Read Online The Bloody Wood by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page A

ever at the moment – she has a right to.’
    ‘The point isn’t at all likely to escape me.’ Fell was impatient. ‘But there are limits, it seems to me. Mrs Martineau tells me that later today there will be turning up some woman who has scarcely ever been to Charne before. And only half an hour ago there were arrivals in an affair like a battleship. Martineau should have more sense. The strain on his wife is quite untimely.’
    ‘And here,’ Judith said, ‘the crew of the battleship come. Like a boarding party, one might say.’
    This was true. Round the corner of the house came the new arrivals. They were unaccompanied by their host. The Pendletons, it was to be conjectured, having arrived at Charne at a somewhat early hour, had murmured their wish to wander round without fuss. And here they were.
    It was believed by the dramatist Strindberg that professional cooks are invariably persons sanguine, fleshy and bloated through a mysterious battening upon the life-blood of those whom they are employed to nourish. A similar mechanism is sometimes asserted to operate in the case of surgeons. But Edward Pendleton was far from bearing this out. From his exquisite silver-grey hair to his wholly appropriate weekend-in-the-country brown shoes he was eminently the man who has kept his form through all the severities of an arduous calling. His figure was that of a young athlete – and a fencer’s or a wing three-quarter’s, one told oneself, rather than a forward’s or a rowing tough’s. And to this his wife Irene very adequately matched up. If she a little too clearly suggested what her own portrait would be like when encountered on the walls of the Royal Academy – for she seemed very much a product of delicately applied glazes – she was yet so nice a specimen of her particular world that one would have felt wholly churlish in thinking to scratch a lacquer so elaborately contrived for one’s delectation. The Pendletons were cordial and perhaps even kindly people; they possessed and exercised every art for putting you at your ease; it wasn’t at all their fault – you had guiltily to feel – if the total effect they projected fell a little short of the wholly sympathetic.
    The Pendletons approached the Applebys with appropriate expressions of pleasurable expectation now gratified. The Applebys, bracing themselves, responded with actual gestures of a decorous joy. Dr Fell stayed quite still – but as these ritual approaches did not concern him there was nothing out of the way in that. Dr Fell, however, had to be introduced, since it would hardly have been proper to let a professional colleague of the eminent Edward Pendleton simply fade into the background. Appleby was about to perform this office when he became aware that the two men were already known to each other.
    It wasn’t that they had broken into speech, or given each other so much as a nod. Dr Fell remained immobile, looking at Pendleton. His posture held the rigidity to which there is conventionally applied the rather violent term ‘transfixed’. Pendleton, although his own relaxed stance didn’t change, was looking straight at Fell with an expression of dispassionate scrutiny which didn’t suggest itself as a stranger’s. And then Appleby had said something, and Pendleton was stepping forward with an extended hand.
    ‘How do you do,’ he said, with brisk cordiality. He had, if ever so faintly, the air of a man making a gesture. ‘May I introduce you to my wife? Irene, this is Dr–’ Pendleton paused in the kind of polite apology of a man who has failed to pick up an unfamiliar name.
    ‘Fell,’ Fell said.
    ‘I am so sorry. Dr Fell.’
    Mrs Pendleton broke into gracious speech. She had, one felt, scores of obscure medical practitioners presented to her every week. Fell listened with a near approach to silence. When Mrs Pendleton eventually made a flicker of a pause, he bowed and walked away.
    ‘What an interesting man!’ Mrs Pendleton said.