‘Very well.’ Judith extinguished the small ritual lamp on her tea-tray. ‘The Ashmores have been around these parts for quite a time. Since the Conquest, in fact.’
‘Absolute rubbish. Nobody has been around since the Conquest – except in the commonplace sense in which we all have. The Ashmores no doubt emerged from their hovels in the time of Thomas Cromwell, and liberated something substantial from a monastery. Not that it’s material. Go on.’
‘It certainly wasn’t all that number of generations back. Not their generations.’
‘I know. Their ultimate ancestor was a tortoise. Or a Galapagos turtle. Martyn Ashmore told me all that. His grandmother was present at the Rape of the Lock. I accorded his recital – offered in the presence of appropriate family portraits – instant and implicit belief. But it scarcely appears a factor in the present mystery.’
‘I suppose not. But I don’t see how I’m going to tell you about the Ashmores if you will go on talking.’
Appleby made a resigned gesture. Then he threw a log on the fire – thereby bringing the looming Hoobin crisis one step nearer – and filled his pipe.
‘The Ashmores,’ Judith said, ‘have a reputation for eccentricity. They’ve had it for a long time, and occasionally it seems to deepen into madness. That must be the Chief Constable’s excuse for ignoring Martyn Ashmore when he started some tale of mysterious persecution over a glass of sherry.’
‘Pride didn’t exactly ignore it. He had somebody go round asking discreet questions. But nothing emerged. And it seems that Ashmore wasn’t in any sense asking for help. It was this neighbour business again – feeling it due to a fellow to tell him about something that was going on. And if that isn’t nearer to madness than to eccentricity I don’t know what is.’
‘If that’s one salient point about Martyn Ashmore, another is his wealth. There’s far more money than simply comes to him from land.’
‘That’s not quite what he suggested to me. He implied that it was safe, broad acres with him, and what I remember his calling bubble-and-squeak stock-jobbing in his numerous relations.’
‘He was being less than candid.’ Judith appeared in no doubt about this. ‘It’s combining a large fortune with really miserly habits that has given him so picturesque a reputation.’
‘There didn’t seem to be a servant about the place. He said they demand exorbitant wages.’
‘I think he was being less than candid again. There are said to be some old creatures lurking around the place, although he refuses to have them quartered in the house. As to the whole family, I don’t know much about them in recent years – not really since they used to be around when I was a girl. Martyn wasn’t the head of the family. An elder brother had the Chase, and was married and had a son. Martyn inherited only because his brother and nephew were killed in a motor smash. There were two younger brothers who are still in circulation, although they aren’t at all young now. And there are nephews and nieces, and great-nephews and great-nieces. Even the younger ones are much in these parts from time to time. Shall we have a big party and ask the lot? You could go round questioning them closely. That would clue you up.’
‘I think not. But I’d like to know more about the French side – for instance how Martyn Ashmore’s French ancestry landed him in France, and in what capacity, during the war. That young Frenchman, de Voisin, puzzles me quite a lot. Why on earth should he have turned up like that?’
‘Might he have been the villain of the piece? Might it have been he who chucked the stone?’
‘In theory, yes – although it would have involved some very funny business with a motor-cycle engine. The only clear point is that his arrival on that particular day cannot conceivably have been purely coincidental.’
‘You used to say that the most inconceivable coincidences just do happen.’
‘They weren’t happening at Ashmore Chase.’ Appleby paused to allow for his wife’s amusement before this dogmatic statement. ‘I’d like to help this chap.’
‘The mysteriously irruptive Jules de Voisin?’
‘Of course not. Ashmore. He’s so queerly discontinuous that he’s hard to assess. But he’s not a bad old chap. Kept some sort of end up under pressure both from within and without. And he has some uncommonly good claret.’
‘Obviously a worthy object of benevolence. But do you think–’
‘Colonel Pride, my lady,’ a voice said at the door.
