Death at the Chase Read Online Free PDF

furthermore – beyond all sober belief as it seemed – he was in fact the recurrent object of a species of diabolically cat-and-mouse revenge, then equally surely he could claim credit for not being vastly madder still.
    But now they had climbed a final flight of wooden steps – it was little more than a ladder with a handrail – and passed through a low door. They were in open air, with a flat leaded area beneath their feet, the long spine of a steeply pitched stone roof behind them, and in front a low parapet constituted by battlements of a conventional sort. They were not particularly high up, since the house nowhere rose above two main storeys and a range of attic rooms. Appleby walked to the battlements and looked over. What lay immediately below was undoubtedly the front door. Ashmore had at least brought him straight to the spot from which the attack had been launched. And this seemed good enough warrant for recurring to it.
    ‘These periodic attempts to murder you,’ Appleby said boldly. ‘Do you regard them as strictly your own affair, or have you been accustomed to report them to the police?’
    ‘Oh, that!’ Ashmore’s tone, if not exactly dismissive, was that of a man to whom a topic of no great moment has been proposed. ‘I don’t make a fuss.’
    ‘You must forgive me for appearing merely curious. I realize the thing is no business of mine.’
    ‘Not at all.’ Ashmore turned to Appleby decisively. ‘Here you are, my dear sir, consenting to be my guest – and after some initial misunderstanding which I regret. And as a result, somebody nearly brains you. I say just enough – or so I suppose – to explain the matter, and pass to less disagreeable topics. But you are certainly entitled to a further word, if you feel that way. What’s that about the police? You told me you were a policeman yourself. Indeed, I’ve heard of you, as I said. Am I to understand that you are acting–’
    ‘Nothing of the kind, Mr Ashmore. I have no standing in your affair whatever. Perhaps I’m talking entirely out of turn. What happened before lunch stemmed, you say, from some very painful incident in the past. I do confess to wondering whether that fact has prompted you to keep quite mum about these attempts, or whether the local police know about them.’
    ‘I don’t see the local police doing much about them. Outside their range, if you ask me.’
    ‘I must disagree with you.’ Appleby spoke more forcibly than he had yet ventured to do. ‘If it is really true that your life is in some danger on only one day of the year, it is evident that the police could ensure your absolute safety upon it with very little inconvenience to either themselves or you.’
    ‘I think you said earlier that I could manage that off my own bat. I refuse to disarrange my life over the matter. But I may as well tell you that the police do know about it. At least their Chief Constable does.’
    ‘Colonel Pride?’
    ‘That’s right – young Tommy Pride. I’ve mentioned it to him more than once when meeting him in a casual way. At drinks somewhere or other – that sort of thing. I don’t, as a matter of fact, go around very much nowadays. I might almost be called a bit of a recluse, you know. But there are three or four neighbours on whom I have a kind of duty to drop in just occasionally. Trouble is, I’m so liable to meet some of my damned relations. Cursed number of Ashmores round these parts.’
    This, Appleby recalled, was a note which his host had already sounded. At the moment it seemed a red herring, and he had better stick to the Chief Constable.
    ‘And what action,’ he asked, ‘did Colonel Pride think it best to take?’
    ‘Oh, he didn’t take any action! I wasn’t urging anything on him, you know. It seemed to me proper he should be put in the picture, eh? But I wasn’t crying out. Thought I’d made that point with you.’
    ‘You made it, all right.’ Standing on what must have been the precise spot from