Appleby Talking

by Michael Innes

  “Nothing of the sort. This second figure was flesh and blood – as I happen to know from the very simple fact that he bumped straight into me. And he was, oddly enough, an unmistakable parson in mufti – a rather haggard, clean-shaven fellow in well-worn clerical grey flannel. He made me a civil apology and then walked straight down the hill. I called after him, but he didn’t stop. I was disappointed, because an extraordinarily interesting possibility had struck me.”

  “A possibility?” Appleby had suddenly looked up.

  “This fellow was certainly agitated. I had remarked that. So what occurred to me was this. Perhaps there had been a small group hallucination – the formation of a joint eidetic image, common to us both, and involving some form of telepathic communication between us.”

  “You mean” – the Vicar took this in slowly – “that the parson too may have fancied he saw Belarius?”

  “Precisely so. And, being no scientist, he was upset about it.”

  “As I should certainly have been.” The Vicar chuckled. “And did you, in fact, then inspect the cave again?”

  “Most certainly. And it was, of course, empty. There are a few cracks in which you could hide a dog or a cat, but there is certainly no lurking-place for a man. That Belarius had no material existence, therefore, we can take to be a matter of certainty. You agree?”

  The Vicar looked doubtful, and then appeared to decide that the best reply would be humorous in tone. “I’ll agree,” he said, “if Appleby will agree. Appleby–” He broke off. “Dear me – where is Appleby?”

  “Perhaps he has been taken ill. But no – how very odd! I think I can hear him using your telephone.”

  “Belarius,” said Appleby five minutes later, “broke prison across the moor early yesterday morning. At Sheercliff he hung about the fringes of the fête, penetrated into a tent with the costumes for the pageant, and got himself up as an ancient Briton. That gave him a respite, since scores of people were going about in historical costume. He used the opportunity to stalk something which would excite less remark elsewhere, and managed to get away with some of the Vicar’s old clothes from the jumble sale. With these in a bundle he made off across the hill, spotted the cave, and slipped into it to change. When he had done so, he thrust the Stone Age dress into a crack, came out, was startled to meet the Professor, and made off as fast as he could.”

  The Vicar shook his head solemnly. “How very dull the truth can be.”

  Appleby, staring across the moor beyond the town, nodded. “Quite so. It’s no fun hunting down a poor devil of an escaped convict. But it would be rather enchanting to capture an eidetic image.”

  A NICE CUP OF TEA

  “A capital game.” The Vicar gave a final brisk rub to his niblick. “And all the more pleasant, my dear Appleby, for coming after a long day’s work. A round of parish visiting makes me feel like Macbeth.”

  “Macbeth?” Appleby drew the cover over his own clubs. “You surprise me.”

  “Lady Macbeth described her husband as too full of the milk of human kindness. I finish my duties far too full of its tea. Towards a clergyman, common benevolence expresses itself largely through the medium of a nice strong cup. Sometimes I feel like Mr Tony Weller’s acquaintance when similarly regaled – a-swelling wisibly before the eyes. Policemen escape this inconvenience.”

  “As it happens, I’ve known something like it in my time.” Appleby sat down on the bench overlooking the eighteenth green. “And if it wasn’t as a policeman that I started in on it, there was undoubtedly a professional twist to its close. It began, of course, with my aunt.”

  “The Yorkshire aunt? A pertinacious and strong-minded woman, to judge from your accounts of her.”

  “Quite so, Vicar. And it was her pertinacity and strength of mind that set me off.

  “Retired and pensioned retainers are one of Aunt Jane’s special lines. I doubt whether either she or her parents ever lived in a particularly large way, but nobody who was once in the family employment is ever dropped off the list. Aunt Jane visits them all about once a month, with a great unloading of admonition, devotional reading, tinned soup, and sacks of firewood. Aunt Jane is honestly domineering and honestly benevolent – a frank anachronism that one can’t very decently turn down. So when I’ve stopped with her from time to time, I’ve lent a hand with the visiting.”

