Appleby File

by Michael Innes

  ‘You mean–’

  ‘Yes – he was planning to plant the theft very ingeniously on his brother. Not at all pretty, but there it was. And the plan broke down only because of that hunting accident, which was bound to give the unfortunate Charles an absolute alibi. Only Lord Roydon – as we heard – had learnt nothing about that, since the brothers very seldom communicated with each other.’

  ‘But if Lord Roydon shaved his beard–’

  ‘He simply went off in his yacht and waited for it to grow. And then he turned up at the Abbey again – a few minutes after we did.’ Appleby paused, and when he spoke again there was a note of professional admiration in his voice. ‘Really quite a remarkable criminal formula. Unique, I imagine. X disguised as Y disguised as X. Think it out like that.’

  Appleby glanced at his watch, accelerated, and laughed softly.

  ‘One has to call it,’ he said, ‘a notably bare-faced fraud.’

  The Exploding Battleship

  Sitting in front of Florian’s café in Venice, Lady Appleby counted her resources. She began with her remaining traveller’s cheques, went on to Italian banknotes, and ended up with small change. Her husband divided his attention between watching this operation tolerantly – Judith was always extremely businesslike on holidays – and surveying the tourists who thronged the Piazza San Marco.

  It was the height of the season. There were Germans fathoms deep in guidebooks, Americans obsessively intent on peering into cameras, and English with their brows furrowed in various degrees of that financial anxiety which Judith herself was evincing. There were also some Italians. These, Appleby thought, appeared agreeably carefree.

  ‘And six days to go,’ Judith said. She had arrived at her grand total. ‘Of course, we have to remember the children’s presents. I’ve got a list.’ She produced a notebook. ‘A mechanical mouse that squeaks and runs; a hunting-crop that turns into a stiletto; an exploding battleship; an atomic submarine; a bone or some other bit of an old saint or martyr; and three caskets in gold, silver, and lead.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Appleby said, ‘that Bobby didn’t add an heiress: Portia as well as her caskets. “In Belmont is a lady richly left.” It sounds most attractive. But don’t you think they all sound rather unlikely objects to pick up in Venice? Even the lethal hunting-crop.’

  ‘Pardon me.’ A polite American voice sounded in the Appleby’s ears. ‘But I guess I’d like to know what is meant by an exploding battleship.’

  The American was at the next table. He was elderly and had the air of feeling lonesome. He was also – Appleby decided with his policeman’s habit of rapid appraisal – wealthy, unsophisticated, and highly intelligent.

  ‘An exploding battleship?’ Appleby turned his chair round and addressed the stranger companionably. ‘It’s built up, I think, in a number of interlocking sections, and there’s some sort of simple spring-mechanism inside. You shoot at it with a little gun. And when you hit the vital spot, the spring is released, and the whole thing flies into bits.’

  ‘Sure.’ The American produced this monosyllable thoughtfully and with much deliberation. Then he turned to Judith. ‘Marm,’ he said courteously, ‘I can direct you to that mechanical mouse. The small toy-store at this end of the Merceria dell’ Orologio.’ He paused, and then addressed Appleby. ‘Would you be in the way, sir, of buying objects of antique art in this remarkable town?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Appleby was amused by this question. ‘I used to pick up very modest things here once upon a time. But I don’t nowadays.’

  The stranger nodded wisely.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I needn’t communicate to you a certain darned nasty suspicion building up in my mind right now.’

  And with this cryptic remark the elderly American stood up, made Judith Appleby a careful bow, and walked away.

  Four days later Appleby received an unexpected request to call on the Chief of Police. He made his way in some perplexity to the Fondamenta San Lorenzo, and was received with great politeness.

  ‘My dear Sir John,’ the functionary said, ‘it was decided by one of my officers that you must be questioned. But when I discovered in you a distinguished colleague, I ventured to give myself the pleasure of inviting you to call. You were well acquainted with Mr Conklin?’

  ‘Conklin?’ Appleby was perplexed.

