Appleby's Answer

by Michael Innes

  ‘No doubt she has her own slant on crime, Sir John, and it is of a different kind from yours. What she had her eye on may have been what I have called an occasion of scandal.’

  ‘I hope to meet Miss Pringle again soon.’ Appleby announced this with a firmness which was possibly for his wife’s benefit. ‘So perhaps I shall be able to enlighten you. Talking of the Pinkertons, by the way: can you tell me how Bulkington regards them?’

  ‘Unfavourably.’ For a moment Dr Howard appeared to ponder the adequacy of this word. ‘Or with a senseless malignancy.’

  ‘Dear me! Have you, incidentally, heard anything about these Pinkertons having been subjected recently to any untoward annoyances?’

  ‘Yes.’ The rector was surprised. ‘Pinkerton was complaining lately of something of the kind. Vandalism, practical jokes: I’m afraid I don’t quite know what. I fear I have contracted the habit of not always listening to Sir Ambrose’s conversation quite as I ought.’

  ‘Let us hope,’ Appleby said gravely, ‘that Sir Ambrose is not similarly culpable in regard to your sermons.’

  15

  The rector of Gibber Porcorum cum Long Canings (as the combined cures were doubtless called) received this valedictory pleasantry in good part, and with further civil expressions he and the Applebys took leave of each other. Appleby himself was disposed to linger by the well, and indeed to give it a good deal of attention. Its surrounding masonry, less than knee-high, was in places crumbling. But there was, he found, a cover of sorts, consisting of a wooden collar and some decayed wire mesh. This was simply lying in long grass, and had obviously so lain for a considerable period. Whether inadvertently or not, the gallant Captain Bulkington maintained within his policies a state of affairs extremely hazardous at least to juvenile curiosity. Appleby was less struck by this than by the apparent disregard of the circumstance evinced by Dr Howard. Dr Howard must be singularly lacking in what somebody had called the imagination of disaster. Appleby expended some minutes, and a certain amount of frayed temper, in hoisting the inefficient contraption back into place. It wouldn’t, he judged, save the life of an incautious dog. Or of the billy-goat, for that matter, if he took to doing a little goat-like scrambling. The goat, although it had once or twice given the intruders a further nasty look, was continuing to regard its prime task as munching anything munchable.

  ‘And that’s all that we can do,’ Judith said. She plainly spoke with the largest reference.

  ‘So that the next job is to give dinner to the Bundlethorpes tomorrow evening? I suppose you’re right.’ Appleby’s agreement was reluctant, but he turned and led the way back to the main drive of ‘Kandahar’. Suddenly he halted. ‘By Jove!’ he said. ‘There are two more of our friends.’

  It was to Messrs Waterbird and Jenkins that this description was being applied. They had appeared some fifty yards ahead, making their way towards the high road in a lounging manner not suggestive of any lively expectations of pleasure when they got there. In fact they were surprisingly like a couple of small boys who had been despatched in an arbitrary manner and on the excuse of wholesome exercise to the performance of an afternoon walk through unadven-turous territory.

  ‘Am I right,’ Appleby asked, ‘in remembering that Gibber runs to a tea-shop of the muffin, crumpet and cream-cake variety?’

  ‘Yes, you are. I noticed it.’ Judith looked at her husband in surprise. It was not his elderly habit to indulge in afternoon recruitment of that order.

  ‘Capital. And now I think you ought to take a healthy walk – just of the sort those worthies have been sent off on. But in the opposite direction. And be back in the car in an hour.’

  ‘Thank you very much!’ Judith’s indignation was extreme. ‘Do I understand–’

  ‘I propose having a quiet chat with our young friends. Over a light but sustaining refection.’

  ‘About tupto and the birth and death of Wordsworth?’

  ‘About rather more intimate matters. I suspect them of being thoroughly conventional and right-thinking little blackguards. So a confidential and man-to-man note will be in order. That makes you an unsuitable participant, darling. So–’

  ‘Don’t imagine I have the slightest wish to be in on your muck-raking. I shall enjoy a walk very much. And if I’m not back in one hour you may expect me back in two.’

  ‘Good. And, come to think of it, I’ll take the car now. The quicker I get them fed–’

  ‘How do you know they’ll want to be fed?’

