The Daffodil Affair (24 page)

They must go to Wine and tell him that his experiment was pointless – pointless because they knew all about it. They must tell him that they knew Radbone to be nonsense; that they were known to be policemen; that they were policemen with a powerful backing behind them; that they had accompanied him up the river knowing all about his game; that their superiors knew all about his game; that diplomatic means were being taken to smash it now; that his best chance was to fade out quietly without committing a capital crime. Government would step in and liquidate his enterprise, but with luck he himself would not be successfully pursued.

Appleby reeled it off in his own mind – and disliked it. The perfection of Wine’s experiment, it was true, they had power to smash. To no unsuspecting friend in that house would the ghost of a murdered man ever appear, or fail to appear. At their first word spoken all that laborious project of Wine’s would be in atoms. But beyond that the position was bleak. Wine was very little likely to be intimidated. He would know, almost as well as they knew themselves, how long and tenuous was the track from the Happy Islands to Scotland Yard. In a world at peace the pursuit of two missing officers would be inexorable indeed, but would be slow. Under present conditions Wine – whose whole vast project was a gamble – might well reckon that his own powers would be deployed and triumphant long before they were run to earth here in their vulnerable cradle.

The river flowed past the front door of 37 Hawke Square. The alligators plopped within earshot of its dining-rooms. Such incongruities, deliberately contrived by a logical if perverted mind, had an insidious power to paralyse the will, to baffle the intellect. But not Lucy Rideout’s. Lucy enjoyed a saving ignorance. She knew far too little of the world to be in danger of sitting back flabbergasted. And she knew enough of melodrama and had enough of native wit to contrive sufficiently surprising answering stratagems of her own. One might do worse than give Lucy her head.

A shadow moved among the chimney pots. Wine had emerged on the roof – an incongruous figure in his quietly immaculate tropical clothes. ‘Appleby, is it you? I am glad you have found this amusing vantage point.’ Wine sat down easily on the leads. ‘Who would ever think to survey the heart of South America from the roof of a London tenement? And yet here we are, and there South America is.’ He waved his hand whimsically before him. ‘Utterly irrational, but a fact. And all the most potent facts are utterly irrational. That is our theme. Men made steam engines by observing and exploiting the way things actually work. We are going to make far more potent engines by observing and exploiting the way things are spontaneously imagined to work. Consider the stars, my dear man.’

Appleby looked up at the darkening sky. In a few minutes now the stars would be hanging there, would be hanging there whether one was considering them or not… ‘The stars?’ he said vaguely.

‘Consider the stars. What is it natural to believe of them? What notions about them come spontaneously into men’s minds? Clearly the notions of judicial astrology. Compared with them the notions of Copernicus and Newton, of Kepler and Einstein, are temporary, local and eccentric in the highest degree.’

‘But the notions of Copernicus and his followers work. Their predictions come true. Whereas with the astrologers–’

Wine interrupted with a wave of an amiably dismissive hand. ‘The human race, my dear Appleby, is much too shock-headed, and has much too short a memory, to take much notice of whether predictions are fulfilled or not. All it wants is a certain quality in the predictions themselves. They must have a magical and irrational element of sufficient substance to satisfy the magical and irrational appetencies which make up nine-tenths of the content of the human mind. That is what we are going to provide – Radbone and you and I.’

‘And Hudspith.’

‘And Hudspith, of course.’ Wine was silent for a moment, as if his mind had gone off on some other train of thought. ‘Has one of you by any chance got a revolver?’ he asked suddenly.

‘I have. But I don’t think Hudspith has. Would you care to borrow it?’ Appleby spoke easily, but with a mild unconcealed surprise. If Lucy’s hair-raising plan was to be adopted it was necessary to appear utterly unsuspecting of danger.

‘Dear me, no. It has simply struck me that some rough census of weapons is desirable. The truth is, there are rumours about the surrounding natives which I don’t quite like.’

‘I hope they haven’t caused any more wastage?’

‘No: the trouble is rather that they appear to be lying very low. It makes me think they may be meditating some attack. And though they are not visible by day, there are stories going round of rather queer things being seen and heard at night.’

