Appleby And Honeybath

by Michael Innes

  The door of the library stood at the end of, and faced down, a broad corridor. This approach Appleby and Honeybath traversed in a slightly constrained silence. The constraint was undoubtedly Appleby’s creation. Much experience had fostered in him a sceptical stance before one or another extravagant persuasion on the part of agitated citizens. There was going to be a moment or two of mild embarrassment as the man in the library of Grinton Hall woke up.

  Honeybath halted before the door, and brought the key from his pocket. At this Appleby was prompted to speech.

  ‘Good Lord, Charles! Did you lock the place up behind you?’

  ‘Well, yes – I thought it just as well.’ Honeybath offered this confession rather awkwardly. ‘There are several children in the house, you know, and no end of women. I felt that if one of them had obeyed the same impulse as myself – an impulse of rather pointless curiosity, I fear – they might have…’

  ‘Quite so. Received a terrible shock. Now go ahead.’

  So Honeybath unlocked the door, and the two men entered the room. The armchair was where it had been. But its occupant had vanished.

  ‘It’s not there!’ This came from Honeybath as a spontaneous cry of dismay. He might have been feeling that here was a large misfortune in itself, much as if the dead man had been a valuable clock or painting.

  ‘Well, no.’ Appleby looked about him at leisure. ‘There seems to be nothing spectacular on view for the present.’ He glanced at Honeybath almost with suspicion – but it was impossible to believe that so right-thinking a man had involved himself in some tasteless practical joke. ‘Is that the chair?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘He was slumped in it?’

  ‘Not quite that.’ Honeybath was relieved at being presented with these matter-of-fact questions. ‘Just sitting. Or better, perhaps, perched.’ Here was a field in which he was, after all, an authority. ‘If a sitter sat like that, I’d beg him to relax.’ Honeybath studied the room more carefully than before. ‘It’s like one of your sealed room mysteries.’

  ‘One of my what?’

  ‘Well, in thrillers, then.’ Honeybath felt that he had embarked on rather a foolish line of talk. ‘A crime or something taking place behind locked doors, so that the perpetrator couldn’t seemingly have got out. Only here it’s the corpse.’

  ‘Oh, that! I see.’ Appleby didn’t sound interested. ‘I can’t remember running across anything of the sort. But I may have. As you know, my bloodhound days are rather far behind me. But here your locked door has happened, without a doubt. Or without, at least, an immediate doubt. Your corpse has vanished through the roof, or something like that. Post-mortem levitation. Or an Assumption…’

  ‘Quite so.’ Honeybath hastened to save his friend from perpetrating a profane comparison. ‘There’s that fireplace,’ he added with recovered confidence.

  ‘So there is.’

  ‘It might be described as of baronial magnificence, wouldn’t you say? Out of proportion even to this large room.’

  This was true. The fireplace was a huge marble affair, massively decorated with statuary and armorial bearings. Appleby obligingly inspected it with care.

  ‘You think,’ he asked seriously, ‘the corpse may have scrambled up the chimney – like some sweep’s unfortunate juvenile assistant in Victoria’s darkest England?’

  ‘Not exactly that.’ Honeybath felt uncomfortable in the face of this unseasonable pleasantry. ‘But it might have been hauled up, if the flue’s a straight one. Or someone may have had a rope ladder. A silk rope ladder. I’ve read that such a thing can be conveyed undetected if tightly wound round a fellow’s body. Under his jacket, you know.’

  ‘Well, it might certainly be a handy thing in your sealed room situation, Charles. But are you sure it is your situation?’

  ‘There’s only one door, and I locked it behind me.’

  ‘There are three windows – and very big ones, if the point’s relevant. Let’s look at them.’

  They looked at the windows.

  ‘Not the original fenestration,’ Honeybath said with knowledge. ‘Altered in the age of plate glass. But what are those little boxes?’

  ‘It’s the age of burglar alarms, too.’ Appleby made a rapid inspection. ‘All three windows firmly secured from the inside. For the moment, your SRS prospers.’

