Appleby at Allington Read Online Free PDF

expected him, as I think I told you. He’d be a support.’
    ‘You’re going to have plenty of support tomorrow – and a church fête as well. Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can myself.’
    ‘My dear chap, you’re very kind. And I’m sorry that the place has produced so shocking an end to your dining with me. I feel it almost as a breach of hospitality.’
    Judging this proposition to be decidedly overstrained, Appleby made no reply to it. He watched Owain Allington climb down the ladder and begin to cross the strip of park in front of the invisible house. Then he turned back to keep his vigil by the dead man. The son et lumière at Allington had certainly had an unfortunate close. But in about half an hour, he told himself, it would cease to be his affair. No doubt he would be required to give evidence before the coroner. But that, after all, was something he had done before.
    Meanwhile, inactivity was his role. He had satisfied himself that the man in the corner was dead, and further than that he had better not go. There must be an investigation, no doubt, although there didn’t really seem to be all that to investigate. But it wasn’t for a retired Police Commissioner to start poking around. If he did so, the local people would be entirely respectful. They would feel mildly outraged, all the same.
    But inactivity wasn’t natural to him. He moved over to one of the glass panels shutting him off from the night, and found that it was designed to slide back in a groove. There would be no harm in letting in a little more air. He did so, and was presently leaning out into the darkness. Being thus less immediately in the presence of death, he decided it wouldn’t be too strikingly improper to light a cigarette. For a moment the brief flare of the match blinded him. Then he realized that the summer night into which he was gazing was no longer all but impenetrably dark. For a moment he thought that the dawn was breaking, and then he saw that he was witnessing one of those odd meteorological occasions, disconcerting to nocturnally-behaving persons, in which the moon heaves itself into the sky not all that far ahead of the sun. It was a very faint moonlight that was seeping with a slow stealth into the park.
    It was with a sense that time had been behaving in some obscurely curious fashion that night that he now glanced at the illuminated dial of his watch. There would certainly be little of the night left by the time he got to bed. Meanwhile, there was this mild lunar manifestation. It would be soothing, even perhaps poetic in suggestion to anyone less gruesomely circumstanced than he himself happened to be. Even so, he watched with satisfaction great trees beginning to define themselves – beginning even, or so he fancied, to cast a ghost of shadow on the grass. He remembered the story about King Charles’ treasure being buried under one of them. He was very far from believing in it, and it was his impression that Owain Allington was very far from believing in it too. But there had apparently been people taking it seriously – even to the point of doing a little quiet trespassing and prospecting at an hour very much like this. It suddenly occurred to Appleby that the dead man might have been one of them.
    He turned back irresolutely towards the body, almost as if prompted to seek verification of this suspicion in some way. But that was nonsense, like a notion out of a boys’ adventure story – in which the dead man would prove to have an ancient map in his pocket, with the hiding-place marked with a cross in rusty red.
    Appleby returned to the window. He could now see the glimmer of the lake, and even the white line of the long drive that skirted it. Low on a near horizon, a beam of light appeared, circled, vanished. That was a car or lorry on the high road. Presently the arrival of the county constabulary would be signalised in that way. And he himself would drive home in the first dawn – drive home without having