Death at the Chase

by Michael Innes

  ‘Decidedly I did.’

  ‘There’s a man in one of them who goes around handing out his card. Mr X, the Celebrated Coward. Just like that. Well, I’m Martyn Ashmore, the celebrated ditto.’ Ashmore laughed harshly. ‘So now we are introduced. Can I have a fill of your tobacco, all the same?’

  2

  Judith – Appleby reflected – would have landed him in precisely this absurd situation. It was again the principle of going on till you are stopped. He recalled the occasion, for example, upon which she had insisted upon their ‘exploring’ – which meant simply breaking into – a house seemingly even more derelict and untenanted than this which confronted him now. There had been a moat round it, and owls had been appropriately hooting. It seemed incredible that any other human being had approached it for years. So they had climbed in through what had once been a window. They had hazardously ascended and descended tottering staircases. They had doubtfully distinguished on mouldering walls what had once been linenfold panelling. It had been great fun. And then the man had come. He was some sort of caretaker – an abandoned family retainer (they had afterwards decided) told to prowl the place in order to repel such vulgar persons as might commit nuisances in corners or scratch initials or even more objectionable graffiti upon disgraced chimneypieces. They had heard his footfalls from afar. Footfalls plus an unnerving tap. For he was an ancient creature who got around only with the aid of a stick.

  Plop, plop, and a tap. Plop, plop, and a tap. Admittedly it had been unnerving. Judith had persuaded him to hide in a cupboard.

  Much later, and in an unwary moment, Appleby had told this story to the children. It must have been after dinner and when the Applebys – as tended to be their habit – were lingering amid Beaujolais and guttering candles before turning to the washing-up. And now the story, if inexpugnably hilarious, had turned faintly tedious. The man, like some homing device of ghastly sophistication in modern warfare, had walked and tapped his way straight to the cupboard. He had thrown open the door – and there Sir John and Lady Appleby had been, like the woman (according to Bobby Appleby, who was of a literary turn) in a play of Strindberg’s, who lived in a cupboard because she believed herself to be a parrot. And Appleby had emerged, fumbling for the famous visiting card in one pocket while noisily jingling a kind of Danegeld of halfcrowns in the other. The man (according to Bobby) had behaved in an impeccably Jeeves-like manner. Recognizing (despite the halfcrowns, which had been a false note attributable to Appleby’s unassuming origins) the presence of the upper classes, he had bowed the Applebys deferentially off the premises.

  Bobby Appleby was not only of a literary turn. He had lately become a novelist. He was entitled to his fantasies. But had it been a fantasy? Appleby could no longer precisely remember. The cupboard indeed he could vividly recall. It had exuded what he vaguely conjectured to be the smell of the droppings of untold generations of bats. But had there really been that moment in which he had simultaneously obtruded an oblong of pasteboard (Sir John Appleby, New Scotland Yard) and a couple of halfcrowns? Appleby no longer knew. But he had been left with a distaste of what might be called false situations. Perhaps he was heading for one now.

  The garden through which Mr Ashmore had conducted him abounded chiefly in hemlock and thistle – these (as once at Byron’s Newstead) having choked up the rose that once bloomed on the spray. Here and there headless statues presided over exhausted fountains and departed shrubberies. There was a croquet-lawn abundant in fungi and mushrooms. Appleby rather suspected that Mr Ashmore relied upon these as upon a home farm; that the fatally inviting stile had tumbled him into the society not merely of a pathological recluse but of a pathological miser as well. The mere possession of a tobacco-pouch had transformed his status with the proprietor of this impressive if mouldering mansion. Extravagantly prosperous gentlemen in the City of London would part with large sums for the possession of so authentically feudal a set-up as lay before him. But Mr Ashmore was prepared to admit to it anybody who would provide him with a free smoke.

  ‘I like your house very much,’ Appleby said. ‘I must have missed it on my map. What is it called?’

