Appleby File

by Michael Innes

  ‘I heard the old ruffian,’ Vivarini said. ‘Trying out roles, indeed! Well, what if I am?’

  ‘What, indeed. I myself shall remain grateful to you. This is a delightful spot.’

  ‘My dear Appleby, how nice of you to say so. But I do enjoy fishing, as a matter of fact. And – do you know? – as far as renting the cottage and this stretch of river goes, it was actually one of these chaps who egged me on. Positively ran me into it! But I won’t say which.’ Vivarini was laughing again – although with the effect, Appleby thought, of a man not wholly at ease. ‘No names, no pack drill. Ah, here come Mervyn and Ralph.’

  Appleby couldn’t afterwards remember – not even with a dead body to prompt him – who at the supper table had introduced the topic of crime. Perhaps it had been Ralph Halberd, since Halberd was one of that not inconsiderable number of millionaires to have suffered the theft of some enormously valuable pictures. This might have given Halberd an interest at least in burglars, although his line (outside owning shipping lines and luxury hotels) was a large if capricious patronage of artists expressing themselves in mediums more harmless than thermal lances and gelignite. Perhaps it had been Mervyn Gryde. Gryde wrote theatrical notices for newspapers (being dignified with the style of dramatic critic as a result), and the kind of plays he seemed chiefly to favour were, to Appleby’s mind, so full of violence and depravity that crime must be supposed his natural element. Or it might have been Vivarini himself. Certainly it had been he who, exercising a host’s authority, had insisted upon Appleby’s recounting his own part in certain criminal causes célèbres. But it had been left to Childrey, towards the end of the evening, to insist with a certain flamboyance on toasting the retired Metropolitan Commissioner as the finest detective intelligence in Britain. The hock, Appleby thought, was a great deal too good for the toast; it had in fact been Halberd’s contribution to the housekeeping and was quite superb. But he acknowledged the compliment in due form, and not long afterwards the company decided to go to bed.

  Rather to his surprise, Appleby found himself obscurely relieved that the day was over. Everyone had been amiable enough. But had something been stirring beneath the talk, the relaxed gestures, the small companionable-seeming silences? As he dropped to sleep he found himself thinking of the deep still pools into which the Dunwinnie tumbled here and there on its hurrying and sparkling scramble towards the sea. Beneath those calm surfaces, whose only movement seemed to be the lovely concentric ripples from a rising trout, a strong current flowed.

  He had a nightmare, a thing unusual with him. Perhaps it was occasioned by one of the yarns he had been inveigled into telling at the supper table, of his early and sometimes perilous days in the CID. In his dream he had been pursuing gunmen down dark narrow corridors – and suddenly it had been the gunmen who were pursuing him. They caught him and tied him up. And then the chief gunman had advanced upon him with a long whip and cracked it within an inch of his face. This was so unpleasant that Appleby, in his nightmare, told himself that here was a nightmare from which he had better wake up. So he woke up – not much perturbed, but taking thought, as one does, to remain awake until the same disagreeable situation was unlikely to be waiting for him.

  The wind had risen and its murmur had joined the river’s murmur, but inside the cottage there wasn’t a sound. The single-storey building had been remodelled for its present purpose, and now consisted, like an ill-proportioned sandwich, of a large living-room in the middle, with a very small bedroom at each end. The bedrooms contained little more than two bunks set one above the other. Childrey and Halberd shared one of these cabin-like places, and Appleby and Vivarini had the other. Gryde slept on a camp bed in the living-room. These dispositions had been arrived at, whimsically, by drawing lots.

  Appleby turned over cautiously, so as not to disturb Vivarini underneath him. Vivarini didn’t stir. And Appleby suddenly knew he wasn’t there, It was a simple matter of highly developed auditory alertness. Nobody was breathing, however lightly, in the bunk below.

  The discovery ought not to have been worth a thought. A wakeful Vivarini might have elected for a breath of moorland air. Or he might have been prompted to repair to the modest structure, some twenty yards from the cottage, known as the jakes. Despite these reflections, Appleby slipped quietly down from his bunk.

