Appleby File (14 page)

‘Why should Vandervell clear the decks – take care to get rid of Litter and the rest of them – if he was simply proposing to walk over
there’
– Truebody gestured towards the horizon – ‘for the purpose of drowning himself? The unnecessariness of the measure worries me. He could simply have said he was going for a normal sort of walk – or even that he was going out to dinner. He could have said half a dozen things. Don’t you agree?’

‘Yes, I think I do – in a way. But one has to allow for the fact that the mind of a man contemplating suicide is quite likely to work a shade oddly. Vandervell may simply have felt the need of a period of solitude, here at Pentallon, in which to arrive at a final decision about himself. Anyway, he
has
been drowned.’

‘Indeed, yes. And his posting that letter immediately beforehand does seem to rule out accident. Unless, of course, be was putting on a turn.’

‘A turn, Mr Truebody?’

‘One of those just-short-of-suicide efforts which psychologists nowadays interpret as a cry for help.’

‘That’s often a valid enough explanation of unsuccessful suicide, no doubt. But what would the cry for help be designed to save him from? Would it be the embrace of that predatory Mrs Mountmorris?’

‘It hadn’t occurred to me that way.’ Truebody looked startled. ‘But something else has. Say that Vandervell was expecting a visitor here at Pentallon, and that for some reason he didn’t want the circumstance to be known. That would account for his clearing everybody out. Then the visit took place, and was somehow disastrous. Or perhaps it just
didn’t
take place, and there was for some reason disaster in the mere fact of that. And it was only
then
that he decided to write that letter to Litter as a preliminary to walking down to the sea and drowning himself.’ Truebody glanced sharply at Appleby. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘I think I’d call it the change-of-plan theory of Charles Vandervell’s death. I don’t know that I’d go all the way with it. But I have a sense of its being in the target area, Of there having been some element of improvisation somehow in the affair… Ah! Here is our friend the constable again.’

‘Inspector Gamley’s compliments, sir.’ The constable appeared to feel that Appleby rated for considerable formality of address. ‘A further message has just come through. They’ve found the dead man’s clothes.’

‘Abandoned somewhere on the shore?’

‘Not exactly, sir. Washed up like the body itself, it seems – but in a small cove more than a mile farther west. That’s our currents, sir. The Inspector has gone over to Targan Bay at once. He wonders if you’d care to follow him.’

‘Thank you. I’ll drive over now.’

Vandervell’s body had been removed for immediate post-mortem examination, so it was only his clothes that were on view. And of these most were missing. It was merely a jacket and trousers, entangled in each other and grotesquely entwined in seaweed, that had come ashore. Everything else was probably lost for good.

‘Would he have gone out in a boat?’ Appleby asked.

‘I’d hardly think so.’ Gamley shook his head. ‘One way up or the other, such a craft would have been found by now. I’d say he left his clothes close to the water, and they were taken out by the tide. Now they’re back again. Not much doubt they’ve been in the sea for about as long as Vandervell himself was.’

‘Anything in the pockets – wallet, watch, that kind of thing?’

‘Both these, and nothing else.’ Gamley smiled grimly. ‘Except for what you might call one or two visitors. All laid out next door. Would you care to see?’

‘Decidedly so, Inspector. But what do you mean by visitors?’

‘Oh, just these.’ Gamley had ushered Appleby into the next room in the Targan Bay police station, and was pointing at a table. ‘Inquisitive creatures, one gets in these waters. The crab was up a trouser-leg, and the little fish snug in the breast-pocket of the jacket.’

‘I see.’ Appleby peered at these odd exhibits. ‘I see,’ he repeated, but on a different note. ‘Will that post-mortem have begun?’

‘Almost sure to have.’

‘Then get on to them at once. Tell them – very, very tactfully – to be particularly careful about the bottom of the lungs. Then I’ll put through a call to London myself, Inspector. We must have a top ichthyologist down by the night train.’

‘A
what
, sir?’

‘Authority on fish, Inspector. And there’s another thing. You can’t risk an arrest quite yet. But you can make damned sure somebody doesn’t get away.’

Appleby offered explanations on the following afternoon.

