Appleby Talking (13 page)

When Appleby had concluded his narrative neither of his hearers spoke.

“My dear Appleby,” the Vicar said presently, “you were in a very difficult position. I shall be most interested to hear what your decision was.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.” And Appleby smiled at the astonishment of his friends. “Did you ever hear of Arthur Thorman?”

The Doctor considered. “I can’t say that I ever did.”

“Or, for that matter, of the important Sir Charles Tumbril?”

The Vicar shook his head. “No. When you come to mention it–”

And Appleby picked up his novel again.

“Didn’t I say,” he murmured, “that I was going to tell you a story?"

"And there it is – a simple story about footprints on the sands of Thyme.”

“A mere impression,” Appleby said, “was all I had to go on in the affair of the X-Plan. But it turned out to be enough.”

“The X-Plan?” The Doctor was suspicious. “Are confidential documents really given those fancy names?”

Appleby smiled. “I’m calling it that. Even in a small circle like this, security must be respected.”

The Vicar tapped out his pipe. “One hears a great deal about this security. And the more one hears of it, the less one feels it. But tell us about the X-Plan.”

“Essentially, it was an explanation.” Appleby paused to let this mild pun take effect. “A committee of the Cabinet wanted a comprehensive and non-technical account of some very important scientific work, and that was what Tilley had prepared for them. Tilley did it out of his head, while on holiday here by the sea. I used to watch him sitting in this very beach-shelter we’re in now, jotting it down on a scribbling-pad.”

“How did you know,” the Doctor demanded, “that what he was busy with was the X-Plan?”

“My dear chap, it was my job, I was the detective guarding him.

“Our people knew Tilley to be pretty vague,” Appleby continued. “That was why they insisted on a detective. And I must say I’ve had easier assignments. The chap liked solitude, and would slip away to take a long ramble along the coast, or just bury himself among the rocks at the foot of the cliff here.

“Whether Tilley was feeling active or inactive, I had an equally anxious time. A holiday place like Sheercliff is always tricky. There’s a floating population, and you’re constantly wondering about one new face or another.

“Again, there’s the fact that trippers have no respect for privacy, and walk in on you after a fashion they’d never dream of at home. I’d hear a thoroughly suspicious scurrying after dark, and it would turn out to be a woman from a caravan, filling a kettle in the kitchen, or placidly borrowing the matches.”

The Vicar had lit his pipe again. “What kitchen would this be?”

“Tilley lodged with an old friend of his called Stepaside, who had the last cottage on the cliff road. Stepaside was a bachelor, and by occupation a prolific but rather unsuccessful novelist. He was no doubt quite glad of Tilley’s money – and of mine that went with it."

“There was nobody else in the cottage. We lived on the can-opener, and an old woman came in and cleared up. She was a queer, gobbling creature called Mrs Hodge, from whom one seldom caught an articulate word.”

“I remember her quite well,” the Doctor nodded. “An interesting speech dystrophy.”

“No doubt. Well, that was the set-up. Stepaside divided his time between tapping interminable fiction out of an old typewriter and going for long brooding walks to think out his plot.

“He was scarcely an entertaining character. A day for him seemed simply a space of time in which he could fabricate so many thousand words. ‘I’ve finished chapter four,’ he’d say; or ‘I’ve got her living with her husband again and now I must think up a new lover, blast it.’ I came much to prefer the queer noises made by Mrs Hodge."

“As for Tilley, he read novels – including some of Stepaside’s, for he was a good-natured soul – and scribbled this minute that I’m calling the X-Plan. For my own part, I kept my eyes and ears open and waited for a rather tiresome fortnight to end."

“Everything looked like being thoroughly uneventful. And then, one day in the High Street, I saw Gruber.”

The Vicar chuckled. “Enter the villain. The well-known secret agent.”

“This Gruber had done time for an offence under the Official Secrets Act, so you describe him fairly enough. His presence in Sheercliff might be coincidental. But I had an obstinate feeling that he was after Tilley and his stuff. I took to carrying a gun.”

“I didn’t know you people ever did that.” The Doctor appeared disturbed. “They’re frightfully dangerous things.”

