Appleby File by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

bellows will produce a blaze in a few minutes.’
    ‘Then this will be the best place in which to meet. You had better get on to the job… But one moment.’ Appleby held up a hand. ‘You could not have been mistaken about the identity of the man peering in on us a few moments ago?’
    ‘Certainly not. It was Mr Trevor.’
    ‘Nor could you have had any motive for…deceiving me in the matter?’
    ‘I quite fail to understand you, sir.’
    ‘Do you think that Mr Trevor – if Mr Trevor it is – may have some reason for entering the gallery? Might he be outside that door still, hoping that we shall leave by the other one?’
    ‘I can’t imagine any reason for such a thing.’
    ‘Can’t you? Well, I propose to put it to the test, by going down the one staircase, through the hall, and up the other one now. You will stay here, please, blowing up the fire.’
    ‘I don’t see that–’
    ‘Frape, you’re far from being in the dark about what we’re up against. Please do as I say.’
    This time, Appleby waited for no reply, but left the gallery by the door beside the target, and ran downstairs, playing his torch before him. As an outflanking move it seemed a forlorn hope, but in fact it was startlingly successful. When, a couple of minutes later, he returned breathlessly into the gallery by the other door, he was hustling before him a figure who had in fact still been lurking there. It wasn’t Charles Trevor. It was Robert Darien-Gore.
    ‘All right, Frape,’ Appleby said. ‘Get everybody in here. But give them a few minutes to get dressed – and get dressed yourself.’ He turned to Robert, who was wearing knickerbockers and a shooting-jacket. ‘You mustn’t mind my staying as I am,’ he said. ‘It might be a mistake if you and I were to waste any time in beginning to work this thing out.’

     
     
VII
    ‘Good God!’ General Strickland said, and put down the binoculars. He was the last of the company to have accepted Appleby’s invitation to scrutinise the inner bailey. ‘The fellow walked deliberately out and killed himself. And in that hideous way.’
    ‘It isn’t,’ Mrs Strickland asked, ‘some…some abominable joke? He can’t, for instance, have tiptoed back again in his own prints in the snow?’
    ‘I’m afraid not.’ Appleby, who was planted before what was now a brisk fire, shook his head. ‘Robert Darien-Gore was good enough to accompany me down to the inner bailey a few minutes ago. We didn’t go right out to the well – I want those tracks photographed before any others are made – but I satisfied myself – professionally, if I may so express it – that nobody can have come back through that snow. Whatever the tracks tell, they don’t tell that.’
    ‘The snow on the parapet,’ Trevor said rather hoarsely, ‘–on the low wall, I mean, round the well – seems to have prints at one point too.’
    ‘Precisely. And the picture seems very clear. There is one person, and one person only, missing from the castle now – a chance guest like myself: the man Jolly. Whether deliberately or by accident, he has…gone down the well. And I believe you all know what that means.’
    ‘By accident?’ Strickland asked. ‘How could it be an accident?’
    ‘I can’t see how it could possibly be,’ Judith Appleby said. ‘No sane man would take it into his head to go out in the middle of the night–’
    ‘He was a bit tight,’ Jasper Darien-Gore said. ‘I don’t know if that’s relevant, but it’s a fact. Frape – you noticed it?’
    ‘Most emphatically, sir. Although not incapacitated, the man was undoubtedly tipsy.’
    ‘He must have decided to go back to his car.’ Prunella Darien-Gore broke in with this. ‘He thought he’d go outside the castle, and he went blundering through the snow–’
    ‘It’s not impossible,’ Appleby said. ‘Only it doesn’t account for Jolly’s climbing up on the lip of the well. Face up to that, and suicide is the only explanation. Or it