Appleby and the Ospreys by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

you think,’ he asked, ‘that our murderer simply snatched one of those museum pieces from the wall, went to work with it, and then simply put it back in place again?’
    ‘It’s just a possibility, Mr Ringwood.’
    ‘And if we take down the whole lot we’ll fine freshly congealed blood on one weapon or another?’
    ‘That would possibly be so. The blood group would then be determined: all that. And what else would follow?’
    ‘Quite a lot.’ Ringwood spoke slowly, like a man finding his way on unfamiliar ground. ‘The murder of Lord Osprey becomes unpremeditated, and a matter of imaginative resource and quick thinking as well. There’s also a kind of gambling element in it or – or something almost taunting, crying “Catch me if you can”.’
    ‘Just that.’ John Appleby knew how to be briskly approving. ‘It couldn’t be better put, Ringwood. And if we’re right, if we find Osprey’s blood on a blade, we have something like a psychological sketch of the man – the man or woman – who wielded it.’
     

6
    Ringwood now took himself off to what he thought of as his headquarters in the Music Saloon, and as he did so he also withdrew the two guardian constables to the corridor outside the library. By this manoeuvre he contrived to leave Lady Osprey’s visitor (who just happened to be a policeman too, although on the retired list) alone in the room in which, only a few hours earlier, Lord Osprey had been killed. This was quite a stroke on the Detective-Inspector’s part towards implicating Sir John Appleby in the investigation of what was in itself an invitingly mysterious affair.
    It wasn’t, Appleby felt, an investigation that had made a great deal of headway so far. He had himself hit upon where the weapon might be found, but this was no more than a conjecture which had yet to be verified. And even if it was so verified, the motive prompting its use was still totally obscure. Who had murdered Lord Osprey, and why?
    The only answer afforded to either of these questions to date had been in the form of an eccentric and almost burlesque confession by the dead man’s brother-in-law. Appleby found himself disliking Marcus Broadwater, but this dislike arose merely from his feeling that murder was never something to be funny about. Nor had Broadwater, in fact, offered a confession in any exact sense. He had merely obtruded himself as being a promising suspect in the affair, and had hauled in the elusive Osprey Collection of coins by way of motivating his supposed crime. There was surely a streak of sheer nonsense in this. Broadwater had professed himself ignorant of where the collection was kept; and if Lord Osprey was alone in possession of this secret, cutting his throat was by no means a good way of getting at it.
    Broadwater was not to be eliminated, all the same. He might have advanced a wholly implausible motive for killing his brother-in-law by way of getting himself dismissed as a harmless eccentric when in fact he was nothing of the sort and had killed Osprey for some totally different reason.
    Appleby paced moodily round the library. Why, near midnight or in the small hours, had Osprey been here at all? It could hardly have been to edify himself by reading eighteenth-century sermons or to shed his cares by chuckling over back numbers of Punch . Had he a known habit of nocturnal prowling through this vast travesty of a dwelling place? Was it conceivable that he occasionally kept disreputable trysts in this unfrequented apartment?
    Appleby paused at the window through which – as he had idly remarked to Ringwood – there was an almost Venetian effect. It was a French window, beyond which was a small patch of paving, surrounded on its other sides by the area of stagnant water they called the moat. So it was just possible to imagine moonlight, and a courtesan stepping swiftly from a gondola into the arms of an expectant grandee waiting within the shadow of his palazzo. Something of this silly fancy