Death at the Chase by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

kinsman he had never before set eyes on precisely on the day which had seen that kinsman’s attempted murder was too improbable for any ready belief; it would have been so even if Ashmore had not himself provided that attempt with an obscure but lurid French background. Appleby decided at least to make one more exploratory move.
    ‘You ought to know something of the circumstances,’ he said to de Voisin. ‘They represent an odd mingling of premeditation and improvisation. Or that’s the appearance of the thing. The fellow ensconced himself here, and lay in wait until Mr Ashmore (as it happened, in my company) came up to his front door – which is directly beneath, as you can see. A shot would have settled the matter. But he employed something just a little less accurate. He yanked a stone–’
    ‘Yanked?’
    ‘He wrenched a stone from the roof, and dropped or lobbed it over this parapet.’ Appleby paused. ‘Would you care to see where it came from?”
    De Voisin was again – in effect – enchanté ; he evinced, in other words, a purely conventional interest. Or this was how he appeared. But then de Voisin – Appleby inclined to conclude – was rather a deep young man. Perhaps he was at once deep and out of his depth. Or perhaps – but this was highly speculative – he was playing it all a little more cool than was perfectly convenable simply because what he had stumbled upon was in some way wholly staggering.
    ‘You can see where one stone is missing,’ Appleby said. ‘If you consider that a full half of it was tucked away beneath the row immediately above, you’ll see that it can’t have been very easy to prise out – and that it was big enough to brain an elephant… Take a closer look, Monsieur de Voisin.’
    Rather as one courteously acquiescent before some importunate invitation to view an uninteresting knick-knack, heirloom, or indeed mere snapshot, de Voisin did as he was required. Perhaps he was a little short-sighted, for a fraction of a second seemed to pass before he became aware of the enigmatically scratched surface of the freshly exposed stone. When he did so he gave a startled exclamation. But when he turned to Appleby it was with an expression at once of anger and of contempt. And it was very deliberately that he spoke in his own tongue.
    ‘ Je ne le crois pas, Monsieur. C’est un galimatias, une pure bêtise .’
     
    In the silence which for a moment followed this the rising wind continued to murmur and whisper in the interstices of the roof. According to one’s mood, one might have concluded the effect to be either maleficent or benign; a sinister stirring of those natural forces by which the pyramids themselves will one day be worn away, or a comfortable cradle song crooned by earth over a structure which, although venerable to a human eye, must nestle in a mere infancy to the eye of time.
    But if Appleby had been disposed to poetical reflection of this sort – which he was not – he would certainly have been recalled from it by the curious behaviour of his host. If de Voisin was oddly angered by what he had seen, his English relative was yet more angered by what he had heard – by the scornful exclamation, that is to say, which the young Frenchman had produced upon becoming aware of the scrawled Cross of Lorraine. But Martyn Ashmore was not merely indignant; he was agitated as well. He had become in fact very much the Ashmore into whose arms Appleby had more or less tumbled over the stile. It was almost as if something which was essentially a protective fantasy were under attack.
    And now, for the first time, Ashmore spoke in French. He spoke so vehemently, and was so instantly answered by his young visitor in a similar key – for seconds indeed to an effect of shouting one another down – that Appleby’s ear was again momentarily baffled. Then this indecorous episode ended as abruptly as it had begun. Ashmore had pulled himself up – and although his limbs were trembling