The Secret Vanguard (2 page)

And beyond this – to the vaster enigma of continental Europe – the eye of Philip Ploss would not travel. He would break off and look up at the great three-dimensional highway of the sky. Then – very likely – he would descend from the gazebo and go indoors and take his chequebook and pay as many bills as he could find. And after that he would walk through the spinney and note how black the brambles were, or he would visit one of the little fields where there was a particularly expressive bullock. The confused and subterraneous logic of all this was perhaps a shade ignoble – but after all a prudent man has the right to purchase what tranquillity he may. Had Philip Ploss’ money from tea, and from his acquaintance with the editors and publishers, been able to exercise a remoter control than it did – could it have commanded in chancelleries and cabinet rooms and the offices of great trusts and concessions – it is certain that this narrative would never have come into being. It would be possible to read instead many more slim volumes of Ploss.

‘Ploss,’ said John Appleby deliberately. ‘Philip Ploss, the Cow-and-Gate poet. Who would want, now, to shoot a quiet fellow like that?’

Old Mr Hetherton put down his glass of milk and looked warily round the Express Dairy. He and Appleby met once a fortnight to talk archaeology. They talked, that is to say, old Mr Hetherton’s subject; Hetherton looked after some species of antiquities in the British Museum. And now Appleby had switched unwontedly to his own field, for Appleby worked at Scotland Yard. Hetherton, who had an abstract mind and thought of his friend vaguely as a criminologist, was surprised at this abrupt laying, as it were, of a concrete corpse on the narrow marble table between them. He looked cautiously about him – here was a topic which would not edify any young persons near – and then took up the first point to suggest itself. ‘A
Cow-and-Gate
poet?’ he asked.

‘His verse was simple, wholesome stuff – a sort of food for babes. And exclusively rural in inspiration.’

‘Indeed.’ Hetherton had never made proprietary baby foods a subject of study, and he conveyed by this tone awareness of a joke, scrupulous admission that it had failed to reach him, and courteous acknowledgement of the attempt to amuse. ‘Shot
dead
?’ he further inquired.

‘Quite dead. And instantaneously so. You would scarcely have suspected that anything was wrong. I find myself rather haunted by that.’

Hetherton reached for the menu, as if additional baked beans on toast might have a sedative effect. ‘You exclude,’ he said, ‘the possibility of this unfortunate man’s having taken his own life?’

‘I didn’t to begin with.’ Appleby crumbled a roll. ‘It was my first – and flippant – suggestion. That sounds bad. But it is a fact that a forthright violent death sends up my spirits. And homicide makes them soar.’

Hetherton looked troubled. ‘I can conceive a certain excitement–’

‘It’s not exactly that. You would be surprised to know how much of my time is given up to suspecting people in the most indefinite way. Not suspecting people of this or that, but simply
suspecting
. Sometimes I feel it is the most debasing activity possible to man. Any specific suspicion can come as an enormous relief. You see?’

‘I really believe I do.’ Hetherton smiled with pleasure. ‘It is a response of considerable interest from the point of view of ethical theory, is it not?’

‘No doubt. But the simple fact is this: when my sergeant told me that Philip Ploss had been murdered I fell into a gamesome mood and insisted that it would prove to be suicide after all. There was no weapon – but then the thing had happened on some sort of tower, presumably in the open air. So I said it was done with a balloon.’

‘With a balloon?’ Hetherton’s bewilderment made him lay down his knife and fork with extra care.

‘A small, very buoyant, helium-filled balloon. You wait for a dark night and a stiff breeze blowing out to sea. Then you go into the open air and shoot yourself – having attached the balloon to the revolver first. The revolver vanishes and no verdict of suicide is possible.’

‘Really, I can hardly imagine–’

Appleby smiled. ‘No more can anyone else. This is just what I made up for the sergeant as we motored down: the local police, you’ll realize, having sent for us pretty quick. I embroidered on the idea readily enough. Our only chance, I said, lay in revolver and balloon being one day cut out of the tummy of a shark. The balloon might prove to have been made in Japan. Investigations would be instituted in Tokyo. That sort of thing.’

‘I see.’ Hetherton nodded slowly. It could not be maintained, the nod seemed to say, that the humour Appleby was describing wore or carried well.

