Appleby's Answer

by Michael Innes

  18

  Detective-Inspector Graves, as was appropriate to one of his cognomen, was a man of sombre habit. That Sir Ambrose Pinkerton, a grandee whose powers Mr Graves was unequipped with the sophistication very accurately to determine, should for some months have been tiresomely creating about the discovery of two or three senseless scarecrows around his estate had in itself been enough to tinge the sombre with the positively saturnine in Mr Graves’ nervous constitution.

  Then there had come, from some seemingly deranged woman declaring herself resident in the neighbourhood of distant Worcester, the vehement assertion, too urgent to be ignored, that Sir Ambrose was in immediate need of protection against mysterious menace alike to his property and his life. And now – Mr Graves having arrived with several subordinate officers in order to preserve the Queen’s peace at Long Canings Hall – it had transpired that there was already on the scene, irregularly and therefore the more alarmingly, nothing and nobody less than a retired Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. Mr Graves had nothing against Sir John Appleby, a man famous within his late jurisdiction for impeccable relations alike with his most exalted lieutenants and the humblest constables on the beat. Still less had he anything against Sir John’s wife, a woman who struck him at once as of an agreeably composed and sceptical disposition. The situation, nevertheless, could legitimately be regarded as trying to any honest man soothingly habituated (as Mr Graves was) to the rapid sorting out of petty and crystalline misdemeanours of a sort compassable by the yearning but incompetent rustic criminals of darkest Wilts. It was the first tenet of Detective-Inspector Graves’ professional code that before acting one must make sure of one’s ground. But in this instance it was distressingly unclear to him how this preliminary step was to be achieved. The sensible thing would be to await a hint from Appleby himself. But Appleby too appeared to be waiting. Nothing much could be done, it seemed, until the lady from Worcester arrived. She was expected at any minute now.

  ‘A Miss Pringle, she called herself,’ Graves said. He had cautiously consulted a notebook before committing himself thus far. ‘Would anything, now, be known about her? She isn’t on the list of folk who make irresponsible calls to the police. And a pretty long list it is – as you, sir, know.’

  Appleby agreed that this was indeed within his knowledge, but offered no further remark. Sir Ambrose, a hospitable if irascible man, advanced upon Mr Graves with a cobwebby bottle which apparently contained brandy of an unusual and superior sort. This embarrassed Mr Graves, who had been taught as a young man that he must not, when on duty, accept refreshment of this sort. Sir Ambrose, of course, was Sir Ambrose. But then Sir John was Sir John. Sir John resolved this dilemma by himself commending the brandy to Mr Graves in a relaxed and friendly manner. Mr Graves accepted a glass like a young football and applied himself, not ungratefully, to the reassuringly moderate tot it contained.

  ‘A most impertinent woman,’ Lady Pinkerton said. ‘For a start, we do know that.’ Lady Pinkerton was not only herself drinking brandy; she was also smoking a cigar. This increased Mr Graves’ sense of being a little out of his depth. ‘She came into our church,’ Lady Pinkerton said. Lady Pinkerton said this much as if she was saying ‘She took off all her clothes and danced on our lawn.’ Mr Graves, who was accustomed to regard church-going as meritorious and reassuring, was further baffled. ‘And it appears that she writes books,’ Lady Pinkerton said.

  ‘Like Jane Austen and George Eliot,’ Appleby offered, and gravely shook his head.

  ‘Obscene publications, sir?’ Thus seeking some glimmer of light, Mr Graves produced a handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘Or merely literature, like?’

  ‘Detective literature,’ Lady Appleby said, with a gravity equal to her husband’s. ‘Which you might describe as betwixt and between.’

  Not unnaturally, this appraisal produced absolute impasse. Silence descended upon Lady Pinkerton’s impressive drawing-room. It was terminated by the distant ringing of a bell.

  ‘And – damn it – here she is,’ Sir Ambrose said.

  But the lady presently ushered in upon the expectant company was Miss Anketel of Hinton House. Miss Anketel was known to Detective-Inspector Graves as being, like his host of the moment, an ornament of the bench. This increased his sense that something portentous was going forward, without at all enlightening him as to just what it was. He consulted his watch, however, and resourcefully recorded in his notebook that the lady had arrived at 11.20 p.m.

