Death at the Chase

by Michael Innes

  ‘He could have, in a way. It’s a Yale lock. He could have shoved up the little button thing inside as he came out, and then it would have locked itself automatically.’

  ‘I see.’ Remarking that Finn had now concluded a substantial repast, Appleby pushed forward a cigarette-box. ‘There’s one thing I’d like to ask you more particularly about this man you came upon at the door. And we’ll stop, for the moment, calling him the maniac. You say he looked ferocious. Are you speaking of what had the appearance of a settled disposition, or of features momentarily contorted by anger or fury?’

  ‘Oh, I say!’ For a second it looked as if this discrimination was beyond Finn’s powers to reflect on. But this proved not to be the case. ‘Well, sir, I don’t think he’d ever look a terribly nice person. But there was quite a lot just happening on his face in the very short time I had my dekko at it. At bay – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Rage?’

  ‘Rage, all right.’

  ‘Surprise?’

  ‘Surprise, certainly.’

  ‘Terror?’

  ‘I think I’d rather say fear, sir.’ Finn paused, as if rather astonished by this nicety. ‘He was scared, all right – which was why he hit out quick, I suppose.’

  ‘I wonder whether–’

  Appleby paused, for the breakfast-room door had opened, and Mrs Colpoys stood framed in it.

  ‘Colonel Pride is on the telephone, sir. And he says it’s urgent.’

  14

  Bobby Appleby came downstairs half an hour later, and made his way hopefully to the kitchen. Mrs Colpoys was polishing silver.

  ‘If you want coffee, Mr Robert, you must make it for yourself. A busy woman can’t be expected to run a cafeteria service. But at least the milk has come.’

  ‘All right, Mrs C. Do you mind if I get busy on the grill as well?’

  ‘Well, don’t make a mess.’ Mrs Colpoys rubbed vigorously. ‘There’s plenty of bacon, but don’t touch those kidneys. They’re for a sauté tonight. If you look in the brown bowl you’ll find some particularly large eggs.’

  ‘You spoil me, you splendid woman.’ Bobby moved contentedly about the kitchen. ‘I say, Mrs C, do you happen to know whether my friend came in last night?’

  ‘Of course he came in. He’d be no gentleman if he hadn’t. There are limits to the ways college boys can carry on.’

  ‘We’re not college boys any longer, Mrs C.’

  ‘Perhaps not – but it’s the behaviour that counts.’ Mrs Colpoys shook her silver-polish vigorously. ‘Your friend came in at I don’t know what hour in the morning. And disturbed your father, it seems. Your father poured a pint of milk into him, and then had to listen to I don’t know what nonsense. Not that your friend sounded as if he were drunk. I won’t say that of him. But so excited that your father had to put him to bed. He might have got you up to do that for him I’d have thought, Mr Robert. Not that you came home at a very early hour yourself. I heard you. And her ladyship’s light didn’t go out until she heard you safely in the house. But she won’t have let on to Sir John about that.’

  ‘Mrs C, you’re a very observing woman. I had to see somebody off on a train at Linger Junction.’

  ‘Well, I’ve no doubt an escort must do his duty.’ Mrs Colpoys sounded mollified. ‘I’m glad to know it was at least a lady, and not one of those young trollops from the village.’

  ‘You have a shocking old mind, Mrs C. It comes of a lifetime in good service. As a matter of fact, I haven’t spoken either to a trollop or a young gentlewoman for weeks.’

  ‘I don’t call that anything to be proud of.’ As she achieved this volte-face, Mrs Colpoys picked up a Georgian cream-jug. ‘Not wholesome, at all. And now you come gossiping, and keeping an old woman from her work. Now, stop it, Mr Robert.’ Mrs Colpoys flushed with artless pleasure as Bobby kissed her. ‘Here I am, behind-hand already, and not even knowing whether your father will be home to lunch.’

  ‘He’s gone out?’

  ‘Appealed to by that Colonel Pride. The Chief Constable.’ Mrs Colpoys made this communication with great satisfaction. ‘Urgent, the Colonel said it was. Sir John is a long-suffering man. Hurried away, he has, and taken your precious friend with him.’

  ‘Taken Finn?’ Bobby put down his knife and fork in astonishment. ‘Taken Finn to see the Chief Constable?’

