Appleby Talking (4 page)

The Vicar nodded. “I think I have. None of the folk congregated in those nearby inns had anything to do with the disappearance of
A Candid Chronicle of My Life and Times
. The Marquis of Scattergood had himself staged the burglary, and saved his family’s honour by pitching the wretched thing in the fire.”

“You are at least half-way to the truth.” And Appleby smiled a little grimly. “That night I stopped at Benison Court after all – and did a little burglary of my own. Lord Scattergood, too, had a sitting-room, and Lord Scattergood, too, had a bureau. I broke it open. The manuscript was there.”

“He had preserved it?”

“He had begun to transcribe it. And with a new title page.
The Intimate Journals of Eustace
Scattergood, Fifth Marquis of Scattergood
. It was as a writer that he would have chosen to be remembered, after all.”

“The death of Miss Pinhorn,” said Appleby, “was decidedly bizarre. But it was some time before we realised that it was sinister too.”

“I remember Miss Pinhorn slightly.” The Vicar set down his tankard. “My daughter called on her once when collecting for European relief. Miss Pinhorn owned a cottage here, I think. She gave the poor girl sixpence.”

The Doctor chuckled. “She was quite astonishingly mean.”

“She would have lived, if she could, on free samples of breakfast cereals,” said Appleby. “But she died, nevertheless, of something odder than starvation. In a sense, she died of drink. But I see I must tell the story.”

“Capital,” said the Doctor. “And we’ll try a second pint ourselves.”

“Amelia Pinhorn was a woman of considerable fortune and marked eccentricity.

“For most of the year she lived in London the normal life of a leisured person of her sort. Then for a couple of months each summer she came down here and led a solitary and miserly existence in a small cottage.

“She had no contacts with anybody – not even the milkman.

“I don’t exaggerate. Everything was sent down from town before she arrived. She lived on tins.

“And then one day she was drowned. Or at least, it is supposed that she was drowned.

“For we never, you see, recovered the body. The poor lady went over the cliff just short of the lighthouse. You must know about the current that sweeps in there and then goes out to sea again past the Furies.

“And this was awkward when the rumours began to go round. It might have been particularly awkward for Miss Pinhorn’s niece, Jane. Old women over their teacups would have credited the poor girl with the most masterly crime of the age.”

The Vicar looked disturbed. “This is not
really
a crime story, I hope?”

“It certainly is – but whether masterly or not, you must judge. The initial facts were perfectly simple, and fell within the observation of a number of people who were about here at the time.

“Miss Pinhorn emerged from her cottage, locked the door behind her, and set out on what appeared to be one of her normal solitary rambles. She came in the direction of this pub, and as she neared it she was seen to be hurrying – like a seasoned toper, somebody said, who is afraid of being beaten to it by closing time.

“But she wasn’t known to drink, and she had certainly never been in this very comfortable private bar before.

“Well, in she came, talking to herself as usual and looking quite alarmingly wild. She called for two pints of beer in quick succession, floored them, planked down half a crown, and bolted out again. By this time she was singing and throwing her arms about.

“It was only when she had gone some way that she appeared to lose direction and wheel round towards the brow of the cliff.

“By that time she was in a thorough-going state of mania, and she went straight to her death.

“Perhaps, you may say, she had a repressed tendency to suicide, and the need for that took charge when her inhibitions were destroyed by the poison. For this is a story of poisoning – as you, Doctor, have no doubt realised.

“My aunt was the first person to suspect foul play. That needs qualifying, maybe.

“For the notion of poisoning seems to have arisen almost at once at what you might call a folk-level. Everybody was whispering it.

“What my aunt certainly spotted was the significance of the beer. It indicated, she said, a sudden pathological thirst. Together with the very rapid onset of a violent mania or delirium, it should give us a very good guide to the sort of poison at work.

“When I say ‘us’, I mean, of course, the local police and myself. It’s a queer thing that I seldom quit Scotland Yard to spend a week in Sheercliffe with my eminently respectable kinswoman without her involving me in something of a busman’s holiday. But I felt bound to peer about.

