I was peering at the mirror – as if that were at all likely to afford a clue to Cudbird’s speculations – when the door opened and Hubert Roper came in. He seemed to have no disposition to question our presence, but walked directly to the window and looked out over the park. I moved to his side. Unbroken snow was below us; beyond, the city sullenly resisted the pressure of a leaden sky. To the left, and closer than I had ever realized them to be, back-to-back houses spilt themselves down the valley-side in parallel rows, like grimy tentacles abruptly lopped. Everywhere, above black roofs snow-powdered, slow smoke rose grey and black to heaven, so that the city showed like a vast and cinereous altar whose useless offerings smouldered in a void. A lurid sun hung low as a furnace door in a foundry, or like a burning football tumbled between the goal-posts of the brewery chimneys. And far away down the valley, as if to suggest that here was but an outer circle in the inferno of industrialism, lay a blacker smudge that told of iron and steel in a neighbour town. That somewhere winter brought the earth repose, that somewhere the freshets drew their speed from unsullied snow: this was impossible to believe. Hubert looked intently at the brick and slate and smoke. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘what a fool I was to go south and paint their damned silly mugs!’ He turned to Cudbird. ‘Do you know that I’ve given twenty years to painting mugs that are all as alike as the bottoms of identical twins? While all the time there was that.’ And he jerked his thumb backwards at the window.
I was startled; for me the scene spelt nothing but depression. But Cudbird appeared to be startled too. ‘You find faces monotonous? Now, that’s very interesting. I should hardly have believed it. Why, even canaries–’
Hubert shook his head absently. ‘My dear man, canaries live in a state of nature – more or less. But human features are coming to compress themselves more and more within a few masks. Three or four masks to each sex in each social class, and faces have to conform. It is very boring, believe me. Of course back-to-backs are monotonous too. But one can put a quarter of a mile of atmosphere between oneself and them. And they gain in mystery and beauty with every yard.’
‘A case,’ I said, ‘of distance lending enchantment to the view.’
It was a banal remark, and Hubert contrived to give the impression of inspecting it gloomily. ‘Distance,’ he remarked presently, ‘would lend some enchantment to those confounded policemen. They’re here again, you know. First Leader badgering people about times and places. And now Appleby collecting slips of ivy in the garden. You may well look surprised. I came on him while he was at it and asked him if it was by way of souvenir. He said that was it. Incidentally, he was looking at the stuff in all gloom, as if it had let him down. I hope he grows really discouraged and goes away.’
‘You don’t think,’ Cudbird asked, ‘that the shooting had better be cleared up?’
Hubert made no reply but perched himself on the table amid a litter of sketches. He picked up a crayon and began to scrawl on the back of a portfolio, his gaze moodily lost in the cheval-glass. I broke the silence. ‘Perhaps you agree with me that the thing was a momentary madness and is best forgotten?’
Hubert glanced at me vaguely. ‘Momentary? Oh, assuredly. Takes no time to pull a trigger.’
I was disturbed by this deliberate inconsequence. ‘Well, perhaps not quite as momentary as that. Appleby has a theory that someone saw a chance of shooting Basil, went to get a weapon, and failed to notice that in the meantime Wilfred had taken Basil’s place. That gives the thing a certain sinister deliberation. But even if that happened I regard the whole series of events as a single aberration. And if I know anything of human nature – our sort of human nature in this house – the only sequel will be horror and recoil. There will be no second attempt. Don’t you agree, Hubert?’
Hubert stopped fiddling with his crayon. ‘I can’t say I do. No. I think your position is forced and risky. Decidedly risky. The truth is, Arthur, that you are the sort of person who would do a good deal to avoid a vulgar scandal. Cudbird, don’t you read him that way?’
Cudbird said nothing. Hubert looked at Cudbird as if detachedly interested in the way that Cudbird was looking at him. In the silence there floated in through the window a sound of sparrows scuffling in the eaves. I felt baffled and alarmed. ‘Appleby–’ I began.
‘It’s odd,’ interrupted Hubert, ‘how this Appleby stuffs Arthur with ideas and sends him running round. The police are telling us a lot. But what ought we to tell the police?’ His fingers jerked nervously on the crayon. ‘Where we were at the time – that sort of thing. I’ve told them I was in my room.’ He laughed vaguely. ‘Except for yourself, Arthur, about everybody has told them so. I wonder how many fibs that involves?’
