Appleby Plays Chicken (17 page)

‘If there’s anything I can properly tell you, Sir John, I shall, of course, do so.’ Pettifor’s tone was slightly chilly. Appleby, he seemed to be saying, was only a policeman, after all. And one doesn’t much chat to policemen about one’s pupils.

‘Thank you very much.’ Appleby was unperturbed. ‘He tells an extraordinary story. But I can say at once that I see no reason to doubt his good faith. What he may have missed, or what he may have muddled, is of course another matter.’

Pettifor shook his head. ‘I think he’d miss or muddle very little. I regard him as a thoroughly reliable man. And discreet. Would I be right, Sir John, in thinking that he possesses information which you have asked him not to spread?’

‘You would be quite right.’ Appleby, although rather startled, answered readily.

‘I somehow formed the impression that he knew the identity of this man who was killed on Knack Tor. But he would not discuss the matter. On such occasions, David’s lips are locked.’

Appleby said nothing. But he looked steadily at Pettifor, for he had an obscure feeling that he had heard something distinctly odd. And the man
looked
odd – or at least he looked oddly done up. He had, of course, learned that one of the young men in his charge had spent the better part of the day being hunted for his life. And he had seen with his own eyes another of them – who was incidentally his own nephew – in the most imminent risk of being shot dead. These facts were no doubt sufficient to account for an impression of strain or exhaustion in him. But there was something else. Appleby wondered if it was some sort of fanaticism. Elderly dons were sometimes like that. They spent their time dishing out such a lot of intellectual and personal tolerance that they went mildly mad on this specific topic or that, and would be utterly intransigent over it. Perhaps Pettifor had a hobby horse of that sort. But it was hard to see how it could tie up with the mystery. ‘About Henchman,’ Appleby asked. ‘Do you know whether he has any acquaintance or relations round about here?’

‘I am almost certain he has none. None of the men has, except Dancer – Ian Dancer. He wasn’t with us on our expedition. He has relations with whom he sometimes stays for the hunting. And, as a matter of fact, he had a riding accident this afternoon, and got back to the George only half an hour ago. His story is rather obscure, but I gather he required some medical attention. He’s gone to bed too.’

Appleby nodded. ‘I know about Dancer. I ought to mention that I’m staying for a few days with my wife’s people at Dream.’

‘Indeed.’ Pettifor took crisp note of this social fact. ‘Of course my nephew, Julian Ogg, is also acquainted with people round about – if the matter has any significance for you.’

‘Your nephew displayed, if I may say so, remarkable courage.’ Appleby offered this comment in the way of tact, for Pettifor’s tone had been slightly impatient.

‘Yes, yes – he showed rather more courage than good sense. Lads of that age are often impetuous. And Julian, being younger than the others, no doubt feels a special need to keep his end up. I was of course appalled at the risk he ran. But a risk’s not a bad thing now and then. There was an affair here last night – I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it – that represented a deliberate courting of risk. I was displeased about it, naturally. But I gather young Julian was all right on that too.’

Appleby nodded – and, as he did so, he dropped this elderly scholar into a certain pigeonhole in his mind. ‘Do you know that fellow Farquharson?’ he asked.

‘No. He has no connection with my party whatever. A lonely man, I should imagine, retired from the Army rather early, with time on his hands and a nostalgic feeling for the charm of youth. A familiar type. Seldom any vice in it. But I don’t think it can be said that he has a very well-stored mind.’

Appleby had to take some care not to smile; it was once more a matter of characteristic academic attitudes. ‘The reading party’, he asked, ‘consists simply of yourself and the undergraduates?’

‘Dear me, yes. A Dr Faircloth – whom I think you met on our extraordinary occasion this afternoon – has a little attached himself to us since he arrived the other day. My lads tell me he is a clergyman, but I find him to be a man of some learning. As a matter of fact, it was on his suggestion, and quite on the spur of the moment, that we decided on our late afternoon jaunt to Knack Tor. I had been working throughout the day – and have no doubt that most of the men believed themselves to have been doing that too – so the proposal was a pleasant one. Who could have believed how untoward the result would be! A deed of dreadful note. Or rather two of them.’

‘Three.’

‘Ah, yes.’ And Pettifor looked momentarily vague. ‘One really loses count. Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill. And may I ask, my dear Sir John, if you have any idea how these things came about?’

