In
Death at Charne House
it wouldn’t be at all like this. The
dramatis personae
would advance one by one, each in turn under the spot-light – a mild sort of spot-light, by no means glaring pitilessly into the contracted pupils of wretches successively under interrogation. The only penetrating beam would live in the level gaze of the person – Great Detective or humble sergeant of police – charged with the business of presently rendering all lucid to the sleepy reader curled up in bed.
Sir John Appleby knew that at Charne matters weren’t going to be conducted after this fashion. He was to be confronted by Muddle – and Muddle that was none of his business. He was – it was idle to deny – the authority in exigencies of the kind that had blown up; long ago he had sorted out such affairs in St Anthony’s College, in Scamnum Court, in the rat-ridden castle of Erchany, far up the Parana (had it been?) where they kept the calculating horse and the disassociated girl, even on that wholly deplorable Pacific island known for some reason as Ararat. It was natural that people should gape at him now – or should do so, at least, as soon as it was acknowledged that something more than simple fatality had occurred. But he didn’t like it. He had traffic problems to get back to, and the wickedly disinherited children they called Mods and Rockers, and disgusting pockets of indecency organized to collect ten-pound notes from business gentlemen, impeccably chapel-going in Preston or Hull, who unfortunately found themselves at large for an evening in London’s West End. This was Appleby’s world – quite a serious world, quite enough to be going on with. And now he found himself confessing with a bewildered local constabulary in the country house of an old friend – an old friend just deceased.
The police had actually arrived. Dr Fell had declared – pretty well on the instant – that they must be sent for. They were in the music room, being regaled by Holman Hunt’s Shakespearian musicians with ditties of no tone.
Musing among these masterpieces, Appleby looked broodingly at Christopher Sly. He was, for some reason, compelled by Christopher Sly – perhaps because that sadly bewildered tinker had a natural right to be considered the presiding genius of the present gathering. For bewilderment is just what happens when your host and hostess both die on you. Nobody knows who ought to give this quite trivial direction or that. And the absurdity of such small social dubieties throws into relief the stark fact of mortality.
One looks, oddly enough, for a chief mourner – for only upon him, or her, can the beginnings of a composing social ritual be built. It was Bobby Angrave, rather than Martine Rivière, who seemed to fill the bill. Bobby’s controlled reception of Appleby and Judith must have been the product of a stiff exercise of the will. It looked as if the young man’s legs had ceased to be useful to him now; he was limp in a chair; intermittently his whole body trembled.
If an opposite extreme were to be sought, it would be found in Friary. Friary – quite incredibly, but simply because it was his prescriptive task at this hour – was dispensing drinks. No longer having an employer to consult, he had decided off his own bat that the two uniformed officers of police should be included in this dispensation. He received with evident disfavour their somewhat abrupt indication that thus to join in the household’s compotations would not be at all in order. Not that anybody else, for that matter, was accepting drinks. Or nobody except Mrs Gillingham. She had allowed herself to be provided with a glass of barley water. It was clear that at Charne nothing at all in the nature of a Wake was likely to get under way.
‘This is deeply distressing – most deeply distressing.’ Edward Pendleton had come up to Appleby with this remark. His tone couldn’t quite justly have been called perfunctory, but his manner clearly intimated a conviction that it was time the two Top People on the scene began to pull together. ‘Of course when it has been a matter of fire-arms these fellows have to be called in. They will be required to give evidence before the coroner, and so on. But these are mere wretched formalities. Can’t you get them away, my dear fellow, and leave us to our grief?’
‘Certainly not. They must be their own judges of what is necessary. I have no standing in the matter whatever.’
‘They don’t look to me likely to make much headway. I’d say they were a bit overborne by their company.’
‘If they are, it’s no credit to us. Still, there’s some sense in what you say, Edward. We need someone who won’t even be conscious that he’s standing up to the gentry. That’s why I’ve stretched a point.’
‘Excellent, my dear John. You mean you’ll take hold of this thing yourself?’
