‘It sounds very odd to me,’ Judith Appleby said.
‘It was no business of mine,’ her husband replied. ‘I must get that bird out.’ A thrush had got under the net guarding the raspberries, and for a couple of minutes he devoted himself to ejecting it. ‘I’m not a policeman,’ he then said. ‘Or not any longer.’
‘John, dear, whenever you meet anybody you judge to be a socially pretentious person, the first thing you announce is that you are a policeman. It’s like some City gent in a Victorian novel, bellowing that he’s a plain British merchant.’
‘All right, all right. But stick to the point. This rum death at Allington is not my concern. And there’s another of those confounded birds. These nets are no good. They’re a notion out of Noah’s Ark. This winter we’ll have Hoobin and his boy build cages. We’ll put all the soft fruit inside cages. It’s the only way. I’ve been thinking about it for some time.’
‘Cages, by all means.’ Judith clapped her hands expertly behind the second thrush. She had come home by the mid-morning train, and they were making a round of the garden. ‘And perhaps you should keep bees. There’s said to be a lot of intellectual interest in them. You could embody your observations and researches in what used to be called a monograph.’ She lowered the net into place again. ‘Of course, I can see that this affair is very old-hat.’
‘What do you mean – old-hat?’
‘ Death at Allington Park. It sounds like the most antique sort of detective story. But, in fact, it’s something that has happened to one of our neighbours. And it’s unexplained.’
‘It doesn’t seem to be a neighbour who got himself killed. The body conveyed nothing to Owain Allington. As for its being unexplained – it’s early days to say that. No doubt the police and the medical people will work it out.’
‘I suppose, John, you’ll have to answer questions yourself?’
‘No doubt.’
‘Do you know, I doubt whether you’re going to strike your local colleagues as a man of much observation. How large is this gazebo-thing the show was run from?’
‘Surprisingly large to be perched up on stilts like that. Perhaps twelve feet square – if my observation is any good, that is.’ Appleby looked dubiously at Judith. What she was going to say wasn’t exactly obscure to him.
‘And you were shut up in it for quite some time, fooling around with that lumière, and quite unconscious that you were cheek by jowl with a corpse?’
‘There was only a very low light. And no question of being cheek by jowl with the thing. It was crumpled in a corner, and more or less under a bench.’
‘That’s one of the things which don’t make sense. The electrocuting was of the instantaneous sort, and not the nasty hang-on-until-charred business?’
‘It was nasty enough. But you’re quite right.’
‘Otherwise, there would have been a kind of cook-house smell.’ Judith made this revolting point dispassionately. ‘So I don’t see how–’
‘No more do I. It was curious that the chap tumbled himself so unobtrusively into a corner.’
‘It was Owain Allington who went up the ladder first?’
‘Yes.’
‘Into the dark?’
‘Yes.’ Appleby smiled at his wife. ‘We’re quite getting somewhere, are we not?’
‘The first thing Allington did was to shove the corpse out of the way. Then he switched on this low light as Sir John Appleby – a dignified figure who is not to be hurried – lumbered majestically up the ladder.’
‘Laughter in court,’ Appleby said. ‘The witness appeared discomfited.’
‘But it still doesn’t make sense. For why should he do anything of the sort?’
‘Why, indeed?’ Appleby looked worried – but this was because he had failed to count accurately the peaches on the old brick wall which they were now facing. ‘Perhaps I haven’t made it clear that my lack of observation continued to the end. I’d have left the blessed gazebo as ignorant of the corpse as I’d entered it, if Allington himself hadn’t absolutely invited me to find it.’
‘You mean that he said, “Look, Appleby, there’s a dead body”?’
‘Not precisely that. He said, “What’s that bundle of stuff in the corner?” And I went over and found what I found. If he knew the body was there – and it’s a perfectly fantastic notion, anyway – and wanted me to find it, he might as well have let me find it at the start, and not made a dive for it when he first entered the place, in order to shove it out of sight for a time. Isn’t that obvious?’
‘Not in the least. He may have felt that an extra ten or fifteen minutes would make it more certain that the chap really was dead.’
‘You have the most macabre imagination of any woman I have ever known. Here is some wretched accident with a live electric cable, and you start fumbling round to find something suspicious in the behaviour of a highly respectable landed proprietor.’
‘You oughtn’t to expect me to do any more than fumble. I’m just an amateur. But you’re a professional, and ought to be able to get straight at the truth.’ Judith produced this argument with a great air of lucidity. ‘It would be dreadful if poor Mr Allington did come under any sort of suspicion. So I think you owe it to–’
‘Considering that you’ve just been cooking up a sheer rigmarole against the fellow–’ Words failed Appleby. ‘I think I’ll spray this one,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of the leaves. I’ll do it this afternoon.’
‘But, John, we’ll be at the fête.’
‘Fête! What fête?’ Appleby looked at his wife in alarm. ‘I detest fêtes.’
‘The fête at Allington, of course.’ Judith seemed entirely surprised.
‘There can’t be a fête at Allington. A death yesterday, and a fête worse than death today: it just wouldn’t do.’ Appleby paused, but this fatigued joke raised no mirth in Judith. ‘They’re bound to put it off.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Judith shook her head decisively. ‘Not just for an unfortunate accident.’
‘You’ve just been maintaining–’
‘It will give you another chance to look around.’
‘I don’t want another chance to look around. I refuse to go to Allington’s wretched fête. The vicar over there runs a gambling hell. It’s something that, in my position, I ought not to countenance.’
‘I really think you must, John. It wouldn’t be civil to Wilfred Osborne not to.’
‘Wilfred Osborne? What the dickens has he got to do with it?’
‘He makes a point of always going to the affair at the Park. As the former owner, he feels it would be ungracious to stay away.’
‘Very proper, no doubt. But I don’t see what it has to do with us.’
‘John, it’s why I came back by the early train. I’ve asked Wilfred to lunch, and said we’ll all go across together.’ Judith glanced across the garden. ‘And here he is.’
Osborne, spare and oddly elegant in ancient tweeds, gave them a wave – genial, but at the same time indicating that Sir John and Lady Appleby must wait their turn. Osborne was conversing with their gardener, the aged Hoobin. The exchange began with formal courtesies, modulated into lively and contentious debate, and closed upon what appeared to be a note of harmonious despondency. Hoobin shook his head gloomily at Mr Osborne, and Mr Osborne shook his head gloomily at Hoobin. The fatality that lies in wait for all horticultural endeavour was common ground between them.
‘Judith, my dear, you look extremely well.’ Osborne kissed his hostess and shook hands with Appleby. ‘How are you, Appleby? Not too bored, eh? Very little scope for the fingerprints, and all that, in Long Dream, I should say.’
Appleby made a suitable reply to this humorous sally. He had done a great deal of living on terms of mild acquaintanceship with people who appeared to have known his wife intimately from her cradle. He rather liked Wilfred Osborne. His conversation could scarcely be called intellectually stimulating, but it was inoffensive even when slightly absurd. And his manners were of the kind that can’t go wrong; he had the flawless confidence and the polite diffidence of a man who has never had to give his position in the world a thought. It was a position which had, indeed, taken quite a tumble. Like Dogberry, Osborne must have had losses, since he had once lived in a large way and now lived in a small one. But there was not the slightest sign that this change in material circumstances had made any mark upon him. He was today what from his birth he had been. The great-grandson of the tallow King of Victoria’s middle time seemed to embody the aristocratic idea much more securely than did the descendant of the Cavaliers and Crusaders who had supplanted him at Allington Park.
‘Hoobin is worried about the moles,’ Osborne said. ‘And quite right, too. Your upper spinney’s alive with them, and it stands to reason they have to get down to the stream. And you can see what that means, Judith. It means your croquet lawn. One day you’ll ask all your friends to a tournament – all those dead-keen old ladies and gentlemen, my dear – and they’ll all spend a wakeful night planning the what-d’you-call-it – the strategy of their game. But that same night the moles will have been at work. So when the company arrives, brandishing its mallets–’
‘It sounds a catastrophe,’ Appleby said. ‘So what should we do?’
‘You’ll find that Hoobin wants to bring in the mole-catcher. But that’s because he has a family interest. It’s Hannah Hoobin’s boy who is our local mole-catcher now.’
‘Hannah Hoobin’s boy?’ Appleby was now accustomed to this sort of conversation. ‘Is that the old fellow with the grey beard?’
‘That’s Hannah Hoobin’s boy. But have nothing to do with him, Appleby. Shoot the creatures. It’s the only way.’
‘Shoot them!’ Appleby was dismayed. ‘I shoot squirrels, and I shoot pigeons, and I rather think that soon I shall have to be shooting rabbits. But I’m blest if I’m going to start on the moles. Besides, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a live mole in my life. They’re of a reclusive habit, I’d say.’
‘My dear Appleby, you don’t need to see them.’ Osborne was harmlessly amused by this innocence. ‘You get a stepladder, set it up over each mole-hill in turn, and fire straight down into it. Of course the timing’s important. Moles, you know, go by the clock. Twelve noon used to be the time. But that was in the old days. Summer time may make it a bit chancy. In which case, I’d try moth-balls. Moles don’t care for moth-balls at all.’
‘I think, perhaps, we should go in and begin lunch,’ Judith said. She felt that John might support all this rural lore better over his cold salmon and hock. ‘And we don’t want to miss the opening of the fête. That’s always fun.’
‘Judith and I missed the son et lumière,’ Appleby said over the coffee. ‘But Allington gave me an account of it last night. He appears to have enjoyed it, really – although he was putting on a bit of a turn about how upsetting it had been.’
‘And now,’ Judith said, ‘there really has been an upset. Have you heard, Wilfred? Mr Allington took John to look at the lighting equipment last night, and they found a dead man. He had received a lethal electric shock.’
‘Good Lord!’ Osborne had put down his cup. He looked very startled. ‘Somebody who had strayed in?’
‘He was still unidentified when I came away,’ Appleby said. ‘It does look as if it may have been a matter of rash curiosity. And Allington has a curious story about one consequence of this show he has been putting on. There was something about treasure in it – and people have actually been found wandering about the park in the night, treasure-hunting. It sounded a bit unlikely to me, and I couldn’t be certain that Allington himself was being quite serious about it.’
‘There was always a legend about treasure.’ Osborne spoke thoughtfully. ‘I remember it quite firing my imagination as a boy. In fact, my brother and I went digging for it. I haven’t thought about it for years, but no doubt the story still lives on. It’s rather a pleasant memory, so far as I’m concerned. I’d hate to think of it leading to anybody’s death.’
‘No need to, at the moment.’ Appleby gave a brief account of his experience of the previous night. ‘I can’t see how any notion of hunting for treasure would take a chap up among all that electrical stuff.’ Appleby paused, suddenly frowning. ‘Osborne, you attended this affair?’
‘I went along on the first night. As Judith knows, I’m careful not to seem standoffish about anything at Allington. And this was a good idea, without a doubt. Jolly well done, I thought, and pots of money for charity.’
‘Did the part about the treasure suggest one likely spot for it more than another?’
‘I don’t very clearly remember. To tell you the honest truth, Appleby, I got a bit sleepy at times. History, and all that, tends to have that effect on me, I’m afraid. Not that it wasn’t tiptop, as I said. There was what you might call a will-o’-the-wisp effect when they told about the treasure. You know what I mean: lights darting here and there, and always deeper into the park. Come to think of it, they always seemed to end up in the same spot. As if that was the goal, you know. But it was very confusing. That was the idea, I suppose. The place wouldn’t have been easy to identify afterwards.’ Osborne shook his head. ‘I see what you’re getting at, of course. But it would only be a wholly uneducated person – indeed, a half-wit, wouldn’t you say? – who could take anything of the sort as other than make-believe. No sensible person could suppose that an actual likely hiding-place was being – what’s it called? – spot-lit.’
‘That seems fair enough.’ Appleby saw that Judith was looking at her watch; she seemed genuinely determined to be at Allington in time for the start of the afternoon’s proceedings. ‘But suppose it was rational to believe that the will-o’-the-wisp was a reliable guide. There might then be sense in turning it on again, in order to take accurate observations at leisure. Allington actually invited me to get going on it myself. I don’t at all know how it would have been done, since all I ever did last night was to flick a switch or two at random. But one imagines there must have been some sort of script or score or notation. The whole affair – the lumière part, I mean – must have been programmed to go through certain sequences at command. You’d do this or that, and the treasure-hunt sequence would result – duly synchronized, of course, with the relevant chunks of son. It is just conceivable – and I may say, Osborne, that it’s Judith who has set me taking such a fantastic view of the affair – it is just conceivable that the chap who came to that nasty end thought that, there under his hand, he had some clue to finding the treasure.’ Appleby paused. ‘I don’t think it likely. But it’s a line. It’s one line – for a start.’
‘I’ll get out the car,’ Judith said and slipped quietly from the room.
‘Osborne,’ Appleby asked thoughtfully, ‘I think you did know Judith from her earliest years?’
‘Certainly. I can remember her in bonnets and long clothes. Queer things they dressed infants in in those days.’
‘Would you say that, from the first, she was peculiarly adept at getting her own way?’
‘That puts it a little strongly, perhaps.’ Wilfred Osborne wasn’t at all at a loss before this question. ‘But she had marked strength of character from the first. Most important in the – what would you call it? – battle of life. I often reflected that the fellow who married her would bless himself. Splendid housewife, too – eh? Capital lunch.’