  ‘An American visitor with whom one of our vigili happened to observe you in conversation in the Piazza on Monday.’ The Chief of Police spread out his hands expressively. ‘A most elusive and unobtrusive man. He proved to be unaccompanied by a wife or other companion. We can discover almost nothing about him, so far. Except, indeed, that the gentleman was a millionaire.’

  ‘Was?’ Appleby said.

  ‘Alas, yes. His body has been recovered from the lagoon. And almost certainly there has been foul play. A perplexing affair. We do not like unresolved mysteries in Venice.’

  ‘Nor do we care for them in London, my dear sir. But what you tell me is most surprising. Mr Conklin seemed a most inoffensive man, quite unlikely to get into trouble.’ Appleby reflected for a moment. ‘You know nothing about him?’

  ‘It appears that he was something of an art-collector. Not, perhaps, among the more highly-informed in the field. But – as I have said – a millionaire.’

  ‘In other words, a ready-made dupe?’

  ‘It is sad, Sir John.’ The Chief of Police again made his expressive gesture. ‘But they have much wealth, these people. And they come among us, who have little wealth, but much colourable junk lying ready to our hand. I command very poor English, I fear. But at least I make myself comprehensible?’

  ‘Certainly you do. And you feel, I think, that drowning the dupes is going rather too far?’

  ‘It is my sentiment in the matter. Decidedly.’

  Again Appleby reflected.

  ‘My encounter with this unfortunate man,’ he said, ‘was of the slightest, as I shall explain. But I believe I can possibly help you, all the same.’

  ‘My dear Sir John, I am enchanted.’

  ‘Only I am afraid it may cost money. Or at least look as if it were costing money.’

  ‘Non importa,’ the Chief of Police said.

  Appleby began by buying – or appearing to buy – a genuine Tintoretto. He followed this up with a clamantly spurious Carpaccio, and then with a Guardi so authentically lovely that he could hardly bear to reflect on how fictitious his purchase really was. Judith sometimes watched him covertly from over the way. It intrigued her to think that she might really have married an American precisely like this.

  It was on the third day that Appleby made the acquaintance of the Conte Alfonso Forobosco. This gentleman’s conversation, casually offered over a cappuccino, showed him to be familiarly acquainted not only with his fellow members of the Italian aristocracy but also with the President of the Republic, the exiled Royal Family, and most of the more important dignitaries in the Vatican. All of which didn’t prevent Conte Alfonso from being hard up. This fact, emerging in due season and with delightful candour, precluded the further revelation that he was even constrained, from time to time, to part with a few of the innumerable artistic treasures which had descended to him from his ancestors.

  All this was extremely impressive. And so was the speed with which the Conte worked. Half an hour later, Appleby found himself in a gaunt and semi-derelict palazzo on the Grand Canal.

  ‘The goblets,’ Conte Alfonso said, ‘belonged to Machiavelli. The pistols were Mazzini’s. The writing-table was used by Manzoni.’

  Appleby made the sort of responses he judged appropriate in a wealthy American. The palazzo – or its piano nobile at least – had been well stocked with a variety of imposing objects. And presently the Conte came to the most imposing of the lot: a species of elaborately convoluted urn in Venetian glass. Appleby doubted whether anythi
ng more completely hideous had ever issued from the glass-factories on Murano.

  ‘The poison-vase of Lucrezia Borgia,’ the Conte said, pointing to it on a table. ‘Take it – but carefully – and hold it up to the light.’

  Appleby did as he was told. But even as he raised the precious object in his two hands there was an ominous crack. And then he was looking at its shattered fragments lying at his feet.

  Conte Alfonso gave an agonized cry. Then, with a gesture magnificently magnanimous, he stopped, picked up the pieces, strode to a window, and pitched them into the Grand Canal of Venice.

  ‘Non fa niente,’ he said. ‘No matter. An accident. And you are my guest.’

  Appleby went through a pantomime of extreme contrition and dismay. The least he could do, he intimated, was to pay up. The Conte protested. Appleby insisted. Reluctantly the Conte named a sum – a nominal sum, a bare million lire. And then Appleby led him to the window.

  ‘At least,’ he said, ‘I may get back the bits.’

