Silence Observed by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

has been very fully investigated.”
    “If that were the way of it, then the lad’s motive might not have been robbery at all. The old woman might have refused him credit.”
    “It would remain a poor reason for kicking someone to death, sir.”
    “I don’t need to be told that, Parsons.” Appleby snapped this out in a tone he didn’t often use. “We have to consider the interest of the accused man, you know, in the existing state of the law.”
    “Yes, sir. But we found nearly six pounds on him. And, only a couple of hours before, he’d struck his mother because she wouldn’t let him have half-a-crown. He’s a very violent lad – and perhaps a bit crazy. The defence will be more interested in diminished responsibility than in that old man upstairs.”
    “Very well, Parsons.” Appleby’s voice was briskly approving again. “Anything else?”
    “I don’t think so, sir. Another probable homicide – in Bloomsbury this time. Fellow calling himself an antiquarian bookseller. Would you like particulars now?”
    Appleby glanced at his watch.
    “No. But send me up a note about it tomorrow. And thank you, Parsons. Good night.”
    Appleby put down the receiver and reached for a black tie. People who got themselves murdered, whether in Stepney or Bloomsbury, were no longer any very direct concern of his. If a corpse ever came his way now, it was only after having passed, so to speak, through a beautiful electric typewriter and then having been analysed under half a dozen intelligently chosen headings. It had been better fun when he had dealt with them in the raw. And sometimes they had been very much that.
    When Appleby opened the drawing-room door he saw that someone had already arrived. So he entered with an air of cheerful apology which he maintained while Judith introduced him to Mary Wildsmith. He was sure he had never seen her before, and almost sure he had never heard of her. She was old rather than young, and small rather than large – and at a first glance one would probably have ventured that there was nothing more to be said about her. For her face couldn’t be held to possess features, nor her voice character – so that all in all she seemed to Appleby, as he poured her sherry, to be pretty well the essence of the unmemorable. This made it the more annoying that Judith had presented him to this stranger with a total lack of explanations coupled with the largest suggestion that it was a moment in which one of her husband’s longest cherished ambitions was being realized.
    “It’s frightfully good of you,” Appleby said, “to find time to come to dinner with us. You must be tremendously busy and tremendously in demand.”
    Miss Wildsmith – for she seemed to be that – was amused. And it was in a fashion, somehow, that told Appleby at once that she was a clever woman. Moreover as her amusement took the form of a momentary and entirely deliberate transformation of her neutral expression into one of extraordinary mobility and charm, he realised that at least he had got hold of her profession. And at once Judith, who had tumbled to his blankness before Miss Wildsmith’s name, confirmed this.
    “Mary’s last enchanting part,” she said, “was as the Hungarian refugee in Thunder Without Rain .”
    Appleby registered appropriate enlightenment.
    “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Everybody talked of it. I was extremely sorry not to see it.”
    “But your wife says you did see it.” Mary Wildsmith again looked amused. But this time she looked, so to speak, like a different person being amused. She was a character actress, one must suppose, who enjoyed moving freely around.
    Appleby nodded easily. If Judith said he had seen Thunder Without Rain then, no doubt, he had seen it. But it appeared to him absurd to expect any rational being to remember one West End play from another.
    “Only the first act,” he said firmly. “Most unfortunately, I was called out of the theatre. So the last time I really had