Hare Sitting Up

by Michael Innes

  ‘Bad, is he?’ Appleby was rather surprised. ‘Tell me all about it. You don’t think anybody has guessed?’

  ‘Lord, no. Our crowd has no eyes for anything outside a test-tube, thank goodness. Getting the deception going was perfectly easy. As soon as brother Miles arrived I whisked him into Howard’s private lab, dressed him up in a white coat, and had in a couple of junior people just to get a word from myself. So it went round at once that the Head Man was back. Lucky that brother Miles didn’t have to put up more of a show at the start. He was in a poor way.’

  ‘He was sufficiently strung up when I saw him at his school and gave him the news. But I’m rather surprised by what you say. Miles struck me as quite tough, down below. And the brothers used to play ball with each other’s identities long ago. So the job oughtn’t to have been too disconcerting. Although it’s Howard, it seems, who has been a bit of an actor since.’

  ‘Certainly it isn’t the usher, as I’ll make clear. But first – about his being in a state. That hasn’t lasted, thank goodness. The next morning, he was a different man.’

  ‘A different man?’ In its particular context, Appleby found this phrase startling.

  Clandon roared with laughter. ‘One can see it turning into an old-fashioned farce,’ he said. ‘First twin going out by the door and second twin climbing in by the window. But all I mean is that this Miles had got a grip on himself. He was far less anxious.’

  ‘About his ability to carry the impersonation through?’

  Clandon looked doubtful. ‘Well, I suppose so. Although if he thought he was being good at it, he was quite confoundedly wide of the mark. Still, there it was. If you’d been able to weigh his quantum of anxiety on a balance, I’m pretty sure you’d have found that about half of it had evaporated.’

  Appleby considered this. ‘Perhaps it was a sudden swing to over-confidence?’

  ‘Perhaps it was. Part of the trouble with his passing himself off as Howard during these last two days has been that there’s been no discretion about it. He’s drifted round the labs – and even entered into conversation with people – far more than has been necessary. And it isn’t, as I’ve said, as if he were capable of putting up a virtuoso performance. I’ve seen him make several hair-raising blunders myself.’

  ‘How very odd.’ Appleby had risen from his desk and himself paced rather restlessly to a window. ‘Rusty, in a manner of speaking – wouldn’t that be it? Nothing like up to his old level of performance, and yet instinctively aiming at it.’

  ‘It’s an idea.’ Clandon sounded dubious.

  ‘Consider the sort of turns the two brothers used to put on as lads. You must have heard of some of them.’

  ‘I’ve heard’ – Clandon rumbled with renewed cheerfulness – ‘that Howard played Rugger for England. Eighty thousand people looking on, and supposing that it was Miles scoring the vital try against Ireland.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Appleby swung round to face the room. ‘To you and me, a thing like that is amusing and admirable. But think of the scandal, if it had ever come out officially: a rowing Blue – which is what Howard was – smuggling himself into an International Rugger match! Think of all the old gentlemen who played against Wales in ’97, and so on. Criminal irresponsibility would be their verdict. Fellow who could do that, sir, ought to be ducked in a horse-pond. Wouldn’t that be the reaction?’

  Clandon nodded. ‘Certainly it would. No doubt as undergraduates the terrible Juniper twins made their fun as risky and outrageous as possible. But would that really prompt Miles to be unnecessarily venturesome – now, in this desperately serious situation? No, I think it must be simply that he lacks judgement. And technique. He’s simply just not a convincing Professor Howard Juniper. But, I dare say, we can get by for a few days more. At least the man isn’t the nervous wreck he showed signs of being when he arrived.’

  Appleby stared at Clandon thoughtfully. ‘That wouldn’t be because of your playing down the possible calamitousness of the thing?’

  ‘Certainly not. It was my idea that it might brace brother Miles to be told straight just what the conceivable stakes were. I put it in the same entirely untechnical language that I treated you to, my dear Appleby, when this bombshell first burst on us. We have all sorts of checks and precautions at our little game, and according to the book of rules I ought to have known, day by day, precisely what Howard was, or was not, in possession of. But Howard is far too brilliant – and wayward, if you like – to stick to all that. So, when he vanished, I was in no position to check up with certainty. Supposing him to have been quite, quite mad – which we are agreed is one possible starting point – then he may conceivably have had it in his power to walk out with something almost inconceivably lethal. I put that to brother Miles straight.’

