Ampersand Papers

by Michael Innes

  ‘We don’t give at the door,’ this person said promptly.

  ‘Is Miss Digitt at home?’ Making this ritual inquiry, Appleby had charitably to assume that the eyesight of Miss Digitt’s retainer must be much impaired. He had to conjecture, too, that the superior inhabitants of Budleigh Salterton were constrained to cope, surprisingly, with a surge of mendicants against their gates. The maidservant, however, had now opened the door more widely and admitted him to a small hall. She then picked up a silver tray and positioned it accurately a couple of inches in front of the visitor’s chest.

  ‘I can take up your card,’ she said austerely.

  Appleby produced what was thus demanded. As it was some years since he had done anything of the kind, the small oblong of pasteboard when deposited proved to be picturesquely yellowed round the edges. It occurred to him that this purblind guardian of Miss Digitt’s portal might almost mistake it for a butterfly. Without more ado, however, she turned away and disappeared up a narrow staircase, her joints audibly creaking the while. Appleby looked about him. There was nothing on view except a couple of spindly chairs (not conceivably capable of supporting a human frame), some blue-and-white china, a large aquatint of Treskinnick Castle, and an ornately illuminated genealogical table.

  The creaking renewed itself; the aged retainer came painfully down the stairs, turned, and as painfully mounted them again: Appleby made bold to suppose that he had been given some sign to follow her. And all being indeed now in order, he was shown into Miss Digitt’s drawing-room.

  Miss Digitt, having perhaps a little miscalculated the time at her disposal, was in the act of replacing a reference book on its shelf: it was to be presumed that she had been acquainting herself with the cardinal facts in the life of the stranger who had sent up his card to her.

  ‘Sir John Appleby?’ she said. ‘Pray sit down. I do not recall our having met before. Am I to take it that this is a business – or shall I say professional – call that you are making on me?’

  ‘Oh decidedly, Miss Digitt – and I must offer all the proper apologies. The more so, indeed, since the matter I come about is not of the most agreeable sort. I have driven over from Treskinnick, where I have been trying to assist – at the instance, I ought to say, of the Chief Constable – in elucidating an unfortunate occurrence which you may have heard about.’

  ‘I have heard of nothing of the kind, Sir John. I receive little news of my relations there – apart from what my very dear kinsman, Charles Digitt, judges may afford me amusement from time to time.’

  ‘I fear it isn’t anything amusing that I myself have to report, Miss Digitt. At the same time I must hasten to say that it is unlikely to affect you in any intimate manner.’ Appleby paused on this careful speech. He was finding Miss Deborah Digitt surprising in several ways. It was odd that she should have started off by according Charles Digitt that commendatory little chit. Appleby would somehow not have expected the young man to be anybody’s very dear kinsman. Then again, Miss Digitt proved to be not as old as he had been imagining she’d be – although this still left her far from young. And there was some further oddity about her in this area, although it was hard to pin down. He had a dim sense of her as being perhaps in unfamiliar clothes, and of these clothes as clashing with her years, whatever they were. But odder still was something yet more indefinable. Miss Digitt’s comportment and address, which were predictably on the stiff and formal side, were at variance with some state of feeling in her amounting, surely, to an inner excitement. Appleby had to remind himself that the Digitts as a family enjoyed a certain power to set one guessing.

  ‘If you have something unamusing to report,’ Miss Digitt said dryly, ‘I think I can undertake to be not amused. Pray continue.’

  ‘You may at least have heard that there has been much interest at Treskinnick of late in the possibility of turning up the papers of Adrian Digitt, whom I understand to have been your great-grandfather.’

  ‘I have certainly heard a good deal about that singularly futile project, Sir John.’

  ‘From Mr Charles Digitt, no doubt.’ Appleby was again conscious that Miss Digitt had employed a somewhat surprising form of words.

  ‘From Charles. Precisely.’

  ‘And I suppose you will also be aware that Lord Ampersand lately engaged the services of an archivist to look into the matter – in the person of a certain Dr Ambrose Sutch.’

  ‘The proposal was certainly made known to me.’

  ‘But you may not have heard that Dr Sutch is dead?’

  ‘Dear me, Sir John! I am a little astonished, I confess. I am aware of your standing, or late standing, in the Metropolitan Police. Is it possible that you have come all the way from Treskinnick to apprize me of this doubtless regrettable event?’

  Appleby was about to say, ‘You have not answered my question, madam’. But he decided against this briskly policemanlike manner of approach to the conundrum Miss Digitt presented. For one thing Miss Digitt, who was seated beside the chimney-piece of her drawing-room, had put out her left hand in the direction of an antique bell-pull depending from near the ceiling beside it. She was clearly minded to give the thing a tug and have her creaking parlour-maid show Sir John Appleby out. Sir John Appleby found the spectacle instructive – almost as instructive as the fact that Miss Digitt had appeared to betray a moment of indecision before the last question put to her.

  ‘Not only is Dr Sutch dead,’ he said. ‘His death has taken place in circumstances that have engaged the curiosity of the police.’

  ‘Need they engage mine?’

  ‘Most assuredly, madam. There is a distinct possibility that the affair has its aspect of grave scandal, or worse. You must be anxious, I am sure, to have nothing of the sort reflect upon the credit and honour of your family.’

  ‘Do I understand you to be saying that this man Sutch met with foul play? That he has been murdered, in short?’

  ‘I cannot say that. The fatality is under close investigation now.’

  ‘I see.’ Miss Digitt paused. She in her turn might have been weighting a precise form of words addressed to her. ‘And what more have you to ask?’

  ‘I have to ask, among other things, whether you have ever heard of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario?’

  For the first time, Miss Digitt was at a loss. For a moment, indeed, she looked completely blank. It was not perhaps an unreasonable reaction to so completely inconsequent-seeming a question. Quickly, however, she recovered herself.

  ‘Of course I have, Sir John. There is an old family legend about that shipwreck and its sequel – but one completely forgotten, I should imagine, except by persons – and they are few – with some interest in our history.’

  ‘Would Lord Skillet be one of those?’

  ‘I understand Lord Skillet to be an entirely frivolous person. His only interests are likely to be disreputable.’

  ‘Or Mr Charles Digitt?’

  ‘I decline to discuss Mr Charles Digitt with you, Sir John.’ Miss Digitt had drawn herself up stiffly. ‘He happens to be the sole member of my family with whom I am on terms of intimacy. And with whom I would wish to be that.’

  ‘As you please, Miss Digitt. Let me only say, then, that in what may be called the Spanish treasure there is at present a certain amount of interest at Treskinnick too. There is the thought that it may have been hidden in a chamber in the North Tower; and that the circumstances of Dr Sutch’s death – how shall I put it? – interdigitate with that hypothesis.’

  ‘I judge, Sir John, that you have taken to speaking in riddles. Pray make the particulars of this man’s death known to me.’

  This was a very reasonable request, and Appleby answered it, although confining himself to fact rather than inference. Miss Digitt heard him out.

  ‘The state of that staircase,’ she then said briefly, ‘is clearly to be deprecate
d. Or, rather, having this unfortunate man go constantly up and down it was censurable. I can see no graver scandal than that.’

  ‘Others, as it happens, had of late been going up and down it a good deal. Both Lord Skillet and his cousin, for example.’

  ‘I can say nothing as to that. And need this interview continue?’

  ‘Only for a moment longer, madam. I am interested in your declaring that the hunt for those papers at the castle was a singularly futile project. May I ask why you are in a position to express yourself so strongly?’

  ‘Certainly you may. The entire body of my great-grandfather’s papers are in my possession and are my property. They have been so since the death of my father many years ago.’

  ‘In fact they are in this house now?’ It was in a reasonably composed manner that Appleby asked this question. It would have taken a very keen observer indeed to detect that a moment of complete illumination had come to him.

  ‘Indeed they are – although I am ashamed to say that until recently I was unaware of the fact. It is true that I have come across a few scattered papers from time to time. But my collection of family material is voluminous, and I have been deferring my full examination of them – thinking of the matter, perhaps, as an occupation for my later years.’

  ‘An agreeable prospect, I don’t doubt.’ Miss Digitt’s last words had again produced an effect of illumination, although this time of a minor order. ‘May I take it that it has been Mr Charles Digitt who has succeeded in turning them up for you?’

  ‘You may,’ Miss Digitt said. And she rose and gave a tug at the bell-rope.

  So Sir John Appleby was indeed shown out. He drove back to Treskinnick meditating, among other things, the mysteries of the female heart. What had made Miss Deborah Digitt so problematical was that she was living – uncertainly, no doubt – in a new world. She had even been wearing an engagement ring.

  18

  Appleby arrived back at Treskinnick at an hour constraining him to close with the Ampersand Arms for another dinner and another night’s lodging. This time it looked as if, so far as residents went, he was going to have the place to himself. Mr Cave, of course, had once again departed. It had been a shade unkind to terrify him with the threat of a charge of conspiracy on the strength of his abortive designs upon the Spanish treasure, even although it might be conceivably possible to secure his conviction if the police went about it with a will. A good deal of play could be made with those coils of rope and cord, and of the close contiguity to them in which the speleologist had first revealed himself. Appleby worked out this picture as he ate his dinner.

  Dr Ambrose Sutch was the master criminal, and an inspired opportunist into the bargain. Having run up against Cave in an entirely fortuitous way, and discovered that he had at least vague designs upon wrecked treasure ships in general and the Nuestra Señora del Rosario in particular, he had promptly recruited the wretched man as his accomplice or tool. Granted that that inaccessible chamber in the North Tower held riches untold, it would be evident that getting at the loot and smuggling it out of the castle would be two men’s task at least. Suppose that much more extensive work with mallet and chisel would make it possible to haul the stuff up into the muniment room, just where did one go from there? Very evidently, it could be said, to that cave, or system of caves, almost immediately below. One would make one’s preparations there. It would not be possible, without grave risk of detection, to carry through the castle and up the wooden staircase the large coil of stout rope essential for the operation to be put in hand. But the cord one could collect at any convenient time, carry in and up in something no bulkier than a briefcase, and subsequently employ to haul up the rope under cover of night. Providing these materials would have been Cave’s job; Cave would cache them in the cave; and thus Sutch would not, so far, have made a single incriminating move. Even if his labours as a stone-mason should chance to be detected and interrupted, they could be passed off as no more than an excessive zeal exercised wholly in the interest of his employers.

