“The Goblin King?” Miss Brown, whose spirits appeared to be a little revived, interrupted. “Do Goblins have that?”
“Certainly – and he is rather a fine personage. It is a mistake, you know, to suppose that goblins are dwarfs, or in any sense little people. I was not at all surprised to find that the Goblin King was a most distinguished figure, magnificently attired in black and gold.”
“Cousin Hiram!”
“With him he had an obscure familiar. I caught only glimpses, you know. As I remarked earlier, it is very dangerous for the clergy to get involved with goblins. So the utmost circumspection was necessary. The Goblin King had some species of lantern. I had to be very careful to keep out of its beam; and it was only from the oblique light coming from it that I could distinguish him at all. The familiar puzzled me. Could it have been Hecate? I am more inclined to suppose a minor Teutonic divinity. Possibly the Sow Goddess.” Mr Buttery looked ingenuously at Miss Brown. “Would that appear to you to be a tenable hypothesis?”
“I think you are a very wicked old man.” Miss Brown’s response, if not strictly relevant, was spirited.
“Presently however the familiar was banished. This was the only occasion upon which I actually heard the Goblin King speak. ‘Go away,’ he said. I was much struck by his tone of authority. Without more ado, the Sow Goddess – I am sure she was that – took her departure.”
Richard Poole looked wickedly at Miss Brown. “With more rumbling?”
“I should rather say with a purr. I am inclined to suppose some species of chariot. The Goblin King then withdrew to the house. In fact, he withdrew to this hall, and sat for a long time there in the window, quite still and silent. He appeared lost in sombre thought. When at last he stirred, it was because the dawn was breaking. He then began once more to explore the house. I felt that I had seen enough, and I slipped out to recover my dinghy. I was halfway across the lawn when I heard the laughter.”
“The laughter?” Richard Poole was startled.
“It came from high in air, and I knew at once that it was supernatural. Very cautiously I skirted the house – and suddenly I saw the Goblin King again, silhouetted against the dawn. He had climbed the ruined stair – climbed right to the top – and now he was looking down on all that part of Water Poole that is mere ruin. And he was laughing. I have never heard such laughter. It was, I say, supernatural – and yet all the gaiety and all the fun of the world we know seemed to be in it. I was astounded. I was strangely moved. Once more it pealed out – and then, quite abruptly, ceased. And the Goblin King had vanished.”
There was a long silence. At last Richard Poole spoke softly. “He had vanished?”
“Yes – following darkness. Following darkness like a dream. That was all.”
The silence renewed itself, until broken by Appleby. “Yes,” he said. “That – I am very glad indeed to say – was all.”
And Appleby and Judith drove away. He waited until they were on the highroad and then asked a question. “The doctor is quite sure?”
“Quite sure. It will be confirmed at the post-mortem. Hiram Poole was dead before he reached the ground. He died of the heart-failure that had threatened him for a long time.”
“That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that he died of laughter. It was appropriate enough, for the whole affair was comedy. Once or twice it looked like crime – but it proved to be comedy in the end. One can’t consider that Richard Poole was very culpable, and he told the truth as he knew it. So did that tiresome but perfectly honest temperance crusader… But of course there was more to it than that.”
“More to Hiram Poole’s death?” Judith nodded over the wheel. “Decidedly.”
“One can’t doubt that young Richard’s deception was something the discovery of which was very painful to him. Imagine him, sick and chill and tired, being haled around that derelict shrine – for it was that to him – in the small hours.”
“And by a Daughter of Abstinence, at that.”
“Quite. It must have been sheer nightmare. And any common man would simply have felt himself abominably cheated and betrayed.”
“Any common man would have suspected the very obvious mercenary motive.”
“Hiram had his dark hour, I don’t doubt, hunched there in a window of the hall. But he rose to the thing.”
“He rose to it.”
“The Pooles are still resourceful and gay. Hiram saw it like that, and his own laughter attested it. I take off my hat to him.”
