A Change of Heir

by Michael Innes

  What that explanation could be, Gadberry unfortunately didn’t tumble to.

  PART THREE

  THE PASSING OF NICHOLAS COMBERFORD

  17

  Gadberry’s sole companion at the breakfast-table was Miss Bostock. Fortunately it was the custom at the Abbey that Boulter’s principal assistant should be in attendance throughout this meal, and Gadberry was relying upon this to protect him from anything in the nature of renewed full-scale attack. As soon as breakfast was over he’d go out on another prowl, pay his proposed visit to Captain Fortescue, and get back just in time for the luncheon party at which, as Nicholas Comberford, he was going to blot his own copybook – cut his own throat, indeed – gloriously and for ever. Then he’d make his getaway. That Miss Bostock would subsequently denounce him as having been an impostor he continued to think highly doubtful. All the same, he’d do everything his ingenuity could suggest to leave a hopelessly broken trail behind him.

  When he entered the breakfast-room, Miss Bostock, who had the air of having been up and about for some time, was accepting a second cup of coffee from the parlourmaid.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Comberford,’ she said, and helped herself to sugar.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Bostock. It looks like more snow, wouldn’t you say? But at least the gale has dropped. Later on, I hope a little sunshine may break through. We must expect bleak conditions in the next month or so, all the same. The Yorkshire Dales–’

  ‘Quite so.’ Miss Bostock had the appearance of proposing to acquiesce amiably in this chatty manner. ‘The kidneys are excellent, and this morning I have no criticism of the bacon. You must be hungry after your long tramp.’

  ‘Oh, decidedly.’ Gadberry poured thick cream over porridge which wasn’t at all like Mrs Lapin’s. He gave, in fact, an extra tilt to the jug. He was aware, as he did so, that this was an act of bravado. His appetite wasn’t really all that good. He had a suspicion that his inside was proposing to behave as it had been accustomed to do long ago on those three dread mornings in the year when he was due to return to his private school. This terminal phase in the life of Nicholas Comberford was being as nasty as – he supposed – death agonies commonly are.

  ‘How did you find the dear vicar?’

  Thus challenged, Gadberry put down his spoon. Since he had taken so much cream, he even put it down with an awkward splash. Was it possible that this ghastly woman had been trailing him? He didn’t see how it could have been done – not across all that naked snow.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said easily. ‘I thought I’d just look in on old Grimble, in case last night should have been a bit too much for him. He must have had a chilly drive home. And the vicarage is none too warm and comfortable.’

  ‘No doubt you will be able to do something about that in future years. Evans, I think we shall need a little more toast.’

  Evans provided more toast. This, fortunately, didn’t involve taking her out of the room. She also stirred the kidneys gently in their sauté dish and dealt expertly with the filtre à café. Gadberry watched her gloomily. These high-class ministrations no longer held any charm for him. Were I from Dunsinane away and clear, he was telling himself, Profit again should hardly draw me here.

  ‘Certainly one’s heart bleeds for Mr Grimble’s visitor,’ Miss Bostock said. ‘One can only hope he has brought a hot-water bottle.’

  ‘How on earth can you know–’ Gadberry checked himself. Miss Bostock’s talk had taken an alarming turn. It looked as if she had spies all over the place. But he himself ought, of course, to remain unperturbed.

  ‘I am a person of some observation, Mr Comberford. You must by this time have remarked the fact. And I am particularly fond of bird watching.’

  ‘Bird watching?’ Rather absurdly, Gadberry’s mind took a dive in the direction of Grimble’s black cock. Perhaps the woman was intimating that she knew about this too.

  ‘The Abbey tower is an admirable station for that sort of thing. Of course the climb is a little hazardous. But I don’t mind that. As you know, Mr Comberford, I have fairly strong nerves.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Gadberry’s own nerves were allowing him only to poke rather dubiously at the kidneys which Evans had now placed before him. ‘You mean you go up there with binoculars?’

  ‘Quite frequently. And I see what is to be seen. There is a very clear view of the vicarage. Not, of course, that it holds any particular interest for me. Mr Grimble has a hen-run, indeed. But domestic poultry scarcely engage the attention. You will no doubt agree with me there.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Gadberry felt slightly dizzy. The woman did know about that black cock.

