A Night of Errors

by Michael Innes

Mr Greengrave too was heavy-eyed, as if alternate driving and slumbering in moonlight had not quite cleared his head of either the Landorian periods or the Falernian potations of Canon Newton. He glanced from the living to the dead – both the dead – and his jaw sagged. ‘A chair,’ said Mr Greengrave.

  ‘A chair and a glass of water, if you please. You see, it keeps on happening.’

  The constable and Hyland brought forward what was required. ‘Keeps on happening?’ said Hyland. ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I scarcely understand myself. The night has taken upon itself a habit – well, a habit of duplication. I am not in error’ – and Mr Greengrave took a wary glance towards the fireplace – ‘in supposing that there are two bodies in this room?’

  ‘There are certainly two. Mr Sebastian Dromio has killed the gardener, I am sorry to say.’ Hyland, somewhat uncertain in the presence of the clergy, announced this with something of the air of a superior servant intimating disaster to the second-best dinner service. ‘He shot him while under the influence of drink.’

  ‘Drink?’ Mr Greengrave gulped hastily at his glass of water. ‘I have often thought that if only the bishop would encourage the practice of total abstention within the diocese–’ He stopped. ‘Would that be a man named Grubb?’

  ‘That’s the man. He worked here as a lad, it seems, in Sir Romeo’s time. I suppose, sir, you’d like to look at the bodies?’ Hyland spoke a little more briskly, as if passing to what he took for a routine professional procedure.

  ‘Thank you. It will no doubt be proper to do so presently. Let us pray.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Let us pray.’

  Hyland, much confused, looked round for a suitable object by or upon which to kneel. Then he compromised by assuming the attitude generally judged proper at the more solemn moments of the burial service. Mr Greengrave prayed – and rose very much a different man. ‘This is altogether shocking,’ he said. ‘As an unresolved mystery it is not to be borne. The women of the family are altogether overwhelmed. For their sakes I hope that the truth, however distressing, may be found at once. I have myself a communication to make. Sit down.’

  Obediently Appleby and Hyland sat down.

  ‘I saw Sir Oliver. And I saw his brother too. They were driving together in a car.’

  Appleby spoke for the first time. ‘You knew, then, that Sir Oliver had a brother living?’

  ‘Certainly not. But Lady Dromio has just told me her story, and now I know it must have been a brother. At the time, and for reasons which our earlier encounter tonight has made known to you, I supposed my eyes to be playing tricks on me. In a sense it is something of a relief to know that what I saw was – um – veridical. The two men were uncommonly like each other – a most striking family resemblance. But then I suppose they were what are called uniovular twins – or triplets, I should say.’ Mr Greengrave paused on this, a little proud of his command of a scientific vocabulary. ‘Clearly they were driving home to Sherris together. And clearly it was with this brother that Sebastian – the wretched Sebastian as I fear we must say – saw Sir Oliver earlier in the day.’

  ‘That what?’ Hyland almost jumped from his chair.

  ‘It is a circumstance which Lady Dromio has not been able to bring herself to communicate to you. You must forgive her. It is not unnatural – nor, I venture to think, altogether improper – that it is to her spiritual adviser that a woman will choose to reveal a matter of this sort.’ Mr Greengrave, who until this night had never with Lady Dromio achieved very much in the way of spiritual admonition, spoke not without a modest triumph. ‘Sebastian knew that Oliver was back in England. He caught a glimpse of him lunching with a stranger in London today – or rather I should say yesterday. He did not actually see the stranger’s features, but there is a strong inference, surely, that it was one of the missing brothers. Sebastian appears obscurely to have felt that his nephew’s return was likely to occasion some crisis in the family’s affairs, and so he hurried down here at once.’

  ‘And what did he do when he got here?’ Hyland was once more alert. ‘That’s the question, if you ask me.’

  Mr Greengrave shook his head. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘I for my part ask no questions. Rather, I have further information to give. Or, better, I have a speculation.’ He frowned. ‘Or, better still, I have an intuition strongly supported by subsequent reflection. It may be that I ought to have taxed Lady Dromio with the matter at once. At the moment of bereavement, however, such things are difficult. I have half a mind to ask Canon Newton to come over. He has great confidence and address. He faces the most distressing pastoral tasks with what I can only term aplomb. Only I have a notion that, at the moment, he will be – um – particularly fast asleep.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Appleby, ‘it will not be too distressing to you to confide this intuition to us?’

