Appleby And Honeybath

by Michael Innes

  ‘Of course I follow you.’ Honeybath wondered whether ‘testy’ could fairly be applied to his manner of saying this.

  ‘Well, sir, your statement needn’t take us five minutes. I’ve a very fair notion of its content already. But I do wonder whether you have formed any impression about the whole thing.’

  ‘I have been thinking about it, of course.’ Honeybath recalled Appleby’s advice to refrain from conjectures. ‘But not, I’m afraid, to any effect worth recording. I’m entirely in the dark. Probably a good deal more than you are.’

  ‘Well, sir, I don’t mind admitting that, for a start, I’d like a little more light on that dead body. You are convinced that it was a dead body, and would maintain that in court. Right?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Honeybath hesitated. ‘But you might call that my rational conviction. It has been dawning on me that, in a position like mine, it isn’t easy to be wholeheartedly rational. Really, I begin to harbour doubts. Coma, now. One hears a lot about coma nowadays. How close to actual death can its appearances be?’

  ‘Deep waters, Mr Honeybath. It used to be assumed that death invariably happens in a breath. One moment alive; the next, not. Nowadays there’s a different view. And whether this man was really dead is something – to be frank with you – that I have to keep an open mind about. But of one thing I’m confident. If he was merely in deep coma when you came on him, he could nevertheless be in no condition simply to stand up and walk out of the room a few minutes later. Alive or dead, he was carried out. Somebody lugged the guts into the neighbour room.’

  This literary flight on the part of Inspector Denver quite startled Honeybath. But he saw that a real analysis was going forward.

  ‘There’s another question,’ Denver said. ‘Agree that you were correct in deciding the man was dead. Did any suggestion of the cause of death occur to you then and there?’

  ‘I’m afraid it didn’t. I can’t recall holding any internal debate on the matter.’ Honeybath was aware of this as rather a pedantic form of words. ‘But you see what that means,’ he suddenly added. ‘I must have been taking it for granted that the chap had just died in a perfectly natural manner. As Appleby has pointed out to me, most people do. And at times very suddenly, if I’m not mistaken. A totally unheralded cerebral disaster. One has been harbouring a treacherous aneurysm – I believe that’s the word – inside one’s head, and quite suddenly it goes bust.’

  ‘But you didn’t, at the time, actually find yourself thinking along those lines?’

  ‘Assuredly not. I was simply extremely shocked.’

  ‘Quite so, Mr Honeybath. Nothing could be more natural. Of course if you had happened to think of something entirely different – some form of violent death, I mean – you would probably have spared a moment or two to investigate before going for help.’

  ‘No doubt. And if there had been any substantial and overt sign of violence I’d surely have been aware of it. If the man was murdered, in other words, it wasn’t in any strikingly gory fashion.’

  ‘Exactly. No blood here, and none next door – where you and Sir John had those two odd experiences.’

  ‘Two experiences?’

  ‘Oh, decidedly. Signs of an unobtrusive squatter in a country house like Grinton were uncommonly curious in themselves. And then finding that the signs had vanished was more curious still.’

  ‘A vagrant,’ Honeybath said hopefully. ‘A kind of new style tramp. Or an enterprising hippie, perhaps with a little van. He has been quite snug here. But something sinister happens, and he takes alarm and bolts.’

  ‘Dear me!’ Denver was staring at Honeybath in what might have been charitably regarded as admiring astonishment. ‘I’d almost suppose you to be a scientist, sir, rather than an artist. I believe fertility in the field of hypothesis to be the hallmark of your top scientific man.’ Having allowed himself this frivolity, Denver again took up his pen. ‘Just a brief recital of facts,’ he said. ‘That you can put your signature to. Not a deposition, you understand, in any legal sense. Just to help us along.’