  ‘Ambrose,’ Miss Anketel demanded sternly and without preliminary greeting, ‘what do you mean by surrounding your house with lurking men? Fortunately I have come on foot. A horse might have been seriously alarmed.’

  ‘Not men, my dear Kate,’ Sir Ambrose said – placatingly and while reaching for the brandy. ‘Constables. Constables and sergeants and so on. Graves’ people, I’m sure you know Graves. Fact is, it has been decided the place must be guarded. All those damned unaccountable goings-on. You’ll take a drop of this?’

  ‘Well – I think I can add to them.’ Miss Anketel gave a vigorous nod which served at once to emphasise her claim and accept Sir Ambrose’s offer. She then surveyed the room and acknowledged the presence of the Applebys. ‘Judith,’ she demanded, ‘didn’t you say you were driving straight home?’

  ‘That was the idea. But it so happens that John has interested himself in Sir Ambrose’s perplexities. Have you really got something to add to them?’

  ‘I have the explanation of something.’ Miss Anketel sat down and consulted her glass. ‘That’s why, Cecily, I’ve made so uncommonly late a call. You ought to know about it at once, I felt. And I’d have brought Henry Howard with me. Only Henry felt he ought not to leave the boy.’

  ‘One of Captain Bulkington’s boys?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘Quite right!’ Miss Anketel was surprised. ‘It was like this. After dinner, I left Barbara Vanderpump to her own devices – she said she thought of taking an evening walk – and went over to the rectory. I had promised Henry to check the parish accounts with him. It is something we do together from time to time. But we had scarcely settled to the job when this youth burst into the house without ceremony. He was in a state of abject terror.’

  ‘This,’ Appleby said, ‘must have been the one called Ralph Jenkins?’

  ‘Yes – that appears to be his name. It was difficult to make sense of his blubbering account of himself. But the other youth had been bullying him, and for some reason he had got in a panic about a very queer escapade in which they both had engaged–’

  ‘Stealing some of Sir Ambrose’s clothes?’

  ‘I see I am not bringing you news, after all – or not so far as Jenkins is concerned. But it seems that he had been reading a historical novel – no doubt Bulkington keeps his pupils quiet by obliging them to follow such useless pursuits – and there had been something in it about the right of fugitives to seek sanctuary in a church, and Jenkins had felt that church and a rectory are very much the same thing. It was a little awkward for Henry, being suddenly confronted with such a piece of nonsense. But there was something else that Henry appeared to like even less. It was when Jenkins began talking about Bulkington and the well.’

  ‘The well?’ Appleby repeated this on so sharply interrogative a note that Detective-Inspector Graves might have been observed to jump and then hastily commit some thought to his notebook. ‘Just what had Ralph Jenkins to say about Bulkington and the well?’

  ‘It was far from clear. But I found myself persuaded that this, rather than the absurd theft of Ambrose’s old clothes and the using them to dress up dummies and so forth, was what had really broken the miserable Jenkins’ nerve. And then a walloping from his precious friend earlier this evening had been a last straw.’

  ‘I don’t know what all this is about,’ Sir Ambrose said, ‘and for either of the man Bulkington’s precious pupils I couldn’t care less. But what’s this about a well? Graves, do you make any sense of it?’

  ‘I can’t say tha
t I do, sir. Except that, before my time in the district, there was some fatality, I believe, connected with a well in the grounds of the Old Rectory – “Kandahar”, as it now is.’

  ‘Gad, yes!’ Sir Ambrose was enlightened. ‘Fellow called Pusey – young Howard’s predecessor. Managed to drown himself in the thing. Rum business.’

  ‘Precisely so,’ Miss Anketel said. ‘Of course, it was before Henry came here, and it is something he has never much cared to discuss. Tonight he appeared almost upset by the drivel this gutless young Jenkins was talking about it.’

  ‘Can you be a little more explicit about that, Miss Anketel?’ Appleby asked. ‘I think the Inspector may have a very good reason for being interested in it.’

  ‘Thank you, sir – precisely so,’ Graves said stoutly. And he licked the point of his pencil.

