‘No doubt it is, sir. But even so, we’re after something scarcely credible, if you ask me. Just not the sort of thing that could happen in a nobleman’s seat.’
Clandon, who had been for some time in an abstraction, laughed suddenly, as if this formal manner of naming Lord Ailsworth’s place amused him. ‘You’re wrong there,’ he said. ‘It’s just in barracks like Ailsworth Court that you get deuced odd things tucked away. When I was a lad I used to visit an old chap in very much the same sort of house – only, I suppose, a good deal bigger. He was supposed to keep an opera singer in the east wing. A duke, he was. A good many people thought it not quite proper, since he wasn’t separated from his wife, or anything of the sort. But the duchess didn’t seem to mind, and it was all very domestic. Every evening after dinner the old chap would toddle off to his alternative lady for an hour or so. And she’d sing to him all that noisy stuff out of Wagner. Could be heard half a mile away – which tended to increase people’s sense of the impropriety of the whole thing. Still it went down rather well, really, and nobody would ever have thought of expressing any impertinent curiosity. But, if you’ll believe me, all that singing came out of a gramophone. What he kept up there was a model railway. He was ashamed, for some reason, of still wanting to play trains, but not of being thought to keep a mistress under the nose of his wife. What do you think of that, Cudworth?’
Cudworth let in the clutch rather abruptly. ‘That it’s improbable,’ he said briefly.
‘Well, so is this situation as Sir John envisages it. You were saying so yourself, and I rather agree with you. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call it incredible. Big house, sketchy staff, perhaps one or two confidential retainers prepared to take a risk. One can see it as just feasible for a time. Only the idea of the girl worries me. Appleby, what do you think about the granddaughter? Might she be in with the old man?’
‘Quite impossible, I’d say. Such an idea would require us to suppose that she was mad too. And I never heard of lunatics being sufficiently of one mind to conspire together in such a fashion. Anyway, she’s
not
mad – although I think she’s very worried about her grandfather. He’s probably revealed more than enough of his oddity to her to make her feel that if the doctors crowded happily in, they’d suggest he needed looking after in ways that would be most disagreeable to him. To what extent she’d be prepared to conceal and condone his exploits I don’t at all know. But quite a long way, I’d say at a guess. If, for example, she found he had contrived to kidnap two respectable citizens and hold them under duress, I’m sure it would be far from her first thought to run off to the police. She’d try to introduce a little sense into the proceedings and sort them out quietly. But I don’t think she’d eye poor old grandpapa with sudden horror.’
Clandon nodded. ‘It sounds as if we may be of one mind with the young lady. My own sympathy for Howard and his precious brother – supposing nothing too dire has happened to them – will be very moderate, I confess. Our job with them – if they really are here – is to get them quietly away, and back on their respective jobs. And to keep the damned thing away from the newspapers and the police.’ Clandon glanced at Cudworth. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’ he asked cheerfully.
‘That, sir, is not for me to determine.’
‘We shall be guided by circumstances,’ Appleby said rather austerely. It wasn’t quite fair, he felt, that poor Cudworth should be teased with the prospect of having to compound a felony. ‘There’s the complication of Grindrod. But I see him as a latecomer in the affair, and as rather peripheral still. It would be satisfactory to nail him, of course. But it mustn’t be done at the cost of injudicious publicity. Cudworth, you agree on that?’
‘Well, sir, I don’t know that I have to. The decision is yours. But I sometimes think I’ve lived on into a world I just don’t get the hang of. Still, I do know how jittery the public is.’
‘Great heavens, yes!’ Clandon was suddenly and surprisingly explosive. ‘Do you know, there are thousands of people in this country who hunt around for dried milk with what they consider to be some safe date stamped on the bottom of the tin? Educated people, capable of following scientific reports and making quite difficult calculations. A story like this of Ailsworth’s designs upon Howard Juniper and his bugs is something to handle like dynamite. Your instinct, Cudworth, is to find your crook, take him along to the station, and book him. And I agree that doing that in an undeviating way is the basis of all decent law and order. But there just have to be limits, it seems to me, to the
fiat justitia ruat coelum
attitude. If you follow me.’
‘No, sir – I don’t venture into speculative fields of that sort.
Ne sutor ultra crepidam
is my motto… Nether Ailsworth, I suppose.’
