Appleby raised his umbrella and pointed. ‘May I propose that we walk over and have a look at that swimming pool? I take no chances in an affair like this. Even to your secretary, please, I remain just another inquiring parent.’
They walked across the August grass, faintly brown. From the edge of the field a breeze, still warm, brought the scent of grass-mowings now rotting. It was familiar and precious, and for a moment Appleby had an odd sense that he was really doing what he was pretending to do: looking over a school to which he was thinking of sending a son. He had indeed done it often enough – but his own children were beyond private school age now. ‘I like everything here,’ he said suddenly. ‘And I wish I wasn’t bringing you this bad news – that I wasn’t merely pretending to be a parent.’
Juniper looked at him rather oddly. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘My secretary took you for a grandparent, actually. But’ – he spoke with a touch of mockery – ‘no doubt that’s the beard.’
Appleby smiled. ‘I do apologize for it again. And I’d repeat that it’s a fantastic degree of caution. There are people – as I’ll explain to you – who would be very interested indeed in the notion of a Professor Howard Juniper vanished into the blue, and of Scotland Yard hurrying down to see his brother. But, to the best of my knowledge, the disappearance is a secret still. I’ll explain that too. It will bring me to my real proposal.’
‘I’m waiting for that,’ Juniper said.
The pool was drained and empty. But the garden boy who was cleaning out the mud and leaves had gone away, and they were again quite alone. Only from the school there came a sudden faint confusion of voices. The holiday crowd had emerged from tea. Perhaps they had discovered the prosperous Mr Clwyd’s Rolls Royce.
Appleby paced out the length of the pool. He might have been a veritable Mr Clwyd, checking up with mercantile caution upon the dimensions as declared in the school prospectus. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘how your brother lives: an unmarried man like yourself – and like yourself, right on the job. But – I gather – as something of a recluse. Certainly rather an aloof figure, as far as the staff at the research station goes.’
Juniper nodded. ‘Quite so. And I understand it very well. Howard and I are worlds apart in intellectual endowment. That hardly needs saying. But in temperament I imagine that we are notably akin. And that sort of shyness, or whatever it is, grows on both of us with age.’
Again Appleby smiled. ‘I think I’d have guessed as much. And, at the moment, there’s one important consequence. With the exception of Dr Clandon, his principal assistant, there’s as yet nobody to know that the professor’s absence isn’t perfectly regular. Clandon covered up at once with the small domestic staff; and the scientific people have precisely the notion you had: that your brother’s at a conference, or something of the sort. So there we are. At the moment, no sensation. And no alerting of the relevant espionage people.’
Juniper drew a long breath, ‘Surely not
that
? It sounds like a shocker. There can’t really be – foreign agents who would be interested in the idea of my brother wandering about ill?’
Appleby shook his head rather grimly. ‘Shocker or not, there certainly are. And I’m taking no risks. I’m going to find your brother before they do. With luck, I’m going to find him before anybody knows he has to be found. If you will help, that is to say.’
‘I’ve already said I’ll help in any way I can.’ Juniper was suddenly impatient. ‘Good God, man – does it need saying? Howard and I have gone our different ways, and no longer see a great deal of each other. But we’re closer to one another than perhaps most brothers are.’
‘So far, so good. You see, although Clandon is doing his best, we can’t cover up for much longer.’
‘But is that really the right thing, Sir John – really necessary? Surely if Howard is missing – and perhaps, as you suggest, a very sick man – it’s in his interest and that of everybody else that there should be an alarm and an extensive search?’ Juniper seemed now perplexed, anxious, and on the verge of renewed anger.
‘There’s an extensive search, all right.’ Appleby strolled across the grass verge of the swimming pool and glanced into the gloomy changing shed, so that it was almost as if he suspected Professor Howard Juniper of being in hiding there. ‘But – I can’t too emphatically repeat – I’d rather know where he is before it becomes known that he isn’t where he ought to be.’
‘Very well. You are the judge. But I record that I consider it thoroughly dangerous.’
‘You protest?’
‘I don’t protest. I simply put that on the record.’ For a moment Juniper seemed entirely the rather pedantic schoolmaster. ‘Now, go ahead.’
