A Connoisseur's Case (19 page)

‘You mean having seen my car at a time and place that fits?'

‘Of course, there is that. And at a time and place, Mr Binns, that would fit with a good deal. But there's more than that. Your story has a very odd shape to it. But I can fit at least one loop of it, so to speak, into the jigsaw.'

‘There is a jigsaw?' Binns spoke swiftly. ‘One, I mean, that is beginning to show a pattern?'

‘Dear me, yes. I've been looking into this affair, you know, for more than twenty-four hours now.'

‘Yes, of course.' Alfred Binns received this sudden shocking piece of arrogance almost humbly.

‘And I'm under a sort of contract, as a matter of fact, to clear it up by midnight. By the way, when your son was quite small, and when you had Crabtree about the place, was there any one thing about the boy that particularly worried you?'

Binns suddenly passed a hand rather wearily over his forehead.

‘It seems strange,' he said. ‘But that's just the sort of thing I can't remember.'

‘For example, did the boy sometimes seem to have more pocket money than seemed accountable?'

Alfred Binns stared.

‘Why, yes,' he said. That's true. It was a worry. I used to wonder whether he was going to his mother's purse. She…we parted, you know, when Peter was about fifteen. But up till then.'

‘I see. And later? Have there been later occasions, I mean, upon which Peter has seemed oddly flush?'

Binns frowned.

‘Perhaps there have. There was his second car. It looked remarkably expensive. Peter said he'd traded in his old one in some advantageous way. But I remember feeling that there was something to account for.'

‘Thank you.' Appleby nodded gravely. ‘I ought to say that, in the nature of the case, your son remains just as much a suspect as you do. Rather more so, perhaps – since I could provide a motive of sorts for his killing Crabtree. I shall probably be in a position to provide one for you too. But it may take just a little thinking out. You are a slightly more mysterious figure to me, Mr Binns, than your son is. In fact, I see nothing that is mysterious about Peter. Your daughter, however, is another matter.'

Binns had received the first part of this speech impassively. But its conclusion brought him to his feet.

‘Daphne has nothing to do with this,' he said. ‘She has no part in it at all. I'll thank you to leave her alone.'

‘I hope I shall be able to. But has what you have told me, Mr Binns, really been entirely dictated by a sense of what you called your own better safety? Are you quite sure that Daphne's better safety hasn't been a little in the picture too?'

For a moment Binns was silent. When he spoke, it was with a sudden vehemence which bore every appearance of spontaneity.

‘For God's sake,' he said, ‘live up to your boasting. Find who killed Crabtree. And find him by midnight. I can't stand much more of this.'

 

 

Judith Appleby's teeny toddle had not, in fact, been along the canal. That – she discovered – was a route she never wanted to take again. It was the route, after all, that had led from Seth Crabtree alive and conversable to Seth Crabtree dead and battered. She had therefore turned in the other direction on leaving the inn and taken the narrow lane down which the disagreeable van man had retreated with his rejected piano. She would explore the hamlet of Nether Scroop.

It didn't look as if this enterprise could occupy her for long. There was a small church which might, or might not be of interest; there was a village shop which was also a post office; there was a scattering of cottages round an uncertain demarcated green; and behind hedges there were two or three houses of slightly larger pretension. Just emerging from the garden gate of one of these last was the only figure visible in the scene. It was that of a woman who, seeing Judith's approach, first hesitated and then waited for her to come up. As she did so, Judith realized that it was Mrs Coulson.

For a moment Judith couldn't recall why this encounter took her slightly by surprise. Then she remembered.

‘Good afternoon,' she said. ‘I'm so glad that you are better.'

‘Better?' Mrs Coulson looked vague. Then she smiled. ‘These small attacks never last. I was only sorry to have to go and lie down during your call.' She hesitated. ‘You are looking round the village? Shall we walk together to the church? There is one rather lovely Elizabethan tomb.'

‘Yes, I should like to see that.'

