Ampersand Papers

by Michael Innes

  ‘Quite so, Lady Geraldine. So let me continue. Imagine Dr Sutch to have found the papers, and to have taken them straight to Lord Ampersand. Might there then have been any dispute as to their ownership?’

  ‘Indeed there might.’ Grace spoke without hesitation. ‘I have discussed the issue on the telephone with our family solicitor, Sir John. It is his opinion that the papers, regarded as physical objects merely, might be adjudged to be the property of my father. But since they have never been published, the copyright in them continues in being indefinitely, and may at this moment be the legal property of some legitimate descendant of Adrian Digitt’s, supposing such a person to exist. So your question is answered, Sir John. There might well be dispute about the matter. It would, of course, be a disgraceful thing.’

  Appleby didn’t quite see that it need be a disgraceful thing. But he did see that a point of substance had emerged about those hypothetical Ampersand Papers.

  ‘Lady Grace,’ he asked, ‘do you yourself possess any information as to whether or not a descendant of Adrian Digitt’s is alive today?’

  ‘I have discussed the question with a cousin, Charles Digitt. As it happens, he is staying at the castle now. But I first raised the problem with him a considerable time ago, when this fuss about Adrian Digitt arose. He appeared at that time disinclined to treat it seriously, and had nothing to say about it. Indeed, I cannot say that he was wholly civil to me. But now, and no doubt as a consequence of this shocking affair, he has been more communicative. We have a distant relation, an elderly woman named Deborah Digitt, who lives at Budleigh Salterton. Charles believes her to be Adrian Digitt’s great-granddaughter, and his only living descendant. So the copyright of which we have been speaking may well be her property.’

  ‘Might not the papers be her property too – and actually in her possession? She would appear to be the natural person to have inherited them. Has inquiry been made of this Miss Digitt?’

  ‘It shall be made, of course.’ Grace said this grimly. ‘We haven’t got round to it yet.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby paused for moment. ‘Allow me, Lady Grace, to put what is admittedly an extremely bizarre suggestion to you. Suppose that the papers were here at Treskinnick, and that the copyright was Miss Deborah Digitt’s. Might she not feel that the tidy thing, as it were, would be that the papers themselves should be in her possession too? After all, she might well believe that she had a moral, and even legal, right to them. Might she not have decided to simplify matters, as it were, by entering into what you call an intrigue with Dr Sutch?’

  There was a moment’s silence, during which Appleby had the satisfaction of seeing that he had produced an absurdity (as it must surely be) that the competent Grace Digitt hadn’t thought of. Oddly enough, it looked as if Geraldine had. For this time she had given a nod of a peculiar character, rather as if acknowledging that here was a glimpse of the obvious.

  ‘We have no reason to suppose,’ Grace said a little coldly, ‘that Miss Digitt, although living, indeed, in an obscure situation, is other than a person of unblemished character.’

  ‘Nor have we of Dr Sutch, Lady Grace, although his was no doubt an obscure situation too. I only wished to bring home to your sister and yourself the curious manner in which suspicions may ramify, when once embarked upon. I wonder whether it will be possible for me to have some conversation with your father?’

  ‘I see him coming through the main gate now.’ Grace was standing by a window. ‘And Skillet with him.’

  ‘And the dogs,’ Geraldine said.

  ‘Sir John is unlikely to wish to converse with them, Geraldine,’ Grace said severely.

  ‘I suppose not, Grace. At least we haven’t given the dogs a bad name.’

  This unexpected witticism was not well received by the elder daughter of the Ampersands. Grace walked to the door.

  ‘My sister and I will now withdraw, Sir John,’ she said with a touch of hauteur, ‘and I shall ask my father and brother to join you.’

  So Appleby was left for some minutes to his own devices. At least he no longer felt himself to be in any false position. Here was a mystery of sorts, and he had made his life among such things. He was quite prepared to assume the full mantle of the law, and sort these Digitts out. It was true that he hadn’t developed (as he had occasionally done in the past) a rather instant insight into the state of the case. If Dr Sutch had been murdered, it was difficult to see just how. It was still more difficult to see in all this stuff about Adrian Digitt’s remains anything that could have quite the weight to precipitate a crime of such a sort. The unfortunate Dr Sutch, indeed, had been precipitated, but there was still very little reason to suppose that he hadn’t, so to speak, precipitated himself. At least there had been nobody to give him a lethal shove.

  Or had there been? Why not? Why not? Just suppose that…

  But no. It was impossible. Thinking back hard, Appleby told himself that what had glimmered in his mind just wouldn’t work. The clock was against it. And, in any case, it was utterly improbable that, in such a situation, anybody would pause…

  The door opened. Lord Ampersand and his son, Lord Skillet, entered the room.

  11

  It must have been the helicopter,’ Lord Ampersand said.

  ‘The helicopter?’ Appleby repeated, at a loss before this abrupt announcement.

  ‘Yes, the helicopter. It must have been that. I’ve been turning over one thing and another. And that’s it.’

  ‘You will observe, Sir John,’ Lord Skillet said, ‘that my father has been addressing his mind to our problem.’

  ‘Properly so,’ Appleby returned dryly, and made a mental note that the heir of the Ampersands was one given to irony and perhaps malice. ‘But just what helicopter, Lord Ampersand?’

  ‘Well, you know, they’re around a great deal. The naval station has the things. Police borrowed one, as a matter of fact, to land a fellow up there on the North Tower.’

  ‘Did they, indeed?’ It surprised Appleby that Inspector Craig had not reported this obvious manoeuvre.

  ‘Confounded nuisance they can be, my dear sir.’ Lord Ampersand appeared to remain a little vague as to Appleby’s identity. ‘Make the devil of a racket at times. But what I remembered, you see, was a kinsman of mine who was a fighter pilot during the war. Resourceful chap. Discovered how to cope with those buzz-things. He’d come up behind them, and just touch a fin, or whatever it was to be called, with his wing-tip. And down it would go into the English Channel.’

  ‘Lord Ampersand, are you suggesting that this is how Dr Sutch met his end?’

  ‘That’s right. Bit of a lark, I suppose. High-spirited fellows. Of course, the chap mayn’t have noticed Sutch crawling around. Unfortunate, eh?’

  ‘Decidedly so.’

  ‘Or the catastrophe,’ Lord Skillet said, ‘may have been wholly inadvertent. The helicopter simply flew too near to that staircase, and the mere turbulence from the rotors brought it down. As my father says, that’s it. So we needn’t trouble ourselves further.’

  ‘I fear we shall have to trouble ourselves quite a lot further, Lord Skillet.’ Appleby accompanied this expression of opinion with a stony glance at Archie before turning back to his father. ‘Are you saying, Lord Ampersand, that there was a helicopter?’

  ‘It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Otherwise it couldn’t have happened that way.’ Lord Ampersand paused on this triumph of logic. ‘But I quite accept what my son has to say. Pure accident, and so on.’

  ‘Lord Ampersand, it appears from the police report that you yourself actually saw the staircase collapse…’

  ‘Perfectly true. It was quite worrying, my dear Sir Robert.’

  ‘John. Do you now assert that you also saw a helicopter – and heard it as well?’

  ‘Well now, I can’t say that.’ Lord Ampersand had the air of a patient
man meeting some merely captious criticism. ‘As I say, the things are around a great deal. It’s so usual that one ceases to notice them. But the staircase giving way like that wasn’t usual at all. In fact, I never saw it happen before. So of course I was aware of that.’

  ‘As always,’ Lord Skillet said, ‘my father is the soul of lucidity. I look forward to his explaining the affair to our local naval commander.’

  ‘That, I judge, is unlikely to happen.’ Appleby wondered whether Lord Skillet was quite as frivolous as he appeared determined to represent himself. ‘We must put your father’s theory out of our heads, for the simple reason that I myself know quite positively that there was no aircraft of any kind around. I was down there at the foot of the cliff, you see, when the staircase fell, and Dr Sutch with it.’ Appleby paused on this long enough to see that he had disconcerted his auditory. It was odd that this piece of information seemed to come as a surprise to these people. Or was that the position? There was nothing astonishing in the fact that Lord Ampersand was a good deal less on the ball than his daughters. But what about his son? Appleby found himself wondering whether Lord Skillet was a man who – habitually and, as it were, by routine – faked his reactions to whatever turned up.

