A Connoisseur's Case (12 page)

‘My husband has had to go over to the farm,' she said, ‘but he will be back quite soon. It is something to do with the milking parlour.'

‘Why does one have milking parlours?' Judith, whom Appleby judged liable to start conversations on too brittle a metropolitan note, looked interrogatively at Mrs Coulson. Stable boys make those odd noises when grooming horses, but do milkmaids converse with cows?'

‘I'm afraid I have never thought about it. We must ask Bertram. He is very proud of knowing everything about English country ways.' Mrs Coulson paused, as if seeking some way of carrying on the topic. ‘In my own country we have a saying – or it may be a song, for I don't quite remember – about singing to the cattle. But that is not, perhaps, quite the same thing. The point about the milking parlour, I think, is that it has to meet certain standards before Bertram is allowed to market the milk in a certain way. Bertram has letters about it from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Not that we market fish.' Mrs Coulson paused again. ‘Does Colonel Raven market fish?'

Judith laughed. Having received a frown from her husband, she was obediently dropping her conversational pitch.

‘I don't think so – although fish are almost the only thing he talks about. Do Mr Coulson and he have angling as a topic in common?'

‘Oh, certainly they do. Bertram has all the topics he feels he ought to have. He does everything. Did you know, Lady Appleby, that there is something called the Country Gentlemen's Association?'

‘I don't think I did. But there ought to be, so I suppose there is.' Judith was conscious of receiving another frown from Appleby as a reward for this idiocy. ‘And Mr Coulson belongs?'

‘I believe he is on some sort of council or committee. My husband, you see, was a little diffident about coming to live at Scroop. Having nerved himself to it, he does nothing half-heartedly.'

‘That's very sensible,' Appleby said. He was coming to feel that Mrs Coulson, as one might say, decidedly knew what was in her flower pots. And a critical spirit lurked in her. For that matter, something less readily distinguishable lurked in her as well. In fact, it suddenly came to Appleby that he was enjoying the Crabtree affair very much. There was no dead wood in it. There were no supers – no mere walking-on parts. Everybody was at least worth observation. ‘So I take it,' he went on, ‘that Mr Coulson is very much a practical farmer?'

‘Yes, indeed. He is very much against what he calls surtax farming. And weekend squires.'

‘I suppose his former tenant, Mr Binns, was something of a weekend squire?'

‘My husband did eventually rather fall out with Mr Binns.' Suddenly, Mrs Coulson was speaking with caution. ‘But I don't think that, to this day, he really knows why he did so. Something bad, you see, happened in the Binnses' home.'

‘Yes, I've heard of that.'

‘And Bertram hated it. Bertram hated that happening in a home where – where there were children.' Mrs Coulson had again changed her manner, as if resolved upon frankness. ‘You see?'

‘Yes, I see.'

‘And he would have liked Scroop to have a direct heir. That – although he scarcely knows it – is why he agrees to having the young Binnses here from time to time.'

‘We walked up from the canal with them,' Judith said. ‘We found them – most interesting.'

‘Yes, of course.' Mrs Coulson gave Judith a glance which wasn't exactly uncomprehending. ‘And I like having them simply because they lost their mother when so young. I have thought I might be more to them than I have turned out to be.'

‘Don't be too sure.' What Appleby thought of as her social manner had suddenly dropped from Judith. She spoke gently and seriously. ‘You are rather important to Daphne Binns.'

‘You think so?' Mrs Coulson had flushed faintly. ‘There are things one learns too late.'

Silence followed this – as it will when casual acquaintances have gone a step too deep. Mrs Coulson looked out over the terrace, as if hoping that her husband might now turn up. But the park was empty. And its emptiness seemed to drive Mrs Coulson to further confidence.

‘And there is the fact,' she said, ‘that this house is haunted.' She smiled at what must have been Judith's look of alarm. ‘Perhaps you are thinking of poor Mrs Binns, who disappeared so oddly. But it's nothing like that. I don't speak literally, Lady Appleby. Scroop is haunted only for my husband. And by the last Mrs Coulson.'

‘The Grand Collector?'

‘They called her that.' There was a trace of impatience in the present Mrs Coulson's voice. ‘I suppose she was a remarkable woman. Scroop House appears in the books of that period – in the biographies and memoirs of famous people.'

