Appleby Talking

by Michael Innes

  “It was Lady Clancarron who spoke this time – and quite clearly in the most sincere bewilderment. ‘You mean–’

  “‘I mean that your ladyship’s diamonds are quite safe. There is no reason why the ball should not continue on its normal course.’”

  Appleby took a last puff at his pipe. “It was three in the morning, and the ballroom was empty except for the Clancarrons and myself when I got a step-ladder and fished that diamond-necklace out of the great central chandelier – where it had been no more than a few purer points of fire amid a myriad gleams of crystal. Lord Clancarron was very upset. ‘I can’t understand it’, he said. He didn’t ‘my man’ me this time.

  “ ‘A tiresome practical joke, my lord.’ And I hope I managed to give him a sufficiently nasty look that his wife didn’t see. ‘Somebody had an opportunity to tinker with some of the temporary wiring earlier in the day, so as to control the entire lighting with a flick of a toe. It’s a thing very easy to do. And the same person snatched the necklace from her ladyship in the darkness and tossed it into the chandelier. He must have had plenty of practice and a very good aim. But he did something more. He carried round some suitable object in the pocket of his tails – say a cricket ball. It didn’t show – except perhaps to a trained eye wondering why those tails didn’t swing evenly in a dance. And with that object our practical joker did a really wonderful job – still in the dark, mind you, just before flicking the lights on again. He contrived the effect of somebody’s bursting out through that French window.’

  “ ‘You amaze me.’ His lordship was now looking pretty green.

  “ ‘No doubt.’ I waited until Lady Clancarron, simple soul, had wandered over to stare at the broken window. ‘And now, my lord, I must be off. Like the Australians last season’ – and I looked round the vast, empty room – ‘I shall have good reason to remember the famous Clancarron ball.’”

  A DOG’S LIFE

  “Human action,” remarked the surgeon, “is often oddly disproportioned to the motive prompting it. Men are driven to suicide by mere boredom and to murder by simple curiosity.”

  The philosopher stretched out his hand for the decanter. “I should have thought,” he said, “that it was the other way about. Boredom makes us long for some decisive action, and killing a man is surely the most decisive action we can achieve. Correspondingly, curiosity is prompted by nothing more acutely than by the secret of the grave. And our chance of solving that lies in ourselves descending into it, and not in giving a shove to some other fellow… My dear Appleby, a capital port.”

  “I’ve seen a good many cases of homicide.” The QC cracked a walnut and inspected its kernel with care. “That some had boredom behind them and that some had curiosity, I won’t deny. But a good many more had respectability.”

  “Respectability?” The surgeon put down his glass. “My dear sir, you alarm me. My own respectability is most pronounced.”

  The QC chuckled. “Well, have a care. The desire to retain one’s respectability is a terrible killer, I assure you. And I think our host would tell you the same thing.”

  There was a pause, which grew expectant as Appleby silently watched the decanter returning to him round the little table. “Yes,” he said presently, “that’s fair enough. I’ve known a woman who poisoned her husband in a particularly horrible and lingering way rather than sully her fair name with the neighbours by just going off with another man. And then, of course, there was the Lorio case. Interesting? Well, you may judge for yourselves.

  “I was a young man at the time, and having my first holiday since being sent into the CID. Not a very exciting holiday, for I was spending it with my aunt at Sheercliff – a retreat to which she withdrew periodically from the harassing life of Harrogate. It was she who sent me to make the Lorios’ acquaintance. Robert Lorio, it seems, came of a good Yorkshire family, which meant that my aunt had him down in a sort of social card-index of persons not altogether to be lost sight of. Most people, I found, had lost sight of Lorio, and of his wife Monica too. They lived quite alone, in a farmhouse that no longer had anything to do with a farm, about a couple of miles outside the little town. The tremendous cliff from which the place takes its name was hard-by; and about a mile farther on again it piled itself up in the famous landmark called High Head.

