Appleby And Honeybath

by Michael Innes

  Then one day (yesterday in fact) something distinctly awkward happens in the library – although whether he is directly implicated in it or not is at present an unsolved question. And suddenly in the night he realizes that he must have left one of those catalogues behind him. A very recent catalogue, as its number will at once betray. Probably carrying his fingerprints. Awkward. He gets out of bed and steals down to retrieve it. While he is down below, first Mrs Mustard arrives, and then Hillam. Fracas! Enter Terence, who promptly fires his pistol. Tancock decides to emerge, and when he does so makes the discomfiting discovery that police have been lurking around all the time. Finally he spins them a yarn that has at least a certain ingenuity to recommend it.

  But the yarn involves the missing body. And the missing body is the crux. And this conjectural history of Giles Tancock affords no explanation of it. No place for the body. Checkmate.

  Appleby got up and poured himself another cup of coffee.

  Second scheme of depredation: the short-term one, and susceptible of being outlined very succinctly. Hallam Hillam, some sort of art historian. Probably from Reliquiae Grintonianae, but perhaps through other professional researches, he learns about Ambrose – or Autolycus – Grinton and his thieved Claudes. Cadges an invitation to Grinton. Spots the Claude in the drawing-room and knows he isn’t on a fool’s errand. Like Tancock, is under some sufficiently powerful impulse to risk a nocturnal visit to the library despite the afternoon’s startling episode there and the subsequent visit of police. It doesn’t seem possible that he has any precise information about where the drawings may be found. There is, of course, nothing about that in the Reverend Simon Upcott’s book. Nevertheless, Hillam contrives to feel himself on the very brink of success. He renders an irritated and thwarted impression, all the same. A jumpy chap. But if this is the whole of his story, the dead man is again left out in the cold. So once more checkmate is the last word.

  Appleby had arrived at this bleak conclusion when he became aware of Burrow’s voice murmuring discreetly in his ear.

  ‘The telephone, Sir John. Mr Denver the policeman.’

  ‘Appleby here.’

  ‘Denver speaking. We’ve found the body, Sir John.’

  ‘Dear me!’ Appleby was constrained to this almost Honeybathlike response by a feeling of something ominous in the air. This chap Denver was reporting to him precisely as if he, Appleby, were in charge of the case. It was absurd and most irregular. Nevertheless, Appleby succumbed at once to what his wife was so fond of borrowing from Love’s Labour’s Lost to describe. A trick of the old rage… ‘An American’s body, I take it?’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘Keen observation, Inspector. But Mr Honeybath’s, not mine. Where has it turned up?’

  ‘At the parish church, Sir John. Or, rather, in its graveyard.’

  ‘Do you mean somebody has been burying it in the night?’

  ‘Not exactly that. I’m wondering whether you would care to’ – Denver hesitated for a moment, and then plunged at a bold word – ‘investigate?’

  ‘Yes.’ (Honesty, after all, is the best policy.)

  ‘I’ll send a car at once. If, perhaps, you’d care just to take a stroll down the drive.’

  ‘Why the dickens should I do that?’

  ‘Well, sir, I think we oughtn’t to advertise too much – not just at the moment we shouldn’t – to the Grintons and their other guests.’

  ‘Sound policy, Denver. I’ll set out in five minutes.’

  So Appleby had to acknowledge to himself, once more, that Denver was a thoroughly good officer. With an uncommon puzzle on his hands, he was only acting sensibly in tapping a considerable fund of experience in such matters when it came his way. Appleby returned to the breakfast-room, murmured to Judith, got into his overcoat, and set off in search of his unnecessary conveyance. The church could be no distance away – and indeed he recalled Honeybath as telling him there was a short cut to it from the back of the house. But no doubt it was a matter of punctilio with Denver that he should arrive in style at this new seat of the inquiry. There was a young uniformed constable in the driver’s seat, and on Appleby’s approach he leapt from it with parade ground smartness. He had clearly been told that he was going to act as chauffeur to a very great man indeed.

