The Daffodil Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

open door. ‘Hurrying?’ said a harassed voice. ‘After another of the vanishing ladies?’
    Hudspith snapped an affirmative reply and strode on. But the harassed voice stopped him. ‘Well that’s nothing. They’ve put me on a vanishing house.’
    ‘A vanishing house?’ Hudspith turned reluctantly round. ‘What the deuce do you mean?’
    ‘I mean that somebody’s pinched a house – a whole blasted house!’ The harassed voice rose to a note of extreme exasperation. ‘And a thoroughly crazy house at that.’

 
     
4
    The best connection was by Leeds. But Appleby, because the thing had been put to him as a holiday, went by York. The wait there was over an hour, and that would be time for a stroll up to the Minster. Also, he remembered a teashop with remarkable muffins; and although muffins are largely a matter of butter, he hoped for the best. With this judicious balance of spiritual and material satisfactions in mind he left the station.
    The city walls were still there. Naturally so – but nowadays one went about in that frame of mind. The city walls were there, and in places as fresh as if they still expected culverins and demi-cannon to be brought against them hourly. Cromwell, thought Appleby vaguely as he crossed the Ouse. Extraordinarily difficult really to imagine the siege of an English town. But then how oddly things lie in the womb of time: any amount of small change from Roman legionaries’ pockets was dug up when they started making the railway station, A great massacre of Jews, thought Appleby as he passed the reticent façade of the Yorkshire Club. They had just time to kill their own wives and children and then the mob were on top of them. In England that was eight hundred years ago. He glanced down Coney Street. There was little traffic at this hour; shopkeepers, who had never read manuals on scientific salesmanship, stood at their doors, unashamedly at leisure; it was all very tranquil, very secure. Laurence Sterne, Appleby thought. And there is something in walking at random about a city, he thought, that makes one’s mind turn thus idly over and over, like Leopold Bloom’s.
    On the left, a huddle of half-heartedly ecclesiastical buildings. On the right, the unbeautiful but beneficent York City Dispensary. And in front, the Minster. The poet Shelley had called it a monstrous and tasteless relic of barbarism. But then Shelley’s was an appallingly rational and scientific mind. And perhaps they had been telling him about the Jews… Appleby climbed the steps.
    When he came out he stood for a moment blinking in the sunshine. A baker’s cart rattled past; it might have reminded him of the muffins; instead, it merely recalled Daffodil and the dubious investigation in prospect. Why, he asked himself, should you prefer a quiet cab-horse to Captain Somebody’s whopping expensive brute? Well, you hired a cab and you went to a party and you told the man to wait. Then you stole your hostess’ diamonds, deftly wrapped them in a wisp of hay and pitched them through the drawing-room window at the creature’s head. The creature at once devoured the unexpected luncheon, thus unwittingly becoming your accomplice in crime. It only remained –
    Appleby shook his head at this unpolicemanlike fantasy, and found that he had wandered into that narrow and winding street which has the most interesting shops. This bookshop, for instance: A Good Warm Watch Coat – that was Laurence Sterne again; Francis Drake’s Eboracum of 1736 – one would have to be fairly prosperous to buy that. And that antique shop – he crossed the road. Such places were not quite what they were in the great days of those wandering scholars, the fabulous horn-rimmed Americans of the twenties. Perhaps they will be back again in the fifties, Appleby thought; and paused to glance in. Warming pans, coffin stools, china dogs. He walked on, passing a second shop of the same sort: china dogs, warming pans, coffin stools. The pomps of death: