Appleby's Other Story (16 page)

‘I don't follow you.'

‘Tytherton had occasion to contact his solicitor about something totally different. But doing so put it into his head to play an ill-natured joke on you. He told you he was about to institute divorce proceedings, although in fact nothing of the sort was in his mind. Probably he couldn't care less whether you were sleeping with his wife or not.'

‘You are painting a picture of an extremely disagreeable group of people.'

‘That's true, Mr Carter. I think I'd prefer to believe that he
had
just found out the truth, and
was
intending divorce. Even if it wasn't the authentic occasion of his contacting Pantin there and then. However, the point is that you were convinced he had to be stopped. And there was only one sure way to do it.'

‘To kill him?' As Carter asked this, he produced a cigarette and lit it with a steady hand.

‘Yes. Dead men, they say, can tell no tales. It's equally true that they can start no law-suits. Nor can their heirs and executors – when all that's in question is a treacherous friend and a faithless wife.'

‘You have a case.'

‘Nothing of the kind. I repeat that I am only dealing in tenable views, and there are several more of them floating around. This particular one can possibly be rendered no longer tenable by something quite simple which you may now judge it sensible to say.'

‘I didn't kill Maurice Tytherton. Is that any good?'

‘It has its weight with me. But I think you will agree that it doesn't take us all that far. But there are a number of possibilities. According to Henderson's first information, you had gone off to bed, and were thus alone in your room, during the material time.'

‘The material time?'

‘Say, between eleven o'clock and eleven-thirty last night. But about this your recollection may have been – shall we say? – faulty. Perhaps you were in the company of somebody else – and thus have, in effect, some sort of alibi.'

‘You do make me out to be a shady character!' Carter seemed genuinely amused. ‘If I wasn't industriously murdering somebody, I was at least rampaging in my role as the celebrated adulterer, or perhaps merely seducing one of those attractive Italian maids.'

‘May I suggest, Mr Carter, that this is no occasion for merriment?'

‘How right you are. But about my movements last night I have nothing further that is helpful to say.'

‘And nothing else whatever?'

‘At least at this stage, no.' Charles Carter rose composedly to his feet. ‘Except that, in the light of what you have been kind enough to suggest to me, Sir John, I think I shall cancel my evening engagement in town. It would be something of a rush now, in any case. Moreover, I am not sure that I might not feel a shade out of things.' And Carter glanced at his watch. ‘Do you know,' he said, ‘I believe there is now some prospect of tea?'

 

 

This proved to be not too sanguine an expectation. In a library which opened through high French windows upon the main terrace before the house tea was being dispensed to the company at large by a personage of no less consequence than Catmull himself. Perhaps he was making amends, Appleby thought, for having delegated to inferior hands the serving of that buffet lunch.

But the ritual of tea-drinking at four-fifteen in the afternoon (and this, however superior is the Lapsang Souchong, however thin the cucumber sandwiches, however delicate the breeze that ventures to stray indoors through filmy curtains from the golden glow without) is unlikely to be a wholly comfortable occasion when chiefly participated in by suspected murderers and variously graded officers of the police. Such conversation as was taking place fell noticeably short of that sparkle and elegance which might have been expected in a company of so notably polished – or at least prosperous – an order as now haunted Elvedon Court.

The efficient Ronnie Ramsden, it was true, found something to say as, seconding Catmull's more professional labours, he moved around in the interest of polite attentions to the ladies. The ladies, however, were unresponsive. Alice Tytherton, whose bearing before lunch might have been called aggressive, was now distinctly subdued. Carter had crossed the drawing-room and had a murmured word with her when he entered. Was she too now meditating the possible implications for herself of the suggestion that her husband had been considering the possibilities of divorce? Or even – to go back to what Appleby really knew – the advisability of changing his will? Under the existing will, as Appleby had heard, there was appropriate provision for her by way of jointure. Presumably Maurice Tytherton, had he wished, could have altered this in some way. The law would not have permitted him to leave his widow without a penny – or so Appleby as a layman supposed – but perhaps it had been in his power drastically to curtail whatever settlement he had made. In other words, once that particular alarm was started, once the abrupt summoning of Mr Pantin (of Pantin and Pantin) was known, Alice Tytherton was among those who might be favourably disposed to securing Maurice Tytherton's abrupt decease. Conceivably the fact of the police having tumbled to this simple point had come home to her.

