Appleby File by Michael Innes

fear you have a poor opinion of us.’ Sweat was pouring down Gryde’s face, but he managed to utter this with an air of mild mockery. ‘Should we be quite so inept? And there’s something you just haven’t accounted for: your own damnably odd conduct.’
    ‘Do you know, I’d call that right in the target area? Although I’d say it was not so much a matter of my conduct as of my mere presence.’ With an air of conscious relaxation, Appleby began to fill his pipe. ‘We were talking about coincidence. Well, the really implausible coincidence was my being here at all. Don’t you see? I was meant to be here. Vivarini wanted me here – and that although he and I were no more than casual acquaintances. That was the first thing in my head when I found him dead. And it led me straight to the truth.’
    ‘The truth!’ There was a dark flush on Halberd’s face. ‘You mean to say you know the truth , and you’ve been entertaining us to a lot of damned rubbish notwithstanding?’
    ‘I certainly know the truth.’
    ‘May we be favoured’ – Gryde hissed this – ‘with some notion of when you arrived at it?’
    ‘Oh, almost at once. Before I came in to tell you that Vivarini had been shot. First I thought for a few minutes, you know. It’s always the advisable thing to do. And then I went to have a look at the gas cylinders. That settled it.’
    ‘Vivarini,’ Appleby said, ‘didn’t like any of you. You’d refused to publish him as a classic, you’d reviewed him waspishly, you’d been in a mess-up with him about a girl. But what he really resented was being treated as outmoded. His so-called Comedy of Discomfiture you all regarded as old hat. Well, he decided to treat you to a whiff of that Comedy all on your own.’ Appleby paused. ‘After all,’ he said – blandly and with apparent inconsequence – ‘I was his guest, you know. I owed him something. It would have been a shame to knock that comedy too rapidly on the head.’
    ‘The man was a devil,’ Gryde said. ‘And you’re a devil too.’
    ‘No, no – Vivarini wasn’t really an evil man. He had me down so that there would be a sporting chance of giving you all no more than a bad half-hour.’
    ‘Three hours.’ Childrey had glanced at his watch.
    ‘Very well. And I’ve no doubt that he’d taken other measures. A letter on its way to Australia, by surface mail, perhaps, and then due to come back the same way. At the worst you’d have had no more than a few months in quod.’
    ‘Go on,’ Halberd said grimly.
    ‘There’s very little to tell! He spread a few useful lies: that one of you had egged him on to arrange this fishing-party; that he was nurturing something between thoughts and intentions of suicide (although that was not a lie); that he had evidence of some discreditable sharp practice on Childrey’s part. Then, similarly, he prepared his few useful clues: making that footprint, filching the cord from Gryde’s dressing-gown, making his little imperfectly burnt heap of old business letters. After that, he had just one more thing to prepare.’
    ‘You mean to tell us,’ Halberd said, ‘that he killed himself just for the fun of playing us a rotten trick?’
    ‘Certainly. It was to be his last masterpiece in the Comedy of–’
    ‘Yes, yes. But surely–’
    ‘My dear Halberd, didn’t you notice he was a sick man? It’s my guess that he was very sick indeed – with no more than months, or perhaps weeks, before him.’
    ‘My God – the poor devil! Ending his days with a revolting piece of malice.’ Halberd frowned. ‘What was that you said about gas cylinders?’
    ‘There are three stored at the back of the cottage. Two contain butane, all right, but the third contains hydrogen. And all he needed apart from that was a fair-sized child’s balloon – just not too big to go up that chimney. Plenty of lift in it to float away a very small gun. With this west wind, it must be over the North Sea by now. So you see why he