Cudbird, who had picked up a drawing and perched it critically against the wall, turned round on this. ‘Perhaps everyone concerned has an irrelevant secret to hide. But somewhere someone has a secret which is relevant. It’s teasing, you know.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Twelve hours now, and the cat is still in the bag. Will it turn restless and give itself away? Or all the time’ – and Cudbird set up another drawing and cocked a considering head at it – ‘is there some chink through which a whisker or the tip of a tail is showing?’ He nodded his head in the slightly oracular way he occasionally affected. ‘There’s a relevant secret somewhere.’
‘Are you sure?’
We turned round at the sound of a new voice. It was Appleby who had slipped into the room. Viewed by daylight he looked older than I remembered him. Or it may have been a certain air of anxiety which gave this effect: he had the appearance of a man dissatisfied with his own efforts.
‘Are you sure?’ he repeated. ‘What if the cat is a Manx cat, with no tail to protrude? And that’s how I really feel about this problem: something missing.’
‘A Manx cat?’ said Hubert. ‘Ferryman here would like to see the mystery behave like the Cheshire sort and just fade away.’
Appleby looked soberly from one to the other of us. ‘Something missing,’ he reiterated. ‘That’s it.’
As if he were being fitted with one of his new shiny suits, Cudbird placed himself carefully between the big mirror and the cheval-glass. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Cecil Foxcroft is said to be missing. What about that? But I’m not sure myself that we haven’t everything to hand for solving the riddle.’
Appleby paced across the attic, turned round, surveyed first Hubert and then myself. I had the uncomfortable impression that he was recording us as thoroughly unsatisfactory exhibits. ‘No,’ he said – and his manner was brusque as it had not hitherto been, ‘there’s something missing and I know it.’
Hubert swung himself off the table. ‘Rather a negative piece of knowledge, is it not?’ He took up a palette and began to scrape at it. ‘And we should hate to think of you wasting your time.’
If this was a hint Appleby ignored it. ‘I really don’t think I’m doing that,’ he said. ‘This conviction that something is missing – it may be useful. Yes’ – his voice was hesitating in evident absence of mind – ‘yes… I think you may find it that. It is what I felt from the first. Otherwise I would scarcely have pushed in.’
We looked at him in perplexity. ‘Mr Appleby believes,’ I said, ‘that the missing piece will fall into place as soon as he remembers a bit of poetry – something about mist and snow.’
Turning away from the window through which he had been peering at the back-to-backs, Appleby shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly a matter of a missing piece. Nor – however interesting Dr Foxcroft’s proceedings may be – of a missing man.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘If Ihad this fellow Beevor after me I’d nip out of a window myself. Incidentally, Beevor has arrived. He and Wale are discussing the case in absentia in the library. Not, one would imagine, the most satisfactory of clinical methods. And Mrs Chigwidden has been in conference with them too. She has a theory.’ Appleby was speaking in disjointed sentences which made me suspect that his mind was not entirely on what he said. ‘Perhaps Dr Foxcroft has a theory also.’ He glanced at us ironically. ‘Who hasn’t?’
‘I understood,’ I said, ‘that Lucy Chigwidden was reluctant to divulge her theory to the police.’
‘She is quite unaware that she has divulged it.’ And Appleby treated me to a grin which might have been reckoned – unfairly perhaps – faintly conceited. ‘Or that it is wholly untenable.’ He turned to Hubert. ‘For there is one – just one – piece of positive knowledge that I do possess. Dr Foxcroft didn’t fire that shot. But anyone else – barring Wilfred Foxcroft himself – might have. Any of you might have.’ Appleby paused and I had the impression that all this was somewhere a deliberate marking time. ‘Dr Foxcroft alone has an alibi.’
‘Cecil has an alibi!’ I cried in astonishment. ‘But we understood–’
‘Yes. But Dr Foxcroft’s devotions were not performed in solitude. In fact’ – and for a moment Appleby looked the most wooden of policemen – ‘the young person’s name is Rose. The servants have been questioned; the fact emerged.’
‘This,’ I said, ‘is what one gets by raking about. And no wonder that Rose was upset by Lucy’s remarks. I am shocked, and I can see that Cudbird is too.’
Hubert chuckled without much mirth. ‘One imagines that Cecil’s advances would be indecisive and embarrassed. I do not suppose that Rose lost her virtue – or as much as her breath.’
‘But Cecil has certainly lost his head.’ I turned to Appleby. ‘Is this indiscretion known to Wale? And is that why…’
Appleby had gone to the window and was drumming gently on the sill; it struck me again that he was waiting for something other than the conversation of Hubert, Cudbird, and myself. Now he turned round. ‘It would hardly explain his wanting to make a will. Nor his sudden bolt.’
