The Secret Vanguard (3 page)

The air was filled with mild sunshine; a nondescript sprinkling of people – learned, eccentric, dull – ate belated sandwiches on the steps; above them the pigeons manoeuvred from their bases in the colonnades. And Hetherton, pausing between great pillars as a man pauses at a suburban gate, said wistfully: ‘Won’t you come in?’

Appleby went in. A grey light, cold and pure; sound at once muted and faintly echoing; sightseers moving about with slightly puzzled faces – puzzled chiefly by the obscure sense that it was here and not in any imagined palace of romance that the burden of selfish solicitude might lift. The place was massively timeless; it seemed firmly stayed upon the very pillars of eternity.

Ahead, past insignificant doors and a primitive cloakroom, lay the great domed library that was the cerebral cortex of England. All around and on many levels stretched the long galleries with their millennial spoils: Brahma and Minerva, Mumbo Jumbo and Kwannon, Bes and Set and all the brutish gods of Nile looking down upon a trickle of idle Londoners in the year of Christ nineteen hundred and thirty-nine. And the bronze and the granite and the quartz, the black basalt and the green slate seemed like bucklers against death, buttresses to an invisible permanence. Get old Hetherton safely from under the snouts of the buses and taxis, inject him into this all-sheltering womb and he was utterly secure until he chose to venture out again. Nothing could happen here… Appleby blinked. It was a delusion – a trick of the spirit of the place such as a brain sparely dieted on milk and baked beans might surely resist. For let a shot be fired in the Balkans or a bomb be dropped on Warsaw, and this adamantine haven would untenant itself, the vases vanishing into wood-wool and the colossi departing amid much heave and shove for hiding places unrevealed. The red granite lion from the temple of Soleb looked permanent enough, had looked so for well over three thousand years. But plenty of monuments not dissimilar were now one with the hot dust of Spain.

‘Who would want to shoot a quiet fellow like that?’

Appleby blinked again. Hetherton had paused by the door of his own room as he uttered the question; very evidently it had been repeating itself persistently in his mind.

‘Who would want to shoot Ploss? Lord knows. But bullets do sometimes find quiet fellows. And then one has to discover in what direction they have been not so quiet. Or perhaps quietly nasty – to a woman, a dependant, someone with a secret. But I can’t fit anything of that sort to Ploss.’

They entered Hetherton’s room and its owner began to clear papers and photographs from a chair. But Appleby prowled restlessly about – presently to halt before a little statuette on a shelf. It was a faience figure from Cnossos, a female form headless and full-breasted, brandishing what appeared to be a snake. ‘Sex,’ said Appleby. ‘Begin there. Ploss was unmarried and he had a sexual life which was trivial and regular. He was of the sort to have seen it as such and to be chary of anything else. And anyone – well – in on that with him had to have the same rational views. Just no room for out-of-hand passions there.’

‘No, I suppose not.’ Hetherton, speaking diffidently, transferred his gaze from the Cnossos figurine to a somewhat faded photogravure of the Hera of Samos. It was a favourite of his and he had possessed it from boyhood; it was an ideal round which a good many of his convictions had crystallized. ‘I suppose not. But I should imagine that, even so, it is a field in which one never can tell.’ He stopped as if struck by a sudden thought. ‘You’ve already made all that a subject of investigation in this case?’

‘Oh, yes. Such things make part of our day’s work.’ Appleby smiled wryly. ‘And with the habit and technique of just suspecting all round I can assure you we make pretty good going. But we get nowhere with Ploss along these lines. So, of course, we turn to the notion of blackmail. The fact that the place was searched makes that a reasonably promising approach.’

‘Searched?’

‘Yes. I said, remember, that one couldn’t be sure he didn’t keep a diary. That is because his house was searched and anything of the sort may have been removed or destroyed. You can guess that something like that is a common feature of cases in which blackmail figures: the blackmailer is silenced and a hunt made at the same time for incriminating documents and the like.’

‘It must be very difficult, surely, to ransack a whole house?’

