Appleby's Other Story (14 page)

‘It couldn't possibly be something I would discuss with you, Sir John.' Ramsden's reply had been swift and tart. ‘You would have to apply to Mr Tytherton's solicitor.'

‘The Chief Constable has already done so, and I think we have enough to go on. Are the pictures and so on here in Elvedon insured?'

‘Yes, they are – although it costs the moon.'

‘Those that disappeared a couple of years ago were insured?'

‘They were, although not adequately.' Ramsden sat back squarely in his chair, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him. Although young, he looked formidable. ‘Sir John, you are advancing a very grave allegation – and through the singularly odd medium of an informal conversation with myself. You are saying, in effect, that the late Mr Tytherton, some two years ago, stole certain of his own pictures, collected insurance money on them, and then presumably quietly sold them on some illicit market. Moreover, you are suggesting that something of the same kind has in some mysterious fashion resulted in Mr Tytherton's death now. Am I right?'

‘Yes, you are – provided you bear in mind that it is my common method in affairs of this kind to advance and review every conceivable hypothesis. I am perfectly willing to take up the sort of conjectures which you yourself appear more inclined to entertain. Some of them would be little more to Mr Tytherton's credit than is the theory I have just sketched. They will, of course, take longer to run over – and for an obvious reason.'

‘Indeed?' Ramsden had perceptibly relaxed. ‘May I ask what it is?'

‘On the immediate horizon, I'm not aware of anybody who is at all intimately concerned with pictures except the man Raffaello. His presence at Elvedon has struck me a good deal, I'm bound to say. But he's a single spy, so to speak – whereas on the other side of the account there are battalions.'

‘The other side of the account?'

‘Or the column in which we reckon up the number of people showing signs of involvement in one or another sexual intrigue – and therefore very conceivably entangled in some drama of the sort which has had a fatal ending. This is really what you are saying yourself, I think.'

‘I suppose it is.' Ramsden's grey eyes had clouded; he was looking at Appleby sombrely. ‘But other possibilities remain. Sexual passion, after all, isn't the only sort of passion – I mean passion as distinct from calculation and cupidity and so on – that can lead to some fatal act of violence.'

‘Certainly not sexual passion narrowly regarded.' Appleby paused; his own gaze upon Ramsden was speculative and intense. ‘Sexual nausea, for example. Think of Hamlet.'

‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.' Suddenly Ramsden's expression changed, and he sprang to his feet. ‘My God – you're thinking of Mark!'

‘Who is said to have a thing about his mother.' Appleby spoke coldly. ‘Is it
you
who are thinking of Mark?'

‘In a way, yes. You yourself have gone out of your way to let me know that Mark was around Elvedon last night. What if he found the body – minutes before that woman and I did?'

‘Just
found
it?'

‘Yes – and in Tytherton's hand was the gun with which he'd killed himself. Why
shouldn't
he have killed himself? One way and another, he was in a considerable mess – as you and those policemen appear to have nosed out. But it's not a pretty thing for one's father to do. Better to die, say, defending the
lares et penates
– or the Goya. So Mark picked up the gun, and departed as he had come.'

‘You don't seem to be too bad at conjectures yourself, Mr Ramsden. And if you ask me whether, at the moment, I possess a single fact that contraverts that little theory, I have to confess that I do not.'

 

 

All the same, I have a hunch – Appleby told himself as he prowled Elvedon. Maurice Tytherton assuredly did not blow his own brains out. If his story is to have a surprise ending it won't be that one. It may be true that the man was in a deepening mess, but it was a slowly deepening mess, not a sudden one. If he was hard up it was only in the sense in which the prosperous can be hard up. The need for embarrassing retrenchment may have been looming ahead, but he was never going to be in doubt about tomorrow's dinner. Or about tomorrow's Mrs Graves, for that matter. No, Tytherton had been murdered, all right. It just remains to spot by whom.

