Appleby's Answer

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

  Appleby’s Answer

  First published in 1973

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1973-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755120833 EAN: 9780755120833

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Part One

  BRITISH RAIL

  1

  It was with gratifying frequency, nowadays, that Miss Pringle found herself sharing a railway compartment with some total stranger who was reading one of her books. And this was not all. During the last few years (since, to be precise, she had found an American as well as a British publisher) Miss Pringle had been in a position to treat herself to first-class tickets. It was her distinct impression that the upper stratum of society to which this indulgence had introduced her had more of a nose for, or in, her novels than had, when previously observed, the common herd who travel ‘second’. (Miss Pringle, being almost elderly and instinctively old-fashioned as well, in fact referred to ‘second’ as ‘third’.)

  ‘Firsts’, it was true, seemed as indisposed as ‘thirds’ to apply themselves to hard-cover editions of Miss Pringle’s increasingly celebrated books. With only the rarest exceptions, they were paperback readers to a woman or a man. Miss Pringle at times found herself a little resenting this. It was surely a legitimate expectation that carriage-folk – and what are first-class passengers but the modern equivalent of these? – should be thinking, when they bought books, in terms of permanent and worthy accession to the substantial private libraries which doubtless dignified their homes. Consider, for instance, a baronet’s library. (Miss Pringle’s fictions often had one of these as crucial setting.) What could be more inappropriate to so august a chamber than a line of tattered old Penguins? And there was the question, too, of the rate of expenditure in a literary field consonant with, or seemly in relation to, other forms of expenditure. These people were certainly not paying, on average, less than a couple of guineas for their well-cushioned ride. Would not one guinea, and not what was now called twenty new pence, be a reasonable outlay upon the reading that would last them to the end of it?

  But when these thoughts visited the journeying Miss Pringle it is not to be supposed that it was to an effect of any marked acerbity of mind. Miss Pringle had achieved her modest eminence only after struggle. She had never, like Lord Byron, awakened one morning to find herself famous; she had in fact quite frequently awakened to morning papers which dismissed her latest brain-child in a couple oflines. It was only when Vengeance at the Vicarage had so providentially tumbled itself from the ample garments of the Archbishop of Canterbury as he stepped from an aeroplane, and she had thereupon worked night and day to finish Revenge at the Rectory six weeks later, that fortune had a little begun to smile upon her.

  So what Miss Pringle chiefly felt now was simply that it was nice to be fairly widely read on any terms. Of course it would be even nicer if one day she contrived to hit the jackpot (as the young people mysteriously expressed it). At this very moment she had a sneaking feeling that Poison at the Parsonage (more than half-finished, and safely in the suitcase above her head) might do the trick. Meanwhile, it was agreeable to be favoured by the comparatively few. Her publisher, a personable young man who had lately and quite charmingly taken to addressing her as his Dear Priscilla, teased her about being an élitiste. He appeared to have invented the word; it wasn’t in her Larousse; but one got the idea. And the young man had been told by an uncle, the Dean of Barchester, that the Archbishop ofYork, first attracted by his senior colleague’s inadvertent advertisement, had become a devoted follower of Inspector Catfish. Inspector Catfish was Miss Pringle’s detective.

  There appeared to be a high probability that the gentleman seated diagonally to herself in the compartment belonged to an élite, although perhaps one of birth rather than intellect. He was elderly; his droopy moustache held the particular tinge of brown which Sherlock Holmes would undoubtedly have known to proceed only from the smoking of Ramon Allones (or would it be Romeo y Julieta?) cigars; and he was clothed in shapeless and shaggy tweeds. He looked, come to think of it, uncommonly like a baronet himself. And there he was – absorbed in Murder in the Cathedral. (Her work of that title; not the late Mr T S Eliot’s.)

  In paperb
ack once more, it was true. But that, after all, introduced into the situation an element that Miss Pringle never ceased to experience as piquant and even in some degree alarming. The jackets of her hard-cover books relied upon a bold typography for their effect. But the paperbacks led off with a stimulating, although entirely decorous, pictorial allurement on the front, and finished with a photograph of herself (herself and Orlando her cat) on the back. A spectacular recognition scene was a possibility at any moment.

