Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘How so?’

‘Well, frankly, Watson — and in the circumstances there seems little point in not being frank with you — Jack has been living here largely on my charity. I offer it gladly as he served under my father, but it galls him. And beneath that quiet exterior, you know, there’s a cauldron of feelings. Not a stable character, Jack’s. It told against him in the regiment, so the dad said.’

In the pause that followed, I ran my eye over a weapon I recognized, one of the single-action Rossi-Charles rifles with the old aperture sight. Though inaccurate at anything of a range, they had been much prized at one time for never jamming and for their lightness and cheapness. I mentioned having come across them in Afghanistan and Sir Harry told me his father had picked this one up after Jellalabad. Forty years ago and more, I remember thinking to myself, and am still at a loss to say why I did — forty years ago, before I was born.

The rest of the evening passed pleasantly if inconclusively enough, and in due course the party dispersed. My bedroom was on the second floor, above which lay what I had taken to be a number of unoccupied or unused garrets and the like; I was slightly surprised, then, to hear, as I made ready to retire, the distinct sound of a door shutting somewhere above my head, and proceeded to listen with half an ear to a conversation of which I could at first make out nothing but that, of a small number of speakers, one or more was male and one or more female. My attention mounted as the voices grew in volume and feeling until, when it was plain that upstairs a tenacious woman faced an importunate man, I hung on every word, but no words were distinguishable, none save one, the interjection ‘No!’ thrice pronounced in feminine accents, and accompanied by what was beyond all doubt the defiant stamp of a feminine foot. This evidently settled the matter; the colloquy at once died down and soon ceased, the door opened and shut again, and in a few moments all was still.

The whole incident had not lasted a minute, and its meaning and importance were far from certain. Nevertheless, I found some difficulty in composing my mind for sleep. The man’s voice I had been unable to identify; the woman’s was quite positively that of Lady Fairfax. What, I asked myself, could have taken her at such an hour to a part of the house so remote from where her own quarters must be situated?

When sleep came it was deep and dreamless. Next morning, thoroughly refreshed, I had barely finished breakfast when the household exploded into sudden clamour. It appeared that the gun-room had been broken into by a window and the Rossi-Charles rifle and half a dozen rounds of its ammunition removed. Nothing else was missing, according to Carlos, who, I gathered, was in virtual charge of his master’s modest armoury. Mindful of Sherlock Holmes’s dictum, that there is no branch of detective science so important as the art of tracing footsteps, I fetched the large magnifying-glass I had had the forethought to bring with me and set to work on the approaches to the window. But circumstance was against me in the very particular in which it so often favoured my friend; the ground, baked hard by the hot summer, yielded no trace of what I sought. I returned to the gun-room to find an altercation in progress.

‘It is indeed suspicious—’ Sir Harry was saying.

‘Suspicious!’ his wife flashed at him. ‘Might a bullet in your heart come near to furnishing a certainty?’

‘In law it is no more than suspicious, and even a magistrate cannot have a man confined on such grounds. I have no charge to bring.’

Bradshaw, at the lady’s other side, seemed disposed to agree, pointing out that there had been no witnesses to the burglary.

‘Then,’ came the ready rejoinder, ‘Harry must be placed under guard, protected night and day.’

‘I refuse to be made a prisoner in my own house, and out of doors the plan would be quite impracticable, eh, Jack?’

‘I shouldn’t care to undertake it myself with anything less than a full platoon,’ declared the soldier.

‘Then you must leave the Hall, go somewhere safe and secret until—’

‘What, and give a rascal like Black Ralph the satisfaction of making me bolt like a rabbit? I’d sooner die.’

His sincerity was unmistakable, and made an impression on all his hearers, even his brother, who for the moment forgot to sneer, though he remembered soon enough when I took a hand in the conversation.

First explaining the absence of footsteps outside, I added, ‘But I did find some fragments of glass on the soil, as we did on this side of the window.’

‘Is that so surprising?’ was the baronet’s question.

I answered it with another. ‘Is this door normally kept locked?’

‘Why, yes, of course.’

‘How many keys are there?’

‘Two. I have one, Carlos the other.’

‘Does he carry it with him at all times?’

‘No, for the most part it’s kept on a ring hanging up in his pantry.’

‘And is that generally known in the household?’

‘It might well be, yes.’

The younger twin said with a curl of his lip, ‘Your reasoning is pellucidly clear, Dr Watson. Any of us, and Carlos besides, could have let himself in here, broken the window from inside in order to suggest an intruder from outside , and made off with the rifle. How exquisitely ingenious!’

‘Mr Fairfax,’ said I, summoning up as much reasonableness as I could, ‘all I seek to do is to explore possibilities, however remote they may appear to be, and however absurd they may turn out in retrospect to have been.’

‘As the great Sherlock Holmes would be seeking to do, were he here.’

‘I am not too proud to learn from my betters,’ I observed a little tartly as I drew Sir Harry aside.

Before I could speak, he said with some warmth, ‘You don’t seriously suppose, do you, Watson, that Carlos, or Jack Bradshaw, or my own brother would have stolen that weapon? For what conceivable motive?’

‘Of course I don’t suppose any such thing,’ said I. ‘This Black Ralph miscreant is obviously the culprit. No, I was merely—’

‘Displaying your powers of observation?’ he asked, his good humour at once restored.

‘Very likely. Now you must tell me where to find the fellow. There’s no time to be lost.’

‘I beg you to be careful, Watson.’

‘ You are to be careful, Sir Harry. Keep to the house as far as you can. Take Bradshaw with you if you must venture out. Warn the servants.’

He promised to do as I said, and his directions conducted me straight to the noisome hovel which was Black Ralph’s abode, but my journey was in vain. The slattern who answered my knock informed me that the man had left the previous day to visit his sister near Warminster and was not expected back for a week. I did not stay to puncture such an obvious tissue of falsehood. When an inquiry at the local tavern fell out equally fruitless, I returned to Darkwater Hall and addressed myself to questioning the servants, the source of the disquieting rumours that had reached Lady Fairfax in the first place.

My most puzzling informant was the girl Dolores, who fortunately spoke English well, though with a stronger accent than her husband. At first she had little to say, answering in curt monosyllables or merely shrugging her graceful shoulders by way of reply. But then, by luck or instinct, I ventured to ask what were her personal views of her employer. At once her dark eyes blazed and I caught a glimpse of splendid white teeth.

‘He is cold!’ she cried. ‘He is a good man, this Sir Harry Fair-fax, a fine English gentleman, but he is cold! His blood is like the blood of a fish!’

Making no move to restrain her, for we were out of hearing of the household at the time, I did no more than encourage her to explain herself.