The Daffodil Affair (21 page)

They watched him go briskly down the hill. And Hudspith snorted – so vigorously that the tuco-tuco beneath his feet fell silent. ‘Softening process!’ he said. ‘I’ll soften him.’

‘On the contrary, it is only too likely that he will soften us. Light after light goes out, including two luminaries from Scotland Yard.’ Appleby stretched himself in the sunshine. ‘Or, if you prefer it, light after light has gone out already, including several in our friend. As the old books used to say, his mind is darkened.’

‘You think he’s mad?’

‘What is the test? If his fantasies are unworkable – as I rather think they are – then he is mad. But if he could bring his scheme off, or even bring a sizeable fragment of it off, we should have to allow him a sort of perverted sanity of his own. I thought he might have made a little more of that stuff about science and superstition – because of course there’s something in it. And if he isn’t quite so impressive as he ought to be it’s because he fails as the thoroughly objective exploiter of the situation as he sees it. He reckons the uncanny can move the world. Why? Primarily because it can move him, The truth is, he’s the kind that would blench before a ghost.’

‘And I would beam before roast mutton and a pint of bitter in the Strand. But I’m as unlikely to have occasion for the beaming as he for the blenching.’ Hudspith stopped as if to scrutinize the syntax of this. ‘We can’t whistle up a squad of ghosts to corner him.’

‘I suppose not.’ Appleby took a last look at the islands and started off down the hill. ‘But as far as the roast mutton goes there is likely to be some quite reasonable substitute cooking now. One can’t complain of short rations.’

‘Talking of short rations’ – Hudspith had fallen into step beside him – ‘has it occurred to you that in all this business nothing much has happened so far?’

‘Nothing happened?’

‘No one pulled out a gun or smashed a window or pushed someone else over a cliff.’

‘Over a cliff? I don’t think I’ve seen any. But perhaps we
have
been rather quiet.’ Appleby paused to watch a charm of humming-birds mysteriously suspended at the lips of flowers. ‘Would it be a good thing, I wonder, to take the initiative in brightening things up?’

Halfway down the hill Hudspith halted. His indignation had got the better of his appetite. ‘The cheek of the man!’ he said. ‘Telling all that to people he knows are police officers.’

‘He doesn’t know that we know that he knows.’ Appleby tramped on and made this familiar refrain a marching song. ‘He thinks we think we have tricked him. We are Radbone’s men.
We
have persuaded him we are agents of a man of whose existence
he
has persuaded us. And that gives the basis of his plan – or that little bit of his plan which concerns you and me. If we believe in Radbone, and believe Wine believes we’re his men–’

‘The experiment will work.’

‘Just that. It will be colourable that he should send one of us off to do a deal, while the other remains as a sort of hostage. But any suspicion on our part would be a spanner in the works.’

‘A spoke in the spook.’

‘Just that.’ Appleby nodded placidly at this cryptic remark. ‘But, talking of expectation, I really must insist on luncheon. So come along.’

Luncheon was excellent; nevertheless it was consumed in an atmosphere of gloom. Something had bitten Beaglehole, who glowered at his companions with frank dislike. Mrs Nurse was tired and without spirits even to pronounce things nice. Opposite to her sat sick Lucy in an abstraction, her mind turned perhaps on
moneo
and
audio
, perhaps upon Socrates or Marcus Aurelius.

‘This Schlumpf,’ said Appleby, cheerful amid the glumness, ‘–did he build European-looking houses on what you call Europe Land? Did I once hear Wine say something about English House?’

Beaglehole looked up warily. ‘English House? Yes – and damned odd it looks. It’s the larger part of the sort of house you might find in a Bloomsbury square.’

‘What an odd idea! Surely something rural would have been more in the picture?’

‘The man was loopy.’ Beaglehole spoke ungraciously but carefully, with evident knowledge that for his employer here was delicate and important ground. ‘And there it is. One of those big houses built about a gloomy sort of well with a staircase going round and round.’

Mr Smart’s staircase, Appleby thought – and Colonel Morell’s before him. ‘It sounds,’ he said aloud, ‘a very costly affair to erect.’

‘Enormously so, no doubt. But the whole house isn’t there.’ Beaglehole caught himself up. ‘I mean, they build just a sizeable part of such a house. And with old materials, I fancy. In places it looks quite genuinely old.’

