Ampersand Papers

by Michael Innes

  So carry on – and approach the thing from another angle: that of Charles Digitt. Where, in the set-up Appleby had just been imagining, did that young man come in? For he did come in: Appleby felt assured of that. Perhaps he had simply tumbled to what his cousin and Sutch were up to between them, and had been demanding his share of the loot. Appleby didn’t think very much of this simple theory, which left too many aspects of Charles Digitt – even if aspects only insecurely sensed – out in the cold. The Spanish gold beckoned again here. Sutch (if the wretched Cave was to be believed) had formed a theory about that. And the theory had been put in his head by an architect – who might well have been Charles Digitt.

  Appleby heaved himself off the dinghy and fell to pacing the muniment room. What this thought tied up with was obviously the business of Sutch prowling through the castle, tapping and sounding for hiding-places. Surely what he had picked up from Charles – and from Charles in his character as an architect – was a particularly likely place in which to look, whether for bullion or for Adrian Digitt’s papers.

  As he arrived at this not very recondite hypothesis, Appleby chanced to let his eye fall on that mallet and chisel which the young workman had disclaimed, and the use and provenance of which he had discussed with Ludlow. They were eminently instruments, he again reflected, for breaking through substantial barriers of stone. Ludlow had been confident that in the castle itself Sutch could not have so employed them without detection. But what about up here? The sudden obviousness of this question almost took Appleby aback.

  He picked up the tools and examined them carefully. Each gave off a fine grey powder as he gently brushed it with a finger, and he took this as an indication that they had been quite recently in use. But where, and for what purpose? It was scarcely possible to suppose that Adrian Digitt’s papers had ever actually been immured behind or beneath stone and mortar. But a treasure in the unmetaphorical sense of precious metals, coins, plate, jewels was quite a different matter. If you had possessed yourself of such a thing with no secure legal entitlement to it, and if this was a fact rumoured among your enemies, some such operation was likely enough. So the Nuestra Señora del Rosario was making the running again.

  The most obvious place of concealment of such a kind up here was behind the bricked-up doorway which had originally given upon the spiral staircase. But obvious hiding places are scarcely good ones. And moreover Ludlow had declared that he recollected a time when you could still open the door there and come on nothing but the broken stone left after the collapse of the staircase, which had presumably taken place during the siege. Where else could one think of? ‘Beneath the floor’ would be another fairly obvious answer. Already, indeed, and in the obscurely intuitive way in which his mind sometimes worked, Appleby had found himself casting a considering eye over the flagstones with which the entire muniment room was paved. But what lay beneath them? Ultimately, it was a further chamber, and one to which access was no longer possible. But on what sort of structure would the formidable weight of stone now beneath his feet be supported? Here at least was a question for an architect. Appleby was inclined to guess that some sort of fairly shallow stone vaulting must be involved. And this might conceivably mean that at each corner of the structure there would be hollow spaces – perhaps filled with rubble which could be readily removed, and thus freed to accommodate bags or small chests or the like.

  All this speculation seemed extremely absurd; seemed, indeed, of a wholly juvenile order. As he set himself to scrutinize the floor virtually inch by inch, Appleby was rather glad that none of Inspector Craig’s men had as yet turned up again. The process of inspection was laborious and slow, since every sort of junk had to be moved around as he worked. And the final result was wholly negative. Nowhere over a substantial area in each of the four corners of the muniment room was there the slightest indication of a flagstone having been tampered with. But this, of course, didn’t quite conclude matters. Even beneath the central part of floor there might be the effect of at least a shallow cavity, in which it would have been possible to spread out thousands and thousands of pieces of eight.

  To test this possibility it looked as if he would have to operate upon what he had come to think of as the Ampersand Zoo in a big way. The creatures extended to the middle of the room, and at its centre to a little beyond that. Appleby began boldly with what came first to hand: a really handsome but unfortunately particularly mouldy stag standing upon a sort of low pedestal vaguely representing rock and heather. Had this pedestal lately been moved already? Faint lines in the dust surrounding it suggested that this might be so. With considerable effort, Appleby shifted the position of the stag’s nearest neighbours and then the stag itself. And his pertinacity was at once rewarded in the most startling fashion.

  A neat circular hole had been hewn in the stone, of a size adequate to admit a hand and arm. It must have been a laborious job – so decidedly so that for a moment Appleby judged that it simply didn’t make sense. Wouldn’t it have been much easier to prize up the entire flagstone in which it had been cut? But that, it immediately came to him, might well have been beyond a single man’s strength. And from this came the inference that it was a lone operator that had been involved in this curious performance. It seemed most improbable that he could have been other than the late Dr Ambrose Sutch.

  The mysterious aperture was perhaps no more than a foot from the dead centre of the muniment room. Had it been near an outer wall, one might have conjectured – in such mediaeval surroundings – that nothing more than some primitive form of sanitation was involved. But of course nothing of that kind was in question. Here was the point at which any system of vaulting that lay below would make its nearest approach to the floor on which Appleby now stood. This small chasm had been contrived in order to render possible some inspection of the inaccessibly sealed-off chamber below. So it was very simple, indeed. Some of Inspector Craig’s men, he told himself grimly, deserved a bad mark. They ought as a matter of routine to have scanned every inch of the place – shoved around the whole zoo and everything else. It wouldn’t be for him, however, to point this out. With Craig, indeed, it was going to be quite awkward to be sufficiently casual about what it had been left to a peripatetic retired policeman to discover.

