Appleby's Other Story (5 page)

‘And lurked?'

‘Just that. Put up in that pub and hung around before going through with the thing. If I hadn't done that, it seems possible that what has happened
wouldn't
have happened.'

‘You mean, Mr Tytherton, that you have reason to believe that your father's death has been the consequence of a situation which your earlier arrival would have obviated?'

‘Not specifically. I know nothing about my father's death. It's just a feeling that it all
might
have been different.'

‘Different, exactly, from what?'

‘I just mean that various things – things I don't myself know about at all – might have taken a different turn, so that he might have been alive now. Perhaps it's a silly feeling. But if I
had
gone up to the house at once – if I'd had the guts for it – then, because of the way one thing leads to another–' Mark broke off rather helplessly. ‘It's difficult to explain.'

‘I think you mean that your father's death has come at the end of a chain of events which you are entirely in the dark about – but which, even so, your turning up might have broken or altered.'

‘That's just it.'

‘Mr Tytherton, have you, whether directly or indirectly, been getting very much news of your home during recent years?'

‘Only in patches. This and that, you may say.'

‘I see.' Appleby registered an impression that he had come on ground where Mark's instinct was for evasion. ‘For instance, a business of stolen pictures a year or two ago. I dare say it may have got into the papers. You have heard about it?'

‘Nothing at all. What you say is news to me entirely.'

‘I haven't yet been given any particulars, but I gather none of the stolen works was recovered. Your father was judged to have taken it all rather quietly. But I'm not sure that he didn't have some hope of reviving the scent. I used to be a good deal concerned with such matters, and I rather suspect that my being brought to Elvedon by Colonel Pride this morning had some element of plot to it. At least I was to be asked to give advice.'

‘And you think this has something to do with my father's death?'

‘It would be rash to assert anything of the sort. But a possible link has to be kept in mind.'

‘I say! Didn't you tell me that this disgusting chap Pulcinello–'

‘Raffaello.'

‘Yes. Didn't you say he was an art-dealer? Would there be anything in that?'

‘I have far too little information to venture an opinion, but rather imagine I shall soon be given a good deal by Colonel Pride or his officers. And I'm going back to the house now. I take it you are going there too?'

‘Well, I suppose so.' Mark Tytherton hesitated. ‘I have to, I suppose – and I set out after breakfast to go through with it. But I don't know that I'll be a great success.'

‘A success?' Appleby found himself wondering how much this sudden diffidence was to be taken at its face value. ‘My dear sir, are you not presumably at this moment the owner of the place?'

‘I don't know. I haven't thought. You see, there's Alice – that's my stepmother. And there's my cousin Archie, who has always hung around. Or perhaps it's all going to be turned into a home for stray dogs.'

‘Perhaps. But, whatever your relations with your father have been, the sober probability is that his sudden death has brought you a great deal of property.'

 

They walked out of the wood and through the garden in a silence which served to accentuate a monotonous cooing of doves behind them. The sound was like a bored or half-hearted keening for the dead.

‘Were you brought up here?' Appleby asked.

‘Oh, yes – all my boyhood. I was rather fond of it, as a matter of fact.'

‘Aren't you fond of it any longer?'

‘I suppose I ought to be. Perhaps I am. But I've wandered around, you know.' Mark Tytherton seemed almost confused. And suddenly he stopped in his tracks. ‘I say, there's an ambulance! Do you think somebody else has got hurt?'

There was certainly an ambulance. It had taken the place of one of the police cars on the wide gravel expanse before the house.

‘I think,' Appleby said gently, ‘that it will have come for the body. The body must be taken away, you see, for the
post mortem
. That's routine. But it will be brought back before the funeral.'

‘I see. But look – there's a kind of prison van as well!' Mark Tytherton glanced at Appleby in what might have been naive dismay. ‘Who's
that
going to take away?'

‘Your guess is as good as mine. Raffaello? Mrs Catmull the cook? Actually, I expect it's here simply because the police piled into anything they had handy… I beg your pardon!'