  Honeybath helped along, and then withdrew from the library. His own duty in the matter he could now consider to have been discharged, and it was unlikely that anyone would bother him again. Nevertheless he continued to feel something vexatious about the whole affair. He had come to Grinton to cope with a mystery, since that is what painting the portrait of another human being involves. Or painting a kitchen chair or an old pair of boots, for that matter. You have to love the things, and achieve an obscure act of possession, and the result is that you have brought a minute speck of light into the vast darkness in which we move and have our being. Honeybath had preserved this sober faith in his craft through several decades of painting Terence Grintons and Dolly Grintons and all their company. So it was tiresome that when just about to start on a serious job there should bob up this distracting issue of a mobile corpse.

  He had left Denver sitting in the library, absorbed in pen-and-ink labours like some conscientious fellow in what they called middle management. Honeybath felt that the man ought to be on the telephone arranging a sort of cordon of roadblocks round Grinton, or out and about in the shrubberies hunting for clues with a magnifying glass. But perhaps his subordinates were now doing that sort of thing. Perhaps Denver was like a spider, alert at the centre of a finely fabricated web of intelligence. He didn’t quite give that impression. But no doubt he was competent enough.

  The broad corridor from the library led to the main hall of the house. This had at some time or other been carved out of several rooms, so that both in its shape and in its proportions it was a little odd. But it was spacious and also lofty, since a couple of upstairs bedrooms had disappeared into it as well. It testified to the consequence of the Grintons; its walls were adorned with trophies of the chase; it had been furnished in a half-hearted way as a place to sit about in.

  Nobody was sitting in it now. But at one end, and beside the door leading to a vestibule, there stood a uniformed policeman. Although he rendered no impression of being aggressively immobile, and although the epithet ‘rigid’ could scarcely be applied to him, he was yet so motionless, so little suggestive of having lately done anything or of being about to do something, that he somehow seemed less a policeman than what is called a police presence. Within a fairly short span of time the entire Grinton family and their guests were almost sure to pass through this hall. Honeybath therefore concluded that the role of this constable (who was ‘stolid’ as all such persons are in fiction) was simply to impress the household at large with the reserve, the lurking, powers of the law.

  The Applebys now appeared – Judith presumably having lately returned in the dusk from a long tramp on the downs. For a moment they didn’t notice Honeybath. Appleby strolled up to the constable just as if he were quite real but also entirely harmless. The constable appreciated this, producing brisk and amiable replies to whatever Appleby was saying to him. Judith began to circle the hall, pausing here and there before masks and brushes as if some interesting individuality attached to one vulpine relic or another. Then she saw Honeybath and came over to him.

  ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘John has just spun me the most extraordinary yarn about high jinks at Grinton. I suppose it’s not one of his tiresome jokes?’

  ‘Definitely not. I’ve no doubt he has told you exactly what has happened – or the very little that we know to have happened, perhaps I’d better say.’

  ‘You didn’t do it, Charles?’

  ‘Judith!’

  ‘I expect it’s what everybody’s going to be asked – if not just in so many words. John says one reading of the thing is murder of someone unknown by someone unknown. One must hope it turns out to be an inside job.’

  ‘I sometimes can’t decide whether you or John is the sillier.’ Honeybath had known Judith from childhood.

  ‘There would be more excitement in an inside job. Haven’t you even been suspected?’

  ‘Well, I’ve just come from an interview w
ith the top policeman on the scene. Whether he suspects me or not, I haven’t the faintest idea. But it’s his business to suspect everybody, no doubt. Although of precisely what isn’t yet at all clear.’

  ‘John says he’s next after you for interview. Here he is.’

  Appleby, having finished his conversation with the constable, had now joined them.

  ‘Yes, it’s me next,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And do you know? I don’t believe this excellent Denver has a clue to my murky past.’

  ‘Ah!’ It was plain that Honeybath relished this. And he was even constrained to an uncustomary colloquial note. ‘John,’ he said, ‘don’t make me laugh.’

  6

  ‘I hope I guessed right,’ Denver said to Appleby. ‘About not wanting your official position brought forward, that is.’

  ‘My former official position, Mr Denver. But you were certainly right. I know very little about most of the people now at Grinton, and some of them might quite well take it into their heads that I was ready to meddle in this thing. Nothing could be further from the truth.’

