Appleby's End (21 page)

Hannah Hoobin's boy looked momentarily downright frightened; then (with what, in one possessed of his wits at least, would have been considerable moral courage) he gave a low, deep grunt, eminently evocative of the very spirit of Gloucester Old Spots.

Mutlow helplessly spluttered. “Where's the pig?” he demanded inconsequently. “Where's Scurl's pig?”

Hannah Hoobin's boy took his hands from tattered pockets, picked several straws from his hair, and then luxuriously and expressively stroked his belly. “Ate 'un,” he said. “Breakfast, dinner, supper. Breakfast, dinner.” He looked at his mother. “Supper?” he asked hopefully.

Mrs Hoobin, convinced that her son was about to be hauled off to gaol, fell to blubbering again upon this pathetic question. The elder Hoobins, it seemed to Appleby, were both of markedly low intelligence. This might explain a good deal. For it seemed clear that some fantastic deception must have been imposed upon them. “Well, well,” he said amiably. “I'm sure the boy is much more interesting than a Gloucester Old Spot. I'm quite glad I have a share in him. And now we'll all go inside and have a little talk about it.”

They returned to the Hoobin kitchen, Hannah Hoobin's boy shedding straws as he went and Mutlow bringing up the rear, muttering. The displeasure of Mutlow was easy to explain; he had experienced another encounter with the unexpected, and there was nothing of which he more strongly disapproved. Old Mrs Grope had fallen down a well and Heyhoe had been found buried in snow; heredity therefore required that the disappearance of Hannah Hoobin's boy should have an issue at once more sinister and conclusive than this of his discovery alive, well, and lavishly dieted on pork in a pig-sty. Had the boy been found quartered, cured, smoked and hanging in joints from the maternal rafters Mutlow would have been altogether more pleased.

Appleby, on the other hand, who had been tired and dispirited at the end of his day's tour among the curiosities of the Linger country, was now discernibly in good spirits. He watched with a benevolent eye while the boy, tattered as the prodigal in the painted cloth and equally fresh from the swine, applied himself to such victuals as Mrs Hoobin could provide. And he studied the family. Mr and Mrs Hoobin, he concluded again, were extremely stupid – and what is called “sane”. The boy was as undoubtedly crazed – but his mind was as quick as it was aberrant. And that he traced his descent from a Raven it required only half an eye to see.

“Well,” said Appleby, “how did all this happen?”

“Yes,” said Mutlow, “how did it happen? Out with it, before you're off to the county gaol.”

Mr Hoobin cursed; Mrs Hoobin wept; the boy quickened the pace of his eating, as if distrustful of the adequacy of prison fare.

“Oh, come,” said Appleby. “They didn't constrain the boy to live in a sty, you know. And they've fed him well. I don't believe a charge of neglect would stand for a moment.”

“Neglect!” Mutlow sputtered indignantly. “These people have compounded a felony; that's what they've done.”

“What felony?”

“Well, a misdemeanour. Turning cows and things to marble. They've obstructed me in the execution of my duty.”

“My dear inspector, when you came here previously to enquire for the boy, did you explain that it was in pursuance of a criminal investigation? Did you tell them of these various odd happenings that Sir Mulberry didn't want advertised?”

“Of course I didn't. I simply demanded to know the whereabouts of this brat.”

“And the Hoobins refused to give you any information. They were legally entitled to do so.” Appleby chuckled. “Take them before a magistrate and they may very well say that they regarded you as an unsuitable associate for their boy.”

Mr Hoobin nodded. “That's right,” he interjected with large, stupid cunning. “That's it, mister. We didn't like 'un. There's always plenty about a countryside that'll take advantage on a half-wit. And we didn't like the look on 'un.”

“And now I think we'll have the truth.” Appleby turned to Mrs Hoobin: “What frightened you?”

Mrs Hoobin hesitated. Then, slowly and without speaking, she turned to an untidy dresser behind her and rummaged in a drawer. From this she presently produced a much-thumbed scrap of paper which she handed to Appleby. Printed on it in bold letters and a staring red ink was this injunction: something has happened at tiffin place they will take the boy again hide him a friend.

“And what does the boy say?” Appleby tried a direct approach to the bright-eyed, gobbling youth at the table. “What did you make of it, Mr Hoobin?”

