Appleby File

by Michael Innes

  The congregation had got to its feet, and was listening to the singing of a psalm. It was well worth listening to, since the words were striking in themselves and the choir of St Boniface’s is justly celebrated. The congregation was, of course, in the expectation of playing a somewhat passive part. At such services it is understood that there is to be comparatively little scope for what, in another context, would be called audience participation.

  Appleby looked about him. It was impressive that the Lord Chief Justice had turned up, and that he was flanked by two Ministers of the Crown. There were also two or three socially prominent dowagers, who were perhaps recalling passages with Christopher when he had been young as well as gay: these glanced from time to time in benevolent amusement at the two old creatures in the front pew. Among the clergy, and wearing a very plain but very golden pectoral cross, was a bishop who would presently ascend the pulpit and deliver a brief address. In the nave two elderly clubmen (as they ought probably to be called) of subdued raffish appearance were putting their heads together in muttered colloquy. These must liaise with yet another aspect of the dead man’s dead life. They were presumably laying a wager with one another on just how many minutes the address would occupy.

  The service proceeded with unflawed decorum. An anthem was sung. The bishop, ceremoniously conducted to his elevated perch, began his address. He lost no time in launching upon a character-analysis of the late Queen’s Counsel; it would have been possible to imagine an hour-glass of the diminutive sort used for nicely timing the boiling of eggs as being perched on the pulpit’s edge beside him. The analysis, although touching lightly once or twice upon endearing foible, was highly favourable in the main. The dead man, disposed in his private life to charity, humility, gentleness, and the study of English madrigals, had in his professional character been dedicated, stern, courageous, and passionately devoted to upholding, clarifying, reforming his country’s laws.

  It was now that something slightly untoward occurred. A late arrival entered the church. An elderly man with a finely trimmed grey moustache, he was dressed with the exactest propriety for the occasion; that he was accustomed to such appearances was evident in the mere manner in which he contrived to carry a black silk hat, an umbrella, and a pair of grey kid gloves dexterously in his left hand while receiving from the hovering verger the printed service sheet. Not many of those present thought it becoming to turn their heads to see what was happening. But nobody, in fact, was cheated of a sight of the newcomer for long. He might have been expected (however accustomed to some position of prominence) to slip modestly into a pew near the west door. But this he did not do. He walked with quiet deliberation up the central aisle – very much (Appleby thought) as if he were an integral and expected part of the ritual which he was in fact indecorously troubling. He walked right up to the front pew, and sat down beside Christopher Brockbank’s female relatives.

  There could be only one explanation. Here was the missing Adrian, brother of the dead man – to whom, indeed, Appleby’s recollection sufficed to recognize that he bore a strong family likeness. Perhaps the plane from Singapore or the Bahamas or wherever had been delayed; perhaps fog had caused it to be diverted from Heathrow to a more distant airport; thus rendered unavoidably tardy in his appearance, this much-travelled Brockbank had decided that he must afford a general indication of his presence, and move to the support of the ladies of the family, even at the cost of rendering an effect of considerable disturbance. It must have been – Appleby thought sympathetically – a difficult decision to make.

  The address went on. The new arrival listened with close attention to what must now be the tail-end of it. And everybody else ought to have been doing the same thing.

  But this was not so. The Lord Chief Justice had hastily removed one pair of spectacles, donned another, and directed upon the fraternal appearance in the front pew the kind of gaze which for many years he had been accustomed to bring to bear upon occupants of the dock at the Central Criminal Court. One of the Cabinet Ministers was looking frightened – which is something no Cabinet Minister should ever do. Two of the dowagers were talking to one another in agitated and semi-audible whispers. A third appeared to be on the verge of hysterics. As for the bishop, he was so upset that he let the typescript of his carefully prepared allocution flutter to the floor below, with the result that he was promptly reduced to a peroration in terms of embarrassed improvisation.

  But before even this was concluded, the brother – whether veritable or supposititious – of the late Christopher Brockbank behaved very strangely. He stood up, moved into the aisle, and bowed. He bowed, not towards the altar (which would have been very proper in itself), but at the bishop in his pulpit (and this wasn’t proper at all). He then turned, and retreated as he had come. Only, whereas on arriving he had kept his eyes decently directed upon the floor, on departing he bowed to right and left as he walked – much like a monarch withdrawing from an audience-chamber through a double file of respectful courtiers. He paused only once, and that was beside the uniformed Appleby, upon whom he directed a keen but momentary glance, before politely handing him his service sheet. Then he resumed his stately progress down the aisle until he reached the church door and vanished.

