A Connoisseur's Case (23 page)

‘An exhibit?' Coulson was startled. ‘Anything you like.'

Amid another baffled silence Appleby crossed the library and threw open the beautiful double doors which were its main entrance. He stood back, and there was a sound of heavy movement outside. Then four constables entered. They were carrying with effort a large oblong wooden crate. They lowered it carefully to the floor and withdrew.

‘How did you come by that?' Channing-Kennedy asked the question.

‘From close by the Jolly Leggers, as a matter of fact. It was on a punt, some twenty yards inside the tunnel.'

‘How damned odd.' Channing-Kennedy drained his glass and stood up. He gave Bertram Coulson his affable smile. ‘Have another of these, old boy, if you don't mind.' He strolled over to the table with the decanters, which stood in a window embrasure. ‘And what's inside?'

‘Inside the crate?' Appleby paused. ‘Do you know Mr Coulson's butler?'

‘Of course I don't know Mr Coulson's butler.'

‘I thought you might. His name's Hollywood. And what is inside the crate is Hollywood's dead body.'

This time, the silence was a stunned one. It was broken by Mrs Coulson, who gave a low cry.

‘In a manner of speaking, that is to say.' Appleby looked straight at Channing-Kennedy. ‘Put it that what is in that crate means that Hollywood is as good as a dead man. Or say a hanged man. Quite prosaically, what the crate contains is something – or something looking like – what would be called a
chinoiserie
-decorated Chinese lacquer kneehole writing table of Serpentine shape.'

These fantastic words had an instantaneous and equally fantastic sequel. There was a crash of glass, and Channing-Kennedy disappeared into the night.

Outside, the engine of a car burst into life, whistles blew, there was some shouting. Appleby turned back into the library. His racing and chasing days were over; all that was somebody else's job.

‘Exit Channing-Kennedy,' he said. ‘If he comes back, it won't be as Channing-Kennedy. It will be as Miles Coulson.'

‘I knew it.' Bertram Coulson had stood up. ‘When he offered my brandy round, I knew in my heart that it was he.'

 

 

‘May I go back a little?' Appleby asked. The uproar of flight and pursuit had faded into the night. ‘The little barge was beautifully made. And that was the point. Seth Crabtree was an admirable carpenter, well able to make clever little hiding places for Mrs Coulson in her last years. But he was more. He was a superb natural craftsman.
When her choicest pieces needed repair
,
Crabtree did the job.
He was the Grand Collector's right-hand man. And remember that Sara Coulson
was
the Grand Collector.'

‘Ormolu and OMs,' Colonel Raven said. ‘Pottery and prima donnas.'

‘Precisely. And two things stick out about Scroop House, all through the record. Sara Coulson filled it with the very finest things from cellars to attics. And all this has been preserved
in situ
. The house was let furnished immediately she died. Later, Mr Bertram Coulson took over, and kept everything as it was. Just as – well, just as an antique shop, the place was a treasure house of the first order. Crudely put, the furniture was worth a fortune.'

‘And so it is,' Bertram Coulson said. ‘I have the valuation for probate. And I've been told that the market value of the stuff has increased fantastically since then.'

‘Quite so. A few weeks ago, a Louis XV black and gold lacquer commode fetched $48,000 in New York. Do you mind, Coulson, if I have in those Bobbies again?'

The constables returned. They lifted the lid of the crate. Regardless of litter, they removed a good deal of wood wool. And then they produced a piece of furniture.

‘Would you be so very kind' – Appleby said, with the unconscious extreme courtesy of a remote superior: so that Judith was amused – ‘as to take it down there, and put it beside the other one?'

The constables did as they were told. Appleby nodded to them. They went away. And the company stared, stupefied.

‘This has been a connoisseur's case,' Appleby said. ‘Or, rather, two connoisseurs. Crabtree being the one, and my wife being the other. Crabtree had just one glimpse of the hall and staircase here. And he was a disconcerted and puzzled man. The fine things – which had chiefly drawn him back to Scroop – seemed not
quite
the same. Hollywood knew that, if this disastrously returned
émigré
‚ had one further straight look at the furniture, the game would be up. That is why he followed him to the Jolly Leggers, spied on him there, dogged him to the lock, and killed him.
It's why he took away the little barge
. It must come back into nobody's head that Crabtree had been the craftsman he was. Do I make myself clear?'

Bertram Coulson was staring at the two identical writing tables, now standing side by side.

‘No,' he said. ‘I can make nothing of it, at all.'

‘This morning, you showed Judith over Scroop. When I asked her about it, she reported that it contained some superb pieces, and a great deal of “ultra-shiny high-grade reproduction antique”. You mustn't be offended by this. It's important.'

‘My dear man, of course I'm not offended. Do you take me for a furniture dealer?' Bertram Coulson spoke briskly and without self-consciousness – so that Appleby had an impression that he had listened, almost for the first time, to one who was the natural master of Scroop.

