When private investigator Miles Bredon and his wife, Angela, arrive for a weekend at the Hallifords' country house, they find themselves part of a singularly ill-assorted house party. Waking one morning to the news that one among their number has been found dead by the silo, Miles has no shortage of suspects. The entire party had spent the previous night haring around the country side in an 'eloping' game instigated by their hostess, and no one can fully account for their whereabouts. The arrival of Inspector Leyland from Scotland Yard, investigating a spate of apparent suicides of important people, adds another dimension to the mystery, and Miles finds himself wondering 'whether the improbable ought to be told'.
Release date:
September 6, 2012
Publisher:
Orion
Print pages:
256
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“IT’S NO USE,” said Miles Bredon. “The man’s a bore, and the woman’s a pest, and if I did
ever say I’d go there I must have been drunk at the time. Let us leave it at that.”
It is one of the drawbacks of the happiest marriage – and his was a happy marriage – that husband and wife are expected to go and stay with other husbands and wives. Men on the whole
prefer their own firesides, where the same drinks are to be had, the same books within reach, the same disposition of pipe-cleaners, match-boxes and envelopes is to be expected. Women on the whole
prefer one another’s; it saves the weekly books, and all the multitudinous worries of housekeeping, while the expedition lasts – I assume, of course, as you could assume with the
Bredons, that an ideal nurse reigns in the nursery. The argument now in progress was a common one; it ranged over a question of fact, whether the invitation had been accepted with or without
Miles’s consent; a question of values, whether it was worth spending three or four days of what looked like promising summer weather in the house of casual acquaintances; a question of
policy, whether some excuse should not be dug up for cancelling the acceptance after all.
“You were, rather, as far as I can remember,” admitted Angela. “I can’t always wait till you come round. The pity was that I didn’t give you an extra glass to lay
you out, put you straight in the car, and decant you at the Hallifords’ there and then. A sensible wife would always cart her husband about the country in a sack.”
“Now I come to think of it, I don’t believe I can have been as drunk as all that. To want to go and stay with the Hallifords, a man who’s all Adam’s apple and front
teeth, and a woman who’s all colours of the rainbow, at a place on the Welsh border where there probably isn’t a golf-course within miles – no, you must have misunderstood
me.”
“It’s no use crabbing the Hallifords; that’s not the point. They’re your friends, not mine.”
“My friends? Listen to her! You know perfectly well that they scraped an acquaintance with me through Sholto; and how the mischief they knew I was connected with the Indescribable
beats me. People aren’t supposed to know that kind of thing, and I believe I could get Sholto the sack if I told the Directors he had been giving away their little games. Oh, Mr.
Bredon, I’ve always wanted to meet a real detective – blast her!”
Once again, for the benefit of the illiterate, I must take up my pen to describe the Indescribable, and to define Bredon’s indefinable relation to it. The Indescribable is the
insurance company, compared with which the other insurance companies all look like last year’s models. It was the Indescribable which paid up, merely for the advertisement, when a large
hotel in South America took out a policy against earthquakes and was blown down, while in building, by a tornado; it was the Indescribable which underwrote the recent attempt to cross from Durazzo
to Brindisi in a canoe; there was a rumour, but the thing was never acknowledged, that they were prepared to insure a belligerent minor state against all indemnities it would incur by going to
war, only the League of Nations stepped in at the last moment. Such is the Indescribable Company; it likes taking big risks and taking risks on a large scale. It also likes charging big
premiums.
Miles Bredon was its private detective. To be sure, such an adjunct was not absolutely necessary. Those who set out to defraud insurance companies render themselves thereby liable to
prosecutions which are instituted, at the taxpayer’s expense, by the police. But the police do not always find it advisable to prosecute, and a company does not always find it advisable to
contest a fishy claim. It paid the Indescribable, therefore, to keep their own private inquiry agent, who would go round and ferret out the facts, so that they could be sure where they stood. The
position was well paid, and the man who held it was an ex-officer who was a good deal cleverer than he admitted. But for some reason he held that his profession was the degrading profession of a
spy, and did his best not to let it be talked about. In this the company nobly seconded his efforts; their “representative,” Mr. Bredon, appeared on suitable occasions, but they were
not anxious that his precise position in the economy of the business should be made public.
