Finn was standing on the terrace. He had got tired of waiting in the car, and had been taking a prowl round the house, the sickle moon was now high in the sky. But light cloud was drifting across it, and the broken façade of the ancient building gleamed and darkened alternately like a stage-set defectively lit.
‘I took a peep,’ Finn called out as they came up. His voice sounded much too loud in the still night. ‘But I didn’t see any sign of you. Didn’t the old fellow crack one of those bottles of champagne?’
‘What do you mean – you took a peep?’ Giles demanded. ‘Have you been peering through a keyhole?’
‘That lighted window, you idiot.’ Finn pointed along the terrace. ‘There’s a curtain not quite drawn, and it seems to be the old gentleman’s sitting-room. But he must have been palavering with you somewhere else.’
‘We didn’t go beyond the hall,’ Bobby said. ‘And now I think it’s time we cleared out. Let’s get back to the car.’
‘I wonder whether he has opened a bottle of that wine?’ Giles asked. Uncertainty again seemed to have overtaken him. ‘He has an odd way of talking sometimes. Courtly and old-world, I suppose. And he said something about enjoying what I’d brought along. Let’s have a look.’
‘For pity’s sake!’ Bobby said. He was suddenly feeling impatient over this whole affair. But Giles had already moved the short distance down the terrace, and Finn was skipping gleefully after him. Bobby hesitated, and then followed.
‘He isn’t!’ Giles whispered, and drew back from a quick glance he had taken through the half-drawn curtains. Bobby said nothing, but made a similar brief inspection. It was the room with the fire which had been visible from the hall, and Martyn Ashmore was sitting in an easy-chair at one side of the fireplace. Bobby saw him put out a hand to a small table and pick up a book. There was certainly no bottle or glass in evidence.
‘He was merely saying something polite,’ Finn said. ‘Probably he doesn’t drink at all, and will send your blessed cadeau to a church sale.’ Finn’s voice was again recklessly loud. ‘It’s not quite the Christmas season yet,’ he added. ‘But what about striking up with a carol?’
‘Be quiet, you fool,’ Bobby said. ‘And if you both want to come away in my car, come now. This prowling and spying–’
But Bobby’s sentence – plainly to be framed in a key of moral reprobation – never got itself finished. It was interrupted by an angry voice from the near-darkness below the terrace.
‘Stay where you are!’ the voice shouted roughly. ‘If you run, I’ll fire!’
‘Run!’ Bobby hissed. He was clear he wasn’t going to take an order like that. ‘Into the park. Draw him away from the car.’
‘It’s Ibell!’ Already fleeing down the terrace, Giles produced this in a panicky gasp. ‘He’s quite–’
But Giles’ sentence didn’t get itself finished either. There was a loud report, accompanied by the unbelievable sound of a patter of lead on the wall of the house close behind them. The ferocious Ibell – if it was indeed he – not being in a position to fire a shot across their bow, had fired one manically close to their stern.
‘Scatter!’ Bobby shouted. And he ran to the edge of the terrace and jumped. At once a dramatic darkness engulfed him, so that for an alarming moment he wondered whether his blind leap had taken him to the bottom of a well. Then he realized that it had merely been synchronous with the moon’s making a dive into deeper cloud than hitherto. With a madman around, this was all to the good.
He had fallen soft – into a drift of beech-leaves, with leaf-mould underneath. He put up a hand and removed a dry twig from his hair. He could still faintly hear running footsteps. Suddenly he heard, too, the baying of a hound. But no – he didn’t. It wasn’t a hound. It was Finn. And his heart warmed to Finn, whose involvement in this night’s proceedings was not, like Giles Ashmore’s, mercenary, but entirely joyous and freakish. And now the hound abruptly – so to speak – took to the air. It too-whitted and too-whooed. Finn, like the boy so movingly recalled by Wordsworth, was blowing mimic hootings to the owls. But the keeper – if it was the keeper – appeared not assuaged by this gamesome metamorphosis. There was a further angry shout, and the shot-gun went off again. If the chap was really firing into darkness – if he was letting off his bleeding weapon other than straight into air – he deserved to be locked up. Even if he believed himself to have stumbled upon a trio of burglars on his employer’s terrace, he was far from entitled to try and maim somebody.
The racket didn’t appear to have brought Martyn Ashmore out of the house. Perhaps he was accustomed to Ibell’s behaving in this way during his nocturnal perambulations. Perhaps he was just absorbed in his book. But that was unimportant. The main point seemed to be that, like Bobby himself, Giles and Finn had, for the present, got clean away. Particularly if the moon continued covered, there was really very little that Ibell could do in the way of running to earth any one of three young men in prudent hiding in a large park. Unless, of course, Finn started fooling again. Or unless Ibell, if so minded, could summon a real Hound of the Baskervilles to his aid. Only Bobby’s car was a difficulty. If Ibell was aware of its presence, as he well might be, he had only to lurk near it to make a fair cop later on. Fortunately the car was in deep darkness a hundred yards down the drive. Bobby decided to wait for ten minutes or so, and then make his way cautiously in its direction. Perhaps they would find themselves making a rendezvous there, all three, and manage a successful get-away.
If that was at all the proper thing to do. Bobby Appleby, whose intellectual interests and literary pursuits didn’t much alter the fact that he was a very correct young man, found himself not at all sure about this. The whole evening’s adventure had been a plot of sorts directed against Martyn Ashmore – and looked at other than in irresponsible high spirits it had been a plot of rather an unworthy kind. And the further business of peering through that window – which was what the keeper had virtually caught them at – was something that, as between gentlemen, ought simply not to have been on.