  Dr Sutch had certainly not chipped so pertinaciously away in the interest of tracking down Adrian Digitt’s remains. What had come to be believed about the history of the North Tower was quite clear. It had taken such a battering from the engines of Oliver Cromwell more than 300 years ago that its staircase had been demolished and its upper ranges rendered inaccessible ever since – except, indeed, by the hazardous external structure that the birdwatching Lord Ampersand had caused to be erected.

  It was evident that all this had been implicitly believed. Yet it became nonsense as soon as one took a hard look at it. It would be nonsense, for instance, to an architect giving it a moment’s thought. Here was a spiral staircase the greater part of which purported to be choked up with, as it were, its own detritus – and this within a massive tower which showed no sign of having been damaged in any really major way. So what was the explanation? Appleby thought he saw the answer: a hastily improvised and very tolerably cunning construction of a large place of concealment. Take a picturesque guess, he told himself, and complete the picture. Cromwell or such another has surrounded Treskinnick Castle and the cannon-balls are flying, are here and there bringing down little mountains of shattered masonry. Everything that ever was aboard the Nuestra Señora del Rosario is due to be discovered and carried off by these atrocious rebels. So the stuff is bundled into the topmost chamber but one in the North Tower, and the staircase immediately above it and below given a hearty bashing and jammed up with stone from the shattered battlements of the castle or wherever – and with the hope that the final effect is going to pass as the result of cannonade. It is, of course, no more than a desperate gamble. And whether the gamble paid off had been a speculation o
ccupying the spacious mind of Ambrose Sutch.

  Soberly, Sir John Appleby reconsidered these extravagant conjectures, and decided that they weren’t entirely prompted by the reading of much romantic fiction in youth. The thing just was feasible. Sutch had done well to investigate. And he would do well to investigate too.

  He knelt down and thrust an arm through the hole. It moved freely around in vacancy. If there were a watcher in the chamber below, it would appear to him that a minatory hand had suddenly appeared as from the heavens, dramatically pointing at the hoarded treasure of the Digitts. Appleby withdrew his arm, and peered through the hole instead. Nothing except utter darkness was to be observed. No ray of light appeared to penetrate to the mysterious chamber. A torch was essential for any further discovery, and he hadn’t such a thing any nearer than in his car outside the castle. Some sort of periscope would be useful as well. But such things don’t lie around.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ a respectful voice said from somewhere behind him. ‘Can I help you in any way?’

  Appleby stood up and dusted himself down. He had just made an important discovery which others ought to have made before him – possibly even this constable who had now appeared in the muniment room. Nevertheless Appleby found himself feeling slightly foolish. It was quite a long time since he had pursued the art of criminal investigation to the extent of peering through a key-hole (or some such aperture) and making what he could of what was thus revealed. It would have been more becoming, he told himself, if some keen young detective officer under Craig’s command had brought off this particular triumph of espionage.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but I’ve finished what I’ve been up to. Just what have you got there?’ There had appeared through the window, and behind the constable, two men carrying a large metal contraption.

  ‘It’s a grille to put up over this window, sir. Inspector Craig doesn’t want to set a guard over the place any longer. But he feels it ought to be kept under lock and key until after the inquest at least. It won’t take these men above an hour to do the job, and I’m to hand one of the keys to you now, if you care to have it, sir.’

  ‘I think not.’ Appleby shook his head briskly. ‘If I want to come back here I’ll contact the Inspector. Is he, do you know, thinking of returning to the castle this afternoon?’

  ‘I think not, sir.’

  ‘Then get hold of him on the telephone as soon as you can, and ask him to come and take a look at this.’ Appleby had beckoned to the constable, and was now pointing to the late Dr Sutch’s effort as a stone-mason. ‘Take a good look at it, Constable, so that you can describe it accurately.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And tell him that, in my opinion, it would appear to bear upon the Spanish hypothesis.’

  ‘Upon what, sir?’

  ‘The Spanish hypothesis.’

  ‘The Spanish hypothesis, sir. Message understood.’

  Appleby, although he doubted whether these last words were quite true, judged the lack of expression with which they had been uttered to be to the credit of this young man’s training. He relaxed a little.

  ‘And now I’ll get out before they turn this place into a cage,’ he said. ‘I’ve no wish to become one more animal in that zoo.’

  ‘You’d be better preserved than most of them, sir.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Constable. But – by the way – always choose your man before you make your joke.’

  ‘I did, sir.’

  ‘Young man, I’m afraid you’ll go far. Be so good, incidentally, as to tell Inspector Craig that I am driving over to Budleigh Salterton.’

  ‘Budleigh Salterton, sir. Very good.’

  ‘And breaking the speed limit,’ Appleby added, as he climbed through the window.

