‘And a further coincidence brought Sir Oliver and we don’t know which of his new-found brothers.’
‘There was rather more than coincidence there. It was the sense that Oliver was returning and bringing the problem of Lucy with him that made me speak when I did.’
‘I see.’ There were shouts and Appleby looked at the blazing house. Some roof or wall was about to crash and the firemen were being ordered back. ‘Does it still hold, Mrs Gollifer, that nothing will serve except the truth all round?’
‘It may be that there are matters on which I shall be silent. But I do not think I shall ever tell a lie again.’
‘If that is so,’ said Appleby gravely, ‘you will make an altogether uncommon witness, and I should be sorry to lose the opportunity of questioning you.’
‘You may question me.’
‘Do you believe that your son–’ Appleby checked himself. ‘Do you still know more about this business than you have yet told?’
For the first time Mrs Gollifer hesitated. ‘There is something,’ she said; ‘something very small – far smaller than I would wish. I had thought not to speak of it until my solicitor was with me, for it is something that might help Geoffrey in the terrible position in which he has placed himself. But now I think I will tell you, for you seem a very fair sort of man.’
There was a sudden childishness in this that was moving. ‘I certainly have no case,’ Appleby said, ‘to which I wish to twist the facts. Every possibility I take up leads me only to misgiving.’
‘What I have to tell is this: Geoffrey is confused about my own part in the events of the night. He thinks that I insisted on concealing something from him. It is not so, but he is convinced of it. That is important, is it not, Mr Appleby?’
‘It may be very important indeed.’ Appleby pitied the urgent impulse of hope in the woman’s voice. ‘Can you be more precise in the matter?’
‘When I eventually drove away from here I was still very agitated. I was still in that condition when Geoffrey overtook me and made me stop. He saw how it was – although he was agitated himself – and the first words he spoke were very strange. “It’s all right,” he said, “but we must square the fellow who grabbed you.”’
‘I see.’ Appleby tested the words on his ear, and it seemed to him that Mrs Gollifer spoke them in all sincerity. ‘That was certainly strange. And your son’s remark had no meaning for you?’
‘None whatever. And the thing was so urgently said! Remember what had happened so far. I had revealed to Lucy that I was her mother, and to both Lucy and Kate that Oliver had been blackmailing me. I saw that those two revelations should not have been made together; that the shock of them had overthrown Lucy entirely. I was filled with remorse and for a time, as you know, I wandered about the gardens here. But nothing else occurred. And so, you see, the unaccountability of Geoffrey’s words frightened me.’
‘Mrs Gollifer, let us be very careful. You say those words were these: It’s all right, but we must square the fellow who grabbed you. Now, you were agitated, and you may have a little twisted your recollection. I put it to you that what your son said may have been something like this: It’s all right, for I have settled the fellow who had you in his clutches.’
Mrs Gollifer drew in her breath sharply and there was a second’s silence. ‘No!’ she said – and her voice held a quiet intelligence which was impressive. ‘That would be an altogether unnatural turn of phrase. But you are very ingenious.’
‘Only as a barrister would be ingenious with you in the witness box. He would certainly endeavour to twist the thing into some such sense.’
‘It is unnatural. He would have said: I have settled Oliver. And my recollection, I assure you, Mr Appleby, is wholly accurate.’
‘Very well. And you are sure the words do not now – as they did not then – convey anything to you? There was no sense in which any fellow had grabbed you?’
‘None whatever. I was immediately at a loss. I told Geoffrey that I had no idea what he meant. And from that moment confidence disappeared between us. He seems to have felt that I was concealing something, and that I was in danger? Mrs Gollifer paused. ‘Nothing has been heard of Geoffrey since he – since he escaped?’
‘Nothing at all. But the police have been rather preoccupied, as you see… Do you know anything about Grubb, the dead gardener here?’
‘About Grubb?’ Mrs Gollifer looked startled. ‘I knew him by sight very well, but I don’t think I ever spoke to him.’
‘I wonder if there is anybody who was in his confidence, or particularly well acquainted with him?’
‘There are always several other gardeners. But it is the red-faced lad over there – I believe his name is William – who was commonly to be seen working with him.’
‘Then I think it is to William that I must go and talk now.’
At first William was not conversable. He stood looking at Appleby open-mouthed – and so very red was his face that it was possible to wonder whether his words were simply vaporizing as they left his lips. But it was clear that William enjoyed the fire. He enjoyed seeing his employers’ house utterly destroyed; he also enjoyed his own unsparing efforts to extinguish the blaze. ‘You’d better come and have a mug of cocoa,’ Appleby said. William’s mouth opened wider; he mopped his sweaty brow with an equally sweaty forearm and looked at Appleby with mingled wonder and distrust. That anyone should approach him with this affable proposition was obvious cause for suspicion. Nevertheless William did throw down his bucket and accompany Appleby to the canteen.
‘I suppose,’ said Appleby, ‘that you would know a good deal about Grubb and his ways?’
‘Old Grubb,’ said William.
This was encouraging. It could not perhaps be called very communicative, but plainly there was considerable achievement in having brought William to the point of articulate speech. ‘Did he,’ Appleby asked, ‘drink much as a regular thing?’
‘Old Grubb,’ said William.
Just as William was enjoying the fire, so had William enjoyed Grubb. This much was clear from his tone, which was of connoisseurship rather than of affection or admiration. So might a man speak of a vintage, characterful but unendearing, of which the last bottle has recently disappeared from the cellar. There was silence while William swilled cocoa. It was as if, by some act of retrospective gustation possible to the initiate, he was recalling the tang of that bottle to his palate. ‘Old Grubb,’ he presently repeated once more. He knit his brows – bunching them much as he might bunch his muscles to propel a heavy barrow up a bank. Some supreme effort, Appleby could feel, was being made to snare the well-nigh indefinable in words. ‘Old Grubb,’ said William, coming down with decision on a much deeper note. ‘’E were a one.’
‘And drank?’
‘When ’e weren’t drinking ’e were thieving. Thieving liquor yesterday, thieving terbaccer today. And tomorrow? Thieving worms, most like, from his neighbour’s winding-sheet.’
‘I see. And was he a friendly man?’
‘’E were a man always chewing over ill turns done ’im long ago.’ William, once launched, proved to be a person of some intellectual power. ‘And ’e relished a conundrum. There be a cottage in park with a legend to it. ’Tis where a keeper and his family disappeared from, sudden-like, long ago. Grubb ’e would stand afore it as if ’e would thieve a secret from the place.’
‘That is very interesting. But now about his thieving. It would appear as if some time yesterday he slipped into Sir Oliver’s study and made off with a decanter of spirits. If I supposed that some time last night he made his way to the terrace with the idea of replacing the empty decanter would that be more or less in accordance with his way of going about such things?’
‘Old Grubb never went out of ’is way to meet trouble. Like enough ’e’d take the decanter back.’
‘A little later he was still very drunk, and he was very abusive–’
‘’E ’ad a dirty mind, ’ad old Grubb.’ William supplie
d this information again with his air of disinterested connoisseurship. ‘Fair likely to stop the devils in their ’owling, ’e is, once ’e gets started on women.’
‘No doubt. But the point is this: when Grubb was abusive was he also inclined to be violent? Would he be likely to attack anybody?’
William slowly but emphatically waved his large red face in air behind his cocoa mug – a gesture designed as a comprehensive negative. ‘Talked big, ’e did – talked big and ’orrible. But old Grubb were chicken-hearted. Wouldn’t so much as throw a pint pot at you if you was to talk filthy about his grandmother.’
‘I see.’ Grubb, Appleby supposed, had not actually evinced a special veneration for this relative, and William’s phrase was illustrative merely. ‘You don’t think he might have killed Sir Oliver?’
William’s eye rounded. He thought for some time and then spoke. ‘Old Grubb!’ he said.
This time Appleby understood that his suggestion was thrown entirely out of court. He turned to other matters. ‘If a man wanted three or four gallons of petrol what would be his quickest way here of getting hold of it?’
William looked about him. ‘From fire-engines,’ he hazarded. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean last night. Suppose you had been standing on the terrace there, close by the study windows, and you suddenly wanted petrol. What would you have done about it?’
William set down his mug and made a jerking motion with his thumb. Then he set off for the burning house with as much resolution as if proposing to immolate himself. Appleby followed. Every now and then William turned his head as if to give encouragement; the effect was rather as of a deep-red lantern intermittently flashed against a background of the brighter glow of the flames. Firemen began to shout at them, for they appeared to be making for the short flight of steps which led to the terraces, where debris was now dangerously falling. But at the last moment William turned aside and led the way to what was apparently a tool-shed, ingeniously concealed on the lower level. He thrust his hand beneath some sacking on the window-sill and drew out a key. ‘’E did always keep ’un there,’ he said, and unlocked the door. The place held a miscellaneous collection of tools at one end and at the other a motor-mower and several tins of petrol. William examined these with slow care and then turned upon Appleby reproachfully. ‘Not a drop gone,’ he said. ‘It be all here as ’twere when I put the mower away yesterday.’
‘We can’t always strike lucky first time.’ Appleby picked up a couple of tins. ‘But we can get these out of the way. A spark might get this place any moment.’
They carried the tins to safety. Appleby looked about him. ‘Well,’ he asked pertinaciously. ‘Where else?’
‘Motor houses at back.’
‘But they will be burning, will they not?’
William shook his head. ‘They be right back from house by spinney.’ William’s complexion and interest were alike fading and the long trudge round the burning house was made in silence. It was, however, rewarded. Three sides of the courtyard upon which they came were burning. But the fourth, a detached building across a broad flagged space, was intact. From a small store-room here, with the word ‘Inflammable’ painted in white letters on the door, Lady Dromio’s chauffeur and a fireman were engaged in removing a quantity of petrol in two-gallon tins. In order to do this the chauffeur had been about to run to his cottage for the key when he discovered that the place had been broken into and four tins of petrol removed.
Appleby left William to help and returned thoughtfully to the front of the house. It was sufficiently clear that the last probability of the fire’s having been an accident had vanished.
In full daylight the scene had become less spectacular. Smoke and steam were now more evident than flame and of the idle spectators a number could be observed preparing to depart. Nevertheless a crisis was yet to come, for of the main structure a greater part of the roof was still standing, and when this came down it was expected that much of the weakened walls would come down too. Appleby made no effort to join again in the fire-fighting. He saw that the ambulance was still on the drive and walked across to it. Dr Hubbard, who was pulling on his gloves, looked up as he did so. ‘Ah,’ he said dryly, ‘another professional man in search of a victim. For my own part, I am just about to hand over to Ferris.’
‘Ferris?’ asked Appleby.
‘The young police-surgeon whom you met, I think, earlier in the affair.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Appleby frowned, conscious that something stirred obscurely and vainly in his mind. ‘How is Mr Sebastian Dromio?’
‘His condition may perhaps best be expressed by saying that Ferris can do him no harm. He is conscious, however, and you may talk to him if you like.’
‘Good.’ Appleby was about to turn away to the ambulance when a thought struck him. ‘Would it be true to say that Dr Ferris could have done him little harm before his fall either? He looked a sick man to me.’
Dr Hubbard nodded. ‘You have an eye for man’s mortality, Mr Appleby. And I don’t doubt that better doctors than either Ferris or myself have given Sebastian Dromio over. He had a few months to live. Now he has a few hours. You yourself have from twenty-five to thirty years if you keep your weight down. Good morning.’
Appleby, his sympathies veering sharply to young Dr Ferris, watched him go. Then he squeezed into the ambulance. Sebastian Dromio lay under a blanket, drowsy but sufficiently aware of what was going on around him. His eye rested on Appleby and he looked faintly puzzled. ‘Ah,’ he murmured, ‘the colonel – the enquiring colonel who would have weaned me from the bottle. Good morning to you.’
‘Good morning, Mr Dromio. Are you prepared to die?’