The eyes of Hannah Hoobin's boy rounded at this mode of address. “Mischief,” he said decidedly.

“I'm sure you weren't far wrong. And who do you think this message came from?”

“Fairies,” said Hannah Hoobin's boy. His voice was as decided as before.

“Ah.” Appleby looked abstractedly at Mutlow, who – despite his weakness for witchcraft and sorcery – was displaying at this suggestion all the indignation of an aggressive rationalist. Then his glance turned to Mrs Hoobin, but he continued to address the boy. “Do you know the folk over at Dream? Do you know an old man called Heyhoe?”

“I know 'un. He be purple.”

“Purple?” Appleby was puzzled.

Hannah Hoobin's boy, who appeared to have formed a high opinion of this stranger's abilities, looked surprised. “The air about him be purple when he moves,” he explained. “I be purple too. But most folks hereabouts be yellow.” The boy paused and then jerked his head at Mutlow. “He be mucky green – which is what I've never seen before.”

“Is that so?” Appleby was perfectly serious. “A mucky green aura is something quite out of the way?”

The boy nodded, equally serious. “Only pigs be mucky green,” he explained.

Mutlow breathed heavily. Appleby picked up the scrap of paper again – with exaggerated caution, as if it were a dangerous charm. “You've none of you had anything stolen from you recently?” he asked. “Anything that could be taken to a witch or a sorcerer?”

Blank silence greeted this question. Then the elder Mr Hoobin spoke. “Old Gammer Umbles that lives Tew way be a witch,” he said informatively. “But us never had nothing to do with hern.”

“That's very wise of you.” Appleby rose, patted Hannah Hoobin's boy amiably on the shoulder, and moved towards the door. “Let him sleep in his bed again,” he said. “Whatever happened at Tiffin Place had nothing to do with him, so nobody's going to take him.” He paused. “Tomorrow, by the way, it's possible you'll have quite a number of visitors.”

“Visitors?” Mrs Hoobin looked obscurely alarmed, and her glance travelled about the untidy kitchen – conceivably in search of the broom of which Brettingham Scurl had declared himself to see no evidences. “Us be to have visitors?”

“Several of them. Very pleasantly spoken gentlemen who will want to have quite a lot of talk. Well, talk away – and particularly the boy.” Appleby chuckled. “But not free.”

Mr Hoobin was staring open-mouthed. “There be money in it?”

“Decidedly. Don't you, my dear sir, make the mistake of talking just for beer. Make it a fiver before you open your mouth to anyone. And another fliver if they want to take photographs.”

In the Hoobin pantomime it was Appleby himself who was the Good Fairy after all. His aura must have been golden – and now, with Mutlow following him, he withdrew while still surrounded by it. Mr Hoobin accompanied him through the untidy little garden. And at the gate Appleby asked a final question. “That boy,” he said. “Are you his father?'

Mutlow was starting his car. Mr Hoobin stood silent for a moment, and there was no sound except the spluttering of the engine. Then he spoke. “Be I the one that got t'half-wit?” he said.

“That's what I'm asking.”

Mr Hoobin considered. “Mister,” he said heavily, “did 'ee ever see a saw?”

“Dear me, yes.”

“And would 'ee ask which tooth cut board?”

 

 

Darkness had fallen and it was snowing again; snowflakes danced in Mutlow's headlights; far away a melancholy hoot told of Gregory Grope chugging between Snarl and Linger, dreaming of the Flying Scotsman, the Golden Arrow, the Berlin–Constantinople Express. Linger Court, Tiffin Place, Dream Manor, the rectory of the Reverend Mr Smith, Mrs Ulstrup's cottage, the hovel of the Hoobins: England in all its venerable and grotesque stratifications had crept under a single blanket. The scattered lights that appeared and disappeared as the car ran through the hedgerows told of labourers' wives stirring porridge, of butlers coaxing up the temperature of claret, of parlour-maids disposing respectable silver on carefully patched damask, of anomalous proceedings in the kitchens and dining-rooms of the dissipated, the simple-lifers, the artistically inclined… Gregory Grope's engine hooted again – this time from farther away. “It
ought
to come together,” said Mutlow irritably.

