Free The Daffodil Affair by Michael Innes

sea, as they say. Obscurely he wished for a familiar landfall – as if that would help. Table Mountain, hanging in the sky like Swift’s floating island. The litter of gigantic lettering on the quays of Manhattan; Brooklyn Bridge, Liverpool and its monster hotels. The low, dun, saurian ripple of land which Australia rolls into the Indian Ocean. If the ship could only raise one of these, he felt absurdly, then the unaccountable fragments of this business might come together in his mind. But what lay before the ship’s prow was South America, and of South America he knew nothing. Nor was he sure that it was in South America that this chase would end.
    The saloon was empty; he sat down and let the weeks of tedious investigation trickle through his mind. The haunted house had gone to Boston and thence to Port of Spain; after that it had disappeared. Hannah Metcalfe and Daffodil had last been heard of in Montevideo. But Lucy Rideout had been reported – though uncertainly – in Valparaiso, and perhaps there was significance in that. He looked up as Hudspith slumped darkly down beside him. ‘What would you say,’ he asked, ‘to Robinson Crusoe’s island?’
    ‘Roast Hazel Hen,’ said Hudspith sombrely. But this was to the steward.
    ‘Juan Fernandez,’ continued Appleby. ‘Are they particularly immoral there? Because it looks as if our rendezvous may be somewhere in that direction.’
    Hudspith shook his head and said nothing. Bodfish himself, it occurred to Appleby, would be as entertaining a companion. The truth was that Hudspith, learned in the depravities and perversities, had invented a new one – and was foundering beneath the additional burden. The seduction of feeble-minded girls he had supported for years, but the seduction of a plural-minded one was too much for him. Lucy Rideout, he believed, had been carried off for some person so vicious as to relish a mistress who was now one woman and now another. One could probably search all the volumes that booksellers discreetly call ‘Curious’ without coming upon anything quite so odd – and here was Hudspith obsessed by the thing as if it were an ultimate manifestation of evil. Appleby waited until Hudspith’s plate was before him and then tried a little reason. For it is desirable that policemen should be reasonable – and particularly those sent expensively across the world on detective missions.
    ‘Look here, I grant that your hypothesis would be sound and sufficient if Lucy’s affair stood in isolation. But it doesn’t. It’s linked to Hannah Metcalfe – to begin with, by the single word “Capri”. And Hannah Metcalfe is linked to the horse; she travelled with it. Just admit that and then ask yourself: how does the horse fit in with your notion of the vice racket?’
    Hudspith, who was eating with great intentness, paused briefly. ‘I could tell you things about horses,’ he said darkly. His eye was far away; it might have been conversing with the shades of Caligula and Heliogabalus.
    Appleby sighed. ‘Lucy and Capri. Capri and Hannah. Hannah and the horse. Hannah has witchcraft in the family. Lucy evidences a morbid psychology of a kind which former ages accounted for in terms of demoniac possession. The horse has some power of hyperaesthesia which can be seen as an uncanny ability to read thoughts. And all these and a haunted house are picked up in England and spirited off in the direction of South America. These are the facts, and I ask you to explain them – particularly the house.’
    Hudspith was studying the menu with a faintly pathological concentration. ‘Of course they hang together,’ he said. ‘Nobody denies it. And I suppose if a man has a taste for demented concubines he may have a taste for a crazy house to keep them in. You don’t know the lengths to which these wealthy degenerates will go. You ought to see the private movies they have made. You ought to see–’ Hudspith broke off and sat glowering at some inward vision.