  ‘Vultures are another matter,’ Miss Bostock said.

  ‘ Vultures?’

  ‘Hawks, of course – yes. I saw several when up on the tower earlier this morning. Local birds of prey are one thing. And they will do well to stick together.’ Miss Bostock took a quick glance at Evans, who had moved over to the fireplace to replenish the grate. ‘You and I are birds of a feather, are we not?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Even as he uttered these words, Gadberry was conscious of their pitifully feeble character. Before he could improve on them, however, Evans was back within hearing again.

  ‘Exotic predators are another matter. Vultures, for example, Mr Comberford. Mr Grimble has his ornithological interests, I think you will agree. But what if he should be harbouring a vulture? You and I might have to tell him he was making a great mistake.’

  Gadberry almost repeated ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’. It would have been a remark at least having the merit of veracity. On the other hand, it would probably be a tactical mistake to admit ignorance at any point where he was not driven to it. So he said nothing at all.

  ‘I have to admit that I am ignorant,’ Miss Bostock said – so that Gadberry positively jumped. ‘I should like to help dear Mr Grimble to a better ordering of his affairs. I have a notion that he is a little helpless. You follow me? It would be well if we could rid him of – well, an incubus. Am I right?’

  Gadberry had to admit that his breakfast was a shambles. He pushed away his kidneys, half consumed, and groped for a cigarette. An incubus was primarily a visitant from a supernatural world. Perhaps this was what Miss Bostock meant. Perhaps she was merely advancing the benevolent thought that the Vicar of Bruton should be disengaged from his injudicious implication with the infernal powers. Or perhaps she was talking about something different. It was already her line that she and Gadberry were fellow conspirators, and that Gadberry would attempt to break away from that only at his peril. Conceivably she had now become aware of some new threat from without, and was proposing that the two of them must close their ranks against this too.

  ‘What is required in bird watching,’ Miss Bostock said, ‘is patience. But there are times when I feel that rapid results are essential. When this happens, I appeal to fellow students. I admit my ignorance at once. I don’t pretend to know what is in fact obscure to me. I say “Tell me what you know, and I will undertake to make sense of it. I will undertake to bring our joint study-project to a successful conclusion.”’

  ‘Most interesting,’ Gadberry said. He had scrambled to his feet. ‘But I must be getting along. I’ve promised to go across and have a word with Fortescue.’

  ‘I could wish it was fortified with a better breakfast. But perhaps you are saving up for our interesting luncheon.’

  ‘Well, I am rather looking forward to that.’ As he said this, Gadberry allowed himself an injudicious grin. Miss Bostock’s sharp eyes narrowed on it, and she too got to her feet.

  ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘that the Shilbottles won’t be held up by more snow. Do you know, I think you and I might consult the barometer?’

  Gadberry didn’t in the least want to consult the barometer. Nor, for that matter, did Miss Bostock. She was merely proposing a course that would take them through the cloisters and out of earshot of Evans. But Gadberry, despite his percep
tion of this, followed her out of the room. It was craven, after all, positively to cower away from the woman.

  ‘By the way, are you a professional actor?’ Miss Bostock asked this, casually but suddenly, as soon as they were by themselves. ‘It has just come to me that you probably are.’

  ‘I’m not telling you anything about myself. I’ve said that before.’

  ‘Very well. I was going to inquire if you’d ever played in Macbeth. Perhaps as Third Murderer. Anyway, fail not our feast.’

  ‘What do you mean – our feast?’ Gadberry very much disliked this riddling talk.

  ‘The luncheon party we were talking of. Go off and see Fortescue, by all means. You’re going to have the whole management of the place on your hands, after all. And you won’t be wanted for this morning’s earlier engagement.’

  ‘Earlier engagement?’

  ‘I sometimes think you’re going to be a disastrously stupid confederate. The visit of Mr Middleweek, of course. As you are the principal beneficiary, you can’t be called on to act as a witness. I don’t know whether I can. But I hope at least to be present. I want to see with my own eyes those dotted lines signed on. The situation is then transformed. We can proceed.’