But Appleby, for some reason, paused to take a wider view of the scene. He raised his umbrella and pointed at a beech wood beyond the little river from which Splaine Croft took its name. He might have been talking timber. Then he turned and looked at the school. ‘I think I heard some boys?’ he asked. ‘You have holiday boarders?’
‘Only a handful.’ Juniper was impatient.
‘So the school is fairly empty?’
‘There’s certainly oceans of room.’ Juniper glanced at Appleby and gave a sudden exclamation. ‘Great heavens! You don’t imagine that – that I’m
hiding
my brother – sheltering him?’
Appleby smiled faintly. ‘You are, if I may say so, Mr Juniper, most promisingly acute. And I try to imagine everything under the sun. It’s my job.’
‘Very well. You can bring down the whole flying squad – if that’s what it’s called – and search the place. But, meanwhile, and while you’re pursuing some damned fantasy, Howard may be in real and sober danger.’
‘It’s not a point I’m likely to overlook. And we’re not, I hope, going to quarrel. Let me come at once to what I want you to do. I want you – just for a vital few days – to take your brother’s place.’
Juniper stared at his visitor, thunderstruck. ‘Take Howard’s place! I’m to be involved in pantomime too! It’s impossible. And there’s no sense in it. You can’t be serious.’
‘I’m perfectly serious, and you know it. And it can’t be impossible, since you’ve done it before.’
‘Done it before?’ Juniper now looked bewildered. ‘Just how much have you ferreted out about Howard and me?’
‘I know that you are identical twins, and amazingly like each other. I know that when you were both up at Cambridge you played some famous tricks on the strength of it. And I know that it went along with a certain amount of regular theatrical activity – the Footlights, and so forth. Do you happen to have kept up your amateur acting?’
‘No, I haven’t – although Howard has, to a certain extent. He is altogether more versatile than I am.’
Appleby was carefully testing the flexibility of the diving board. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘whether that tells us anything about the probabilities or possibilities of your brother’s situation now?’
‘Yet more false beards, and so forth, Sir John?’ Juniper seemed to intend to speak ironically, but to be veering towards anger again instead. ‘It’s certainly conceivable that Howard is play-acting. He may have disguised himself as a commercial traveller in order to seduce the wife of a greengrocer. Or a dozen other things – provided you’re willing to ignore plain common sense. If Howard is himself, he may be doing something slightly freakish, but not anything downright irresponsible. I’m certain of that. If he’s had this nervous breakdown, it’s at least my guess that any sort of deliberate disguising of himself is most unlikely. I mean, simply in the light of what sick men do and don’t do. But I’m not an expert. I may be wrong there.’
Appleby nodded thoughtfully. ‘I imagine you have clinical experience on your side. But there’s an exception to every rule. And Professor Juniper, of course, must be an exceptional man to start with. Are you often anxious about him?’
The sudden question took Juniper by surprise, as it was meant to do. But his answer seemed to come frankly enough. ‘Well, yes – I am. Ever since he has been on this secret work. We’ve already touched on that, haven’t we? The moral burden must be almost unbearably onerous. If I had to carry it, I think it would make me completely unscrupulous.’
‘Unscrupulous?’ Appleby took up the word curiously. ‘A strong sense of moral responsibility would make you unscrupulous?’
Juniper was frowning, rather as if his perception was still obscure to him. ‘Yes – in a sense. I’d feel that I lived in a world of moral imbeciles, against whom I must defend myself by any means in my power – including, perhaps, just clearing out. Something like that.’
‘You have a strong sense of sympathy with your brother?’
‘Haven’t I made that clear?’ Juniper turned away impatiently.
‘Then you will come to the rescue in the way I’ve suggested?’
‘Yes, I will. If you can show me it isn’t nonsense, that is to say.’
‘Very well.’ Appleby turned away from the swimming pool and began to walk in the direction of the school. He seemed to be confident that the interview would now soon be over. ‘What I have to show you is that, if he is known to be wandering round in some more or less helpless state, your brother’s danger is acute. I can do that – although you may feel that what I have to tell you about foreign agents, and so forth, is like stuff out of a book. But there’s more of – well, more of the same order. Professor Juniper has vanished. That’s strange enough. But there’s something that takes a good deal more swallowing – and that makes the dangerousness of the situation extend far beyond your brother himself.’
