Silence Observed by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

But it had, somehow, made its mark, and occasionally it consented to painless elucidation during the slumbers of the succeeding night.
    And there was no guessing beforehand which of many matters might thus survive ablution. In the course of this very day, for instance, he had read several reports on issues of serious moment. It was hard not to feel at the end of them that London, as a civilized city, pretty well had its back to the wall. In face of them, certainly, Sir Gabriel Gulliver’s yarn ought to have faded at a first grab at the soap. Yet here it was, spotlit in Appleby’s mind, and the whole of the rest of a busy day blotted out.
    “Judith,” Appleby called, “I’ve got a message for you.”
    Lady Appleby appeared at the bathroom door. She had the abstracted and slightly forbidding air natural in a much-occupied professional woman and housewife who must, within the next fifteen minutes, transform herself into a leisured hostess in the Edwardian mode.
    “A message, John? Is it something you ought to have remembered as soon as you got in?”
    “Oh, no – nothing like that. Just that old Gulliver sends you his love.”
    Judith, who had been distracted from a crucial operation before a looking-glass, made a resigned noise and turned back into her bedroom.
    “Nice of him,” she called back. “Old habit, of course. Gabriel Gulliver has been sending his love to women for half a century – and drawing lucky from time to time.”
    Appleby lay back in water that was agonizingly hot. In the early hours of that morning an eighteen-year-old Stepney lad, having unfortunately been rather heavily shod when feeling entitled to the contents of an elderly shopkeeper’s till, had taken a first and certain step in the direction of the gallows. Appleby always made the water hotter, somehow, when anything of that kind had occurred.
    “Dear me!” he said. “I think of Gulliver as a respectable old connection and family friend. Your uncles were devoted to him. Are you suggesting he has been a person of irregular life?”
    Judith gave a shout of laughter. It was delighted laughter, because in the looking-glass things were coming right.
    “John, dear, your way of expressing yourself is getting nearer and nearer to that of a High Court judge. Gabriel Gulliver has been a restless and unsatisfied person all his days. And he was tiresome with women.”
    “Well, well. Perhaps he’s being tiresome about you. He says you don’t call in on him in his blessed gallery. You don’t mean to say he’s been making improper advances to you?”
    “It would be inconceivable, wouldn’t it?” Judith appeared in the bathroom door again, carrying a necklace. “Fasten this, will you? I must go down and see that everything isn’t chaos. Was old Gabriel entertaining?”
    “He had an extraordinary yarn about an unknown Rembrandt which is being carried around by a girl calling herself Astarte Oakes.”
    “Good. You can tell it at dinner. It sounds just right for the Bendixsons.”
    “It’s more or less confidential, I’m afraid. I’ll tell you about it afterwards. Who else is coming, besides the Bendixsons?”
    But Judith, having got her necklace to rights, had vanished. Appleby went into his dressing-room. He was rummaging for a shirt when the telephone rang. It was the routine report he always received at this hour. For two or three minutes he listened to the precise voice from the other end, only now and then interrupting with a brief direction. Finally he asked a question.
    “And that Stepney affair? There’s no doubt that the lad took the money?”
    “None at all, sir, I’m afraid.” The voice would have been slightly impatient if it hadn’t been perfectly correct.
    “I had my mind on the lodger upstairs – the old man with the petty criminal record. It seemed to me just possible that, immediately after the killing, he might have taken advantage of the confusion to help himself from the till.”
    “Yes, sir. The possibility