‘It has been my experience that the cleverest criminals are often prone to doing some one, isolated stupid thing – particularly when under pressure, and driven to improvise. In this case it lay in the decision to post that letter to Litter, instead of just leaving it around. The idea was to achieve a delaying tactic, and there was a sense in which a typewritten address would be safer than one which forged Vandervell’s hand. But it introduced at once what was at least a small implausibility. Vandervell while obsessed with suicide may well have prepared a dozen such letters, and without getting round to either addressing or dating them. But if he later decided that one of them was really to be delivered – and delivered through the post – the natural thing would simply be to pick up an envelope and address it by hand.’

‘Was that the chap’s only bad slip-up?’

‘Not exactly. The crime must be called one of calculation and premeditation, I suppose, since the idea was to get the perpetrator out of a tough spot. But its actual commission was rash and unthinking, so that it left him in a tougher spot still. Consider, for a start, the several steps that led to it. Charles Vandervell’s supposed financial reverses and stringencies were entirely a consequence of sustained and ingenious speculations on Truebody’s part. They didn’t, as a matter of fact,
need
to be all that ingenious, since our eminent philosopher’s practical sense of such matters was about zero. But then Mrs Mountmorris enters the story. She is a very different proposition. Truebody is suddenly in extreme danger, and knows it. His client’s attitude stiffens; in fact you may say the worm turns. Truebody is summoned to Pentallon, and appears on Tuesday morning. He is given only until the next day to show, if he can, that everything has been fair and above board, after all. But Charles Vandervell has a certain instinct for privacy. If there is to be a row, he doesn’t want it bruited abroad. When Truebody comes back on Wednesday afternoon there is nobody else around. And I suppose that puts ideas in his head.’

‘So he waits his chance?’ Fabian Vandervell asked.

‘Not exactly that. Imagine the two of them, walking around the gardens. Your uncle is a new man; he has this dishonest rascal cornered, and is showing grim satisfaction in the fact. He says roundly that he’ll have Truebody prosecuted and gaoled. And, at that, Truebody simply hits out at him. He’s a powerful fellow; and, for the moment at least, your uncle is knocked unconscious. It has all happened beside one of those small ponds with the tropical fish. So it is
now
that Truebody sees – or thinks he sees – his chance. He will stage some sort of accident, he tells himself. In a moment he has shoved your uncle into the pool. And there he holds him down until he drowns. So far, so good – or bad. But the accident looks a damned unlikely one, all the same. And then he remembers something.’

‘
Biathanatos
, and all that.’

‘Precisely so – and something more. Truebody has had plenty of opportunity, during business visits to Pentallon, to poke about among your uncle’s papers. He remembers that batch of elegant farewells by a Charles Vandervell about to depart this life by his own hand–’

‘But nobody would drown himself in a shallow fish pond. It simply couldn’t be done.’

‘Exactly so, Fabian. And as soon as Truebody had slipped into the empty house and secured that batch of letters, he heaved your uncle’s body into his car, and drove hard for the sea. And there, let us just say, he further did his stuff.’

‘And later posted that letter to Litter. After which he had nothing to do but lie low – and get busy, no doubt, covering up on the financial side.’

‘He didn’t quite lie low. Rashly again, he took the initiative in holding rather an odd conversation with me. He thought it clever himself to advance one or two considerations which were bound to be in my head anyway.’

‘And now he’s under lock and key.’ Fabian Vandervell frowned. ‘Good Lord! I’m forgetting I still haven’t the faintest notion how you tumbled to it all.’

‘That was the shubunkin.’

‘What the devil is that?’

‘Small tropical fish – decidedly not found in the sea off Cornwall. A shubunkin deftly made its way into your uncle’s breast-pocket while Truebody was holding him prone in that pool.’

‘Well I’m damned! But it doesn’t sound much on which to secure a conviction for murder.’

‘It’s not quite all, Fabian. In your uncle’s lungs there was still quite a bit of the water he drowned in. Full of minute freshwater-pond life.’

Bobby Appleby (successful scrum-half retired, and author of that notable anti-novel
The Lumber
Room
) had been down from Oxford for a couple of years. But he went back from time to time, sometimes for the day and sometimes on a weekend basis. He had a number of clever friends there who were now busily engaged in digging in for life. They had become, that is to say, junior dons of one or another more or less probationary sort, and had thereby risen from the austerities of undergraduate living to the fleshpots and the thrice-driven beds of down associated with Senior Common Rooms and High Tables. They liked entertaining Bobby, to whom
The Lumber Room
rather than his athletic prowess lent, in their circle, a certain prestige. One of these youths was a historian called Brian Button.