  ‘I believe I am bound to do so. Although in all probability my discovery is unconnected with Sir Oliver’s death.’

  ‘To say nothing of Grubb’s. We mustn’t forget him.’

  Somewhat unexpectedly, Mr Greengrave robustly laughed. ‘To Grubb himself,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t at all matter if we do. He will be adequately borne in mind elsewhere. But about my discovery let there be no beating about the bush. I believe Lucy Dromio to be the daughter of a lady who, I am told, came to dinner here yesterday evening. Her name is Mrs Gollifer.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby looked thoughtfully at the dying and still sinister embers in the great fireplace. ‘And does your intuition extend to the girl’s father?’

  ‘Dear me, no. On that I have no information whatever.’

  Hyland stirred impatiently. ‘But have you any information at all? Or is it just a feeling inside?’

  ‘I can only describe it as a sharp visual perception. I was driving home earlier tonight, and Miss Dromio was much in my mind. Suddenly her image rose vividly before me – and at the same time that of Mrs Gollifer, whom I had never connected with her in any way. I realized at once that they are mother and daughter. And the realization is the more curious in that they are not really at all like each other. I doubt whether an excellent photograph of each would remotely hint anything of the sort.’

  ‘Very interesting – very interesting, indeed.’ Hyland glanced over at Appleby with an expression suggesting profound gloom. ‘But as evidence–’

  ‘It’s not offered as evidence.’ Appleby had sat forward and was looking at Mr Greengrave attentively. ‘Was this before you saw Sir Oliver and the stranger we suppose to be his brother?’

  Mr Greengrave nodded. ‘It was some little time before. As a matter of fact I took those two men to be something in the nature of a hallucination, and the experience tended somewhat to shake my confidence in this earlier visual experience. But I have no doubt of it now. Very strange as it must seem, Mrs Gollifer is the mother of Lucy Dromio.’

  Hyland shook his head. ‘Really, sir, your conviction seems to me most unreasonable. For instance, why mother? Might she not be the girl’s aunt?’

  ‘I quite understand your misgivings.’ Mr Greengrave was unperturbed. ‘But I believe it will turn out as I say.’

  ‘And what is known of this Mrs Gollifer?’ Appleby addressed the two men equally. ‘Is her husband alive? Has she children? Is she an intimate friend here?’

  ‘Her husband died many years ago.’ It was Hyland who replied. ‘He was one of the largest landowners in these parts. There is one son, a Mr Geoffrey Gollifer, who inherited the estates. Mrs Gollifer now lives on one of the smaller of the family properties not many miles away. Whether she has been much in the way of visiting here I don’t at all know.’

  ‘I have an impression that she is a very old friend of Lady Dromio’s.’ Mr Greengrave had risen, crossed the room, and was standing composedly over the shrouded bodies by the fireplace. ‘That she comes here often I do not know. Rather less often, I imagine, than the degree of intimacy existing between the two women would suggest.’

&
nbsp; ‘And her moral character?’

  Mr Greengrave smiled. ‘Really, Mr Appleby, she is rather too old to have a moral character – at least in the sense which you probably imply. She is not, of course, one of my parishioners, and I am only slightly acquainted with her. I would hazard that she is a woman of high principle.’

  Hyland, his hands deep in his pockets, sighed with a resigned impatience. ‘Does that not suggest its being unlikely that she should have to farm out an illegitimate daughter on Lady Dromio?’

  Mr Greengrave took a turn about the room. ‘Assume,’ he said, ‘that my intuition in this matter is correct – although I grant that you do very right to question it. The illegitimacy of the child by no means necessarily follows. To begin with, I have the impression that Lucy Dromio is by some years older than Geoffrey Gollifer. Thus if the late Mr Gollifer were not her father – and it is hard to imagine that he can have been so – it is yet possible that she is legitimate. She may be the legitimate daughter of Mrs Gollifer and some man unknown to us.’

