‘Damnation!’ Comberford was plainly startled. But then he recovered himself and grinned. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that it’s uncommonly obliging of you to point that out? I’ll ease them for a bit. But lie down on your stomach, and then don’t move.’
Gadberry obeyed this order. He concluded, as he felt the bonds slacken, that he had won a first trick. Those on his ankles would need untying before he could stand up. But he believed that, at a pinch, he could now free his wrists with a quick twist.
‘That shows,’ he said, without raising his head from the floor. ‘Detail’s not your strong point – Comberford, old boy.’
‘Listen. I leave you here. I smother the old woman–’
‘Smother her, do you? What rot!’
‘Yes, I do. It’s going to look like a very clumsy attempt to suggest natural death in her sleep – heart-failure, or something like that. I take care to leave in her room certain tokens of your own presence, dear boy – I won’t tell you what. I come back here and give you your shots. I bundle you into your own room, get a good deal of whisky into your stomach – and that’s that. That’s the whole thing, and I depart from the dear old Abbey as I came. The body is found, the doctor comes, the police come, they pay you a not very polite call – and there you are, still snoring like a pig.’
I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt…
The icy drops were coursing down Gadberry’s spine once more. This time, they seemed each to explode with a tiny splash deep in his loins. He had been rash to think that the world of Macbeth was safely behind him.
‘It won’t do you any good,’ he said. ‘It just can’t.’
Comberford looked at his watch again.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘In my little Riviera nest – where I have a cast-iron alibi now – the sad news of this foul deed reaches me. I turn up. I have reason to suspect, I say, that a letter written to me by my great-aunt some months ago was intercepted. And intercepted by you, old boy. There’s a story waiting to make a plausible job of that. You turned up at the Abbey. You waited – and only just waited – until the will and what not were signed–’
‘You bloody fool!’ Risking something unpleasant, Gadberry rolled over on his back. ‘You don’t think those precious documents will be valid, do you?’
‘Of course they’ll be valid, old boy. The impostor is out of the picture – hanged or at least jugged for good. But the heir remains the man intended: the authentic Nicholas Comberford. And that’s me. I get what I’ve always meant to get – without ever coming near this place, and without waiting until the old girl does die a natural death – at about a hundred and two. It’s in the bag, George my lad. It’s all in the beautiful bag.’
‘ I think not.’
Suddenly, there was another and more powerful torch at play in the cell. It was in the left hand of Miss Bostock, who stood in the door. In her right hand there was a gun.
25
‘May I introduce you to Miss Bostock?’ Gadberry said. At the same time he gave a quick tug at his wrists. He had been right. They came free quite easily. He sat up, stretched his arms – it was already a painful process – and untied the knots at his ankles. Nobody hindered him. Comberford and Miss Bostock were too much at gaze, so to speak, to notice. Gadberry contented himself with wriggling into a corner in his sitting posture, and there a little taking his ease. He had a notion that the situation remained on the tricky side.
‘An embarras de richesses,’ Miss Bostock said. ‘One Nicholas Comberford too many. The question is, which is to survive? Perhaps we might hold an auction. No – don’t move.’ She had said this in response to a threatening gesture by Comberford. ‘Unless you want the problem resolved out of hand.’
‘ Permit me, madam.’
With the effect of a conjuring trick, a dark-sleeved arm had appeared behind Miss Bostock, and the small pistol had been snatched from her hand. In the same moment she was given a not very respectful impetus from behind – indeed, on the behind, and from a powerful knee. She was thus jolted into the cell. And Boulter was commanding it from the doorway.
‘All the conspirators,’ Gadberry said. For Macbeth was out. It seemed reasonable to switch to Julius Caesar.
Or even – Gadberry was to reflect afterwards – to A Comedy of Errors or All’s Well that Ends Well. Abruptly, that is to say, the situation had modulated into the absurd. Unfortunately, as it turned out, nobody except himself appeared aware of this possible change of key. His three companions were glaring at each other – and at him, for that matter – with undisguised malignity. As it was, he made one forlorn gesture in the direction of a certain lightness of air.
‘Couldn’t we,’ he asked, ‘have Grimble along? It would seem the tidy thing to do.’
‘I’ve got the gun,’ Boulter said.
‘You have, indeed.’ Miss Bostock simultaneously recovered her physical equilibrium and her nervous poise. ‘Only, it isn’t loaded.’
There was a pregnant silence, while Boulter verified this. The stillness was broken only by the flapping of an intrusive bat. From somewhere outside – perhaps from the tower itself – one of the resident owls hooted. It was on a satirical note.
‘Thank you, madam.’ Boulter handed the useless weapon back to its owner. He had returned to his most wooden manner. ‘It would appear that some accommodation must be arrived at.’
‘Accommodation to hell,’ Gadberry said – still from his seat on the floor. ‘From now on it’s going to be the truth.’ He glanced at each of his companions in turn. ‘The whole bloody truth, and nothing but the bloody truth,’ he added by way of emphasis.
Miss Bostock looked at him coldly.
‘Young man,’ she said, ‘for I don’t know your name–’
‘His name,’ Comberford said, ‘is–’
‘You shut your mouth,’ Gadberry said. This injunction, although crudely expressed, appeared to carry weight, at least for the time. Comberford fell warily silent.
‘Young man,’ Miss Bostock resumed, ‘that was a very foolish remark. The truth is a luxury to be afforded by none of us. By you least of all.’
Gadberry stretched himself. He was still feeling uncomfortably stiff. He chafed his wrists, and then chafed his ankles.
‘That’s certainly true of Comberford,’ he said. ‘He has been lurking in the vicarage. He has been plotting with the old imbecile Grimble, who wouldn’t stand up to police interrogation for ten minutes. He has broken into the Abbey in the night. In that black bag he has chloroform, other soporific drugs and – if I have understood him aright – a hypodermic syringe. He’s for it.’
‘And what about you?’ Still blocking the doorway, Boulter produced this with one of his abrupt returns to the natural man. ‘You’ve lived here under false pretences for months. You’re for it, you young bastard, if anybody is.’
‘But the point about me is that I don’t mind.’ Gadberry stood up. ‘Can you get that into your thick skull? I don’t mind.’
There was another silence – rather a long one, this time. Everybody seemed to be paying this the compliment of rather serious attention. Then Miss Bostock spoke. It was with an air of patiently beginning again from rational premises.
‘It appears to me that the superfluous person is the real Mr Comberford. Until his arrival, we were getting on very well. Boulter and I, it is true, were a little in the dark about each other. But our interests are readily reconcilable.’
‘That’s right!’ Boulter nodded his head vigorously ‘Our money’s on the fake Comberford, not the true one.’ He paused as if to consider. ‘Could this chap – the real Comberford – prove himself to be the real Comberford? That’s the point. If he couldn’t–’
‘Of course he could.’ Miss Bostock was impatient. ‘And any dispute about identity would be fatal. Start investigating our own young man’s claim, and it wouldn’t stand up for a week. Probably not for a day.’
‘Then, in that case, th
ere seems to be only one thing for it.’ Boulter eyed Comberford grimly before turning back to Miss Bostock. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘Certainly I agree. One regrets the necessity. But it is self evident.’
‘It’s unfortunate the ground’s so hard.’
‘Yes – but other means can be thought of.’
At this moment – rather unexpectedly and wholly fatally – the true Nicholas Comberford’s nerve broke. And panic lent him strength. He took a lunge at the portly Boulter which sent him sprawling into the corridor. A split second later, he was in full flight down it himself.
Calmly scrutinised, this precipitate retreat might have yielded much that was rational. There was nothing more in Bruton Abbey for Nicholas Comberford; in that direction he had dished himself for good. He was in the presence of two baffled and ruthless antagonists, and of a man whom he had proposed to see indicted of murder. To cut his losses and stand not upon the order of his going was sensible enough.