  ‘How disagreeable for you,’ Lord Skillet said. ‘Sutch was rather an old tortoise in a way. And the helicopter, like Aeschylus’ eagle, might have dropped him plumb on your head.’

  It is unlikely that this somewhat strained piece of classical lore meant much to Lord Ampersand. But Lord Ampersand nodded appreciatively, all the same. He probably held his heir in high regard, at least intellectually considered. Appleby found himself, feeling differently. Something indefinable in Lord Skillet’s bearing, even more than his last slightly crazy remark, made him wonder whether this scion of aristocracy was wholly sane.

  ‘There was also a man called Cave,’ he said. ‘Cave was the man who came up to the castle with the news that Sutch was dead. But Cave had been in a cave, and mightn’t be able to swear that there had been no helicopter. But it is probable that a jury would take my word for it.’

  ‘A jury?’ Lord Skillet was all innocent surprise. ‘The Coroner’s, do you mean?’

  ‘For a start, yes. But another jury may enter the picture later, Lord Skillet. Possibly at the Central Criminal Court. For as the newspapers like to have it, the police are not ruling out the possibility of foul play.’

  ‘Foul play!’ Lord Ampersand exclaimed, as if the thought had never occurred to him. ‘Do you mean, my dear sir, that somebody may have plotted to kill this Sutch fellow? Who on earth would do that?’

  ‘At the moment, I haven’t the slightest idea. Perhaps nobody. “Foul play” is a term one can apply rather widely, I suppose.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Lord Skillet asked politely, ‘you are turning over in your head my father and myself as likely foul players?’

  ‘Certainly not. I turn nothing over in my head until I have an adequate assemblage of facts there. And that means that there are certain questions I’d like to ask. It will be perfectly proper for you to take exception to my doing so. As you know, I am merely assisting your Chief Constable in an informal way.’

  ‘Man’s at least a gentleman,’ Lord Ampersand said, turning to his son, and speaking precisely as if he’d forgotten that Appleby was in the room. ‘Know where you are with him, eh? Better let him go ahead.’

  But at this candid moment there was an interruption, the door of the library opening and a young man coming into the room. He paused, but not as if having been unaware of whom he was going to find there. Then, as it seemed not to occur to either Lord Ampersand or his son to say anything, he addressed himself to Appleby.

  ‘May I introduce myself?’ he asked. ‘My name is Charles Digitt.’

  ‘And he is going to be my heir,’ Lord Skillet said. ‘When my poor father passes on, Charles will undoubtedly be my heir. Presumptive, of course. Entirely so until they’ve ordered my coffin. I imagine Grace and Geraldine will do that. So it’s sure to be on the cheap.’

  These unseemly remarks didn’t discompose young Charles Digitt, who shook hands with Appleby, sat down, and devoted himself to taking stock of the situation.

  ‘Are they all coming out?’ he asked presently.

  ‘Are all what coming out, Charles?’ It was Lord Ampersand who was perplexed.

  ‘The cats from their bags, Uncle. And scattering in every direction. Some of them getting into cupboards, perhaps, and rattling the family skeletons.’

  This, although homelier matter, seemed to be as baffling to Lord Ampersand as the fabled death of Aeschylus had been. Appleby wondered whether it was in some way directed against Lord Skillet. He had detected a glance passing between the two cousins which somehow spoke of a covert war of nerves as existing between them. In an ordinary way first cousins don’t much trouble themselves with sibling jealousies. But here there was the special circumstance that the first of them was at one remove and the second of them at two removes from the same marquisate. Appleby, whose more common contacts were with professional persons and a modest gentry, felt unsure of his ground here. He had seen enough in his time of dirty work in the higher reaches of society to form the view that the only fairly constant attribute of the aristocracy consisted in their being rather odd, and in particular in their secretly setting store by distinctions which overtly they made light of. Perhaps this crowd was like that.