  “My aunt had no intention of calling on these people herself. They existed, as it were, in too small a type in her index for that. It was simply a matter of sending me out with a stately message of recognition. So off I went one windy morning and presented myself. Lorio proved to be a glum, commonplace-looking chap of middle age, whose only notion of impressing the world seemed to have been to grow a short black beard. The dismal condition known as ‘reduced circumstances’ was written all over him, and all over his house. You could see the unfaded places on the walls from which some picture or cabinet had been wafted away to end finally in the family stew-pot. Yet if one had really thought of the culinary aspect of things chez Lorio one’s associations would have been rather different. Eye of newt and toe of frog, with plenty of baboon’s blood for saucing, would have been the predominant image. Monica Lorio, in fact, was decidedly a witch. Dark like her husband, she was at the same time much younger. She had a fine body, which rippled with a sinister grace beneath a slatternly rag of a dress. It was she who entertained me, after a fashion – for her husband, with one hand deep in the pocket of his shabby lovat tweeds and the other playing with the ears of a large shaggy dog, did little more than stare at me morosely. Mrs Lorio stared at me too, for that matter – and then her eyes would wander to Lorio with a look I didn’t like, or out of the window to a tumbledown barn at the bottom of the garden, and thence to the loneliness – for it was that – of the moor and cliff beyond.

  “You will have gathered, I think, that I hated the whole thing. What I find difficult to convey is the inexplicable intensity of my feeling. I sat there talking rubbish about my aunt’s health, and the innumerable calls upon her benevolence – and all the time there was growing on me the conviction that I had strayed into the presence of some bold approximation to absolute evil. When I got back that evening, and my aunt asked me about Monica Lorio, a fair answer would have been: ‘She is a woman who has sold herself into some depth of degradation I can’t at all fathom.’ But that is not the sort of thing one says to an aunt – or not to my aunt. So I held my peace.

  “Will it surprise you to learn that I took to walking that way almost every day? The views were magnificent; nevertheless, I don’t doubt that it was my infant detective faculties that were at work. On one occasion they actually took me through the yard at the back of the house, although I’d have hated to be spotted by one of the Lorios and sociably received once more. Well, for a moment I thought I had been spotted by Monica, though not to the kindling of feelings at all sociable. For there she was, peering covertly out from the side of an uncurtained window, and glaring at me with a sort of gloating malignity that made my heart jump. Or rather that, momentarily, was what it looked like, and then I realised that she was really glancing straight past me at something else. I turned my head, without seeing anything at first except that great dog, lying in the sun scratching itself. Then – just for a second and turning a corner of the barn – I glimpsed a slouching, listless figure in shabby lovat tweed and a black beard.

  “Lorio was not a chap I’d taken to, but in that moment I felt uncommonly sorry for him. He was no good; the whole tumbledown place witnessed to that; and his wife, who clearly had vitality and ambition, hated him as a failure. It was a sombre and sordid picture, and I decided that my curiosity had had about enough. Nevertheless, it got another dose later that day.

  “I walked a good many miles along the cliffs, lunched in a pub, and came back by the shore – you can do that until you are within about a mile and a half of High Head; from there onward the cliffs drop sheer to deep water, and you have to climb again and go along the top of them. Well, I was down there by the shore still; it was sunny and warm; I sa
t down in a little coign to read, and very presently I was asleep. I doubt whether I slept very long, and when I woke it was to the sound of voices coming from not half a dozen yards away – from the next little hollow, in fact, among the sandhills. One of the voices was a woman’s, which I recognised instantly as Mrs Lorio’s. The other was a man’s, and it was certainly not her husband’s. I didn’t hear what was being said. But it wasn’t the sort of talk in which the words hold much significance in themselves; in fact, it was unmistakably the low murmuring of lovers. I was extremely disconcerted. You see, I had set out that morning with a restless curiosity about the Lorios in my head. And now here I was, without the least intending it, skulking like a little private inquiry agent at the door of a hotel bedroom. So I bolted – and without a glance. I hadn’t yet learnt that policemen can’t afford nice feelings. On this occasion, had I just done a little crawling and peeping – But I see that you are getting impatient. I’ll hurry on to the kill.”