WAS HE MORTON?
“Yes,” Appleby said, as we strolled to the far end of his study, “I do keep a bit of a museum in this room. A sign of old age and the reminiscent mood, no doubt.”
He pointed to a range of well-ordered shelves. “You may find them depressing. For these things connect up, one way or another, with every sort of wickedness under the sun.”
“All of them?”
“Well, no. One or two recall affairs that would have to be termed bizarre, I suppose, rather than nefarious. For example, that photograph. What do you make of it?”
I found myself studying a formal, three-quarter-length portrait of a young man, taken full face and looking straight at the camera. A professional job, I thought, but of rather an old-fashioned sort.
“Attract you?” No comment had occurred to me, and Appleby appeared to feel I needed prompting. “Or do you prefer a man to be handsome in a more regular way?”
“The features are certainly irregular enough,” I said. “But they have vitality. For what it is worth, then, your specimen does attract me. Was he a great criminal?”
Appleby considered. “Do you know, I didn’t find it at all easy to say? But I suspected the answer to be in the negative. You never heard of Leonard Morton?”
“Never. Is this his photograph?”
Appleby smiled. “Sit down, my dear chap, and I’ll tell you the tale.”
“It’s sometimes said that if the whole population was fingerprinted the police and the law-courts would be saved some pretty large headaches. And Morton is a case in point.
“His parents had been wealthy folk who lost their lives in some accident when he was a baby. There were no near relatives, and young Leonard was brought up in a careful enough, but rather impersonal way. Nobody had much occasion to be interested in him, and he seems to have had no talent for impressing himself upon the world.
“You spoke of vitality. I suspect he shoved most of that into a rugger scrum. And by his companions there, I suppose, he was remembered only as so much heave and shove. He made no print, so to speak, as a personality. Which was awkward, in view of what happened.
“He took off into the skies one day – it was for the purpose of bombing Berlin – and ceased to be a recognisable physical object some hours later.”
I was horrified. “Do you mean,” I asked Appleby, “that he was charred to a cinder?”
“Nothing so drastic. But he was abominably burned. Or that was the story the world was asked to believe later. At the time, Morton was posted as missing, believed killed. No word of him came through, you see, as a POW or anything. Then the war ended, and suddenly there was this mutilated man with his story – his story of being Leonard Morton.
“There was nothing out of the way in it. He had baled out; every rag had been blasted or burned off him; and he had for a long time suffered a complete loss of memory. And now here he was back in England, proposing to claim quite a substantial fortune. But was he Morton?”
“If he wasn’t he had certainly known Morton – and known him as quite a young man, before the war started. There could, it seemed, be no doubt about that. If he was an impostor, he wasn’t impersonating a dead man whom he had met for the first time in a hospital or prison camp. But here certainty ended.”
Appleby paused at this to stare thoughtfully at the photograph, and a question occurred to me. “At which point did you come into the affair?”
“In the first few days. There was, you see, a time-element. For
a reason I’ll presently explain, it was important that the truth should be got at quickly.
“Sooner or later, of course, it was bound to be got at – although a bold imposter might well persuade himself it wasn’t so. The claimant – as I suppose he should be called – hadn’t materialised miraculously on a frontier of post-war Germany. He had come out in a train, and the train had had a starting point, and so on. There existed, as you can guess, a highly efficient organisation for tackling just such problems, and there was little doubt that in the end the facts would be run to earth.”
“But meanwhile there was this time-element?”
“Precisely. Nearly everybody’s relations with Morton had been impersonal, as I’ve said. Or, if not impersonal, say professional. Schoolmasters, holiday tutors, trustees, executors, bankers – and so on. They could none of them be confident, one way or the other. Quite early on they got together and held a sort of committee of inquiry on the young man, with a fellow called Firth, who was senior trustee, in the chair.