6
‘My dear fellow, I’m most grateful to you.’ The Chief Constable turned to Appleby with these words as soon as he had greeted Judith with the familiarity of an old friend. ‘I ought to have been more on my toes when old Ashmore first spun me his unlikely yarn. No smoke without fire, and all that. No tea.’
‘No tea?’ Appleby was perplexed by this expression.
‘Talking to your wife, my dear chap. Had tea. Shouldn’t be surprised if I’m still here when it’s time for a drink though. A good deal to beat out. Plot thickens, as a matter of fact.’
‘Toast your toes,’ Appleby said hospitably. ‘Evening’s turning chilly now. You’ve found some sort of substantiation of Martyn Ashmore’s story?’
‘Well, yes and no.’ Pride turned again to Judith. ‘Is this going to bore you, my dear? Your husband’s told you about it?’
‘He’ll talk of nothing else. And you’ll remember, Tommy, how reliable I was as a small girl. All those sworn secrets.’
‘Yes, of course. That business of Anthea Killcanon’s pony, eh? The old pheasant lord was furious.’
‘New light on the French yarn?’ Appleby prompted. He found a slight tedium in Pride’s and Judith’s colloquies of this order.
‘Yes, decidedly yes. Some of your old henchmen at the Yard doing their stuff splendidly. Been on the line to them on and off all day. Mind you, we must distinguish. No compulsion to believe everything the old fellow says – or even believes. We have just the one hard fact still.’
‘It was certainly quite adequately hard.’
‘Quite so. It must have been a deuced near thing for both you and Ashmore. And for Ashmore there have been other deuced near things. That’s what I’ve turned up. But those really on record happened long ago. And in France. He stuck it out in France, it seems, for some years – in fact until he inherited this place over here. And there were attempts on his life – attempts which were undoubtedly a sequel to the grim business he told you about. No question, our people think, of his having played any sort of double game. Perfectly honourable above-board chap, caught up in desperate affairs. But there were plenty of people a bit off their rockers over there in the years after the war. Something had been screwed out of him in a manner unfit to be talked about. Unfortunately there were people who didn’t believe in the real existence of – well, the screw. As a consequence, he was shot at, had his house set fire to in the night, and was sent infernal machines inside wine bottles. Common form for a time. Bit of national what’s-it-called. Psychosis.’
‘I was telling Judith as much,’ Appleby stirred the logs in the big fireplace. ‘But after that?’
‘There’s the nub of the matter. The business of an annual persecution strikes these back-room types in London as most improbable. Bosh, in fact. They never and nowhere heard of such a thing. And I myself will believe that part of the yarn when it too is vouched for by somebody a little more reliable than this old chap seems to be. I’ve tackled him myself, I may say. But he manages to be uncommonly elusive. At times he seems to imply that these demonstrations, or whatever you’d call them, have been going on ever since he left France. At other times it seems as if only the last few years are in question. For that matter, they’re the crucial ones for us. Trail not too cold, eh? Get him to detail some of the alleged circumstances, and we might just conceivably pick up something like corroborative testimony. But I wouldn’t put money on it.’
‘But suppose,’ Judith said, ‘that Martyn Ashmore is actually killed just short of a year from now. This story that he put on record wi
th you, Tommy, would be the only context, conceivably, available to you in order to make any sense of his death. In fact it would come back to you – and perhaps to others to whom he has told it – in rather a devastating way.’
‘In what might be an uncommonly confusing way.’ Pride glanced from Judith to Appleby, and hesitated. ‘Do you know? I have one damned odd notion in my head. But I rather think I’ll keep it under my hat until I’ve thought over it a bit more. Nothing in it, likely enough.’
‘Then I’ll be more rash.’ Appleby was careful not to appear amused. ‘It’s just conceivable that the odd notion in your head is an odd notion in my head too. Somebody has it in for Ashmore on grounds which have nothing to do with that ghastly French affair. And that somebody is confusing the old gentleman, and consequently confusing us, by cooking up a spurious connection with it.’
