Appleby File (8 page)

The Applebys drove back to London in the dark – but not before Appleby himself had contrived a short private conversation with Lady Parmiter.

‘Lucky your aunt turned out to know the stuff fairly well,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I doubt whether much that’s really first-rate now remains outside that strongroom.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘You’d agree, Judith, that Aunt Jessica has been persuaded to do the rational thing?’

‘Clearly she has – unless it really is a supernatural agency that’s at work.’

‘You’d also agree that what she has done is the
obvious
thing in the circumstances?’

‘Well, yes. But I don’t see–’

‘The
predictable
thing?’ It was almost in anxiety that Appleby appeared to wait for his wife’s acquiescence this time.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Then I think all’s well. Yes, I’m pretty sure of it. By the way, just give a glance at the spare bedroom tomorrow. Your aunt’s coming to stay with us.’

‘To stay with us!’

‘Oh, not for long. Just for two or three days. She’s telling that butler tonight that she’s coming to us in the morning.’

‘How very odd! But at least we can get a good night’s sleep first.’

‘Very true. Just one telephone call, and I’ll be ready for it.’

‘A telephone call?’

‘To the Thames Valley Constabulary, my dear. Anderton is on their territory – so I must liaise with them, as people now say.’ And Appleby laughed softly as he swung the steering wheel. ‘I set the trap. They spring it.’

‘All caught,’ Appleby announced a couple of mornings later. ‘Butler, phoney parlour-maid

‘I recall remarking,’ Lady Parmiter said, ‘that servants tend to be rather unreliable nowadays.’

‘Quite so – and in fact two more were in the pay of the gang. All small fry, of course, the butler included. Fortunately their bosses decided to be in at the kill. Our Thames Valley friends nicked the lot while they were happily treating your strongroom, Aunt Jessica, like a hunk of old cheese.’

‘We had really done quite a lot of their work for them?’ Judith asked.

‘Just that. They count as top-ranking villains, but happen not to be all that clued up on the fine-art front. They could only have made a purely random haul by themselves. Hence the poltergeist, who made us work like mad doing all the sifting for them.’

‘But John, what about the tumbling jar? That
did
look like the real thing.’

‘Not to me. A little bladder on the end of a long tube passing through the window. Squeeze a bulb at the other end, and the trick’s accomplished. You just pull the thing out through the window again, and there you are. Literally a trick. Every kid’s conjuring-set includes a miniature version of the same thing.’

‘I must go upstairs and pack at once.’ Aunt Jessica announced this firmly. ‘It would be the wish of dear Adolphus that the
status quo ante
at Anderton be restored forthwith. And Mrs Thimble must find me a new butler. His first task, my dear John, will be to pack up every bottle of Andron-Blanquet I still possess. And I needn’t tell you where it will be despatched to.’

In Scotland trout-fishing, almost as much as deer-stalking and grouse-shooting, is an amusement for wealthy men. Appleby was not particularly wealthy. From a modest station he had risen to be London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police – a mouthful which his children, accurately enough, had turned into better and briefer English as Top Cop.

Top Cop’s job turning out, predictably, to be more purely administrative than was at all enlivening, Appleby had retired from it earlier than need be, and now lived as an unassuming country gentleman on a small estate in the south of England, which was the property of his wife. This, very happily, had proved not incompatible with getting into odd situations from time to time. Sir John Appleby liked odd situations. As a country gentleman he also, of course, liked fishing.

So he had accepted Vivarini’s invitation to bring a rod to Dunwinnie, although he didn’t really know the celebrated playwright particularly well. Now here he was, cheek by jowl with four other piscatory enthusiasts in what had once been a crofter’s cottage. Crofters, and all such humbly independent tillers of the soil, had almost vanished from this part of the Scottish Highlands. Whether in small patches or in large, the region had been turned into holiday terrain for those rich men.

Appleby didn’t brood on this. At least the hunting boxes and shooting lodges were (like everything else) thin on the ground. From the cottage one saw only the river – a brawling flood interspersed with still-seeming pools, brown from the peat and with trout enough – with an abandoned lambing hut on its farther bank and then the moorland that stretched away to the remote line of the Grampians. Dr Johnson, Appleby remembered, had once surveyed this scene and disliked it.
A wide extent of hopeless sterility
, he had written down.
Quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation
. That had been the heather.