  And this seemed true. Several police launches were diverting the vaporetti and other traffic on the canal. Just beneath the window a frogman was already at work. It would have been possible to reflect that there was an authentic Carpaccio depicting a very similar scene.

  ‘And now I think you have visitors,’ Appleby said, turning round. ‘Including your Chief of Police himself.’

  ‘It was this so-called Conte Alfonso’s regular racket?’ Judith asked afterwards.

  ‘Certainly it was.’ Appleby paused in the task of packing his suitcase. ‘The fellow had a steady supply of Lucrezia Borgia’s teapots, or whatever. Two seconds after you picked them up, the spring went off and shattered them. And then, of course, the problem was to get rid of the evidence. But there lay the advantage of having the scene of the operation on the Grand Canal. The Conte made detection impossible simply by putting on that aristocratic turn of gathering up the bits and chucking them into the water. Our friend Conklin, however, was a shrewd chap in his way, and he suspected he’d been had. When I explained about the exploding battleship, the full truth flashed on him.’

  ‘So he went back and taxed the Conte with the fraud?’

  ‘Just that. And the scoundrel – rather an engaging scoundrel if he hadn’t gone so decidedly too far – liquidated him at once. Quite in the antique Venetian manner, I suppose one may say. But, apart from that, there was certainly nothing genuinely antique about him.’

  A knock came at the bedroom door, and a hotel servant handed in a parcel. Appleby received it, regarded it doubtfully, and then opened it up. What lay inside was the little Guardi.

  ‘John!’ – Judith was very startled – ‘you haven’t really gone and bought the thing?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Appleby had opened a letter. ‘It’s a present – call it from the Doge and the Serenissimi.’

  ‘Meaning from the mayor and city council?’

  ‘That does make it sound a good deal more prosaic. But remember for how long Venice held the gorgeous East in fee. She seems capable of decidedly regal behaviour still.’

  The Body in the Glen

  ‘Dr Watson,’ Appleby said, ‘once discovered with some surprise that his friend Sherlock Holmes was uncommonly vague about the workings of the Solar System. Holmes explained that he hadn’t much interest in acquiring useless information – useless, that’s to say, from his professional point of view, which was that of a dedicated enemy of crime. But the truth is that some scrap of quite out-of-the-way knowledge may turn out uncommonly useful to a detective. For example, there was that Highland holiday of ours. Judith, you remember that? It was when we stumbled upon the mystery of Glen Mervie.’

  ‘The affair that began with my refusing the milk?’ Lady Appleby said cryptically. ‘It was most obtuse of me.’

  I scented a story in this.

  ‘I can’t believe,’ I murmured diplomatically, ‘that Judith would ever be obtuse. But just what happened?’

  ‘My friend Ian Grant,’ Appleby began, ‘is Laird of Mervie, and the place runs to some uncommonly good shooting in a small way – to say nothing of a trout stream that’s a perfect wonder. So I always enjoy a holiday there, and so does Judith. But this particular holiday turned out to be of the busman’s sort. When, I mean, they found Andrew Strachan’s body lying by the Drochet.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Drenched in gore?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Capital, Appleby. Your reminiscences, if I may say so, tend to be a little on the bloodless side. But here is a certain Andrew Strachan steeped in the stuff. Proceed.’

  ‘Actually, I’ll go back a bit – at least to the previous day. Grant and I had been shooting over a neighbour’s moor, and Judith came to join us in the afternoon. We drove back to Mervie together, and Grant stopped just outside the village to speak to one of his tenants, an old woman called Mrs Frazer. Mrs Frazer’s sole possession seemed to be a cow, and she was milking it when we all went and had a word with her. She wasn’t interested in me, but she looked at Judith rather searchingly. And then she offered her a drink of milk straight from the cow. Judith refused it. I think she felt that poor old Mrs Frazer needed whatever dairy produce she could raise, and oughtn’t to be giving it away.’

  ‘And that,’ I asked, ‘was what was obtuse? The old woman was offended that Judith declined her hospitality?’

  ‘It wasn’t quite that – as I realized when Grant stepped forward and insisted rather peremptorily that Judith should change her mind. He apologized later. It was a matter, it seemed, of the Evil Eye.’