  ‘That he has. And left a message for you with her ladyship. If you’ve finished eating me out of my kitchen you’d better be off and find her.’

  Bobby did as he was told, and came upon his mother arranging a bowl of chrysanthemums in the hall. He wondered why she was putting in time in this ladylike way instead of slapping clay around in her studio. Then he saw that she had the rather still expression she wore when something disturbing or unfortunate had happened.

  ‘Mummy, what on earth is this about Daddy and Finn and Colonel Pride?’

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tommy Pride rang up to tell your father that Martyn Ashmore is dead. Tommy just heard.’

  ‘That old man dead!’ Bobby looked blankly at his mother. ‘I’m very sorry to hear it. But why on earth should Pride have heard about it so soon – and want to get hold of Daddy?’

  ‘It ties up with other things, I suppose. Including the nonsense that you and those two young men were up to last night. I gather you actually did go to the Chase?’

  ‘Yes, we did.’

  ‘It seems to have been rather a dangerous place recently. Your father was very nearly killed there the other day. Has he told you?’

  ‘Good God! No, he hasn’t. You mean in some accident?’

  ‘It didn’t seem very like an accident. Equally, it might have been Martyn Ashmore who was killed…then.’

  ‘Daddy ought to have told me – I mean, when he knew we were going to be fooling around there.’

  ‘I rather agree with you.’ Lady Appleby was extremely calm. ‘But you must remember how much such things have been part of the day’s work with him all his life.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Bobby was surprised to find himself feeling rather sick. ‘Do you mean that the old man has been killed?’

  ‘Killed? Murdered? I’m not the police, and I can’t tell you. They can’t tell themselves, for that matter. Your father has gone off with his fingers crossed.’

  ‘Mummy – what do you mean?’

  ‘He told Tommy at once about what you three had been up to. Tommy was very nice. He said instantly he had some hope that it would turn out to have been a CVA.’

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘It’s doctors’ and coroners’ shorthand for cerebro-vascular accident.’ Lady Appleby smiled faintly. ‘And that’s just technical jargon for a stroke.’

  ‘I see,’ Bobby said slowly. ‘I was taken in, you know.’

  ‘Taken in? Hoodwinked?’

  ‘No, no – I don’t mean that. Taken into the Chase by his nephew – Finn’s friend Giles. I talked to him. He seemed quite all right.’

  ‘But odd things were happening?’

  ‘I suppose one would have to say that. Ashmore and Giles had a talk about that beastly girl. It seems that the old man himself–’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘So there was that – shabby deceptions with the makings of something nasty in them, I suppose. And, for good measure, there was a demented keeper with a gun.’

  ‘I’ve heard that too, Bobby. And your friend Finn – he continued to hang around, you see – ran into something odder still. It’s my guess that a great many inquiries will have to be made. And that brings me to your father’s message. You know where King’s Yatter is?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You are to go straight there now, get hold of Giles Ashmore again quite quietly, and take him over to the Chase. Daddy will be there – as a policeman more or less, you should remember – and so will the Chief Constable and his surgeon and a whole crime squad. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Mummy, it won�
�t get me down – not even if I’m to be painfully exhibited as having been fooling around like a kid. Will Daddy think it awful?’

  ‘No, he will not. Of course, he will like it better if you show some brains. I expect you will.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. But, by the way, I don’t know about Giles. If I can get hold of him, I mean. It’s quite likely he won’t be back yet. But I’m forgetting I haven’t told you. I shoved him on the midnight train for London. He was determined to see the girl. Quite right, in a way.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ With an effect of some concentration, Lady Appleby stepped back to examine the effect of her flowers. ‘Whatever has happened,’ she said, ‘there is bound to be an inquest. Not all the doctors in the county, with the Lord Lieutenant himself behind them, could prevent that. In fact there’s a disgusting scandal ahead.’ Lady Appleby stepped forward again, and altered the position of the chrysanthemums in relation to the dark panelling behind them. She gave a nod of satisfaction. ‘Never mind,’ she said briskly to her son. ‘And now be off.’