There was a brushing sound in the heather now. Appleby looked up from his task of gutting fish for supper, and saw that his host was returning. Vivarini had been the last to leave the water. He seemed to be a keen angler. In his stained waders, Balmoral bonnet festooned with dry-flies, and with his respectably battered old creel, he certainly looked the part. But perhaps the playwright had enough of the actor in him for that. Snobbery and expensive rural diversions are inextricably tied up together in Britain, and in pursuit of some elusive social status men will go fox-hunting who in their hearts are terrified at the sight of a horse. Perhaps Vivarini with his costly stretch of trout-stream was a little like that.

Very rightly, Appleby felt mean at harbouring this thought, particularly as Vivarini looked so far from well. Even in the twilight now falling like an elfin gossamer over these haunted lands, one could distinguish that about the man. Perhaps it was simply that he was under some sort of nervous strain. Appleby knew nothing about his London way of life, but there could well be things he wanted to get away from. A set-up like this at Dunwinnie – a small all-male society gathered for a secluded holiday on a bachelor basis – might well have been planned as wholesome relief by a man rather too much involved in something altogether different.

‘Cloud coming up,’ Vivarini said, ‘and that breeze from the west stiffening. Makes casting tricky. I decided to stay with Black Gnat, by the way.’ He indicated the fly still on the end of his line. ‘A mistake, probably. Not sultry enough, eh?’

Clifford Childrey, ensconced with a three-day-old copy of the
Scotsman
on a bench beside the cottage door, glanced up – not at Vivarini but at Appleby – and then resumed his reading. He was Vivarini’s publisher. A large and ruddy outdoor man, he had no need whatever to look a part.

‘You deserve a drink, Vivarini,’ Appleby said.

‘Not so much as you do, sweating away as cook. I’ll see to it. Sherry, I suppose? And you, Cliff?’

‘Sherry.’ Childrey momentarily lowered his newspaper. ‘Don’t know about the other two. They’ve gone downstream to bathe.’

‘Right. I do like this American make.’ Vivarini had leant his rod against the cottage’s low thatched roof. ‘No more than five ounces to the six feet. Flog the water all day with it.’

‘Umph.’ This response came from behind the
Scotsman
, which had been raised again. But it was tossed to the ground when Vivarini had entered the cottage. ‘No need to be supercilious,’ Childrey said.

‘I’ve been nothing of the kind.’ Appleby was amused at the charge. ‘And if “umph” isn’t supercilious, I don’t know what is.’

‘Well, well – Freddie Vivarini and I have been chums for a long time.’ Childrey chuckled comfortably. ‘A damned queer lot writers are, Appleby. I’ve spent my life trying to do business with them. Novelists are the worst, of course, but dramatists run them close. Always getting things up and trying out roles. What they call
personas
, I suppose. Thingamies, really. Chimeras.’

‘You mean chameleons.’

‘That’s right. No reliable personal identity. Shelley said something about it. Right up his own street.’

‘Keats. You think our host is playing at being a sportsman?’

‘Oh, at that and lots of other things. What he’s run on all his life has been folding up on him. Unsuccessful literary man.’

‘Unsuccessful?’

‘Of course he’s made a fortune. But that’s what he’s taken to calling himself. You’re meant to regard it ironically. Uneasy joke, all the same.’ Childrey checked himself and got to his feet, perhaps aware of talking too casually about his host. ‘I’ll start that grill for you,’ he said. ‘I see you’ll need it soon.’

As if in one of Vivarini’s own neat plays, Childrey’s exit-line brought the subject of his late remarks promptly on-stage again. Vivarini was bearing glasses and a bottle which, even in the gloaming, could be seen as lightly frosted. The cottage was not wholly comfortless. Warmth was laid on for chilly evenings, and there was hot water and a refrigerator and a compendious affair for cooking any way you liked, all served by a few cylinders of butane trundled across the moor on a vehicle like a young tank. Not that their actual culinary regime wasn’t simple enough. Elderly Englishmen of the sort gathered at Dunwinnie rather enjoy pretending to be public-schoolboys still, toasting crumpets or bloaters before a study fire. Of course there are limits, and when it is a matter of a glass of dry sherry or opening a bottle of hock, they don’t expect the stuff to reach their palate other than at the temperature it should. Nor do they care to couch in straw. Appleby was just reflecting that the cottage’s bunks had certainly come from an expensive shop, when he became aware that his host, uncorked bottle in hand, was laughing cheerfully.