Sebastian Dromio looked considerably surprised. ‘Damn it,’ he said, ‘the fellow’s a parson. Took him for a military man.’ He glanced at Appleby warily. ‘You an Anglican?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Pity – a great pity.’ A fleeting expression of cunning crossed Sebastian’s ashen features. ‘Happen to be a devout Catholic myself. Sorry you can’t be of use to me. Goodbye.’
‘You are dying, you know. And I think I can mention it without gross inhumanity because you have known for months that it is so. Now, what can you do about it? I think it likely that your life on the whole has been disagreeable and useless. Well, now, what about your death? Can we put our heads together and turn it to some reasonable account?’
‘Fellow doesn’t sound like a parson.’ Sebastian turned his head painfully to get a better view of Appleby. ‘By God!’ he said, ‘it’s the undertaker. Well, as I used to tell them at board meetings, business methods are deuced keen nowadays. But it’s useless, my good fellow. As it happens, I am under arrest by the local police, and I don’t doubt they will have their own man. Obliged to you, all the same.’
‘I’m not interested in your funeral. But it would worry me to see a nice girl hanged.’
Sebastian closed his eyes. When they opened again it was as if nervous intensity had flooded back to them for some crisis. ‘Talk,’ he said. ‘Be quick about it.’
‘Confess that you killed your nephew Oliver. I, for one, won’t blame you. He was always worthless. And now it has turned out that he was a bit of a rat.’
‘I knew there was something damned queer in the air. Did you say a rat? I rather like you. You seem to have good taste. Interested in wine?’
‘I was saying that it would be a pity to see a nice girl hanged. So why not confess you killed Oliver?’
‘But I didn’t kill Oliver.’
‘Then why did you kill Grubb?’
‘Because–’ Sebastian hesitated. ‘Grubb?’ he asked. ‘Did I kill Grubb?’
‘You know you did. And there’s a chance of people thinking it was because he was going to give you away. He did call out that he had seen you prowling round. But he was going to call out that he had seen something else. And then you shot him. You had seen the possibility of the emergency coming, and you had feigned drunk on the chance it might be usefu
l. But let me get back to the main point. You are going to die. So why not confess?’
‘But surely–’
‘You are going to die, you know. Perhaps within a couple of hours.’
‘Then get a pen and paper.’ A light sweat had broken out on Sebastian Dromio’s brow. ‘And get a couple of witnesses too.’
‘Very well.’ Appleby rose. ‘But just a moment. It won’t do to get the story wrong, or to make a muck of it. We’d better run over the true facts first and then see just what we ought to say.’
‘That’s right. Got to see that we bally well fox ’em.’ Sebastian began to laugh; then he checked himself at some spasm of pain. ‘Better hurry,’ he said. ‘Quite right about that couple of hours. Deuced discerning fellow, colonel. Obliged to you.’
Appleby leant forward. ‘Then, just how much do you know for certain? What did you hear? What did you see?’
‘Not so much as Grubb did, I’m afraid. Can’t think what the fellow was doing, slinking around like that.’
‘He was doing no more than propose to return a half-empty decanter to the study. Later, and when he was scared, he drank the rest of it.’
‘Well, I was scared too. You see, I heard her say she’d do it.’
‘You heard Lucy say she would kill Oliver?’
Sebastian nodded painfully. ‘Haven’t got the exact words, but that was the sense of it. Told you there was something damned queer in the air. Something between the women. I kept away most of the evening. Couldn’t stick it. Had a shock earlier, you know, seeing Oliver like that in a restaurant. Nerved myself to join them once or twice and just didn’t make it. I was hesitating on the terrace just outside the drawing-room window when she said it.’
‘I see. But you know more than that?’
‘I took another turn on the terrace later, and strolled down into the garden. As I came up a flight of steps there was this fellow Grubb grabbing at Lucy and saying “So it was you, was it?” – or something like that. She broke away from him and ran down the terrace. There was horror on her face, poor girl. I didn’t understand it. I went on through the rest of the evening – or night, rather – in a dazed, automatic sort of way. But of course I realized in the end. At the moment I did no more than go up to Grubb with the idea of ordering him away. Fellow took one look at me and bolted into darkness.’
A Night of Errors Page 17