‘Just so.’ Pride appeared a little crestfallen that he held no monopoly in this idea, but a moment later he chuckled amiably. ‘And in that event, I suppose, we should have to estimate the degree of malice intended. You see what I mean? Is it proposed just to give Ashmore a bad time every year? Or are these demonstrations – however many or few there may actually have been – intended to climax in the real thing?’
‘It may be,’ Judith said, ‘that if Mr Ashmore was actually killed – say next year – the intensive investigation you would set going might turn up real evidence of previous attempts, or apparent attempts, and all with something of the Cross of Lorraine association attached to them. And away your people would go, hallooing and baying in that direction. But it would be a false scent, very deliberately contrived.’
‘It’s a theory that isn’t quite plain sailing,’ Appleby, having produced this, paused as if to consider his abrupt shift from a hunting to a nautical metaphor. ‘We have to take account of the precise character of what occurred the other morning. Of course it’s easy a little to misinterpret just what has been happening in the second or two before one has nearly been killed. But I can’t believe that the stone came over that parapet blindly. The chap must have been aware of my presence, and presumably of my being a total stranger to him. And he lobbed the thing over, therefore, equally in a hit-or-miss way in relation to either the one or the other of us. Do I make myself clear? It was quite likely that he would kill neither of us – indeed the actual cold probability might be estimated as lying that way. But he very well might have killed one of us. He might have killed Ashmore – who was clearly the relevant one of us in the context of that scratched symbol on the roof – or he might have killed me. It’s a difficulty that has to be faced in considering any annual-build-up theory.’
‘But you have to consider,’ Pride said, ‘that fellows who go in for that sort of thing often get surprisingly muddled. All calculation one moment, and completely random behaviour the next. Or so I’ve read in the books on criminology. We don’t get much experience of that sort of thing in these parts’ – Pride innocently winked at Judith – ‘or didn’t until your husband came along. Mustn’t make a joke, though, of a bad affair like this.’
‘What we’re considering is that there may be a kind of joke at the heart of it,’ Appleby said. ‘A thoroughly evil joke. But you’re absolutely right about the criminal mind – or rather about any mind wrought to plan and perpetrate something like murder. Calculation and rationality can suddenly go by the board, and something quite unpremeditated, and even quite profitless and meaningless, take their place. That’s why detective stories are of no interest to policemen. Their villains remain far too consistently cerebral.’
‘You wouldn’t have remained very cerebral, either – not if that hunk of roof had copped you.’ Even before he had concluded this reflection, Colonel Pride looked conscience-stricken. ‘Sorry, my dear,’ he said to Judith. ‘Rotten sort of crack, eh? Fact is – come to feel much at home here.’ The Chief Constable, if not embarrassed, was diffident. He turned to Appleby. ‘Been on my mind for some time. John and Tommy, perhaps? Seems reasonable sort of thing.’
Appleby gravely agreed to this somewhat heavily promulgated advance in relations. It seemed, moreover, the moment at which to produce the sherry. He had just addressed himself to this task when there was a sudden roar from outside the house. Bobby Appleby had arrived.
It seemed to Judith that the two men might well be left alone, so she followed her common habit when any of the children turned up and went hospitably out into the open air. The autumn dusk had already fallen, and mist was drifting up from the river and curling round the house; out of this Bobby’s car seemed to thrust a bonnet of disproportionate size, as in a badly focused photograph. Behind this two bear-like figures were in process of heaving themselves out of the front seats while simultaneously shedding shaggy outer integuments; the car was an open one, and both had been appropriately attired.
‘Hullo, Mum!’ Bobby called. ‘Here we are, unscratched but perished. This is Finn.’
The appearance called Finn – he seemed quite as large as Bobby – advanced amid awkward contortions which stemmed from the difficulty of shaking hands while halfway out of a duffel-coat.
‘Oh, I say!’ Finn said. ‘How do you do? Frightfully kind of you Lady Appleby, to offer to put me up. Bobby’s always babbling about Dream. Wanted to see it for ages.’
