Appleby at Allington (7 page)

‘That business here last night,’ he said. ‘Poor show. Awkward thing. Sorry you tumbled into it. Odd, in a way, that it should have been you. Coals to Newcastle, I mean.’ Pride paused for a moment, as if rather dimly trying to verify the appositeness of this figure of speech. ‘Lucky for Allington, though. To have had your support, that is.’

‘I left as soon as your people arrived and I’d told them anything I could. Naturally, the inquiry wasn’t far advanced at that point. The chap hadn’t been identified. Allington felt he’d never set eyes on him.’

‘Identified? Ah, yes – important that. Investigation going on, of course.’

‘Of course.’

It was an impasse, since Pride now seemed to feel that he had said what was necessary. Appleby was constrained to risk at least a sighting shot.

‘The
son et lumière
people have got their junk away pretty smartly,’ he said.

‘Needed it elsewhere, no doubt.’

‘That may be it – and Allington was anxious it should go. Before the affair this afternoon, that is. I see they’ve even taken the control-room, or whatever they call it. The place in which we found the body.’

‘We haven’t got a murder on our hands, you know.’ Pride had stiffened. ‘Would you expect me to object?’

‘To the removal?’ For a second Appleby hesitated, considering the precise form of words Pride had just used. It seemed illuminating – and Appleby decided to take a risk. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would. But you didn’t have a chance.’

‘Unless I have occasion to hold an inquiry and deliver a reprimand, I take full responsibility for any decision arrived at by one of my officers.’

‘Yes, of course. And this particular decision
was
taken by one of your–’

‘Really, I don’t think that the affairs of the County Constabulary are any concern–’ Rather surprisingly, Pride checked himself. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Relation of confidence should subsist between us, I hope you feel. And, of course, you’re quite right.’

‘Allington must have been rather urgent about it, I imagine. And one of your subordinates would be a good deal more impressed by a local magnate than you or I should be. It wasn’t unnatural either, that Allington should want the thing out of the way before this show.’

‘No.’ Pride appeared not altogether happy with this conclusion on the matter. ‘Don’t think I’m not concerned about it, Appleby. Mind you, my people worked on it intensively from an early hour this morning. They excluded foul play. If there were any suspicion of
that
, of course, we’d be judged to have fallen down on the job. In letting the damned thing be taken away, that is.’

‘I take it the dead man has
not
been identified so far?’

‘Not when I was last in touch with anyone. It rather tells against his being a local, don’t you think? And one’s pretty sure what happened. Not quite a tramp – they say he didn’t look quite like a tramp – but a fellow drifting across country for one reason or another. Been walking all day–’

‘His shoes didn’t suggest that to me.’

‘His shoes?’ Colonel Pride was disconcerted; it was as if he had forgotten Appleby’s eye-witness status. ‘Well, it’s not essential to the argument. He was benighted, and that scared him. Suggests a townee, wouldn’t you say? It’s remarkable how reluctant fellows of that sort are to spend even a summer night under the stars. So he climbed up into this affair as the only available shelter, fell asleep on the floor, rolled over and dislodged something, and this live cable got him. Trouble brewing for somebody in the
son et lumière
business, I suspect. But nothing beyond that. The coroner will sit on the poor chap, and that will be the end of it.’

‘You’re very probably right.’ Appleby judged it was time to be soothing. ‘The only thing I’m not confident about is his not being a local man. The time has been rather short to be sure of that. When a question of this sort turns up in any district, whether urban or rural, it’s astonishing how many respectable male characters turn out to be away from home and unaccounted for.’

‘Perfectly true.’

‘Of course, when the news of an unidentified dead body gets around, people become scared, and turn up with admissions about missing relatives. Until that happens, they keep dark about a husband or son having a night or two out. And the news of this affair must just be beginning to get around the district now.’

‘That’s certainly so.’ Colonel Pride was perturbed. ‘And it’s hard to see why a man should climb into that damned thing if he had a perfectly respectable roof of his own near by.’