  ‘Proceed?’

  ‘You certainly are a fool. But about the Shilbottles. You will be civil to both girls indifferently, as the old woman suggested. There isn’t any danger, you know.’ Miss Bostock paused to glance at Gadberry sardonically. ‘Long before they can get you in even up to your ankles, the whole thing will be over.’

  ‘It certainly will. I’m going to–’

  ‘You’re going to do as you are told. And what you are to be told is extremely simple. It’s in Macbeth again. Be bloody, bold, and resolute. Either that, or leave it to me.’

  Gadberry was struck dumb. He could think of nothing to say. Dimly through his head there passed the conjecture that Miss Bostock was as mad as nearly everybody else at Bruton. Perhaps she really saw herself in the character of the Thane of Cawdor’s fiend-like Queen. The raven himself is hoarse… Unsex me here… Make thick my blood…That sort of thing.

  But they had reached the barometer. Miss Bostock – or Lady Macbeth – tapped it briskly and unnoticingly, and walked away.

  18

  A car drew up at the gatehouse as Gadberry plunged once more into the snow. There could be no doubt about whom it brought to the Abbey. This was Mr Middleweek, Aunt Prudence’s solicitor, and in his briefcase were the documents which, in Aunt Prudence’s word, were to be executed. The very word itself was somehow sinister. Gadberry had a confused feeling that, once the documents were executed, it mightn’t be long before he was executed himself. At least he could no longer pretend that he hadn’t a tolerably clear view of what was in the mind of Miss Bostock. When Mrs Minton signed her new will she would at the same time be signing her own death-warrant.

  Gadberry of course knew that he wasn’t going to kill anybody. He just wouldn’t know how to begin. But – he remembered – when Macbeth felt like that, Lady Macbeth showed him just how, and then tidied up the job herself. The result had been to leave Macbeth very awkwardly out on a limb; he’d had to spend the rest of his days wading through blood and so forth in a highly disagreeable manner. It would be the same in his own case. Once Miss Bostock had done the deed (and he had no disposition to believe she wouldn’t be perfectly fit for it) he would be helplessly in her hands for keeps. If she was brought to justice he would be brought to justice too. No court would believe that they hadn’t been tightly bound together in the planning and carrying out of an ingenious and intricate crime.

  He walked on – in the opposite direction, this time, to that which had taken him to the village before breakfast. Captain Fortescue’s house lay about two miles away, just beyond the only sizable plantation the landscape boasted. Why he should be continuing to make his way there he just didn’t know. His appointment with Fortescue was now meaningless. What he did understand, oddly enough, was precisely what he ought to be doing at this moment. He ought to be retracing his steps to the Abbey. For only one rational course remained to him. It was to make his way instantly into the presence of Mrs Minton and confess to the whole thing. There was quite a chance that she wouldn’t prosecute, wouldn’t hand him over to the police. Family pride was her ruling passion. She might shrink from exposing that pride to the ridicule that would attend a public exhibition of the manner in which she had been duped. She might simply let him clear out, and then cook up some story to account for his so abruptly vanishing from the Bruton picture.

  But Gadberry found that he was walking on. The sunshine for which he had expressed some hopes to Miss Bostock seemed very far from breaking through. The obliterating snows lay everywhere, in some mysterious fashion both dazzling and lustreless, under a sky like a livid lid. He walked for half a mile, and then turned and looked at the Abbey. He had been climbing slightly, and he could now see the River Brut winding its way into the great complex of buildings and then out again. It looked narrower than usual, presumably because it was starting to freeze from its banks inward, and had the appearance of a line scrawled across a virgin sheet of paper by a thick pencil which might have been represented by the Abbey tower. The tower was now a mere stump or stub compared with its former self. It was said to have been the tallest in England, rivalling even the great spires in height. From this point his eye seemed on a level with its crumbled summit. He wondered whether Miss Bostock had returned to her observation-post there, and was at this moment taking advantage of his having turned round to study through her binoculars the expression of consternation which he could feel had settled on his face.

