Alan Hunter - Landed Gently

‘I cannot be positive, Sir Daynes. He expressed the intention, and I last saw him ascending the stairs.’

‘Didn’t you hear him moving about when you went up? Room only one away from yours, eh? Passed your door when he was on his way out of the wing?’

Somerhayes did not reply immediately. His expression a blank, he seemed to be running over in his mind every minute detail of the night before.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I can be of no help to you on that point. I heard nothing from his room when I went up, nor later when I was in bed. Being tired, I went to sleep quickly, and I remembered nothing more until I was wakened by Thomas at ten minutes past seven.’

‘Feller might never have gone to his room, then?’

‘As you say, Daynes, he might not.’

There was a small commotion by the hearth as Gently searched the pocket of his ulster and produced a crumpled pamphlet. It was a visitor’s guide to the Place, of which a small pile still lay on a side-table in the great hall.

‘If you don’t mind… I’d like to get these premises clear in my brain.’

He opened the guide on the table and turned the pages with clumsy fingers. On the verso of the cover was printed a plan of the state apartments, in shape a large rectangle, its width two-thirds its length. At each corner were four smaller rectangles representing the wings. They were connected to the central block by narrow anterooms or galleries. In the centre of the state apartments, facing east, was the great hall, with galleries running round its three inner walls. From the inner end of the hall, at almost the exact centre of the block, the flight of marble stairs descended from the gallery-level.

‘All this isn’t used at all… it just connects the four wings?’

Gently poked at the enormous central block, which dwarfed its four appendages.

Somerhayes smiled bleakly. ‘It was not built for utility, Mr Gently. The state apartments were designed to house visiting royalty and the first baron’s collection of pictures and antiques. In a more spacious age they were certainly in frequent use, but I believe there is no record of the family having inhabited other than the wings. Today, I’m afraid, the state apartments are no more than a museum which in summer we open to the public. At other times they are merely an insuperable inconvenience to the poor inhabitants.’

‘Going round the clock… who lives where?’

‘Going round the clock, we have first the south-east wing, in which the tapissiers and the outdoor staff have their quarters — it has entry, you see, into the coach-houses and stabling, part of which has been turned into the tapestry workshop. Next at that end is the south-west wing where Mr Brass has rooms, and above him the indoor staff. In that wing are also the kitchens. Coming to this end, we have, first, the north-west wing, which is my cousin’s sacred domain, and second the north-east wing, in which we are now, and which Thomas and myself inhabit. In the usual way all meals are taken in the kitchen wing, but it was decided that over Christmas my own suite would be used, and so the yellow drawing room here was the scene of last night’s party. I trust you can find your way about now, Mr Gently?’

Gently nodded broodingly. He placed a stubby finger on the top of the great stairs.

‘That’s about equidistant from each of the four wings.’

‘The landing of the marble stairs is, I believe, the geometric centre of the house.’

‘In fact it’s the logical place for a rendezvous… don’t you think?’

Somerhayes said nothing, but his eyes never left Gently’s face.

‘We’ve got to ask ourselves why he went there — at that time of night. It isn’t just round the corner… see here, there’s four or five rooms to go through after you’ve left this wing, not to mention the gallery on the north side of the hall. What was he after, unless he’d arranged to meet someone?’

Somerhayes shook his head slowly. ‘I can suggest no reason…’

‘And what was the object of the meeting, which was presumably clandestine?’

Again the head shook, unhurriedly but with determination.

‘Gad, Gently, you’ve got something there,’ broke in Sir Daynes. ‘If the feller went to meet someone, must have been clandestine. D’you think he was a bad ’un, and this tapestry fal-de-lal was just a blind?’

‘Be a good way of getting in, sir,’ put in Dyson, with interest.

‘Damn it, yes — confounded clever. And not above some of the johnnies we’ve had to deal with.’

It was Gently’s head that was shaking now. ‘He comes from a US camp, you know…’

‘That’s just the point, man,’ exclaimed Sir Daynes. ‘Who’s going to check his credentials, when he turns up at an Air Force lecture? Feller’s genuine — take him at his face value — and all the time he’s a crook, infiltrating his way into a country house. It’s been done before, I tell you. There’s no end to the tricks these johnnies get up to.’

‘But surely they’d know their own officers at the camp?’

‘Not necessarily — not at Sculton. Place is a staging-post, men in and out the whole time. And the whole business fits in… You’ve got a motive there to play with. Feller lets his accomplice into the house, say — they quarrel about the division of the loot — accomplice fetches him one with the truncheon, and clears off sharp without touching anything. There you are, man, in a nutshell. Answer to the whole confounded mystery.’

Gently shrugged his bulky shoulders. ‘Just one minor objection. Did they happen to know who you were talking about when you phoned Sculton Camp this morning?’

Sir Daynes gave him the look he usually reserved for defaulting constables…

They could get little more out of Somerhayes. For the benefit of the record he repeated his description of the finding of the body, of his suspicion about the injury, of the search he had made with Thomas, and the subsequent phoning of the police and Sir Daynes. And all the time Gently had the curious impression that he had been constituted as some sort of special audience, that he was a gallery to whom Somerhayes was playing. But why? And with what object? — the circumstances remained a mystery. Somerhayes’s last look, like his first, was an unclassifiable smile aimed at the man from the Central Office.

‘Hmp!’ grunted Sir Daynes, as the door closed behind his lordship. ‘What do you make of it all, Gently, what do you make of it? Can’t say I like the way things are shaping — damn feller Somerhayes doesn’t seem to realize his position.’

‘He was the last person to-’ Dyson was beginning complacently, but he discreetly ended there as he caught the expression on the baronet’s face.

‘Confound the man!’ Sir Daynes turned to stare gloomily into the fire. ‘What a blasted kettle of fish to turn up on a Christmas Day, eh? I feel like a drink… I feel like some of that 1905 cognac.’

Leslie Brass, dressed in green Harris tweed with a red line, seemed to bring a current of vitality with him into the room, which Somerhayes had chilled and enervated. One only had to catch a glimpse of his strong features with their Semitic nose and twinkling green eyes to be impressed by a feeling of warmth and energy — the ginger beard suited Brass; it seemed to grow out of his personality like an overplus of good spirits. When he sat down, the chair creaked under his massive but boyish frame.

‘Leslie Edward Brass, thirty-seven, artist — this isn’t the first time I’ve given the police my particulars! — late of Kensington, W8, now of Merely Place, Northshire — servants’ wing, if you want to be precise.’

Nothing was going to make this serious for Brass. He grinned irreverently at the whole of the set-up. Policemen might impress the bourgeois, but from Brass they just bounced off — his piratical spirits surrounded him like an envelope of India rubber.