“Of course it ought. Only there's rather a lot to fit in.” Appleby, huddled still within Mark Raven's baggy tweeds, tapped the modest row of gauges on Mutlow's dashboard. “Look at these. You could wire them up in a number of ways and get some very odd results. This affair's like that. Any number of little wires, and if we just get a terminal or two wrong the final report will be grotesque. Or – what's worse – it may be both incorrect and specious. Have you any kids?”

“Four boys.” Mutlow spoke with all the casualness of the proud father.

“Well now, suppose you got out the Meccano and made a pretty elaborate crane. Then suppose you took it to pieces again and handed just those bits to your boys and told
them
to make a crane. Each boy would produce something different, and each would have a few bits over, which they'd have to use up just anyhow. We've been given just such an assortment of bits – but we don't even know whether they should make up into a crane or a windmill or a bridge. For instance, why am I here? Why did your precious Chief Constable get me down? What am I supposed to be investigating?”

Mutlow slowed down and carefully negotiated a bend. For a moment he seemed nonplussed by this batch of questions. “Certain events at Tiffin Place–” he began heavily.

“Events? What do you mean by events? Practical jokes? Would you say it was my business to go chasing about the countryside after a practical joker?”

“The cow was valuable.” Mutlow paused on this, as if acknowledging that it was a somewhat lame rejoinder. “And that boy had disappeared. It looked as if there might be something sinister about that.” Mutlow was confident again. “I tell you frankly, I never expected to see the lad alive.”

“Don't you mean that late this afternoon, and when you had heard of certain other matters, you
started
not expecting to see the Hoobin boy alive?”

“I wouldn't say you were wrong in that, Mr Appleby.”

“But you think it's improbable that we're any longer investigating anything in the nature of a series of practical jokes?”

“I do.” Mutlow was wholly decided. “We're investigating murder – and perhaps attempted murder as well.”

“But you won't murder somebody by persuading him to hide in a pig-sty.”

“There's that Heyhoe.”

“Um.”

“And old Mrs Grope. I suppose you'll agree” – Mutlow was massively sarcastic – “that you
do
murder somebody if you persuade him to fall down a well.”

“But old Mrs Grope's falling down the well never roused the faintest suspicion of foul play. It's merely that certain facts the authenticity of which is still extremely doubtful have suggested to us one possible interpretation of these facts. Can you imagine yourself asking your local coroner to reopen the inquest on Mrs Grope – just on the strength of that interpretation?”

“No, Mr Appleby, I cannot.” Mutlow, though not perhaps distinguished by any talent for seeing life whole, had a capacity for seeing minute sections of it with tolerable steadiness. “But the point is that Mrs Grope was Heyhoe's mother. And you can't get away with Heyhoe.”

“I shouldn't at all want to attempt anything so disagreeable. But if you're going hot-foot after homicide, you may find Heyhoe a broken reed. What do you think the doctors will say he died of?”

Mutlow hesitated. “Exposure.”

“Precisely. And how do you know he didn't die of exposure
before
he was buried in that grotesque way? He was old, drunken, and wandering about on a freezing night. Within an hour the fact of his being dead would be indubitable to anyone who came upon him. His burial after that would simply bring us back to the level of macabre joking.”

In the faint light from the instruments Mutlow looked genuinely shocked. “It would still be a crime,” he said briefly and after a pause.

“That's very true. A judge would take an uncommonly dark view of it. But how would Ranulph Raven regard it? For that's the question.”

Mutlow swung round and stared at his companion. “Ranulph Raven! I don't understand this Raven business at all. It seems plumb crazy to me. How should he come in?”

“Because everything that's been happening – and more has been happening than you've heard of yet – is related either closely or vaguely to something or other in this old fellow Ranulph Raven's books. It's a correspondence so odd that it's difficult to recognise. For instance, you yourself have told me the story of some yarn of Ranulph's you once read as a boy; while quite failing to see that it bears a point by point resemblance to all this turning-to-stone business at Tiffin Place.”

“Good Lord!”

“Why was Sir Mulberry – a notably courageous man – rattled or scared by those idiotic incidents? Because buried somewhere in his mind – and at a level where one can bring very little sense of proportion or common sense to bear – he had this yarn of Ranulph's. And if the analogy from that yarn –
The Medusa Head
– continued it would be his wife, Lady Farmer, who would be overtaken by some uncanny fate in the end. That's clear enough. And in this affair a little clarity is pretty well worth its weight in gold.”