  ‘My what, John?’

  ‘Sealed room situation. But wait a minute! Here’s a staircase – an odd little spiral one – descending to some depth below. You don’t see it at first, since it’s hidden in this furthest bay. I’m going down.’ Appleby had scarcely ceased speaking before – with remarkable agility in an elderly man – he had simply vanished beneath the floor. For a couple of minutes Honeybath heard him moving about. Then, decidedly in a dusty state, he reappeared again. ‘Only a very large basement,’ he said. ‘No door, just some massively barred semi-basement windows. And the whole area absolutely crammed with junk. But literary and learned junk. More books, stacked up in enormous piles, higgledy-piggledy. Old trunks bulging with papers in bundles and papers in tatters. A kind of librarian’s nightmare.’

  ‘How very odd.’

  ‘It’s just a matter of most Grintons having been of the true Terence breed. But return to the body, Charles – in recollection, that is. Would you say you examined it at all thoroughly?’

  ‘I can’t say that I did. But I do feel I made sure the man was dead. And something about it does now come into my head – just because of your own present appearance, as a matter of fact. There was something dusty about him – and a cobweb in his hair. Do you know? I’m beginning almost to see him again.’ Honeybath frowned. ‘Something about his clothes – no, not just the dust. And about his shoes. But, no – it’s gone again.’

  ‘It may come back.’

  ‘I suppose I ought to have been more observant. You see, being quite sure the man was dead, I decided to get Grinton at once.’

  ‘Quite right, but you realize where we are now. When you left the library, the probability was that you were leaving behind you a death from natural causes. Most people die that way, after all.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘That the chap was unknown to you was perplexing, but there could be several explanations of that. When bodies immediately disappear, however, the probability shifts. Why whisk away into concealment the victim of a simple heart attack? No answer, Charles. Or none that I can see off-hand. So miching mallecho seems to be at work.’

  Appleby was now prowling the room rather in the manner of one of the larger cats waiting to be fed in a zoo. It was a room deserving to be called handsome in every way. From the marble floor, for the most part obscured beneath dim and doubtless valuable rugs thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa or similar localities, up to a deeply coffered ceiling to which gilding had at some period been liberally applied, every inch of wall space was occupied by tier upon tier of books in a state of centennial slumber. More books – thousands rather than hundreds of them – were ranged in deep bays or alcoves projecting from the long north wall of the room. The total effect was oppressive, and this was enhanced by the presence of a powerful smell. Even well-kept books, provided they are numerous and old enough, generate this phenomenon. Confronted by all this, Honeybath, although much distracted by the untoward situation into which he had been precipitated, spared a thought for his wonderful vision of Terence Grinton here in his hunting kit. Sitting at ease, perhaps, in that fatal chair…

  ‘Learned Grintons,’ Appleby said. ‘It’s a staggering thought.’ Appleby seemed to be judging it useful to study the books almost shelf by shelf. ‘The Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, for example. Now, just what would that be? I have a notion they were a kind of learned dining club. And here’s…ah, yes – here it is. The dummy section, Charles. You must have seen it often enough. A childish amusement in eighteenth-century libraries. But whither, in this particular case? Wohin der Weg? as Faust asks Mephistopheles.’

  It was almost as if Appleby was
excited, and old habits were overtaking him. He had done no more, of course, than locate, and pull open, a section of shelving that wasn’t shelving at all, but merely a door deceptively veneered with the spines of non-existent books. What was revealed was a further door, apparently outward-opening, and no farther off than the thickness of the library wall. To this door there was a key, but it wasn’t turned in the lock.

  ‘Now, just what lies beyond that?’ Appleby was bringing a handkerchief from his pocket. ‘The library occupies the entire breadth of the wing, so it must simply be open air. A bolt hole from learning back to nature. Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet. Don’t touch the handle, Charles. Fingerprints, you know.’

