Hare Sitting Up

by Michael Innes

  ‘Was it, indeed?’ Clandon was interested. ‘I don’t know that he can be called all that peripheral, if he’s got himself down to Ailsworth ahead of us. Still following the usher, I suppose. Not that it was the usher, come to think of it. It was Howard himself, after all. Confoundedly confusing this affair is. But why should this Grindrod be so scared of your catching a glimpse of him?’

  ‘I imagine because he very well knows that he’s somebody we want to get a line on pretty badly. He’s following up his own shady angle on this affair. And he’s startled to find Cudworth – whom he knows very well – so close on the track of it. He realizes that if things go just a little bit wrong on him now, he’s had it. My bet is that he bolts straight away, as soon as he thinks the coast is clear. We shan’t see him again.’

  This time, it proved possible to find a track that joined the main drive just short of the house. ‘It all looks uncommonly neglected,’ Clandon said, as the car slowed down. ‘Except by the birds.’

  Cudworth surveyed Ailsworth Court dubiously. ‘It doesn’t seem right to me,’ he said. ‘For the purpose, I mean, to which we’re supposing it to be put.’

  Appleby climbed out and stood on the neglected sweep which here ran across a broad terrace. ‘You want something more in the medieval manner,’ he said. ‘With dungeons, and so forth. And a gaoler with an enormous bunch of keys. I have my doubts about him, and about the feudal retainers in general. Probably there is somebody to do a little cooking. And of course there is Cowmeadow. There have been Cowmeadows here for generations, and this one may well be in a highly confidential relationship with his master. Ah, there’s my friend Jean.’

  Jean Howe had come out of the house and was walking straight towards the car. It seemed likely that she had remarked its arrival from a window. ‘So it’s you, is it?’ she said unceremoniously to Appleby as she came up. ‘Did you draw a blank on that island?’

  ‘Not quite a blank. I learnt something, I’m afraid, that suggests a good deal of doubt about the reliability of Lord Ailsworth as an informant. Quite briefly, Professor Juniper can’t have been under the impression about Ardray that your grandfather declares him to have been.’

  ‘My grandfather is a very old man. It’s not to be expected that his recollections should be entirely reliable.’ Jean glanced with frank hostility from Appleby to his companions. ‘Are these policemen too?’

  Appleby performed introductions. ‘Is Lord Ailsworth about?’ he asked. ‘It’s essential we should have a word with him at once.’

  For a moment Jean frowned uncertainly. It was as if she was unable to make up her mind whether Appleby was friend or enemy. ‘Very well,’ she said suddenly. ‘He’s in the drawing-room with the Donkey Ducks. I’ll take you straight in. Come through the gunroom.’

  They entered the house by a French window. Like everything else that Appleby had seen at Ailsworth Court, the gunroom was dusty and neglected. But this didn’t apply to the guns themselves, of which there were half a dozen in a rack on the wall. Cudworth paused beside them. ‘Quite an armoury,’ he said suspiciously. ‘Cartridge boxes, too. I suppose his lordship spends quite a lot of time shooting game at this time of year?’

  ‘You can ask him,’ Jean said.

  Appleby laughed rather impatiently. ‘Miss Howe doesn’t mean that. It would be a most unfortunate question to put to Lord Ailsworth. If one of these guns is loaded, my dear Cudworth, it’s no doubt for the purpose of taking a shot at young Tommy Pickering. Your friend the Chief Constable, that is.’

  Hearing this, Clandon turned to Jean in rumbling alarm. ‘Your grandfather doesn’t really do that sort of thing? We’re absolutely banking on his having no retail impulse that way.’

  Jean looked puzzled. ‘I don’t understand you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better explain.’ Appleby paused by the door and spoke gently. ‘We’re pretty sure that your grandfather has some very strange ideas in his head. Delusions, perhaps they should be called. Fantasies, with a very large element of the lethal in them. But my hope is that they’re only fantasies, and quite unconnected with anything he might actually do. Do I appear to you to be talking any sort of sense?’

  There was a long pause. ‘Yes,’ Jean said. ‘You do.’

  ‘How would you yourself describe them – these fantasies of Lord Ailsworth’s?’

