Appleby Talking

by Michael Innes

  The benevolent features of Sir David Evans were shadowed by perplexity. “But why, Mr Appleby, should this man want such a pody?”

  “I shall come to that in a moment. But first keep simply to this: that the body had to be stolen even at great hazard; that when glimpsed and recognised by Finlay the potential thief was sufficiently ruthless to silence him with a dagger secreted for such an emergency – and was also sufficiently quick-witted to exploit this extemporaneous murder to his own advantage. If he had simply bolted with Cass’ body and left that of Finlay the hunt would, of course, have been up the moment somebody turned the lights on. By rapidly substituting one body for the other – Finlay’s for that of Cass – on the dissecting-table, he contrived the appearance first of some more or less natural momentary absence of Finlay from the theatre, and secondly the suggestion of some possible joke which kept the audience wary and quiet for some seconds longer. All this gave additional time for his getaway. And – yet again – the sheerly grotesque consequence of the substitution had great potential value as a disguise. By suggesting some maniacal act of private vengeance it masked the purely practical – and the professionally criminal – nature of the crime.

  “And now, what did we know of Cass? We knew that he was a seaman; that he travelled more or less regularly between England and America; that he was knocked down and presently died shortly after landing; and that he was a simple-minded fellow, easily open to persuasion. And we also knew this: that he had a set of rather incongruously magnificent false teeth; that in the anatomy theatre these first protruded themselves and then by some muscular spasm appeared to lodge themselves in the throat, the jaw closing like a vice. And we also knew that, hard upon this, a certain Dr Wesselmann, an alien comparatively little known in Nessfield and actually a specialist in false teeth, hurried from the theatre accompanied by a companion. When I also learned from a seaman who had sailed with Cass that he was often concerned about his teeth and would hurry off to a dentist as soon as he reached shore, I saw that the case was virtually complete.”

  “And would be wholly so when you recovered Cass’ body and got hold of these.” Holroyd came forward as he spoke, carrying two dental plates on an enamel tray. “Sir David, what would you say about Cass’ teeth?”

  Nessfield’s Vice-Chancellor had removed the muffler from about his jaw; the excitement of the hunt had for the moment banished the pain which had driven him to Wesselmann’s rooms. He inspected the dentures carefully – and then spoke the inevitable word. “They are pig,” he said decisively.

  “Exactly so. And now, look.” Holroyd gave a deft twist to a molar; the denture which he was holding fell apart; in the hollow of each gleaming tooth there could be discerned a minute oil-silk package.

  “What they contain,” said Appleby, “is probably papers covered with a microscopic writing. I had thought perhaps of uncut diamonds. But now I am pretty sure that what we have run to earth is espionage. What one might call the Unwitting Intermediary represents one of the first principles of that perpetually fantastic game at its higher levels. Have a messenger who has no notion that he is a messenger, and you at once supply yourself with the sort of insulating device between cell and cell that gives spies a comforting feeling of security. Cass has been such a device. And it was one perfectly easy to operate. He had merely to be persuaded that his false teeth were always likely to give him trouble, and that he must regularly consult (at an obligingly low fee) this dentist at one end and that dentist at the other – and the thing was practically foolproof. Only Wesselmann and his friends failed to reckon on sudden death, and much less on Cass’ signing away his body – dentures and all – to an anatomy school.” Appleby paused. “And now, gentlemen, that concludes the affair. So what shall we call it?”

  Holroyd smiled. “Call it the Cass Case. You couldn’t get anything more compendious than that.”

  But Sir David Evans shook his beautiful silver locks. “No!” he said authoritatively. “It shall be called Lesson in Anatomy. The investigation has been most interesting, Mr Appleby. And now let us go. For the photographers, look you, are waiting.”

  IMPERIOUS CAESAR

  “It all began,” Appleby said, “with a Professor writing a learned article called Shakespeare’s Stage Blood. He wasn’t starting a theory that the Bard came of a long line of actors. He was simply showing from a study of the old texts that the Elizabethan theatre was a thoroughly gory place.”