  Gingerly, and using the handkerchief, Appleby opened this second door upon what, according to his reckoning, ought to have been afternoon sunshine. But it wasn’t.

  ‘My dear Charles!’ he exclaimed. ‘Just what do you make of that?’

  And at this Honeybath was inspired to a little quotation-dropping on his own account.

  ‘Hellish dark,’ he said, ‘and smells of cheese.’

  2

  The smell of cheese was undeniable. It was a smell, indeed, of toasted cheese, as if somebody had lately been indulging in the humble but delectable dish facetiously known as Welsh rabbit. At half past four in the afternoon it was an unexpected smell in a dignified country house, but the explanation of this might well have lain in the fact that what Appleby and Honeybath now confronted was a seeming maze of unassuming domestic offices. If Grinton ran to anyone as archaic as a bootboy or a buttons, it was conceivable that this lowly and juvenile servitor was recruiting himself with a snack in the privacy of his own obscure quarters.

  That our explorers could arrive at any such speculation was due to the fact that ‘hellish dark’ was an exaggeration on Honeybath’s part. He had expected bright sunlight; what he had come upon was merely gloomy and crepuscular. There lay ahead a narrow and ill-lit corridor, with what appeared to be a considerable number of small rooms opening off it on either hand.

  ‘But of course!’ Honeybath said. ‘I remember now. I took a stroll round the outside of the house yesterday, and came on all this. It makes hay of poor James Gibbs’ subdued Palladian design, you know. An entire little shanty town tucked into the angle between the library wing and the main building. Quarters for garden boys and stable lads by the dozen, I suppose. A monument, my dear John, to the inexpugnable philistinism – vandalism, if you like – of the English lesser landed gentry.’

  ‘It does seem a shade dismal.’ Appleby wondered whether Terence Grinton would care to hear himself as coming from this precise social class.

  ‘And all entirely unused and deserted now. Nothing but an occasional rat stirring.’ Honeybath shook his head gloomily, but then brightened a little. ‘I wonder whether we could persuade the fellow to knock it all down?’

  ‘I doubt it. And one must look ahead. The accommodation may come in handy when Grinton is turned into a dump for the delinquent young. And meanwhile we must be said to have other work on hand.’

  ‘Yes of course. The corpse.’ Honeybath opened a door at random, and peered into a small empty room. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘these quarters can’t be quite deserted. There’s this smell.’

  ‘A clinging sort of smell. But it can’t be lingering from eighty years back, or thereabout. Try the next room, Charles.’

  The next room proved to be larger, and not quite unfurnished. It contained a folding table and chair, a camp bed, several cardboard boxes, and a cooking stove fed from a small cylinder of butane gas.

  ‘What might be called a holiday home,’ Appleby said. ‘And simple holiday fare. Observe the plate.’

  Honeybath observed the plate. It stood on the folding table, and on it lay a knife and fork and a substantial slice of toasted cheese. There was also a glass of water, and a small medicine bottle, unlabelled, and half full of pills.

  ‘I suppose they’re really there?’ Appleby asked with an effect of mild humour. ‘We’re not just dreaming something up?’

  ‘They’re there, all right.’ As if to reassure himself of this, Honeybath advanced and poked the plate with a cautious finger. ‘Cold,’ he said.

  ‘Which at least suggests that a solitary feast wasn’t interrupted no more than five minutes ago. Can we gather anything else from this small spectacle?’

  ‘Well, half the feast is unconsumed. Perhaps the feaster’s eye was bigger than his belly. Or his digestion wasn’t too good.’

  ‘The pills might suggest that.’

  ‘Yes – but perhaps it was something quite different. Perhaps he was suddenly alerted or alarmed.’

  ‘Right enough, Charles. But what about a third possibility? Toasted cheese is rather a perfunctory and uninteresting dish. The mind of this lurking character is elsewhere. Some notion suddenly starts up in his mind so commandingly that he must follow it at once. He shoves his plate aside, hurries back to the library – and never again leaves it alive. So the cheese is important, as you can see.’