  ‘And how did he react?’

  ‘Reasonably enough. He asked me for my own opinion – my own estimate of the degree of probability that it was such a situation we are up against. I gave him my own honest answer: that there’s a slight balance of probability against Howard’s being in possession of anything of the sort.’

  Appleby frowned. ‘I see. Well – that’s why Miles’ nervous tone has improved. He has confidence in your opinion – which is the only well-informed one, after all.’

  ‘Perhaps so. At the time, I was chiefly struck by his inability to make much of it all. No doubt he’s a classical man, and all that. But his ability to grasp some elementary scientific conceptions is pretty dim. I doubt whether he understood the nature of a filter-passing virus.’

  ‘Didn’t he, indeed?’ Appleby had turned away rather absently, and was once more studying the Thames. ‘But Miles’ intellectual constitution is less relevant than Howard’s emotional one. That’s what I want to get clearer from you, Clandon. What I have got doesn’t help. I mean that, in a way, I’d like to think of Howard as a bit battier than you seem able to bring him out.’

  ‘I understand that – and, mind you, Howard’s a dark horse. Although I’ve worked with him so closely for some time, there are few men I’m conscious of being so uncertain about. Of course he lives on his nerves, as so many top-flighters do. He’s a worrying type, in a way. But then so does brother Miles seem to be – so that’s perhaps no more than a family trait.’

  Appleby reflected for a moment. ‘But I gather you don’t suspect Howard of regarding the whole drift of his work as a nightmare?’

  ‘Well, no – not quite that. Of course, he does brood at times on the insane purposes science is being harnessed to. We all do that. And I’ve known him, in phases of discouragement, declare our own particular position – at the research station, I mean – to be on the verge of becoming morally impossible and unendurable. But then he bobs up again, damns all governments roundly, and says that we’ll whack some sense into them yet. By “us” he means, you know, scientists as a class – or as a calling or vocation or whatever. If I have doubts about Howard having cracked up and gone batty, it’s because of that intensity of faith in “us”. No doubt, if something happened to undermine that faith, he’d be in for a bad time.’

  ‘But, so far as you know, nothing has?’

  Clandon nodded emphatically. ‘So far as I know, nothing has. Rather the contrary. In June he went to a conference in Amsterdam, and met some top Russians. He came back quite cheered up. Those chaps, he said, were pretty cautious, of course. But it was clear that, in a last analysis, they belonged to “us” one hundred per cent.’

  ‘Not meaning more, really, than that they are good and sincere scientists?’

  ‘Oh, quite so. Still, Howard was rather cheered up, as I say. Although worried, at the same time, by the whole damned thing.’ Clandon shook his head impatiently. ‘I find it hard to give you the picture of Howard as I see or feel it. Comes of being no sort of psychologist, I suppose.’

  Appleby smiled. ‘Aren’t you simply saying this: that your Head Man has been at times sorely troubled, but has shown no signs of really acute anxiety?’

  ‘T
hat’s it.’ Clandon looked relieved. ‘That’s it exactly. No acute anxiety. Except, conceivably, about his brother.’

  ‘What’s that you say?’ For a moment Appleby was left staring. ‘I’m quite clear that Miles has been subject to rather acute anxiety about Howard: about his brother’s whole moral position and so on. Are you telling me that Howard has been in acute anxiety about Miles?’

  ‘Well, yes – I am, as a matter of fact.’ Clandon was almost apologetic. ‘Mind you, Howard hasn’t often talked to me about Miles. And, when he has, his overt attitude hasn’t been of anxiety at all. He’s professed rather to envy Miles his obscure and blameless life. You can imagine the sort of thing: decent job teaching decent boys decency. Not, like ourselves, walking a razor’s edge between science and lunacy. Obvious line. Wholesome line, for that matter. I take it about my own elder brother, who’s happy all the year round, just improving the estate and chasing foxes.’

