Free Appleby File by Michael Innes

placed under lock and key. The poltergeist was thwarted – or so it was to be hoped.
    The Applebys drove back to London in the dark – but not before Appleby himself had contrived a short private conversation with Lady Parmiter.
    ‘Lucky your aunt turned out to know the stuff fairly well,’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I doubt whether much that’s really first-rate now remains outside that strongroom.’
    ‘I suppose not.’
    ‘You’d agree, Judith, that Aunt Jessica has been persuaded to do the rational thing?’
    ‘Clearly she has – unless it really is a supernatural agency that’s at work.’
    ‘You’d also agree that what she has done is the obvious thing in the circumstances?’
    ‘Well, yes. But I don’t see–’
    ‘The predictable thing?’ It was almost in anxiety that Appleby appeared to wait for his wife’s acquiescence this time.
    ‘Absolutely.’
    ‘Then I think all’s well. Yes, I’m pretty sure of it. By the way, just give a glance at the spare bedroom tomorrow. Your aunt’s coming to stay with us.’
    ‘To stay with us!’
    ‘Oh, not for long. Just for two or three days. She’s telling that butler tonight that she’s coming to us in the morning.’
    ‘How very odd! But at least we can get a good night’s sleep first.’
    ‘Very true. Just one telephone call, and I’ll be ready for it.’
    ‘A telephone call?’
    ‘To the Thames Valley Constabulary, my dear. Anderton is on their territory – so I must liaise with them, as people now say.’ And Appleby laughed softly as he swung the steering wheel. ‘I set the trap. They spring it.’
     
    ‘All caught,’ Appleby announced a couple of mornings later. ‘Butler, phoney parlour-maid
    ‘I recall remarking,’ Lady Parmiter said, ‘that servants tend to be rather unreliable nowadays.’
    ‘Quite so – and in fact two more were in the pay of the gang. All small fry, of course, the butler included. Fortunately their bosses decided to be in at the kill. Our Thames Valley friends nicked the lot while they were happily treating your strongroom, Aunt Jessica, like a hunk of old cheese.’
    ‘We had really done quite a lot of their work for them?’ Judith asked.
    ‘Just that. They count as top-ranking villains, but happen not to be all that clued up on the fine-art front. They could only have made a purely random haul by themselves. Hence the poltergeist, who made us work like mad doing all the sifting for them.’
    ‘But John, what about the tumbling jar? That did look like the real thing.’
    ‘Not to me. A little bladder on the end of a long tube passing through the window. Squeeze a bulb at the other end, and the trick’s accomplished. You just pull the thing out through the window again, and there you are. Literally a trick. Every kid’s conjuring-set includes a miniature version of the same thing.’
    ‘I must go upstairs and pack at once.’ Aunt Jessica announced this firmly. ‘It would be the wish of dear Adolphus that the status quo ante at Anderton be restored forthwith. And Mrs Thimble must find me a new butler. His first task, my dear John, will be to pack up every bottle of Andron-Blanquet I still possess. And I needn’t tell you where it will be despatched to.’

 
     
The Fishermen
    In Scotland trout-fishing, almost as much as deer-stalking and grouse-shooting, is an amusement for wealthy men. Appleby was not particularly wealthy. From a modest station he had risen to be London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police – a mouthful which his children, accurately enough, had turned into better and briefer English as Top Cop.
    Top Cop’s job turning out, predictably, to be more purely administrative than was at all enlivening, Appleby had retired from it earlier than need be, and now lived as an unassuming country gentleman on a small estate in the south of England, which was the property of his wife. This, very happily, had proved not incompatible with getting into odd situations from time to time. Sir John