‘Only a very general one. But perhaps it will serve for a start. Henchman’s body, you know – the one he came upon first – wasn’t the same body that he and I found on the Tor later.’

Pettifor got suddenly to his feet, crossed the room, and rang a bell. ‘I am forgetting the duties of hospitality,’ he said. ‘I hope I may offer you a drink. And this really sounds as if it requires one. I had no idea. But I now understand what you mean by three fatalities. Henchman has not been very explicit – but then he is, as I said, quite tired out… But here is Lina.’ One of the George’s engaging Italian maids had come into the room. ‘Brandy, perhaps, Appleby?’

Appleby accepted brandy. He also remarked this advance to a more familiar mode of address. ‘Henchman must have got to Knack Tor’, he said, ‘round about noon. He appears to have been attracted to it by a column of smoke.’

‘Of smoke? How very unaccountable. It’s not a time of year for heath fires.’

‘There’s no heath up there, anyway. He formed a notion that what he saw might be a signal.’

‘A signal!’ Pettifor was startled. ‘A kind of appeal for help?’

‘Something of the sort. There can be little doubt that it was from a small fire kindled by a man who was presently shot dead. I have an idea myself that he may have been destroying papers.’

‘Here is the brandy. Armagnac – I hope that is all right? My friends maintain that it should always be taken in a warm cup from which one has just drunk the last of one’s coffee. But I am perfectly content with a rummer myself. Ah, with the grape my fading life provide.’ And Pettifor took a first sniff at his brandy. ‘Now, what were you saying? Something about destroying papers.’

‘There is as yet no clue to the identity of the man whose body Henchman first found. But the body that he and I found later on I happened to have no difficulty in identifying. It was that of a man who had enjoyed a discreditable career in espionage – who worked, in fact, for two sides at once.’

‘I see.’ Pettifor took this not undramatic information coolly enough. ‘It scarcely sounds as if we need much mourn him. And so you suppose that the first man – the one who kindled the fire – was of the same kidney?’

‘He may have been a victim rather than an associate. His death may have been the consequence of his resisting some demand or proposal.’ Appleby sipped his brandy. ‘That, of course, is a very tentative idea, but it’s the direction in which my mind is moving.’

‘Most interesting. But I need hardly say that it takes me over ground entirely unfamiliar to me. Am I wrong in supposing that this conjecture of yours doesn’t much assist to an understanding of why there was first one body and then another?’

Appleby nodded. ‘That’s the core of the problem. And it certainly doesn’t get me far with it.’

Pettifor considered for a moment. ‘I said that David Henchman was a thoroughly reliable young man. And so he is. But could he, after all, have been perhaps mistaken? One body seems so much simpler than two.’

‘That’s incontrovertible.’ Appleby spoke rather dryly. ‘But I’ve never found I got far by ignoring awkward evidence. And this wasn’t a matter of hurried glimpses. Henchman found a dead body, examined that dead body, and then, in the presence of that dead body, held quite a substantial conversation with another man. And the instant we returned to the Tor it was that other man’s body that he declared to be lying there in front of us. We must accept it as gospel, I think, that the substitution of one body for another did, after some fashion, take place.’

There was a short silence, and then Pettifor sighed rather helplessly. ‘You puzzle me sorely,’ he said.

At this moment the Italian maid returned to summon Pettifor to the telephone. He excused himself and went out, leaving Appleby with his nose buried thoughtfully in his rummer. David’s tutor was certainly right in supposing that Appleby’s conjectures weren’t taking him very far. He could see no key to that enigmatical switching of the bodies. Hither hurried whence, and whither hurried hence? He frowned as this absurd jingle formed itself in his mind. He took a sip of the Armagnac.

Another and another cup to drown

The memory of this impertinence…

Pettifor’s habit of tags and snippets of verse was perhaps catching. Still,
whither
hurried hence?
Where
had that first body gone? And suddenly an extraordinary streak of light played upon the affair. He put down his rummer, and sat up with an exclamation. Then he rose and walked about the room, absorbed in thought. He hardly heard the door when it opened again, and it was a moment before he turned round, expecting to see Pettifor.