‘Call it professional callousness. Ploss meant little to me. I had never been moved or even pleased by his verse. Of his life I knew nothing at all. From his death I hoped to get a certain intellectual stimulus. I hoped, that is to say, that there would be a decent element of puzzle to it.’

Hetherton’s lips moved, presumably to reiterate that he saw. Then he appeared to feel that such a bold claim might be unjustified: insight into the mind of a young man who motored about the country hoping for mysterious deaths ought not to be lightly claimed. ‘You interest me,’ he said carefully.

‘And the element of puzzle proved to be there. An obstinate puzzle, too. I’m carrying it about with me now and I’ve put it to you.
Who would want to shoot a quiet fellow like that
? And yet this element – the intellectual element, you may term it – is not the thing’s main fascination. What I called its haunting quality comes from something else – comes from its power to impose itself as drama.’ Appleby paused and Hetherton saw his eyes light up. ‘Yes; the honest truth is in that. It was like going into a theatre and seeing a curtain – an object insignificant in itself – faintly stir in the dim light. It stirs because the ropes have taken a preliminary strain and it is about to rise. And one knows that on the other side is a great hinterland of drama. That is it. The death of Philip Ploss was like the stirring of such a curtain.’

Hetherton, mildly surprised, did not fail to notice that his friend was surprised, too. In talk of this sort it was easy to guess, he did not commonly encourage himself. ‘And you say’ – Hetherton had some skill in prompting – ‘that the force of the situation lay in nothing appearing to be wrong?’

‘Largely in that. Listen. I motored down on Saturday afternoon. He lived much as one might suppose – a small manor house at Lark, on the slope of the Chilterns. A peaceful place. He was comfortably off but not wealthy, and he had cultivated his garden. Literally and in Marvell’s sense: as if his highest lot to plant the bergamot. And in Voltaire’s sense, too. Discreet cultivation all round. I went into a living-room first to see the doctor and the police down there. It’s interesting. I don’t know if you know his poetry, but it struck me that he must have confined himself within its narrow compass with all the intelligent deliberation of the authentic minor artist. For there was plenty of major art about, and one had the sense that he was on terms with it. There was a refectory table with a local detective-sergeant making notes at one end – and at the other was a
Purgatorio
open at the thirtieth canto, with Vernon’s commentary beside it. A gramophone – one of those great horned things – was in a corner. He had been playing
Opus 131
.’

‘Ah,’ said Hetherton.

‘You will feel nothing out of the way in that sort of life – but it’s an unusual setting for violence. There is something moving and mysterious – if you’ll believe me – about a half-smoked cigarette lying beside a murdered tart. When its place is taken by the thirtieth canto of the
Purgatorio
–’

‘Quite so.’

‘I lingered in that room. It tempted to rather futile guessing. Reading Dante and writing a sort of higher dairymaid poetry…one seemed to see the man as one who knew the nature of strength – and who never risked the disillusion of finding himself without it. I prowled the room and tried to build him up further. It was possible to fancy a faintly silly streak – or more strictly perhaps the affectation of it. In an extreme I could imagine a dilettante giggle deliberately assumed – defensive mechanisms of that sort. Certainly not a rash or even a resolute man. One would guess that if he kept a diary–’

‘Did he keep a diary?’

Appleby looked at Hetherton’s seriously inquiring face and smiled. ‘You should be an assistant-commissioner; it’s their business to stop gabble in just that way. And the question is pertinent. Unfortunately the answer is unknown. Ploss may have kept a diary and it may – as you shall hear – have been destroyed… But I see that you are all impatience to be conducted to the corpse.’

Rather as if he took this proposal literally, Hetherton sat abruptly back. The little restaurant had emptied and in place of a babel of talk and the clatter of knives and forks there was only the rumble of traffic outside. ‘Really, my dear Appleby, you have drawn me into very unfamiliar territory – very unfamiliar territory indeed. But I shall certainly not boggle at the body. Indeed, I am inclined to charge you with deftly withholding it in order to whet my interest.’ Hetherton shook his head with a mock solemnity which was intended to make it quite clear that the accusation was facetious. And then his solemnity became genuine. ‘Dear me! I hardly know that I ought to speak of this unfortunate man in such a way.’

