Appleby Talking

by Michael Innes

  “Just that. And perhaps he didn’t like what he saw. You told me that he walked up there briskly enough, but that his return to the Metropole was a bit irresolute. But he went through with the thing. Knowing that he had to give you the slip this time, he changed into those anonymous clothes in the dark – which is how he managed to land himself with different-coloured shoes.”

  “That may be true.” Meritt was suddenly interested. “And the shoes were, in fact, to give him away! It might be one of those queer tricks of the mind – and particularly of a mind like Borlase’s. Part of him didn’t want anonymity and extinction. So he made this unconsciously motivated mistake and betrayal. An instance of what Freud calls the psychopathology of everyday life.”

  “No doubt.” Superintendent Lort did not appear to feel that his picture of the case was much strengthened by this speculation. “Well, Borlase slipped out again later, and simply pitched himself over Merlin Head. He reckoned to go straight into the sea, and to be drawn out by the current. Later, we might or might not have got back an unrecognisable body in unidentifiable clothes. Of course, further investigation may prove me wrong. But I’d say it’s a fair working supposition. Do you agree?”

  Without interrupting the business of lighting his pipe, Captain Meritt shook his head. “I don’t see it. Borlase was an odd chap, or I wouldn’t have been given my job. He might, I suppose, feel driven to take his own life. And he might feel the act as disgraceful – as something to disguise. But why not disguise it as an accident? He had plenty of brains to work out something convincing in that way. Why should he try to make his death look like an unaccountable disappearance?”

  “Might it be because he disliked you, sir?”

  “What’s that?” Meritt was startled.

  “I mean, of course, disliked the way you’d been set on him. He resented having a gaoler disguised as a bodyguard – and quite right too, if you ask me.” Lort delivered himself of this sentiment with vigour. “So he resolved to leave you in as awkward a situation as he could. Had he seemed just to clean vanish, you’d have been left looking decidedly a fool.”

  “I see.” Meritt digested this view of the matter in silence for some seconds. And when at length he pronounced upon it, it was with unexpected urbanity. “Well, Borlase is dead, poor devil – and it’s a bad mark to me either way. I’ll be quite content myself if your interpretation is accepted by the coroner.”

  “But you doubt whether it will be?”

  “I do.” And Meritt puffed at his pipe with a sombre frown. “My guess is that there’s more to come out, Superintendent. And probably with more bad marks attached. The country has lost Stephen Borlase. I have a nasty feeling it may have lost something else as well.”

  3

  Derry Fisher felt rather like the Bellman. “What I tell you three times is true.” It was just that number of times that he had now told his story: first to his uncle, then at the local police-station, and now – rather to his awe – to Sir John Appleby, high up in this quiet room in New Scotland Yard. Appleby himself, Derry saw, must be pretty high up. He was, in fact, an Assistant Commissioner. Derry was already guessing that the queer situation in which he found himself involved was important as well as conventionally sensational. Appleby was not at all portentous. His idea of police investigation appeared to be friendly and at times mildly whimsical conversation. But Derry sensed that he was feeling pretty serious underneath.

  “And you say you saw this girl into a taxi? But of course you did. Pretty or not, it was the natural and proper thing. And then you took the next taxi yourself?”

  “No, sir.” Derry shook his head, genuinely amused. “I found my natural level on top of a bus.”

  “Quite so. Taxi queues at these big stations are often longer than bus queues, anyway. I suppose there was a queue – streams of taxis going out?”

  “Yes, sir. Parts of our train had been pretty crowded. I had to wait a moment while several more taxis shot past. One of them nearly bowled me over.”

  “Did you find yourself staring at people’s shoes?”

  Derry burst out laughing. “As a matter of fact, I did. I keep on doing it now.”

  “You do, indeed. You had a look at mine the instant you entered this room.” And Appleby smiled genially at his embarrassed visitor. “You’d make a detective, Mr Fisher, I don’t doubt. And you tell your story very clearly.”

  “To tell you the truth, sir, I’m very relieved to find it credited. It seems so uncommonly queer.”

