Appleby made the attempt forthwith. But he had no sooner moved out of his corner of the library than he became aware that the late Maurice Tytherton’s nephew must have been keeping an apprehensive eye on him. The young man was now making for the door. Appleby felt a certain sympathy for him. Archie had twice been carpeted by Inspector Henderson, and it wasn’t perhaps unreasonable in him to feel that this was enough. Moreover that he was in a fine state of panic was attested by the precipitate clumsiness of his present retreat. He had put down his cup and saucer with an unseemly clatter, and had then stood so little upon the order of his going that he had bumped into Mrs Graves quite violently from behind. Mrs Graves had turned and glared at him; they had glared at each other, indeed, with a curious and disagreeable intensity of regard; and then the unappealing Archie, with one further panic-stricken glance at Appleby, had bolted from the room.
Appleby followed, more decorously but with almost the same speed. At least he was out of the library in time to see that Archie, swayed perhaps by the cunning of a hunted creature, had turned not towards the other principal apartments of the mansion but down a short passage leading to its domestic offices. What was now going forward was, frankly if absurdly, a pursuit. When Archie vanished through a green-baize door of the free-swinging sort which prescriptively segregates from their betters the menial hordes of a house like Elvedon Appleby was so close behind him that the rebound of the contraption almost caught him on the nose. This was not a major check; nevertheless when he had coped with it and plunged into a further passage it was to find that Archie had vanished. He could certainly not have reached its other end, so he must have dashed through one near-by door or another. Appleby chose the one closest to him, threw it open without ceremony, and entered the room thus revealed.
What he first became aware of was a culinary object which he had no difficulty in identifying as a rolling pin. He next observed that a certain amount of flour and even pastry still adhered to its surface. Finally, he realized that this normally harmless implement was being employed as a weapon, and seemed about to come down on his head.
Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. Appleby must, he supposed, have contrived some such injunction as this, although phrased more prosaically. For the lady with the rolling pin (who could only be Mrs Catmull, thus emblematically armed, like a saint carrying the appropriate instrument of her martyrdom) set it down, albeit reluctantly, on a table chiefly furnished with cloths, brushes, and silver-polishes. Appleby was constrained to realize that he had unwittingly blundered into what was a sanctum indeed. Here was the pantry of Mr Catmull himself.
‘What you doing here?’ Mrs Catmull demanded. Her tone suggested much more of truculence than of the reasonable deference prescriptively required of her when suddenly confronted by somebody of superior social station. ‘You’ve no business here, you haven’t – nor has anyone except this new Mr Tytherton himself. And the good manners to keep away, he’s had, he has.’
‘I’m sure that’s most commendable.’ Appleby recalled Catmull’s derogatory attitude towards his wife’s degree of educational accomplishment. ‘And I’m very sorry to intrude upon you in this way. I thought I was going to find Mr Archie Tytherton.’
‘If you want him, sir, you can have him, so far as I’m concerned. But he wouldn’t be welcome in this pantry of my husband’s, he wouldn’t. Nothing but a paratroop, that young Mr Archie is, nor ever was anything else.’
‘A hanger-on, Mrs Catmull?’ It was only for a moment that Appleby had been baffled by the apparent ascription of the career of arms to Archie. ‘Living on his uncle, would you say?’
‘His late uncle. This new Mr Tytherton, he’ll give him the right-about, I shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘I see. Well, my conversation with Mr Catmull earlier today suggested, I’m afraid, that he was a little apprehensive of receiving the right-about himself. He resents the possibility – very naturally, I should say, considering how snugly he’s accommodated here.’