Appleby wandered up Elvedon's main staircase. It reminded him, incongruously, of Mr Voysey's delicately peeled apple, so elegant was its gentle spiral in finely chiselled Bath stone. Reaching the first floor, he walked down a cool corridor which seemed to stretch almost to a vanishing point before him. Embellished on one side by a long line of Flemish flower paintings of considerable merit, it displayed on the other, between high windows, a succession of console tables topped by fantasticated mirrors in the manner of John Linnell. They were like the ghosts of departed footmen, Appleby told himself, patiently doing nothing at all in the interest of the greater grandeur of some long since forgotten rout or soirée offered to the neighbouring notabilities by those first exalted Whigs who had built Elvedon.

It was doubtful whether he had any warrant thus to perambulate. Alice Tytherton would almost certainly consider it a vast impertinence. But Alice Tytherton was now, to put it crudely, a back number. If Elvedon ran to a dower house, that was what she was booked for. And it was for Mark Tytherton to say who went where. Indeed Mark, if the law didn't in one way or another interfere with his freedom of action, would have to decide what to do with the place. Perhaps he would settle down amid the paternal acres, shoot the pheasants, hob-nob with the neighbouring gentry and marry one of their daughters, become a magistrate or an MP. Or perhaps things would turn out to be so bad on the financial front that he would be obliged to sell up and return to Argentina. In that event the Tytherton occupancy of Elvedon Court would have been an episode between its pristine glories and its final decline into a mental hospital or a disgraced mansion mysteriously necessary to the well-being of some hypertrophied public corporation.

With such reflections going through his head, Appleby shamelessly peered into one room or another. There was certainly no sign that Maurice Tytherton had been discreetly trundling his household chattels to the pawnbroker. Everything was as slap-up – Appleby wasn't sure that the vulgar expression didn't, somehow, fit – as in so imposing a country house it ought to be. And everything was on display. Only the door of Tytherton's workroom, which he came upon by chance and recognized, was locked. Henderson had now set up his headquarters elsewhere, no doubt.

There was still a notable absence of anybody around; Elvedon seemed to own a curious power of absorbing its occupants. He found a subsidiary staircase and went up to the next floor. The general effect here was identical, except that there was even less sense of any present human habitation at all. Or what there was, at least, was patchy: one principal corridor was uncarpeted and without any console tables presided over by gilded and rococo goddesses, huntsmen, stags, hounds, slaughtered wild-fowl, prodigal vegetation; some rooms were wholly unfurnished; it even all smelt a bit damp. Appleby recalled Alice Tytherton's disapproving sense that the Tythertons had never quite grown into the dimensions of the place. It wouldn't have been too easy to do, even in Victoria's middle time.

Appleby's meditations had advanced to this point when he turned a corner and bumped into Egon Raffaello.

 

It was an odd encounter, unexpected on both sides. Appleby even found it a little disconcerting, since he and this undesirable person were so demonstrably engaged in the same pursuit: that of quietly roaming through Elvedon for purposes of their own. Raffaello, indeed, since he was staying in the house, was perhaps behaving the less eccentrically of the two. He was also behaving after a fashion that Appleby had already heard of. Catmull had commented with disfavour on Raffaello's snooping round the place in a manner unbecoming in a gentleman. Catmull would presumably take a dark view of Appleby's present courses too.

‘Good afternoon.' Appleby thought he had better move straight into the offensive. ‘Are you running an eye over any unconsidered trifles – perhaps in the hope of snapping them up?'

‘Snapping them up?' It didn't seem as if Raffaello made much of this innocent literary allusion.

‘At the forthcoming sale, of course – if there is one. Something of the kind often follows a death in a household like this. It would be quite an event in your world, would it not?'

‘No doubt.'

‘And here you are, privileged to have a most valuable preview of what may go under the hammer. You must have given the whole house a pretty thorough once-over by the time you've come up here. Shall we go one higher? There's certainly another floor. Probably servants' rooms, for the most part, and largely empty. But one never knows what may be hidden where. At least that's what I feel about a house like Elvedon.'

‘I don't care for your tone.'