‘Dear me.’

‘Dear you, indeed.’ Beaglehole, still unaccountably disturbed, was openly rude. But he continued to give his explanations with care. ‘As a matter of fact, the constructing or reconstructing or whatever it was seems to have been uncommonly badly done. We had a storm some months ago, and a good part of it came down. Awkward, because we have a lot of material for English House. Men are just finishing working on the repairs now.’

Appleby felt an impulse to smile confidentially at the savoury mess of fish before him. As an explanation of the awkward fact that 37 Hawke Square was still going up this was no doubt as good as could be contrived. ‘It sounds pretty queer,’ he said. ‘I’m rather looking forward to seeing it.’

Beaglehole put down his knife and fork. ‘You’ll see it, all right. And damned nonsense it is. Bah!’

‘Bah, indeed,’ said Appleby cheerfully. It was plain that there were matters upon which Beaglehole and his employer failed to see eye to eye. And it was not difficult to guess what these were. With the proposition that a good experiment is everything Beaglehole had no patience at all. ‘And you have a certain amount of what Wine calls material waiting to move back into English House? The exhibits weren’t blown away in the storm?’

Beaglehole pushed back his chair; he was even more irritated than before. ‘One’s gone,’ he said. ‘A confounded–’

‘Gone? More wastage?’ Wine had returned and was standing in the doorway looking at his assistant with a sort of easy dismay. ‘Don’t tell me that the alligators have got old Mrs Owler – or the Cockshell boy – or little Miss Spurdle?’

‘The alligators have got nobody. But that Yorkshire vixen has decamped. I told you there would be trouble with her. They lost her after a couple of days. She’s been gone for weeks.’

Wine frowned, now genuinely displeased, and turned to Appleby. ‘The girl called Hannah Metcalfe. I sent her on a couple of sailings ahead of us. A mistake. An intractable person I ought to have kept an eye on.’ He smiled wryly. ‘You can tell Radbone we’re at least not a hundred per cent efficient.’

‘And it’s not her alone.’ Beaglehole was calmer now. ‘She took a horse with her.’

Wine sat down, his brow darkening. ‘Not Daffodil?’

‘Yes. That’s how she managed it. She sneaked over to German House in the night, nobbled the brute and a saddle, and swam the river with him. After that she had the pampa before her. But she wouldn’t go far with an old cab-horse, you may be pretty sure. The Indians will have got her by this time. There’s some consolation in that.’

Mrs Nurse, vaguely apprehending, looked distressed. Hudspith was concealing signs of massive disapprobation. And Appleby looked dubiously at his fish.
Did you ever hear of the isle of Capri
? She had said that.
The Happy Islands
. Well, at least the girl had made a break for it. Perhaps it would be well to follow suit.

‘I find no consolation in the poor girl’s death.’ Wine was looking sternly at his assistant, and it occurred to Appleby that he was speaking the simple truth. ‘Such talk is vindictive nonsense. Her death is useless to us.’

‘At least it means that nothing will be given away.’

‘Rubbish. If she got through to the coast she would be judged merely demented. And alive she was valuable – very valuable indeed. She might have been brought round. And she had guts. There was the makings of a Joan of Arc in her – our own sort of Joan of Arc.’

‘Tell me,’ said sick Lucy plaintively, ‘about the voices of Joan of Arc.’

No one replied, and in the brief silence Appleby felt an uncomfortable pricking of the spine. ‘After all,’ he said at random, ‘she mayn’t be dead.’

‘I hope not,’ Wine reached for a decanter. ‘Death is sheer waste –
useless
death.’ For the fraction of a second he looked Appleby straight in the eye. ‘Do you know, I think we’ll all move to Europe Island in the morning?’

There was murder in the air. And that afternoon Appleby committed two murders. It was time to take the offensive, after all.