  It was dark, then suddenly not dark, then dark again. But nobody had flashed a light. Outside, the sky must be a huddle of moving cloud, with a moon near the full sometimes breaking through. Vivarini’s bunk was indeed unoccupied. Appleby picked up a torch and went into the living-room. Gryde seemed sound asleep – a little dark man, Appleby passingly told himself, coiled up like a snake. The door of the farther bedroom was closed, but the door giving direct on the moor was open. Appleby stepped outside, switching off the torch as he did so. He now knew why he was behaving in this way – like an alarmed nursemaid, he thought. It was because of what had happened in his dream.

  He glanced up at the clouds, and in the same moment the moon again came serenely through. The Dunwinnie rose into visibility before him, like a sudden outpouring of hoarded silver on dark cloth. On the other bank the lambing hut with its squat square chimney suggested some small humped creature with head warily erect. And something was moving there. Momentarily Appleby saw this as a human figure slipping out of the door. Then he saw that it was only the door itself, swinging gently on its primitive wooden pivot. But no sound came from across the softly chattering flood; no sound that could have transformed itself into another sound in Appleby’s dream. There were stepping stones here, practicable enough for an active man. But they faded into darkness as Appleby looked; the moon had disappeared again. He had to switch on the torch or risk a ducking. He risked the ducking, although he could scarcely have told himself why he disliked the idea of being seen. When he reached the hut he reconnoitred the ground before it with a brief flicker close to the earth. He felt for the door and pushed it fully open; it had been firmly shut, he remembered, and with an old thirl-pin through the latch, the evening before. Now he was looking into deep darkness indeed. The hut was no more than a square stone box with a slate roof; it had a fireplace more for the needs of the ewes and lambs than their shepherd; and in one wall – he couldn’t recollect which – there was a window which had been boarded up. Treading softly, he moved through the door and listened.

  No sound. No glimmer of light. Nothing to alert a single sense – unless it was a faint smell of old straw, the ghost of a faint smell of carbolic, of tar. Then suddenly, and straight in front of him at floor level, there was an illusive suggestion of light. All but imperceptibly, the small glow grew; it was as if a stage electrician were operating a rheostat with infinite care. It grew to an oblong, with darkness as its frame. And now within the frame there was a picture, there was a portrait. It was the portrait of Vivarini – but something had happened to his forehead. It was Vivarini himself.

  Appleby was on his knees, his ear to the man’s chest, his fingers exploring through a sports-coat, a pyjama-jacket. His face close to the still face, he flashed his torch into unclosing eyes, saw uncontracting pupils. He turned his head, gazed upwards, and was looking at a square of dimly luminous cloud. Nothing more than the moon’s reflected light filtering down the chimney had produced that moment of hideous melodrama. Vivarini himself at his typewriter, or pacing his study while dictating to his secretary, couldn’t have done better. It was backwards into the rude fireplace that he had crashed, a bullet in his brain. And hence the crack of that ugly whip in the other dimension of dream.

  Twenty minutes passed before Appleby re-entered the cottage. Arrived there, he didn’t waste time. He gave Gryde a rough shake and rapped smartly on the closed bedroom door. Within seconds his three fellow-guests were around him, huddled in dressing-gowns, dazed and blinking.

  ‘Vivarini is dead,’ he said quietly. ‘In the lambing hut. Shot through the head.’

  ‘My God – so he
meant it!’ This exclamation was Ralph Halberd’s, and it was followed by a small silence.

  ‘One of us,’ Appleby went on, apparently unheeding, ‘must get down to Balloch, and telephone for a doctor and the police. But something a shade awkward comes first.’

  ‘Awkward?’ It was Mervyn Gryde who repeated the word, and his voice had turned sharp.

  ‘Well yes. Let me explain. Or, rather, let me take up what Halbend has just said.’ Appleby turned to the millionaire. ‘“My God – so he meant it!” Just what made you say that?’