  ‘Even if I don’t find Giles, I still go on to the Chase?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Don’t waste time.’ Lady Appleby smiled suddenly. ‘Only don’t drive that ancient thing too fast. Remember there will be coppers all over the place.’ She put down a pair of scissors. ‘Hoobin’s cocoa,’ she said. ‘That’s the next thing.’

  15

  There was no Appleby or Raven fortune to speak of, and neither Bobby Appleby nor his brother and sisters had much thought of anything that could be called a patrimony. Probably Dream would have to be sold up one day, and that would be that. This situation had one consequence at the moment: Bobby had driven halfway to King’s Yatter before it came into his head that numerous Ashmores must have fresh expectations as a result of Martyn Ashmore’s death. Rupert Ashmore, father of Giles and of de Voisin’s fiancée Virginia, was probably the person most immediately affected. Unless Bobby had got things wrong, Rupert was now the head of the family, and would be due to inherit the Chase. But Martyn Ashmore had at least enjoyed the reputation of being very wealthy, and if this was true there would be a lot more going. Of course the dead man had notoriously disliked his relations (doubtless including the wretched Giles, whom he had been amusing himself by making a fool of), and this might mean that he would leave all the wealth he could to, say, an Oxford college or a home for stray dogs. But Bobby had a notion that this was something which didn’t often really happen. Even detested relations usually came in for their whack.

  It was a sunny morning with a nip in the air, and as he crossed the downs at a good pace once more Bobby’s spirits rose. The notion that on the previous night the Chase had really seen some deed of dreadful note was surely extravagant. There wasn’t all that to be said for the country gentry; he seldom found them other than dismally dull; but at least it wasn’t their habit to go in for crimes of violence. His father probably found them dismally dull too – and perhaps for precisely this reason. That was it. His father, in too placid and uneventful a retirement, was taking to fancying things. Bobby shoved the accelerator farther down. He felt a little sorry for his father. As for his mother, she was easily upset. She didn’t at all want crime bobbing up in the vicinity; as John Appleby’s wife she had come in for quite enough of it. But by now she would have taken Hoobin his cocoa and gone off to mess about with her clay. That was clearly one of the pleasant things about a career in the plastic arts. You could keep it up pretty well to the grave. Since it was all a matter of exploring formal relations it didn’t really require – as writing, on the other hand, did – any constant access of fresh human experience.

  Bobby Appleby began to whistle as he drove – and then checked himself, feeling that perhaps it wasn’t quite decent. It struck him that it was a bit feeble to be hoping that any real excitement over Martyn Ashmore’s death would fade out. What was involvement (in not too desperately intimate a relation) with crime and guilt and misery except very much an access of fresh human experience? Bobby assumed a more serious expression, waited for a signpost that said ‘King’s Yatter 12, Abbot’s Yatter 4’, and turned off the high road.

  The house was a half-timber affair with a thatched roof; there was plenty of it, but it was probably more picturesque than comfortable. At the back there was a large garden, walled round in ancient brick. There didn’t seem to be more land than that. Bobby wondered whether Rupert Ashmore did, or had ever done, anything in particular. He wasn’t a Colonel or a Commander or an Honourable, like so many people living in this sort of style round these parts. A City gent, perhaps. Or just a gent.

  Bobby remembered that his instructions were to get hold of Giles Ashmore ‘quite quietly’. He was sure that these had been his mother’s words, and they suddenly struck him as a little odd. Rupert Ashmore was presumably the next proprietor of the Chase, and he was quite certainly what was called the dead man’s next of kin. Surely he would have been told by this time of his brother’s death? It seemed impossible that even Colonel Pride could take the responsibility of keeping him in the dark about it for more than an hour or two. Perhaps Rupert was known to be away from home. That might be it.