  Appleby too had risen and was looking out of the window. Hyland’s bodyguard – whether with licence or not – had departed, and the terrace was empty under a fitful moonlight. He turned round. ‘You say that the late Mr Gollifer was a landowner? He would be the old-fashioned territorial magnate with his wealth pretty well entirely locked up that way?’

  ‘Just that, I imagine.’ Hyland yawned. ‘Though I don’t see–’

  ‘Then we have a very queer situation indeed. Mr Greengrave’s suggestion is virtually this: that Mrs Gollifer’s marriage – her known marriage – may have been bigamous. It is this Geoffrey Gollifer who is illegitimate. And he is at present in the enjoyment of estates which are likely enough entailed upon his father’s legitimate heirs male. The situation has the makings of a melodrama of the most orthodox sort.’

  ‘And is obviously quite intimately connected with the deaths of Sir Oliver Dromio and the man Grubb.’ Hyland was reduced to irony. ‘Mr Greengrave has been privileged to see a vision in the midst of great darkness, and at once our problem becomes crystal clear.’

  ‘If true, it certainly makes our problem more complicated. But that is all to the good. With police work, it is only in the very simplest cases that failure can be excused. The unknown body in the river, the robbery in the dark lane–’

  ‘Yes, to be sure.’ Hyland made an impatient gesture. ‘The queerer a case, the more there should be to get hold of. But here we are heading for having a lot too much. Mr Greengrave has formed rather an irrational conviction and you, my dear Appleby, have built upon it one of a number of possible flights of fancy. But even if what you say is true all along the line it appears to me to give us not a single and more complicated case but two cases with no more than an accidental connexion. Think of that brother – or of those brothers – brought back from America. Half an hour ago you were for having them right in the forefront of the investigation. But what earthly connexions can they have with the hypothetical bigamy of Mrs Gollifer?’

  ‘One possibility is surely not at all difficult to grasp.’ Appleby took another turn about the room. ‘It attracts me too – just because I am reluctant to have those brothers back from the shades at all.’

  Hyland shook his head. ‘They’re back all right. Mr Greengrave here saw two Dromios driving in a car, not one.’

  ‘But I don’t think you have any confidence in the other thing he saw?’

  ‘Well, no – I haven’t. But that wasn’t really seeing, was it?’

  ‘Here was Mr Greengrave driving through the dusk. His mind was active but his senses somewhat distracted. I am myself inclined to give more weight to his sudden inward perception about Mrs Gollifer and Lucy Dromio than I am to the two men of similar appearance whom he actually believed himself to see. He was sitting behind a windscreen – and so, too, presumably, was whatever he saw. You yourself must often have observed that a mere defect in a sheet of glass will momentarily produce the appearance of two identical objects where there is, in fact, but one.’

  Hyland threw back his head in despair. ‘Really, my dear fellow, this exceeds all bounds. First you build up a most ingenious story on the basis of there having been two, and perhaps three, Dromio brothers in this room. And now you talk of a defect in a sheet of glass. Be serious, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘But Mr Appleby is to be commended.’ Mr Greengrave spoke with mild confidence. ‘It is plain to me that in such an affair as this there must be a stage at which nothing is more useful than a facility and fertility in hypothesis. Canon Newton said something of the sort to me only this evening. Only he was speaking – or I think he was speaking – of investigation in the field of the higher physics.’

  Hyland clasped his head in his hands. ‘Where were we?’ he asked. ‘Just tell me that.’

  ‘I was going to say that the American brothers are still conceivably shades – convenient shades who have been wished on us for the purpose of obscuring something else.’ Appleby paused. ‘This matter of Mrs Gollifer’s bigamous marriage may be the core of the whole affair. Even if the American brothers are a fact, and were about the place, this may still be true. And we mustn’t forget that more has been destroyed than two lives. A rose has been destroyed as well.’

  ‘A rose?’ said Mr Greengrave blankly.

  ‘Yes. A rose is a rose is a rose. And in the presence of Mrs Gollifer. It was after that that Sir Oliver died.’

  ‘It was after a good many other things as well.’ Hyland was sarcastic. ‘And who destroyed this rose, anyway?’

  ‘Lucy Dromio. I attach some importance to it as indicating a mental state.’