Appleby, who had been listening in silence, himself for some reason felt impatient at this point.

‘Perhaps it does,' he said, ‘–here and there. But I suspect that local legend exaggerates that aspect of the place, if I may say so. And I hope your husband doesn't put in a lot of time sighing over past glories that are mainly in his own head.'

Whether this forthright and not entirely civil speech was calculated or not, it had a decided effect upon Mrs Coulson.

‘But he does!' she said. ‘And yet he is quite as able a man as Alfred Binns. He would have gone farther, by a long way. I mean, at the sort of thing men like to do. Nobody knew more about packing meat. He was all set to put Australia right away ahead. But he had to have this. And it hasn't worked – or not really. I don't know why. But I sometimes think he doesn't, for some reason, feel entitled to be at Scroop at all.'

‘How very odd!' Judith said – rather at random, and by way of breaking another silence.

‘I sometimes think it
makes
people odd. Certainly it did no good to Alfred Binns. And old Mrs Coulson is said to have turned very queer in the end. Of course she had reached a great age. She turned secretive, I understand. But here comes Bertram.'

 

Appleby eyed with considerable curiosity the figure now hurrying down the terrace towards them. But, although the figure was indeed making very good speed, ‘hurrying' was not the precisely appropriate word. ‘Loping' might be better. Bertram Coulson was tall and lean, with a slight stoop. His possession of these features was enhanced by his being dressed in a Norfolk jacket which only just stopped short of a length suggesting a hunting coat, knickerbockers which hovered between being breeches and the species of garment vulgarly known in Appleby's youth as ‘plus-fours', and leggings with the dull polish that comes from the careful scouring and burnishing away of many impositions of mud and loam. And Bertram Coulson carried a shooting stick. It was not, perhaps, an object with which many gentlemen equip themselves for the purpose of strolling to and from a home farm. But it did contribute to the general effect. So did the lope. It seemed to suggest somebody who is never more at home than when striding across ploughland on some urgent bucolic occasion.

Not – Appleby at once added to himself in justice – that there was anything that could be called absurd about Bertram Coulson. He was a good-looking man, and the clothes that did somehow catch the eye were good-looking clothes too; his tweed had plainly reached him from the Hebrides by way of Savile Row. There wasn't about him – as there had been about Mr David Channing-Kennedy of the Jolly Leggers any suggestion of the spurious. He was man who had taken on a role, and who remained a little conscious of the fact.

‘Lady Appleby? How do you do.' Bertram Coulson advanced to shake hands, became aware that the result of this gesture was to offer Judith the shooting stick, rectified the error hastily, and then turned to Appleby. ‘Sir John, how do you do. I must apologize to Lady Appleby for not being on the spot. Good of Raven to persuade you to come over. He's a very good neighbour of mine. We hit it off pretty well on one local matter and another. Both believe in keeping an eye on things. Many of them are a neglectful lot about here, I'm sorry to say. Up and down to London by train, spend the weekends with their noses in financial journals, and scarcely know their own people by sight. Sad state of affairs. But how is your uncle, Lady Appleby? I gathered he'd had another touch of gout. Stood thigh-deep in too many rivers in his time, I suppose. But worth it, after all. No peace like the peace you get flogging a decent stretch of water.'

Various civilities succeeded upon this speech. Mrs Coulson's contributions to these were adequate but not prominent. In her husband's presence she seemed inclined to withdraw into the position of a spectator. And Appleby thought that her attitude to Coulson was tinged with an ironical quality that one would scarcely have predicted from the general warmth and simplicity of her personality.

‘The reason I'm late,' Coulson went on, ‘is simply that, as Edith may have told you, I'm a bit of a practical farmer nowadays. I went over to see about flooring the milking parlour of my own little concern. And it occurred to me' – Coulson turned to his wife – ‘that it might be a good time to concrete the farther yard. There are times of the year when Bridges has to bring in his cows from the twelve-acre through a couple of feet of mud. And mud' – this time Coulson turned to Judith – ‘is bad for muck, wouldn't you say?'

‘Oh, yes – indeed.' Judith was all grave assent. ‘Concrete a yard, and you begin to get some of the cost back in muck in no time. I'm so glad you're sound on manure.'

Coulson was delighted. But Mrs Coulson – Appleby noted – was regarding Judith with a sceptical eye.

‘I don't remember,' Mrs Coulson said, ‘that Bertram was so enthusiastic about the manure, or would have entertained visitors with it so speedily, when he was an overlander.'

‘An overlander?' Appleby said.

The
overlander, in the end.' Mrs Coulson spoke with a touch of affectionate pride. ‘Whenever they ate a steak in Melbourne or Adelaide – and they begin, you know, eating them at breakfast and go on all day – Bertram had brought it to them on the hoof. And he was in at the death, too.'

Coulson laughed.

‘By the death,' he said, ‘Edith means the big freeze. We stopped herding them down that murderous thousand miles, and started slaughtering and freezing them on the spot. Technical advances made it the logical thing. But it took – well, it took all the romance away.'

Judith nodded sagely – so that Appleby had a gloomy vision of her making a pet of this Bertram Coulson rather in the way she had been disposed to do with the late Seth Crabtree. He hoped that another prompt fatality wouldn't ensue.

‘But there's still some romance,' Judith asked, ‘in concreting that yard, and thinking about the twelve-acre, and – well, in living where Coulsons have lived for a long time?'

Appleby wondered whether Mrs Coulson's toes were curling as his were at this outrageous appeal to sentiment. Not that Judith wasn't doing her bit. They weren't, after all, honest payers of a morning call. They were snoopers, as young Mr Peter Binns had roundly suggested. And Judith was simply prodding Bertram Coulson to see how he would respond.

He didn't, in fact, respond with any very direct reply: rather, he gave the impression of something like a nervous shying away from the theme of Coulson succeeding Coulson.

‘I certainly arranged about the yard to my satisfaction, Lady Appleby. But then I was held up by something else. A fellow called Hilliard, our local police inspector, rang me up.' Coulson turned to Appleby and gave him a straight glance – the kind of straight glance, Appleby thought, that is planned that way a second before it happens. ‘It was about this poor fellow Crabtree.'

‘The man who had the fatal accident yesterday?' It was Mrs Coulson who asked this.

‘Yes, my dear – at the lock. Hilliard is coming up to make some inquiries. As you know, I ran into the old man yesterday. It must have been only a few hours before he died.'

‘And it was my wife and I who found the body,' Appleby said. It wasn't clear to him whether Bertram Coulson already knew this. ‘Has Hilliard in fact told you that Crabtree's death was accidental?'

‘Well, no. His mind seems to be running on foul play. But policemen are obliged to think of such things.' Coulson checked himself, and made what appeared to be a spontaneous gesture of apology. ‘But I really forgot, Sir John, that you must yourself, I suppose, be called a policeman.'

Appleby felt that it was his turn to offer a straight glance, and at the same time make it explicit that in fact he wasn't paying a merely social call.

‘Of course,' he said, ‘I have no standing in this affair at all. Or not officially. But, as it happens, I have spent the better part of my career in criminal investigation. So when I happen to stumble upon what may be a crime, the local police take it for granted that I'll give them a hand if I can. Something of the sort is plainly in this man Hilliard's head. And I have to confess that an unsolved mystery acts as a kind of irritant on me. I want to scratch. So wherever I go at the moment – Scroop House or anywhere else – I shall be thinking about Crabtree's death, and looking round for any light I can get on it. This is rather an awkward thing to say. But it must be said.'

There was a short silence. Mrs Coulson employed it in remarking a drooping plant on the balustrade, rising, watering it, and returning composedly to her chair.

‘Quite right,' Bertram Coulson said. ‘If there's a mystery about this man's death, I'm glad you're here to look into it. We don't want anything of a dubious nature going unquestioned, I assure you. Bad for local feeling. Of course I'm a magistrate and so forth, as well as passing pretty tolerably as the squire, and perhaps I can say without impertinence that your help is welcome.'

‘Thank you.' Appleby felt that Coulson had come rather well out of this. ‘And I'm afraid we can't very lightly dismiss the possibility of foul play. Frankly, I don't see how Crabtree's injuries could have been accidentally occasioned.'