  ‘Important?’ It was with a touch of irritation that Honeybath repeated the word. ‘For heaven’s sake, John, don’t start talking to me in Sherlock Holmes riddles. This whole business has upset me very much. It’s quite some time since I stumbled on a dead body.’

  ‘Sorry – and of course it’s all thoroughly conjectural. The plate may very well have been cold from the first. But I do somehow like the idea of his jumping up halfway through his meal, whether because he was somehow alerted to your entering the library and finding the corpse, or because some exciting notion had suddenly got hold of him.

  ‘It may be a woman, not a man.’

  ‘There’s a statistical improbability there. The male sex has the stronger predilection for toasted cheese. Females eat poached eggs.’

  Charles Honeybath compressed his lips. He rather envied his friend this ruthless chauvinism. But he considered it indecorous, all the same.

  ‘John,’ he asked, ‘I take it you believe us to be in the presence of a crime?’

  ‘It’s a working hypothesis. We might be more confident about it if you’d thought to take a better look at that dead man.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I see that.’ Honeybath paused, and it turned out to be in search of a small levity of his own. ‘I’ll try harder next time.’ He paused again, not being at all happy with this. ‘There’s one thing I did notice,’ he said. ‘It was the expression on the dead man’s face. I thought of it as malign glee. Really that. A malicious grin, as if he was pleased about something, or enjoying a nasty joke.’

  ‘Rictus,’ Appleby said – but with more of perplexity than conviction. ‘A big gape often remarked in what you might call sudden corpses. It used to be noticed when they’d hanged people.’

  Honeybath felt that he could have done without this information. He also felt increasingly bewildered, and now expressed the fact.

  ‘I can’t make head or tail of it,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. The head and tail are there, all right – although I admit that, even metaphorically speaking, the body is still to seek. As you are a perfectly reliable witness, my dear Charles, we have this: there in the library was a dead man; you came upon it, and at once proceeded, very properly, to tell our host; you left the library for that purpose, locking the door behind you; some person or persons, with the alternative means of ingress and egress we have discovered, almost at once took alarm and removed the body, the whereabouts of which are now unknown to us. Right?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘This room seems to have been in the more or less temporary occupation of a single person. A single bed, and what you might term catering for one – and pills for one – make that point clear. It doesn’t follow that only one person was involved in the total operation – whatever the total operation may have been. Metaphorically again, it’s the total operation – the teleological aspect of the thing, so to speak – that is the missing
body. The why and wherefore entirely elude us at the moment. Right again?’

  ‘Yes.’ Honeybath, although a little distrustful of the philosophical embellishment given to this series of propositions, could only agree. ‘Do we now hunt around further on our own, or do we call in assistance first?’

  ‘An immediate alarm, and sending for the police and so forth, would be the proper thing. But we can give ourselves another ten minutes or so of impropriety. Fossick around this odd set-up a little.’

  ‘There may be a lurking miscreant – or miscreants.’ Honeybath is not to be charged with offering this observation apprehensively. He was necessarily an imaginative man, or he wouldn’t have succeeded as a fashionable portrait painter. But although he could conjure up risks and horrors with some facility, he was by nature a courageous person. Nevertheless, he thought to ask a question.

  ‘John, are you armed?’

  ‘Armed?’

  ‘Carrying a gun, or something of the sort.’

  ‘Good lord!’ Appleby refrained from laughter. ‘Guns and sealed rooms go together, my dear chap. Their natural home is in your story books. And now we’ll take a look at the other rooms in this abandoned Grinton slum.’

  They looked at half a dozen rooms. The disagreeable accretions to the library’s north front proved to be, after all, not strikingly extensive. Here and there were a few sticks of abandoned furniture, but apart from these the rooms harboured nothing except dust and cobweb.

  ‘Not even a bat, owl, or temple-haunting martlet,’ Appleby said. ‘Let’s find our way into the open air. The approach to these aedes liberae may be instructive.’