  Giles – as Bobby had now worked it out – would undoubtedly still be absent. He couldn’t even have changed his mind about London, for the train into which Bobby had shoved him, and which he had watched leave the Junction, travelled non-stop to Paddington. Even if Giles had lost his nerve there – which was likely enough – he could hardly have turned tail and got home by now. Bobby wondered whether there was a Mrs Rupert. He had a notion that Rupert himself was almost as old as Martyn. That meant well past the span allotted to us by the Psalmist. But then the Psalmist was almost gruesomely out of date. (Gruesomely, Bobby added to himself, except when one is thinking of one’s parents, old housemaster, former tutor, and a few other persons to be viewed in a sentimental light.) People – or at least people who inhabited houses like King’s Yatter – now invariably lived to an enormous age. Even if they were Ashmores only by marriage they did that. So in all probability there was a Mrs Rupert. Perhaps it would be Mrs Rupert – silver-haired, gracious, and rather puzzled – who would receive him when he asked for Giles. He would have to fish around to discover whether she had received the distressing news about her disagreeable brother-in-law. If she hadn’t, he would have to decide whether he was meant to tell her. And he hadn’t been given a clue. Perhaps his father designed that he should use those brains. Bobby himself had never been sure that he had brains. He had once been possessed of a sort of rapid cunning useful on a rugger-field. But his writing didn’t seem to have much to do with brains. It was something that bobbed up in his head – he really didn’t at all know how. It wasn’t even part of what could be called his normal personality – the personality, for example, of the chap who went around with chaps like Giles and Finn.

  Bobby Appleby (it will be observed) had fallen as he drove upon an absorbingly interesting subject. This was why he had to brake rather sharply in order not to kill somebody.

  It was a girl – surrounded by dachshunds of the long-haired sort, and behaving as if she and they owned the road. This, indeed, might well be the state of the case, since he was now on the very short drive leading up to Mr Rupert Ashmore’s residence.

  ‘I’m most frightfully sorry,’ Bobby said. At least – since the Mercedes was an open car – he didn’t have to stick his head in an idiotic manner through a window. Before looking at the girl he had looked at her nasty little dogs, since he felt that it was solicitude in that direction which would go down well. ‘I hope I didn’t startle them.’ He transferred his gaze, and as a result was uncommonly startled himself. She, was an overwhelmingly beautiful girl. The overwhelmingness was perhaps a consequence of that celibate life which Bobby – as he had lately informed Mrs Colpoys – had been maintaining for weeks. It was striking, all the same.

  ‘We weren’t startled, at all,’ the girl said politely. Very vexatiously, she gave no sign of being immediately prepossessed by
Robert Appleby (Rugger Blue, promising anti-novelist). ‘Have you lost your way?’

  ‘Well, no – I don’t think so. I’m looking for a friend I believe lives here. Giles Ashmore.’

  ‘I’m Giles’ sister, Virgina. You must be Finn.’

  ‘I’m not Finn. My name is Appleby. Bobby. I haven’t known Giles for very long.’

  ‘How do you do? I’m afraid Giles is away. That’s to say, he went off yesterday, and hasn’t come back yet. I don’t know why. He isn’t at all wild.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ It had just dawned on Bobby – to an effect of somewhat absurd dismay – that this girl was engaged to the young Frenchman he had stumbled upon on the previous evening. It seemed a most unnecessary entanglement. Bobby felt rather cross. This made him speak abruptly. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘Giles has gone off in a hurry to see Robina.’

  ‘Oh.’ Miss Ashmore put something decidedly chilly into this monosyllable.

  ‘Is either of your parents at home?’ Bobby had remembered that there was a Mrs Rupert. She had accepted Robina sufficiently to tote her round. Hence the plebeian girl’s fatal rencontre with the late Martyn Ashmore. Socially regarded, Mrs Rupert must be more open-minded than her daughter.

  ‘My mother is at home. My father went to London yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he went to see this Robina Bunker, by any chance?’

  ‘I hardly suppose so.’ Virginia Ashmore said this very coldly indeed. ‘My father does not wholly approve of my brother’s engagement. It is kind of you to be so interested in us, Mr Appleby. Are you the police officer’s son?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ Bobby felt angry. ‘Police officer’ contrived to be both accurate and derogatory.

  ‘So your father is a Bobby too.’ Miss Ashmore produced this impertinent joke as if it were a substantial witticism. ‘Should you care to see my mother?’

  ‘I don’t think so, thank you.’ Bobby, although he had decided to hate Virginia Ashmore, hesitated for a moment. Regarded merely as a visual object, she was so compelling that he almost felt prepared to stand and be insulted by her indefinitely. Were one to venture to imagine her as a tactile sensation – Bobby pulled himself together. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting Monsieur de Voisin last night,’ he said with some formality.