“Well, the claimant did pretty well. When he realised that they conceived it their duty to question his identity, he behaved very much as the genuine man might have been expected to do – if the genuine man was a pretty decent and forbearing sort of fellow. They were impressed, but by no means convinced.
“And then the claimant sprang a bombshell. There was after all, it appeared, one highly personal relationship in his life. Shortly before that bombing trip he had met and become engaged to a young lady. He demanded to be confronted with her. And the young lady, when named, proved to be the only daughter of the occasion’s Grand Inquisitor.”
I stared. “Firth?”
Appleby nodded. “Just that. And that was where I came in. Miss Firth – at least according to her father’s idea of her – was a young person of an extremely delicate nervous constitution. And to be presented with a lover from the grave, and later see him unmasked as an impostor would be quite, quite fatal to her. So Firth came and besought me. Could I resolve the puzzle straight away or at least arrive at some confident opinion? I said I thought I could.”
“And you did?”
“Yes. Not in a fashion that would have had much value if presented as evidence in court. But at least it gave Firth confidence in choosing a line.
“I did a quick rake round photographers who might have had dealings with young Morton just before the war – and then some equally quick work in our own laboratories and files. When I met the young man – whose face was certainly sadly disfigured – I had a batch of portraits, including the one that you see hanging here. I asked him to find his own portrait. And he chose this one. I wonder whether you can see what that enabled me to infer?”
“I don’t know that I can.”
“I was able to tell Firth that the claimant was certainly genuine, and that his daughter might be brought along.”
This floored me completely. “My dear Appleby, I don’t see–”
“I realise you don’t. Imagine you’re a tailor, and try again.”
Inspiration came to me. “The button and buttonholes!”
Appleby was delighted. “Splendid! What is to be said about them?”
“They’re on the wrong side. The printing has been reversed.”
“Exactly. I found a photograph of Morton and had this reverse print prepared. The two looked substantially different, because human features are never symmetrical, and his were more irregular than most. Both prints were given him in the batch he was to sort through to find himself. You see what was involved?”
“I’m blessed if I do still.”
“If he chose the positive print, he was choosing a Leonard Morton he recognised from life. If he chose the negative print, he was choosing a Leonard Morton he had never seen – except in a mirror. That, you see, was how I knew that here was the genuine Morton. And so – after months of investigation – we were able to prove with legal certainty. It was quite a puzzle. But – as I said – the answer was in the negative.”
DANGERFIELD’S DIARY
“A criminological museum ,” Sir John Appleby said, “ought to consist for the most part of objects that are quite startlingly macabre. But my own exhibits, as you see, are quite uniformly dull. Look at that old diary, for instance. Nothing could appear dimmer – in the strictest sense. And yet there is a decidedly queer yarn behind it.”
My eminent friend paused. “Now what – just at a glance – would you make of it?”
It didn’t seem intended – for the moment, at least – that I should pick the thing up, so I simply gave the covers the most penetrating scrutiny I could manage. “It’s for 1911,” I said.
Appleby laughed. “It certainly says that much in gold on the cover. So perhaps you’re right. Anything else?”
“It doesn’t appear to me to be a specially bound or got-up affair. I’d say it’s the sort of ready-printed, one-page-to-a-day, diary that you get from a stationer. No doubt such things were already manufactured long before 1911. But it looks good and expensive of its kind. Bought in Bond Street, in fact, in the old opulent days.”
“Just that.” And Appleby nodded. “Did you know that Ralph Dangerfield kept a diary?”
“The Edwardian playwright? I had no idea of it.”
“Well, he decidedly did. Dangerfield kept a scandalous and compromising diary.”
I’m bound to say that at this the faded volume lying before me took on considerable interest. “It’s well known,” I said, “that Dangerfield’s morals weren’t good.”
“That puts it mildly. He belonged to a fast and raffish set, and it seems that he had the thoroughly undesirable habit of writing up its intimate chronicles from day to day. There was a run of these diaries covering nearly twenty years.