  The Vicar chuckled. “My dear fellow, this is a new light on your character. One thinks of you as banging on the doors of thieves’ kitchens and shouting ‘Open in the name of the Law’. And here you are, tinkling the bells of old women and disgorging tinned soup. The more credit to you. But proceed.”

  “Sometimes it was entertaining enough. If I ever heartily regretted being my aunt’s emissary, it was the afternoon I visited Nannie Moggs. I believe she had been no more than temporary nursery maid in some remote branch of the family sixty years before, and she was too peripheral, so to speak, to be among the pensioners in any substantial way. Her circumstances were dismal, and so was she.

  “She inhabited what they call a back-to-back house of the most meagre sort – one room up and one room down, with the upper one let off to another penurious old person like herself. The only vestiges of comfort she rejoiced in – or rather was lugubrious over – were an emaciated cat, distinctly disposed to spit, and a minute gas-fire that seemed incapable of as much as singeing the cat’s whiskers. It occurred to me that the old woman would do better to scrap the thing and apply to Aunt Jane for a sack of firewood. Meanwhile I planked down those tins of soup and made what conversation I could.

  “The wickedness of some local burial society proved to be the main field of Nannie Moggs’ interest. Indeed, I could get her to talk of nothing else. For years, it seemed, she had subscribed ninepence a week, and the man who collected the money had assured her at the start that this meant solid brass handles and an inscribed plate. But when one of her neighbours – a ninepenny neighbour – died some months before, Nannie Moggs had contrived a personal inspection of the coffin and satisfied herself that no plate was provided, and that the handles would be a disgrace at fourpence.”

  The Vicar shook his head. “Deplorable. There is undoubtedly much exploitation of the importance which the simpler classes attach to matters of that sort.”

  “No doubt. Well, we had this sort of chat for some time, and if the old lady didn’t get any less dismal, at least she managed to get more excited. I pointed out that there was a metal shortage, and that perhaps it was unpatriotic to insist on carrying lumps of the stuff into the grave. As old Sir Thomas Browne insisted, the commerce of the living is not to be transferred unto the dead.”

  The Vicar shook his head. “Appropriate,” he said. “But not perhaps persuasive.”

  “Quite so. And of course Nannie Moggs was in the right in the matter. She had paid her ninepences, and was entitled to corresponding riches in the adornment of her ashes. Fortunately all her pennies hadn’t gone the one way. She had a secret to reveal, and the nearer she got to it the more excited she became. She banged the floor with a stick, and her voice rose to a screech that might have made the cat bolt from the room. ‘Three-pun ten under the third stair’, she said. ‘And a letter to the Royal Fambly respekfully demanding that justice be done.’

  “It wasn’t clear to me how the letter was to reach its august destination, or even that seventy shillings would pay for the brass handles. But Nannie Moggs’ spirits began to rise as she surveyed her posthumous triumph, and I did my best to confirm her in this improved nervous tone. Presently I was congratulating myself on having the makings of a successful district visitor after all. The cat had begun to purr, the gas-fire was burning brighter, the tins of soup took on the appearance of a magnificent benefaction, and the old lady was crowing away merrily over her nest-egg. So it was rather disconcerting that, when she hobbled out of the room to let me have a peep at it, it proved to have disappeared.

  “So my visiting, Vicar, had ended much like yours: in what might be called a nice cup of
tea. Alternatively, you might say that we were in the soup – the tinned soup – or that the fat was in the fire.”

  “Nannie Moggs was upset?”

  “It was clear that seventy bob out of my own pocket would get us nowhere. She cried aloud for vengeance. So I had to abandon my charitable character, turn back into a policeman, and investigate.

  “When had she seen the money last? Apparently it had been not long before I arrived. Her main occupation was taking furtive peeps at it whenever her upstairs lodger, Mrs Grimble, was out of the way. As you can guess, Mrs Grimble seemed to me the first person due for interview, and I climbed straight to her room. It was pretty well a replica of Nannie Moggs’ – the same cat, the same miserable little gas-fire, the same suggestion of horrible poverty.