  Jean smiled uncertainly. ‘I think I found a name for them some time ago. Prospero fantasies. The sense that he has supernatural aerial messengers at his command. It’s just an extension, no doubt beyond the bounds of strict sanity, of his intensely imaginative life with the birds. I don’t know what you mean by an element of the lethal. But then I do have a sense that there are some ideas that he very carefully conceals from me. Do you mean–?’

  ‘My dear Jean, have you friends with you? How very nice!’

  They all turned round. Venerable and distinguished and entirely at his ease, Lord Ailsworth had come into the room.

  ‘But now you must all see the Donkey Ducks.’

  Lord Ailsworth was so consummately the host, that the initiative had for the moment passed entirely to him as he led the way into the great drawing-room of Ailsworth Court. It was an astonishing sight. The long white and gold chamber had been stripped of its furnishings. On the walls there were blank spaces where a score of large paintings had hung – so that Appleby was reminded that the famous Ailsworth Collection was on loan to the nation. But one painting remained. Probably it had been the most splendid of the lot. It was Poussin’s ‘Noah Sending Forth the Dove’.

  Appleby looked at Noah and then at Lord Ailsworth. He wondered whether this tremendous canvas, doubtless familiar to its present owner from his childhood, had been the first occasion of his mind’s taking the bent to which it had later so extravagantly inclined. There was even a physical resemblance between the mad peer and the majestic patriarch at the prow of his storm-tossed ark. It was as if here were an instance of the old fancy that nature sometimes moulds itself at the bidding of art.

  The Donkey Ducks were accommodated in a line of pens or hutches running the full length of the room, and communicating with a sort of promenade on the terrace outside. Through wide-open French windows the precious creatures – which to Appleby’s inexpert eye appeared to be of no special distinction – waddled in and out as their obscure avine whim directed. Just so, fifty years ago and on such summer days as this, there must have wandered in and out the first thronging exponents of the Edwardian country-house weekend. For a moment Appleby had an alarmed sense that what stretched before him was tangible evidence of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and that in this quacking and gobbling crew were incarnated, not inappositely, the spirits of eminent parliamentarians long deceased.

  Lord Ailsworth was telling Cudworth about his celebrated expedition to Tibet. He seemed to have taken a fancy to Cudworth. Perhaps Mrs Cudworth cherished a parrot and some sixth sense had appraised Lord Ailsworth of this propitious fact. Clandon was wandering round by himself, darkly brooding. This sort of place represented – Appleby recalled – Clandon’s own early background. He might be finding disturbing this vision of ducks and geese, rather than lions and lizards, keeping the place where great-uncles had gloried and drunk deep.

  ‘And now, I wonder whether you would care to look over the rest of the house?’ The preternaturally bright eyes of Lord Ailsworth glanced with charming diffidence from one to another of his visitors. ‘It is all quite undistinguished, I am afraid. And I can’t be certain that, in parts, everything is quite as it should be. Footmen, you know, are very hard to come by nowadays. We have to run Ailsworth on a gaggle of housemaids and parlourmaids, I am sorry to say. Did I use the word gaggle? The expression is distinctly on the complimentary side, it is to be feared. Here is the library.’

  They began to make a tour of the house. It was a move in the face of which Appleby felt disposed to bide his time. He didn’t judge this showmanship to be the kind of thing that came at all naturally to Lord Ailswort
h. The old man was up to something. Probably he believed himself to be acting with the deepest cunning. By showing off what it was safe to show, he believed that he would be disarming the suspicions which he must now realize were directed against him. And they could hardly, of course, be led through every room in the house. Ailsworth Court wasn’t like Splaine Croft, which could be thoroughly searched in the course of an hour’s romping. By noting just where Lord Ailsworth didn’t lead them, it was conceivable that a good deal of time could be saved. Of course the obvious course was to tackle the old man head on with the serious crime he was suspected of having committed. But, for the moment, Appleby distrusted this. The consequence of such a move wasn’t easy to assess. Nothing, for that matter, was easy to assess when your antagonist happened to be as mad as a hatter.