Mrs Coulson took a step forward. As she did so, the garden gate by which she had been standing swung to, and Judith saw that it carried a small brass plate:

 

BRIAN WEST MB, BS

PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON

 

It was to be presumed that Mrs Coulson's indisposition had prompted her to visit her doctor. This being no subject for comment, Judith moved forward, and the two women walked towards the church together.

‘Your husband is not with you?' Mrs Coulson asked.

‘He is talking to somebody in the inn. I must go back there in ten minutes or so.'

‘His inquiries about the poor man Crabtree have brought him to the Jolly Leggers?'

‘Well, I think that is what he is discussing now. He is interested in somebody who was staying there last night.'

‘I see. I suppose that no stone must be left unturned.'

‘Just that.' Judith was amused by this well-worn metaphor. ‘All sorts of things can lurk under stones.'

‘Yes, indeed. And some of them will be far from pretty.'

Judith was silent. There had been something in Mrs Coulson's voice which she found difficult to know how to respond to.

‘I wonder whether it has occurred to Sir John,' Mrs Coulson said, ‘that Hollywood may be in danger too?'

‘Hollywood – your butler – in danger?' This placid if slightly subterraneous lady, Judith was reflecting, could scarcely have uttered more absolutely mysterious words.

‘Crabtree came back to Scroop out of the past.' Mrs Coulson had paused at the entrance to the churchyard, and her gaze was travelling slowly over its crumbling evidences of mortality. ‘You would agree that the essence of his situation lay in that?'

‘I suppose it did.'

‘He was
bringing
something out of the past. And therefore somebody killed him. I have been thinking about it, Lady Appleby, and that is how it seems to me.'

‘I can see it as a possibility. But I don't understand how you relate to it the notion of Hollywood's being in danger.'

‘He is the only other person with any direct knowledge of Scroop in Sara Coulson's time.'

‘Yes, I see. But Hollywood has been available for killing for a long time. And nobody has killed him yet.'

Mrs Coulson nodded slowly. The gesture might have been an acknowledgement that her line of thought had been not precisely rational. Or it might have been a nod directed, so to speak, to some further inward and unspoken process of her own mind. And she moved forward again towards the church porch.

‘As you see,' she said, ‘there is a parvis. It is very small – yet hardly smaller than the church itself. The church at Upper Scroop is larger, but I am very fond of this one. You will see a little Saxon work at the east end.'

They walked round the church. Mrs Coulson continued the competent talk of a squire's lady who has done some appropriate homework in local archaeology. But she had made one very odd remark. And Judith felt a mounting conviction that she was going to make others.

‘Shall we go inside?' Mrs Coulson held open a roughly constructed wire door – intended, one supposed, to discourage sheep, cows and others of the brute creation from frequenting the church porch. There were the usual notices and exhortations, including an uncertainly sketched barometer or thermometer in red ink, designed to impress upon the faithful how much they yet had to subscribe if the church roof was not to fall down on them.

‘Of course, Bertram is responsible for the chancel,' Mrs Coulson said, studying this. ‘The chancel is always the responsibility of the patron of a living. And Bertram doubles any sum subscribed for the upkeep of the rest of the fabric. He is very keen on everything of that sort.'

‘He is a strong churchman?'

‘I hardly think it can be called that.' The faint irony occasionally to be distinguished in Mrs Coulson's voice was sounding. ‘He seems to have no religious convictions. But he always goes to church. And likes to see a good turnout, as he calls it, of the village people.'

‘Yes, I see.' Judith realized, more vividly than before, that the woman beside her harboured rather a large impatience with her husband's conception of his place in society.

They entered the little church and walked round it. There wasn't a great deal upon which to pause until they reached the north transept, which was screened off by some worm-eaten oak.

‘This is the tomb,' Mrs Coulson said. ‘Don't you like it? The Crabtree Tomb.'

So Judith examined the Crabtree Tomb – thinking, as she did so, that this odd lady had certainly brought off another surprise. Sir William Crabtree lay supine in armour and his wife lay at his side. Beneath them, and in bas-relief, a line of Crabtree sons face a line of Crabtree daughters, all in prayer.