  “Mrs Grimble was out. It was an hour before she came back again. She was precisely the miserable old soul I expected, and most suspiciously communicative about her movements. She had been out of the house all afternoon, she declared, visiting the municipal cemetery with her widowed brother.

  “I saw that if this story was true she could have nothing to do with the disappearance of Nannie Moggs’ nest-egg. And I guessed that there was a widowed brother and that the story Mrs Grimble was telling he, too, would tell. It was a reasonable story, too – even if the weather was uncommonly chilly for a long afternoon among the graves.

  “Suddenly the truth came to me. I fished a box of matches from my pocket. There was an experiment I could make. You can guess it, of course.”

  “Guess it, my dear Appleby?” The Vicar was bewildered.

  “The gas-fires. There had been a point, you remember, at which Nannie Moggs’ fire burnt brighter. In a couple of minutes I had satisfied myself that just this happened as soon as Mrs Grimble’s fire was turned off. It was a wretched old installation, but I’ve seen the same effect even with tolerably efficient ones.”

  “Did Mrs Grimble confess?”

  “Yes. I told her precisely what had happened. Lurking out of mere curiosity outside Nannie Moggs’ door, she had heard the secret confided to me, stolen the hidden money, and bolted back to her room. Then she had had sufficient cunning to realise that she must get it out of the place and fake a kind of alibi. So off she went to her brother – who was no doubt as dishonest as she. But, being a thrifty soul, she turned off her gas-fire before she left. And she did confess. My apparently supernatural knowledge of her movements was too much for her.”

  “And Nannie Moggs continued vindictive? A constable was called in, and the one wretched old woman got the other sent to jail?”

  Appleby shook his head. “It was my aunt who was called in. I doubt whether Mrs Grimble ever ventured on dishonesty again.”

  THE SANDS OF THYME

  The sea sparkled and small waves splashed drowsily on the beach. Donkeys trotted to and fro bearing the children of holiday-makers who themselves slumbered under handkerchiefs and newspapers. On the horizon lay the smoke of a Channel steamer, on a day trip to Boulogne. And at all this the vicar glanced down with contentment from the promenade. “Fastidious persons,” he said, “would call it vulgar.”

  “I like a deserted beach myself,” said the Doctor.

  Appleby looked up from his novel. “Do you know Thyme Bay?” he asked. “No? It’s as lonely as you could wish, Doctor.”

  The Vicar removed his pipe from his mouth. “You have a story to tell us,” he said.

  Appleby smiled. “Quite frankly, Vicar, I have!”

  I was there (said Appleby) on special duty with the Security people at the experimental air station. It was summer, and when the tide allowed it I used to walk across the bay before breakfast.

  Thyme is a tremendous stretch of sand; you may remember that in the old days they held motor races there.

  But the great thing is the shells. Thyme is the one place I know of to which you can go and feel that sea-shells are still all that they were in your childhood. Both on the beach itself and among the rocks, you find them in inexhaustible variety.

  On the morning of which I’m speaking, I was amusing myself so much with the shells that it was some time before I noticed the footprints.

  It was a single line of prints, emerging from the sandhills, and taking rather an uncertain course towards a group of rocks, islanded in sand, near the centre of the bay. They were the prints of a fairly long-limbed man, by no means a lightweight, and more concerned to cover the ground than to admire the view. But I noticed more than that. The tracks were of a man who limped. I tried to work out what sort of limp it would be.

  This had the effect, of course, of making me follow the prints. Since the man had not retraced his steps, he had presumably gone on to the rocks, and then found his way back to the coastal road somewhere farther on. So I continued to follow in his tracks.

  Presently I was feeling that something was wrong, and instead of going straight up to those rocks I took a circle round them. No footprints led away from them. So I searched. And there the chap was – tall, heavy, and lying on his tummy… He was dead.

  I turned him over – half-expecting what, in fact, I found. There was a bullet-hole plumb centre of his forehead. And a revolver was lying beside him.

  But that wasn’t all. Suicides, you know, are fond of contriving a little décor of pathos.