  Jean Howe accompanied the tour for the most part in silence. Appleby felt that it had her guessing too, and that she was trying to suppress a mounting uneasiness. Ailsworth Court was certainly not a house that any normal owner would show off with pride. Several more rooms were given over to birds of various sorts, but the rest were simply mouldering away. Appleby’s earlier impression, it was clear, had been simply of the two or three that were kept habitable. Nobody could believe that there was a single housemaid in the place – and on this occasion even the decayed Cowmeadow was invisible. Jean must know well enough that she was involved in a state of affairs that couldn’t continue indefinitely. But she was rather a dogged girl. And she was also a distinctly observant one. It seemed inherently improbable that much was going on even in this very large house that she wasn’t aware of.

  ‘One is never quite easy about captives,’ Lord Ailsworth had once innocently remarked to Appleby. It didn’t seem likely that he could be at all easy about having a couple of them directly under the nose of his acute granddaughter. Turning all this over in his mind, Appleby was beginning to suspect that his problem wasn’t precisely as he had conceived it. But it was just at this moment that Lord Ailsworth said something rather surprising.

  ‘I am terribly afraid,’ he said, ‘that I can’t show you the attics.’

  4

  Of course – Appleby thought – there is a mania nowadays for prowling round great houses, commonly at half a crown a time. And sometimes the tour doesn’t stop short of the kitchens and larders and dairies. But whose curiosity about high life ever extended to the servants’ bedrooms? Or what polite nobleman, showing a group of acquaintances over the more notable features of his mansion, would announce with regret that he couldn’t trail them around beneath the leads? Lord Ailsworth’s apology in this matter was so odd as to deserve – Appleby decided – a little prodding.

  ‘I confess that to be disappointing,’ he said. ‘Attics and roofs are a great hobby of mine.’ He looked plaintively at Lord Ailsworth – with a disingenuousness, he reflected, that Judith herself could not excel. ‘I was hoping to have a look at your Mansard roof at close quarters. Slated, I noticed. But would it be large ladies?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Lord Ailsworth was bewildered – which was not perhaps surprising.

  ‘Large ladies are 16 by 8. Countesses, of course, are 20 by 10. And duchesses are 24 by 12. Do you think we could just take a peep?’

  ‘The point about the attics,’ Jean said, ‘is that they’re given over to wild duck. And of course they’re very shy.’ She was looking rather coldly at Appleby. ‘If you want to search the whole house,’ she added in a low voice, ‘why don’t you say so, straight? We shan’t demand your warrant, or whatever it’s called.’

  But Lord Ailsworth appeared to have been intrigued. ‘Slates,’ he said, ‘are really called large ladies and duchesses?’

  ‘Certainly they are.’ Appleby, as it happened, could make this reply with a good conscience. You never can tell, he was thinking, what utterly useless bit of stray information may turn out useful after all.

  ‘I would rather like to examine them.’ Lord Ailsworth paused. And then something appeared on his face that Appleby had never detected before. It was an open, if fleeting, look of cunning. ‘Yes, let us go up. Not on the south side, of course. We really must not disturb the young ducks there. But on the north. And we can certainly manage a look at the slates.’

  ‘I think this is great nonsense,’ Jean said. ‘We badly want to have, straight out, what this visit is in aid of.’

  Lord Ailsworth seemed much embarrassed by this breach of hospitality. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘if you are not very interested in our little trip to the attics – the north attics, of course – I wonder whether you would seek out Cowmeadow and consult him about something to eat? It is a matter which worries me, I confess. But no doubt something can be provided. And, meanwhile, I will take our friends upstairs.’ Again Lord Ailsworth paused, and again the cunning expression flitted across his face. ‘Not on the south side, you know. Not on the south side, at all.’

  Jean went off without a word. Appleby, Clandon and Cudworth were left glancing at each other curiously. There seemed to be only one possible explanation of this odd development. Lord Ailsworth really had something to conceal in his ramifying attics. And with childish guile he was proposing to avert suspicion by the careful display of some innocent section of them. It wasn’t a reading of the situation that Appleby much liked. Even in a large house – he was thinking as he followed his host up narrowing stairs – it surely isn’t possible to conceal the presence of two live prisoners in one set of attics while trailing an exploring party through another?

