‘Awfully good of you to have come in and given me early word of the thing,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I suppose it will have repercussions here in due course.’ The Commissioner was standing at his window gazing out over the Thames, now brown and broad and tidal, as it emerged beneath Westminster Bridge. ‘A pity the Boat Race doesn’t come as far downstream as this,’ he said. ‘One would get a nice view. Only it sounds as if, this year, there might have been no Boat Race at all.’
‘Quite so – in which case the Applebys would not have been very popular. Judith says it ought to be a lesson to me.’ Sir John Appleby paused thoughtfully. ‘And I dare say she’s right.’
‘But she took a hand too, didn’t she? And actually with Canadine himself.’
‘Perfectly true. But she didn’t encourage her own son to organize an extravagant and – as it turned out – lethal rag.’
‘Ah, well.’ The Commissioner, who seemed a little at a loss before this aspect of the matter, turned back to his desk. ‘As I was saying, there will be repercussions here. Some of these defrauded people will come asking for their stolen property.’
‘I hardly think they’re likely to get it. Cockayne’s Duccio and Carrington’s Stubbs will by now be in private collections – very private collections – in the United States. Braunkopf is presumably to be deemed the legal owner of the Nanna and Pippa, and will no doubt part with it advantageously to some well heeled art lover quite soon. The Meatyards are unlikely to try to get some money back for “Autumn Woods”. The Lewis and Short Sarcophagus is now home again in college, and will be all right after a good scrub up. As for Canadine’s antique statue, it was never, of course, anything of the sort. There are places in Germany where you can commission gross objects of the kind, and that is probably what Canadine’s father did.’
‘My dear Appleby, I am curious. How did you come to pick out Canadine from, so to speak, the middle of all this nonsense?’
‘It was partly what I’ve just been saying. A valuable antique statue for long leading an unregarded life as a garden ornament is a most implausible conception – as Judith felt at the start. Then Canadine was the only person who, when defrauded or practised upon, didn’t, initially at least, make some public fuss. Canadine only told a few private friends. His little insurance policy, that is to say, was to remain confidential unless it was by any chance needed. He could at any time show that he belonged with the cheated, and so could hardly be regarded as the cheater.’
‘It sounds a crackpot notion to me.’
‘Certainly. But Canadine was a bit of a crackpot. And he was the kind that gets fun out of knowing that he is. But you were asking me how I plumped for him. In the end, it was a matter of the most utterly primitive criminal investigation. He gave Judith a plan of his blessed railway, you know. Well, there – bang in the middle of it – was the vital fingerprint.’
‘I’ve never heard of a twenty-year-old fingerprint. You must – yet once more, my dear fellow – have made criminological history. Canadine was the equerry in the bogus royal visit to Keynes?’
‘Undoubtedly he was. He wasn’t personally known to the Lywards at that time. The affair may well have been planned as a genuine joke – and then Canadine glimpsed that there was, as it were, a career in it.’
‘I’m surprised he lasted so long. In this last business he appears to have been utterly reckless. How did you set him on it, anyway?’
‘By having Cockayne ask him to lunch, and having Cockayne’s youngest son, Oswyn, chatter about the rag he was organizing for his friend who was being sent down, and of the part to be played in it by the sarcophagus. A love of the really freakish was Canadine’s Achilles heel, poor fellow. He fell for it instantly. And his organization was once more superb, you know. He was behind British Railways’ withdrawing their agreement to provide a van. I suppose as an amateur of railways he had a pull with them. And look how he managed the funeral barge, or whatever it’s to be called. He diverted the real one by a false message to some wharf higher up the river. And there he was – together with that wretched Sansbury – at the appointed spot with his own.’
‘How was he proposing to make his effective getaway? Surely he’d have been held up at – what’s it called? – Iffley Lock.’
‘Ah, your Oxford topography isn’t up to date.’ Appleby chuckled. ‘There’s a bridge now, you see, half a mile short of that – Donnington Bridge. It carries something like a whacking great motorway across the Isis. He had only to run ashore there, have a lorry with a hoist waiting – ’
‘But he never made it. He had a shade too much respect for young lives.’ The Commissioner fiddled with a paperweight. ‘I’m bound to say, the fellow had a sense of style. A peer of the realm in quod for that sort of thing would be awfully awkward. Hardly fair on the screws.’
‘I don’t think he meant to commit suicide. He just took an instantaneous big risk because he disliked the idea of manslaughter.’
‘That’s how one has to look at it, no doubt. And it was Sansbury who got the raw deal. In that second of crisis, he had no say in the matter. He wasn’t at the tiller. For that matter, he wasn’t at the tiller all through.’
‘Indeed, he wasn’t. A weak character, if ever there was one. Plenty of cleverness, plenty of conceit. But he certainly got shoved around. Or call it deeper and deeper in. For long, of course, there was no single affair in which his part, viewed in isolation, could not be interpreted as more or less innocent. He was probably slow to see that the eventual addition sum, as one may call it, would be damning. Canadine must have had some ugly hold on him, to make him progressively expose himself as he did. He had the role in a crisis of what Bobby calls the fall guy, poor devil.’
‘It wouldn’t have saved Canadine.’ The Commissioner appeared to recall that some civil inquiry should here be made. ‘And how is Bobby? I hope this business won’t upset him, so shortly before those important final exams.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Appleby glanced at his watch. ‘As a matter of fact he’ll be waiting for me down below with the car.’
‘You ought to have told him to come up.’ But the Commissioner was looking at his watch too. ‘Awfully good of you to have come in,’ he said. ‘We must have that lunch together soon. Get your secretary to ring up my secretary any time. My dear fellow, goodbye.’
‘Shall we be put inside: Oswyn and Paddy and me?’ As he piloted the Rover round Parliament Square, Bobby Appleby asked this question casually enough.
‘Definitely not. And the odd thing is that nobody is likely to be put inside. In all these affairs, various minor villains must have been involved. But I don’t think anybody’s going to catch up with them.’
‘Not you?’
‘Decidedly not me.’
‘Calling it a day, Daddy?’
‘Just that.’ The car was heading for the Great West Road, and Appleby was silent for the whole length of Victoria Street. ‘Straight to college, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I drop you, and drive home.’
‘Yes.’
‘Give my regards to the Master, if you run across him in the quad.’
‘Of course.’
‘Your mother is likely to feel that the supervision of Hoobin, and the apple trees, and my mythical apiculture – ’
‘What’s that? Oh, bee-keeping, of course.’
‘She is likely to feel that these should be my principal occupation for some time.’
‘Yes,’ Bobby said. ‘I’m afraid that’s true.’