  ‘Ashmore Chase, of course.’ Mr Ashmore had turned to stare at him. ‘What do you think? They’re all around me, my damned brothers and cousins in their bogus Lutyens homes-and-gardens manor houses. Opening their interesting grounds for the benefit of District Nurses and God knows what. But I’m the head of the family, after all. You may say that the Sixteenth Century means nothing nowadays. Fair enough. But land does. I’ve been out in your bloody modern world, and I’ve crashed in it. The Celebrated Coward and all that. But the estate’s mine too. And that’s a different matter – eh? I know my rent-roll, and I know their rotten stock-jobbing bubble-and-squeak standing. No wonder they hate me. Well, I hate them too.’

  Appleby said nothing. These family amenities didn’t strike him as a very proper matter of communication to a stranger. But he was surprised that he hadn’t heard, either from Judith or one of his new neighbours, of a network of Ashmores in the county; he promised himself to gain more accurate information about them than was likely to come from the eccentric old person he was now listening to. But he also wanted to know about the old person’s harping on the theme of the Celebrated Coward. Just for the moment, he couldn’t place this at all. He had been challenged to respond to the name of Ashmore in a way that in fact he couldn’t do. When the old man had said ‘You’ve heard of me’ some faint bell had indeed rung in his head. But it hadn’t, so to speak, rung up any curtain. Mr Ashmore owned some perished history which the world had cast into a deeper oblivion than he knew. Because curiosity had been so large a part of his professional life, Appleby had an instinct to get at this. But the time for it hadn’t quite come. Perhaps it would come when the old fellow found that pipe.

  But now it didn’t look as if this was going to happen in a hurry. Mr Ashmore – Martyn Ashmore, as he had declared himself to be – appeared curiously reluctant to go indoors. They had reached a terrace which, although much overgrown, could be distinguished as attractively paved in ancient brick. This ran the length of the house on the front now exposed to them, and from it a few farther steps led up to a front door in equally ancient oak.

  The door was shut. Apparently it was locked as well, for Ashmore as he walked up to it had produced from a pocket an impressively large key. Instead of applying this to the keyhole, however, he somewhat surprisingly applied his ear to it instead. Then, with a gesture to Appleby to follow him in silence, he moved softly down the terrace, pausing every now and then to peer cautiously through a window. But the windows were in so begrimed a state that this inspection could have had little practical utility, and Appleby was unable to resist an uncomfortable impression that what he was witnessing was a compulsive ritual devoid of rational significance. Presently they came to a second and smaller door of what appeared to be comparatively recent date, sheltered beneath a frankly unauthentic Gothic portico. This door – Appleby was further instructed to remark – was ajar and swaying gently to and fro in a light chilly breeze which was now rising. Ashmore paid no attention to it. He walked on to the next window, stopped, and anxiously examined its fastenings.

  By this time it seemed evident to Appleby that there must be somebody around the place charged with the not very easy duty of looking after Mr Martyn Ashmore. Yet nobody of the sort had appeared – and for that matter he had been building up a strong impression that the old man lived in this great place in absolute solitude. He was about to frame a question which might throw some light on this when he saw that Ashmore had moved on.

  But now they were approaching an angle of the house, and Ashmore’s behaviour had become stranger still. He still held the big key in his hand – or rather he held it in both hands, cradling it as a trained Commando might cradle an automatic weapon. And some fantasy of this kind he actually went on to enact. As if this corner were a spot peculiarly vulnerable to a lethal enfilading fire, and with an agility altogether
surprising in so elderly a man, he crouched, sprang and swung round the corner at the double. Appleby, caught unawares, found himself adopting a ludicrous compromise between the same manoeuvre and a more reasonable manner of circling a secluded country house on an unremarkable autumn day. He reflected impatiently that there was a great deal of Ashmore Chase; what had appeared at a first glance was that the house did nothing if not sprawl; this depressingly senile or demented war-game might go on for quite some time.

  And this it did – to an extent indeed which prompted Appleby to ask a question the tone of which he a little regretted as he uttered it.

