‘My dear Charles, “old family friend” is inaccurate. He’s not even an old family friend of Judith’s: just a distant relation she feels ought to be given a nod to from time to time. It’s one of those tedious upper class things.’
‘Well, yes.’ Honeybath nodded understandingly. Although, as a boy, chance had taken him to Eton, it no more occurred to him that he belonged to an upper class than that he belonged to an aristocracy. He was just a painter. ‘But what troubles me, you see, is what he said or implied about me at his wife’s dinner table. He told the company at large – wouldn’t you agree? – that I am virtually a loony.’
‘It was perhaps a little lacking in address. But the man is clearly uneasy for some reason about this whole affair, and says anything that comes into his not exactly thin head. If it really bothers you, you might yourself be charged with owning a thin skin. Forget it.’
‘Yes. But it’s the business, you see, of my being commissioned to take the chap’s likeness. Ought I, in the circumstances, to pocket the money of his subscribers – ingenuous souls, I imagine, just like himself? He can’t very well get out of it when a thing like that has been fixed up. But he may very reasonably resent having to sit to a man he has decided sees things. That’s how he’d put it. So I might see heaven knows what in him.’
‘Why not? It’s your job. And it’s as near to objective fact as makes no matter that you did veritably see something. Precisely what, may be not quite certain. But that’s no matter. There is a mystery, I assure you. And you happened to be the first to stumble on it.’
‘What about the police? They seem simply to have cleared out. Washed their hands discreetly of the whole load of rubbish – which of course is how Grinton judges it.’
‘Charles, I doubt whether he does anything of the kind. And certainly the police don’t. I’ve thought about it a lot, and it’s my opinion that our friend Denver is up to something.’
Honeybath was silent for a moment. He was clearly impressed and a little disposed to be comforted.
‘You mean, John, that Denver has some sort of clue?’
‘That I don’t know at all. But I have. It’s in the pocket of my dinner jacket at this moment.’
‘My dear Holmes, you amaze me!’ Honeybath was sufficiently heartened to decline upon this piece of ancient facetiousness.
‘Something very little remarkable in itself, but remarkably so as having turned up decidedly in the wrong place.’ Appleby loyally preserved an oracular note. ‘You remember my dodging down into the library’s cellarage? Absolute chaos, and I was in it no time at all. One might expect to find almost anything. But not what I did find.’
‘Which was?’
‘A copy of a quite recent bookseller’s catalogue. To be precise, Blackwell’s Rare Books: Catalogue A27. It’s called “Antiquarian Books on Travel & Topography”. Here it is. Look at it. Item 269, where someone has made a pencil mark in the margin. Read it right through. It’s a model of exact bibliographical record.’
So Honeybath – with an occasional wary glance at the rest of the company – read it.
269 Shaw (Revd Stebbing) The History and Antiquities of Staffordshire. Compiled from the Manuscripts of Huntback, Loxdale, Bishop Lyttelton, and other Collections of Dr Wilkes, the Revd T Feilde &c. Including Erdwick’s Survey of the County, and Approved Parts of Dr Plot’s Natural History. The Whole brought down to the Present Time, interspersed with Pedigrees and Anecdotes of Families; Observations on Agriculture, Commerce, Mines and Manufactories, and Illustrated with a very full and correct New Map of the County. Agri Staffordiensis Icon, and many other Plates and Tables. 2 vols. Printed by and for J Nichols, 1798–1801, LARGE PAPER (?), with 82 plates, 2 large folding maps, and some 32 illustrations printed in the text, in both the full-page and smaller illustrations extensive use has been made of the aquatint process, as well as the usual copper engraving, the pagination is erratic throughout, folio, contemporary paper boards, somewhat rubbed and worn, paper backstrips repaired, all edges uncut, contained in two solander cases, in brown cloth, size 20 ins x 12 ins. (Upcott 1176) £650.00
‘And 270,’ Appleby said, ‘is more or less the same work, and is marked with a pencil too. It would cost you a hundred pounds less.’
‘I see.’ In fact, Honeybath didn’t see at all. ‘What’s a solander case?’