This upsurge of what Bobby himself would scoffingly have called sahib-stuff upset Bobby a good deal. Perhaps the only correct course was to walk up to the house again – risking a few pellets in one’s backside – and ring that damned bell and apologize and explain. They ought all three to do that. But if the other two weren’t now contactable, and this was Bobby’s own honest conviction, then Bobby ought to do it off his own bat.
Bobby didn’t. What he reckoned as ten minutes went by, and he had made no move to do anything of the kind. And the reason, he found, was a very odd one. It had something to do with old Mr Martyn Ashmore himself. There had been something equivocal – a good literary word – in Ashmore’s attitude during the brief epilogue – so to speak – to his encounter with his nephew which Bobby had been called in to witness. To put it vulgarly, the proprietor of Ashmore Chase had in some obscure fashion been laughing up his sleeve. In language yet more demotic, he had been pleasing himself with the knowledge that his designing nephew Giles would presently be laughing on the other side of his face.
At this point Bobby Appleby found himself feeling in a pocket for his pipe. He checked himself as he did so – the flare of a match would be just one more folly – and probably without reflecting on the truth of Finn’s assertion that he was his father’s son. But at least his father had confessed to him that a good part of his policeman’s career had been built on hunches, and that hunches were always the better of being controlled by a meditative smoke. This present drift of an odd persuasion through his own mind was eminently a hunch. He could give himself no rational account of it. There was, for instance, only further perplexity in his awareness that it was bound up with something sensed in the hinterland of Finn’s more recent posture in the affair. For what was Finn but a silly ass? Nothing at all, Bobby told himself. He almost spoke the words aloud.
He suddenly found that he was looking at the smooth shaft of a beech – the tree, presumably, amid the fallen leaves of which he had tumbled. In other words, the moon was in business again. He listened intently, and all he heard was the hooting of an owl. He had no difficulty in distinguishing between a real owl and a mimic one. (Real owls, if Wordsworth was to be believed, did have – which shows that an anti-novelist is cleverer than an owl.) Some sort of proper nocturnal order was establishing itself again in the purlieus of Ashmore Chase. It seemed a hint that the best that three young idiots could do was to clear out.
Bobby heaved himself out of shadow – absurdly enough, it took quite a nerve – and walked in the direction of the drive.
Two indistinguishable figures stood beside the car. They might, for all Bobby knew, be a couple of constables, summoned by an Ibell who had come to a better mind. Which could mean that, the next morning, Sir John Appleby would be faced with the job of offering tactful explanations to Colonel Thomas Pride. Boys will be boys. Still scarcely more than undergraduates. That sort of thing. Mr Robert Appleby (author of a promising first novel called The Lumber Room) found himself not liking this idea at all. However, the figures turned out to be Finn and Giles.
Giles looked pretty ghastly – so much so that Bobby found himself wondering whether his was a backside that was really half an ounce or so heavier than it had been fifteen minutes ago. But probably it was only funk. A young man whose ambition it was to snuggle into some womb-like museum or gallery for life was probably not apt for wild doings in the dark.
‘Pile in,’ Bobby said curtly. ‘Pile in, and I’ll start the car. That chap–’
He broke off – as one was apt to do when Finn produced one of those lunatic laughs. But there had been another sound as well. It had come from Giles, and it could be described only as a snarl. Bobby suddenly perceived that this tiresome evening had produced yet another annoyance. Finn and Giles were in the middle of a violent quarrel.
‘Stimied!’ Finn turned and hurled this at Bobby in a kind of mad glee. ‘Giles is stimied. And the old fox is preparing to ply his niblick in the bunker. Robina Bunker. Hooray!’
‘Stop it, Finn. You’re behaving like an idiot. And rather a nasty idiot, at that.’ Bobby’s patience had suddenly vanished. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I don’t think I want to.’
‘You’re a prig, Bobby Appleby. All Applebys are prigs. And as for Giles, he’s a kind of cuckold. Uncle Martyn has booked the Bunker. It’s in The Times. I saw it in the pub.’
‘You’re a bloody liar!’ Giles advanced rather indecisively upon Finn. ‘A bloody liar and a horrid cad.’ Giles’ fury was not impressive. He might have been about to stick his fists in his eyes and blubber.
‘I thought we were going to have the fun of seeing Giles kicked out,’ Finn said. ‘But the old chap played it cooler than that. He sat back and laughed at his youthful rival. He’s toasting his toes, and drinking Giles’ confusion in Giles’ own champagne at this moment, I expect. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever met.’
‘Finn, I’ve had enough of you.’ Bobby had stepped between his two companions. ‘If Martyn Ashmore has really got this girl to agree to marry him it seems to me a pretty poor show. I don’t see anything particularly lovely about your pal Giles’ behaviour, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to shut up.’
‘Prig. Sir Prig, Lady Prig, and Baby Bobby Prig. All the Applebys.’
‘If you say part of that again, Finn, I’ll knock you down. It’s a promise. And I can.’
‘You can’t take a ruddy joke, either of you. I’m off, if I have to sleep under a hedge.’
‘We’re being silly.’ Bobby found it took a good deal of self-control to say this. ‘We’d better begin to–’
He was talking, so far as Finn was concerned, to empty air. The violent young man had turned, swung down the drive, and vanished into darkness.