Appleby chuckled. Cudworth, he was thinking, could always be relied upon for a stiff comeback. ‘Yes,’ he said aloud. ‘This is Nether Ailsworth, all right. And that’s the Bell… Hullo! Did you see that?’
Clandon had turned round and was looking backwards. ‘I saw a fellow looking at us in an uncommonly scared sort of way. And bolting into the pub as if he wanted to avoid our seeing him. Local criminal classes, eh? World must be full of chaps whose instinct is to dodge the cops.’
‘No doubt. But there’s not the slightest outward sign that we
are
the cops, Clandon. As a matter of fact, that was the fellow we’ve been talking about. Grindrod, the peripheral factor in the case.’
‘Was it, indeed?’ Clandon was interested. ‘I don’t know that he can be called all that peripheral, if he’s got himself down to Ailsworth ahead of us. Still following the usher, I suppose. Not that it was the usher, come to think of it. It was Howard himself, after all. Confoundedly confusing this affair is. But why should this Grindrod be so scared of your catching a glimpse of him?’
‘I imagine because he very well knows that he’s somebody we want to get a line on pretty badly. He’s following up his own shady angle on this affair. And he’s startled to find Cudworth – whom he knows very well – so close on the track of it. He realizes that if things go just a little bit wrong on him now, he’s had it. My bet is that he bolts straight away, as soon as he thinks the coast is clear. We shan’t see him again.’
This time, it proved possible to find a track that joined the main drive just short of the house. ‘It all looks uncommonly neglected,’ Clandon said, as the car slowed down. ‘Except by the birds.’
Cudworth surveyed Ailsworth Court dubiously. ‘It doesn’t seem right to me,’ he said. ‘For the purpose, I mean, to which we’re supposing it to be put.’
Appleby climbed out and stood on the neglected sweep which here ran across a broad terrace. ‘You want something more in the medieval manner,’ he said. ‘With dungeons, and so forth. And a gaoler with an enormous bunch of keys. I have my doubts about him, and about the feudal retainers in general. Probably there is somebody to do a little cooking. And of course there is Cowmeadow. There have been Cowmeadows here for generations, and this one may well be in a highly confidential relationship with his master. Ah, there’s my friend Jean.’
Jean Howe had come out of the house and was walking straight towards the car. It seemed likely that she had remarked its arrival from a window. ‘So it’s you, is it?’ she said unceremoniously to Appleby as she came up. ‘Did you draw a blank on that island?’
‘Not quite a blank. I learnt something, I’m afraid, that suggests a good deal of doubt about the reliability of Lord Ailsworth as an informant. Quite briefly, Professor Juniper can’t have been under the impression about Ardray that your grandfather declares him to have been.’
‘My grandfather is a very old man. It’s not to be expected that his recollections should be entirely reliable.’ Jean glanced with frank hostility from Appleby to his companions. ‘Are these policemen too?’
Appleby performed introductions. ‘Is Lord Ailsworth about?’ he asked. ‘It’s essential we should have a word with him at once.’
For a moment Jean frowned uncertainly. It was as if she was unable to make up her mind whether Appleby was friend or enemy. ‘Very well,’ she said suddenly. ‘He’s in the drawing-room with the Donkey Ducks. I’ll take you straight in. Come through the gunroom.’
They entered the house by a French window. Like everything else that Appleby had seen at Ailsworth Court, the gunroom was dusty and neglected. But this didn’t apply to the guns themselves, of which there were half a dozen in a rack on the wall. Cudworth paused beside them. ‘Quite an armoury,’ he said suspiciously. ‘Cartridge boxes, too. I suppose his lordship spends quite a lot of time shooting game at this time of year?’
‘You can ask him,’ Jean said.
Appleby laughed rather impatiently. ‘Miss Howe doesn’t mean that. It would be a most unfortunate question to put to Lord Ailsworth. If one of these guns is loaded, my dear Cudworth, it’s no doubt for the purpose of taking a shot at young Tommy Pickering. Your friend the Chief Constable, that is.’
Hearing this, Clandon turned to Jean in rumbling alarm. ‘Your grandfather doesn’t really do that sort of thing? We’re absolutely banking on his having no retail impulse that way.’
Jean looked puzzled. ‘I don’t understand you, I’m afraid.’
