Read Online Appleby Talks Again by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page B

King then withdrew to the house. In fact, he withdrew to this hall, and sat for a long time there in the window, quite still and silent. He appeared lost in sombre thought. When at last he stirred, it was because the dawn was breaking. He then began once more to explore the house. I felt that I had seen enough, and I slipped out to recover my dinghy. I was halfway across the lawn when I heard the laughter.”
    “The laughter?” Richard Poole was startled.
    “It came from high in air, and I knew at once that it was supernatural. Very cautiously I skirted the house – and suddenly I saw the Goblin King again, silhouetted against the dawn. He had climbed the ruined stair – climbed right to the top – and now he was looking down on all that part of Water Poole that is mere ruin. And he was laughing. I have never heard such laughter. It was, I say, supernatural – and yet all the gaiety and all the fun of the world we know seemed to be in it. I was astounded. I was strangely moved. Once more it pealed out – and then, quite abruptly, ceased. And the Goblin King had vanished.”
    There was a long silence. At last Richard Poole spoke softly. “He had vanished?”
    “Yes – following darkness. Following darkness like a dream. That was all.”
    The silence renewed itself, until broken by Appleby. “Yes,” he said. “That – I am very glad indeed to say – was all.”
    And Appleby and Judith drove away. He waited until they were on the highroad and then asked a question. “The doctor is quite sure?”
    “Quite sure. It will be confirmed at the post-mortem. Hiram Poole was dead before he reached the ground. He died of the heart-failure that had threatened him for a long time.”
    “That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that he died of laughter. It was appropriate enough, for the whole affair was comedy. Once or twice it looked like crime – but it proved to be comedy in the end. One can’t consider that Richard Poole was very culpable, and he told the truth as he knew it. So did that tiresome but perfectly honest temperance crusader… But of course there was more to it than that.”
    “More to Hiram Poole’s death?” Judith nodded over the wheel. “Decidedly.”
    “One can’t doubt that young Richard’s deception was something the discovery of which was very painful to him. Imagine him, sick and chill and tired, being haled around that derelict shrine – for it was that to him – in the small hours.”
    “And by a Daughter of Abstinence, at that.”
    “Quite. It must have been sheer nightmare. And any common man would simply have felt himself abominably cheated and betrayed.”
    “Any common man would have suspected the very obvious mercenary motive.”
    “Hiram had his dark hour, I don’t doubt, hunched there in a window of the hall. But he rose to the thing.”
    “He rose to it.”
    “The Pooles are still resourceful and gay. Hiram saw it like that, and his own laughter attested it. I take off my hat to him.”

 
     
WAS HE MORTON?
    “Yes,” Appleby said, as we strolled to the far end of his study, “I do keep a bit of a museum in this room. A sign of old age and the reminiscent mood, no doubt.”
    He pointed to a range of well-ordered shelves. “You may find them depressing. For these things connect up, one way or another, with every sort of wickedness under the sun.”
    “All of them?”
    “Well, no. One or two recall affairs that would have to be termed bizarre, I suppose, rather than nefarious. For example, that photograph. What do you make of it?”
    I found myself studying a formal, three-quarter-length portrait of a young man, taken full face and looking straight at the camera. A professional job, I thought, but of rather an old-fashioned sort.
    “Attract you?” No comment had occurred to me, and Appleby appeared to feel I needed prompting. “Or do you prefer a man to be handsome in a more regular way?”
    “The features are certainly irregular enough,” I said.