  Appleby paused, and the QC nodded approvingly. “We are taking it for granted there is going to be a kill. Is it too much to hazard that our friend Lorio comes to a sudden and sticky end?”

  “Sudden – yes. But I don’t know that I’d call it sticky.” Appleby paused to draw at his cigar. “There’s no mystification about this, you know. I’m just telling you a straight yarn.”

  “A simple bed-time story.” The surgeon pushed an ashtray towards the philosopher and chuckled. “Or that was the turn it seemed to be taking when you broke off. Proceed, my dear Appleby, proceed.”

  “Well then, after that I reckoned never to see a Lorio again. But I was out of luck. For the very next day Robert Lorio called on my aunt. That was only right and proper, no doubt. It surprised me, all the same. The fellow had seemed too sunk in his private miseries – whatever they might be – to care twopence for social forms. However, there he was; and when he took his leave I strolled along the front with him and tried to say a civil word. In this it seemed that I was only too successful. For three or four days later he turned up again and suggested we go for a walk."

  “And walk we did – then and on a couple of subsequent occasions. Young and conceited though I was, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that the thing was a pleasure to him. He did his best to make himself agreeable; we looked at such antiquities as that countryside boasts of; and he talked about them like a chap who had got them up the night before. He had something on his mind. That fact was plain enough. And at first I supposed that he was anxious to unburden himself, and was grooming me for the role of confidential friend. But then I realised that there was more to it than that; and I remembered with a bit of a shock that I was a police-officer in the CID. Perhaps Lorio was clinging to me in my professional character. I had already done some tagging around as bodyguard to one important person or another. Poor Lorio, it occurred to me, was trying to place himself unofficially in the same category."

  “The man was afraid. When I grasped that simple and abject truth about him, and when I pictured him in that lonely house, with his hell-cat of a wife, and that wife’s lover lurking perhaps in the next village, I – well, I felt thoroughly sorry for the man. His must have been a dog’s life. I think I even felt a bit alarmed – although I didn’t, so far as I can remember, at all anticipate what you have called a respectability murder, or anything of the sort. He seemed unable to talk – really to talk, that is – and I believe that at the end of our third walk I’d have questioned him outright. Only that third walk never had an end."

  “It differed from the earlier walks in two ways. First, we didn’t have Rex, the shaggy dog. And that seemed to make Lorio’s nervousness and apprehensiveness worse. For normally the creature would take great sweeps round us and he would follow it affectionately with his eye; then it would dash up and fawn on him, and he would give it a quick thrust away with his arm, and away it would go again. Now, not having the dog to look at, he kept looking at his watch instead – for all the world, I thought, as if he were Dr Faustus waiting for midnight. The other difference was in the weather. There was a gale blowing that made walking thoroughly hard work, and the sea beneath us was tremendous. For we had taken the cliff path past Lorio’s own house, and were climbing steadily towards High Head. We had been silent for some time – needing, as we did, all our breath to face that tremendous wind – when he muttered something incoherent about the dog. I gathered presently that it had disappeared that morning and that he was worried about it. I tried to sound sympathetic, but I was more worried about the man himself. His agitation was growing, and it struck me that he must be a bit mad about the brute. Perhaps he gave it the affection that it was no good carrying to his wife."

  “As it happened, I ought to have been a bit more worried than I was. For Robert Lorio had then just about thirty minutes to live."

  “There is a motor road of sorts leading right to the brow of High Head, and as we approached it I saw three or four parked cars and a little knot of people standing at a discreet distance from the edge. That was to be expected, since when a bit of a gale is blowing the spectacle from up there is justly famous. For a stretch of about fifty yards the top of the cliff breaks down into a system of jagged rocks, crazy ledges, and rudimentary caves, with here and there a thorn or a clump of gorse clinging desperately to terra firma above an utter void. Then there is simply sheer precipice, and the breakers that crash and roar and seethe I don’t know how many hundred feet beneath.

