The wine was superb, but only the most evil-hearted of grocers could have purveyed the cheese. Appleby ate it heartily all the same – mostly with the end of a knife, since the bread available at Ashmore Chase was on the elderly side. He found that the morning’s adventure had given him an appetite, and this he took to be a sign that there remained to him at least some vestige of the spirit of youth. In a sense however it was an adventure wasted on him; he had spent too much of his life walking in and out of affairs of this sort; the thing would have come at least with a greater effect of impact to another man: a quietly wayfaring scholar, say, or the simplest of citizens on a country jaunt. On the other hand he was himself at least in a strong position to get on with the matter, since he need waste no time in perturbation or amazement.
And certainly he couldn’t simply let it lie. It had undeniably become his affair, since one can’t see either oneself or another within inches of being murdered and at once merely close the file. Moreover there seemed something helpless and unprotected in Martyn Ashmore’s situation which had the effect of placing additional responsibility upon even the most fortuitously contacted represent-ative of society and the law. That this went with something courageous in the man – that although a rum old creature with some unknown horror behind him he was yet evidently indisposed to flap – seemed no more than a fact constituting an additional claim.
And the first point was clear. Something extremely definite had happened. At one moment, that was to say, Appleby had been supposing himself in the presence of a harmless eccentric – or lunatic, to use a harsher word. In the next moment an event had happened which had at least served to set the old gentleman’s outlandish behaviour in some rational consonance with outer reality. The stone that had come crashing down in that transforming instant might fairly be called a sizeable chunk of just that: outer reality in its most lethal form.
It hadn’t come down by accident. It hadn’t come down as a mere alarming joke. The person who dropped it had aimed it – and had surely been curiously indifferent as to which of the two figures below got killed. Or had the assailant so concentrated on Ashmore that he (or she) simply failed to notice Appleby standing within a few feet of him? It didn’t seem possible. What was perhaps worth remarking was the fact that probability had remained a little against anybody getting killed at all. It had been a murderous attack conducted, so to speak, on the principles of Russian roulette. If Ashmore himself was to be believed – which there was no very compelling evidence to persuade one to do – something of this sort happened to him precisely once a year, and obscurely as the consequence of a bygone horror so hideously hinted that Appleby’s scepticism had faltered before it. Yet even if one granted that Ashmore had experienced some unspeakable outrage, direr still in its consequences, in occupied France, it didn’t necessarily follow that either the hurtled stone or (if they really had happened) any of its annual equivalents were in the causal relationship with those distant events that Ashmore supposed them to be.
Appleby finished his cheese. It was definitely mouldy. He finished his claret. It was faintly musty, as the most perfect clarets are. He didn’t delude himself that the facts he had just been reviewing made the faintest sense in his head. But he still felt that action was required of him. Even if – fantastically – it was true that Ashmore’s life would not again be in danger until a year had elapsed it didn’t mean that a resolute attempt ought not to be made to catch here and now the person who had ridden away on a motor-cycle.
Appleby felt he had already been remiss about this. But the trouble lay in Ashmore’s attitude to his guest, which was bewilderingly fluctuating and inconsequent. At present he was pleasing himself – living in this pathologically miserly and reclusive manner as he did – in dredging up as from some former existence the attitudes of an urbane and practised host, entertaining a neighbouring gentleman amid all the amenities of a well-appointed establishment. The wartime episode, the mysterious annual persecution, its latest exemplification at the very door of Ashmore Chase an hour ago: these topics had somehow become taboo during the frugal repast. It wasn’t at all clear to Appleby how Ashmore would receive a proposal to turn to and prosecute a little detective investigation on the spot. Nevertheless the proposal must be made.
‘I’ve very much enjoyed my lunch,’ Appleby said. ‘And now – do you know? – I’d rather like to climb up and have a look at your roof. And perhaps at the back of the house as well.’
‘My dear sir, I shall be delighted. These would not be my own first choice, and perhaps you will permit me to show you a little more of the house. It is an unassuming place, but at least I can act the cicerone with affection. But you must check me, if I too much indulge in family history.’
‘I don’t think I shall do that.’ Following his host’s example, Appleby rose from table – a plain scrubbed table, for they had eaten in a kitchen. ‘Your family history would interest me very much.’
‘My poor father, Ayden Ashmore,’ Ashmore said, and paused.
They were traversing, at the top of one wing of the house, a long gallery – a gallery indeed not all that long, yet answering respectably to one’s idea of this characteristic apartment in a Jacobean mansion. The portrait was that of a young man in his mid-twenties, and Appleby was less immediately struck by his features than by his attire.
‘In fancy dress?’ he ventured.
‘Nothing of the kind.’ Martyn Ashmore stared. ‘The portrait is by Haydon – Benjamin Robert Haydon.’
‘Haydon?’ It was Appleby’s turn to stare. ‘But Haydon painted Wordsworth! He even painted Keats, who died–’
‘Oh, no doubt. But he also painted gentlemen as well.’ Ashmore, as he achieved this magnificent piece of cross-purposes, shook his head sadly before the young man in his late-Georgian finery. ‘My poor father’s life was a tragedy.’