  ‘May I ask whether you do this kind of thing often?’

  For some moments Ashmore – who had started the window-business again – offered no reply, so that Appleby feared he must have offended him. But this proved to be not so, and Ashmore’s answer when it came held almost the suggestion of polite conversation.

  ‘Oh, dear me, no! Not at all. Only on the anniversary.’

  ‘The anniversary?’

  ‘Of their all being killed, of course. Massacred. Today is the anniversary. I told you, didn’t I, that I remember the date?’ Suddenly Martyn Ashmore looked strangely grim. ‘I still have reason to.’

  Suddenly Appleby quite definitely knew that he wanted to ask no more. Yet this, in some obscure way, was not possible. To close up when so strange a remark had been offered one would represent an indecent withdrawal of human sympathy. And he did feel a genuine if still wholly uncomprehending sympathy with this strangely driven recluse. He waited however until the ritual dash round a further wing of the house had been made.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. Do you mean that there is one special day in the year in which you face a peculiar physical hazard?’

  ‘Just that. They make an attempt upon my life only on the one day. And, even so, only one single attempt. It’s a matter of their honour. Too much honour – honour and dishonour – about the whole thing.’

  ‘Why don’t you keep yourself securely shut away on this one dangerous day of the year? Or call in the police? It ought to be quite easy.’

  ‘I funked once. I gave in once. No good came of it. Did you ever read Nostromo by the fellow Conrad? Some sort of foreigner.’

  ‘I’ve read it more than once, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Dr Monygham. A gentleman – English gentleman. He gave in. It broke him.’

  ‘It didn’t break him. He ends up as the voice of reason and morality in the book. But why did you give in?’

  ‘They had an electrical thing. After some hours I couldn’t take it any longer. I could show you the places – if they were at all decent.’

  Appleby acknowledged a long silence. They had now got right round the house. Its front door was again ahead of them. The day seemed to have darkened – to have turned suddenly colder, as is said to happen when ghosts walk. Appleby knew that he must speak again.

  ‘Something very bad followed?’

  ‘The whole village. The men were shot. The women and children were told to go and pray for their souls in the church. Then they fired it. I was made to watch.’ The crazed country gentleman called Martyn Ashmore was silent again for a time. ‘It wouldn’t have been quite so bad, you know, if my mother hadn’t been French.’

  ‘But even in the years immediately after that sort of thing happened, surely, people didn’t exact vengeance from men who…who were tortured until they talked.’

  ‘It wasn’t believed. It was thought to be a put-up job. Don’t blame them. Collaboration often worked like that.’

  ‘Good God, man!’ In the stillness of the early afternoon Appleby heard his own voice almost crying out. ‘This must have been nearly thirty years ago! You can’t believe–’

  Ashmore made no direct reply. He walked up to the front door, and this time put the key in the lock without hesitation. He turned it, threw open the door, and stepped back as if to let Appleby be the first to enter.

  ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘you’ll stay to lunch.’

  It was in this second that the thing happened. Suddenly between the two men the worn brick on which they stood quivered and seemed to explode. There was a crash and an effect of flying splinters. There was a brief dust. A large flat stone – a roofing stone – lay in fragments at their feet.

  Appleby looked up. He saw a mouldering and crenellated parapet. Behind it there must lie a flat leaded space. Beyond that rose the swell of the ancient roof from which this deadly projectile must have come. He was instantly and enormously angry. Martyn Ashmore had been within inches of his end. So for that matter had been a retired and inoffensive Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. He grabbed Ashmore and dragged him within the shelter of the doorway.

  ‘Have you servants?’ he demanded. ‘Have you a telephone?’

  ‘A telephone? Yes, of course. But they’ve disconnected it. The post-office people. They were demanding some extortionate rent.’

  Appleby scarcely heard this. He was listening to something else – the sound of flying feet on what must be an uncarpeted staircase. He dashed into a gloomy hall. A door banged. He turned towards the noise, but its direction eluded him. Then from somewhere beyond the back of the house came the roar of a motor-cycle engine. It rose and then rapidly faded into distance.