  “I have a pretty tolerable head for heights, but I can tell you that on that morning I was disposed to keep well away from the edge. With Lorio, however, it was otherwise. He seemed drawn to the verge, and I followed him – or at least I kept sufficiently close to hear his sudden cry before it was caught by the gale and blown to limbo. ‘Rex,’ he shouted, ‘Rex! He’s trapped!’

  “Sure enough, there was the dog, cowering on a narrow ledge some twenty feet below us. It was a horrid enough sight. Yet my instant calculation was that the animal was not trapped; and that with a little encouragement it could be persuaded to come up as it had, presumably, gone down. Of any other trap being in question I hadn’t a notion.

  “Before I knew what he was about, Lorio had started to scramble. I called to him not to be a fool, but he waved his hand and went on. There seemed, as I’ve said, to be a practicable path, up which Rex might have been whistled. For a man, the difficulty seemed to be that it was in two places sharply overhung. The second of these places, which was right on the verge, so that its passage admitted of not the slightest slip without disaster, was partly obscured by a great boulder. A couple of the spectators up on the Head, seeing that something was happening, had strolled down to investigate; we waited breathlessly together; it was a moment in which it would have appeared like murder to call out a single word.

  “Lorio came to this last and critical place, and I could see him hesitate. Then he bent low to creep past the overhang. His head disappeared; then his shoulders in that shabby tweed; then all we could see was a single foot, edging cautiously out of sight an inch at a time. It seemed an eternity before anything appeared at the other side. At last one of the men standing beside me exclaimed softly, and I saw an arm. It was feeling for a hold – and then it was flailing wildly in air. I recall in that horrible instant a most extraordinary association of ideas. What that arm fantastically suggested to me was the conductor of an orchestra, working up some terrific coda. And at that random thought my ears were opened. I heard – what I had been unconscious of an instant before – the roar and crash of the tremendous seas below; and I heard, too, a single ghastly scream. For a split second the whole man was visible – the gale lifting his jacket, his curved back pillowed on the void, his bearded mouth gaping in that last despairing scream. Then he was gone. Have you noticed that when one pictures such a fall one sees the progress of it – the object, whatever it may be, on its journey through the air? The reality isn’t like that; the speed is so great that it is over as one looks. I think I was aware of that tremendous fall n
ot in terms of distance but of size. At one instant a man had hovered in agony before me; at the next a small black blob hit the sea.

  “There was, of course, nothing whatever to do. I knew very well that what I had seen was sudden death. Nevertheless, I raced to the coastguard hut on the other side of High Head. For some reason it was deserted. But I knew it had a telephone. So I broke in through a window and sent a message to the lifeboat station in Sheercliff – which was futile enough, but the best that could be done. All this took about fifteen minutes. When I got back to the scene of the accident there was quite a crowd collected. The people who had come up to the Head by car were pointing, jabbering, and gingerly exploring the edge of the cliff; in fact, they were getting more kick out of their expedition than they had expected, by a long way. One group was in particular agitation. And in a moment I saw why. Rex had apparently managed to rescue himself after all – as I had thought he very well might. They were patting him, shaking their heads over him, shouting at him against the gale, and generally driving the poor brute silly. He gave a howl. And at that moment a hand fell on his collar and quieted him. It was Mrs Lorio’s. How she had come upon the scene wasn’t clear.

  “She was as pale as a ghost, and wildly questioning the folk around her. Somebody, indeed, was in the middle of explaining the accident; it was one of the two men who had stood by me and watched the thing happen. But he was confused and stammering. I had no liking for the job, but I saw that I must step up to her and tell her the horrible truth as I knew it.

  “Or was it she who knew the truth? If suspicion had been slow to stir in me, it came flooding in now. I hadn’t actually seen the dead man begin to fall. He had disappeared for a second, and then I had seen him actually off-balance and falling. And the terrain down there was quite problematical. I knew only that before the cliff fell away sheer, there were those dizzy little paths and ledges, with here and there niches and shallow caves fit enough for lurking in. What if Monica Lorio’s lover had been lurking there – or even the two of them together? What if the dog had been no more than a decoy?