As he thus enlarged the scope of his conversation with the lady, Appleby glanced round the pantry. In this adytum, he recalled, Catmull had asserted that all his worldly possessions had their sanctuary. It was a fairly big room, and with a certain amount of furniture, largely in abraded leather, of the sort that upper servants do over a period of years collect from indulgent employers. But perhaps its most prominent object was one which would have startled and not much pleased the Reverend Mr Voysey: a stuffed badger to which some rustic taxidermist had ingeniously imparted a quite needless air of extreme ferocity. For the rest, it might have been conjectured that Catmull shared with his late master a decided taste for the graphic arts. In a position of honour over the large safe in which the butler presumably kept the Tytherton silver hung an enormously blown up photograph, in dingy sepias, of some departed Catmull ancestor. Standing on one foot only, with just the toe of the other elegantly touching the ground, and supporting an elbow on a kind of up-turned drainpipe topped by a fern, he was in fact the Catmull equivalent – Appleby reflected – of that Tytherton whom Sir Thomas Lawrence had depicted gesturing at a ledger. But apart from this exhibition of family piety, Catmull’s taste appeared to incline towards pugilism and the turf, since the dozen or so other pictures, displayed in heavy and hideous frames of some ebony-like substance, were prints of improbably elongated racehorses and all too persuasively gory prize-fights being fought out for the delectation of assembled groups of gentlemen upon grassy swards and amid surroundings of rural calm. Appleby turned away from these evidences of connoisseurship in the interest of furthering his acquaintance with their proprietor’s spouse. Archie Tytherton had eluded him for the moment, but it ought not to be difficult to run him to earth later.
‘Your husband,’ he said with mild geniality, ‘tells me that you’ve read about me in a book.’
‘Ah, then you’re him I thought you might be – Sir John Appleby.’ If Mrs Catmull was impressed to a gratifying degree it was also true that a certain air of suspicion which emanated from her seemed not wholly abated. ‘It’s not proper,’ she went on, ‘what’s been happening at Elvedon. Not proper at all. Shooting poor Mr Tytherton like that – a perfect gentleman in every way, sir–’
‘You had a high regard for your employer?’
‘Well, now – not that he wasn’t a shocking old goat, begging your pardon. But very correct as a gentleman in every way, and this shooting of him like a dog is a very bad thing. But that’s not all.’
‘Ah – these, Mrs Catmull, are familiar words. But to just what do you refer?’
‘The foreigners, sir. Not respectable company any way on. Peering and spying, like I’ve no doubt you’ve heard. The one called Raffaello. Caught him in this very pantry, we did – which is why I now give a hand to Catmull keeping an eye on it.’
‘And with a rolling pin. Well, well. But what do you suppose Mr Raffaello to have been after here?’
‘The spoons, I’d say, or anything he could lay his hands on. Taken into custody, he should be, and remanded and all that, and put away proper.’
‘I’m not altogether unsympathetically disposed to that point of view. But did you say “foreigners”? You surely don’t regard Mr Mark Tytherton as a foreigner simply because he has lived for a long period overseas?’
‘Certainly not. An empire-builder in the Queen’s dominions, Mr Mark has been – and had a very civil word with me not an hour ago.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it.’ Appleby refrained from a discussion of the political status of Argentina. ‘So who–’
‘The other prowler and peeper. Her as calls herself Miss Kentwell.’
‘I’ve heard something about her prowling and peeping. But isn’t she Miss Kentwell? I confess she doesn’t suggest herself as a foreigner to me, Mrs Catmull.’
‘Then with respect, sir, you don’t know what you didn’t ought not to be aware of.’ Mrs Catmull paused on this syntactically complicated reproof. ‘A Russian Bolshevik, she is, and nothing else. Kentwell! If you ask me, Kentwellski’s her middle name.’
‘You astonish me, Mrs Catmull.’ Appleby was able to reflect that this was literally true. He wondered whether Mrs Catmull’s cooking was as bizarre as what appeared to go on inside her head. ‘Suspicion has been more or less my trade. But here is something which, I must confess, has totally eluded me.’
‘I know what I know.’ With this gnomic utterance, Mrs Catmull’s own suspicions seemed to deepen – as they well might while Appleby allowed himself this ironical vein. ‘And so does others in this house. Them girls.’
‘Ah, I’d forgotten. Your housemaids, and so on, make up quite a little colony of foreigners.’
‘And very well-conducted young persons they are. No trouble with the outside men – or not that they’re so careless as to let you hear of.’ Mrs Catmull paused on this generous encomium. ‘On account of the Pope of Rome, that is. Keeps them properly in order, he does. What they do, they have to confess. And when he doesn’t like it, he slaps them down hard.’
