“Everard Raven and Miss Clarissa – who, I believe, is only a distant relation – are among the most regular of my congregation, and with the former I frequently discuss matters of common interest. Of late he has been giving increasing thought to religious matters, I am glad to say.” Mr Smith chuckled. “Or I should be glad to say, were I not cognisant of the fact that what he likes to call the doggy letter is hard upon him. He has also discussed Romanticism and Representative Government with me, just as he has discussed Railways with Gregory Grope. I feel that Gregory and I have some title to be considered among the many scholars and men of science whom the New Millennium declares itself as drawing upon.”
“But it appears that – apart from picking other people’s brains – Everard does all the work himself. He must be a most industrious person.”
“Eminently. Have you seen what he calls his Scriptorium? It is in most marked contrast with the rest of the house, and suggests notable efficiency. And yet I don’t know whether Everard Raven really possesses that. Is he, as Byron so admirably describes Gibbon, ‘laborious, slow, and hiving wisdom with each studious year’? I really couldn’t say. Only I see from Mr Mutlow’s kindling eye that Childe Harold is a favourite with the Yatter constabulary.”
Mutlow scowled at this innocent badinage. “Byron?” he said. “Didn’t he get himself into trouble over–”
Mr Smith held up a hand in which a last fragment of plum cake reposed. “Ah, my dear inspector, the professional angle again! Let us pass on to the other Ravens. The melancholy Luke is very fond of our church and churchyard – but not at service time, I am sorry to say. He is a friend of the Longers – the Marquis, as you may know, is of somewhat saturnine temper himself – and visits frequently at Linger Court. As a consequence, he has been given a key to the Linger vault, and sits there amid the bones of long-dead Longers, composing poems. Poetry, of course, is in the Raven family. You will have heard of Herbert Raven, well known for his revival of the madrigal and the aubade.”
“A gifted family running to eccentricity,” pronounced Mutlow heavily. “Just the place to look for trouble, if you ask me.”
“But I notice,” said Mr Smith benignly, “that your London colleague does not ask you. Possibly he is conscious of your own marked disinclination to ask him? You must forgive my interest in the organisation of the police force. It is something quite new to me.”
“And Robert Raven?” asked Appleby. He was obscurely aware that Mr Smith, still amiably discoursing, had concentrated his mind on some pressing business of his own. “What sort of a man is Robert?”
“A delicate water-colourist, Mr Appleby, and one with a considerable reputation in embroidery.”
“Embroidery?”
“Ah, I perceive that you have not penetrated much below the ferocious outer integument of Robert – though you must have marked too, I think, his gentle manners. I sometimes associate him in my mind with the Tchambuli.”
Mutlow tapped his notebook with a pencil. “Come, come, sir,” he said. “There are no gentry of that name in this part of the country, I very well know.”
“My dear inspector, the Tchambuli live in New Guinea, south of the mountain-dwelling Arapesh and west of the cannibal Mundugumor. A most interesting culture. The men, although of virile appearance and demeanour, spend their time indoors in the pursuits of weaving and painting, while the women–”
“Who’s been eating my cake?” In the shadowy kitchen a new voice broke in upon Mr Smith’s ethnological discourse. The three men looked round, startled. And then, with even more emphasis, the voice spoke again. “Who done it?” demanded the recumbent Mrs Ulstrup. “Who’s been and pinched my cake?”
“It’s gone, all right,” said Mutlow.
“You’re sure she didn’t eat it herself?” Appleby asked.
“Quite sure. She left a bit on that plate there, and I shoved it to the corner of the table nearest the door.”
“Then you must have shoved it too far, so that it fell on the floor.” Appleby peered under the table. “Better bring the lamp over and look for it. Mrs Ulstrup seems quite upset.”
Mutlow brought the lamp and grovelled. “Nothing here,” he said. “Nothing at all. Must have been mice.”
“Nonsense – mice can’t make away with a sizeable chunk of plum cake. Look again.”
“I tell you, it isn’t here.” Mutlow rose, red-faced and wrathful. “Must have been the cat.”
“Hodge? He hasn’t stirred.”
“Well, then, Mr Appleby, a rat. At any rate it’s gone. Good heavens! Where’s Mr Smith?”