  ‘I see no sense in that. A flower may be idly plucked to pieces by any petulant girl…Who the devil is that?’

  Again there had been a knock at the study door. It opened to reveal not a constable but the corpse-like face of Swindle. Swindle looked balefully at the three men and then peered despondently at the clock. ‘No baths before breakfast,’ he said.

  Hyland stared at him. ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘Breakfast we can manage, though there won’t be no heggs. But a bath you can’t ’ave – not without a new boiler.’

  ‘We don’t want baths and we don’t want breakfast, either. We’re going away presently to get some sleep. Now, don’t come disturbing us again.’

  ‘As you say – hofficer.’ Swindle’s was a malignant snarl. ‘I just ’as to know. And what of the dead?’

  ‘The dead? They don’t need baths or breakfast either.’ Hyland checked himself, aware of the peculiar impropriety of this witticism in the presence of Mr Greengrave. ‘And now, go away, my man. Go to bed.’

  ‘Bed? With ’er ladyship choosing to keep open ’ouse all night? There’s company in the drawing-room now.’ Swindle paused. ‘Gentle-folk,’ he added witheringly.

  ‘You mean to say that Lady Dromio has visitors at this hour – at three o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Mrs Gollifer come back – and young Mr Gollifer come with ’er. I daresay they might like to ’ave Mr Greengrave in, if ’e cares to go along. But they’ll ’ave ’ad enough of the constabulary.’

  ‘The Gollifers haven’t had the constabulary at all. You can give them my compliments and say I’d be glad to see them. By the way, isn’t Dr Hubbard supposed to be coming?’

  ‘Dr ’Ubbard be out still delivering some drab of her folly. And what be the use of it, I ask? Wickedness behind a hedge, travail in a hovel – and then it all come to that.’ And Swindle pointed at the shrouded form of Grubb. ‘Birth, copulation, death,’ he said, and slammed the door.

  Mr Greengrave shook his head. ‘Do you know, I seem to have heard that depressing summary of human existence before. But no doubt the unfortunate old man has been much shaken by these sad events.’

  ‘Very odd about the Gollifers.’ Hyland frowned at the ashes fluttering in the great fireplace. ‘Can somebody have rung them up? And why should they come straight along in the middle of the night?’


  ‘For the sake of what used to be called the Unity of Time.’ Appleby moved towards the door. ‘The Dromios’ tragedy has its roots forty years back – or so we are asked to believe. But, as with some classical drama, its action is to be compressed within the space of twenty-four hours.’

  Hyland laughed shortly. ‘You think we shall have a tangle like this cleared up by ten o’clock tonight?’

  ‘It seems not impossible. But, of course, we must keep moving; and I greatly doubt our getting to bed.’ Appleby turned to Mr Greengrave. ‘At the moment I think we might tackle the Gollifers – constabulary and all.’

  10

  Lady Dromio, it appeared, had made no attempt to go to bed before the arrival of the Gollifers; she now sat on one side of the empty fireplace in the same deep crimson gown which she had worn earlier that evening. And opposite sat Mrs Gollifer – a woman of the same age and somewhat statelier presence, wrapped in a flowing cloak of white velvet. Between the two stood Geoffrey Gollifer, a handsome young man now so sunk in sombre thought that it was some seconds before he became aware of the three men who had entered the drawing-room.

  There was a moment’s silence as the door closed behind them. What, Appleby wondered, had been passing in this room? Had these people been sitting in a stricken silence? Was there some good understanding among them, and had they been engaged in rapid conference – planning an attitude, a story? Or was each an uneasy enigma to the others? Or was there here merely a bereaved and bewildered woman with two sympathizing friends? To some of these questions, at least, it should be possible to arrive at an answer now.

  But it was Lady Dromio who took the initiative. ‘Inspector Hyland,’ she said sharply, ‘where is my brother-in-law? Swindle has a fantastic story of his having shot a policeman. I am very much distressed.’

  ‘Very naturally, Lady Dromio. And I am sorry that you should have further occasion for sorrow. But it is unfortunately true that Mr Sebastian Dromio has acted in a very rash manner.’ Hyland, a monument of caution, was giving nothing away. And now he turned swiftly to Mrs Gollifer. ‘What brought you back?’ he asked.