Mrs Graves, too, was subdued – although not indeed in the aspect of
tenue
. The advancing cohorts of photographers conjured up for her by Appleby in the course of their curious encounter at the Hanged Man had evidently been in her mind when making a subsequent
toilette
. She would now cut a striking figure even in the most sensational public print. And she had, it was to be presumed, little to lose by appearing there. Perhaps she even had something to gain. Figure as a high-class courtesan in a sufficiently newsworthy situation and the most gratifying offers are likely to come pouring in. So why should she be glum – even (as Appleby sensed her to be) uncommonly scared?

Perhaps Mrs Graves had shot her lover. Perhaps she had walked into that workroom of Tytherton's, surprised him sitting at his writing-table, and put a bullet in his brain. But why – except that it was one of the far too numerous guesses it was possible to make in front of this unpleasing affair? Doggedly disposed to consider the problem, Appleby retreated, tea-cup in hand, into an embrasure between cliffs of books. There was the business of Mark Tytherton's mother's jewels. Suppose that they existed, and were not more or less a figment of that young man's heated imagination. Suppose that Maurice Tytherton had in some way contrived to hold on to them in an improper fashion after the dissolution of his first marriage. Indeed, something more than supposition was available here. Appleby had not himself encountered Pantin, but had no reason to suppose that he would be given to unfounded gossip about a client. It could at least be taken as assured that Tytherton had angered his second wife by telling her he had sold certain jewels she considered herself entitled to the enjoyment of. It was after
this
that conjecture really came in.
If
Tytherton had in fact given or lent these contentious objects to his latest mistress, and
if
there had been a further row about them, might this not conceivably have led Mrs Graves to some lethal extremity? It seemed not probable – but a possibility it certainly was. And when one brought into the picture the curious fact that his mother's jewels were an acknowledged obsession of the newly-arrived Mark Tytherton it did look as if they could not be far from the centre of the mystery.

Appleby abandoned this speculation for the moment. The relevant facts would come clearer if Mark Tytherton turned out to have been communicative with Henderson. And now his eye fell on the third of the ladies. Miss Kentwell was talking to Carter with an air of composed affability about which there was nothing obtrusive, but which yet somehow arrested Appleby's attention. She was like a cat, he told himself, that has decided to call it a day with a mouse. The image was an extremely odd one, and quite unsupported by any simple visual suggestion. Miss Kentwell was less like a cat than an over-fed canary, and Carter wasn't in the least like a mouse. But then every time Appleby thought about Miss Kentwell he was irked by a sense of something unaccountable about her. It was partly that he didn't quite believe in her charitable zeal, which seemed just a little too good to be true. And it was partly – as he had reflected before – that she was most unlikely to have gained the
entrée
to Maurice Tytherton's Elvedon on quite that ticket. She had insinuated that Tytherton had owned some notion that philanthropic gestures might get him into an Honours List, but the suggestion hadn't been a convincing one.

So mightn't all this have been a cover for something else? Once more Appleby glanced at the lady, and at Carter with whom he was sensing her to be in some equivocal relationship. A
post
-
bellum
relationship, he suddenly told himself. That was it. Mr Charles Carter, the eminent surgeon, was no longer Miss Kentwell's quarry.

 

Appleby was so pleased with this discovery that he looked round for somebody to whom he could communicate it. This, in the nature of the situation, could only be Colonel Pride or Inspector Henderson, and Pride had for the moment vanished. But Henderson was approaching him now, and with some air of requiring moral support. Henderson didn't feel this tea-party to be altogether regular. But in the company of Sir John Appleby, after all, he couldn't be going too far wrong.