Lady Appleby – whose practised glance had already penetrated to the back of the car and distinguished not one suitcase but two – made a suitable reply. She couldn’t recall that she had ever heard her son speak of a friend called Finn. Perhaps they had been at school together – in which case Finn might be a surname. Or the young man might belong to Bobby’s Balliol period – and then he would be Finn plus some further appellation which the elder Applebys might or might not learn before he went away again. It at least seemed unlikely that Finn was part of Bobby’s new and literary life. At least he didn’t sound literary. Perhaps he too had achieved the distinction of a match against the All Blacks.
‘Funny that Finn’s never been down before,’ Bobby said, and tossed the suitcases out of the car as if they had been handbags or school satchels. ‘Where shall I put him, Mummy? In the haunted room?’
‘Well, it is the haunted room that I’ve prepared for him.’ Having managed this polite prevarication – which she could see that Bobby appreciated – Judith turned to her totally unexpected guest. ‘The haunted room is the one with a bathroom,’ she explained. ‘Most people feel it balances up.’
‘Oh, I say! Yes – what fun!’ Finn – or Mr Finn – appeared slightly at a loss. He scarcely seemed to be of what could be called an intellectual habit, or likely to be au fait with the nouveau roman world. Perhaps, for professional purposes and in quest of ‘copy’, Bobby was reviving an acquaintance with uncomplicated types. ‘Jolly good!’ Finn said – perhaps a little overdoing things. ‘I don’t a bit mind a ghost.’
‘I’m so glad. But I may just mention that the bathroom is a modern addition, and the ghost never enters it. If the ghost turns tedious, you just go and have another bath.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Finn sounded puzzled rather than suspicious, so that Judith took an honest vow not to make further fun of him.
‘You’re in splendid time for dinner,’ she said. ‘Bobby will steer you round, and bring you down for drinks.’
‘Oh, thanks most awfully!’ They were now in the hall, which Finn was surveying with large rather than merely civil admiration. ‘I say, jolly fine! Marvellous base for operations – eh, Bobby?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Bobby Appleby appeared to feel – very properly – that this naïve remark called for explanation. ‘As I was saying, Mummy, it’s odd Finn’s never been to Dream before. He has a lot of friends in these parts, and we’re going to look them up. Not close by, actually, but on the other side of the downs. People we haven’t met, I think, since we moved into the old home. But you must know all about them. The Ashmores at King’s Yatter. And I suppose the other Ashmores – the ones at Abbot’s Yatter – as well.’
7
/> ‘Finn has rung up one of his pals,’ Bobby Appleby announced an hour later. He had come downstairs before his friend, evidently with the very proper aim of putting his parents a little more in the picture. ‘Giles.’
‘I don’t think I know anybody called Giles in these parts,’ Appleby said. ‘But no doubt your mother does.’
‘No, no, Dad. Not Dash Giles Esquire. Giles Ashmore, the son and heir of the King’s Yatter lot. Finn and this Giles were after the same girl. Name of Robina.’
‘I don’t believe it. No girl with a name like Robina could possibly have two suitors simultaneously.’
‘Well, this one had – and it seems to be Giles Ashmore who has got away with her. But of course it brought Finn and Giles together.’
‘How very odd!’ Appleby turned to Judith. ‘Competition in that sphere is commonly regarded as divisive, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Not at all.’ Bobby seemed to judge it unnecessary to give his mother time to reply. Although essentially a modest youth, he was inclined to regard himself as the family’s authority on human relationships. ‘One gets terribly thick with a chap who wants the same girl. As a matter of fact, Finn wants to give this Giles a bit of a leg up. That’s partly why he’s come down to Dream.’
‘I see.’ Appleby provided his son with a glass of sherry. ‘A leg up with Robina?’
‘No, not exactly with Robina. As a matter of fact, Finn seems rather to have stopped talking about her. Giles is in some sort of family scrape or difficulty, and Finn thinks it would be decent to lend a hand.’
Death at the Chase Page 5