  ‘Well now,’ Appleby said cheerfully as he got into the front seat, ‘have you been involved in this discovery of a dead man?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I found him, as a matter of fact. A bit of a shock, really.’

  ‘It comes to us all, sooner or later. Sooner, with me. I hadn’t been on the beat a week when there suddenly was my first corpse. Outside a pub. A pool of blood. Now tell me about this one.’

  ‘As I drive, sir?’

  ‘Certainly not. Now, and giving your whole mind to it.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ The young man had taken this well. ‘I live in the village – marrying into it, you may say.’

  ‘You got married to a girl from here, so they found you a house at once and told you to be the village bobby.’

  ‘About that sir, although the term now seems to be neighbourhood policeman.’

  ‘Encouraged to be friendly all round.’

  ‘Just that, sir. With some of them it can be a bit of a strain. But I like talking to the kids. And it’s why, once a week or thereabout, I go into the Grinton Arms for a pint and a chat.’

  ‘Without your funny hat.’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, of course. Off-duty kit. And yesterday evening I got talking to an old chap called Bill Mace – or he got talking to me. He has a cottage near the church, and since ever anybody can remember he’s been saying he has lived in it for eighty-seven years. It’s the only dwelling that has a view of the churchyard. He’s an unreliable old gossip is Bill Mace – particularly once a month, which is as often as he can afford to get drunk. But when he starts talking to me I always try to listen. You never know.’

  ‘A great truth in our walk of life, constable. Yes?’

  ‘Earlier in the evening, he said, he’d seen a funny thing: a gent going into the church. He said a gent, but may have meant actually a gentleman.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby received this mysterious remark seriously as an attempt at precision. ‘There doesn’t seem anything particularly funny in a man going into a church.’

  ‘It’s more commonly women nowadays.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true. Devotion has become women’s work. But what arrested the attention of this Bill Mace?’

  ‘He was carrying a kettle and a frying pan.’

  ‘Mace was?’

  ‘No, sir. The gent. Presently he came out again, but returned within a couple of minutes carrying a bed. He took that into the church too. A folding bed, it was.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Mace says he drew down his blind. He says he was afraid he was seeing things. It’s a trouble with him now and then.’

  ‘So he took no further action?’

  ‘No, sir. But I did.’

  ‘Good. Go on.’

  ‘I downed the remainder of my pint – it wouldn’t have looked right if I hadn’t – and went straight over to the church. There was nothing out of the way in it – so it looked as if Mace had been seeing things, just as he said. But I tried the vestry, which leads off one side of the chancel. The vicar never locks it up, although I’ve warned him more than once. Well, there the bed was – and the kettle and frying pan and a fold-up table and a chair I knew didn’t belong there as well. It wasn’t very accountable.’

  ‘Clearly not.’ Appleby paused. ‘And what, constable, did you do then?’

  ‘I’ve been taught that when you come on one unaccountable thing you should lose no time before looking for others. So I cast around. That’s how I came to look into the charnel-house.’

  ‘Into the what?’

  ‘It’s what the vicar calls it, although it’s no more than the shed where the man who looks after the churchyard and digs the graves keeps his tools and things. Except that when he tur
ns up bones – and once or twice a skull, I believe – he stores them there. Thinking of them as curiosities, I suppose. They ought to be buried again at once. And perhaps with the vicar saying a prayer over them. I wouldn’t know. But there the body was.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I went straight home and got Mr Denver on the telephone, sir. And that’s all. Of my part in the thing, I mean.’

  ‘I think Mr Denver will agree with me that you didn’t do badly. And now we can move off.’

  The body had been moved out of the charnel-house (which did in fact shelter a little pile of bones) and into a police van of sombre character in which it was to be whisked away for what Inspector Denver called forensication. Appleby contented himself with a look at the dead man’s features and found them uninformative: during the night hours it was to be presumed that their internal chemistry had wiped out the expression that had so vividly struck Charles Honeybath.