  “We get plenty of queer yarns in this place.” Appleby companionably held out a box of cigarettes. “But of yours, as a matter of fact, we have a scrap of confirmation already.”

  Derry Fisher sat up eagerly. “You’ve heard from the girl?”

  “Not yet – although we ought to today, if she ever looks at a newspaper or listens to the wireless. Unless, of course–” Appleby checked himself. “What we’ve had is news of an angry traveller at Waterloo, complaining of theft from his suitcase while he was absent from his compartment.”

  “Isn’t that sort of thing fairly common?”

  “Common enough. But this was on your train from Sheercliff this morning. And what was stolen was a pair of shoes – nothing else. I’ve no doubt that you see the likely significance of that. By the time you had got to Waterloo, there was certainly nobody on your train in the embarrassing position of wearing a discernibly odd pair of shoes. Only the dead body in Sheercliff was still doing that… By the way, have you any ideas about this?”

  Derry, although startled, answered boldly. “Yes, sir. At least, I see one way that it might have come about. The two men – this Sir Stephen Borlase who is dead and the man who was on the train – for some reason changed clothes rather hastily in the dark. And they muddled the shoes.”

  Appleby nodded approvingly. “That’s very good. Borlase, as a matter of fact, has been found in clothes which, it seems, can’t be positively identified as his. Correspondingly, the clothes which your girl described as worn by the fellow on the train sound uncommonly like those being worn by Borlase when he was last seen alive. He may, of course, have been dead when the exchange took place. Indeed, that would seem to be the likely way of it. I wonder, now, what it would be like, changing clothes with a dead man – say with a murdered man – in the dark.”

  “I’m sure I’d muddle a good deal more than the shoes.” Derry Fisher’s conviction was unfeigned. “One would have to possess nerves of steel to do so ghastly a thing.”

  “Either that or be in an uncommonly tight corner. You’d be surprised at the things that timid or even craven folk will brace themselves to when really up against it.” Appleby paused. “But aren’t we supposing a darkness that can’t really have been there? Unless, of course, we can place the thing in a cave or cellar or shuttered room.”

  “The moonlight!”

  “Precisely. I asked about that during my last phone call to Sheercliff half an hour ago. There can be no doubt that there was a full moon in an unclouded sky. I dare say you were aware of it yourself.”

  “Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, I was dancing in it.”

  “Then, there you are.” Appleby appeared much pleased. “Are you fond of Rubens as a landscape painter?”

  “Rubens?” Derry felt incapable of this abrupt transition to a polite cultural topic. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about him.”

  “He has one or two great things done in full moonlight. Everything marvellously clear, you know, but at the same time largely drained of colour.” Appleby chuckled. “If you knocked me out by the light of the moon, Mr Fisher, you could exchange clothes with me without the slightest difficulty. But you might very well go wrong over brown and black shoes. My guess is that they wouldn’t be indistinguishable to a careful scrutiny, but that they would be the next thing to it… And now I must really go across to Waterloo. I should be greatly obliged if you’d come along.”

  “While you inquire – investigate?”

  “Just that. You might
be a great help to us.”

  “I’ll certainly come.” Derry stood up – and suddenly a new view of this invitation came to him. “You don’t mean to lose sight of me?”

  “That is so.” For the first time, Appleby spoke with real gravity. “You may as well know, Mr Fisher, that this affair may be very serious indeed. Nobody connected with it will be lost sight of until it is cleared up.”

  “You make me wish I hadn’t lost sight of the girl.”

  “I wish you had not. We must face the fact that she is the only person who could identify the man on the train – the living man in the odd shoes.”

  Slowly it dawned on Derry. “And I – ?”

  “You are the only person who could identify the girl, supposing – well, that she was no longer in a position to speak up for herself.”

  “You think she may be in danger?”

  “I’d like to know who was in the next taxi or two after hers.”

  It chanced that the morning’s train for Sheercliff had been neither broken up nor cleaned through, and a clerk led them to it over what, to Derry, seemed miles and miles of sidings. It stood, forlorn, dusty, and dead, in the rather bleak late-afternoon sunshine. Once aboard, Derry had less difficulty than he had expected in identifying the compartment in which his adventure had begun. It looked very impersonal and uninteresting now. He felt suddenly depressed, and watched with growing scepticism the minutely careful search that Sir John Appleby made.