‘I am very sorry to hear it.’ Appleby, with improbable sums in his head, looked speculatively at his host. ‘At least he can scarcely have died young.’
‘He died in a hunting accident. It was in his ninety-ninth year, when he was already preparing for his small family celebration. It cut me up very much. I was a lad of eight at the time.’ Ashmore moved on. ‘Perhaps it is a shade surprising. But it just so happens that, in my family, there is a tradition of marrying a little late. May I invite your attention to this by Charles Jarvis? It is of my grandfather Silas.’
‘And Jarvis painted another of the English poets, Alexander Pope.’ Appleby recalled his reflections on the life rhythm of the tortoise. He had scarcely been wrong about its relevance to his new acquaintance.
‘Of course,’ Martyn Ashmore was saying, ‘Jarvis painted my grandfather when he was still an Eton boy. You can see that. My grandfather was born in 1720. He was known among his familiars, even to the end of his long life, as “Bubbles” Ashmore. It was the year, you know, of the South Sea Bubble.’
‘I suppose your grandfather married rather late in life too?’ Appleby followed up this harmless question with one which he felt even as he uttered it, to be impertinent. ‘And perhaps you may carry on the tradition?’
‘It’s a question which others are asking themselves.’ Ashmore, who seemed unoffended, produced a malicious chuckle as he said this. ‘But I think you mentioned the roof? There is a point of access to it above the front door. But I am afraid that it affords no very great extension of view.’
Appleby found himself walking on – and presently descending some stairs and ascending others – in a meditative silence. About the Ashmores he was obliged, he supposed, to believe what he had been told. Perhaps Martyn Ashmore was a little embroidering or overstating the facts; perhaps he had even skipped a generation in his leapfrogging progress back to the age of Queen Anne; but notable longevity and a propensity to take up the task of procreation only at an advanced age no doubt ran in his family authentically enough. What was perplexing was the manner in which, while airing these matters, he seemed entirely to have dismissed both the dreadful personal history at which he had hinted and the sufficiently startling event of an hour ago – which he had declared to be only one in a series of such events with which that history continued to implicate him annually.
Perhaps he had an iron nerve, so that what occasioned him a very natural anxiety in the immediate prospect he was at once able to banish from his mind as soon as he was assured of his next twelve months’ immunity. Or perhaps he simply suffered from some disorder of the memory, so that his mental life was subject to pathological discontinuities. If, after all, he had suffered what he had so briefly claimed to have suffered, and seen what he had equally briefly claimed to have seen, then he surely had some title to be a little off his head. And if furthermore – beyond all sober belief as it seemed – he was in fact the recurrent object of a species of diabolically cat-and-mouse revenge, then equally surely he could claim credit for not being vastly madder still.
But now they had climbed a final flight of wooden steps – it was little more than a ladder with a handrail – and passed through a low door. They were in open air, with a flat leaded area beneath their feet, the long spine of a steeply pitched stone roof behind them, and in front a low parapet constituted by battlements of a conventional sort. They were not particularly high up, since the house nowhere rose above two main storeys and a range of attic rooms. Appleby walked to the battlements and looked over. What lay immediately below was undoubtedly the front door. Ashmore had at least brought him straight to the spot from which the attack had been launched. And this seemed good enough warrant for recurring to it.
‘These periodic attempts to murder you,’ Appleby said boldly. ‘Do you regard them as strictly your own affair, or have you been accustomed to report them to the police?’
‘Oh, that!’ Ashmore’s tone, if not exactly dismissive, was that of a man to whom a topic of no great moment has been proposed. ‘I don’t make a fuss.’
‘You must forgive me for appearing merely curious. I realize the thing is no business of mine.’
‘Not at all.’ Ashmore turned to Appleby decisively. ‘Here you are, my dear sir, consenting to be my guest – and after some initial misunderstanding which I regret. And as a result, somebody nearly brains you. I say just enough – or so I suppose – to explain the matter, and pass to less disagreeable topics. But you are certainly entitled to a further word, if you feel that way. What’s that about the police? You told me you were a policeman yourself. Indeed, I’ve heard of you, as I said. Am I to understand that you are acting–’
‘Nothing of the kind, Mr Ashmore. I have no standing in your affair whatever. Perhaps I’m talking entirely out of turn. What happened before lunch stemmed, you say, from some very painful incident in the past. I do confess to wondering whether that fact has prompted you to keep quite mum about these attempts, or whether the local police know about them.’
‘I don’t see the local police doing much about them. Outside their range, if you ask me.’
‘I must disagree with you.’ Appleby spoke more forcibly than he had yet ventured to do. ‘If it is really true that your life is in some danger on only one day of the year, it is evident that the police could ensure your absolute safety upon it with very little inconvenience to either themselves or you.’
‘I think you said earlier that I could manage that off my own bat. I refuse to disarrange my life over the matter. But I may as well tell you that the police do know about it. At least their Chief Constable does.’
‘Colonel Pride?’