They stared round the fire-lit kitchen. Mrs Ulstrup, her weak indignation quickly expended after the manner of her kind, had returned to ruminative ease, and might never have heard either of plum cake or of the divine gift of articulate speech. The door was open. Mr Smith had disappeared.
“Well, I’m blessed!” said Mutlow. “I thought he was a queer customer – coming like that to give the old girl tea! – but who would have thought he’d behave so?”
Appleby frowned. “What do you mean – behave so?”
“Bolt like that, of course. Make off with a piece of cake.”
“My dear man, it was his own cake.” The fatuity of this conversation was reducing Appleby to bewilderment. “And why shouldn’t he give the old girl tea? It’s what’s called the visitation of the sick.”
“I’d call it the visitation by the cracked. Rushing off with a hunk of his own cake! It makes it pottier still.” Mutlow had opened one of his notebooks as if urgently compelled to commit this conviction to writing. Then he shut it again in despair. “It’s just awful, all this,” he said. “No sense in it at all. Just one perfectly idiotic thing after another. A clutter of ghastly, disconnected lunacies. It’s impossible even to keep them all in one’s head. The old man they buried in the snow, for instance. I’ve almost forgotten about him.”
Appleby laughed. “Pins and needles,” he said. “So many red herrings that the haystack has fairly got pins and needles. But here is Mr Smith back again.”
It was true that the large form of Mrs Ulstrup’s pastor was framed in the doorway; he was panting heavily and clasped a stout stick which he must have snatched up from beside his clerical hat in the porch. “Missed her,” he said; “and not for the first time. Got away with a capital selection of exuviae too.”
Appleby, who had thrown himself down rather wearily in a chair by the fire, sat up again abruptly. “Section of what?” he asked.
Mr Smith laid his stick on the table. “We are in the presence of sorcery.”
This time it was Mutlow who reacted violently. “Sorcery? Of all the damned nonsense–”
“Do not swear, sir!” Mr Smith, suddenly drawn up to his full six feet four, was revealed as a formidable – and angry – specimen of the muscular Christian. Then he turned to Appleby. “Sorcery,” he repeated. “It is not, of course, so common as witchcraft proper. But it does turn up from time to time.”
“I saw her hand come in at the door,” said Mr Smith, “and then she snatched the cake. Of course she must have been watching and so knew who had been eating it. Something left by Mr Mutlow would be useless for her purpose – unless her purpose is to sorcerise Mr Mutlow, that is to say.”
“Sorcerise me!” Mutlow peered rather nervously about him in the shadows of Mrs Ulstrup’s kitchen. “I never heard of such a thing.”
“Possibly not. But I fear, my dear inspector, that your nescience is scarcely very strong evidence against the objective existence of a phenomenon. I doubt, for example, whether you have ever heard of the planet Pluto. But the planet Pluto exists.”
“I should have thought” – Appleby was frowning into the fire – “that Mrs Ulstup was sufficiently sorcerised already. It is your opinion that we have just been visited by some woman concerned to gain an occult power over her?�
��
“There is no other explanation. As I pursued her I saw that she had not only the fragment of cake (which would be specially valuable as having come direct from Mrs Ulstrup’s lips) but a large bone evidently purloined from the larder. These exuviae – a scientific term which I see is familiar to you – would of course, according to the theory of sorcery, be transmitted to the sorcerer, who would then have Mrs Ulstrup within the malign power of his, or her, art. Had I caught the woman I fancy that I should have extorted a confession from her. But, most unfortunately, she eluded me in the dusk.”
Appleby shifted the lamp on the table and looked hard at Mr Smith. “You speak of all this, sir, in a somewhat equivocal way. Do I understand you to mean that what you call the theory of sorcery vindicates itself in practice? In short, do you believe in sorcery?”
Mr Smith smiled – a whimsical smile such as he had not before offered. But his words were carefully chosen. “I do not know that I can tell you offhand whether we are required to believe, or required to disbelieve, in sorcery. The subject is dark and intricate.”
“But I’m not seeking theological information.” Appleby shook his head impatiently. “I’m asking whether you yourself believe in such things.”