‘It sounds an admirable system. But just what are you telling me, Mrs Catmull, about Miss Kentwell and these Italian girls?’
‘There’s one of them does her room. And tidies her drawers.’
‘Garments, Mrs Catmull?’
‘Chests of drawers, and the like, sir.’ Mrs Catmull showed some sign of being offended by this wanton indelicacy. ‘Part of their proper duties, that is. And taught them myself, sir – which is no part of a cook’s junction, as you’ll admit. But junctions get mixed up, when you’re in service as a married couple.’
‘It seems undesirable in junctions. But just what did this rummaging in drawers produce?’
‘Excommunications from the Kremlin.’ Mrs Catmull paused, as she very justly might upon such an astounding announcement. ‘The same being clear,’ she added a shade bathetically, ‘through having Russian stamps.’
‘Miss Kentwell gets letters from Russia. Is that what you are telling me?’
‘Not sent to her at Elvedon, they weren’t. Brought them with her, she must have done. And hidden away in a wallet.’
‘It was obliging of the young Italian lady to tidy her wallet. Have you seen any of these letters yourself?’
‘I have not – nor would be the wiser either, seeing they must be in a heathen tongue. But there was no doubt about the stamps, this girl says. Hammers and sickles all over them.’
‘If Miss Kentwell was indeed an emissary of the Kremlin, Mrs Catmull, it was rather careless of her to be carrying such letters around with her. And even odder that she should have received them through the post at all. Incidentally, how would you account for the late Mr Tytherton’s having admitted such a person into his house?’
‘She infiltrated, that’s what she did.’ Mrs Catmull paused again. ‘Catmull’s word,’ she said. ‘He’s an educated man, he is. Means no more than making coffee to me.’
‘Mr Tytherton would have been unaware of her true identity and purpose?’
‘Just that. Thought her one sort of spy, he’d have done. And all the time she was another.’
‘I see.’ Despite the lunatic cast of Mrs Catmull’s mind, Appleby was rather impressed by this. ‘So what do you think should be done?’
‘An importation order – that’s what she needs.’ Mrs Catmull was incisive. ‘An importation order, and put on the first plane available. And that Raffaello gaoled, like I said. It would be the beginning of a clearance, wouldn’t it?’
‘A clearance which you would then like to see continue?’
‘Well, that’s Catmull’s idea. After all this, he says, they ought to leave the place to ourselves. It’s quite often done, he says.’
‘I was remarking something of the sort to him earlier today.’
‘That’s right. While the lawyers and probate people do their work, and that. Not that I take account of such things.’
‘Ah, yes. Everything will have to be valued, no doubt. And in a place like Elvedon, that is liable to take quite a lot of time.’
‘Well, they’re not coming in here, they aren’t.’
‘I am sure, Mrs Catmull, they will not be so discourteous. And I must apologize for my own intrusion. You will no doubt be having to think of dinner.’
‘A saddle of mutton, sir, and the peas and beans our own, I’m thankful to say – and the same going for the basil for the tomato salad. It all takes some preparing, it does, for a company like the present – and me with no more than a couple of girls from the village to help me, so far as all the kitchen work goes. May I make bold to ask if you will be dining yourself? In which event I’d manage a soufflé, sir, if your taste was such.’
‘That’s most obliging of you.’ Appleby was surprised and gratified by this signal mark of favour. ‘But I shall be going home to dinner, although I may return to Elvedon later. And now I must continue my search for Mr Archie Tytherton.’
‘Ah, him! I’d look under the beds, if I was you. Treacherous, is that young man. Treacherous as a sparrow.’
‘I believe I understand you, Mrs Catmull. Has he been a nuisance to the maids?’
‘A nuisance to the pigs and the chickens, he’d be, if you gave him half a chance at them. Even made passes at me, he has.’ It was with no particular appearance of humility that the robustly spoken Mrs Catmull appeared thus to rate herself below the beasts of the field.
‘I am very sorry to hear it, Mrs Catmull. My advice is to take that rolling pin to him, should he think to annoy you again. However, I judge it probable that, for some time, other matters will be occupying his mind.’