The Vicar looked distressed. “Montmartre, I am afraid, would not be the best place in which to build a stable union.”
“It was certainly far from being that. Mrs Pelter turned up on her parents. She brought an infant son, Peter Pelter, and the news that her husband had cleared out. She rather thought that he had gone off to fight in the Spanish civil war.
“So the Vizards cared for the mother and child, and refrained from asking too many questions. About a year later there was a letter with a foreign stamp waiting for Mrs Pelter at the breakfast-table. She read it; said in a steady voice ‘Terry’s dead’; and then walked across the room and threw both letter and envelope in the fire. She remained calm and dry-eyed all day. The next morning she was found drowned in a small pond where she had sailed boats as a child.
“Nothing could be discovered about the fate of Terry Pelter. I think the grandparents may have made no more effort than was legally discreet, for they were devoted to the child and anxious to enjoy its custody. Nothing happened for some years – nor ever might have, but for an odd circumstance. An eccentric and extremely wealthy sister of Lady Vizard’s died. She believed that more vigorous inquiries should have been made, and she bequeathed a large sum of money to Peter Pelter and his father equally.”
“Well I’m blessed!” The Doctor sat forward attentively. “I call that an uncommonly interfering thing to do. And it produced a claimant?”
“It did indeed.”
Appleby had nodded grimly. “It produced as Terry Pelter a young American who seemed at first to be not at all a bad fellow. He had a very colourable story – the Spanish civil war came into it – and for a time it looked like being accepted without question. But Sir Charles and Lady Vizard – no doubt because they wanted to keep the child themselves – decided first to dislike him and then to question his identity. They had investigations opened up all over the place – in America, Paris, Spain – and eventually they turned up a fact of prime significance. Terry Pelter had been one of identical twins. And his brother, a dental surgeon somewhere in the Middle East, had disappeared not very long before the man claiming to be Terry turned up in England. Once more there was an explanation, involving, this time, a revolution in some South American republic. The claimant, in fact, had something like proof that his brother the dentist was dead. And he had enough evidence about his own supposed identity to promise a rather ticklish case.”
The Vicar looked up. “What about blood-groups?”
“As between identical twins, they couldn’t possibly help. What did help was the swift intelligence of Geoffrey Bellyse.”
“The QC?”
“Yes. He led for the Vizards, and looked like having a rough time. Young Capcroft was for the claimant – and he was just beginning to build up the big reputation he has today. It was, of course, a jury matter; and Capcroft knew from the start where his strength lay. It was in the apparent personality of the claimant – and still more, perhaps, in his mere physical appearance.
“Pelter – there was no disagreement about his surname – was tall and athletic, with regular features, fine brown eyes, a serious expression occasionally lit by a frank and friendly smile, and the best of American good manners. In fact, he was an examining counsel’s dream – and correspondingly as hard a nut for cross-examination as Bellyse had ever had to tackle.”
Appleby paused. “Bellyse would ask himself, you know, ‘What is this man’s weak point?’ And he would answer, ‘The obverse of his strength. His strength is his good looks. His weakness will be personal vanity. I must try to get him on that.’
“So towards the close of a very unspectacular cross-examination Bellyse shifted his ground. The material question was whether the claimant was Peter Pelter’s father. What Bellyse worked round to asking was this:
How can you be confident that Peter Pelter is your son?
The judge didn’t like it, but he held his peace for a vital couple of minutes. It went rather like this:
“ ‘I believe, Mr Pelter, that you have been allowed to see the boy you claim as your son?’
“ ‘Yes, sir – two or three weeks ago.’
“ ‘When had you last seen him before that?’
“ ‘Just before I felt compelled to leave my late wife in order to fight in Spain.’
“ ‘The child being then only a few weeks old?’
“ ‘That is correct, Mr Bellyse.’
“ ‘When you saw Peter as a five-year-old boy recently, you could yourself have no possible means of identifying him as your son?’
“ ‘No very certain means, I suppose. But the child at least has my eyes.’
“ ‘You mean that you have brown eyes and that the child has brown eyes?’
“ ‘Well, yes – and perhaps a little more. They are my sort of brown eyes, I figure.’