  ‘It appeared to be something like this,’ Miss Anketel said, absently pushing her emptied glass in the direction of her host. ‘Some months ago Jenkins and the even more disagreeable Waterbird had an encounter with the scribbling woman – whose name escapes me.’

  ‘Pringle,’ Appleby said. ‘And we expect her here at any moment. But that is by the way. Please go on.’

  ‘Expect her here? Good God!’ Miss Anketel was properly astonished. ‘But the gist of the matter was that this encounter with the woman represented an obscure stratagem on Bulkington’s part. The young men had instructions to present this Pringle person with alarming facts – or supposed facts – about their tutor. In particular, they were to assure her that he had himself made away with the unfortunate Pusey – I suppose actually by pushing him down the well.’

  ‘Drowned him, in fact?’ Sir Ambrose demanded. ‘I call that a deuced high-handed thing to do. Always knew the fellow was a scoundrel. Often said so. Cecily will back me up.’

  ‘Jenkins,’ Miss Anketel pursued, ‘is accustomed to having to regard much that goes on round about him as incomprehensible and therefore not usefully to be worried about. That, I imagine, would frequently be his condition in any environment. But it has been particularly so in Bulkington’s broken-down mad-house.’

  ‘You view it as a mad-house?’ Appleby asked. ‘And Bulkington as mad?’

  ‘At least Jenkins does. But he appears to be less impressed by his tutor’s imbecility than by his inebriety. He maintains that Bulkington has been mysteriously keyed up of late, has been drinking heavily, and has been behaving in some very alarming ways when drunk. For one thing, he visits the well.’

  ‘Ah!’ Appleby said.

  ‘Ah!’ Graves echoed – and appeared to write down this ejaculation in his little book. Then an original thought struck him. ‘Returning to the scene of the crime, perhaps? It’s said to be a common thing. But then, of course, it’s unlikely’ – Graves contentedly finished his brandy – ‘that there was a crime.’

  ‘No crime?’ Appleby queried – and inwardly concluded that the Detective-Inspector was no fool.

  ‘Well, sir, not just that crime. If you push a man down a well and drown him, you don’t oblige a couple of young men to inform a lady of the fact many years later. No sense in that.’

  ‘But the point may lie just there,’ Judith said. ‘There is no sense in Captain Bulkington. He’s off his head. He imagines he murdered his predecessor, this unfortunate Dr Pusey. He nourishes beautiful fantasies of achieving further drownings. The well has become a kind of wishing well, and that’s why he haunts it.’

  ‘In fact, the fellow’s a harmless, although damned offensive, crack-pot?’ This was offered rather hopefully by Sir Ambrose. ‘Put our heads together, and see how we might get him quietly put away. Just a matter of nobbling the right mad-doctors, if you ask me.’

  ‘That Bulkington is insane,’ Appleby said, looking round him, ‘seems to be almost the majority view. And I think it quite possible myself. But, even if he is mad, is he ineffectively mad? It would be rash to suppose so. He may nourish fantasies, as my wife says. But he has a considerable disposition to action, as well. He took action, which I need not particularise, to get these two young men we have been talking about well under his thumb. He made them steal your clothes, Pinkerton, and probably do the job of planting those dressed up dummies as well. There can be little doubt, moreover, that what the inventive Miss Pringle is proposing to reveal to us is further machinations on the Captain’s part. Lethal machinations, if my colleague Inspector Graves has understood it aright.’

  ‘Why do you call this Pringle woman inventive, Sir John?’ Miss Anketel asked. ‘Do you suppose that she has been making something up?’

  ‘At least that is her profession – which it is possible to suspect she has lately been exercising in an unusual way. But we must wait and see.’ Appleby looked comfortably round the company. ‘I’ve never much cared for bizarre hypotheses… Ah, Pinkerton – your door-bell again.’

  19

  Miss Pringle had not, of course, expected to find herself in the presence of Sir John Appleby – whom nevertheless she recognised at once. Hither and thither dividing the swift mind (like the Homeric hero whose guilefulness she might be said to emulate), she tumbled at once to the fact that he must be that ‘man from Scotland Yard’ who had so mysteriously entertained Messrs Waterbird and Jenkins to tea. That he had now arrived, equally unaccountably, at Long Canings Hall (principal seat of Sir Ambrose Pinkerton, Bart.) was a circumstance which she saw she was likely to judge either gratifying or alarming according to the amount of nerve she was herself importing into this impressive mansion. The presence of so famous a policeman must surely most notably add to the news-value of the strange and sinister events which were about to transact themselves in and around the place. On the other hand, Appleby – she clear-sightedly acknowledged to herself – might prove to be rather a different cup of tea from even a senior and experienced rural police officer.