‘That’s right – young Tommy Pride. I’ve mentioned it to him more than once when meeting him in a casual way. At drinks somewhere or other – that sort of thing. I don’t, as a matter of fact, go around very much nowadays. I might almost be called a bit of a recluse, you know. But there are three or four neighbours on whom I have a kind of duty to drop in just occasionally. Trouble is, I’m so liable to meet some of my damned relations. Cursed number of Ashmores round these parts.’
This, Appleby recalled, was a note which his host had already sounded. At the moment it seemed a red herring, and he had better stick to the Chief Constable.
‘And what action,’ he asked, ‘did Colonel Pride think it best to take?’
‘Oh, he didn’t take any action! I wasn’t urging anything on him, you know. It seemed to me proper he should be put in the picture, eh? But I wasn’t crying out. Thought I’d made that point with you.’
‘You made it, all right.’ Standing on what must have been the precise spot from which that deadly stone had been dropped or flung, Appleby scrutinized the owner of Ashmore Chase anew. Then he thought of the Chief Constable. Colonel Pride had in recent months become quite well known to him, and although there mightbe aspects of police work in which this gallant soldier was distinguishably an amateur Appleby made no question of his being a thoroughly conscientious person. If he had taken no action as a result of Martyn Ashmore’s story it could only be because Ashmore had so told his story as to give the strongest impression of being gently mad. Pride of course had not enjoyed the additional stimulus to action of seeing a sizeable chunk of stone suddenly fragment itself in the vicinity of his feet. Appleby promised himself to relay his own persuasive experience to Pride as rapidly as might be. Pride was not perhaps to be described as an Appleby enthusiast, but he had accepted amiably enough the rather tiresome bobbing up in his neighbourhood of a superannuated top policeman from London. He would certainly not be disposed to assert that Appleby had been imagining things.
Quite possibly, with the ordinary resources of a detective branch, this deplorable affair could be got to the bottom of almost at once. Failing that, it should be easy to ensure that a year today (whether with Ashmore’s knowledge or not) a disagreeable reception should be awaiting anybody making a felonious approach to Ashmore Chase. Appleby found himself looking forward to this with satisfaction. It was odd how angry he still felt. Often enough in the past, desperation of one sort or another had prompted various people to deliberate attempts on his life. He couldn’t recall ever having been furious about it. There must be something particularly exacerbating in being nearly killed as the mere consequence of a casual encounter during a blameless country walk.
Meanwhile, he wondered whether an old professional instinct could be aroused in Ashmore as well as in himself. If what Ashmore had recounted was true, tragedy had come to him only as a result of his being in some situation which an active and adventurous man could alone find himself in; the background of his story appeared to be the Résistance in occupied France. It should be possible to coax him into a mood in which his reaction to danger and violence would be other than his present mask (if it was that) of contemptuous disregard.
‘Why a stone from your own roof?’ Appleby demanded suddenly. He turned and pointed. ‘I know about that sort of construction, and I’m sure you do too. It’s immemorial, and it’s made to last. One might be able to wrench one of these heavy slabs free, but one couldn’t reckon on it. Why didn’t he bring something handier up with him? Did he want to suggest an accident?’
‘Perhaps you want to suggest an accident.’ Suddenly Ashmore’s attention did really seem engaged, and he pointed in his turn. ‘It could have been an accident – if the stone had simply become detached from somewhere up there near the ridge of the roof. By the time it reached this flat platform its momentum might be such as to bounce it over the parapet. That’s it, isn’t it – and all the rest just an old fellow imagining things?’
‘To be frank, I rather wish that it was – since your story, you know, is an uncommonly uncomfortable one.’ Appleby smiled disarmingly. ‘Unfortunately it just isn’t so. A sharp-edged stone crashing down on this lead might conceivably bounce, but it would leave a substantial gash or scar in doing so. I wouldn’t believe it to have been an accident even if I hadn’t heard that motor-cycle. Besides, you know, the stone didn’t come from high up. It came from there.’ Appleby’s finger went out straight in front of him. ‘Right by the fellow’s hand.’
There could be no doubt of it. A slab had successfully been wrenched from the roof, and the underlying stone thus uncovered was lighter in colour than those surrounding it, so that what had happened was visible at once. Appleby walked up to the place. He had to inspect it only for a moment before suddenly stiffening. Then he turned to his companion. ‘I think you may feel you know,’ he said, ‘just how to interpret that?’
That was a very simple design which had been boldly scratched on the exposed surface with a sharp instrument.
For a moment both men looked at this in silence. Appleby recorded to himself an impression that Martyn Ashmore’s breathing was for the moment not perfectly regular. But when the old man spoke it was detachedly and with a faint irony.
‘Perhaps it isn’t as recent as it looks? A mason’s mark, would you say? They were still very fond of them in the sixteenth century.’
‘No doubt.’ Appleby’s tone indicated that he took no pleasure in this trifling. ‘But if that is a medieval stonemason’s mark, Mr Ashmore, what he chose to sign himself with was the Cross of Lorraine. It was to have other associations in a later age.’
‘Capital plan!’ Lord Ampersand was constitutionally averse to small cash disbursements. ‘And no heel-taps, Archie. We’ll go and tell your mother.’