  Somebody would possibly have followed a man so patently deranged, and therefore conceivably a danger to himself or others, had not the Rector of St Boniface’s thought it expedient to come to the rescue of the flustered bishop by promptly embarking upon the prayers which, together with a hymn, were to conclude the service. These prayers (which are full of tremendous things) it would have been indecent to disturb. But a hymn is only a hymn, and it was quite plain that numerous members of the congregation were giving utterance not to the somewhat jejune sentiments this one proposed to them, but to various expressions, delivered more or less sotto voce, of indignation and stupefaction. The Lord Chief Justice, moreover, was gesturing. He was gesturing at Appleby in a positively threatening way which Appleby perfectly understood. If Appleby bolted from this untoward and unseemly incident instead of reacting to it in some policemanlike fashion he would pretty well be treated as in contempt of court. This was why he found himself standing on the pavement outside St Boniface’s a couple of minutes later.

  ‘Get into this thing,’ the Lord Chief Justice said imperiously, and pointed at his Rolls Royce. ‘You, too,’ he said to the Home Secretary (who was one of the two Ministers who had been giving thanks for the life of the deceased Brockbank). ‘We can’t let such an outrage pass.’

  ‘An outrage?’ Appleby queried, as he resignedly sat down in the car. ‘Wasn’t it merely that Christopher Brockbank’s brother is mildly dotty – nothing more?’

  ‘Adrian merely dotty! Damn it, Appleby, didn’t you realize what he was doing? He was impersonating Christopher – nothing less. That moustache, those clothes, his entire bearing: they weren’t remotely Adrian. They were Christopher tout court. Didn’t you remark the reaction of those who knew Christopher well? Both those Brockbank brothers were given to brutal and tasteless practical jokes, but this has been the most brutal and tasteless of the lot.’

  ‘They may well have been. In fact, I seem to remember hearing something of the sort about them. But if Adrian has judged it funny to get himself up like Christopher in order to attend Christopher’s memorial service that seems to me entirely his own affair. I shall be surprised, Pomfret, if you can tell me he has broken the law.’ Appleby smiled at the eminent judge. ‘Although, of course, it wouldn’t at all do for me not to believe what you say.’

  ‘I don’t believe it was Adrian at all. It was Christopher’s ghost.’ The Home Secretary endeavoured to offer this in a whimsical manner. it was he who had been looking patently frightened ten minutes before, and he was endeavouring to carry this off lightly now. ‘Turn up as a ghost for something like one’s own funeral is a joke good enough to gratify any purgatorial spirit, I’d suppose. What we’ve witnessed is the kind of t
hing those psychic chaps call a veridical phantasm of the dead.’

  ‘I haven’t set eyes on Christopher Brockbank for thirty years,’ Appleby said, ‘and his wandering brother Adrian I’ve never seen at all. This well-groomed person bowing himself down the aisle in that crazy fashion was very like Christopher?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Thoroughly scandalous,’ Lord Pomfret said. ‘Not to be tolerated. Appleby, you must look into it.’

  ‘My dear Chief Justice, I have no standing in such matters. This uniform is merely ornamental. I’m a retired man, as you know.’

  ‘Come, come.’ The Home Secretary laid a hand on Appleby’s arm in a manner designed as wholly humorous. ‘Do as you’re told, my boy.’

  ‘Do you know – perhaps I will? The ghost, or whatever, did a little distinguish me, after all. He stopped and handed me this.’ Appleby was still holding a superfluous service sheet. ‘It was almost as if he was passing me the ball.’

  Much in the way of hard fact about Christopher Brockbank turned out not easy to come by. He proved to have been surprisingly wealthy. As the elder of the two brothers he had inherited a substantial fortune, and to this he had added a second fortune earned at the Bar. Uninterested in becoming a judge, he had retired comparatively early, and for the greater part of the year lived in something like seclusion in the south of France. It was understood by his acquaintance that this was in the interest of uninterrupted labour on a work of jurisprudence directed to some system of legal reform. The accident in which he had lost his life had been a large-scale air disaster in the Alpes-Maritimes. He had died intestate, and his affairs were going to take a good deal of clearing up.

  It was on the strength of no more than this amount of common knowledge, together with only a modicum of private inquiry, that Appleby eventually called upon a bank manager in the City.

  ‘I understand from an official source,’ he began blandly, ‘that the late Mr Brockbank kept his private account in this country at your branch.’

  ‘That is certainly true.’ The bank manager nodded amiably. He had very clear views, Appleby conjectured, on what information was confidential and what was not. ‘He used to spare a few minutes to chat with me upon the occasion of his quite infrequent visits. A delightful man.’

  ‘No doubt. It has occurred to me that, in addition to keeping both a current and a deposit account with you, he may have been in the habit of lodging documents and so forth for safe keeping.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I know that you maintain some sort of strongroom for such purposes, and suppose that your customers can hire strongboxes of one convenient size or another?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Sir John. Should you yourself ever have occasion–’

  ‘Thank you. Brockbank did this?’

  ‘Sir John, may I say that, when inquiries of this sort are judged expedient for one reason or another, a request – and it can scarcely be more than a request – is commonly preferred by one of the Law Officers of the Crown?’ The manager paused, and found that this produced no more than a composed nod. ‘But no doubt there is little point in being sticky in the matter. Let me consult my appropriate file.’ He unlocked a drawer, and rummaged. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘it would appear that Brockbank had such a box.’