‘I believe it’s a box made in the form of a book: a kind of little brother to that dummy door. But you see the point; why, I mean, this catalogue can be called a clue. Clearly it was left behind fairly recently by somebody rummaging down there. So it ties in – or to some extent it ties in – with a notion I sketched out for you at the start. Clandestine investigation of the riches, or supposed riches, of the Grinton library. But not quite the sort of investigation I had in mind. The academic pernoctationist, you remember, avid for the advancement of learning. This isn’t Staffordshire, and nobody is likely to be prompted to ransack Grinton specifically in search of Staffordshire antiquities for their own sake. I see this chap as having had half a dozen or more catalogues of this sort, and ticking off in them any particularly costly items that he came upon here. Or that general idea. There are lots of possibilities. For example, he gradually gets together a pile of such things – a cache of them, you may say – and proposes to remove them en bloc on some favourable occasion. Anyway, a money-making rather than a knowledge-making ploy. In fact, a straight criminal enterprise, probably on a fairly small scale, but conceivably on a moderately large one. It’s interesting. As such, it lends a little support to the conjecture that one kind of crime led – through some untimely discovery, or the like – to a much graver one. But I’d need a good deal of stronger evidence before I put my own money on that.’
‘There’s stuff in this description’ – and Honeybath tapped the catalogue – ‘on aquatints and copper engraving.’ It had come into Honeybath’s head that he had perhaps something to contribute to this impressive detective process. He glanced once more cautiously round the drawing-room. ‘Might a special interest in these arts be involved? I ask because I’ve discovered something about that chap Hillam – whom for some reason I rather distrust. Indian religions and so on are his hobby. But he told me in the dining-room that by profession he’s an art historian.’
‘More specifically, an iconographer, according to Dolly.’
‘Is that so? I suppose one ought to have heard of him. But, John, there was another thing. I thought I detected him as being a little put out when I happened to ask him whether he had ever had a look round the library here.’
‘Well, well! Any further revelations, Charles?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ But even as Honeybath shook his head, his expression altered. ‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed. ‘It has come back to me – just as you said it would. About the dead man’s clothes. And his shoes as well! I habitually notice such things when male sitters turn up in my studio. Savile Row, or off the peg. A kind of Tailor and Cutter interest.’ Honeybath was almost incoherent before the magnitude of his discovery. ‘The corpse’s togs. American.’
Appleby received this excited communication with respect.
‘Bravo!’ he said. ‘The plot thickens.’
9
When Appleby went up to his room it was to find his wife already in bed, and reading.
‘I’ve borrowed a book from Burrow,’ she said. ‘Burrow for a good borrow.’
‘Whoever is Burrow?’
‘Burrow is Terence’s butler. You ought to talk to him. He’s an interesting man.’
‘So is Terence, in a fashion – or so I’ve come to believe.’ Appleby began to undress. ‘What sort of book does one borrow from Burrow?’
‘I’ll give you a guess, and a hint. It’s historical.’
‘Butlers – a dying race – lead sheltered lives until they fade away. So they like reading rough stuff. It’s a history of pugilism.’
‘Wrong. It’s called Reliquiae Grintonianae.’
‘Impossible.’
�
�Not at all. It’s an anecdotal affair, apparently privately printed, and brought together by one Simon Upcott, a cleric of antiquarian tastes, who was Vicar of Grinton Parva early in the eighteenth century. And, of course, it’s all about the Grintons.’
‘Well, I’m blessed!’ Appleby was in his pyjamas. ‘How does this Burrow come by such a thing?’
‘Burrow is an antiquarian too. His father was butler here before him. So he’s more interested in the Grintons than the Grintons are.’
‘That may well be. What have I done with my toothbrush?’
‘It’s in front of your nose, John. Or your teeth.’
‘So it is. Has Burrow filched this book from that wretched library?’
‘Not at all. He has his own collection, ranged on long shelves in his pantry. In a house like this one ought always to have a chat with the butler in his pantry. It’s considered quite proper. But not with a housemaid in a linen room.’