This time, it seemed, a leak had occurred. A Mr. Halliford, calling at the offices of the Indescribable to effect a very heavy insurance on his own life, had demanded to see “that clever
fellow Bredon, who made such a good job of the Burtell business.” I cannot stop to explain about the Burtell business, but Halliford, anyhow, was a friend of Mr. Nigel Burtell, who (for
reasons elsewhere given) had a higher opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Bredon than they had of him. It happened that Bredon was in the office; the authorities of the Company, always anxious to make a
good customer feel at home, insisted that he should come up and be introduced, not only to Halliford himself, but to the lady whom he had just married. In this Mr. Halliford did not stand
alone; a certain exotic charm and a volatile temperament had already endowed the lady with a rich supply of matrimonial aliases. Bredon loathed her at sight; loathed her still more when,
through sheer importunacy, she secured his presence and that of his wife Angela at a dinner in her London flat. And now the third wave was threatening; nor can we judge Bredon hardly if he showed
symptoms of wanting to retire up the beach.
Angela, however, was inexorable. “I don’t think it’s quite nice to talk like that of a woman who will be so rich when her husband dies,” she pointed out. “How much
did you say it was? Eighty thousand?”
“That was the figure. But, you see, the Indescribable doesn’t insure people against divorce; and I fancy Mrs. H. will have run through several other husbands before we have to cough
up the claim. Are you really going to take me to stay with that woman? You can’t even pretend there’s anything to be said for her.”
“Of course, she’s pretty.” Angela spoke in that ruminating voice which wives use when they want their husbands to contradict them on such points as these.
“The great detective,” Bredon pointed out, “is expected to be able to see through all disguises. But then, I’m not a great detective, and Mrs. Halliford . .
.”
“Charitable as always. Well, anyhow, you’re for it. I’ve never been to Herefs, and I hear great things of it. Probably there will be golf somewhere, there always is; and there
will be lots of other ways to keep in training. She says something in her letter about a scavenging party; that ought to be a good opening for a man who wants to keep his hand in at
detection.”
“A scavenging party – what on earth’s that?”
“Miles, dear, don’t be old-fashioned. A scavenging party is when you go round in cars picking up tramps by the roadside and feeding them fish and chips at Much Wenlock; or collecting
sandwich-boards and doorscrapers and things like that. All the brightest young people do it.”
“Sort of thing the Hallifords would do, anyhow. Those are the people who make one so sick of England; people who make money in oil or something, and buy up the old houses where decent
people lived before them, who had a stake in the country and knew their tenants and preserved and drank port and lived natural lives. These people play tennis instead of cricket . . .”
“Why not?”
“Don’t interrupt me; I’m in the middle of a speech. It isn’t that I mind tennis, but it hasn’t got the tradition value of cricket. Who ever heard of somebody
refusing to do a shady thing on the ground that it wasn’t tennis? And of course these modern people wouldn’t refuse, anyhow. They play tennis with their rich friends instead of cricket
on the village green with the blacksmith at one end and the second footman at the other. And instead of hunting hounds, or even subscribing, they tear round the countryside in cars making
themselves a nuisance to everybody. Of course we breed Bolsheviks; who wouldn’t be a Bolshevik when he’s expected to go and stay with a long-necked man who spends his time pinching
other people’s doorscrapers?”
“Oh, Miles, I wish you’d been one of those old-fashioned rich people who played cricket. Think what a lovely magistrate you’d have been, if you can make speeches like that. Mr.
Bredon, in remanding the prisoner, called attention to the growing habit of doorscraper-pinching, to which he attributed the falling off of enlistments in the local territorials. And you would
write letters to the papers, and I would correct the spelling for you. However, it’s no good worrying over what might have been. What’s got to be is that Annie’s mother is ill and
I’ve got to let her go off home, and while she’s away I’ve got to have you looked after by somebody else’s housemaids. You may not think the Hallifords much class, but their
invitation was a godsend just now. And it’s Herefs for us tomorrow.”