  On a flat ledge of the rock a score or so of shells – the long, whorled kind – had been ranged in straight lines, like toy soldiers drawn up for battle. Beside them lay an open fountain-pen, and a scrap of paper that looked as if it had been torn from the top edge of a notebook. There was just a sentence: “As a child, I played with these for hours.”

  Of course I did the routine things at once. The dead man was a stranger to me.

  He carried loose change, a few keys on a ring, a handkerchief, a gold cigarette-case, and a box of matches – absolutely nothing else. But his clothes were good, and I found his name sewn inside a pocket of the jacket. A G Thorman, Esqre. It seemed familiar.

  I made one other discovery. The right ankle was badly swollen. I had been right about that limp.

  Thorman was in late middle-age, and it turned out that I was remembering his name from the great days of aviation – the era of the first long-distance flights. He had made some of the most famous of these with Sir Charles Tumbril, and he had been staying with Tumbril at the time of his death.

  But he had belonged to the district, too, having been born and brought up in a rectory just beyond Thyme Point. So it seemed likely enough that he had chosen to cut short his life in some haunt holding poignant memories of his childhood.

  I took Tumbril the news of his guest’s death myself. It was still quite early, and he came out from his wife’s breakfast-table to hear it. I had a glimpse of both the Tumbrils from the hall, and there was Thorman’s place, empty, between them.

  Tumbril showed me into his study and closed the door with a jerk of his shoulder. He was a powerful, lumbering, clumsy man.

  He stood in front of an empty fireplace, with his hands deep in his trouser pockets. I told him my news, and he didn’t say a word. “It comes completely as a surprise to you, Sir Charles?”

  He looked at me as if this was an impertinence. “It’s not for us to conjecture,” he said. “What has prompted Thorman to suicide can be neither your business nor mine.”

  “That doesn’t quite cover the matter, Sir Charles. Our circumstances are rather exceptional here. You are in control of this experimental station, and I am responsible to the Ministry on the security side. You have three planes here on the secret list, including the P.2204 itself. Any untoward incident simply must be sifted to the bottom.”

  Tumbril took it very well, and said something about liking a man who kept his teeth in his job. I repeated my first question.

  “A surprise?” Tumbril considered. “I can’t see why it shouldn’t be a surprise.”

  “But yet it isn’t?”

  “No, Appleby – it is not. Since Thorman came down to us a few days ago there has been
something in the air. We were very old friends, and I couldn’t help feeling something wrong.”

  “Thorman didn’t give any hint of what it might be?”

  “None at all. He was always a reticent fellow.”

  “He might have had some sort of secret life?”

  “I hope he had nothing as shoddy as that sounds, Appleby. And I don’t think you’d find any of the very obvious things: money gone wrong, a jam between two women, or anything of that sort. But serious disease is a possibility. He looked healthy enough, but you never know.”

  “Were there any relations?”

  “A brother. I suppose I ought to contact him now.” Tumbril crossed the room to the old upright telephone he kept on his desk. Then he said: “I’ll do that later.”

  I thought this might be a hint for me to clear out. But I asked one more question. “You had confidence, Sir Charles, in Thorman’s probity?”

  He looked at me with a startled face. “Probity?” he repeated. “Are you suggesting, Appleby, that Thorman may have been a spy – something of that sort?”

  “Yes, Sir Charles. That is what I have in mind.”

  He looked at me in silence for almost half a minute, and his voice when he spoke was uncomfortably cold. “I must repeat that Arthur Thorman was one of my oldest friends. Your suggestion is ridiculous. It is also personally offensive to me. Good morning.”

  So that was that, and I left the room well and truly snubbed.

  All the same, I didn’t precisely banish the puzzle of Arthur Thorman from my mind.

  And there was a puzzle; it was a perfectly plain puzzle, which appears clearly in the facts as I’ve already given them.

  Tumbril must have felt he’d been a bit stiff with me, and that I’d shown the correct reactions.

  At least that, I suppose, is why I received a telephone call from Lady Tumbril later in the morning, inviting me in to tea. I went along at the time named.