A Connoisseur's Case Read Online Free PDF Page B

brains, and all that, as the pundits can tell by the shape of the skulls. Puny too, in a way. Look at the suits of armour in the museums. The outfits of famous knights, eh? And yet you could hardly get an undersized Pay Corps boy into one of them today. All because we’re tolerably well provided at the trough nowadays. Even the plebs – eh? Live like lords. Live a damned sight too high, if you ask me. And not even content with it. Reds at heart, the whole lot of them. Need discipline. And another big show would bring that fast enough, whatever else it brought. What they call a balance of advantages. A loud bang or two, but the whole unruly crowd put on parade.’
    Mr Channing-Kennedy, as he talked this disagreeable nonsense, was still favouring Appleby from time to time with an appraising glance. And the appraisal struck Appleby as of an order cooler and more collected than was altogether congruous with Mr Channing-Kennedy’s woolly talk. In part, moreover, it was a kind of glance with which Appleby, like other men of a mild celebrity, was familiar: the kind of glance that is comparing a living and present image with a recollected photograph. Since serving Appleby with beer it had occurred to Mr Channing-Kennedy that here was a face somehow familiar to him. He had even perhaps identified it. But this scarcely seemed to justify something wary in his rather covert scrutiny. Perhaps Mr Channing-Kennedy did not possess the comfort of an entirely clear conscience in minor matters of the law. But – although he scarcely seemed a very intelligent man – he could hardly suppose that he was being run to earth by London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police in person.
    Talk now seemed likely to languish, since Appleby was not one largely given to casual conversation and Judith was distinctly unsympathetic to the philosophical propositions to which this dubiously déclassé publican adhered. But for a further minute or two Mr Channing-Kennedy talked on – although with so little encouragement that Appleby found himself wondering whether the fellow had some motive for detaining them. Was he proposing to fish for information? Was he – conceivably – anxious that Seth Crabtree should be well out of the way before his late interlocutors should be free to trail him? These were fantastic conjectures. They were a throwback – Appleby found himself reflecting – to his old CID days, when a large part of his waking life had been dominated by the supposition that there was a crook in every second citizen he encountered. This Channing-Kennedy was a vulgar and rather offensive fellow, but there was not the slightest real reason to believe that he was in any such category – any more than there had been any real reason to believe that there was more in Seth Crabtree than Judith had been disposed to remark in him.
    And yet there was another queer thing about the unengaging Channing-Kennedy. Half his mind was on what might be called his lines of communication. The canal was no longer a real artery; nothing arrived at or departed from the inn by this route any more. Wayfarers, indeed, might come along the towpath, as Appleby himself and Judith had done. But this would be at the cost of laddered stockings and muddy trousers. As Appleby had remarked, in a motorized age people were no longer disposed to potter along the bank of a canal. The normal approach to the inn was now by a lane at the back: a narrow and winding affair, barely adequate for vehicular traffic, which presumably led to some more commodious highway along which Channing-Kennedy’s anticipated cohorts of tourists would advance. Conceivably his uneasily divided attention at this moment was to be attributed to the expectation that the great moment had come. Alternatively, he might simply be afraid that something awkward was due to turn up. Perhaps he ran a sideline, unknown to the respectable firm of brewers that employed him, in