Appleby Talking Read Online Free PDF Page A

that sometimes goes with old age. He took me to his late brother’s sitting-room himself and showed me what had happened. A window giving on a terrace had been forced open, and so had a handsome bureau in the middle of the room. Splintered wood and disordered papers were all over the place, and one capacious drawer was entirely empty. The Scattergood Papers, roughly ordered into A Candid Chronicle , had been in that.
    “I asked a number of questions – pretty discreetly, for Lord Scattergood had held, as you know, all but the highest office in the realm, and was a person of decidedly august and intimidating presence. He answered with the unflawed courtesy one would expect, and very coherently in the main. If his years showed at all, it was in the way that a certain malice – what one might call the hitherto suppressed family malice – peeped through the chinks of his great statesman’s manner. And he was decidedly frank about his younger brother’s proposed book. Claud had never acknowledged the responsibilities proper in a Spendlove; his incursion into the Cabinet had been a fiasco; and while he, the elder brother, had toiled through a long lifetime to sustain the family tradition of public service, Claud had done nothing but amass low scandal in high places, and acquire the ability to adorn and perpetuate it with what was undoubtedly a sufficient literary grace. To this last point Lord Scattergood recurred more than once. But I see, Vicar, that you have guessed the end of my story.”
    The Vicar nodded. “I think I have. None of the folk congregated in those nearby inns had anything to do with the disappearance of A Candid Chronicle of My Life and Times . The Marquis of Scattergood had himself staged the burglary, and saved his family’s honour by pitching the wretched thing in the fire.”
    “You are at least half-way to the truth.” And Appleby smiled a little grimly. “That night I stopped at Benison Court after all – and did a little burglary of my own. Lord Scattergood, too, had a sitting-room, and Lord Scattergood, too, had a bureau. I broke it open. The manuscript was there.”
    “He had preserved it?”
    “He had begun to transcribe it. And with a new title page. The Intimate Journals of Eustace Scattergood, Fifth Marquis of Scattergood . It was as a writer that he would have chosen to be remembered, after all.”

 
     
THE FURIES
    “The death of Miss Pinhorn,” said Appleby, “was decidedly bizarre. But it was some time before we realised that it was sinister too.”
    “I remember Miss Pinhorn slightly.” The Vicar set down his tankard. “My daughter called on her once when collecting for European relief. Miss Pinhorn owned a cottage here, I think. She gave the poor girl sixpence.”
    The Doctor chuckled. “She was quite astonishingly mean.”
    “She would have lived, if she could, on free samples of breakfast cereals,” said Appleby. “But she died, nevertheless, of something odder than starvation. In a sense, she died of drink. But I see I must tell the story.”
    “Capital,” said the Doctor. “And we’ll try a second pint ourselves.”
    “Amelia Pinhorn was a woman of considerable fortune and marked eccentricity.
    “For most of the year she lived in London the normal life of a leisured person of her sort. Then for a couple of months each summer she came down here and led a solitary and miserly existence in a small cottage.
    “She had no contacts with anybody – not even the milkman.
    “I don’t exaggerate. Everything was sent down from town before she arrived. She lived on tins.
    “And then one day she was drowned. Or at least, it is supposed that she was drowned.
    “For we never, you see, recovered the body. The poor lady went over the cliff just short of the lighthouse. You must know about the current that sweeps in there and then goes out to sea again past the Furies.
    “And this was awkward when the rumours began to go round. It might have been particularly awkward