  The Vicar nodded. “Carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,” he quoted cheerfully. “Accidental judgements, casual slaughters, death put on by cunning and forced cause–”

  “Quite so. But the relevant point was this: when X drew his dagger or rapier on the stage of the Globe and appeared to stab Y, what in fact he did stab was a concealed bladder, full of some sort of red paint. The stuff spurted out all over the place, and gave an engaging impression of a neatly severed artery.”

  “Messy. One hopes it came out in the wash.”

  “No doubt it did. But the immediate effect was terrific. All concerned simply wallowed in this bogus blood, and the audience got no end of a thrill. Now, no sooner had the Professor published his discovery than it greatly took the fancy of a chap called Cherry, who was the moving spirit of a group of amateur players at Nessfield. Most of his company belonged to the staff of the University there, and this blood-bath business apparently gave very general pleasure to all. It was felt that something should be done to put this discovery about Shakespeare’s stage into practice. So Cherry decided that the next play should be Julius Caesar.”

  The Vicar chuckled. “‘Stoop, Romans, stoop, and let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood.’”

  “Precisely. ‘Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.’ Contemplating that scene, Cherry, you may say, simply saw red. As it happened, I was visiting a friend of some consequence in those parts, and he took me along to the performance. For some reason that I didn’t gather, it was quite an occasion, and we sat among a whole gaggle of the local nobs, all doing Cherry and his friends proud.

  “They played uncommonly well. The scene in the Senate House built up some first-rate suspense, and when at length the conspirators had edged round Caesar and isolated him beside Pompey’s statue, the audience was as keyed up as ever I’ve seen it at a professional production. Then Casca gave his signal, and that dignified group of noble Romans closed in like a rugger scrum, and had a high old time stabbing and hacking for all they were worth. You wouldn’t have believed, Vicar, that most of them were Doctors of Philosophy and Readers in Ancient Hebrew and such like. And the gore! It exceeded all expectations. Every one of the conspirators – Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Decius, Cinna, and the rest–”

  “Ligarius, Trebonius, and Metellus.” The Vicar rubbed his hands in mild self-congratulation. “Once learnt, one doesn’t forget these things.”

  “They were all dripping some beastly stuff supplied, I imagine, by the Department of Chemistry. And the rest of the scene went with a swing – Mark Antony’s ‘Cry Havoc’ speech and all. It was only when Antony and the servant of Octavius started to bear away the body that things went wrong. You see, it was a body. Caesar had been stabbed through the heart.”

  The Vicar looked serious, but his memory did not fail him. “‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay’ – eh? What an uncommonly disconcerting business.”

  Appleby nodded. “It was clearly my business, whether disconcerting or not. Scotland Yard was in the stalls, and Scotland Yard had to step into the limelight. So I got my august friend to announce my presence in due form, and there and then I took charge. Within half an hour I felt like concluding myself to be at grips with the perfect murder.

  “Caesar – I needn’t drag up those people’s real names – had been an unpopular figure about the place. He was a mathematician with a boring habit of pestering his colleagues with insoluble problems. He and Cassius had had a tremendous row over something entirely technical; Brutus was believed to be his bitter rival for the next Fellowship of
some important scientific society; and Casca was convinced that he had done him out of a job.”

  “Ah!” The Vicar was impressed. “There looks to have been quite a field. But I put my money on Casca. ‘See what a rent the envious Casca made.’”

  “These things might be far from very substantial motives for murder. But they hinted an atmosphere which might nurse really bad blood – real blood, you may say. And now think of the actual melée. There’s nothing like a crowd of amateurs for doing that sort of thing in a really whole-hearted way, and for a conspirator meaning actual homicide this bit of stage assassination was ideal cover.