“For a very little thought suggested to me that my aunt – in this instance at least – was talking sense. Had the body been recoverable I’d never have bothered my head.

“Miss Pinhorn’s cottage was not a difficult place to search thoroughly.

“There was a tremendous store of patent medicines – something quite out of the way even with a maiden lady – all put up in very small packs. But each was more utterly harmless than the last.

“They were, in fact, almost without exception, free samples which had been stored away for a long time.

“A related inquiry to this was that into the dead woman’s recent medical history.

“We learned from her maids in town that a few months previously she had been having trouble with her eyes, and that for some unknown reason she had to be hurried off to a nursing-home.

“But now I must tell you about the chocolates.

“You see, it really comes down to a sort of sealed-room mystery. Miss Pinhorn is poisoned – and yet
nothing
has gone into her cottage for days.

“Or so we thought until I happened, during the search, to take a second look at this half-pound box of chocolates. It was lying in the sitting-room, with the top layer gone.

“It wasn’t anything about the chocolates themselves that struck me. It was the lid.

“You know that slightly padded sort of lid that confectioners go in for? It was of that kind. And just visible on it was the impress of three or four parallel wavy lines. That box had been through the post, lightly wrapped, and here was a faint trace of the postmark.”

“Most astonishing!” The Vicar was enthusiastic. “My dear Appleby, a fine feat of detection indeed.”

“I don’t know that I’d call it that. But at least it sent me to the waste-paper basket. And there, sure enough, with a London postmark and Miss Pinhorn’s address, was the scrap of wrapping I expected.

“And there was something more – a slip of notepaper with the words: ‘To Aunt Amelia on her birthday, with love from Jane.’

“So I hunted out the postman. Apart from a few letters, he had delivered nothing at Miss Pinhorn’s for weeks – until the very morning of the day on which she died. On that day he had delivered a small oblong parcel.

“I looked like being hot on a trail. That evening, while the remaining chocolates were being analysed, with what was to prove an entirely negative result, I went up to town and sought out Jane Pinhorn.

“And I didn’t care for what I found. Jane was as nice a girl as you could wish to meet, and she had liked her eccentric aunt. This birthday box of chocolates had been an annual occasion with her. She was a highly intelligent girl, too.

“Miss Pinhorn’s symptoms, so far as we knew about them, were consistent with the ingestion of some poison of the atropine group. The sudden thirst, and the delirium resulting from incoordinate stimulation of the higher centres of the cerebrum, were consistent with this.

“Deadly nightshade, as you may know, is not in fact all that deadly. But one could no doubt cram a chocolate with quite enough to cause a great deal of mischief, and Jane Pinhorn had possessed the opportunity to do this.

“Moreover, she had a motive. Along with a male cousin – a ne’er-do-well in Canada – she was the dead woman’s only relative and co-heir.

“I saw suspicion inevitably attaching itself to this girl.

“I came back to Sheercliffe that night seriously troubled, and as soon as I arrived I went straight out to the dead woman’s cottage.

“The rest of that night I spent prowling from one room to another.

“And then, quite suddenly, I found that I had come to a halt in the little hall and was staring at an envelope lying beside the telephone directory on a small table. It was a plain manila envelope, stamped ready for post, and creased down the middle.

“For a second I didn’t see the significance of that crease. What had touched off some spring in my mind was the address – a single-spaced typescript affair of the most commonplace sort. International Vitamin Warehouses Limited, if mildly absurd, was nothing out of the way and wouldn’t have troubled me.

“The snag lay in what followed. I know my East London fairly well. And the street in which this pretentious organisation claimed an abode contains nothing but mean private houses and a few shabby little shops.

“And so the truth came to me… The truth, to begin with, about that crease. This envelope had come to Miss Pinhorn folded inside another one.

“I slit the thing open there and then. ‘
Send no money. Simply fill up the back of this form
…’ It had been a diabolically clever scheme. And it had, of course, been a completely fatuous one as well.”