This apology was occasioned by Appleby's having turned rather sharply round a clipped hedge and almost stumbled over a lady sitting on a garden bench in its shade. But the lady was not discomposed.

‘Not at all,' she said. ‘It seems almost wrong that it should be so beautiful a morning, but I have come out to enjoy it, all the same. I think you must be Sir John Appleby? Mr Ramsden – poor Mr Tytherton's secretary – was told about you by the military man. I didn't catch his name.'

‘Colonel Pride. He's the Chief Constable.'

‘Ah, yes. And Mr Ramsden told me. My name is Jane Kentwell, and I have been staying in the house over the past few days. I cannot claim to be more than an acquaintance of the Tythertons.' There was a pause which seemed designed to lend a slight emphasis to this remark. ‘But I am much shocked by what has happened, all the same. And you' – Miss Kentwell had turned politely to Mark – ‘are Maurice Tytherton's son. Will you allow me to say how grieved I am, and how much I wish to sympathize?'

Perhaps because of his life in exotic parts, Mark appeared a shade thrown out of his stride by this business of a competent English gentlewoman doing her stuff.

‘Thank you very much,' he said gruffly. ‘But I can't see how you know me from Adam, I must say.'

‘Your photograph stands on your father's desk – in his small writing-room, where he died.' Miss Kentwell paused, apparently out of a well-bred impulse to mute what might easily be too dramatic a note. ‘You may like to think that it was the last thing he ever saw.'

 

 

Whether Mark Tytherton did like to think this was not clear. Perhaps he considered Miss Kentwell's suggestion – coming, as it did, from a total stranger – an indecent invasion of family privacy. Certainly his response was no more than an inarticulate grunt, coupled with a movement as if to walk on. Miss Kentwell, however, had more to say.

‘I have been so interested to hear about your work in South America. It is clear that you have had to undertake substantial responsibilities from an early age.'

‘That's all rubbish – the kind of thing you say about the wanderer from the fold. I've just been doing this and that.'

‘I am sure that you are taking too modest a view of yourself.' Miss Kentwell spoke firmly, and as a woman who expects to be believed. Raffaello, Appleby recalled, had pronounced a modified eulogy upon her as a harmless creature of a tiresome sort, and at the moment at least her tiresomeness was evident. ‘But now,' she continued, ‘there is suddenly this larger sphere of usefulness before you. You will have the happiness of bringing some of your father's finest schemes to fruition.'

‘I hope I'm going to have the happiness of keeping out of quod. My father has been done in, and now the dicks have found me hiding in the wood-shed. It doesn't look too good, does it?'

This odd and indecorous speech did for a moment hold Miss Kentwell up. Yet almost at once she returned to the charge.

‘You must not distress yourself, Mr Tytherton, with morbid fancies. They are common in the first shock of bereavement. But they quickly pass, particularly if one throws oneself at once into some wide sphere of usefulness, some well conceived scheme of beneficent activity.'

It was at this point that Appleby felt the character of Miss Kentwell to be coming clear. She was a fanatical promoter of good works, and she felt that somebody freshly in command of what must be presumed a large fortune was a prospect to be gone for at once. It was even possible that she had softened up the late Maurice Tytherton in the interest of some charitable project or other, and was now beginning to mount a campaign to ensure his son's carrying it on. Appleby judged this something of a forlorn hope. Certainly Mark Tytherton was responding far from amiably now.

‘I must be getting on to the house,' he said abruptly. ‘Only decent to see Alice. I suppose.' This remark he had addressed to Appleby. ‘Hope you won't be obliged to hang around Elvedon indefinitely.' This had been for Miss Kentwell. ‘So long.' And on this colloquial note Mark Tytherton strode away.

 

‘A most interesting young man.' Miss Kentwell had somehow managed to take it for granted that Appleby would remain in conversation with her. ‘His manner is a little unpolished, but that is merely a matter of his colonial associations. I believed him destined to be a person of strong character and vigorous conviction.'