But there was really nothing rational about the pursuit. It was a matter of sheer confusion, and perhaps of something like blood-lust. Strangely enough, Miss Bostock led it – and at a speed which might have been envied by Atalanta, or by swift Camilla scouring the plain. Boulter followed, cursing and looking round for a weapon as he ran. Gadberry, utterly astonished by this fantastic rout, at first brought up the rear. Surely they couldn’t really intend – He decided to suspend speculation, and crowd on speed.
Corridor, staircase, corridor, staircase. Cloisters, abbot’s arch, scriptorium, monks’ arch. Strangers’ hall, locutory, gatehouse. They all went past as in a dream. The chase was now in open air. The wind still whistled, and it was bringing up more clouds heavy with snow from the north. But to the south the moon still flicked in and out of mere shreds and patches, so that the Abbey with its ruins and its gardens, its fishpond and its terraced parterre, was behaving like an ancient and decomposing film. Amid all this, Comberford was a dark, headlong blotch on the snow.
‘Comberford, stop! Stop, you fool!’ Gadberry spared breath to yell thus desperately, for he had suddenly realised the fantastic hazard ahead. But it was in vain. The fleeing man, wholly disoriented, had steered a course straight across the fishpond. And the thousand-to-one chance fulfilled itself. There was a quite small sound – rather like the plop of a frog in a stream. Nicholas Comberford had vanished. His inheritance at Bruton was with its pike.
For a long time Gadberry knelt by the dark hole – the other two standing silent beside him. But there was nothing whatever to be done. Finally he got to his feet.
‘We make a bargain,’ he said.
‘A bargain? What do you mean?’ Boulter spoke aggressively, but there was uncertainty in his tone.
‘We let each other alone. I’m going – now, this minute. You return to the house. You get rid of Comberford’s bag. You find the hat I’ve been wearing lately – the deerstalker. You leave it here by the hole. When the body’s found – which won’t be for some time – it will be my body.’
‘Your body?’ Miss Bostock said.
‘Damn it, woman, you know what I mean. It will be the body of the only Nicholas Comberford to have been at the Abbey for years. He behaved pretty crazily this afternoon; he went wandering out again tonight and had this ghastly accident. One of you can get that car away from the vicarage – and that buttons it up. There may be odds and ends.’ He looked at Miss Bostock. ‘But they’re not beyond your wits to get away with. And you’re lucky, both of you. So is poor old Aunt Prudence, if she only knew it. She’s got rid of two rotten great-nephews at one go. Goodbye.’
The first flakes of the next snowstorm were beginning to eddy in the wind. By morning they would have obliterated all traces of this wild chase. And they had an immediate utility now. George Gadberry, with fifteen pounds in his pocket and a lesson in his head, made a moderately dramatic exit through their gentle fall.
Note on Inspector (later, Sir John) Appleby Series
John Appleby first appears in Death at the President’s Lodging, by which time he has risen to the rank of Inspector in the police force. A cerebral detective, with ready wit, charm and good manners, he rose from humble origins to being educated at ‘St Anthony’s College’, Oxford, prior to joining the police as an ordinary constable.
Having decided to take early retirement just after World War II, he nonetheless continued his police career at a later stage and is subsequently appointed an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, where his crime solving talents are put to good use, despite the lofty administrative position. Final retirement from the police force (as Commissioner and Sir John Appleby) does not, however, diminish Appleby’s taste for solving crime and he continues to be active, Appleby and the Ospreys marking his final appearance in the late 1980’s.
In Appleby’s End he meets Judith Raven, whom he marries and who has an involvement in many subsequent cases, as does their son Bobby and other members of his family.