  ‘Another failure,’ Ashmore said. ‘Three hundred and sixty-five days to go.’ He laughed harshly, but his voice was steady. ‘And now about luncheon. Would claret or burgundy be your choice?’

  It was not much Appleby’s habit, in any crisis, to lose a tolerably sharp consciousness of his surroundings. But he was forced afterwards to admit that it was in an almost dreamlike state that he had traversed shabby and almost empty rooms, had watched his host light a candle, had descended behind him into just such a cellar as he had fatuously imagined he might be incarcerated in by a maniac. It wasn’t an empty cellar. He opened his eyes wide, indeed, at what he saw.

  ‘What about this?’ Ashmore was asking, and held up a bottle.

  ‘That’s brandy,’ Appleby said. Even in this extraordinary situation he was able to reflect that it was a long time since he had set eyes on just such a bottle – its neck bulbous with wax, its label hand-written in France long ago.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Ashmore put the brandy back in its rack. ‘We want a half-bottle, wouldn’t you say?’ His impulse of hospitality seemed to be moderating itself. ‘One doesn’t care to turn too sleepy of an afternoon, eh? And here they are. Lafite.’ His unnerving laugh echoed queerly beneath the vaulting of the chilly place. ‘You must try my Lafite. Just a glass.’

  3

  The wine was superb, but only the most evil-hearted of grocers could have purveyed the cheese. Appleby ate it heartily all the same – mostly with the end of a knife, since the bread available at Ashmore Chase was on the elderly side. He found that the morning’s adventure had given him an appetite, and this he took to be a sign that there remained to him at least some vestige of the spirit of youth. In a sense however it was an adventure wasted on him; he had spent too much of his life walking in and out of affairs of this sort; the thing would have come at least with a greater effect of impact to another man: a quietly wayfaring scholar, say, or the simplest of citizens on a country jaunt. On the other hand he was himself at least in a strong position to get on with the matter, since he need waste no time in perturbation or amazement.

  And certainly he couldn’t simply let it lie. It had undeniably become his affair, since one can’t see either oneself or another within inches of being murdered and at once merely close the file. Moreover there seemed something helpless and unprotected in Martyn Ashmore’s situation which had the effect of placing additional responsibility upon even the most fortuitously contacted represent-ative of society and the law. That this went with something courageous in the man – that although a rum old creature with some unknown horror behind him he was yet evidently indisposed to flap – seemed no more than a fact constituting an additional claim.

&
nbsp; And the first point was clear. Something extremely definite had happened. At one moment, that was to say, Appleby had been supposing himself in the presence of a harmless eccentric – or lunatic, to use a harsher word. In the next moment an event had happened which had at least served to set the old gentleman’s outlandish behaviour in some rational consonance with outer reality. The stone that had come crashing down in that transforming instant might fairly be called a sizeable chunk of just that: outer reality in its most lethal form.

  It hadn’t come down by accident. It hadn’t come down as a mere alarming joke. The person who dropped it had aimed it – and had surely been curiously indifferent as to which of the two figures below got killed. Or had the assailant so concentrated on Ashmore that he (or she) simply failed to notice Appleby standing within a few feet of him? It didn’t seem possible. What was perhaps worth remarking was the fact that probability had remained a little against anybody getting killed at all. It had been a murderous attack conducted, so to speak, on the principles of Russian roulette. If Ashmore himself was to be believed – which there was no very compelling evidence to persuade one to do – something of this sort happened to him precisely once a year, and obscurely as the consequence of a bygone horror so hideously hinted that Appleby’s scepticism had faltered before it. Yet even if one granted that Ashmore had experienced some unspeakable outrage, direr still in its consequences, in occupied France, it didn’t necessarily follow that either the hurtled stone or (if they really had happened) any of its annual equivalents were in the causal relationship with those distant events that Ashmore supposed them to be.