‘Definitely not. I’m in precisely the position that you are – or Friary there. But I’ve advised them to get through to their station and get the fellow in charge to contact the Chief Constable.’
‘I see.’ Edward Pendleton was dubious. ‘Isn’t that to make rather a thing of it?’
‘It may possibly turn out to
be
a thing – without any making on our part.’
‘I’m sure you know best, my dear chap. Charne’s in the county, I imagine, and not the borough?’
‘Certainly it is.’
‘You know this Chief Constable? He’s–?’ Pendleton paused significantly.
‘He’s a Colonel Morrison.’ Appleby was conscious of a need for patience. ‘And not late-risen from the people, or anything disagreeable of that sort.’
‘My dear John, if there’s anything I can’t be charged with, it’s being a snob. But there are times when one doesn’t want too many jumped-up fellows running around.’
Appleby found no reply to this – or no reply of any particular relevance.
‘I began on the beat myself, you know,’ he said.
‘Ah, yes – but of course that was rather different.’ Edward Pendleton evinced mild disquiet; he clearly felt that Appleby had said something that wasn’t very good form. ‘Well, I must go and comfort Irene a little. Naturally, she’s very upset indeed.’
Pendleton moved away abruptly. It was what Appleby had designed that he should do. He himself was only a spectator, as he had said. But at least he wanted to see clearly. He would sit down in a corner – there was nothing else to be done – and piece together what he knew so far. It wasn’t much.
Hard upon the death of his wife, Charles Martineau had gone into his office and killed himself. So much Bobby Angrave had conveyed to Appleby at once, but thereafter the general shock and confusion still predominant in the household had much impeded the flow of further information. Had Appleby felt himself to be in charge, he could no doubt have assembled in ten minutes such preliminary facts as there were. But standing on the touch line as he did (if the figure wasn’t too weird a one to entertain), he had to await what the general disorganization cast up to him. The first odd circumstance, perhaps, consisted in what was reported about the conduct of Friary. It was Friary who had heard the shot – or rather who had alone heard it for what it was, and with distinct attention. Other people thought that perhaps they had heard it, or that at least they had heard something like it. They explained how this had occasioned no alarm. The popping of fire-arms was not encouraged round Charne, but even outside the shooting season there was a certain amount of it. Grace Martineau’s notion of wild nature was such, one gathered, that Charles’ keepers had discreetly to thin out sundry predators if its appearance was to be preserved.
Friary had heard the sound for what it was: a pistol-shot within the house. And Friary – now so composedly offering unwanted whisky to all and sundry – had apparently panicked. Instead, that is to say, of going straight into his master’s office he had rushed around the house shouting for help. Edward Pendleton had already murmured that there was nothing surprising in this; the fellow had never been in the army; servants are unaccountable at all times. Appleby, on the other hand, felt that if he himself were minded to be curious he would probably start being curious at this point. He had gathered something of Friary’s private interests; there was nothing very out of the way about them; but Appleby had often had occasion to remark that professional amorists are a bit soft. Friary by no means struck him, however, as nervously flabby. If the man behaved oddly, it would be because he was under considerable pressure of one sort or another.
But now, at least, everybody had some excuse for being in a state of shock. In a sort of delayed reaction, the double fatality was coming home to them. A thousand deaths are not ten times as appalling as a hundred – not by a long way. If there were a machine to measure such things, it might show, correspondingly, that two deaths fall at least some way short of being twice as appalling as one. There can be circumstances in which duality suggests positive comfort – as when a childless and devoted married couple die simultaneously in a road accident. Some sense of this sort might even have been conjectured as likely to obtain in the present case. But Charles Martineau hadn’t died beside his wife; he had died after being agonizingly parted from her. Nor – and this added to the sense of horror which was beginning rather mysteriously to pervade the matter – had he died the same sort of death. Charles had died, one might say, by fire. His wife had died by water.