“My dear Mr Appleby – does the inspector here believe in Pluto? We don’t know, and it would be pointless to enquire.” And Mr Smith fell to packing up the tea things. “By the way, Mr Appleby, are you fond of beagling?”
“Beagling? I’ve been out with beagles, from time to time.”
“Ah. It occurred to me to wonder if you were familiar with the habits of hares.”
Inspector Mutlow’s car chugged competently through the dusk. “I agree with you,” said Appleby. “I agree with you entirely. Sorcery is the last straw. For what may we predict as a consequence of its intervention? Far greater complexity and confusion; obscurities such as our case had not shown hitherto.”
Mutlow groaned. And what would you be thinking of that old parson, Mr Appleby? A bit touched, if you ask – if I’m not mistaken.”
“I should describe him as intelligent, learned and impulsive. And possibly as being wise as well. Consider his attitude to Mrs Ulstrup. The poor woman has taken refuge from some nervous conflict in the notion that she is a cow. On that basis she is getting on very nicely. Now, I suspect that theology disapproves of people imagining themselves cows–”
“There was Nebuchadnezzar,” interrupted Mutlow unexpectedly. “Yes – and I’ve no doubt that he was badgered and told that it had all happened because of his sins. But Mr Smith in this instance keeps his theology in his pocket, and acts as if dropping in on an old cow and taking tea with her were an everyday affair. He spoke very cautiously of sorcery. Nevertheless, I think we may add unorthodoxy to his attributes.” Appleby paused. “Intelligent, learned, impulsive, wise and unorthodox. What do you make of that?”
“It sounds like one of those old-fashioned tombstones. By the way, what was that he said about Mr Luke Raven and a tombstone? I didn’t follow that at all.”
“Somebody sent Luke Raven a tombstone, complete with the date of his death in the then near future. It didn’t come off.”
“It would be chiselled on.”
“What?”
“If it didn’t come off.”
Appleby groaned in his turn. “Our brains are turning to train-oil and will be useful only to Gregory Grope. I mean that Luke Raven didn’t die.”
“Of course he didn’t die. He’s alive.” Mutlow took one of his swerves towards the ditch. “I always think one gets sleepy driving through the evening air.”
“Then you had better recite poetry in order to keep awake. It’s what the airmen do.”
“I don’t know any poetry.” Mutlow made this statement simply. “I never liked it much.”
“What do you read?” Appleby was somewhat inclined to give rein to the field-naturalist’s instincts when adventuring among his rural colleagues. “For instance, did you ever read any of Ranulph Raven?”
“Yes. Mother had some books of his, and I remember reading a story or two sometimes on Sundays when it was wet.”
“Of course. And did you ever read Paxton’s Destined Hour?”
“No.”
“Or The Coach of Cacus?”
“No.”
“Or one about a fearful maid who came upon a gentleman buried up to the neck in a spinney?”
“No.” Mutlow’s voice was wholly unresponsive. “But I remember reading one called The Medusa Head.”
“Called what?” Appleby’s question was almost a shout.
“The Medusa Head. I don’t know why. It was about a family portrait that seemed to have the power of paralysing any living creature that looked at it. First it was the owner’s canaries, which had been hung in a window in the picture gallery. One morning they were found stiff and dead, staring at this portrait. Then it was his dog. It was found staring at the portrait too, cold and as stiff as a statue. Then the owner’s wife was found there, staring at the thing in the same way – and as you might say turned to stone. After that–”
“I see. And would you say that it was interesting?”
“Interesting?” Mutlow’s voice was puzzled. “How could it be interesting – just a lot of rubbish in a book?”
Appleby sighed. They drove in silence through the gathering dusk.
“But about that sorcery, you know,” said Mutlow; “I think there may be something in that. And it’s serious when that sort of thing starts up in a countryside. Leads to trouble.”
“Ah.”
“Probably nothing to do with this Tiffin Place affair. But I would like to look into it, all the same.”
“I judge that you will be invited to pursue it.”
“What’s that?” Mutlow was suspicious once more.
“Nothing at all.”
Again they drove in silence. “Hoobin’s,” said Mutlow briefly.