  ‘Quite so, Sir John.’

  ‘And for that matter, you know, retired or not retired is all one. If the present Metropolitan Commissioner – a very nice fellow, by the way – was in this house now, he would have no special standing in the matter whatever.’

  ‘Very true, indeed, sir, speaking by the book.’

  ‘Well, let me make that statement for you. At four thirty-five this afternoon I was about to enter the drawing-room at Grinton Hall. I met my fellow guest, Mr Charles Honeybath, coming out. Mr Honeybath said, “John! There’s a dead man in the library.” I said–’

  Appleby was speaking at brisk dictation speed, so Denver had to grab his pen and make do. For two or three minutes he scribbled hard.

  ‘Read it back to me,’ Appleby then said, ‘and I’ll sign and you can get on to your next chap. Grinton himself, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes – Grinton.’ Denver didn’t seem enchanted with the professional brevity of this performance; in fact, he looked very like a man who wants to say, ‘But please don’t go away’. What he did say was, ‘Mr Honeybath tells me he’s painting his portrait. He’s rather a tetchy fellow.’

  ‘Mr Honeybath?’

  ‘No, sir. Mr Grinton.’ Denver was unruffled. ‘Would you have known him for long?’

  ‘For a good many years, in a very slight way. Through some female line or other, he’s related remotely to my wife. On two or three occasions we’ve lunched at Grinton. But this is our first regular visit.’

  ‘Have you noticed, Sir John, anything odd about Mr Grinton’s attitude to this room?’

  ‘My dear Denver, I’ve had very little time to become aware of anything of the sort. But, I suppose, in a way – yes. It’s no more than goes with a certain general eccentricity of character. Plenty of people, you know, don’t care much for book-learning. It just doesn’t enter their lives. But that perfectly common trait Grinton seems to carry a step further. He positively dislikes books, and so owns a frank antipathy to his own library.’

  ‘More than that, Sir John. He keeps people out of it. There’s something almost nervous about the thing. And progressively so.’

  ‘I’ve had no opportunity to remark that, Inspector. And I don’t see how you can have had such an opportunity either. To observe, I mean, any change of attitude or emphasis on Mr Grinton’s part.’

  ‘Well, not myself, sir. Certainly not. But I’ve had a word with the butler.’

  ‘The dickens you have!’ Appleby was impressed by this.

  ‘I got hold of him by saying I’d need him to hunt up people I wanted to talk to. It wouldn’t have been colourable, of course, to have more than five minutes’ chat with him. But I told him he mustn’t be surprised if one of my men turned up in this library with a little vacuum cleaner. It would be to collect specimens of dust for scientific purposes. There was a surprising amount of dust, I said. That touched his professional pride. Nowadays – as you must have noticed in your walk of life, Sir John – a butler is often the only upper servant even in rather grand places like this one. He doubles up as housekeeper as well, and is in charge of the entire bag of tricks, you may say. Well, the man explained to me that Mr Grinton can hardly have anybody enter this library – and he says this seems to have been particularly true of late.’ Denver glanced quickly at Appleby; he probably felt that he had got his man. ‘It takes some accounting for, if you ask me.’

  ‘Are you suggesting, Inspector, that this room harbours a dark secret, which an intruder might stumble upon? A mad relation, perhaps, dressed chiefly in rags and cobwebs?’

  ‘Not quite that, Sir John.’ Denver was again unruffled in the face of this mockery. ‘But, well – something.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t Grinton simply keep the room locked up?’

  ‘That would perhaps be a little too obtrusive to be prudent.’

  ‘If he said his library happens to contain items of great value, turning a key on it might seem quite natural. But I don’t say you’re not on to something, Denver. Well within a target area. We have to keep thinking about this room.’ Appleby was aware that he had employed a possibly disastrous pronoun. ‘Whenever you think about that dead body, think about this room as well. And now I’d better make way for your next suspect.’

  ‘There’s one thing Grinton can’t be suspected of.’ Denver gave no sign he felt this interview to be over. ‘Shunting the body – always supposing it was a body, of which I’m not quite convinced – through that dummy door. He was in the drawing-room as that was happening.’