‘Then let me be thoroughly serious. I mentioned a tower. Actually it proved to be a gazebo at the top of the garden – a large affair, with a sort of sun-room from which there is a magnificent view. Ploss seems to have spent a good deal of his time there. Books were littered about – eighteenth-century memoirs mostly, with slips of paper stuck in them as if he was up to a job of work. I expected Ploss’ brains to be littered about, too. But the thing had been neatly done. I looked at him and it didn’t occur to me that he was dead.’

Appleby paused. He had embarked on an account of the Ploss affair almost idly, but an odd urgency had been growing on him as he talked. He wanted to recreate at least some shadow of the thing; to share it in some degree with this vague, intelligent scholar who would presently disappear within the recesses of Barry’s portico. It was not often that a case so got on his mind as to need purging in this way.

‘I took him for a relation, a lawyer – lord knows what. For he had been shot as he sat. He had been shot directly in the middle of the forehead and a lock of his hair – long, untidy hair – had fallen by some strange chance directly over the wound. That made it uncanny enough. But there was more. I have seen plenty of bodies to which death has come instantaneously, but never one in which there has been visible neither awareness nor effect of death. It was so, however, with Ploss. He wasn’t shot from hiding; the character of the little sun-room makes that impossible. For some fraction of a second at least he must have seen a weapon pointed fatally at his head. But whatever muscular action it was that produced, death had cancelled out. His hands were folded lightly in his lap. His expression perhaps was slightly puzzled – but this, I think, may have been habitual. And then there was his eye…’

Hetherton shifted on his chair. ‘Do these’ – he hesitated – ‘curious circumstances help you towards – towards a reconstruction of the crime?’

‘No.’ Appleby was emphatic. ‘Nothing of that sort. Friend or enemy, stranger or acquaintance: any of these may have stood up before Ploss and fired that revolver. The odd fact of his apparent unawareness tells me nothing in a detective way. It is simply a fortuitous thing that enforces the strangeness of the whole impression. For there he sat with the paraphernalia of his tranquil and secure existence about him, and below lay a countryside utterly at peace in the evening sun. Only up there and with the Chilterns behind us there was a first breath of cold night wind. It blew in like a commentary or a question, and it stirred his hair.’

There was silence. Hetherton looked thoughtfully at Appleby. ‘And there was something,’ he said presently, ‘about his eye?’

‘At a second glance it was, of course, a dead man’s eye. And curiously unfocused. At one moment it would seem as if he were looking at somebody or something across the little glassed-in platform. And the next I would get a very different impression.’ Appleby hesitated. ‘I would see him as looking in that agonal second not at anything on the gazebo, and not at the prospect immediately before it. I would see him’ – Appleby stretched out his hand for the bill – ‘as looking not at that English vista at all; as looking straight over our heads here as we sit and seeing something very far away.’

Appleby stood up. ‘To which there is only one thing to add. “And this was strange, because it was the middle of the night.” Ploss was shot round midnight on Friday, so these fanciful feelings about his glance are scarcely relevant.’

Hetherton took a deep breath, rose, produced a florin. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I am quite gripped by the mystery. I wish I could help.’ And, as if at the extravagance of the thought, he smiled his scholar’s smile.

The little Greek restaurant in Coptic Street had opened a miniature fruit-counter in one of its windows; some way beyond a gentlewoman’s tea-shop had changed curtains and perhaps hands. Our private landmarks alter in a companionable way, thought Appleby, reminding us that we are slipping along ourselves. Only the city in its vastness is unchanging – its growth or decay no affair of ours, like the things that happen in geological time. Or is it not so? Across the street a young soldier in private’s uniform was carefully reading what appeared to be an Italian missal in the window of an antiquarian bookshop. Round the corner a group of American tourists stood before the Thackeray Hotel – and people glanced at them in passing, like ornithologists taking note of a diminishing species. Of course restaurants took to trying to market fruit and gentlewomen sold each other the goodwill of tea-shops. Πáντa ρει – things amble along. But might things not at any time begin to move very fast indeed, as fast as the traffic in Great Russell Street, which seemed likely to be fatal to old Hetherton one day…? Appleby took his friend’s arm and steered him across to the gateway of the Museum.