It had required a little time for Appleby to arrive even at this quite simple fact. He had taken it for granted – the moment Bobby Angrave spoke, he had taken it for granted – that Grace Martineau had died, if not in her bed, then at least on the way to it. And when the truth – the first bare fact of it – had come to him, it was of Bobby Angrave that he found himself thinking: Bobby standing by one of the great stone basins in the obliterated formal garden, and proposing to fill it to the brim as a surprise for his uncle. But the basins, of course, were still dry. It wasn’t in one of these that Grace had been found drowned. It was in that deep pool in Charne Wood through which Judith Appleby had once proposed to urge her pony.
That a man should, by his own hand, follow his wife to the grave is a solemn and dreadful thing. But if it is to be condemned it must be either on religious grounds or in terms of some humanist persuasion that we best show our devotion to the dead by continuing in a state in which we can remember and honour them.
Appleby, turning this over in his mind as he sat alone for a little in a corner of the music room, had a sense that he wasn’t quite wasting his time. What these thoughts had brought him was a suspicion that a little professional activity might be incumbent upon him after all. But, if it were, it wouldn’t be at all a matter of his duty as a policeman. He had, of course, a duty to keep the Queen’s peace and protect the Queen’s lieges. The Queen, after all, might be said to have done very well by him, so that he had a particular obligation to do as well as he could by her. Yet these very proper considerations, he knew, were very far from likely to set him breathing down the necks of Colonel Morrison and his men. What he was seeing now, however, was that he conceivably had a duty to the Martineaus. Their death mustn’t be got wrong. In all probability there was no hazard of its being so. It all seemed simple – and sad – enough. But the simplicity was, in one aspect, so painful a simplicity that it ought to be tested before being accepted. It ought to be tested hard.
Appleby’s first test was by way of Judith, and took place shortly after they had gone finally to their room.
‘Grace is as well where she is,’ he said. ‘And perhaps that goes for Charles, too. Looking at the thing now, one sees the utter nonsense of Charles married to Mrs Gillingham, or Charles married to Martine.’
‘Oh, quite. It doesn’t mean that Charles ought to have blown his brains out – if it was his brains.’
‘Certainly it was his brains – and
very
out. That sort of action has a shocking aspect of sheer physical mess.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Judith had been sufficiently involved in certain episodes in her husband’s career to take this in her stride. ‘I’m going to begin
Emma
tonight. I brought up a copy from downstairs.’
‘Emma?’
‘Grace had got to the place where Emma doesn’t repent her condescension in going to the Coles.’
‘I see.’ It must often have been in an extremity of pain that Grace Martineau had followed for the last time the fortunes of Miss Woodhouse and Mr Knightley. The small private commemorative act now proposed by Judith would have pleased her. ‘Are you left puzzled by anything in this affair?’
‘Yes.’ Judith gave this reply at once.
‘Just how is it mysterious?’
‘It’s mysterious – if ever so slightly – in your simple Scotland Yard way. Weren’t we making a stupid joke about
The Mysterious Affair at Charne
, or something of the sort? I’ve sometimes thought it fatuous to get excited about this particular death or that as being mysterious, when every death there ever was is a mystery there are absolutely no clues to.’
‘Yes,’ Appleby said patiently. When Judith offered remarks of this kind of philosophic generality it usually meant that she was getting something quite different clear in her head.
‘Charles acted out of character. The puzzle lies there. What are the reasons why people commit suicide? You must have them all indexed in your head.’
‘Not all, I imagine – but a good many of them. Some people do it rationally – almost, you might say, on a hedonistic calculus – when they realize that their bodies have finally betrayed them, and that there is nothing left for them except pain on this side of the grave. For instance, if Grace had drowned herself deliberately, instead of by accident–’
‘Yes, of course. What about the other reasons for suicide?’
‘It can be done by way of punishing people by whom one believes oneself to have been slighted. “They’ll be sorry now.” That’s quite common.’
‘Yes?’
‘Melancholia – the real, black thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘To cheat an insurance company, to avoid imprisonment or disgrace intolerable to one’s pride, to rate half a column in one’s local paper or two or three lines in a national one–’ Appleby broke off. ‘And, of course, by way of self-punishment and expiation.’