It would be theatrical to declare that, very suddenly, the die was cast. But Appleby certainly felt himself, as he eyed the man called Egon Raffaello, moving perceptibly nearer to the life and death of Maurice Tytherton. The uninteresting story of some theft or burglary which had resulted in the loss of a number of not-all-that important pictures: this had instantly turned, as it were, three-dimensional. A curtain with some conventional scene depicted on it – a stately home appropriately surrounded by gardens and park – had unexpectedly lifted. And what stood revealed was a solid set, handsomely stage-carpentered, which (to hold the metaphor) was irresistibly beckoning Sir John Appleby to step across the footlights and take up a familiar role.
‘Oh, good morning,’ Raffaello said. He had jumped to his feet and was still uncertainly poised on them – much as if not wholly without the thought of taking to his heels. But his voice was steady enough. ‘How curious, my dear Commander, that we should meet at Elvedon. But I am forgetting. Not Commander. Sir John. I think, in fact, you run the whole show? I congratulate you.’
‘Thank you. But I have retired. It’s some time – is it not? – since we effectively met. Perhaps you will allow me to say that I have continued to follow your career as well as a secluded countryman can. A compulsive interest attaches to a charmed life, don’t you think?’ With the effect of one owning a good deal of leisure, Appleby sat down on the tree trunk from which Raffaello had started. ‘Do you know that after the Nessfield affair I thought they had you? But not a bit of it. Here you are, never having had to listen to a judge’s hard opinion of you in your life. So I congratulate you.’
‘You can’t be said to be turning civil, Appleby. I fear a morose and acrid dotage is ahead of you. What you have just been saying, by the way, if heard by witnesses, would probably be actionable. And I should be in quite a strong position to sue. No doubt I am regarded as what is called a keen business man. But no art dealer could stay in business without being that. The fact is, I am enormously respectable.’
‘You are most assuredly nothing of the kind. In fact, no adequately informed person would much want to have dealings with you – except, perhaps, for purposes of an irregular sort. So I find your presence at Elvedon interesting. I take it you are staying in the house?’
‘Has some local policeman decided to send you round asking questions? But yes – I have been staying with Maurice Tytherton.’
‘And his death has disconcerted you?’
‘Obviously. We are all – the small house party here – very much upset. When a sudden death occurs, it seems natural to express proper condolences, and then pack up and go. But the police have asked us all to stay till tomorrow. And some of us may have to return for the inquest. Rather a bore, that. But my anxiety to assist the law is, of course, almost celebrated. I’m even perfectly willing to assist you – who may be described as the law in carpet slippers.’
‘They may be useful for getting about quietly.’ Appleby paused. ‘There’s plenty of room on this trunk, without any question of disagreeable contiguity. So won’t you sit down?’
The man called Egon Raffaello sat down. Heaven knows his real name – Appleby reflected – but the ridiculous mix-up of his assumed one is almost offensively absurd. Perhaps Raffaello is still a common Italian name, although I don’t remember ever having shaken anybody so denominated by the hand. And this chap is Portuguese. It’s one of the few facts certainly known of him. Not even a political refugee – whom one might continue to respect even if he has been constrained to fall for a living on the more shady edge of things. Nothing to be said for him whatever.
But that’s not true, Appleby thought. There’s no human being on whom such a verdict should be pronounced. In this hostile universe some of us hold out longer or better than others, and in the eyes of the gods Egon Raffaello – who is a thorough-going pest in mine – is simply an early casualty. Which doesn’t at all mean, however, that he ought to be let get away with something at other people’s expense. So what is he doing here, anyway? One wouldn’t suppose violence to be at all his line. Still, he must be checked out of the affair pretty thoroughly – whether by me or by Pride’s men.
‘Are you in the habit of visiting Elvedon?’ Appleby asked.
‘I’ve never been here before.’ Raffaello produced a relaxed gesture. He was by nature an urbane twister, and his urbanity had been shaken only momentarily by his unexpected encounter with an old adversary. What he would in any case have to tell somebody sooner or later, he had no objection to telling Appleby now. ‘And you’ll want to know whether I came in a professional character. Well, certainly I did. Tytherton wanted to discuss one or two proposals at leisure. And to show me things.’
‘Paintings?’
‘Works of art in general. The collection here isn’t at all remarkable, but it’s worth thinking about, all the same.’
‘From a commercial point of view? Tytherton was what may be called an investor in the fine arts?’
‘My dear Appleby, they’re all that.’ Raffaello’s tone was indulgent. ‘No man in England knows that better than you. Think of all those dukes and marquises with Titians and Holbeins that you’ve hob-nobbed with in your time. Charming and unworldly characters. Removed through centuries of privilege from the base temptations of the market place. But was there ever one of them who didn’t keep an eye on how such things were going?’
‘Some of Tytherton’s pictures went, I gather – and more or less out of the window. I imagine he had given up hope of recovering them. Was he perhaps proposing to make good the gaps by fresh purchases? And was he enlisting you to help him?’
‘It’s a reasonable conjecture, no doubt.’ Raffaello smiled blandly. ‘But matters of that sort are highly confidential, as you know. I could scarcely discuss them without the consent of Tytherton’s heirs and executors.’
‘Even when the manner of Tytherton’s violent death is a matter of police investigation?’