Near the upper end of the island the departed Schlumpf had caused a bathing-pool to be constructed – an elaborate little place, presumably in the Californian style. To this Lucy Rideout – young Lucy Rideout – had betaken herself shortly after luncheon, and here Appleby later found her practising diving with only a modicum of skill. For a time he watched her – watched that which was common to the Lucy Rideouts – flopping into the water and scrambling out. Sometimes she chattered to him, and her chattering was a twelve-year-old child’s. But the body which curved and slid and panted before him was a grown-up woman’s – the body of a grown-up woman and of a woman spontaneously physical. In fact, real Lucy’s body. In that tenement of clay the other Lucys were misfits…

Lucy Rideout flopped and scrambled and panted; tired and gasping, she lay on warm concrete and closed her eyes against the sun. She opened them, and suddenly they were sick Lucy’s eyes – strained eyes which looked disconsolately down at a bright red bather, at a full and abounding body. She reached for a towel and wrapped it round her shoulders. ‘About Socrates,’ she said, ‘and what he said about being dead–’ She looked up – pathetic, unhealthy, tiresome. And Appleby found that he had murder in his heart.

There had been such a lot of sick Lucy lately; it was as if real Lucy had miscalculated in her notion of what a change of environment might do. Sick Lucy was winning. And although an interest in Socrates and the Sages is generally accounted highly estimable, Appleby was tired of it. He was tired of it as would be – he believed – a physician by this time. And he would take the responsibility of killing it if he could. This Lucy’s head he would hold under that glittering pool until it breathed no more. Or he would do some equivalent thing. ‘About being dead?’ he repeated. ‘Socrates was interested in what happens after death; in whether anything happens. But he wasn’t like Wine. He wasn’t prepared to kill people in order to find out.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sick Lucy had sat up and was looking at him with dilated eyes, suddenly trembling and deadly pale.

‘Wine wonders if there are really ghosts. He has stolen a house where twice in the past the ghosts of murdered men are said to have appeared to friends. He himself is going to have a man killed there in order to find out. I am going to be killed without Hudspith knowing or suspecting – and will Hudspith see my ghost? Or the other way about. It is what Wine calls an experiment.’

‘I don’t believe it. I don’t understand it. I don’t wish to hear it or speak of it.’ Sick Lucy was cowering horribly in upon herself. ‘I wish to continue my Latin, to be told about–’

‘You didn’t know Wine was like that? You didn’t know the world was like that?’ Appleby had leant forward and was almost whispering into Lucy Rideout’s ear. ‘It is only one of Wine’s experiments. Others will be on you. He teaches you Latin just to keep you about – to keep you alive until he is ready. You understand? He has to keep on encouraging you, or the others would drive you away – drive you into nothing. They are stronger than you. For a long time now you’ve only been kept alive by believing in Wine and the things he teaches you. Well, they are all false. That stuff isn’t even Latin at all. You could never learn Latin – only gibberish. Your mind is too feeble. Your whole life has only been a sick flicker. But it has interested Wine because it is a freak life. What would happen if you died? Would there be three ghosts? He is interested in that sort of thing. You see? And there are other things about the world that I will tell you too. Listen…’

She had given a last little cry…infinitely horrible. And he looked down on her sprawled body and felt himself faint with compunction and fear. But, ever so faintly, the body was breathing. Perhaps – The breathing was less perceptible, less perceptible still, had surely ceased. Seconds stretched themselves out interminably. He turned away his head in despair.

‘Jacko.’

He looked at her, and she was still pale as a corpse. But her eyes were open; were awed; were full of intelligence and life.

‘Jacko – John’ – the voice was faint, excited, alive – ‘something’s happened; something’s happened to the prig.’ Her voice rose in sudden triumph, complete conviction. ‘She’s dead.’ Real Lucy sat up and laughed – happily and exultantly laughed. And then she was weeping uncontrollably – bewildered and bereaved.

But Appleby sat still and waited, like a fantastic sniper beneath the Tree of Life. Presently young Lucy would appear. She was tougher than sick Lucy had been; it would be less easy to hold her head beneath the glittering pool. He sat still and waited, thinking with what words a child could best be killed.

‘Dead?’ said Hudspith and paused, startled, in climbing once more the little hill.

‘Dead.’ Appleby looked westwards to where the farther islands were swimming into evening. ‘You remember how I suggested that two of the personalities might be systematically discouraged? That’s slow murder, though it’s an orthodox clinical method. In this case quick murder proved possible. Single lethal doses of discouragement sufficed. And two things are left: an extremely curious moral problem and a valuable ally. Ought I to be hanged? The question will have significance only if the alligators are cheated of their due. As for the ally, there is no doubt of her. Real Lucy – sole Lucy, as one will think of her for a bit – may be a little lacking in modesty. But she has plenty of intelligence and resolution. Wine’s plan pleases her very much.’