‘Perhaps I’d better explain.’ Appleby paused by the door and spoke gently. ‘We’re pretty sure that your grandfather has some very strange ideas in his head. Delusions, perhaps they should be called. Fantasies, with a very large element of the lethal in them. But my hope is that they’re only fantasies, and quite unconnected with anything he might actually do. Do I appear to you to be talking any sort of sense?’
There was a long pause. ‘Yes,’ Jean said. ‘You do.’
‘How would you yourself describe them – these fantasies of Lord Ailsworth’s?’
Jean smiled uncertainly. ‘I think I found a name for them some time ago. Prospero fantasies. The sense that he has supernatural aerial messengers at his command. It’s just an extension, no doubt beyond the bounds of strict sanity, of his intensely imaginative life with the birds. I don’t know what you mean by an element of the lethal. But then I do have a sense that there are some ideas that he very carefully conceals from me. Do you mean–?’
‘My dear Jean, have you friends with you? How very nice!’
They all turned round. Venerable and distinguished and entirely at his ease, Lord Ailsworth had come into the room.
‘But now you must all see the Donkey Ducks.’
Lord Ailsworth was so consummately the host, that the initiative had for the moment passed entirely to him as he led the way into the great drawing-room of Ailsworth Court. It was an astonishing sight. The long white and gold chamber had been stripped of its furnishings. On the walls there were blank spaces where a score of large paintings had hung – so that Appleby was reminded that the famous Ailsworth Collection was on loan to the nation. But one painting remained. Probably it had been the most splendid of the lot. It was Poussin’s ‘Noah Sending Forth the Dove’.
Appleby looked at Noah and then at Lord Ailsworth. He wondered whether this tremendous canvas, doubtless familiar to its present owner from his childhood, had been the first occasion of his mind’s taking the bent to which it had later so extravagantly inclined. There was even a physical resemblance between the mad peer and the majestic patriarch at the prow of his storm-tossed ark. It was as if here were an instance of the old fancy that nature sometimes moulds itself at the bidding of art.
The Donkey Ducks were accommodated in a line of pens or hutches running the full length of the room, and communicating with a sort of promenade on the terrace outside. Through wide-open French windows the precious creatures – which to Appleby’s inexpert eye appeared to be of no special distinction – waddled in and out as their obscure avine whim directed. Just so, fifty years ago and on such summer days as this, there must have wandered in and out the first thronging exponents of the Edwardian country-house weekend. For a moment Appleby had an alarmed sense that what stretched before him was tangible evidence of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and that in this quacking and gobbling crew were incarnated, not inappositely, the spirits of eminent parliamentarians long deceased.
Lord Ailsworth was telling Cudworth about his celebrated expedition to Tibet. He seemed to have taken a fancy to Cudworth. Perhaps Mrs Cudworth cherished a parrot and some sixth sense had appraised Lord Ailsworth of this propitious fact. Clandon was wandering round by himself, darkly brooding. This sort of place represented – Appleby recalled – Clandon’s own early background. He might be finding disturbing this vision of ducks and geese, rather than lions and lizards, keeping the place where great-uncles had gloried and drunk deep.
‘And now, I wonder whether you would care to look over the rest of the house?’ The preternaturally bright eyes of Lord Ailsworth glanced with charming diffidence from one to another of his visitors. ‘It is all quite undistinguished, I am afraid. And I can’t be certain that, in parts, everything is quite as it should be. Footmen, you know, are very hard to come by nowadays. We have to run Ailsworth on a gaggle of housemaids and parlourmaids, I am sorry to say. Did I use the word gaggle? The expression is distinctly on the complimentary side, it is to be feared. Here is the library.’
They began to make a tour of the house. It was a move in the face of which Appleby felt disposed to bide his time. He didn’t judge this showmanship to be the kind of thing that came at all naturally to Lord Ailsworth. The old man was up to something. Probably he believed himself to be acting with the deepest cunning. By showing off what it was safe to show, he believed that he would be disarming the suspicions which he must now realize were directed against him. And they could hardly, of course, be led through every room in the house. Ailsworth Court wasn’t like Splaine Croft, which could be thoroughly searched in the course of an hour’s romping. By noting just where Lord Ailsworth didn’t lead them, it was conceivable that a good deal of time could be saved. Of course the obvious course was to tackle the old man head on with the serious crime he was suspected of having committed. But, for the moment, Appleby distrusted this. The consequence of such a move wasn’t easy to assess. Nothing, for that matter, was easy to assess when your antagonist happened to be as mad as a hatter.