Appleby Titles in order of first publication
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels
1. Death at the President’s Lodging Also as: Seven Suspects 1936
2. Hamlet! Revenge 1937
3. Lament for a Maker 1938
4. Stop Press Also as: The Spider Strikes 1939
5. The Secret Vanguard 1940
6. Their Came Both Mist and Snow Also as: A Comedy of Terrors 1940
7. Appleby on Ararat 1941
8. The Daffodil Affair 1942
9. The Weight of the Evidence 1943
10. Appleby’s End 1945
11. A Night of Errors 1947
12. Operation Pax Also as: The Paper Thunderbolt 1951
13. A Private View Also as: One Man Show and Murder is an Art 1952
14. Appleby Talking Also as: Dead Man’s Shoes 1954
15. Appleby Talks Again 1956
16. Appleby Plays Chicken Also as: Death on a Quiet Day 1957
17. The Long Farewell 1958
18. Hare Sitting Up 1959
19. Silence Observed 1961
20. A Connoisseur’s Case Also as: The Crabtree Affair 1962
21. The Bloody Wood 1966
22. Appleby at Allington Also as: Death by Water 1968
23. A Family Affair Also as: Picture of Guilt 1969
24. Death at the Chase 1970
25. An Awkward Lie 1971
26. The Open House 1972
27. Appleby’s Answer 1973
28. Appleby’s Other Story 1974
29. The Appleby File 1975
30. The Gay Phoenix 1976
31. The Ampersand Papers 1978
32. Shieks and Adders 1982
33. Appleby and Honeybath 1983
34. Carson’s Conspiracy 1984
35. Appleby and the Ospreys 1986
Honeybath Titles in order of first publication
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels
1. The Mysterious Commission 1974
2. Honeybath’s Haven 1977
3. Lord Mullion’s Secret 1981
4. Appleby and Honeybath 1983
Synopses (Both Series & ‘Stand-alone’ Titles)
Published by House of Stratus
The Ampersand Papers
While Appleby is strolling along a Cornish beach, he narrowly escapes being struck by a body falling down a cliff. The body is that of Dr Sutch, an archivist, and he has fallen from the North Tower of Treskinnick Castle, home of Lord Ampersand. Two possible motivations present themselves to Appleby – the Ampersand gold, treasure from an Armada galleon; and the Ampersand papers, valuable family documents that have associations with Wordsworth and Shelley.
Appleby and Honeybath
Every English mansion has a locked room, and Grinton Hall is no exception – the library has hidden doors and passages…and a corpse. But when the corpse goes missing, Sir John Appleby and Charles Honeybath have an even more perplexing case on their hands
– just how did it disappear when the doors and windows were securely locked? A bevy of helpful houseguests offer endless assistance, but the two detectives suspect that they are concealing vital information. Could the treasures on the library shelves be so valuable that someone would murder for them?
Appleby and the Ospreys
Clusters, a great country house, is troubled by bats, as Lord and Lady Osprey complain to their guests, who include first rate detective, Sir John Appleby. In the matter of bats, Appleby is indifferent, but he is soon faced with a real challenge – the murder of Lord Osprey, stabbed with an ornate dagger in the library.
Appleby at Allington
Sir John Appleby dines one evening at Allington Park, the Georgian home of his acquaintance Owain Allington, who is new to the area. His curiosity is aroused when Allington mentions his nephew and heir to the estate, Martin Allington, whose name Appleby recognises. The evening comes to an end but just as Appleby is leaving, they find a dead man – electrocuted in the son et lumière box which had been installed in the grounds.
The Appleby File
There are fifteen stories in this compelling collection, including: Poltergeist – when Appleby’s wife tells him that her aunt is experiencing trouble with a Poltergeist, he is amused but dismissive, until he discovers that several priceless artefacts have been smashed as a result; A Question of Confidence – when Bobby Appleby’s friend, Brian Button, is caught up in a scandalous murder in Oxford, Bobby’s famous detective father is their first port of call; The Ascham – an abandoned car on a narrow lane intrigues Appleby and his wife, but even more intriguing is the medieval castle they stumble upon.
Appleby on Ararat
A Change of Heir Page 17