  ‘Bother your own elder brother.’ Appleby was almost excited. ‘What has seemed to lie under Howard’s obvious line?’

  ‘The notion, I imagine, that Miles is thoroughly unstable. And it’s so strong in Howard, if you ask me, that it has to peep out whenever Miles is in focus at all.’

  ‘A kind of morbid apprehensiveness?’

  ‘My dear chap, you do put these things well. Comes of constantly having to size people up, I suppose.’ Clandon seemed genuinely admiring. ‘Put it this way: if Howard read of something pretty calamitous happening to somebody, he’d be apt to think that that’s just the sort of thing likely to happen to Miles. A foreboding attitude, you might say. And occasionally sticking out so that even a mere nose-in-test-tube type like myself must notice it. Brotherly instinct for protectiveness, I suppose.’

  ‘No doubt it can be put that way. And I’m no sort of psychologist either. But wouldn’t it be orthodox psychoanalytical doctrine that the basis of such an attitude – at least if at all obsessive – lies in deep unconscious hostility?’

  Clandon was silent for a moment. ‘Deep waters,’ he said quietly. ‘And I suppose Cain and Abel are latent in every pair of brothers. But identical twins may be a special case. Probably one pundit would regard them as one sort of special case, and another would regard them as another. Meanwhile, where do we go? Unconscious hostility is a queer notion to take up – having landed ourselves with the fantastic situation we have.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more.’ Appleby paced the room. ‘So take it, for a start, in terms of common sense. Excessive anxiety about a brother – or any other relative – would be too pathological altogether if there weren’t some reasonable springboard for it. Well, I suppose Miles might be said to afford something of the sort?’

  ‘I wonder.’ Clandon hesitated. ‘Do you know, I don’t think much of it? Remember that our only experience of brother Miles is in a thoroughly upsetting context. First, you go down and tell him his brother’s vanished. And second, he’s yanked off to undertake a decidedly queer assignment. Well, he’s had his bad time, as I’ve described. But it’s not clear to me that in any circumstances he’d be a really bad risk. Would you agree?’

  Appleby, back at the window, was watching a line of lighters dropping down river. ‘Well, yes. Only–’ He broke off impatiently. ‘But bother Miles! He’s only the stand-in, after all; and we’re allowing him to become a blasted red herring. I rather wish I’d let him alone. And I bet you do.’

  Clandon rumbled amiably. ‘I can take it, my dear fellow. Incidentally, I suppose I’d better be getting back. I’m principal stage-manager, after all.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘You’ve thought of straightforward abduction – plain violence? We live amid so much blessed law and order that perhaps we tend–’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby interrupted at once impatiently and with perfect good humour. ‘If morbid psychology is being kept well in view, it isn’t to the exclusion of simple melodrama. In fact, at the moment, it’s on melodrama that I’d put my money.’

  But after all – Appleby said to himself when Clandon had gone – need my money be on melodrama either? It’s a possibility, it’s a definite field I have a dozen men working on now – but am I missing the likeliest explanation of the lot? And just because I’ve been stampeded into taking the sensational view? The PM perturbed and informing the Cabinet. My own Minister wanting to guard the reservoirs. The genuinely alarming thought of how the public might react to a bit of scare reporting. Bacillus botulinus has already been making some headway in people’s imaginations. Suppose the populace at large got the idea that any wandering stranger of intellectual appearance was likely to be the mad scientist, intent on dropping the small fatal dose straight into the national teapot? It is a prospect almost equally ugly whether false or true.

  And – just conceivably – it is true, more or less. But it is far more probably false. So, too, are all the other more sensational readings of the affair. Isn’t it likely, in fact, to be on a par with two or three other cases with which I’ve been concerned in the last half-dozen years?