  Those proud towers – he found he was saying to himself – to swift destruction doomed. The words must be coming to him out of some dreary old poem. And they didn’t really apply. For the towers – and there were several, since a fifteenth-century abbot had added one to his lodging, and a nineteenth-century Minton had done the same to the gatehouse – the towers would continue where they were for several further centuries. It was he who was doomed to swift destruction, should he ever return among them. For that, he suddenly realised, was his appalling situation. He couldn’t go back. His nerve had deserted him. And here he was, a picturesquely fated creature, out in the snow.

  To swift destruction doomed. Because his temperament was, after all, theatrical, Gadberry repeated the words to himself with gloomy relish. And the persuasion accompanying them – that he simply could not set foot in Bruton Abbey again – ought to have passed in a matter of seconds or minutes. It ought to have represented no more than another quick flare-up of panic, which would depart leaving him harassed indeed but not helpless. Only this time it didn’t seem to be working that way. There had suddenly come upon him a settled conviction that he could not return to the ghastly mess that he had contrived for himself.

  He had about fifteen pounds in his pockets. He was dressed in clothes which, although new, expensive, and congruous with the rural solitudes through which he was at present moving, would look not quite right on Mrs Lapin’s doorstep. He had nowhere any other possessions in the world – except behind him in the Abbey, where he had probably been signed up as heir to the whole place within the last ten minutes. In vain, in vain, he told himself. He recalled with astonishment his light-hearted plan to quit after some episode of freakish clowning at the expense of the innocuous if no doubt boring Shilbottles. Between him and any such nonsense there now lay the grim shadow of Mrs Minton’s fiend-like companion.

  Three miles beyond Fortescue’s house ran the high road. If he trudged on there he might pick up a lift that would take him quite a long way – even into Leeds, a comfortingly large and anonymous sort of city. There he could take breath and think, before presumably spending an uncomfortably appreciable part of that fifteen pounds on a second-class railway ticket to London.

  So Gadberry trudged on. There wasn’t another moving creature in sight. In a field on his right, indeed, quite a lot of sheep had for some reason
been left to make what they could of their cheerless environment. But the sheep simply stayed put. They seemed entirely contented. Every now and then they made noises expressive of nothing in particular. Gadberry envied them their humble lot.

  He had come to a point at which the dale rose in a short swell on his left, dipped to an invisible hollow, and then rose again steeply to a considerable height. On this latter surface the snow was marked with a vaguely familiar species of zigzag lines. He glanced at these without interest, and hurried on. It was starting to snow again: first in large, spectacular flakes which would have looked well on a Christmas card, and then in very small ones which plainly meant business. He turned up his collar. It was while he was in the act of doing this that he heard a cry.

  ‘ Help! Oh, please, help!’

  Gadberry stopped in his tracks. What was astonishing was not the suddenness of the appeal, but the thing done to him by an indefinable quality in the appealing voice. Had he paused to think, he might have said that the Vale profound was overflowing with the sound, or that a voice so thrilling ne’er was heard in spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird. As it was, he scrambled over the snow-covered dyke beside him without pausing for a moment. The voice had been a girl’s, and it had instantly declared itself as of magical beauty. Gadberry plunged towards it like a man whose fate has caught up with him.

  Philosophically regarded, there can be little doubt that what had taken place was an event of considerable psychological complexity. It will be recalled that Gadberry was a young man markedly susceptible to female charm, but that by constitution he was one fondly overcome by this intermittently and violently rather than in a settled and diurnal manner. A frolic such as he had indulged in that morning with the little housemaid was really something to which he had, so to speak, to address his mind; it was more or less the right thing to be doing as a regular part of what one owed to being alive and healthy and twenty-seven years old. But this catastrophic business was another matter, and it came along rarely. That it had come along now was partly the consequence (as in the next thirty seconds he was overwhelmingly to see) of a single absolutely objective fact. But it undoubtedly had an origin, too, in his own present depressed and disordered situation. For a long time he had been hearing nothing but voices that were either boring or disagreeable or ominous or downright threatening. And now, suddenly, there was this.