Appleby And Honeybath Read Online Free PDF

variety. Leave the other fellow to do the rather thinking.’
    ‘I’ll take your advice, John.’ Honeybath saw that, behind a smokescreen of badinage, Appleby was genuinely concerned over the harassment he was bound to endure. ‘Will there be an inquest, do you suppose? Can a coroner, I mean, sit on a body that isn’t there?’
    ‘Certainly not in such circumstances as we have here now. I’m bound to say a spot or two of blood would be useful.’
    ‘A spot or two of blood?’ For a moment, Honeybath was both horrified and bewildered.
    ‘Just that. Let’s have a good look at that chair, and at the rugs round about. Not that there aren’t plenty of ways of killing a man without shedding gore.’
    Appleby carried out this investigation while Honeybath stood by. The effort was apparently unrewarding.
    ‘Nothing doing,’ Appleby said. ‘Although, mark you, it’s astonishing what the forensic chaps can conjure up out of what seems to be empty air.’
    ‘You mean, the idea that I’m of a disordered mind…’
    ‘No, no – I’ve told you already. They won’t assert that you’ve eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner. But remember that it has proved, after all, not to have been a sealed room that you left behind you when you turned that key in the door. Suppose it was only a slumbering student that you came upon, and suppose he knew about that concealed exit. He had only to wake up and take himself off.’
    ‘A student, did you say?’ Not surprisingly, Honeybath was distinctly at a loss.
    ‘Or scholar. Conceivably quite a ripe scholar. A Regius Professor from one of our ancient universities, or somebody like that. Sufficiently distinguished to lend tone to this whole affair.’
    ‘John, I do appeal to you…’
    ‘I’m not just being funny, Charles. I’m putting forward a perfectly tenable hypothesis. And it explains, doesn’t it, even the toasted cheese?’
    Honeybath pulled himself together. He wasn’t dull, and he now vindicated the fact.
    ‘You mean,’ he asked, ‘that somebody has been pursuing a course of clandestine research in this library – and so much at leisure as to have fixed himself up sleeping quarters and culinary arrangements next door?’
    ‘Just that. The academic term for it is pernoctation. The chap pernoctates. Remains in residence night and day.’
    ‘You really believe I may have been mistaken…’
    ‘I don’t really believe anything of the kind.’ Appleby was a shade impatient. ‘What I do believe is that you entered this library and found a dead man. Even so, a certain amount of what I’ve just said may apply. The waking up and making-off theory isn’t mine. It’s just something that may occur to somebody else.’
    ‘But why ever should anybody be researching here in such a crazily covert fashion?’
    ‘Because of the peculiar disposition of our host. Judith has told me quite a lot about your prospective sitter. Terence Grinton actively dislikes his library, associating it with what he regards as loopy egghead Grintons who have turned up from time to time. It’s not an altogether uncommon thing. There have been Coleridges, for instance, who took a thoroughly dark view of Sam as the family’s black sheep. And would even have liked to shoo enquiring scholars from the door. Can’t you imagine our Terence roaring at such people?’
    ‘Yes, I can.’ Honeybath now acknowledged this with candour. ‘But if the man was dead, he can’t have come to life again and simply walked out of the place. He must have been smuggled out.’
    ‘Quite so. And I don’t suggest that we have really got all that far. Merely penetrated to one conceivable tip of a mystery. However, let’s be off. Just lock the door beyond those fake books, Charles, remembering again not to touch the handle. And we’ll lock the main door behind us, just as you did before.’
    A couple of minutes later, the two men walked in sober silence away from the library.

 
     
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