‘Later today, Mrs Coulson reiterated to my wife how you had a passion for keeping everything about the place precisely as it was in Sara Coulson's time. And my wife had an obscure sense that she had been told something that simply didn't match with something else. That something else was, in fact, all the nicely made replicas – the “high-grade reproduction antique” – which Miles Coulson, alias Channing-Kennedy, and Hollywood have been substituting over a number of years for the real thing.'

‘It doesn't make sense.' Alfred Binns spoke up violently. ‘It simply doesn't make economic sense.'

‘I assure you that it does. Marketing stolen Old Masters and so forth is very difficult. Marketing stolen antique furniture, however superb, is dead easy. And fantastically profitable. Just you try to buy, in London or Rome or New York, a gentleman's social table by Hepplewhite.'

‘Or a Gothic cabinet by Chippendale,' Judith said. ‘Or a Louis XVI semainier, or a French provincial commode before about 1750, or a set of quartetto tables, or a Grecian squab, or a couple of Herculaneums, or some girandoles by Matthias Lock, or even a garden seat by William Halfpenny–'

‘My wife studies these things,' Appleby interrupted rather hastily. ‘And you see the situation. It paid these people – your distant cousin Miles and the rascal Hollywood – many times over to have exact replicas made, and to substitute them, piece by piece, for the real thing. You yourself, you know' – and Appleby glanced disarmingly at Bertram Coulson – ‘have never made a study of these things. Mrs Coulson is not one with any particular eye for the mere inanimate paraphernalia of living. And your guests – as Colonel Raven put it to me in a slightly different form of words – are not collectors and aesthetes and people of that sort. Miles Coulson – the dispossessed Miles Coulson, as he felt himself to be – was an actor, you remember, and had no difficulty in turning innkeeper. He enjoyed the part. A gentleman, pretending to be a vulgarian pretending to be a gentleman: it was great fun.'

Appleby paused and glanced at his watch – perhaps with a shade of anxiety.

‘I don't know whether,' he said, ‘you'll want me, just at this hour, to dot all the
i
's and cross all the
t
's. But consider your disused canal, and that mysterious tunnel. It would be hard to manage even a nocturnal traffic unobserved by way of Upper Scroop. The village presses hard upon the house. But the canal, the old boathouse and the tunnel were absolutely ideal for the job. By the way, you were never aware of any mysterious bumpings in the night?'

‘Never.' Bertram Coulson passed a hand over his forehead in a dazed gesture.

‘Miss Binns was. But she decided it was a matter of ghosts and so of no importance.'

 

Everybody was silent. And, into the silence, broke the shrill summons of a telephone bell.

‘It will be for me, I think.' Appleby turned to Bertram Coulson. ‘Do you mind?' He went over to the instrument and picked it up. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘Appleby.' Then he listened in silence – in a silence that seemed unnaturally long. ‘Thank you,' he said quietly, and hung up.

‘They've been – been caught?' Daphne Binns asked timidly.

‘Not precisely that.' Appleby glanced first at Judith and then at the rest of the company. ‘Hollywood had made himself scarce with the idea of having a car ready if the game should really prove to be up. I was in favour of giving him some play. Flight would be good evidence. That is entirely my responsibility, and not Hilliard's.'

‘You mean they've got away?' Peter Binns demanded.

‘Not that either. They got out of the park, and clear on the high road. But Hilliard was on top of them. They got to your county town. And there they crashed.'

‘Crashed?' Colonel Raven said sharply.

‘Yes. Straight through a plate glass window and half across the shop that lay behind it. They're both dead.'

There was silence. And faintly from the stables of Scroop House, a clock was heard to chime.

‘Midnight?' Judith asked.

Appleby shook his head.

‘Eleven,' he said. ‘I thought we'd have a margin.' He smiled – and then looked seriously about him. ‘By the way,' he said. ‘The shop. It was a furniture shop. And there's nothing to do but disperse and go to bed.'

 

 

 

John Appleby first appears in
Death at the President's Lodging
, by which time he has risen to the rank of Inspector in the police force. A cerebral detective, with ready wit, charm and good manners, he rose from humble origins to being educated at ‘St Anthony's College', Oxford, prior to joining the police as an ordinary constable.

Having decided to take early retirement just after World War II, he nonetheless continued his police career at a later stage and is subsequently appointed an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, where his crime solving talents are put to good use, despite the lofty administrative position. Final retirement from the police force (as Commissioner and Sir John Appleby) does not, however, diminish Appleby's taste for solving crime and he continues to be active,
Appleby and the Ospreys
marking his final appearance in the late 1980's.

In
Appleby's End
he meets Judith Raven, whom he marries and who has an involvement in many subsequent cases, as does their son Bobby and other members of his family.

 

 

 

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels