Appleby And Honeybath by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

obtuse.
    ‘When Mr Honeybath first spoke to me about it,’ Appleby said, ‘he made a remark about a sitter posed for a portrait. It was merely something running in his head, since it’s to paint a portrait that he’s at Grinton now. But it suggested something to me: a body set in that chair and pointing just that way. It suggested a deliberate extravagance – a flamboyance, say, or a very grisly joke. Somebody was to come into this library and receive a nasty shock. It’s a tenuous notion. But it came to me.’
    ‘It might come to anybody,’ Denver said – perhaps not wholly felicitously. ‘But it’s worth thinking about. Mr Grinton, who would be likely to come into this room and have that happen to him?’
    ‘Her,’ Grinton said. ‘Almost certainly, her. One of the maids comes in once a week – on what day I don’t know, although my wife probably does. Flicks around with one of those feather things.’
    ‘I see.’ Denver was silent for a moment, perhaps perpending the absurdity of such a pitiful onslaught on thousands of books. ‘But occasion might be found to get somebody else to come in? An interested party – to put it that way – might have thought to contrive that you yourself should come in and be surprised by the thing?’
    ‘Most unlikely.’ Grinton gave this reply with a robust confidence. ‘And this is all rubbish, anyway. What’s the use of talking about a dead body when there isn’t one?’
    Denver made no reply to such confused logic. Much as Appleby had done before him, he was studying the chair with minute attention. He then applied the same technique to the library at large, so that his companions might have begun to feel that they were all going to be there till dinner time. But quite soon he gave it up.
    ‘There’s absolutely nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s all as normal and innocent as may be. Of course we can bring people in, you know, whose line is to produce marvels. They’ll analyse the dust – of which there’s enough, I must say – and they’ll analyse the lord knows what. They’ll tell you how many different people, if any, have been in this room over the past week. Tell you their sex, for that matter, and perhaps the colour of their hair. But it takes time. And I won’t say what I think it leads to.’
    Appleby liked this, perhaps as himself having similar phases of bafflement stacked up pretty abundantly in his past. And the momentary sense of fellow-feeling prompted him to break that resolve to keep almost entirely mum.
    ‘At least,’ he said, ‘we can now go next door. Architecturally speaking, it’s to move from the sublime to the ridiculous. There’s a little warren of small domestic offices – grotesquely opening, as I’ve told you, from behind an imposing stack of bogus seventeenth-century theology, if I remember aright. But at least there’s something on view. Even toasted cheese is better than nothing.’
    ‘Marginally, perhaps.’ Slight gloom appeared to be possessing Denver.
    ‘Incidentally, I suppose the state of those doors and keys is important.’ Appleby produced this conjecture with splendid vagueness. ‘But Mr Honeybath will be clearer-headed about that than I am.’
    This was a bit steep – or at least Honeybath thought so. But he did his best.
    ‘Sir John and I,’ he said, ‘found a door behind the false one unlocked but with a key in it. A further door, giving on a yard outside, was unlocked and without a key. That’s perhaps a little surprising. And those offices must be connected in some further way, I imagine, with the main building. We didn’t investigate that. I think it was unnecessary because, before going to look for Mr Grinton, we locked both these entrances to the library itself. But one sees that the body may have been removed – when it was removed during my very brief absence – in one of two ways: either into the yard and then whisked away in a conveyance, or back into the house itself through the far end of