Free Appleby's Other Story by Michael Innes Page B

– that are subject to the dictates of fashion, or at least of custom. Banish the widow’s bonnet and the widower’s arm-band, banish the black-edged writing paper and envelopes, and at the same time you are likely to see vanish or attenuate themselves the very lineaments of sorrow. One must make no snap judgement on Alice Tytherton’s emotional state.
    â€˜Colonel Pride, is that a man from a newspaper?’ It was at Appleby that Mrs Tytherton was glancing.
    â€˜Nothing of the kind.’ It clearly cost the Chief Constable an effort not to speak curtly. ‘This is Sir John Appleby, whom you may remember I brought over to pay a call, before knowing of this sad event.’
    â€˜Yes, of course.’ Mrs Tytherton was indifferent. ‘How do you do.’
    Appleby expressed himself civilly. He had not perhaps the appearance of a man from a newspaper – or at least not of the kind of man from a newspaper who is sent scurrying after a corpse – but he saw no necessity to be offended.
    â€˜As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I am another policeman, although a retired one. And the Colonel has asked me to help him. Otherwise, I need hardly say, it would not–’
    â€˜What an insipid room.’ Thus not very politely cutting Appleby short, Mrs Tytherton looked round her in a kind of slumberous distaste. ‘No wonder I seldom enter it. But at least there are cigarettes.’ She had pointed to a small glass box on the mantelpiece. ‘Please give me one.’
    Inspector Henderson obeyed this injunction with a lack of hesitation which told Appleby at once that everything recordable about this room had been recorded. He now took another look at it himself. It was to be supposed that Mrs Tytherton’s sense of the insipid stopped short of the Goya, since the character there represented glanced sideways out of his frame with a fiery intensity of regard that was daunting or inspiriting according as to how one cared to receive it. Nor would it quite apply to the only other ancient thing in the room: a Tuscan marriage cassone in darkened olivewood obscurely painted by a cinquecento hand with some sacred nuptial occasion. The rest of the furniture was simple enough, and no doubt it could be called insipid or even jejune. Appleby wondered whether the late proprietor of these objects had also been that – or at least whether his wife had so regarded him.
    â€˜And there’s brandy. I’ll have some of that.’
    This time, Henderson did hesitate – and to Appleby’s sense rather out of delicacy than of professional instinct. On a side-table stood a tray with a decanter, a soda-water syphon, an affair which must have contained ice cubes, and four glasses. Appleby was near enough to see that three of the glasses had been used.
    â€˜All right to go ahead, Henderson?’ The Chief Constable had moved towards the tray. Perhaps he increasingly disapproved of Mrs Tytherton. But his obedience to a lady’s request was automatic.
    â€˜Yes, sir. It looks as if some brandy was drunk by two people shortly before the shooting. And after it, of course, by Miss Kentwell. Nothing you could call fingerprints.’
    â€˜Somebody rubbed them away, would you say?’
    â€˜Possibly so, sir.’ Henderson’s tone indicated disapproval of such a question in Mrs Tytherton’s presence. ‘No reason not to use the remaining glass now.’ He watched the brandy being poured and handed. ‘Can we be of help to you, madam?’ he asked formally.
    â€˜So far, I have been insufficiently informed. I want to know exactly how my husband died. I am surely entitled to any information you have. Do you, or do you not, yet know who killed him?’
    â€˜Inspector Henderson will allow me to reply to that.’ Colonel Pride had spoken with surprising promptness. ‘Unless your husband killed himself, nobody can declare he knows who killed him until a jury