  Of course there was the distraction of all these birds. As they finished climbing and began to move along a narrow corridor with doors on either side, it became clear that birds were indeed in very substantial occupation of this part of the house. Although invisible, their fluttering, flapping and squawking could be heard everywhere. If Lord Ailsworth’s human captives were incapable of more than, say, a knock or moan, they would have very little chance of drawing attention to themselves. And, of course, they might both be dead…

  ‘Here we are.’ Lord Ailsworth had paused before a door at the end of the corridor, and now he threw it open. ‘There’s an excellent view of the roof from here.’

  He stood aside to let his guests pass. Appleby, Cudworth and Clandon filed into a small empty room with a steeply pitched ceiling. Whereupon Lord Ailsworth shut the door on them from the outside, shot home a bolt, gave a loud happy chuckle, and walked away.

  ‘How extremely childish!’ Clandon was much amused. ‘I suppose this is what he’s done with the other fellows too.’

  ‘I can’t see it quite like that.’ Appleby had walked over to the window of the small attic room. ‘You can’t play such a primitive trick successively on a couple of perfectly able-bodied men, and expect them to stay put. But it may exhibit the general outline of Ailsworth’s proceedings, all the same. Cudworth – can we break out?’

  Cudworth was examining the door. ‘Not a doubt of it.’

  ‘My guess is that the granddaughter will be up in a minute or two, explaining that the old gentleman plays these pranks from time to time. Meanwhile, there’s at least an extensive view.’

  Clandon joined him at the window. ‘Striking enough, in a lonely way,’ he said. ‘Not a sign of life. Except that smoking chimney.’

  ‘Smoking chimney?’ Appleby frowned. ‘Now, just what is that queer structure?’

  Cudworth, who had been giving the door a final irritated shake, crossed the room and looked out. ‘Isn’t it one of those observation towers?’ he asked. ‘The more remote and elaborate one?’

  ‘Then it’s on fire,’ Appleby said. Suddenly he turned and stared at his colleague. ‘Good heavens – what an ass I’ve been!’

  ‘An ass, sir?’ Cudworth appeared to question the propriety of this self-accusation. ‘You can’t mean–?’

  But at this moment there was the sound of a bolt being drawn back, and the door was flung open. As Appleby had foretold, Jean stood in the corridor, flushed and angry. ‘It’s too absurd!’ she said. ‘You
see, my–’

  Appleby was already past her, and calling to the others to follow. The narrow corridor seemed interminable, the narrow staircase hard to make any speed on. Then the going was easy, but on the ground floor he had to pause to orientate himself. The others were still some way behind him as he ran through the long, disgraced drawing-room. The Tibetan Donkey Ducks flapped and quacked indignantly; they were unaccustomed to such rude behaviour. In the dusty, gloomy hall Appleby halted again. There were glass doors giving on a lobby, and then solid wooden ones. They all looked forbiddingly secured. He remembered the open window of the gunroom. That would take him out on the side of the house he wanted. Cudworth was now up with him, and Jean was a little way behind. Clandon was still lumbering down the main staircase.

  They were halfway through the gunroom when Cudworth came to a dead halt and pointed to the rack on the wall. There was a shotgun missing. ‘Perhaps we’d better hold on and think a moment, sir. It looks as if the old chap may be more immediately dangerous than we’ve been reckoning.’

  Jean ran up. ‘What is it?’ she said.

  Appleby pointed. ‘A gun gone. We think your grandfather–’

  She shook her head. ‘It must have been the man who was lurking on the terrace. I saw him just for a moment before I ran up to the attics. I thought vaguely he must be another of your people. I’d never seen him before.’

  Appleby frowned. ‘There’s certainly nobody else with us.’

  ‘Grindrod!’ Cudworth said.

  They tumbled out on the terrace. There was now a tall thin column of smoke on the horizon. And the air seemed suddenly to be full of birds. Clandon, who had gained his second wind, was now up with Appleby. He ran surprisingly easily for so lumbering a man. ‘Ailsworth’s away ahead,’ he said. ‘I caught a glimpse of him from a landing.’