“Gruber was dangerous, too. I warned both Tilley and Stepaside about him – and I even did my best to warn Mrs Hodge. Mrs Hodge made noises like a hen – I imagine she must have had some horrible Freudian experience in a poultry yard when a child – and Stepaside half emerged from his fictional world and promised to keep a look-out."

“But Tilley himself just laughed at the thing as cheap melodrama, and advised Stepaside to cook it up for a yarn. The next morning Tilley disappeared.”

“Capital.” The Doctor was delighted. “Appleby has quite the Stepaside professional touch – eh, Vicar?”

Appleby shook his head. “There was nothing funny about it at the time. Tilley left the breakfast-table to walk down the garden and decide about the weather. And he just didn’t come back. By ten o’clock I had been round all his nearer haunts, and by eleven I’d summoned the local police to the hunt. A week earlier, I’d have given Tilley rather more rope, but Gruber had got me on the jump."

“It was close on noon, and I was coming back to the cottage to see if there was any news there, when Mrs Hodge met me. ‘Glook-coop,’ she said. ‘Boo-goo-hoo’ – and rather more to the same effect. It came to me like an inspiration that these remarks were topographical, and that she was reminding me of a little coign in the cliff no more than a hundred yards off. I’d missed out on it.”

The Vicar was looking sober. “Tilley had been killed?”

“So I supposed. And then I saw something that was an immense relief. His blessed scribbling-pad was sticking out of his hip pocket. A moment later I found that he was simply heavily asleep."

“Getting him awake was quite a business. He had climbed down here, he said, to see if the tide was right for bathing in a little cove below. And not having slept very well during the night, he had just dropped off in the warmth of the morning sun."

“By the time I got him back to the cottage Stepaside was laughing at me, too, for at my first alarm he had pooh-poohed the notion of any danger, and I’d simply left him at his interminable tap-tapping.

“But in point of fact he appeared uneasy. ‘I still think there may be something wrong,’ he said. ‘After all, the whole morning’s gone past. And I saw Gruber on the cliff.’

“ ‘So you went out?’ I asked."

“He scowled at the litter of typescript on his table. ‘I finished that blasted Chapter Six, and then I thought I’d better join in your hunt.'"

“ ‘After an hour down on the shingle I came up to the cliff. And there was your spy. His idea seemed to be to slip off inland. He had all the appearance of a harmless tourist – rucksack, camera, and a hearty stick.’ ”

Appleby paused in his narrative. “A nasty moment,” the Doctor said.

“It didn’t look too good. ‘Did you tell the police?’ I asked Stepaside.

“He shook his head. ‘I thought I’d better keep it for you, Inspector Appleby. I wasn’t sure what you wanted known. So I came back to the cottage and started on the seduction scene. That’s Chapter Seven.’"

“Stepaside pointed at the papers on his table, and something prompted me to take a good squint at them. The next moment I had that gun out. It was a big thing, and I was taking no chances. ‘Your trick has failed,’ I said. ‘Hand over.’ And there was no trouble. The fellow crumpled at once.”

The Vicar took his pipe from his mouth. “You mean that Stepaside –?”

“He had drugged Tilley at breakfast, and managed to suggest the direction of his stroll. As soon as the hunt began, he had slipped down, taken the scribbling-pad, returned to the cottage and typed out its contents at high speed. Then he’d returned it. It was, of course, my warning about Gruber that had put the treacherous idea in his head.”

The Vicar nodded. “It was certainly a nasty piece of perfidy. But I don’t yet see how you tumbled to it.”

“Stepaside had put a new ribbon in his machine near the end of what he called ‘that blasted Chapter Six.’ That gives at first, as you know, a very black rather broad print, which when the ribbon reverses, begins to fine away to normal. The fading process, of course, goes on all through the life of the ribbon, and an expert can always tell whether one sheet has been typed much before or after another.

“In this case, there was evidence visible to my naked eye. Between the end of Chapter Six and the beginning of Chapter Seven, Stepaside had done quite a lot of typing that he was keeping quiet about. It wasn’t difficult to guess what it had been.”