‘Henderson, come into this little retreat, and let us confer. We ought to have a certain amount of information for each other by now.'

‘We'd have wasted an afternoon if we hadn't.'

‘Good – but first tell me this.' Appleby put down his cup. ‘That Miss Kentwell, there at the other end of the room. Have you discovered her profession?'

‘Charity organizer.'

‘Ah, yes – but anything else?'

‘The only other thing I know about her – apart from her own account of her movements last night, and so on – is that the servants here don't like her a bit.'

‘Catmull?'

‘Both Catmull and his wife.'

‘I see. I haven't yet met Mrs Catmull. I think I must seek her out.'

‘That won't be difficult, sir. She's in the butler's pantry more often than not.'

‘Her husband's pantry? But isn't she the cook?'

‘I believe so. Perhaps she's scared. But about Miss Kentwell – some of the servant-maids don't care for her either. Foreigners, of course, they are; and perhaps one needn't much attend to them. But they say she spies on them.'

‘On the maids themselves – those Italian girls?'

‘Yes, sir – and in a general way as well. The young women sleep at the top of the house, and three nights ago one of them came down to the kitchens in the small hours. Catmull hadn't allowed her something she rather fancied at supper in the servants' hall, and she was determined to get the better of him and nobble some. A kind of jam tart, I gather it was.'

‘Good for her. Well?'

‘She saw Miss Kentwell creeping round the house. She–'

‘Bedroom doors – that sort of thing?'

‘Yes, sir.' Henderson stared. ‘Or so this young person says. She may have a nasty mind.'

‘Nothing of the kind.'

‘I'm sorry, sir.' Henderson was like a rock. ‘Whatever the lady may have been up to, I have a strong impression that this girl was drawing on her imagination, at least to some extent.'

‘It's immaterial, Henderson. There can't be any doubt about what the woman has been up to. Her role as a charity organizer or whatever is entirely spurious. And her real role, incidentally, makes it pretty certain that she didn't – that she and Ramsden between them didn't – kill Tytherton. Tytherton was her employer. He introduced her to Elvedon, in an entirely bogus character, to spy on his wife. He was meditating a divorce, and Miss Kentwell is nothing other than a private inquiry agent. And from some damned expensive firm, I don't doubt.'

‘I see, sir.' Henderson said this a shade woodenly. ‘And it would be Carter who is in question?'

‘Yes, Carter – the fellow she's innocently chatting up now. Her assignment is over, after all.' Appleby paused. ‘Not that Alice Tytherton mayn't have been admitting other lovers. So Miss Kentwell may have enjoyed what might be called a roving commission.'

‘It seems to me, sir, that the Chief Constable is pretty well right about this lot.' Henderson grimly surveyed the tea party at large. ‘Live like cats, it seems. But it may all be a bit aside from our concern.' Henderson hesitated. ‘You see, Sir John, it's rather my instinct to cling to the pictures as the mainspring of the affair. If Miss Kentwell had been prowling Elvedon suspiciously, so has Raffaello–'

‘That's absolutely true.' Appleby's admission was immediate. ‘And it's certainly not something to lose sight of.'

‘Well, we do know where
his
interests lie. He may have made brief passes at Mrs Graves–'

‘Not significant, I agree. She's a loose woman, and asks for it.'

‘Just so, sir. And if Raffaello is near the centre of the thing, then the pictures are.' Henderson hesitated. ‘And you see, sir, in my own mind, I keep on coming back to the one in the dead man's room.'

‘Ah, the Goya. A splendid portrait.'

‘I'd be right, I take it, to suppose it very valuable?'

‘Certainly. At a guess, I'd say it's the most valuable thing in the house.'

‘Then Tytherton's being killed right in front of it looks to me like being significant.'

‘But it's there on the wall still, quite undisturbed.'

‘Yes, Sir John – it's safe and sound, all right. But I have this thought about something unexpected having perhaps disturbed somebody's programme. I know it sounds a trifle vague, that.'