  ‘Because he told me. He confided in me. It was a fearful shock.’ In the cold light of a hissing gas-lamp, Halberd, who normally carried around with him an air as of imposing boardrooms, looked uncertain and perplexed. ‘On Tuesday – the day we arrived. It was because I happened to see him unpack this thing, and shove it under his shirts in that drawer over there. A pistol. It looked almost like a toy.’

  ‘Vivarini said he was going to kill himself with it?’

  ‘Not that, exactly. Only that he had thoughts of it, and couldn’t bring himself not to carry the weapon round with him.’

  ‘Did he give any reason?’

  ‘No. It seemed to be implied that he was feeling discouraged. His plays – all those Comedies of Discomfiture, as he called them – are a bit outmoded, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Perhaps so. But, Halberd, did you take any steps? Even mention this to any of the rest of us?’

  ‘I wish to God I had. But I thought he was putting on a turn.’ The patron’s indulgent scorn for the artist sounded for a moment in Halberd’s tones. ‘That sort of fellow is always dramatising himself. And people don’t often kill themselves just because they’re feeling discouraged.’

  ‘That’s certainly true. There are psychologists who maintain that suicide never happens except on top of a clinically recognisable depressive state. An exaggeration, perhaps, but no more than that. But here’s my point. Whatever Vivarini said to you, Halberd, he can’t have made away with himself. I found no weapon in that hut.’

  There was a long silence in the cottage.

  ‘That’s just according to one witness – yourself – who was the first man on the scene.’ Gryde’s voice was sharper still. And with a curiously reptilian effect, his tongue flickered out over dry lips.

  ‘Exactly. You take my point.’ Appleby smiled grimly. ‘Anybody can tell lies. But let’s see if there’s a revolver under those shirts now.’

  Watched by the others, Appleby made a brief rummage. No weapon was revealed.

  ‘I may have killed him,’ Halberd said slowly. ‘And made up a stupid story about suicide, which the facts disprove.’

  ‘Certainly you may.’ Appleby might have been discussing a hand at bridge. ‘But you’re not going to be the only suspect.’

  ‘Obviously not.’ Childrey spoke for the first time. The least agitated of Appleby’s companions, he might have been a rosy infant doubly-flushed from sleep. ‘Nor are we – the four of us here – characters in a sealed-room mystery. Why the lambing hut? Why did Vivarini go over there secretly in the night? To meet somebody unknown to us, one may suppose – and somebody who turned out not to care for him.’

  ‘It might still have been one of ourselves,’ Appleby said. ‘But may I come back to the business of going for help? I’m thinking of the weapon. If one of us killed Vivarini, he may then have had enough time to get quite a distance across the moor and back for the purpose of hiding the gun where no search will ever find it. On the other hand, one of us may have it on his person, or in a suitcase, at this moment. Whichever of us goes for help must certainly be searched first. Or perhaps all of us. Do you agree? Good. I’ll search each of you in turn – over there in that bedroom – and then one of you can search me.’

  ‘I’ll come first,’ Childrey said easily. ‘But behind that closed door. Less shaming, eh?’

  Appleby’s was a very rapid frisking. ‘By the way,’ he asked at the end of it, ‘have you any notion how this fishing-party originated? You didn’t by any chance suggest it to Vivarini, or in any way put him up to it?’

  ‘Lord, no! Came as a complete surprise to me. We’d been on bad terms, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. Send in Halberd.’

  Five minutes later, they were all in the living-room again. In another ten, the whole place had been searched.

  ‘No gun,’ Appleby said. ‘But another lie – or the appearance of it. Vivarini told me one of you had egged him on to organize this little fishing-party. But each of you denies it.’

  ‘All according to you,’ Gryde said.

  ‘Yes, indeed. I’m grateful to you for so steadily keeping me in mind. And now, who goes to telephone? It’s at least five miles. I suggest we draw lots.’

  ‘No. I’m going to go.’ It was Childrey who spoke. ‘Trekking over the moors in darkness is my sort of thing. I’ll just get into a jacket and trousers.’