‘I quite agree, Pride. I’ve thought about it a little – you must forgive me if I do that – and only one possible explanation has come to me so far.’ Appleby was glancing here and there in the crowd. ‘Do you happen to know a citizen called William Goodcoal?’

‘Never heard of him. Sounds like a fellow in a book.’

‘You’ve heard
from
him. He was the man who did all that enthusiastic bellowing while the old lady was making her speech. Bellowing is rather his line. He has a machine over in that van which will bellow as loud as you please. I’m going over to have a word with him now.’

Lady Killcanon having departed with her bouquet and her frugal and judicious purchases in an ancient Rolls-Royce, Owain Allington felt it proper to give a little undivided attention to the woman of next consequence now left on the scene.

‘Don’t you think we might take a turn down the terrace, Lady Appleby, and return refreshed to the fracas? We’ve done not too badly, I’d say, on the first round.’

Judith accepted the invitation; she wasn’t averse to bettering her acquaintance with Allington, whom she hadn’t very frequently met. His mere manner interested her, for one thing. She told herself that he always exhibited a shade more confidence than there was any call for. It couldn’t basically be the product of social uncertainty, although she had once or twice previously heard him talk in a way that almost deliberately suggested something like that. It was much more likely to reflect a sense that he had made a bad guess about himself when he dropped a distinguished scientific career for his present way of life.

She had known similar things happen before. Or at least she could recall one or two cases of men making their way in exacting and absorbing professions – as lawyers, surgeons, scholars – who had unexpectedly ‘come into property’, as the phrase was, and thrown up their jobs in consequence. It hadn’t, in her experience, worked well, since an able man, after all, can’t delude himself that there is any hard challenge in pottering around an estate. Even so, there had been an element of piety in these cases. An elder brother had died, or something of that sort, and what must be thought of as some peculiarly English
mystique
had come into play. In Allington’s case the
mystique
had been the odd one of a quite distant family history. Somehow or other he had made rather a lot of money rather quickly, and he had sunk it in this business of becoming, so to speak, an Allington again. Imaginatively, there was no doubt something attractive about it. He must be an unstable creature, all the same.

‘Has all this been a success?’ Judith asked. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Life here?’ If Allington was a little startled by this directness of address, he was too intelligent to pretend to be at a loss. ‘I don’t think I know yet. They say, of course, that as a physicist I was feeling the twitch of my tether, and that I took the chance of a break when it came. It’s a reasonable conjecture. I was rather good. There’s no denying I was rather good. But, as you know, it’s young men who make the running in my sort of thing. Even more than with the poets, and characters of that sort. Year by year, the neurones inside one’s skull become less numerous. And what is affected, oddly enough, appears to be the mind’s more intuitive operations. And physics and maths are damnably intuitive – beyond a modest bread-and-butter level, that is. When that fails, we have to be turfed out into being heads of this and that – like those wise and worried old father-figures, sitting behind desks and directing unfathomable researches by vast teams of young eggheads, that you get in television drama.’

‘I see.’ Judith had a fleeting impression that she had been listening to a set piece; that it wasn’t only once or twice before that Allington had gone into this explanatory routine. ‘But you still do some scientific work?’

‘I must confess that I conduct a little experiment from time to time.’ Allington paused for a moment. ‘By the way, I was so sorry to run your husband into the business of that unfortunate discovery last night.’

‘I hardly think it worried him, such affairs, after all, used to be very much in his day’s work.’

‘But I’m afraid I gave him a dull evening as well. I’d rather expected my nephew Martin to turn up after dinner. But he didn’t. Indeed, he hasn’t turned up yet, although other members of my family have. Three nieces
plus
two husbands – as I think I told Sir John. And several of their children, as well. I very much hope you will meet them.’

Judith offered a civil reply, although she wasn’t very sure that she really wanted to embrace the acquaintance of shoals of further Allingtons. Her host had now conducted her round a corner of the terrace, and they were passing a light barrier to which had been affixed a notice saying PRIVATE. Allington regarded this dubiously.

‘I wonder whether that looks a bit unfriendly?’ he said. ‘After all, all these good people are my guests for the afternoon, more or less. But tiresome things can happen, if they roam all over the place. Things vanish from the greenhouses, and the gardeners are upset.’