‘He was due,’ said Hubert, ‘to lunch with a parent – awful man called Podman who makes motor-bodies over in Riverton. I suppose someone ought to ring up and say he’s ill. For I suppose he is ill. Going to be dam’ well dammed up by Beevor.’ Over this joke – characteristic of Geoffrey rather than of his father – Hubert laughed with even less enjoyment than before. He tossed his palette on the table and paced restlessly across the attic. ‘What the devil of a lot of interesting talk. Nothing bores me more. Can’t we have a spot of action?’
‘Action?’ said Appleby. He smiled with an affectation of vague geniality. ‘Oh, no. We just wait about.’ He put his hands in his pockets.
Cudbird, as if prompted to take up a contrary attitude, moved briskly towards the door. ‘To keep up with John’s waiting about,’ he said, ‘you have to look pretty nippy. As for action–’
‘Yes, action.’ Hubert’s voice rose insistently. ‘This chatter gets nowhere.’ He paused, and I was conscious of his giving me an odd look. ‘If only the unknown would take another crack at Basil the thing might begin to work out.’
‘I think,’ said Cudbird, ‘that Sir Basil is safe enough at the moment.’
‘From what you said last night’ – I turned to Appleby – ‘I gather you really think there might be some danger of Basil’s being attacked? And Cudbird has several notions which point to the same possibility.’
Appleby shook his head; he seemed increasingly preoccupied. ‘No, I hardly think there’s much danger. Perhaps I was just trying something out on Sir Basil.’ He smiled his absent and engaging smile. ‘As Mr Roper says: a lot of interesting talk. All over the house. Theories rather than deeds, perhaps, are incubating at Belrive. Don’t you think so, Mr Cudbird?’
Cudbird was still standing by the door; his reply was lost in the sudden screech of the Cambrell siren. ‘Twelve o’clock,’ I said, ‘and it seems as if we had scarcely finished breakfast.’
‘Twelve o’clock?’ Appleby took his hands out of his pockets and looked innocently surprised. ‘Dear me, perhaps we ought to be going downstairs.’
‘Perhaps you ought,’ said Hubert. ‘You have all been very generous of your time already. And I mustn’t be greedy and expect more than my share.’
Appleby amiably smiled. ‘I am sure – and Mr Cudbird is even more sure – that you are quite absorbed in your work.’ He glanced at the brewer and I thought that his smile took on the character of a private joke. ‘But perhaps you will come down too? I have just remembered’ – and Appleby’s features took on the expression of a man who had just remembered – ‘that Leader is proposing a sort of conference at twelve.’
‘A conference?’ I said suspiciously.
‘In the library. We must hurry or we shall be late.’
With Cudbird leading the way we trooped downstairs. Everybody was in the library – or everybody except Basil and Cecil. Even Cambrell had appeared once more. And at a desk near the middle of the room sat Leader supported by a sergeant of police. We edged ourselves into chairs, and I noticed that Appleby dissapeared into a shadowy corner. Then we waited. Nobody had anything to say, or any apparent idea of what was going forward. The effect was uncommonly solemn.
A long and somewhat fidgety silence was broken by an important cough from Leader. ‘Our business–’ he began.
The sergeant murmured something in his ear. Leader broke off and nodded. The sergeant rose and rang a bell. A constable appeared, was given whispered instructions, and departed. The police, we had to realize, had descended upon Belrive in a flood.
‘I am afraid,’ said Leader, ‘that we can scarcely begin without Sir Basil.’ He tapped the desk impatiently. ‘But he is unlikely to be long. He promised to be here with the rest of you at noon.’ And Leader fell to studying his notebook. It had the appearance of having grown larger overnight. He turned a page; the rustle fell upon an increasingly nervous silence.
A couple of minutes went by. Leader, I thought, was passing from mere impatience to apprehensiveness. At the sound of a footstep in the hall every eye turned towards the door: it was the constable again. He murmured to Leader, crossed the room, and murmured to Appleby. And it seemed to me that between the two men there passed a guarded but startled glance.
Silence descended once more; once more it was broken by the sound of footsteps. But this time of running footsteps. The door flew open: Richards appeared with yet another constable behind him. He looked distractedly round the room, hurried across to Leader. ‘Sir Basil,’ he cried; ‘Sir Basil has been attacked in the ruins. An attempt to murder him. They’re bringing him up to the house.’