  Marchbanks, for instance – remember him. He hadn’t been kidnapped. He hadn’t gone mad. He hadn’t even bolted with somebody else’s wife. He had simply packed a bag and gone off trout-fishing in Scotland. And, although Marchbanks’ disappearance was public property from the first, with a national hue and cry whipped up by twopenny papers, nobody came within a mile of spotting him for a month. Marchbanks himself had read The Scotsman every day over his tea, and without himself turning a hair. He was just being damned to them – which was an expression, come to think of it, that the Junipers seemed to be fond of as a family. Marchbanks – so far as Appleby could make out afterwards – hadn’t as much as seen the thing as an enormous joke. His absence had cost no end of public money; heaven knew what complicated experiment had gone to pot because of it; but the simple fact was that he had decided it was about time for a holiday.

  And wasn’t Howard Juniper – Professor Howard Juniper – out of the same stable: a don, seconded to this national work, who had grown up in an ancient university as a sweet law unto himself? Appleby would never forget the mild surprise with which Marchbanks, run to earth – or rather run to burn – in Morayshire, had received the suggestion that there might be people who were displeased with him. He’d had more useful ideas, he’d said, while flogging this very decent bit of water, than he’d had for years in their ineptly pretentious laboratories. He’d even brought off the really crucial experiment at last – with a length of gut, Mrs Macnabb’s porridge pan, and a really superb spring-trap that old Macnabb had invented in pursuance of his profession as a poacher. So what the hell?

  Appleby smiled at the memory. There was decidedly a lesson in Marchbanks. Entirely sane, Marchbanks had been, even if by some standards irresponsible.

  Irresponsible… The word moved uneasily in Appleby’s mind. It was something that Miles Juniper had said. It was something in the tone, the mere inflexion, of something he had said… Appleby paused on this, aware that he was on curiously obscure ground. For this hadn’t been the only moment of its kind during that interview at Splaine Croft. There had been something else of the sort too: something that had just hung for a moment on the ear – and something that Appleby, try as he might, just couldn’t pinpoint or bring back to consciousness. But this was clear enough. Miles had expressed his certainty that his brother Howard was up to nothing irresponsible. But there had been just the faintest hesitation or reservation in the way he had said it.

  And there was that freakish past – common, indeed to both brothers. Wasn’t it conceivable that Howard Juniper had simply behaved in some fashion that would indeed be merely freakish in an unimportant young man, but that did rather more than verge upon irresponsibility in a famous one?

  Very well. Go back to Marchbanks. He had in the end found Marchbanks – and had put a good deal of ingenuity into the task. But wouldn’t he have done it quicker if he had kept one fact more clearly in focus from the start? When a man bolts from his job it is probably because
he is fed up with it. And the natural thing to do, when one is fed up with one’s job, is to turn to one’s hobbies. Dry-fly fishing had been Marchbanks’ hobby. What about Howard Juniper’s? Drop for the moment – Appleby said to himself – all the more sinister pictures this business has conjured up. See if you can get anywhere with the simple notion of a chap bolting to have a go at something he is known to like.

  He reached for one among the several neat files that the Juniper affair was bringing to his desk every day. It was the one that began with Howard Juniper’s entry in Who’s Who and went on to as complete a biographical outline as could be built up. When he reread it carefully he pressed a bell on his desk.

  ‘You see that?’ he said to the secretary who answered it – and pointed to a place on the page. ‘What do you think of the possibility of our missing friend’s having gone harking back to something of the sort?’

  ‘Not much,’ the secretary said promptly.

  ‘Nor I. Would you say it would be a good time of year for it?’

  ‘Nice weather, and all that, sir. But I really haven’t a clue. Get an expert view, of course, in ten minutes.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘Go ahead. It’s another of those tiresome stones.’

  ‘Not to be left unturned, sir? Quite so.’ The secretary, who was young and alert, nodded cheerfully.

  ‘And find out about the most likely place where this sort of interest’ – Appleby tapped his file again – ‘may be – um – prosecuted.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, Charles. Just see if you can get me Judith on the telephone.’

  Two minutes later the instrument purred on the desk. ‘Lady Appleby on the line, sir,’ a voice said.

  ‘Judith – is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me. Aren’t you coming home to lunch?’

  ‘No, I’m not. And I want you to make yours a sandwich in the car. Do you think that you could – entirely unobtrusively – do a job that normally requires quite a large squad of police?’