  Part Three

  Budleigh Salterton And After

  17

  But in fact Appleby covered the first part of his route at a very moderate pace. He couldn’t represent to himself that he was on any sort of urgent mission. He wasn’t going to make history in Budleigh Salterton by defusing the terrorist’s bomb or arresting the assassin’s knife. An afternoon call on an elderly lady was all that he had in mind, and there was no hurry about that. Even if he stopped at a pub for a late lunch he’d probably be a little early in terms of the ordinances of Budleigh Salterton society.

  Yet he had hastened away from Treskinnick Castle. That young policeman – who could judge his man – might even have thought him hot on the scent, and this he couldn’t honestly claim was the case. He did, indeed, now believe that he knew how Dr Ambrose Sutch had died. The narrow truth of that matter had come to him as he stood contemplating that deceased scholar’s surprisingly deft performance with mallet and chisel on the floor of the muniment room. But the why and wherefore of the affair was still obscure to him, and he doubted whether the true history of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario was going to clear it up. It was undeniable that the ill-fated galleon had rather notably hove up on his horizon that morning; had come grandly in, so to speak, with all sails spread. When he had shoved aside that (far from well-preserved) Monarch of the Glen the revelation beneath his nose had been a revelation authentic enough. But it was, his instinct told him, a little off-centre from the heart of the mystery, just as that peep-hole was a little off-centre on the floor of the muniment room. But what about Miss Deborah Digitt (to whom he had so abruptly been prompted to make his way) being positively peripheral? In point of mere physical remove that was certainly her station in the case. When, for instance, Ludlow had been aware of much mysterious coming and going, and of sundry nocturnal flickerings in the North Tower, it was scarcely to be supposed that this elderly spinster had broken into the castle and was up to mischief.

  But at least Appleby had somehow received the impression that Miss Digitt had a lucid mind, and that she was interested in family history: neither of these being attributes with which it was possible to credit that family’s present head. Send her out on a country – or marine – walk, and she would probably know whether she had, or had not, seen a helicopter. Incidentally, did she at this moment know anything whatever about the existence, let alone the sudden death, of Dr Sutch? It seemed likely that nobody at Treskinnick would much bother to inform this obscure relation of the distressing affair. Or would Lady Grace Digitt have done so? Lady Grace had spoken as if Miss Digitt were yet to be tackled about those problematical papers. No doubt Sutch’s death-plunge had been featured in the press, but it wouldn’t have been with any prominence in the newspapers Miss Digitt was likely to read. It seemed conceivable that Appleby, like some messenger in high tragedy, was going to arrive with the news of totally unapprehended disaster.

  It certainly wasn’t with this intention that he was climbing up to Dartmoor now. He wanted to receive information, not to disseminate it. And it was information about Adrian Digitt’s remains. Here, he saw, was the explanation of his having set out so rapidly to exchange the north coast of Cornwall for the south coast of Devon. He didn’t want that galleon creeping up on him. Or not to the exclusion, as it were, of the other side of the penny. He’d started out from those confounded papers, and he’d stick to them if he could. And Miss Deborah Digitt was likely to know more about them than anybody else – or than anybody else still in the land of the living. If they were extant, they might even be legally her property. And certainly not a dozen words of Adrian’s could be converted for the first time from manuscript into print without her permission being obtained. Or at least Appleby believed that to be the law. Of course judges – he thought gloomily, and on the strength of considerable acquaintance with their ways – can contrive to bring in any judgement they please upon any subject under the sun. It’s their way of vindicating natural justice, often enough, against the imbecilities of what they are appointed to administer. But the results can be disconcerting at times.

  He had reached that point, a
little short of Two Bridges, at which one can enjoy, if one wants to, an advantageous view of Princetown Prison. Another facet of the law, Appleby told himself – and accelerated as he did so. He had never much cared for penal establishments, and in his later years had even discovered a fondness for those detected criminals who contrive to meet with fatal misadventure or to make away with themselves rather than enter such dismal receptacles. What if this respectable if decayed female at Budleigh Salterton proved to have been master-minding (or mistress-minding) highly criminal activities in the abode of her ancestors, and had to be huddled into Holloway as a result of his own good offices? It seemed, indeed, highly improbable. But a detective’s life is full of nasty surprises. He wouldn’t like it a bit.

  Budleigh Salterton, although no doubt provided with a base and brickish skirt somewhere or other, appeared on immediate view to consist of two large hotels, a single narrow street much impeded by motor cars of the more prosperous sort, and a scattering of villas of varying consequence straggling up a slope overlooking the sea. Among these last Miss Deborah Digitt proved to occupy what might be called a middling station, her house being less spacious but more elegant than those immediately adjoining it. There was a small garden at the front, and in it at the moment an elderly man of decent appearance was trimming a low box hedge which had the look of having been quite sufficiently attended to already. Appleby passed the time of day, and at this the elderly man straightened up and respectfully touched his cap. It was evident that, within the curtilage of Miss Digitt’s domain, antique ways prevailed. Appleby rang a bell, and it was answered almost at once by an equally elderly maidservant.