And Hoobin opened the door. It had not occurred to Appleby that there might be a Hoobin; he had thought of the household in terms simply of Hannah Hoobin and the vanished Hannah Hoobin’s boy. But not only was there a Mr Hoobin; at the moment there was a visitor as well – and an irate visitor at that. The Hoobin home was small – and even in the darkness discernible as squalid – and it echoed to angry voices. Mutlow frowned as he listened, convinced that altercation among the labouring classes calls for immediate police intervention. “Now then, now then,” he said. “What’s all this?”
“It be thee, be’t?” Hoobin, who was an elderly man contorted like a thorn tree, held up a candle and viewed Mutlow with sullen distrust. “Hasn’t found t’half-wit?”
“No, we haven’t.”
Hoobin’s brow cleared slightly. “Two on you, be there? Come in and turn ’un out.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Summat for you to do for your money besides feedin’ your fat bellies,” he added more expansively. “Come in and turn t’pig man out.”
“What big man? What are you talking about?”
“T’pig man. Scurl. Hark at ’un.”
From within the cottage voices were growing louder – a high-pitched man’s voice and a higher-pitched woman’s. “Look at it again,” said the man’s voice. “Look at it as long as you like. It’s the law, I tell you, and it’ll take more than your ugly mug to change it.”
“Get out on here,” said the woman. “Get out on here afore I take the broom to you.”
“Broom?” The man’s voice was elaborately scornful. “Your dirty hovel hasn’t seen a broom this twelvemonth.” There was the sound of somebody displeasingly spitting on the floor. “Why don’t you keep the brute in here and let him feel homelike?”
“Get out on it, I say.” The woman’s voice rose to a crazy scream. “Come back come Easter and I’ll let you have the chitterlings to choke on.” She
paused. “But they’ll have taken you up by then, Brettingham Scurl. They’ll have taken you up for the Abbot’s Yatter alms-box.”
Hoobin had turned round, and now Appleby and Mutlow followed him into an untidy kitchen which compared most unfavourably with Mrs Ulstrup’s. “Aye,” said Hoobin. “And for Dr Whitehead’s chickens.”
“And for what happened to little Sarah Pounce,” said Mrs Hoobin.
“And for what George Potticray told his mother.”
“For what you did in the Shrubsoles’ byre.”
“For the way they found–”
Brettingham Scurl, who was a diminutive creature in a suit of cheap townee clothes, interrupted this increasingly mysterious invective with a yell of rage. “Give him up!” he screamed. “I’ve got the law on you and you know it. Give it up or pay the money now. I’ll have you before the Sessions. I’ll have you gaoled. You never had the money. It’s fraud. It’s conspiracy between the two of you.” He brandished a document in air and advanced threateningly upon Mrs Hoobin. “You!” he howled. “You and your fire-bug bastard! You rakes, you jakes, you lousy callet–”
Mr Hoobin took a step forward and seized Brettingham Scurl by the ear. “Out on thee!” he roared.
With surprising power, Brettingham Scurl twisted himself free and hit Mr Hoobin hard on the jaw. Then he snatched up a lantern which was burning smokily on the table and made for a farther door. “I’ll out with it,” he cried. “And you’ll be in for assault if you try to stop me. For I’ve the law on you. Assault and battery is what it’ll be, you slut, you trollop, you great cuckoldy booby of a Caleb Hoobin.” And Brettingham Scurl disappeared in darkness. Whereupon both the Hoobins pursued him, roaring and screaming the while with inexpressible rage and dismay.
The emotions of Inspector Mutlow were scarcely less extreme. That such a scene should transact itself within the very ambit of the law outraged him profoundly. Bellowing angrily, and rather – Appleby thought – like the elephant Babar when disposed to smash everything to bits, Mutlow pursued the ill-conducted peasantry into a muddy and malodorous yard. It scarcely seemed a trail likely to lead to the heart of the Ranulph Raven Mystery; nevertheless, Appleby followed in time to see his colleague, by some titanic exertion of policemanship, momentarily dominating the situation. “Explain yourselves,” Mutlow was saying; “explain yourselves, or it’s the lock-up for the lot of you.”
Appleby's End Page 15