The Long Farewell by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

He was decidedly that.’
    ‘And sanguine? Constitutionally convinced that things would always turn out all right?’
    Appleby nodded. ‘That too. I see you have formed a very good impression of him, Cavill.’
    ‘Then I don’t think it’s all quite so much out of the way as we might suppose. There’s a type of middle-aged man, you know, who’s just the kind of late starter we were talking about. He’s been firmly convinced all his days that he’s a born bachelor. It’s something he’s likely to be uneasy about, and you often find it going along with a rather secretive disposition.’
    ‘Packford had that – in a way. But it mostly connected itself with his work. As a man, he usually gave an impression of candour. He wouldn’t conceal his delights and triumphs.’
    ‘No doubt, sir. But I think our picture of him is building up very nicely.’ Cavill was now entirely happy. Psychological types were his great stand-by and he loved expounding them. A few minutes before, he had ignored an invitation to sit down. But now he tumbled into a chair and wagged a cheerfully egalitarian finger at the Assistant Commissioner. ‘One day this type of chap discovers that his doubts and distrusts of himself – in the matter of sex, that’s to say – are all moonshine, and that he’s been treating himself as an outsider for no good reason at all. It’s a discovery that will be very likely to throw him a bit off his balance. He decides that there’s nothing in the world to compete with the very simplest tumbling in the hay.’
    Appleby smiled. ‘Your image doesn’t express the matter with much delicacy. But I follow you.’
    ‘And there’s almost no folly that such a man, more or less in the first flush of his discovery, won’t unhesitatingly commit. He’ll take a couple of girls in his stride.’
    ‘I admit that. And I’ll even agree that the man might conceivably be Lewis Packford. But surely, my dear fellow, he needn’t marry them both.’
    ‘He might possibly think it more correct – fairer all round.’ Cavill had offered this with every appearance of a serious contribution to the discussion. And Appleby himself saw that, fantastic as it might seem, Packford’s mind could really have worked that way. ‘And the ladies were unaware of each other’s existence?’ he asked.
    ‘Certainly they were – just as the rest of Packford’s acquaintance was unaware of the existence of either of them. I have a feeling that the whole crazy and dangerous proceeding was very much to the man’s taste. It answered to his love of secrecy, and he probably enjoyed laughing up his sleeve about it.’
    ‘Laughing up his sleeve?’ It was a phrase, Appleby recalled, that had somehow turned up during his own last conversation with Packford. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t a secret that he could have any rational hope of keeping indefinitely. Bluntly put, our eminent scholar was heading for gaol.’
    ‘Of course he was. And as for the ladies, sir, they had in fact just found out. And they had turned up to have the matter out with Packford. That was the precipitating occasion of his suicide.’
    Appleby was silent for a moment. ‘It takes some believing, you know. It was only an hour ago that I was talking to Packford’s solicitor, a fellow called Rood–’
    ‘Ah, Rood,’ Cavill spoke tartly. ‘I know him .’
    ‘Well, Rood said nothing of all this. I can’t believe he knows anything about it. And yet he strikes me as a thoroughly acute man.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘And I still find it uncommonly difficult to think of Packford in this sort of context at all. He was a scholar, Cavill. When I saw him in Italy I’m quite sure that he was utterly absorbed in some plan for discovering whether Shakespeare had ever been there – or at least a project of that kind. There was certainly something else just tugging at his mind. But it’s a bit stiff to believe it was a superfluity of wives.’
    ‘I’ve no doubt, sir, that