  Not that Appleby was suggesting himself as at all formidable now. He had the air of a man who, having embarked upon some social occasion of the most commonplace kind, and then discovered himself to have stumbled upon the fringes of a small family contretemps or the like, politely effaces himself until the insignificant disturbance has been smoothed away. Something of the same appearance, too, was presented by Lady Appleby, a well-groomed woman who had produced a fragment of crochet-work, from her bag, and was applying herself to it in a mild abstraction which somehow contrived to suggest that she had come to stay with the Pinkertons for a month, and that Miss Pringle’s incursion – oddly nocturnal though it was – was an episode of an ephemeral and unimportant kind. It was different with Miss Anketel, who had also instantly recalled herself to Miss Pringle’s mind (or better, perhaps, to Miss Pringle’s nose, since the same unmistakable high-class effluvium, as of horse embrocation by Chanel, attended Miss Anketel’s person in Lady Pinkerton’s drawing-room as had done so in Dr Howard’s church). Miss Anketel from time to time directed a certain grim attention upon Miss Pringle – rather of the sort (Miss Pringle thought) to which she might be prompted by the sight of some coughing, spavined, or glandered jade. As for the Pinkertons, they combined the verbal expressions of courtesy incumbent upon a host and hostess with the stony stares and the pervasive bemusement to which their upbringing and their intellectual equipment respectively prompted them.

  All this added up to the fact that Miss Pringle’s sensational communication, although advanced in so unexpectedly numerous a company, seemed effectively to be made to the reassuringly respectful Detective-Inspector Graves alone. And Miss Pringle felt she was not going to be intimidated by a Detective-Inspector. She had, after all, invented such persons by the score.

  There was something a little daunting, all the same, in the circumstance that it was entirely without comment, and entirely without perceptible change of facial expression, that Graves wrote it all down in a notebook. Miss Pringle wondered whether, when at length she fell silent, she would be invited to sign the record, or perhaps receive some caution required by what are called the Judges’ Rules. (In Miss Pringl
e’s romances there was commonly a point at which some shady character was told by Catfish that anything he said would be taken down and might be used in evidence: an incident which her more experienced readers knew to be virtually a verdict of Not Guilty delivered on the spot.) But, on the whole, Miss Pringle was satisfied by her performance. Her only regret was that she had not thought up some stratagem for introducing into Lady Pinkerton’s drawing-room (at this crucial stage of the affair) the Crime Reporter of The Times. But did The Times (the London Times) have a Crime Reporter? Possibly not. In general terms, however, the idea would have been a good one. It was now close on midnight. But, had there been a journalist on hand, it might just have been possible to make one of the later editions of a national daily before it went to bed. In her mind’s eye Miss Pringle was seeing, if vaguely, a banner headline, when she was called to present reality by the voice – still the respectful voice, addressed as to his betters – of Detective-Inspector Graves. It was a voice, however, that held a not altogether agreeable property. Almost, indeed, it appeared to speak of worms and epitaphs.

  ‘Thank you very much, madam. What you have to tell me is very interesting. Striking, in a manner of speaking. Decidedly striking. And we seem to have a little time in hand. If, that’s to say, your calculations are correct, and this gentleman we’ve been hearing about wholly reliable.’ Graves consulted his watch. ‘Just under fifteen minutes. And as Sir Ambrose is with us in this room, his bacon – if I may express it in that vulgar way, madam – appears safe enough.’

  ‘And how thankful I am!’ Miss Pringle said. She remembered to clasp her hands in a kind of secular ecstasy. ‘But we must remember that the incendiary device–’

  ‘Quite so, madam. But let me remind you that, as a result of your very public-spirited telephone message, I have a number of officers posted round the house. And even one up beside the stable clock itself. You are quite sure that the detonator is sited there?’