  But at the moment he’d had a stroke of luck. With the exception of that Miss Deborah Digitt whose existence and possible connection with the hypothetical Ampersand Papers had been revealed by Lady Grace, he’d now had the whole lot on parade. And here at the moment were three male Digitts in a room with him. It wasn’t a bad opportunity for beginning to sort things out.

  ‘I don’t know about cats in bags,’ he said easily, ‘but I am, I confess, curious about cupboards. As containing, you know, not skeletons but papers. I have gathered from Lady Grace that Dr Sutch, who has died in so startling and indeed perplexing a fashion, had been employed by you, Lord Ampersand, to search for documents which might prove to be of great interest and equally great financial value. Anybody not assured that Dr Sutch’s death was purely accidental would be bound to centre his inquiries on those activities. For example, on the probable legal ownership of anything of the kind that turned up.’

  ‘It isn’t plausible,’ Charles Digitt said, ‘that a man should be murdered – and it seems to be murder that you are talking about, Sir John – over scraps of Shelley and Byron.’

  ‘Not even if they had, potentially, a high sale-room value?’

  ‘Not even then, I’d say – for what my opinion is worth.’ Charles now seemed to be speaking quite seriously. ‘Literary remains – if that’s the term – are not things that people get murdered about. Or not outside harmless fiction.’

  ‘I’m bound to say I agree with my cousin.’ Lord Skillet stretched himself lazily. ‘Jewels, yes – or bullion, or even what people stow away in the vaults of a bank. But, somehow, poems and diaries and so forth, not. Murder goes along with glamour. Something of that kind.’

  There was a pause which lasted long enough for Appleby to digest the fact that beneath a tiresome frivolity these first cousins were both intelligent men. But he was aware of something else as well. It was as if there were a game of skill in progress and one of the contestants – whether judiciously or not – had exposed an important card upon the table. At least Archie (which he recalled as Lord Skillet’s name) and Charles had taken another hard look at one another. And what about Lord Ampersand? During these latter exchanges he would have had to be described as fallen into an abstraction. Perhaps he was merely thinking about his dogs, or about the perplexing fact that nowadays he never seemed to have quite enough money to pay his bills. Or was it about something more germane to the current situation at Treskinnick Castle? Quite unexpectedly, Lord Ampersand now answered this uns
poken question in Appleby’s mind.

  ‘Tell you an odd thing,’ he said to the library at large. ‘About that fellow Sutch, you know. Turned uncommonly curious about matters he wasn’t being invited to stick his nose into. Did you ever hear’ – Lord Ampersand had turned to Appleby – ‘of the art of war in the Middle Ages?’

  ‘It was quite advanced, no doubt.’

  ‘No, no. It’s a book. By a chap called Oboy, or something of the kind.’

  ‘Oman,’ Lord Skillet said indulgently. ‘But just what are you talking about?’

  ‘Rummaged for it in this very room. And talked about Oliver Cromwell. No connection with Shelley and that lot, at all. I looked them up, you know. And about Treskinnick being reduced. It was damned rum.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Archie said, ‘that he was going to take advantage of his stay here to write a history of the wretched pile for some antiquarian journal. With profuse acknowledgements to the Most Hon. the Marquess of Ampersand. A spot of kudos. That sort of thing. And some chaps did reduce the castle. But, this time, it was the castle, you might say, that reduced Sutch. Such is life, as it were.’

  Appleby listened without impatience to this return to frivolity. Let these people exhibit themselves to the full. Even egg them on.

  ‘All sorts of legends,’ he offered, ‘do attach themselves to a historic place like this. No doubt a siege of Treskinnick is a historical fact, although I know nothing about it. But there must be all sorts of stories of dubious authenticity as well. Sutch may have thought of treating of them too. In lighter vein, one might say.’

  ‘If so, they didn’t exactly buoy him up.’ Lord Skillet seemed to find this reflection funny. ‘But it’s all none too relevant, Sir John, to what you appear determined to take in hand.’

  ‘Perfectly true – but it’s interesting, all the same. Is there any member of your family who goes in for the annals of the Digitts?’

  ‘Our cousin Deborah.’ Charles came out with this decisively, but after a second’s pause. ‘She lives at Budleigh Salterton, and knows a great deal of family history.’