‘Well, well – we shall see about that. The day is still young, after all. By the way, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that Tytherton may have wanted to sell something?’
‘To sell something?’ Appleby looked hard at Raffaello. He was wondering whether this question was as meaningless as its casual tone suggested, or whether it somehow represented Raffaello’s vanity in some fashion betraying him. ‘Tytherton was concerned to have a balanced and coherent collection? He sold off second-bests?’
‘Another reasonable conjecture.’ Raffaello stood up and stretched himself lazily in the sun. He appeared to have wholly recovered from the disconcerting apparition Appleby had constituted, and to be addressing himself to enjoying the situation. After all – Appleby thought grimly – he eluded me once. In fact he got the better of me. Why shouldn’t he be confident he’ll do it again?
‘Or he may have been hard up.’ Raffaello said. ‘Many of us are.’
‘One wouldn’t be prompted to such a notion by Elvedon, or by the way the place is maintained.’
‘Perfectly true. But appearances can be deceptive in this sector of society.’ Raffaello again made a sweeping gesture. ‘It’s a fact of which I’ve had a good deal of experience. One learns to look out for the signs.’
‘And what are the signs here?’
‘I see you haven’t met Mrs Graves. Otherwise you’d scarcely ask.’
‘I certainly haven’t met Mrs Graves – or heard of her either.’
‘And what about Carter? Coming to an understanding with him might be quite expensive, if you ask me. Miss Kentwell, of course, is different. A harmless creature, if there ever was one – although as tiresome as they come.’
‘Do I understand that these people constitute a kind of house party at Elvedon?’
‘My dear Appleby, I see you are by no means au courant. Some of them I should call a little more than that. But you will see for yourself. My own advice to you would be to concentrate your celebrated detective powers on Catmull.’
‘And who is Catmull?’
‘The butler. It’s never safe to ignore the butler. But, on reflection, I change my mind. Go not for Catmull but for his wife. Mrs Catmull is the cook. And if cuisine means anything, Mrs Catmull is the most sinister of the lot.’
Meaningless badinage, although not to be judged morally reprehensible, is seldom entertaining for long. Appleby remembered it now as one of this disagreeable character’s more tiresome propensities. But there were more relevant matters to recall to memory. For example, there was Raffaello’s chief field of professional activity. No doubt he had a good enough line on where to pick you up, say, a Caravaggio, if you wanted such a thing, and knew just where to find a couple of collectors susceptible of being talked into profitable competition with each other for a Monet or a Renoir. The mechanics of inflating a contemporary reputation at a commercially propitious moment were unlikely to be beyond him. And he certainly possessed skill in filtering quietly out of a private collection awkwardly valuable works on which no right-thinking man would like to see the successful collecting of estate duty. It was this last beneficent activity, indeed, that had first commended him to Appleby’s notice a good many years ago. More recently, he had been peddling one or another remote past or dawn of history. He had a little gallery off Bond Street which announced in a refined and reticent lettering: The Arts of the Ancient Orient. He financed what had the appearance of a learned journal but really acted as a sales-sheet with the title Etruria. If you were knowledgeable, you went to him for authentic Etruscan stuff smuggled out of Italy, and got it; if you were less knowledgeable, you did the same thing, and acquired some perfectly respectable fakes. And then – Appleby remembered – there were the displaced lamas and monks and anchorites and archimandrites. These people were always turning up nowadays – fleeing from the threat of the sword, more or less, but with marketable objects of great value in their baggage, and stories about their own just proprietorship of these which nobody in the western world was in a position to check. Raffaello, it was understood, had cashed in on that.
Much of this was rather a long way from Elvedon Court. It did seem as if what might be called Raffaello’s pliability had been his recommendation to the place; in other words, that the late Maurice Tytherton had been up to something not wholly reputable. People who get themselves murdered have often been up to precisely that. Roughly speaking, it is a black mark against a man if he finishes up with a bullet in brain or heart. Still, about Tytherton this remained wild surmise. He might well have been as monumentally respectable as most landowners, bankers, care-ridden industrialists, minor Ministers of the Crown, newspaper owners, and indeed all affluent persons normally are. As for the insinuations in one or two things Raffaello had said – well, that might just be the fellow’s common venomous style. Except that one had to remember there had been the Reverend Mr Voysey as well. Voysey, who was odd but neither venomous nor vulgar, had been constrained to admit that a certain lack of edification marked the Elvedon scene. And who was Mrs Graves? Who was Carter? Could the significance of Mr and Mrs Catmull conceivably be other than a silly joke? Asking himself these questions now, Appleby had to confess to himself that he was hooked.
‘What an estate agent would call an imposing country residence.’ Raffaello had taken a few steps across the little glade to a point from which it was possible to glimpse the roof of Elvedon. He looked like a very minor devil, Appleby thought, taking a brooding and disparaging survey of Eden. ‘Who inherits it? Not I’d suppose, that superior tart, the second Mrs Tytherton. The sponging nephew?
Surely not. But I’m forgetting. There was a useless son, I’ve been told, by a first marriage. He skulks somewhere in South America.’
‘On the contrary, he has the good fortune to be skulking within reach of your backside.’
These surprising words had scarcely been uttered before Appleby was aware of Raffaello sprawling face-downward on the grass. It had been a vigorous and accurate kick. Had the unfortunate art dealer really been a football, he would have gone straight between the posts.