Juniper stopped in his tracks, and Appleby saw that he had quite suddenly gone deadly pale. ‘You can’t mean–’
‘Yes. You yourself came quite near to mentioning it, if only as a sort of joke. Your brother may have taken something with him. Something that ought never to have left a locked refrigerator in his laboratory.’
‘It can’t be true!’ Juniper’s voice had risen in pitch again. ‘Howard would never – Why, it’s madness!’
Appleby turned and looked at him steadily. ‘Isn’t madness,’ he asked, ‘one of the possibilities we’ve been talking about?’
The summer sun, low in a clear sky, was at play on the rambling red-tiled roof of Splaine Croft. It made the place blaze like fire. From the paddock on the other side of the house came the shouts of boys playing tip and run. Appleby, his bowler hat on his head, walked towards the building as if his next task was to check up on its sanitation.
For some moments Juniper walked silently beside him. When he spoke, it was still incoherently. The man – Appleby saw – was really shaken.
‘I won’t believe it! You said something out of a book. It’s that – but absurd, banal. The demented scientist with the vital secret in his pocket? I just won’t take it. I doubt the whole thing…your whole visit…who are you… It’s a hoax – a hoax in filthy taste.’
Appleby allowed a minute for this disturbance to subside. ‘No,’ he said presently. ‘This is quite literally no joke, Mr Juniper. You know that, really. But I admit that it is all close neighbour to absurdity. The atom bomb in the attaché case. They made rather a good film out of that, although not perhaps a very plausible one. The bomb was certainly a bit much. And of course – inside the story, I mean – it could have been checked up on at once. One can go in and count such things, I suppose, on their racks. Bombs don’t obligingly breed for you.’
There was a silence during which Juniper was clearly striving for self-control. ‘That assistant,’ he brought out presently. ‘Clandon, did you call him? Is he certain?’
‘No. He can’t be certain. The whole technical set-up, it seems, is such that he can’t be certain. Your brother is the only person who can be certain.’
‘I accept it. I accept your story…the situation.’ Juniper, although he spoke firmly, was like a man slightly dazed. ‘And I’ll go – I’ll go at once, and hold the fort as best I can. Although I never expected to be the cuckoo, so to speak, in my brother’s scientific nest.’
Appleby smiled grimly. ‘It’s not a very exact image. But I’m glad you’re game. Thank you.’
‘I’ll need a lot of briefing. But I suppose I can get it from this fellow Clandon. He’s to be in the secret, I suppose?’
‘He must be. But he’s entirely reliable. I know him quite well. A man of some imagination, as well as a competent scientist. He’s absolutely willing to see you through as Professor Howard Juniper for a few days.’
‘You know…it’s funny.’ Juniper had come to a halt and was gazing with unseeing eyes at Splaine Croft. ‘Did I tell you how I travelled from Oxford today with a lot of young people? I was led into talking to them about all this sort of thing. The whole nightmare, I mean, of these new ways of making war – if war is not far too clean a name for the horror. I think I even mentioned having a brother who was a little concerned in it. The thing slipped out – although not, I hope, indiscreetly. It shows that my anxieties about Howard have been very near the surface of my mind. But I never dreamed of this – that my brother may be carrying round death and destruction with him.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t.’ Appleby, who appeared to be a born actor, meditatively stroked his false beard. ‘It would be a distinctly morbid mind that would think up anything of the sort clean out of the blue.’
‘But it’s true?’ Juniper appealed oddly for confirmation, as if he had a lingering hope that he had got the whole thing wrong. ‘Howard may actually have taken – have taken something almost as destructive as an atom bomb?’
‘
Almost as destructive!
’ Appleby paused, apparently thinking better of going on. ‘Clandon will be the man to tell you about that.’
Juniper was very pale again. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I think my own imagination can cope with the possible dimensions of the thing. Now, how had I better get away? I’m ready this instant.’
Appleby nodded approvingly. ‘Mr Clwyd,’ he said, ‘will take a quick look at a form room and a dormitory, and drive off. You’ll get a telegram within half an hour. It will be a genuine telegram from – shall we say Dorchester? But it will have begun its life on the short-wave transmitter in my car. Would the sudden death of an old friend serve?’
‘Quite adequately, I suppose. And he can be given any name under the sun. Even Miss Grimstone – that’s my secretary – hasn’t a line on my whole former acquaintance.’