  Whether after any success or not, Appleby eventually gave over. “This fellow who complained of losing shoes,” he said. “Where was he?”

  The clerk consulted some papers. “We have a note of that, sir. It was three carriages down, next to the restaurant-car. The passenger had gone to get himself an early lunch, leaving his suitcase on the seat of the empty compartment. When he got back, he found it open, with the contents tumbled about, and a pair of shoes missing. Of course he has no claim.”

  “Except on our interest.” Appleby turned to Derry. “Now, I wonder why our elusive friend didn’t substitute his own troublesome footwear and close the case? That would have given the other fellow a bit of a shock in time. But perhaps it was no occasion for a display of humour.” Appleby spoke absently. His glance was still darting about the uncommunicative compartment, as if reluctant to give it best. Then he stepped into the corridor and moved up the train. “A group of airmen,” he said, “mostly asleep. A solitary lady. A clergyman and his wife. Is that right?”

  Derry nodded. “Quite right.”

  “And then the compartment where your girl made her awkward observation. If you don’t mind, I’ll go into this one alone.” He did so, and moved about as if the whole place was made of eggshell. Derry watched fascinated. His scepticism was entirely gone. To his own eye the compartment looked blank and meaningless. Yet it suddenly seemed impossible that to so intent and concentrated scrutiny it should not at once yield some clamant and decisive fact.

  “You can still smell what she called the Russian cigarettes.” Appleby spoke over his shoulder. “And here in the ash-tray are two or three of the yellow stubs you saw yourself. I at once produce pill-boxes and forceps. Also a pocket lens.” Derry glimpsed the railway clerk watching wide-eyed as Appleby actually performed these legendary operations. “I sniff. This tobacco – my dear Watson – is manufactured only in Omsk. Or is it Tomsk? At any rate, I distinctly begin to see Red. Only Commissars are ever issued with this particular brand. The plot thickens. The vanished man has a slight cast in his left eye. A joint – on of the lower ones – is missing from his right forefinger…” On this surprising rubbish Appleby’s voice died away. Regardless of the two men waiting in the corridor, he painfully explored the confined space around him for a further fifteen minutes. When he emerged, he was wholly serious. And Derry Fisher thought that he saw something like far-reaching speculation in his eye.

  “Those young airmen, Mr Fisher – you say they were asleep?”

  “Not all of them.”

  “And the clergyman and his wife?”

  “Chatting and admiring the view.”

  “On the far side?”

  “No, the corridor side.”

  “And the solitary lady?”

  “She struck me as a headmistress, or something of that sort. She was working at papers.”

  “Absorbed in them?”

  “Well – not entirely. I think I remember her giving me rather a formidable glance as I went by. You think these people may have seen something important, sir?”

  “They are a factor, undoubtedly.” Appleby was glancing at his watch. “I must get back. The mystery of the rifled suitcase is something that we needn’t pursue. What we want is your girl. And there ought to be word of her by now. What would be your guess about her when she saw all this in the papers? Is she the sort who might lose her head or panic and lie low?”

  Derry shook his head. “I’m sure she’s not. She would see it was her duty to come forward, and she’d do so.”

  “Kensington, you said – and you absolutely didn’t hear any more?” Appleby had dropped to the line, and they were now tramping through a wilderness of deserted rolling-stock. “And you gleaned absolutely nothing about her connections – profession, reason for having been in Sheercliff, and so on?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t.” Derry hesitated. “It wasn’t because I didn’t want to. But she’d had this shock, and it would have seemed impertinent–”

  “Quite so.” Appleby was curtly approving. “But I wish we had just the beginning of a line on her, all the same.”

  Derry Fisher for some reason felt his heart sink. “You really do think, sir, that she may be in danger?”

  “Certainly she is in danger. We must find her just as soon as we can.”

  Back in his room half an hour later, and with Derry still in tow, Appleby was making a trunk-call.