  ‘His executors haven’t yet got round to inquiring about it?’

  ‘Seemingly not.’

  ‘I’d like you to open it and let me examine the contents.’

  ‘My dear Sir John!’ The manager was genuinely scandalized. ‘You can scarcely believe–’

  ‘But only in the most superficial way. I have an officer waiting in your outer office who would simply turn over these documents unopened, and apply a very simple test to the envelopes or whatever the outer coverings may prove to be. He will not take, and I shall not take, the slightest interest in what is said.’

  For a moment the manager’s hand hovered over his telephone. An appeal to higher authority – perhaps to the awful authority of the General Manager himself – was plainly in his mind. Then he took a deep breath.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I suppose an adequate discretion will be observed?’

  ‘Oh, most decidedly,’ Appleby said.

  ‘So that, for a start, is that,’ Appleby murmured to the Lord Chief Justice an hour later.

  ‘But surely, my dear Appleby, he would scarcely recognize you at a glance? The years have been passing over us, after all.’

  ‘That is all too true. But the point isn’t material. There I was, dressed up for that formal occasion in the uniform of a high-ranking officer of the Metropolitan Police. He felt he could trust me to tumble to the thing.’

  ‘And you are quite sure? Absolutely sure? The fingerprints on that service sheet were identical–’

  ‘Beyond a shadow of doubt. Christopher Brockbank always deposited or withdrew documents from that strongbox in the presence of an official of the bank who was in a position to identify him beyond question. The man who attended Christopher Brockbank’s memorial service was Christopher Brockbank himself.’

  ‘And he wanted the fact to be known?’

  ‘He wanted the fact to be known.’

  ‘It makes no sense.’

  ‘What it makes is very good nonsense. And there is one kind of nonsense that Brockbank is on record as having a fondness for: the kind of nonsense one calls a practical joke. And I expect he had money on it.’

  ‘Money!’ Lord Pomfret was outraged.

  ‘Say a wager with one of his own kidney.’

  ‘We have been most notoriously abused.’ Something formidable had come into Pomfret’s voice. One could almost imagine that high above his head in the chill London air the scales were trembling in the hand of the blindfolded figure of Justice which crowns the Central Criminal Court.

  ‘I wouldn’t deny it for a moment. But I come back to a point I’ve more or less made before. You can’t send a man down, Chief Justice, for attending his own memorial service. It just isn’t a crime.’

  ‘But there must be something very like a crime in the hinterland of this impertinent buffoonery.’ Lord Pomfret had flushed darkly. ‘Steps have been taken to certify as dead a man who isn’t dead at all.’

  ‘In a foreign country, and in the context of some hideous and, no doubt, vastly confused air crash. Possibly without any actual knowledge of the thing on Brockbank’s own part. Possibly as a consequence of innocent error – error on top of which he has merely piled an audacious joke. And a singularly tasteless joke, perhaps. But not one with gaol at the end of it.’

  ‘We can get him. We can get him for something.’

  ‘I don’t know what to make of that from a legal point of view.’ The retired Commissioner of Police made no bones about glancing at the Lord Chief Justice of England in frank amusement. ‘And there will be a good deal of laughter in court, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘You’re damn well right.’ Not altogether unexpectedly, Lord Pomfret was suddenly laughing himself. ‘But what the devil is he going to do now? Just how is he proposing to come alive again?’

  ‘With great respect, m’lud, I suggest your lordship is in some confusion.’ Appleby, watching his august interlocutor dive for a whisky decanter and a syphon, was laughing too. ‘Christopher Brockbank is alive. He’s in a position, so to speak, in which no further action is necessary.’

  ‘Nor from us either? We leave him to it?’

  ‘Just that I wouldn’t say.’ Appleby was grave again. ‘I confess to being a little uneasy still about the whole affair.’

  ‘The deuce you do!’ Now on his feet, the Lord Chief Justice held the decanter poised in air. ‘So what? Say when.’

  ‘Only a finger,’ Appleby said. ‘And I’ll continue to look into the thing.’

  ‘With discretion, my dear fellow.’ Pomfret was suddenly almost like th
e bank manager.

  ‘Oh, most decidedly,’ Appleby said.

  Retired Police Commissioners don’t go fossicking in France, and through the courtesy of his successor Appleby received reports in due season. Hard upon the air crash, it transpired, an elderly and distressed English gentleman had appeared upon the scene of the disaster in a chauffeur-driven car. Presenting himself to the chef de gendarmerie who was in control of the rescue operations, he had explained that he was Adrian Brockbank, and that he had motored straight from Nice upon hearing of the accident, since he had only too much reason to suppose that his elder brother, Mr Christopher Brockbank QC, had been on board the ill-fated plane. Could he be given any information about this, either way? It was explained to Mr Adrian Brockbank that much confusion inevitably prevailed; that, as often happened on such sad occasions, there was no certainty that an entirely reliable list of passengers’ names existed; and that certain necessarily painful and distressing attempts at identification were even then going on. Would Mr Adrian Brockbank care…?