‘Ransack isn’t quite the word; it suggests disturbance, and there was nothing of that. Nor was the whole house involved. There had simply been a skilled search –
skilled
, mark you – of those places in which a man would be likely to leave papers. Not to hide papers, but just to leave them. And it was all simple enough. Ploss had a habit of sitting late sometimes on the gazebo, and then his housekeeper – the only other person sleeping in the place – would go to bed without locking up. To dispose of Ploss and then go indoors and hunt around was not difficult. But it was all very efficiently done.’ Appleby, again pausing before the Cnossos statuette, stared at it as a man might stare at a blank wall. ‘What I should be tempted to call a sheer waste of first-class technique.’

Hetherton had sat down at an untidy desk and printed ‘PHILIP PLOSS’ in capital letters on a scribbling pad. He was now looking at this with a disconcerted expression. ‘The search you describe,’ he said, ‘–I think I see the point. If Ploss held a valuable or incriminating document he would be likely to keep it in some place of concealment or security. Or at least another person could not be sure that he would not do so. But his search would seem to have been directed towards something which Ploss saw no reason to stow away.’

‘Just that.’

‘Put it this way: the search was made because Ploss possessed – or because there was a chance that he possessed – some paper or record or object the value or significance of which was unknown to him.’

Appleby nodded – with a faint smile that made Hetherton suddenly chuckle. ‘My dear Appleby, you must not laugh at my first steps in criminal investigation. We must all walk before we can run.’ He chuckled a second time. ‘There – it sounds as if I
wanted
to run, does it not? And perhaps I do. You have suddenly made me feel that this is a dull old place.’ Again he stared in obscure disquiet at his scribbling pad. ‘I feel that I want to know the truth about this Ploss. Not for the sake of hunting down a criminal – I fear I would shrink from that – but just for the sake of knowing.’ And Hetherton, thus unconsciously enunciating the central faith of the dull old place, began to print ‘PHILIP PLOSS’ once more. ‘Tell me how the professionals set about the task.’

‘Laboriously and without inspiration. We inquire into the man’s way of life, and particularly into any changes which it may recently have undergone. But on Ploss we get almost nothing that way. Recently he had been coming rather more frequently up to town. And staying longer. And his housekeeper seems to feel that he was using his books in rather a different fashion. Instead of taking down a book and reading it through he would be going from book to book – or have several open before him at the same time. You will remember the eighteenth-century memoirs I noticed in the gazebo. It seems reasonable to conclude–’

With an effect of great unexpectedness Hetherton tapped his desk with a forefinger. From a person of his habits the interruption was positively brusque. Appleby stopped and stared.

‘My dear fellow, you must forgive me.’ Hetherton was most apologetic. ‘Something had just come into my head. Bishop Sweetapple.’

‘Bishop Sweetapple?’

‘Yes, indeed. Notice how I have been printing Ploss’ name on this pad. These small capital letters: what would you say they suggest?’

Appleby glanced at the pad. ‘The signature to a letter,’ he said without hesitation, ‘as printed in a newspaper or possibly a book.’

‘Exactly. In fact I have been groping unconsciously after something recently seen. And that was it. A letter from Ploss – probably in the
Literary Supplement
– asking for documents and so on concerning Bishop Sweetapple. Ploss was writing a book.’

Appleby shook his head. ‘I’m afraid his lordship is unknown to me.’

‘Sweetapple was an undistinguished Erastian divine with literary tastes, a friend of Chesterfield’s and a contributor to the
World
– that sort of thing. I fear I know very little about him. No doubt a biography is wanted.’ Hetherton paused. ‘By workers in that field,’ he qualified cautiously.

‘No doubt. But it seems hardly likely that Ploss was shot because hot on the traces of Sweetapple.’

Hetherton looked quite dashed. ‘I cannot but agree with you. Only–’ He frowned. ‘I have a notion that there is something else in my head.’ He glanced again at the scribbling pad. ‘That I recently noticed Ploss’ name in some other connection.
Quite
recently… Do you know, I think it was something about a poem?’

‘A poem?’

Hetherton sighed. ‘How irrelevant this is!’ He tore off the sheet of scribbling paper and crumpled it up. ‘Yes,’ he said – and he spoke at once dismissively and with conviction – ‘it was something to do with a poem.’

The train stopped – as it sometimes did – on the middle of the Forth Bridge. It was then that the uncommunicative man spoke grudgingly from his corner. ‘Poetry?’ he said.