  “And all I had to go on was a bunch of confused statements by these people – that, and eight daggers; seven of them trick daggers of the sort that disappear up the sheath, and one of an authentic and deadly kind. The seven were dripping this beastly red muck; the eighth–”

  “A nasty contrast, indeed.” The Vicar was sober. “‘And as he plucked his cursed steel away, mark how the blood of Caesar followed it.’ Would there be fingerprints?”

  “I hadn’t much hope from them – and so I was the more pleased when I suddenly had an idea. I gathered the cast together; told them I believed I knew who was responsible; and announced that I was going to have them enact the scene over again, with myself as Caesar.”

  “My dear fellow, wasn’t that rather risky? If the crime had been the work, say, of a homicidal maniac, this second chance–”

  “There were to be no daggers this time, and no disgusting red paint. Even so, I got well thumped, for those people’s zest for violence wasn’t to be exhausted by the mere spectacle of a murdered colleague. They found the re-enacting thoroughly enjoyable. And I don’t doubt that, at the end of it, they were extremely disappointed when I simply told them to go home.”

  “To go home!”

  “Certainly. For all I’d wanted to do, you see, was to count – to count the conspirators. And my memory proved right. Eight daggers made one too many.

  “It’s true that there are eight conspirators, and you completed my own list quite correctly. But Trebonius’ job, you may recall, is to get Antony out of the way; and so he isn’t concerned in the killing. Caesar, in fact, had killed himself. For distressing reasons into which I needn’t enter, his life was no longer of any use to him; and it had pleased him to exploit the occasion of his own suicide to set his colleagues, and the world in general, a final little problem.”

  “My dear Appleby, this is a very shocking story. Suppose that one of those unfortunate conspirators had actually been suspected of murder.”

  “Nothing would have pleased Caesar more. He was a thoroughly malicious fellow – and, like the real Caesar, a good deal of an exhibitionist. He liked staging that sensation for all the important citizens of Nessfield. And had Casca or Cassius been brought to trial, he would have been delighted. He had even left with a crony a letter addressed to the Home Secretary and telling the whole story. It was to be posted–”

  “Only in the event of a criminal trial?”

  “Only in the event of somebody having been hanged.”

  THE CLANCARRON BALL

  “I hadn’t been in the police long,” Appleby said, “when they put me into plain clothes. It meant a much more colourful life.”

  “Not, I imagine, in the literal sense.” The Vicar knocked out his pipe in the grate and turned an expanse of shabby clerical flannel comfortably to the blaze. “Plain clothes are commonly drab.”

  Appleby shook his head. “Think of hunt balls and a dozen other such things. They all allow free play to the thwarted male instinct for bright feathers. And I went to all of them. I was the scarlet-coated but otherwise unobtrusive guest, with his eye on the gold plate, the silver cups, the more portable objets d’art in unnoticed corners.”

  “You kept an eye on things generally?”

  “And on people too. At times it was not at all a nice trade. Even in the most polite society efficient peeping and peering uncovers a good deal that is far from edifying.”

  “No doubt.” The Vicar pushed his tobacco-jar companionably across to Appleby. “But, when the gold plate really disappeared, what sort of person was commonly responsible? Would it be a professional criminal, or just a bad baronet or absent-minded bishop?”

  “You never could tell until you’d caught your man. That was part of the difficulty, for instance, in the Clancarron affair.”

  “Ah!” The Vicar straddled himself yet more comfortably before the fire. “Now we come to something. Proceed.”

  Appleby leant forward and thrust a spill into the flames. “A big evening party among people of that sort means hosts of tradesmen, caterers, extra servants, and so forth hard at work from early morning. I liked to keep an eye on the whole thing. So I would arrive with the milk, more or less, and looking as if I were the head man from the florist’s or the confectioner’s.