Judith again produced an appropriate murmur. Allington, she felt, rather abounded in nice feelings. But now she noticed that his attention had strayed for a moment, and that he appeared to be listening to the miscellaneous hubbub from the other side of the house. William Goodcoal’s canned music was its chief component. But the assembled children were also yelling fairly pertinaciously, and for a moment there had been the sound of a motor engine. It was this that Allington proved to have been held by.

‘I thought it might be Martin’s car,’ he said. ‘He’d ignore the car park, of course, and drive straight up to the house. But it isn’t. I’d know the sound of Martin’s damned car anywhere.’

‘Why is it damned?’ Judith had detected the inflection of something almost grim in Allington’s voice. ‘Is it abominably noisy?’

‘It’s abominably powerful. And Martin drives it far too fast. He treats a common English high road as if it were the
Autostrada del Sole
.’

‘It’s against the law to do quite that sort of speeding now.’

‘Quite so. Plenty of people do it, of course.’ Allington hesitated. ‘If the boy got himself disqualified, and was off the road for a time, I’d be easier in my mind.’

‘Is Martin just a boy?’

‘Well, no. In fact, rather far from it. But I think of him that way. As I was telling your husband, Martin will inherit Allington one day. Good for him, I hope – a settled country life.’

‘I see.’ What, in fact, Judith thought she saw was an answer to her own earlier speculation. Allington was devoted to his nephew. So much so, that he was mounting this whole country-gentleman business in his interest. Martin Allington had to be rescued from something – and presumably from something even more hazardous than driving a powerful car much too fast. And the rescue was to be effected by handing him Allington Park and its attendant position of consideration in this eminently respectable county. It was a plan almost certainly belonging to that class of fond plans which come to nothing. For the first time, Judith felt an impulse of sympathy towards this slightly factitious squire before whose mansion she was perambulating. ‘It’s a wonderful thing to have to offer anybody,’ she said.

‘I think he’ll do very well.’ Allington, who had spoken almost gruffly, hesitated again. ‘He hits the bottle,’ he said suddenly.

For a moment, Judith’s feeling of sympathy wavered. She didn’t know Owain Allington at all well, and this sudden confidence was rather forcing the pace. Moreover, it hadn’t been of an order to which there is any easy reply. Judith chose a somewhat modish one.

‘Better that than drugs, I suppose,’ she said.

‘That depends on the drug.’ The grim note in Allington’s voice was now indubitable. ‘Hard drinking isn’t too bad in itself. But ahead of it lies alcoholism – an addiction one doesn’t care to think about.’ He glanced at Judith, and seemed to realize that he had plunged rather oddly into this family matter. ‘Your husband and I happened just to touch on this last night,’ he said. ‘It turned out he had met Martin – I didn’t gather just how – and seemed to know about this liability of his. At least, that’s the impression I got. And I imagined he might have mentioned it to you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started in on such a boring matter. First a corpse in the gazebo, and then a skeleton in the cupboard. I’m really not serving the Applebys at all well.’ Allington came to a halt. ‘The castle looks rather impressive from here, don’t you think?’

Judith agreed about the impressiveness of the castle. It had been quite time that her host changed the subject. Not – she told herself honestly – that she hadn’t asked for what she’d got. For wasn’t she much given to vulgar curiosity? Wasn’t it the motive, for instance, of her wanting John to worry out the not terribly interesting mystery of last night’s dead man? But now she thought of an innocuous topic which ought to last Allington and herself until they returned to the scene of the fête.

‘Wilfred Osborne came to lunch,’ she said, ‘before we drove him over here. We talked about the story of the Allington treasure – because of its having been mentioned, you know, in your
son et lumière
. I think I have a theory about it.’

‘A theory about it!’ Allington was quite startled. ‘I’ve heard plenty of theories from time to time. But I’m sure, Lady Appleby, that yours will be a particularly interesting one.’

‘I think it was dug up by Humphrey Repton when he was improving the place. He improved himself on the side.’