  ‘In an establishment like “Kandahar” short commons are the rule. That’s self-evident. They’ll make no end of pigs of themselves. And then they’ll unbutton and talk.’

  ‘How utterly revolting.’

  ‘Cheer up. I promise I’ll repeat every word they say.’

  ‘That’s extremely kind.’ Judith, about to march off, cast around for a Parthian shot. ‘See that you keep square with them: crumpet by crumpet and cream-cake by cream-cake. Then at least you won’t want much dinner tonight.’

  Captain Bulkington’s charges made no bones about accepting an invitation to tea. They climbed into the car with alacrity. Jenkins’ permanently open mouth even began to dribble, as if the prospect of solid fare had prompted him to anticipatory salivation at once. Waterbird was more restrained. There was something permanently wary about Waterbird. Sitting in the front of the car beside Appleby, he kept glancing at his prospective host suspiciously and askance. He might have been remembering too late the warnings of his mother or his nurse not to accept sweets from strangers.

  The tea-shop was thoroughly satisfactory, being of the kind kept by teetering old ladies in the interest of their health, and, although small, otherwise unfrequented on the present occasion. Appleby ordered muffins and crumpets for a start. Then recalling the existence of anchovy toast and toasted tea-cakes, he called for them as well. Already in evidence on the table was a three-tiered contraption loaded with pastries and éclairs. In no time Appleby’s appearance was that of a thoroughly injudicious uncle giving an outing to a couple of nephews from a preparatory school.

  And for Waterbird and Jenkins, subjected to the influence of this environment, the years fell away. It seemed inconceivable that anything other than the most innocent depravities could issue from their confiding lips. Appleby, however, hoped for the best.

  ‘And what sort of place is “Kandahar”?’ he asked cheerily. ‘Can you conscientiously recommend it to an enquiring parent?’

  ‘Recommend it!’ Curiously enough, it was Jenkins who responded. It seemed miraculous that articulate speech could issue at all through jaws so inordinately agape. ‘Why, it’s the most–’

  ‘Ralph means that it all depends.’ Waterbird said this very loudly, thereby deftly all but drowning the yelp elicited from his comrade upon receiving a savage kick under the table. ‘Whether it’s Oxford and all that, or the Army, or the Church, or whatever. I don’t suppose Captain Bulkington is equally good all round. Ralph, that’s right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ralph echoed, and comforted himself by reaching for another half muffin.

  ‘I can see that, of course,’ Appleby said judiciously. It looked as if Waterbird intended not to play. Waterbird was not an admirer or adherent of Captain Bulkington’s. Savage hostility towards his preceptor simply oozed out of him. But unlike Jenkins he possessed an adequate low cunning, and knew there were things it would be unwise to chatter about – even in return for the most gargantuan tea. But what things? Appleby, practised in situations even as odd as this one, knew that he would have to adopt a change of tactics.

  ‘It doesn’t look to me,’ he said with a sudden briskness, ‘as if many parents of prospective pupils turn up on your tutor. But when it does happen, I must say you put on a pretty brisk routine. Waterbird and Jenkins doing Greek; rear view of ditto as the rump of the Army Class; ditto again, mucking around with a record-player or tape-recorder and producing the Modern Side in full cry. Smart work – very.’ Appleby glanced from one young man to the o
ther. ‘Eh, Jenkins?’

  ‘Ask Adrian.’ Jenkins contrived to gasp this through too hastily ingested muffin. ‘All a bit deep for me.’

  ‘Well, Adrian?’ Appleby offered encouragingly.

  In this crisis Adrian Waterbird showed considerable presence of mind – as well as a gratuitous viciousness signalised by another brutal kick under the table. He helped himself to an entire toasted tea-cake, thereby indicating that he at least saw no reason to abrupt the feast.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘ – are you really what you call an enquiring parent?’

  ‘Of course not. And you have your wits sufficiently about you to spot the fact. I’d have thought you had your wits sufficiently about you simply to clear out. The place is a fraud, isn’t it? Why stay? You’re not a kid.’

  ‘Just what are you really, please?’ With wholly praiseworthy coolness, Adrian Waterbird reached for what proved to be strawberry jam. ‘Some sort of detective?’