“ ‘Ah, yes – splendid brown eyes, I suppose you mean. Would it be correct to say, Mr Pelter, that you spend a good deal of time before your mirror?’
“ ‘I have to shave.’
“ ‘To be sure. The world would not like to lose a chin such as yours behind a beard. Would you go so far as to say that when you saw Peter a few weeks ago you remembered his eyes?’
“ ‘Certainly I did.’
“ ‘They had struck you from the first – perhaps as a comforting assurance of paternity?’
“ ‘I never doubted my wife’s honour, if that’s what you mean. But it was kind of good to see my own brown eyes smiling up at me from the bassinet, all the same.’
“ ‘I fear I don’t quite follow you, Mr Pelter. You found something appealing in the baby’s blue eyes?’
“ ‘Blue eyes?’
“ ‘Yes, Mr Pelter. Blue eyes.’ ”
Appleby paused. “It was a wonderful moment. Pelter was still speaking confidently, but he looked scared. And I shall never forget the softly final way in which Bellyse pounced.
“ ‘Would it surprise you, Mr Pelter, to learn that no baby
ever
has brown eyes?’”
“Clever!” The Doctor gave a delighted chuckle. “Little Peter’s eyes could certainly not have gained their pigment at the time this fellow claimed to be admiring their beautiful brown. They could only have been blue.”
And Appleby nodded. “It was a small lie, but it fatally destroyed the impostor’s credit. He’s in jail now. And Peter Pelter lives with his adoring grandparents still.”
“The Bandertree case?” Appleby frowned. “Well, yes – I did have something to do with it. But it wasn’t pretty.”
“No more is the name.” The Doctor looked up from the intricacies of mulling a pint of claret. “But was it
queer
? I’m all for a bizarre story tonight. And Bandertree sounds promising. Who was he?”
“A deeply unfortunate man.” Appleby, staring into the fire, appeared reluctant to proceed.
“How did his case begin?”
“As yours might, or mine, if fate had a whim that way. Bandertree’s troubles started with people beginning to talk. Every day, you know, and in every little suburb, people
are
beginning to talk. You can never get at the first whisper – the first starting up of a suspicion in some acute or timid or dirty mind. Hundreds of these notions just die away. But a few become the occasion of persistent, sinister gossip, and may reach the police. If they are not quite clearly mere twaddle, they are investigated. And, every now and again–”
“Quite so.” The Doctor sat back. “And now we proceed from the general to the particular. Just pass that nutmeg, would you? And then go ahead.”
“Very well. Bandertree was a middle-aged man with a small private income, a small strange talent as a painter, and a large and intermittently explosive temperament. He had been in bad trouble once as a younger man – I believe over some freakish brutality to a friend who had betrayed him in a love-affair – and the rumour of this had followed him to the little village of Chingford, where he lived by himself in a cottage standing by itself on the south bank of the stream. He lived there for years, a great recluse, and it seems that all sorts of odd yarns were told about him. Even when one discounts the greater number, it is evident that he was becoming very eccentric. And then he got married.”
The Doctor nodded. “With what might be called a composing and normalising effect? I thought so. It’s a not uncommon result – for a time.”
“Bandertree married a war-widow called Agnes Mole. That must have been in 1943; and for a couple of years all went well. They were a devoted pair, despite the lady’s being a completely commonplace person, incapable of telling a Picasso from a Modigliani. What you might call a thoroughly successful, thoroughly carnal marriage.”
Cautiously the Doctor tested his claret with a silver spoon. “And with rocks ahead.”
“It might be better to say a single submerged reef. For what the couple presently ran up against was something thoroughly unexpected and treacherous. Mrs Bandertree proved not to have been a widow after all.”
“This being, in fact, one of those Back-from-the-Dead yarns?”
“Just that. Rupert Mole had been captured, not killed; and for some reason no news of him had ever come through. It was partly, I believe, because he had done one of those brilliant escapes that were apt simply to land a man in hiding with friendly folk in enemy-occupied territory. Anyway, at the end of the war Rupert Mole came home, and presently traced Agnes to Bandertree’s cottage.