  ‘No external signs of violence immediately apparent,’ Denver said. ‘Of course we’ll know more in a few hours’ time. As for the clothes, they’re American beyond question. There’s the label of a New York store, or tailor, on the inside of the jacket. That’s the only scrap of documentation, though. All the pockets turned out and emptied. But this is an odd sort of hiding place, wouldn’t you say? Gruesome.’

  ‘Or at least fantastic. Have you discovered how often this shed is likely to be entered?’

  ‘At this time of year, with nothing much going on in the way of tidying up the churchyard, not all that often. Probably not until the fellow concerned has a burial on his hands.’

  ‘What about the church, where your young man tells me those scraps of furniture were found by him tucked away in the vestry?’

  ‘Every second Sunday only. The vicar has three other rural parishes on his hands, and manages only one early-morning communion and one matins in the month. No demand, he’d tell you – and he never bobs in just on his own. Strange, that – don’t you think?’

  ‘What I chiefly think, Denver, is that this has the character of a holding operation: a temporary cache while taking a second breath in an alarming situation. But another thing: why both shed and vestry? There would have been plenty of room, surely, for both the corpse and the paraphernalia in either. Perhaps it’s a pointer to something in the character of the operator.’

  ‘How so, sir?’

  ‘My guess is that he made two journeys. One with the body and one with the furniture. And the body first, on a trip Mr Bill Mace didn’t spot. When he came back with the furniture – the existence of which he may have been unaware of at the time of bringing the body – he suddenly felt he didn’t want to face the body again. So he thought of the vestry, and dumped the stuff there.’

  ‘And he knew the lie of the land, Sir John, and about the infrequency of the services here. A local man – like, for instance, Mr Grinton himself.’

  ‘Aren’t you being rather determined, Denver, not to lose sight of Mr Grinton?’

  ‘Certainly I am, Sir John. I’ve no mind to lose sight of anybody.’ Denver said this stiffly, but at once added, ‘You’ve produced a picture, sir. Not a doubt about that. I’m most grateful to you.’

  ‘The chap who will be grateful to the police for finding the corpse is Mr Honeybath. He can’t any longer be suspected of having dealings with little green men.’

  ‘I never thought Honeybath was off his head.’ Denver was a shade indignant again. ‘But I did think that his supposed dead man might be ambulant – capable of packing up and making off under his own steam. Do you happen to have heard, Sir John, of anything of particularly high value that may be tucked away in the library up there?’

  This sudden and penetrating question took Appleby by surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at once. ‘A group of small paintings or drawings by a French artist of the seventeenth century, Claude Lorrain.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Denver had taken the measure of this at once. ‘That’s just something more that it’s hard to believe. Who knows about them?’

  ‘Certainly not Mr Grinton. Just possibly, his butler. Assuredly my wife and myself. And, among the present guests up there, almost certainly Mr Hillam.’

  ‘Well, I’m definitely not losing sight of him. That was a poor show he put up in the library last night, wouldn’t you say? Not that the same wasn’t true of the other fellow as well. The son-in-law. Tancock. Mightn’t he know about the Claudes too?’

  ‘He might. Or he might know about something else. Or they may be hand in glove with one another, although they gave no hint of it. But neither of them seems to me to guide us to the dead man. Where did this American come from, and why did he come?’

  ‘For the matter of that, Sir John, why did he go – and why had he been camping – if it had been he – in that little room behind the library? No end of questions. What seems fairly clear to me is that it all ended up with an effort to remove the slightest trace of a crime. And it looks as if it were an effort made by somebody unaware of Mr Honeybath having come upon the body, or of you and Mr Honeybath having come upon the camping kit. But for these two things, there would be no mystery at this moment. There would only be a body and some junk in hideaways of tolerable security, waiting to be permanently disposed of at the first safe opportunity.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector – only I’m not quite sure about the crime – or at least about its having been at all a bumper one. We’ve found the corpse, but is it very substantially what the lawyers call a corpus delicti, evidence of a major breach of the law? There may be light on that when you get your police-surgeon’s report.’