Sheila Grant scarcely heard. She was squinting out at as much of the bridge as she could see – squinting out and remembering. Right on top of the central cantilever there had been a little box. A sentry, her father had explained. And knowing that it is the business of sentries to pace up and down she had been puzzled: there seemed so little point in pacing up and down on the topmost girders of the Forth Bridge.

That must have been in 1917 – she was barely four – and, of course it was a puzzling time. There was a drive – it was from Queensferry towards Cramond surely – on which one saw the fleet, one saw the long low ships in their fantastic camouflage. It made them invisible, people said – and other people, knowing ones, said No, but it made them look like different ships, or all like the same ship. A crazy time, a time as crazy as those fantastic patterns she remembered, and very much in the past… Sheila looked down through the slanting girders – and almost rubbed her eyes. Gliding smoothly up the Firth was a small warship, camouflaged.

‘Poetry?’ said the uncommunicative man irritably.

Since then she had been abroad. And back in Edinburgh for a time when she was nineteen. She had gone for that same drive one evening with a young man, a friend of the family. They had got out and he had tried to make love to her. ‘There’s a rug in the car,’ he had said. It was a formula, some sort of password current at the time… And then she had been abroad again… And here she was once more, with a small camouflaged warship – something of the sort – gliding past below.

‘I seldom read it,’ said the uncommunicative man. He spoke with a finality which even the expansive person opposite found momentarily damping.

Sheila remembered that her mother would never believe that these stops on the middle of the bridge were for any purpose other than to afford passengers a view. She believed this so firmly that if a train on which she was travelling did not stop she felt cheated of something for which she had paid when they gave her a ticket. And even when her husband had pointed out, over tea at a window of the Hawes Inn, that goods trains frequently stopped in just the same way…had pointed this out to her mother, who always called goods trains luggage trains… Sheila sank back, lost in reminiscence.

‘Rousing stuff sometimes,’ said the expansive man, returning to the assault. ‘I remember, now, something we had to learn at school. Our flagship was the
Lion
–’

The uncommunicative person frowned. And the fourth occupant of the compartment, an undistinguished young man with sandy hair, looked up curiously from his magazine. But again Sheila was scarcely listening. She had recalled her disappointment on first crossing the bridge. That, of course, had been because of the Marine Gardens… had they been at Portobello, and were they there still? In the Marine Gardens there had been a gigantic scenic railway, a switchback up and down which shouting and laughing and breathless people were swept in charging coaches. And so she had come to suppose that on the bridge trains would behave in the same way – that they would make the crossing sweeping magnificently up and down the bold outline of the cantilevers. Her indignation when the great moment came and she found herself part of a sedate and level crawl through a maze of dull red girders and tubes had been extreme.

The expansive man had become frankly aggressive. ‘Our flagship,’ he reiterated loudly and rapidly, ‘was the
Lion
and a mighty roar had she and she was first in the van sir when the foemen turned to flee–’

With a jerk the train moved on. It made a considerable clatter on the bridge. The expansive man obstinately raised his voice. ‘And if e’er again they try sir to creep out warily–’

The uncommunicative man gave a grunt of frank disgust.

‘We’ll send them
staggering
back to port from the grey North Sea.’ The expansive man put a quite terrific emphasis on ‘staggering’; he seemed to concentrate in the word all the growing animosity he felt towards the reserved person at the other end of the seat.

Sheila had not noticed how it began. But certainly the oncoming man – he was a powerful and florid person, with something obscurely disturbing about his bearing – certainly the oncoming man had been at it before the train left the Caledonian station. He was of a type, no doubt, whom reticence or reserve in a chance companion will drive to outrageousness. And certainly the reserved man was reserved to a point of ostentation; he had crackled his
Scotsman
forbiddingly when addressed and had uttered scarcely half a dozen words during the journey. Just how it had got to poetry – or to what the aggressive man thought of as poetry – Sheila could not remember. At any rate, it was mildly absurd.

North Queensferry. Sheila, who had a copy of
The Antiquary
open before her, turned back to the first page.
It was early in a fine summer’s day,
she read
, when a young man of genteel appearance, having occasion to go towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in one of those public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the Queensferry, at which place, as the name implies, and as is well known to all my northern readers, there is a passage-boat for crossing the Firth of Forth
.