‘I heard the old ruffian,’ Vivarini said. ‘Trying out roles, indeed! Well, what if I am?’

‘What, indeed. I myself shall remain grateful to you. This is a delightful spot.’

‘My dear Appleby, how nice of you to say so. But I do enjoy fishing, as a matter of fact. And – do you know? – as far as renting the cottage and this stretch of river goes, it was actually one of these chaps who egged me on. Positively ran me into it! But I won’t say which.’ Vivarini was laughing again – although with the effect, Appleby thought, of a man not wholly at ease. ‘No names, no pack drill. Ah, here come Mervyn and Ralph.’

Appleby couldn’t afterwards remember – not even with a dead body to prompt him – who at the supper table had introduced the topic of crime. Perhaps it had been Ralph Halberd, since Halberd was one of that not inconsiderable number of millionaires to have suffered the theft of some enormously valuable pictures. This might have given Halberd an interest at least in burglars, although his line (outside owning shipping lines and luxury hotels) was a large if capricious patronage of artists expressing themselves in mediums more harmless than thermal lances and gelignite. Perhaps it had been Mervyn Gryde. Gryde wrote theatrical notices for newspapers (being dignified with the style of dramatic critic as a result), and the kind of plays he seemed chiefly to favour were, to Appleby’s mind, so full of violence and depravity that crime must be supposed his natural element. Or it might have been Vivarini himself. Certainly it had been he who, exercising a host’s authority, had insisted upon Appleby’s recounting his own part in certain criminal
causes
célèbres
. But it had been left to Childrey, towards the end of the evening, to insist with a certain flamboyance on toasting the retired Metropolitan Commissioner as the finest detective intelligence in Britain. The hock, Appleby thought, was a great deal too good for the toast; it had in fact been Halberd’s contribution to the housekeeping and was quite superb. But he acknowledged the compliment in due form, and not long afterwards the company decided to go to bed.

Rather to his surprise, Appleby found himself obscurely relieved that the day was over. Everyone had been amiable enough. But had something been stirring beneath the talk, the relaxed gestures, the small companionable-seeming silences? As he dropped to sleep he found himself thinking of the deep still pools into which the Dunwinnie tumbled here and there on its hurrying and sparkling scramble towards the sea. Beneath those calm surfaces, whose only movement seemed to be the lovely concentric ripples from a rising trout, a strong current flowed.

He had a nightmare, a thing unusual with him. Perhaps it was occasioned by one of the yarns he had been inveigled into telling at the supper table, of his early and sometimes perilous days in the CID. In his dream he had been pursuing gunmen down dark narrow corridors – and suddenly it had been the gunmen who were pursuing him. They caught him and tied him up. And then the chief gunman had advanced upon him with a long whip and cracked it within an inch of his face. This was so unpleasant that Appleby, in his nightmare, told himself that here was a nightmare from which he had better wake up. So he woke up – not much perturbed, but taking thought, as one does, to remain awake until the same disagreeable situation was unlikely to be waiting for him.

The wind had risen and its murmur had joined the river’s murmur, but inside the cottage there wasn’t a sound. The single-storey building had been remodelled for its present purpose, and now consisted, like an ill-proportioned sandwich, of a large living-room in the middle, with a very small bedroom at each end. The bedrooms contained little more than two bunks set one above the other. Childrey and Halberd shared one of these cabin-like places, and Appleby and Vivarini had the other. Gryde slept on a camp bed in the living-room. These dispositions had been arrived at, whimsically, by drawing lots.

Appleby turned over cautiously, so as not to disturb Vivarini underneath him. Vivarini didn’t stir. And Appleby suddenly knew he wasn’t there, It was a simple matter of highly developed auditory alertness. Nobody was breathing, however lightly, in the bunk below.

The discovery ought not to have been worth a thought. A wakeful Vivarini might have elected for a breath of moorland air. Or he might have been prompted to repair to the modest structure, some twenty yards from the cottage, known as the jakes. Despite these reflections, Appleby slipped quietly down from his bunk.