‘An excellent woman, Mrs Gathercoal,’ Dr Absolon said, a few hours later. He was walking with Appleby across the park, preparatory to offering him the hospitality of Ledward Vicarage. It was from this undisturbed abode, it had been agreed, that the rescue of Appleby’s car might be effected with a minimum of publicity. ‘To organize coffee and bacon-and-eggs after a night like that was a considerable feat. Not to speak of the capital potted char. A most interesting old-world dish.’ Absolon paused. ‘But it is hardly surprising that young David had little appetite. It must all be a terrific shock to him. Particularly as it culminated in finding the bodies of poor Beddoes and the scoundrel Basil.’
‘Each was as great a scoundrel as the other, Vicar.’
‘But surely Beddoes was a mere accomplice, and more than a little mad?’
‘To my mind, nothing of the kind. When I tumbled in on the middle of their plot last night, the Professor may be said to have put on a very distinguished turn indeed. He was as good an actor, in a way, as the fellow one is inclined to call Basil-Leonidas. And Basil had, at least as a young man, actual experience as an actor.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Well, as an amateur and when at Oxford. See Who’s Who. But when he returned to the scene of action so hard upon removing Leonidas’ beard, it ought to have occurred to him not to stink of soap and what they call after-shave lotion.’
‘It was really so odd a circumstance that alerted you?’
‘Well, say that I was at once aware of it – having a good sense of smell.’ Appleby smiled. ‘But really, the instant he entered the corridor, I remember simply staring in astonishment at the effrontery of the proposed deception. They were very rash, to put it mildly, to go ahead with their plan once they knew the identity of the stranger out of the night.’
‘Yourself, you mean?’
‘Precisely. My wits may be growing dim, but I’m a professional, after all. You see, as the thing was plotted, it would be only yourself – called in to substantiate the story of lurking and implausibly chattering thieves – who would be likely to see the briskly materializing Basil hard upon the departure of the offended Leonidas. It was all entirely foolish, nevertheless. Particularly as almost the same complicated preparations must have been made last year – and would have been next year, one has to suppose, if Adrian hadn’t turned up last night.’
‘Yet, basically, their plan was fairly simple.’
‘Perfectly true. In the interest of Basil, who would succeed to the property and then do a quiet share-out with Beddoes, Adrian was to be killed as soon as he turned up, and the blame laid on non-existent burglars. But they elaborated far too much – simply, I suppose, in a spirit of malign and rejoicing ingenuity. The interrupted supper and the clutched poker. All those sound-effects – a little lacking, incidentally, in lucid sequence – which were a mere matter of time-clocks and magnetic tape.
‘Not that it wasn’t all marvellously dextrous. Basil must have done an uncommon amount of brisk skipping around before he presented himself to Beddoes and myself. “Mr Snodgrass is in residence”, forsooth! His manoeuvres had included, remember, the actual intercepting and shooting of Adrian when still out of earshot. What Beddoes would call terrain and tactics, no doubt.’
‘Ah, that admirable book.’
‘But there was one staring indication of the bogus character of the off-stage noises. Out on the terrace, Basil tried out one sequence – simply to test it, I imagine – in what happened to be my hearing during my first unsuspected presence in the library. It was the one of the thieves chattering or whispering, dropping something metallic, and then making off at the double. You got the benefit of it as you came through the park. But I’d heard the rehearsal. The identical sequence twice over! There could be only one explanation of that.’
‘God bless my soul!’
‘But they were both capable of quick thinking. When they got at the truth about David…’
‘I don’t understand that at all.’
‘I’ll explain in a moment. But, when they did, and saw that he must appear to be killed by intruders as well, they did a really brilliant improvisation. Voices again – but real voices this time. In fact their own voices, talking Spanish. They had to reckon, having set their trap, that they might fail to kill the boy, or somehow be surprised, and have to bolt. There would then have been David’s own testimony that it had been our Latin-American friends who had been for some mysterious reason gunning for him.’
‘But there really have been…’
‘Oh, indeed yes. And the reason I wasn’t very briskly backed up by the police in the crisis was that they had got word of them and were after them. Our friends from Azuera had crashed the car they were escaping in, and had scattered. So it required quite a force to bring them in. It was effected pretty quickly, all the same. And it is pretty quickly, too, that these South American gentry have tumbled out their story. It has been the wisest thing they could do.’ Appleby halted for a moment. The herons were still in the water, and their heads were still behaving like automata. ‘They had arrived to do a little burglary…’
‘Which was a most absurd coincidence.’