  ‘In a preliminary and informal way, Sir John, that may be within an hour or two. And I’ll let you know as soon as it comes in. But the dead man’s identity may be a real headache. Missing persons have a way of not being missed. Particularly, as you know, if they happen to be foreigners. Shall I get that constable to drive you back to the house?’

  ‘Thank you, no. I think I’ll walk. And perhaps take a turn round the place. I’ll contact you if anything comes into my head. Or anything that at all looks like standing up.’

  So Appleby went strolling through what Terence Grinton called his park. It wasn’t really much of a park, since the ancient manorial status of Grinton was still evident in the fact that what fairly closely surrounded the house was the territory of the original home farm, around which now extended the fields of further farms which the Grintons had progressively acquired for themselves over several centuries. Appleby thus strolled for quite some time, having thinking to do.

  The identity of the intrusive American, now dead, would no doubt emerge in time. It was less important than his role. With just what – and perhaps with whom – did he tie up? It seemed unlikely that he could be in any way connected with the shifty Hallam Hillam. About Hillam there was no doubt. He had somehow got wind of the possible treasure trove of Claudes, and he had wished himself upon the Grintons, or at least upon Dolly Grinton, as a result. He was entirely a newcomer on the scene. And he believed himself – Appleby was almost certain of this – to be on the brink of successful depredation when baffled and incommoded by unexpected complications in the situation. It was, of course, possible that he had in some way acted rashly as a result, and was implicated in the main mischief under review. So it wouldn’t be quite prudent to write him off as, so to speak, a peripheral phenomenon. But the likelihood lay that way.

  Giles Tancock was a different fish. Depredation was his line too, but it was on a long-term basis. With those catalogues in his pocket, he was in the habit of prowling his father-in-law’s library, and unobtrusively milking it. Perhaps his wife Magda knew or suspected this; to Honeybath she had acknowledged herself to be nervous, even apprehensive, of the now police-infested Grinton scene. It was a minor point. What was significant was her husband’s movements – and even, perhaps, something in his character. Had he been in any sort of collusion with the dead man – either for some time, or abruptly drawn into something of
the sort by an unforeseen turn of events? He was a more resourceful person than Hillam: his performance during that nocturnal episode in the library, when in a tight place, had been evidence of a certain power of quick thinking.

  What else was to be said about Tancock? Looked at hard, the notion of his being in any sort of settled partnership with the American just didn’t wash. Tancock’s behaviour was commonplace in a shabby fashion; the American’s was almost too fantastic to be believed. What could bring a man to consume hasty Welsh rabbits in a lurking-place in another man’s house? Find an answer to that conundrum, Appleby told himself, and this weekend mystery was solved.

  As he became aware of this conclusion he became aware, too, that he was about to be joined by another guest taking the morning air, Magda Tancock’s former tutor, the learned Miss Arne. She greeted him briskly, and fell into step with him at once – not, it presently appeared, without designs upon him.

  ‘Chilly but no puddles,’ she said. ‘So we can walk right round the gardens, Sir John, and call it the day’s constitutional.’

  ‘An odd use of the word,’ Appleby returned. ‘Would it perhaps have been university slang?’

  ‘Definitely – and a sort of academic ancestor of jogging. A constitutional of forty minutes every day was de rigueur at Oxford in the eighteen-eighties. What is this I hear of further absurdities in the library during the night?’

  ‘They occurred.’ Appleby felt that this was a little bleak and off-putting. ‘Our friend Mrs Mustard was involved. She appears to have believed that the mysterious affair of the afternoon might be cleared up by means of supernatural solicitation. Nothing came of the idea.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it. An unresolved fatality is an unsatisfactory thing to leave behind one after a quiet weekend in the country. I suspect you, Sir John, of having your own views about it all.’