  And now the gentleman, who was perhaps about to light a cigar, put down Murder in the Cathedral, open and covers upward, on the seat beside him. He produced – with a slight effect of anticlimax – a pipe and a tobacco-pouch. They were in a smoking compartment. Nevertheless the gentleman looked straight at Miss Pringle and spoke.

  ‘Madam,’ he asked with grave courtesy, ‘will you allow me?’

  Miss Pringle fluttered into acquiescence. The fact that she had rather a line in gentlemanlike villains – particularly curates who had been to Eton and Cambridge and who appeared to be heading for a blameless berth among the Superior Clergy – sometimes inclined her to an irrational sense of guilt in the presence of gentlemen who (like her own late father the Archdeacon) were gentlemen in every sense. And the elderly man now lighting his pipe was certainly that. It wasn’t merely that he talked (as her nephew Timothy would say in his slangy way) pucka posh and not synthetic posh. There was something about his bearing – or perhaps one might say his air – which told you at once that here was somebody flawlessly well-bred. That air of aloofness and perfect diffidence which marks an English gentleman. Miss Pringle was surprised at being unable to remember where she had read that. It had impressed her very much. She wasn’t entirely sure that she hadn’t, somewhere or other, quietly made use of it. Her long years of imaginative commerce with high life and criminal practice had necessarily a little impaired her moral character. But only a very little. Even when writing a book in an awful hurry, for example, she would never have purloined a whole paragraph. And a mere phrase or even a sentence, after all, might occur to anyone.

  Miss Pringle’s travelling companion (and fan) had returned to his book. He was observably quite near the end of it. Perhaps he had got to the page on which the revolver was found behind the reredos, or even to the climactic moment of Inspector Catfish’s discovering the missing cathedral plate in Canon Pantin’s pantry. Unfortunately he didn’t look terribly pleased. Indeed, behind the ogee-curve of his moustache his aristocratic features – for they were aristocratic – had settled into a mould of what could only be called sombre discouragement. Miss Pringle was distressed. She felt an impulse – for she was a proud and sensitive woman – to reach into her handbag, fish out twenty more or less new pence, and tender this reimbursement to her dissatisfied customer. But now she noticed that he was himself obeying some kindred fumbling manoeuvre.

  He had produced a pencil. It was a distinguished pencil. It was in form a flattened oval; it was no more than an inch long; its value would have to be placed at something under a farthing (old style). But it lived with its tail in a little gold holder and its head in a little gold cap. It somehow didn’t look the sort of writing instrument for which one could obtain a refill; when the stubby little affair had been sharpened and whittled away you simply had to repair to some jeweller’s shop in Bond Street and start all over again.

  Miss Pringle (because she had an instinct for the minutiae of refined living) would have been much impressed by the mere appearance of this object had she not been so instantly depressed by the use to which she now saw it put. The stranger turned over the last few pages of Murder in the Cathedral – without even skimming them! – and inscribed beneath the final paragraph a sign which (since he then obligingly dropped the book on his knees) Miss Pringle was at once able to read.

  It was this:

  ß –? –

  Miss Pringle not only read; she understood, since conversation with her erstwhile undergraduate nephew Timothy had taught her the elements of this dismal academic language. Beta-minus-query-minus was what you got from your tutor for a composition which somebody using plain English would call ‘mediocre’ or ‘dull’ or even perhaps ‘dim’.

  It might have been expected that a just indignation at so ungenerous a verdict would alone have occupied Miss Pringle’s consciousness at this discomfiting moment. Actually, she was aware of other feelings as well. One was disappointment. The elderly man in the corner could not, after all, be a baronet. Baronets don’t deal in betas, or in alphas and gammas either. It seemed more likely that he was a university professor. Miss Pringle had been brought up to hold the learned classes in high regard, but she was aware that these classes – indeed the liberal professions generally – were not quite what they had been in her father’s time. Even the fellows of an Oxford college, she had been reliably told, might now be rather a mixed lot. Still, however that might be, there could be no doubt about this particular individual’s social ambiance. And it was even possible – it suddenly came to her – that he was both a baronet and a professor as well. In the church there were certainly persons who held hereditary titles as well as being the Rector of this or the Lord Bishop of that. No doubt in the universities the same sort of thing occasionally occurred.