‘Possibly so. But by the way, and talking of his colonial associations, you didn't seem at all surprised at his having suddenly turned up here.'

‘It would have been scarcely civil, Sir John, to betray any reaction of that kind. One is only sorry that he didn't arrive a few days earlier. He might have cheered and heartened his father's last hours.'

‘His father didn't exactly have last hours of that sort.'

‘Perfectly true. For a moment I was forgetting the extremely distressing circumstances of Mr Tytherton's end. A death without a deathbed is a horrid thing.' Miss Kentwell paused on this curiously Victorian sentiment. ‘Unless,' she added as an afterthought, ‘it be death on the field of battle. That is quite another matter.'

‘It appears so to us. To the people dying, I suppose, these distinctions may not be all that apparent.'

‘That is a most interesting thought.' It was evident that Miss Kentwell was not readily made aware of any element of levity in response to her observations. ‘I am so glad that the young man is going straight to Mrs Tytherton. As you can well imagine, she is prostrated. The presence of her step-son will be a great support to her.'

‘No doubt – although I can't see that they can be very well known to each other. Would you describe the Tythertons, incidentally, as a devoted couple?'

‘Ah.' Miss Kentwell made this noise in a considering way, and was plainly playing for time. It must be her instinct to treat as scandalous any suggestion that couples – at least among the respectable classes – are ever other than devoted. On the other hand, and in this instance, it looked as if there was something to a contrary effect that she wanted to say. And she managed to say it now. ‘One could not maintain, Sir John, that poor Mr Tytherton's second marriage quite filled all his horizons.' Miss Kentwell paused on this expansive if not very lucid image. ‘Upon signs of that, indeed, one might come in the composition of our present small house party.'

‘Indeed?'

‘And of the second marriage there are, of course, no children.' Miss Kentwell had gone discreetly off on another tack. ‘So it seemed rather a question of Mr Tytherton's finding new fields of interest, of worthwhile interest. Signs were not wanting that he was about to do so.'

‘I see.' Appleby felt prompted to add: ‘You think you had pretty well nobbled him for something?' Instead, he said: ‘I gather he had been something of a collector or connoisseur of pictures, and so on. Perhaps he was proposing to start in again on that? Perhaps that's why Mr Raffaello is here?'

‘Mr Tytherton was too large a man to rest content with a sterile dilettantism.' Miss Kentwell paused on this elevated persuasion. ‘Besides, Sir John, as you know, in that field public recognition takes some time to mature. To give this to one gallery and that to another is not enough. A whole collection is required, and the nation itself has to be the recipient. All that takes time.'

‘I suppose it does.' Appleby was conscious of perceptible effort as required for dissimulating a growing astonishment before this lady. ‘Would you describe the dead man as having been a person of the first ability?'

‘Not, I think,
quite
that.'

‘He wouldn't have been likely, for example, to have got to the Lords on a life peerage by way of public service on boards and commissions and so on? Philanthropy would have to be his line? What one might call instant philanthropy, if possible?'

‘I am afraid we are coming to speak in very crude terms, Sir John. Of course Mr Tytherton would have accepted proper public recognition of anything he did. But his deeper motive–'

‘Quite so. We need waste no time upon so obvious a thought. However – and to be crude again for just a moment – are you sure that there was quite all that money available?'

‘No, I am not.' Miss Kentwell was surprisingly emphatic. ‘I am bound to confess that my inquiries in that direction have yielded some rather disappointing, even disconcerting, results. However, we must not talk in this fashion with poor Mr Tytherton not yet even in his grave. I am told that the coroner's inquest is likely to be held on Thursday. It is most inconvenient, since it will clash with an important meeting – that of the committee of the Society for the Relief of Depressed Widows of the Higher Clergy. There is a need there that is too little recognized. So I am most anxious to attend.'

‘Then I hope you will be able to do so. Have you been positively notified that you will be required to give evidence at the inquest?'

‘But of course, Sir John!' Miss Kentwell sounded surprised and even offended. ‘Was I not the first person to set eye upon the body?'