  “Stephen Borlase?” The cultivated voice from Cambridge wasted no time. “Yes, certainly. I have no doubt that I count as one of his oldest friends. The news has saddened me very much. A wonderful brain, and on the verge of great things… Mentally unbalanced? My dear sir, we all are – except conceivably at Scotland Yard. I know they were worried about Stephen, but if I were you I’d take it with a pinch of salt. He was not nearly so mad as Mark is, if you ask me.”

  “Mark?”

  “Mark Borlase – Stephen’s cousin. Haven’t you contacted him?” The voice from Cambridge seemed surprised. “Mark is certainly next of kin… Address? I know only that he lives in a windmill. From time to time I should imagine that he goes out and tilts at it… Precisely – an eccentric. He goes in for unworldliness and absence of mind… The same interests as Stephen? Dear me, no. Mark is literary – wrote a little book on Pushkin, and is a bit of an authority on Russian literature in general. An interesting but ineffective type.”

  “Thank you very much.” Appleby was scribbling on a desk-pad. “Just one more thing. I wonder if you can tell me anything significant about Sir Stephen’s methods of work?”

  “Yes.” The voice from Cambridge took on extra precision. “It happened in his head, and went straight into a small notebook which he kept in an inner pocket. That – and perhaps a few loose papers lying rather too carelessly about – was nowadays pretty well his whole stock-in-trade. I hope that notebook’s safe.”

  “So do I. Sir Stephen had a bodyguard who ought to have kept an eye on all that. I expect to contact him at any time. You’d say that the notebook may be very important indeed?”

  “My God!” And the telephone in Cambridge went down with a click.

  As Appleby dropped his own receiver into place, a secretary entered the room. “A caller, sir – somebody I think you’ll want to see about this Sheercliff affair.”

  Derry Fisher was conscious of sitting up with a jerk as Appleby swung round to ask crisply, “Not the girl?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. A cousin of the dead man. He gives his name as Mark Borlase.”

  “Bring him in.” Apple
by turned back to Derry. “Lives in a windmill, and pops up as if he were answering a cue. He may interest you, Mr Fisher, even though he’s not your girl. So stay where you are.”

  Derry did as he was told. Mark Borlase was a middle-aged, cultivated, untidy man. He had a charming smile and restless, tobacco-stained hands. His manner was decidedly vague, and one felt at once that his natural occupation was wool-gathering. Only good breeding and a sense of social duty, Derry guessed, kept him from relapsing into complete abstraction straightaway.

  “Sir John Appleby? My name is Borlase. They got hold of me from Sheercliff, and asked me to come along and see you here. This about Stephen is very sad. I liked him, and hope he liked me. We had nothing to say to each other, I’m afraid – nothing at all. But he was a good sort of person in his dry way. I’m very sorry that his end should be a matter of policemen and inquests and so forth. I wonder what I can do?” As he spoke, Mark Borlase produced a pair of glasses from a breast-pocket and clipped them on his nose. “Perhaps I could identify the body – something like that?” And Mark Borlase looked slowly round the room, as if confidently expecting a corpse in a corner. Not finding this, he let his glance rest mildly on Derry Fisher instead. “This your boy?”

  “Your cousin’s body is naturally at Sheercliff, Mr Borlase. It has been adequately identified. And this gentleman is not my son” – Appleby smiled faintly – “but Mr Derry Fisher, who happened to travel up from Sheercliff this morning in circumstances which give him an interest in your cousin’s death.”

  “From Sheercliff this morning? How do you do.” And Mark Borlase gave Derry a smile which, for some reason, sent a prickling sensation down the young man’s spine. “You were a friend of poor Stephen’s?”

  “No – nothing of that sort. I never knew him. It’s just that on the train I ran across a – another passenger who’d had a queer experience – one that seems to connect up with Sir Stephen’s death. That’s why the police are interested in me.”

  “Indeed.” Mark Borlase did not appear to find this ingenuous explanation sufficiently significant to hold his attention. He turned his mild gaze again to Appleby. “They say, you know, that there were times when Stephen wasn’t quite himself.”