  ‘That’s not at all a bad guess.’ Considering the situation, Appleby decided to stretch a point. ‘I come’ – he added, accurately enough – ‘from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Oh, I say!’ Tucking his shins safely away, Ralph Jenkins produced rash speech. ‘Did that old woman come from there too?’

  ‘That old woman?’

  ‘The one we met in the pub that Sunday. Bloody inquisitive, she was. Adrian said so afterwards.’

  ‘Shut up, Ralph.’ Adrian’s vindictive toe had shot out in vain. Then he looked sullenly at Appleby. ‘You can’t mix us up with whatever the Bulgar gets up to. We’re just his pupils, aren’t we?’

  ‘Almost his prisoners, I’d say. And what does he want with the two of you, anyway? Just the fees – or something else as well?’

  ‘He wants a bit of cover, I suppose. Kidding he’s a coach, when really he’s a bloody crook. And he’s got us where he wants us. One day I’ll damn well have him like that. And, my God, he’ll howl.’ Adrian Waterbird paused, ferociously scowling. He had resumed his full years again. This, however, did not prevent his starting in on the anchovy toast. Appleby found himself attempting imaginatively to create on his own palate the effect of this delicacy on top of tea-cake and strawberry jam.

  ‘Would you be so good,’ Appleby said with measured severity, ‘as to tell me just what you mean by saying that Captain Bulkington has got you where he wants you? I assure you that it will be in your own interest to do so. To be unresponsive, on the other hand, may land you in an awkward situation. I say this informally. My enquiries, as a matter of fact, may be described as wholly informal, so far.’ Appleby produced this, he noticed, with the emphasis of one who offers a sop to his own conscience. ‘Frankly, Mr Waterbird, it is in your urgent interest to come clean.’

  ‘Honest?’ It was with a sudden childishness that Mr Waterbird responded with this.

  ‘Honest.’

  ‘Your wife isn’t going to join us, is she? It’s something that’s not really for ladies, this.’

  ‘That’s what I said to the old woman,’ Ralph Jenkins said. Ralph Jenkins seemed to make a speciality of intermittent rash and random speech. ‘I said–’

  ‘Shut your bloody trap, Ralph, and leave this to me. Mrs Appleby isn’t coming in to tea?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ Appleby said. And he added unblushingly: ‘My wife has gone to pay a call on friends.’

  ‘I expect we’ve been more nervous than we need have been.’ Adrian Waterbird was at his wariest. ‘Of course, we may have been a bit rough with the girl–’

  ‘Being our first,’ Ralph Jenkins interpolated surprisingly.

  ‘Shut up!’ This shameful and unnecessary admission had goaded Adrian to fury. ‘She’d simply been put up to it by the Bulgar – you see? Yelling that it had been rape. And then in he came. Frankly, I lost my nerve. And I’ve never properly recovered it – not enough to walk out on him. My parents, and all that. Even the police. And Ralph would be hopeless if we were really got into a corner.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ralph said. ‘It’s all really not my thing.’

  Appleby refrained from asking whether the girl had been in any degree Ralph’s thing. That unedifying episode, at least, need not be further enquired into. Something of the technique of Captain Bulkington had sufficiently appeared in it. And what was conceivably of greater interest was Ralph’s reiterated reference to the old lady, by whom he undoubtedly meant Miss Pringle.

  ‘About this meeting in a pub,’ Appleby said. ‘The lady wasn’t a detective, however inquisitive she seemed. Her name is Priscilla Pringle, and she’s a novelist. Did you simply run into her by chance?’

  ‘Yes, of course. We’d just slipped out for a drink in the Jolly Chairman. And there she was. Adrian, that’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Adrian Waterbird had hesitated. He had clearly been calculating where his best course lay, and it was for further frankness that he opted now. ‘Ralph isn’t very clear on these things,’ he informed Appleby. ‘He gets rather at sea when there’s anything he calls deep going on. Actually, we were told off to shadow the woman, and to nobble her if we got the opportunity before she cleared out. Then we were to chat her up.’

  ‘And that’s what you managed in the pub?’

  ‘Just that. As you can imagine, Ralph wasn’t much good–’

  ‘None at all,’ Ralph said.