‘Never mind my tone, Raffaello. I've something to tell you that it may be useful you should know. In fact, several things. One is that the change of ownership of all this is an established fact. Tytherton's son inherits. There are legal formalities, of course. But in practice Mark Tytherton is the boss from now on. And he won't like you any more now than he did this morning. So you're on the way out. This may be your last snoop around. And I think I'm right in saying it hasn't got you anywhere.'

‘And what about
your
snoop around? Has that got
you
anywhere?'

‘Ah, that – my dear Raffaello – is confidential. I think Tytherton had rather baffled you? He'd been dangling possibilities that remained tantalizingly vague?'

‘You know too much.' It was rather surprisingly that Raffaello said this unguarded thing. ‘He was a tricky man to do business with. But there are plenty who are like that.'

‘I don't doubt it for a moment. He was tricky when you did business with him before?'

‘Before?'

‘Come, come. You told me this has been your first stay at Elvedon, but you didn't say it represented your first acquaintance with Elvedon's owner. What about a couple of years ago?'

‘A couple of years ago?'

‘That's another of the things I have to tell you. There was a theft or robbery here, was there not? What I'd call rather a muted affair. But the police are interested in it again. They're
very
interested. The file is being reopened. And you know what happens when
that
takes place. Quite positively, my dear Raffaello, no stone is left unturned.'

‘To hell with your stones. And I'm here on a proper social footing, Appleby. It's more than can be said of you. Not that that excludes professional services. I was to advise. I've been conducting expertises–'

‘Absolute rubbish. You're a smart dealer, no doubt. But you have no scholarly authority whatever. I don't say you weren't competent to advise Tytherton what could be most profitably marketed where. But that's another matter.'

‘Professional services.' Raffaello repeated this phrase with dignity. ‘And I'll send in a bill.'

‘I'm sure you will – and that it will be paid, worse luck. Unless we can land you in gaol first, my friend. One can send out bills from Wormwood Scrubbs. But they're not always attended to.'

‘Quite a slanging match, this – isn't it?' Raffaello, although his confidence had been shaken, contrived a mocking note.
‘You're
hanging around, Appleby. You're at a loose end. You're not getting anywhere.'

‘In clearing up this murder? I wonder if you're right. But you'd like to see it cleared up, wouldn't you? It would take a weight off your mind?'

‘It damned well would.'

‘In which you are at one with all innocent persons – is that right? I'll do my best. But the solution of the affair – I warn you – may be attended by some inconveniences. Quite major inconveniences. Some of them may emerge when you and I have another talk.' Appleby looked at his watch. ‘Perhaps some time after tea.'

‘You're working to a timetable, are you?'

‘Roughly speaking, yes. I'm getting rather more than middle-aged, you know. And I don't want this affair to keep me out of bed.'

‘You seem very confident. I suppose it's part of your technique.'

‘My technique is quite simple. It consists largely in persuading people that it's to their advantage to tell the truth. The graver the crime, the more obvious, surely, that is. I don't suppose people often get convicted of murders they didn't commit as a consequence of being insufficiently candid about precious little enterprises of their own. But it can land them in a very awkward situation. So oughtn't you perhaps to consider where you stand? You see, there's just nothing more coming your way in any case. Whether we wind the matter up briskly or not, this little house party will disperse as soon as the Chief Constable gives the word. And that will be immediately Inspector Henderson has finished taking his formal statements.'

‘I know the law, Appleby. There's nothing to prevent any of us walking out of this damned house now.'

‘Ah, but that's irrelevant, so far as you're concerned. You'd like to linger on – and you haven't a hope of it. You'll be shown the door, and whatever you've been hoping for here will be a complete write-off. I'm suggesting, therefore, that you cut your losses, come clean with a candid little account of yourself, and depart with an easy mind.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Yes, you do. I'm saying that Maurice Tytherton was up to something not too reputable, and was thinking, very appropriately, of enlisting the services of your shady self. But he dies leaving you in the dark – at least in some vital particular or other. You're still thinking that, if you can just find out, you may be able to extort some advantage from the situation. This, at least, is one way of looking at you.'