Appleby's Other Story Read Online Free PDF

you would be to concentrate your celebrated detective powers on Catmull.’
    â€˜And who is Catmull?’
    â€˜The butler. It’s never safe to ignore the butler. But, on reflection, I change my mind. Go not for Catmull but for his wife. Mrs Catmull is the cook. And if cuisine means anything, Mrs Catmull is the most sinister of the lot.’
    Meaningless badinage, although not to be judged morally reprehensible, is seldom entertaining for long. Appleby remembered it now as one of this disagreeable character’s more tiresome propensities. But there were more relevant matters to recall to memory. For example, there was Raffaello’s chief field of professional activity. No doubt he had a good enough line on where to pick you up, say, a Caravaggio, if you wanted such a thing, and knew just where to find a couple of collectors susceptible of being talked into profitable competition with each other for a Monet or a Renoir. The mechanics of inflating a contemporary reputation at a commercially propitious moment were unlikely to be beyond him. And he certainly possessed skill in filtering quietly out of a private collection awkwardly valuable works on which no right-thinking man would like to see the successful collecting of estate duty. It was this last beneficent activity, indeed, that had first commended him to Appleby’s notice a good many years ago. More recently, he had been peddling one or another remote past or dawn of history. He had a little gallery off Bond Street which announced in a refined and reticent lettering: The Arts of the Ancient Orient . He financed what had the appearance of a learned journal but really acted as a sales-sheet with the title Etruria . If you were knowledgeable, you went to him for authentic Etruscan stuff smuggled out of Italy, and got it; if you were less knowledgeable, you did the same thing, and acquired some perfectly respectable fakes. And then – Appleby remembered – there were the displaced lamas and monks and anchorites and archimandrites. These people were always turning up nowadays – fleeing from the threat of the sword, more or less, but with marketable objects of great value in their baggage, and stories about their own just proprietorship of these which nobody in the western world was in a position to check. Raffaello, it was understood, had cashed in on that.
    Much of this was rather a long way from Elvedon Court. It did seem as if what might be called Raffaello’s pliability had been his recommendation to the place; in other words, that the late Maurice Tytherton had been up to something not wholly reputable. People who get themselves murdered have often been up to precisely that. Roughly speaking, it is a black mark against a man if he finishes up with a bullet in brain or heart. Still, about Tytherton this remained wild surmise. He might well have been as monumentally respectable as most landowners, bankers, care-ridden industrialists, minor Ministers of the Crown, newspaper owners, and indeed all affluent persons normally are. As for the insinuations in one or two things Raffaello had said – well, that might just be the fellow’s common venomous style. Except that one had to remember there had been the Reverend Mr Voysey as well. Voysey, who was odd but neither venomous nor vulgar, had been constrained to admit that a certain lack of edification marked the Elvedon scene. And who was Mrs Graves? Who was Carter? Could the significance of Mr and Mrs Catmull conceivably be other than a silly joke? Asking himself these questions now, Appleby had to confess to himself that he was hooked.
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    â€˜What an estate agent would call an imposing country residence.’ Raffaello had taken a few steps across the little glade to a point from which it was possible to glimpse the roof of Elvedon. He looked like a very minor devil, Appleby thought, taking a brooding and disparaging survey of Eden. ‘Who inherits it? Not I’d