‘Queer things? That sounds right up your pitch. Perhaps they just want to pull their weight in your brave and irrational new world.’

Wine laughed – perhaps a shade uncertainly. ‘After so much of Beaglehole it is really delightful to talk to somebody who can make a joke. But, seriously, I am a little perturbed. They undoubtedly ate those two women who were so interestingly
en rapport
.’

‘Miss Molsher and Mrs Gladigan?’

‘Yes. And now they have most certainly eaten the Yorkshire girl who escaped with the horse. That is most upsetting in itself, for really she was a most promising witch. But what I am afraid of is that the thing may give them an ungovernable taste for white man in the stewpot. I believe it does sometimes happen that way.’

‘No doubt. In fact, an abstention from cannibalism, if one takes a broad enough view, is probably temporary, local and eccentric in the highest degree. And if the savages turn really spontaneous we are all likely to be turned into cutlets.’

Wine’s laugh was perceptibly harsh this time. ‘Quite so. We don’t want magical practices
too
near home. Perhaps Hudspith may congratulate himself that he is going downstream in the morning. He, at least, won’t be eaten by cannibals.’ Wine paused. From the river below came the faint
plop
of an alligator.

‘But for us who remain you think there is real danger?’

‘Only of inconvenience and a tiresome scrap. The savages are believed to exist in quite considerable numbers and in these upper reaches have never been brought under control. But fortunately they are quite without any sort of directing intelligence.’

‘Ah.’ Appleby knocked out his pipe and looked up at the heavens. Yes, the stars were there – armies of unalterable law. And, perched obscurely on his grain of dust in space, he winked at them. ‘Fancy,’ he said. ‘Fancy a Yorkshire witch ending her days in an American savage’s cauldron. Irrational, isn’t it?’

Hudspith snapped down the locks of his suitcase. ‘I wonder why it should be me?’ he asked composedly. ‘Of course Wine came to realize that my having a vision of Lucy that night was a hoax. But I feel he went on believing those stories of yours about my being that sort of man.’

‘In a way you are that sort of man.’ Appleby, sitting on his bed in the small hours, spoke softly across the room. ‘You’re a moody devil with an abstracted eye and a bee in your bonnet about abducted girls. It gives you quite a distinguished air. And I don’t doubt Wine regards you as psychically sensitive. Nevertheless you are going to supply the ghost and I am going to be the percipient: there’s no doubt of that. Probably the theory is that only psychically peculiar people have the makings of good ghosts. Come to think of it, ghosts are seen by all and sundry in the most unselective way. If they’re seen at all, that is.’ Appleby paused in order to give some attention to loading his revolver. ‘Whereas as often as not a ghost has been a person of some mark. I think you must take it as rather a compliment that you have been cast for that particular role.’

‘Cast is the word,’ said Hudspith. ‘But not so much a role as a bump.’ He laughed loudly at this complex of puns, and then checked himself as the sound echoed startlingly in the night. ‘You know I can’t help feeling an element of waste in the thing.’

Appleby laid the revolver on his bed. ‘Very natural, I’m sure. All condemned men must regard the projected execution as a quite unjustifiably lavish expenditure of life. They must feel that a decent regard for economy positively requires that the thing be commuted to a kindly rebuke.’

‘I don’t mean quite like that. Do you ever read detective stories?’

‘Lord, lord! What sort of talk is this? No, I haven’t read a detective story for years.’

‘I read quite a lot. Recreative, I find them.’ Hudspith had switched off the light and was speaking out of the darkness. ‘They quite take one out of oneself, if one’s in my line.’

‘I see. No ruined girls.’

‘Not many ruined girls. They don’t sell. How many people would you say have written detective stories?’

Appleby yawned. ‘Hundreds, I should imagine.’

‘Quite so – and some of them have written scores of books. Folk with intelligences ranging from moderate through good to excellent. A couple of women are quite excellent; there’s no other word for them.’

‘Is that so? I say, Hudspith, it must be deuced late.’

‘And what would you say those hundreds of folk are constantly after?’

‘Money.’ Appleby’s voice, if sleepy, was decided.