“Trust you to get out of it on a technicality of some kind. Why didn’t you tell me about the domestic crisis before? And answer me this if you can; why on earth do the Hallifords
want us there? Why did they rout me out at the office and send us about six invitations to dine? We aren’t their sort; we don’t know the people they know; and it’s going to cost
more in petrol getting there than it would cost getting in a deputy housemaid. Well, well, have it your own way. But remember, I take the patience cards. It isn’t a business expedition
this time.”
What good things Angela had been told about Herefordshire did not transpire, but certainly on a flawless day of summer it endeared itself by its approach. Sudden, conical hills thickly wooded,
old grey archways that had once been lodge gates, pointing along grass-grown roads up avenues now meaningless, farmhouses older and more substantial than is our English wont, vistas, as you climbed
a hill, of hops stretching across the fields, row upon row, like Venetian blinds; orchards of whitened trunks and fruit-laden boughs, little brick-and-timber villages huddling round duckponds, tall
hedges with white-faced cows at the gaps in them looking at you with an outraged expression, as if they suspected you of being after the doorscraper – it was holiday enough, this afternoon
drive, whatever hospitality awaited them at the end of it. There is a remoteness, a tuckedawayness, about our countryside where (especially) England of the English marches with her
neighbours; here towns were scarce, and abbeys and bridges, because living was unsettled, and except where some accident of modern industrialism has intervened there are no landmarks to
distinguish today from yesterday; only the rare castles lie in ruins, and there are no Roman roads, no remembered battlefields.
Above all, when they reached it, the Wye had this atmosphere of seclusion. The road is for ever travelling close to it, as roads must when there is hilly country to be traversed, but always at
just so much interval as gave you only tantalising glimpses of it; secretum meum mihi, it said, and kept you at a distance. The modernity of the bridges reminded you that it was not meant
for traffic to cross; a ford here, a ferry there, had been enough till the other day to serve its rustic neighbours. The banks sloping precipitately, with trees older and more spreading than such
as love the companionship of rivers, a bare scarp, sometimes, of red cliff rising two hundred feet out of the stream, hurrying rapids alternating with deep pools where the salmon jumped
noisily – of all this they caught only an occasional view, but enough to whet their appetite for closer exploration. Certainly it seemed hard on this patient countryside, so far from London
that the very speech of its inhabitants came near to the pitch-accent of the barbarian Welsh, that the Hallifords and their friends should have descended upon it; that their gramophones should
pierce the stillness of its woods, their motor-boats foul the river, their metropolitan vulgarity drive the labourer further than ever into himself, further than ever away from the masters who
hired his service. All this, be sure, Bredon rubbed into his wife relentlessly, and suggested more than once that they should lose their way, put up at a village inn somewhere, and have the
country all to themselves.
They did lose their way in the end, through the fault of an optimistic cartographer who promised them short cuts across a district with which he was plainly unfamiliar. Lastbury, the village for
which they were making, disappeared suddenly from the signposts, and their informants bewildered them, as such informants will, by assuming a knowledge of the local landmarks which only a
native could possess. In the end, they found that Lastbury Hall was a more natural objective than Lastbury village; it was impossible to miss it, once you were within a mile or two, you would see
the silo standing out as plain as you would wish among the trees, “Like as it might be a church tower,” one imaginative mind suggested. And it was, finally, what looked like a round
church tower that identified their destination for them. Telegraph wires pointed towards it, and it seemed clear that they were going to strike a farm road into the estate. “But,”
insisted Bredon, still unenlightened, “what on earth is a silo?”