‘I’ll remember that as a warning. Have you come on anything by or about Jonathan Grinton, who patronized Pope?’
‘No, not yet – and I don’t know that the book gets as far as that. There’s a lot about Thomas Sackville Grinton, whose father married into the nobility, and who was a top scholar in his time. And about Ambrose, a Restoration eccentric. Ambrose went in for travel, and what would later have been called Bohemian society.’
‘Really, Judith, I’m coming to hear too much about the Grinton odd bods – all remorselessly marching towards poor Charles and his wretched corpse and the cock-eyed theory hovering in my head about it. I’d like to hear about the quiet and ordinary Grintons: generations and generations of them, all leading up to Terence.’
‘I don’t think I’d call Terence quiet.’
‘Perhaps not. Did you get a hint from someone to chum up with this elderly Ganymede?’
‘Burrow? Yes, from Dolly. I got her on to her husband’s family. She said she had never been told much about it, or bothered to read it up. Nor have the Grintons themselves. Their attitude in the matter is a little like that of Count Philippe Auguste Mathias de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Axel towards the mere business of living.’
‘Judith, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Axel is made to say that our servants will do that for us. At Grinton it’s apparently servants who hold the position of historiographers-royal.’
‘You’re saying all this because you don’t want me to mess around with this stupid mystery.’
‘Well, it does seem to me a family affair, and likely to lead to a good deal of embarrassment.’
‘A family affair is certainly an element in it. I wouldn’t go further than that. But I can’t be certain the missing man wasn’t murdered. And that’s a serious thing. If anything comes into my mind that might be useful to Denver and his crowd it’s my duty to pursue it.’
‘It’s your ingrained habit, you mean. I can’t take you anywhere without your indulging a trick of the old rage.’
‘Judith, you’re up to something of the sort yourself, with these mole-like researches in that ridiculous Reliquiae Grintonianae.’
‘True enough.’ Judith Appleby was seldom very serious in these attempts to dissuade her husband from detective activities. ‘Would you like to have a read of the thing now?’
‘I’ll have a look at it in the morning,’ Appleby said with a certain dignity. ‘At the moment, I propose to go to sleep.’
But this was not to be. Appleby lay awake for some time, obstinately thinking his way through the Grinton enigma. The last piece of hard evidence to have turned up was Charles Honeybath’s sudden memory about the dead man’s clothes. It is commonly women that notice such matters. But Charles spent much of his working life reproducing on canvas gents’ suitings of one sort of another, and was thus obliged to cultivate what might be called the sartorial eye. What Appleby had similarly been obliged to cultivate was alertness to every sort of criminal ingenuity. In the world of Scotland Yard – so largely a dream world – it was necessary to think twice about a corpse in American clothes – and shoes. The corpse might have been stripped of honest English garments and shoved into those alien ones in the interest of some deep and devilish design. In a really high-class detective story it would almost necessarily be so; the reader would feel cheated if it turned out otherwise. But – Appleby firmly decided – here at Grinton had been an honest-to-god American interloper now dead – or dead except in the wholesomely sceptical mind of Inspector Denver.
So far, so good – and to Charles a very high mark, indeed. Like the poet among hedgehogs, he was a man who noticed such things. He had noticed something dusty about the man, and also the bizarre circumstance that he had a cobweb in his hair. About the first of these further facts there was nothing remarkable, since the library wasn’t a particularly well dusted room. But the cobweb was another matter. Unless – a morbid thought – a spider had got rapidly to work on the corpse with the benevolent intention of weaving it a shroud, it powerfully suggested that fairly soon before his death the man had been occupied in the library’s cellarage, which Appleby had himself discovered to be dusty and cobwebby in a big way. But this wasn’t all. Honeybath had noticed something else.
Appleby almost sat up in bed as he realized the shock which this fact was suddenly occasioning in him. Why ever hadn’t he pondered it before?
Malign glee. . .a malicious grin. . .enjoying a nasty joke. . . This sequence of words from Honeybath was now sounding in Appleby’s ear again, and he realized with astonishment that it had evoked from him no more than a feeble joke of his own and an obscure medical term. Rictus. There was such a word, but he would need a dictionary to tell him exactly what it meant. Whereas there was something uncommonly exact, or at least vivid, in the image Honeybath had called up. Moreover, when studying a human face Charles Honeybath must own professional expertise in a very high degree.
Appleby, thus alert in darkness, perversely asked himself whether he was half asleep. How could there be any significance in this vagary of physiology? At the moment of death or just after it, random twitchings no doubt occur all over the body, and it may well be that the features fall into some chance configuration which it is idle to think of reading in any meaningful sense. Was anything more to be said about Charles’ impression than this? Surely not. Yet Appleby felt that he had somewhere read a recondite study of the matter which had advanced more complex considerations. Many living men carry around in their cast of countenance a silent exhibition of their cast of mind. One goes about looking supercilious, another severe, yet another furtive or alarmed. Sometimes the effect remains after death; sometimes it is, as it were, neutralized or swailed away, so that what is left may be seen either as a nothingness or a noble calm. Into some interpretations of the thing imaginative or sentimental or pietistic fancies intrude: the dying man has glimpsed before him heavenly joys or the flames of hell.
This was sombre territory – and suddenly Appleby found himself confronting something macabre. It was the story of a wake, a vigil maintained beside the body of a man eminent as a philosopher or a dramatist – Schopenhauer, Strindberg? – of strongly pessimistic persuasion. The features of this man had settled into an unaccustomed expression of calm nobility. Then suddenly in the silence of the night a small strange clatter was heard, and the dead face was found contorted in a ferocious snarl. It was because some odd chemistry had operated and the dead man’s false teeth had tumbled out of his mouth.
The story was probably apocryphal, Appleby told himself; it might even have been invented by one of his own sons who went in for modishly improbable fictions. Nor was it very relevant to Charles Honeybath’s experience. What Charles had seen, or believed he saw, was a man instantaneously struck dead while momentarily under the influence of a pleasurable malice. Under what sort of conditions might one find that? Perhaps under the conditions of warfare. A bullet finding a man in the act of successfully raining bullets into others; blown up in the act of launching a torpedo.
These were ugly re
flections and speculations; and there was no point in them. Such things didn’t happen at Grinton. Appleby had just told himself this when he sat up in bed very abruptly indeed. Faintly but unmistakably, the sound of a pistol shot had made itself heard in the house.
Judith slept on undisturbed – nor did anybody seem to have been awakened in the immediately adjoining bedrooms. Appleby got out of bed and opened the door. A long corridor lay in darkness, but there was a glimmer of light at the end of it. Listening intently, Appleby thought he heard voices – one of them an angry voice – in a distant quarter of the house. He slipped on a dressing gown and slippers and fished an electric torch out of his suitcase. Burglars with an adequate presence of mind sometimes found and flicked off a master switch, thus securing a convenient darkness holding up identification or pursuit. Then he hurried down the corridor.
It was the main staircase of the house that was lit up in a subdued way: probably a normal disposition of things at night. Stepped one below another, like advertisements on an Underground escalator, there hung a succession of Victorian oil paintings of fox-hunting life. They bore titles, he recalled, like Squire Grinton with the Nether Barset Hunt and Melton Mowbray: a Strong Scent and Returning Home after a Good Day. Like the tiny John Varley in the drawing-room, they wouldn’t fetch much under the hammer. But there were plenty of objects at Grinton worth making off with, although probably taken very little account of by their proprietor. Grintons had been a home-keeping crowd on the whole. But such of them as had wandered abroad – the scandalous Ambrose, for example – had probably been men of sufficient enterprise to possess themselves of objects of artistic or antiquarian interest as they moved. Thus among those commonplace busts skyed in the library there might well be something authentically Hellenic brought unobtrusively home in the baggage of such a traveller.
Appleby reached the ground floor, and the voices were immediately louder. It was, in fact, from the library that they came. The burglary, if burglary it was, didn’t own the nature of a chance distraction. It wasn’t an irrelevance. Almost certainly, it tied in with what Appleby was coming to think of as the absurdity, the zany mystery of the missing corpse.
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