“On the day that Dangerfield died, his mother, Lady Julia, made her way into his chambers in Jermyn Street and burned the lot. It was high-handed, illegal and thoroughly sensible. Everybody approved – and no end of people breathed more freely, too. But one volume escaped, since Dangerfield happened to have lent it to a crony. It was for 1911.”
I glanced at the diary again and wondered how it had come into my friend’s possession. “You say there is a queer yarn behind it,” I ventured. “Would there also be some queer yarns inside it?”
“You’ll know quite soon.” Appleby was quizzical. “Did you ever have a chance of viewing the Cinzano Collection?”
“Never. But I believe it was most remarkable.”
“In its limited field it was unique. Just why Sir Adrian Cinzano took to collecting literary rarities and curiosities nobody ever quite made out. He had made humble beginnings at it quite early in his career – not long after setting up his first little business on these shores – and eventually it became something of considerable interest and importance to the learned.
“Indeed it wasn’t merely the learned who were interested. To get the entrée to the Collection became rather fashionable. And Cinzano, who was immensely vain, exploited this quite a bit. He would give little dinner-parties, for instance, followed by a personally conducted tour. On one occasion – oddly enough – I was asked to one of these parties myself.”
Appleby now picked up Ralph Dangerfield’s diary. “And eventually we were shown this. Cinzano did what one might call quite a build-up before handing it round. First we were shown all the regular things – the rare first editions, the collections of letters by famous authors and artists and so on. But the great event was to be this wretched curiosity. Just how it came into Cinzano’s possession I never discovered. Part of his success consisted in a flair for picking things up in unobtrusive ways.
“Well, the big moment, such as it was, came. We were all, it seemed, to be allowed to edify ourselves by taking a quick peep at famous names in sundry intriguing and improper contexts. There was some to-do over impressing us with how very confidential it all was, and then Cinzano handed the diary to the lady of most consequence present.” Appleby paused. “Just as I now hand it to you.”
> It was, I confess, with some curiosity that I took Ralph Dangerfield’s record of the year 1911 in my hands and opened it.Then I gave an exclamation of surprise. “But my dear Appleby, it’s a complete blank!”
“Not quite. Turn to the first of May.”
I did so. “There’s a cross in red ink.”
“Now try the first of June.”
“The same thing.” Then I gave another exclamation. “But the inside isn’t for 1911 at all. It’s for 1952.”
“Precisely. And it was in April 1952 that I attended Cinzano’s little party. It was all mildly alarming, was it not? The real diary had been filched from its covers. And what had been substituted appeared to be by way of a delicate intimation of certain dates on which there would be trouble brewing for somebody.”
“Blackmail?” I asked.
Appleby nodded. “There could be little doubt that the missing diary gave wonderful scope for just that. Our party broke up in some confusion, with Cinzano imploring everybody to keep mum. But of course the situation was altogether too interesting for that: and by the next day all London – by which I mean all fashionable London – had heard about it. And on the next day, too, I went back to call on Sir Adrian Cinzano in a professional way.”
“He had called in the police?”
“He had – and he was quite communicative on how he believed the thing to have happened. He hadn’t, it appeared, had the diary out for about a month – and on that occasion he had shown it to a small party of complete strangers.”
“Wasn’t that very rash?”
“It was both rash and most unusual. These people had been Americans – university professors, he rather thought – and they had presented a letter of introduction from Burcroft, the eminent poet. Burcroft died, you remember, in 1952, and this letter of introduction must have been about the last thing he wrote.
“Unfortunately Cinzano hadn’t preserved it, and there seemed no way of tracing his visitors. He agreed that the diary contained a great deal of scandal about bright young people of the Edwardian era, now in a respectable old age, which would be a gold mine to an unscrupulous person. It looked as if Society would just have to wait in some trepidation for the first of May.”
Appleby Talks Again Page 6