‘Not really. They had to beat Adrian to it, so to speak, and they just brought it off. Of course they proved to have been under a comical misconception, so that in the end they simply dropped everything, and ran. Literally dropped everything. And that, I have to confess, was something I didn’t reckon on. And my stupidity nearly cost young David his life.’
‘My dear Appleby, I am quite bewildered. You speak in riddles.’
‘Nothing of the kind, Vicar. I am explaining this rather odd affair to you at breakneck speed, and with a lucidity born of years of practice.’ Appleby looked half-seriously at Dr Absolon. ‘Ask me any question whatever, and I’ll carry on logically from that point.’
It was some moments before Dr Absolon availed himself of this invitation. He too had halted, and was studying the creatures hunched in the shallows of the Ledward.
‘God has not died for the white heron,’ he said. ‘God has not appeared to the birds.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m sorry. Only a modern poet’s way of raising an interesting theological point. But here’s your question. What did those foreigners want from a safe, and how did they know it was there?’
‘Two questions, Vicar, but both quite simple ones. Long ago, Adrian Snodgrass let it be known that he had somewhere tucked away documents the production of which would at any time be fatal to some political group or other in Azuera. And at this point we have to rely a little upon what those people’s emissaries (as I suppose they should be called) told Stride after he’d hauled them in this morning. It seems that Adrian, quite recently and just before setting out for England, hit the bottle in what proved to be politically unreliable company. He was coming back to Ledward, he announced in his cups, to get some papers out of a safe hidden behind the portrait of a lady in his bedroom – and the consequences were to be of a highly dramatic order. That’s why, as I said a couple of minutes ago, our recent visitors had to beat Adrian to it. It was their job to find the safe, blow it, check the documents, and then either carry them off or destroy them.’
‘And they succeeded?’
‘They did, up to a point – and, although their investigation proved a fiasco, they might have got clean away had they not been a bit shaken and run into a tree.’
‘A fiasco? The incriminating documents weren’t there?’
‘They weren’t there. Probably they had never been there. Possibly Adrian had dropped the notion of political revenge, and destroyed them long ago. What was there was a certificate of marriage. I’ve never seen it, and I suppose that now I never shall. But I can give you the names, the date, and the church. The officiating clergyman was a Mr Templeman. You see, Mrs Anglebury – not that she has any title to be called that – can be much more precisely communicative at moments than her unfortunate condition of mind would suggest.’
‘In fact the lad we call David Anglebury is the legitimate son…?’
‘Precisely. It was an obscure possibility to be reckoned with from early on. Indeed, you may recall my putting it to you. The marriage between his mother and Adrian Snodgrass was perfectly valid. But the lady quickly proved so dotty that Adrian lost his nerve, and got clear of her by telling her a perfectly ghastly lie. It seems incredible that he got away with it. But the whole thing had been a secret and runaway affair, which presumably made the deception feasible. She believed him. Then, later, nobody much bothered to believe her. Much later still, Adrian met his son, and liked him. His conscience got to work – only it wasn’t a conscience of a particularly expeditious order.’
‘It would by no means have been necessary that he should produce that scrap of paper from the safe in order to prove the validity of the marriage and to effect the legitimation of his son.’
‘Perfectly true. But he wanted to do the thing in style. Or even, you might say, with a touch of theatre. The Snodgrasses (as Basil-Leonidas had the effrontery to tell me about himself) have a theatrical streak to them. But now I come, Vicar, to a fantastic turn in the affair. Adrian is dead: successfully killed by the bogus butler, and his body disposed according to plan. But our South American friends are still hanging on grimly – and Beddoes Snodgrass actually encounters or glimpses them. Coming after the jar of my appearance, it was almost too much for the old rascal. He could only call weakly for Leonidas – in other words for Basil, who was undoubtedly the initiating and controlling intelligence all through. The South Americans, I say, hang on grimly, and blow the safe. They see at once that the only document it contains is totally without significance for them. So they simply chuck it away, and bolt.’
‘Chuck it away?’
‘Yes. And one of our two native worthies – Beddoes or Basil – finds it. That was the bizarre circumstance that beat me. They realized that, if their whole elaborate course of criminality was not to be in vain, David Snodgrass must follow his father Adrian Snodgrass rapidly into the grave.’