  ‘–but I managed to get across the required line.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby had unconsciously helped himself to an éclair, and now contemplated it gloomily on his plate. ‘You were to do what you could to allay Miss Pringle’s suspicions about Captain Bulkington? You were to represent him as no more than a harmless eccentric – that kind of thing?’

  ‘Not that at all.’ Suddenly Adrian Waterbird was looking at Appleby with something like Ralph Jenkins’ helplessness. It was as if the limit of his intellectual capacities had been reached, and only bewilderment was before him. ‘We were to plug the Bulgar–’

  ‘The Bulgar?’

  ‘Not the word we use ourselves,’ Ralph interrupted, markedly brightening. ‘But near it.’

  ‘Shut up, Ralph. We were to plug him as thoroughly dangerous. As a homicidal maniac, in fact, who had done in the chap he took the place over from, and who now had it in for the local big-wig, Sir Ambrose Pinkerton, in a thoroughly murderous way.’

  ‘Dear me! And did Miss Pringle accept all this?’

  ‘I rather think she did. I had a feeling we were only confirming what she’d been given a glimpse of already.’

  ‘I see. And would you say that Miss Pringle was alarmed?’

  ‘She thought she was being clever.’ It was Ralph who said this, and he had momentarily even put down a cream-cake in order to do so. ‘That’s something that somehow I always do know. When a person is thinking he’s bloody clever. The old woman went away feeling she’d outsmarted us. I don’t know what about. But she had at least bought us a couple of drinks.’

  ‘Mr Waterbird,’ Appleby asked gravely, ‘do you concur in your friend’s appreciation of the lady’s state of feeling?’

  ‘Do I–?’ Mr Waterbird glowered suspiciously at this orotund question. ‘Well, yes – that’s right enough.’

  ‘And can you tell me just what, in all this, Captain Bulkington was up to – and perhaps still is up to? Just what was the exercise in aid of?’

  ‘Money, I suppose.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘I don’t believe the Bulgar thinks of anything else. He may talk murder, but it’s money that’s really in his head.’ Having produced this succinct opinion, Adrian Waterbird made one of his ritual appeals to his companion. ‘Ralph, that’s about the size of it, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’ Thus offering his accustomed corroboration, Ralph Jenkins seemed about to return to his cream-cake. Before doing so, however, he unexpectedly contributed a thought of his own. ‘Of course he might combine business and pleasure, I suppose, from time to time.’

  ‘The possibility ought certainl
y to be borne in mind.’ Appleby glanced at his watch, and asked for his bill. The little tea-party proved, not unnaturally, to have been a most expensive affair. Nor, in requital of the massive carbohydrates, fats, and sugars spread before them had his guests let more than a few crumbs of information fall from the board. Such as they were, however, Appleby was grateful for them. He accordingly took leave of Messrs Waterbird and Jenkins on a restored note of avuncular benevolence. It was only when he had done so that he recalled having rashly announced himself as an emissary of Scotland Yard. Would they hand on this information to their hated tyrant, and thus explode the myth of Arthur Appleby for ever? Appleby judged it a fairly safe bet that they would not.

  Judith was perched on a stile, sucking a straw, and with an air of contentment perhaps attributable to the continued warmth of the early evening sun.

  ‘Were the young men communicative?’ she asked.

  ‘Moderately. Jenkins is too witless to be particularly helpful, but Waterbird wasn’t entirely useless. Neither of them has a very clear or extensive view of the affair.’

  ‘The affair?’

  ‘There’s an affair, all right. And Bulkington, incidentally, really has turned that worthy couple into a pair of helots. He has engineered a hold over them – by contriving they should behave not too prettily to some local trollop. Not edifying, but I have a notion it may rather establish Bulkington’s pattern.’

  ‘You mean that he gets people into compromising, or at least humiliating and embarrassing, situations, and then presents a bill?’

  ‘Excellent. You express my thought very well.’

  ‘Thank you. And now we had better be getting on to the next thing.’ Judith jumped down from the stile. ‘Mustn’t be late for it.’

  ‘Your blessed Bundlethorpes? That’s tomorrow, not today.’

  ‘Not Bundlethorpes. Pinkertons – at the big house.’

  ‘Pinkertons? What on earth do you mean?’