  'The Evil Eye!’ I was startled.

  ‘Just that. Didn’t the poet Collins write an ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands?’ The Evil Eye is very much one of them. But, of course, you come on the idea all over Europe.’

  ‘The Italians,’ I said, ‘call it the Malocchio.’

  ‘Quite so. Well, Mrs Frazer had decided that Judith was perhaps the possessor of the Evil Eye. It’s widely believed to accompany great physical beauty.’ Appleby paused happily on this obvious invention. ‘Anyway, the point seemed to be this: Mrs Frazer’s cow would die unless the magic was defeated. There are various ways of defeating the Evil Eye, and the surest of them is obliging its possessor to accept a gift. Hence the milk.’

  ‘Superstition of that sort is still widely prevalent in those parts?’

  ‘Most certainly. Grant talked to us very interestingly on the subject that evening. He had a shepherd some way up Glen Mervie whose possession of the Evil Eye was one of the terrors of the region. And there’s great belief, too, in various forms of Second Sight – particularly in what’s known as Calling – and in family apparitions and so forth. Ian Grant himself would be regarded as no true Laird of Mervie if he admitted that he hadn’t in fact seen the spectre of a white horse on the night his father died on the battlefield.’

  ‘And Andrew Strachan,’ I asked, ‘whose body was found by the Drochet? I suppose the Drochet is a burn?’

  ‘Yes. It rises on Ben Cailie, and runs through the Glen of Mervie to join the Garry. As for Andrew Strachan, I took him to be one of Grant’s tenants. But actually he wasn’t. His father had been a crofter who bought his own farm. So Andrew Strachan was a landowner himself in a very small way – which was what enabled him to keep his younger brother Donald so harshly under his thumb. If Donald had been a tenant of Grant’s he’d have had a square deal. As it was, he worked for his brother Andrew, who was a very hard man. They lived in neighbouring cottages in a clachan a mile beyond the village, which is itself a pretty remote spot. There was only their mother – and she was over eighty – who heard a word of their quarrel.’

  ‘Ought you to tell me they’d had a quarrel? Isn’t it giving too much away?’

  ‘You’ll find out in a minute. In any case, they did have a tremendous quarrel – on that very afternoon, as
it happened, that Mrs Frazer gave Judith the milk.

  ‘Donald Strachan’s story of what followed was quite simple. The quarrel came to nothing, and later that evening Andrew set off up the glen for Dunwinnie. He was courting there. Or rather, if Donald was to be believed, he was after a woman there who was no better than she should be. It was the sad fact, Donald said, that his brother would often spend half the night in Dunwinnie, drinking a great deal with this ungodly wench, and then he’d come stealing home before daybreak. Such goings-on, you understand, have to be conducted much on the quiet in that part of the world, The kirk and the minister are still powers in the land.’

  ‘And I suppose Donald’s suggestion was that Andrew had simply met with an accident?’

  ‘Just that. And all the facts – or nearly all the facts – were such as to make it quite possible. There’s a point half-way down the glen where the path forks. One branch climbs imperceptibly, and eventually skirts the verge of some very high rocks overhanging the burn, it was at the foot of these that Andrew Strachan’s body was found. His skull was cracked open, and in a way that was a quite conceivable consequence of a perfectly possible fall.’

  ‘In all probability,’ Appleby went on, ‘there would have been no serious question about what had happened, if it hadn’t been for one very queer thing. The lad who found Andrew Strachan dead found Donald Strachan, too – alive and not a couple of hundred yards away. Donald had fractured a thigh, as a man might do who had a bad fall while running blindly among rocks. It seemed a queer coincidence that both brothers should meet with an accident on the same night. And what was Donald doing in the glen, anyway? He had an explanation to offer. It was an uncommonly odd one.’

  Appleby paused for a moment. He is rather a practised retailer of yarns of this sort.

  ‘I mentioned what, in the Highlands, they term Calling. It’s supposed that, in some supernatural way, a man may sometimes hear his own name being called out by a relation, or a friend, who at that moment is either dying or in great danger in what may be some quite distant spot. It might be Canada, for example, or Australia.’