  ‘So it would seem. But that sort of alibi, you know, can turn out to be unexpectedly tricky.’ Appleby was now the man of experience, uttering cautionary words. ‘Have an incident re-enacted as closely as may be, keep a stopwatch in your hand, and surprising results sometimes appear.’

  ‘Of course that’s so. And it would be absurd to speak of Mr Grinton as a suspect, anyway.’ Denver somehow didn’t say this very convincingly. ‘Far too many unknown quantities still. For the sheer devil of the thing, give me what they call a house party every time.’

  ‘Well, yes. But it isn’t a big house party, you know. And it’s not really a very big house either. Think if this was happening at Blenheim or Knole or Castle Howard.’

  ‘Or Scamnum Court,’ Denver said – thus showing a surprising acquaintance with Appleby’s early career. ‘But you know, sir, there is one promising factor in this affair. It’s rum. It’s uncommonly rum – and that’s something. Because, you know, it’s when one has an absolutely colourless crime–’

  ‘There’s been a crime?’ Appleby interrupted. ‘Apart from that absurd talk you put up about burglared furniture?’

  ‘I think there’s been a crime.’ Denver said this with a very proper gravity. ‘But what I was suggesting is this: it’s the colourless crime that can be the devil to get any grip on. As soon as the quirky comes in, there’s likely to be something to get hold of.’

  ‘That’s very true.’ Appleby contrived to receive with admiring surprise this commonplace of criminological lore. ‘So concentrate on the very odd business of a dead man being spirited away. Tabulate all rational motives for such an act that you can think of, and then weigh each in turn.’

  ‘But are there any rational motives? Can you come up with one for a start, Sir John?’ Denver seemed to feel that this had been venturesome. ‘For I don’t know that I can,’ he added.

  ‘Well now, what about it’s being a matter of taste?’

  ‘Taste, Sir John?’

  ‘There’s a certain suggestion that a dead body had been perched or posed in that chair to create a macabre effect upon discovery. The perpetrator may have decided, upon reflection, that it was a somewhat unbecoming joke. Not on, as they say. So he picked up the corpse again and moved elsewhere.’

  Inspector Denver – as well he might – didn’t at once know how to take this.

  ‘Would you really think–’ he began.

&nb
sp; ‘I’m not being entirely frivolous. In cases of murder – and we keep an open mind about this being one – the murderer often turns curiously confused. He may go in for compunctions before the deed, but something like mere bewilderment after it. The classical instance is Shakespeare’s Macbeth.’

  ‘Macbeth’s bewilderment wouldn’t have caused him to move Duncan’s body out of the chamber where he’d murdered him.’ Denver, a reasonably literate man, remembered the play pretty clearly. ‘Lady Macbeth might have done it – if she’d seen any sense in so doing.’

  ‘Excellent! You see how indulging in quite fanciful ideas can open up useful trains of thought.’

  ‘You mean, sir, that Mrs Grinton, as well as Grinton himself, may have been in on the act?’

  Appleby, not commonly unready in reply, was held up for a moment by this. He wondered whether Dolly Grinton could possibly support the character of a fiend-like queen. More clearly, he saw that the otherwise thoroughly competent Inspector was in some danger of developing an awkward idée fixe about Terence Grinton. Terence had undoubtedly been uncivil to the chap. But Terence would be uncivil to anybody, and with a kind of saving geniality more often than not. Appleby wondered whether he ought to try to put in a good word for Terence. But then he remembered that he had been asked a question and had better answer it.

  ‘It certainly hasn’t occurred to me, Denver, to start suspecting my host and hostess of some dark crime. I meant merely that there may be two or more villains in the piece. Two people, for that matter, can lug a body around more easily than one.’ Appleby hesitated for a moment. ‘But just go back to that rather odd thing you said about Grinton. Surely you’ve already admitted that as a prime suspect he just doesn’t stand up. When this supposed body-shunting business was going on, he was at the other end of the house.’