“Just what happened at first, I never got fully sorted out. Probably – as so often with such predicaments in real life – it was nothing very clear-cut. I suppose a tug of emotions, of appetites, memories, decencies, loyalties now one way and now another – and, as a result, a state of pure muddle and misery for all three of those people, such as would have taken some powerful external authority to straighten out. But in the end the jam did look like having some sort of decisive issue. The woman said she was going to stick to Bandertree; Bandertree agreed to keep her; and both of them told Mole to clear off. Only he didn’t. He took a cottage just on the other side of the Ching and began a policy of hanging around. It couldn’t be called very wise.”
“Nor very noble.” The Doctor poured out his concoction deftly and sat down again. “But of course it might produce results.”
“What it produced was an abomination. Bandertree began to go queer again. Agnes alternated between clinging to him passionately and moods of guilt and revulsion. And Mole went about pubs and talked.
“This state of affairs continued for some months, and one consequence was that Bandertree could no longer face the world, and ceased absolutely from ever leaving his cottage. He wouldn’t so much as go out into the garden. Only when Agnes did her shopping in the village, he could be seen staring out of the window after her in a sort of bestial fear. Mole, remember, was lurking not much more than a stone’s throw away, across the stream.
“Well, Mole might be driving Bandertree crazy, but for a long time he didn’t seem to be getting much out of the situation himself. He’d sit sullen and silent in a bar parlour of an evening, and then on a third beer he’d open up and curse his wife for her obstinate faithlessness. He was becoming a recognised bore in this way, when there appeared a sudden change in him. For about a week he became strained and utterly secretive. And then one evening he turned up darkly exultant, but taciturn still. It was on gin – something like a bottle of it – that they got him to talk that night. What he had to say was simple. Agnes had promised to return to him next day, and had agreed to their leaving the country together. And she had told Bandertree that she had made up her mind to this.
“And the next day, sure enough, Mole’s cottage was seen to be shut up and deserted – nor did anybody ever set eyes on Agnes again. Bandertree was still to be glimpsed occasionally at a window, but his look was now wandering, and he appeared quite demented. He continued never to leave the house, and lived on supplies which he had persuaded some old woman to leave two or three times a week on his doorstep.
“It was only after about a couple of months that people began the talking – the really sinister talking – that I was speaking of. Eventually it reached the Chief Constable down there – a fellow who is something of a connoisseur in the macabre, and who decided to investigate himself. Bandertree proved to be in sober truth the next thing to crazy. But his story was quite simple. Agnes had simply vanished, and he had no doubt that Mole was responsible.
“So the Chief Constable went after Mole. He was eventually found in Dublin – and alone. His story, too, was simple. Agnes had failed to keep her promise; had simply not turned up. Whereupon he had decided he had had enough, and cleared out.
“There was one plain fact in this tangle: a woman had disappeared, and must be accounted for. The Chief Constable returned to Bandertree’s cottage – and as well as an inquiring mind he took with him a sharp eye. In the middle of the sitting-room the floor seemed to have sunk slightly, as if there had been a subsidence. So he got a search-warrant, had the floorboards up, and dug. Need I tell you any more?”
The Doctor considered, and then smiled grimly. “My dear Appleby, if I know anything of you, the answer is decidedly Yes.”
“Very well. They dug, and found the woman’s body. The question that arose was whether Bandertree would be considered fit to plead. For he was certainly uncommonly strange, and the discovery, as you may imagine, didn’t do him any good.
“It was about getting hold of the right medical line on this that I was consulted, and eventually I reviewed the whole case. There is something to be said for being thorough, even in the dullest and most routine way. I got Bandertree’s whole history in all the detail I could. Then I got Mole’s, and as soon as I read it I went down to Chingford and found what I expected to find. Four months later Mole was hanged.”
“I don’t see it.”
“You would have, if you had learnt from the report on him that as a prisoner of war he had become one of the finest tunnel-diggers on record. He burrowed his way under the Ching and beneath Bandertree’s house. Then he killed the woman, got her body where he wanted it, and sealed that end of the tunnel with what must have been astounding technical skill. After that he had only to wait a bit, and then from a distance somehow contrive to set rumour going in Chingford. He planned, you see, to be revenged on both his wife and her lover. Didn’t I say the story wasn’t pretty? Let’s forget it in this remarkable brew.”