‘But if they had simply destroyed the marriage certificate…’
‘No good at all. The discovery that David was legitimate, and heir to the estate, was a thoroughly shattering one. They knew, after all, that their evil star had brought me to Ledward. They knew I would hear about Mrs Anglebury’s supposed delusions regarding a false marriage. And they knew that, having stumbled upon a mysterious crime, I wouldn’t let so dubious a piece of past history go uninvestigated. Even if the poor woman hadn’t come out with date and place as she did, a little organized police investigation would have got at the records. Ledward was as good as David’s – unless David went.’
‘They might have been disposed to feel that you ought to go too.’
‘That’s true. But before going off on that final chase I scribbled three words – just three – for the excellent Inspector Stride. They might have puzzled him for a minute or two. But finally they’d have taken him right to the end of the road.’
‘Three words?’
‘Basil was Leonidas.’
‘A succinct communication, indeed. But about a most complicated affair! From what would you be inclined to say that it all began?’
‘From the open house – the rather fantastic birthday compact which must once have been simply a light-hearted affair between Adrian Snodgrass and an uncle who didn’t like him nearly so much as he imagined. It was the legendary tryst that brought David’s mother here – and the lad himself after her. It was the same legendary tryst that must have set Basil’s mind working. He would see that any reasonable police force would positively expect burglary, missing Claudes and so on under such conditions – and would take an enraged householder shot by panic-stricken crooks as something entirely in order. He worked from that.’
‘He was, in fact, a brilliant crook himself.’
‘Oh, dear me – no!’ The tone in which Appleby said this was almost shocked. ‘The idea of a butler who couldn’t be caught for the very good reason that he didn’t exist, and who moreover had an unbreakable alibi because he was in the presence of witnesses when what would be taken to have been the fatal shot was heard: all that was ingenious enough, I agree. But Coxing and Boxing between two identities – at least intermittently – over a substantial period of time had nothing to commend it except the degree of virtuosity required. And his noises off – all that fun with tape-recorders and time-switches – was just a shade at random, as I’ve said. The woman’s scream puzzled me, by the way. Why should he feed in that? But of course that was real: a viva-voce interpolation, so to speak, by our crazy lady.’
‘You mentioned the Claude. Do you think it will have come to harm?’
‘Almost certainly not. I have no doubt that Basil-Leonidas simply made off with it, and the rest of the supposed spoils, when I so trustingly instructed him to drive away and find a doctor. My guess is that the Campagna with Banditti will be safely in Stride’s keeping by sundown.’
‘We cross this foot-bridge,’ Dr Absolon said presently, ‘and it is the gate of my back-garden that is in front of us. You must excuse the state of the lawns. The leaves have begun to fall rather fast, you know, and I have been tardy in sweeping them up. Naturally I don’t keep a gardener. But one or two of the pensioners among my parishioners are very good. They give me a hand from time to time, and with no thought of pay.’
‘You must let me do the same, while waiting to hear about my confounded car.’ Appleby paused, as his companion had done, to view the vicarage now before them. It was a house of very modest dimensions.
‘I am extremely fortunate in my quarters,’ Absolon said. ‘Thatch is always picturesque. But it is also an admirable insulating agent. And that saves fuel.’ He was silent, and then glanced at Appleby as if a fresh thought had struck him. ‘I hope that Ledward, and the substantial wealth behind it, will not be too much for our young man. It need not necessarily be a blessing, I fear. And it is not as if he had been brought up to expectations of anything of the kind.’
‘David Snodgrass will keep his head, I’d say. Or at least recover it quickly, even if it goes a little astray for a time.’
‘He could, of course, do much good in the parish.’ The vicar had moved forward again. Perhaps it was being on his own ground, Appleby thought, that was prompting him to these very proper professional reflections. ‘It would be pleasant to feel that blessing might eventually come from these sad, and largely evil, events. But have you considered, my dear Sir John, their sober irony? It was a very wicked deed on Adrian Snodgrass’ part that set all this in train years ago. But it was an eventual good impulse, an impulse to repent and make amends, that directly brought about his death.’
‘Very true. But we must not be too hard even on his original course of conduct. The act of perfidy towards the distraught woman he had rashly run away with and married was of course abominable. But he must quite quickly have come to judge it too late for repentance. For Charles Anglebury appeared, a respectable seeming-marriage took place, and Adrian’s child had a father. Within a few months of his sin – for it was a sin – he may have felt that telling the truth could produce only misery and scandal. I have some sympathy with Adrian. But Beddoes and Basil are another matter.’
‘Not wholly another matter. They must come together in our prayers. May God have mercy on their souls, all three.’ Dr Absolon had opened a door, and now stood aside for Appleby to pass. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘whether Mrs Gathercoal might be persuaded to give my housekeeper the receipt for that potted char?’