IF BREDON HAD kept in his car – and what could possibly be more useful? – a copy of Larousse Universel, he
would have been able to pick up a lot of knowledge about silos, most of which would have been misleading for his present purposes. He would have learned that a silo is a subterranean ditch where
one puts down the grains, the vegetables, etc., to conserve them; that there is a punishment existing in the army of North Africa which consists in shutting up the condemned in a silo; that
silos were known by the ancients, and that traces of them still exist, remarkable for their impermeability. That the name is used, by extension, of airy reservoirs in cement, etc., in which
one immagazines the grains while waiting for their loading on boats or waggons. Finally, after much else, that these airy silos (for the grains, the minerals, etc.) are hermetically sealed and
carry dispositives of mechanical brewage to assure the conservation of the grains. Nothing would have prepared him for finding a large building made like a lighthouse, forty feet high, with no
windows, except a skylight in its conical top, no door, and indeed no opening at all except on one side, where a series of square hatches, one above another, led right up to the roof.
His thirst for information was fortunately in a good way to be satisfied. At the foot of the building stood Mr. Halliford, who was even then explaining the silo, a recent and favourite toy, to
one of his guests. This was a young man with pronounced horn-rimmed spectacles, whom Bredon suspected, with justice as it proved, of being an author. His manner and costume did not suggest that he
was a ready audience for agricultural homilies, and it seemed only decent to leave the car and express polite interest. “Know Mr. Tollard? Mr. and Mrs. Bredon. I was just telling Mr. Tollard
about the silo. Get all my stuff stored in there for the winter, stuff for the cattle, I mean. It ferments in there, you see, and keeps as sweet as possible all the year round, like preserved
fruit, you know. Cattle get so fond of it, you have to drive ’em off it when the spring comes before they’ll look at grass; positively. You’ll see the men filling it
tomorrow.”
“Stinks rather,” observed Mr. Tollard, who felt that something was due from him in the way of conversation.
“Stinks? You bet it does; gas coming off all the time. You have to be careful in there, people have been overpowered and poisoned in silos before now. And of course you have to have men
standing in there to spread it out level; otherwise you get air-pockets and it goes bad through not fermenting evenly. Of course, if I was really up to date I should have a proper machine to pile
it with; looks in over the top, you know, for all the world like an elephant’s trunk. But we hoist up the bundles by that pulley there – good strong pulley, that is; take any amount of
weight – and the platform by the skylight is hinged, so that it makes way for the sacks when they come up, and falls back into place to receive them. The men climb up by that ladder –
you can climb up by the traps, of course, but it’s a nuisance. Well, it’s no good looking at it now, because the men have knocked off work; come down tomorrow if you’re
interested. You must be tired, Mrs. Bredon, after that long drive; come up to the house; there’s tea there and things.”
Lastbury Hall, like several other houses in those parts, has paid in Victorian architecture the price of its Victorian prosperity. The old farmhouse – it was hardly more – was burned
down in the sixties, and was replaced by a considerable, though not uncomfortably large, mansion (I use the word advisedly) in a style which can only be characterised as imitation Pugin. Bad
red bricks, badly laid, stretched this way and that with unrelieved surface, save where they were broken by arched windows, innocent of depth and moulding. Slate pinnacles crowned the roof,
reminiscent of our nursery boxes of “stone bricks”; the house was too high for its area, too shallow to admit of comfortably sized rooms; the windows fitted badly, after the fashion of
Victorian Gothic windows; the chimneys were out of proportion but could never be persuaded not to smoke. And this regrettable incident of modern architecture faced squarely, across a
precipitous lawn, to the lovely deep pools of the Wye, along which a path ran, the envy of river-farers, roofed with ancient trees, fringed with meadowsweet and wild Canterbury bells. To enjoy
this view, which they had done so little to deserve, the earlier owners of the house had thrown out a hideous iron verandah, the lower part of it mercifully hidden in rambler roses. It was here
that the Bredons were presented to their hostess and to a group of guests who struggled uneasily out of their deck chairs.
Mrs. Halliford was a synthetic blonde whose schoolgirl complexion was startlingly ill matched to the extreme frailness of her physique. Her welcome, and her alternative offer of tea and
cocktails was emb. . .
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