The Vicar – not a mechanically-minded man – was working it out slowly. “The impress of the machine upon its ribbon yields a progressively fainter–”

“Precisely. Didn’t I say it was a mere impression that I had to go on?”

Already the anatomy theatre was crowded with students: tier upon tier of faces pallid beneath the clear shadowless light cast by the one elaborate lamp, large as a giant cartwheel, near the ceiling. The place gleamed with an aggressive cleanliness; the smell of formalin pervaded it; its centre was a faintly sinister vacancy – the spot to which would presently be wheeled the focal object of the occasion.

At Nessfield University Professor Finlay’s final lecture was one of the events of the year. He was always an excellent teacher. For three terms he discoursed lucidly from his dais or tirelessly prowled his dissecting-rooms, encouraging young men and women who had hitherto dismembered only dogfish and frogs to address themselves with resolution to human legs, arms, and torsos. The Department of Anatomy was large; these objects lay about it in a dispersed profusion; Finlay moved among them now with gravity and now with a whimsical charm which did a good deal to humanise his macabre environment. It was only once a year that he yielded to his taste for the dramatic.

The result was the final lecture. And the final lecture was among the few academic activities of Nessfield sufficiently abounding in human appeal to be regularly featured in the local Press. Perhaps the account had become a little stereotyped with the years, and always there was virtually the same photograph showing the popular professor (as Finlay was dubbed for the occasion) surrounded by wreaths, crosses, and other floral tributes. Innumerable citizens of Nessfield who had never been inside the doors of their local university looked forward to this annual report, and laid it down with the comfortable conviction that all was well with the pursuit of learning in the district. Their professors were still professors – eccentric, erudite, and amiable. Their students were still, as students should be, giving much of their thought to the perpetration of elaborate, tasteless, and sometimes dangerous practical jokes.

For the lecture was at once a festival, a rag, and a genuine display of virtuosity. It took place in this large anatomy theatre. Instead of disjointed limbs and isolated organs there was a whole new cadaver for the occasion. And upon this privileged corpse Finlay rapidly demonstrated certain historical developments of his science to an audience in part attentive and in part concerned with lowering skeletons from the rafters, releasing various improbable living creatures – lemurs and echidnas and opossums – to roam the benches, or contriving what quainter japes they could think up. On one famous occasion the corpse itself had been got at, and at the first touch of the professor’s scalpel had awakened to an inferno of noise presently accounted for by the discovery that its inside consisted chiefly of alarm clocks. Nor were these diversions and surprises all one-sided, since Finlay himself, entering into the spirit of the occasion, had more than once been known to forestall his students with some extravagance of his own. It was true that this had happened more rarely of recent years, and by some it was suspected that this complacent scholar had grown a little out of taste with the role in which he had been cast. But the affair remained entirely good-humoured; tradition restrained the excesses into which it might have fallen; it was, in its own queer way, an approved social occasion. High University authorities sometimes took distinguished visitors along – those, that is to say, who felt they had a stomach for post-mortem curiosity. There was quite a number of strangers on the present occasion.

The popular professor had entered through the glass-panelled double doors which gave directly upon the dissecting-table. Finlay was florid and very fat; his white gown was spotlessly laundered; a high cap of the same material would have given him the appearance of a generously self-dieted chef. He advanced to the low rail that separated him from the first tier of spectators and started to make some preliminary remarks. What these actually were, or how they were designed to conclude, he had probably forgotten years ago, for this was the point at which the first interruption traditionally occurred. And, sure enough, no sooner had Finlay opened his mouth than three young men near the back of the theatre stood up and delivered themselves of a fanfare of trumpets. Finlay appeared altogether surprised – he possessed, as has been stated, a dramatic sense – and this was the signal for the greater part of those present to rise in their seats and sing
For he’s a jolly good
fellow
. Flowers – single blooms, for the present – began to float through the air and fall about the feet of the professor. The strangers, distinguished and otherwise, smiled at each other benevolently, thereby indicating their pleased acquiescence in these time-honoured academic junketings. A bell began to toll.

“
Never ask for whom the bell tolls
,” said a deep voice from somewhere near the professor’s left hand. And the whole student body responded in a deep chant: “
It tolls for THEE
.”