Appleby paused. The Vicar was looking largely puzzled. But the Doctor drew a long breath. “The nephew in Canada?”

“Precisely. He knew about the sealed-room effect. He knew about Jane’s annual birthday gift. And he knew about his aunt’s idiosyncrasy to belladonna.

“Some months before, its use by her oculist in a normal clinical dose had made her so seriously unwell as to take her into a nursing-home. The nephew believed that he could get on the gum of a reply-paid envelope a quantity which in her special case would be fatal.

“Miss Pinhorn, you remember, could never resist a free sample of anything. So she would fill in the form, lick the envelope – and perish!

“The envelope, if posted, would go to what was in fact a shady accommodation address in London, and our precious nephew would pick it up when he came over to England. He would also pick up the half of his aunt’s fortune – or the whole of it if the unfortunate Jane was hanged on the strength of her chocolates.

“But this amateur in poison had confused a lethal with a toxic dose.

“With this particular drug, as it happens, the margin between the two is unusually wide. Having her special susceptibility to it, poor Miss Pinhorn did go horribly delirious, just as she had on a previous occasion.

“But that she chose to hurry on to this pub near the cliff, and thus put herself in the way of tumbling into the sea when the attack was at its worst, was pure chance.”

Appleby paused and stood up. “It wasn’t, as it happened, the last stroke of chance in the Pinhorn case. You may wonder what happened to the nephew.”

The Vicar nodded vigorously. “Yes, indeed. He was certainly a murderer.”

“He had aimed at being that, and showed a certain efficiency.

“But he hadn’t the stuff that an effective killer is made of. No sooner had he set his plot in motion, it seems, than he cracked up badly and went on a drinking-bout. Staggering home one morning in the small hours, and making his way through some public park, he fell into a very small pond and was drowned in six inches of water.

“At just about the same hour that tremendous current must have been drawing Amelia Pinhorn’s body to unknown depths beneath the Furies.”

“It is sometimes alleged,” the Doctor said, “that the law and medical science don’t always see eye to eye. And it may be true in regard to one big problem – that of what constitutes an understanding of the wrongfulness of a course of action.”

The Vicar nodded. “Pleas of insanity, and that sort of thing?”

“Precisely. But in the main, the law has been very quick to accept and profit by scientific progress in medicine. The light that blood-grouping can sometimes throw on matters of disputed paternity is a good instance.”

“And what a lot of them there are!” Appleby had glanced up from the newspaper he was reading. “But I suppose the Pelter case was unique – an upside-down business.”

“The Pelter case?” The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t remember it. And what do you mean by calling it upside-down?”

Appleby let his paper drop to the floor. “In most of these affairs some unfortunate woman is trying to establish that a particular man – also sometimes unfortunate – is the father of her child. In the Pelter case the claimant was a
man
attempting to establish legal paternity. He came forward to declare that Peter Pelter, then a five-year old boy, was his legitimate child. I’m surprised you don’t recall the affair.”

“We neither of us do.” The Vicar produced his pipe. “Which gives you a chance of telling us about it.”

“Very well – I’ll try. And although it may sound a bit complicated at first, it was in its essence a tolerably simple affair.

“Some time in the nineteen-thirties an English girl called Sylvia Vizard, coming of a wealthy family in good society, kicked over the traces in a mild way, and went off in defiance of her parents to become an art-student in Paris. She was dead serious about it, apparently; got herself into a suitable
atelier
; and for the rest lived a lonely sort of existence, working like mad. Then she met a young American, Terry Pelter, who was also an art-student, and who had a similar somewhat unsociable slant on life. And this was important, as you will presently see.

“These two got married – in an unquestionably valid but, again, thoroughly unobtrusive way. Then they departed back into a sort of shifting and impermanent studio life that leaves very little trace of itself behind. Later, it was going to prove extraordinarily difficult to find anybody with precise memories of them. Vague impressions abounded – but, so to speak, the crucial eye witness was missing every time. Nor did the marriage last long. In fact, it broke up within eighteen months.”