The Daffodil Affair by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

ended with my giving five pounds for the broom and the cauldron and two or three other things you can inspect. If the Metcalfe cottage was being broken up there seemed no harm in being in on the dispersal.’
    ‘None at all.’ Appleby was staring thoughtfully at a table weighed down with elephants’ tusks, snuff boxes and Dresden shepherdesses. ‘But tell me: did you have any further talk with Miss Metcalfe herself?’
    ‘No – or nothing with any sense to it. After the things had been brought out I did try to pass a conversational remark. “So you’re off to see the world?” I said – something like that. And she looked at me mockingly, as you might say. “That’s just it,” she said. “Did you ever hear of the isle of Capri?” And with that she disappeared inside the caravan and I saw no more of her.’
    Appleby frowned. ‘The isle of Capri? It seems a far cry from Haworth. And not too easy to get to in these days.’
    ‘I think, sir, she might be speaking in what you would call a metaphorical way.’
    ‘Very probably.’ Appleby glanced at his watch and saw that he would have to hurry for his train. He did not want to miss it; Bodfish, Daffodil, and even the Assistant-Commissioner’s sister had taken on a much more beguiling colour in the past half-hour. ‘It is possible that you will hear more of this.’ He looked at the dusty man and remembered how outrageously he had intruded upon his little mystery. ‘And meanwhile I wonder if you could sell me a – a teapot?’
    But his choice was abstracted. The odd matter of Miss Hannah Metcalfe had pretty substantial possession of his mind.

 
     
5
    The telephone wires rose and fell, and beyond them the dales swept past, fluid and subtly circling. It was on the white ribbons of road and lane that Appleby kept his eye – expecting always to see, symbolically receding, a caravan and a temperamental horse. There was little of reason in the expectation. But then neither had there been reason in what happened in York. Policemen rarely make long and expensive journeys in search of unimportant quadrupeds. They do not commonly come upon traces of their quarry in wholly unexpected places and in a wholly fortuitous way. And Sir Robert Peel himself still slumbered in the womb of time long after witchcraft had ceased to be matter of their serious concern.
    The witches have departed, leaving no addresses; the last of them is now somewhere diminishing into distance, headed for the fields of amaranth and asphodel – and with Bodfish’s Daffodil as an appropriate guide. Hannah Metcalfe has gone; down these receding vistas she has grown smaller and smaller, as did the Good Folk before her.
    And so much for the fantasy of the thing. What of its sober reason? One departs from one place because one designs – or because somebody else designs – that one should arrive in another. The witches, then, are arriving – at addresses which are yet to seek. And equally Daffodil is arriving, and the problem is to find out where. For behind the abductions, thought Appleby, there was enterprise, enterprise as well as – perhaps rather than – mere caprice. And efficiency. If the removal of Captain Somebody’s brute had been a piece of bungling, at least the error had been repaired with confidence and speed. And if you want to smuggle an undistinguished horse across country it is not a bad idea to clap it within the shafts of a caravan. Incidentally, you will need all the ideas you can think up. For England today is a country in which even slightly mysterious manoeuvres are singularly difficult to perform. At the top of that little church tower on the hill is the squire or the pub-keeper or the blacksmith, his imagination keyed up to suspect the ingenuities of enemy action in anything a bit out of the way. As far as interfering with Lady Caroline’s carriage exercise is concerned, or in point of persuading Yorkshire maidens that they are bound for the isle of Capri, the times