

  The body of Sir Oliver Dromio still lay on the bearskin rug. The body of Grubb the gardener had been brought into the study too – this social indecorum being justified, Appleby supposed, by the convenience of having a single depository for corpses. Would there be any more to follow? Hyland, at least, appeared not to think so. He was drinking whisky with the air of a man who prepares for bed. ‘Thank goodness,’ he said, ‘that that’s that.’

  Appleby too helped himself to whisky. There was only a drain left in the bottle. Sebastian Dromio had consumed the greater part of it earlier – and hence, it was to be supposed, his undoing and present languishing in whatever dungeon Hyland had assigned him.

  ‘I was pretty sure it was a family affair. And now – well, there you are.’ Hyland nodded sagely. ‘Grubb must actually have seen him do it.’

  Appleby set down his glass. ‘You are convinced that Sebastian Dromio killed his nephew?’

  ‘Of course I am. It stands to reason. We all heard Grubb begin to denounce him, and then he fired and stopped his mouth.’

  ‘You think that Sebastian up on his hippogriff was acting from calculation? I don’t see that Grubb’s denunciation – whatever it was going to be – could have been absolutely incriminating. It was no more, after all, than one drunkard’s bawling about another. Whereas the actual shooting of Grubb was a plain and confessed crime in itself. It will be argued in court that he had an insensate notion that he was defending the place from pillage. But on the score of Grubb he has no chance of getting off. Apparently the shooting was mere drunken stupidity.’

  ‘But, dash it all, you heard what Grubb said.’

  Appleby smiled. ‘I kept on hearing what Grubb said. He was chucking words about in a very wild and unedifying way. And I don’t assert that his accusation may not have substance. I merely assert that it is not in itself evidence of a very impressive sort. However, I’ll agree that Sebastian is a suspect. He had substantial control of the family finances, and if Sir Oliver came home and demanded an account of them he may have judged it the simplest thing to hit him hard on the head. But there’s a great deal that such a hypothesis just doesn’t begin to touch.’

  Hyland put down his glass briskly. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘one or two points are not quite clear.’

  ‘For instance pitching the body into a fire. And pitching the tantalus into a corner of the study. And Sir Oliver sending Swindle a telegram to open the study on the quiet – one doesn’t see why an intention to bring Sebastian to account should require that. Still, the Sebastian hypothesis has one great attraction. Sebastian himself is not a hypothesis. He’s a fact.’

  ‘What the dickens do you mean by that?’

  ‘The late Sir Oliver’s brothers are a hypothesis. They may have substance and they may not. Their mother found some evidence that they survived the fire and were smuggled away. In that case the probability is that they are still alive today. There is a further possibility that Sir Oliver contacted them when in America.’ And Appleby gave some account of his interview with Lady Dromio.

  Hyland was impressed. ‘It’s a deuced queer tale,’ he said.

  ‘Almost too queer. And rather thrust at me, too. But consider it. Did Sir Oliver bring one, or both, of those brothers home? It would be the natural thing to do. And it almost explains the first mystery – that telegram to Swindle. These brothers are middle-aged Americans. We don’t know what provision was made for their upbringing, but it may have been not very substantial. They may be quite simple people, interested in this queer discovery about themselves, but awkward and shy. Oliver might propose to introduce them to Sherris in some unobtrusive way; to take them quietly in of an evening and let them see what they thought of it. That would explain his instruction to Swindle.’

  ‘It wouldn’t quite explain his being killed.’

  ‘That’s true enough. But imagine something like this. Just one of those brothers comes across to have a look – and so far as Oliver is concerned he is altogether an unknown quantity. They walk round the place in the dusk and this disinherited brother begins to realize what a grand place it is. They go into the study, have a drink or two, and Oliver begins to take quite the wrong line. Perhaps lets out an old story that nobody really knew which of the three infants alone appeared to survive – so that not he, Oliver, but actually this disinherited brother may be the true heir. And at that his brother may have been moved to make some substantial demand upon the estate. Upon that they may have quarrelled–’

  ‘And the long-lost brother taken a fatal swipe at him?’ Hyland shook his head. ‘It’s a bit far-fetched, if you ask me.’

  ‘Of course it is. But then so was this brother – fetched from forty years back and from lord knows where in the backwoods of America. We may suppose that the whole queer discovery had sent him a bit off his head. The fire which had been the instrument of his father’s abominable plot would rather obsess him, no doubt. And in the thoroughly crazy state that follows upon homicide it gave him some odd emotional satisfaction to start a fire in the study and pitch his murdered brother into it.’

  ‘What about that tantalus?’

  ‘We bring in the second long-lost brother. Both came back with Oliver. Both were in this room. The quarrel was general. One or other of them killed Oliver, and then they fell out between themselves. One pitched the tantalus at the other; there was the most frightful crash; and at that they came to a sense of their danger and bolted. They are on their way back to America by now. By next week they will be back to the common round of selling insurance or peddling vacuum cleaners.’

  Hyland sighed. ‘Do you always go to work this way? And do your powers of belief keep pace with those of your imagination?’

  ‘I would rather not believe in the long-lost brothers at all. As I say, they may be phantoms – mere ghosts.’

  ‘Then they may turn up at any time.’ And Hyland glanced at the clock. ‘Half past two in the morning is no bad hour for supernatural appearances.’

  ‘And an awkward time to get at ordinary flesh and blood. But there is more of th
at to be got at. For instance, what about the woman who came to dinner?’

  ‘Mrs Gollifer?’ Hyland shook his head. ‘I can’t see that she’s very likely to come in. Simply an acquaintance who came and went. And the evening begins to be abnormal, surely, only when Sir Oliver and whoever it may have been arrive home and step through that window.’

  ‘I think not. The evening began to get out of hand not in this study but in the drawing-room. There was a row there. Quite possibly it was an altogether independent row – or revelation.’

  ‘We could do with a bit of revelation ourselves.’ Hyland, his confidence in the guilt of Sebastian Dromio now shaken, glanced gloomily at the two shrouded bodies. ‘I wish they’d come and take these things away.’

  ‘The person who was particularly upset was the girl – Lucy Dromio. It would be interesting to know a little more about her. Do you think Sherris runs to any more old retainers besides Swindle and the late Grubb? An aged crone, long ago familiar with the nursery and schoolroom, would be a most desirable acquaintance. I don’t think one will get much from Lady Dromio – and from Miss Lucy herself still less. Of course, about a girl brought up in such a situation one can make a guess. The wonderful little Oliver turned her head – and she quite failed to screw it straight again when she grew up.’

  ‘Bother guesses. I never heard anything less like useful police work in my life.’ Hyland checked himself. ‘Sorry, my dear chap. Feeling a bit out of my depth, to tell the truth. So guess away. But I suggest we keep it till breakfast. I’d uncommonly relish a few hours’ sleep.’

  The study door opened and a heavy-eyed constable put his head into the room. ‘Reverend Mr Greengrave,’ he said. ‘He’s just been seeing the ladies.’

  Hyland groaned. ‘This is as interminable,’ he muttered, ‘as one of those beastly mystery thrillers in a cinema. No let-ups at all. Show him in.’