But it wasn’t Pettifor who had come in. It was Dr Faircloth – obscurely conjectured, he remembered, to be a clergyman.

‘Good evening,’ Faircloth said. ‘Pettifor has asked me to make you his apologies. He has been called away – and, I fear, in considerable distress. There has been some sort of accident. His brother, I am sorry to say… What a shocking day it has been with us! I am really rather relieved that my daughter hasn’t been able to turn up.’

‘Your daughter was to have joined you?’ Appleby thought it civil for a moment to continue this theme.

‘Yes, my daughter Alice. She was to have motored from Hampshire, where she has been staying with friends. When she hadn’t turned up by lunch-time, I was a little worried. However, there was a telegram later. I showed it to our friend David Henchman at dinner. I’m not supposed to know, but Pettifor’s young men have been indulging in various conjectures about Alice. Many of them, I have no doubt, would be unsuitable for elderly ears.’ Faircloth, who was comfortably smoking a cigar, sat down opposite Appleby in an entirely companionable way. ‘Not that today’s adventures haven’t put Alice and everything else out of their delightful heads. These have been horrible events, my dear Sir John. They shock me profoundly. I am glad, as I say, that my child hasn’t tumbled in upon them. But for the young men they represent a wonderful irruption of excitement and speculation. I am afraid that Plato and Kant and the rest of them will be very poor seconds for some days – and even if the mystery is cleared up at once. For I suppose it
is
a mystery? You would – expert in these matters as you are – accord it that status?’

Appleby could understand why Pettifor’s youths had decided Faircloth was a clergyman. It wasn’t just something vaguely suggestive in his name. He could find a good many words to cover no great quantity of matter. A few years ago, some of the young men had been surreptitiously timing such discourses in their school chapel, whether in the interest of winning wagers or merely compiling records. ‘A mystery?’ he said. ‘I need make no bones about that. What happened on Knack Tor is at present completely inexplicable.’

‘Pettifor has no theory?’

‘Well, he certainly hasn’t advanced one.’ Appleby eyed Faircloth curiously. ‘Have you any theory yourself?’

‘My dear sir, I’m not even in possession of the facts.’ And Faircloth suddenly raised a hand, as if anxious to forestall a flow of indiscreet communication. ‘Nor, I assure you, do I ask for them. I quite under-stand that matters of this sort, especially where national security is concerned, must be treated with the utmost circumspection. It is something I have been impressing – or endeavouring to impress – upon Colonel Farquharson. As a military man he ought, of course, already to be aware of it.’

Appleby raised his eyes from his brandy – he had been letting it circle slowly round the glass – and regarded Faircloth more thoughtfully than he had yet done. ‘Farquharson?’ he said presently. ‘Do you know much about him?’

‘My dear sir, nothing at all. Remember that I have been in Nymph Monachorum only for a few days. And I don’t think, indeed, that Farquharson is a man with whom I should readily become intimate.’

‘But you have nevertheless been discussing the affair with him this evening?’ Appleby shook his head seriously. ‘May I be so impertinent, sir, as to offer you a word of advice? Hold very little communication with him over this matter.’

‘Dear me!’ Faircloth was impressed. ‘Would it be too venturesome to ask whether he is somebody already known to you?’

Appleby shook his head. ‘Not exactly that. And nobody concerned, I may say, was known to me before today, with the exception of Redwine, the man that Henchman and I found dead on Knack Tor. But I have been making what inquiries I could, both locally and by telephone to my own people in London.’

‘About the whole lot of us?’ Faircloth appeared to find this idea amusing, for he took the cigar from his mouth in order to laugh the more unrestrainedly.

‘I am afraid so. It is a very early piece of routine. Of course the connection between the events on the moor today and anybody in this hotel may be extremely tenuous. Henchman may be the only link – and a purely fortuitous one. Still, one does what one can. And one result has been the discovery that this Colonel Farquharson is not a person of estimable character.’

‘I am very sorry to hear it.’ Faircloth said this with a proper sobriety.

‘Perhaps if you become conscious of anything out of the way in his conduct, you will be good enough to let me know.’

‘Certainly, certainly.’ Faircloth clearly regarded this proposed alliance with interest and satisfaction. ‘But is what you have heard about him – well, of likely relevance to our mystery? Does it in any way point a finger of suspicion at him?’