Button sometimes came home with Bobby to Long Dream. Sir John Appleby (policeman retired) rather liked this acquaintance of his son’s, and was very accustomed to address him as B B – this seemingly with some elderly facetious reference to the deceased art historian Bernard Berenson. Bobby’s B B (unlike the real B B) came from Yorkshire, a region of which Bobby’s father approved. So Appleby was quite pleased when, chancing to look up from his writing-table on a sunny Saturday morning, he saw Bobby’s ancient Porsche stationary on the drive, with Bobby climbing out of the driver’s seat and B B out of the other. But the young men were unprovided with suitcases, which was odd. The young men bolted for the front door as if through a thunderstorm, which was odder still. And seconds later – what was oddest of all – the young men burst without ceremony into the room.

‘Daddy!’ the distinguished novelist exclaimed – and he seemed positively out of breath – ‘here’s an awful thing happened. Brian’s got mixed up in a murder.’

‘Both of you sit down.’ Appleby looked with considerably more interest at Mr Button than at his son. B B too was out of breath. But B B was also as pale as death. The lad – Appleby said to himself – is clean out of his comfortable academic depth. ‘And might it be described’ – Appleby asked aloud – ‘as a particularly gruesome murder?’

‘Moderately,’ Bobby replied judiciously. ‘You see–’

‘In Oxford?’

‘Yes, of course. We’ve driven straight over. And you’ve damn well got to come and clear it up.’

‘But, Bobby, it isn’t my business to clear up homicides in Oxford: not even in the interest of B B. Of course, I can be told about it.’

‘Well, it seems to have been like this–’

‘By B B himself, please. It will do him good. So do you go and fetch us drinks. And, Brian, go ahead.’

‘Thank you, sir – thank you very much.’ Mr Button clearly liked being called Brian for a change; it braced him. ‘Perhaps you know the job I’ve been given, it’s ordering and cataloguing the Cannongate Papers.’

‘The Third Marquis’ stuff?’

‘Yes. I’m the Cannongate Lecturer.’

‘You lecture on the Papers?’

‘Of course not.’ B B found this a foolish question. ‘That’s just what I’m called, since I’ve got to be called something. I get the whole bloody archive in order, and then it’s to be edited and published in a grand way, and I shall be Number Two on the job. Quite a thing for me.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it. Go on.’

‘All Lord Cannongate’s papers have been deposited with the college by the trustees. Masses and masses of them – and some of them as confidential as hell.’

‘State papers, do you mean?’

‘Well yes – but that’s not exactly the rub. There’s a certain amount of purely personal and family stuff. It hasn’t been sieved out. I have to segregate it and lock it up. It has nothing to do with what can ever be published.’

‘Then the trustees ought to have done that job themselves.’

‘I couldn’t agree more. But they’re lazy bastards, and the responsibility has come on me. It’s a question of confidence. If there’s a leak, what follows is a complete shambles, so far as my career’s concerned.’

‘I see.’ Appleby looked with decent sympathy at this agitated young man. ‘But I think something has been said about murder? That sounds rather a different order of thing.’

‘Yes, of course.’ B B passed a hand across his brow. ‘A sense of proportion, and all that. I must try to get it right.’ B B took a big breath. ‘So just listen.’

And B B began to tell his story.

He worked, it seemed, in a kind of commodious dungeon beneath the college library. The cavernous chamber was impregnable; so, within it, were the numerous steel filing cabinets in which the Cannongate Papers had arrived. B B, coming and going, had only to deal faithfully with locks and keys, and nothing could go wrong. Unfortunately it is not easy, when living in a residential university, to bear at all constantly in mind that the world is inhabited by others as well as scholars and gentlemen, ancient faithful manservants of a quasi-hereditary sort, a few pretty secretaries, and an excellent
chef
. One may differ sharply from one’s colleagues over such issues as the problem of the historical Socrates; one may even be conscious that at times quite naked and shocking animosities can generate themselves out of less learned matters – as, for example, where to hang a picture or who shall look after the wine; but one doesn’t – one simply doesn’t – expect to have one’s pocket picked or one’s researches plagiarised. The concept of the felonious, in short, is one to which it is difficult to give serious thought.