‘They’re constantly after a really original motive for murder. And here one is. I’m being murdered to further the purposes of psychical research; murdered in order to manufacture a ghost. It’s a genuinely new motive, and none of them has ever thought of it.’

‘Probably someone has. You just haven’t read that particular yarn. Good night.’

‘But I haven’t explained what I mean. About waste, that is.’ Hudspith’s voice continued to come laboriously out of the night. ‘Here is a perfect detective-story motive, and yet we’re not in a detective story at all.’

‘My dear man, you’re talking like something in Pirandello. Go to sleep.’

‘We’re in a sort of hodge-podge of fantasy and harum-scarum adventure that isn’t a proper detective story at all. We might be by Michael Innes.’

‘Innes? I’ve never heard of him.’ Appleby spoke with decided exasperation. ‘You might employ your last hours more profitably than in chatter about the underworld of letters. Go to sleep. Go to sleep and dream of the nice boiled egg they send to the condemned cell on the fatal morning.’

Hudspith sighed and for a time was silent. ‘It’s all very well rotting,’ he said at length. ‘But about this idea of Lucy’s – do you think it will work?’

Silence answered him.

‘Do you think it will? After all, it’s a matter of some importance from my point of view.’

But again there was silence. Appleby was asleep.

Boiled eggs had been prominent on the breakfast-table, and while discussing them Wine had gone over in considerable detail the terms which Hudspith was to propose to his employer Radbone. Hudspith had made jottings in a notebook, scraped out his second egg and gone stolidly on board the little steamer. And no one could have guessed he guessed he was flirting with death. He stood beside Beaglehole in the stern, and sometimes he waved and sometimes Beaglehole waved, and quite soon they were indistinguishable dots far down the river. Wine, whose farewells had been openly affectionate, retired to administrative duties for the day. And once more Appleby climbed the little hill and sat himself down beneath the Ñandubay.

Hudspith was gone. A policeman who believed himself not to be known as such, he was gone as the result of what he believed to be a successful ruse – was gone, as he believed, to bring back troops and police and the rule of law to the Happy Islands. But in all this he was deluding himself. Radbone was a fiction successfully imposed upon him. And he was going to his death – a curious death, useful to science.

Such was the picture of the affair as it presented itself to Wine now. And how did Wine see Appleby? As another policeman who believed himself not to be known as such, a policeman who had only to go on pretending to believe in Radbone, a policeman who had only to sit tight in unsuspicious-seeming ease until his colleague returned with abundant help. But in all this but another deluded policeman. For to Appleby no Hudspith would ever return in the flesh. Only to an Appleby wholly unapprehensive, whole unsuspicious of his friend’s death, there might one day appear Hudspith’s ghost – a ghost calling for revenge. To others as well the ghost might manifest itself, but it would be to Appleby, as to Captain Bertram and Dr Spettigue, that some definite revelation would be attempted. Hudspith was to die, and thereafter the unsuspecting Appleby would be under scientific observation. Has he seen anything? Has the spirit of his murdered friend managed to communicate with him? These would be the questions asked. And all this as a sort of sideline to Wine’s vast organization. The man sat down there, marshalling and docketing his growing army of clairvoyants and astrologers and miracle workers to strictly practical ends. But he had this little weakness for real science. And hence the strange transplanting of 37 Hawke Square and Hudspith’s present voyage… Appleby gazed down the river. The little steamer had rounded a bend. There was only water, yellow and empty, to be seen.

Appleby filled his pipe. He lit it and puffed and thought about Hudspith’s death. It was important to get this melancholy event quite clear.

Hudspith must die here. It would be no good cutting his throat fifty miles down the river – else might his ghost vainly haunt a solitude broken only by the flamingos and the scissors-birds. And not only must he die here – here in 37 Hawke Square – but here too must violence first be offered him. Wine’s scientific thoroughness would insist on that. The murder must, so to speak, begin and end here.

Hudspith, then, must be brought back all unsuspecting. And quietly; nobody must know. Not one of the teeming occupants of the house must know. Even thoroughly reliable accomplices must be at a minimum – for the more of these there were the more possible would it be that the experiment might be vitiated by the operation of telepathy. Minds knowing of the murder might communicate to Appleby an obscure alarm.