‘So the Crabtrees were people of consideration long ago.' Judith turned to Mrs Coulson. ‘I felt Seth to be a Thomas Hardy character, but it didn't occur to me that he might be first cousin to Tess. Here's where a kind of fineness in him came from.'

‘I'm sure Bertram would think so.' The irony was operative again. ‘But I suspect that the Crabtrees have been very simple folk for generations, Lady Appleby. There may be something in blue blood. I don't know. But I doubt whether it can be put in cold storage.'

‘So do I. But a clever boy, a sensitive boy, bred in a cottage, may have his whole life conditioned by knowing that his name is on a tomb like this. When he has become aware of it, he may see the gentry with a different eye.'

‘And see their wives with a different eye, too.'

Judith had a sudden feeling – perhaps to the credit of her own ancestry – that for the purposes of this sort of conversation it might be seemly to get out of God's blessing and into the warm sun. Mrs Coulson, however, had sat down in a pew.

‘I never saw this man Crabtree,' she said. ‘You saw him once.'

‘Twice. Once living and once dead.'

‘And both occasions were only yesterday. I try to think how he must have appeared to you. As an English villager, I suppose, with some overlay of American democratic assurance.'

‘Not in the least.' Judith, seeing there was no help for it, sat down in the pew in front of Mrs Coulson, and turned round to speak to her. ‘He seemed to me to have taken no colour from his recent years. He was a villager, as you call it, with something else added. I'm not quite sure what. Talent, feeling, sensibility: that was my idea. But I have to admit that my husband felt there was some strain of disingenuous-ness or concealment in him as well.'

‘Something – wicked?' Mrs Coulson hesitated. ‘A man who might make unscrupulous use of – well, of something he had stumbled on?'

Judith knew that, for a fraction of a second, she had had hard work not to stare.

‘I felt nothing like that,' she said. ‘But I'm not sure that he hadn't come back to something he was very far from telling us about.'

‘Exactly.' Mrs Coulson was eager. ‘Something out of the
past
. And it must be stopped. That is the important thing.'

‘But it
has
been stopped, has it not?' Judith made this point reasonably. ‘Somebody has killed Crabtree. Do you think that somebody ought to kill Hollywood as well?'

‘There is something mysterious about Hollywood. I discovered that today. It would not surprise me if somebody killed him. I believe somebody will. He knows too much.'

‘About the past? Does he know something about the present too?'

‘Perhaps. I don't think I greatly mind about the present. Or do I? You see, Lady Appleby, that I am very confused. But I cannot believe that any revelation about the present can hurt anybody that – that I really love. I hope that your husband will discover everything about the present that there is to discover, and that the mystery of Crabtree's death will be sufficiently explained as a result. I hope that we shall not have to have the whole past spread out before us.'

‘Mrs Coulson, this seems to me to be a very strange conversation that we are having. I just don't know where to begin trying to make sense of it. About Hollywood, for instance. You say that you discovered something mysterious about him today. What could that have been?'

‘The alibi, of course. I am sure your husband didn't believe it. I am sure he saw how surprised I was.'

‘If you were surprised, I have no doubt that John detected the fact. But I still don't understand you.'

‘Hollywood protected me. He said that I was checking linen with him. It wasn't true.'

‘I see. But you didn't say so at the time? You accepted what you call his protection?'

‘I had reason to.'

‘And he must have known that?'

‘He must. He knows a great deal.'

‘But why should he do this?'

‘I have no idea, Lady Appleby. But I think he is a deep man.'

‘Perhaps he is. But there doesn't seem to me to be anything particularly deep in the action of Hollywood's that we are discussing. His protecting you resulted in your protecting him. He knew that you would be grateful for an alibi, and he wanted one himself. That may, or may not, be sinister. In the circumstances, after all, anybody would want an alibi. But there is the fact of the matter. On the terrace of Scroop House, and between the pouring of a glass of Madeira and the handing of a piece of cake, you and your husband's butler cooked up what is undoubtedly a piece of criminal deception between you. I hadn't a notion of it. But you're quite right in supposing it unlikely that it eluded my husband. For anything of the sort, John has pretty well developed a sixth sense. It was rash of you – by which I mean the two of you.'