  “Lady Clancarron counted as an important political hostess in those days. She was determined to get her husband out of county cricket, where he was a notable fast bowler, and into the Cabinet, where it was unlikely he would have got things moving so rapidly. When she gave a really large-scale affair she opened up the whole of Carron House, although during the months the family spent in town they commonly made do with about half of it. When I arrived on the morning of her biggest party it seemed impossible that, in a mere twelve hours, order and every appearance of settled splendour and luxury could be extracted from the chaos of the place. The great ballroom, in particular, was like a museum emerging from cold storage: dust-covers coming off the chairs and chandeliers, a squad of men working on the floor, another on the lighting, and a third bringing in so much vegetation that they looked like a tropical Birnam Wood arriving on an equatorial Dunsinane. Not that the temperature was at all equatorial. Outside it was quite freezingly cold, and yet another army of men were busy draught-proofing the line of French windows which open on the flat roof of the offices.

  “And it was pretty well the same all over the house. In such conditions one can do little more than hope for the best. Anybody can walk in, you see, make a grab at anything, and stump off with it as if under orders. A terrible headache these occasions are, you may believe me, both for the police and the insurance people. Particularly as, among the owners of easily vanishing heirlooms and the like, it is decidedly within wheels, so to speak, that wheels sometimes incline to revolve.”

  The Vicar chuckled. “A dark saying! But proceed to the ball.”

  “The ball was a relief when it came. If I’d had eyes in the back of my head, and a large endowment of extrasensory perception, I might really have felt quite on top of things. But don’t let me spin the story out. Just after midnight the whole place was suddenly plunged into darkness. The dancing stopped, the band stopped, there was a hum of people exchanging amused and reassuring remarks. But they didn’t reassure me. I wasn’t surprised to catch, seconds later, the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood.

  “And then the light went on again. Some of the nice young people on the floor clapped their hands, to show what fun it all was, and the assembled elder aristocracy who were scattered around the walls just continued conversing as if nothing had happened at all. But a good many of them were guessing, all the same. Indeed, there was something pretty definite to guess about. Those lights had been out for a matter only of seconds. But in that interval the frame of one of the French windows had been splintered and was hanging open.

  “I became aware that Lady Clancarron was approaching me from across the room with an appearance of the very largest leisure. She even stopped for a moment to say something polite to a couple of rather obscure guests. Then she came up to me and tapped my shoulder with her large fan. You would have thought she was talking about the next by-election or the Prime Minister’s sore throat. ‘My diamond necklace,’ she said, smiling charmingly. ‘It was snatched from my throat the instant the lights went out.’ And she turned away for a moment to give a particularly delightful bow to some
inconsiderable personage – a cultural attaché, perhaps, from a minor legation. It was the noblesse oblige business in action. I admired it very much.”

  The Vicar nodded. “Wonderful! But then the nobility are trained to that sort of thing.”

  “Quite so.” Appleby smiled ironically. “Training is uncommonly useful, there’s no doubt. I had some of sorts myself, as it happened, that was quite useful on that difficult occasion. But let me continue. Lord Clancarron, who had been standing beside his wife near one of the ballroom’s two big fireplaces, now came across to us rather more quickly, but in the same carefree way. ‘My God, Kate!’ he said as he came up. ‘Some rascal’s got your diamonds and made off by that window. What shall we do? Some people have spotted what’s up. Beastly unpleasant for them, eh?’ He had ignored me as he spoke to his wife, but now he wheeled round on me with his athlete’s speed, so that his coat-tails swung in air behind him. ‘Have you anyone on guard out there, my man? Or will the fellow have got clean away?’

  “I shook my head. ‘I don’t think anybody will have got clean away, my lord. And it’s possible that the broken window may be a feint.’

  “ ‘What the devil do you mean?’

  “ ‘The thief may still be in this room. He may have managed that business at the window simply to set us on a false scent.’

  “Lord Clancarron stared at me. ‘That’s a deuced clever idea.’ He glanced round the room. ‘Look here – nobody’s gone out. What about a search – of every man-jack and woman-jill of us in the room?’

  “I believe he meant it quite seriously – that he had no notion of how monstrous and impracticable such a course would have been. I gave a second to looking him squarely in the eye. ‘Nothing of the sort is necessary,’ I said.