  That, it could be said, had been the plan, and its main actual risk would have been a simply physical one: were Sutch to begin enthusiastically lowering from that crazy little platform something in the nature, say, of a heavy sea-chest, the chest and the staircase and Sutch himself might all arrive at the bottom of the tower with an altogether unplanned impetus. But nothing of the sort – of precisely that sort – had happened. The breach in the floor of the muniment room was still no more than a peephole, and the treasure remained where for centuries it had been. And rope and cord, too, remained undisturbed where Cave had so neatly deposited them. On this theory, therefore, it would be necessary to believe that, at some anterior point in his preparations, Fate had intervened and been the end of Ambrose Sutch. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that the whole sequence of events had terrified Cave very much.

  Was there anybody else who would have reason to be terrified – anybody else whom this untoward turn of events would threaten to expose, as it were, as hazardously out on a limb? Appleby asked himself this question as he finished his meal and was about to leave the dining-room of the Ampersand Arms. He was arrested, however, by the entrance of Inspector Craig.

  It was evident in an instant that Craig was pleased neither with himself nor with his subordinates, and that the situation required the exercise of a certain amount of tact. The tap-tap of Dr Sutch’s mallet could almost be heard in the room.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ Appleby said easily, ‘that you’ve found time to drop in. We’re not without notes to compare. Let me fetch some brandy from the bar, and we can get down to it. And you mustn’t be too hard on your chaps for not nosing out that small activity on our deceased friend’s part.’

  ‘They’ve heard about it already,’ Craig said darkly.

  ‘One of them took the dramatic revelation quite well. What about some food, by the way?’

  ‘No thank you. I had a bite an hour ago, Sir John.’ Craig was recovering good humour. ‘But the brandy I’ll be grateful for.’

  Appleby fetched the brandy. He went up to his room and dug out of his suitcase that solace of elderly and modestly prosperous men, a box of Havana cigars. Having thus adequately played the host, he left it to Craig to begin.

  ‘It may be tricky,’ Craig said. ‘Just getting at that stuff, I mean. They may have to tackle clearing that spiral staircase from the top. The main walls of the tower are immensely solid, as you’d imagine. But it’s a question whether they can monkey with that floor without inviting trouble. They’ll know in the morning.’

  ‘And we’ll know quite a lot by then, too,’ Appleby said cheerfully. ‘Perhaps Sutch was having his own doubts about more banging away.’

  ‘Perhaps so. We’ve enlarged that hole a little, of course, and had a flashlight camera down. Odd bit of work. So I can tell you what’s there – in a very general way.’

  ‘I can tell you what isn’t – in one specific particular, at least. The place isn’t harbouring Adrian Digitt’s remains.’

  ‘It would be most unlikely, sir. But you mean you can be confident about it?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Didn’t I let you know I was going to Budleigh Salterton? All those confounded papers are there, in the possession of Miss Deborah Digitt. If the woman isn’t mad, that is. I didn’t actually get a sight of them.’

  ‘You mean that this relation of those people has had them all the time?’

  ‘So she says, and so perhaps she believes. It’s perfectly plausible, you know. She’s the direct descendant of Adrian Digitt. But although plausible, Craig, it isn’t true. I haven’t the slightest doubt that those papers were in that muniment room no time ago at all.’

  ‘Right up to the day of Sutch’s death?’

  ‘Possibly so – although I rather suspect they may have been moved elsewhere in the castle by then.’

  Inspector Craig took some mom
ents to digest this information and these conjectures. He sipped his brandy, drew on his cigar, and directed rather a sombre gaze on the former Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.

  ‘And would you know,’ he asked, ‘how they got from Treskinnick Castle to Budleigh Salterton? Would it have been by parcel post?’

  ‘Almost certainly not. They were taken there by Charles Digitt. He either handed them to her with a flourish, in which case she is a shocking old liar, or slipped them in among her own voluminous and very-little-examined family papers for subsequent delighted discovery by himself.’

  ‘Why on earth should he do such a thing, Sir John? A jury would find it hard to believe.’

  ‘A jury mayn’t be asked to. And he had several reasons bundled together, I imagine. He wanted to cheat Sutch, who was proposing to do a quiet deal with him. He wanted to cheat his cousin, Lord Skillet, whom he detests. He wanted, you may say, to make fools of his whole family. And the papers, don’t forget, may have a quite absurd market value.’

  ‘But, if they were sold, wouldn’t the proceeds come to him one day in any case? So wasn’t he cheating himself, in a way, when he dumped them on this distant kinswoman in Budleigh Salterton?’

  ‘He couldn’t be sure there would be a penny left by the time he became Lord Ampersand – which, in any case, he may never do. As for the lady, I rather suspect him of having turned her head.’

  ‘Turned her head!’

  ‘She has what you might call a faded romantic streak to her. I’m not sure she doesn’t believe herself to be engaged to him.’