  ‘The cunning criminal makes good his escape,’ Gryde said. ‘But it’s all one to me.’ He turned to Appleby. ‘While Cliff is louping over the heather – I believe that’s the correct Scots word – I suggest we open a bottle of whisky and have a nice friendly chat.’

  It didn’t prove all that friendly. Childrey’s, it struck Appleby, had been the genuinely genial presence in the fishing-party; now, when he had gone off with long strides through a darkness with which the moon had ceased to struggle, the atmosphere in the cottage deteriorated sharply.

  ‘Odd that Vivarini should have made you that confidence, Ralph.’ Gryde said this after the whisky bottle had clinked for a second time against his glass. ‘And odd that he asked you here. Wanted to make it up with you, I suppose. Tycoons make ugly enemies.’

  ‘What the devil do you mean?’ Halberd had sat bolt upright.

  ‘And it’s going to be awkward for that girl. He’d miscalculated, hadn’t he? Thought she was just one of your notorious harem, no doubt, and that you wouldn’t give a damn. Actually, you were ludicrously in love with her. Not unusual, once a man has reached the age of senile infatuation. Everybody was talking about it, you know. And I’m surprised you came.’

  ‘One might be surprised that cheerful idiot Childrey came.’ Halberd had controlled himself with an effort in face of Gryde’s sudden and astonishing assault. ‘He told me that he had been on poor terms with Freddie. And, for that matter, what about yourself, Mervyn? I believe–’

  ‘I don’t filch other men’s trollops.’

  ‘You certainly don’t. What you’d filch–’

  ‘One moment.’ Appleby had set down his glass – and he plainly didn’t mean to take it up again. ‘If we’re to have this sort of thing – and experience tells me it may be inevitable – it had better be with some scrap of decency. No venom.’

  ‘Venom is Mervyn Gryde’s middle name.’ Halberd reached for the bottle, but glanced at Appleby and thought better of it. ‘Read the stuff he writes about any play in which the dramatis personae aren’t a bunch of sewer rats. Read some of the things he’s recently said about Freddie, He had his knife in Freddie. You’d suppose some hideous private grudge.’ Halberd turned directly to the dramatic critic. ‘How you can have had the forehead to accept an invitation from the poor devil beats me, Snaky Merv. That’s what they called him at Cambridge long ago, you know.’ This had the character of an aside to Appleby. ‘Snaky Mervyn Gryde.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Appleby said dryly, ‘that I can’t contribute much to these amiable exchanges. I don’t know a great deal about our late host. But of course – as you, Gryde, will be quick to point out – you have only my word for it. What I do see is that this party is revealing itself as having been organized by way of sinking differences and making friends again. And it hasn’t had much luck. One result has been that, in your two selves, it brought here a couple of men with an undefined degr
ee of animus against Vivarini. Perhaps Childrey has been a third. Can either of you explain what Childrey meant by telling me he’d been on bad terms with Vivarini?’

  ‘I can, because Freddie told me. Not that you’d believe me.’ Gryde, having apparently seen danger in too much whisky, was chain-smoking nervously, so that he was like some small dark devil risen from a nether world amid mephitic vapours. ‘Childrey had refused to do a collected edition of Freddie’s plays. And Freddie had found out it was because he was planning something of the sort for a rival playwright. Freddie was furious.’

  ‘I can certainly believe that. But it’s scarcely a reason why Childrey should murder Vivarini. Rather the other way about.’

  ‘True enough.’ Gryde laughed shrilly. ‘But Freddie believed he was on the verge of exposing Childrey in some disreputable sharp practice about it all. He said he could wreck his good name as a publisher, and that he meant to do it.’

  ‘And had meantime invited him to this friendly party? It’s an uncommonly odd tale.’

  ‘I said you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘On the contrary.’ Appleby’s smile was bleak. ‘I’m inclined to believe that the dead man told you just what you say he did.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ It wasn’t without looking disconcerted that Gryde said this. ‘And where the deuce do we go from here?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Halberd had got up and was restlessly pacing the room to the sound of a flip-flap of bedroom slippers. ‘Where the deuce – and all the damned to boot.’