  These thoughts (in an area in which Miss Pringle was prone to be rather foolish) were jostled by others (in an area in which she could occasionally be more perceptive than her unassuming profession required). As well as being injured by her travelling companion’s low rating of Murder in the Cathedral and disappointed by what she now had to judge ambiguous in his social situation she was intrigued by something elusive – that was the word – in the nature of his concluding reaction to her book. Deep in the constitution of the detective story there is a large liability to end flatly or badly, and readers who have perused some 200 pages with satisfaction are often enough disproportionately censorious as they make their way through the score or so of pages with which it concludes. It is as if the ungrateful creatures were suddenly persuaded that they have been chewing straw. They may even be annoyed that this innutritious diet has been purveyed to them at an approximate rate of ten of those new pennies to the hour.

  But this didn’t seem to be quite what the gentleman with the ogee moustache was feeling. He wasn’t registering irritation; he was registering gloom. And it came to Miss Pringle instinctively that her novel hadn’t been judged and written off quite in terms of the simple canons of its craft. It was not with a literary critic that she was encapsulated in this snug and slightly overheated compartment. And this inclined Miss Pringle to a charitable view of her companion and his behaviour. For instance, she dismissed at once the thought that the recognition scene had taken place; that the injurious scribble had been perpetrated, and cunningly offered to her regard, by one who had spotted her identity. He was a gentleman. He wouldn’t do just that.

  And now the situation developed. The elderly man began to evince certain small signs of physical discomfort characteristic of elderly men during the later stages of a railway journey. He shifted slightly in his seat. He discernibly estimated his distance from the door giving on the corridor. He equally discernibly studied Miss Pringle’s knees and feet – not lasciviously, but from a courteous impulse as little as possible to incommode a fellow traveller. And then he knocked out his pipe, rose a shade stiffly to his feet, produced the ghost of a polite murmur, reached for the door beside her, and in a moment had vanished in quest of whatever convenience it had become incumbent upon him to seek. Miss Pringle was left alone – or alone except for the company of a harmless detective romance the quality of which had been most cruelly aspersed with the aid of an elegant gold pencil.

  Miss Pringle’s glance travelled, by an involuntary movement, to the suitcase perched on the rack in the further corner of the compartment. It revealed a luggage-label of that old-fashioned sort consisting of a leather sheath with a small celluloid window through which a visiting-card may be exhibited. It could be seen that such a
card was actually on view, and it would be quite easy to stand up and examine it. Miss Pringle, who would have hated to be caught out in any unladylike act, hesitated. What if the owner of the suitcase had discovered what he sought to be ‘engaged’, and had decided that, rather than linger awkwardly in the corridor, he would simply return in temporary bafflement to his compartment? But Miss Pringle was a courageous woman, and she decided to risk it. What this resolution brought her was the following:

  A G de P Bulkington

  Imperial Forces Club

  Pall Mall, SW1

  This was informative; yet, somehow, it was not quite informative enough. Miss Pringle’s curiosity was but sharpened, and it was when thus vulnerably keyed-up that her attention was caught by something else. The gentleman’s overcoat had been thrown carelessly on a vacant seat, with its lining – and in that lining an inner pocket – revealed. And peeping out from the pocket…

  A strong tremor passed through Miss Pringle’s frame. She felt like one standing on the brink of an awful chasm. What she saw was a letter, without a doubt. And a letter might tell much, or all!

  Ladies do not trespass upon the private correspondence of gentlemen. On this there could be no conceivable argument. But are not lady-novelists a little different from mere ladies? Do they not possess a certain licence – even, in a sense, a certain duty – in the matter of possessing themselves as they can of whatever may the better inform them of the mysterious lives of the opposite sex? And all that seemed required, initially at least, was a mere tweak. The letter might simply have tumbled from the pocket! Miss Pringle tweaked, and found herself looking at an envelope thus directed in a sprawling hand: